taking the day off

I feel like it would be good to know when to "take the day
off", but maybe what's on my mind is just "lightening up"
and not expecting the day to be too serious?

identity, interrupted

I am listening to "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce
read by Patrick Healy
(cf http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/audio_5.html).
It seems to be exactly the sort of text that is best
enjoyed read aloud. Perhaps time after time.

I'm also looking at "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature
and Cosmology". Thinking about the things that
go beyond language.
(cf http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1993/PlankRev.html)

My current thought is that "intelligence" (sometimes
not so intelligent) exists in "interfaces". Or put it
another way, that Coincidence, Causality, and
Correlation, are completed by Creativity.

But.

The "but" is that once some rather concrete idea
is enunciated, it creates some requirement to
actually do work. That seems to create pressure.
It's not as though we have infinite attention (right?)
(cf http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/468828.html)

It's interesting to mix these things in with the legacy
of the Beats
(e.g. http://www.stevesilberman.com/celestial/)
which just aren't going to pay the bills no matter
how "true" they are -- though perhaps by simply
shifting perspective a bit ("trendiness not
timelessness") we can recover some Sex Pistols-like
/currency/.

I mean, thinking about how focus can be quite nice:
how in order to focus at all, one in fact needs to be
reasonably calm (not hyperfocused; not too "distracted"
either). In the words of Susanna Kaysen,

«freedom was the price of privacy»

but equally, /privacy is the price of freedom/.

an alternative to 'causative process'

We might conceive of the artist as a pre-given entity who views, is
inspired by, and utilizes pre-given things in the world around her as
she then goes about making her work. The production of the work would
then be a causative process contributing in turn to the production of
the historical world. We might also understand the work as an
objectification of the artist, an expression of her inner spirit that
externalizes and actualizes it. Nishida envisioned an alternative: the
artist takes in or intuits the world and transforms or enacts it, both
of which are but two moments in a single unfolding—not only of the
world but of the artist as well. Both artist and work are formed
mutually and are reflected in one another. While this mutual formation
can be described in terms of a causative process taking time, with the
person first intuiting or internalizing and then acting or
externalizing, Nishida described it in terms of the place or topos
wherein intuiting entails acting and acting intuiting, and wherein the
difference between internal and external collapses.
--http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/

the space in between seeing and acting

«In attempting to explain the formation and working of the historical
world, Nishida coined the term "action-oriented intuition" (kōi-teki
chokkan). His texts suggest a reciprocity between action and intution,
so that we could also speak of "intuition-oriented action" or simply
of "action-intution" [...] Here again Nishida sought to discover the
topos or common space that underlies a distinction, this time between
intuition or seeing as a more or less passive reception of the world
and its objects, and action as the human-engendered production of the
world.» --http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/

snake & monkey

To my way of thinking, the snake's main activity is to be
apprehensive. There are a variety of "good" reasons to
be apprehensive, and probably a variety of not so good
reasons as well.  What I notice is that there's a very
"embodied" or even "yogic" aspect of this.  Movement, talking
with people, breathing all tend to counteract the apprehension.
But much, much, more so -- a sense of accomplishment tends
to make the snake happy,  whereas a sense of failure puts it into
a mode of embroiled frustration.

The snake often sends messages that the monkey doesn't know
what to do with.  It's not clear to me whether it's more apprehensive
about the monkey's potential behavior or about the
situation as a whole.  One way the opposition can be fake is
if the snake says to the monkey: "look at this horrible situation
you've gotten us into."

Well, just because the monkey has a wider range of
activities and proclivities and so on doesn't mean that
it should always take the blame when things go wrong.
The snake seems to think so and wishes to absolve
itself of all blame.  But clearly an apprehension engine
like the snake DOES contribute to bringing things about
(even if its main contribution is to put on the brakes).

I don't think either one is going away (since both
presumably correspond to real brain structures and
not just temporary habits), so I'm guessing the
challenge I face (and presumably at least some
other people are challenged by the same thing) --
is how to make them both happy.

For example, putting in some effort to teach the
monkey to feed and care for the snake, while
also teaching it how to avoid getting bitten or
hissed at a lot.

Going a bit further with this:

Saying things like "trust your intuition!" may really
over simplify matters, if there's a snake-intuition
and a monkey-intuition, for example, and they
*are* in conflict.  And saying "humans are social
animals" is another over simplification, insofar
as humans do have hereditary origins among
much "less social" animals who are still somehow
"social".

http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Parental_Care.html

I don't think I understand where self-criticism
comes from (on the one hand) any better than I
understand where language comes from (on the
other).  Sometimes feeling better is as simple
as having a cup of coffee... potentially both very
social and at the same time, a "mere" matter of
neurochemical doctoring.  Similarly, sometimes
we have the strongest self-criticisms in social
situations -- other times it seems more a matter
of getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

The interplay of animal meanings (e.g. sex)
and human meanings (e.g. partnership) is
hard to understand.  Society is more than
the sum of its brains.  If I've done an OK job
sketching a hypothetical brain's self-relations,
another interesting next step would be to look
at what happens when brains collide.  How
do the range of interpersonal experiences from
admiration to zealotry come about, and where
do they go to once they've arisen?

Coincidence, Issue #1: Left over physical or online artefacts to examine

A moment of pure joy:

«thanks for your interest in Skepsi. "Left over physical or online
artefacts to examine" shall be available upon publication of our next
issue. Please do check our blog or website to keep updated:
http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/»

What an awesome title for a special issue, I thought!

Then I realized that the *way* I had expressed my interest was implicated.

«I'm sorry to have missed your recent conference, it sounds like it was
great! Are there any left over physical or online artefacts to examine?»

life in an indeterminate space

Dick Taylor of UC Irvine proposed "Ten Little Questions"; the list
begins as follows:

1.What is the main goal of your work?
2.What are the tangible benefits of achieving your goal?
3.What are the technical problems that make your goal difficult to achieve?
4.What are the main elements of your approach?

etc. (the rest is elided for copyright reasons). My thought: Doesn't all this
talk about 'goals' immediately put us into a world in which the goal is always
distant, perhaps even -- unreachable? This is the typical critique of the
business of fighting poverty or what have you.

At the same time, explication is important, not just to function in 'society'
but also to function as part of the 'society of self'. In my case, at least
at the moment, it seems easier and more natural to have many small
goals than to have one large/central goal.

I *have* had various large/central goals in the past, and some of them
continue to resonate for me. But I tend to feel a bit guilty about the
way these giant-sized goals seem to come out of left field. If instead
of an extra-dimensional goal imposed from 'outside', I lived in a world
populated by micro-goals that sometimes assemble themselves into
interesting configurations... would I earn any respect from the
'academic establishment'? Or is that sort of thing just seen as... dicking
around?

mini-essay on the SECI model

The idea of "shared context in motion" (basho, 場所 in
Japanese, or "ba" for short) is dealt with extensively by
two progenitors of the knowledge management paradigm; see
Nonaka and Toyama [1].

The philosophical foundations of this notion, summarized
in Abe [2], describe the way in which events and objects
arise from their larger contexts. In other words, The
idea of ba can help us think about how a context
constrains or supports different types of (inter-)actions.

Nonaka and Toyama take this idea and apply it to knowledge
creation. They suggest that knowledge is created as
people interact over time in a shared context, in a
process that can be broken up into repeated phases of
Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, and
Internalisation (SECI) [3].

The SECI process takes into account the range of different
behaviors and modes of interaction, involving processes
that are both individual and collective, and forms of
engagement that are embodied or virtual (see Table 1):

Phase Knowledge conversion Setting Gloss
Socialization tacit-to-tacit embodied/individual I
Externalisation tacit-to-explicit embodied/collective We
Combination explicit-to-explicit virtual/collective Its
Internalisation explicit-to-tacit virtual/individual It

Table 1: Nonaka and Toyama's SECI model, augmented with
simple glosses from Ken Wilber's similar AQAL model [4]

The idea of ba can thus help us move from the big but
amorphous picture of stakeholder groups in a given social
setting (e.g. Professions, Research), towards a clearer
picture of the roles of actual participants
(e.g. students, teachers). SECI can give us a detailed
understanding of the activities which support these roles
(e.g. a student's activities include going to class,
collaborating on a class project, building a transcript,
and ultimately gaining a skill).

In short, this analysis can give us a ``check list'' of
the forms of engagement we need to support to create
systems that have a broad impact.

[1] I. Nonaka and R. Toyama (2003), The knowledge-creating
theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing
process, Knowledge Management Research \& Practice, 1(1),
pp. 2-10

[2] Masao Abe (1988), Nishida's Philosophy of `Place',
International Philosophical Quarterly, 28(4), pp.
355--371

[3] I. Nonaka, R. Toyama, N. Konno (2000), SECI, Ba and
Leadership: a Unified Model of Dynamic Knowledge Creation
Long Range Planning, 33(1), pp. 5-34.

[4] Ken Wilber (1997), An Integral Theory of Consciousness,
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4(1), pp. 71-92

symbols and sense-making

I am very taken with this symbology, and furthermore, I
think I see an intuitive way to connect it to several
small projects I have in mind:

∫ EXPERIMENT

PlanetMath.org is just one example of a tool that has more
content contributors than coders, and more feature
requests than anyone knows what to do with. Good
documentation is part of making hacking easier. Towards
this end, I'm planning to build PlanetComputing.org to
document the software used on PlanetMath (and many other
projects).

∂ MOTIVATION

There are various techniques for dividing content into
thematic clusters (useful for supporting simplification
behaviors needed for sense making), and for annotating
data with new relationships (useful for supporting
interconnection behaviors). I will explore these in
various applications, e.g. applying them to the streams of
data identified above.

/ CONTROL

Marking up complex and changing relationships between
objects is standard in e.g. computer animation and
computer games; it is interesting to think about how these
ideas can work in other domains (e.g. to assist with
learning).

+ INTERCONNECTION

Content may still be king, but application programming
interfaces make up the board on which the game is played.
I plan to use an existing standard for mathematical
documents (OMDoc) and other API-building tools to help
make the PlanetMath.org collection of mathematical
resources interoperable with e.g. OU's SocialLearn
platform, contributing to the development of a public
service to STEM learners and practitioners worldwide.

* PRAXIS

Data about social interactions is all interesting and
potentially useful, but data about "live" social
interactions is becoming increasingly available in forms
that are suitable for large-scale computational analysis,
and real-time use.

- SIMPLIFICATION

To be a resource, something has to be used. The insight
of e.g. category theory or behaviorism seems to be to
asking "how is it used?" instead of "what is it?". My
sense is that the only useful sense of "identity" is
created in the dynamics of interaction.

'doing philosophy' in the age of Internet

«If you want to be a philosopher, it is no good just reading
philosophy; you will need to start doing it – clarifying meanings,
drawing distinctions, and evaluating and constructing arguments. And
the best way to do this is in debate with fellow students and tutors.
(Philosophy has always had a social dimension; the ancient Greek
philosophers used to discuss their ideas while strolling in the public
buildings of Athens.) Some people find this daunting, and get upset
when their views are criticized, but you should look at it as an
opportunity to develop your ideas and hone your philosophical skills.
By raising objections to your views, other people will help you to
improve your arguments and make your position clearer and stronger.
And if it is all done in the right spirit (as it usually is), it can
be great fun too! On A211 the main opportunity for discussion will
come at tutorials, where you will meet your tutor and fellow students
from your region. Tutorial groups are small and friendly, and the
atmosphere is very supportive. Do try to attend them if you can, and
be prepared to speak up and get involved. The value of tutorials
stretches well beyond the two hours you spend in the seminar room.
After you leave, you will find yourself thinking about what you said,
how it was received, how you might have said it better, or even how,
on reflection, the thought behind what you said was mistaken. This is
all part of learning to become a philosopher. You will also have an
opportunity to debate with fellow students online.» --
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=170263

Well, when I went over to OU's philosophy department, I learned that
most of the people employed there tend to work from home. I was,
frankly, disappointed. Maybe working from home is the new 'social
dimension' -- and instead of peripatetic philosophers, we now have
netizen-philosphers. I suppose I shouldn't complain -- that's
evolution (and I'm 1%-4% Neanderthal...
http://www.economist.com/science-technology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16056349).

There's a guide to philosophy on the internet here --

«Limited to major philosophers, i.e. omitting "professors with home
pages" as far as possible.» --
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/gpi/philo.htm

all a bit disappointing -- isn't that what Pirsig calls
"philosophology"? Which is not to say that "philosophology" can't be
"done right" (but on that note, the three links to pages about Deleuze
mentioned in that guide were 404 not found -- pfff!).

Elsewhere I found mention of a book (out of print) called "The ends of
philosophy: an essay in the sociology of philosophy and rationality"
by Harry Redner -- well, that sounds good to me. Lately I'm thinking
that we're just about "thought out" -- all the good ideas have been
conceived of already (at least for the moment) and what we need now is
a phase of implementation. OK, maybe that's just me speaking
personally. But gosh, maybe I have a point...

What if the true ends of philosophy are not "clarifying meanings,
drawing distinctions, and evaluating and constructing arguments" and
are instead things like, you know, human happiness and so on? I
suspect I sound a bit like a Freemason, but, again, maybe there's
nothing really wrong with that; I guess the only problem is all this
talking (a little less conversation, a little more action, please).

Still, you might think that this step of "putting philosophy into
action" would be a bit more popular, and I would not feel so all
alone...

These days it seems to me that we have "actionists" (who may not
concern themselves so much with ideas -- implement first, ask
questions later), and "ideaists" (who like to talk, chill, distill --
let's not be too hasty). Hm... now I've found this:
http://www.actionphilosophers.com -- that's exactly the idea. (And
golly, I always wanted to make a book like that...)

Maybe I'll stop here while I have something optimistic to think about.

a certain doctrinal disqualification

«Furthermore, a certain doctrinal disqualification seems to bear on
the love for boys.» -- M. Foucault, "Care of the Self"

After 24 hours of thinking about the question "what do I find the most
depressing", I think 'doctrinal disqualifications' take the cake.
Other family favourites include "A & ¬B: you can't make everybody
happy", and "anything that evidences a dehumanized/unperson status".

«The Greek analogy is the etymology of catechism.» -- Wikipedia

This is interesting in part because catechesis is "an education in the
faith of children, young people and adults, which includes especially
the teaching of Christian doctrine imparted, generally speaking, in an
organic and systematic way, with a view to initiating the hearers into
the fullness of Christian life."

To translate more pithily: depression seems to be a sort of learned
helplessness, in particular the helplessness that comes with
non-existence. But it's the learning that's key, the "organic and
systematic" annihilation of self. (As opposed to "care of the self":
a self that's been "taken care of".) Of course this doesn't happen
all at once; it's an ongoing process, or shall we say, a practice; a
bit like a prayer.

Note that I'm not talking about an existence in the form of a
"lived contradiction". The thinking is more along the lines of
Protagoras:

«The dictum is that there is no such thing as a falsehood; a man must
either say what is true or say nothing.» -- Plato, Dialog of
Euthydemus

Indeed, we come to dialectical materialism, and "an opposition
inherently existing within one realm, one unified force or object."
Out of this tension, it seems *something* must get "aufhebened" --
kept and contradicted. This 'cancelled' (doctrinally disqualified)
existence is like that of the slave in Hegel -- though there's some
sort of happy ending implied in that --

«As the slave creates more and more products with greater and greater
sophistication through his own creativity, he begins to see himself
reflected in the products he created, he realizes that the world
around him was created by his own hands, thus the slave is no longer
alienated from his own labour and achieves self-consciousness, while
the master on the other hand has become wholly dependent on the
products created by his slave; thus the master is enslaved by the
labour of his slave. The realization of this contradiction allow the
slave to once again struggle against his master. The contradiction is
resolved when the difference between slave and the master is dissolved
and both persons recognize that they are equal.» --Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master-slave_dialectic

(I can't help but think of Darth Vader's chestplate...
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/chestplate.html)

«His deeds will not be forgiven, until he merits» ...

or, writ large,

«Repentance of the mouth and not of the life is not repentance.
Sins are not forgiven through repentance of the mouth,
but through repentance of the life.
Sins are continually being forgiven man by the Lord,
for He is mercy itself; but sins adhere to the man,
however much he may suppose that they have been forgiven,
nor are they removed from him except through a life
according to the commands of faith.
So far as he lives according to these commands,
so far his sins are removed; and so far as they are removed,
so far they have been forgiven.
For by the Lord man is withheld from evil, and is held in good;
and he is so far able to be withheld from evil
in the other life, as in the life of the body
he has resisted evil; and he is so far able to be
held in good then, as in the life of the body he
has done what is good from affection.
This shows what the forgiveness of sins is,
and whence it is.
He who believes that sins are forgiven in any other way,
is much mistaken.» -- Arcana Cœlestia (Heavenly Secrets), see
http://www.sacred-texts.com/swd/ac/ac168.htm

dynamic mapping

«As the cliché reminds us, information is power [sic]. In this age of
computer systems and technology, an increasing majority of the world's
information is stored electronically. It makes sense then that as an
industry we rely on high-tech electronic protection systems to guard
that information. As a professional hacker, I get paid to uncover
weaknesses in those systems and exploit them.» -- product description
of "No Tech Hacking" on Amazon.com

The actual cliché, is, of course, that *knowledge* is power; in any
case, the real message of the quote above is that power is wrapped up
with /exploitation/. (Foucault might think a bit differently about
this, I'll have to check this out and report back (something I read
last night...).)

Lately I've been yaking about "sense-making", which I think works
along dimensions having to do with Motivation, Simplification,
Control, Experiment, Praxis, and Interconnection. Since sense-making
is a rather fundamental human activity, I wonder if these activities
might be usefully mapped onto Saunders MacLane's "+", "-", "*", and
"/" (from "Categories for the Working Mathematician").

Indeed, thinking about this made me wonder why it is that
mathematicians talk about ideas like "contradiction" *without* talking
about the more fundamental human experiences related to this
phenomenon (e.g. surprise or sadness). Well, it's a general trend
with academic subjects to leave out everything that the learner is
"presumed to know" (whether the presumed-known material is quantum
mechanics or the state of one's own soul...).

Anyway, it's easy to see that Simplification is rather like a "/",
Interconnection is rather like a "+", Praxis is a bit like a "*" (i.e.
it is itself a mapping of some sort), and Experiment is a bit like a
"-" ("now let's see what happens when we restrict the problem in this
way..."). Maybe a bit glib, and besides, I've left out Motivation and
Control, which are obviously pretty major. In any case, if
sense-making is the overall activity, it's reasonable to think that it
might have a few basic constituent actions.

We could try that idea out a different point of view on Ken Wilbur's
I/We/Its/It framework, in the first place to come up with some
narratives:

When making sense of something, *I* do some Experiments, sometimes
looking at Simplified versions of the problem; sometimes I will also
ask someone else for help, and *We* are able to do more by working
together and Interconnecting our skills and knowledge; out of this
comes some patterns, often a set of relationships between variables
(*Its*) that are embodied in some means of Control; lastly, the
take-home point (*It*) is a Praxis, something I can do that addresses
my initial Motivation for looking at the problem.

This suggests the correspondences:

I ~ Experiment, Simplification ("/", "-")
We ~ Interconnection ("+")
Its ~ Control (no symbol)
It ~ Praxis, Motivation ("*")

Well... I'm tempted to jiggle this a little bit, so that

I ~ "-"
We ~ "+"
Its ~ "/"
It ~ "*"

That is, insofar as "/" allows us to choose what levels of complexity
to work at, or allows us to run algorithms like "divide and conquer"
-- it dose begin to seem like a basic emblem of "control". Besides,
it is commonly used to take apart "*", in other words, as the operator
that deconstructs practices. (It indicates the factors of
production?)

So, that's pretty interesting, yeah? :) But what about that notion of
Dynamic Mapping that we were supposed to be getting to?

In the short essay I've been working on
(http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/crc-conference-abstract), I've
suggested that Dynamic Mapping is a good way to understand and improve
social interactions. I claimed that in order to make *useful* maps,
we would want to understand something about sense-making behaviour.
(Maps are somehow supposed to help with that.) ALL of the activities
I engage with are supposed to connect back to this thematic idea of
Dynamic Mapping -- which I guess I'm saying is basically "helping out
with sense-making". So, at least initially, my plan is to analyse my
various proposed activities in terms of their relationship to the
various dimension of sense-making that I've sketched (probably
focusing on Simplification, Interconnection, Control, and Praxis, in
light of the above symbol-wrangling). After that, the question of
Dynamic Mapping should then just be "what can I do to help?"...