virtual argumentation (untaken notes)

Baudrillard:

«[J]ust as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish
chance -- which is to say that there would never be a final throw of
the die that, through its automatic perfection, would put an end to
chance -- so one can hope that virtual programming will never abolish
events.»

Hutto:

«In this model the clinic could become a virtual model of the
patient's workplace or home and the construction of such virtual
environments in a clinical setting could introduce novel (more
thoroughly embodied/enactive and environmentally informed) aspects to
the therapeutic process.» - "Embodied cognition and body
psychotherapy: the construction of new therapeutic environments"

Me:

0: (Permitted and encouraged.) Virtue, Wisdom; what the philosophers
seek to teach. (Related to the idea of a prima causa.)

1: (Permitted but discouraged.) Vice, as distinct from sin or crime.
(Do not worship false idols; or phrased positively, study cosmic principles.)

2: (Required and encouraged.) Using the common currency, speaking
the common language. (Study the liberal arts.)

3: (Required but discouraged.) Social transformation through
deviation from the norm. (There is a time for all things under the
sun.)

Hayles:

The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual
Ecologies, Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest"
New Literary History
Vol. 30, No. 3, Ecocriticism (Summer, 1999), pp. 675-697

Aberdein:

«Virtue theory originates in ethics, and in particular the work of
Aristotle. In recent years, it has come to be applied to other fields
of philosophy, most conspicuously epistemology. There are two main
constituencies among virtue epistemologists, distinguished by their
different characterizations of virtue. Reliabilists understand virtues
to be reliable faculties, such as sight or logical inference. For
responsibilists virtues are acquired character traits, such as
open-mindedness or intellectual humility.» - In Defence of Virtue: The
Legitimacy of Agent-Based Argument Appraisal

Lenin (as quoted in "The Big Lebowski"): "You look for the person who
will benefit."

how to mutate and take over the world? (pt 2)

A survey of various control applications in physics is given: control
of chaos, controlled synchronization, control of spatiotemporal
systems, control of molecular and quantum systems. An approach for
building models of system dynamics based on control methods is
discussed. The presented methods and results are illustrated by
examples of new approaches to classical problems: Stephenson-Kapitsa
pendulum, escape from a potential well, synchronization of coupled
oscillators, control of chemical reaction with phase transition,
controlled dissociation of molecules, controlled oscillations of
complex crystalline lattices. Controlled pendulums appear in many
parts of the book since pendulum models can be thought of as the
"atoms of nonlinear physics". - Alexander L. Fradkov, "Cybernetical
Physics: From Control of Chaos to Quantum Control", preface

Re: Open Ed Challenge

Fred said:

Possibility of Progress.--When a master of the old civilization vows to
hold no more discussion with men who believe in progress, he is quite
right. For the old civilization has its greatness and its advantages
behind it, and historic training forces one to acknowledge that it can
never again acquire vigor: only intolerable stupidity or equally
intolerable fanaticism could fail to perceive this fact. But men may
consciously determine to evolve to a new civilization where formerly
they evolved unconsciously and accidentally. They can now devise
better conditions for the advancement of mankind, for their
nourishment, training and education, they can administer the earth
as an economic power, and, particularly, compare the capacities of
men and select them accordingly. This new, conscious civilization is
killing the other which, on the whole, has led but an unreflective
animal and plant life: it is also destroying the doubt of progress
itself--progress is possible. I mean: it is hasty and almost
unreflective to assume that progress must necessarily take place: but
how can it be doubted that progress is possible? On the other hand,
progress in the sense and along the lines of the old civilization is
not even conceivable. If romantic fantasy employs the word progress
in connection with certain aims and ends identical with those of the
circumscribed primitive national civilizations, the picture presented
of progress is always borrowed from the past. The idea and the image
of progress thus formed are quite without originality.

-- http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38145/38145-h/38145-h.htm
(Of First and Last Things, section 24), cf.
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/scientism-1-of-5/

gathatoulie live

... some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience
with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally
relative, in the sense of being determined by the society which has
influenced his experience. Among these variables are categories with
which he classifies his visual stimuli, the knowledge he will use to
supplement what his immediate vision gives him, and the attitude he
will adopt to the kind of artificial object seen. The beholder must
use on the painting such visual skills as he has, very few of which
are normally special to painting, and he is likely to use those skills
his society esteems highly. The painter responds to this; his
public's visual capacity must be his medium. Whatever his own
specialized professional skills, he is himself a member of the society
he works for and shares its visual experience and habit. - "Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy", by M. Baxandall, quoted by
Clifford Geertz in "Art as a Cultural System"

alterations

Connoisseurs of the Russian novel could have foretold with certainty
that this fresh, still youthful novel would lose its harmony before
thirty years had passed; it would "spread", that the thick cover would
become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon the
fronticepiece and round the colophon; the texture of the pages would
grow coarse and smudged perhaps--in fact, that
it was only a novel of the moment, the fleeting novel which is so
often read by Russian women.

- Dostoyevsky (with modifications), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html

Venus Infers

"In order to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things;
and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of
sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide." - Clifford
Geertz, "The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind", p. 82 in
"The Interpretation of Cultures" (2000)

le penseur

"As jumping a stream in order to find out if it is jumpable is on a
higher sophistication-level than jumping to get to the other side so
exploring is on a higher sophistication-level than piloting, which in
its turn is on a higher sophistication-level than following a pilot's
lead. Similarly, Euclid trying to find the proof of a new theorem is
working on a higher accomplishment-level than Euclid trying to teach
students his proof when he has got it; and trying to teach it is a
task on a higher accomplishment-level than that on which his students
are working in trying to master it.

None the less it may still be true that the only thing that, under its
thinnest description, Euclid is here and now doing is muttering to
himself a few geometrical words and phrases, or scrawling on paper or
in the sand a few rough and fragmentary lines. This is far, very far
from being all that he is doing; but it may very well be the only
thing that he is doing. A statesman signing his surname to a
peace-treaty is doing much more than inscribe the seven letters of his
surname, but he is not doing many or any more things. He is bringing a
war to a close by inscribing the seven letters of his surname." -
Gilbert Ryle, 1968