An Octad of Items For Your Delectation

Q: Is the OG stoned while writing this post?
is X
is not

Random articles I stumbled upon that interested me, with brief (you hope!) comments. - OG

1. When fire alarms go off, or you're stuck in a burning building, or even in the WTC just after they were hit by planes, many people don't do anything. They second-guess what's going on. They rationalize. Some apparently think they'll do something to get away from danger, but let me finish this phone call first, or oops, let me go back into the burning building to save my photos. They don't want any unknown changes in their lives. This is well-documented. Stephen Grosz, a psychoanalyst, notes clients who come to him with obvious problems. They want to change. The decision to make the change seems like a no-brainer to us, reading this. But they don't want to make any changes. How do we account for this?

Comment: as I read this brief article, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the people who neglected to get out of harm's way, and all I could think of was "Gads, I've seen so many false alarms and I've felt foolish a few times when I overreacted to what purported to be danger signals, I bet this is really not a big deal." But staying in a burning restaurant and burning to death because you thought you should pay the check first? Approach/avoidance cross-signals and Really Bad Outcomes...

2. Sorry for this article's length, but I couldn't stop reading it when I began. New School University cultural critic and PhD in American Studies, Mark Greif, writes one of the best cultural sociological pieces on the role of police in a Constitutional democracy that I've ever read. Tackling the topic due to increased visibility of police violence and numerous cries for reform, Greif notes that the role of police is "impossible," that when they graduate from the academy they swear to uphold the Constitution, though every cop knows this isn't what they do. Indeed, legal and political thought is "above their pay grade." Because a theory for the existence of police is fairly informal, reform will be difficult. Greif ironically mentions the great sociologist of police, Egon Bittner, who wrote that "criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with a frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely," and yet police departments award a Bittner to cops who've stayed on the force for 15 years.

This is an amazing piece, and despite quotes and references from and to Foucault, Adam Smith, Ben Franklin, Erving Goffman, Mary Douglas, Hobbes, Locke and the formidable police ethnographer Peter K. Manning, the piece flows. What hooked me in was the first section, about how police touch you. The varieties of touch. Women can be touched by police in public and the subtlest shift in touch can go from "professional and neutral" to "sexual and humiliating." There's a catalog of touching, and Greif states, "The purpose of touching by police if to make people touchable." And it can go all the way up to being punched and kicked while an arrestee is already on the ground.

Police in ambiguous situations add violence, and Greif argues this is a way to "test" the "good" citizens in the public to see to what degree they will support this violence. A problem is that the police really don't know who the "good" citizens are. Another problem: do you think your neighbors support escalating police violence? How many object, but withhold their voices for fear of retribution by the police? One thing is clear, and Greif points this out: police know black and poor people look wrong in white and rich neighborhoods; they know white and rich people in black and poor neighborhoods look suspect. So they investigate. "This, to their minds, is parity. They don't recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same."

Comment: if you're concerned with police violence, read this.

3. In Russia, a 53 year old former professor who favored poetry stabbed to death his 67 year old friend, who said the only real literature is prose. Both were drunk.

Comment: Who knows what got lost in the translation here, but neither guy had ever read Korzybski, that seems for goddamned sure to me. In other words, in my own evaluations of poetry and prose, both seem like what is commonly called "literature" to me, and both forms can say profound things; at the moment I write this, I consider both forms as complementary, and if I encounter a drunk who gets belligerent and wants to argue that either poetry or prose "is" better than the other, I will very likely leave the presence of such a learned moron.

4. At Stanford's "Cracking The Neural Code Program" they've developed ingenious ways to isolate the circuitry for social behavior in the brain, of mice. Using optogenetics (read the article), when the circuit was buzzed the mouse interacted with a new mouse. (By sniffing. I do this too at parties but have found it necessary to develop stealth methods, know what I mean? Also at parties I frequently search for the cheese, but that's not my social behavior circuit working and merely my mouse-circuit.) By inhibiting the circuit, the mouse doesn't care for mingling at all. Of course dopamine is involved in this new knowledge of social circuitry, and I'm impressed not only by the Stanford people's techniques, but by the fact that they didn't buzz a circuit and note which neurochemicals rose up. That's what most pharmacological research does. This is on a very complex circuit, with branches into the ventral tagmental area and the nucleus accumbens. Just the trick of finding the social circuit(s) seems impressive. Buzz the circuit and put an inanimate object in the environment and the mice don't care: it's a social circuit. These researchers think this knowledge may spin off into helping humans with autism, social anxiety, depression, and maybe even schizophrenia. And let's hope it does help. I just hope these researchers aren't yankin' our chains, or chainettes.

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                                I take this to be Mamakind with a vaporizer                

5. Here's a review of Sex Pot: The Marijuana Lover's Guide to Gettin' It On, from 2011. Written by Skunk mag's legendary Mamakind, a bisexual and polyamorous stoner who was so compelling to one reader that he developed her imagined "pussytoke": a way to get stoned through what I visualize as a dildo crossed with a pipe. It is described as gourd-like. Anyway...yes. Pot and sex: one of the alchemist's better-kept open secrets to illumination. I like reading books on pot. I like reading books on sex. I've been known to put a book down, walk nine feet, and have stoned sex. And yet I've only thumbed this baby in public.

Comment: I think I grokked it fully standing in a place that sells tie-dyes and does piercings. In Sebastapol, if I recall correctly.

6. Prof. of Analytical Philosophy at Geneva, Kevin Mulligan, reviewed A.W. Moore's book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. Mulligan likes it. It's about "meta-metaphysics," or trying to make general sense of the metaphysical thought of 20 eminent philosophers, all male, all English, French, or German. And Spinoza. The review was head buzz enough for me. Moore looks at Transcendent things. He tries to tease out the meta-metaphysics of Novelty: can we make sense of things in entirely new ways? Or are we "limited to looking for the sense that things already make?" I think making sense of things in entirely new ways is one of the great joys and jobs of the visionary, but what do I know?

Also scrutinized for its meta-metaphysical aspects: Creativity. Can we make things make sense in a creative way without hauling in wrong vs. right? Wittgenstein is a big deal for Moore. So's Guattari, as you see by Mulligan's remarks.

Very early in my reading of this review, I thought of William James's lecture on pragmatism in which he says (I paraphrase from memory) if you're reading Hegel or Spinoza or any of these Wiggy Thinkers and can't help but think, "What sort of person writes an entire, fat and very learned book on such topics?" And James says you're not wrong to think this. I love that riff. Anyway...

Okay, so there "is" propositional knowledge: of facts and truth. Non-propositional knowledge is what we get from art, or listening to music: we get knowledge, but it's not stated in the Art. And Moore wants his meta-metaphysics to be more like Art than Theory. What a relief! What appears to be the most important role of metaphysics, to Moore, is giving us "radically new concepts by which to live." This strikes me as having a strong family resemblance to Harold Bloom's notion of what the Strong Poet does. I wonder if neologisms qualify as quanta in this instance for Moore?

Comment: I doubt I'll read this book, simply because there's not enough time in my life. A more personal reason: knowledge and "reality" are, in my favorite models - pragmatism, the sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, and the diffuse thought radiating from Robert Anton Wilson's writings - one in the same. Social knowledge is constantly creating "reality" and vice-versa. The various metaphysical issues are ones that function either as artistic objects for contemplation, or as tools for living. While I applaud the attempt (and I may surprise myself and end up reading such a thing as A.W. Moore produced here; stranger things have happened) to hunt for a simpler overview of metaphysics, I really do seem to have a full plate of reading to do already. The plate piles with books into the ionosphere, and Air Traffic Control and the Federal Aviation Administration is constantly on my ass over this.

7. A woman attended a lecture on out-of-body (OBE) experiences at the U. of Ottawa, then told the lecturers that she can do all that voluntarily, and seemed surprised that not everyone does it. They did an MRI on her and found that the visual cortex deactivated, and instead she had "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery." These areas do mental representations of body movement. The woman often did it before sleep. She was aware she was still in her body, but says she could see herself "rotating in the air above her body" and other similar extravaganzas. The woman never told anyone because she thought everyone did it. She should've brought it up at parties! (Or maybe her social circuitry isn't working on all cylinders?)

The cool thing: maybe there are more people who can do this than we thought. Also, it may be learned during a "window" of time during adolescence. I think I've done it in middle-age - maybe 20 minutes ago, in fact - but I had extra-botanical help, so who knows if it counts. Also: because the woman said there was no feeling of "awe" or marvel when she did it, it wasn't classified as a classic OBE, but instead was deemed a mere ECE, or Extra-Corporeal Experience.

Comment: I'm jealous, frankly. Of course I'd want the whole nine in an OBE, but I sense an ECE would still be a kick. (Insert your anal probe joke in this space; go ahead and write on your computer screen right now, but only in crayon using cursive, please: _____________________________.)

8. I'm guessing a lot of you who've stuck it out here have already heard the one about the two Kazakhstan scientists who have looked at the human genetic code and think they have detected the hazy signals that our designers stamped their designer label into our genes, if we can only decipher it. Oh, they're onto it. If you play with models of the genetic code you see all sorts of cool things, like the use of zero and other mathematical concepts. What they are looking for will be statistically significant patterns in our code with "intelligent-like features" (ehhhh?) that are inconsistent with any naturally known process. Sounds like that book The Bible Code to me. Or using pretzel logic to find a cryptogram in Shakespeare that ends up reading, "I'm Sir Francis Bacon, and I approve of these plays."

So yea: here's yet another panspermia scenario of our origins. Which I'm open to. The proof will be in the pudding code though. The Kazakhs say this code, once deciphered will prove all those dummies who thought SETI and use of radio-telescopes to pick up non-random patterns from within the white noise wrong: it's in all our cells! It's the SETI of molecular biology! And I've heard there's a lot of white noise in there, too, but it's gooey.

No, but wouldn't this be mindblowing if they pulled it off? And a real coup for Kazakhstan, not to mention. Golly! They (the Kazakhs, not our designers from millions but probably multi-billions of years ago) say this "stamp" will have math-semantic info (talk about time-binding!) and be unmistakably OTHER, and be "the most durable construct known" and it's utterly outside neo-Darwinian models. I'm not even at a party and I sniff Intelligent Design, don't you?

On the other hand, let's cut these guys some slack. How much more unheimlich is this compared to The Matrix trilogy? Or, serious philosopher Nick Bostrom's idea that there's a better than 50% chance that we're all living in a simulation? We live in a hologram? And I have a dippy blog there? Whoa!

Okay, okay, but Who or What designed the designer(s)?

At this point I whip out of its fine-tooled corinthian-leather sheath my Occam's Razor and see that once upon a time, one fine infinite day, Cosmic Mommy and Cosmic Daddy loved each other very very very much...

Qualia and Having a Nasty Cold Virus, Drinking Wine: What's It Like?

My colleague Eric Wagner recently wrote that reading primary sources rather than studying what other writers have to say about the primary sources was lately more enjoyable for him. While I read this, I had been trying not to notice that I seemed to have been "coming down" with a particularly virulent cold virus that others around me had been jousting with. (I used the quote marks in that last sentence for  fans of George Lakoff.)

This is not the flu; I have no fever. But it is a markedly aggressive HRV (human rhino virus) that has had normally hale and stout friends sneezing, hacking and croaking their speech for eight days, some even 17.

Eric's self-observation made me think of Robert Anton Wilson's line about reading primary sources to avoid the "standardization of error," which made me look up and read about Vilhjalmur Stefansson's life.

                                      If you feel not-sick while reading this, do you 
                                      remember vividly what it FEELS like to be like
                                      this guy?

As my throat got scratchier and my feeling of physical being worse and worse, I thought about our reactions to works - even people and ordinary objects - prior to contamination by others's opinions or learned "expertise."There's a long line of thinking that says Go First To The Source, forsaking all others. Both Eric and I have been influenced by Ezra Pound in this, although Ezra, much of the time, wants you to see for yourself, by thinking for yourself, that his - Ez's - esthetics were superior all along. He's funny in that way. One of Ez's students, Louis Zukofsky, wrote a book called A Test of Poetry, which seems like a better way to test your own esthetics without previous knowledge that "experts" agree that So-and-So is great, others less so, etc. In an earlier part of the Roaring Twentieth Century, I.A. Richards conducted similar tests about poetry; I did a gloss on him HERE. Wagner has a blog that's centered on his experience reading and thinking around Zukofsky.

What Pound, Richards and Zukofsky seem to want to engender in their readers is an axiology: a personal hierarchy of values about what's good and why and how works are alike in some way and not in others, etc.

I went to sleep reading about Heidegger's phenomenology, neuroscience ideas about Art, Kant's ding an sich ("the thing in itself"), and wasted into somnolence thinking how underrated phenomenology was...or that it seemed  that way to me.

I woke up feeling much worse. The virus had set up shop in me, clearly: I had observed friends with this same thing, hoping I wouldn't get it. My symptoms, as I understand them, arose due to my immune system's "war" (for Lakoff fans, again) against the virus, which only wants to hack into my own cells and use their resources to make more copies of themselves. The symptoms are a good thing, even though we feel like shit. It means we're probably winning. (Who's this "we"?)

As I felt worse and worse and dreaded the at-minimum seven day sentence of dealing with this virus, I began to realize something I'd noted many times before: being sick, for me, seems like an odd discrete mind-state. I don't think I've been sick for a couple of years, but here I am, knowing intellectually that I'm usually not in this state. The odd thing - for me - is this: I can't feel what it's like to not be sick when I'm sick, even though I spend most of my life, in effect, "practicing" the state of being not-sick. I can certainly remember the state of wellness, but it's as if I remember it by reading about it in a book.

I've talked to friends about this and it seems around half know what I'm talking about and roughly concur: a nasty cold or the flu is a discrete mental state, like being high on LSD or mourning the loss of a loved one. The other half either doesn't "see" it this way: they're still "themselves" but just temporarily feeling lousy. It's not discrete; it's more a matter of degree for them, which certainly seems legit to me. Others who haven't seemed to agree with my "discrete state" of sickness idea seemed to have either been bored with my line of thought, or that I was talking too much again about some bizarre idea.

So I dropped my thinking of esthetic perception and read all day on qualia, a topic in the philosophy of mind that generated much debate and heat, shed some light of various quality, and seems to go on and on and on.

Very very briefly and ridiculously inadequately: We both sit down to drink a glass of zinfandel and talk about rock, stocks, the Sox, or life's building-blocks. Apart from the language of wine-tasting (the gamut: oak cask, aged, berry, body, nose/bouquet, tannins, bitterness, fruitiness, etc), we're drinking wine poured from the same bottle. How do you like it?, I ask. It's very good, you say. Yea, I like it too. Nice color.

Here's the thing: those on the side of qualia's existence and importance say there's something ineffable about your experience drinking that wine, an explanatory gap. It's not like doing your income taxes. Drinking that zinfandel - your experience doing it - is not like feeling rushed and late for work. It's not like stubbing your toe after getting out of the shower. Each of these things is different from each other, even though they all involve you in the world, subject to gravity and made of atoms, possessed of articulate language, and a nervous system well experienced in myriad environments. It seems like each experience of the world cannot be completely reduced to physical processes; there's always something left-over, something ineffable and unique about our experience.

We do simulations of what it might be "like" to "be" someone famous, brilliant, beautiful, or widely hated. Some of us may have tremendous imaginations, but we cannot know, I cannot know, what it's like to be Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. Or Cate Blanchett. Or Dan Dennett.

I began to think of having this nasty cold as a suite of qualia: the feeling of being literally phlegmatic due to a virus? We've all had the experience. But how do I know your experience is the same as mine? I can't. Oh, we can talk and nod: yep, I feel that way too; those words seem adequate enough. But they are only words.

A typical thought-experiment in philosophy: You meet some alien from another world who cannot feel physical pain, but It speaks your language well and is crazy-intelligent. You explain the physiology of nerve pathways and the spine, types of pain receptors, qualities of pain from a paper cut versus a kick to the shins, etc. The alien downloads into his freakish mind, from the Cloud of info available to us via Internet and books: everything available that has any sort of important bearing on the physiology of pain. And categorizes and memorizes all of it, so any question you ask it about pain, no matter how occult and abstruse? Our alien can answer you in a matter of seconds, with a long stream of data that seems meaningful in some way. Very soon It knows everything any human has ever discovered about pain, and could lecture at the best medical schools on it. Every human authority on pain in the world recognizes our alien ("It") as the Brain About Pain. And yet: It can't feel pain. This is qualia. The alien knows everything about pain except the actual experience of pain, and what sort of "knowledge" is that? 

"What's it like to experience_____?"


"What's it like to be_____?"

Now: qualia is usually discussed in terms of basic, simple experiences, like the wine example I gave. Departures from our mundane, "ordinary" feelings of "reality" - altered states of consciousness - seem to enter into the qualia discussions less often. But if they are not the same, then surely the ideas do overlap? Being very stoned on hashish while sitting intensely close to one of the great violinists in the world as she plays the Chaconne in D minor seems like both a very radical altered state and so filled with qualia as to be qualia-stupid: just model it: This is what it is for me to be radically stoned and sitting 4 feet from Victoria Mullova playing Bach...Yes? And how was it different from the way coffee smelled, from down the hall on Sunday morning while you were still in bed and just coming out of sleep? We realize one experience was otherworldly, but only you know what it was like for you to experience both events.

A very convincing idea in cognitive psychology that has to do with the question: Why do we "like" horror movies or tragedies and sad stories? Why are we drawn to news stories about horrible things that happen to people? A big part of the answer is: we use these stories to mentally rehearse worse-case scenarios for ourselves. Just in case. The fictional horrors and depressing stories are more "enjoyable" because, while we know they could be "real" in this case everyone's safe because they are not in fact real. We build circuitry in our brains about these stories, just in case we need to draw upon the "knowledge" there. David Hume said this type of thinking about the sufferings of others builds empathy towards others. The experience of the stories have qualia, if you're into that too. But maybe I'm muddling up the topic even more than I normally do...

Daniel Dennett defends the materialist view of the world by saying that qualia is a fancy word for something that is so ordinary we hardly ever think about it: the way the world seems to us. He has a very refined and nuanced refutation (or denigration) of qualia, and I refer The Reader to his book Consciousness Explained. Because most of the eminent adherents of qualia seem to talk about it as if it's aligned with the Hard Problem of nailing down what consciousness "is" and we don't have any way to scientifically answer this to most scientists' satisfaction, it's a metaphysical concept. Which is anathema to the materialist. I disagree with Dennett and Minsky and a few other qualia-denigrators/deniers of repute, but not for reasons that seem all that robust to me: I think it's a question of personality and temperament. I think the major reason I like and "believe" in qualia is because it's fun to do so. Others choose Batman or God. Go figure.

Now, I have thought a lot about very high order abstractions like god, justice (especially informal examples), terrorism, Being, and infinity. There are similar debates about these words too, and what they refer to, or why referring to them is to talk poppycock. It's all fascinating to me. I find I think about these ideas in as many rational ways as I can; I try to articulate the points of view of those who seem to disagree with me in order to better understand where they're coming from. And I note I always have strong emotional responses to each word, for different "reasons." With qualia, I'm okay with it: I find it pragmatically useful to assume it exists, because it's pleasurable to do so. I'm well aware of a host of very good arguments against it, that it's "mere metaphysics," and that it might be an accident of language or brain evolution; it could be the result of a kludge.

V.S. Ramachandran thinks qualia is probably related to brain development that differs us from chimps. We have Wernicke's Area. Parts of the parietal lobe became differentiated in function way back in our dim past. "Rama" thinks qualia has to do with the idea of "the self" and finding meaning and brain areas - it has a whole hell of a lot to do with the Big Problem of consciousness - so he thinks qualia is a metaphysical concept now, but with further neuroscience, it can become physical.

John Searle sees consciousness as explainable by biology too, "like digestion," and I once heard him say that "conscious states are qualia all the way down."

David Chalmers posits a "principle of organizational invariance" and says that hey, if you AI/roboticists can array computer chips in a way to map the neural circuitry of the brain, you'll get qualia, which is such a trippy idea I almost feel a cannabis contact-high writing this.

But I and many others see Chalmers, Searle, and Rama as serious characters. And aye, the Materialists are worthy opponents too.

Robert Anton Wilson, as far as I can recall, never used the word qualia, but he did think we experienced it, because of the array of life-experiences and memories we brought with us to any further experience. These memories and life experiences were totally unique to us. Right there: qualia. But add to this: our nervous systems are not identical, physically, so our sensoria cannot be 100% identical. We bring cultural references and a vast suite of tricks that our language can play in our experience too. Wilson was a longtime linguistic relativist. He said we also bring moods and expectations to experience, which seem highly variable and can shape our experience of something as simple as a glass of wine. For Wilson, we lived alone on the island of our own vastly idiosyncratic subjectivities, but due to language, gestures and time-binding, we can have intersubjective discourse, bugs and misunderstandings and all.

Indeed, have you ever been so preoccupied that you took your first sip and then were asked "How do you like it?" and you realized you didn't even tune in to the taste and note anything? That's a quale right there: singular for qualia. Either lie and say it's "a bit too jammy for my taste, but all in all it's quaffable and not plonk by any means, no," or admit it: you didn't even notice, because, "I just found out the IRS is going to audit me." So...there's qualia: your total feelings about finding out you're being audited by the IRS, but only your unique feelings about it. Everyone will agree it sucks, of course. But there's more!

For Further Reference
-John Searle's TED talk on consciousness: 15 minutes. The old Berkeley dude still has it, here.
-Wiki for qualia. I was going to make most of the post about Schrodinger, but the Idiot parts of my writing brain took over. Sorry!
-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is usually a first-rate place to dig into a topic in philosophy, and here they come through in spades.
-V.S. Ramachandran! It's worth 8 minutes of your day, probably.
-9 1/2 minutes: this guy does a very good job of giving us a basic idea about qualia
-Thomas Nagel's famous 1974 paper, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", which did a lot to make qualia into more of debated and then popular topic in the philosophy of mind. (Schrodinger's ideas should have done it in the late 1940s/early 1950s, but I think he was way ahead of his time.)

Metaphysics and Overspecialization: A Meander

Woody Allen once talked about the time when he was expelled from college because he was caught cheating during the final exam in Metaphysics, when he "looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

Aristotle
The subject of metaphysics is something I will never truly understand, but I'm cool with it. It's a blast to try to understand. There are many, many metaphysical roads to take from Aristotle, who is generally credited with being the first to tackle metaphysics as a "science" or a topic in philosophical thought, even though he didn't use the word, apparently. Along with a lot of hand waving and trying to field answers from students about "ultimate things," he variously called what his translators have labeled as metaphysics: "theology" "first philosophy" "first science" and "wisdom." When I read him, he wants to get at the "first cause" of things. He wants to talk about ontology, or the Being-ness of stuff. (Kant put epistemology as the "first philosophy" but I'm getting ahead of myself.) The part that has most intrigued me lately is the search for that which does not change. Given my understanding of physics, I'm not sure there "is" anything that does not change, but it's an interesting idea to think with, and I guess Aristotle was influenced by Plato here, at least a little.

The semantics of "metaphysics" among non-professional philosophers (like the OG) has always seemed a mess, but as I get older, that bothers me less and less. Just think of what metaphysics implies: thinking about things that are above physics. Or beyond physics. It's supposedly a topic that addresses those things that have no mass, no atomic or subatomic structure and no energy. I usually see the topic as what Max Stirner called a "spook": we humans can make up all kinds of things and ideas that simply don't exist, and then reify those "things." And yet, as some sort of humanist type, this notion of metaphysics goes back so far...it's a part of us. And therefore, it can't be negligible, even if it's just made out of words.

Aristotle's origin of all things was with the Prime Mover. For a good time over the next month, mentally insert "Prime Mover" in place of "God" every time anyone says it or writes it...or you think of It. Report your results! ("For Prime Mover' sake! Put the toilet seat down once every blue moon!")

Words
I remember where I was when it happened. I was sitting in a room a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, near the Los Angeles harbor. I was half-awake and listening to some scientist answer questions on the radio. He said something about language and neuroscience and I started to perk up and listen attentively: it turns out that language, our words, have physical status. It's hard to pin down, but neural imaging, studies of brain damaged people, and our understanding of synapses and learning...the words we use are all tied up with larger neural clusters (made of atomic goo and having some weight and mass)  that have to do with our being human beings with bodies and living in a world with language...but the words themselves have some physical, ontological status, even if it's hazy and difficult to pin down. They're taking up neural space. It made sense: language does not Speak from On High to us. It's not "out there" and emanating from some Superior Being. It's a biological property, and for abstruse evolutionary reasons we developed it to a very high degree, compared with our other-ape cousins. And a lot of it seems localized in the brain - language, that is - and it's so enchanting to other parts of our brain that most of us seem to think that language "really does" reflect "reality." It "actually" maps anything "out there" into words, in a perfect fit. If we're stunned and "can't find the words to express...," it's only due to some temporary imbalance. Possibly of the humors. Or not enough coffee. Too much wine. Not enough sleep. You're freakin' stoned again?

Topics
What are our thought-chains that lead us back to privately pondering the origin of matter, what happens after death, whether there's a superior, even transcendent intelligence inhering somewhere, or a perennial favorite: why is there something rather than nothing?...or why we find ourselves getting all worked up over other peoples' answers to these questions? For me, often: mortality thoughts. And, especially in groups of friends and acquaintances of "curious, breathing, laughing flesh"(Whitman), we're already outside our ordinary "reality": drinking some wine or other inebriant accomplices, jousting with witticisms, stoned on weed, euphoric in music, coming down softly from a whirl of flirtation. I know these states get me going on some metaphysical topic, but often I keep it to myself. Although I do like to hear where you stand. And why.

                                                   Habermas

Jurgen Habermas (and Marx)
I see Habermas as the Noam Chomsky of the European Union, committed to rationality and saving Europe from monied interests. (To my German and other European readers: I apologize in advance for the paltry riffs on Habermas I'm about to play.) Habermas, now in his 80s, is still fighting for something saner. He's made splashes in legal theory, political theory, sociology, psychology. (Here's a blogger-champion to read on him.)

I first became interested in Habermas when I heard a lecture about his idea of an "ideal speech situation," and this seemed to come of his historical views on the rise of literacy and media, coffee houses and newspapers. Everyone should be allowed to speak their view, without fear of recrimination. Metaphysical appeals are the wrong way: we should talk about what's demonstrably "real." Only rational thought will save us. With enough of this massively democratic speech, the better ideas will out. I'm making this too simple to an absurd degree.

Anyway, since the early 1980s - when Habermas was advocating no metaphysics in public speech about our life conditions - he's gradually softened up. He now believes that the discourse of religion has its place in public speech in his massively democratic ideology. Even though he confesses he's "unmusical" when it comes to religion (borrowing a phrase from one of his biggest influences, Max Weber), Habermas thinks there's no getting around the impulse to religious thought. Even though he still seems to be an atheist, he's made amends with religion while trying to maintain his Kantian-Enlightmenment rationalistic ideal speech situation idea.

Peter Berger, reviews Habermas's slow move toward allowing religion/metaphysics. I agree that Habermas is like Edward Gibbon's magistrate, who finds the various religious beliefs of the populace, "useful."

Being a carrier of the Critical Theory tradition (even though he had some cogent critiques of Adorno, Horkheimer, et.al and their opposition to "instrumental rationality"), Habermas is thoroughly steeped in Marx's ideas about religion, that it was "the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions," and that it was the "opiate of the people." Marx: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up on a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." - Contribution To The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843.

A common reading of this goes something like this, thumbnail: Religion is a conspiracy, mostly by the Ruling Class, to conceal from Workers the actual reasons for our unhappiness. I think anyone pondering Marx (or The New Atheists, for that matter) ought realize the ambiguity here in Marx. For he might also be saying, religion has the correct insights in that our suffering must be overcome and what we really desire ought to have satisfaction, but  in looking toward religion we make a fundamental error in thinking of deriving our happiness through metaphysics, and not the nitty-gritty mundane, materialist world, which will require knowledge and action.

Anyway, one of the most renowned thinkers in the European Union had at the center of his social ideas the rejection of appeals to metaphysics as a basis for rational understanding, and now he's allowing metaphysics into that program. Which now seems primarily aimed at saving the idea of a relatively sane Europe.

I've often wondered, in the years since I read Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (I read volume 1 and only thumbed through volume 2), that the ideal speakers in his ideal democracy might need to know more than about what they've specialized in, because I've been in rooms with far too many well-educated specialists who can't understand why the other guy ain't seein' it all from his angle. About which more later below...

Very Brief Take on Philosopher Kings
I still get a charge out of the far-more ancient-than-Aristotle Chinese view of metaphysics in the Tao Te Ching: "That which is above matter is the Tao." Hey: it's a decent take. Or at least it makes it for me.

There was a time when the Schoolmen, the Scholastics, doing philosophy as theologians, were The Cheese intellectuals in the West. When they decided to hold the Renaissance, starting on January 1, 1500, some Humanists, artists, engineers, poets and political philosophers began to get a piece of the action. By around 1860, Natural Philosophy (AKA "science") began to rack up win after win. And this held sway through the Roaring 20th century.

Richard Rorty said the Philosophers had always insisted that, no matter what others thought, theirs was The Cheese all along. They had constructed a bunch of elaborate systems that placed something between the individual and the world: Mind. Language. History's Laws. But theirs was the discipline ne plus ultra.

Whatever, it had always been assumed, says Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, that the role of philosophers was as meta-cultural criticism and the assumption that only philosophers had a "God's Eye View" on all the other sub-disciplines and fields of study. It was even up to philosophers to tell the lesser historians or economists or psychologists or anthropologists to do more of this, less of that.  We're never going to arrive at a One True Real Copy of Reality if you keep doing that sort of fieldwork! Do something else. The very picture of Plato's Philosopher Kings. As the renegade Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner called it: a Platonic Complex.

Rorty says, enough with the idea of achitectonic disciplines: the true role of the philosopher is to live up to its name: love wisdom. And we do that by being Generalists: we read about popular culture and wonder what it means for sociology. We talk to some historians about medicine and get some ideas there...how can this all "hang together...?" We read the philosophy of science and then about actual conditions in labs and see if we find something there. We look at marginalized discourses and books and authors and then make conversations about what they may have to offer that is being missed by those not being marginalized. We wonder about happiness and political power and economics and language and quantum mechanics and Dark Matter...and how it all hangs together. Or might.

Rorty says: enough with the Philosopher King role. It never worked and was pretentious and it alienated philosophers from a more valuable role: as messengers between disciplines. Generalists.

(Right now witness the Third Culturalists trying to assume the role of Philosopher Kings, and attacks from the traditional Humanities and other places. Maybe start HERE. How much of it has to do with funding and prestige?)

Contra people like Pinker and Dawkins and (what I see as) their sophisticated scientism, I do not abide by the idea that there exists any meta-discourse, anywhere. (As of October, 2013)

                                          rendering of Margaret Fuller

The Fascinating Case of Buckminster Fuller's Metaphysics
Talk about a Generalist! And yet, as I parse Fuller's books, I always got the feeling that, as much as he paid lip-service to economics, sociology, poetry, and the humanities, he thinks (he died in 1983, but his ideas are still alive for me) Science is a meta-discourse. And metaphysics actuates science.

So what is metaphysics, according to Fuller? Scientific laws that express a tremendous amount of generalization from a dizzying welter of individual cases. Or, an example in Bucky-speak:

Humans are unique in respect to all other creatures in that they also have minds that can discover constantly varying interrelationships existing only between a number of special case experiences as individually apprehended by their brains, which covarying interrelationship rates can only be expressed mathematically. For example, human minds discovered the law of relative interattractiveness of celestial bodies, whose initial intensity is the product of masses of any two such celestial bodies, while the force of whose interattractiveness varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical interdistancing increases.
-Critical Path, p.63

Fuller thinks that humans, constantly looking into Nature, using their Minds (different than the brain), discover generalities expressed in the language of math. As time goes on, these generalities get honed and become evermore exact and interaccomodative. (<----I just used a word that I'm not sure even exists, but every time I study Bucky I get infected with his unique verb-ifying language style, so I say what the hell and let 'er fly.)

But this bit about the Mind not being the same as the brain? Well, first let's get to Fuller's conception of God:

Acknowledging the mathematically elegant intellectual integrity of eternally regenerative Universe is one way of identifying God. 

Ohhh...another Platonist. Hey, whatever floats your Dymaxion House!

God may also be identified as the synergy of the interbehavioral relationships of all the principles unpredicted by the behaviors of characteristics of any of the principles considered only separately. 

Recall: Fuller is the grandnephew of American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. There's something genetic. Nevertheless, Fuller seemed Leonardo enough for the 20th century.

Oh yea: Mind does not equal Brain:

Brains always and only coordinate the special case information progressively apprehended in pure principle by the separate senses operating in pure mathematical-frequency principle. Brain then sorts out the information to describe and identify whole-system characteristics, storing them in the memory bank as system concepts for single or multiple recall for principle-seeking consideration and reconsideration as system integrities by searching and ever reassessing mind. 

Okay, this brain sounds pretty impressive to me. How can anything be better than that? Well, here's how Bucky conceived mind:

Only minds have the capability to discover principles. Once in a very great while scientists' minds discover principles and put them to rigorous physical test before accepting them as principle. More often theologists or others discover principles but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special-case testing before accepting and employing them as working-assumption principles.
-pp.159-160, Critical Path

The mind, unlike the brain, is weightless, massless, colorless, and not detected by any instrument that I know of. Furthermore, for Fuller, the physical principles that actually work to run our world of technics and know-how, are also weightless, massless, odorless, colorless, and they don't take in or emit energy, etc:

Mind and general physical principles, generalized, are metaphysical entities. And their synergy runs the world.

Fuller, in book after book, is able to think about our lives and educations and be somewhat dispassionate about the way we were trained to think of inquiry and knowledge as being separate entities. At other times he sees this as something like a conspiracy theory against Mind by powerful interests. Why so much at stake? Because, specialization gets you extinct. And we need as many people to think in creative, generalistic ways as possible if we are to avert catastrophe. Think of his God, his idea of Mind, your Mind. Does it make sense? In the introductory chapter to Synergetics he sees specialization as fostering isolation, futility and confused feelings. Humanity is "deprived of comprehensive understanding." Understanding based on the soundest metaphysical principles. Because most of us in the West were educated to specialize, we tend to abandon personal responsibility for thinking of the Big Picture, and taking social action. We let others deal with the big stuff. He doesn't say it, but he seems to equate specialization with marginalization. "Specialization's preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy."

Fuller sees art, science, economics and "ideology" all as having separate "drives" and "complexedly interacting trends" which could be understood via synergetics, but hardly anyone "in" one of those fields seems to believe this. This is threatening to the survival of the species. Giant pandas only eat bamboo. When the bamboo is gone, the panda is gone. 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct (or a like number; it's not good news), and not all extinctions were due to specialization or overspecialization, but there have have been enough extinctions, presumably, due to this short-sightedness. And we're supposed to have all the tools! We live at the equator and near the Arctic Circle, in rain forests and deserts, savannas and at 10,000 feet above sea level.

Related to this, here may be one of the brainiest conspiracy theories you'll ever read:

We have also noted how the power structures successively dominant over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a "specialization" upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided - ergo, "conquered," powerless. The separate individuals' special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary flow of total knowledge and its power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-humanity-advancing potentials. Thus the few became uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.
--p.162, Critical Path

In a slim and criminally underrated and under-read book by Fuller, GRUNCH of Giants, he goes into the history of this conspiracy by the very few to use the "wizards" for their own control of wealth and power. And if you can get with the prose style, you might find it very rewarding.

With this I abandon my typing with the idea that we've specialized too much; we've been marginalized, the survival of our species is at stake, and the deepest synergetic nexus of survival and real wealth is metaphysical know-how. I had no idea I'd end up here. Adieu!

P.S: Not long ago I was delving around in the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, and in 1948 he seems to have thought very much like Fuller on these topics. I wonder if Fuller influenced him, or Quine influenced Fuller, or this is another of those convergences that Charles Fort described as "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time." In 1948, in an essay, "What There Is," Quine said that our best scientific theories "carry an ontological commitment" to objects whose existence is incompatible with nominalism.

                                                 Buckminster Fuller