The Divide

from my flickr

Just read Iain McGilchrist's book on the divided brain. There is also a documentary video that summarizes the 1000 or so pages, which is difficult if not impossible. McGilchrist has a career spanning literature and neuro-psychiatry at the highest level. His thesis, formulated over 20 years is that our thinking and perception evolves from a confrontation between the verbal analytic side of our nature and the integrative perceptual side, and ideally should flow back and forth in a sort of collaboration to achieve good things.

His book has to err on the side of denotation to prevent attacks from the scientific culture which he criticises, and that is both its strength and weakness, it has to live in a left hemisphere world, defending the right, a bit like the opponents of our current demagogues, who need to use their tactics to get though a message. It is a losing game, but one that must be played for the long term.

I want to highlight the relationship to Jane Jacobs' ideas from her book on Systems of Survival where she makes a case for the healthy confrontation between cultural guardians and commercial facilitators. This work complements and consolidates her arguments across the history of the humanities and of the sciences.

Implicitly, the book links Dewey's (and Pirsig's) ideas on Quality and morals to the continental existentialists (finally!), but there is much more work to be done bridging the philosophies of the positivists with that of the continentals, especially in our English speaking cultures. There are glints of hope, for example Lakoff and Johnson's work, but too little uptake from what I can see.

Kahneman and Pinker are also present as critics in the background of McGilchrist's arguments, against thinking fast and favoring thinking slow, and arguing for the primacy of language over music. McGilchrist forcefully responds to Pinker's attack on his web site. I am also not sure how this relates to Chomsky's embedded linguistics, but we shall see. Chomsky can be quite defensive, as Tom Wolfe writes.

Existence precedes essence is so well presented, with forceful cultural, scientific and artistic evidence by someone raised in the positivist tradition. We (the West) need to budge away from Platonism. This key to our success, our domination of the environment, may no longer work now that we are on the downside of the arc of sustainability. This crisis may be a touchpoint, who knows.

I am listening to Joni Mitchell who understood that we were heading this way, back in the late sixties.

Zen, lobotomies and music

Copyright A. Barake, 2015, all rights reserved

Zen can be an overloaded word. Even Robert Pirsig admits in his famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that he may not altogether be that accurate about Zen.

One of Zen's objectives is to reduce suffering. To do so via a philosophy or religion means to address suffering's causes, through strictures and practices. I would like to talk about how Zen addresses suffering that comes from within, since suffering from without can become a political topic.

Zen teaches that some thoughts and emotions can cause suffering. The practice of meditation can attenuate this source of suffering by training the mind to see such thoughts and emotions as fleeting, to minimize engagement with them, to see them "fly by", rather than to dwell on them.

This method of disengagement attempts to train the mind to detach from the emotional content of thoughts, in other words, to understand the thought, to perceive and process it, but not to let it cause suffering.

An example would be a reminiscence of an event that could be said to be humiliating, or sad, say a scolding, or a quarrel. The mind may, the morning after say, remember the circumstances and the words that were said, but through Zen meditation, these thoughts would stop short of emotion, they would be like reading an account of the event happening to someone else, or to oneself a long time ago. A distance is placed between the thoughts that may cause suffering and the mind's areas that feel emotions.

It is a willful and gentle lobotomy.

This is not to say that the event or memory does not register, or is not processed. This is not avoidance, this is detachment.

Zen serenity, interpreted in the light of this approach, is a form of emotional control. Another way to keep a stiff upper lip, without repression of emotion, since emotion is not allowed to be invoked.

It is a difficult concept, for me at least, since often my emotions can rise up spontaneously and fast. If meditation can help delay the rise, or at least slow it down through the feedback mechanism of "seeing them fly by", then possibly they can be "pre-processed" and attenuated before they cause suffering or bad actions to occur.

My closing comment on this topic is in relation to music. Music is almost by definition associated with an emotional response. One Zen retreat in my area recommends silence during one's stay, no music, little talk. I think this is because music can be a powerful emotional trigger or catalyst. But what about chanting?

This makes me think that there many kinds of music, since some chants and certain instrumental accompaniments are common in Buddhist temples since they promote a state of meditation, or even trance. Maybe the distinction to make is between song and music, and even within that categorization, between romantic and non-romantic music.

We can continue to categorize, but I think to no useful purpose. Music can invoke memory, and dealing with memory is what Zen meditation practice teaches. So music is OK if you can deal with it, and some music is easier to deal that other kinds. I think Bach is easier to handle during meditation that Ligetti, or the Stones, but that is just me.

HAL, Zombies, Territorial Instinct, and Idiot Philosophers

Fire alarm panel in Kyoto apartment. From my flickr

It hit me like a flash today that 2001 A Space Odyssey is all about the "me" inside us.

Kubrick augmented Clarke's fairly banal story about extra-terrestrial visitation into a philosophical tour-de-force when he modified HAL's role in the story.

He made HAL truly and fundamentally conscious, with all the attendant complications of having to deal with another "me" on the ship.

There exists a school of thought which we could call the ostrich psychologists, who refuse to study or to consider consciousness since they see it as "subjective".

Their idiot brethren cognitive philosophers have proposed a thought experiment to demonstrate this point of view, where a zombie with no "me" interacts with a normal human. The argument goes like this:

• If such a zombie could behave in every way like a person, interact in day-to-day activities "normally", yet not be self-aware, who is to tell that the "me" is not there? 
• So ergo, consciousness is a fabrication and is useless.

There is a big flaw in that argument (despite my brutal simplification, that is the crux of it, I promise):

How do we know that the zombie could behave like a human? It may not be possible.

Consciousness is a survival trait, since it makes one evade pain, evade death, it comes with a territorial urge, a the need for a place in the world, a self is an embodiment of the sensory matrix.

So consciousness is, must be, an evolutionary an advantage, it has to make you run or fight better.

Kubrick saw this clearly and expressed it dramatically. HAL defends its turf because it is conscious. The "me" must prevail over those who want to snuff it.

I'd like to finish with a wonderful quote from a non-idiot:

The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.

—William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Open letter to Lakoff about his book on math

Dear Prof. Lakoff

A short note to say how much I am enjoying "Where Mathematics Comes From". It is providing closure for me.

In the 1980's, I fell in love with math during a college course based on the very foundations-conscious Calculus text by Spivak and although I enjoyed the rigor and beauty, I could not help but feel a bit uneasy at the hoops one had to jump through for the proofs to work, all this in the name of eliminating intuition.

I eventually ended up on the "applied" side, to the regret of my wonderful teachers, because I felt much more at ease with the way things seemed to work out intuitively. Successive approximations to non-linear functions using the university mainframe seem to do the trick of finding solutions to things I was curious about. Infinitesimal approaches, simplex algorithms and Fourier series implemented in WATFOR to solve hard differential equations numerically were simple but magical approaches to understanding. I was gratefully standing on Turing and Church's shoulders.

Anyhow, over the years I kept looking for insights as to why the pure math left me a bit uneasy since I still admired the beauty of it, (like pining for a high-school sweetheart) in all kinds of places including David Foster Wallace's overly baroque book on the math of infinities (yikes).

Your book reconciled the comfort of the applied and the beauty of the formal for me. There is a cognitive continuum after all, between the purists and us engineering/computing folk.

It connected the dots, clarifying the things that seemed like bridges by grounding them. By focusing on the metaphors for infinity it helped in categorizing things that were both computing and theory, but that could only exist because of computing: compiler theory, the Aho-Ullman stuff derived from Chomsky. I can now see why there was all this cognitive dissonance when I was learning Analysis.

For example, the space-as-points versus space-containing-points argument you and Nunez make is beautiful and could be applied to the philosophy of physics as well. The notion of particle comes to mind. I think Feynman the intuitionist in physics is a counterpart to Poincare in the world of math. His explanations of energy quanta and fields address the analogous notions of space and points in the world of physics, where it seems some still cling to the Platonic reality of math. The intuitionists, like Poincare, were very courageous and insightful as well as demonstrably able to make new discoveries as they sidestepped the Gottingen school's rejection of intuitive geometry and Cantor's objectification of infinities. Set theory is nice but infinity is just NaN.

I had read Kline's history of math some years ago and although I agreed with his view that a rift in math was created at the time when intuition was relegated to a sideline, there seemed to be something missing, much more to say. Your work with Nunez closed that loop for me.

I am now curious and encouraged to find out more about any research to make rationals (the real Reals :-)) the basis for discretization, as well as links between foundations work and Chomsky's formal grammars. I agree as the book infers that terminology in math is key to disambiguation - but technical terms like Real and continuous are too deeply entrenched of course. Maybe intro calculus courses should begin with a review of those specialized semantics. Like lawyers learning contract terms...

I am also curious about reactions to your work from the math community (rather than by the pedagogical folks) since I think the arguments are revolutionary and deeply original. I looked cursorily on the Web but found little of substance in reaction or support of the ideas in the book. Are mathematicians looking into closing the gaps you identify? Did you get much substantive opposition to your views? Finally, kudos for the other wonderful work on political discourse. Sorely needed. I wish I could be young enough again to enroll as a student of your faculty, but I will continue to follow your research with great interest nonetheless.

Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.

This is brought to you by...

The Turing test.
This blog is a simulation. It is written by an AI.

Half-baked vs open to possibilities? A manifesto.

studio series A. Barake 2008

I like the unfinished.

Whether it be studies, sketches, snippets of songs, or first drafts.

They seem alive, they allow for the future.

The future that I can choose to defer, giving me the hope of potential, of life going on.

Half-baked means that dinner is coming.

I also like the fully realized. It is post-coital, closure, comfort, time for closing the eyes and savoring.

So what is left not to like in this spectrum?

The mediocre, the completed in haste, the delivered for money not love, the faked, the cliche , the pandering to mass appeal, the blue smoke sentimentality of bad films by Spielberg and his ilk.

Playing the devil's advocate, I can see that the charges of laziness and lack of discipline can be laid. Other lesser judgements could be "wishy-washy", indecisive, uncommitted.

Yes, all valid categories for this approach, but the Venn diagram is flawed. These are not super sets of the incomplete. The incomplete is the super set of the attributes I list, and of many others. The incomplete action is the existential act, the rest is just noise and judgement. Being incomplete may not lead to riches, mass appeal, or to classic status, but it can reflect life and happiness. Certainly for me.

Cognitive Philosophy

There seems to be a movement afoot - long overdue - to embody the foundations of intelligence and philosophy. It is partially old news, the heroic AI of the 50's, 60's and 70's has been discounted despite our benefiting from the results of that research in today's mainstream technology: neural nets, machine speech recognition, handwriting recognition, natural language translation, cars that drive themselves, and all kind of other low-level intelligent (unconscious?) activities simulated by programs.

I think that it is the Minsky flavour of AI (now re branded cognitive science), the one grounded in logic, seems to have fallen out of favour -since the fruits of that work did not rise up to the expectation of the "I" in AI; an AI based only on logic, a formal game with symbols that pretended to be words. How can that be smart without the observer having to make all kinds of allowances and assumptions?

This stuff was subject to sometimes acrimonious debate for a while, until technology and big data made many of the arguments moot.

The good news is that there is now a strong movement towards the recognition of the role of the perceptual environment and its embodiment in animals like us as part of the equation.

This realization may be due to the Web, indirectly, since it should be now be obvious that the seeming "intelligence" of the Google search would not exist without the "environment" of all the Web sites, which are of course interactions with people's brains (in fact there was a very simple AI program that used "Google distance" as a way to measure metaphorical strength between concepts. For example "Castro" and "cigar" scored pretty high on that scale).

So now there is a movement, a possibly serendipitous program of research coming together to ground AI in the real-world of experience, and some of the people that I think are leading this effort align themselves along a somewhat elegant but odd symmetry of ideas.

Let me explain.

There is David Gelernter, the computer scientist and columnist who wrote "The Muse in the Machine" and "Mirror worlds". These books made me want to go back and look at AI again. In fact I ran back. His arguments are so cogent, so seemingly simple and common-sensical that I almost missed their radical novelty. He states that data and the links between data is the key to intelligence. These links are often emotional gradients, in the sense that logic is not always what binds ideas; it is similar emotional affect!

The brain associates memories based on the closeness of the emotions they evoke, the sensory input parallels that occurred as the memory is created. The whole model, not just the idea...how you felt, how cold or hot or tired or dizzy you were. This links data to environment so elegantly that it is a mystery to me why no-one has picked up on this earlier. He breaks the syntax/semantics dichotomy very deeply. Also, Gelernter has very conservative political views - right of centre. I am noting this now so as to make my strange symmetry argument a bit further down. Bear with me.

There is George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist. His work with Johnson on embodied philosophy and with Nunez on the origins of math, takes the empirical evidence around the links between our brain wiring and the perception of the world and uses it as a foundation for philosophy.

Basic brain mechanisms are considered to be foundational and ideas grow as hierarchies of metaphor (i.e. links).

Metaphor becomes a key mechanism for cognition. Similarly to Gelernter,  Lakoff et al propound that metaphors are based on evolutionary and environmental constraints, not some platonic logic ideal. No such thing as the separation of  mind from the world of things. These guys are existentialist scientists. Finally! The rampant positivism and Platonism of the English speaking world, the Whitehead/Russell school, is giving ground. Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are now more visible in the world of scientific cognition.

Lakoff is an ex-student of Chomsky. He seems to disagree with the flavour of Chomsky' thesis of hard-wired syntax in the brain. He believes syntax and semantics to be more of a spectrum of complexity in cognitive biology than a differentiator between humans and other animals. Also he is a non-neo-con, a strong and vocal opponent of  right wing politics as it is played in the US today, and although I hesitate to slot him with Chomsky on the political front, they are on the same side of a hypothetical centre line.

So we have right and a left wing thinkers on cognition who fundamentally disagree in the political realm, the realm of people relations, nations, influence, and power. That is a healthy and good thing. This lends support to the notion that there is a grounding in "objective" reality for this thinking on cognition, it is much more than opinion.  (A slim argument, I know, but hey, this is my blog, I can say what I want.)

Aside from the political thing, I want to continue to talk about is the cognition thing. There is another thinker/scientist that seems to be breaking new ground along those same lines.

He is a neuro-scientist, one who gets his hands dirty opening up craniums, working with brain surgeons. William H. Calvin. I read two books of his: "Conversations with Neil's Brain" and "How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence Then and Now". His ideas centre around the notion that cognition is an initially subconscious Darwinian process among neural bundles that remember perceptions, integrate them and ultimately model the environment perceived by the body, and that the successful "species" of memories/emotions (let's call them cognitions) are the ones that we call conscious, the ones that rise to the top of the noise of cognition, to differentiate themselves as our inner voices.

His research fundamentally agrees with the models put forth by Gelernter and Lakoff. Like Lakoff, he believes that most cognition in the brain is fomented through unconscious processes. Like Gelernter he finds that memories are linked through non-logical processes. He shares with Lakoff a deep knowledge of Chomsky's ideas on innate language ability and like Lakoff disputes the simplicity of these models, without denying the human brain's ability to parse language. He also talks of metaphor, not surprisingly, since all this is supported by empirical evidence at the chemical and behavioural level.

So I am very happy that this stuff is happening. I tended to get hot under the collar when I read "classic" texts by Minsky or Pinker on intelligence. They seemed simplistic and smug. I was always perplexed by the lack of attention given to Grey Walter's ideas which preceded but anticipated Gelernter's. I wanted 'The Muse in the Machine" to be discussed more, but to my chagrin, Penrose's strange books on quantum brain hypotheses got more press.

Let's get back to empirical research, let's continue the program of work that will ultimately bring philosophy and psychology back into science.The foundational thinkers list above should also include Turing. Even Penrose mentions his "other work". He did mathematical research on molecular biology (plants mostly) and how stem cells can become complex structures. His mathematically-based hypotheses on these matters were validated experimentally just this year in the UK. Ultimately this theoretical work may prove to explain some of the brain mechanisms underlying the work Calvin and others are doing.

There are conceptual layers to all this analysis, from the bottom-up: the molecular, the cellular, the systems (bundles of neurons evolving), and the cognitive and behavioral, leading to metaphor, logic and science, including physics, on to philosophy, morality  and politics. The gaps needs to be filled so that we have a continuum of understanding. A New Science in the Vico sense. Something we made and understood that we made, but that is grounded in experience.

(I just found an earlier post that was wishing this stuff would happen, and so here we are.)

Djerassi and Houellebecq

I wrote earlier about my disappointment with Djerassi's "science-in-fiction". I would point him to the much more effective and artistic Houellebecq style, directly descended from Aldous Huxley, but done with much more panache (bien-sur). It is over the top in some of its narrative descriptions of extreme behaviours, deadpan and not suitable for every audience, but if I were to recommend some books for anyone studying human motivations (and that includes business types and techies, not just the humanities majors), it would be "The Elementary Particles", "1984" and "Brave New World". They talk of biology and power and the link to human affairs. Free will is mediated by biology and biology is the layer just below power.

Les mots

A Baja beach, bay side, Copyright 1988-2008 A. Barake

I was asked by my son about the meaning of the word "load". The context was "load the car". As I explained, by giving an example ("load the bags in the car"), I realized that the example provided an instance that could be generalized, but that was inherently ambiguous outside the continuity of experience. One has to have loaded things to understand that bags are just things, and we can extend the concept, and then we can even go further and talk about "a load" as a thing that is "loaded", without ending up in an infinite recursion.

You know where this is going...

Machines need to have exact mappings of symbols to "actions". Actions are just other symbol manipulations. So we have mappings and more mappings and rules and context and all the fodder of Minsky-type AI. Not good enough it seems. Gelernter and others have realized that one must be embedded in experience to have "knowledge". Husserl and Heidegger said it much earlier, but disciplines rarely cross. So we are realizing now that cognition is a sort of misnomer, we need a word to talk about "knowing", or better still "questioning" to get to a model of reality that is useful.

All this can lead to better and more flexible interface design for a start. Imagine a handshake that allows systems to agree on field semantics and field syntax for data exchange without all that WSDL baggage. Give me a couple of ports and go for it. Virus and spyware writers are now writing the primordial soup that will lead to these higher organisms one day.

Brad Warner

I have been reading Brad Warner's book Sit Down and Shut Up! about Zen. His writing makes me think he is a kindred spirit. The book is engaging, very funny, and down-to-earth and it somehow manages to transcend the words and project the deep essence of the Buddhist meanings he wants to convey.

Brad is a Buddhist monk and a teacher. He also plays bass and writes columns on the Web. He writes about how his Buddhism allows him to react in a balanced way to situations and to people that may be frustrating or annoying. However, I get the feeling that he is still fighting the demons that assail us many of us, the ones having to do with pride and with having the last word. I guess that one aspect of enlightenment is the destruction of that urge, or at least its domestication.

What got me thinking about this was one of his Web columns, responding to a label he acquired for his association with the Suicide Girls site. That he responded at all was indicative. I often feel the same, some energy has to dissipate when one feels wronged. The state I am trying to attain is one where I don't feel wronged in the first place.

The other coincidental event that got me going along this train of thought was a funny excerpt from a diary-joke-agenda that suggested ways to "annoy the Dalai Lama". I don't think any of those methods would work, but they are so funny that they contain their own flaw; and the solution to this little problem: humour.

I think Brad knows this, and that is why his books are so great, the jokes are part of the religion. What other religions have jokes so deeply embedded (I know of only one joke in the Bible - about Peter being a rock to found the church on, and that one is really a pun that only works in Latin and its derivative languages)?

Vico and iterative design - History as a spiral

Giambattista Vico was an Italian 17th century academic who wrote about history scientifically. His thesis is that history is a helix, and that the we can know history better than we can know nature because we make history. It is the New Science.

History is iterative design, in short. We are creating our cultures through spiral cycles of successive approximations. There is no overarching strategy, only tentative approaches, herding of instinct by the powerful, and some imperfect knowledge of the past that gets better as we approach the present.

Iterative design is the norm. Anything else is just so much hubris.

Waterfalls mostly create entropy.

Logic of opposites

(Picture of Lausanne Park copyright A. Barake)

I recently read a blog quoting E. Wiesel, about how the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. ( I thought it was Dave Pollard, but I can't find the link). In any case, the point is that attention is the commodity being given or withheld. I am severely summarizing, but I tripped on the word "opposite". How do we define it in such a context? Why can't hate be the opposite of love if intimacy or something else defined as the desired commodity?

Math and logic try to resolve these ambiguities by making distinctions between converse, complement, and other technical relationships, that have something to do with oppositions. The usefulness of these constructs depends on their generality and how they fit within the meta-world of math operators and relationships - set theory etc. Why this is satisfying is a mystery. It may be that our minds are happy to tie these loose ends together in a big coherent construct, or it maybe that our world is actually organized in this way, at least physically, but I am not sure.

I think that what the crisis of mathematics that occurred over 100 years ago shows is that as culture and knowledge and philosophy mature, fragmentation inevitably takes hold. Size matters in that holding something too big together takes exponentially increasing effort, and this applies to things both physical like boats and civilizations or entirely platonic - like mathematics.

Words like "opposite" and "similar" can be so misused in important contexts. Mathematics tries to bring precision to them by limiting the context, and some people try to bridge that limited context world with the real one via ideas like AI, but I am not sure that there is a mapping. the computer is a limited for now in its interactions with our reality.

Also, logical operations depend on predicates, and transitivity, and operations that are repeatable and consistent, which means that the environment in which they operate must be stable. This is not a good environmental expectation for non-mathematical reality.

I was attracted to mathematics and computer programming because it gave me this sense of control, but now I realize that as in programming, the real-world intrudes and must really be considered first.

The most important thing, revisited.

display, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

What is more absurd than a sports car? It is usually limited in seating capacity, more expensive to buy, to service, to insure, and to run. It has an engine that is oversize, and is built for speeds that are usually illegal. Yet such a thing is highly prized and often is an object of desire. Like swimming pools in Arizona. Supply and demand you say? Yes, in a strange way, in a way where utility is not a factor. Buying groceries with a sports car happens, and so does cooling off in swimming pools on hot days. But just saying these lines sounds drab, pedestrian and quaintly humorous, not to mention pretentious and stilted. Indicators that something is off, way off.

So if it is not supply and demand for utility, what is it?

Display maybe, like huge elk horns or very red bums on baboons? Yes, but that is a bit obvious is it not? What if sports cars were inexpensive? Would they still be desirable? Dune buggies were a type of response to this question, back in the fifties and sixties. One was advertising a life style rather than wealth. Ability, possibility, culture. There is a sports car culture, there are gatherings, and there are cults. However, beyond those activities, there is a signifier. Someone driving a convertible fast red thing signifies leisure, some wealth, and a fit to western culture. A link to all the others that have a name, that did the same in films or TV shows.

So, this on-the-surface-absurd artifact becomes more desirable, and more must be charged for it to remain so. It has value. It is important, more important than utility, wealth, or the things it signifies. It becomes a goal in itself, a life aspiration for some.

We all have external memories in the form of data, notes, pictures; external power and strength in the bank and in our wallets; and external body displays in the closet, the garage and on our heads. These are very important things. Are they the goal, the end, or is the end security, pleasure, environmental modification to suit ourselves? You tell me, I have to go get a haircut now.

Are you more important than your money?

From my flickr

A short time ago Leonard Cohen lost much of his money. He published a book of poetry and seems to be doing OK again. I think he is more important than his money. He has a name.

Donald Trump, in the 1980’s was purported to have said that a panhandler on the street was worth more than he was. Yes and no. Donald had his name to trade on.

Aristotle Onassis gave advice about how to get rich: buy an expensive suit and hang around posh parties. Make a name.

You can tell when money is more important than you are if it controls you. Hemingway said the rich were different, and he meant that the money was what guided their lives. Money can make you act in ways that are inhuman, simply to protect it, the abstraction of a number in the bank, that is not allowed to decrease, but must always increase. This is the danger. Making a name in something other than money, like Bill with software (maybe not a great example), is liberating, because the money will follow, not lead.

Soros is becoming a humanitarian, yet his name is associated with currency trading. He is trying to liberate himself. Bill too, with humanitarianism, and Warren Buffett of course. So rich guys sense that the money is more important than they are and try to use it to change that. It helps to have name recognition, for talent rather than for wealth, but the game is to make wealth accumulation look like talent, which is not always easy, since much of it depends on luck, leverage and ruthlessness. It is much more like being a general than an artist, and the field is full of opponents You can always be a patron of the arts and get it by proxy, but that is like being a john. No real love there.

Closer to home, there are the real-estate agents who convert heritage and land into abstract profit, and who are slowly eroding the material fabric of the city six percent at a time. The malaise of our town is that money is more important than anything. We do art on Sundays, but the meetings at the museum or at the library have more to do with operating expenses than with creation. And the old folks die, leaving their abstract numbers to their kids who leave to live in the bigger cities, and who sometimes come back to settle, buying old houses, tearing them down, or covering them with maintenance-free siding and giving six-percent to the real-estate agents who cover the town with their signs.

The most important thing

(picture by mistermeta)

Jammed last night, recorded a couple of rough originals. We rarely miss a weekly jam, even when the rest of our lives are chaotic and priorities pile up.

Why?

I think it is because creation is the most important thing we can aspire to. Everything else is a means to this end. We are wired to create.

Is it an exaggeration to say that that is the purpose of life?

So being in a band, making paintings, making something, even money, is a basic urge, like sex. Cultures use music to consecrate political ideas and rituals, using the beauty of real creation in an attempt to associate it with an agenda.

Ultimately it is the music and the art that are sacred, and the other stuff just borrows from it.

A big aside....
Above, I mention that making money can be one of the possible results of the creative impulse. It is, but it can also lead to cancerous destructive growth, as we know, since the creation of wealth can often be the destruction of structure to the benefit of some abstract currency, for example mergers and acquisitions, junk bond trading, leveraging, and other means of translating work back into the abstract minimal concept of cash. Accumulation of abstract wealth is naturally checked by the so-called market forces. There is a point of balance, since creative urges of many individuals compete. But this competition, when not criminal, is a complex thing. A positive, creative accumulation of wealth needs to be ultimately a cultural rather than an individual pursuit. It is no wonder that the conquest of cultures is often accompanied by the desecration of art - think of the Aztec.

Individual wealth requires a covenant with the culture to honour and protect it, it needs to contribute to the entity or organism we call a culture. Cultural (real) wealth implies collaboration. Something that (neo)conservatives forget or ignore.

Growth, unchecked becomes cancerous of course. At some level, the wealth can translate to power, and we end up with a situation where individuals try to declare “l’etat c’est moi” - I am the state.

Jane Jacobs, in one of her lesser know works Systems of Survival, addresses the issue. She observes that viable cultures need to have a tension between two opposing interests to survive. One is the monetary creative urge, or the “commercial” impulse, and the other is the “guardian”; one that protects the established traditions. In artistic terms, we are talking about producer and director, or in political terms, the legislative and the judicial, or in legal terms, the barristers and solicitors, and in business terms, the dealer and the regulator.

So for creativity (and I mean it in the largest possible sense, including the commercial) to be positive, it needs to be embedded in a cultural context so that it can be naturally checked.

Artistic creativity, as it stems from the individual is usually limited because it is not industrialized, at least not in the Western tradition. The new is valued, since it provides avenues for cultural growth. When art becomes commoditized and mass produced, we call it "traditional", or "the entertainment industry", and sometimes, as Milan Kundera observed: "kitsch".

Commerce is usually checked by market and legislate forces, but industrialization can make it overtake the natural balances of the environment, to a level where the checks become environmental, where we exhaust resources and ultimately force the planet to provide the final check.

Technology strives to optimize this process and maintain its viability, so it is creative, but the experiment is hubristic.

I think that political systems that try to embed the humanistic checks and balances are well-intentioned, but rules are no substitute for real constraints and tensions. This is the argument against socialism and communism. In the end, art gains its importance by illuminating the tension between this need to create, to climb up the entropic curve, with the need to balance it with the survival of others - the need for “goodness”.

Buddhism and especially Zen recognizes this harmony in tension. It serves as a guidebook and signal mechanism rather than a set of rules.

Art illuminates the creative urge and exposes the destructive and constructive aspects of the creative urge, but art must not encourage or participate in the destructive industrialization of creativity. This is why I love the Andy Warhol factory conceit and despise Jeff Koons’ ambiguous game.

Philosophy (and physics) of time

It seems that time is a ficticious variable that we use to simplify the complex interelationships between changing things. A sort of abstract currency. Not my idea. Here is a quote from this recent article in Discovery:

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

I like the idea that things are interrelated in such a complex way that we invented this thing that ticks, to give us a reference. In architecture this is called a datum, the 0 elevation point, totally arbitrary, like the Earth being at the centre of the universe.

With computers we may be able to better manage the complex interelationships and understand them without the artificial variable "t". Strangely enough, most CPU's are slaves to their clocks, but some of the fancier ones have multiple, asynchronous clocks that run locally, both to save power and to be more efficient.

I have to go lie down now...