Maxistentialism

Major Octopus news: An octopus and its coconut-carrying antics...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:45:00 -0500

An octopus and its coconut-carrying antics have surprised scientists.

Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.

The octopuses eventually use the shells as a protective shelter. If they just have one half, they simply turn it over and hide underneath. But if they are lucky enough to have retrieved two halves, they assemble them back into the original closed coconut form and sneak inside.

This shouldn’t be surprising… I previously posted that an Octopus flooded the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium:

[An Octopus] in the aquarium’s Kids’ Corner octopus tank had swum to the top of the enclosure and disassembled the recycling system’s valve, flooding the place with some 200 gallons of seawater.

The tiny octopus, which is about the size of a human forearm when its appendages are extended, floated lazily in the water that remained in its tank.

It watched intently through glass walls and portholes as workers struggled to dry the place out in time for the day’s first busload of schoolchildren to arrive on a 9:30 a.m. field trip.

He may have been trying to escape, or just turn off the lights so he could enjoy his HDTV.

Last Words

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:37:13 -0500

Last words of death row prisoner Napoleon Beazley, May 28, 2002:

The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here - I am.

I’m not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I’m not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I’m not only upset, but I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight. I’m not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.

If someone tried to dispose of everyone here for participating in this killing, I’d scream a resounding, “No.” I’d tell them to give them all the gift that they would not give me…and that’s to give them all a second chance.

I’m sorry that I am here. I’m sorry that you’re all here. I’m sorry that John Luttig died. And I’m sorry that it was something in me that caused all of this to happen to begin with.

Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice…Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right.

This conflict hurts us all, there are no SIDES. The people who support this proceeding think this is justice. The people that think that I should live think that is justice. As difficult as it may seem, this is a clash of ideals, with both parties committed to what they feel is right. But who’s wrong if in the end we’re all victims?

In my heart, I have to believe that there is a peaceful compromise to our ideals. I don’t mind if there are none for me, as long as there are for those who are yet to come. There are a lot of men like me on death row - good men - who fell to the same misguided emotions, but may not have recovered as I have.

Give those men a chance to do what’s right. Give them a chance to undo their wrongs. A lot of them want to fix the mess they started, but don’t know how. The problem is not in that people aren’t willing to help them find out, but in the system telling them it won’t matter anyway. No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. No one walks away victorious.

Humans vs. Zombies in the Washington Times

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:39:31 -0500

The Washington Times gets the rules for Humans vs. Zombies hilariously wrong:

The game, a national craze on college campuses, involves “zombie” students attempting to eliminate “human” students by pelting them with Nerf balls or socks. Once a “human” has been tagged, he becomes a zombie and must wear a bandana around his head.

Humans can stun zombies for 15 minutes by tagging them with a Nerf ball or sock. Zombies must hit at least one human every 48 hours or “starve.” The game ends when all the humans have been turned into zombies or all the zombies have starved, which can take days.

For the Times: Here is some basic research help, free of charge.

Reposting this because it continues to be awesome: Bobby...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:33:00 -0500

Reposting this because it continues to be awesome: Bobby McFerrin demonstrates how our brains are hardwired to anticipate the Pentatonic scale by programming the audience as an instrument.

Arreon, Lizzy, Vicky, and Emma singing Little Drummer Boy on our...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:17:18 -0500

Arreon, Lizzy, Vicky, and Emma singing Little Drummer Boy on our way home from A Very Tuttle Christmas Party last night.

Here’s the recipe for the mulled wine I made last night:

1 bottle of merlot or burgundy
1 pint brandy
1 cup sugar
cinnamon sticks
whole cloves
allspice
mace
1 big quartered orange
1 or 2 quartered lemons

christielouwho: Masterswarm by Andrew Bird My little sister...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:59:25 -0500

christielouwho:

Masterswarm by Andrew Bird

My little sister just got into Andrew Bird, a musician I haven’t had the chance to test out, and told me I would love this song. She knows me so well.

Burrow into me and this is sure to misspell disaster

Andrew Bird is the best - glad you’re enjoying!

Start with Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs - YouTube Link to “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”. When you’ve scraped all of the tasty Andrew Bird morsels out of Weather Systems, Mysterious Production, Armchair Apocrypha, and Noble Beast I’ll hook you up with Andrew Bird and His Bowl of Fire.

alligatortower: Feed The Head A game from Vector Park, a small...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:40:06 -0500

alligatortower:

Feed The Head

A game from Vector Park, a small (I think it might just be one guy) studio that makes some pretty interesting games. In a lot of their stuff, and this game specifically, they do an excellent job of rewarding playful exploration - which I feel is an underdeveloped skill in our society, and something that games are probably the best at fostering.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many big name titles that encourage you to explore in what I would call a truly meaningful way. Most popular games have very explicit goals and give you very specific means to accomplish them. Even the trips you can take off of the pre-defined path are directed. “Play” is almost always defined by the game, rather than the player. In other words, there is an industry-wide acceptance that a game should tell the player how it will be played, rather than creating a situation where the player can explore and define play on their own terms.

To some extent I think that’s because dealing with questions like “what am I supposed to be doing?” is uncomfortable. Because in most situations we don’t associate having to figure that out with having fun. What’s funny to me, is that, if we allow ourselves to have fun with those questions and approach them as play, we’re infinitely more creative and the answers we come up with are superior. If we made that association, we’d be better at solving those problems (and we’d be having more fun). This is one of those things that feels utterly self evident to me, and seemingly few other people. At least in my experience, most people will do anything to avoid a confusing situation. I find it tragic that so many opportunities to commune with the creative mind go unexplored.

So take a breath and allow yourself to be confused for a few minutes as you tackle this game. You’ll have fun, and it will make you better at life*

Thank yous to Max for showing me this a few months back.

*citation needed

Well said, Chris. I <3 this game a whole lot.

What’s up Newsweek. Let’s be friends. You’re...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:06:43 -0500

What’s up Newsweek. Let’s be friends. You’re like TIME magazine for people who can actually read.

christielouwho: evansiegel: radicalquaker: Game on. Eshleman...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:04:49 -0500

christielouwho:

evansiegel:

radicalquaker:

Game on.

Eshleman smashed a plate of gravy and other food products into Evan’s face while sitting talkign to some people outside Huebeck. Retribution will be swift and painful.

Swift and painful.

I think this retribution needs to be heavily advertised, marketed, and televised. Goodness knows I’d put down money.

Evan is having a rough week. Gravy in the face right after he almost died from eating Chicken McNuggets.

"There’s way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Standards and Accessibility and not enough..."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:25:15 -0500

“There’s way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Standards and Accessibility and not enough talk about people. CSS and Standards Compliant Code are just tools.”

- Jason Fried

Dialectic and Emergence in the Phenomenology of Spirit

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:22:17 -0500

Final number 3 out of 6. This is not my finest work. There are some interesting ideas. I don’t know if it holds together. Given more time, I would have liked to have drawn more out of the Phenomenology. Hegel makes my head spin. My formatting and citations are lost when I post this on Tumblr so read at your own risk.

For my Grandfather’s 90th birthday, I taught him how to use a computer. He picked up the basics pretty quickly, and one of the first things that he did after I showed him a web browser with a search engine was to Google his own name. To his amazement, there were several hits. “Who put my name into Google?” he asked me.

“Everyone and no one,” I explained, but for people of my grandfather’s age, understanding intelligent organization as an emergent and cultural process is a radically new and challenging idea. Today we see these emergent patterns everywhere – in our technologies, in our theory of mind and politics, and in our cultural and economic organization. These emergent patterns seem paradoxical. They arise out of many unintelligent parts (all of the people using Google, neurons in the brain, consumers making simple choices) but form a kind of intelligence. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenolgy of Spirit, Philosophy of Right and system of dialectic reason gives us a unique perspective on these emergent patterns and their place in the evolution of consciousness. In this paper, I will discuss the relationship of the Hegelian Dialectic to these emergent patterns of intelligence. My argument is that what DNA is to evolutionary pressure, dialectic is to emergence; it is not the DNA or the dialectic that is intelligent or conscious (or even necessitates consciousness), but that it is the process that gives rise to an appearance of design. Like evolution, emergent patterns are not themselves designed or intelligent. They are simply the result of the law of averages and a large sample size over a long period of time, and they work so well that they appear to be the work of a designer.

I have already briefly discussed the emergent intelligence of Google, but I think that the concept of a Wiki – a collaborative cross-referenced network of information – is rich with Hegelian ideas. Anyone can edit any of the three million articles on Wikipedia. It is entirely counter-intuitive that Wikipedia should be as accurate as it is, but in fact, Wikipedia is strikingly accurate. The shear number of people who take time to edit articles makes it almost impossible to vandalize Wikipedia or slip in false information. There is no central authority backing the knowledge contained in Wikipedia. How does this accuracy and intelligence emerge? I would submit that Wikipedia is a prime example of dialectics leading to an emergent intelligence. In articles where many individuals are fighting over an article with two points (such as, for example, in the article on climate change or evolution), one would expect to see a sprawling mess of contrary opinions; for every thesis, an antithesis. The dialectic mediation here is Wikipedia’s “Neutrality Policy,” which is in cases of debate to simple cover both sides of the debate with outside sources. There is no central authority deciding which position Wikipedia will take on a given issue, but a comprehensive database of information on all sides of an issue. Over time, experts in their fields add information and mediate disputes and like consciousness itself, Wikipedia becomes more complex and intelligent. Like consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, content on Wikipedia is entirely intersubjective – the result of the culture that has produced and reported it. But Wikipedia is unique in that like Hegel’s philosophy, it is transparently intersubjective, and aware of its own intersubjectivity. As people learn to work with social tools like Wikipedia to produce and transmit knowledge, there is certainly a case to be made for spirit coming to self-understanding. As Hegel wrote in Philosophy of Right, “Mind is the nature of human beings en masse.”

We can also see our understanding of these emergent patterns reflected in our theory of mind and politics. In the forward to Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain?, Mark Jeannerod writes, “The brain has always been described by means of technological metaphors: as an apparatus relaying excitation with the precision of a mirror reflecting light, as a hydraulic pump driving animal spirits into the muscles, as a central telephone exchange connecting or cutting off communication; in the digital age, as a computer running its programs. These metaphors, as Catherine Malabou remarks, proceed from a centralizing concept of the brain seen as a machine that works from the top down, that orders movement, controls behavior, and brings about a unity of mind, consciousness, and man.” Historically, this has been the ideal in both personal and political governance, but today, we know that this is not, in fact the relationship of intelligence to the brain. If these is a centrally organizing principle in the mind making decisions (a ghost in the machine), how does the ghost make decisions? Our most current understanding of human intelligence points to an emergent pattern among the neurons in the brain. A thought is not in any single neuron, but lies in the connections between neurons. This theory of mind is rife with dialectic tension. Malabou writes about a dialectic tension between what she calls the “neuronal” – the mechanical function of the brain – and the “mental” – our phenomenological experience of having a mind. In What Should We Do With Our Brain? Malabou mediates these two opposed ideas with the theory of plasticity, the brain’s ability to change. I see another classic source of dialectic tension in the mind that, as with Wikipedia, gives rise to the appearance of intelligence. For years the “nature/nurture” debate has been one of the most prominent bones of contention between the hard and social sciences, and many important findings have been disregarded on both sides because one side or the other is uncomfortable with the conclusions. There is dialectic tension between the biological processes of the brain and our environment. I would argue that there is mediation to be found in Hegel’s understanding of spirit. An understanding of consciousness that shows us evolving alongside Spirit recognizes that we are radically intersubjective, but also the constitutive element of spirit. Spirit makes us who we are, but we make spirit what it is. Our consciousness emerges in this environment. Take language as an example. Language is culturally transmitted, but the hardware for learning language is already present in our minds. The combination of our minds’ programming and our cultural influences make language and consciousness emergent social entities.

As we become increasingly aware of these emergent patterns and their role in all aspects of our life, it also becomes clear both how much these patterns – governed by dialectic movement – form our social institutions and us. Dialectics and emergence are ultimately the answer to the classic rhetorical question asked in many “introduction to economics” classes, “Who feeds Paris?” Asking who feeds Paris is meant to highlight the staggering number of activities to feed a modern city. As if by magic, the right amount of produce appears in the market and the butcher has the right amount of meat to satisfy his customers’ demands. The only magic necessary to make this happen are the emergent properties of a free market that works to allocate resources to where they are needed. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to be revolutionary in a free market with a decentralized political system. There is no “they” to rebel against - there is increasingly only “us.” As Hegel notes in the Philosopy of Right, even “international law springs from the relations between autonomous states.” The income gap is growing but it is a more telling measure that the standard of living has increased dramatically all around the world. Technological advancement begets cheaper goods that are more widely available, and if one is poor, having cheaper goods available is the same thing as having more money. If the poor can afford a television for less money, it’s the same as if they had more money in the first place. It is of course challenging to talk about ideas of societal progress even in the context of Hegel, but it is hard to argue that there is movement. It is amazing enough that we can now shop for a television 24 hours a day from our iPhones, but in 1971 a 25-inch color television set cost the average worker 174 hours of wages. In 2009, a 25-inch television set (which is more dependable and receives more channels) costs the average worker 23 hours of pay. The availability of a better, cheaper television set is obviously not the best measure of social progress, but this democratization is not limited to consumer goods. In the 20th century, “American life expectancy has climbed from 47 years to 77, infant mortality plunged by 93%, and we have wiped out or gained control of diseases like polio, tuberculosis, typhoid, and whooping cough. ” It is this kind of movement that led Adam Smith to describe an “invisible hand,” but of course, there is no hand, there is no design, and there is no intelligence. The appearance of intelligence or design in our marketplace is the emergent property of billions of individual transactions. From these millions of small, occasionally irrational, sometimes random movements, something emerges. Like in the brain, the intelligence is not in any single transaction, and there is no puppet-master controlling the process. How can we say this works? Coherence in market signals arrives through dialectic process. Supply is the thesis; demand is the antithesis; the exact right amount of fresh tuna making its way from a fishing fleet in the South Pacific to a restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli is evidence of the mediation of these factors. There is no one at the top to make these kinds of decisions, yet we see the emergence of design. Hegel recognized the power of autonomy when he wrote, “Colonial independence proves to be of the greatest advantage to the mother country, just as the emancipation of slaves turns out to the greatest advantage of the owners” [Philosophy of Right].

For Hegel, Spirit evolves in the same way as consciousness, dialectically. What makes both consciousnesses and spirit special in Hegel’s system is that they have the characteristics of being designed and of making intelligent decisions, yet it is difficult (if not impossible) to pin down the design, the intelligence, or even their agency. Hegel’s understanding of Spirit, especially when applied to ideas like our technologies, our minds and politics, and our way of life, is empowering. Hegel writes, “By means of the self as soul of the process, substance is so moulded and developed in its moments that one opposite stirs the other into life, each by its alienation from the other gives it an existence and equally receives from it an existence of its own” [299]. We are intersubjective, but form that intersubjectivity. What is exciting about recognizing Hegel’s dialectic and evolution of consciousness in these emergent patterns is that it is further evidence that of Spirit gaining self understanding. Hegel writes, “The truth of subjectivity is attained only in a subject, and the truth of personality only in a person” [Philosophy of Right]. Recognizing our place in the movement of spirit and history is Hegel’s entire project, as he notes in the introduction to the Phenomenology, “To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of ‘love of knowing’ and become actual knowing- that is what I have set myself to do” [Phenomenology, 3].

"Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:10:19 -0500

“Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.”

- David Hockney

"Great stories happen to people who can tell them."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:09:00 -0500

“Great stories happen to people who can tell them.”

- Ira Glass

Coolest Clock Ever This is not an actual man - it’s a...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:08:37 -0500

Coolest Clock Ever

This is not an actual man - it’s a flatscreen display with a 24-hour looping video of an artist “watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute.”

"Accidents often produce the best solutions… only you can recognize the difference between an..."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:03:17 -0500

“Accidents often produce the best solutions… only you can recognize the difference between an accident and your original intent.”

- Jennifer Morla

Radiohead’s Creep Preformed by a Homeless Man Wow.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:01:06 -0500

Radiohead’s Creep Preformed by a Homeless Man

Wow.

Recursive Doubt In The Inescapability of Gettier Problems

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:53:00 -0500

My second favorite philosophy joke involves an engineer, a scientist, a mathematician, and a philosopher driving through the countryside when they see a single brown cow out the window. The engineer says, “What do you know, it looks like the cows around here are brown.” The scientist looks at him skeptically and replies, “Well, at least some of them are.” The mathematician considers this for a moment and replies, “Well, at least one of them is.” Then the philosopher turns to them and says, “Well, at least on one side.”

The joke works because it calls attention to the highly critical nature of philosophy, but sometimes, that critical nature can be entirely impractical. In my critique of Linda Zagzebski’s The Inescapability of Gettier Problems, I will argue that Zagzebski is so critical of reason that she herself can no longer employ its use in her deductive reasoning. In other words, she is so critical of the process by which we have knowledge of the color of the cow in the field that she can no longer have knowledge of the cow even existing before her very eyes.

Zagzebski is discussing the Gettier problem, which has plagued epistemology since Edmund Gettier published his three page paper in 1963, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Gettier deconstructs the notion of knowledge being tantamount to a justified true belief, and gives several examples of cases where a belief is justified, and happens to be true, but is not true for the reasons given in the justification. Intuitively, in those cases, we would not call the resulting belief “knowledge,” since it is not necessary that it be true given the justification used. Since Gettier published in 1963, many philosophers have tried to overcome Gettier-style problems, using a variety of solutions, such as adding “self-evidence” or a clear causal chain. Zagzebski argues that any account of knowledge that allows for a given belief to be true as a result of luck or chance are vulnerable to Gettier-style counterexamples. Zagzebski writes that beliefs can only be shielded from doubt if justification entails truth or if justification and truth are completely separated. Neither course is desirable. If justification entails truth, than truth would be entirely unnecessary. If justification and truth are completely separated, than the element of luck is added. Zagzebski argues that any instance where knowledge (“k”) = truth (“t”) + “x” (where x is anything that does not entail t) can be exposed to Gettier-style doubt where t is true in a way that is entirely unrelated to x – by luck or coincidence. She writes, “…a general rule for the generation of Gettier cases. … Make the element of justification (warrant) strong enough for knowledge, but make the belief false. … Now emend the case by adding another element of luck, only this time an element which makes the belief true after all. The second element must be independent of the element of warrant so that the degree of warrant is unchanged. … We now have a case in which the belief is justified (warranted) in a sense strong enough for knowledge, the belief is true, but it is not knowledge.”

In this passage, Zagzebski is making an entirely reasonable deductive leap from analyzing Gettier-style counterexamples. The problem is that her deduction and abstraction of the Gettier problem itself suffers from our inability to judge that abstraction with any degree of certainty. When Zagzebski makes a broad claim about all instances of knowledge after studying a few examples, she does not specify whether the truth and justification of this abstraction are one-in-the-same or completely independent, or if she is using some test other than justification such as self-evidence. In either case, an analysis of her conclusions using her own methodology would expose her to Gettier-style doubt. Though her reasoning may be sound, if her examples are all true only by coincidence, she has made no claim to knowledge. If her claim is true through luck we cannot have knowledge about the persistence of Gettier cases. Even as thorough as her logic is, we might have a belief that is merely true by luck and unjustified. Correspondence with a state of affairs is merely left up to chance. In the case of her claim about the unreliability of knowledge, a belief that happens to be true by luck would render any justification of that belief impossible.

This kind of recursive problem in which you doubt the very tools necessary to prove doubt itself has long been a challenge to positivism in the social sciences. Consider the problem of experimenter bias in psychological experimentation. Were I to conduct a psychological experiment, my expectations and preconceptions might influence the outcome. Can we say that this effect exists? Presumably, we could conduct a psychological experiment to test if it exists or not. If the effect does exist, it would bias the test. If the effect doesn’t exist, the test would return no results. In either case, the measures of the tools available are subject to the same degree of doubt that we are using them to measure. Consider as another example the possibility that a sociologist is experiencing a cultural bias which is affecting her fieldwork. Again, we could observe the sociologist to determine if she is culturally biased, but we would also have to account for a bias in our own observations. Zagzebski’s argument that Gettier-style doubt cannot be defeated is itself subject to Gettier-style doubt, and she has tripped up reason with uncertainty. In summary: we lack the tools to judge her argument.

The McNugget Challenge My screwball friends Skippy and Evan...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:57:00 -0500

The McNugget Challenge

My screwball friends Skippy and Evan engage in a lot of food-related challenges. You might remember that just a few weeks ago, Skippy ate three Chipotle steak burritos in slightly under one hour. Why? Mankind’s thirst for conquest. Also we bought the burritos.

Their challenge tonight was a race between Adam and Evan to eat fifty (that’s five-zero) chicken McNuggets. Loser had to pay.

The results? Evan tapped out after eating 43 McNuggets, claiming that “his heart might stop.” After he stopped eating, Evan said, “Hey, I think I have a headache.” Adam said, “Yeah, me too,” but he continued until he had devoured fifty McNuggets in 19 minutes.

As they drew down to the last boxes of nuggets, Evan was pale and looked like he might be shivering. He reporting a ringing in his ears. Adam turned bright red and started profusely sweating.

Each of them consumed fifty grams of saturated fat, 700 milligrams of cholesterol, and ten-thousand milligrams of sodium. Also, they received 80% of their daily dose of iron.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollen describes the 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget. It’s 56% corn - but there are some disturbing additives.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

Adam and Evan were both experiencing pretty severe cramping on the ride home. I’ll let you know if they survive the night.

In honor of being almost done with my second of six philosophy finals (and going mildly insane in...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:00:58 -0500

In honor of being almost done with my second of six philosophy finals (and going mildly insane in the process), here’s a philosophy joke.

How do you get a philosopher off your porch?

ANSWER: Pay for the pizza.

Actual news from the year 2009: Uganda bans female genital mutilation

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:38:00 -0500

Actual news from the year 2009: Uganda bans female genital mutilation:

Also actual news from 2009: Texas defies Supreme Court, continues to execute the mentally retarded.