Echoes and Mirrors » armchair philosophy

Yelling at the Grass For Being The Wrong Shade of Green

Daniel — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 01:44:08 +0000

Americans Should Be Able to Sell Stuff Without a Permit

The normal mindset among U.S. officials is that prior permission should be required to sell legal goods to a willing buyer. Kids selling lemonade on the street are shut down. A Missouri man has been fined $90,000 for selling rabbits (he made about $200). In Illinois, an artisan ice cream maker is being shut down for lack of a dairy permit. Manuel Winn was arrested, handcuffed, and booked for selling magazines door-to-door without a permit. A Maryland mother of three was arrested for selling $2 phone cards without a license. Lots of municipalities are going after food trucks. A group of Louisiana monks had to go to court to win the right to sell simple wooden caskets to consumers.

Hey now, if papa government doesn’t get his cut then these so-called entrepreneurs are doing a disservice to America, obviously. And bigger companies/corporations are easier to get bigger cuts from. When it comes to forcing businesses to follow regulations all these little businesses become a burden on the bureaucracy. Government loves big-business, because big business funds campaigns and is willing to pay the government all sorts of regulatory fees to stay off their backs.

I just finished reading Milosz’s The Captive Mind, and I’m reminded of a frightening section of that book recounting the way the totalitarianism of Stalin’s communism couldn’t abide by even one person being in business for themselves. Only here we have the government insisting that every single business transaction be closely monitored and shut down if it doesn’t meet their exacting standards, not crushed/killed. This is what libertarians really mean when they say we need deregulation in business:

These needless, onerous regulations would be objectionable at any time. But they’re particularly problematic when many Americans find themselves unemployed, needful of income, and thrust into the position of doing what they can to get by. That may mean a series of garage sales, or selling fruit from a backyard tree, or making a craft to offer for sale on the street, or going door-to-door offering handyman skills, or any number of other informal businesses. We’re making things harder on the least advantaged among us, and some are forced to take more social welfare because laws prevent them from making a living on their own.

This isn’t a jeremiad against all government regulation. Should commercial airline pilots be required to have a license? Sure. Are zoning restrictions sometimes legitimate? Of course. But is society really going to suffer if lemonade vendors, casket makers and purveyors of $2 phone cards sell their wares without permission? The default should be that free citizens can engage in commerce with one another, sans any prior restraint by federal, state, or local governments. It’s time to deregulate.

It’s not a matter of everything being a total free-for-all, but nobody should have to ask permission to go into business for themselves if said business has no repercussions on others. This is one of the biggest ways people have confused libertarianism. That Salon publishes articles like “Why libertarians apologize for autocracy” doesn’t help. Of course, Roderick Long made a very concise and clear rebuttal of the bizarre misinterpretation of libertarianism by Lind:

One reason for Lind’s conflation is that he automatically translates being anti-democracy into being pro-autocracy — because he assumes that the only alternative to democracy is autocracy. But in fact there is a third option; rather than the many dictating to the few or the few dictating to the many, what libertarians seek is a world where nobody is in a position to dictate to anybody — or at least to get as close to that situation as possible. (It might be argued that such a system actually has a better claim to the term “democracy” than those regimes that typically receive that label.) For anarchist libertarians, this means replacing the state entirely with networks of voluntary association; for minarchist libertarians, it means structuring the machinery of government in such a way as to make it as difficult as possible to abuse.

In other words, libertarians don’t oppose democracy (in the conventional sense) because they hanker after autocracy; they oppose democracy because it is too much like autocracy.

And even this point assumes, generously, that existing democracies really are majoritarian. As many libertarians have argued, the logic of monopoly government and special-interest capture explains why real-life “democracies” tend to be plutocratic oligarchies in democratic trappings.

There you go: criticism of democracy, in a quick youtube video. Obviously, that means I favor autocracy because I don’t think that democracy works justly. I think many naysayers of libertarianism (as Roderick points out in the linked article) are simply making an either-or fallacy. There aren’t only two options, but the one advocated by the left libertarians is so mindblowingly unheard of that most people dismiss it before they even hear an explanation.

In Which I Ponder Language and Philosophy, Causing Me to Nerdgasm Publicly… Again

Daniel — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:05:50 +0000

Language is fine; people are the problem

It is neither rational nor moral to suggest that words have some—let me risk lifting a word from Dr. Hart’s field—ousia or Platonic essence. Words mean only what people choose them to mean. That is precisely why nice no longer means “lewd.” Transpire came to mean something in English beyond its roots in Latin, from “giving off breath or vapor” to “coming to light.” And it is increasingly in use meaning “occur.” Over time, the vulgar, who created English in the first place, have their way.

This is essentially what Wittgenstein elucidates in his Philosophical Investigations: that words do not have any intrinsic meaning, but only gain meaning through use. Although Wittgenstein is not mentioned in the debate, the points their arguing are Wittgensteinian in nature.

To insist that words are intrinsically bound to their meaning is a referentialist argument (which some may recall is the basis for the Tractatus) and leads to paradoxes that wind up mucking up any rational explanations for anything. This is ethically unsound as it produces a situation where the word ‘ethic’ must refer to some thing that is ethical, the essence of ethics. Which, if we disregard that the word necessarily refers to some thing, but understand that the word simply means what we intend it to mean, through its use, then we arrive at a more truthful meaning of the word. That meaning, however, is fluid, not fixed.

The Unbearable Death of Postmodernism

Daniel — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 04:55:42 +0000

Postmodernism is dead

I have some good news—kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn’t heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls “the first comprehensive retrospective” in the world: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.”

So… the party’s over folks. Please dispose of any empty bottles, used condoms, golden apples, skeletons, overcoats, or whatever it was you were playing with in the trash before leaving. Last one out turn the lights off.

Whatever is next ought to be fun. Let’s take a nap until then.

Quick and Dirty, but I couldn’t help it…

Daniel — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:01:22 +0000

Taking a quick break from studying to do this reflects how much I don’t care about time management. I know it’s a crappy photoshop job: I’m no photoshop guru, and that it only took 15 minutes doesn’t help either.

The Monty Hall Problem

Daniel — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:48:47 +0000

One of my favorites. Learned about this the first day of a course on Lonergan, oddly enough (or not, really, as much of Lonergan says is counterintuitive and made a nice lead-in). This video is a very eloquent explanation of the problem. Easily half of my classmates refused to believe it. I was skeptical at first, too, admittedly.

I think little exercises like this can make philosophy (Lonergan & Wittgenstein included) less intimidating. This sort of exercise pairs well when you are looking to understand something as frustrating as Wittgenstein’s language games, or anything from Lonergan’s Insight for example.

In Which I End Up Sounding Like a Conspiracy Theorist

Daniel — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 22:48:27 +0000

I’m not big on conspiracy theories. Some are more entertaining than others, sure. And some are right in pointing out that something isn’t right in re whatever it is they’re theorizing conspiracies about. And I have one of my own.

I’m really concerned that I haven’t heard much really about this:

Artificial Leaf Could Be More Efficient Than the Real Thing
Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.

The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.

Nocera’s leaf is stable — operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests — and made of widely available, inexpensive materials — like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It’s also powerful, as much as 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.

With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14-terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.

And it’s ready for production use. A gallon of water per day (probably more like 3-4 for American households, but really, that’s still not very much). In fact, they’re going to make them. And sell them in third-world countries that lack centralized power grids.

Couple it with a little wind turbine and a solar panel, and you’ll never pay for electricity again.

But we will never see this in America. Except as a niche market sold to eco-warriors and survivalists. (Not that anyone seems to have much of a problem with either group, but most of those who claim association are readily identified in some way as a nut.) Now here’s my crazy bit: it’s okay to lower your power use, but it’s impossible to cut yourself off from the power grid. I think it’s even illegal in most places (I could be wrong about that, but it seems like something a housing code would include for making a house livable).

And it’s not about electricity. It’s not about people being lazy. It’s not about economics. Or the environment.

It’s about power. Not the electrical kind. But big-industry, centralized power. As long as there is a very small number of places generating everyone’s electricity, they have America by the nutsack.

Oh, and according to the Japanese, Nuclear Power plants can get really dangerous sometimes. We have a pretty good track-record here in the US, sure. I guess that will last forever. We will never have a problem like that, right?

So it’s like this: they have figured out a way to dispose of a multi-billion dollar industry that, when faced with a natural disaster or a drunk engineer or a crack in some concrete, could irradiate huge sections of the planet. And that industry will instead continue building nuclear reactors really close to me.

And it’s not just in electricity or utilities industries – the federal government has been continually centralizing law enforcement and other things for decades. Everyone wants to do away with distributed computing that doesn’t have a centralized host (this new Cloud Computing thing is the solution to decentralized internet gibberish). There is a war against anarchism. They powers that be are insisting that for everything, somebody has to be in charge. And to that I say, no. No there doesn’t. Fuck off.

You wanted to see my crazy: there it is. I think that corporatism is going to destroy what’s left of humanity with e-books and fucking cloud computing. We’ll all be hooked up to the same power, internet, and ‘distributed’ systems. All traffic will be monitored or be pay-per-view/use and being outside of its grasp will make you an outsider in the truest sense. It’s going to taxonomize and categorize everything until we can’t fucking breath. And we’re going to shell out cash to the big centralized machines that give us our little happiness. And don’t forget to update your fucking facebook status either, to let the marketing drones watching that you’re upset or happy.

Yes, I’m on the power grid. That doesn’t make me hypocritical. If I shunned the power grid I wouldn’t be able to do anything. There is a line between being ideological and being stupid. We can still choose quite a bit right now. And we can still be anonymous (I don’t mean Anonymous, but you can be that too, if you like) for the moment. And when that changes, I’ll be in Peru, with a leaf-powered home, drinking Ayahuasca and laughing at everyone. I hope.

An aside in re sense and nonsense, sparked from a lazy afternoon on the couch reading a book outside of my academic studies

Daniel — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 22:24:59 +0000

The term “nonsense” is one of the most baffling words in our vocabulary. It has a negative quality only, like death. Nobody can explain nonsense: it can only be demonstrated. To add, moreover, that sense and nonsense are interchangeable is only to labor the point. Nonsense belongs to other worlds, other dimensions, and the gesture with which we put it from us at times, the finality with which we dismiss it, testifies to its disturbing nature. Whatever we cannot include within our narrow framework of comprehension we reject. Thus profundity and nonsense my be seen to have certain unsuspected affinities.

The passage is from Henry Miller’s Sexus, page 214. It struck me as being somewhat provocative even if it is not particularly relevant to the distinction of sense and nonsense in the Wittgensteinian paradigm. It’s only a small snippet of a larger segment where he laments the work of the artist. It begins with this:

In the beginning one wants to approach every problem directly. The more direct and insistent the approach, the more quickly and surely one succeeds in getting caught in the web.

Which echoes of Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy’s linguistic confusions.

There may be nothing in this, but I found it interesting. I suspect that there is at least a small hint that Miller read, and incorporated, and then regurgitated more than a little bit of Wittgenstein in his own art. Whether or not it is the case, these labored digressions in the book more than make up for the frequent unerotic sex that takes place in it.

Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part III

Daniel — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:30:35 +0000

The Picture Theory of Meaning, Part Deux

Propositions picture states of affairs.

If the given states of affairs are true it is a fact, otherwise it is a possible fact. The expression of a proposition is mapped out in the same logical form as the fact (states of affairs) itself, but is a mapping of names rather than the objects (which constitute the fact). This is a shared (mirrored) logical form. It cannot be pictured; only shown. (I’ll come back to this shortly, it seems to raise a bit of a problem for me.)

But this expression, a thought, is also a fact, composed of objects. But they are merely representative of another fact: a picture of some real thing.

A proposition doesn’t contain meaning in itself, but points at the meaning (it has sense, or direction) by mimicking the fact.

A recipe is a like a sentence, or a thought.

The act of cooking is akin to thinking.

Cooking a specific recipe (a propositional sign) creates the proposition.

This mental food is a picture of a real fact. (Or, the fact that the potatoes are mixed with gravy, for instance (Or that fact that aRb (a is related to b by relation R)).)

The origins of these “states of affairs” is troubling. It seems to be empirically evident that objects must necessarily exist, but that states of affairs are somewhat assumed to exist. What if they don’t? This sort of dashes the logical atomism. It is the bricks which which facts are built. Without states of affairs, facts are also assumptions; a propositional sign can no longer project a proposition because the fact it senses is in dubious danger of being non-existent.

I may be walking down the entirely wrong track here. I digress.

“As we know, Wittgenstein did not believe that words were necessary for thought; however, if a thought is a proposition (with sense), then are there wordless propositions?”

Err, This appears to be somewhat of a chicken before the egg problem. A proposition can be wordless, but in order for it to become so, it must first be a projected propositional sign. Yes, this seems to be somewhat sensible, if a thought contains its own sense (propositions only contain the possibility of its sense, if I’m not straying too far from the logic Wittgenstein has laid out).

There must be some sort of mechanism for this transformation, that imbues the thought with this. Through this mechanism, thoughts are facts, and the world is facts but only one is real. Some sort of mysterious transformation has occurred via thinking.

But that seems to be an a priori assumption. I’m not going to step on that land mind just yet.

Understanding: Stupid hobbitses, tricksy hobbitses, always keeping it from us… yes, my proposition! We wants it!

Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part II

Daniel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:08:25 +0000

Names, like little points
Propositions, point at things:
Because they have sense.

Between Logical Atomism and the Picture Theory of Language, there really seems to be a robust ontology developing in the Tractatus.

1.Facts are made up of States Of Affairs.
2.States of Affairs are made up of named objects

and

1.Names refer to objects.
2.Propositions have sense of facts.

Propositions are models (or, a loosely defined “picture”) of facts. They hold the same logical form. Neither is reliant on the actuality (for lack of a better word) of any object or SoA for it to have meaning.

To muck it up a bit, the model itself is a fact whose meaning is that it has a certain structure. Which seems a bit self-referential.

An expression of a proposition (i.e. a sentence) is a model of that proposition; it maps out the structure of names. It is a fact that consists of whatever arbitrary states of affairs the proposition it represents points to. The sentence is a projection of the expression.

The expression of a proposition has the form it does because it necessarily must: if it does not share the same logical form as the fact it points at, then it is illogical.

The elements of a pictures must be connected with objects. Schroeder notes that “this connection is not intrinsic in words.” The act of ‘thinking out’ the sense of a proposition, gives a sentence a sense. It becomes an expressed thought, which is a proposition.

Hopefully, this analogy works:

An Actor:A video recording of an actor :: A Proposition:A Sentence

It’s a broken analogy because the video recording cannot be used to recreate (bring to life) the actor. Vincent Price is, and will remain, dead. But a sentence can be used to project and ‘think out’ a proposition.

Thoughts are pictures, organized in the same logical form as the fact they have sense of.

So thoughts are pictures
mirroring the form they sense
and they make Hulk smash

Also, everyone should listen to The 21st Century Monads while they study:

Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part I

Daniel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:53:42 +0000

The first portion of Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1-3.328), doesn’t seem to be as wildly confusing after a second reading. It lacks the more artful style of any other philosopher I’ve ever read, that much is certain. But what it lacks in artful (or dare I say playfulness of) prose, it makes up with in conciseness.

These initial propositions seem to be trying to wheedle out what knowledge is, how knowledge relates to reality, how reality is represented in both thought and language, and how any language that is to be used to represent language ought to function (or how he intends to use it for the purposes of logically analysis, as the case may be).

Propositions 2.1 through 3.1 seem to be very nearly in line with what Bernard Lonergan posits very early in Insight, specifically:

2.1    We picture facts to ourselves.
2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
2.131   In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.
3          A logical picture of facts is a thought.

This seems very clear to me in what I’ve gleaned from Insight previously: thoughts are the logical representatives of objects, through pictures (Lonergan calls them images). Still, I think they were both aiming at roughly the same apple. The idea of how knowledge comes to be is difficult. Wittgenstein’s mucking around with signs, symbols, the signified, signifiers, and signification seems to correlate directly with what I’ve learned of literary analysis. He breaks it down in a very forthright manner, seemingly.

However, the following propositions troubled me:

3.04 If a thought were correct a priori, it would be a thought whose possibility ensured its truth
3.05 A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only if its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything to compare it with).

But it occurred to me that he may be trying to banish all ideas of tautalogical arguments from his work by initially stating upfront that everything must be compared to some other thing and cannot prove itself true on its own. From earlier:

2.225 There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.

Which seems about as straight-forward as it can get.

There was a proposition that irks me a bit, if only because it seems to take the logic a step too far (and goes meta in itself far too early in the text):

3.1432 Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.’

Which makes sense, but seems pedantic. Although it is in line with the previous propositions, it seems unnecessary and obtuse. It took me much page flipping and head scratching to grasp it (and to seemingly little purpose).