Author: Psybertron

Foucault meets Moby Dick

Almost finished Foucault’s The Order of Things. The powerful chapter on Labour, Life and Language attempts to build fundamental levels of existence based on processes of creation and change (as opposed to being and exchange) in contrast to models based on taxonomies of representation. Labour – Ricardo building fundamental value on Adam Smith, arriving at Marx and Nietzsche, Life – Cuvier building a hierarchy of levels of classification around Lamarck and Jusseau where form is fundamentally subservient to function; Language – Bopp building a process view around Schlegel and Grimm where language is defined by its history of (ongoing) development not frozen in written form, and by the activities, events and processes willed by it’s users, not objects described or represented.

Moby Dick reared his head in the Cuvier / Lamarck analysis, where the anatomical features of cetaceans are related to the fundamental aspects of mammals – something on which Melville dwells at deep and gory length.

Multiple, fundamental “levels” – a common thread in Pirsig, Maslow, Post-Modernism and now specifically Foucault.

A Little More Synchronicity

Bumped into Michael in the Pick – my first night there in weeks, probably his last in months, and when I mentioned I’d been to the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta the week before last, he revealed that his father had developed and exploited a radio / radar based probe for surveying tar sand deposits in Alberta in the 70’s.

Michael also revealed that he’d experienced the Kobe earthquake, been physically knocked about personally and seen quite harrowing scenes of destruction, human as well as property, as fires burned for days whilst he was effectively trapped. Unsurprisingly then, the 4.8 Richter scale earthquake we’d experienced in the UK on Sunday night held more than passing interest for him. In fact Michael had been awoken / disturbed by the quake in the night and, recalling the fear and horror of the previous event, had suffered a traumatic Monday.

Michael also indicated distaste for the Foucault I was reading, and the French Post-Modernists in general. I know what he means about the de-constructionist analytical froth, with little attempt to re-construct anything substantial, but I have to say I think he’s wrong about Foucault. In fact one of the main threads of my thesis is that apparently tangible facts of life are constructed from much less tangible interactions on many levels.

It was Michael who first drew my attention to Jung / Synchronicity / I Ching, the evening we met, when I was reading Melville’s Moby Dick, moments after he’d been recommending to one of his students, standing on the pavement outside the Pick, that he really should read something other than Jane Austen, like Melville for instance ! On another occasion, finding me reading Pirsig (Lila, as opposed to ZAMM), the person he was with that night had been teaching Pirsig to students at Berkley. On the face of it Michael and I now have no evident plans to be in the same place at the same time in future, but synchronicity (or some less mystical quantum non-locality) will no doubt prevail in our decision making once again. Good luck with the move Michael, including re-housing the second largest personal library in Cambridge (after Pepys apparently) – housed in Magdelen, just across the road from ….. the Pick, where else ?

Cronies in Arms

Cronies in Arms. This is a Common Dreams article (via Jorn) by Paul Krugman, describing Enron / Hallburton / Cheney / US-Arms situations in frightening detail. One powerful quote “When one top executive learned of millions in further losses, his e-mailed response summed up the whole strategy: Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the [next quarter]. The strategy worked. Enron collapsed, but not before insiders made off with nearly $1 billion. The sender of that blunt e-mail sold $12 million in stocks just before they became worthless. And now he’s secretary of the Army.”

Fraudodynamics – Coined by Barry Minkov / Minkow (?) the Teenage Fraudster (see earlier blog) – uses similar example around Nick Leeson case – simple rationale leads to major corruption – tacit, non-pre-meditated, emergent, conspiratorial cock-ups, are just as likely as pre-meditated conspiracies. The dividing line is academic as far as the catastrophic conseqences are concerned. Institutionalised in “received rationality”.

Careful with that Razor, Occam !

Mentioned earlier that Foucault & Quine (and many others) consistently warn against the “simplification” implicit in scientific method when arriving at descriptions of the world. Part of my thesis that “received rationality” is unwise in complex systems, and I’ve already used the thought of “Avoiding cutting one’s own throat with Occam’s Razor” in my original “manifesto“. Found an interesting aphorism from Ted Samsel, in a Google thread started by Jorn called “Two thoughts on e-life” namely “ObConcept : Occam’s Razor meets the Procrustean Bed” (apparently the Athenian tyrant Procrustes had a bed of fixed length into which he “trimmed” miscreants to fit – one size fits all idea.)

Normal Mailer on US Psyche and 9/11

Normal Mailer on US Psyche and 9/11. Full text from the Times interview with Mailer, from Google (in two parts) via Jorn. Long interview on thoughts around the US Psyche, following 9/11 / Enron / Andersens / WorldCom etc and “why nobody loves us”. Powerful stuff about rationality, the complexity of life, and a reasonable balance between security and freedom, based on statistics.

Quite a bit on principles of democracy and pragmatism. Also seems Mailer is part of that growing number of commentators who seriously thinks it’s possible the world as we know it may not exist for another century. Several serious scientists have the doomsday scenario driving their efforts to find alternative worlds to accomodate the remnants of the human race. Heavy.

Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg. Saw this guy do his “alternative” documentary on the Earth Summit last night on the beeb. Turning most global warming / natural resources / industrial polution / global economics received wisdom on its head. The individual mechanisms may well all be technically (scientifically) correct, but the long term emergent effects are much more complex, and all decision making based on such “scientific” information is entirely political. His (much challenged) claim is that well intentioned “conservationists” are typically calling for completely the wrong lines of action, whereas big bad US / Global economics / Dubya are probably doing the right long-run things, if not necessarily for the “highest” of motives. Wide-ranging issues covered in convincing pseudo-scientific style. Need to follow-up further links to this guy. Powerful themes around chaos and complexity, and pseudo-periodicity being mis-interpreted as trends over selected timescales (the Antarctic Survey Ice Core Records stuff – incidentally, housed in the next door office) Also the same lines around evolution and success of species and the effect of man on all of this. Magic stuff, [ post note ] but beware enormous quantity of scientific backlash against Lomborg since he first published in Danish back in 1998 – Notice however many of the counter-arguments are “statistical trend” based (Cf S J Gould). The Skeptical Environmentalist debate could be useful test-case for my thesis. When is bad science better than good-science ? – I wonder what anti-Lomborgers think of Wolfram ?)