All posts by anomalogue

Common sense

Philosophy, Synesis

Most of the time, when we say “common sense”, assuming we bother meaning something precise by our words, we mean one of two things: the sense of things we all (should) have in common, or the sense of things common people (should) have. Conversely, lacking common sense is failing to understand what is self-evident to everyone else, or it is being oblivious to what is obvious to common people.

However common sense has another less common meaning. Common sense can mean that sense of things that emerges from the coordination and convergence of all our senses. We intuit that our senses are each different modes of access to a world common to all — a multi-sensory world which transcends any single sense. What we see, we can also hear, smell, taste, touch — and interact with.

If we experience life with all our senses, and account for the full experience instead of just what we see or hear, that gives us something much truer than a truth based only on reflecting on what we see or what we hear. We develop a common sense understanding triangulated, quadrangulated, sextangulated, myriadangulated, and endowed with parallactic depth.

I just read that intuition is the spiritual sense of touch, and that gnosis is the spiritual sense of hearing.

I think we can only know this is true if we can understand what is meant by this analogy.

And I think we can only know what is meant by this analogy if we exercise sensory common sense.

And with this, intuition and gnosis become intrinsic to a deeper common sense.

Ideologies prey on people whose primary experience of the world is spectatorial. Ideology is founded on hearsay and look-see, and absence of direct participation. They look out at a world of televised images seen from a distance. They hear or read reports about things that happen elsewhere and compare them to other things they have heard or read about.

Ideology projects a world of word and image that is consumed and thought about and talked about in a pre-formatted way. Repeatedly consuming these ideologically formatted images and reports, and performing the ideology’s approved actions, thoughts and feelings gradually reformats the consumer in conformity with the ideology. 

Ideologies render those caught up in their closed autonomous logics, numb and deaf to reality.

Is truth constructed?

Ideological truth is constructed.

Common sense truth, however, is instaurated in unceasing collaboration with the inexhaustible. 

WordPress, R.I.P.

Biography, Design, Ethics, Extended Self

WordPress has completed its long pivot and has finally fully transformed itself into a website design tool. It is no longer optimized for writing. It is designed to assemble media elements into engaging, immersive digital experiences, or something.

The upshot is I can no use it and absorb myself in my writing. The legacy text editor has been fully retired. The block editor is now non-optional, at least if you use the WordPress app. And the online editor is extremely broken. The block editor layout causes weird typos (for instance, I constantly hit underline when I mean to hit delete). When you tap on a word in a different text block, the whole thing lurches upward, and instead of the word you were trying to select, the word below it is selected. And it is now entirely impossible to cut multiple paragraphs. Everything conspires to distract and frustrate.

WordPress is no longer a tool I can use. Even right now, writing this little diatribe, I am having one problem after another. I can hardly get this out. It is depressing.

I loved WordPress.

I also loved Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

I loved MacOS, iOS and I loved Apple.

A new alienated generation of designers now dominates UX. One by one these alienated incompetents are destroying designs that I once loved and relied upon. These tools were part of me — extensions of my own being. My intuitive bond with these tools has been severed. I experience it as amputation. It is deeply personal. It is betrayal.

Alienated people cannot design intuitive systems, because alienated people do not even know what intuition is. To them intuition is just arbitrary mental habit, which can be retrained. With enough repetition and drill, just about anything can be made familiar, intuitive and true.

When one is fully alienated, this seems absolutely true, and, without any contrasting experience of intuition with which this alienation can be compared, it is impossible to know or even conceive otherwise. Where conception ends, imagination ends.

Things can be better. Things will be better. Whether we live to experience it, or die from alienation is the real question.

Intuition versus alienation

Enworldment, Judaism, Pragmatism

Intuition is direct response to experience, unmediated by language.

Confusingly, though, our most spontaneous utterances and immediate responses to language are also intuitive.

When we say “experience-near” this means using words that directly refer to intuited experience. We can use and understand experience-near language intuitively. We do not need to use words to help us use other words. We simply speak, and what we say means what we mean to convey.

Language becomes unintuitive when speaking or understanding requires long intermediating chains of language. We must speak to ourselves inwardly about our speech, and pick our words carefully, word by word. With each layer of meta-talk, the connection between word and experience grows more remote and attenuated. This is what is meant by “experience-distant.”

Destruction of intuition is alienation — from the world, from others, and from oneself. It begins with over-reliance on experience-distant language. Alienation is complete when the experience-distant language detaches from its alleged object and begins to refer only to itself.

In alienation, whatever one experiences is subjected to elaborate interpretive processing and explained in theoretical language. We psychoanalyze ourselves, explain our biological brain states, interrogate our power relations, theorize on how our social conditioning might be distorting our perceptions snd feelings, speculate how we might be perceived by others, and so on, before simply experiencing what we might otherwise experience. Our intuitions are diffused among many fragmentary notions, or redirected into one compulsive direction, away from one’s immediate or thinly mediated experience.

Same with actions. One no longer interacts directly and wordlessly with objects in ones environment. One no longer picks up a pen and writes, or picks up a knife and cuts. One must anticipate, set goals and plan before acting. One must recall directions and then follow them. One must ask what the next best move is, pick it, then execute it. And at each step one must document the move, to provide transparency. The more a person’s actions are of this kind, the less intuitive contact with the world one has. One’s intuitive connection is primarily with one’s own instruction set. There is no craft, just foresight and execution.

Same with speech and interactions among people. Speaking becomes a risky endeavor. People must carefully consider and select every word or gesture before using it. Words become dangerous things to be handled with thick gloves, carefully assembled and inspected unit by unit before any sentence is delivered. Beliefs are charged with extreme moral significance. Asserting the truth of some facts makes one a good person, where denying their truth, or wrongly asserting the truth of false opinions makes one a bad person. We must constantly reassure one another where we stand, and wherever possible demonstrate our true belief of true beliefs.

But personal beliefs are viewed as constructs — conventions acquired through habit, shaped by social conditioning. Beliefs should never be left to personal judgment, but rather determined by ethical experts who can calculate the effects of various beliefs upon society, and select beliefs capable of generating maximum justice for those who most need and deserve it. Bad beliefs are beliefs left to organic distortion or intuition, which, more likely than not, serve only one group or one person.

With sufficient degree and duration of alienation, a person can be made to lose all direct connection with self, with others, with reality beyond one’s alienated language.

And sadly, one cannot avoid alienation from the alienated. In alienated times, those with functioning intuitions must find one another, offer one another refuge, commune with one’s ancestors — and recommit to future generations beyond this human void.

The key is to develop experience-near language that does full justice to the wordless realities we intuit in our midst.

We intuit energies, tones, vibrations around us and emanating from others and concentrated in certain places and objects. What can we do with them, when we intuit them and speak of them in such nebulous language? Nothing. And that is why the alienated world approves of leaving them in such a wispy, flaky, woo-woo state. Belief in energies and vibes has very little pragmatic consequence.

But these realities of which we are unable to speak are the most consequential. They move mountains.

We do not know how to think and speak and share the most crucial realities of our lives. Our language is optimized to physics and technological manipulation. So we talk about our brains and hormones and social conditioning when what really concerns us are our minds, our hearts and our place in the world.

We have it all everted.

Things can and must be otherwise.

Service design initiation

Design, Enworldment

I am starting a class on online course creation this month. The class is project-based, centering around the design and implementation of an actual online course.

My class project will be an initiation into the enworldment of service design.

By enworldment, I mean the practical-experiential manifestation of an understanding, which causes a person to approach, perceive, understand, respond to and attempt to change the world in some distinct way. (Enworldment is close enough in meaning to “worldview” or “lifeworld” that for most purposes it can be used interchangeably.) *

The course is not meant to be a philosophy of service design, but a series of exercises to effect a shift that causes service design problems to become conspicuously visible as what they are: service design problems.

Currently, under the mainstream corporate enworldment, most service design problems, if noticed at all, are understood in other terms (such as technology problems or management challenges) and are addressed in ways that fail to resolve them, or make them worse.

For a variety of reasons, I have it in for the corporate enworldment, and its failure to detect and respond to service design problems is the least of them. The main problem with the corporate enworldment is the alienating, intuition-paralyzing, depressive effect it has on the majority of people who subscribe to it.

People who believe they hate capitalism don’t really hate capitalism as an economic system, but rather this corporate enworldment’s mode of capitalism. Frankly, if we were to establish socialism today, we would establish it under this same hellish enworldment, while losing many of the tempering effects of the market, and end up with something at least as soulless, oppressive and violent as the Stalinist or Maoist systems. Today’s youth are some of the most thoroughly alienated people I have ever met, and they suffer from political Dunning-Kruger of the profoundest kind that makes them believe they have the answer when they can’t even hear the question. If they do not grow out of their social childishness before they take full control of our society, mass suffering is inevitable. I am sorry, but this is the truth.

I despise the corporate enworldment, too. The only thing I despise more is the anticapitalist two-in-one political enworldment that opposes it — proggism and its complement, alt-rightism. They each think they are the opposite of the other, but they are just the vessels and veins of a single bad-blood pumping circulatory system.

I know that commerce can be conducted in myriad ways within a capitalist system, and one of the better ways is service design. I would like it to become the universal enworldment in the domain of business, and to see all the bean-counters, systems engineers, product managers, perception manipulators, strategic planners and so on, to find their proper places within it, not over it, as they are today.

There is a lot of interest in service design right now. Most people try to do service design within the corporate enworldment, which causes it to be far more complicated and ugly than it could be if it were practiced under a more suitable enworldment. I hope this online course might inspire people to approach business — and life — in a radically different, much better way.

NOTE * : Here is an outtake from an earlier version of this post, where I was attempting to shed more light on enworldment:

“I’ll restate this same idea religiously. Why not? : An enworldment is the way the world manifests to us when we approach it in some particular faith. So when employees of corporations experience their work lives in that dull, weary, anxious, workaday way we describe as “corporate”, that is an enworldment. And any product of corporate life also belongs to that enworldment and it bears a corporate aura — more like a smell — of phoniness, impersonality or insincerity and artificiality. Art aspires to the opposite. An artist with his own enworldment produces artifacts experienced as art, ideally bearing a genuine, intensely personal, otherworldly aura — also known as a halo. Most aspiring artists have absolutely no idea of enworldment, and just try to craft interesting-looking stuff that seems to suggest something provocative or mysterious. Most art does not even manage to be bad art. It is just the idle play of people who’d like to bear an artist’s aura, but who are too timid, pain-averse and unimaginative to diverge from the popular enworldment with its moral norms of norming the abnormal and conventional wisdom of deconstructing convention, playing around with materials in hopes something novel will emerge.)”

 

 

Faith, doctrine and sheer bullshit

Wheel

Faith is not the same as doctrine.

Faith is a way of believing: faith is subject.

Doctrine is what is believed: doctrine is object.

Faith is not the degree of certainty in a belief. Faith is not quantitative.

Faith is the quality of belief, the particular way a belief is conceived.

If a doctrine is conceived by the believer in a way that spontaneously produces clarity, affirmation and action, that conception is faithful to the doctrine, and certainty naturally follow.

If a doctrine is conceived by the believer in a way that fails to produces clarity, affirmation and action, that conception is misconceived and is not faithful to the doctrine. And if the believer tries to will certainty into existence, anyway, that believer believes in bad faith and becomes self-alienated.

As the self-alienation intensifies over time, as it must, the false certainty demands more and more effort and detects threats in more and more sources. The self-alienation metastasizes into general reality-alienation. The alienated being is forced to retreat further and further into delusion and further and further away from what seems unsafe, unjust and unreasonable to them — safe, just and reasonable meaning, of course, harmonious with their own tyrannical, impracticable, imagined ideal. The self-alienated ideologue becomes so brittle the entire world must be terrorized and coerced into conformity with its ideological notions, which become more and more ludicrous from the outside. And, most of all, this ludicrous exterior must never, ever be comically reflected back to believer. Reality itself is offensive, especially the reality of how ridiculous the believer has become.

We can change our beliefs, but to do so we must, in the best faith, change our faith.

And this does mean experimenting with possibilities, that is, entertaining them. We observe how we, ourselves, respond to “what if?” propositions, and really notice if we find ourselves persuaded by the pragmatic consequences.

We ask ourselves, perhaps by invitation, “What if there no such thing as extreme virtue — that virtue is essentially moderate? What if virtue is always at the mean, somewhere between vices of deficiency and vices of excess? Which means too much of any good thing — too much empathy, too much equality, too much honesty, too much love, even — becomes vicious? What then?”

Or “Maybe progress is not progress toward perfection or toward any good, but, rather, progress away from misery and cruelty of various kinds? What then?”

Or “What if justice is not an absolute, but rather an ever-changing agreement between each and all, and that any one person or any one group, however benevolent, who exalts themselves above their fellows as judges of absolute justice becomes a tyrant — the epitome of injustice? What then?”

Or “What if liberal democracy is essentially contentious, and any attempt to purify it of conflict or to force it into harmony is an existential threat to liberal democratic life? What then?”

Or “What if every villain of history believes they are on the right side of history — and that if you, yourself, were such a villain you would passionately pursue a perverse justice, in total belief of your own righteousness, just like the villains before you? What then?

Or “What if that dichotomy of mind versus matter is just a weird artifact of human being, and that metaphysical reality is both, neither and infinitely more? What if materialism and idealism are both anthropomorphisms, at best stations on the way to real relationship with divine infinitude? What then?”

Or “What if infinity is qualitative, not quantitative? What then?”

Or “What if we are no more capable of doubting what we cannot doubt than we are believing what we cannot believe? What then?”

Or, finally, “What if truth has little or nothing to do with correspondence with reality, but rather with the fitness of a set of beliefs with a particular kind of life? And that correspondence theories of truth are no longer fit for the kinds of lives most of us are living today? What then? — Or! Or what if the opposite is true — that abandoning our incorrect but useful correspondence theory of truth destroys our ability to live?

And so on.

Asking such questions — assuming we can authentically ask them — and meeting these questions with an authentic response is the key to changes of heart, soul and strength — of metanoia — of saying “hineini” in new, better ways. When we respond, if we are observant, we will feel the implications of the possibility reverberating through the world as we’ve known it, ringing true or false, full or hollow, cramped or grand, dissonant or harmonious.

Sometimes, if we persevere in our asking and responding, something inconceivably weird happens. An entertained possibility crystalizes into actuality. New relationships, concepts, analogies, meanings ripple across our past, present and future, rearticulating time, space and being, tearing and restitching the fabric of history and the storyline we’ve woven through it with our own life. The world re-enworlds itself and we find ourselves standing in a remade place as reborn newborns.

This is how it actually happens when it happens. Beliefs change with a change of faith.

But falsifying your beliefs in this or that doctrine — or arduously retraining your thinking to better conform to the doctrine that you have come to assume ought to be true — this will never get you there. It will only infect you with worsening bad faith. It will make you profoundly and ridiculously full of shit.

The Reformed Bully

Fables, myths & parables

One day, as the world’s most terrifying playground bully was applying an atomic super-wedgie to one of his favorite victims, he had a profound change of heart.

He looked at the miserable face of the poor kid he held aloft by the elastic of his tighty-whities.

Then he looked the sadistic faces of his jeering comrades.

He was overwhelmed with disgust at himself, and those who found pleasure in bullying the helpless.

He immediately released the kid he was tormenting and turned on his laughing comrades.

“What are we doing? This is WRONG!”

To everyone’s surprise, the bully grasped the waistband of his own underwear, and yanked until his eyes teared up with pain and emotion.

He then lunged violently at his shocked comrades.

“You, also, will do this work!”

With the assistance of his former victims, the ex-bully inflicted some of the most brutal and heartfelt wedgies anyone had ever seen.

The tables were now turned. With the ex-bully’s energetic assistance, the former victims were now destroying waistbands across the playground and in the school bathrooms. The tormented now had their chance to torment their tormenters.

The reformed ex-bully calculated that the former tormenters had approximately five years of suffering before them before fairness would be achieved.

He found deep gratification using his strength to restore justice to the playground. Soon equity would be achieved — all because of his heroic rejection of bullying.

Experiencing infinitude

Judaism

1.

When we are young we are full of potential. We feel immeasurable future before us and we overflow with hope.

When we are older, after living most of a lifetime, looking back on the one narrow path we actually followed through these possibilities, we might feel bitter.

Was all that possibility an illusion doomed to be dispelled by actuality?

No: That possibility was real. We thought we were anticipating our own personal biographies, but now, our maturity reveals it for what it was: In truth, we were savoring the infinitude of God.

This ambient eternity was not over the horizon, but rather, was the sky and air of our lives. And it is still there around us and, if we choose, we continue to breathe it.

Possibilities are valuable whether they are actualized or not.

2.

Human nature is apocalyptic. Every generation feels it in their bones that they are the last generation. And in a sense, they are right. Each generation is the end of existence as they know it.

But this is no reason to surrender to despair. This is just one way we experience our own mortality. When we die, everything as we know it disappears with us. The universe loses one of its universes, even as another infant universe pre-experiences its genesis, or some grace-struck soul is reborn mid-life, ex nihilo.

Nothing is okay, and that is okay.

3.

The hope of potential is the experience of God’s infinitude, filtered through our own finitude.

The hopelessness of apocalypse is the experience of our own finitude, but if we look deeper into the nothingness, we can feel the back-glow of infinitude behind it.

We do not have to be bitter.

4.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught: “Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: ‘I am a speck of dust,’ and on the other : ‘The world was created for me.’”

Against caremongers

Ethics

Here’s the thing: Most people who care very intensely and noisily about this thing or that care much less about the object of their intense, noisy caring than 1) the activity of intensely, noisily caring, and 2) the fact they they are a good person who cares intensely about important things.

But it is possible to stop caring about caring and about being a sincere, good person.

“Oh no! Will this turn me into a cynical nihilist?” you might ask.

No, it will free you to figure out what you actually care about.

And that knowing what you actually, for real care about allows you to work for what you actually, for real care about, instead of being a loud, hyped-up, bullshit caremonger.

Of course, insincere, inauthentic people who prize sincerity and authenticity get pissed off if they suspect you can see direct through them. So, unless there is a good reason to, don’t confront them. But don’t play along, either. Armor yourself with etiquette.

*

Etiquette is not fake. Etiquette is formal.

Etiquette is not faking how you feel. It conceals how you feel by replacing self-expressive speech and action with proper speech and action.

Etiquette keeps the social peace by keeping our inner selves inward and our outer selves inoffensive.

Anyone who tries to pry under etiquette, demanding access to our real selves deserves to be politely rebuffed. That is impolite.

Anyone who ignores the rebuffing, and persists in prying and pushing and otherwise fucking around with our real selves and our real beliefs and our real values, deserves to be impolitely rebuffed. Because that is disrespectful.

And if that does not work — if they refuse to desist — they deserve to be resisted forcefully.

*

So, if you want to be good, just do the right thing, and leave your feelings out of it. Do the right thing politely until you cannot be polite, anymore.

Few people deserve intimacy, and you alone are the judge of that.

Reserve your authenticity for people who aspire to authentic authenticity.

Authenticity is for the authentic.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Equality is for the equal.

Have a good day.

Sermon on the Distributed God

Enworldment

There is a plurality of ways to be a pluralist, and pluralism is prepared to accept the pragmatic consequences of this truth by acknowledging that apparent contradictions to any given truth, even the truth of pluralism, does not imply falsehood.

Pseudopluralism believes that its view on pluralism is the only valid form of pluralism, and sees any contradiction to its own form of pluralism as false and anti-pluralist and something a pluralist should suppress through responsible use of overpowering force.

This is one variant of an ancient and universal trap: of merely knowing, or worse, saying, when we are summoned to act and to be.

Each of us is a divine spark of the immanent Distributed God.

Pluralism is the acknowledgment that our finite efforts to conceive reality from our various points in the divine body will necessarily differ, just as we feel different sensations in different points in our own bodies. Sparks within sparks. Speck-size sparks; flame-size sparks; inferno-size sparks, sun-size sparks, galaxy-size sparks. Sparks seen close-up, sparks seen on the horizon, sparks floating on the surface of the azure sky and sparks set in the depths of darkness.

Each spark regards the others as if through the eye of the one and only God. The Golden Rule urges us to know that we are merely participants in a transcendent one and only God, and we are surrounded by innumerable fellow-participants, fellow sparks. We are all centers of the universe.

Borges:

In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: ‘God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.‘

Here we can see the ethical dimension of pluralism — an attitude of mutuality toward our fellow-I — who, from our own perspective, is Thou — and actions of reciprocity. The principle of reciprocity — which must not be confused with a rule, because rules determine actions, but principles determine rules — goes by the misnomer “the Golden Rule.” The Golden Principle is a test for any action, and it iterative asks — that is, it interrogates — every action. It asks “By what principle is this action justified?” Then, “Would you accept that principle?” Then it asks, “By what principle is this principle justified? Would you accept that principle?” and this questioning iterates until the test fails, or it terminates at the root of this principle, which requires us to involve our neighbor, our Thou, as ourselves, as fellow participants in a We.

The Golden Principle can be restated as: Thou shalt codesign.

The Jewish tradition, in which the Jesus was a participant of supreme genius, has always approached God as community in covenant. He understood and taught that the Golden Principle — to respect and love Thou as I — is precisely the same principle of loving God with our entire being — not just with our theological minds, not only with our overflowing hearts, not only with our serving strength — but will all of ourselves, integrated and whole and in communion with our fellows in a network of I-Thous, woven into a jewelled Indra’s Net, who can never been seen from outside, despite all appearances. Indra’s Net is woven of first-person. The refractions of first-persons within first-persons is the scintillation of these jewels.

Martin Buber:

To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.

The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.

The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.

Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

Primary words are spoken from the being.

If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.

If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.

The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.

The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.

To make the leap from monocentric “I am one with God, and coextensive with God” to polycentric “I am a participant in God, and I am entirely of God and nothing but God, while God infinitely exceeds my finite being” is also to say “My participation in God is inseparable from my participation with my fellow I, as they are also of God, and participants in God’s being.”

To oppose God, the world and other people is to render God finite and deny his very infinite essence. And we all do it every minute of every day. Each moment it is an infinite challenge to overcome this natural sin, and it is to this challenge we are summoned. “Where are you?” To which we respond “Hineini“: within Thou who is, am, will be. And to this we say “Amen.”

We are called to radical pluricentrism within the Distributed God.

To know and say it epistemologically: pluralism.

To do it ethically: codesign by the Golden Principle.

To be it ontologically: be a polycentric participant in the Distributed God.

This is my religion. It is Judaism. It is all religion. It is All, or at least one way to situate within All.

I am trying to convey this to anyone with the hope to know better, the will to receive new givens, the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the space of an open outspiraling heart.

I am not trying to convey it to those who do not want it, and that is most people, especially those who say “pluralism!” or related words like “diversity!” or “equity!” or “inclusion!” Two millennia ago, a radical Jew said “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” The kingdom, of course, Malchut, Shekinah, is the enworldment of participation in the Distributed God.

All too often we believe beliefs as a counterfeit for a faith of being and doing and receiving givens.

Last point: Participate first with participants.

You cannot play Uno with one who will only play Solitaire.

But the more people are playing, the more the hesitant will feel compelled to join, and joining is its own kind of persuasion. With games, too — with games, especially — the medium is the message. And what isn’t a game? (Language games. Ethnomethodic games.)

Remember: Persuade the persuadable first.

Starting with the obstinate, focusing on the obstinate, is obstinacy.

Belief as anti-faith

Philosophy

Beliefs can be a defense against faith.

Do not be fooled: “True believers” are not the faithful.

Casual accepters of truths lack faith.

Fervent believers in the Truth try to grip faith and cannot. They fear faith and hate it.

*

If you cannot live up to a principle, believe in it instead.

Alcatraz Tour

Fables, myths & parables

Once the wife of a former inmate to Alcatraz decided to take a tour of the prison so she could better understand what he’d gone through in his two decades of imprisonment.

She walked through the stone corridors, ate a snack in the mess hall, and even experienced the cold clank of the iron door closing behind her as she was shut up in a cell for a few minutes to contemplate the horror of confinement in a nine-by-five-by-seven foot space.

Afterwards, she reflected with her husband on her experience. “It was really quite interesting. Maybe next time you will agree to go with me, so we can experience it together.”

Inner-leftism

Philosophy

Wherever I read “the unconscious” and its implications of thoughts concealed beneath the surface of the mind, I intercept it and substitute ‘the unsayble”, implying that it is perfectly conscious, but just not yet intuitively disciplined and equipped with language.

To people for whom thinking is a word manipulation affair, the unconscious is beyond the limits of reason. If you cannot make an idea from some combination of the existing stock of words and meanings, then the idea isn’t even an idea. It is the unconscious.

For those of us who think partly with words and partly with images, relationships, obscure hunches and experimental action, though, it is the language recombination games of wordworld intellectuals that seems more deserving of the label “the unconscious”. A small gang of word-equipped intuitions uses their words to dominate the others.

My entire philosophical project is to equip a new faction of intuitions with words — intuitions sworn to protect the rights of wordless intuitions and to give them space to fully participate in the microcosmic political order known as the soul. It is an egalitarian inner-leftism.

Herbert Simon’s first book

Design

I’m finally getting around to reading Herbert Simon.

I wonder how many service designers are aware that before writing Sciences of the Artificial, Simon wrote another book called Administrative Behavior, which according to Wikipedia, “was based on Simon’s doctoral dissertation” and “served as the foundation for his life’s work.”

I haven’t experienced this precise species of excitement since I learned that Adam’s Smith’s other book was all about empathy.

Prying open the hand of thought

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Love

I’ve begun to notice where other people’s own original “pet theories” harm their overall understandings and ability to communicate their ideas. The noticing is spontaneous and intuitive, too. It is not an intention or an analysis. I just see it as given.

This matters to me because I have become aware that I am guilty of the same thing. The idea that I was going to write a book to mark my intellectual property, and my intense anxiety of getting scooped has corrupted my thinking. Now my philosophy is scarred with neologisms and mangled with argumentative entrenchments.

For this reason, I am doing some strange things to loosen my own grip on “my” ideas.

I feel that if I can stop caring, or at least suspend caring about the source of the ideas I use and care about — if I can “open the hand of thought” and let my precious, old, complicated ideas fall out — maybe some simpler ideas might land on my palm.

I am focusing on learning to teach — prioritizing what is most readily learnable over what is mine — as a mindset to gently pry my fingers open.

And what I am going to learn to teach is service design. I want to get service design dead simple, so it can do its transformative magic on our everyday dealings with others.

When done in the right spirit, service design invests us with a new practical faith — one that guides our participation in the transcendent, mysterious, glorious drudgery of life. This drudgery — ours and others — deserves our love and respect. Service design operationalizes that love and that respect within an organization.

It is important!

Hope

Biography, Design, Enworldment, Love

I spent most of this week at Greenville Memorial Hospital. My dad had a Type A aortic dissection, and had to undergo emergency open heart surgery. So far, he has beaten some terrifyingly slim odds, largely thanks to his heart surgeon, Dr. Bhatia, who worked on him literally all Sunday night through Monday morning, and the incredible nurses and support staff at the CVICU.

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These days it is easy to lapse into pessimism regarding our species.

But it is important to remember that the people who give us this dark impression is a small and specialized segment of the population, who spend their days reading about and writing about one small corner of human experience.

Meanwhile, another, much larger group of people show up to work each day to give care and comfort to a perpetually rotating set of hurting, terrified people. They serve with skill, professionalism, compassion and humor. We don’t often hear their perspectives on things because they are incredibly busy. Their communications are mostly practical and specific and directed to one person or a few.

When I focus on people like this, and recognize them as representative of humanity I feel much, much better about everything.

Philosophy as engineering

Enworldment, Philosophy

From William Wimsatt’s Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality:

I seek methodological tools appropriate to well-adapted but limited and error-prone beings. We need a philosophy of science that can be pursued by real people in real situations in real time with the kinds of tools that we actually have-now or in a realistically possible future. This must be a central requirement for any naturalistic account. Thus I oppose not only various eliminativisms, but also overly idealized intentional or rationalistic accounts. In these chapters I advocate an approach that can provide both better descriptions of our activities and normative guidance based on realistic measures of our strengths and limitations. No current philosophy of science does this fully, though increasing numbers are moving in that direction. A philosophy of science for real people means real scientists, real engineers, historians or sociologists of real science and engineering, and real philosophers interested in how any of the preceding people work, think about their practice, think about the natural worlds we all inhabit, and think about what follows reflectively and reflexively from these facts.

This view involves a species of realism, though not of the usual sort. It fits current scientific practice and illuminates historical cases better than other approaches, and it has implications for how to do philosophy. It neither has nor seeks the stark simplicities of current foundationalist theories. This philosophy must be based from top to bottom on heuristic principles of reasoning and practice, but it also seeks a full accounting of other things in our richly populated universe — including the formal approaches we have sought in the past.

This project is a philosophy for messy systems, for the real world, for the “in-between”, and for the variegated ecologies of reality supporting and increasingly bent to our science and technology. Pace Quine, this is ontology for the tropical rainforest. The “piecewise approximations” of the book title is unavoidable: we are, must be, and can be realists in our science and much of our practice. But our realism, like our practice, and even our inferential consistency, must be piecemeal and usually satisfied with a local rather than a global order. We aren’t God and we don’t have a God’s-eye view of the world. (In this piecemeal world, we don’t even have a gods’ eyes view.)

But then the first part of the title is only half-truth: to re-engineer the whole of philosophy in a human image is still ambitiously global. I don’t do all this. I sketch how to do it for significant parts of philosophy of science and closely connected areas of science. This captures new phenomena and reconceptualizes old in ways that fit more naturally with how we proceed. I hope that others find these results sufficiently suggestive to use, extend, and add to the tools I describe here to employ them elsewhere.

“Re-Engineering” appears in the title as a verb: this view of science and nature is constructed largely (as with all creative acts) by taking, modifying, and reassessing what is at hand, and employing it in new contexts, thus re-engineering. Re-engineering is cumulative and is what makes our cumulative cultures possible. And any engineering project must be responsive to real world constraints, thus realism. Our social, cognitive, and cultural ways of being are no less real than the rest of the natural world, and all together leave their marks. But putting our feet firmly in the natural world is not enough. Natural scientists have long privileged the “more fundamental” ends of their scientific hierarchy, and pure science over applied — supposing that (in principle) all knowledge flowed from their end of the investigative enterprise.

Not so: Re-engineering also works as an adjective, and has a deeper methodological role. Theorists and methodologists of the pure sciences have much to learn about their own disciplines from engineering and the study of practice, and from evolutionary biology, the most fundamental of all (re-)engineering disciplines. Our cognitive capabilities and institutions are no less engineered and re-engineered than our biology and technology, both collections of layered kluges and exaptations. We must know what can be learned from this fact about ourselves to better pursue science of any sort.

This is very, very close to my own thinking, that philosophy ought to be understood as a species of design — the design of how we conceive — and judged by how well it does its job of enabling us to communicate and share a common sense of reality, how well it guides effective action and how well it reveals the value of our lives and our world.

These are design goals, not engineering goals, so I must say that on some level I probably disagree with Wimsatt, but I’m a quarrelsome person, and for me disagreement is a feature, not a bug. I suspect I will find much of use here. I’m already finding myself noticing heuristic thought more than before, and it is enabling me to make some weird wormholes between distant realms of thought normally considered absolutely untraversable.

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One newer development in my thinking on design: Increasingly, over the last five years I have spent practicing service design (my first exposure to a truly polycentric design discipline) I have realized the enormous importance of philosophical interoperability — of designing philosophies that enable connections between people, instead of distancing and alienating them. This is always a change, but is exponentially challenging in times like these when all popular philosophies are philosophies of alienation and despair.

Parents now feel virtuous teaching their children ways of understanding the world that reveal it only as a vale of tears, dominated by sin, oppression, greed and hatred — and doomed to perish of these vices — and then blame the world for their children’s despair.

A well-designed philosophy must speak to people with these mentalities, whether these apocalyptic visions are secular or antisecular, but must divert them away from nihilism, without also diverting them from the reality of reality.

Anyway… I’m excited about this book.