The Wild Region in Life-History

I don't know much about the wild-region, as discussed in the book The Wild Region in Life-History, but it is an interesting approach to a problem that I've been thinking about from a completely different direction.

See, it turns out that memories aren't simple things, that there isn't a single sort of memory or a single way of encoding memory traces. The distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (and any other variety of non-episodic memory that a psychologist might investigate) are a distinction between those memories with traces in the medial temporal lobe and those which are encoded through other mechanisms.

If we accept a multiple drafts picture of the mind, there's not guarantee that there even are discrete physical tokens corresponding to the neural "engram", the physical memory trace. It may be the case that information, in the sense of causal processes orginating with the distal object of perception go there own ways once they get into the nervous system. Some bits about go off to the area looking to recognize spatial orientation, other parts go off to process colors, to serve as memory cues, to answer questions in concert on with other processes ("what's that smell?") or "Seeing the turkey" becomes a relatively distributed task, not distributed in the sense of not correlated to a physical structure, rather decomposed into a set of functions which correspond to what the various parts of the nervous system actually do (as oppossed to what we tend to think they do when we're doing whatever it is that we might be doing, such as looking at freshly roasted turkeys.)

There's always the functional answer, that what's human is what tends to do human things. Some form of this answer has been popular, even dominant, since the time of Aristotle. This answer is good for a lot of practical purposes, but the functions that we find important might not correspond to the one's that our brain is actually carrying out. It also opens an interesting discussion about the relative worth of various functions. Not all of the functions develop in the same way or at the same time. Depending upon what we want to consider the valuable aspects of human development, the critical functions could be formed either early in pregnancy or not for several years after birth. (A lot of what I'm thinking about here is motivated by a book I'm reading right now called The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory by Rovee-Collier and others).

Which brings us to the question of "who are we?", the cognitive and physiological data is obviously of critical importance, so is the input of naive or folk phenomenology (what we get when studying phenomonological experience without using words like alterity), and more developed phenomenological theories as well. None of these however can be decisive. It would be nice if the anatomical evidence could provide knock down evidence to answer these questions but, for reasons I've been hinting at, there's no probably no "I" operating at a much lower level than my entire self. (In other words, there's no smaller "me" somewhere inside pulling my strings.)

I was recently having a discussion with someone about physicalism and after-death experience. (I am now convinced that these two topics have even less to do with each other than they may at first appear.) He didn't quite pick up on how odd this formulation was, since by dead, he meant not exhibiting life-signs (heart beat, brain functions), while the functions that are of most interest or value tend to be the one's that allow experiences, the traditional life-signs are just more easily observable functions that tend to correlate strongly with having experiences (rather having experiences tends to strongly correlate with having a heart beat). Of course, there's no evidence that there was any experience during the period of clinical death, just after the fact memories.

In any case, continuity of memory seems a critical part of self-identity. I don't care to examine this at the moment since it would require a consideration of Locke and Hume. In any case, this brings us back to the wild-spaces, a phrase taken from Merleau-Ponty. Once again, I'm reminded that I should get around to reading Merleau-Ponty. The anatomical evidence seems to converge with the historical debate, memory by itself is insufficient for telling our stories in a useful way, perhaps the wild region could be useful in this regard as well.

Just a thought.

The fun part of writing my most recent post was imaging all the different ways in which it would be terrible to live a Little House lifestyle. The boredom. The threat of disease bandits and indians. The possible run ins with US Army forces trying to stop you from stealing the Indians land. Freezing to death, high infant mortality, the list goes on. The possibilities for snarky cosmopolitan humor at the expense of those who romanticize the frontier were many. After all, I can't help, life in a Little House was a mere step from the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short.

My impression of this state is built up as much from having read the books as it is from relating Hobbesian stereotypes about life outside the city. But then I ran out of steam. The last part of the entry, the part I'd really been looking forward to writing, just didn't entertain when I finally got around to it. What after all would be wrong with such a life? Sure, its not the most appealing way of life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau excepted, not the most conducive to either literature or philosophy (and Thoreau's shack wasn't that far from the settled town of Concord and today would be considered a relatively easy commute to Boston).

Of course, prison has traditionally been considered a rather productive environment for writers of all sorts. So, conduciveness to the life of the mind shouldn't be considered sufficient for a worthwhile form of life.

Maybe I've been infected too strongly by the Socratic bug, the unexamine life holds no appeal and a constant struggle for existence leaves little in way of time for examination, of an either philosophical fashion.

Moreover, I don't have any imaginative connection with the people of the frontier, the people who settled this country. I come more from those people who Howard Dean refers to built America. My forebears left Ireland and the thought of shoving the family into another two room shack to risk starvation would have seemed like defeating the whole purpose of emigration. That, and holy days of obligation were probably a serious inconvenience on the open prairy. I romanticize the tribalisma and corrupt politics of those who came before me in the same way that the descendants of the settlers look back fondly on the struggle to displace indigenous Americans.

Post-message: now there's a nice contrast, the people who settled this country (enamored of the frontier, agricultural background, rural, suspicious of large organizations) and those who built it (the teeming masses, industrial background, urban, at least acclimated to large scale organizations such as trade unions, governments or the Catholic church), to describe the red-blue divide. Of course, it's just as facile as any other simple division.

How Things Should Be Revisited

I've been thinking more and more about the conservative student who bemoaned that the problem with the world as it is is that thing as not the way they should be. The more I read about the election and the distribution of red and blue counties, the more I see that he's not alone, not at all.

The family needs to be fundamental unit of society, small government is necessary for the family to perform its appropriate functions. Unions are unnecessary. Large corporations are a necessary evil. (I can't see anyone whose primary focus is hearth and home finding much sympathy with something as impersonal as a multi-national conglomerate.)

The point seems to be that the family, working as a unit, is best able to secure the goods to its members, including a relevant sort of freedom. My rough (ie unsupported) conclusions indicate that this position is most commonly held in rural (ie red) counties. I've also seen it described as the position shared by the people who founded this country, by which I think they mean the settlers of various generations. This is the group that tamed the wilderness, settling wherever they could clear their own bit of land to satsify their needs. Quite literally the family would be the most relevant unit of operation. This group contrasts with later generations of immigrants who left Europe for the more familiar context of the cities.

The rural counties have an obvious sort of appeal for someone who'd like to emulate these values and the descendants of the frontier settlers who haven't rejected these values would most reasonably be found in the red counties.

This particular approach reminds me strongly of the Little House books. Pa didn't need any social security. Retirement was an alien concept anyway. In traditional societies, offspring are security in old-age. Here's one more way that contemporary western cultures break with traditional ways of living.

Regulatory government is the death of the Little House approach to living. Environmental regulation prevents the most effecient forms of farming, large scale projects lower the entry costs to the frontier too much ...

But the more I think about it, the less appealing a Little House life seems. The isolation, the crude ammenities, not to mention the occasional brutality and lack of good coffee make all make me glad that I don't live on the frontier.

www.ComicCovers.com - Your source for weekly comic book cover scans.

www.ComicCovers.com - Your source for weekly comic book cover scans. ahh, this is heaven, and very useful incase I have another dream inspired search for comic book covers.

I have two concerns about this:

1. considering my post earlier this week on hypergnosia, there may be some reason to doubt my grip on reality.

2. the database contains 50,000 covers. Considering that I have, conservatively, owned 1,000 comics over the years and read more, it would seem that 50,000 isn't that many.

EDIT: and they don't have the cover to the immortal Devil Dinosaur. This says something about me, and its something I didn't really want to know.

Hypergnosic Moments

This morning I'm having a hypergnosic moment that I'm trying to break.

For many, a hypergnosic moment is when the implicate order of the universe is revealed and the oneness of being is made apparent.

For me, a hypergnosic moment is when I make the comic book guy character from the Simpson's look well adjusted. In this particular case, I set out to take some notes on my "thinking about technology", by which I mean "trying to have something relevant and interesting to say". So, while I was trying to get up the courage to continue writing my paper on
the use of blogs in a philosophy class . This lead me to be reading a some other books speculating on technological development, specifically K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. The book consists of many weak analogies, appeals to ignorance and irrelevant anecdotes. But one of those anecdotes really set me off.

He described how Douglas Lenat entered of his heuristic experiment, EURISKO, into the Trillion Credit Squadron competion in 1981. I was familiar with Lenat's work but not with EURISKO and I had managed to miss the Traveller connection.

Traveller was what I did in high school, probably instead of both homework and dating. I don't say it kept me off drugs because the biggest dealer in my high school was a regular member of my group. I may have felt a strong social pressure not to experiment with drugs because this individual put a higher value on his role-playing games then his drugs, at least until sometime senior year. Traveller had many cool features that would seem fresh, even cutting edge today. Two features in particular: it was modular, you could use just a core set of rules, or any of a large number of independent supplments (far more modular than Dungeons & Dragons ever was, modules or no) and it didn't have an experience point system. The first was great for supporting organic roleplaying groups who could fill in their own galaxy with either a little or, a great deal, of detail already established for them. Later variations of the game became more integrated and more dependent on a continuing backstory and lost my interest as a result. The no experience system was a great feature because it took away the pre-programmed plot that most games have. Instead of a constant upwards arc of power and competence, the players could lose what they had gained, be rich and powerful one moment, impovrished the next. It made for more interesting interaction since there was a greater range of valuables to be gained or lost.

Trillion Credit Squadron was a supplement to the game which focused on the space-ship design rules. In this variation, the players were each given a trillian credits to design a fleet which would then compete with other fleets players had constructed. My own group was pretty heavily role-playing, rather than strategy, oriented, so the number crunching aspects held little appeal and I was left to explore this dimension of the game on my own. But I guess that it was something of a big deal at some point in 1981.

Drexler makes this game out to be a futuristic naval simulation. This set me off on the trail of how this particular game was understood by people since. This became a trek which offended my nerdiest instinct for purity, but it also seemed to continue unfolding until I found that I had grasped a thread was closely enough tied into the story of how the 80s and 90s unfolded that it literally lead anywhere.

BANG!

Hypergnosia.

I'm beginning to come down now, I've started to concentrate on those details that might help me get some work done.

Apparently, Lenat's program did make at least one interesting variation on a centuries old naval planning problem.

First conclusion, there is a significant overlap between the set of people writing about artificial intelligence and those who have experience with early 80's science fiction themed role-playing games. Second conclusion, spelling check has not solved everything as "traveler" (with one l) and "trillion" (with an o) have both been pretty common in sites I came across while developing this entry. On closer examination, this is probably because English spelling is not quite as standardized as we have often been told.

Why use good design when bad design sells better.

"Soapbox: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really!" by Richard Bartle is really interesting, if only because of his unstated premise. Bartle's argument is that the design of virtual worlds, or other on-line games, is filled with poor designs. His argument is that these choices are demanded by players. That is, people tend to play games which incorporate certain design mistakes.

So why would anyone want to design that didn't incorporate these poor design decisions, after all, that's what your customers want?

The answer has to be, because he wants to build the best virtual worlds that he can, judged by his own standards.

I find this refreshing.

Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax

Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax A link to go with my last post.

on the other side of the circle

The conservative movement seeks to change science curricula by opening them up to considering alternatives, Intelligent Design and more extreme variants of creationism. In doing so, they put question the status of science as a unique method of truth production. Competing "narratives", such as the Genesis narrative could be considered.

This has struck me as a surprising variety of relativism. Even more so since, it seems to at least superficially lead to alliance of the conservatives and the anti-science left such as those who would argue that in post-colonial days, the hegemony of western systems of knowledge needs to be broken up.

While surprising, this parallel makes some sense, American conservatism, in many ways, reflects the interests of, and gives voice to, groups in American culture which are all but looking at the rest of the culture as if they were forces of some colonial power.

the day after the day after

It's raining pretty hard, I can't see much activity over at the construction site, but I can hear something, so there must be a lot of work going on.

The world shows no signs of imminent doom, but its certainly no better than it was 48 hours ago either.

Election Day 3

A vote mob representative called me about an hour ago to let me know that one of my students might be late for my 5:30 class. He'd apparently already been in line for an hour. I certainly can't fault the student, its seems that he'd set aside three hours for voting, which is a reasonable amount of time.

Now the student in question is pretty engaged with the class and a good sense of humor, I wouldn't put it past him to have the volunteer call-in just because he could, when they first put phones on planes people would call home just to say "guess where I am".

Still that's a long line, and that's real news from somewhere close to the front lines.

The bamboo is still doing well. Night is falling, I can't really see much of the hill at this point. You know that's where the national guard stood back in 1970?

Election Day 2

The Bamboo plant is still watered.

When my friend Geoff came to help out with the election, he brought me his copy of Black & White , I think that may replace the Radiohead CD.

The construction crew made it back from lunch, but its raining now, so they're not doing much at the moment.

The hill is still there, I can see parts of now that they knocked down the old dorms, my view will disappear again when the new ones go up.

Election Day

I'm situated high above the intensely contested battleground state of Ohio, my extensive readership no doubt awaits my insightful analysis of what's occuring here.

Well, the sky is grey, the crew at the construction site across the street seem to have taken a break for lunch and my bamboo plant has been watered. Also, I'm listening to Kid A, but mostly out of apathy. Maybe I'll put on Boards of Canada a little later.

Meanwhile, somewhere just over the next hill, the world teeters on the abyss. I just read electoral-vote.com 's just a little too speculative account of what could happen if the election goes back to the courts and Rehnquist isn't healthy to preside.

More as the day develops. My prediction: the bamboo will have ample water and Boards of Canada won't make it into the rotation.

POW 1

Last week, the philosophy department here at Kent State held a POW,
short for Philosophy on Wednesday, that was a round-table discussion
of philosophical issues that might be relevant to tommorrow's
election. Prof. Norman Fischer had recruited two members of his
political philosophy class to present on each side. The student
prepresenting for the Democrats was a true representative of the
wonkish wing of the party, all policies and numbers. While I think we
need more of this attitude, the conservative did make a more
interesting subject of study.

He was interesting mostly because I had to work to understand what he
was getting at and how his positions could be interpreted as a
coherent position. So I reconstructed a Conservative from the signs
and clues that I could find in his speech. This was a lot like
reconstructing the achievements of a lost civilization from bits or
pottery. Hence, I won't name my subject, since this reflection isn't
really about, its a reconstruction of sorts.

He was obviously preplexed by the world and the state in which he had
found it. Some of his confusions could have been easily corrected,
perhaps they were even affected for the sake of sharpening his
message. For instance, he expressed great surprise that a blue collar
region shouldn't be conservative in nature. Of course, the reasons why
blue collar workers don't flock to conservativism are pretty clear.
Among other reasons, American industrial workers have benefitted
greatly from union membership and American conservatism has not
enthusiatically embraced the unions. The coolness of that relationship
isn't mysterious either. The unions have often been of as the leading
edge of socialism, which still haunts the sleepless nighttime hours of
many on the right.

My conservative subject had a deeper confusion. Most of his arguments
were supported by constrasting either the current situation or a
Democratic proposal with a well-developed sense of "the way things
should be", as if the justification for his vision should have been
entirely obvious. I think he was confused that others couldn't see
that his imagined America was the true America.

He had difficulty providing other principle on which either this
vision or the road to could be justified. When an audience member
suggested that conservatives tend to utilize principles of individual
autonomy and responsibility, he jumped on this as an important
principle, but I don't think that he would have come up with it
himself. "The ways things should be" didn't seem to have much room for
a robust sort of individual freedom.

He's going to need some decent principles to develop his position so
that others could see it as well as he could. Even accepting the
explicitly stated principles of "the way thing should be" would not
work to bridging the gap. (Unless of course, one were to accept the
reliance on traditional religion in just the manner that he meant it.)
The typical liberal isn't a fan of huge, monolithic, or overbearing
goverment or really of any significant weakening on limits on the
application of power. Most liberals I know place a pretty heavy on the
limited and deliberate use of power.

Since they've already come up, unions act to insure that the power of
corporations (or other employers) is appropriately limited, and unions
do it while minimizing government exercise of power. The government
could fill the same role, but no one really wants that. Of course, a
conservative could argue that the market is the appropriate regulatory
mechanism for wages. This would, however, be evidence that they simply
weren't paying attention. Assuming labor is a resources just like any
other, which it isn't, aggregation leads to effeciency, and is
unavoidable in any but a tightly controlled market. Unions are a
market-driven solution.

How "things should be" without large-scale goverment or strong
unions. One could imagine it to mean power concentrated in large
corporate interests acting without significant limits or balance. I'm
not so sure that my conjectured conservative subject would agree that
that was his vision of "the way things should be". There were definite
signs that family and religion should provide the structures within
which people would be able to lead orderly and meaningful live. This
idyll constrasts sharply with a socialist idyll in which comradeship
and goodwill would cement and energize the bounds of community at a
much more abstract level than that of family or parish. They are both
similar however, in that bonds of affection and loyalty are considered
the skeleton on which a culture is constructed.

The democracy envisioned by the framers did not involve a government
of the scope of the current American government. They also didn't
envision the telegraph, let alone the airplane, superhighway,
computer, etc. These larger scales of organization are not things from which
we can effectively back away.

Marx was on to something when he observed that the the means of
production determine patterns of social organization. One thing he
did not foresee was that the means of production would not remain
static at the stage of the early industrial revolution, they would
change and change and change again. The socialist state becomes just
as irrelevant as a Jeffersonian Democracy because they have been left
behind by the increasing scale, complexity and plasticity of human
organization.

In the case of "how things should be", the idyll would require finding
our way to a world in which there were no large scale organizations
that were not firmly entrenched in smaller, more local, stable
structures. Family and church, without union, government or
multi-national, clearly with no organization coordinating human social
interaction somehow higher than the nation-state, seems the core of
the conservative vision. However, it doesn't seem any more attainable,
or even approachable than the socialist one.

How should things be? Well, I haven't a clue, which is part of why I
had to try to get into the mindset of my conservative subject. What
does seem clear is that the balanced and deliberative limitation of
power allows for human thriving. The large the scale on which power
can be exercised, the large the scale at which the limits and balances
must be pursued.

What has caused this new age to dawn?

Three years ago, I moved away from Massachusetts. At the time, Eastern Massachusetts, from which I mean Worcester and eastwards, was filled with complaints and moaning. I have a hard time imagining Worcester without a spirit of discouragement. Not me, I like the place and have many happy memories, but the city itself.

Part of the problem was the sort of resignation that comes from rooting for teams that never win. The Patriots had never won the Superbowl, and it had been 1918 since the Red Sox last won the World Series. Perhaps, you had heard this before.

But then I moved away, and everything changed.

They're never going to let me back.

Now we just need one more win.

What has caused this new age to dawn?

I moved away from Massachusetts a little over three years ago. When I left, Eastern Massachusetts, by which I mean from Worcester in though I can remember a time when I felt like Worcester was deep in the contintental wastes of America, was a land of complaint and sorrow. The Patriots had never won a Superbowl and Red Sox had last won a world series in 1918. Perhaps, you were aware of this latter fact. Since then, things have changed.

They're never going to let me come back.

You know that Hunter S. Thompson article I mentioned yesterday? In there he says that Bush is worse than Nixon.

That's sort of like Ahab saying that Moby Dick wasn't really that much of a whale.

Fear and Loathing

Here it is, my secret life's ambition that I share with no one, by which I mean anyone who'll listen to me, I want to able to write like Hunter S. Thompson. See RollingStone.com: Politics - Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004 Tell the truth, even the ugly parts, especially the ugly parts. He may not be as on as he was back when he was writing about Nixon, but he's certainly a lot more on than he's been since before Clinton was president. with the single exception of his euology for Nixon. Which, for whatever reason, does not seem to be freely available on the web.

And its not the profanity or the ad hominem that I'm talking, it's the honesty.

John Stewart pulled it off last week on his cross-fire appearance. (The link probably won't work, but then you've probably see it already.)

And by "truth", I mean speaking sentences intended to convey accurate information. Now, what accurate information means turns out to be what I spend my time trying to write about, which is a lot duller than pointing out that the rot in this administration is so bad that calling them liars doesn't work, you have to be capable of acknowledging the truth in order to lie.

It also makes me part of the problem.

Salon.com Life | Curses!

Since I'm bloggin Salon today anyway, I should note that what Ken Burns says in this article,
Salon.com Life | Curses!, is correct. It's in the waking moment that I'm aware of being a Red Sox. And it was almost Christmas last year before that particular moment of the day stopped being rather unpleasant for me.

Team America: World Police

Nobody has ever accussed me of having too subtle or sophisticated a sense of humor. If I'm the only one laughing, people tend to describe the moment as "stupid". Needless to say, I enjoy "South Park" andI enjoyed reading Heather Havrilesky's interview with Trey Parker or Matt Stone, if for no other reason, the their great parting line: And it's no big deal. If you don't want to vote, you don't have to. Fuck that vote or die shit. I hate that.

Reading that I was immediately struck by the guitar lick for a speed metal song entitle "vote or die". Its a good thing I have absolutely no idea how to play the guitar or to otherwise express said guitar lick, so the dar thing is going to have to stay locked in my head forever. There's no need for you to ever listen to it.

Emacs, AucTex, MikTeX, Aspell.

I got all the odd GNU stuff that I use working well on my new windows system in less than 2 days not the weeks that its taken me on previous installations. I can't say that it Microsoft was responsible for this feat either. Did you know that they finally got rid of the autoexec.bat? It sure took them long enough. The funny thing is that they didn't fix sysedit so that it would stop trying to open this now non-existent file. I had a moment of panic until Geoff clued me in. Not only couldn't I set the HOME variable, but it sure looked like I had deleted a formerly important file.


Why am I posting this? Well, I'm pretty sure that no one's reading this blog, so it makes a fine spot to pat myself on the back for this little achievement. It's the sort of thing that seems pretty trivial to anyone who can understand it and arcane to everyone else.

Consider Run-DMC: "It's Tricky"

Take a look at New York CiTay's - Run-DMC: "It's Tricky" and pay special attention to the second chorus. Where the English phrase "It's tricky" repeats many times, the German translation uses

"Es ist knifflig (Was ist es, DMC?)
Es ist kompliziert
Es ist schwierig ", translating "tricky" three different ways.

The German translation adds nuance to the song, or at least semantic variety.

I find that odd.

More on Ireland

The only sign that all was not right in the Republic was watching an armored car make a visit to the bank next to the hotel.

The first thing you saw was a group of large men with very impressive looking guns, not the pistols you might see on American bank guards, taking up positions on the sidewalk. Only when they had the area secured did the armored car even come into view and it was followed by another vehicle. Armored car transactions are taken seriously. I recall from growing up near Boston, that the IRA, or former members of said organization on the run in the US, would occasionally rob an armored car in the area.

Another was just how green everything was. I know, people go on about how green Ireland is, but its still surprising. The one that really got me was the hay fields. Here in OH, if you see a field covered with baled hay waiting for pickup, the field itself will be the same straw color as the hay itself. Even the word "straw" is used for that color because that's the color a field of mowed hay usually here. But in Ireland, the hay fields had already seen another generation of grass start coming up, so they were green.

Maybe it never gets so hot that the grains are burnt out, or so cold that they really stop growing. In Ohio, or in Massachusetts for that matter, you get both extremes.

Back from Ireland

The Ireland trip was a much more wonderful experience than it even seemed at the time.

One night the hotel smoke alarm went off at around 3 a.m., we were the only ones in the entire hotel who thought that it might be a good idea to leave our room. (I believe that J was the only child in the hotel, so that might have something to do with it.) When we got down to the lobby, the night staff gave us a look like he was surprised to see anyone and asked "is there a fire?"

He later came out and explained that 7 or 8 guys had holed up in room with "a great many bottles, if you know what I mean" and started smoking. When he went up to check on them, they seemed unaware that the loud alarm noises had anything to do with them.

In retrospect, this experience seems like a lot of fun. I'm sure it didn't so at the time.

the other blog doesn't seem to be working

Mission of Burma

I used to listen to Mission of Burma a lot. But I wasn't cool enough to listen to the band back when I should have. Instead I had to wait until a friend of a friend left a cassette copy in my car. The tape had most of the songs form "signals, calls and marches" on it, but I'm sure it also had "Academy Fight Song", so either that song was added to a release of the EP back in the days before CDs, or else this was tape that someone had put together themselves. I vaguely remember audience sounds at some point so it may have been a boot leg. Given the vagueries of memory, and the fact that this was an audio cassette played in a pretty crappy automobile sound system its tough to say exactly what I was listening to, but it really made mornings on the Mass Pike more bearable.

I was sad when that tape broke, and I didn't have much opportunity to listen to MoB much until recently. Yes, of course, I was surprised by their brilliance, but by much else as well. I was surprised by the extent to "post-punk" actually meant something.

The music I've been reading about has been praised so much for its "Pop constructions" and the sonic nature of the music. Think about any "Beastie Boys*" album, the most sophmoric lyrics can be ignored because they're tossed in front of interesting noise.

MoB, aren't old school punk, at least in the sense that everyone has learned to play their instruments and the sounds are carefully constructed. There's still a raw quality, but that's been carefully constructed.

(I once covered a specialty Punk radio show for a friend of mine who was passed out. I knew he took pride in running a good show so I kept a careful log of everything I played, and I constructed the show out of samples of his old play lists. Turns out the log was worthless since the track lists on the album sleeves didn't correspond to the track list on the albums. In any case, it was a good thing no one from the FCC tuned in.)

"New Nails" for instance, "There once was a special book it got changed by fascist creeps". All your Marilyn Manson nihilist posturing, or even Beastie Boys new age political awareness style fades in comparison to the anger that fuels MoB rebellion. There's more to be said here, but I'm not going to say because I lack the bands courage.

*legal disclaimer: nothing in this post should be taken as evidence that I own any Beastie Boy's music, despite my obvious committment to "kicking it old school".

Blog this gives me weird titles.

jay is-jay bibby's rants and raves of technology and games, very cool. DIY games are cool. More on games later. Anyone who reads this is probably already fascinated with games, so you don't need a warning.

When people bring up Dungeons and Dragons around my wife, she says that she got ahead by marrying the dungeon master.

You have been warned.

The Direction of Time

I'm right now reading Hans Reichenbach's The Direction of Time, the section on the "The sectional nature of Time Direction" is breath-taking in its imaginative scope. If postive time direction is defined as the direction in which entropy increases, and thermodynamic processes are random, then the positive direction of time will change at different "times". However, a time sequence can still be determined (that is, thermodynamics will give us a unique ordering of events, but not a consistent postive direction).

Reichenbach goes further, since human life could not survive in the peaks and troughs of entropy values, there is no possibility of experiencing time as flowing in the other direction and no possibility for contradicting experience.

This is not as detailed as Reichenbach's preceding arguments, and the conclusion itself is such an excessive speculation that, had it been presented along, I would have put the book and not come back. I prefer my science fiction with characters and plot. However, the arguments preceding this are so carefully constructed and the methods of analysis so interesting in the book, that I can afford to really enjoy Reichenbach's moments of imaginative freedom.

Of course, Reichenbach doesn't leave the apparent paradox in play. Reference to non-deterministic laws might be useful in figuring out which way the future lies, but more importantly, the various branching processes that we encounter in everday life are always increasing in entropy, so that must be the positive time direction, those temporal regions in which time might flow in the opposite direction are so distant as to not exist.

more signals

I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I'd sworn to read it after reading All Tommorrow's Parties, but then I'd promised that I wasn't going to read that after reading Virtual Light. This one though is well worth reading. This novels influence can be seen in my recent posts.

Signals do arise from the noise, that's the odd thing.

Signals arise in three different ways:

1. spurious signals, everything from paranoid delusions to various procedures for finding patterns that are really only reflections of the procedure (from reading tea leaves on)

2. genuine signals, appropriate inferences on available evidence leading to deeper knowledge. Looking as the movements in the sky and inferring that there are planets, that move in regular orbits and are explained a certain. Looking at the movement of a speck of pollen and inferring the molecular nature of matter. But not only scientific truths. Listening to person's speech and learning things about that aren't explicitly stated, where they're from, who they've spoken to and so on.

Whenever I get into the sorts of moods about how surprising it is that the world makes sense, someone tries to deflate my euphoria. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and if the deflators point is that I'm engaged in irresponsbile navel-gazing, well I have no defense. More frequently someone will object that order of either sort is not surprising because there are human minds around that are very well adapted for recognizing patterns. In fact, over-adapated for pattern recognition, which accounts for spurious patterns.

This strategy frustrates me. It's particularly frustrating when Peircean distinctions are used to deflate my mood. "Its simple," they explain "Every symbol means something for someone under some interpretation. There's no mystery because patterns only emerge for somebody."

Time to reread Peirce.

What is a person? "A Person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea" (as he says in "Man's Glassy Essence" refering back to "Some Consequences"). Even more than being a natural system that can detect order, a person is a naturally ordered system. While the physical details of how the brain works still need to be worked out in their entirety, it's pretty clear that this is all something we do with our brains.

Explaining the human ability to recognize signals and patterns is equivalent to explaining the existence of signals and patterns through the existence of a special sort of signals and patterns (those that occur in brains). This come real close to circularity. Either the mind is something other than a naturally occuring patterned activity, or the mind can not be used in a non-circular way to explain why there are symbols, patterns or signals.

This dichotomy isn't really a challenge to any naturalist. Just explain the mind as a information process in turn explained physiologically. Thus, the third sort of symbol to be explained is

3. mind

signals in the noise

There are hidden messages. Some of these are guerrilla art, intentional acts of expression hidden in plain view. Some are the simple coincedental juxtaposition of informative elements into a psuedo-message. Do the latter count as messages? Guerrilla art instances that I've been thinking of recently are:

Screaming baby, There was a sign, maybe a route number or instructions to pedestrians. Smallish for a traffic sign. But the original sign had been covered with a poster of a screaming babies face. The poster was the same size as the original poster and the same black and light grey.

That Stupid Pencil. No link. This was a stunt that some people at my undergraduate institution* tried where they drew pictures on the boards of empty classrooms and took out classified adds in the paper which featured a cartoon pencil sharpened to a nub and a sentence like "It's coming." The problem was that the cartoonist in school paper had been using the same sigil as a signature for over a year. Anyone observant enough to notice their guerilla message had probably also noticed the cartoon. When I asked about it, I was told there was no big event planned, it was just to get people talking, but the stunt was never that interesting.

Andre the Giant. This campaign had some advantages: Andre the Giant is cool, and the posse vibe simultaneously intimidates and offers promise of belonging to a secret clique. Some people still look at me oddly when I mention that "Andre the Giant has a posse." If you've never heard of Andre's posse, then how did you get here.

Ana Ng. The song that really turned me to They Might Be Giants. I had appreciated them before I heard this song, but only because of their novelty flavor and because I had friends who liked them. I can remember a time when MTV would show this video back to back with Rockit by Herbie Hancock. MTV was cool once. When was the last time they put anything by a veteran of the Miles Davis Quartet in heavy rotation?

There's an important difference between Andre the Giant and Ana Ng. In the first case, some guy who sells t-shirts has conspired to hide his messages in the environment, while in the second, the messages arise on their own.

* refering to your "undergraduate institution" immediately identifies me as one of those people who aren't to be trusted.

Legal Reasons

Tim Wu, posting on Lawrence Lessig's blog gives a very cogent example of disciplined reason giving. This is reason in the thin sense, there's no need to refer to a substantive faculty to make sense of this entry. That's nice because it doesn't put any undue burden on other sorts of theories that might be contiguous to your legal reasoning.

Also, I agree with the general point that Wu is trying to make, and he makes it well.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon's Razor

Bumpersticker wisdom fails to satisfy. I find treatises by talking dogs and the Hulk far more entertaining. Moreover, I tend to try to think through the consequences and has so far each bumper sticker tends to lead to consequences other than the initial, surface meaning. The possible exception is "Sound fiscal policy doesn't fit on a bumpersticker."

I'm not judging you, I'm judging me

This is not my first journal, not by any means. I have 12 volumes kept in a closet at home, I keep volume 14 in my book bag wherever I go. One volume dissappeared when my bag was stolen in 1997.

This is also not my first expirement of publically displayed writing. I wrote a weekly column for the Stonehill College Summit from 1988 until 1991. This column, Meditations, was distinquished both for making a long string of deadlines on time, perhaps even a record, and generating exactly 0 letters to the editor, thus making it, word for word, the least controversial thing published in the paper, microscopic copyright notifications and straight news stories about new selections in the cafeteria not excepted.

I don't like thinking about the consequences of these observations.

The True Cyberpunks

I'm finishing Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, its sort of fun, a through back to the days when the likes of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling were writing something like straight science fiction. Gibson reports, I think on behalf of that cohort of writers, that the cyber-punk movement had to end because the future had arrived and it was much stranger than he had imaginged. Morgan doesn't feed any obligation to make his world any stranger or more inventive than the real world. He doesn't even hold up a mirror to the way the world. The Takeshi Kovacs books give voice to violent fantasies without having to really consider the consequences of that violence.

One of Moran's important characters is a "data rat", a skill hacker, part merc, part detective. Similar characters existed in the classic cyber punk works. These skilled professional were at the center of the action. Its not too much of a stretch to suppose that they were the characters with whom the reader was supposed to be able to best identify. Their abilities analyzing data gave them both power and freedom. The emerging culture surrounded the internet, at least in the early days of the boom, were energized with this sort of promise. And, to a surprising extent, the technology paid off on this promise. At least to the extent that it's inspired the above writers to move into contemporary and/or historical fiction.

But what about the promise of the data-runner. I remember the thrill that I got when I first developed some skills in teasing out hidden facts and discovering unseen patterns in the vast web of electronic data. There was a definite rush. I was working as a part-time proof reader/ copy editor. I bet fact checkers get the same rush. I bet mercs and detectives have more important things to do with their time. This sort of character has elevated the lowest position in the traditional publishing hierarchy to that of super-powered noire anti-hero.

I suppose it shouldn't be suprising that people in this position should find themselves elevated in genre fiction. What else is a struggling novelist going to do to buy food before selling that first novel?

Title

Other possible titles for thes blog were:

• Silence, Exile and Cunning
• This Machine Kills Fascists
• That's When I Reach for my Revolver

What these title all have in common is that they make me sound like I'm 22 and think I know what I'm talking about.

I chose "Free the Turtles" because its something I came up with when I was 16, depressed, sleep deprived and completely full of myself. Since I came up with this myself during a crazed moment, I can be reasonably sure that the reference is as inscrutible as possible.

I have another blog, where I write in professional persona for a particular audience. Here, I write what I really think. Also, maybe I can fool myself into thinking that I'm 22 and I know what I'm talking about. Either of these would be good feelings.