Prima facie, a fantastic collaboration.
Ennio MorriconemusicQuentin TarantinosoundtrackThe Hateful EightMorricone and Tarantino
Prima facie, a fantastic collaboration.
Satchmo SummerFest
Be sure to check out Satchmo: His Life in New Orleans a collaboration between the Louis Armstrong House Museum and the Louisiana State Museum that was co-curated by the amazing Ricky Riccardi and his Archives Assistant, Brynn White.
The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences
Any book endorsed by Christian List must be taken notice of, the introductory chapter available here along with the OUP webpage. Contrary to the extracts below I think we actually have a very good theory as to how individuals (ants) aggregate — it’s called STIGMERGY. In a forthcoming special issue of Cognitive Systems Research we will be presenting papers on human-human stigmergy, a follow-up to an earlier issue on stigmergy.
My aim is to allow us to start freeing ourselves from “the ant trap”—the anthropocentric picture of the social world as being composed by individual people.
We have a poor understanding of the “emergence” of group properties out of aggregates of individuals. Systems of interacting parts often have very different properties than the individuals that compose them. A brain has different properties than individual neurons, an ant colony has different properties than the individual ants, and likewise a society has properties that cannot easily be predicted from the properties of individuals. The diagnosis is that our models of individuals may be ok, but our theories are not good at determining how individuals aggregate into large groups.
We might have poor models of the parts of cells. We might misunderstand how ant colonies aggregate out of interacting individual ants.
Here’s a Ted talk by Brian:
Here’s an article about the book:
And the “ant trap” in the title? Some people see the social world as a kind of ant colony, an allusion to biologist Edward O. Wilson’s theories about ants with no leaders that somehow create a superorganism together.
“It’s an incredibly misleading metaphor,” says Epstein, because it suggests that society is just a superorganism built out of human organisms—but it’s much more than that.
Walker Percy Wednesday 45
Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first.
Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against world which is pari passu demoted to immanence and seen as examplar and specimen and coordinate, and who is not at same time compensated by beauty of motion of method of science, has no choice but to seek reentry into immanent world qua immanence. But since no avenue of reentry remains save genital and since reentry coterminus c orgasm, post-orgasmic despair without remedy. Of my series of four suicides in scientists and technicians, 3 post-coital (spermatozoa at meatus), 2 in hotel room. Hotel room = site of intersection of transcendence and immanence: room itself, a triaxial coordinate ten floors above street; whore who comes up = pure immanence to be entered. But entry doesn’t avail: one skids off into transcendance. There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence.
Lt. B.: “Maybe they’re so shocked by what they’ve turned loose on the world—” Pandora’s Box theory, etc. “Maybe that’s why he did it,” etc.
I say: “Bullshit, Lt., and on the contrary. This Schadenfreude is what keeps them going,” etc.
What I cannot tell Lt: If R.R. had been a good pornographer, he would not have suicided. His death was due, not to lewdness, but to the failure of lewdness.
I say to Val: Re Sweden: increase in suicides in Sweden due not to increase in lewdness but to decline of lewdness. When Sweden was post-Christian but had not yet forgotten Cx (cira 1850-1914, Swedish lewdness intact and suicides negligible. But when Swedes truly post-Christian (not merely post-Christian but also post-memory of Cx), lewdness declined and suicides rose in inverse relation.
Val to me: Don’t sell Sweden short. (I notice that her language has taken on the deplorable and lapsed slanginess found in many religious, priests and nuns, and in Our Sunday Visitor.) The next great saint must come from Sweden, etc. It is only from desolation of total transcendence of self and total descent of world immanence that a man can come who can recover himself and world under God, etc. Give me suicidal Swede, says she, over Alabama Christian any day, etc.
Engineering Human Stigmergy
A recent paper freely available in IJCCC.
Susan Haack — Passionate Moderate
Susan Haack is one of my absolutely favourite living (and still very active) philosophers. The appellation Passionate Moderate had such deep resonance from the moment I read her eponymously titled book. (This is a great book to read if you are coming to formal philosophy for the first time: Susan writes without ever being “jargony” or condescending and whose interests are very much recognizably a part of the “real” world). Susan, I fear, seems to be a last vestige of decency, integrity, humaneness and intellectual honesty — in a prevailing climate of sanctimonious know-alls, a ruling class of (very clever but hardly wise) illiberal groupthink hipsters, hucksters and bullies. Pretty much everything that Susan says substantively is notable for its modesty. Susan has a lovely disposition: a mix of commonsense informed by the scholarly and the empirical always tempered by a dose of humour and fearlessly scathing if need be. It’s worthwhile reading Richard Carrier’s interview with Susan:
I am not, however, like so many, an evangelical atheist. I will tell anyone who asks what my views are; but I’m not inclined to try to dissuade religious people from their convictions—in fact, I’m repelled by evangelism, whether for religion or against it, and allergic to atheism-adopted-with-religious-fervor. I’m especially disturbed by the recently popular (and disagreeably self-congratulatory) idea that atheists are somehow smarter than religious people—not true, in my experience: I know plenty of thoughtful and intelligent religious people, and plenty of shallow and none-too-bright atheists.
I’m sorry to say that our profession seems to me in even worse shape now than it did then. It has become terribly hermetic and self-absorbed; bogged down in pretentious and pseudo-technical jargon; in the thrall of those dreadful “rankings”; and splintered into narrow specialisms and—even worse—cliques identified, not by a specialty, but by a shared view on a specialized issue. A friend of mine put it in a nutshell when she described professional philosophy as “in a nose-dive.”
When setting up EPISTEME I asked Susan to provide a paper for the first issue and moreover get her to London to speak at the EPISTEME launch — little did I know that she was arriving from China that very day and was not feeling well at all, a real trooper!
Take some time to listen to the lectures I’ve posted below and you will see that in every aspect of her philosophical interests however disparate they may seem, Aristotle’s “appropriate feelings” is the thread. It’s in the last video that her absolute (moral and intellectual) brilliance comes through, a function of the intimate format.
David Madden and Walker Percy
From Black Mountain News
In 1968, Madden began 24 years of teaching at Louisiana State University. Living near him in Covington for a while was the writer Walker Percy, author of “Love in the Ruins” and other novels.
“He got on the faculty for just a quarter. I think his daughter was going to LSU,” Madden said. “He was a very quiet fellow. He would hold these deep philosophical discussions at his house. I don’t think he realized how deep into philosophy I was. I kind of wanted to be there, but I didn’t want to ask him.
“Anyway, he was very friendly to me. He wrote a comment on my novel ‘Bijou,’ which is about being a movie usher in Knoxville, at age 12. Percy told him he thought it was better than “Huckleberry Finn.” “So naturally, I’m well-disposed to him,” Madden said.
“Anyway, I’d see him in the hallway (at LSU), going to class or the bathroom or wherever. He would walk close to the wall, with his head down, in a kind of saunter. He was a very handsome fellow. One time he said, ‘David, how do you write a novel?’ I’m so naive that you can ‘get’ me anytime you want me. But he wasn’t trying to ‘get’ me. So I took him at his word and started telling him how to write a novel.
“Afterward, I realized what he meant was, he was writing a new novel, it was like he didn’t know how to write a novel – which is exactly what every writer feels. When you start a new novel, you think, how do you write a novel?”
Alfred North Whitehead
I notice that my chum Andrew Irvine has given his ANW entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a revamp. Though probably best known (at least to the man on the Clapham omnibus) for the quote that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology), one can see why ANW is not that interesting to prevailing philosophy. I’d be interested to read more on ANW’s philosophy of education which I know next to nothing about. Were I to list some of my favorite philosophical works, ANW’s Adventures of Ideas would be included. I was lucky to have been able to chat to a student of ANW — a dear, dear lady and very strong philosopher Dorothy Emmet. Speaking of ANW and DE here’s a book that’s been around for a while but there now seems to be a reissue immenent: Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of Seventy Years in Philosophy.
Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon
Foreword by Katherine Simon Frank
1. Herbert Simon – a Hedgehog and a Fox by Roger Frantz and Leslie Marsh
Part I – Minds
2. Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s 21st-Century Mind by Robert Rupert
3. Towards a Rational Theory of Heuristics by Gerd Gigerenzer
4. From The Sciences of the Artificial to Cognitive History by Subrata Dasgupta
5. Rationality and the True Human Condition by Ron Sun
6. Boundedly Rational Decision-Making under Certainty and Uncertainty: Some Reflections on Herbert Simon by Mark Pingle
Part II – Models
7. Herbert Simon and Agent-Based Computational Economics by Shu-Heng Chen and Ying-Fang Kai
8. Simon’s (Lost?) Legacy in Agent-Based Computational Economics by Marco Castellani and Marco Novarese
9. From Bounded Rationality to Expertise by Fernand Gobet
10. Multiple Equilibria, Bounded Rationality, and the Indeterminacy of Economic Outcomes: Closing the System with Institutional Parameters by Morris Altman
11. Organizational decisions in the lab: the long road from the Art to the Science of organization by Massimo Egidi
Part III – Milieux
12. Simon on Social Identification: Two Connections with Bounded Rationality by Rouslan Koumakhov
13. Models of environment by Marcin Miłkowski
14. Bounded Rationality and Social Relationships in Simon’s Perspective by Stefano Fiori
15. Bounded Rationality in the Digital Age by Peter Earl
16. Herbert Simon and Some Unresolved Tensions in Professional Schools by Mie Augier and Bhavna Hariharan
Walker Percy Wednesday – 44
Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.:
for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—”
manwithoutqualities 