Born on this day and still with us.
Garth Hudsonmusicthe bandGarth Hudson
Born on this day and still with us.
EPISTEME 12:3
JOHN GRAY ON HAYEK
Gray assesses Hayek’s life and work. For those interested in the Encounter piece “My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein” here it is.
Equally, and perhaps also happily, Thatcher had no understanding of Hayek’s ideas.
Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents
What did Napoleon like to eat and drink?
Napoleon Bonaparte was not a gourmand.
He might well have found English cuisine too sophisticated and tasty!
Morricone 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.
