Philosophy and its moods

kenneth mcintyre

These excerpts from Ken McIntyre’s essay Philosophy and its moods:

Oakeshott’s insistence on the dispositional skepticism of philosophical activity leads to his rejection of both the importance of authority in philosophy and the relevance of philosophy to practical life. He writes that philosophy “recognizes neither ‘authorities’ nor ‘established doctrines,’” because such institutions present themselves as conclusions to be interrogated rather than as dogma to be accepted and deployed (EM, 347). Philosophy as an activity requires neither the reverence of the postulant nor the conversation of mankind deference of the exegete. Ironically, ignorance, in its literal sense, is irrelevant to philosophical activity, because, for the philosopher, the conclusions of other philosophers are invitations to further reflection. But the impetus toward a philosophical disposition need not arise because of an engagement with a philosophical tradition but can emerge from almost any encounter with the given world. The interrogation of the conditions of various given worlds of understanding, like the questioning of the arguments and conclusions of other philosophers, renders both the activity and conclusions of philosophy irrelevant to the successful navigation of such given worlds. Oakeshott insists that “philosophy is without any direct bearing upon the practical conduct of life, and . . . it has certainly never offered its true followers anything which could be mistaken for a gospel” (1).12 Indeed, philosophy is an escape from the normal requirements of getting and spending, and it requires a severe discipline to remain committed to such a useless (i.e., nonutilitarian) activity.

For Oakeshott “there is no vita contemplativa; there are only moments of contemplative activity abstracted and rescued from the flow of curiosity and contrivance. Poetry [like philosophy] is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life” (RP, 541). This is true not only of poetry and philosophy, however. Neither historical inquiry nor scientific explanation is necessary for the continuation of human life, either, and both can be considered, like philosophy and poetry, to be momentary escapes from the “deadliness of doing.”

The philosopher is not engaged in the attempt to reach an understanding of the world that is in itself unconditional or presuppositionless but is instead unconditionally committed to understanding the general conditionality of all understanding or experience. The philosopher, or theorist, maintains an attitude of sceptical dissatisfaction with understanding because it always rests on conditions that can be further explored. The results of such in an engagement in philosophical reflection (i.e., theories or philosophies) are inherently provisional, or, as Oakeshott puts it, they “are interim triumphs of temerity over scruple”. And, of course, they lose their concrete character when they are detached from the activity that produced them and transformed into sets of doctrines or dogmas.

fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation

jazz

Though there is much talk about this study, check out this study that goes back a few years:

Our results strongly implicate a distinctive pattern of changes in prefrontal cortical activity that underlies the process of spontaneous musical composition. Our data indicate that spontaneous improvisation, independent of the degree of musical complexity, is characterized by widespread deactivation of lateral portions of the prefrontal cortex together with focal activation of medial prefrontal cortex. This unique pattern may offer insights into cognitive dissociations that may be intrinsic to the creative process: the innovative, internally motivated production of novel material (at once rule based and highly structured) that can apparently occur outside of conscious awareness and beyond volitional control.

In jazz music, improvisation is considered to be a highly individual expression of an artist’s own musical viewpoint . . .  In short, musical creativity vis-à-vis improvisation may be a result of the combination of intentional, internally generated self-expression (MPFC-mediated) with the suspension of self-monitoring and related processes (LOFC- and DLPFC-mediated) that typically regulate conscious control of goal-directed, predictable, or planned actions.

In an intriguing neuroimaging study of musical improvisation in classically trained pianists, Bengtsson et al. [13] found activations in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as well as premotor and auditory areas during improvisation. Our study differs from this one in several important ways. First, the study by Bengtsson et al. utilized contrasts that were designed to remove deactivations. In comparison, we had the explicit goal of identifying relevant deactivations that might support the notion of a hypofrontal state associated with creative activity. Hence, the masking strategies employed by our studies were fundamentally different, and would be expected to lead to divergent results. Second, our subjects were jazz pianists (rather than classical pianists). This difference is relevant in that jazz, much more so than classical music, is intrinsically characterized by improvisation. As a result, we believe that our findings reflect neural mechanisms behind improvisation in a perhaps more natural context, and certainly in musicians who have finely developed improvisational skills. Lastly, Bengtsson and coworkers utilized conditions in which musical improvisations were generated and then subsequently reproduced by memory. These conditions address an interesting facet of improvisation—the interaction between spontaneous musical performance and memory. We sought to eliminate the secondary impact of episodic memory encoding on improvisation by using either an over-learned or completely improvised condition (without a reproduction task in either condition).

Because our experiments were performed in highly trained musicians, it remains to be clarified whether or not our findings have characterized a higher qualitative level of musical output (as opposed to that which might be produced by less skilled performers). However, the similar findings seen for both Scale and Jazz paradigms, despite the musical simplicity of the former, strongly suggest that our findings are attributable to neural mechanisms that underlie spontaneity more broadly rather than those specific to high-level musicality alone. Taken together, the consistency of findings reported here suggests that the dissociation of activity in medial and lateral prefrontal cortices is attributable to the experimentally constant feature of improvisation and may be a defining characteristic of spontaneous musical creativity.

The Complex Mind

Andy Clark

This book features a chapter by Andy Clark entitled: How to Qualify for a Cognitive Upgrade: Executive Control, Glass Ceilings, and the Limits of Simian Success. Here is the intro to the chapter:

10.1 Introduction

It is sometimes suggested that words and language form a kind of ‘cognitive niche’ (Clark, 1998, 2005, 2006, 2008; Chapter 4): an animal-built structure that productively transforms our cognitive capacities. But even if language cognitively empowers us in many deep and unobvious ways, it would be quite wrong to assume that such empowerment occurs in either a neural or an evolutionary vacuum. In evolutionary terms, we need to recognise the various precursors of our own prodigious skills at species-level selfscaffolding. In neural terms, we need to uncover the specific innovations that allow certain kinds of agents to benefit (humans massively, simians somewhat, hamsters not at all) from the empowering effects of exposure to a public linguistic edifice. What we need to understand is thus a delicate balancing act between extra-neural and neural innovation, such that the public material structures of language are enabled (in some beings and not in others) to play significant cognitive roles. In the present chapter, I first lay out a few of the ways in which language may indeed act as a potent form of cognitive scaffolding. I then briefly rehearse the results of a series of elegant comparative and developmental studies (summarised in McGonigle and Chalmers [2006]) that suggest a surprising amount of evolutionary continuity between human and simian (squirrel monkey) subjects in respect of some of the key ‘building block’ skills that enable this potent ‘mind-tool’ (Dennett, 2000) to emerge. I end by asking, ‘What then limits simian success?’

An Evaluation of the Model of Stigmergy in a RoboCup Rescue Multiagent System

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A lot of scientists study the behavior of insect’s colony like ants, wasps and bees. Through these researches, it is possible to establish patterns used by a group of insects and apply these patterns in other domains. In this paper it will be showed the use of stigmergy in a rescue situation using the RoboCup Rescue simulator. We performed a set of experiments using a metaphor based on the behavior of an ant colony, where the communication between agents is done through the environment. We measured the performance of the ant-based algorithm, expecting to figure out the feasibility of using swarm intelligence in a rescue situation. We compared the results of using stigmergy against a multiagent system based on direct messages. The results showed that the use of stigmergy can outperform the use of direct messages.

Riders on the storm

jim morrison

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm

There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah

Girl ya gotta love your man
Girl ya gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah

Yeah!

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm

Deep Cuts from Oakeshott Companion

idealism

This from David Boucher’s The Victim of Thought: The Idealist Inheritance:

Idealists and realists were not as antagonistic toward each other as is commonly thought. Harold Joachim, for example, submitted the second chapter of The Nature of Truth to his “friend Bertrand Russell” before the book was published. R. G. Collingwood was a respected figure internationally the conversation of mankind and a very close friend and godfather to the son of the realist E. F. Carritt. Even the younger generation of philosophers opposed to idealism admired Collingwood’s work. A. J. Ayer, against whom Collingwood directed much of An Essay on Metaphysics in an attack on logical positivism, admired his older colleague. Ayer maintained that his esteem for Collingwood came in the 1930s. He admired the style of all of Collingwood’s books but was particularly impressed by the application of his theory of absolute presuppositions in The Idea of Nature Ayer devoted a chapter to Collingwood in his Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, alongside Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Hilary Putnam, and W. V. O. Quine.

Gilbert Ryle, Ayer’s tutor and Collingwood’s successor to the Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy, published The Concept of Mind in 1949. Both Ryle and the British idealists were anti-Cartesian. Ryle wanted to deny the mind and body dualism, which was the received orthodoxy. Ryle called it “the ghost in the machine.” Like Oakeshott, Ryle maintained that it is a category error to conjoin or disjoin statements about mental and physical processes as if they are of the same logical type or as if they are species of a genus called experience. The mind cannot be separated from its “overt acts and utterances.” Ryle was more than generous in attributing to his idealist predecessor a significant role in exorcising the ghost in the machine.

Socrates on Trial

plato

I want to give a plug to my chum Andrew Irvine’s play Socrates on Trial. Of perennial interest it is a way of communicating important ideas in an accessible but compelling way.

Here is a dedicated page with video footage and reviews.