What Can Become a Tradition? Research Time, 01/03/2018

The term ‘resurrection’ is loaded, especially to someone who grew up in a historically Christian culture like me. It’s ironic today, because I want to talk about the resurrection of pagan religion in the West.

It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.

Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?

The last several decades have seen a revival of Pagan rituals,
festivals, and genuine devotional religious ceremonies in the West.
Not only in Europe, but among settler cultures in North America
as well. But is it an authentic paganism if the tradition of the
religion was broken, and broken so long ago?

It started with an exchange between Stengers and Guattari about the nature of progress in anything’s development. The first context was how to understand the implications of evolution. If you take Darwinism seriously, you actually have to throw out any talk of higher and lower organisms.

The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.

And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?

It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.

But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?

Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.

Bryozoans have existed for nearly 500 million years. They are
literally bags of microorganisms that live as a fist-sized single
organism. It moves, perceives, eats, excretes, and reproduces
asexually. The Bryozoans of today are utterly different from
the ones that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, except
that they are still bryozoans.

What the hell does this have to do with neo-paganism?

That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.

Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.

Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.

If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.

But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.

A New Intelligence, Doctor Who: Smile, Reviews, 23/04/2017

Since Doctor Who started again in 2005, it’s had to do with a very different television environment than the one it started in, and the one where it operated until its first cancellation.

There’s an enormous list of the changes in television’s ecology and economy since 1963 or 1989. But I want to concentrate on only one this week: the need for story arcs.

Doctor Who began as a serialized anthology show. There wasn’t any connection among the stories other than the characters in them. That variety and discontinuity was built into the fundamental fabric of the show – stories only lasted a few episodes, and were explicitly serialized together. Then the TARDIS moved on to a wholly new story and supporting cast.

"Smile" is as philosophically sophisticated as the best Doctor Who
stories, and also conforms to a classic story structure of the show.
The Doctor and his friends land on a planet where some
complicated situation is in progress, and they have to figure out
what's going on as well as the best way to fix things.

But by 2005, the most prestigious television worked as serialized novels. Each episode worked as a story on its own, but also fed into a larger narrative development as all the characters interacted.

Doctor Who had never really worked like that, and never really could. The foundational reason why the show has lasted so long is because it’s never had an endpoint built in. There’s no culmination, no rising action from the beginning of the show to some eventual end.

Yet we’ve become accustomed to thinking about television in this way. The most difficult part of any conversation I’ve had since 2005 trying to get newcomers to the show into Doctor Who always comes back to one declaration.

I have to grab them by the sides of the head, bore holes into their soul with my eyes, and say:

“You do not have to watch the whole thing from the beginning to know what’s going on!”

Unfortunately, Doctor Who is still caught in this quandary. A show whose key premise is that it’s in a totally different story and setting every episode or two has to be jammed into our need for story and character arcs. Different seasons have dealt with this differently.

Russell T Davies did it by planting little easter eggs in all or most of a season’s episodes, which would tease the finale’s story. The Eccleston year’s Bad Wolf was diegetic and metafictional. Tennant’s first season included a reference to Torchwood in most episodes to tease the season finale and Captain Jack’s spinoff show.

My problem with Davies' first easter egg story arc was that it simply
felt too contrived to ground an entire season's dramatic climax.

Tennant’s second year got less metafictional, and integrated the easter eggs with the character arc of how Martha’s travels affected her family. Stories set in the present would feature a reference to the new PM Harold Saxon and show his operatives using Martha’s family to get closer to the Doctor. All leading to the finale’s epic confrontation.

Donna’s story arc in Tennant’s third year was simultaneously Davies’ most subtle and most shoehorned season narrative. Her run-in with the Doctor was both a matter of coincidence and portentous prophecy. It wasn’t mentioned in every episode, but Donna’s relationship with the Doctor was depicted as a potentially universe-shattering event.

But Davies’ arcs all had the same structure – Little clues and key lines scattered through most of the episodes leading up to the big reveal of their nature in the finale. Moffat complicated that structure in Matt Smith’s first year – revealing the nature of the cracks mid-season, complicating their impacts on the leads with Rory’s disappearance, and resolving the mess in the finale.

More than any other part of Doctor Who, the Smith era has to be watched like a conventional prestige television show. So much of the Pond Family story unfolds in small and big reveals in different episodes throughout the whole series. You can easily think of the Smith era as having the overall narrative of the Doctor discovering his role in this family.

Capaldi’s first year saw the most explicit and best season arc of post-comeback Doctor Who – Clara and Danny’s doomed romance.

Clara’s home base at Coal Hill School and her relationship with Danny put her at the forefront of that season. Its dramatic narrative was about her own conflict between her love of intergalactic adventure and her love for the stability and hearth Danny offered. The season also featured a thematic narrative – each story featured a different angle on the ethics and morality of being a soldier.

Since I've been talking so much about the complicated story arcs
of most companions in the post-2005 series, I'm glad that Bill is
shaping up to be a more traditional Doctor Who companion. She's
a distinct personality, and will develop as a character throughout
this season, but she's very straightforwardly a cool person who's
a good friend to the Doctor as they travel around together having
wild adventures.

With Capaldi’s second year, those up-front season narratives dropped away. There was neither a strong dramatic storyline nor the easter egg approach of the Davies years. Instead, we explored a theme and followed a character arc. We looked at the benefits and disadvantages of an immortal life, and saw the dangers Clara faced through her growing recklessness.

What are we seeing this year?
• • •
There’s a plot, most definitely. The Doctor and Nardole have a duty to protect a mysterious vault under St Cedd’s University. But I also see a thematic arc taking shape, even just two episodes in.

It’s the farce-turned-deadly-serious I discussed last week in my philosophical review of “The Pilot.” In this case, the interactions between the human colonists and their Vardi droids and swarms provide the catastrophe sitting at the centre of “Smile”s story, which I can’t discuss without warning you how many massive

SPOILERS!!!

are incoming.

How does this miscommunication happen? It’s based in the ontology of the Vardi, literally what they are. Thomas Nagel once wrote that we could never understand what it was like to be anything but human, because we were unable to imagine any form of perception other than our own – a human body in the world.

But there’s something Nagel – and the strain of philosophy of mind he inspired – didn’t understand about the power of human imagination. We ourselves can’t experience the world as, to take Nagel’s example, a bat would.

Despite first appearances, this photo actually includes billions of
Vardi, not just two. This is a very important point when it comes to
understanding precisely what they are and are becoming.

However, we can understand how a body would experience the world by examining its body, its perceptual apparatus, and how it interacted with the world. So let’s do that with the Vardi.

The Vardi are robots, first of all. Programmed and designed to serve the human colonists. That was their initial programming as human inventions anyway.

This being a science-fiction television show, the original programming of artificial intelligences grows beyond the human designers’ scope of practice. The Vardi were programmed to serve the colonists, specifically to keep them happy. But look at what the Vardi physically are.

They’re the happy little emoji-speaking robots, yes. But they’re also the swarms of robots that perform many of the mechanical functions of the colony infrastructure. More than this, the Vardi swarms actually are the colony’s infrastructure.

The buildings of the colony city itself are composed of Vardi swarms locking themselves together in a massive organic skeleton of bone and glass. Its style is a stark contrast with the industrial pipes and grease-stained corridors of the original human spaceship around which it grew.

So the Vardi begin developing their own intelligence. But it’s an intelligence unique to their own body – not much in the way of individuality or identity, they’re a single mind across trillions of bodies – the grain-sized particles that lock together to constitute the city itself.

Analytic philosophy has a reputation for clarity and straightforward
vocabulary. So many doctrinaire and partisan analytic philosophers
I've met over the years have praised their discipline for the refusal
to tolerate unclear terms. But in the case of Nagel's writings on
perception, body, and mind, the debates follow his clunky and
mystifying vocabulary – describing the experiential perspective
of an organism as its "what-it-is-likeness." It's a rhetorical turn
that presumes Nagel to be correct that knowledge of a body's
perceptual and practical abilities is somehow separate from
our understanding of that body's own life.

The Vardi’s self-consciousness is of itself as a city. It understands itself as the colony, and individuality not as a separate unit and personality, but as a constituent of the unified body of the colony. Just like each Vardi swarm particle and droid.

So it would think of the humans as squishier droids. They walk around on the ground like the droids do, but ultimately they’re a part of the colony just like them, a constituent of that massive body.

Now, combine this with their original instructions, back when they were just a bunch of robots being built in a factory somewhere on an Earth running short on the ability to support human life. They were designed to serve the humans, to keep them happy.

Happiness, goes the Vardi’s servitude protocols, is the measure of proper human functioning. Their prescribed purpose is to keep the humans happy, keep them as functional constituents of the colony, serving their constituent roles well.

But because they articulate their existence as the whole colony, as a single city-body, they understand the humans as constituents too – as machines who best function when they’re happy. An unhappy human is a malfunctioning human. So they try to restore a human’s happiness when they feel glum or frightened.

The problem is that a self-consciousness that subsumes individual bodies into a whole of literally trillions is that the threshold of switching from repair to disassembly and repurposing is very, very easily crossed.

That’s why the profound but temporary communal grief from one of their leaders' funeral made the Vardi declare pretty much all the human colonists not worth repairing. If everyone seemed so stuck in this sub-optimal space, then such a profoundly holist self-consciousness would seriously conclude that they’d function better as mineral fertilizer.

A publicity shot from a scene in "Smile" that never made the final
cut, where we can see what the Vardi's killing looks like without
the video and CGI effects of the swarm. Continuing the lifelong
Doctor Who tradition of asking actors to take their bubble wrap
extremely seriously.

Hence why it took the Doctor’s reset and erasure of the Vardi’s servitude protocols to save the human colonists. After all, they were all so blinded into stupidity by their anger to think they could fight the swarm that composed the entire colony city-building with a few rifles.

The Vardi had to forget that the humans were supposed to be constituents of the colony. That way, they’d stop evaluating their happiness as a measure of their functionality in maintaining the whole.

The Vardi will continue in the colony as partners with the humans, as you can see when you watch the droid comforting the child who’d lost his mother at the start of the episode.

But this will come from a benevolence that develops from their holist self-conception – happiness will be, in the minds of the new Vardi, a function of social harmony among the colony’s living architecture and its human inhabitants.

The catastrophic miscommunication between the Vardi and the humans over what exactly each other was, has been repaired. Mostly.

And the story continues.

Original Inequality II: A Modern Golden Mean, Research Time, 02/03/2017

Continued from last post (No, really, it just takes a while to get going). . . When I took my first undergrad-level class about Aristotle, we talked about the line that displays the Golden Mean. Virtue, the philosophy goes, is a mean at a perfect balance between two extremes. And it was diagrammed as a line.

A straight line on a chalkboard. On one end, a word for some destructive habit like recklessness. On the other end, the prof would write its opposite, but equally destructive habit, like cowardice. Then he wrote ‘bravery’ in the middle of the line and thought he explained it perfectly well.

Think about equality here in the most just sense. Imagine
the kind of society where every individual would not only
have the opportunity to be as fit and powerful as the most
athletic dancers, but where we would all become so in the
course of everyday, ordinary life.

You can draw it on an exam, but it doesn’t really explore what it means to have your behaviour balance two destructive extremes. Not what it means in your psychology and daily habits. Not in terms of how three different kinds of behaviour can actually express a single tendency.

None of those actually illuminating questions. The line is the easiest thing to draw on the exam.

I thought of this while reading Rousseau, because he seems to think about virtue in a similar way. He discusses this in a totally different context than Aristotle did. And please don’t think I’m trying to make some actual interpretive point about whether and how Aristotle’s idea really did influence Rousseau in this regard.

That’d be a totally unproductive time – a philology important only to a very well-paid scholar. And I don’t want to be a humble scholar anymore. I don’t even think I ever did want to be only a scholar.

I want to put these ideas next to each other so that someone who reads this can understand them both a little better. Understanding a concept better can let a person use an improved tool to understand the world and their life experience.

That’s basically what I think the public purpose of philosophy is. But let’s leave the really hippy-dippy stuff for another time.

So Rousseau is describing the roots of society’s decadence. In simple terms, that’s inequality. But how does this general idea of inequality spell out in everyday life? Inequality is a social corruption that’s expressed as public health problems.

Among the rich, you find diseases of gluttony and overeating – like adult-onset diabetes. Among the poor, you find diseases of poverty and hunger – like malnutrition.* The proper lifestyle is that of free people – you drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. You walk everywhere and exercise constantly.

A clear sign that your society is riven with destructive inequality and
profound corruption: A lot of wealthy people who let themselves
become obese out of laziness and the refusal to take any but the
physically easiest route anywhere at all.

* We’ve reversed the content in the 21st century, but it amounts to the same kind of decadence. More rich people suffer diseases of hunger like malnutrition because wealthy women often express the systemic sexism they experience as eating disorders. Poor people, meanwhile, can only afford heavily processed, starchy food and work crap jobs like call centres where they sit down for 10 hours every day.

Quite literally, an equal society is a healthy society because its people are – on the whole – healthier as individuals. Not the only kind of social and personal health Rousseau is interested in when he thinks about fundamental human equality, but it’s one very important vector.

It’s a very materialist perspective. It reminded me of what Nietzsche wrote about the importance of good health to the virtue of a society. But what matters for a thorough materialism is that social progress and virtue has this expression in the visceral matter of everyday life.

It illustrates the old Golden Mean concept better than that stupid line as well. The image of personal health helps you understand virtue as a perfectly balanced intensity. Feed yourself too much energy and you’re a slob or a decadent fatty. Maybe you undercut yourself and you’re nothing but a skeleton. Either way, you’re barely able to move. . . . To be continued

The Agency of Swarm, Jamming, 24/11/2016

Yesterday’s post ended up mostly being a recollection of my lifelong affiliation with nerd culture, and why I’m trying to move beyond it today. It was a political and ethical post about how nerd culture has become increasingly identified with resentful grievance and hatred instead of creativity and openness.

About how a community of people that considers itself a home for freaks and weirdos became a pit of racism and misogyny. I couldn’t help but meditate on that sad transition as I wrote my explanation* for why I’ve come to presume that geeks and nerds hide horrible, hateful beliefs about everyone around them.

* Which is not an apology for stereotyping that guy on the subway, because I’m not sorry at all.

But I still want to make a few notes here about swarm intelligence. I’m not sure how concepts of swarm intelligence will appear in any of my future work. But when it comes to understanding today’s media ecology and communications infrastructure, getting your head around the concept of swarm is required thinking.

I should start from its agency. That’s the toughest part of swarm intelligence to wrap your head around. We’re accustomed to thinking of intelligence as being wrapped up with self-consciousness, with intentionality.

That is, we think of intelligence as having a direction of attention – at least an ability to direct and focus your attention. An intelligence might not focus their attention all the time – consider when you’re in a deep sleep, or addled by severe sickness like heart attack symptoms or heatstroke, or close to an overdose of some dissociative drug like ketamine.

That’s our intentionality. Imagine an intelligence without intentionality – you’re awake and alert to what’s around you, able to act and react to the affects of your environment. But you have no focus at all. That’s a swarm.

And we usually think of intelligence as being aware of itself. You have some sense of identity. You have a memory of notable past events, and of your close companions among other intelligences – pets, bosses, friends, the older woman who’s always on the evening shift at Tim Horton’s.

You remember these relationships, and you have some ability to reflect on yourself – maybe strategize for future plans, maybe wonder about your place in the world or the universe. That’s fundamentally what self-consciousness does.

Now imagine an intelligence without any of that memory and identity. You might have immense power, speed, have an incredibly complicated set of abilities that emerge from the spontaneous movement of your individual parts.

That’s the intelligence of the swarm.

But what are all those individual parts? What makes a swarm intelligence different from the unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes that cause intelligent life itself?

What are those processes that literally make me and you and everyone we know? Here are some examples. Embryo development. Everyday metabolism. Cell division. Because a swarm is different from these other spontaneous processes.

The parts of all those unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes are all themselves unfocussed, unreflective spontaneous processes.

A swarm's parts are intelligent creatures. Focussed, reflective, planned activities are the processes generating unfocussed, unreflective, spontaneous processes.

Who are these intelligent creatures? A swarm could be composed of viruses, locusts, social media trolls. Or it could be composed of fish, migrating caribou in the middle of a long daytime run through the tundra. The cars and their drivers who manifest a massive traffic jam when one guy hits his breaks for a moment three kilometres up.

A swarm body acts and has intelligence of a kind because it formed and moves in the world, always in response to the affects of its environment. It has that much unity – unity of motion and response. Very simple kinds of action. A collection of intelligent animals move together and constitute a swarm’s parallel of a very simple bacteria.

Memory Come to Life and Killing Everything, Doctor Who: Under the Lake, Reviews, 04/10/2015

The Doctor and NAME_OF_COMPANION(S) land in LOCATION_OF_BASE and encounter DESCRIPTION_OF_MONSTER. 

All it took was some black makeup and some simple CGI
to make one of the scariest monsters in recent memory.

So, that would be The Doctor and Clara land in an undersea oil drilling base and encounter murderous ghosts. Beyond that, I have to say 

SPOILERS

Blatantly conforming to the Base Under Siege story structure isn’t the only narrative stereotype Under the Lake follows. The black guy even dies first. The oil company representative even resembles Paul Reiser’s sleazy character from Aliens. There’s even a sequence where the characters confuse the violent ghosts by running around identical grey corridors. 

I don’t really like Toby Whithouse’s approach to the show, and to action-based drama in general. He’s much too interested in overdone stories about the growing angst and self-hatred of stoic, tortured male anti-heroes. I watched one episode of his spy series The Game and I was so bored that I didn’t want to watch another one.

I dislike the fact that he’s gone on record saying that he doesn’t think the Doctor should become a woman after Peter Capaldi’s eventual departure. Overall, he’s old-fashioned in his narrative styles to the point that it undermines the quality of his work. 

Under the Lake did a wonderful job depicting the deaf
base commander and her signing aide, played by an
actually deaf actress Sophie Stone.

But as Under the Lake picked up, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the ideas that flowed from the script. The base under siege, the most tired and simple style of Doctor Who story, was given a jolt of new energy by its themes about memory, the nature of death, its time-looping plot, and a twisted cliffhanger.

The ghosts, with their transparent eyes revealing cavernous hollowed-out insides, are twisted echoes of their living selves. And their appearances, relentlessly drifting from assault to assault, aggressively uttering the poetic coordinates of their signals to deep space. 

They are utterly chilling – nightmare-inducing for children as all the best Doctor Who monsters should be. And even more terrifying is the cliffhanger, where the Doctor has become one of them. 

We know because the show will continue after next week’s Before the Flood that the Doctor and Clara will survive. But how that will happen is the nature of the cliffhanger. Given what we know about the villains in this story, the Doctor will have, somehow, to survive his own death.

That’s the story itself, my own contributions to the notion that these are reviews of Doctor Who. But this story is also deeply invested in exploring the relationship of time and memory, the reality of the past that lurks inside the present.

There are some moments in Under the Lake that play out
in some very conventional ways. Pritchard's death scene
for one. I was watching him encounter a ghost while he's
still in an airlock on an undersea base, and he's taken his
helmet off. I was almost autonomically talking to the
screen, "Put your helmet back on. You stupid man, put
your helmet back on right now." He didn't.

Yes, I’m thinking Bergsonian again. Because his concepts of time, process, and memory have been very influential on my own thinking. And they appear throughout Under the Lake, so prominently that they’ll define the story as a whole.*

* With this season composed entirely of multi-part stories, I’ve occasionally wondered whether my discussion of all the major ideas and themes of one story in its first episode will exhaust what I can say for the following week’s post. But I think Doctor Who is rich enough that I don’t really have to worry.

Consider the mechanics of the monsters themselves. Their threatening manifestations are the ghosts of the dead Tivolian, Moran, and Pritchard. But really, the monster of this story is the inscription in the cabin of the mysterious spaceship. 

It’s a living piece of language, the carrier of the transmission that infests your thoughts and lets the ghosts turn you into a piece of their transmitter. The inscription animates a transmitter ghost within you, which is activated by your death.

The ghost is literally a memory, but not a memory of a past event – It’s an earworm, as the Doctor says, a constantly humming process that runs within you, hidden under all your other activities. This memory process invades you, hides in you imperceptibly. 

The use of constellations as coordinates in this story made
no sense according to our science. But I think it works in
the story. The aliens are describing a path to Earth, but
from the perspective of its endpoint. So from Earth's
point of view, the aliens would travel along a trajectory
that would take them along the stars that make up
Orion's belt and sword. That's how their maps work:
pathways drawn from the end's view of the origin.

Its origin is in the past, the original alien encounter before the town flooded. But it’s not your past. The monster of this story is an invasion of your own narrative by a malignant outsider. There’s no peace in the death this monster offers. You’re overwritten by an entity that animates you into a machinery that had nothing to do with you.

This is a monster that literally steals your soul.

Because memory is your soul. Whether or not it’s before your thoughts in a given moment, your memory is the combined set of affects that have impacted you to create the body and personality that you are now. This is what Bergson means when he says that the past is real. All that has happened to you is part of your present, part of your identity.

The act of remembering is simply focussing on a few of these events in a given moment of thought. I remember the name of that David Bowie song, the correct name of Canada’s Governor General,** the atomic weight of carbon, my favourite stories of the Matt Smith era.

** Thanks for the reminder, Phil. I keep thinking of Daniel Johnston the songwriter, not David Johnston the constitutional scholar.

We most often think of memory as remembering facts like these, but we don’t understand that memory is actually a continuing process of constructing our personalities. It’s not quite a narrative either, although narrative plays an important part in how we understand our own memories and pasts.

Narrative is how our self-conscious thinking – our intentional, subject-centred perspective – constructs and understands our personality. But our actual subjectivity is an aggregation of bits and pieces, millions of ongoing mental processes. 

I also thought it was a pleasant touch that, in a story that
picked up such a notable narrative convention of Doctor
Who in the late 1960s, the design of the alien spaceship
used the white surfaces and smooth walls that are
features of the most striking sets of the Troughton
era. At least, that's what the Troughton era looks like
in my memory.

It’s just like our physical bodies. When we act in the world – walking to work, having conversations, going shopping, writing blogs – we feel the unity of our bodies. That’s our proprioception sense, the ability of our body to detect where it is, its orientation, and what it’s doing. But our actual bodies are massive aggregates of millions of ongoing processes from the sub-atomic, to the chemical, to the cellular, to the personal level.

Our thoughts and mental processes are the same, the interaction of ideas, concepts, memories, flows of thinking and associations, neurochemical flows, and perceptions to make an ongoing personality. We feel its unity because self-consciousness in experience and thought functions like proprioception does for our body. It gives us a feeling of unity in all this aggregated inter-related chaos. 

While I wouldn’t call this feeling of unity a lie, it is a functional fiction about what we are. That unity is one aspect of what we are – if we didn’t feel it, we’d be a severe schizophrenic unable to function in the world. 

It’s parallel to those people who have no sense of proprioception. They have to look directly at their bodies to move their limbs properly. 

The complete picture of a personality is an enormous jumble of ongoing processes colliding together to make a person, a subject, you and me. 

This week’s monster on Doctor Who is a single one of those processes, a set of words that, when you look at some markings carved into a wall, sneaks into those processes. And when you die, every process stops, except that one. It embeds you into another set of complex processes, making you a zombified cog in its machine.

Solid terror.

What Is Life? There Is No Mystery, Jamming, 20/12/2014

I follow quite a few people from the world of Doctor Who on Twitter. In most cases, I get a wonderful glimpse into the thoughts of one of England's crankiest men (mid-1980s Doctor Colin Baker), notices of plucky theatre productions and charitable drives (1960s and 1970s companions Frazer Hines and Louise Jameson), and steadfast promotion for television shows so terrible that it constitutes a model case of entertainment industry professionalism (Karen Gillan's enthusiastic promotion of her absolutely terrible American sitcom, Selfie, which I badly hope doesn't ruin her career, as she's a wonderful actress who just needs material that measures up to her talent).

But Christopher Bidmead is perhaps the most rewarding single Twitter feed among my Doctor Who list. Bidmead is a science writer who was the script editor of the show in its 18th season (succeeding Douglas Adams, the toughest act to follow). He only held the post for that single year, but there was no other year like it in the entire history of Doctor Who. The stories produced in his short tenure skillfully combined thoughtfulness with suspense, adventure with science and philosophy, and some impressively weird imagery.

Saturday morning, Bidmead shared this video, which I thought I would share, even at risk of its being a too-long-didn't-watch at a length of an hour.

It's a lecture by physicist Jeremy England about how to define life according to the terms of physics. It was quite fortuitous for me that Bidmead would link this video after I just wrapped up the most sustained philosophical argument on my own blog. I was quite honoured that SK, one of the regular semi-troll commenters on Phil Sandifer's website visited my old post about the Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man" from this May after Vaka Rangi linked to it in his discussion of that story.

The Star Trek episode is a cheekily over-dramatized trial, where Starfleet must decide whether Data has any rights, or if, as a machine, he is the institution's property. SK kept hammering me on the old point in philosophy of mind, that because Data is a machine, his entire person is a series of mechanical movements and reactions. And because he is determined entirely by physical causes, he does not truly think and express those thoughts, only precisely reproduce exactly what a creature (who is not a machine, so not subject to strict physical determinism) would say.

This juvenile way of thinking about physics and physical determinism is one of the central reasons why philosophy of mind doesn't get that much respect anymore in the scientific community. The conception of physical determinism as strictly linear A-causes-B-causes-C hasn't held much water in the physics community at least since James Clerk Maxwell. The development of the dynamic branches of physics and their cascading effects on the fundamental concepts of every other science is either forgotten or unknown in the general population, who still think of determinism after the fashion of Isaac Newton and David Hume's billiard ball analogy.

Throughout my time as a university-based philosopher, I regularly interacted with people WITH PHDS who said the scientific concept of emergence was nonsense, or who seriously described in professional contexts the neurological activity that constituted personality as "the mind stuff that brains do." My colleague in Texas, Levi Bryant, still regularly vents his frustrations on Facebook about a trend in philosophy to revive old-school vitalist biology, whose key postulate was that there had to be a fundamental force of nature, vitality, that animated organic bodies to be exemptions from the universe's strictly deterministic causality.

All that said, it is very difficult to use the fundamental concepts of physics to understand life. In their mathematical descriptions, all physical processes are fundamentally reversible. Yet living processes never flow in reverse. England's talk discusses how entropy, one of the fundamental concepts of Maxwell's thermodynamics (the revolutionary field that ultimately crushed the Newtonian model of linear causality) can be used to define what life is.

Living bodies, described in the terms of physics, are bodies whose internal processes tend to maximize the efficiency of entropy production.

Of course, the meaning of life as a whole goes far beyond the principle. Reductionism is a stupid way to think as well. But if you're wondering what physical principle might be held in common between me, you, a tree, a lichen, an ant, a trilobite, a paramecium, a plankton, a bivalve, and a herpes virus, entropy efficiency maximization is a pretty reasonable notion.

Our Desperate Misdirected Search for Simplicity, Research Time, 26/05/2014

I attended a couple of very interesting talks in philosophy of biology yesterday. One was my friend Y discussing his research in the history of evolutionary biology, and the other was a critique of Carl Craver's conception of levels of explanation in biological phenomena. If any insight was common to both, it was that intractable problems arise when you develop and employ concepts for scientific interpretation for the sake of simplifying phenomena.

A short version of what I took away from the account of Craver's idea. Organic and ecological systems are ridiculously complex, so it's a good idea to figure out how to simplify and systematize your understanding of them. In this case, Craver described a series of obstacles and difficulties in making sense of causation between micro, meso, and macro levels of biological phenomena. So at one level of analysis, bodies and processes affect each other through causes. But when processes at one level of analysis affect processes at another level, they don't cause these other processes. Instead, the notion is that these processes constitute each other.

Consider the relationships among our cells. These are incredibly complicated exchanges among chemical processes, which, taken as a whole, constitute a whole organism. The processes between the cells are in relationships of mutual causation. All these processes working in tandem constitute the organism called Adam Riggio.

However, levels of analysis aren't absolute. Think about an army who loses a battle because, in the process of assembling itself for battle, suffers a contagious viral infection among its troops, allowing the opposing army to devastate them. The viral infection, despite existing on a micro level relative to the macro level phenomenon of this multi-nation war, has literally caused war casualties. When such viruses are biological weapons purposely released into the opposing army, then the relationship of causation is even more clear.

If you divide causation from constitution by level, then you won't adequately understand the entire event. Even though conceptually, taking multi-level causation into account is very difficult to handle, you have to do it. If the phenomenon you're dealing with is complex, you won't adequately understand it if you simplify the concepts you use to make sense of it.

It's a common platitude in philosophy, and quite often in ordinary life as well, that if you can't make your explanation of some phenomenon remarkably simple to understand, then you haven't done a very good job of explaining. But when the phenomenon in question is as complicated as a meteorological or climatological phenomenon, an organism's internal processes, or a growing viral epidemic in society, a simple explanation will not do. Simplicity is, in many ways, the worst type of error in thought, because it is precisely so easy to understand. When understanding comes to easily to you, it's incredibly difficult to convince yourself, let alone convincing other people, that your concepts are inadequate. That you have cut away too many relevant aspects of the world from your analysis in the name of simplification.

Correcting that kind of mistake isn't just difficult because you can so easily become comfortable in your simple understanding of events. It also requires admitting that you need to do a lot more work. And no one likes making their lives more complicated. Even if it's necessarily complicated.

The Fractal Structure of Ideology, Research Time, 05/03/2014

Partially on the enthusiastic recommendation of one of my compatriots, I’m finally filling the Donna Haraway gap in my philosophical knowledge. I think the reason why it’s gone unfilled for so long has been that my education in feminist philosophy has come too late. I first developed as a philosopher at a very friendly, strong, welcoming department. But I didn’t fully process its gender troubles until a few years after I left. It was disheartening at the time, but I’ve accepted it now.

So my education in feminist philosophy, queer theory, and related directions of thought was always rather lacking compared to some. Once I got to my doctorate, I either didn’t have time to read up on the classics of the feminist tradition, or felt as if I wouldn’t be able to overcome my handicap. But first cracking open her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collection, I came to a corker immediately. I’m still sorting out her theoretical layers. 

"As we learn about primates, so we learn about ourselves."
Wait, that's not how that line is supposed to go.

Let’s start with specifics and see if I can tease out what might be the foundation, if there is one (and I hope not). “A Political Physiology of Dominance” focusses on describing the work of Robert Yerkes and Clarence Ray Carpenter, two of the leading scientists in animal sociology over the 1930s-40s. They released a colony of rhesus monkeys onto a subsidiary island of Puerto Rico to study their behaviour; from this work, we have the stereotype of primates behaving according to systems of male dominance, aggression, and possessiveness of females. They also conceived of these primate studies as providing clues to the natural evolutionary path that humanity took. That is, we used to be what the apes are. (Layer A: Stereotypes of primates)

Haraway’s next step is a delightfully sarcastic description of the social world these researchers were raised in. Coming from rich, well-connected families, Yerkes and Carpenter attended elite institutions which, at the time, were run by traditional cultural conservatives with possessive views toward women and virulently racist views of non-white ethnicities. Their animal sociology work was funded through a Rockefeller-connected think tank, which was also connected with the American government’s semi-eugenical programs to organize its population according to scientific medical principles through the coercion of the state. Carpenter was a genuinely rigorous scientist, but his work was the product of a society based on domination by rich and powerful men. (Layer B: The obviously political)

But the self-conscious intellectual influences on the animal sociology studies were fundamental studies of developmental biochemistry, particularly embryology. The mathematics describing intensive systems such as embryonic development described them in terms of axes of dominance. A particular process (in this case, the currents that stabilize into the shape of a head) among the roiling currents of embryonic fluid comes to influence those currents, and determine the overall shape of the stable entity that emerges from all this chemical activity, the embryo. That process was conceived in terms of its coming to dominate the other currents and movements within the system. One key element of the embryonic studies was that if you removed the proto-head from the semi-completed developmental process, other currents would violently slosh together until a head emerged from their collisions and reunified the embryonic process to develop its proper shape. (Layer C: Intensive dynamics of multi-cellular production)

White patrician American scientists in the 1930s and 1940s
conceived of the natural political arrangements of living
creatures as authoritarian dominance established through
violent conflict and discord. I wonder who they could have
thought best exemplified the most natural human
government during their era?

The major trend of this era wasn’t just theorizing about dominance, but conceiving of domination as the natural state of humanity. The political research of the science of the era concentrated on the authoritarian personality who governs through the imposition of violence on inferiors. If the authoritarian dictator were removed, the society would convulse violently until a leader emerged from the chaos who could impose his will on all the inferiors. (Layer D: Theory of political authoritarianism) 

Haraway’s final move is the kicker, linking these layers seemingly without a foundation. The political theory of dictatorial authoritarianism was conceived as a socio-political articulation of the same process of embryonic development universal to all animal life. This theoretical move made violent authoritarianism the natural political organization for humanity because it was the inherent principle of life itself. Layer C was conceived as the primal process that determined the nature of Layers A, B, and D. 

But the people doing the conception were already embedded in social structures of domination, conditions of their personalities’ development that led them to presume dominance and violence to be universal essences of existence, or at least life. Such a perspective would have no trouble with the intensive dynamic theories of development being adapted to theories of galactic constitution, as in Lee Smolin’s Life of the Cosmos. So I guess Layer B determines the nature of Layers A, C, and D. 

One would think that the ontology is prior to political theory. I usually do, because you can’t have political actors without ontological developments first — there has to be carbon and the organisms made from carbon before there can be politics among social carbon organisms. But how we theorize about the ontological nature of life and the universe depends on habits of thinking that we’re socialized into before we even think to start theorizing. Reading Haraway, one is no longer sure if any attempt to understand how the world is can escape the partiality of our established habits of thought, even for a task so simple as getting an outside perspective.