Something recapitulates Something else
Feb. 22nd, 2005 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerAn introduction, in which I waffle a lot, use long words and grammar so tortuous that the following is all once sentence:
It sometimes feels to me as if my ideological development has mirrored that of society, a not unreasonable idea when you consider that society also started off in a state of perfect ignorance, accepted whatever basic explanations for the state of the universe it was offered, eventually discovered the idea of Rationality and Science before embarking upon The Enlightenment Project, whereby answers to all things ontological, ethical and aesthetic could be answered in a rational way, before eventually discovering the bleeding obvious: to wit, that there are no absolute answers to these things, as they either rest upon axioms which are emotional in nature (and thus at least somewhat individual) or are considered to be mere theories about the nature of the universe, and liable to be revised at any moment.
Pre-modernism, a state of ignorant belief which lasts altogether longer than you might expect
As a child I would believe anything I was told (within reason). I was lucky enough to receive a decent education, have smart, reasonable, fairly liberal parents and generally be surrounded by people that didn't try to fill my head with nonsense. The easiest way for me to find something out was simply to ask - if I asked a question my parents didn't know the answer to they would generally be able to find out. While this was obviously very useful, and something I'm incredibly grateful for (especially when compared to some of my friends who had the misfortune to grow up with the most appalling people for parents), it did leave me feeling that adults in general were likely to be reasonable, fair-minded, unbiased and generally good people - something that left me with no in-built defenses for dealing with people that aren't that way. It took a remarkably long time for me to realise that there were people in the world who have extreme cultural biases, believed things for no good reason and would deliberately write things they knew to be untrue in order to get their own way. And by "a remarkably long time" I mean to say that I was between 20 and 24 when it slowly dawned on me that this was the case. Prior to this point I would tend to believe whatever I had read most recently, assuming that as it was more recent it therefore superceded all previous writing on the subject.
Modernism, in which goals are set and work begins, not altogether succesfully
Having realised how much plurality of opinion there was, that some was obviously nonsense and that there was, overall a complete lack of clarity and agreement of what was reasonable and what wasn't I embarked upon a project to find out what was true, what was false and what was the reasonable, rational way to live. This meant reading a fairly large number of books on a wide variety of subjects in an attempt to see what made sense and what didn't, investigation ontology and epistomology to see how the underpinnings of knowledge ae constructed, tearing apart pretty much everything I know and trying to rebuild it in a way that was cohesive.
At which point (and this is a fairly smeared point, carrying over approximately 4 years) I ran into a problem well described by the following two quotes:
Postmodernism, which is not entirely satisfactory, but no less true
Which is to say that binary logic only pertains to certain limited aspects of the world, and only when you deliberately divide up the world so that it works with them, that objects are as much a product of our perceptions as they are of their own existence, that words are intrinsically metaphorical and imprecise and that all systems of categorisation of anything bar the simplest of objects are intrisically human in nature.
Which is _not_ to say that there is no 'truth' or that the universe is entirely constructed in our heads, but as we very rarely deal in the raw basics of the universe (and those seem to work in ways that aer almost entirely counter-intuitive anyway) then we are almost always dealing with our limited perceptions of highly complex objects that react in non-linear ways, what we have left is largely opinion, conjecture and generalisation. The truth can be approached in an asymptotic manner by careful experiment, using others to check that you aren't imagining your results and attempting to extrapolate into the unknown and then checking to see if your extrapolation was accurate. But even then it's possible to end up with the most arrant nonsense on occasion and even on a good day all you have is a theory that nobody has managed to prove wrong _yet_.
This came along with the understanding that all aesthetics was personal - that stating that "X is pretty" actually means "I like the way X looks" - the prettiness lies in the relationship between the subject and the object, not in either of them. On top of this came the realisation about morals - that they were merely statements about how people wished the world would be, that these were also judgements, part of our relationship with an act or situation, not intrinsic to the world at all.
First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.
All of this left me adrift in a sea of meaninglessness, with no anchor to link me to anything. I had no idea what to think or feel about anything any more. Except. Except... Except I found that I _did_. I still had feelings about things, still felt that some things were better than others, still preferred Babylon 5 to Deep Space 9, Alan Moore to Phillip K Dick, Terry Gilliam to Paul Verhoeven. And this seemed to me to be the answer - if you can ask Why an infinite number of times and never actually reach the truth, or even worse realise there was no truth, then I wasn't lost - I was free. It wasn't that there were any correct aesthetic decisions, it was that the word 'correct' could not be applied to aesthetics. One thing couldn't be better than another thing unless it was better _at_ something, and whatever scale you chose was just that, a choice.
I'd reached the goal I set for myself - to find a rational basis for the morality and aesthetics I favoured being the best - by simply adding 'for me' to the end of the sentence. And if other people chose to prefer other things then that was fine, their choices were best _for them_. I'd killed off my sense of aesthetics and morality and then rebuilt it out of nothing more than myself - only now with a greater sense of understanding towards other people. The feelings I'd always had that either I was intrinsically wrong in some way (or everyone else was) vanished pretty much overnight.
This awareness of the subjectivity of human experience made me feel much more confident in my dealings with the world - I didn't feel I needed to argue about many of the things that had worried me in the past (not that it stopped me, but it was now a fun way to pass the time, nothing more) - I didn't feel that people who felt the opposite to me were wrong or bad, just different.
As I said elsewhere:
And where previously I had been against the emotional basis (yes, yes, I know, I'm a complete geek), now I recognised its value - it told me what I wanted. Logic could tell me how to get what I wanted, experience could tell me the likely consequences of getting it, but only emotion could tell me what I wanted in the first place.
It sometimes feels to me as if my ideological development has mirrored that of society, a not unreasonable idea when you consider that society also started off in a state of perfect ignorance, accepted whatever basic explanations for the state of the universe it was offered, eventually discovered the idea of Rationality and Science before embarking upon The Enlightenment Project, whereby answers to all things ontological, ethical and aesthetic could be answered in a rational way, before eventually discovering the bleeding obvious: to wit, that there are no absolute answers to these things, as they either rest upon axioms which are emotional in nature (and thus at least somewhat individual) or are considered to be mere theories about the nature of the universe, and liable to be revised at any moment.
Pre-modernism, a state of ignorant belief which lasts altogether longer than you might expect
As a child I would believe anything I was told (within reason). I was lucky enough to receive a decent education, have smart, reasonable, fairly liberal parents and generally be surrounded by people that didn't try to fill my head with nonsense. The easiest way for me to find something out was simply to ask - if I asked a question my parents didn't know the answer to they would generally be able to find out. While this was obviously very useful, and something I'm incredibly grateful for (especially when compared to some of my friends who had the misfortune to grow up with the most appalling people for parents), it did leave me feeling that adults in general were likely to be reasonable, fair-minded, unbiased and generally good people - something that left me with no in-built defenses for dealing with people that aren't that way. It took a remarkably long time for me to realise that there were people in the world who have extreme cultural biases, believed things for no good reason and would deliberately write things they knew to be untrue in order to get their own way. And by "a remarkably long time" I mean to say that I was between 20 and 24 when it slowly dawned on me that this was the case. Prior to this point I would tend to believe whatever I had read most recently, assuming that as it was more recent it therefore superceded all previous writing on the subject.
Modernism, in which goals are set and work begins, not altogether succesfully
Having realised how much plurality of opinion there was, that some was obviously nonsense and that there was, overall a complete lack of clarity and agreement of what was reasonable and what wasn't I embarked upon a project to find out what was true, what was false and what was the reasonable, rational way to live. This meant reading a fairly large number of books on a wide variety of subjects in an attempt to see what made sense and what didn't, investigation ontology and epistomology to see how the underpinnings of knowledge ae constructed, tearing apart pretty much everything I know and trying to rebuild it in a way that was cohesive.
At which point (and this is a fairly smeared point, carrying over approximately 4 years) I ran into a problem well described by the following two quotes:
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."--Albert Einstein.
Postmodernism, which is not entirely satisfactory, but no less true
Which is to say that binary logic only pertains to certain limited aspects of the world, and only when you deliberately divide up the world so that it works with them, that objects are as much a product of our perceptions as they are of their own existence, that words are intrinsically metaphorical and imprecise and that all systems of categorisation of anything bar the simplest of objects are intrisically human in nature.
Which is _not_ to say that there is no 'truth' or that the universe is entirely constructed in our heads, but as we very rarely deal in the raw basics of the universe (and those seem to work in ways that aer almost entirely counter-intuitive anyway) then we are almost always dealing with our limited perceptions of highly complex objects that react in non-linear ways, what we have left is largely opinion, conjecture and generalisation. The truth can be approached in an asymptotic manner by careful experiment, using others to check that you aren't imagining your results and attempting to extrapolate into the unknown and then checking to see if your extrapolation was accurate. But even then it's possible to end up with the most arrant nonsense on occasion and even on a good day all you have is a theory that nobody has managed to prove wrong _yet_.
This came along with the understanding that all aesthetics was personal - that stating that "X is pretty" actually means "I like the way X looks" - the prettiness lies in the relationship between the subject and the object, not in either of them. On top of this came the realisation about morals - that they were merely statements about how people wished the world would be, that these were also judgements, part of our relationship with an act or situation, not intrinsic to the world at all.
First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.
All of this left me adrift in a sea of meaninglessness, with no anchor to link me to anything. I had no idea what to think or feel about anything any more. Except. Except... Except I found that I _did_. I still had feelings about things, still felt that some things were better than others, still preferred Babylon 5 to Deep Space 9, Alan Moore to Phillip K Dick, Terry Gilliam to Paul Verhoeven. And this seemed to me to be the answer - if you can ask Why an infinite number of times and never actually reach the truth, or even worse realise there was no truth, then I wasn't lost - I was free. It wasn't that there were any correct aesthetic decisions, it was that the word 'correct' could not be applied to aesthetics. One thing couldn't be better than another thing unless it was better _at_ something, and whatever scale you chose was just that, a choice.
I'd reached the goal I set for myself - to find a rational basis for the morality and aesthetics I favoured being the best - by simply adding 'for me' to the end of the sentence. And if other people chose to prefer other things then that was fine, their choices were best _for them_. I'd killed off my sense of aesthetics and morality and then rebuilt it out of nothing more than myself - only now with a greater sense of understanding towards other people. The feelings I'd always had that either I was intrinsically wrong in some way (or everyone else was) vanished pretty much overnight.
This awareness of the subjectivity of human experience made me feel much more confident in my dealings with the world - I didn't feel I needed to argue about many of the things that had worried me in the past (not that it stopped me, but it was now a fun way to pass the time, nothing more) - I didn't feel that people who felt the opposite to me were wrong or bad, just different.
As I said elsewhere:
Believing that women should have equal rights is equally as valid as believing that women should be kept as sex slaves, because both of them are just statements about the way that a person would like the world to be. Iranian theocracy is as valid as western democracy, because both of them are just choices, there's no logical reason why one is 'better' than another on any kind of absolute scale. You could choose a scale to measure them on where one would be better than the other, but then you'd be left justifying why that scale was better than any other scale, and so on, in an infinite regress. The only way to stop this is to say "I just prefer democracy to theocracy" or "I prefer freedom to being told what to do and believe that democracy leads to more of that", or some other statement with an emotional basis.
And where previously I had been against the emotional basis (yes, yes, I know, I'm a complete geek), now I recognised its value - it told me what I wanted. Logic could tell me how to get what I wanted, experience could tell me the likely consequences of getting it, but only emotion could tell me what I wanted in the first place.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 12:26 am (UTC)You human being you :-)I skipped to there, experientially wise..It never even occurred to me the world should run by rules.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 09:18 am (UTC)The laws of physics are damned handy for predicting where things will go if pushed/slid/fired/dropped.
etc. etc.
'Rules' with real predictive power exist all around us. Knowing or working them out enables you to get what you want quicker/safer/more often/cheaper. Of course people (like any living thing) can and do 'follow' such rules 'blindly' by instinct or guided by emotion and very little actual 'thought' (that's what emotions are for after all). It's just that when certain people find out that knowing 'rules' can bring the advantages described above, then they look for more and more 'rules', more shortcuts, more of getting their own way!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 11:16 am (UTC)Thinking the world runs by rules is No 1 Geek Social fallacy and should be discouraged.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:35 pm (UTC)Your example was (deliberately) very simplistic. Of course we are capable of (demonstrably) a much more complex weighting of desires and consequences. But the mere fact that you might want you girlfriend not to be angry at you is quite explicable, and that failure to do things that she very much appreciates inspires a certain degree of anger (possibly even much delayed) usually obvious. Of course it all comes back to that you want her to stay your girlfriend - and the underlying motives for that are varied but come back to pretty basic desires (both social and physical).
There *are* a broad set of social 'norms' to which ALL human societies conform - despite the efforts of various ideologically based movements trying to deny this and claim that any arbitary system can be set up. (There seem to mem to be a whole 'blank slate' bias in a lot of the 'soft sciences' which I blame to some extent on US academia [and those influenced by it]- for the obvious reasons [religion, equalitarianism, bias towards respect for arts over sciences].)
These norms are concepts rather than 'if..then..else' rules. (e.g. family loyalty, incest taboos, fear of other groups than your own, sexual possessiveness etc). The full list is available derived from extant social research - I've encountered it most recently in the back of a Stephen Pinker book, can't recall which one, but I've seen very similar lists elsewhere.
We are animals, social animals and if studied as such, a lot becomes pretty clear. If not studied as such, you get a lot of nonsense proliferating. The set of social norms that I referred to are clearly either identical to those of other animals in form and function, or easily seem to be derived from them.
*That's* what I was thinking about when I said rules. A lot of peope try to deny that sort of thing, Don't like to dig deep enough.
Thinking 'the world' is about *people* is the No 1 fallacy of WAY too many social groups to list and should (in my opinion) be discouraged. We are just not important or special.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 03:47 pm (UTC)I was NOT in any way saying anything as trivial as
there's a "a broad set of social 'norms' to which ALL human societies conform" and you know cos you found it in the back of a Stephen Pinker book."
OR that "the entirety of human behaviour has already been wrapped up in an appendix"
I was merely indicating that there was an accessible version of a meta-reference based upon a much vaster set of observational studies upon human societies, (some of which I have read some of which I haven't).
I'm not about to get into that popular internet game of reference wars :-)
You'll probably find many of the common 'norms' that I was talking about are in fact also on the bible (along with the dross). The bible (or other holy book) list is *prescriptive* though, "this is how you should behave", whereas what the list I was on about was *descriptive* - this is how people are *observed* to actually behave. Do you see the difference?
People are not important. Reality is not provable - ultimately that takes the urgency out of talking about any of it - it's all just amusement to what way or may not be myself :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 04:08 pm (UTC)People are infinitely amusing - the most fun you can have with or without your clothes on.
is the most imprtant thing in your world proving stuff? - essentialy, winning arguments?
I find this like talking to an alien, honest.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 04:20 pm (UTC)Not the first person to think that :-)
I shortcut my explanations a lot, which doesn't help comprehensibilty. Let's just say that if I am profoundly unconvinced by reality, no aspect of it is going to matter all that much.
That's probably no better.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 05:36 pm (UTC)Exactly what I do do.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:46 pm (UTC)I haven't got much time right now but I think one of the fallacies in your main reply is that you are conflating "rules" to mean both "patterns of predictable behaviour" which of course can be noted and used in social situations; and "social norms" by which I think you mean mainly socially useful instincts, - eg the instinct not to commit incest.
It would be as useful to throw in legal rules and ecclesiastical rules while you're at it.
My point is not that people don't sometimes behave in predictable ways but (a) they don't always, often, and you need experience not principles to understand why and what to do then, not more abstract navel gazing, and (b) most people who are hung up on abstract rules in fact rarely do spot useful social rules because they don';t fit int teir idea of what a rule is. For example, 90% of geeks may e good at maniulating rules in a RPG game but can't work out that as a rule you can't get a girlfriend if you don't regularly wear deodorant.
And if you don't think people are the most intersting thing in this world for other people, (not say for sperm whales :-) then , well, I feel sorry for you.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 04:06 pm (UTC)Well yes, but I'd still want to watch :-)
Surely the social norms are just expressions of a (roughly) codified set of predictable behavioural patterns (nearly all of which can be traced back to their effect upon or usefulness to basic biological functions).
I should clarify 'the list' of social norms is for those that all observed societies have *in common*. There can be extras on top!
The trick with using knowledge and learning to shortcut experience is in making it look 'natural'/graceful. This applies to a whole range of things. It CAN very definitely be done. Most geeks would rather just get to the punchline in as short a time as possible :-)
For example, 90% of geeks may be good at manipulating rules in a RPG game but can't work out that as a rule you can't get a girlfriend if you don't regularly wear deodorant
Surely that sad sterotype isn't still circulating? (maybe my definition of geek is broader than yours) Also, surely people cannot be that dim? Well, maybe... Anyway, real geeks aren't all that interested in girlfriends.
And if you don't think people are the most interesting thing in this world for other people
I won't disagree with it as a statement of observation. Clearly most people do find other people utterly fascinating almost to the exclusion of all else.
Personally I don't. We aren't the most important or interesting thing on this planet or in the universe or whatever else. Nothing of itself is, no matter what.
There's no need to feel sorry fro me - human behaviour is no more (but no less) fascinating to me other than as one of a myriad of creatures on this planet (or possibly on others).
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 05:33 pm (UTC)It can't to social interaction, except exclusively with geeks I suppose :-) . Unless you are using "learning" to *mean* "experience", in which case the whole sentence falls apart. That's what I said above and I stick to it. If this is what geeks believe, that they can survive socieal interaction by applying abstract rules rather than observing, picking up cues and learning from experience, then this is why geeks on the whole are poor at social interaction and come of badly, rather than being confident social butterflies.
And no the deodorant thing isn't a stereotype, it's an observation: the difference in how our lecture hall at work smelt when full of geeks watching Cory Doctorow speak, than when full of law students was rather obvious..:-)
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 05:52 pm (UTC)wow! I'm amazed. You have to be not washing as well to make that much difference. The again some people are more sensivete to odours than others, or find them more unpleasant, so maybe it can go the other way and people can be LESS sensitive? Hmm, maybe time for a study on sense of smell and geekness?
I did mean learning other than that by direct experience. The technique of mental rehearsal (for example) is a big part of most sports (especially at the higher levels), and definitely boosts perfomance. For physical things you need both mental learning and physical practice. So I suppose that a substantial proportion of the recognising/making expressions/gestures part of social interaction comes under that one.
Relatedly, what was the article that I was reading the other day that just *watching* ballet dancers activates the parts of the brain that woudl be activated if you were actually doing the moves yourself.
There is research to suggest that adults reacting to a baby/small child's expressions/noises as if they had more meaning than they actually do greatly encourages the speedy development of proper deliberately meaningful communication. Apparently works with robots too(I can't recall but must be the kind that have some form of neural net I suppose).
Education (of a bright and quick thinking person) plus a bit of experience (even in things with physical components) can often lead to performance/results surpassing no education and a lot of experience - I have seen it and I have done it (and I have seen the resentment it sometimes causes). It's not reliable though :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 02:23 pm (UTC)Surely you find the smell of stale BO unpleasant. I know you can get used to your own smell if you don't wash for ages, but
a) you notice it as you are going from clean to smelly at the start of the process.
b) even the worst geek spends some time in rooms with other people and would notice *their* BO, surely?
c) people do tell you. repeatedly.
But folks ARE weird about smells. I don't understand why so many people are hyper sensitive to the slightest oudour of fish, or onions for example. Women do tend to have a 'different' and possibly more sensitive sense of smell. I have had the experience where a bunch of women thought a guy smelt unpleasant, when I knew for a fact that he bathed every day and used all the right hygeine products. Strangely I didn't think he smelt at all.
ya know, maybe part of the geek lack of social skills thing is due to a deficient sense of smell? You know all sorts of subliminal clues go into judging people in interactions, and smell will play a part, even if not consciously. Ach, maybe I'm just rambling....
no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 10:19 pm (UTC)And like boiling frogs you really don't notice the change over time.
At least _I_ don't.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 09:09 am (UTC)I did have a longish period of being puzzled as to how people could have the same data but reach different conclusions - and (crucially) be unable and/or unwilling to examine the thought processes (and any extra data) by which they got there. There was much shouting.
Trying to discover the 'rules' of social interaction (to which I was clearly not adhering at all) led me to the problem that most people act as though everyone else thinks much like them about most things. So do, I but in my case the match is terribly bad and so not useful at all. Plus when I stated the obvious ones I had worked out, or pointed out the contradictions, or enquired as to 'why' , people blankly denied it, lied (usually badly) and/or blatantly changed the 'rules'.
In one long semi-catatonic afternoon when I was about 12, I thought my way through from an objective reality, to "nothing is real" to "it doesn't matter".
I went through a period of wanting not to have ever existed.
I realised that that was just being uber dramatic and the only thing I couldn't get away from was me.
I calmed right down about people after that, and I suppose that I see them purely in their function in relation to me, and don't worry about much else. I don't really think people are important, no more so than cows, or grass, or rocks or interstellar gas clouds.
I don't have the formal vocabulary that many people have about all this, because I did my thinking so young and so much in isolation. I was never interested in Philosophy as a subject. I wasn't interested in what other people had thought about thinking, I was interested in working it out myself - for obvious reasons.
I get on with you, Andy, because you can and do think about your thought processes - not a common thing.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 10:20 am (UTC)I just wanted to look at beautiful pictures and admire them for being just beautiful. I don't want to analyse *why* certain paintings grab me. Analysis of this sort takes the fun out of looking at them for me and somehow reduces them to mere objects.
She's coming round to my way of thinking. Its a 'wonder' thing I think - the ability to be able to look at a sunset and not always dismiss it as another mundane event - but for it to occassionally grab you, your heart to miss a beat, to well with emotion at wonderful and beautiful things.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:41 pm (UTC)To me, it doesn't 'spoil' it in the least :-) How could understanding somethign better possibly spoil it?
Are you claiming that there is(are) NO reason(s) that you like what you like, or saying that you don't want to know them?
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 02:42 pm (UTC)It's the difference between looking at a map and deciding that the view at a given point will have 94% of the criteria I have previously discovered makes me enjoy a view and walking along a cliff edge and bumping into the dawn and just going "fuck....I mean...fuuuuck!".
But that is me and you are you :)
Also, this is not saying you do what you do in a robotic and entirely technical way or that I don't head in the general direction of things I like (hence my predilection for popping chemical substances into my mouth), but too much analysis leads to too much expectation, which always leads to disappointment or, at least, reduced enjoyment for me.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 04:10 pm (UTC)Emotionally, for me, there is effectively only the now (or maybe VERY recent past, last couple of hours tops).
no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 02:26 pm (UTC)