Thursday, April 24, 2008

PHILOSOPHICAL NUKING.

Abstract: There was a general attack against so called "French Theory" by Stanley Fish (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/). The idea is to lump most late Twentieth Century French philosophers with the evil Nazi cow Heidegger, and declare the whole thing irrelevant, and a "farce". Verily, there is a lot that is correct about deconstruction. We use the occasion for a philosophical nuclear bombing on language, truth, thinking, etc... After all, Nietzsche was making philosophy with a "hammer", but science has progressed...
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NO DECONSTRUCTION, NO THINKING:
The practice of explicit deconstruction is a very old story. Socrates was deconstructing the argument of his interlocutors. Not only is deconstruction very old, but finding it insufferable, or abusing it is just as old. Abuse of deconstruction was central to policies of the Athenian assembly (before Plato was born). Consecutive to this deconstruction, all ethics was made relative to Athens. The argument that might is right, and that there is no truth, and no morality, won the day, but lost the war. This theory that absurdity ruled, that all was relative led directly to fascism in Athens, and its near annihilation.
Actually deconstruction is central to creative thinking, it's a precondition. It's not limited to language. After all human babies spend a lot of time pruning their neurology.
Any serious psychoanalysis involves a deconstruction (analysis from ana- "throughout" + lysis "a loosening" ). Neither can be a method (Derrida pointed this about deconstruction). But they flow from a determined hostility against established thinking. That is intrinsically extremely politically corrosive. For example, a deconstruction of American motivations to go invade where the oil is connects the obsession with superstition (aka "My higher father made me do it"), general "bad intelligence" (the official line for getting into Iraq).
All knowledge is social in origin, even the hardest core logics, mathematics or physics. No need for deconstruction a la Derrida to show this: it is obvious. For example, it took 22 centuries for the paradox of the liar to be used in the Godel incompleteness theorems. Perhaps ninety percent of Godel's reasoning came from the efforts of others, some long dead. No man could have invented all the tools Godel used. It took a civilization to build the argument.
Thinking itself is social in origin; humans brought up by wolves showed irreversible neurological deficits.
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SPEAKING IS SPECIFICALLY HUMAN, BUT IT'S NOT THINKING:
Another thing that is completely obvious is that LANGUAGE ALLOWS THE SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE AT THE HUMAN EFFICIENCY LEVEL. Language is the big difference we have with animals. Although most knowledge is non verbal, and internally established, by one's own neurology, corrections to it get transmitted in a finite way by this thing we know as language. LANGUAGE IS TO A GREAT EXTENT AN ERROR CORRECTING MECHANISM. Language does not incarnate truth, it corrects mistakes. It kicks mistakes around, and it shoves in the direction of the truth. Language can also symbolizes truth (E = mcc is a symbol of an enormous theory, where E, m, and c are all independently defined and made true before being finally related). But it's not the truth.
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The PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD:
It consists into grabbing rare special facts one has observed, and IMAGINING a lot from them, by using more logic and metaphors than are supported by the raw experimental facts (because there are not enough facts to start with).
In other words philosophy does not fundamentally differ from science, except that it has to walk onto thin air (somebody has to do it!). Science uses FACTS DETERMINED TO BE TRUE (through experimentation and/or observation). So science is naturally more certain, and philosophers are known to trust the truth of the scientific machines they fly around with.
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SCIENCE IS A SOCIOLOGY:
Now, of course, the arsenal of facts science uses did not grow out of thin air, but itself came from building entire preliminary theories of thin air, thanks to philosophy. So, it is true that SCIENTIFIC FACTS ARE SOCIALLY REVEALED, and one can deconstruct such revelation, and one should, because sometimes one comes up short (see inertia below). An example of this is the indispensable precedence of alchemy to chemistry (alchemy's fundamental motivation, real transmutation, was out of reach, but it was still a good hunch, and many instruments were devised during the search). An other example was the (so called) Darwin theory of evolution. It was guessed millennia before (by Greek philosophers).
Still the philosophical method, being much more guess work, by definition, can sometimes err big time: Aristotle physics was obviously wrong on inertia. Buridan and Oresme showed it was wrong during the Middle Ages, seventeen centuries later, by a more careful experimental and logical analysis (14C; this is erroneously labeled as "Newton's" first law, because many in the Anglo-Saxon crowd are still fighting the 100 years war, and want to believe only the English speaking invented every thing -a case where some serious deconstruction is obviously needed to show that some French theory can be indisputably true! Buridan and Oresme were pillars of civilization; head of the university of Paris, top adviser to the king, the other a bishop; but all some American university types with intellectual pretension can do, is to try to read the obscure Derrida to try to deride themselves!)
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THE AUDACITY OF NUGGETS:
Modern apostles of deconstruction were philosophers, and the worthy philosophical question should be: did they find/guess something worthy, somewhere, that had not been found before? Is there something to save from Derrida's elucubrations, some ray of light? One thing could be that deconstruction has to be applied with maximum severity (not a hard fact, but a hard emotion; still, a form of knowledge).

One does not want to just insult deconstruction with outrageous simplicity as the NYT obituary did: “Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.”

Once one has gone beyond the mentality of being persuaded that one could get the "truth" from Moses or the Bible, a finite string of signs, one discovers that any text is made of a few symbols. It could as well have been haphazardly typed by a monkey, it cannot reflect all, so, in a way, it's false, true. Truth is obtained by rejecting what is false, and that is all what the text can do, that and following procedures made of a few actions. When the tire of a plane looks tired, one replaces it: therein the truth, not a discourse of a few symbols, but a visual inspection of a two manifold.
There is physical truth (gravity, and how it's space time measured) and metaphysical truth (happiness is worth living for). Truth is about finding what was wrong before and otherwise (in the context at hand). Thus one has to deconstruct what one believed in before. How does one do that?
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LANGUAGE AS A META SUBSET OF TOUGHT:
Language is a massive simplification of what is going on in the brain (this is obvious in two ways: language areas form a limited part of the brain; and see the GTM below). To limit a theory of truth to language is therefore itself a mutilation (it is probably even more: a dedimensionalization -and you thought deconstruction was as bad it got!) Truth is the appropriate enough adequation of neurology to reality. There is truth is the flight of a moth. Deconstructing such a flight entails exposing the detailed machinery of the neural networks allowing such a flight. It has nothing to do with social constructs.
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ALL TRUTH IS LOCAL, NOT RELATIVE:
Gravity also is local, but it does not mean it does not exist absolutely: it does. In manifold theory, many concepts are local, but that does not mean they are not absolutely true in neighborhoods. Not having that picture in one's mind has led many "philosophers" to confusion.
Suppose A implies B, and B implies C and A is true; then A is true (says Aristotle). Old fashion logic implied that this would go on indefinitely, but Godel found that, in any first order logical theory rich enough to contain basic arithmetic, such a logical chain could NOT be extended to infinity. In second order logic (as used in mathematical analysis, because it allows to claim the existence of least upper bounds and the like) the failure of Aristotelian logic is even more drastic.
This means that Hilbert program of finding a few axioms out of which all mathematics would spring out was so naive as to be wrong.
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FUNDAMENTAL OBSERVATION OF THE THEORY OF MIND:
The deepest philosophical reason for the collapse of Mathematics-as-a-simple-thing comes from what one should call the (modern) General Theory of the Mind (GTM). The fundamental observation of GTM is that ATOMS OF THINKING ARE CARRIED BY NEURAL NETWORKS. This simple biological observation has huge consequences all over, including in philosophy and logics. The axioms themselves are neural networks (OK, they will slightly differ from person to person). One cannot deduct ALL neural networks from a few neural networks (anymore that one can deduct all animals from a few birds).
Old fashion logic said that the flow of logic (axon to axon), a countable process, exhausted all. But the environment of the brain is extremely high dimensional, and ultimately Quantum, and that makes it a non differentiable, continuously infinite process (thus, going down axon chains is not a deterministic, let alone countable process). If mathematics is roughly identified with (the set of) partial explicitations of brain logic, no counting on one's hands (which is what Hilbert's idea was) will do justice to it.
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THE NEUROLOGICAL NECESSITY OF DECONSTRUCTION:
As far as deconstruction is concerned, since all thoughts are carried by neural networks, any new thought will mean a new network. But there are only a finite number of networks. Hence networks will have to be somewhat deconstructed, when not outright demolished and nuked, to build new ones, more fitting to the world. It's also an emotional operation, because not only neural networks can themselves generate emotions, but they are entangled with astrocytal networks (which are purely chemical, hence emotional).
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DECONSTRUCTING WITH NUKES:
Hence the necessity for mental nukes, sometimes, to demolish not just the logics, but also eradicate the emotional system of the opposition (a "hammer" as Nietzsche had it, proved too delicate, as the rise of mentally challenged Nazis such as Heidegger proved it!) This is important, to devastate the emotional system of (say) Nazis, because psychological evidence is that the emotions tend to come first (we have now physiological indication regarding this: more active astrocytes tend to grow dendrites in their direction).
All this happens after a correct impulse from the outside world of "phenomenology", or language, and has to be done internally (in a generalization of discourse, since discourse is a particular case of neurology).

Sorry about all the deconstruction! But the aim of the preceding was to show that the work of the intellectual, fundamentally, and unavoidably, is to deconstruct previously conceived notions, somewhere, somehow. Just because a few writers (Heidegger, Derrida) may have erroneously used the notion (clear with the mental retard Heidegger, not so with Derrida), does not mean the concept of deconstruction should be guilty by association (as those who condemn all and any "French Theory" do). To do so would be to give up thinking (or embrace thinking a la Hitler, murky and Destruktion obsessed, so dear to Heidegger).
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Patrice Ayme
http://www.patriceayme.com/index.htmlhttp://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

TIBET VERSUS IRAQ.

LACK OF CIVILIZATION VERSUS LACK OF INTELLIGENCE, TIBET VERSUS IRAQ.
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“Does the U.S. matter anymore?'’ said Mike Wittner, head of oil research at Societe Generale SA in London. “Has the U.S. mattered for the last few years? It is debatable. As far as the oil market is concerned, demand growth is going to be continued to be driven by China and the Middle East.'’ (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/irrelevant-america/)

The USA is not just getting irrelevant for oil, it is getting economically irrelevant, it is even getting mentally irrelevant, and this will, in turn, feedback further on the US economy.

If China had been fighting a huge civil war in Tibet for the last five years, with no end in sight, the world uproar would be colossal, and China would be universally despised, with heavy diplomatic, financial, currency and economic consequences. Moreover new investment in building useful things for China would have collapsed, just as investing in useful things for Germany collapsed when Hitler invaded other countries.

By its own admission, the best excuse the USA has found to justify its Iraq invasion, is LACK OF INTELLIGENCE. No, really! This is a revealing Freudian slip. I am world leader, with a superpowerful lack of intelligence! Indeed, looking forward, it is impossible to imagine a scenario where the USA comes out ahead from the Iraq adventure. At best the EU and the UN will come, and help the US with not too disgraceful an exit. The US will be left to take care of its mutilated veterans, and the economic consequences of world condemnation, and lack of intelligence.

At this point the USA is mentally irrelevant to the rest of the planet (as the Papua New Guinea delegate pointed out at the last world climate conference). The US has abdicated all and any mental leadership. Its irrelevance is global and will show economically looking forward.

Patrice Ayme