(Final version June 08)
FREE REINS TO THE AUGMENTATION INSTINCT AS THE MOTHER OF MENTAL, SOCIAL AND CIVILIZATIONAL INSTABILITY.
THE WILL TO POWER AS A COROLLARY TO THE WILL TO AUGMENT.
May 28, 2008 by Patrice Ayme
WHY DISREGARDING MORE BASIC INSTINCTUAL FORMS OF AUGMENTATION IS FRIENDLY TO WISDOM.
Can one kill a relationship with hope and certainty? Yes, one can! Better can be worse! How come? People always want more, and that includes relationships. Once they feel socially secure enough, many move on. To know more, to possess more. It's part of a general instinct, the "Will to Augment".
Why do people always want more? Well, it’s a survival skill that turned into an evolutionary advantage: expand, augment when the going is good, and the probability of surviving will be greater for the group. The larger the territory, the more to exploit, the more buffer. After all, Homo evolved as a hunter, and social hunters on land have to be highly territorial, they spend a lot of time acquiring a place that they will defend to death. Lions and wolves spend a major part of their energy acquiring, and then patrolling their territory and advertising loudly their presence. Those who did none of this did not contribute to the species beyond themselves (they had no descendants among their kin). The same holds for humans for the same reasons; it even holds strongly for chimps, although the reasons who make humans so prone to augmentation are diluted in chimps, they kill and go to war to augment themselves.
Everything else being equal, having more, of whatever one controls, means such a higher survival capability, that the “Will to Augment” has been a strong advantage, so it evolved to become strongly dominant. Even many birds and squirrels enjoy it, gathering and storing more nuts than they can use. Since human beings can do much more things than any other species, over the last few million years many activities were found in which frantically augmenting could be very advantageous. The instinct to augment evolved for millions of years on a huge planet, with a few good human troops, fighting each other to death. There were none of the limits to growth civilization would meet later, bringing that instinct under scrutiny.
When people have it all, all what they wanted previously, they move on to want even more, and not just landscape, or material goods, it extends to all imaginable dimensions. Augment as much as can be imagined, and when the going is good, get going some more. The instinct to augment is so ravenous, it’s why so many tyrants never stopped, even when it was clearly wiser to do so. Many a human folly, by otherwise wise people, is just about the "Will to Augment" gone on a rampage inside their minds.
The traditional example of Will to Augment gone amok is Easter Island, where, having cut the last tree, the islanders could not transport the last statue, nor build the last boat, nor fish the last fish, nor escape. A subset of the “Will to Augment” acquired in turn a philosophical life of its own under the label of “Will to Power”. Nietzsche made it famous. But Nietzsche disliked Darwin (whose insistence on biological evolution contradicted the Buddhist idea (parroted by Nietzsche) that the wheek of fate would roll back, just the same). So, ultimately could not ground his Will onto anything. Whereas the "Will to Augment" justifies it (all the way to Quantum Theory, if need be!).
In particular, once people have a relationship full of hope and certainty, they tend to want to move on. It’s psychobiological, all about getting maximum territory under control, in this case, social territory. Indeed, perhaps the greatest asset for survival has been the quest for power by extension of alliances, good both for groups and individuals in them. Ultimately, most of what people do is to extend these alliances (in particular in the framework of what is called a “career”, from the Old French meaning “horse race”). So if one can depend upon an individual, having thus one alliance one can depend on, one tends to move to the next one to extend an alliance with: the bigger the total set of alliances, the stronger. There is always a greener meadow on the other side of the fence, a new spring somewhere, and more interesting (in particular, the “Will to Augment” may even be the root of the anti-incest “instinct”: no point augmenting what you already got; this is proven by the fact that non genetically related sibblings, or simply people who lived long together, tend to exhibit the same incest repulsion).
The quest the "Will to Augment" spurs one into is unending. Or is it? It’s not just that when astronauts went in orbit, they found nowhere else to go. The Dark ages themselves show that controlling the augmentation instinct is key to surviving the ongoing civilizational expansion. Augmentation here may mean diminution out there, somewhere more important.
For the longest time, indiscriminate augmentation was NOT what the Roman republic was about. Just the opposite: the law was Rome meta structure, in overall mental and social control. It prevented augmentation for augmentation’s sake (that naturally occurs most readily along the most basic instinctual lines). Roman secular law as the overlord of Roman psychology kept for many centuries the Roman republic as the most civilized place on Earth. The People, Populus Romanus, augmented its power as the plutocracy reluctantly relinquished its power.
But then, after Hannibal and his army hanged around Italy defeating and massacring Romans for 15 long, devastating years, indiscriminate augmentation of Roman material power and territorial extension was felt safest and wisest (all the more since brute augmentation of the military allowed the plutocracy (the Senate) to beat back the People into submission). That change to uncontrolled augmentation was perhaps the largest mistake civilization ever made. The brute force augmentation and militarization of Rome was deadly to civilizational progress. Within a century, it led to uncontrollable civil strife. Augustus was at the tail end of the next century, during which the republic died.
“Augustus” means “Augmenter”. It was the title Rome’s first official “Princeps” kindly found for himself. The fascist “augmentation” that great nephew and adoptive son of Caesar provided with, put most of civilization in reverse, and ended with the Christian apocalypse of the Dark Ages. Augustus' augmentation blocked higher mental creativity, that was Rome's undoing.
So, for more than two thousand years, the lesson has been that the quality and nature of what one wants to augment is more important than augmentation for augmentation’s sake. Augustus reached that conclusion himself in his testament, tentatively, but without drawing any deep consequence thereof (having got augmentation shy in his later years, he told his successors to stay out of Germania, a mistake that the Franks corrected five centuries later). Precisely for having the wrong concept of augmentation, the Augmenter, “Augustus”, single-handedly insured the dead end of Greco-Roman civilization.
The quest “Will to Power” spurs one to is unending, it’s a blind psychobiological instinct. It is very hard to stop, and it's more astute to redirect it towards internal, mental growth. And what is this growing inside about? Civilization. It starts inside. Otherwise one ends up with many ephemeral friends, and no meaning.
If one wants more civilization, one wants to transform relationships between people in ways that augment mental creativity. That’s what the Franks succeeded to do, by freeing women and slaves. When the slave is slave no more, and talk back she will, dumb exploiters of the people are forced to get smarter (or devise smarter schemes to exploit people). Thus an increase of intelligence feedbacks on itself. The entire society is forced to get smarter. That’s how the Franks resurrected Western civilization: by using higher ethics to force down more basic instinctual forms of the “Will to Power”, which had been thoroughly rotting the Greco-Roman edifice.
So material and social comfort is not something one wants to augment if one wants to create a context more friendly to the very highest civilizational principles. An advantage of discomfort, and resisting the call to more simplistic instincts are necessary to get smarter.
The unbridled "Will to Augment" along the most basic instinctual lines has been characteristic of the domineering class of all empires that got out of control. There is actually a causal relationship. The USA has been no exception, and lack of psychoanalysis, at the individual or national level, has been overwhelming. Psychoanalysis is as far removed from the basic instincts as one can get, since its aim is to dissect them.
A very prosaic application of all this has been the huge taxes on energy long found in the European Union. The discomfort they induced have forced the Europeans to get smarter. Augmentation along the basic instinctual line of maximum waste became more uncomfortable than the alternative of augmenting in more spiritual ways.
A more subtle application of the psychological mechanisms exhibited here is that easy and cool mental attitudes are not the smartest. Unsurprisingly, both subjects are entangled: US society has learned to love it cool and easy, and general intelligence should have suffered as a result, and it did! This encroaching stupidity is demonstratable by looking at the US spurning of energy taxes, that led to an obsolete economy, the US incarceration rate, the US skewed distribution of riches, or health care, or the sub prime heist, or the hare brained invasion of the Middle East. All this is maddening in a country that wants to define itself as being about freedom, and the question is how did it happen? How did the US become the pathetic victim of unbriddled propaganda of the few, the rich, the plutocrats, etc. All these were not fought, as they augmented themselves, because not doing anything augmented comfort: fighting back clearly diminishes one's perception of augmentation. It's time to understand that the augmentation of comfort beyond some reasonable markers is the root cause of a lot of deviance.
If we do not want civilization to devolve, as it did with Rome and various fascisms, one will have to be careful what one wants to augment it with. The same goes for anyone, anytime, for the civilization in one's head. Augmented yes, but not if it means demented. It's a fine line individuals and countries have crossed readily.
Patrice Ayme,
Tyranosopher.
P/S: The analysis of Confucius, Machiavelli and Foucault on power are much more focused to the structures society uses for stability; Nietzsche was more ambitious, since he covered much of psychology, not just the part pertaining to sociology; we provided here with an evolutionary support for Nietzsche's work, generalizing and explaining the foundations of the "Will to Power".
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Tentative HAPPINESS OBSERVATIONS.
Many people say what they want from life is happiness, it's their guiding light. Diamonds can be defined, but how can happiness be defined? Often what people mean actually by happiness is that they do not want stress. Indeed, stress can be defined objectively, by the presence of some hormones (cortisol, norephinephrine, etc.). So happiness could be objectively defined as the absence of stress. (OK, there are endorphin centers all over the brain, but that is more of a punctuated reward system, not the Holly Graal of genuine happiness.)
Such a tentative definition of happiness would lead one to suspect that any activity which would reduce stress levels generate happiness. But controlled, ephemeral situations of distress, by augmenting stress considerably, but transiently and willfully, make average life seem much less stressful, in comparison: one gets vaccinated against stress (all people in highly stressful occupations know this, and military training fully exploits it). Hence high stress, controlled and momentary, makes average life much more peaceful (rats shocked in the same way as a control group, but knowing exactly when the shock is coming, get much less stressed) . Hence stressful physical exercise should augment happiness, which is exactly what is observed.
The conventional explanation for the later effect is that stressful exercise generate endorphins which make people happy. This is indubitably true. But the endorphin effect is only during exercise, and it could be argued, just to compensate for pain and effort, ephemerally. The mechanism described above, admittedly a bit cynical, may be more relevant to how exercise removes stress long term.
Patrice Ayme'.
Such a tentative definition of happiness would lead one to suspect that any activity which would reduce stress levels generate happiness. But controlled, ephemeral situations of distress, by augmenting stress considerably, but transiently and willfully, make average life seem much less stressful, in comparison: one gets vaccinated against stress (all people in highly stressful occupations know this, and military training fully exploits it). Hence high stress, controlled and momentary, makes average life much more peaceful (rats shocked in the same way as a control group, but knowing exactly when the shock is coming, get much less stressed) . Hence stressful physical exercise should augment happiness, which is exactly what is observed.
The conventional explanation for the later effect is that stressful exercise generate endorphins which make people happy. This is indubitably true. But the endorphin effect is only during exercise, and it could be argued, just to compensate for pain and effort, ephemerally. The mechanism described above, admittedly a bit cynical, may be more relevant to how exercise removes stress long term.
Patrice Ayme'.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
STRANDED IN WASTELAND.
It's no accident that both the USA and Australia, with Canada, emit up to more than three times the carbon dioxide per person, that France does. It's not just because these countries are huge (most of the populations are actually concentrated, and France is also pretty big, the size of Texas, and very spread out). It's not just because gasoline was kept all too long very cheap in these countries (whereas it was made voluntarily expensive in Europe, by huge taxes). It's because of a willful cultural tweak.
As they devoured entire continents (Australia, North America) the European colonists had interest to push and enjoy a culture of waste (because a wasteful culture helped in wasting the human element which was there before). Thus waste anywhere, anyhow, was favored. Thus no wonder the first rule of European urbanism was forgotten: don't sprawl!
An example. In the San Francisco Bay Area local authorities have resisted allowing the construction of high density housing, around transportation nodes (such as train stations) for no good reason whatsoever, except keeping on doing what they do best: augmenting GDP with giant traffic jams. The same authorities keep the price of operating a car with a single person on board cheaper (by at least 50%) than taking public transportation, even across the bridges they control the fares of. No matter that they have been unable, for nearly 20 years to build a replacement for the quake damaged Bay Bridge, and that cities are going bankrupt.
An economic metamorphosis is needed in the high carbon coutries, but it will not come without a philosophical one, first. Change? Yes, we should. But start with the head, not the pocketbook (that was tried before, and found wanting).
Patrice Ayme.
(The preceding observations were published on the Krugman NYT blog post of May 13, 2008, 9:17 am "Stranded in suburbia; "Stranded in suburbia" reproduced from The Oil Drum a nice picture from the Sydney Morning Herald about the percentage of income Sydney area residents will spend on fuel if the price rises substantially. The outer suburbs are, not surprisingly, hard hit. To which Krugman added, following one of our (obvious) themes (he got many comments about prior): "This is really our big problem: we’ve made long-lasting investments — in infrastructure, in housing, and to some extent in our auto fleet — based on low oil prices. Those past decisions are what make (sic) today’s high prices such a big problem.")
As they devoured entire continents (Australia, North America) the European colonists had interest to push and enjoy a culture of waste (because a wasteful culture helped in wasting the human element which was there before). Thus waste anywhere, anyhow, was favored. Thus no wonder the first rule of European urbanism was forgotten: don't sprawl!
An example. In the San Francisco Bay Area local authorities have resisted allowing the construction of high density housing, around transportation nodes (such as train stations) for no good reason whatsoever, except keeping on doing what they do best: augmenting GDP with giant traffic jams. The same authorities keep the price of operating a car with a single person on board cheaper (by at least 50%) than taking public transportation, even across the bridges they control the fares of. No matter that they have been unable, for nearly 20 years to build a replacement for the quake damaged Bay Bridge, and that cities are going bankrupt.
An economic metamorphosis is needed in the high carbon coutries, but it will not come without a philosophical one, first. Change? Yes, we should. But start with the head, not the pocketbook (that was tried before, and found wanting).
Patrice Ayme.
(The preceding observations were published on the Krugman NYT blog post of May 13, 2008, 9:17 am "Stranded in suburbia; "Stranded in suburbia" reproduced from The Oil Drum a nice picture from the Sydney Morning Herald about the percentage of income Sydney area residents will spend on fuel if the price rises substantially. The outer suburbs are, not surprisingly, hard hit. To which Krugman added, following one of our (obvious) themes (he got many comments about prior): "This is really our big problem: we’ve made long-lasting investments — in infrastructure, in housing, and to some extent in our auto fleet — based on low oil prices. Those past decisions are what make (sic) today’s high prices such a big problem.")
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
GAS TAX HOLIDAY FROM REASON FOUND INEFFECTUAL.
It was not just a crime that Hillary Clinton wanted to cancel the gas tax, it was a mistake: voters were not impressed, she lost impressively.
Clinton had demonstrated she was a panderer. Obama showed he was a leader. In November, he will have the pleasure of reminding Mr. McCain of this. A leader has to show the way, and especially when the way is not obvious, not just where everybody sees it too. Leaders encourage people to do well by teaching them what's right.
In Norway, which produces 3 million barrels of oil a day (and exports more than 93%), two-third of the price of gasoline is tax. Overall, European gasoline costs around eight to nine US$ a gallon, most of it, tax. The idea is to force efficiencies. The Peugeot 308, a regular family car on sale now in Europe, gets more than 63 mpg (one did 14,500 kilometers at 75 mpg!). Those efficiencies are all over, explaining why a 65 million strong country such as France make do with less than one-third of the CO2 emission of the USA per person.
Clinton had demonstrated she was a panderer. Obama showed he was a leader. In November, he will have the pleasure of reminding Mr. McCain of this. A leader has to show the way, and especially when the way is not obvious, not just where everybody sees it too. Leaders encourage people to do well by teaching them what's right.
In Norway, which produces 3 million barrels of oil a day (and exports more than 93%), two-third of the price of gasoline is tax. Overall, European gasoline costs around eight to nine US$ a gallon, most of it, tax. The idea is to force efficiencies. The Peugeot 308, a regular family car on sale now in Europe, gets more than 63 mpg (one did 14,500 kilometers at 75 mpg!). Those efficiencies are all over, explaining why a 65 million strong country such as France make do with less than one-third of the CO2 emission of the USA per person.
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...
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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!)
***
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?
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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).
***
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).
***
Patrice Ayme
http://www.patriceayme.com/index.htmlhttp://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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
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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
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