Things I believe that you probably don’t volume 1 Human Caste Systems I believe that human beings naturally self-organize into components that tend to accommodate the larger organizations in which they are embedded. That doesn’t mean that people are always altruistic or considerate of others; it just means that people will tend to work together towards organized interests when provided the opportunity. I’m thinking, for instance, about the ways a crowd might distribute itself inside a subway train: how they make room to accommodate incoming and outgoing passengers, or passengers with special needs, and so on. Each individual on the train must consider not just their local territory but also the distribution of other passengers on the car in order to determine where best to settle. Since each of us is in a different position relative to the others and the distribution of people on the train is regularly in flux, the passengers are each performing a slightly distinct balancing act in subtle coordination with all the rest. I’d hardly describe this process as “altruistic”, but it’s certainly an investment in collective, cooperative behavior, and it’s frankly amazing that we not only have the ability to do it, but that we actually do. Not always, but enough to run all the cities. I also believe that what we take to be the “appropriate” distribution of persons in space is influenced at a deep structural level by the conceptual and procedural assumptions shared by all the individuals on that train, and furthermore that many of those structures are socially conditioned. The “appropriate” distribution of persons on a bus, or the accommodations taken to be adequate for persons with special needs, or indeed, whose needs are worth considering at all, are all going to change depending on the social and historical circumstances […]

// This essay was originally posted here. I have complex feelings about +Jason Silva. He describes his work as “philosophical espresso shots” of “psychedelic art” conveying wonder and awe in technology “as the manifestation of our dreams”. I’m all in favor of psychedelic art. I’ve honestly found some of Silva’s art to be inspired, and I’ve used it in my classes. It’s started some interesting discussions. But I’ve also found myself needing to say a lot to provide background and context for the claims he makes. Sometimes I can, but too often I find that in fact _there is no background_ for helping to make sense of the claims being made in this work. There is very little theory supporting the stream-of-consciousness style association of infobytes and futurism. Maybe I come from a different school, but for me philosophy is associated with rigor and clarity of thought, in the pursuit of _understanding_. What Silva packages as “wonder and awe” is too often just disguised bewilderment. Perhaps we should encourage a childlike sense of wonder, but I also think we should try to cultivate clear and mature thinking wherever possible. In any case, we should be careful to distinguish wonder from bewilderment. Wonder is a sense of fascination that encourages further exploration. Presumably, that exploration ought to settle into a mature and developed understanding of a field– not to eliminate wonder but rather to mark intellectual progress and to encourage still further exploration of the details. Bewilderment, on the other hand, is the sense of confusion one feels when overwhelmed by experiences one can only just barely process. Bewilderment might be an inevitable aspect of any learning experience (including psychedelic ones), but it is clearly distinct from wonder, and it isn’t so clearly something that we should be encouraging. Learning, done […]

About a week or so back, I wrote a longish critique of +Jason Silva‘s philosophy of technology. Although my comment was critical and negative, I don’t believe I trolled, insulted, or otherwise abused anyone in the thread. Nevertheless, my comment has since been deleted. See for yourself: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102906645951658302785/posts/U4EFvbX9pa5 You’ll notice a few direct responses to my comment, and my replies to those comments are still around, but my original comment has been deleted. Luckily, I archived it here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/J2TxJqhSv2D I’m rather disappointed that Silva chose to censor my critique, instead of addressing it and taking it seriously. I think I’m raising legitimate concerns that ought to be addressed. I’ve enjoyed engaging the responses from Silva’s fans, including some G+ science heavyweights whom I respect a lot, like +Fraser Cain. I’ve tried to engage the community in a respectful manner with the goal of discussion and dialogue. I’m not trying to start a fight, I’m just trying to do some philosophy on a topic I care about at least as much as Jason. I’d understand if Jason is too busy to respond, but I don’t understand the need to delete my comment. He’s since reshared the talk, presumably to get a fresh comment thread going without my critique. I’m not trying to troll, so I’ll leave the thread alone. However, Silva’s series of talks makes it clear that he’s willing to stake quite a lot of his intellectual motivation on this idea of “exponential thinking”. In my original critique, I argued that this term is empty, and has no basis in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy. The only academic reference you’ll find for the term comes from the Singularity Institute and their brand of futurism. That’s fine if you’re looking to give motivational speeches to the tech industry, but as a philosophical […]

There are plenty of stories about what’s going on with the shutdown, both in terms of the banalities of D.C. politics and legal arcana, and in terms of the impact it has and will continue to have on real people’s lives. But none of this really gives us much perspective on the event in terms of the narratives we tell about ourselves, collectively, in order to make sense of it all. So maybe this will help: our country is having a stroke. A stroke happens when a part of the brain loses function due to lack of blood flow. The blockage can happen in a variety of ways, but what matters is that the juice isn’t flowing to the brain, and so parts of it shut down and stop functioning. The analogy to our government shutdown works surprisingly well, if you can stomach its implications. I’m not trying to make a small political point or lay the blame anywhere. Determining whether the blockage was caused by the Tea Party or the medical insurance lobby or the broken and constraining conventions of Congressional procedure at this point is like wondering while it happens whether a stroke was caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, or genetic disposition. The more important lesson going forward is that the system is in poor health and is experiencing trauma as a result. It should be noted that, contrary to certain memes currently being spread, an organic system (like a “government”) is not the sort of thing that can be “turned off and on again” in the way that is default for much of our digital gadgetry. Your computer suddenly works after a reboot because powering off also dumps the memory, and hopefully eliminates whatever corrupt files were causing the problem. In this way, rebooting is […]

Another essay in the “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series Extremism has been getting a bad rap lately. It gets blamed for acts of terror, for political dysfunction, and for general cruelty and hatred. Few people will admit to being an extremist; the ones who do often appear unreasonable and difficult to work with. Extremism is opposed moderation, which is the reasonable and practical demeanor we are all urged to adopt. Moderation isn’t just the alternative to extremism, it is also claimed to be the tactic best used to counter extremism where it lies. Michael Kazin recently attempted a defense of extremism (and, by proxy, of Ted Cruz) in the New Republic: Sometimes, those who take an inflexible, radical position hasten a purpose that years later is widely hailed as legitimate and just. Extremism is the coin of conviction, whether virtuous or malign. It forces middle-roaders to crush the disrupter or adapt. Kazin goes on to list the examples you’d expect to find in an article like this: abolitionism and the suffragettes, and Goldwater’s pedantic reworking of Cicero in 1964: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” These arguments are all instrumental in character: they purport to show that extremism is a viable and effective tactic for realizing one’s ideological principles, and moreover that extremism has been responsible for what have come to be some of our most important institutional values. The claim is that extremism works, and we are evidence of is success. Ted Cruz might be the punching bag of the moment, but Kazin assures us that history vindicates the extremists that stick to their principles and shun moderation. Given this instrumental argument, one would expect some explanation […]

Machine Autonomy Skepticism 1. Taking autonomous machines seriously According to the US Department of Defense, as of October 2008 unmanned aircraft have flown over 500,000 hours and unmanned ground vehicles have conducted over 30,000 missions in support of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past few years a number of government and military agencies, professional societies, and ethics boards have released reports suggesting policies and ethical guidelines for designing and employing autonomous war machines. In these reports, the word ‘autonomous’ is used more or less uncritically to refer to a variety of technologies, including automated systems, unmanned teleoperated vehicles, and fully autonomous robots. Describing such artifacts as ‘autonomous’ is meant to highlight a measure of independence from their human designers and operators. However, the very idea of autonomous artifacts is suspiciously paradoxical, and little philosophical work has been done to provide a general account of machine autonomy that is sensitive to both philosophical concerns and the current state of technological development. Without a framework for understanding the role human designers and operators play in the behavior of autonomous machines, the legal, ethical, and metaphysical questions that arise from their use will remain murky. My project is to lay the groundwork for building an account of autonomous machines that can systematically account for the range of behavior demonstrated by our best machines and their relative dependence on humanity. Pursuing this project requires that we take autonomous machines seriously and not treat them as wide-eyed speculative fictions. As a philosophical project, taking autonomous machines seriously requires an address to the skeptic, who unfortunately occupies the majority position with respect to technology. The skeptic of machine autonomy holds that any technological machine designed, built, and operated by human beings is dependent on its human counterparts in a way that fundamentally constrains its […]

This is the second in my “Things I believe that you probably don’t” series. See the first here. A computer is any system that takes a set of inputs and performs a series of finite, formally specified operations to produce a set of outputs. For specific goods and services, economist talk about input and output in terms of supply and demand. For the economic computer as a single massively distributed computing system, the inputs are the finite resources available, including human labor, and the outputs are the products we consume and the waste we produce. The operations are all massively complex activities that we do to turn the one into the other. The economic computer is a human computer, in the sense of “human computation” (http://goo.gl/LtEVLp): it is a system in which human agents play computationally salient functional roles. The things we do as we assist in both the production and consumption of various goods are operations in the economic computing machine. This includes our buying and selling and claiming of ownership over various things in competitive markets, yes, but it also includes the eating of a meal and the using of a pen and the chopping of a tree. Those particular behaviors are activities through which we each participate on a continuous basis with the operations of the economic computer. You are a component of this massive machine. Right this moment, you are doing its computing work. The economic computer can be optimized like any other computer to fit a variety of constraints and conditions. We can optimize the machine to maximize potential wealth, or to distribute resources equitably, or to minimize environmental disruption. Like any other computer, such optimization proceeds by revising the set of operations for carrying out a computation, or changing the computations being performed, or […]

I just hit 20,000 followers in my G+ stream. I’ve adopted the habit of celebrating follower milestones with a reflective essay. You can find previous milestone essays in my profile; this will go alongside them. Two years ago I left an adjuncting position in Illinois to focus on my writing and research. I conduct most of that work publicly on my G+ stream and blog. In that time, I’ve published an article, sat through some graduate level math classes, and put myself in a position to defend a doctoral dissertation in the Summer. I won the #ifihadglass contest and brought Glass into a classroom of gifted teenagers, and I’ve started developing a game for wearable computers meant to run on the device. I also moved, first to California to make a freaking movie with +kyle broom , and then to New York to be with +Rebecca Spizzirri and +Jon Lawhead. They have all supported me in uncountably many ways, I don’t know where to begin. During this time I’ve had no fixed source of income, and it’s freed me up to write and learn a lot, and in the process I’ve cultivated one of the most interesting and active digital communities I’ve ever participated in. I’m a little rough around the edges and it hasn’t always made me friends, but I’m honored to be a part of it and I’m optimistic about it’s future. I feel like these two years have been the most productive of my life. But I’ll eventually need a stable source of income if I want to keep doing this. I’m currently leading a single class at Fordham University, but that position ends in December and I have nothing afterwards currently lined up. I currently have no other sources of income; my total income this year […]

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Aquinas’ ontological framework implies that angels have some spatial presence, and he devotes a section of his Summa Theologica to work out the implications. The question is only significant if you already largely accept the rest of Aquinas’ view; to most of us, the implausibility of the view looms much larger than the results of this particular logical puzzle within its scope. So although Aquinas was just being thorough, the passage has come to represent the idle intellectual activity that is supposedly typical in philosophy. Aquinas’ method applies generally: pick any ontology you like and there will be a variety of logical and metaphysical implications just waiting to be made explicit. Working out the details of a received view can support several lifetime’s– literally multiple named chairs– worth of philosophical work. Attending to minor logical puzzles within frameworks with major methodological failings has become a successful strategy within philosophy for keeping niche positions alive and immune to the consensus of the field. A poorly defended or ill-defined view isn’t a defeater in this world, it is just more fodder for the cannon, further entrenching one’s influence and status in the field. To an outsider this work might look like innocuous intellectual progress, but if it has no traction with what we know about the world from our best science, then it is effectively arguing about angels and pins: a waste of time. Let’s use the term “pinhead philosophy” to describe any philosophical writing that engages with ontological or metaphysical suppositions in a manner that is not directly informed by current scientific and mathematical practice, broadly construed. I’ll call philosophers who engage in pinhead philosophy “pinhead philosophers”. Pinhead philosophy is rampant in the debate over “material objects”, especially ordinary objects […]

Your Life has Been Designed (via +Winchell Chung) But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. The article is largely pessimistic and critical, but we might approach the issue with a more neutral vocabulary in the hopes of being constructive. Your life has been standardized to fit a particular model: the model of the Ideal Consumer. You aren’t the ideal consumer. You are a real human being, and you fit the model only approximately well. The injustice of our system is not that you are coerced into conforming with the model. If it was, then correcting this situation would be a matter of authentic individual expression, which would presumably be contrary to the model (for instance, buying less stuff, monitoring spending more closely, not watching TV, etc). But of course, none of us conform to the model exactly, so the premise that individual expression is sufficient for correcting the injustice is obviously mistaken. Keeping people tired, broke, and scared makes them malleable; Foucault used the word “docile”, and there’s good psychology backing the idea up. It takes additional time and energy to process decisions independently, and it is much easier to repeat the same behaviors, preferences, and viewpoints that have been consumed through the media. But I don’t think docility explains the failures of the world today much better than a lack of individuality. Presumably, […]