I love this about nebulosity, David-- although I can't [of course!] say precisely why. A couple of poets that I like a lot, come to mind: the first is Emily Dickinson-- "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant: success in circuit lies."
The other is Marianne Moore-- "What is more precise than precision? Illusion." Paradoxical bits of poetry have always served as koans for me, fermenting away at the back of my mind and sparking unexpected leaps in understanding. This one has informed my sense of the interplay between emptiness and form, existence and appearance.
A few years back, I noticed that sky phenomena seemed to have started calling attention to themselves more. Clouds, in particular-- very dragon-like in their metamorphoses, are clouds...
Thanks, Kate. Glad you liked it. This is a case in which I'd rather not be poetic, though. I'd be a lot happier if I could give a straightforward, no-nonsense, engineer's definition. Oh well!
For some nebulous reason, I just wrote a long flame on the philosophy of knowledge representation for a conference, more academic that I've been in years. I didn't use your vocabulary, but now that I think about it, it seems that the field is dominated by a raging, pathological fear of nebulosity, and I was arguing that that was perhaps not a good thing for the progress of science.
There's two complementary error one can make in the face of the ill-defined. One is to force some conceptual scheme on it that doesn't actually fit, because you'd rather have a wrong explanation than none at all. The other is to say "Ah, this is a holy mystery, to investigate further would be sacrilege." The first error is characteristic of the European Enlightenment; the second is characteristic of Romanticism, which (to its credit) understood the Enlightenment's error and sought to avoid it. Keats was a Romantic, and possibly fell into the second mistake.
When I started reading the negative capability article you linked, I thought "I'm pretty sure I've heard of this before somewhere." And then it mentioned that negative capability plays a major role in The Subtle Knife, which is the second volume of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; which is probably my "somewhere."
If you don't know about it, His Dark Materials is a brilliant sword-and-sorcery novel aimed at teenagers which is actually propaganda for maltheism. Maltheism solves the problem of evil by supposing that God is evil, and that he ought to be killed. I ought to re-read the books; they are a lot of fun, and a close parallel in some ways to my The Vetali's Gift, which also disguises philosophical propaganda as a sword-and-sorcery novel. (Or will, once I get it unstuck—it's been on hold for six months.) The "subtle knife" was so sharp it could effortlessly cut through anything; it occurs to me that my book centrally features a similar weapon, taken from Indian mythology. The detached tongue of a vampire, according to Tantra, can slice through even diamond.
Interesting what you say about knowledge representation. AI could be seen as calling the European Enlightenment's bluff; and as such it has systematically fallen into that first error of premature conceptual interpretation.
Interesting also that you are getting sucked back into that... On the recommendation of Tom Clark and Jayarava, I am reading Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel, a neuroscience-influenced pop philosophy-of-mind book. It is quite good, but I am gritting my teeth a bit because it looks like his unquestioning assumption of the representational theory of mind is going to lead him into some big mistakes. His main aim seems to be slaying the homunculus; but he enthusiastically elaborates what Phil Agre called the "orbiculus"—the mentally represented world-in-the-head. And that doesn't work—as we figured out sometime in the late Ordovician.
I have a bad feeling that I might get sucked back into philosophy of mind when it comes time to write the self chapter of this book. It might be impossible to explain my take on the nebulosity of selfness without explaining what's wrong with the representational theory of mind. And that is a total pain in the butt; doing it once was bad enough. On the other hand, I am writing this book for a general audience, and probably regular folks are less committed to the RTM than cognitive scientists are.
Maybe we can make a pact to both not re-write our respective PhD theses?
I do know Pullman's books quite well, but the term "maltheism" is new to me...useful concept.
I got sucked into this due to a chance encounter with Carl Hewitt, of all people, who is out in the Bay Area now...he's organizing a symposium on Inconsistency Robustness (http://robust11.org), and for some reason it got me interested. The semantic web/biological ontology community is being overrun by naive realists of the worst sort, and I thought I'd join in the battle for sanity...probably a waste of time. It's also a function of being in close proximity to a bunch of elderly GOFAIers at SRI. Definitely had thoughts of you and Agre in mind while writing it...I had forgotten about the orbiculus, which is another very useful concept.
I actually had two papers in mind for this thing, one on representation that I actually wrote, and the other on goal-conflict in society of mind like systems, comparing Minsky to the work of George Ainslie. That seems like it might actually be of more interest from a Buddhist perspective (insert standard disclaimer that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to B.). Ainslie has a worked-out theory of phenomena like addiction and akrasia, based on a sort of abstract utility calculus, and according to him the self developed mainly to enforce peace among the conflicts between lower-level agents with inconsistent time preferences. I've talked about Ainslie on my blog [link omitted due to your spam filter], but writing a paper on him maybe is too close to redoing my thesis.
Your "elderly GOFAIers" made me start thinking about the analogies between AI and Buddhism. They are both primarily baby-boom phenomena, with hype peaks around the same time (late 80s for AI, mid-90s for Buddhism), which have gone out of fashion. Both claim to be powerful ways of understanding the mind that are radically different from common sense. And there is a religious, soteriological current in AI (although few practitioners would admit that). AI went out of fashion because it couldn't deliver on its promises. Maybe that's true for Buddhism too. ("We've been doing this Buddhism stuff for 30 years, and who's gotten enlightened? Nobody.") Hmm, I'll keep thinking about whether that analogy is productive.
I read Ainslie's book on your recommendation. Thank you very much; it's brilliant. I think you are right that his view and the Buddhist one are similar (and seem to cast light on each other). I expect to make heavy use of it in my "selfness" chapter.
Interesting analogy...not quite sure I see it. AI as practiced in industry and academia seems largely sterile, so if there's a religious aspect to it, it's one that's reached the stage of priests going around in meaningless rituals that have lost whatever juice they once had...now, on the other hand, there's the cultish, fringy Singulitarians. While I generally think they're crazy, at least they have some energy and liveliness to them. They seem to embody something of a living as opposed to a dead religion. They are in touch with the original alchemical madness of AI, which however wrongheaded is better than being dull.
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Comments
'I've looked at clouds from both sides now...'
16 Dec 2010
I love this about nebulosity, David-- although I can't [of course!] say precisely why. A couple of poets that I like a lot, come to mind: the first is Emily Dickinson-- "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant: success in circuit lies."
The other is Marianne Moore-- "What is more precise than precision? Illusion." Paradoxical bits of poetry have always served as koans for me, fermenting away at the back of my mind and sparking unexpected leaps in understanding. This one has informed my sense of the interplay between emptiness and form, existence and appearance.
A few years back, I noticed that sky phenomena seemed to have started calling attention to themselves more. Clouds, in particular-- very dragon-like in their metamorphoses, are clouds...
I'd rather not be poetic
17 Dec 2010
Thanks, Kate. Glad you liked it. This is a case in which I'd rather not be poetic, though. I'd be a lot happier if I could give a straightforward, no-nonsense, engineer's definition. Oh well!
Negative capability
15 Feb 2011
Speaking of poetic, Keat's notion of negative capability sounds like a version of nebulosity to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
For some nebulous reason, I just wrote a long flame on the philosophy of knowledge representation for a conference, more academic that I've been in years. I didn't use your vocabulary, but now that I think about it, it seems that the field is dominated by a raging, pathological fear of nebulosity, and I was arguing that that was perhaps not a good thing for the progress of science.
...and the subtle knife
16 Feb 2011
Thank you very much—that's apropos, yes.
There's two complementary error one can make in the face of the ill-defined. One is to force some conceptual scheme on it that doesn't actually fit, because you'd rather have a wrong explanation than none at all. The other is to say "Ah, this is a holy mystery, to investigate further would be sacrilege." The first error is characteristic of the European Enlightenment; the second is characteristic of Romanticism, which (to its credit) understood the Enlightenment's error and sought to avoid it. Keats was a Romantic, and possibly fell into the second mistake.
When I started reading the negative capability article you linked, I thought "I'm pretty sure I've heard of this before somewhere." And then it mentioned that negative capability plays a major role in The Subtle Knife, which is the second volume of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; which is probably my "somewhere."
If you don't know about it, His Dark Materials is a brilliant sword-and-sorcery novel aimed at teenagers which is actually propaganda for maltheism. Maltheism solves the problem of evil by supposing that God is evil, and that he ought to be killed. I ought to re-read the books; they are a lot of fun, and a close parallel in some ways to my The Vetali's Gift, which also disguises philosophical propaganda as a sword-and-sorcery novel. (Or will, once I get it unstuck—it's been on hold for six months.) The "subtle knife" was so sharp it could effortlessly cut through anything; it occurs to me that my book centrally features a similar weapon, taken from Indian mythology. The detached tongue of a vampire, according to Tantra, can slice through even diamond.
Interesting what you say about knowledge representation. AI could be seen as calling the European Enlightenment's bluff; and as such it has systematically fallen into that first error of premature conceptual interpretation.
Interesting also that you are getting sucked back into that... On the recommendation of Tom Clark and Jayarava, I am reading Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel, a neuroscience-influenced pop philosophy-of-mind book. It is quite good, but I am gritting my teeth a bit because it looks like his unquestioning assumption of the representational theory of mind is going to lead him into some big mistakes. His main aim seems to be slaying the homunculus; but he enthusiastically elaborates what Phil Agre called the "orbiculus"—the mentally represented world-in-the-head. And that doesn't work—as we figured out sometime in the late Ordovician.
I have a bad feeling that I might get sucked back into philosophy of mind when it comes time to write the self chapter of this book. It might be impossible to explain my take on the nebulosity of selfness without explaining what's wrong with the representational theory of mind. And that is a total pain in the butt; doing it once was bad enough. On the other hand, I am writing this book for a general audience, and probably regular folks are less committed to the RTM than cognitive scientists are.
Maybe we can make a pact to both not re-write our respective PhD theses?
Eternal recurrence
18 Feb 2011
I do know Pullman's books quite well, but the term "maltheism" is new to me...useful concept.
I got sucked into this due to a chance encounter with Carl Hewitt, of all people, who is out in the Bay Area now...he's organizing a symposium on Inconsistency Robustness (http://robust11.org), and for some reason it got me interested. The semantic web/biological ontology community is being overrun by naive realists of the worst sort, and I thought I'd join in the battle for sanity...probably a waste of time. It's also a function of being in close proximity to a bunch of elderly GOFAIers at SRI. Definitely had thoughts of you and Agre in mind while writing it...I had forgotten about the orbiculus, which is another very useful concept.
I actually had two papers in mind for this thing, one on representation that I actually wrote, and the other on goal-conflict in society of mind like systems, comparing Minsky to the work of George Ainslie. That seems like it might actually be of more interest from a Buddhist perspective (insert standard disclaimer that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to B.). Ainslie has a worked-out theory of phenomena like addiction and akrasia, based on a sort of abstract utility calculus, and according to him the self developed mainly to enforce peace among the conflicts between lower-level agents with inconsistent time preferences. I've talked about Ainslie on my blog [link omitted due to your spam filter], but writing a paper on him maybe is too close to redoing my thesis.
AI as religion
18 Feb 2011
Your "elderly GOFAIers" made me start thinking about the analogies between AI and Buddhism. They are both primarily baby-boom phenomena, with hype peaks around the same time (late 80s for AI, mid-90s for Buddhism), which have gone out of fashion. Both claim to be powerful ways of understanding the mind that are radically different from common sense. And there is a religious, soteriological current in AI (although few practitioners would admit that). AI went out of fashion because it couldn't deliver on its promises. Maybe that's true for Buddhism too. ("We've been doing this Buddhism stuff for 30 years, and who's gotten enlightened? Nobody.") Hmm, I'll keep thinking about whether that analogy is productive.
I read Ainslie's book
on your recommendation. Thank you very much; it's brilliant. I think you are right that his view and the Buddhist one are similar (and seem to cast light on each other). I expect to make heavy use of it in my "selfness" chapter.
Sorry about the spam filter! Here's a link to your discussion of Ainslie.
Living and dead forms of AI
19 Feb 2011
Interesting analogy...not quite sure I see it. AI as practiced in industry and academia seems largely sterile, so if there's a religious aspect to it, it's one that's reached the stage of priests going around in meaningless rituals that have lost whatever juice they once had...now, on the other hand, there's the cultish, fringy Singulitarians. While I generally think they're crazy, at least they have some energy and liveliness to them. They seem to embody something of a living as opposed to a dead religion. They are in touch with the original alchemical madness of AI, which however wrongheaded is better than being dull.
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