If I Ran the Fashion World, People Would Probably Not Let Me Run the Fashion World

Here's my idea of fashion - Data Chic. As I defined it in a hazy-headed 4chan post on /fa/:

Data Chic: Beauty is semantic and linked. Aestheticism is determined by meaning; the visual representation of data as art and its integration with existing traditional methods of meaning-making, such as a cheongsam.

Permutations of a Data Chic pattern (QR Code) applied to Cheongsam:

Reminds me of houndstooth, only more meaningful (to me). But that's to be expected, as I am utterly lost in the world of fashion; it makes total sense that I'd try to forge ahead by trying to do something which seems meaningful to me. Result: probable disaster. Yet I am strangely attracted by the concept nonetheless. Certainly there are others that could do it better.

Chances are this will make it into a cyberpunk fiction of mine, although I already had one iteration of fashion that I thought worked really well in that milieu - Office Krieg. Office Krieg is, in my mind's eye, a sort of punk appropriation of totalitarian military (specifically 1930's and '40s Wermacht and Soviet) orthography to traditional office wear - as appropriate for any future where one's affiliation with a mega-zaibatsu is one's livelihood AND de-facto nationality, and intra/inter-office warfare is not always a metaphorical term. Typified by a woman in one of my short stories who dressed in a tight black leather skirt worn just above the knees, white dress blouse with a military cut, lapels and chest pockets, knee-high jack boots, and no jewelry other than perhaps a black wristwatch and black metal stud earrings.

Apparently in my worlds, everything is black and white! Of course that need not be; imagine the above cheongsams in any shade you like, and of course Office Krieg, while more limited by its heritage, is to be found in all the shades of the office (white, black, gray, heather, navy) and field (charcoal, taupe, khaki, tan, forest green).

The only thing left is to flesh out the sorts that would wear such things, and the world that would compel them to.

What is Cyberpunk to Me (Now)?

I've recently been on a Cyberpunk upswing. Gibson created the genre in the late 80s, at the dawn of the information age. He was prescient, but not perfect. Stuff's changed, even if it tries to remain the same. And how cyberpunk tries. My two most recent in-genre love affairs are computer games: Satellite Reign and Brigador. Both of them cling to the neon, rain soaked, industrio-gothic aesthetic of the ur-titles in the visual realm of the genre (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, et al).

These titles are in no way unique; others have done the same before. I've played the Deus Ex series, the Cyberstorm games (although that series is nigh-contemporaneous with some of the founding visual assets, I suppose), Hard Reset, Neotokyo. 

But that's not necessarily the way it has to be. There are other titles that, interestingly to me now that I stop to think on it, I've eschewed, which could nonetheless comfortably be labeled cyberpunk based on their themes and settings: Watchdogs, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Uplink, Hacker Evolution, just to focus on games and ignore film and television for the moment. All of these titles to various degrees do not slavishly follow the genre art tropes, while excellently (by all accounts) executing the themes and settings which make them cyberpunk at heart, if not on the surface. So why don't they attract me? Some of it pretty much has to be nostalgia, I think. But the art has a message, too, and that's important to me. The world I live in is essentially some kind of cyberpunk lite, near as I can tell - there are certainly huge networks layered on top of physical reality which dictate much of our lives invisibly, serving as electronic metaphors for the cabals and secret organizations which run them and run through them. Cyberwarfare is a thing. Virtual realities are a thing. Dreary, rain-soaked neon corridors are definitely a thing if the weather's right. By and large, however, the world doesn't feel cyberpunk. It doesn't have the same gothic, the same unceasing dim flicker and sparking neon baroque. Those art tropes communicate density; a closeness and claustrophobia which seemed very much a possible future back during the completely unabated population growth of the late 20th century when the genre was born. Yet despite a mildly diminished outlook on world population growth, the feel still seems right. I think the art also codes for a different kind of density: information density. 

That doesn't require much definition, does it? Cyberpunk, as much as it is about dystopian futures with massive overpopulation, rampant destruction of the ecosystem, the rise of sprawling megacities overflowing with crime and filth, and generally the characterization of humankind as a sort of bacterial infection gone disgustingly out of control (see: The Matrix), is also about the pressing (oppressing?) density of information:

• omnipresent surveillance states
• omnipresent information networks
• layered realities (virtual reality; actual physical layers of megacities defining the vast distances between upper and lower castes, a proliferation of cultural and social constructs instead of a monoculture, etc)
• layered selves (virtual avatars, mind uploading, sockpuppeting physical bodies, robot bodies, etc)
• information overload
• gnostic, hermetic knowledge structures (hacking as an esoteric skill, government plots, secret societies, demigod AI, conspiracies, etc)

Art direction that visually communicates that deep, layered - encrusted and barnacled, even - sense of setting is a welcome thing, then. It is another avenue for communicating the kind of reality in which a cyberpunk narrative takes place. And I think insofar as that narrative's relationship to our actual reality goes, it is that artistic correspondence of information density which most engages with us as readers/watchers/players today - at least moreso than the sort of Malthusian prophetics of the 80s do. Whether it's still proper for art to attempt to convey that sensibility with protagonists strapped into full leather, shifting from shadow to sodium lamp-defined shadow, eking their convoluted way through an electronic distortion of present-day realpolitik, War-on-Drugs era street crime, and late 90s industrial-punk-harajuku fashion is another question (but sort of a meaningless one, as these tropes still engage the audience as intended, even as much of the audience becomes a generation not yet born during the heyday of those cultural signals). 

Sidebar - Deus Ex: Human Revolution doesn't get a lot of credit for this (considering its best aspects lay perhaps elsewhere), but one of the interesting things that game did, sort of presaged in Niel Stephenson's Diamond Age, was attempt to redefine at least the fashion sense of cyberpunk. Where Diamond Age tried to show a caste of folks living as neo-Victorians, Human Revolution posited a kind of neo-Renaissance aesthetic - attempting, no doubt, to draw comparisons between the dawn of Reason in Western Civilization and the posited sea-change of that game's narrative. I don't think it quite worked for either Stephenson or Square-Enix, but it's not like it exactly didn't work. The fact they at least tried is important and interesting to me.

• https://community.eidosmontreal.com/blog/Fashion-of-Deus-Ex

• http://cyber-renaissance.tumblr.com/

• http://kotaku.com/5491544/how-deus-ex-3s-cyber-renaissance-averted-a-puffy-pants-disaster

Whew, that was a long sentence. But that's sort of the point: once you're past the feeling that "old" art direction still somehow communicates the modern version of cyberpunk quite well, the question becomes "to what end?" If I can agree with myself that there is a coherent vision of the genre anno 2015, then what is that genre's message now? It seems logical to me that a coherent vision entails a coherent voice, or at least one strong trope that is reflecting a reality about our world. If the original cyberpunk as envisioned by Dick, Stephenson, Gibson, and the rest of that cadre was something about the nearness of the future, the rise of the information age, the uncertainty of the self and what it means to be human, and the disgusting, inevitable decay of the corporation-state - in short, basically the high-tech version of a po-mo takedown of Western Civilization, what's different now?

I think time has pared back some of that initial, really rather reactionary stuff. Because it's more or less actually already happened, we aren't worrying so much about the nearness of the future. Gibson himself has since said (one of my favorite quotes, if you haven't already read some of my other blog posts): "the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet." We aren't perturbed by the information superhighway; it's part of our lives now. We saw in 2008 that the (to use a more neutral term) evolution of the corporation-state is basically underway, and we predictably took sides as to whether that was a good thing or not. But all that's past, and Postmodernism's given way to the stochastic establishment of a mono-reality in which we all pragmatically must coexist. SCIENCE! etc. What we are left with is the ancient question of how to define the self and humanity, and associated questions. The mission of the genre, if you will, seems clearer and more focused on a question that is "timeless" - but its unique ability to do so remains  seated in its setting; its sense of information density. And I think that it is actually continuing the attack it began on Western Civilization, just via another route.

Instead of attacking the cracks in the (mostly imagined) monoculture of Western Civilization, as the po-mos did, the new cyberpunk attacks the teleology of Western Civ. If enlightenment, rationalism, and humanist futures are the aim of our culture at its best, then Cyberpunk counters it with a still-too-real imagining of a future that is dense beyond comprehension; too complex for our understanding, and totally out of the control of rational (to us, at least) beings. Whether its initial demagogues agree or its current torch-bearers had this in mind when they began their stories, the collective effect seems to be to place Mysticism squarely back into the human narrative of what is to come.

• Omnipresent surveillance imbues human-made cityscapes with an animist sense of agency in all things.
• Omnipresent information networks imbue those same 'scapes with animist, ley-line-esque magical properties - magical because hidden from plain sight.
• Layered reality reinstates dualism, the supernatural.
• Layered selves reinstates reincarnation; astral projection, etc.
• Information overload places characters firmly into a universe based on the basic premise that not all which occurs can be understood by mere mortals.
• Gnostic, hermetic knowledge hardly needs an introduction, but it too supplies more religious veneer to all of the above, and it again separates the known from the unknown, fundamentally questioning the ability of rational inquiry to penetrate the veil because now the veil is basically protected by agents beyond ones' understanding.

Personally, I love this. I think that this is exactly the kind of critique of our science-infatuated culture that is needed right now. The logical encrustation of high technology civilization upon itself makes it top-heavy; the very things we counted on to render our future readable make it recondite. Science is tipped on its head and we realize that it is without teleology; it is merely a tool. Our aims, though furthered by science, are not simply science - otherwise you turn science and technology into a religion, and it defeats itself. As well, as a person who likes history and is religious himself, this kind of mystic future is one which jives with what I know and expect of humanity, and which seems more like to accurately represent us, and the stories we like to tell about ourselves. As I've already begun to talk about in other posts here, the stories we like to tell about ourselves are actually important; to a greater than usually recognized degree, we are our stories.

Returning to the Concept of Narrative Morality - Briefly

The picture is cropped, focused, sized,
and tells a story - but what happens next?

Narrative is a form of linguistic expression that tells a story. It really is this basic. It need not be constrained by the mores of chronology, or the strictures of a particular point of view, tense, tone, setting, or any other thing. Narrative, however, IS about change. There is a beginning, and there are points in the narrative which come after the beginning, and there will be an end of one sort or another.

Narrative's purpose is to be told - whether to oneself, or to others, or to some undefined audience which may or may not include various listeners and authors. And a narrative remains untold until it is finished; it is an inherent frustration of this linguistic format to leave a narrative unfinished, untold. This does not necessitate a climax or denoument, or any other "standard" narrative format for the end of a story, but rather so long as there exists the possibility for the narrative to continue, there is some unfinished aspect to the character of the narrative - and to some extent, this is an aspect of narrative common to all stories. Wherever an author or authors might think to end their story, whether by design (here's the conclusion, etc.) or accident (the author died before the work was completed, etc.), the audience may well ask "what next?" and it is an intelligible, reasonable question to ask of the story so long as a continuation can be imagined and articulated. Narrative, it seems, cannot fulfill its own purpose.

So narrative is linear in format if not in content, restrained in this way as are all things bound by the rules of our four-dimensional existence. Through that sequence, the presence of change makes the transition from one part of the sequence to another intelligible by allowing differentiation. Narrative also has a purpose - that of being told - and by its nature it seems that purpose cannot be completely fulfilled. Even from these basics the morality of narrative seems to arise for me: It is imperative (good) that the narrative be told, but it is to be understood that its telling will never be complete. Striving for completion is not necessarily bad insofar as it does not impede the good (which right now is just the imperative of actually telling the story), but it is also essentially nonsensical. And there are other, even more elemental goods that arise: change is good. We cannot at this point say how much change is good, but that it exists is good within the framework of a narrative; it is existentially good because it allows the narrative to be told, splitting up an indistinguishable linear experience into segmented, differentiated parts with relationships to one another (at the bare minimum, the relationship of being included in the same narrative by their author or authors).

The knowledge of these goods sheds light on another facet of narrative that, it quickly becomes apparent, is necessary to the good of the narrative by virtue of its effect on the purpose and change of a narrative: the narrative focus. Like change, linearity, purpose, and incompleteness, focus is a fundamental aspect of any narrative. It arises from the nature of language: without going too far afield into linguistics as opposed to narratology (which is the proper topic of this screed), a word spoken is also every other word not spoken. Language, the substrate of Narrative, is inherently focusing. Narrative focus cleaves that which is part of the narrative from what which is not part of the narrative - that which will be told, and that which will not be told. It is not a clean delineation: from what a narrative explicitly includes, an audience may deduce the probable existence of some aspects of the narrative not explicitly told (the plot of a mystery depends on this principle, for example). This ragged limn is the happy playground of the close reader. But at some indefinite point there would seem to be a limit to the determinations that can be made from a finite narrative, and this limit is helpful to the telling of a narrative because it limits what the author must complete in order to approach (but, remember, never quite attain) completeness. Focus is a good insofar as it aids the completion of the narrative; it would seem that it is possible for focus to also be a bad thing - too much of it, and we lose all sense of meaningful change. Like change, then, focus is good, but it remains unseen how much focus is a good thing. Probably, change and focus - and their proper amounts - maintain a delicate yin and yang (possibly also forming a tripod with linearity, in that too little time spent on a narrative - or too much - compresses or dilutes the focus and change contained within its limits?), and it is this good tao which is so ineffable and indispensable to a "good" narrative. But this is not an investigation into the proper qualities of good narratives. It is a simpler task taken up here; to simply identify what is fundamentally imperative (good) for narratives. A narrative without focus is everything, which is an unchanging totality. It is not a narrative. Focus is imperative to narrative, and good.

For a narrative, being told is the purpose, and therefore good. Its focus, its changes, its linear duration - these are the fundamental aspects of a narrative which are imperative for its telling, and therefore their existence is also good. If one were to derive one's own morality from the morality of narratives at this point, it would not be so hard to make a start:

1. It is good to tell the narrative --> it is good to act, to live life, to exist, as opposed to inaction and non-existence.
2. Acting, living life, existing: these are accomplished by focusing, by changing, by enduring - though to what degree one must do these things is somewhat unclear.  
3. It is impossible to complete - to do all the good there is to do. 

Obviously, this appears extremely general. It is the most vapid seed of a morality, almost totally undefined, but it also seems like it could be used as a general compass rose for a more complete map of human morality as derived from our favorite form of expression, the narrative. The fleshing out of this correspondence and its implications for our own moral understanding does not seem impossible, or even improbable. The foothold has been crossed, and ground found upon which to stand. It might even be a good and useful project; it seems like there could be a lot of use for a morality derived from the morality of the Narrative. These problems are not the issue. 

The issue seems to be that Narrative's morality must be justified. Why is narrative so important to us? What does it do for us? These appear to be linguistic and cognitive questions, digging into Narrative's rich human substrate.

My Child's Protolanguage

This is more of a documentary post than anything, though it might be interesting tidbits for those of us who - like Emily and I - are interested in language. Our new child, Joseph (our first), is
approximately four months old at the time of this writing. We have discovered that he has several utterances/vocalizations which recur pretty exactly, according to a formula. These sounds do also seem to correspond very strongly to different kinds of emotional states and/or stimuli Joseph encounters. A brief catalog, spelled phonetically:

"Ghee" - Used to express probable worry, concern.

"Naing" - Used in the throes of a tantrum. Appears to express extreme dissatisfaction.

"Agoo" - Somewhat more mysterious. Seems to imply pleasant surprise? The first of these three to appear.

I will add more later, so this will be something of an ongoing effort to catalog all his "words" before he begins to make real ones.

Sidenote: the meaning of these phrases was of course determined by Emily and I prior to Joseph's actually being able to articulate what he feels they signify. In the absence of a sufficiently robust theory of universal grammar, we may suppose that these are somewhat unique to this baby, though perhaps they share similarities with other babies of English-speaking couples in the 21st century. Nevertheless, the strong correlation with visible external states (crying, smiling, etc) seems to imply that we cannot be far off in guessing the import of these sounds. Considering the remarkable simplicity and ease of use inherent in these sounds (probably not full symbols - they are direct results of mental states, not communications thereof), it would behoove a science fiction author and worldbuilder to do research at some point into what extent such directness can be found in natural/synthetic languages.

Narrative Morality

There have been projects to derive morality from science, but I view this approach to morality as poorly-suited to accept the facts of culture, as culture, being a dynamical system, is something science has traditionally shied away from as being too complex to render reductively to any degree of satisfaction. That may change in the future, but I think that once again it is plausible to suggest that liberal arts may be required to lead the way.

Whereas scientific morality sought to wring universal truths from scientific fact, my project is to find universal truth in human culture. Whereas human culture itself is fantastically diverse and might at first suggest the useless relativity of postmodernism, when understood as a dynamical system it can be conceived that the whole of human culture is in fact derived from simple starting mechanisms which are universal: namely language and narrative. Language, for what culture exists that does not use a natural language, and narrative, for this is the first and foremost thing humans do with language. Indeed, much scientific thought has gone into the apparent fact that humans think and understand themselves and their world through the narrative form. 

Yet what can language and narrative teach us about morality? Can they even be the basis of a new philosophy? 

What do you think?

A Comment from RogerHub, Metastasized

A comment I began writing on a great post over at RogerHub kind of became too long-winded to politely dump in that man's comment section, so now it's going to live here. It even fits in with the focus of this blog!

Comment Transcript:
Just to add to this article from the point of view of someone who was educated in the liberal arts: technology is a sort of odd binary in the minds of most people: it is seen as savior and satan simultaneously. As in this blog post, anyone who stops to think about it long enough must inevitably conclude that technology's moral standing must necessarily be a reflection of its users.

That's where a lot of the fun in Science Fiction is - when technology is used in a plot to elevate the moral quandaries of characters to epic heights, or to make moral issues that seem unimportant to us now more concrete and pressing. When technology is presented as inherently good or evil, that's often when we lose interest in the story; such technologies seem like too much of a crutch propping up a certain decision (stories are always problems, and problems are always decisions).

Humans like verisimilitude in our stories (our "virtualizations" of other's lives, as you term them in another post). You can be as fantastic as you like, but on some level - literal or metaphorical - you have to jive with reality. So it should be no surprise we like it when technology simply magnifies the decisions of people (or other sorts of moral agents like intelligent robots, aliens, etc.); that's because this is basically how technology works in the real world.

So when you say "Progress exists indifferently: the problem is mankind. Science moves forward, yes, but humans don’t. We don’t mature. We just don’t learn, and this is why we have problems with technology." it is crux of the issue. The user is the reason technology seems two-faced. But what does it mean that the power technology grants us is being put into the hands of a proportionally ever-more inept species?  You do not give a rifle to a child, because although the child may choose between right and wrong, they are not as good at it as an adult, and most think the consequences too severe to risk allowing them to make a bad decision with such a technology. Some other people believe that even an adult is in no position to make proper moral choices with a firearm, and this debate rages in our society these days.

There is no technology for improving human moral decision-making; it's extremely doubtful that there ever could be, given how much of a premium we place on free will. Human beings seem to think that the good life can only be lived when they are free to make their own choices; look at the plot of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. This is considered dystopian fiction; a picture of a world in which technology is used to subjugate and control humans - drugs and epigenetic engineering are used to create individuals with certain moral capacities and inclinations. Few mature people would conceive of that world as ideal, yet it is essentially the gist of what any attempt to improve humans would look like - a removal of choice, of free will. A subversion of the good.

Technology isn't going to get us a solution to our moral quandaries; neither is Science. There is nothing particularly new to be discovered about what humans find moral and immoral; only changing fashion. Basically, however revolting it might at first seem to some, a technological society is in need of something like the solution in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End - something paternal, that is, which comes very close to being - perhaps even is - a religion.

However, we are in the process of abolishing religion from society, it seems - in part because of what it has to say about how technology should be used (stem cell research, abortion, etc.). Potential irony aside, there's only one further resolution to the conflict. When humans are removed from the equation and there's only mindless technology (true AI would just be a repeat performance in silicon), then technology will have at last had its apotheosis. Most people don't like the sound of that either; so conflict it is for us. We will never be at peace with technology, because we cannot be at peace with ourselves and our choices.

Semantics, Language, Cognition, and Science

This probably counts as more of a muse than a full-blown blog post, and I'm not going to go through the effort to link justifications, but there is a worm of a thought in my head that has to do with words and concepts like this:

• System
• Organism
• Taxonomy
• Species
• Category
• Delineation
• Group
• Individual 
• Discipline
• Narrative
• Metaphor

Even a crappy amateur of a Philosopher of Science such as myself knows that these words don't relate to any reality at all; that they mean nothing in the scheme of the universe. When we are talking about these words, we are talking about mental constructs - purely human, purely conceptual, used for the way they simplify our thinking about something that resists cognition by pretending to unify and define a certain segment of the unbroken swath of the fabric of reality. That metaphor is important to me - the fabric itself is essentially unbroken, but we look at the crest of a wrinkle in the cloth, which from our perspective looks like a line separating one part of the whole from the rest, and we say "ah, on this side the cloth is different from the other side." You can nitpick about it. You can say "well, the wrinkle itself is a real aspect of the cloth, so we are talking about something real after all." But it happens in science (and in bed-making) all the time: the closer you get to the wrinkle (the better to inspect it), the less and less it looks like a wrinkle as your perspective changes. It might as well be an axiom that the better you understand a subject, the more and more it starts to look like a part of other related subjects - until, in the final estimation, it all comes down to brute physics, and perhaps even math. 

It also goes without saying - but is worth reiterating for effect - that this goes very deep. Down to the most infinitesimal aspects of our understanding of physics: everything is energy, made only apparently different by entropy and space. Up to the grandest cosmological viewpoint: Our universe may well be part of a single infinite multiverse. Difference is purely the cognitive short-cut our minds take in order to perceive the world in a timely fashion. 

So what. So reality is actually an un-individuated, atomic totality - who cares? We seem to be able to actually learn a semblance of truth about the universe from flawed perception; science delivers repeatable results; God's in his heaven and all's well with the world. Yet I think some fascinating things follow from this line of thinking. More trivially: it reinforces the notion that what we discover through science is not reality per se, but rather a stochastic revelation about a certain perception of reality, given other perceptions. This was already essentially made clear via quantum physics at the latest (but could have perhaps been arrived at earlier had more attention been paid to the philosophy of science). It's trivial because it has little to do with what we care about (i.e. we only care about adequately predicting that which we can perceive to begin with), but it does serve to set us on the right path about what we expect science to tell us and how it will tell it to us. 

Less trivially, I think it teaches us to look at our language and its semantics as a potential source of difficulty in doing science. In English and Spanish at the very least (the two languages I know the most about), the very structure of the language works by using "systems thinking" to represent aspects of the reality it is trying to describe; that is, it breaks reality up into chunks that are used in the language as though they were discrete units, separate from the rest of reality. For example, I talk about my ingrown big toenail as though it can be understood separate from my body; it is part of a discrete limb. But this toe is only being discussed because it is causing the rest of my body pain, for it is connected to my body by my leg, and because my body is connected to a world in which various forms of infectious disease live, because it also contains enough living things in it to sustain populations of these diseases, because it has an environment that can sustain these living things, and so on ad nauseam. How does it make sense to call it a toenail, when you can't even understand everything about it unless you consider it as part of a larger system, which itself must literally be infinite in scope before the toenail can be understood completely?

More seriously, think of ants and humans as a biologist would. There are biologists out there who would call an ant hive a superorganism; that is, it is an organism that is composed of smaller pseudo-organisms. Pseudo-organisms, they might argue, because a worker ant or a queen ant by itself does not actually fit the definition of an organism - it cannot maintain homeostasis or reproduce without its compliments in the ant hive. Nobody calls a human a pseudo-organism that is just a cog in a superorganism, though - even though humans as they exist today cannot, for the most part, maintain homeostasis or reproduce without society for help. A tiger could - tigers need no tiger friends. But then even a tiger is unable to reproduce or maintain homeostasis without some help from at least a few unfortunate goats now and again. Or from another angle still - what would the tiger be without his eye cells? What would the tiger's eye cells be without his brain cells or his gastrointestinal cells? Well, the tiger would certainly not be an organism; perhaps a superorganism, though. So? So this is all semantic; so what! How we break it down is arbitrary; where the line between one word's meaning and another's is wholly arbitrary so long as what we mean is conveyed properly! 

"So long as what we mean is conveyed properly." That is the kernel of the whole problem. It is very, very difficult to keep track of all the things we mean when we use "systems thinking." We talk about an organism as though that word allows us to think of it differently from a solar system, but both maintain a certain kind of homeostasis, and both grow, reproduce, and die (not necessarily in that order). So what if, in our false conception of separation between the notions of galaxies and game birds, we lose out on a revelation for one that is perfectly applicable, yet not applied because discovered in "another" discipline?     

But Adam, I ask myself, why did you belatedly tack on "narrative" and "metaphor" to the list of words that lead you here? Because these are more tools we use to simplify our perceptions for ourselves; a narrative is a pattern that we use to break up chunks of time into discrete units with causal chains running from their beginning to their end, and a metaphor is a way of understanding something by simply saying that it shares properties with another thing, as if it were possible for two things to be actually different from each other; devoid of connections that influence both ends of the metaphor, however raggedy and attenuated, like some literary form of quantum entanglement. 

Basically, humans do science in spite of all the most-used tools in their language toolkit, near as I can tell, yet it's not clear that any science could be done without language (at least, no science of any use to us!). That paradox is fascinating, but it took so long to arrive at that any further consideration will have to wait until another post. 

Of course, if anyone has gotten so lost on the internet as to wind up here, and they think they can add to the idea, then please do. This is the current limit of what I have consciously perceived.

The New Mysterian Myth

"Our internal computers are powerful but unknowable."

Read this on an unrelated site, coming from the mouth of a reporter. Is New Mysterianism actually a popular "pop" neuroscience hypothesis these days? I find it inane to conceive that the brain somehow is incapable of understanding a system as complex as itself - when has that ever been the case in any other discipline - who would say that the endocrine or the lymphatic systems are too complex for the brain to understand, for example? What is the objective measure of complexity, really? And even if the complexity of the brain is such that human scientists had difficulty understanding it, can't we summarize our knowledge of portions of the brain such that we can preserve knowledge of all its essential functions using models that are simpler than the natural reality?   


Of course I may be putting words in the mouth of the author of this line. Maybe they mean that the brain is unknowable for other reasons. It would be more plausible to think that the brain is unknowable because of the type of thing that it is, perhaps. One could argue that there are sorts of things in this universe that the human mind is not particularly suited to understand, and it could be a cosmic irony that our own CNS falls into one of those areas. Still, the power of metaphorical thinking is vast, and everywhere we look with science we seem to make progress. Perhaps these areas of expertise which are not amenable to human understanding are also unknown unknowns, so that even our ignorance is hidden from us, but human research is driven not by sighting down the easiest avenues of pursuit. Rather, our engine has always seemed to be necessity, as the cliche goes. 

I realize now that this post is actually somewhat tangentially related to its prior. We could conceivably measure rate of evolutionary change via changes in the complexity of organisms, but that would get us nowhere for a variety of reasons - the most pertinent of which is that complexity has no measure. Complexity can manifest as a function of the scale of inquiry - a simple baseball seems complex on the atomic level. Complexity can manifest as a function of the sort of inquiry - the baseball is chemically simple, but the physics of its trajectory and attitude from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove appear to be dynamical. 

(Probably Unoriginal) Hypothesis: complexity is not so much a property of things as it is a property of inquiries about those things. The brain is not complex, it is the degree to which we want to know it that is complex. Didn't Glieck say as much in his book on chaos, Chaos? 

Granted, that's chaos, but then chaos is intimately related to complexity. This much I do remember about that book. One, perhaps the one, objective way to measure the complexity of a thing (not the inquiry into it) is to look at how well you can reproduce the thing using abstracted patterns that describe it. This is not possible for all things; measuring how well a thing is reproduced is often only discernible by means that, it immediately becomes obvious, are essentially qualitative. Yet it is possible for some things; you could measure the complexity of a statistical model that way; by how closely its abstracted pattern reproduces an observed distribution.  

How you could ever measure the brain's complexity using that metric is beyond me. And how much of what we understand as humans is the same as the brain in this way? We don't understand the actualities of our surroundings; we don't have objective, un-biased/skewed/anthropocentric knowledge of our existence. That much (and only that much) of postmodernism is true. Yet we do science, and even beyond that, we execute simple heuristics that somehow tell us when the patterns and metaphors we use to represent our existence are close to the mark.  

The reason for that kind of bizarre ability is kind of simple, probably. And I think I've already touched on it here: The complexity of the universe we interact with is tamped down by our physical size, our mental limitations, etc. The arbitrary facts of our existence determine a sort of baseline for us to work against, which has made it much easier to apply metaphors and patterns to the universe that model it (the way we experience it) pretty well. Think how much more intuitive newtonian physics are than quantum physics. It's when we are able to gain insight into scales and ways of looking at things which are not normal for humans that it gets difficult; our pattern-making and metaphor-jumping starts to get messy. Not impossible, but a more difficult grade. It would be a mistake to call this hill a cliff, as the New Mysterians do.
I have no idea of the worth of this concept, but one thought does now occur to me. It serves the wonderful purpose of making epiphenomenalists look silly. They seem to have lost their ability to fight with the pantheists in their effort to exclude consciousness from the Great Causal Chain, as it were.  

Postscript: While I'm on the topic of the brain, I might as well write down something I was thinking about. My head is exploding right now, which is not a good sign (it's another one of those subtle indicators that tells me I'm far out of my depth), but I wonder whether it is wise to confine attribution of sentience to living things only. A rock is not alive; how do we know it has no experience? Nagel asked "what is it like to be a bat?" I want to ask "what is it like to be a rock?" Isn't this something practically religious and unscientific? Well it may be, but then the skeptics, so abhorrent of the unproven that they revile conscious sentience as an "epiphenomenon" are basically giving this illogical idea a helping hand. To call sentience consciousness an epiphenomenon only strengthens this pseudo-religious idea of "pansentience," let's call it. If it has no effect on the brain, conscious experience could just be something that all matter does, stuck in a non-causal loop off to the side of everything else, generated by, but not itself generating, anything at all. Maybe we're just the only lumps of stuff in this big lump of stuff we call the world to emergently gain the ability and the will to communicate our consciousness and make it known to others. How would a rock do that? Would it even want to do that? Does this mean that when we die our conscious experience does not go away, but rather undergoes a transformation? Was our birth into this world the opposite reaction? 

Seems to have at least one good use going for it - pansentience makes the epiphenomenalists look like goobers. When you completely sideline conscious experience, you make it impossible to find evidence of absence in something like a rock. That rock might be experiencing things, but you'll never know, because its experience never has anything to do with anything you might observe!

  

Google+ Post Becomes Worthy of Archival

After writing this post on Google+, I felt the need to publish it here, as a sort of archive so that I could come back to some of the ideas within as a mine for fiction, non-fiction, or simply a good line at a cocktail party:

Rate of evolutionary change is a complicated concept because, at some level, you're trying to collapse a variegated gene pool into a single entity that can then be measured by the amount we perceive it to be different from its predecessors. Is that measurement to be phenotypic? Genetic? A combination of both? If you just measure genetics you end up ignoring the fact that a whole lot of change can occur to "junk DNA" or mitochondrial/commensals DNA without noticeably changing the organism. If you just do phenotype then you're going to miss changes that might result in speciation without phenotypical changes. Doing both requires you to come up with some kind of weight distribution that basically, as far as I can tell, is determined by your arbitrary bias. 

A species can go a very long time without experiencing noticeable change or significant speciation if it experiences no bottlenecks or separations, but this is not to say that its gene pool is not diversifying or converging greatly. Similarly, a species at a bottleneck event may very quickly speciate, but its difference from the progenitor who survived the bottleneck may be little.

At the root of this problem is the issue that we don't have a clear definition for what "species" means. Reproductive compatibility isn't a binary equation, genes intermingle in an astonishing number of ways, and in general the problem is just very difficult: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem

Speciation is, after all, a human attempt to define a natural system that could not possibly care less. From one extreme point of view, everything on earth is a single species, while from another extreme each genetically unique sibling is a separate species from its fellows. The need to keep researchers employed and the improvement of measuring technologies ensures that science will continue to tend toward the latter extreme, allowing new species to be discovered all the time. After all, it's ultimately just a question of how minutely you wish to split the hairs on evolution's hoary back.

Needless to say, the same may apply to all cultural artifacts (language, technology, etc.), and of course even to the strata of the universe (differentiation of matter, energy, vacuum, etc.). This kind of cuts to the heart of science while preserving the usefulness of the body, in an odd sort of way.

Politics of the Science-Fictive Future: Or, what a "Futurist" Wants from the Republicans

This election year, many have been quick to note that Romney and the Republicans lost at least in part because they are no longer speaking  to a demographic (white males) capable of winning them the election. I think these pundits may be on to something, but I don't think the same will be true four years down the road, when that party will be presented with a far more equal shot at the White House. The pundits reason that the conservative values held by white males aren't views shared by the growing majority of america that is not white or not male or both, but I think these commentators don't get that it's not the whiteness or the maleness of the demographic that gives it its conservative bent.

The white male gets his generic conservative attitude from working in a system that supports him. He doesn't want it to change because for him, it works. Instead of innovating the government's policies, he would take the more cautious approach of working within the lines as they already exist, because they seem well-drawn to a cohort that has benefitted from their delineation (such as him). That, not fiscal responsibility or religiosity, is the core of the conservative ideal. There is actually much to like in such an ideal, even for people whom the system has not thus far made ascendant: stability, assurance in the knowledge that it has worked for others and could be made to work for you, the advantages of familiarity, the perpetuation of rightly-honored traditions, etc. These aspects will also appeal to the section of the majority that also sees itself as on top, as working within the system they were given to rise to the point they are at. It would be foolish to think that just because of race or gender they will somehow find the conservative ideal unattractive. 

They will not vote conservative, however, unless the party redefines itself by reimagining their take on this core value and abandoning some of the traditional trappings of that stance.

In the arena of social policy, they will need to eschew publicly-religious-based moral decision-making. This is not because basing moral choices on religious beliefs is wrong. In fact it is probably the only truly legitimate way to do it. The reason they need to avoid this, though, is that in a non-white male majority, they can't count on establishing a unifying religious vision; the new majority is going to be made up of a patchwork of nominal Catholics, a whole bunch of vying protestant sects, and ever-increasing number of the irreligious who are trying to base their morality on some kind of scientific ground or another. Thus, candidates wishing to appeal to this majority of minorities will need to appeal to the one thing most of them will have in common - the belief in a separation of church and state. It will be fine to mention that a candidate is religious, and to in actuality make decisions based on that candidate's own religious integrity, but the party and candidate must have a wholly secular justification thought up as well. It can be done; you can convincingly argue that abortion is wrong not just from a religious standpoint, but also from a scientific/philosophical standpoint, for example. The other basis for social policy in a new conservative party should be economic - a language of dollar bills that every American intuitively understands. Take a cue from the growing libertarian sentiment in this country - if weed and other drugs could be legalized and taxed to turn a profit, then they should be. Let the individual decide what is right for them if it only hurts them - a true conservative sentiment if there ever was one. This coming change is as inevitable as Prohibition's repeal was in the 30's - don't let the Democrats get the jump on this message. Couch it in terms of reacting to the situation as history dictates you should, thus enshrining the move as a move from the heart of your conservative ideal - the idea that we should act based on what we know already works. This will steal the show from the Democrats for the young electorate and truly move the debate about the war on drugs, our border, and the national debt forward into new and fruitful territory - all in a way that preserves your conservative ethos. 

In the arena of business and fiscal policy, the Republican party desperately needs to cease its big business protectionist tendencies and become the friend of the entrepreneur, the nascent Green Economy, and the Internet. Teddy Roosevelt was once a member of your ranks; this man is a ghost from your past whose policies are writ large in your political future. Nobody in America likes that we have businesses that are actually "too big to fail." Deregulate - stand for a more open economy so long as trusts and monopolies are not in play. Keep arguing for a smaller government - the nightmare of Greece's downfall is strong in our memories, or could be made strong - but be willing to compromise here (look to cut defense spending, foreign aid, and the postal service instead of healthcare policies, for example). The Green Economy will need some incentive to get started, but not as much or of the type that many Democrats think it will need if a conservative agenda of deregulating the economy and busting up the big  players is successfully pursued. Focus emphasis on the improvement of American industrial infrastructure via our Internet - bust up the cable companies, make sure Google and the rest are keeping the net neutral, and ensure it remains the wellspring of entrepreneurship that has made it so huge thus far. Divorce the party from SOPA and the RIAA as much as possible given recent history and use the idea that an economy driven by information technology will boom on a glut of FREE information. Stand against regulation of this most important of business sectors, and be ready to disagree with Democrats on the degree to which governments should have oversight into network traffic and censorship. Some of this does constitute an about-face for the party, but characterize the party and the candidates as disparate instead of united; show that the party candidates who uphold these and other policies are united in ideology but are willing to try to realize it in different ways. This will give the party's image some vitality and dynamism. Liberals will be forced to pay attention to each candidate instead of dismissing them as "Republican." Conservative voters will find the party more inclusive.

Where foreign policy is concerned, Republicans should foster a revolutionary approach with roots deep in American history. Americans are psychologically ready for an era of political (but not economic) isolationism. We should be the country with open borders for immigrants of all colors, with little cause to be involved in foreign conflicts or peacekeeping operations unless called to do so by NATO or the United Nations. The War on Terror can be fought via cunning realpolitik diplomacy with other nations, especially China and India, and by an expansion of the CIA, as we did during the Cold War. Propose to lead the free world by example and not by fiat. Make it clear the USA is looking for profitable business opportunities regarding our planet's climate change and the dawn of Peak Oil.

That last point brings us to the Republican party's relationship with science. The future of the world is one in which science and technology will make an ever-increasing impact, which makes intelligent and coherent use of these tools an imperative for any political party. The reality of Climate Change and humanity's role in it must be acknowledged, as must the possibility that peak oil is upon us. These two events constitute an enormous problem for our developing worldwide civilization, and the Republican party's relevance must consist in engaging with these realities instead of denying them. There are valid conservative approaches to this: focusing on conservation and renewal of natural resources as opposed to major terraforming initiatives, for instance, or championing nuclear power as a tried-and-true green technology with downsides that can be mitigated at a later date by human ingenuity. Actually coming around to the fact that we will need to cut back and be sustainable instead of a forever-expanding industrial revolution. Democrats are lacking in this area because they aren't putting enough emphasis on conservation and sustainable growth, and they tend to wrongly link their strategies to unhappy social policies, such as various forms of population control. They are surprisingly unable to mobilize social responses that Republicans could happily adopt; for instance, the victory gardens and DIY projects which characterized America's incredible response to the stresses of the Second World War could be used to greatly improve sustainable living in America, as would initiatives to move the middle class out of sprawling suburbs and into more densely-packed urban areas that made use of the extra space to create "green belts" in which the ongoing green revolution could develop in close proximity to the people. An emphasis on at-home production instead of reliance on imports would help us avoid the inevitable rise of costs in shipping that will attend the oil crisis in the years to come. American agriculture, manufacturing, and information technology should be bolstered with improved educational outreach to the millions of new immigrants more open borders would provide - these people should be turned into the newly-revitalized blue-collar class of the twenty-first century, ready to actually implement what we have the know-how to do. It is one thing to promote science and technology in our schools, but businesses today know that America's true lack in human resourcing is in the blue collar area. Science and technology are changing what blue collar looks like, but our preconceived notions of its inferiority are unfortunately not. Republicans should make life easy for high-tech blue collar workers, and help resurrect that kind of practical middle class.

America could benefit greatly from a Republican party that stands for the entrepreneur, the individualist, and the sustainable lifestyle. Some party members already have inklings of putting their feet through this door; Romney was really a moderate defeated because of being backed by a rabidly right-wing party that in all probability was the driving cause behind him saying some very unsavory things that voters (like me) just couldn't stomach. I suspect the same was true of McCain, the last time I voted for Obama. Obama is a great president, but it would be great to see a new kind of Republican the next election competing with whoever is tapped to succeed Obama. A Republican prepared to be competitive and radical - only in the sense that they are rethinking what always has made the conservative approach appealing. That Republican could stir up the new majority and do major good for the country and its world. In a future that looks to change our lives so much, so rapidly, we could all benefit from a powerful voice for conservative nation-building philosophy.