In response to mixed-up monsters

In response to Tim Morton’s post on chimerical monsters, some thoughts. 

One way to rework ecologists and others at ‘evolutionary purpose speak’ when they come out with some version of ‘x is to/for a’, is to change the ‘to/for’ into ‘that’, and the infinitive to third person present. So ‘one way to rework’ becomes ‘one way that reworks’.  The focus is then on one aspect of what x seems to us to do relative to a, without presuming any prior purposiveness.

Don’t know whether this can work with Aristotle, but it works with Attenborough at least for domestic consumption. Whatever he comments on does whatever it does that has whatever effects it has without doing it to have those effects. The kids shout ‘not to, that’. 

‘In Our Time’ this morning was a discussion about determinism with some quite eminent philosophers > http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z . The discussion rather skirted quantum entanglement.

One thing not explicitly addressed was the fare/fate of the anthropic principle, strong or weak, in a determinist but not teleological cosmos (actually determinism seems quite compatible with tautology).  The anthropic principle, weak or strong, acknowledged or not, seems to me to underlie and underpin all classical/conventional ecological and philosophical observation, so normalising anthropocentrism.  Anthropocentrism is inevitable, but it need neither be privileged as a perspectiveless perspective, nor disparaged as a species-culture-specific prejudice.  Instead we need a theory and model of experience and empathy in terms of quantum entanglement.

Strawson came really quite close to something somewhat similar to OOO (as did his father), in recognising the idea of free will as an entity of experience. Some development of this (like OOO) may potentially resolve the teleology of the strong version, in a sort of tautology that may enable quantum entanglement to mediate Munchausen’s trilemma.

NB Monster derives from monstrum portent or monster, from monere to warn.  Apparently it isn’t related to monstrance, from monstrare to show. 

Trying speech recognition

Now am using voice recognition to dictate my post. This is frustrating.  Not using headphones so picks up every sound and tries to make it into a word-very sweet, very obliging, not very effective.  It’s hard to know what to do.  It saves my wrists and fingers, but it’s so hard to use it.  There must be a solution.  I’m having to correct constantly, using my hands to cancel its responses to commands I didn’t make. I despair. 

experimenting with ergonomics

As any readers will know, my blog posts have been severely constrained and curtailed by exacerbation of chronic RSI, that started shortly after I started my first blog, into acute, after a couple of weeks of three blogs (and even though was writing less in posts in total, I think).

Himself has bought a comfort keyboard for himself, and I’m having a little try with it to see if it would help me at all. 

So how does this comfort keyboard work for me? well, better, a bit, I think, maybe, perhaps: actually, dunno yet, will have to do a good bit more typing to find out for sure what is the case.  Holding my hands downward while having my fingers dangle depends on my wrists being high enough that dangling fingers don’t seem likely to accidentally type, preventing which likelihood being the reason for raising my ring and little fingers.  But there’s a sort of diminishing returns here; the position that guarantees no accidental typing also prevents actual typing.  Ho hum.

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › The Goat Rodeo Complex/Difficult situation scale

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › The Goat Rodeo Complex/Difficult situation scale.   Hmmm…can see several useful and some seemingly useless bits here (the latter in the phrase ‘totally misaligned fundamental evolutionary cognitive biases’ – no such thing, only prior epistemic commitments).

The amazing all-pervasive perspectival parallax of anthropic perception and conception

There is no perspectiveless perspective.  Everything we sense reflects and represents and is reflected and represented in our species and culture specific sensing apparatuses and artefacts with their specific scopes and scales of reference. 

Take complexity, for example.  Apparent complexity, actual or abstract, is a function of scope > scape + scale > spect: perception and conception, reconciling experience past and present.  A mountain in itself, as a percept and concept, doesn’t seem particularly complex to perceive and conceive.  However, in its place within a range of mountains formed at a particular moment in time as a result of tectonic movement, as a site of past, present or potential volcanic activity , in its persona as a climbable peak as a set of faces and faults and flaws and ascent approaches, in its geoclimatic role as the boundary of a watershed, it acquires complexity as a content of complicated contextual conditions and constraints. 

Complexity as character emerges fractally in examination of experience across scopes and scales of scapes and spects.  All that complexity means is myriad multiply materially ‘meaningful’ materials mutually metabolically implicated, that may require to be disentangled so that their mutual material ‘meaningfulnesses’ might be discovered and displayed.  Complexity alludes to the complicated compressed compacted intricacies of apparent or assumed abstract and actual material implications of interactions to be disentangled, and is a function of large-scope spects of small-scale scapes.

Our apparatuses and artefacts enable us to see relatively large or small areas in relatively fine detail – relatively large or small compared to ourselves in our usual sensory lives – and we make sense of what we see by applying categories and classifications that are themselves entirely/merely aspects of the action of reconciling earlier experience with and of existing meanings to experienced emerging and potentially (re)merging meanings under examination.  This examination and attempted reconciliation of experiences is meaning-making and/as meaningfulness-making. 

On sensing sense

‘We see things, not as they are, but as we are’: a phrase credited to Anais Nin, and to Judaism.  How is it that we are? – That is, ‘as we are’ means what, in regard to ‘seeing things’?  We are sensing, seeking, making, sense-seeking-making mammalian multicellular metabolisms in membranes  with memories, with ‘sensing’ becoming ‘sense’ by iteration as material molecular metabolic meaning-fullness.  We make meaning, we mean.  Meaning-fulness is inherited-inherent so intendent in human beings, in human-being, in being human.  Humans see themselves as intelligent.  ‘Intelligence’ means simply ‘reading into’ and ‘choosing among’.  What is being read into and chosen among by humans is meaning and meanings and meaningfulness.  Minds are meaning-making means, media, modes, of the brains bodies bring forth.

Brains are presumably an excess of various environmental materials > metabolites that get deposited/reposited at the edge of our bodies.  This is the case with all structural aspects of bodies, if we look tautologically not teleologically.  So brains can be seen as accumulative fatty deposits at one end of our central spindle, that like fat deposits over the rest of our body turn out to continue live/life and contribute in various ways to our ongoing metabolism.   All aspects of our bodies can be considered from this happenstance position and perspective:  bones, skin, nerves, lungs, circulations (NB calling circulations systems may seem to perpetrate and perpetuate a teleological account into a tautological, unless a careful clear distinction of systemic from systematic is made).  All characteristic mammalian multicellular features can be seen as iterative depositions of metabolic by-products at the edges of cells/membranes, registering and replicating axis polymorphies of cellular metabolism including membrane-and/as memory-making in environmental conditions under metabolic constraints at mega-multicellular scales and scopes.

In this view DNA also can be seen as expressing a material memory of metabolic meaningfulness made by metabolising in species-specific patterns of cellular metabolic processing in particular material environments.  Genes become tautological/ly emergent by-products of metabolism, rather than as currently seen, an essential/ly teleological morphic blueprint to be realised in metabolism, as in the central modern dogma, genes copy only one way.  Instead, the entire material-molecular metabolic-morphic meaning-making membrane-memory medium-mode could be seen as fractal iterations with fracted itinerations of a central tendency or propensity to sense sense in experienced iterations.  The issue then is one of making the sense we sense consistent across senses, on the grounds that that is not only likely to be how it is, but actually how it is, that is, it is experienced iterations and the experience of iterations that we experience in fracted degrees of similarity and familiarity despite variability as sensed sense, our intendent ‘essence’ and the essence of all the entities that emerge to our experience from our environment of as yet unattended-to sensed sense.

Of course, this account is me/my making meaning out of metabolising existing meanings, metabolising my current meaning environment, sensing and attending to emerging aspects of all the meanings in my experience, seeking a view, a position – procept, prospective, proscape, prospect – through and by which to reconcile and resolve parallaxes.

(Next: How meaning-making works might be something like this…)

Trigger finger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trigger finger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  Among symptoms of acute RSI that are making it difficult and painful to post at present.

Cambridge Journals Online – Search Results

Cambridge Journals Online – Search Results BBS issue on empathy, as potential antidote to most recent issue on deception/self-deception.

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global: Amazon.co.uk: Ursula K Heise: Books

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global: Amazon.co.uk: Ursula K Heise: Books.  A really important aspect is the recognition that awareness and awareness of awareness are artefacts of our species’ apparatuses, with ourselves appearing in our own images as archetypes, anthropic principle writ large/bold. Will try to post more by voice., typing hurts.