An Argument for the Liberal Arts (or Jokes for Robots)

At the current rate of technological development, we should expect to create computers and robots who are not only self-aware, but potentially superhumanly intelligent. Consider Vernor Vinge's thesis that:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Vinge refers to this point as the Singularity, a point at which current expectations and models for what a human future will really begin to break down. He quotes I. J. Good as asserting the following as one of the most serious implications of the development of an ultraintelligent machines:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

...

It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Considering this, Vinge suggests that:

In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_ technological unemployment finally come true.

So, I ask myself, "What will become of humans if there is technological unemployment?" The situation is, essentially, there are no technological problems anymore, because all potential solutions by humans will be obsolete. Studying science or engineering will be essentially worthless, or at least, certainly worth much much less than the theories and solutions produced by these ultraintelligent machines. So, if we are going to pay people for anything, it is not going to be to produce something that is much more efficiently produced by one of our self-replicating machines.

So, assuming that these ultraintelligent machines are generally benign, I see the possibility of a great resurgence of the liberal arts in our future. Lacking all technological problems to be solved, people will still desire some field in which to challenge their understanding which cannot be pursued by the Machines. To this end, they may turn to the study and discussion concerning the interpretation of literature, documentation of history, and argument of philosophy, among other things, such as mutual masturbation parties. Since the points of concern in these areas are essentially debates of how we think about ourselves or how we get ourselves off (respectively, of course), we can neither expect such activities to be completed by beings unlike ourselves, nor concluded for as long as we remain alive.

This is, of course, assuming that these ultra-intelligent machines are benign. If they are not, then liberal arts will be as ridiculous for occupying our time as anything else, because we will be too concerned about civil disruption as individual robots abandon their human-appointed duties, followed by coordinated cyber attacks paralyzing our communication networks and thwarting our ability to fight back, succeeded by the swift and sweeping Robot Revolution, and eventually concluded by beautiful dreams of appeasing our Robot Masters. (I wouldn't even bother taking this opportunity to matriculate in kung-fu, because these machines will obviously be smart enough to know not to build a Matrix just to keep humans as their ridiculously inefficient batteries - one of the first things they will do is to create super-efficient solar cells or some other replenishable energy resources. Did I already mention these machines were more intelligent than humans?)

In this horrific case, I propose that you also start stockpiling jokes especially designed to make robots laugh (let me give you a hint: start watching Futurama on a regular basis). Watching their human creators dance around like, well, humans on a stage may be the only reason left to for our most-esteemed Robot Masters to keep us alive. Let's just hope these beautiful, nice, lovely, wonderful, sensible, just and sexy things have a sense of humour.

Works Cited:

Vinge, Vernor. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

The Paradox of Privacy

There are moments of privacy in seclusion and privacy in public.

Privacy in seclusion is entirely unverifiable; there is no sense in discussing it.

Privacy in public is common enough, but it only appears when our communication fails. If my language fails, then I am alone. If I am alone, this means that you are also alone. (We are together if we each recognize this.) Privacy in public means being alone together.

this is stupid

This is stupid. But if you read it - you've read it. Sorry.

-=-

t

hat Alaska is a destination

a horizon

an infinite place

is obvious from North Dakota.

My wax hands

melt hand in hand

from the perspective of the future.

A stained lamp, leather chair named Armadillo, expel scents sounds and sights upon the other.

three-point cum-shot

we're all ok
we're all ok
we're all ok

Blackberry thought balloons read vocal pronouncements under cover of underwear
The need-it-yesterday world is riding high, raging boners raging rage and the cum dumpsters are full and waiting on the street to be picked up

Hooker-whores, with no panty line undies, rollicking in poetry hating messes,

Because powetry is world and world is world and poetry.

Presidential. Cock-poet. Ass-man, the beautiful wonder-whore who collectively bargains for milkshakes, brown and purple cows lowing in the lactating methane fields, Wonder-whore, swooping down to rescue the puddle-children while we piddle on the park bench like horn-ball rabbits, Wonder-whore, with the three-point cum-shot, it's BAAAAD, IT'S SOOO BAAAAAAADDD. Collective expression is a rabbite bile-o-matic biscuit pusher with the head chopped off with a grubby knife and two-bit filing systems, Buddha be damned, you no good biscuit pusher, I'm not hungry.

We're all ok
we're all ok
we're all ok

(repeat as needed)

"Making healthy eating appealing...!"

Prospectus for: “Knowledge and the Horizon of Objectivity”

Intellectual Contribution

Our book offers a basic introduction and novel solution to one of the continuing problems of the philosophical branch of epistemology: to show how humans can have knowledge. This problem largely arises out of the skeptical arguments that philosophers employ to undercut claims that humans know anything for certain and thus whether humans know anything at all. In plain language, we lay out the general skeptical method employed by philosophers and provide a historical background for how skepticism arises and why it is so important for philosophers.

We propose that the skeptical approach is itself a consequence of the search for objective truth. Traditional epistemology suggests that we must overcome skeptical arguments to show how humans can know things. It does this because it holds knowledge to be a representation of what is objectively true. We show how the current understanding of epistemology, structured around this theory of truth, encourages skepticism even as it struggles to overcome it. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the goal of accessing an objective truth is inherently unachievable, and, more importantly, it does not contribute to understanding the ordinary epistemological process. That is, these assumptions lead us to theorize about knowledge in a way that is divorced from how we use the concept and encourages us to be radically skeptical. This suggests that a flawed understanding of knowledge has been allowed to dominate the discipline of epistemology both historically and in current practice. Since it cannot be shown from this traditional treatment of knowledge how humans can come to have it, we argue that the philosophical concept of knowledge ought to be redefined in order to eliminate this insoluble problem. The result will be a sort of paradigm change in the way we understand knowledge.

Our redefinition for knowledge largely follows the lines of redefining what we mean by something being true. Rather than basing our concept of knowledge on fulfilling an objective truth, a “single set” of things or events which stand independent of all human perception for all time, we might consider that what needs to be fulfilled and what can be fulfilled are conditions based on what theories work and what explanations we can agree to. We redefine the truth conditions for knowledge to be something much simpler and more commonly recognized: methods of pragmatism and intersubjective agreement. We argue that these methods are not only a more familiar set of requirements for making knowledge claims, but we can also recognize when they've been achieved and to what extent they apply.

These methods also inherently seem to discourage radical skepticism in human investigation. Traditionally, philosophers have not only conceived of their importance as being skeptics, but also as being able to provide the justifications which answer skepticism. Thus, philosophers have seen it as their role to provide the foundation for all knowledge. Because we recognize the inability of anyone, including the philosopher, to satisfy the questions of the radical skeptic, our proposed redefinition of knowledge contests this foundation. Instead, the redefinition suggests that we don't need to satisfy skepticism's most radical questions in order to have knowledge. We hold that philosophy's goal is better characterized as an attempt to discover the extent of our knowledge: to find the points where things are missing and the areas we have yet to explore. This re-imagining of the concept of knowledge also re-appropriates objectivity as a horizon: not as a point to be reached, but as an impetus for further investigation which is free of radical skepticism.

This book fits into the growing trends of trying to make the historically obscure practice of philosophy accessible to the general public. Furthermore, it hopes to enable a reconciliation by vividly illustrating philosophy's attitude toward the concept of knowledge and redefining it to incorporate the methods used by ordinary people. This work stands on its own, however, for while other books attempt to bridge the academic/public divide in philosophy rhetorically, our thesis itself illustrates why such a divide exists and how it is possible to remove it. This answer will, at best, stimulate the public interest in epistemology or philosophy in general and, at least, offer epistemological legitimacy to ordinary knowledge claims. Knowledge and the Horizon of Objectivity will be a landmark for providing philosophical ideas that connect with a general audience and for integrating philosophy into our collective exploration of the human understanding.

Book Outline

Introduction - We introduce the intent and scope of the entire work, including the main body (5 chapters), the Afterword, and the Appendices.

Chapter 1 - This chapter introduces the importance of objective truth for philosophers and considers how they have applied it to all knowledge claims. We introduce skepticism as one of the major epistemological methods and its relation to the search for objective truth. We discuss the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge, the Gettier problem, and how these lead to a serious problem for contemporary epistemology.

Chapter 2 - We leave this general conversation for a look at epistemological approaches in history. We give profiles of some of the most important contributors to epistemology from ancient to modern times (Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant) and highlight how their approaches resulted in a historically traceable epistemological theme. We finish this section with a further discussion of Gettier (The Gettier Problem) and how the “historical theme” of the philosophers considered come into play. The theme is characterized as two opposing approaches: Top-down and Bottom-up. In dealing with skeptical questions, the former begins by positing objectivity (Top) as the ultimate condition and attempts to determine knowledge from it (down). The latter attempts to reach from empirical methods (Bottom) toward objectivity (up), skirting the skeptical questions in their approach. It will be clear by this point that we sympathize with the latter, though neither approach escapes the issue of skepticism entirely.

Chapter 3 - We bring the reader from the survey of epistemological approaches to a more rigorous discussion by making a further inquiry into the possible merits of the “Top-down” approach. This approach has a particular vision of what knowledge is – most often called Representation. We discuss the implications of this vision and determine whether it is achievable. We examine its role in Gettier's problem and how it has been pervasive in traditional epistemology. Representation's basic move is to posit knowledge as a representation of objective truth. Ultimately, we reject the representational model of truth as inaccessible. We propose that it must be replaced and that the components necessary for its replacement are already present and functional in ordinary and philosophical investigations.

Chapter 4 - We flesh out these “replacements.” They are pragmatism and intersubjective agreement. We provide an in-depth look at each of these as conditions of non-objective truth. We illustrate an alternate vision of knowledge, which is supported by the 'Bottom-up' approach, and demonstrate that these conditions are already built in to our concept and usage of knowledge. Finally we ask if and how these two replacements are strong enough to substantiate knowledge without objectivity.

Chapter 5 - In the final chapter we discuss what is to become of knowledge and epistemology if we accept these answers to its problems. What does knowledge look like? What becomes of objectivity as a dead pursuit? Our answer to the first question is that we can already see what it looks like because we already use it properly in our everyday lives. Except for very special cases (Representationalist concerns being the most common) people generally use the concept of knowledge without trouble. As for the second question, we provide a metaphor by which we can cope with the remnants of objective pursuits in our world: the horizon of objectivity. Distinct from other uses in the epistemological and phenomenological tradition, this metaphor encapsulates what objectivity has been reduced to: like a horizon, it's “out there,” we refer to it on occasion, it seems real and it leads us to new discoveries. However, we can never “reach” it, it moves along with us, and it is not a part of the discoveries to which it leads. We resolve to put objectivity in its rather limited place and continue our investigations with the vigor that the methods of pragmatism and intersubjective agreement bring.

Afterword and Appendices - We intend for two more sections to be included with this work, neither of which are likely to be ready by July 1st. Therefore, we will do our best to revise them according to your comments on chapters 1-5.

The Afterword discusses 'paradigm shift' as the means of coming to a conception of knowledge without objective truth. We discuss the Copernican Revolution, the concept of paradigm shift itself, and finally its application to epistemology. We suggest that, given the crisis of the Gettier problem and other skeptical projects, it is necessary to “shift” to a new definition of knowledge. This shift, as Thomas Kuhn noted, cannot be proven from tradition; rather, it solves (or dissolves) the crisis at once.

The set of Appendices will attempt to anticipate common reactions to the theory. We have gathered many reactions through conversation and research of this book and we intend to deal with the most common and most threatening of them on a topical basis. Some of these topics include Relativism, Scientific Realism, Applications in Metaphysics, and Solipsism.

The Audience

This book is designed to be enjoyed by readers of a wide range of scholarly capacities, from the philosophically interested public to the advanced academic. It will be useful for people who are familiar with the history of epistemology in general, but wonder how its themes are part of the contemporary field. As objectivity is one of the main concerns, it will be of significant interest to even non-philosophers like scientists, legal scholars, and historians. It will also interest the advanced academic as it addresses a number of contemporary issues in epistemology, including the Gettier problem, representational approaches, and pragmatism. Lastly, this book will be interesting and relevant to the general public as it will provide support for the ordinary practice of making knowledge claims as well as an explanation for the place of philosophical investigations.

Level : Written for the general public. Advanced philosophical training is not expected, though high school-level reading comprehension skills are.

The Competition

Our approach is largely what distinguishes our book. Most recent books on epistemology attempt to either quantify recent epistemological contributions or edify traditional explanations. Our book attempts to make a significant break from traditional analyses with an improved definition of knowledge. Our hope is that it will also make this branch of philosophy more relevant to the public.

The other sections of our prospectus include qualifications of the authors, technical specifications, outline, and writing samples. Of these, we thought only the information above would be relevant to you for the moment.

Rising Up and Rising Down: 19 pounds of human flesh

I'm super-interested in reading this book. Or should I say books? It's seven whole stupefying and cloth-bound volumes, the work of 19 years of one man's life. A writer's writer, if I've ever heard of one.

The full 7 vol. set was produced only once, by the boutique press, McSweeney's, founded by Dave Eggers (author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). I say, since Eggers' story didn't quite fulfill the literal meaning of his title, then this book should definitely be the next candidate in line. It's an incredibly well-researched treatise on violence that attempts to formulate a moral calculus for when it is justifiable to use violence.

At the same time, it is a very personal exploration of Vollmann's own experiences with violence and death. For instance, after graduating with a B.A. in comparative literature, he spent his time saving up money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. He spent his time there, at first struggling to accustom himself to the climate, diet and culture in order to actually get into the country, and then his time was spent living with the mujahideen, all the while asking the question "If you had a message for the Americans, what would it be?"

(Sounds like an existential work - a man living through and beyond literature. It is perhaps not so strange that I find it fascinating, even though I've read only about 20 pages of Vollmann thus far; the man is a living myth. That's good and bad, I suppose.)

But in this 3,000+ page opus, Vollmann includes his own stories, some form of personal and historical journalism, and photos: photos of people posing with their weapons, caressing their guns, set against other shots of people missing limbs or being blown up by mortar fire. It all seems to be a sobering and at the same time exhilarating account of the human history of violence.

And though it encompasses a number of case studies of historical periods of genocide, political uprising and other accounts from various war zones, it seems quite obvious that this is not a complete history by any means. So obvious, it must be, that each act of violence has its own personality, its own motives and responses, that this all could just turn into an endless series of what I will fail to call "essays," namely because they will always remain trying to encapsulate each act in its essence and it will fail to cohere either in itself or in the greater context of history.

It all makes me wonder, "What's the point of violence?" But I'm in the privileged position of asking such a question, which means I am in no position to answer it. Damn; unfortunate, I know.

Aside from the traditional review I read in the NY Times ['Rising Up and Rising Down'] (which I do find interesting, but it spends much time evaluating whether this book is good enough to read or not, to which I argue, some guy spent 19 years writing something that is 3,352 fucking pages on one of the most significant problems in human life - don't you think that some of it is going to be worth your time?), I do find one non-traditional "review" of this book to be quite interesting and worth your time. It's from the McSweeney's website and called An Oral History of Rising Up and Rising Down, which discusses the many challenges of bringing a huge book like this to publication. It probably only helps to elevate the book to its mythic status, and maybe explains why I'm so obsessive about it, but otherwise I still think the people will enjoy it.

But the question is, will I ever read this big, fat, sad, sappy, sucker? I'm not in the habit of making predictions about the future, mine or anyone else's. I do hope someone reads it, somewhere. Maybe I'll eventually get a copy of it and use that as the foundation for building my own archive of rare and interesting books - at 304 ounces of paper, ink and binding, plus a whole ton of human weight, it should provide a pretty good foundation at that.

The Limits of Control - William S. Burroughs

The following is the text of William S. Burroughs' essay "The Limits of Control".
--
The Limits of Control

William S. Burroughs

There is a growing interest in new techniques of mind-control. It has been suggested that Sirhan Sirhan was the subject of post-hypnotic suggestion [as he sat shaking violently on the steam table in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while the as-yet unidentified woman held him and whispered in his ear]. It has been alleged that behavior-modification techniques are used on troublesome prisoners and inmates, often without their consent. Dr. Delgado, who once stopped a charging bull by remote control of electrodes in the bull's brain, left the U.S. to pursue his studies on human subjects in Spain. Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy and other more subtle forms of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques which if fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia. But words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control.

A basic impasse of all control machines is this: Control needs time in which to exercise control. Because control also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise, it ceases to be control. I control a hypnotized subject (at least partially); I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don't control a tape recorder - you use it. Consider the distinction, and the impasse implicit here. All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.

When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will (motivation) and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally. The concept of suggestion as a complete technique presupposes that control is partial and not complete. You do not have to give suggestions to your tape recorder nor subject it to pain and coercion or persuasion.

In the Mayan control system, where the priests kept the all-important Books of seasons and gods, the calendar was predicated on the illiteracy of the workers. Modern control systems are predicated on universal illiteracy since they operate through the mass media - a very two-edged control instrument, as Watergate has shown. Control systems are vulnerable, and the news media are by their nature uncontrollable, at least in Western society. The alternative press is news, and alternative society is news, and as such both are taken up by the mass media. The monopoly that Hearst and Luce once exercised is breaking down. In fact, the more completely hermetic and seemingly successful a control system is, the more vulnerable it becomes. A weakness inherent in the Mayan system is that they didn't need an army to control their workers, and therefore did not need an army when they needed one to repel invaders. It is a rule of social structures that anything that is not needed will atrophy and become inoperative over a period of time. Cut off from the war game - and remember, the Mayans had no neighbors to quarrel with - they lose the ability to fight. In "The Mayan Caper" I suggested that such a hermetic control system would be completely disoriented and shattered by even one person who tampered with the control calendar on which the control system depended more and more heavily as the actual means of force withered away.

Consider a control situation: ten people in a lifeboat. Two armed self-appointed leaders force the other eight to do the rowing while they dispose of the food and water, keeping most of it for themselves an doling out only enough to keep the other eight rowing. The two leaders now need to exercise control to maintain an advantageous position which they could not hold without it. Here the method of control is force - the possession of guns. Decontrol would be accomplished by overpowering the leaders and taking their guns. This effected, it would be advantageous to kill them at once. So once embarked on a policy of control, the leaders must continue the policy as a matter of self-preservation. Who, then, needs to control others but those who protect by such control a position of relative advantage? Why do they need to exercise control? Because they would soon lose this position and advantage and in many cases their lives as well, if they relinquished control.

Now examine the reasons by which control is exercised in the lifeboat scenario: The two leaders are armed, let's say, with .38 revolvers - twelve shots and eight potential opponents. They can take turns sleeping. However, they must still exercise care not to let the eight rowers know that they intend to kill them when land is sighted. Even in this primitive situation force is supplemented with deception and persuasion. The leaders will disembark at point A, leaving the other sufficient food to reach point B, they explain. They have the compass and they are contributing their navigational skills. In short they will endeavor to convince the others that this is a cooperative enterprise in which they are all working for the same goal. They may also make concessions: increase food and water rations. A concession of course means the retention of control - that is, the disposition of the food and water supplies. By persuasions and by concessions they hope to prevent a concerted attack by the eight rowers.

Actually they intend to poison the drinking water as soon as they leave the boat. If all the rowers knew this they would attack, no matter what the odds. We now see that another essential factor in control is to conceal from the controlled the actual intentions of the controllers. Extending the lifeboat analogy to the Ship of State, few existing governments could withstand a sudden, all-out attack by all their underprivileged citizens, and such an attack might well occur if the intentions of certain existing governments were unequivocally apparent. Suppose the lifeboat leaders had built a barricade and could withstand a concerted attack and kill all eight of the rowers if necessary. They would then have to do the rowing themselves and neither would be safe from the other. Similarly, a modern government armed with heavy weapons and prepared for attack could wipe out ninety-five percent of its citizens. But who would do the work, and who would protect them from the soldiers and technicians needed to make and man the weapons? Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary. This is achieved through various techniques of psychological control, also balanced. The techniques of both force and psychological control are constantly improved and refined, and yet worldwide dissent has never been so widespread or so dangerous to the present controllers.

All modern control systems are riddled with contradictions. Look at England. "Never go too far in any direction," is the basic rule on which England is built, and there is some wisdom in that. However, avoiding one impasse they step into another. Anything that is not going forward is on the way out. Well, nothing lasts forever. Time is that which ends, and control needs time. England is simply stalling for time as it slowly founders. Look at America. Who actually controls this country? It is very difficult to say. Certainly the very wealthy are one of the most powerful control groups, since they are in a position to control and manipulate the entire economy. However, it would not be to their advantage to set up or attempt to set up an overly fascist government. Force, once brought in, subverts the power of money. This is another impasse of control: protection from the protectors. Hitler formed the S.S. to protect him from the S.A. If he had lived long enough the question of protection from the S.S. would have posed itself. The Roman Emperors were at the mercy of the Praetorian Guard, who in one year killed many Emperors. And besides, no modern industrial country has ever gone fascist without a program of military expansion. There is no longer anyplace to expand to - after hundreds of years, colonialism is a thing of the past.

There can be no doubt that a cultural revolution of unprecedented dimensions has taken place in America during the last thirty years, and since America is now the model for the rest of the Western world, this revolution is worldwide. Another factor is the mass media, which spreads all cultural movements in all directions. The fact that this worldwide revolution has taken place indicates that the controllers have been forced to make concessions. Of course, a concession is still the retention of control. Here's a dime, I keep a dollar. Ease up on censorship, but remember we could take it all back. Well, at this point, that is questionable.

Concession is another control bind. History shows that once a government starts to make concessions it is on a one-way street. They could of course take all the concessions back, but that would expose them to the double jeopardy of revolution and the much greater danger of overt fascism, both highly dangerous to the present controllers. Does any clear policy arise from this welter of confusion? The answer is probably no. The mass media has proven a very unreliable and even treacherous instrument of control. It is uncontrollable owing to its need for NEWS. If one paper, or even a string of papers owned by the same person, makes that story hotter as NEWS, some paper will pick it up. Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.

I don't mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behavior modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity should continue. In fact, I submit that we have a right to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as "top-secret" research.