Author: Andi

Half of Autechre on intuition and will

“Disagreements only happen when you enter the conscious world, when you try to consider things.”

“Sometimes you have to accept that you’re a product of your environment and no matter what input you want to put into that environment, that’s just your personal taste, the culmination of all your influences, being creatively voiced one way or another, like a painter might do.”

“Some people are so tied up with the whole issue of understanding — they think you need to understand something in order to like it.”

“You don’t realise where routine and schedule become habits, and then become rules. […] It’s good sometimes to remove a lot of the conscious process.”

—Sean Booth, of Autechre, an interview, Wire (2008, March)

Particulars

“In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples…”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Fodor on evolution

Over the years, people keep proposing theories that go: “what everybody really wants is just …” (fill in the blank). Versions fashionable in their times have included: money, power, sex, death, freedom, happiness, Mother, The Good, pleasure, success, status, salvation, immortality, self-realization, reinforcement, penises (in the case of women), larger penises (in the case of men), and so on. The track record of such theories has not been good; in retrospect they often look foolish or vulgar or both. Maybe it will turn out differently for “what everybody really wants is to maximize his relative contribution to the gene pool”. But I don’t know any reason to think that it will, and I sure wouldn’t advise you to bet the farm.

—spotted over here in an old Mindhacks post.

Protection

I like this, but the analogy is a bit… crude.

“Zoos display an irresistible passion for the preservation of endangered species. A number of these are being protected, later to be released back into the wild. In the meantime, however, ‘the wild’ has disappeared! It is the same with human beings: ideally, they are recycled in human isolation cells (thalassotherapy, psychoanalysis, luxury health clubs, hospitals or asylums), and later released back into social life — in the meantime, however, the social environment has disappeared!”

—Jean Baudrillard, in Fragments

Weary?

“Discussions of minor problems in traditional logic are in these days generally regarded as a bore. They are commonly prefaced by an apology, and the people who chance to see such things in print, wearily remark, ‘Good Lord, yet another one!’ Such is the fashion. We are apt to forget that boredom is often the shadow cast by an enthusiasm; and that the wailing from him who is bored, is the complaint of one who can neither escape from, nor enter into, the interest which, for these very reasons, is to him so exasperatingly stale and unprofitable. This does not mean that all men are under a moral obligation to delight in what interests any one of them. But neither should the lone individual tremble at the possibility that what interests him may weary others. Rather let him state his interest plainly, and to those who fail to share it, wish a kindly ‘God speed’ as they depart.”

– Roelofs, H. D. (1927). The Distribution of Terms. Mind, 36, 281-291.

The phrase “in the interests of economic well-being”

Appears all over British government documents. This explains what it means, in a 2000 Commons committee debate on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill:

“There is the provision for action—the tasking of our intelligence agencies—in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom. Those who have followed these matters know that that is a well-worn provision. It is in existing legislation, and is provided for in the European Convention on Human Rights. It sometimes causes puzzlement as to what it can mean.

“Examples of where it might be useful are where there is instability in a part of the world where substantial British economic interests were at stake, or where there was a crisis or a huge difficulty about the continued supply of a commodity on which our economy depended.

“The House will notice that the Bill restricts the activities of the SIS and GCHQ for safeguarding the economic well-being of the country to the acts or intentions of persons outside the United Kingdom. […]

“The examples that Douglas Hurd gave are clear. One is coded speak for oil—

“the continued supply of a commodity on which our economy depended.“

A good way to think about truth

“My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role.”

Discourse & Truth, Concluding remarks by Foucault. (Spotted here.)

Science for the half-wits

A bit from Jean Yves-Girard‘s latest rant, The phantom of transparency:

Still under the heading « science for the half-wits », let us mention non monotonic « logics ». They belong in our discussion because of the fantasy of completeness, i.e., of the answer to all questions. Here, the slogan is what is not provable is false : one thus seeks a completion by adding unprovable statements. Every person with a minimum of logical culture knows that this completion (that would yield transparency) is fundamentally impossible, because of the undecidability of the halting problem, in other terms, of incompleteness, which has been rightly named : it denotes, not a want with respect to a preexisiting totality, but the fundamentally incomplete nature of the cognitive process.