Category: Ceci n’est pas une catégorie

Success

“This series of lectures on proof-theory is a priori dedicated to mathematicians and computer-scientists, physicists, philosophers and linguists ; and, since we are no longer in the XVI—not to speak of the XVIII—century, it is doomed to failure. […] This being said, plain success is not the only possible goal ; mine might simply be the exposition of a disorder in this apparently well-organised universe, in which logic eventually took its place between two beer mugs and the Reader’s Digest, and does not disturb, no longer disturbs—a sort of fat cat purring on the carpet.”

–Jean-Yves Girard, The Blind Spot

Serenity

“A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.”

— A letter from Wether (Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther)

Freedom Evolves?

Here are some quotations from Freedom Evolves which may help you decide whether you want to bother reading it (I enjoyed it).

“To say that if determinism is true, your future is fixed, is to say… nothing interesting. To say that if determinism is true, your nature is fixed, is to say something false. […] The confusion arises when one tries to maintain two perspectives on the universe at once: the ‘God’s eye’ perspective that sees past and future all laid out before it, and the engaged perspective of an agent within the universe.” (p. 93)

Another on different viewpoints:

“Population geneticists tend to shun all discussions of bodies, structures, and real-world events that somehow compose selection events and instead just talk about the effects on the gene pool of one hypothesized change or another. […] Imagine a tennis tournament in which contestants just strip to the buff and get carefully examined, pairwise, by sports doctors and coaches who vote on which of each pair advances to the next round, until a winner is declared. Population geneticists would appreciate the point of such strange practice, but would acknowledge that since the judges’ criteria ought to be grounded in the rough-and-tumble of actual play, it is better to let the players go at it and let their actual contests decide the winners. Still, they would insist, you don’t have to watch. [… W]e can stand back and just tabulate eventual winners and losers, but we mustn’t forget that the contests do go on. Thinking happens, and how thinking happens affects which memes do well.” (p. 188)

On Dennett’s choice of tactics:

“I see him [Daniel Wegner] as the killjoy scientist who shows that Cupid doesn’t shoot arrows and then insists on entitling his book The Illusion of Romanic Love. […] Wegner and I agree on the bottom line; what we disagree on is tactics. […] I prefer to make the same points by saying that no, free will is not an illusion; all the varieties of free will worth wanting are, or can be, ours—but you have to give up a bit of false and outdated ideology to understand how this can be so. Romantic love minus Cupid’s arrow is still worth yearning for. It is still, indeed, romantic love, real romantic love.” (pp. 224-225)

And this is lovely, from Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will:

“A voluntary action is something a person can do when asked.”

I’m not sure Dennett likes it, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some of the BS I’ve heard recently in a conference and read.

Protesting close to parliament

As you’re probably aware, to protest near parliament these days you have to ask for permission. Mark Thomas recently played around with this, seeing how the system worked…

Officer: Let’s have a look. What have you got here? You want a demonstration to defend Surrealism.

Mark Thomas: Yeah, I do. I can have a demonstration about anything I like.

O: Indeed you can. I just didnae know surrealism was under threat!

MT: It is.

O: How so?

MT: Because we have a government of paradox. We have a government that seeks peace through war and protects civil liberties by eroding them. This is a paradox. This is absurdism. Absurdism is the enemy of Surrealism. Ergo it is under attack.

O: I wish I’d never asked.

[Thanks James—and this gentleman for saving me typing]

The world is like a ride…

“The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, ‘Hey—don’t worry, don’t be afraid ever, because this is just a ride…’ And we … kill those people. Ha ha, ‘Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.’ It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because—it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”—Bill Hicks (You Tube here)

Logic and Reasoning: do the facts matter?

Had a read of Logic and reasoning: do the facts matter? by Johan van Benthem. Covers much ground in a short space and I found it thought provoking. Here’s a quick sketch of the bits I liked.

Van Benthem mentions the anti-psychologism stance, briefly the idea that human practice cannot tell us what correct reasoning is. He contrasts Frege’s view with that of Wundt; the latter, he argues, was too close to practice; Frege was too far. He argues that if logics were totally inconsistent with real practice then they’d be useless.

Much logic is about going beyond what classical logic has to offer and is driven by real language use. Van Bentham cites Prior’s work on temporal structure, Lewis and Stalnaker’s work on comparative orderings of worlds, work on generalised quantifiers which was driven by the mess of real language and for instance produced formalisations of quantifiers like most and few. Generally, van Bentham argues, “one needs to move closer to the goal of providing more direct and faithful mathematical renderings of what seem to be stable reasoning practices.” You want your logic to be more natural, closer to the phenomena. Conceptions of mathematical logic were driven by the terms that appeared in rigorous proofs, so the linguistic stuff is just widening the set of practices that are modelled.

Correctability in a logic is more important than correctness, he argues. This is consistent with the goals of the non-monotonic logic crowd I know and love. I find this most interesting when looking at individual differences in reasoning processes: perhaps a correctability dimension is out there somewhere, if only we could measure it and its correlates.

Divergences from competence criteria, he argues, suggest new practices. I still see many papers in which people are scored against classical logic. Failure should cause an attempt to work out what practice is being followed by a person rather than the more common concern of what went wrong and how we could bring people back.

Much more in this little paper…

Here, have a spot of Brecht

From In the Jungle of Cities:

Love, the warmth of bodies in contact, is the only mercy shown to us in the darkness. But the only union is that of the organs, and it can’t bridge over the cleavage made by speech. Yet they unite in order to produce beings to stand by them in their hopeless isolation. And the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes. If you cram a ship full to bursting with human bodies, they all freeze with loneliness.

From Baal:

EKART: There’s a kind of sky in my head, very green and vast, where my thoughts drift like featherweight clouds in the wind. They’re completely undecided in their course. All that’s inside me.

BAAL: It’s delirium. You’re an alcoholic. You see, it gets you in the end.

EKART: When I’m delirious I can feel it by my face.

BAAL: Your face has room for the four winds. Concave! [He looks at him.] You haven’t a face. You’re nothing. You’re transparent.

EKART: I’m growing more and more mathematical.

BAAL: Nobody knows your history. Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?

EKART: I shan’t ever have one. Who’s that outside?

BAAL: You’ve got a good ear! There’s something in you that you hide. You’re a bad man, like me, a devil. But one day you’ll see rats. Then you’ll be a good man again.

Group versus individual statistical predictions

Lovely article in the Guardian by Christine Evans-Pughe on how making statistical predictions about individuals is exceedingly tricky. Reports work by Hart, Michie, and Cooke (2007).  Abstract of the latter:

BACKGROUND: Actuarial risk assessment instruments (ARAIs) estimate the probability that individuals will engage in future violence. AIMS: To evaluate the ‘margins of error’ at the group and individual level for risk estimates made using ARAIs. METHOD: An established statistical method was used to construct 95% CI for group and individual risk estimates made using two popular ARAIs. RESULTS: The 95% CI were large for risk estimates at the group level; at the individual level, they were so high as to render risk estimates virtually meaningless. CONCLUSIONS: The ARAIs cannot be used to estimate an individual’s risk for future violence with any reasonable degree of certainty and should be used with great caution or not at all. In theory, reasonably precise group estimates could be made using ARAIs if developers used very large construction samples and if the tests included few score categories with extreme risk estimates.

Hart, S.D., Michie, C., & Cooke D.J. (2007) Precision of actuarial risk assessment instruments: Evaluating the ‘margins of error’ of group v. individual predictions of violence. British Journal of Psychiatry, 190, s60-s65.

Sónar 2007

Sónar was ace. Some people I’ll probably look out for (or avoid…):

A lovely vocalist in the Red Bull room. No idea who she is. She used one of those delay loop pedal thingies to sing with herself.

Les Anciens: experimental baldy blokes with very tight and clever percussion, bass, random sounding, jazzy but not with the right kind of chords to be jazz if you get what I mean.

Littleprettyautomatique: nice dubby trendy housey DJ set.

Kazumasa Hashimoto: LOVELY. live piano and piano style playing of electronica sounds with live drums.

FM3 with the Buddha machine: BIZARRE wee machines each of which plays 9 loops. There’s a button on the side to decide which loop plays. The performance looked like two people playing a game, moving the machines around, stacking them, knocking them over, sounds picked up with microphones. Looked impressive but we couldn’t really hear what was going on!

Piana: BEAUTIFUL Japanese Sigur Rós-like sounds.

FM3 feat. Blixa Bargeld: WEIRD. Yer man from Einstürzende Neubauten. Lots of delay-loop pedal madness with instrument after instrument fed into it all. Blixa’s voice was put through some kind of scary harmonising layered thing which made him sound like Satan.

Burbuja: PERFECTION. One of my favorite acts from Sónar. (I wish I’d seen Night of the Brain as well—also featured Merche Blasco and Cristian Vogel.) Here, have a listen to Roped.

Beastie Boys: after the initial “WOO it’s the Beastie Boys!” effect had worn off I just thought, whatever :-). Nothing particularly memorable happened.

Nettle: KINDA COOL! electronic drumming action with live Arabic instrumentation.

Black Affair: vocals, drum machine and sequencer, and bass. Dull to watch but sounded like a male-led Ladytron.

Clark: looked like the drummer fell out with the electronic dude at one point. Looked boring but sounded KINDA COOL. Big fat electronica with huge drumming.

Richie Hawtin: bopped away to him for a while! Very serious—wish it had been less gurny!

[Um, some other bands and DJs whose names I’m not quite sure of. I was just kinda wandering around!]

Wolf Eyes: crap, loud, noisy, angry. People with fingers in ears for this, my shorts were flapping with the bass.

Andy Stott: I like his stuff a lot. After Burbuja, though, I really wasn’t impressed by people just nodding behind a laptop—and that’s all he did.

Mira Calix: more nodding. I like her music but visually it was totally boring.

Blackout Concert: this was KINDA FUNKY, down at the Centre d’Art Santa Mónica. Gist: they dumped us all in the basement of an art gallery and turned off everything that makes any noise (water heating, air conditioning, whatever else there is in a building), step-by-step, then the lights, bolted all the doors shut. The silence interrupted only by a bloke issuing orders on a walkie talkie, “Step 1… *tissssst* turn the air conditioning to level… 2 *tissssst*” (presumably—was in Spanish).

Christian Vogel: AMAZING. Up until this bloke’s set I’d decided that techno was no longer worth the misery. Bleepy jerky techno DJ set. The Burbuja crew [I’m not obsessed, honest, I didn’t even mention that I noticed one of the Burbuja dancer people in the Blackout Concert…] were merrily bopping away! Vogel looks a bit like a PhD student trying and failing to explain something mathsy at an undergrad seminar. He sort of stumbled around behind the decks, half-jerking, but still managed to mix seamlessly.

Mogwai: alright, but, MEH!, by this point I was all technoed up so ventured across to another room.

Black Devil Disco Club: AMAZING–just what I needed. Sort of Donna Summery style basslines, bongos, random singing, bloke with long hair and beard. Bouncy discotek, I guess. Audience was a happy audience—much bopping.

Milky Globe: AMAZING—still Lo Recordings. More bouncy happy stuff.

Cursor Miner: AMAZING. I think I like Lo Recordings (also home of The Chap whom I love). “There’s a battle there’s a war / Killing used to be a chore / Now there’s just a switch to flick / Oh so easy oh so quick.” This dude was wearing a ski mask, had flashing lights on his head, wearing a fluroscent vest and Y-fronts. Loved it. Mostly banging trance-techno but I’m sure I heard him sing sonething about philosophical theories of free will.

Altern8: FANTASTIC! They played a DJ set featuring rave classics and the likes of Voodoo Ray, Inner City—hmmm what’s it called—you know that Detroit tune with the vocals.

Much fun had.