Friday, March 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
X: What type of things do you think we’ll see in the city?
Y: Prisoners.
X: What? Do you mean I should bring my knife?
Y: Why on earth? They aren’t criminals!
X: But you said they are prisoners.
Y: Prisoners of ideas!
X: Oh. That doesn’t sound too threatening
Y: Don’t be foolish, it is the most threatening of all things.
X: Well, will they be bound?
Y: As in chains?
X: Yes, and collars and cuffs.
Y: Why on earth? They can’t move! They’re prisoners.
X: But they are outside?
Y: And inside, always.
X: Are there walls to the city? And bars?
Y: If there were, how would we get in?
X: But how else would the prisoners not get out.
Y: I told you, they can’t move. Besides they aren’t violent. They’re just like you and me.
X: Then we too are prisoners?
Y: God, yes! Now lets go, we’ll be late.
X: Shouldn’t we alert the guards?
-Patrick Conners Jr. 2/22/12
Y: Prisoners.
X: What? Do you mean I should bring my knife?
Y: Why on earth? They aren’t criminals!
X: But you said they are prisoners.
Y: Prisoners of ideas!
X: Oh. That doesn’t sound too threatening
Y: Don’t be foolish, it is the most threatening of all things.
X: Well, will they be bound?
Y: As in chains?
X: Yes, and collars and cuffs.
Y: Why on earth? They can’t move! They’re prisoners.
X: But they are outside?
Y: And inside, always.
X: Are there walls to the city? And bars?
Y: If there were, how would we get in?
X: But how else would the prisoners not get out.
Y: I told you, they can’t move. Besides they aren’t violent. They’re just like you and me.
X: Then we too are prisoners?
Y: God, yes! Now lets go, we’ll be late.
X: Shouldn’t we alert the guards?
-Patrick Conners Jr. 2/22/12
Friday, February 17, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The funeral business and the entertainment business
As highlighted by previous posts, it is natural for us (ie. humans) to create narratives in order to help us understand and make sense of the world. This is something that we often do without thinking simply by filling in gaps in events that appear could be causal. This can also have the consequence of giving random events the impression of greater significance than they necessarily deserve. This may be brought to its greatest display in Aristotle assigning Final Cause to his list of causes.
Our need to create narratives can often lead to parsing events into beginning, middle, and end; the fairly standard sequence of events for a narrative—or perhaps better thought of as states of equilibrium—either way, at the end of our narratives we seek finality. The scale of a funeral may be thought of as an intensity measure, indicating the impact that we deem that person had on the world. I suppose when an important enough of a person dies the equilibrium of the world is distorted to such an extent as to require either a week of games, or perhaps just Christina Aguilera belting out your hit song.
The creation of narratives can make it easier to manufacture support for a number of things. "Bringing the troops home" is used as a signal to the end of the war narrative, and has been used over and over by politicians to suggest that That Politician knows how to end the "war on terror," another narrative.
Of course, the funeral doesn’t have to be the end of a narrative, but our preoccupation with mortality leads to the sequel of our lives in some afterlife. Here we are free to envision a more perfect narrative as well as our carrot for being good vegetarians.
~patrick conners jr
Our need to create narratives can often lead to parsing events into beginning, middle, and end; the fairly standard sequence of events for a narrative—or perhaps better thought of as states of equilibrium—either way, at the end of our narratives we seek finality. The scale of a funeral may be thought of as an intensity measure, indicating the impact that we deem that person had on the world. I suppose when an important enough of a person dies the equilibrium of the world is distorted to such an extent as to require either a week of games, or perhaps just Christina Aguilera belting out your hit song.
The creation of narratives can make it easier to manufacture support for a number of things. "Bringing the troops home" is used as a signal to the end of the war narrative, and has been used over and over by politicians to suggest that That Politician knows how to end the "war on terror," another narrative.
Of course, the funeral doesn’t have to be the end of a narrative, but our preoccupation with mortality leads to the sequel of our lives in some afterlife. Here we are free to envision a more perfect narrative as well as our carrot for being good vegetarians.
~patrick conners jr
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Bacon
"Anticipations are a firm enough basis for conscent, for even if men all went mad in the same way they might agree one with another well enough."
-Francis Bacon
-Francis Bacon
Friday, January 27, 2012
Donnie Darko, Heider Experiment, and The Lion King
[from the Extended and Deleted Scenes. The class is discussing Watership Down]
Karen Pommeroy: This could be the death of an entire way of life, the end of an era...
Donnie: Why should we care?
Karen Pommeroy: Because the rabbits are us, Donnie.
Donnie: Why should I mourn for a rabbit like he was human?
Karen Pommeroy: Are you saying that the death of one species is less tragic than another?
Donnie: Of course. The rabbit's not like us. It has no... keen look at something in the mirror, it has no history books, no photographs, no knowledge of sorrow or regret... I mean, I'm sorry, Miss Pommeroy, don't get me wrong; y'know, I like rabbits and all. They're cute and they're horny. And if you're cute and you're horny, then you're probably happy, in that you don't know who you are and why you're even alive. And you just wanna' have sex, as many times as possible, before you die... I mean, I just don't see the point in crying over a dead rabbit! Y'know, who... who never even feared death to begin with.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/quotes]
---
The experiment performed by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel (if you missed it, see my previous post) demonstrates not only how people construct causal links in their minds (as Kahneman talks about in Thinking, Fast and Slow), but, I believe, also demonstrates an emotional response to signifiers. We associate the actions performed by these shapes and they signify different personalities and relationships to us. We see that the circle and small triangle appear to be friends and that the larger triangle is made upset by this. We can read the "language" of the movements of the circle as being frightened by "watching" the large triangle "beat up" the small triangle. This narrative is being told to us by our minds. In fact, they are only shapes moving across the screen.
I wonder if the same holds true to why we react emotionally to scenes from Disney movies, lets say, The Lion King, when we watch Simba's father being killed by the evil uncle. Although they are only animated figures in a movie, we know what they signify and so we give them value, identities, and even moral qualities because of what they signify to us--perhaps some struggle of good and bad or a weak character becoming a stronger character through the challenges and tragedies that he encounters in his life.
In our minds, they (the rabbits, the shapes, Simba, etc) do have minds, do have histories, do fear death, do share love. It is what they signify that matters, not what they are, as well as the ability for either the author to show causal relationships, and/or our ability to create them in our mind. It is as though we respond to the concept and not to the characters at all.
~Patrick Conners Jr 1/27/12
Karen Pommeroy: This could be the death of an entire way of life, the end of an era...
Donnie: Why should we care?
Karen Pommeroy: Because the rabbits are us, Donnie.
Donnie: Why should I mourn for a rabbit like he was human?
Karen Pommeroy: Are you saying that the death of one species is less tragic than another?
Donnie: Of course. The rabbit's not like us. It has no... keen look at something in the mirror, it has no history books, no photographs, no knowledge of sorrow or regret... I mean, I'm sorry, Miss Pommeroy, don't get me wrong; y'know, I like rabbits and all. They're cute and they're horny. And if you're cute and you're horny, then you're probably happy, in that you don't know who you are and why you're even alive. And you just wanna' have sex, as many times as possible, before you die... I mean, I just don't see the point in crying over a dead rabbit! Y'know, who... who never even feared death to begin with.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/quotes]
---
The experiment performed by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel (if you missed it, see my previous post) demonstrates not only how people construct causal links in their minds (as Kahneman talks about in Thinking, Fast and Slow), but, I believe, also demonstrates an emotional response to signifiers. We associate the actions performed by these shapes and they signify different personalities and relationships to us. We see that the circle and small triangle appear to be friends and that the larger triangle is made upset by this. We can read the "language" of the movements of the circle as being frightened by "watching" the large triangle "beat up" the small triangle. This narrative is being told to us by our minds. In fact, they are only shapes moving across the screen.
I wonder if the same holds true to why we react emotionally to scenes from Disney movies, lets say, The Lion King, when we watch Simba's father being killed by the evil uncle. Although they are only animated figures in a movie, we know what they signify and so we give them value, identities, and even moral qualities because of what they signify to us--perhaps some struggle of good and bad or a weak character becoming a stronger character through the challenges and tragedies that he encounters in his life.
In our minds, they (the rabbits, the shapes, Simba, etc) do have minds, do have histories, do fear death, do share love. It is what they signify that matters, not what they are, as well as the ability for either the author to show causal relationships, and/or our ability to create them in our mind. It is as though we respond to the concept and not to the characters at all.
~Patrick Conners Jr 1/27/12
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Public Organon 1
The OED offers the following obsolete definition for "organon" :
"A bodily organ, esp. as an instrument of the soul or mind."
The Organon ("instrument") is also a title used to group together Aristotle's treatises on logic.
~http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#AriLogWorOrg
The OED offers this definition of "public"
"Open to general observation, view, or knowledge; existing, performed, or carried out without concealment, so that all may see or hear."
----
"One should guard against seeing anything more than a language of signs, semiotics, an opportunity for parables in all this" ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Semiotics, "the science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols as they operate in various fields, esp language", this once more is thanks to the good people at the OED, thank you for such a concise set of signs to communicate what is being signified with a particular use of the sign "semiotics" (in this case, definition 2; definition 1 relates the meaning of the sign to indicate a medical search for symptoms).
Signs are a social, and often public, construct (although there of course can be "private" signs, or codes, however they still require a method of interpretation which require the knowledge of more than one person to actually be functional to another person. In other words, unless you are encrypting your own writings for yourself alone, this would not prove to be terribly useful to anyone else).
Dictionaries are an interesting institution for interpreting signs. One way to look at language would be as a code that people who are aware of that language can decode in order to know what is being communicated, in this case the dictionary acts as a tool to aid in decoding these signs. The "code" view of language, however, is not a very popular one--it gives an impression of language as static and not changing, it as though, all you need is to "break the code" and you would be good to know all facets of a particular set of signs that constitute a language. This is not a very good way of treating a dynamic language that is changing, as indicated by the "obsolete" definition of organon given earlier, this particular sign no longer signifies a bodily organ associated with the mind and soul. In fact, this sign probably does not really signify much of anything for many people--when I saw it, it reminded me of the state of Organ.
When a sign is introduced to the brain, the brain can quickly relate that sign to other signs. Sometimes these signs are related in different ways, either by association, likeness in what they signify, likeness in sound, some unique memory association, perhaps by opposites (as argues one model for how meaning is attained, for instance "dark" being defined by "light", "good" defined by what is not "good", "man" can be opposed to boy, woman, god, or beast -- this creates problems as usually one group of opposites is assigned different values than others in different cultures).
Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" explains how our brains hold a model for what we expect normal reality to be. Signs we encounter throughout the day either enforce or conflict with this model. When what we encounter conflicts with what we expected, this can create an emotional (and indeed physical) response of surprise (possibly excitement, possibly fear, possibly something more subtle that we are unconscious of).
The point is, that this model for the world is both private and public. The signs we use have an effect of shaping our reality, as individuals and as a culture--privately and publicly. The Internet today plays a crucial role in all of this, for instance, even this private blog in the public domain; anyone who actually reads it will be able to either accept or reject these signs and what they signify. Perhaps they raise more ideas in a person's mind, and perhaps not. Perhaps someone corrects something in here, perhaps they criticize something in here, perhaps they add to something in here. Yes this might be pretty obvious ("Yeah, wow, welcome to the Internet, buddy.") yet it does hold profound potential and actualization.
~Patrick Conners Jr
"A bodily organ, esp. as an instrument of the soul or mind."
The Organon ("instrument") is also a title used to group together Aristotle's treatises on logic.
~http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#AriLogWorOrg
The OED offers this definition of "public"
"Open to general observation, view, or knowledge; existing, performed, or carried out without concealment, so that all may see or hear."
----
"One should guard against seeing anything more than a language of signs, semiotics, an opportunity for parables in all this" ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Semiotics, "the science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols as they operate in various fields, esp language", this once more is thanks to the good people at the OED, thank you for such a concise set of signs to communicate what is being signified with a particular use of the sign "semiotics" (in this case, definition 2; definition 1 relates the meaning of the sign to indicate a medical search for symptoms).
Signs are a social, and often public, construct (although there of course can be "private" signs, or codes, however they still require a method of interpretation which require the knowledge of more than one person to actually be functional to another person. In other words, unless you are encrypting your own writings for yourself alone, this would not prove to be terribly useful to anyone else).
Dictionaries are an interesting institution for interpreting signs. One way to look at language would be as a code that people who are aware of that language can decode in order to know what is being communicated, in this case the dictionary acts as a tool to aid in decoding these signs. The "code" view of language, however, is not a very popular one--it gives an impression of language as static and not changing, it as though, all you need is to "break the code" and you would be good to know all facets of a particular set of signs that constitute a language. This is not a very good way of treating a dynamic language that is changing, as indicated by the "obsolete" definition of organon given earlier, this particular sign no longer signifies a bodily organ associated with the mind and soul. In fact, this sign probably does not really signify much of anything for many people--when I saw it, it reminded me of the state of Organ.
When a sign is introduced to the brain, the brain can quickly relate that sign to other signs. Sometimes these signs are related in different ways, either by association, likeness in what they signify, likeness in sound, some unique memory association, perhaps by opposites (as argues one model for how meaning is attained, for instance "dark" being defined by "light", "good" defined by what is not "good", "man" can be opposed to boy, woman, god, or beast -- this creates problems as usually one group of opposites is assigned different values than others in different cultures).
Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" explains how our brains hold a model for what we expect normal reality to be. Signs we encounter throughout the day either enforce or conflict with this model. When what we encounter conflicts with what we expected, this can create an emotional (and indeed physical) response of surprise (possibly excitement, possibly fear, possibly something more subtle that we are unconscious of).
The point is, that this model for the world is both private and public. The signs we use have an effect of shaping our reality, as individuals and as a culture--privately and publicly. The Internet today plays a crucial role in all of this, for instance, even this private blog in the public domain; anyone who actually reads it will be able to either accept or reject these signs and what they signify. Perhaps they raise more ideas in a person's mind, and perhaps not. Perhaps someone corrects something in here, perhaps they criticize something in here, perhaps they add to something in here. Yes this might be pretty obvious ("Yeah, wow, welcome to the Internet, buddy.") yet it does hold profound potential and actualization.
~Patrick Conners Jr
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