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Part I: The Concrescence of The Uncanny

22 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Logic

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This year of the plague has been a miserably difficult time for all of us. For my part, it has all but obliterated my writing and research which, given how others have suffered, is a rather small price to pay. I’ve not gone cold or hungry, and but for the one time when pipes burst, I’ve had running water. So I’m trying to push myself back into writing, and that push has got me toying with thoughts of something that is fun yet Whitehead related. So I’m going to deviate from the “standard” Whiteheadian brief here, and perform a two part divagation into an arena that is often left aside as an example of the “irrational”. Specifically, I want to dip a toe into the uncanny. I will explain in a moment my reasons for the previous two scare quoted terms. But first I want to say something about my own curiosity on the subject. Also, I would draw everyone’s attention to the irony that I begin this writing on “pi-day”, March 14 or 3/14. For the “irrational” number π, as we will observe, is disturbingly uncanny.

Night time, when shadows and substance blur into one another

My own little journey began – one hesitates to say “innocently enough” given the nature of the subject matter – on social media. With social distancing (which, in my case, includes an unpleasant measure of social isolation) I was shifting around for various available forms of online connections, and stumbled into a small group of writers, creators, and artists who focus their attention on folk stories, and folk horror in particular. We engaged in various asynchronous forms of sharing, but also in synchronous activities such as watch parties of old-school ghost stories freely available at various streaming services. Given the workings of my mind, I naturally began wondering about fitting such stories and ideas within Whitehead’s speculative philosophy.

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At Least I Have Chicken

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, John Dewey, Process Philosophy

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Person’s familiar with the gaming world might well recognize the title of this essay as a quote from a famous incident in the online game World of Warcraft. The incident, recorded and posted on YouTube (see video below) might be labeled The Last Charge of Leroy Jenkins. A group of players are nervously planning a complex attack against a difficult, game generated collection of very dangerous “creatures” (the online game permits players in remote locations to play together, and communicate verbally even as they operate their “character” in the game.) But after a few minutes of this, one of them (“Leroy Jenkins”) loses all patience with the process, declares “Enough talk!” and rushes into the midst of the creatures bellowing his battle cry, “LEEEROY JENKINS!!!” Caught off guard, the other members of the team realize they’ve lost the advantage of surprise and follow in, only to have the entire team wiped out by this cluster of creatures. As they bitterly review this catastrophe, casting an occasional word of criticism in Jenkins’ direction, Leroy simply responds, “At least I have chicken” (presumably in his real world crib, as there is none in the game.)

The whole thing is much funnier if you’ve had any experience with multi-player roll-playing games, whether online, networked, or old school paper and painted tokens D&D. But the behavior is familiar to us all from the broader reaches of our lives, as we recognize a form of doomed compromise that those around us – and most likely we ourselves, at one time or another – have made. This came out again recently in a colleagues interaction with the students in his class. (It is not revealing much to note that said colleague is, indeed, a man.) The colleague was presenting one of the classic figures of Western philosophy, and the students began asking in reply, “but how important is this really?” Discussion went back and forth a few times until finally exasperated, my colleague said something to the effect that, “the alternative is to be an uneducated pawn in a machine that views you as nothing more than a commodity to be used until you’re used up, suffering the waste of your life in a job that offers no fulfillment, living in a house in the suburbs with a spouse that is indifferent to you and children that despise you!” There was a moment’s silence, when finally one student replied, “at least we’ll have a house in the suburbs.”

At least they’ll have chicken. Continue reading →

Shut Up and Calculate

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Science

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson shares with Stephen Hawing a commitment to demonstrating that lots of schooling will never, by itself, equate to an education (a distinction I’ve explored in a variety of places.) For example, in a bromide from a few years back, Tyson not only dismissed philosophy as being of no value, but insisted that bright students should stay away from it as it is nothing more than a distraction.i Stephen Hawking, for his part, has maintained a long running snark-fest directed at philosophers, notable mainly in that Hawking’s petulance is only exceeded by his ignorance, and the indefensibility of his “arguments”. One must scare quote the word “arguments” in the preceding because neither Tyson nor Hawking have an actual argument, only ex cathedra pronouncements that are to be accepted without question, and in the complete absence of anything like logic, principles, evidence, or facts.Adding Machine

Thus, for example, Hawking vapidly legislates in his recent book, The Grand Design, that, “philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” What Hawking is, in fact, asserting here is that philosophy is only philosophy when it is doing physics. So when it fails to do physics (and actually does philosophy – a subject Hawking knows absolutely nothing about, and imagines himself virtuous for his willful lack of education) then this can only be because philosophy is dead. He declares (in Black Holes and Baby Universes), without a particle of evidence to support his claim that,

There is a subspecies called philosophers of science who ought to be better equipped. But many of them are failed physicists who found it too hard to invent new theories and so took to writing about the philosophy of physics instead. They are still arguing about the scientific theories of the early years of this century, like relativity and quantum mechanics.

and then goes on to pule that, “Maybe I’m being harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me.”ii This is the sort of childishness one might expect from a 3rd grader, not from a man who held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University. In its way, however, it is perfectly representative of an attitude that has consumed much of physics, in which any attempts to ask deeper questions about the issues of contemporary physics are met with the dismissive command to just, “shut up and calculate.” Continue reading →

Reason as Revolutionary

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ignorance, Inquiry, Intelligence, Logic, Politics, Relativism, Trump

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So now this appears to be happening: several users out in the Twitter-verse apparently are crowing about the repeal of Obamacare while defiantly bragging about keeping their insurance through the ACA. Again, to all appearances, these people are real. Meanwhile, racist Trump designee for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, questions whether women and LGBTQ people face any serious discrimination in the world. Examples could readily be multiplied. This is because fascism is a movement that does not center on any sort of intellectual framework, while its appeal is to persons of an authoritarian mindset that rigidly compartmentalizes concepts and experiences so that genuine intelligence can never get a foothold on the person’s thinking. Under such circumstances, exercising reason – genuine reason – becomes itself a revolutionary act.revolution

But beyond that quip, what more can be said about the matter? Isn’t that a bit like dismissing Trump’s followers as being stupid? Even if this was true, would it really be an effective approach to dealing with the current consolidation of power by the fascists? In response, I would encourage people to read the above linked posts on the authoritarian mindset, but I’ll have a few more words to say about the nature of genuine intelligence below the fold. But mostly I want to think about the revolutionary aspects of reason around the topics of memory, logic, and leadership. Continue reading →

Anti-Intellectualism and Racism?

20 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, General Philosophy, Logic, Racism

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A post over at Psychology Today makes the claim that “Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America.” Citing the horrific mass murder in Charleston by the overtly racist Dylann Roof, the essay goes on to state that, “Many will correctly blame Roof’s actions on America’s culture of racism and gun violence, but it’s time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation’s culture of ignorance.”

Now, among the more singularly despicable statements made by conservative politicians, pundits, and supposed “news” outlets, have been the cowardly red herring evasions of the obvious and irrefutable fact of Roof’s overtly and explicitly stated racist motivations in the mass murder at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The disgusting refusal on the parts of so many to frankly acknowledge and deplore the blatant racism behind Roof’s act of terrorism is beyond inexcusable. The people engaged in such denial and misdirection are themselves complicit in Roof’s crimes as enablers and legitimizers.mckinney-texas-pool-party_400x295_82

But even though anti-intellectualism and racism may likely be frequent, even inevitable, co-travelers, can we justifiably assert that anti-intellectualism is the root, and racism is the branch, as the author in the above Psychology Today post does? I do not think so. Continue reading →

HERSTEIN’s FIRST LAW

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Psychology

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Never underestimate human capacity for denial.

I first formulated the above phrase – and flattered myself by naming it – some decades ago; so long, indeed, that I’ve no clear idea when I first said it. Other people have probably said similar things, long before I ever first quipped the idea. But my first contact with the phrase was in my personal act of formulating it. The second person to invent the wheel still invented it if she didn’t know about the first person. The earliest example of the exact quote (it is important that you search on the quote, otherwise the search registers all the words, regardless of their order) that I can find on Google brings up the pseudonym of “Logic Deferred” as first stating the phrase publicly back in February of 2010. Feel free to click on the pseudonym to see who it is that comes up. But as I said, I’ve used the phrase for many decades now.

DerpAnd I am quite sincere about this statement: Never underestimate human capacity for denial. Smart people can be the worst cases when it comes to denial, because rather than using their intelligence for inquiry, they will use it to justify their ideology.

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Authoritarian Thinking 2: Compartmentalization

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Logic

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In previous posts I discussed various forms of invalid lines of reasoning – lines of argument that were not just casually erroneous, but formally and demonstrably wrong. In the case of the enthymeme about the existence of a right to privacy, the error is allowed to move forward because the people making the argument fail to fill in (and then attend to) all of the premises necessary to make their argument valid. Jonah Goldberg’s argument was far, far worse: Goldberg contented himself with promiscuously throwing about terms and quantifiers without any evident concern, or even grasp, of how such things actually function.crates14

It would be a gross mistake to simply dismiss the people making these errors as merely uneducated fools. The “no right to privacy” fallacy I previously detailed has been argued for by legal scholars of significant practical and scholarly background, and Jonah Goldberg is a college educated journalist with a substantial background in the industry. So how are such obvious – indeed, manifestly egregious – errors committed?

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Let’s Get … Philosophical!

30 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Education, General Philosophy, Politics

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(“I want to hear your bodying forth talk?” If you understood that joke you are both old and over-educated.)

So, I see another popular article suggesting that an education in philosophy is not the worst thing a person might do to themselves. I actually agree with the argument, but as presented by US NEWS in the above link, a few notes ought to be added from some one who went all the way down the rabbit hole.

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Don’t Do It, Wuss

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Academia, General Philosophy, Personal History

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This one is rather more personal than most of my entries, so I beg your patience.

The title above is based on a pet saying of a friend of mine; the meaning is a little more complicated than a first reading might suggest.

It has to do with something most of us have witnessed – and many have not only participated in, but actively brought about – when exactly the wrong person, at exactly the wrong time, takes exactly the wrong stand, for exactly the right and noble reasons, all without the slightest hope of “survival,” much less success. (Usually they/we literally survive, but with physical and emotional scars that are added to an already long list.) Witnessing such a train wreck, you say to yourself (because the disaster is too overwhelming to even say it out loud): “Oh dear god; don’t do it wuss …” But you can see that it is already too late; even though it has not yet been done, it certainly is going to be.

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