I had more notes on 18 and 19 I forgot to put down.

The fractionalisation of social life inherent in the spectacle produces strangers and intimacy much differently than Levinisian phenomenology. Face to face social interactions are no longer the most common form of interpersonal engagement; people are engaged with as a cavalcade of images, words, sounds; a series of decontextualised and otherworldly aberrations. The assault on the senses obtained from walking down a high street invites us to avoid eye contact, handshakes; the other no longer is a lossy presentation of transcendent depth, the other is a blur of static in a transparent, almost self sufficient narrative.

The gentleness of the other and their touch recede from the world, dragging intimacy with it. Love suffers a transformation under the spectacle; it becomes a refuge that removes restrictions on our sensory modalities; a life partner is someone to watch with. A life partner is the one I can touch... Touch takes on the character of privation just as Netflix and chill becomes the very name of sex.

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own
We don't need
Anything
Or anyone
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

I think that generating shared, factual narratives is rendered very difficult by 'the spectacle'. It isn't so much that the science has stopped working or needs a new paradigm to deal with life as it is now; the spectacle modifies how scientists communicate their work, grant applications etc, but doesn't change whether what they're saying is true or false. I think the reality dealt with in most scientific thought doesn't care whether communications about it are mediated by imagistic false consciousness.

Which isn't to say that fact-hood and the 'playing field of intellectual life' aren't perturbed by the spectacle.

18. Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19. The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

A fictitious world with present day journalism and its news cycles alone would recede in much the same way. By isolating a point of our social fabric and imagining the features of the world necessary to support it the logical-historical structure of that point can be obtained. The generalised suspicion towards journalism and news perhaps can be interpreted as an explicit expansion of the spectacle (as conceptual scheme) to facticity itself. What is true in the news is what is omitted from its broadcasts (consider alt left/right narratives on the news and their selection of sources).

Further, the preponderance of 'fake news' as an ideological category indicates that the spectacle has evolved, since writing, to encompass critical reflection. Another way of saying the domination of facticity was always within the spectacle's grasp. The kind of critical reflection embodied in this is a reflexive gainsaying of all representations; we have become so embroiled in the shifting mirage of appearance the belief that there is an underlying, shared reality has began to recede.

This presents us with an interpretive challenge: where is it still possible to hear echoes of this ever receding real? What remains universal for us? How can we revivify -or even reimagine- what is always already destroyed?

The ensnarement of facticity through the demolition of public life produces an archipelago of subjects. To be a subject in the modern day spectacle is now to take facticity as an indexical of personhood rather than as one of its constitutive elements and marker of a common real. The unimaginable vastness that can be obtained from 'looking from the shore of one's island' quickly takes on the real character of depth; we swim in complexity, kept afloat by the fractionalisation of our social fabric; together perhaps we would drown.

To provide some positive character to identity politics, I think it's politics characterised as: representation without goals; raised consciousness of problems without attempt at worked solutions; solidarity with people rather than against problems.

↪fdrake It depends on the grain of one's analysis obviously. There are things different about the groups on my helicopter list, sure, but there are also linked genealogies, similarities; and it's the things shared that are causing the problems - as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed, first practiced by Marx in terms of socioeconomic class, that's been translated wholesale into the idioms of gender and race.

Linked genealogies? You mean like what they produce in post structuralism? Bloody French, coming over here, codifying the trope of the genealogical critique of ideas.

What're the shared things? How Marx tackles problems is quite a lot different from how Foucault tackles them, Deleuze is different again... Post-structuralism and 'pomo' in general are really the name of a historical moment rather than any shared set of ideas. Perhaps in general they were reacting against - with sympathetic criticism - enlightenment scientific ideology (da big bomba), structuralist linguistics and the existential/phenomenological traditions.

as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed,

I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that?

I didn't believe that the examples I gave could be accurately described as identity politics, save perhaps how gay marriage was strategised. The point I was trying to make was that when 'identity politics' becomes 'the politics of extending rights of or de-marginalising a group' it's already lost most of its meaning. An incoherence that comes from misunderstanding what identity politics is rather than from any incoherence in identity politics.

I was hoping that you'd chime in and provide some decent historical context, it was why I included the needle exchange thing as an example.

Self Help programs generally are ethnicity based--because they arise out of a specific community. The gay response to AIDS was identity based self help. Organizing west coast agricultural workers and the grape boycott was self help with an ethnic base. The National Farmers Organization (now long gone) was a rural white-ethnic based agricultural self help drive. The civil rights movement was a black ethnic self help movement.

I agree with that characterisation, I don't think identity politics has anything but a pejorative sense. Politics is usually about some group or another being subjected to blah, trying to stop or circumvent blah and the conditions that keep blah happening; in this sense it's about the differential treatment of groups coupled with the imagination of specific ways things can be improved. (and then trying to do these things)

In that regard, even intersectionality and standpoint theory make some kind of sense. The insight that people from different backgrounds are likely to have different experiences is something that needs repeating; even if the theoretical tenets of standpoint epistemology are disagreed with.

Regardless of theoretical confusions; when you see something like gays banding together for gay marriage to be a thing, people advocating for and setting up needle exchanges in drug infused areas, the end of apartheid, setting up free evening classes in impoverished areas, the entry of all races into most parts of the workforce; would you agree these changes are in part attributable to 'identity politics' in the broad sense?

You just described an incredibly heterogenous bunch of.. well.. everything. Absolutely not worth aggregating them into a coherent whole... They aren't a coherent whole, never will be, and were never intended to be.

A set of distinctions that allows the equation of Freud with Foucault is not very accurate.

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?

16. The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

17. The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

While this may have been true at publication, the present is a little different. What now is more valued than a close friend or life partner? An inversion (which remains the same as always) of the generalised mediation of social life through images can be found in the true and trusted friend; a friend is someone in a similarly demarcated zone of the spectacle with a similar resistance to the generalised subject present in the spectacle; a partner, a soulmate, is someone to watch Game of Thrones with. The spectacle penetrates private life by diminishing its bearers to passive receptacles; enjoying each other perhaps by sitting closer than norms (for others) allow. It produces a blind form of resistance in terms of the elevation of friendship and affectionate solidarity to the highest ideal; a simple restatement of 'let us enjoy things together'.

13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

(13) The idea of the spectacle as a representational model of social processes; simultaneously their reflection and determination is present here again. As the sole means of generating expressions it reflects itself and thus is 'tautological' by its own ruling. The spectacle is functioning as simultaneously a constraint upon intelligible forms of expression and their means of expression; so its character becomes implicit in every moment of itself as a process; and thus guarantees its continued expression. The spectacle is a self evaluation in precisely the same way it is a generator of representations.

A physical analogy could be the means by which a photon expresses its diffraction pattern through slits as the Fourier transform of those slits; a translation of itself into a different register which maintains all the same information; a repetition of itself in a different modality. Common to both is the idea of a projection (to a screen, to the frequency space...) as a conditioning of what is projected.

14. The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15. As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

(14,15) This is more likely to appear true than to actually be true. The spectacle, as a form and generator of false consciousness, must be contrasted to the reality it is embedded in which remains indifferent to its procedures. There are things which are invariant to their interminable and repetitious display. We need not give the spectacle our eyes and tongues to provide immanent critique of its schema, even if we have to borrow the voice of its generalised subject.

The spectacle, so far portrayed, is a closed circuit of affectation, monopolising expression in forms it has already digested. One casualty of this is the disappearance of touch from public life and the a priori obscenity/privation of smells; little is more intimate than a hosted dinner, or more terrifying than work's morning elevator.

10.The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.

11.To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.

12.The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

(10->12) It seems appropriate to locate 'the spectacle' as a social mechanism, at least insofar as its surface appearance. In a sense the spectacle is the means by which anything social can become expressed in the public domain - it is the reflexivity of the social as a unified process. The givenness of the spectacle as 'socially organised appearance' renders the spectacle as socialised conceptual scheme. Greedy and tyrannical, this scheme unifies all social practice by means of common mediation; the means of expression of sense in general has become directed to an invisible audience of the agent's imagination. It imbues all use of language with narcissistic overtones, since the mediation of such spans the public and the private - rendering the public as the private sui generis and the private as the public in particular. A certain schizophrenia of perspective is required; painting the spectacle as a ghostly voyeur.

1: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

(1,2) This unification takes an extreme form within the social practice/construct of 'Netflix and chill', in which the most intimate union of a couple is identified with the passive reception of images. What is intimate in such an endeavour is the privation of these public images to a shared narrative of love and sex. {the way this privation eroticises/libidinally invests the joint consumption of images and produces a withdrawal of the sense of touch from public life is a theme elaborated upon later}

The sense of representation engendered by the spectacle produces a logical space in which the edifice of cultural criticism - trope theory, implicit biases, heteronormativity etc - is constructed. The mythology present in televised stories and its presuppositions take the place of analysing lived experience; in a sense we all partake in this universal history of images as instances of subtext. Each sensory modality becomes mapped to its audio/visual digitisation as its predominant means of expression. The tapestry of man becomes a jigsaw of missing pieces.

3. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

4.The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

5. The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

(3->6) "appears as a model" of the world for the generalised subject of the spectacle. Model might be worthwhile to interpret in something similar to its mathematical sense {a mapping from objects to their truth values, 'conditions of satisfaction' being, an evaluation of what is true (real) and false (unreal)}. The mediation of life by images tells life what it is. It's similar to Azrael's clock in the Discworld books; a clock that tells time what it is. The subject analysed here is rather artificial - suspect some of its features are phenomenologically derived from the constraints placed upon them through the stance of critical theory. Is the mediation by images total? Is there no escape? The condition of possibility for criticism here is also proof of a fundamental incompletion of the described totality. This gives the interpretive task of finding sites of resistance - remainders slowly being made invisible...

7. Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.

8. One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

9. In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

(7) This insight finds an extreme example in the passive regurgitation of memes. Consider the subject 'conjured' by this identification; to ensure they remain nothing but a receptacle and editor of their 'model of the world' in the sense of (6) they become entangled in a generalised destruction of inner life. Such an analysis finds, unsurprised, man as split through a prism; unable to trace any ray of life to its source.

(8) In light of (8), authenticity too is bought and sold. To act authentically is to represent oneself as a self-determined series of images with the mere identification that they are 'yours' to begin with; rather each life project becomes a function of the public domain and a personalised story of success or failure attached to it. (see Kickstarter)

Mythology becomes what is universally represented, and thus the 'subtext of the spectacle' is generated by, and amenable to, critical theory. There is a strange alliance here between the generating categories of the spectacle and their faithful representation in their critique; we envision passive non-relational subjects inextricably subsumed in imagistic false consciousness; this is likely to be an exaggeration for effect. The true is a moment of the false, after all.

Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc. — unenlightened

There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".

I feel as though the idea that there could be virtue in it is some projection from an un-oppressed out group. That the meek will inherit the Earth makes it tempting to emphasise your meekness. This is a retrojection which gives rise to the perception of political activism as 'virtue signalling' - those who are seen to 'virtue signal' are judged simply because their expression indicates a lack of virtue in those applying this judgement. The whole game is somewhat pathetic, as if, say, Christian gays were not protesting some real cause of marginalisation when rallying for their right to marry; they were just signalling their moral superiority to those who disagreed with them.

In this broad sense of identity politics - identity politics as the politics of rights elevation of a somewhat homogenous group - all political action concerned with the differential treatment of groups can be cast as identity politics.

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in @gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics.

By 'mere' identity politics I mean political acts whose entire purpose is to produce recognition of an identity's plights - the kind of thing which can be seen in the worst excesses of Twitter and tumblr -. A pseudo-politics of goalless representation. Popularisation - carving out a place in public discourse for some issue affecting a group - is necessary but insufficient for producing social or economic change about that given issue.

Those people who practice this address such 'mere representation' to a invisible guarantor of social justice. Those who criticise politics as such on this basis express nothing but a need for recognition by this vanished God of political change. As if the point of politics was to produce a cancellation of marginalising ideas within public discourse rather than to impede or circumvent the conditions - politico-economic-legal structures - which continuously create this marginalisation in the first place.

Do you think there's something inherently spectacular - as in spectacle - about identity politics? Your description of it seems to paint consciousness raising as similar to watching a horror movie; look at how the little ones are suffering, isn't this horrible? Irrelevant of the good intentions - wanting some basic things for oppressed identities - it seems that this transforms some aspects of any concrete person who is subsumed under the identity as a public display.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

Solidarity within identity politics, then, has a perverse aspect; the oppressed are identified with their image, and people take your voice for purposes of the movement, or recognise it was already theirs all along...

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.

as you were already equivalent to the soundbites generated about you.

Does that seem sensible? I've been going through Society of the Spectacle recently and it's probably colouring my response.

I vaguely remember that you see all politics as identity politics.

So you see class politics as an example of identity politics?

In addition to being empirically wrong, as Sapshin highlighted, what you said doesn't even have the concepts right.

Western Maoists, Leninists etc... hate identity politics, intersectionality, discourse analysis etc etc. The Marxist or Marxism inspired left dislike identity politics; in that it fractures the interest of the proletariat in some way, or is entirely irrelevant to any class struggle in other forms of Marxian doxa. Particularly dogmatic ones, like any contemporary third worldists, get really pissed off if you start trying to locate an oppressed class or sites of struggle which aren't fundamentally reducible to economic class. They think along with Peterson that the contemporary liberal left is engaged in useless virtue signalling partisanship and the third worldists (read: those with Maoist heritage) hold this belief especially strongly.

Does this make Peterson a Maoist or a Marxist? No. Does this mean that the majority of these leftists with Maoist sympathies are actually engaging in revolutionary violence? No, the majority of them are blogging from good universities in the US (in my experience).

Bucolic. Sounds very sinister, means pleasantly rural.

Any resistance to the unfolding of nature is done within its scope. An insight from De Sade. He thus had all kinds of fun with the idea of natural law.

What would a sufficient description of 'how a mind works' in general be? I imagine that there would need to be a few elements, will make some kind of map here. Stuff applicable to us:

(1) capacity for sense
(1a) what are bearers of sense? capacity to make sense bearers
(2) some kind of locality, people dwell in contexts, contexts are meaningful. Is this meaning the same as sense? Is it a necessary condition for sense?
(3) many dimensional sensory manifold, vision/touch/taste/smell/hearing/temperature/pressure/kinaesthesia/others, possible couplings (synaesthesia)
(4) aspects of volition
(4a) coupling of volition to sensory manifold generating affordances, affordances similar to ours necessary to produce an understandable mind?
...

I can imagine an argument between two people over something like von Uexkull's umwelten, and whether and how much humans can grasp of other umwelten using our capacity for generalisation and 'adequation of the intellect and its object'; primary properties and intrinsic relations make sense for humans, would they make sense for Wittgenstein's lion? What about the lion's beetle in a box?

What about for a tick with a much lower dimensional sensory manifold (from Wiki):

Thus, for the tick, the umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37°C (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairy topography of mammals.

What are our limits for understanding the umwelten of other species? "If a lion spoke, we could not understand what he said" & private language argument vs a thesis of radical translation and understanding:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.

what does the private language argument foreclose from the understanding of other species' umwelten? How does our 'signs all the way down' mind apprehend a mind which 'bottoms out quickly in the world'?

Can see something interesting in this general area, though I have no idea if you and someone else would want to argue about it.

I don't think he did - at least he hasn't yet, if you're referring to the video I recently uploaded.

Harris/Peterson debate was painful, I think the criticism that they were both out of their field of expertise; or at least out of their fields of preparation; is well placed. That they were attracted to this interstice of conflict was pleasant though; at least it highlighted that Peterson's aware that most of his generalisations about morality/normativity aren't true in a scientific sense (he calls them 'meta-true' in his lectures sometimes) and that Harris' neuroscience inspired ethical naturalism has some fairly presumptive balls in it. Though I'm not that familiar with Harris (certainly not read the Moral Landscape), so this might be unfair on my part.

I don't think it's really necessary to situate Peterson in the alt-right mileau as a means of undermining him; he's undermined quite throughly in that he sees no need to locate why and how 'postmodern neomarxism' infiltrated the universities, how its pernicious ideology actually propagates etc. Also he's not done even cursory homework on postmodernists or Marxists, I don't think he could acknowledge these errors without significant public backlash at this point.

Also, @Maw, in my experience 'look at how the alt-right or other reactionary blowhards have appropriated him' isn't the kind of thing you can use as a counterpoint to the alt-right against Peterson and that discursive strategy is something they're primed to see as leftist drivel. At best it works when someone is already suspicious of a target, or when you're speaking to someone that's ideologically closer to you than the worst excesses of Youtube Peterson fans. Just because Peterson does it all the time with Stalin and Mao doesn't mean we get to play with the ideological finger paint too. Though, I agree that it's concerning that Peterson's worldview - or what is implicit within it - is so easy to reconcile with bigots.

It's a casual conversation on an Internet forum. So far everything I've heard about Peterson, which is not much, seems agreeable enough. Can't see what all the fuss is about.

Some people are using Peterson to legitimate viewpoints which should under no circumstances be legitimated. This isn't wholly Peterson's fault, and is more of an ideological enemy mine situation imo.

Forgot this gem, addressed to Peterson.

You yourself are a postmodern philosopher, and many of your views align neatly with those found in Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida. It’s in your interest to use Postmodern texts to your advantage by dismantling the weaker arguments of your opponents, not to constantly advocate for their elimination from the intellectual world.

One of the bloggers on the Partially Examined Life made an extended critique really hitting home Peterson's poor scholarship as far as anything 'postmodern neomarxist' goes. It's very thorough.



some highlights:

Let’s be clear--I’m not going to deny that there are problems with hyper-professionalized academia, SJWs, etc. etc. I’m extremely sympathetic to your situation regarding bill C-16, and even wrote to you privately expressing as much. I’m a fan of Sargon’s “This Week In Stupid,” and have had enough experiences of my own in and around academia to know that you’re pointing out some legitimate issues and some troubling trends in public opinion. Things like the Sokal hoax are crystal-clear examples of how much of a sham “peer reviewed” journals can be, but they’re not much of a takedown of the actual ideas behind postmodernist theory. If anything, they’re more evident of a general problem within all of academia. After all, Antivaxxing, homosexual shock therapy, craniometry, etc. all had a presence in peer reviewed publications while in fashion.

Saying Derrida and Foucault were Marxists is flat out wrong--the former refused to join the French Socialist Party or write Marxist theory, despite immense pressure to do so, and the latter spent so much time shredding Marxist arguments that they refused to accept him. It is absolutely, inarguably true that both of the thinkers I am defending grew up in cultures that were heavily dominated by Marxist thought. But even then, saying “Marxists make Marxist philosophy” is as inane as saying “Capitalists produce capitalist philosophy” or “Jews produce Jewish philosophy.” You’re either saying something astonishingly, painfully obvious--that people produce thoughts relating to the culture in which they find themselves, or you’re making the very strong claim that thinkers are not able to produce valuable insights if they find themselves within the confines of a restrictive ideology. We know, from people like Martin Luther, Nietzsche, Frederick Douglass, Solzenitzen, and so many more that great thinkers often produce thoughts that run against the grain of the society in which they were raised, despite oppressive regimes that attempted to stifle discussion. Furthermore, the most valuable, ever-green insights from these thinkers are often their critiques, not their recommended solutions.

Understood. I asked because I imagined you'd have thought about it quite a lot and would have a unique/interesting perspective - of all the people here I'd imagine you would have found out if scientific results/training made a difference in how you treated people professionally. Apologies for wasting your time. :)

@unenlightened

Do you ever use any scientific results or ways of thinking to inform your people-handling part of the job? (IIRC you work in medical care?)

They're task specific AIs in each case, almost certainly. I find the 'deep marketing' very scary and intrusive.

I referenced chess because I thought it was intended to be a casual/not particularly philosophical discussion. The staggering power of neural networks in solving highly constrained predictive tasks meant that a recent AI learned to make better moves in 4 hours than the entire history of chess theory and tutelage. AlphaZero's ELO rating is estimated at something like 3400. Magnus Carlsen (world's highest elo) is 2882. That's the same difference between a skilled intermediate player and a national master.

Luckily generalised intelligence is something the robots can't do very well yet, and they need a lot of data to excel at predictive tasks. We'd need to be living in something close to surveillance camera panopticon for a typical person's visage to become arbitrarily manipulable by deepfake like software - and that's assuming all the data was public.

As it stands, 'the robots are coming to take over our souls' is still sensationalist claptrap. It's
still (more?) worthwhile to be concerned about the restrictions on freedoms powerful learning algorithms - so called 'architectures of persuasion' are having on us. (Do you have mania? Are you on Facebook? Have some tickets to Las Vegas!)

It's not just philosophy any more, supervenience of mindstates upon brainstates and neural correlates are essentially the same concepts. Whether this implies that consciousness is just something the brain does or whether it's enabled by the nervous system and sensorimotor constraints too is a different question; I think it's pretty incontestable that there are neural correlates of consciousness in a loose sense at this point.

Well some solace can be obtained from the sheer amount of data required to deepfake even a short video of a speech. It's unlikely that there'll be widespread abuse of identity for people in general, at least. Of course the resources are available to spoof people who have lots of video or audio records, though.

If it became too much of a problem it could probably be dealt with by standard cryptographic techniques for important broadcasts. Standard public/private key techniques are still going to work.

If you're interested in chess, you might like Google's new chess AI AlphaZero, after 4 hours of learning it beat the current best chess engine in the world.

Ok. Well epsilon-N implies 0.9 recurring = 1 anyway. AFAIK it's even true in non-standard analysis. 1 - infinitesimal isn't the same thing as 0.9 recurring.

I'm mostly just watching from the sidelines, but I think you slipped up a bit here Banno.

Will mere implication do? I think not, since any true proposition is implied by any other proposition, true or false.

A contextually relevant sense of implication might. I don't think it's so easy to substitute material implication into an arbitrary language game involving justification. Will give an example.

One of the things that hinted the energies of electrons in orbit around a nucleus came in discrete jumps was the mismatch between the Coulomb force law and empirical observation. Coulomb force predicts an elliptical orbit of electrons around a nucleus - since they're in an ellipse they're accelerating, and accelerating electrons were known to emit light. When they emit light, they lost energy, and thus were predicted to spiral towards the nucleus; thus all atoms would collapse. Scientists at the time had the theory of electromagnetism on one hand, and it predicted P="the electrons will spiral towards the atom", however they knew that ~P. If justification worked here like material implication, all scientists who knew the experimental results and the predictions of electromagnetism would have immediately believed everything through explosion*. Nevertheless, the scientists did not, despite accepting the general applicability of the Coulomb force law and the experimental results.

(1) B(P)
(2) B(~P)
(3) B(P)&B(~P)
(4)B(P&~P)
(5)B(P&~P->Q)
(6)B(Q)

I think, what is more likely, is that the scientists concluded that there was some flaw in the Coulomb law (and Maxwell's equations) despite being generally correct, since they trusted both the experimentation and the theory, but allowed the extent of their trust to dynamically limit the applicability - it was found to be an incomplete description, and thus beliefs in some predictions made by the theory (insofar as they contradicted experiment and good sense) were suspended. Until a more complete description, and a reason for the flaws, was found.

This is to say that the language game of justification and belief in science, at least at this point and in this topic, is poorly modelled by a doxastic logic featuring material implication. It is more a history of trust, flaw finding, and the discovery of scope-limitations of previously 'universal' laws.

edit: * assuming they are rational in the sense of a doxastic logic with material implication, which I'm making a reductio of here.

Is this a criticism of the epsilon-delta and epsilon-N convergence/continuity criteria?

In the first case it's easier to think of as a direction. In the second case - for cardinals - they give the size of infinite sets, so yes they are probably quantities since they represent the magnitude of something.

There are a few different conceptions of infinity in mathematics.

There's what the usual infinity symbol represents: $\infty$, which usually denotes a limiting process: $\lim_{x\rightarrow\infty}f(x)$, IE what value $f(x)$ tends to when $x$ becomes arbitrarily large. Formally this corresponds to a definition of a limit and can be considered shorthand for it.

Then you've got cardinal numbers, which count how many of something there are. The smallest infinite cardinal is called $\aleph_0$, which is the size of the set of natural numbers $\mathbb{N}=\{0,1,2,3,...\}$. Then there are ordinal numbers, which agree with cardinal numbers up to $\aleph_0$ and can disagree beyond that - they correspond to different ways of ordering infinite sets of things. For example, the standard ordering of $\mathbb{N}=\{0,1,2,3,...\}$ is given the symbol $\omega$, which denotes its order type. If you removed 42 from $\mathbb{N}$ and stuck it on the end (after the infinity of numbers), you'd have the same set of elements but it would look like $\{0,1,2,...,41,43,44,...,42\}$, and this is given the order type $\omega+1$. You can separate out the odds and evens similarly and end up with $\omega+\omega=2\omega$. This operations allow you to define standard arithmetic operations on infinities relating to orders, and similarly for cardinals.

In the first case, infinity is a shorthand for a limiting process (the infinity is hidden in the quantifier 'for all epsilon'), in the second case infinite objects are referred to explicitly.

The strongest argument against this kind of claim, in my view, is what happens when you consider events which predate the advent of consciousness. This does two things:

(1) It reveals that there is a time in which all that is was unconditioned by the ideational imposition of 'form', or similar concepts; anything which produces a relativisation of space and time as such to perceptual space and time.
(2) It reveals that whatever our consciousness does, it dwells within this apparently unstructured universe radically indifferent to but nevertheless consistent with the advent of our consciousness.

More precisely, considering the universe prior to the advent of consciousness reveals a becoming which is not reducible to a becoming for a human. In the language of Locke, this is an affirmation of the difference between primary and secondary qualities - primary qualities are those which are not determined by their relationship to a person; like curvature, specific heat capacity, temperature, chronological age...

Levi Bryant articulates it (following Meillassoux) here:

By contrast, when we speak of primary qualities were are speaking of non-relational properties that are in the thing itself. These properties are non-relational in the sense that they do not depend on us in order to exist. As such, they are characterized as the “in-itself”. For Descartes these properties consisted of length, width, movement, depth, figure, and size. Meillassoux, by contrast, adopts the thesis that any aspects of an object that can be formulated in mathematical terms belong to the object in-itself.

this is not necessarily to affirm that properties such as temperature, distance, curvature are non-relational tout court, but they have their own specific strata of relations which cannot be seen as reducible to a relationship between them and a person. Such as temperature being a result of relations of motion of particles, curvature being generated from constitutive spatial (more generally, parametric) arrangements of an object.

I'm tempted to try to start a reading group for this paper discussing Rosen:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03081079.2012.689466?needAccess=true

Rosen's modelling relations constitute a conceptual schema for the understanding of the bidirectional process of correspondence between natural systems and formal symbolic systems. The notion of formal systems used in this study refers to information structures constructed as algebraic rings of observable attributes of natural systems, in which the notion of observable signifies a physical attribute that, in principle, can be measured. Due to the fact that modelling relations are bidirectional by construction, they admit a precise categorical formulation in terms of the category-theoretic syntactic language of adjoint functors, representing the inverse processes of information encoding/decoding via adjunctions. As an application, we construct a topological modelling schema of complex systems. The crucial distinguishing requirement between simple and complex systems in this schema is reflected with respect to their rings of observables by the property of global commutativity. The global information structure representing the behaviour of a complex system is modelled functorially in terms of its spectrum functor. An exact modelling relation is obtained by means of a complex encoding/decoding adjunction restricted to an equivalence between the category of complex information structures and the category of sheaves over a base category of partial or local information carriers equipped with an appropriate topology.

Any takers? We'd get to learn some category theory!

I have an anecdote from a f2m transexual I used to work with. He kept an eye on the number of times he was interrupted in conversation as a function of the pitch of his voice - which was being decreased by the hormones. Pitch went down, so did the interruptions.

I had to collect a bunch of data from students and staff at the university, I collected from him and asked if I could record a little * in the gender column of the spreadsheet to signify that they were currently going through gender reassignment therapy. They said 'yes, of course, there are probably lots of biological differences between me and a typical male relevant to the study - and that should be controlled for'. Not that I could've seen any trend from a single data point. So for the purposes of the analysis, I included him as a him, then excluded him, then included him as a her to see if there were any differences - there weren't any, no effect sizes large compared to the noise.

How much gender matters depends a lot on the questions you ask. And if you're tactful and respectful, your requests don't go into the expected prejudice box that reactionary ideology paints as already existent and unavoidable.

Yeah this is fair enough. I've been imprecise a few times in the thread, which is certainly a shame since it's a thread about logic; and no one is less sympathetic to imprecision (rightly, probably) than logicians.