What happened to you claim that "randomness can only be spoken of in relation to a fixed system"? A "fixed system" is an artificial system. — Metaphysician Undercover

A fixed system can and does capture real phenomena. A great deal - if not all - of experiments in science involve fixing possible variables in order to isolate some dynamics of some system or another. That does not make scientific results artificial.

In political theory, there's a useful distinction that often gets made between 'antagonistic' and 'agonistic' politics, where antagonism is the struggle between enemies, while agonism marks the struggle between adversaries. Whereas antagonism marks the effort to vanquish or destroy the enemy, agonism is an adherence to shared principles over whose meaning is contested over by adversaries. For the ancient Greeks, the agon was a contest, primarily athletic, in which competitors pitted themselves against each other, but nonetheless in a spirit of mutual admiration for the other. (for more).

If, as some democratic theorists have it, the whole point of democracy is to transform antagonism into agonism, the danger occurs when the direction of flow changes from agonism to antagonism: when the other becomes not an adversary to compete with, but an enemy to destroy. So yes, divisiveness ought to be affirmed and even celebrated, but ideally in a way that doesn't make of the other someone to destroy (although a little bit of strategic destruction every now and then ain't so bad, in my books).

My condolences.

This is important, randomness is only a property of an artificial system. — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't say this. That a coin toss is random is entirely a real, and not artificial property of a series of coin tosses. In fact it might be fair to say that 'real' and 'artificial don't even come into it at all. A coin toss is random, no qualifications attached. But that our object of investigation is a coin toss it itself, follows from a choice made by an agent.

Moreover, Peirce did not posit "randomness as a fundamental ontological principle", but chance. The two are not interchangeable.

A quick comment on some of the discussion here: a clean way to understand randomness is as equiprobability: if, given certain outcomes, the likeliness of each happening under repeated iterations is the same, then your system is random. There's no 'discrimination' as to the end result (no 'asymmetry that would favour some outcomes over others).

One thing that follows from this understanding is that randomness can only be spoken of in relation to a fixed system. Something is random insofar one cannot choose, in advance, between fixed outcomes. So a coin toss is random because the two outcomes, head and tails, are fixed in advance, and what makes the toss random is the equiprobability of outcome. Conceptual problems creep in when this relation to fixity is lost: if the coin turns into an elephant, that's not random, that's nonsense.

A further consequence of this is that randomness is an epistemic, and not ontological concept. If randomness is system-relative (defined only in relation to a fixed system), then no event 'in-itself' is either random or not-random. Instead, you need a distribution of (potential) events relative to a system in to qualify something or some event as random or not. But importantly, what counts and does not count as belonging to, or constituting a system, is itself relative to the kind of investigation one conducts.

That we take a series of random coin tosses to be our object of investigation already supposes artifice; that we count the repetition of coin tosses as constituting a series at all (rather than say, unconnected, singular coin tosses that happen to occur in a row), is the result of a decision, and does not follow from anything 'naturally occuring' in the world.

I read "neither entity" as referring to position and momentum, not to the electron itself. — Janus

This nasty slight of hand is how one goes from science to Deepak Chopra woo shit.

This seems like invisible hand meets central planning and the handwaving about details, while legit, is also a clue that this is a fantasy of relinquishing control that satisfies both the right rejection of being held responsible for others and the leftist need for a caring, nourishing bosom. — csalisbury

What I like about it is it's clear-eyedness about not 'going back to how things were before'. With 'big data' you can't just institute laws or protections to get us back to our old 'private' lives. There's no putting that genie back into the bottle. Your data's out there, and if not Facebook, then someone else will mine you for all you're worth. So it's a question of how to negotiate it and engage it, rather than bemoan it. For just the reasons you point out, it's not going to satisfy everyone. It still compromises too much with capitalism, as radical as it is (imagine what it would take to institute something like it). If the article advocates for more governability, the other, even more left take would be a politics of ungovernability. For a take like this see:

https://societyandspace.org/2018/02/27/on-giving-up-on-this-world/

“Communism has a rather orthodox definition including the abolition of private property, the cessation of class relations of domination, and the withering away of the state. Left-accelerationism [i.e. data democratization -SX] is a total non-starter on this issue for me because it remains a technocratic state socialist project rather than communist one. [One should] propose blocking, sabotage, and ungovernability as a shared exodus from an Empire that operates according to communication (the precise cybernetic system that left-accelerationists advocate). The speed of such revolt may actually be experienced as a slowing down, as the complicity between cybernetics and capitalism is that both speed things up because they perceive most problems to be an issue of efficiency.“

This would be a third option. Not ethics, not politics, just escape, inoperativity:

“We do not want to be better than our enemies. They are good, and that is why we hate them. They go to church, pay their taxes, and play well with others. They care about the environment, they oppose intolerance. The problem with do-gooders is that they try to be better than their enemies. So busy being ‘for good things and against bad things’ that they lack vision. Strategy is utterly lost on them.... Ethics is an impediment to us. ... The earth does not smile any more on those who refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, call themselves anti-capitalist, or eat organic. " (https://incivility.org/2017/07/22/a-short-introduction-to-the-politics-of-cruelty/)

I'm attracted to this in theory, but I have alot more hope for an expanded democratization. I not sure I have the constitution for it. Perhaps a bit counter-revolutionary in that regard.

A world-historical crisis with no forthcoming human solution coincides with a extreme sophistication of AI, and the overwhelming exigency forces us to remove the ethical brakes, and cede control. I can imagine AIs resettling refugees in camps, AI-training as the new means of wage labor (both of these are already happening embryonically btw) , cultivation of echo-chambers and reality-bubbles as enforced fragmentation. — csalisbury

To shift a little to diagnosis again, one thing that depresses me is that this 'removal of ethical breaks' comes right at the time when ethics has become our predominant if not only mode of engagement with the civitas. We're all really bloody ethical now, super sensitive to the desires, wants, needs of the other (the corollary to this, one might say the mechanism for this, is shame, or weaponized shame: we shame those who are (deemed?) unethical on a literal global scale. Think of red hat kid. This wielding of shame is in turn premised on, precisely, responsibility taken to the nth degree: feel shame because you are responsible for the thing).

The problem isn't this in itself (it's done alot of good, even though its been messy), but that it's become the limiting horizon of any transformative action. We only know how to speak the language of ethics while being almost completely politically incompetent (or else we orient our politics towards ethics, we engage political mechanisms to achieve outcomes in the field of ethics). The problem is that all of this can be accommodated by the prevailing order: everyone's really fucking nice and lovely to each other, in the meantime, the Amazon burns and the polar ice caps melt. And the only language we have to deal with the former are the tools of shame ('look at Bolsonaro, burning the Amazon!' Shammeeee). It's so inadequate. These people are fucking shame-less, because they don't operate on the field of ethics, they operate on the field of politics, and everyone else is completely underprepped for it.

The other symptom that follows from this - the predominance of moralization - is a reaction against it in light of its total ineffectiveness in certain parts of society. 'Our' counter-cultural movement is the alt-right. If previous decades had punks and hippies and hipsters, 'we' have the alt-right. That's our current contribution to the pantheon of counter-culture. And the whole nexus of shame-responsibility-ethics is precisely what they do not respond to, what they are in precise reaction against. But they too have no political vocabulary, their mechanisms of civil engagement are myth, violence, and (a certain form of) joy, among other things.

As far as the idea of convergence upon some radical upheaval - in some ways I'm even more cynical: I think that uneasy knot of tension, like we're suspended between what's happened and what's to come is the point, like Kafka's trial (unending or normalized Krisis, according to the old etymology: the moment at which, in the evolution of an illness, a doctor must make a judgement as to the life or death of the patient). That suspension between life and death, not knowing if one can continue, that's also the interregnum that Gramsci spoke of: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The feeling of convergence might do even more to sustain this than ease it (one more step, we'll get there!). But what if not?

I don't think it would be unfair to say that hylomorphism informs Kantian philosophy from end-to-end: “Matter and Form - These are two concepts which lie at the basis of all other reflection, so very inseparably are they bound up with the use of the understanding. (A 266/B 322)." The key difference is that Kant's hylomorphism is 'transcendental', rather than ontological: Kant shifts 'form' from the things themselves (as it were), to the human subject: it is the subject which in-forms the possible objects of knowledge and judgement, and indeed, makes them "possible objects" at all to begin with.

Or does he discuss sensory perception from another context.? — Arthur Rupel

The entire 'Transcendental Aesthetic' in the CPR is more or less dedicated to the question of sensory perception, which Kant generally groups under the name of 'sensibility' more broadly. A20/B34 lays out the broad strokes of how sensation figures in the architectonic:

"The capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is entitled sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. ... The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance."

Importantly, for Kant, sensibility involves both what he calls 'matter' and 'form'. 'Form' involves the a priori conditions of space and time, while 'matter' involves 'sensation in general':

"That in the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance. That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form, cannot itself be sensation; and therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must allow of being considered apart from all sensation." (A20/B34).

"Space and time are its [intuition's] pure forms, and sensation in general its matter. The former alone can we know a priori, that is, prior to all actual perception; and such knowledge is therefore called pure intuition. The latter is that in our knowledge which leads to its being called a posteriori knowledge, that is, empirical intuition. The former inhere in our sensibility with absolute necessity, no matter of what kind our sensations may be; the latter can exist in varying modes" (A43/B60).

So yeah, read the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' carefully, and you might find what you're looking for. There's alot there regarding the status of appearance, representation, and what can be known, especially in the bit titled "General Observations on Transcendental Aesthetic", (A42/B59).

"We are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do".

There's alot of weird modal shit going in a statement like this. Take 'choose' out of it, and this becomes a tautology: "We are never able to do... other than what we actually do". But what would it mean to do otherwise than what we do? Say doing otherwise were 'possible'. And then you did otherwise. But then, you could not have done otherwise than that. So, no, obviously, you can't have done otherwise than what you did, or do. And the same considerations apply to statements like this:

"So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future".

One can only say to this: of course our actual future is our only possible future. What other future could there be? Another possible future? But were that 'other' future 'actualized', that too would be an actual future. And that too would be the only possible future. So one has to wonder what the qualification 'if', in 'if determinism is true' is doing in a statement like this. I mean, what other state of affairs ought to hold? That other possible futures are... possible futures? Tautology again.

Conceiving the future in terms of "possibility" is where the root of the problem lies, but it suffices to point out the strangeness of the above statements for the moment.

I don't know why atheism is always framed in epistemological terms: as if its merely a matter of 'knowing'. People ought to consider instead an 'ontological' atheism, a refusal of the very idea that God makes sense at all to begin with, or that he could be afforded any place whatsoever among 'what is' or, in the case of negagive theology, what 'is not'. Framing atheism as a matter of knowledge already concedes too much to the theist: that the very idea of God is at all sensical. I don't 'know' God doesn't exist, in the same way I don't 'know' square circles don't exist. Not because I'm ignorant about the 'existence' of square circles, but because the very idea is stupid to begin with.

Only when atheism is framed as a matter of 'knowing' or 'believing' does it have anything in common with agnosticism.

If you're envisioning something different that a restoration (brave new world thing) then this would have be the creation of something new. I know this is nitpicky (and I'm not sure you used the word literally) but wouldn't it have to be less a matter of 'engineering' and more a matter of *cultivating* present (pregnant) conditions for (the realization of) new conditions?

If so, what would that kind of politics consist of? — csalisbury

I guess my personal framework is a largely (radical?) democratic one: if responsibility really has become so diffuse, then democratize responsibility. That is, locate responsibility on a societal/structural level, rather than an individual one, and approach 'control' similarly. This is, I imagine, quite close to what Butler is getting at in the quotes provided by @Number2018, although I've not read later Butler myself. Butler aside, I understand this largely in terms of cultivating and engineering widely accessible means and mechanisms of societal participation and 'self'-control.

This itself may translate in different ways, but one way in particular would be rather anti-capitalist approach, or at least an approach which would not enshrine capital accumulation as the one and only means of such participation, which is largely what's what we have today ('vote with your dollars'). Another, complimentary one might be an anti-statist or para-statist one: a need to understand democratic politics in a way that's not just a contest over state control. A democratic politics that would look nothing like what we have now. Insofar as we're talking social media, democratize data, for a start? Alternatively, disrupt and jam: flood the dataways with bullshit. That would have to be a coordinated effort.

And what's the best way to go about all this? I'm not sure. Insurrection, revolution, reformation? I have a rough idea of an ideal: I'm torn on how to get there. Disoriented. One thing I'm convinced of is that ethics won't save us. I can diagnose better than I can strategise.

Suspect there is some confusion between choice as verb and choice as a state of affairs, and over how the one relates to the other. Would be interesting to tease out.

These two sentences contradict each other. — RogueAI

Yet, Deep Blue is real. Between contradicting sentences and contradicting reality, best to choose the former, and reevaluate what we understand of contradiction.

Choices are not antithetical to determinism. And it is not axiomatic that they are. At the very least an argument must be presented. Something has gone wrong in our understanding of one or the other or both if they are taken to be as such.

It's not a matter of if. Deep Blue evaluates options. That is what it does. That is what it is programmed to do. And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined. I'm not arguing that this entails the reality of options. It's a statement of fact.

Consider it a reductio.

How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?

In a deterministic universe, there are no options. Everything's already been set. You are determined to eat whatever. — RogueAI

Of course. You are determined to eat the apple. But you still had the option between apple and the pear. You just chose the apple, not freely. There is a choice, and what is chosen. That you didn't choose it freely is irrelavent to there being a choice.

Deep Blue chooses between two possible moves in a chess game. Everything about it is determined. Yet it still makes a choice, among the possible options, to castle or to check, to move the queen, or sacrifice the bishop. This is what Deep Blue is designed to do. Make choices.

Choosing require there to be at least two options. How are there any options if everything is already determined? — RogueAI

There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple (to eat). The determinist says: the choice was not one freely made.

Here you have both options and determination, neither of which are incompatible with the other.

I read this the other day; it's a fantastic overview of Peirce's thought. Didn't realize firstness, secondness, and thirdness were modelled after index, icon, and symbol. That was very helpful.

If we have free will, then our choices are being freely made. That is a necessary condition for free will. If your choices aren't being freely made, then you obviously don't have free will. — RogueAI

Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made. The determinst simply has to reply that of course choices are made all the time - only that those choices are not freely made. So the argument that we need free will in order to practice science collapses. I.e.

"3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices."

Is false.

3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices. — RogueAI

But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely chosen, or itself 'determined'. If so, the fact that science requires 'choices' to be made says nothing about the necessity of free will to underpin science. What matters is how 'choices' are to be understood, not weather or not they occur in the practice of science. The equation of free will with choice seems to be a mistake.

Of course Hegel is not a philosopher.

If you conveniently define philosophy in such a way as to exclude him, all the better to make provocative, attention seeking claims.

One thought I keep coming back to is something like a foreclosure of ethics or an impossibility of ethics: if - and this is a big if - ethics is in some way premised on the possibility of responsibility, and if - another one - responsibility is itself becoming more and more destitute, one ramification is the impossibility of ethics. In a world where responsibility is so diffuse as to be rendered inoperative, then ethics too becomes unintelligible. Not that we can't 'act ethically' in a kind of everyday sense: murder bad, graciousness good and so on, but that these injunctions lose their bearing as relations between humans (acting responsibly to and for another) and become instead stultified rules, a juridicalization of ethics, or ethics become legalist.

This is a pretty totalizing thought, but I think it's worth considering as a pole of a tedency at work in a kind of world-historical drift. And if I can 'float' a bit more, I imagine there are a few ways to respond to this condition too: one is greenhouse you write of, or else and together with the escapist communes (of noble savages? Thinking Brave New World); another is a grasping of the nettle and a ('willed') devaluation of ethics in favour of politics: if ethics has gone to shit, shift the focus to communal world building, to reengineering the conditions under which we could again relate to one another outside juridical categories, whether in a renewed ethical mode, or simply otherwise. These paths don't exhaust the range of responses, but indicate, if I'm not insane, some possible ones.

I don't quite see how labor conditions under post-Fodist Capital dissolve responsibility. You're actually held to more of a standard. Even a dishwasher has to be some sort of artist. The pressure to perform is inane. Responsibility becomes distorted under post-Fordist Capital so as to be equated with service as an art form. — thewonder

The basic idea is that if it's true that responsibility has a constitutive link to what escapes control, then the breaking of that link (so that responsibility and control become coextensive) equally implies the breakdown of the concept of responsibility. When what you call the 'pressure to perform' becomes all encompassing, the sphere of responsibility expands without limit and effectively collapses: responsible for everything, you are effectively responsible for nothing.* Responsibility lies in the tension sustained between what we control and what we do not, and when one of those poles collapses, so too does the very idea of responsibility.

*(I think again of social media performers - or anyone, really - who get called out for saying the wrong thing by hundreds and thousands of anonymous netizens: how does one respond in a way commensurate to that? One releases a tweet 'taking responsibility' and apologizing for one's words - but what can this mean any longer? Isn't this more performance? More labour?)

One other way to think about is in terms of 'state of emergency' discourses. As understood by certain legal theorists, in states of emergencies, we are held accountable (to the law) without being held accountable to any particular law. In Giorgio Agamben's terms, we are held accountable to the 'form' of the law, emptied of any content. Such a situation is particularly dangerous because it is a particular form of 'anything goes', but in a way that's sanctioned by law (thus distinguishing it from pure anarchy).

With respect to responsibility, one can say something similar is occurring: we are held ever more accountable to the form of responsibility without being held accountable for any one thing in particular. With work coinciding with performance and control being ever more absolutized, there is no longer any space of 'non-control' in relation to which responsibility becomes intelligible. Hence a kind of diffusion of responsibility which makes us both absolutely responsible, while at the same time emptying responsibility of any content.

Overpopulation is a sham peddled by apologists for capitalism:

"It is unconscionable to call for a decrease in birth rates rather than an end to an economic system based on the maldistribution of wealth between the Global North and the Global South, to leave undisturbed the fossil-fuel industry that powers unsustainable growth while finger-wagging at women in impoverished countries. It’s a transference of responsibility from the rich countries who produced climate change to the poor countries most affected by it.

The emphasis on family planning as an environmental fix distracts us from making essential investments in people and the environment. This includes supporting clean energy, food security, and mass transit, along with accessible comprehensive health systems infrastructure, education, and employment"

You know what a chair is and can describe it thus because its meaning is grounded in a community of users without which your description would carry no weight. That is the relevant individual vs group distinction here and the one which renders Terrapin's argument absurd. — Baden

I agree that most of everything Terrapin says is absurd, but I think there's a confusion between understanding chair as a nominatum (the thing named) and chair as nominans (the name 'chair'). Qua nominans, yes, to understand what a 'chair' is requires a community of users who use the word in that way, etc etc. Qua nominatum, you need a great deal more than that, including all the stuff I mentioned regarding the grammar of chair (used for sitting, moveable, etc). I only insist that we can't treat the two nomen separately, and its only at the 'shallow' level of the nominans that one can argue about individuals vs groups and so on.

(Sorry about the Latin terms, but it's just a useful distinction that I'm used to and work nicely here).

In Arendt's terminology, he was creating works while refusing action. But in this very precise way, where the work simulated action. ... It really does feel like the sphere of 'action' in Arendt's sense is lessening. — csalisbury

There's an Italian philosopher, Paolo Virno, who argues that one of the transformations that's happened since Arendt's time is that work has more and more taken on the aspects of action. For Virno, where work (/labour) once was defined in terms of producing an end product which was then sent out into the world (you produce a kettle, and now it's someone else's kettle, and they can do as they like with it), work is now ever more modelled on the category of performance: the results of work now coincide with the performance of work itself (think of social media stars whose work - the 'product' - just is their performance. There's no separate, distinct, end-product that gets detached from the labour of work itself).

Virno uses the pianist Glenn Gould to make the point, but I'd wager that DFW fits that bill too: the attempt to anticipate is just this attempt to prolong the performance 'into' the work (using Virno's terminology, DFW might be considered a 'post-Fordist' labourer). Anyway, this makes me think that this all might have some pretty consequent ramifications for responsibility, in that it kinda throws the whole notion into a kind of crisis of intelligibility: if responsibility requires, as a condition of its being, a relation to what is not in our control, the drive to subsume everything into the ambit of our control (a socio-cultural shift as much as a matter of individual psychology (?) like DFW) means that we can no longer think in terms of responsibility. Not that we are 'not responsible' for things, but that responsibility loses it's coherency as a concept altogether. The 'material conditions' that underwrite it have given way (or are eroding, at least).

(I think here of the politics of/around Youtube, which is perpetually responsible and not-responsible for all sorts of things, from radicalizing teenagers, to demonitizing LGBTQI content for the sake of advertising, etc etc.)

Yeah, I saw comments to that effect, just lending my agreement.

Can you give us a bit more to chew on? A link even. It's got to be more interesting than what's come before. — Baden

One way to think about it is that concepts have purposes. They are motivated by something, necessitated by a convergence of issues and problems (like a horseshoe). We invent a horseshoe so as to stop the wearing down of the hoof due to our use of horses. If one starts thinking of horseshoes in terms of 'agreed upon terms' or 'individual uses', one abstracts from the whole point (read: purpose) of a horseshoe to begin with. It's the latter that grounds the former, and any debate that takes place wholly on the grounds of meaning in this narrow sense is misguided from the beginning.

With respect to 'correctness', that's also a poorly posed notion. Concepts are neither correct nor incorrect, but rather useful or not useful, felicitious or infelicitious. A horseshoe is neither correct nor incorrect, and it's simply bad grammar to consider it so, the kind of thing one corrects in grade school. They are however, more or less suited to their purpose, a better or worse response to the problem and constaints around keeping a horse's hoof from wearing out.

What's the grammar of a chair? Roughly, something to sit on, shaped for a human sized butt, mostly mobile but not always, useful for when you've been walking all day. A chair is roughly a response to the problem of human fatigue, our particular physiology, and our ability to create things (some other stuff too). The concept of a chair responds to all of this. We know, for the most part, what counts as a chair because we know all this. We understand how humans live. Not merely how they talk (the latter a subset of the former). But if it's framed at the question at the level of talk only, we lose everything important. Significance, not meaning.

What's missing in the conversation here is any sense of the problems to which concepts respond. Concepts are addressed to problems to which they form a response. This thread started with a horseshoe - a horseshoe is designed to protect the hoof of a horse: it is a solution to a problem. And not just any solution will do. The 'two sides' here, one placing concepts in the purview of the individual, and the other in the social, are both entirely wrong. Both ought to think to ask the horse, which cares neither for what individuals nor societies think about horseshoes.

Hadn't heard of that one. Any good? — Baden

It's good once you realise that it's like a 40 page essay on Deleuze and then the rest is cultural critique where Deleuze barely figures. The Deleuze stuff is - expectedly for Zizek - incredibly unorthodox (its almost written in a way to make orthodox Deleuzians mad), and worth reading precisely for that.

It's a choice. — S

Yep.

Eh, not a thread for you I guess.

If you were boring and unspecific maybe.

You're simply collapsing knowledge, intention, and action into one big blob. There things are not the same, and it is not very useful to treat them as such,

And I take it as self-evident that speculating what something entails does not require it's instantiation. Existence does not follow conception, as anyone minimally familiar with the standard reply to the ontological argument understands.

you have assumed that we do have responsibility. — thewonder

I don't believe I have, and furthermore, whether or not we do or do not have responsibility is not very relevant. The question is over what responsibility entails. Whether we have it or not is a separate question, one that I've not asked, nor am particularly interested in here.

That the consequences of an action can not be known — thewonder

This is not about knowledge. I've said nothing about knowing - or not - the consequences of an action. The OP is not framed in any epistemic terms.

But maybe this is confusing the epistemic issue (risk or not knowing the unintended consequences of an action) with the metaphysical issue (whether actions are indeed mechanical or ‘information in, action out’)? — Noah Te Stroete

Like I said to someone else, this isn't a debate over intention.

--

Also, Butler's just a good old fashioned lesbian. The discussion of her title isn't very relevant. Professor Butler would probably be the preferred one, if you neurotic nerds really care that much about it.

If you were to hold me personally responsible for, say, it raining last Friday in Bulgaria, then I would probably laugh in your face — S

Probably, but then, if you were to read past my click-baity OP title, you'd know I'd laugh along too.

Andrew Culp - Dark Deleuze (meh)
Jane R. Goodall - The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia
Slavoj Zizek - Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences