Look At the View

I've been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death coincidentally with Martin Heidegger's essays "Letter on Humanism" & "The Question Concerning Technology", and realized just how easy it is, once you break through his jargon, to get at the practical consequences of Heidegger's methodology when applied to a different medium. Enframing, in a certain restricted way (i.e. without specific regard to man's special reflective relationship to Being from perspective of Thrown-ness. Ek-sistence not withstanding, as it were) is precisely what Neil Postman's book seems to concern itself with.

For all intents and purposes, Postman spends around 180-ish pages lamenting the fall of The Age of Exposition (the age in which culture and thinking is funneled through the lens of typography and print media, which organizes thinking and discourse in discreet, rational, and highly contextualized forms) as it is replaced by the Age of Showbusiness wherein the culture is dictated by the context-free, absurdist, and ultimately superficial colander of television. Postman's characterization of the Age of Exposition is suspiciously close to Heidegger's lament in the "Question Concerning Techology" concerning man's Enframing by Techne and being Ordered Into Parts for the purposes of Consumption. While anytime one is considering Heidegger, he or she is primarily supposed to be concerned with what such an imposition means in terms of the relationship of beings to Being, it seems like Postman's criticism of the oncoming (as of 1986-ish) epoch, while couched in terms of culture, addresses a sort of practical parallel similar in process, if not in function, to Heidegger.

Heidegger was concerned that, in an epoch in which beings are Set Upon by Techne, they are Ordered as Objects -- massed for the purposes of future consumption -- in such a way that alters their relationship to Being itself. They are no objectified and alienated from Being. They are de-contextualized, and removed from their special relationship to Being. Man's Thrown-ness from Being is ignored as he and Being both become objectified and Ordered.

Postman is concerned that, in a cultural epoch in which Television is the specified norm of discourse and information, people, news, and events are de-contextualized into floating bits of pointless matter. Huxley was right, and information is trivialized, making man's relationship to the whole is ignored and practical news and information is largely irrelevant.

Heidegger would almost certainly not lament a removal from the homogenization of the print culture which Postman champions so dearly, but I find that the comparison of de-contextualization of some sort of ethereal special relationship, which Heidegger DOES lament, appears to be a shared theme. Postman's analysis looks like a practical application of Heidegger's more obscurantist method (although couched in non-poetic, concrete terms that Heidegger would absolutely hate.)

It's fun to see that they are at cross points, and that Postman apparently decries the fall of a sort of aspect of the specific paradigm which Heidegger is specifically trying to remove.

Moving In Stereo

So, I've been thinking about materialism and determinism a lot; specifically I've been thinking about it since hearing a piece podcast by NPR's Radiolab wherein Robert Krulwich interviewed Brian Greene from Columbia University concerning multiple universes. Mr. Greene vehemently insists that the data which comes to theoretical physicists points directly to the conclusion (from varying angles, I might add) to his multiple universe conclusions. He also admits to at least two fundamental assumptions: one, that the universe is infinite; two: that the entirety of existence in the universe can be defined mechanically.

It's the latter assumption that had me thinking. Mr. Krulwich pushed Mr. Greene in the interview gently on this assumption, but it wasn't especially cogent to the purposes of their discussion. However, the nudging did lead Mr. Greene to assert that there is not any compelling evidence that the universe contains anything that we couldn't, theoretically, represent via physics -- in fact going so far as to say that physics is all there is, and that free will is an apparent illusion.

I'm not sure I buy that on the grounds that he is asserting it. I mean, it seems like any sort of evidence which Mr. Greene and other physicists would deem worthy already contains within it the assumption that materialism is true, while all at the same time making that assertion through the lense of his/her own consciousness, which appears to be an immeasurable and disingenuous practice. Doesn't that count for something? I mean, while it's fine and dandy to account for brain states of various stimuli and the like to explain emotional responses, does it stand to reason that the existence of such a correspondence accounts entirely for consciousness and other human experiences without including first the premise that those experiences are non-existent? Do those brain states account for the experience or feeling of the emotion? Do those experiences exist in any meaningful way? If those experiences DO exist in any meaningful way (and I see no reason why they shouldn't), then certainly mapping brain states doesn't make for concluding that radical materialism is true.

What about something like Sartre's version of consciousness, wherein we are always radically free to choose? Can it not be the case that while our subconscious (and presumably the determined world) merely influence the way we might perceive the viability of potential candidates for choice, but leave the ultimate decision to act a sort of radical consciousness? If this is the case, then clockwork determinism, at least in the company of agents, cannot account for the whole of being.

Basically, I don't see that so long as we are living in such a way as that all of our experience, all of our feelings, and all of the contents of our consciousness generate the contents of our perception (accurate/real/existent/whatever or not and inside of which even the assertion that those contents might be illegitimate) how we can conclude that materialism is definitely or even reasonably accurate as a holistic program without first including the premise that materialism and what defines it must be the only "stuff" that counts.

Radiolab interview with Brian Greene via Youtube:

Beast of Burden

So, I had this thought, because I suck so much.

I was considering Zeno's paradoxes a little (one of which he uses to disprove motion... kind of).

That got me thinking about how much things can suck. So, let's say Person A sucks big time. Person B sucks the biggest time. I, on the other hand, do not suck. I lack suck. There is a profound absence of suck in me. I am point 0 for suck. If it is the case that there is clearly some sort of relative measure of sucking (Person B sucks more than Person A) is it possible for me to not suck at all?

I mean, we can surely infer that the absence of sucking means that I stand in a relative position of sucking less than Person A and Person B. However, if there is a defined gradient, the difference between sucking between myself and Person A (the closer of the two to myself) can be infinitely divided, so that the best I could say about my sucking is that I suck only an eency-weency bit, and yet still a lot less than Person A, and a whole hell of a lot less than Person B. That is unless I transcend sucking. I am the target and not the arrow. I lack suck in all its forms. Other objects of suck move to meet me at point 0, the target.

My point? Everyone sucks a little, except me, because I include the absence of sucking as a premise of my nature. It is up to the individual for whom this ridiculous nonsense was posted, to prove that premise unsound.

Mayor of Simpleton

So, I had started this thing in anticipation of cracking open my copy of Penguin Classic's Early Greek Philosophy (edited by Jonathan Barnes) for the first time. It turns out that, as Mr. Barnes classifies them, the Pre-Socratics weren't really "philosophers" in the sense that we usually might characterize philosophers (probably involving complicated hierarchies of logical arguments used to devise an edifice of metaphysical, ethical, or other abstract construction of the world, or experience, or what-have-you.) Indeed, they are what, in the text and apparently throughout antiquity, were called "natural philosophers", or more accurately for us I suppose, "Guys That Looked At the World and Tried to Understand It Somehow", and this appears to be their fundamental unifying characteristic.

This characterization alone would have made the kind of thing I wanted to do here very difficult, but when combined with the sparsity of resources concerning the Pre-Socratics; the lack of any holistic texts or models; such a task becomes far more distant. Instead, this book has lent itself to my intellectual curiosity more through an academic-historical interest than a philosophical, argumentative, or critical-thinking interest.

It's definitely satisfying to get a glimpse into the beginnings both of what we (I) understand as philosophy and natural science. These guys were really trying to understand the fundamental workings of the world, specifically separately from the traditional "it must be magic," or, "the gods did it," or, "it just is, so get over it, pussy,"-styled modes of thought.

It is definitely interesting, but that's why this thing has taken a bit to get off the ground. I might bump this post a few times with some thoughts on each of these guys (they're organized by individual in the book, chronologically) as I get through this thing, but it may be some time before I get around to making fun of Plato for being so self-righteous.

Everyday I Write the Book

I can't say that I'm certain how this works, but apparently if you don't have your own blog, you don't qualify as a person... so here's the only testament to my personhood. I will mostly be posting thoughts on the philosophy I'm reading, because I need a vetting process. Otherwise, there's a significant chance anyone stumbling nearby will get the cross-stench of my D&D affliction also, though this interface isn't for that specific purpose. I'm going to post this, just to test it out.

Can you hear me now?