Clarifying last statements on Kant ...

I don't think i said that real well ... though the main point is probably clear.
I'll break it down using the Paul Guyer break-out:

The Critique of Pure Reason ... the meat of the book ... and the mass ... is covered in The Transcendental Logic

The Transcendental Logic has 2 divisions ...
The Transcendental Analytic
The Transcendental Deduction

The TA is there to say that there is "synthetic a priori" knowledge, but it is only available through the sense. Kant's critique of space and time and such notions about which i post from time to time all falls under this section. All talk of the "understanding" falls under here.

The TD, about which i attempted to speak last post, is a destructive turn. Its purpose is to show that dogmatic metaphysics cannot be a ground for knowledge.

A big part of the Critique's force revolves around whether one agrees that synthetic a priori judgements are possible. Or, like Morton White, you may deny that claim.

(more later)

Some more Kant notes ...

Thinking about Kant's reaction to Hume ... "awakened from my dogmatic slumber".

Kant realized, via Hume, the deep troubles involved in rationalism, all types. Kant's work in the Transcendental Deduction section of the "Critique of Pure Reason" is in some ways an extention of Humean skepticism ... a formalization there-of.

Kant's validation of reason is not like his predecessors ... there is no, like Descartes, looking for a ground for reason. Kant accepts that all such grounds will be problematic for the reasons Hume gave and for reasons refelcted still today in post-modernistic critique of rationalism.

"What can we know?" Kant really struggles with this question.

Kant does not begin the Critique right-off in validating reason. He starts talking about such things as "understanding". "Understanding" i take to be the deductions/inductions we make directly from our observations of nature ("objects of understanding" Kant calls the basic units). He takes what he takes to be the "best answer", and what most of us take today, the scientific world view. That is ... Kant sees in science, and its core matha nd logic, the most likely equivalent to what is actually going on in the real world.
AT THE SAME TIME, though, he is pointing out that "understanding" is a low level psychological event. Truth does not come from this route. He unifies the mesh of "objects of understanding" under a rational scientific unity, and then looks for the unifying elements in these and we have things like logic as the unifying principles.

But then Kant turns. He lets us know that logic and rationality are not tightly related to the "reason" he is going to be critiquing. This "reason" of his is not deduced or induced from nature. It is, at best, a unification of the unifying principles used in deducing nature.
That is ... reason is the ACTIVE human attempt to unify and the ability to come face to face with contradictions and unify beyond them ... where the contradiction are the result of going too far with the rationalistic approach.

I don't feel i am explaning this well, i think i need to re-read and try again.

But to get across my key thought here ... Kant does not think of "reason" as being a mirror of nature. Reason just is. Reason does what it does, it is active, but there is no justification in assuming that nature and reason are alike in any way. The project of reason may be doomed.
Rationalism, however, is from the basic understanding ... there is a tie between it and the real world and we expect them to mirror one another. But rationalism is not and cannot be a proper ground, it is limited by the limits of reason itself, whatever those may be. This is most obvious when contradictions and necessary contradictions (what is the term? ... antinomies).

So then, at heart, it is this thing, "reason" that Kant wants to critique as a "prelegomena" toward future work. His critique is a direct attack on the attempts at rationalistic grounding of science (or other modes of thought such as religion).

more later ...

quick quote

“All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you have read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever.”

Ernest Hemingway

pragmatic linguistics ...

Somewhere between semiotics/sociology and Richard Dawkins like meme/replication theories there lies an area of progmatic linguistics which contains elements of both the evolutionary stance and phenomenology.

This is not an area of focus of my studies, but i do like the possibilities of the field.

Here is an article/interview by one of the big names of the field ... Dan Sperber ...
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html

Here is a good quote from the article ...

"When we speak we want our audience to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no way to fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible would be absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and complex they may be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can give strong richly structured piece of evidence of what our thoughts are.

From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you."

And another good general observation ... that when we talk about communication we are talking about a vast array of subject up and down the animal kingdom, and many different spheres of human life. We must narrow the subject a lot if we care to make headway into any of its sub-branches.

Saturday

Nothing much new to post about. I spent a good part of the day Friday at the public library but i didn't really garner anything interesting to talk about. Their philosophy section is very limited. I have a note here telling me to look for Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" but i forget why. I came home only with a text on the pre-Socratic philosophers ... an area that has interested me but that i know little about. I can name some of bigger names, but little depth in knowledge.

I don't know what i expect to find, my past excersions into ancient Greece have found very little. I like the notion of Aristoteleon "moral spheres", but little else have i pulled forth from that ocean. Perhaps it is because i am not among those that believe the old ideas and the new ideas are closely linked, even when (translated) the same words are used in both. I am very strict in keeping my discussions within their contexts ... be that ancient to modern or even, within modernity, across fields of study. (I do not believe th "Incomplete Theorum" or "Quantum Wave Packet collapse" or any of those terms have meaning outside the tight construction of the fields, especially the math, from which they originate. The same i find true of the ancients (and medievals and moderns for that matter) ... you can't just tie any two statements together merely because you think they sound like they might be related. The relationship, if you want to use it, must be shown/demonstrated, and the sphere of using the terms cross-paradigm must be tightly controlled.

Still ... like Heidegger and his lightning bolts, or Dennett's brainstorms, the images sometimes invoke new thoughts in my thinking structure. I try to be carefull, though, to not co-opt the words ... i will not say "God" when i know i do not mean God in the way my audience might expect me to mean it. If i do not mean "the thing in itself" i try to say it differently, or, at least, say it thusly and then explain how my conotation differs.


See ... i had nothing interesting to say, just as i told you. And i have said said.

Thales versus Pythagoras ...

Reading is problematic.
Sure, i learn this or that ... but what i really learn is that there are at least a 100 more things i should know before opening my mouth on any topic.

Perhaps a vow of silence?
My friend August was keen on that subject some years ago. I wonder if he ever experimented? I wonder how it turned out?
Maybe i shall try that ... Wednesday through Friday of this week.

Anyway ... i need to know more about Thales, and i need to imagine Thales and Pythagoras debates. (They were not contemporaries i do not believe, Thales was first ... but it is an imagined debate). I can hear echoes ... of the "shut up and caculate" school of physics versus the cosmological theorists ... of the rationalist versus the romantic-sci-fi-metaphysician.


This about the Greeks ... they are the first people to sit down and "prove" mathematical truths, rather than just know and use them. That is ... the Egyptians and Babylonians were both familiar with the ratio of the sides of a right triangle ( A squared plus B squared equal C squared) ... but they did not think to sit down and prove the Pythagorean Theorum ... the Greeks are the first to think about proving such things.
I am certain that says something about our intellectual ancestry.

Added later - I checked and Pythagoras was probably a young man while Thales was still alive. It is said that Thales told him to go study math in Babylonia and Egypt to get out from under the sway of the Greek Homeric myth thinking of his day.

algebra history ...

As i posted a while back ... i was wondering about the earliest forms of algebra. (Though i used the alternate Nydronderian spelling, really.)

Anyway

Like most of mathematics as we have it today, algebra is not just one thing. At least one primary component, however, linear equations, is as old as ancient Egypt, nearly 2000 bce.

What i found remarkable ... (what the author [Victor Katz] found remarkable, and pointed out, and with which i agreed) ... is that the thought process is so similar.

We have papyrus with math lessons on them. They'll say things like this ...

Take a number times 3 and add to it 4. The result is 10. What is the number?
Our linear equation for this is 3x + 4 = 10.
Now, they did not use the notion, of course, but the papyrus talks the student through solving the equation.
First, just like we do, they subtracted the 4 from 10 ... 3x = 6
Second, they divided both sides by 3 ... x = 2
Answer = 2

Aside from using linear equation type thinking, they also seemed to have a robust notion of what a linear equation is ... that is, a linear relationship between two quantities.

Given a problem such as ... x + (1/4)x = 15 [again, they described it in words] ... like a good SAT taker they would try a quick and easy "false position", for example ...

x + (1/4)x = ?
x=4 (because the math is easy that way)
so, substituting ...
4 + (1/4) * 4 = ?
... = 5

Now, here is the key concept ...
realizing the relation of 5 to 15 (the original quantity on the right side of the equation) is 3, they know the unknown on the left side of the equation needs to be 3 times larger than the number they tried. That is ... 4 * 3 ... that is ... 12

12 + (1/4) *12 = ?
15 of course
We have used a linear equation AND demonstrated the basic knowledge of the relationship between the 2 quantities.


So ... while it is not as old as counting (the Summerians did not have linear equations), it is still very old.

I may well have posted this before ...

an old favorite ...

The Genius of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art

- Charles Bukowski

Other minds ...

A simple theory ... IF a creature with the brain the size of a bird can accomplish a certain task THEN it doesn't take human level computational capacity to perform that task.

Thomas Bugnyar, working in the field of animal cognition, has discovered that even ravens have some sense of "other minds" ... something thought to be in the nature of only the intelligent apes. [Yes, dogs have shown the trait too, but this has been written off as piggy-backing somehow on their advanced social learning and as not the same thing humans do ... "not so fast", maybe.]

Anyway ... Bugnyar's ravens were given canisters with cheese bit prizes inside. Apparently the ravens can see inside to know if there is a cheese bit.
Only the smartest ravens could open the canisters.
One particular smart raven was having a problem, he was getting pushed aside when he opened opened the container before he got any cheese. The big dumb bully ravens were getting all the rewards.
So ... this doubly smart raven started the habit of opening empty canisters and pretending to pick at some cheese. When the bully ravens came over and pushed him away he quickly slipped off to a cheese containing canister, opened it, and ate the cheese while the big dumb ravens will still staring into and pecking around in the empty canister.

One does not want to attribute a human like thought process to the doubly smart raven, but it seems obvious enough that this case (and ones like it) demonstrate the the rudimentary cognitive capacities for such "human thought processes" are availble quite a ways down the "great chain of being". Surely we add a lot with our big newer brains to this skill, but the basic trick is there in old "small" brains.

Daniel Dennett, from Tufts University, has the theory that most of the "complexity" in human cognitive activity stems from our research looking for "big tricks" that account for how we do things ... when the case is probably that often it is a combination of a bunch of little tricks that actually do the work.
The raven's capacity to have some concept that the other ravens have a perspective of him, and the further capacity to manipulate that perspective for his own advantage, are a couple of those small pieces of the puzzle.

terrible ii

3 feeling of great dusgust over the New Orleans area disaster ...

1) As mentioned in the previous post, the almost immediate politicalization of the tragedy.

2) The looting (non food related) and other savagry in the streets, and doubly so that it is not surprising.

3) That the insurance and FEMA related fraud that will be carried out afterword, the white-collar theft, which will be ten fold in value of the looting theft ... and that so few will feel gut rending emotion for this theft as they did for the looting.

terrible

I am absolutely sickened by the speed in which partison political organizations have made a political football of the terrible events in the New Orleans area gulf. I particularly call out The Nation, Huffington Post, and DailyKOS on the left, and Sean Hannity on the right. I'm sure there are plenty of local GOP going after Governor Blanco too, i just don't hit those sites.

Sickening.

Now ... if you are priveledged enough to have access to a computer so as to be reading this, i encourage you to send money or other aid to one of the many organizations trying to help. I like the American Red Cross, but there are many good organizations.