Common knowledge and a theory of meaning and friendship

Just yesterday I saw a lecture by Steven Pinker on shared and common knowledge. Shared knowledge is the kind where we both know something, common knowledge is where, in addition to shared knowledge, we also know that each other knows.

For years now I've been thinking about how best to understand meaning. One of the best answers I was able to come across was from John Searle. He describes meaning as the "imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction." He ought to have won a prize for the ugliness of that phrase, but in a weird way, it sticks. He is trying to describe a state of affairs where you try to make your words do something, and what they are supposed to do is to make you understand something. And the only mean something if you understand them. So words in this sense work. 

Searle also has this idea of the "background" of knowledge, which he works into his ontology of words. Words come into being because we declare them into being. It has the formula "X counts as Y in context C." Context here is analogous to background. 

With these two pieces of ideas, the creation of words and the maintenance of their meaning I set to work trying to understand language in a new way, but I quite couldn't get there on his account. Basically, I was unhappy with the idea of background knowledge. This was a vague term that didn't really do much of the explaining. What did these C ideas contain anyway? But, if one did away with it, all one was left with was a simple identity statement, like A=B, which is not enough. Why? Because then you would not have actually added anything to the language, only made a synonym. 

After a long period of thinking, I came to the conclusion that what a background could be, was our semantic memory, a network of facts and words maintained by our brain. As for context, this idea had to be a little richer, but I came to that this could be looked upon as the activated parts of the semantic memory, along with the content of our phenomenal awareness. This is the view of a kind of brainspace where thinking happens. To cut a long story short, I decided that the version of reality that looked best to me, was that the formula for the creation of new language ought to be R(n) -> R(n+1). There is no sense to this logical notation. All it tries to convey is that, all we have is a network of ideas, and from this we can combine ideas to have new ones; which we can then declare as a whole. But this view has ramifications for the theory of meaning.

What happens when you send those pressure waves out of our mouth? To say that they satisfy a condition only sends us on to ask; what conditions? What I actually believes happens, is that our language evokes the memory of that language and it's associations in the brain of our interlocutors, and the grammar of the sentence tells us in which relation these words are to be related in. So, for instance, in the sentence "Me and my friend went for a walk.," you are supposed to bring up ideas of the speaker designated as "me", and the image of this "friend", then form an image of these two together. Then you bring up the activity of walking; and you make a scene that portrays this event in your mind. At least, this is how I experience my own thinking. Talking about things that are not right in front of us, as a conversation, is an exercise of binding together many of these ideas in to a shared fantasy which' content is logically identical. 

Alright, so this is already further than I had gotten before. Where I had gotten to before was a simple image; the image of the pressure waves as a key, opening up two rooms in the other persons brain that were to be connected. New evidence, however, has recently implied the existence of space in our brain reserved for the importation of nouns and verbs which are related logically, and then this Pinker talk happened, and now we're off to the races. Yes, and one more thing; I had discovered the power of these imagined rooms for cognition; both through memory training techniques, and literature. Moving on.

The reason we can have discussions of things that are not present, is that we have common knowledge. I know that when I say something, you will remember, and that each following sentence can carry within it the reference to earlier conversation. It becomes part of the context of the conversation, and we can build very complex ideas within this conceptual space. Since I know that you know what we were just talking about; I can build on our conversation and shared knowledge to make our talking much more efficient. With some friends, I feel that I am flying, because the meaning of our conversation is so rich; with every sentence we are living together in the same world, experiencing each other and at each step learning that we are continuing to share a common experience. We explore each other through a supposition of common knowledge, and for each time our assumption is answered we are awarded with the additional knowledge that now i know that you know that I know, and a bond is created of safety and trust.

I think Wittgenstein was knocking at the door of these insights when he talked of language as a tool, and as a game. We was groping for the ideas that there is a context that is colouring the ways in which we use our language. Later we got the ideas of intentionality, the idea that other people are lighting up the world with a searchlight, throwing their mind outside. But that is not it. We must combine the two while still acknowledging that thinking happens in the brain. We are surfing our our minds network, trying to build up and understanding that mimics what we see with our senses; and when we find someone who has traveled the same road, it is a delight. A delight for the common knowledge is a harbinger of truth.

Maybe this is why political rallies can be so effective. When we meet so many people that we feel see the same truth as us, we are highjacking the part of our brain that is supposed to bring sense of the world, and get rewarded for getting it right.  Instead of finding joy in the fact that many people have independently come to the same conclusion, we are rejoicing that many people have been told what to believe.

There are so many things I have yet to explore within this new framework of mind, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Two limits to Carnaps internal framework

First I need to write; I am not an expert. The things I write here are tries at exploring my own intuitions around this subject. I try to dash my brain at the limits of his ideas, not to find the truth in itself, but to maximally expand my intuition. With that caveat, here are two limits to Carnap's epistemology.

First, bring into your mind a coherence theory of truth, and then say that questions external to this network of statements and ideas make no sense. The reason they don't is that one simply cannot go beyond them, as long as one wants to use this language explain it. How, in other words, can I explain with words what cannot be said in words? Think of this view as being inherited from early Wittgenstein, and I think you are approaching the right idea.

Incidentally I'm not a great believer in precision in language. The reason is that my theory of meaning basically says that words function by awakening cognitive capacities, and that new meaning is made by the deliberate connection in consciousness by two priorly unconnected "rooms." Meaning is private in the sense that each meaning- structure has a history particular to that person, and collective insofar that this corresponds to other peoples notions. The prior paragraph is then as good as it gets if it brings out in you the relevant places where meaning resides, not matter if Carnap used those words or not. I would therefore like you to trust me in that the ideas you have in your mind after the last paragraph correctly connects the right clusters of concepts. But this is not an exact science, of course.

For didactic purposes, I here need to introduce two interlocutors.
A: In introducing this network of declarative statements and beliefs Carnap will run in to two limits.
Z: Limits of what?
A: Merely limits, I think. If there are no external questions, then the limits will be in the ability of the internal language to represent itself. 
A: Then I'm guessing these limits will be limits in how the language is able to represent itself.
Z: Yes exactly. I want you to envision this network of truths very literally, as a weave of white wool, completely round. Since, on the classical view, every belief must be justified, every thread connects to something else; these are the justifications, and the following are sort of... conclusions.
A: I suggest we use some alternate terminology. Let all parts of threads be "lemma", and justifications here are only "pre-lemma", and following them are "post-lemma", relatively.
Z: Okay, I can work with that. Now, with this intuition we are able to better describe some of the limits of Carnap. The first question is; what do the edges of this textile look like?
A: Let me think. I can envision two versions. One of them is that the strands are just roughly cut off, and a second is that every thread neatly wraps back into the fold.
Z: And what would those two versions represent?
A: The first is that there is a limit to human cognition, and to the society of knowledge in the sense that; we could have made more lemmas to tack onto the end, had we just thought about the edge cases. As soon as we reached those lemmas, new one's would be produced.
Z: So, for instance, in a mathematical framework, as soon as a new problem presents itself, there is the area ripe for expansion?
A: Right, that is one version of it. The second one is that, in a sense, this system is internally closed off. You don't phenomenally experience any edges to your thinking because even fringe ideas, in this case those that are not connected to many other ideas, but kind of exist almost on their own, refer back to som other lemmas that support them.
Z: How, on this view, would new knowledge arise?
A: This question must be answered on two levels. Either internally to one person through a synthesis of prior lemmas that would create a new representation of earlier facts, or make a new connection between existing threads, or, on the societal level, this same thing happening but between two minds, such as in a research collective.
Z: With this I think we can approach one of the limits raised in class, namely that Carnap should really be careful when he is even talking of there being external questions that we should not take seriously, like the very existence of things or a framework.
A: Yes, but, I think this is difficult. Carnap says that existence is a presupposition in every internal declaration of facts. In our terminology this would merely be a pre-lemma attached as a substrate to every lemma in the fabric of statements, but, I think maybe Carnap didn't have this clear idea of it. To throw his own ideas back at him, I think that in the idea of the internal the external is presupposed. There cannot be internal statements if there is no difference between the internal and the external. But, this last sentence is in fact a pleonasm, a direct analogy, a tautology to his statement of existence as presupposed.
Z: Is he begging the question?
A: I think so. If you are to presuppose external reality, I think Peirce did so more elegantly, because he didn't erect this dichotomy of outside and inside, and so he gets around all the problems of representation which was clearly on Carnap's mind.
Z: Yes, I think I see what you mean, but, I have a second intuition which we don't have time to explore so deeply, and that is that any internal framework that presupposes existence will have a problem of dealing with negative statements. How do you say that something is not true, when both the not and that which is true has the presupposition of existence? You get into al sorts of questions such as, "How can the not being be?" and all those parmenidean conundrums. 
A: Yes, but moving on; I think you had a second limit you wished to discuss.
Z: Yes. There is an internal dimension too, which has to do with the nature of language. The problem is, can Carnap describe the nature of the system, if he is not able to put himself outside of it?
A: Okay, I think I understand you, but I sense you are employing the Munchhausen Trilemma, and I'm not sure our readers are familiar with it, so could you perhaps introduce it?
Z: Certainly. Under this name it was introduced by Albert, but it really has it's roots in the Sceptical school of philosophy, and is treated of in Sextus Empiricus "Pyrrhonic Sketches".  It is a threefold critique of the possible truth of a lemma. There are three possible critiques it says; One; the statement is circular,  or it rests on something which must rest on something ad infinitum, or the whole system of statements only float in a vacuum, without external reference.
A: And our mat of woven text would at once have all properties I think?
Z: Indeed. Put your finger on a tread and follow it; the outcome must be one of these. It reaches an edge, it comes back to itself, or you trace every tread, but can never go to an external vantage point from which you can view everything. And, I'd love to go on right now, but first I need to introduce three new concepts; 'generativity', 'embedding', and self- similarity.
A: Actually, you speak too much, let me do it. Generativity is the feature of language by which elements of meaning combine to create new meaning, 'Embedding' is the reduction of a prior statement to a flexible word like "which", that takes as it's reference the prior sentence or meaning as a whole, and brings it into the next sentence. Self- similarity is the idea that structures  repeat their structure at different scale, like how a branch of a tree, if put on the ground, kind of look like a whole tree. Now, what are you trying to say with all those ideas?
Z: Yes... through a juxtaposition of a few terms now I have tried to open up many rooms having to do with spacial reasoning, complexity and depth. Language is a complex phenomenon which builds on itself; as Munchausen did in the story, it pulls itself out of the bog by it's own hair. Through generating new meaning, in a social as well as a private sense, and through using parts of itself in new connection it builds, so to speak, outwards and enlarges itself. Roughly speaking there is a constant synthesis going on, which reaches out to embrace even new phenomena..
A. You have lost the thread haven't you...
Z: Maybe a litte, but exploring one's intuitions is not an easy thing. Well. Opposite to this expansion, one can analyse, that is, take apart one's ideas; the ungenerativity, to make a neologism, the decompositionality of language. And this sense of going inward is then, I would argue, something different to going along.
A: So thinking like this isn't covered by the trilemma of necessary connections in a network of statements?
Z: It is. but, at the same time, it is running towards the simples of simple statements, those which all others are supposedly created from.
A: I get two immediate associations when you speak like this; one is the logical atomism of Russel, and the other is the simplest elements of impression one gets in Hume from which all other things are made.
Z: Parts of my intuition may come from there, I don't know; but truly I am thinking of morphemes..
A: The smallest unit of meaning...
Z: Yes. A concept which I'm not really sure of yet. My initial intuition is that, at least from the viewpoint of cognitive science the idea of the morpheme is a bit like the idea of the atom; a useful idea from which it makes sense to start if one aims to research the combinatoriality of matter, or in this sense, meaning, but in truth merely a theoretical construct.
A: If it is only a construct, how is it useful in this analysis?
Z: It is used precisely because it is a construct. The very idea of the morpheme is to establish a smallest unit of meaning. But if, as I believe, there are smaller units, but that the morpheme is only the smallest analyzable part of meaning, then Carnap has found a second limit; which is the limit of the resolution of language with reference to itself. I seem to think that, because of embedded ness and generativity, there are hierarchical structures of language, and that these get their meaning in virtue of their structural self similarity; and that this self similarity rests on a prior cognitive structure of standing in a kind of isomorphic relationship to the linguistic least meaningful things; morphemes. I think I'm only trying to say that there are these structures, and that therefore there is a limit to be found here.
A: I cannot fail to notice that your argument works by analogy. That is usually not a strong argument. 
Z: No, you're right. But, I have a second argument by analogy which I think can strengthen it. When you define a word you do so by using a phrase which generative meaning is supposed to make up this word, correct?
A: Let us say for the sake of argument that you are.
Z: OKay, this process can be repeated for all the words of the definition, and, presuming that your definitions don't change during this process, you will in principle find all the words of your vocabulary. 
A: I don't entirely agree, but, go on.
Z: Well, then you should be able to find the morphemes, because these will be the bottom concepts, since these are undefinable on account of them being a simple as simple can be.
A: I see where where you're going; How do you understand what these mean unless you can define them?
Z: Exactly. I can only see two solutions to this problem. Either they rest on extra- linguistic phenomena, as I believe, or they are subject to one of the mechanisms in the trilemma, which I kind of also believe. These two ideas are not opposed, and I think are roughly analogous to our earlier statements about the edges of the woven textile.
A: Yes, and Carnap expressly stated that the internal statements did not refer to mental states...
Z: ...which for him only leaves the ways of the trilemma. But all in all, I think this is a weakness in him, and why the resolution of the internal language will remain a limit on his view.

I think we can safely leave our interlocutors here. To sum up, there are two limits. One is the reference internally of things external, which is so to speak trying to break through the edge of the system of statements, and the other is the problem of the resolution of the language system. There are other compelling arguments to make in favor of this latter point of view, such as the jain concept of anekantavada, and the idea of the map that cannot cover the entire world, but these remain versions of the same concepts brought forward by the interlocutors.

This text has made many references to intuitions. This is to highlight that the opinions in this journal entry were written entirely from my remembrance of Carnap, and should not be taken a authoritative.

On the appeal to intuitions in philosophy

I've listened to dozens of interviews with philosophers of all kinds; moral philosophers, philosophers of art, ontologists and natural language philosophers; and all seem to refer to the same thing in judging the validity of their philosophical claims: does our definitions appeal to our common sense intuitions? Which has made me incredibly curious; what is an intuition?

As of writing this sentence, I don't know the answer to that question. These essays are exploratory, and their conclusions are tentative. But there is a method to this madness. First, let me start with a definition.

Intuition: The sense of rightness or wrongness felt at pondering an idea or concept.

At first glance, this definition nicely captures the idea of the intuition. But as I write this, two different thoughts appear in my mind. The first: What mental faculty through this definition into my head, and the second; What mental faculty felt a sense of rightness at reviewing this definition. 

As I wrote the previous sentence, an answer started appearing in my mind. It looks something like this: The definition is the idea that is the best approximation I could find, that was at the same time the abstraction of the many tokens of this idea I had heard in all those interviews. In Fregian terms, this definition is the sense that has the most of the utterances as a reference.

But, this latest paragraph does not, I can now see, answer my questions. It is rather a description of the result of the process that would lead from a stepwise progression of asking those two questions many times. As I wrote that sentence, the words "algorithm" appeared at the forefront of my mind. I guess then, that, as I continue to wrote, I can effortlessly describe and algorithm detailing what I have just conjectured. Let's see.

Okay. First I start with all the instances I have read and heard in those instances. Then I seek a definition. A crude definition comes up. I then count the number of tokens covered by the type. Thirdly I make a new definition, and proceed with the same step. After, the two is compared, and the definition with the fewest members is discarded. I repeat this process, much of it unconsciously, and through transitivity I reach the best definition I can. I only stop when my sense of "wrongness" turns to "rightness."

Reviewing the last paragraph, I see that I introduced three new concepts; analogies, which admittedly came in a little earlier, sneaking it's way in like water sneaks itself on a fish; then transitivity and the unconscious. Transitivity is merely the logical mechanism that allow these kinds of comparisons without actively comparing all definitions at the same time. The unconscious, though, is a worse case to crack.

Intuitively, and there is that word again, I imagine the unconscious like the part of a theatre scene that is behind the curtain. It is the same actors that are in front that go in the back, but sometimes they bring forth a new prop. You knew it was back there somewhere, but you didn't quite know what the actor was going to fetch. 

Now, let me introduce the word "metaphor" in the sense which Lakoff uses it. Why? I'm not quite sure, it's just what the actor brought. I think it's this; at least, what I'm about to write is also something hollered out from behind the curtain. This scene is a description of the metaphor which structures my thinking around the conscious and unconscious boundary. And, in most cases, this is what my ideas of that boundary will be constituted, limited and empowered by. That is, until an idea steps so close to the walls of the internal image of this metaphorical state that I must come up with a new framework to thinking by and within for a while. 

The whole theatre is me. There is a part of me that is doing this wrong and wright check on the ideas that peek behind the curtain. From neuroscience, we know that the ideas that come into our phenomenal consciousness get extra "resources" allocated to them. The brain sends more little actors to check of something somewhere else in the theatre is relevant. (Oh my, I seem to be captured by this metaphor. Let me break free of it)

Just imagine my whole life. I have lived it, and all my experiences, the things I've read, the habits, all detritus gathered on the stream of my consciousness, piled up in river bends, deposited like silt in my delta, compressed into energy rich oil in my deepest strata, fossilised in the sands - you get it, all of that is with me. Now, the next sentence hits my forebrain, and I become conscious of it. What's happening?

My ideas are gathering around it, I can feel it. I am waiting in anticipation for the next sentence to crop up. I am leaning on my intuition. It is a sense, a trust, that my past has something to offer me, to flow through and out onto the page. (I'm looking back over the essay now. If found the definition, and my next sentence will be a combination of everything written til now, and my revised opinion on it.) My whole earlier self is looking for ways to solve the problem I have put myself, and when a good candidate comes along, I spend time looking again, seeing if I can further modify it. The search finally ends when there is no better definition to fit the fact.

Again, my attention splits two ways. 1: This is a conscious version of the unconscious algorithm described earlier. 2: This looks like the socratic method used to describe a cognitive capacity. 1.1: There is a second law of parsimony, which, I think is a natural analogical extension of it. In nature, most often a single developed capacity is used multiple times before a new kind of capacity is evolved. An example of this is scilia, which are found as the tails of sperm, and in our ear to expel foreign bodies. (Discriminating bastards.) Having no other knowledge of the subject, it is then natural to extend this general biological trend to brain function. (Other reasons for me to put forth this thesis are to many to enumerate in this blog post.) 2.1. It is natural to apply a socratic method like this, because argumentation and thinking is of course a cognitive capacity. 

But, a sense of wrongness has just assailed me. I feel that the definition above does not cover all t the advances made in the preceding paragraphs. Two separate things have been talked of; Background knowledge, or habit, and a critical capacity. Let me again try to write a definition of intuition:

Intuition: The our critical capacity applied to a definition or set of beliefs, made to judge whether this definition or set of beliefs is consistent with our lived experience.

Let me now bring in the first definition to compare them:

Intuition: The sense of rightness or wrongness felt at pondering an idea or concept.

Okay; let us take bit by bit, and see the transformation: (The sense of rightness or wrongness --> Critical capacity.) (Idea or concept --> definition or set of beliefs) These last two have been transformed. The third component (lived experience) is new.

The first two things that pops into my head, is that the definition has changed because I have immersed myself in thinking about it, and secondly that my thinking upon it has lead me to revise my definition through altering the pattern of my background beliefs. I was thinking a lot during these last two sentences, so the are probably not well formed. What I now think, more clearly, is that my critical reflection on the definition has edited my set of beliefs, which are part of my background knowledge. But, as you can see, the idea just once again morphed in my brain. Now set of beliefs" and "definition" is not the same thing anymore, and thus the last definition is no longer true to what I think. I now seem to distinguish between three separate states of "fact remembrance", going successively from "simple, immediate, in front of the curtain." to "complex, more complex and behind the curtain." The first is the "definition", the second is the "set of beliefs", and the third is the "background knowledge."

This, it now strikes me, fits well with the idea of the successive stages of critical reflection upon some more stable idea. Which I now think takes place on every stage of think memorized, up until the highest and most active conscious level, above which there is no higher court of appeals. Except, a decision can be taken at every step.

But now I have changed my mode from trying to describe intuitions to describing a cognitive faculty or rational thinking and refinement. What within this broader system is the intuition then?

I feel that, within this view, what we mean when we talk of intuitions has more to do with the more background and lived experiences part of our thinking. We are, when we are engaged in philosophical thinking, always conferring with ourselves, with our earlier experiences and sense of what the society might want to say. What they want to say is really the way we imagine it, or in other words a part of our background experience of how society and people work, and what they do.

And now I feel I am nearing the end of this essay. What then, do I think it is that makes our intuitions powerful? Well, it is namely that we have such a broad store of experiences, which far outreach the limited immediate cognitive capacity of the here and now. Critical thinking often involves casting the idea of the current definition backwards, to see if it fits with our prior knowledge. And thinking consists in going back and forth between levels of abstraction, bringing in and discarding ideas. Our intuition, is our old self, which we talk to, to find our new self is on the right path.

Four styles of writing in philospohy

Writing is the primary technology for philosophers. It allows us to string together words into whole tapestries of ideas. Because of the interconnectedness of these ideas, and the fact that they are realized, both in writing, and in reading, in a conscious mind, we ought to be very cognizant of the format of our writing. Allow me then, to share four different styles of philosophical writing, to give you a glimpse of the possibilities:

The first form I wish to present is the dialogue form:

1: X: Okay Y, so tell me about the format you have chosen.
Y: This is the dialogue form, which was favored by Plato after the death of Socrates, but, many others since.
X: Such as?
Y: Seneca, Cicero, and I would argue Thomas More in his book "Utopia", and later passages in Douglas Hofstadter's work.
X: You seem to wander into the novel form too.
Y. In a way. Several philosophers have written novels in which there is, of course, dialogue. But there is something unique in the straight dialogue form, like it instills the essence of debate.
X. And this is clearly an interview, so that helps structure the writing.
Y. That's right, and that didactic reason I think is the most important reason for writing dialogues. Many readers have questions they wish to ask the writer during the time of reading. Writing a dialogue helps the author to imagine an inquisitive reader, and maybe preempts some of those questions.

The second form I wish to present is the essay.

The essay form was invented by a philosopher, Michel du Montaigne. In our modern world, it seems to resemble most closely a blog post. It is personal, meandering, and takes it's time. Montaigne was also very thorough in the way he wrote, and, I think, saw himself as a collector and curator of old opinions, but always with himself at the center. 

Most important to the essay form is, I think, that the thoughts somehow run together, and that one thought lead you into the next. It should somehow be confessional, honest and have one central theme which the whole text revolves around.

Finally an essay has the opportunity to end in a sort of open position. It is okay to acknowledge that one is part of a conversation stretching back hundreds of years, and that, while one may certainly reach a position, it is definitely not the position.

The third form I wish to present is the technical paper.

A technical paper as a definite aim, a problem, a question, a critique in mind. It sets up its definitions, which are to do work. Particular passages will be dissected, and at the end a clear statement is made about what has been accomplished by the words on the page.

The literary character of the technical paper, is all directed in service of clearness and distinctness. Because of this, one can achieve such levels of accuracy that single concepts within the whole framework can be critiqued, without a general impact on the whole structure; or that, if if it must have consequences, they will be definite.

Because of their clearness, technical papers can often have room for far more complexity than the more internally peripatetic style of the essay. Subclauses can have their own subclauses, hypotheticals can be safely stored away, and in general, advanced logical structures can have their place.

The fourth form I wish to present is that of juxtaposition and aphorism and analogy.

1. The is nothing but the fiber of reality.
2. Time is a line.
3. Each of us must be a weaver of our own experience.
4. Human society is a tapestry.
5. A text as a weft, a warp, a weave of life.

A Lonely Tree

John opens the gate to let Lucy in. They stand in the park admiring the huge variety of trees that are there, but, in the end wander into a strange little circle. A bench stands before a huge concrete foundation, in the center of which there is a tree. It's roots only stretch to the ends of the foundation, and a huge net is stretched over it, so that no birds can land there. That is the bench that John and Lucy decides to sit on.

John; See this tree here, Lucy. Is it lonely?
Lucy: I don't know. It isn't connected to any other trees, and the birds can't reach it. I think we can agree that it is alone, but, what separates aloneness from loneliness?
John: I suppose, that would be the sensation of being alone. But, I don't know if that works. If you are alone, and you are a being, then implicitly in the definition of being, one must be able to sense. And only being are alone, so that, then, through that necessary synthesis one can only be alone if one is able to sense it, and thus you have a sensation of aloneness. If we presume then, that loneliness and aloneness are different, they at least cannot be different in this respect.
Lucy: I think you are right to think this way. But, intuitively, we feel that there is a difference.
John: Okay. Moving to a second example. In the morning an old lady is sitting in her home, by herself, and she is feeling lonely. In the evening she is still alone, but she does not feel lonely. What is the difference?
Lucy: That is a hard nut to crack. I'd think that, in the morning she has a desire to meet someone, but in the evening she doesn't.
John. Yea, that seems like a reasonable start. Returning to the tree then, can we say that a tree has desires?
Lucy: Actually, I think we can. A tree has a biologically instilled instinct to survive. If we analyse it's ways of behaving, we ought to conclude that it would behave like it looked like it had desires to survive, and, on a pragmatic view, this would indeed mean that it meant to do such that it survived. Now, with this definition in mind, we only need to show that it is in the trees interest to seek out companionship for it survival value, and the rest would follow; it would desire contact, and deprived of this, being both alone and in the state of desire, we could conclude that the tree is in fact lonely.
John: And, as we know, trees to in fact connect to other trees. If there was no survival value in this, we would expect that this would not be the case in nature. Which means, I think, that, at least on one reasonable definition, this tree in front of us is most likely lonely!
Lucy: Yea. (...) But there are lots of trees standing alone the streets, confined to a small square of land. They are probably lonely too!
John. Yea. (...) But, I don't think they feel lonely, because I don't think they are conscious. Of course, in one sense they feel, because they have receptors, and act accordingly, but; though they use these receptors to orient themselves in the world, there is no pain involved in not attaining those goals.
Lucy: So, you don't think we have a moral responsibility towards the trees we imprison?
John: I don't know. I feel for the trees that are cordoned off from the rest of nature, in the same way that I feel sorry for myself, that I cannot reach nature as often as I wish. And, I think I would actually prefer for the sake of the tree that it could realise it's reason for being. Though the tree can't care in our sense, I can imagine myself in it's stead, and when I do, I feel pity. 
Lucy: So, we should relocate those trees for your sake? 
John: I don't know. My position is an aesthetic one. I like seeing the world being correct in a way, effortless and natural. I know that nothing is intrinsically no more natural than other things, intrinsic worth being, at least, highly problematic - but in a way, that is yet another defence of my view. If there is no higher standard than the aesthetic and moral considerations we have, then these should weigh heavily in how we organize our world.
Lucy: It's a political issue then. Should we relocate trees or not?
John: Yes, I think so, but I think we should at least know that these trees are lonely. They have something to teach us about what it means to desire to be social, and I would actually wish that we leave more room for nature in our cities.
Lucy. (...) Yea, but I think that will have to wait for a further discussion.

Lucy and John rise, and walk out of the park.

The Natural argument

I live by something I call "The natural argument". It is very simple, and goes like this:

1. Everything is natural. Or, in its negative version; There is nothing that is not natural. Or in a third way. Everything is in nature, and therefore of nature.
2. If there is such a thing that it is, it must interact with something else. This something else, normal things, behave like any other thing, and interacts accordingly. For anything then, to interact with this other thing, it has to have the same interactions. 
A little less abstractly. Let us say you had a vase, only this vase had not electrostatic forces, no covalent bonds. It would then fall through the earth until it reached the center, where it would continue to the other side of earth, and then fall backwards again. Or, if this vase in addition did not interact with gravity, it would continue along its current path at thousands of kilometers per second, the speed of the earth, functionally blinking out of view for you. And let us further say, that you were to look for your vase with a telescope, zooming out there in the great beyond, only it did not interact with light well then, you would not have been able to see it. And if this process of non-interaction would continue with the other fundamental ways of interaction with this world, the vase would then finally become undetectable to any way of knowing if it is really there - and would then cease to be a part of this universe.
3. From this we can see that there is no other way to be in nature than to interact with it. If it does so, then it is a part of nature, and has to connect to our life in some particular way.

There are some things that are barely real - like dark matter. Dark matter is so named because it, to my limited knowledge only seems to interact with our matter through gravity. You can't see it through natural light, or any other frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. It is the very non.-interactiveness of it's being that put's it at the speculative end of "real".

Some people say that chemicals are unnatural. They aren't. Synthetically produced chemicals, which is what they really mean, are just as natural as other chemicals (everything else). What I think they mean is that they were not produced by "natural processes", by which they mean produced from the mechanisms of evolution - and I suppose that it is from this same stem that the leaf of "it is only natural for women to do carework" comes from. To these I would say simply, there is nothing that is unnatural. Our way of life is a convention, and as long as we stay within the wide boundaries of physical possibility, we are free to choose how to live ourselves.

As to the complaint about chemicals. The distinction we wish to make is if the chemicals are beneficial or harmfull. This is an important issue which I applaud your concern around.

A final issue is about the immortality of the soul. If we have a soul it has to be natural, otherwise it simply won't be real. With what we know about the natural decay of anything not built to reproduce itself, a soul outside of the body would have to find some other means of sustainment. I think it is rather unlikely that a soul would arise through evolution, because they would not serve any purpose as I could see, and I've personally seen a soul - and I don't know of anyone else who has either, so I don't think it interacts with light. In fact, I don't think the body becomes appreciably lighter after death either, so it does either not escape the body, or does not interact with light. The whole deal with the soul is looking less real by the minute to me. Sorry. 

Do we need the word Natural? What useful function can it serve? I feel that we should reserve the meaning "of nature" in the slightly undefined sense to the word, and instead of using the word "unnatural", we should substitute the word "artificial", which can be either bad or good, just as natural things can be. The word pair is already still in use, as in artificial intelligence, and perhaps the sadly less used "natural intelligence". Aha....

Thank your for reading.

The economy of tempo in abstract board games.

It is tempting to say that a tempo is a move, but that is not correct. Just listen to the phrase “Gaining a tempo”. Gaining a tempo is something one does with a move. But, each player has an equal number of moves in the game, so one cannot be gaining a move.
    Typically, when one is “gaining a tempo”, one is forcing one’s opponent to take a move that is not that beneficial to themselves, while oneself has the opportunity to do something beneficial. And since it is not the move itself that is the tempo, the tempo must then be that which is beneficial.
    However, how can something beneficial be a part of chess when there is only one condition for winning? The answer here is clearly that, that which helps one towards the goal of check mating your opponent's king is beneficial. And now, I feel, we are getting somewhere.

Tempo’s then, can be defined as “that which aids towards the goal”. Now, there are many things that are known to help one towards one’s goal. I’ll list up a few; Space, material, pawn chains, maneuverability, the bishop pair, and control of the center.
    Aha. You may have spotted it too. There is a problem with the definition - an ambiguity. These separate things are clearly separate things, so they cannot be a tempo. So what is the relation of the tempo to these things? I see two separate options. Either a tempo can be to the advantages as money is to particular coins; an abstract word for a group; or, we can again relate the idea of tempo to the move, by saying that a tempo is the average amount of beneficial things one can achieve with a move. Both sides have commendable attributes to them. The first has the simplicity, and I think the second is more accurate, because the value of each beneficiality fluctuates within games and between item. To see why, we must sadly go even deeper into the nature of the game.
    
Abstract games have human players. These can see into the future of the game to different degrees, depending on their calculating ability and their repertoire of concepts. They are trying to move towards a future in game terms that either has more beneficialities, or mates the king. The popular thing is to envision one’s choices as branching into the future. From each branch yet more branches and more futures can be seen. A better player is a player who can imagine himself standing on a few of those future branches, see what life looks like there, and decide which is the better. That, and a second crucial trick.
    One must not underestimate one’s opponent. The most secure way forward is to envision that one’s opponent makes the best move possible, and to find the way where this strategy will make yourself as little bad off as possible. You are looking for the best least bead position; which is why this strategy is called the minmax strategy. 
    Since the goal of the check mate is fo far off however, no player can see to the end of the game. Evaluation is still centered around these concepts of benefits, of tempo.

Now how did I use the word tempo there? It was as the potential for making moves of a higher tempo. See how words twist under our grip like this? That is the power and powerlessness of words, the paradox of speaking. Yet, we are now using the Socratic method of enchelus, and then we must soldier on with fixing and unfixing our definitions.
    With the future in mind, and taking the definition of tempo involving the average benificiality of a move, we can say that the optimal strategy is to chose those moves that, on the average over the whole game, maximises your economy of tempo. And that, if your economy of tempo is consistently higher than your opponent, the strong tendency will be for your to win your games.
    This conceptual lifting is not that easy to do with the abstraction model of tempo. Yea, you have more tempos, so what? The interesting thing, is that the quality of one’s moves are better. That, is what counts.
    Still, the abstraction model has it’s benefits. As I said. It is simple.
Imagine that you are trying to evaluate your moves. In that instance, you can look for the things that your moves will accomplish, and then simply count. Will one of my moves do more? If so, that has the higher number of tempos, and is the better move. It is maybe that simple.

A note on Skakktafl.
Chess is a zero sum game. In the end, there can be only one winner, and one loser. It is also a game with a single win condition; kill the king. Therefore, every good move that you make is also a move that is bad for your opponent, and is contributing towards your own win. The game is symmetrical in this sense. You are trying to hide away his win condition, so that his end is on a branch further along than yours, and pulling your win condition closer. Your king stays in his castle, his pawn structure is broken. These two concepts are direct mirrors of that asymmetry, which, aside from the fact that one player must start, is the only asymmetry in chess.

But what happens if we try to play with some of these fundamental aspects of chess? All of this was some of my thinking when I made Skakktafl. In Skakktafl evaluation is, if not harder, then different. There are three win conditions; get one’s king to the center of the board, invade his empty castle with one of your pieces, or kill his king.
    With multiple win conditions each move may be simultaneously good and bad, depending on what win condition your are making your move in relation to. This highlights the fact that evaluation is determined by a relevancy criteria looking at a particular goal. A good Skakktafl player will then be able to cut off a win from one’s opponent, such that he must change it; and through this retroactively lowering the value of his opponents previous moves. A good move in Skakktafl then, may be one that manages to keep the most number of roads open.
    Because of this higher complexity, the actual tactical complexity has been lowered. No piece is able to cross the gameboard fully in one move. Because of this, pieces must participate in local battles, the outcome of which will only then affect the game globally.
    This has a great effect on how one should manage one’s economy of tempos. If you can foresee that you will loose one tactical battle within two moves no matter what, then you should change your focus to another part of the board, where you can restore the economic balance between you and your player, by playing two equally valuable moves there instead. 
The evaluation of the games position therefore has three layers. The first is the local tactical positions, then it is their outcomes evaluated against the board, and then at last the board position as counting towards the six possible final outcomes of the game. Normally, these six will not be relevant at the same time. At most I have experienced three to be relevant at the same time.
For inexperienced players of Skakktafl, then, a good skill is being able to set up a new goal; managing the complexity of the board. If you start by playing for development, a good early tactic, you can close of the board pretty effectively. This will limit the need for evaluation on multiple fronts. After that, it is time to formulate a simple high level plan, what we call playing prophylactically, to, for instance, relocate resources to his right flank in order to penetrate with force, and either mate his king, or take his castle. Let the fun begin.

Dandelions and Depth Vision

I remember an episode from my early childhood where I was trying to envision something. I knew that if someone told me a story, images would dance before my inner vision, and I would see them with great clarity. But when I tried to do so deliberately, there was only blackness, or a faint contour of the object. 

What I was specifically trying to imagine was a green leaf. The harder I tried, the worse my results were. It was as if all that concentrating on concentrating was taking focus away from the actual task. Then, suddenly, while I was relaxing, images would swim before my inner vision, and the leaf would come too.

As time went on my powers of imagination grew, but only in the normal directions. I could see a tree, or many people, but things that were beyond my knowledge was outside of the scope of my imagination. And there was especially one whole dimension that elluded me. That of scale.

I might have been able to conjure a leaf, but could I ever see this?

The pollen filled anthers of a dandelion.

These are the male sex organs of a dandelion. They are called anthers, and are filled with pollen ready to be picked up by a bumblebee and transferred to another plant. It is possible to see these structures, but to envision them at this detail is something that can only come with the aid of imagery and knowledge.

As Richard Dawkins once said in a televised lecture; Humans simply live on the human scale, the just so scale. The things that are tiny we don't really notice. We look at ants and think that they are small, but we have no idea about the real scale of bacteria. Or indeed, how they differ in scale. The largest is just about visible to the naked eye, up to a third of a millimeter long. The smallest, a mycoplasma, is 1500 times smaller. That is about the relationship of your size to that of a small rat. A rat, a scavenger of a city. 

You, yourself is of course a city. A colony of cells, each bigger than most bacteria, and some of them capable of living a few hours after you are dead. They share, probably at about an equal rate, their life with the rats of the body, the bacteria. Okay. So bacteria actually serve a host of useful functions in the body, to the degree that mother's milk actually seems to foster bacterial growth in the gut of the infant. 

The metaphorical switch of looking at the body as a city is only possible with an imagination of the depths of scale; and nothing of what we've been talking about, except for those things as a whole, is visible to us. Throught knowledge we may delve even deeper to imagine the atomic structure of our dna, watery blood or the fatty lipid membranes that cover our cells. 

An imagination of depth allows us to investigate the same things, but over and over. Like the cells relation to the body, we can look at the body's relationship to it's friends, your friends.  See you as groups, as the cells of a city; The doves serving the useful function of picking up scraps of food that would otherwise rot in the streets, but otherwise being quite irritating...

What allows these strange hangers on anyway? What is it about these systems that allow smaller freeloaders. Perhaps that there is a surplus of energy that is negligible to the bigger entities, but not to the smaller. And that, since this energy loss is then serving a useful function through the symbiotes it has not been selected against evolutionarily? I don't know, but such comparisons are rich with potential areas of study.

One of the first people to realize the modern version of this was IBM mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. From observing nature he found that many patterns in nature were self similar. That is, a thing at one scale looks the same as itself at a lower scale. An example of this is most trees. Pluck a branch from a tree and set it on the ground. Quite often it will mimic the overall structure of the tree. The same tree-like structure of self similarity can be found in the circulatory system; with thick blood vessels branching out until they reach the smallest capillaries. 

Mandelbrot was less about looking into the body, and emphasized the difference between seeing things close up and from far away. The description given from your perspective will depend of the nearness your are currently at. A house seen from a kilometre away will be drawn on a piece of paper as a dot; but from 1cm it is the color and roughness of the paint which is described.

Analogies up and down the scale are easy and fun to pull of; They are capable of revealing the degree of self similarity of elements at all the scales, and they allow us to take a center stage in this whole process. At least the us that is doing the justification.

If a cell wrote this essay, it might very well talk of the body as we do the city. If an atom wrote it, it would talk of itself as a conglomerate of insignificant quarks, and clothe itself in the glory as it's role is a kalium messenger in a synapse, in the spiral arm galaxy known as the corpus callosum! In fact, that very atom is probably now playing an integral part of writing this essay; thought it can't possibly know that, it's an atom. 

However, if that atom can't know it's writing this article; then neither can the one beside it, or the one beside that - or any other atom in my brain. Except, I DO know that I'm writing this essay; and my brain is only made of those atoms, so they must know. At least a few of them must know. 

And there I run off again, on another adventure of scale. Those are the kinds of thoughts that depth vision affords. I think this kind of imagination is incredibly valuable, like that view of the dandelion, whose beauty is apparent both as a field, as a flower and as a forest of anthers.

An analysis of a simple photograph

I took this image during my easter holiday, standing only a few meters from my mothers house. The composition stood out to me instantly when I saw this house - and I only took one foto of it. Later I tried playing around with it in after effects, but to my surprise there was nothing I could do to it that would in any way enhance the composition or colours. It was simply, perfectly balanced. I'd like to take a minute now to analyse the composition to try to discover what makes this image so compelling to me, and hopefully to many others. The method is a list, first of general features, then going into some details, as you will see.

The most obvious feature of this composition, its main star, is the house placed slightly to the right in the frame. Especially the south wall stands out, with the sun striking it directly, and all around it there are darker details. The corner closest to us is black, creating a sharp boundary between this wall and the shadowed wall behind, and this line continues up to split in a y shap at the roof. The house itself, as a product of postwar functionalism, has an extremely simple shape. It is like a playhouse, a cube at the bottom and a triangle at the top. I will return to the house later.

Apart from the house we can say that this image has four horizontal bands of difference crossing up to the right; sequentially from the top; the blue sky, the white mountain, the clutter of houses and the ground. This dark/light/dark/light pattern gives the image most of its dynamism. The house is standing as a blotch of light on top of the dark middle band, and this contrast ads depth to an image which would otherwise stand in danger of seeming a little flat.

For a winter scene, this image has a surprising amount of colour. The two major players are blue and white. Notice the deep blues in the shadows, especially behind the main house. These shadows, as it were, bring the heavens down to earth, and at the same time reminds us of the fact that what we are looking at is mostly water. The snow is water, and the colour of the air is that of water. In fact, the shadow behind the main house has a similar shading towards a lighter blue at the bottom to the sky, though it has more of a pastel tint.

There are also three minor colours represented; yellow, red and green. The red and green houses, as they are of contrasting colours and standing quite close together balance each other out. The main house is yellow, but in fact, offwhite. The yellow coloration comes from the sun, and seems to give the house some warmth. The house is the only warm element of this wintery scene, and is why I earlier wrote that one gets the sense that this house is blasted by the sun. Almost imperceptibly the lines of the house are tilting towards the oncoming light, and I get a visceral feeling that the house is leaning against the oncoming rays. But the colour is not alone in creating this effect:

The two white fields, standing to either side of the house, has line that bend around the house. On top there is the rising mountain, at the bottom the the snow is set like a barrier curling around a few meters in front of the house. In this image, at least, reality has shaped itself to nest this house within its fold, and to give it a respect that may seem a little peculiar. After all, the house seems very worn and weathered.

Why, then, does this house deserve so much attention and respect? Using japanese aesthetic concepts, one could perhaps say that this house has a certain wabi-sabi quality; A history that speaks to us of its fifty ears facing the elements. But, this seems off somehow. It is, after all, not a japanese house. Is it that it is showing the age of functionalism? - reminding us that even our modern culture, wise to abstraction, is showing it's age. No, I don't think that's it either. The only answer that seems to fit, is that this house is so essentially a house. The essence, Aristotle tells us, is what is left when all the accidental things are removed. This house may have had a veranda, but it doesn't need one to be a house. This house could have had a fence around it, but this would be an addition to what is already, essentially, a house.

What we see then in this picture is the purity of a concept, delivered with a world bending force, singled out by the sun itself - except, for one little detail; a dark circular shape on the shadowed wall, where a parabolic antenna is half obscured like a half moon. This single shape put a crack in the pure concept. The antenna is accidental, an addition that tells of the human element inside, that does not care that this photograph is taken, or that the sun illuminates it - and I thank Fortune for it's existence. This antenna gives a dynamism to the theme, and highlights it in a new way that a "perfect" image could not have. Can an image be more than perfect? To even ask such a question is silly, and in a way every image is perfect and imperfect - but that is a digression.

A second thing the antenna disrupts is the uncanny rhythm and symmetry of the windows. Like the pips of a die the southern windows are evenly aligned, nine in all with double windows on the right. The regularity gives the flat surface sense of depth, which the enlarged closer windows help amplify. The same effect can be seen on the eastern wall, but the small top and bottom windows acting as points of symmetry about the horizontal axis. Technically, that is a rotational symmetry of 180 degrees, since both are offset from the vertical line in the same rotational direction. Our antenna remains a beauty spot on the facade.

Only a few details remain. The rythm of the windos lead into the third shadowy band, and leading lines are kept up by the houses in the background.

The wisdom of Andrew Parrot

I recently had the pleasure of being conducted by Andrew Parrott. He is a man that embodies the good things of english culture; learnedness, politeness and a certain enterprising impatience - well hidden by manners. He is also a brilliant scholar and conductor, who interspersed his instructions with amusing, though relevant anecdotes. But it is not they I have come here to share. What I want to convey to you are some of the musical lessons he taught us during those early rehearsals - lessons that are meant to be universal to classical and, I presume, romantic music. There are seven lessons in all, and here they come:

1: The start makes the phrase. As listeners of western music we have certain expectations of how the music will flow. If the start is good, the audience will fill in the occasional blank. The start also gives the timing, which is important in choral works where precision can make or break a performance. When the chorus is singing with an orchestra, a precise (and perhaps a millisecond early) start to the phrase can help the audience follow the voices in a crowded soundscape.

He illustrated this with the wonderful example of an old tenor mimicking his way to a high note. Parrott said, and I'm paraphrasing: "You could hear the notes, but they were definitely not there!"

2. Piano and forte has a different colour (timbre). Piano should be softer, and, perhaps a forte more penetrating. Later I found my ppp's to be marked "breathy" in a few occasions. 

3. Chromatic progressions should have a its own colour. I believe this is because you wish to draw attention to these, or maybe it is because they function to add some emotional content to the music that should be indicated.

4. Language determines the stress and rhythm of words and phrases. If you learn the music by heart the natural pronunciation of the words will guide the musical expression.

5. Crescendos rise from the bases. Tenors and so on should be delayed. I couldn't tell you the reasons why, except that it sounds good. Also,  a crescendo lasts the whole phrase; don't start too early!

6. In pieces where the voices are doubled by the orchestra, start the phrase a millisecond before the beat, and relax on long notes. You can even let up a little before the the end, as long as you come back for the consonant.

7. In a good performance every musician must be aware of their role in the whole performance, and to identify the places where it is their turn to shine. Good form is to identify your soloistic parts, and when you don't have them - pull back to give space to others.

Such are they joys of reading Kant

Today I was sitting in a coffee shop, dressed in my finest sunday clothes, with my favorite pen and my favorite notebook, and I was reaching such rapturous heights of intellectual ecstasy that creativity burst from my pen. I immediately wrote down an emotional remembrance, a phrase of music and a poem. What could have spurred me to such a height? A sentence from "The Critique of Pure Reason," by Immanuel Kant.

Then there are the low points. The very first page, two and a half paragraphs in all, supplies you with eleven definitions - intricately interlocked like a crystalline tower of thought built to allow for as few handholds as possible. It must have taken me half an our to surmount that challenge, but the payoff is great. From there you get a view to at least a few pages, and far into the philosophy of science in the 20th century.

I feel incredibly lucky to have a friend in Sweden going through this book with me. We call each other each tuesday to tear our hair out, and to critique and marvel at the words of this small prussian man. As we are both parents, we must steal moments from the busywork of everyday life to delve into the mind of this enlightenment thinker, hoping thereby to feed our starved brains with enough matter to last us through the week. And, it generally does.

To a modern reader, Kant is maybe not as difficult as we have been lead to believe. Once it was perhaps strange to think that the real world is not naively presented to us as we see it; but since Kant, we've had Freud and neuroscience and nature show on tv; heck, we've had Darwin and biology and all of modern science. We've had analytical philosophy, philosophy of the mind, Wittgenstein and even out of body experiences in the form of tv and games, training your mind to survey the landscape of reality from a third person point of view. We are as born for reading Kant. So when Kant writes that "our understanding makes a concept which is the form appearance of a thing that we really cannot see directly," we just go "Oh, you mean that we are like the photochip in my camera that catches the light? - got it!".

That chip, by the way, is an excellent metaphor for much of what Kant talks about. The aim of his "Critique of pure reason", is to create for us an account of the mind which is a bit like an engineer's schematic for the camera chip - a guidebook for the perplexed in matters most perplexing. The thing that makes the book great though, is that he also tries to do two other things; to tell us how to know there is a reality outside of what the "chip" catches of the light, and also to tell us that, by knowing how it works, we are also better prepared to use our understanding as we see fit. And if we are freer to use our minds, then we reckon, we are more free.

As an enlightenment thinker, Kant was not only contributing to the scientific movement, but also to the political movement for intellectual freedom. In his essay "What is the enlightenment?" he gives direct answers to some of these questions. How can one have intellectual freedom? To do that one must be able to separate the lies of those that wish to manipulate us from the truths that we encounter. And to do that we must be able to say what truth is. The political answer is that we must be free to give time to thought, and to voice our opinion; but then there is the practical question: How do we know? How do we answer the question "What is truth?"

And that is the first question Kant asks when we have fully surmounted that glass tower. Only, the answer you see from there is not the one you want; Which is that is that the question "What is truth?" is itself a falsity. Kant attacked the problem by attacking the foundation of thinking itself. By writing The Critique of Pure Reason he was trying to show us what it was possible to know; and then comes the road to liberation. The follow up work to the Critique of Pure Reason, was The Critique of Practical Reason; Which is about how to use your newfound powers of thought; or in other words; ethics.

It was about at this stage in my reading that my amygdala started pumping out happy-hormones, which would wash into my general bloodstream - there to mix with freshly imbibed caffeine to create an innocent high so high music flowed from my pen (read, scribbled notes laboriously.) This buzz also totally broke my concentration, but, still... worth it.

It is wonderful that a metaphysical work such as this should have such a simple and wonderful aim; to free us. It is, in a sense, a religious work. A work exploring the nature of reality, of the soul and of the furthest reaches of understanding - and, in this he is not alone. Plato had his "Timaeus", Aristotle his "Metaphysics". Both works of a religious nature according to the authors. Then there was, at a later date, Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", and perhaps Wittgenstein's two works "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" and "Philosophische Untersuchungen". Or, in the east the third basked of the "Tripitaka", the "Chuang Tsu" or "Lao Tsu" of the taoists, or "Treasury of the true Dharma eye" by Dogen.

And, I must confess, reading such works is like a religious experience for me too. Not a mystical experience, or magical or anything like that; but it is in such works that I find that I am able to think most deeply about the nature of our relationship to everything, in the sense that these authors connect their world-view, often complex and philosophical, to their ethical view, to the view of life as experienced. Such books seem to me like the expression of the act of giving, where they wish to give others understanding in both connotations; intellectual understanding and compassion.

I don't know if these are the emotions you are looking for, or the questions or the answers. I can only tell you that, for me; such are the joys of reading Kant.

The two ways of shaping knowledge.

Imagine Raphael working on the David, chipping away at the stone, uncovering a hand, and a face, and then slowly seeing the rough outline - a man shaped form, but not yet a david, not yet a copy of a model. Now Raphael is looking at his model, a young handsome man, and he closes his eyes, trying to remember him. He can see a hand here, the shape of a brow, but the details are somehow gone. And you, my reader, if you close your eyes and imagine your father, isn't most of the features there? But some of the details are blank. Some of his life history... a few lost years. But if you could only see him, then you could know. You could chip away your misconceptions, make the details more accurate.

Michel Foucault is sitting at his desk, writing. His shelf is full of books, but he isn't looking at them, for now he is writing. His considerable knowledge is woven into a well measured pattern of historical development, but, maybe he's not completely sure. After a few days he comes back to the printed page with a critical pen. A bit more reading, and inaccuracies are chipped away. More and more his text is looking like reality, and he knows that when it is published, many more will be bringing their chisels to bear on those words, and in the end, they will near a real representation much more.

Raphael is looking over the fence into his neighbor's yard. She is sitting there, back turned to him with her potters wheel. Potters don't get famous, but she is a master of her craft. There was nothing there to chip away at; she only had formless clay - but, she's making due, and a beautiful amphora is given shape between her hands. 

Elsewhere Lorenzo de Medici is drafting law. One hand is on his pen, and the other on "The Prince" by Machiavelli. He sees in it a bit of himself, and now he is about to give a new shape to Florence by his pen. A new guild is about to be established. Picking up the book, he wonders how much came directly from Machiavelli's head, and how much is an inference from direct example. "We can all suppose", he thinks, "but in the end we must bow to the simple facts." And he should know, realpolitik schews even the despots law, and however much a description rings true...

Plato is writing "The State". His characters are building it from the ground up, and he is building them. He is thinking about Sparta. How could they ever beat Sparta? What manner of organisation could beat their perfect tyranny? The state is rising in his mind, and he is walking through it, imagining citizens bartering, conniving, discussing. Something seems wrong. How do we ensure a stable food supply? The wall is raised by.... one days work on obligatory duty, and, then there is the sea? But what if there were a sea power? Sometimes he feels like a potter, and sometimes as a stone carver - only the shifting mass of the idea is between his hands, writhing and alive, and for now "on the wax", as they say.

I am sitting here, thinking about this piece - writing it. Some text is added, some is taken away. A critical thought strikes a sentence, a new one is formed, from new ideas - edging closer to truth. 

Work in progress: A Grassroots Spelling Reform

I'd like to share my method of working, through showing at each stage where I'm at in the work. Below you will be able to follow as I work on this essay, and make progress towards a finished text. In this essay I will be making arguments for the use of spelling that lies closer to the spoken language, and that also moves with natural language development. I hope you will enjoy the process and the read.

***

There was a danish phonetician of high repute by the name of Otto Jespersen. In 1910 he published a small essay titled "The Usefulness of Phonetics." The essay is as clear as the title, but, as he says, extra-scientific. It is an educated opinion. Jespersen advocates the spread of phonetic knowledge as a means of teaching children how to read. He points to the common orthography, the way we spell, as lagging behind the spoken language, and also serves up some interesting research: Already at that time it was shown, in Denmark, Norway, England and France, that teaching children to write phonetically first, and then to go on to "proper" spelling, enabled them to learn reading faster than would otherwise be the case. 

Spelling has always been a political issue, from nasjonalalistic sentiments, to efforts to controll "correctness". What was different with Jespersen, though, was that he was arguing from a scientific standpoint. The motivation for reform was to help children learn everywhere, and to make spelling a more sensible activity for all of us.

It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the english language that it is in bad need of spelling reform.

If you are not familiar with the fact that english is in need of spelling reform, allow me to show you a small sample of the wrongheadedness of our writing. Let's pick a one syllable word, "thought", for instance, then count the number of letters. That's right, seven is the answer. Now, how many sounds can you count? I hear three, which is represented with the IPA script system as: θɒt. Now, let's break this down. The first glyph is "th" the second "ough", and the third "t". Then why is it that a three-sound word has seven letters? Some of the blame, for the "th" especially comes from the fact that we are using a roman alphabet, and it simply didn't have a sound for the germanic th-sound. We used runes for a while, then settled on the th-representation. Standardisation often comes from the 1500'ds, when printing presses lead to a standardisation of spelling. Some of the earliest technicians were from the netherlands, which can help explain why there is an "h" in "ghost". 

From that time, the english language has slowly been sliding away from it's written form. The absence of proper spelling reform has exacerbated the problem.

Another thing advocated by  Otto Jespersen is spelling reform. His idea was that influential writers would choose some words at random, which they cared about, and spell it the way they thought was most logical, and by this building an understanding that things could be different, that we needn't stick to the old ways. In this he was half right. Now let me tell you a little story of a school day in Nicaragua.         

In the late seventies center for specialized learning opened a school for deaf children in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Attending must have been very difficult for the children. In 1979 there was a military coup, and the government changed hands to the Sandinistas. In addition there was no proper paradigm for the teaching of deaf children. Learning centered on lip reading of spanish, something that was all but incomprehensible to them. The children, however, found time to communicate between themselves. In the school yard, on the buss, and elsewhere in social settings they started using signs to communicate. Soon they had the beginnings of a sign language. By the mid eighties the teachers at the schools were in distress. They weren't understanding what their kids were saying, and sendt for help from a linguist at MiT. Judy Kegl, arrived in 1986, expecting what the teachers said was miming, not language at all, but just a visual mimicking of ideas. Instead she found a thriving sign language. 
Lacking proper instruction, the children had started developing a sign language by themselves. At first, it was simple. I imagine singled out nouns and words, put together, like a two year old will have a two-word sentence structure, based on the principle of juxtaposition "Table high", or "food hot". This was not what she found. By 1986 the children had agreed upon grammatical structures, a complex form of communication worthy of the title of a full language. Here is the rub, though. Children who had been part of the early development of the language, and had left school, did not benefit from these later advancements in complexity. As the passed into adolescence and adulthood, they moved further away from the critical age of language acquisition, and though they were able to learn of the later grammatical advancements, they never gained the fluency of the young children.

As adults we have passed from the early creative faze of life, where we are willing so sacrifice efficiency and jump into learning without reservation. Children are open to learning the most ridiculous things, and are incredibly flexible in their disposition to life and learning. As we get older we lose this flexibility for another virtue; efficiency. Without blinking our eye picks up the known structure, decodes it, and moves on. Even across nations, word comprehension is about the same for writing. The important time saver here, is in how easy it is to learn.

There is a problem though. Children will happily fill in any clear space you have with wonderfully productive nonsense, but they will not petition the government for spelling reform in their schools. For that, they will have to learn "proper" spelling first, finnish high school, and probably get at least a bachelor degree in phonetics, preferably while being a productive participant in student politics. And at that point, why redo the way you do spelling? Instead the work falls to us boring adults. And it is here that Jespersen enters the picture again. How about we just all, you know change the way we spell things okeishnally? As we will see the age of the proponents may not be the most crucial step after all, but first I'd like to turn your attention to a second issue; What are the stakes?

Have you heard of a "deep orthography?" A deep orthography is what you have when the grapheme (the written word) does not match the phoneme (the spoken word). 

Picture it like this. You are a kid, standing at the edge of the pool, about to learn how to swim. You are at the kiddy-pool side, simple words and phrases, but far ahead, there is the really deep pool where you will one day thrive as a literate adult. But okay. First things first, jump in. Staying at the surface you are at the "phonemic" level. You know how to speak. At the bottom you see the hints of writing. Those are the graphemes. Phonemic depth, here, is equivalent to the depth of the pool. The more unintuitive signs there are for the learner, the harder it becomes to see the spoken words at the bottom of the pool. Some kids are naturally good readers. They can hold a lot of breath and go down more easily. For others, it is harder.They will be left squinting for a good long time. But no matter what happens, the more phonemic depth your language has, the harder it becomes to learn how to read. If you are the unlucky speaker/reader og Danish or English, the orthographic depth can add more than 2 years (!) to learning basic reading. That, is too much.

The invention of the alphabet was a one time occurrence, and a revolution. The phoenicians, a mediterranean trading people took arbitrary signs from egyptian, and turned them into letters. Sometimes using the rhebus princple, like for the letter "m", which was written like a rippling form which mimicked "water" and stood for the same; "mem". The current letter is a simplification of that riple; now there are only two waves to our M. Alphabetication, was a huge step forward for language aquisition. In ancient egypt writing was so copmlex, it was only reserved for an elite class of priests. As the written language was increasingly sipmlifed, first by having a few simple signs, then by developing a syllaberry, writing spread to ever more circles of life. The phonecian alphabet was used in trade, but soon also for poetry. It was a democraticing power. Only now, has the english language taken a step back.

The great orthographic depth, indicates that english speakers must employ a "two method" decoding system. One alphabetic, and and one logographic! Meaning, they don't "read" the word, they just recognice it as what it stands for.The research indicating this was done in 2003 by Seymour, Aro and Erskine - but this knowledge seems not to have spread in a public forum. Apparently there is a cutoff point, where the distance between the spoken word and the written word becomes so great,  that this shift to a double system occurs - and danish and english are both below this cutoff point.

This is particularly distressing because language proficiency is what social scientists call a "key skill", which will control your access to learning other subjects. Spelling has consequences. 

Common orthography, the slow move away from common sense.

Printing a ghost.

Pedantry and coinage.

unneeded sounds, unwanted sounds. What, then, is the relationship between alphabet and language? Many of the vowels and consonants have direct correlates: N, m, a, b, k and so on, though "A" for instance, will stand for many variations of the vowel. But this must be so, and is sensible. Then there are a few, like x, sometimes z, that stand for more than one phoneme. Then we have a number of phonemes without a sound; like "th" in "thing", j in "judge", th in "this" and ng in "bang". It is in this area that we have the most to save on "mental space". Introducing new symbols for these kinds of sounds will drastically change english orthography.
      The ordering of the alphabet is also completely arbitrary, and this should change. It should reflect the physical characteristics of sound production. This would also make dictionary searches much easier, as one wouldn't have to guess at the start of the spelling of a word, but could go right onto the actual sound produced.

Using the ipa. The question becomes; where should be get the new symbols from? In this we essentially have three choices: We can go to other alphabets that have a common heritage with ours; meaning Greek, ethiopian and cyrillic, or even runes;(2) make new ones based on current research on readability (often done for dyslexic people, but applicable to everyone.), or we can go to the International Phonetic Alphabet; and I think this is the most sensible option. If we do this, we hitch a ride on an already established system, which is already international. This would then help us to learn foreign languages who adopt the same standard. Frankly, taking globalisation into account, I think it's the obvious choice.

The invention of writing novel writing systems seems to have been a uniquely end of last century effort, with many interesting contributions, such as Shavian - a phonetic, rather alien looking script invented by George Bernard Shaw - and curiously "Deseret", developed at the (now) university of Utah. These efforts failed, I believe, because they sought to create a new novel and comprehensive scripts - which would be very hard to implement. There was one man, however, who sought to reform the english language through a much subtler inclusion of just a few letters, and that man was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin excluded c, j, w, x and y - meaning that they could be replaced by other letters, and introduced for new ones, digraphs of th, dh (this -> dhis), ng and sh. His most influential letter was to be the ligature of ng, which became the ŋ, which was adopted into the IPA. His original article is available to read on open library, and I recommend a read. Especially entertaining are the "letters" at the end written in this new manner. It is quite legible, although somewhat difficult at first.

There are ways and there are ways. As a radicalist I'd say that Franklin didn't go far enough, as a realist I'd say that it was too much too fast. At any rate, adult efficiency overcame philosophical curiosity, and old Benjamin didn't make much headway. But he did allow us to dream, and to be critical. Why do we need capital letters? They are only double forms letter forms, and have little use. At least, let us get rid of them in the beginning of sentences, which is already marked by a period. Or, if we are to use it, let us mark something useful, like sentence subjects, or better, sentence head (that word which determines grammatical structure.) In this fever dream, I'd also like to do a revision of our diacritical marks. Though double consonants should go away, (they give entirely the wrong picture of what's going on; what really happens is that a vowel is elongated or shortened; which we rightfully call "stressed."), instead to be replaced by a flat accent, as in the japanese ö. And I'd also teach that words stand for concepts, and that, generally, a sentence should end at the end of the proposition.... but, I think I'm running ahead of myself. You see, it is easy to dream. Bernard Shaw dreamed, and Franklin too - but their contributions to orthography are all but forgotten.

The reason, I believe, is that adult convenience we were talking about. Reading Franklin's sample text are difficult for about fifteen minutes, and then it's quite fine - but, never great. The problem, I think, is that he jumps back and forth for the same words, depending on the pronunciation. The same words get different pronunciations depending on what other words they are next to. In the word pair "good dog", we pull the d-s together, and only pronounce one, like "good-og". This also happens within compound words. Listen, for instance to the different pronunciations of "photo" in"photograph" [/ˈfoʊtəɡrɑːf/] and "photographer." [/fəˈtɒɡrəfər/] In the latter word the stress is moved to the second syllable, and so the diphthong falls away.
     Franklin would have spelled these two words differently. But, I believe that this would have been a mistake. We need some degree of standardisation so that we don't actually have to read every letter, but can rather skip the middle and concentrate on the ends. But there is a way.

According to Jespersens studies, learning to read was faster when tied to a phonetic logic, but in adulthood it turns out that reading speeds are pretty much constant accross languages. The adult brain reads differently than children. We are elevated to a different level, and read two or three words together. And, although there is no direct research on this, what little we have would predict that adult reading speeds would drop if this standardisation falls away. This means that we have to be very careful if we want to change our writing system drastically. The middle ground, though, is open to us.

The trick is to introduce standardisation at the smallest level of meaning in each word, that is, at the morpheme level. The word photographer contains three morphemes; photo-graph-er. Once each are given a phonetic transcription, they are turned into natural "units", which we can then combine to form words. In this case, the result would be something like fotogræfer. In this case, I have chosen not to include diphthongs for the first two vowels, as I felt they added little to our intuitive understanding of that word.
 

There is a modern way for a state to accommodate spelling reform which removes some of the legacy problems. Most reading now is done online, and text in this instance is only code. And code, can be changed. Through a simple process, a browser can install an application that changes the spelling of english words. Every person can then themselves choose the varieties of spelling they choose, or even start a learning algorithm which changes the spelling of words little by little until a full transition has been made. The application can be made by the state, and installed on a voluntary basis. However, I don't think states will do this, until we first have a grassroots spelling reform by people world wide. If we wish, a shift on orthography could be planned as a long plan, introducing word changes one by one in public media and papers. Spelling is a policy issue which is easy to implement, contrary to other reforms requiring massive investments in material, like in the care for the elderly.

(Orthographic depth hypothesis was proposed in 1992 by Katz and Frost, and subsequent data was provided by Seymour et. al (2003))

The consequences of bad textbooks.

You are standing there, in the classroom; two dozen eyes are sleepy from an evening of gaming, chatting, living. But you are there, and you are demanding their attention. You are laying claim to precious teenage minutes, and I dare you to waste them. A minutes inattention in a teacher can loose a class, make them lose track, and spin back from hard won miles of slog through a hormonal forest of competing ideas. What matters, the only thing that matters, is the presence you share, and what it is filled with.

So you do a good job, you bring them in - you increase understanding. And then, the test comes. What pupils don't understand is that the test is not only of them, but also of the teacher. What has the teacher managed to convey, inspire and cajole into the pupil? Usually, there are a few glimmers of gold, a few inspired thoughts. Most of it is simply average, and some of it is horrible. Nothing new, perhaps. But then you look closer, and you find the writing style of the book reflected in student assignments, and you shriek, because that horrible rag isn't worth it's own weight in paper. 

The writing style is overly clear, and laborious. It puts in many little word, like this, only so that the hard words should be a little further apart, because that is important when writing such texts for such you people. Infuriating. Here are a few reasons why writing is a bad idea:

1: It is uninspired. Flat writing makes for a flat emotion, and memory works best on heightened emotion. Emotion is the brain's way of noting what is important, and the brain wants to remember things that are important. Soulless writing diminishes the soul
2: Putting filler words in a sentence to create "mental space" has the opposite effect. Especially in an early learning situation, when the learner is inexperienced at parsing information, spreading out the crucial nouns too far away from each other, makes them loose connection in a mental sense. Ideas seldom stand alone, they are to be related for a maximal understanding, be it in social science or literature. Classical writing style guides say, "put the noun and the verb close to each other in the sense", and with good reason. It is a best practice borne out of experience, and now, of cognitive science.
3: Learning happens through imitation. Badly written books give badly written tests. The syntax of sentences are the skeletons of the logic of the meaning - and I don't think I'm going to unpack that much further. If you don't know what it means as a writer, you have some studying to do. For the layperson; Word order is crucial to meaning. Bad word order hides the meaning of words that stand in a special relation. When students use this dilute form of writing, they are making the thinking process harder for themselves. Ideally, notes should be taken in haiku.
4: Final reason. Textbooks should reflect the passion of those who wrote them (unless they already do), and also current research and issues. You don't need to make it completely coherent or all-encompasing - it is the teacher's job to sow it all together, and also provide the additional material, or guidance to find that themselves.

Please make good textbooks. These are so bad, I'd rather not have any.

A case for philosophy in school

Rote learning is out, we know. We know, because it stopped being useful, and curriculae are now being changed to account for that fact. We are responding to a technological reality that requires high levels of expertise and logical thinking. Just knowing how the world is, isn't good enough; now we must know how to make it.

There is a second, slightly more invisible demand, though, and that is that the kind of motivation one need for doing such tasks is wholly different for classical work. Doing highly technical work, keeps you very many steps from those who benefit from your work.

Perhaps you are working as a programmer on communications system. You might then only your part on an aspect of a system, designed to better productivity in another job, that isn't even then directly tied to people's everyday needs. Such work situations increase the demands for inner motivation. and the skills necessary to understand your place in society. And that basically means, learning philosophy.

Philosophy, ever since Socrates, became a discipline for learning how of live well,  and remained so roughly until the enlightenment. And, while the tradition has been with us, it has been toned down in favour of hard nosed academic philosophy. But it is this living well tradition that will be crucial to a modern worker. The aim  of such philosophy is to learn how to be an autonomous and good person; which is learned through a tripartite program; learning logic, ethics, and physics. Or, how to think, how to live, what is real.

The clearest expression of this tripartite route is found with the Stoics. Ethics was the goal, they argued, but to get to it, one needed a command of logic. The idea of logic in the time of the stoics was wider than our current conception. It included learning how to think, how to write well, argue and analyse. Logic was the tool that was to open up a wide analysis of lifes problems, and grant you access to the higher faculties of reasoning. Analysis, though, will not help you if you don't have the proper material to do an analysis of. Here, one needed to know something about the composition of the world, which would provide the raw material for your query. Together these become a philosophy in the strict sense, a search for wisdom that is a life project, and not a motivational poster.

There are always dangers in engaging in such grand projects such as "learning philosophy in school". How does one insure that we just supplant one dogma with another? Hopefully this is countered by a demand for critical thinking, and if it isn't - well, we tried. The main goal ought to be that, whatever work one will be doing in the future; one will be able to make rational choices, and the choices here is the important part. Moral actions come from personal initiative; which is not only a moral truth, but also a sociological one. Groups tend to do worse in difficult moral situation, due to an effect known as a diffusion of responsibility, where everyone feels that others could do something. Such effects can only be countered by a rational readied mind, or as I'd like to think of such people; as autonomous individuals. 

Besides the work place benefits, there are learning benefits as well. Standard pedagogical knowledge today teaches that bridging knowledge between subjects, and understanding the intentions of the writers of technical material is crucial for good learning. Philosophy can help make these bridges by taking an overall outlook of knowledge and learning.

Start them in first class, philosophy as it's own subject, and drop the greek. Teach them how to effectively think, how to think about acting, and how to connect the knowledge from all other subjects, that is "physics". 

Regarding classes such as religion and social science, we could learn in a philosophy what good a religion can bring to our lives, or what social science can teach us about humility. For mathematics, we could take a deeper look at what counting actually is, and what uses the = sign could have for making analogies. For english, one could look at how words change us, and how we change words. In the end, philosophy can be used as a key that opens up life for us in a new way, and gives direction to our activity.

Philosophy has the potential to make us better learners, and better people. I don't need any other reasons than that.

Pencil and Paper

A japanese tea room may have paper covering a latticed wooden construction. Tea rooms are meant to be ephemeral, soon passing into decay to that curious wabi sabi aesthetic for which the japanese are so known. Paper, it seems, embodies this ephemerality together with an undefinable elegance, which I, personally, think blooms from its potentiality - which is a potentiality for carrying an eternal and beautiful message. And yet, paper is the medium closest to destruction, blotching, incineration. Paper is cheap, though it defies this. It defies it by nature of its cheapness - by affording us chance after chance to make something good, to correct our mistakes, new music, new words, new drawing flowing from us, and onto that indestructible format. Indestructible not because it is, but because another always takes its place, and gives us another chance.

Enter pencil, the prodigal brother of paper. Like paper, pencil destroys itself, sacrifices itself in the act of creation. I envision the two mediums as chaotic and self destroying things, that stand between the maker and the product, though, between is a vagueness of necessity. The bond between us and the finished product is so complicated, trying to describe it has resulted in books that spend lifetimes talking only about parts of it, and which in themselves talk of something as broad as the human condition. Think of treatises on musical composition, like Fux' "Gradus ad parnassum", or "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White, detailing best practices in writing. These books are mere binders of experience, enablers which seek to sophisticate our expression onto this holy of mediums. And yet, it seems sometimes that the annotated sheet of paper is the final product. A duality then, comes in form of the piece of paper. It carries an eternal message, which is the experience we wish to perceive, but this is only enabled by the paper, which carries little intrinsic worth.

Think of music that has been lost to us, and that is only read off the page freshly after being left untouched for a hundred years. At such time these flimsy mediums seem not so ephemeral after all, but rather eternal - and yet, the piece of paper in your hand, stained as it is strategically with black ink is most certainly not the page in which the music was originally written. No, those pages are surely now a smear of dirt in an ancient trash heap, perhaps so diffuse now that any trace could not be found.

Paper and pencil conveys ephemeral thoughts through its short life, only to be copied into eternity. Or not. Most paper is used once, its contents wasted soon after- as with my sons endless drawings of lines and circles, specks of color. Still, these marks also leave indelible traces in his mind, which will find themselves copied onto new pages in slightly new forms. The paper and pencils become wittgensteinian ladders, stepping stones towards an experience of future proficiency. A stepping stone towards a type of humanity that would not be, were it not for these cheap yet eternal things, extensions of our hands and minds into the world of the extant, the interpersonal. 

It is no wonder that the masters of composition simultaneously describe a skill and markings, scratchings on a white medium. The humanity they describe is a sliver of a society that would not be were it not for the notational capabilities, the foundation of empire and culture - and only through, at least a partial mastery of these can we become that praized of beings, the citizen.

The vote, which extends our selves into a system of bodies, counting up to the idea of representation in a legislative superbody, is a law giving body, which amounts to a writing the minds of our condensed and extended morals into a code that we are to follow. We, the nation, stand on the ephemeral paper and pencil, and define ourselves through writing. 

Abstract is the word, thought abstracted from ourselves, given shape through a technique of composition into a form of communication that describes our experiences, whether of music, words, of vision, and through words, of food and smell, sex and death. But here is the problem. If paper can hold so much, then where do we start?

In a way, those works on composition are not enabling us through and expression of what we can do, but as an expression of what we can't. We reign ourselves in, and bind ourselves to a few forms. Rarely do we see books of music, morse, words and drawing, all falling under one. These competencies are so large that rarely are they found in one person, and so we must cordon off these techniques of sharing ourselves, as we limit our friendships to those who at least intersect with us, with our language and with our spheres of knowledge. Competency lies on a continuum, which we all must inhabit towards one end or another.

There are those who are not allowed to go to school, about a billion of the earth's poorest. Then there is a few percent, a few million with access to the world's best education. Mastery of knowledge, we will see, largely resides in the individual's proficiency at making scratches on paper, to externalise themselves into eternal systems of conduct, of bundles of norms in banks, in schools, in high society, which lives in this paper world, of which money is of course a part. Money. Dirt cheap to make, but expensive to own. The makers of money are the externalised selves who have thrown their whole beings into pieces of paper, who stand on the ballots, who print the green. 

It's about organisation, often. The words I have here thrown together are snippets of logic brought to bear on an educated mind. They sunder against an educated intellect, and trickle into understanding as packets of meaning, opening up vaults of comprehension that may, for all I know, have been wide open already. These very words are an expression of a competency not inherent in the metaphorical paper on which it is metaphorically printed, but it is enabled by it; as medium, as a part of an education, as an external memory and a holder of arguments. But first, comes the paper.

The empty page, the blank screen. These are the canvases of civilisation. The clay tablet, on which the first pieces of accounting were done wrote and finalized bargains that tied cities into interpersonal relationships. The modern contract is a promise enabling us to live tripple lives. In the now, the past and the future. Perhaps it is the now that is ephemeral, and the paper is the durable - the hard, the forcing. Paper here stands between us, enabling us once again to take on new forms of being.

As you are reading this now, you are engaging in an externalized version of myself which could not be had it not been for you reading this. Such, is the importance of pen and paper.

The knowledge of the hands

Nothing more familiar, more concrete or more symbolic, than your hands. Metonymously they are a workforce, symbolically they are power, scientifically they are tools both of destruction and creation; but in philosophy they are the prime representation of the battle over knowledge. If you can doubt your own hands, they feel, you can doubt anything. I cannot bring myself to doubt my hands, but I can empathise with those for  whom hands show us a way of a humble questioning of knowledge.

Below I'll show you two philosophies which used hands as a metaphor of knowledge, albeit in slightly different ways.

  The first school of philosophy is that of the Stoics. Stoicism was founded by a philosopher in Athens named Zeno of Citium. Like many of his time, he claimed inspiration from Socrates - and taught, like him, on the streets. Also, like Socrates, he appealed to us to use the rational part of us to find guidance in ethical issues. Connecting rationality to morality meant that finding out one what really could know became incredibly important. Knowledge of knowledge, and especially logic, was the admission ticket to a good and moral life. But, knowledge was  a difficult subject. According to Zeno, there was several levels of knowledge, which he used to teach with a metaphor of the hand.

Zeno, would say, and I paraphrase; "The open hand is passively observing of the world, grasping with one finger is ascent or descent; close your hand to a fist, and you have belief." Then he wrapped his left hand over his right. "This is knowledge, but only the perfect sage can have this." - the implication being, of course, that there is no perfect sage, and no perfect knowledge.

For him, a critical stance was only the first step to knowledge. To come closer one had to have thought about a problem, and come to understand it in some more fundamental, technical way. Compare this to the art lover, and the artist. An artlover can approach a drawing, and say with confidence; "I like this", or "this isn't as good as that other person's work." He would know something of that work, but nearly nothing in comparison with the artists, who has the technical skill to produce it. This is the difference between holding something with two fingers, and grasping it firmly.

    What this parable does for us, is to equate knowing with the intuitive notion of "grasping." Tentative knowledge can be "lost," firm knowledge does not slip away from our conscious grasp. Of course, both the words of conscious and "graspable" has to do with actually taking something. The neuroscientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger, says that the "hand" is represented in the language center of the brain. Grasping after a word, for us, is more than a metaphor - it is part of our basic approach to knowing.

There is a second metaphorical mode for the hand, and that is of letting go. Letting go is more emotional, more fundamental I would say.

Now imagine yourself in feudal japan, sometime in the 1200s, sitting cross legged in front of an old wrinkly man in orange robes - a buddhist, and perhaps even a buddha. An enlightened one. He is not the perfect sage, but he is closer than any living human you know. Then he stretches out his arm, holding his hand in a fist. "The knowledge of buddha, is to be found within my palm". You are not sure, but there seems to be a golden shimmer emanating from his closed fist. Slowly, he opens it. There is nothing there. 

    This simple image is incredibly powerful. If you can, through this, understand that "there is no hidden truth",  at the very same time as you understand that this "no truth" is more like the truth of "no", then you are on your way to understanding the way. If not, hang on a little longer.

The zen buddhists thought that language could not show us the truth about how reality was put together. One of the reasons for this was that, there are really no true distinctions in reality. All difference, like you and me, bad and evil, up and down, are the result of our perceiving that there is a difference. To get closer to the nature of reality then, is to understand intuitively the idea of "no", of "no distinction." If you can just sit, just perceive, and open your mind to creation, then you yourself fall away, and become one with everything.

This is difficult stuff, but it's worth paying attention to. I think one of the ideas is, that if you identify with everything, then your empathy will also reach out to everyone. You will see that there is really no difference between your enemy and yourself, and you will understand him, and love him. At least, such is the ancient interpretation of buddha's words as they have come down to us in the tripitaka.

    There is a hidden likeness between the open palm of the stoics and the open palm of the buddhists. In both cases you are naively letting the world pass by your senses, only being "aware" of it. The distinction is that, for the stoics, this is the beginning of inquiry, but for the buddhists it is the end of inquiry. The stoics sought to "grasp" the world with logic,  the buddhists sought to "let go" of himself to unify themselves with the world. I actually think that both have something going for them.

    Even the buddhists thought that knowledge counted for something. Knowledge of the fourfold path, was after all a positive doctrine on how to relinquish pain from your life. Knowledge, or wisdom, is a crucial part in the step to attaining enlightenment.

    The stoics, on the other hand, saw logic as the entry gate to more perfect knowledge. But this logic was only a tool, which was to be used in attaining ataraxia, or freedom from sorrow by releasing oneself from the worries of man. For both stoicism and buddhism, then, the endpoint of sagehood is one who has freed himself from the evils of the world, from sorrow, and become a man apart from the perturbances of the ocean of reality. To say it with Yoda. Knowledge leads to freedom, freedom leads to contentment.

    Equally, for both, attaining this end state is close to or downright impossible. It is rather an ideal towards which we may strive, but can never be sure of attaining. There must be an emphasis then, on praxis itself, if these dogma are to have any value for us mere mortals. It is a comfort to me then, that so much of what they believed can be described in the metaphorical language of the hands.

Are you in the habit of meditating? Perhaps the next time to slip into the lotus position, you will have one hand open, and the other closed.

Speaking at Jabb!

The 18th of March I'm going to be speaking about thinking at the forum Jabb here in trondheim! Jabb is a forum for sharing projects and perspectives. I'll be talking about how we can think - which, I think, is a really important theme. (Obviously, I'm talking about it, so I must think it is at least a little important.) Well. The importance of it is that thinking is the most essential skill we have. Everything we learn, every important action, choice and direction we take is made through the medium of thought. Therefore it is really important to know something about what thought is.

Not to spoil the fun I won't go into what  I'll be covering, but I'll provide a few headlines as to what I believe will make it into the talk: (1) Thought isn't handled directly in our educational system. (2) As a skill it is at least as important as reading. (3) The brain has a special memory faculty for the remembering of facts. (4) These facts are mental constructs. (5) We call these concepts, and they are both units and categories. (6) We group these by comparing them to similar instances. I.e. "this animal looks like that animal and is probably the same". (7) We have been misdirected as how to think of thoughts by the metaphor of thoughts as a stream or a river. Think rather of them as a seed, which you can grow, mate, get to the roots of or find the kernel (of truth) in. And the details of that will be for the talk!

The above is the abstract version of the tale. Then there are all the infinitely more fun named methods like, The Socratic method, the method of loci, and further the names of memory like "episodic" and "semantic" - or one might even go straight to the metaphors. One might discuss philosophical ideas like deduction and induction, or mould the whole talk as an exercise in analysing Plato. At least I don't think I'll make thinking seem as boring as "connecting the dots".

I intend, at least, to deliver a show worth considerably more than the admission price of free!