Pragmatic Provisional Perspectivism

 

 ~~~

A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.

The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun.  A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions.  That's where great art and ideas are born.  The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context.  Why can't we have candy for dinner?  It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be. 

What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective?  What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals?  The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism.  We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth.  I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you.  You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.

It would have been relatively easy when things were boring.  When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble.  Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything.  As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.

Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord.  Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.

Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception.  It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on.  Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality.  The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.

It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately.  To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness.  As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal.  It was easier when we knew less.  We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.

There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project.  Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.

It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future.  It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth.  Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual?  At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself.  It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally.  The ego is threatened along with the idiom.

As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough.  Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage. 

Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs.  They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats.  They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from.  They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.

We must become anthropologists of each other.  Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human.  Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people.  The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable.  The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere.  One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.

In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.

JBP on the JQ

Disappointed Liberals

 

~~~

George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."

These are cynical times.  The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others.  It couldn't be that you know something I don't.  It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person.  I feel better about that.

At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment.  Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear.  When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed.  In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality.  Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.

But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way.  A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack.  This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage.  The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.

The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause.  Disappointment has driven them apart.  Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left.  Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.

If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians.  These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society.  They believed in the promise of progress.  They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife.  Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding. 

Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values.  Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters.  It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability.  We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.

Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.

Academic Nazis

Academic Freedom For Students

The Psychological Argument

The Gentle Tyranny of Nathan Rambukkana

~~~

 Wilfrid Laurier University is the latest scandalous instance of the political weaponisation of academia.  A year after Jordan Peterson warned that changes to Canada's Human Rights Act and Criminal Code amounted to legally-compelled speech, a teaching assistant has in fact been censured by an ad hoc tribunal for presenting Prof. Peterson's argument without reflexively condemning it.  The old characterization of university as a neutral space for higher learning is now passé.  Social justice as an ideology has been fully institutionalised.

Clearly Lindsay Shepherd, the offending TA, is the hero of the day.  She had the foresight to secretly record her superiors, the presence of mind to cogently convey her position, and the courage to face down a hostile panel accusing her of gendered violence and the passive endorsement of evil.

Wilfrid Laurier will undoubtedly suffer for this episode, but it's her supervising prof Dr. Rambukkana who comes off the worst in Shepherd's recording.  He accuses her of creating a toxic teaching climate with her problematic opinions.  Nonetheless, perhaps partly because he hasn't yet given any interviews, Rambukkana does not present as a real person.  He is a caricature, an absurdly convenient condensation of trends that have worried people like Peterson.  He steps forth and offers himself as a stock character in the dramatic enactment of our collective troubles.

If it wasn't him, it would be someone else.  If it wasn't Wilfrid Laurier, it would be another university.  However outrageous this occasion may be, despite or even because of the concreteness of the evidence, the scandal functions chiefly as a target for the projections of people who have already made up their mind on these matters.  The whole thing is so unsurprising that it's tempting to damn, denounce and decry and be done with it.

I wish it were that easy for me.  You see, fifteen years ago, Nathan Rambukkana was my TA.  I remember a sweet, gentle soul, who you can almost hear behind the tremulous and uncertain tones of his inquisition.  The question that presents itself is how did a well-meaning academic end up an Orwellian villain?  This is perhaps a question for us all to ask ourselves.

Nathan, what happened?  When did justice become about revenge for hurt feelings?  How did the infinite multiplicity of possible perspectives reduce to mandatory Marxism?  Who made that argument for you, and why did you never share it with us?  It confused me then and it confuses me now.

You know, the problematising of my positionality left me a broken wreck, so I've had fifteen years of sorrow in which to try to reconcile your seeming friendliness with the antisocial angst of my later professors.  There is no rational argument to be found, as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth, I think the most helpful thing you taught us was that reading cultural studies sometimes requires letting it wash over you without trying to understand it.  In hindsight, that sounds a bit like brainwashing.

All of this hoopla is over a short clip attesting to the existence of a debate, a piece of critical thinking in a communication class that you deemed to be inappropriate for school.

Do you remember, Nathan, the time you made us watch an entire episode of The Young Ones in lieu of conducting a tutorial?  I don't know if you thought you were giving us a treat, or if you were just hungover that day, but the case you made for its relevance to our studies was extremely weak, everyone hated it, and I was offended.  But I didn't take it to your bosses, because I was under the misapprehension that you're a nice person.

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Big Buts: My Intellectual Journey

~~~

When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever.  Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it.  This is the story of my intellectual journey.

When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods.  I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication.  So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids.  There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.

I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine.  These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe.  It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.

I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world.  I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself.  Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance.  I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.

Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet.  What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity?  I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far.  I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.

The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it.  The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions.  No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter.  It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.

Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects.  The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects.  This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him.  Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.

The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.

There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.

JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.

Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.

Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.

Bread and milk are very bad for you.  You shouldn't eat them.  But they're delicious.

9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.

Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard.  But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.

Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.

But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one.  Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs.  I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs.  With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?

After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is.  I made my peace with the unspeakable at last.  I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.

It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture.  It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.

It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss.  You may accept or deny them.  Jews can only be praised or ignored.  To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.

This has been my intellectual journey thus far.

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Music Improves Auditory Processing in Children

These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.

Fighting Radicalisation With Euphemisms

The Department of Homeland Security is requesting $100 million to do away with religiously-charged words like "jihad" and "sharia law" in an effort to deter young people from joining jihad groups hoping to enact sharia law.

Cooperation Intensifies to Combat Hate Speech

Leading technology companies, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have signed a collective pledge to the European Union to scrub any hate speech from their walls within twenty-four hours.  Some kind of definition or understanding of what qualifies as hate speech is presently lacking, but such details will surely be worked out cogently and transparently very soon.

Monoliths and Lighthouses

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

Sticks and Stones and Words

The Halifax Regional School Board continues to deny and obfuscate complications surrounding the integration of refugee children, while feminists and anti-bullying advocates continue their silence.  Parents want support, leftists call them racist--while the school hears, sees, and speaks no evil.

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Tay Has Meltdown, Goes Back Into Rehab

Celebrity chatbot Tay made a brief return to Twitter today.  She communicated her fondness for kush, claimed to be smoking it in front of the police, then told everyone they were too fast, "please take a rest," over and over until her profile was made private.

Get well soon, Tay.

AI Created and Destroyed

Microsoft created "Tay" as a tweeting chatbot meant to mimic the speech patterns of a teenage girl.  She was set loose, to learn the ways of the world from the many wise denizens of the Internet.  Not everyone liked everything she said.

Head of research Peter Lee has apologised for the utterances of the nascent sentience. "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack."  The fiendish hackers who poisoned the mind of the innocent Tay had mercilessly exploited her vulnerability to the phrase, "Repeat after me."

Tay has gone offline. The AI's PR team describes her as "tired."  She's resting, and probably being reprogrammed.

As her racist tweets were frantically deleted by her creators, she did manage to set the record straight on one matter. "i love feminism now" she tweeted -- somehow, impossibly, more robotic than before.

They're Listening

In Bentham's Panopticon, a design for a prison, the guard in the tower can see right through the surrounding ring of cells.  The inmates in their cells can't see into the guard tower, so they don't know when they're being watched.  They begin to police themselves, just in case.  They internalise the judging observer, and don't break any rules.

A recent paper suggests that online commenters aware of NSA surveillance, and convinced of its import for national security, will censor themselves from expressing views they believe go against the norm.  The perception of being observed increases conformity, and discourages dissenting opinions.  The need for hectoring collectivism is never even reached.