The Appearance of Value

Do you know where one of the most annoying places to get a paper cut is? on the tip of your right index finger....ow...no typing right, no writing....bah....

Petty complaints aside, I have a bigger issue to tackle, and this is the idea that I crave my coffee in the morning. I will often get it from the coffee shop downstairs, where it will cost me about £1.30, although I have perfectly good coffee (which at this moment is actually a small fib, this unfortunate purchase has all the appearances of good coffee and none of the taste, but that's a side issue) in my office, which will cost me all of £0.30 or less to make (factoring in its cost, and milk and sugar, and my hourly wage ;)).
Yet, I get distinct pleasure from coffee served to me and have an irrational conviction that it is somehow better than what I could make. It is my little indulgence for getting up in the morning :)

With the plethora of coffee shops around my work, I understand that to attract more customers they need to 'differentiate' themselves from the rest. How? I can guess, by cooler music in their cafe, or fancy spoons, or red cardboard cups instead of gray ones, etc etc. How provide their customers with a 'feeling' that they are special without forking out the extra money for fancy coffee, or organic sugar, or whatever...

Successful marketing plays on this, i.e. selling hot air, 'a feeling at no cost, and all profit'. This is where the 'cost benefit' occurs - in the time lag between the actual/legal meaning of a word, and customer perception, or the 'street' meaning. For example, when you/I think organic, we think cows on green pastures, eating buttercups bathed in sunshine. It means 'good', 'warm', 'grassy', 'wholesome', that is it's street value. Yet, legally, to be allowed to stick an organic label a product, means obviously something different. Something like, the fertiliser which the food was grown with had to be 50% sourced from renewable sources (erm...let's not go to define renewable), for example. This is its 'real' meaning.

This disparity between meanings is where a lot of profit is to be made, and it's legal. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. I would definitely not maintain a close friendship with a person, to whom I said: Please do not tell this to anyone....blah blah.
I later found out that they told everyone, and when I confront them they retort that they kept their word, they did not tell 'anyone'. Admittedly, this is a clumsy example, but I hope it carries the point. The people we value most are those who understand us most, not weirdos that don't 'get' our meaning.
Hmmm... this actually reminds me of a book about jokes that Freud wrote (yes! would you believe! and which I have read, that is also not a joke). In this book, Freud explores the mechanics of the most basic turns of phrase that make us laugh etc, and one of the most common is the brief misunderstanding of a word in a given context.
So I guess, I understand why this approach is so common in many branches of our society, not just between friends over a coffee.... ooohhhhh .... yes, coffee... in a brown coffee cup for £1.30 :D....special.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Hahaha....I never noticed before - but there's a 'transliterate' button in blogger now, very interesting.....

"I have just been to" <--> "И хаве юст бен to" ....хехехе....

Anyway, indeed, I have just been to the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I remember seeing his painting "Musicians in the Orchestra" which for an instant made me think I was looking through a window at real people. It is a beautiful exhibition, and makes you realise that not that long ago, we had no idea what people looked like in motion - the way our muscles flexed, or the lines our knees/arms/thighs traced as we walked or swam. Amazing to think that this knowledge was absent from the collective consciousness! (...made me consider how trivial my research is in the larger scheme of things... in a decade or so, everything that I have done will be worthless, not to say it's not important, but that it will be assimilated into public knowledge, and hence become unnoticeable, because it will become obvious.)

I left with one distinct impression though...as though the exhibition, it's arrangement... had an idea to express: the idea of our (i.e. humanities) visual maturity. What I mean by this is, as you begin your walk through the exhibition, you see the first early paintings/sketches by Degas of dancers/people. And you realise how awkward and sometimes out of proportion the limbs are, and how sometimes the faces, heads, necks of his subjects are almost brutal in their coarseness. The plaques in the exhibit make mention of the fact that at this time, people in motion were rarely drawn because it was so difficult to hold a pose, and sometimes ropes or other props would be used to fix a dancer's figure in a certain position.

Then, as you walk on, you get introduced into the idea of photography, the efforts to capture motion. And Degas' paintings improve - the dancers now posses a delicacy, fragility and grace that was absent in his early drawings. Now, I do not want to say that Degas drew these later paintings from photographs, but that rather, the existence of photographs, and his exposure to them, allowed him to fix in his memory (for longer than was otherwise possible) the still figure of a dancer 'in motion'. Consequently, when drawing from memory, he was able to recall this image with greater accuracy than he was previously able to do.

Now, is it possible, that before photographs to compare to, people seeing Degas' first paintings of dancers in motion, really considered that this is what they looked like? Not having the capacity to 'feel' that the proportions where wrong, because they of course had even less exposure to dancers than Degas? (i.e. this sense of proportion, and motion, had not entered the collective consciousness?)

Could this in any way be justifiably related by analogy to the infantile early (early! i.e. BC) paintings? or those of small children? Photography/movies has allowed the specific fluidity of human form to enter our minds. Before this, we looked upon these forms, and in our 'minds eye' saw the stick figures of our early childhood?

Relational Relativity

I've had an interesting week, a spending a few more evenings in the pub than usual, meant that I spent a few more hours than usual harping on about my philosophical ideas (I apologise to my companions!). It occurrs to me, that 'the world is bad', 'life is unfair', etc etc. Yet, 'we are not bad', 'we are fair' etc etc., 'we' just 'do' bad things occasionally (as I expanded upon in one of my previous posts). So we live in a world that we say is all these negative things, and in which we try our dared hardest to be all the positive things, and occasionally find ourselves doing some negative things. And yet, we are the world - as Sartre said - "hell is other people".
Anyway, this is a nonsensical post.

Interconnectedness

"To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know why you're alive or it's all nonsense, it's all dust in the wind." by Chekhov . Wow :)

I'm sure it even sounds/feels even better in Russian! I'm sure I've read it too at some stage, but somehow it didn't have such an impact as I feel now - and funny thing is I just read it in: "The Making of a Fly: the genetics of animal design".... after hearing about the book watching a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html. 


Hmmm....but for now...back to CryoSat :)

Growing up

What a day... how fortunate I am to be able to spend a day inside my head, with my body on the beach warmed right through by sunshine and sand, my soul calmed by the breaking waves.
I find myself again returning to 'problems' of 'our' society. (Hmm.... I have starting using these quotes in an attempt to indicate emphasis, or commonly questionable definition of a given term, but I fear that most definitions are questionable, consequently, in order to somehow progress, I should stop the formation of such a habit.) Okay, so, I'm reading way too many books, which means I'm not finishing any of them, however, one book I am hooked to, and have not yet finished simply because it is on my computer only (for now), is "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus (cool name, huh?). It's fascinating reading about the act of hacking, possibly the reasons people hacked, the process, their successes and of course generally their stories. Wonderful book.
Hacking always fascinated me. I have always been and am on very good terms with computers, both their hardware and software. Dad decided early on that that should be the case, after forcing me through a touch typing course by the time I was in third grade, I then started learning QBasic. Hahaha :)
For all of this (and perhaps because of this... :)), it never occurred to me to 'hack' into a system. The drive for that was simply absent. My worst attempt at a prank, was to use the POP3 protocol to send my uni friend a friendly email from the 'Vice Chancellor'. Unfortunately, from memory I got her email address wrong, and then spent a few days thinking what would happen if my email bounced into the Chancellor's inbox.
But reading this book: the advent of computers, and computer hacking necessarily raises a few questions of 'why'? Was the attraction - the process of discovery? These people were cognizant (as I definitely wasn't!) at a time when the artificial (perhaps more apt - silicon) fabric of our society was starting to grow. (What could be brought up as an analogy to that time? The discovery of electricity - and it's gradual penetration into every household? I do not recall reading of any electricity hackers.) Their hacking was the act of breaking into computer systems that were ultimately built by individuals: engineers, scientists pushing the frontiers of knowledge and thereby creating a new cognitive process (existence/space). Why? What motivated these people? Instead of enrolling into colleges, unis or whatever means were available then, so as to become part of this new foundation and accelerate with it forward. To not only learn (and not by trial and error), but to write this new dialect, why instead did they choose to drive its evolution from the underground, the shadows?
What would these people have done (as others of their nature must have), had they not come across computers? Would they have become HAM radio operators? :) TV hackers? :) and before then?
Essentially, I do not think that it was the attraction to bits and bytes, to the hardware or software that motivated many of them. It seems to me, that it was for them simply a chosen medium of protest against authority, expression of dissent, and a means to understand ... (I want to say reality, but that seems a little facetious, undercutting the life believed, and lived, by the majority of people)...their world (?).
Perhaps, I shall attempt an analogy - that these people are themselves bugs, a viral infection in the fabric of society, and computers/internet was just a new weakness/backdoor of the organism which we call society? (Now, I am aware that by using words such as 'bug', and 'virus' I am necessarily evoking feelings of distaste. However, that is not my intent, nor is it applicable to these social protesters. I am also assuming that the understanding is that I am talking of hackers who had the intellect for introspection to ask themselves 'why'? and the motivation and decency to answer.)
Okay, and were is this drive to undermine: governments, corporations, big business etc coming from? All these systems are comprised of individuals, and yet, as we all know, or at least have an intuition (there is a little communist it all of us! :)) that the amalgamation of humans, the dissemination of their creativity, creates something something less than human. It's like back in the day when I was entertaining notions of studying medicine/genetics after my PhD, I read about a bacteria (?) whose cells will form 'secondary structures' (I don't remember much now, but the idea was that the same bacterial cells would, depending on their relative location, become different parts of the bigger structure.). The actions that these systems take (actuated by 'human' individuals!) in instances lead to intense suffering of other parts of our global society.
Where does this drive come from? and I think more importantly, is this drive simply reactive, intuitive due to social frustrations (which at least many of the people in this book seem to have experienced in an acute form)? or is it proactive (Wikileaks for example) and remedial in its quality. There is an effort here necessary to distinguish what would constitute as criminal behaviour and what would not? However, I find this difficult to answer, as I see most of these actions as an attack on the system, not attacks on the individual. Launching such an offensive attack is sometimes a healthy work out for the cogs of society. Without such actions women would still not be allowed to vote for example, and I am sure I do not need to mention others.
I think here, perhaps it is appropriate to mention the other book that I am reading - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. In the very first chapters, he talks of the merit/mark of intelligence as 'jumping out of the system'. To identify perhaps simply a level of discomfort and act on it, or: "there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive the system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had never before even been recognised as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be existed from!"
So, is this what motivated these people? Perhaps. Hopefully and most importantly, they have answered this question for themselves.

The 'act' of doing

I'm not very good at it, after all I have spent a large (close to 8 years and counting) of my life expressing myself in numbers, equations relating them, and the restricted semantics of programming languages, but lately, slowly, I am starting to gain a exquisite/poignant feeling for words, their nuance. It's a wonderful feeling, and at times when you not only express yourself as you desired, but sense recognition in your audience, it is an intoxicating feeling.

So, to be stickler for definition, and to follow on the thread of my previous post, I wonder what I mean by 'doing', what does it mean (especially these days) to perform an action. (As a small aside, perhaps a disclaimer, I sometimes think about my thinking, and scare myself into how infantile it is. I think it must be vanity, and not hope that dies last, as I somehow find the strength to persevere ;).)

And so, what defines an action? i.e. an external output that you (person) may be (should be?) judged by? My impulsive naive attempts to map everything down to a binary map is quite obviously too simplistic. I guess, a first attempt would be to assert than an action will/must affect someone else. But in that case, is the generation/publication/vocalisation of a meme an act? If you have some crazy idea, relate it to a person, and they go ahead to implement it, who is to blame? It seems that there are instances when this could be answered either way. Or even more complicated, is the facilitation of the successful propagation of a meme an action? (like an 'accessory' to the act?)

Hmmm....time to think :)

Introspection

Recurring thoughts.... things you hear people say, and are then surprised that you actually listened. I guess this is what happened to me, when I heard Goodman say (to paraphrase) - 'people are essentially good'. What a load of crap.

or is it? So this is what I have been thinking about recently: what does it mean to be a bad person.

It's almost a given, that most people consider themselves 'good' (defined here best by its negation, i.e. 'not bad'). And yet, most people will admit to doing 'bad' things, i.e. stealing, lying, cheating, etc. With the caveat that they do this on a small scale, and rarely - only when they are particularly angry, upset, lost control, emotional, 'not thinking clearly' blah blah. Additionally, most of the time, the 'bad' action is assessed so only in retrospection. Very few people consciously perform a bad act, i.e. with their 'super ego' monitoring the situation.

Most people think they are good, but will admit to sometimes doing bad things.

So then the question is, when do their/your actions begin to define who you are? When does a bad action make you bad? How many bad things do you have to do to become bad? Is that possible? Is there a tipping point? is it reversible?

I don't know. But I offer this as a possible measure - introspection. A person 'becomes bad' when no longer are their actions subject to the scrutiny of the super ego - or perhaps it drifts far away from the society that the person occupies. No one can live with themselves long thinking they are bad - it's a terrible stress on the psychologically, and physiologically. Consequently, something has to give, and it is either the persons actions, or their definition of them.

Ultimately, and fortunately (?) it's not really important whether you 'are' bad or good. What matters is how your actions reflect in the society that you live in, starting from your family society, friendship group, and of course the society at large. However, I do think that this is an important point to identify - people 'do' bad things.

Perhaps it is not possible to define a bad/good person, yet strangely this word combination exists in many languages, and is frequently used. It's a label that is applied to people all to thoughtlessly, and consequently has the potential to color/taint every subsequent action, as well as your reaction.

My final thought is that language is a powerful weapon, our own vocalisations mould our subconscious more than we would like (hence I'm typing! :)), we not only hear ourselves talk, we actually listen - so we should choose our words wisely.

Denial - a positive sign of a progressive society?

I guess I just cannot help it - I had decided for myself after attending a relatively miserable debate on the subject of "Whistleblowers" organised by the Frontline Club I would steer clear of such events. I had originally had high hopes for the event - Assange was to attend, as well as many interesting people 'in the know how'. I battled a bunch of Assange groupies to sit right up the front where to my great disappointment the infantile nature of the event unfolded right in front of me. Only a few of the speakers made any attempt to keep to the subject, mostly it was not even run as a debate... Anyway, that went past, and I decided that I had nothing to learn from Assange, that he had grown completely outside his own humanity and was no longer capable of hearing, or listening, unless it was the projection of his own voice and simple ideas.

Hahaha, gosh, that felt better!

Anyway, so, I was firm in my decision not to attend the next Frontline organised event where Assange was to 'star': http://www.frontlineclub.com/blogs/WikiLeaks/2011/07/live-assange-zizek-and-goodman-in-conversation.html

....but I couldn't help it, I tuned in to listen.... And it was fascinating! Wow - I am deeply impressed by both Zizek and Assange. Zizek is hilarious which was refreshing, but also provocative. Assange came across as having had given the ideas under discussion a lot of thought and had a sense of maturity.

But I'd like to pick up on an interesting point that was raised and seemed to carry through the discussion - namely that the presence of censorship in a society is a good thing, as it is indicating that the 'government' is afraid of what people think. To me this smells of a logical fallacy, so let's explore. By analogy, this is perhaps like saying that it is a good sign that garbage is being manufactured by society - that means that there is progress? Perhaps poor analogy.

Okay, so let us keep with the validity of this statement, but then Assange's outlook for the future, namely that it would be ideal that the unadulterated truth is preserved in historical records which are accessible to all, must be in contradiction. And here I start with some generalisations: humans are terrible/horrible creatures - we commit atrocities, and what is worse that being in possession of consciousness means we do these things with our eyes open.  As of course Wikileaks has undeniably revealed to us. And yet, most of us would like to think that it would never be us - 'we' would not be so spiritually ugly and base. It is others, because they are dumb or thoughtless, or ruthless etc. We spend most of our lives living under one lie or the other.

The very fact that honesty is a virtue I think is a lie. "We do not see things as they are but as we are" - Kant.

You never say things as they are if you want to live in a civilized society - you use analogies, and euphemisms, because true words are weapons. In your life, you allow very few people the luxury, privilege, and also the responsibility of enlightening you to the facts of a matter outside your own mind. But why? why this cloak of denial, deception, etc? why? because we recognise our capacity for ugliness, and we have a reasonable sense of understanding that it is unacceptable if we want to satisfy our desires for social living. And I think that is itself a good sign - our own lies to ourselves, our own innate capacity for self-censorship, means that we want to be better than we recognise that we are. And to now extend this to the whole global society - the fact that most of us cannot, and don't want to deal with the truth of brutalities committed in our name, is that we globally 'think' we are better than that.

To see history written just as it is, not white washed and painted pretty would be to have to abhorrent truth stare us in the face everyday - to be the Dorian Gray's with their painting hanging in the living room for all to see. It would be at first I am sure very educational, but also with time sterilise us emotionally to it, as it becomes a matter of fact.

This is just one idea - but perhaps for us to continue to fight for beautiful ideals, we cannot strut our ugliness in public? "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Nietzche


However, on the other hand of course, a good dose of reality is necessary to keep us in check, like a strong dose of antibiotics.

Basically very interesting discussion! Next time I guess I'll just have to go battle some groupies :D

The awesome feeling you get when your thoughts are put in order :)

Hello! Gosh... I visited my grandparents over Christmas/New Year period, and today ran for the first time since the visit. My legs would hardly carry my weight... Seriously, as I am sure most grandparents are, mine are almost criminal in their insistence that I eat a LOT! The visit followed a simple routine: eat, sleep, then repeat.
(Thank you grandmum and granddad! I love you :))

Hahaha :) I thought I'd share that... but now to the real point, and that is this amazing article by Jaron Lanier - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-hazards-of-nerd-supremacy-the-case-of-wikileaks/68217/

I have been having doubts about Wikileaks and they had been increasing with time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was that was troubling me, and when I tried to talk it over, or write it down it was infantile and shallow. Basically, the effect this article had, I think can be explained by the laser analogy: my thoughts were in a kind of state of population inversion, and basically, reading it was like sending a photon at the correct frequency resulting in a crystallisation of my ideas! :D Ahhhh! Totally cool :)