Posts Tagged ‘value’
“As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”*…
Further in a fashion to last Wednesday’s post on Quality: James Wilson on ethics, and how we might best think about them. He starts by referencing Bernard Williams‘ (and here) take on ethical inquiry– that it is about sense-making, starting from what we already care about, and always local– which led Williams to discourage scientistic models of philosophy, and to argue that philosophy should be seen as “part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities.” Wilson invokes Dewey’s pragmatism to suggest that what is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.
His introduction…
Philosophy is the oldest academic discipline, but where philosophy should be placed within the space of disciplines remains elusive. In the essay that inspired this special issue, Bernard Williams (2006b) is sharply critical of what he describes as scientistic approaches to philosophy, which assimilate philosophy to a model of science exemplified by physics or chemistry. In place of scientism, he offers a vision of philosophy as a humanistic discipline.
Williams says little about what it is for a discipline to be humanistic, but takes history to be a central exemplar. Humanistic inquiry is pursued, in Moore’s elucidation ‘by humans, from their unique position in the world, to make sense both of themselves and of that position’ (Moore 2017, p. 45). Humanistic inquiry focuses on forms of sense- making, and on articulating in human terms the meaning of texts, institutions, norms, events, and artefacts through interpretation, criticism and argument. In Williams’s words, viewing philosophy as a humanistic discipline is to view it ‘as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities… in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history’ (Williams 2006b, p. 197).
Not all forms of inquiry are, or should aspire to be, humanistic. Williams was sympathetic to the motivations that lead some to hope that science will be able to attain to what he described as an absolute conception of reality. It is a virtue of physics that it aspires to (and has succeeded in) providing an understanding of the world, which abstracts to a very great degree from our ‘own perspective, our peculiar and local ways of apprehending things’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185). However, he was sharply critical of the assumption that abstracting away from specifically human forms of sense-making will invariably improve our cognitive grip on ethical and political questions. As Williams argued, ‘in seeking to understand ourselves—we need concepts and explanations which are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our history, and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share with very different investigators of the world’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185).
While humanistic scholarship remains crucial for self-understanding, the longue durée has seen an apparently inexorable decline in the prestige of the humanities in relation to the sciences, and a continued narrowing in the scope of the questions that are taken to be best answered with humanistic means. The result has been a profound shift away from the humanities and towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the intellectual resources used to educate children and ready them for the workforce, and in prevailing assumptions about which disciplines bring the greatest social benefit. A sense of this long-term decline is already present in Williams’s text, and in the 25 years since then, there has been an ever-growing discourse on the decline of the humanities. The view that the humanities are in crisis has become ubiquitous even amongst their defenders.
How should philosophy position itself in this changing intellectual landscape? One obvious move is for philosophers to reframe their discipline as a science — a move that Williams disparages as ‘scientism’. Scientism, on Williams’s account goes beyond a philosopher’s ‘interest or involvement in science’, and involves a ‘misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences’ (Williams 2006b, p. 182). Williams is unusual in directing his concerns about scientism towards conceptions of philosophy, rather than, as is more often the case in philosophical discussions of scientism, the encroachment and/or overvaluation of science more broadly (Ridder, Peels, and Woudenberg 2018). Hence, unlike some who critique scientism, Williams does not disparage either the aims or methods of science. His goal is limited to providing a principled account of why questions relating to human self-understanding are not best interpreted as questions that can be answered using scientific means.
Williams presents two main objections to scientism in philosophy. First, philosophical writing needs to be reflective, and that reflection requires styles of writing in which the reader’s sense of what is important is engaged, rather than ignored or kept at a distance. Second, philosophy (or at least those parts of philosophy Williams is most interested in) is about sense-making. Sense-making is to a significant degree interpretive, historically situated and local. For both reasons, importing scientific methods, or assumptions that philosophers should adhere more closely to scientific methods, ends up obscuring or misinterpreting philosophy as an activity, rather than shedding light on it.
Williams’s wide-ranging essay takes for granted the intellectual landscape of the end of the twentieth century, and makes some deep and provocative claims about what philosophy is and how it should be done. My response starts from the somewhat changed intellectual landscape of the mid-2020s, is similarly wide-ranging, and also aims to say something novel and provocative about how philosophy should be done. I engage closely with what Williams says, but with the aim of thinking about what philosophy now should be, rather than providing an interpretation that takes up every strand of Williams’s argument or is definitive even in the interpretation of those elements I do discuss.
I am sympathetic to Williams’s reasons for reasserting the importance of the humanistic in philosophy, but will question some of the assumptions about disciplinarity that seem to shape his argument. In particular, I argue that it is a mistake to think that there is an overall answer to the question whether philosophy belongs with the humanities or the sciences. Rather, the philosophical methods that it is most fruitful to adopt depend on the research question to be addressed (a point that Williams’s own philosophical practice showcases, even if his metaphilosophy makes this less clear).
Williams’s objections to scientism are most persuasive in cases where the domain to be investigated is, at least to a significant degree, constituted by and through human self-understandings. Williams, of course, thought that value inquiry — whether in ethics or political philosophy — is such a domain. However, this is a point on which Williams and his moral realist critics sharply disagree, with both sides at times thinking the other’s position not only wrong, but hopelessly confused and obscure.
Williams’s views about the nature of ethics both support, and are supported by his broader humanistic conception of philosophy, while other philosophers’ views of ethics as being akin to science (or to mathematics) both support and are supported by their distinctive conceptions of philosophy. This might lead to the worry that there is something question-begging about Williams’ argument. I shall suggest that appearances may be deceptive: to the extent that there are deep-seated and apparently intractable disagreements about the ontology and epistemology of ethical values, this is evidence in favour of Williams’s view rather than his moral realist opponents. I argue that it is helpful to view such disagreements through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies, and how to reconcile them, are central themes.
Looked at from this perspective, philosophy is an outlier: no other discipline suffers such a mismatch between the level of confidence of its competent practitioners that there are correct and highly general answers to its research questions, and the power of the methods adopted within the discipline to resolve disagreements between these same competent practitioners. Philosophers working in value inquiry would do better to be more honest about philosophy’s limits and more modest in what they expect it to do. Looked at in this way, it is Williams’s humanistic view of ethics that better comports with the totality of the evidence. I close by reconsidering the role of cases and thought experiments in ethics, and arguing that a suitably refined version of Williams’s position in ethics has much in common with Dewey’s pragmatism…
Read on: How should philosophers approach ethics? “Williams, Dewey, and the nature of value inquiry“
(Image above: source)
* Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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As we think about thinking, we might spare a thought for Dōgen; he died on this date in 1253. A Buddhist monk, writer, poet, and philosopher, he was the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. Dōgen is known for his extensive writings like the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, considered his magnum opus), the Eihei Kōroku (Extensive Record, a collection of his talks), the Eihei Shingi (the first Japanese Zen monastic code), along and his Japanese poetry, and commentaries.
Relevantly to the piece above, Dōgen’s perspective of virtue is discussed in the Shōbōgenzō as something to be practiced inwardly so that it will manifest itself on the outside– i.e., virtue is something that is both internal and external in the sense that one can practice internal good dispositions and also the expression of these good dispositions.
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good”*…
Keyana Sapp maintains The Brand Ledger…
Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t.
The Brand Ledger tracks 397 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change…
On his blog, Worse on Purpose, he considers what quality is and how it is degraded. He begins with the story of his (now 15-year-old) Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar (a la the one pictured above), an exemplar, for Sapp, of “quality”…
… Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It’s mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on “I just like it” and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn’t just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen…
… In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach “quality”. He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn’t.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
When colleagues demanded proof that an undefinable thing existed at all, he offered this subtraction:
Pull quality out of the world and street noise ranks with symphonies, slop ranks with dinner, and no made thing is worth choosing over any other. A world without quality would still function. You just wouldn’t want to live in it.
Similar threads have appeared across disciplines.
The architect Christopher Alexander encountered the same problem from a different angle. A career spent asking why some buildings feel alive and others feel dead ended in the same non-definition, a quality that in his words “is objective and precise, but cannot be named.”
What Alexander did about it is the useful part. If the thing itself could not be written down, the places where it reliably appears could be, so he and his collaborators catalogued 253 of them, pulled from centuries of buildings people love, and handed architects and builders a working method for producing quality in buildings and towns.
That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.
That fact cuts both ways. The judgment that can only be carried in people is also the one thing no spreadsheet can measure.
Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.
That blindness is not an accident of modern business. It was designed, it has an inventor, and the tragedy is that it was invented to do the opposite job. During World War II, a General Electric engineer named Lawrence Miles was tasked with scaling turbo-supercharger production for B-24 bombers from 50 a week to 1,000 while steel, copper and nickel were rationed to hell. He hunted substitute materials, and noticed the surprising fact that substitutes often made the part cheaper and better at the same time. In 1947 he formalized the method and called it value analysis. Identify the function a part serves, then find the best possible way to serve that function. Function first, cost second. Through this process, Miles built a machine for producing quality cheaper.
The method worked so well it quickly became universal. The Navy adopted it in the 1950s and renamed it value engineering. The Pentagon eventually wrote it into federal procurement rules. Miles’s 1961 handbook was translated into a dozen languages, and within a generation nearly every large manufacturer ran a version of the program. Continuous, itemized, never-ending review of everything a product is made of, scored in dollars saved. That framework is now as ordinary as accounting.
Unfortunately, his descendants now run the machine backward. The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…
Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter’s, comes back as “no detectable difference,” and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.
It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.
When we ask what quality actually is, only two answers exist. Either quality is objective, meaning a physical property located in the object itself. Or quality is subjective, meaning an opinion located in the person judging.
Take the first answer seriously. If quality is a physical property of the object, then instruments should detect it. We can measure a guitar’s weight, its neck relief, its fret height, its finish thickness down to the micron. No instrument has ever measured whether it is good. If quality sat inside the object the way mass sits inside the object, quality control would be a solved engineering problem and a factory could certify goodness the same way it certifies tolerances.
Now take the second answer seriously. If quality is only an opinion, then a quality judgment reports a fact about the judge and no fact about the object. Two things follow. First, quality judgments should distribute evenly, because nothing in the object itself would constrain them. Second, no quality judgment could ever be right or wrong, because there would be nothing objective in the world for it to be right about.
Ultimately, both answers fail.
Pirsig’s blackboard example demonstrates the failure of the first: his classes converged on the same rankings, semester after semester, with no criteria handed to them. They agreed independently on some notion of quality, recognized it, but could not explain it.
The second fails on an experience everyone reading this has had: being wrong about quality. Nobody has ever been wrong about liking vanilla, because a preference claims nothing factual about the world. A quality judgment claims plenty. When I decided that Les Paul was good, I was predicting that the neck would stay straight, the frets would survive the abuse, and the guitar would still be worth reaching for in fifteen years. Every one of those predictions could have failed, and with other guitars, for other players, they have. Boots that looked right have come apart in one winter, and every buyer of a bad pair has said the sentence that pure subjectivism cannot explain: “I was wrong about those boots.”
So if quality is not an objective property, since no instruments can detect it, and it is not just a subjective opinion because we are able to make predictions about the quality of an object that are verified in time, then what is it?
Pirsig’s answer was that the question itself smuggles in the false assumption that quality must be located in one place or the other. He argued instead that quality is a feature of the relationship between the person and the object. Quality occurs when a person and a thing meet in use: the weight settling onto the shoulder, the wrench loaded to its limit and holding. Before they meet there is only a guitar and a player. Quality exists in the connection.
Apply this idea in the realm of consumer products, and the slow decline of quality starts making sense.
Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.
Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.
What produced quality in the first place was care. Pirsig again: “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.”
A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.
That is why extraction works the way it does. When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly. Absence does the job on its own…
…
… There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone’s memory catches up…
Eminently worth reading in full. An ode to Pirsig: “On Quality,” from @worseonpurpose.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Plato’s Phaedrus (which means, as Sapp observes, that the question of quality is at least twenty-four centuries old)
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As we interrogate enshittification, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that Buick Motor Company head William Crapo Durant incorporated General Motors in New Jersey…
Durant, a high-school dropout, had made his fortune building horse-drawn carriages, and in fact he hated cars–he thought they were noisy, smelly, and dangerous. Nevertheless, the giant company he built would dominate the American auto industry for decades.
In the first years of the 20th century, however, that industry was a mess. There were about 45 different car companies in the United States, most of which sold only a handful of cars each year (and many of which had an unpleasant tendency to take customers’ down payments and then go out of business before delivering a completed automobile). Industrialist Benjamin Briscoe called this way of doing business “manufacturing gambling,” and he proposed a better idea. To build consumer confidence and drive the weakest car companies out of business, he wanted to consolidate the largest and most reliable manufacturers (Ford, REO, his own Maxwell-Briscoe, and Durant’s Buick) into one big company. This idea appealed to Durant (though not to Henry Ford or REO’s Ransom E. Olds), who had made his millions in the carriage business just that way: Instead of selling one kind of vehicle to one kind of customer, Durant’s company had sold carriages and carts of all kinds, from the utilitarian to the luxurious.
But Briscoe wanted to merge all the companies completely into one, while Durant wanted to build a holding company that would leave its individual parts more or less alone. (“Durant is for states’ rights,” Briscoe said. “I am for a union.”) Durant got his way, and the new GM was the opposite of Ford: Instead of just making one car, like the Model T, it produced a wide variety of cars for a wide variety of buyers. In its first two years, GM cobbled together 30 companies, including 11 automakers like Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland (which later became Pontiac), some supplier firms, and even an electric company.
Buying all these companies was too expensive for the fledgling GM, and in 1911 the corporation’s board forced the spendthrift Durant to quit. He started a new car company with the Chevrolet brothers and was able to buy enough GM stock to regain control of the corporation in 1916, but his profligate ways got the better of him and he was forced out again in 1920. During the Depression, Durant went bankrupt, and he spent his last years managing a bowling alley in Flint.
– source
In the early 1900s public outcry over weak government regulation of gasoline-powered horseless carriages was significant. Durant clocked this public anger, and rather than relying on government regulations to improve their safety, he saw it as an opportunity to create a company which could improve the quality and safety of this new class of transportation. Fast forward just over a century and General Motors seems to have fallen prey to the extractive impulse that Sapp describes: the company and its cars are beset by myriad quality issues.
“Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.”*…
In 2018, John Coates wrote a paper that argued that “in the near future roughly twelve individuals will have practical power over the majority of US public companies.” That article has now become a book in which he has expanded his analysis. FT Alphaville reports…
…
The 2018 paper was focused on index funds, and that is the bit most people have freaked out about. After all, even Vanguard’s founder Jack Bogle raised the dangers of a narrow clutch of rapidly growing passive investment giants controlling more and more of the corporate world.
However, the book finally comes good on a promise made in the original paper to also explore the implications of the rise of private equity. It is the missing piece of the puzzle. As Coates puts it in the intro:
A “problem of twelve” arises when a small number of actors acquires the means to exert outsized influence over the politics and economy of a nation. In US history, problems of twelve have recurred, as the result of a clash of two fundamental forces: economies of scale in finance on the one hand, and constitutional commitments to fragmented and limited political power on the other. Each time, the “problem” has been two-sided. The concentration of wealth and power in a small number of hands threatens the political system and the people generally, and the political response can threaten the financial institutions in which wealth and power are accumulating, even when those institutions create economic benefits.
Today, two late-twentieth century institutions — index funds and private equity funds — are creating a new problem of twelve. As financial organizations, they amass and invest capital, and have been primarily scrutinized through a financial lens. As with other financial institutions, they pool savings from dispersed individuals and channel it to fund major projects. They facilitate capitalism, which has created huge benefits for humanity — wealth, health, and much longer life spans — along with inequality, misery, and the existential threat of climate change. Finance creates value by facilitating change, but distributes the gains unequally, and magnifies the gales of “creative destruction.”
But both kinds of funds are now so large, and have influence over so much of the economy, that they have economic and political power, whether they want it or not. Their power makes them targets of political threats. Both institutions exhibit “economies of scale.” Both are active politically — directly, and indirectly — through their control of businesses.
Their growing and concentrated wealth and power threatens the foundations of a democratic republic built on Montesquieu’s separation of powers as well as federalism — the “checks and balances” taught to every civics student. In a predictable response, the republic is increasingly threatening each type of institution with new restrictions, burdens, and limits. Because index funds certainly, and private equity funds possibly, create value within the US economy, the threats to them are as important as their potential threats to American democracy…
In a thoughtful analysis, FT Alphaville asks, is this a problem to be solved or a dilemma to be managed? “The ‘Problem of Twelve’ — redux” (gift article) from @FTAlphaville.
* Lord Acton (perhaps better known for his remark in an 1887 letter to an Anglican bishop, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”)
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As we contemplate consolidation, we might spare a thought for Fischer Black; he died on this date in 1995. An economist, he is best remembered as the co-creator of the Black-Scholes model, a technique for valuing financial options. The model established that an option could be priced from a set-in-stone mathematical equation, which allowed the Chicago Board Options Exchange (C.B.O.E.), a new organization, to expand their business to a new universe of financial derivatives. Within a year, more than twenty thousand option contracts were changing hands each day. Four years after that, the C.B.O.E. introduced the “put” option—thus institutionalizing the bet that the thing you were betting on would lose. “Profit at all prices” had joined the mainstream of both economic theory and practice, and by 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year.
The Nobel Prize is not given posthumously, so it was not awarded to Black in 1997 when his co-author Myron Scholes received the economics honor for their landmark work on option pricing along with Robert C. Merton, another pioneer in the development of valuation of stock options. However, when announcing the award that year, the Nobel committee did prominently mention Black’s key role.
As Warren Buffett (whose birthday is today) observed: “The Black–Scholes formula has approached the status of holy writ in finance … If the formula is applied to extended time periods, however, it can produce absurd results. In fairness, Black and Scholes almost certainly understood this point well. But their devoted followers may be ignoring whatever caveats the two men attached when they first unveiled the formula.” Indeed, the “ruthless” application of the model has led to a number of disasters for investors (c.f. Long-Term Capital Management).
“Everything / is not itself”*…
Toward an ecology of mind: Nathan Gardels talks with Benjamin Bratton about his recent article, “Post-Anthropocene Humanism- Cultivating the ‘third space’ where nature, technology, and human autonomy meet“…
The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux…
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
This is the view, at least, of Benjamin Bratton, a philosopher of technology who directs the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera project to investigate the impact and potential of planetary-scale computation. To further explore the notion of “post-Anthropocene humanism” raised in a recent Noema essay, I asked him to weigh in on the nature of human being and becoming when anthropogenesis and technogenesis are one and the same process.
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“I can’t accept the essentially reactionary claim that modern science erases ‘the Human.’ Demystification is not erasure. It may destabilize some ideas that humans have about what humans are, yes. But I see it more as a disclosure of what ‘humans’ always have been but could not perceive as such. It’s not that some essence of the Human goes away, but that humans are now a bit less wrong about what humans are,” he argues.
Bratton goes on: “Instead of science and technology leading to some ‘post-human’ condition, perhaps it will lead to a slightly more human condition? The figure we associate with modern European Humanism may be a fragile, if also a productive, philosophical concept. But dismantling the concept does not make the reality go away. Rather, it redefines it in the broader context of new understanding. In fact, that reality is more perceivable because the concept is made to dissolve.”
How so? “The origins of human societies are revealed by archaeological pursuits. What is found is usually not the primal scene of some local cultural tradition but something much more alien and unsettling: human society as a physical process.
…
All this would suggest, in Bratton’s view, “that cooperative social intelligence was not only the path to Anthropocene-scale agency for humans, but a reminder that the evolution of social intelligence literally shaped our bodies and biology, from the microbial ecologies inside of us to our tool-compatible phenotype. The Renaissance idea of Vitruvian Man, that we possess bodies and then engage the world through tools and intention, is somewhat backward. Instead, we possess bodies because of biotic and abiotic ‘technologization’ of us by the world, which we in turn accelerate through social cooperation.”
In short, one might say, it is not “I think therefore I am,” but, because the world is embedded in me, “thereby I am.”
…
Bratton’s view has significant implications for how we see and approach the accelerating advances in science and technology.
A negative biopolitics, so to speak, would seek to limit the transformations underway in the name of a valued concept of the human born in a specific time and place on the continuum of human evolution. A positive bio-politics would embrace the artificiality of those transformations as part of the responsibility of human agency.
Bratton states: “Abstract intelligence is not some outside imposition from above. It emerged and evolved along with humans and other things that think. Therefore, I am equally suspicious of the sort of posthumanism that collapses sentience and sapience into an anti-rationalist, flat epistemology that seeks not to calibrate the relation between reason and world, but is instead a will to vegetablization: a dissolving of agency into flux and flow. Governance then, in the sense of steerage, is sacrificed.”
To mediate this creative tension, what is called for is a theory of governance that recognizes the promise while affirming the autonomy of humans, albeit reconfigured through a new awareness, by striving to shape what we now understand as anthropo-technogenesis.
In the political theory of checks and balances, government is the positive and constitutional rule is the negative. The one is the capacity to act, the other to amend or arrest action that could lead to harmful consequences — the “katechon” concept from Greek antiquity of “withholding from becoming,” which I have written about before.
An ecology of mind, in the term of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, would encompass both by re-casting human agency not as the master, but as a responsible co-creator with other intelligences in the reality we are making together…
“The Evolution of What It Means To Be Human,” from Nathan Gardels and @bratton in @NoemaMag. Both the conversation and the article on which it is based are eminently worth reading on full.
Pair with: “Artificial Intelligence and the Noosphere” (from Robert Wright; for which, a ToTH to friend MK): a very optimistic take on a possible future that could emerge from the dynamic that Bratton outlines. Worth reading and considering; his visions of the socioeconomic and spiritual bounties-to-come are certainly enticing.
That said, I’ll just suggest that, even if AI is ultimately as capable as many assume it can/will be– by no means a sure thing– unless we address the kinds of issues raised in last week’s (R)D on this same general subject (“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”) we’ll never get to Bratton’s (and Wright’s) happy place… The same kinds of things that Bratton implicitly and Wright explicitly are mooting for AI (as a knitter of minds in a noosphere) could have been said— were said— for computer networking, then for the web, then for social media… in the event, they knit— but not so much so much in the interest of blissful, enabling sharing and growth; rather as the tools of rapacious commercial interests (c.f.: Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification”) and/or authoritarians (c.f., China or Russia or…). Seems to me that in the long run, if we can rein in capitalism and authoritarians: maybe. In the foreseeable future: if only…
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we contemplate collaboration, we might send mysterious birthday greetings to Alexius Meinong; he was born this date in 1853. A philosopher, he is known for his unique ontology and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and axiology– the theory of value.
Meinong’s ontology is notable for its belief in nonexistent objects. He distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them: existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world; subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts; and objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts. See his Gegenstandstheorie, or the Theory of Abstract Objects.
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money”*…
Further to yesterday’s post (about the relevance of Edith Wharton’s observations of her Gilded Age to ours), Dorinda Evans takes a look at rough contemporary of Wharton’s, and at his (similarly relevant) work…
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks [are nowconsidered] unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time…
The fascinating story of Victor Dubreuil’s cryptic currencies and the questions they raise about value and values: “Illusory Wealth,” in @PublicDomainRev.
For an illuminating look at Dubreuil’s spiritual successor, see Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful Boggs: A Comedy of Values.
For a loosely analogous artist: “Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for… what the hell are they? What do they do? How do they do it?”
And for an appreciation of trompe l’oeil (and its influence on Cubism), see “Feinting Spells.”
* H.L. Mencken
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As we contemplate currency, we might pour a cup of birthday tea for English mathematician, logician, photographer, and Anglican cleric, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson– better known as the author Lewis Carroll– born on this date in 1832.
“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Alice in Wonderland (nee “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” then “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”)
Oh, and… Happy Mozart’s Birthday!
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