Tag: meaning

Speak Our Truth

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

The coastline of the United Kingdom as measured with measuring rods of 200 km, 100 km and 50 km in length. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

I was always attracted to that old dichotomy: people must be either stupid or lying when they claim to believe some obvious falsehood. This dichotomy is a staple of Democratic theorizing about our political culture. (Sometimes the choice is between stupid and evil, which amounts to the same.) For example, Adam-Troy Castro’s social media classic “Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters Are Stupid?” has been circulating since halfway through Trump’s first term. But this simple dichotomy is losing its appeal. It is just not plausible that tens of millions of ordinary Republicans—our neighbors, friends, and families—are stupid or evil. There have been many proposed explanations of this puzzle: information siloes hide the obvious from otherwise intelligent people; tribalism exerts a powerful evolutionary draw. I believe, though, that there is a different and hidden complexity here.

I use the word “complexity” deliberately, because my argument draws on one of the icons of chaos theory (aka complexity theory) known as the “Coastline Paradox.” That name refers to a 1967 paper, “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” by one of the pioneers of chaos theory, Benoit Mandelbrot. James Gleick provides a quick introduction to the topic in “The Man Who Reshaped Geometry” (1985), and a thorough treatment in his book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). But the Coastline Paradox itself is easy to understand.

Imagine you measure the coast of Britain by putting markers every ten miles and summing the distances between them. You get a certain result. If you put markers every mile, you get a larger result. Measure the coast with a yardstick: longer still. With an inch ruler: longer. The coast will continue to get longer as you trace it around ever-smaller irregularities, around every grain of sand. So, how long is the coast? As Gleick says in his article, “In fact, it depends on the length of your ruler. As the scale becomes finer and finer, bays and peninsulas reveal new subbays and subpeninsulas, and the length—truly—increases without limit, at least down to atomic scales.” In a sense, physical length does not exist. Or, physical lengths are all infinite. Or, better, length depends on your method of measuring.

Examining length gives us a glimpse into a new picture of how the things we say and believe relate to reality. Read more »

Monday, October 18, 2021

The Von Neumann Mind: Constructing Meaning

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: The homunculus fallacy: attempting to explain understanding in terms of representation begs the question of how that representation is itself understood, leading to infinite regress.

Turn your head to the left, and make a conscious inventory of what you’re seeing. In my case, I see a radiator upon which a tin can painted with an image of Santa Claus is perched; above that, a window, whose white frame delimits a slate gray sky and the very topmost potion of the roof of the neighboring building, brownish tiles punctuated by gray smokestacks and sheet-metal covered dormers lined by rain gutters.

Now turn your head to the right: the printer sitting on the smaller projection of my ‘L’-shaped, black desk; behind it, a brass floor lamp with an off-white lampshade; a black rocking chair; and then, black and white bookshelves in need of tidying up.

If you followed along so far, the above did two things: first, it made you execute certain movements; second, it gave you an impression of the room where I’m writing this. You probably find nothing extraordinary in this—yet, it raises a profound question: how can words, mere marks on paper (or ordered dots of light on a screen), have the power to make you do things (like turning your head), or transport ideas (like how the sky outside my window looks as I’m writing this)? Read more »

Evil and Meaning in Life

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

“The message is not one of simple pessimism. We need to look hard and clearly at some of the monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.”

– JONATHAN GLOVER

To many religious believers, one of the hardest aspects of maintaining their faith is steeped in mental gymnastics: using the pole of a loving god to leap over the reality of a horrible world. There are many clever and not-so-clever ways that religious people pacify themselves; often, in the most obscure, self-congratulatory way: the creation of Original Sin, free-will, gays, drugs, abortion. The “problem of evil”, as a whole, deserves a special consideration, however, in a way that may be secularised.

ScreenHunter_02 Jan. 17 10.49 The philosopher Susan Neiman has an entire reworking of the history of philosophy with this in mind. Her book, entitled Evil in Modern Thought: an Alternative History of Philosophy, ignores the usual Cartesian beginnings of modern philosophy. She begins rather with her “first Enlightenment hero”, Alfonso X, king of Castille.

Alfonso, who lived in the 13th century, commissioned several Jews to instruct him in astronomy. One, Rabbi Isaac Hazan, completed what became known as the Tablas Alfonsinas. Years after studying them, Alfonso remarked: “If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.”

Upon Alfonso’s death, his reign fell into ill repute. Commentators used this single sentence as a means to undermine his memory: one spoke about Alfonso’s entire family being struck by lightning and another detailing the “fires of heaven” burning in the king’s bedroom. There were no doubt many reasons for trashing Alfonso, but one reason we can be fairly certain of rests in his heroic blasphemy. Some even suggested that the reason the kingdom faired so poorly arose as a result of that single sentence (or some version of it).

This mattered for one very important reason: a human presumed himself smarter than god. A human saw the fallaciousness of many of god’s designs. Calling god out on an imperfection was the first step toward denying him all together. This Promethean attitude would lead us to take a firmer grasp of reality, an attempt that would begin and build science, and lead to undermining every aspect of religion. It also, however, leaves us searching for answers.

Along with Neiman, many philosophers – like Bryan Magee – have stated their annoyance with colleagues, who appear to take a lax interest in the relation between the world and philosophy. These philosophers’ main criticism is that their colleagues have either lapsed into jargon and technical obscurity about pointless subjects or are simply not interested in public matters. Nigel Warburton describes this stereotype as someone who is excellent at solving logical or abstract puzzles, but can’t boil an egg. Whether this is true or not is not my point here. Its importance rests in how Neiman takes her challenge further.

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