Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
The awful state of prisons in the UK. And the US is much worse.
Thoughts on the relationship (or lack thereof) between Foucault and Nietzsche.
“Time is everywhere, except in the equations. So, in short, what the hell?”
Is there such a thing as Western civilization? Not really, says Anthony Appiah.
Facebook, echo chambers, and the new media landscape.
Footnotes to Plato 
On the time/Gleick review piece, Massimo has already seen me point out this:
Tosh.
First, time’s dimensionality is a measurement only, not a controlling factor. That’s like saying my height is predetermined at birth because height is a dimension, or something similar.
Second, the fact that people think such things about time, and not about the other three dimensions, is itself a good indicator that the analogy is wrong.
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Having already read the Appiah, and largely, but not totally, agreeing, I think it touches on issues of cultural expropriation (as a legit issue, not SJWs at a university worrying about yoga) and other related issues, such as hyperbole, a sort of “Western exceptionalism” and more.
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On Facebook, the caption of the photo, at the top, is itself a Zuckerberg lie. Effbook has long deleted about any picture with boobies in it, for example. The “napalm girl” photo mentioned in the body just adds to that.
Second, here’s a Gizmodo story on the same issue, probably better in some ways, that illustrates how much Zuckerberg will spin. http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204
Couple of key points starting with this:
The “build and withhold” is a lie by misstatement. Facebook insider staff said that what was under discussion was tweaks to current algorithms, not building something new.
The “one political party” is the same. The fake news was often about one individual, Trump, or another, Clinton, not political parties.
Later, the story talks about Effbook touting its “family and friends” tweak as a filter. Well, if your family and friends are all posting the same shite …
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“There is no such thing as Western Civilization”
What a lot of nonsense. Of course there is. It’s the civilization that can trace its origins back to the dual sources of Jerusalem and Athens, by way of the Christian synthesis.
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Have you actually read the piece, Dan? Appiah isn’t a kneejerk SJW type; and it’s an extract from his Reith Lecture.
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Yes, I read it. And I’ve read a bunch of his other stuff as well. Of course he isn’t an SJW type. It’s just that he expects more from such characterizations than they need.
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Put another way, there’s nothing wrong with what he calls “the golden nugget,” unless you apply a standard that is misplaced with respect to most uses of the expression “western civilization.”
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I mean it’s not as if we didn’t already know that there are all sorts of technical problems with the term “Western” even when just applied to Europe — let alone North Africa, Turkey, etc.
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Well, maybe her perceives that others need to be … enlightened? corrected? on the expectations issue themselves? When I read it, I thought in part, but not entirely, of the likes of Huntington and “clash of civilizations”
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Copy-pasting from Massimo’s previous post about Julia, as I think he meant it for over here:
Massimo says:
November 18, 2016 at 11:50 am
Dan, Socratic,
You both make good points. I agree with Dan that of course there is such thing as Western civilization, and that if one were to take Appiah’s argument to its logical conclusion then one couldn’t probably talk of any civilization. That said, Dan, I think you may overestimate the degree to which many people are aware of the crucial impact of Islam on the history of medieval Europe, and therefore on “Western” civilization itself.
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And, with dual “likes,” Dan and I may be in a general degree of agreement!
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On a globe west ant east are not places. Only directions. I guess it refers to the eur-asian Continent with the America’s attached to the western end by conquest and a smaller gap.
;;_)
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I was surprised in finding the Nietzsche/Foucault article interesting. I think, though, that reading Foucault himself might require more Ritalin than is strictly good for me.
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Foucault’s Ritalin, the never-completed sequel to Foucault’s Pendulum?
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I guess commenting on the time piece would be redundant for me, but;
“Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.””
All duration is, is the present. As its configurations change.
““There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it,” ”
Our consciousness is flashes of cognition, recording states of the configuration. Why is it not equally valid to say it is the coming and going of these events, future to past, that is the effect of time? It would certainly explain why we only exist in the present.
Are the other three dimensions, Euclidian space, inscribed all that deeply into the foundations of reality? If so, why isn’t the earth flat? Why don’t we see much more straight lines and right angles in nature? Or is it just foundational to how our minds initially conceive of space, like starting in kindergarten with a pencil and ruler?
Science and physics are the gods of academia, but as this article points out, these ideas only really coalesced in the last 150 years. In the grand scheme of things, that really is just a hiccup.
On the personal side, started a new job today. Actually have to drive to work, a whole 15 minutes at that. Which means I can’t pop by the house and give people grief over the internet over the course of the day.
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Gliding over the article on Nietzsche and Foucault, the term “recursive abyss” comes to mind.
Keep in mind a vortex is both centripetal and centrifugal. Like two black holes combining and shedding a gravity wave. Or galaxies pulling mass in and radiating energy out.
This one only seemed to spin my mind out to dim mist, without coalescing into any particular insight. Guess I should have been a professional philosopher.
Maybe;
“It again seems that Foucault’s concern is closer to Weber’s: the distinctive ways in which the modern era controls human beings, and circumscribes their identities, their actions, and their aspirations.”
And their minds. Specialization renders us atomistic, not holographic.
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A good selection this week, albeit not many choices here need any great comment.
Re.: Gray: I will remark, considering recent events, that it is clear that the ‘liberalism’ that developed after the ’60s is almost certainly exhausted. We need to find our way to a 21st century interpretation of the liberalism of FDR and John Dewey and John Sullivan. We need to find the working classes again and become their champions. They have been ignored and misled too long, and we certainly need to accept some responsibility for that on the left.
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Re the Lanchester time piece 🙂
He worries about free will and time travel via the Grandfather paradox–
“There are a number of preferred solutions to the Grandfather Paradox, the most common of which is that time is in fact fixed, so that the actions in the past end up being the very factors that determine the future. Alternatively, the altered past does indeed involve an altered future; or the world splits into multiple timelines, multiple universes.”
What Lanchester doesn’t go on to say is that these present two resolutions to the free will/time travel question. The first is the premise of all the Terminator movies (except the last I think, which betrays the franchise)–time is one line forward and backward, and through time travel one can go on a tangent closed loop curve from one point to another, but only backwards from future points to past ones. That’s because these travels to the past are necessary for the future to be as it came out to be (e.g., Kyle’s fathering John Connor so he can send Kyle back later). Free will? Not so much. Things are going to play out one way, even if time travel is a necessary part o0f that way.
The second part of the quote is about the Back to the Future franchise. One can travel to one’s past–or some version of one’s past–and affect the future–or some version of a future relative to a past–and travel forward again to resume a future quite unlike what one knew. McFly might have married his own mother in the past (!!!–why not–except for that fading out bullshit when his parents seem to disconnect thus threatening his “real” existence?) and gone on to live a different future on some other timeline. But instead his used his free will to try and bring his parents together, which allowed him to travel back to the future–an alternative future–where his parents are, unlike his own experience, successful and happy. McFly’s free will help fix–ala Everett/Wheeler–an alternative future relative to the one he (or his counterpart) once inhabited.
The two franchises thus represent two rough depictions of time: of the block universe unfriendly to free will–The Terminator–or one where free will (read indetermnistic Libertarian-style) choices can change things at any given time to produce one of many metaphysically possible futures relative to that time.
FWIW as I have argued in many publications (Erkenntnis last year in favor of Einstein’s train of thought), I’m more a block guy. So naturally I love the Terminator franchise, and think BTTF is philosophically candy-assed.
And BTW Lanchester fails to mention that the ’72 Libertarian candidate Hospers was as far as the free will question was concerned a hard incompatibilist–he did not believe in libertarian free will.
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https://goo.gl/z6FY02
My ‘consistent’ time-travel version of Oedipus Rex with philosophical flourishes.
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The article on Western Civilization presents many interesting relationships, comparisons, conflicts, nodes, networks, binaries, polarities, distillations, expansions, etc. All trying encapsulate how this current world context reached and reaches its present dynamic, but it does seem difficult to explain how this all comes about, when the belief is of some fundamental physical linear progression of time, whether deterministic, or with some degree of conscious input, that it all must be shoehorned into.
Rather than a constant dynamic of interaction and feedback in an incredibly dense physical present, in which prior configurations are constantly cannibalized and consumed, while future ones have far too broad an input to sense, in any but the most broad, or clearly defined aspects.
How do we really know our current beliefs are not another example of normalcy bias, re-enforced by economic and egotistic constraints?
Might some future generation pigeonhole our world as the apex of ˙hubris, with the Donald as its exemplar? How would the “smart people” like that?
Time travel? The world of five minutes ago no longer exists, or this current situation would not exist. If you think otherwise, avoid driving in traffic.
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The grandfather paradox isn’t really a paradox as such. If you could travel back to your own past and meet your grandfather before he had any offspring you it would simply be impossible to kill him, something would always prevent it from happening.
If you travelled to your own past with a list of all stock prices and horse race winners you would find that something prevented you from delivering the list.
Or, if you did successfully deliver the list you.would find that you had not travelled back to your own past at all but another close copt of it, it would do you no good at all.
Which means that if you receive a list of future stock prices from your future self, you won’t need to worry about eventually having ti travel back in time to deliver the list.
Come to think of it, the list will probably do you no good anyway. It would be for another Universe.
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The interesting thing to me about time travel and free will is that if you could send retrotemporal messages we could break the illusion of free will (if it is an illusion) completely.
You could give people a detailed list of the things they are going to do in the next three hours and offer them enough money to retire on if they can do otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to collect the money.
Imagine being offered 20 billion dollars to not eat a sandwich and not being able to avoid eating the sandwich. Even if you found the sandwich was poisoned and would kill you, you still couldn’t avoid eating it.
It wouldn’t be that the retrotemporal message had robbed us of our free will, it would just highlight what life is actually like for us.
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Consistent time travel is the point of Eddy Pus.
Note: If time travel is going on it makes an in principle testable prediction. While you couldn’t go back and kill your father or mother before you were born, you could be your father or mother.This would introduce striking correlations into our genomes!
Even put back a generation or so, would introduce such correlations. They would be quite striking, but if time travel is rare still quite hard to find and falsifying it would be difficult (just make it rare or move it back a few more generations).
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Probably the best time travel film ever made, in terms of really working through the complexities and paradoxes involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
I believe it is on Netflix. If not, it is worth a purchase.
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Primer sounds good. Looks like you can also rent it on Amazon video.
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They make movies with dragons, elves, werewolves, mermaids, dwarves, etc. too.
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From my point of view, the premise of time travel is like supposing 1+1 doesn’t always equal 2.
Just try wrapping your head around the process that creates the effect of days, with this rather large orb, from our point of view, spinning in space and that other larger ball of radiant energy shining on it. Now a hundred years ago, they determined measures of duration and distance are similar and therefore space and time are interchangeable, give our conscious perception is of linear narrative and from this we come up with wormholes through spacetime.
Wouldn’t there be any scientific interest in revisiting the premise and considering whether anything has been overlooked, or would that be against the Canon?
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It’s not time-travel, but I’ve heard Arrival is supposed to be very good and I’m planning on seeing it as soon as it percolates to my area.
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A consistent time travel movie is Bruce Willis’ ‘Army of the 12 Monkeys’ in which Bruce sent back to get a sample of the virus that made the surface of the earth uninhabitable ends up causing the the accident that released it.
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Synred: The movie is just called “12 Monkeys.” The Army of the 12 Monkeys” is a faction, in the movie.
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