Spool Five

tags

#philosophy

This is a note about an interesting article I just read, The New Control Society by Jon Askonas.

The core idea, that social control has moved from a ‘disciplinary’ model, where power is centralised, to a ‘protocol’ model of control, where power is decentralised, is not new at all. As the author mentions, one of the first, clearest articulations of this shift is found in Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, but we can also see clear articulations of this concept in Alexander Galloway’s book Protocol (2004). The New York Times also had a recent story about the “Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber”, which looks at how some of the Ted Kaczynski’s ideas relating to technological control have found advocates across the political spectrum. You could also say that some of Slavoj Zizek’s work is tangentially related. Although he doesn’t reference the idea of the ‘protocol’ as the mechanism of social reorganisation, he does frequently reference the shift in ideology from Soviet communism to ‘western’ capitalism, sometimes summarised by reference to Coca-Cola. Whereas in Soviet times you were commanded to ‘obey’, in capitalist times you are encouraged to ’enjoy!’.

tags

#philosophy

A note on some thoughts around ‘data’. Inspired, in the first instance, by this discussion on hacker news.

TODO Summarise some key points from the Hickey/Kay discussion

• The starting point of the discussion is the questioning of the assumption that ‘data is a good idea’ from Kay
• Hickey challenges the assumption that data has any innate value at all. Any ‘value’ is added through interpretation.
• So, the core issue here is around the value (moral or otherwise) of ‘data’, and whether it has any at all.

Questions

In relation to this line by Hickey:

tags

#philosophy, #hermeneutics

In a certain sense, the measure of hermeneutics is understanding. Through careful interpretation, we begin to grasp the meaning of the text. Through careful listening and active engagement, I begin to understand, more deeply, what you are communicating to me. This is the heart of hermeneutics, this active movement toward understanding the meaning of something. The movement from uncertainty toward clarity.

tags

#books

Some alternative formulations of Chaos, taken from Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick

The complicated, aperiodic, attracting orbits of certain (usually low-dimensional) dynamical systems.

• Philip Holmes

A kind of order without periodicity.

Read more →

Overview

A folgezettel is a ’next note’. It is part of the Zettelkasten Method notetaking system. The name of this technique wasn’t coined by Niklas Luhmann but the technique derives from his method.

tags

#philosophy

An (in)famous concept from the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

Difficult to explain/simplify, but I will try my best here.

I think a good starting point for thinking about this idea is David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech for the graduates of Kenyon College.

tags

#philosophy

I am rooted, but I flow. ― Virginia Woolf

The concept of appropriation is one of the key ideas within hermeneutic philosophy.

It arises from the idea that we are embedded (thrown) into a world. The notion of ‘world’ is important here, and distinct from the general usage of the term. For example, Heidegger famously distinguished between different ’levels’ of worldhood:

tags

#philosophy

years

1861 - 1947

notable works

Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas

Originally a mathematician, Whitehead’s primary contribution to contemporary thought is through his Process Philosophy and Process Theology.

tags

#philosophy Gilbert Simondon Process Philosophy

The term ‘concrescence’ was coined by Alfred North Whitehead and figures strongly in his systematic account of process.

Roughly, it means the coming together of multiples into a unity.

TODO

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Read more →

tags

#philosophy

A difficult term to explain in a brief note, but I’ll try anyway.

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to move away from the subject-object division that pervaded modern philosophy and science prior to the 20th century.

tags

#philosophy

years

1952-2020

notable works

Technics and Time

An influential philosopher of technology.

tags

#technology

I putting this note here more as a reminder to go an do some actual research on this topic. This is not in any way an authoritative note.

tags

#philosophy #technology #biology

An influential philosopher of technology.

noteable works

On the Mode of Existenct of Technical Objects

tags

#technology #biology

Permacomputing is an offshoot of permaculture . There is already a dedicated wiki to the topic that is definitely worth checking out.

One angle to permacomputing which hasn’t been explored yet is perhaps in relation to the work of Gilbert Simondon.

tags

#biology #environmentalism

:TODO: Fill in this section

Permaculture refers to a way of thinking about land dwelling and the management of living systems, whose end goal is sustainability and ecological flourishing.

tags

#biology #environmentalism

Observe & Interact (the forces present on a site)

Catch & Store Energy

Obtain a Yield (promotes self-reliance - choose location that provides greater/diverse yield over ornamental plant, for example)

Gemini is an internet protocol designed by solderpunk in 2019. It is a lightweight protocol with a small number of response codes. It uses TLS to secure connections. One of the motivations in designing Gemini was to make it simple enough that someone could sit down and “write a server for it over the course of a weekend”. It is served on port 1965, a reference to the year of the first manned Gemini mission.

An idealised place that is nowhere.

The name is a pun - ’eu’ is the Greek prefeix meaning ‘good’ (eudemonia - the good life, eucalyptus - the good covering, euthenasia - the good death, etc.)

The study of life.

tags

#philosophy #biology

A highly influential idea first introduced by systems biologists Fancisco J Varela and Humberto Maturana. In some ways the idea is simple, but in others it is complicated (arguably, over-complicated to the point of mysticism). In simple terms, it describes systems which are “self generating” and “self-sustaining”.

tags

#philosophy

As espoused in From Chance to Choice, liberal eugenics is a system which seeks to apply John Rawls’ Theory of Justice to the field of genetics. In Rawls’ system, to simplify it a bit, the fairest system is one in which shares are distributed as evenly as possible. If you imagine you are tasked with dividing a cake, but you don’t know which slice you will get in advance, rationally you will divide it as evenly as you can. The same logic applies to social shares - from a rational perspective you would find it unfair if shared were distributed too unequally.

tags

#philosophy

A concept used by Jurgen Habermas in his book The Future of Human Nature. The book is largely a response to the model of liberal eugenics found in From Chance to Choice. There are many arguments you could make against liberal eugenics, but Habermas approaches it from what you could possibly call an existentialist perspective. In short, he considers the problem of genetic therapies from the perspective of the child whose genotype has been altered. His argument centers on the idea that, through pre-birth genetic intervention, the child’s singularity has in some manner been tampered with. The situation is qualitatively (I hesitate to say “metaphysically”) different from cases where, for example, a parent forces their child to practice violin every day from the ages of four until eighteen. Here, there is indeed some infringement on the autonomy of the child, but it is an infringement that is reversible. The child is always free to rebel later on, and distance themselves from this relation. However, in the case of genetic intervention, the infringement is irreversabile - the child is forced to live with a decision that was made prior to their existence, involving their parents and medical professionals, and which affects them in the most intimate way possible.

tags

#philosophy, #hermeneutics

A theory that claims, broadly, that understanding is the product of iterative interactions between wholes and parts. What constitutes a “whole” and a “part” is flexible. In the context of a narrative text, for example, the whole may be the overarching idea or world that is trying to be communicated. The “parts” are the various characters, settings, events, and so on that, through their particular juxtapositions and cross-references generate a larger picture. As a reader, you might begin on the first page with an idea of what the story will be about (an idea of the “whole”), but as you read further and further, each new twist and turn causes you to revise your idea of the whole in an iterative, recursive way.

tags

#philosophy, #hermeneutics

There has been some debate over the image of the “circle” when discussing the hermeneutic circle. A circle is an established geometric shape with highly regular features like a centre-point and so on. However, when most people talk about the hermeneutic circle, they are talking about a kind of recursive relation between two points. It is more appropriate, perhaps, to describe this relation as circlular rather than as a circle. For example, Paul Ricoeur tends to prefer the metaphor of a spiral, since the hermeneutic relation implies some kind of movement outside of a simple circle-like orbit. When travelling the path of the circle, we always arrive back where we started. In the process of hermeneutic understanding, however, the is a returning motion, but we never arrive exactly where we started. When I travel abroad for the first time, I learn about new cultures and languages, then, when I return home, my home has also been transformed, I now notice peculiarities about my own culture that aren’t shared elsewhere, and so on. So, the motion is more akin to a spiral than a circle.

tags

#philosophy

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness is one of those philosophical ideas that has stayed with me ever since someone first told me about it. These are some notes about it. Please do not take them to be in any way authoritative.

The Box 3 portion of this website is my attempt at creating an online directory of personal knowledge notes. It comprises one section of my personal notes management system.

It is inspired by “Digital Gardens” like evergreen notes and Nikita’s Knowledge Wiki, but on a much smaller scale. It might be more appropriate to say it is directly inspired by m150’s wiki on ichi.city.

As with many features of org/emacs, it can be a bit intimidating at first. However, if you spend about 30 minutes digging into it, it becomes much simpler. Or, at least, it can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be.

Org roam is a plain-text personal knowledge management system.

My past org roam settings [2022-06-04 Sat]

These settings are designed to work with Doom Emacs.

Updated [2023-03-28 Tue]

I now use denote for managing my notes.

Much of what I wrote below still applied, except now I use a much ‘flatter’ hierarchy with all my notes (including journal entries and box3 reference notes) in a single directory. I find that denote’s file-naming system allows me to do this without too much trouble.

Clippings from things I’ve read.

:END:

tags

#books #philosophy

Clippings

p. 17

The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is po- litical. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable,

Read more →

tags

#books #Capitalism #philosophy

A book by the Salvage Collective.

Found/available on gemini: gemini://beyondneolithic.life/salvage_collective/tragedy_of_the_worker/index.gmi

Part 1 - M-C-M and the Death Cult

As Andreas Malm has fiercely and beautifully argued, capitalism did not settle for fossil fuels as a solution to energy scarcity. The common assumption that fossil energy is an intrinsically valuable energy resource worth competing over, and fighting wars for is, as geographer Matthew Huber argues, an example of fetishism. At the onset of steam power, water was abundant, and, even with its fixed costs, cheaper to use than coal. The hydraulic mammoths powered by water wheels required far less human labour to convert to energy, and were more energy-efficient. Even today, only a third of the energy in coal is actually converted in the industrial processes dedicated thereto: the only thing that is efficiently produced is carbon dioxide. On such basis, the striving for competitive advantage by capitalists seeking maximum market control ‘should’ have favoured renewable energy.

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Semantic line breaks are a technique for structuring plain text files. They can be useful in cases where you are writing in a markup language like Markdown, html, AsciiDoc, Gemtext, and so on. These markup formats automatically join consecutive lines, so the resulting output will be rendered as a paragraph of continuous text.

Some notes for trying to use the GTD workflow:

Getting things done:

1. Capture

2. Clarify

You need to review and process everything you’ve collected in your inboxes. This means you have to decide where things belong in the Getting Things Done system. Ask yourself the following questions for each item:

tags

books #philosophy

A series of posts by James Williams.

First part here.

This reduction of the real to the possible is exactly what Deleuze seeks to avoid, because he wants the potential of radical novelty in every part of his system. When I called this series of posts ‘Deleuze’s timed logics’ it was an allusion to Arthur Prior, temporal logic and tense logic. For Prior, the difficulty of time for logic is a problem of undecided possibilities in the future. For Deleuze, the problem of time for logic is the difficulty of how propositions are both decidable and undecidable at all times and beyond any set of possibilities.

Read more →

:TODO: Clean up!

Setting default shell on linux:

• edit /etc/passwd/
• chsh

popd and pushd

• can use to create a directory ‘stack’
• pushd pushes the new directory to the stack, e.g., pushd ~/directory/another/andanother/
• then popd takes you back to the previous directory in the stack.
• popd +0 prints the stack (current directory first)
• popd +1 takes you to second directory in stack.

Exclamation mark !

• double exclamation !! re-run previous command
• exclamation plus number !500 run the ‘500th’ command from history
• exclamation plus a few characters !pa runs the recent command matching that pacman -Sy or whatever
• any of the above followed by colon ‘p’ !!:p prints the command instead of running it.
• exclamation with dollar sign !$ use argument of previous command.
  • E.g., say you create a file touch filename then, if you run vim !$ it will open that file in vim. Useful for very long filenames/arguments.
  • The $ represents the last argument of previous command. For example: ping google.com -c 4
    • echo !$ will print 4
    • echo !^ will print the first argument instead (google.com)
    • echo !* will print all the arguments (google.com -c 4)
  • to get a specific number argument, you first ‘select’ the command, then use colon+number. E.g.:
    • ping google.com -c 4
    • echo !!:2 returns -c if it was the previously run command. Alternatively, use !pi, !389 (the history number), etc.
    • Also, you can use ranges: echo !!:2-4
  • Also, you can ‘find and replace’ text in a command using ^ e.g.,
    • Say you run ping googl.com -c 4
    • You can correct the error in ‘googl’ with ^googl^google this automatically re-runs the command.

Tail

tail -n +1 file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

Three key elements

The Zettelkasten method is a way of taking notes that emphasises the following three things:

1. Hypertextuality
2. Atomicity
3. Individuality

Starting from the bottom, notes should be individual and personal. I feel that this is especially true in the information age where fast and easy access to a lot of information is already available. Personalising notes, either through style, or through curation, helps make information and knowledge meaningful.