Reality - Weiye Loh on Diigo

Apr

28

2012

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

www.philosophynow.org/...th_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

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Postmodernism Foucault Philosophy Modernism Spectacle Reality Reality TV

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
18 more annotation(s)...
- Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
- Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.
- The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
- Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
- Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money.
- The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.
- A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity.
- If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state.
- The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal
- Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters.
- A triteness, a shallowness dominates all.
- In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
- To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them.
- Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
- whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety
- Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.
- pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent.
- pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists

Feb

22

2012

Club Troppo » George Bush, Bruno Latour and the end of postmodernism

or discussion: one of the far right’s greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were.

Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly Karl Rove) disparaging what the aide calls “the reality-based community”:

“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’

The quote may not be correct, and it may be that the aide was actually making the case for action over endless analysis; it isn’t as clear as Suskind paints it. But the whole quote had a post-modern ring to it, and it set me thinking about post-modernism and the right.

clubtroppo.com.au/...r-and-the-end-of-postmodernism

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Postmodernism Science Modernism Rightwing Politics Reality

First, the attempt by some on the US right to push creation science into schools is a pretty textbook implementation of the postmodern philosophy of science. Specifically, it is …

… an implementation of the views of the post-modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend about replacing science with democracy. Feyerabend was not much of a believer in seeking “the truth”; rather, he wanted to let a thousand flowers bloom. Here’s his Wikipedia entry:

“Feyerabend defended the idea that science should be separated from the state in the same way that religion and state are separated in a modern secular society. He envisioned a ‘free society’ in which ‘all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centres of power’. For example, parents should be able to determine the ideological context of their children’s education, instead of having limited options because of scientific standards. According to Feyerabend, science should also be completely subjected to democratic control: not only should the subjects that are investigated by scientists be determined by popular election, scientific assumptions and conclusions should also be supervised by committees of lay people. He thought that citizens should use their own principles when making decisions about these matters. In his opinion, the idea that decisions should be ‘rationalistic’ is elitist, since this assumes that philosophers or scientists are in a position to determine the criteria by which people in general should make their decisions.”

Determining scientific assumptions and conclusions by committees of ordinary people, of course, is just what the proponents of creation science are currently fighting for.
It was the climate science debate that drew the attention of Bruno Latour, a philosopher frequently associated with post-modernism, although he has preferred to be seen as an opponent of the very idea of modernity. Latour was one of those analysts of science so neatly skewered by Alan Sokal in 1996 in the famous “Sokal hoax“.

In 2004, Latour wrote an essay, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? Not much noticed at the time, it’s now finally available online. And it’s well worth a read, in part because Latour can actually write well when he wants to.

He started by noting that US Republicans strategists such as Frank Luntz had adopted a conscious strategy of stressing that the scientific debate on climate change was “not settled”. Latour was now unsettled to find that people with whom he disagreed were using the same attitude to truth that he himself had spent years promoting.
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- “Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientiﬁc certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a ‘primary issue’. But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? …
  
  “… While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.
  
  “Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this ﬁeld known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts … Isn’t this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish?…

Dec

18

2011

Karlie Kloss Vogue Italia Video Casts Doubt on Photoshop Accusations - News - FashionEtc.com

Under suspicion for potentially airbrushing a photo of teen model Karlie Kloss, which was later taken down from its site, the magazine has let slip a behind-the-scenes video which may clear them of any wrongdoing

fashionetc.com/...s-photoshop-vogue-italia-video

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Body Body Image Photoshop Reality Fashion

Though the magazine has yet to offer an explanation as to why it pulled the picture, which saw the 19-year-old Kloss popping an awkwardly contorted and muscular hip, many have speculated that the decision was sparked by rumors that the image was Photoshopped to depict an unhealthily thin body.

But as the video of the Steven Meisel shoot shows, Kloss may actually just be that flexible and lean (the latter of which may not appease those who complained that the spread glamorized an unrealistic body type).

Oct

5

2011

Skepticblog » Faux (Fox) Pas

www.skepticblog.org/...l-warming-but-it-doesnt-matter

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Climate Science Climate Change Reality Denial Postmodernism

New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:

he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.”
1 more annotation(s)...
- In the meantime, I proudly wear a badge which proclaims my allegiance to the “reality-based community”.

Oct

4

2011

Mathematics and the nature of reality | plus.maths.org

Submitted by mf344 on October 4, 2011
How many universes are there? What has made us into who we are? Is there absolute truth?

These are difficult questions, but mathematics has something to say about each of them. It can probe the physical reality that surrounds us, shed light on human interaction and psychology, and it answers, as well as raises, many of the philosophical questions our minds have allowed us to dream up.

On this page we bring together articles and podcasts that examine what mathematics can say about the nature of the reality we live in. They look at physical reality, the mind, consciousness, the emergence of life, philosophy and mathematics itself. The page will be continually updated with new relevant articles, so keep looking and get reading!

plus.maths.org/...mathematics-and-nature-reality

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Mathematics Reality Philosophy

Sep

13

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Climate Science and Politics: Still One Way Traffic

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...ce-and-politics-still-one.html

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Climate Science Policy Politics Framing Reality Data

From the outset, these [climate] scientists also brought their preferred solutions to the table in US Congressional hearings and other policy forums, all bundled. The proposition that ‘science’ somehow dictated particular policy responses, encouraged – indeed instructed – those who found those particular strategies unattractive to argue about the science.36 So, a distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.
Andrew Dessler, currently a minor celebrity in the blog battles between climate scientists and their skeptical opponents, explains that those who reject his views of the science are politically motivated:

"People who discount the science of climate change don't do it because they've read the science," he says. "The science of climate change is a proxy for views on the role of government. From what I understand, Perry's position is that he doesn't want government to interfere in private lives or industry. That means climate change — which calls for a government solution; there's no way for the free market to address climate change by itself — that doesn't fit anywhere with his political values. So he shoots the messenger."
Really? Does "climate change" call for a "government solution"? Or is it more complicated than that? And if the "science of climate change is a proxy for views on the role of government" (which I agree with), does this apply only to opponents to action?
6 more annotation(s)...
- In a recent essay Mike Hulme presents six different ways that the issue of "climate change" might be framed in terms of its policy implications.
- This open letter boldly states its framing narrative: “The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.”
  
  Fact. Nothing to challenge there.
  
  But how about this alternative?
  
  “The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions, land use changes and aerosol pollution are all contributing to regional and global climate changes, which exacerbate the changes and variability in climates brought about by natural causes. Because humans are contributing to climate change, it is happening now and in the future for a much more complex set of reasons than in previous human history.”
  
  I’m confident too that none of my climate science colleagues would find anything to challenge in this statement.
  
  And yet these two different provocations – two different framings of climate change – open up the possibility of very different forms of public and policy engagement with the issue. They shape the response.
- The latter framing, for example, emphasises that human influences on climate are not just about greenhouse gas emissions (and hence that climate change is not just about fossil energy use), but also result from land use changes (emissions and albedo effects) and from aerosols (dust, sulphates and soot).
  
  It emphasises that these human effects on climate are as much regional as they are global. And it emphasises that the interplay between human and natural effects on climate are complex and that this complexity is novel.
  
  The frame offered by the 87 Australian academics who signed the “open letter” is more partial than mine and also, I suggest, is one which is (perhaps deliberately) more provocative.
  
  It may work well if their intention is to reinforce the polarisation of opinion that exists around climate change science or if they are using scientific claims to justify a particular set of policy interventions.
- Last week Hulme visited my graduate seminar to discuss he excellent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. One of the students asked him about the reaction to his book. Hulme replied that the reaction has been largely positive and engaged, with one notable exception -- the climate science community, which has largely ignored his work.
- depends upon what you mean by "credible policy approach" and also "climate change". How you define both of these concepts will be a function of your politics and values.
  
  But the obvious answer is that surely you understand that _not responding to climate change_ is viewed by many to be a perfectly "credible" policy approach.
  
  The point of this post is that "the science" doesn't go very far resolving such disputes.
- I've called for a government role in responding to climate change (e.g., see The Hartwell Paper and TCF for specifics) ... but you won't here me saying that "climate change" or "science" calls for these solutions, because they don't.
  
  Scientists ostensibly concerned about the politicization of climate science should stop politicizing it, seems obvious, no? ;-)

Sep

12

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Risk and Reinsurance

On many topics of risk there are a wide range of legitimate points of view which collectively span a large range, and there is benefit for companies to selectively interpreting such risks in a way that is beneficial to their bottom line.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...risk-and-reinsurance.html

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Insurance Risk Climate Change Climate Science Reality

Bloomberg Businessweek has an article on the global reinsurance industry, tied to the 9/11 anniversary.
In 1888 the city of Sundsvall in Sweden, built of wood, burned to the ground. A group of reinsurers, Swiss Re among them, let Sweden’s insurers know there was going to be a limit in the future on losses from wooden houses, and it was going to be low. Sweden began building with stone. Reinsurance is a product, but also a carrot in the negotiation between culture and reality; it lets societies know what habits are unsustainable.

More recently, the company has been working with McKinsey & Co., the European Commission, and several environmental groups to develop a methodology it calls the “economics of climate adaptation,” a way to encourage city planners to build in a way that will be insurable in the future. A study of the U.K. port of Hull looks at potential losses by 2030 under several different climate scenarios. Even under the most extreme, losses were expected to grow by $17 million due to climate change and by $23 million due to economic growth. How Hull builds in the next two decades matters more to it than the levels of carbon dioxide in the air. A similar study for Entergy (ETR), a New Orleans-based utility, concluded that adaptations on the Gulf Coast—such as tightening building codes, restoring wetlands and barrier islands, building levees around chemical plants, and requiring that new homes in high-risk areas be elevated—could almost completely offset the predicted cost of 100-year storms happening every 40 years.
5 more annotation(s)...
- As with Sweden’s stone houses, all of these adaptations cost more money in the short run, but reinsurers must take the long view, and they can drag development along with them. The public, whom the reinsurers refer to as “the original insured,” should be concerned by these hints. Even when they are forced to sign all-perils covers, reinsurers are writing more known risks out of their treaties. Swiss Re publishes an annual report on catastrophe losses; since the 1970s losses have been increasing exponentially. It’s this graph that gives reinsurers pause. The God clause includes less each year because every loss event—every catastrophe—reminds them of the hubris of thinking God doesn’t have any surprises left.
- The fact that projected societal changes increase projected losses by more than projected changes in climate is not going to be surprising to readers here.
- Reinsurers, however, have no incentive to mislead. Their choices on risk, with billions of dollars at stake, are necessarily aligned with the pursuit of truth. If a reinsurer is more scared of a risk than it should be, its shareholders will punish it. If it is less scared than it should be, the world, eventually, will break it. There are rewards for politicians, corporations, think tanks, and activists who dissemble about risk. There are none for reinsurers.
  While I think that in the abstract this claim is right, I don't think that it recognizes the challenges associated with a diversity of knowledge about risk.
- Reinsurers, however, have no incentive to mislead. Their choices on risk, with billions of dollars at stake, are necessarily aligned with the pursuit of truth. If a reinsurer is more scared of a risk than it should be, its shareholders will punish it. If it is less scared than it should be, the world, eventually, will break it. There are rewards for politicians, corporations, think tanks, and activists who dissemble about risk. There are none for reinsurers.
  While I think that in the abstract this claim is right, I don't think that it recognizes the challenges associated with a diversity of knowledge about risk. On many topics of risk there are a wide range of legitimate points of view which collectively span a large range, and there is benefit for companies to selectively interpreting such risks in a way that is beneficial to their bottom line. It would only be surprising if it were otherwise. On the other hand, there are other players in the re/insurance market place for whom incentives line up a bit differently.
- On many topics of risk there are a wide range of legitimate points of view which collectively span a large range, and there is benefit for companies to selectively interpreting such risks in a way that is beneficial to their bottom line. It would only be surprising if it were otherwise. On the other hand, there are other players in the re/insurance market place for whom incentives line up a bit differently.

The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry - BusinessWeek

www.businessweek.com/...surance-industry-09012011.html

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Insurance Risk Climate Change Climate Science Reality

Sep

9

2011

Would You Donate Your Facebook Account to Al Gore For a Day? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

On September 14, Al Gore will launch the Climate Reality Project, or “24 Hours of Reality” — this most recent project will have 24 presentations, done by 24 presenters in 13 languages, each broadcast one hour after the other, representing all the time zones of the world. Al Gore will be connecting the dots of climate change, extreme weather and pollution, among other things — but the innovative thing is that he wants to harness the power of his follower’s social media accounts in order to reach more people.
Gore is asking his supporters to lend him their accounts — the Project will be posting status updates in their name, trying to reach many more people as well as start a dialogue on the subject.

utopianist.com/...k-account-to-al-gore-for-a-day

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Facebook Climate Change Activism Social Media Reality

But are there problems with this plan? Will harnessing social media seem like advertising, or does Gore have nothing to sell? Is there a reason to be worried about surrendering your online life to another person, or a corporation? Does one need to full-heartedly agree with the message before they choose to donate their account? Or is there simply nothing to worry about, and all that will be accomplished is a healthy, informative session on what could be the biggest problem humanity has ever faced?

Climate Reality

climaterealityproject.org

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Climate Change Activism Social Media Reality Facebook

Aug

28

2011

The crystallising Universe | plus.maths.org

many physicists believe that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in a block Universe and our perception of time is just an illusion. Sure, you can watch one scene in your movie morph into the next, but they are all pre-recorded on that little DVD. As for free will — well, that went out with Beta tapes.
But now, George Ellis at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is challenging that notion and trying to restore the idea that "now" is special and that free will exists with his model of a crystallising block Universe. "Free will is such a controversial thing," says Ellis, yet, "it is indeed one of the underlying things which motivated me."

plus.maths.org/...crystallising-universe

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Time Physics Free Will Model Reality

many physicists believe that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in a block Universe and our perception of time is just an illusion. Sure, you can watch one scene in your movie morph into the next, but they are all pre-recorded on that little DVD. As for free will — well, that went out with Beta tapes.
The view that the past, the present and the future are of exactly the same physical character seems to be supported by Einstein's special theory of relativity, which describes how observers moving relative to one another may disagree about the order that events occur, preventing them from defining a unique and universal now (see the Plus article What is time?). However, in his prize-winning FQXi essay On the flow of time Ellis maintains that the most important property of time is that it unfolds. The past is already written, yes, but the future contains endless possibilities. To Ellis, the history of the Universe is a film that is still being made.

"People must take seriously the fact that time does evolve," says Ellis. If the models don't jibe with our perception of reality, he argues, maybe the problem is with the models. "Some of my colleagues seem to think their models trump reality!"
5 more annotation(s)...
- In the quantum world, particles do not exist in a definite state until they are observed. Prior to observation, they are mathematically described by a wavefunction that encompasses all the possible states and properties that could be attributed to them. Ellis argues that the present is the moment when these quantum potentialities are transformed into a single observed reality. As physicists put it, the wavefunction collapses.
- In the crystallising block Universe time does not roll out quite as uniformly as film spooling out from a reel. Wavefunctions created at the same moment need not collapse in unison, Ellis points out. Two photons, created in the same instant and headed toward a physics experiment where they will be observed, may hit the apparatus at different moments. One photon would then move into the past just a little sooner than its twin.
  
  There is another pretty dramatic wrinkle in the neat line between past and present, too: sometimes, the present can influence the past.
- "What you think is the present is not yet quite crystallised," explains Ellis. In other words, the film may roll through the camera, but the image sets in fits and starts, like a Polaroid in which one smiling face appears in advance of another.
  
  The crystallising block Universe may help to describe peculiar photon paradoxes, but it leaves itself open to a major criticism: what if wavefunction collapse is not the correct description for the emergence of objective reality? There are dozens of other ways to think about quantum physics. For instance, Hugh Everett III famously suggested that every potentiality represented by a wavefunction actually comes to be — in a separate universe. In this many worlds view, fresh universes split off at every quantum fork in the road.
- Theoretical physicist Julian Barbour, based in Oxfordshire, UK, imagines how this might work if Ellis himself were performing an experiment: "According to quantum mechanics, taken at the face value of its equations, George himself is split into many different copies of himself whenever he makes a quantum measurement."
  
  Ellis, however, is far from convinced: "I just find that a fantastic thing. I simply can’t believe it!"
- Barbour also takes issue with Ellis' insistence that we can feel time flowing: "My direct experience is of change of phenomena: the images that I see change. The idea that there is a flux of time is for me merely a convenient way of summarising a vast body of experiences that typically are like me holding up, before a mirror, a picture of myself as a boy in the village in which I still live and seeing and comparing the image of my face in the mirror next to the picture."

Jul

22

2011

Rationally Speaking: Economics should not be divorced from morality

Last week, our friend Massimo Pigliucci published an essay here in which he argued for an idea I have long thought to be true: that economic considerations cannot be divorced from moral ones. Here is the appropriate passage from Massimo’s article:
“I simply do not buy the fundamentalist (yes, I’m using the term on purpose) libertarian idea that economics is all there is or that should count in pretty much all human transactions and social problems. The hallmark of a just society is precisely that it does consider issues of intrinsic rights — not just to life and property, as the libertarians would have it — but also to health, education, housing and jobs. The whole point of living in a structured society, as opposed to Hobbes’ war of all against all, is so that our lives are not going to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Which means that what [Larry] Summers dismisses as ‘social concerns’ really ought to be central to the way we structure our societies. Economic systems ought to be the servants of human flourishing, not its masters.”

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ould-not-be-divorced-from.html

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Paradigm Data Economics Reality Morality

people in several political camps, namely libertarianism and neoliberalism, disagree that economics is so closely linked with morality. They believe economics is a discussion about business and bottom-lines, not ethics. This divide is also present in political news coverage. Take this quote from Mark Caleb Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University: “Economic issues always dwarf social issues. … [The 2012 election] is shaping up to be an economically driven election with a possibility of foreign affairs entering the discussion as well.” This is precisely how most news outlets and polling organizations frame pre-election public sentiments. How many times have you heard that “people are voting on the economy, not social issues, this election cycle"?
Yet, while economic issues are in some way different than social ones — in the same way that, say, economics and philosophy are two different fields — they are also undoubtedly intertwined at many levels. At the interpersonal level, business transactions hinge on a basic sense of morality. When you purchase something, you trust that your source of information (sales person, gas attendant, waiter/waitress, Amazon.com review) is being honest about the quality of the goods offered. You also expect a certain degree of performance from the product you are buying.
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- Morality is also present in larger economic debates. Consider the question “how can we create jobs?” At face value, there might be little in this question that concerns morality. It is simply about increasing the number of jobs available to human beings. But what if I answered that the way to create jobs is to eliminate the minimum wage? Or to loosen restrictions on workday hours and factory conditions? Or to lower the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy? Or to repeal last year’s health insurance reform package? These questions all contain a moral aspect as well. Would it be right to allow companies to pay their employees however little they can get away with? Would it be right to rescind worker safety laws? Would it be right to increase the tax burdens on the middle and lower classes and allow further disparity? Would it be right to repeal legislation that increases the availability of health care?
- at bottom, the question of “what is best for the economy” is really a question of “what should we want the economy to do or accomplish?” And that is a question not of pure mathematical reasoning, but of ethical contemplation.
- Michael, several of your contentions are ill formulated.
  First, there is no substantial difference between "economic" and "social": all economic facts are social facts, and economics is a social science.
  Second, there is no equivalence between "social" and "moral" issues. There are moral issues in all fields of knowledge, such as economics, medicine, genetics, and many more.
  Third, economics has moral issues, as have other disciplines, inasmuch as it is used to guide action. It is NOT about morals inasmuch as it remains in the realm of POSITIVE (as distinct from NORMATIVE) statements.
- That bioengineering knows the way to clone a human being (a positive piece of knowledge) just as it knows how to clone a sheep, does not mean that it is morally advisable to clone humans. Likewise, the positive acknowledgement that balancing the books in Greece requires curtailing its public spending by half in the coming three months and remain there thereafter for about 20 years (a positive statement) does not mean that it is morally advisable to proceed in such a way (political and not only moral considerations may advise otherwise).

Jul

20

2011

Are social media creating the laziest generation? - CNN.com

Is social media becoming our opiate of the masses seducing us into being slacktivists, believing that simply because we make a cyber comment, we are somehow actually affecting our world? Will our generation leave a lasting legacy or just millions of snarky tweets?

edition.cnn.com/...obeidallah.laziest.generation

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Social Media Reality Slacktivism

Fake Chinese Apple Store Looks Amazingly Real

Don't be deceived by the slick marketing materials and blue shirts with Apple logos. This is not an Apple Store. It's a cheap knock-off located in Kunming, China.

These photos were taken by a pair of Americans who stumbled on this store in southwestern China. It looked like an Apple store, had display material consistent with an Apple store and the employees even believed they worked for an Apple store. But it's fake, fake, fake.

There are several subtle signs, not the least of which is that Apple does not operate a store in Kunming, that suggest this store is one amazingly realistic ripoff. One clue is the sign which has the Apple logo and says "Apple Store". And the badges which have the word staff, but not the employee names on them. And, lastly, the store itself which on close inspection looks shoddy. Craziness

gizmodo.com/...1

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Apple Simulacrum Reality Counterfeit

Jul

10

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Bad Analogy in Australia's New Climate Policy Proposal

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...-australia-climate-policy.html

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Carbon Emission Carbon Tax Climate Science Reality

Australia has released its much awaited carbon tax proposal (here in PDF). I am just now browsing through it. This analogy in the document strikes me as particularly unfortunate:

The Government has committed to reduce carbon pollution by 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020 irrespective of what other countries do, and by up to 15 or 25 per cent depending on the scale of global action.

Meeting the 5 per cent target will require abatement of at least 159 Mt CO2-e, or 23 per cent, in 2020 (Figure 2.4).1 This is equivalent to taking over 45 million cars off the road by 2020.
Well, Australia has only about 12 million cars (and 16 million total vehicles), so using a reduction of 45 million cars "off the road" to illustrate the unilateral emissions reduction goal simply illustrates the impossibility of the task.
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- In any case, at current rates of growth Australia will have 5 million more vehicles in 2020, and not any less.

Jul

6

2011

All good reasoning proceeds from prior commitments and beliefs | Nicholas Lash | Comment is free | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...ng-proceeds-from-prior-beliefs

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Reasoning Faith Belief Religion Truth Language Reality

all good reasoning expresses and proceeds from prior commitments and beliefs and relies, at every step along the way, on believing – however cautiously and critically – the testimony of others engaged in this and similar collaborative enterprises. I emphasise "collaborative" because at the heart of the inadequacy of frequently repeated accounts of the supposed incompatibility of "science" and "religion", and of the imagined conflicts between "faith" and "reason", is the failure to appreciate all our intellectual enterprises are social enterprises, projects undertaken in community.
George Steiner argued that "any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs … is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence". One supposes many of his readers found this contention bizarre. But Steiner believed there would be "no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, so fundamental as to be constitutive of the relation between word [the logos] and world".

Jun

28

2011

Fukushima babies and how numbers can lie - Boing Boing

When you think about what information be skeptical of, that decision can't begin and end with "corporate interests." Yes, those sources often give you bad information. But bad information comes from other places, too. The Fukushima accident was worse than TEPCO wanted people to believe when it first happened. Radiation isn't healthy for you, and there are people (plant workers, emergency crews, people who lived nearby) who will be dealing with the effects of Fukushima for years to come. But the fact that all of that is true does not mean that we should uncritically accept it when somebody says that radiation from Fukushima is killing babies in the United States. Just because the corporate interests are in the wrong doesn't mean that every claim against them is true.

www.boingboing.net/...fukushima-babies-and.html

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Corporation Data Bias Information Capitalism Reality

Over at Scientific American, Michael Moyer takes a critical look at an Al Jazeera story about a recent study purporting to show that infant deaths on the American West Coast increased by 35% as a result of fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown.
At first glance, the story looks credible. And scary. The information comes from a physician, Janette Sherman MD, and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, who got their data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports—a newsletter that frequently helps public health officials spot trends in death and illness.
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- Look closer, though, and the credibility vanishes. For one thing, this isn't a formal scientific study and Sherman and Mangano didn't publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal, or even on a science blog. Instead, all of this comes from an essay the two wrote for Counter Punch, a political newsletter.
- Let's first consider the data that the authors left out of their analysis. It's hard to understand why the authors stopped at these eight cities. Why include Boise but not Tacoma? Or Spokane? Both have about the same size population as Boise, they're closer to Japan, and the CDC includes data from Tacoma and Spokane in the weekly reports.
- More important, why did the authors choose to use only the four weeks preceding the Fukushima disaster? Here is where we begin to pick up a whiff of data fixing. ... While it certainly is true that there were fewer deaths in the four weeks leading up to Fukushima than there have been in the 10 weeks following, the entire year has seen no overall trend. When I plotted a best-fit line to the data, Excel calculated a very slight decrease in the infant mortality rate. Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering.

The uncanny valley is right at our doorstep | Techgoondu

Japanese, and candy company Ezaki Glico has confirmed that Eguchi Aimi is completely computer generated. She’s made a composite of facial features from the six other AKB48 members in the commercial.

www.techgoondu.com/...alley-is-right-at-our-doorstep

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Uncanny Valley Simulacrum Simulation Virtual Reality

meet Eguchi Aimi. She is the latest member of Japanese pop band AKB48, and her perfect good looks and uncanny similarities to other AKB48 members have taken the Internet by storm.

Well, no, not really.

To put things into context, take a look at the video below:

Just a bunch of kawaii Japanese girls advertising some candy, right? Looks tasty, too, like one of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. But take special notice of the girl in the center. Yes, the prettiest of the lot. Since the commercial went live on Japanese TV, she has attracted a lot of attention and a large fan base eager to learn more about her.
According to Channel News Asia, Eguchi Aimi took the best features of her real counterparts, namely Atsuko Maeda (eyes), Tomomi Itano (nose), Mariko Shinoda (mouth), Yuko Oshima (hair/ body), Minami Takahashi (outline) and Mayu Watanabe (eyebrows). Her voice was then provided by Yukari Sasaki.
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- Take a look at how the CGI was done:
  
  Astute observers have been pointing out her seemingly photoshopped qualities, so the revelation doesn’t really come as a surprise to many. To top it off, crushes on virtual girls aren’t all that uncommon in Japan or anywhere else.
- ery soon, we won’t be able to tell our reality from virtual reality. Eguchi Aimi looks pretty darn real to me, and if AKB48 and Glico had managed to pull off the ruse without anyone catching on, would they have continued using her in other promotional materials?
  
  At this rate of technological advancement, it won’t be ten years before we can see an entire movie made up of CGI characters looking like they real actors. And then what, synthetic life forms which look and behave exactly like us?

Jun

13

2011

Atheism Is the True Embrace of Reality | The Hibernia Times

Atheists recognise that we need evidence in order to come to reliable conclusions about reality and that, so far, those who claim there is a god have signally failed to provide it. And atheists care about reality: not what it might be comforting to believe, or what has traditionally been believed, or what we have been instructed to believe. And this focus on reality, far from diminishing our experience of life, as so many religious people imagine, actually makes our lives all the richer: once you have faced up to the reality that there is no evidence to suggest there is another life after this one, it becomes all the more important to live this finite life to the full, learning and growing, and caring for others, because this is their only life, too, and there is no reason to believe there will be heavenly compensation for their earthly sufferings.
An atheist life, well lived, leads to the only kind of afterlife there is any evidence for whatsoever: the immortality of living on in the fond memories of those who loved us.

thehiberniatimes.com/...is-the-true-embrace-of-reality

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Atheism Religion Reality

In practice faith is always a pick-and-mix affair: believers emphasise those bits that sit comfortably with them, whilst mostly ignoring those bits that do not, or concocting elaborate interpretations to allow them to pretend they do not mean what they actually say.
subjective experience cannot tell us anything about God. Knowing what kind of god someone believes in tells us a great deal about that person – but nothing whatsoever about the truth or otherwise of the existence of any god at all.
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- Atheism is not in itself a belief. Few atheists would be so bold as to declare the existence of any god at all utterly impossible. Atheism is, quite simply, the position that it is absurd to believe in, much less worship, a deity for which no valid evidence has been presented. Atheism is not a faith: on the contrary, it is the refusal to accept claims on faith.

Jun

9

2011

We Do It All The Time | Politics | The American Scene

Knobe goes on to argue that the answer to this question is inevitably ideological – people identify the “true” Mark Pierpont with the “side” in the conflict that they agree with. Liberals say he’s “really” gay and should chuck the religious repression. Conservatives say he’s “really” Christian and shouldn’t give in to temptation.

But those are the perspectives of outsiders. What do they know? I would wager anything that, from Mark Pierpont’s perspective, the “real” him is the one in conflict. That’s what makes his situation tragic. The desires don’t come from the devil and the repression doesn’t come from society. They both come from him.

theamericanscene.com/...we-do-it-all-the-time

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Religion Homosexuality Reality Identity Fragmentation

this is not a peculiarity to homosexuality. The woman who is a devoted mother who’s fallen out of love with her husband has a conflict. You could say that she “needs” to take care of her needs and leave him, or she’ll wind up dragging her kids down with her misery, or you could say that she “needs” to put her selfish needs aside and think of her children, and that if she does this she’ll find fulfillment within the life she has. But these aren’t advice – they are ways of making us feel better about the advice we’re giving. The reality is: she’s got a profound conflict. Her true self is divided.
whatever way you wind up jumping in these sorts of conflicts, you first have to acknowledge that the conflict is real. It’s really easy to tell ourselves happy little lies to convince ourselves that the conflict doesn’t actually exist, but we’re not really fooling ourselves. We’re getting through the day, but at a cost of escalating levels of stress and alienation from ourselves. And, as a consequence, from those who care about us.
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- When the woman tells her husband about her conflict, he’ll have to respond. That response, in turn, will help clarify for her what is and isn’t possible.
- if we experience an internal conflict, such as Mark Pierpont’s, why, unless there is a reality to the self, can we not resolve that conflict by an act of will? Why are we so constituted that we can experience that kind of conflicted self, a self that needs two things that cannot be reconciled? I don’t see how you answer that question without accepting that the self has some reality. When you say “anything that works works” that means, presumably, anything that works for your real self. Because, given that you have a real self, not everything will.
- both Wilkinson and Knobe spend much of their time thinking about how we perceive other people’s “true selves.” But it’s important to recognize that their examples pertain to situations where we are not experiencing these other selves directly, but rather mediated through mass communications. If we knew Mark Pierpont through his various changes, we would make an assessment of whether he seemed “more himself” before or after not only based on our ideology but based on our actual experience of him. If we are at all sensitive people, we’d know – whether we liked it or not – whether he seemed more “real” before or after.
- it’s worth highlighting how our intuitions can serve us poorly when we experience people in a mediated form.
- when we talk about politics, the intuitions that we bring to the game from the world of small-scale interpersonal relations can easily betray us. The guy who “seems authentic” and “makes you want to trust him” is the guy to be nervous about – because he has a kind of charisma that is powerful. He is not earning your trust; almost by definition, he’s conning you. That doesn’t mean “don’t vote for that guy” – precisely because that guy has that power, he’s likely to be more effective. It means don’t trust that this “authenticity” means what it might mean in an interpersonal context of long and stable relationships. You don’t really know who any of these guys are. The one thing you can know for certain, though, is that they aren’t who they want you to believe they are. Because they want you to believe that they understand you, personally, and they want tens of millions of other people to believe the same thing about them. And that’s just not humanly possible.

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