Materialism quote

"But just as idealism underwent a series of stages of development, so also did materialism. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, it has to change its form." Frederich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Tools and consciousness

An article by Gautam Naik, "Arrowhead Case: Knapping Hits a Spot For Flint-Stone Fans" appeared in the 10/6/05 Wall Street Journal, on the modern-day hobby of "knapping" -- making Stone Age tools the Stone Age way. Naik quotes knapping superstar Jim Spears: "Every stone is different and every stone is a challenge... It helps me get into the minds of ancient people."

The means by which we interact with the world -- tools, processes, production, rituals -- structures and bounds our thinking. To understand a people, try out their tools. Okay it's more complicated than that, and it would be extremely difficult to forget everything we know and the way we know it -- the recreation of the past is always problematic -- but immersion into the tool culture of a people provides a peek into a different consciousness.

jd

Goethean Science

The journal Janus Head's summer 2005 issue is devoted to "Goethean science". Craig Holdrege of The Nature Institute is one of the guest editors.

jd

Policed state

First some links that came across a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility mailing list today:

Secret tracking codes in Xerox printers cracked: Xerox and other printer manufacturers print tracking codes on each document the user prints, ostensibly to thwart counterfeiting

Adobe, others slip anticounterfeiting code into apps: Applications designed to not open certain images, again "to foil counterfeiting"

FBI to get veto power over PC software?: Declan McCullagh reports that according to a recently released FCC document, "to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.'" To which Declan cautions the reader: "Read the last seven words again."

Wiretap rules for VoIP, broadband coming in 2007: Rules to ease wiretapping.

The rest of this post is excerpted from a discussion that I contributed to on "the police state". The conference took place in 1995. The complete text is no longer available:

The "police state" is not just a state form, but a description of social relations. It includes not just the obvious relationship of the state to the citizen, but also the realms of neighborhood life, social services, production, the reproduction of labor power, and culture. The "police state" describes not just the "state" as the organ of enforcing class rule, but also a "state of existence", which can be roughly described as the absence of legal protection of the property-less classes; or the rule of the propertied class unfettered by a social contract or constitutional law.

...

The contemporary police state is the form which capitalist society assumes on a foundation of electronics technology. We frequently describe this as the form that capitalists must use to preserve their property from the property-less, and to protect their rule from the new class creating itself in the wake of the new technologies. But we can also look at this in other ways.

In order to maintain high tech production, and the circulation of commodities, and hence the realization of value and of profits, the capitalists must turn to more and more sophisticated techniques. In general, all of these techniques involve the spontaneous construction of a "surveillance society", where people are monitored as workers (if they still work), as consumers (to the extent they still consume) or, otherwise, as non-producing non-consumers. This surveillance society is both needed by capital, and is also only feasible because the technology is cheap enough to allow the collection and storage of new types of data. The once-unique purview of the state -- the collection and storage of personal data -- is now possible by private firms willing to pay the minimum wage to have someone key-in data from public records, or pay for tapes from state agencies, or match information from credit bureaus, census reports and on-line telephone directories . To the degree that information commons is enclosed and privatized, communication is subject to censorship -- not by the state, but by the "owner" of the system via which communication takes place (as has happened with the joint IBM-Sears project called Prodigy) .

Contemporary production relies on fewer workers who are expected to devote their attention, creativity and loyalty to the "knowledge-intensive" workplace. The proper "attitude" is a key job requirement. At the point of production, workers are screened before employment via private firms that handle background checks, or in the near future, perhaps, via a national "work eligibility" database, and during employment by keystroke monitoring, drug tests, "smart" badges, videotaping, and computer logs. So workers must submit to the surveillance regime or be blocked from participating in the high-tech capitalist economy.

After the workday, consumer profiles are created via purchases at the grocery store, credit card purchases, loans and mortgages, drivers license information, calls to the "National Psychic Network" -- that is, via any of the expanding list of activities that leave a data trail. Companies, because of increased competition, shrinking markets, the need to be more efficient in marketing, (or as entrepreneurs, creating new commodities in the form of various kinds of mailing lists) are compelled to collect and utilize this data to survive in the contemporary business climate. This "data shadow" can be accessed in turn by employers or the state. For the non-producing non-consumers, their data shadow is different -- it exists in the welfare and police data systems. People are categorized and classified, and some effectively filtered out of the high tech economy, by what Oscar Gandy, Jr. calls "the panoptic sort".[Oscar Gandy Jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, 1993; See also, "Consumer Profiles and Panopticism," proceedings of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Chicago, 1994; Computer Underground Digest, available in the comp.soc.cud newsgroup on the Internet; "Computers and the Poor", CPSR Newsletter, 1993; and "Workplace and Consumer Privacy Under Siege," Macworld, Special Report, 1993.]

Capitalism in the age of electronics means both the end of privacy, and the extension of privatization, as further reaches of human activity are commodified in the search for profit. With the end of privacy, comes the end of legal protections like the right not to self-incriminate (the data shadow does not know how to keep its mouth shut, and laws illegalize such a broad range of human activity). With privatization comes the conflict of civil and human rights with property rights. Compelled by the demands of the high tech economy, capitalism can take no other form that the "police state."

jd

Creative Commons

Here is a clear description of the Creative Commons license.

Although not confronting the logic of "intellectual property", the license does provide a convenient way for creators to flow around existing law. Perhaps in that way the Creative Commons concept serves to undermine IP.


jd

Predictive markets

Found this on Marty Kearns' fine Network-centric Advocacy blog, a reference to Yahoo's technology prediction market, Yahoo Tech Buzz. Prediction markets are based on the notion that crowd thinking in many cases is more accurate than "expert" thinking. James Surowiecki popularized this idea in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (see earlier posts on this blog). John Brunner also had something like this in his classic and remarkably prescient 1970s sci-fi novel Shockwave Rider.

The Yahoo market uses NewsFutures engine. See their "A Simple Example" page for how these markets work.

"Market" is accurate in the sense that people trade "shares" that have some either real money value (as in the case of the Iowa Electronic Markets political futures market) or play money value as is the case with the Yahoo Tech Buzz market. The notion is that the "market" only works if the participants have something at stake (presumably something scarce and desirable, like real money). In the case of play money markets, this might be reputation or desire to win or "to be right" or "not be wrong". I wonder if the structure of "market" is necessary for such a mechanism to work -- could there be a predictive commons? Surowiecki argues that for crowds to be "smart", they need to be diverse and the members independent, otherwise you get herd behavior. The market by definition assumes the separation between participants on the basis of conflicting (self) interest. But the positing of a "self" is a philosophical assertion, and "self-interest" a political position. Perhaps some sort of collective-interest expressed through the individual, the struggle of internal contradiction as opposed to "self-interest". Hmmm.

Research indicates that these markets can be more accurate predictors than a room of experts. Marty's blog calls for one for environmental issues. An open source version anyone.

jd

Richard Lewontin NYRB article

Richard Lewontin, co-author of The Dialectical Biologist, has a review of a couple recent books on evolution in the Oct 11, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books. In "The Wars Over Evolution", he covers a lot of ground.

He unmasks creationism dressed up as "intelligent design" ("if the living world is too complex to have arisen without an intelligent designer, then where did the intelligent designer come from?").

He gets to the spring of creationism -- the social and psychological dislocation resulting from the technology revolution and globlization are driving a pummelled and bewildered people into a soothing story of love and redemption:

What is at issue here is whether the experience of one's family, social, and working life, with its share of angst, pain, fatigue, and failure, can provide meaning in the absence of a belief in an ordained higher purpose. The continued appeal of a story of a divine creation of human life is that it provides, for those for whom the ordinary experience of living does not, a seductive relief from what Eric Fromm called the Anxiety of Meaninglessness...

He also defends Darwinism from those who would make it into more than it is. He concisely summarizes the fundamental tenets:

Darwinism is a population-based theory consisting of three claims. First, there is variation in some characteristics among individuals in a population. Second, that variation is heritable. That is, offspring tend to resemble their biological parents more than they do unrelated individuals. ... Third, there are different survival and reproduction rates among individuals carrying different variants of a characteristic, depending on the environment inhabited by the carriers. That is the principle of natural selection. The consequence of differential reproduction of individuals with different inherited variants is that the population becomes richer over generations in some forms and poorer in others. The population evolves.

He challenges the notion of directionality or progress in evolution ("evolutionary biology is not, in fact, committed to progress"):

[T]he modern empirical science of evolutionary biology and the mathematical apparatus that has been developed to make a coherent account of changes that result from the underlying biological processes of inheritance and natural selection do not make use of a priori ideas of progress... So why does evolution not result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world? Wouldn't that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is that the environments in which particular species live are themselves changing and, relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse. So most of natural selection is concerned with keeping up.

Lewontin swiftly dismisses sociobiology, memes, evolutionary psychology and other attempts to overlay Darwinism onto social processes:

"We would be much more likely to reach a correct theory of cultural change if the attempt to understand the history of human institutions on the cheap, by making analogies with organic evolution, were abandoned. What we need instead is the much more difficult effort to construct a theory of historical causation that flows directly from the phenomena to be explained."

Good stuff.

jd

Random quotes

"The flood control equation is the sum of many parts, and to view only one or two of those parts without consideration of their relation to the whole is to invariably reach a badly flawed conclusion." Yazoo (Mississippi) Delta Levee Board

"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there." William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

"The ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies ... I shall call knowledge... The elements in poetic diction which must conduce to it are, as we shall see, metaphor and simile... A little reflection shows that all meaning -- even of the most primitive kind -- is dependent on the possession of some measure of this power. Where it was wholly absent, the entire phenomenal cosmos must be extinguished. All sounds would fuse into one meaningless roar, all sights into one chaotic panorama, amid which no individual objects -- not even colour itself -- would be distinguishable." Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

"We have learned from Saussure that a human language is structured not so much as a collection of terms, each of which possesses a determinate meaning, but as a complexly ramified web, wherein the knots, or terms, hold their specific place or meaning only by virtue of their direct or indirect relations to all other terms within the language. If such were indeed the case, then even just a few terms or phrases borrowed directly from the vocal speech sounds of other animals would server to subtly influence all the ratios of the language, rooting the language, as it were, in a particular ecology, a particular terrain." David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

jd

P2P and Human Evolution

Michel Bauwens has written an interesting piece "Peer to Peer and Human Evolution": "peer to peer as the intersubjective dynamic at work in distributed networks, and how it is creating a third mode of production, peer production, a third mode of governance, peer governance, and universal common property regimes."

There is quite a bit there -- p2p economics, p2p politics, even p2p spirituality. Hopefully after I have had a chance to look through it I can offer some substantive comments.

For a weekly newsletter that includes comments on Michel's manuscript, as well as lots of interesting links and bits, see http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

jd

More pattern recognition

Maybe there's a pattern here. I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. He references "apophenia" (see the 8/30/05 post below), a term which, I like to think, I came across on my own, by as much accident as web crawling and googling can be. Not that it matters -- inspired by, learning from, borrowing, building on the borrowed, cross pollination. A quote from Marshall McLuhan in "Media and Cultural Change" (in Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, 1995, BasicBooks): "If the business of the teacher is to save the student's time..." How development is done.

For example, Gibson (publish date 2/03): "Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, [Parkaboy, one of the characters] says." Ray Kurzweil, quoted in Steven Gibson's Emergence (publish date 8/02): "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations... Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry."

No surprise -- themes? memes? circulating. Cultural echoes. Resonance. The "quality of the time" expressing itself.

On a separate track (but really, how separate can it be?) I am also reading David Abram's remarkable The Spell of the Sensuous (more on this in a future post I hope). In one section he discusses the impact of the phonetic alphabet on consciousness -- references to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy among others. So me digging out the book referenced above, and then coming across this (bear with me through the extended quote):

[Harold Innis] changed his procedure from working with a 'point of view' to that of generating insights by the method of 'interface,' as it is named in chemistry. 'Interface' refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of 'symbolism' (Greek 'symballein' -- to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. This interplay of aspects [as is likelier to happen in conversation or dialogue -- jd] can generate insights or discovery. By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction.

Following an interesting observation that the process of transferring data, information, knowledge to computer tape -- he was writing this in the early 1960s -- required people to look at the knowledge structurally -- to understand the form of the knowledge: "This has led to the discovery of the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition."

And then McLuhan quotes from Kenneth Sayre's 1963 Modelling the Mind:

Classification is a process, something that takes up one's time, which one might do reluctantly, unwillingly or enthusiastically, which can be done with more or less success, done very well or very poorly. Recognition, in sharp contrast, is not time-consuming. A person may spend a long while looking before recognition occurs, but when it occurs, it is "instantaneous." When recognition occurs, it is not an act which would be said to be performed either reluctantly or enthusiastically, compliantly or under protest. Moreover, the notion of recognition being unsuccessful, or having been done very poorly, seems to make no sense at all.

Wheee!

jd

Après Le Déluge

Political power is exercised through social networks. Yes individuals make history, and yes under specific conditions, but never alone. History, inasmuch as it is made by humans, is always made by humans organized -- networked -- with others.

The contest over the re-building of New Orleans is underway. As always the question is, in whose interests? Not whose individual interests, but whose class interests? And the contending forces will be represented or expressed by networks of individuals, sharing common values and goals. In most cases the contest will play out within a broader arena of class interests -- the contestants share a common interest in the supremacy of private property, the extraction of maximum profit, the maintenance of basic existing class relations -- but the how being up for grabs.

How a real class contest might be fought is a much more interesting question. The hurricane and flood are providing a real opportunity. The shock at the stark display of absolute disregard of the country's ruling class for the poor; and the profound disillusionment with the government -- its tax-breaks for the rich, its oil war, its abandonment of responsibility to provide for the general welfare -- creates an opportunity for a new politic. But without the networks in place, networks with a coherence around goals and vision, the opportunity will recede as suredly as the flood waters.

It is not unfair, or exaggerated, to call the ruling class a "ruling class". They are networked (perhaps better to say there are many networks, at different layers, regions, sectors, etc, inter-networked), and generally are conscious of their goals and vision. A telling article in the September 8, 2005 Wall Street Journal (see the Common Dreams repost), titled "Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future", describes a representative of one such network.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

The owners and regional managers of the New Orleans economy live in the same neighborhoods, vacation at the same resorts, and interact in the same social circles. They run the city. And this network is moving to implement its vision of New Orleans after the flood. "[Anton O'Dwyer] says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin [the Mayor of New Orleans] to begin mapping out a future for the city."

One of the sub-texts in the talk of the future is if it is possible to re-make the city without its poor. "The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss [a wealthy local businessman] says, with better services and fewer poor people. 'Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,' he says. 'I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out.'"

There are other forces competing to steer the future of the region. An article in today's (9/15/05) WSJ reports "with as much as $200 billion beginning to gush out of Washington for the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone, the fight already has begun over who will control the spending and make critical decisions about the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast." The future funds may be controlled by a federal body a la the Tennessee Valley Authority, usurping the state and local governments. This of course does not mean that the local networks are necessarily out of the picture -- their means of exerting control over the situation may more easily be accomplished via a Republican Party-controlled federal agency than a Democratic Party-controlled state or local authority. Which of course doesn't mean that the Democrats would re-build the city with democracy in mind, only that they are answering to a different network of capital.

It appears, as has been the case historically, that the poor are a political pawn in the maneuvering, with no clear organization or network articulating their class interests. Class cuts across race, albeit not evenly, and there is no reason to expect that the black owning class will represent the class interests of the poor, whether black or white, except in as much as they can rely on the votes of the un-propertied to maintain their political position. For example, from today's article:

On Monday night, nearly 30 black business leaders from New Orleans and Baton Rouge met at a church in the capital city to discuss ways to make sure that all New Orleans citizens are included in conversations about how to rebuild the city.
"What makes this city so great is the gumbo mix of people," says Alden J. McDonald Jr., chief executive of Liberty Bank & Trust Co., one of the nation's largest black-controlled banks, and chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. "Everyone has to be at the table."

The rhetoric of inclusion implies that all classes need to be represented, but this is unlikely, no? Simply because the poor, by-and-large, while loosely "networked" through churches, gangs (who stepped up to provide some semblance order at the Convention Center), neighborhood social circles, etc., are not organized for political power, and so the political leadership can so easily be usurped. This is not because of any inherent failings among the property-less, but because the ruling class deliberately works to undermine independent expressions of class power that emerge in spite of the poverty of resources, education, etc.

This raises an interesting dimension of networks. What about the space between the nodes and links, the negative space or anti-matter of networks? In this case, these would be the dis-connected. The people-without-value (in the Marxist sense of the term that is -- no use-value as worker, and no opportunity to realize the exchange value of their labor power). Of course un-connected in one sense, but connected in other dimensions -- economically as consumer without real choice or politically as voter without real choice. Or culturally as spring of innovation and desires. Or historically, as agent of mayhem, rebellion or revolution.

jd

Tech workers / stepping up

Technology workers -- programmers, sysadmins, database developers, site designers, data entry folks, cable-layers, etc. etc. -- have stepped up in different ways to bring some network structure to the chaos of information swirling around in the vacuum of leadership following Katrina. Some notable examples:

The Katrina Help Wiki, based on a model developed for the tsunami aftermath, and based on wikipedia technology.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project. For some background on this, see the Network-centric Advocacy press release on same.

The Public Web Stations project that provides an elegantly simple way of quickly setting up Internet kiosks to help evacuees connect to the online world to use the resources above. See the discussion on the Linux Desktop Forums for posts on where and how these webstations are being used.

jd

Hurricane Katrina and networks

The Gulf of Mexico area, or which New Orleans is the de facto center, is a major node in energy extraction, refining and distribution. Per Daniel Yergin in an opinion piece in the September 2 Wall Street Journal:

The full extent of the Gulf of Mexico energy infrastructure is hard to grasp. Altogether, about 800 manned platforms, plus several thousand smaller unmanned platforms, feed their oil and gas into 33,000 miles of underwater pipelines, a good part of which eventually reaches shore at Port Fourchon at the mouth of the Mississippi. That adds up to 35% of domestic oil production (including oil from state as well as federal waters) and over 20% of our natural gas coming from off-shore. Add to that the 10% of U.S. oil imports that flow in through the same corridor, plus the string of refineries and pipeline networks that sprawl along the Gulf Coast, and you have a complex that constitutes our single most important energy asset.

In addition, New Orleans is the major transfer point for North American grain floating on barges down the Mississippi River. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 2 that Cargill alone had 300 barges holding grain, salt and fertilizer stranded on the lower Mississippi. Each barge is capable of holding 55,000 bushels of grain, as much as 60 semis.

"By closing the New Orleans ports, Katrina effectively eliminated the cheapest way for American industries in the nation's heartland to do business overseas. Some economists figure that the competition of the river-barge industry with the railroads and trucking companies saves companies roughly $1 billion annually.

Agriculture-industry officials say other U.S. ports simply don't have the capacity to absorb the two billion bushels of grain that move annually through New Orleans. "The ports in the rest of country are already at capacity," said one federal official.

Other damaged ports in the area compound problems. According to an article in the September 1 New York Times, Chiquita Brand's facilities in Gulfport, Mississippi, which last year handled about 25% of its banana imports to the United States from Central America, were too damaged to receive shipments.

The distribution problems in particular highlight the interconnectedness of the global economy, and vulnerabilities that loom large in very specific areas. The port of New Orleans, like that of Los Angeles and elsewhere, is a super-connector in the global economy. (See an earlier blog item for more on the L.A. port; also, "Networks and Globalization"). The global transportation system is not a particularly robust network. The cost (both financial and political) of adding new ports (i.e. nodes) capable of handling today's super-tankers and super-container ships means that the failure of any one node (whether by hurricane, dirty bomb or strike) can have a powerful impact, as options for re-routing traffic are limited.

In the energy distribution system, the Straits of Hormuz represents the biggest chokepoint (15 million barrels of crude pass through it every day, 10 times the daily production of the Gulf of Mexico platforms). The scramble to build redundant and/or politically secure pipelines and tanker ports in the Middle East, Caucasus and Balkans explains much about global politics.

Daniel Yergin points out in the article cited above that since 1973, U.S. strategy for energy security has been securing sources of oil, and policy from support for Israel and the Saudi royals to the 1991 Gulf War and the takeover of Iraq relate to this goal. A new security model is needed, Yergin argues:

But a host of developments -- from terrorism to the California power crisis to the East Coast blackout to Katrina -- have emphasized a return to what might be called the World War II model of energy security, assuring the security and integrity of the whole supply chain and infrastructure, from production to the consumer. (The gravest energy threats during World War II were when Nazi U-boats came close to cutting the tanker pipeline across the Atlantic that supplied U.S. military forces). This more expansive concept of energy security requires broader coordination between government and the private sector; more emphasis on redundancy, alternatives, distributed energy and back-up systems; planning and pre-positioning of vital supplies ("strategic transformer reserves" for electric substations); and methods that can quickly be applied to promote swift market adjustment. As with the August 2003 blackout, this crisis underlines the need for modernization and new investment in the energy infrastructure that supports our $12.4 trillion economy.

That is, expanding the energy network in various ways to provide robustness. The same could be said for other transportation systems. An interesting challenge will be that, while historically the government has provided the coordination and funds to ensure that infrastructure is modern, adequate and maintained, in the era of neo-liberalism that support is withdrawn. Just as the levees of New Orleans were left to sink or wear out or whatever exactly happened to them, because the money disappeared in tax cuts to the rich or went to pay for the war in Iraq, so the general infrastructure of distribution is more or less ignored. This provides a crisis not just for the worker/consumer/unpropertied, but also a crisis for sectors of Capital that require the infrastructure for the extraction of surplus value and profit. In the absence of a broad class-based movement for change, the differences within the capitalist class provide the engine for politics. So it will be interesting to see what comes of Katrina in the halls of Congress.

jd

New Orleans ranting

New Orleans after the deluge ranting:

-- The black faces on the rooftops, on the streets, in the Superdome. Looks like race, but really it's the hard reality of class in America.

-- The totally inept response of city, state and federal government to the disaster. (a) why do I bother to pay taxes? (b) doesn't the Navy or the Marines have landing craft, boats, etc to pick up people from rooftops? Or to deliver food and water? (c) the U.S. seems to get its armed forces to places quickly with no trouble (d) why a "Federal Emergency Management Agency" if they can't manage an emergency? (e) remind me again what "homeland security" is?

-- Aaron Brown on CNN (and Kyra Phillips too) going on about "looting" in the wake of the disaster. With no food or water, and no prospect of food or water from the inept State, what would any sane person do? Worship the sanctity of private property and die in three or four days? Or...

-- The helicopters flying over the city should have been waving signs saying "Sorry, your relief effort is in Iraq". Some 35% of Louisiana national guard troops and 40% of Mississippi national guard troops are in Iraq.

-- How far the privatization of social caring has gone -- the president and governors and mayors telling people to not look to the government for help, instead go to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army. And send money to those organizations. Because your tax money went to Iraq; which leads to...

-- It's not like no one imagined this could happen. The New Orleans Times-Picayune had repeatedly run stories about the tenuous state of the aging levee system and what might happen if a major storm struck the city. See, e.g., Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?. Following 1995 flooding, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, to address the problems. But, per the story just cited:

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps [Army Corps of Engineers - jd] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

-- The communist impulse among most people to help their neighbors, to pull together, to share and support, to violate property rights to ensure human rights; vs. the capitalist impulse to "stop looting", protect property, and either abandon the people-without-value outright, or shove the police state stick farther up the collective ass of those who survive.

-- And don't forget those who make money off of this: the credit card processors are scraping their 1 or 2 or 4 percent off of the top of every donation. Good news for the shareholders of donation processor Kintera: stock is up 17% since Monday!

-- So when do we start talking about the destruction of the environment? The loss of wetlands to mindless development? Global warming resulting in rising sea levels and extreme weather? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

One could go on. And on. And on.

In network terms? New Orleans as transportation node. As energy production node. As cultural node. Seriously disrupted, the consequences will slosh through the economy.

Or 1.3 million human nodes in the greater New Orleans area disrupted, thousands lost. A disturbance in the Force.

jd

(Thanks Jon for additional bullets).

Perceived connections, patterns, networks

Perceived connections, patterns, networks. Any consideration of networks, especially as they relate to consciousness, thought systems, history, etc. would be incomplete without some consideration of apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena." (Robert Todd Carroll, The Skeptic's Dictionary, 1994-2005.)

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld "hits", most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena. (Carroll)

The human brain is a powerful pattern-recognition machine, evolved over the millennia. Ray Kurzweil: "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These facilities make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons." (quoted in Steven Johnson's Emergence). We evolved to see connections.

And there is some research that indicates that dopamine levels in the brain enhance pattern recognition. In a New Scientist article, "People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none." ("Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry", New Scientist, July 27, 2002.)

To the skeptic, Carl Jung's "synchronicity" is an example of apophenia. Synchronicity suggests an acausal connection between phenomena, that two apparently unrelated events reveal something. (Again, see The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on Jung for an unsympathetic view.)

Saying the world can only be understood empirically, and that empirical tests are the basis of knowledge, is problematic without taking into account the role of the brain in organizing sense data into recognizable phenomena. Inasmuch as consciousness has evolved (and continues to evolve), that science has passed through various "paradigms" since Copernicus and Galileo, and that there are "qualitative" modes of scientific practice in addition to quantitative or deductive modes suggests at least that we keep an open mind about ways to knowledge.

In this vein, one would have to say exactly what "meaning" or "meaningfulness" is, in light of coincidence and metaphor, before dismissing Jung. (Per Agent Dale Cooper: "When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention." or "Coincidence and fate figure largely in our lives. Ah! Damn good coffee!" I could swear I remember him saying "Never laugh in the face of coincidence", but that could be false or true-but-clouded memory.)

The ability of the brain to see patterns, or connections, or to make connections or leaps between two seemingly unrelated concepts -- e.g., "all the world's a stage" -- is a basic, perhaps universal, human device for exploring and understanding the new, the complex, the difficult, and perhaps the unfathomable.

Along these lines, see the Journal for Patterns Recognised: "The Journal for Patterns Recognised is a journal dedicated to the study of pattern recognition. We can recognise sheep in clouds, faces in 4 well-placed rocks and a tree in a mathematically produced set of lines. This ability to recognise familiar objects in formlessness is said to be the engine behind imagination. Therefore we understand pattern recognition gone wrong as the well from which human culture, roughly defined as the framework of socially accepted interpretations of the real, flows." For more, see the background essay, "Why a Journal for Patterns Recognised?!".

The "perceived connection where none exists", a pattern recognized where no obvious or detected material interaction is taking place between the two nodes. But a connection erupts in the mind, rich in meaning maybe, revealing something. Something has happened.

This past spring, under the Kennedy Expressway on Fullerton Avenue here in Chicago, someone observed that the water dripping down the concrete underpass had created a form like Mary, the Mother of God. There is something inherently un-testable (and what does it say about someone who wants to test it?) about images of the Virgin Mary anywhere, but regardless, the pattern recognized becomes in itself a material force as people act on the idea. As word of the Virgin of the Kennedy spread, hundreds came to pray and leave flowers, candles and other offerings. "Faithful Call Image On Underpass Wall 'Beautiful' Others Call Image Salt Stain." A few weeks later, police charged Victor Gonzalez with defacing public property by writing "Big Lie" across the image with shoe polish. Police then asked the Illinois Department of Transportation to paint over the image to prevent further trouble.

There is a network of interactions, let's say, independent of human consciousness. Say salty melted snow running off of a highway, rusting steel, dripping down concrete. Molecules interacting, the workings of ice and salt, bonds breaking and re-forming, themselves influenced by Winter yielding to Spring, by the motion of Earth around the Sun. (Is there not something wonder-full even in that process?) And then there is the interconnection of consciousness with sense perceptions, the sparking of recognition of a pattern on the concrete, yielding meanings, shared by some, contested by others. Another network, this one of ideas, thoughts, understandings. Why not the Goddess revealing herself, exerting herself, in the most mundane, dismal, anti-Nature of places, the expressway underpass, the literal underside of another network, the infrastructure of Global Warming and Planet Destruction? Or maybe the pattern recognized is "just" illusion, or dis-illusion. Prompted by the hunger of the dispossessed who beg under that underpass, and the workers crawling along Fullerton in perpetual rush-hour Chicago traffic on the way home from another day of mind-dulling, soul-stealing work; the hunger for a Sign that they might achieve a future worth living in? Or does it say that that which you long for is nothing, void of meaning, a stain? Which is the Big Lie?

Something in the "perceived connection", even if it is not agreed upon by all parties.


jd

More on maps

Related to the post yesterday about maps -- I brought along a GPS receiver, compass and topo maps on a trip to the Colorado canyonlands a couple of years ago. I wanted to work on reading maps, but it quickly became clear to me that experiencing a place through a map is not the same as experiencing the place. Certain areas of the brain fired when looking at the grids and topo lines and the numbers and drawing lines on the map, trying to convert the mapwork into geological features. But the map could not come close to the rich sensuousness of sitting and listening, hearing, smelling, seeing the place.

This is the difference between the network diagram and the process (I hesitate to even use "network" as synonym for "process", as "network" suggests that a derivation or abstraction has already taken place). "Knowing the process" versus knowing the map.

But... Last February my brother and I were tramping around the Desert National Wildlife Refuge north of Las Vegas. He could look at a topo, and project a hint of what would be there. He could read a map. In its proper place, the map was a powerful tool. In itself not a complete knowledge of what was being represented, but contributing a piece to the puzzle of understanding.

jd

Open access to state-collected geocode data

Making maps is a kind of networking activity. Or seeing networks is a kind of mapping activity. Accurate maps have been one of those state-sponsored activities critical to social development. One might argue that all geo-information is a public good (inasmuch as all intellectual activity is, in that it always takes place in a social context, i.e. interconnected with everyone else throughout time). If that is too much to accept, at lease state collected geodata is a public good -- after all you paid for it. Geodata -- the raw material of maps ("information with a spatial component" per the site mentioned below) -- is a source of power: where development is taking place, where the environment is being destroyed or thriving, where voters are and are not, etc. It is the quantitative data used to get a snapshot perspective of what is happening, towards developing effective strategies for change. Knowing the network as a first step to transforming the network.

The Open Geodata project is an effort to pry this public data out of the hands of just the state agencies (UK-focused for now it looks). In addition they sponsor projects to create copyright-free street-level maps, a kind of popular mapping initiative. The project is part of the Open Knowledge Foundation Network.

The Open Geodata project has a manifesto which they invite you to sign.

jd

Here's an interesting abstract: "Four correlates of complex behavioral networks: Differentiation, behavior, connectivity, and compartmentalization: Carving networks at their joints"

[The full paper is available here.]

The authors identify two properties of networks -- "selected"-ness and "behavioral". The first property is present if the network developed or evolved under "selective pressure" (e.g., as in "natural selection", where some features would tend to persist because of environmental or other pressures). The second property is present if the network demonstrates "network-level behaviors".

Per the authors, networks with these properties are similar in four respects:

Differentiation: The networks accommodate more types of structure through a variety of types of nodes

Behaviors: Networks demonstrate a greater repertoire of behaviors through an increased number of lower-level behavior types

Connectivity: The networks tend to maintain a consistent network diameter as they grow, via increased connectivity

Compartmentalization: For efficiency sake, the networks tend to become increasingly "parcellated"


jd

"...Merleau-Ponty said that we live 'out there among things,' in a kind of communion with the world: 'there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.' [apply appropriate gender transformations - jd] Through their descriptions of pre-reflective experience, then, the phenomenologists disclose human existence as a network of relations; our being is not locked up inside us, but is in fact spread throughout this web of worldly interactions in which our existence continually unfolds." -- Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. 2002. State University of New York Press. (p 11)

How to know the network?

"Network science" has been pitched as an alternative to "reductionist" science. That is, after dissecting processes into ever smaller units, and trying to understand the process by understanding the units, "knowing" the process still eluded scientists.

Now we are close to knowing just about everything there is to know about the pieces. [an absurd claim, no? - jd] But we are as far as we have ever been from understanding nature as a whole. Indeed the reassembly turned out to be much harder than scientists anticipated. [!] The reason is simple. Riding reductionism, we run into the hard wall of complexity. (Barabasi, Linked, p6)

"Network science" then comes to the rescue, revealing the laws of self-organization: per Barabasi, complexity has a "strict architecture", and its name is network.

One might argue though that this is just a deeper reductionism. Instead of just the parts -- now called "nodes", we add another abstract fundamental, the "link" to represent the richness of interconnection (reducing that to a bundle of discrete threads, each of which can be examined and presumably understood). Simple mechanics are enhanced to include another order of properties. Concerning ecology, a discipline that is heavy on interconnection, William Brinton writes "ecological perspectives within the sciences often only strengthen reductionistic directions, since they provide important details about relationships, which in turn help 'fine tune' the existing mechanical models." ("Environment as Data versus 'Being': Is Goetheanism possible in the West?", http://www.ifgene.org/brinton.htm)

In a harsh critique of "complexity", Steve Talbott argues that the more abstract theories and observations become, the more they become about nothing. "The problem with a scientific method based on maximum generalization and abstraction is that the more it succeeds -- that is, the more general and abstract its results become -- the shallower they tend to be. They tell us less and less about the particular contexts we wish to understand... In our drive toward generality and abstraction, we end up with what we ask for... We will get a theory that 'connects' diverse things, but in the process loses the things we are connecting." ("The Lure of Complexity", http://www.natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic7/complexity.htm)

How much simpler can the abstraction "network" become? The network diagram is to the actual process or phenomena as a stick figure is to a painting, or really, to the phenomena represented in the painting.

In general, modeling and abstraction are useful tools and part of the dialectical process of coming to understand phenomena, assuming that the researcher makes the return trip to the phenomena. Goethe's assertion that "the phenomenon is the theory" is a powerful insight. The abstraction is not the phenomenon.

A phenomenon cannot be understood as a "network". The "network" reduction is an abstraction. Certainly (I think) the "network" reduction, as part of a bigger project of isolation, focus, and then re-assembly, re-contexting and re-imagination, can lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Ultimately, though, "knowing the network" is a process of imaginative participation in the phenomenon. In part this is because the "complexity" of the interactions can only be grasped imaginatively, and in part because the network is a process in time, developing, changing, growing or dying or both, and likewise only graspable in the imagination. "Knowing the network" is a challenge that requires a holistic approach, a holistic scientific method.

Okay, so I am struggling through the ideas above. See The Nature Institute's website for more on what has been called a phenomenological approach to Nature, or holistic science, qualitative science, Goethean science, etc.

- jd