vistas in conceptual design: a preface on anthropic singularity

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baby, baby...

“Oh, how cute!”

“Well, it’s still a toddler. You should have been here just a few years back. Just wait a few more years.”

What is a “mind”? As it goes now, a recent Science article titled “A Mind of Its Own” is subheaded: “Novel neuromorphic chips and software should provide robots with unriveled perceptual skills.”

Forget computational neuroscience (trying to model wetware perception, which is the result of eonic biogenic self-sorting, then intelligent self-selectivity which outstripped natural selection, yet is replicably encoded in the [regulatory] genome). The Game is neurocomputational beings (with quantum computational capacity allegorized in human terms). And the meta-Game is conceptual design of computational complexity—if not conceiving autogenic algorithmicity (which must remain always susceptible to human halting).

being a zoo (or algebraic gadfly)

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When we look at a photograph, we project a third dimension (depth, “going back” “in” the imagespace). 3-space is mapped into the 2-space photo. We see this because we live in 3-space—or rather, we see within the 3-space (4-space actually, of course) in which we move and live.

But someone who was congenitally blind, then gains sight has to learn to see 3-space. You take his hand (which is so familiar to him having done to him, as he has always lived by touch and embodied spatiality) and move it toward the glass on the table. His fingers touch the glass, and he takes hold of it immediately, as he’s always done—yet now amazed that there is the glass seen at the distance that his reach knows well. (Seeing in 3-space is learned by infants, as they also learn to focus).

Suppose an ant on a plane (flat surface, not a jet). Dependent on everything being in his plane, there is no such thing as something being above or below the plane. Above and below don’t exist. (This little fiction is stipulating absurd cognitive ability with severe constraints, but what the heck...). If a circle that is positioned above the plane (to we beings who know an x, y, z coordinate system) passes through the plane, the ant sees a point suddenly emerge, which becomes two points which move away from each other, each stopping, then moving back to each other, finally becoming a point that disappears.

philosophy lives in highlands

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Habermas’ recollections on Jewish émigrés is a partial version of a chapter of The Lure of Technocracy, which will be available between March and May, 2015.

Postmetaphysical Thinking II is due in mid-2017 (German original, 2012!). And he has a big manuscript in process on the evolution of religion, he noted in last June’s interview.

One might easily forget that Habermas is a philosopher in a fully-philosophical sense, not just a political philosopher also being a public intellectual. Someone approaching the challenge of understanding Habermas’ career is met with the best paradigm available of what philosophy may strive to be. At 85, the philosopher is still actively engaged as philosopher. Very few pretend to understand the philosophical example that Habermas continues to work to exemplify. Whatever disagreement one has with particular views, his scale of recognized engagement is in small company, if having any peer.

architexture

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One might easily associate my coinage with the craft of textual layout; or maybe: writing itself as presentation—and presentation as design: presenting as a designed endeavor, a deliberateness of presenting, like a poet thinking of immanent belonging in the line that breaks aptly.

I recall David Krell’s Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (1997—so long ago) in a Derridean mood, as if the endeavor was about glyphical design in conceptuality: a glyphical fate of the trace in all perception.

summer 2014

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September 14: protean daze

Ever wonder why the old Greeks would fabricate such a god as Proteus?

I have a story about that, way beyond what They Say about a king—who so loved Helen before Troy?—who became the Old Man of the Sea who would always tell Truth, if he could be captured.

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flexible perspectivity

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I mentioned a notion of “flexible perspectivity” in my discussion of Habermas’ essay on Putnam’s “pragmatist virtue ethics,” but I didn’t introduce the notion carefully. I discussed it briefly, but that was unfair to the value I find in the notion.

Worse yet, I introduced the notion as if it was transparent, out of the head of Zeus, then mentioned more-accessible aspects later, which would better have been mentioned first (discussed in detail first). After some more preliminaries here, I'll quote all I mentioned earlier, in better order (giving it salience); and include some discussion.

radiant gravity

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Nothing that I write is a clear pointer about where I’m going, though the point (the event of writing presented) should be clear in each instance—and is, I hope, for the thing here, the trace of the event, a time-space architexture presented.

For example, all I’ve written recently about Habermas is part of drawing a provisional closure, not departing further into being there soon (though surely again later!). Likewise with Heidegger. Writers who have profoundly influenced me are part of going on—where “on,” as my pathmaking, would be my learning going forward, into undefined horizons that nonetheless are the gravities, the Appeals.

What’s worthwhile to say about the Sirens drawing Ulysses?—as if I knew Homer. (My Dad’s first name was Homer. I was born on Bloomsday, June 16, the singular day of Joyce’s Ullysses, when Leopold Bloom has his odyssey about town.)

Yet, a draw—The Draw—draws me on.

I’m surrendered to being drawn by the hill whose forward vista I can’t yet see.

I’m given to the draw of drawing, given to drawing as such.

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