In my last entry I made a brief foray into a discussion of marriage. After a discussion of the subject with my grown son on the same day it seems appropriate to expand on that a little.
You may recall I stated that marriage should not be considered a social environment for sexual relationships. Well, this is news to a lot of people.
We hear a lot these days about "sustainable" (fill in the blank). I find this trend a matter of deep irony. You see, all the things we talk about sustaining are things like the environment, economic development, and any other such issue that is amenable to the centralized control of an elite few. In all the history of humankind no such enterprise has ever been sustainable for an extended period of time. The best and brightest among us are just too bloody corrupt to do good well.
This is the very essence of why we have culture. The dirty secret of culture is that it is not about what we are being told it is about. We are being sold a culture that is about entertaining adults and empowering elites. That is, by definition, an unsustainable development.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Albert Einstein was famous for his use of mind experiments, little mental models and scenarios set up to explore ideas. Let's try one here.
Imagine that you are a benign sentient microbe. You and a social network of your friends live in a human brain, each of you able to observe the actions of at most fifteen or twenty neurons. As individuals you would be able to observe the firing of these neurons. As a group you might be able to ascertain that there is an order to the "universe" of the vast organism comprised of your, and their, neurons. Would you, or all of you together, be able to detect the intelligence of the larger organism?
No. Undoubtedly you would not.
Lee Emmerich jamison
Go to: http://aimath.org/E8/
Here is described in the sort of unrevealing lay terms we can at least begin to grasp difficult ideas in the results of a pioneering study of very abstract multidimensional spaces in mathematics.
This is important because one must have an idea what one is looking at before one can really SEE it.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
To most of us, even most artists, the arts look like magic. Hence the myth of "talent" in the arts. It is easiest in the face of that general misconception to go with the flow and treat art as a form of mystical enlightenment most people will never have access to.
That 's a mistake.
Sometimes you just have to shake your head. The link below tells of a science experiment revealing that people see what they believe to be true. Duh.
It is called "prejudice". You may have heard of it. It is how we all work, even the poor, but revealing that would not have gotten you noticed on Yahoo! news.
Proof that an advanced degree is not a hedge against stupidity.
Human beings are self-aware. We not only ponder subjects such as our own existence and the nature of our finitude, we ponder our consideration of those subjects. To come to grips with the nature of these explorations we establish concepts to help us bridge the gaps between what is ponderable and what is knowable.
Such mental work starts with our earliest experiences, even with experience prior to birth. We have experiences. We seek to orient our minds to those experiences. To do so we develop cognitive structures that allow us to order our responses to sensory experience. Because we are social creatures some of these response/cognition structures are adapted to communication. We can share our adaptations to novelty and help others to develop cognitive structures analogous to those we have created for ourselves. Two major communication processes function to do this, the highly fragmented, symbolic, linguistic method, and the more fluid, but less tangible, inductive-artistic method.
Perspective is all-important in understanding a new approach to an old, but intractable, problem. It is well to remember the lesson of Gallileo's education of the Pope. From his own perspective it was so obvious he was correct that in writing his "Dialogue" on the motion of the planets he made out the character supporting the Ptolemaic position to be an obvious fool. This didn't play well with the Church and earned the scholar a life of house arrest. It probably also meant his ideas waited an extra generation to be accepted.
If one is going to be right it is a good idea to be civil about it.
From time to time I commit a terrible error and actually read someone's theory of art. What is amazing to me is how undisicplined such thought can be even among minds which presumably have some of the training in the keys to understanding. If you wish you can take a little time to see a case in point in the writings of a young philosopher named Micah Sparacio:
http://astro.temple.edu/~sparacio/artcore.html
These are the musings of a graduate student in Philosophy at a very good school on the nature of art. Given the other areas of his philosophical study, philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence, he should have the foundations of understanding. He is, none the less, clueless. This is not to his discredit. His teachers and the whole philosophical world, as far as I can see, are likewise clueless.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." Well, he said it in French but that's what he meant. How we deal with the singular way humans are that is different from the way we see every other animal being is really quite remarkable. We do seem very different. It’s an important enough point to us one might think we were a little insecure about it. The fact of the matter is, though, that a lot of our behaviors are modeled pretty well in a number of other animals, particularly in chimpanzees. The behavior of small human tribes, or small groups in large tribes (you might call them "cities") is really remarkably like that observed in chimps. These animals and some others, such as dogs and horses, may lead solitary lives but they usually do not. As a matter of fact they seem to derive a tremendous sense of purpose from the communal context of their existence. So, indeed, do we. Is thinking really the essence of being, or is there something to the jostling we experience among these inconvenient other humans that is important to being? Smart as Descartes was, and believe me he gets a lot of credit in that area, was he right?
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Very early in my career, when I was still teaching in Shreveport, one of my students caught me off guard with a question. "You can do so many things." she said, "Why did you choose to be an artist?"
I recall being uncomfortable at trying to answer, and taking a moment to understand myself. My reply was unsatisfactory. Indeed I have struggled with it ever since.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
It is frustrating to be human.
Let me tell you, briefly, a story about humility.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
A peculiar inconsistency reigns in the worlds of politics and religion. In America the religious right too frequently eschews the concept of evolution as a fact in the development of species while embracing it in the economy. On the other hand the other end of the politcal spectrum wholeheartedly endorses evolution among species while decrying it as a form of economic dynamism.
What goes here?
It is fairly simple, really. Neither side knows what the heck they are talking about.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Yesterday I wrote of a world led with prejudice and the danger of being outside the dominant mindset. This is an important issue because of a simple fact, crucial to understanding how politics and culture are shaped.
Nobody, well, no human being, lives in the "real" world.
