Mental Music Machinery

(for Marvin Minsky)
[better audio]


I've been thinking a lot about music lately, trying to come up with a theory of catchiness. That is to say, despite my notable lack of actual musical talent or knowledge, I have a tendency to latch on to particular songs and replay them in my mind throughout the day, grooving to the best of my limited abilities. This doesn't make me any different from everyone else, but something about the way I grasp or don't grasp music makes it seem theoretically interesting. At least to me. What is going on in my head that these artifacts of pop culture should entrain and engross me?

The very difficulty of grasping music is part of its attractiveness. Music is or ought to be the paradigmatic case of embodied cognition. Musical knowledge (certainly the kind I have) is not so much representational as enactive. I don't "know" the tune, I couldn't write it down, but I can replay it. That is, I've built inside my head a little music machine, capable of recreating some of the structural elements of a song, all without knowing much about it in any symbolic sense. Over the years I've learned a few tricks, like ways to count beats, that I can use to produce a traditional symbolic representation of some aspects of music. but it's laborious and it has nothing to do with the way a catchy song catches. I don't "know" these songs in the sense that I know a fact, but in some other way.  What that way is is a bit of a mystery, but I envision as a little clanking machine I've cobbled together that is capable of crudely reproducing the core of a tune.

These machines generally are not purely mental; they tend to involve bodily movement (sometimes called "dancing" or "spazzing back and forth") and/or vocalization. In other words, I can't just replay them in my head; muscles need to be involved.

So once I get the core of a little music machine in my head, I enjoy letting it go, and sometimes it goes off on its own without me willing it (that is practically the definition of "catchy"). I envision it as a complex collection of roughly-built mechanisms, something like the mechanical sculptures you see in every public space these days, but more energetic and involved with itself, so maybe a cross between one of those and a Friden calculator, with a touch of Arthur Ganson. A rattling contraption at best, but fun to watch, to participate in.

There is a bootstrapping quality to learning one of these things, because repetition makes the machine work better. The cognitive slipperiness of the music contributes the the pleasurability of these repetitions, because (a) the act of repeating always seems like a bit of a feat, and (b) the results are always a bit of a surprise. This may be essential to catchiness, which (and here I'm getting into more music theory than I really know) tends to involve swing or other elements that play off a standard mechanical metric.

The things that seem catchy to me seem to be characterized by a strong rhythm and a certain way the lyrics snake through the beats in unexpected ways. There, now, as soon as I start to try to describe anything musically specific I get hopelessly tangled in the inadequacy of language. Actual musicians do have ways to talk about this stuff of course.

This train of thought was partly inspired by Marvin Minsky's essay Music, Mind and Meaning, which has a section entitled "Sonata as Teaching Machine". But where Minsky's theory is mostly structural, I'm trying to get at some other qualities of music besides its formal relationships.

Music's metric frames are transient templates used for momentary matching. Its rhythms are "synchronization pulses" used to match new phrases against old, the better to contrast them with differences and change. As differences and change are sensed, the rhythmic frames fade from our awareness. Their work is done and the messages of higher-level agents never speak of them; that is why metric music is not boring!

So I'm fully in sync with the first part of this idea, that one of the functions of rhythm is to provide a frame for comparing different things (phrases) in a common context. But he loses me on the second half, partly because we are talking about different types of music and different types of listening. In my type of music, the rhythm does not fade from consciousness but is ever-present, and the higher-level structures are maddeningly elusive.

Again, this might be a function of my idiosyncratic tastes (I am a rhythm guy; while I can appreciate other aspects of music like beautiful harmonies, they don't have this entrancing quality for me) and/or the primitive state of my musical abilities. I like to think that my ignorance may be a strength in thinking about this stuff. As to why I or anyone else should be interested, well, there is a sense in which musical entrainment may be at the core of human society. Maybe music is not some weird side effect of the human mind but something fundamental to what we are. And if so, my crude models of it may be getting at something more fundamental than those that employ sophisticated theory.

Anarchy of Mind

Thanks to reader bhyde's recommendation I've been reading George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, which is on the whole excellent. I can't quite believe that I never ran across it before, since I did my graduate work on somewhat similar issues. But while I explored all sorts facets of the control of behavior by networks of loosely-coupled goal-directed units, I was innocent of economics or utility theory, so missed out on some things.

The underlying idea of Ainslie's work is that we prefer more immediate rewards to longer term ones, and that the discount curve for such preferences is hyperbolic rather than the more rational exponential curve predicted by standard utility theory. The hyperbolic discount curve leads us to preferences that are not consistent over time, and thus to a process of "inter-temporal bargaining" between different versions (or parts) of ourselves.

The phenomenon of akrasia -- acting against one's own better judgement and values -- has been recognized for millenia, and has its most obvious manifestation in the form of addictions and the failure to overcome them. Ainslie extends his scope way beyond that, however, and attempt to explain everything from scratching intolerable itches to empathy using his framework. I'm not completely convinced, but I probably need to make another pass over the book to fully understand the theory.

Most interesting to me, he posits that the need to manage intertemporal relations between parts of the mind are the root of the self itself. Mental phenomena like will and selves results from attempts to build internal structures that constrain and rationalize divergent preferences. The structure of the person mirrors what we know of the structure of social institutions:

The historic difficulty of specifying what the self consists of doesn't come from its superfluousness, but the fact that it's a set of tacit alliances rather than an organ. The logic of limited war relationships naturally creates a population of cooperating processes, a fringe of outlaw processes, and a means of determining which will be which. And since limited warfare is conducted among individuals as well as within them, we can observe some of its properties in interpersonal examples.

Societies settle disputes within legal systems. Some depend on legislators...who lay down procedural principles. They've been the model for conventional allegorical theories of intrapersonal governance. But the most successful legal system in history, the English common law, has no lawgiver and no written constitution, only a tradition...

Like the common law, this process doesn't require an executive function to steer it. Nevertheless, a person's efficiency at developing personal rules s probably ncreased by executive processes....Thus "ego functions" may be learned on the bass of how they improve intertemporal cooperation.

Ironically, this picture of the person mirrors what our picture of a corporate hierarchy has become...people in corporations don't blindly follow orders, but act only when they're confident of each other's commitment to act. Executives don't function effectively by rationally analyzing facts as by finding facts that make good rallying points.

(p. 98-100)

All this is very reminiscent of Minsky's Society of Mind, which also had a large focus on competition between different parts of an individual's mind. Both theories paint a picture of the self as radically discordant, a network of semi-independent processes whose coordination is not given, but has to be achieved. However, Minsky focused more on cognition and mechanism and less on utility and reward.

Ainslie writes in a highly compressed style that is sometimes difficult to follow. His ideas raise more questions than they answer (for instance, they suggest ways to re-think some standard psychological ideas like the Freudian superego, authoritarian personality characteristics, and "disorders of volition" like depression). And when I read this kind of stuff I always worry a little bit if it is psychologically harmful -- given the effort we put into constructing coherent selves, subverting that effort by pulling the curtains aside and revealing the backstage machinery seems to entail a risk of spoiling the show. But these caveats aside, I found this book extremely worthwhile.

Here's a musical accompaniment:

Ultramaterialism

The word "ultramaterialism" has been rattling around my brain for a few weeks. I came up with this while trying to characterize the worldview of a certain class of thinker, exemplified by Minsky, Dennett, and most recently Gary Drescher in his recent book Good and Real. These people could all be called materialists or naturalists, but in some sense their mission seems to be pushing the materialist view farther than it has gone before. Minsky was one of the inventors of AI and his late work has been devoted to finding ways of breaking down minds into networks of small machines. Dennett has applied philosophical analysis to consciousness and free will, and Drescher's work in a way synthesizes the philosophical rigor and problem space of Dennett with the technical rigor of an MIT-trained engineer.

Drescher's book, which I'm still digesting, might epitiomize this tendency. In his strict mechanist worldview, there are essentially no selves, no freedom of action. The flow of time is itself illusory (we're really just embedded in an unchanging spacetime), and hence your life is not only deterministic, it's already happened.

Strictly speaking ultramaterialism is just the same as naturalism, which seems to be growing as a movement among non-academics as an "applied philosophy". So it may not make sense to introduce this a new term. But the connotation of ultramaterialism is different. Naturalism sounds rather nice and innocuous -- we think nature is rather pretty and friendly, made out of trees and scenic vistas (although this is a recent development in human history). But hardcore materialism is actually a rather disturbing philosophy. It has at least the possibility of being deeply anti-humanistic, since it holds no privileged position for persons, and doesn't believe in autonomy or moral agency.

This is not to say that the ultramaterialists are antihumanistic, or bad people. On the contrary, they are all seem like pretty decent folks, and they are making sincere efforts to preserve human values in the face of the rather pitiless mechanical universe they are exploring. But to some extent their decency is independent of their scientific thinking -- it's ungrounded, or emerges from somewhere other than their philosophy. Drescher tries to derive ethics from his pure materialism -- I don't know if he succeeds, haven't processed that part of his book yet.

The problem I see with ultramaterialism is not that it is wrong, but that it is too impractical. Say Drescher's scheme to derive morality is successful -- will it have anything to say to practical everyday ethical decisions? What about answering questions such as the morality of abortion and end-of-life decisions, which hinge on rights and what exactly counts as a person? I don't really expect that a pure materialist philosophy can say much to these questions, although I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But even if it can, it's too much work to derive ethics from complex utilitarian calculations, as opposed to the alternative of taking them from cultural institutions (like religion). Culture is a bundle of evolved heuristics, and most people, even bright people, are forced to rely on their culture for both moral principles and factual matters -- they can't really take the time to figure everything out for themselves.

While I'm not religious myself I think I can appreciate the fear that religious people get when presented with the materialist worldview, which cheerfully undermines both tradition and intuition, leaving only machinery behind. Drescher has taken on the task of reconstructing ethics in a mechanical universe, but to believe him you have to follow a fairly complicated chain of reasoning. Not only that, you have to trust that other people will follow the same reasoning, a scary and dubious prospect.

That's why I prefer my term to naturalism -- it makes it clearer that there is something radical going on here, something disturbing. I doubt it will catch on.

Transpersonal metacognition: it's on!

I gave myself the fake title "Chair of Transpersonal Metacognition, University of Saskatoon" (on the right column, until I get tired of it and change it) in a fit of amused randomness, but metacognition turns out to be a real thing, if not quite real enough to have its own department yet. I shouldn't be surprised. If I could only take my offhand inventions more seriously maybe I really would be occupying a loftier chair than my decrepit used Aeron.

Anyway, there are over 63K articles returned by Google Scholar with the word "metacognition" in them. The linked one above has lots of intriguing references, like to a study that showed that telling subjects that free will doesn't exist led to more cheating; and research that suggest that metacognition is located in an area of the brain called Bordmann area 10. All of that sounds fascinating but it somehow misses the main point (or at least the point that interests me), it buries the lede, hides the jewel within a bushel of plain oats. That point is that "metacognition" is not some random phenomenon to be isolated and studied, it is very close to the fundamental quality of being human. Somehow turning it into a serious (but ordinary) academic subfield seems to drain it of interest. That is no doubt a problem with me, not with any of the actual work or people working on it.

Metacognition improves upon the completely broken notion of "consciousness". Consciousness is looking at roughly the same phenomenon but in such a way as to make it mysterious. "Consciousness" suggests a magically transcendent form self-knowledge; "metacognition" by contrast suggests that we know ourselves in almost exactly the way we know everything else: partially, murkily, filtered through inadequate representations and built-in biases. We are foreign to ourselves, we take ourselves for objects just like anything else.

What about "transpersonal"? The deep idea there is that our self-cognition and our other-cognition is essentially the same, or at least generated by the roughly the same processes, and we build up our self-image by observing others, and by observing others observing our self. That is to say, our metacognition, even of ourselves, is "transpersonal", which is just another way of stating the conclusion of the preceding paragraph.

Some philosophical works that touch on this: Paul Ricoeur's Oneself as Another, and (in a fairly absurd way) Daniel Kolak's I Am You. Douglas Hofstadter has been obsessed by it in one form or another for decades and in some ways has already exhausted the topic, now that I think about it. Other computational thinkers have tried to create models that embody reflection, introspection, or self-modelling (Brian Cantwell Smith, Jon Doyle, John Batali, Marvin Minsky). But those never seemed to lead anywhere…although apparently there have been AAAI symposia on metacognition, which I am somewhat sorry I never went to (and will likely never, having once more derailed myself off the research track).

This blog post may be a personal apotheosis of meta for me, since it is about (meta) to my own relationship with both the idea of metacognition and the academic instutions of knowledge that study (are meta to) it. And of course that last sentence was one more level of meta, and so is this one.

[And to go meta on a different axis: I'm starting a new job tomorrow so it is likely that this blog might take a turn towards being more about software development and other mundane matters. Or it might get even more random as I use it to vent all the parts of my mind that do not have a professional outlet. Or it might stay just the same, or stop altogether for awhile.]

[And one more: checking my archives, I see I was thinking along much the same lines back the last time I was in the midst of a job change. Scary! Or predictable? I guess it's scarily predictable.]

Romantic Science (or, something missing is missing)

This review by Daniel Dennett of Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon is interesting in itself, but one passage leaped out at me, where he attempted to delineate a split between reductionists and holists, or Enlightenment and Romantic science:

There are no entirely apt labels for the opposing sides of this gulf… Reductionism, fie! Holism, fie! …“Enlightenment” versus “Romanticism” is pretty close, as the reader can judge by considering what the following team players have in common; on the Enlightenment side: Darwin, Turing, Minsky, Dawkins, both Crick and Edelman (in spite of their antagonisms), Tibor Gánti, E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and both Raymond Kurzweil and me (in spite of our antagonisms). On the Romantic side are arrayed Romanes and Baldwin, Kropotkin, Stephen Jay Gould, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Stuart Kauffman, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine, Rupert Sheldrake, and the philosophers John Haugeland, Evan Thompson, Alicia Juarrero, John Searle, ... Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel.

I’m not sure Varela and Gould would appreciate being lumped in with Rupert Sheldrake, and they aren’t around to defend themselves, but never mind. I suppose another label for the gulf would be greedy mechanistic reductionists on one side, vs. those who have some qualms about it. The qualms might be similar, they probably all stem from a sense that viewing minds and organisms as machines leaves out something important – the “aching void” that Dennett refers to. But the things they choose to fill the void aren’t all the same, which is why the lumping is inappropriate.

Romantic science is a recognized thing, but that wiki page makes it seem like a purely historical phenomenon, whereas Dennett recognizes as a living force today. Most remarkably, he says that Deacon’s book has caused him to shift his views in the Romantic direction, to the degree where he is “re-examining fundamental working assumptions”. That I guess is a pretty big deal from someone as prominent as Dennett and someone so identified with straight-ahead materialism.

It reminded me of a similar-but-different dichotomy I came up with the other day, between what I think of as mainstream science, roughly the same as Dennett’s first group, that is, mechanistic and reductionist, and people like Haeckel, D’arcy Thompson, Rene Thom, Buckminster Fuller, Christopher Alexander, and Adrian Bejan whose book instigated the discussion. This group, which probably also includes Prigogine, tend to be more obsessed with form and geometry than mechanism, which gives them a somewhat marginal quality, even when they are obviously right. Their tendency to reinvent metaphysics from the ground up also tends to make them marginalized, even crankish, although their very real achievements undercuts this. I’d say this is a cousin or sub-family of Romanticsm, and driven by some of the same underlying forces. Alexander especially makes this very explicit, that his entire work in architecture, aesthetics, and metaphysics is driven by a need to make a place for what he calls “the quality of life”, which has been exiled from the mainstream mechanical universe.

I guess I need to read Deacon’s book, but my sense is that this dichotomy is never going to be solved or go away. Science by its nature takes a depersonalized (or more precisely, de-subjectivized) view of the universe. Attempts to re-graft subjectivity onto the results of science always seem forced and unsatisfactory. The work of the Romantics, valuable though it may be, has its value in design philosophies or moral philosophies or something else that is on the borders of science but is not itself science. That’s one reason it is attractive, most of us aren’t practicing scientists and are hence are more interested in the consequences of scientific results to our standing in the universe than in the science itself.

Moment of Totality

Eclipse of the Heart

So I went to see the eclipse in central Oregon, in the company of 30000 or so hippies at a music festival, kind of a lighter weight version of Burning Man (same esthetic, less extreme in weather and participation practices). Not sure how much I belonged there, of course – even more so than BM, the crowd is dominated by the young, the beautiful, and the partying. But for some reason I feel a pull towards such things, and the conjunction of the eclipse and the festival was irresistible. I took my son along since he has inclinations along those lines -- here he is posing next to Ken Kesey's old bus which was on display:

The eclipse itself was as wondrous and magical as anything I've ever seen. It really made me viscerally aware of standing on a planet. There were tears in my eyes, and the same was true of many others there. I'm not even sure why – it's just astronomical bodies moving according to predictable physical laws, so what's the big deal? It's a rare event, but why should it be an emotional event? In my case I don't think they were tears of joy, or sadness – more like tears of connection, a feeling that despite the constant forces of isolation and alienation, by being part of this event I am hereby demonstrably connected to the heavens and to all the other watchers as well.

That is to say, it was a ritual. To quote myself: " ritual, broadly speaking, exists any time humans come together around some shared focus of attention." An eclipse is perfect for this role, because it is rare, overwhelming, and universally accessible. The large-scale workings of the cosmos, usually taken for granted, produces a spectacular reminder of itself. For one brief moment everything is different and everyone's attention is shared and everybody knows everybody else is paying attention to the same thing as well. And because this event is a function of the mechanical workings of the universe rather than any human creation, it is mercifully free of political implications – all factions in the culture war will put down their weapons for at least two minutes. Not that we can't impose some cultural meanings on it – it's a metaphor of death and rebirth, most obviously, but I saw something else there.

Something Else

While waiting for the cosmos to do its thing, it occurred to me that a festival and an eclipse have some deep structural similarities or metaphorical resonances. A festival is a short-lived period in which the normal order of things (work, money, politics, etc) is replaced with Something Else. In a solar eclipse, the sun (identified in myth with authority, reason, and order) is temporarily obscured and replaced with something dark and strange. Both are soon over and people and universe go back to their regular lives, perhaps changed by the experience.

So what is this Something Else, this alternative order that festivals manifest? I don't think words (or at least, my words) are capable of characterizing it, because in its essence it resists characterization. Part of its nature is resistance. It is has definite religious qualities (not a very original observation). It's too easy for me to dismiss it as nonsense, a puerile mess of shitty new age and hippie thinking, but I am going to try to take it seriously, at least as seriously as I'd take any other religion that I don't practice but appears to provide a matrix for an interesting community and culture.

What are some of the foundations of this religion (which I guess I will call festivalism)?

• monism (all is One, everything is connected)
• love (whatever the One is, it is fundamentally benevolent and loving )
• individualist self-expression (in theory at least, although actual self-expression seems to be within a fairly limited range as one would expect)
• tribal (subcultural – they constitute a particular community that offers an alternative to mainstream culture)
• anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian (mainstream culture is toxic; hence the need for oppositional culture)
• shamanistic (in the sense of emphasizing journeys to spiritual realms; usually with the aid of drugs; in pursuit of healing)
• indigenous (believes and tries to preserve and use (some would say appropriate) the knowledge of indigenous people)
• physical skills (people devote themselves to "flow arts" such as fire spinning or juggling, yoga, dance, or sheer acrobatics)
• play:

\

• transformative (that is, all of this activity adds up to a revolution in human consciousness; that it constitutes a vanguard of a quiet revolution)

I also want to say that there is kind of an emphasis on visual and geometric thinking rather than symbolic/linguistic. There is a certain lack of critical thinking, and even a distrust of language and reason, perhaps because they are tools of the enemy.

And all of these qualities together compose a critique of mainstream culture and a proposition for an alternative. That last proposition seems quite overblown, but it is kind of essential to the whole package – all of this foolery is in pursuit of a better world, all this devotion to self is not merely for the self. It reminds me that there was a cultural revolution in the sixties, which had a great transformative impact on culture but almost none on the fundamental structures of social power. This crowd seems like they didn't get the memo that that revolution was a failure and are keeping the dream alive. And why not? It may be that the ideas are worthy but that actual change takes a long, long time.

Brain-damaging ideas

A couple of ideas I encountered struck me as really bad, but I was in the right mood to consider that maybe they might actually be useful, when considered from a different angle.

On our first night I wandered into a small performance tent and heard a duo playing a bunch of weird instruments including digeridoo and antler-bone flute. One of their songs was a paean to "radical self-love", which immediately set off my bad-meme detectors – could there be anything less radical than self-love, a quality which humanity does not seem to lack and which to me implies infantalism, passivism, and stasis (since if you love yourself you will feel no need to change or improve yourself)?

On the other hand – I'd just been reading a book by a Freudian so I was primed to believe that most of our misery is caused by our superegos, introjected bits of cultural machinery devoted to criticism, forbidding, and negativity. And if the Freudian solution to the problem is endless and unsatisfactory talk therapy, maybe a more radical solution was called for, one that simply overthrew all that stuff by declamation. Self-love is radical because the world tells you (makes you tell yourself) that you are unworthy of love, or that love is dependent upon adult currencies like status, money, and power. Challenging that, declaring yourself loved despite all the ways that you might seem to suck, is a radical act. I can sort of see it as the spiritual foundation needed for an actual radical rethinking of society – what could the world be like if we didn't hate ourselves most of the time?

Unfortunately upon getting home and googling it appears that radical self-love is (a) a mere self-help movement and (b) aimed exclusively at women, so doesn't seem to be too much there for me – not radical in the sense I'm interested in. Still there is something suggestive about the phrase. Anarchism (radical politics) is overly motivated by fear and hatred of authority, maybe if it was combined with radical self-love it could prove to be more robust. Also worth noting: the concept appears in Rousseau as amour de soi, a sort of pre-civilizational self-love that is contrasted with amour-propre, a more relational kind of self-love that depends on the opinions of others.

On another occasion, I was getting water from a public spigot and a couple of old hippies started chatting me up and informed me that the past and future were illusions and only the present moment was real (spontaneous metaphysical conversations are a common thing at such gatherings). This seemed extra-dumb considering we were in the midst of a festival organized around a phenomenon that had been precisely predicted years before it actually was to happen. But – it's a fairly common belief among mystics and it was the topic of an early Grateful Dead song, so there's that. As is my practice, I tried to find an interpretation or state of mind in which that statement would feel true .

There is indeed something special about the present moment. It is where the self is, the only part of the universe that can be directly apprehended. All those other moments are filtered through a haze of memory and representation, but the present is present. It may not be the only real moment, but it definitely has some quality that the other ones don't.

At least, that is how it appears to an embedded consciousness. From a physicist's point of view, all of spacetime is equally real, the flow of time and change is illusory, and there is nothing special about any particular moment. But I am not a physicist, certainly not in my daily life. The physicist's view of reality is in a certain sense incommensurable with or inimical to lived experience. These village elders were telling me in essence to ignore the learned rational scientific models of reality and pay attention to my actual experience. Which seems like a good thing to be able to do, at least temporarily.

Marvin Minsky used referred to these sorts of thoughts ("all is one" being canonical) as "mind-destroying ideas" – that is, ideas that were not necessarily wrong, but led nowhere, rather than to learning a better rational understanding of the universe. I think that's a bit overblown, these ideas don't quite destroy the mind, unless you take them too seriously, which I'm not about to do. Instead they seem to be aimed at subverting certain modes of rationality, creating spaces for the apprehension of the aspects of reality that are not well suited to language. That seems like it could be worthwhile.

Totality

As the events (eclipse and festival both) recede in memory, they don't become any less real, although my consciousness of them does, rather like a dream – it's a week later and I can feel myself struggling to recreate or at least remember the mental state I had at the time. It kind of works. But the point of a ritual is participation, not remembering. Everything is distinct from its representations; rituals especially so. So I can't very well describe what I was going through at the time, but from the current vantage it seemed like a point where everything – humanity, cosmos, time, timelessness, and my personal concerns – came briefly together. It may be that they are always together but it takes a special event to make that fact obvious.

[Last two photos by Jacob Avanzato --  many more here]

[Addendum: really tempted to retitle this:

Civilization and its Disco Tents #RuinABookTitleInOneLetter

(@mtraven) September 1, 2017

]

Tempus fugit

A while back I had the unusual pleasure of meeting someone in person that I met through the blogosphere -- Venkatesh Rao, proprietor of the Ribbonfarm blog (and now hitting the big time by blogging at Forbes). That sort of thing often doesn't go well, but in this case it did, we had an invigorating conversation. I hope he won't mind me saying so, but he feels like a kindred spirit, from his notions of being an "illegible person" (and thus difficult to categorize), to his use of ideas from narrative theory in his book Tempo: Timing, Tactics, and Strategy in Narrative-Drive Decision Making.

Tempo is a small book which is about too many different things; many of them some of my own favorite topics: conceptual metaphor, narrative, decision theory, enactment, situatedness, Minsky's Society of Mind theory. Again, I'm in complete sympathy with the author, because I too can't write anything without a couple dozen different ideas and approaches creeping in. In a way it reads like a proposal for a much longer book, a grand work of synthesis that could be called something like "The Temporal Structure of Action". But perhaps he's not in a position to write a longer book, or doesn't want to, or maybe nobody reads monumental tomes anymore. But that seems to be what he's trying to get at:

I define tempo as the set of characteristic rhythms of decision-making in the subjective life of an individual or organization, colored by associated patterns of emotion and energy.

Although I don't think this is made quite explicit, what struck me most about this concept is that it blithely crosses the boundary between agent and environment. Tempo is a property of the situation, and is equally objective and subjective.

The most basic decision-making skill is adapting to the tempo of your environment, and setting your own pace within it... 

[an analysis of the task of driving as an example] 

...Driving graphically illustrates the four main skilled behaviors that constitute the overall skill of timing: merging, going with the flow, pacesetting, and disrupting.

That last gives you a feel feel for the book. It's mostly a collection of temporal patterns, or attitudes toward time and action. Like pattern languages elsewhere, I find I have a dual reaction: yes, these all seem like useful ideas in a sort of cookbook-y way, but where's the theory behind them? What unifying principle lets you declare that these are the patterns of reality and not others? That's not a fair question in this context, because rather than presenting a rigorous or pompous philosophical system, Tempo reads somewhat more like a self-help or business book, urging readers to come to grips with the temporal nature of their world.

Also among the ingredients in this stew is a dollop of military theory, which is an area I'm almost totally unfamiliar with. But it fits in well, since matching your actions to a ongoing fluid situation is obviously something armies have to be good at. 

Anyway, this book is hard to categorize, hard to classify, and hard to locate, in keeping with the author's idea of illegibility. I put it somewhere in between the land of academic cognitive science, management theory, and self-help. Although the style is totally different, it also seems to have something in common with books on meditation, since that too is a way of redirecting attention to the temporal nature of reality.

Firing up the Emotion Machine

Marvin Minsky has passed on, to use a phrasing I feel pretty confident that he՚d dislike. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, so according to him there is nothing to pass on, no spirit to live on beyond the body. Let՚s just say his machinery gradually broke down, as they all do, and eventually ceased to function. He՚s rumored to have signed up for cryogenic preservation, for what that՚s worth, so there is the possibility of the machinery coming back into operating condition at some time in the future.

But whatever spirit animated him does live on, in the hacker culture that grew up around MIT and has since kind of taken over the world. Many people built that culture, but Marvin was at the core of the restless inquisitiveness, pragmatism, skepticism, and general disrespect of established institutions that characterizes it.

Everyone else who embodied this spirit gave their own twist to it, and perhaps Marvin՚s own special version is now lost until the digital resurrection. It almost doesn՚t matter. Marvin I think was somewhat disappointed, even bitter, in his later years, because the field he founded wasn՚t taking his ideas as seriously as he felt they deserved, and was going in directions he viewed as unpromising. If I could have had a last conversation with him, and felt presumptuous, I would tell him not to worry about any of that. The important part of who he was made it out into the world, embodied in the vast number of people he influenced.

And Marvin՚s own words and works live on. There՚s a collection of 150 or so video clips of him holding forth on the history of AI, his personal story, and the intellectual milieu he lived in and generated. His daughter Margaret assembled a beautiful web presentation of his paper Music, Mind, and Meaning. There is plenty of Marvin left in the world.

Marvin was brilliant in numerous ways, an accomplished inventor, mathematician, and musician aside from the work on artificial intelligence he is best known for. But his big trick was to face squarely the mechanical nature of the human mind and not be alarmed by it. Indeed, he found it rather delightful and intriguing. This put him at odds with standard-issue humanists, which suited him just fine. But Marvin himself was not in any way inhuman, far from it. He was an extremely warm and welcoming individual, and always willing to engage with anyone՚s open mind.

He was I suppose a reductionist, but to label him that is to reduce his own complicated way of thought to a single-word slogan. And that was one kind of reduction he did not practice. His other big trick was to know that there is no one big trick to the mind, that single-idea solutions like logic or bayesianism are insufficient, and that building a mind requires the complex orchestration of multiple mechanisms. Society of Mind was itself structured as a cooperating network of very specific ideas for mechanisms, making the form match its content. He was an extreme fox on the Isaiah Berlinfox/hedgehog scale (while John McCarthy, a co-founder of AI who was more fond of logical formalism, might be his counterpart hedgehog). So he tried to take intractable concepts like selves and consciousness and “reduce” them to a complex interaction between mechanisms:

“The idea that there is a central I that has experience is a typical case of taking a common sense concept and not realizing that it has no good technical counterpart, but it has 20 or 30 different meanings and you keep switching from one to the other without even knowing it, so it all seems like one thing…Consciousness seems very mysterious and unphysical if you don՚t know how it works, like when Houdini or Penn and Teller make an elephant disappear, then you say “this is not physical, it՚s impossible”. When you know how the magic trick works, the sense of wonder goes away, although you still might remember how it puzzled you once.”

His life could be seen as a battle against the idea that understanding how something worked in any way diminished it.

It was truly a privilege and a gift to learn from him. I was far from an ideal student, and went off in directions he didn՚t really approve of. I was consumed by the specifics of the notion of “agent” that he developed – a subpart of the mind with its own machinery, goals, and ability to act – and tried to understand exactly what agency consisted of, what it meant, how it was deployed as a metaphor in technical talk in general. When Marvin wrote a a follow-up book, the The Emotion Machine, he decided to drop the agent language in favor of the more neutral “resources”. I guess he was unhappy at how people inferred from the agent metaphor that these components were full-fledged minds with sophisticated reasoning and representations of their own, in which case the theory didn՚t really explain anything.

This may have been sound tactics but I think it was a strategic mistake. The question of what agency is and what machinery could underlie it is important, and lack of good ways to think about it is responsible for some of the confusion in current discourse around the idea of superempowered artificial intelligences.

Marvin was a mathematician (albeit a very nonstandard one) and mathematicians have the job of pulling eternal truths into the temporal processes of life, cognition, and scholarship. Computation itself – an idea that he helped define – is also a way of connecting the timeless and the temporal. His time to be active has come to an end, and you can look back on his life and see how he was a creature of his time, how he learned from the great minds of an earlier time, and how he passed on his knowledge to the generations that followed. All of whom had their own visions, colored by their own times, yet retaining and transmitting some fragments of what was learned from their teacher.

Time marches on and cuts us all down eventually, but some part of us is timeless. Not godlike or soullike, Marvin wouldn՚t have any of that, but perhaps there is some quasimathematical pattern that our mechanisms embody and that precedes us, outlives us, and connects us.

[More people remember Marvin. My own mentions of him over the years, here and on Ribbonfarm.]

Blogyear 2019 in Review

The blog is obviously close to death, but somehow refusing to die. Two posts this year, barely.

I՚m doing just as much thinking, and presumably have about the same level of somewhat-blogworthy ideas as I always did. But the shape of the media landscape has changed. It՚s weird because I never really thought of this blog as part of a trend or movement, but I started it when blogs got started and it died when blogging as a medium died. As someone who generally feels out of step with everything, it՚s kind of strangely pleasurable to find myself part of a wave, even if I only noticed it after the crash.

The Minsky book came out with an introduction I wrote (I got the gig on the strength of this earlier blog post), which gave me some momentary kvelling opportunities. Then shortly thereafter his name got ensnared with the Epstein/MIT sex scandals. Eeesh. (I mostly resisted commenting on this sad situation, but here՚s my thoughts).

That was a blow, and it wasn't the worst of last year, not by a long shot. It՚s been a rough one.

I՚ll close it out with some thoughts from some of the weirder neighborhoods of Twitter:

Ego is the mind overfitting to its own history.

— Sport of Brahma (@SportOfBrahma) December 24, 2019

The year is 20XX. Crime is not just legal, it is mandatory. The only currency is photographs of water and the last remaining company, Capitalism Corp, is hoarding them all. Only one man can stop them, and his name is John Motorcycle. There’s just one problem: he’s a computer.

— Emma (@emmadaboutlife) December 16, 2019

The body is the API of the soul.

— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) February 10, 2019

instead of a new year's resolution, consider articulating a new year's resignation; for example, I am resigned to the violent passage of time, the waste of my mind, the endless winter

— neotenebre (@ctrlcreep) December 31, 2019

Counting the Omer: Tiferet: Beauty, Integration

As usual when I try to write about this abstract metaphysical stuff I find my mind flying to the opposite pole of where it is supposed to be headed. So if this week was supposed to be about integration, I instead thought about all my unintegrated tendencies, one of which is exploring this religious nonsense. Is my mind a chaos of divergence? Well, yes, but I like to think that at some level it does all fit together into something coherent, which I would hesitate to label beautiful but perhaps there's a conceptual elegance to be found there. If I've gained anything from too many decades of programming computers, it's a sense for that sort of thing, for what is required to capture a lot with a little. And that seems to be closely linked to integration, because given the limited capacities of the human mind, increasing the elegance and power of its conceptual apparatus is the only way to extend its reach. You can't integrate things without a powerful representational framework.

Of course, that's not really the type of integration I'm supposed to be meditating on. It's more about having an integrated character, a self that's a whole rather than a loosely-bound collection of tendencies. Again, my natural tendency is to the opposite, I am fascinated by thinkers like Minsky and Ainslie (and Buddhists perhaps) who highlight the fragmentary nature of the mind, the lack of a real self.

That's all very well, but the fact remains that no matter how fragmented the infrastructure of the mind might be, there's a need to have at least a fictional coherent unified self, for social purposes, for moral purposes, for simply managing a life. The self and God are almost exactly the same kind of fiction, and they may be equally necessary. The God of the Bible himself seems to be a radically un-integrated character, at one moment loving, the next angry, both omnipotent and jealous, clearly a product of multiple authors. Yet at some level those authors are writing about the same (possibly fictional) thing. God hangs together no better than we do, but like our selves does nevertheless have some sort of coherence.

The idea of integration suggests holism, an idea that has hovered around the background of my thinking, a somewhat flaky and mysterious alternative to mechanistic reductionism. Gregory Bateson may have had the most coherent version of this idea, but even in his relatively lucid writing it appears as something too profound to be thought about in any clear or rational way. Holism has faint overtones of religion, and like religion it just won't go away.

So, holism is the (unsupported) faith that the universe is in fact integrated, and that some of the entities within it reflect that integration by being wholes themselves: organisms, ecosystems, whatever. This is one of those things that seems to be a glowing and resonant truth to some people, and nonsensical to others. To these cheerful mechanists, holism and soulism are just illusionary artifacts that ought to be dispensed with by clear-thinking folk.

As usual, I can't quite put myself squarely in one camp or the other but have to oscillate between them. I am thus unintegrated, but only because I seek an even greater integration, one that leaves nothing out. The obvious hopelessness nature of this quest is what drives me to religion, which seems to be the only human construct even remotely capable of containing such longings. Science is great, but it is not up to that kind of task, and is usually wise enough not to try.

Programmer, debug thyself

Back when I was in graduate school thinking about AI and Minsky's Society of Mind, I had vague notions that this stuff would be useful for practical psychology -- it could actually help people to make them aware that they are a collection of disparate agents with divergent goals. I thought about making software that would let you visualize and model your own agents, but never really took the idea anywhere.

Well, here's a programmer named Phillip Eby who has morphed himself into a self-help guru, with ideas that if not derived from SoM are pretty much completely in tune with it.

Now, when I say you're just a subroutine and that your animal nature is the kernel, this doesn't mean that we are robots or machines or that we don't control our actions. Far from it. I mean, however, that we are deluded when we think we directly control our actions, and therefore ascribe intention to our actions that doesn't exist.

Why does anyone do anything?

In fact, we frequently do things for reasons that are entirely opaque to us, and then make up reasons later to explain them, because nobody wants to admit that they don't know why they did something. Nonetheless, none of us know, because it's not in our process space to know why the kernel switches in this process at this time, and that process at another time. We can reverse engineer things, and we can use our "supervisor calls" to inject new programs into kernel space, sure, but we don't run in kernel space and we never will.

And yet, we all mostly go around pretending as if we did run things in our mind and body, which then leads to all sorts of screwed-up thinking - "delusion and ignorance" as the Zen Buddhists call it. We mistake kernel notifications for our own thoughts. We think our actions somehow reflect on us, when in fact they may reflect nothing more than a poorly-written script that the kernel is running. This is like trying to eat pictures of food: it might fill you up, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.

Well, this is all good stuff. But does it work? My resistance to self-help is extremely high, and when he starts talking about Self 2.0 like this:

About a month and a half ago, I pulled off the most successful hack of my own mind, ever. You could call it a personality transplant, or maybe an identity theft. It was so successful that it almost seems wrong to say that I was the one who did it, because the "I" who actually performed the hack isn't there any more, and this "I" is someone different

that's when I balk, and this quote from Dostoevsky comes to mind:

Now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and only an idiot can make anything of himself.

That's me, an Eastern European underground man condemned to live in California with sunny self-improvers.

Oh yeah, and the other thing that makes me less than fully enthusiastic is his offer to vacuum up to $2500/year out of your pocket for his advice and insight.

The Infrastructure of Intention

So I am starting a new and rather different job tomorrow. In preparation for that, I have been ruminating on an topic for the last few weeks, trying to turn it into a post before I start and get immersed in a new and probably overwhelming environment.

This idea is nicely captured by the phrase "The infrastructure of intention". That is to say, living things, social systems, technologies, all embody purpose in various ways and all these purposes have various ways of interacting with each other and wouldn't it be great if we could find some better ways of both analyzing these extremely important processes, and improving them? I didn't get very far with this essay because the ideas are just way too big for a blog post, and kept threatening to grow into something dissertation-sized.

Fortunately in goofing off from addressing it I ran into this post by Robin Hanson, which very helpfully reminded me that questions are typically more interesting than answers. So, here are some questions around the idea of intention and computation, some of which have been dogging me for decades. Some managed to get into my actual dissertation, and some others may be addressed in this new gig, but we will see. I'm just a computer programmer, which means most of what I do is just informational plumbing, and it doesn't leave that much time for grandiose theorizing. But high and low have their ways of coming together on occasion.

So, the questions (and pointers to people who have spent more time thinking about them then I have):

• What is the nature of purpose? (Cybernetics, particularly Gregory Bateson)

• How do humans (and animals manage their various divergent intentions? (Freud, Tinbergen, Minsky)

• Can inanimate things have purpose? (Latour, Bennett)
• How do individual goals relate to social structures and institutions? (all of sociology and political science, at the moment particularly Charles Tilly and Mary Douglas)

• How do computer programs embody purpose? (AI)
• Can/should goals be explicitly represented? (Agre and Chapman's situated action critique of planning-based AI)

• How does can encode divergent and conflicting goals? (Actor theory, Multi-agent AI),

• How does goal-directed behavior work in human activity that is clearly non-functional in any simple way, like religion and art? (Evolutionary psychology)

• Can/should/how can software embody and extend human goal structures (the CSCW field, but originating maybe with Doug Engelbart)

• What would the world look like if computational infrastructure actually supported goals in a powerful way (lots of science fiction, mostly with a dystopian flavor, but for a somewhat more cheery spin, Bruce Sterling's story Maneki Neko)

Big fucking questions, aren't they? And quite out of scale compared with my ability to provide answers, but they won't leave me alone.

What's on my mind

Messing around with some computational language tools, I generated this list of words which are more frequent on this blog relative to a standard corpus (some misspellings removed), in order from most overused. Many of these are unsurprising, but I had no idea I used "cannot" more than is normal. Or "parasitical", which is more worrying.

cannot simpleminded parasitical excoriate delegitimize kvetching temperamentally treacly politcs cosmopolitans authoritarians twitter rightwingers inexpert constructivists constructionists entertainingly clathrate undesireable frenzies mystifies wastefulness repurpose gintis wobblies kunstler turmoils bukovsky bankrolls laitin smidgeon sociopaths scienceblogs cleavon oddsmaker vegetating reifying situationists doper yecs popularizer nobels cultish solidary arduino militarist prolixity congealing proft larded atran nixonian seatmate appeaser rationalists leftish libertarianism literalist materialist vitalism rejoinders schuon fusty facebook torahs arduously hugeness universalizing tinkerers factuality autoworkers parasitize rationalist dominionism physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically ferreted gourevitch glaringly symbiote averagely incisively shitheads skimped netzach appall metonymic onrush chokehold halldor churchy scampers starkest agentive dalliances emet mistimed ceasefires hallucinated reimagined overplaying bioethicist copleston disempower flippancy oversimplifies outrageousness indvidual ginned douchebags explicates plumbs mencius metaphysically schelling foregrounding polarizes outlives subtexts acquiesces nostrums undescribable malkuth marketeer analagous preeminently remediable flamers slipperiness bunraku proles burkean peaceniks materialists unaccountably athwart mcworld petraeus romanticizing unnamable huffpo ineffectually commonsensical interoperating empathizing wingnut supplicants hypostasis inchoate obama transhumanists fulminate affordance nonviolently geneological gashed mussed chuppah charnel felin reconstructionism verbalizing tegmark crabbed armys shalizi dehumanization hoohah vannevar copyable bungler unlikeliest preindustrial legitimated downscale fugs bilin slavering egomania naveh determinedly oligarchies chasten reappropriated bekki taleb bioethicists valdis ultraconservative wahabi straussian rewatch anthropomorphism ecstasies libertarians ruination exceptionalism vacillate overreach forthrightness informationally bushites rottenness biomorphic parceled twittering sorley parapsychological irreligious statists maddeningly selfing militarists bushite infuriates deconstructionist dallying harrows glutted worths misplacement engross jewishness hearkens girdled zombified prohibitionist braf sniggering positivists prostrating doomy schmaltzy yesod hewing philosophize doomsayers unconcern conflate jibes misappropriate convulse constructionist relabeled cavalierly mesmeric phantasms atrophied nattering reductionist personhood asocial placating incuding amorality incontestable weida greybeard inescapably scrabbling foreordained puthoff antiabortion commandeering iphone reinterpreting fudges minsky spluttering obsessional explicating rovian subdues ascription graeber counterargument plops

Now I'm playing the Burroughs-ish game of trying to find meaning in this shredded language. "physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically" sounds applicable to a number of discussions I've been having lately.

Software Studies

Everyone I hope has read the classic and much-loved children՚s book The Phantom Tollbooth. But you may not remember that the plot revolves around a longstanding fraternal feud between the kings of two separate intellectual domains: Aziz, The King of Dictionopolis, ruler of the land of words, and the Mathemagician, whose domain is numbers. Until their conflict is reconciled, no peace can be found in the world of the mind. Like most wars, it seems almost senseless from the outside. What are these two kings fighting about? They each have their land and have no real use for the other՚s, so no material interest drives them. No, it must be some abstract war of pride and place, an eternal struggle for dominance between equal opponents. Certainly Milo, the protagonist (admittedly a bit dull) can՚t see the point of it.

This storybook war is quite obviously based on the real-world cultural disconnect between the humanities and the sciences. While this divide has been around forever and isn՚t going away anytime soon, fortunately there have always been plenty of people willing to be double agents and smugglers, engaging in valuable commerce between two realms that like to pretend that they have nothing to do with one another. I like to think that the computation is a major route for such intellectual vagabonds of uncertain loyalty, and certainly I՚ve always been drawn to those who expressly aim at transgressing the boundaries.

Computation was birthed by the sciences, and is in universities normally a branch of engineering or math departments, and computer people have always been mostly of that ilk. But there have always been other kinds of people involved: call them digital humanists, those who had deep roots in something more human than dry mathematics. Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson come to mind. The MIT Media Lab was initially created in the school՚s architecture department precisely to avoid being the narrow nerdish viewpoint of straight engineering. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, who co-founded the Artificial Intelligence lab in earlier decades were key early players there as well. Both of the latter were accomplished mathematicians but were not satisfied to work within the strictures of that field, and sought to find deep connections between mathematics, mind, and culture.

Perhaps its the influence of the Phantom Tollbooth that drew me to them; I՚ve tried to follow these luminaries in various ways and done my own bit to tunnel underneath the borders, although I wasn՚t always thinking of it in that way. At the the Media Lab, I was part of a cabal that was trying to be even more interdisciplinary than the official line, and so we explored connections between largely technical areas like AI and some of the more rarefied products of the humanities. This was in early 90s, more or less, so just before computers started the process of taking over all of human culture. Since then there has been a small and refined explosion of work in what is apparently now called “digital humanities”.

So I have been (out of the blue, and somewhat unaccountably) been invited to an academic workshop at UC Santa Cruz in this area (whose goal is producing a book for this series). This is a field which I have only a tenuous and out-of-date connection to, but I can՚t turn down a chance to live the life of the mind, if only for a day. But I don't really know what the hell is going on in this field. This post represents a few days of light cramming; I may have a post-workshop followup.

So what is digital humanities? Well, people in the traditional humanities (literature, arts, philosophy, and of course “critical theory”) are not stupid and can see just like everyone else that the world is getting eaten up by software and digital technology. This includes both the everyday human world that is their subject, and the professional academic world of teaching and publishing. Naturally they want to get a foothold in the eating side of this revolution, lest they among the eaten.

That is the crass way to think about it though. There is actually interesting stuff going on!

Some branches of digital humanities (not counting people who are more like new media artists here, to limit myself to the scholarly):

• applying computational techniques to traditional questions in the humanities (eg, doing large-scale textual analysis to learn how language and idioms change over time)
  
• media theory: taking the approach of an art historian / social theorist to the new forms of human communication such as the web and Facebook (hero: Marshall McLuhan)
  
• software studies: treating computational artifacts themselves as texts to be analyzed; thinking about the role of human values in their creation.
  

The latter is the most apt to induce spluttering from a mainstream technologist (and hence is the most interesting -- the other aspects seem like worthwhile academic pursuits but don't seem like they are likely to rock my world). While Moby Dick and the source code of the Emacs editor I am using right now are both “texts” in some very abstract sense, they are pretty different kinds of things and it is not immediately clear that they cast any useful light on each other.

They do, of course, meet at one point: the human reader and writer. That is to say, the same person may at different time interacting, creating, interpreting both kinds of texts, along with many others. And it՚s not too much of a stretch to say that some of the mental machinery used for both kinds of texts is the same: both require parsing into small chunks with formal relationships to each other, for instance. Both require creativity in their creation, although of fairly different sorts. Literature requires creativity in its reception as well; does software? Arguably yes, especially in the common case where one programmer is trying to understand another՚s code (for purposes of fixing or extending it).

But the real thing that the humanities brings to the software table is the idea of critique, or in other words, the idea that it is a perfectly proper and useful thing to do to take a cultural product (aka text) and dissect the ways in which it works, how it relates to its subject matter and its audience, what it tries to say about the society that produced it and what it actually says, what effects it has on that society, what values it embodies, and what values we should be applying when we sit in judgement. And techniques for doing so.

This is something that is almost entirely missing from the engineering culture that most software people are trained in, and it's pretty clearly desperately needed. Software is eating the world, very smart people and corporations are busily figuring out how to eat faster and more effectively, and there needs to be better ways to think about this process, to critique it and possibly even resist or redirect it. I՚m not sure these obscure academic fields will do it, but they are better than nothing.

And I՚m looking forward to the day when software critics become major cultural players, passionate minds on the order of Pauline Kael or Lester Bangs who can teach us new ways to read the latest releases on Github.

Horrified Fascination

Here is a very common visual cliche that oddly doesn՚t seem to have an actual name (the title is best I could come up with):

There are hundreds of stock photos and movie stills in which someone simultanously covers their eyes and peeks through the fingers. What kind of sights can provke such a strange reaction, and what could be its function or meaning? Some prospects simultaneously draw one՚s attention and repel it, giving rise to an internal conflict. You shield yourself from the thing (but not in any truly effective way) and then undermine your own act. Who is supposed to be fooled by this looking-while-not-looking? If it was just a matter of modulating a disturbing incoming visual signal, surely the eyelids would do as good a job as the fingers?

It seems to be a clear outward form of an inner conflct, and inner conflicts are always interesting because they reveal something of the structure of the mind (a jumping off point for Freud, Tinbergen, Minsky, and Ainslie, to name only the most influential).

The conflict between fascination and horror comes up in my thinking a lot these days. I detect it in my attitude to onrushing catastrophes like climate change, or the Trump ascendency, or the aftermath of various natural or manmade calamities. And in my otherwise inexplicable fascination with neoreaction and other wingnutty emanations on the internet, which is sort of like a slow-motion trainwreck of the intellect. Or doom in general, which was a founding theme of this blog. My mind is drawn irresistably to such topics, then forced to draw back.

There՚s something almost shameful and twisted about it, although I can՚t quite say why. At least I՚m not alone in having this perverted attraction towards the repulsive. The entire US media apparatus seems to be in this kind of relationship with Trump, both horrified and addicted to the spectacle.

In my defense, I don՚t think the alternative of pretending these looming horrors don՚t exist is any better. It seems almost impossible to face them squarely, so this kind of half-assed playful attitude is probably the best I can do.