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Ok, so I'm writing this little essay on the aestethics of failure, glitch music, relation between man & machine etc etcetera. I already have some good texts on the subject, an article from Kim Cascone about glitch, a text on micromusic, squarepushers text on collaboration with machines,... ..but need some books or names from philosophers that dealt with this whole issue of man versus material / machines. I'll do some more googling and wiki'ing in a minute,but maybe some of you guys can direct me to a good resource, drop some names??? That would be very helpfull :) cheers |
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I've done one year of philosophy at UNI, but I hate writing about it to other people. I'm sure Drunken Mastah will sort you out soon :) |
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i have this |
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lol @ hanal if i wasnt at work id be googleing pron |
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heh, thanks for the confidence, but I don't bother too much with aesthetics. I think theorising about aesthetic experiences will mostly fail unless it's a theory that says nothing more than that aesthetic experiences are sensory experiences perceived by a subject that then finds some appealing quality in the experience. In other words, describing [object / class of objects'] inherent aesthetic attributes would amount to no more or no less than to describe all possible experiences of the object which means you'd have to ask every single person alive plus those dead and those that will be born what he "gets out of" this particular object and you'd have to do it at all times, throughout all time. ever. or something like that. Short version: I think it's pretty futile, and I just enjoy the art I enjoy and don't care much for the other stuff. |
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A lot of postmodernists and postmarxists are into theorizing about aesthetics though. Like the aesthetics of power, the aesthetics of femininity, post modern readings of movies, music, etc. I posted one about Gary Glitter (written in 1985 at the start of Derrida's influence) a while back, but nobody could be arsed reading it. |
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So you don't think art has any inherant worth or quality, beyond the sensory experiences of those who perceive it? I suppose that is probably true, but I can't help but feel that certain works are better then others, and I'm picking up and exploring those aspects which make it great or not so great. Obviously some things are just a matter of subjective choice; some hate some sounds, others love those very sounds. However, if we're comparing "The Rite of Spring" to a badly-written pop-song...I don't know. I can't admit what you say when I consider some would describe The Rite as noise and a badly written pop song as "great music". (btw, if this is shit, i apologize, i'm not really sure what's going on.) |
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yes, yes, people do that all the time, but they just keep forgetting that it's subjective experiences that don't necessarily have to be similar. if you talk about how x is beautiful there's always someone to disagree, both that it isn't beautiful and that it is beautiful, but in a different way from how you see it as beautiful. |
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not only the sensory experiences. I said that the person had to find some sort of appealing quality in it. Now, ask yourself why you find some works to be better than others. Then ask yourself how someone can disagree. You seem to appeal to the notion that something being complex or someone having given something up (if even only time) for something gives it more worth, but I could spend my whole life, give up a limb and spend all my money creating a really really really complex theory about how the human essence is jellyfish and it'd still be wrong. |
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"philosophers ask the questions, scientists answer them, and philosophers get really pissed off" |
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I'm more interested to know philosophers that dealt with the relation man - machine then a discussion here on aesthetics :) as like drunken master says is always subjective. |
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I'd love to see a scientist answer these questions. |
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not vague social/psychological shit like this, i mena definite questions/statements. like that knob-jockey philosopher who apparently said "we will never know what the stars were made of" and some twat who said "everything that can be invented has been invented" in 1899. |
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these questions are as definite as any other questions and they all ask things about the world that can be answered only by looking at the world. The problem is that many questions have more than one answer and to answer some you'd need to answer all answers, plus you can't really ever be sure, but this goes for any natural science as well. Also, do we know what the stars are made of? No. We have a good guess, though. |
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that's kind of vague.. I don't think you'll find many people who'd be willing to argue that a machine is different from any other tool... you could probably check out Turing or something, but that's more along the lines of AI and computers... |
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lucifer where are you from ? i got a really good article in a polish magazine about aesthetics of failure. - that failure can for example be specially created by the musician and so on... but i guess i wouldn't be able to transfer it into english. but i would rather recommend you not searching for philosophers dealing with music but musicians dealing with philosophy. try the big names: karlheinz stockhausen, luigi nono and so on |
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I also just read an article about how some "scientists" had discovered the "sex drive gene" and that people with less activity in this gene were five percent less lustful than those with more activity in the gene. Hello, you are five percent less lustful. |
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oh i just realised that the polish article was based on kim cascones work... |
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we do know what stars are made of. from absorption spectra. |
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Pffft. Are you going to trust your puny inductively derived physical laws in the face of DM's mighty imagination? Maybe the absorption spectra are wrong and the sun is made of flaming peanuts. Maybe! |
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sorry, not good enough. still guessing. |
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that is probably less likely to be true than what we currently believe, but you're still, as you say, talking probabilities here. |
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William S Burroughs wrote about you in Naked Lunch, I think. |
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lol @ drunken mastah, once again :) you should write comedy sketches that would be hilarious on the subject of aesthetics, we (as in the human comunity, both scientific and philosophic) know that there are many exemples of work of art being 'beautiful' to so many people that it transcend common notions of aestethics being a personal experience. IMO there is common ground shared by every human beings as to what is beautiful, like some sort of global consciousness, totally independant on your culture or personal experiences. |
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I've only seen the movie, I am afraid, but what are you referring to? You somehow seem to have gotten the idea that it is unwise to be sceptical about what is portrayed as being the truth about the world into your head. Why is that? Also, I'd like to note that being sceptical on a principal level isn't the same as true disbelief, it's just acknowledging that what I hold to be true now may prove to be untrue, and that the best way to reach a more complete understanding of the truth is to challenge popular beliefs at any time. Is this a bad attitude to have towards anything? Or is it the opposite attitude, the one that will lead to total stagnation that is the bad one? On a related note, I was at a debate between a biologist and an intelligent design guy (can't remember his name, but he was from that weird csc discovery institute thingie you've got over there). I was kind of hoping they'd both be really really angry and act stupid, etc, but I was pleasantly surprised.. at all but the stupid questions form the audience. The biologist did an awesome job of defending evolution and explaining why the id guys claims were unjustified (he was rather "mild" in that he only wanted intelligence to be added to the toolbox for explaining phenomena or something). The point, though, is that the biologist had the best attitude towards his science he could've had, the only desirable attitude for a scientist: that all his observations and the interpretations of them could just as well be as wrong as the id guys. |
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I'd like to see any work of art that could be universally regarded as beautiful. Not even where you'd expect there to be some kind of "natural" inclination to find this or that beautiful are you able to find any sort of consensus. This is mostly because we have no "nature" any more, and if we even had one in the first place is debatable. Some cultures prefer fat women, other prefer small women, other prefer women with their feet tied up. In one culture white is life, in another it is death. Red can be danger, red can be an invitation. You don't even need to go to a cross-cultural level to see the differences; one person is a fatty chaser, another prefers 7-year old boys, and they're neighbours. |
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do you have any fucking idea? do you know how absorption spectra or emission spectra work? the fucking wavelength emitted by excited electrons as they drop back to their ground states, creates an absorption line on the spectrum of radiation passing through it, gives away the atomic configuration of the fucking atoms the radiation fucking passes through, verifiable by a fucking lame student like me in a dark room with a spectroscope and an ionisation tube. you have no fucking idea about science. i hate the way you seem to see scientists as just old guys who sit around, stubbonly refusing to accept anything that goes against their outdated ideas. science is not dogmatic in the slightest. new shit comes up all the time. that is why it is so exciting. yet whenever any form of science is mentioned, you seem to go into "science is inferior to psychology / what i think" mode and shit all over it, saying we dont actually know whereas you can personally verify this shit given the right equipment that costs a tenner at a bloody car boot sale. |
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everyone these days seems so fucking ignorant of science in general. its all "how do they know that, they are probably just making it up" bullshit. get involved .go and do some fucking sfcience instead of sitting on your arses slandering decent inquisitive curious dedicated people. |
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and its not all just fucking taking things unquestionably from lecturers. you hink i just sit there and dont question anything? of course i fucking do. i ask about the proof for everything, the evidence for thos and that. i want to fukcing know . |
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I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I'm not only challenging natural sciences.. I always challenge anyone who seems to believe they have the truth in any way. I know I've challenged your perception of what is a good action at some point. Sometimes, though, I do this by taking up a very defined point of view, like someone else who believed they had the truth, but that it was different from yours.. to illustrate the point that nothing is "obvious" in any sense outside of a purely logical p->q thing. I'm not of the opinion that there is no truth, I just believe that we can't ever be sure we have it. Now, as we can't be sure, the best we can do is approximations, but when you have something that is held for true for too long (too long can be a very short time), people will hold it habitually true, holding it true without ever knowing what it is they're holding true and even worse why. Now, the only way to insure the quality of the beliefs we have about the world is to challenge them and see if they still hold up good or if the person holding it as true is actually aware of what it is he is holding true and why. The problem with this is those completely basic assumptions that you can't justify many later theories without and that aren't justified in anything else outside themselves. A good example of this problem is that absorption stuff you described. There is a basic, but not unproblematic, assumption about atoms and electrons at play there, and this is one of those theories that has been so heavily embedded into the natural sciences that you have to work it into your theory.. not necessarily in the sense that you don't believe it, but you work it in there to get some merit for your theory, but rather that you just can't get the assumption of atoms out of your system; you assume the atoms are there before you even formulate the theory. |
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now, I am aware of the good explanatory and predictive power of the atom theory, but that is irrelevant. The thing is, most people have no idea what it is, but they still believe it to be true, and hold stuff that invokes this magical word "atom" to be true because it's "scientific." To sum it up, my problem is with peoples beliefs when they get to the stage where people believe them to be true. It's always easier to convince someone that there is no truth about ethical patterns of action (there really isn't, not in any objective sense anyway) than it is to convince anyone that current scientific theories may very well be wrong: the odds are against them, ask any probability calculating math dude. |
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it's not only natural science (english speaking people really need to get rid of that pesky science word in its current state) people have no clue about. Anyone from another part of the university knows next to nothing about what we actually do at philosophy, and if you ask someone from law if they know what they're doing in social sciences, they'd probably say something like "isn't that economics and politics and shit?" Now, it's an unreasonable claim to make that everyone should know about this science (again: not only natural science) because you believe it to be so damned important, but I believe it is a reasonable claim to make that people should be critical about what they see portrayed as the truth, and either, if they care, seek out the evidence to support their beliefs, or if they don't care, just do nothing (including not believing it to be true, but maybe, in lack of any other explanation go "oh.. ok, whatever"). |
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I'd also like to note that you are wrong: any scientific community is full up of old codgers stuck in their own system of beliefs, and with universities being the way they are, they mostly have to all die at once for any new thoughts to truly win through. To think that truly new and inventive thoughts win through this impenetrable wall of geriatric cobweb is just naïve. |
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well, I certainly hope not, but I know from experience that there are more than enough people who do (in any field) and that manage to get rather high up in the system by just uncritically performing tasks set before them, or, if they set their own tasks, they set them in a way where they don't challenge any of what they've been told. |
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The best philosophy of man/machine that I've read tend to be "philosophy of work". Primo Levi's "The Wrench" is good for examining how people are (to some degree) defined through the machines/tools they work with. Robert M. Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" nicely covers (amongst a lot of other philosophical points) the intangible bond/intimacy between man and machine, particulary a machine that a man works on himself. It even suggests that relationship can be a useful tool in reaching enlightenment on a number of matters: such as 'worth'; the relationship between things; how the sum of the parts can not only be greater than the seperate parts, but also different, through the situations you encounter working on machines. |
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I read Nietzche |
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As mentioned earlier, you might like to look up Alan turing, who invented computer science. He saw man as a machine, and the computer as a type of electronic brain. A reason I'd say he would be good to lookup is that he invented the idea of the turing machine, aka the universal machine. This is a type of machine (a computer) that can answer any given computable question provided it has enough time and memory. I guess it is a controversial topic but there are many things that suggest that we are infact a universal machine. Other names that might be of interest are Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Wolfram, David Chalmers and perhaps even Kurt Godel. What drunkenmastah was referring to earlier about aesthetics could be narrowed down to the If you're still interested in writing about aesthetics you might also like to lookup . Oh, and Ezkerraldean, showed last century that any formal system strong enough to axiomatize the natural numbers is essentially incomplete. Or, if not incomplete, it is inconsistent (ie, contains a contradication). Since mathematics is the queen of the sciences (as Gauss said, and I agree) the problems transfer across to science aswell. Even if only the integers exist, we cannot have a complete system. So if science were to succeed in its goal of explaining everything, it would infact be unprovable, and hence it would be religion, since science requires proof. Hence, science is essentially incomplete. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't believe it, it has the best explanation of how things work. But there are also questions of life, and questions why things work which become more and more of an issue as we answer how things work. We go to university not to praise knowledge, but to question it. |
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The incompleteness of science suggests it never stagnates. Which is most definitely a good thing. But everything in science (just as in mathematics, and, well, everything) is derived from premises or axioms that we grant as true without absolute proof. Sure axioms and premises appear to be true without question. But proving them is a whole other story. So science essentially comes down to a hypothetical. "If the axioms are true, then all that follows logically from those axioms is true." has a similar principle. Having said all that, I will object to anyone who challenges scientific ideas without good cause or with cum hoc ergo propter hoc type arguements. Science is magnificent, but there are more questions out there than science dares answer. I also think that people shouldn't take Quantum Mechanics so literally, there can be many interpretations. There is something very unsettling about the idea that the underlying nature of everything is infact random, so I refuse to believe it. It is a limit in what we can know, not the true state of a physical system IMO. "God does not play dice with the universe" - Albert Einstein |
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lol! not just you tnavelterri, even though you spent the time to link to some obvious writings. |
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When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images. - Neils Bohr |
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i'm trying to find the definition of ordo inveniendi if anyone has the resources |
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cheers tnavelerri, will defenitely check out those links! |
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"The incompleteness of science suggests it never stagnates." yeah, but as science is practiced by human beings, who often like to believe their beliefs are the correct ones, you get stagnation non the less; science doesn't progress onwards on its own, and, in fact, without the people practicing it, it does not exist. |
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"without the people practicing it, it does not exist" well of course! but i think you overestimate the problem of people closing their minds to anything but their personal theory. that is certainly not the case with any professional scientist i have ever known. in geology here we have the whole mantle plume debate - in the geology department here we have two of the leading proponents of both sides (for and against), both with numerous books and publications to their name. and they still listen to each other, accept evidence contrary to their theories. because they admit that, as long as there is a single piece of evidence that a theory cannot explain, it is provisional, and only after it explains everything, will that theory become the convention. and that is the way it should be. i have already had some decent discussions with lecturers of mine where i put forward ideas contrary to their personal positions, and they usually say "good point, i never thought about that". everyone i have come across is much more open-minded than you seem to think. PS sorry if i sounded abusive/angry in them thar posts above, i was a bit pissed though. |
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funny... I think everyone else are underestimating the problem because we are so "advanced" these days. now, I have no idea what this mantle plume debate is about, but I'm sure there are some things both sides take for granted and that a theory of geology wouldn't be seen as "serious" without. In other words, I find it quite likely that it isn't as much a debate between two theories, but a debate about variations within some theory. Of course, as I don't know what the debate is, I won't say this with certainty. Another fine example of a scientist with a good attitude is my father. He works in the geophysics department at the university here (mostly solar radiation and meteorology), but he's also complained about some closed minded colleagues, and I've even talked to a professor in philosophy who said his colleagues were closed minded (you get stubborn people in all departments). That guy from the debate also mentioned something about people on his field being stuck in their current beliefs, but those who say other people are stuck in their beliefs are few and far between. There's also that guy who tried getting an alternative to plate tectonics through... He wasn't only discredited, but he had to get a secret phone number and move from Bergen because he was being harassed and threatened by people for putting forth his theory (rotational something or other) |
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haha, I didn't see that you'd mentioned zen and motorcycle maintenance! That's like the first book I ever read! It was lovely, and though I generally don't like reading fiction-ish books, I just couldn't put it down. |
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(1) we are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances, (2) the same natural effects must be assigned to the same causes, (3) qualities of bodies are to be esteemed as universal, and (4) propositions deduced from observation of phenomena should be viewed as accurate until other phenomena contradict them. -Newton This is why scientists stick to their beliefs. I've actually found that a lot of scientific theories have isomorphic conclusions, interpretation plays a big role. |
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the problem is that in many cases things that contradict theories, small observations that don't fit are swept under the rug until the bulge is so large you keep tripping over it. Most modern theories have data they aren't able to explain. If you criticise these theories for not being able to explain this or that, they call it an anomaly or say you're getting caught up in details or whatever. There is also a problem with the first point up there both in that we don't know what is true and that I can still posit some cause that we believe to be true and that explains appearances without there actually being a connection. |
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eat bread feed ducks |
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eat ducks feed bread |
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