Dashed Off XVII

 Sanctions are not a generally motivating factor when it comes to law; people who follow the laws are only sometimes thinking of the sanctions, and in fact many times people are not very aware of what the sanctions are, at least outside extreme cases. People seem more motivated by, 'This is how we do things' -- i.e., socially -- than by 'Or else', and people both demand the 'or else' to wield against social deviation specifically and get angry if it is wielded against people doing 'what everyone does'.

To be right often, we must be wrong often.

Evaluating is often harder than creating and applying is often harder than analyzing.

Since social institution always presupposes normativity of some kind, normativity as such can't be socially instituted; it arises naturally in social contexts; get a bunch of sufficiently cognitive agents in cooperation, and you have normativity. It just is part of what such cooperation has to involve.

We construct norms because normativity is natural to us.

durability of argument-form
(1) Take an argument.
(2) In use, people tend to vary it a bit.
(3) An argument is more durable if minor plausible variations keep conclusion roughly the same.

"A man without religion is a maimed man." Gaudi

Language is a system of rites.

"A consturction only becomes interesting when it can be placed side by side with other analogous constructions for forming species of the same genus." Poincaré

The mathematics for physics is drawn out of causal structures, particularly of measuring devices.

Social progress in any aspect involves many small improvements over many domains, which eventually start interacting with each other.

"Home is the part of the universe so thoroughly elaborated by our tendencies that it has become for us, so to say, an enlarged sphere of disposability." Patočka

fictive lived-experiencing of the past

Nothing we actually know is merely singular.

The capacity to abstract is essential to sign use, because things are signs in a respect.

In speech we instrumentalize our voice & philosophers of language often do nto do justice to this.

Signs often come in complexes so that we can pick one representamen out of the whole as convenient (e.g., spoken words -- written words -- associated gestures & expressions -- iconic representations).
-- Metonymies and synechdoches perhaps come out of treating things themselves as such sign-complexes.

Measurement always involves getting the right causal interactions under the right conditions.

In language we often use words to operate on and modify words and their meanings.

intension/remission -- quality as quasi-quantity
estimate/approximation -- quantity as quasi-quality

Every human person has an implicit wisdom; the difficulty is unfolding it.

Mt & Lk: Christology by causation
Mk: Christology by remotion
Jn: Christology by eminence

agak-agak -- v., to estimate/guess; adj, involving guesswork
agaration: estimation

When human beings reject a transcendent order, they gravitate to a totalitarian one.

being as showing itself to other being, being as showing other being to yet other being

Temporal measurement requires presence to a clock, and spatial to a boundary; presence is thus more fundamental.

Fully to understand oneself as a creature requires the concept of nothingness. (the 'distance between being and nothing')

"It was not nonexistent things that needed salvation, so that a command alone would have sufficed, but the human being, already in existence, who was corrupted and perishing." Athanasius

When we look at genuine and successful prediction, it always begins with retrodiction.

(1) Either infinite regress of causes or state.
(2) If infinite regress, there is something with unlimited power for effect, i.e., the series and what maintains it.
(3) If state, there is a first cause, with unlimited power for effect.

In artistic matters, the sacred becomes secularized and the secular becomes sacralized.

regulative, educative, and nobilitative right & wrong

Shared biological reasoning has the force, in reasoning, of mutual obligation.

It is important to the function of physical theory that its equations not be happenstance equations, that they are Box and not merely True. V=kP needs to be true not here and there, now and then, but true in all relevant possibilities. (The tricky thing, of course, is that we may not know the exact range of relevant possibilities -- studying this is one of the standard paths of scientific discovery.)

"It is amazing how much one can learn from just following the grammar of scientific utterances."Judea Pearl
"Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do."

One of the fundamental problems in modern politics is that honest attempts to correct evils lead easily to temptations to injustice.

'a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort'

grave goods as a sign of respect for persons as persons

Charles Elton and niche-convergence: "the tendency...for animals in widely separated parts of the world to draft into similar occupations" (Animal Ecology)

-- Achinstein on design-, use-, and service-functions

'Episteic virtues' in analytic philosophy are generally just moral virtues in contexts of inquiry. (They are inquiring subjective parts of moral virtues.)

As we move from art -> prudence -> knowledge -> understanding -> wisdom, we move roughly from dealing with the less common to dealing with the more common. ('Roughly' because each higher can 'use' the lower quasi-instrumentally.)

All virtues have 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding faces, btu the 'roles' of these faces differ according to the virtue.

Human beings know together, but even in knowing together do not know in precisely the same way.

We are all both persons and ghosts or echoes of the persons we are.

We always share some credit for the success of our inquiries with others.

Since intellect thinks allt hings, the presence of what is foreign to thinkign all things hinders and obstracts it; what appeared within would impede what was without.

Judicial review is powerful because it is in fact a notwithstanding power. However, judicial review is also the progressive explicit recognition by the courts of limtiations to their own authority.

It is not so much that truth must be tested and deepened over time as that we must be.

The oldest known extant statue is the Lion-Man of Hoblenstein-Stadel, carved out of ivory with flint knife between 35000 and 40000 years ago. It had to be reconstructed out of more than 200 fragments, 'glued' together with a reversible mix of beeswax, artificial wax, and chalk. It was found with bone tools, worked antlers, beads, and pendants. A similar but smaller image was found at Hohle Fels.

The earliest known extant humanish artifacts are knapped stone tools at Lomokwi 3 in Kenya, from about 3.3 million years ago, predating the genus Homo, and thus associated with either Kenyanthropus or Australopithecus. The next definite tools are Oldovan, beginning about 2.9 million years ago, and Acheulan (apparently a significant leap forward) about 1.7 million years ago & associated with Homo erectus, which is not only manipulating and hammering stone but creating hand axes. The Mousterian, beginning about 160000 years ago and associated with Neanderthals, shows a massive variety of tools using stone and antler with remarkable precision. The Aurignaian, beginning 43000 years ago, associated with Homo sapiens, expands this even further and includes jewelry, cave art, and figurines.

If I meet a lion in the prehistoric savannah and tell it I am no threat, is this religion? If I have made a figurine and show it to the lion to communicate the same, is this religion? If I get by unscathed and think the lion understood my message, is this religion? If the figurine represents an actual line and I talk to the figurine as if a friend, is this religion? If I like the figurine because I feel lionlike, is this religion? If I identify with the figurine, which I take to represent both me and the lions, is this religion? If I take it to represent lions generally, including myself, is this religion? If I wear and display the figurine whenever I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I share food and drink with the figurine to get on the good side of lions, is this religion? Anthropologically, these are all kinds of things that human beings do spontaneously in some form or other.

The use of human body lice, which are clothing-dependent, to date clothing suggests that humans wore clothes about 40000 to 170000 years ago; residues and deposits suggest about 120000 years ago. Clothing tools are known to have existed (sewing needles in particular) about 50000 years ago (associated with Denisovans).

The earliest definite evidence of controlled use of fire is at Wonderwork, from about 1 million years ago; any earlier & it becomes unclear whether it was really controlled. Yulambo Falls shows clear evidence of fire-use tools about 180000 years ago. The earliest extant fired pottery is from Xianrendong about 20000 years ago.

term, connection, direction

To find invariants, you need causal reasoning about what varies.

It is an eror to think that because Euclidena diagrams can be visually inspected that they therefore work entirely by visual inspection.

"As strange as it may sound, the notion of probability raising cannot be expressed in terms of probabilities." Judea Pearl
"The proper way to rescue the probability-raising idea is with the do-operator; we can say that X causes Y if P(Y|do(X)) > P(Y)."

Qualities of the Heart

 Talent is a gift, the use we put it to depends on ourselves. Now talent of itself affords no guarantee of being well employed, rather it may tempt us to abuse the gift. The heart, on the contrary, inclines us to make a proper use of such talent as we may possess. More valuable therefore are the qualities of the heart, which give a right direction to our actions; virtue, in fact, is the only thing in man deserving of praise, inasmuch as it is his own. 

 Antonio Rosmini, Letters, Chiefly on Religious Subjects, pp. 599-600 (To Don Paolo Orsi, 27 Jan 1827).

Links of Note

 * The Death and Evolution of Education, at "The Lyceum Institute"

* Christian, Russek, & Griffiths, Resolving Feynman's restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies

* Dario Compagno, Identifying Intended Effects with Causal Models (PDF)

* Charles Hughes Huff, Deuteronomy Is Not a Punishment, on the 'Hahn School' interpretation of Deuteronomy, at "in media mabul

* Michelle Van Loon, The Sure Way of Edith Stein, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Matthew Minerd, Ens Morale: The Scholastic Metaphysics of Morals, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Gregory B. Sadler, The Original Turing Test

* Jane Psmith reviews David Gelernter's 1939

* Sandrine Bergès, A philosophy of home, at "Aeon"

* Ryan Moulton, Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

* Rob Alspaugh, The Evolution of the Diablo Cosmology, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* There is good reason to think that two sermons by St. Augustine have been newly rediscovered.

* Cordithicus, St. Thomas Aquinas Was Not Obese

* Abraham Anderson, Rousseau, Hume, and the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (PDF)

Fortnightly Book, June 21

 A little behind here. I've been puzzling what to do for the next Fortnightly Book, and I've decided to do a re-read: Michael Flynn's Eifelheim. It is based on a novella originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1986, and the novel itself was published in 2006. So later this year (October for the novella, November for the novel) it will be forty years since the original novella and twenty since the novel itself was published, which seems to make this a good time to do it. 

This will be the third Flynn novel I've done for the Fortnighly Book, and I have in fact been intending to do it for some years now. As was the case with In the Country of the Blind, the novel has a frame at a different time; in that book the modern story was the primary tale, and the frame was the backstory. In this work, however, the main story is a medieval tale, and the frame is a modern frame about some of the consequences. 

In the fourteenth century, without any clear reason, the town of Eifelheim in the Black Forest seems simply to have vanished, and the entire area becomes associated with strange events in devilry. The disappearance alone could be explained by plague or something similar; but one would expect from other cases, given its location, that it would be resettled, and a general cause doesn't explain the specific associations. Something strange happened in Eifelheim in the fourteenth century, something so momentous that it will have significant effects even when it is rediscovered in our day: Aliens crashed nearby. But the story itself is more complicated....

A Poem Re-Draft and Two New Poem Drafts

Leaves Falling 

A man may love a woman, and a woman love a man,
so take my hand in yours, though we have no path or plan,
that we may dance in springtime when the flowers bloom in cheer,
and pirouette, with spinning to defy the turning year. 

Then after comes a summer, when we wear a splendid crown,
and then we weep in autumn when the leaves are falling down.
A love may be as pure as sky and burn with blazing light,
undoing every darkness and making day from night,

but we ourselves, like water, through our fingers slip away;
can love be everlasting when we have no strength to stay?
Beginnings come to endings for all things we love and know;
we weep while leaves are falling, then after, only snow. 

So take my hand in dancing, for the time will swiftly run,
but we may love together for a while in hope and sun;
perhaps it will give smiles that endure to our recall,
yea, even as our tears well up as leaves begin to fall.

Cloud of Unknowing

A very vasty shadow,
unknowing like to wings,
is spread across the heavens
within which star-suns sing.

All shadows in that shadow
are sleeping, rich with peace;
though they are waxing, waning,
it stays and does not cease.

The night is but a duskling,
though midnight is its hue,
its blackness not the blackness
of the dark beyond all view.

For in that darkness shadows
are blazing like to flame
and all that we think darkness
is darkness but in name.

The horror that you suffer,
the thing you do not know,
against that nightmost darkness
is but a glow-worm's glow.

We feel our way like blind men;
in shade we trip and fall;
but in darkness in its glory
we scarce can move at all,

so when it falls upon us,
we cannot do but kneel
and pray there as we waver
before the darkness real.

Christmas

The stars in the quiet
shine softly above
as wind in its silence
is whispering of love.
The world in its sorrow
may weep for the day,
but high in the heaven
the angels all say:
Fear not, fear not,
but bow down to pray,
and know him, and love him,
the babe born today.

The sins of the nations
rise high to the sky;
the heathen are raging
with violence and lie;
but look to your Savior,
who shows you the way,
and meet your salvation
as shepherds now say:
Fear not, fear not,
but bow down to pray,
and know him, and love him,
this bright Christmas Day.

Bai T. Moore, Murder in the Cassava Patch

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

From behind the rusty bars of a cell in Monrovia's South Beach Prison facing the Atlantic Ocean, I can now try to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country one bright Sunday morning in the year 1957. 

It rose over the discovery in a cassava patch, of the mutilated body of Tene, the daughter of a well known Dewoin family who live in Bendabli, just a stone's throw from Amina, the former Paramount Chief's town, twenty miles from Monrovia on the Monrovia-Bomi Hills motor road.

Summary: Gortokai, or Kai, for short, is in love with a beautiful local Bendabli girl, Tene. There is something about the relationship to begin with. While they are not physically related, Kai and Tene were raised as brother and sister, because Tene's parents took him in when he was young. When Kai decides he wants to marry Tene, some people think it wrong, but technically it is not against any of the rules; the primary problem is that Kai has no family, so he has no family to represent him in the negotiations over Tene's brideprice. He has to rely on Kema, Tene's sister.  Something is off about Kema's role in the matter, too; she is very obliging, and suspiciously so. Because Tene is so beautiful, and because she is, it would seem, not the sort of girl to lack for suitors, Kai is easily convinced by friends that he needs to take steps to make sure that Tene loves him, and so he goes to an old sand reader, Bleng, who confirms his suspicions and offers to provide him powerful love medicine to conjure her love. All of this is rolling, in a chain of events, to a bad end, the bad end with which the story opens.

Murder in the Cassava Patch is in a sense a story about a society falling apart -- rather ironically, because the story takes place during the period of William Tubman's national unification policies. But it is precisely this that is creating problems. Liberia is modernizing and becoming, slowly, wealthier, but the cracks in traditional Liberian like Bendabli are beginning to show. The younger folk don't take the old traditions quite seriously, but they have not come up with anything that actually replaces them, so there is a kind of lost quality to all the young people in the tale. But there is a more immediate factor, and that is drink. There is rum or palm wine on almost every page. Even Kai's name, Gortokai, means 'Brown-Jug Man'; he is literally named after the jugs in which Dutch gin was stored. The drinking is not purely social; it is extensive, and often associated with bad judgment. Alcohol can dull pain or boredom, but it also dulls your ability to pull yourself out of your problems. 

Murder in the Cassava Patch is a tale of scheming arising out of blind desire. One of the interesting questions throughout is how much we can trust anything Kai says; indeed, almost everyone in the novella seems to be dissembling in one way or another. Kai wants Tene; Tene wants out of Bendabli; Kema wants money. These goals lead them each to hide what they are actually doing, and in each case it ends up being counterproductive. Neither Bleng nor Kai's friends seem entirely above-board about anything. But Kai is our narrator, and at times there seem reasons to think that he is spinning parts of the story in his favor. The overall story at a glance can seem quite simple, but at every turn Moore has layered in psychological complexities until everything is a tangle. 

Favorite Passage:

Bleng placed the bag on the mat and began to unfasten it. I had my eyes glued on every movement he made. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the sand reader poured the contents of the bag into the mat. They were an assortment of quartz crystals, large yellow beads, smooth pebbles and some strange-looking beans. One of the pebbles rolled under my stool. I tried to reach for it. Bleng stopped me. 

 "No one is allowed to touch these sacred objects unless I give them permission. God gave them to me in a dream and taught me how to use them to help mankind. He told me not to let anyone touch them, else they would loose their magic power.“ 

 The contents of the bag were collected and tossed into the air and allowed to scatter on the mat again. Bleng viewed the objects with penetrating eyes for a minute or two without uttering a word. He broke the silence, by murmuring the word "Tene“ to himself several times, nodding in between. The old man cleared his throat and offered to tell me what he saw in the crystals. For some reason which I cannot explain, I turned pale and felt nervous. Bleng looked straight into my eyes; "young man,“ he uttered. I felt a sudden thump against my chest. It was my heart, beating like a machine. "Tene's heart is divided.“ The old man revealed.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Selecting and Shaping like the Gardener

 Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the word “make” about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man “makes his way” through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans. When a man “makes a friend,” he makes a man. And in the third case we talk of a man “making love,” as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the word, the artist.

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Free Man", A Miscellany of Men.]