David Bohm on the problem of thought
David Bohm was a U.S.-born British quantum physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Evidently, Bohm hung out w/ one of my favorite thinkers: Krishnamurti.
(Reading the below passage, I can see why this dude was drawn to Krishnamurti.)
From Bohm’s Thought as a System:
A corporation is organized as a system – it has this department, that department, that department. They don’t have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.
Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, “felts” and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.
A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes…although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure…. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can’t say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal.
It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it – a “systematic fault”. It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere.
You may say “I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem”. But “my” thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I’m trying to look at, or a similar fault. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)
(I am kinda curious if he wrote this after he met Krishnamurti.)
Campbell's law, evolutionary epistemology
The notion that measurement can directly affect the phenomena being examined is a major issue arising out of quantum mechanics with the problematized measurer/observer.
Kinda fascinated by the law named after this dude:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
(Ex. high stakes testing advocated in No Child Left Behind.)
It would seem the act of applying quantitative measurement is laden with contingencies in a number of contexts.
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A social scientist, Campbell is also known for coining the term ‘evolutionary epistemology,’ an approach which applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge.
That knowledge collapses onto ever evoloving cognitive abilities (based on ultimately biological thought organs) makes sense to me.
The idea that any epistemology could have an unchanging ground strikes me as stupid. There is no static ground for knowledge (unless we were to grow a knowledge organ and/or tap knowledge beyond the biological realm).
unconference as post-modern agora
In ancient Greek city-states, the agora was a ‘place of assembly’ that served as a marketplace for ideas, politics, and commerce.
(Agoraphobia – the fear of being in public places – tracks back to Greek Ἀγορά .)
Earlier today, the Greek agora came up in conversation I had with @DayJobView at a local unconference called Congress Camp.
A lecturer in Greek and Roman Literature and Civilization, she offered some insights into the cultural station of the Greek agora the possible overlap in social function with self-organized unconferences that have been gaining traction in tech circles.
The resonance has got me thinking of unconferences as post-modern agoras, augmented with computer technologies facilitating new channels of interactivity and communication.
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A recent Benjamin Barber piece in The Nation adds some z axis:
The ancient agora, or civic marketplace, of democratic Athens and the covered arcades of nineteenth-century European towns exemplify a spirit where public things (literally res publica, the origin of our word “republic”) become paramount. Entertainment and commerce are necessary and important, but they “work” because people are drawn into public spaces for other reasons: to play in the company of others, to watch one another and see others with fresh vision (here the fabulous red stairs atop the TKTS booth at Forty-seventh Street make a splendid start), to interact with strangers, to get out of private space and into common space.
Recursive Life
British programmer Aimee Trescothick has figured out how to log into Second Life from within Second Life (via).
