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you forget so easy

My girl Iris Murdoch talks a lot about attention, attentiveness. What does this mean?

As I’m writing this, there is a very small but not negligible possibility that we will see global thermonuclear war, which may (if my high-school debate cards were correct) lead to human extinction.

G. W. F. Hegel, our favorite German idealist, saw time as a march towards consciousness coming to know itself. An inevitable march, actually, thanks to the cunning of Reason. (To be fair, he was writing at the very beginning of the 19th century, and he couldn’t possibly have known the 20th century would happen.)

Fiction writers, who are generally the better philosophers, have generally seen things differently.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

wittgenstein & suspicion

“Why did you do that?” Wittgenstein objects to this question, insofar as it suggests a misleading image. If you ask me why I picked up my pencil, it may be because I wanted to write something; but in what sense this “reason” existed in my mind is a bit unclear. Is the reason I picked up my pencil even the same kind of reason as the reason I ordered Chinese food tonight, or the reason I went to a coffee shop to work today, or the reason I called my parents last night, or the reason I wrote this essay? Is there really a singular kind of mental experience underlying all of these, which we are simply observing and reporting on when we say why we did something?

It seems doubtful. Instead, Wittgenstein suggests that at the time of answering the question, we give an answer that fits the why-did-you-do-that language game. So the “reason” exists only in a social/linguistic context...although it is still in relation to you specifically.

Going a step farther, you could treat the problem as actively adversarial. This is what, say, TLP does. His maxim “you are being lied to, by yourself” echoes the mindset of a security researcher: you need to think like the enemy. The enemy (you) might produce a reason that flatters you, or is plausible enough to avoid a revelation that might change you.

I still think some “whys” are useful. But how do you know which ones?

paying attention

Many people aspire to be serious thinkers, but I keep coming back to Iris Murdoch’s idea of attention, which seems to me more essential to quality of thought. She elaborates on this in her philosophical essays, but I’m always drawn to this passage from The Black Prince (emphasis mine):

...any artist knows that the space between the stage where the work is too unformed to have committed itself and the stage where it is too late to improve it can be as thin as a needle. Genius perhaps consists in opening out this needle-like area until it covers almost the whole of the working time. Most artists, through sheer idleness, weariness, inability to attend, drift again and again and again from the one stage straight into the other, in spite of good resolutions and the hope with which each new work begins. This is of course a moral problem, since all art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

The narrator of The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson, begins the story as a very, very serious man; he has just retired from a steady job as a tax collector, he pontificates on Important Art that he never actually makes, and he breaks into nervous hysterics at the mere thought of any variation from his routine. But he is not very attentive, certainly not to other characters in the story; he repeatedly, painfully, demonstrates his inability to notice the reality of anyone else around him. (Well, and then some things happen; but I don’t want to spoil it.)

This idea is not unique to Murdoch, anyway; in fiction, I think it shows up quite often, in characters who are morally weak, and, relatedly, bad readers. An extreme, caricatured example of this is something like Matilda’s crass, television-obsessed, small-time-crook family in Matlida, but I have something slightly more subtle in mind.

don jon vs. the church

JGL’s 2013 rom-com Don Jon is basically the perfect thinkpiece bait; the protagonist is a guy who prefers porn to real sex, and you can take that to make pretty much any statement you want about modern masculinity, sexuality, the media, etc.

I’m going to talk about a less flashy aspect of the movie: his relationship with the church. (It may be worth reading the Wikipedia summary if you’re not familiar with the movie.) In particular, I’m going to saddle up on one of TLP’s hobby-horses from Sadly, Porn: the idea that, to avoid taking responsibility, people create an omnipotent authority that they can fool. This may sound a bit elaborate, but I promise it’s all right there. I’ll walk you through it.

meaning is (nothing less than) use

Phases and images from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (“language-games,” the fly-bottle, “meaning is use”) get thrown around pretty liberally, both by academic philosophers and by Twitter amateurs like me. Following in the steps of my forbears, I’d like to show some love for a lesser-known example from the Investigations that made a big impression on me.

Wittgenstein takes a number of examples from chess. For Wittgenstein, both chess and language are governed by rules. But in both chess and language, he finds a case that is a bit strange...

563. Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game. — Now let it be decided by lot which of the players gets white before any game of chess begins. To this end one player holds a king in each closed fist while the other chooses one of the two hands at random. Will it be counted as part of the role of the king in chess that it is used to draw lots in this way?

Even though this is in some sense a “rule” — the players agree on it, and it has a mechanical impact on the game — I don’t think we’d say that this is “what the king does in chess.” This “rule” feels somehow inessential compared to, say, the rule that the king may move one space in any direction.

In the same way, we have intuitions about what is essential in language. He points out that the word “is” means something different to us in these two sentences:

The rose is red.

Two plus two is four.

561. Now isn't it queer that I say that the word "is" is used with two different meanings (as the copula and as the sign of equality), and should not care to say that its meaning is its use; its use, that is, as the copula and the sign of equality?

One would like to say that these two kinds of use do not yield a single meaning; the union under one head is an accident, a mere inessential.

In both cases, we have a strong intuition about something that isn’t based in any hard-and-fast classification system. We feel that something is essential or inessential because...well, we just know. It’s just what we’re inclined to say.

When Wittgenstein says that meaning is use, it’s sometimes taken as a demystification, or a disparagement of language: that we may know the meaning of a word by merely looking at its practical effects, and the rest is all hogwash. But no! It’s because humans have such a remarkable relationship with language, that we have to look at use to understand meaning. The dictionary definition is stripped of our power.

fighting games & why I’m reading lacan

Fighting games are philosophically interesting, because they offer a unique perspective on game-theory “games.” To explain what I mean, let me start with a simplified example: a game-theory “game” that might happen within a single round of a fighting game.

Let’s say I’m on the offense, doing a series of moves on an opponent who is currently blocking (usually called a string or blockstring). Let’s say I’m doing a string that has two possible endings. In one ending, it is a true blockstring, meaning, if my opponent tries to attack during it, my move will hit her during the startup of her attack, and I get a counterhit that does a LOT of damage. In the other ending, it is a “fake” blockstring, meaning my opponent can interrupt it with a fast attack, leading to a small reward for my opponent. However, in exchange, if my opponent does block it, I am left in an advantageous situation.

Those of you have who have been incepted by the RAND Corporation and/or Venkatesh Rao are probably already picturing this 2x2:

In theory, we could “do the math” on all possible options that either player has at any given time. After all, fighting games are turn-based games, it’s just that each “turn” lasts 1/60th of a second. In practice, there are way too many options to consider all of them, so the game happens at the speed of thought.

This allows a more psychological level of play, where I can “get into my opponent’s head.” For instance, continuing the example above, if I just used the true blockstring and counterhit my opponent, I might expect her to be more wary of interrupting my string next time, in which case I can get away with a riskier ender. @spilledreality might call this “anti-inductivity.”

This is of course a simplified example: in most games, both players have more options. I might attempt to throw my opponent out of her block, or “reset” to a completely new string, or mix up my opponent between blocking high or low, or do nothing at all; my opponent might do an invincible but very risky “reversal” attack, or use special defensive options, or use more advanced defensive techniques that cover multiple options (e.g., fuzzy blocking, chicken blocking)...although those techniques, in turn, can be countered by various offensive techniques...

You might be tempted to model this as simply updating the probabilities in the payoff matrix. You’re not entirely wrong: most players will do some quantitative analysis when they’re not in the middle of a game, looking at damage numbers and calculating the risk/reward in a given situation. In practice, though, I can’t prepare for every possible situation, and in the moment of action, I can’t remember every possible situation at the same time. Not to mention that some techniques might be difficult to manually execute, especially under pressure! So the pure game-theoretic model turns out to be inaccurate. At the very least, it requires some notion of “mental resources” (see this video), and some notion of risk of execution failure...

...but even with those adjustments, the game-theoretical model feels distant from what most players actually do. I can’t just will myself to do something 37% of the time, even if that’s what the model says. And in other cases, the model might be exploitable. In Street Fighter V, throws do much, much less damage than getting hit...but the advice to “just take the throw” has become a bit of a meme, because players who “just take the throw” will often get thrown several times in a row. When that happens to you, it’s hard not to feel like a complete fucking moron.

Just as how, in physics, different properties can be observed at the quantum scale, the extremely fast time-scale of fighting games actually gives reality to eerie mind-reading qualities like yomi. It’s hard to consistently win at rock-paper-scissors (although some have tried in interesting ways), but high-level fighting game players “get the read on” or “download” their opponents all the time.

This is why I think it’s not a stretch to call fighting games philosophically interesting. The question of whether, or under what conditions, this kind of “mind-reading” is possible is not a new one. In Poe’s 1844 story “The Purloined Letter,” the proto-Holmesian gentleman detective C. Auguste Dupin tells this story about a childhood friend:

“[...] I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis, is it?"

"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."

"It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

Does this schoolboy’s strategy seem quite plausible? This question, and its implications for a cybernetic understanding of human psychology, would be taken up a century later by Jacques Lacan.

Which brings me to where I am presently.

#anti-inductive

save the last dance for me

Wanna see something cool?

One thing, first. This is improvised.

I hope you liked it - I certainly did when I first saw it, and I still do. This grainy-ass reupload only has 27K views, but I promise that virtually everyone in the West Coast Swing community has seen this video, and virtually everyone liked it.

It’s not particularly flashy, certainly. Nobody gets lifted over anybody’s head; nobody does anything especially acrobatic. It just looks really nice.

I’ve mentioned previously that folks can get a little pathological about the dance. In the pursuit of excellence, this lovely moment was immediately sucked into a grim vortex of what my friends @spilledreality, @mclegibilist, and @natural-hazard might call “anti-inductivity.” This poor couple found themselves in the face of incessant demand to reproduce every component of this dance. Whenever an event director had the chance to choose a song for them - even when it was supposed to be “random” - it was always something exactly like this song. When they gave classes, it was expected, tacitly, that they would teach a “move” from this video. They were asked: when will you turn this dance into a routine?

Every aspect of the goose was dissected, and meticulously examined for traces of gold dust. It never really worked, of course.

And yet. Good dances still happened: dances that managed to be surprising and delightful in different ways. The meta-goose, if you will, which lays the geese that lay the golden eggs, has not yet been located. My belief, or rather, my hope, is that this is because it cannot be found.

II.

I dislike John Barth for multiple reasons, but the relevant one right now is that he wrote an extremely bad essay called “The Literature of Exhaustion.”

Barth takes a view of art that draws on Borges’ short stories. In “The Library of Babel,” for instance, which he mentions briefly, Borges describes a near-infinite library of books which contain every possible combination of letters and punctuation. Only an infinitesimally-small number of them are even intelligible, of course; but every possible book is in there somewhere.

Barth argues that, in a similar vein, we’ve exhausted existing forms: for instance, he says, the whole “modernism” thing is pretty much played out. Bold claim, but for the sake of argument, I’m willing to grant it. Certainly it’s true that certain forms feel useful for expressing certain kinds of things, and that an entire form might be no longer useful if the things that feel urgent to express no longer mesh with that form.

My bigger problem is with his proposed solution. His plan is, essentially, to combinatorially recombine existing forms, so that rather than simply “writing a novel,” one would write about writing about writing, etc. He admires Borges’ short stories, like “Pierre Menard,” because Borges skips all the boring business of actually writing the base-level books and simply describes them, leaving to the reader the intellectual exercise of imagining them.

Barth has the sort of naive fascination with recursion that you only see in folks who’ve never studied math. What he doesn’t understand is that each level of recursion (writing about writing about...) does not produce a fundamentally different thing each time. A programmer could tell you that recursion looks something like:

def fibonacci(n): if n == 0 or n==1: return 1 return fibonacci(n-2) + fibonacci(n-1)

This function can execute to as many levels of recursion as you like, and it is completely expressed in four lines of code.

It speaks to a lack of faith, I think, and a kind of self-centeredness, to believe that all truly new forms have been exhausted in our time, and all that remains is to stick them together like Lego blocks. Although it may not be present in an individual creative work, there has to be something in any creative field that is truly inexhaustible. Otherwise, what’s the point?

looking for your muse

My dance teacher had a joke. Sometimes, during a lesson, he’d catch someone looking up and to the right. “Looking for your muse,” he called it. “There’s nothing up there, you know.”

Which is true, but. Why do people do that? Here’s one hypothesis: it’s because we know that’s what people do when they’re thinking.

I think my dance teacher knew this, or guessed this, subconsciously, and that’s why he made fun of it. And he was right to. Because you only pull a thinking face if you’re not actually thinking.

pride & prejudice

Many people read Pride & Prejudice as a romance. Some people read it as a scientific sociological study, which, for mysterious reasons, has been stapled to a work of fiction. Not enough people read it as practical philosophy.

Why is it called Pride & Prejudice? Darcy’s pride is pretty obvious - he goes around acting like an asshole - but what about Elizabeth’s prejudice? Well, she makes an error of judgment. She admires Wickham, and takes his side of the conflict with Darcy, until she learns the real story. Now, why does this happen?

Is it just an isolated mistake? is it simply because Wickham is seductive and charming? Some adaptations have played it that way. It is true that he is described as personally charismatic, and Elizabeth certainly likes Wickham. But she is something less than in love with him. They never go beyond flirting, and when he leaves to pursue the wealthy heiress Mary King, she has no hard feelings. Actually, she defends his right to do so, even as other characters point out that openly pursuing Miss King’s fortune is Not A Good Look.

This ambivalence makes sense when we realize that her attachment to Wickham is really about intellectual vanity. Actually, sorry, I’m making this sound like a theory I came up with, but she literally just says it (emphasis mine, in this and the excerpts following):

“How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”

She is ready to believe Wickham because it gratifies her quick judgment of Darcy. “I called it right away, Darcy is an asshole - and I was right again!”

So what Pride & Prejudice is “about” in this sense is Elizabeth overcoming this vice that impairs her judgment. And note that this vice is not some sort of trick or glitch in the system, like the experiment where you don’t see the gorilla on the basketball court. Like in all of Austen’s novels, the heroine’s problem is coming from inside the house, so to speak: her judgment is impaired by the fact that it cannot judge itself from the outside.

Elizabeth is intelligent - much more intelligent than most of the people she interacts with - and wields her intelligence as an ironist. We learn this partly from her own bon mots, but we get this sense from the text as a whole, as well. While Austen isn’t overtly narrating from her heroine’s perspective, as she would do more obviously in Emma, the seemingly-objective narration is...not, really. Austen has rigged the deck. That’s why the first line is this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

This is a joke. It is a witty, sarcastic joke. Which is Elizabeth’s strength, and her problem. Her sense of irony, while not harmful in itself, threatens to curdle into a reflexive cynicism.

That’s what happened to her dad. Mr. Bennet is a pathological ironist: he is intelligent, but uses his intelligence only to make quips at others’ expense, and in practice is little more of an asset to his family than his ridiculous wife. (Actually, he’s done much worse: he is the one who failed to manage the family’s finances, and so he is the one who has precipitated the Bennet daughters’ financial predicament.)

She reflects on this, later in the story, after she has had her own personal crisis, and has come out somewhat better for it. In the last moment of peace before the flurry of action, right after Elizabeth’s father has sent Lydia off to Brighton, where she will abscond with Wickham:

Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible. But she had never felt so strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising from so ill-judged a direction of talents; talents, which, rightly used, might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.

Mr. Bennet, after seeing what happens to Lydia, demonstrates some awareness of his failings, that he might have done better. But it is too late for him. His irony has metastasized.

“You must not be too severe upon yourself,” replied Elizabeth.

“You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough.”

This is borne out by the text. He soon loses his grip on whatever solidity he had, allowing Wickham and Lydia to pay a wedding visit to their house, only pages after swearing that he wouldn’t. He can only see that his daughter marries someone better.

And on that account, I think we can be optimistic. Darcy is able to recognize his own blind spot, which is perhaps not just simple I’m-the-best arrogance, and is perhaps more like Elizabeth’s than we realized...

Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth!

So there we have it. Austen’s perceptive tale of self-reflexivity and irony, nearly two centuries before David Foster Wallace.

phenomenology of crossword-solving

I’m solving a crossword. For the sake of example, I’m solving the Friday, 9/17/2021 NYT crossword.

I’ve started off in the top left, and I’m doing quite nicely!

The clue for 15 Down is: “Typist’s help to avoid repetitive strain injury.” The clue for 32 Across is: “Ground shaking stuff?”

It occurs to me that the answer to 15 Down might be WRISTPAD. That sounds like a thing, right? Now, if that were the case, 32 Across would begin PE. But I can’t immediately think of anything fitting the clue that begins PE, so I move on.

Later, I fill in some other answers, and I become convinced that the answer to 15 Down is, in fact, WRISTPAD.

And now something strange happens. Now that I know for sure that 32 Across begins PE, I immediately figure out the answer: PEPPER.

It’s not just visual: if I put the letter in, but I know that I’m just doing it as a guess, it won’t work. I have to commit to the letter, and then suddenly I see the answer.

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