Driftwork

Nick said “most successful collective project we’ve created” and after a little extra thought, surely this is hyperbole of the same nature as the statement that the human brain is a very complex organism, more complex than a rabbits. And surely given that the scientific-industrial revolution has now brought us close to absolute disaster, examples such as climate change, nuclear warfare, liberal economics, the ongoing mass-extinction spring to mind but also here are some counter claims…

For example - the first industrial revolution - neolithic farming. The invention of the state. The invention of writing and later of printing…

Anyone interested in contemporary philosophy, becomes aware of the waves of fashion and change that are produced and then break on the shores of ideas that are necessary to function in what is for the moment capitalist society.

By now having become more conscious, than I probably wanted or needed to be of Speculative Realism (SR)courtesy of Peter Hallward and more crucially Eric, it’s become clearer what is at stake here. But the question that interests me is not what SR is or proposes but why is it that they are not aware and never discuss what is at stake in the acceptance that “the scientific image describes ‘what really is’” There is something feintly theological in the equation science == reality, which is remarkably equivalent to certain theological propositions that presume that god == reality.

Perhaps if I could escape from a society awash with jurist/scientists explaining the world they have constructed, I might have more sympathy for the view ? Don’t know really, I’ll probably be dead by the time the rather obvious relationship between science and the world has unravelled sufficiently for this to be addressed. The scientific function…

enough later.

Virilio cautions us to keep in mind that “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!” . Timing is indeed everything.

A bright sunny afternoon in Paris and a bright sunny morning in New York. Two people, a man and a woman step onto two matter transmitter panels, one in New York (the man) and one in Paris (the woman). Two transport engineers press the  buttons simultaneously and as you would expect two people travel at the speed of light along optical fibre cables, they should arrive separately, but the code for the transfer of people, well, the collision software doesn’t work as well as it does for internet traffic or perhaps it is just that people don’t notice when data disappears into the proverbial black hole, and they just blame the network. On their arrival their bodies merge into a single merged being. The network operations staff function according to Procedure 63 which tells hold the new singularity in stasis on the arrival platform whilst they check that the singularity will be able to ‘live’ whilst they re-engineer and split the singularity. They identify that they will be able to and notify the network engineers (procedure 64). The operations vice president is told of the problem he says ‘Follow procedures’ and ‘I’ll be in shortly Director’ The network engineers arrive and begin Using their analysis tools to disentangle the two ‘human subjects’.

For scientists this is what constitutes proof of planning ahead. No wonder we are in such trouble.

Love the Chimp…. though.

It’s a truism but endings sometimes take years. One I’ve been participating in for years took from Octover 2007 until now to end, I always promised myself in one of those ethical promises you come to regret, that I’d follow it until the end and now finally it’s over.

I have some fond memories of such things as the fear of the Chinese that emerged from America on the list, the occasional rabid anti-Marxism, the Utopian and dystopian discussions of technology frequently related to discussions of cyborgs and technological reason, a rediscovery of Kant (who I’ve always loathed), Hegel, Lyotard, Badiou, Kristeva, Marx, Negri and Hardt, Foucault, Women, non-western philosophies, Deleuze & Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Whitehead, religion, science, the transcendental, the curious way in which the postmodern debt to Nietzsche was never to be discussed, Iraq, the 11th of September, difference, the slow death of transcendentalism, the endless lack of the political, networks and network society, open source, class never discussed and evidence that was misread. This has fed over the years into the ontology and sometimes hardened the politics.

but all things considered - i prefer my own name…

This book is a collection of texts and images on human futures. Ranging across the spectrum of post-humanisn into the inhuman.

Can you judge ideas and concepts from the delivery mechanism ? Andy Miah better hope not because if you can then not a single idea in the book is worth anything. This is the worse designed book for the delivery of ideas I’ve come across for decades. Terrible fonts, pale text on pale background, yelloe on black, meaningless images… design designed to non-deliver the concepts.

Whilst I was struggling to read this book, it occured to me that the cheapest most infantile popular paperback delivers it’s ideas better than this expensive unlovely book.

The grey cloth boards are nice though.

I don’t think at the philosophical level we are now speaking of it that the issue of realism really matters - what seems to matter may be the philosophical and positional difference between materialism and realism, and whether the new realism you are adopting is capable of unquestionably supporting human emancipation and equality. Given your new dependence on evolutionary science, on biology, as opposed to Ladyman and SR who are dependent on physics and cosmology it is clear that issues of emancipation have to secondary. (It’s been pointed out to me recently that the authorial reference ‘Darwin’ is being used by creationists to treat the science as non-science, they use Darwinism and Darwinists rather than evolutionary science and biologists). Evolutionary science is simply science, biology. I agree with you that the science is (obviously, obviously) empirically proven, but suggest that the claims being made for scientific and philosophical realism as being the same thing are unproven. It seems that when thinking about science realism is being used as a means of avoiding the social, technological, conceptual and metaphysical that combines to produce /the practice of science/, it is this practice that interests me rather than any attempt to produce a realist metaphysics. For this metaphysics always requires (ala Ladyman and SR) the development of an apolitical position - which then proves to be incapable of critiquing the state sciences, whether the exemplary science is physics or evolution. In a recent New Scientist - Dennett and friends wrote to the magazine in defence of the concept of the ‘tree of life’ - but no science can be produced which justifies the metaphorical concept with its explicit treelike hierarchy. But still they are trying to enforce this metaphysics on us. They are being as reactionary as some religious fool who believes that god gave us language and the moon. Are these the reactionaries you mean who argue that “intelligence, race, gender” are real categories or do you mean those others who argue that “intelligence, race, gender, creationism” are real categories ? The former may also argue that these categories are as real as the tree of life, and are incapable of accepting that all these categories are the consequence of pre-existing social, technological, conceptual, metaphysical norms.

Any anti-realism proposes that both versions of the ‘real’ categories intelligence, race, gender, creationism, are never real. An anti-realist philosopher and engineer argues that the danger of a metaphysics founded on science is as great as one founded on anything else. Locke argued that philosophy was the “under labourer to science” whilst Meillassoux argues that “Philosophy’s task consist of re-absolutizing the scope of mathematics” However even allowing for the fact that the state science of physics is the model science for these philosophers, it’s clear that the problem is the same if biology is the model science. The task of metaphysics and ontology has been passed to (a) science and philosophy has no purpose - a realist philosophy is less than it might be. Rather obviously so for an engineer who thinks that the purpose of philosophy is to contain and control science (and invent concepts).