You’re Eating The Wrong Political Agenda

Concomitant with the evacuation of economics from the political sphere and the subsequent colonisation of politics by cultural ideology - so thoroughly embodied throughout the culture as the discourse of identity politics - has been the offloading of ethical decision-making by the state and the shift to that of a choice to be made by the consumer. We don’t demand that our clothes are made ethically with our voices and our votes, but with our wallets. And in fact we don’t even do that, as the signifiers of ethical decisions will substitute just fine for the real thing and we settle for the appearance of an increase in justice - a saccharine smearing over of societal problems that enables uncritical enjoyment of one’s daily latte.

The influence we can wield as consumers is ineffectual against the systemic a-morality of unrestrained capitalism, as it reframes ethical decision-making in terms of market exchange when it is precisely the opposite that should be occurring. That is not to say that consumers should not be aware of what they consume, that they should not research them, but all this extensive research for the minutiae of every small transaction becomes far too taxing on one’s time and energy and only further entrenches the capitalist frame.

Thoughts On: Superintelligence

As with my previous post relating to Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis (available here), these notes are long overdue, having originated with my reading of Bostrom's Superintelligence and coming up on being almost a year old at this point, having been jotted down in August and September of 2017. As I noted in my simulation hypothesis post and in my summation of my reading for 2017 (that post is here), I found Bostrom's coverage of the topic of superintelligence to be a lot less thorough than I had expected and it left me with a slew of unanswered questions and challenges to Bostrom's thinking which developed into these notes. I've tried to tidy up the notes into something a little more cohesive and comprehensible than their raw form, and have revised them where I was quite unsatisfied with them, so they may reflect some updates to my thinking in the year since I initially jotted them down. But enough introduction, on to the notes!

Our Worringly Undemocratic Future

During a talk on nationalism and globalism, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari makes clear what he perceives as the need for effective global governance. Particularly in dealing with the looming existential threat of ecological collapse posed by climate change, he notes that as it is a lose-lose as opposed to a win-win scenario, there are not workable solutions by which separate national authorities can come to an effective agreement. Harari admits that there is no guarantee that effective global governance will be democratic and that it may end up looking more like ancient China than modern Denmark. But Harari's position is clear: democracy is simply a luxury we can ill afford on such issues (TED, 2017).

Harari is a historian but as evidenced by his writing (Harari, 2015) he is quite concerned with the future. Harari attempts to foresee, at least in broad outline, where humanity might be going and to encourage some thought about what options may be open to us. Harari's recent books have been very large international bestsellers, so for such an influential thinker to be so unimaginative and pessimistic about the ability of democracy to grapple with the challenges of the future is both worrying and telling.

Technologies Are Themselves Logic Bombs

They bring with them all of the ideological baggage of any idea, but contain no arguments for us to consider. They coerce us to modes of thinking through our use of them. Without an ability to foresee what we are being coerced into, we blindly follow wherever technologies take us. What is vital then, is knowing how to read technology.

Thinking Through Your Limbs

I’ve been playing with an idea recently that goes to discussions of images and text, and of how we think. Because language is how we articulate thoughts, that is how we reproduce them for others, many people hold that we think through language, so that language shapes our thoughts. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker argues against at least the strong form of this view, proposing that we think in a more abstract language - Mentalese - and then translate from this to the concrete expressions of verbal and written communication (Pinker, 1994). Both of these views set aside the power of imagery in thoughts, and many will attest that not only are they able to better express themselves visually but also that they are able to conceive of extremely detailed, vivid, and clear image-thoughts which may be extremely difficult and perhaps on occasion impossible to translate into words. I think that the widespread experience of image-thoughts gives us a clue that the linguistic paradigm to thought is too limiting.