There is something so inane, so intellectually lazy, about ascribing recently invented psychological categories to figures from the past on the basis of their writing and the anecdotes about them. Yesterday’s NYT Blogs offer the unoriginal “insight” that Wittgenstein, Russell, and Sartre may have been autistic.¹ First, “autistic,” like any other diagnostic category, is intended to diagnose, not to label. Unless it is being used to place a particular therapeutic course in context, it is meaningless. Second, making any psychological or medical diagnosis without the full fidelity of interacting with a patient is as irresponsible as standing on the Senate floor and insisting that a comatose woman, hundreds of miles away, will recover. And third, in suggesting that many philosophers were autistic, the idea, clearly, is to rely on unsaid presuppositions about autism to  deploy unsaid claims about the relevance of philosophy, to wink at the reader and say, between the lines, that we may not be that smart, but at least we’re normal.

This tired trope is bad analysis. But, more vile, it also pathologizes the effort to think abut the world with discipline and rigor, another bit of trash floating in the sewer of the anti-intellectual tradition.

¹Ref: Andy Martin, “Beyond Understanding,” The New York Times, November 21, 2010

Excellent find worth spending some time with later. It seems to have lots of resonance with other activities that depend on the circuit from design to use, with other practices that entail construction.

ajnabee:

Material(ism) for Architects: a Conversation with Manuel DeLanda

Phaedrus: 5

Symposium: 2

Parmenides: 2

Ion: 1

Theaetetus: 1

All others: 0

Says rather a lot about me, actually.

As the worshipping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance, so the lyric poets are not in their senses when  make these lovely lyric poems. No, when once they launch unto harmony and rhythm, they are seizes with the Bacchic transport, and are possessed—as the bacchants, when possessed, draw milk and honey from the rivers, but not when in their senses. So the spirit of the lyric poet works, according to their own report. For the poets tell us, don’t they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as the bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for the poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

Plato, Ion

I’ve decided that it’s too self-indulgent to turn off the alarm clock on weekends. The time to get up is the time to get up. And then actually sleeping until the alarm goes off? That’s just lazy.

There are plenty of things in this article to agree and disagree with, but it’s great journalism nonetheless, taking risks and doing analysis that few U.S. papers would consider. It also offers a parallax view on the current situation from an outside perspective.

The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it’s also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country’s capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don’t believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.

“Is the American Dream Over?,” Der Spiegel, November 1, 2010

If you were an octopus, would you view the world from eight different points of view? Nine? The answer may depend on how many brains an octopus has, or, to say it another way, whether the robust bunches of neurons in its coiling, writhing, incredibly handy arms bestow on each of them something akin to a brain. Is an octopus a creature ruled by a single consciousness centered in its large brain, or, by dint of its nerve-infused legs, a collaborative, cooperative, but distributed mind?

…

“Octopuses let us ask which features of our minds can we expect to be universal whenever intelligence arises in the universe, and which are unique to us,” Godfrey-Smith said. “They really are an isolated outpost among invertebrates. … From the point of view of the philosophy of the mind, they are a big deal.”

HarvardScience, “Thinking like an octopus,” October 21, 2010

The resulting theory of Quantum Darwinism is relatively straightforward:

1)      Human measurements are only one, rather unusual, means of forcing decoherence of a superposed or entangled quantum state into simpler states. The primary mechanism causing decoherence is the many types of interaction that the quantum system has with its environment. Typically quantum systems experience a vast number of such environmental interactions selectively destroying entangled quantum states.

2)     As a result [of] these environmental interactions, or environmental monitoring, only a small minority of quantum states, called pointer observables, are able to survive and evolve for any sustained period of time in the deterministic, classical manner. Their prolonged survival is due to the peculiar property of these pointer states that interactions with the environment and the subsequent decoherence leave them largely unchanged. They alone are able to survive in the face of environmental monitoring.

3)     As the pointer states are the only ones able to survive decoherence, and as interactions with the environment pass information concerning the quantum state to the environment, a quantum system’s environment becomes heavily imprinted with redundant copies of information concerning the quantum system’s pointer states. It is these environmental copies that we actually experience and from which we gain information concerning quantum systems in almost all cases. For instance, quantum systems are in continual interaction with the vast number of photons in their immediate environment. When we observe an object visually we are actually accessing information that has been imprinted on photons during previous interactions with the quantum system under observation.

4)     The redundant imprinting of information in the environment makes this information available to multiple observers and provides the basis for our classical concept of objectivity or the ability of numerous observers to access and confirm the same information.

While this process may explain the emergence of classical physics from quantum physics it may not be clear where the Darwinian part comes in. Zurek explains his motivation in naming Quantum Darwinism:

Using Darwinian analogy, one might say that pointer states are most fit. They survive monitoring by the environment to leave descendants that inherit their properties. [The] classical domain of pointer states offers a static summary of the result of quantum decoherence. Save for classical dynamics, (almost) nothing happens to these einselected states, even though they are immersed in the environment.

As found in Marginal Revolution, “Quantum Darwinism,” November 6, 2010