Sumer, Greece, America, and Conan

    Having abandoned a writing project because the ideas which I was trying to illuminate with the story were a little unclear to me, I went for a bike ride into desolation because I am always alone in the wild when I see the world and decided to linebacker my databases and paradigms by filling the gap of a relatively new subject, Sumer and its civilization. I began to read in things Sumerian.
    I found there a mythos and art of civilization that surpassed the Greeks. The Sumerians invented civilization and significant elements they originated were given to the Greeks by way of succeeding societies. Sumerian myth is like getting civilization from the horse's mouth; Greek myth is like reportage. Let me qualify this bold statement by saying that if I were to be stranded on an island and given the task of recreating civilization using one written work, it would be 'Prometheus Bound', the Greek classic.
    However, I find in my acquaintance with Greek myth no succinct statement of the essential act of civilization, the ethos of the whole milieu we so label, as the Sumerian: 'The good things from the pure sheepfold are why man was given breath.' It is all there, stewardship, husbandry, and artisanship, the essential roles of civilization. I find nothing so real, so illuminating as the story that Enki, the god of wisdom, was drunk when he decreed the arts of civilization. It probably was not a particularly wise thing to do as the Sumerians found out when Conan, I am being metaphorical, had their lunch.
   Civilization proceeds at a measured pace in a world of great risk. Exceed your wisdom, La Belle Epoque, and you risk losing everything, the First World War and all that followed. Hubris, as the Greeks termed the sin of pride, is as true now as it was then. Do not tempt the gods, Conan is waiting.
   There is a shiny new world being born today that smacks of hubris, from the highways to the cell towers to Amazon.com, there is that pride in taking risks and reaping rewards that does so tempt the gods.
Be Well and Do Well.

Towards an Integrated, Comprehensive Systems Theory of Economic Behavior

Key to this discussion is the assumption that human economic behavior is a self-regulating ecosystem of material existence. This assumption is made on the basis of observable facts involving market economies where resource scarcity leads to higher commodity prices and those prices modify economic decisions and behavior. That is definitely a feedback loop and that is where this paper begins, with a definition of the feedback loop in human economic behavior.
The feedback loop consists of five elements:
1.Discriminating disjoint system
This is a special usage of disjoint from mathematics and means no more than that a human being in the role of economic agent is possessed of integrity and judgement.
2. Entanglement
Taken from quantum mechanics, the usage is here simpler and more intuitive. Human beings, in other words, are entangled by language, monetary system, and quantifying methodology which provide the common basis for the measurement of economic behavior.
3. Information operations
This is simply the codification of the value adding task which involves a modification of information.
4. Discovery
This is the point at which markets define the feedback loop. A market is a game in which the relative value in currency of a value addition is discovered. Markets function under conditions of imperfect information and are therefore approximate and mercurial in the moment and efficient over unspecified time periods defined by changing conditions of material existence.
5. Feedback
Discovery information applied by an economic applied by an economic agent to future economic behavior.

The element of interest in this discussion is that of entanglements since that is a term from another discipline applied in a novel fashion through information theory to systems theory. Entanglements involve no more than roles and relationships. If I am another human being standing directly to your left, then you are a human being standing to my right. We are entangled. Similarly, language involves roles and relationships in any communication as does the more or less of a monetary system.
Human economic behavior, then, consists of an information loop involving modification, discovery, and feedback among disjoint discriminating systems. It is no more or less than that. Economic behavior is the primary social behavior of human beings and is conditional upon meaning defined psychological space, integrity, and informed mental discrimination, judgement.

Radical Instrumentalism

First, let me make a mea culpa. I am being fast and loose with the concept of instrumentalism. Postmodernists as a group push the limit of that concept. Instrumentalism is a philosophical doctrine within empiricism that judges a theory by its explanatory power. It is only a step from that to the radical instrumentalism that Dewey himself decried of an epistemology that states that we do not 'know' reality, only our perception of it.

Throw in modified Kantian 'hardwired' concepts, once again fast and loose, and you have my position in which I am borrowing a term from a rigorous empiricist and expanding and modifying it to 'explain' phenomena. Would Dewey object? Absolutely. He drew the line at such epistemological exercise. It is only with Kuhn that the boundary of pragmatism is extended beyond empiricism into the mechanics of mind and the limits of the possible.

Would Dewey understand? Absolutely. As we move to the convergence of Information Theory there is no question that pragmatism has been altered out of all recognition by an organic evolution of truth. He would be dismayed at the lack of a general purpose which he equated with meaning but he would accept individual purpose as meaningful which is the art of postmodernism.

Do good and be well.

Language, Thought and Reality (revisited)

Benjamin Lee Whorf once wrote an important little book of linguistic studies titled, 'Language, Thought and Reality'. It ranks with the work of Dewey and Kuhn as seminal American thought. However, Whorf wrote instrumentalism somewhat out of the picture in his study of how language and reality influence each other. In fact, language and thought are interactive but significantly not the same thing. Thought is influenced by our perception of reality and subject to critical failure driving aberrant cognition when that thought and that perception are demonstrably incommensurable, i.e. when there is a low degree of coincidence.

Faced with three disjunct systems, one is forced onto a central dichotomy, thought and reality which are arguably incommensurate , and an information calculus, language, which is, as Wordsworth brilliantly put it, 'the language of the sense', disjunct from both but relational to both which is identical to perception. Perceptions, the senses, are not thought and neither, as simple experiments show, are they reality. Language, however abstract, is rooted in perception and reflective of the interaction between whatever is 'out there' and cognition. It informs both our thought and our perception of reality and there is the genius of Whorf.

Do good and be well.

Interesting Times

This is an interesting time in which to live. We are in the midst of a massive paradigm shift from energy based theory to Information Theory which is being significantly driven by the new technology. This shift is so massive that it will be at least twenty years before various and somewhat isolated current theoretical structures are infused and aligned with Information Theory to create a coherent view of the universe.

Our knowledge of paradigm shifts in science is limited to the exchange of one fairly simple paradigm for another as in the Copernican Revolution. The social consequences of such shifts are not well understood. I propose, after Schumpeter, a period of creative destruction in which the old paradigm fails, intellectual bankruptcy, and the new one succeeds, enlightenment. As in all periods of creative destruction, society suffers transformational stress and emerges as a differently constituted entity.

The danger and opportunity of any period of creative destruction is social chaos and repressive reaction. Intellectual bankruptcy is a dangerous state. The incommensurable nature of thought and reality evidences itself in occult constructions such as occur in much postmodernist work, some of which is artistically commendable. Meaning, in any rational sense, is a function of a coherent, comprehensive world view. The central focus of postmodernist thought, the personal myth and the lack of structure, i.e. a Grand Narrative, is actually an attempt to keep the darkness of nihilism at bay by creating abstract structures in which meaningful behavior is possible.

This is a confused and chaotic period. It is necessary and inevitable to the evolution of pragmatic truth which is the force that drives our behavior. Dogma that is intellectually bankrupt is notoriously subject to critical failure and is therefore self-limiting. However the human brain is only so plastic and change tends to be generational.

We live in a difficult, challenging, and intellectually uncomfortable age. That is what makes it interesting. No human society of record has ever undergone the degree and duration of change that we currently endure. It will, I guarantee, test our intellectual mettle and our moral fiber. God's mercy on us all.

Do good and be well.

The Surprise of Writing

I've just finished the last draft of a story I've been working on for three months. After proofing it and doing the final tweaks, it should be up as a Kindle single by the end of March. I am always amazed at the surprises that the creative process holds and it is a process. For all the outlines and all the character sketches, a literary work has a life of its own. This is just a mystery, but the 'just' is qualified by the great writers who have turned their hand to this genre, Dashiell Hammett to name my favorite (I write nothing like him except we both do noir) or A. Conan Doyle to name an immortal.

I had no sooner rejected my first draft as inadequate and started on the second draft when the story began to tell itself, the mark of a good tale. It took me through twists and turns with its own curious logic and soon it was its own creature. That's the joy and surprise of creation, being an instrument of the Muse. I never tire of it.

Do good and be well.

Information Overload and Change

Information overload, information that has not been processed and integrated into the cognitive and neural structure of our brains, induces a mild dementia that may well be the genesis of the American malaise, neurasthenia. If you're searching your diagnostic manual for that word, give up. It's no longer in there. Wiser minds than mine, I'm sure.

Consider the technological changes made in the last ten years, the smart phone, the tablet, and streaming have now become common. All of these changes have to be integrated into our lives and into our cognitive and neural structures or there will be consequences. The brain does not like cognitive dissonance or anything like it. Living in rapidly changing technological environments is extremely difficult on the human psyche.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that by the ad hoc logic of doing what is technically elegant as it appears in the development of our technology, we are describing and creating a complementary mix of gadgets and capabilities that themselves describe a stable baseline of technology. There will always be a leading edge, but for most of us the end of change is realizable and with it an end to information overload and we can return to integrating annual reports and economic conditions which is normally a comprehensible degree of brain rewiring.

Do good and be well.