Book Review: Non-zero by Robert Wright

In this book Wright tells the story of a planet where biological and social complexity both arise out of largely similar core processes: evolution via natural selection plus technological innovation plus 'non-zero sum' dynamics.

In short, 'zero-sum' interactions occur wherever one player's gain is another player's loss - where the net value to be obtained out of the interaction must sum to zero (think duel to the death). 'Non-zero sum' interactions occur wherever certain actions by players may lead to gains by both players. The language of games and players comes out of game theory – the classic non-zero sum game being the Prisoners' Dilemma, about which much has been written. The interesting bit here is that our 'players' may be humans, but they might also be genes, chromasomes, molecules, organs or memes. Memes are theorised units of cultural evolution: they replicated, mutate and survive insofar as they successfully colonise 'niches' within human minds. The meme for the belief “slavery is fine” isn't doing so well at the moment, but the meme for “we should try to stop global warming” is doing pretty well. The existence of non-zero sum interactions doesn't guarantee that the players actually choose actions which realise the potential positive sums, it simply provides a potential for mutual gain.

One approach to the talk of non-zero sumness would be to say “so what, he's just saying that co-operation is good for everyone.” But as Wright points out, there are many non-zero sum interactions which don't look much like cooperation at all. When you buy a watch made in China you are involved in a non-zero sum interaction with the factory worker who assembled it — you get a cheap watch, he gets paid (hopefully) but the relationship hardly constitutes cooperation. Alternatively, mitochondrial DNA and regular nuclear DNA both benefit from their contributions to the reproduction of a eukaryotic cell, but again, calling it cooperation would be stretching the meaning of the word pretty far.

Wright writes the book from a fairly hard-line technological determinist perspective (which at first I found disappointing, but it paved a solid path on which to ground more speculative considerations near the end of the book). What allows the non-zero sum interactions to expand over time, in number and scope, is the availability of certain technologies (as he says: “Add technology and bake for five millenia”). The two critical types of technology are: information technologies, which allow quicker, more accurate transmission and processing of information (writing, the invention of money, printing, the internet); and trust technologies, which produce an environment where the procedures and outcomes of interactions are increasingly stable and predictable (authority of the chief of a village, rule of law, contracts).

Add to this his claim that humans have an innate tendency to innovate — to find new ways of doing stuff. This in itself is a predictable outcome of evolution powered by non-zero sum interactions: humans who were less interested with tinkering with stuff are less likely to stumble across cool new tools that help further harness potential non-zero sum interactions. As information and trust technologies progress, those with access to them can productively realise the benefits of non-zero-sum interactions with more and more people who live further and further away. These increasingly large and interconnected social units, armed with good information processing and some semblence of stability, operate effectively as social/collective brains — creating feedback loops which increase innovation and so on. This is what leads to the broadening of complexity and geographical scope of human collectivities: nomadic tribes to villages to chiefdoms to towns to city-states to fully fledged nation states to some possible future institution of global governance. All pretty neat, right?

As any history-of-everything is, Wright's story is very selective. But it is also well considered, and tackles many of the important questions along the way: why did humans make the leap to agriculture when life what pretty cruisy as a hunter-gatherer? why did the industrial revolution happen in western Europe, even though China was far more advanced technologically, hundreds of years beforehand? didn't civilization nearly get 'lost' in the middle ages anyway? what about the continuous threat of the 'barbarian hordes' — aren't they a counterexample to the story of increasing complexity? if non-zero sum interactions always tend towards larger social organisations, why did all the big empires collapse? For someone who hasn't read much history, there are many interesting stories here.

Wright generally reads history in an optimistic light — even given all the horrors of war, , genocide, famine and disaster, human societies have basically moved consistently in the direction of greater individual freedom and wider distribution of power. Although war was often a potent tool in engendering stability within social units (and hence increasing non-zero sum potential locally), increasingly our interdependence is making all-out war a less and less productive strategy. This is not to say that we can't screw it all up by dropping A-bombs everywhere, but it is the increasingly negative-sum nature of war that makes it less and less palatable: “Hate ain't what it used to be”. The rise of the internet is the next big thing in information technology and prefigures the arrival of masses of new potential non-zero sumness, if we can develop sufficient trust technologies to catch up with all the potential. It also heralds some good news on the social front: “...the most ambitious realistic hope for the future of amity — a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn't that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic.”

The sad part, however, about the story is that history's progress is still framed largely in terms of human beings' self-interest (and correspondingly their genes'). Sure, cooperation evolves with near certainty as the devlopment of technology broadens the scope of potential non-zero sum interactions, but in the end this is only because engaging in more non-zero sum games brings windfalls of material goods, status and sex for the players (there is a complete ignorance of any questions of gender here — it's always the men getting the sex...).

This is a bit of a caricature though — Wright admits his story is partial, and there are many complications surrounding selection at the level of the gene, organism and group. But the question I think it raises is an interesting one: yes human beings are often selfish, we do like to accumulate things and status. But we are also genuinely caring and innately socially minded. “Aha,” the critics will say “but all this altruism evolved only because it served your innate self interest, therefore it is not really altruism, just selfishness disguised as unselfishness.” Well, maybe, but no one claims that just because we evolved from apes that we are actually apes. In fact, by the above line of argument you may as well say that humans are in fact just primordial slime from which all life evolved. My point is that just because we can theorise how our innate tendencies towards cooperation, altruism and love might have arisen because they served the replicative needs of our genes, it doesn't mean that the resulting altruism is actually selfishness. The response should be quite the opposite – isn't it amazing and wonderful how essential selfishness could evolve into real, genuine altruism! Of course we're still pretty much beginners at this whole altrusim thing. Wright does point to a sort of necessary spiritual transformation but, typical of his cautious style, doesn't elaborate, and sticks with the nuts and bolts.

After being a bit underwhelmed by the materialistic and economic style of Wright's major arguments, I was quite impressed with his movement into the problem of consciousness and more theological speculations. Far from solving the intriguing problem of consciousness, he reminds us, modern science has actually emphasised its mystery. By showing that the brain operates consistently and coherently as a purely physical system, with no apparent need for 'input' from a conscious inhabitant, modern neurosciences have in fact highlighted its own inability to explain consciousness. If consciounsness doesn't appear to do anything, then why does it exist? Why did consciousness evolve if it doesn't achieve anything? Why is it like anything to be alive, to feel? Science cannot explain this because there is just no evidence that consciousness is useful to explain anything in the material world, it's just neurotransmitters and action potentials in there. This makes the question of what the heck consciousness is much more interesting and important than ever. The best explanation so far is that consciousness is some sort of correlate of increasing density and speed of information processing, which matches up with the idea of human collectivities operating as 'social brains'. Consequently, Wright asks — could a global brain ever become conscious? I think he misses the most obvious point here: even if neurons do have some sort of limited consciousness of their own, their consciousness is not identical to the consciousness of the whole brain. As a corollary, even if a true global consciousness could emerge (or has emerged!) we would not have access to the experience of that consciousness, as we are but the neurons, not the whole brain. However dissapointing this may be, it's still an interesting line of thought: human beings + internet may well be conscious, but me might never know it.

Although relying on the random processes of mutation and selection, the combination of self-replication and non-zero sum dynamics produces, according to NZ, a systematic tendency towards evolutionary units of higher and higher complexity. Major debates about the notion of 'progress' aside (insert 100 years of debate here), this places Wright within a movement exploring notions of models and scales of human development. A central qualification of his argument is that although we, as homo sapiens, with our particular version of a highly complex, globally integrated society were incredibly unlikely to have eventuated (given all the randomness of evolution), it is almost certain that some kind of highly complex, intelligent, integrated organims would have arisen out of the same primordial goop that produced us. Given enough time, and escape from giant meteors and invading aliens, something resembling us would eventually develop. This is directly contra the well known writer Stephen Jay Gould who sees us as an altogether very unlikely accident, and that's all. If somewhere along the way homo sapiens had all been obliterated by a meteor then, according to Gould, that was our one and only chance, gone.

These arguments lead to an interesting discussion concerning in precisely what way (once we admit the importance of non-zero sum dynamics and the tendency towards complexity) we can say that evolution has a 'goal', or shows evidence of 'design'. I've always been extremely tetchy about people who talk about natural selection 'designing' things (eyes, cell walls etc) but Wright makes some points that help tease out the concept. If you belive NZ progress in a restricted sense, and indeed intelligence and possibly consciousness, are so deeply embedded in the natural world that we cannot ignore it. In the end it might come down to questions of semantics whether we read this tendency as 'design' or not (with one huge caveat to destroy any quacky notions of intelligent design coming from Kentucky). Although not pursued by Wright, I think this connects back to the discussion of consciousness: 'design', 'purpose', 'intention' are all things that only arise in relation to consciousness. So by definition (if we belive the neuroscientists) we can never find these things in the physical world, as consciousness is not a feature of the physical world. The uncomfortability in Wright's discussion I think arises from his attempt to place it there. But if we imagine the world in its totality (as an information processing system) as potentially engendering some sort of meta-consciousness, then it might seem possible to speak of such things as design, intention, purpose at that level.

Read in comparison to Wilber's SES (see book reivew posted on this blog 5/9/2007), NZ is easily an order of magnitude less bold. But because of this, it requires you to take a lot less on faith and appeals much more to common sense and empirical history. What NZ does that Wilber doesn't, is provide a coherent mechanism to explain evolution's remarkable tendency towards higher complexity and apparent 'progress' (however much you dispute the term), without invoking some mysterious 'Omega Point'. Although Wright flirts speculatively with the notion of a teleology or goal-directedness in evolution, his prime movers are always replication, mutation, zero and non-zero sum interactions and lots of time. The interesting implication for our own little slice of history is that the feedback loops of evolution — technology begets more non-zero sumness begets technology — mean that increases in complexity and global interconnection may be on an accellerating gradient, reducing the amount of the 'time' ingredient necessary to bake the next round of tasty evolutionary cakes. In sum, we might be in for an interesting ride within our lifetime.

Where am I being led...

So new interests are:

what it means to be "white" and including this in the discourse on racial politics.

geography... Im very excited about this one. Maybe chris can give me more insight.

positions of power and democratic ideals

Very Happy

Hey,

Im very happy you two have decided to come back. I can't say much about what you have written, but I can say we need to be wary of absolutisms in any form, notice I am not saying "absolutisms are bad." haha funny me.

Nah really, I wish we could all go get a coffee again or have a drink at my place, I need some deep discussions.

Been reading a ton on the history of educational reform in America as well as Sociological studies of teachers and am starting to come to some fun responses that I need to talk out before I can move further with them.

Im also becoming aware of the concept of Youth Activism, and how giving young folks political leverage could affect communities.

Third, I'm looking forward at research and getting ideas of bringing in design research methods to better understand what I hope to examine.

Fourth, I'm excited about the program I am in and realising I have somehow ended up in a very small program in a big university in which there are several people thinking about the same things as me (relatively). I'm not sure the chances, but I think I've landed pretty serendipitously.

Fifth, I wish I could respond to Wilber.

Sixth, I miss everyone over there and want you all to know you are welcome at anytime to come over and we will drink wine and talk and play guitar and watch movies and go for walks along the mississippi.

Wilber (and me)

Hello again,

I’m back! After an absence of many months I’m glad to see the health of this blog is intact. It’s not everyday you learn the name and existence of a new form of punctuation is it!? (I still haven’t worked out how to write one though). I had to respond to Chris’ review, but I’ll try and keep this post brief.

Firstly, I’ll admit upfront that I’m a fan of Wilber’s work. My own history as a lot to do with the reasons for this. As most of you know, I began study at Melbourne University spread across disciplines – economics, history, philosophy, environmental science, French – it always appealed to me to look at knowledge and the world from as many angles as possible. The experience I had with music also opened me up to the effect that the interior dimensions of experience (awareness, emotions, attitude, ego, etc) have on the expression of music. What is art but the creation of something that reflects some form of interior state of an individual? For some reason this notion escaped me when I was younger, but in my early 20s it flooded my interests. This led to me checking out meditation, martial arts and sampling a large part of the new age menu.

What makes ‘new age’ a dirty term? My guess is the largely uncritical acceptance and belief of a whole bunch of wacky ideas that are not well supported by empirical research or observable evidence. From the experiences I’ve had this is largely deserved but occasionally unfortunate. In my opinion, Wilber presents the most sophisticated theoretical framework that provides a space for many new age ideas to exist (satori, altered states and higher stages of consciousness etc).

When I went back to university and did International Studies at RMIT, the course was attempting to provide a holistic range of compulsory subjects that would provide the student with multiple access points to better understand globalisation as the most significant social/cultural transformation of our era. We were required to study economics and the history of techno-economic modes of production, the history of migration, ethnicity, construction of racial categories, languages and cultures other than English, the development of the nation-state system and development of the media. What was lacking in depth was compensated through span. It was fantastic, but something was missing -it didn’t quite all hold together.

There was the Marxist techno-economic history and the importance of the means of production in determining cultural outcomes.

There were the post-colonial critiques of scientific constructs as tools that facilitated domination and disempowerment.

There were the arguments over individual agency versus the effects of social structure in determining how messages in the media are interpreted.

We studied the great visionary leaders and great villains of history, but had no real sense of why and how these individuals emerged.

In other words, my previous studies seemed to prepare the soil for a certain uneasy contradiction between (seemingly) disparate knowledge systems to arise in my understanding.

When I came across Wilber’s work, it appeared that here was finally a framework that not only acknowledged the validity of each of the areas of study that I’d spent time with, but a way of understanding the relationships between them. This is why he calls what they do integral studies.

Now there are some issues that seem quite particular to Wilber when compared to other theorists. He is an extraordinarily charismatic individual and releases regular taped conversations from his websites. This combined with the weightlifting, yoga, 4am meditation, pop-culture references, taste for Armani suits, descriptions of non-dual spiritual experiences, and the constantly explicit description of developmental hierarchies in conversations has created a kind of personality cult that leaves many uneasy. The persona of an integral superman leaves many people suspicious, but I also think it stirs people’s own feelings of inadequacy. I don’t think these facts alone deny the validity of his work.

I'm going to leave this little narrative here, and post a rough overview of the key ideas of his model. If this bores the hell out of you I’m sorry, but at least it will give some substantive points to critique.

book review

So, I just finished reading this massive tome by an amercian philosopher (well, I'll call him that to keep you reading) Ken Wilber. It was quite an interesting ride so I thought I'd do a mini-review. Of necessity, a mini-review of a massive book equals a pretty-monstrous blog post!

The book is called 'Sex, Ecology and Spirituality' (actually, there is very little 'Sex' in the book and I think that was just put there to move units).

The scope of the book is gargantuan to say the least – basically a philosophy of everything built from the ground up: from atoms to the entire cosmos and from basic perception via the emergence of reason to full non-dual spiritual transcendence. This leaves the impression that, even at 550 pages (plus another 250 of footnotes in tiny-type), we are left with a half filled-in sketch and not a full thesis. However, the depth of his scholarship is undeniably impressive, covering the gamut from Plato and the numerous Eastern sages through to Kant, Descartes, Hegel, Schelling all the way through to Derrida and Foucault.

On the down-side, Wilber's writing has flavours of 'undergraduateness' about it on occasions and I see how people who are serious boffins regarding particular thinkers may take objection to his often rather brief interpretations. Overall, the prose is very easy to read and feels remarkably straightforward given the complexity of the task. The text becomes repetitive beyond belief which does inevitably cause irritation. However, I can almost forgive Mr. W. on the grounds that some of the points he is arguing against are so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that logic has to be supplemented with a little brute-force repetition in effort to dislodge the cobwebs...

First on the hit-list is the post-modern fallacy that all sets of values are equally valuable: How the heck do people out there go on not realising that 'all values are equally valuable' is a deeply value-laden statement‽ (and yes, that was an interrobang) Of course the position that all values should be respected is more valuable than one that says “only my values are valuable” but somehow this just gets warped into the same old meaningless contradiction of 'all values are relative' (except this one...). Just shows you the grip that a watered-down and simplified post-modernism has on much of public discourse (and this coming from a guy who digs his Derrida!).

Wilber's great skill is to take seemingly irreconcilable oppositions and situate them snugly within his overall schema. He manages to do this in such a way that each position makes sense as a partial response to a particular set of problems, and the contradiction between views appears as the manifestation of each party making the same mistake in different ways. Solutions are therefore always close at hand.

The schema is built from two basic concepts: holons, and the four quadrants.

For Wilber, everything in this reality is made up of 'holons' or whole/parts. Nothing is either completely whole, or completely a part, but everything is simultaneously both. Lower order holons aggregate via emergent processes to form new holons of greater complexity which maintain the properties of the lower levels but add novel features. The classic example is that interactions of atoms form molecules, molecules combine to form materials and so on up to organs and entire humans, each level adding greater complexity. To the extent that a holon is more 'whole' it experiences agency/independence, and to the extent that it is more a 'part' it experiences responsibility/boundedness. It is this necessary tension between the two which basically keeps the whole ship going.

The notion of the four quadrants divides the entirety of reality (or 'Kosmos', as Wilber calls it) along two dimensions: interior (left) – exterior (right) and individual (upper) – collective (lower).

Every single phenomena in the Kosmos has aspects in each of the four quadrants, and the scheme works remarkably well in allowing Wilber to locate, well, everything, in it. For example: 'mind' manifests as individual consciousness (upper left - interior individual), as physical processes in a material brain (upper right - external individual), as culture (lower left - interior collective) and as the manifestations of culture in architecture, institutions of education and government (lower right - exterior collective).

Centrally, Wilber posits the main conundrum of modernity as a false choice between two equally doomed alternatives, both emerging from the same fundamental misunderstanding – that of collapsing reality into its merely external (material) surfaces. He calls these two camps the 'Ego' and the 'Eco'.

The 'Ego' camp maintains that the liberation of the modern individual is found in the absolute freedom of the rational ego, released from social convention and mythical religious injunctions, and from the brutality of the natural world (including the 'natural' within the ego: the drives, the id etc). The material world is all there is, and the job of the ego (somehow spliced uncomfortably into this material-only world) is to reflect upon nature in order to gain mastery over it. This camp emphasises the wholeness of the ego, its independence from the natural world and from other egos. This tradition arises broadly from Kant and the liberal traditions including liberal feminism.

The 'Eco' camp, on the other hand, sees that the focus on the individual Ego-subject, abstracted and removed from nature, is the source of our alienation from nature, and hence is responsible for nature's impending destruction at our careless hands. Consequently, liberation is to be sought in immersing the ego entirely in ecology, in its inter-relatedness within the natural world. This perspective emphasises that the value of the individual arises only in its role as part of the 'great web of life', which itself is the only true source of value. From this perspective arises most of modern eco-philosophy, deep ecology, radical feminism etc.

The problem which unites and dooms them both, says Wilber, is their 'subtle reductionism' which denotes the reduction of the entirety of reality to its external (right-hand) components and the neglect of the interior dimensions (individual consciousness, culture etc). It is this mistake that keeps both camps perpetually frustrated and perpetually at loggerheads.

Another aspect of the book which had a striking impact on me was the reminder that if there is some supposed opposition between 'hard', rational, Western philosophy and 'soft', mystical, Eastern philosophy, it is a complete fabrication. Wilber shows how thinkers from ancient Greece (notably Plato and Plotinus), via Christian mystics, all the way up to the German idealists in Schelling and Hegel (and to a lesser extent postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida) made interrogations of reality that explored the same space (or at lest parts of it) as the most profound Eastern mystics. It is part of the 'subtle' reductionism of modernity that all the 'Spirit' gets crushed out of the great Western sages, and is left to be projected on the mystical, exotic East. And we are left with the philosophy of today, the majority of which deserves its reputation as dry, abstract and hollow.

Challenges for any critical reader will include his argument for (at the very least not to exclude) 'transrational' modes of apprehending reality. By working through Piaget and other developmental psychologists we see that human beings develop cognitive and moral capacities in a pretty much regular fashion, from basic sensations right up to formal rational thinking. The simple claim is – why stop at rationality? In each stage we reach a point where the current tools for interpreting the world meet problems for which they can not find a sufficient answer. Anyone who has every sat down for a while and thought about whether ethical frameworks are relative or universal, or about whether minds are just brains or indeed are something different, or have read about Godel's theorem, will have noticed that there are problems out there that rationality simply cannot solve. So maybe there are ways of knowing beyond the rational – and Wilber suggests that various Eastern and Western sages/thinkers have experienced and written about exactly that.

The best thing about this is that Wilber meets head on the charges of un-testability or non-falsifiability that are usually leveled at any claim about mystical or transrational experiences. In the end it's all about practice: If you want to understand what someone means when they say, 'the patterns in the bubble chamber demonstrate the creation of particle-non-particle pairs', (and you don't just want to take it on faith) you go and do a physics degree, spend ten years in a lab and then you understand. If you want to understand when a monk says 'the ground of all manifestation is emptiness', (and you don't want to take it on faith) you go and study zen, sit and meditate for 10 years and then you understand. The fact that we see the first practice as common-sense and the second one as bizarre is just a reflection of a faith in scientists, and a culturally-bound refusal to admit the existence of anything beyond the merely 'material'.

The other challenge will be the inevitable arising of the icky feeling that this could all be a bit too New-Agey. What comforted me is how Wilber persistently (and repetitively, in his signature style) differentiates the genuinely 'non-dual' spiritual traditions, that he endorses, from the various New-Age movements, which he sees as securely stuck in the 'Eco' half of the flatland modernity that he spends most of the book critiquing. New-Age philosophies are essentially all guilty of what he calls the 'pre/trans fallacy', that is, confusing pre-rational structures (sensuous embodiment, basic human desires, communing with nature) with genuine trans-rational structures (mystical awareness & higher order intuitions).

Not everyone will be sympathetic to Wilber's way of seeing things, but the book presents a pretty thorough going-through of many of the problems that I see underpinning what's wrong with contemporary reality, and places them in a relatively consistent and mostly complete historical and philosophical framework. The key to confronting the ecological and social crisis of modernity is not simply to be found in trying to understand and then managing the material world; and neither is it to be found by turning inward and solely focussing on individual personal/spiritual transformation (although this aspect has been largely excluded in modernity and definitely needs work); the real step forward lies in the integration of both of these, incorporating both internal and external, individual and collective aspects into our ways of understanding and our ways of acting.

A pretty glaring inadequacy of the book is its extremely dismissive treatment of theories of evolution (a couple of paragraphs) and its ignorance of fields such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which potentially provide other important insights into the evolution of consciousness. For the more kooky aspects, it's a case of take it or leave it. You can make a rational argument for an opening or a space for the transrational, but rationality by definition can't fill that space in. In my opnion, for all its limitations, Wilber in this book has got a lot of things right. If anyone's got a spare couple of months (and enough energy to keep an open mind without getting carried away) I'd say it's definitely worth the effort.

Community, Internet and Commerce?

I was reading about this company/website the other day in Businessweek, sounds pretty fantastic in regards to how it is run, the ideals behind it and then also in that it is doing very well.

See what you think:

http://www.etsy.com/

Businessweek Article:

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2007/sb20070611_488723.htm

Theory I thought Id share

Future of Energy:

See the Music Business/ more recently Food/Agriculture as examples--
Large distributors will be overcome by independant and local providers (individuals, community boards) of a host of different sustainable solutions (whatever is appropriate for the region--a couple windmills, home owner solar panels, geothermal, methane, hydro)-- see cradle to cradle, deep economy and a lot of other places Im sure for reference.

I guess the fallacy lies in this idea that we need to be dependant on centralised grids, when the better solution seems in the biased editorialised books I am reading is a diverse localised solution. Thing is this wont happen as some sort of "new solution" or economic revolution. It will simply happen when those coiches become more affordable and make more sense for people to consider. Big Energy will likely fight it and continue to push unrenewable solutions on us, simply because they want to stay afloat, make money and keep us buying from them. But people will wake up and realise a one time and then periodic maintainance costs will be far below that of more oil, gas, coal or ethanol.

Does this make sense? I really just see what happened with the hole being poked methaphorically in the inflatable raft record companies created and now what is happening as people become more concious of their food choices and local farmers start reclaiming power.

Hope one of you guys still reads this!

Save Africans!

Bono has guest edited an issue of Vanity Fair.

It is all about Africa.

I heard on the news that he had sent journalists all around Africa to write about it.

First thing that pops into my head:

"Were any of them African?"

looking at the table of contents, from what I can tell, only one story written in the entire magazine was written by an African. Wouldnt an issue about Africa and what needs to be done there be more effective or more powerful if I was reading African voices?

Is this the eighteenth century? Are we going to save these poor people with missionary politics?

just an aggravation.

I wonder how Bono would feel if I guest edited a special issue all about Ireland, and I sent a whole lot of people from Kentucky. I wonder what sort of insight we would gain...

Now, dont get me wrong, I dont think it is bad for an outside perspective or for peopel to want to help there, but I think it needs to be balanced and probably balanced more towards the voices of the people there. They are not mute people. I am pretty sure they have voices, and things to say. Then we could get the point of view of a couple people going there the first time or who have some experience working there...

More Education Stuff... Plus

The other day Heather asked me what I call myself if I dont call myself a teacher or an educator. She was thinking Facilitator, which I think is in danger of losing meaning, and so I said "learning enabler" because I was trying to remove myself from a position of too much power. Im not the one who directs the learning or makes it happen, Im just there to kinda answer questions and help make sure it keeps going... (ideally).... and then after a while I came up with "learning assistant" Heather made the comment that this one works because it puts the learner in the position of power.

Also, Im slowly working through Al Gore's new book "The Assault on Reason" I originally decided I wouldnt buy it because it would be just another book by another politician, but after seeing him on enough programs and deciding he is incredibly smart, and has a good sense of humor, and aware of his own inconsistencies, I decided to pick it up.

I think the thing that works best for me, and the way I think, is the way he jumps between subjects and makes connections between things like brain chemistry, evolutionary psychology, media studies, politics, history, constitutional scholarship, law, the environment and his own life is pretty impressive. Plus, and in many ways because of this, it is a very acute criticism of mainstream culture and the culture of the present administration: Al Gore admits as much, but there is a seemingly "good old days" nostalgic blindness to his discussion, but I think when he discusses earlier societies he is talking more about the big idea driving them than how they really were... similarly when he talks about the "reason" lessness of present day I dont think he is necessarily implying people are stupid and without reason (see idiocracy!) I think he is making a bigger comment on the "big idea" driving corporate culture and presidential/legislative politics, and I dont think he is very far off at all.

Enough gushing, although it is very weird for me to sit back and say I hope Al Gore runs, because Obama and Hilary are strong symbols but I am not sure of their ideals and consideration, which I know Gore has... screw the inconsiderate truth bullshit-- Im talking more about his conviction, calmness and attitude towards it all--

politics schmolitics.

commentary and ageing brains

I'm starting to think that the architecture of this blogspace is not actually ideal.

Why? The fact that comments remain to some extend hidden (i.e. just appearing as hyperlinks below a post rather than actually displayed) seems to work against the formation of dialogues that develop in depth.

Simple solution:

Any substantial responses to a posted post should probably be posted as a new post. The 'comments' functionality should be reserved for short, well, comments that the poster doesn't necessarily expect to in turn provoke a response.

Unless, of course, there is a way to make the comments always visible (blogministrator? can you check this out?).

Unfortunately this would mean that conversations would be read backwards from the top of the page, but I think we're all sharp enough to deal with that.

My second comment for today is this:

In addition to longer posts that analyse or argue for this or that, I would like to encourage shorter, more spontaneous posts containing interesting facts that have popped up, quotes, images, or well, whatever.

For example:

In an interesting lecture the other day, it was pointed out that the number of neurons in a human brain peaks at about 18 months of age. We then proceed to lose about 200,000 neurons per day ("neuronal death") for the rest of our lives.

So, if we start off with about 10^12 neurons (apparrently this is a good estimate), and we lose about a million neurons every five days (5*200,000 = 10^6), then we have about 5 million days to live before our last brain cell flickers out! (10^12/10^6 = 1 0^6, times 5 days gives 5*10^6) Luckily that's about 13 and a half thousand years...

The conclusion: old dogs really do have a bloody hard time learning new tricks - enjoy your neural plasticity to the full while you still have it!

C

This is not a response...

This is not a response to Aaron's response, but really the second part of the post I posted for Matt C yesterday.

I'm enjoying being an observer to the dialogue!


Matt Chudek said:

Here are a couple of extra thoughts about education, since I've already started.

One of the measures for improving the quality of education mentioned in the article, aside from a nationalised curriculum, is "improving teacher quality through merit pay".

This is an interesting idea. It seems to stem from the economic notion of letting the market optimise efficiency of service provision by competition for the best rewards. I'm sure we're all familiar with the economic version: there's money to be made selling bread, several bread-makers compete, the ones which can make the best bread for the least cost get the most customers because of their cheap price for a better product, the others go out of business and only the most efficient producers are left.

I could be getting it wrong, going on just the one brief quote above, but it sounds like they're trying to achieve something similar in education: post a big reward and let competition improve efficiency. I suspect though, and this is just my own humble opinion, that the two situations may be strongly disanalogous and this might not work out so well.

A key feature of free-markets that let them optimise production is selection pressure, poor producers are simply eliminated, good producers take their place. They expand their business to fill the void. This is not the case in education. There's a shortage of teachers, let alone good teachers. Even when you reward the best teachers, the worst are not eliminated from the market and replaced, they're still desperately needed and still teaching, but now having resources channeled away from them towards the best teachers.

Even the best teachers can only teach a few kids. In fact, trying to identify the best teachers and by rewarding them hoping that they'll somehow "replace" the worst is crazy, increase a teacher's class size over a certain threshold kills their ability to teach well, and in fact reducing the number of kids in their class increases the quality of education they can provide to each. Let this play out and you have the already good teachers with small classes getting extra money, and thus needing to teach fewer pupils to sustain their income and being able to reduce their class sizes further; while the worse teachers are left with ever increasing class sizes, and those students get ever worse education.

In short, rewards for good teachers necessarily entail a basic cost for other teachers, the opportunity to have invested that money in improving all teachers, but could also have greater costs for poor teachers: demotivation since rewards are seemingly unattainable and increased class sizes.

I doubt that's the motivation for "merit pay", I suspect it's more likely to be motivated by this sort of argument:

Every teacher wants more money. They can get more money by becoming a better teacher, so they'll work hard to become a better teacher.

Now if it were the case that every teacher could make a choice to magically work harder and become better, that could work. But teaching isn't like working on a production line, where all you have to do is sew faster and take shorter lunch breaks to increase your productivity. It's a complex art that deals with a very, very sensitive complex medium: human minds. Just like making a race out of building rocket ships tends to produce rocket ships that explode, good teaching is more likely to result from investment in on-going training and support than a scramble to win the prizes.

What's more, if the prizes are awarded the basis of student performance on national tests, teachers have a very strong incentive to teach students "for the test", rather than actually aiming to produce intelligent, well-rounded students. Anyone who's ever studied for an exam, passed it and forgotten everything a week later (but is still talking about the few arts lectures they went to without even being enrolled in), knows that teaching-for-assessment is the anathema of good education. Fostering an environment where students' test performance is a teachers' income, isn't likely to put students in a situation where the significant adult relationship in their daily lives is a very healthy one.

Still, there is a class of teachers for whom "merit pay" could produce a significant improvement, and they're worth mentioning. Imagine again a bell curve, this time describing quality of teachers: few awful teachers on the left, and few prodigious pedagogs on the right and most teachers somewhere in the middle. Those teachers just up from the middle, who could be excellent teachers but just lack the motivation, might get just kick they need from the promise of extra money and really fulfil their potential.

I wonder though if this would be more than compensated for by the already excellent teachers who really inspire their students and produce world-leaders and geniuses, but instead are forced to start teaching-for-tests in order to earn their money.


Rather than forcing the misplaced metaphor of market-competition on this rather disanalogous situation, I reckon we should try to figure out how best to improve a field where you can't "out-compete" the worst, but rather need to improve everyone's skills, given a whole spectrum of prior teaching-ability and potential. I reckon programs of constant and on-going teacher training and peer-support would be a much better idea.

I actually did a dip-ed at unimelb (withdrawn: term 3), and was astounded at how flimsy the training was. The uni-based lectures taught entirely detached theory (which I happen to love, but helped about butt-kiss when I actually got in a class room), and the practical placements involved watching one other teacher teach just a couple of classes and then jumping in the deep end and just making it up as I went (which I also enjoy, but is really a terrible way to induct new teachers, especially if you don't want every single teacher re-inventing the wheel). I made a point of going to see as many different teachers teach as I could during my placements. Most were happy to have me there, but mentioned that this was very unusual, and certainly not required. It was completely unheard of for established teachers to go to each other's classes and learn from each other, even though this would obviously be the cheapest, simplest and most effective way to drastically improve everyone's skills.

I've been reading a book recently on deep cultural differences in worldviews, especially between the "East" and "West", and their consequences for our everyday behaviour. It's called "The Geography of Thought" by Richard Nisbett. I recommend it. These two paragraphs on education caught my attention and I thought I'd quote them for you:

p.55 "Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. This stance of perfectionism through self-criticism continues throughout life. Sushi chefs and math teachers are not regarded as coming into their own until they've been at their jobs for a decade. Throughout their careers, in fact, Japanese teachers are observed and helped by their peers to become better at their jobs. Contrast this with the American practice of putting teachers' college graduates into the classroom after a few months of training and then leaving them alone to succeed or not, to the good or ill fortune of a generation of students.

An experiment by Steven Heine and his colleagues captures the differences between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement. The experimenters asked Canadian and Japanese students to take a bogus "creativity" test and then gave the students "feedback" indicating that they had done very well or very badly. The experimenters then secretly observed how long the participants worked on a similar task. The Canadians worked longer on the task if they had succeeded; the Japanese worked longer if they failed. The Japanese weren't being masochistic. They simply saw an opportunity for self-improvement and took it. The study has intriguing implications for skill development in both East and West. Westerners are very likely to get good at a few things they start out dong well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades."

p.189 "Asian math education is better and Asian students work harder. Teacher training in the East continues throughout the teacher's career; teachers have to spend much less time teaching than their American counter-parts; and the techniques in common use are superior to those found in America...Both in America and in Asia, children of East Asian background work much harder on math and science than European Americans. The difference in how hard children work at math is likely due at least in part to the greater Western tendency to believe that behavior is the result of fixed traits. Americans are inclined to believe that skills are qualities you do or don't have, so there's not much point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Asians tend to believe that everyone, under the right circumstances and with enough hard work, can learn to do math."



Afterthought:

Aside from competition not being able to eliminate bad teachers (and possibly worsening them), there's a second disanalogy between “merit pay” for teachers and market competition. Students often have little choice in who their teacher is, many parents have little choice about which school they send their kids to. Consumer choice is very limited in the education market, but is essential if market competition is going to be able to optimise teacher quality. Without it you're just channeling more resources to those who need them least.

Excuse me.

Hey guys.

I want to apologise. My responses and posts in this blog are very much "of the moment" I am not saying this to negate any of the content (which I will stand by-- be it stream of concious) but more so to recuse myself of the many grammatical and spelling errors, and perhaps logical jumps that litter them!

That is my apology, and my recognition of this issue.

That being said, it will likely continue.

A

This is not my post..It's (the other) Matt's post...

Sans-google account I'm posting this for Matt Chudek...read on!!

Hey guys,

It's my first post. My name's Matt, I'm a friend of Chris'. He introduced me to this forum a few months ago now, but I've been distracted with other things and it didn't really seem like anyone was discussing anything, so I'd forgotten about it till now.

I think ? made a good point a few posts back. Everyone here seems to just be posting interesting questions about what they themselves are interested in, but not replying to what others are interested in. It's understandable, but a shame because in the end, no discussion happens at all.

I reckon that one day I'll want to post some ideas and have them discussed by clever people one day, so here's my thoughts on some of the topics others have raised here.

In reverse chronological order.

Education:

1) National curriculum


Ok. Here are my initial thoughts on the reasons for or against a national curriculum. No actually, let me start by talking about the reasons for having centralised education at all, and get to that by framing the question in really broad terms.

Each generation children need to be educated. We have this tendency to keep dying and forgetting everything we know and being reborn knowing nothing. We also have a society which depends on people having tremendous amounts of specialised knowledge, and implementing it daily in really, really complex ways. That combined with the constant dying could spell disaster, if it weren't for a convenient overlap in people dying (thus forgetting everything) and being born(knowing nothing). We've got a narrow window of time, say 20-25 years while their brains are growing explosively and sucking up knowledge to train the generations that will succeed us.

The number of students in each generation is fixed (for the purposes of our discussion), so all we can tinker with is the number of people we devote to teaching them, and how we coordinate/organise them.

Now this raises some problems:

1.A) How many people should we invest in education?

Any people invested in educating successive generations aren't available to do work useful for this one, whatever that may be. So the more teachers you have, the fewer firemen, farmers, inventers and whatever else you'd like.

If education is completely decentralised, everyone educates their own child, or however many local children they manage to round up, class sizes would be a lot smaller, and so the relative proportion of your working population "lost" to education much higher.

Standardised, centralised education gives a society far more control over how many people are teaching and so improves efficiency. Ideally this will happen without a decrease, or even with an increase in the quality of education the students are receiving(discussed below). Going from complete decentralisation to some centralised schools gives a big jump in efficiency.

What about going from state-centralised schooling to national-centralised schooling? An argument could be made that having a centralised curriculum allows teachers to move between schools/states more easily, helping you achieve an optimum teacher distribution across the country. So if one state is teacher-rich(Note: consequence in simplistic economic model today's politicians like: high supply=low wages), and another student-rich (high demand=high wages), teachers can migrate across and resource distribution gets optimised. This is a very empirical claim, it depends on how compatible your curricula are without national centralisation, other barriers, relative socio-economic status of these areas, etc. It can't really be debated on the very general level I'm approaching this from, so I just mention it as a type of argument that could be raised.

This is all actually a periphery point, really what Bill Gates and everyone else is interested in is not the *efficiency* of teaching, in terms of students per teacher, but the quality. So...

1.B) How "standard" should our education be to optimise quality?

This is an even more difficult question.

The implicit claim of the “Ed' in 08” campaign seems to be that larger-scale standardisation increases quality of education. Does it, and how?

Now for simplicity lets assume that the quality of education a nation's students are receiving at any given time follows a roughly normal distribution, few students receive really bad education, few students receive really outstanding education, most receive somewhere in between. This may be very different in any given country, they could have a wealth of excellent schools, or the majority of the population could live in poverty and receive no schooling, or both at once. We can't account for everything, so lets look at the normally distributed case.

There are a few ways national standardisation could improve the quality of education.

1.B.i) Shifting the bottom of the bell curve up.

Standardisation, enforced by testing, could ensure that everyone, regardless of local peculiarities, receives a minimum level of education, though this may come at the cost of shifting the majority of the bell curve, especially the people at the top, down.

I think this is the strongest case to be made for centralised education. The key advantage of a national standardised curriculum is that it allows national standardised testing. It allows a central group of administrators to keep tabs on how everyone is doing relative to a single measure. Anyone who's dropping behind can have their resources re-jiggled (i.e. teachers fired, new teachers sent in, wages adjusted, etc) to ensure conformance. This greatly reduces the possibility of having local patches where students are receiving atrocious education and no-one notices (until someone writes "histery of irak" on the board and someone sends a photo of it to bill gates).

Of course all this testing and standardisation takes considerable teacher and student time to implement, and is often of very little benefit to either. The benefits are for the central administrators, and (hopefully) via them to the least well educated students. Classes that were already doing well actually suffer because of the time wasted on testing and the focus of education shifting to doing well on tests rather than learning interesting things. Gifted students, who could be turning into little geniuses with sufficient challenge, stimulation and advanced, individual, wandering-greek-pedagogue style teacher attention, are instead forced to endure year after year of training for spelling tests.

Outcome: Fewer geniuses, but a better minimum standard for everyone.


1.B.ii) Shifting the top of the bell curve up.

This is quite hard to argue, for the reasons just mentioned. Nominally it seems that innately better students, or classes already well taught would suffer under standardisation.

Perhaps a case could be made that standardisation would improve the likelihood of gifted students being identified, allowing them to be centrally picked out and connected with the best resources in the country for gifted students.

Without evidence that standardised testing actually picks out gifted students, or rather without tests designed to do this, it's unlikely to happen.

I guess it comes down to what you design your standardised curriculum (and the testing the accompanies it) to do: pick out gifted students, or ensure “no-one gets left behind”.

Standardised testing for “gifted” students, to whom resources would then be preferentially allocated, brings with it the chance of cheating. Everyone wants their child to be gifted, or at least go to the special school for gifted kids and have super-teachers and thus chance to become gifted. Some people have money, others are willing to investigate the testing system and figure out how to intensively train kids just to do well on the test. Money can buy even less scrupulous means of cheating too.

It's quite a mire. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that national standardisation is likely to benefit the children at the top of the bell curve.


1.B.iii) Shifting the whole bell curve up.

If you could show that *everyone*, on average, benefits from national standardisation it'd be a pretty good reason to adopt it. This is not an easy task, because there are quite a few additional costs to overcome

-Ground level costs: Teachers and students are going to have the their time and energy, which could have been invested in teaching and learning, consumed by administering the new national curriculum. This involves:

Teachers learning the new material
Testing
Paper-work
Students studying to pass national tests rather than genuine learning

-Hierarchical costs: You need a whole centralised bureaucracy to administer the new system, which means new “national curriculum” staff in every school, for every district, state and nation. As the number of people and levels of hierarchy to co-ordinate increases, efficiency drops and costs and mistakes increase.

So what sort of global benefits could counter these costs?

I'm not sure, perhaps you guys can think of some.

The only one that comes to mind for me is a kind of national “learning from each other's mistakes”. If some local area seems to be consistently worse of better than others, lessons can be observed there and the techniques pro/prescribed for the entire nation. Having observed the consequences of this, new, better national guidelines/requirements can be developed so that, rather than each little state constantly reinventing the wheel, and the quality of education dropping again once experienced teachers retire, the whole nation becomes one slowly learning collective. This could be quite costly at the start and even entail a drop in quality, but in the long, long (think generations) term, if well administered, holds the potential to achieve much, much higher standards that any alternatives.

This is a dodgy, wishful argument which relies of a tremendous amount of care and attention being given to the central administration over long periods of time. But an argument to consider none-the-less.


1C) Axuillary consequences of national standardisation

Call me cynical but:

The key change with national standardisation is that “requirements” can be centrally imposed on everyone, at an early age.
Bill Gates is really pushing for this.
Education gets centralised and the administrators, open to the wise advice of their new friend Bill, who lobbied so bravely for their very existence, agree that every student needs a computer.
Kind, education-loving Bill releases free (nationally compulsory) software for schools so that every student can receive cutting edge education. It only runs on Microsoft Windows. Kids get used to using Windows. Once people are used to using something it's not likely to change. QWERTY. err...i mean QED.

That's what I'd do if I was Bill :-)



So there are my thoughts about some of the costs and benefits of a national curriculum. They're far from complete, but I tried to define some of the concepts involved and broadly, basically and clearly as I could to help facilitate more clear, interesting discussion.

I was going to reply to more posts, put this reply turned out to be quite long already. So I'm going to leave it here for now. I'll post some more later, hopefully later today.

Coming up:

2)Educationalism
3)Being smart enough to realise you're not smart enough, and meditation.

Open

I am going to be writing an open letter soon to Bill Gates. Specifically in response to this story that my father forwarded me:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/education/25schools.html?ex=1178164800&en=64c526e2221ce366&ei=5070&emc=eta1

My question for this group are in a country the size of America, or even Australia, why would you argue for/against a national curriculum.

More specifically who, if a national curriculum would be created, would administer such a thing.

This is making me very upset. On at least one issue I am not a federalist! AHHHHHHH!!!!!

My Doctorine: Educationalism.

From my response to Chris' post:

"My most recent realisation is that I liberate myself with the omission of certain words: I will try not to mention education or learning in the pursuit of my PhD in the Department of Education on Community Learning. Instead I will focus on the words: diversity, community, democracy, voice, play, involvement, activism, environment..."

Why does this help me?

It does!

The more I avoid those words the more I can express what I am talkign about. I firmly believe in public education, but I dont believe in what people understand education as. I dont agree with how "learning" is understood by the institution of Education--notice the capital E. I feel like a feminist, but instead I'm an educationalist. Im reclaiming the e word.

...must lose, focus

After an inspiring start, something strange had befallen the AO team. No-one knew quite what it was. Some said it was apathy, some said it was epistemic fatigue, others said it was something to do with not eating enough red meat.

Look, I admit it, I have made some bold claims recently about intention to post and have not come through with the goods. But I guess we're all asking ourselves exactly what the purpose of this blog is (aren't we...anyone...is anyone out there?). Is the purpose merely to post idea after idea, or to actually start constructive dialogues with the aim of refining understanding of particularly pressing questions? Personally my contributions have mainly been massive question-asking exercises. Trying to open up spaces for dialogue to start. Selfish, I know. And nothing has really kicked off. It's hard to maintain the necessary feelings of community out here in deep virtual space that would inspire one to continue to post comments, consider responses and keep thinking in the face of all the rest of life's...well, stuff.

As is my general habit, the further I look, more and more questions seem to open up, and before long some new conundrum takes my fancy. Then it's like an obsession, I'll spend weeks, months thinking, reading writing about it, conviniced it is the one thing that simply must be answered if life on this earth (at least mine) can continue. Then, as if a honeymoon has ended, I slowly begin to see the icky technicalities, deep lines of debate and impasses that the question in question leads to. I realise that many other people, most of them almost certainly alot smarter than I, have spent decades, entire careers, whole books and journal issues nutting out the critical issues involved. Already done.

Here, then, is the problem:

I am smart enough to identify what I believe to be a number of very important questions. Sadly, though, I am also smart enough to realise that I am almost certainly not smart enough to solve any of them.

Not knowing where to go with that, I'll mention something that occurred to me during meditation today:

To be aware of everything, one must focus upon absolutely nothing.

C

Complexity in the real world

What is complexity and why do we need to think about it? After reading Aaron's last post I realised that it had been quite some time since I'd looked at complexity and that my knowledge of what it is and why it's important to keep in mind had started to fade. Luckily, the next day someone suggested I read the UK government 'do tank' the Design Council's Transformation Design paper. The paper proposes using a human-centred design approach, usually employed for commercial products, in producing solutions for social and economic problems. Existing solutions, such as the division of government into departmental 'silos', are based on the failing assumption that the world is complicated, that is that problems can be solved through analysis, decomposition into the pertinent variables and conditions and finally implementing a logical solution. In the Transformation Design paper, they have neatly summarised an emergent problem solving approach based on the assumption that the world is complex, that it is extremely difficult (impossible for a lot of systems) to decompose a problem into its constituent parts due to the extent of interdependence between the parts of the system and the multiplicity of viewpoints. They put forward that the best way to solve problems in a complex world is through an approach that employs collaboration between disciplines, includes regular people as part of the design team and builds into a solution the ability to adapt to change.

I hope this sheds a little bit more light on the topic. Chris might be able to offer an explanation of some modelling-based approaches to dealing with complexity.

This Blog II

Matt listed "complexity" as being one of the points of departure for this blog.
I'd like someone to elaborate!

I just watched this film "My Night at Maud's" by Eric Rohmer. Being a French Film from the sixties, they did a lot of talking about the human condition. Specifically they looked at catholicism and life, mostly in reference to Pascal. In the extras there was a philosopher and priest talking for twenty minutes about Pascal. A couple of interesting points which might work into this "complexity" idea:

1. That Pascal might have "discovered" differential calculus years before it officially emerged (I dont know the history here, or anything about Pascal), but he rejected Mathematics as not being pure enough to describe our existence before he could write about it, however in his writing and his work it was there so that somebody could act as "one looking over his shoulder" and discover it. The philosopher and the priest seemed to say that this was part of his genius, that he left clues for other people to discover (which they did--leibniz? supposedly used Pascal to come to differential calculus... again, excuse my crude understanding of the subject)-- Im troubled by that, and would like to think it is more just a representation of dialogue , emergent conciousness and the foundation and construction of knowledge, especially in times of revolution. (this was all mid 17th century through the 18th century)

2. Hinted at above, but there was the idea that was floated around through the conversation about man as liar. That Pascal wanted to change mankind to what it could be (love, peace, moral), but had to start at what it was (lying, selfish).

Again, COMPLEXITY?

Do any of us know anything about Pascal? Is he worth exploring? or is it a bit "French" and self important. I enjoyed watching people talk about it, but Im convinced I got more out of that than I probably would from reading his writing first hand.

This Blog

I've been reading and writing a lot recently, and boring people with discussion of change, growth and stage of consciousness and self identity. One way i came up with for understanding where i might sit (and i guess other people) is what kind of fundamental paradoxes arise for me, and how i try to solve them. People don't tend to change that much at one time, even the 'correct' answers only make sense if a particular 'question' has arisen within awareness. I think this is the real value of a community like this one. A place where we can post the fundamental issues that concern us, the ones that the mind just can't concieve of an answer being possible, but doesn't want to dismiss. I think these sorts of questions are the real sign of an emergence in consciousness, an deep seated need to solve (or disolve) such questions.

Its good for me to share that. Its silly to face it alone. I don't think they have to appear academicor quote theorists, but often i find it natural to do so. One of my favourite quotes is from a Zen swordmaster Shissai:

"A warrior is measured according to this: That he learns from the dregs of the ancients and extracts clear liquid from them"

Demos=People

Hey, so in that last response to J, I brought up the idea of democracy outside of "politics". This has been on my mind a lot lately, especially in thinking about how to accomplish or make happen what I see as my goals in the future-- do I involve myself in public policy, or do I work through alternative avenues? Does democracy work best through government, or in the day to day ineractions between people and the building of communities? I don't doubt the value of a republic, or federal union-- I just am uncertain of their effectiveness to lead change when change is in the works... it seems revolutions (paradigm shifts, what have you) only occur in democratic governments when the shit has hit the fan, never before. I am wondering if there is another way to go about effecting change, democratically of course. So, how does a democracy work outside a system of politics?

Hey Aaron

So what's the vibe with Obama over there?

I'm excited already, and i don't even get to vote.

Jules

Too Easy

Weren't in to that one?

Okay what about this:

What is consciousness?

The birth of a puppy

Yo animal orchestra team. Bigups to matt for setting this up. I'm excited, where do we begin?
So i'm reading for my honours thesis that Bourdieu says:

“By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the education system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give. This consists mainly of linguistic and cultural competence and the relationship of familiarity with culture which can only be produced by family culture and upbringing when it transmits the dominant culture.”


He uses this term habitus, which basically means world view/disposition.

A blank canvas

Over the coming months (years) the Animal Orchestra will be posting musings relating to and hopefully linking the fields of philosophy, education, urban design, complexity, politics, collective action and economics.