LOL 1900s

For Pythonistas

 

BACKGROUND READING ON SYNERGEO

Drifting Apart

The Roaring 20s

Like many in my senior cohort, kicked back in a McMansion maybe, in Beverly Hills, what I like to do with my time is check out the long arc of history as seen through the filmmaker's lense. That includes, but is not limited to, the Hollywood movie makers. They didn't used to have so much competition as they have today. 

Likewise I believe my Lazy-boy chair peers are glad for the Criterion Collection, which in the rabbinical tradition glosses the films with lots of behind the scenes peeks, along with scholarly commentary, to provide more context. Context matters.

I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.

The theme of the evolving roles for good guys and bad guys, star heroes and villains, with supporting characters, is especially pronounced when the film is self consciously doing a "great sweep of history" angle. 

They were all good guys in WW1, sharing the same foxhole. But in returning to civilian life, they'd gravitate to different scenarios based on luck and character. Bogart plays an especially villainous dude. Cagney is the more likable, but too full of himself to realize how clueless he is with respect to women.

I learned a lot listening to the followup analysis, including from the director himself from the 1970s. I'll be weaving what I've learned into my own internalized tapestry of world history; something we should all be working on. If you need an excuse to pay people (so they don't starve or turn to criminal activities), pay them to improve their internalized world models. 

Don't let them turn out like those RAND Corporation or Brookings people: pathetic when it comes to understanding how the world moves on (the original title for this film).

Consciousness Studies

When doing philosophy in the Wittgensteinian vein, we like to take inventory, of the many ways in which a given word, the one under study, gets used in actual practice. 

We cultivate our ability to conjure up all the ways in which we use “consciousness” for example, or just “conscious” versus “not conscious” versus “unconscious” and so on.

The EMT (emergency responder) wants to know of  X is conscious, meaning aware of X’s surroundings, responsive to stimuli. 

But then you’ll get a guru stepping in to talk about “levels” of consciousness, with “higher” and “lower” as possibilities.  People talk about “raising consciousness” which would seem to have not much to do with the EMT’s meaning.

Sometimes “conscious” means “sentient” i.e. we think sensations must be happening. But other times we might say “this sentient being has no consciousness” meaning in some sense “no sense of self”. 

But what does it mean to sense a self? We have to keep taking inventory, multiplying the number of special case examples. 

To sense a self has to mean knowing a difference between sense of self and sense of other. This is what Wittgenstein would call a grammatical remark vs some deep truth or empirical finding. It’s “deep” in the same way “grammar” is deep, he’d famously put it.

Clearly, when we stop to really think about it, the number of language games in which “consciousness” figures is quite large, and then comes the game of explaining the “essence” of consciousness. 

Per Wittgenstein, that’s just another game, typically philosophical in nature, with the connotation (in his writing) of empty wheel spinning. 

Who says there needs to be some “essence” to which all these usage patterns must distill at the end of the day? Bad philosophers? Weak thinkers?

We might want to shift away from “consciousness” in some contexts, giving preference to the word “awareness” and emphasizing its “of otherness” focus, as in defining otherness we likewise define not-otherness, meaning self. 

Awareness is a of a self-otherness dichotomy. 

Do we need “self awareness” on top of simply “awareness”? Judging from common English, we need that nuance, yes.

So is awareness the same thing as consciousness then? 

If your mental model is there’s this Thing, call it C for Consciousness (what it is, in itself) and Awareness and Consciousness are both labels for that Thing, then yes, “same thing” is apropos. 

However, those following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps have learned to question the questionable dogma that there’s this Thing, this spooky essence. 

We have the operational utility of these words, and get our work done with them. 

Who says these terms are actually “labels of” or “pointers to” some Object (i.e. the “true meaning” per this particular superstition)? Weak thinkers? Dogmatists? 

What does a pawn on the chessboard point to, as its meaning? Not the right question, right? Pawns don’t “point”. So now consider “consciousness” to be your pawn, your tool, your artifact. Use it however. And good luck making it point to some Thing. We all suffer from fevered dreams from time to time.

More Bizmotica

Bible Studies

One of the many benefits of practicing Quakerism is one is not beholden to a chain of command when it comes to beliefs handed down from "on high" (snicker).

I classify unprogrammed Qs (as distinct from the evangelicals) as one of those practices not that into what we call "head beliefs" i.e. some credo one should be prepared to stand and recite, like a loyalty oath. 

Per Karen Armstrong, Some Protestants are really into that; they think religion is about "what's in your head" in terms of whether you've absorbed Calvinist eugenics or some other Genesis-based racism (anything invoking "Noah's sons").

However, we do recognize everyone is entitled to a private "bag of beliefs", much like a spleen, a personal organ, and one engaged in filtering out the old while training for the new. 

T-cells and B-cells (antidote beliefs, the immune system) get a workout, as the macrophage dogs force-retire the red blood cell imposters, no longer able to perform their role. Everybody needs a healthy counterintelligence system.

Whether one wants one's private bag audited by others is a different matter. What others might be available? We have Clearness Committees for those wishing to enter a peer review process.

If you plan to go out into the world advertising your Quaker status, while meanwhile unfurling some elaborate ministry, you're expected to gain clearness and support from your local meeting, or else be prepared to explicitly state that you've bypassed that route. 

Thanks to this workflow, established over the centuries, other Quakers will know that, if you're out there sounding crazy, you might be doing so on your own recognizance, with no meeting expected to back you up.

We have a lot of Quakers exercising this freedom, well-complemented by the Bill of Rights, should the happen to be US-American or akin to same. These Qs not officially "released" -- meaning freed from committee work -- so as to speak their truth to whatever powers.

In my own case, I wanted to protect local Qs from having to vouch for my ministry in any way and so laid down my membership without lowering my level of participation. 

As far as my ministry goes, according to my version of Quakerism, all meeting positions are open to non-members, including clerk, as to be a member mostly means to be openly publicly a Quaker, not afraid to journal and/or list oneself in the public domain. In terms of workflow, unprogrammed Friends pride themselves on transparency and inherently have no secret rituals, even if they deal in confidential information.

As a non-member, I was cleared by Oversight (so-named back then) to clear members for membership. I saw nothing the matter with performing this role, as an "experienced Friend" as Friends called me. However other meeting-goers did express their reservations about my faith and practice, as would be expected. 

That's back when I joined QuakerQuaker, a discussion board devoted to hashing out (threshing about) such issues. Said board seems these days moribund, probably because the attempt to upgrade the underlying framework failed.

From my angle, many non-members are more courageous than members in this respect.  Some are just shallow status seekers.

Curriculum On-ramps

Many of us come to Cascadian Synergetics through Media Studies, featuring such authors as Marshall McLuhan, and readings such as EST: The Steersman Handbook. The verb "to steer" relates to the Greek "cyber" as in "cybernetics". "Call me TrimTab" -- Bucky Fuller.

Another on-ramp is First Person Physics combined with Anatomy, adjacent to "sports medicine". The topic of "energy expenditures" in terms of joules (or calories), and in terms of rate, gets us to such energetic terms such as "frequency" and "amplitude". Energy Slaves. Anatomy provides valuable experience becoming fluent in a dense namespace. Cytology and virology sit close by.

Market Metrics: Robotics

We can gauge the progress of humanoid robot technology in proportion to how much war game simulations factor in these robot armies when scheming and dreaming about futuristic wartime scenarios.  If the generals aren't expressing worry about the displacement of human soldiers, and/or the boots on the ground soldiers aren't organizing to keep their roles, then likely the state of the art is pretty far from replacing actual GIs. You'll need GIs with different skills. What's really happening is the "dronification" of various vehicles, such that they might be piloted remotely.

To what extent is DARPA funding "drone tanks" would be a question for some chatbot. I'm not planning to ask because I don't really care that much about what DARPA is or isn't funding these days. CP4E was enough to get the ball rolling in my bailiwick.

CP4E was Guido's proposal to develop a world-changing computer language, starting with a campaign to make it work equally well (via a GUI IDE) on all major platforms. This he accomplished, with masterful success, and the rest is history.

I expect Wall Streeters are already inundated with humanoid robot portfolios, glossy presentations about future product lines, an extension of the Kitchen Debate struck up by Nixon vs Khrushchev, in the shadow of the Moscow Dome. 

The state of "kitchen technology" is indicative of civilian quality of life overall. If the average household has all the requisite appliances, it gets to be rated "first world" (using an obsolete jargon). Will Japanese households have humanoid helpers in the kitchen? What tasks will they perform? 

In the meantime, the consumers control the marketplace in large degree. When it comes to AI, a lot of the GenZers are less interested in humanoid robots than in pet feeders employing facial recognition to dole out requisite portions and meds. In a cafeteria plan, individuals get handed a completed tray based on their dialed in dietary profile, much as on an airplane, but with meds meted out.

These are humans on the go who don't just wanna drink Soylent before heading back out to the playing fields. They do wanna be facially recognized, although fingerprint readers might be doable. Swipe cards will likewise work in some clubs (for food, gym locker, sailboat, scuba gear and so on).

The pet facial reader and feeder, like the floorplan-learning vacuum cleaner, are both examples of specialized appliances that don't need a humanoid appearance so much as a voice-controlled API.  

Many Gen X-, Y- and Z-ers are already passing on to Gen Alpha the joys of using inhouse voice-activation to control lighting, heating, meal planning, online shopping and so on. 

Instead of driving to the store, conveyor belt driven fulfillment centers assemble orders and push them out.

However, when it comes to the rough-and-tumble world of real-world driving, fantasy fiction meets reality in a big way. The Amazon delivery fleet, with private car armada, is not robotized, nor has drone delivery yet taken off (that'll be more relevant when we set up our more remote Earthala-type campuses).

Wall Street as a whole, on average, is not necessarily tech-savvy enough to not fall for empty promises. Once parted from their money, investors have little choice but to ride the rollercoaster in some cases. Their money was skimmed from their borrowing accounts (by prior agreement) and invested on their behalf, with the promise of more back than put in. 

The promise of the LLC is you won't lose more than you put in, not that you won't lose. Benefits from risks cannot be locked in, by law of nature. But by law, they may be mitigated.

SpyVille

So what I’m I learning from all this noir watching, thanks to MMU (Movie Madness University — but I repeat myself)?

I’m glad I caught up to The Girl Hunters (1963). Even though I’m older than Bogart (physically if not psychically, whatever that means), that doesn’t mean ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (as goes the tired cliche). I didn’t grow up on those Mickey Spillane novels featuring private eye Mike Hammer (thank you Google Gemini, not Mark). 

What I got was Spillane was up against Ian Flemming, the competition, as the Cold War was giving rise to a new set of stereotypes around good versus villainy. How to get the new spy lingo into Hammerese? The Girl Hunters marks a stab in that direction, with its fem fatale star the lucky girl to get painted gold in Goldfinger (which I also just rewatched thanks to MMU).

Trevor had earlier taught me about the Ian Flemming versus Patrick McGoohan school of thought, which could be summarized I suppose as “do the goodie spies have to be good with guns?” The question is akin to the age-old: “must the hero engage in swordplay?”. That depends on whom the script is written for. Speaking of which, Dick Van Dyke was offered the possibility of being a Bond after Connery, but he didn’t think the audience would buy it. True, it’s hard to imagine Dick sounding British.

As a child of the Cold War, I got to spys’ ville (a city of shadows) via such as Spy vs Spy in Mad Magazine, and yes through the Bond films, more than the novels, which nudged me into John le Carré, one of who’s novels I was privileged to read actually traveling through Victoria Station or one of those, on a rare visit closer to his setting.

Then of course I met some real spies in person, like Ralph McGehee that time, and later Ed Applewhite. Mostly I’d just read their books, like with Colby, Turner and that Spy for All Seasons guy (Duane “Dewey” Clarridge). Of course Casey (we might’ve met). Etcetera. More recently, I’ve been picking up some clues on stuff to read through Candace’s show (she’s eclectic).

Anyway, all that later stuff I’ve written up in previous posts, other media. It’s the out-of-sequence noir stuff that’s new (with thanks to MMU). Hey, I didn’t get to Sesame Street until high school, given Manila screened more USA telly than Rome. Or maybe that was more a case of getting it contemporaneously, versus catching up through reruns?