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.