Current mood:	calm
Entry tags:	anarchism, cybernetics, new school, philosophy, primitivism

Interconnectedness
Tuesday was the last day of my introduction-to-epistemology class. I'd never read much about the philosophy of knowledge, and I didn't really think I wanted to. Turns out I rather enjoyed the class, boring Scienticians like Ayer and Quine excepted (although the ensuing discussion was interesting).

My prof is a rarity apparently—someone who largely disagrees with the aim of much of traditional analytic philosophy, that is, that philosophy should be mostly about defining and elucidating the foundations of science. I was under the impression that there has been a lot of work done in the last twenty or thirty years that has moved on past this view, but according to him it's still quite prevalent, in North America at least. Perhaps iopha could tell you more about this.

About a third of the way through the semester, he showed a movie called Mindwalk. In terms of artistic presentation, the movie is lacking rather a lot. It's essentially one long conversation, which isn't exactly a thrilling concept to begin with, but the director doesn't seem to know how to make it engaging past just shooting it in different locations in and nearby an old church in France. But the content was quite interesting.

It's based on the 70s book The Tao of Physics; the director is actually the author's brother. I haven't read this book yet, but the ideas are quite similar to many of those in Morris Berman's The Re-enchantment of the World. Anyone who has spent any time with me when I've been in a philosophical/pedagogical mood has probably at least heard the name, if not heard me go on at length about it. I read this book in 2004, and it is the main reason I am now studying philosophy.

I've been interested in social justice issues for about 10 or so years now. After my realization that there were some rather Bad Things in the world and that we could do something about them, collectively and individually, for several reasons I quickly adopted a fairly radical stance—that of the general rejection of hierarchy and power structures, aka anarchism. I was, and remain, convinced that reforms and other band-aid solutions are not addressing the real problems of society, which I believe are largely caused by power imbalances. In a sense I am both pessimistic and optimistic about humanity: when a human gets into a position of authority over others, she or (more often, historically) he will have a high probability of misusing that power, sooner or later. She or he will also not normally give up such a position willingly, often (but not always) creating a list of reasons why it would be a bad idea to step down.

I realized that political philosophy played a large role in clarifying the systems and structures that would lead to and maintain decentralization of power in society, but as for the rest of philosophy I was largely ignorant. Although not defining myself as an engineer, that part of me is undeniable, and traditionally engineers sneer at philosophers. I didn't accept that view wholeheartedly, but I had yet to be shown that philosophy could actually affect anything or, in general, be "useful".

One of the best things about facilitating a class on anarchism at Dawson is the new ideas that you encounter in a class devoted to learning as a group, in which the facilitator, while performing some of the duties of a traditional teacher, is understood to be at least part student at the same time. Several people in my first class were hot on an idea called "primitivism". As with any vague idea like this one, there are a lot of definitions and a lot of ground covered, but what I have been able to take out of it is a new understanding of civilization through the study of "primitive" ("traditional", "simple", "hunter/gatherer") societies. Here, I was being told, was anarchism in as close to a "natural" state as we as a species seem to get. I read more on the issue, by radicals like Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Dave Watson, John Zerzan, although I have a lot more to read still.

I was surprised and distressed that these ideas seem to have gone unnoticed except by those who read a few quasi-underground publications. But when I read the back cover of The Re-enchantment of the World at a friend's house, I realized that some of these ideas were being discussed in an academic setting. Berman's book is a birdshot blast at a range of topics including physics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and even alchemy. It was an attempt to examine some of the foundations of civilization and how we arrived at the worldview most of us share in contemporary western society.

One of the areas that interested me most is the examination of the assumptions and foundations of modern science. Berman essentially posits (along with many others, I've since discovered) that the mechanistic view of the world, enforced by a distinct subject/object split, has given us some power over it in return for a loss of connection with it. Part of the solution he (vaguely) discusses is an enlargement or replacement of this kind of science with one dedicated to connections, systems, and holism.

But back to my class on epistemology... a year or two ago I became aware of the field of "cybernetics", which is the study of control and communications and a part of systems theory in general. Systems theory has only really been around for 50 years or so, maybe less, and has influenced many areas of knowledge, by its very nature being interdisciplinary. Sure enough, I managed to find some philosophical treatments of its ideas, and, more interestingly, the derivative idea of "second-order cybernetics", the cybernetics of cybernetics, discovered when cyberneticians attempted to use cybernetics to construct a model of the human mind. Knowing my prof has some similar ideas gave me extra impetus to write my term paper on the epistemological ramifications of cybernetics.

I present the paper below for those of you who, for whatever reason, are interested in reading a brief survey of a bit of the philosophical origins and a few of the interesting and relevant features and discoveries of cybernetics, in my opinion of course. This is only a 200-level course, so it's a short paper that doesn't do much more than cursorily scan a small part of a large terrain, with a bit of my interpretation thrown in, but if you're really interested it should provide some directions for more information. I found the online journal Constructivist Foundations to be particularly interesting.

Voilà: Teleology, Cybernetics, and Cartesian Dualism

Btw I apologize for the quality of the PDF... OpenOffice apparently still has some work to do on its PDF-exportation feature.