If you don't know about parallax you should check it out. It means to wander. It also means, the multiple views on a single object revealing the "imperfect" nature of perception, this according to Plato, barker for the "world of forms."
The term is important even when we look at hyperreality as a created thing and go so far as to view theories of reality as tools for bending reality to suit our needs. We define intersubjectivity to be multiple subjectivity. Scientific epistemology reduces to parallax.
What a change of heart that was! And it sure took a long time, but, then again, so does the reversal of the magnetic poles. But all this is preface.
(I too have at times taken objection to the way things are expressed. I don't have a problem with the way things are expressed in reality, as by occasion I may chance to learn something about it; but human understanding, and accordingly, human expressions, are often painfully limited. And indeed, with the fanaticism for "classic texts" – "religious texts" some might even say – among mathematicans, it might appear that mathematicians are stuck in Plato's cave hunting around in the dark for ideal forms, and maybe even fancying that they have come "pretty damn close." Well, I say, that isn't very scientific.)
Consider the mind, in its own most humble aspect, as the recipient of data coming in through the sense organs, which it then captures, recycles, and projects through various mirrors, evoking a picture of reality. An involuntary simulation, what we might call a "simulasm"; an agentless simulation, to correspond roughly to the notion of "simulacrum", a simulation without original.
Agentless? Really? Perhaps not entirely so (what is an "agent"?); the mind is in actuality somewhat more sophisticated, and having learned what sorts of things it likes and what sorts of things it detests, here and there the putative simulasm may show some rosy-colored tinges of self-deception or even self-creation.
Somehow it seems important to know; does the individual have choice? Presumably some of the most well-trodden philosophical ground out there. The sense that we either do or do not have choice is assumed to be so ingrained as to be inescapable, regardless of the analytical conclusions one comes up with. But without even a proper definition for this term, "choice", I don't really know how to describe my sensations of it. Perhaps it is a matter of degrees; a person with [Unable to write template]1 items, whereas a person with [Unable to write template]1 item. Freedom, or for that matter, agency, not as an abstract state of mind, but as a physical quality (or vector of such quantities).
For one thing, a choice is usually defined with regard to some set of outcomes. For example, we have been considering choices having to do with how one understands the world. Perhaps an instance of this sort of choice is found when one goes to the library and selects a book to read. But one's agency here should hopefully have been called in question by the foregoing: what are the preconditions under which the selection of reading material is made? Often there are some "prior causes"; other books one has been reading, things one has been thinking about, recommendations one has received. On the other hand, to ignore such things and choose a book "at random" from the shelf would seem to dash all hopes of "agency" obtaining. We seem to be arriving at a contradiction; one can not make an informed choice with "agency" (because any informed choice is a mechanical one, i.e., based on prior causes); and, one can not make an uninformed choice with "agency", because (whatever agency is!) it is informed. Or maybe our conclusion should be that agency, like justice, must be blind.
To be continued…maybe…
Here is one footnote on "systems". Physical systems, or computational systems, or cultural systems would all do as examples. Or the formal mathematical systems from Ray's Monadology of systems, which maybe could be used to model these other sorts of systems in a formal way.
I don't mean to lead anyone far out on a limb here, but I was interested by the connection between simulation, systems, and metasystems. Consider that a mind understands the world and that a mind is a part of the world. Well, it doesn't understand the world completely, but it understands the world somewhat. "Understanding" and "simulating" are used essentially as synonyms here.
The curious thing here, I think, are the containment relationships. The world contains the mind (as embodied in some physical computation system, e.g., a brain), and the mind contains a representation of the world, specifically, a "grainy" representation. You could also look at this grainy representation as a "subset" of the world (actually a projected subset). Really, this is just saying that the world contains "grainy self-similar representations of itself."
Now, the question is whether these representations are "meta" to the world or not. On a day-to-day basis, we act as though they are; we speak of these representations as "understanding", and we can use our understandings of the world to make predictions about outcomes of other events that are taking place in the world. I.e., we model these systems. But I think it is overstepping to say that the mind is "meta" to the world in any fashion, since (as Baudrillard put it) the world can't be exchanged for anything. Translation: the world can't be modeled. Translation: the world is the top of the lattice of models. So, our minds are only "meta" to some subsets of the world.
That matter settled, let me now note the connection to a somewhat different kind of "meta" relationship, namely the one I have been talking about on the tragical comedy intermission page and surrounding environs. This is the relationship of media to content, or similarly, systems for exchange to the things that are exchanged, or similarly, CBPP projects to CBPP products. You get the idea.
When I say there that I think it would be good for more CBPP participants to take a hand in the "leadership" of the project, and that the fundamental gap in participant knowledeg is the one of understanding the "meta" aspects of the project, and that the potential tragedy of the information commons lies in the scarce, singular, nature of the leadership group…, I think I'm talking about something that relates closely to the more formal ideas about metasystems.
I won't go into that relationship right now, but will state a conclusion I came to earlier, which is that DIY is very "monadological" in nature. If you are your own doctor, your own lawyer, your own baker, butcher, and candlestick maker, then you can call yourself DIY and you will be (in an economic sense) sufficient unto yourself. You will still depend on the world, and it should be clear that the DIY "ideal" can't realistically be obtained, and may not even be very desirable. Well, that isn't completely clear. Humans could, in theory, depend on each other for "non-economic" goods, even if each was fully DIY in other areas.
I assume that this speech is either motivating or incomprehensible.
I consign myself, a lasso between the animal and the superman, --jcorneli