writing keeps ideas in space
speech lets them travel in time
we use paintings to decorate space
music to decorate time
and movies to capture spacetime
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«algún día recordaremos, recordaremos», se decía con la seguridad de que el origen de la fiesta, como todos los gestos del hombre, existía intacto en el tiempo y que bastaba un esfuerzo, un querer ver, para leer en el tiempo la historia del tiempo.
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this is a collection of notes that i've written over time, mostly for myself. in the spirit of working with garage doors open, i've published them and open sourced this website. works under writing are original, my notes a mix of thoughts with quotes from the artwork subject of the note.
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books
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articles
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film
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philo
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symbols
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writing keeps ideas in space
speech lets them travel in time
we use paintings to decorate space
and music to decorate time
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find the way by moonlight
see the dawn before
the rest of the world
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unconscious time, no peace of mind,
falling in space but still alive.
sketching the future in a single line,
everything's spinning, cannot sit down.
moments in space, places in time,
thoughts penciled in, now come to life.
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As of today, no one knows how to translate paintings, flowers or music into language. Their beauty is implicit and exclusive to their form, which is why it's so hard to explain how a particular piece of art makes us feel.
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notes on david deutsch's (fascinating) the beginning of infinity (2011), about infinity & universality, memetics and philosophy of science.
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curiosity: thinking existing explanations don't fully capture the ideas behind them, being unsatisfied with current stories.
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creativity: ability to create and replicate ideas to increase the amount of usable knowledge.
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ideas: information that can be stored in human brains and affects behaviour.
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culture: set of ideas that cause holders to behave alike.
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some aspects of nature (night sky, waterfalls, sunsets) seem to be beautiful to humans but show no signs of being designed with this intention. However, flowers do seem to have an apparent design for beauty.
humans recognizing that flowers are beautiful even though they evolved this way for unrelated purposes is evidence that some beauty is objective: it can be found in all places from the flower's genome to human minds.
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enlightenment: 1688 (English Enlightenment), inconceivable a century earlier.
static societies: people could expect to die under the same values, lifestyles, technology and patterns of economic production.
humans alone are authors of explanatory knowledge, the human behaviour called history.
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nature of science can be understood with theories=misconceptions
scientific method: increasingly difficult to ignore philosophical implications of the fact that nature had been understood in unprecedented depth, and of the methods of science and reason by which it was done.
evolution: optimizes neither good of species or individual, but the relative ability of surviving variants to spread through population. it favours only genes that spread best.
genetic code as language for organisms has shown phenomenal reach.
evolution of biological adaptations and creation of human knowledge are similar (ideas and genes are replicators, knowledge and adaptation hard to vary) yet distinct (human knowledge as explanatory and with reach, contrary to adaptations.)
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quantum physics
quantum theory discovered independently by Heisenberg and Schrödinger between 1935 and 1927.
issue: not consistent when applied to the case of an observer performing quantum measurements on another observer.
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computational universality should have happened with Babbage's Difference Engine (1820s), which had rules of arithmetic built into hardware to to automate log, cos, sin (used in navigation and engineering).
193# electrical relays for the analytical engine were just being used for the first applications of electromagnetism and were about to be mass produced for the telegraphy revolution.
Turing Test: The general-purpose sense of Intelligence that Turing meant (constellation of attributes of the human mind) puzzled philosophers for a millennia. (others are consciousness, free will and meaning).
Quantum computation: Computation in which the flow of information is not confined to a single history.
michel foucault, 1975
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Seems to be a history of criminology, but Foucault is making a much deeper analysis
Foucault strong disliked the term "history" He argued that the notion of history as constant progress leading to the endpoint of current civilization is wrong. He wanted to explore how structures of power have changed over time.
He starts Discipline and Punish describing punishments from 1757 and arguing that one has to do more than just assume moral superiority and dismiss those times as barbarian. That is the key to understanding the similarities between the power structures and relations of the 1750s and today.
It is important to understand that old punishments like those of Ch.I happened before the American and French revolution ∴ not modeled after the Enlightenment, but after a renaissance interpretation of Hobbes’ Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince.
Punishments were crafted to uphold the Social Contract ∴ crimes were seen as a direct attack on the authority of the king. Here lie the clues to understand the function of the penal system of the 1750s: Neither justice nor fairness, but maintaining social order.
What happens when the power structure no longer serves the needs of the people?
These extremes public punishments had 2 major unintended consequences. First, the population frequently agreed that punishment>crime and often sided with the criminal, questioning the authority of the sovereign. Second, since public punishments leave no doubt of who is in power, whenever people were not receiving their end of the social contract, there was no doubt as to who to blame.
People of power soon realized that in their society, the will of the people often had influence over which people were in positions of power. This was very inconvenient for the sovereigns, as it made reigning for long periods of time statistically challenging.
1757-1837: In order to make power more sustainable, drastic changes had to be made. Foucault argues that the reasons for these changes don’t have to be evil per-se, politicians often only looked at ways of keeping society in peace.
Impossible not to be aware of → Abstract, far, unimportant
Why do people who want to maintain structures of power prefer systems like this?
By 1837, two main things had changed
Emergence of the modern prison system. Much more efficient and effective way of waving power over people.
Prisoners had every minute of their days scheduled → not much time for thinking
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Foucault thinks this system might have its origins in the works of Jeremy Bentham.
Panopticon: Building designed so that one in power can see everything every prisoner is doing all the time, but the prisoner is unable to know when he’s being watched. Bentham argued that this would leave prisoners with no choice but to behave as expected every single second.
All this is much more than just a narration of prison history. Foucault is analyzing how Bentham’s Panopticon is a way of obtaining "power of mind over mind." What stops mental institutions, military trainings, factories, multinational corporations or schools from implementing this design?
No need to treat employees/patients/students/soldiers as prisoners. Instead, by keeping the leash very loose, people in power could set narrow parameters of what it means to be a good employee/patient/student/soldier.
If people do not feel like prisoners they will even police themselves to adhere to the normalized way of behaving, because their work life is one of constant surveilling (clocks, deadlines, supervisors, other employees), normalization (speaking, acting, dress codes, political correctness, team player) and examination (monthly evaluations).
Surveillance, Normalization and Examination has become such a good system of controlling human behavior that it is now embedded in our culture, social circles, media…
What’s insidious about how modern power keeps people in control today is that people are both subjects being controlled and also active participants in the system that (unknowingly) supports the current power structure.
Foucault argues that the new goal of the modern penal system is also neither fairness nor justice, but the production of harmless, non-rebellious, working, tax-paying productive citizens who follow the rules and are satisfied with the normalized standard of what it means to be a person, according to people above.
This explains the stark difference between sentencing of Blue and White Collar crimes:
The goal is reforming criminals to fit a preexisting mold of what a normal person is, not direct retribution for the crime.
People who never change and never reform will eventually end up with life sentences. Foucault argues that it is those kinds of people that are fascinating to us as "normal people." He thinks we love criminals so much because when they refuse to play by the rules of society, they show us what we really are: the law abiding and active participants in a massive global prison.
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Constantly being disciplined and reformed into good employees, consumers, students, voters –internalized expectations of ourselves given to us by someone in a position of power.
We’re given standards by TV Shows, Movies, Books, etc. We have internalized standards of how we should look, what beauty is, what you should care about, what you can and can’t say, etc…
No prison of method of torture ever devised that can doo to people what they willingly do to themselves in our modern social prison. We live in a Panopticon.
We have created a world where we are in constant surveillance by ourselves. Surveillance by looking in the mirror.
Genealogy of the modern soul. The media even gives you the vocabulary you have ∴ the only vocabulary you have to think of yourself as a person
Billy the Kid, Bonny and Clyde, what happens when you put a criminal beloved by the people in the execution room?
Foucault strong disliked the term "history" He argued that the notion of history as constant progress leading to the endpoint of current civilization is wrong. He wanted to explore how structures of power have changed over time. People of power soon realized that in their society, the will of the people often had influence over which people were in positions of power. This was very inconvenient for the sovereigns, as it made reigning for long periods of time statistically challenging.
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stiegler agrees with derrida's critique of the opposition of the signifier and the signified, which proposes that language is always already writing, and in order for language to be written, it must already be a writing, a system of traces, a grammatic of discrete elements.
image mental ∄ → image mental ≔ image object
director/editor's job is to hide the discontinuity by playing with it (analysis), continuity then comes from spectatorial synthesis (done by good artists)
discretization opens new artistic, theoretical and scientific knowledges of the image.
now there's two syntheses (spectator + camera): evolution of technical synthesis → evolution of spectatorial synthesis.