Yet There Is Method In It

I was engaged in a lively debate recently on the merits or demerits of a monarchical system. Personally I am a republican and in general I consider monarchism an outmoded relic of a bygone era of social repression.

As the debate wore on it became obvious that on most points I was possessed by the spirit of reason. The supporters of monarchy in general could only make appeals to tradition whereas mostly my arguments were based on sound pragmatic opinion.

Then they wheeled out what they consider their strongest argument. Namely “The Royals bring in so much money” i.e. through tourism and as industrial and trade ambassadors.

It is a fairly good argument. Why? Because it sounds empirical – rather than being an appeal to tradition this is an argument based on pragmatic concerns.

There is one problem – basically it is what Wittgenstein would call nonsense. The sentence or proposition though constructed in a way that is similar to an empirical proposition, a proposition about a definite state of affairs, is in fact a clever charade – and according to ‘logical’ rules is a non-argument.

The proposition reads: we must not abolish the monarchy as they provide substantial income for the nation through tourism and trade and industry ambassadorships.

The objection reads: Can you verify this – and is this open to falsification?

The conclusion is: technically one could only hope to measure the “value” of the monarchy by its abolition and subsequent measuring of financial effects.

Naturally no monarchist is going to vote for its abolition – so the argument is null.

The moral of the story – be careful of making psuedo-empirical propositions. When the falsity of their factual basis is uncovered you may find the validity* of your viewpoint eroding away rapidly.

* Validity depends on the language game being played. Just as Anselm famously said “God is a special case” one may choose to argue that psuedo-empirical propositions are in certain language games still valuable and valid as rhetorical tools.

I was reading the Gene Expression blog and it claims that generation of scientific knowledge is generated through the scientific community acting as the overall arbiter and gatekeeper. Without this collaboration, science would not function. Individual scientists are not fully rational and presumably the rationality of the scientific process arises through ‘”wisdom of the crowds” at its apotheosis’.

Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community.

[...]science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us[...]

[...]the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Gene Expression blog

The author implies that no individual scientist is capable of really doing science in isolation.

Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool’s errand only results in glorious foolery.

I picture this as an infinite amount of research monkeys almost randomly striking keys on type writers and the gate keeper of science, the community, allows anything that happens to be scientific. As Newton said, possibly with sarcasm, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.

Peer review and the scientific community is not what distinguishes science from other areas of knowledge. After all history community decides what is good history knowledge, theology community decides what is good theological knowledge and the law community decides what is good law knowledge. Since they have similar process for publication and dissemination of knowledge, why are they not also “a superior method of extracting information about the world”?

What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge is empiricism. Production of scientific knowledge occurs when we use our personal experience about the world to form predictive theories and we attempt to verify them. When Galileo looked through a telescope and saw dots circling Jupiter and him realizing they were moons was a scientific achievement. Since there was no community, it is clearly false to say the community is necessary to progress science.

Referring to the scientific community as this monolithic truth machine is not helpful considering that good science is decided by a very small subsection of the community who have the relevant background knowledge to review cutting edge research. In some fields, everyone knows the other researchers by name. I will admit that science has progressed more quickly because collaboration and teamwork is more efficient than solo working. But teamwork it is not necessary for science to occur.

Anti Citizen One

Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power is fundamental to his philosophy and yet often misunderstood. It is also constantly discussed by commentators but they seem to state the history of its interpretation rather than interpreting the idea itself. Indeed, Nietzsche warned against this view of ideas – of collecting and cataloging them:

Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of years turned into concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. Whenever these venerable concept idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it [...] (Twilight)

Another mistake of commentators is to say what the will to power isn’t – most typically in relation to the will to existence. I will try not to use this method and positively define the Will to Power. Most of the ideas are Nietzsche’s own but I am contemporized them in places.

1) The Will to Power is the force that determines good and evil. (Read in a footnote but I forget where.)

If I may assume for a moment that morality has an earthly origin, what else can we say of its source? The source by definition must be outside morality. Or more directly, the source of morality is immorality. For example if we say “it is always good to tell the truth”, we are in fact lying since we are just inventing a false objective truth.

My chief proposition: there are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin. WtP 258

Personally, I am greatly influenced by the “it-ought” problem. I have not yet seen a satisfactory solution and I provisionally conclude there is no external source of ought statements. I do accept that “ought” statements are necessary. “Ought” statements provided by society may be tolerated but are not truth. I conclude that morality is completely discretionary. If course I would still suffer the consequences if I was caught breaking the law but there is no truth at work here.

Another theme in Nietzsche is the how much primitive superstition is loaded into language. Morality is not justified by language, rather language is shaped by moral judgments. A linguistic argument for morality is, by definition and by virtue of needing outside definition, not objective and therefore not truth. This foreshadows Wittgenstein’s concept of language games. The Will to Power’s voice is the language game.

Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain himself — he created only the significance of things, a human significance! Therefore, calleth he himself “man,” that is, the valuator. (Zarathustra, The Thousand and One Goals)

2) The Will to Power is the force that determines knowledge.

Truth is the kind of error without which a species could not survive. (WtP?)

All philosophers love to argue “logically”. Why logic? Why not rather illogical argument? That accusation we can put to all a-priori discussions. The reason for accepting logic is that it seems to be reflecting in the testimony of our senses (a posterior experience). For example, we generally don’t see things as simultaneously X and not X. Therefore any tendency to argue logically is, in fact, an acceptance of the natural world. To disprove naturalism by logic is self contradictory.

Inductive reasoning has the problem of potential over generalization. We may always discover a counter example to a given rule. As Shaw once said “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules”. But we still hold that concepts such as time, space, causality, substance, properties really exist. The ability to do this has no objective basis but we must impose a schema on sensory experience to understand it. To accept that these concepts are real, we must effectively ignore the problem with inductive reasoning – this is an exercise of the Will to Power. We assign value to sensory phenomena and call them arbitrary things: words, language, computer, screen, blog, etc. Note that none of these concepts have any reality except in our minds. But act as if they do – that is valuation.

Science cannot escape the flaw in inductive reasoning but it attempts to mitigate its effect. So called scientific “dogma” is all conditional knowledge and not objectively true – this is an acceptance of the limitation of induction. Also to use valuations of things but to be economical as possible with valuations is an interesting guideline (also known as Occam’s Razor). But since some valuation is necessary to do any science, objective truth via science is unachievable. But ignore the impossibility of the task and do it anyway – that is Will to Power. This economy of valuation causes science to find a description of reality rather than an explanation of reality. The “explanation” could only exist in our minds.

3) The Will to Power is the abstraction of all other drives e.g. Will to Existence, Will to Knowledge, Will to Virtue, Will to Wealth, Will to Political Influence, etc.

4) Will to Power is a discharge of gathered potential for action. The Will to Power is an abstraction of the source of happiness.

What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome. (The Anti-Christ)

This means we should not seek to abolish resistance to our will since it is necessary for exercise of the will. It is therefore a freedom from ressentiment and slave morality (which states what harmful agents are “bad” and should be eliminated). (Note: happiness is not a proof of truth.)

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto— WtP 382 Emphasis mine.

5) Existentially, the Will to Power is a rejection of nihilism.

Ironically, Nihilism claims “life is meaningless” or more accurately “life should be meaningless”. That is itself a valuation of life and therefore a use of the Will to Power. The flaw in nihilism is it is a valuation of life that says there is no “true” valuation. There fore it is a self contradiction.
6) All life has the Will to Power. Throughout history, only a few individuals have ever exercised it on a grand scale.

People always get worried when there is mention of imposition of views from one charismatic leader. The comparison is always of a totalitarian leader and guilt by association. This is not logical. Let me state: “you may not impose ideas on others” is this not ITSELF an idea? And it is value imposed on modern society? This is a self contradiction!

All art and all creating is a value judgment “The world lacks X and should have X. I will create it.”

If I may talk for a moment beyond Good and Evil, we have to be more questioning of our ideals. And yes I am questioning of my tendency to be questioning!

Most influential sources of western culture: Equality (Christianity), The soul (Plato), Right to divorce (Henry VIII), Pursuit of branded goods (Marketing departments), Environmentalism (???)…

7) In some ways, the act of defining the Will to Power IS the Will to Power – since it is act of valuation.

As Brian was accused in the Life of Brian, I am also guilty: “He’s making it up as he goes along!” That is almost the point of The Will to Power. Also a bit like the Wizard of Oz himself: the will to lie to maintain so called “truth” as true. It also reminds me of the justification used by parents though the ages: “Why? Because I said so.”

The one who exercises the Will to Power is closely related to the concept of the superman.

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self–rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. (Zarathustra)

Anti Citizen One

PS I am half way though Nietzsche’s book called, confusingly, “The Will to Power”. I will explain why sometime later.

“The [European] Commission wants to extend the copyright period for music performers from 50 years to 95 years.” BBC

This should be strongly opposed. My views are public. My proposal: to cut copyright to 50 years or the death of the performer which ever is sooner. Only exception: if they have a significant other that absolutely depend on the money (or perhaps they should have got life insurance??). In fact 20 years or until time of death is even more reasonable! (This is the lengths of patents typically.)

Anti Citizen One

I was reading extracts from the book “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen. He states that

Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned and extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional[s] [...] and other purveyors of expert information are being replaced [...] by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers, and attic recording artists. Andrew Keen

The full extract is available on the BBC.

Andrew Keen makes a simple but fundamental mistake: he equates the professional with competence and the amateur with incompetence. This is so obviously untrue that I find it hard to know where to begin with counter examples! Many examples are stated in the report from Demos titled “The Pro-Am Revolution”

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We’re witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought. Demos

Obviously, if I agreed with Andrew Keen, I would not be writing these words on this blog!

Anti Citizen One

PS I finally finished History of Western Philosophy! Hooray!

I have occasionally highlighted concerns about copyright and its implications on society. But why does copyright matter? Good question…

Knowledge is a resource which we all use to some extent in order to live. Bacon’s saying “knowledge is power” might be rather cliché but it has a certain amount of truth. Influentially, Plato valued knowledge above material concerns. This is neatly summed up by George Bernard Shaw:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Most forms of artistic expression fall within one tradition or another. Virtually all artistic works incorporate elements of earlier works. Example: Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet drew heavily on verse written 30 years earlier by Arthur Brooke (and he based that on a traditional Italian story). Another example: Beethoven’s 9th symphony uses the poem “Ode to Joy” written by Friedrich Schiller. ALL art draws on previous work to some extent. Even new art forms like photography draw on painting for inspiration (and to seek acceptance as an art form at all). How many films are based on books? Conclusion: past artistic works is a foundation for new artistic works. If you restrict access to artistic reuse, you restrict what can be done artistically.

The sound recordings of Beatles become public domain on or around 2013. This means anyone can reproduce and enjoy the Beatles songs without charge. This does not mean people can record their own versions as the score and lyrics are under copyright for a looooog time – I think 70 years after death (and some of them are still alive) in the UK. Guilbert and Sullivan operas are an example which are completely in the public domain. People may adapt and stage this without obtaining permission – after all Guilbert and Sullivan are well past caring. This incidentally introduces a practical problem: for an obscure artistic work, how can we check when the author died? This leaves many original works in a limbo of unknown copyright (so called “orphaned works”). This aspect needs reform to make it clear when it is public domain, for example copyright lasts for X years after publication or Y years after creation.

There has been recent controversy over a Canadian web site that distributed music scores which are out of copyright – at least out of copyright in Canada (which is a generous 50 years after death).

“Within two years – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.” BBC

Unfortunately, they were still in copyright in Europe. So this Canadian was “breaking” a law in another country but was not in any way based in Europe. After legal threats from Universal Edition (an American company) the site was closed. The obsurd conclusion: a web publisher must comply with every law in every country in the whole world!(!!!!) Clearly this is absurd since many countries have absurd laws and one cannot hope to obey them all.

I suspect the problem is caused by international trading organizations forcing their dogmatic pro-market agenda on the world. Example: when copyright laws are harmonized between countries to assist in free trade, they are always changed in favour of business. This policy is rooted in US thinking, which Noam Chomsky summed up brilliantly: “The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains”

One organisation which as worked tirelessly for the publics rights is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The “copyleft” movement is also a significant counter movement that I applaud.

Another example: scientific journals charge subscriptions for readers but (as far as I am aware) generally do not charge to publish. The articles are copyright. This is a RIDICULOUS state of affairs, since most journal articles are university groups which are funded by public money. So the public have to pay the scientists to do they work and pay a second time to get the published article! Also, this might be affordable to large institutions in richer countries, but is unaffordable to the majority of institutions in poor countries. What we need is a “pay to publish” model that allows free distribution of scientific results.

As Max said in the movie Pi: “I’m trying to understand our world! I don’t deal with petty materialists like you!”

Well said, Max, well said.

Anti Citizen One

PS. This site is all under a creative commons license which is “copyleft”.

You said in a recent comment:

“the point of Feyerabend”.. “is neither a reccomendation nor a requirement but an opinion” and “it is about the realm of possibilities.”

“I have rejected the nature of rational argument and thus its correlating fallacies”

Since opinion is now a method which you accept, in my opinion, Feyerabend only offers tautology and nihilism. And if you want to abandon rational argument, is it time to abandon this blog? The title of the blog implies method! You can start a new one called “against method”?

Anti Citizen One

Was prompted to ask this question yesterday whilst watching the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Tennis final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

I’m not usually a fan of tennis, but this was a captivating match of highs and lows, or emotional and physical fluctuations. It was also considered one of the great tennis finals of all time, and the eventual winner Roger Federer equalled Bjorn Borgs record of 5 Wimbledon titles in a row. It was hard not to disagree with the analysis that I was watching history in the making (which is a tautology) and that I was watching a sporting legend in the making.

But I wondered why is sport of such social and cultural importance to us?

I know the obvious answers that sport has its origins in the martial activity of man. That athletes, wrestlers, javelin throwers, archers, horse-racing, shot-putters were all engaged in a false-war activity. It’s sometimes easy to forget that medieval jousting contests (despite the danger to limb and life, including to the spectator) was a sporting event.

Then there is the tribal element to sport, that peoples unite in a common support for the nation, their district, their community. The modern support that many young men and women give to Football clubs is a manifestation of this. Replace sense of community with a sense of pride in the badge, the jersey. Supporters feel they own the club they support, that they employ the players to represent their hopes and ambitions.

But then nowadays any martial element to sport as a preperation for war is just a social memory. Soldiers are not expected to complete their training these days on ‘the playing fields of Eton’ or elsewhere for that matter. Though admittedly it is still a means of learning about and engaging with competative behaviour, as important on the battlefield and sports field as it is in the world of business.

And culturally sport is perhaps less cohesive than it once was. There is television for example, where a particular sports team may have its supporters situated on the opposite side of the globe, paying supporters even who may have no idea where Manchester (for example) really is. And of course people have a very different idea of social identity as cultures intermingle.

Of course there is the simple answer, it is all just a game, a recreation, a bit of fun, maybe even an act of escapism. But I can’t help but think that it is slightly more purposeful, that there is something more cohesive about sport than its purely being fun. I dont pretend to know what the answer is, but having watched the great Tennis final yesterday I pondered whether it was a sense of shared hope, of myth-making, of taking joy from arbitrary beliefs (i.e. the idea that sport matters) that draw so many people to it.

Iain Duncan-Smith former leader of one of the most Right wing Conservative Parties in opposition has published a report that he hopes the new centrist Conservative Party will adopt. In the report IDS attributed most of societies ills to the development of an underclass. This underclass was created, he believes, by the breakdown of the family and of traditional moral values.

He identified a number of key elements that he believed disproved the old Tory theory that overall wealth and wellbeing, even that of the poor was improved by general increases in social wealth. He suggests that the underclass was never going to get better of its own accord and that it needed a helping hand up.

For example he suggested that alcohol tax rises by 10% in order to cover NHS treatment costs for alcohol abuse (a problem he associates with the underclasses). Furthermore he believed that prisons should build drug-rehab wings, that local health authorities should stop handing out free clean syringes to drug addicts and that methodone treatment for Heroin addiction should cease and that the addicts should just go ‘cold turkey’.

But his overall commentary was on the ‘family’ and the ‘welfare state’ he believed that more should be done to deny freebie handouts to the idle (not his words I must emphasise) and that the state must reward marriage with tax-breaks and welfare benefits as opposed to cohabiting partnerships or single-parents.

This bizarre attempt at compassionate conservatism is alarming because of two things. Firstly most people who are comfortably well off will agree with his diagnosis of the underclass and his prescribed solutions. Secondly he appears to be harking back to a ‘Golden era’ where society was better off. The so called age of ‘Victorian values’.

Yes there is an underclass, I call them the have nots. No not everyone that he and others believe to belong to this underclass truly do. But more importantly wake up politicians and people there never has been a golden era of social values. Social problems such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction, teenage parenthood, the breakdown of marriage, crime, the unemployed, the unemployable… these things will not be solved by tax-breaks and tweaking the welfare benefits system.  Where there are exceptions to the rule (i.e. tax-breaks) there are the scrupulous who will manipulate it to their favour. For every person who cheats the benefit system or who is a ‘burden’ on society for refusing to work there is a seemingly respectable law-abiding person shafting the state or their neighbour for everything they can get.

A recent example has been the managers of private equity firms who have bought large companies, stripped them of their assets and then sold them on for huge profits. Thanks to a loophole and a tax-break system not meant for them, they have escaped paying 100′s of millions of pounds. They pay less tax on their earnings (percentage wise) than domestic cleaners do.

So lets stop harking on about golden eras and social collapses and a return to good old traditional values. Lets re-make our cultural values, cut our cloth accordingly and finally realise that a fair society with oppurtunity for all can only be created when those who can, those who belong to the upper social strata ‘the haves’ pay their proportional way in society.