admirable people

It is surprising how sometimes you find rational people where less you would expect, living totally out of the mainstream ideas of their times. It is always reassuring, and heartwarming, encountering by chance one of those figures, and understanding that not everything’s lost with the human kind, that there’s worthy life beyond the masses around of selfish, egocentric, and deceptive citizens who don’t give a shit for anything except money and anyone except themselves, and their really close ones. Today, I was reading a bio of the American post-metal band Isis, which has climbed up to be my favorite music of the week, and found out that they shape their songs based on books such as Cervantes’ Don Quijote, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Borges, and the philosophies of the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. I knew of all these references (they also figure among my favorite readings of all time), except for Jeremy Bentham, of whom I only knew the name. So I looked him up in Wikipedia and came to see that he’s an amaaazing character, the kind of person who motivates notes like this one here. Bentham (1748-1832) is one of those political men that the Anglo-Saxon tradition calls, usually in a pejorative manner, radicals (more on this some other day). I knew he was one of the founders of the school of philosophy known as utilitarianism, but apparently he was much more (well, like everyone, of course): he was also an advocate for the concept of animal rights, and an opponent to the idea of natural rights (the idea that some rights are natural, or rather, given by God, and not the result of the actions of government, or evolution from tradition). But there's more: he was also a defender of ideas that in his time were totally anathema such as individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the end of slavery, the abolition of physical punishment (including that of children), the right to divorce, the decriminalization of homosexual acts, and the abolishment of the death penalty. Awesome, huh? Oh, and he's also known as the creator of the concept of panopticon (a type of prison structure that Michel Foucault made famous in his Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison), and as the godfather of the prestigious University College London, where his embalmed body is still stored and occasionally brought out for reunions of the council. (He requested this in his will, apparently). Well, independently of this last extravagant note, this man merits my absolute admiration and applause, and I hereby add him to the list of readings for the summer (looking forward to it).

(In the picture, you can see the embalmed body of Bentham.)

The mathematical structure of the mind

Marc Lachièze-Rey, cosmologist, and Heinz Wismann, philosopher, establish an interesting dialogue on the origins of the universe in the pages of the magazine Philosophie. The following extract is extremely relevant to the categorization problem I've been recently thinking and talking about, regarding the quote by Eugenides below:

"Qu'il s'agisse d'expliquer le monde en termes de causalité ou de l'interpréter en termes de finalité, on formalise la succession des événements à l'aide de certaines structures de raisonnement (la schématisation et la symbolisation, pour parler comme Kant), dont la ressemblance renvoie à une racine commune, l'imagination" [that is to say, categorization; tx]

[BUT] "il y a une raison sous-jacente à cette similarité: ces catégories de pensée, nous les traduisons sous forme de catégories mathématiques, et c'est à travers d'elles que nous exprimons notre perception du monde. Autrement dit, la nature des mathématiques correspond aux structures profondes de notre pensée. Plutôt que de croire comme Galilée que le livre de la Nature est écrit en langage mathématique, nous pouvons penser que c'est la manière dont nous lisons la nature que s'exprime dans ce langage. Ceci pourrait répondre au physicien Eugene Wigner qui s'interrogeait sur la déraisonnable efficacité des mathématiques dans les sciences naturelles. [Wigner argued in a now classical paper entitled "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences"published in 1960 ethat biology and cognition could be the origin of physical concepts, as we humans perceive them, and that the happy coincidence that mathematics and physics were so well matched, seemed to be "unreasonable" and hard to explain.] Il est permis de supposer que la pensée fonctionne selon une structure logique, doncs relevant des mathématiques. Mais là nous abordons le domaine des sciences cognitives..."

interview with the queer theorist beatriz preciado

as a first step towards some queer theory writing, i've decided to post this interview in the spanish tv between the philosopher-writer-entertainer-and-so-on alejandro jodorowsky, and the philosopher of gender beatriz preciado, professor at the université de paris viii... the interview is in spanish

trainspotting end lines

So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers, all false. The truth is that I'm a bad person, but that's going to change, I'm going to change. This is the last of this sort of thing. I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm going to be just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisurewear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, to the day you die.

(The movie was directed by the fucking genius of Danny Boyle, based upon the first novel by Irvine Welsh.)

interesting quote

I'd like to dedicate some lines to the following quote, mentioned to me by an undergrad today:

"Biology gives you a brain.
Life turns it into a mind."

It comes from the novel Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Click here for a review in The New York Times Review of Books). I haven't read the book, but looks like very interesting, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003, which normally is a good indicator of literary quality, I think. The topic of the book, by the way, reminds me of a long overdue posting on queer theory I've been wanting to write for some time now. I'll do that soon. For now, I'd like to say, with respect to the quote above, that I kinda disagree with it, but I'd like to know what other people have to say, before posting my own opinion... So I'll try to discuss the topic with friends, read about it, maybe read some take from some of the readers of this blog, and then I'll post my opinion in a couple of days, taking advantage of the relative quietness of the also looong overdue spring break that starts next saturday.

Biolinguistics...

… is an area of research that focuses on the human faculty of language from the point of view of the natural sciences. Rather than a discipline in itself, biolinguistics is a multidisciplinary paradigm where scientists from many different fields collaborate to reach a better understanding of one of our most (if not the most) important endowments of humans as a species. Among those different disciplines we can find philosophy, linguistics, neurology, biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, ethology, genetics, psychology, computer science, and so forth. As you may guess, the object of biolinguistics is not the description of particular languages in itself (although that is an important part of it, as the subject matter of strict linguistics), but rather the faculty of language as a system of the mind, and ultimately of the brain. The main hypothesis in biolinguistics is that humans are endowed with cognitive and physio-anatomic features that allow them to acquire and use language, and that that endowment emerged in the course of the general evolution of our species. So the questions that we ask as biolinguists are essentially five: (1) what is the faculty of language: how is its architecture, and what is essential to it?; (2) how do we humans mentally process language online in perception and production? (this is the core of the discipline called psycholinguistics); (3) how is the implementation of language within the brain and the anatomic structures used in language?; (4) how is language acquired by children, and how does this acquisition affect the evolution of particular languages?; and (5) how did the faculty of language and the systems it interfaces with (cognition and motor articulatory systems) evolve in the general phylogenetic evolution of our species? I kinda think that these questions define to a great extent what  means to be a human being. For this reason, I think there's nothing more exciting than biolinguistics, and I strongly support its development as a paradigm, even though it is looked with scepticism by a number of my fellow linguists.

There used to be a group of biolinguistics in Barcelona which did a lot of things for a couple of years, but lately they're a little quiet... Click here to access their website.

(The picture shows a real human brain, but the numbers are only part of the picture :D)

a quote from marx (via tricia irwin)

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism".

--Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

chasing subjects

Classical mechanics turned around the concept of simplicity. The world it described was the result of a set of trajectories which were determined and reversible. In that view, you could isolate a central fact (say universal gravitation) and from there you could rebuild the whole universe. The most important formula in Newton's mechanics was the famous F = m . a. which was the first cause for a universal causal structure. To unfold it, you require positions and velocities, on the one hand, and to know the nature of the dynamic forces on the other. If you had that, in this framework of absolute space-time, and you made explicit the initial conditions, you would be able to predict the set of past and future trajectories. In this world, the subject is secondary, as everything turns around the object. This is, according to some people, the world of the common sense.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), there was going to be another copernican turn in this story, one brought up by Eistein's relativity theory. In this new framework, the concept of space and time as absolute is disposed of. Now, they are relative to the reference structure determined by the subject. That is to say, Einstein adopts for the physics the "copernican turn" Kant (the one in the picture) had introduced for philosophy, which was nothing but the establishment of the subject (not the object) as the center of the world (although for many people this had started with Descartes, already). Actually, Newton's theory had been the subject of critique, precisely because of this conception of absolute space (cf. the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence). This view by Einstein does not involve relativism, though, as all laws remain invariable with the change of structure of reference, and as a result, there are absolute laws of nature regardless of which system the subject is located in, although it is true that there are no privileged structures of references. Reality in this world view is a sum of subjectivities, and therefore, there's no definitive breakdown between subject and object: they keep existing as separated realities, although the center had shifted.

Now, the copernican turn will become more radical in the next step of the story: quantum mechanics. It is there where the Kantian (or Husserl's) philosophy become actual, or postmodern if you want. There's no object (there's no spoon)... Everything is the subject. Quantum mechanics establishes a model where dynamic trajectories are associated to wave functions. That is to say, the world is now a set of particles that behave like waves that behave like particles... The whole system entails a couple of things that are absolutely revolutionary: (i) prediction is impossible, beyond statistical probability, because there are no determined trajectories anymore; (ii) measuring reality transforms reality (this is, roughly, the main consequence of Heisenberg's incertitude principle). Both things say, in essence, not only that the subject has now an absolute priority, but that the subject is the only thing. The consequences of this last step (for now) in the evolution of physics, will have consequences at many levels of our world, from Husserl's phenomenology to Blanchot's or Barthes' literary theories, and many other really interesting ideas that for some reason (specific some) are often discredited under the name of post-modernism (i.e. the after to a world that had established the primacy of the subject over the object, but had left the object there, as some independent reality). In some future post, I may go to explore this other side. For today, however, this has already been too much diversion, and I gotta get back to work on my "dear" topic of deixis and dativity.

To read more on this (from a more academic point of view) you can check this out:
Scientific Revolutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

american museum of natural history (sic)

I really don't get this museum's idea of natural history... you have things i understand that have to be there, like biological history of the human kind and other animals (i.e. fossils), geological history of our planet and the outer space, etc... then you have things that are kind of crappy, and I don't understand that much, like a lot of stuffed animals, some of them exhibited in painted cages, which kinda reproduce their natural environment, but some of them simply hanging on the wall (foxes, bobcats, etc), and the most stupid of the things: pinned butterflies... why if you love butterflies would you kill them to exhibit them? no idea... i don't like this at all, but well, you can understand that they are in a museum of natural history... now, the problem is that you also have things for which i can't see at all the reason to be in a so-called museum of natural history, like these halls on Asian, Mexican, Polynesian, Native American, African peoples (as in the picture above)... i mean, this is part of natural history according to them? you know, these peoples that are studied by anthropologists, as opposed to those other peoples that are studied by sociologists, economists, etc. this must be the reason why the museum doesn't have a hall of European and White American peoples, huh? this also entails then that the latter are, according to this ethnocentric view, somehow different to all the other peoples on Earth (different or simply superior?? probably the latter, in the mind of the organizers of this place)... now, if you read on their website, what they say is the following:

"The founding of the Museum’s anthropology program in 1873 is linked by many with the origins of research anthropology in the United States. With the enthusiastic financial support of Museum President Morris K. Jesup, Boas undertook to document and preserve the record of human cultural variation before it disappeared under the advance of Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Their expeditions resulted in the formation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the core of the Museum’s broad and outstanding collection of artifacts."

So this seems to be the idea: let's eliminate all this diversity that bothers our line of businesses, but let's put it on a museum so that we can be considered philanthropists... Nice!!!

And then, there isn't a single hall in the museum dedicated to plants, their history, their diversity, etc. there is some tree here and there, but nothing that deserves commentary.

And finally, if you pay general admission you don't get to see the really spectacular shows in the museum (because this is their idea of museum: spectacle)... for those really expensive shows, like cosmic collisions, or temporary exhibits, you have to pay supplements that can raise your day in the museum to almost $40 to $50...

The AMNH might be, as some say, one of the most famous and acclamated museums in the whole world, but I think the conception as a museum is old and to a large extent cheesy, and it would need a lot of improvement to deserve that acclamation.