potential-energy.us

Spent a few hours walking around today, if you picked a copy up, let me know, would love to hear from you.

Planning to head out into London today, say hello if you pick up a book.

I’m planning on getting out there with more copies of the book in London next week, I can’t say where just yet but it’s likely to be central. Will post more once I’ve got the route planned.

I imagine I’m writing to myself here, but for those who might be passing, the project goes on. I haven’t written anything for some time after life got simply too busy but now I find myself with some time on my hands so I’m getting back to it. More thoughts to follow.

Thanks for this one Ruth.

There is an American professor of anthropology called Daniel Everett who has written a book all about the subject, check it on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Sleep-There-are-Snakes/dp/1846680301/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240344277&sr=8-1 or listen to the BBC interview on http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1246_the_forum/page3.shtml

If we take the idea that thought is inextricably linked to language development (there appear to be many studies arguing so) then we might make a simplistic assumption that the more language you have then the more thought you are capable of and so, depending on your definition, the more intelligent you are. Because you are able to communicate ever more accurately the precise nature of the idea that sits inside your head you are ever more equipped to probe deeper into the ideas that float in your brain. Does that mean that English speakers are potentially more intelligent, better thinkers than French by virtue of having a vastly more complex language?

Going on from this, what does adding a time dimension bring? If we work on the assumption that humanity is getting ever more intelligent, larger brains and so on, are we to assume that language is responsible for this? You could say that language is mutable so I suppose there is a case for suggesting that both have evolved in concert. That being so, it seems the implication is that we are converging toward a point of ultimate expression and intelligence. We will keep pushing thought and language simultaneously (a classic chicken and egg scenario it seems), in line with certain Darwinian ideas, until at some unknown future point we discover all possible thought. Yet more implications spring forth: that thought is a discrete thing that we discover by part, that we have a certain access to. I am a long, long way from being convinced.

Off the remit of the site here but I’d love to have some kind of explosive way to blow the hands off those that are responsible for spam. Interestingly, I’m getting an awful lot about jewelry (spelled the American way so there’s a clue) and very little on porn. I can’t be fucked thinking about how that’s happened but I can at least revel in my fantasy that one day these people will suffer as their keyboards come alive and swallow them whole, or maybe just nibble their finger tips off, yeah that would be better I think.

I realise this is a western phenomenon but I imagine it has resonance around the world.

The current generation of under 25s have a desire, near obsession, with eclecticism. They exhibit a cultural promiscuity not seen before. The result is the creation of a mind with an incredibly short cultural attention span, mashing, mixing, layering elevating the idea of the radom looking for results through accident. There is a lack of application, no energy to pursue an idea to its conclusion. The emotional highs and lows are not available in this middle ground of sketchy thought, but, worse than this, what really suffers, is excellence, we may have to wait many years to see its return to mass culture.

In its 20th century articulation it is arbitrary nonesense. Assuming language and thought are aligned is an astonishing error and this is no more ridiculous than the idea of deep grammar. I feel sure that in time we’ll look back at this period of philosophical thinking as a wasted era, akin to thinking phrenology had medical value or that the earth was at the centre of the universe. Indeed this parallel is useful, in placing the human experience at the centre of all assumes all thought is human and we can only use introspection to explore its dynamics, it is the same mistake religions make in elevating the human brain and soul above all else, it is as if we have learned nothing about our lowly, coincidental place in the universe.

The next problem is the lack of a role for incentive in human responses, that we perform actions because of a perceived gain, this allows two people to make two different decisions with precisely the same set of data because they see different possible gains to their decisions. Logic ignores this ability to assess gain, artificial intelligence will need this faculty.

Many benefits have arisen from logic, especially in the field of computing, but I would suggest this was as much by good fortune as it was design and would put forward the idea that we would be far further on if we had not become bogged down in the pointless minutiae of the field. Neural networks and fuzzy logic seem more useful, let’s see what they yield but until then, philosophy should learn to see a bigger picture and not be concerned with creating catchy nomenclature.