This post was provoked by New Aesthetics, New Anxieties that was provoked by the new aesthetics movement. I will start with a few comments on the book (which I highly recommend BTW). One point that the book clarified for me, even though NA isn’t explicitly mentioned, is that the “algorithmic …
A Universe of Consciousness by Edelman and Tononi — this is the third Edelman book I’ve read, the others being: The Remembered Present, and Neural Darwinism. The central idea in Edelman’s work is neuronal group selection, shown below (figure 7.2 from the book — I’m reproducing this, since wikipedia doesn’t adequately capture …
While reading this Ambient Commons I bounced between thinking Cool this is someone who’s using data/being the environment without the digital detox meme to No, he just wants us to drop our phones to No, this really is a different take. Upon finishing the book I settled on the idea …
My feelings about Strangers To Ourselves are colored by my having read it after Beyond The Brain (BTB). I have a difficult time giving it appropriate credit since much of its content was subsumed by BTB, even though the book has a lot going for it: interesting examples, good writing, etc. …
Here’s a short note on Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind. My immediate reaction is that the mechanisms he’s positing are not all that surprising: I would expect that any task we do frequently would be accompanied by various physical affordances that reduce our cognitive load, sometimes these affordances are inherent …
I found myself forced to re-explore the Object vs. Parts vs. Surface (OPS) issue when looking for appropriate opportunities to apply OOO in practice (previous post). It occurred to me that the OPS distinctions might be the source of the much-maligned (by me) idea that objects don’t directly interact with …
I’ve now spent a couple months reading and thinking about OOO. At this point the question becomes: if object-oriented ontology is interesting and useful, how do you use it (productively) for analysis? The terms used in OOO make me think a lot about surfaces, even though that doesn’t seem to …
I just finished Guerrilla Metaphysics (GM) by Graham Harman. The core of GM interrogates the way in which objects interact — in this, GM complements other OOO ( object-oriented ontology) books such as the the democracy of objects which I feel take the form of interaction as a given. GM isn’t …
I read Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects a couple of months ago, but it’s taken me a while to coalesce my thoughts on it. Here they are (I’ve come to one viewpoint about the first part of the book and another about the second part of the book): The first …
I internalized CEP (Circular Error Probable during the cold war) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_error_probable as it pertained to ICBM effectiveness (for those unfamiliar, it is in some ways similar to the difference between precision and accuracy. CEP came to mind during the polling averaging controversy of the recent 2012 presidential election. In my …