Alignment

Driving just the other day flipped on the radio in my zipcar and NPR was broadcasting an episode of Philosophy Talk. I like this show. My lovely wife gifted me a year subscription to their podcast a couple years ago. I am not totally sure who the guest was on this particular show as I jumped in halfway through but I think it was Richard Hanley as he was talking about a book he wrote regarding philosophy and pop culture, particularly South Park.

Both of the hosts of philosophy talk are professors at Stanford, and for the most part they run an awesome show. However, I feel sometimes that they underestimate their listeners. To be honest this particular episode was a bit uninteresting barring one important, throbbing question which was asked and then moved passed. I didn't listen to the whole show so it may have been addressed earlier or later, but I find this to be the MO of the show. A surface scraping.

They show was concerned with philosophy in pop culture and in discussing different manifestations of philosophical conundrums in pop culture the question was posited: Do these philosophical questions arise intentionally or do they surface in pop culture naturally?

I tend to think that there is a sort of case by case basis for these sort of things but the latter part of this question really got me thinking as it touches on something I posted long long ago on this here blog.

Philosophical questions do arise naturally. As I have said before: we are sentient beings and sentient beings must deal with a whole slew of questions that arise out of the act of being conscious. The concept of "I" brings with it a chest of philosophical gold.

So when we see deep questions in things like Finding Nemo, The Big Lebowski, or more blatantly The Matrix, etc... they are byproducts of the telling of the human experience.

We are all philosophers.

let's start at the very beginning...

Socrates.

A familiar name.

The truth about Socrates is that we do not know much (if anything) about him. All that we know is from second hand accounts; if Socrates wrote anything (which is unlikely) none of it has survived. Most of what we know has been conveyed to us by Plato. Many of Plato's works are still with us today and Socrates is a main character, or vocal piece in most of them.

The most significant contribution to philosophy that Socrates gave us was the Socratic Method which is a method of teaching someone what they already know. Thats the beauty of it. It works like this: Socrates would ask a question of someone such as, "what is piety?" the person then answers, ands then Socrates pokes at the validity of the answer. The point of the socratic method is to be a teacher that does not lecture, but would rather ask: "As a student what do you know? Why do you know that? Are you justified in believing that?" Socrates had a way of forcing you to describe your beliefs in such a way that they become arguments.

At least thats what we think Socrates did. As I said, all of the accounts we have of Socrates are second hand. Socrates is an ambiguous fellow, more on him when we talk about

Plato.

399bc

Thought experiments

A thought experiment is basically a hypothetical situation.

Any philosophical stance can be strengthened by a thought experiment; a bare bones argument is just premises and a conclusion, a thought experiment is a hypothetical situation that illustrates your argument. Each thought experiment is designed to apply to a specific argument. It is not important (depending on the argument) that thought experiments be plausible or feasible in reality.

Some examples of thought experiments:

Molyneux's problem

Suppose there was a man born blind. He is made familiar with a metallic cube and a metallic sphere of the same material roughly the same size. Using his sense of touch he easily can tell one from the other. One day due to a miracle the blind man attains his sight. If the man was presented with the sphere and cube on a table, could he discern which was which without touching them?

Brain in a Bucket (the matrix)

What if reality as you know it is all an elaborate science experiment. You think you are who you are and live where you do but in reality you are a brain in a bucket in this mad scientist's laboratory hooked up to some sort of reality generating machine. Everyone and everything you know is a lie; a rouse.


What if the cube and the sphere had a particular smell? What if the reality machine was conveying the false reality of being a brain in a bucket? Thought experiments do not work if you do not accept them as they are. You cannot change a thought experiment to prove a point; if you did you would be creating a new thought experiment all together. Creating a new thought experiment is fine and well, but try not to do so until you have answered all the questions the original thought experiment has posed.

Next a philosopher spotlight!

Art and aesthetics

After a long hiatus, I'm back! I'm ready to fill your brain with stuff again. 2010 has been quite unkind to me so far...

The Greeks were concerned with many things philosophically; the concept of "beauty" was one of them. At first glance, this subject can seem a bit trivial. Compared to contemplating what exists, or the concept of good and evil, 'what is beauty?' seems to lack a little weight, but there are some very interesting and important questions loaded in the concept of beauty. In this post 'beauty' should be considered that which is aesthetically or visually pleasing.

I had prepared some research on the subject over a month ago but a couple things this past week re-sparked my motivation to tackle the intro course to this subject. The first was a movie The Art of the Steal and the second a show I saw this morning, This is Civilization titled "Uncertainty." "Uncertainty" provided a comprehensive look at the history of 20th century art and the very best description of abstract/abstract expressionist art I have heard.

The movie was about the art collection of Alfred C Barnes. It follows the control of the foundation that is in charge of it, and the legal battle of where and how it should be displayed. It is an interesting documentary about something I didn't know anything about. What sparked my interest specifically was not the magnitude of the collection itself, estimated to be worth between 25 billion and priceless (the Barnes Foundation has the largest collection of post-impressionist art in America and, to some, the most impressive collection in the world) but specifically was how Mr. Barnes acquired this art.

He became a millionaire around the turn of the 20th century and soon after fostered an interest in collecting art. He traveled to France and around Europe and started meeting with artists and buying paintings that he liked. When he brought these paintings back to Philadelphia and showed them to the public he was ridiculed for showing ugly, uninteresting paintings. Lo and behold some 15 years later the art Alfred had begun collecting grew exponentially in value as post-impressionist art swept the world. Mr. Barnes would tell you that he was just collecting paintings that he enjoyed, but in effect what he did was predict the next large movement in the global art culture.

Aesthetics as a philosophical subject is concerned with which objects are considered visually pleasing whether they are art or not. Artists create art objects as representations (of the human experience, etc...) in doing so they are commenting directly on their personal aesthetic philosophy. The very creation of art is a philosophical statement. Because of this a large chunk of the philosophy of aesthetics concerns itself with art, however it is also concerned with the beauty in non-art objects.

Art creates an interesting aesthetic dilemma: should the standard for beauty be the same for art objects and non-art objects?

Until next week...

and we are all metaphysicians...

Metaphysics is one subject in philosophy that can be hard to wrangle a good definition for. The word "metaphysics" has itself a sort of storied history. Aristotle is credited with the oldest known writings we have on "metaphysics," yet he himself would not have defined this particular collection of writings as metaphysics. You may or may not know that a good chunk of what in Aristotle's day was considered "philosophy" would today be considered biology, general science, and physics. It was a translator after his death that dubbed the writings we speak of now as "ta meta ta phusika" which translates roughly to "the ones after the physical ones." Indeed these chapters did directly follow Aristotle's physics, as it happens they would become a subject all their own.

Enough jibber jabber. What IS metaphysics? A very broad generalization of metaphysics can be summed up in a very broad general question:

What exists?

Simple as that question is there are an infinite number of questions that can fit inside that tiny two worded question. For example:

Is mathematics an actual thing existing outside our understanding, or is it a thing we use to understand? Is time an actual thing outside our understanding or is is something we use to understand? Do I exist? Do you exist? What is qualia? Do animals experience qualia? Do i have a soul? Is there a god? Are there gods? Does the world exist as I perceive it, or is it affected by my perception? When/where did the universe start (and why)? Is time an actual thing outside our understanding or is is something we use to understand? What is free will? As I age and my tastes and knowledge change, do I change or am I the same? What is causality?

This is truly the tip of the metaphysical iceberg.

When we ask "what exists?" the "what" is the important part of the question. THERE ARE SO MANY WHATS!!! When people think of philosophy as a subject it is often metaphysics they think of instinctively.

why are we here?

Metaphysics is an exciting, storied, and extensive philosophical discipline.

So what do we REALLY know?

Since we have realized as conscious beings that we know stuff, it has dawned on some to ask the bigger question: What exactly do we know? It seems like a silly question at first but it is an ultimately important one and not just in the realm of philosophy.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge; it is concerned with two core questions: What do we know? How do we know it?

When we analyze things that we know they can generally be categorized in two groups, "that" statements and "how to" statements, for example:

I know that spiders have eight legs.

I know how to distill whiskey.

"How to" statements are the less interesting of the two types; if what we know is how to distill whiskey, how we know that is because we either learned somewhere how to do that or taught ourselves.

"That" statements are a little more tricky to analyze. If what we know is that spiders have eight legs, how do we know that is so?

The ancient Greeks came up with a rubric with which to determine what knowledge is. For something to be counted as knowledge it must be a justified, true, belief. The statement that spiders have eight legs is my belief. It is true because one of the requisite characteristics of being a spider is having eight legs. I am justified in believing so as I have seen a spider and counted its legs. That last step is it is the most important.

Say someone asked me who the fathers of calculus were and I immediately answered "Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton." That statement happens to be true. Can I be justified in saying so? What if I knew the names of two mathematicians (Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton). Had you asked me who the fathers of algebra or game theory were I would have answered, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, or both. On the other hand I could have just guessed. In either case I would not be justified in providing my statement and thus be able to count my answer as genuine knowlege.

It was this way until a man named Gettier published an important paper (more on this next time)... In the mean time here is some reading I used to prep for this lesson.

So, who cares? Well, as philosophy is concerned with posing questions and answering them the veracity of the answers becomes an issue. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy unto itself, and yet every branch of philosophy has some sort of epistemic skeleton.

To govern the people...

Aside from an innate sense of "right" and "wrong" there is another sense that we humans have an opinion on naturally (it also has to do with ethics as well). When defining the boundaries and definitions of any other branch of philosophy is an appropriate starting point, when it comes to political philosophy we should start with is most base question and go from there:

(i) What sort of laws and/or governmental structure (if any) is/are the most appropriate for our community (and for the communities of others for that matter)?

Political philosophy is, to be honest, not my favorite branch of philosophy, but it is one that everyone has an opinion on and to be fair, a very important one. While making conjectures about ethics or metaphysics or logic or epistemology political philosophers are often commenting on the current practices in government. Anyone who has an opinion about (i) is a political philosopher. This is where political philosophy becomes diverse, because there are so VERY MANY ANSWERS to (i).

There are a multitude of types of government. Each of these types of government all have variations, and those variations have their own variations, and so on. Indeed, even the absence of government has variations because the absence of government is itself a political philosophy.
The best way to attack political philosophy is to start with the type of government you are most interested in studying and jump down that rabbit hole; there will be ample reading to follow.

Introductory Ethics

Consider the following scenarios1:

(i) Your neighbor comes home with your dream car, the car you have wanted since you were a teenager. He gets out of it beaming, obviously proud to have the money and ability to afford such a magnificent machine. As he walks towards you to surely boast about his purchase you grab a monkey wrench from the garage and bludgeon him to death in his own drive way. You get in the car of your dreams and (since the keys are still in the ignition) park the car in your garage and continue about your day.

(ii) After a night of libations and conversation at the local bar, you bid your company a good night walk out of the bar and begin your trek home. Upon reaching your apartment complex you find a wallet on the ground full of money. The license has an address in your building. The next morning you return the wallet to its owner (just as you found it).

(iii) A trolley is barreling towards a fork in the tracks, its operator is obviously some sort of villain as he has a menacing mustache and is laughing maniacally. Quickly you notice that one tine of the fork has three people tied to it and the other tine of the fork has one person tied to it. You can see ahead the lever that will switch the direction the trolley will travel on the fork. You have enough time to reach the lever before the trolley hits the fork, but certainly not enough time to try to untie anyone (do to your distance from the lever and the speed of the trolley). The fork is currently set so that the trolley barrel over the group of three, what should you do?

Each of these scenarios has surely evoked some sort of opinion in you. Most people (although not necessarily all) would disagree with murdering your neighbor for his new car as depicted in (i). Most people would agree with returning the wallet to its owner as in (ii). There is a sort of murkiness that is intentional when it comes to (iii), the outcome of your decision will ultimately result in some sort of harm done, more on (iii) later.

Now, your natural gut reaction to the scenarios here have something to do with the philosophical branch of philosophy called "ethics." People who study ethics are concerned with the concepts of "right" and "wrong." As in it would be "wrong" to murder your neighbor for a car. It is the "right thing to do" not to take any money out of the wallet and return it to your neighbor.

Ethics is a great subject to start the amateur philosopher with because everyone has a sort of idea what is "right" and what is "wrong." Whether you analyze each situation and make a decision accordingly or you subscribe to some sort of ethical system (that you have concocted or that accords with your religion, etc...).

Most studies in ethics are concerned with developing some sort of ethical system that can be applied to any situation and produce a consistent outcome. The tricky thing about ethics is that not every situation is ethically cut and dry as it is in both (i) and (ii).

As ridiculous as (iii) is, it demonstrates an ethically sticky situation. No matter what you decide to do a person will get horribly hurt or die. Perhaps you choose to switch the tracks so that the three people are saved and the single person faces the wrath of the trolley. What if i told you that the one person was a baby, and that the three people were three geriatric old men, would this change your decision? Or what if the one person was not a baby but the leader of a neo-nazi sect of the KKK and the three people were single mothers? What if they all were neo-nazis? What if they all were members of your family?

Scenario (iii) is a famous philosophical scenario and an important one because it makes us think about all ethical situations in such a way that we ask why we consider a decision to be a "right" one or a "wrong" one. The point of it is not to avoid the decision you have to make by say throwing yourself at the trolley in an attempt to stop it before it hits the fork, or running super fast and switching the tracks, using your machete to untie the single person saving everyone before the trolley can do any harm. The point of studying ethics is making that hard decision and knowing why you have chosen the way that you have.

What makes a question a philosophically ethical one? If it is concerned with morality and/or the difference between right and wrong.



1. These scenarios are all thought experiments, or hypothetical situations invented to evoke some sort of reaction to prove a point. Thought experiments are an important philosophical and scientific tool.

Administration

One of my professors at Portland State (Alexsandar Jokic) would always start his classes with the same lecture. The theme of that lecture was this: Philosophy is concerned with questions, so what sort of questions are philosophical ones? Genius that I am, I discarded all of my notes from college so I cannot tell you exactly what Professor Jokic defined as a philosophical question. The themes I will be discussing over the next ten posts or so will be my own attempt to answer that question.

In addition I will be tagging each post with a difficulty rating ranging from "freshman" to "senior". As this blog is a small effort to prepare myself for a larger project this will help me keep things organized and help you, the reader, gauge involvement.

The New Age Conversation

Quite some time ago while I was tending bar and I had a fascinating conversation with a man who works in the publishing industry, specifically he is and editor and publicist for an author of New-Age literature. After some idle chatter about the weather I prodded him to describe his New-Age view of the world, as I was interested what that entailed exactly.

He started by telling me that god is everything and everything is god, we are all manifestations of the same type of thing, he explained. The details are blurry now but when he was finished I said, "Sounds like Spinoza." In truth, what he described was a brand of Spinozism; I explained to him what that was, he shrugged and went on.

We continued and he went on to describe the human soul and reincarnation. He said he believes that being born is the most traumatic experience a soul can have and that we all tend to be certain ways because our soul is remembering the past lives it has had, I understood immediately, "That's Plato!" I said. I got an emphatic "No way!" as a response. I explained the Platonic concept of anamnesis. As the conversation went on we got into Hume's problem of induction and Kantian ethics, there were many tangents, all in all the conversation was very entertaining.

When he had finished eating and drinking he had a whole lot of reading he wanted to do. I have had many conversations like this one but what he said before he left stuck with me: "I would never have thought that philosophy was interesting." In truth, I never would have thought talking about somebodies New-Age views would be interesting.

Another reason why this conversation has stuck with me is because all the philosophy i had studied became a frame of reference for this man's description of his own philosophical views. Mind you, he would probably not describe his views a philosophical ones, but in truth that's what they are.

Next up: Philosophy 101 - What is a Philosophical question?

History of money: Real Research!

I have bought to books on the history of money. The one I have started to read seems to be the book that I would want to write myself which is both fortunate and unfortunate as it goes. It is called (crazy enough) Money, a History edited by Johnathan Williams. While it reads like a text book if you are at all interested in the subject it is proving to be a valuable read.

My research is fueled by my need to know when money became so important. As a species humans became sedentary as a means of easing the struggles of providing for ones own health and well being. As our cultures became more complex we learned to specialize in things. With this specialization came surplus which could be traded for things other people specialized in. The point to note here is that each persons specialization had something to do with survival.
At some point money became everyones specialization, to the point where most of us have nothing to do with our own survival. All we need is money. I am not anti-money or anti-technology, I am just fascinated by this phenomenon.

With that:

Money as a concept emerged in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. At this point in the history of human culture most societies worked with an economic system of 'centralized redistribution' in which all the resources amassed by a society were given to that societies authorities and then redistributed among the public (minus tribute, one can assume). Outside of these agricultural/textile goods, silver (as well as other precious metals) was regarded as a very valuable thing. So valuable in fact that its exact value was determined by the authorities of ones society. These standardized weights were kept in sacred places. A sheqel for instance was not a coin but a standardized amount of silver. Each society had a standard weight of silver used as a monetary standard and early societies used this silver standard as a means of calculating interest on loans, determining fines, and assessing value of other non-silver things. So we can see that as soon as we become a stationary people and amass a surplus we began to assess and compare that surplus to silver. How much we humans love our shiny things...

Most of the silver any given community or society had was owned by kings and temples. That being said, not all transactions were dealt with in silver, in fact most were not. As the aristocracy be it theistic or royal had most of the silver, they were the ones who would deal in silver. While a man might know or count how much his millet he had harvested was worth in silver, that standard was used as a means of calculating barter. I have two bundles of millet which is worth a gram of silver, a gram of silver is worth a goat, therefore: two bundles of millet is equal in . worth to a goat. It is amazing that this early in our evolution as a thinking creature we developed an extraction of a things worth. Why would not two bundles of millet just be equal in worth to a goat?

The first coins emerge in the kingdom of Lydia. With the development of the minting of coins, the necessity of stamping them followed so as to identify where the coin had been made. It is important to note that at this time coins were very valuable; even the smallest coin was much to valuable to use on an everyday basis and there is debate about how much these early coins were circulated. In effect the smallest coin would be worth (picking a denomination at random to prove a point) 500 of our contemporary U.S. dollars.

With the advent of coins we start to see an unusual phenomenon. As coins become more and more popular as a means of commerce, the value of a coin starts to separate itself from the worth of the amount of precious metal from which it was made. We also see coins from the community you are living in be worth more than coins acquired from other societies.

More to come...

A Departure: The olafactory sense

I have started real research on the history of money and am excited to share what I am learning soon. For now I am going to expunge some research I was doing some time ago on the olfactory system.

I was attending a lecture with my fiance at Portland State some time ago by a very talented and interesting artist by the name of Daniel Bozhkov. In the lecture he talked about a handful of projects he had worked on, all of them interesting, but when he was talking about a particular project a certain statement he made caught my attention.

The project was called "The scent of America." Daniel was staying at a hotel in Istanbul where Hemingway once stayed during his travels in Europe as a young reporter. In this part of the world, and particularly in Istanbul, there are perfumeries where one can create a unique scent to please your particular taste in such things. This is how Daniel came up with the idea of creating a scent that represented Hemmingway (as a sort of virile American symbol). He came up with three finalists and took them to an annual Hemingway look alike contest in the Key West. There he asked the lookalikes which one smelled the most like Hemingway; there was a clear winner. He then went back to Istanbul and bottled some "Scent of America" cologne.

Now, when he was talking about why he embarked on such an interesting project he talked about the sort of guttural, primal instincts that some smells can invoke. He mentioned specifically that the part of the brain that processes smells is the limbic system which is the "reptilian" part of the brain.

This fascinated me. I began to wonder, what are smells? How do we process smells? Seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting seem to be fairly straight forward senses. Smelling became more and more elusive as I pondered its mechanics. And so I researched. Here is the result of that research:

Daniel called the limbic system the "reptilian" brain. It is also called the paleomammalian brain as it is the oldest part of the brain evolutionarily speaking. In addition to the olfactory sense, the limbic system is also associated with long term memory, the senses of reward and fear, as well as the regulation of happiness.

What is a smell? A smell or odor is a combination of chemicals. There are many chemicals that float about in the air and each odor we experience is comprised of a certain combination of chemicals.

When an odor enters the nose it is met with the olfactory sensors. Olfactory sensors are patches of nerves behind your nose at the top of your nasal passage. Each nerve in your olfactory sensor is encoded by a particular gene (therefore if one were missing a gene or had a damaged gene they would not be able to detect the odor associated with said damaged or missing gene).

The olfactory epithelium is the tissue that comprises the part of the olfactory sensor that is directly involved with detecting and defining smells. There are three types of cells that make up the olfactory epithelium: the olfactory cells combine to form an olfactory nerve, the supporting cells support the integrity of the whole, and basal cells are stem cells that split to form either supporting cells or olfactory cells (the constant division of basal cells results in a completely new epithelium every two to four weeks).

When a odor enters the nose and reaches the olfactory sensor the chemicals that it is comprised of are recognized by the nerve associated with each chemical in the odor. This information is transmitted via the olfactory nerve to the olfactory bulb (located in the limbic system) where it is interpreted and identified.

While it is recognized that each nerve in the olfactory sensor is associated with certain airborn chemicals there is debate in the scientific community how the information triggered in the olfactory sensor is transmitted to the olfactory bulb. Some believe that the combination of nerves that have identified a chemical is transmitted; that is to say, the areas of the olfactory sensors that are triggered by a certain odor is sent to the olfactory bulb. Others think that the nerves that are triggred by an odor are translated into self generating electrochemical activity (a sort od morse code if you will) and transmited along the olfactiry nerve thusly. Still others argue that it is a combinmation of the two, of course.

Side note: smelling salts irritate the olfactory sensors evoking a reation that helps arouse consciousness.

And that is an elementary explanation of how we smell and what smells are. I will leave you with some interesting definitions:

Phantosmia: an olfactory hallucination; smelling a non-existent odor (the most common phantosmia are urine, feces, rotting flesh, and smoke)

Parosmia: a distorted sense of smell; misinterpreting one smell for another (the most common parsosmia are the same as phantosmia). Parosmia can be caused by a sever cold or some other damage to the olfactory system

Anosmia: lack of the sense of smell. Anosmia can be total or specific. It can be the result of genetics (as mentioned above) or the result of trauma/damage to the olfactory system as with parosmia.

Hyperosmia: hightened or extremely sensitive olfaction

Hyposmia: lessened or dulled sense of olfaction

Numismatics Part Two: {Meta} & Rushkoff

The very idea of money has begun to fascinate me. I am researching now some books to read about the creation and standardization of money and while I am still in the early stages I am seeing a lot of histories of money in the west not so much about money as it was developed in ancient China or anywhere in the Americas.

What is money? It is a symbol; it represents something. To have money is to have wealth; to have surplus. That is a powerful concept. It is no coincidence then that money as a symbol, as a tangible thing, originated in the very place where humans learned how to create a sustainable food source and thus a constant surplus? This expands what the symbol "money" represents to/for the human experience.


"Money isn't everything
but everything makes me want it."
De La Soul

Recently Tom brought Douglas Rushkoff to my attention. He has written a book recently called Life Incorporated where he discusses the effects of the corporate mentality on the society at large [explained here] (in areas not related to corporations). In the context of his book he discusses the establishment of "the coin of the realm" and the dawn of corporate thinking. It is an interesting take on how we stopped (or were forced out of) believing in barter and started believing in the dollar [clip here].

More soon...

Numismatics: Part One

I have written and rewritten this post many times. It began as a post about the future of money and what that means for the plausibility of community currencies. This naturally lead me to to the history of money and what the history of money meant for community economics.

And so I embarked on a self guided tour of numismatics.

The first question I asked was: How long has currency existed?

Well currency has existed for quite some time. The Sumerians first used commodity money as a means of accounting. The Babylonians are credited with the first sort of economic systems. From there the Ancient Egyptians created the first minted coins and this spread to Greece and then to Rome and so on and so forth.

That question being answered made me wonder. While money as a physical thing and commonly accepted concept has been in use since the essential dawn of civilization when was it that money became the dominant provider of survival for individuals? That is to say, when did we stop herding goats and start hoarding money?

The Sumerians were practicing agriculture and domesticating animals, and they had a form of currency, but this currency seems to be a sort of side note. The economy of the currency at large played a parallel role to the economies of communities (towns, areas, etc...). This seems to have remained true up through Egypt, Greece, and Rome. While there was royalty and a sort of aristocracy that were a part of all of these cultures the aristocracies surplus seemed to have been based on certain virtues whether they be academic, artistic, heroic, or pious. Those of the "working classes" gave to these people because of their virtues.

I am having a bit of trouble finding resources on this topic specifically, not just on the history of money but how money and its related economies worked with/along side the local merchant/specialized craft economies.

The first road block in the discussion of community currencies is the problem of plausibility; people often think you are crazy or that the goal of community economics and alternative currencies set themselves up for an unachievable goal. My natural response is "We used to operate this way." However my knowledge on the actual history of this was rudimentary to say the least. This next series of posts will focus on the history of money and its larger worth within the society it existed in during all its historical manifestations.

Please suggest any reading you think is appropriate!

Open Philosophy: accessbility short and sweet

"Why is philosophy no longer loved to-day? Why have her children, the sciences*, divided her inheritance, and turned her out of doors, like another Lear, with ingratitude unkinder than the winter's wind?"**

The second branch of Open Philosophy is accessibility as it pertains to comprehension, as opposed to publishing. All too often the meat and potatoes of philosophy is lost on the general public for any number of reasons. The most fixable of these is the use of language.

Some (if not most) philosophers are in the business of creating language. This can be appropriate, however, a lot can be lost in over complicated florid language. Let's start with a term like "qualia." Qualia can be a tough to define term, but its existence is necessary for a huge chunk of discussions in the philosophy of mind. The term qualia refers to the personal experience of any given moment.

Let's say I am looking at a red ball. While looking at the red ball I know what it is like for me, Tim, to experience looking at a red ball. In contrast, a digital camera could be "looking" at a red ball but it would not have the cognizance to say "I am a camera looking at a red ball." Experiencing what it is like to experience something is qualia. Thomas Nagel wrote a fantastic essay on qualia, even though the term was coined after his essay was published it is a good read.

Having to define a concept like qualia every time you are talking about qualia would be a trying task. I am not going to propose that philosophers stop inventing words. As new concepts arise so will new terms to describe those new concepts - so it goes in slang and science. However the muddying up of philosophical thought with unnecessary language is just unfortunate.

A lot of this boils down to the fact that philosophers are notoriously bad writers. This is not the only case, I would argue. With a tinge of condescension often amateur and tenured philosophers alike are guilty of over complicating concepts.

The crux of the issue for me is this: When writing philosophy you must use language as a tool of conveyance for your concept. In doing so you must use the most appropriate means possible. You would not use a Hummer to transport an apple, or a bike to transport a cheetah.

That is what the accessibility of open philosophy is. That is the goal for the website that this is a precursor to.

Next up, open money plausibility.






*All of the sciences as we know them: biology, mathematics, psychology, and so on, were all considered a branches of philosophy before they were accepted as academic fields of their own.
**Will Durant The Mansions of Philosophy 1929

Open Philosophy: Publishing

It has been too long since my last post, but some cancerous family news and my recent engagement have kept me from publishing here; fear not, I have still been working and you can expect to see more posts more regularly.

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To begin again, the problem that plagues open access publishers is the same that will plague open access philosophers. As highlighted in my previous post, it all comes down to the money. The very idea of Open Access publishing sounds crazy in the wake of so many factions of print media choosing closed access online publication over traditional print media or Open Access media due to record losses in profit.

I have been struggling with how open access publishing works. In the end I have had to accept that while working towards Open Access publishing solutions is not in vain, I will not be able to solve the problem by myself any time soon. Amidst this realization I wondered: what is the philosophical question that we are dealing with here?

Well, it is sort of an ethical question I believe. As a publisher/author interested in concept of "Open Accessibility" you must walk the line of fiscal success and your pride and duty as a publisher. That is to say, you must find out the exact point in which the financial burden of livelihood outweighs your urge/want/need/duty to publish. In addition, to what extent are you willing to cede compensation for accessibility to your published work?

Simply put, as a publisher/author you must analyze first: financial responsibility vs. creative duty/need - and then: compensation vs. accessibility.

One would assume that if you are a publisher or author already, you are in the business because of your passion to create, so the first question can be a relatively easy one, depending on how much of your life you have dedicated (or plan to dedicate) to the profession.

The second question becomes more sticky and complicated. Publishing as a business is like others of its kind where you start off with meager beginnings most of the time. The amateur publisher is usually getting no compensation what-so-ever and so publishing in an open access journal or forum (such as blogspot) can create much needed recognition among those who haunt such places. Indeed, I have heard of quite a few book deals of late who were once bloggers. The benefits of just throwing yourself out there in an Open Access forum have many benefits for little or no investment when it comes to the emerging author/publisher.

That being said, for an established author or publisher this question is not as easy to answer. The question of financial responsibility vs. creative/need or duty can morph into a question of expected standard of living vs. creative duty/need. This is where the real tough question is. It is easy for an amateur like myself to champion Open Access publishing as I have nothing to lose. But where is there compromise between the established author and myself? How can we bridge this chasm?

In a Wired article this month, Clive Thompson proposes that not only the way we publish must change, but also the way we read. In his article The Future of Reading, he cites the success of Wark's book Gamer Theory which was published in print as well as in an open access forum, CommentPress. CommentPress allows for a sort of technological immersion into the reading experience; the combination of the act of reading and the book club. As one reads the book online they can participate in various forums that discuss the topics of the book and, invariably, related tangents. It is this sort of Open Access publishing that lends itself directly to the concept of Open Philosophy.

The nature and purpose of written philosophy is discussion, sites such as CommentPress can only facilitate the accessibility of philosophy to the professor, student, and curious individual alike. Secondly, as it is now, publications in philosophy tend to centralize around whatever topic happens to be the most "sexy" at the time, these types of forums can facilitate such discussion and possibly diversify the the trends of philosophy altogether.

But, I shouldn't get ahead of myself. After all, it is at this point merely speculation.

In my previous post, I did not mean to say that professional philosophers are only in it for the money, I meant more to focus on the fact that Open Access publishing can potentially destabilize a large chunk of a philosopher's income. A good salary as a doctor of philosophy is not easy to come by, and while some are involved in the racket of requiring students to purchase their overpriced text books in the college bookstore, others publish/edit journals, or write books as a way of extra means. CommentPress is awesome, but it is not the end all be all solution to the problem. It is however a light at the end of the tunnel.

Introduction Part 3: Open Money - or how I learned to stop worrying and understand the Tom

After returning from a conference in California, a friend of mine Tom, introduced me to the idea of community economics and alternative currencies. He was quite excited about these ideas and he kept going on about creating currency and sandwiches and Powell's books. I was apprehensive and unenthusiastic to say the least. While he was explaining a lot this was all I heard:

Step one: Create currency
Step two: Tutor
Step three: Claim sandwich

We moved on to other topics and I went about working on other things. The next week I was cruising twitter and saw that Tom was going to be a guest on a streaming podcast with the guy who introduced him to these sort of Open Money concepts. I don't know what was said that made it happen (even re-listening to it now) but it all made sense like an explosion of understanding in my head.

I remembered Argentina.

You may be familiar with the tremendous economic collapse/crisis Argentina went through around 1999 2000. I remembered seeing a documentary not long ago on the subject called The Empty ATM (part of PBS' Wide Angle series). The segment that pertains to the discussion here is about the barter clubs. With the economy left in utter ruin, the banks having to ration out how much paper money they could give you (hence the documentary's title), and unemployment rates hovering around 25%, the people had to do something. Some of them did.

The Argentinian social credit or credito is a currency used in barter clubs run in Argentina. With dentists and farmers and pilots and everyone out of work a fundamental problem arose when there was no paper money to be had: People had stuff to sell. People had services to preform. Unfortunately, no one could afford to buy stuff or services hence barter clubs came into being. They provided a place where one could, say, bring a goat and get dental service or an airline ticket or what ever service one desired and vice versa. With a sort of economic apocalypse on their hands the people of Argentina created economic stimulus outside of the economy at large.

This isn't crazy. This is how people operate before there is an industrialized, currency driven economy. Some people have stuff, others do stuff. People do stuff for stuff and people give stuff to people for the stuff that they do. When money gets introduced into the mix, it acts as a liaison between vendor and specialist. Some people have stuff, and some people do stuff, people sell their stuff for a price people perform services for a price.

Community economics is a way of determining your price, in such a way that it directly benefits your community. I have found that many people have decided to think locally and not nationally when it comes to economic stimulus.

The theory is easy to resist, but after some very minimal research I have become fascinated by the practice. Posts here on Open Money will be an exploration of the practice of community economics wherever such a thing is being practiced. How has it worked? How is it working? Consider me an amateur community economist.

More to come,

Introduction Part 2: Open Access Philosophy

Open Access Philosophy as defined for this forum has two branches: one in the realm of publishing the other lies in the idea of accessibility.

For many, there are inherent problems with open access publishing and philosophy. First, being a published author in the field of philosophy can be a large chunk of your income as a philosopher; taking the time to write an essay or book and giving it away for free is a loss of income. Additionally, getting published in any number of the open access journals of philosophy is actually looked down upon in the philosophy community as it implies that you could not get published in a more distinguished closed access journal. Finally, discovering the new sexy topic to debate in philosophy gets you appearances, lectures, and publications, if you were giving away your ideas for free, someone could steal your idea or enhance its appeal before you got yours. The tides are changing, however even David Chalmers' new site is more of a search engine for those with access to academic journals than anything else.

Those of us who study philosophy tend to hold ourselves in high regard - to the point of unfortunate condescension. I noticed this when I was working towards my BA in philosophy. In the 100 and 200 level classes I took there was always that one person who touted his/her knowledge, engaging the professor in a conversation that was over everybody's head. As I continued with my studies I noticed myself taking part in this practice. It is something that unfortunately caries outside of the classroom. It's not something that every one does, even I don't do it all the time, but it happens. It's that response you get from the black turtleneck wearing philosophy student with greased back hair reading Wittgenstein on the bus. This is one of road blocks when it comes to the accessibility of Open Access Philosophy.

The second road block is that a lot of people do not know what the subject of philosophy consists of. Frequently when I tell people I have a degree in philosophy they say "I could never devote time to studying CRAZY people..." The main tenet of accessibility in Open Access Philosophy is that, when it really comes down to it, we are ALL philosophers. Philosophy is a side effect of consciousness and not just an academic discipline. The roots of philosophy are in the questions that every human encounters. Some of us devote insane amounts of time trying to answer these questions. Some of us never cared to ask these questions. Some of us found the answers and have no need to return to them.

Which brings us to the final road block. While contemporary philosophy is notoriously atheistic, that has not always been the case. There are scores of philosophers throughout history and even some today that are deeply religious folks. Indeed there are whole branches of philosophy that aren't even concerned with religion. Any doctrine/publication/etc... that attempts to answer the ultimate whys and hows of human existence is a work of philosophy: religion is philosophy.

The collide that religion has with philosophy lies in the confrontational nature of philosophy. When a philosophers engage in a philosophical conversation with a religious person we do so (well most of us anyways) under the pretense of friendly discussion in the spirit of a Socratic dialogue. We are not trying to test your faith. We are just as curious about why you believe what you do as you are of us.

I know that I will never be able to convince the philosophical community to convert to open access publishing, the customs in place are rooted in practices decades/centuries old. I will do my best to search out those open access sites and amass them here. You will notice that I link to Wikipedia often, this is because Wikipedia is the best Open Access Philosophy resource on the web right now in terms of publishing and accessibility. While this site is a great resource it is much less accessible to the general public.

This blog is a dumping ground for a larger more comprehensive site on Open Access Philosophy. I will mostly be designing the skeleton of what Open Access Philosophy is here, but I will occasionally be posting some articles that will appear on the actual to-be-named site.

Next up: Open money.

An Introduction

Hello,

Complementary Reason is a baby blog. It will grow into a fat baby as I will more than likely feed it more than it needs to eat. As it matures it will turn into a larger more refined teenage blog (with the help of all of you), and eventually it will leave this place here at blogspot.com as an adult blog ready to fend for itself in the world. Hopefully it will make us all proud. We shall see.

So, what is it with this baby? Does it have chubby cheeks? It it unnaturally gassy or intelligent? Why should you watch it grow up? Well. Complementary Reason is a blog concerned with two subjects as of right now. The first: open access philosophy, the second: community economics, in that order. There will be tangents and random musings, but the focus here will be on those two things. If these things interest you, you will be interested in this blog. It may happen that you become interested in these things because of this blog. That would be neat. Your feedback, thoughts, and concerns, are all welcome as they will help me help you.

So what is "open access philosophy"? What are "community economics"? That, my friends, will come in posts to follow. For now I must ready myself for the day and prepare to eat some Japanese food.

The Unaccredited Philosopher