Hey!
I have now set up a personal site at www.emildanielsen.com. My blog will continue under the name "Philosophial Journal", which I think is an accurate description of future content.
I hope to see you there!
Thank you to any and all readers.
Sincerely
Emil Danielsen.
Then he was not bound
I remember a man who said;
Free will is dead. We are nothing
but a machine, and chemistry
will not obey a mind.
Then a girl walked up to him:
"I do as I please - and no one told
me I was bound. Once I moved
a mountain up a hill"
The man then rose and said:
I have been foolish to see
a blocked path where there is none.
From this day I shall be free
and not bound.
In defence of the chance to draw a game of chess
Chess is the occident's intellectual game par excellence. It is lauded for its determinism, its clarity and its light but potent theme - end the enemy king's life! But as an abstract game, chess has been criticized for one thing; It's high draw percentage among professional players.
In tournament at the highest levels, between forty and fifty per of all games played cent are agreed a draw. There are a few ways this can happen. If too many pieces are taken off the board, there may be insufficient material left for one player to mate the other' king, or a player may have no legal move left to play, or if the same position is reached three times either player may demand a draw. The first option is common because it can be hard to pull away to get a good advantage in a high level game, the second less so because a good player will know to avoid this situation, and the third is most often reached as a loosing player finds two moves to alternate between, where the choice of a not obvious reply from the opposition would be enough to tip the balance.
The two ways in which professionals might find their way into a draw is interesting. The one puts demands on the stronger player to pull ahead, and the other on the loosing player to salvage an otherwise lost game by finding these forcing sequences. The game, in other ways is rigged towards a slight equilibrium. You cannot expect to take a smaller force into battle and win on a whim.
I think the chance of a draw then should be counted as removing elements of chance from a game which holds this to be one of it's strengths. And to strengthen this notion, let us look at the intellectual game par excellence of the orient and see how this handles draws.
It doesn't. Go, or Wei Chi as it is known in china, is a land grabbing game with the additional idea that surrounding your enemy captures his soldiers. As in chess the first mover is considered to have an advantage. Therefore points are awarded before hand to the second player to even the core. Within the modern history of the game it was decided that among these points would be awarded a half-point, so that the score would never be even, and the winner would always be decided. The total amount of points awarded in go are in the dozens, if not more. How much of a winner are you, then, if you beat your opponent by half a point?
A draw in chess can be a victory for a weaker opponent - or for those of even strength a concession that today one was not better than the other. But it is not a bad thing - not at all.
In tournament at the highest levels, between forty and fifty per of all games played cent are agreed a draw. There are a few ways this can happen. If too many pieces are taken off the board, there may be insufficient material left for one player to mate the other' king, or a player may have no legal move left to play, or if the same position is reached three times either player may demand a draw. The first option is common because it can be hard to pull away to get a good advantage in a high level game, the second less so because a good player will know to avoid this situation, and the third is most often reached as a loosing player finds two moves to alternate between, where the choice of a not obvious reply from the opposition would be enough to tip the balance.
The two ways in which professionals might find their way into a draw is interesting. The one puts demands on the stronger player to pull ahead, and the other on the loosing player to salvage an otherwise lost game by finding these forcing sequences. The game, in other ways is rigged towards a slight equilibrium. You cannot expect to take a smaller force into battle and win on a whim.
I think the chance of a draw then should be counted as removing elements of chance from a game which holds this to be one of it's strengths. And to strengthen this notion, let us look at the intellectual game par excellence of the orient and see how this handles draws.
It doesn't. Go, or Wei Chi as it is known in china, is a land grabbing game with the additional idea that surrounding your enemy captures his soldiers. As in chess the first mover is considered to have an advantage. Therefore points are awarded before hand to the second player to even the core. Within the modern history of the game it was decided that among these points would be awarded a half-point, so that the score would never be even, and the winner would always be decided. The total amount of points awarded in go are in the dozens, if not more. How much of a winner are you, then, if you beat your opponent by half a point?
A draw in chess can be a victory for a weaker opponent - or for those of even strength a concession that today one was not better than the other. But it is not a bad thing - not at all.
Ramble about current interests.
These past months have been a blur of discovery. The last piece I did, on chess, was only the beginning of a lasting infatuation with abstract board games. I played a few, investigated more, printed and played and even went so far as to invent my own. I lovingly call it "Hoplite", and it is about forming defencive barricades while at the same time penetrating your opponent's to get at his king.
Before that I was interested in modular building toys. I eventually bought "strawbees", which are plastic connectors for drinking straws. They are great for building sierpinski triangles (think Zelda triforces forever expanding), and also includes fasteners for cardboard plates. But there was more! The Eamse's "House of Cards" - which are cards with slits cut into them for fastening, legos, building blocks, and also game systems. The latter are objects used in gaming, but not in themselves games - like playing cards.
Abstract games and modular toys are connected in an interesting way. I've been trying to find out many things connecting the two, such as: What are rules? What are games? What is the difference between gaming and playing? How are rules connected to material objects? ...and many more questions. I really ought to write a blog post just discussing these few things, because it is so damn interesting. Just to leave you with a tidbit: What happens if you connect game changing rules to playing pieces? Then you get the modern card collecting games! It is awesome, and very tiring. Such games can get very complicated, and very expensive... and very educational.
But I must move on. My latest interest is flutes. I'm currently trying to learn to play the recorder. It is a difficult process. Any child can get some sound coming out of it - but to get it to sound really nice is difficult. This process has driven my to reconsider some renaissance music I was listening to before - and now I've learned that much of this repertoire is very well suited to the flute. Hmm... I hope this will be a new venue to explore the rules of musical composition with more passion. They are so hard to master! But I feel that beginning with the renaissance is fitting. It was around this time that the rules of musical composition were established - and I find that starting with the historical beginning when learning a new thing is often very educational.
Let me think... Yes. Lately, as in the last few months, I've been interested in the connection of modern escapist culture and romanticism. It turns out the connection is more direct than I would have though. Romanticism contains an allusion to "roman times, or lands", which was very far removed from 19th century citizens. At the same time they took up myths of their people and brought them into popular culture. In many ways the fantasy genre was born there. Tolkien took up some of these strands, but added his historical know how to weave the tapestry of fantasy we have today. Modern escapism is fantasy, but also Science fiction - which is a whole other thing, but was also started around the same time with the publication of Frankenstein, and later H.G. Wells' works. The whole thing is woven together with the last big element of our culture - superhero-worship. Our focus on batman, superman, and all the other men and women of the pantheon reminds me of pagan gods, and also of the mortal heroes which followed in their wake. I cannot help feel that all these strands of our culture were very much started or developed in the 19th century, and that we are now reaching a sort of culmination of this trend, where it must shift or transform. The new "Gardians of The Galaxy", has brought in humour to the picture, maybe this will turn the trend around a bit.... who knows.
Rambling on... Ooo... there is this new video-game which I constantly thinking about. It's called "No Man's Sky". In it you are a person with a space craft. You zoom around the galaxy exploring, shooting down things, trading... whatever. The whole galaxy and everything in it is procedurally generated. You are playing with others in the same universe, but it is so vast that were you to visit every planet, if only for a second, it would take you more than 5 billion years. Planets are also frequently the size of earth.
I'm telling you: This is the future of video-games.
Before that I was interested in modular building toys. I eventually bought "strawbees", which are plastic connectors for drinking straws. They are great for building sierpinski triangles (think Zelda triforces forever expanding), and also includes fasteners for cardboard plates. But there was more! The Eamse's "House of Cards" - which are cards with slits cut into them for fastening, legos, building blocks, and also game systems. The latter are objects used in gaming, but not in themselves games - like playing cards.
Abstract games and modular toys are connected in an interesting way. I've been trying to find out many things connecting the two, such as: What are rules? What are games? What is the difference between gaming and playing? How are rules connected to material objects? ...and many more questions. I really ought to write a blog post just discussing these few things, because it is so damn interesting. Just to leave you with a tidbit: What happens if you connect game changing rules to playing pieces? Then you get the modern card collecting games! It is awesome, and very tiring. Such games can get very complicated, and very expensive... and very educational.
But I must move on. My latest interest is flutes. I'm currently trying to learn to play the recorder. It is a difficult process. Any child can get some sound coming out of it - but to get it to sound really nice is difficult. This process has driven my to reconsider some renaissance music I was listening to before - and now I've learned that much of this repertoire is very well suited to the flute. Hmm... I hope this will be a new venue to explore the rules of musical composition with more passion. They are so hard to master! But I feel that beginning with the renaissance is fitting. It was around this time that the rules of musical composition were established - and I find that starting with the historical beginning when learning a new thing is often very educational.
Let me think... Yes. Lately, as in the last few months, I've been interested in the connection of modern escapist culture and romanticism. It turns out the connection is more direct than I would have though. Romanticism contains an allusion to "roman times, or lands", which was very far removed from 19th century citizens. At the same time they took up myths of their people and brought them into popular culture. In many ways the fantasy genre was born there. Tolkien took up some of these strands, but added his historical know how to weave the tapestry of fantasy we have today. Modern escapism is fantasy, but also Science fiction - which is a whole other thing, but was also started around the same time with the publication of Frankenstein, and later H.G. Wells' works. The whole thing is woven together with the last big element of our culture - superhero-worship. Our focus on batman, superman, and all the other men and women of the pantheon reminds me of pagan gods, and also of the mortal heroes which followed in their wake. I cannot help feel that all these strands of our culture were very much started or developed in the 19th century, and that we are now reaching a sort of culmination of this trend, where it must shift or transform. The new "Gardians of The Galaxy", has brought in humour to the picture, maybe this will turn the trend around a bit.... who knows.
Rambling on... Ooo... there is this new video-game which I constantly thinking about. It's called "No Man's Sky". In it you are a person with a space craft. You zoom around the galaxy exploring, shooting down things, trading... whatever. The whole galaxy and everything in it is procedurally generated. You are playing with others in the same universe, but it is so vast that were you to visit every planet, if only for a second, it would take you more than 5 billion years. Planets are also frequently the size of earth.
I'm telling you: This is the future of video-games.
Chess tips from a beginner to a beginner
This is advice from a beginner to a beginner. I've recently picked up the game, and I've taken a liking to it. This post is a go at giving the new beginner some advice.
Let us assume that you know the basic movements. You know that the end goal is to threaten the king so he cannot escape, but what are you supposed to do in the mean time? Let us first separate the pieces into three classes. Those who are the least worth; Pawns, those who are second to most important; Knight and Bishop (the minor pieces), and the most important; The Rook and the Queen (the major pieces). The chess game is also roughly described in three stages. The opening, the middle and end. Now comes a few general rules to know when to do what.
1. The jobs of the pieces
A chess piece has two jobs. The first is to guard a square against the move of an attacker. Different pieces guard different amounts of squares. A rule of thumb is that you would like to control many of the center squares in on the board, where a lot of the movement happens. The second job is to attack.
2. Trade down in value
Most of the time your opponent knows that you want to get him, and guards his pieces carefully. It is therefore very unlikely that you will be able to take a piece, without getting hit yourself. You might then ask, what is the point? An important rule is this: Always try to trade your low value pieces with his high value pieces, and watch out for the reverse. Equal trades should be based on other factors, such as; "Will I control more important squares if I exchange my bishop for his knight?"
3. Hide the goodies
You know that you'll never want to trade a queen for a bishop. What do you then do if that bishop put's the ultimatum to you; "Move away, or trade?", you choose to move away. When you do that, the opponent has gained some territory and made you spend a turn running away. To avoid such embarrassments it's best to let the queen wait for a bit to shine, and only bring her out late-mid game to solve some tricky questions. As a rule go like this:
Opening: Develop your minor pieces. This means the Knights and Bishops. Knights leap over your own pieces, so they are only a move away from being played, but not so with bishops. They need free way, and some pawns are standing in the way. Moving the two center pawns gives your bishops time room to move, and otherwise controls some nice center squares. So that your minor pieces aren't tied up in protecting the pawns, you might, after a while, want to bring up a second pawn to protect it. If you form a diagonal chain with pawns, they are all watching one another.
4. Protect the guy giving the killing blow
It's hard to put you opponent in check mate if you've never done it before. The easiest oversikt is this. What is unique about the king, is that he cannot willingly put himself in risk. Therefore, the whole "trading pieces" technique doesn't apply to the king. Have your queen rub noses with the king while being protected by any other pieces - that is one of the easier ways to victory!
5: Use "the scientific method".
Without going into the intricacies of philosophy, let us say that the principle is: "Make a guess, double check". It is impossible to know what the very best move would be, but you can make a good guess based on the tips above. When you have decided where to move, ask yourself, "What are the reasons I shouldn't move there?". Double check to see which pieces threatens that square, what territory you are giving up, and so on.
All these skills require a bit of training, but within a very short time you'll be a lot better. keep enjoying chess and keep that learning attitude. I go into the whole thing thinking "There are two winning conditions, the first is "Capture the King", the second is "Learn more than your opponent". Happily, you'll usually win one of the two goals.
Let us assume that you know the basic movements. You know that the end goal is to threaten the king so he cannot escape, but what are you supposed to do in the mean time? Let us first separate the pieces into three classes. Those who are the least worth; Pawns, those who are second to most important; Knight and Bishop (the minor pieces), and the most important; The Rook and the Queen (the major pieces). The chess game is also roughly described in three stages. The opening, the middle and end. Now comes a few general rules to know when to do what.
1. The jobs of the pieces
A chess piece has two jobs. The first is to guard a square against the move of an attacker. Different pieces guard different amounts of squares. A rule of thumb is that you would like to control many of the center squares in on the board, where a lot of the movement happens. The second job is to attack.
2. Trade down in value
Most of the time your opponent knows that you want to get him, and guards his pieces carefully. It is therefore very unlikely that you will be able to take a piece, without getting hit yourself. You might then ask, what is the point? An important rule is this: Always try to trade your low value pieces with his high value pieces, and watch out for the reverse. Equal trades should be based on other factors, such as; "Will I control more important squares if I exchange my bishop for his knight?"
3. Hide the goodies
You know that you'll never want to trade a queen for a bishop. What do you then do if that bishop put's the ultimatum to you; "Move away, or trade?", you choose to move away. When you do that, the opponent has gained some territory and made you spend a turn running away. To avoid such embarrassments it's best to let the queen wait for a bit to shine, and only bring her out late-mid game to solve some tricky questions. As a rule go like this:
Opening: Develop your minor pieces. This means the Knights and Bishops. Knights leap over your own pieces, so they are only a move away from being played, but not so with bishops. They need free way, and some pawns are standing in the way. Moving the two center pawns gives your bishops time room to move, and otherwise controls some nice center squares. So that your minor pieces aren't tied up in protecting the pawns, you might, after a while, want to bring up a second pawn to protect it. If you form a diagonal chain with pawns, they are all watching one another.
4. Protect the guy giving the killing blow
It's hard to put you opponent in check mate if you've never done it before. The easiest oversikt is this. What is unique about the king, is that he cannot willingly put himself in risk. Therefore, the whole "trading pieces" technique doesn't apply to the king. Have your queen rub noses with the king while being protected by any other pieces - that is one of the easier ways to victory!
5: Use "the scientific method".
Without going into the intricacies of philosophy, let us say that the principle is: "Make a guess, double check". It is impossible to know what the very best move would be, but you can make a good guess based on the tips above. When you have decided where to move, ask yourself, "What are the reasons I shouldn't move there?". Double check to see which pieces threatens that square, what territory you are giving up, and so on.
All these skills require a bit of training, but within a very short time you'll be a lot better. keep enjoying chess and keep that learning attitude. I go into the whole thing thinking "There are two winning conditions, the first is "Capture the King", the second is "Learn more than your opponent". Happily, you'll usually win one of the two goals.
5 burgeoning trends in gaming, as exemplified by the most interesting future games.
I keep a close eye on the developments of video games I truly believe that, just as the 20th century was the century of the movie, the 21st century will be the century of the video game. Right now we are standing at the cusp of the next console generation. Traditionally they have not in themselves been great for innovation in gaming. They tend to reset innovation, to make us content with the beautiful graphics and buzz hype. But amongst these blind blockbusters there have also been some signs of what is to come, and those are the game's I will be picking out for this list. These games carry over from the previous generation something we had just begun to grasp, and develop their potential in a way only possible from this point in time onwards. I give you, the list:
The Division (A natural public space in a game)
The Division is an open world 1st person shooter game set in a mid-crisis New York. It's visuals are stunning, and it's production values are excellent. So what is it that sets this game apart? It is the multiplayer features. Your friends can drop in and out as they please, no lobby required, to team up with you to do anything available in the game. And not only that, you can also meet other groups of players, like yourselves, which might be fighting you for the scarce resources in the game. Not many games have tried this type of multiplayer before, and never on this scale. Dark Souls and Journey did similar things, but not with an open world structure. The reason I think this is going to be one of the biggest trends in the next generation is that similar things are begin done by Bungie, with a game called Destiny, and in another ubisoft game called Watch_Dogs.
The Witness (Philosophically ambitious titles for a mature audience)
The Witness is the second game by Jonathan Blow. His first game, Braid, gave us a mature (if underdeveloped) story, and excellent puzzle-gameplay, which toyed with industry standards in several ways. Since Braid we have been given several mature stories and philosophically demanding games, but few of these have stood front and center in the media. The Witness is one of the games which set out to counter this trend. The Witness seeks to tell a complicated story through it's world alone, one which it will be difficult to understand for anyone but an adult. But the true innovation is that such a complicated work can get a prime spotlight in the release of a new console! When the ps4 was presented, The Witness was one of the showcase games. And in that it becomes a symbol of a new trend in games culture; The understanding that the median age of gamers is now creeping near 40, and that the audience of gaming demands more that power fantasies. I hope The Witness will help prove that games can be escapist and serious at the same time.
Project Spark (Game making enabling)
Project spark is, to put it succinctly, the Little Big Planet that Microsoft never had. It is a game, but also a toolset for anyone to create their own games. It comes with a simple logic system, and a palette style of material application which will make creating more complicated game world relatively easy. The possibility of this kind of game was shown in the last generation with Little Big Planet, but little big planet didn't completely realise the potential of the vision. It was a 2.5D game with some serious memory limitations. These limitations will be severely reduced with Project Spark, and I hope that it will set off a new trend in game making - perhaps one where simple versions of developer tools will come with more games.
Hyper Light Drifter (Cooperation and publishing trends)
Hyper Light Drifter was recently kickstarted, for that is the word, into existence by the trend of crowdfunding. It did a number of things right. It showed off the potential talent for the game, the art-work, the vision and most importantly the driven mind behind this vision. Crowdfunding has recently become an established trend, but it has had some problems. Often those who are funded are lone people, who just wants to get into the game, and to realise their own dream. HLP was different. In the background we could eye a team which was ready to step in when the project exceeded it's funding goals. And maybe most importantly, they decided to expand to the PS4. HPL symbolizes a trend where young people who have grown up in the world of technology use their expertise and networking skills to form loose coalitions around common goals. And on the other hand, Sony is showing their capability in playing off these groups by allowing indie games to publish on their platform. But this, in turn, is only made possible by the robust online game shops that businesses like Sony maintain. HPL symbolises a new work trend which was started in the last generation, but will develop in the next: Loosely connected groups forming around a vision, grass roots funding by interested and integrated people and near self publishing on larger platforms - curated to support this kind of activity.
Rime (Emotional depth and simplicity, a trust in game literacy)
We know very little about Rime. It seems to be an open world game. It seems to star a little lonely boy, and that it is almost unbelievably beautiful. And there is one more thing. It is very clearly inspired by the work of Fumito Ueda - especially the game Ico. Ico was released in 2001 - more than then years ago! Still, there are many of us who recognize this homage, if you will, and welcome works that play on the same kind of emotions. Though such a long time has passed, very few games have tried to follow a similar technique, where gameplay strongly informs the emotional state - which subsequently tells a story. In fact, the only one which readily springs to mind is Journey. But it is not the emotional content per se which is interesting - the interesting part is that we now have such a stable culture that we can trust people to have experienced the more important entries in gaming history. Games are starting to get a cannon and complexity which we normally only find in the established arts. Rime isn't notable for borrowing an aesthetic understanding from literature or film, but for referencing something which is so uniquely a game.
The Division (A natural public space in a game)
The Division is an open world 1st person shooter game set in a mid-crisis New York. It's visuals are stunning, and it's production values are excellent. So what is it that sets this game apart? It is the multiplayer features. Your friends can drop in and out as they please, no lobby required, to team up with you to do anything available in the game. And not only that, you can also meet other groups of players, like yourselves, which might be fighting you for the scarce resources in the game. Not many games have tried this type of multiplayer before, and never on this scale. Dark Souls and Journey did similar things, but not with an open world structure. The reason I think this is going to be one of the biggest trends in the next generation is that similar things are begin done by Bungie, with a game called Destiny, and in another ubisoft game called Watch_Dogs.
The Witness (Philosophically ambitious titles for a mature audience)
The Witness is the second game by Jonathan Blow. His first game, Braid, gave us a mature (if underdeveloped) story, and excellent puzzle-gameplay, which toyed with industry standards in several ways. Since Braid we have been given several mature stories and philosophically demanding games, but few of these have stood front and center in the media. The Witness is one of the games which set out to counter this trend. The Witness seeks to tell a complicated story through it's world alone, one which it will be difficult to understand for anyone but an adult. But the true innovation is that such a complicated work can get a prime spotlight in the release of a new console! When the ps4 was presented, The Witness was one of the showcase games. And in that it becomes a symbol of a new trend in games culture; The understanding that the median age of gamers is now creeping near 40, and that the audience of gaming demands more that power fantasies. I hope The Witness will help prove that games can be escapist and serious at the same time.
Project Spark (Game making enabling)
Project spark is, to put it succinctly, the Little Big Planet that Microsoft never had. It is a game, but also a toolset for anyone to create their own games. It comes with a simple logic system, and a palette style of material application which will make creating more complicated game world relatively easy. The possibility of this kind of game was shown in the last generation with Little Big Planet, but little big planet didn't completely realise the potential of the vision. It was a 2.5D game with some serious memory limitations. These limitations will be severely reduced with Project Spark, and I hope that it will set off a new trend in game making - perhaps one where simple versions of developer tools will come with more games.
Hyper Light Drifter (Cooperation and publishing trends)
Hyper Light Drifter was recently kickstarted, for that is the word, into existence by the trend of crowdfunding. It did a number of things right. It showed off the potential talent for the game, the art-work, the vision and most importantly the driven mind behind this vision. Crowdfunding has recently become an established trend, but it has had some problems. Often those who are funded are lone people, who just wants to get into the game, and to realise their own dream. HLP was different. In the background we could eye a team which was ready to step in when the project exceeded it's funding goals. And maybe most importantly, they decided to expand to the PS4. HPL symbolizes a trend where young people who have grown up in the world of technology use their expertise and networking skills to form loose coalitions around common goals. And on the other hand, Sony is showing their capability in playing off these groups by allowing indie games to publish on their platform. But this, in turn, is only made possible by the robust online game shops that businesses like Sony maintain. HPL symbolises a new work trend which was started in the last generation, but will develop in the next: Loosely connected groups forming around a vision, grass roots funding by interested and integrated people and near self publishing on larger platforms - curated to support this kind of activity.
Rime (Emotional depth and simplicity, a trust in game literacy)
We know very little about Rime. It seems to be an open world game. It seems to star a little lonely boy, and that it is almost unbelievably beautiful. And there is one more thing. It is very clearly inspired by the work of Fumito Ueda - especially the game Ico. Ico was released in 2001 - more than then years ago! Still, there are many of us who recognize this homage, if you will, and welcome works that play on the same kind of emotions. Though such a long time has passed, very few games have tried to follow a similar technique, where gameplay strongly informs the emotional state - which subsequently tells a story. In fact, the only one which readily springs to mind is Journey. But it is not the emotional content per se which is interesting - the interesting part is that we now have such a stable culture that we can trust people to have experienced the more important entries in gaming history. Games are starting to get a cannon and complexity which we normally only find in the established arts. Rime isn't notable for borrowing an aesthetic understanding from literature or film, but for referencing something which is so uniquely a game.
Myth & Reality
Leave it to the mystics to ruin a good myth. Taking myth at face value, actually believing in the stuff, is missing the point. What you are supposed to believe in is the ghostly image of your own reality; The shimmering path of destiny (your garden walkway), the all seeing eye of God (the sun), and the quest for the holy trifecta - truth, justice and beauty (your day job and family life).
The heroic narrative, such as we find in "The Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter: Whatever", is supposed to overlap with our own life and make it magical. I don't mean this in, pardon the puns, a literal sense, but a transferred (or maybe transcendental) sense. Myth, or modern narratives, heighten our imagination. It makes the unmagical come alive, and transposes our emotion onto everyday things.
These stories find their way into our everyday life. Objects, even those we only keep for their utility, are granted many symbols from the mythical realm. Take, for instance, the saying; "The Pen is Mightier than the Sword!" No it's not. Try wielding a pen against a person with a sword - you'd die 99 times out of a hundred. But the myth of the pen makes our work holy, beautiful, true - just! The pen is a feeble object, without any real power. The power comes from the potency of the imagination of the wielder.
Only the person who really believes in the might of the pen succeeds in transferring it into that weapon. It is the myth which grant the pen it's fateful power. A power which another myth can take away. When Eichmann deleted people by the millions with his pen - he didn't see himself as a wielder of great power. He was, according to himself, merely the instrument of another person. A cog in the machine. It was Hanna Arendt's triumph and sorrow that she discovered this myth built into the system and upbringing around Eichmann - a myth she dubbed "The Banality of Evil". Eichmanns true fault was that he was unable too look beyond himself, and control the myths of his life. That he could not turn the cog in his heart into a mighty pen.
But there is always two sides to any dichotomy, what about "real life's" effect on myth? During the twentieth century Europe saw an incredible growth in population, and at the same time a "rationalisation". More potent beurochrasies were needed to organize society, and at the same time the was a trend of secularisation. Personal power was lost , not because the myths were different, but because our real power was in fact diminished. For every citizen born, the value of the vote is lessened - and with that the "rights" which allow us to do so. Eichmann's claustrophobic myth of being a small person in a big bureaucracy wasn't merely a fantasy - it was also reality. What truly incapacitated his ability to resist, according to Arendt, was his total mediocracy - his inability to see himself as anything but that cog in the machine.
So where does the actual power lie. With myth or reality? Actual power is a treacherous word. What is more powerful, that which "moves" or that which "transcends", that which is "hidden" or that which is "veiled", the "leader" or the "pope". In fact, as we well know, the two are inseparable. The actual power lies in realizing that they are inseparable, and through that knowledge either manipulate others, or stop oneself from being manipulated.
There seems to me to be two camps if misunderstanding, the sceptics and the mystics. Of these two I mostly identify with the sceptics. They try to look to what is real, and disregard that which is veiled. Mystics, on the other hand, try to see the "true" truth behind the "veil". What the mystics fail to see is that there is no truth behind the veil. What the sceptics fail to see is that the veil is, in itself, true.
From here it gets a little complicated. (Digging downwards in the bog of ideas. The bottom layer is always pete - words appearing in clusters - impossible to separate. Before going any further, arm yourself with a cup of coffee.) (Coffee is a fun word to write. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee.)
There is, in fact, a truth behind the veil. It is our own fear. The word "protection" means to "cover up". Mystical veils cover our weaknesses. Hinders us from seeing that which destroys, ruins, disfigures and starves us. The horrible. The irony of life is that justice is not blind, but that truth is. Truth does not care of it is just, it disfigures reality for all of us in equal measure. Only justice can save us from ourselves. And I mean it. Justice is a social system which divides human conduct into the good and the bad. The bad is that which we fear, and the good is that which we like. Justice protects personal goods, life and health. But what is justice, really?
Justice is maybe the ultimate protective myth - but oh so true. Humanity's strong belief in justice is perhaps our best defining characteristic. A belief which has helped keep it for thousands of years. Some of civilizations oldest writing are codes of law, such as the code of Hamurabi, written definitions of justice to set things right for all, or at least firmly crooked.
Justice, however, is not a fundamental part of this world. (In fact, as fundamentals go, very little is. As Searle puts it; "Particles in fields of force.") Break a lawbook apart and grind it down to the finest powder. Then look at it with the strongest microscope. You will not find a shred of justice. Justice is something we add to that book of law through cultural practice. To say it with Karl Popper. There are two kinds of law. Natural law (such as gravity), and conventional law. And justice, is part of the latter. The sceptic must admit that there is no justice - and no meaning to this world other than that which we create ourselves.. He might, as I have, fall prey to nihilism - to truly believe Nietzsche's maxim "Nothing is true, everything is permitted".
The sceptic is caught by his belief that nothing has meaning - but he tricks himself. A meaningfull understanding of reality is inescapable for humans. The very idea that there is "nothing which is true", is a statement about the value of truth. There is no non-mythical standpoint from which to view the world. What I presented as a paltry dualism is really a dimension, a continuous line held together by interwoven terms - spread over the bread of life as so much jam. We mythologize reality, and we observe myth from the real world. The two are interdependent and inseparable - and transcend one another.
Let us arm ourselves with the words of struggle, and ground our feet in reality. Let us "really see" that christmas is wonderful, and believe there is a tomorrow with a space for us in it. And let us do it armed with a true sense of myth and reality.
The heroic narrative, such as we find in "The Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter: Whatever", is supposed to overlap with our own life and make it magical. I don't mean this in, pardon the puns, a literal sense, but a transferred (or maybe transcendental) sense. Myth, or modern narratives, heighten our imagination. It makes the unmagical come alive, and transposes our emotion onto everyday things.
These stories find their way into our everyday life. Objects, even those we only keep for their utility, are granted many symbols from the mythical realm. Take, for instance, the saying; "The Pen is Mightier than the Sword!" No it's not. Try wielding a pen against a person with a sword - you'd die 99 times out of a hundred. But the myth of the pen makes our work holy, beautiful, true - just! The pen is a feeble object, without any real power. The power comes from the potency of the imagination of the wielder.
Only the person who really believes in the might of the pen succeeds in transferring it into that weapon. It is the myth which grant the pen it's fateful power. A power which another myth can take away. When Eichmann deleted people by the millions with his pen - he didn't see himself as a wielder of great power. He was, according to himself, merely the instrument of another person. A cog in the machine. It was Hanna Arendt's triumph and sorrow that she discovered this myth built into the system and upbringing around Eichmann - a myth she dubbed "The Banality of Evil". Eichmanns true fault was that he was unable too look beyond himself, and control the myths of his life. That he could not turn the cog in his heart into a mighty pen.
But there is always two sides to any dichotomy, what about "real life's" effect on myth? During the twentieth century Europe saw an incredible growth in population, and at the same time a "rationalisation". More potent beurochrasies were needed to organize society, and at the same time the was a trend of secularisation. Personal power was lost , not because the myths were different, but because our real power was in fact diminished. For every citizen born, the value of the vote is lessened - and with that the "rights" which allow us to do so. Eichmann's claustrophobic myth of being a small person in a big bureaucracy wasn't merely a fantasy - it was also reality. What truly incapacitated his ability to resist, according to Arendt, was his total mediocracy - his inability to see himself as anything but that cog in the machine.
So where does the actual power lie. With myth or reality? Actual power is a treacherous word. What is more powerful, that which "moves" or that which "transcends", that which is "hidden" or that which is "veiled", the "leader" or the "pope". In fact, as we well know, the two are inseparable. The actual power lies in realizing that they are inseparable, and through that knowledge either manipulate others, or stop oneself from being manipulated.
There seems to me to be two camps if misunderstanding, the sceptics and the mystics. Of these two I mostly identify with the sceptics. They try to look to what is real, and disregard that which is veiled. Mystics, on the other hand, try to see the "true" truth behind the "veil". What the mystics fail to see is that there is no truth behind the veil. What the sceptics fail to see is that the veil is, in itself, true.
From here it gets a little complicated. (Digging downwards in the bog of ideas. The bottom layer is always pete - words appearing in clusters - impossible to separate. Before going any further, arm yourself with a cup of coffee.) (Coffee is a fun word to write. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee.)
There is, in fact, a truth behind the veil. It is our own fear. The word "protection" means to "cover up". Mystical veils cover our weaknesses. Hinders us from seeing that which destroys, ruins, disfigures and starves us. The horrible. The irony of life is that justice is not blind, but that truth is. Truth does not care of it is just, it disfigures reality for all of us in equal measure. Only justice can save us from ourselves. And I mean it. Justice is a social system which divides human conduct into the good and the bad. The bad is that which we fear, and the good is that which we like. Justice protects personal goods, life and health. But what is justice, really?
Justice is maybe the ultimate protective myth - but oh so true. Humanity's strong belief in justice is perhaps our best defining characteristic. A belief which has helped keep it for thousands of years. Some of civilizations oldest writing are codes of law, such as the code of Hamurabi, written definitions of justice to set things right for all, or at least firmly crooked.
Justice, however, is not a fundamental part of this world. (In fact, as fundamentals go, very little is. As Searle puts it; "Particles in fields of force.") Break a lawbook apart and grind it down to the finest powder. Then look at it with the strongest microscope. You will not find a shred of justice. Justice is something we add to that book of law through cultural practice. To say it with Karl Popper. There are two kinds of law. Natural law (such as gravity), and conventional law. And justice, is part of the latter. The sceptic must admit that there is no justice - and no meaning to this world other than that which we create ourselves.. He might, as I have, fall prey to nihilism - to truly believe Nietzsche's maxim "Nothing is true, everything is permitted".
The sceptic is caught by his belief that nothing has meaning - but he tricks himself. A meaningfull understanding of reality is inescapable for humans. The very idea that there is "nothing which is true", is a statement about the value of truth. There is no non-mythical standpoint from which to view the world. What I presented as a paltry dualism is really a dimension, a continuous line held together by interwoven terms - spread over the bread of life as so much jam. We mythologize reality, and we observe myth from the real world. The two are interdependent and inseparable - and transcend one another.
Let us arm ourselves with the words of struggle, and ground our feet in reality. Let us "really see" that christmas is wonderful, and believe there is a tomorrow with a space for us in it. And let us do it armed with a true sense of myth and reality.
The Candle
Lately I've been burning candles, and not metaphorically either. I buy them white, the best color, and try to have the time to burn the fully - letting them put themselves out when their fuel is gone. A love of the object is important in a review, I feel. It allows the mind to dwell, to consider several aspects.
The candle is a commodity object, first invented in China and adopted in europe at around 400 CE. Commodity objects bring with them a slew of challenges. They are bought often, which mean that the packing material must be as minimal as possible. Further, any left over material which is not used, is only waste. Commodities often have a shelf life, so durability is of the essence.
The candle, however, is happily free of many of these problems. Though they are made from organic material, they have a very long shelf-life. Stearin candles are essentially a form of fat, but seem blessedly free from spoiling. I'm not sure, but I think this is because the energy of the candle is safely hidden away behind a costly door. Only a flame will set off the chain reaction to release a candles energy, without that it is very hard for, say, bacteria, to enjoy a good meal off your candles.
Since candles keep well they are rarely protected well. Many candles can be bought as they are. I buy my candles in packets of 24. They are stacked neatly in a cardboard box. What could be simpler?
And if there is little waste before using, there is literally none after. The wick and wax burns, obliterating itself as it goes. It burn mine completely down, leaving little but half a centimetre of black wick, and a millimeter of wax. As a commodity object, nearly nothing beats the candle.
Candles are also blessedly inexpensive. I pay 3NOK, or 50 cents per hour of a candle burning - which I consider a cheap delight. Well, I guess this one depends. As a source of light candles are horribly inefficient, releasing merely a hundredth of the light of and incandescent light bulb for the same amount of energy. At any point the candle produces about 80W of heat. A wall mounted electric heater often runs at 800W, which means that ten candles would replace it. At 4 cents per hour for the oven per hour, the candles would be more expensive by a factor of ten. Again, not the most efficient use of energy.
But I don't buy candles for the utility they used to have, but for the aesthetic pleasure they now give me. Candles give off a beautiful yellow light, and the flame itself - a translucent and dynamic sculpture that casts no shadow, is an object worth the attention of the eye. Over and above the visual pleasure, the philosophical categories a candle inhabits give me enormous pleasure. A candle is an object which consumes itself in it's duty, a material object without a shadow, and it is a dead thing made from a live thing which is described as alive, and which burns that which would have been the energy reserves of the animal itself, the fat. A candle is the defiance of the pig whence life was snuffed out to produce it - the life after death. How fitting it is that the ultimate end of that life flame comes in the form of a breath.
As metaphors go the candle is a strong one. At one point in our history candles were used to measure time - but they weren't very good at it. My candles burn for a steady 6 hours - but milage varies depending on air humidity and airflow. This time aspect of candles has also been linked to death - captured in proverbs such as "the candle which burns twice as bright burns half as long", or "burning one's candle at both ends". But I rarely think of candles this way.
Candles are mostly given their meaning for me, through their use. I only take out candles when I feel I have the time to enjoy them. Like flowers, they have a limited life - but candles demand more. Flowers imply transience, but merely die silently if left unattended. Not so with the candle. The candle you leave unattended kills you. When you light a candle, it will have your attention, but in return it gives light and heat - two of lifes best necessities.
The highest pleasure is the leisure to burn a candle uninterrupted, from the first lighting of the wick to its self deletion - because this means an evenings worth of calm and beautiful ours. Of awakened attention. Of enlightenment.
The candle is a commodity object, first invented in China and adopted in europe at around 400 CE. Commodity objects bring with them a slew of challenges. They are bought often, which mean that the packing material must be as minimal as possible. Further, any left over material which is not used, is only waste. Commodities often have a shelf life, so durability is of the essence.
The candle, however, is happily free of many of these problems. Though they are made from organic material, they have a very long shelf-life. Stearin candles are essentially a form of fat, but seem blessedly free from spoiling. I'm not sure, but I think this is because the energy of the candle is safely hidden away behind a costly door. Only a flame will set off the chain reaction to release a candles energy, without that it is very hard for, say, bacteria, to enjoy a good meal off your candles.
Since candles keep well they are rarely protected well. Many candles can be bought as they are. I buy my candles in packets of 24. They are stacked neatly in a cardboard box. What could be simpler?
And if there is little waste before using, there is literally none after. The wick and wax burns, obliterating itself as it goes. It burn mine completely down, leaving little but half a centimetre of black wick, and a millimeter of wax. As a commodity object, nearly nothing beats the candle.
Candles are also blessedly inexpensive. I pay 3NOK, or 50 cents per hour of a candle burning - which I consider a cheap delight. Well, I guess this one depends. As a source of light candles are horribly inefficient, releasing merely a hundredth of the light of and incandescent light bulb for the same amount of energy. At any point the candle produces about 80W of heat. A wall mounted electric heater often runs at 800W, which means that ten candles would replace it. At 4 cents per hour for the oven per hour, the candles would be more expensive by a factor of ten. Again, not the most efficient use of energy.
But I don't buy candles for the utility they used to have, but for the aesthetic pleasure they now give me. Candles give off a beautiful yellow light, and the flame itself - a translucent and dynamic sculpture that casts no shadow, is an object worth the attention of the eye. Over and above the visual pleasure, the philosophical categories a candle inhabits give me enormous pleasure. A candle is an object which consumes itself in it's duty, a material object without a shadow, and it is a dead thing made from a live thing which is described as alive, and which burns that which would have been the energy reserves of the animal itself, the fat. A candle is the defiance of the pig whence life was snuffed out to produce it - the life after death. How fitting it is that the ultimate end of that life flame comes in the form of a breath.
As metaphors go the candle is a strong one. At one point in our history candles were used to measure time - but they weren't very good at it. My candles burn for a steady 6 hours - but milage varies depending on air humidity and airflow. This time aspect of candles has also been linked to death - captured in proverbs such as "the candle which burns twice as bright burns half as long", or "burning one's candle at both ends". But I rarely think of candles this way.
Candles are mostly given their meaning for me, through their use. I only take out candles when I feel I have the time to enjoy them. Like flowers, they have a limited life - but candles demand more. Flowers imply transience, but merely die silently if left unattended. Not so with the candle. The candle you leave unattended kills you. When you light a candle, it will have your attention, but in return it gives light and heat - two of lifes best necessities.
The highest pleasure is the leisure to burn a candle uninterrupted, from the first lighting of the wick to its self deletion - because this means an evenings worth of calm and beautiful ours. Of awakened attention. Of enlightenment.
Postscript: A Description of a Candle
I bought white and odourless candles from Ikea - two palms high and a thumb's girth. At one tip, the wick, on the other a furrowed and narrowing pattern - tallow ready to crumble to fit the holder. It does. As I put it in place I feel the pattern bulge like packed snow. I light the wick with a match. The fringed end sears quickly and blackens. The tip of the candle drops outwards - at the end nearly as wide as the candle - but right before a sharp edge cuts it off, leaving the tip looking inorganic - machine-like, fashioned by a knife while spinning. The sharp tip melts as the match comes near, providing the first fuel for the wick. I can feel the melting wax, filling the pores in the fibers, sucking upwards through capillary action.
The wick is now burning, but not burning. Only a small glow at the end, like on a cigarette, tells of smouldering. It is surrounded by the much powerful flame - but seems impervious. "Immolation is not my game", it seems to say, "I prefer to cinder". Except for a millimeter at the base, the wick is now totally black - bendt like the end of an old man's cane.
The flame envelops the wick, cobalt blue and a luminous bronze. Only some way up is the flame solid. This is the only place where one must divert one's eyes. Where we are denied a longer look. This solid block covers a translucent cap, again covering the wick. The wick, from that stem the stearin fumes - but invisible. Only when the fuel mixes with the air does ignition occur, so around the wick there is little light. A darkness, compared to the shimmering peak. But from this darkness, to the side, erupts an edge of serrated blue - the holiest part of the flame. Then, on the crowning tip, the redder edge - often forked.
The wick stands in a molten lake of shimmering fat, and once still and moving. A crater has formed around the flame, from which the fuel sweats. But no sooner does it pool, and it is sucked into the fibrous center, then tossed into the air for its final cremation. It is a shimmering pool, but its light is drowned by its funeral pyre.
From afar a candle's light is too defuzed to have a strong effect. But on itself it has an almost violent presence. It strikes into the candle and scatters - lending the tip a warm glow of its own. From there the contrast fools my eye. The white candle is white no more, and turns a yellowish grey. This is the part that waits.
I move my hand around the candle. The same warmth is felt a palms width from the candle, as four palms height above. I strain to think how warmth and light are only variations of the same, when they give such different effect. But then the visible has always had more sway with the living, and the living flame most of all.
Poem: I confine my logic to lines
I confine my logic to lines
running through life.
With colors I paint my space
and sound fills the void of my
being.
I dream of white clouds
edgeless breaths through
a blue escape, and wake
to ink running through
the horizons.
Night rejoices in pointilist dark
sprinkles space through needle pine
Dawn fades into view the absolute.
running through life.
With colors I paint my space
and sound fills the void of my
being.
I dream of white clouds
edgeless breaths through
a blue escape, and wake
to ink running through
the horizons.
Night rejoices in pointilist dark
sprinkles space through needle pine
Dawn fades into view the absolute.
Building Understanding From Uncertainty
How do we know what a word means? Do we ask a friend? Do we search our minds? Do we check the dictionary? If we ask the makers of dictionaries they will say that they have two principal methods. The first is to ask other dictionaries, and to etymologically - that is, through historical texts, determine the words. The second is to ask a great number of people the question "What do you mean when you say "so and so". These methods are respectively called "prescriptive" and "descriptive".
These methods roughly parallel our ideas around deduction and induction. Etymological determination is like deduction, precise and elegant, but it may have funny nonsensical results - words that do not mimic the real world use. Descriptive determination, like induction, may be correct just at the moment of printing, but the next time we ask things may have changed, so that meanings drift and change their shorts.
The problem of fixing words is a dual one. Either the words change their meaning to suit society, or people must change their ways to suit the words. And this is the problem we are facing. There is no stable ground from which to determine the meaning of a word. Words mean what we use them to mean at the moment we say it, though our hearers may not understand us. Failing to make ourselves understood in a conversation is not dramatic - we can reformulate what we mean into a different sentence, which will almost always do. But in a written format this possibility is lost. This blog post is about how we can ensure that we are understood, and how we can aid the understanding of our readers, despite the limitations of the written word.
The fickleness of words is hard to understand. We are natural language users, and live by words. So let me illustrate with a few examples how words writhe under our pen.
The first is to form portmanteaus in the connection between two existing words to form a third. You may now be thinking of obvious ones like bee-hive or meaning-full, but many words carry this structure. We have grammatical rules which put on suffixes - words we add on the back on a word to change it's meaning, or greek words like oxymoron which might not have made grammatical sense to the greeks, but which we can adopt because, since we don't understand greek grammar, we just add the meanings instead. Incidentally oxymoron means "sharp-round".
The second is new words. New words are often made like a blacksmith makes a sword out a of piece of iron, through constant strain and a hammering of meanings, to form something new. New words often start out as metaphors, or poetic turns, which are then used so much in their new capacity that we forget the original connection. "Smokes" used to be slang, "Goldylock-zone" came from a fairy tale character, and hundreds of years ago "text" meant "fabric".
Words are shaky ground, you cannot build great fortresses of understanding on words alone. As you build the foundations shapeshifts, crumbles and erodes. Your towers are made of bricks unknown to basement dwellers, so that any ambitious climber would be lost. You may seek to build pools of understanding, but your efforts drain through the cracks of translation.
You might now ask yourself, how great is this problem? It's not as if you couldn't understand what I was writing. And I must admit, in ordinary use a language performs fine. A measly blog-post such as this won't be outdated before it is obsolete. But this is a real problem.
For any research you must know the words of what you describe then and there, and the same words are supposed to be used for the same phenomenon a hundred years later. In politics words are tied into ideological battles, in which the same goings one are described in different colored words. In war the armies of soldiers and scores of journalists may describe similar events with radically different words. Right there, it is important to know how to make clear what a word means.
Words that shape-shift under your pen, which' historical determination is cracked, which' function is politically hijacked or which' meaning of popularly misunderstood, find it hard to settle powerfully in the minds of the readers.
So then the question becomes. How can we counteract the problem of shifting words, to create a clear base of understanding?
There are two principles to follow. The first is: "Say the same thing twice". If one word or sentence is poorly understood a synonym, definition or repetition in different words may help to determine the meaning of both words. For example, I may scramble to find the right words, and strive to do the same. The meanings of the words "scramble" and "strive", are not the same, but they are similar enough that, if we take the two together, we get a fairly good impression of what I mean. Or I could give a definition, for example of "ideology": "A system of logically connected ideas serving as a world view."
The words of a definitions are not synonyms to that defined, rather they are the parts that make it up. These words may have more general meanings of their own, but we faultlessly understand what they mean within the definition. Since they are many, they are also more historically robust.
Giving the same message twice gives you a firmer ground on which to build understanding in a text, because if one or both have two meanings or nuances to them, their joint inclusion will make them highlight each others correct meaning. "Scramble" may mean to right oneself in after a fall, and "strive" may mean "aspire" - but we have no difficulty understanding what I mean when both are included.
The second principle is to keep tight control over the associations formed around the words we are using. Make sure that your metaphors extend naturally. For instance, earlier I used a building metaphor when describing the phenomena of "understand and text". If my reader were to think more of text and meaning within this metaphor he or she will find that it will provide many handy ideas. Rooms (of meaning) may be "illuminated", important words may act as "supporting structure", or high towers may provide a "great view of things".
Scholars may use words which indicate which tradition they belong to, politicians which ideology they subscribe to, clergy which god they pray to or corporations which market they sell to. Words are often grouped into "families", which they appear more often together with. By exclusively using words from a particular family you are signalling a standpoint, which will remain more robust than single words.
Familiarity is a very fundamental principle of understanding, which you will discover repeated on all levels of text. Words have the same flavor within sentences (often loaned from bigger more stable metaphors) such as "She was a sweet girl, but her sister was bitter", and whole chapters may allude to other chapters in other books. I once read a chapter written as a dialogue, inspired by a dialogue written by Louis Carroll, inspired by a dialogue written by Plato - the similarity of the texts bound them together in history and tradition.
Because the phenomena of familiarity is so basic, it is very hard to understand. It is true that there is familiarity in the sense that they "belong together naturally as a class", but it is also true that there is no such thing as a "natural class". Words are made by people, and so are classes of words. Words of the same "family" are known as such only because they are "familiar" to us as such.
Did you get that? Let's try again. We know groups of words belong together because we learned it. That's all. But how does this affect what I'm trying to convey with the second principle? Well, it all boils down to this:
Because not everyone is equally familiar in every field, you must choose who you are writing for before you start writing. That way you can tailor your connotations and metaphors to just that group of people. You must relinquish the notion that you can write just as well to everyone. Give in to the idea that specialized literature is just that.
Without a sense of who you are writing for, you get into the same problems that populist newspapers are having. They are writing for the "lowest common denominator", which translated means "so simply that everyone can understand" - and that is very simply indeed. A problem best described by the aphorism "There is no use in learning to swim in a pool so shallow you could stand in it". Instead we should seek to counteract the uncertainties of our text, to build a tower of understanding.
Thank you for reading this short essay - if you wish to explore some of these more deeply then I recommend googling "connotation", "denotation", "Sense/reference", "Metaphor, allegory", "lemma", or just ask me, and I'll point you onwards.
These methods roughly parallel our ideas around deduction and induction. Etymological determination is like deduction, precise and elegant, but it may have funny nonsensical results - words that do not mimic the real world use. Descriptive determination, like induction, may be correct just at the moment of printing, but the next time we ask things may have changed, so that meanings drift and change their shorts.
The problem of fixing words is a dual one. Either the words change their meaning to suit society, or people must change their ways to suit the words. And this is the problem we are facing. There is no stable ground from which to determine the meaning of a word. Words mean what we use them to mean at the moment we say it, though our hearers may not understand us. Failing to make ourselves understood in a conversation is not dramatic - we can reformulate what we mean into a different sentence, which will almost always do. But in a written format this possibility is lost. This blog post is about how we can ensure that we are understood, and how we can aid the understanding of our readers, despite the limitations of the written word.
The fickleness of words is hard to understand. We are natural language users, and live by words. So let me illustrate with a few examples how words writhe under our pen.
The first is to form portmanteaus in the connection between two existing words to form a third. You may now be thinking of obvious ones like bee-hive or meaning-full, but many words carry this structure. We have grammatical rules which put on suffixes - words we add on the back on a word to change it's meaning, or greek words like oxymoron which might not have made grammatical sense to the greeks, but which we can adopt because, since we don't understand greek grammar, we just add the meanings instead. Incidentally oxymoron means "sharp-round".
The second is new words. New words are often made like a blacksmith makes a sword out a of piece of iron, through constant strain and a hammering of meanings, to form something new. New words often start out as metaphors, or poetic turns, which are then used so much in their new capacity that we forget the original connection. "Smokes" used to be slang, "Goldylock-zone" came from a fairy tale character, and hundreds of years ago "text" meant "fabric".
Words are shaky ground, you cannot build great fortresses of understanding on words alone. As you build the foundations shapeshifts, crumbles and erodes. Your towers are made of bricks unknown to basement dwellers, so that any ambitious climber would be lost. You may seek to build pools of understanding, but your efforts drain through the cracks of translation.
You might now ask yourself, how great is this problem? It's not as if you couldn't understand what I was writing. And I must admit, in ordinary use a language performs fine. A measly blog-post such as this won't be outdated before it is obsolete. But this is a real problem.
For any research you must know the words of what you describe then and there, and the same words are supposed to be used for the same phenomenon a hundred years later. In politics words are tied into ideological battles, in which the same goings one are described in different colored words. In war the armies of soldiers and scores of journalists may describe similar events with radically different words. Right there, it is important to know how to make clear what a word means.
Words that shape-shift under your pen, which' historical determination is cracked, which' function is politically hijacked or which' meaning of popularly misunderstood, find it hard to settle powerfully in the minds of the readers.
So then the question becomes. How can we counteract the problem of shifting words, to create a clear base of understanding?
There are two principles to follow. The first is: "Say the same thing twice". If one word or sentence is poorly understood a synonym, definition or repetition in different words may help to determine the meaning of both words. For example, I may scramble to find the right words, and strive to do the same. The meanings of the words "scramble" and "strive", are not the same, but they are similar enough that, if we take the two together, we get a fairly good impression of what I mean. Or I could give a definition, for example of "ideology": "A system of logically connected ideas serving as a world view."
The words of a definitions are not synonyms to that defined, rather they are the parts that make it up. These words may have more general meanings of their own, but we faultlessly understand what they mean within the definition. Since they are many, they are also more historically robust.
Giving the same message twice gives you a firmer ground on which to build understanding in a text, because if one or both have two meanings or nuances to them, their joint inclusion will make them highlight each others correct meaning. "Scramble" may mean to right oneself in after a fall, and "strive" may mean "aspire" - but we have no difficulty understanding what I mean when both are included.
The second principle is to keep tight control over the associations formed around the words we are using. Make sure that your metaphors extend naturally. For instance, earlier I used a building metaphor when describing the phenomena of "understand and text". If my reader were to think more of text and meaning within this metaphor he or she will find that it will provide many handy ideas. Rooms (of meaning) may be "illuminated", important words may act as "supporting structure", or high towers may provide a "great view of things".
Scholars may use words which indicate which tradition they belong to, politicians which ideology they subscribe to, clergy which god they pray to or corporations which market they sell to. Words are often grouped into "families", which they appear more often together with. By exclusively using words from a particular family you are signalling a standpoint, which will remain more robust than single words.
Familiarity is a very fundamental principle of understanding, which you will discover repeated on all levels of text. Words have the same flavor within sentences (often loaned from bigger more stable metaphors) such as "She was a sweet girl, but her sister was bitter", and whole chapters may allude to other chapters in other books. I once read a chapter written as a dialogue, inspired by a dialogue written by Louis Carroll, inspired by a dialogue written by Plato - the similarity of the texts bound them together in history and tradition.
Because the phenomena of familiarity is so basic, it is very hard to understand. It is true that there is familiarity in the sense that they "belong together naturally as a class", but it is also true that there is no such thing as a "natural class". Words are made by people, and so are classes of words. Words of the same "family" are known as such only because they are "familiar" to us as such.
Did you get that? Let's try again. We know groups of words belong together because we learned it. That's all. But how does this affect what I'm trying to convey with the second principle? Well, it all boils down to this:
Because not everyone is equally familiar in every field, you must choose who you are writing for before you start writing. That way you can tailor your connotations and metaphors to just that group of people. You must relinquish the notion that you can write just as well to everyone. Give in to the idea that specialized literature is just that.
Without a sense of who you are writing for, you get into the same problems that populist newspapers are having. They are writing for the "lowest common denominator", which translated means "so simply that everyone can understand" - and that is very simply indeed. A problem best described by the aphorism "There is no use in learning to swim in a pool so shallow you could stand in it". Instead we should seek to counteract the uncertainties of our text, to build a tower of understanding.
Thank you for reading this short essay - if you wish to explore some of these more deeply then I recommend googling "connotation", "denotation", "Sense/reference", "Metaphor, allegory", "lemma", or just ask me, and I'll point you onwards.
Art in the Information Society: Or, The Connection of Hyper Realism and The New Aesthetic by the technology of the camera.
The two most interesting movements in modern art are, to my mind, Hyper Realism and The New Aesthetic. The two are, respectively, a movement trying to capture reality by painting it in such a find detail that it would be indistinguishable from a photograph, and the second is capturing the idiosyncrasies of the digital.
But there is an intimate connection between these two art movements. They would both be impossible without the technology of the camera. This is because of two main reasons.
(1) Our visual perception is fluid and transient. We can capture very little detail from our vision, only as much as a couple of square centimetres at a meters distance. This limitation makes it impossible to observe much about the surroundings in any detail before they change into something else. Natural light, coming from the sun, changes throughout the day, and people move, change complexion and so on. The only way to reliably capture a whole painting in such exact detail, and still have a coherent overall image, is to take a photograph, or to study in detail the lighting conditions of a particular scene, transferring these to a new setting. But this, again, is only achievable by taking a photograph.
Our vision is intimately connected to the symbols which we overlay our reality with. Chairs are chairs and windows are windows, but this is only the case from a human perspective. Lighting and objects are in fact seen differently depending on what we think they are and what mood we are in. There is no such thing as a completely objective vision. Therefore the exactness of hyperrealism must depend on something very stable, something you can match pixel for pixel, drop for drop of paint. Like in photography...
In Hyper Realism the exactitude of our camera replaces the inexactitude of our visual perception. A similar process happens in The New Aesthetic where one sacrifices ones own selection of the visual to the machine - and our notions of beauty and "interestingness" are the only selection mechanisms used thereafter. Our vision is pushed entirely to the side in favor of the camera lens itself taking command over what should be taken in. This role of the camera is normally understated in photography, but in the new aesthetic it takes center stage - often by making adjustments to the camera so that the effect of the distortion of lenses or the digital become more visible. The only limitation to the power of the camera is found in the selection mechanisms of the artist. But a version of this selection mechanism also has it's place in Hyper Realism.
(2) Hyper Realism selects it's visual aesthetic on the back of the options available through camera technology. This we can clearly see in the painting above by Denis Peterson. Notice that detail in the woman's arm is lost because of the brightness of the sun. This effect wouldn't happen when just seeing something. Either it would be to bright for us to turn our eyes there, or we would see the detail. Only in cameras do you get the effect of "whiteout". This happens when the light sensitivity of the film or digital chip in the camera is adjusted for the median amount of light in the image. Any light that comes above the amount the film can handle in the time frame it is set to "expose" would, just be lost in a whiteout. The "information" of the different levels of light is lost, so that there is no difference between the second lightest and the lightest. This effect removes the contrast required to see the details on the arm. We can understand then that the visual expression chosen in the painting comes not from the artists perception of the world, but from an artifact of the technology he has chosen to use as his aid - the camera.
It is not a bad thing that he has done this. We are trained to think of photographs as real - they are the truth witnesses of our culture. Images are used as evidence in court, and trusted more than an eye witness. This symbolic truth can be made part of a painting, and so it is made truer than if the painter painted something real in front of his eyes, it has become hyper real.
But there is also something hyper real about The New Aesthetic, which is also freed in some way from it's subjective limitations. This aesthetic shows us the truth from two worlds - from the real and from the digital. It is a point that, though our programs are very abstracted from the transistors and hard drives from which they originate, anything we see on our screens is a manifestation of millions of binary signs. When these work as they should, as in our vision, they are invisible to use. We simply see the content and not the medium. But when these are mixed reality asserts itself, and comes to the foreground of our experience of them.
The glitched image on the right was made by Jack Addis (and his computer). The "first" layer of reality, which we seek to see, is the man, but the computer has made us experience him in a new way through it's interference. But the interference is as real as the man.
We might say that both these artistic expressions are a blend of our symbolic/visual field and a technologically determined reality - but they two are each near the ends of a continuum. What this tells me, is that technology is now such an integral part of our reality that we understand both it and us through it. The two are combined to create something new, something informational: Maybe it is The New Hyper Real Aesthetic of the Information Society.
 |
| Painting by Denis Peterson |
(1) Our visual perception is fluid and transient. We can capture very little detail from our vision, only as much as a couple of square centimetres at a meters distance. This limitation makes it impossible to observe much about the surroundings in any detail before they change into something else. Natural light, coming from the sun, changes throughout the day, and people move, change complexion and so on. The only way to reliably capture a whole painting in such exact detail, and still have a coherent overall image, is to take a photograph, or to study in detail the lighting conditions of a particular scene, transferring these to a new setting. But this, again, is only achievable by taking a photograph.
Our vision is intimately connected to the symbols which we overlay our reality with. Chairs are chairs and windows are windows, but this is only the case from a human perspective. Lighting and objects are in fact seen differently depending on what we think they are and what mood we are in. There is no such thing as a completely objective vision. Therefore the exactness of hyperrealism must depend on something very stable, something you can match pixel for pixel, drop for drop of paint. Like in photography...
In Hyper Realism the exactitude of our camera replaces the inexactitude of our visual perception. A similar process happens in The New Aesthetic where one sacrifices ones own selection of the visual to the machine - and our notions of beauty and "interestingness" are the only selection mechanisms used thereafter. Our vision is pushed entirely to the side in favor of the camera lens itself taking command over what should be taken in. This role of the camera is normally understated in photography, but in the new aesthetic it takes center stage - often by making adjustments to the camera so that the effect of the distortion of lenses or the digital become more visible. The only limitation to the power of the camera is found in the selection mechanisms of the artist. But a version of this selection mechanism also has it's place in Hyper Realism.
(2) Hyper Realism selects it's visual aesthetic on the back of the options available through camera technology. This we can clearly see in the painting above by Denis Peterson. Notice that detail in the woman's arm is lost because of the brightness of the sun. This effect wouldn't happen when just seeing something. Either it would be to bright for us to turn our eyes there, or we would see the detail. Only in cameras do you get the effect of "whiteout". This happens when the light sensitivity of the film or digital chip in the camera is adjusted for the median amount of light in the image. Any light that comes above the amount the film can handle in the time frame it is set to "expose" would, just be lost in a whiteout. The "information" of the different levels of light is lost, so that there is no difference between the second lightest and the lightest. This effect removes the contrast required to see the details on the arm. We can understand then that the visual expression chosen in the painting comes not from the artists perception of the world, but from an artifact of the technology he has chosen to use as his aid - the camera.
 |
| Jack Addis |
It is not a bad thing that he has done this. We are trained to think of photographs as real - they are the truth witnesses of our culture. Images are used as evidence in court, and trusted more than an eye witness. This symbolic truth can be made part of a painting, and so it is made truer than if the painter painted something real in front of his eyes, it has become hyper real.
But there is also something hyper real about The New Aesthetic, which is also freed in some way from it's subjective limitations. This aesthetic shows us the truth from two worlds - from the real and from the digital. It is a point that, though our programs are very abstracted from the transistors and hard drives from which they originate, anything we see on our screens is a manifestation of millions of binary signs. When these work as they should, as in our vision, they are invisible to use. We simply see the content and not the medium. But when these are mixed reality asserts itself, and comes to the foreground of our experience of them.
The glitched image on the right was made by Jack Addis (and his computer). The "first" layer of reality, which we seek to see, is the man, but the computer has made us experience him in a new way through it's interference. But the interference is as real as the man.
We might say that both these artistic expressions are a blend of our symbolic/visual field and a technologically determined reality - but they two are each near the ends of a continuum. What this tells me, is that technology is now such an integral part of our reality that we understand both it and us through it. The two are combined to create something new, something informational: Maybe it is The New Hyper Real Aesthetic of the Information Society.
Poem: Coming to Life
I came to some 26 years after life,
to find my world was melting into words.
When the whys fell out of fashion to the hows,
and a man was said to function, not to live.
As the quantum field spun energies, mysterious and vast,
the billiard balls lost luster, reducing beer
to insestious sensations.
Still.
Life moves us to love
like love moves us to live
for another
day
coming to life to move against fashion
slowly spinning in honey light,
licking nectarious dew after blues of night
ecstatically churning the mill, working up sweat,
gristing the nuggets of will.
Still.
love moves us to live,
grinding lenses for others to see,
or rather not, as it often is.
But I still tend to whisper - therefore.
to find my world was melting into words.
When the whys fell out of fashion to the hows,
and a man was said to function, not to live.
As the quantum field spun energies, mysterious and vast,
the billiard balls lost luster, reducing beer
to insestious sensations.
Still.
Life moves us to love
like love moves us to live
for another
day
coming to life to move against fashion
slowly spinning in honey light,
licking nectarious dew after blues of night
ecstatically churning the mill, working up sweat,
gristing the nuggets of will.
Still.
love moves us to live,
grinding lenses for others to see,
or rather not, as it often is.
But I still tend to whisper - therefore.
Words for describing the relationship between ideas, facts and theory for research purposes.
This text names, and gives the logical relations to, fundamental categories of theoretical, methodological and empirical problems. They are based on naive realism, and a correspondence theory of truth- type thinking.
The first and innermost intuitive notion is the idea. This is an illogical stream of images and sensations. Then these images get a structure of a sort - which one can follow through ones own mind. This is called a conception. Formalized conceptions are named concepts. Concepts formed together become a theory. The knowledge of how to apply a the theory to a research situation is called a methodology. The operationalized form of the theory for research purposes, after it’s transformed by your methodology, is called your method. If it is for engineering purposes it is called technique.
The researcher in the field is ontologically speaking a subject, and epistemically speaking subjective. The image created in the researchers brain, that which bear the subjective characteristics, is called his phenomenal experience. What is perceived is called reality - or, if one wants to add emphasis, ontic reality. What we perceive in reality are objects and subjects. These categories are ontological, naming respectively inorganic matter, and organic life. The unprocessed information streaming from objects and subjects onto us, either in the form of sound waves, light rays, pressure or anything else we can sense - is called presentation. The form this information takes in our phenomenal experience is called the representation. Though these representations bear the characteristics of our subjective interpretation, they may contain information with the same logical pattern as the causal pattern of reality. The technical term for this will be presentation/representation- isomorphy; but we will more generally speak of this as objective or factual knowledge. Entities of factual knowledge are called facts.The degree to which single concepts or logical connections are in an isomorphic relation to ontic causality, is called the degree of correspondence. The degree to which a theory corresponds to reality is called it’s coherence.
Theory has a descriptive relationship to reality, and their descriptions are often either anachronistic (structural) or diachronic (functional). In ontology we discriminate between constitutive causality, and temporal causality. The researchers relation to reality, both in this constituted subjectivity and in his subject- relation, is called his perspective. The phenomenal experience resulting from the researchers method and perspective will take the form of ideas and conceptions.
There are two processes of abstraction. One is the abstraction of fact from reality, the other is the abstraction of concepts from ideas. Abstractions appear in our mind as mental objects available for scrutiny. Fact and concept have a complicated relationship in our phenomenal experience - where they will remain as almost overlapping categories of thought. We may be successful in holding facts as ideas in our mind, in which many conceptions may be tried to find the one form at the same time most corresponding to the fact and to our coherent theoretical structure. Any extant concept or fact is positively stated. The logical processing of factual and conceptual information is called deduction. The addition of more facts of varying degrees of isomorphy (but always some) is called induction. Non- corresponding, or dysmorphic, facts bear upon conceptions and facts negatively - changing them by subtraction. The belief in epistemic progression through discovery of positive inductive facts is called positivism. The danger of positivism is to bloat your theory to encompass every fact. The belief in epistemic progression through the discovery of negative facts is called falsificationism. Statements can only be negative in relation to another fact. This is because negative statements also are statements - that is; they must be positively stated. These statements can result from a dysmorphic presentation/representation relationship (or error), leading you to make a false negative statement bearing on the original theory.
Inductive facts that bear upon a theory in such a way that their existence is incommensurable to other concepts in the theory create the situation of a paradox, oxymoron or aporia. The resolvement of these may sometimes lead to paradigm shifts.
While we call our coherent collection of concepts “theory”, we call our collection of facts either “empirical” or “scientific”- knowledge.
One of the main problems of knowledge in the social sciences is separating fact from concept.
Dreaming about writing
I have this dream where I have a room of my own, a writing desk, and time enough to write what I want. I want to write beautifully, truly and rightly. I want to write for people who like to read - and who, like myself, like to explore the culture we are a part of. To people who cherish life, and who cherish it more and more because they ever increase their knowledge of it.
So far my dream is just a dream. But maybe one day, if I work hard enough, I can achieve it.
Here is a snippet of my dream:
On the different kinds of messages in common myths, and what they can tell us are the chief concerns of people everywhere.
On how to understand what understanding is - and how this connects us to everyday life.
A serious philosophical work on the self- organisational aspects of information in a historical context - ranging from ancient times and to today.
On the relationship of Truth, Beauty and Ethics - and how we can live by engaging interchangeably with this trifecta.
The book I'm writing now, The Steps of Etemenanki, a grand vision of building a coherent modern world view, and how to detail it out, without turning to complete scepticism or conservative views.
A serious philosophical work on notation, what it is, and how we might change from learning to write to learning a nomenclature for making symbols.
A Sociological work on the development of Norwegian school curriculae, their historical heritage, and their dynamic development.
A Book about what it is possible to think, and how this shapes our world.
So far my dream is just a dream. But maybe one day, if I work hard enough, I can achieve it.
Here is a snippet of my dream:
What Kinds of Books would I like to Write?
On how to understand what understanding is - and how this connects us to everyday life.
A serious philosophical work on the self- organisational aspects of information in a historical context - ranging from ancient times and to today.
On the relationship of Truth, Beauty and Ethics - and how we can live by engaging interchangeably with this trifecta.
The book I'm writing now, The Steps of Etemenanki, a grand vision of building a coherent modern world view, and how to detail it out, without turning to complete scepticism or conservative views.
A serious philosophical work on notation, what it is, and how we might change from learning to write to learning a nomenclature for making symbols.
A Sociological work on the development of Norwegian school curriculae, their historical heritage, and their dynamic development.
A Book about what it is possible to think, and how this shapes our world.
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