Plato on Writing to Forget

I originally wrote this entry on September 17, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I took my Plato with Professor Wallace Matson in Berkeley some 15 years ago, and I still have the copy of Plato we used as our text. When I took it off my bookshelf and looked at it tonight, I noticed I had even underlined and made many comments on the margins of the part of Phaedrus that is about writing, and yet, I had to read a mention of those sections (well, erroneously, a mention of Pheado instead of Phaedrus) in Dreyfus' On the Internet to go back and try to find them. Dreyfus has written a couple of paragraphs on the material in Phaedrus but I think Phaedrus already contains many of the critical elements in Dreyfus' argument which seeks to deflate some of the (unjustified?) hype about the Internet.

In Phaedrus, Socrates critiques writing and finds deficiencies in it (and I suppose in reading) which are absent in rich conversational dialogues. Such dialogue leads to deeper learning and exchange.

Take for example, the following paragraph, which should ring strikingly uncanny for a software developer today.

SOCRATES:
Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must be ignorant of Ammon's utterance, if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who already knows that which the writing is concerned with.

Ammon was an Egyptian sage-king, whose beautiful discourse on writing Socrates had just shared with Phaedrus, the young man fond of compositions on love.

More on "Ammon's utterance" later!

Why bits bore

I originally wrote this entry on September 8, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Every software and hardware engineer wants to know that there's something great behind (or at least beyond) the bits and bytes they are working on. The tendency to despair with bits agrees with the fact that we're dynamic, not digital, beings.

Chess is a digital game. Our lives are not.

Chess moves are known. Life moves rarely work out the way we plan them. In chess, you move from one well-defined state to the next. There is no real ambiguity about the state of the board. Life, on the contrary, is full of ambiguities.

Here's another example. Soccer is not a digital game. It's a dynamic game. One may argue that digital (or pseudo-digital) events exist in soccer, too, such as pentalty kicks at the end of a long and exciting game. Well, these are the most boring parts of the game of soccer (or English football).

Some would even argue that football, I mean the American variety of it, although quite "dynamic" in some very paticular moves, has more on the "digital" side of the scale than soccer does. There are many, many more interruptions and cuts into the game, and many more intendedly "digital" measurements on the field.

Nevertheless, sports as played on the field will always have more dynamism than digital-ness. No wonder . . . Even the octogenarian seem to enjoy watching their favorite sport.

Trust and Cyberspace

I originally wrote this entry on September 3, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I've	been wanting to write something about trust and cyberspace for some time, and I have avoided it (because it cannot be done in any short format, except in poetry, perhaps?) until last night, when I read Albert White's personal story of blogs and relationships.

I have seen and heard the word "trust" used in such loose manners that I'm afraid this could-have-been-useful word in the English language may be on the way to its own extinction.

Let's not worry about the romantic uses of the word "trust" and focus on its more practical uses.

Person A may say "I trust B will write about the same subjects on his weblog again." This is what I call uni-directional trust. This trust has to do with predictability. ("I trust he will always remain a thief.") This is not a bidirectional, social kind of trust. It is really about the expression of beliefs based on previous experience. It has to do with what some economists have called "reputation effects". (He is been a thief for some time in his dealings with me. Therefore, I trust he will remain one.)

How about the bi-directional, more social aspects of trust? When I trust in X, I trust that X will not take advantage of my vulnerabilities, and I say that "X and I trust each other" as long as neither of us is bound to take advantage of the other's vulnerabilities.

But how is that possible? It can only be possible if both sides have exposed vulnerabilities of relatively equal value, for example, through mutual, relationship-specific investments in each other, exchange of "hostages" or other "credible commitments," to borrow a phrase used by Oliver Williamson, the distinguished Berkeley economist. (See many of his publications, including "Credible Commitments: Using hostages to support exchange", 1983, AER)

Let me finish this long piece with a quote from Hubert Dreyfus' wonderful little book, On the Internet, about which I've written earlier:

. . . investment bankers know that in order to get two CEOs to trust each other enough to merge their companies, it is not sufficient that they have many teleconferences. They must live together for several days interacting in a shared environment, and it is quite likely that they will finally make their deal over dinner.

. . . [It] seems that to trust someone you have to make yourself vulnerable to him or her and they have to be vulnerable to you. Part of trust is based on the experience that the other does not take advantage of one's vulnerability. I have to be in the same room with someone and know they could physically hurt me or publicly humiliate me and observe that they do not do so, in order to feel I can trust them and make myself vulnerable to them in other ways.

. . . If that background trust were missing, as it would necessarily be in cyberspace, we might tend to be suspicious of the trustworthiness of every social interaction and withhold our trust until we could confirm its justification. Such a scepticism would complicate if not poison all human interaction.

In short, real embodied presence is absolutely critical to trust.

Part of it may have to do with the fact that once we are in each other's physical presence, we know much more about each other's vulnerabilities. Another part has to do with the value of knowledge about the other. In fact, business and economic advantage has a great deal to do with information asymmetries. To paraphrase a maxim more accurately, "knowledge has power" because knowledge of the other can be used to their disadvantage!

On the other hand, information-sharing can produce trust as a by-product. By sharing information (of relatively equal strategic value), the parties are exposing vulnerabilities and building trust. (Information sharing is often required in supply chain management in order to alleviate the bullwhip effect, i.e. increasing fluctuations in demand as one moves up the supply chain.)

Trust,
Economics,
Philosophy,
Internet.

Self and the Other

I originally wrote this entry on August 29, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

In The Analects (or Lun Yü), one sees Confucius' developing various ideas about the self vs. the other. Here is an example:

The Master said, "If one learns from others but does not think, one will be bewildered. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one will be in peril."

-The Analects, II.15, trans. by D. C. Lau.

Confucius' Life Through His Own Words

I originally wrote this entry on August 28, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

The Master said, "At fifteen I set my heart on learning; at thirty I took my stand; at forty I came to be free from doubts; at fifty I understood the Decree of Heaven; at sixty my ear was atuned; at seventy I followed my heart's desire without overstepping the line."

-The Analects, II.4, trans. by D. C. Lau.

What a glorious life !

References: Confucius, A Great Philosopher-Prophet

Alzheimer Epidemic and Being-in-the-World

I originally wrote this entry on August 25, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I am one of those very rare Americans who rarely watch T.V.

In fact, I watch TV so rarely that some people have argued that I'm not even an American. (Some other people have reached the same conclusion from wildly differing points of origin but that's a different matter.)

Why am I sharing such odd facts with you?

Well, there are those rare times that I do watch TV, for example when I'm traveling for business, say for a visit to one of Sun's telecommunications partners in Europe or for an Open Mobile Alliance working group meeting, as was the case this past week.

That's how I ended up glimpsing through parts of a PBS program on the epidemic and growing spread of Alzheimer in the U.S. while resting in my hotel room in Kona. (My best other alternative, perhaps from an anthropologist's point of view, was KWHE TV 14, a religiously inspired TV station running long ads for vacations to Israel, interdispersed with news casts about evil deeds of various Muslim governments. Why does that remind me of the case of the Holy Land Foundation?)

Obviously, most neurobiologists, neurosurgeons and other scientists and clinicians pay a great deal of attention to what happens to the brain, physically, when one is afflicted with Alzheimer. In other words, they look at the brain and they see synaptic and neural atrophy with an onset of fibrous bodies within the neurons. I'm summarizing things here and certainly don't claim to know very much in this field of scientific enquiry although I did take as much biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, embryology and physiology as any pre-med student, if not more, when I was an undergrad and then a grad student. In those years, I even took a graduate course on physiology of language, with some real human brains used as instructional material.

In any case, what's the problem with the conventional scientists' approach to the study of Alzheimer's Disease?

In my view, the conventional "scientific" enquiry is missing a whole set of possible reasons and sources for the epidemic affliction of short-term memory loss followed by Alzheimer's devastating degradations.

The "scientists" seem to be looking primarily at the symptoms of something that may be much deeper. In their efforts, they are trying to correct those symptoms head-on, delay their onset or biochemically alter their operations.

But handling symptoms directly rather than seeking the root causes of the physiological changes and afflictions could be putting the cart before the horse. According to a proper method, root causes should not be claimed to be known unless we have a proper and a well-understood explanation connecting cause and effect.

Well, what are the causes of Alzhemier?

I'm not a doctor, and what I write here are my own views and are based on a quick philosophical analysis of the problem with some informed understanding of some of the biology involved. So, instead of directly answering the question, I'd like to share some hypothesis regarding short-term memory, how it is stressed and how it may be damaged. [Note: From a conceptual point of view, the damage to our short-term memory organs can be operating very much like how our inner ear's cochlea can be damaged and rendered useless for particular sound frequencies. However, in the brain the various "frequencies" or "duration" organs of memory are much more integrated and networked than the organs of sound frequency audition in the cochlea itself. In other words, any damage in the brain will probably spread much more easily than any damage in the cochlea.]

Martin Heidegger has effectively said that "being" is "being-in-the-world," and that we're the only being (among the rocks, animals and other inanimate and animate objects that surround us) whose being is a concern for itself. In other words, the lion in the forest may not be so concerned about why it, i.e. the lion, is, but we are. That's what distinguishes us as a being-in-the-world.

Now, how do we come to be a being-in-the-world? How do we absorb the world? (I'm coining "absorb the world" as a phrase to use here.)

Let us look at two cases: In the first one, we're walking in the Henry Cowell State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, here in California. In the second case, we're driving between between 60 and 70 miles per hour (or say 70 - 90 miles per hour when in Europe) on a stretch of freeway where we see a variety of cars and other objects passing us at a dizzying speed.

How would you absorb the world (the physical environment) in each of these cases?

Of course, absorbing your physical environment is simply an instance of "absorbing the world" not the whole experience involved when you "absorb the world." (For example, when you absorb the "world of physics" or the "world of high-performance computing," there is something more than simply absorbing some physical environment.)

In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that short-term memory is crucial for absorbing the world through the gradient of variations that pass the field of our perception.

If the gradients in the field of our perception are sharp, for example when objects pass our field of vision very quickly with no chance for us to integrate them into a larger experience, we lose the connection to the world, we cannot absorb and interpret it within the context of our experience. We cannot build on a sequence of sensations. Our short-term integrative cognitive apparatus is strained. (Why do people listen to soothing music in their sound-proof luxury cars while driving at dizzying speeds on the freeways of the Silicon Valley? Could a will towards continuity in the field of auditory perception in order to counter-balance the sharp gradients in the field of visual perception provide a possible answer?)

A fast-paced life--a life of constant and unpredictable change in the perceptual world--drastically increases perceptual gradients and reduces our ability to properly absorb and integrate what goes on around us. This is a true malady and must have some physiological consequences. However, I don't see any of these questions being raised or asked by the Alzheimer researchers, whether those conducting behavioral or biochemically rooted research.

With the absence of such alternative research approaches, we may be missing many interesting questions which could be tackled in the way I've just described. Such an enquiry may conclude that we may have to do something to the way we live before we can root out early onset of memory loss and Alzheimer's Disease.

Thank you for listening !!!

Shooting Donkeys or Nobility in Anger

I originally wrote this entry on August 20, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

This morning at about 4:30 am--I'd woken up by a family call from 12 time zones away--I bumped into a deeply disturbing Reuters' news report from Najaf (Michael Georgy, "U.S. Air Strikes Spread Fear in Najaf" August 20, 2004).

Reading Georgy's report made me wonder whether there is any noble feelings one may experience in confronting such carnage unleashed with technologically advanced weapons of (mass ?) destruction raining terror upon the population below. (For evidence of the carnage at its earlier stages, one can start with reports collected here.)

Although feelings of anger in cases similar to this one would be considered a natural reaction and the absence of such feelings an oddity (except perhaps in great historical human beings who were masters of their emotions), it still seems to me that anger cannot be noble or virtuous.

Anger (particularly when combined with fear) darkens the mind and clouds the eyes. It blunts positive social feelings and strenghtens the asocial ones.

On the other hand, it appears to me that a feeling of shame can be truly noble in cases such as this.

By "a feeling of shame" I do not mean "feeling ashamed of X" or "feeling ashamed of oneself" where X could be, say, one's facial or bodily features or some other similar aspect of one's existence for which one has little or no a priori responsibility. Instead, I use "shame" to refer to an emotion that may arise when something horrible is done in one's name or under one's watch or involving one's resources, an emotion that would be mixed with a deep sense of real and factual responsibility. (Of course, some degree of emotional education is required before one begins to experience such feelings. I've written earlier, very briefly, about the importance of such emotional education.)

By the way, Georgy's report ends in the following paragraph:

"You know the snipers shoot donkeys to intimidate us. The smell got to be so bad after 25 were killed that we collected them and put them in one grave just up the street," said Abdel Sanassi. "It's a warning."

Now, all this reminds me of Pablo Picasso's Guernica.

	An excellent critique of the painting can be found in John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso, a wonderful book from a truly great art commentator. Berger's critique focuses primarily on Picasso's inability to reflect the real horrors of modern warfare with advanced, death-at-a-distance technologies.
	Here's a creative take on Guernica which attempts to apply it, rather crudely, to the aerial bombardments in Iraq. Baghdad was the first city subjected to aerial bombardment, in the early 1920s, when it was under British occupation. Perhaps in this visual change, Berger's critique (see above) has been answered, albeit not in the most acceptable artistic fashion.

Shooting Donkeys or Nobility in Anger

I originally wrote this entry on August 20, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

This morning at about 4:30 am--I'd woken up by a family call from 12 time zones away--I bumped into a deeply disturbing Reuters' news report from Najaf (Michael Georgy, "U.S. Air Strikes Spread Fear in Najaf" August 20, 2004).

Reading Georgy's report made me wonder whether there is any noble feelings one may experience in confronting such carnage unleashed with technologically advanced weapons of (mass ?) destruction raining terror upon the population below. (For evidence of the carnage at its earlier stages, one can start with reports collected here.)

Although feelings of anger in cases similar to this one would be considered a natural reaction and the absence of such feelings an oddity (except perhaps in great historical human beings who were masters of their emotions), it still seems to me that anger cannot be noble or virtuous.

Anger (particularly when combined with fear) darkens the mind and clouds the eyes. It blunts positive social feelings and strenghtens the asocial ones.

On the other hand, it appears to me that a feeling of shame can be truly noble in cases such as this.

By "a feeling of shame" I do not mean "feeling ashamed of X" or "feeling ashamed of oneself" where X could be, say, one's facial or bodily features or some other similar aspect of one's existence for which one has little or no a priori responsibility. Instead, I use "shame" to refer to an emotion that may arise when something horrible is done in one's name or under one's watch or involving one's resources, an emotion that would be mixed with a deep sense of real and factual responsibility. (Of course, some degree of emotional education is required before one begins to experience such feelings. I've written earlier, very briefly, about the importance of such emotional education.)

By the way, Georgy's report ends in the following paragraph:

"You know the snipers shoot donkeys to intimidate us. The smell got to be so bad after 25 were killed that we collected them and put them in one grave just up the street," said Abdel Sanassi. "It's a warning."

Now, all this reminds me of Pablo Picasso's Guernica.

	An excellent critique of the painting can be found in John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso, a wonderful book from a truly great art commentator. Berger's critique focuses primarily on Picasso's inability to reflect the real horrors of modern warfare with advanced, death-at-a-distance technologies.
	Here's a creative take on Guernica which attempts to apply it, rather crudely, to the aerial bombardments in Iraq. Baghdad was the first city subjected to aerial bombardment, in the early 1920s, when it was under British occupation. Perhaps in this visual change, Berger's critique (see above) has been answered, albeit not in the most acceptable artistic fashion.

Confucius, a great philosopher-prophet

I originally wrote this entry on August 7, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I've never liked it when people ridicule something they can hardly understand. That sort of behavior not only shows a lack of tolerance but also a lack of capacity for dialogue and true learning.

Zimran Ahmed's shallow misunderstanding of Confucius recorded on his "economics" weblog, winterspeak, is so glaring that it gives me no choice but to write at least a few words about it and about Confucius, the great philosopher-prophet of China.

Since I have a regular job, I can hardly scratch the surface of how badly off track and lost Zimran has gotten himself.

Zimran's reading of Confucius demonstrates a lack of skill for the art of interpretation or tafsir. This is typical of those so focused on technical learning. Zimran's analysis is not only shallow and misguided but also vindictive and one-sided.

One of Confucius' major projects, which Zimran has ridiculed in his post, was to create a body of discourse to frame the universe of human emotions. Confucius' biggest complaint (about the modern world, one might add) is that human beings have lost touch with their true emotional roots, with what makes them human. He seeks to educate for a nurturing of emotional rootedness. Confucius is one of the first great philosophers who describes the importance of rites in the emotional universe of human beings in the context of relatioships, in the context of the world. In this, his project differs little from other prophets and philosophers.

Confucius is also one of the first who lays the groundwork for an analysis (later, by Mencius) about how filial feelings of love for family and those who are near us could be nurtured and extended to affect and reach a larger set of relationships. Confucius elucidates the function of the family as the cradle of necessary emotional education.

The gate to a proper understanding of Confucius' Analects is of course a proper reading of the works of Mencius. (Given my evaluation of what little material Zimran has already written about Confucius, I'm afraid he might get Mencius equally and terribly wrong, too.) Without reflection on Mencius, the core of Confucius Analects may remain in darkness for the unlearned.

While Zimran boasts about his studies of Chinese philosophy and classics at school (probably an upper division course or audit of such a course, at Harvard?), his ridicule of Confucius shows that he has not comprehended the meaning of the Confucius' Analacts. It also shows that he has either not seen or rushed through Mencius.

This is a real pity for someone who has listed so many other accomplishments.