MachineMachine /stream - tagged with meaning http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable... http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/12159601444

Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas

Lewis F. Richardson

]]> Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:42:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/12159601444 Evolution and Innovation http://theeuropean-magazine.com/352-dyson-george/353-evolution-and-innovation/george-dyson-evolution-and-innovation-information-is-cheap-meaning-is-expensive-the-european-magazine George Dyson: “Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive” http://t.co/wKQfp6rP ]]> Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:55:49 -0700 http://theeuropean-magazine.com/352-dyson-george/353-evolution-and-innovation/george-dyson-evolution-and-innovation-information-is-cheap-meaning-is-expensive-the-european-magazine Is mental time travel what makes us human? http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece Meaning/time=? [e-flux on Coked-Out, Motherless Robots] http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/09/29/meaningtime-e-flux-on-coked-out-motherless-robots/ Are we moving too fast for meaning? That’s the argument put together by Franco Berardi in his essay Time, Acceleration, and Violence, published on e-flux. It’s the latest in an expanding body of “are we moving too fast for…?” thinking, with meaning-as-victim following truth-as-victim (Zygmunt Bauman), character-as-victim (Richard Sennett), and promiscuity-as-victim (Miquel Brown). But does it make any sense? From what I understand, Berardi’s argument is that among the many ills caused by capitalism’s constant acceleration is an “inflation of meaning.” The increased production of symbols – aided, one assumes, by greater productivity among symbol-creators – has had roughly the… ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:29:59 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/09/29/meaningtime-e-flux-on-coked-out-motherless-robots/ How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"? http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning. Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities.… ]]> Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:23:48 -0700 http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"? http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code." However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning. Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities.… ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:26:12 -0700 http://henryjenkins.org/2011/09/how_can_we_understand_code_as.html Humanism / After Humanism http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to consider the relation of displacement and humanism—a cultural ideal on the one hand, a social fact on the other. The two seem to have nothing in common. Yet I want to argue that they do; at the dawn of the modern era, a person’s capacity to manage and master displacement formed part of the humanist project, and, I argue, it continues to do so today, but on very different… ]]> Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:30:24 -0700 http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php Secularism and Its Discontents http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:57:04 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all Michel Serres, The Natural Contract http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8687570754 “Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take place. There can’t be an argument between two people if one speaks a language the other can’t understand. […] Can an individual actor, lost in these gigantic masses, still say ‘I’ when the old collectivities, themselves so lightweight, have already been reduced to uttering a paltry and outmoded ‘we’?”

- Michel Serres, The Natural Contract ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 05:36:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8687570754 The Pathology of Collecting http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European Artistic Research Debate http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when their circulation is grounded on an imprecision inherent in language. The connotative meaning of a word, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, can diverge greatly from what are often contradictory origins, allowing ideology to reify itself on a lexical level. Let’s examine the word science itself. It derives both from the Latin, scientia, “to know”—but also from the Greek, scienzia, “to split, rend or cleave.” That art… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:13:52 -0700 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 A Medium for the Masses http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact. As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.” Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together,… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:25:06 -0700 http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF) http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif

In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing.

To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a… ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 05:21:34 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/the-doctrine-of-the-similar-gif-gif-gif Japanese people need our solidarity, not a blame game http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback.

The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards life that has served Japan well in the post-Hiroshima era. It makes a powerful point, which is that looking for someone or something to blame is often a time-consuming exercise that rarely has positive outcomes. Whereas nothing can be done about an unfortunate event that has already occurred, we can mobilise our creative powers to fix problems that stare us in the face. History shows that… ]]> Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:48:19 -0700 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ What concepts do not exist in the English language? http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going."

In an essay by Louise Edrich (Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart), she writes about learning Ojibwemownin and how "nouns are mainly desginated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate...once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting iteslf in my… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:17:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/10490/What-concepts-do-not-exist-in-the-English-language An Amoral Manifesto (Part I) http://www.philosophynow.org/issue80/80marks.htm Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column?

Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my computer writing this column is April 1st, let me assure you that I do not intend this as a joke. For the last couple of years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether! This has certainly come as a shock to me… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:12:00 -0700 http://www.philosophynow.org/issue80/80marks.htm Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists… ]]> Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:08:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg20727741.200-biosemiotics-searching-for-meanings-in-a-meadow.html Manuel De Landa. Theory of Language. 2009 1/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr11PhgyOOk&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:35:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr11PhgyOOk&feature=youtube_gdata Should This Be the Last Generation? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.… ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ The Opposition Paradigm (Together Again for the First Time) http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/the-opposition-paradigm-together-again-for-the-first-time.html

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

Clegg, Cameron, Brown : Brown's Last Prime Minister's Questions

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye…

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