Hard News: A thing that rarely ends well
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I've only really encountered both of them through my computer screen, and frankly I always find it a little hard to tell.
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As someone who almost became a librarian (at the General Assembly Library), back in those dark old pre-computer days, I wonder if we really need them any more. At the uni, we used to have department secretaries--now that virtually all academics do their own word-processing, design etc, such wonderful people have to be found other roles. We have an excellent university library but I rarely ever go near it, other than to scan the new books/journals displays. Like most of my colleagues, I do all my own searching online or via data-bases and my only real contact with flesh-and-blood librarians usually involves arguments over overdue fines! Some uni libraries (Otago, for instance) are beginning to acknowledge that libraries can be social spaces, and not just hushed tombs.
Media Studies is taking the lead from librarians, in introducing students to the notion that all web content is not of equal value--that it needs to be selected, filtered and evaluated..But, as RB might say, these are fightin' words!
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Which actually makes librarians work much more interesting and probably valuable too.
I suspect we have a few librarian lurkers here. Wanna come out and play folks?
And I know regular PA commenter Pete Darlington once practiced the dark arts of the bookshelf. I gather the new info-storage architecture in his house is a thing to behold ...
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I mean has he actually tried to do what his thought experiment suggests would be a piece of piss?
Well, the point of thought experiments is that you don't do them physically, but think about their logical implications. There's no point in actually putting a cat in a box actually. All you get is an angry cat. And a very dangerous angry cat if it's Greebo.
Thought experiments are useful in generating testable hypotheses and in the end, observation trumps hypothesis.
Still, Searle may be stacking his deck, but biologists, neurologists in particular, seem to be genuiely baffled as to why the brain bothers spending its huge metabolic budget on consciousness. It certainly interests me and I wonder if our big brains and minds are a sort of evolutionary equivalent of Tulipmania.
It may seem that way to a human but it sure doesn't to an engineer.
Um, you might want to consider the implications of that sentence.
I take your point however, because
it's the low level stuff that he/she does display, like picking up which object in a sentence you are talking about from context.
I have a feeling that we'll find out what conbsciousness is by digging into the squishy stuff rather than ontological discussions with AIs... and then I wonder if there would be crises in hospitals because the signs for the oncology departments are misspelled and patients are admitted with ontological problems and suffer acute existence failures. Then I have a shot of Scotch and things are much better.
The idea in the mind is perhaps not exactly the same thing as any word or set of them
And thus were launched the careers of a thousand poststructuralists.
Beware the Derrida gang.
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I wonder if we really need them any more.
As any Pratchett fan knows, Librarians Rule OOK.
Dealing with librarians as a course co-ordinator (back when I had a full-time job), I had to arrange seminars for the librarians to explain laboriously to the godda- I mean sweet and fluffy undergrads the use of databases and search engines and so forth.
Their job has certainly expanded in the internet age rather than been made redundant. There's a vast academic Web (after all, that's what the WWW was intended for) accessible only through subscription and they spend a lot of their time managing that for university use - Is it worth investing in this e-journal subscription? Are people using it? How does the budget stretch? What about rights? Etc etc.
Then there's the reading and literacy programmes for young people and so on and so on. Really, it's a complex information resource management job and there's far more to it than just shelving!
I'd never piss off a librarian. Especially not a hairy orange one.
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As someone who almost became a librarian (at the General Assembly Library), back in those dark old pre-computer days, I wonder if we really need them any more.
As a non-academic, having entered the trade of scribing straight from school, I have a particular perspective on libraries and archives.
On one hand, I'm inspired by the systematic storing of things. I really liked being walked through the NZ books conservation room at the Turnbull -- there are something like 10,000 pamphlets there, many of them part of the original Turnbull bequest. All full of ideas. How cool.
On the other, I despair of the silo mentality -- it's all about who gets the funding -- and what comes down to a lack of enterprise in the library and archive sector. I take the replication of knowledge as a given, and I look at stuff and think of cool things you could do with it. But I recently heard someone say "enterprising" like it was a bad word.
I really admire what the Humanities Research Network has done in getting New Zealand Creative Commons licenses up and running. But it needs marketing. If you go to Dave Dobbyn and ask him for just one song on a CC licence, I bet he'll do it.
Small brag: I'm on the board of nzonscreen, a screen culture archive and website (I'm trying not say "portal") that will launch later in the year. All the content we produce to go around the steamed archive works -- production info, interviews, essays -- will be available under a CC licence.
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Some uni libraries (Otago, for instance) are beginning to acknowledge that libraries can be social spaces, and not just hushed tombs.
Ugh. The number of students down here who complain about people who start up 20 minute conversations in study spaces about their weekend and how much they hate exams, at full outside volume. There's a whole student union tacked onto the side of the library... seriously.
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Points taken...but I still prefer a library where there is movement, conversation...even the aroma of coffee in the air. Maybe my attitudes were coloured by early exposure to stereotypical librarians. I still remember the chief librarian at the GA Library, who used to stand by the exit doors and glower at anyone who dared to take books out!
I agree that librarians are great at acquiring and sorting print materials (including so-called ephemera at the Turnbull) but I reckon they know diddly-squat about organising CDs/DVDs/computer games. They seem to have no clues about fan groupings or genres, and all should be taken on a compulsory tour of Real Groovy. Wellington PL may well be the sole exception.
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I'm hoping all this will blow up in Nationals collective face and I'm sure it will, (People who live in glass houses etc.)
Um... and how about the old saw about Caesar's wife having to be beyond reproach, Steve? I can't really get the outrage gland pumping over this -- too much rich food and good company while Wellywood was beyond fabulous -- but I must admit that I've loved watching Labour have its own "rich prick" donors and senior moments put under the spotlight.
Perhaps that makes me a terrible person, but I really can't give the proverbial two-penny toss.
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Kracklite, there's a place for thought experiments. I don't think this is an example of it. Searle just comes across to me as naive, as someone who doesn't get that people really were working on this stuff and understanding it, rather than insisting it couldn't be done because of thought experiments that are highly disputable.
My take on consciousness is pretty simple. It's not scientific. You could be not conscious, and no-one else would know. Your conscious may go to heaven when you die - only you will ever know. You could be the only conscious in a world of meat machines. You could even not be conscious and just think you are.
Thought and communication are another matter. They are an evolutionary explosion.
> It may seem that way to a human but it sure doesn't to an engineer.
Um, you might want to consider the implications of that sentence.
I did, it's an engineer's joke.
And the squishy side is very, very important, I totally agree. I don't know that we could say it's the most important thing, but it's probably the least well understood, and yet a huge part of what makes us human. But 'higher reason' by which I pretty much subscribe to Chomsky's take on it being nearly synonymous with recursive language use, is what separates us from other animals, and so it is also a huge part of our humanity.
I think it's pretty much a continuum - that reason and intuition are tightly bound together, and intelligence spills over boundaries that are not defined by our skins. Without all the resources of my office I'm nowhere near as intelligent in any productive sense. The notes I've written, the code I've cut, that's all part of what I consider my mind. Even the posts I've made on this blog are my mind, hopefully a shared part.
That does not mean I'm post-anything. I'm still scientist who believes in progress, and wants to be part of it, rather than giving up on it, or turning it back even. That I think most thought is quite possibly undefinable in a practical sense and thus perfect communication is impossible does not mean that I think communicating and thinking are a waste of time, or just an animal expression of prejudice. More accurate would be to say our minds are a fantastically complicated universe and understanding them fully is about as elusive as a general field theory is to physicists - something they know how to get, but also know they won't get for a very, very long time, if ever.
If I have to wear the label of modernist and incur the wrath of hundreds of thousands of angry post-whatnots in language I can't understand, so be it.
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This particular conversation is all over the shop,so I guess it is ok to introduce a new topic--or more correctly, go back to an earlier topic. I notice that Duncan Fallowell (our Favourite Tourist) is whinging on in the latest New Statesman (Feb 18) about his treatment by some much-offended Kiwis viz, " I was a snotty Brit whose one purpose in life was to insult them. The result was a tidal wave of Kiwi hate. One morning I went to open the webmail as usual and there they were, pages of curses and four-letter words shimmering in shocking pink, lime green, malevolent black. This has never happened to me before"
Poor dear! I would though that the newspaper coverage, and the particularly silly Listener cover story, would have shifted a few copies of his crappy book.
(Why 'malevolent black'? Is that worse than 'lime green'?) -
He's really milking it, isn't he?
I think we need a visitor like him once in a while to remind us why our ancestors left England in the first place.
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We can be pretty sure he's a member of the Libertarianz party. Or at least a devotee.
And that he posts on this blog under a pseudonym.
Oh yeah, forgot about that. Sprung!
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I reckon they know diddly-squat about organising CDs/DVDs/computer games.
It should be noted (as a former public library worker) that it is almost impossible to keep any of those things in any kind of order that makes sense, since they are so heavily browsed and/or stolen. (I am never leaving academic libraries again, by the way.)
Their job has certainly expanded in the internet age rather than been made redundant. There's a vast academic Web (after all, that's what the WWW was intended for) accessible only through subscription and they spend a lot of their time managing that for university use - Is it worth investing in this e-journal subscription? Are people using it? How does the budget stretch? What about rights? Etc etc.
Yes. This deserves repeating any time anyone implies that librarians are redundant. There is a *lot* of shit to do behind the scenes - the assessment and accessibility of vast swathes of information is the whole point of academic or governmental librarianship nowadays.
(I do, however, find libraries insanely hierarchical and the bunker mentality Russell refers to is often off-putting.)
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he just uses Andrew Llewellyn when he's dressed up like a human?
That'd only work if Andrew Llewellyn looked like a human.
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merc,
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/20/library-starts-to-in.html#comments
Brilliant quote in comments,Just because someone's wrong on the internet, it doesn't mean I have to do something about it.
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I reckon they know diddly-squat about organising CDs/DVDs/computer games.
They do a lot better than any DVD/Video hire store I've been in. eg.
K: Do you have XXXX.
VS: (looks on computer) Yes we do, and it's in!
K: I've been looking for it and can't find it.
VS: Ah, try the new releases section, and if it's not there try the action section... oh, and it might be in kids. Of course, if someone has mis-shelved it, it could be anywhere. Just y'know. Look around for it, I'm sure you can find it.
K: Yup. Thanks for your help. -
Thank you Ben and Kracklite for a fascinating discussion (and intersting Wikipedia references). I am really enjoying it.
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'lime green'?
Can't resist: 'gan green' maybe? All the bilious shades from infradig to ultraviolent perhaps? (Tip o' the hat to the shade of Douglas Adams.)
Anyway...
Kracklite, there's a place for thought experiments. I don't think this is an example of it.
Well, maybe thought experiments are koans. Deconstruction of their premises is productive and that can be their utility too. Knowledge is ultimately advanced and so on. Thought experiments aren't blueprints for actual experiments, but if there is a critical divergence between a thought experiment and the physical world, then something's awry with the thought experiment - fair enough.
Chomsky's take on it being nearly synonymous with recursive language use, is what separates us from other animals, and so it is also a huge part of our humanity.
I heard a Kim Hill interview before Xmas with someone who I'd describe as a fundamentalist anthropocentric behaviourist. His thesis was that animals 'don't think' and his response to any counter argument was to drawl 'Nonsense!' in his awful mid-Atlantic accent, without following up that assertion. What frustrated me was that he didn't define 'thinking' but implied that it was formal symbolic reasonic with grammar.
This seems to me a thoroughly ignorant position as it's becoming increasingly clear that consciousness has many modes and phases.
I think it's pretty much a continuum - that reason and intuition are tightly bound together, and intelligence spills over boundaries that are not defined by our skins.
That would be pretty much my position too.
That I think most thought is quite possibly undefinable in a practical sense and thus perfect communication is impossible does not mean that I think communicating and thinking are a waste of time
Alas, many postmodernists let their enthusiasm get the better of them in the 80s 'Science Wars'. I watched a documentary on Derrida a couple of years back, made by a very earnest American and the voice over was like a prayer. Derrida himself was a joker, running rings around his interviewer without them even knowing it. French philosophy in my opinion still bears the imprint of the Enlightenment salons hosted by the likes of Madame Pompadour where debate was a stand-up performance and eloquent hyperbole and wit were essential. Americans, basing their learnings on texts, tend to miss the point. Indeed, Sylvere Lotringer, publisher of the periodical Semiotext(e) in the States, complained at a lecture on a visit here that they misinterpreted Baudrillard (as did the Warchowski brothers).
So,
If I have to wear the label of modernist and incur the wrath of hundreds of thousands of angry post-whatnots in language I can't understand, so be it.
In fact what you're saying is quite congruent with what a lot of postmodernists have been saying (which is what I suggested above with the 'thus were launched...'). Donna Haraway's writing in particular, though you may find it hyperbolic, and the architect Daniel Libeskind's 1987 Venice Biennale installation, 'Three Lessons in Architecture' expressed the intermingling of thought and mechanism by reference to Mediaeval and Renaissance memory theatres.
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Libertarianz
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian is indistinguishable from an asshole.
(I cannot claim it, but I cannot resist passing it along. It seems to true of most persuasions really, but especially so if the inhabitants of (tax-free) Liberteria).
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I am really enjoying it.
You're welcome. I'm enjoying it too, especially hearing a real engineer confronting theory.
Odd thread in which to have the conversation tho'
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Any sufficiently advanced libertarian is indistinguishable from an asshole.
No argument there...
As a corollary to Clarke's third law, Gregory Benford proposed that technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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I was gonna cite Conan the Librarian... but maybe it should be Conan the Libertarian.
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In fact what you're saying is quite congruent with what a lot of postmodernists have been saying (which is what I suggested above with the 'thus were launched...').
I know. I only pretend to dislike postmodernists.They have some interesting points. My main problem is that it's a whole lot of effort to get to the points. It seems to be a consequence of insisting on witty poetic writing, which is nice to appreciate from an artistic point of view but it can get in the way of communicating ideas. Anglo-american styles of philosophy are much more about communicating in a very systematic and step-by-step way. I get the impression that postmodernists are not really about the individual points, but seem to be trying to convince you of an entire world view with every sentence. Which makes them seem like idealistic middle management consultants getting in the way of people who really are diligently getting on with a complicated project. Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe they are making real progress.
What frustrated me was that he didn't define 'thinking' but implied that it was formal symbolic reasoning with grammar.
Yes, I always find that one annoying having spent years and years actually doing formal symbolic reasoning with grammar and seeing what a small part it really is of intelligent behaviour, and furthermore how few really intelligent people can actually do it properly. Expert systems and other AI inventions had the reasoning and grammar parts down pat years and years ago, but would you trust one to advise you on, say, your health? I wouldn't. The knowledge itself is the hard-won part, and how we come by it, advance it, and use it, is way more than a simple matter of logic.
Odd thread in which to have the conversation tho'
Yes, I don't know how we got on to this! Looking back it all came about from trying to work out if Key is a robot. Pretty tenuous.
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http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/20/library-starts-to-in.html#comments
Brilliant quote in comments
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