Generosity

This is another spark thrown off by Larval Subjects’ meme post (see previous post for link).

Some time ago another blog colleague posted on a now-deleted blog about the generosity of famous intellectuals. He has found them to be gracious, open and helpful, even early in his career when his status was low. I’ve been mulling this. I can’t say my own experience in this respect has been entirely consistent – this colleague is himself becoming noted for selective graciousness – but in general I can confirm that many of the bigshots I’ve run across are actually pretty cuddly.

Well, sometimes that old guy wants to give you candy because he’s just super nice, and sometimes it’s because he’s got some more back at his house plus other things he’d like to show you. Levi’s argument about memes is that their top priority is to reproduce themselves, and they’re looking for whatever ways to do that they can find. What makes intellectuals famous is that they are the source or vectors of memes. They are accordingly on the make, the more so the more successful they are (or want to be).

The generosity of famous intellectuals is no different than the generosity of the old guy with candy or that fellow who winks and buys you a drink from across the bar. If he looks good to you, go right ahead. But it’s not generosity yet until you turn down the bedroom proposal and he still wants to talk to you. It’s how you treat people who aren’t means to your ends that counts.

You’ve got a nasty case of the memes there, I’m afraid.

At Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has just posted a ripping analysis of how memes (cultural units like hairstyles, songs and theories) work, starting with their basic aim to replicate themselves and then focusing on their development of defensive ‘immune systems’ to further that aim.

You kids stay off my lawn!

The target exemplar of memic self-defense in Levi’s post is ‘anti-realism’, roughly, the philosophical tradition holding that things only become real (to us) through our access to them in thought. His analysis of its characteristic defense strategies and their contextual elaboration through the work of trial and error is terrific. I’ve pulled Levi’s leg in the comments by turning the analysis back on his own ‘realist’, ‘object-oriented’ philosophy, reversal being another classic defense strategy that only works in this case if he has correctly identified a universal dynamic. As you know, Bob, claims made about geese apply to both gooses and ganders, which is also a good way to test them.

I know there's an argument around here somewhere.

Before he gets to anti-realism, though, Levi illustrates the principles of memic self-defense by reference to religion, which sent me off on another thought. The afterlife thesis in various religions starts as a faith defense against the inconvenient but otherwise ordinary and irrefutable fact of death and our inability to see past its threshold. This fact need not bother us at all, of course – we could take life and death as they come and make the best of them. It strikes me that our access to the world only through our perceptions is another of these inconvenient but otherwise ordinary and irrefutable facts. Isn’t, then, a philosophical assertion of objects sealed from perception the same sort of defense against inconvenient facts that religious afterlives are? Couldn’t we just take our perceptions and thoughts as they come and make the best of them?

Be sure to get the sasquatch catcher for the front of your car.

Interaction density

Remember the thing from high school physics where molecules move faster and get hotter when they are compacted into greater densities of interaction? Basic principle of my car’s diesel engine, for example: the piston compresses the air/fuel mixture until it gets hot enough to ignite, explosively expands, drives the piston outward which rotates the crankshaft, yadayada.

People work like that too. At least I do. I’ve been really slow this summer. Lots of alone time and very low interaction density. Plenty of time to do all the things I don’t think I have time to do in other parts of the year, but not enough pressure and interaction density to get me energized and moving. Just a molecule wandering around the big ether.

As the video shows it’s not the density per se that energizes the system – actually molecules bouncing off each other dissipate each other’s energy – but the process of confined compression. Too much and there may be an explosion, or just a lot of dissipative jostling. Not enough and there’s the aimless wandering.

There are all sorts of problems with this analogy, but you get the idea. It’s like Kant’s remark about the swallow imagining how much faster it could fly without the air holding it back. I’d like to think that less pressure would be good, but really it’s not.

That’s what she said

According to a press release by the Optimum Population Trust for a recent conference of population and climate scientists in London, it turns out that population growth is caused by sex. Perhaps this is not an entirely new insight.

Haha, it’s funny because they’re self-defeating and don’t know it. Anyway, the OPT’s point is that large families in developing nations need not be explained, as would be the case according to a kind of market fundamentalism, by intentional economic rationality. Large families happen quite naturally when folks have a lot of sex without contraception. “Having a large rather than a small family is less of a planned decision than an automatic outcome of human sexuality,” Prof. Guillebaud of University College London says. “For a fertile couple, nothing is easier.” Right, sort of like with bunnies and cows and voles and drunken teenagers.

Getting square on this seemingly simple question is of some importance if it’s the case that there are real limits to the numbers of humans the planet can sustainably carry. The good folks at OPT, like our Protestant exemplars in the video, note that contraception is a good thing to “separate sex from conception,” and they find that people will actively choose contraception if it’s available. But they also stay true to the original insight that rational choice is not likely to be the solution to all problems by observing that contraceptives for which the “default state” (what happens when you botch it) is failure are likely to disappoint in real human use. The Pill and condoms, not so good; implants and IUDs, much better.

Of course there’s always the worry that this is just another way to recolonially meddle in the affairs of the world’s downtrodden peoples. Let’s see implants in our own sons and daughters before we go tsk-tsking about all the little brown babies. But from this perspective you’ve got to admire the profound wisdom and sacrifice of the Pythons’ Protestant couple, who have gotten themselves into such a tangled Gordian twist about sex it’s a miracle they managed to produce two little carbon-emitters at all.

Thanks to Improbable Research for this notice.