Toluu : The Institute of Illogical Operation

It would be a cliche to repeat the argument that, “Information wants to be free.” Instead, let’s analyze the concept of information. Is it born free, but everywhere in chains? No, it is produced by instruments and machines, recorded from every possible surface. But as soon as it is produced, it is put to work.

What does it mean to put information to work? Information is put to work in computer models so that it might be used to predict events. The ability to predict is central to the concept of security. Analysis of information then becomes the production of security. The worldview of security, or making-predictable, recognizes that the movement of life, resources, and information is chaotic, yet it seeks to anticipate the movement of the noise by analyzing noise and patterns in a joint effort to win wars and make profits.

However, there is only so much value one can place on predictive models, and eventually, information bubbles burst.

There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.

This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study on fruit flies involved placing them on hooks with wires tying them down in a white environment devoid of resources. It turns out that their behavior formed a pattern. specifically, a Lévy distribution. If anyone out there can explain the math on this, that would be great because I’m definitely lacking in that area.

What I don’t understand is that how that implies free will. The scientists quoted in the article seem to be saying that the flies exhibited spontaneous behavior, but how does that jive with being a Lévy distribution?

Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy’s distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals, as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in the flow of e-mails, letters and money, and in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brembs said.

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Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would you try to find books or articles by those influenced by the intellectual, to see if his or her legacy produced any useful concepts?

Suppose instead that you had already made up your mind that the intellectual is an impostor, and you just wanted to demonstrate that he or she had nothing important to say. Would you quote a difficult passage out of context? Would you find a short, jargon-laden passage and then leave it up to the reader to make sense of it? Well you could, but that would be intellectually lazy and disingenuous.

That’s exactly what Richard Dawkins did in this ten year old review of Fashionable Nonsense, a book that supposedly “outed” French intellectuals for abusing scientific terminology. You can think of Dawkins’ review as a condensed version of the book. In it he focuses on Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze,

Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would you try to find books or articles by those influenced by the intellectual, to see if his or her legacy produced any useful concepts?

Suppose instead that you had already made up your mind that the intellectual is an impostor, and you just wanted to demonstrate that he or she had nothing important to say. Would you quote a difficult passage out of context? Would you find a short, jargon-laden passage and then leave it up to the reader to make sense of it? Well you could, but that would be intellectually lazy and disingenuous.

That’s exactly what Richard Dawkins did in this ten year old review of Fashionable Nonsense, a book that supposedly “outed” French intellectuals for abusing scientific terminology. You can think of Dawkins’ review as a condensed version of the book. In it he focuses on Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze,

Toluu

The Institute of Illogical Operation

Dedicated to the Pursuit of Operational Illogic.