21 | December | 2014

Eclipse of Reason

I’m starting to read Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason. I have had high hopes for it and have not been disappointed.

The distinction Horkheimer draws in the first section, “Means and Ends”, is between subjective reason and objective reason.

Subjective reason is the kind of reasoning that is used to most efficiently achieve ones goals, whatever they are. Writing even as early as 1947, Horkheimer notes that subjective reason has become formalized and reduced to the computation of technical probabilities. He is referring to the formalization of logic in the Anglophone tradition by Russell and Whitehead and its use in early computer science, most likely. (See Imre Lakatos and programming as dialectic for more background on this, as well as resonant material on where this is going)

Objective reason is, within a simple “means/ends” binary, most simply described as the reasoning of ends. I am not very far through the book and Horkheimer is so far unspecific about what this entails in practice but instead articulates it as an idea that has fallen out of use. He associates it with Platonic forms. With logos–a word that becomes especially charged for me around Christmas and whose religious connotations are certainly intertwined with the idea of objectivity. Since it is objective and not bound to a particular subject, the rationality of correct ends is the rationality of the whole world or universe, it’s proper ordering or harmony. Humanity’s understanding of it is not a technical accomplishment so much an achievement of revelation or wisdom achieved–and I think this is Horkheimer’s Hegelian/Marxist twist–dialectically.

Horkheimer in 1947 believes that subjective reason, and specifically its formalization, have undermined objective reason by exposing its mythological origins. While we have countless traditions still based in old ideologies that give us shared values and norms simply out of habit, they have been exposed as superstition. And so while our ability to achieve our goals has been amplified, our ability to have goals with intellectual integrity has hollowed out. This is a crisis.

One reason this is a crisis is because (to paraphrase) the functions once performed by objectivity or authoritarian religion or metaphysics are now taken on by the reifying apparatus of the market. This is a Marxist critique that is apropos today.

It is not hard to see that Horkheimer’s critique of “formalized subjective reason” extends to the wide use of computational statistics or “data science” in the vast ways it is now. Moreover, it’s easy to see how the “Internet of Things” and everything else instrumented–the Facebook user interface, this blog post, everything else–participates in this reifying market apparatus. Every critique of the Internet and the data economy from the past five years has just been a reiteration of Horkheimer, whose warning came loud and clear in the 40’s.

Moreover, the anxieties of the “apocalyptic libertarians” of Sam Franks article, the Less Wrong theorists of friendly and unfriendly Artificial intelligence, are straight out of the old books of the Frankfurt School. Ironically, todays “rationalists” have no awareness of the broader history of rationality. Rather, their version of rationality begins with Von Neummann, and ends with two kinds of rationality, “epistemic rationality”, about determining correct beliefs, and “instrumental rationality”, about correctly reaching ones ends. Both are formal and subjective, in Horkheimer’s analysis; they don’t even have a word for ‘objective reason’, it has so far fallen away from their awareness of what is intellectually possible.

But the consequence is that this same community lives in fear of the unfriendly AI–a superintelligence driven by a “utility function” so inhuman that it creates a dystopia. Unarmed with the tools of Marxist criticism, they are unable to see the present economic system as precisely that inhuman superintelligence, a monster bricolage of formally reasoning market apparati.

For Horkheimer the formalization and automation of reason is part of the problem. Having a computer think for you is very different from actually thinking. The latter is psychologically transformative in ways that the former is not. It is hard for me to tell whether Horkheimer would prefer things to go back the way they were, or if he thinks that we must resign ourselves to a bleak inhuman future, or what.

My own view is that a formalization of objective reason would allow us to achieve its conditions faster. You could say I’m a logos-accelerationist. However, if the way to achieve objective reason is dialectically, then this requires a mathematical formalization of dialectic. That’s shooting the moon.

This is not entirely unlike the goals and position of MIRI in a number of ways except that I think I’ve got some deep intellectual disagreements about their formulation of the problem.

December 21, 2014

Reflecting on “Technoscience and Expressionism” by @FractalOntology

I’ve come across Joseph Weissman’s (@FractalOntology) “Technoscience and Expressionism” and am grateful for it, as its filled me in on a philosophical position that I missed the first time around, accelerationism. I’m not a Deleuzian and prefer my analytic texts to plod, so I can’t say I understood all of the essay. On the other hand, I gather the angle of this kind of philosophizing is intentionally psychotherapeutic and hence serves and artistic/literary function rather than one that explicitly guides praxis.

I am curious about the essay because I would like to see a thorough analysis of the political possibilities for the 21st century that gets past 20th century tropes. The passions of journalistic and intellectual debate have an atavistic tendency due to a lack of imagination that I would like to avoid in my own life and work.

Accelerationism looks new. It was pronounced in a manifesto, which is a good start.

Here is a quote from it:

Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via voting, discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by its goal — collective self-mastery. This is a project which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of The Network.

Hell yeah, the Enlightenment! Sign me up!

The manifesto calls for an end to the left’s emphasis on local action, transparency, and direct democracy. Rather, it calls for a muscular hegemonic left that fully employs and deploys “technoscience”.

It is good to be able to name this political tendency and distinguish it from other left tendencies. It is also good to distinguish it from “right accelerationism”, which Weissman identifies with billionaires who want to create exurb communities.

A left-accelerationist impulse is today playing out dramatically against a right-accelerationist one. And the right-accelerationists are about as dangerous as you may imagine. With silicon valley VCs, and libertarian technologists more generally reading Nick Land on geopolitical fragmentation, the reception or at least receptivity to hard-right accelerants seems problematically open (and the recent $2M campaign proposing the segmentation of California into six microstates seems to provide some evidence for this.) Billionaires consuming hard-right accelerationist materials arguing for hyper-secessionism undoubtedly amounts to a critically dangerous situation. I suspect that the right-accelerationist materials, perspectives, affect, energy expresses a similar shadow, if it is not partly what is catalyzing the resurgence of micro-fascisms elsewhere (and macro ones as well — perhaps most significant to my mind here is the overlap of right-acceleration with white nationalism, and more generally what is deplorably and disingenuously called “race realism” — and is of course simply racism; consider Marine le Pen’s fascist front, which recently won 25% of the seats in the French parliament, UKIP’s resurgence in Great Britain; while we may not hear accelerationist allegiances and watchwords explicitly, the political implications and continuity is at the very least somewhat unsettling…)

There is an unfortunate conflation of several different points of view here. It is too easy to associate racism, wealth, and libertarianism as these are the nightmares of the left’s political imagination. If ideological writing is therapeutic, a way of articulating ones dreams, then this is entirely appropriate with a caveat. The caveat being that every nightmare is a creation of ones own psychology more so than a reflection of the real world.

The same elisions are made by Sam Frank in his recent article thematizing Silicon Valley libertarianism, friendly artificial intelligence research, and contemporary rationalism as a self-help technique. There are interesting organizational ties between these institutions that are validly worth investigating but it would be lazy to collapse vast swathes of the intellectual spectrum into binaries.

In March 2013 I wrote about the Bay Area Rationalists:

There is a good story here, somewhere. If I were a journalist, I would get in on this and publish something about it, just because there is such a great opportunity for sensationalist exploitation.

I would like to say “I called it”–Sam Frank has recently written just such a sensationalist, exploitative piece in Harper’s Magazine. It is thoroughly enjoyable and I wouldn’t say it’s inaccurate. But I don’t think this is the best way to get to know these people. A better one is to attend a CFAR workshop. It used to be that you could avoid the fee with a promise to volunteer, but that there was a money-back guarantee which extended to ones promise to volunteer. If that’s still the case, then one can essentially attend for free.

Another way to engage this community intellectually, which I would encourage the left accelerationists to do because it’s interesting, is to start participating on LessWrong. For some reason this community is not subject to ideological raids like so many other community platforms. I think it could stand for an influx of Deleuze.

Ultimately the left/right divide comes down to a question of distribution of resources and/or surplus. Left accelerationist tactics appear from here to be a more viable way of seizing resources than direct democracy. However, the question is whether accelerationist tactics inevitably result in inequalities that create control structures of the kind originally objected to. In other words, this may simply be politics as usual and nothing radical at all.

So there’s an intersection between these considerations (accelerationist vs. … decelerationism? Capital accumulation vs. capital redistribution?) and the question of decentralization of decision-making process (is that the managerialism vs. multistakeholderism divide?) whose logic is unclear to me. I want to know which affinities are necessary and which are merely contingent.

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December 21, 2014

Imre Lakatos and programming as dialectic

My dissertation is about the role of software in scholarly communication. Specifically, I’m interested in the way software code is itself a kind of scholarly communication, and how the informal communications around software production represent and constitute communities of scientists. I see science as a cognitive task accomplished by the sociotechnical system of science, including both scientists and their infrastructure. Looking particularly at scientist’s use of communications infrastructure such as email, issue trackers, and version control, I hope to study the mechanisms of the scientific process much like a neuroscientist studies the mechanisms of the mind by studying neural architecture and brainwave activity.

To get a grip on this problem I’ve been building BigBang, a tool for collecting data from open source projects and readying it for scientific analysis.

I have also been reading background literature to give my dissertation work theoretical heft and to procrastinate from coding. This is why I have been reading Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations (1976).

Proofs and Refutations is a brilliantly written book about the history of mathematical proof. In particular, it is an analysis of informal mathematics through an investigation of the letters written by mathematicians working on proofs about the Euler characteristic of polyhedra in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Whereas in the early 20th century, based on the work of Russel and Whitehead and others, formal logic was axiomatized, prior to this mathematical argumentation had less formal grounding. As a result, mathematicians would argue not just substantively about the theorem they were trying to prove or disprove, but also about what constitutes a proof, a conjecture, or a theorem in the first place. Lakatos demonstrates this by condensing 200+ years of scholarly communication into a fictional, impassioned classroom dialog where characters representing mathematicians throughout history banter about polyhedra and proof techniques.

What’s fascinating is how convincingly Lakatos presents the progress of mathematical understanding as an example of dialectical logic. Though he doesn’t use the word “dialectical” as far as I’m aware, he tells the story of the informal logic of pre-Russellian mathematics through dialog. But this dialog is designed to capture the timeless logic behind what’s been said before. It takes the reader through the thought process of mathematical discovery in abbreviated form.

I’ve had conversations with serious historians and ethnographers of science who would object strongly to the idea of a history of a scientific discipline reflecting a “timeless logic”. Historians are apt to think that nothing is timeless. I’m inclined to think that the objectivity of logic persists over time much the same way that it persists over space and between subjects, even illogical ones, hence its power. These are perhaps theological questions.

What I’d like to argue (but am not sure how) is that the process of informal mathematics presented by Lakatos is strikingly similar to that used by software engineers. The process of selecting a conjecture, then of writing a proof (which for Lakatos is a logical argument whether or not it is sound or valid), then having it critiqued with counterexamples, which may either be global (counter to the original conjecture) or local (counter to a lemma), then modifying the proof, then perhaps starting from scratch based on a new insight… all this reads uncannily like the process of debugging source code.

The argument for this correspondence is strengthened by later work in theory of computation and complexity theory. I learned this theory so long ago I forget who to attribute it to, but much of the foundational work in computer science was the establishment of a correspondence between classes of formal logic and classes of programming languages. So in a sense its uncontroversial within computer science to consider programs to be proofs.

As I write I am unsure whether I’m simply restating what’s obvious to computer scientists in an antiquated philosophical language (a danger I feel every time I read a book, lately) or if I’m capturing something that could be an interesting synthesis. But my point is this: that if programming language design and the construction of progressively more powerful software libraries is akin to the expanding of formal mathematical knowledge from axiomatic grounds, then the act of programming itself is much more like the informal mathematics of pre-Russellian mathematics. Specifically, in that it is unaxiomatic and proofs are in play without necessarily being sound. When we use a software system, we are depending necessarily on a system of imperfected proofs that we fix iteratively through discovered counterexamples (bugs).

Is it fair to say, then, that whereas the logic of software is formal, deductive logic, the logic of programming is dialectical logic?

Bear with me; let’s presume it is. That’s a foundational idea of my dissertation work. Proving or disproving it may or may not be out of scope of the dissertation itself, but it’s where it’s ultimately headed.

The question is whether it is possible to develop a formal understanding of dialectical logic through a scientific analysis of the software collaboration. (see a mathematical model of collective creativity). If this could be done, then we could then build better software or protocols to assist this dialectical process.