Quasioptimal

Optimization is perhaps the most useful single word for understanding the conflicting pressures on society.

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Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell

[S]o much of the specific neurological injury that arises from getting an economics degree is organized around never asking the question: Optimal for whom?

— Cory Doctorow

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

— Father John Culkin, glossing McLuhan

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

— G. K. Chesterton

Above all, there is no strict distinction between means and ends.

— James C. Scott

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

— John von Neumann, reportedly

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting man's wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth.

— Marshall McLuhan

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

— Marshall McLuhan

In citing [etymological] evidence, we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism. Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

— Martin Heidegger

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

— Max Frisch

Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind's relationship with the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.

— Meghan O'Gieblyn

Uncategorized

Heidegger - 1927 - Being and Time

Heidegger, with his fine scalpel work, deft fingers, and the occasional hammerblow, executes a daring reconstructive surgery on the deepest structures of thought, language, and being for the willing and patient subject (some would say unwary victim). You don't read Heidegger so much as yield to him, and in so yielding you're thrown back to the world you never realized you were always already in. Heidegger's world, which is to say our world (and which is to say further not the crystalline, arranged, static worlds of philosophers like Plato, Descartes, and even Kant), is a tangled web of references, objects ready-to-hand, actions to be engaged in, decisions to be made, moods to be thrown into. It is a relational world in every sense, and only secondarily through thinking, speaking, and tarrying alongside things a world of arrays of objects standing side-by-side in space. Heidegger's work is barely philosophy, if philosophy to you is made up of arguments and propositions. Arguing with Heidegger is as foolish as arguing with a piece of music: it's operating on a different level, a more mythical and mysterious one. When the theme calls out to you, you either hear it in your soul, or you don't.

Lakoff & Johnson - 1980 - Metaphors We Live By

Essential reading on the centrality of metaphor to language, cognition, and experience. The book is overflowing with wonderful examples of metaphor in speech (a container, alas!) and provides a suggestive bridge between human embodiment and language.

McGilchrist - 2009 - The Master and His Emissary

McGilchrist's admirable and searching attempt to explain the macrotrends in Western intellectual history and the malaise of modernity through the lens of neuroscience and in particular through hemispheric asymmetry. The ambition of the work, not to mention its compelling execution, is worthy of the highest praise.

Scott - 1998 - Seeing Like a State

Scott's classic analysis of the intellectual structure of Utopian High Modernism and its (sometimes disasterous) consequences when yoked to the apparatus of a state bent on transforming its subjects into legible units for efficient governance from outside and above.