Phono Sapiens

Mathew Gasda, "Phono Sapiens"

My friend J, a computer programmer, once convinced his former roommate—also a programmer—to watch the Japanese art film Asako I & II, about a woman who falls in love with two identical-looking but different men. J’s roommate sat patiently through this intricate, two-hour meditation on identity before complaining that the film could have been much shorter: say, five to ten minutes. He could have saved even more time by reading a plot summary in bullet-point form. That would have been far more efficient.

This story, which J told me over lunch when I said I was writing this review, is also a parable. We are either J, the humanist programmer, or we are the ex-roommate, the rationalist who doesn’t see the point in J’s humanism—in his engagement with gradual, digressive, and lyrical unfoldings. The roommate just wanted information, conveyed in useful packets.

This split—and perhaps existential choice—between information and narrative animates the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s new book-length essay The Crisis of Narration. According to Han, narratives—formally constructed stories, rich with allusion and suggestion, open to interpretation by the community—are disappearing as Homo sapiens transforms into what he calls Phono sapiens.

Han’s prime example of a master narrator is Herodotus. The Greek historian could “forgo explanation,” trusting in the power of a few key images to convey history’s complexity and tragedy. His audience knew what it meant when a city was sacked, or a general sent into exile. Thus Herodotus’s storytelling made sense of the past and pointed to the future. Narrative, Han argues, brings together discrete moments of experience, both personal and collective, so that we feel that it’s all heading towards something, is for something. Stories can bind together families, tribes, and civilizations.

By contrast, Han looks around at the present and sees disintegration. People who grew up with phones—and even many older people who didn’t—can’t read a novel anymore, sit through a film without looking at their phones, sit through a TV show without pausing it to check their emails, finish an article online—in short, can’t really do anything without multitasking. There’s no moment of rapture in reading the first page of a book because the mind no longer expects to reach the end. The old tools of storytelling are obsolete; distraction supersedes even entertainment, let alone art. And because we can’t narrate our lives, “we can’t construct narratives connected to our own inner truth.” Truth simply falls out of the human vocabulary, replaced by big data: charts, memes, viral clips. Phono sapiens is “lost” in a “forest of information,” without passion or purpose.

He also lacks consolation. Whereas narratives have a “wondrous and mysterious” quality, there is something frantic about the data pouring out of our screens: charts and infographics, advertisements and commercials. Our information society lives in an “age of heightened mental tension”: constantly stimulated, constantly expecting surprise, constantly fragmented. Phono sapiens may become terrified of climate change, political extremism, or microplastics; he may compulsively bet on stocks and games; he may be addicted to dating apps; or all of the above. In any case, he is stuck in an information loop without the possibility of closure.

If we take Han’s argument seriously, and I think we should, its implications for our common life are very grave. A society structured around pure information, around data, will struggle to access the traditional meaning inscribed in acts such as marriage, child-rearing, community service, and churchgoing. All of these come to be perceived as inefficient or pointless. The same could be said of cooking dinner for friends, attending a sporting event without wagering on the outcome, or writing a thank-you note.

But, one may object, isn’t the world full of narratives? Don’t people turn to their phones in search of Instagram stories? Aren’t politicians always trying to construct a compelling “narrative”? Not so: “The more we talk about narration or narrative,” Han cautions us, “the more we’re alienated from it.” The stream of pseudo-narratives one finds on TikTok, Instagram, or X are replacement calories for a narrative-starved hive mind. Han calls this development “the inflation of narrative,” a term that applies to much of the media landscape. UFOs, pandemics, pop-star romances, global wars: All, in different ways, are discursive simulacra of the complex, allegorical, future-oriented, rich, and humanizing narratives that Han locates, however vaguely, in the past.

Han’s diagnosis is partly a spiritual one. Most contemporary people, he suggests, don’t experience the time between birth and death in a natural, primal way—especially if they no longer believe in stories of salvation, whether pagan or Christian. Instead they must anxiously distract themselves from death. According to Han, the busyness and noisiness of digital life and the internet is the eerie sound emitted by the narrative vacuum: a void that expresses itself “in a lack of meaning and orientation.”

Han finds the smartphone age overwhelming. So do I. And yet as powerful as Han’s brief book is, he is perhaps too pessimistic about our ability to regain our spiritual thirst. In my own work, writing and directing plays in New York City, I have found that narrative and the demand for narrative are still alive. A good dramatic scene, written and performed at just the right pitch of subtlety and pathos, may still speak for itself; there is indeed something “wondrous and mysterious” in those moments in which something small can stand for something big, something close to universal.

I’ve come to understand that theater, in our time, isn’t a genre of entertainment. It is, for me at least, a refuge and a place of consolation: a castle at the edge of the desert in the late empire of the human soul. What theater is for me, and philosophy is for Han, any number of things could be for any number of people: cinema, prayer, a long walk, a night in front of the fireplace, with the phone on airplane mode (or even, dare I say, off).

Homo sapiens has reason to hope, then, that Phono sapiens is just a very modern version of the Neanderthal: a competitor species that will not live to tell its own story.

Understanding Straub & Huillet

Deleuze, "What is a Creative Act?" Adventures in Space-Time

Robert Bresson - Blocks of Movement-Time linked by Hand Movements:

Did Bresson NEED hands?

Did Kurosawa Need Dostoevskian urgency?

HUMINT - An App for Crossing the Limits of Space - Time

Text

Excerpt:

I consider that having an idea, in any case, is not on the order of communication. This is the point I was aiming for. Everything we are talking about is irreducible to any communication. This is not a problem. What does it mean? Primarily, communication is the transmission and propagation of information. What is information? It is not very complicated, everyone knows what it is. Information is a set of imperatives, slogans, directions—order-words. When you are informed, you are told what you are supposed to believe. In other words, informing means circulating an order-word. Police declarations are appropriately called communiqués. Information is communicated to us, they tell us what we are supposed to be ready to, or have to, or be held to believe. And not even believe, but pretend like we believe. We are not asked to believe but to behave as if we did. That is information, communication. And outside these orders and their transmission, there is no information, no communication. This is the same thing as saying that information is exactly the system of control. It is obvious and it particularly concerns us all today. 

[...] 

Let's say that is what information is, the controlled system of the order-words used in a given society. What does the work of art have to do with it? Let's not talk about works of art, but let's at least say that there is counter-information. In Hitler's time, the Jews arriving from Germany who were the first to tell us about the concentration camps were performing counter-information. We must realize that counterinformation was never enough to do anything. No counter-information ever bothered Hitler. Except in one case. What case? This is what's important. Counter-information only becomes really effective when it is—and it is by nature—or becomes an act of resistance. An act of resistance is not information or counter-information. Counterinformation is only effective when it becomes an act of resistance.

What relationship is there between the work of art and communication? None at all. A work of art is not an instrument of communication. A work of art has nothing to do with communication. A work of art does not contain the least bit of information. In contrast, there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance. It has something to do with information and communication as an act of resistance. What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance when the men and women who resist neither have the time nor sometimes the culture necessary to have the slightest connection with art? I do not know. Malraux developed an admirable philosophical concept. He said something very simple about art. He said it was the only thing that resists death. Let's go back to the beginning:

What does someone who does philosophy do? They invent concepts. I think this is the start of an admirable philosophical concept. Think about it... what resists death? You only have to look at a statuette from three thousand years before the Common Era to see that Malraux's response is a pretty one. We could then say, not as well, from the point of view that concerns us, that art resists, even if it is not the only thing that resists. Whence the close relationship between an act of resistance and a work of art. Every act of resistance is not a work of art, even though, in a certain way, it is. Every work of art is not an act of resistance, and yet, in a certain way, it is.

[...]

What relationship is there between human struggle and a work of art? The closest and for me the most mysterious relationship of all. Exactly what Paul Klee meant when he said: "You know, the people are missing." The people are missing and at the same time, they are not missing. The people are missing means that the fundamental affinity between a work of art and a people that does not yet exist is not, will never be clear. There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist.

Building the PERTs

Bryan Counter reviews Byung-Chul Han's "The Crisis of Narration"

In response to the familiar platitude that everyone is distracted these days, Marina van Zuylen has argued that what we actually have is “disengaged engagement” in a “multitasking universe, where we are enthralled by a weird kind of disembodied focus.”[1] Our attention is monopolized by a constant influx of information, data, statistics, and as a result we seem distracted, but in reality we are hyper-focused. In other words, narrative gives way to storytelling, with the latter being aligned with information and commodity rather than relaxation and imagination. As Byung-Chul Han writes in The Crisis of Narration: “The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze”—that is, the ability to daydream or to be truly distracted (p. 1). This also means that we can no longer listen to one another. As we can no longer listen or distractedly read, we lose our capacity for wisdom, “and its place is taken by problem-solving techniques” (p. 10). Not for nothing is part of this book focused on digitalization, which, to a higher degree than information in general, “intensifies the atrophy of time” (p. 19).

Han begins this study by writing: “Everyone is talking about ‘narratives.’ Paradoxically, the inflation of narrative betrays a crisis of narration.” What he goes on to lament about this paradox is itself paradoxical: the crisis of narration is “a lack of meaning and orientation” in narrative, but this lack of meaning and orientation is a lack that ostensibly fills itself with various narrators and types of information (p. vii). There is never a lack of information! And yet, calling on a children’s book by Paul Maar, Han shows on the one hand how storytelling tends to reduce the world around us to mere information, and on the other hand how narratives come about when the world refuses that reduction.

The Crisis of Narration brings to mind other recent texts that diagnose our present moment with striking accuracy and urgency, such as Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Defense of Secrets (2021) and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), to give just a couple of examples. The modern touchstones of transparency, immediacy, and telling stories each leave so much left untouched, unsaid. As Han writes: “Narrative is a play of light and shadow, of the visible and invisible, of nearness and distance. Transparency destroys this dialectical tension, which forms the basis of every narrative” (p. 40). Writing and thinking in a style reminiscent of Martin Heidegger, Han has many other reference points throughout this slim book. Echoing the juxtaposition of eroticism and pornography by Roland Barthes, Han in one notable instance contends that information “is pornographic, because it has no cover. Eloquent narrative is only the cover, the veil that weaves itself around the things. Covering and veiling are essential to narrative. Pornography does not tell anything. It gets right down to it, whereas the eroticism of narrative indulges in incidental details” (p. 30). Information decides ahead of time how it should be interpreted, whereas narrative gives us the task (and enjoyment) of making sense ourselves.

The transition from narrative to storytelling is how the world becomes disenchanted, and this disenchantment proliferates. As our everyday lives are increasingly transformed by the media we consume and their methods of consumption, so are our works of art and ways of experiencing art. We can seemingly no longer speak of the quasi-Romantic conception of the artist or of the spectator: “A Netflix series is nothing like a piece of art that corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb” (p. 47). Our state of constant bombardment itself becomes the danger when so much of what we take in is low stakes, for profit, part of an entertainment machine.

In a brief later section called “Theory as Narrative,” Han justifies theory insofar as it “designs an order of things, setting them in relation to each other” rather than, like data, “merely disclos[ing] correlations between things” (p. 50). And perhaps this is Han’s intervention: to show that theorizing can help us to create a path, to prioritize the world around us, even if—and in fact precisely when—this means going against the grain. For if we do “live in a post-narrative time” despite the abundance of narrative-speak everywhere, it is for no other reason than that we have lost the plot (p. viii).

Notes:

[1] Marina van Zuylen, The Plenitude of Distraction (New York, 2017), p. 9.

Gravity and Light (Photons)

A Bridge too far?

Zizek, "Why Authoritarian Leaders Are Obscene", et al

Slavoj Zizek, "No Barbarism Without Poetry"

From Russia to Israel, mythical nonsense is being used to stoke sadistic impulses and justify indiscriminate lethal violence toward enemies. The collective abandonment of reason, and where it leads, is all too familiar - and yet remains all too appealing.

LJUBLJANA – When the basic pact that holds society together is crumbling, which appears to be happening worldwide, wild rumors and conspiracy theories proliferate. Even, or especially, when the message is obviously nonsensical, it can evoke deep-seated fears and prejudices.

A perfect example of this, which I have noted previously, occurred in late August 2023, when a priest known as “Father Anthony” ceremoniously doused holy water on a 26-foot-tall statue of Stalin in Russia’s Pskov region. Though the Church had suffered during the Stalin era, he explained, “thanks to this we have lots of new Russian martyrs and confessors to whom we now pray and are helping us in our Motherland’s resurgence.” This logic is just a step away from claiming that Jews should thank Hitler for creating the conditions that allowed for the State of Israel. If that sounds hyperbolic, or like a bad joke, consider that some Zionist extremists close to the Israeli government openly advocate exactly this position.

To understand the success of such perverted argumentation, we should first note that, in developed countries, unrest and revolts tend to explode when poverty has ebbed. The protests of the 1960s – from the soixante-huitards in France to the hippies and Yippies in the United States – unfolded during the golden age of the welfare state. When people are living well, they come to desire even more.

One must also account for the surplus enjoyment that social and moral perversion can bring. Consider the Islamic State’s recent attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, in which 144 people were killed. What some call a terrorist attack others call an act of armed resistance in response to the massive destruction wrought by the Russian military in Syria. But whatever the case, something notable happened after the attack: Russian security forces not only admitted to torturing the suspects whom they had arrested; they publicly displayed it.

“In a graphic video posted on Telegram,” writes Julia Davis of the Center for European Policy Analysis, “one of the detained had his ear cut off and was then forced to eat it by one of his interrogators.” No wonder some Israeli hardliners look to Russia as a model for dealing with arrested Hamas members.

Russian officials did it not just to deter potential future attackers, but also to give pleasure to fellow members of the tribe. “I never expected this from myself,” writes Margarita Simonyan, a Russian propagandist who heads the state-owned media outlet RT, “but when I see how they are brought into the court crooked, and even this ear, I feel extremely satisfied.” Nor is this phenomenon confined to Russia. In Tennessee, some lawmakers want to restore public hangings (from trees, no less) for those who receive the death penalty.

Where do such acts end? Why not just bring back the premodern practice of publicly torturing alleged criminals to death? More to the point, how can “normal” people be brought to the point where they would enjoy such sadistic spectacles?

The short answer is that it requires the unique power of some kind of mythic discourse, religion, or poetry. As the reluctant Nazi fellow-traveler Ernst Jünger explained, “Any power struggle is preceded by a verification of images and iconoclasm. This is why we need poets – they initiate the overthrow, even that of titans.”

One finds poetry playing an important role in Israel. On March 26, Haaretz ran a story explaining “how Israel’s army uses revenge poetry to boost morale.” An anthology published by the Israel Defense Forces includes poems that “express a desire for vengeance and paint the combat in Gaza as a religious war.” In an October 13 announcement soliciting submissions, the IDF invited potential contributors “to embark on a poetic journey and reignite the great Israeli spirit,” so as to “raise the spirit in wartime.”

Apparently, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s references to Amalek (the Jews’ biblical enemy in the Torah) after October 7 were not enough. They needed to be supplemented by modern verse. Or perhaps Netanyahu’s biblical reference conveyed more than he wanted to say. After all, according to the Old Testament, when the wandering Jews reached the hills above the valley in Judea where the Amalekites lived, Jehovah appeared and ordered Joshua to kill them all, including their children and animals. If that is not “ethnic cleansing,” the term has no meaning at all.

It is worth remembering that Germany was known as the land of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), before its turn toward Richter und Henker (judges and executioners). But what if the two versions are more similar than they appear? If our world is gradually becoming a world of poets and executioners, we will need more judges and thinkers to counter the new tendency and regain our moral footing.

Does Law lose it's efficacy in the total absence of a visible feedback loop of "justice"? Can the end of Disciplinary Societies lead to a collapse of Law, when 'access" in the Society of Control is the only "invisible" feed-back loop, and which may not even rise to a level of human consciousness (Only visible at a machine protocol or AI level)? Is the increasing "obscenity" displayed by leaders merely a performative artifact to satisfy the populace's desire to "see" or experience "justice" (ears cut off Moscow terrorists)? Is that why chants of "lock her/ him up" have so much "populist" resonance, further coarsening political discourse?  Christianity solved the problem by saying that "justice" would be made apparent in the afterlife (heaven/hell).  Will we be taught to religiously "trust the algorithms for they will distribute "access" justly"?  No wonder the State is becoming the people's new religion.

The Reflexive Alchemy (Advanced Sophistry) of George Soros

Excerpts from video:

Hegel propounded a dialect of dialectic of ideas. Marx turned the idea on its head and espoused dialectical materialism. Now there's a new dialectic that connects the participants thinking with the events in which they participate. That is, it operates between ideas and material conditions. If Hegel's concept was the thesis, and Marxism is the antithesis, reflexivity is the synthesis...

... "There's a fundamental difference," Soros tells, "between Marxism and the new dialectic. Marx labored under the misapprehension that in order to be scientific, a theory had to determine the future course of history. The new dialectic is emphatically not deterministic, since the shape of society cannot be scientifically determined. It must be left to the participants to decide their own form of organization."

That's his definition of Open Society. "Since no participant," he says, "has a monopoly on Truth, the best arrangement allows for a critical process," there's your critical theory, "in which conflicting views can be freely debated and eventually tested against reality." But there he's trying to mix it with actual scientific and reasonal, uh, and reason, like in the liberal tradition. Democratic elections provide such a form in politics and the market mechanism provides one in economics that he's actually correct about. In both cases neither markets nor elections constitute an objective Criterion, only an expression of the prevailing bias. But that is the best available in an imperfect World, thus the concept of reflexivity leads directly to the concept of an Open Society. 

...but at the same time he had his practical survival skills that he would later learn to apply to the market to get rich. And the lesson that he drew is: that outcomes are more dependent upon perceptions than they are about facts. That's very important, and it's at the center of reflexivity. We can talk about if he's a good guy, or a bad guy, in relation to that. But the lesson was that outcomes are more dependent upon people's perceptions than they are on facts, which in practice means: "if you can screw with people's perceptions, you can lead them in places you want them to go if you're good at it."

Remember, the whole thing is called "the Alchemy of Finance". Well, it would also be "the Alchemy of social science". It would also be "the Alchemy of historical change".

And so, here's how he spells out some of these ideas in the book that were that he developed out of this realization of perception versus reality. So we're pack backtracking a page and a half or so in the book, if you're following along. He says, "I was greatly influenced at the time by Karl Popper's ideas on scientific method. I accepted most of his views, with one major exception. He argued in favor of what he called 'Unity of method'. That is the methods and criteria that apply to the study of natural phenomena also apply to the study of social events. I felt that there was a fundamental difference between the two. The events studied by the social scientists have thinking participants. Natural phenomena do not. The participants thinking creates problems that have no counterpart in Natural Science. The closest analogies in quantum physics, where scientific observation gives rise to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but in social events, it is the participant's thinking that is responsible for the element of uncertainty, not the outside Observer."

"Natural Science," he says, "studies events that consist of a sequence of facts. When the events have thinking participants, the subject matter is no longer confined to facts, but also the P, the participants perceptions. The chain of causation does not lead directly from fact to fact, but from fact to perception, and from perception, to fact. This would not create any insuperable difficulties if there was some kind of Correspondence, or equivalence, between facts and perceptions. Unfortunately, that is impossible because the participants perceptions do not relate to facts, but to a situation that is contingent on their own perceptions and therefore cannot be treated as a fact."

"So," he says, "that in fact, people don't act on facts, they act on their perceptions of facts." As he says, "facts lead to perceptions and then perceptions lead to new facts, which are new states of the world, but those are assessed as perceptions."

"Again, and the process repeats over, and over, and over again." And the fact is that he says, "there's not a correspondence between what people perceive, and the facts." Which seems to be a strong overstatement of how much bias there is, "but to," he says, "a situation that is contingent on their own perceptions."

So, people's perceptions are based on people's perceptions, they're not based on the facts of the world. Which kind of overwhelmingly says that when we're looking at Social phenomena, we can't kind of boil it down and do the observational study. Which, I think, some rigorous social scientists would have a hard time with. The way that we say could boil it down and agree upon the facts, you know, describing a rock, or a tree, or something like that in the, or a proton in the natural world. He says, "economic theory tries to sidestep the issue by introducing the Assumption of rational Behavior." So, economic theory in fact does presume that people can be rational, he overstates it by saying that it assumes that people are perfectly rational. And we all know those Libertarians, and we know that that's not correct, but at any rate he says the economic theory is wrong because it assumes rationality. So, this is a, this "Alchemy of Finance" is a robust attack also on the rational Tradition at the heart of Classical liberalism. So, to characterize Soros, even though he's already admitted he's a dialectical character, means not classical liberal, as a classical liberal, or in line with Classical liberalism, would be dead wrong.

The dude's a leftist... 

 

...That comes from his financial thinking about how prices may or may not anticipate future Behavior, or discount prices. A simpler way to put it would be that our beliefs about the future, right or wrong, are among the inputs that determine the future. That's a much simpler way to put it. If we believe something's going to be true, then we might make it true. If we believe something's going to be false, then we might make it false. In other words, Soros's great idea is that markets, and social circumstances, operate according to the rules of dynamic systems governed by coupled differential equations. And he seems to lack the mathematics to express it that way. So he has this great Insight, really his great Insight is that people can be wrong. It really is, people can be wrong and other people can act on wrong Behavior too. And then, things that are wrong can happen because people were wrong. Soros, in fact, goes further and believes that we're always wrong, though. Which is actually of some importance because it means he thinks we're always creating the future out of beliefs about both the future and the present that are in fact, "not just biased," as he calls it, "but also wrong."

One of the ways he explains this sounds a lot like the whole dialectical process of either Hegel or Marx is, that we're always making mistakes, and then we're correcting according to them, or losing control of them. More per pertinently though, it isn't said here explicitly yet but it comes up later, Soros's idea of reflexivity contains the idea of feedback loops and Perceptions, in other words, chaotic circumstances creating future reality. That is, he believes that our incorrect beliefs can run away and spill over into historical change, and that's, in fact, how he defines historical change, It's when these feedback loops spill over based on incorrect beliefs, creating more incorrect beliefs going, and people acting on them. And then, boom! You end up in a completely different system. So within much waffling, as an aside, another character related piece to bring up here, he says, related to this attitude, he says, "when I asserted that markets are always biased, I was giving an expression to a deeply felt attitude. I had a very low regard for the sagacity of professional investors." Of course, he does, because he think thinks he's smarter than everybody else because he thinks he's a God, right? "And the more influential their position, the less I consider them capable of making the right decisions. My partner and I took a malicious pleasure in making money by selling short stocks that were institutional favorites." 

 

...The other point is more subtle, but I want you to catch it. He said the participant's bias is the key to an understanding of all historical processes that have thinking participants. So I don't want to give away the whole point, although I did at the beginning too quickly here, but it's this. Soros realizes something very important, and I want you to take this in. Get ready, Soros realizes that he who controls the biases of the people, controls the future. Not, "he who can relate the best facts, he can understand the world the best, who can articulate facts the best, that's not who controls the future." Soros realizes, it is he who controls the biases of the people, is who controls the Future. Okay? So that's really important.

But let's carry on, it's tangential to read it all here. I just want to talk about something, because it's going to come up later, about why he wants to short America, and how it's structured. But there's a big long piece of substance that comes next, throughout most of the rest of the introduction, where Soros is talking about, uh, the history of financial markets. And the, he, wants to talk about, as I mentioned before, that the history really needs to be understood in terms of boom, and busts proceeding, and Cycles. The so-called boom-bust cycle of the market. And of course, generally speaking, what he's putting out is that the bigger the the Boom, the bigger the unhappy, and his words, bust that follows it. And he seems to think that in fact, there was a huge credit boom that happened during the 1970s, and since that should have produced, in his words, a very unhappy Financial bust that never arrived. I don't know if 2008 changed that, this is obviously written long after 2000, or long before 2008, but maybe not. So he thinks there should have been a, there was a huge amount of of market bubble through the 1970s through a credit boom, and there was no accompanying market crash, no big recession, no big depression, or whatever that should have corrected for it. And so, we're in a hugely artificial state of economics, and have been ever since, really, uh, at least the 1970s, but maybe completely after World War II, and this resulting state that we're in of avoiding the inevitable bust that he said must happen, uh, he calls the Golden Age of capitalism with some self-aware irony. And we're not going to get into the whole weeds, but it's it's more to understand Soros's mentality and disposition, and to introduce a couple of other, uh key Concepts, that are going to matter later.

...The point is that imperfect understanding isn't a state of ignorance or bias. It is a feature of every system that consists of thinking participants. This is his point. He says, scientific method he has a very he doesn't say the scientific method or the scientific methods he always just says scientific method he says scientific method is to designed to deal with facts but as as we have seen events which have thinking participants do not consist of facts alone. The participants thinking plays a causal role. Yet it does not correspond to the facts for the simple reason that it does not relate to facts. participants have to deal with a situation that is contingent on their own decisions. their thinking constitutes an indispensable ingredient in that situation. whether we treat it as a fact of a special kind or something other than a fact the participant's thinking introduces an element of uncertainty into the subject matter. This element is absent in the Natural Sciences skipping a bit it is the self-influence character of the participants thinking that is responsible for the element of uncertainty or indeterminacy I mentioned before. the difficulties of scientific observation pale into insignificance when compared with the indeterminancy of the subject matter. The indeterminacy would remain even if all the problems related to The Observer were resolved. that means even if God were the Observer whereas the problem of the Observer can be directly attributed to the indeterminacy of the subject matter thus the problem of the social sciences is not merely methodological but is inherent in the subject matter."
 

...He says (about Social Sciences), "They've had little success in the unity of method thing. Their endeavors have yielded little more than a parody of Natural Science. In a sense, the attempt to impose the methods of Natural Science on social phenomena is comparable to the the efforts of Alchemists, who sought to apply the methods of magic to the field of Natural Science. But while the failure of the Alchemists was well nigh total, social scientists have managed to make a considerable impact on their social matter, or their subject matter. Situations which have thinking participants may be impervious to the methods of Natural Science, but they are susceptible to the methods of alchemy."

That wording is very important. I think that the Natural Science methods actually can work in a like I said, limited scope in the social sciences and that recognizing those limitations is actually pretty key to doing rigorous social scientific work. And I don't think most social scientists would disagree with me. I think most of the reason that most social science is crap is not because of inherent limitations that he's talking about, because I think he's a crackpot, but rather because of badly aligned professional incentives that ran amok. But he didn't say that. He said that situations which have thinking participants are "susceptible" to the methods of alchemy. They are susceptible, you can intentionally do alchemy to social science. In other words, you can intentionally NOT do social science in the name of social science. You can do social Alchemy. You can try to make lead into gold through misapplication of the social sciences, which is in fact exactly what his reflexive method is. And what it's doing, he says, the thinking of participants exactly because it is not governed by reality. Reality is easily influenced by theories, so you can mislead people in the field of natural phenomena. Scientific method is a effective only when its theories are valid. But in Social, political, and economic matters, theories can be effective without being valid. In other words. they can be operationally useful.

Whereas Alchemy has failed as a natural science, social science can succeed as alchemy. That is very interesting wording. Social sciences can succeed as Alchemy, he insists, but that means to make something that isn't out of what is. That's a heavy point that deserves a whole podcast of its own, that the social sciences can succeed as Alchemy. It's not that they are Alchemy. They can succeed "as Alchemy." In other words, you can do bogus social science like nudge Theory, and Achieve results in the world. That's what he's actually saying.

But we can understand Soros. And his reflexive dialectic here is indicating that he subscribes to sociological gnosticism. In fact, a hermetic kind of it that is "social science as a form of social Wizardry." That is, social science as intentional manipulation by those who understand the boundaries of social science.

Not only that though, but this is alchemy which makes something that isn't, from something that is, by means of magical processes, which, in the social realm means manipulative processes. Think of magic. So I'm not talking about like Gandalf, cuz that's fiction, I'm talking about real magic. You go to a real magic show, you watch a real magician. Did the real magician that you went and watched do real magic? No. So a good definition from a real Magician of magic that I saw is where you have cause A leading to effect B, and you have no ability to discern a causal relationship between cause and effect. That's a, you can let that sink in, that's actually a sophisticated definition. But it's, for example, that I put the thing in the cup, and I wave my hand in front of the cup. Which should do nothing to the thing in the cup. And then the thing inside the cup is gone. So, you have the cause A, me, waving my hand in front of the cup, and the effect B, the thing inside the cup disappeared. And there's no causal relationship. You can't discern how it happened. Now, of course, there is a causal relationship between the ball leaving the cup. You just don't know what I did because I tricked you. which is to say, I manipulated you. I had it tucked between a finger, or in a cup with a false bottom, or you know, whatever. It depends on the trick. And there are lots of videos, go watch your Instagram. Look it up on on your Instagram or whatever, YouTube. There are lots of videos where they show you magic tricks from The Magician's perspective. I've watched a ton of them, and when you see it, you're like... uh... social Alchemy, which is what he's actually advocating for here as what social science either is or can succeed as, is manipulation. It is deception. It's not real magic. You cannot make an Open Society out of a real Society through a magical alchemical process. Somewhere in there, is lying deception, manipulation. And when you try to do it, it's not a magic trick in a show. You're going to cause massive disaster. This is the same problem all of the other sociological gnostics that are hermatic in nature, like the Marxists, have caused. Or the liberationists. It's Calamity after Calamity after Calamity because they're trying to make something that doesn't exist out of something that does exist through deceptive methods.

But anyway, later in this book actually, Soros explains explicitly what he means by Alchemy. So let's say in his words instead of mine. It's important to bring it to Bear immediately since he's now invoked the word alchemy, which is, of course, in the title. This is how Soros splits the natural and the social sciences, and it's crucially important to understand. He says, "scientific method seeks to understand things as they are while Alchemy seeks to bring about a desired State of Affairs." So, you're not trying to study social phenomena, you're trying to manipulate them. Or the point is, not to understand the world but to change it. The guy says he's not a Marxist, let's be very clear. To put it another way the primary objective of science is truth, that of alchemy, operational success. So, you have an intended state that you want to change the world to, and your goal is to succeed in the operation through alchemical, which is to say manipulative, processes. That is reflexivity. That is George Soros's modus operandi.

 

...He says, "there is much to be gained by pretending to abide by the conventions of scientific method without actually doing so so" he's talking about behavior in the social sciences he says, 'yeah try to look scientific'. He says, 'there's much to be gained by pretending to be scientific but you're not actually doing so, you're doing Alchemy, pretending to be a scientist ,listen to science, follow the science. Oh my God the whole covid thing was a gigantic reflexive environment wasn't it? Let that pill sink in for a second, or is it a jab? I guess we got to inject it ,right? "Natural Science," he says," is held in great esteem. A theory that claims to be scientific can influence the gullible public much better than one which is, frankly, which that frankly admits its political or ideological bias. Follow the science, listen to science the science is settled," he said, "a theory that claims to be scientific can influence who the gullible public much better than one which frankly admits it's political or ideological bias."

"I only need to mention," he says, "Marxism and psychoanalysis as typical examples but Laissev fair capitalism with its Reliance on the theory of perfect competition is also a case in point. It is noteworthy that both Marx and Freud were vocal in protesting their scientific status and based many of their conclusions on the authority they derive from being 'scientific'." Once this point sinks in, the very expression "social science" becomes suspect. It is a magic word employed by social Alchemists in their effort to impose their will on their subject matter by incantation. And he just said Marx and Freud are these people. Now hang on, so you think, "wow, he just said that's really bad. That's not legitimate." But no, as a matter of fact, he's like, "this is how the world works, so that's what we're going to do." That's really important to, to get. He's basically saying, "People can be manipulated so we should. The gullible public can be tricked by the appearance of science, so let's do it!"


...So let's just jump into it. The next section is called "The Concept of Reflexivity". It starts out this way, "the connection between the participants thinking, and the situation in which they participate, can be broken up into two functional relationships. I call the participants efforts to understand the situation the cognitive or passive function, and the impact of their thinking on the real world, in the participant," uh, sorry the grammar here is a little challenging, so I'm going to actually modify what he wrote to make it more clear. "I call the participants effort to understand the situation the cognitive or passive function, and I call the impact of their thinking on the real world the participating or active function."

I don't know why he says passive and active, because what he really says is when you try to understand the world, that's the cognitive function. When you try to act in the world, that's the participating function. We could call them "theory" and "practice", right?

"In the cognitive function, the participant's perceptions depend on the situation. In the participating function, the situation is influenced by the participants perceptions." So when I said Dynamic systems with coupled equations, that's what I'm talking about. "It can be seen that the two functions work in opposite directions. In the cognitive function," this is a very bad way to say they're coupled equations. By the way, "in the cognitive function the independent variable is the situation. In the participating function, it is the participants thinking. But again, this is theory and practice, and that they're reflexive on one another."

This guy's just Reinventing, you know, the other dialectics and thinking he's got something genius here. "There are many cases where one or the other function can be observed in isolation, but there are also instances where they are both operating at the same time. When both functions operate at the same time, they interfere with each other. Functions need an independent variable in order to produce a determinant result. But in this case, the independent variable of one function is the dependent variable of the other."

I'm telling you all he did was invent Dynamic systems here, and think he's done something really freaking genius. You got, oh you found out, coupled equations exist, did you? Instead of a determinant result, usually what happens in Dynamic systems is that you have a dynamic result. Like, that the population follows a cyclical like, an orbit, right? So sometimes a population goes up, and then, when they get kind of over stresses this environment, it goes down, and then there's not really enough. So there's lots of food, or whatever, excess of food, so it goes back up. And then it overstress the environment, so it goes back down. And it goes in, like a circle of up and down, or a sine wave up and down, up and down. Something that's a very simple example, Oh my gosh, it's so complicated.

He says, "Instead of a determinant result, like a single number, we have an interplay in which both the situation and the participants views are dependent variables, so that an initial change precipitates further changes in both the situation, and in the participants views. I call this interaction 'Reflexivity' using the French word," sorry, "using the word as the French do when they describe a verb who subject and object are the same." So like I said, he literally just figured out coupled equations and dynamic systems. And he's like, Errmagerd, like because he doesn't actually know the math behind what he's doing. But I digress.

Here's a simpler articulation of his Reflexive thing, because that was Technical and weird. I just need this to set up for the determining function and the cognitive or the participating function, and the cognitive function. "Reflexive things, are things," this is a simple definition, "Reflexive things are things that are neither true nor false, but that become true or false based on what people believe about them. That simple. "This is a revolutionary moment, well, if we all believe it is then it is. It becomes one. And if none of us believe it, nothing happens, and it's definitely not one. If enough people believe a stock is going to crash, people will act in a way that crashes the stock. If enough people believe a bank is going to fail, people will act in a way called 'Running on the bank,' that causes the bank to fail. If enough people believe that a stock is going to go Gang Busters like Dogecoin, or even like Bitcoin did for a while, they'll buy in and it'll go Gang Busters."

For Soros, these states are not reflections of reality itself, but are a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop caused by misperceptions of reality that cause circumstances that generate more perceptions, that cause more circumstances, and so on. In other words, sort of like 'Society creates man, creates Society, creates man.' But it's the circumstances create perceptions, the perceptions create circumstances, and the circumstances create new perceptions, and that creates new circumstances. In fact, they are in his mind, so he thinks that it's a dialectical environment. Basically, when people act in Mass formation idiocy, he thinks it's a dialectical environment. And so, what do dialectical environments produce? People that are acting in Mass formation psychosis. Oh, how about that! But the fact is for Soros, this always depends on a inaccurate appraisal of the situation. It's always that it's based on perception, and your perceptions are always wrong.

Soros then says that, "this situation can be depicted mathematically, specifically." He actually shows a pair of coupled functions. He doesn't write them as differential equations, but he actually shows a pair of coupled equations "where the input of the cognitive function is, itself, a function of the participating function. And the input of the participating function is, itself, a function of the cognitive function." It's a lot of math work. I apologize, "that is the theory function takes practice as an input, and the practice function takes Theory as an input." Which is exactly like dialectical Marxism and exactly like Hegelian dialectics. Just like Soros said about his method in the first place.

Now, let me remind you real quick as a tangent here, that for Marxists, and Soros says he's not a Marxist, right? But he just uses the same methods. The exact same methods that happen to have kind of an identical conclusion, but not the same way of getting there. 'The saying is that practice is the Criterion of Truth." And I've wanted to do a short podcast about that phrase itself, and I haven't done it yet. "Practice is the Criterion of truth," but what that actually refers to is that theory and practice are unified dialectically. and literally. As Hegel said, "it, the unification, is speculative." Which means, in a sense, reflected. Because it, when Hegel says 'speculate' he's talking about "look in a mirror" from the Latin speculum, which means mirror. So it's, when, when he says, 'it's a speculative thing', what he's saying is that you're looking at what's happening in the world while you're reflecting not just on your ideas about the world, but what the ideal ideas, the perfect idea might be. And that allows you to refine your ideas about things more toward the Platonic ideal. That is, if something, uh, in other words, that if something is true, if it works to advance the goals of the theory. And the way that you can tell is, you look at the theory and decide whether or not it advanced the goals.

And Soros thinks the same way about his own approach. If it works, say, if it opens Society some more, and, he says, it, or if it makes him money in the market. And he says, "this is the only quasi objective measuring stick available." By the way, whether or not it works, then it is true within the boundaries of social Alchemy. And that's what Soros is trying to describe practice is. A Criterion of Truth.

So it doesn't matter if it's true or false. It doesn't matter if it takes you to a state of society that's functional, or not. It matters were you able to move Society. That's all he cares about. And if it was, then it must have been right. So it doesn't matter how many misconceptions your historical change is based on, it must have been right if you were able to induce it to happen in the first place, and if it moves you more in the direction of what you think is supposed to be. Which, he says, you're not supposed to know what the direction is, it just has to be open, which means more people get to participate. And I'm telling you, Soros is quite explicit about all this. Here's how he continues, "this is the theoretical Foundation of my Approach," he says. "The two recursive functions do not produce an equalibrium, but a Never-Ending process of change."

Remember when Freddy said that the the cultural revolution would be Perpetual? "The process is fundamentally different from the processes that are studied by the Natural Science. There, one set of facts follow," see it's not a traditional theory it's a critical theory, uh, "there one set a facts follows another without any interference from thoughts or perceptions. Although in quantum physics observation introduces uncertainty, when a situation has thinking participants the sequence of events does not lead Direct from one set of facts to the next. Rather, it connects facts to perceptions, and perceptions to facts in a shoelace pattern. Thus the concept of Reflexivity yields a shoelace theory of history, or really, a theory of change is how it should be looked at, because this is how you're going to go do change in the world. It must be recognized that the shoelace theory is a kind of dialectic."

Game Theory. Cooperate or Compete?

Fermi: On Life in a Dark Forest...

Would Governments Play it Safe?

...or Go Berserk!

Could Someone Please Lend Me Ockham's Razor?  Hanlon's?

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Funny how people are willing to dream up and pursue complex means for colonizing the galaxy, but they can't imagine and figure out a way for us to live peacefully with other civilizations here on Earth.  Perhaps we need to establish an Asimovian "2nd Foundation" on the Moon before we send out any von Neumann probes to the surrounding planets of the Solar System and/ or Galaxy.