[extropy-chat] PHIL: Derrida and Deconstruction

[Jef Allbright]

Robert -
 
I took a chance with my perceived credibility by writing an opening
paragraph parodying the style of Derrida.  It contained virtually zero
direct content, but many allusions to profundity. I received offlist
comments that were *very* appreciative of the humor, but I'm afraid
others may have taken a quick look and thought something like "there's
Jef being inscrutable again."
 
As I said to Natasha, I spent some considerable time looking into
postmodernism, for the purpose of understanding, relating, and better
communicating with those who view the world from that mindset. Over the
years I have taken a similar approach to understanding beliefs about
Christianity, other religions, Buddhism, other philosophies, paganism,
parapsychology, occult practices, drug use and abuse and other less than
rational areas.  Hell, a few days ago, I spent a half hour in
conversation with a clearly deranged homeless person camping in a public
park.  Our conversation was almost entirely bereft of substance, but I
came away with a deeper understanding of his world.
 
But back to postmodernism.  My bottom-line and crude assessment is that
postmodernism represents essentially a bottomless pit of navel-gazing,
mental masturbation and academic in-fighting.  
 
I think Derrida did have a valuable point about the contextual
relativity of meaning and how the contextual sphere extends to the
reader and even beyond, and quite probably he made some other good
points, but the [IMHO] self-inflicted vagueness and obfuscation makes it
an anti-extropic use of time.  And let's not forget the Sokal hoax as
another important indicator on this topic.  It reminds me of certain
forms of "abstract" art which some people (by virtue of their
"sophistication") will find to be very profound, while others may
observe that this says more about the person and society than it does
about the actual work of art  We should also recognize that there is a
certain response in the brain that can trigger a very real sense of awe
and profundity regardless of the stimulus providing any real substantial
content.  Examples include feelings of profound significance induced by
drugs, directed intercranial magnetic fields, epileptic fits, hormonal
fluctuations or even the hypnotic influence of being part of a large
crowd.
 
That said, I value very highly the freedom of individuals to follow
these paths, I appreciate the diversity generated by such "unproductive"
efforts, and I trust that overall, that which is more effective will
tend to persist and grow to our benefit.
 
- Jef

________________________________

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert
Bradbury
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 2:10 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] PHIL: Derrida and Deconstruction



On 10/31/06, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote: 

	 If I were asked this in a personal sense, although not, of
course, in the person of Derrida, but rather, as one who might have a
sense of some aspect of being that is Derrida, I might answer that it is
in large part unknowable, but in some small part I could say that the
crossover, however small, gathers meaning from the context of the
question, and the questioner. [snip] 
	


Being unfamiliar with Derrida (and much "philosopy" for that matter [I
know a little about Chomsky]) I briefly scanned his Wikipedia entry.
One thing I wondered (given how long his entry is) is *why* do people
care so much about this stuff? 

As a total aside, when one gets into these "transhumanist" vs.
"postmodernist", vs. xyzzy-ist "type" discussions, I am struck by some
of the similarities between fields like philosophy and computer science.
For example programmers can have long and passionate debates over the
relative merits of C++ vs. Perl vs. Python vs. Java (and don't even
mention Lisp or Smalltalk).  One difference between computer science and
philosophy is that in the former the discussions can rely on some
generally agreed upon definitions that mean the same thing to everyone.
In the later I'm less sure that that is the case. 

With computers a 1 is a 1, a 0 is a 0, an "and" and an "or" are certain
things you can do with them.  With philopsophy, at least at some levels,
those things are still being defined and debated.  It seems that much of
the discussion originated before any modern hunderstanding of what the
brain is and how it works (neuroscience) which in turn is developing in
parallel with the understanding of the hardware itself (molecular and
genomic biology).  With philosophers, not only do you have this *huge*
body of knowledge, represented by relatively nondeterministic and highly
unique neural patterns but its running on top of hardware (genetic
polymorphisms) which may have sufficient differences that it may be
relatively impossible for the individuals to "think" the same way.  In
computer science one would look at it and say its simple -- machine X
executes the X instruction set and machine Y executes the Y instruction
set and there is no way that either of them is ever going to execute
each other's instructions [1].  The best you can do is create sort of an
abstraction (which is what higher level languages are) that let machine
X and machine Y accomplish specific tasks in their own way.  One has to
wonder if the entire area of philosophy is nothing more than a complex
variation of this. 

It will be interesting to see how philosophy deals with differences in
genetic polymorphisms and neural structures that explain precisely why
Chomsky could never have understood Derrida, why a postmodernist can
never understand a humanist, etc. 

Robert

1. One could consider spoken languages, written languages and perhaps
cultures to be parallels to computer languages and computer instruction
sets -- but they are *so* much less precise that one would wonder
whether people not educated in computer science (presumably most
philosophers) can even begin to comprehend the degree to which they are
communicating with play-doh? 



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