Philosophy and Technology

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

I want to share the news that I'm getting hired (5% full-time) to teach
"Philosophy of Technology" to architecture students at Vilnius Gediminas
Technical University this Fall. It seems that I'll be able to redefine
the course so as to teach my own philosophy. My main ideas are that it
should be called (but won't be called) "Philosophy and Technology" where
Philosophy is the collection of unsolved riddles, Technology is the
collection of solved riddles, and Science is what takes us back and
forth between the two. I want each student to choose one personally
meaningful question, design and pursue an investigation of it, and share
the conclusion and subsequent questions. So students will write a
report about that, and take an exam where they have to write how they
personally would approach 5 other students' questions, and also help
each other out with the investigations. Class will be 30 minutes
lecture, 30 minutes discussion, 30 minutes working together on their
investigations.

I'll be introducing them to a great variety of ways of figuring things
out. I have a large collection here
http://www.selflearners.net/ways/
and I appreciate ideas on extending it.

I want especially to introduce:
* Architect Christopher Alexander, his "Timeless Way of Building",
patterns, pattern languages, his fifteen principles of life, his
wholeness transformations (which read very much like how simplexes unfold)
* Mathematicians George Polya ("How to Solve It") and Paul Zeitz ("The
Art and Craft of Problem Solving")
* CIA analyst Morgan D. Jones has a very readable book "The Thinker's
Toolkit" about structuring and mapping ideas in different ways depending
on the problem.
* Soviet inventor Genrich Altshuller surveyed 40,000 patents to develop
the TRIZ system and other systems.
* I don't know much about Buckminster Fuller or his ways of figuring
things out (that would be interesting) but certainly he's a great
example of a practical prophet.
* Rhetorician Stephen Toulmin's "The Uses of Argument" shows how the
same basic logical structure is used in different domains (law, art,
science, medicine, politics, business... ) which have their own bases
for drawing conclusions.
* "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo has 80 games
for getting small corporate teams to think together productively.
* I want to show Terrence Tao's video "The Astronomical Distance Ladder"
and discuss it as a history of inspired thought throughout the ages.

I will organize all of the many methods into my own "House of Knowledge".

So the overall thread is that if we want to see the interplay between
philosophy and technology it makes sense to draw inspiration from
philosophically thinking people who succesfully engaged their
technological environments.

I hope my course description gets approved...

I appreciate ideas.

Thank you!

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
m...@ms.lt
+370 607 27 665

[kirby urner]

I wish I could take your course.  Maybe we'll get an on-line version someday.

Congratulations on having a good working relationship with some nearby academy, must be nice.

I want especially to introduce:
* Architect Christopher Alexander, his "Timeless Way of Building", patterns, pattern languages, his fifteen principles of life, his wholeness transformations (which read very much like how simplexes unfold)
* Mathematicians George Polya ("How to Solve It") and Paul Zeitz ("The Art and Craft of Problem Solving")
* CIA analyst Morgan D. Jones has a very readable book "The Thinker's Toolkit" about structuring and mapping ideas in different ways depending on the problem.

I remember your sharing this one before, from Chicago.  I agree it was very readable.  Dunno of Morgan and EJA knew each other.
 

* Soviet inventor Genrich Altshuller surveyed 40,000 patents to develop the TRIZ system and other systems.
* I don't know much about Buckminster Fuller or his ways of figuring things out (that would be interesting) but certainly he's a great example of a practical prophet.

You've got a lot on your plate without tackling yet another important thinker. 

I recommend two works if you really want to include this New England Transcendentalism in your syllabus:

(1)  Omnidirectional Halo, in No More Secondhand God, quite interestingly technical without resorting to lots of AI expressions

http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Secondhand-God-Writings/dp/0809302470  (Bradford mentioned this one recently)

(2)  Grunch of Giants (St. Martins Press), a pithy overview of how he saw the state of the world in the early 1980s, shortly before he died.

I've just run across this write-up of RBF's Cosmography and EJA's own Paradise Mislaid in this 1991 Whole Earth Review:

https://flic.kr/p/Hwtooq  (2-page spread)

https://flic.kr/p/HQw8nF (cover)

I'm not suggesting you need to get these, just underlining the importance of this lineage to digerati and literati (cognoscenti) who actually had time to read much in adulthood (a minority). 

Fuller had a huge following among young people in his day, inspiring the hatred and jealousy of many older folks.

As you know, the Internet was not yet available to most of us back then in 1991. 

Print media like Whole Earth Review were always higher IQ than TV knew to do.  Actually TV has its own ways of encoding higher culture.
 

* Rhetorician Stephen Toulmin's "The Uses of Argument" shows how the same basic logical structure is used in different domains (law, art, science, medicine, politics, business... ) which have their own bases for drawing conclusions.
* "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo has 80 games for getting small corporate teams to think together productively.

Learning to see your own line of work as a board game, or any kind of game, is a great way to do what we used to call "systems analysis", back when everyone was so keen to be taken seriously with their boring business-like titles.

I really like that Parisa Tabriz is a Security Princess at Google.  Colorful titles are more memorable and not so stuffy.

I was in the audience for this one, in a vast hall:

https://youtu.be/kxqci2mZdrc

The hall:  https://flic.kr/p/GNyKaS  (chairs more filled during keynotes)

 

* I want to show Terrence Tao's video "The Astronomical Distance Ladder" and discuss it as a history of inspired thought throughout the ages.

Is this like one of those Powers of 10 like things?

https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

There's been a lot more work in this area, in terms of visualizing across the frequency spectrum (a theme in Omnidirectional Halo)
 

I will organize all of the many methods into my own "House of Knowledge".

Reminds me of House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where Dr. Algorithm worked (translation).
 

So the overall thread is that if we want to see the interplay between philosophy and technology it makes sense to draw inspiration from philosophically thinking people who succesfully engaged their technological environments.

I hope my course description gets approved...

Me too.
 

I appreciate ideas.

Feedback from your students will guide you to a next iteration.  That's how it works for me.

Kirby

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Kirby,

Thank you so much for your encouragement! Yes, I will try to make as
much of the course available as I can.

Terrence Tao's lecture on the Cosmic Distance Ladder is the best video
lecture that I've ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs
He goes through all of the creative reasoning that allowed people to
figure out since ancient days the size of the Earth, the Moon, the
distance to the Sun, to the nearest stars, to the edge of the galaxy.
It's such a great story that I want to watch it with my students and
stop it briefly after each segment to note how it relates to the history
of thought and to the "ways of figuring things out" that we'll be
collecting and to note the principles that the arguments depend on.

A few more thinkers I may likely devote a class to, relating them to my
own discoveries:
* Stephen Wolfram, "A New Kind of Science". The point is that cellular
automata (and the idea of just running through a set of all
possibilities and noticing what shows interesting behavior) can be a
tool for discovery, both practically and theoretically.
* Robert Horn. "Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st
Century" He sketches the basics of a visual grammar by which images,
text and diagrams combined are much more expressive. The point is to
encourage visual notebooks.
* Natalie d'Arbeloff. "Designing with natural forms". As an artist,
she gives examples of playful ways to investigate an onion, a pineapple,
water... The point is to involve our hands, our body, our technology in
our thinking. So I think circle folding would be a great exercise to go
with that. So I look forward to doing more of that.

None of the reading will be required. But I will try to select the best
short pieces or excerpts.

The "No More Secondhand God and Other Writings" book is a very nice
introduction to Buckminster Fuller, I imagine. I found this copy online:
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/bucky-fuller-writings.pdf
I will have to explore the "Omnidirectional Halo". My own philosophy,
the "divisions of everything", are for me much more directly basic and
useful. And I'm writing up my investigations of the simplex, etc., and
will be giving a talk this Saturday at an aesthetics conference,
analyzing how Christopher Alexander's principles of life apply both to
the Mandelbrot set (superficial beauty) and more purely to the simplex
(deep beauty). So I expect to give my own lecture on the distinctions
between tetrahedral and cubic and other kinds of thinking (as given by
the 4 classical Lie groups/algebras).

But I want to illustrate a very curious "way of figuring things out"
which is the precarious capstone of the whole system. I call it
"context" for lack of a better word. And here is my example. I ask the
students, what is 10 + 4? And they say "14". And I say no. Why? The
answer is 2. Why? Because I'm refering to the hours of the clock: 10
o'clock + 4 hours = 2 o'clock. And here is an example where everything
they new was wrong. Because they didn't have the right context. But we
can never be sure that we have the right context. We can't explain all
of the context, there's just too much of it. OK, but that's just one
example. But Buckminster Fuller's whole life is an example. One way
(perhaps the standard "academic" way) to look at him is that practically
all of his work is nonsensical. But another way to look at him is that
he's a prophet, and most particularly, a prophet in an age of
technology. So it's very nice to read what God means to him in such an
age. And it's inspiring to hear him go on about "electronic voting" as
the solution for humanity's problems in 1940 and to realize that he's
actually somebody from today who has gone back in time and is trying to
explain the world-wide-web. So the point is that one way to figure
things out is to be the poet-prophet-visionary. Another poem, perhaps
more directly relevant to "figuring things out" is his "A Comprehensive
Anticipatory Design Science." I'm trying to explain that at any point
it may be that everything we know is wrong. That's why the sum of all
my thinking is "God doesn't have to be good." (Life doesn't have to be
fair.) And so we can figure things out by being ever ready to unlearn
everything we know. And then relearn it, along with others, if it
happens to be true. There is a deepest unity in that.

I just want to say that one reason I'm adding thinkers is to be sure to
have at least a few women. So far I have Natalie d'Arbeloff, Sunni
Brown (of the Gamestorming trio) and I'm also adding Sarah Susanka, who
has popularized Christopher Alexander's work for the masses through her
series "The Not So Big House", which I think should be interesting to
architecture students, how these ideas make their way. I thus
appreciate more suggestions...

And Parisa Tabriz's keynote speech is quite intriguing - thanks!

I also found Grunch of Giants online:
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/bucky-giants.pdf
and somewhere - perhaps at the beginning and throughout the course - I
want to reference his personal endeavor: "I set about fifty five years
ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a
dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on
behalf of all humanity in realistically developing such an alternative
program [of livingry rather than killingry=weaponry]."

I have a similar endeavor, more or less. But I'm not allowed to talk
about examples from my own life or talk about God. I'm suppose to use
examples from other people's lives. So Buckminster Fuller might be a
great life to talk about throughout the course.

Another issue is the ethics of getting and using copies of all these
texts. And in general, of Public Domain vs. copyright forms (including
Creative Commons and copyleft). It's relevant when your doing
investigations that depend so much on analyzing and reanalyzing content,
chopping it up and reorganizing it.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
m...@ms.lt
+370 607 27 665

> Paradise Mislaid in this 1991 /Whole Earth Review/:

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[kirby urner]

On Wednesday, June 8, 2016 at 3:56:58 AM UTC-7, Andrius Kulikauskas wrote:

Kirby,

Thank you so much for your encouragement!  Yes, I will try to make as
much of the course available as I can.

Terrence Tao's lecture on the Cosmic Distance Ladder is the best video
lecture that I've ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ne0GArfeMs

I'm out to the planetary orbits and digging it.  Great lecture, I agree.

He's put a lot of work into this presentation and really gives respect
to the hard work of those with comparatively little in the way of
technology.  I like how he keeps saying "high school math" as
all it takes at the end of the day.  They're just story problems.

The genius is in telling the right story, and Kepler's shines through. 

We're reminded that Copernicus cites an "ancient Greek PhD"
(original philosopher) for first proposing the heliocentric model,
upon proving with delta calculus (pre Newton's, not infinitesimal
deltas), that the sun was way way bigger than the Earth (and it's
even way bigger than he thought).

In other words, armed with only geometry and a logical argument,
they could obtain rational results.  The drag was having so few
others to check and verify.  Being the only one to know something
is not necessarily a joy.  In the world of Open Data, we have a
community with the potential to reach consensus, at least on the
relevance of data to their analytical process, and possibly on much
else besides.  An Age of Empiricism seems upon us again, what
with Big Data nets and those neural net sifters.

I look forward to continuing onward with this lecture, out to the
galactic reaches of Hubble Space itself.

Many in my network are astronomers, many of those with ties to
MMCC (Mount Hood Community College). 

I've gone out to their planetarium for special events a few times. 

We've got some serious star gazer types in Oregon, as one of
those places where stars on a clear night still exist.  Brenda built
her own telescope from scratch, getting help where she needed
it.

Kirby

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 2:39 PM, kirby urner <kirby...@gmail.com> wrote:

<< SNIP >>
 

I look forward to continuing onward with this lecture, out to the
galactic reaches of Hubble Space itself.

Many in my network are astronomers, many of those with ties to
MMCC (Mount Hood Community College). 

MHCC, duh.

No need to read this now, put here more for geocachers...

Of some interest perhaps.

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2013/04/wanderers-201343.html

(curriculum as treasure hunt trails...)

Kirby

Related reading:

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-age-of-carbon.html