Stitch Era Universal Crack Reflexive
Vaniria Setser
So many philosophers seem to desire to legislate and judge, rather than listen and hear. At any point in history the world is populated by Truths, yet Truths have the peculiar property of not being reflexive. In the domains of art, love, science, and politics they are haphazardly lived and enacted while, as it were, remaining unconscious. Philosophy strives to bring a little reflexivity to the Present. It strives to grasp that which is concretely universal and singularly eternal in the Present (Truths) so that these Truths might appear a little more intensively in the world, a little more legibly, and so that these Truths might become capable of enjoying new aleatory adventures and inventions in the order of Time. Concepts are performative or enactive, not representational.
It is true that concepts in themselves can be judged neither true nor false, unless it contains a logical inconsistency. But I wonder, if you are not using your useful concepts to produce true statements about the world, then what are you using them for?
Next week I will print this connection onto a A4 sheet of paper. I will brainstorm, writing out links to other interviews and wider reading. It might well be that this piece of reflective listening is actually an important theme for the research. If so, then it has emerged from reflective listening. I like the way that conversations with people can shape thinking and help develop ideas.
Then I assigned different threads of wool to each pattern. It was partly playful, a distraction from the hard work of coding. It was also a good way of reminding me that the patterns are grounded in practice, a knitter reflecting on the hundreds of stitches that make up a Christmas angel, or the thousands of stitches that make up a Knitted Climate Scarf.
As I planned the 2024 year, I set aside April and May to progress analysis and writing on the Ordinary Knitters research project. Since Ordinaryknitters began, I have been privileged to interview 43 people from 4 countries who knitted for a public project, collected over the last few years.
I track the shifts in reflexivity by using mind maps and tables. These make visible my unfolding analysis. The mindmaps and tables allow me to keep track of my decisions and reflect (reflexively) on my assumptions.
I want to interview knitters in several countries who have participated in knitting projects. Firstly, I also want to interview knitters of scarves for the Common Grace Knit For Climate Action in Australia. I hope to interview knitters either together or alone and explore why they participate and what meanings they make. Second, I want to interview knitters of Christmas Angels. These include groups in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Again, I hope to interview knitters either together or alone and explore why they participate and what meanings they make.
If you are aged over 18 years and have been involved in a knitting project (like Common Grace Knit For Climate Action or Christmas Angels or similar) and are willing to be interviewed about your experiences, we would love to hear from you.
The ordinary knitters research project involves not only interviewing people who knit for projects for a Christian church or organisation. It also involves reading about the role of knitting in Christianity, including in history. This week, while examining a post-graduate thesis, I came across some writing that in passing noted an entry from 1741 in the journals of John Wesley:
My design, I told them, is to employ for the present all the women who are out of business, and desire it, in knitting. To these we will first give the commonprice for what work they do; and then add, according as they need. (The Journal of John Wesley, 7 May 1741).
Compare knowing and saying:
How many meters high Mont Blanc is;
how the word game is used;
how a clarinet sounds.
Someone who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.
And to kind of take this and ground this in an actual example that we have today, because we don't have full brain emulation, I want to talk about leafcutter ants. Leafcutter ants are one of the coolest animals in my opinion, because like us, they're also farmers. So an interesting thing about leaf cutter ants is they don't eat leaves, which may seem weird, because why are they cutting them? And the answer is that leafcutter ants are cutting the leaves and marching them down to their hives because they have fungus gardens there. And that's what they feed their larvae on. And that fungus doesn't survive in the wild, right? That is a domesticated fungus that is groomed by leafcutter ants, it's given leaves, it's kept clean, it's kept free of parasites so that the fungus can keep growing and growing. And they feed it to their young.
The idea of a "whistle robot" really sticks with me. I wonder what it would take to build a whistle robot that could reliably whistle even when given fallible, varied, or outright defective lips. Maybe this sort of robustness is what we should be striving for when we try to build intelligent machines. There's a certain merit to a computer vision system that figures out how to function even when you provide it with random webcams dredged out of the bargain bin.
Have you read Ian Hacking's "The Social Construction of What?" -- in it he talks about "interactive types" which is similar to what you're getting at (but I think distinct). I'd say that he focuses more on "interaction" being "interaction with humans", but I think your leafcutter ant example is nice because it shows this is even more pervasive as an issue.
Last month, I spoke at the inaugural Fluidity Forum. I\u2019m going to share my talk a bit further down, but first I\u2019d like to talk about Fluidity as a whole. One way to encapsulate Fluidity Forum is that the first presentation brought the house down with this meme:
If you get the joke here, you\u2019d fit right in. If you don\u2019t \u2014 then the elevator pitch is that this is a spot for people who like to think about thinking. There\u2019s a whole social scene around this, certainly, and knowing the canon will probably help you appreciate some of the nuances. But folks at Fluidity are unusually kind and willing to explain, so all you really need is curiosity and a willing to interrogate your lived experience more strongly than the norm. In fact, one of my favorite talks was about the Qualia Diversity Project, and all you need to contribute to that frontier of research is literally having been alive. (Even if you didn\u2019t go to the talk, you can still help the cause by taking the survey, and it can be very interesting to see which things get divided into categories that you assumed were universal experiences.)
A lot of the fun was the conversations that came after, which is the mark of a good conference. And it had a rule that everyone who came had to bring something (a presentation, exhibit, food - no restrictions aside from \u201Cnot nothing\u201D) which anecdotally seemed to filter out wet rags and got us an interesting and assorted gang of people. If you\u2019re interested in going next year, it\u2019s worth subscribing to the newsletter or reaching out with any questions.
For my contribution, I went with the talk \u201CThought Strewn All Around Us\u201D, which linked together some analogies I\u2019ve used before to highlight a central theme: the mental shift of thinking of facts/memories/knowledge not as discrete things unto themselves but pointers at patterns sustained in environments through time. I was most explicit about this in Memories are environmental indices, but it\u2019s lurking behind a lot of what I post, and it was worth calling out as a whole.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted this to be an extemporaneous speech with just a rough outline and no associated PowerPoint. I\u2019m metaphor-building and not pushing individual facts around, and the ability to be expressive and spontaneous was a huge benefit for that. However, as every standup comedian knows, the secret to having a good spontaneous speech is to have a gigantic library of soundbites already in the top of your mind and to save the spontenaity mostly for stitching them together. I planned to do more of that than I ended up doing, and so this was a bit less zippy than it could have been.
Still, I\u2019m mostly just disappointed by the omission of better potential comparisons, not what\u2019s there. And I can be a bit of a stuffy writer sometimes, so hopefully it\u2019ll be fun to see something less rigid. Video is below, and a lightly edited transcript to follow.
And that is the frame I want to carry into this talk today. This isn't a sort of a linear argument beginning to end about a thesis. This is about getting together some metaphors, some of which I've used in previous writings, some I haven\u2019t, for a particular purpose. Which is to induce onto you a sort of vibe, and avoiding sort of a rigid and nounified classification scheme about the vibe, and just getting you to see this way.
And the way I want you to see is to think of knowledge as something like a library catalog card, right?1 That's got the shelf that the book is on, maybe the content of the book, what it's about, but it's not the book. And that the environment all around us is carrying the equivalent of the text of the book forward through time. And so what you think of as your knowledge is more like your index of where to find the knowledge that you're used to substituting for the knowledge so quickly, that you kind of miss that elisioon is there. And so I'm going to use one more quote from Wittgenstein. This is philosophical investigations, prop 78:
Compare knowing and saying:
How many meters high Mont Blanc is;
how the word game is used;
how a clarinet sounds.
Someone who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.