Changing concepts

Creation of Concepts

For Rawls: Indeterminate “ideas” (such as the rights of individual) inform the creation of “concepts” (such as Justice and Original Position), which allow for systematic “conceptions”; principles for deciding which concepts are arbitrary.

With Rawl’s constructivism, the content of the concept (for example Justice) is procedurally constructed not from historically loaded ideas, but as the outcome of a dialogue between ideas. This is definitely not the same as Deleuze.

Deleuze does not see the creation of concepts (i.e. Philosophy) as the result of a conversation. In “What is Philosophy” Deleuze describes a “horror” of discussions within Philosophy. This is his account of a ‘rhizome-book’ of movement in concepts (in Patton’s paper above).

Deleuze sees distinct concepts, but something “passes between them”. So internal consistency, but “exo-consistency” between changes. Source of mobility through these connections. ”Relations to concepts provide pathways to others”. This is linked to the plane of immanence, and the (changing) image of thought; searching for different image of thought. An account of “Becoming Just” contour configuration, constellation.

Patton sees the mobility provided by Deleuze as a useful awareness, thinks it is apparent that the creation of Justice is exemplary of Deleuze’s concept creation: Justice (Rawls) is a mobile concept (Deleuze). Conception of Justice becomes historical as “incremental conceptions”. ”Subject to assumption that firmly held convictions change”. Patton examines how Rawls was Looking at Justice as primary social concept, but focussed on Stability, as he wanted to say the Just was more stable. Through the forces between concepts, the one effected the other.

Conceptual personae

From What is Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari:

“The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosdopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.”

For Rawls; Rational, Citizens, and Reasonable.
For Deleuze: ”Friend of concept” (Nietzsche, Blanchot), set up to measure forces outside of philosophy . Future transformations. Becoming.

from http://blog.neonascent.net/

Ideas and technology

Tristao Da Cunha
It is technology. It doesn't affect ideas, theory or concepts.

Jean-Philippe Pastor
You're partly right. Deconstruction has learned us that the way we think interferes with the idea we express: support matters in itself

Reach Out
And metanarratives are the start of the ideas we express. If we deconstruct the metanarrative we might find freedom to think and express our own ideas xxxx

Jean-Philippe Pastor
and to do so, we must tackle with the difference between narrative and metanarrative...

Reach Out
Post-structuralism is so cool, that's a reification if ever there was one ...

Jean-Philippe Pastor

Anyway, I talk the way I write http://bit.ly/7ghOzI

Reach Out
Didn't Jaques Derrida write about the difference (differance) between talking and writing. ? So, talking and writing can indeed be the same ...

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Ideas are not transcendent substances

Natorp's interpretation of Plato's Ideas, far from being an uncritical projection of Kant back onto Plato, is a remarkable attempt to dissociate the theory of ideas from its Aristotelian reception, still dominant today, which sees the ideas as transcendent substances, and to argue that Plato's theory is basically a theory of explanation.

In particular, Natorp argues that Plato's ideas are simply explanations, or laws, rather than substances; and what the ideas explain is in the first instance the possibility and nature of thought and knowledge, and only as a consequence the nature of reality. Natorp emphasizes the broadly Kantian origins of his approach, but he takes issue with Kant on a number of crucial points, and this not least is what allows him to defend a transcendental interpretation of Plato's theory of ideas.

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Idea is not only a concept

Plato's ideas are virtues, properties of the divine being, communicated also to the created existence, as Augustine understood too.

Goodness is not just a 'form' and concept, it is the fact of being good, with goodness elevated to its source and perfection in God. The Holy, holiness, is not just an idea, but a reality in which all saints participate in various degrees. Plato's ideas have their real source in Homer and the (common in Greek life) relationship and communication between God and man.

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Mapping ideas with hypertext

People have different ways of communicating their experiences.

Some express themselves in pictures, others talk about how things sound to them, and others speak about how things feel.

A Mental Map in an hypertext is a powerful way of expressing the thought patterns, pictures and associations that already exist in the brain. "When new information is compatible with your knowledge structures it is accepted, when it does not mesh with your pre-conceived ideas or past experience it receives little consideration, is distorted or ignored".

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-Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Google's effect on our mind

In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue
Posted on June 19, 2008 by Douglas Bell

Yes, again: The cover story that launched a thousand blog posts.
For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.

Some agree with Carr, of course:
Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes—and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives. —Andrew Sullivan in The Times of London

Some disagree:
Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.
You look at a book, read a book, and you easily perceive a coherent whole. You look at all the information on that book’s topic on the Web, all connected, and you can’t see the sum of the parts—but we are starting to get our minds around it. We can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.
Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.—Scott Karp at seekingalpha.com

But here’s what both sides in the debate missed: Google’s motivation in all this is money. For all their drivel about corporate responsibility (Google’s motto is the impossibly pretentious “Don’t be evil”), Google “monetizes” (lovely word that) what Karp calls “networked thinking” by charging fractions of whatever currency to place links nearer to the front page of a given search.
And guess what? Google couldn’t care less whether this new form of thought is our salvation or our damnation. In business speak, they’re “content agnostic.” The debate about which is the better mode of rumination for optimal human development—algorithmic/hypertext or monastic/contemplative—is nothing but a sideshow.

So long as the dollar calls the tune at Google, it seems to me that how we read—Carr’s po-faced lament notwithstanding—is somewhat less problematic than whether what we read is the straight goods or just another ad campaign done up in digital drag.

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? [The Atlantic]• Idea Watch: Is Google Making Us Stupid? [Wall Street Journal]• Google is giving us pond-skater minds [The Times]• Connecting the Dots of the Internet Revolution [Seeking Alpha]• How Google ate my brain [Globe and Mail]
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Categories: General, Internet, Over the Border, Magazines
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Impressions and ideas

Berkeley thought that material objects were just collections of ideas partly because he used the word 'ideas' to cover everything that the mind perceives, from abstract ideas about God or physics to sensations of color, sound, smell, etc.

Hume thought that we should discriminate a little more than that. So he distinguished between impressions, which are what we actually sense or feel while we are having a sensation or feeling, and ideas, which are slightly faded copies or memories of past impressions and also made up combinations of ideas and impressions (such as the made up idea of a golden mountain).

All ideas come from impressions, Hume maintains. Any alleged idea that cannot be analyzed into its original component impressions is bogus and has no real meaning. We should remove it from our thinking and thereby remove all needless obscurity from philosophy.

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Semantic web

Sir Bernard Berners-Lee recently discussed how the 'semantic web' will form the next stage of the web's evolution - essentially allowing users to collect data together whether it's part of the world wide web or not.

He gave the example of combining online bank statements and photos with a desktop calendar, allowing people to work out what they were doing when they took a particular photo.
Summing up the development of the web, Berners-Lee said: "A small number of ideas have a disproportionate impact."
Berners-Lee proposed the world wide web in 1989 while working as a software engineer at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
The global project created a web of connections to information on the internet using hypertext documents. During the early 1990s Berners-Lee worked to develop the web, specifying the URL, HTTP and HTML standards.

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Writing as a condition of science

Writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its object — but first, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.

Before being its object, writing is the condition of science.

The strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for nonfortuitous reasons, during a certain period of the world's history (beginning around the eighteenth century) and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between “living” speech and inscription.
Historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical becoming. And the former presupposes the latter.

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Science of thought

Logic might have been defined as the science of the pure Idea.

Pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought. But logic might have been also defined as the science of thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. But thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, or qualifying circumstance, which renders Ideas and Lexias distinctively logical. If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. Hypertext and lexias.These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.

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Absolute Mining

Hegel defines the Absolute Idea as the “unity of the Theoretical Idea and the Practical Idea".

The Theoretical Idea is the completed Notion or concrete concept of the world or object; the Practical Idea is the activity expressing this concept (practice); the unity of the two means fully “conscious practice”, people acting in true accord with their own nature.

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Expressions of ideas

Once we use language (speech or writing) to refer to reality, that reality is linguistically formulated and therefore indeterminate.

Meaning is not something preexisting in the mind that we struggle to express. Like the main analytical schools of language philosophy from Hume onwards, and contrary to Saussure, we must not regard words as the expression of ideas.

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Related ideas

With computer technology, it's easy to direct readers to related ideas.

This computer-based glossary is hypertextual: I can refer you to terms like Alexandrine and Postmodern, and you can go directly there — and once there, you can follow links elsewhere. Text turns into a web of connections, and the reader chooses which connections to follow.
Metabole is a huge collection of hypertext documents, where each page on the solution can refer to any other page of the hypertext.

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