(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.)

Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern.

In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some sense, responsibility for society itself, its decision making and its future.

However, he who lacks information about some matter cannot take responsibility for it. And thus we often defer to authorities in practice. Authorities allow us to specialise our understanding, which increases our net ability to understand as a collective, assuming that we have sufficiently well functioning interpersonal communication.

There are whole categories of problems that routinely are assigned to specific, predefined authorities and experts; for instance legal matters, constitutional matters, whether some person is mentally ill, medical matters, nuclear and chemical hazards, and so on. Fields where some degree of extensive training is generally required. (However, under the right conditions, these authorities could probably also be called into question by the public opinion.) The opposite is those categories of problems that are routinely assigned to “public opinion” and all of its voices and modulating contraptions and devices, its amplifiers, dampeners, filters, switches and routing mechanisms.

Responsibility aside, in order to maximise an individual’s prospects for life, and by extension society’s prospects for life, it seems important that the individual possess just the right knowledge that they need in their situation. Adding more knowledge is not always a benefit; some kinds of knowledge can be entirely counterproductive. Nietzsche showed this (“On the use and abuse of history for life”), and we can easily apply the idea of computational complexity to see how having access to more information would make it harder to make  decisions.

This is especially true for some kinds of knowledge: knowledge about potential grave dangers, serious threats, monumental changes threatening to take place. Once we have such knowledge we cannot unlearn it, even if it is absolutely clear that we cannot act on it and that we do not have the competence to assess the situation fully. It  takes effort and an act of will to fully disregard a threat on the basis of one’s own insufficient competence.

On the other hand, knowledge about opportunities, about resources, and about problems that one is able to, or could become able to deal with, would generally be helpful and not harmful. However, even this could be harmful if the information is so massive as to turn into noise.

Even disregarding these kinds of knowledge, one of the basic assumptions of democracy – that each individual takes full responsibility for society – seems to be an imperative that is designed never to be fulfilled. An imperative designed to be satisfied by patchworks of individual decisions and “public opinion”, and whatever information fate happens to throw in one’s way. Out of a basic, healthy understanding of their own limitations, individuals generally assume that the democratic imperative to know and to take responsibility was never meant to be taken seriously anyway, but one does one’s best to match one’s peers in appearing to do so.

It seems to me that the questions we must ask and answer are about the proper extent of responsibility, and the proper extent of knowledge, for each individual. For the individual, taking on no responsibility seems detrimental to life; taking on full responsibility for all problems in the world right now, here today, would also be an impossibility. There would be such a thing as a proper extent of responsibility. One’s initial knowledge and abilities would inform this proper extent of responsibility, and the two might properly expand and shrink together, rather than expand and shrink separately.

In a democratic society, in so far as one wants to have one, we should ask: what is the proper level of responsibility that society should expect from each individual, and what level should the individual expect from himself as an ideal?

More generally, empirical studies of how public opinion functions and how democracies function in practice are needed. It is inappropriate to judge and critique democracies based on their founding ideals when the democratic practice differs sharply from those ideals – as inappropriate as it is to critique and judge economies based on the presumption that classical economic principles apply to economic practice in the large.

I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked composition of software components to concepts in classical logic, and informally divided composition into a light side and a dark side. On the light side are ideal concepts such as monotonicity (the more axioms we have, the more we can prove), absence of side effects and a single, canonical decomposition of everything. On the dark side are properties such as side effects, the absence of a single decomposition, knowledge that invalidates previously obtained theorems, and so on.

One of the ideas that resonated the most with me is the tyranny of the dominant decomposition. (For instance, a single type hierarchy). Being forced to decompose a system in a single way at all times implies only having a single perspective on it. Is this not platonism coming back to haunt us in programming languages? (Ostermann did indeed say that he suspects that mathematics and the natural sciences have had too much influence on programming). What we might need now is an antiplatonism in programming: we might need subjectivist/perspectivist programming languages. If components can view their peer components in different ways, depending on their domain and their interests (i.e. what kind of stakeholders they are), we might truly obtain flexible, evolvable, organic composition.

It might be thought at first that the assertion that all judgments are subjective has some exceptions. After all, maybe we all agree that matters of taste and style are inherently more subjective than measurements of the length of a pencil or the weight of a stone. Maybe we would be tempted to posit a hierarchy of degrees of subjectivity. But Nietzsche rejects this too, emphatically expressing that there is no objective basis to which observations can be reduced, no judgment that is absolutely and irreducibly validated. For Nietzsche, the world seems to consist of multiple interlocking interpretations that support each other, a bit like an M. C. Escher drawing.

Elsewhere, Nietzsche invokes the death of God. Christoph Cox, in his “Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation”, points out that the death of God as an idea has only been understood in its most shallow form if it is seen as a mere rejection of Christianity. For Nietzsche, Platonism, “the thing in itself”, the “forms”, “truth”, “paradise” and “objective facts” are all — maybe paradoxically — ways of rejecting reality, rejecting the world. They are dogma. The death of God, Cox asserts, is the end of all these various forms of dogma, not just of Christianity.

As for the intellectual conscience, Cox asserts that by this, Nietzsche simply means that one must question and attack one’s perspectives and interpretations as much as possible, and that a refusal to do this — an acceptance of dogmatic thought — would be a betrayal of the intellectual conscience. In this view, Nietzsche seems to state that in order to best know the world, we must entertain multiple parallel perspectives and harden each one as much as possible through questioning.

A naive questioning of objective truth can lead to a naive relativism, in which every assertion appears to be equally valuable or equally true. It is often on this account that social philosophers and thinkers of today are criticised, as champions of a destruction and levelling of all valuation, a mindless relativism. However, the idea of the intellectual conscience does seem as if it can point the way to new and quite concrete valuation. Nietzsche’s project is ultimately a constructive one which seeks to show a way forward.

What of science then, and its claims to empirical, objective truth, found through experiment and measurement? It seems that scientific thought and scientific findings are in no way invalidated through a Nietzschean epistemology. Science would merely have to forge relationships with other perspectives and find useful ways of relating to them, instead of claiming to be the sole valid way of viewing the world.

After all, what evidence is there that the world exists objectively and independent of the mind? And if there is no evidence either way, let us use Occam’s razor. Which alternative is the simplest explanation?

Last year, we started hearing about the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Google. The two companies were poaching talent from each other, and reportedly, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt got increasingly confrontational with each other on a personal level. Historically, the two companies both operated in the shadow of and against Microsoft, but with Microsoft sliding into irrelevance, they now appear to be competing with each other instead.

Apple commands tremendous respect, and enormous excitement surrounds its product launches, such as the ones of the iPhone and the iPad. Jokingly, one could almost describe Apple products and shops as a micro-religion, and maybe there is a grain of truth to this joke.

What Apple does so well is to create and project values that surround their products. For the purposes of this blog entry, let us forget about the usual drab meaning of the phrase “project values” as it is used by marketing people and PR consultants. Let us try to have in mind a philosophical meaning of the word value – and why not understand it as Nietzsche did, as a necessary way of relating to reality, a necessary epistemological bias? Apple has a vision for what life with digital products should be like, and the vision has no clear boundaries: its edges are carefully concealed, the vision overflows, spills over into every aspect of the customer’s life. Something that there is a definite dearth of today has been supplied. But this vision cannot easily be imitated or supplied by other companies. It is effective simply because everyone can perceive that Apple and Steve Jobs are so firmly behind it, that there is almost nothing in the way of hypocrisy in how the product is marketed. These people firmly and deeply believe what they say.

In contrast, products developed by Google are to a larger extent designed and developed through deductive reasoning. Even though Google as a company has an image as being progressive and modern, in the sense that they publicly do not want to be evil, and want to make the world’s information maximally available, their deep commitment to pure deduction and logic prevent the products from truly occupying the spiritual territory that Apple has staked out for itself. (Their approach may, however, have other benefits – this text is not a statement about product quality.)

If we establish a scale from creativity-driven production to deduction-driven production, Apple would be on the far left, Google somewhat to the left of the middle, and the likes of IBM and Microsoft on the far right. The latter two are only minimally concerned with changing consumers’ lives; in fact, it sometimes appears as if these institutions would like to be culturally invisible and project as little as possible. Their products strive to be value transparent.

The role that Steve Jobs and his team occupy, then, is something of what philosophers could be. They are, or appear to be, creators and projectors of values, which include aspects of morality and ethics. And such firmly felt values are in fact what society really wants. Apple goes some way towards filling the gap created by cultural nihilism.

Reason can be understood as man’s ability to think according to precise rules. Logic is one such set of rules: by using axioms and inference rules, we are able to generate vast arrays of valid statements. For instance, we can attempt to prove mathematical truths, or we can work out how to place furniture in a room, or the quickest way of carrying out five different errands in an afternoon.

Two essential functions of reason are finding solutions and validating solutions. In finding solutions, sometimes we apply reason as a search process, that is, we work through a number of combinations until we find one that works, or until we give up. By deduction we can reduce the size of the search space, and sometimes deduction will lead to a result without any search being necessary at all. In validating solutions, we might obtain the proposed solution from anywhere, possibly from outside reason itself, and then, again it is sometimes a search process: we may attempt to find contradictions that invalidate the proposed solution, and we do not always find them immediately. This would be validation by absence of contradictions, but we might also validate a solution affirmatively by using it in a problem. For instance, we can verify that 7 is the square root of 49 by computing 7*7, and it would be useless to verify it by testing that 7*7 does not equal any of the values 1,2,3…48,50,51,52… infinity.

Reasoning is a slow, tedious process, and it can only consider so many possible solutions in a given amount of time. But it is reliable, and the results of different pieces of reasoning can often be composed to yield a larger, consistent result. But it is clear that our minds have other ways of functioning as well, with other strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that reasoning is essentially a reactive process. It reacts to a given problem with given constraints and rules of inference. But it seems to be unable to create. Creativity appears to always come from extralogical, extra-reasonable places. Creativity in the spontaneous sense of a child drawing a picture with crayons, or a novelist writing a book, or an orator using a particularly persuasive combination of words that captures a fleeting feeling, or a commuter taking a different route home from work, out of curiosity. The distinction is not always clear-cut: a decision like choosing the colour of a wallpaper could be done both using “principles” with which one reasons logically, or using a spur of the moment feeling about what is good. It is clear, though, that the two can interact very productively: often a complex mental activity needs a dialogue between reason and extra-reason, and not just in the sense that extra-reason produces a suggestion that reason validates. This seems to be the danger with excessive reliance on rationality and scientific skepticism, then – it risks shutting out the essential extralogical factor and reducing decision making to searching, or from another viewpoint, it risks invalidating the most powerful search heuristic of all.

It seems as if there is a parallel, of sorts, with modern democracy in this distinction. Democracy at the national level, too, is a reactive form of decision making today. It is true that groups of a small or moderate size sometimes can create things collectively, and when they do, it seems to be the case that the form of the group enables individuals to take turns in influencing the group and being responsible towards it: the individuals make serial contributions that layer on top of each other to form the collective contribution. But voters in a national democracy do not have a format that allows this process to take place across the entire group, and the scale is too great. Those who create proposals are smaller subgroups or elites, and the voters are reduced to playing one of the roles that reason can play: affirm or reject proposals. In fact, not even this, since they are typically not asked to affirm every proposal – they are able to stage a revolution if their discontent becomes tremendously large, and otherwise they only have the ability to voice rejection every four years or so. (The exceptional case where very large groups can create something collectively would be when they share a common sentiment very well, for instance in the event of a national crisis.)

The seat of creativity is ultimately in the individual, and not in the collective. When democracies create agendas, goals, projects and proposals, they are not acting democratically, but channeling individual elements within.

This is hopefully the start of a short series of posts in which I attempt to relate the concepts of value and value creation, in particular as they were understood by Friedrich Nietzsche, to the modern world, in some kind of way. Comments of all kinds are encouraged!

In the beginning (understood as ancient Greece), there was philosophy. That is to say, most systematic inquiry into matters worth thinking about was collected under this umbrella term. Ethics, politics, epistemology and metaphysics went side by side with physics, biology and astronomy. As millennia passed, the collective human knowledge and scholarly labour grew, and some philosophical disciplines got their own name, cut the umbilical cord, and got to stand on their own feet.

There are many definitions as to what a philosopher is; one definition would be those who study the academic subject of philosophy in academic institutions. The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at length about what a philosopher really is; in his definition a philosopher is someone who creates values. Nietzsche rejected morals and universal truth as laid down by a God or higher authority; instead they are created by subjective human beings, and by philosophers in particular.

Perhaps [the genuine philosopher] himself must have  been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and also poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and moralist and seer and “free spirit” and almost everything in order to pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings [...] But all these are merely preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different – it demands that he create values.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, s. 211, Walter Kaufmann transl.)

We may understand a scholar to be a person who processes knowledge. Good scholarship entails marshalling what has been written and studied previously, perhaps with a view to settling a question or supporting a perspective. Scientists and philosophers can make use of scholars in their work. To the extent that the scholar does more than merely process knowledge, he or she is something more than a scholar.

In contrast, a scientist, as we understand him or her today, is someone who combines scholarship and primary investigation (in the form of calculation, experimentation, measurement and so on) in order to create models of nature and the world, in order to gain the power to explain. The classical scientific process involves repeated refinement of hypotheses until one that cannot be proven wrong has been found.

Today, science, which formerly was known as natural philosophy, has grown enormously large, and to most people probably appears to have much greater value than philosophy. The scientific mindset is widely appreciated and respected throughout the world — perhaps too respected. Scientists learn as one of their highest virtues to be skeptical and to reject assertions that are made without a basis in measurement or theory. Paralysis by skepticism is very much a possibility. To see the danger in this, we have to recognise that a great deal of valuable things in human history have been created without such a basis – by people who have been something like the ones Nietzsche describes.

The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” – so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. [...]

Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of god. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher”, it hardly means more than “prudently and apart”.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, s. 205, Walter Kaufmann transl.)

In fact, scientists today do not, in my experience, work like the ideal scientist described above. Scientists often use their own judgment and their own values in order to influence how their science is to be used. Einstein and Oppenheimer had opinions about the use and misuse of the nuclear bomb. Creators of vaccine may have opinions on how it is to be distributed and may be able to influence this. Sometimes these value statements made by scientists are pure judgments, applications of an ethic that the scientists already believe in. However, sometimes the situation is so new that the scientists effectively have to create values. To the extent that they do this, these scientists dabble in ethics, morality and philosophy, but this is often overlooked, as is the fact that scientific method itself was created by philosophy.

Nietzsche calls for philosophers to make use of scientists and artists, and create values in the service of mankind. He calls for a new recognition of the true role and dignity of philosophy, which does not at all need to mean a reduction of the value of science, but rather an expansion of the whole system. Philosophy stands naturally above science and scholarship and uses them as its tools. The activity of creating values based on philosophical insight by necessity goes on constantly and should not be confined to little nooks in the margins of society. The full extent of and need for this activity needs to be acknowledged.

Has the situation changed since Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil in 1886?

2. Skyscrapers in Ootemachi, Tokyo and the City, London. Buildings belonging mostly to banks and insurance companies. They appear, on some intuitive level, to have been there forever, though most of these buildings can now be built from the ground up in less than a year. It is hard to fathom how they could ever be destroyed, though the work could be done in a matter of months (?) with the right equipment.

3. What is permanent? Anything that we cannot perceive as changeable, we call permanent. But this is a linguistic and epistemological error. The inability to perceive something has led us to declare its absence.

4. The earth. 5.9736 x 10^24 kg of matter, likely fused into a planet about 4.54 billion years ago. The sun will enter a red giant phase in about 5 billion years and swallow or cause tremendous damage to it. The sun is also currently the source of all fossilised energy on earth and the energy used by most life forms on it.

5. A certain class of mathematical proofs often consist in converting facts from one basis (family of concepts) to another. Such proofs often have a hamburger-like structure: first the initial facts are rewritten into a larger, more complex formulation that suits both the assumptions and the conclusion, and then the complex formulation is collapsed in such a way that the desired results come out and the original formulation is lost. The “beef” in such a proof often consists in carrying out the correct rewriting process in the middle.

6. Facebook takes off and becomes enormously popular, in part because it facilitates, on a huge scale, something that human beings want to do naturally. Communication and the need to relate to crowds and individuals could be said to be universal among humans.

An incomplete version of the technology lattice, as suggested in this post, with human desires at the top and the resources available in the universe at the bottom.

7. We can imagine technology as a lattice-like system that mediates between the human being, on one hand, and the universe on the other. As a very rough sketch of fundamental human needs, we could list drives like communication, survival/expansion, power/safety and art. (In fact, an attempt to make some of these subordinate to others would constitute an ethical/philosophical system. Here we do not need such a distinction, and the one I have made is arbitrary and incomplete.) When we place our fundamental drives on one end, and the resources and conditions provided by the universe on another – elements and particles, physical laws and constants – we can begin to guess how new technologies arise and where they can have a place. The universe is a precondition of the earth, which is a precondition of animals and plants, which we currently eat. And food is currently a precondition of our survival. But we can imagine a future in which we are not dependent on the earth for food, having spread to other planets. We can imagine a future in which oil and nuclear power are no longer necessary as energy sources, because something else has taken their place. New possibilities entering the diagram like this adds more structure in the middle – more beef – but the motivating top level and the supplying bottom level do not change perceptibly. (Of course, if they did, beyond our perception, they could be made part of an even larger lattice with a new bottom and top configuration.)

8. Technology is a means to the establishment of permanence, and a re-encoding of human desires into reality.

9. New technologies arise constantly. But can this evolutionary process go on forever? Does the lattice converge towards a final state?

So I would like to, probabilistically, maximise my set of skills in order to best be able to achieve some kind of ambition I have set for myself. Cutting off my hand will probably not help me, but learning arabic might. Being in a car crash is unlikely to be helpful, but being a marathon runner could conceivably be useful. Both involve pain, but one causes irreversible damage, the other causes an increase of strength if done properly. What is the ideal form of schooling for children (If we take the unlikely view that the purpose of schools is teaching things)? That which increases their ability the fastest, which is to say, the most difficult knowledge, the fastest speed of teaching that they can possibly cope with. The maximum trajectory that they can sustain without losing the grip or their interest in the subject.

Should I do the same in life, then? Probably, but it gets tricky, because life experiences that promise to teach me a lot are often unfamiliar, or dangerous, or otherwise involve pain. As we have seen, it is not the case that pain equals learning, but pain can be strongly correlated with learning. To be more precise: if I become crippled in a car crash, or by cutting off my hand, it is because I received stimuli from directions and with intensities that I could not withstand. Provoke me at a slowly building rate, and I will learn to deal with the provocations and perhaps bite back. Provoke me really hard and really fast from the start, and I will die. And then there are provocation vectors to which individuals cannot adapt in a single generation, for instance, drowning. Species might adapt to this kind of threat over several generations. Is not life precisely that which adapts to changing circumstances, potentials and provocations, in particular potential threats or benefits? But intelligent animals, like humans, are a special form of life. We can select what experiences to undergo, and thus what training to receive. This is how we can consciously adapt in advance when we expect a difficult situation. (Young animals play in order to train themselves for adult behaviour, but this kind of training has been conditioned by evolution over many generations. Are there any animals that train selectively to face threats that they have identified during the same generation, like humans do?)

It is a fact that we cannot predict all the circumstances that we will find ourselves in throughout our lives. So we cannot predict what skills or strengths we will need either. Any one who has some kind of ambition in life has no way of establishing completely beyond doubt that their ambition will come true. They can only work towards reducing uncertainty.

At this point a number of different attitudes emerge. One could take the view that “Life is nothing but suffering. We must learn to cope with it.” Subsequently one could teach that suffering is a thing in the mind, and that training the mind to absorb suffering without feeling pain or becoming upset is our best hope. Either that, or reduce the ambitions so as to be frustrated less often. The goal of this ambition reduction is zero ambition, zero desires and zero expectations. With this mindset, you can never be let down. Nullified resistance, maximum fluidity.

Another view: life presents us with challenges, some of which we may overcome, some of which it is pointless to even try overcoming. A “pragmatist” view that tries to establish a middle ground. Some suffering is worth resisting, some is too much. People taking this view have some degree of resistance, but also a breaking point at which they would accept that “life is hard” and bend according to the circumstances of fate. Maybe they would also be opportunist and take their chances for easy gains when they can, to get revenge on life.

And finally, let’s look at the other extreme view. Nietzsche also said, perhaps slightly less famously, that “only to the extent that man has resisted, has he lived.” If I take this view, that I should resist adverse circumstances maximally and have my way in life, I must handle the problem mentioned at the beginning of this post — I cannot predict the circumstances that will befall me. No matter how strong I am, it is likely that there will be some set of circumstances that might destroy my aims completely, and me in the process. But let’s say that I take the view that some outcomes are less likely than others. I buy into some form of probability, for instance I think that five dice are less likely to all have the number four facing up than they are to not end up in this configuration. What choices should I make to maximise my ability to resist, given that some choices actually do make me stronger?

300. HOW FAR EVEN IN THE GOOD THE HALF MAY BE MORE THAN THE WHOLE. — In all things that are constructed to last and demand the service of many hands, much that is less good must be made the rule, although the organiser knows what is better and harder very well.He will calculate that there will never be a lack of persons  who can correspond to the rule, and he knows that the middling good is the rule. — The youth seldom sees this point, and as an innovator thinks how marvelously he is in the right and how strange is the blindness of others. (Helen Zimmern transl.)

Friedrich Nietzsche did not describe software making – I can only assume that he was describing authors and ideologists – but this seems to capture the difficulties of software development only too well. And it seems to give a recipe for how to overcome the communication difficulties (abandon exotic, over-refined solutions and focus on an easily understood middle ground, so that everybody can get together and comprehend the architecture). This was originally published in 1886.

With that, merry christmas!