Inner and outer

Goatsbeard will yellow

  Should we think of prediction as top down, see it as the past making assumptions about the present. Or should we think Saint Teresa of Avila's Inner Castle and explore prediction as the outside dominating the inside.

 There's a good chance none of this makes sense to anyone.

 Prediction is what happens next. You wake up in the morning and the top part of you, the most recent, the youngest bits of your brain, sigh before accessing your more mechanical, more ancient capacities like hearing, sight and smell. 

  Your Top, a relative juvenile, 3 to 4 hundred thousand years old,  knows how to get from it's bed, to the kettle in the kitchen, and on the way there, as an upright and decent male you'd pop outside to point Percy at the Banana Tree - boy pea is very good for the general wellbeing of Banana Plants.

 Your older self - which goes back to those happy years we all spent as air-breathing fish experimenting with furriness, a less imaginative time perhaps dominated by matter of fact mechanical senses, such as hearing, sight and smell - has information for you. It's quite obvious to them that not only has the Banana Tree disappeared, no sign of it ever having existed, but in the kitchen the kettle along with a packet of strong breakfast tea are nowhere to be found.

 Go ahead call this First Monday in September an example of systemic dissonance, the first step into a dystopia of confusion, sadness and possibly some sort of retardation. Or venture into the Inner Castle, re-write the narrative as a message from God. 

  

  

Dewey, the Inference Machine and an objectified populace

Fun With Gravel

  Ages ago, we're talking decades, back when Baxter was a bead in the wicked eye of a lonely aorta, we looked at how neuroscience interpreted aspects of the human way of being, a way of being that specializes in experiencing existence second by second. An existence in play that rebels against the disciplined understandings of working toward a sensible goal, as the painfully correct John Dewey and most all institutions of education would have us believe. 

 We swam around in the rather neat ways of thinking that suggest we people are constantly updating our view of the world, giving it a hard look and then comparing it with what our memory suggests is a view of the world as it was yesterday, or two seconds ago. Within this process we grasped that a mind has a capacity to predict what today - or now - should look like. This prediction emerges from a set of prior understandings, built slowly and often painfully over time and many hours spent in detention or on the dole line. 

 It's that isolated and distant castle that rules all and we had fun with Saint Teresa of Avila's insights into how we navigate our own Interior Castle if we'd ever been foolish enough to plan on a retirement in paradise. 

 Prediction, we tried to assure ourselves, is top down. There's a central control post, a big vein, perhaps a really bossy neuron, it could be a soul wanting to go home, it's a something, and do you know why science argues for a top down prediction of what today should look like. I'll tell you! Top Down is efficient, it saves energy, there's none of this committee libtarding around the Brie cheese and leaving the lights on because Chalky forgot his false teeth!

 Then when the senses, those undeserving underlings start going all Bayes Theory - posh math talk for Bottom Up - the command post, that well dressed sunshine of our lives, can be persuaded to weigh its prior understandings against today's sensory inputs. Staying awake gets expensive while inputs moan and complain, and yes indeed the be and end of all things will need two ham sandwiches followed by a caramel flavored ice cream, dancing girls and a couple of chewable antacids. Either that or a sharpie with which to change the forecast. 

  There are occasions when Bottoms Up - or sensory inputs - achieve what you and I might prefer to call a Sodom Interpretation of what you and I rather pompously call the real world. And when a Sodom interpretation from the cellar presses too mightily on The Top, it can sometimes breach the barrier of priors and when it does, it can be honestly read as social collapse.

 Here there's always a chance the messengers from the bottom will be locked in the strangling cupboard and forgotten, there's a call to the cavalry, and a committee of the ruling class makes laws that allows for the public execution of Luddites. And well worth remembering that far too often, priors with responsibility for the efficiency of accurately predicting today can become totally decoupled from reality. Loopholes help.

  Lucky for us in the underclasses, at the moment we're still allowed to call this sort of irreversible retardation, Systemic Dissonance as we quietly drink ourselves into a stupor and wonder what happened to guilt in a new world of education that's divided work and plays.

  To follow Kant and bring Hume back into the room we can be easily persuaded to believe that we people are inference machines, we never see "the thing in itself," and because we never see "the thing in itself," "the thing in itself" remains a creation of our mind. 

  I was almost four months old when the great educator John Dewey died. He cultivated one of those choir boy pervert middle partings for his hair. He developed his belief in Rational Empiricism while teaching at the University of Chicago which had been founded four years before he joined the faculty. And maybe it's just me but the Chicago School has, I'd argue, despite the passion of their claims to the contrary, always supported a Capitalist Elite and the widgetization - posh talk for objectification - of us people. 

Objects for Property Developers

Mooncarrot Maybe?

  If we're bold enough to question Dewey's assumptions about how we think, an agile yet less aggressively ambitious mind will enter the meanings contained within the word Teleological. Here we encounter the nightmare of teleological ethics and that brotherhood of ass-holes defined by utilitarianism. This so called common sense of backwardness, which when confronted quickly reverts to wishing on the star of deontological ethics......

  "What!"

  The Ancient Greeks, comrade! Happiness is Duty over Outcomes which bled into the Kantian supposition of pretty little rules that turn angels into pedants because, you know, categorical imperative just felt right. And then of course we have to look at the incessant dribble from the crotches of the evolutionary biologists, those owners of a second home in Colorado about whom not much good can be said........

 "Stop! What's wrong with you?"

 First of all Dewey had a depressing enthusiasm for the world Europeans were building north of Mexico and South of Canada. It was the sort of enthusiastic rah-rah that makes the mistake of assuming The Impossible It is on our side. Prelude to New Jerusalem. Golden City on a Hill. Breakfast with Bozo, or whichever one was the monkey. In short we people became objects for Property Developers, there was only one way to be, either a winner or a loser, nothing else mattered because nothing else needed to matter...... 

 "What's the second of all?"

  Call it the Black Prince, The Edward of Woodstock, either a chivalrous knight and brilliant leader of men or a brutal fanatic, depending on whether you share a narrative with Spain, France or England. Edward died in 1376 of what could have been battle fatigue but which was diagnosed as An Inflammation of the Bowels, a dysentery that afflicted him while he was battling The Spaniards and followed him to his deathbed.

The errors in Dewey's end purpose.

There

  More likely, I could well be wrong, yet I'll continue to suggested that in one way or another, John Dewey's approach to the distinctions between work and play figure large in current theories of education. In his How We Think he does rather lay down the law when he touches on the idea that work and play have a connection. The difference is play has no definite order, the thinking wanders, it chases squirrels. Work directs thinking toward particular goals, a teleology is explained by its end purpose.

  Kafka was bored reckless by his work, his nights were spent in a rented room with his pens and paper, looking for moments of ultimate release. He wrote to a friend about the joy he felt when the words became sentences that made him feel. Dylan Thomas was the same. His Black Cat Night spoke, it connected. 

  The trouble with work, is the draw between the difference between what Arendt call work and labor. Like Dewey, work "was thinking toward a goal." As for labor, Arendt saw it as the means to insure the necessities, a task generations of slaves had provided for generations of property owners.

 When a person pins their destiny to a futures market funded by venture capitalists time to reappraise Dewey's  assumptions about "how we think?"