Campbell’s law, evolutionary epistemology
The notion that measurement can directly affect the phenomena being examined is a major issue arising out of quantum mechanics with the problematized measurer/observer.
Kinda fascinated by the law named after this dude:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
(e.g. high stakes testing advocated in No Child Left Behind.)
It would seem the act of applying quantitative measurement is laden with contingencies in a number of contexts.
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A social scientist, Campbell is also known for coining the term ‘evolutionary epistemology,’ an approach which applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge.
That knowledge collapses onto ever evoloving cognitive abilities (based on ultimately biological thought organs) makes sense to me.
The idea that any epistemology could have an unchanging ground strikes me as stupid. There is no static ground for knowledge (unless we were to grow a knowledge organ and/or tap knowledge beyond the biological realm).
Recursive Life
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British programmer Aimee Trescothick has figured out how to log into Second Life from within Second Life (via).
Lyric – Let the Beat Ride
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technology as reflection of internal structures
“The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of
technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human”
-John Naisbitt
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This blog post about a paper comparing the structure of cities to the structure of the human mind has me wondering if a larger trend will soon unravel:
that the design of technology across the board is the reflection of existing internal structures within the human organism.
An excerpt from the study’s abstract:
Because both cities and brains are under selection pressures to make their connections efficiently, we investigate the hypothesis that the organization of city highway networks and the mammalian neocortex may be governed by common principles. Here we measure how city highway networks vary with city size and find that, consistent with the hypothesis, highway networks scale with exponents nearly identical to those found for the analogous quantities in the neocortex.
As we delve further into the logic of our own design and the logic of the technologies we create (computer software/hardware, cities, economic markets), I think it will be laid bare that technology exists within the same chain of evolving and increasing complexity that we find ourselves a part of.
That what we understand as Darwinian forces reach well beyond the biological domain and that the ‘common principles’ that animate our evolution are not fully understood.
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Related links:
-Link to article (pdf): “Common Scaling Laws for City Highway Systems and the Mammalian Neocortex”
-Evolution 2.0: On the origin of technologies (NewScientist)
-Jonah Lehrer on moving to Los Angeles
8 bit trip
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(via)
Kolakowski on the cultural role of philosophy
Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski died a last month.
I really haven’t read a lot of his stuff, but the stuff I have read has been very smart and very dense.
I dig this quote on the cultural role of philosophy (from here):
In a noted lecture in 1982, Mr. Kolakowski said the cultural role of philosophy was “never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense” and “never to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it.”
