The Dead Law December 20, 2008

by pegleghippie

This isn’t going anywhere in particular, its just an interesting idea.  I worked this idea into a few government papers at the end of the semester, and I was reminded of it while reading this post by Bing, where he discusses the transient nature of language, and how writing something down ties it to an in-transient document.

Basically, the law, our written laws, are dead.  That doesn’t mean they don’t matter, however, cause they’re still there, taking up space the way a corpse takes up space.  

How is the law dead?  Well when a law is written, it is in reaction to something, some event or concern, that was necessarily raised before the law was written.  In other words, laws account for the past.   And not even the entire past, but one particular moment in the past for each particular law.  Let me simplify: when something happens that our legislators think is sufficiently important, we enshrine that moment, and our collective reaction to that moment, on paper.  

Ok, so the law isn’t forward-looking, so what?  Well look at Bing’s post again, particularly the part about transience.  The world isn’t broken up into distinct moments, time doesn’t start and stop.  Rather, things just keep going.  All the time.  Laws are one of the ways that we say, “hey, look what happened there!  Isolate that period of time.  But time keeps going anyway. So, as time keeps going, we’re left with this law on this paper, continually reminding us of a time that isn’t now.

The Law is a leftover, a “corpse,” if you will, of the past.  In this light, maybe laws aren’t the expression of morals that we often think of them as.  And if that’s the case, that means we aren’t moral people simply by following the law. Instead, being moral is something that we always have to strive for, always do better at than before.  We’re never done being ‘moral.’  

But back to the law.  Is the law a cumbersome corpse, getting in the way because it can’t be constantly ‘becoming,’ the way our lives come into being continuously?  No, instead the law is a-moral, that is, free from moral weight.  It does present moral ideas though, things that we can consider when making decisions.  All of our decisions are based on what we know of the past anyway, ignoring what we wrote down about the past doesn’t free us of that limitation.  

So the law is dead, and can’t be said to give us a moral code.  It does provide some thoughts for behavioral guidance, however.  It’s a corpse, but a very interesting corpse to examine.   And that’s it.  That’s enough continental politics for the night.  Now go out, think carefully about your ethical actions, and break any laws that you decide don’t measure up with a clear conscious.

Venting about Humanity November 24, 2008

by pegleghippie

*sigh*

This semester has done a lot to make me better relate to my fellow humans.  I’ve gotten to know people who think very much like I do, which is a nice validation for my sanity.  I’ve also gotten to know people who think very differently from me, and I’ve come to really appreciate the multitude of perspectives.  Now I’ve been surrounded by people with different views my whole life, but only recently have I come to not be so concerned with bringing those people closer to my perspective.

But recently, and especially tonight, I’ve felt that many of my peers have been less-than-hospitable, less than open to the very diversity that lets me be open to them.

I’m speaking of my involvement in the Student Government.  This is not a strictly political post, but some of the conservatives in SGA have been… irritating.  Last week two of my fellow senators voted against supporting an anti-genocide group on campus, even though there was no required cost or time involvement in the bill.  One senator said he voted against it because “psshh, I don’t care about Darfur.”  I don’t know if that’s true or not, I do know that he has a bit of a grudge against the senator who wrote the bill for his various legislative shenanigans and over-the-top personality.  He went through the rest of the meeting groaning and making a scene every time anything happened that failed to meet his approval. 

The other one who voted against it did so because he’s a libertarian, and doesn’t believe that the rest of the world is any of our business.  As frustrating as that position may be, it’s not necessarily an antagonistic view.  Tonight, however, this same senator used a procedural, political trick to kill a bill before we could discuss it.  We used to have certain rules in place that kept this from happening, but we removed those rules because they were unwieldy, and we collectively decided that we trusted each other enough to commit to honest debate, instead of dirty tricks.  Now there’s talk of bringing back the more unwieldy, less charitable procedures.  I feel that if we need rules to protect ourselves from dick moves, even in something as informal as a group of college peers, then we replace the opportunity for human connection with legalize and impersonal procedure.

In an effort to not just be down on conservatives, there’s another guy whose politics I largely agree with, but who has a dick side of his own.  He has this habit of giving arguments against something that we’ve done after we’ve done it.  I’m not sure why these objections don’t come up during debate.  Maybe he wants us to feel that we’ve made a mistake for some reason, or maybe he’s just releasing steam, but it makes this normally intelligent person look like a dumbass with no sense of timing. He also continually comes up with fun ideas, does nothing to think out the idea or research the consequences, then gets upset when he gets shot down.  On both of these annoying habits, I guess he just doesn’t like getting input from other people, and that really bothers me.  It seems so close-minded. 

The reason these minor things have got me down is two-fold:  First, these events are just recent examples of long term behavior that has slowly gotten under my skin.  Second, in my Peace and Conflict class, we’ve been discussing the need for forgiveness after a genocide, how to forgive is to acknowledge the past without assigning blame or identifying current people with past atrocities.  

From what I can tell, the peace process never moves forward without some level of forgiveness.  The only exceptions are when one side annihilates the other, leaving no one to be reconciled to (like the Native Americans), and when conflicting groups are sufficiently geographically separated and militarily repressed (the various factions of the Balkans are now organized into homogeneous regions).  

The ability to forgive is the ability to assume the best in a person, to see them as human, and give them all the respect that “human-ness” entails.  So it’s a bit depressing when a group of college students, coming from more-or-less similar economic and cultural backgrounds, fail to conceive of each other in such respectful terms.  If we, of all people, can’t treat each other decently, how are the victim’s of genocide and international calamity going to embrace decency?  It takes a lot of trust to break political cycles of violence and repression, and right now, I just don’t see enough trust in my fellow humans to make the future any better than today.

My conservative peer’s childish behavior, my libertarian peer’s use of politics as a weapon, and my liberal peer’s distaste for other’s opinions, all display a lack of respect for “the other.”  This is all just as I begin to really understand this concept of respect, and really start to pursue connecting to very different people in a meaningful way.  

I’ve always been told that I act more open-minded than most, and that my indifference towards cultural norms and biases are something special.  I don’t see why it’s special though.  Liking people, all people, shouldn’t be difficult or idealistic.  It should be the expected response to otherness, the state of mind that grown-ups adopt in order to live in a world that is both functional and worthwhile.  

Waking Life November 14, 2008

by Pegleghippie

I have a new favorite movie.  It’s called Waking Life, a 2001 film by Richard Linklater, and I’m a little jealous that it exists, because that means that I don’t get to be the creator of such an awesome piece of art.  

Honestly, I was beaten at philosophy tonight.  I didn’t know it was a competition until this film came along and totally kicked my ass.  Now I know a little more about the stakes involved.

Waking Life follows a guy as he has various philosophical discussions with/dreams about writers, philosophers, psychopaths, crackpots, filmmakers, imaginative figments, and one very pissed off libertarian.  Many of these are real people really being interviewed about their area of expertise (oddly, many are faculty from the University of Texas at Austin), but the interviews flow seamlessly between real and imagined.

And imagination is really very important here.  The protagonist spends a long segment of the film not knowing if he is awake or dreaming, and the settings only subtly clue you in.  Eventually he becomes aware that he is in a lucid dream, which turns into a bizarre series of dreams-within-dreams, and the discussions turn increasingly towards what a dream-like reality entails.  Things end with the suggestion that all these dreams are the last firing of consciousness before the protagonist dies, but the narrative is unclear about whether this actually happens.

I can’t accurately summarize everything I loved about this movie.  Top of the list is the conversations, which are consistently mind-blowingly well thought out.  Here’s one example of an earlier one:

Insane, right?  and there are dozens of these, on a wide variety of topics, in the movie.  You could teach a course on this movie alone, going topic by topic, exploring each one for all that it’s worth.

Next thing I loved was the animation.  I’m sure you noticed from the first clip, this movie looks strange.  The style changes at least every scene, and often in the middle of a scene.  The strangeness of dreams is very well captured here.

I’ll admit, if you don’t like philosophy you will not like this movie.  Fortunately for me, I love philosophy, and this movie challenges me in ways I had not even considered.  I need to get a copy of it and watch it until I’m comfortable with the discussions.  Only then will I feel qualified to really engage with all these topics, and to conceptualize exactly what it is that Linklater did here.  

If you do like philosophy, even a little bit, see this movie.  I doubt you will regret it, and it may even change your life.

This may be all over the place… November 6, 2008

by pegleghippie

So recent events (the election last night, playing guitar hero tonight) have crossed with my philosophy classes in my mind to form some ideas that I want to sort out.  I will do my best to connect the ideas in some way, but no promises.  I’m telling myself I’m writing this for an audience because I think they’ll find it interesting, but there’s just as much of a chance that I’m writing this to talk to myself, in a way (sorry, I’ve been reading about deconstruction, and ever since I’ve had the nasty habit of deconstructing whatever I’m writing as I’m writing it.  I’ll do my best to refrain from here on out.)

Anyway, first a take on my favorite obscure philosopher, Bataille.  Specifically his view of consciousness.  Normally I don’t like the consciousness debate, but his views lead to some fun philosophy.  Bataille was a fan of the “pre-reflective consciousness,” also known as “lack of self-awareness,” or as he termed it, “theopathy.”  What he was talking about is traditionally understood as the idea of a mystical experience, like zen, or transcendence, or buddhist enlightenment.  

I don’t mean to sound like i’m spreading woo. All through history people have found themselves feeling connected to things greater than themselves, to the point where they stop self-analyzing and just interact with the experience.  Similarly, people have spent lifetimes trying to get back to that experience, and often tied the experience into the supernatural.  Supernatural causes weren’t really what Bataille was into, instead he found these moments in deviant sexuality, like BDSM, but also in simple things, like smoking a cigarette, or taking a coffee break.  

I break from Bataille in a few ways.  First, why is this state is so important? I’ve had plenty of “transcendent” moments in life, some purposeful and as Sometimes accidental.  Sometimes its meaningful, sometimes it is just fun. At the same time there are plenty of moments where I really enjoy being self-aware.  Consciousness, much of the time, is pretty sweet!

Second, I think that maybe this is a matter of degree.  You’re aware of yourself, but you don’t have to think about your heart, or you liver.  Unless something goes wrong, in which case your awareness has expanded. I guess that isn’t so sweet.  But this illustrates where I’m going with the degree thing.  

Stick with me here.  Imagine the pre-reflective state of mind, going along its own business, fitting into the pattern of some larger whole.  Suddenly, something appears to the consciousness that doesn’t fit the pattern.  Like getting heart burn, suddenly the consciousness has to account for something that is just weird, something that takes an analysis to deal with.  If the pre-reflective consciousness is to successfully account for the discrepancy, it will have to define itself in relation to the discrepancy.

Ok, now imagine yourself, everything you are aware of, and everything around you that you are not aware of.  You’re self aware, but you aren’t aware of your intestines, because your intestines fit a larger pattern.  When something starts to hurt, you analyze things so you can experience a more comfortable level of awareness.

I’m going to leave the different levels behind now.  This is where things get strange, but at the same time I don’t think I’m writing anything you don’t know here.  The intestine pain isn’t really without a pattern.  It’s not random, it has a cause, say evil bacteria, and fits into a larger pattern of Earth’s biology that is just too complex for the human mind to fully recognize.  A self-aware consciousness is just a consciousness capable of admitting that the pattern we think we are a part of is just a simplification of larger, more complex patterns.  

I thought of this playing guitar hero (I know, I know, I should be studying).  Think of a beat in a song.  now imagine a guitar playing along with the beat.  Suddenly, the guitar plays something quick, something that doesn’t seem to fit the beat, just for a moment.  Of course, if it’s a well written song, it does fit into the overall math of the music.  But it gets our attention because we’re experiencing the beat, and we don’t imagine that the songwriter planned anything more complex than that.  

Now to the next level: to go with the following example, Say maybe we pick up an instrument, or learn some musical theory, and then the change in the song doesn’t surprise us anymore.  This would mean that the pattern we’re experiencing is more complex than before, we’ve expanded our pre-reflective consciousness.

So the reflective consciousness allows us to expand the range of our pre-reflective consciousness.  It’s a cyclical relationship, both feeding the other, and oftentimes both go on simultaneously.  Should we see one as the goal?  I don’t think so.  Maybe it’s important to know the difference between analyzing something and experiencing something, but I don’t think we should be so dualistic about the two concepts.  

I may have had a transition to this next part when I started this, but I’m not seeing it now.  Oh well, you get two posts in one!  Don’t worry, this part is shorter.

Now, a word on Democracy.  I’ve long wondered why we don’t qualify democracy as simply a political committal of the ad populum fallacy.  Ad populum, for the record, is the fallacy of arguing that a position is correct because lots of people hold that position.  The problem is, of course, that all those people can be wrong.  Importantly, even everyone ever could be wrong about a position.  So we appeal to a different set of standards.  

Democracy, at its most basic, involves asking everyone what side of a position they think is right, and then taking action based on which side has the most people behind it.  It’s like the perfect illustration of the ad populum fallacy.  As long as we’re talking about right and wrong, I don’t see any way around it, really.  Democracy is inherently illogical.

At the same time, democratic governments are more peaceful, richer, and advance faster than any other form of government humanity has tried.  Philosophically, only an idealistic anarchy seems more equatorial, more focused on humanism, in short, more legitimate than the democratic attempt to make political decisions that benefit a polity.  Additionally, people like democracy.  If a group comes to a democratic decision, the minority may grumble, but they usually go along with the decision.  

So how to explain this divide?  We have logic so we can make smart decisions, yet our best political tool for making decisions is illogical.  

We do what good philosophers always do.  We challenge the assumptions.  A couple paragraphs back, I just described the democratic process as  “asking everyone what side of a position they think is right, and then taking action based on which side has the most people behind it.”  Why the assumption that Democracy is settling a question of right and wrong?  Can we still have democracy if we ignore questions of truth at the ballot box?

I think we can.  Instead of looking for a right, I propose that the democratic process is asking everyone what experiences, given society’s limited resources, should society pursue for its members, and in what manner, and then taking action based on which path the most people prefer.  Logic only enters into the equation for the “choosing the manner” part of things.

 Because of limited resources and limited time, we can’t afford to make universal proclamations about right and wrong. We can only compare our plans, argue and compromise about them, and, once it’s time to make a decision, use democratic machinery to pick a path.  An advantage of democracy is that since people are involved in the decision making process, previous decisions that led to unwelcome experiences serve as a feedback loop, and the next vote goes differently than the previous one.

So to sum up, the line between simple awareness and self-awareness is fuzzy at best, and Democracy isn’t logical, but we should stick with it anyway, cause it’s not about logical decisions.  Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

What I wrote for POMO October 9, 2008

by pegleghippie. 

I know it seems i don’t write anymore, but its just that I’ve been writing a shitload for school.  Wednesday I wrote three papers.  Yeah.  Three.  and they kicked ass.  I write a small novel’s worth of material on a weekly basis.

Anyway, since I don’t have much time to blog, I thought I’d post my class notes from one of my philosophy classes.  Take it as you will.

So in this class we talked mostly about Bataille, who is pretty much a mascot for us at this point. 

We started out with how the crush freaks are performing animal sacrifice, and how this was just a modern version of what ancient cultures did.  We also talked about how Bataille described sado-machochism is modern human sacrifice, while more generally, deviant sexuality is filling a general religious role.  This lead to Cs’ weird thought:

“Reproduction of [the crush freaks video] is like printing the bible.  The bug is the Christ figure”

I think C may be onto something here.  While sure, it is pretty much pornos being produced, the only reason there is a market for these videos is because people are feeling that sort of transcendent connection to these bugs, they’re identifying with them. 

This led us to discussing the sacrificial nature of the religious experience, with R saying,

“religion is the destruction of the individual” 

What he meant was that the individual gets lost in the group and the experience.  Animal sacrifice serves as a nice metaphor for this since it involved something very valuable being given up.  We talked about the meaning of the word “sacrifice,” and how it denoted loss automatically.  To emphasize the sense of identity, and not just property, that was lost, Dr. T said, 

“the property has to be so valuable that losing it is a loss of at least some self.”

This reminds me of the story of Cain and Able in the old testament, where Cain’s sacrifice is deemed unworthy by Jahweh because it was second rate property.

3One day, Cain gave part of his harvest to the LORD, 4and Abel also gave an offering to the LORD. He killed the first-born lamb from one of his sheep and gave the LORD the best parts of it. The LORD was pleased with Abel and his offering,5but not with Cain and his offering. This made Cain so angry that he could not hide his feelings.  6The LORD said to Cain:

 

   What’s wrong with you? Why do you have such an angry look on your face? 7If you had done the right thing, you would be smiling. ^[c] But you did the wrong thing, and now sin is waiting to attack you like a lion. 

(Genesis 4:3-4.7, Contemporary English version, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%204;&version=46;)

Dr. T mentioned a similar story from Hinduism: it seems that the idea of sacrifice being a valuable personal loss is prevalent across religions.  This supports Bataille’s idea that sacrifice is an attempt to escape oneself and to connect to something more continuous.

We also talked about a paradox with regards to objectification:  Being objectified violates our sense of self, and makes us feel less-than-subjective.  At the same time, our own subjectiveness only emerges when we have an objective sense to define it against.  An “I” and a “not I.”  This is the uncomfortable part of consciousness, which led us to desire.

Desire arises when our undifferentiated consciousness (which does not suffer the objective paradox) experiences the addition of objectivity.  Slipping in and out of this “auto-hypnosis,” this “Bhudda mind,” we go about our lives.  Dr. T said there were a few different ways to do this:

 “War is a form of sacrifice.  So is capitalism, which is basically consumerism.  Consuming is a form of sacrifice.”

The mention of economics led us to discuss Bataille’s concepts of economy.  K already posted on this, but basically he defined a general economy, with infinite consumption, contrasted with a restricted economy where the consumers are aware of limits.  He was more interested in how different cultures made use of their excess resources than with how they dealt with scarce resources.  

This led to mentioning the idea of pot latch, where native americans would either give something away or destroy it.  We talked about how eating something was destroying it, and how a pot luck in modern times did pretty much the same thing.  

T then asked:

“isn’t all this desire talk a new foundation?” [remember, pomo is anti-foundationalist]

to which Dr. T responded,

“Bataille is like walking into a junkyard.  We are playing with these ideas, don’t be so serious.”

I’ve actually been thinking that the philosophy we’ve been looking at has a non-serious attitude to it.  A lack of seriousness doesn’t mean we don’t work hard, that we don’t accomplish what we set out to do, or that we dismiss other people.  

But nothing has to get us so worked up that we start defining ourselves by it permanently.  It also means we don’t have much room for regret in our lives.  Whatever we do, whatever we philosophize about, it is neither significant nor insignificant.  It’s just something we do, or something we did, that is if we remember it at all.  So when we are aware, we shouldn’t fear enjoying ourselves,  or jumping headfirst into whatever comes our way, cause, in the end, what are we worried about?

What about this idea of a non-serious approach to philosophy?  Can an attitude undermine our field, or does it make philosophy less boring, more engaging?  Are there any consequences to light-heartedness that we should take seriously, and if so, why?

Geez do we still exist? September 18, 2008

by pegleghippie

Sorry for not writing anything in forever. I get ideas and concepts and then i get tired and fall asleep. Don’t ask me what Mekhami’s excuse is for not posting.

But not tonight! Ok just a quickie, but i’m going to do a few different posts on post-modernism, and why you shouldn’t hate it (i’m looking at you Bing). So here’s my first thought:

The postmodern critique has largely been accepted and integrated by different fields. By postmodern critique i mean the old idea that we can’t ever really be sure of anything, and that input from our senses is no guarantee of truth. Pomo goes one step farther by positing that it’s unlikely that our senses work the same was as anyone else’s senses, so what seems absolutely right and true to one just doesn’t add up to another.

Scientists has accepted this by saying that empirical observation never proves anything, and that questions of any notion of ‘truth’ cannot be resolved by the scientific method. Rather, science categorizes and analyzes observation, nominally to make use of those observations.

Mathematicians have accepted the same critique by viewing math as a system, rather than as a picture of reality, the way Pythagorus did when he claimed that everything was numbers.

Engineers have accepted it by, well

It’s similar for artists:

So what’s the resistance? If everyone is pretty much ok with nothing being for sure, then why is there a problem with postmodernism? I have an answer.

Pomo goes a bit beyond just demanding that everyone admit they aren’t sure about reality. Pomo asks that we act based on values that deal with that uncertainty. In other words, because we don’t know if we are right or not (nor, in the case of pomo, do we really care), we have to be humble and accepting when we encounter views different from our own. It isn’t really fair to call someone an idiot anymore, since there’s no definite standard to judge idiocy by.

So take science. Science is often associated with enlightenment values (humanism, individualism, secularism, and of course, respect for the scientific method as a means of making decisions) and someone with a scientific view of the world is likely to hold these values. So when a scientist meets, say, a fundamentalist christian (who at best only partly holds a few of these values), the scientist is going to see the christian failing at living up to all these values (particularly the last one about the scientific method) and is going to dismiss the fundie as a moron.

So it only makes sense that when a postmodernist comes along and says to the scientist, “be hospitable! Try to see where the fundie is coming from, and look for common ground so that you can be useful to each other!” the scientist is going to get a little pissed. After all, it takes a lot of work by a lot of committed people to build the scientific body of knowledge, this fundie doesn’t recognize any of it, and on top of that this philosopher is telling him/her they have to give a rats ass about this person?  “I’m right and I’m the only one who has any proof!” he/she might say.  

I’m sorry, but technically, you don’t have proof.  You can’t.  What you can do is try to navigate the absurd, ambiguous web of human relationships in a non-inflammatory way, by recognizing your own limits.  Now is that so objectionable?

Of course, if the fundie doesn’t reciprocate with similar open-mindedness, that’s a whole different issue.   Maybe i’ll do conflict in another post, but what it boils down to is, “winning the conflict doesn’t make you any more right than anything else. Please try not to kill anybody, but do what you think you gotta do anyway.”

So that’s it for tonight: POMO in terms of action-values.  I’ve been cooking something up regarding democracy, should be exciting.

Burning Quick and Loving it August 28, 2008

by pegleghippie

Classes are hard.  And I mean harder than they’ve been in the past.  All of my time has been devoted to class related activities for the last few days, and when I take a break to do something else, I fall behind.  That’s right, its the first week and I’m already behind.

At the same time, this may be the most enjoyable combination of classes that I’ve ever had.  Four of my five classes pertain to either my major or one of my minors, and I think all four of those are going to be memorable and exciting.  The fifth (economics) isn’t too bad either–I like the professor, I’m interested in the subject matter, and comparatively, it’s my easy class.

I transfered out of a useless public speaking class and into a government class taught by one of my Switzerland professors.  It’s about peace and conflict.  A friend of mine at another school is majoring in conflict resolution, but my school doesn’t offer that, and I figured this class would be the closest I could get. So far it’s involved examinations of how peacekeeping efforts can minimize unpleasant cultural side effects.  That means it’s 30 people discussing how to be peaceful.  It’s classes like this that make me feel like I’m at home in a classroom.

Leadership inspires a lot of what I blog about, and I have two leadership classes this semester.  One has been transformed from it’s regular approach of teaching how change works socially to examining the presidential race (you know, cause change is Obama’s slogan).  The other is on the history of leadership.  So both are about examining politicians and what they did.  Hopefully we still work in lots of leadership theory and methods.

Then I’ve got a class on postmodernist philosophy.  I like it so far, I’m beginning to understand what postmodernism really is (hint:  it’s antifoundationalism).  The class isn’t run like any other class I’ve ever seen.  For the first time ever, I am absolutely sure that psychadelic drugs will improve my work greatly in a class.  They’ll also make it fun as hell, but it’s not the first time that has happened.

So yeah, if I can control all that, all i’ve gotta do is balance in two (maybe three) clubs, a part time job, and being an SGA senator.  Free time and sleep is for underachievers anyway.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I got up this early so I could study (2 chapters of leadership and 3 journal articles in pomo catches me up to today’s assignments.)

Holy shit go see Wall-e right now July 7, 2008

by pegleghippie

 

Know how cars sucked ass?  Well Pixar is back in the game, motherfuckers.  Wall-e totally owned.

 

 Robot fiction, and truly human-like representations of AI are now decidely mainstream after the cute-but-fascinating portrayal of wall-e (The character) and his love interest Eve.

 

 Eve rocked on her own, being completely empowered and multi-dimensional, rather than just being a damsel in distress.

 

And the idea of people overcoming shitty environments to be something greater is a commonplace theme, but what is less commonplace was the philosophical equivalency of trying to survive and enjoying your survival.  When the autopilot says (I’m paraphrasing on this first quote), “this is necessary for survival”, and the captain responds, “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”  he says it all.  Surviving is not enough of a goal for the decisions we make, me must also survive well.  Otherwise, there isn’t much point in accomplishing the first, is there?

 

Quantifying Rationality April 21, 2008

by pegleghippie

This post may be a bit all over the place, and It will definitely be on the heavy side, so strap in now or get out of the car.

Now I know that the motto for this blog is “building irrationality.”  I’m going to do the opposite.  Sorry Mekhami, sorry Teslanaut, but my purpose here is to make the idea of a ‘rational individual’ a little more concrete.

Some of you may see my phrase-choice ‘rational individual’ and think of economics.  Good job!  That’s what I was thinking of too when I came up with these ideas.  Bear in mind that I have not formally studied economics in depth, so the following may be old news, but it’s so specific, and only briefly touches on the field of economics, that I doubt I’ll be committing any Faux Pas’ here.