Algorithmizing Sampling Practices

One thing I am trying to do is to complete the linguistic turn, that is, making explicit that there is nothing for humans outside of language, which also means nothing outside of some scene. Thinking of technics as the perfecting of the imperative makes it clear that “language” and “scenes” includes, for example, all ways of generating new ostensives (technologically and scientifically) and all media (as ways of staging scenes). Ethics and morality must also be rolled up into idiomatic intelligence (which is reducible to the selection among possible names on a particular scene), as I have been doing through the concept of grammatical stacking: the reciprocal exhaustability and addressability of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives in the samples you donate to the center. (The center, Godelian-like, is inside and outside language, represented by the oscillation between It and This.) This post will scoop up a couple of additional concepts into the net, and indicate a way forward towards programmability.

The weakening of sacrality has replaced the ritual/narrative form of imperative exchange with the practice/hypothesis one. Ritual and narrative involve a relation to a single scene, in which donations given and gifts received from the center are commensurable. If it ever crosses your mind to, say, promise God that will give up on some sin if He just gets you through this tough situation, you are within the ritual/narrative problematic. This is also the case if you think something like “I’ve played by the rules set up by this social order and I’ve got coming to me a good home, a safe neighborhood, retirement while I’m still young enough to enjoy it,” etc. Our conceptions of justice and fairness still hearken back to the shared ritual scene. But our social orders have not, for a long time, been organized around a sacrificial center. There is a center, and the center distributes, but what the center distributes is not the sum total of what it has taken in; rather, it distributes nexuses where power intersects with responsibility, and needs with abilities—if it, or whoever runs it at the moment, does this badly, it has nothing to do with what any individual deserves, so the best complaint to make is always that you want more power so you can fulfill your responsibilities and you want your needs met in a manner commensurate with your abilities—and you want the same for everyone else (indeed, that is part of your responsibility, and the telos of your abilities), because only if so ordered can anyone’s place be relied upon.

The most minimal way I have of thinking of practices (in a winnowing process going back to Alasdair MacIntyre’s well-known definition) is tasking yourself to approximate conditions under which the results of what you do can be shown to be part of what you do. This makes practice close, but not identical, to technics, and technical examples will be the most accessible: if I set out to build a table, and the table comes out as I imagined it, while I used the time and resources I had planned upon in building it, then we have a “practice.” But language use examples are better for my purposes. Let’s take a simple one, a promise: a practice is not so much keeping your promise, but, first of all, making a promise that, in keeping it, would contribute to creating and preserving the kind of relation to (the scene shared with) the other in a way that only making and keeping a promise (that promise) can. This can be put simply as meaning what you say. Meaning what you say is not so simple, though, because, as David Olson shows, the separation of the two results from literacy, which makes it possible to look at what has been said as a text, and attribute to it meanings the author could not answer for. Following Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and asserting that the effects of literacy only show that what is said and what is meant can never be present to each other is fine with me.

The distance between saying and meaning is a question and problem, though, not just a condition. The author may be dead, but you could strive to speak for the author, to enter his idiom and, of course, do so better or worse—that would be a practice. If you could ridicule someone, you could know what it would mean to not ridicule him. Doing so is always tentative, though, which is to say, hypothetical (undertaken with insufficient data). You have to see, for one thing, whether others will answer you as the author’s stand in. (Will your refusal to ridicule open the floodgates to ridicule that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred?) More important to me is setting the meaning of words to practice. Again, we can start with obvious examples: what does it mean to be “honest,” or “trustworthy”—what do these words mean, here and now? How do you enact honesty or trustworthiness in a way that ramifies across the various media, so that when the results of what you have said and done bounce around for a while through the mouths and hands and devices of others, you can step back into what you have said and done and continue it, or take the next step? All of us would make a lot of mistakes trying to make what we say remain the same over time and space, but constructing a practice entails making this more the case with each sample one donates. Now I can say: the practice of bringing saying into accord with meaning, or of keeping what you say the same as it passes through others, involves saying what contributes to the perfecting of the imperatives that design the scenes upon which your sample will be iterated. My bet is that all ethics and morality can be rolled up thusly.

I’ve been working on the following political concept: primearchical successionism/successionist primearchy. All political problems can be reduced to (and ultimately abolished by) following, in order, whomever is to be followed, and ensuring the transition between whomever is to be followed now to whomever should be followed next. You follow the person currently in charge as if he is the person who stepped up to be in charge and in doing so you both make it more likely that he will be that person and make it possible for him to be proven to be not quite right in such a way as the “criteria” for rightness would be clarified for succession purposes. All political discussions can be rerouted to this practice (there’s no point to concepts that don’t reroute everything into a practice). Approximate the conditions under which some occupant of center will see to the next occupant in perpetuity. Obey better than you are commanded so as to be a reminder of the origin of human order. So, this is a test: how is this to be “languaged”? I’ve already done it: idiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity is PS/SP linguified. Idiom and intelligence apex at the center: the center selects from among possible names of events, scenes, participants, and, in selecting, continues as the center. You select from among idioms for This, some local object of attention, for It, the center that distributes places from which attention can be directed. You make a practice of it so as to facilitate the arrangement of a field of practices by It. The It is enacted by some him whose practice is to ensure it remains the same It—doing so may subvert a lot of good practices across the field, but the hypothesis is that good practices, which provide a fine array of ostensives/names for him/It to select from, can eventually circumscribe a place wherein the apex of idiomatic intelligence successively approximates good practices.

The reason why all decision making can’t be assimilated to technology (after all, the central authority wants to perfect the imperatives he issues) is that technology doesn’t produce unanswerable questions (at least not in any way humans would have to address) but humans engaging with technology do. Selecting from among names is the practicing of modeling declaratives that map over unanswerable questions. This may entail eliciting the unanswerable question lurking behind an answerable one. The unanswerable question is some version of, where is the representation of the scene upon which I issued an unambiguous declarative to the effect that you can impose this set of expectations on me here and now? We can be generous and say this demand retrieves the memory of the originary ritual scene, with its absolute conformity and to that extent equality; so, the response must be to predicate the originary ritual on the event it commemorates and forgets. The question is not being asked of he who is exercising authority but of the It whom the question imagines adjudicates between us. So, the question already acknowledges that which it questions—if you think the It (center) has been poorly preserved, instantiated, represented or enacted, fine, but that’s a very different kind of (answerable) question, which would turn into something like “how can we perfect this infrastructure of imperatives?” (The more I think about technics, the more I think to make all my concepts interoperable with each other.)

I would like to create a computer program that would translate text into Anna Wierzbicka’s primes, assess that translation in accord with stacking protocols based on model sentences comprised of primes and their possible combinations, resulting in a series of retranslated versions of the original text that approximate, in different degrees and different ways, model-sentence style discourse. This would be a way of using algorithmic governance to heighten ethical and moral reasoning. I have no computing skills and no intention to acquire them in the near future, so someone who does would have to get interested, which means, I suppose, it would have to be either profitable or to pose an irresistibly fascinating problem for someone. But it might even suffice as a hypothesis—a kind of technological sublime. The core of the project would be turning Wierzbicka’s primes into a kind of elementary moral idiom, with enough sentences of various types (imperatives, interrogatives, and exclamations—which would function as ostensives) so that unlimited recombinations would be possible. The idiom would be comprised of little moral “profiles”—relations between wanting things, seeing things, hearing things, knowing things, doing things, and so on, and saying things are good, or can be good, or not. The sentences in the original translation (in Wierzbicka’s analyses of individual words, she always arrives at an exhaustive “translation,” but translating sentences and texts would be a different matter, and one might program for various translations) would be converted into the sentences and their combinations available in the elementary idiom—one could program so as to display moral deficiencies in the source text, or (really, and) rebuild a more moral (idiomatically intelligent) stack out of it. But one could already develop the habit or technique of carrying out reductions to primes, which creates little scenes (Wierzbicka’s analysis are like this) in which someone says something about what someone else (or that same person) does.

For my day job, I’ve recently been reading a bit about how the emergence of automated grammar checks changes the landscape with regard to dealing with student error in writing. In theory, it should already be possible for anyone to turn in an error free piece of writing, whether for publication or for a class. Of course, we could then say that students (or writers in general) don’t really know grammar, even if they make no mistakes. Then again, what it means to “know grammar” is a complex issue. But it turns out that, since grammar check has to work with sentence models rather than assessing individual sentences in terms of their accordance with grammatical conventions (regarding which there is, anyway, no universal agreement), its “reading” of text and search for error is erratic in ways that are likely to persist for quite a while—like many students, for example, it is likely to find a long and complex, and therefore unfamiliar, sentence, to be ungrammatical, even without being able to say why that’s the case. It turns out that the use of grammar check becomes a human-machine collaboration, where both learn together: the grammar check provides alternative sentences to some of the sentences you’ve written, and you have to determine whether those are really “your” sentences. It’s like reading a translation of your writing and deciding whether you prefer it to other possible translations. If you’re serious about your writing (and if you’re not, none of this really matters), this may get you thinking more about questions of grammar and error, which, in the end, is really a question of the ratio of attention to meaning, for writer and reader alike: error is a problem when it causes attention to be paid that is disproportionate to the meaning derived from a text. But there are lots of ways of deriving meaning.

Similarly, what I am proposing would be a kind of moral prosthesis, which would transform and potentially enhance, rather than replace, one’s relations to other humans within institutions. We already have moral prostheses, in the form of moral rules, codes and conventions, laws, and so on—this would simply be a more deliberately constructed one, capable of receiving feedback. A prosthesis can extend well beyond a replacement limb—as theorists of technics have been arguing for a long time, all of technology can be seen as a vast, shared, prosthetic device—eyes, ears, hands, feet, now brain, extended across the world. An imperative, in this case, is already a prosthesis—you make another an extension of yourself. Whether I create a program along these lines or not, it’s a way of thinking that can be increasingly formalized and made a source of thought experiments. How would “formalize,” for example, be translated into the primes? I would start with “say something is this thing because you want others to say this is this thing,” but this further requires that “people can see you say this is this thing. People can hear you say this is this thing. You have to do this in some place where everyone can see you, where everyone can hear you.” But for something to be formalized (the passive voice) we would further need something like “people can do this: people can say this is the same thing now. People can say this is the same thing after now.” But what makes it possible for them to do so? We would need to start to distribute and arrange people: not everyone sees, says, and hears simultaneously. Are there times when someone has to say, and other times when that person has to hear? We would be constructing an elementary moral order, kind of like some video games and computer simulations do. At the end of it we might have a way of talking about formalizing as some people speaking, some listening, under controlled conditions necessary for formalized relations to be sustained.