Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason

Generally, I'm a fan of Manuel DeLanda, but this book was a disappointment.  After reading Difference and Repetition, I really wanted to pursue two ideas that were touched on fairly briefly there -- the idea of the simulacrum and its relation to simulation, and the idea that Kant takes for granted the conscious unity of a priori synthetic reason, precluding its emergence from the interaction of smaller, passive, unconscious syntheses.  You can see from the title why I picked this volume off the shelf.  Unfortunately, it is misnamed.  DeLanada does very little philosophy in this book.  The simulation bit only refers to computer simulations of systems like the weather, or fluid dynamics, or Kaufmann's autocatalytic sets, or Axelrod's autonomous Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments -- an idea of simulation that is related to what Deleuze had in mind, but only tangentially.  And finally, DeLanda thinks he addresses the problem of the subtitle by using modern assembly line automation software to discuss how the Egyptians learned to build pyramids.  So while he discusses interesting stuff, it wasn't at all what I was looking for.

DeLenda devotes most of the book to reviewing a number of computer simulations that try to model how various puzzling phenomena may perhaps have emerged in evolution.  So he summarizes, in a kind of pop-science style, toy models like those that attempt to explain how a population of replicators, or cell membranes, or memory, or altruism, or language, could have emerged spontaneously from the blind interaction of lower level components.  These summaries are fine as far as they go.  DeLanda seems perfectly competent to explain this stuff (judging from his explanations of the ones I was familiar with).  But he has none of the wit or literary skill to make these explanations very interesting.  It's dense, dry reading even if you already understand how the NK model or the perceptron work.  It kinda reminded me of my father's explanations of battery chemistry -- simultaneously way more than you ever wanted to know, but still not enough to feel confident you wouldn't blow yourself up if you tried it on your own.

Which makes you wonder who the target audience is here.  On the one hand, these mathematical simulations are pretty technical and far afield from my impression of what interests the average philosopher.  On the other hand, DeLanda's summaries are just scratching the surface of all the work that's been done on each of these, and I don't see how his recaps would contribute much to the understanding of someone who already knew the models well.  Is he trying to interest philosophers in computer science, or computer scientists in philosophy?  Or is he just trying to make the case that scientists should embrace simulations more?  Don't they already do quite a lot of this though?  Since it's not clear who the audience is, you start to get the impression that maybe you're just reading DeLanda notes to himself.  He spent a lot of time understanding each of these simulations, and he just wrote down what he learned in compressed format.  The impression is amplified by the fact that the book is absolutely chockablock with typos and missing commas that make sentences needlessly difficult to parse.  After all, who edits their personal notes?  

For me, the most interesting part of the book was actually the appendix, where DeLanda pulls back to summarize the summaries and link them to the larger project which he calls "assemblage theory".  In fact, the appendix really contains all the philosophy that the book has to offer.  If you've read other DeLanda, you already know that he's a popularizer of Deleuze and Guattari who takes their key insight to be that the virtual is the structure of a space of possibilities of some system.  I think this is a fine interpretation of the virtual (though hardly the only possible one).   DeLanda has done a lot of good historical and philosophical work with this concept in both A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.  The question is really what new insight it has to offer us in the present context.  

Unfortunately, this is where the book really falls down philosophically.  Because here DeLanda does little more than reiterate the idea that assemblages (systems of interacting elements) have both a concrete mechanism, as well as a mechanism independent structure of their space of possibilities.  The latter may sound esoteric, but it's actually quite familiar -- we call it math.  For example, the mechanism independent structure of the space of possibilities for a system composed by the coupling of two liquids of different temperatures is just ... equilibrium.  The hot side gets cold and the cold side gets hot (that's exactly what made the McDLT such a revolution!).  Of course the possibility space could be more complicated, and we could get interested in the time course by which the system approaches equilibrium, or what happens if it is held away from equilibrium, but basically in all these cases, we're just saying that the virtual is nothing more than the structure of the phase space of a dynamical system.  Since you can use the same math to describe, say, the way a liquid approaches thermal equilibrium and the way a market achieves a clearing price, then, sure, there is a "universal mechanism independent structure" of what these types of systems can do.  That's a truly fascinating observation that amounts to being blown away by the fact that math works.  I too am blown away by this fact.  Some hairless chimps came up with a symbol system whose space of possible behaviors exhibits the same structure as waves and planetary motion.  That is to say that a bunch of grey matter in the human skull can simulate other matter.   How does this work?  Great question, but one DeLanda doesn't even really try to address.  He states that since they can be shared, these virtual structures must exist objectively, outside the systems that incarnate them.  On the other hand, the structures themselves need some concrete mechanism to be visible, so we should consider them immanent in matter itself.  Again, I'm not arguing with this conclusion at all.  I'm just asking whether we've posed the question adequately enough to advance.  It seems to me that DeLanda hasn't even begun to address the really deep philosophical problem this implies.  If some matter can run a simulation of other matter by repeating some (portion of) a universal structure immanent to it, then matter is nothing much like the bunch of marbles we normally imagine it to be.  So do the simulations go all the way down, or is there some sort of 'base matter' that would be like the hardware of the universe?  And how would we be able to identify this with the simulation software installed in our brains?  

"Society Must Be Defended"

Our first book club selection was a transcription of an 11 lecture course Michel Foucault gave back in 1976 at the College de France.  I don't know if the course really had an official title, but in any case, the quotation marks are part of the title of the book.  They're meant to convey that it's not M. Foucault who believes society must be defended.  Instead, he traces the history of this concept of society; how would you come to imagine society as something that requires defending?  Who would defend it?  And against whom?

There's quite a few interesting ideas and a lot of good history presented in the lectures.  Foucault has some particularly penetrating analysis of Hobbes idea of the social contract and the way it ends the "war of all against all".  He also outlines the birth of what he calls historicism -- the idea that history is a struggle and the interpretation of history is necessarily a weapon in that struggle -- in 17th century England and 18th century France.  Fortunately, all this is presented in a pretty accessible style.  You don't need to spend much time scratching your head about what in god's holy name he is blathering about.  

Unfortunately, the course doesn't live up to Foucault's idea of what he set out to do.  You can see this best if you compare the 8 page "Course Summary" that appears at the end of the lectures with the course itself.  This summary is a real gem, but it turns out to be more a description of the overall problem that interested Foucault, and which situates what he tried to say.  There's only one page reserved for summarizing what the course actually contained, which, in retrospect, makes the whole class appear a sort of long-winded digression on a particular sub-topic.  

His goal was ultimately to analyze concrete power relations.  To do this, he had to think beyond our typical abstract understanding of how power functions in society, which involves the fiction of a sovereign individual giving up some of their god-given rights in order to form a more perfect union called the State.  In fact, there are all kinds of power at work within society, the field changes all the time, and none of them really operate on the basis of some fabricated contract that creates or transfers "rights".  Foucault calls this type of thinking the juridical model of sovereignty.  While we might think of this today as a type of social contract theory, he points out that it is historically much older, being associated with the old image of the king as a sovereign representation of the social body.

If we're going to avoid this kind of abstract, almost magical, thinking about power, we have to look at real concrete relations of power that are not based on right but on force.  In other words, it seems like we have to take violence and war as our fundamental model of how power works.  If all political power can always ultimately be traced to relations of domination, then it seems like we arrive at an inversion of Clausewitz's famous formula: politics is simply war by other means.  

Foucault summarizes how this is a fairly radical shift in perspective for a number of reasons.  First, it makes power a matter of historical contingency and not juridical inevitability.  The story of power has a history, that of the historical struggles between different factions within a society.  Kings and emperors and social contracts, on the other hand, don't have a real history.  They have a mythical birthplace and an eternal divine right (regardless of whether the divinity in question is some bearded dude or "reason").  Second, since history is real and ongoing, someone has to actually write it, interpret it, produce it.  This production of knowledge is never neutral, but is always itself a weapon in the struggle of history.  In other words, the historian doesn't merely describe, he acts.  Third, this type of thinking changes the form of explanation we give for the political world we find ourselves in.  We no longer try to explain the present by reference to some simple, timeless, and universal principle that makes it seem natural, inevitable, and commonsensical.  Instead, things stand as they do because of a long and convoluted history of real struggles replete with alliances, betrayals, and accidents.  That is, the explanation of the present becomes a lot more complex and obscure.  Finally, as a sort of corollary to these others, the idea that politics is a form of war means that there is a dark violence constantly churning below the superficial appearance of order in our society. 

All of this is very interesting stuff, and probably feels like a very modern perspective on history.  None of it is really discussed at length in Foucault's lectures.  In other words, with one important exception I'll get to presently, he doesn't actually try to show us how our society, today, our politics, is structured by an ongoing war of some sort.  Remember, "society must be defended" is not Foucault's thesis, it is his problem.  So the actual lecture is not devoted to using this framework to explore how power operates concretely today.  The actual lecture is 80% devoted to figuring out where this idea came from historically.  In other words, who was the first to come up with the concept that power is all about war and history is all about struggle?  What is the history of this concept of history?

As I already mentioned, Foucault locates the birth of the idea in two places.  17th century English historians saw their world as structured by the fundamental conflict of the Norman invasion of the Saxons in 1066.  18th century French historians like Boulainvilliers understood their world by reference to the war between a Frankish aristocracy and a Gaulish peasantry.  Most of the class is devoted to examining these contexts, in particular the French one, in considerable detail.  It's interesting history that I am hardly in a position to argue with.  It's also a very complicated story, because Foucault wants to understand not only how this idea of politics as war arose in the context of a particular history, but also how it mutated as it gained currency and became a whole genre, or way of looking at history.  Because, after all, each war has at least two sides and therefore two histories.  And, more importantly, in a world of many real struggles, there will be a history of each one.  Which means that Foucault is most interested in tracing the genealogy of a certain form of history, a form that can serve many ends once it has been invented.

Tracing this complicated genealogy takes up most of his lecture time.  Like I say, it's an interesting story in itself, and Foucault fills it with many interesting digressions (like the one about how Hobbes was not, as is commonly thought, the guy who put war into politics).  But I found myself wishing that he would have shortened this genealogy, which is, after all, just one piece in his broader project.  The takeaway point of it all is really just that this type of history always posits some binary relation of forces that represents society as structured by a struggle between two "nations", or "peoples", or "races".  This last idea -- that placing war into politics ultimately becomes a matter of placing race into politics -- turns out to be the main thesis of the whole course, as well as the point where it touches contemporary political discussion. 

But what exactly does Foucault mean by race?  He uses the term in a deliberately slippery way in this class.  At first, he just means the word to refer to the two sides of any binary structure.  The "us" and the "them" locked in the war we call politics.  For example, the French aristocracy and the peasants.  So it starts off being much more abstract than our modern understanding of race.  A synonym would be "people" or "group".  Foucault's genealogy of this whole way of looking at politics as war is aimed, however, at showing us how the term can gradually morph into the two great State racisms of the 20th century -- the Nazis and Stalinism.   In other words, he asks: how does race become race-ism?  

Unfortunately, he spends only the last two lectures trying to outline this connection, so it remains a bit vague and tenuous.  The connection seems to consist of two parts.  

First, the universalist modern State -- the bourgeois State -- had to get a hold of the idea that it is animated by some sort of internal war.  The way Foucault has told the history, these two concepts should not get along.  The modern State claims to be the universal and inevitable form of political organization.  Its form of sovereignty, and its monopoly on violence, gives it the same structure of juridical justification as the absolute kings of old.  But Foucault's genealogy of politics as war was meant to challenge precisely this juridical and universal concept of political power.  So how was the idea that power is a struggle of races absorbed by the modern universal State?  Foucault's answer to this question is basically "Hegel".  He doesn't literally credit Hegel (in fact, his name is never mentioned) but he claims that the two concepts can be wedded if we adopt the dialectical interpretation of history we associate with Hegel.   The idea is that the sovereign right of the State stems from the institutions of governance that it provides.  Instead of interpreting these institutions as constructed through a historical process though, Hegel conceives them as existing in embryonic form amongst a nation or a people even before there is a formal State.  Actual history, and all the struggles it represents, is just the progressive self-realization of this embryonic form.  This neatly squares the idea of war with that of universality.  History is indeed struggle and opposition, but these only serve to fully give birth to the inevitable and universal that was already latent at the beginning.  

Second, once we have this idea of an internal struggle whose inevitable conclusion is the birth of the State, the State needs to start taking matters into its own hands to hasten the process along.  Like many things "dialectical", this doesn't make that much sense as a historical explanation.  I mean, how does the non-existent State pursue a war to bring itself into being?  Perhaps this is part of why Foucault doesn't give us a detailed history of the State, but spends the final lecture giving us a more abstract theory of how our modern political world is secretly structured by the division and violence internalized by a State that nevertheless still sees itself as universal.  

Here he quickly introduces his two pronged theory of how power operates in our society -- through individual bodily discipline, and through mass biopolitical regularization.  A disciplinary society operates by controlling the individual bodies of its subjects in various ways.  The idea seems to be to describe the techniques of surveillance and control that are implemented at factories, prisons, schools, etc ... in order to organize society.  Foucault mentions this concept only briefly, I think we are presumed to have read his other works on the topic.  Biopolitics is the name he gives to the systems the State sets up to control the social body considered as a statistical aggregate of individuals.  For example, when the State designs various systems of public health for reducing mortality, or for increasing the birth rate, or for insuring against natural disasters, that is biopolitics at work.  Foucault alludes to some quite complicated relationships between these two forms of power, but in this context the distinction isn't actually that important.  Both of these forms of power are ways that the State disciplines and regulates every aspect of life itself.  In effect, they are just fancier French names for Seeing Like A State.   But the concrete operation of these techniques of control are how the idea of an ongoing war creeps back into a universal State.  In trying to control life individually and collectively, the universal modern State begins to posit that some individuals deserve to live more than others, and that for the collective health of the population, certain segments may need to be eliminated.  That is to say that, "society must be defended".  Even though it is universally and inevitably triumphant, it still needs to be defended against any elements that would undermine its discipline and any irregularities that would complicate its trajectory.  As Foucault puts it:

It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States ... What in fact is racism?  It is primarily a way of introducing a brak into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die.  The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and the other, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.

From this vantage point we can finally see why Foucault so belabored the history of the idea that politics is war.  An idea that begins as a real historical war between various groups ends as an internalized war against dissent and irregularity.  Race is the concept that allows for this gradual transformation from a cultural to a biopolitical war, and it is precisely race that gives the "universal" State a concrete power structure.  Foucault clearly sees this racism as a force running through all modern States.  But of course the Nazi obsession with racial purity and the Stalinist obsession with evoloving a stronger people took this logic to its extreme.

After writing this, I can see that the lectures were actually more coherent than they appeared at first.  Understanding the larger problem Foucault was working on helps to clarify which bits are essential and which we should regard more as discursive tangents.  You may still say that it's quite a leap to go from discussions of 18th century aristocratic historians in France directly to Hitler and Stalin.  All I can say is that my faulty exegesis is not (wholly) responsible for this impression; Foucault manages the jump in just a few highly abstract pages.  Maybe we have to come back for the Fall term to get the full story?

The Good Lord Bird

James McBride's terrific novel tells the tall tale of Osawatomie John Brown from the perspective of a 12 year old negro boy who spends the whole story pretending to be a girl.  It's an interesting device, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, and it permits the same type of candid, commonsensical observation of the absurd lives of adults.  As a result, I felt like it dramatized the terrorism at the core of the slave era even better than something like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad.  Telling the story from the often comic perspective of a child takes away some of the explicit moral outrage, but more effectively conveys the humanity of the situation.  And pairing the childish self-centeredness of Henri/etta off against the laughably insane Christianity of the white savior John creates a complex symmetry that ends up being really powerful.  

Also, it's a great shoot-em-up action-adventure story.  Go read it.

Ghangis Khan and the Quest for God

I have no idea why exactly this one landed on my shelf.   I was interested in the revaluation of the "barbarians" in James Scott's Against the Grain.  I enjoyed Ian Morris's reflections on the importance of steppe conquerors on much of recorded history in Why the West Rules -- for Now.  And of course, Deleuze and Guattarri's idea of the nomad war machine and its connection to capitalism is intriguing.  So maybe I was just thinking vaguely that I really should learn a bit more about the Huns and the Tartars and the Mongols.  Or maybe I was just spending down the enormous credit I have at the cat book store.  At any rate, I do now know a little more about the most famous barbarian of them all -- Ghengis Khan.  And it's actually fascinating to know more about him and the interesting moment in history he inhabited.

It's just too bad that I had to read this whole long-winded and poorly written book to find it out though.  

Jack Weatherford begins his saga (and takes his title) with the idea that a wave of 17th century histories and dramas about The Great Khan might well have influenced John Locke or George Washington on the question of religious freedom.  However, even as he tosses this out there, he himself doesn't believe it, and the book mercifully spends no time trying to establish that tenuous connection.  Mostly, he just relates a long history of the life of Ghengis, beginning with his humble childhood, his unification of the Mongol tribes into a nation, his conquest of much of the Chinese and Islamic empires, his death in 1227, and the inevitable fractious division and decay of the Mongol empire under his heirs.  It reads much more like a biography than a history book.  There's no real attempt to grapple with the forces that led to Mongol unification and conquest at this particular time in history.  Nor is there much real discussion of the innovative way The Great Khan ran his empire.  Beyond the biographical, the only real argument of the book is that Ghengis Khan let the people he conquered keep their respective Gods.  Somehow Weatherford thinks that this means he invented the idea of "religious freedom".  It seems lost on him that this is the same idea of religious freedom that might appeal to any intelligent toll road operator -- believe whatever you want when you cross, but fuck you pay me.  

So it was a pretty disappointing book.  Nevertheless, along the way, I absorbed a little history I was completely unfamiliar with, and this is why I didn't drop the book after the first fifty flowery pages speculating on what Ghengis was feeling as he married his third wife.  The main observation that will linger with me is how different a nomad empire is from a sedentary empire.  Ghengis Khan was not a farmer.  He wasn't interested in controlling territory or a large population from which he could extract labor.  Instead, his wealth and power were connected with movement, with the circulation of people and goods.  This really was a completely different type of empire, one that was even in some cases welcomed by the mass of 'vanquished' population as a significant reduction in the State's ability to extract surplus from them.  This concept of a classic liberal empire, if you will, seems to me a much better way to connect the Mongols to modernity than any legalese about religious freedom.

If anybody comes across a really good history of the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, let me know.  I would happily read much more about this period.

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Difference and Repetition makes heavy use of the system Kant lays out in his Critique of Pure Reason.  Since, to quote another philosophically minded friend, my understanding of Kant is shallow, I wanted to go back and see if I could better grasp what Deleuze saw in a man who was so systematic he even had suspenders for his sock.  However, reading the entire Critique of Pure Reason as a footnote to Deleuze seemed too daunting a task right now.  Luckily, Kant himself wrote a shorter and clearer version that is meant to frame the project of his Critique and introduce us to its basic ideas --  the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science.

Since the Prolegomena presents an abbreviated version of Kant's system, I don't think I can claim a deep understanding of it yet.  But I found the basic outline of the system easier to grasp and more interesting than I was expecting, and I certainly understood something more about how it relates to Deleuze's project in Difference and Repetition.  

Kant claims that the Prolegomena addresses four questions:

1. How is pure mathematics possible?
2. How is pure natural science possible?
3. How is metaphysics in general possible?
4. How is metaphysics as a science possible?

But he really only addresses the first 3 of these in this book, and refers us to the Critique as the answer to the fourth.  The importance of the words "pure" and "science", which appear in 3 of these 4 questions cannot be overstated.  For Kant, they mean roughly the same thing, namely, our ability to establish completely certain a priori knowledge that does not need to make reference to any particular empirical experience (which Kant terms intuition or sensibility).  This distinction between what can be known a priori and what we have to discover empirically is intimately related to the central distinction in Kant's philosophy -- that between the mere appearance of things, and the things in themselves.  

Now, even my shallow understanding of Kant already had an adequate grasp of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us, perhaps because he beats this point like a dead horse.  Kant reasons that we cannot know anything about how things are in themselves because all our concepts only pertain to how we represent those things for ourselves in our experience.  Since we only know how things appear to us, it may at first seem like all of our knowledge must therefore be empirical and derived from the habits of our experience.  Indeed, this was Hume's skeptical argument about our ability to ever infer something like causality from correlation.  Kant begins with Hume's skepticism, but thinks we can overcome the problem by observing that all of our experience fits into a limited set of general forms, regardless of what its particular content might be.  For example, our sensible experience occurs in time and its objects in space, and our thoughts about those sensible experiences are always related by the form of cause and effect.  Kant calls these forms are the "categories of the understanding".  They operate as a general background or structure of our experience and enable connections between its particular contents.  In fact, since Kant thinks that these categorical forms are necessary for all possible experience, they actually provide the solution to his problem of what we can know a priori and prior to all possible experience.  In other words, we can know these forms of experience without having had any experience.

To me, this sounds a bit like Athena being born fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.  The idea almost perfectly captures the essence of what the Enlightenment took for granted as the new center of the universe.  An adult white upper class European male who just appears on the scene with no development and no history.  This type of parthenogenesis is crucial for Kant's universalizing project.  If you want to systematize all possible experience, you are ultimately forced to believe that it is all just like the particular experience you know best -- your own.  The quest to close the door on experience, to render some parts of it impossible and literally unthinkable, will always have both a normative and a mystifying dimension.  After all, if you believe an  experience is so different as to be unthinkable, you will certainly never be able to explain how it happened.

But I digress.  The universal forms of experience become Kant's categories, and form the basis of his answer to those first two questions.  Mathematics is possible because all our sensory experience must occur in space and time, and mathematics, according to Kant, is nothing but an elaboration of these a priori forms of intuition (sensibility).  And Natural Science is possible because all conceptual experience takes the form of causally linked representations appearing to a unified subject in our understanding.  This second part sounds weird at first, because it seems to define "natural science" in a way that removes all reference to empirical measurement and experiment in disciplines like physics and chemistry.  However, since Kant is not concerned with founding actual physics but only the possibility of physics, he's really only interested in proving (a priori of course) that there is a natural world to begin with, and that it follows certain laws.  In other words, for Kant, nature simply is the law-like connection of the appearances; asking to know nature in itself is meaningless.

We must, however, distinguish empirical laws of nature, which always presuppose particular perceptions, from the pure or universal laws of nature, which, without having particular perceptions underlying them, contain merely the conditions for the necessary unification of such perceptions in one experience; with respect to the latter laws, nature and possible experience are one and the same ...

So then what about question three: how is metaphysics  in general possible?  Since the universal forms of experience Kant has discovered are concepts only apply to actual experiences, Kant is adamant that we will only fall into error if we try to apply these concepts to anything that cannot be an object of possible experience.  This seems to make metaphysics, insofar as its objects are sure to be meta-physical, impossible.  Basically by definition, we can't have any possible experience of metaphysical entities like, say, God.  So at first it seems like the book should end here; metaphysics is bunk.  But the great Kant is too wily for that, and this is actually where the book starts to get more interesting.  

Kant explicitly limits the categories of the understanding to their application in sensible experience.  However, he claims that our reason is more difficult to tame, and is not satisfied by these limits.  The goal of reason is the unbounded application of the categories to everything, even those things that we cannot possibly have an experience of, namely, the things in themselves.  Basically, reason aims for extrapolation to completeness and totality, and the harmonization of all of our experience (including the stuff earlier discarded as illegitimate because it couldn't refer to a possible experience).  The Prolegomena doesn't make super clear why we have this (seemingly counterproductive, and practically speaking useless) mania for completeness, or exactly why Kant decided the mind was carved into exactly the three domains of sense (intuition), understanding, and reason.  Surely the a priori inevitability of this division is all cleared up in the Critique?  At any rate, the concepts that reason comes up with as it extrapolates the categories of the understanding beyond sensible experience are called Ideas.   There are basically three Ideas which structure the complete possibility of experience, but whose objects we can really say nothing about -- God, Self, and World. 

I say that the book gets more interesting when Kant introduces the concept of Ideas for two reasons.  First, this is where you can start to see how important Kant's scheme is for Deleuze's definition of Ideas in Difference & Repetition.  Unfortunately, fully fleshing this out goes way beyond what fits in a book review, and anyhow I'd probably need to read the whole Critique to accomplish it to my satisfaction, so I won't go into these connections.  Second, it's at this point that Kant's system gets weird and complicated.  He has introduced some fundamental tension or split within us where we inevitably strive for something we cannot reach and need to discipline ourselves with respect to it.  He calls the production of the Ideas a natural or transcendental illusion which we can only overcome ... by reading his Critique I guess.  Without this, reason remains trapped in a war against itself which he sees taking the form of the "antinomies of pure reason", which are his way of describing the classic philosophical paradoxes like whether the unstoppable force can push the immovable object.  

As you might expect from this structure, things get complicated quickly, and I'm not sure I quite understand all the ins and outs and whathaveyous.  Kant's goal is clearly to restore to us all our common sensical ideas of the unity of our ego and our belief in God and a world of unified objects in interaction with one another.  But since he's already pronounced these illusions (albeit transcendental and inevitable), he can only give these Ideas back to us by analogy.  We can't know our ego in itself, but we can know that our experience is structured as if we possessed a substantial unity of soul.  Likewise, we can't know anything about a Supreme Being in itself, but we do know that the world of experience is structured as if it had a plan and hence a creator.  In the end, Kant is as conservative as he can be.  However, I understand better now what Deleuze saw in him.  While the damage may be repaired and the conclusions may look much like what came before, on his way to them, Kant has completely cracked open the unity of our most cherished concepts.  

A Brief History of the Paradox

Roy Sorensen's history of paradoxes wasn't really quite what I was expecting.  Nevertheless, I still found it entertaining.  It's actually more a history of philosophy as told through the lens of the concept of the paradox that it is a deep exploration of the concept itself.  Sorenson spends quite a lot of time on the ancients, including discussions of Pythagoras, Sextus Empiricus, and perhaps most interestingly, Parmenides.  But the story stretches all the way up to the modern era, ending with Wittgenstein's philosophical suicide and Quine's reign of logical terror.  

Sorensen is an analytic philosopher.  Sometimes this unfortunate fact shows up in his terse writing style that leaves everything interesting unsaid.  But most of the time he avoids delving too deeply into argumentation and keeps the tone light; there are humorous examples and little biographical thumbnails of the various thinkers he discusses.  Despite this lightness, you can still get a flavor for the overall philosophy of each of these thinkers.  I'm not sure there's anything particular from his book that will stay with me, but if you want to read a quirky history of philosophy, this might be just the thing.

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

I discovered Cliff Mass's invaluable weather blog shortly after moving to Seattle.  The blog is great because it goes far beyond merely trying to predict the weather and includes a lot more data and explanation of what's happening, often including a discussion of how the prediction was made.  So when I saw that we wrote a whole book about our regional weather I was too intrigued to pass it up.

Unfortunately, the book is a bit of a disappointment.  I don't regret reading it and learned a bunch of interesting things from it.  There are good explanations of interesting geographic anomalies like the Oregon banana belt and the Sequim rain shadow effect.  There's also a lot of good stuff about general tendencies in the weather around here.  For example the correlation of El Niño with warmer, drier winters, the way fog develops and what it portends, the wind tunnel effect of the Frasier River Valley, and so on.  The explanations are scientific, but ably presented in a way that I think most anyone could understand.  

The disappointment is that the book contains so much useless weather trivia.  For example, after spending a few pages discussing the unusual conditions that produce heavy snow in lowland Seattle, there are even more pages devoted to discussing the details of the half dozen largest storms, complete with dollar damage estimates and number of downed electric lines on Columbus Day, 1962.  Who cares!?  Who is really into that kind of trivia about "largest" and "highest" and "record-breaking"?  I guess we expect this sort of doom loop from the TV weatherman.  But why bother to put so much of it into a book?  It could have been half as long, or better yet, twice as good, with more technical discussion of specific local weather features.  This is what the blog is like when it's at its best.  

And when it's at its worst?  Well, you just have to ignore his Statler and Waldorf impression when it comes to anything other than the weather.