Noocracy: The Intelligent as Civil Servants?

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Ive heard the syllogism described as the worlds first algorithm
That's interesting. A systematization of cognition. Manual, where the algorithm is automatic?

I had mistakenly understood a syllogism to be an adage/maxim/aphorism. Still a vague cluster there for me.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I think the syllogism is automatic, it just takes time for the human to process it. The conclusion is inevitable and in that sense automatic
 
McLuhan on the alphabet

The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy. But many people are also disposed to object that we have purchased our structure of specialist technology and values at too high a price. Certainly the lineal structuring of rational life by phonetic literacy has involved us in an interlocking set of consistencies that axe striking enough to justify a much more extensive inquiry than that of the present chapter. Perhaps there are better approaches along quite different lines; for example, consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness. Consciousness is not a verbal process. Yet during all our centuries of phonetic literacy we have favored the chain of inference as the mark of logic and reason. Chinese writing, in contrast, invests each ideogram with a total intuition of being and reason that allows only a small role to visual sequence as a mark of mental effort and organization. In Western literate society it is still plausible and acceptable to say that something "follows" from something, as if there were some cause at work that makes such a sequence.

It was David Hume who, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated that there is no causality indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The sequential is merely additive, not causative. Hume's argument, said Immanuel Kant, awoke me from my dogmatic slumber." Neither Hume nor Kant, however, detected the hidden cause of our Western bias toward sequence as "logic" in the all-pervasive technology of the alphabet. Today in the electric age we feel as free to invent nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean geometries. Even the assembly line, as the method of analytic sequence for mechanizing every kind of making and production, is nowadays yielding to new forms. Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike. That is the reason why our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations uniform and continuous. This procedure, manifest even in the Graeco-Roman phase, became more intense with the uniformity and repeatability of the Gutenberg development.

Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and time by the alphabet. In tribal cultures, experience is arranged by a dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values. The auditory sense, unlike the cool and neutral eye, is hyper-esthetic and delicate and all-inclusive. Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man. The story of The Ugly American descri
 

catalog

Well-known member
Very good constant escape but we need your own words, max 5 lines of text, no sentence longer than 25 words, no word longer than 10 characters, no jargon or acronyms.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think the syllogism is automatic, it just takes time for the human to process it. The conclusion is inevitable and in that sense automatic
Ah, well here's a good point. Do we have to collectively write/code these processes before they sediment into intuitive cognition?

It is as if, in order to incorporate such processes into our unconscious cognitive acumen, we need to digest them with our conscious cognition.

While this may or may not apply to the syllogism, it does seem to be a larger, more general mechanism at play.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Very good constant escape but we need your own words, max 5 lines of text, no sentence longer than 25 words, no word longer than 10 characters, no jargon or acronyms.
The zine would lend itself to bite-sized inoculations - a highly compressed theory package delivered into the domain, the readers mind, where it can properly germinate and take root.

And a nice aesthetics can be the sugar for the spoonful of medicine.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yes we need the sweets, plus you can explain the other stuff when you go to zine fairs after lockdown.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Apocalyptic zine fairs? I'd imagine that'd be quite the scene.

In all seriousness, I like the idea. It could be a refreshingly non-academic approach.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I took a zine to a fair once and a Muslim woman, full niqab, came up to have a look. The zine I was selling at the time, tutntup 3, had loads of different pages from various different people.

She stopped and read a page, turns out it was written by a good pal who went to jail, just some snapshots of prison life basically.

She ended up asking me about it, so I explained some more of the story. She was fascinated, talked for a long time about the prison system and some other stuff. didn't buy it, but I felt like some kind of worthwhile exchange had taken place. Like basically, it was nice we could have that conversation, we both learnt something.

That's the value of them quite a lot.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well are zines typically one-person products? That might let it convey a much less pasteurized/processed message, unfiltered through publishing standards and stampings.
 

catalog

Well-known member
There's no rules mate, just handmade generally, and yes, self publishing innit so typically really shit but then also golden cos of the no filter. Basically it's like blogs but on paper, but when you sell em, you might have a chat. Analogue. I mean it's just another medium, another way to waste your time, but different effects to internet
 
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