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alien_phenomenology [2018-03-24 18:45] – created 98.172.104.215alien_phenomenology [2018-03-24 18:50] (current) – 98.172.104.215
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-==== Alien Phenomenology ====+==== Alien Phenomenology - Ian Bogost====
  
 [[reading notes]] from **Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing** by Ian Bogost           [[reading notes]] from **Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing** by Ian Bogost          
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 <blockquote>anyone who has ever had to construct, repair, program, or otherwise operate on a computational apparatus knows that a strange and unique world does stir within such a device. A tiny, private universe rattles behind its glass and aluminum exoskeleton.</blockquote>           <blockquote>anyone who has ever had to construct, repair, program, or otherwise operate on a computational apparatus knows that a strange and unique world does stir within such a device. A tiny, private universe rattles behind its glass and aluminum exoskeleton.</blockquote>          
                      
-<blockquote>If we wish to understand a microcomputer or a mountain range or a radio astronomy observatory or a thermonuclear weapon or a capsaicinoid on its own terms, what approaches might be of service?                                 +<blockquote>If we wish to understand a microcomputer or a mountain range or a radio astronomy observatory or a thermonuclear weapon or a capsaicinoid on its own terms, what approaches might be of service?</blockquote>           
-   The “akinness” of various material behaviors to human thought and feeling has promise, but it also draws far too much attention to the similarities between humans and objects, rather than their differences. Whitehead was careful to distinguish prehension from consciousness, while still managing to hold that entities are “throbs of experience.”</blockquote>          +           
 +<blockquote>The “akinness” of various material behaviors to human thought and feeling has promise, but it also draws far too much attention to the similarities between humans and objects, rather than their differences. Whitehead was careful to distinguish prehension from consciousness, while still managing to hold that entities are “throbs of experience.”</blockquote>          
                      
 <blockquote>Timothy Morton rightly calls vitalism a compromise, one that imprecisely projects a living nature onto all things.[27] With this in mind, Morton suggests mesh instead of nature to describe “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.”[28] But to take such interconnectedness seriously, we must really mean it. The philosophical subject must cease to be limited to humans and things that influence humans. Instead it must become everything,</blockquote>           <blockquote>Timothy Morton rightly calls vitalism a compromise, one that imprecisely projects a living nature onto all things.[27] With this in mind, Morton suggests mesh instead of nature to describe “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.”[28] But to take such interconnectedness seriously, we must really mean it. The philosophical subject must cease to be limited to humans and things that influence humans. Instead it must become everything,</blockquote>          
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 <blockquote>For Husserl, in order to consider appearances seriously we must avoid commonsensical presuppositions. We cannot escape the attitude we portray toward the world, but we must bracket its validity. Husserl gives the name epoché (έπχή, suspension) to this procedure of bracketing our natural assumptions about perception.</blockquote>           <blockquote>For Husserl, in order to consider appearances seriously we must avoid commonsensical presuppositions. We cannot escape the attitude we portray toward the world, but we must bracket its validity. Husserl gives the name epoché (έπχή, suspension) to this procedure of bracketing our natural assumptions about perception.</blockquote>          
                      
-<blockquote>Harman uses the name “black noise” to describe the background noise of peripheral objects: “It is not a white noise of screeching, chaotic qualities demanding to be shaped by the human mind, but rather a black noise of muffled objects hovering at the fringes of our attention.”[73] Black is the color of sonic noise that approaches silence, allowing emissions of but a few spikes of energy. Similarly, in physics a black body is an object that absorbs all the electromagnetic radiation it encounters, emitting a spectrum of light commensurate with its temperature.                   +<blockquote>Harman uses the name “black noise” to describe the background noise of peripheral objects: “It is not a white noise of screeching, chaotic qualities demanding to be shaped by the human mind, but rather a black noise of muffled objects hovering at the fringes of our attention.”[73] Black is the color of sonic noise that approaches silence, allowing emissions of but a few spikes of energy. Similarly, in physics a black body is an object that absorbs all the electromagnetic radiation it encounters, emitting a spectrum of light commensurate with its temperature.</blockquote>           
-                 Dialogic Model for interstellar message design</blockquote>          +           
 +<blockquote>Dialogic Model for interstellar message design</blockquote>          
                      
 <blockquote>SETI’s fundamental assumption: if there is life in the universe, it ought to be able to recognize its counterparts by pointing radio astronomy apparatuses like the VLA in their direction, and to understand their answer.</blockquote>           <blockquote>SETI’s fundamental assumption: if there is life in the universe, it ought to be able to recognize its counterparts by pointing radio astronomy apparatuses like the VLA in their direction, and to understand their answer.</blockquote>          
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 <blockquote>For humanists, including philosophers and critics of all stripes, writing is literally the only way to scholarly productivity. One’s career is measured in books and articles: publications counted on curricula vitae, citations of those publications in other written matter measured, and on and on.</blockquote>           <blockquote>For humanists, including philosophers and critics of all stripes, writing is literally the only way to scholarly productivity. One’s career is measured in books and articles: publications counted on curricula vitae, citations of those publications in other written matter measured, and on and on.</blockquote>          
                      
-<blockquote>In the humanities in particular (unlike the sciences), the academic conference is often understood as an opportunity to test out ideas in front of an audience. Those ideas will, inevitably, become professionally valid only if written down. And when published, they are printed and bound not to be read but merely to have been written.        +<blockquote>In the humanities in particular (unlike the sciences), the academic conference is often understood as an opportunity to test out ideas in front of an audience. Those ideas will, inevitably, become professionally valid only if written down. And when published, they are printed and bound not to be read but merely to have been written.</blockquote>           
-                            writing is dangerous for philosophy—and for serious scholarly practice in general. It’s not because writing breaks from its origins as Plato would have it, but because writing is only one form of being. The long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still bafflingly popular, opinion. But so long as we pay attention only to language, we underwrite our ignorance of everything else.</blockquote>          +           
 +<blockquote>writing is dangerous for philosophy—and for serious scholarly practice in general. It’s not because writing breaks from its origins as Plato would have it, but because writing is only one form of being. The long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still bafflingly popular, opinion. But so long as we pay attention only to language, we underwrite our ignorance of everything else.</blockquote>          
                      
 <blockquote>If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought be someone who practices ontology. Just as one would likely not trust a doctor who had only read and written journal articles about medicine to explain the particular curiosities of one’s body, so one ought not trust a metaphysician who had only read and written books about the nature of the universe.</blockquote>           <blockquote>If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought be someone who practices ontology. Just as one would likely not trust a doctor who had only read and written journal articles about medicine to explain the particular curiosities of one’s body, so one ought not trust a metaphysician who had only read and written books about the nature of the universe.</blockquote>          
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 <blockquote>Philosophical Lab Equipment</blockquote>           <blockquote>Philosophical Lab Equipment</blockquote>          
                      
-<blockquote>Carpentry is philosophical lab equipment.[20] +<blockquote>Carpentry is philosophical lab equipment.[20]</blockquote>           
-Carpentry can serve a general philosophical purpose, but it presents a particularly fertile opportunity to pursue alien phenomenology. The experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between that black noise and the experiences internal to an object.</blockquote>          +           
 +<blockquote>Carpentry can serve a general philosophical purpose, but it presents a particularly fertile opportunity to pursue alien phenomenology. The experiences of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between that black noise and the experiences internal to an object.</blockquote>          
                      
 <blockquote>The phenomenologist who performs carpentry creates a machine that tries to replicate the unit operation of another’s experience. Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist’s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience.</blockquote>           <blockquote>The phenomenologist who performs carpentry creates a machine that tries to replicate the unit operation of another’s experience. Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist’s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience.</blockquote>          
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