skandalon

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. […] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And, again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

✖ Via The Washington Post: “Sen. Stevens, the tubes salute you” by Alexandra Petri, August 10th, 2010

Sen. Ted Stevens who died in a plane crash last Monday is known, among other things, for having coined the phrase “a series of tubes”

“The internet is a series of tubes!” This was the gaffe heard round the ‘net, igniting a response that spanned every news outlet from Fark to the New York Times. The phrase became a badge of pride. Stevens’s quote showed up on the Colbert Report and the Daily Show. Experts confirmed it. People remixed his speech. The “tubes” even have their own Wikipedia page. Google briefly incorporated them into a program as an easter egg. They took on a life of their own, ensconcing themselves in online lore. The Internet was not a big truck! It was a series of tubes! And it was proud. (more)

• Aug 12, 2010 link notes tagged: technology metaphor tube medium media Internet container content representation analogy form epistemology communication

✖ Via Stanford University: “Analogy as the Core of Cognition” by Douglas Hofstadter, Feb. 6, 2006.

Hofstadter’s presentation starts at 13’30”.

“In this Presidential Lecture, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points.”

“Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.” (wikipedia).

Previously on Skandalon : analogy

• Mar 21, 2010 link notes reblogged from fuckyeahphilosophy [via] tagged: art communication cognition analogy philosophy metaphor knowledge science creativity author video

D’un côté, la représentation met la force en signes (comme on met un bateau à l’eau) et, d’un autre, elle signifie la force dans le discours de la loi. Elle opère la substitution à l’acte extérieur où une force se manifeste pour annihiler une autre force dans une lutte à mort, des signes de la force qui n’ont besoin que d’être vus pour que la force soit crue. La représentation dans et par ses signes représente la force: délégation de force, les signes ne sont pas les représentants de concepts mais des représentants de force saisissables seulement par leur effets-représentants: l’effet-pouvoir de la représentation, c’est la représentation elle-même.

✖ Via Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi, éd. de Minuit, coll. Le sens commun, Paris, 1981 p. 11.

Compare with Charconnet’s observations. That’s one way to approach relations shared between knowledge (reflexive representation), art (transitive representation) and power. Or between science, art and politic.

• Sep 09, 2009 link notes tagged: author book philosophy art politic science power representation concept model analogy

D’autre part, si l’on considère les grandes révolutions scientifiques comme celle de Galilée et d’Einstein, on peut dire que le discours scientifique vise à proposer des représentations nouvelles du monde et à faire accepter ces représentations par les interlocuteurs. En effet, chercher à construire des représentations qui rendent mieux compte des faits, comme le modèle copernicien par rapport au modèle géocentrique de Ptolémée, ou la relativité générale d’Einstein, puis les faire accepter relève de l’argumentation, et même d’une argumentation très puissante, puisque cela ne va pas sans résistance. Séparer dans ce cas argumentation et démonstration paraît parfaitement illusoire. Vouloir caractériser les discours par une fonction unique paraît donc forcément manichéen. Il y a dans tous les discours scientifiques de l’esthétique, de l’argumentatif, et de l’heuristique.

✖ Via Jean Charconnet, Analogie et logique naturelle. Une étude des traces linguistiques du raisonnement analogique à travers différent discours [Amazon], éd. Peter Lang, Berne, 2003, p. 33-34.

Read also Max Black and Jacques Bouveresse on a similar topic.

• Aug 04, 2009 link notes tagged: science philosophy book author analogy metaphor representation model

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

✖ Via Walter Benjamin, “On The Mimetic Faculty” (1933) in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Part 2 1931-1934, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 720

Read also David Hume’s Natural History of Religion

• Jul 12, 2009 link notes tagged: philosophy author book analogy