Purple Haze

I have spent the last few days in Purple Haze. We moved to a bigger condo to facilitate the needs of our extending family. Three days of working from 0800-2400 doing hard manual labor makes me really happy to be back at work. The best way to spend your money, hire professionals to move your stuff. Even though we did this, the effort level was rather high. Kudos to the lovely friends and family who volunteered to help us at various stages of the process.
Music from the iPod this particular morning was a pleasure. "Here comes the flood" from Peter Gabriel's first solo album fit the rainy morning:

When the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.

I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

The book Hyvä yritys, which I wrote together with Pekka Aula, a good colleague and friend has won the Pro Oeconomia prize, the highest price to be awarded to a business/economics book in Finland. This came as a surprise, as the book is quite heavy on theory and also contains a critical angle toward certain business practices such as strategic management.

To be acknowledged by a board consisting of company CEOs is highly gratifying, as it says that meaningful, non-diluted dialogue between practitioners and academics is both possible and worthwhile. It is even more sweet that the book was a labor of love of sorts for both Pekka and me, as we felt so passionately for the topic that the actual work of writing the book did not feel like work at all.

On moral subjectivism and objectivism

I had a rare morning, as I had time to glance through the newspaper before rushing off to work. In Helsingin Sanomat, two students had written an opinion in which they argued for moral objectivism (according to which moral values exist regardless of our interpretation of them). They were criticizing a previous editorial in Helsingin Sanomat, touching the recent (in)famous Islam example by the Pope. The editorial had promoted a what the students regarded as a subjectivist view on morality (only people's interpretations of moral values exist).

In their rebuttal, the students, after referring a whole number of historical authorities from Socrates to Newton, argued that moral relativism and subjectivism are dangerous views, according to which we cannot condemn, e.g., Nazi atrocities. "Moral relativism is a view best left within university walls".

I would argue the absolute opposite. Moral objectivism is a dangerous view, best fiddled with within university circles. Academics can play their games, exploring what it might mean that moral values have objective existence. In practice, objectivism very easily leads to religious fundamentalism, when people rush to read holy scriptures in their attempt of finding the TRUTH about morality. These processes typically lead to people getting hurt.

Indeed, I find the notion that the moral subjectivist cannot condemn perceived moral atrocities, e.g. , the massacres conducted by Nazis, rather strange. Of course a subjectivist can condemn such actions. Indeed, he or she will, if she regards them as atrocities. It seems that indeed, most people do. I am puzzled by the fact that so many people seem to fear morality lacking an universal ontological bedrock. Isn't it an uplifting thought that morality is what we manage to make of it?

Some soothing music on the bus today. The song Middletown Dreams from Rush was playing in my head when I woke up and I had to play it from my iPod on the way to work. It is a melancholic, yet sympathetic acccount of life in a small town.

The boy walks with his best friend
Through the fields of early May
They walk awhile in silence
One close - one far away

But he'd be climbing on that bus
Just him and his guitar
To blaze across the heavens
Like a brilliant shooting star

For me, the text has wider meaning, also somewhat relevant to the subjectivist / objectivist debate. Most of us dream of making something big of ourselves. In the end, most of us do not reach the stars, but have to accept a mundane existence where the value of what we are doing is mostly our personal interpretation. Yet, in the end, this seems like not such a bad existence after all.

Is positivism really dead?

Saturday. A good beginning of the weekend. Got to spend some time playing with lego bricks (and my daughter). Also an enjoyable jog in the forest of falling leaves. Autumn at its best. OK, the morning was a bit drab - standing in the rain at the playground.

In the sauna after the jog, I immersed myself to an article in the London Review of Books (Sept, 21 issue, pp. 9-10). Jerry Fodor, one of my early philosophical heroes, had reviewed a book in which the author tried to do an anti-Copernican turn from a positivist standpoint, along the following lines (I will do a gross simplification):

1. What exists must be perceivable
2. Stars and quasars have (meaningful) existence only because we have the ability to perceive them
3. Maybe we are after all the center of the universe.

Fodor does not seem to have a stomach for this kind of an argument. He notes that:

The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren’t astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren’t chemists to analyse it. And water would still run downhill, and there would still be hills for it to run down, even if none of us were here to take note of its doing so. You can’t pin the natural order on me, Frayn; I’m not guilty. I didn’t make the universe; I wasn’t even there at the time.

How on earth can anyone seriously suppose otherwise?

Fodor argues that Fray (the author whose book he critiques) makes the same mistake that he takes as a mistake being made by positivists: confusing epistemology with metaphysics, that is, to make arguments regarding what exists (or can/must exist), based on what we can know.

Frayn’s discussion of perception offers a clear case of his general tendency to confuse epistemology with metaphysics. I have ten toes, I can see that from here (I like to type with my shoes and socks off). Now, there’s a lot we don’t know about seeing.

One of the key arguments against phenomenalism (all meaningful statements must be reducible to primitive or pure perceptions) is that there really is not primitive perception. Perception is filtered through all sorts of conceptual things, or directed by them. Touché, I would say. However, Fodor makes references to 'common sense' and ' neo-pragmatism that is as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus ' which sound curious:

How on earth can anyone seriously suppose otherwise? That’s a long story, and it comes in a lot of versions. There is, however, a gaggle of fallacies that generally get committed when a philosopher tells it, and Frayn’s book is no exception.

In a sense, this sounds like Fodor's argument boils down to his being 'as close as anything gets to being the current philosophical consensus'. Sounds a bit unphilosophical to me.

This reminds me of an interview I did with Fodor long ago to Niin & Näin, a philosophical journal (link to the interview). I asked him about the Language of thought hypothesis, which is one of his key theoretical foundations, that is, that there exists a symbolic language for human cognition. I was interested in understanding his ontological position:

JF: I take it that the way you find about ontology is to find out which explanations work. I'm a fervent believer in arguments to the best explanation. I don't know how else you do science. So I assume that if we can show that given the available data the mind seems to work the way it would work if it employed a sentential means of representation, then that's a pretty good reason to think that it employs a sentential means of representation.

SM: This brings us nicely toYour ontology. Did I just detect a pragmatist flair?

JF: No. Pragmatism says "whatever works is ipso facto true". I was saying only that if a theory works, then, all else equal, the best hypothesis is that that's the true theory. So I was endorsing a kind of realism, not a kind of pragmatism.

<>This, I guess, illustrates how hard it is to admit that pragmatism is really the word of the day. We do not say the most functional hypothesis is 'ipso facto' true, but have the sentiment that it is the true hypothesis. After all, truth is such a hairy word these days.

An upbeat morning, some extra family time in the form of a shared breakfast and drive to work. Led Zeppelin's IV was playing in the car. I was struck by - as stupid as this might sound - what a great song Stairway to Heaven is after all. Evocative lyrics, great arc, a masterwork guitar solo, nice sound.

Maybe it was the amount of mind altering drugs that lyricists took back in the seventies, but somehow there is an irresistible fairy tale quality to many of the classic rock texts:

"And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long,
and the forests will echo with laughter."

I have no idea what that means, nor do I have a particular inclination to, but it sure sounds great. Another great text, also featuring a piper, is King Crimson's In the court of the crimson king:

"The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournaments begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king.

The keeper of the city keys
Put shutters on the dreams.
I wait outside the pilgrims door
With insufficient schemes.
The black queen chants
The funeral march,
The cracked brass bells will ring;
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king."

And now, back to work. Now where was I? :-)

I recall a discussion we had with my classmates in high school about the life of a researcher. In our math book, there was a picture of a great finnish mathematician called Rolf Nevanlinna, who was instrumental in creating complex numbers. We were looking at the picture and one of my friends made a joke: "what would that guy's day be like?" Did he come to the office, grab his coffee, say good morning to his colleagues, sit at his desk and ask himself: "now, where was I?"

We all thought this was great fun, but in the end, how did we end up? Although none of us is a math genius, nor an scholar of international acclaim, the guy who made the joke is an independent AD. He comes to the office, asking himself: "innovation, innovation... Now how would I portray innovation..."

As an organizational researcher I literally come to the office most mornings, say good morning, grab a cop of coffee and start thinking: "now where was I? Temporal forms of agency and middle management involvement in strategy..."

A monad = Luke Skywalker's helmet


This morning, while passing through the Hietalahti graveyard with its monumental tombstones I had the strangest realization. You know how in the back of your mind, there are pictures representing abstract things that you take for granted but never really realize that you have? In my case, last week a colleague Aki-Mauri Huhtinen used the word "monad" to characterize an issue. I hadn't heard the word in a long time. The strongest recollection of monads was from the time I was nineteen, just getting into philosophy by reading Esa Saarinen's book on the history of philosophy.


Today, 13 years later, I realized that in making sense of the difficult concept, I had associated with the conceo the image of the closed helmet Luke Skywalker wears in Star Wars while practicing his lightsaber moves. This was probably because of the notion that "monads are windowless". It is funny how the consciousness is layered. You are aware of an association on one level, yet it may never really surface.

I am reading another Neil Peart road novel, Landscape with Drums, where he accounts for life on the road on Rush's 30th anniversary tour. Strange how somebody else's mundane experiences can transport you into another place. I guess we all long to be somebody else. Maybe that's why people watch Big Brother, too.

The Hietaniemi graveyard is another pleasant recent find. The
monuments that people have built for themselves are astounding, at least in our subdued, protestant culture. One family actually has a tomb carved into a hillside with a granite
archway and an imposing padlock.

Passing through the cemetary each morning on my way to work, I cannot help but wonder the Freudian nature of it all: in the cramped space, the monuments compete like skycrapers for attention in a metropolis. In the end, the largest one is the winner.