I am a huge fan of open source. This blog is published by WordPress, which is a completely open source. The current design of the site is also based on an open source theme that was designed by someone, tweaked by someone else, then tweaked by me to fit our use. I’m sure by now someone has grabbed my version of it and tweaked if for their own site. I love open source.

I’m not as convinced by the connection between open-source and truth. I think there are some real problems with the idea that “we are determining truth by consensus”. I don’t know if I’m reading it the way you are intending it, but in philosophical terms, “determining” is not a term of discovery, but of establishment. To determine that from now on, the number 45 means the color orange doesn’t mean that you’ve found out that 45=orange, but that you’ve instigated and established the new definition.

This is my biggest hangup with hardcore pomo folk - the idea that truth is determinable and not discoverable. The idea that, if we poll 500 people on a given topic, their consensus will establish the truth of the matter. I’m pretty sure that a consensus doesn’t establish anything other than … well, a consensus.

What do we get if we democratize “2+2=4″? Is it possible that if we pack 500 people onto an open-source math site, and they all come to consensus that 2+2 no longer = 4, that it will actually and suddenly be true? It seems to me that the voice of one expert, one person who has studied math, who has placed two things next to two other things and tabulated the results, carries more weight than the consensus of the masses who insist that 2+2 now equals “Jim”.

The sort of truths that are established by consensus are truths of convention: things that we agree are true between us, usable within our community. The idea that the letters “r-e-d” signifiy light of a certain frequency is a conventional truth, established by consensus.

Hard PoMo doesn’t stop there though. It holds that there are no truths that are not established by consensus. Not only does the language about the color red come from my community consensus, but the actual existence of the light, of the frequency, of the object projecting the color, all of these things are only true if the consensus of my community has created categories of perception for these things, and they are really and actually not true if I don’t have context derived from consensus for them.

That I have a problem with. Also, what’s the rule on leaving a comment that is longer than the initial post? We should reach some sort of consensus on that …

This is why I’m not philosopher or futurist enough to work this stuff out.

I’m not a proponent of democratizing truth. I’m perfectly happy with r-e-d referring to light of a certain frequency (though that’s only true in English), and I’m not encouraging the embrace of hard pomo’s view of truth-by-consensus. I’m merely observing a shift in authority when it comes to information, and wondering if it’s good, bad, irrelevant. Perhaps the shift is not about authority at all, and I’m misreading it. I don’t know. It SEEMS like it’s something we need to think about, since Wikipedia specifically and sites like it generally are gaining popularity as legitimate resources for accurate information.

If you replace “truth” with knowledge, then I dig it. I think the biggest shift in human expereince engendered by the the internet is the democratization of knowledge. The part that stokes me about this move is that it involves both the masses and the experts. Check out Open Course Ware at ocw.mit.edu - it’s MIT’s push toward open access to all of it’s courses. They fly the banner first raised by Brewster Khale of the Internet Archive (archive.org), of “Universal Access to Human Knowledge”. Now that’s an idea I can get with.

I’ll post on ocw and the move toward access later.

Bleah. I hate the word “truth” anymore. “Knowledge” suits me just fine, but as far as Truth is concerned I seem to be veering dangerously towards nihilism in that one respect. I certainly don’t believe that all truth is gained by concensus, but as well my list of things that I believe to be True is getting shorter and shorter. And that little right-wing Fundie Weakness Sensor that I swear I was given with my mother’s milk goes “DINGDINGDING! Relativism Alert!” and I feel kind of stupid and morally weak and unworthy. And I’m finding out, too, that what I know to be true (thank youk Oprah Winfrey) has less and less to do with the Christianity I was taught and more to do with love, compassion and decency. And yes, sadly I too often find the two camps to be, if not polar opposites, at least rather…divergent. Guess I should stop calling myself POMO if I don’t even know what the description contains.

Cerise

Anybody into Mother’s Finest?

“Truth’ll Set You Free”

Yeah, yeah.

I love truth. I don’t think we always know what it is, and I don’t think we always know where the line is between truth and knowledge. This is one of the nifty legacies we’ve inherited from modernity: equating the two and feeling hazy on which is more important.

A quote I’ve heard before is “Truth is knowledge applied and experienced.” How do you differentiate, Mikle?

Ok, so clearly I don’t get to use my philosophy training often enough, so I’m vomiting it all out on this one post. Here’s my breakdown on it.

Truth is an objective quality. It has one condition: correspondence to reality. Something is true if it real, actual, equivalent to reality, like two things plus two things adding up to four things. There is no observer neccesary in the truth quality, it remains true whether or not anyone recognizes or acknowledges it; gravity was a true force for billions of years (or a few thousand if you’re a fundie) before it was discovered and articulated.

Knowledge, on the other hand, has three conditions; it is 1) justified, 2) true, 3) belief. For me to know that there is a chair in my kitchen, I have to believe that there is a chair, I have to have good reason for believing that there is a chair, and there has to actually be a chair. If any of these conditions are missing, I don’t have actual knowledge; I am either misled (not true), irrational (not justified), or a radical skeptic (not believed).

Here’s the problem in confusing knowledge with truth. As involved participants, we have can evaluate justification, and we can evaluate belief, but we can’t make an impartial evaluation of the truth quality. It is possible for us to believe something, and to have good reason to believe it, but for it also to not be true. For this reason, we should be very circumspect when we make statements about knowledge. At most, we can say we have good reason to believe that something is true, but that leaves us quite a bit short of being able to make categorical statements.

There ya go. If there’s anyone still reading who hasn’t dropped off from boredom and skipped over to boingboing.net, lemme know. We’ll have beers and discuss correspondence theories of language.

Yeesh. Pardon my post yesterday. I veered off into the (sometimes) icky land of Cerise’s Religious Past where “Truth” meant all sorts of silly things: looking at soft porn eventually makes you into a serial killer, if you engage in pre-marital sex with your betrothed chances are good that he’ll eventually cheat on you. People are basically bad because Adam and Eve gave in to the devil and we’ve been doing it ever since. THAT was what was toited as Truth to me, which means I go all over sulky and stupid when I hear the word again. Hair-trigger.

However, I DO have a rational mind (it’s around here somewhere…) that reminds me that Truth is much bigger, much sweeter and has to do with much more important things than I was taught. Thanks for the reminder, Michael and Aly.

Now if only I’d taken more than that one philosophy class…

Cerise

also, aly, belated props for the fantastic link to me, who unbenownst to me, is a a kick-ass team leader. I think this quote sums up how I treat this blog community:

“After the recent assassination attempt on the team Michael has taken it upon himself to take care of the problem, namely the assassin.

Having taken part in numerous missions, Michael tends to shoot first then ask questions later. This practice has gotten him (not to mention the rest of the team) into trouble more than once. After watching one of his best friends get bitten by a vampire, Michael began studying the undead and their weaknesses.”

Great picture of you, too. Weird that I never noticed you look kinda like Chow Yun Fat.

And your theme music is quite haunting.

Ok, Michael asked me to post, so here goes, my apologies for the big brain dump to follow:
Though I work for Microsoft *waits for the boos to subside*, I also have a great love for Open Source software. I’ve been dabbling with Linux for the last 8 years or so, and I specifically picked my web host provider because they not only supported WordPress, but even gave a portion of my signup fee to the WordPress foundation. That said, Open Source is not going to solve all our software woes. The fact is that if you are relying on volunteer developers, the stuff you get is going to be stuff that developers are interested in writing, things that interest them, or that scratches their itch. That’s why it’s so successful in things like OSes, webservers, text editors, compilers, blogging software, etc. We like those things. We are good at those things. Things like useable (by your average user) interfaces aren’t interesting. We like strange command line switches and arcane config files. There is a reason that you love your Mac, and a lot of it comes from the fact that your experience as a user was planned from the top down and rigidly controlled. You get a lot of benefits from that as a non-techie user. You get that because Apple, while building OSX on top of an open source OS (BSD), is most emphatically NOT an open company.

But the future of Open Source software is really less interesting than the questions that it raises. Economics, from time immemorial, has depended on a model of scarcity. There are only so many goods to go around, so we assign values to things based upon how much we want them and how much there is to go around. But things changed when these things called ideas started to become as important as physical goods. The strange thing with an idea is, if I take an idea from you, you still have it. Economics of scarcity don’t apply. We have invented the concept of copyright and patents to try to artificially introduce scarcity to ideas to encourage the flourishing of valuable ideas, but there has always been a tension between the value to society of a free exchange of ideas, and that of trying to incentivize the creation of new ideas. The language that we use to speak of copyright violation shows just how deeply ingrained the ecomics of scarcity is in our minds. We talk of “software piracy” or of people downloading music as “stealing”, yet there has been nothing necessarily “taken” from anyone, the ideas have just spread. This raises whole new ethical questions, which I’m not going to tease out right now, but I do want to point out that the system of enforced scarcity that we take as a given isn’t woven into the fabric of the universe. It is socially constructed. It provides us with many benefits (like my salary, which I’m happy about), but it is not the only way of doing things. The twin assumptions of our society have been that the only reason people will want to produce “ideas” (and things like software, music, books, etc. are nothing more than ideas) is to make money, and that people will only be willing to pay for ideas if scarcity is forced on them (copyright) . But Open Source questioned those assumptions, and now we are seeing fruit in other places. Things like Wikipedia, and even more importantly, Creative Commons, which is an alternative to the traditional copyright scheme (which Michael has used for his podcasts). Musicians are seeing that sometimes they can reach a wider audience (and even sell more merchandise), by being willing to make their music freely available. Things that seemed like an insurmountable task for a volunteer, like maintaining an ever growing omnipedia of information on just about everything, are suddenly doable, because we are willing to share our ideas rather than hoard them.

It’s not something that works for everything, and we do receive a lot of benefits from copyrights and patents. But it Open Source has started a new conversation that has spread to other areas, and it has made us begin to question the wisdom of giving corporatations ever more control over the spread of ideas, and think about what the benefits might be if we shared our idea rather than hoarding them. And for that, I am very thankful.

Awesome, Michael (Kelley). I admit to being a bit of a pseudo-bohemian, so my overly-positive reaction to the sharing of ideas makes perfect sense to me in light of your explanation of economics and the world of ideas.

I think your statement “The twin assumptions of our society have been that the only reason people will want to produce ‘ideas’…is to make money, and that people will only be willing to pay for ideas if scarcity is forced on them” is the thing that bugs me the most. (I agree with you, it just bugs me.) As an aspiring writer, I live in this tension constantly. Sure, I’d like to make a living writing stuff that people actually want to read (and purchase) - but that’s not WHY I write. This assumption in our society has always bothered me. If I’m constantly trying to write what I think people will want to buy, how will I create an ‘idea’ that is truly original? That’s a big reason (I think) much of the creative output in music, books, film, etc. is so derivative: it’s based on what’s already selling.

This is part of my angst about whole-heartedly embracing a market-driven society (sorry, Mike Lee). I don’t think whether or not something is marketable should be the last word on its value.

Wow, Mr. Kelley. You have prodded open a stuck, stubborn door into a very, very dusty room in my mental attic today. [Not the room that contains the bats, thank god. Holding off madness for another day] I started reading your excellent post and my brain cells, long unused, started saying “No. Oh, no. No, no, NO, NOOOOOO!!!” But I dragged them along, kicking and screaming, for the ride. I’m sure you’ve tossed these ideas around for quite some time (otherwise, how would you have presented them so coherently?) but for me many of these thoughts are a first and I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for sharing them. Mind if I copy them down and file them somewhere? [smile]

Aly, that same thing bugs me and has bugged me since my first Musical Ethics class in college. This was before music sharing ever got going, by the way. I would love to say that most Creators of Ideas (commonly called artists, I think) don’t do it for the money, but still have to keep half an eye on the possibility/necessity of finding a way to make their ideas commercially, uh, gainful. The balance is the key, in my mind, at least with our present economic system. Artists/writers/what-have-you who slip over too much into the artistic integrity/creating for themselves/don’t care about money typically either starve to death or work a day job and their art, which they fought to preserve tooth and nail to begin with, suffers. Artists with an eye too much towards commercial success are called “sell-outs” and their product (ironic that I call it that) is derivative, pedantic, unoriginal, unsatisfying. The artists in the middle go mad in the process of constantly trying to tweak the balance between Simply Creating and trying to appeal to people with money, but they do it. It would be nice if there were a different way altogether. Watching my husband deal with this has brought all of this screaming back into the forefront of our minds.

One other thing that leaped into my mind - if we could eliminate the model of scarcity in the planetary society/economy our system would probably evolve into a model much like the one Star Trek writers emulate in their world. Cerise’s idea of Heaven on Earth. Viva la revolucion.

Cerise

I can think of a few societies who have tried, Cerise, and it ends badly. It works well in small, controlled, homogenous societies of no more than a few dozen, where people are deeply vested in the communal good. It fares very poorly as a broadly instituted social experiment, as evidenced by the horific economic failures of communism and socialism around the world.

At Mike Kelley’s suggestion, I’m going to post later on the idea of Creative Commons, and ownership of ideas. For now, let me just say that our current system fails us on both counts; it is a burden to broad creativity, and it financially rewards distributors of intellectual property far more than it rewards creators.

Also Mike Kelley and I were in youth group together in High School. He was best friends with the girl that everyone had a crush on, and also, if you say our names out loud, it’s hard to tell which one of us you’re talking to.

Michael Lee
Mike Kelley

and for like two weeks, there was a kid visiting named … Mike Halley. It got too confusing, so we put him in charge of the flannelgraph until he left.

[laughing] You two were cosmically meant to walk the earth together. Since the cosmos have a wicked sense of humor and all.

Well, OK, that explains why I keep getting urges to look into the local communes and see if they have a place for me. And, yes, you’re right that communism and socialism (where was pure socialism even adopted by an entire people? I’d like to know…) have failed miserably so far, especially since the rights of the individual seem to keep getting pushed aside, though I don’t think the model of communism is to blame for that. I’m on shaky ground, arguing poli-sci with anyone, so suffice it to say that though the model has failed so far I’m willing to see if the world might tweak it and give it a couple more tries. Not re-invent the U.S.S.R. or anything, of course. I’m looking forward to reading more of your ideas on the subject. Maybe we can discuss it whilst deep in our cups at Aly and Ash’s sometime. I’ll at least learn a lot, even if I can’t really contribute very effectively.

Cerise

Also, I’m pretty sure the Star Trek Federation isn’t communist. [sniff]

Cerise

Is there never the magical Third Way?? I read The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. last year (it’s a collection of his letters to family and friends) and one of the rants he returns to again and again is how communism doesn’t work and capitalism doesn’t work. Well, what DOES work, Dr King? We’re open to ideas. Really, anything would be great.

Sorry for the rant.

This reminds me of that hilarious Wayne’s World sketch where Steven Tyler of Arrowsmith visits Wayne’s basement and they get into a discussion about social experiements. [Imagine Wayne voice here]: “Dude, dialectical materialism hasn’t even been attempted on a broad social scale. Like, don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.”

Ah, Aly at her finest: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Steven Tyler and Wayne’s World all in one very salient intellectual point. As usual you’ve captured exactly what I was trying to say.

Cerise