(With apologies to The Eels.)
This is a brilliant summary of my issue with meme theory from Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity:
Originating in a set of radical proposals advanced by the biologist Richard Dawkins, memetics has come to embrace a great variety of competing arguments. There is no consensus, at yet at least, on such basic questions as what constitutes a “meme,” whether an agreed definition is necessary in the first place, and even whether memes are located in minds or in the environments that surround them (or both). Not only are there diverse notions of what memes are and where they can be found, but there is no agreement on the general aim of memetics: is it to explain something, to describe it more precisely, to provide an inspiring metaphor for the analysis of some other process, or what?
It’s my birthday weekend, and for my birthday, I’d like to give you a gift.
After a long delay, I finally sat down and recorded the presentation that I gave at the Peace and Justice Studies Association national conference. People have been asking for it, but life has been busy, and it is just now here.
The basic question is how game theory can inform nonviolent activism, and how nonviolent activism might inform game theory. I go through much of the history of game theory without getting bogged down in mathematical notation.
As always, it is published under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. More information here: 
Peace Games: Game Theory and Peace by Robert Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. In short, feel free to pass it around.
You may want to download the file in order to avoid some squishing action in my lame player. The full-quality version is downloadable here.
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (41.6MB)
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Posted 27 November 2011
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Gandhi Quotes § Politics § Sermon / Story
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Tagged: Game Theory, Martin Nowak, Negative Peace, Peace, Peace and Conflict Studies, Peace and Justice Studies Association, Positive Peace, Retributive Justice, Robert Axelrod, Satyagraha, Satyagraha matrix, Tit for Tat
I just had an exchange with an atheist on Twitter who became incredibly condescending when I asserted there were ways of knowing other than empiricism.
[EDIT: Said atheist has since deleted the tweet. It's still appearing in my timeline, though, and appears here.]
These kind of exchanges are really frustrating, and they’re really much more common than they should be. The ardent atheists that I have encountered pride themselves on being grounded in truth and rationality and reality and all that goodness (over and against the crazy-ass theists and their delusions). If you really want to be grounded in truth and careful thought, then you need to catch up on the careful thought about truth which is out there. There’s a long history and significant work in the philosophy of knowledge, and if you’re going to start condemning people because of their ways of knowing, you should really have a handle on what you’re talking about. Right now, as I hear many atheists talk, I wish they’d just catch up — often, their arguments about epistemology are like someone coming into a physics conversation and arguing for luminiferous ether.
Here is my take on a mandatory reading list if you really want to engage in conversations about truth. The ordering is significant: I think that if you want to have your mind appropriately blown, you need to move in roughly this order. (Of course, this order happens to be roughly the order I encountered things, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.)
- Descartes, Discourse on Method — Seriously, it’s short, it’s accessible, it’s well-written, and it’s the basic blow which sets up both modernism and postmodernism.
- Heidegger, Being and Time — This gets at the basic difference between that-which-is and that-which-seems-to-be (my words, not his). This book is one that I keep coming back to, because just when I dismiss it as being simplified or impractical or something, it somehow comes back and grabs my imagination.
- Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge — A brilliant analysis of science and knowledge conversations in general. Although I don’t necessarily agree with all of it and it makes me squirm in a bunch of places, my critiques are mainly more of form than core content.
- MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? — You may need a running start into this book via MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but this is the more important text when it comes to discussing truth. Most importantly, it lays out an actual and effective technique for engaging in conversation with someone whose worldview is so thoroughly different.
- Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe — A vital check on the presumption of the universality of science as a means of description and conception.
- Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript — If you make it this far: Kudos, and think of this as the boss fight of the list. Kierkegaard here lays out the most sustained and thorough attack on objectivity-as-knowledge, and although Kierkegaard is no doubt more devotedly Christian than his pseudonymous authorial personae, I find myself often in deep sympathy with the authorial personae, and it’s a position that I think many agnostics and open-minded atheists can appreciate. (I actually encountered this book first, but it’s such a massive beast and such a deep and shockingly ahead-of-its-time text that it made it onto the list last.)
With these thinkers under your belt, I think we might be able to have a conversation in 140 character tweets on the issue of belief. But otherwise, it’s going to take a lot more work to try to get anywhere, and some of the claims I make (like the ultimate subjectivity of all knowledge) will seem really weird. Unfortunately, the truth is that our experience of reality is just plain weird — if you consider carefully what is going on when we know something, you end up deeply enmeshed in your own preconceptions, presuppositions, and interpretations. This makes knowledge and means of knowledge (including empiricism and its expression in western science) as contextualized and culturally loaded. I’m willing to have deeper conversations on this point, but just not over Twitter.
