Now this is interesting…
Now that I have the schedule for the Methodology Conference, I can direct my reading more carefully (no sense in reading Saturday’s articles first, then scrambling to prep for Tuesday’s workshop).
The first day includes Roy Sorenson and Josh Dever, and I’m taking a break from packing for Austin to read Sorenson’s paper on interestingness.* One of his points is that dull objects can constitute interesting facts–he gives Warhol’s art as an example. Wittgenstein doesn’t figure prominently in the paper. He’s mentioned briefly as someone who would disagree with Sorenson, so I thought it would be fun to transform him into a piece of pop art.
I leave Wednesday for Austin, so I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll have time for between today and that trip. I will try to blog the workshop (keeping confidentiality issues in mind, of course) but can’t promise much. If you leave comments on posts, I apologize in advance for the resounding silence you may receive as a response. That said, some questions that I hadn’t really thought about before, in connection with Sorenson’s paper.
There are a couple of ways to think about something being “interesting.” In one sense, I can say that street art is interesting to me, although it may not be to you. Seeing a paste-up or tag from an artist that I know is interesting, something that draws my attention. As I walk around the city, I’m focused upon what stickers are art and what are advertisements people have stuck up.
Another way to talk about things being interesting is relative to a question or an investigation. This is what Sorenson (and most analytic philosophers) are focused upon. Given a set of mathematical facts, what makes one interesting and another trivial? In science, what makes certain observations interesting and others not relevant to an experiment? These are questions about interesting facts, rather than interesting things. It’s an (interesting) question, though, how the first kind of interesting might relate to the second.
Consider the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, in which the central character, a mathematician, had his “interesting neurons” firing hyperactively. He saw every sentence and word in newspaper articles as being clues in some overarching pattern. Interestingness seems to be somehow related to patterns. Philosophy itself has to determine what questions are interesting and worthy of investigation. Is it interesting that “Everyone dies?” is a true statement? Some would consider this trivial. However, set within a different context (questions of ethics, meaning, etc.), this fact might become interesting, as a clue to how we should live.
Perhaps one of the differences between the analytic and continental styles of philosophy (a difference which is notoriously difficult to characterize) is what the traditions find interesting. For example, Heidegger’s question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” doesn’t seem to be one that most analytic philosophers (that I’ve read, anyway) dwell upon. If interestingness is about finding clues to solving a puzzle, then, it seems like the two groups might be working to solve different puzzles. Of course, just as in the sciences, connections between fields can emerge, so, too in philosophy, apparently different puzzles can turn out to be the same one (or two sides of one Rubik’s cube).
A question to ask about identifying philosophical puzzles might be what sorts of puzzles Martian philosophers would be solving. Identifying these–assuming they have a different psychology, perceptual apparatus, geography, biology, etc.–could get at whether anything has “intrinsic interest. What about mathematical and scientific facts which are interesting? A creature who perceives the world in ultraviolet might pick out different objects as interesting than I, but would they agree what what integers and theorems are interesting? Etc. On a daily basis, my dog finds things interesting that I don’t (my wife remarks that Lucy watches for squirrels in trees and I watch for street art on signs).
I’ve divided the kinds of interest into broad categories of “facts/truths” and “things/objects”, but maybe intrinsic and variable interest don’t map one-to-one onto those categories. Perhaps there are facts which have variable interest and things which are intrinsically interesting. If God existed, would he be an intrinsically interesting object? (Given this situation, would interestingness then be derivative of God’s interest?)
(Sorenson, it should be noted, doesn’t think that objects are bearers of interest, but rather, that facts are.)
*It’s in manuscript form, so I am not going to quote or summarize it extensively. Instead, what I’ve written are broad questions prompted by it.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:24 am
In another life, I would get training in neuropsychology. One of my first thoughts reading this article was what is going on in our brain when we think things are “interesting.” After reading it, I read “Kant and the brain: A new empirical hypothesis” by Linda Palmer at Carnegie Mellon University.
Although she’s talking not about “interesting” facts, but the Kantian “inner sense” that coordinates imagination and understanding, I couldn’t help but wonder if there aren’t connections. It seems that there’s some empirical evidence emerging that the basolateral division is active when new things are learned, though not before that and not after when they’ve become mundane tasks.
Since pattern recognition in the environment is an “evolutionary precursor to, and a prerequisite for, the higher level conceptual subsumption found in human cognition” (from the paper), I wonder what the connection is between this internal sense of “aha! I’ve found a pattern” and the interestingness that Sorensen is writing about. What would it mean, if anything, if it were to be found that determining whether a fact is interesting is a brain-based skill, one that could be honed and which is intimately involved in our inductive judgments?
The article is in press in Review of General Psychology, 2008: Shortened version, last revision 2/16/08.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Greetings,
I want to interject that interestingness is not about pattern but a break in the pattern. Symmetry is only interesting in the context of confusion
Kaz
August 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Kaz, why do you think that? Isn’t it interesting that there are infinitely many prime numbers? Or that 142857 multiplied by 1 is 142857, by 2 is 285714, by 3 is 428571, etc…a pattern where the number looks to be chopped up and rearranged. Those are patterns.
Granted, sometimes breaks in patterns are also interesting. I don’t mean to say that only patterns that aren’t interrupted are interesting, but that it’s a function of our finding patterns in the environment that makes things interesting. Clues as to how a pattern progresses or is interrupted are what we consider interesting. At least that’s what it seems in terms of interesting facts.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:23 am
When one is not experiencing a mathematical (logical) concept one senses the chaotic irrational clutter in ones mind much like pink noise. Throughout time we can sense the same irrational clutter. If one is to take a snap shot of the clutter one will find very little perfection. Every snap shot of ones mind through time is a copy of the same noise. After looking at many snap shots one realizes that there is a repetition of pink noise. The repetition of noise becomes a pattern experience through time. Then one senses a mathematical concept and senses the change in pattern from the noise to this new clarity such as there being infinitely many prime numbers. It is the change in pattern that becomes interesting yet what is really more interesting is the question; why is it that the change in pattern is interesting?
:)Kaz
August 6th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Or the fact that many interruptions of patterns happen predictably, which prompts the question of whether that is properly labeled “confusion”. Not that I was terribly impressed by The Black Swan (Nassim Taleb), but failures in our understanding of patterns could be the consequence of the models used.
Just a thought, but “shiny things” seem to be interesting broadly, backing currencies, empires, religious imagery, etc. I love shiny things.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I suppose I’m not following your description of “experiencing a mathematical concept.” How do you experience a concept, and what “chaotic irrational clutter” are you talking about? Perception of the world around us? I wouldn’t describe it in that way–our perception seems to be focused on interpreting and recognizing patterns in the world around us.
And “perfection” and “pink noise”? What do you mean by that–the world isn’t constructed in Euclidian geometric terms or Platonic forms?
I have to admit that I’m not following your argument very well.
August 10th, 2008 at 5:50 am
This topic is entirely too complex to map out through comments on a blog … I will have to address it someday in an essay at my blog.
Sorry,
Kaz
August 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
No problem, Kaz. Thanks for the comments, and I’ll check back over your blog sometime.