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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from equality and hierarchy
  • Phil Agre on Conservatism: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
    • From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
    • The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. ... People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
    • The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth.
from Heidegger
  • A big influence on Meaningness and Phil Agre and thus indirectly on me. But I also have a pretty deep resistance; the man was a Nazi, and when the anti-rationalism starts to shade into fascism that's where I get off the train.
from Protocols/Protocol Thinking
  • Phil Agre, Routines (maybe a stretch? But shows some new ways to think about the emergence of patterns of interaction)
from Meaningness
  • David Chapman (aka @meaningness) has been a major influence on my own thinking. His work at the MIT AI lab with Phil Agre made a deep impression on me when I was trying to figure out my own academic path. This included a critical take on the standard cognitive science view of the mind, which is pretty much Rationalism minus the more cultish and cartoonish aspects.
from orbiculus
  • A term proposed by Phil Agre in his essay @Writing and Representation , meaning, the environment in which a mental homunculus operates. In the classical AI planning model, the homunculus is some kind of general problem solver or optimizer, that operates within an environment made up of representations.
from antiphilosophy
  • I came by my anti-philosophy stance at MIT, of course, where the standard line was that AI and cybernetics had rendered all past philosophical discourse obsolete and irrelevant. This was not quite the case (See Heideggerian AI , and Phil Agre on AI's contempt for philosophy The Soul Gained and Lost )
from Orality and Literacy
  • Phil Agre՚s Writing and Representation caused a related and similarly violent lurch in my thinking, because it made me realize that the metaphor of writing underlies the technology of computing in a fundamental way, all the way back to the Turing machine. And while from a computer-as-medium perspective that was interesting but not problematic, from an AI standpoint it seemed to fatally compromise the whole operation. The strengths of writing (definiteness, stability, abstractness) were a late achievement of human minds and thus obviously unsuitable to be the building blocks of human minds, which evolved under conditions of orality (and before that, from animal signalling and sociality).
from Joseph Goguen
  • Cited and acknowleged in Phil Agre's Towards a Critical Technical Practice
from LWMap/The Rocket Alignment Problem
from writing
  • On the nature of writing and its relationship to thought, or how we think about thought, Orality and Literacy blew my mind, along with Phil Agre's Writing and Representaton. Highly recommend.
from Mastodon 20 books project
  • 14 Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre
from Infrastructure of intention
from situated action
Twin Pages

Phil Agre

30 Oct 2021 - 08 Oct 2025
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