30th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Thursday

A flight from San Francisco to LA + a flight from LA to London + 24 hours in Oxford + another flight to Vienna (Austrian Airlines are excellent, I fully recommend them) + one hour car drive later (that is, after the Google meeting, see previous post), and here I'm, a bit jet-lagged, attending and speaking at the 30th In. Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel.

This is not California, or Silicon Valley, or Google Headquarters. At the meeting, you pay 1 euro for your coffee (sic) and there is no wireless, but half a dozen, arthritic PCs, which are so sluggish that the 10cents per minute you are charged to check your email (airport business model?) become a fortune.

Luckily, the staff is helpful, the weather is fine, and the close Mamas restaurant offers a very nice refuge: free WiFi, decent food (pizza/coke being your nerdy blogger's unimaginative usual food; but I am trying to switch to salads, thinking of the next squash season and the team back in College) and comfortable seats. The green mountains and valleys surrounding us are astoundingly beautiful. The village pleasant.

This year the conference is dedicated to The Philosophy of Information Society. This has attracted an unusual range of papers, some embarrassingly poor (trust me, I've seen crap, but some appalling papers still managed to astonish me), some truly excellent (more on both presently).

There is the usual amount of Wittgenstein scholarship - as one may expect - though with a digital bent, and more than a pinch of St. Wittgenstein Church goers (the believers who dedicate their lives to the exegesis of The Philosopher's venerable Scriptures), as one is by now used to fear (after all, whom am I to speak? Oxford is one of the strongholds of Wittgensteinian scholasticism).

Some speakers dare to suggest that it is time to move on. To someone used to see Wittgenstein as part of the history of philosophy syllabus (great as Descartes and Kant are great) this sounds like a very good idea, actually so good that it has well passed its best-before date. But here it seems original and rather risky, almost provocative, seeing the reactions among some of the attendees.

And now for the papers.

So far, the worst two (but I cannot imagine anything could beat them) are the following.

One paper (Catholic education: you censure the sin not the sinner) was supposed to address the problem of the global production of knowledge.I thought it might be interesting or at least informative. I was wrong on both accounts.

Some trite but, admittedly, conceptually innocuous remarks on globalization were soon followed by utterly unjustified (though not unjustifiable) complains (no empirical evidence or logical support provided, they were merely vented) on how science is becoming increasingly specialised (no historical insights offered either), fordist (you sure?, is the lab culture fordist? and the peer-reviewed system? and the conferences? and...?) and apparently narrow-minded (read: people need to spend years of hard work before becoming experts... and hence having less chances of giving talks like this).

The shallowness was so breathtaking, it made you think of a black hole. We kept swirling into it. Increasingly bewildered, I heard the speaker saying that scientists (yes, the whole category, no pointless discrimination required) are no longer driven by curiosity or scientific interest (ah good old days!) but only greedy publish-or-perish strategies (disgusting! And, on top of that, they publish in English, how disheartening for the speaker, whose English, to be fair, was very good).

All this would have been already preposterous had we been drinking an espresso at Mamas. I was still hoping things might suddenly, if inexplicably, improve when we were treated to the following couple of observations. Of course, philosophers can afford to care little about how science is going stinky rotten these days, since we (well, "you", really, the speaker being careful about indexicals) are a bunch of impractical daydreams anyway (ok, if was phrased a dash less explicitly than that, but not much). And neuroscientists (yes, the speaker had a very broad view of whom should be nailed to their responsibilities once and for all, for goodness' sake) are ruining our beautiful understanding of the mind we have inherited from Christianity (no, this time it was not put a dash more subtly than that; this is almost a quotation). It was a this theological turning point that I left the room. It was the most polite thing I could possibly do.

The other talk at the bottom of the list was on silence and grammar in Wittgenstein. There wasn't anything as bad as the arrogant nonsense and incompetence I illustrated above, the problem was another. It was a long sermon. No thesis stated, no problem tackled, no question answered, no reasoning, no ifs&thens, no nothing. It was not wrong because it was not right either. Goody-goody, probably deeply felt by the speaker and I would say rather convincing in leading the audience. It really made you conclude with an "Amen" at the end of it. But I kept quiet, and I did not leave either; I behaved properly and just made a mental note never to read or listen to this person again. Unlikely, but just in case.

And now for the good stuff. Very good indeed.

The two talks I enjoyed most so far (two more days to go) were:

Greg Chaitin's. On Wednesday, he gave a brilliant exposition of his philosophy of mathematics, his digital epistemology and ontology and his criticism of the theory of incomputable irrationals. I had already heard a similar talk at ECAP 2007, but I still enjoyed it enormously, not least because Greg and I have had opportunities to discuss digital ontology since then and, despite our different views (basically, he is for, I'm against it), his remarks are always intellectually instructive and very stimulating. I still believe he is wrong about the vaibility of a Neo-Pythagorean ontology of bits, but I fully respect the view and find it most intriguing. If you are interested, his views on the topic are published in his most recent book (more information here).

Juliet Floyd's. This was today. Absolutely fascinating. She reconstructed Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics and Wittgenstein's interactions with Turing and the computational tradition impeccably and engagingly. The scholarship was first-class, insightful, accurate and precise, but never obstructive. The emphasis on what I would like to define Wittgenstein's and Turing's interest (and bias) for visual thinking was most convincing. And the delivery was engaging. I learned a lot and, as with the best papers, did not realise time was flying. Ah, I almost forgot: all references to mathematical and logical issues were based on solid, technical knowledge, a refreshing pleasure, after the talks mentioned above.

This is all for now. I also met old friends (hi Charles!) and made new ones. So far, it was definitely worth the long trip and the jet-lag. I'm glad and grateful for the invitation.