Matthew T Grant

In America, and apparently some parts of the developing world, it can be very shocking when you tell people that you do not believe in God. Indeed, even among America’s educated classes, you’ll rarely hear an expression of outright atheism (though you will encounter a fair amount of agnosticism).

I asked a friend once why this was and he replied, in effect, that people claim to be agnostic mainly because they are cowards. At first I thought he meant that they, like Pascal, were basically hedging their bets. I mean, what if they’re wrong? Better not to commit either way.

Now I believe that he was pointing instead to their fear of communal opprobrium. Agnostics don’t fear God, after all (if they did, they wouldn’t be agnostics). The only thing they have to fear is Believers.

For my part, I’ve tended to be fairly forthright about my atheism. I do not believe that God exists. At the same time, being of a rather philosophical bent, I’m not entirely comfortable with that manner of expressing things. Why? Well, it all depends on what your definition of “is” is.

You see, we humans tend to have a pretty strong physical bias when it comes to “existence.” When we say that something exists in the course of daily conversation, one can safely assume that we mean “physically” exists. And to the extent that we are particular in questions of fact, we have some fairly rigorous and straightforward standards regarding proof of physical existence.

For example, one should be able to supply fairly precise coordinates of an existing entity’s location in space if one wants to definitively claim that it does indeed exist. One should also be able to specify it’s mass, its physical dimensions, and so on. (In the case of those “objects”—electrons, black holes, photons, etc.—for which precise location or exact mass, among other things, may be difficult to establish, we have mathematical models and experimental procedures that provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence from which existence can be reasonably inferred, if not postively demonstrated.)

Unfortunately, the existence of God doesn’t lend itself to such procedures and demonstrations. If it is argued that the reason for this is that God does not exist “physically,” then I must respond, “Well, then, in what sense of the word ‘exist’ does God exist if not in the physical sense?”

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Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Epistemology pays no bills,” Martin remarked drily. – Charles Stross, “The Singularity Sky”

When I wrote about the “database of intentions” and linked that concept to my own longstanding view of the web as the “database of human consciousness,” and thus the fulfillment or actualization of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, I was not trying to make a business point; I was trying to make a philosophical point.

By making a distinction between the two, however, I do not mean to elevate the latter (philosophy) above the former (business). In fact, I was mildly chagrined that my arcane references to a long-dead philosopher and the equally deliquescent tradition of German Idealism with which he is associated bore so few immediately practical fruits. A few kindly souls actually took the time to read the post, so where was the pay off?

While I would like to say that “philosophy is it’s own pay off,” I actually believe that philosophy’s pay off is always and necessarily extra-philosophical. As the  the epigram to this post suggests, by “putting things before us” philosophy’s product amounts to “a perspective on things,” rather than any “thing” in particular. Wittgenstein put it this way: “One might also give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.”

Heidegger too insisted on the “no-thing-ness” of philosophical thought. To him, thinking was unique as an human activity because it did not truck with beings, but solely with Being (Sein), which he called “essentially the same as Nothingness” (wesenslgeich mit dem Nichts, or something like that).

But the case of Heidegger reminds us that philosophy’s product – a perspective on things – while not belonging properly to the order of things  can nevertheless have a tangible impact. A philosophical perspective not only shows what is there, but what is possible and, in some cases, what is necessary. When these things, possibilities, and necessities get organized into practices, philosophy has its pay off and that pay off could take the form of a religion, a political system, a life-style, or even a business.

Of course, in all these just-mentioned cases the work of organizing is what produces the real value, not the work’s philosophical underpinnings. The value of philosophy is always mediated. In the absence of this mediation, philosophy is as bereft as the coin of a vanished realm or lyric poetry in a dead and forgotten language.

Image Source: danbri.

Bob Knorpp of the Cool Beans Group kicked things off with “pay attention to the keywords you are using in social status updates.” If you are looking for additional SEO power and buzz, focusing on these status updates can have an impact based on the way these things are indexed (with an emphasis on the first six words).

Dave Thomas of SAS focused on the power of content and especially the importance of re-purposing the content you produce. He referred to Kirsten Watson’s (Kinaxis) practice of producing a white paper, first, then using that to produce blog posts, then creating a deck from that for Slideshare, and finally, interviewing the author to create a podcast. An audience member then told people not to forget about images which are, of course, indexed as well.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path recalled the advice that you should never test just to test, but always to use testing to prove out particular points.

Bob Knorpp shared the lesson that you should listen to your sales force to find out what kinds of content bring the best leads, then optimize for that content. It might sound obvious, he said, but it bears repeating because it gives you something very concrete to work with. (I found “improving the relationship between sales and marketing” one of the sub-themes of the entire forum.)

Dave Thomas echoed several speakers saying that it’s ok to take a hybrid approach and integrate your “traditional” marketing techniques with all the emerging tactics now available.

Stephanie Miller, finally, recalled an exercise used in one session where the speaker took the marketing messages of several competitors and showed that you could not tell the companies apart solely based on these messages, which were essentially the same. Compare your messaging to that of your competitors and prepare to have your eyes opened!

As part of a discussion about getting more people in your organization involved in social media, Bob Knorpp cautioned first that it may not be the case that everyone is actually going to be good at it (blogging, for example). So you should take people’s strengths into considerations before asking them to do something. He wanted people to remember that, frankly, if your organization is listening, then that is already a win.

There followed a discussion about the loss of control brought about my social media. It was acknowledged that this loss of control can certainly make some people nervous, and that this is a natural response in some cases, but that our role needs to be one of educating people on how to use these tools. In fact, we can create whole plans around it so that we have a framework within which to judge and evaluate our efforts.

The conversation then returned to the publishing metaphor especially in the context of Kipp Bodnar’s suggestion that your goal should be to produce the best-read magazine in your industry. Bob Knorpp took issue with the publishing metaphor and suggested that we use, instead, the “theme park” metaphor. “When people go to Disneyland, they don’t rave about the brochure, they rave about the experience,” as he put it.

Finally, I said that my big takeaway was that all this isn’t about the technology; it’s about the “soft stuff.” Marketing automation, lead management, social media engagement all boil down to human interactions. It’s these interactions that produce the processes that you automate, build trust between marketing and sales, and, ultimately, determine the role you play in the lives of your customers.

I’ve never been a big fan of the “reality is an illusion” perspective, though I certainly understand it.

If we equate reality with our perception of reality, for example, then we are naturally deluded, for that perception is a product of our sense organs, our neurological infrastructure, and, I’m told, our race, class, and/or gender.

If, on the other hand, we say, “Reality is what is really there regardless of how it is perceived or whether it is even perceptible in the first place,” then we simply concede that our normal state of conscious awareness is, at best, a useful representation of the thing (reality) itself. That may not make it an outright delusion, but it at least makes it something like a practical hallucination.

The curious thing is that these hallucinations, these delusions, can be shared, even massively so (think of religions, nation states, the cult of celebrity, etc.). I would even go so far as to say that the process of sharing our delusions actually serves as a helpful corrective. We get closer to “what is really there” whenever we engage in a conversation with others concerning what seems to be there or what we assume to be there.

At least, that’s what my work as an independent professional (or, “thought ronin“), has taught me thus far.

If you want to get as close as possible to understanding what someone else wants, what they’re after, and how they would like you to help them, then you got to talk it out. And the more you talk it out, the more real everything gets. (I’m referring to actually talking here, conducting an email correspondence or swapping lengthy voice-mails does not count.)

Of course, sometimes you just don’t want to get real, finding the familiar cocoon of delusion far more comforting and far less vexing. But that’s another issue we should talk about.

Image Source

I saw Avatar yesterday and, well, you know.

I thought it would have been so much better if they had discovered that the All-mother, Eywa, was actually an evil AI and the Na’vi people were really her slaves or her batteries, like in the Matrix, and that the “attack” by the “sky people” was actually created by her to punish them for something.

This would have also allowed for a Philip K. Dick-esque bending of reality/identity as Sully discovers that the woman he’s fallen in love with is actually an avatar, that all the soldiers and scientists and corporate flacks from Earth are avatars, and that, in fact, he is an avatar as well!

On another note: SEO

I did a Google Image search for “Avatar” and, of course, mainly got pictures of Aang and his cohorts from Avatar: The Last Airbender, which first aired in 2005.

Just goes to show that half a billion dollars in production and advertising can’t turn back the accreted long tale of web content.

Or can it?

Image Courtesy of rxau.

In Ithaca, my friend Art once told me that he hated it when people spoke of “levels” as in, “We’re seeing a whole other level of play on the court today.” (I had just told him that, having finished my dissertation, I felt that I had “moved to another level.”)

Years later, I’m in New Zealand hanging with this other friend, Russel, and I say, “I’ve always got to remind myself that there are other levels. Like, I imagine I’m at the highest level, but then I realize there’s another level.”

“There’s always another level,” Russel said.

I believe that there is always another level if for no other reason than that such a belief can spur us on and inspire us to be better, do more – grow, change, thrive.

Nevertheless, I also hold fast to the faith that there is a level where there are no levels at all.

Incredible Image Courtesy of kern.justin.

Conservative critic Ross Douthat recently took James Cameron and Hollywood to task for rampant pantheist sympathies writing that pantheism “represents a form of religion that even atheists can support.”

While I believe he is mistaken to equate, as he does, pantheism with “nature worship” – the latter being more akin to polytheism or animism and the former meaning literally that God is too be found in the totality of the All, not “just” nature – I do agree that those who seek solace in natural wonders tend to be fairly selective about those parts of the natural world that they find wonderful, failing, for example, to hear the voice of God in cancer’s fatal malignancy or see the face of God in the blue sky’s indifference to atrocities unfolding ‘neath its broad, azure beams.

Though I sense Douthat’s tacit support of the Christian side of the equation, I appreciate that, in his argument against pantheism, he actually grants atheism a kind of tragic nobility:

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Personally, what fills me with awe is the age-old human struggle to wrest sense from the senseless and to fashion purpose in the raging forge of entropic impermanence. That these efforts have about them the air of inescapable doom does indeed make them tragic.

That they can also result in moments, even epochs, of beauty, wisdom, freedom, and love, is truly divine.

Image Courtesy of Mark Cummins.

Yesterday I was to meet with a fellow, Charles Hamad, so naturally I Googled him.

Among the treasures that Google served up was this article from 1974 describing Hamad’s work as a graduate student on a talking trash can named “Arthur.”

Here’s a clip from a spot the BBC did about this novel application of behavioral psychology to the problem of environmental pollution:

Enabling a trash can to talk in an effort to curb litter reminded me of the more recent work of BJ Fogg in the area of persuasive technology.

More importantly, it reminded me also that technology can be used for good, and not (just) evil.

I launched the incredibly successful Twitternet phenomenon, #onewordwednesday, in May 2009, at least by my reckoning.

The fact that on every subsequent Wednesday (and sometimes earlier) the hashtag has seen action, and not just due to my own fervid zealotry, I consider one of the few real achievements of my adult life.

Nevertheless, I fear that I have been lax to the point of wishi-washiness on what constitutes proper observance of #onewordwednesday. Among other things, my wavering spirit has led some to attempt a #onewordwednesday takeover, albeit it in the interest of your eternal salvation.

Today, however, I’m drawing a line in the sand and stating clearly and definitively, that true, devout observance of #onewordwednesday calls for limiting all Tweets that day to ONE WORD.

“But Matthew T. Grant, what about retweets or the sharing of links?”

Gosh darn it! OK. Fine. As Buffy Saint-Marie once sang, “I was an oak, now I’m a willow, now I can bend.”

• You may retweet other contributions to the #onewordwednesday experience until the 140 character limit has been achieved.
• You may also share links if and only if the Tweet consists of nothing more than one word and a shortened URL.

Look, I’m not asking that everyone across the Twitterverse adhere to this standard of observance. I simply want to provide those interested in truth, purity, and righteousness a guiding light and a clear sign that they may better find their way on the path to (#)one(wordwednesday)ness.

Peace.

A local, recently gender-reassigned nanny drove a car which featured the following bumper sticker:

While sympathetic to the sentiment expressed, believing, as I do, that reality, taken in the totality of its sordid, mundane, and astonishing details, is nothing if not outrageous, I felt nevertheless rankled.

Said rankling arose from my even stronger belief that the unstated logic of the proffered statement – “If you are not responding in a specific way, then you are not perceiving reality as it truly is” – serves as the logical underpinning of political, ideological, or religious fundamentalism in every form.

My work on Germany’s Red Army Faction (aka, The Baader-Meinhof Gang, a much cooler name, IMHO) led me to rebel against and reject “the unassailable logic of the next step,” as Norman Mailer called it in The Armies of the Night, insisting instead that there is no ethical norm inherent in the physical world, including, and this is the real scandal, the human world in all its perplexing complexity.

It is one of the benefits of being human that we can simply observe. While sense stimuli – a flashing light, a gunshot, an electrical shock – do indeed provoke hard-wired responses, and the body may involuntarily behave in a specific way based on the type of stimulus, this becomes less and less the case as we consider more involved levels of cognition.

Sunlight reflecting off a passing car may make us squint; recognizing the driver as our mortal enemy could make us cry out in fury or turn away or remain impassive. Conscious, attentive perception, thankfully and sadly, does not produce an automatic, programmed, and necessary response.

Still, to a certain way of thinking, the true outrage is human freedom.