The Complex History of Dreads (And Why White People Should Stop Wearing Them Anyway)

I feel compelled to write this post because I find popular discussions on this topic are painfully lacking in nuance, and whenever it comes up in social media, I always have to bite my lip and avoid saying anything, lest any partial answer I give be misconstrued.  Here's the crux of the matter:  Within the past 20-30 years, it has been a popular trend for white people to wear dreadlocks, which are seen in popular culture as a black hairstyle most famously associated with Rastafarianism.  Recently, this has become a contentious issue, as white people donning this hairstyle are accused of appropriating black culture.  White people have responded in turn by pointing out examples of dreadlocks in other cultures, and specifically in European history, such as among the Vikings and Celts.  There's a lot of history that gets left out in such discussion, but more than that, I feel like such discussions end up focusing on the wrong things and missing the point entirely.

So I'll start this off by saying that so far as I've been able to discern, the whole "Faerie Locks" thing among the Celts is dubious at best, and they most likely wore braids rather than locks.  But it is definitely true that locks are far from unique to black culture.  In India, they are known as "jatta," and they are worn by sadhus -- Hindu holy men who renounce material possessions, live austere lives of prayer and meditation, and, among other things, are forbidden to comb or cut their hair.  The god Shiva is portrayed with long, flowing locks, with which he is said have soaked up the waters of Ganga, goddess of the Ganges, and prevented the world from drowning.  A similar practice exists in Tibetan Buddhism among Ngagpas -- tantric specialists who are not ordained monks but receive a skra dbang, or hair blessing, which is said to infuse their hair with dakinis, and as such should never be cut or combed.  Various Sufi groups have also adopted the practice.

On Brains and Computers

It's been a while since I've posted here, but perhaps the best impetus for doing so is when I have more to say on a subject than can reasonably be covered in a Facebook post.  I had recently shared this article by famous psychologist Robert Epstein, claiming that the brain is not a computer: that it does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories.  This elicited a rather mocking response from Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist who teaches at the University of Waterloo.  I'm afraid my credentials pale in comparison to either of them.  My degree is in sociology and anthropology, not computer science, psychology, or philosophy.  My knowledge of computers and AI comes mostly second-hand from philosophers and scientists I've read on the subject.  I am simply a philosophy enthusiast with a keen interest in issues of the philosophy of mind.  Nonetheless, however limited my knowledge of computers or mathematics, I think I may be able to offer some insight on the situation at hand.

One of the central disagreements here seems to be the definition of "information."  I'm prepared to award the point to Mr. Shallit here, I think we should at least attempt to understand what Epstein is getting at.  Humans experience inputs just as computers do, but computers, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong here), take in data bit-by-bit, building their models and programs from the ground up.  The human mind, as Husserl astutely pointed out, encounters not merely the sense impressions of which Locke spoke, but objects.  There is a holistic quality to perception that moves from the general to the specific, not the other way around.  I have no qualms with continuing to call this "information," so long as we understand that we are talking about very different kinds of information.

Structation

Thought I'd start posting YouTube videos here so I don't have to write out all my thoughts.  Here I address a conflict between process philosophy and object-oriented ontology, and my attempted synthesis between the two camps.




For those who want a visual representation of what I'm talking about:

The Mythology of the Modern World

I'd like to explore the mythology behind what we call the "scientific worldview." Just to clarify, when I speak of "mythology" here, I don't necessarily mean something that is false. Myths are rather metaphorical motifs by which we make sense of the world around us. Many people today imagine that what is propagated as the "scientific worldview" is based purely on empirical research, and has no untested assumptions or metaphorical ideas behind it. In response to this, I would like to give a genealogy of the modern worldview known as "scientific materialism."

We begin with Thales, the earliest recognized Greek philosopher. He was the first to try to explain the world without reference to traditional mythological explanations. He developed an alternative mythology which did not appeal to personal deities, but instead involved a theory of matter and form. Next, we come to Pythagoras, who saw all the world as an expression of mathematical equations. Many physicists today, when you scratch the surface, are still essentially Pythagoreans.

We then skip to Parmenides, who used logic to try to prove that change is an illusion, and that the one true reality is eternal and unchanging. His followers were impressed with his logic, but couldn't quite accept his conclusion. Instead, they all tried to figure out which aspect of reality was eternal and unchanging. For Plato, it was the eternal forms. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that there is a reality hidden to the senses but accessible to reason, of which the world of appearances are like shadows on a cave. It is from this idea that we get the idea of eternal, unchanging laws of nature.

The One and the Many

There is an increasing tendency among philosophers and other intellectuals to insist that everything is interconnected.  So consistently will they harp on the sickness and wrongheadedness of the tendency to divide the world up into discrete, autonomous entities, that one wonders who exactly they're arguing with.  The Cartesian worldview is dead, and Aristotelianism doesn't get much praise either.  So who is contesting this interconnectedness that all these intellectuals insist upon?

One person challenging this view is Graham Harman.  In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations.  He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do.  In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly.  They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation.  Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them.  Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing.  He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.

Deterritorializing Authority

I think it's crucial to understand the role of habit in upholding social systems.  Yes, it is true that the state's authority is ultimately backed by violence, but most people don't encounter this violence, and don't even give it a second thought.  They're simply used to always doing things a certain way.  David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, suggests that hierarchy develops out of habit.  If someone acts like royalty, people will begin treating them like royalty.  In what sociologists refer to as the Matthew effect, there is a common social tendency to give more to those who already have more.  More prestigious scientists are likely to be given more credit for a discovery than lesser-known scientists who did more significant work that preempted theirs.  If you do a favor for someone, you are more likely to do favors for them in the future.  If someone does a favor for you, they are more likely to do favors for you in the future.  In order to avoid the emergence of such hierarchy, rules about reciprocity need to be established and made habitual.

We also see the notorious effects of habit in all systems of privilege.  White privilege exists because white people are used to being treated a certain way and people of color are used to being treated another way.  White people are oblivious to their privilege because for them, things have always been a certain way, and it's working great for them, so they don't understand why everyone's complaining about it.  They don't see what it's like for people of color when interviewing for a job, applying for a loan, trying to move into a neighborhood, or getting pulled over by the police.  And if they did see it, they might not recognize what's going on, because they don't see the influence of habit in these situations.  The person interviewing a person of color for a job probably isn't consciously looking to disqualify them based on their race, but they might think they look "unprofessional." The police officer might pull over a black person not because they're consciously looking to persecute black people, but rather because they look "suspicious."

Habit creates systems of privilege through normativity.  It determines the norms that people follow without questioning them.  This is not to demonize habit.  Habit is neutral.  The issue is what kind of habits we have, and how to shift toward healthier habits.  This is no easy task.  If morphic resonance means anything, it is that each repetition of a habit makes it more solidified and deeply entrenched.  Counteracting these habits involves the construction of new habits.

Cosmic Creativity

Previously, I mentioned my long-standing enthusiasm for Whitehead, and the compelling critique of his ideas presented by Graham Harman.  I must say that I am in broad agreement with much of Harman's thought, and cannot continue to identify myself as essentially Whiteheadian.  However, if there is one thing I take away from Whitehead's work, and wish to preserve, it is this fundamental polarity between habit and novelty.  It seems to me that these two components are the only necessary ingredients to have any kind of creativity.  I think Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance is about the best theory of habit I've encountered.  Novelty is a more subtle problem that I think needs a bit more unpacking.

I think Whitehead had the right idea, but ultimately I find his system a little too Platonic.  Whitehead's idea is that every occasion is mediated by eternal objects(essentially Platonic forms) that are narrowed into a set of probabilities by God and selected by each actual occasion in its act of becoming.  First of all, I don't like this atomistic account of becoming.  I'm much more keen on Bergson's idea of duration.  Second and more importantly, I have trouble believing that every form or type of experience existed in this potential realm for billions of years before there were lifeforms that were able to prehend them.  Yes, I realize that Whitehead's system is panpsychist(or to use David Griffin's term, panexperientialist), and I'm very sympathetic to that idea.  But there are different types of experience that different entities are capable of.  Vision, for example, is a type of experience that was not available until the evolution of eyes.  The qualia associated with the color red could not have predated vision, even if the part of the light spectrum we associate with red may have existed and made a difference for photons bouncing off of surfaces we would perceive as red.  The kind of universal forms we experience visually are very different from the ones we encounter through auditory or tactile sensations.  If these forms are indeed eternal, we'd have to believe that the universals available to sight were just sitting in the ether waiting for a creature that is able to prehend them.

What I think Whitehead is getting at, though -- and I very much agree with this -- is that creativity is archetypal.  There is a sense in which creative acts of novelty are moving toward something virtual that has not yet been actualized.  It is moving toward a form.  In this way, final cause can be considered to be simply a broader variety of formal causation.  So where do the forms come from if they aren't eternal?