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Welcome to "A thousand plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. ATP is a political book, albeit not a book about politics. But in the process of buildin

Welcome to "A thousand plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. ATP is a political book, albeit not a book about politics. But in the process of building their radical political theory, they build a radical general systems theory that's u-n-m-a-t-c-h-e-d. We have no choice but to study it. This doesn't do it justice, but it's a fair beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy) This is an illustrated audio reading of the first chapter of ATP (the one dedicated to rhizomes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XYc2scuJrI&t=64s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XYc2scuJrI&t=64s

echelon 4y ago
When I read Wikipedia (or any treatment) on philosophy, I can't help but feel like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it. The linked article for this thread is about how "tree" biology keeps springing up and disappearing - the molecular biology, genetics, convergent evolution -- and how the human concept of "tree" doesn't really map cleanly. All of that, to me, is intuitive. But philosophy is lost on me. Neither your linked Wikipedia article or the article on the book you suggest [1] make much sense to my non-philosophical science brain. My eyes just glaze over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago
  D&G are a bad place to start with philosophy. I recommend watching these lectures by the late Professor Rick Roderick for a more accessible introduction: http://rickroderick.org/101-socrates-and-the-life-of-inquiry-1990/ http://rickroderick.org/101-socrates-and-the-life-of-inquiry...
  - soco 4y ago
    Is D&G an established term for Deleuze&Guattari? Because for me it will always decode to Dolce&Gabbana...
    - whitemary 4y ago
      Yeah, it's slightly unfortunate but well-established inside and slightly outside of philosophy circles.
  - whitemary 4y ago
    Rick Roderick is the best! Great recommendation!
- attemptone 4y ago
  For me it is the other way around. Scientist sound like laymen in philosophy when they want to bring their data into a larger context. They stumble to explain why certain connection can/cannot be made and how they come up with the implications. ^This applies mostly to epistemology. I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.
- feoren 4y ago
  [dead]
- kosherhurricane 4y ago
  I think philosophy is somewhat like math in that there is an attempt to create a logically self consistent system. Except it's not rigorous like math because the logic often have gaps that gets filled with observations (anecdotes), and it tries to explain the observed world. Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data. So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.
  - lo_zamoyski 4y ago
    Not quite. The philosophical sciences (I use this word in the classical sense, not the narrow modern/Anglo-American sense) can be said to couple the deductive rigor of math with general empirical observation. For example, consider metaphysics. Metaphysics often begins from very basic and general observations like "things change", observations that, btw, everyone generally presupposes, including the empirical scientist. From these observations, we can infer what must be true about reality in general and necessarily so. Metaphysics gives us the principles characteristic of being as being, or being in general. Such principles are therefore true of all things. If this seems very abstract, you would be right, as metaphysics concerns the most general things. Concrete-minded people will have a difficult time. Sadly, because of ignorance, many take philosophy to be some kind of idle speculation or some kind of put on where anything goes. This may be a result of either bad experiences or simply a lack of preparation to understand what is being said. Also, certain philosophical "schools" seem to be notorious for their unintelligibility (Derrida has this reputation). But read someone like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, or better yet, recent commentators and didactic works, and you will breathe fresh air and feed your mind. Perhaps it won't be easy, but the clarity and value are there and there is plenty to chew on. Philosophy also investigates the entailments of various held positions. For instance, your view of philosophy, science, mathematics, aesthetics, of what constitutes knowledge, etc, all very much present in your comment, all fall under the jurisdiction of philosophy. The assumptions you are making are philosophical in nature and they have profound logical consequences that make shock you and cause you to revise your views. For instance, a kind of quasi-/amateur positivist, scientistic materialism seems to be popular on HN. But a rather modest philosophical examination shows that logical positivism, scientism, and materialism are all self-refuting or incoherent. You can't escape philosophy. You can either do it well, or do it poorly.
- erulabs 4y ago
  You might enjoy reading at least a summary of existentialism. It is somewhat anti-scientific at its root - but like economics - philosophy exists in a somewhat untestable area. One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry. People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm. I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.
  - msla 4y ago
    > One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to empirical scrutiny, but whenever people use the historical evidence to determine things like how well different economic systems behave, for example, all of a sudden a lot of people get very angry and defensive and refuse to acknowledge the validity of prior experience. > People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm. Some kinds of philosophy can be experimented on in some respects. For example: Does unquestioning obedience produce an ethical system that minimizes arbitrary killings? Well, I think we can look to the historical record and find the answer to that one, and conclude that it doesn't. More deeply, though, how do we conclude that we care about arbitrary killing? That's a kind of question that we can't answer through experimentation, because the world doesn't outright tell us what values we should adopt. The most we can do is reason through the problem and then use experimentation (even retrospective experiments, as in history) to try to figure out which ethical systems support those values best. That said... We're not blank slates. We're humans, we're social animals, so we care about certain things instinctively and, thus, some ethical systems are more humane than others in their outcomes.
    - 4y ago
- mcphage 4y ago
  > like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it. It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out. That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > that got useful enough Does that mean "they figured out ways to make it reproducible and/or validate it"? Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible?
    - mcphage 4y ago
      > Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible? I think it depends on the field. Reproducibility is more of a recent concern, whereas this process has been going on since the ancient Greeks, I'm sure. Probably more recently the criterion is "commercial value".
- dTal 4y ago
  The problem isn't with "philosophy", which is at the heart of any inquiry into truth, as evidenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph... . There are many perfectly fine articles on philosophy. The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the gullible.
lukeasrodgers 4y ago
What do you mean their general systems theory is unmatched? Unmatched for what? I have read a bunch of D&G (as well as D on his own) and generally enjoy their writing, but I find it basically useless in my every day life and work (software engineering), my attempts to understand science and the world, etc. For example the "body without organs" is a cool idea that unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena, but other than that it kind of useless. It does not lend itself to making predictions, drawing causal connections between things. I don't think it's even a good intuition pump, in Dennett's sense. Most of the "use" of D&G's philosophy that I'm familiar with boils down to "oh hey this thing is kind of rhizomatic and look at how it antagonizes capitalist structures". Would love to be proven wrong, since I spent hundreds of hours and thousands dollars getting an education with a strong emphasis on this kind of stuff.
- googl-free 4y ago
  In software engineering, monkey patching and use-after-free are some examples of lines of flight. Broadly though, an ossified and financialized academy is never going to embody a rhizome. Check out the interview with the IDF commander who "use"s deterritorialization. If you want predictions, Nick Land was full of them
- uoaei 4y ago
  > unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses. I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems. It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.
  - lukeasrodgers 4y ago
    For me, the sense in which it "unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena" is not that different than the sense in which "purple" unites a lot of purple things. It is true that they are all purple, but ultimately not very interesting or useful. Of course as a concept it is more complex and richer than "purple" hence why academics are able to write so many books and articles using it. I just don't recall ever having read anything that used these concepts to describe phenomena X and then felt like I better understood phenomena X, other than that I know realized it was sort of rhizomey.
feoren 4y ago
I'm confused. Does this word-vomit have anything at all to do with the article you're commenting on?
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  They both seem to be about evolution...
- Zetice 4y ago
  If there's no tree, then what is there? A rhizome, maybe. The article is about literal trees (e.g. dogwoods, oak) and not mathematical structures, but it has a decidedly philosophical bent, and I find the idea of rhizomes to be relevant to that, at least. IDK, I barely understand what's going on here.
ranting-moth 4y ago
You need to share whatever you're smoking with the audience before you post a text like that.
zopa 4y ago
I’m not yet persuaded this is relevant, at all. This isn’t a case where hierarchy fails us: we have a perfectly good and natural hierarchical model of speciation based on descent from common ancestors. That model doesn’t give us the common-sense notion of a tree, but that’s fine: so much the worse for common sense. If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad. If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  your concept of time is one which puts ancestry front and center as the obvious most important factor, but is in no certain terms the only method of interpretation. there are many other factors, and in fact, that reinterpretation is the point of rhizomatic thinking. and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising. epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking. blasting out of these constraints is the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization D&G put forward as necessary and essential.
  - ImaCake 4y ago
    To put this in a statistical paradigm; time is always an important predictor in your model of organism traits (outcome) but there also a whole lot of other predictors that sometimes, or often, are more important/correlated than time.
  - zopa 4y ago
    > and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? I think we see the opposite! We start with a naive and non-hierarchical view of relatedness: trees are tall woody things, fish live in the water and have fins. And the piece argues that we should let go of our common-sense categories and use the descent-based ones, like the biologists do. Anyway --- I didn't say that ancestry is the only factor. I said it was natural, and useful. Epigenetics is fascinating, really! But it's not 'blasting out' of anything, it adds a bit of detail and complexity around the edges. A sense of proportion is important; we shouldn't miss the forest for the...never mind.

echelon 4y ago

When I read Wikipedia (or any treatment) on philosophy, I can't help but feel like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it. The linked article for this thread is about how "tree" biology keeps springing up and disappearing - the molecular biology, genetics, convergent evolution -- and how the human concept of "tree" doesn't really map cleanly. All of that, to me, is intuitive. But philosophy is lost on me. Neither your linked Wikipedia article or the article on the book you suggest [1] make much sense to my non-philosophical science brain. My eyes just glaze over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus

chordalkeyboard 4y ago
D&G are a bad place to start with philosophy. I recommend watching these lectures by the late Professor Rick Roderick for a more accessible introduction: http://rickroderick.org/101-socrates-and-the-life-of-inquiry-1990/ http://rickroderick.org/101-socrates-and-the-life-of-inquiry...
- soco 4y ago
  Is D&G an established term for Deleuze&Guattari? Because for me it will always decode to Dolce&Gabbana...
  - whitemary 4y ago
    Yeah, it's slightly unfortunate but well-established inside and slightly outside of philosophy circles.
- whitemary 4y ago
  Rick Roderick is the best! Great recommendation!
attemptone 4y ago
For me it is the other way around. Scientist sound like laymen in philosophy when they want to bring their data into a larger context. They stumble to explain why certain connection can/cannot be made and how they come up with the implications. ^This applies mostly to epistemology. I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.
feoren 4y ago
[dead]
kosherhurricane 4y ago
I think philosophy is somewhat like math in that there is an attempt to create a logically self consistent system. Except it's not rigorous like math because the logic often have gaps that gets filled with observations (anecdotes), and it tries to explain the observed world. Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data. So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  Not quite. The philosophical sciences (I use this word in the classical sense, not the narrow modern/Anglo-American sense) can be said to couple the deductive rigor of math with general empirical observation. For example, consider metaphysics. Metaphysics often begins from very basic and general observations like "things change", observations that, btw, everyone generally presupposes, including the empirical scientist. From these observations, we can infer what must be true about reality in general and necessarily so. Metaphysics gives us the principles characteristic of being as being, or being in general. Such principles are therefore true of all things. If this seems very abstract, you would be right, as metaphysics concerns the most general things. Concrete-minded people will have a difficult time. Sadly, because of ignorance, many take philosophy to be some kind of idle speculation or some kind of put on where anything goes. This may be a result of either bad experiences or simply a lack of preparation to understand what is being said. Also, certain philosophical "schools" seem to be notorious for their unintelligibility (Derrida has this reputation). But read someone like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, or better yet, recent commentators and didactic works, and you will breathe fresh air and feed your mind. Perhaps it won't be easy, but the clarity and value are there and there is plenty to chew on. Philosophy also investigates the entailments of various held positions. For instance, your view of philosophy, science, mathematics, aesthetics, of what constitutes knowledge, etc, all very much present in your comment, all fall under the jurisdiction of philosophy. The assumptions you are making are philosophical in nature and they have profound logical consequences that make shock you and cause you to revise your views. For instance, a kind of quasi-/amateur positivist, scientistic materialism seems to be popular on HN. But a rather modest philosophical examination shows that logical positivism, scientism, and materialism are all self-refuting or incoherent. You can't escape philosophy. You can either do it well, or do it poorly.
erulabs 4y ago
You might enjoy reading at least a summary of existentialism. It is somewhat anti-scientific at its root - but like economics - philosophy exists in a somewhat untestable area. One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry. People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm. I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.
- msla 4y ago
  > One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to empirical scrutiny, but whenever people use the historical evidence to determine things like how well different economic systems behave, for example, all of a sudden a lot of people get very angry and defensive and refuse to acknowledge the validity of prior experience. > People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm. Some kinds of philosophy can be experimented on in some respects. For example: Does unquestioning obedience produce an ethical system that minimizes arbitrary killings? Well, I think we can look to the historical record and find the answer to that one, and conclude that it doesn't. More deeply, though, how do we conclude that we care about arbitrary killing? That's a kind of question that we can't answer through experimentation, because the world doesn't outright tell us what values we should adopt. The most we can do is reason through the problem and then use experimentation (even retrospective experiments, as in history) to try to figure out which ethical systems support those values best. That said... We're not blank slates. We're humans, we're social animals, so we care about certain things instinctively and, thus, some ethical systems are more humane than others in their outcomes.
  - 4y ago
mcphage 4y ago
> like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it. It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out. That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > that got useful enough Does that mean "they figured out ways to make it reproducible and/or validate it"? Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible?
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible? I think it depends on the field. Reproducibility is more of a recent concern, whereas this process has been going on since the ancient Greeks, I'm sure. Probably more recently the criterion is "commercial value".
dTal 4y ago
The problem isn't with "philosophy", which is at the heart of any inquiry into truth, as evidenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph... . There are many perfectly fine articles on philosophy. The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the gullible.

lukeasrodgers 4y ago

What do you mean their general systems theory is unmatched? Unmatched for what? I have read a bunch of D&G (as well as D on his own) and generally enjoy their writing, but I find it basically useless in my every day life and work (software engineering), my attempts to understand science and the world, etc. For example the "body without organs" is a cool idea that unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena, but other than that it kind of useless. It does not lend itself to making predictions, drawing causal connections between things. I don't think it's even a good intuition pump, in Dennett's sense. Most of the "use" of D&G's philosophy that I'm familiar with boils down to "oh hey this thing is kind of rhizomatic and look at how it antagonizes capitalist structures". Would love to be proven wrong, since I spent hundreds of hours and thousands dollars getting an education with a strong emphasis on this kind of stuff.

googl-free 4y ago
In software engineering, monkey patching and use-after-free are some examples of lines of flight. Broadly though, an ossified and financialized academy is never going to embody a rhizome. Check out the interview with the IDF commander who "use"s deterritorialization. If you want predictions, Nick Land was full of them
uoaei 4y ago
> unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses. I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems. It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.
- lukeasrodgers 4y ago
  For me, the sense in which it "unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena" is not that different than the sense in which "purple" unites a lot of purple things. It is true that they are all purple, but ultimately not very interesting or useful. Of course as a concept it is more complex and richer than "purple" hence why academics are able to write so many books and articles using it. I just don't recall ever having read anything that used these concepts to describe phenomena X and then felt like I better understood phenomena X, other than that I know realized it was sort of rhizomey.

feoren 4y ago

I'm confused. Does this word-vomit have anything at all to do with the article you're commenting on?

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
They both seem to be about evolution...
Zetice 4y ago
If there's no tree, then what is there? A rhizome, maybe. The article is about literal trees (e.g. dogwoods, oak) and not mathematical structures, but it has a decidedly philosophical bent, and I find the idea of rhizomes to be relevant to that, at least. IDK, I barely understand what's going on here.

ranting-moth 4y ago

You need to share whatever you're smoking with the audience before you post a text like that.

zopa 4y ago

I’m not yet persuaded this is relevant, at all. This isn’t a case where hierarchy fails us: we have a perfectly good and natural hierarchical model of speciation based on descent from common ancestors. That model doesn’t give us the common-sense notion of a tree, but that’s fine: so much the worse for common sense. If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad. If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.

LesZedCB 4y ago
your concept of time is one which puts ancestry front and center as the obvious most important factor, but is in no certain terms the only method of interpretation. there are many other factors, and in fact, that reinterpretation is the point of rhizomatic thinking. and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising. epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking. blasting out of these constraints is the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization D&G put forward as necessary and essential.
- ImaCake 4y ago
  To put this in a statistical paradigm; time is always an important predictor in your model of organism traits (outcome) but there also a whole lot of other predictors that sometimes, or often, are more important/correlated than time.
- zopa 4y ago
  > and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? I think we see the opposite! We start with a naive and non-hierarchical view of relatedness: trees are tall woody things, fish live in the water and have fins. And the piece argues that we should let go of our common-sense categories and use the descent-based ones, like the biologists do. Anyway --- I didn't say that ancestry is the only factor. I said it was natural, and useful. Epigenetics is fascinating, really! But it's not 'blasting out' of anything, it adds a bit of detail and complexity around the edges. A sense of proportion is important; we shouldn't miss the forest for the...never mind.