Loose Notions

From John Searle’s Mind: An Introduction.

I have now completed the task I have set for myself in the first chapter [of Mind: An Introduction]. I have tried to give an account of the mind that will situate mental phenomena as part of the natural world. Our account of the mind in all its aspects — consciousness, intentionality, free will, mental causation, perception, intentional action, etc. — is naturalistic in this sense: first, it treats mental phenomena as just a part of nature. We should think of consciousness and intentionality as just as much a part of the natural world as photosynthesis or digestion. Second, the explanatory apparatus that we use to give a causal account of mental phenomena is an apparatus that we need to account for nature generally. The level at which we attempt to account for mental phenomena is biological rather than, say, at the level of subatomic physics. The reason for this is that consciousness and other mental phenomena are biological phenomena; they are created by biological processes and are specific to certain sorts of biological organisms. Of course, this is not to deny that our individual minds are shaped by our culture. But culture is not something in opposition to biology; rather, culture is the form that biology takes in different communities. One culture may differ from another culture, but there are limits to the differences. Each must be an expression of the underlying biological commonality of the human species. There could not be a long-term conflict between nature and culture, for if there were, nature would always win; culture would always lose.

People sometimes speak of the “scientific world-view” as if it were one view of how things are among others, as if there might be all sorts of world-views and “science” gave us one of them. In one way this is right; but in another way this is misleading and indeed suggests something false. It is possible to look at the same reality with different interests in mind. There is an economic point of view, an aesthetic point of view, a political point of view, etc., and the point of view of scientific investigation, in this sense, is one point of view among others. However, there is a way of interpreting this conception where it suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense. I think that is profoundly mistaken. The view implicit in this book, which I now want to make explicit, is that science does not name an ontological domain; it names rather a set of methods for finding out about anything at all that admits of scientific investigation. The fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron, for example, was discovered by something called the “scientific method,” but that fact, once discovered, is not the property of science; it is entirely public property. It is a fact like any other. So if we are interested in reality and truth, there is really no such thing as “scientific reality” or “scientific truth.” There are just the facts that we know. I cannot tell you how much confusion in philosophy has been generated by the failure to perceive these points. So, for example, there are frequently debates about the reality of the entities posulated by science. But either these entities exist or they do not. The view that I have of the matter is this: the fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron is a fact like the fact that I have one nose. The only difference is that for quite accidental reasons of evolution, I do not need any professional assistance to discover that I only have one nose, whereas given our structure and given the structure of hydrogen atoms, it takes a good deal of professional expertise to discover how many electrons are in a hydrogen atom.

There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it. As far as we know, its most fundamental principles are given by atomic physics, and, for that little corner of it that most concerns us, evolutionary biology. The two basic principles on which any such investigation as the one I have been engaging in depends on are, first, the notion that the most fundamental entities in reality are those described by atomic physics; and, second, that we, as biological beasts, are the product of long periods of evolution, perhaps as long as five billion years. Now, once you accept these points, and they are not points about science but about how the world works, then some of the questions about the human mind admit of rather simple philosophical answers, though that does not imply that they admit of simple neurobiological answers.

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and the world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as a part of it.

In his essay on What Business Can Learn from Open Source, Paul Graham has some interesting things to say about work environments.

Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they’re often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It’s the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren’t even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it’s not just the way offices look that’s bleak. The way people act is just as bad.

Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it’s “work safe.” The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it’s ever going to be.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.

To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can’t measure their productivity.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn’t need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don’t care.

That may seem utopian, but it’s what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren’t saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don’t try to fool us just by being here a lot.

The problem with the facetime model is not just that it’s demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I’m convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.

For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive.

Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there’s the cost in fragmentation— breaking people’s day up into bits too small to be useful.

You can see how dependent you’ve become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden— where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I’m sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it “Work Day.”

The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I’m writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I’m sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase— this is where ideas come from— and yet I’d feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It’s hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that’s one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.

We’re funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn’t propose that to save money. We did it because we want their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart.

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I’m convinced, is a mistake.

Here’s the obligatory first post. As mentioned in the about page, I plan on just storing snippets from articles or other blogs here, not updating the world about the last time I brushed my teeth. I think that will also make this blog a lot easier to maintain.

I already store articles I like as individual pages, but this started getting cumbersome. I thought about writing some kind of “online scrapbook” software (partly as an excuse to try out Django), but this seemed so much easier.