Thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic

There is a large gap in my notebook entries, the last entry with content being from 12/23/2019? So what has happened in these last 5 months? Is my project dead?

During Jan & Feb, 2020, I stopped working on the project in order to work on the Xcel demonstration and associated conceptual work. This was a productive time, but much of what I wrote was on Google Drive, since I was collaborating with Marie. The challenge posed by this period was to bring my more general philosophical concerns into a more practical program of developing the ‘democratic energy transition’.

During March & April, 2020, COVID-19 took up most of my brain. Lots of news reading, looking at epidemiological models, etc. During this time I encountered Evald Ilyenkov’s work (in a somewhat random Google search) and read his ‘Dialectical Logic’ book [@ilyenkov:1974:dialectical]. I also tried to slog through Dewey’s “Logic: The Theory of Inquiry,” [@dewey:1938:logic] which I’m still trying to work through. There is a lot I like in this book, but Dewey’s tendency to use a wide variety of terms for the same concept makes this tough sledding. I believe there is a close affinity between these two thinkers, and in particular between activity theory and pragmatism. It good project would be to compare activity theory, pragmatism and critical theory - three post-Hegelian philosophies with a fair amount of similarity but also important differences. The links between pragmatism and critical theory were made early by Apel, so the question is whether any activity theorists have done a similar study of pragmatism.

I also began considering a project to teach ‘logic’ in the broad sense at the high school level. My ideal course would combine a semester of mathematical logic, a semester of probability & machine learning, and a semester of ‘theory of knowledge’, combined into a single year-long course. The unifying formalism would be ‘game semantics,’ which would allow for the three subjects to be taught from a uniform point of view. At the present moment, the details of this program are still blurry, in part because I’m still fuzzy on several parts. The link between semiotics, game semantics and category theory is still very loose. Paul-Andre Mellies’ work seems particularly important here, since he has worked with both existential graphs and game semantics. But my limited understanding of his work interferes with making this connection. Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen has also developed work relevant to game theory, logic, and Peirce, but I found his book tough sledding as well [@pietarinen:2006:signs]. I need to find more time to read books outside of going to bed.

Clearly, several Peircean’s have taught first-order logic using existential graphs, which have a game-semantic interpretation. The links between categorical game semantics and probability is a little looser. It seems like there is a potentially close link between the approach developed by Jacobs and Chu spaces, or perhaps the generalization to tensorial logic proposed by Mellies could be used. My sense is that categorification of probability will result in a fairly diverse family of quantitative logics. On the other hand, there is the game-theoretic approach to probability developed by Schafer. Could this be developed within compositional game theory?

One reason I started to revisit the notion of games was the idea of developing a mathematical framework for modeling the electrical distribution system. It is clear that our current approach to electricity markets is a poor fit to renewable energy. There are many articles on the Energy Transition Show where the difficulties with commodity electrical markets are discussed. The central problem is the near-zero marginal cost and the very high fixed cost. The central planning model used in the regulated integrated vertical monopoly is only as good as its notion of profit. The idea of performance-based regulation tries to fix the centralized planning model by providing the regulated integrated vertical monopoly with the proper ‘incentives.’ This idea needs a detailed critique, and should be at the top of my list. For now, I’ll rely on the generic arguments about market and state provided by socialists and the P2P Foundation, and assert that an ‘energy commons’ is the path forward, managed by a democratic planning process.

This is all well and good, but the challenge is how to convince skeptics that such a process can work. The energy system is incredibly complicated, and there is a large barrier to entry. democratic planning becomes