Having a day in bed, trying to shake off this year’s cold between Christmas and New Year. Know exactly where we picked it up. Someone suffering conspicuously badly behind the bar a week before Christmas at one of the pubs we frequent was surely the spreader event. Naughty. Same symptoms, including a damn cough, but not severe, just nagging and lingering over three weeks. We’ve both had all the Flu and Covid jabs available.
Got a few books as Christmas gifts though surprisingly only one from my book wish list (permanently linked top-right) and started reading “Faith, Hope and Carnage” by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, already making copious notes after only 3 or so chapters, I’m going to have to make space to do it justice. It’s very good and relevant to my epistemological agenda, which is no doubt why I added it to the list. Since being primarily in writing mode, and even if I weren’t, all reading spawns multiple new reads, impossible to read or even add to the exponentially expanding “library of unread books”. Being very selective in what I give reading time to.
That said, this holiday period has given me a break from the research routine, and lots of fresh distractions. (Let’s just ignore the Thunberg / Tate / JHB / Pizza-box / Autism noise – though Autism remains relevant.) A great forking set of threads started independently by Lee Cronin and Kevin Mitchell:
There is something below math
β Prof. Lee Cronin (@leecronin) December 29, 2022
And
Some holiday reading (and re-reading) in preparation for our new module on Systems – the Science of Everything π pic.twitter.com/sTZYkV7djg
β Kevin Mitchell @WiringtheBrain@ mstdn .social (@WiringTheBrain) December 29, 2022
I added Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind” to Kevin’s Cybernetics / Systems / Complexity stack after opining that they had really evolved to be a single “science of everything” topic, where original distinctions are moot.
And I added this to Lee’s throwaway after Philip Goff had suggested the missing ingredient was panpsychsim:
Pan-proto-psychism anyway.
The stuff that maths works on.
It’s neither conscious nor even consciousness but it is the stuff of consciousness in the same way it’s the stuff of maths and physics.
Information for want of a word.
β Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) December 30, 2022
A question in response to that sent me down my “it from bit” rabbit hole (30th May 2021):
It From Bit β Psybertron Asks
Which led me to the nothing new under the sun aspect of Bohr’s work pre-dating Wheeler and Shannon’s s original coining of it from Tukey’s bit. (Not to mention Whitehead and Wiener / Cybernetics / Systems-Thinking (12th May 2021):
Mach, Bogdanov, Nagarjuna and Rovelli β Psybertron Asks
An important post in its own right. It’s all connected. Which a couple of links later – via Dante – led me to my year before last 2020/21 turn of the year post (8th Jan 2021). Another important post:
We Can Be Heroes in 2021 β Psybertron Asks
And thanks to that reference shared above with Kevin, this 2012 recap of my 2002 reading of Dupuy is another important post:
Cybernetics β Psybertron Asks
Phew! Not only is there nothing new under the sun, everything has already been said by others – the patterns continue to evolve new species as they always did – I’ve also pretty much said everything I need to say about that somewhere before. It may have been, certainly has been, an entertaining distraction, but it certainly reinforces my main project need for more creative output and fewer content inputs. Back to work.