Author: Psybertron

I’ve mentioned Charles Handy only a few times in my thought journey, maybe only a dozen times here on Psybertron, without spending much time specifically referencing or quoting his work. Together with Tom Peters and Peter Drucker I singled him / them out, in my 1988/91 Master’s Thesis, as a management writer beyond the changing fashions of the “airport bookstall” management texts. One of the people who got the quality of humanity in organisational processes and relationships, business or otherwise, or simply “cybernetics” in my preferred term. So together with my original humanist mentor, Jeff Turnell way back in 1979/80, part of the embedding of humanism in my own world-view.

He was of course, also a (Christian) lay-preacher, and his words of wisdom were spread as much through his BBC Radio 4 “Thought for the Day” contributions – particularly in that “driving the kids to school” period of life – as through his “management” writing and teaching.

A given, part of the fabric, my constitution, where I rarely feel the need to mention the sources, and in fact I had barely noticed his work continued during the 21st century. But credit where it is due.

Wisdom is one of those words gradually re-establishing its value, after decades of pillorying by the “scientistic”, the so-called “critical thinkers” as woolly and ill-defined. And I notice several people using it in their own reflections on working with Charles Handy. Just a few examples:

Here someone on LinkedIn who saw him as a mentor,

Here another LinkedIn thread.

And here the FT Obituary that started the above thread.

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Previously:

My (1991) Master’s Thesis.

The (2005) Pirsig paper that effectively set the agenda for Psybertron.

My Identifying as a Humanist

My (2024) Research Proposal

Wisdom as “more than” Science.

• • First formal attempt for one “Skeptic” audience.
  • Notes of a piece of a work-progress writing for ISSS audience.
  • Ongoing dialogue with Dave Snowden, latest instalment.

The search result for all references throughout Psybertron.

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A regular dialogue here on Psybertron is defending the reality of Dennett’s conceptions of mind in the face of those who see only the sound-bite quotes about the illusory aspects of our intuition about our minds. As I often say, our minds (and hence consciousness) are as real as anything else in our ontology of what exists in the world, so I was attracted by the title of this Aeon piece, which incidentally now exists only in the link not in the actual title and subtitle on the face of the article itself.

“As Real as it Ever Gets – Dennett’s Conception of Mind”
by Tim Bayne, Ed Nigel Warburton (@philosophybites)

Anyway, I Tweeted:

Dennett clearly defended the position that philosophy was “more than” science, and what he did was:

“Dennett helped shift Anglo-American philosophy towards a coalition with science.”

And

“in Dennett’s view, relatively little of folk psychology is beyond salvation. What needs to go is not so much folk psychology, but the gloss on folk psychology that philosophers [of the linguistic turn] have imposed on it. In that regard, Dennett doesn’t mark a radical rupture in the aims or methods of philosophy of mind, but instead belongs firmly in the tradition of his mid-century heroes, Ryle and Wittgenstein.”

Can’t argue with that conclusion, but yet again, no mention of his (2017) “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” his own summary of the actual content of his life’s work on the evolution of mind, before his final autobiographical work (2023) “I’ve Been Thinking”.

Great to see a serious critique that recognises Wittgenstein as a hero of my own hero. Hofstadter – erstwhile Dennett collaborator – also came to understand this despite steering clear of Wittgenstein in his earlier work.  My own summary of what I got from Dennett I posted back in April.

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I’ve listened to the whole of this 3-way interview / dialogue between JBP, Glinner and Doyle. Hard to take everything JBP says seriously, too many sweeping statements, but this is an excellent piece of content on so many of my agenda items, JBP’s contributions as well as his guests. On the back of Glinner & Doyle (& Gourlay & Schneider) new comedy production project in the US (in Phoenix, AZ).

Really, really excellent. Most explicitly about the whole woke gender culture-war, but so much more. (The reason this particular issue is the exemplar in my own thinking.)

Foucault, post-modernism, PoPoMo.

The court jester.

Obvious why this stuff is worse in UK culture vs US land of free-opportunity.

Psychology, opportunism, victimhood,  – the problem of direct human interconnectedness – “unintended consequences of the internet” bad ideas move too fast as I’ve called the Dysmemic / Memetic Problem.

NCHI’s as per Thursday night’s talk. Nothing wrong with recording “Perceived” complaints before any crime is established – normal in fact, but perception and intent are crucial to what is judged when recorded. Artificial objectification is the problem. The process is the punishment / cost.

The need for proper dialogue to change minds, clear-up misunderstandings, rather than simply spreading them.

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Just a holding post for the latest in a long series of dialogue with Dave Snowden and his Cynefin complexity-science / systems-thinking. Probably need to address in some detail:

Regularities & Reductionism #1/2

Regularities & Reduction #2/2

Both part of his Anthro-Complexity series. I need to join up some dots with earlier exchanges.

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A New Conversation

Having a new conversation with a couple in the bar last night, showed lots of interest in the ideas shared and discussed here, and it became quite positively passionate. Lots of shared recognition. Reminded me of another conversation a week or so ago, which I didn’t mention yet.

The one last week was simpler, because the focus was Humboldt and the two books by Andrea Wulf much loved and discussed here, and where copies had been left in the bar book-club. Seemed we had a new fan, appreciating Humboldt’s amazing international adventures and his massive influence on the great and the good of the age of revolution in the first book, whilst itching to get to “the invention of the self” agenda of the Humboldts’ extended family circle back in Jena in the second book, again with a name-droppers dream in its cast of real characters. Darwin himself acknowledged Humboldt’s important influence. No doubt we’ll talk again when he finishes the second 🙂

Last night started much more general with a question about what “my post-retirement project (to save the world 🙂 !!!)” was. I was able to give a 4 or 5 sentence statement (see below), which started the conversation described at the top. What floored me – apart from the enthusiasm – was the final question. What would I recommend they read to understand more? I should have stock answers – elevator pitches – for both of those questions, of course.

I didn’t say “this Psybertron blog”.
www.psybertron.org

I didn’t say the Humboldt books, above.
(Especially the second.)

I didn’t say McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things”.
(The most comprehensive and thoroughly researched & referenced account of where the dominant 20thC worldview is leading our understanding of the world astray – but a massive and expensive undertaking to read from a cold start. He re-habilitates the true position of left-right brain thinking despite it remaining contentious among deniers. Attention / ways of attending, as a moral act.)

I didn’t say Mark Solms’ “The Hidden Spring”.
(The best very technical explanation of where our real – subjective, bio-psychological – knowledge of the world arises in our consciousness, yes, even the knowledge we conceptualise as objective – one very important core issue, but not the whole psycho-social-intellectual story. Very important basis in the fundamental information & computation vs entropy & complex systems (“Free Energy Principle”) view of the foundations of physics and hence all evolved, living things, if you want to dig even deeper with Solms and Friston – cross the Rubicon – into the real scientific underpinnings of this “more-than-objective-science” story of our subjective, intuitive experience.)

I didn’t say my hero Dan Dennett (RIP) and his “From Bacteria to Bach and Back”.
The most patient, avuncular, philosopher-guide along the real evolutionary story of our consciousness. (Still so many philosophy-vs-science misunderstanding-deniers of his work but, with the help of the two above, there really is no longer any mystery about our consciousness of ourselves and the world.)

I didn’t say Robert Pirsig (RIP) and his “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” though I did mention ZMM in the course of the conversation.
(Still to this day an excellent introduction to the moral philosophical framework of the whole evolved physical-bio-socio-intellectual stack of reality, which nails the Zen or “Quality”  radical-empirical-experience-of / immediate-attention-to the world firmly as its insubstantial foundation. That “attention as a moral act” massively elaborated by McGilchrist above, who freely admits to have been influenced by Pirsig but, like many many others, finds it difficult to academically reference the work with the whacky Zen title and the imagined 1960’s hippy life-style associations. Quality will out.)

I didn’t mention Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind”
(Intriguing read that I didn’t fully appreciate how much it intersected with all the topics I’ve mentioned, the first time I read it right at the start of my journey. It set me up for so many of my “Psybernetic” research avenues, and is actually a good introductory read I realise.)

I did mention that some of the very basic “is / ought” aspects of everyday life were as old as ancient Greek philosophy and remain as relevant to today’s problem. (In its simplest form, what “is” is or can be factual, objective, scientific whereas what we “ought” to do isn’t and never can be, certainly not entirely. The massive success of science and technology – and the relatively easy use of objective numbers and arithmetic-maths compared to the complexity of human systems – dominates and hides that very important “not entirely”.)

I didn’t mention any of the Complex Systems Thinkers and their many published theories, sciences and methods, mainly because most – but not all – still ignore the underlying philosophical / epistemological problem.

I did for some reason suggest watching the new BBC “Renaissance” docu-drama, because it’s topical and surprisingly relevant – maybe after you understand the intellectual journey above?

One day I’d hope to recommend the book(s) I’m writing, as much better organised versions of the thoughts scattered throughout this blog. Meantime maybe see my Research Proposal.

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My opening statement of what “my project” is about:

(The research proposal above contains a good statement of the problem, but the following is more or less what I said last night.)

The root topic is Cybernetics (or Systems Thinking) as originally conceived post-WWII by the 1946 Macy Conferences. (There was actually a similar movement post-WWI, but of course our backsliding into WWII meant much momentum was lost. And many before, it turns out.) Imagine being among the smartest people in the world – running our institutions post the industrial revolution – and asking yourself how did we fuck it up so badly, twice. We really must learn to do better? This was their project. Cybernetics was always about human systems of organisation and self-governance – the most complex of physio-bio-psycho-socio-cultural systems, despite the word becoming most associated with the successes of industrial computation and automation via feedback and the like.

Similarly, in parallel with that science and technology success in cybernetics, objective science and technology have come to dominate all our information and decision-making processes. In free-democracies – the best forms of government, before we get to best forms of democracy, local national, international, global? – we expect decisions and policies justified on “fully costed” plans and cost-benefit-risk analyses and the like. Arithmetic. Numbers. Despite the fact we see the massive hearts and minds effects of rhetoric, sound-bites, symbols and slogans, good and bad?

It’s “my project” because after ~30 years as a Systems Engineer in industry I had seen time after time how the explicit / objective / factual (classical) won out over the intuitive / implicit / valuable (romantic). The nagging doubt that we were missing something important was kicked in the pants by 9/11 and the ensuing God vs Science wars, (and now all the woke-PC / anti-woke culture wars) before I even knew for the first time that the recurring classic / romantic division was as old as philosophy itself, a subject I knew nothing about, 25 years ago, before I read ZMM.

Be nice to find ways to improve before we slide into WWIII or worse, global / environmental disaster?

(No-one is messianic enough, least of all me, to believe we are “saving the world!”. Like many others I’m hoping individual efforts to fix misunderstandings that are leading us astray will help steer the evolutionary direction of progress.  There are actually lots of people who “get it” – they’re just drowned out by dominant 21stC communication paradigms and understandings. I’m not proposing anything that hasn’t already been thought of, it’s about synthesising / evolving ways of doing better. But none of it is possible without fixing the core misunderstanding.)

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How free should public communications be?

General

Simple fact is that free-speech in a free-democracy does need regulation and, if we are serious about that regulation, we do have to be prepared to enforce it and sanction transgressions, ultimately backed with the power of the law. Guard rails in the current vernacular. Inescapable.

What is appropriate in the rules of communications, and what is proportionate in their enforcement are hugely context dependent. Even accepting that basic fact, it gets worse. Perversely, the broader the context – as in global public social media – the tighter the controls need to be. Let that sink in.

Current State

X/Twitter, post Musk, has made the error of absolute freedom, limited only by criminality in the communications. This leads to degenerate, unhealthy, polarising, high-noise, counter-productive discourse, long before we get to the last resort of legality. X/Twitter is currently failing to control either content or behaviour, and the inevitable degeneration is driving many to leave – or consider leaving – for pastures blue.

BlueSky has started to enforce “content” controls, simply by deleting the content. This is far too crude long-term, degenerate in the “woke/PC” direction, blocking/erasing anyone or anything that anyone MIGHT claim to be offensive to anyone for any reason. Hopefully this a temporary response to sudden surge in numbers – but it is already generating a backlash. And what it’s effectively doing is drawing the polarisation battle lines physically between these two platforms, making them very distinct silos or echo-chambers, not just different factional interests within any one platform. Doubly unhealthy.

Blocking, erasing, deleting or cancelling are NOT moderation. But, either extreme of freedom vs moderation is unhealthy. What neither of the above is doing is regulating what matters, which is behaviour. Very little content need be absolutely taboo (see legal constraints). Generally, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. Anyone who has ever moderated any serious online discussion group knows this is non-trivial philosophically and linguistically.

[Facebook / Threads is in a different game. Nothing to recommend it here?]

Mastodon, so far, has exhibited very little of the degeneration, although ad-hominem behaviour is already creeping in, despite much lower numbers and traffic than any of the above. What is different however is that whilst X/Twitter, BlueSky and Threads are centralised, Mastodon is distributed and federated.

Practical Possibilities

The question is always asked when controls are suggested – however sensible the rules themselves – “Who decides, who does the controlling and moderating?”. With centralised systems – especially one like the Musk / Trump alliance – this question has enormous authoritarian implications. With multiple federated systems with distributed moderation arrangements, people can experience and cluster around environments that suit their needs, and we can let market forces drive the distribution between Mastodon instances.

X/Twitter already has the hooks for distributed moderation in its “Community Note” mechanism, though even that is already gamed and abused. Ultimately it really is about behaviour. What none of them have yet is individual tuning of the dreaded algorithms. Personally I’m an “all / latest” user, in order to minimise the effect of feed algorithms, and is only practical if you keep numbers down. At this point it’s about commercial / monetisation interests of the platforms and the users. Personally, it’s the reason I’ve paid for my “Pro” X/Twitter instance, no-one need advertise anything I don’t follow. But much more configurable experience – including the moderation “style” – is needed.

Behaviour? See Rules of Engagement.

[END]

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Previously “Freeze Peach“ – an earlier draft to edit the rules of engagement to fit the social-media behaviour / moderation model.

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Post Notes:

All the people “announcing” their X/Twitter departures to their “new” BlueSky accounts are quite comical if sad. I signed-up to both BlueSky and Mastodon as soon as they became available, immediately after the Musk / Trump takeover which completed over 2 years ago, and have been monitoring activity and behaviour there ever since. (Links top right here and in my X/Twitter bio.) It’s about behaviour NOT about the technology.

I’ve several times labelled people like Colin Wright @SwipeWright and James Esses @JamesEsses and Matt Goodwin www.mattgoodwin.org as “trolls” in this game. On the specific content of their “anti-woke” agendas and statements I’m on the same side and mostly agree. It’s their extreme rhetoric I reject as #PartOfTheProblem – like their wishful yearning for  Christopher Hitchens . Sure enough it grabs the attention of low-attention span men of few coherent words, like Musk / Trump, but it’s a dangerous game – cutting off noses to spite faces. I too have been “warning” the liberal-left @UKLabour @USDems @HumanistsUK they were missing the important message in the woke / anti-woke “culture war since I first read Alice Dreger on sex/gender politics in 2015 and more generally since I started this blog in 2001 and joined Twitter on SMS before it became an App in 2007. Warning continuously that if the liberal-left didn’t get a grip on the science / dialectic / facts vs subjective-identity / rhetorical / rights&freedoms balance, then the opposing right / libertarian press and politics were going to wipe the floor with them on the emotional issues. Let’s be clear, like broken clocks, people like Musk / Trump / Badenoch can be right twice a day on the woke / DEI agenda but still be wholly reprehensible, dangerous and unfit for office. They remain so. Retweeting without qualification? Careful what you wish for. You can have too much #CreativeDestruction

Yogi Yaeger on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@yoginho@spore.social

If it’s elitist to think we should have the best people lead us instead of corrupt morons taking over everything then, yes, do count me as an elitist.

If it’s against free speech to want pathological liars censored then, yes, I’m against free speech.

If progress is the greediest bastards pushing the most dangerous technologies on us for nobody’s benefit but their own then, yes, call me a luddite.

An extreme statement of the crux of the problem.

And an essay on why decentralised social media is best from Oxford via Mastodon, naturally.

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I mentioned in a “note to self” post back in 2021 that I was looking forward to the publication of Emily Herring’s biography of Henri Bergson

“Herald of a Restless World
– How Henri Bergson brought philosophy to the people“
Emily Herring (2024)

Posted a review on Goodreads: (Slightly edited version below.)

I already had some appreciation of the significance of Henri Bergson’s philosophy from its take-up by US pragmatists (eg James and later Pirsig readers) as well as by Whitehead and most recently by Iain McGilchrist’s extensive use of Bergson references in his (2023) magnum opus “The Matter With Things”. Emily Herring I had noticed write an (2017) article on Julian Huxley’s use of Bergson, have been since then anticipating the biography she has now produced. It does not disappoint.

Her writing style is a major attraction. Here in one sentence describing Bergson’s experience of the run-up to the first world war: “Even for those more attuned to recent developments in international relations, the threat of war had not felt real until the news broke that it was.” Neat turn of phrase.

Many spoilers about the the Bergson biographical content have already been shared in published reviews, and perhaps his role in wartime politics is one of the more surprising. Intriguing too that he effectively converted to Catholicism, in all but name, late in life. Less surprising is the fact that prejudices against his being a French Jew and his work attracting a massive public and female(!) following explain why an academic backlash against his undoubted initial superstar success – not helped by Einstein’s “put-down” of philosophical time, nor Russell’s mischaracterisation of his work – led unfairly to his fall from favour and visibility thereafter.

“Bergson is back” and deservedly so on the subtle reading of his ideas on integration of the recurring philosophical division between the explicit / objective / classical and the intuitive / implicit / romantic. Biography is an excellent medium to get to grips with human ideas. Herring will deserve our future gratitude, if her efforts are taken up by enough new readers in our troubled and confusing present. Highly recommended as a biography in what were interesting times, whether you’re specifically interested in Bergson or philosophy generally, or not.

Herring spoke about her work and about Bergson at Collected Books in Durham last Monday 4th Nov.

(Above) In the foreground Emily Thomas (Durham Uni, Philosophy) and Simon Oliver (Durham Uni, Divinity) and, middle distance on the right, me in the rusty-red top awaiting the start of the event.

(Above) Emily Herring (L) being interviewed by Emily Thomas (R).

Reading Herring, and previously Bergson (Creative Evolution), I remained intrigued, given that focus on “the recurring philosophical division between the explicit / objective / classical and the intuitive / implicit / romantic” that I could see no references to the German & British romantics and transcendentals who had been expressing similar thoughts with similar concerns against the seeming dehumanising trend in the progress of science and technology. So I asked. She confirmed  there was little if any sign of any such engagement in Bergson.

Previous references:

First attempt at reading Bergson’s Creative Evolution  back in 2007 as recommended by other Pirsig scholars on “MoQ-Discuss” (See now the Robert Pirsig Association). Herring advises there is a newer, better translation now available.

That “note to self” above, where the significance of Bergson to McGilchrist’s “Matter with Things” is also acknowledged and where I had completed my read of Creative Evolution. (My summary of Matter With Things.)

An introduction to Bergson and the revival of anglophone interest in Emily Herring’s essay from earlier this year.  My reading Emily Herring’s 2017 piece on Julian Huxley’s “Great is Darwin and Bergson his Poet” which had whetted my appetite for her upcoming biography.

Also relevant, as well as the question above – biographies of the positivists (Mach Society / Vienna Circle) and the German transcendentals (around Humboldt and Jena)

• • • The Jena Set as Magnificent Rebels (Andrea Wulf)
    • The Vienna Circle as seen by the Brits (David Edmonds)
    • The Vienna Circle from their own Austro-German perspective (Karl Sigmund and Douglas Hofstadter)

The connections never end.
And neither does the work of organising the writing.

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Post Notes:

New York Times review by Anthony Gottlieb.
Gottlieb is someone I’ve read and written very positively about before, and we note from the by-line in that review that his new book out soon is on Wittgenstein – see in contrast to the positivists above. Can’t wait.

“It is very difficult, if not impossible, to express in words something that goes against the very essence of language” Bergson

“Perhaps it’s also true that Bergson’s ideas were not substantial enough to endure.” Gottlieb

(Me: the stuff beyond “substantive science” is very hard to make stick, very Pirsigian “Quality”.)

And a recent Times Literary Supplement review “How the World’s Most Famous Thinker Fell Out of Fashion” by Mark Sinclair, who has written about Bergson before in their Footnotes to Plato series.

A nice interview of Emily Herring here in a German Idealist context:

(The whole section from ~36.40 to the end where she describes his metaphysics in her own words will resonate with Pirsigians – McGilchrist fans too – the evolution of intellect as we know it. Some new French references in there for me too.)

Another review from Science.Org – surprisingly positive despite the rather pejorative use of “fodder” to describe his relationship with science?

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Watched the film Deliverance last night. It’s a film I’ve been looking out for since the world switched from DVD to streaming, but have never found it free of commercial strings until BBC2 TV broadcast it yesterday.

I saw it only once a long time ago, when watching a film was about entertainment, but since 2001 – the start of my quest here on Psybertron – every time I see and/or hear the duelling banjos meme it sets off the thought “I really must watch Deliverance properly”. Mission accomplished.

I riffed on it on X/Twitter whilst watching:

Me:
Well done @BBC2TV
#Deliverance is a film for our times.
How will humanity find our place in the world?

Quote:
This is our last chance.
I’ve never been lost in my life.

Me:
I’d forgotten the “famous scene” is just 5 minutes in.
Makes me suspect most people have never actually watched the whole thing?
#DuelingBanjos

Quote:
You’re missing the point Ed!
Sometimes you have to lose yourself
before you can find anything.

Me:
#Deliverance is surely the template for #ApocalypseNow every bit as much as #Conrad #HeartOfDarkness and/or #Fitzcarraldo and/or #Lila ? (All at sea, but on a river.)

Quote:
Things are gonna fail. The system’s gonna fail.
System’s done alright by me. I love my life.

Me:
Jeez @ZMMQuality guys.
John Voight in #Deliverance is surely Eugen Herrigel (The Zen archer duelling with the rifleman.)

Me:
OK, a fork in the thread.
Alex Cox introduced me to cultural cinema beyond entertainment back in 70’s/80’s. Paris Texas, Fitzcarraldo, Brazil, Walker, The Mission and probably Deliverance and later Devil Wears Prada and indeed Walter White & Saul Goodman. But I guess I was too young to get the full significance back then.

Me:
Trump is that narrowly informed bigot (and Musk the narrow autist) on the riverbank.
The whole #Deliverance story is surely also Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment”.

Quote:
He was the best of us. (Me: The guitarist who duelled with the banjo. Robert Johnson at the Crossroads and/or the duelling fiddles / banjos / guitars – choose your weapon – bow / rifle) Amen.
They brought the cars.
You have a phone, a telephone?
Yes sir.
I don’t remember nothing.

Me:
Deliverance. Deliver us from evil?
Crime and Punishment?

Anyway, lots of connections as food for thought.

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I’ve been a follower of Sabine Hossenfelder since ~2008, mentioned here in 2014 and more including experiencing her appearances first-hand at HTLGI up to and beyond the publication of her “Lost in Math” in 2018.

She’s morphed in that time from being the typical scientist who would deny any “philosophy” as unscientific if not testable, to being philosophy-friendly (at least philosophy-of-science friendly) to her current phase of ranting against the ills of the scientific enterprise more generally.

Three of those recent rants below. The first I shared 6 months ago with local Sceptics / Humanists in which they (most seeing her for the first time, I was surprised to hear) misinterpreted her rant as hard-done-by sour-grapes at “her failure” to succeed as a practising academic physicist. Talk about missing the point. (I think she spoke at the recent QEDcon?) The other two videos are from the last few weeks.

I lost faith in scientists a long time ago – the reason I started this blog almost 25 years ago was science over-reaching into believing it was (or could be) the one true explanation of anything and everything, reinforced in the public mind by sexed-up popular science media and the educational fashion for critical thinking. Usual disclaimer – don’t get me wrong – science and critical-thinking are wonderful resources and as an engineer in the physical-electro-mechanical-built-environment, my career depended on it. My beef is with that arrogant over-reach. The meme that if something’s not scientific, it can’t be true, right? it can only be bullshit.

Her point – in the middle video – is about lack of empirical testability in (would-be scientific) theories that have been repeatedly theorised about for decades, and yet they still command attention and resources. The ontological commitment, as philosopher Rebecca Goldstein calls it, demands that rubber hasn’t hit the road until said scientists can say (and even mean) “and that’s how the world really works”. As per Hossenfelder’s book, mathematical beauty and logical coherence are not even science without the explanatory step into the real-word. That real-world step might not be science.

And again, I’m fan of Carlo Rovelli’s writing. In terms of his “QLG” competitor to string-theory – the archetype of failed scientific ideas, alongside multiverse bullshit – it has a feature I like as an engineer, the loop of integration around inconvenient singularities, but I certainly don’t understand the theory as a whole, and am ultimately disappointed at the lack of any “so what” in the real-world.

Science needs its arrogance taking down a peg or two and a return to valuing the real world. It will surely die if the woke / anti-woke culture war doesn’t kill it first.

And I do still very much read books, despite sharing these short videos 🙂

END

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Post Note: Just capturing another of Sabine’s videos – “Entropy isn’t What You Think” which caught my eye in the side-bar when collecting links to the 3 above. It’s her more usual physicist educates non-physicists scope, but relevant to me because my information views of entropy are crucial to my own worldview, so I’d be interested to know if she disagrees with what I think I know 🙂

She doesn’t like the word order / ordered, but overall nothing contentious to me. Her link behind the information<>ignorance view of entropy is neat – the number of possible micro-states per macro-state … pretty standard textbook stuff as she says. BUT …  in my words … Yes, the preservation and creation of new order (low entropy) is driven locally by life and intelligence, any life, even if we expire in our corner of the universe, it is highly likely – inevitable – to evolve elsewhere. Universal heat death isn’t  very likely or inevitable. Our view is necessarily anthropic – macro-states are always a human (lack of) knowledge perspective – R.I.P. Rick Ryals.

Onward and upwards.

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And for balance a recent YouTube response from Professor Dave – that recognises her as a good sci-comm source, but is worried about her recent expressions of concern for where physical science is going. Not digested the whole, but his initial concern is that her expressions of concern attract attention from those with dubious anti-science agendas – an obvious risk – but what about her actual message? Doesn’t change the fact for me that science does need to learn from the expressed concerns I share with her, since long before she expressed them. It’s a lot more than good old “anti-establishment” that’s also behind the whole woke/anti-woke conspiracy-theory, culture wars. (In my language it’s actually the memetic problem, #Dysmemics )

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Dave Snowden posted on his LinkedIn Feed “tongue in cheek and with mischievous intent”

“North Atlantic Buddhism, gurus & cybernetics on the one hand with Daoism (& its interaction with Confucianism), distributed intelligence & complexity on the other.”

Weirdly my last post, 2 days ago, mentioned Dave in the context of Cybernetics vs all the other available Systems Complexity views out there, but I’d not remembered that when I took the rise to his mischievous intent challenge:

Ian GLENDINNING
“Not quite sure where you’re going with the ‘on the one hand / on the other’ … given your distaste for dichotomies :-)”

Dave Snowden
“Two sets of associations Ian”

Ian GLENDINNING
“Dave Snowden But with more overlap than divergence / distinction?”

Dave Snowden
“Ian GLENDINNING Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”

Maritina Dimopoulou
“Dave Snowden ah, I first came across this poem when I watched Dead Poets Society in my teenage years…”

Ian GLENDINNING
“Dave Snowden Excellent.

So I guess I need to acknowledge that allusion to the Good-Fences / Gates-in-the-Forest metaphor I often use.

Mischief appreciated 🙂

(Robert Frost being the common source – and G K Chesterton – I shall have to write a longer piece myself. Weirdly I wrote a piece only yesterday referring to Dave and Cybernetics … in other concurrent parallel threads … https://www.psybertron.org/archives/18971 )”

Essentially this an ongoing dialogue with Dave on here as well as on LinkedIn and his own blog, several in parallel on related topics live on LinkedIn right now – will not link to all – but in summary:

Rather than get into debates about which Systems theories (inc Cybernetics) Dave emphasises his own (Cynefin) approach as using Complexity (and other) Sciences …

Partly, most of us would say that Systems Thinking (of all kinds) is a response to complexity (including the complexities of humanity itself), even if this wasn’t explicit in the way various Systems theories and sciences were framed. Complexity – as a science – came later or independently Dave would say?

My response is four-fold:

• • From the start Systems Thinking was always about the complexities of self-organising humanity, even if complexity per-se wasn’t the explicit topic and even if the early applications were more machine than human. (First & Second Cybernetics and Cybernetics as Feedback)
  • Secondly whatever it is we’re talking about, it’s more than science. We’re trading poetic Robert Frost and GK Chesterton quotes above ferchrissakes!

“With complex systems modelling doesn’t work.”

(Modelling can’t work completely, there are always losses.)

• • Thirdly, the above are long-running dialogue, but the (mischievous) Buddhist (also non-science?) topics are new in this dialogue, even if long-standing here (and Dave referencing “Zen” back in 2003). Obviously a lot more to discuss here on Eastern thinking, but for now,
  • Fourthly Dave first puts his forking Buddhist path in our way.

Although he says, he’s not positing a dichotomy he’s only pointing out “two sets of associations“. He’s making a distinction, the existence of two paths, two sides to a gate or fence, in time and/or space. “Two sides to every story”. The sets of associations he’s highlighting are:

• • between “North Atlantic” Buddhism and Cybernetics [bad?], and
  • between authentic Eastern Thinking and his Distributed Intelligence plus Complexity story [good?].

We can only wonder why?

I think we’re violently agreeing about #GoodFences and #Dichotomies.

The point of #GoodFences is that many distinctions of many kinds exist for all sorts of reasons, good and/or circumstantial. (Fences, gates or forking paths in forests.) But they are never dichotomous, between two entirely different things, never the twain shall meet, unless we actively choose to make them that way. They are things that are mostly the same, with shared histories, but with one or more selected distinguishing feature that is significant in some way(s). They have a purpose, but can move and evolve.

“Complex vs Complicated is a false dichotomy.”

Essentially what I’m struggling with is that when Dave points out a distinction he says he doesn’t mean it dichotomously even though the difference is significant, but when others (Iain McGilchrist’s left<>right-brain say, or myself) point out distinctions, we are accused of (false) dichotomies. Differences are real, dichotomies more often false.

Need to see what Dave is saying in his Third Eastern dialogue before we can see if and why his Fourth divergent views is relevant, even if not dichotomous. As is hopefully obvious above I’m sceptical with putting Cybernetics back in some simplistic mechanistic box it was never intended to occupy. Better to find common ground than to divide?

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Post Note:

Dave continues his raging against dichotomies here comments on LinkedIn again.

“There are a lot of dichotomies here, two many for my taste and some stereotyping which never helps. For example intellectual knowing is far from black and white and nothing I have encountered there would result in a quick fix, if anything it makes you more aware of the dangers of simply acting based on how you feel at the time. New materialism for example transforms our understanding of the physical reality of stories and allows us to scale. Just living in the moment can reinforce racism and other forms of prejudice, the intellectual knowledge that is coming from the field of epistemic justice allows us to better understand what is happening when people just tell stories without thinking. … [and more].”

Still intrigued by his reaction to these when calling various distinctions dichotomous – surely we all understand they are distinctions that matter, but which are always understood integrated and mutually. It’s not dichotomous to point out and refer to distinctions – even ones that come with stereotypical names – provided one goes on to address their true dynamic relationships thereafter?

In this particular example we’re getting very close to the central point in my current agenda in the recurring philosophical division between the explicit / objective / classical / intellectual and the intuitive / implicit / romantic / lived. The very reason to point out the (binary) distinction out is to warn against that particular (polarising) dichotomy – in terms of the choice of one side (of a good-fence) vs another. Proper account of both is required and required to be understood. That’s the point.

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Post Post Note; (19 Nov 2024) – the dialogue continues:

Dave:
Confining science to formal cause is just a little 19th Century in nature.

Working with indigenous people you soon realise they have scientific knowledge they just don’t the same language. Letting go of irrelevant details may mean missing weak signals, focusing on the individual, as you implicitly do here creates multiple issues.

Wisdom lies in understanding not in creating dichotomies based on a culturally specific perspective.

Ian:
Thanks for elaborating your “it’s all science” position clearly and succinctly Dave. Appreciated. I still beg to differ:

Indigenous peoples – including us “Western” indigenous peoples – do have access to hi-quality / valuable knowledge beyond “formal science”. A knowledge or wisdom that is lived, intuitive, implicit, shared between people in rhetorical narrative, etc, but not formalised or formally causal and therefore not science in that formal sense. (That much we agree?)

A reason to maintain that science<>not-science distinction, is not to create any kind of dichotomy or polarisation nor a return to the 19thC – all real knowledge and communication is a tangled mix of the formal (dialectical) and the informal (rhetorical) – but to ensure that the different components are treated appropriately.

So for example, we need to recognise the informal / implicit / intuitive for what it is and not “accidentally” attempt to formalise it explicitly and analytically. Making the implicit explicit risks losing its value.

“We murder to dissect” as some old romantic once said 🙂

Dave:
I think I’ll stand by my original statement rather than you reframing it as ‘all science’. The oral tradition exists in different forms in various traditions, more pronounced in indigenous communities but it’s there in others. I think people should generally avoid the wisdom word in any comparison statement and I don’t think your idea of ‘formal science’ is helpful given the role of intuition, abduction etc in all types of human discovery.

Ian:
I think you’re misunderstanding or misrepresenting my point now – I agree with all of that. I used your word “formal science” precisely to leave space beyond that for (in your words) “the role of intuition, abduction etc in all types of human discovery”.

Attempts to formalise the latter … don’t help, indeed do damage? Calling the latter science (as you did) risks attempts to formalise it scientifically. Anyway …

In the ongoing dialogue I phrased it as a question “Why call the latter science? I agree that words like Wisdom and Rhetoric can be woolly and pejorative – why not just call it “knowledge”. [This post]

Knowledge comes in various forms. Why call it science? Why call all knowledge science?

Dave:
well then the feeling is mutual 🙂 Representing indigenous knowledge as ancient wisdom is to deny the scientific nature of the knowledge and the review process. Characterising knowledge which has been subject to third party validation in contrast to ‘I just believe this’ is important.

Ian:
I did no such thing. I’m calling it knowledge – the indigenous / lived / intuitive / radical-empirical kind – but real actual here & now knowledge. I am happy to call it “indigenous knowledge” if that’s your preference, though like any word, indigenous comes with its own baggage and risks of unintended meanings.

Obviously also, it is subject to validations beyond “I just believe it” – obviously, hopefully. What I am “denying” is that validation is (or can be or should be) scientific in any formal sense. If it’s not science in any formal sense, why insist on calling it science?

Mr. Bjørn Gustav Nielsen:
Hi (Ian) and interesting. Is democracy a scientific construction? And if the way we organise democracy today, you can actually hide yourself behind the party program, or by stating “It’s politics” kills the globe, what field of science can help us to avoid that?

Ian:
Applying this thinking to (free) democracy is another topic I take seriously in my writing. We are overwhelmed with working examples in these recent years 🙂

Founders of constitutional democracies certainly brought enlightened philosophy to their framing and justifications, Locke, Humboldt, Jefferson, Paine, you name them, but those included “inherent” freedoms and “self-evident” truths. Democracy is not, cannot be, and never was, entirely “scientific”. As scientific as possible, but not more so.

We definitely need to bring all forms of knowledge to bear and no one science holds all the answers – if that answers your question?

Calling all good / valuable knowledge “science” seems to be giving it credence by sprinkling it with scientific holy water, when the knowledge in question doesn’t actually meet any formal scientific criteria?

Dave:
So you are creating an either/or between the lived, intuitive and what you call ‘formal science’?

Ian:
A “good fence” – a distinction that matters (for reasons suggested). But not a “dichotomy”. Real life knowledge and communications has both intimately entangled and more or less integrated.
So either and/or both. We need both but we need to understand the different bits we’re dealing with differently, so we can understand their relationships and differences, whilst valuing both.
[ What you called “formal science” BTW 🙂 ]

Dave:
Formal science is your language not mine.
If there is a fence it’s (thankfully) broken

Me:
OK – “Science of formal causation” was your actual words.
The whole point of a “good fence” is its permeability. The distinguishing (taxonomic) line exists, but it doesn’t prevent any interaction. If you deny the distinction you have no way to describe or characterise the interactions and relationships?

Dave:
“Science confined to formal cause (*) …” actually

Ian:
Ha, yes. I was drawing attention to the fact it was you introduce the word / concept of “formal” … but we’re still not addressing what I said was the point … (also in the exchange with Nicola). Can pick up elsewhere another time 🙂  [Formal science or science of formal causation – clearly just me “naming” the kind of science Dave had described (without further definition of what make it science), but as my previous answer said – this focus on these words is missing “the whole point” there and further elaborated in the exchange with Nicola.]

(*) Formal Cause? Not sure anyone would (or could) literally confine science to “formal cause” in the Aristotelian sense? I was working on the basis of more pragmatic understanding of the whole of science as we know it in 21stC. In that Aristotelian sense of “formal” cause – I do in fact have a strong preference for what I would call a “systems architecture” view of any real world situation – the Aristotelian defining form of any thing or system being its structural arrangement. But there are a lot more formal / explicit / objective methods and processes – as well as all the other aspects of human creativity and imagination involved in science. It’s the difference between broad and narrow definitions. A broad definition of science includes all those things and more a narrow definition (what I call #GoodFences) is a dividing line that distinguishes science from all other interrelated aspects of human understanding and activity. Science <> Not-science? Without such a distinction how would we talk about their relationships, recognise their different values, applications, etc?

Nicola Robins:
I have a masters in science from an ivy league university; I have trained in the traditional Southern African knowledge system called Ngoma. They both taught me how to use intuition, analysis, narrative (etc) to make sense of things, though in vastly different ways. Both are validated by third parties, one through the Western scientific method, the other through extensive lineage networks. (Neither refers to itself as wisdom…) Why and by what criteria would I call the one ‘science’ and the other ‘knowledge’?

Me:
OK, so I’m not contrasting science with knowledge.
I’m distinguishing between scientific-knowledge and non-scientific-knowledge and both are kinds of knowledge.
Q. Why would you make a distinction?
A. For the very reason you give – “one [is validated] through the Western scientific method, the other through extensive lineage networks” You make precisely my point. The one <> the other. (As in fact Dave also did at one point earlier) Having made your distinction we can now talk about the relationships between the two (whatever actual names we give them, no existing word we pick is free from baggage.)

Nicola:
(And I’m not just being bloody minded here – I am really interested in these questions…)
Okay, so anything validated through the Western scientific method would get into the category that you call “science”. Would other forms of knowledge, validated (as they are) in different ways, be in their own special categories too? Or would they all be in an enormous category called “knowledge-not-validated-by-Western-science”?
If the former, then I still don’t see why the Western form of validation gets to use the collective noun of “science”. If the latter, then… well, that’s the old pattern of organising and naming things to validate Western science as a little bit more special than others. George Orwell wrote a good book about that.

Ian:
Me too, for 25+ years 🙂
Choosing a name, for what we’ve agreed exists is essentially political and rhetorical. Existing words have baggage and even neologisms come with the baggage of their previous linguistic parts. So there is no “right” answer.
I am suggesting the knowledge (and processes) according to explicit formal causation, formal dialectic, objective, scientific method (etc) is what we continue to call “science”.
The kinds of knowledge that don’t meet that kind of formality – I am simply questioning WHY people (wish to) call that “science”.
Whatever alternative name we choose / agree on, I have one point for now. We are talking about less “formal” stuff – stuff that doesn’t benefit from tighter formal definitions (etc) – so WE SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISED if the name we choose looks a bit “woolly” or ill-defined or incomplete or ineffable compared to “science”.
Once people get over it (that fact) – I could even live with “wisdom” – but I have endless possibilities. Depending on which schools of philosophical epistemology we subscribe to you might have a favourite. Mine would be radical-empiricism, but I honestly really don’t care what we call it, so long as we distinguish it from “the other kind”.

Nicola:
Got it. As you say, it is political and rhetorical. I found our exchange useful – thanks!

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Post Post Post Note:

Had this linked for a while, but only juts realised it is closely related to the dialogue above – Scientist Brian Goodwin being interviewed by John Brockman over at The Edge on his “new science of qualities”.

JB: What have you been up to?

GOODWIN: […] For me, a lot of the ferment that’s going on in science is around this problem of how we deal with the subjective and the intuitive. Everybody knows that the subject is primary. ‘Objectivity’ is something that comes out of consensus between subjects who have agreed methods of practicing science. Scientific objectivity is a democratic consensus between practitioners of science that such and such is the case, based upon experimental method and modeling. If there’s no consensus in science, there is no agreement about facts and hence no ‘truth’.

There’s another important component of science, and that is what’s philosophers refer to as realism. Scientists virtually all agree that there’s a real world that’s being investigated by science. Science itself, and the tools of science, are social constructs. But the methods of science address something that is real and independent of human beings. I believe in such a world. The knowledge you get from science is real knowledge about the real world. It’s not absolute truth, which is never attainable; it’s an approximation to it. So there’s this strong element of social construction in science, but I’m not a relativist.

JB: So define yourself.

GOODWIN: I’m a pluralist. I believe that there are different ways of getting reliable knowledge about the world. But because they refer to the same world we can compare them and decide which is more appropriate for particular forms of action. This implies that knowledge and (ethical ) action are connected, unlike the usual assumption in current science that facts and values are quite separate.

Interesting that despite the title “new science of qualities” in that final remark he talks about “different ways” of getting reliable knowledge about the world, and acknowledges that they are connected. Implies but doesn’t actually say at this point that the subjective knowledge of ethical action should simply also be called science?

This is my Monist-Triad model BTW.

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