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Peterson in Cambridge

Jordan Peterson has been in the UK since early / mid last week, visiting Cambridge and, over the weekend, London, with assorted media engagements along the way.

Pretty sure it’s not his first visit to Cambridge, one of his earlier “controversial” talks was there as I recall. Anyway, this time he’s been taking advantage of playing tourist with his life-partner and being hosted inside St John’s, Christ’s, Kings and Trinity historical collections, and the general history-laden built-environment of Cambridge itself. Like a child in a sweetie shop he’s been moved by the abundance of books, artefacts and locations imbued by association with the greats, Darwin, Newton, etc. I know the feeling having spent 4 years working in Cambridge – just before smart-phones and social-media. It was instrumental in this blog becoming the project that is Psybertron.

He’s posted eight or ten pics or selfies alongside various significant places and objects. At Trinity he visited the Wren Library, which included some of the books and notebooks he snapped, but erroneously posted a shot of Trinity Chapel with a Wren Library caption. His denigrators latched onto that with a sad meanness – memeing his error with a thread of assorted piss-takes. You really think the man cannot tell a library from a chapel, and didn’t just have many dozens of snaps on his phone?

Here an example piss-take from a bear with very little brain? Three days late to the party by a public intellectual who should know better, yet illustrates how low intellectual discourse has sunk. (A screenshot ‘cos he’s someone who blocked me some years ago when I once pointed out to him the irony in his reaction to having the piss taken out of himself, turning his own joke back on him. Ho Hum.)

Anyway in London over the weekend he got his revenge when he posted a selfie in The National Gallery alongside Willem Kalf’s classic still-life with a large red lobster (and drinking horn, in the title). Like the Quakers, turning a jibe into a trademark.

Rock on Lobster Peterson 🙂

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[Ha. And this week (25th/26th Nov) he’s in Oxford, the Union, Oriel college etc. Perhaps over-sharing the people and places. Definitely the kid in the candy store.]

There We Have It

Mentioned earlier collecting previous links in preparation for receiving Iain McGilchrist’s latest, well here it is:

Iain McGilchrist
The Matter With Things –
Our Brains, Our Delusions
and the Unmaking of the World

        • Volume I – The Ways to Truth
          • Introduction
          • Part 1 – Chapters 1 to 9 plus Coda
            The Hemispheres and the Means of Truth
          • Part 2 – Chapters 10 to 19 plus Coda
            The Hemispheres and the Paths to Truth
          • Appendices (1 -3)  to Vol I
        • Volume II – What Then is True?
          • Part 3 – Chapters 20 to 28 plus Coda
            The Unforeseen Nature of Reality
          • Epilogue
          • Appendices (4 – 8) to Vol II
          • Bibliography
          • Index of Topics
          • Index of Names

[Full index here at Channel McGilchrist.]

Beautifully produced by Perspectiva, see publisher and editor Jonathan Rowson’s introduction in the post linked at the top.

References in marginal side-panels of every page and, as with the previous Master and Emissary, almost a 1/3 of the 1577 pages taken up with end materials – reference bibliography, index and appendices.

As well as all the blurbs and commentary / interviews already circulating, simply:

“One of the most important books ever published.”

I couldn’t help but notice the parallel in the form of the title with physicist Lee Smolin:

      • The Trouble with Physics.
      • The Matter with Things.

Like the thorough referencing, McGilchrist’s scientific, practicing and academic credentials are very important to this project, since the level of positive commendation, the book clubs and retreats studying his work and the association with other alt-academics could easily create the impression of an alt-lifestyle cult (in much the same way Jordan Peterson’s following might appear to some). The content is of course very much alt-received-wisdom so it demands very careful consideration. Part of that alternative wisdom is in the integration of orthodox objective & positivist science with the sense of the sacred, even divine – soul food as well as brain food “beyond prevailing epistemic capacities and spiritual sensibilities”.

As well as the immense collection of references a long list of individual acknowledgements, not just in the core neuroscience and psychotherapy technical areas, but all over the map from: Lee Smolin, within the fundamental physics camp, noted after I’d made the parallel above; Rupert Read, green activist and Wittgensteinian philosopher; Philip Pullman, humanist and fantasy fiction writer; and Nick Spencer, senior fellow at Theos, the Christian think tank, to name a few.

“A [remarkable work] written with
the soul and subtlety of a poet,
the precision of a philosopher, and
the no-nonsense grounding of a true scientist”
– Read suggests.

I may be some time.

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The introduction alone is 47 pages with 99(!) references of its own. McGilchrist’s Hemispheric Hypothesis (and more) introduced and – as in his previous Master and Emissary – contrasted with earlier pop-psychology misconceptions. (I’ll hold off any spoilers until later reviews.)

I’m nearing the end of Volume I Part 1. The 9 chapters and 270-odd pages that form the technical means at McGilchrist’s disposal. The neuroscience and psychotherapy sources and resources. Full of those famous published names like Hughlings-Jackson, Sacks, Damasio, Ramchandran, Sperry, Gazzaniga, Bolte-Taylor, Kahneman and Tversky as well as the mass of lesser-sung heroes of primary and secondary research and practice. An important solid foundation that is tough going if it’s not the kind of technical subject matter you’ve read before. As advertised, the chapter summaries will prove useful. The anatomical plates from p430 onwards are invaluable too. The human condition exposed in neuro-atypical conditions from split brains and traumas to epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism – mercifully without a single mention of the over-used Phineas Gage in almost 1600 pages.

I noted earlier the beautiful presentation and resolved when I started to read once right through without taking notes or – god forbid – physical annotation on the publisher’s work of art. Well, I can report that lasted as far as Chapter 7. That’s a particularly interesting section on “Cognitive Intelligence” and measures of general intelligence “g” – like IQ-Testing – and especially what misleading features and comparisons such tests might really expose. I’d like to think Nassim Nicholas-Taleb would approve of the treatment (*). No surprise to find the Hemispheric Hypothesis conclusion that a general decline in general intelligence is closely associated with devaluation of the right-brain.

Reading on.

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(*) Ha. Didn’t know it at this time, but Taleb privides one of the positive blurbs on the Channel McGilchrist page about the book. And that later there is at least one reference to Taleb’s Antifragile.

“I loved The Master and his Emissary: this is even deeper.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Deutsch over Rovelli and Carroll

Recent reads of Carlo Rovelli and Sean Carroll have been ultimately disappointing, but don’t get me wrong …

Helgoland (2021) – by Carlo Rovelli

and, The Big Picture (2015) – by Sean Carroll

… are both informed & informative, deep & wide, well-written reads. I got a lot out of both. Creative new restatements as well as entirely new leads from my perspective. Greatly recommended.

Disappointments are – that despite apparent openness to philosophical & metaphysical thinking, between ways of talking & ontological reality, of causation & emergence, weak & strong, with information<>entropy & dynamic-process driven perspectives of life, consciousness & everything – an ideological certainty that “Core Theory” (Standard model plus general-relativistic gravity) remains the final word in physics and yet that physicalism will suffice to represent all of reality.

Not so much a god of the gaps as the physics of of the gaps. Science is only human, and physics is only a word. Mulling over these thoughts led me back to my readings of David Deutsch, in particular his “Beginning of Infinity”.

I’d be as happy as anyone extending the word physics as the foundation for a naturalist scientific explanation of the whole of reality, but not with the condition that there can be no (so far mysterious) defect requiring any Core Theory update. Physicists and physicalists can’t have it both ways. Can they?

Ways of talking and emergence are fine, but with only weak emergence as merely useful ways of talking, this leaves even seeming fundamentals as time and causation as merely anthropic perspectives. Surely some aspect of the quality of our explanations has to lead us to the ontological commitment that what we are describing is what we believe reality to be, even if that description remains best (ie contingent) human endeavours. Not even Core Theory can be exempt from such contingency?

Surely, …

Core Theory (now)
= Standard Model
+ General Relativistic Gravity

… must evolve to become:

Core Theory (future)
= Core Theory (now)
+ specific force / particle additions
+ (something like) “Emergent Causality Theory”

Last time I did a riff on this was back here in May 2018. (I do have a more formal metaphysical thesis too, but this is not the place.)

Fundamentally, What Do I Know?

Reminded me that one thing Carroll does get right is the idea that emergent “levels” in reality are in some sense like phase-changes. The aspect I could not reconcile with Carroll after much positive talk about “ways of talking” and the possibilities of “strong-emergence” – where this phase-shift metaphor comes in handy, is that ultimately – the last 10 or so chapters – his language switches to just or merely “ways of talking” implying only “weak-emergence”. Even if phase-change is being used metaphorically, we must be using it to refer to some aspect of reality. Some ontological commitment, please.

“Physics becomes the epistemological question
of what can we know about the world.”
(Me, in the above.)

“fundamental physics remains incomplete until hypothetical rubber hits the road of reality.”
(Rebecca Goldstein on “ontological commitment”)

It’s the difference between accepting that there can be many valid “ways of talking” when describing the world from our anthropic perspectives (clearly true) and having a particular way of talking that describes the world according to our chosen Core Theory of Everything (clearly necessary for that ontological completeness).

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[Post Note, here a discussion on the state of the Standard Model, with Sabine Hossenfelder, Sam Henry and Bjørn Ekeberg chaired by Philip Ball at HTLGI.

Sabine makes the point that we’re really talking about the Standard Model (of particle physics) AND General Relativistic Gravity (of cosmology).

“Do we really know?”
“Maybe we should talk to more philosophers of science?”
“Divergence between simply describing and actually explaining.]

Metaphysics<>Physics Caricature

Very difficult to have conversations at the limits of fundamental physics.

Physicists are obviously very attached to which parts of fundamental physics – and deep understanding thereof – are considered “fixed” in their firmament. And that’s true even if they appear open-minded on philosophical discussions. It’s impossible for all of us to have the same depth of understanding – or even the same kind of understanding – of all the sub-topics as conversations dot all over this map – of life, the universe and everything – for me that’s a given, the reason for the dialogue.

All too often however, you get to the “turtles all the way down” lower limit to whatever we choose to name “physics” and when you are prepared to admit you’re really talking metaphysics – and more to the point being comfortable doing it. However, when the caricature becomes

Physics= real, whereas
Metaphysics = anything goes, flights of fancy, etc.

The dialogue has ended, at least temporarily.

In metaphysics, and at the lower reaches of the physics that interface with it, the idea that objective, empirical falsifiability is the sole test of an idea is an obvious flaw. It’s about what indirect predictions, including empirically falsifiable ones higher-up in the observable stack, can create the best, most consistent stack with the least reasons to doubt, the best reasons to take as true. The best chances of fixing existing problems, the least chances of introducing new ones. I mentioned this in the previous post – Whitehead and Wittgenstein at the very least. Even within the canon of accepted physical science, there are many methods and processes for assessing truth and validity other than direct falsification: Bayes, Occam, etc.

Choosing a single test is fine as a boundary condition – a working definition – for any given discourse, but is ideology if it is seen to set a fundamental limit on what things exist in reality.

#EpistemolgicalOntology

(A branched thread …)

Poetic Naturalism Meets Fine Tuning

This is just a placeholder for something I should write based on my reading of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture” particularly chapter 36 on Fine Tuning. I’m still reading and almost finished, having posted 2 or 3 reflections so far. Whether I ever do a full review or not, it is very good despite many details of disagreement on “Life, Meaning and the Universe“.

I really do like his poetic naturalism taking seriously “Ways of Talking” around emergence – as I wrote already – and his Bayesian “valuing your priors” logic throughout – the Wittgensteinian thought of “which idea does it make most sense to believe”. There are however, the usual problems for me when it comes to “consciousness” – ignoring 30+ years of Dennett after “Consciousness Explained” (1991) and the “Intentional Stance” (1987). For a physicist he has as open a take on consciousness and free-will as any, and stays close to the information<>entropy<>fitness-landscape thinking, though I’m not sure he makes a lot of progress on consciousness itself. I will come back to this once I’ve finished.

What did catch my eye was his discussion on Fine Tuning, the Anthropic Principle(s) and the Multiverse(s) in Chapter 36. A good elaboration clarifying the distinction between the multiverse and many-worlds ideas but feel he misses the “Anthropic Perspective”. Eye-catching because as I already mentioned, it was the political denial of anthropic problems with our fundamental view of physics – after Rick “Island” Ryals – that first drew me to Carroll. And incidentally it was Island gave me my best understanding of multiple sequential (real) universes, driven by cosmological constant and boundary conditions thinking. [Also in parallel our anthropic (psychological) perspective(s) in how we see and interact with the world is at the core of Iain McGilchrist’s work, mentioned in the previous post. It’s all connected.]

Anyway, for now, the Anthropic issues are worth some analysis … at some point.

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Post Notes:

Here Carroll in 3 hours of dialogue with Goff and Frankish has a section on Fine Tuning (as well as emergence generally):

And here, completely left-field, Hossenfelder finds Krauss “fun”. Connected because of the mention of “science ideology” – progress in itself!

And even “lefter” field?
Woke is when naivety is mistaken for wisdom.

The Matter With Things – Iain McGilchrist

[Latest Updates:

Iain McGilchrist’s new 2-volume book was published earlier this week – I’ve not yet received my copy and was unable to attend any of the launch events either online or in person – but here is Iain with Jonathan Rowson of the publisher Perspectiva:

I’ve referred to McGilchrist and his “Master and Emissary” over 50 times in my work and had the pleasure of meeting him at one of the “How The Light Gets In” events. Here I’m just collecting a few key pieces before I receive his latest. First the RSA-Animate that Jonathan refers to:

And here the full-length The Divided Brain – Film.

And let’s add previews on his latest:

And post-notes:

Follow The Money?

Or does the money follow them?

The “TERF War” has been topical here because it exemplifies the “woke” culture wars that have totally disfigured public discourse. Essentially that wider rationality has been “captured” by a simplistic, selective, PC, polarising and sloganising objectification of facts and rights that squeeze out all care for individuals, nuance and complexity.

The irony is that free-thinking “intellectuals” would traditionally side with left-leaning, “liberal” politics and yet it is the left-liberal institutions and media that get most “captured” and paralysed by the simplistic PC versions of the wokery. We get a “culture war” between narrow “ideological” rationalities instead of a wider rational integration of the true complexities experienced by human individuals. Free-thinking intellectuals become constrained – even unwelcome and attacked – at the institutions where they are most needed and inevitably seek alternatives that provide them the freedom and security. Resources that require funding beyond the traditional left-liberal context.

Alice Dreger already left academia to set-up her own self-sufficient “on a shoe-string” local media operation.

Of course, that’s a reference to yesterday’s announcement of the new “University of Austin” (UAT) not to be confused with the UT@A and all the other Austin universities.

Jonathan Haidt had already set up his “Heterodox Academy” and he’s one of the “board of advisors” at UAT. Quite a roll of founders and advisors: Niall Ferguson, Bari Weis, Steven Pinker, Haidt, Vicky Sullivan, Deirdre McCloskey and more. Actual staff – Peter Boghossian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and …

… Kathleen Stock, who must have had the UAT proposition put to her when she needed a way out of her Sussex harassment.

And because the UAT venture is funded by … the Koch Brothers … a lot of Left-Liberal academics are now tarred / smeared by the Right-Libertarian brush. Ho hum. This one will run and run. (It’s why I started the Liberal<>Libertarian thread last week.)

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Post Note: And talking about true complexity and “capitalist” funding of free academic thought:


Several academics associated with SFI Complex Systems considered intellectual friends here on Psybertron, including Jessica Flack, justifying her net-good position re the funding (thread):

Trans “Debate” Optimism

Promised myself I wouldn’t post anymore about the “TERF War” since it seemed that at last common sense was starting to prevail, and I could shift my attention to the wider issues of identity politics in philosophy and science (and hence “science-led” politics) generally.

ie There’s an even bigger issue than the “TERF War” even though that already affects over 50% of the world’s population directly and who deserve our support and defence (Women and Trans and LGB and Children).

But, the Doc Stock interview with Julie Bindel is so positively uplifting and filled with unmitigated common sense around all the issues involved that it needs to be shared and experienced by everyone who “cares”.

“Kathleen Stock – I Won’t Be Silenced”
with Julie Bindel on Unherd.

Highly recommended.

(Retweeted and commented several highlights from the interview, and the transcript is only highlights too, but there are so many good points in there. An exemplary resource for anyone who cares.)

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Post Note: and the best outcome for me? Adding Doc Stock to my list of philosophy resources generally – beyond this one issue. She’s a keeper.

Post Note: And the common sense reaches the mainstream. Hat Tip to Lorraine Kelly:

Henri Bergson, Julian Huxley’s Seed Crystal?

Bergson scholar Emily Herring 2017 piece in the Annals of Science is worth a read for the Bergsonian influence on the modern evolutionary synthesis.

I was struck early on by the sentence quoted below, a recurring theme for me of the idea that one’s own supersaturated (dense and incoherent) thoughts often crystalize (cohere) around a recognisable seed crystal event involving one individual. For Robert Pirsig it was Sarah Vinke’s “quality” question. For me it was retrospectively recognising Pirsig’s coming together of Zen and Engineering when Nobel physicist Brian Josephson mentioned (with Henry Stapp) the weird parallel’s between fundamental physics and Eastern philosophies.

For Huxley, encountering Henri Bergson shortly after the 1909 Darwin 50th event in Oxford was:

… not so much a turning point in my career
as a crystallization of my ideas.

Whatever the precise sequence of events, the remembered event pinpoints a significant step in the development of thought.

Don’t Panic Captain Mainwaring #COP26

Pointing out that hypocrisy has become the standard of all political discourse rather than addressing substantive content. Great post from Jamie Bartlett earlier today:

(And actually a good thread of comments reinforcing the point that “taking sides” against opponents is generally destroying all political decision-making nuance.)

In fact as I frequently point out (after Brunsson) hypocrisy is an essential political skill – being able to hold conflicting positions in different contexts over different times. Anyone who can’t is a simpleton and shouldn’t be allowed near a difficult decision.

The rest of this post is just a dump of thoughts I really can’t be bothered to append to every social-media post or response.

So much in the opening COP26 speeches by national premiers and treasures “out-rhetoricking” each other in how close to midnight / extinction / crisis / emergency / rebellion / time-bomb / now-or-never / last-chance we are on climate change. It just ramps up the political stakes – rallies “troops” – without adding anything to any solutions. Indeed it simply leaves more meaningless hostages-to-fortune lying around for hypocritical hypocrites to pick over next time round. All it does it make future rational action much harder and in the meantime increases the risk of taking dumb counter-productive actions because they are populist vote-catchers.

And in a similar vein from Tom Chivers too:

Some specifics:

The new Workington coal mine? How can the UK claim climate leadership whilst building a new coal-mine. Quite simple really:

And now after commitments to net-zero carbon-equivalent footprints and fossil-fuel usage, driven by global-warming calculations we have a methane commitment. We keep setting targets based on simple single numbers. Tunnel vision on a few easy tangibles, ignoring the ecosystem as a whole:

Teli Chinelis (on LinkedIn)
“Once again they left out noise pollution. The second biggest environmental health risk after air pollution (according to WHO). Whoever deals with Net zero etc assessments is laughing all the way to the bank!!!”

a close up of text on a white background

Me in reply:
“It shows *that* some things are connected, but nothing about *how*. Anything this complex needs a level of abstraction – and systems thinking and complexity as explicit subjects in their own right. As soon as one tries to be specific, any list (eg of emissions or pollutions – air, water, noise, light, …) will be incomplete. But I agree with the thrust of the post. The “tunnel vision” comes from focussing on the specific countable things. Carbon equivalent, average temperature, … ‘one species loss is a tragedy’ anyone?”

Matthew West, further reply:
“I think the mistake here is to think that focusing on one thing means not focusing on something else, that somehow these things are mutually exclusive. Personally, I’d go for the UN sustainability goals. We need to address all of them, and addressing one does not mean not addressing the others. https://sdgs.un.org/goals – 17 distinct goals.”

Yet again the UN itself has high-quality content. Just like with human rights from freedom of expression of thought and belief downwards, it has sustainability well covered as a complex interdependent system.

Which leaves a few things for now.

The Biodiversity angle of terrestrial sustainability? A huge amount of focus is put on individual species and mutations, but there are zillions of them. The way I see it we should obviously avoid artificial mono-cultures, at least ones without more natural ecosystems joining them up. BUT at any given point in time (roughly) 1/3 of those zillions of species are going extinct quite naturally, 1/3 enjoy stability and 1/3 are still finding their secure niches. Sure, the gene-pool might lose a potentially valuable gene somewhere at some point (it’s losing 1/3 zillions of them quite naturally) but we can’t “focus” on every individual gene.

(Same as we can’t focus on counting individual Covid deaths in a pandemic.)

And as I also often point out hydrocarbons, fossil and living, in the soil and deeper in the earth are themselves entirely natural, methane included. There are places where they bubble to the surface entirely naturally.

Forest fires too. Recent years we are actually having fewer fires over smaller areas than has historically been the case quite naturally. They’re just hitting the media more (a) because it’s fashionable and (b) because thanks to more human habitation closer to less managed wild forests more humans are being affected directly. (Trump – the fuckwit – was actually right on this one. See Jamie’s “finding hypocrisy” post at the top.)

And finally for now – I really must get someone to answer this question directly. We’ve got very focused on global-warming and carbon-dioxide (and methane) as greenhouse gases as the primary mechanism to deal with. (And I know there’s an ongoing controversy about sabotaging the hockey-stick data from East Anglia Uni – where coincidentally Rupert Read is employed.) BUT Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been an issue for me throughout the industrial age. Surely a large part of the AGW simply comes from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – energy<>entropy / order<>disorder. We are filling our ecosystem with low-grade heat faster than any previous species, simply due to our energetic activity?

My pet hate – a real trigger – “young” people suggesting “old” people don’t care about their future. How little they know.

We really ought to be spreading our sustainability concerns and actions over a much broader and joined-up range of human activities and at the same time being realistic about which are natural features where we need to work with mitigations rather than fool ourselves into imagining we can reverse or even stop.

The catchy rhetoric of “No more X by <date>” is bollox.
For the birds. (For the voters actually.)

[Climate previously on Psybertron.]