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Roger Boscovich

Roger Boscovich (several different spellings) is an 18C Jesuit I regularly mention here as someone whose intuition of a fundamental view of physics probably influenced Mach and hence Einstein – though precious few if any direct references are discoverable.

Apart from a few Boscovich enthusiasts and a few web-pages dedicated to him (and Margaret Wertheim’s Pythagoras Trousers), I had forgotten this mainstream reference from Charles Simonyi in his response to the 2012 Edge Question. Must check where else Simonyi uses Boscovich references.

Boscovich smallest conceivable intervals of time and space are “atomic” in the true Democritan sense. For my work, these represent the smallest “fundamental particles” of information, the smallest difference between any two distinct things.

“An atom should rather be viewed as a point source of force, with the force emanating from it acting in some complicated fashion that depends on distance.”

Points than which nothing smaller can be conceived – by definition.

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Blimey, small world, Simonyi also contributed a 2005 Edge answer – about his intentional  / generative software concept. Moore’s law has left computing in an evolutionary backwater without it, he says. Sure has.

Obviously very wealthy from his original Microsoft involvement sponsoring the Oxford professorship bearing his name since 1995, a multi-billionaire after selling his IntentSoft back to Microsoft in 2017, 2 x space tourist(!), mega-yacht owner and sponsor of Princeton IAS. Up there with Gates, Bezos and Musk.

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Conscious Will – The View from Science

Coincidentally, having just read and reviewed the Dennett piece at lunchtime today, after having it bookmarked for a month or two, I picked-up on a Twitter thread between Philip Ball and Sabine Hossenfelder on pretty much the same topic, but based on a piece I also had bookmarked for sometime, by Ball in Physics World.

Despite a period of being seemingly open-minded to philosophy, Sabine seemed to have nevertheless ended-up at what I consider the caricature position of physicists. Since causal effects of conscious will cannot be explained by orthodox physics, it can’t be real. No escaping that causation itself is an elusive concept even if consciousness and free-will can themselves be explained. One thing’s for sure, something in the orthodoxy has to give, whether it’s in physics itself or in the nature of causal explanations. I’m with Dan in the evolutionary nature of causal explanations. Philip at first sight seems to suggest a dualist explanation – that there is something other than physics that explains consciousness:

“Philip Ball argues that “free will” is not ruled out by physics ” because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.”

But I see now that’s the editor’s click-bait, maybe not necessarily what Philip is really arguing.

(Continuing, after a full read …)

“[I]s free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.”

Claiming too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics and acknowledging (metaphysical?) claims beyond physics.

“[W]e can have both (physical determinism and free-will). It’s simply a matter of recognizing distinct domains of knowledge.”

Still sounding very dualist? Unless one posits a single metaphysics underlying both domains – sometimes called a dual-aspect monism – a metaphysics that physicists can accept.

“The underlying problem here is that the reducibility of phenomena ” which is surely valid and well supported ” is taken to imply a reducibility of cause. But that doesn’t follow at all. What “caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is fundamentally absent.”

Now you’re talking – evolutionary causation is not “reducible” in the same way as an “atomic” ontology of phenomena that exist.

“There is good reason to believe that causation can flow from the top down in complex systems.”

Absolutely! – so evolved outcomes are a whole history of repeated two-way / circular interactions. (Will we be hearing of non-ergodicity later here?)

“[Avoiding the problematic language of “free” and “will”] Decisions are things that happen at the level of neural networks and they are made using the coarse-grained information available to sensory receptors and neurons. It makes no sense to regard them as interventions in particle interactions.”

“[T]he origins of volitional decision-making lie in evolutionary biology, [this] doesn’t share an epistemic language with Newtonian and quantum mechanics. To talk about causation in science at all demands that we seek causes commensurate with the phenomena: that’s simply good science and good epistemology.”

Anyway he concludes with:

“[Metaphysics] can be fun
and stimulating to debate such things,
but it is not science.”

OK, so he is saying these different epistemic domains are all within science, physics and evolutionary-neuro-biology are such distinct domains. No metaphysical duality as such. No metaphysical claims at all.

But. What makes such domains distinct – emergent-from / supervenient-on – each other has to be an important question? How we come to have an epistemic-ontology, with what exists being dependent on the language of what is known and meant in a given evolved domain.

I could understand science – the physical orthodoxy of science – being sceptical of that being sufficient explanation, but Sabine is wrong to simply give-up on causation at the boundaries of what physics can explain and declare such inexplicable phenomena as illusory.

A well argued piece from Philip. I feel Philip and Dan would find a great deal to agree on.

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All my own epistemic-ontology would add is a metaphysical choice. That given that what exists somehow depends on “epistemic language”, that something like “information” – the stuff communicated by language – must underlie all domains, physical science included. In my epistemic-ontology all things and phenomena would be reducible to “particles” (Democritan atoms) of this stuff. Even without going back to metaphysical levels, it’s pretty clear that information is in some way fundamental to both physics and evolution. No?

Interestingly, in the Twitter thread linked above Philip offers this 2013 PNAS paper co-authored by Giulio Tononi (of IIT fame) and edited by Michael Gazzaniga, both referenced here multiple times, most recently in the previous Dennett post. A small and ever more convergent world.

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Dennett & Conscious Will – Having the Right Conversation

Since Dan Dennett’s (Jan 2018) “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) which I wrote about here, I’m not aware of other general publication work from Dan. When it comes to human consciousness and free-will Dan is a hero of mine I’ve written about in many contexts.

I’ve seen a few articles and talks since, and had mentally filed away that he was working on a paper with evolutionary systems engineering guru John Doyle, someone I picked-up on in the work of Michael Gazzaniga. I’ve seen no evidence of Dennett / Doyle collaboration since, so maybe wishful thinking on my part maybe.

One longish Dennett paper – from later in 2018 – I’ve had bookmarked for quite a while appeared in the proceedings of the Royal Society. I only got around to reading it this lunchtime.

As with B2BnB, this paper is really about changing the conversation on consciousness. “Our very rationality is at stake” I summarised previously. Sweeping away popular misunderstandings that are getting in the way of progress – progress that is otherwise very substantial, if only we can let go some scientific and philosophical illusions.

Primarily here, he is switching out Chalmers “hard problem” and replacing it with his own “hard question”. The “so what?”, “how come?”, “what next?”

Qualia don’t exist as things to be represented and perceived by our homunculus. They are our representation – in the complex dynamic patterns of our senses – of that which our sensors perceive.

Typically when experimenting on conscious subjects they are “systematically constrained” for the sake of science “to a tiny subset of the things they can do”. Since the point of our conscious will is open-ended creative possibility it is not surprising that this kind of scientific orthodoxy fails to find it.

One of the other features of a constraining kind of political correctness in scientific consideration of consciousness is the idea that conscious will in humans can be no different to that found in other sentient and/or “intelligent” creatures. He lists the obvious candidates – primates, corvids, cephalopods, cetaceans – but concludes (as I have) that the open ended creative nature of conscious will is of a different order or kind in humans. It’s a special evolved feature of our species, literally. That’s a kind of human exceptionalism, except there is nothing to say that equivalent consciousness can’t evolve anywhere else, just that in our corner of the universe we just happen to be that species. And that confers no special rights to the home planet, just a special responsibility towards it.

The only illusions are our misunderstandings. And, as Dennett said several different ways in B2BnB, if we constrain our conversation to the orthodox conventions of those we’re debating, we’ve already given up. What is needed is the same kind of creative dialogue that led to the evolution of ourselves.

The Hypocrisy of Debate

Reading on in Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, we’re into his early undergrad life at Trinity Cambridge. Trying out the various college and university debating societies including the still legendary Cambridge Union.

A recurring topic of mine is the value of dialogue in contrast to the artificial win-lose aims of debating a motion. Inescapably and imperfect binary decision-making component of choice by voting in a democracy, but far from advancing truth and knowledge. Rather the contrary. An evolutionary degeneration  towards a world of binary opposites, as I’ve characterised it many times in the last two decades.

After giving up on debating societies Ramsey records
(my [paraphrasing] Misak, quoting Ramsey):

He loathed the perverted ambition of debating … [playing to the gallery]

He found [it better] in less formal settings … [like being invited to tea to debate with individuals]

Obvious risks in identifying with the greatest genius that ever lived, but I do … also in his impression of mixed gender settings moderating the “silliness” of debate. And how about (with my day-job information management hat on) a woman’s intuition (Dora Black) after wading through an archetypal (C.K.Ogden) tutor’s office buried under cluttered piles of books and papers …

… a method of filing which would commend itself to anyone who knows that, once a thing has gotten into a folder of a filing cabinet, it will never be found again …

Too true. The hypocrisy of formally imposed structure.

Reading on.

Ramsey, Wittgenstein, Gödel and the rest.

Cheryl Misak’s biography of “Frank Ramsey – A Sheer Excess of Powers” is proving to be an excellent read. It’s a 500 page tome and is a beautifully presented academic reference work in terms of front and end materials. The main narrative is broken only by occasional elaboration in text box asides, contributed by recognised experts in each subject.

For anyone interested in the limitations of logical positivism as I am, Ramsey’s key touch points with the other main players of early 20th century philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics – Cambridge and the Bloomsbury set – are already legendary. A legend of genius sealed by his untimely death in his prime, aged only 27 in January 1930.

Part of that interest is in the Vienna Circle and its relationships with the other players, so another book I have lined-up to read after Misak is David Edmonds “The Murder of Professor Schlick”. (Schlick being the “leader” of the Vienna Circle and the murder it seems being literal not rhetorical.)

But I’m only 70 pages into Misak’s Ramsey as I write this. After the Cambridge childhood and Winchester schooldays, Chapter 3 has set the stage for the the main players who “[really lived] in a great time for thinking” and with whom Ramsey was already interacting.  Keynes, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein.

At this remove, it’s hard to understate the importance of the world-in-crisis in the first three decades of the 20th century and the search for better models for understanding and living together in the world. Misak conveys the import. An import we surely face again as we enter the third decade of the 21st. Politics or economics, philosophies or logics, Ramsey had already discovered, before going up to Trinity Cambridge aged 17 in March 1920, as I have (now aged 65 next month in 2021), that metaphysical questions are unavoidable in these otherwise worldly topics. “PPE” depends on metaphysics to this day.

Russell’s mentor Whitehead had understood. Wittgenstein clearly had too. His WW1 (Austro-German) isolation evolved the written Tractatus to the point he was apoplectic at the empty tautology of “Russellian orthodoxy” misunderstanding his seeming “completion” of logic. Looking ahead in the index it is gratifying to see that the “speculation” of how different things might have been had Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Gödel had time to work together in educating the logical positivists in the errors of their orthodoxy. Another fascination of mine.

400 pages to go. I’m all in.

Dante. 2021 is Looking Up

Who knew 2021 was a year of celebration for Dante’s Comedia? Dante 2021 starts on BBC R4 tomorrow 1th Jan with an introduction from Katya Adler broadcast last week. Apparently there are many events planned in Florence and beyond in 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, having only just completed his magnum opus the previous year. I didn’t know any of that when I started a serious attempt to read it the weekend before Christmas 2020.

It’s a read that’s been on my list for most of the last two decades and probably 15 years since I acquired the Everyman Library translation by Allen Mandelbaum. I can even remember buying it, at Barnes & Noble on University Drive in Huntsville Alabama. The first of many false starts to actually reading it, prompted invariably by intriguing references in other works.

The next significant milestone was acquiring the Clive James translation in 2013. It looked more promising language but in fact proved another false dawn. But James’ notes did provide an important piece of information. As a read, it’s written backwards. With all the action in part 1 Inferno, and the dry philosophical theses in parts 2 and 3 Purgatorio and Paradiso. BBC Radio4 serialised the whole thing in 2014 and it’s being rebroadcast from tomorrow on BBC Radio4 Extra.

There was hope in early 2020 when I discovered Mark Vernon, active on my Twitter timeline, was a Dante scholar. But we know what happened to 2020! The tipping point to the latest attempt was reading the many references to Dante in Carlo Rovelli’s There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness a collection of his essays published in Italian media in recent years. As a big fan of Rovelli in my wider agenda concerning the metaphysical boundaries of physics and consciousness, that read was ultimately disappointing (a longer story) but I posted references to 6 or 7 really wonderful pieces in the first half.

I can confirm having completed Inferno and Purgatorio – skim-reading towards the end of the latter, and now thinking hard about embarking into Paradiso – that Mark, like Clive James, is right. Parts 2 (and 3) much tougher going than part 1. (After trying both versions – quite different in style – I did find the traditional translation easier, feeling closer to Dante himself.)

Though even in Purgatorio there is the recurring “virtual reality” of the physical geometry / topology of Dante’s world being somehow other than our orthodox 3D.

Anyway obviously I’m not writing “a review” of Dante, but I can say I’m really glad I shared Inferno and Purgatorio with him, even if I never venture into Paradiso. I am of course going to have to revisit the first two to pick out the metaphysical links – it’s not the kind of read you can really annotate as you read. The rhythm demands attention. Wonderful stuff, as many greater than I have commented previously.

Loved our visit to Florence and Pisa in 2018, focussing on Galilean connections. I can see future Dantean visits are on the cards, but maybe 2021 will enforce other priorities.

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(Aside. One linguistic observation, the occupants in translation are referred to as “shades” – is that ghosts of souls?)

We Can Be Heroes in 2021

It’s fair to say 2020 wasn’t the year most of us were expecting, and it’s not over yet. It’s been a very long 2020.

As well as the culmination of the self-inflicted BoJo/Brexit/Trump insanities that meant UK and US were distracted from what really needed attention in the world at large (Chinese Uyghurs anyone? Climate Change solved?) Covid took over any remaining attention-spans we had left.

The effect was compounded for me personally, because towards the end of 2019, after a decade of mostly home working – visiting colleagues and clients in person as and when necessary – I’d just committed myself to near-full-time working at offices ~120 miles from home. Back to a previous life on the road and mostly in hotels a couple of nights a week. The particular job was (is) complicated enough in scale and complexity of partners and stakeholders, that the switch to enforced total homeworking has been a hammer blow.

Mostly home working as-and-when is a flexibility. Enforced total home working is a millstone to progressing shared understandings of a novel approach to information architectures for digital transformation – to use the jargon of my current day-job. Remote working works well with people with whom you have significant shared understanding and trust, but not when you’re still trying to get on the same page under complex work pressures. That requires human dialogue and contact beyond the formal transactions.

Anyway, this isn’t about me and my day job, it’s about the relevance of information & communication architectures to the full context, humanity and our ecosystem. The information environment and decisions made by us and for us about Brexit, Trump, Covid etc. Decisions which are themselves reflected in everyday life and day-job choices. Follow-the-science & official advice vs fake-news & conspiracy-theories at its most stark.

Since the 1940’s – before electronic computers – that’s been known as Cybernetics. These days it’s called Systems Engineering – human systems to manage the organisation & governance of human affairs – biological, social, business, political – you name it. In my day-job it’s primarily about business systems and operations, but all human life is here in any complex business.

Just before I committed to that job in Sept 2019 I posted about identifying a new potential hero in terms of systems architectures, systems which go right back to biological evolution of our sentient and purposeful selves. Our human architecture. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last night was the US day-after the Trump rabble(*) insurrection of 6th Jan 2021 and social media was full of “takes” and updates. That whole melee of information, official & individual, fact & opinion, real &”fake”. One thing’s clear, a large part of the Trump mob angle comes from the QAnon all-purpose anti-establishment conspiracy-theories end of that spectrum, whether it’s rigged-elections, anti-vaxxers, white-supremacy vs antifa or whatever.

(* I say “rabble” – but with the actual intent and planning, and a little different chances on the day, it was close to being a mob bloodbath.)

Deciding – or simply having an opinion about – the best thing to do with or about Trump and his mob is tricky to say the least at many levels across many timescales. Obviously for most of us there’s a general bias towards justice, but that still leaves many options. And none of the choices is independent, eventually they’re integrated into an objective reality and a collection of perceptions we have to live with. In my previous post I started to bring in journalists that get the significance of the information communication architecture – how the information flows affect the actual knowledge content, when the consumers are democratically (individually) controlling them, as we are in social-media environments. (It’s an idea as old as McLuhan, but …) Transparency that bypasses the idea of professional media is ultimately and inevitably degenerate. (Read the Jay Rosen 24-tweet thread linked in that post.) All issues degenerate to binary / unstable extremes, with all stable / nuanced options crowded out.

Last night – in a pause from the Trump traffic – I happened to watch the lecture by the potential hero I’d blogged about in Sept 2019. John C Doyle. Apart from capturing the link and my reasons for doing so, I’d completely forgotten I’d watched it before last night. Looking at my on-line activity, it seems entirely random that I did.

“System architectures for massively enhanced evolvability” is spookily close to my day-job agenda, but that’s a story for another day. The game changer for us humans more generally is this:

Human systems architectures are well evolved
to deal with bio-genetic viruses. (And deal with mountain-biking down steep rocky paths.)

Human systems architectures are not well evolved
to deal with info-memetic viruses.

The latter is our bigger problem right now.
Has been (my main agenda) for two decades.

It’s been apparent since the rise of personal email, compounded in the days of bulletin boards and email exploders, and gone nuclear thanks to real-time “unmoderated” social-media. The human system can’t handle it for in-built design reasons. The information  channels are too fast for our internal system dynamics and instability is inevitable.

Breivik#2 – The Nashville Bomber – Tip of an Iceberg.

Different collection of conspiracy theories, different anti-establishment target … but

Spent over a year building the bomb in the RV in his back yard – trespass warnings on gate and front door – reported by a girlfriend back in 2019.

Mailed his “manifesto” to conspiracy mates, used his dog’s name Julio as his on-line ID, and took the dog with him in the suicide bombing – Breivik planned for the legal martyrdom rather than suicide.

Warner targetted AT&T assets and went for minimal human targets, early morning Christmas day, whereas Breivik targetted people that represented the left-right conspiracy extremes. (Destruction of the old downtown buildings and businesses particularly on the east-side of 2nd Ave will be long term damage to a great city. The west side already had modern office buildings.)

Supremacists or Antifa – all the same, extremist nutters at both ends of the “fascist” spectrum – and Trump has a lot to answer for. The AT&T / 5G / chips-in-brains conspiracists were welcomed to a White House meeting in the past year.

This CBS report will do for now, but will add detail and more links when the content of his packages are made public. (And this Tennessean story with some details a day earlier. More from ABC News overnight 2nd/3rd Jan.)

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Notes:

(And yes, Tim McVeigh preceded Anders Breivik.)

(Not becoming a “big story” amidst all the other Covid and Trump stories – mainly it seems because he killed no-one other than himself and his dog – by design. Doesn’t change the scale of the conspiracy-ideology-motivated action? It only leads if it bleeds! But just as dangerous to humanity.)

(And – the antivaxxer angle – different case – the Wisconsin pharmacist sabotaging Covid vaccines. We need to address not just countering the content of conspiracy theories – which generates more for-against traffic on the content. We need to address moderation the “environment” that supports the traffic – that reinforces the ideological conspiracies to action in the first place. See Jay Rosen at foot of the threads below.)

(And – the Trump-led 6th Jan insurrection – need I say more. Q it is.)

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Why do I care?

Thing is, conspiracy theories are an easy “intentional” take on what is a natural memetic evolutionary problem with reasoning degenerating to simplistic polarised extremes in our times of maximum information communication – it’s why I’m here these two decades.

We need “moderation” – proper journalism – unfettered communications are dangerously degenerate.


Seemingly unconnected?
(Each link is part of a Twitter thread …)


The connection ? … is mass communications – in fact it’s the mass interconnectivity of the communications that allow “like ideas” to connect with and reinforce each other – and drive to polarised extremes crowding out subtle variation and nuance.

This whole thread – the rejection of “journalism” by internet processes – Jay Rosen and Alice Dreger – two journalists that “get it”.

“Information is downstream from identity”.

Remember that phrase!

Me and Roy Harper

Pretty sure I first heard Roy Harper 1972/73 ish, probably in a John Peel Sounds of the 70’s session. The first thing of his I bought was the 1973 Lifemask album, his sixth, shortly after his Flashes (from the archives of oblivion) 1974 live-album. The Zeppelin, Jimmy Page & Keith Moon connection was already there in those live shows. [Along with Floyd’s UmmaGumma when it came out in 1969 (another story), the purchase of Lifemask in 1974 invokes memories of the specific visit to the shop in Middlesbrough. I can still see myself flicking to it in the rack.]

Between then and a year after Uni in 1978, we must have seen him live a couple of dozen times; some particularly memorable gigs at Middlesbrough Town Hall, Newcastle City Hall, Colchester Essex Uni, London LSE and (alma mater) Imperial College. Hazy student debates were often Harper vs Dylan (a la Oasis vs Blur in its time) and the fact Dylan had “gone electric” a decade earlier.

In that same time I collected and played to death most of his back catalogue: Sophisticated Beggar (67), Folkjokeopus (69), Flat Baroque and Berserk (70), Stormcock (71). As well as Lifemask (73) that period included HQ (75) – an electric album including Chris Spedding (*). I was obsessed with Me and My Woman from Stormcock and Twelve Hours of Sunset (off the live album (I never did buy Valentine for some reason?)

Most people – apart from the Zeppelin Hats Off to Harper and Pink Floyd Have a Cigar connections – heard Harper as a result of his HQ album, thanks to The Old Cricketer single. BUT, the “epic” on that album was not the popular single, but The Game Pt’s 1 to 5 which we Harper aficionados knew to be the (then) culmination of a series of epic political humanity works spanning the previous 6 albums.

In fact, mention of cricketer by Jon Butterworth was the reason I’ve tweeted about Harper a couple of times recently, and why my “Harper Epics” playlist has been boosted in my media collection:

[Should probably leave that Flashes (live) version of “Highway Blues” off the regular playlist – serves to demonstrate how weirdly “electric” (*) he’d become by 73/74/75 and remind me of the feel of those sections of his mostly solo gigs, as contrasted with the perfection of Flashes (live) version of “Me and My Woman”?]

Anyway, back to the Harper epics …

Harper has of course gigged and recorded since then (I have Bullinamingvase and Man & Myth) but let’s stick to the early body of work here. You’ll find him in De Barras Folk Club, Clonakilty, Ireland these days, if live venues ever re-open.

Apart from my infatuation with Me and My Woman, the resonance of Twelve Hours of Sunset was the same for me as it had been for his originally creating it. I found myself in one period of my life on many west-bound transatlantic flights, and home-bound from Asia, and even a few circumnavigation trips, reading books and listening to music in headphones.

Anyway, in recent years I’ve acquired the remastered electronic copies of the record collection and built the playlist. To my mind, these days, The Lord’s Prayer from Lifemask is the definitive track, and it’s nothing like his title might suggest, but I have that playlist on shuffle / repeat.

To my mind, these days,
“The Lord’s Prayer”
from Lifemask
is the definitive track.

Except that in the last few days I re-watched the I’m Your Man (**) documentary about Leonard Cohen and have Anthem, Hallelujah and Tower of Song  currently on repeat. That’s a much shorter story since I never really became aware of Cohen until the last 10 years or so, but mentioning that on Twitter was what prompted this post, today.

Harper vs Dylan? Oasis vs Blur? Cohen vs Harper?

It’s a tower of song either way.

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(**) Oh, and by the way, Chris Spedding is in the band playing tribute to Leonard Cohen along with the Wainwrights, the MacGarrigles, U2 and others in I’m Your Man. A man of taste, ask Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols. What goes around comes around. Loudon’s Dead Skunk and Hollywood Hopeful were in the mix back in ’75. John Martyn in there too, gig at Imperial in those same days, with Paul Kossoff on guitar, and later Dave Gilmour … on John Wayne. … and Neil Young’s live triple album in late student days amidst all the punk action. The connections are endless, which is the point of the Twelve Hours reference linked above ….

[(*) not just tons of sustain and reverb, but long delay distorted tape loops – quite like John Martyn – who also deserves a mention here in his own right. That later recording with Dave Gilmour in that role would be a good evocation of the effect, just like that live Roy Harper recording, with spoken interludes as the delayed tapes come in and out to maintain the mood and rhythm (though by this 1990 performance Martyn is also using an electric, the effects pedals are already electronic, and other instruments, keyboards and sax are also feeding into the loops. Much less of Gilmour in that video recording, where his main bridge riff is always duetting with the sax. Some great right-hand pinching though in the fills).]

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Brian Josephson at Nobel Lindau 2019

Just a holding post to capture this recent (2019) link to Brian Josephson’s Nobel Laureate talk to young scientists at the 2019 Lindau meeting.

Brian was one of the first physical scientists I came across (back in 2002) that gave serious consideration of the relevance to physics of living and conscious models. I’ve seen him speak and linked to other lectures of his, and it’s fair to say his written thought is better than his presentation skills, but his thinking is still worth close consideration.

“Matter thinks, feels and converses” in Karan Barad’s words he was tempted not to quote.

Much about the limitations of mathematics to represent physics. Our choice of mathematics (languages) greatly influences the models we arrive at
(Reminded me of @katoi and Peter Rowlands)

Lots of good links in his entirely textual slides, pan-psychists and universal-lifeists take note. (Mentioning no names Philip Goff and Tim Bollands).

A lot of the content of the talk is in this paper “The Physics of Mind and Thought“. And consistent with my original and enduring cybernetic interest, it has a strong information processing and game theory thread. A physical scientist quoting Foucault, Wittgenstein and ABBA’s Name of the Game! Excellent.

[As recently as here, quoting the paired concepts that to start playing a game you have to know (some of) the rules, but the playing of the game evolves and creates new rules and objects between the players, even if the formal (constraining) rules are fixed. I think that “stepping stone” model is basically “your move” in Hofstadter’s “Tabletop” game.]

Oh my:

“This is what conversation is about; individuals develop tools for creating a synthetic reality on the basis of their past experience (compare this with building real objects with a construction kit, on the basis of descriptions in language) and can cooperate in their use.”

… and …

“[T]here may be no other way to advance beyond the unavoidable limitations associated with the outdated idea that the complexities of reality can be reduced to a formula.”