Category: Uncategorized

Wrote a fairly comprehensive piece on #IdentityPolitics a year or two ago. Have a “Good Fences” thread on the go also, about classifying individuals AND groups and recognising “woolly” boundaries and less than objective definitions (amongst other things). Naming is always political, for reasons of policy objectives. ALWAYS. The individuals being named, fluidly straddle the definitions of the groups or classes being named. When it comes to naming and identity, (subjective) self-identity is the closest we can get to neutral objectivity, but even then contentious identities may conflict, so mutual acceptance is needed. Equally externally imposed identities are “somebody else’s”, unwitting or deliberate, political ideology.

[The “Good Fences” piece remains in draft for a possible wider publication, but many fragmented references.]

Anyway. 3 Twitter threads today on the topic

Clive on “Disabled cyclists”, the disabled and cyclists

Worthwhile reminder that cyclists & disabled people are not 2 separate, somehow opposed, groups. Cycles often offer mobility & independence. https://t.co/11VzXOmHPg

�” Clive Andrews (@CliveAndrews) June 20, 2017

The “political utility” of calling #FinsburyParkMosque perpetrator a “terrorist”. This whole thread:

I understand – completely – the place that this comes from. But I question the political utility of calling Darren Osborne a terrorist.

�” Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) June 20, 2017

The recurring “Islam is not a race” nonsense – supporting a couple of threads from Alom Shaha

Yes. “Race” based on religious tribes is no more or less real than race based on biological tribes. Bigotry is bigotry either way.

�” Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) June 20, 2017

Don’t @ me with your “Islam is not a race” nonsense.

�” Alom Shaha (@alomshaha) June 20, 2017

Obviously the last two are related. The naming of the perp as a terrorist and the claims he’s not a racist. Generic point would have been clearer if I’d used “cultural tribes” rather than “religious tribes” in that tweet, but same-same … is the point.

All grist to the upcoming “Good Fences” piece.

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[Post Notes – and there’s more …

Category mistake: they are not mutually exclusive.. https://t.co/BEIg97HNpi

�” Peter R. Neumann (@PeterRNeumann) June 20, 2017

And more from 2019:

“You would have been met with incomprehension in 2015 if you had declared yourself a “Leaver” or “Remainer” or talked about E U nationals in Britain and Britons in Europe as if they were aliens” – Me on the identity politics of the right.https://t.co/Pb3LcXiefA

�” Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) October 5, 2019

50 years ago we sang “All you need is love” as the BBC linked up the world with the Beatles by satellite for the first time ever in the summer of ’67. The summer of love.

These days a catchy little meme like that is generated every few seconds and disseminated at the speed of light around the media bubble we might easily call our global village. Increasingly the medium is the message, but not all memes are created equal. Yesterday’s meme was the idea “Grenfell Tower IS political” or if you prefer “Grenfell Tower IS NOT a tragedy, it’s a monstrous crime”. And boy, are the Corbynista’s exploiting these shamelessly.

Sure Grenfell Tower is political, but it’s not Political, it is not necessarily or usefully partisan political. There are many questions of policy and implementation, about green & fire-safety standards in new and refurbished high-rise buildings, about social housing, about the cladding spec, building control practices as well as international experience and changes in these. Relevant all, almost certainly, but the cause celebre? Already a rush to judgement. Funding of social housing and cost-cutting in public services? Tory austerity or Labour budgetary control? Where to point fingers? Which heads need to be rolling? Boris’ “get stuffed” was in response to being called a liar. He did actually respond to the funding criticisms of fire-station closures. There was no shortage or slowness of funded firefighters at the blaze.

Anger is a fair human response following the horror and grief at the human tragedy. But it is not fair policy unless you’re promoting populism.

Corbyn and McDonnell are. Political opportunists of the most contemptible kind. Mass protest against a democratic election result (!) being stoked with the Grenfell Tower anger. Commandeer property from the rich (!) to house the poor. Corbyn man of the people (!) vs May’s awkwardness failing to deal directly with an angry public. Listen to ourselves folks.

I’m no fan of May or Boris. But as a Labour voter I was one to point out that “for the many not the few” was almost an ideal definition for a tyranny of the majority in the reality of an inhomogeneous plural society . Interestingly, listening to Peter Jones, Newcastle University professor of political philosophy last night, he paralleled the idea of a tyrant being a misliked king with the idea of populism as “misliked democracy”.

I’ve had actual language lessons in maybe four non-English foreign languages at various times, studied a couple more as a precursor to needing to learn them and looked-up some basic vocabulary in a couple more for travel reasons. More generally, I’ve taken longer term interest in etymology, particularly from Proto-Indo-European roots and sometimes Sanskrit sources as well as the ubiquitous Greek and Latin classics. Any written language I can decipher phonetically, I can usually make a stab at the gist of an English translation.

On the only two occasions I’ve both learned a language and had the opportunity for immersion amongst native speakers, I’ve been in project working environments where the technical language of the main topic has been English and/or the native speakers have preferred to work on their English. To my shame I can’t speak or listen at conversational speed in any language other than English beyond a few basic context-specific sentences with a few key words. My own rationalisation of that failure is that on top of the technical interest in language, my priority has always been impatiently wanting to get on with whatever our topic is, at the rate the English thoughts run in my head, rather than use of the language itself. Anyway, at my age, I’ve no doubt paid that price.

My original loose interest in etymology has of course been focussed by my researches into epistemology and the philosophy of mind and in the reading in English translation of “great books” of literature with a philosophical bent. I was able to appreciate Andy Martin’s “MML The Film” Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge Uni back in 2011 which I came across after having already being a fan of the engaging and linguistically playful writing in his books and his blog.

I noticed Martin’s latest “long-read” in The Independent on “Speaking in Tongues” was on the the value of speaking a foreign language, in extending one’s monoglot appreciation of the world, more than the obvious and immediate multi-lingual communication value. I’d noticed the connection and the thought had crossed my mind to link to it when I mentioned the limits of exclusively anglophone thinking in this recent Pirsig Meets Foucault piece. However, by then the scope of that piece was set and there wasn’t room for the wider acknowledgement of lessons I’d learned from Martin’s appreciation of the French existentialists that really needed to be added to the French post-modernists I’d already name-dropped. Everything’s connected you know, world without end.

Well now I have read Martin’s latest.

In mentioning the value of some original linguistic appreciation in understanding the conceptual thought processes in Greek and French philosophy, I’d used the Savoir / Connaître distinction to make the crack about the difference between being acquainted with someone and “knowing” the same person biblically. Andy’s piece has an orgasmic thread running through it, from the Sonata Erotica to Last Tango in Paris. Couldn’t help but be reminded of my previous reference to Lacan’s use of “Jouissance” – the pleasure principle in the games we play with ourselves and each other.

Specifically Martin says “language was always an evolutionary mash-up of random phonemes” which resonated with my view that all language started out onomatopoeic and variously metaphorical body-language-by-association (after Lakoff), before it was ever formally captured as vocabulary with definitions and grammar with rules

His further quote “English doesn’t contain all the words you need” is so like the salutary Korean reaction to Pirsig’s suggestion that our 26 letter English alphabet was so marvellous and flexible we could express anything we needed. Martin goes on to reference the early and late aspects of Wittgenstein’s work before and after the Tractatus whereby the impression that language can somehow logically describe the whole enchilada is replaced by the idea that it’s all word games we play with each other. I go further and suggest that even Tractatus was a mind-game at the expense of Russell and the logical positivists. Cruel to be kind, pleasure in pain.

Your thinking necessarily stops when you’re lost for words since “words represent thoughts you otherwise can’t have”. In any event there is far more in heaven and earth Horatio than your language can capture.

Whilst obviously intellectually knowing, Martin’s language and turn of phrase is as ever witty even hilarious. A recommended read.

I have a friend in New York who tends to hark back to the good old days of truth-speaking. Yes, he lives on the eleventh floor of a tall building in Manhattan, but he occasionally looks out of the window at Central Park and he dreams of being a hunter-gatherer.

Ostensibly Martin’s piece is driven from the nostalgic idea that somehow our “post-fact” world is less concerned with truth and that the closing of our borders (eg with the EU) is closing channels of communication, but the fact is that whilst language enables both thinking and communication,  a single language really does restrict our own thoughts.

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[Post Note: Reminds me I’ve still not read Martin’s piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which he mentions in this piece in terms of the power of her multi-lingual understanding. Certainly a crossing of contents I’d not envisaged.]

Variations on this graphic are much shared in the wake of terror events, as part of reassuring people that we have more important risks to worry about than terrorism. Public reassurance is good, genuinely valuable, but the relative risk implied is massively wrong, when it comes to planning appropriate actions – allocating resources and time to addressing the risk.

Here the Politico version.

So what’s wrong?

Sure all the circles represent the size of a risk. But they are quite different risks. The distributions of the probabilities of the “event” occurring inside each coloured circle are all different – they may look to the untrained eye like “normal” (gaussian) distributions but in important ways, they are almost certainly not. Similarly the distribution of the negative consequences of the event – to individuals and/or to populations may look typically random, presumed normal distributions, but again in very important respects they are not.

We are fooled by randomness, the normal look of a seemingly random distribution, and exploiting that look in a graphic of comparative size compounds the error. It simply reifies and reinforces the statistical error in easy to share (but wrong) memes. They are comparing pommes with pomegranates.

There are many classes of statistical risk distribution (See Taleb’s Real World Risk Institute for more. Fooled by Randomness is one of Taleb’s book titles. And I’ve written previously about Taleb.)

The rallying cry is “fat-tails“. At the thin end of low probability event distributions – the gaussian tails – the actual shapes vary massively and, with low probability events, this is the part of the distribution that matters most. Think about that. The 99.99% that looks normal, maybe a skewed normal, tells us nothing about the risk of the low probability event. NOTHING we didn’t already know; that the vast majority of us are unlikely to die in a terror event. Who knew? But of course we are massively affected by other consequences of such events as well as the effects and effectiveness of actions to counter them. This statistic tells us nothing.

The technical detail (in comparative differences between the different classes of distribution) lie in differences of effect on the individual and the population, different populations of different participants, and imbalances between high downside risk and upside cost-benefits of avoidance. The fat-tails and/or heavy-tails simply hide the true cost-benefit risks, unless we address these. And to understand these you need to be an expert, not simply someone who can recognise the reassuringly misleading size of a coloured dot. If you need to share information in simple graphics, ensure the classes of thing being compared are visually apparent.

It’s public misinformation. Rhetorical bullshit designed to attract funding to somebody’s pet project. It’s memetic. Catchy colourful graphics designed as click-bait to sell media links irrespective of the quality of the information content or the headline.

Lies, damn lies and statistics. Fake-news I think we call it these days.

(Hat tip to Terry Waites for the Twitter conversation that prompted this post.)

[Jan 2018 addition: Your lawnmower is not trying to kill you. This paper came out of Taleb calling BS on Royal Stats Soc rewarding a paper on terrorism risk assessment, that got attention thanks to the Kardashian social-media connection. It’s a classic long-fat-tail error. Taleb endorses this corrective paper. The point is if you hear it via social media without informed dialogue, even if it appears to come from the highest statistical authority in the land, it’s probably wrong.]

I’m exploring available theories of consciousness that tie themselves in open-minded ways to fundamental physics, that is they don’t automatically exclude themselves from physical explanation by overly reductionist reliance on objects already (accepted as being) defined by physics.

Yesterday, I summarised what I heard from Robert Kuhn’s Physics of Consciousness / Closer to Truth resources. The things I liked the sound of is the general line that there must be something missing from current physics and physical explanations, so it is important that investigations include philosophical / metaphysical questions for physics itself. Dennett I’m already a fan of thanks to his warnings against greedy-reductionism and premature-definitions, and his plea for more repetitive, creative dialogue to allow new explanations to evolve instead of destructive criticism of incomplete explanations of consciousness on the fatal terms already set by objective physical discourse.

Information has always been core to my own developing theses. That is, information pretty obviously seems fundamental to knowledge and epistemology, but increasingly also seems fundamental to physics itself. Those objects we know as particles and fields would seem to be manifestations of more fundamental information, in the limit any “significant difference”. Most recently Rovelli seemed to be arriving at similar views through his Quantum Loop Gravity work – everything and anything being identified as integrals of differences over closed-loops in space-time. Earlier works influencing Einstein involving Mach and before him the likes of Poincaré and Boscovich also suggested this limit of significant difference as fundamental to all the real world physical concepts we deal with.

Also with the cybernetics angle of my work, a systems view of identity suggests that higher level evolved or derived objects, whilst clearly derived from, supervenient on, their more fundamental parts, nevertheless have definitive identity that is more than the sum of their parts.

I feel I’ve been at this position for decades now.

I was naturally intrigued when I came across the words Integrated Information Theory in the field of the science of consciousness. Information and Integration, creative synthesis of information, not simply critical analysis.

Now from my (so far) very brief investigation of IIT I’m finding their choice of terms for axioms and postulates (and subsequent logical maths notation) very tough going, but I am seeing things I find promising:

Firstly, starting on their own terms for conscious experience without any constraint of existing physical models, it does indeed seem to be a new open-minded metaphysics. Secondly, Mach is the source of the fundamental units of experience – and experience is the fundamental “substance” of their model. In my own words ….

Axioms 1, 2 and 5 – Existence, Structure and  Exclusion – say that conscious experience exists with an ontology and each individual experience has distinct identity in space-time.

Axiom 4 – Integration – says that the ontological composition involves integration, that higher “system” objects are not reducible to their component parts.

Axiom 3 – Information – says that consciousness comprises information arising from differentiation, represented by distinct individual differences

When it gets onto its postulates, explanations, graphical examples, cause-and-effect repertoires and the logical relations derived, I’m afraid it loses me, except for the Identity postulate. That is there is an Identity relationship between our subjective experience or qualia and and the axiomatic IIT construct of consciousness. That is this IIT construct IS our experience, not simply the causal explanation of some other subjective mental level.

How’ma doin’?

[Aside – Quality and Irreversible Incorporation – Tad Boniszewski – in there again?]

[And – the other corollary here is that whist these guys are developing IIT in a science and philosophy of consciousness sense, it is quite clearly at a fundamental level. Something that consciousness shares with physics.]

I’ve been sitting on this Physics of Consciousness link for a while, without so far watching the video interviews, because of both the topic and the participants. I’m a bit sceptical I’ll hear anything newly convincing, but I will take a look.

(Also worth linking because of the overall range of material on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s “Closer to Truth” PBS site generally, but FQXi and Templeton I notice. Is Templeton also the reason Dennett not involved in EES?)

Post Notes:-

David Chalmers – Non-reductionist emphasis, new fundamental role for something like consciousness. Tononi “integrated information theory”. Materialist /identity theory (Penrose /Hameroff) adds nothing.

[My own Tononi / IIT Links here.]

Sean Carroll – Unreconstructed determinist reductionist – simply emergence of useful-category short-hand.

David Wallace – References Dennett, but seems to be an epiphenomenalist – no interaction backward interaction from conscious to physical. But like Dennett he does agree the problem is with our arguments, not with our subjective intuition.

Max Tegmark – Fact is outstanding mysteries of physics do seem to have issues with consciousness. Prejudice regarding the subjective element in objective physics. But, the hard-problem is actually a hard-fact. Consciousness is a real thing, however fundamental or otherwise. Clearly some additional fundamental principle about information processing. (Tegmark seems pretty close to my position, see also Rovelli.)

Bernard Carr – (seen him talk previously at HTLGI) – Sees the limitations of most science seeing consciousness as one-way emergent epiphenomenal from physics, whereas there clearly is interaction. Consciousness is more fundamental than that -William James. Filter, limiter or transducer of information processing consciousness in the brain, (doesn’t actually use the phrase) free-won’t rather than free-will, but … not the creator or consciousness. Consciousness is a primary fundamental element of physics. It’s physical reality that is the secondary manifestation of more fundamental information processing, Carr is not a “panpsychist”, but prepared to countenance effects that science would brand as “paranormal” phenomena. Any way – NOT simple reductionist.

[One to one interview format is much better than conference “debate” formats!]

Paul Davies – Systems view, more than the sum of the parts. (Also a Tononi integrated information reference. No reference to Tononi in Rovelli?) Promising. Not panpsychist, but some proto-conscious stuff must be missing from models – but not necessarily an independent fundamental stuff. Physics and psychic must both arise from same info stuff – form and complexity (“II” must also relate to entropy?)

Jeff Tollaksen – new to me – and not sure I get anything newly intelligible, other than it’s a problem with our tools or particle-properties models – Hammer / Nail metaphor? Quantum miracles! Hmmm.

Don Page – also new to me – “sensible quantum mechanics” and “mindless sensationalism”. Interesting, “sensible” is a parameter I use. Speculative framework rather than a theory or thesis. Limitations of explanations in descriptive physics are everywhere, not just with consciousness, so “hard-problem” is an unfair categorisation for lack of explanation of subjectivity.

The death of Robert Pirsig last month triggered a good deal of new correspondence on his work, his Metaphysics of Quality as well as his novels, “ZMM” and “Lila“. My own summary of his MoQ, or more correctly the world-view implied by his metaphysics, I have previously presented here:

I’ve expressed my (limited) appreciation of the French Post-Modernists (PoMo’s) by dubbing myself a PoPoMo, but it is often difficult to talk directly about Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Žižek et al and still be taken seriously. It is fashionable to knock the Foggie-Froggies, and just this past month we are reminded of the infamous Sokal hoax by a back-firing pastiche on supposed “gender-based science”. The scientistic meme is to ridicule anything that looks like pseudoscience and to brand as pseuds those whom science misunderstands.

Foucault I’ve actually linked to Pirsig previously, since reading his “Les Mots et Les Choses (1966)” (translated oddly as “The Order of Things”), but as a PoPoMo I’d kinda put PoMo behind me. One persistent thread arising from the renewed interest in Pirsig is a conversation with Janet Abbey (Seymour Blogger @AbbeysBooks) who is a much read French-PoMo scholar who became very enthusiastic about parallels and connections between Pirsig and Foucault. As a consequence, we’ve both been reading / re-reading Foucault’s “Lectures on the Will to Know“. Based solely on his first introductory lecture (9 Dec 1970) the following is already apparent. As with ancient Greek philosophy, post-modern French requires linguistic care, there are terms – concepts – that don’t translate simply into English – not just English language expression but anglophone thought itself.

Foucault majors in his introduction on the Connaître vs Savoir ambiguity in our knowledge, and of course knowledge and epistemology are a major part of my Psybertron blogging project which is why I’ve picked-up on Foucault before. This little graphic summarises what I read from 9 Dec 1970

[Most developed recent version here.]

There is much to infer from this picture in general as well as specific to Pirsig’s MoQ. Certainly the human side of knowing; Connaître as in being familiar with a concept, knowing someone or something by name, as opposed to (say) the “biblical” knowing of another person.

Specifically, the Pirsig connection is in connaitre as radical-empiricism, direct experience in the absence of any mediating conceptual model. The “quality” of immediate subjective interaction, involvement or immersion in something before any intellectual attempt to conceptualise, define or document.

The Will to know obviously echoes Nietzsche, but we’re really talking about how we act on our desire to know something, anything, the processes of coming to know, rather than the Power side of Nietzsche’s equation, Bacon’s knowledge as power. Foucault says himself “it is possible to resolve semantic questions completely ONLY at the end of the journey“. Dan Dennett constantly warns us all, including his scientist friends, to hold off on our definitions, to suspend judgement. Real knowing of the actual world is Connaître by participation. Savoir is a model we construct individually and collectively after we think we know, or as a hypothesis to test if we do know.

In Pirsig, this is the tension between his alternative intellects of the Subject-Object Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Quality, mediated or compromised by the social patterns or shared knowledge we construct.

(See here for more discussion on this Pirsigian view.)

I’m sure I’ll elaborate further when I’ve read more of Foucault’s “Will to Know” and I’m sure I’ll hear more from Janet Abbey on the subject.

But for now, a final aside, a piece of work I heard about only yesterday. Most of my thinking is based around a memetic view of what is going on as our “knowledge” evolves, and as a consequence I have a particular interest in how media propagates memes, particularly modern social media connections between all forms of online media. The idea is older than Marshall McLuhan, that the medium drives the message, what we know is largely moulded by the medium used to communicate it. It’s not that social media is new, but that it is fast, effectively instantaneous on evolutionary timescales. The evolution of what we know is massively distorted. The medium selects the messenger and the message. The problem is not the players it’s the game. The gap – the tension – between the truly experienced knowledge and instantly constructed social knowledge is massive. So massive that James Williams speculates that “digital technologies are making effective politics impossible“. Absolutely! This is the main driver of my own epistemological agenda – when it comes to making decisions on our behalf, what, why and how do we know?

It’s not so much a post-fact world, but a world where facts are ever more difficult to get a grip.

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[Post Note: And many more Pirsig resources coming to light.

• • The Motorcycle is Yourself
    – Tim Wilson revisits his interview with Pirsig.
  • Paul Kennedy interviews Tim Wilson
    – reflecting on the above at CBC Ideas.
  • Forest for the Wood – reflects on reading Lila
    (Ha, “new knees and hips” stream of consciousness!)]
  • Zen and the Art of a Higher Education
    – Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the LARB.

[Post Note: And an example to prove a point. Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s latest book. I have him in the same part-of-the-problem league as Dawkins and Cox, but his title tailor-made for the short-attention-span generation “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry“. Don’t expect any lasting useful facts, just persistent catchy memes.]

Ant McWatt in SciPhi journal (2017):
Four Thousand Holes in Brexit Lancashire.

Ant McWatt in Philosophy Now (2017):
Robert Pirsig & His Metaphysics of Quality.

Ant McWatt in Bozeman Magazine – News & Media (2018):
McWatt-Pirsig correspondence archive to MSU Bozeman.
Ditto in MSU News.

“Explain that to me again!” was the title of a talk I gave a couple of times recently, once to Teesside Sceptics in the Pub and once to Teesside Humanists, with an entirely new audience each time. The subject was Dan Dennett’s most comprehensive exploration of consciousness in his latest book “Bacteria to Bach and Back”. As with the previous occasion, when I gave a brief taster version which went as far as introducing Dennett on the topic of consciousness, both audiences gave me plenty of interaction with questions and ideas. Quite different audiences, with different starting points, each challenging in their own way. Thanks to Terry Waites for giving me the opportunities and to the audiences for their participation.

My main aim is to counteract the denial, by many scientists and more scientific philosophers, that Consciousness (and Self and Free Will) are somehow unreal or merely illusory epiphenomena. Dennett’s response to science’s (current) inability arrive at a well-formed watertight definition that explains this thing we call consciousness, let alone our subjective experience of it (the hard problem), is a plea to suspend disbelief and to go round his evolutionary arguments again, as many times as it takes.

Experience shows that new things, and entirely new types of thing, emerge from this strange-loopy thing we call evolution. They say “a good workman never blames his tools” but as Dan quotes “in the same way as you can’t achieve much carpentry with your bare hands, you can’t do much new thinking with your bare brain”. The inability of science to explain consciousness may be a failure of the tools of explanation, not a failure of scientists to use current scientific thinking tools. Consciousness and subjectivity are clearly – almost by objective definition – not the types of object current scientific thinking can get a handle on. By repeating the evolutionary synthesis – explain that to me again – science will not only continue to attempt new explanations with existing tools, but will find new thinking tools, new ways of scientific thinking, will also emerge. Only then can a definitive satisfactory scientific explanation of consciousness (and self and free-will) be found.

Thinking about thinking tools is the domain of philosophers, and Dennett’s Bet is that only if science suspends disbelief and engages with philosophers in the evolution of all our thinking, will new solutions be found. We will not find a solution to the hard problem of consciousness simply by assembling the objects we can currently define with the tools we already use.

[I gave a better updated version of this talk originally entitled “Explain That To Me Again” to the Newcastle Skeptics in November 2017. The original May 2017 deck is also here .]

[Post Note: See also Dennett’s Bet
and a Review of B2BnB I did for New Humanist.]

I have many times left hanging the idea that causation is seriously weird, if you get down to looking closely at what we really mean or try to explain how it works.

“… important assumptions about time and causality at base �” seriously weird concepts when you research beyond common sense �” a recurring issue of mine …” [Already “recurring” back in 2006]

In fact it came up again just yesterday as I was giving my talk on the reality of our conscious will to the Teesside Humanists. (More on that later, but my topic has been Dan Dennett’s latest evolutionary explanations of consciousness in “Bacteria to Bach and Back”.)

Like many philosophical conundrums, what you mean and the definitions you use, leave you with choices but precious few firm conclusions. Here Stoic Massimo Pigliucci shares his (technical) slides on causation at the “Cause and Process in Evolution” 2017 conference at KLI Vienna these past few days. Massimo is providing the philosophical help to scientists in the same way I see Dan doing, though I don’t see any Dennett in Massimo’s paper or anywhere in #CAPIE2017 ?

Firstly I have to say I agree with Pigliucci that Philosophy and Science must be seen as “overlapping magisteria” – the essence of my “good fences make good neighbours” message – we can draw definitional lines in the sand around our fields of interest, but the boundaries have to be porous and flexible enough for proper collaborative progress. Scientists dissing philosophy and building defensive walls helps no-one. Philosophy has useful thinking tools, to use Dennett’s language.

Also agree with Pigliucci, after Ernst Mayr, that

“Ultimate” causes are no more ultimate than “proximate” ones. Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (*) is an expansion [dare I say, evolution], but not a radical revision or rejection, of the (so-called) Modern Synthesis [and (so-called) Deductive Nomological views?].

Can’t help thinking that controversy around group selection effects could also be resolved by such enlightened thinking. His list of (example) areas of debate where philosophy and science really need each other is also spot on:

• Species concepts in biology
• Definitions and uses of “gene” [and “meme” I’d say]
• Discussions of the concept of race [and cultural / religious “tribes” I’d say]
• Nature of evolutionary theory
• Epistemic limits of evolutionary psychology, medical research, neuroscience, social science
• Neuroscience of consciousness
• (Metaphysical) interpretations of quantum mechanics
• Desirability of “post-empirical” science (see string wars) etc., etc., etc. ..

[That “post empirical science” already in there. It’s my agenda. And – Backward / Top down causality also in there. This has to help with strange-loopy explanations of subjective consciousness level objects (ie subjects) supervenient / arising on the stack of materialist physical science. Dennett again. And – Functional (what for) explanation of why?!? Dennett again. And lots more good stuff in Massimo’s paper. As he says many accounts of causation are themselves confused. I need to understand “Conserved Quantities Theory” of causation. Later (below).]

Question – there must be some good reason why Massimo Pigliucci doesn’t see Dan Dennett as part of this story?

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[Post Note – Riffing on Pigliucci’s words on causation as exchange of conserved quantities.]

OK I think I get it. At the smallest reductive (irreducible) levels of physics, this is the model in use. Gluons and gravitons etc as the transferrers of force between the massive particles, and the same force as the transfer of momentum between larger Newtonian billiard-ball objects. Reductive science would have ALL causes – chemical, biological, mental – built on top of physics as aggregations of forces between particles. But these force and particle models are themselves simply analogies to predict and explain observed behaviour.

Some of us (eg Rovelli) would contend that information – any significant difference in potential – is the fundamental particle underlying the standard model anyway, whether you’re into strings or quantum-loop-gravity or whatever. Causation as transfer of conserved quantities > Collier’s transfer of information, same thing. Information is simply a difference in some property.

The example of the plant dying “because” I didn’t water it? It DOES fit the same model. Obviously there’s a complex string / stack / network of irreducible causes between me, the water and the plant and its life, where the mass of water is a conserved property being transferred through the chemical and biological processes. It’s clearly short-hand to reduce to a single causal statement, but it’s not of a fundamentally different kind, simply a higher aggregation of the same kind. Proximate or Ultimate (or First even?) is a matter of reductive choice of metaphor. Of course this throws up that at all levels, above some irreducible one – even Newtonian billiard balls above the standard & quantum models – it’s a metaphorical aggregation.

What this throws into question is more the issue of whether there is really ANY (real) irreducible level – other than information, the epistemic one – and that we are in practice always using an aggregated metaphor at ANY level. In causation, we have something that would remain the same unless some “event” exchanges a quantity. Feels almost tautological, or circular, in that we simply shifted the problem of causation to what causes the exchange event. [End riff.]

(*) EES (Extended Evolutionary Synthesis) would appear to be Templeton funded. The religious connection always causes some people a problem, but it’s just another good-neighbour / good-fences case to me.

[Post Note: And here are Massimo’s summary notes of all the CAPIE2017 (Cause and Process in Evolution) conference presentations.]

Part of my agenda is being honest about the limits to science. Some parts of the Science-PR machine will defend to their death, that no such limits exist, but in fact such dogmatic defence in itself shows up these limits, is one of the limitations.

I haven’t fully unpicked these recent stories yet, but wanted to capture them as part of the bigger story.

Pop Goes the Universe – A Feb 2017 SciAm article on alternative interpretations of CMB observations.

A Cosmic Controversy – Response to the above signed by 30-odd scientists, defending the empirical scientific nature of existing accepted theories.

33 Physicists Sign Angry Letter – 11th May Gizmodo article about the controversy (hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder).

What If Cosmic Inflation Is Wrong? – 11th May Forbes piece by Ethan Siegel, also shared and discussed in this FB Thread.

Is Inflationary Cosmology Science? – Sean Carroll’s blog on 10th May asks the question I’m asking; the implied question that drew the defensive response to the original piece.

Big Bang as in something from nothing, and Big Bang in the sense of its particular inflationary explanations are separate questions but are connected by ignored limits to science and self-imposed limits to scientistic thinking. Both these are metaphysical issues, or theological ones if you prefer. Matters of politics rather than science or rationality.

Something from “literally” nothing is not a scientific question and by definition can never be amenable to testable and falsifiable science. Some scientists get angry at that suggestion. The Science-PR machine (eg Dawkins) sticks its head in the sand even though Krauss (author of “Something from Nothing”) is honest enough to back off from the literal, absolute view.

Particular explanations of the progress of universal evolution involve adding fudges (like particular values for the cosmological constant, or the existence of dark matter and energy) to make the equations fit the observations. That’s not wrong in itself. It’s how science often proceeds, with explanations that are ultimately proven wrong, but which allow understanding to evolve as observation and revised theories are developed and justified. It’s a holding pattern.

But part of the holding pattern is to circle the wagons in defence of all suggestions otherwise.

The reason these two issues are connected by a common problem is the fear of a “god of the gaps” being conveniently invoked to explain not only the primary gap (something vs nothing) but some of the other inconvenient gaps in fundamental and near-bleeding-edge science – the “standard” models of both particles and cosmology – where even such everyday things as mass, gravity and rules of causation remain seriously weird, for want of a better word. Nothing important then? Something worth defending?

But dogmatic defence can hide genuine non-scientific issues with the processes of science. The politics of defence is not itself scientific.

I’m an atheist. Science moves in mysterious ways, there is no god of the gaps, in fact no god of supernatural causation and purpose. The natural world is driven entirely by natural processes amenable to natural explanation. But science is not only the sum total of our scientific knowledge of the world it is also the meta-science of how science proceeds as a human endeavour. Science can only ever be the sum of this human product, however carefully we eliminate extraneous subjective influence and use the empirical tests of falsifiability of objective observation.

The thing is we can never entirely remove the human perspective from the whole stack of knowledge and processes. It’s an anthropic effect, not the anthropic principle, simple a perspective. Our observations from our evolved position in our universe, and theories built on them, are anthropocentric. The ultimate subjectivity of science. Our natural rationality is more than the strictly objective, causally reductive science that science would will it to be.

As well as glossing over the necessarily fundamental gap in cosmic knowledge, this anthropic ignorance has also air-brushed out of the picture, in the name of politically defensive warfare, perfectly valid alternative theories for the evolution of the cosmos and its properties. It’s highly probable the 33 scientists rejecting the alternatives suggest by “Pop Goes the Cosmos” misunderstood the suggestions actually being made against the status-quo of science. We’re only human after all, but can we ever learn to compensate for our anthropic perspective?

[Refs to be added. Brandon Carter / Rick Ryals.]