Year: 2004

One of Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) on the end of the world (again)

Another of Ernst Mayr (of Pirsig interest)

Just read most of the Mayr interview. Interesting. A bit of a sales pitch for Biology as a distinct subject (motivated by some round of budgeting somewhere I’ll wager). His point that biology is not just molecular biology, and molecules are not just physics, and physics are not just …. etc is the usual stuff. All biology is just molecular biology of course if all you are going to do is analyse it, but it is not just a synthesis of its molecular parts. There is an emergent level, called life if you like, which requires a holistic systems view of the parts interacting, not just adding together. This is Capra’s connections, and Pirsig’s levels. Biology is distinct from physics, in the same way that consciousness is distinct from biology. That is, not very.

If you want to do more useful than just scientific analysis, the connections / relationships / interactions are more interesting than the distinctions.

Updated biographical timeline now includes a number of corrections, as well as aditional updates taken from the St.Paul newspaper clippings and articles.

Sorry, I’m jusy housekeeping collecting / checking non-dead links for ZMM resources…

Jones Pegasus Bibliography
The Bruce Charlton Review
Brad Cox’s Site
Chicago Graduates

A little overblown – I’ve got the solution for the sematic web style – but I guess we’d all like to believe that. Nova Spivack’s Minding the Planet blog is marketing stuff from his Radar Systems venture, but his paper From Semantic Web to Global Mind brought to me by Matt Whyndham includes some good concepts amidst a review of their relevance to achieving the semantic web dream.

Breathless Fluff to Deep Thought Matt calls it, but I think Nova touches on a key point in the ability to characterise new links, and see these as additive to a given knowledge object as he calls them.

e-Biz sounds awfully passe already, but as Business Week’s special issue, “The E-Biz Surprise” (May 5, 2003), noted, “The Web is the same age color TV was when it turned profitable.” It’s gonna need a new name but e-everything has barely started, and the technological capability aspects of it are arriving plenty fast. That’s not (never been) the problem.

The Futurist: The Intelligent Internet. [via FN4] This long review of “The Intelligent Internet – The Promise of Smart Computers and E-Commerce” By William E. Halal actually reads very naively and uncritically about the many technology advancements it catalogues arriving around our ears. What it doesn’t really address is the “business modelling” side, though it does identify the problem …

[QUOTE]
Cynicism persists over unrealized promises of AI …. forecast for a glorious IT future may seem extravagant amidst the dismal mood of IT today …. main obstacle is a lack of vision among industry leaders, customers, and the public as scars of the dot-com bust block creative thought.
[UNQUOTE]

Cracked record time … this is the memetic problem, which the web suffers from in spades. “Next big things” circulate at the speed of light, particularly if they’re catchy and easy to understand, whether or not they are likely to be successful in any pragmatic sense beyond the marketeers wet dream. This would be an annoyance, but for the fact that such traffic noise drowns out the possibility of analysing the more difficult (human) questions, whose answers might actually create uses for us (humans) amidst the free-for-all.

Evolution leads to dead ends as well as progress, you know.
“We do these things because they are difficult, not because they are easy.” JFK

Blogged all of these “consciousness” scientists before but find them more closely linked that I’d realised. John Gregg’s site draws on the other two and indicates Chalmers / Rosenberg biographical as well as subject links. John (Gregg) clearly finds Gregg (Rosenberg)’s thesis very important – a metaphysics for consciousness he says …..

Looks like I made all the right connections with John Sowa the first time I blogged him, despite finding the VUB connection a surprise just a few days ago.

(A propos of nothing much, got a 10 minute direct (non search engine) hit on that 2003 link from someone in Minnesota last night.)

Must get this blog internally categorised and cross-linked – come on Blogger, or I may have to shift to MT after all.

A small exception to my no politics rule, but this makes interesting reading even if it’s only 10% true. (Apart from publishing left-wing & anti-war propaganda, not sure what else “The Stranger” do.)
[via Dave’s Wibblings] As Dave says “be very afraid”.

Alex Lennon adds this earlier George Monbiot article from the Grauniad too.
Same story – must be true 🙂

Pages updated here include the various newspaper cuttings from St.Paul, Minnesota, which now include Pirsig’s denunciation as a bigot following a book review by Pirsig in the New York Times.

Read it and see what you think. I ain’t saying nuffink.

(I’ve also updated links between the related articles, including the Cruising Blues piece and Nancy’s interview about their own world cruise plans. Makes you want to cry.)

Thanks to Matt Bartlett, who commented on my previous post, for this pearl from Edmund Burke.