Year: 2008

WordPress 2.5

I’ve been a WordPress blogger for almost three years, after orginally being satisfied with (Google owned) Blogger for almost five years. It was a tough decision to switch from the successful simplicity of Blogger to the sophistication of WordPress. My overt reason was that Blogger were not supporting “categories” anytime soon, and look as though they still do not – though there are some quite sophisticated themes / styles and plug-ins for Blogger too.

In fact “categories” per se was never my real aim. They are just too “hierarchical” for my needs. I really wanted “connections” and “connections that connect connections” and I have a knowledge-model in mind to do this with the PHP / MySQL capabilities – if I had the time to teach myself.

Anyway I’ve been through several upgrades with WordPress, all perfect right from the first install, with single-click upgrades through the DreamHost hosting service. BUT the most recent upgrade to 2.5 has been disappointing to say the least, just unnecessary changes in the organisation of the management tools in many cases – nuisances that one can always get used to – but also retrograde steps in functionality. No editing directly coupled to the published view, incompatibilities with subsidiary pages and commet page themes and styles; much tougher graphic (& media) publish & linking methods, no editing of comments, no searching or selecting of posts by ID-number in the edit mode. And these are just my problems – the list seems to go on if one reads the WordPress forum.

So I’m sitting here with a three-way choice.
Grin and bear it and wait (in hope) for WordPress 2.5.1
Roll-back to WordPress 2.3.3
(In both the above I can still aspire to more sophisticated knowledge-organisation apps.)
Switch back to Blogger.
(And abandon the more sophisticated modelling hopes.)

In all three cases securing the valuable content resources is paramount.
Decisions, decisions.

McGrath on Memes

Listened to the Blackmore / McGrath debate on Belief in God as a Dangerous Delusion. (Mentioned earlier.)

Some observations. He talks about things being “unprovable” and of course that’s true of so many things, not just matters of religious faith, something science is very poor at recognising in its arguments in the space beyond repeatable experiments and clear logic. That is effectively my agenda here. But he uses this as a straw man argument against memes, not proving anything and no more explanatory of religious faith as it is of theism. Of course the memes shorthand can be used to explain any kinds of ideas and beliefs, including atheism. In Sue’s opening speech, she made this clear already, the significance of meme’s in this debate is the evolutionary process, competition AND co-evolution. Religion, rather than no-religion, is a predictable outcome. But meme’s are just short-hand for all the complex communications, selection and replication processes – the world doesn’t “reduce” to memes, in anybody’s arguments.  Alister says “web of ideas” and “interlocking beliefs”, Sue says “memeplex” – they agree, already. Jeez. All language is just short-hand (Sue even says it !). [Meme in action towards the end about the “72 virgins” reward … much bandied, but where did it originate ?]

He also referred to the Dawkins “Root of All Evil” programme and the “selective” parade of extremist nutters broght on to represent the “evil” and contrasted with more normal moderate faithful, and parallel this with the atheist evil arguments – eg Stalin, etc. Oh, well. Both sides use these straw-men too; Both equally guilty. This is my agenda. Will both side please stop trying to “beat” the other, and look for truth, the point (sense-making, the meaning of life, if you like), and the bases of believing it.

Intetesting that both speakers in this debate are “converts”. Alister from science to theology, Sue from parapsychology to sceptic, and Alister also refers to CS Lewis et al. That theme keeps coming up.

Sorry Alister, Harris does NOT say we must only believe things that can be positively proven to be true. His philosophy of belief is much more sophisticated than that.

Oh well. Poor debate – well typical debate – each side using rhetorical tricks to make the other appear wrong. THAT is the problem meme, as if argument is somehow not “rigorous” if it isn’t in this dialectical style of showing I’m right whilst you’re wrong.

Hooray – one synthetic audience comment / question – about the “both 95% right” position, this is not an either/or question. Though the question, was framed with a “real but less personal” god in both sides – so it fell on largely deaf ears – 20/80 in the audience. The point here is not God but faith – bases of belief and value. Most people still want an either / or answer … that damn meme again.

Anyway, they eventually get to the point – what is evidential ? what is real ? what bases do you believe these things, science as well as theistic. The either / or notion closes off the “open” position. As Sue (the most open-minded person I know, apart from me, obviously) says in response to this suggestion – the polarisation is part of the fun and process of “debate” – BUT DO NOT APPLY THIS THINKING TO REAL LIFE.

Actually Sue’s behaviour in the debate, shows well that this is not simple objective logical dialectic. She several times points out it’s easier to have the debate when she can “see” who she is responding to. This is about human interaction.

Sounds like Alister McGrath’s writing might be worth reading. (I’ve already read all of Sue’s).

Columbians Listen to Volcanoes

News story today about an eruption of Nevado de Huila 240km SW of Bogota, causing concerns in Colombia.

And this is why. Lahars – rivers of broken rock and meltwater, like concrete flowing at 10’s of m/s (!) – were still up to 5 m deep 100km away (!) from the 1985 eruption of Nevado del Ruiz – sweeping 23,000 people to their deaths in the village of Armero. (Wikipedia is good on vulcanology.)

Macho Culture a Problem ?

I’ll say. This news story is about male hormone levels in financial market traders, but it is just one symptom of the problematic win/lose meme. The gender angle is real too, a balanced feminine-side significant, but it would be overly simplistic to see this in terms of men vs women … though the physiological / hormone angle is interesting.

More later.

Talking Nonsense

Wonderful quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, uttered by Razumikhin in an intense drunken rant in defence of his friend Raskolnikov, who may be going mad – talking nonsense – with the guilty complications of living with the double murder he has committed.

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth !

I talk nonsense, therefore I am human.

Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked [reams of nonsense] and that’s an honourable thing in its own way; well but we can’t even talk nonsense with our own brains ! Talk nonsense to me by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot ! […]

We’ve got accustomed to making do with other people’s intelligence – we’re soaked in it !”

Too true. I suspect Dostoevsky wasn’t drunk when he wrote it.

More Blackmore on The God Delusion

Checking out Sue’s web site, I see this contribution passed me by.
Article on Comment is Free (UK Guardian)
Podcast of debate with Alister McGrath, author of ‘The Dawkins Delusion’. (Bristol Uni & RichardDawkins.net)

I have to say the text of the piece posted before the debate seems to have it pretty well right, so I’m going to have to read / listen to the whole debate and comment threads. Sounds like Blackmore and Dawkins have been listening to their critics and their “atheism” is ever more sophisticated. (Here is the last substantial thing I wrote on this.)

[Post Note – Having fully read the article – I do find I agree with the gist of it, in the same way I was positive about Sam Harris, in the earlier post referenced. As with all these debates the danger is one of over-simplification – what Rayner would call simplistication.

She says “In a society that strives for honesty and openness, that values scientific and historical truth, and that encourages the search for knowledge, [religious faith] is outrageous …” I’d say that the striving for honesty and openess is not actually that unequivocal – she herself mentions the game theory angle, but reality of the lives of individuals and groups is more complicated than that. I’d also say that “values” in scientific and historical truth are not simple matters of science and history. And I’d say that there is more to it than the “search for knowledge” – there are quests for wisdom and value too, to name but two. She even mentions the value-deficit in the costs of the religious meme. Anyway, I’m pretty sure given an environment where “wiggle-room” is not seen as a sign of weakness in argumentation, Sue would further acknowledge these complicating aspects of the debate, as indeed Harris does.

Even more positively Sue ends with what is really a Quine, which is a great Hofstadterian place to build evolutionary uderstanding of the full picture. “Mostly Harmless” Meta-Logic.

She says ” … belief in God is not just a harmless choice; it is a dangerous delusion.”

I would say that the idea that {the idea of belief in God is either a harmless choice or a dangerous illusion} is not just an (entirely) harmless choice; its a (partly) dangerous delusion.

Dichotomy kills.]

Temes – Techno-memes or what ?

I see Sue Blackmore coined the idea of a third level of replicator above genes and memes, termed (so far) “temes” in her recent presentation to TED2008.

Not entirely convinced yet that this form of technology enabled memes are fundamentally different to memes. As she says herself, in discussing whether “artificial-meme” might be a better name “But really they are no more artificial that we are.”

Meme’s have benefitted from being technology enabled since the printing-press or maybe even the tabula-rasa or papyrus scrolls – whatever  – maybe even the use of myths and symbols in story-telling ? This is really just a debate about what technology is, and our parochial human perspective of intelligence and communication.

It’s really the same debate as to whether Strong-AI need be considered “artificial” if it is indeed “intelligent”. The artifice is in a non-human-bio-physical substrate brain, and the debate as to whether such an intelligence is possible without a substrate that is actually living – artificial life. I’m beginning to believe the latter – that AI may prove impossible without AL (which would be wonderfully consistent with neither actually being “artificial”, and with quality evolutionary theory and experience of life before intelligence to date.)

Anyway, the term may be useful pragmatically; as we so often find “fundamental” definitive distinctions are rarely black-and-white anyway.

An aside … joining up the dots increasingly between Quality (a la Pirsig), Wisdom (a la Maxwell), Inclusionality (a la Rayner), and more recently IdentityTheory, and find the convergence between The Edge / Third-Culture and TED becomes ever greater. These latter two initiatives are on a much grander scale than the former 3 or 4, but the agendas converge – “Third-Culture” is as good a catch-all umbrella as any for these syntheses of classically scientific and traditionally romantic understandings of humans in the cosmos.