Atheism Needs Religion

I agree with Mr Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, with maybe minor (but very significant) adjustments inserted:

Atheism has failed [is failing].
Only religion [or a more enlightened atheism]
can defeat the new barbarians.

Certainly my main agenda for some years has been that New Atheism has won the puerile sound-bite war, but needs to up it’s game to fill the vacuum with anything more than scientism plus chaos – the kind of chaos that will be exploited by barbarians. At least Jim (Al Khalili) has said that he sees the initial (sound-bite) battle to be won, and the need for BHA to focus on the next phase of adding value to atheism in collaboration with religion, and take the focus away from simply fighting against religion. Finding fault with religion is like shooting fish in a barrel, already. The activities of the BHA don’t yet reflect this change of view. (Sadly I couldn’t make use of my ticket to the BHA conference last weekend.)

What Sacks says about Spinoza, Voltaire and Nietzsche is dead right. The Horsemen (‘cept maybe Dennett) and Pinker / Krauss / Coyne et al just cannot compete beyond the chat shows and popular media headlines in terms of any depth of understanding of what civilised culture needs to thrive, what real values are and how they are nurtured.

Wake up BHA.

PIL / JKL (Levene)

Interesting selection of top 10 PiL songs (from April this year) – great to see that original Public Image video in there.

Interesting article covering Levene & Wobble as much as Lydon, leading to Levene’s current work. I guess when you’re the one that leaves the band, you can’t really expect an invitation when the band reforms – but clearly Levene and Wobble were fundamental to the post-punk sound they created and all the more impressive of Lu, Scott and Bruce in the current line-up. Got tickets for Manchester Ritz 28th of this month to see them for 5th time in 2012/13 …. and great that Public Image appears to be back in the set.

[What is also apparent in the mix of older and most recent stuff in the PiL set is how much the older things have evolved in their delivery as live pieces compared to their original arrangements. Death Disco for example in the list above includes the original TOTP video for comparison. Levene’s original sample from Swan Lake – low in the TOTP mix – is still very much part of it, but the whole thing is greatly extended. Even the relatively short and simple Pubic Image is now much heavier with – god forbid – some great power chord accents to that U2-Edge-esque picked-riff invented (pre-U2) by Levene.]

Already Love Mach

Received and already skimmed the introductory chapters (and index and references) of Ernst Mach – The Analysis of Sensations, and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. (1914 translation of the 1906 5th edition of the 1885 original), and – Space and Geometry, in the Light of Physiological, Psychological and Physical Inquiry. (1906 edition, 1901, 2 and 3 originals)

As well as many psychology references to William James, many “antimetaphysical” philosophy references, that make promising reading:

People new to me but apparently important to Mach like Rudolf Willy and Richard Avenarius (the latter – started with Spinoza).

A full enumeration of Mach’s philosophical position would require us to begin with Spinoza.

Obviously – not essentially different from Hume.

Borders closely – the immanence of Schup.

Psychological facts at least as important as the physical facts – contrary to Comte.

Affinity with Avenarius, so great as can possibly be imagined yet having followed entirely different histories.

Plato’s fiction – the unfortunate antithesis between appearance and reality in The Cavenot thought out –  lasting influence needing correction to put everything right again. (Cf Barfield Saving the Appearances)

So, Mach’s starting point :

The physiology of the senses demonstrates that
spaces and times may be just as appropriately
called sensations as colours and sounds.

Can’t wait.

Muscle Shoals Music Foundation

Open letter to Rodney Hall (of FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Music Foundation).

[Post Note : GREAT NEWS Rodney confirms in his response to this letter on the MSSS Facebook page – copied and inserted as a comment below – that the new MSM Foundation really does seem to have the blessing of all existing parties, and any previous differences that led to the split are healed amongst the current generation. MSM Foundation has my support.]

It is a healthy step to get MSSS and FAME under one umbrella foundation if it heals any apparent split or confusion between two competing sources for “Muscle Shoals Sound” in the present-day “music heritage” market. However, there are a couple of important points.

Given both the efforts and the considerable success in recent years of Noel Webster in getting 3614 Jackson Highway studio back on the map heritage-wise and musically, it’s important despite his (financial?) wish / need to sell, that Noel’s relationship with the new foundation is understood?

And, given the significance of “The Swampers” to the Muscle Shoals brand, it’s also very important to set straight the original 1969 split between The Swampers and FAME – which led to them actually creating 3614 Jackson Highway separate from FAME and Rick Hall. The split between the locations is of course part of the current heritage within the new foundation. But, publicly the differences were / are a matter of myth – musical / personal / business / money – but split they did, so The Swampers or their living representatives probably also need to shake on the deal?

[Having met Noel when we were living in that part of Alabam in 2006/7/8, I created an MSSS / FAME summary of what could be found publicly at that time. Since updated : Latest links are MSSS FaceBook page and MSMF Facebook page, still distinct but clearly collaborating since the foundation acquired the 3614 Jackson Highway studio from Noel. See AL.Com news story.]

 

The Temple of Science

TempleOfScienceBreuerGutenberg
“I saw the famous Science Temple
with its constant stream of worshippers.”

A Problem in Communication
By Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
PART I – The Science Community

I came across this accidentally via the name Ernst (surname of one author in the 1930 collection “Astounding Stories of Super-Science” on Project Gutenberg) whilst looking for Ernst Mach content on Gutenberg – of which there is sadly only one collection of lectures, though a fascinating range of topics.

Apart from the image, I love the significance of the problem words

Communication and Community.

Dead right.

Of course I’m searching for Mach to follow-up the Boscovich / Einstein links on relativity and space-time – so far his Mach, E. (1906) Space and Geometry. Open Court Publishing: Chicago looks like the best shot, after the collection of lectures (1864 to 1898).

Given that Mach is popularly famous for his Mach Number (ratio of velocity to the local speed of sound), the Mach Principle (your inertia arises from the gravitational mass of the rest of the universe) and the Mach Effect (dynamic visual illusion at the crossing of light lines on a dark background) – it is interesting that he has plenty of fingers in the philosophy of science too . Particularly interesting, given the Mach Principle  and the Mach Effect is the combination of the psychology of (visual) perception of space together with the philosophy of science itself. Clearly a good vantage point for space-time and relativity, no ?

Oh, even better, the subtitle of Space and Geometry is:

….. in the Light of Physiological, Psychological and Physical Inquiry

And encouraging to find also, that is has been part of the forgotten books / classic reprints collection – though newer paperback editions are available;

And wow, like Boscovich, his initial focus is on:

“Physiological Space distinct from Geometrical Space.”

And another of his titles is:

“The Analysis of Sensations and the
Relation of the Physical to the Psychical”

[No reference to Boscovich in either the book or the collection of essays – nor on the Mach Wikipedia page – the plot thickens. Greg Volk suggested (below) there was a direct Boscovich > Mach influence? More good links on Mach here.]

Space-Time / Space-Matter

Struck by a parallel, reading the Roger Anderton translation of the Dusan Nedelkovich (1922) work on Roger Boscovich (1763). A parallel with Alan Rayner.

Earliest piece on unified field theory (100? years before Mach and 150 before Einstein) already led to ideas of relativity in the world as we experience it being distinct from any objectively real world. One particular aspect that troubled Einstein – the later Einstein (where Einstein was right to be concerned) unlike the mid-period Eddington-created (*), post annus-mirabilis, post-WW1, (where Einstein the precocious superstar was too quickly interpreted in Copenhagen) – is how seriously weird time and causation are, if we take our common sense view of matter in space, with the time axis of space-time as merely an add-on to a pre-existing view of space.

In fact Boscovich had already suggested a space-time where our view of space (and matter) were already seriously distorted by our attempts to standardise (normalise / absolutise) time with time-keeping and clocks, whilst failing to notice that our human experience of time is already highly relativistic – (aside – see also Douglas Adams on errors of scale). We need to consider the geometry of space time very carefully first, before we subdivide into the now familiar common sense axes. Reality is less concrete than prevailing common sense suggests.

The parallel ? Well excusing my very rough summary of my 3rd-hand reading of Boscovich, this seems very close to Alan Rayner’s take on the dynamic, but non-exclusive nature of space and matter in his “Inclusionality” approach. It’s wrong to think in terms of objective matter “occupying” space, since it pre-supposes an existing “space”.

[Recent Inclusionality piece by Ted Lumley on the analogy of “PhotoShopping” experience into a convenient reality – only in email so far – need to put up a link. We get a perfectly self-consistent picture, but it’s not reality.]

[Also, struck in that PhotoShopping analogy with the image of the Greek seeing perfection in his reflection in the animation of Iain McGilchrist’s Divided Brain lecture.]

[PS – The Anderton translation is the product of much effort by Roger to get Boscovich’s work recognised and deserves much credit. The actual translation, from a mix of Latin and French, with Serbo-Croat and other reference sources en-route, means the English is seriously stilted, with strange word order, inconsistent use of he & it, explicit and implicit definite and indefinite articles, strings of complex Latin translated literally without selection of newer compound words or concepts, and new editorial notes on top of previous biographical and scholarly reference notes in both Boscovich’s work and in Nedelkovic’s paper. This is undoubtedly deliberate by Roger, in order not to obscure any possible subtleties from his sources with his own interpretation, but does mean the reading requires considerable patience to understand.]

[(*)PPS if anyone is in any doubt how much modern science (and hence modern scientistic culture) is distorted by a distorted view of Einstein’s work, the Foreword by Greg Volk is a must-read for the lay reader. After a post-Newton, post-Boscovich summary of science of field theories through Faraday, Maxwell, Euler, Leibnitz, Mach, Hertz, Heaviside, Kelvin and Michelson-Morley, Volk continues:

“… the real bombshell happened in 1905.

Albert Einstein’s 1905 (annus mirabilis) papers introduced yet another option, not Netwonian motion with respect to space, and not Boscovich’s relational motion with respect to matter, but motion with respect to the observer. Curiously, Einstein rejected the views of his mentor, Ernst Mach, and indirectly those of Boscovich (quoted earlier by Mach). Both scientists criticised Newtonian absolute space, but for significantly different reasons, which are (now) lost to modern science.

Encouraged by some approval of his 1905 Special Relativity, Einstein introduced General Relativity in 1916. Naturally, Einstein’s radical ideas weren’t accepted overnight, but ….

…. in 1919, Arthur Eddington’s media blitz exalted Einstein as the new Newton ….

[….] Ironically, for the rest of his life, Einstein sought to unify physics with a field theory. Despite his rise to Time Magazine’s “Person of the Century”, he himself doubted his ideas would stand the test of time.”

…]

[PPPS – “Einstein was Right” is a meme for the idea that whilst much of what became accepted interpretations post-Relativity, post-Bohr, post-Copenhagen was right enough for science and technology exploitation, and despite the fact Einstein never fully resolved his doubts, he was right in so many aspects of what he actually believed and right to doubt what had by then become accepted as right. Einstein was right when he said he was wrong and where he’d previously been more right. He was quite right to go to his grave regretting that he had ever “fiddled” his own workings to be consistent with what had become popularly accepted, and no-one was actually listening by then to the quotable old man shouting “you’re all making a big mistake”.]

[Topical at New Scientist.]