Year: 2014

Saw Karen Armstrong speak at the Royal Institution last night at an event organised by Intelligence Squared and hosted by BBC Radio journalist & presenter Tom Sutcliffe.

It’s a “book tour” speaking and signing in support of her Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, and the formal part of the evening was in 3 parts. Roughly a 20 minute talk, a 30 minute interview and about 30 minutes of Q&A. Clearly Karen has done plenty of speaking on her topic recently, and in fact it was Tom Sutcliffe who hosted Start The Week this Monday on BBC R4 with Karen as the main guest. There were a couple of occasions when both speaker and host had to apologise for “stop me if I’ve said this already”.

In her opening talk, 20 minutes on her latest 600 page tome (25% of which is notes, bibliography and index), she clearly needed to be selective and I believe she chose to go deliberately off-script to talk in immediate terms of the current ISIL situation. Sadly I felt this was a little incoherent, too much easy conflation of ISIL with Islam and Muslim males with the idea that “men are from Mars” generally. A little like the Quilliam Foundation, the main message is that radicalisation arises from dissatisfaction, boredom, frustration and humiliation wherever “my people suffer”, whether the “other” is sectarian, ethnic, national or simply imperial oppression. Her main point being that this was pretty much true of historical conflict generally. Her other historical point is that religion as we now know it, the kind we (including she) would like to keep separate from the politics of states, is a recent, post-early-modern, understanding that would simply not be recognised by the ancients. Then religion was simply the belief system embodied in the actions of everyday life, not a thing or “it” to be viewed objectively separate from “us”. Suffering, and the compassionate personal human reaction to it, is of course a feature emphasised by the main religions.

In putting questions to her of the kind, “but you would agree that … , you even say in your book that …” Tom actually struggled to get Karen to concede any point he put to her – perhaps familiarity had bred contempt? But gradually, the flow of her arguments became clearer, and fortunately that positive trajectory continued through the Q&A. None of the questions proved a problem to her, and in pretty much all cases she agreed with the rhetorical points being made, even by the pointedly atheist / anti-religionist questioners. For example, sure, belief in “a god” is not very important to religion, the idea is really just a placeholder for the idea of good in the individual human. Much of the problem in the violent and aggressive frustration in how to respond to perceived suffering, was the ego’s focus on being “right” and rationalisations religious or otherwise to support that, rather the person’s focus on active “good”.

It was, she said, important to understand the value of mythology and the non-literal narratives of the scriptures. Previously they would never have been read by individuals, but told and interpreted as part of wider living narratives. Clearly myths always contain some general underlying or essential truths about human life, but the point is not the intellectual understanding of the specific myth to the general message, but much more important the living essence of the myth in one’s own life. To fail to personally enact it was to “not get” the mythology. She also emphasised the distinction between idols and icons in the objects of mythology. Both are clearly metaphorical but idols become objective substitutes for the points represented, even words to name them, opaquely obscuring the point – “we” become idolatrous – whereas icons no less represent them but remain metaphorical and transparently reveal the true objects of the myth – “they” remain iconic.

Karen is one of those of whom I’ve said before, that a sophisticated theologian typically talks a great deal more sense than the average scientistic (objectively reductionist) atheist, and I didn’t come away feeling any different, despite a shaky and somewhat disappointing start to the evening.

[Post Note : topical from HuffPo via Sayeeda Warsi on ISIL ignorance of Islam according to Islamic theologians. Armstrong made her remark about Islam for Dummies and The Idiots Guide to the Quran, much tweeted about in previous weeks.]

Interesting …. having pointed out yesterday that humanists typically hold (religious) faith in love (of humans), but the formal voices of humanism would reject the suggestion this was a religious trait, as they do whenever religious comparisons are made – also re-blogged the link to the reaction to Andrew Brown’s suggestion … that today there is a tweet circulating about why humanists don’t get a voice in BBC R4’s Thought for the Day – presumably prompted by the similarity with the BHA’s Though for the Commute – exactly as it prompted my post yesterday too.

Thought for the Day is based on spokespeople with religious values. Humanism resists the idea it has such values, and indeed apart from expressing (and acting on) very generic do-gooding towards humanity on every issue – freedoms, etc – still tends to define itself in terms of being against religious dogma (who isn’t) rather than any specific values it is actually for.

Humanism wants to be seen and heard alongside religions on an equal footing without acknowledging that this is because of what it has in common with religions. Disingenuous.

Interestingly, one of the BHA’s “Thought for the Commute” posters is Peter Tatchell saying:

“The Beatles were right, All you need is love.”

I couldn’t agree more. One of my long-running threads here on Psybertron goes by the tag #whatsofunnybout (peace, love and understanding).

It’s at root behind my three rules of dialogue – (Respect, Respect and Respect, in the footnote here) – which I often use to counter “no-one has the right not to be offended” being naively interpreted as therefore I have every right to offend you. That right to offend lies with the court-jester (Steve Fry or Frankie Boyle say), the cartoonist-in-residence (Martin Rowson say) and the fool-of-the-parish (Dick the Dawk say), but general debate and dialogue proceeds by conversation built on respect for fellow man. An obligation to understand, interpret and agree before criticise or mock and/or attempt to persuade change in the other.

However, what I find ironic is that “All you need is love” is profoundly religious statement of faith in humanity being touted by humanists who run a mile screaming at comparisons with religion.

Of course there are many organised religions, theist or otherwise, where love of fellow man is at least an important component, and even a few where it is the core component, or sole aspect. Organised religions, particularly those with archaic traditions of authority and hierarchy, ultimately with omnipotent causal gods overall, have well recognised downsides. Downsides we want to keep well away from secular governance of society.

But it feels like throwing baby out with the bathwater, to reject the shared value of love, the religious value shared with many religions.

Drs Alice Roberts and Michael Mosely on BBC2 Horizon today 29th September.

Just rough personal notes here, whilst watching: Vive la différence, I usually say 😉

Hmmm. Nothing is “hard” wired. Some stuff is pre-wired, genetically and in foetal development, neurally and hormonally, and a great deal is infant developed by stereotypical “encouragement”, and a lot more is moulded by formal parenting and education, and even more is moulded by experience of the social / peer environment.

Roughly 5, 15, 30, 50 % contributions maybe (after Pinker), depending which specific traits you’re evaluating. Anyone can do anything equally well, but their innate propensities do start different, and these differences are re-inforced or de-emphasised.

So testing an adult human, will be a complex – pointless – situation, without an enormous amount of historical data to support the exercise. Also very hard to create totally controlled boundary conditions for testing pre-and-early-post-natals – a human individual is not to be seen as a repeatable experiment – macaque’s could be different.

Anyway there are real from birth differences – for GOOD evolutionary reasons. Equality of opportunity is one thing, but vive la difference is also important if we humans are to develop maximum value together.

Direct objective measures of physical brain differences can be highly misleading, because correlations between mental, behavioural and physical are complex patterned in many dimensions and levels. Many of the defining differences arise from the connective and permissive control mechanisms (hippocampus, corpus-callosum, etc) not size and wiring-symmetry of cortex, etc.

My most recent reference to this is the left-right brain difference between male and female – but remember left-right brain concerns not the jobs the halves do but the mechanisms that bring them into play in “mind”. The Gur input is important – left-brain analytical propensity to physical detail, exaggerated in males – and in the autistic. Note it’s the connections between the hemispheres, not the hemispheres themselves that are important. I see the Gur data supports the McGilchrist hypotheses. Women are typically “better connected” than men, though again there are developmental and plasticity mechanisms – causality is two way – and again the life of a human individual is not a repeatable controlled experiment.

Men are not “better” decision-makers unless your idea of a good decision is analytically objective. Women (archetypically) make decisions differently, though we can all learn better behaviour any number of ways. My thesis is that the difference, variety, is better for humanity, than having all our eggs in the one basket of one decision-making paradigm. But of course the more we understand the explanatory cause and effect model, from genes onwards the better equipped we are to make the political and ethical choices. The science may be incomplete, but it’s not really controversial.

The parentally-subconscious preference on how they see infant boy & girl capabilities is an interesting part of the 15% contribution – not seen that before. Parents can choose to avoid explicit stereotyping, but this sub-conscious effect could be important and culturally variable. But, as I say, I don’t see the gender differences as necessarily a bad thing, and it’s never a bad thing to know what they are. Vive la différence.

The two presenters eventually agree (actually they don’t, see post note below). Small but real genetic & infant biological development difference, huge socio-cultural plasticity. Stereotypes can be destructive, but archetypes remain valuable.

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[Post Note : Didn’t spot this piece based on the program at the time. Concludes with real differences, including the degree of left-right interconnection. Seems Mosley really did disagree with Roberts.]

Excellent episode of Start The Week. Not just Karen Armstrong on the links between religion and the history of life in general, including war, but more history of Baghdad, Islamic learning, culture and trade, and the evolution of the middle-east situation in general. Imperial dominance overtaking historical cultural leadership, leading to “humiliation” as a driver to violent frustration. We learn that despite Mesopotamia being the prehistoric cradle of civilisation, Baghdad itself is much newer dating from 700’s AD.

[Seeing Karen Armstrong speak at the Royal Institution on Wednesday.]

[Previously blogged about her back in 2010.]

[Post Note : Karen’s Grauniad article /essay to promote her book tour.]

[Post Note : and a CFI_UK response from Stephen Law.]

[Post Note : and an ex-Muslim perspective.]

Been reading  The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley, at the suggestion of an exchange between Dave Morey and Harvey Taylor on FB.

Other than the two title topics being part of any complete brain-mind story, the only real connection between Neuroplasticity and Mental Force is that they are both aspects of science denied by mainstream science for many decades for which common sense and less-reductionist open-minds would recognise much supporting evidence. Most of the book is the authors’ narrative of the battle to generate support for the evidence already out there, as well as their own neuro-psychological experience, in the face of political resistance to good science.

For me it’s another book I could have (wish I had) written. The line of argument and all the sources are those I’ve been marshalling on the blog for 15 years, so in practice I skim read it, but would recommend it for anyone for whom the lines of thought are novel.

After kicking off with Terry Bisson’s Thinking Meat, there are 3 or 4 solid chapters on 20th century demonstrations of brain (cortical neurone rewiring) plasticity. Tough in gory detail for anyone squeamish who finds vivisection distasteful or morally questionable, but the Silver Spring macaques and human stroke survivors suffered more for longer than strictly necessary for our knowledge to become accepted. Ramachandran is referenced, and I’ve used the likes of Damasio, Sacks, Zeman, and others to provide the same stories. Not only does the “mind” learn, the brain re-wires itself according to real life experience of the individual, not just in its early development. The authoritative body-scientific learns to rewire itself much more slowly than human individuals. (3 generations or 80 years is my typical estimate, after Kondratiev.)

The second half of the subject matter kicks off with my 3 favourite quantum physics quotes from Bohr, Born and Heisenberg. These provide a lead-in to the relationship between the writer(s) and Henry Stapp, and the long relationship between them and the Chalmers et al Arizona / Tucson Science of Consciousness and Quantum Consciousness movement(s) – a resource I’ve plundered for much material previously. I must have seen the Schwartz and Begley names before, but not registered.

Finally, they cover Libet’s Volitional Brain. Unlike so many in the mainstream, they do not misinterpret Libet as evidence that free-will is non-existent, an illusion. Like Libet (and myself) they recognise that it points to a free-won’t view of how free-will really operates. In closing they join up Jamesian and Buddhist world-views with the science presented so far. The “quantum Zeno effect” whereby the mental really does supply “downward causation” on the physical. A clear antidote to the objectively-physical greedy-reductionists; free-will really does wield mental force over the merely physical.

A great reference work from my perspective, and as I say, a recommended read for anyone to whom the subject matter is new or mysterious.

[Post Note : will come back and gradually add internal links to all the existing blog references.]

Another interesting and typically honest down-to-earth Grauniad piece by Jon Butterworth, following on from a couple of weeks ago, he’s obviously had plenty of correspondence from two quarters. Scientistic types who find Bayes Theorem the thin edge of a statistical wedge, admitting subjectivity into their hallowed ground, and philosophical types (aka nut-jobs) using the chink to insert suggestions of alternative physics into Jon’s “standard model” domain. Against the scientistic types Jon is happy to point out the value of honesty when it comes to admitting Bayes; to the nut-jobs he says:

For example, as a writer and head of a physics department, I get quite a few unsolicited communications about new theories of physics, often involving Einstein having been wrong, or the Higgs boson actually being a macaroon or something. I have a prior bias here, based on the enormous amount of existing evidence. Einstein might have been confused about the cosmological constant on occasion, but given prior evidence it is highly unlikely that the whole thrust of relativistic mechanics is up the spout. Likewise, I personally have quite a lot of evidence that the Higgs boson is consistent so far with being the fundamental Higgs of the Standard Model, and inconsistent with the macaroon theory.

Well I’ve not been sending Jon any pet theories, but I do highlight two of Jon’s points:

(1) it is highly unlikely that the whole thrust of relativistic mechanics is up the spout.

(2) a lot of evidence that the Higgs boson is consistent so far with the Standard Model.

Firstly, that prior assumption, his bias,  has a massive impact on interpretation of new results. Perversely, Einstein was right, and there is a great deal of “non-inflation” evidence the standard model is way off the mark. Once that is more generally recognised, that prior assumption (1) is gone, totally.

Secondly, as I reported when I heard Jon speak on the latest LHC Higgs evidence, it is quite explicit that the increasingly significant (5-sigma plus) evidence is pointing to internal self-consistency of the incomplete standard model. (2) does doing nothing to prove the fit between the model and the real world, other than to reinforce the subjective impression in (1).

As well as Bayes, we need a little Godel here. Jon already highlighted last time, the need to look elsewhere. It is a wonderfully healthy situation to have an honest scientist thinking out loud in the mainstream press. Could save science form the scientistic extremists. Be even better if we could find Jon a philosophical type for similar dialogue, with mutual respect.

[Post Note : More on Bayes in science from the NYT –

“Statistics sounds like this dry, technical subject, but it draws on deep philosophical debates about the nature of reality,” said the Princeton University astrophysicist Edwin Turner, who has witnessed a widespread conversion to Bayesian thinking in his field over the last 15 years.

Countering Pure Objectivity

Woohooo – maybe more scientists will gradually see the need to respect and/or get to grips with philosophy?]

 

Public communications piece from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Laura Mersini-Houghton’s recent announcements (previously reported Bang Goes The Big Bang here):

“Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories — Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics — for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony,” said Mersini-Houghton. “And that’s a big deal.”

And it does that by dispensing with black holes and singularities (and consequent inflation and dark-matter and dark-energy and many-worlds multi-verses), all the way back to the big bang. Stripping out the hacks and returning to (classical) common sense. (Hat tip to Rick on FB again- trawling the web for big-bang updates.)

That’s a big deal.

[Post Note : Obviously there are honestly sceptical responses to Mersini-Houghton, but so far no direct refutation, and I did notice one reference to Stephen Hawking having now agreed with her, over the non-existence of black-holes as singularities anyway. Need to collate other links.]

[Post Note : Oh, and how timely.]