Month: May 2015

This is hilarious. [Hard copy of Scientific American June 2012] “The Human Brain Project”

Sad too, but since it seemed to be funded by Big Blue rather than public funds, maybe not actually criminal. But, aaaaggghh no, “The Human Brain Project” is a multi-billion EU project. Now that is criminal.

The saving grace being that latter 2015 article says The Human Brain Project is premature, it needs a rethink. I’ll say. What were they thinking of, other than all that lovely money. This is not hindsight but basic common sense, not science, obviously. Big science needs better non-scientific advisors.

I was reading the 2012 piece because I was given the hard copy last night. We were at a talk on consciousness, mind, decision-making and morality (more on which soon) and the topic came up (a la Dennett) that the key feature that makes the human brain a mind – our mind – was software, not hardware. No amount of physical scale (exa-flops) nor connectivity (connectome) makes it a mind. It makes it a very complex machine. Building an elctronic simulation may be a fine model of its physical working, as physiologiocal, elctro-thermo device, but it doesn’t come close to asking how does the brain work – as a mind.

[Post Note – not watched yet, but here another current machine-brain is a delusion piece shared by Johnnie on FB]

Today we protest another atheist blogger murdered – hacked to death in public – earlier this week, and demand the Bangladeshi government take public action to condemn such behaviour as totally unacceptable, and be seen to capture and bring the guilty to justice.

I posted on the freedom-of-expression aspect of this unacceptable train of events back here. As atheist, secularist, rationalist bloggers for democratic freedoms we share the pain, but we must not forget that the following morning 45 Ismaili Shias were publicly murdered in Karachi just for holding a different view to another murderous sect in the name of Islam.

Also recently we noted the agreement – between (atheist) Bob Churchill and (Christian) Ben Rogers – that in defense of freedom:

Art.18 is there to defend freedom for every human being.
Too often Christians speak up for Christians,
Muslims for Muslims, atheists for atheists.
Freedom should be defended [by all] for all.

When it comes to freedom of thought, belief and expression, we must not be partisan in our condemnation of violent suppression.

 

[Post Note : And some success.]

 

If it looks designed, call it designed … by evolution.

At root it’s all about (disembodied) information, and intelligence is evolved too.

(Good to have that Q&A on gender cognitive differences [9:39 to 13:23 (*)] captured for posterity too.)

Anyway – reported on this talk back in March 2015 – I was there.

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[(*)Post Note : On that gender differences issue. In fact the question is specifically on “intelligence” – tougher for reasons of meaningless scales as Dan suggests – but also that balance between scientific benefit and social disbenefit – I heard it right on the night. BUT also references to reactions to James Watson and Larry Summers statements like these – non-PC but not false, says Dan … And he really did side-step a full answer with the idea that some things we are better not knowing … to much criticism from those on the YouTube comment threads. This one is parked.]

Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder for this link to SciAm article by Victor Stenger, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. Their title is “Physicists Are Philosophers Too” misled me slightly. Misled me into the “Yes, but often not very good ones, if they prejudice their philosophy with their physics” response. What was it Max Born said? “When we are doing theoretical physics, we are doing actual metaphysics.”

In fact it’s a plea for Physicists to recognise rather than deny philosophy, whether they consider themselves to be philosophers or not. Doubly interesting to me since the arch-denier cited is again Larry Krauss, US humanist of the year – again – with whom Stenger has had much debate on the topic in 2012 before his death last year, and because one of the contributors is Peter Boghossian, darling of many an atheists fighting irrational religious dragons. The latter is someone I need to bone up on.

Also interesting, because although I’ve done Krauss position on denial to death before, it includes a link to his debate with Julian Baggini in the Grauniad back in 2012 when Krauss was making his ignorant claims, and when I was too ignorant of Baggini.

Anyway both good reads. The SciAm article in fact analyses much of the content of the Baggini piece before going on to a pretty thorough summary of the changing relationship between philosophy and the field of knowledge now generally known as science. Good stuff.

The immediate data:

Actual 2015 Result in Full.

Comparing D’Hondt PR with FPTP in 2015 Voting. (ER Tweet) (Proportionality)

Electoral Reform  and A Constitutional Convention (<<< This)

Unlock Democracy and Joint Electoral Reform Petition
(naff link, may need to search each org for fresh link)

2015Constitutionalists

[Community Union] [Paul Mason’s Blog] [Adam Bienkov’s Blog] [Left Foot Forward] [Alan Johnson] [Spiked Brendan O’Neill] [The Economist] [Laurie Penny New Stateman] [Claire Wilsher] [Rod Liddle]

That last message – we must turn anger and disappointment into constructive action, and not let it become despair and depresssion. Or as Michael Cashman put it:

My mantra for the next few months: Don’t blame others, no one sets out to fail, accept responsibility, be generous and don’t become bitter.

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My starting positions:

Liberal & Democratic & Sustainable, where Values beat Arithmetic. Freedom – individual human rights – not “individually unconstrained” but guided by values. In order to decide (things of value) you need values to start with.

Individual Representation – is first about “self-identity” – who are we, who do we see ourselves as, what constituencies are we part of, what labels to we choose.
Multiple identified constituencies National, Regional & Local, and National, European, Global/Cosmic as well as Multiple tribal constituencies on shared features and issues.
Multiple representational institutions – nationally we are bicameral, regionally/locally we have overlapping authorities. Extra-nationally we have many authorities.

So electoral reform is not about House of Commons in isolation. It’s also about relationship to second house and to lower and higher institutions, and about democratic arrangements of those other houses & institutions. (eg HoC vs HoL, UK vs Countries and Regions, UK vs EU, UK & EU vs UN, etc.)

Delegation vs representation. Pragmatism. We can never pre-agree, or decide in real time (referenda) on every decision our various representatives make (or promise to make). Authority is “delegated” UP the chain of institutions (federation). Representation is “delegated” DOWN from people to the representatives in the institutions, Our representatives cannot literally be our delegates, making the decision we would make in every case in every institution.

Life is for living according to values – mutual values (freedoms) – our individual time cannot to be taken up with governance. Governance we want to delegate efficiently to those we can trust (and hold accountable). Some of us can spend some of our life wholly bound up in campaigns for something or other, but we can’t all spend all of our time on the campaign, it’s the “something” we really want to live, not the campaign.

Trust and love (care for fellow human individuals, individuals in a shared sustainable cosmos), are the key values. Everything else is priorities and practicalities of resources, of which time is one we all value (for living, otherwise why care about sustainability).

Some immediate corollaries:

Do not want pure arithmetic solution for proportionality of popular (votes) to representation (seats). We must not replace values, or allow them to be replaced, with numbers.

Do not want same democratic representation arrangements for all houses and institutions – not all popular vote based. (eg if HoC is popular vote based, then HoL should NOT be, not entirely.) Diversity is an important component of sustainability.

Assuming a good level of trust is maintained, the best relationship between population and governance is bottom-up. Popular votes for local / regional institutions, with lower institutions delegating power and authority upwards upwards (federally) and delegating appointed representatives upwards, generally without popular voting. Exceptions should be exceptions, and in practice there will be many until and unless that trust-based state is achieved. The fact that this would be a multi-generational project, does not change the aim, the vision.

Manifestos may be filled (for practical reasons) with promises of short term plans and actions, but must not be confused with actual values and visions shared for the sustainable long-haul.

THE KEY MESSAGE:

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, so the elected will not have electoral reform as their highest priority. Something like the Constitutional Convention is therefore essential to making progress with electoral reform in line with longer term shared values.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T.E.Lawrence

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Post notes:

[@RustyRockets Vlog Sweet, naive learning with a voice, real time before our eyes. Split “anti-nasty-Tories” vote. Common compassion message, needs new thinking, but the naïveté means his language inevitably hits the right words. What’s so funny ’bout …  The boy done good.]

[And a good long Facebook exchange on Clive Andrews timeline.]

[And more on voting for individuals you can trust locally – even if they’re Tory. Hat Tip to Smiffy on FB.]

[And, Oh wow, the Vive La Difference agenda too.]

[Jim Messina in The Spectator.]

Oscar Holderer, the last survivor of Wernher von-Braun’s team of “rocket scientists” (proper engineers dreaming of a sustainable future actually) based at Redstone (Huntsville) Alabama, has died. The city has a considerable German connection and von-Braun is commemorated in civic buildings and the like.

Recorded when Ernst Stuhlinger passed back in 2008 at the time we were living there, and Sylvia had some tales to tell having met the old boy.

[And the same day – the baton passes eastwards.]

Law against Islamaphobia? OK here goes:

• Phobia? – Literally “fear of”, but generally understood as “hatred of” or “prejudice against”.
• Religious Freedom? – We have UN Dec Art 18 (Freedom of thought, belief, expression and conscience – inc religious and non-religious belief and practice.)
• Prejudice & Hate? – We also have legal protection against hatred & prejudice, speech and acts, against race, colour, gender, sexuality, etc.

[These are protections of freedoms for humans to be who they are, but clearly none of these license or grant rights to these same humans to act in ways that are either illegal or infringe other rights and freedoms of others (illegal religious practices like “burning witches” or establishment of theocracies). Irrelevant to this particular decision.]

Now, we need to be careful not to conflate religion with these topics, nor these topics with each other, BUT they share a key feature which is being protected. Something which humans are, claim or hold, which is not an individual choice in the present, but biologically or culturally inherited difference (*). Something self-identifying and self-expressed, physically or verbally.

My view is that prejudice and hate laws should simply cover creed, as well as race, colour, gender, etc … Creed here is simply belief, and external expression of that belief.

End of.

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(*) And before anyone throws the “multi-culturalism” pebble into the pond, here we’re just talking about non-prejudicial recognition of difference – different culture, different religious culture – this says nothing about national cultural norms and values, which evolve naturally from the actual present and its actual history – conserved but open to inputs. How to “manage” this with policy is another story, a recent minefield. The current issue above is simply freedom from prejudice in the meantime.

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Post Notes:

Realised a flaw in my argument – grey scales from biology (genes, etc) to culture (memes, etc) to religion (more memes) – but there is a key point of distinction – hard to clarify, but bound up in choice in the present moment. We are our memes.

Real distinction is between reasonable criticism and prejudiced hatred or phobia – but reasonableness of criticism depends on ability to change. At one end – can I reasonably criticise an individual’s genes? At the other how personally directed can my criticisms be of mere “views” someone holds. Important point linked by Love (what’s so funny ’bout .. ) and Ad-Hominem (no no). It’s the difference between valid criticism and gratuitous, prejudiced bigotry or hatred.

Collecting other contributions:

James Lawrence via Adrian Dewey http://www.atheistrepublic.com/blog/james-lawrence/islamophobia-can-it-be-considered-type-racism

Sarah Brown http://hurryupharry.org/2015/05/03/ed-miliband-and-islamophobia/

Alex Wood / Richard Dawkins http://religiousreader.org/outlawing-islamophobia-misses-point-hate-crimes/

Ali Sina http://examine-islam.org/2015/04/will-you-pimp-your-wife-to-get-promoted-ali-sina-on-ed-miliband/

And right on cue the next “bunch of fucking idiots” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-32586699
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8545831/texas-attack-pamela-geller
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/04/opinions/moghul-texas-shooting-gellar/index.html
Just because the content is art & cartoons and the headline is free expression doesn’t make it do. Bigotry is bigotry.

Here, fig leaf of free-speech in Glasgow Herald.

And here Michael Gove before his new appointment as minister for justice.

And to be clear this example – @AMDWaters – is not Islamaphobic.

[Key point is non-explicit legal (negative) constraint on free-expression, but (positive) incentive of explicit values. See Ayaan Hirsi Ali.]

[Latest from Kenan Malik on banning of hate speech.]

Sarah Brown, @SarahAB_UK writing at Harry’s Place (hurryupharry.org) also responds to Charlie Klendjian’s Islam vs Islamism post. Also generated was a fair amount of twitter traffic about what he and I had posted. If I had time this Saturday evening, I might give Sarah’s post the fuller consideration it probably deserves, but for now the points of constructive agreement. Sarah said, verbatim:

Clearly it’s possible to argue (as Klendjian does) that for whatever combination of reasons Islam is either inherently or contingently more problematic than other religions. (This point is made by Psybertron here.) But if liberal Muslims are in a minority compared to liberal Jews and Christians, all the more reason to offer them some support by reinforcing the fact that Islamism, although it’s certainly a subset of Islam, is not identical with it.

Repeating two of Sarah’s points for emphasis:

although [Islamism is] certainly a subset of Islam, [it] is not identical with it.

Agreed. The original core disagreement with CK’s thesis. Whatever terms we choose there is an important distinction to make between the two ideas, and understand when and where that distinction matters.

all the more reason to offer [Muslims] some support by reinforcing [their distance from Islamism]

Agreed. Pretty much where I’m coming from more broadly.
Support = constructive.
(What’s so funny ’bout … etc.)
I think @SarahAB_UK gets it / me.

Sadly, the full posts and the twitter threads arising degenerate into what I called “whataboutness” in my original criticism of the original talk. If in any one conversation we bring the entire history of every religious influence on every cultural, demographic, walk-of-life – like why I eat fish on a Friday –  where “we agree, already” – we create a fog-screen that means we never make progress on the original point. Very much my meta-point on constructive styles of dialogue. If we simply want noise to promote the existence of issues, publish satirical cartoons, increase your twitter following, fine, but I’m well beyond that. I’m seeking progressive solutions to those issues, in achievable chunks. Understanding of and sensitivity to historicity is very important, but that’s no excuse to cram every dialogue with everything we know.

I’ll always condemn criminal acts, but I’ll not be letting the terrorists win by distracting our valuable time from progress where it can be made.