Month: January 2016

Post before last, I indicated I was reading some histories and oldies in their original published forms.

Last week I picked-up several more books. One new handful from a current reviewers’ copy list at the Rationalist Association, and another old handful of discard copies of the Rationalist Association library held by Conway Hall. Both the oldies in the previous post came from that latter source.

Same again; I’m reading the oldies. Specifically right now I’m reading T. H. Huxley’s “Darwiniana” collection of essays. Published as a collection by MacMillan in 1893, I have the 1899 reprint, the essays themselves come from 1859 to the 1880’s. Lots of stuff here already well referenced and quoted by Dawkins, Dennett, Lewontin, Gould and the rest, but nevertheless fascinating to read in the original contexts. The novelty for Darwin’s conservative religious critics and the need to take “creation” as a serious input, somewhere; the Judaeo-Christian cultural standpoint of the whole, the racial and imperial outlook from our little island towards the French, the Germans and those of the “Palestine” region. (Wallace, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Harvey, Paley, Spencer, De Maillet, Haeckel, Newton, Leibnitz, Galilleo and the Medicis, and yet another Goethe reference, all there.)

Two things of note for me.

• The careful debate about Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the fact that whilst Darwinian natural selection is undoubtedly true, it is clearly not the whole story. Lamarck remains “the skeleton in the closet” (as recently as this 2016 reference).
• That race and species always were (and still are) slim and slippery customers. It doesn’t pay to dwell on fixed, one-time definitions of either of them. Time and isolation, history and hindsight matter more. Long enough to be usefully named. Pretty much as with “non-racial” cultural and religious belief identities & differences; No?

Frankie Boyle sums it up nicely most recently here, most magnificently here:

“it’s difficult to explain why an
ingrained assumption is wrong
in a soundbite”

Contrasted with Margaret Beckett patiently explaining the labour party review of its post-Ed-defeat policy problems on BBC R4 Today – resisting the demand for a single “thing” to “blame”.

The point is, it really is DIFFICULT to “explain” (ie argue, understand, convince, change) in a sound bite, you have to put in the effort, but having implanted the message (right or wrong) it is VERY EASY to capture and spread it in a sound bite. A meme.

The more people accept that (say) science is right because it is logically consistent with objective evidence, the more being “scientific” becomes a positive tag or branding to associate with an idea you’d like to spread (acting on AGW / climate change say). Not all science is good, and anyway logical consistency is highly over-rated. Try explaining that in a sound bite. Ben was able to communicate it to me in a tweeted sound-bite, …

Consistency is over-rated. Being consistent all the time is actually rather scary.

— Ben Cobley (@bencobley) January 20, 2016

… but then we’ve already done the homework and studied Gödel and memetics. [Anthropic effects on our shared cosmos must be taken seriously, but the science is a vanishing small part of the problem.]

So, when I first heard this story about (modern European) Fairy Tales really being the latest versions of 2, 3, 4 or 5 thousand year old folk tales – my reaction was; Obviously. Doh! Did they really need anyone to spend any time and resources to research that, and having done it, how on earth is it news? But then if you already know Joe Campbell (The Masks of God) or Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories) then you know why these stories work and why they stick in our human psyche from generation to generation, evolving in the telling, but with patterns of meaning replicated. Sure we may associate the stories with Grimm and Anderson and later film adaptations of these, but this is more to do with written histories, the printing press and these later media technologies. The content of stories (the semantics, meaning, intent, purpose) long underly the medium (the syntactical and phsyical implementation technology) and remain independent, forever (*).

People may deny memes as not being well defined objectively, they’re not “things” you can easily get a handle on, but they really are there, and they really are the basis of all our knowledge.

They reason they’re a problem – as opposed to simply being a fact of life – is because the ones that spread and persist most, are the ones that are easy to communicate. These are our lowest common denominators, NOT those that are necessarily good or right. That requires homework.

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[Post Note : (*) Also a “PIE” (Proto-Indo-European / Indiana-Jones) languages and culture aspect to the original Fairy Tales story. Another research topic here. https://www.psybertron.org/?p=603 and https://www.psybertron.org/?p=7278 and more.]

Can’t believe how long it is since my last post – but currently buried under a pile of domestic things needing attention, basically a very late-running house improvement project that barely “completed” before Christmas, family Christmas itself, and seeking new paid work since the new year … lots of connected pieces to be picked-up.

Lots of draft posts, stalled due to guilt of those other things needing attention. Loads of tweets too (see guilt) as a substitute for longer posts on the usual subjects. Scientific “rationality” vs religious “irrationality” – the recurring knotty mind-body, free-will, truth-goodness, model-reality “hard problems”, not to mention all the more immediate and evil extreme real-life manifestations reaching us through the news.

Amongst all the tweeted links I’ve also as usual been reading a few books,
so for now a brief Reading Update:

• Captured by all things Bowie in today’s media reminded me one read was a musical biography; Elvis Costello’s “Unfaithful Words & Disappearing Ink“. Recommended read if you’re a fan or interested in Elvis. Densely packed name-dropping anecdotes of all the people and places he’s worked, but organised all over the place by musical and lyrical links in inspiration, writing and performing, his and others. Plus a good deal of his own family and Liverpool heritage of course. The sheer breadth is maybe the most illuminating aspect.

Also reading two more thought provoking works.

• “Vision & Realism – A hundred years of the Freethinker” by Jim Herrick (1982). Fascinating in my current role as board member for the Rationalist Association to get another view of the overlapping (and internally conflicting) relationships and heritage between the various players and publications (and agendas) in the UK rational “free-thought”, secularist, ethical, atheist and humanist movements. The same internal conflicts pop-up daily, and in fact one of my draft posts is a call to unity amongst the warring twitterati factions against the bigger picture.

• Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (1949) “Problems of Life – an Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought” is altogether deeper on the philosophical topics behind scientific rationality, with a pan-Darwinian biological view of processes behind the whole of science and rationality. (The original German title translates as The Biological Worldview.) It’s an Organismic Conception or viewpoint smack bang in the middle between the fundamental “exact sciences” and the higher human and social “sciences”. He uses a gestalt take on how levels dependent on more fundamental levels nevertheless have their own identity (and properties and behaviours) not determined in any direct sense by the sum of their underlying parts, but by their level(s) of organisation. (A view that Pirsig scholars will appreciate.)  It’s the organismic principle that is the driver, not any predetermined plan or any eventual patterns themselves – tough for scientists even now, but a paradigmatic change proposed in his work from the 1920’s onwards, and summarised in this 1949 work. [And it’s no coincidence the book is published in English by Watts & Co, founders of the Rationalist (Press) Association (see above) and the copy I am reading I bought second hand from their library in Conway Hall. Small world.]

Will be writing more on both of these in the right context.
Now, my own garden to tend, where’s my to do list?