Month: January 2017

Altered States of Consciousness

A running theme throughout Psybertron is the reality of conscious mind and its consequences in the real world. That’s partly because explantory understanding of our understanding and of our decision-making is my main research focus and partly because – probably not coincidentally – it’s also a prime (but not the only) example where politicised scientific dogma denies reality and actually prejudices our understanding. Focussing too narrowly on “our” consciousness also risks excluding any panpsychic possibilities, monist or dualist, where our brains / minds – and those of sentient creatures generally – may be more like transducers of consciousness rather than exclusive sources.

Like any rational research, understanding a thing is often best achieved by altering selected parameters of our object of interest, and observing the consequences. And in order to maximise interpretability of any results, wherever possible, alteration of parameters should be done in the most controlled ways, minimising the numbers of variables in play at any one time.

There are two well established schools of investigation. One investigating natural and accidental mental (psychological and physical) “abnormalities” another investigating chemical induced changes of state. Evaluating the abnormal tells us a lot about the normal.

My main objective here – as someone avoiding and not condoning illegal drug use – is to evaluate secondary research, and to promote legalisation supporting valuable research and safe use. In preparation for a survey of the story so far, below are over 15 years of links within Psybertron (Hat tip to Andy Dean for asking the question):

[Altered Chemical States – Peyote, Ayahuasca / Hoasca, DMT Tea, LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin, psychedelics generally, Sue Blackmore, James Austin.]

[Altered Psycho-Physical States – McGilchrist , Schwarz & Begley, Sacks, Ramchandran, Damasio, Zeman, and many more with Phineas Gage as the archetypal meme, the over-exposed pin-up of all researchers in this field.]

[Focus groups – Stephen Reid’s Psychedelic Society, and the Agora Critical Thinking Consciousness group.]

[Psycho-Philosophical positions – Zen et al – also important, but not covered here.]

More recent:

Non-addictive drug use. https://theconversation.com/many-people-use-drugs-but-heres-why-most-dont-become-addicts-35504

Microdosing. https://medium.com/mother-jones/the-case-for-taking-a-very-little-bit-of-lsd-every-day-d74ebb454863#.8jvzcs58f

Jet Lag Melatonin. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/30/is-it-safe-to-use-melatonin-for-jet-lag-insomnia

Broken Links

Link-rot used to be a big problem for early web-loggers, but since everyone (inc mainstream media) started used standard blogging and micro-blogging CMS and storage of content became practically free, most web content sticks once it’s posted. Permalinks usually are. Problems do still arise:

Having reviewed / recommended Andy Martin’s writing over the years, my blog posts include several links to the writing on his “Ink” blog – I pulled some of the key posts together in my previous post, but sadly some links to specific posts on Andy Martin Ink are broken:

http://www.andymartinink.com/?p=707
This used to be a link to his brief personal memoir on how he came to be writing Camus vs Sartre (also published in The Independent review and appearing as a preface to his book).

http://www.andymartinink.com/?p=645
This used to be a link to his promotional film for Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/surfing-in-new-york-2361229.html
This used to be a link to his film “Surfing in New York”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/others/the-other-kind-of-new-york-board-meeting-2353701.html
This used to be a link to his article on how he came to be surfing in New York.

http://andymartinink.co.uk/2016/12/the-culture-of-fear/
This used to link to independent article on how the fiction writer is king and how the crime-thriller genre is contributing to our downfall. (Very important story – closely related to why I find the Child-Reacher oevre “truly awful” however cleverly cafted to be “popular”. Pure memetics – popular does not equal good. There may be meta-qualities to be appreciated, so long as understood they are not literally equivalent to explicit reality. Populism is tyranny, not free democracy. Escapism has its value, but not as a model of reality.)

Pity. I wonder if alternative links exist to the same content? Is everything Andy Martin’s ever written now behind The Independent paywall?

[https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/beyond-understanding/
Still works – this is a piece on Autism – beyond understanding.]

My Lee Child Shaped Hole

I’ve been a fan of Andy Martin’s writing for several years. I also loved his little advertising film recruiting for his home department of modern languages at Cambridge.

Here a selection of previous reviews: [Camus / Sartre Fight Club] [Surfing 9/11 USA] [No Students Were Harmed] [Cosmic Man] [Logic as Autism] [And more …]

However, I wasn’t drawn to his more recent Lee Child project. Interviewing and writing articles around Child’s writing and his Jack Reacher character. Child is prolific with Reacher, and a lot more besides apparently. Martin’s Child project culminated in Reacher Said Nothing.

By rights, given my taste for Martin’s writing, I should be reading Nothing, but as I noted on Twitter a month or so ago, I’d never read any Child, certainly not any Reacher. Obviously I’m aware of Reacher in general through the crash-bang-wallop man-of-few-words genre of films he’s spawned, but not the kind of films I go out of my way to watch. May have seen the odd one on TV. There was a big Child shaped hole in my reading which meant I probably couldn’t appreciate Martin’s latest?

So, for 2017 I’ve been reading Child’s Reacher oevre, starting with his first two; Killing Floor and Die Trying. Having lived in the US myself, the cultural and geographical references amuse, particularly Die Trying set in far north-west Montana locations same as Zen and the Art, same way as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods also does in some of the same locations as Killing Floor. But for the characters, the ballistics and the anti-hero-doesn’t-get-the-girl “thriller” plot lines, truly awful. Worse than I’d feared (*).

OK, so the Raymond Chandler-esque machine-gun narrative of short sharp phrasing I can see has a certain charm and interest maybe for a language scholar. But is there a level of irony I’m not seeing? A joke I’m not in on?

So my quandary is, why would I read Martin’s Reacher Said Nothing, and is there any other Child I should be reading?

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[Post Note: Added links to previous Andy Martin reviews, and …

(*) I say worse than I’d feared. Clearly a phenomenon to succeed over dozens of books, and clever to craft so many stories to a winning formula. But, even having read only the first two, alarming how many formulaic plot and narrative devices are already repeated. The whole man-of-few-words device, an update of the man-with-no-name, leaves endless options for filling out the backstory as hooks for new themes in later pieces. Clever as a craft, but is it not too transparently obvious, a thriller with neon sign-posts?]

[Post Note: As an anlytical piece on the best-seller creative process I see Martin specifically follows Child’s writing of “Make Me”. Oh my god, does that mean I need to read another before embarking on “Reacher Said Nothing”. I’m beginning to see literary criticism of the popularly successful process, not (necessarily) concerned with other qualities of the literary content. Fair enough. Catching-up on Martin’s blog, I see he’s been covering a lot of the Nordic-Noir genre too. Again several very successful strains of the genre have resulted – our house is full of Nesbo, Adler-Olsson and the rest – but has it not all been repetition to the point of boring cliche since the original “Killing”?]

Cornflowers – Too Blue for Logic

Cornflowers

My axioms were so clean-hewn,

The joins of ‘thus’ and ‘therefore’ neat

But, I admit

Life would not fit

Between straight lines

And all the cornflowers said was ‘blue’

All summer long, so blue.

So when the sea came in and with one wave

Threatened to wash my edifice away

I let it.

[Marianne Jones]

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[First discovered and posted back in 2002, but oft quoted since.]

A Rose in a Fisted Glove

Post-Iraq and Afghanistan, with regime-change and support for Arab-spring events, the west and neighbouring governments made plenty of mistakes in the actions they actually chose to take and in how far they thought-through the immediate consequences and the longer-term stabilisation of Middle-East countries. Not to mention the running sore of the unfinished business in Israel-Palestine.

Which isn’t to say they / we were wrong to act, even to “go to war”, with good intentions for populations repressed by or at risk from dictators and ideologues. The complexity is always in the many parties with their own opportunistic agendas and scores to settle, and in the freely fragmented hearts and minds of our own populations that need to be brought along with any such actions and sustained attention to consequences. Even without traditional “imperial” aims, aspirations and the arrogance of knowing what’s best for johnny-foreigner, we all have many interests tied-up in these situations.

Crass with hindsight to be keeping score of numbers (*) of bombs and countries involved – human casualties and cultural damage to “civilisation” for sure – but let’s not falsely objectify what is far more complex and complicated. Crass too to simply blame and vilify our individual leaders, with hindsight or even with I told-you-so slings and arrows of contemporary stop-the-war protestation.

One reason we need institutions like UN, NATO and EU to give us follow-through on policy and initiatives beyond single-national government cycles. Sure these institutions ain’t perfect, even highly flawed, in need of improvement, refreshment and re-commitment to such improvement and their longer term aims as well as learning from evident mistakes. But a rose by any other name would be as thorny.

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[(*) Post Note – Taleb, already merciless against Pinker’s “Better Angels”, here picking-up how misleading it is to simply count the wrong things, the things that might be easy to count.

(Einstein “Not everything that counts can be counted.”)

(Or in a warlike context “The McNamara Fallacy“.)]

C S Lewis and other idiots?

Just a holding post of related links:

Recurring theme of mine – very smart, highly rational people converting to christian religion, even catholicism, as they grow older and wiser. Triple-first C S Lewis, Marshall McLuhan, inklings etc.

This piece on losing faith in experts includes a reference to C S Lewis Screwtape Letters. (Hat tip to @Contronline) Also Taleb’s IYI – semi-serious Intellectual Yet Idiot recurring theme.

Recent “Great Lives” on C S Lewis proposed by Suzannah Lipscomb (@sixteenthCgirl). Like Matthew Parris, I was always turned off by Lewis (and Tolkien) obviously allegorical yet sneakily preachy agenda, despite obvious clever qualities.

Fascinating.

Truth-And-Lies-World

The following is really only a draft (from 15th Dec 2016) but prompted to post after seeing this tweet exchange today:

I’ve reacted against this “post-truth” meme, that somehow we’ve morphed into a world where lies have replaced truth, where “fake-news” has displaced facts, and that this is something new and real.

In fact all that is new is that ever more ubiquitous media clamour for our attention by turning every topic into a battle between polarised opposites. Polemics have always been part of debate, but debate and reality have always been more than a choice between fact and fiction, and fiction has often contained more valuable truth that facts. As old as history in fact. All that’s new is the ever expanding ubiqity of media and the crowding-out all but extreme opposites and sensational interpretations. Memetic click-bait. There have always been headlines – the original marketing click-bait – but now some expect headlines and 140 char tweets to be a valid summary of the story or …. get out of my sight, scroll on.

Interesting how many “BTL” comments and social-media threads spend time debating “but that headline is false, it doesn’t reflect the content of the story and reference material”. Well no, but now you’ve linked to it, it’s the content we’re supposed to be evaluating. It’s the content the writer put their effort into. We’re increasingly meta about the motives in the media messages – second-guessing agendas than we are concerned with the content. We’re in danger of seeing the medium as the only message.

In fact we’re in a world where we no longer understand what truth and reality are. The only test being if it’s not a true fact it must be false. That’s never been true, except for abstract objects confined to some logical truth-table.

More truth in fiction, it has been said many times before.

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[Post Note: This piece from Peter Pomeranstev writing at Granta on “Why We’re Post Fact”. Hat tip to Terry Waites posting on Agora Critical Thinking’s Facebook page.

It’s a good piece, a good summary of the situation we’re talking about, and Pomerantsev draws heavily on Svetlana Boym’s work amongst others. Reinforces my view that what’s changed is the technology, which is not to blame the technology, but recognise that the technology exposes the underlying human reality. As he says in conclusion “an audience which has already spent a decade living without facts can now indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence.”

I might reword “a decade living without facts” as “decades forgetting what truth is” – losing our grip on the necessary balance of facts and stories that make up truth. All truth is made up?]

David Malone’s “Why Are We Here?”

Doumentary Series – Why Are We Here? In four parts.
Blog background info here.

Hat tip to David Morey for the links.

The following is simply raw running notes of content topics.

Almost whole scope of my own agenda and writings. David Malone has pretty much the same rational-atheist position as myself, though I didn’t know that when I reported on being impressed with him at Hay on Wye 2016 and 2014.

Think the series loses its way a little in episode 3 and parts of 4, arguments less coherent either way, and maybe loses the focus on the question in the title. Becomes much more focussed on the existence and/or necessity of God or not.

But overall very good. Recommended and a useful resource for all the contributing talking heads from science and philosophy.

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Part 1 – Meaning Seeking Beings – with or without “God”.

(David Malone and Ard Louis with many sources who have been speakers from Hay on Wye / How the Light Gets In : Marcello Gleiser, Alex Rosenberg, Peter Atkins, Denis Noble, George Ellis, Simon Conway Morris, John Cottingham, Roger Penrose, Frank Wilczec, Semir Zeki, Gregory Chaitin, Ben Okri, Sunetra Gupta, Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, Martin A Novak, Molly Crockett, Gwendolyn Patton, and maybe a few I missed?)

Reductionism > success in science > Scientism – determinist bottom-up causation explains everything real, exclusively, end-of. No free-will etc.

Emergence > the whole is more than sum of the parts > evolved patterns and systems causally effect their component parts.

Illusion of Self

Fine Tuning – for life and intelligent human life – anthropic

The Multiverse – more “universes” than “particles” in this universe

Universe(s) from Nothing

Evolutionary Layers – Physics > Chemistry > Biology > Cognition different “laws” in each phase of evolution of the universe. (Cf Physical / Living / Social / Intellectual after Pirsig?)

Convergence – evolutionary recurrence of patterns & forms – directionality in results of increasing complexity.

Neo-Darwinists’ fear of Creationists – throwing out babies with the bathwater

(The sneering arrogance of Rosenberg and Atkins!)

Objective data vs relationships

Part 2 – The Reality of Ideas

True empirical knowledge through sensory perception – all our “objective” knowledge of reality is filtered through our lens of consciousness.

Mathematical Absolutes – beyond physics of reality – just as real, but a deeper “degree” of existence – after Plato effectively

Abstract “imaginary” mathematical concept like “i” > even basic QM depends on it.

Dirac Equation > Eugene Wigner

Truth & Beauty – scientific truths appear to be related to elegance – simple beauty and symmetries – of some kind. Beauty that “rewards” the subject.

Creativity – stuff emerges from asymmetry or broken-symmetry – the asethetic of imperfection.

Randomness – creation is “sexy” – randomness – unpredictability – is possibility of / opportunity for creation. (Not the religion of randomness – everything is chance – of the scientistic atheist.

The Sublime – true beauty is close to terror, where angels fear to tread – “awe” response to transcendence. Religious “sentiment” at peace with science.

A Different Kind of Narrative Truth – stories, narrative – making sense of reality. Even science has narratives and imagination. Stories of the facts, or stories as tempting illusions that we understand the facts.

Truth as more than those things that can be “proven”? Can narrative contain more “profound” truth than explicit content.

Part 3 – Moral Absolutes (?)

Part 3 – The Animal Within – a moral animal – a sense of knowing right from wrong

Genes – The Science of Morality? Morality as the ultimate emergent property of genes. I’m thinking what you’re thinking – Game theory compromises?

Red in Tooth & Claw? Science too narrow and pessimistic to tell us what is morally right or good.

Our chimpanzee brother. Ard Louis’s own story.

Cooperation – Evolution’s Missing Law?

Fairness & Empathy – our better nature – the Capuchin monkey unfair reward experiment.

The Moral World – religious belief?

Differences of degree and/or kind? Degree evolves to be kind – “new species”

Knowing Good – Choosing Bad – The Milgram experiments – Moral uncertainty, can’t really get inside the other person’s head.

Is ought ever a scientific question? Instinctive empathy is real. There really is a moral compass. Are they fundamental aspect of reality, like mathematical laws?

Part 4 The Moral Compass

Nihilism – A world without values. Cooperation, coordination and division of tasks (and empathy & altruism) are things that evolved by necessity at stages in our social evolutionary history.

Liberation theology of MLK

Instinctive emotional tendencies that are post-rationalised.

Moral Decisions – Emotions vs Ideas – or more like a mixture / balance of the two? The motivation comes from the sentiment before cognitive rationalisation.

More rational to believe in god? Sure, more than to be sure there isn’t. Like David, nothing I believe requires existence of a supernatural omniscient agent. My kind of atheism.

The Case Against God – scientific standards of logical argument and evidence. Leaves possibility of a god outside of physical science – transcendent god.

Unfinished Business – An afterlife? Undecided questions of how we came to be?

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