Month: April 2018

#Libraries

A recurring topic. Just capturing some thoughts / links prompted by (partly) hearing Alberto Manguel reading from Packing (and more to the point unpacking) My Library on BBC R4 Book of the Week.

The mnemonic of unpacking books.

Obviously resonances with Eco and Borges, but also Alexandria and much more.

[Eco – Ur-Fascism, The Rose, Queen Loana
(also Tartt / Caldwell&Thomason)]

Here Dublin from New Year visit 2018 …

mde

Panrelationalism – Everything Comes in Threes

Triples, Triads or Trinities

Every layered, taxonomic or network model of anything.

1D – The identity of every thing being distinct from not-this-thing and the distinction made.

2D – Levels or layers (in 2D orthogonal to any axis in n-dimensions, think onion-skins) come in threes. This layer, the next layer and the interface between the two is the most obvious. But each layer comes in threes – the layer and it’s two interfaces to adjacent layers (network node-edge equivalence). But once you unpick each distinction, it has relationships between the two (or more) things it is distinguishing, etc. Fractally, each component, each identity is a triple.

The semantic web is made of triples, OWL etc.

Most recent collection here Penrose-Foucault-Pirsig.

Relationalism. First mentioned in connection with “relationalism” being a better take than “relativism”. Panrelationalism in fact – everything is relational. Sure everything is in context relative to everything else, but that’s not some subjective groundless valuation, it’s simply reality, at a pretty deep level – fundamental physical ontology – information is any significant difference – thing / distinction / not-thing. Meaning.
(Wow – More Pirsig and Mary Parker-Follett in there. Hat-tips to Matt and Rebecca too. Connections in everything.)

Physics as the Child of Meaning – John Wheeler (1986)

Very much my fundamental information ontology of epistemology, shared as I see it with many current physicists too – Carlo Rovelli for one and of course the whole Integrated Information Theory (IIT) project. Most recently noted the Wheeler origins here in Nov 2017.

[Note however that in Wheeler’s Meaning Circuit, meaning is communicated by humans, not a suggestion that information is necessarily more fundamental to the physical world itself, simply integral to the human model we call “Physics”. (See the Penrose-Foucault triad.) In IIT is is presumed fundamental to the physical world itself.]

Humanism Really is an Organised Religion

Humanism really is an organised religion, which is no bad thing.

With any luck, an enlightened one.

[Placeholder]

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Mockery is not a good look, but many a true word spoken in jest – growing-up / twice-born / enlightened.

And this thread for inspiration seed-crystal:

First proposed this in response to the Oxford annual congress #whc2014

[Terry Eagleton reviewing John Gray:

“Gray also believes that humanists are in bad faith. Most of them are atheists, but all they have done is substitute humanity for God. They thus remain in thrall to the very religious faith they reject.”

As an atheist / humanist / secularist, that’s pretty much my position as far as the New Atheist humanists are concerned. And Humanity of the Gaps is a phrase I’ve coined several times.

Plenty more cutting opinions about New Atheists (Dawkins / Harris / Pinker et al) from both Eagleton and Gray in that review. But also plenty of spot on stuff:

“if you can represent the future here and now,
then it can’t be the future.”

Yes the future evolves and new species (of anything) are only known with hindsight. Political predictions, Marxist or otherwise, are wishful, hopeful, of the general direction of “progress” we want to make happen, but can never be specifically predictable.

“The popular belief that atheism and religion are opposites is, in his view, a mistake. Gray also takes a swipe at the kind of atheism that sees religion as a primitive stab at understanding the universe, one that science will later replace.”

Absolutely!

Although Eagleton ultimately dismisses Gray’s thesis, they’re pro- and anti-Marxists, he clearly has a lot of time for his thinking. Referring to Gray as “a card-carrying misanthrope”is mischievous – sounds like we’d both listened to Gray on BBC R4 DID – neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but hopeful.

Oh, and the (George) Steiner connection … archetype of Gray’s kind of atheism according to Eagleton … and the original promoter of Pirsig (above). What a tangled web.

(Hat-tip to Elizabeth Oldfield for the Eagleton/ Gray piece).]

[Still just a placeholder collecting links.
Here a review of Gray in Quietus.]

The Denial of Dennett’s Consciousness

[I’ve now reviewed this thread in reasonable detail
and have some additional conclusions:]

The Consciousness Deniers
13 March 2018 – Galen Strawson

Magic, Illusions, and Zombies
Rebuttal – Undated – Dan Dennett
With Reply
3 April 2018 – Galen Strawson

I recall seeing the original consciousness deniers piece by Strawson, but not really taking it seriously. Why in 2018, I thought, would anyone think Dennett was a consciousness denier and why would they go back to his 1991 Consciousness Explained in order to attack him on that false premise?

Plenty of scientistic types, both scientists and philosophers, do indeed appear to deny consciousness, for its inconvenience in fitting the received wisdom of – objectively determined and causally reductive – physical explanations. Dennett sure is not one of them. There can be few people making greater efforts, with ever more successful arguments, than Dennett in the last 25 years.

Like many working at the boundary between physics and consciousness, Dennett often warns us that our intuitive impression, of what our consciousness is, is kinda illusory, but nowhere does he suggest our consciousness is not real. It wouldn’t be the first time Dennett has set some public intellectual straight on that point.

Dennett starts with that very point, as his justification for a rebuttal:

I thank Galen Strawson for his passionate attack on my views, since it provides a large, clear target for my rebuttal … He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways. His most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim.

This kinda attack, defence and counter-attack style of argument is suited to proper rational discourse – where people genuinely follow the rules of mutual respect – but I fear it is bad for public debate. Galen’s Straw-man is massively disrespectful to start with.

Anyway, as I type I’ve not had chance to digest Strawson’s reply to the rebuttal, but I’ll be back. He really ought to be embarrassed at so gratuitously missing Dennett’s point.

[Continuing …]

I’m simply further baffled.

Dennett’s rebuttal is exactly as anyone knowing his work would expect. In addition to reinforcing the original premise, that Dennett in no way denies the reality of consciousness, he is saying that, whatever our impressions of our own consciousness are, (a) it is real and (b) it is natural, a naturally evolved phenomenon. Against Strawson he is arguing there is no reason to posit any magical or supernatural causes that must remain obscured from any natural investigation.

He quite rightly points out that Strawson’s argument is largely an expression of fear. The fear that consciousness is somehow devalued and at risk if we explain it as merely natural. That fear is of course perfectly rational, and we do well to explore how better understanding might be exploited for misguided ends as well as well intentioned purposes. Indeed that’s a reasonable statement of why people like myself are keen to understand it – to be able to take an informed position on any future developments. Lots more that could be said about potential consequences, but fear of a natural explanation is no substitute for explanation and argument. In fact, as I said in my own most recent review of Dennett, his case is as much about allowing honest processes of argumentation to evolve an explanation as it is about the content of the argument – rationality itself, I suggested.

What is especially baffling is that Strawson’s reply to Dennett’s rebuttal makes absolutely no reference to anything Dennett has said in the rebuttal or even in his most recent work on the topic. Strawson simply makes something of a selection of much earlier statements, disconnected from the current dialogue. For example, the “Zombie” topic – pointing out that we might not be able to tell the Zombie behaviour from the real thing – says nothing about natural explanations of the real thing.

Frankly, ignorant and dishonest not to address what Dennett is actually saying. If Dennett is denying anything, it’s that consciousness is supernatural.

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[Post Note: And timely to see the latest Michael Gazzaniga book “The Consciousness Instinct – From Brain to Mind”. (And PPS – notice Gazzaniga is part of Ian McGilchrist’s “The Divided Brain” – need to read his book first hand.) Though it’s never a good look when people mention mind and quantum mechanics in the same breath, this makes an important point:

“[Consciousness] might vie with quantum mechanics for sheer counter-intuitive weirdness, hovering way beyond our intuitions …”

Puts me in mind of Terry Bisson’s “Thinking Meat” – where advanced (sci-fi) AI beings have trouble accepting that meat-based life can actually think. No reason to conclude that consciousness is supernatural simply because our natural intuitions struggle to get to grips with its reality.

Interesting that Nature magazine concludes:

“it might all be better left to the theologians”

I give theologians a great deal more credit than the typical scientistic type, but we shouldn’t give up on natural explanations just because they’re hard to reconcile with existing intuitions. The “difficulty” in ever reconciling this may lead the likes of Strawson suggest natural philosophers are misguided in our mission. However, the real defeatists here, as I already said, are the scientists whose “greedy determinism” leads them to brand consciousness as an epiphenomenal illusion, impossible in reality. Dennett isn’t one of them.]

[Post Note: Strangely, that mismatch “triad” between

  • objective reality,
  • our (sensed / felt) intuitions and
  • our formal models

is also very close to my previous post.]

Monism, Dualism … Trialism?

I’m not really talking about making choices here – binary or otherwise – between schools of thought. No, I jest, since the point of any tuple  representation – pair or triple – is about their integration, not their separation. Ultimately any ontology is an arbitrary choice of which “objects” to represent your world view, with everything hanging on what you want to say about their relationships.

Interested to see today

The image being from Penrose “Road to Reality” (and a good thread discussing earlier origins).

A couple of years ago I posted this triad:
summarising how I read Foucault (1970):

[My most developed version of this idea here.]

I see Jessica Flack‘s take mapping cleanly onto this version. That is raw “Data” is the objectively physical world out there,”Natural Language” is the subjectively human expression of our experience of it and “Mathematical Representations” are the formal symbolic representations of concepts. The latter is traditionally “Platonic” but – take note – human constructed nevertheless.

I like it, though as I say, everything hangs on what we intend to say about the relationships and how “useful” the result is in answering questions. And with all “network” diagrams, there is an equivalence in switching node (object) and edge (relation) representations anyway.

Also, shout out to the EES project again, which has some great minds clustered around proper understanding of the evolution of life, the universe and everything.

McNamara Fallacy – Relying solely on metrics.

The above is a from a digest of “big-data” stories from Data Science Central, of which I am typically sceptical.

Sceptical because after two decades banging on about the problem of relying in metrics in complex situations (eg setting a speed limit as a number, anyone?) I wonder how many data-practitioners, large or small, actually get the problem with use of quantifiable data?

In my day-to-day version, it’s resisting the management adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” – because the opposite is true. You’ll only get what you measure and that will be a distortion of what you’re really trying to achieve. Never seen the problem given a name – McNamara Fallacy – before now. Maybe recognising – giving it a name – can help. Not surprised however to find it’s that Macnamara – Bob – of US Vietnam body-count fame.

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured.
This is OK as far as it goes.

The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value.
This is artificial and misleading.

The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important.
This is blindness.

The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.
This is suicide.

  •  Daniel Yankelovich (1972)

The reason given is invariably the scientistic observation that these other hard-to-quantify and too-complex-to-account-for factors cannot be proven with logic and empirical evidence.

[More examples from BBC R4 Today this morning:
Rosling (08:40) – posthumous book – “Factfulness”?
NUT (o8:46) – “more than a score” high-stakes testing?
And Hans’ book is also book of the week.]

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[Post Note: And more examples with “initial” UK Company accounting returns on gender pay … ]

A Licence to Hate? It’s never been about anti-semitism.

Stamping out hate?
There’s a word for that.
Love.

I wish Eddie Izzard every good fortune in his Labour Party NEC role but see the recurring problem  recurring:

Will his use of “terrible” be understood as not hating those Tories?

Will “for the many not the few” be understood as not hating the few, or is it simply an inadvertent licence to choose which few to hate?

It requires action to call out the haters that claim Labour allegiance, not simply disengage from them and allow them to continue hating in our name, any name.

This has never been about social media – and who takes ownership responsibility for content – but about caring enough not to hate. It’s never really been about anti-semitism either – the source of claims of smear-campaigns. There are plenty of anti-semitic tropes embedded in both western post-Christian (inc Islamic) and liberal-left cultures we all need to care about enough not to conflate with reality. Business or politics, no reason for post-Capitalism to involve anti-capitalist hatred of those terrible … (capitalist, imperialist … zionist?) … Tories.

Left or right, caricatures kill.

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[Post Note:

Jamie on the same wavelength again today too. Of course the echo-chamber is full of people attacking the “others” using every rhetorical trick in the book – that’s how you can tell it’s just an echo-chamber rather than a place of meaningful dialogue – the inhuman polarisation of one reinforces the other.]

[Post Note: And after Jewdas-gate, it really is about (not)-hating:

Thread starting here:

Agreed. An “Anarchist Collective” is not what we want a  serious political leader associating with in a democracy, not even an imperfect one. Careful dialogue, with anyone in an appropriate context, sure but also care about political messages.]