Month: May 2018

Few days without any posting thanks to several glorious days in the mountains of UK Lake District (Facebook album here.) Never seen such conditions for hiking and views in dozen or more trips over 40 years. As usual I’m using down time to read, two books this time.

I mentioned Martin Robinson’s Trivium 21c already, but I also started on David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity.

Loved Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality some years ago, but despite a common Information Quanta thread, I largely lost contact with his Quantum Computing and Constructor Theory work, except for brief interest in his colleague Chiara Marletto. [Links]

I’m reading Beginning of Infinity primarily for a single chapter referred to in a Twitter thread about the evolution of culture, but in fact from the off, it is a fascinating book. Several threads right on my own agenda, as well as more of what I liked in Fabric of Reality on the power of explanation as the core (if not the distinguishing feature) of scientific enlightenment. His Infinity refers to the basic principle that good explanation covers not just a rationalisation of experience in a falsifiable form and open to critique, but a potential infinity of not yet even conceived future experiences.

How else could we know what is really happening in stars? This statement comes very close to where I’m at on the anthropic significance of humanity in the grand scheme of reality:

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars,
and by intelligent beings who [unlike the alchemists]
understand the processes that power stars
and by nothing else in the universe.

And more generally:

In this book [he argues] that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what [he calls] good explanations. Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.

Another holding post – simply to capture this Buddhistic David Chapman piece on Robert Kegan and Lawrence Kohlberg’s models of developing (evolving) intellectual competencies. (Hat tip to @MimeticValue for the link.)

They look very much related to sorting out the missing aspects of Pirsig’s Social-Intellectual levels as I’ve tried to do here. (Three aspects within what Pirsig characterised as only two, and left many confused.) Foucault-Pirsig related versions here. And more generic triads here. And of course Trivium 21c.

And “fluid” identity of subjects and objects at the most enlightened level, reminds me of this – my take on Rayner.

Love the dismissal of Trolleyology – they were of course only ever thought experiments to show how ridiculous objective treatment of ethics can get.

Transposing view – Objects > Relations > Systematically-Meta and of course that Eastern (Buddhist) perspective of Western blind-spots. Excellent.

This is just a placeholder / outline / draft post.

#IdentityPolitics are everywhere this morning.

Labour on Windrush, Kanye on slavery and his #takedown, and his clarification, Peterson on Kanye, David Boston offensive posts as Tory candidate.

Each is struggling to articulate an identity politics point which I “suspect” is valid but which is hard to tell on the surface, because the communication is offensive and the reactions invariably pile on the (presumed) bad intent, bad thinking and/or bad character of the individual and their (actual) bad communication. Communicating about identity politics is a PC problem in terms that get attributed to Peterson.

Inevitably such communications get totally polarised, (a) because there is an identity politics at issue where people might tend to take sides anyway, and (b) the “risk” of giving any credibility to (any valid point in) the offensive position is so great that everyone chooses to dissociate themselves from it, often by way of mocking humour or by supporting the rhetorical “takedowns”, and (c) these are all public parties, so the “power” in the misconstrued and inadequately-conceived messages is enormous, further multiplying the (a) and (b) effects. [And (d) as I keep saying all these effects are ramped-up even further by the immediacy of social media speed and access.]

We have a communication problem-to-the-power-of-four.

To some extent the takedown of Kanye is making the same (valid) point that the problem is in the power of communication, but still nevertheless attributes thoughtless intent to Kanye himself. It leaves no crack for there being any valid point, it’s a total takedown, armed explicitly by objective history, especially in the form edited / circulated.

Reality is complex, and despite best efforts of some analysts and historians, that complexity includes subjective positions as well as objective facts. Articulating specific points within that extended issue is tough because of the complexity, requiring careful nuance AND because – even if ultimately reducible to objective facts – the complexity includes subjectivity, the rules of communication are more than the logical grammar of dialectic and must include rhetorical skills. The rules of fact, thought and speech are different. As well as avoiding conflation in nuanced content, the communications (channels) need to be kept distinct too.

We are free to choose what to say, but choosing how much of what to say when and how and in which context is at least as important as the objective truth of anything thought or said. We really do need space for thinking out loud in dialogue. Transparency of public debate crowds this out. Transparency is ultimately opaque to nuanced reality.

There is (needs to be) a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in.

=====

Post note: Even intelligent comics (Romesh retweeted by Baddiel) …

To be fair to Kanye, he might have meant slavery was a choice for white people.

— Romesh Ranganathan (@RomeshRanga) May 2, 2018

… and the whole thread – Gervais etc – oh how we laughed. Funny how these (genuinely) enlightened comedians were only last week applying nuanced thinking to free-speech in the #dankula case, jump straight to one-line mockery in the Kanye case.]

[And Scott Adams agrees it’s about the rhetorical use of metaphor.]

 

I’m reading Martin Robinson’s “Trivium 21c” – apparently propounding adoption of the classical Trivium for the 21st century, so far anyway.

As is my wont, after a scan of contents and a read of introductory chapters I’m posting my early thoughts, so I can more honestly talk about new learning vs existing reinforcement later.

First impression is the parallel to Pirsig’s journey again. A schoolteacher who despite early obvious intellect was a misfit in their own schooling and early career, before becoming a teacher – Drama in Robinson’s case, Rhetoric in Pirsig’s – went on to deploy methods considered radical in their approach to teaching. In both cases they went back to school and wrote an archeology of their journey involving going back to basics with the ancient Greeks.

In fact the subtitle of Trivium 21c is “Preparing young people for the future with lessons from the past”. Very personal lessons.

The second aspect I like is the content-process split in thinking, and the emphasis on the process and action side of the balance. How we think, learn, know and do being more significant than what. What I learned here is the split of the classical “seven liberal arts” constitutes a quadrivium of what and a trivium of how.

• Liberal Arts 7
• Quadrivium – 4 kinds of content
  (originally arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy)
• Trivium – 3 ways of using content
  (originally grammar, dialectic and rhetoric)

Now in terms of definition and understanding these classical liberal arts are already evolved from – not the same as – ancient Greek equivalents, and clearly we need to update what we mean now in the 21st century. Presumably that’s what the rest of the book is about, certainly as far as the process Trivium is concerned. We can take it as read that the content Quadrivium of human knowledge has evolved..

I’m already pushing rehabilitation of the value of rhetoric and dialogue to offset the destructive effect of dialectic and argument. Nothing metaphysical so far in terms of how this ontology of “the arts” relates to fundamentals, but early days. The “rt” in art and in craft is another fundamental aspect of Pirsig. Any way, for now, interesting to scan the references and index:

The bibliography is huge and full of many usual suspects.

Love the fact that Douglas (DNA) Adams features very early on. Despite the Pirsig parallels, no reference to Pirsig but Mortimer Adler, Pirsig’s nemesis, and Matt Crawford, one who picked-up Pirsig’s baton are intriguing. David Deutsch but no Dan Dennett. Dawkins but no Pinker. Toulmin but no McIntyre. McGilchrist, McLuhan, Haidt, (Allan) Bloom, fascinating, though no sense of positive or negative references yet.

I’m looking forward to this.