Year: 2018

Fan Base vs Actually Listening to Content

Fascinating responses to this Grauniad CiF piece on Jordan Peterson – introducing him to new people who’ve maybe heard he has a fan base as well as vocal detractors. The kind of controversy that sells tickets.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do do obsessive fandom of humans I love from afar, but I’m no “fan” of Peterson. I scarcely know him. It’s barely a month since I clicked on any link to listen to or read anything by or about him – I’m a “post Cathy Newman” interested party and I like what I hear. I’m over-60 – male obvs (!) – and he’s talking about stuff I’ve been researching for 20 years. I’m not some snotty teanager looking for a psychological crutch.

The comments of interest are below the line in the CiF piece as well as on social media, like this thread for example:

It’s actually quite a balanced piece, properly sceptical but fair. Yet ironically, Peterson can’t even accept the possibility of error. I guess when you feel besieged even tiny attacks must be repelled:

Maybe some of his generalisation are “kooky” – his anecdotal examples are a bit off the wall, that’s part of his attraction for sure – but generally he seems to talk sense (content) and more importantly seems to talk sensibly in proper dialogue (process) avoiding gratuitous attack and defence straw-men and resisting gratuitous reactions to those that wield them against him. But nobody’s perfect I guess.

Being “based on scientific research” is a ubiquitous claim but only as good – and as relevant – as the science itself and, further, “as solid as it gets in social science” tells its own story. [Invoking the scientific defence is unnecessary and unhelpfully scientistic in my book.] As defence against (enemy) attack, maybe fair enough, but it’s not the proper (mutual) dialogue I’ve already come to expect. It’s what set the Cathy Newman exchange apart.

Still, I should worry! The slings and arrows in the threads are classic examples of the genre, and I realise many people from science and/or the humanities see being smart-ass as part of the game (see court-jester). But if people believed 1% of the reactions to Peterson – and to Gareth Hutchens and the Grauniad for daring to give him a fair hearing – then we are in trouble.

Is there any tiny chance anyone might actually -memetically, naturally, unintentionally – believe Peterson believes anything remotely like:

“that lobsters prove
that women should be
subservient to men” ?!?

Self-selecting fan-base and rubber-necking audiences pay the bills, but no wonder we have the intellectual dark web for proper constructive discourse. Talk about fake-news in mainstream social-media.

The “Guardian Pick” of the positive comments restores your faith (but even that draws the mean-spirited smart-ass crap responses):

“Whether or not everything Peterson says is “defensible” (You would need to establish by whose criteria it was to be so considered), at the very least it is always arguable. The reason is that, unlike so many of those who are prone to mindlessly parroting their own received memes, and which Peterson so rightly excoriates, he virtually never puts forward any argument which he has not thought through from first principles. That is the mark of a genuine intellectual.”
by Tim Cape.

As I say, even when content is imperfect, as it always must be, the process of aiming to talk sense, with mutual respect and good faith is the true mark of quality.

STFU and listen, I say. Talk is cheap and comment is free.

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[Post Note: And another Grauniad CiF piece sparking further threads:

Yawn.]

Evolved Inhumanity

I’ve said it before, Artificial-I will only be reality when it is Real-I, ie long after human extinction I’d estimate.

Inhuman evolution evolves inhumanity until the evolved (machine) inhumanity evolves to be (living) humanity itself. Same same.

Evolution – genetic or memetic – is a real process happening everywhere right now. An evolved species is only a matter of hindsight. Careful what we wish for.

Meta-Meme – The “Overton” Meme Meme

Saw a reference to “The Overton Window” this morning – a meme so embedded in 21st C political commentary that you can simply tweet it in cynical fashion and assume your audience knows what you mean.

The “Overton Window” and its accompanying “Treviño Values” are a meme about memetics. About how ideas shift (ie literally memetics) and, more to the point, how the cynical can exploit the natural effect for ideological ends. As old as Machiavelli’s Prince, ’twas ever thus. Any idea follows a natural trajectory from its first thought. That is:

Freedom evolves:
Conservative and liberal, interests and values, are
Unthinkable > Radical > Acceptable > Sensible > Popular > Policy

Overton was coined in a public policy context, balancing these competing values, so the end-game is “policy”. But, in a more general sense, that end-game is simply “accepted reality”. Pretty much the same as  Arthur C Clarke’s science and new technology trajectory “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  The understanding of things moves from:

“That can’t be for real!”
(Inconceivably Magic)

to

“How did our world exist without it?”
( Everyday Technology)

…. by copying expression and sharing experience.

It’s so natural that the word meme is rejected by many as having any remaining use, because what it means is so embedded in accepted reality. It’s political by political choice and ripe for the adversarial game but an entirely natural process nonetheless.

What we really need to understand is that the stack of interacting memes (or memeplex) we inhabit are evolving ever faster and inexorably in the direction supporting and supported by that environment in a self-reinforcing positive feedback or mechanistic “first cybernetics” loop.

The more we value simplicity, clarity, objectivity, transparency, (ac)countability, the more the popularity contest delivers populism. A free-for-all for the memes – including the unthinkable – rather than cultivating human freedoms and values. Perversely, we need the conservatism of active moderation on all of those inhuman values:

Simplicity and clarity – in so far as  necessary “but not more so”.
Transparency and sharing –  in so far as “need to know” in context.
Objectivity and (ac)countability – in so far as “you get what measure”.
Careful what you wish  for in “best laid plans”.
Careful what you throw out with the memetic bathwater.

Doubly perversely, the greater the stakes, the greater the need for conservation and … yes … mystification. So tough for liberal humanists (like me!) to get this. We need to make space for the humanistic “second cybernetics”.

In order to value freedom of expression we need less of it.

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[Note: The use of the first and second cybernetics is counterintuitive here. I did say “perverse”. When it comes to positive and negative feedback, the point is which processes are reinforced, not necessarily which definable states and outcomes. It’s about the freedom (process) to evolve being distinct from the freedom (state) evolved. A free state is about freedom, the process of free evolution is about conservatism – hi-fidelity and hi-fecundity – many good copies of what already exists.]

In Good Faith – Memes Never Were Objective

I have a kinda love-hate relationship with memes and often find myself writing either about them or at least using the term “meme” and the idea of “memetics”. Most recently here in “Don’t mention the memes“.

As I say, although Dawkins is credited with coining the term to represent an “object”, mimesis has been around forever, and others like Dennett have done most to establish how memetic processes work, and how they are central to “mental” evolution.

My relationship with memes is summed-up in this tweet (retweeted by Elizabeth Oldfield) and my response:

Obviously the seeming objectification implicit in coining the term is the red-rag to anyone wanting to emphasise the non-objective – even transcendent – human aspects of life and the nature of culture. Me too, let’s be clear.

(1) tiny brain: lol memes

(2) normal brain: that’s not what “meme” means

(3) giant brain: the spread of the internet’s definition of “meme” is itself a good example of meme theory

(4) galaxy brain: lol the only useful idea Dawkins ever had was corrupted into a term for vapid derivative jokes

By any definition of truth, that’s all true. So, assuming I’m not stupid, why use a vapid term?

One reason is because, like it or not, (4) simply further confirms the truth of (3). Memetics is so “true” it is not even immune from it itself and, being a game, there is an inevitable end-game. Memetics is true on its own level and any number of meta-levels.

(1) to (2) is the start of the basic language game. Whether as disingenuous straw-men or as flattery by accidental imitation, all words that achieve circulation take on a life beyond any subtle (defined) intent of the originator. That’s not even fake-news. The word that achieves most meaninglessness is likely to be the most significant word in the lexicon on several levels. The more significant, the more it becomes a battleground of competing ideas … if we let it.

By “defending” the term meme – reinforcing the importance of memetics – the classic “critical debate” style of argument practically demands others attack or undermine my defence. Reinforcing the critical debate – logical attack and defence – meme. But that’s a meme that destroys knowledge in the wild, even if it refines knowledge in a controlled discourse. Beyond that environment what is needed is proper dialogue that seeks to evolve understanding. Unfortunately “critical thinking” is winning that game, because we refuse to recognise the degeneracy of that meme.

Secondly, the main aim of my agenda is not to defend meme from accusations of “too objective” or “too inhuman”. Quite the opposite. Not only am I saying memes are largely subjective (See 2), I’m using the fact to say that all other seeming objects – genes say – have an enormous subjective element, definitions which hold only in a human controlled environment. Sadly the winning meme here is scientism – that reductive objective determinsism can never be too greedy.

Even if we coined a new term for more definitive use of ideas involved in memetics in a knowledge context – simply “idea” or “mimidea” say – that term would follow a similar (1) to (4) trajectory.

I really do not care whether the term meme be accepted as valid for its intended meaning. What I really care about is that what evolves to be accepted as a valid and meaningful understanding of what it takes to be valid and meaningful …. is a memetic process. Accepting that meta-reality, we can better design rules for public discourse. One thing’s for sure, that unfettered free-for-all, the fetish of totally transparent freedom of expression, without mutual good-faith in the progress of human knowledge, leads inexorably to meaninglessness. Recent history tells us that good faith is a pretty fragile meme.

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[Post Notes: refine / distill and “starve upon the residue”.]

Nominalism as “Mechanical Philosophy”

In resisting overly mechanistic world-views, the idea of a mechanical philosophy is a scary thought. But it got my attention, as Stuart Glennan intended in the title of his “The New Mechanical Philosophy” reviewed by Carl Craver in the BJPS Review of Books. Hat tip to retweet by Judy Stout.

Based on reading the review only, I’ve not seen the book yet, it seems largely to focus on nominalism. Like many technical terms in philosophy, nominalism doesn’t sound very exciting in the real world, but the key thing is what it says about causation. Now that secured my attention:

A definition of nominalism says nothing about causation directly, indeed it is very dry and opaque in terms of any real world significance:

In metaphysics, nominalism is a philosophical view which denies the existence of universals and abstract objects, but affirms the existence of general or abstract terms and predicates.

It makes a distinction about the kinds of things that can be involved in different kinds of causal relations. Now that’s interesting.

To deny conceptual (universal and abstract) objects, that they don’t exist in your real world ontology, is almost tautological. In fact the conceptual and real, and the relations between them, are part of a more comprehensive ontology. The world we inhabit has both real and conceptual elements.

However philosophers – and physicists as natural philosophers – analyse their world-views into an ontology of what exists, they are ontologically committed, as Rebecca Goldstein has put it. The conceptual rubber of their fundamental physics or metaphysics  must hit real road before the job’s jone. The ivory tower cannot be a permanent refuge.

But it is an issue that whilst involved in theoretical discourse, the ontological commitment, of which objects are in fact real and which are merely conceptual, can get obscured. (Worse still, when working with those same objects in a real world context, we are even less likely to notice the significance at all.)

They key point is that real things in the real world are physical individuals and arrangements of individuals, named for their identity. The conceptual objects are simply named as being significant in the comprehensive ontology of our world-view, but not existing with individual identity in the real (physical) world. Hence nominalism – significant things are named even if they do not exist in a real physical sense. Real even though not physical?

Hence the caveat to both physicists and philosophers. There are several corollaries:

The simplest one is the empiricism alluded to already, that rubber must eventually hit the road. You have to ask yourself why we need to have such conceptual ontologies at all when we all probably prefer to deal with the real world? The conceptual must meet the physical at some point. Real world evidence is the test of any model. But there is a deeper issue here:

The concepts we give names to in our ontology may not exist in the real physical world, but we really do use their names and symbols in language – natural and logical – in predicates describing relationships between them. Many using causal language, even where conceptual objects are involved. One reason where we might find ourselves using sorta / kinda / more like qualifiers (after Dennett), when we realise we really do mean causation, but clearly a strange kind of causation. The review also uses the loose expression “hang together” for the job of the ontology (as I’ve heard Massimo Pigliucci too recently) rather than some more structurally definitive language. Important to note that these are not just about “ways of talking” it’s about saying anything about anything using our world-view. [Paging … Herr Wittgenstein.]

The most obvious place a simplistic physical causation seems disconnected from any conceptual kind is in the ubiquitous mind-body problem. How does an idea cause physical reality? Rather than deny it, we need to notice that causation crosses real and conceptual levels. Causation really is much weirder than a greedy-reductionist view of objective determinism. The because and therefore of argumentation is more than simply physical causation.

When it comes to “how?” because is more than cause as we know it.

Enough about me, the review itself says a lot more:

Craver agrees Glennan’s title is “audacious”. But it becomes clear the mechanical of the title is alluding to the “explosion of interest” in mechanism (ie causation) beyond the scientifically physical. That is so good to hear.

In fact the references – those in the review only – indicate further reasons to take an interest in Glennan’s latest book:

Glennan, S. [1996]: ‘Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation’,
Erkenntnis, 44, pp. 49”71

1996! The nature of causation. And there’s more:

Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. [2013]: ‘Roles of Diagrams in Computational Modeling of Mechanisms’, in M. Knauff (ed.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1839”44.

Bogen, J. [2005]: ‘Regularities and Causality; Generalizations and Causal Explanations’, in C. F. Craver and L. Darden (eds), In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 397”420.

Craver, C. [2007]: Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Craver, C. F. and Tabery, J. [2017]: ‘Mechanisms in Science’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Craver, C. F. and Darden, L. [2013]: In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darden, L. [2006]: Reasoning in Biological Discoveries: Mechanism, Interfield Relations, and Anomaly Resolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giere, R. [2004]: ‘How Models Are Used to Represent Reality’, Philosophy of Science, 71, pp. 742”52.

Woodward, J. [2003]: Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Computation, CogSci, Modelling … and questioning  scientific causal reasoning in life-sciences. Pretty much my own agenda. All human life is here. Fascinating.

There is a reality more fundamental than physics.

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Coda:

Fascinating  because of my current evolutionary-psychology agenda in human knowledge modelling and decision-making generally, in a world where “scientistic” types casually dismiss the reality of the decisions of human minds altogether, whilst stumbling unwittingly towards artificially automating them.

All the more fascinating to me not least because the computer-systems & business-modelling route that brought me into this space from physical engineering focussed very much on the difficulties of getting to grips with relationships crossing the levels between the conceptual (classes) and physical (individuals) – not to mention meta-relationships between the layers of conceptual (classes of class). Something which our clever modellers got pretty much right in the many dimensions of the core ontology of our “high-quality generic entity model”. However, after 30-years of evolution from STEP/EPISTLE through ISO15926 to the Semantic Web it’s still proving pretty much impenetrable to those working with reference data in the real business of engineering. Is it any wonder?

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[Post Note: Missed this earlier tweet from Anita Leirfall …

…. another good article, by Glennan himself.]

Rappaport’s Rule

Rappaport’s first rule of any constructive dialogue that aims to increase knowledge is:

You should attempt to re-express your interlocutor’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that they say “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way myself.”

Clearly, it’s an extreme version of understand-before-disagree and maybe life’s too short to expect to fully comply, but it puts the emphasis in the right place by shunning rhetorical tricks like straw-men as well as avoiding simple but important misunderstandings. Together with hold-your-definition – where Dennett suggests we don’t get too hung-up on objective definitions too soon in any discourse, since it’s unlikely we’ll interpret and understand them the same way anyway – Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps and Other Thinking Tools” captures Rappaport’s four rules and many more constructive ways of thinking and arguing.

You should attempt to re-express your interlocutor’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that they say “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way myself.”

You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

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More on Rhetorical Rules of Engagement

More on Humour in Rhetorical Discourse

Humanist as Language Scholar?

Interesting listening to Andrew Copson – CEO of Humanists UK (HUK) – in this brief interview with Talk Beliefs. In part it talks about his excellent recent book “Secularism” which I briefly reviewed earlier, but also covers humanism and ethics more generally.

In summary he sees humanism defined by the naturalistic (scientific, non-supernatural) outlook on human (and wider ecosystem) ethics in particular and on the truth of beliefs in general. And, given secularism in general, he sees religion pretty much as identity politics by any other name and theism / atheism as not really that interesting an issue.

Seems fair enough.

Earlier on in describing the origins of humanist / humanism as an English language term – as well as the Germanic “humanismus” origins that eventually defined the take on humanism that he and HUK hold (above) – he makes a passing reference to a humanist defined as being a grammarian or language scholar in Johnson’s original dictionary entry. A definition that sounds quaint and antiquated here and now?

(Let’s leave aside for the moment that many pre-enlightenment religious traditions – supernaturally theistic or not – may have long espoused basic human dignity – say, individual freedoms and the golden-rule – as key tenets. This is more a matter who might claim to have “invented” humanism, than what we actually mean by it. Spoiler – humans did it.)

I actually think the received wisdom above holds an important issue missing in appearing to dismiss the grammarian from the naturalistic definition.

Many anti-religion / pro-science groups are nevertheless careful to indicate that their humanist outlook is pro science and reason or rationality. That is despite many individual adherents falling into the scientistic trap that science has some monopoly or priority over reason and rationality, in fact most public considered positions recognise the important linguistic nuance in that “and“.

The knowledge content of science may be objectively independent of humanity, but our reason and rationality are not. As Johnson captured, humanist reason and rationality is as much to do with language – and information and epistemology more generally – as it does with objective science. A naturalistic outlook must cover both (objective) science and (human) rationality. We do well neither to conflate these nor reduce one to the other.

Naturalistic is not as simple as scientific.

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[Post Note: Also linked by Andrew is a written interview with Conatus News. (Hat tip to Terry Waites for sharing.)

Good, is the recognition that exactly who invented humanism, where and when, is no big deal – empathic rational humans reinvented the idea over millennia, and having invented it had preserved the ideas in cultural (and religious) traditions before they were eventually captured by secular umbrella institutions like the UN.

I would take issue however, as a 60+ “secular, atheist, humanist, rationalist, free-thinker”, with his generalisation of “older humanists”. I think we’re beyond any post-9/11 surprise reaction to fears of “irrational” religion and threats to hard-won liberal freedoms. In this Post-Post-Modern (PoPoMo) world it’s about fixing the over-reaction to those perceived threats that have led to warlike polarisations between Political-Correctness and Intolerance, between Science and Religion, between Liberals and Authoritarians, between them and us generally.]