Year: 2018

So far I’ve only seen the Simon Sharma first excellent episode of BBC2’s Civilisations, but plan on catching up. This morning I read Kenan Malik’s review piece from the Observer, and right now I’m listening to all three presenters with Andrew Marr on BBC R4 Start the Week.

Malik’s excellent piece sees a lot of tension between the “certainty” of Clarke’s original UK perspective, and the alternative perspectives of John Berger and the latest BBC series. Strangely he sees the inability to provide (definitive) answers as a weakness of the new series? (I’ll say more when I’ve digested the whole.) The Marr conversation also goes some way to correct any suggestion that Civilisations is a “corrective rebuke” to Clarke’s Civilisation. Far from it. There are many overlapping perspectives (cf Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”).

One question that struck me right from the outset – Clarke and Sharma – is why the land-grab for “art” as the cypher for civilisation as a whole? Marr asks the same question, and we get the sense that art is enabled by the technologies of the day, but art is the human pinnacle. I don’t disagree, simply question how uncontentious is this?

Holding thoughts …

[Deep and long-standing topic. Art & Craft – the “rt” Pirsigian root – even in Engineering / Ingenuity / Built-environment is key.]

[And talking of alternative perspectives, well done BBC R4 for following Start the Week with “An Alternative History of Art” – inspired.]

[In terms of “the greatest ever documentary” I’ve always seen Clarke’s Civilisation as being of a pair with Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. Never seen any need for one culture to launch a land-grab competing with the other. Good fences. A real third-culture.]

The idea of an intellectual dark web sounds subversively negative, but it is a term coined by economist Eric Weinstein I originally picked-up from Jacob Kishere in his Medium post “What is driving the rise of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ ?“. A version of that same piece has also been published by Conatus News. I’ve linked and tweeted a couple of mentions to the former already.

It’s a topic close to my heart. So much would-be rational discourse falls into standards tropes of polarising binary debates in all forms of media (and polls and referenda!), compounded by the compression into rapid “bites” in social media memes and their click-bait headlines, and further moulded by PR and PC constraints on should-know-better “platforming” by academic institutions, institutions in the “market” for money and punters.

It’s a good thing that intellectuals do find their own space to have proper dialogue. Dialogue where not every statement is subjected to the glare of public “transparency” (*) and can simply be treated as part of the dialogue towards mutually beneficial learning. Sure, no learning dialogue should be confined to ivory towers, the learnings must hit the road as real rubber at some point, but difficult dialogue needs space for subtlety and nuance of differences to be integrated into workable knowledge and practical wisdom. It is reductive to insist that every step in discourse – in context – must stand up to instant scrutiny in some global objectivity. [It’s the same reductivity of scientism that presumes all wholes are determined only by their parts without the complex processes of their whole history (see ergodicity). And (*) Transparency in 2010 and most recently with Dan Dennett.]

However as Jacob points out, it is a sure sign of the bad state of things in the public intellectual sphere. Public debate on important and difficult topics simply cannot be conducted in the media and institutions that most people subscribe to. Proper dialogue needs curated boundaries, and trust must be able to exist both sides of such boundaries. Good fences make good neighbours.

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[Post Note: Is it any wonder people with something to say retreat to the intellectual dark web, when there are barbarians at the gate in the real world?]

Recent (26 Jan 2018) talk by Dan Dennett recorded in Warsaw and published by Polish Rationalists on the topic of his most recent “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) book on the evolution of intelligent consciousness. I’ve written and talked much about B2BnB so not a great deal “new” in the presentation – and unfortunately the recording doesn’t capture his slides, just his words. Nevertheless a great talk on his key topics as well as a great book for the Dennett novice.

Other than the hardware plus software model of mind (consciousness, intelligence, the lot), like his book he doesn’t actually spend as much time on this as he does on words and memes as the basic tools and building blocks of everything, including intelligent conscious mind, and on the fact that these are information objects independent of any of their physical embodiments. As I said in my own reviews, Turing and Shannon (and Wiener) feature more centrally than Darwin in this story.

I’m already comfortable with the language of memes and memetics, and the fact that the word simply coined objectively what was already a clear subject of mimesis for centuries. It’s just a word for long established concepts, but a word – because of its seemingly reductive objectivity – that draws a lot of flak from art and culture and the humanities in general. The Q&A allows him to address many objections, as he does as well with his examples in the talk. He also incidentally makes many points I’ve made in my own interpretations of his work in my own. This is the real value for me in this particular talk.

Memetics is no less predictive than genetics and any complex systems science. It predicts that stuff will happen, the kinds of stuff and the explanatory how it will happen. Like all evolution, specific detailed objects and even creative genius exist – attract specific names in our ontology – only with hindsight. Memetics explanations are only as reductive and objectifying as you make them – culture and humanities really have nothing to fear. Dan himself always uses qualitative language sorta / kinda and “more like”. Worth understanding Dennett’s form of compatibilism – subjective stuff doesn’t reduce to objective components, even though they explain the processes. These processes and patterns may be “determined” by these objective component interactions, but the products of culture and creativity are not. This is as important for scientific objectors to understand – eg in the the reality of conscious will – as anyone concerned with the humanities.

Determinism, like transparency, is over-rated – a fetish of the scientistic. The humanities and humanists are right to fear scientism. Some scientists and philosophers have a lot wrong.

There is a strong acknowledgement of information science practitioners – systems developoers –  as one of the fields that takes true ontology of the real world – all of it, not just science – very seriously, and that philosophers ought to take information scientists more seriously. This was incidentally my route into this space.

Might be worth transcribing more of Dennett’s actual words from the Q&A … meantime, worth a listen.

[Hat tip to Terry Waites for the link.]

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Post Notes: topics in the transcript.

Evolution (hi-fidelity / hi-fecundity / lo-mutation – repeatedly emphasised here) is massively positive feedback loop. See also Maruyama on “second cybernetics”.

Transparency is a bad thing – fetishised in mass & social media. Need-to-know is better.

Fundamental Information.

No-brainer = brainless.

Reading this piece today from 2012 on Larry Krauss’ “Something From Nothing”. I reviewed it myself and saw him talk on the topic at that time too. It was pretty disingenuous hype, even though much of the reality was acknowledged in the detail, if not the headings and headlines of his titles and talks. I missed the spat reported here, but see now it was eventually mediated by (my hero) Dan Dennett. I’ve posted previously on Dan’s ongoing attempts to educate the other atheist-scientist poster-boys – Dawkins, Harris, Pinker – on philosophical (ontological and epistemological) considerations beyond their narrow rationalist ken.

Talking of them as “poster boys” – in the light of latest Krauss allegations (anonymous and unconfirmed other than single BuzzFeed article, so unrepeated and unlinked for now – see first comment below) – I also posted previously on sexual chemistry (Pinker) and flirting (Krauss). Ultimately his wife (!) in the former case; incorrigible I said in the latter; but entirely mutual and consenting in both cases in my experience.

Post Notes:

The Larry Krauss stuff does seem serious enough, which is sad. I’m no fan of Larry that’s clear, but sad none-the-less.

I see Sam Harris expressing the same sadness re Krauss in his own way:

“This is a very serious business. We have a colleague and a friend and a person with a very serious and much cherished scientific reputation under assault now.”
[talking in Phoenix Feb 23]

“I think we should be slow to destroy a person‘s reputation … ”
[tweeting in defence of the above statements.]

(Nowhere does Harris defend Krauss actions, whatever they were.) But what is interesting – appalling – to me is the “warfare” between the scientistic public intellectuals (Dawkins, Harris, Pinker, Krauss etc) and their critics. C J Werleman is one critic I have some time for, he gets the fault with their scientism. The same scientism I too am relentless in criticising – and providing constructive alternative epistemologies. But this warlike class of critics – I got the above from @danarel retweet by Werleman – are hateful people, and haters gonna hate, so I’m not including their links.

Everybody on whichever side is fighting whilst humming “we didn’t start the fire”. No disputing that the scientistic horsemen started their careers pouring scorn and hatred on the superstitions of their religious enemies with very little real claim to any enlightened high-ground other than, you know, because science. Choosing sides is the last thing anyone should do.

Time for (proper!) dialogue. Come in Jordan Peterson and the intellectual dark web. Equally sad that true intellectual dialogue has to create its own dark web and leave social and mainstream media to the numbskulls.

Leland (Lee) Beaumont has been corresponding with several of us for more than a decade in dialogue about what we mean by practical wisdom and where more formal ideas about knowledge should fit in. A little constructive synthesis amidst all the dialectical debates between right and wrong, good and bad, science and religion, the daily cut and thrust of liberal vs conservative politics and truth vs fake-news.

His many articles published at Best Thinking and organised as a course on Wikiversity in the last 3 years or so represent a great collection of evolving resources in their own right, but recently he posted a 30 minute summary on “Living Wisely by Seeking Real Good“. Worth 30 minutes of anyone’s time. [Neat evolving dynamic feature of Wikimedia is that Pinker’s latest “Enlightenment Now” is already in the further reading list!]

Understanding reality and being motivated towards the good involves topics that might easily be cast as conflicting positions and binary dichotomies but what this simple presentation highlights is that real good is an integration across all of these driven from basic human dignity – the same dignity that underpins the ubiquitous golden rule and the original UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and Freedoms. Plain and simple yet, as a distillation of so much material, quite profound.

Whilst many epistemological questions of why and how will always require more detailed consideration, of rationality and science, philosophy and theology, even if wisdom itself remains aloof from definitional consideration, it’s good to progress through life with the basics in action at all times.

The trick is realising the integration and convergence of the true and the good, when they might appear as divergent axes on a typical Boston Consulting 2 x 2 grid.

[Post Note: Would love to see a Cynefin (Certainty & Chaos) version of that 2×2 grid.]

In the spirit of “long-read” here is a long-watch (1hr 40mins).

So far I’ve only watched the first few minutes (with false start *) … but it bodes well.
(* Missing start available here.)

Firstly, Rubin makes it clear in his “no rules” facilitation that this is about people talking to each other, himself included at their discretion. The rules come from the enlightened civility of the participants. No adversarial debate either between the two participants or simplistic fault-finding between journalist and participant(s). Proper dialogue as I call it. (Let’s see if they get to first base … I know very little about Rubin, a scarcely more about Shapiro and a little more about Peterson.)

But this is 1hr 40mins. How is a journalist / interviewer to achieve proper dialogue in a 5-10 minute package for a current affairs programme? I’m thinking of the Peterson / Newman interview where I support both parties – Cathy got stuff wrong for sure, but where does the fault really lie? People who learn from mistakes are the kind of people we really need more of.

Anyway here’s hoping the rest of this piece illustrates my point. I’ll be back.

[Spoiler alert – it does, in spades.]

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Real time notes (All human life is here. Material enough for several doctoral theses in here!):

The end of post-modern despair – (PoPoMo) Post-Post-Modernism as I’ve called my own position.

(Remember now why I find Shapiro hard – that whiney accented voice – prejudice, sorry!)

Stating understanding of mutual positions back to the other – and agreeing! (Proper dialogue)

Values … metaphysical … even if a holy book can be a useful repository. Agreed

Biological evolution does not exhaust the archetypes. Precisely! Meaning and value is revealed much more deeply than the cortical.

(Personally believe enlightened understandings of consciousness already get this – so less misunderstood than Peterson suggests.)

Mutual conversational pod-casting … seen as weird but productive … (See Jacob Kishere’s Medium post).

Metaphysical first principles, practically theological. No real distinction.

Internet has exposed what’s “wrong” – enabled us to see (if we’re looking / listening) the problem.

Come for the scandal, stay for the content.
(Comment – “The ultimate clickbait. So happy it turned out to be genuine. 😀“)

Cathy Newman video raised as an example. – A flashpoint of “scandal” that might have achieved genuine “aha” – exactly as I posted. The thing that made it special was Cathy’s “You got me” in the moment. Precisely.

Levels-of- and meta-to- the topic at hand. Hear, hear.

I don’t know who you’re talking to – it isn’t me. (Peterson’s 12 rules & Rappaport rule)

The media is not in the “smart and decent” business.

Classic journalism has been degenerate for quite some time … the summarising back after brief Q&A interviews – but summaries are for media and consumer needs, not for the benefit of the content topic. ie a general point – Cathy just a useful example.

[Jacob says this Peterson post-Cathy analysis with Rogan covers this better. Not sure I agree, but there are many “intellectual dark-web” post-mortems out there.]

Radical left can’t even get their insults right.

PoMo’s are owed some thanks for getting is through to this point. Sure! PoPoMo as I say.
They had a point – so many points of possible interpretation (ie hard) – but “therefore no good point” error is nihilistic. Common sense idea of real.

Iterations across many “games”. (Game theory of memetic evolution – in a nutshell.)

Not caring about offence, hurting feelings? …. not sure about this … ah, identity politics between individual and groups? Alt-right opportunism in dominating identity politics. (Part of game on levels and timescales when it comes to causing offence – NOT caring IS a problem.)

Bringing anger and emotion to a “proper dialogue” – common fault, OK if used sparingly and knowingly acknowledged. Minimum force in defence, not destroying (shellacking) your opponent. This is why the Newman interview worked.

When is gender the actual point at issue? Easy categorisation when opposite sexes are involved …. but often mythical. But honesty says that sometimes the interaction is subtly defined by inter-gender inter-action. It’s the game strategy that varies, not the intellectual content. Shows how many layered this is.

Judaeo-Christian religious historical relations …

(Tremendous positivity in the comment threads – pesumably over the heads of most trolls … See Jacob’s point.)

[….]

Identifier-s, not simply identit-y – oh yes. Individual and group identities – cyclical co-evolution – essential to development.

Psychedelics … Jungian wisdom on LSD – beware the unearned wisdom – beware the crushing responsibility of the enlightening experience. Maybe more real than you want it to be. Careful what you wish for.

Counter-productive to preach – to force faith – on people.

Sam (Harris) cannot be an evolutionary biologist AND say enlightenment values do not come from Judaeo-Christian tradition. (Did I get that right.) I believe that. Values are the elephant in the room generally.

Putting Harris and Dennet in same boat – denying consciousness and free-will (?) – actually neither do. Dennett most obviously, but even Sam contrary to most people’s beliefs. Evolution of religion more than a “spandrell” (a la Pinker) – agreed.

Always possible to commit the error of saying something stupid in defence of your position. Possibly the main thing to strive to avoid in playing “the game” – ethical responsibility too. Main risk to undermining your progress. (Thinking of David Bellamy’s fall from grace.) We’re all human and fallible.

Looking at government and thinking – “is this the best we can do?”.
Rather be (feel) the dumbest person in a smart civilisation.

OK to fake it if your intentions are right.

AI is going to change humanity – reason why WE need to care enough to help define (and achieve) that future vision.

SJW’s are on their way out (thank god).

Teaching vs indoctriniation – on those PC / IDP topics …. dangerous, but risk being true. It’s all risk – hear, hear.

Find what you’re good at. (Popular doesn’t imply good.) Find what bothers you directly, that affect you and you can effect directly – there are enough problems out there.

Ends with – let’s keep the conversation going, and widen it. EXCELLENT. RECOMMENDED.

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[Post Note: Just a 30 minute watch, but an exemplary “Proper Dialogue” – Jordan Peterson meets Iain McGilchrist. And yet quite the opposite, a Jordan Peterson spat with Slavoj Zizek.]

Which came first? The second or the first?

“The Second Cybernetics” is the title of a 1963 paper by Magoroh Maruyama which I discover from a bit of googling around was considered seminal in shifting the focus of cybernetics from machines and mechanistic systems to the biological and social sphere. Much referenced in many later works.

Cybernetics is pretty fundamental to my Psybertron agenda, that the origins of cybernetics / kybernetes was always more general than machines, being more concerned with social systems following WWII. I suspect if I dig out my copy of Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind” (1994) I will find Maruyama as a reference (*). Certainly my own thrust has been to counteract the mechanistic focus of systems of regulation, whether in soft rules (for the guidance of wise men) or in arrangements of hard-wired gates (in good-fences). Especially topical now as people are predicting ever more algorithmic AI interventions in human life.

Maruyama too confirms that whilst he is giving the softer, more fluid kind of cybernetics a name to distinguish it from the harder mechanistic kind, already becoming prevalent in the white-heat of technological industrial growth of the 1960’s, the softer kind with the second name was always a primary part of the original intent of first cybernetics.

Since both types are systems of mutual causal relationships, or in other words systems of mutual feedbacks [between parts and wholes], they both fall under the subject matter of cybernetics.

But since the deviation-counteracting type has predominantly been studied up till now under the title of cybernetics, let us consider its studies the first cybernetics, and call the studies of the deviation-amplifying mutual causal relationships “the second cybernetics.”

The deviation-counteracting mutual causal process is also called “morphostasis“, while the deviation-amplifying mutual causal process is called “morphogenesis“.

Though the second cybernetics as defined here is lagging behind the development of the first cybernetics at the present moment, the germination of the concept of deviation amplifying mutual causal process is not entirely new. The concept was formulated in some fields even before the advent of [applied] cybernetics.

The field of economics is a good example.

The second form of cybernetics was already being applied in the human world before the so-called first kind could be applied in automating the physical world.

Maruyama uses his deviation-counteracting and deviation-amplifying distinction for what I short-handed as hard and soft. Either way, the key point is in the morphostasis / morphogenesis distinction.

The former is essentially static, always self-regulating towards some intrinsic equilibrium or to some stable externally-pre-set state in the mechanism – like a thermo-STAT. It merely preserves the past.

The latter is genetic, creative of new states which may be meta-stable, dynamically-stable or forever in unstable flux from which the future evolves. Quite rightly, the second cybernetics is the primary focus for an enlightened humanity. And not suprisingly is more complicated and more interesting. Not for the first time the easy meme has dominated the difficult.

I came across the Maruyama reference in Alan Rayner’s “The Origin of Life Patterns – in the natural inclusion of space in flux” about which I’ll say more soon, but I’m long overdue a review. In fact the reference is in the preface by the Springer Briefs in Psychology series editors Giudeppina Marsico and Jaan Valsiner:

“Biological and social systems – open in their relationships with their environment – constantly produce innovation. New forms come into being, which are transformed into still newer forms – while maintaining generative continuity with the past.”

More on Rayner’s Origin of Life Patterns to come …

In fact, there’s a lot more to come on Maruyama’s Second Cybernetics too. Two-way “mutual causation” and causality itself, no less! The evolution of inhomogeneous entropy gradients. Informational model of genetics, and a simple cellular-automata example. Cultural and technological evolution. Naturally evolved directivity – teleology! All human life is here.

“The elaboration and refinement of the second cybernetics belong to the future, and we may expect many fruitful results from them.”

Magoroh Maruyama (June 1963)

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[Post Note: (*) Actually there is no reference by Dupuy to Maruyama, but Dupuy also talks in terms of going back to focus on a second cybernetics. I always find parallel thought interesting.]

Picked-up the Guardian long-read on “The Cult of Mary Beard” last night. As a clearly sympathetic biographical piece I found the use of “cult” in the title a little odd.

I presumed some irony, but never found that to be resolved, not even in the conclusion that her star having been in the ascendancy as a British national treasure, she knew she would inevitably fall out of the limelight at some point. I don’t see temporary popularity as necessarily cultish. The style and content of her messages fit a time and need but context-fugit and we either learn from them or not as we all move on. That’s as true of messages that are geuninely valuable as they are of a misguided cult.

I find Mary Beard genuinely valuable. And the long-read is valuable too; providing a great sense of the person you wouldn’t get from the surface of her public writings and broadcasts. Recommeneded.

One reason she has been in the spotlight recently was the spat between her and her legions of social-history supporters on the one hand and a band of scientistic detractors – amongst whom Nassim Taleb was prominent – criticising the appearance of an “African” Roman (ie non-slave) in an educational British-Roman historical piece as a PC fiction. Though the parties are un-named the events get a mention in the long-read:

Beard radiates authority and expertise, but she does not hesitate to get mixed up in messy public arguments, which often puts her on the frontline of the culture wars. Last year, when a far-right conspiracy theorist attacked a BBC cartoon that showed a man of sub-Saharan appearance as a Roman in Britain — political correctness gone mad! — Beard calmly stepped in to explain there was in fact “plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain”. Her expert intervention was met with a what she later described as a “torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender”.

For most people, this would be a cautionary tale; for Beard, it was evidence that such battles cannot be shirked. Embedded in her refusal to be silenced, in her endless online engagement, is a kind of optimism: the idealistic, perhaps totally unrealistic, notion that if only we listened to each other, if only we argued more cogently, more tolerantly and with better grace, then we could make public discourse something better than it is.

I agree with the sentiment and admire that position. A major part of my own agenda is that without “proper dialogue” no argument leads anywhere constructive. Unfortunately the mention as quoted perpetuates a myth that was left in the wake of the original spat. Any disagreement involving social media ends up with a sexist, ageist, racist stink as the trolls pile in, the after-taste can scarcely be anything but bitter, and subtle flavours are inevitable lost.

No one was arguing against “plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain“. That’s a given and that was not the root of the spat.

The political correctness accusations were about proportionality of representation in selecting a single (cartoonishly black-skinned) sub-Saharan / central-African individual as representative of the complex statistics of many haplo-groups that could and would have been amongst the Britannica Romana population over time. Skin colour and appearance varies across these many groups, and exactly which groups matter a great deal to today’s descendents of those populations whose routes took them from (say) North-Africa to the Middle-East and Europe or later from Central Africa to the Caribbean and America and any number of variations on those heritages.

As any historian surely knows, time and context matter. When it comes to identity politics, we do need to care about the political correctness of messages communicated. Of course simplifying decisions need to be made when representing a – model of a – whole complex ecology in a few cartoon examples, and creative fiction is essential to filling gaps in the social-historical record. It necessarily requires careful dialogue when a scientists talks to a social-historian, honesty and care on both sides. Social history is not “BS” (to quote Taleb) simply because it cannot all be evidenced objectively, directly and individually in every chosen detail. That would be scientism (*).

Once the trolls have piled in to defend their chosen party – talking past each other on both sides – dialogue becomes attack and defence. That’s a war between cults – even if it’s a phoney war to promote book sales – on both sides. Battles should not be shirked, but the point should be to turn them into constructive dialogue, not a fight to the death.

That aside, Charlotte Higgins’ piece is a recommended read. You will certainly learn a good deal about Mary Beard.

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[Post Note: (*) In fact one of my pet hates is overly creative scientific representation – sexy CGI videos of scientific happenings – of unobserved detail at cosmic and quantum scales, merely inferred from theory and indirect evidence. Obviously they help communication – and sell clicks and eyeballs – of the otherwise invisible processes and objects at issue, but their visualised “reality” overly reifies what is really informed speculation and generally misleads on the actual uncertainty and lack of detail in a way that a sketch or an “understood to be metaphorical” rubber-sheet (say) cannot. Again, you can forgive the creative “artistic licence” but it cuts both ways and requires balance of intentions. Dramatisation of both social-reality and science necessarily involve creative fiction.]