Intelligent Flow by Alan Rayner

Intelligent Flow

We remain Caught
In a Web of Thought,
Dislocated from our natural senses,
Which argues the Toss
Between Prophet & Loss
As to whether
Life is Created by Intelligent Designation,
Or
Abstracted from randomly generated particular
According to which best fits
Some pre-conceived niche

Stuff & Non-sense I say!
At this dawn of today

Nature’s made of Flow
Don’t you know
Not building blocks
Assembled by some hidden hand
According to some Master Plan

Yes, even building-blocks are made of Flow
And Flow is made
From space and energetic Flux
In receptive-responsive relationship
Also known as Love
Our only true Source of natural, evolutionary Creativity

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Alan Rayner

Tweeted this morning by Alan Rayner following a twitter exchange on “fluidarity” yesterday. All roads lead inevitably to love(*). The metaphysical language of receptive-responsive-flux at the heart of Alan’s Natural Inclusion worldview remains hard to fit into accepted norms of rational discourse – arguing the toss between prophet and loss –  but is seen to be entirely natural in his poetry.

(*) What’s so funny ’bout … ?

After the Fireworks

8th July 1968 was a Monday 50 years ago when Robert Pirsig set off from the Twin Cities on his Honda CB77 Superhawk with son Chris riding pillion and friends John and Sylvia Sutherland alongside on their BMW. That road trip to California formed the narrative of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). You get a clue to the summer holiday timing when Chris finds discarded 4th July firework cases at the Shadehill campsite near Lemmon (SD) on the evening of day 2.

Many fans of ZMM – it has sold many millions – have pieced together such arcane details over the years, from DiSanto and Steele’s Guiebook to ZMM (*1) to the many so-called Pirsig Pilgrims who have dropped in to the DeWeese’s in Cottonwood Canyon, Bozeman (MT) as they’ve retraced the journey for themselves.

[All references in footnotes, read on … ]

Artist friends of the Pirsigs from the days when Bob had worked teaching English composition at Montana State in Bozeman 1959 to 61, the DeWeese’s are signficicant to the chatauqua – the public educational dialogue – within the ZMM story. Bob shifts his metaphors away from his main thread on the mechanics of motorcycles to that of a seemingly mundane self-assembly barbecue for the edutainment of his artistic audience. As well as being a teacher of English rhetoric, Bob had previously also written manuals for early computers and weapons guidance systems. All the while we are reminded that the real object of our maintenance is ourselves. What we are looking for is an operating manual for our minds.

One reason for ZMM‘s success and fanbase was that it caught the zeitgeist of its 1974 publication. It was “culture-bearing” at a time when many were dissatisfied with a post-hippy void left by rejection of the increasing mechanisation of life living with the prevailing military-industrial-complex.

I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust,
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

(Joni Mitchell “Woodstock” Big Sur, 1969)

Pirsig provided a reflective philosophical dissertation packaged up in a motorcycle road-trip / buddy-movie script on what back to the garden might mean for a generation of seekers after truth and goodness.  Think Easy Rider minus the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, or Kerouac’s On The Road stream-of-consciousness with added index-cards. Many ZMM fans found satisfaction in the qualitative individual Zen-lifestyle advice they found there. Whether classified on the shelves under philosophy or under lifestyle, it sold millions and still does. But Pirsig was on a more tangible mission to define quality as something altogether more metaphysical, underlying the whole of objective reality.

This is the start of what I’ve characterised as a persistent irony with Pirsig’s work. A Catch-22. I didn’t come to Pirsig until 2001 aged 45 after 25 years as an engineer. When I did, this battle to dissolve the distracting division between things classically objective and romantically subjective was already raging between Pirsig afficionados who at the same time were working to establish his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) as a thing – the object of serious academic study. The example of modern-day Stoicism (*2) gives hope to the idea that life-style advice and serious academia are not mutually exclusive when in comes to living philosophy.

Pirsig himself wrote his follow-up to ZMM in Lila, published in 1991, as his attempt to establish his MoQ more explicitly as a philosophy, though again his message was bound-up in the rhetoric of a “road-trip”. Actually a sailboat trip this time down the Eerie canal system, the Hudson and the Intra-coastal waterway via downtown Manhattan, where the audience for his chautauqua this time are fellow sailors, Robert Redford and a bar-girl Lila he picks-up along the way. Contrasting with the mysterious recluse persona cultivated to market the original ZMM, Pirsig did in fact go out on the road to promote his philosophical ideas on quality in 1993 and 1995. Pirsig himself however never engaged in comparative criticism with fellow philosophers, a practice he once dubbed disparagingly as philosophology. A philosophologist being to a philosopher as an art-critic is to an artist.

The Lila Squad, those that had taken-up the challenge of Lila to set Pirsig’s MoQ in the philosophical canon, formed an on-line discussion  forum whose primary condition for membership was to have read Lila as well as ZMM. 12 years later in 2003 Dan Glover was able to publish Lila’s Child (*3), a consolidated set of interpretations on Pirsig’s MoQ complete with Pirsig’s own annotations.

As I mentioned, I was a latecomer to Pirsig. I had joined the Lila Squad on the MoQ-Discussion (MD) forum only in 2002, the same year I read both ZMM and Lila for the first time. I stayed active thru 2010 though I’d already signed-off my own Pirsig learning aims in 2008 and eventually dropped-off any participation in 2014.

Anyone “debating” Pirsig’s MoQ has their own reasons for doing so. Initially anyone might honestly claim to be curious to learn and/or test understanding. For some Pirsig becomes the professional interest of their career in philosophy and/or education. Given non-acceptance of Pirsig in mainstream philosophy, that represents significant personal investment by those that do so, in order to achieve and maintain such a position.

Now, as Dan Dannett has said, philosophy is a contact sport. Even small differences over otherwise large levels of agreement can lead to quite vicious personal and rhetorical fisticuffs. Everyone has their own good-intentions, but bad-faith easily sets-in as the default position regarding the disagreement and questioning of others. Claims of authority of direct communication with the author, some I’d even characterised as Pirsig’s Bulldogs. Sometimes even expressed agreement is tainted with ad-hominem suspicions of wilful misrepresentation for personal interests. Part of that irony, where relegation of the ego is an explicit aspect of the MoQ.

People pressing each others buttons.  All kinds of dirty tricks, and not just rhetorical ones. There was even one infamous “Sokal” trick of presenting a spoof paper to test the Pirsig “establishment” response. Suffice to say bad feelings linger between certain parties over particular disagreements. Mis-representation and trolling seem part of the fabric of social-media reality in 2018 but ever since on-line mailing lists and internet discussion forums were invented, flame-wars and very public personal attacks have been occupational hazards. These are of course as old as philosophical discourse itself. If I learned anything, it’s that academia is as inter-personally cut-throat competitive as any commercial business.

After a decade of participation I’d learned a lot about philosophical and rhetorical debate generally but the Lila Squad / MD bubble no longer felt like a healthy environment in which to make progress on either Pirsig or philosophy in general. I actually made several acquaintances that have become firm friends and stayed in regular contact, some still in ongoing Pirsig-related contexts and not solely on-line.

One such, in his last post on his own blog relating to Pirsig, back in 2010 wrote of another Pirsigian (*4): “[We’ve] have had several long-standing disagreements for over seven years now” and an increasing “rudeness” where “we’ve found less and less new to talk about”. In that same piece he goes on to describe the specific point of disagreement – the idea of accepting a “Subject-Object Layer” in order to resolve definitive mis-understandings of the level which Pirsig had called “Social”. Ironically, those defending the Pirsig status quo were actually displaying a more static social view of the ongoing evolutionary dynamics of human intellect, but at some point we all have to stop arguing and live life.

I, and I think I speak for a few others, didn’t stop participating in Pirsig debates because I’d lost interest in Pirsig. Far from it. Pirsig’s MoQ had become embedded in my own world view to the point that I’d lost interest in arguing about that in particular. I’m quoted by others as holding that “Pirsig’s MoQ represents the best framework for the whole of reality I’ve come across” (*5). I still believe that, even though no-one can have the last word, ideas always evolve and anyway, I prefer synthesis to criticism.

Some ex-MD Pirsigian’s continued to plough their own furrows in academic philosophy, so they have personal interest in solving the problem of how to fit Pirsig into the philosophical canon. There are obvious relationships to the Greeks, to Kant and to the US Pragmatists as well as Zen Buddhist philosophies to be explored. None of which we can even attempt here. Still only one person to my knowledge, Anthony McWatt, has successfully made Pirsig’s MoQ the subject of their entire PhD thesis, though gradually more and more academics have Pirsig as a string to their bow. McWatt also went on to create several documentary films, the second of which “On the Road with Robert Pirsig” I’d recommend as an introduction for any Pirsig newcomer with”On the Road with John Sutherland” as probably the best of the bunch for those already interested.

As I suggested, one supreme irony in Pirsig is his rejection of comparative philosophical debate. He’s not in the mainstream precisely because he didn’t like mainstream behaviour – he rejected the academy – and yet, for many, a serious question is what’s the best way to get the essential value – quality – of his work recognised by the mainstream?

One attempt by “established” UK philosopher Julian Baggini in 2006 (*6), to tease out connections between Pirsig and the accepted canon, foundered at least partly because the Pirsigian camp chose to conduct the dialogue by indirect correspondence. The attempt to insulate Pirsig himself from perceived critical intent of philosophology was surely misguided, but in any event it achieved little progress. We can’t fail to notice the parallel in the subsequent rise of the intellectual dark web as a safe-space for constructive dialogue on the publicly disagreeable?

But, there is ultimately that Catch 22 in attempting to fit a novel take on what it means to be rational, using the rationality of established public academic discourse. Pirsig himself noted the exasperation in trying to add something new to mainstream philosophy whilst at the same time manouevring to outflank the entire Western canon. Philosophy is not just a contact sport, it’s war and the Art of War was written by a Zen Buddhist (*7). Good luck to those on that quest.

For many others, the point is that direct and immediate participation  – the radical empirical experience of what matters most in life – is the lesson learned beyond any academic rationalisation. The koans of Zen serve to emphasise that rational responses to life’s biggest questions can be beside the point to actually learning the answers in living practice. Most of us have of course chosen our own balanced selection from the available menu.

Pirsig died only last year, his books still sell and philosophical debate continues 50 years on, if a little more diffuse and less intense than the Lila Squad years. As I noted at the time, his demise prompted a renewed interest in his work and many reflective pieces on what that meant to many different people. [Underway since then has been a new film project with the working title “Pirsig’s Journey” – sadly since defunct.] Pirsig more than once discussed a film project directly with actor-director and mutual-admirer Robert Redford and in later years let it be known that official biographical rights to follow that up lay with his wife, now widow, Wendy (*8). There is a certain perfect circularity that the film project was targetting the Sundance festival for its release.

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More information – generally:

[2024 Update – see Robert Pirsig Association.]

My own “Psybertron Pirsig Pages” of Pirsig, ZMM, Lila, and MoQ links and many more Pirsig references in the blog. Including my own personal (and naive) thought journey and the Pirsig Biographical Timeline. [Biographical source materials and correspondence archive with Mark Richardson and extended in his “Zen and Now. And here, my own 2018 “sign-off” from further Pirsig research.]

Those Pirsig Pages also include an “External Links” section, which I generally keep up to date. For now examples include:

      • Henry Gurr’s “ZMM Quality” web site of the ZMM road-trip narrative locations and so much more. (Also via Facebook). [See also Gary Wegner’s ZMM Route Map in Google format.]
      • David Harding’s “Good Metaphysics” for metaphysics and the MoQ itself.
      • Pirsig dot org” (temporary holding pages) incorporating key content from Good Metaphysics and “Robert Pirsig dot org” pages of Anthony McWatt (retired). [McWatt-Pirsig correspondence archive also at MSU and at Harvard. 2024 Update – Note that all the above (and more) resources / links being organised and indexed under that recovered URL of the Robert Pirsig Association at www.robertpirsig.org]

[Easy Rider, On the Road, Catch-22, Cuckoo’s Nest, Woodstock
– givens inspired by the beat generation?]

More information – the specifics referenced:

(*1) DiSanto & Steele’s – “Guidebook to ZMM

(*2) Massimo Pigliucci’s – everyday stocism as living philosophy “How to be a Stoic“. (See also his blog at “Footnotes to Plato“)

(*3) Dan Glover’s – “Lila’s Child

(*4) Matt Kundert’s – “last post” 2010 Pirsig / MD post.
(Also his 2006 post on Dewey, Pirsig and Rorty.)

(*5) Ian Glendinning’s – retrospective on MoQ Worldview in a picture.

(*6) Julian Baggini’s – Pirsig “interview”.

(*7) Sun Tzu’s – “The Art of War“.

(*8) Wendy as custodian of Pirsig’s story – Tim Adams’ November 2006 interview drew on my existing timeline for much of the story Bob had already shared in correspondence, but in fact Bob makes explicit (jokey) reference: “I told Wendy she should sell [the book / bio / film adaptation] rights as soon as I die.” [Update 2022 – see “On Quality” edited by Wendy Pirsig. and this newly released video of a talk by Robert Pirsig just a few weeks after publication of ZMM.]

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[Timely post-note on living philosophy:

 Zen and the Art of a Higher Education – It may seem odd for the university educated or even university educators to welcome a book that seems to view the academy as enemy territory. But properly understood, and more in keeping with Pirsig’s original intentions, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance shows how the learning in a lecture hall or seminar room should be preparation for a life of learning on the open road.”

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from LA Review of Books 15 July 2018.
A recommended read on many levels.]

Correlation is not Causation, but …

Correlation is not causation …

… smart-asses often point out when someone mis-uses some statistical or perceived correlation. That’s true, and easy enough when potential common causal connections are obviously available, but that’s quite unusual in the “real world”.

Causation is fundamentally mysterious even in simple Newtonian billiard-ball cases, or our daily expectation of sunrise, but at the common sense level causation is really about empirical certainty of expectation and prediction – if this then that, whether precise “physical” mechanisms are or are not clearly available.

In the real world however mechanisms are rarely simple or precise, so causation is really a testable theory of why if this then that, where the why is controllable. But real life is never a repeatable experiment, except maybe with drosophilla, and rarely with humans. And in  real life caustion may involve many variables over many space-time-scales. It’s complicated.

Correlation is useful even with negligible knowledge of causation. More knowledge of causation always helps. (Now, let’s read this:

Big Data, epistemology and causality: Knowledge in and knowledge out in EXPOsOMICS” by Stefano Canali

(Hat tip Timandra Harkness.)

More Multiverse Bollox

Quite normally these days, headlines deliberately mislead – it’s called click-bait – and so often these days “Multiverse” is that click-bait. Total bollox, but it sells clicks.

Trouble is, when it’s the headline, it’s very hard to tell if the piece itself is saying anything useful that may or may not depend on any multiverse ideas. The simplest conception that there are parallel universes where alternate realities have arisen independently of our own is not – and never can be – science. It’s a thought experiment. And as a theory it can explain nothing – by explaining everything conceivable as merely a possibility, it explains nothing. And being an independent universe can never involve any empirical validation in this one. Just not science.

There are scientific theories that predict multiple “universes” that become independent, but they must share some historical points with ours. Even these – the wrong side of some space-time horizon – will only ever be empirically testable by very indirect means, if ever. However, their explanation can have value, and these can explain – must include explanation of – different situations arising non-randomly in these different zones. A single multiverse: one universe, multiple zones, not multiple universes.

Philip Ball writing in Prospect asks “Just how special is human existence?” and his headline writer baits the hook with “The answer could lie in multiverse theory.” Yeah right. Actually some interesting discussion of anthropic prespectives of our special human existence. How could there be any other?

Jim Baggott responds also in Prospect “The problem with “multiverse theories”: they’re just not science.” Agreed. And as he notes, the context of what the author is actually trying to say matters more than any misleading headline.

Anthropic discussions remain interesting however. Also recently, here Max Tegmark writing in Cosmos on the Fermi Paradox paper by Anders Sandberg et al that has been shared widely. (Interesting doesn’t mean either Sandberg or Tegmark are necessarily right …. that’s a longer story eh, Rick?)

Science. The original “fake news”. Sigh!

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[Post Note. Talking of science news, New Scientist now has this story:

Which on the face of it is addressing the bollox, at least making the important distinction between cosmological space-time history and non-scientific quantum hackery.]

[Post Note: Twitter exchange with Tom Chivers, referred to by Elizabeth Oldfield in sharing the original link (follow the thread too, for alternative statements of the argument consolidated below).

“Not science” is only interesting in so far as scientific journals and supporters of scientific explanations make claims for a scientific monopoly on justifying what are really metaphysical assertions.

What really matters are “good explanations” – explanations that are (a) likely to be true, (b) not super-natural and (c) likely to be useful in their explanatory reach. Honesty helps too, when it comes to metaphysical positions.

Likelihood is about information complexity – kinda like Occam’s simplicity argument, which sparked the original exchange – but really about probabilities of events in space-time. Evolution – simple algorithmic repetition – is the simplest, indeed inevitable, path to complex life and intelligence. (The reason other non-human life is unlikely to exist in the “observable” universe is because we’ve failed to observe it, despite our efforts. Not that it is unlikely to arise. We have, already. The observable matters here – see also “horizons”.)

JBP reminds us that even the most objective scientists need metaphysical positions.]

[Post Note – Aug 2018 and the Multiverse-Bollox click-bait continues. One Universe is Not Enough. Ethan Siegel this time from It Started With A Bang writing in Forbes. (Hat tip to Rick Ryals on FB for the link.)

As I said “This is just a word-game – publisher’s click-bait – of undermining the word universe. Cosmology isn’t science, isn’t physics. Starting with the definition that there is only one, with nothing beyond it in space or time – the Uni-verse we’re talking about – there are simply zones separated by horizons, Horizons that limit how much known “laws and constants” of physics communicate and change across such horizons. The universe is more than the observability from the zone we’re in. It’s a communication problem, with meta-laws – all other “laws and constants” evolve as they are repeatedly communicated. (I’m with Verlinde and Rovelli)“]

Because Data?

Possibly conflating two things inappropriately but they are linked at an information level.

Games evolve as their rules are evolved. I call it the John Terry effect. When Terry made the overt calculation that a non-violent “professional foul”, perpetrated on other than the last man with a scoring opportunity, wouldn’t get him sent off, and therefore he would commit the foul and take a yellow-card “for the team” …. he was sent off. Applying the rule, in prior knowledge of the rule – being a smartass – changes the rule. (Ungentlemanly conduct is about bad faith in relation to a rule, not about knowing the facts of the rule.)

That’s evolution, by definition.

Jermain Jenas is intelligent. No amount of information will make Harry Kane as intelligent (or John Terry for that matter). The more is known about the game (eg statistical data), the more how it’s played will evolve, the more its rules will evolve in response AND the less current knowledge will successfully predict its future outcomes.

That’s a game, by definition.

Short-term Jenas will probably be a better pundit than his current older peers (old dogs, new tricks is surely as old as the hills). But that’s because he’s intelligent. Don’t believe the big-data hype.

“There’s an expression: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Computers are our hammers right now.” https://t.co/mRdTNsbsyd

(And if you’re interested in football, Inverting the Pyramid is a great book on how successful footballing strategies inexorably fail. It’s all in the game. Even Eco on Italian Fascism invokes Wittgenstein on games.)

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[Post Note: And who knew?

Later that same day, yesterday, we now have the Harry Kane and the VAR meme doing the rounds. All games depend on the possibility of bad decisions and actions by players and officials – they wouldn’t be a game otherwise. There’s a kind of sweet-spot between the predictable and unpredictability of outcomes that makes for a “good” game. It’s why the rules of long-running popular games (like football) need to evolve over time, to keep play in that sweet-spot and audiences interested, as technologies and tactics evolve. Three points for a win, the back-pass rule and of course the (apocryphal) offside rule. Often subtle changes are not to the rules (or laws) but to the guidance on how they are applied, handling benefits of the doubt. There are many variables for a wise FA to tweak.

Sometimes technology or extra eyeballs are introduced to reduce doubts – enter VAR. Sometimes specific doubts (goal-line technology), sometimes doubt in general (VAR linked invisibly to the ref’s wrist).

Firstly can I say, it was a dire game by the England team after an encouraging first 20 minutes, and as is normal in international football (which I rarely watch these days*), the refereeing was dire anyway. Kane gets MotM because he scores two goals (!) not because Trippier was the best England player on the pitch by a mile (Khazri was the best player on the pitch). How Young and Sterling even get selected ahead of Rose and Rashford is beyond me, but I digresss. Back to the refereeing: No discipline and control generally, tolerating too much disrespect from the players (see Terry-effect) and too many decisions given to England (eg for Tunisia offside). What was meant to be new was the VAR, but few people, least of all the refs (and possible even the VAR teams themselves) appear to know how it is meant to be used. It will take time – that’s evolution.

The problem was the lack of respect. Blatant rugby tackles on Kane at all set-pieces nonchalantly ignored by the ref as the players knew he would. Crap refereeing spoils a game, even for “winners” – see sweet-spot. The VAR never even invoked to help make any call (few of us will know how or why, there is no public “challenge a decision” concept). The talk is not about the quality of VAR decisions, but about their obvious absence, either way. Nothing marginal or sweet-spot about that. Nothing to do with any game. Apart from artistry of the likes of a Messi or a Hazard (or hopefully a Salah) all the value in any game is in its marginal decisions.

When all you have is a computer every problem is a nail in football’s coffin.]

[(*) Prefer real football in championship and football leagues. Where boys (naive) are men (respectful) and goalposts are jumpers …. well maybe not.]

[Post Note: When it comes to philosophy in football,  David Papineau

Seems I am in good company.]

Pan-Proto-Psychism?

Formally agreed names for recognised philosophical positions often elude me because quite often I do want to play fast and loose with definitions until something new emerges. Infuriating I know, but bear with me.

This whacky click-bait headline in Scientific American:

“Could Multiple Personality Disorder
Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?”

… introduces this paper from The Journal of Consciousness Studies:

“The Universe in Consciousness.”

by Bernardo Kastrup, whose idea is:

“There is only cosmic consciousness.” – And the abstract lists the paper dealing with: physicalism / bottom-up panpsychism / cosmopsychism / the hard problem of consciousness / the combination problem / the decombination problem.

Obviously anything like pan-psychism undermines centuries of established physical science, so as is often said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (As Kastrup points out in later Twitter traffic, despite the undermining, much of the established structure can in fact stay intact.) But why make it this hard? Why make such an extraordinary claim?

If physics and consciousness are both emergent from the same proto-stuff and emergent through evolution to be more than the sum of their parts – both ergodic and non-ergodic parts – then job done?

I often refer to my own fundamental information position as pan-proto-psychism. It’s not that the universe comprises or depends on a cosmic consciousness, but that both the physical and mental universes are built of the same proto-conscious and proto-physical stuff – stuff called fundamental information. All the things we know and love are emergent from evolved patterns (of information) but are rarely reducible to their components. Philosophy-friendly scientists in both physics (String and QLG?) and consciousness (IIT?) both seem to be headed to this conclusion.

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[Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder for the original link. However a great flame-war arising from his response to her tweet …

Another side to my agenda – why go looking for a fight when there are more constructive options? Funnily enough in the immediate preceeding post I had said:

“public conversations in science are often dishonest, largely political in fact, about playing to galleries and tribes”

Hear, hear.]

Is Truth Sacred?

Two things came together this morning.

Firstly, over the weekend I engaged in a Facebook thread by Sabine Hossenfelder discussing Brian Keating’s brief video: “What’s a Greater Leap of Faith, God or the Multiverse?”.

And secondly, this morning I listened to Elizabeth Oldfield in conversation with Tom Chivers in Theos’ “Sacred Podcast”.

Brian’s conclusion in the multiverse video, agreed by Sabine, is that as leaps of faith, they are at least on a par. I also agreed with Brian that the difference is that the scientific leap of faith is a dishonest one:

“It’s a brief video, and lots wrong with Keating’s choice of examples and arguments. Most scientists? … sure … I happen to be in the camp that would agree that a multiverse theory (there are many variations) that permits anything, explains nothing. Sabine and many others have pointed this out before. I agree it’s just as big a leap of faith as any theist, BUT more importantly (as Keating suggests) a dishonest one. The real problem is the dishonesty. As Rick Ryals says – this denial overlooks an alternative simple natural explanation that life – and ever more intelligent life in fact – is fundamentally inevitable. Emergent information > time > entropy laws. Entirely natural. Nothing is less surprising than life.”

“When it comes to Ockham and explanations that explain anything explaining nothing – people should look at David Deutsch’s concept of “explanatory reach”. (Particularly intriguing in his case since Deutsch IS in fact a multiverse advocate!) Sabine you should also give Erik Verlinde’s ideas another chance – aside from mathematical rigour 

In the Theos podcast, Tom says a lot of things I don’t agree with – he’s a free-will denier for example. But for me he is simply and quite typically “scientistic” – a greedy reductionist who sees objectivity of evidence as some kind of absolute standard. That’s several longer conversations.

What Tom says he holds sacred is “truth” – which sounds fine apart from this problem with defining truth as something absolute – the result of objective causal reductionism. However imperfect the state of our human empirical quest to get there, this absolute sacred object nevertheless exists on a pedestal somewhere? Truth with a capital “T” as it is often referred in philosophical circles.

There is no such thing, not even in science. And many scientists do in fact agree, though it’s not penetrated the post-Dawkins / New Atheist Horsemen memeplex in public culture yet. Enlightened science really is Post-Post-Modernist. It really has got over the slippery-slope fear of cultural relativism unleashed by relativity and quantum weirdness in public science consciousness.

My point here is more specific – Tom also agrees with Elizabeth, and myself – private conversations can be more honest. As I say, public conversations in science are often dishonest, largely political in fact, about playing to galleries and tribes. In complex situations evidence is always moot and dependent on chains of authority and trust. Faith dare I say?

What is really sacred here is Honesty. Not honesty in the sense of a narrow syllogistic truth of all evidenced premises and individual statements made, but in a wider honesty and integrity sense – character, intent and care for outcomes. Virtue anyone?

The Matrix Cometh

This is just a holding post. Already in my previous post on Carlo Rovelli, I was overdue a fuller review. Since then I’ve been reading Sean Carroll, and finding myself reading backwards, from the index of key topics and chapter headings. The reality is that every current philosophical physicist I read, I find enormous implicit overlap and reinforcement of fundamental models of physics despite explicit competitive disagreement. The critical half of thinking seems to win out in “scientists still haven’t agreed on xxx” whereas a synthetic view suggests enormous deep agreement – on things NOT recognised in accepted authoritative interpretations of the Standard Model and Core Theory of physics.

I’m musing on the idea that a simple matrix, polling who supports which concepts, might lay the points bare more clearly than more prosaic words on the topic(s). Roughly, physics effectively needs a metaphysical reboot from a different starting-point on Quantum Gravity and Emergent Time. Defence of existing bases (ie politics) is leading to supernatural denial of available rational natural explanations (ie science).

Anyway what I need to do is a summary of my recent readings of:

  • Sean Carroll (“The Big Picture“)
  • Carlo Rovelli (“The Order of Time” and “Reality is Not What it Seems“)
  • David Deutsch(“The Beginning of Infinity” and “The Fabric of Reality“)
  • Erik Verlinde (Not yet published, and existing presentations and articles)
  • Sabine Hossenfelder (“Lost in Math” not yet read, and existing articles and papers)
  • Max Tegmark, Lee Smolin and many others (previously read and blogged about on Psybertron)
  • Rick Ryals (fellow traveller physicist on social media etc.)

And no, sorry to disappoint, The Matrix reference has nothing to do with a fictional parallel reality, just a means of presentation and organisation
– aka “For the love of spreadsheets.”