Month: February 2019

One in an endless series … Clive is “not biting” which is the equivalent of not getting to first base … but worth recording anyway:

I genuinely thought this was Viz at first reading. https://t.co/sJznwfQVhT

— Clive Andrews (@CliveAndrews) February 25, 2019

Leaving aside the inconsistency that the headline refers to a speed camera, whereas the event suggests jumping a red light, it’s a thought experiment … that goes on after the snipped section … but the actual context will always matter. The given point is a speed camera is a “cash cow”.

The sarky response, the original not Clive’s, very explicitly suggests the point has something logical to do with nine crimes vs a tenth. No sign of that in the actual letter, and I have no knowledge of the writer’s point other what we see here, but THE important point is clear to me.

Easy beats good. Standard rule of tech enforcement of rules – root problem with AI for humanity at large. We have a situation where an inhuman system can enforce one rule, but several (nine if anyone is counting, but who is ? the point is about the human quality of the crimes) that cannot be enforced without human involvement, so the one that can – easily – is enforced. It’s algorithmic tyranny. We are already regretting it everywhere we look.

Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools. By choosing to enforce easy rules, we are foolishly taking the wisdom out of life.

I gave a talk on what makes for a good argument the other night. (A couple of weeks ago in fact.) Attached is the slide deck I used. (Full ppt, since a couple of the slides rely on builds.)

Two topics came together over the weekend. I’ve been reviewing the recent UK Human Rights Commission guidelines on freedom of expression (FoE) in higher education, and this morning I picked-up on a piece by Jacob Kishere reviewing his Rise of the Intellectual Dark Web a year on. Coincidentally the latter edited by Angelos Sofocleous who himself “fell foul” of use of free-speech recently and has been talking on the topic.

I’ll come later to some specifics in the Human Rights guidance. But for now, I welcome it, if only for the fact it turns out to be a quite large and complex document – 54 pages as a PDF. It’s consistent with the fact that the comments I’ve seen from the free-speech zealots complaining that it’s unclear, despite all the verbiage, when it comes to detailed rules beyond the basic freedom. But this is my recurring point, that the rule may be simple, but the exceptions are neither simple nor objective. No amount of logically objective detail resolves the fact and that makes the exceptions more important to understand than the basic rule. Rules are for guidance of the wise, not for application by logicians 😉 So as I’ve said, that’s promising.

As well as the subjectively indeterminate complexity of valid limitations to free speech – of which I’ve written much more – the key problem boils down to “offense”. No-one has the right not to be offended, and anyone may offend by their free-speech, but there is no open-ended obligation-free right to offend. Apart from the enormous upsides of communication of and about any and all ideas, the negative aspects boil down to this issue, and the fact it can never be definitively defined.

When causing offense, you need to be seen to care about the offended, and you inherit a duty to resolve any offence. Which is where, however self-aggrandising the name, IDW comes in. Life’s too short to conduct every dialogue in public, with the maximum potential for uninvolved bystander offence – or misunderstanding – to be clarified, justified and resolved. Sometimes you have to be able to “speak-easy” with people who already understand the context of, and have skin in the game of making progress in, the particular discussion being had. This way progressive dialogue is possible. Conducting dialogue in controlled circumstances is caring about those potentially affected by it. Reassuringly Jacob’s latest piece is entitled “IDW – A Prelude to the Future of Dialogue” and right from the off is identifying the lack “willingness to do the dirty work of dialogue” amongst those who lament limitations to progress in their SJW agendas.

Pretty much everything I’ve written under my “Rules of Engagement” banner is about achieving constructive dialogue. Anyone providing a platform or a “safe space” for conversation has the right – an obligation – to enforce such rules, though as ever, every decision to enforce is balance of values between the upside and the potential offense and limitations. No matter how much we emphasise the upside, it never gets any easier than that. Totally open and transparent platforms – like social media – are distorted by no end of psychological games, bubbles and biases, as Kishere notes.

Reading the whole of the FoE Guidance, I find only mild disagreements of emphasis. One quirk, for example, is that for the overarching principle it refers to the European Court of Human Rights, where I would have though the UN Declaration would have carried more universal weight and less irrelevant European distraction.

Whilst it correctly and repeatedly identifies the values of respect and tolerance at the root of handling exceptions, all the explicit guidance on limitations are legal references. In a sense, I guess they would have been criticised as overstepping their authority if they weren’t, but these legal instruments arose from cases being set by judgement. Since the rules (laws) covering exceptions can never be definitive, it is important that the principles are understood. All future cases will depend on judgement and meta-judgement – judging whether judgment had been applied by organisers, speakers and participants.

Dialogue is dirty work and we need people prepared to do it. It comes with rules that require effort to understand and apply. Opinions are ten-a-penny, but progressive dialogue is a precious commodity.

Started a short conversation with Steve Turnbull after I responded positively to a tweeted question from Martin Robinson on whether mind could be explained by “materialism”. (The conversation follows in the embedded twitter thread below:)

If by "material" we mean the broadest matter-and-energy-physics understanding of materialist, then in fact all mental stuff is also explainable. (Material and mental share a viable metaphysics. IMHO)

— Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) February 1, 2019

I’m not one for “isms” but definitions aside, it remains clear that mind is a naturally evolved part of the physical world – its not supernatural or in any way “independent” of physical nature. There are plenty of modern (ie 21st C) thinkers who support that and I’ve explored them at length here in forming my “res informatica” view – a (kinda) pan-proto-psychism, a dual-aspect-monism or a trialism. Anyway Steve pointed to a short essay he’d done.

After the all usual arguments referring to all the usual suspects – [including my pet hate, a 30 year old (!!!) reference to Dennett’s “Consciousness (not) Explained”, the height of ignorance IMHO for not having read his later “B2BnB” – he’s a living philosopher FFS!] – we get to his conclusions. Let’s focus on some wishful aims we can agree on, rather than the – difficult – rational arguments:

“[I] sense that consciousness may be the bridge between science and the kind of ‘post-religious’ spirituality envisioned by Einstein through which we are able to experience a deep sense of interconnectedness between ourselves and the wider universe, the space remains open to build this. But if we think we can do so on the ‘sure’ ground of materialism I suspect we may have to think again.”

Steve Turnbull

Me too. I agree. Absolutely.
And I have thought, again (and again)(and again).

After much deep consideration I do consider the hard-problem to be a non-existent pseudo-problem and that natural explanations do exist. The hard part remains getting more people to see that. And the reason for that is a kind of prejudiced expectation about the “materialist” (empirical) nature of the explanation. The physical (material) has exactly the same relationship with the metaphysical as does the mental (spiritual); neither is privileged. EXCEPT we experience subjectively. We obviously experience BOTH subjectively however, with the material, we – deliberately – discount our subjective experience in the model we’ve constructed – called physics. For the mental …. we don’t …. there’s no reason to, we already experience it as it is.

The ground of materialism is no more (or less) sure than the ground of the spiritual. They’re equally sure. Equally grounded. Thereafter they have co-evolved and are causally intertwined. Where’s the mystery? Where’s the conundrum?

That gap being bridged, I tend to call the “humanity of the gaps”. It’s humanity that has created the empirical discount between the world and our experience of the world. Thereafter it is simply become widely accepted received wisdom to focus on the physical model of the world as if it were the world. No mystery. The conundrum lies with regular good-old-fashioned materialists.

[More reference links to be added, if the conversation progresses? Need also to finish and publish my draft on idealism-materialism-panpsychism following Mumford on Russell’s metaphysics. Include Kastrup refs if it helps?]

[PS – also listened to the Nous podcast of Ilan Goodman interviewing Ray Tallis, suggested by Martin. Also falls into the “more of the same old arguments by the same old suspects” for me, sorry. Not remotely “leading edge”.]