Month: October 2021

Matthew Segall (Footnotes2Plato) is a fellow traveller with whom I’ve crossed social-media tracks over several years and he’s not one of those respondents to Philip Goff in this month’s JCS Panpsychism Special, where I’ve been collecting copies of all the freely available pre-print articles.

An intriguing few are not available, below, but I thought I’d use the opportunity to pin down a touch point with Segall since one of the respondents is Christof Koch.

Christoph Koch comes out as a panpsychist? (2012)

That JCS Special?

Goff’s original outline is here.
(Where most of the pre-prints are linked)

The Oct 21 JCS Vol28 (9-10) is now here.

Missing Goff Links include:

Christof Koch — ‘Reflections of a Natural Scientist on Panpsychism’

Keith Frankish — ‘Galileo’s Real Problem’

Alyssa Ney — ‘Panpsychism and the Limits of Physical Science’

Joanna Leidenhag — ‘Why a Panpsychist Should Adopt Theism’

Sarah Lane Ritchie — ‘Panpsychism,  Flourishing and Psychedelics’

All the others appear to be available as preprints or blogs.

 

One of many interviews with Chiara Marletto in connection with her book on Constructor Theory (“The Science of Can and Can’t” which I started but didn’t finish yet – here again after I did finish it), this one by Sean Carroll, who I consider to be one of the more grounded theoretical physicists and science communicators.

Particularly interesting because as well as (obviously) trying to get to details of Constructor Theory and Marletto’s Counterfactual take on fundamental physics, he chooses to start from the angle of why would a young physicist embark on a new topic that overturns the whole of the most widely accepted aspects of modern physics? Isn’t that over-ambitious? Surely most critics and interlocutors must come at her with questions of – Where’s the problem? If it ain’t broke what are you trying to fix? – rather than taking any details of her (and Deutsch’s) alternative theory seriously.

Unabashed, Marletto is pretty clear – in paraphrase:

It will prove to be the case that “Quantum Theory is not up to the job” of describing all of nature.

As conceived by its originators “Quantum Theory was only ever a work in progress” never intended to describe everything.

Information-theoretic aspects of Quantum Theory will turn out to be fundamentally true

Philosophically, I’m already wedded to information-theoretic fundamentals, so I’m obviously willing her every success.

As someone old enough to be her granddad, I’m also glad such a young researcher has taken up the challenge.

[Beyond that it’s a very good interview by Carroll. Marletto responds to most of them with yes, that’s a good / fair / relevant question. Could learn a fair bit about Constructor Theory from the interview.]

Misogyny is actually the title of my latest long-read draft of #GoodFences / #SomethingRottenInTheStateOfPolitics prompted specifically by the recent Afghan / Taliban debacle after a long series of “TERF War” examples.

This isn’t it.

Today’s prompting is the sentencing of Sarah Everard’s killer. Particularly serious from the point of view that if a woman, anyone, can’t trust a genuinely identifiable policeman in an everyday context who can we/she trust. The police and policemen have a lot to answer for here and quite rightly Cressida Dick is being challenged on this.

And it is the trust aspect that is the important feature. Several takes on the “blamelessness” or otherwise of the victim (in the sentencing statement) and on precautions women can and should take to reduce risk and avoid becoming victims. But the focus must be on the males that represent the potential threat – and social / institutional arrangements to minimise this perceived threat, to increase the trust – not on the actions of females (and minors)  as victims – aka “victim blaming”.

This has come up several times previously in the TERF War context, with many on the Self-ID (M>F) Trans Ideology activist side of that war, holding that women (and gays and minors) resisting the access of such “Trans” are somehow tarring all Trans with the threat of that ideology and the threat of violence. The fact is most violent attacks on females come from males, even if the number of actual offenders is statistically small amongst men and genuine (more than Self-ID) trans, and that young males are in fact more likely to experience direct physical violent attacks.

It’s a threat that females feel when exposed to males in confining / controlling contexts and it is for males to reduce any perceived as well as any actual threat. Those that scientistically quote the stats of how few males / trans are in fact a threat and that females should somehow “get over it”, completely miss the point. We males (cis or trans) need to care about how females feel.

[Hat tip to Jess Phillips for reminding us all.]

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Tom Chivers take here. [Hat tip Timandra Harkness.]

[And a great tweet I’ve mislaid … along the lines that setting limits along the lines of a group identity is not the same as giving a job rejection to each member of the group. Banning all men from female spaces is not condemning every member of the group “men”. #GoodFences.]