Month: January 2022

Scientific Advice?

“Follow the science” has become one of the woke mantras I feel the need to rail against. Quite simply, unless you’re a scientist doing science, scientific advice is there to be taken into account, not followed.

It doesn’t help that we have a particularly crap crop of politicians in governance at the moment, but it is their job to make difficult complex ethical, pragmatic, here-and-now decisions with many different consequences over multiple timescales and levels of society.

This is not science.

The problem we need to fix is democratic governance – trust, integrity, resources, etc – not replace it with science which is at best 20:2o hindsight and at worst a mass of conflicting data of dubious relevance requiring informed interpretation.

Erich Fromm – “The Art of Loving”

Mentioned in the previous “Reading List” post I was reading Erich Fromm “The Art of Loving” – though have no recollection of exactly how I picked-up the reference. (Help anyone?)

[Recently from McGilchrist … Fromm, Scheler, Schelling axis?
But Fromm was on my list before McG’s latest.]

My recurring “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding” mantra (*) means I’ve always taken “love” as a serious component of life, the universe and everything – to understand, is to know intimately, is to love, etc. Hard though it is to articulate its place in rational discourse, beyond basic care and responsibility for fellow man, even in argument.

[(*) Examples: What’s So Funny ? and Building Bridges.]

Fromm does not disappoint. Well OK, it’s 1957 and there is a lot of Christian God talk, so non-conformant gender roles and sexuality are given zero schrift, even though the paradox of conformance and individuality feature highly in our escape from the “prison” of loneliness through the joy of giving (and receiving, enabling the giving of others).

Lots of good stuff. Plenty of Spinoza, that most loveable of philosophers. Corrections to Freudian confusions. Knowing oneself and the world. Confusion over transactional misunderstandings of the golden rule in our capitalist market-based western societies. Etymological arguments in respect and education. The “Zen” practice of being at one with some thing or some activity – discipline, concentration & patience. Mindfulness, breathing, atma. One better than his “Art of …” title he even references the original “Zen and the Art … ” of Eugen Herrigel’s archery. One for Pirsig and Motorcycle Maintenance fans too.

“The insane person or the dreamer fails completely in having an objective view of the world outside: but all of us are more or less insane, or more or less asleep; all of us have an unobjective view of the world, one which is distorted by our narcissistic orientation. Need I give examples?”

If you can discount or otherwise get beyond the overt God-talk and the sexist pronouns & stereotypes in 2022, this is a recommended 1957 read. Full of good thinking and practical advice.

Reading List

Noting that my implicit reading list was growing faster with every reference read, I attempted an explicit booklist last year, to keep tabs. I didn’t share it widely, but family bought me a couple off the list for Christmas.

Just updating it – striking out those acquired and adding new references – as I start to read:

Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times“ – which might look topical in our 2021/22 demented Trump / Brexit / Boris / Covid / Woke-Identity-politics times, but is in fact a 2017 reference to the 1930’s Vienna Circle. A reference I picked-up from earlier David Edmonds and Cheryl Misak reads.

Erich Fromm “The Art of Loving“ (1957) which I picked-up as an individual recommendation on social media. (Can’t remember where / who specifically?)

And here is the current BookList as an Excel spreadsheet.
Later on-line updatable BookWishList version as a Google sheet, here.
(Must remember to maintain it up to date.)

Haunted by Eddington’s “Reality”

As noted in yesterday’s post, I’m reading Eddington. Whilst it was the Gifford Lectures association that was the proximate cause, it was clearly McGilchrist’s references to Eddington that had sown the seed. The parallels are already patent – as noted yesterday – but I need to check the specific references from McGilchrist … later. For now Eddington himself:

Our attitude to the whole scheme
of natural knowledge
must be profoundly modified.
(p298)

Scientific determinism is an “ardent faith“.

He spends a good deal of his time elaborating what can we really mean by “reality” and “actuality” – using a lot of scare quotes, as do I, I might add.

There is still the tendency
to use the word “reality”
as a word of magic comfort
like the blessed word “Mesopotamia”.

(Remember WWI and its poets are raw memories here in the early 1920’s.)

Whilst defending the bounds of what can be considered “good science”, he warns that:

“The symbolic nature of the entities of physics are generally recognised; and the scheme of physics is formulated in such a way as to make it almost self-evident that it is a partial aspect of something wider.”

What lies beyond “good science” is no less real, not super-natural, merely super-metrical, super-symbolically-representable. Science cannot have it both ways, as I may have said before. It cannot say that the stuff it has discounted by design is therefore not real. This is “not a rejection of reasoning”, in fact “the same hiatus in reasoning” exists in the foundation of the physical world itself. There is no cosmic bootstrap.

After finally summarising the revolutions connecting Euclid & Ptolemy with Galileo & Copernicus, with Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg he concludes:

“The more it changes,
the more it remains the same.”

‘Twas ever thus, plus ca change.
“Nothing new under the sun” … as I so often say.

Plausibility is key, the counterfactuals of possibility.

“Proof is an idol.”

(And so much more. eg W K Clifford is a source too.)

The biggest reinforcement for me is in my information-based metaphysics of Epistemological Ontology. He makes a good deal of the distinction between symbolic and intimate knowledge – (the Connaitre <> Savoir or Wissen <> Kennen distinction) – and the triad they form with the real world “out there”. The idea of radical empiricism. He even gives it a name:

“The New Epistemological Outlook”

Eddington wasn’t just sharing the weirdness of quantum theory and relativistic gravity, with a non-expert audience, he was pointing out to the experts themselves that it really does undermine what counts as a scientific view of reality. The plausible conviction that there is a lot more to the real world than can be accounted for by scientific symbolism.

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(PS – follow-up the reverse references from McGilchrist.)

McGilchrist emphasis is on Eddington quotes on the physical being more mysterious than the mental (all ones I already had marked even if not included above … excellent.)

“No-one can deny that mind is
the first and most direct thing in our experience
and all else is remote inference …

… inference either intuitive or deliberate.”

With no need of any Descartes references, simply Reinforced by Russell:

Physics is mathematical NOT because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mechanical properties we can discover. For the rest our knowledge is negative.

Mechanical? – real substance – Eddington would say “metrical”.

(McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things” is so marvellously produced by Perspectiva – so thoroughly indexed and annotated – that checking references is a doddle for any scholar.)

[PPS on the strength of this Eddington reading I have now also acquired a second hand copy of his Philosophy of Physical Science – The 1938 Tarner Lectures (1939) – in McGilchrist’s bibliography, natch.]

The Tower of Song

Mentioned in the Alex Klaushofer post that it had been a Leonard Cohen interaction that I’d previously noted. I also mentioned the “song and dance” element of human interaction that was the subject matter of her manifesto whilst noting that for me the key was the song & musical performance aspect. (And we both mentioned the need for natural environmental as well a human interaction.)

What I didn’t note was that the Cohen nexus had arisen from my Roy Harper post which led me back to Roy’s own posts. Originally his “Our Live Voices Are Missing” due to Covid originally, but more recently on his “Lifemarkers” post on the 9/11 20th anniversary. (The latter being extremely influential on my own research blogging project and on my remainder of life expectations!)

Those two Roy Harper posts interesting in the context of Alex’s recent posts.

Alex Klaushofer

I’ve been interacting with Alex Klaushofer since 2014 though I discover I’ve mentioned her previously only once, just earlier this past year in a Leonard Cohen context. (We met in a Theos / Rupert Sheldrake context originally.)

Natural theology is probably my new favourite word for whatever worldview we share – the reality of human values, something more, beyond orthodox scientific objectivity. That and a shared need to relate to human experience beyond the confines of our home culture. We differ recently in so far as she sees much more threat in restricted freedoms – eg in Covid responses and the rise of more right-wing authority – where I see a more pragmatic “shit-happens” bureaucratic incompetence. A difference of political and metaphysical focus.

Anyway, as an actual journalist / writer, she’s written more (and better) than I have, and I’ve not done justice to reading her published stuff closely enough until recently. Here, three links from her current SubStack platform “Ways of Seeing”:

The need for human company, how often, and what form it takes, varies hugely from person to person, and at different times within the life of the same person. But it is not something that we can do without, nor is it wise to construct a society which gives the state the power to take it away.

Can’t argue with that. As someone who’s been remote working on multi-national projects for decades before Covid I can assure anyone that real human interaction has to be part of the mix. And …

As a modern human, I re-affirm my need-right to spend time in nature.

As I was saying myself only recently. And human nature IS a part of nature, a part that the orthodoxy of received wisdom tries very hard to discount and ignore. (And the reason I see a more fundamental metaphysical problem whereby the orthodoxy supports nefarious authoritarian aims.) For me the “song and dance of life” has always been live music, the sweatier the better – something I do regularly mention in the blog, even if the encounters with nature herself tend to go unmentioned in symbolic language.

“Ways of Seeing” (*) is a telling title for her blog.
100% aligned with Iain McGilchrist’s natural theology agenda.
(* Though as she points out, it’s clearly a Berger reference. The socio-political scholars point out that we have choices and are influenced by peers and power-structures in our “ways of seeing” the world. The neuroscientists simply reinforce that we physically evolved to have this gift, but have allowed an orthodoxy of “received wisdom” to dominate our choices of world-views.)

Alex Klaushofer. Worth a read and a follow.

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[Follow-up post here: Tower of Song]

Eddington and the Real World

Arthur Eddington has been on my reading list for a decade or two, since he was so often cited as the person who had first gotten to grips with the new physics and its communication to a wider real-world audience, beyond those minds engaged at Copenhagen / Paris and in the Solvay conferences.

I happen to be reading his 1928 “The Nature of the Physical World” since I spotted in the previous holding post that, like so many important thinkers, this was based on his 1927 Gifford Lectures.

It’s very good.

I had to stop annotating when I was reaching my almost-as-much-annotation-as-original-text state. Noticeable that in terms of accepted physics, he notes that many of his interpretations and perceived problems were very much live debates amongst the main players at the very time he was lecturing and that undoubtedly some of his guesses we now know turned-out not to be the case. But, that doesn’t in any way detract from the quality of his thinking and explanation. A great voice too; it reads like he’s talking to you.

Love that he talks quite naturally of the aether and, without using the word emergence, he talks of possible layers, including a sub-aether for example, as well as the naturally evolved layers of living biology and sentient consciousness.

Love that, although he follows the scientists’ party-line that non-scientific philosophy is there to be the butt of jokes, he clearly has a lot of respect for Whitehead’s contemporary thinking.

Love his Einsteinian emphasis – multi-dimensional, curved space-time – that geometry is very much part of the fabric of reality itself and that, like the ancients, saw geometry as quite distinct from – more fundamental than – the mere human toolsets of the rest of mathematics and logic. Reality, time & causation; fluid-flow metaphors; mind-stuff, will & volition; it’s all there.

[Posted more on this Eddington read here.]

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One example geometric argument:

The number 10.

Recall I kept getting a strange feeling when 10 turned-up in Katoi’s mystical numerology musings – how can the base of our 2 x pentadactyl integer counting convention be significant in fundamental physical constants – it can’t, can it? The significance – if any – must be the other way around.

10 is significant geometrically long before we chordate vertebrates evolved our standard pattern of limbic symmetry.

We find it reasonably easy to think of the fabric of reality – the aether – in 4D terms, 3 of space and one of time. Even in 3D space we have trouble shifting our “surface” idea of curvature from 2D to 3D, but we indulge Einstein’s imagination in projecting the curvature concept into 3D space as a model of gravitation. But 10? And “i” as the square-root of -1 is everywhere as a ruse to symbolise the dimensions beyond those we can envisage in our plane of representation.

(Aside – not difficult to see how knotted strings arise as a way of compactifying or pointifying additional “curved” spatial dimensions above the 3 we can readily envisage. So maybe no coincidence that 10 turns up as the minimum number of dimensions in string theories, long after Eddington’s time? 2nd level interrupt – digression – 4 bases in DNA maybe has a fundamental geometric origin – seen that somewhere before? Long before Crick & Watson [& Franklin] Eddington is musing on the Mendelian atoms of biological evolution. Whoop, whoop, whoop – pull-up, pull-up, pull-up before we crash and burn. (*) See note on mystical numerology below.)

Back to the geometric significance of 10 in the fundamental fabric of reality – geometric series as well a geometry per se?

Eddington is explaining Euclidian & non-Euclidian (E / nE) geometry after several reminders that the whole of nature appears to be defined by 10 principal coefficients – all of which are values of relations, ratios or products – the coefficients are not things in themselves. He dwells at length on the Planck constant “h” being a product of energy and time (erg seconds) a recurring quantum of space-time or “action” – stuff happening.

2D (curved surface) nE geometry plus 1 relation = 3D E.
4D (curved space-time) nE geometry plus 3 +2 +1 relations = 10D E.

Eddington’s world model is relational – objects (relata) are simply intersections of the more fundamental relations. A relational world of 10 dimensions in the sub-aether.

He comes to bury Whitehead, not to praise him, methinks? The whole thing, despite appearances for the sake of his scientific colleagues, is a commendation of Whitehead?!?

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Add:

    • Quotes on Whitehead p236 etc after earlier “jibes”
    • Instinctive awareness p17
    • McGilchrist master <> servant geometry metaphor! p161

“The pure mathematician is under the impression that geometry is a subject that belongs entirely to him.

The pure mathematician, at first called in as servant, presently likes to assert himself as master”

[Posted more on this Eddington read here.]

[(*) Mystical Numerology? I’m making a distinction here with geometric relations that appear in the metaphysical foundations of physics itself, versus other geometric – mystical numerology – relations in other evolved levels. I only mention the number 10 and its relation to our human experience of maths (with base 10 counting) because maths itself has such a hold on foundational thinking (as per that final quote above). Any causal significance is reversed. Eddo points out – as I only hinted – that mystical numerology and the number 10 do in fact turn up at at higher evolved levels too. Not least the golden ratio (phi) and Fibonacci relations in the human aesthetics of wider nature where phi really is cosine (circle/10), a geometric relation whose expansion includes root(5). Starting from an earlier tweet:

The base post here is not about mystical numerology – there are lots of interesting relations – we’ve done the golden ratio et al, before and will no doubt come back to them again at the DNA level 🙂 ]