Month: February 2022

A regular theme here is that those investigating the limits to knowledge often get close to “madness”, even tip over into paranoia or worse and do so either temporarily or irrecoverably depending on the kind of support and understanding they get, or the others that become collateral damage. Such a recurring theme, that I have a euphemism to refer to it as:

“There, but for grace, go we all.”

There is also an element that it is necessary to at least get close to the edge and to witness the source of madness, to experience it as part of truly understanding. But that comes with obvious risks. And, let’s be clear, this is not some kind of new finding. It’s as old as mythology itself that our genius / heroes go on quests for the source of all knowledge, get more than the enlightenment their epiphany bargained for and often don’t get out sane or even alive. And it’s as real in the formal pursuit of would-be scientific knowledge as it is in the romantic humanities. In fact the Romantics often took / take themselves deliberately close to the edge by artificial means. (Simon Schama – The Romantics, currently showing. David Attenborough(!) reading “Tables Turned” from which I often quote “We murder to dissect”.)

In my own personal quest, hearing that the brilliant Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide is as old as Jacob Bronowski’s (1972) Ascent of Man. (The Auschwitz meme too, though I digress, but only slightly.) How mad can we get?

Boltzmann is just one of the self-inflicted deaths investigated along with those of Cantor, Gödel and Turing by David Malone in his (2007 BBC4 / 2008 BBC2) “Dangerous Knowledge“. (Playlist of 5 parts on Daily Motion arranged here by Richard Emerson at Ancient World Org. Original Vimeo version here.)

By a double coincidence Richard had pointed to that film in a comment about my reading of Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times” and lo and behold, we see Sigmund as a contributor to the film in the first two minutes, briefly anonymous initially but more explicitly later in the Gödel episode and more. (Interestingly, Louis Sass is also a major contributor and he’s someone Iain McGilchrist pays particular credit to in his “The Matter With Things”)

[More coincidences – for Richard:

The ticket strip for my daily commute last time I was working in Oslo, was the bookmark for my recent read of McGilchrist – on which I wrote:

“*Add Sass to book list !*” ]

It’s the “denial” that creates the mental tension and crises – whether internally or externally (*) inflicted. And let’s not forget McGilchrist was / is a practicing psychiatrist. These are not “coincidences”.

Anyway, as I noted in my read of Sigmund, all these human stories – of suicides and murders, and of paranoias short of these – are pretty much the story of where “knowledge” went wrong in the 20thC. The denial of sacred nature beyond objective science. The whole of my 20 year blogging project. Approximately from Pirsig to McGilchrist via The Vienna Circle, calling all stations. Next stop Oxford.

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(*) The tension or denial can arise internally dealing with the two (L+R) views in our own heads and/or externally when our own internal intuitive & integrated (L+R) conflicts with the established received wisdom of the dominant (L) social pattern.

Other / Meta / Content:

David Malone is someone referenced here before. A regular host/interviewer at “How The Light Gets In” Hay on Wye, previous interviewer of Iain McGilchrist, and maker of “Why Are We Here?”

He refers to “the slippage” of thinking between the explicit and the intuitive. For me that’s Hofstadter’s “conceptual slippage” in “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies” & “Tabletop“. And Hofstadter is the preface to Sigmund’s book, and a big interpreter of Gödel.

Loved the characterisation of Russell’s Principia as “like 10,000 tonnes of intellectual concrete poured over the cracks in mathematics and logic”. Brilliant!

Mentioned often before how things might have been different now if several people had grabbed the opportunity of their paths crossing at the 1930  (2nd) Königsberg conference on the exact sciences. The denial “Nobody wants to face up to the consequences of Gödel”. And that Catch-22 from Gödel – that humans have (RH) intuition beyond logical (LH) rules, but you cannot prove that to the satisfaction of LH rules. Gödel & Wittgenstein ships in the night, and more. Thank Johnny von Neumann for noticing or we may never have known even now.

It’s not “a problem” in need of a solution – it’s a capability we humans can use, and would use if only the LH will stop denying us – are we grown-up enough to face this or will we fall back on the (apparent) certainties of scientific logic?

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I completed Karl Sigmund – “Exact Thinking in Demented Times – The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science” over the weekend. I’ve mentioned the read a few times already, here for example:

• • • It’s Just Reading and Writing, Right? (Feb 13th)
    • Karl Sigmund and Demented Thinking (Jan 3rd)

The final line of the Afterword – a lesson attributed by Sigmund to  Hofstadter – is “Now I feel that I understand a wee bit better what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by the phrase “the inexpressible“. In many ways my read of Sigmund is the latest in my own quest to understand not so much the Vienna Circle itself but the confusion of science with philosophy which the 21stC has inherited from the early 20thC.

This has more to do with thinkers associated (positively & negatively) with the activities of the Circle than those that were actually members. Russell,  James, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Ramsay and Popper. Not to mention the actual physicists of course, who were busy undermining the foundations of science as fast as the more misguided philosophers were trying codify life according to its received wisdom. In fact a lot of my reading of modern historians of science & philosophy in the last decade has been part of this: Ray Monk, Dave Edmonds, Graham Farmelo, Cheryl Misak and Rebecca Goldstein for example. Karl Sigmund is an extension to this – a tremendously sympathetic human story of these imperfect – even occasionally demented -humans living through two world wars. From Mach and Boltzmann in the late 1800’s to Viktor Kraft the last chair of the Circle in the late-1940’s & early-50’s and the last of them – Einstein, Gödel & Popper – passing in the later 20thC.

With Hofstadter’s acknowledged help, Sigmund’s is the most comprehensive and readable history of the whole, with each of the other modern authors choosing to hang their stories around one or other of the star players. Highly recommended.

That closing line is key. What the quest of the Circle and its legacy miss is that it denies that part of the natural world which is beyond science is not supernatural even though it is intuitively mystical, spiritual, metaphysical, sacred or divine, but never definitively expressible, let alone objectively provable either way. The quest of getting close to this balanced – pragmatic – understanding, in a world more generally in denial, has driven many close to actual madness, some fatally so.

Denial kills.

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[Post Note – I mentioned once or twice before that it was theologian “Sam” – a practicing minister in the Anglican church – first suggested that this atheist take Wittgenstein’s “mysticism” seriously whilst we were both readers of Robert Pirsig. Coincidentally this Twitter thread arose this morning:

Agreed. You might find this of interest (a 20 year old MA thesis of mine!) https://t.co/qR0Dqi0SaV

— Sam Charles Norton (@Elizaphanian) February 21, 2022

Several branches in that thread too, mentioning James as well as Misak / Ramsay and more. Small world.]

The 2001 Jeroen Krabbé film of the 1992 Harry Mulisch (Dutch) novel.

I just watched it at the suggestion of Eddo that it had some value to our recent Pirsig / McGilchrist dialogues – the  divine or sacred right-brain view of reality obscured by the dominance of the received-wisdom “science-led” left-brain model of reality:

(Freedom runs on rails. Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools, so rules cast in stone are bad news. There is no absolute freedom in life and reality is more complicated than any rule-based model. The natural world is more than science’s model of it.)

Anyway the film: 20th C Humans have messed-up.
Heaven would like its tablets of stone back. (Why, no idea.)

The symbology is so transparent and unsubtle, the outline of the plot above is stated explicitly in the opening lines, and the layers of religious-symbology and supernatural-cliché are piled-on thicker and thicker thereafter. (But why, still no idea.)

As well as the film and book being 20 and 30 years old, the plot starts in and is inspired by the 60’s (60 years ago). So, after a bit of student anti-war & anti-military-industrial-complex protest, and some revolutionary-socialism, it’s blasphemous theology all the way. Possibly less clichéd if seen 20 or 30 years ago, but from a 2022 perspective:

We have Name of the Rose, American Gods, Satanic Verses, Da Vinci Code and La Comedia thrown in the blender. Oh, and a raven called Edgar (!) leading our blue-eyed angelic child – with supernatural powers of premonition – on his quest for “Daddy” even though he’s only “a shadow”.

Education, books, libraries, historical art, music and architecture are clearly the good guys. But finally, Heaven and Hell seem to be locked in a mutual conspiracy to keep humanity in the dark about the value of that divine or sacred something we can only glimpse obscurely.

[Also: Cosmic brotherhood. Sexual nudity (?) – we already knew where babies come from.  Symbols of all three monotheistic faiths on the lovers’ necklace gift. The puzzle of finding words to describe or define “the divine”. Auschwitz as our ubiquitous symbol of hell on earth. Coincidence of place. The centre of the centre / the holy of holies / the sanctum sanctorum. The arc of the covenant / the keys to the locks / the tablets of stone. Moses’ staff parting the red-sea. Three faiths meeting each other and the underworld in the Jerusalem of Mohammed, Jesus and the Jews. The freeing of the text from the tablets’ destruction. The ascension to the light, and yet ending in continued endarkenment of humanity. Why? Confusingly overdone with no “redeeming” message that I could see. Maybe the book fares better?]

Just a couple of posts ago, I paused to capture a 3-way link between writers in a “holding post” because my more concerted writing efforts were side-tracked by so many interesting conversations. Not getting much beyond “don’t lose that thought” these days.

The stop-start reading has taken a couple of twists too.

I mentioned remembering I had Stapp (2011) “Mindful Universe” half-unread from a while ago, and decided to catch-up. It was one of many recent references spinning off from McGilchrist’s (2021) “The Matter With Things“. So, I completed Stapp. Glad I did, but it is so connected to much other reading & writing, that I’m at a loss for a “review” – and strangely made precious few notes(?). Going to need a quiet revisit to join-up all the dots, or relate all the relata? [Not only do we need to be using verbs instead of nouns, we need more “active” (dynamic-process as opposed to passive-static) noun-verb forms. Some stuff just is hard to put into words. I’ll be back with Stapp.]

That “interrupt” was on top of another interrupt. I was actually reading Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times“. That was an addition to my long-running quest to understand the whole story of where Russell, Wittgenstein and The Vienna Circle went wrong – and what they actually got right – in the run-up to WWII, from the turn of the century through the great war. Western world in crisis at exactly the time physics was turning itself on its head and no-one noticed. Previously “The Murder of Professor Schlick” and “Frank Ramsey – A Sheer Excess of Powers“ and many more connected with Wittgenstein et al.

I was reading Sigmund partly because despite the obvious caricature of The Vienna Circle attempting to “scientise” the whole word through logical positivism, it was clear that the individuals – Schlick included – did have and did evolve a range of more nuanced views and writings of their own. I did in fact start to read some Schlick directly … Sigmund was already an interrupt on top of that … but so far it didn’t help. However, I have now continued with Sigmund … and will complete it. It’s full of pen pictures of all the players plus brief summaries of their positions, which as well as telling all their stories in German from an Austro-German perspective the language (in translation) is wonderful. Tremendously droll about the personalities, their interpersonal relationships and general shenanigans. Laugh-out-loud if you’re into this subject matter. (All involving facts and events I’ve mostly heard before … but “it’s the way you tell ’em”.) Loving it, reading it slowly with relish, and yes doing most of that in the pub in the early evenings … more of which later … but I was rudely interrupted after my last post about Hofstadter’s preface to Sigmund and it took me a while to recover.

Long story short, without naming names for now, there are a few modern – seemingly intelligent – logical positivists on my Twitter feed. I’m trying to get to understand them from what is mostly “banter” to an outsider. So much so I can’t separate them from their irony. However my post on the Hofstadter preface got such a defensive, dismissive and mean tone of response – directly at Hofstadter – from one of their number that I was left dumbfounded for a while and simply “let it lie”. They’re clearly, in their minds, still fighting a war.

Anyway, still loving my read of Sigmund. Mentioned several times that the whole early 20th century modernism centred around Vienna & Berlin in a time of Europe in crisis is palpable in all these intellectual histories. And as I mentioned I’m doing it in a couple of the local pubs a stone’s throw from our newly simplified and downsized life. I find the general background hub-bub of life going on, aurally and visually, quite conducive to concentrated reading. Quite unlike sitting alone in the man-cave, or attempting to be more sociable by the family TV, or fighting sleep on the pillow. The closest I have to “cafe society“.

Of course the general hub-bub is occasionally interrupted by direct (or indirect overheard) engagement in conversation. That’s a mixed blessing but in fact is rarely a distraction, depending entirely on the follow-up once you’ve answered the first question of “What are you reading?” or “Why are you reading that?” I’ve done a lot of this in various international locations over the years. Cambridge was one sort of experience. A small north-east coastal town is another.

Whether working in one of the industrial (or educational) enterprises on Teesside, or the local folk band on their night off, random locals seeing me reading “Exact Thinking in Demented Times” instantly make the connection with where is it all going wrong today, even though the subject matter is the run-up to Nazism and WWII a century ago.

I think that is telling in itself.
People get it.

Especially telling, one of those conversations, noticing that I was often reading “intellectual stuff” in the pub and not noticing the particular book that night (was probably Stapp IIRC), started to talk about having seen Brian Cox and Robin Ince on stage with their infinite-monkey-cage-based road-show a few nights ago. He was just telling his mates how wrong it seemed, how arrogant science seemed to think of itself. No prompting whatsoever from me. I was on my way home at that point, but mental note made for the next encounter.

This is real life.

I’ve been reading John Ehrenfeld’s “The Right Way to Flourish: Reconnecting to the Real World” (2020). John is a participant in the Channel McGilchrist forum which I joined alongside my reading Iain McGilchrist’s latest “The Matter With Things” (2021). John’s book was largely written before he had read Iain’s previous “The Master and His Emissary” (2012) and he openly admits fitting many references to to Iain’s 2012 work into his own work-in-progress without radically changing the intended structure and messages.

That in itself says something about Iain’s work. That his hypothesis about distinct left and right brain views of the world supports and reinforces natural and intuitive thinking many of us already have in trying to address the sense that we humans have somehow lost our way in the world. Lost our “connection to the real world”. Iain’s is clearly a powerful statement of reality.

In some sense I’m not really John’s target audience. I have already “bought” Iain’s hypothesis and I share many of John’s learning experiences in process engineering and in management generally, in quality management and in management education. If you are a practitioner in that space and you share the sense that our typical processes and procedures are somehow restricting our ability to flourish as individuals and as organisations, and that as a society we are failing to get to grips with the big issues of our time, then this is a book for you. A recommended read with practical recommendations – though as you will discover recommendations cannot be as prescriptive as some might hope.

This is not John’s first work on “flourishing” and for anyone who cares about life’s meaning and purpose, flourishing is the right word, biologically and psychologically, individually and collectively. Connecting this idea to that of sustainability – a totemic objective of so much 21stC effort – causes John some problem in that “sustain” implies some things being maintained or conserved. I might suggest the right formulation is “sustainable flourishing” – it’s the processes of continuous flourishing we are trying to maintain?

Interestingly, John connects flourishing quite early on to the authenticity of Maslow’s “self-actualisation” motives of the individual and the collective and links this to the rehabilitation of “positive psychology” generally.

There are a few quibbles. Recommendations against “management” of flourishing which I suspect would be better framed as warnings against the wrong kind of management – enabling and curating as opposed to direction and control say? His suggestion that we need more critical thinking, when in fact a damaging feature of too much critical thinking is an emphasis on analytical and objective reductionism. But maybe again this is a distinction between good and bad critical thinking?

The idea of the good is however recognised as qualitative, even without any treatment of virtues and qualities more generally. It’s a pragmatic book without too much intellectual philosophy and therefore a much less challenging read than either of Iain’s works.

A “hopeful” book too. Making the distinction between the more subjective (right-brain) hope and the more objective (left-brain) optimism.

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[Post Note:

I actually made a lot more notes on my read, but one that came up today in another conversation is resisting the increasingly fashionable emphasis on “STEM” in education and recruitment. Obviously, who would deny the place of science and technology in human progress, he and I are both engineers after all, but the relentless emphasis deepens the old two-cultures divide in ways that are unhealthy to genuine flourishing.

I’ve said it before, and John says it too.]

Might be the latest working title of my writing-project-in-progress?

The devil is in the detail they say. Presumably as a reminder that the difficult part of any project remains undone – the risks remain high – until all details are properly addressed. Many a slip ‘twixt … failure is a failure to address detail. Look after the pennies … Piss-poor planning … seems to be the received wisdom of that meme?

The ancient sage that first voiced the thought almost certainly did not intend that understanding. They were surely thinking along the same lines as the romantics – we murder to dissect? Reductionism kills the creative whole.

The devil is in the detail, because details kill.

(What is missing in this conception are relevance and appropriateness.)

Today (8th Feb 2022) I published an interview I did by Zoom on 19th Jan with Prof Henry Gurr and David Matos about the active Robert Pirsig related pages they run, and added a news link to my Pirsig Pages.

Just a holding post to capture a three-way link.

Mentioned a couple of posts ago, I was reading some 1900 / 1920 / 1930’s stuff in scientific knowledge – Schlick, Eddington and Haeckel – in which I also mentioned I had picked-up my half-remembered (2011) Henry Stapp.

I suspect I will not complete the early-1900’s Schlick, Eddington and Haeckel but they’re welcome to live in my library of half-read books until some new need arises. 21stC Stapp on the other hand has me hooked.

All these recent reads are arising from the McGilchrist “The Matter With Things” connection, either references of his or those of his readers now engaged in multiple conversations. Although I spotted very quickly the Stapp references to Whitehead (and have since read through them) I had forgotten that the reason Stapp rang a bell as I passed it on the library shelf was precisely because he is a McGilchrist reference.

Stapp “Mindful Universe” is quite recent (2011) more recent than McGilchrist’s original “Master and Emissary” (2009). But Stapp (with his Nobel prize-winning colleague Brian Josephson) was on my radar even earlier, around 2002, with …

“…  the idea from eastern philosophy that in certain states of consciousness the subjective states of mind closely reflect objective reality … and … the parallel between quantum and biological views is not that the former underlies the latter on a human scale, but that both are in fact manifestations of some other underlying physics.”

The Aha! moment that led to (a) my reading Robert Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“, and (b) the credible physicists idea that consciousness might be at least as fundamental as physics. There’s more to life than physical science … and the rest is history as they say.

I’ve now half-read Stapp’s Mindful Universe again, and will complete it this time. I see now the probable reason I quit Stapp originally and forgot what I had read is that early on he has some negative opinion about Dennett based on a pet-hate meme of mine – his early 1991/1994 work only. I have evolved continuously with Dennett (and Hofstadter). Anyway, hurdle overcome. Onward and upward.

McGilchrist and Stapp both positively reference Stapp and Whitehead.

More on Stapp on completion (and his use of quantum Zeno effect).
(Never did do a complete review, but mention again here.)