Year: 2022

Richard Emerson invited me onto his podcast earlier in the week.

We’ve met Richard here before on Psybertron, his personal “Renaissance” book and his “Ancient Worlds” project discovering – rediscovering – the value in ancient wisdom, with Dante’s “cosmology” being the poster boy.

Apart from having a shortlist of topics before we started – and my specialist subject heading of “Cybernetics” – we didn’t have much agenda or preparation other than Richard’s working title for his current podcast series: “Great Conversations about Balance and Rebirth”

Whether it’s a great conversation, you can judge, but Richard holds the thread together as I trample over our starting topics: Robert Pirsig’s “On Quality” published this week; and Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things” from late last year, in my rush to future synthesis.

Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, I certainly found it a useful exercise having to think on my feet and obviously now have half-a-dozen things to write-up based on things I now know I missed in the conversation. How many times for example, did Richard use the word unify, and I failed to make the direct connection between McGilchrist’s hemispherical dualism and Pirsig’s quality monism now reflected in the computational monism of Friston / Solms / Doyle et al under the Active Inference umbrella. You can probably tell, I’m quite excited about these latest practical scientific developments, in the talk as well as the pages of this blog. Onward and upward.

No more spoilers, have a listen. Thanks for the opportunity Richard.

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Just place-holders for pieces – or indeed whole comms campaigns (?) – that need to be created: Most generally because there are enormous persistent misunderstandings within science & technology and with public understanding of it, and specifically (topically given Musk!) with socially degenerate aspects of ubiquitous social media.

In no particular order, they’re all connected multiple ways:

AI or AI?

So called “Artificial Intelligence” has so far come nowhere near real (human) intelligence, basically “automation”, although in the right hands, its study / research / experience to date has undoubtedly contributed enormously to understanding real brains and minds. Part of that understanding is essentially Systems Thinking:- from the Free-Energy-Principle / Markov-Blankets / Ergodicity / Strong-Emergence under an “Active Inference” umbrella, also conveniently still AI.

Algorithms for Humans?

Those with a human (humanist / humanities / dare-I-say spiritual) cultural perspective will react negatively to machine (algorithmic / electro-mechanical computer) models of “how real human (hard/intellectual & soft/emotional) intelligence works”. It’s a common sense of science over-reaching into the “human” culture war, the politics, as old as “The Third Culture”. Our mechanistic, imperfect, negative experience of algorithms so far (eg in social media, and marketing) and automatons (eg in robotics and thought experiments) can only reinforce this sense. However there is a perfectly credible story that the softer side of the human condition is explainable by categorical / qualitative “algorithms” in a living, biological “soft machine”.

Subjectivity for Scientists?

A lot of this reasoning is currently hampered by the limitations of orthodox (objective) scientific rationality. Partly general reductionism in causal chains that cannot handle the strong-emergence of causal agents acting independently of their component parts and partly that subjective agents with “minds of their own” are modelled objectively if not explicitly excluded by design. Catch-22. Scientific rationality needs to embrace – empathise with – the subjective perspective – cross Solms’ “Rubicon”.

Subir Sarkar was interviewed by Sabine Hossenfelder last month, but I didn’t capture the link then:

Interesting content in the “Einstein was right when he said he was wrong” domain when it comes to the cosmological constant. Pointing to to some radically “new” ideas being needed to fix anomalies in physics. (That’s new as in old, but ignored.) But as I tweeted at the time, it is a fine interview anyway – proper respect between scientists with different disciplines of expertise and levels of experience.

Was prompted also to read this “Heart of Darkness” by Subir Sarkar on the same topic in a magazine called Inference. More spooky convergences, as “Active Inference” is this month’s topic in Cybernetics & Systems Thinking generally.

A quickie to capture this link:

Very impressed watching this recorded Web3 Foundation talk by Michael Zargham. He’s a name I came across from making contact with the “Active Inference Lab”. I already know Anatoly Levenchuck and Karl Friston on the AIL Advisory Board and discovered that Zargham is another board member.
(I’m intending to participate in the .edu domain of the AIL.)

The Age of Networks
and the
Rebirth of Cybernetics

Highlights:

• • • Very positive non-apology for focussing on many layers of abstraction above the bits & bytes. The essence of systems thinking is knowing what details to ignore in various levels of complex systems.
    • Very familiar recap of the history of Cybernetics starting from Plato (Kybernetes) via the Macy conferences. With “systems thinking” and network architectures front and centre of response to complexity.
    • Being comfortable with circular reasoning (Hofstadter for me). “Second Order” Cybernetics, positive as well as negative feedback loops. Future consequences are causal now. (There is active predictive inference involved – hence AI-Lab.)
    • Attention cost of participation (eg in social government). The more the “infrastructure” can handle invisible processes we don’t have to worry about, the better for us. Transparency is a distraction from what really matters. Noise means we always fall back to lowest common denominators. [See Mental Switching Costs]. What we need to trust is that the design of the decentralised system knows its own limitations.

(And, great to hear someone use that quote “All models are wrong, they simply have a valuable domain of intended use.” 3 decades (!) since I heard Julian Fowler use it.)

Anyway, a new “hero” (with no mention of John Doyle).
Connected on Twitter.

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Contrast with this pm’s talk with Iain McGilchrist’s elaboration of his “Sense of the Sacred”. Tremendous audience (and Iain) prejudice against “engineering” and machine language. These two domains just don’t get how close they really are. Same as deep thinking physicists being very close to the same sense of (something) sacred. In the Solms / Friston (bio-psycho) story, the turnaround of Damasio is telling, from the same prejudice against mechanistic algorithms to understanding the human subject involvement.

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The feeling of the brain being actively engaged with too many thoughts, to properly address any new issue, never mind any of the existing issues, is a common feeling – for me anyway.

Once you have several mental balls in the air that are connected to some strategy to get something delivered productively, it’s impossible to pick up a new one without letting drop at least one. [The other metaphor is the plate-spinning circus act.]

In correspondence today Richard Emerson coined the expression:

Mental Switching Costs

As well as reflecting the existing thought process above, that formulation instantly suggested its relationship to the (Friston) Free Energy Principle and all those systems-thinking consequences of Markov-blankets and active inference for living and sentient organisms. It’s all about efficient and effective use of resources, and when one of those costly resources is conscious attention itself, maximising which tasks can be left to the sub-conscious.

Isn’t it great when a plan comes together?

Regular commenter AJOwens (“Staggering Implications“) posted a very astute thought below my post on John C Doyle and Zombie Science.

Whether we see problems with “current” science as a bug or a virus, or simply the current state of ever-contingent, imperfect science, the switch to a new dominant view within science is of course exactly what Kuhn was talking about in his revolutions of scientific paradigms. And they’re always revolutions because – for whatever specific reasons – the existing paradigm naturally resists change. (I’d still say the current shift is special, somewhat meta, in that it’s about science not about any particular content of science. But he makes a good point.)

As an engineer / technologist I had always focussed on the techno-economic industrial paradigms (TEP’s after Freeman & Perez, previously Kondratiev Waves) enabled by advancing science, not the revolutions of or within science itself. Doubly meta here, because the current paradigm we’re struggling to get to terms with is the Electronic Information & Communications “wave” in human culture and economies more widely. This is quite distinct from the science and technology market-place that has enabled it, and quite distinct again from the revolutionary idea that information and communications may in fact be the very foundations of any kind of science.

Understood in [Kuhnian] terms, the “bug” in science is a very old one, and its roots are epistemological. All scientific research is conducted within a paradigm, but the paradigm influences what counts as “evidence.” Phenomena contrary to the reigning theory are at first not even noticed or recognized as important “facts.” If they become more persistent obstacles to current theory, they are explained away, dismissed as anomalies, or otherwise resisted. Eventually the reigning theory becomes so riddled with inconsistencies and beset with contrary observations that its very paradigm is overturned, and a new one is adopted which can accommodate the new evidence.

I believe we are in the middle of such a paradigm shift, and the work of people like McGilchrist and Solms and Doyle are part of it.

AJOwens, comment April 11th, 2022.

(And he goes on to suggest some other current sources.)

The point – we are in the middle of a Kuhnian paradigm shift – and being revolutionary, the process will have its downsides as well as its progress.

And this particular paradigm revolution is a complex, ubiquitous, many layered on multiple meta-axes. It is – or will be when it reaches a tipping point – going to be painful on a profound and grand scale. This is not just horse-drawn canal boats being replaced by steam railways. The e-Comms enabling is running full-steam ahead of the consequences in all aspects of humanity.

“The paradigm influences what counts as evidence.”

Indeed, as I’ve said before.
And resistance is futile.

Published this week, On Quality is a collection of writings by Robert Pirsig, prefaced and selected by his widow Wendy Pirsig, almost exactly five years after his death.

The Robert Pirsig Story

Apart from introducing us to Bob’s interest in the ubiquitous presence of Quality and to his two main writings, the books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) and Lila, the preface also gives us “The Robert Pirsig Story”. Ironically, Wendy points out that most relevant parts of Bob’s early biography are to be found in the pages of ZMM, despite the “for rhetorical purposes” warning which led some readers, myself included, to research which aspects did indeed correspond with reality. I say ironically because for quite some time there was speculation, even a direct suggestion from Bob, that Wendy would one day write his biography. Here she gives us an eight page summary – including, despite its brevity, several newly public details – and lets us know that the selections in On Quality are themselves “loosely chronological”.

Previously published selections come not just from Lila and ZMM, and Bob’s paper Subjects, Objects, Data and Values but also from DiSanto & Steele’s Guidebook to ZMM and Dan Glover’s Lila’s Child. New selections come from Bob’s letters (to unattributed correspondents) and from his notes of the very few talks (*) he gave on quality.

[(*) Post note: In fact the whole of the introductory chapter “The Right Way” is a selection from the transcription of a talk he gave just a month after first publication of ZMM – now available in full here.]

On Quality

And the focus really is on quality. Whilst naturally acknowledging that his Metaphysics of Quality is elaborated within Lila, the multi-level “patterns” that form the full ontology – the model of evolved existence in the world -are not mentioned. Dynamic Quality, originally simply “quality” in ZMM, is the fundamental – radical empirical – essence of what is experienced.

‘Quality is just experience. It is the essence of experience of what is sensed. That’s all.’

‘It is not an intellectual category or any kind of thing that is independent of experience itself.’

RMP, Letter October 2, 1993

On Quality focuses on the quality monism itself and on its first division into static and dynamic, contrasted with the more orthodox subject-object split:

‘That line, “Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality it cannot last. Both are needed,” is emerging in retrospect as the most important one in Lila.’

RMP, Letter September 4, 1993.

That statement itself pre-figures what today would be seen as fundamental to “homeostatic” models of life and consciousness in both science and philosophy, where all empirical knowledge is at root “affect” a categorically good or bad felt property before any more specific kinds of thing can develop in biology or in intellect. On Quality includes several references to Bob’s archetypal “hot stove” example of categorically good vs bad immediate experience. Elsewhere he went further and used also the classic “thermostat” example of what would be instantly recognisable as homeostasis today.

Also included in On Quality are selections from Buddhist texts where Bob saw parallels with his original quality thinking and was inspired that quality must indeed be fundamental and ancient, independent of Western scientific progress.

Still Important Today

Existing Pirsig readers – and there are millions – will welcome this sympathetic selection of “the most important” basic thoughts on quality from their source. For those readers, the notes from the few talks he gave form the bulk of the newly published material [(*) above and (**) below]. For a new reader who may have resisted the urge to dive into two rhetorical best-selling and cult road-novels from 1974 and 1991, On Quality provides a gentle introduction to their core thoughts, and may tempt you to follow-up on what all the fuss was about and why they remain important today.

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[For more on Pirsig from me on Psybertron, start from this summary page and follow links to my Pirsig Page short-term and the Robert Pirsig Association page (longer-term)]

[Post Note (**) one such large extract was shared on Literary Hub, by the publisher Harper Collins / Mariner Books.]

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Amazingly, after so many convergent threads on systems architectures and their fragility or resilience to well-placed viruses or bugs – in my agenda that “system” being the whole of science-led rational orthodoxy – I have may times used the systems thinking approach that complex systems (like politics plus media plus social-media) need moderation in the speed of communications in key layers. (As opposed to yes/no censorship of content.) We need this kind of thinking in order not to degenerate to lowest common viral denominators through social-media. (Sadly the prevailing “virus” is that any kind of moderation is a constraint on the much fetishised idol of “freedom of speech”.)

The threat / promise that Elon Musk likes Twitter so much he might buy it, in order to support that fetish, has got a lot of people thinking, and sure enough systems architecture thinking has gained a little traction:

When talking about how to improve social media, don’t focus so much on content moderation; focus on the architecture of viral dynamics. [full conversation coming soon] https://t.co/sxLiyibMD4

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) April 15, 2022

Some of us have been watching the exact same cycle play out since 90s-era IRC chat room days pic.twitter.com/xdGsBIdhaT

— Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, etc (@JohnDiesattheEn) April 4, 2022

Naturally, I enthusiastically agreed with both.

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Freedom runs on rails.
There are rules of engagement.