Year: 2022

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.)

Well, not the whole of it, but a 2021 short story of that title – just 40 pages – “The Renaissance” by Richard Emerson. A personal and poetic story of personal rebirth, a thought journey set in place and in history.

Firstly, I have to declare that from the start, up to the arrival in Florence, my overwhelming reaction was “I am that man” which might also explain the sense in on-line discussions on related topics of being pretty closely aligned on philosophical matters. It also means that from this point on, this is more personal reflection than review:

Reading (and note-taking) in a public places is exactly my style too. To this day I mostly read in pubs and cafes.  Experiencing real-life is never a distraction, it’s important context – until someone engages you in conversation, not that that happens to Emerson here. But even then a “What are you reading and why?” can be a welcome synthesis to the reading I find. Reminded me of years working away from home in Cambridge.

That said, for the first of the three parts, there is no actual reading, just an unread book by his side as thoughts are prepared and noted. An unread book as a friendly companion, one worth giving house-room as Eco recommends in his library of unread books, oft mentioned here. The same unread book – also in three parts – was by my side up until 2021, the 700th anniversary of it’s author’s death in Florence. Appreciating that a book is important and valuable is one thing, but understanding why and how you need to actually read it does require mental preparation. Awaiting the right moment. I personally had several false starts until that moment.

The thought journey – in time and place – is the main thread, one we share as I’ve said, starting with the sense of “something missing in foundational principles” whilst finding oneself like Dante in a thick and dark forest with only glimpses of the the shining mountain in the distance.

Florence is an important place where our paths may have crossed, and many of Dante’s metaphors have been plundered by others since, Robert Pirsig’s intellectual high-ground, Robert Frost and G K Chesterton good fences and gates in the forest.

The meme of using Rafael’s School of Athens as his cover image is a clue to which characters from Dante’s story Emerson identifies with. The end of Inferno, with our protagonists breaking out from hell into view of the stars without having to renegotiate the levels through which they had descended has suggested to others an alternative cosmic geometry. Geographically intriguing also that Emerson’s home town square is only a train-ride from Florence, we too arrived by train, from Pisa airport. I was more focussed on Galileo than Dante on that occasion, looking up at the Uffizi ceiling:

As Virgil led Dante, so Dante can lead us on that journey, recognising that a perhaps surprising component of that missing foundational principle is in internalising ancient literature and in soaking-up the places that created it. Next time, I really must visit the Dante house.

A recommended read. You too might surprise yourself by becoming reborn as part of a bigger tradition.

Having been slightly side-tracked by the TERF-wars again after reading Matthew Burgess “Smart SpaceTime”, it’s 12 days since I last posted.

Lots of email and forum traffic on discussing and promoting the works of Robert Pirsig and Iain McGilchrist (and Dante, and Spinoza, and …) but no posts or reviews, even though I have been reading even more:

I mentioned wanting to read some Moritz Schlick. So I’ve been reading his “Problems of Ethics” (1930) – the 1939 David Rynin translation. Whilst there is lots of good thinking it is clearly part of the logical positivist’s project to make morals part of science. The assertions range from the obvious to the you-cannot-be-serious so, whilst I’m curious where he’s going to end up, I’m struggling to complete.

Having been impressed with Eddington (1928) previously, I also started to read his later (1939)”The Philosophy of Physical Science”. Can’t shake the feeling he was back-tracking here to keep his scientific friends on board, using quite pejorative language about philosophers.

Picked-up off the shelf Ernst Haeckel “The Riddle of the Universe” (1899) Joseph McCabe’s 1929 translation (No.3 in “The Thinkers Library”). Fascinating on a clear monist objective (before the New Science came along). A hard determinist who sees Free Will as an illusory distraction, but I may still complete to see where he ends up.

Also on the shelf I noticed Henry Stapp’s 2011 (2nd Ed) “Mindful Universe” which it appears I only half-read first time round. What I hadn’t noticed was multiple positive references to Whitehead … so that’s my current reading.

And of course “1922” has happened on BBC R4, so lots of modernism subjects in the programming. Current pet hate meme, is that everyone discussing Ulysses seems to start with Molly’s closing “stream of consciousness”. Titillation rules as ever.

I’ve reduced my engagement with Gender Critical / Radical Feminist & LGBT activists several times in several stages, each time as common sense appeared to be gradually breaking out. But no:

Last night Alice Dreger – a hero of mine on the right side of this for a long time – posted an emphatic tweet that provoked much angry response. The polarisation between sex is / is-not “binary” and sex is / is-not a “spectrum” and “dictionary definitions” of sexual dimorphism. This is what Alice actually posted:

Do not erase intersex people
Do not erase feminine gay men
Do not erase butch lesbians
Do not erase trans people
Do not erase gender nonbinary people
Do not erase bigendered people
Stop insisting sex is simply dimorphic in humans because these realities make you uncomfortable.

— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) January 17, 2022

Obviously in non-specific response to much traffic on the topic, and exactly what progress she was hoping to make I can’t guess, but the frustration is obvious. As is the care for the “people” in those groups. Most of the anger is the mistaken assumption that she’s prejudicially “othering” those groups. The insistence on simplification – denial of subtleties – is her actual target.

The real problem is that however binary plus exceptions sex itself is, the word gender has been erased as too problematic, so the word sex has simply inherited all the problems of expression and interpretation. However clear scientific definitions might me, and they are, the problems of caring vs othering are not entirely scientific. As ever this is just a topical example of the much deeper problem I call #GoodFences – between narrow use of class definitions and broader conceptions of individual participation in reality.

Classic example on the scientific side is this one from Dr Emma Hilton

Sexual dimorphism.

Systematic differences between the two sexes of a gonochoristic species of a physical characteristic (or set thereof), not including reproductive anatomy.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) January 18, 2022

It’s a very good thread, except for some non-scientific subtleties in assigning good and bad faith to expressed positions. Possibly a bit circular to have the word gonochoristic within the definition, and not sure why “not including” reproductive anatomy. But very useful summary of the scientific aspects.

As ever, I need to complete the #GoodFences thesis. Ho hum. I fear taboo words like intersectionality, lived-experience and critical-theory will be unavoidable 🙂

I’ve had Mark Burgess “Smart SpaceTime” for a year or more, but was prompted to pick it up and read just last week when I noticed a long Twitter thread by Mark:

I have your Smart Spacetime (unread) on the desk beside me. Have I already missed the sequel?

— What, Why & How do we know? (@psybertron) January 6, 2022

Mark was a theoretical physicist:
– who migrated to computer systems and became interested in the metaphysical (presumed axiomatic) fundaments of physical reality.

I’m a mechanical engineer:
– who migrated to computer systems and became interested in the metaphysical (presumed axiomatic) fundaments of physical reality.

Like so many before us – Eddington for example – we can’t escape the feeling that the physical is at least as mysterious, if not more so, than the mental.

The book is clearly chock full of stuff I found interesting, but in order to “critically review” it I need to understand Mark’s objective. Plenty of stuff I could say “that’s not how I see it” but a great deal more where I could agree “yes, that reinforces how I already see things”. A lot of common experiences in there. Whether differences of detail presentation and expression matter, depends on both our objectives.

In a sentence:- I already happen to think – a network representation of information persisted and processed at “agent” locations – with arbitrary internal complexity and external simplicity of “promissory +/-” communication relations with adjacent agents – at all sampling rates and scales of aggregation & abstraction, from individual sub-atomic “bits” to intelligent conscious individuals – is my preferred view of physical reality. Our everyday views of space & time, motion & causation simply being emergent from this underlying “metaphysics”.

Mark describes all of these things in great detail with examples from his experience in both physics and computing, but doesn’t seem to make the ontological commitment? He is holding-up analogues between these spheres: a many-layered and distributed (cloud) network model vs a Cartesian / Euclidian space-time grid model and suggesting each throws light on understanding the other.

“The purpose of this book [is] to better understand some wide-ranging concepts that involve space and time.”

Can’t argue with that. And he succeeds. Like him, I hope more orthodox physical scientists are curious to learn beyond the received wisdom of our space-time world.

For my own purposes,  there doesn’t seem to be any stronger thesis? As ever I have a great deal of annotation and highlighted examples, but which of these I should try to document and share … depends.

Finn Karsten posted in Channel McGilchrist highlighting a post he’s written. (It’s their first and only blog post – I don’t know any more about the author – search reveals it’s quite a common name.)

Who Are We : Inconstancy

Woke or anti-Woke – as I always say – “a pox on both their houses“. They’re two extremist sides of the same coin – a naive wokeness to what appears “right” or “wrong”. From whichever side you approach cancel culture it’s not right.

Whichever fundamental philosophical question we start from we get to “And what is good, Phaedrus?” Virtue(s) of the person and/or the methods of discourse in which we engage. Sceptical critical thinking is one tool, but as I’ve said many times, I prefer (all forms of) dialogue get a look in. I’ve written a lot about rules of engagement, but finding the positive intent in the other is the first priority.

But the point of this “Inconstancy” post is obviously that even people with positive intent are imperfect, imperfect in our actual actions and discourse, even if perfect in virtuous intent. Karsten points out that we often hold-up hypocrisy – inconsistency in action and argument – as a cardinal sin. Of course as Brunsson pointed-out hypocrisy is essential, the ability to hold or change conflicting views across levels and contexts … is a virtue.

The sin is bad faith.

Rather glibly mentioned in my reading of Karl Sigmund the follow-up need to read more original Moritz Schlick – in the same vein as following-up Arthur Eddington originals – so I’ve been searching new and used book sources. Despite mentioning the importance of the translation – the Hofstadter introduction – silly me wasn’t ready to find so few English translations!

[Several English chapters in this example.]

Language really does represent the limits to knowledge. I could give original German and French a fair stab, but I’d need to plan for the time & effort. Proper scholarship is hard work.

I’ll need to create a little bibliography of what was published and what is available. Simply correlating different titles, collections & dates makes that tricky enough in itself.

Probably time to start taking library collections seriously. Now where did I put my British Library membership? Be a good test to search there.

What a difference two decades makes, or does it? I’ve been blogging over 20 years and rather than do a new year post on highlights from last year, I thought I’d look back over the decades.

Compare earliest posts in January 2002, 2012 and 2022.

Jan 2002 – reading Bart Kosko’s “Fuzzy Logic” (only my 25th post since starting in Sept 2001) – searching for alternatives to accepted rationality?

• • • Why model something approximately rationally, I concluded,
      when it is precisely irrational or predictably chaotic?
    • Also points to “Systems Theory” paradigm from 1950’s / 1960’s
    • Already referring to Heylighen’s Principia Cybernetica.
    • Picked-up my first Wittgenstein reference just 3 days later! But hadn’t yet noticed the Pirsig ZMM relevance until the end of that month. (Significant because it was Pirsigian theologian Sam Norton later turned me onto Witt?)

Jan 2012 – Musing on computation – understanding the manipulation of information without programming skills.

• • • An acknowledgement of a female team member intuitively understanding what was needed unlike her male managers.
    • Noting “agile” as a general principal, not just a specific methodology.
    • Just 2 days later a reference to “Mesopotamian HTML / XML Mark-Up Language” in ancient spreadsheets – nothing new under the sun!
    • And just a week later already reflecting retrospectively on the Cybernetics thread in the whole project.

Jan 2022 – Already following-up references beyond McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things“.  The most important read of the decade.

• • • Focussing initially on Eddington
    • (Soon noticing the need to follow-up Schlick too.)
    • The 2020’s looking like we’re repeating the errors of the 1920’s
    • Already concluded (again) – this is all about rehabilitating ancient wisdom – wisdom as Natural Theology or Sacred Naturalism – a humanism that respects humanity as part of nature’s cosmic ecosystem.