Year: 2022

Tim Mulgan’s view he calls “ananthropocentric purposivism” (AP).

AP is the view that, contra atheism, the universe has a purpose, but, contra benevolent theism (BT), that purpose is non-human-centred. Put simply, there is a cosmic purpose, but humans are irrelevant to that purpose.

Made me laugh. I have a holding post on the special position- not exceptionalism – of humanity in the cosmos not quite ready yet (*), but this bumps right up against it. That cosmic purpose is not irrelevant to humanity.

Sure, it need not have been humans, “we” weren’t pre-ordained or gifted the priviledge, but as the sole representative of higher intelligent life we know about, we are very much a part of it. Intelligent life locally maximises the 2nd law globally – at present we are it. Our special role – as that species – is a responsibility to know and understand this.

[And in my thinking
AP is An-thropic Perpective or Principle
as opposed to Anan- … more some other time.]

=====

[(*) I was intending to respond to this piece:

It’s very interesting to see skeptics actively espousing human exceptionalism. They seem to argue that we are somehow separate from animals, have evolved beyond our mammalian sexual reproductive categories and can think ourselves into a different class.

— Gia Milinovich (@giagia) January 2, 2022

Though no idea what prompted it – other than some gender-war aspect? But also in the last month this piece by Julian Baggini was what motivated me. We wouldn’t be a species if we weren’t “somehow separate”!  It’s the somehow that matters. Jeez!]

Karl Sigmund

Mentioned Karl Sigmund’s “Exact Thinking in Demented Times” in the previous Reading List post. To be clear its sub-title is:

“The Vienna Circle
and the Epic Quest for
the Foundations of Science“

I’ve read 1/3 to 1/2 of it so far and it’s really very good. Interesting voice and turns of phrase, massively comprising quotes from the protagonists with invisible referencing to the text rather that in it. Works well. Obviously large parts of the story I already know, and for my own quest I’ve already formed strong views on the value of the many thinkers and thoughts involved. From the Hapsburg, Prussian, German, Austro-Hungarian thought from Mach and Boltzmann onwards in reaction to Kant and all those other continental foggie filosofers.

In many ways – unsurprisingly – it’s much more comprehensive than David Edmonds’ “Murder of Professor Schlick” but has lots of same Europe-in-crisis feel amidst the Viennese and Berliner, kafe-kultur and end-of-la-belle-epoch, crumbling-high-society atmosphere. (And Schlick’s wasn’t the only assassination!). It’s also organised in clear time order with individual headed sections on the back-stories and contemporary participation of the stellar list of names involved. Easy to navigate. A recommended reference work, even if I never complete and review the whole here.

Apart from, again, recognising the proper place of Mach and Boltzmann in our future scheme of things the main new aspect for me has become the need to read Schlick himself. He wasn’t just the manager of the Circle who misunderstood Wittgenstein – he had, and indeed published, a great deal of his own original thought of which I was unaware. In fact he appears, like Eddington in English, to be an important German interpreter of the 20thC upheaval in the foundations of physics. And again, the personal stories in that historical context always make for an engaging read, whatever the explicit subject matter. Hard to put down.

For now I’ll finish with a little of Doug Hofstadter’s preface, a hero of mine along with Dan Dennett. [And whilst we know from earlier that Hofstadter is a linguist and a translator, as well as a philosopher of knowledge, he is NOT actually the translator of this work. Interesting in itself.]

Demented thinking?

I guess it’s all relative. Thinking of exact science as the basis of truth – and a basis for planned economic activity – clearly looks like an attractive quest when your world is collapsing under authoritarian propaganda and violence – in the 1920’s not our 2020’s remember.

[Previously: 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 1920’s/30’s Vienna Circle. A reference I picked-up from earlier David Edmonds and Cheryl Misak reads.]

But it is merely a lesser evil, a fools errand:

Hofstadter and Wittgenstein

Hofstadter’s introduction scared me at first – very negative, even scornful – about those Germanic philosophers associated with, or who actually became, Nazis. Understandable prejudice.

“the Circle was a salient counterforce to those forces of evil, a noble dream”

And, in his own journey, he also rejected Wittgenstein as obscurant nonsense, “dropping him like a hot potato“. Especially relevant since a misunderstood Wittgenstein became the positive obsession of the Circle in its (main) second incarnation – not to mention the irony between the positions of mystical vs exact science involved in this story. You really couldn’t make it up.

But Hofstadter doesn’t let us down. The perils of pinning “lesser-evil” hopes on that misguided “noble dream”:

“I have come a long way since my teenage infatuation with the vision of mathematical logic as the crux of human thinking. […]

In [a] sense, my teenage addiction to the writings of the Vienna Circle members was not a bad thing at all for me – in fact it kick-started my fascination with the amazingly subtle nature of human thinking, which has lasted my entire life.

[The] Vienna Circle’s vision though idealistic was also quite naïve. The idea that pure logic is the core of human thought is certainly tempting, but it misses virtually all of the subtlety and depth of human thinking.

[The] Circle’s claim that the act of induction – moving from specific observations to broader generalisations – plays no role at all in science, is one of the silliest ideas I have ever heard. The way I see it, induction is the seeing of patterns, and science is the seeing of patterns par excellence. Science is nothing if not a grand inductive guessing game, where the guesses are [constantly tested by rigorous experiments.]

Science has everything to do with induction, and precious little to do with syllogistic reasoning or any other type of strict mathematical logic.”

As Hofstadter says, it’s essential we understand our intellectual heritage, but we mustn’t confuse the content with the lessons (that need to be) learned.

“Science has precious little to do
with any type of mathematical logic.”

Lovely book. Highly recommended.

=====

[Popperians and logicians? Bring it on!]

“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.

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.

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.)

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.

=====

(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.]

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.

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”:

• • Bafflement #1 – The Madness of Crowds
  • Bafflement #2 – The Madness of Power
  • A 2022 Manifesto – Human Flourishing

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.

=====

[Follow-up post here: Tower of Song]