Month: February 2023

Don’t know why but I can’t stop Tom Petty’s “Century City” memeing around in my head, but picked this up from The Guisborough Bookshop today.

Added to my collection.

May need to take priority over the reading list, or maybe hold until our upcoming city break?

[Post Note: Fullest review and links to other references here.]

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Rudolf Steiner divides opinion but his thinking is undoubtedly valuable. Think Anthroposophy/Theosophy and Steiner/Waldorf Schools, whether as intended by Steiner or interpreted ideologically by his disciples ever since, but the value in what he actually said and wrote remains. [Feels a bit like Jordan Peterson for a 21st C example – undoubtedly guilty of association with outrageous assertions (for rhetorical effect?), but undoubtedly heart-felt and sincere “authentic” thoughts behind them.]

[Post Note / Aside: also conscious of Steiner again recently thanks to this Matt Segall (@ThouArtThat / Footnotes2Plato) sharing this talk about Steiner’s “Philosophy of Freedom”. And: Thanks to @ChrisPapavassiliou sharing this full text Steiner Library version of TBoNS  below – from which I’ll be able to extract quotes much more simply than the highlight and snip from Kindle labours so far. Update one day?]

Reading these fascinating lectures again, after many years. Saul Bellow’s brief foreword is also good. pic.twitter.com/cwI8Fpoqj5

— ʿAṭṭār (@noonessleep) February 6, 2023

Prompted by this reference to “TBoNS” (1983 Translation) I recalled I had an unread Kindle copy of a later republication as “TBoS” (2017) complete with the Bellow preface and a Barfield review essay. (Barfield is the common ground here, and the source of the Twitter connection, though I have read lots of Bellow too, without noting any connections.) So, I’m reading it.

Anyway as the Tweet suggests it’s a series of 8 lectures from Sept/Oct 1920 by the Austrian/Croatian, in Switzerland, in German. I hadn’t really twigged until remarked explicitly by Bellow that, like all the Vienna Circle and “modern” science machinations, the context is Germany & Europe & The West generally in crisis post WW1. Souls searching for a better way. [Ditto cybernetics post WW2. Whereas, on the contrary in 2023, the awful buzzwords PolyCrisis and PermaCrisis are already being used by some as if distress-marketing an inevitable state of crisis instead of  a cool-headed recognition that what we’re dealing with is complexity and that it has been well understood by many for many generations and is simply excluded by the narrower received wisdom of rational management. I sincerely hope “Critical Systems Thinking” is not going to make the connection to “Crises” – because marketing!]

[Goethe and Schelling influences !
Total convergence again, nothing new under the sun.]

From Barfield’s review:

The Cognitional Mode – I shall start using that.

And right from the off, it’s that fundamental inescapable question – what do we mean by reality, to exist, to really exist, in this, the real world? (And does science even have anything to say about that, and is it therefore inevitably inadequate?)

From Bellow’s preface:

And to be clear, from Steiner, later:

And rather incongruously by Bellow early on:

I say incongruously, because we are right at the start of a book more generally about science, and that other (ultimately) inescapable “hard problem” question is already on the table (even if his conclusion is not quite the one I’d make now. “We shall never know” IFF we stick with our Cognitional Mode.)

And as I noted “IFF” above:

And again, on the metaphysical questions:

[Aside – can’t see any note about this, but publication of the 1983 translation was the occasion for the Barfield review essay, but that essay in the 2017 publication I’m reading has (additional?) notes with 21st Century sources, including Wikipedia?]

Anyway, so far I’ve only read the Bellow and Barfield contributions. So many sources shared with McGilchrist at al. More later maybe.

Been a bid distracted for a couple of weeks with no new deep reading or writing – not really sure why, some dent in motivation I can’t put a finger on, January blues maybe? Some domestic distractions, DIY car maintenance and planning our birthday city-break, probably relevant. Also tried to focus on engagement elsewhere in ISSS and AII and ECO, but inevitably reduced focus on my own projects. Too many foci.

Anyway, as I do every few years, I had announced some on-line housekeeping earlier in January. This was a significant driver:

“[I] have some glitches in [WordPress] Dashboard, Stats, Page & Post Editing and in published Page & Post functions: – (1) loss of Pingbacks – (2) unpredictable behaviour between Classic and Block Editors and advanced editing Plug Ins – (3) unpredictable behaviour losing “sessions” requiring fresh log-ins every few mins between the different functions above. Secure but time consuming!

So I need to do some maintenance to the blog.”

Pingbacks still seem to be dead(?) and I do have a few legacy character-set failures, but the other annoying inefficiency glitches seem to have been resolved simply by re-installing the existing Plug-ins in a natural order. So, even though I did investigate splitting content into older static copies and ongoing content creation on a fresh newer platform, I no longer have any real incentive to switch horses to SubStack, Medium and/or Mastodon. Onward and upward with WordPress on my DreamHost virtual server with the simple 2016 Theme. (Should probably tidy-up email subscription as well as Twitter follow engagements. Maybe just a theme refresh? Oh and I’ve updated DLVR.IT to share the blog notifications automatically to as many channels as possible – eg Mastodon and Discord as well as Twitter and maybe more?)

Also, my unread and/or re-read pile – not just the burgeoning wish-list -has grown to “where to re-start” proportions.

So, back to that Fields/Glazebrook/Levin (2021) paper which I started to review a couple of weeks ago?

Another informal chat from Michael Levin.
(These are very good and this is a good one.)

Chirality (asymmetry / handedness) from individual biochemistry and cells scaled-up to organs and anatomy- bio-electrical gradients – but sounds very bottom-up mechanistic / reductivist? Yes, much more, part of the “space” in which development happens.

Palpation – in slime-moulds – very much as used by Solms. How does it obtain / remember the information about its environment and then act on it. Computational – physical / hydraulic – view. Still difficult for Iain?

One vs two-headed worm body pattern – learned bio-electrically after normal genetic expression attractor.

The pleasurable-experience <exclusive-or> good-memory option? (Similar to the torture and forget thought experiment.) The fact it’s a counter-factual – can’t actually imagine “how” that exclusive situation could be engineered – means it’s really a philosophical question, to hold a strong-intuition position. The latter for me. People saying the opposite are attached to the now, all that’s real, and don’t see long-term value – (unless they’re cheating in the thought experiment and expecting the experience will give them something of value?) Some degree of permanence, continuity of individual identity – yes, I’m with Iain.

Everything is a whole at its own level, not just a sum of its parts (in time or space), hence the continuity. Left-brained autism to think otherwise possible (eg Derek Parfitt). (Schizo-autistic spectrum very similar to loss of right-brain function – per TMWT. Dissociated personality disorders – even total split-brain cases – tell us a lot about integrated / continuity of personal identity.)

Matter and mind as different aspects / manifestations / (phases?) of the same reality – I should say so. Obviously the affect each other – mad to suggest otherwise. Materialists / physicalists are probably those who least understand – appreciate the value of – matter. (That “reality” is information & computation btw. More mentions of Solms, Friston, Fields …)

Interminable, standard problems in philosophy – as a choice between isms / schools – reflects left-right brain choices. Lack of integration.