Month: August 2023

Deutsch Optimism & Systems Thinking

Just a brief holding post to tie up a couple of incomplete conversations.

I’m a fan of David Deutsch generally, and specifically recently his thoughts on optimism fleshed out by his Constructor Theory with Chiara Marletto.

He’s posted a few talks and articles recently specifically on what he means by optimism, including this one at Warp News. In response to the wall-to-wall doom and gloom from the Extinction Rebellion / Just Stop Oil brigade and in particular writer Ray Monk, whose work I’ve admired here, being “captured” by that agenda, I questioned whether he knew this aspect of Deutsch’s work. He didn’t and when I shared that link he pronounced it “vacuous twaddle”. (Monk is a biographer of major thinkers and scientists.)

Secondly, lots of post-Pandemic chat now morphing into Net-Zero / ULEZ / “Global Boiling” opinions about sane responses to proper understanding of the scale and nature of risks – a backlash to the doom-mongers. As well as the general pub chats mentioned before – people really do get it, even if concensus on sensible actions remains difficult – there was a group of young lads clearly affected by the pandemic lock-down disruptions to their lives (education > unemployment) and, with two in particular, a fair bit of talk about Systems Thinking and Optimism. I need to draft something and add signposts.

For now:

Search Psybertron on Deutsch

Search Psybertron on Optimism

Search Psybertron on Systems Thinking

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Post Notes:

And reminded myself that “Optimism” was already a chapter in his 2011 book “The Beginning of Infinity – Explanations that Transform the World.” Had already made an impression then.

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Matthew West R.I.P.

I heard today that Matthew West had died just yesterday of a brief illness, thanks to a Medium post by Ian Bailey shared on LinkedIn.

Matthew’s contribution to my own interest in ontology is kinda baked-in to a lot of my thinking, in the same way that (say) Dennett and Pirsig are, with only a few direct references to his work. [In fact he and Ian Bailey are both name-checked in one of my earliest long (Pirsig) pieces here on Psybertron.]

Coincidentally, only yesterday, I made one of those baked-in unspoken references – “All models are wrong, [some are useful].” Something he and Ian Bailey and Julian Fowler would often remind us in my earliest encounters with ontological models back in the earliest days of “PISTEP” as far back as the very late 1980’s.

My most recent encounters, after his “Digital Built Britain” work for which he was awarded his OBE, where I was bringing his output to a couple of UK nuclear industry projects, were in recent months on the “Ontolog Forum”. Back in 2010 I’m proud to say he and I were both invited speakers at the Russian Systems Engineering Challenges (RuSEC) Worksop in Moscow, organised by Anatoly Levenchuk the chair of what was then the Russian chapter of INCOSE – the common point of contact with Ontolog and with Active Inference ever since.

As Ian notes, Matthew was a devout Christian, a lay preacher and even founder of his own church, but when it came to day to day engineering and business – and his so-called “high-quality data-modelling” of these – he was as humanly pragmatic as anyone. And helpful. I recall one problem I was struggling with here on Psybertron in the early-2000’s when despite my best efforts at remaining pragmatic, my epistemological researches were getting ever deeper into the metaphysics of existence itself. I found myself awkwardly starting a question along the lines of “I know you believe in God, but …”. He could not have been more helpful in separating the issues for me.

From my non-theist / humanist position, in the context of the 21st C post-9/11 “New Atheist” God vs Science wars, I often use the expression “I’m not anti-theist because theists and theologians are human too.”

Matthew is in that thought. R.I.P

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[Post Note 2 Sept 2024
A Tribute to Matthew West in London 11 Sept 2024.
Weird my last reference above was to 9/11. And coincidentally again, was talking about Matthew and the above post in the pub just last night.]

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Identity Politics 2023

I’ve used Identity Politics as an umbrella for my issues with definitive identity. Essentially that “definition” of anything is emergent from many relations and definitive only for specific “purposes” AND that “identity” of specific things – beyond simply naming being a unique handle in the world – is the net result of the (definitions of the) many overlapping ontological relations – classification & specialisation and whole-part (mereology). Politics because there is always a choice about which set of relations (identity) is most relevant to the context. All models are wrong. Identity is always political.

My descriptions of how all that works I’ve reduced to #GoodFences (after Robert Frost) sometimes with #GateInTheForest (after G K Chesterton). Essentially that the politics of identity is a negotiation with a history of incomplete knowledge. And that history is a “game” with definitions as rules that evolve.

I mentioned that in response on Mastodon to a Ben Taylor post on LinkedIn about Resisting Categorisation and Ben’s posted a couple of references since on Mastodon.

When it comes to “resisting” it, I see it as more like having to accept that it is happening – everywhere all the time – but that the fences, the pigeon-holes, are flexible and not to be taken as definitive except beyond agreed / negotiated contexts / purposes.

This is really just a holding post for the interesting looking references:

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Previously on Psybertron:

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