Started reading Salman Rushdie’s latest Victory City during the past week away in Sevilla. But for various reasons didn’t get much concentrated reading time and and am only part-way into Part 2 of 4 (*). It’s very good on so many levels and I want to continue with proper attention and concentration. As a novel, I’m reading it for what it is and notnote-taking as I read, so I will have to do another pass to pick-up the references I’m going to need.
As well as the historical / mythical story, it is full of wit and practical philosophy from existence, meaning, creation, naming and reality to gender and sex roles. Striking for me, given my own writing project, is how to deal with the long time-scale in a narrative over many generations. In my own case I have a 200+ year timeline from early 1800’s to the present and I’ve been struggling with first-person and/or witness perspective to “narrate” the story. Rushdie’s heroine lives over 250 years which creates some very interesting problems for aging and relationships with other human characters. Also some reliance on the author’s summaries of earlier narrative by the heroine herself and even heads-up references to things that will happen long before they do. Clever. Fascinating inspiration.
The great thing about these images of how the brain works is that they show us this is not the way to understand how the brain works. (See also: the cell.) pic.twitter.com/crigNTiPKX
Hope it’s no letdown to tell you all that I never meant this particular image to be taken too seriously. It’s from a loopy source that also included this image, prompting a nicely sardonic comment from @PessoaBrain. BUT… pic.twitter.com/ecxoEeAN0K
I do think there is some value in mapping brain connectivity, of course. But that crazy diagram was a sort of caricature of where you can end up if you get too literal about it. The same applies to the mapping of biochemical or genetic interactions networks in cells…
2/2 Even in digital computers the categorical variables (voltages and sensor inputs) are analogue and it’s the switches and control circuits that interpret digital “decisions”. Same in brains/minds 🙂
What this article doesn’t recognise is that our awareness of a quality is in the context of our valenced state space, in which our possible actions.. selected to optimise our future valence… are steps to different valenced states. It is this valenced terrain that we feel.
[This is just a stub for elaboration about biological (living, universal Turing) machines … Suffice to say, the claims to be pointing out misunderstandings are themselves misunderstandings]
What goes around comes around – again – is a recurring feeling that suggests again that I should stop reading and focus on the writing. When I reviewed Unger and Smolin back in 2015 – on meta-laws being more fundamental than mathematical laws of physics – I noted another regular reference of mine – Brian Josephson – had published a paper on “Wheeler’s – Law Without Law”. I never did follow-up at the time, but thanks to a hit on the page above I was prompted to read it more closely (*).
What comes around for me is Cybernetics or “systems thinking”.
Like many physicists, Josephson talks throughout in terms of a “system” quite naturally when describing any set of physical entities and their interactions. The paper actually has a reference to Ross Ashby (1960) “Design for a Brain” but long before that reference occurs in the text, he’s already talking of “viable systems” (after Beer, not mentioned) and of “Yardley’s Circular Theory”. Although I was initially fascinated by the idea of circular causal logic implied in the name of such a theory, it turns out it refers to “circles” as units, unitary things or sets/collections/assemblies of things and their relations/links conveniently treated as wholes … and indeed tending to form or effectively behaving as wholes. Something not rigorously defined but discovered in the processes of participation, interaction and characterisation. Pretty much my working definition of a “system”. (Where is IDEF0 tool functionality when you need it to visualise the system circle<>link<>circle (Peircian semiotic triple) view of this world – aagghh!!)
Indeed his examples are homeo/thermo-static systems and “computer” systems. The two-way influence between systems as components in larger systems is self-reinforcing, tending to create and preserve such systems. Very much like life.
“the point is that the coupling between the systems concerned reduces the range of variation available to the joint system, while still making degrees of freedom available”
This reduction can be learned, or can be a natural phase-locking resonance.
And finally of course, the reason I made the Smolin<>Josephson connection he acknowledges Smolin as one of those already having suggested that “meta-laws” closer to those of biological evolution might underlie what appear empirically and mathematically to us as “laws” of physics.
Nothing new under the sun (again!)
[(*) Also I notice that whilst I didn’t follow-up the 2011 paper I did quite independently pick-up a speculative Brian Josephson lecture on the same content back in 2009. I really am going round and round, and need to get off the carousel so I can deliver some writing! – NB the presentation isn’t a great delivery by the Nobel prize-winner, so focus on the content if you can 🙂 Whole networks of connections model in there too. Even more significant in this 2023 context, the Ilexa Yardley contribution is explicitly in the space of systems thinking as an organisation response to complexity. ‘Twas ever cybernetics. Here she is in 2023– all dreadfully self-promoting “I’ve found the secret to the universe” stuff, oh dear, what a pity. Still, she does pick-up on yet another angle where I do too. Navier-Stokes at all scales. Weirdly fascinating.]
[Aside – that self-reinforcement / preservation put me in mind of another meme that’s been nagging at me in recent days – what’s the name for the processes within typical microprocessors that error-correct over clock-cycles to keep interpreted digital values in range as the analogue values of actual electrical potentials drift? My claim the other day that even digital computers are analogue at root – it’s their architectural / systems design that generates the binary digital behaviour. There’s nothing alien about treating information in living things – mental states of living things – as “digital”.]
I don’t know any more about “Naval” (see footnote) but this chat is very enlightening on Deutsch’s position. Some of Deutsch’s recorded conversations can be difficult and disappointing – his geeky style without the benefit of editing for public consumption 🙂 – but as he says himself this interviewer asks good questions, and has clearly done his homework.
Anyway a few immediate notes, but a recommended listen either way, also with a complete transcript. Humans are special – a species by definition, as I keep pointing out – with our ability to use knowledge beyond mere Darwinian evolutionary information processes. Uniquely special in that regard. We have the wherewithal to create any future we value, but are always prone to making wrong decisions with the knowledge available to us. Which is why my focus is and always has been on what makes for a good human decision, a good collective human decision processes. Governance, cybernetics and systems thinking in my ongoing agenda. And in this conversation we pick-up quite early on whether that means rational, and what does rational mean anyway. (Lots of the power of AGI / ChatGPT is the human ingenuity in selecting which pieces of output are valuable & interesting.)
Optimism is about what we can do with the right motivations, NOT what will necessarily happen.
One more note: He very carefully qualifies “falsifiability” as part of a good explanation in science (as opposed to a general fact) and goes on to explain why knowledge beyond this aspect of science is part of constructor theory work “with Chiara”. (Uncomfortable with narrow Popperian view on criticisable / falsifiable – highlighted “reach” as a key feature in previous readings.)
Mentioned Matt Segall (Footnotes2Plato / @ThouArtThat) in an aside note to this recent post on Rudolf Steiner. and I have acknowledged him before here. (He’s a Whitehead scholar with whom I’ve engaged once or twice on questions of process philosophy and McGilchrist space (?) – in comments and tweet threads, but I realise I probably don’t give him enough credit because I’ve not really sought out his work directly until now.)
He shared this little (under 10 mins) talk in that aside above – on the face of it about Steiner and his Philosophy of Freedom – but it’s well worth it for his discussion of some very basic distinctions at the root of so much philosophy within the scope of my own agenda. There are some philosophical questions that are frankly at the root of any and all human endeavours.
I captured a few notes/quotes/paraphrases I find relevant:
The relationship between percepts and concepts, between observation and thinking, is a “dilemma” present in all of philosophy. The dilemma of philosophy that turns up in many different ways – mind-body dualism, relations between ideas and things in the world generally.
Oh yes. Been one of my musings recently that all our bigger problems (yes even the god-awful poly-perma-crisis) rest on just two or three fundamental ontological and epistemological questions – about what we know about or mean by “exist in reality”. (I was motivated to summarise these somehow, and may do so after listening to this.)
The difficulty of defining concepts. Concepts are different to their names, concepts cannot be reduced to words. We run into problems when we attempt to define anything (as the friends on the other dialogue are clearly discovering, and the reason Matt captured these thoughts in a separate video essay).
We can never get to the essence of the concept in our attempts at definition, we can only ever arrive at descriptions of certain sets of characteristics and aspects of “an entity” – even though we seem to be able to intuitively grasp the concept as we come to know it. This difficulty is frequently vexing.
Oh yes. Hold your definition (Dennett). Definition as a coffin (Levenchuk). And this is frankly the point my #GoodFences mantra. The whole post-post-modern / meta-modern stance in reaction to the logical positivism project.
Are we discovering or creating the essence of such concepts? There’s clearly a participatory process happening. Steiner and Barfield. Clearly something has happened in the evolution of human consciousness – since the Greeks – that has created this distinction between percepts and concepts.
Biblical allegory with Adam before and after the fall. Previously he “knew” the other animals in the garden, could name them and “speak” with them. But “epistemologically severed” after eating of the fruit of knowledge, lost direct access to the Logos.
Oh yes. Knowing in the biblical sense. The Savoir/Connaitre or Kennen/Wissen distinction we’ve lost in English. Fundamental to my own metaphysical scheme.
We had to invent “isms” to recreate connections between the knowledge and the known. Physical science has continued to advance its mathematical understanding, but somehow happy to leave intrinsic nature as something absurd (Feyman again) that can’t necessarily be understood at a human level. Another symptom of “the fall” – the split between percept and concept.
So now – Goethe & participation, something new, we can’t “undo” the fall. We have to artistically / creatively participate. An alchemical call to collaborate with nature on this task. Steiner (and Barfield?) are drawing our attention to this problem of separation and the need to bring them back together again. A problem of the “I” – being our identification within the world that connects these halves. Pre-fall symbolic activity of creating our whole self with our “thinking” (in the most general sense). Holy task, a sacrement?
Oh yes. Whatever we arrive at as our “worldview” and however we get there, having re-integrated percept and concept in “us” we are not going to be able to represent it as simply one or the other, or one empirically proving or wholly defining the other, and there must remain an element of “faith” in the value of the integrated view we’ve achieved. In my position this is “Sacred Naturalism” or natural theology.
Nice one – beautifully done Matt. I’m going to have to take a look over at the original Steiner discussion this spun out of.
(PS – will add refs to my points in those inserted thoughts above at some point.)
