Year: 2023

Chris Fields – Physics as Information Processing

I’ve considered the idea of Physics as Information Processing as central to my work for as long as I can remember [As early as Jan 2002 this post on “Quantum Computing” makes reference to information processing as fundamental.]. The last few years, my “Systems Thinking” – thinking of anything as a system, in terms of functional relations with its internal parts and external environment – has become focussed on the Active Inference / Free Energy Principle work associated with Karl Friston. Having noticed so many other systems thinkers I’ve had time for in these past two decades (eg Solms / Dennett) also converging on this view, and my understanding of other non-systems thinkers (eg McGilchrist) similarly converging, I’ve been digging into the Active Inference Institute resources ever more deeply.

It’s an exciting time. A recent paper in Nature declared important because of empirical support for the FEP at a molecular biology level and even jokey memes noticing that the FEP / Active-Inference / Systems-Thinking “movement” is becoming the explanation for anything (a ToE) in direct competition with all the other big ideas out there.

[Interesting that a new (completely unrelated) ambient-super-conductivity material went from zero to hero to zero in barely two weeks recently. Not all big ideas are created equal – some / one will become the next Kuhnian paradigm.]

Explanation for anything and everything?

Chris Fields has given / is giving a series of  lectures to the AII with the title above “Physics as Information Processing” essentially starting with FEPAI as a reformulation of the whole of quantum physics – aspects that were already there – holography and black-hole event horizons (a la Hawking). (Staring here in May 2023 and ending in October. There’s a good summary page too.)

We’re about half-way through as I type.

With anything as comprehensively multi-discipline as this – a ToE – the hubris sensors ring constant alarm bells. I can’t understand all of this and probably neither can Chris, the person giving the lecture. As ever it’s about the right level of abstraction and the place of specialists and generalists. No doubt quantum physics specialists will find fault – even I can detect statements that might not be entirely true as stated – and yet, and yet, it’s very good. Chris has a gentle relaxed delivery, and there’s plenty of space for re-iteration and consideration across multiple sessions. Also notes where decisions within quantum physics were not science but entirely philosophical (as Max Born had warned “theoretical fundamental physics is actual metaphysics”).

As well as the history:

We have the scope – from the most fundamental Qubits to individual cells, whole-brains and electro-mechanical devices and arbitrarily complex systems.

So much more and more names, Bateson again (and for me Verlinde) and more. And great Q&A’s again.

Chris even uses the “shut up and calculate” Copenhagen-jibe as I do, to point out why so much physics has failed to concern itself with reality for so long. Great focus on Topology over Geometry – Geometry IS the queen of sciences, but it’s the topological aspect that really matters – the relative-relations, not the specific dimensions in space and time which are both emergent. It’s why my preferred level of abstraction is architectural.

The quantisation of time as quantum clock ticks, with experienced time emergent in each frame of reference.

Man, isn’t it wonderful when a plan comes together?

(Aside – the Ontolog Forum is in a debate dissing emergence again!)

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Post Notes:

I should add – the scope of AII has been (is) mind-boggling, and with my deliberate choice to keep my involvement at “the right level of abstraction” – I struggle to find value-adding inward engagement. So much good stuff – detailed stuff – I can barely contribute to. Massive applause to Daniel Friedman for his curation of the whole shebang. Took me a while to warm to Dan’s style, but as well as his light-touch in nudging activities along he also clearly has all of the philosophical and physical dots joined-up in his own mind and asks some of the best questions, makes some great “aha” points for the rest of us.

Did I say “exciting times”?


And … AII really is Daniel’s baby.

Measured Testimony

Watched the famous 15 minutes of Carl Sagan’s 1985 testimony to US Congress on the Greenhouse Gases effect of Global Warming / Climate Change.

Everything is there from ~40 years ago – well calibrated evidence by concensus – and we see Al Gore, of later “Inconvenient Truth” fame, listening intently. I would maintain that the developed west has responded massively in terms of our own consumptions and emissions (ref Lomborg?) and that further unilateral reduction has diminishing returns and significant downsides. As Sagan points out the real problem is fragility and sustaining efforts over long time-scales and in partnership with the other global players.

This has been the focus for me on governance (cybernetics) and the scalability & stability of “conservative” democratic institutions, like the UN. Every divisive, anti-establishment or economically-competitive move, even well-meaning ones, increases the downside risks.

[Hat tip to someone on my LinkedIn timeline, which moved-on too fast for me to capture.]

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Transcendent Naturalism?

Just another holding post – John Vervaeke is doing a lot of stuff and getting a lot of traction in areas of my interest. That’s good in itself, even though so far I’ve not seen anything radically new (have I looked hard enough? are there enough hours in the day?)

This link is to a new YouTube venture of his with Gregg Henriques called “Transcendent Naturalism”, shared by the latter on Twitter.

Rang an immediate bell since I was just editing a “world-view” summary of mine, where I’ve previously nailed my colours to the “Sacred Naturalism” mast – that post and additional links in the main comment below it.

Not watched it yet, but looks like more parallel thinking? And lots of things to notice already: These forms of words in the notes:

“metaphysical-onto-epistemological” – I often need the same words “my metaphysics is an epistemological-ontology” to quote myself.

And – the preceding “Consilience Conference”. Just used the word “consilience” as recently as less than a week ago.

And “nature comes in levels” (Henriques UToK parallel to Pirsig MoQ) one of which is “the ontic-real world”. Ontological commitment.

(Still a sense that Christian / Neo-Platonism has to remain central to this particular ecosystem – when talking about transcendence and spiritualism in relation to “the hard sciences” … )

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Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man”

I’ve made reference, and noted others doing the same, to Dr Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 BBC TV series “The Ascent of Man”. As a 17 year old I was already doing the sciences for A-level and intending to do engineering at Uni, but tremendously influential on the history and evolution of science and humanity. Interesting right now, with Oppenheimer in the cinemas, with his friend Leo Szilard involved in the “chain reaction” thinking, and the moral dilemmas in applied science. Not just the bomb, but Auschwitz features famously too. The same thread picked-up by Durrenmatt’s “Die Physiker” (The Physicists) as a minority subject in the 3rd year of my Aero Engineering degree at Imperial.

Anyway, the reason to post that thought today is that I noticed the full series of “The Ascent of Man” is up on BBC iPlayer having been reminded of it by David Deutsch’s reference to it in the “Optimism” post from yesterday. Deutsch is one of those fellow travellers also influence by Bronowski.

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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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Stafford Beer the Hippy?

The Santiago Boys

#EMFAMBE

Audio documentary (9 hours!) about Stafford Beer’s “Cybersyn” project in Allende’s Chile by Evgeny Morozov(*1) – “new” undated. (Hat tip to Ben Taylor on Mastodon / Twitter / LinkedIn – and was reviewed last week 22 July 2023 by John Bartlett in the Grauniad.)

Amidst all the left-right international and corporate power politics (Nixon, Kissinger, CIA and ITT vs Allende, Castro et al) and idealised socialist dreams – Utopia, literally – actually plenty of real world lessons about Cybernetics as Systems Thinking. That and a well documented history of Beer himself with recordings of him and many interviewees. “Went out a Management Consultant, came back a Hippy.” – Maturana.  Thoroughly referenced, (including modern practitioners like Mike Jackson).

Cybernetics is NEVER about the technology. Technology as something owned, physically implemented in licensed hardware and/or software can become a tool of power and dependency. Yes, there is a lot about access to information, using technology to gather more – knowledge is power (Bacon) etc – but again it’s the info not the “tech”, and who has access(*2)? Very disappointing “scientific management” (Taylorism, resource-time-and-motion) aspect to the Cybersyn project – you can only manage what you know in data(*3), etc. Early days I guess of this being something computing technology (ie Telex!) can do. But a distraction. I have similar early “tech” (Telex and Athenaeum! – ticker tape “at the club”) experiences.

Cybernetics is always about the thinking and the decision-making. Really originally (literally) about Governance – how we make (good) collective decisions. Democracy / Bureaucracy / Technocracy / Benevolent-Dictatorship -> Democracy with (or without?) some form of Elitism.

I came to the conclusion more than a decade ago the problem (of how we humans best “manage” our interests in the world) is solved by “proper” democracy and that proper democracy does require some form of “elite” – [Already mentioned here in hindsight in 2008 (*3)] – technocrats in a technical knowledge / expertise NOT technology sense. Balance of populism – popular votes on all decisions – vs delegated / hierarchical power and control. Either extreme is tyrannical. But how? It’s about the ecosystem, the thought-and-value-system, for decision- making and enactment. The technocracy (as thoughtocracy?) is about managing that NOT making / managing / controlling the decisions and actions themselves – that’s for those with their “skin in the game”. Civil service as not merely the bureaucratic executors, but also the guardians / curators of the (evolving) ecosystem – this is an area where “citizens assemblies” idea also fits well?

Hence the abstraction of Systems Thinking distinct from Project / Policy Management and Execution, and an Ecosystem that manages that distancing.

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Notes:

(*1) No secret that Morozov’s own agenda is, like that of the Grauniad, – “a very promising avenue for reinventing what socialism of the 21st century should be”. Not surprisingly, Russian friends with real experience of soviet communism don’t rate Morozov – nor Bogdanov – but as a documentary we can draw our own conclusions from the facts. Aside – Morozov’s project he calls “post-Utopia”, Paul Mason (Bogdanov scholar) calls his “post-Capitalism”. I say a pox on all their Bayesian priors – Post-Post-Modernism for me 🙂

(*2) Clearly significant in 21st C that we have so much more “democratised” consumer information technology. Creates the illusion of more / better democracy, but of course it’s all still owned and funded with interests and power-structures. And even without dubious motives the channels become dominated by mediocre content – the medium is the message. Actually exacerbates the problem of tyrannical extremes – more activism at both ends – faster, more ubiquitous, more complete polarisation of interests. The need for the abstraction / separation of thinking and doing remains, and is indeed more urgent as it becomes ever more obscured by the “traffic” in would-be transparent information-overload.

(*3) That old myth – you can only manage what you measure – mistakenly attributed to the likes of W Edwards-Deming. Not true, and he didn’t say it anyway.

(*4) Given our 2023 Systems context, ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense) that 2008 reference was to a piece by Dave Snowden of Cynefin. Small world of consilience?

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Meta:

Three-week hiatus here since I last posted on Psybertron. Been focussed – apart from housekeeping – on a Research Proposal on that Ecosystem idea, supported by modern neuro-science and neuro-philosophy on how we humans really do make decisions as agents in the complex real world.

Which also means I’ve missed quite a few other interesting inputs. Hat tip to reader AJ Owens on Consciousness & Semantics, Pts 1 & 2, at “Staggering Implications”.

Bit more housekeeping to clear the decks …

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Post Notes:

Note to self – The rubber hits the road in nail clusters (miguelitos) sabotage, whilst the Santiago Boys deal in cybernetic concepts. Distance between thinking and doing again.

Also – Some interaction with this post, in the comments below as noted by Ben Taylor, but also on Twitter and Mastodon. Probably really need to create another summary page for all things Cybernetic and Systems Thinking. The reply to Finn below was itself a from-memory-summary of my previous recaps, with links to three previous recaps. Just capturing  a couple of additional contributions here.

One, I can be a bit dismissive of certain specific thinkers and their branding of their own ideas and methodologies – “nothing new under the sun” – and everybody’s interpretation of everybody else is “for a reason” – so I’m always looking for conceptual essences at the “right level of abstraction”. Gregory Bateson I’ve “discarded” before on this basis, but did include him in one of the summary lists below – Cybernetics #1, #2, #3, the most recent summary before this one.

Two, as I already alluded and Ben made more explicit on Mastodon, it’s moot anyway how much (say) Cybersyn as executed represented what Beer’s ideas had originally intended, not to mention the politics  – there are nevertheless always lessons to be learned from experience of both – the thinking and the projects.

(And h/t Ben, here a post by Petter Holme, linking Beer’s Cybersyn to Hayek.)

And Three, one respondent on Mastodon – “Kihbernetics” – appears to have his own branded version of what I’m simply calling Cybernetics#3 – Feedback + Agent Feed-Forward + Agent Memory – but he also summarises his main sources:

“#Kihbernetics is the study of #Complex #Dynamical #Systems with #Memory very different from all other #SystemsThinking approaches. Kihbernetic theory and principles are derived from these three sources:

[1] #CE_Shannon‘s theory of #Information and his description of a #Transducer,

[2] #WR_Ashby‘s #Cybernetics and his concept of #Transformation, and

[3]  #HR_Maturana‘s theory of #Autopoiesis and the resulting #Constructivism

We use our Kihbernetic worldview to help people navigate their #organization through times of #change. An organization is defined* as:

“An integrated composite of people, products, and processes that provide a capability to satisfy a stated need or objective.”

*MIL_STD_499B definition of the word “system”

#People are always at the forefront of our thinking (the #who and #why are we doing this for and/or with?). Our efforts will continue with the discovery of all the functions or #processes in your organization (#how and #when something happens or has to happen?), and finally, we get to the #products and/or services that you put on the market and the tools that you use or may need to buy or develop in order to fully integrate your system (the #what and #where things have to happen?).

Our goal is always to make the people of your organization self-reliant to the point that they shouldn’t need our help with the further maintenance of a continuous change management process.

In any case, we’ve got your back while you do the heavy lifting of establishing a better future for your organization!”

Why “Kihbernetics” I’ve no idea, nor why that narrow MIL-Std definition for a system, and obviously in the business of branding his own consulting business – but those three source summaries – Shannon, Ashby & Maturana – look useful. People front and centre, obviously.

[Trust is essential, no solution without it – “leave us to do your heavy lifting” (ie don’t trust “them” trust me, essentially) – is placing the expert-technocrat in the elite governance position (this never goes away as I said). And it’s not about transparency, beyond basic access needs & controls. Transparency is the opposite of trust. Effectively – I don’t trust you so keep your hands and your information where I can see them.]

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Post Notes:

Essay on ITT – the bad guys – by the Morozov – the “Santiago Boys” series creator – in Le Monde Diplomatique August 2023.

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