Month: February 2024

Mentioned Thomas Metzinger a few times before, so was interested in his new book. Sadly expensive as a book, so initially on the unbought as well as unread library list, but in fact MIT Press Direct has a free online copy:

[Love that version of the image of the blind men getting to grips with a large complex problem, not a version I’d seen before, but back in the late 80’s / early 90’s every systems engineer, me included, had one in their slide deck (after the obligatory iceberg image, obviously, the small visible part of a very large obstacle).]

I keep falling foul of my use of the word “computation” being taken as the formal “machine” kind intended by Turing, algorithmic at the level of interest with all the corollaries of computability and halting/decidability and Gödelian incompleteness.

I just use it to mean processing (inc. communication) of information quite generally – however it’s done, whether particles exchanging photons or electrons say (information being the complement of entropy in physical system thermodynamics) or whether organismic, human and/or social systems making decisions.

However I intend it’s use, I’m not reducing organisms to that level of deterministic physics machine, even if I’m OK with thinking of them / us as a special kind of “soft machine”. All the interesting “machines” involve formally non-computable levels of emergence, because their complexity is many layered. Dynamical systems where causation is multi-directional.

My smartphone may be a computing machine, but it’s not a very interesting one until our system control volume includes our human brains, eyes and thumbs in real time, locally and remotely. That’s an altogether different kind of “computing machine”. A system complex enough that some layers involve the “algorithm-breaking” agency of free will.

So, I still suspect the whole involves – is based-on – formal “computable” algorithmic computation, right down to fundamental physics of quantum bits, even if the biological and mental level processes are not themselves of that kind. Of course, for me, that’s a metaphysical statement about the basis of even physics long before we get to the sentient living. At this level of abstraction I’m not so interested in the details of computability, even though I appreciate many are for their own good reasons.

Maybe if, instead of “Computation”, I used the word “Reckoning” for this most generic / abstract sense of processing information for decision-making purposes.

What do you reckon?

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Hat tip to Yogi Yaeger for a clarifying discussion on Mastodon.
Useful, even if all outstanding misunderstandings are mine 🙂

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Just to capture a couple of new “process view” resources for me.

Naomi de Ruiter in the first and Dan Nicholson in the second:

The Dissenter Podcast on Spotify

And Brain Inspired on YouTube

Hat tip to Kevin Mitchell’s timeline for both.

Obviously Whitehead is an inspiration, an important reference used, but Dan claims not to be “a Whiteheadian”. Whitehead made his own “neologistic” word choices for process aspects he wanted to pin-down as “entities” in his metaphysics, but clearly these don’t exhaust all possibilities and still drive “exegesis” in interpreting details of what he actually intended – philosophy was ever thus. There’s an ethical choice in pinning named things into an ontology – Yay! And anyway, the real value is in the abstraction.

Yay again!
The Devil’s in the details, but 
The Angels are in the abstraction.

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Dan Nicholson’s “Everything Flows” added to my book list.

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Two of Philip Ball’s books are on my wish list, but I’m unlikely to obtain and have time to read either for a while – “The Book of Minds” and “How Life Works” – in that counter-intuitive order apparently.

I’ve mostly picked-up on his reviews and articles for magazines and journals previously, never actually read any of his books, but he has been prolific alongside his previous editorial day-job. I like the way he thinks.

Hat tip to Yogi Jaeger on Mastodon, for sharing this excellent interview with him about his life and work. Completely different career path from me, but amazingly similar trajectory in joining-up topics and thoughts from schooldays. [Worth some review in its own right … full transcript there too.]

Fascinating that it is a Templeton resource again. As I often say, despite being atheist / non-theist, I get more sense out of the average theologian than the average scientist these days.

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The thing I find most immediately fascinating about Pranay Sanklecha is the title of his 2013 PhD Thesis at the University of Graz, Austria:

“Climate Change,
Theories of Justice, and
The Ethics of Ontology”

“The Ethics of Ontology” sounds a good fit with my “Epistemological Ontology” – there is no absolute ontology independent of what it’s used for, the original meaning and purpose in whoever created it. That’s a matter of ethics, not physical science. Need to find a copy of that thesis. He also has his own The New Philosophy blog project.

Meantime, he published an excellent magazine article in December 2023 – a top-ten philosophers / books for people who don’t know why we need philosophy in our times. Times which look like a collection of enormous existential crises with which we – humanity – seem to be failing to get a grip. Exactly the motive in my own Systems Thinking research proposal, where my title includes systems thinking and cognitive science, but the focus is unashamedly metaphysical, the basis of our knowledge-and-decision-making ecosystem.

And, he leads his philosophy top-ten with Robert Pirsig and his “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (ZMM 1974).

The wisdom of a true philosopher.

“Robert Pirsig was a true philosopher. His book [ZMM] is a serious, sustained and passionate “inquiry into values”. With burning intensity, with transparent sincerity, he asks: what is really valuable? What truly matters? […] essential reading for anyone searching for wisdom in [these times].”

My other interest here is, as you probably already know, in the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) and our current focus on #ZMM50th – the 50th Anniversary of the original publication of ZMM in April 1974. The prompt for his Dec 2023 article above is that 50th anniversary, this year. That quote above is as good as any testimonial the RPA has.

Small interconnected world.

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[Post Note: Additionally fascinating, his academic CV and my own research proposal, neither actually mention Pirsig. Yet.]

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