Psybertron Asks

Might not be obvious, but this is the next in a series of “dialogues” with Dave Snowden. An example of the “dichotomies” Dave warns against.

• • The ongoing dichotomies dialogue.
  • The recent East-West example.

Every choice of word is a binary chop, this not that. And however well defined (or not) the word is symbolic short-hand for whatever we have in mind in the dialogue in which we’re using it. One thing is clear East and West are not about being either side of some #Good Fence of longitude. It’s not about spatial geography.

“West” means the traditions of thought that came to us from Plato via Aristotle (and via the Islamic world) and Europe and hence everywhere else via conquest and empire. Obviously there are zillions of schools of thought, not to mention three distinct monotheistic-sibling religions with any number of factions, all footnotes to Plato, in that one “West” classification.

East simply means “not-West” in that sense. Outside that distinct boundary, the other side of that #GoodFence. As well as a collection of many distinct geographically Eastern / Asian schools of thought, more or less “religious” philosophies, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism and more, it also includes any number of aboriginal / indigenous / native world-views, anywhere in the world, as far “West” as north and south America.

Apart from a wide sprawling collection of sets of classes that fall under those two globally-exhaustive paragraphs, any “definition” of West and not-West can only be about some essential distinguishing feature(s) at that level, even though the many distinct subclasses within each share and differ by many other distinguishing features, enough to fight religious wars over.

The essential feature is the objective, logical, “scientific” facts-based view on the one hand and the subjective, intuitive, “wisdom” values-based view on the other. The latter generally being excluded or denied or redefined to fit, the former. (That’s a whole book or ten.)

But it’s historically recurring many times over:

the recurring philosophical division between
the explicit / objective / classical and
the intuitive / implicit / romantic

Systems thinkers might see (say) Capra as the obvious “hippy” introduction of Eastern – Zen Buddhist – ideas to 20th century Western (US) living, but the doyens of the new physics, Heisenberg and Schrödinger (say) were there before the hippies and the beat generation, not to mention the romantic poets and transcendental philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and that’s just recent history of 21st century mindful – bodily & moral – engagement with our local environment and global ecosystem.

It ain’t a new fashion. It’s an eternal and universal truth.

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The concept of “Ontic Vagueness” caused my ears to prick-up when Adam Weisberg shared a link, asking for review comments on Mastodon a week ago:

Ontic Vagueness – The Argument From Freedom
Adam Weisberg – January 2025

The idea that things are much less well-defined than their accepted definition(s) might imply, is long-standing and oft-repeated here:

Ref: quite separate warnings by Dan Dennett (“hold your definition“) and Anatoly Levenchuk (“definition as a coffin“) about being wary of definitions generally, and my own #GoodFences arguments that all definitions are essentially one or more overlapping binary chops this-not-that, each of which involves arbitrary choice that can be refined or re-purposed once understood

But I’d mostly seen this as essentially human – semantic, epistemological – about current / imperfect knowledge used to make those definitional choices. In terms of orthodox science, this is no problem of course, quite the opposite, definitions evolve as knowledge evolves.

But then again, the closer one’s metaphysics gets to the map being the terrain – that fundamentally information is what everything consists of – however well we humans know it. As I’ve said about myself before, my own ontology is epistemological – about what can be known, whatever our current state of knowledge.

So for me the Ontic vs Semantic case is moot. They’re both epistemic. One about what can be known and the other about what we mean / understand / intend by what we believe we know.

I mentioned this in a bookmarking post a few days ago and AJ Owens had already responded with his own recent post linked there too.

My notes (so far) on “reviewing” Weisberg’s paper:

I really got 2 things out of it:

Identity. Self-Identity – several references to things being “self-identical” represented by the (tautologous?) “X=X” threw me at first. Makes sense if read with the qualifying “for all cases for all time, at all levels of detail from gross to quantum”.

Freedom. Weisberg’s argument against this is “from freedom”, that the universe itself is free to evolve, and not “pre-defined” by any creative hand of god nor by any brute-fact “laws of nature” that happen to be the case from its inception.

So, if you already have a “process” or “interaction” ontology – like Whitehead or Pirsig – then none of this is a surprise. Identity is dynamic and evolves like everything else. Plus:

Unger? – Interestingly Weisberg uses a Peter Unger (1984) “concrete worlds” reference, whereas I’ve used Roberto Unger (2015 with Lee Smolin) “singular universe” for the idea that even laws of nature are evolved in this world (and only inherit any level of pre-definition from boundary conditions in the pre-existing universe in which our big-bang occurred). Unger & Smolin specifically, and Unger more generally.

Identity Generally? Written lots before on identity being defined broadly and narrowly and with purpose (ie politics). Identity without Definitions and Identity Generally. (Something distinct from nothing, one thing distinct from another.)

Owens’ paper (fellow Whiteheadian) and the comments below have a couple of interesting angles for me too:

Dynamical Systems? – can systems be any other kind? (I’m always sceptical of those that qualify their various systems theories and “sciences” for marketing (management consulting?) purposes. All are systems and all systems are dynamic. (Systems all over the blog for 25 years.)

Capra? – I also mentioned Capra very recently and also because some 21st C writers are referencing him in serious systems contexts, even though I’d personally left him behind as unoriginal.

None of which counts as a “review”. All too closely related to what I’m already writing 🙂

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Some things I’m reading and reviewing, but squeezed for time, so just bookmarking here:

Tom Clark, making a defence of Determinism.
My position (after Dennett) is that the problem is not that physical science is determinist, but that people interpret that fact too narrowly and reductively, to the exclusion of other “emergent” causal chains.
“Super-Determinism Sucks” as we’ve said before [and I see – reminds me -this is the source of my Kevin Mitchell / Tom Clark “debate” I need to write-up also.]

Adam Weisberg on “Ontic Vagueness”
Very interesting on where Ontic vagueness is truly Ontic rather than really always being Epistemic?
Fascinating arguments, on identity (self-identity) and a free universe. but going right back to the basic something-rather-than-nothing or one-thing-not-the-other thinking. Again much used here. [Post Note: See AJ’s comment below and the new post he refers to at Staggering Implications. This review has turned into a bigger exercise … because it’s so related to what I’m already writing … and I’ve been under the weather a couple of days. Ho Hum.]

Katherine Cross “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (almost) Never Mix”
H/T Ulrike Hahn on Mastodon for the link. Absolutely fits my agenda:
“social media are not fit for producing [healthy] political change [in fact it’s degenerate]”

[Need to Add: Dave Snowden’s recent series of posts]

What exactly is woke? (And more to the point, why are some people anti-woke enough to label others as woke? A pox on both their houses I say.)

Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.

Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.

Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.

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Frankly, woke used non-pejoratively, just means politically correct in 20th C language. It picked-up the label woke by analogy of younger people being awakened to some suppressed social, freedoms and rights issue behind otherwise everyday life activities, that they hadn’t previously noticed. And from being awoken to the issue, those people often become sensitive to actively noticing and raising the issue at relevant opportunities thereafter.

One quarter of our way through the 21st C most of those issues fall under the DEI and Identity Politics umbrellas, where as well as Race, ethnicity and colour, Gender, sex and sexuality, diversity extends to any kind of socio-cultural or neuro-diversity. As well as actively noticing the issues the woke naturally become active campaigners on behalf of diverse groups, identifying with them.

So far so good, diverse people have diverse needs and individual rights like everyone else, and majorities need reminding of both their explicit and implicit ignorance of diversity issues in both language and action. So far, no different to good old political correctness, it’s about taking care and being seen to take care, when dealing with larger public groups which invariably contain diverse minorities.

The problem arises with the labelling and with campaigning where the latter inevitably demands snappy acronyms and symbolic labelling and the maximising of common interests by joining forces with other potentially suppressed diversity groups.

As originally with political correctness, there is the risk that by focussing on the diversity elements and their needs and rights, the primary purpose of the original activity gets downgraded, overlooked and lost / hidden behind the PC/Woke language. We risk losing sight of the original purpose and the needs of the wider enterprise or public. Potential tyranny of a minority, multiple minorities. Those with interests in and responsibilities for satisfying the majority needs, and recognising the needs of the diverse minorities, quite rightly question the details and validity of the diversity needs where they conflict, add cost and risk or otherwise disadvantage the majority need. Balancing multiple different needs is necessarily a point of contention and compromise, so care – mutual care – is needed in agreeing detail.

When campaigning meets careful management, especially in our electronic-social-mediated times, the nuances of agreeing detail get drowned out by the sloganising of the issues – the othering of those not in full agreement.. One cultural right on one side meets one objective fact on the other, and then any finer but relevant details can’t get a hearing. For this reason, those pointing out the downsides of of any given diversity interpretation end-up labelling their opponents as woke and take up the binary opposite anti-woke position.

Both are stoking a binary war instead of carefully resolving detail to mutual satisfaction. And let’s not forget there are actually many different issues under that “diversity” heading.

Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.

Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.

Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.

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Post Note: Andrew Neil in The Mail

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Post Note: This from Jim Stewartson, back in 2022 before Musk bought Twitter. (Although it’s not where he starts, that 3rd position is the Woke / anti-Woke dichotomy.)

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Two gaps in my reading when it comes to my “Psybernetic” Systems Thinking subject matter, Fritjof Capra and Gregory Bateson.

Bateson was obviously involved in post-WWII “Macy” developments in Cybernetics, but I skipped reading him so far thanks to his unpromising (to me) association with Margaret Mead, critiqued by Dennett, and a feeling more green-ecological than eco-systemic? It’s not that I doubt the quality of his thinking, I simply doubt it holds any more than I now hold in 2025 thanks to the other thinkers I’ve read? [Library of unread books, etc. If I’m wrong, put me right, etc.]

Capra, I had read (1975) “The Tao of Physics” and (1982) “Turning Point” as one thread of my discovery of Eastern analogies to the received wisdoms of fundamental materialist physics, but had only recently noticed Capra’s systems-focussed works being cited by other Systems Thinkers.

[I had also read, but forgotten, his (2003) “Hidden Connections” – from my period in Cambridge, judging by the bookmark – I think it was this read that led me to see his work as stating lots of stuff that already seemed “given” to me, including lots of “Systems Approach” references. Ho hum.]

This week, I picked-up a copy of Capra’s (1988) “Uncommon Wisdom – Conversations with Remarkable People”, partly because it used the word Wisdom in its title and partly because I noticed Bateson was one of those remarkable people. Two birds, one stone. (The book is an auto-biographical summary of Capra’s life and people experiences that led to his “Tao of Physics” thinking and his “Systems View of Life”.)

I’m only skimming selectively before returning it to my reference shelves, because I really have other writing priorities right now, but I have captured a few notes:

Firstly biographically, Capra really was a hippie, unlike Watts and Pirsig, anti-establishment alternative drop-out lifestyle over and above his physics PhD. He was actually at Imperial College London overlapping me by one year in 1974/75 just as his “Tao of Physics” was being completed and published. I had friends in the Physics department adjacent – literally next door – to mine in Aeronautics on Prince Consort Road, wonder if they knew his professor P.T. Matthews? And Big Sur, Esalen, Haight-Ashbury, Taoist Buddhism, the Dance of Shiva, Watts, Suzuki, Castaneda, Krishnamurti, Hesse, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lennon’s “Imagine”, the lot, the whole kit and kaboodle, before that.

“Freedom from the known”

Several Heisenberg meetings, Tagore influence and positive endorsement of the “ToP” – Heisenberg and Schrödinger got it, as already long known. Chew and Bohm – no physical foundation other than systems. (Doesn’t connect with information processing? No “metaphysics”.)

Bateson himself and his “Self Organising Universe”(*) were Capra’s inspiration for his “The Systems View of Life” (**).

[(**) I’m confused now, because the book with that title is a 2014 book co-authored with Luisi. Was he referring to his 1996 “Web of Life” by that Systems title in 1988 – “makes extensive reference to the work of Maturana, Varela, Prigogine and Bateson”? (*) And “Self-Organising Universe” (1980) is by Jantsch, which makes general acknowledgement to Bateson amidst all the other great-and-goods of systems, as well as having a Chapter 8 based extensively on Bateson (1972) “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”. Need to read Capra’s Bateson chapter again.]

Anyway …

“Mind as a systems phenomenon.”

Oh yes. (And therefore with some level of mind in any living organisation / ism before specialised brains.) The Bateson syllogism.

He has the Zen (Taoist) approach to planning. Having in mind things worth doing, but only actually doing them opportunistically when an encounter with a person or situation arises and connects to that dot, rather than any actual “scheduling”.

He met with R.D. Laing author of “The Divided Self”. Again, I’ve not read this popular work, but McGilchrist references Laing’s technical paper(s) on Schizophrenia.

Talking about the drugs scene, and LSD experiences in particular, some things that seem so obvious to me, that I wonder how it can be written as a “convincing discovery”: That the effect is to catalyse, release, invoke, reinforce or emphasise thought patterns that are already somewhere in the subconscious psyche of the subject and not defined by the substance itself, so actual experiences are different for different people. Like, how could it be otherwise? [Meta in kind.]

Back on the shelf. Writing to do.

Reading Capra’s (1988) and (2014) works will have to wait.
Ditto Bateson’s (1972)
Ditto Jantsch’s (1980) – PDF Downloaded (Subtitle … evolution as an “emerging paradigm” – Q – Has Dennett referenced Jantsch?
Not that I can see … oh my!)
Add to that list!

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Post Note:

Here, one of those serious / credible references to Capra’s “Systems View of Life” (2014) from Kevin Mitchell.

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A recurring issue for Psybertron – something that runs quite deep in all binary divisions, and taxonomic divisions ARE all binary many times over (#GoodFences) – is one very specific division, that between the sexes.

Differences are not dichotomous, total, forever, never the twain shall meet. Differences are simply significant distinctions we need to be able to make to even talk about them. In the sex / gender case we undoubtedly share 99.99% of our humanity and everything that goes with that including rights and freedoms of opportunity and the like (and share probably 99.90% with the animal world, and maybe 99.00% with living things generally). But differences that are nevertheless significant enough to care about and understand as properly as possible?

(And no this isn’t a post about the “LGBTQI+” trans-gender wars, those biological-sex and socio-cultural-gender distinctions.)

This is about two very important distinctions that get overlooked because it’s been easier to deny popular misconceptions – that are therefore equally easily mis-used – than it is harder to share understanding of nuanced but valuable truths.

Men / Males and Women / Females ARE different, and 
Left-Brains and Right-Brains ARE different, therefore
Male-Brains/Minds and Female-Brains/Minds ARE different
and their distinctions / relationships ARE significant.

And I say valuable, because such differences are a source of requisite variety in both the meme-pool of ongoing human affairs and in the gene-pool of future human evolution.

A healthy mixture beats artificial uniformity any day.
Vive La Difference(s) because they are a Good Thing.

Anyway, the latest published research on brain & sex differences opens with a simple statement:

“Sex differences in human brain anatomy have been well‑documented, though remain significantly underexplored …”

People steer clear of considering real (and well-documented) facts out of a politically-correct (aka Woke in the 2020’s) fear of unintended misrepresentation and misunderstanding. This one is doubly problematic because BOTH left-right-brain differences AND sex-differences are involved and there’s a lot of popular mythical debunking flak to avoid in order to make any progress with either, let alone both.

Critical Debunking is so much easier than Progressive Creativity.
#Dysmemics #PartOfTheProblem

The significance in the latest paper, is that one of the significant sex differences highlighted is in the scale of the corpus-callosum white-matter permissively communicating between the brain halves. A very old finding reinforced by the latest research.

Hat tip to Kevin Mitchell for the latest link, a biologist specialising in evolutionary brain-mind-agency development. And Iain McGilchrist who having chosen one difficult left-right brain hill to die on (sacred naturalism), has nevertheless also correctly referenced the sex differences in this area, Dennett too.

(Previously on Psybertron? Search “Vive La Difference”)

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Post Note:

Just a bookmark for now 6 sex differences.

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Preamble, I mentioned in both the 2024/25 deck-clearing and previously in my project-summary, that the significance of Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind” was much greater than I’d given credit, and actually suggested it was a good introduction to the whole.

For me, it was the first time (back in 2002) I’d heard of the 1946-onwards Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and systems thinking generally. Apart from being knocked-out by the introductory chapters making explicit the idea that implicit, humanistic aspects of knowledge were at least as important as the objective, mechanistic forms, and that Cybernetics was rooted in human governance following two world wars (despite increasing association of the word with feedback control and computer / internet technologies generally.)

The quotes about “literature as superior knowledge” and about the significance of the “foggie froggies” (ie the post-modernists) reinforced my already new-found born-again-reader drive and led to self-identifying as PoPoMo (post-post-modernist), once I’d given the PoMo’s head-space.

To this day, I discover, the ASC (American Society for Cybernetics) have Dupuy as their main source for proceedings on the Macy conferences.

Anyway, the point of this post, having had the conversation above over book-club-books in the pub, I thought I’d bring in my copy (covered in notes) or maybe obtain a new copy for the bar.

Turns out, as well as my copy being covered in notes – hard-back (2000) “New French Thought” translation of the (1994) French original, not only is it out of print, but used copies command collector prices. Whatever happens I don’t want to lose my copy.

There was a later (2009) MIT Press paperback edition, also unobtainable new, used or remaindered, under £30 including shipping. Anyway I bought a copy for the club.

Apart from the switching of title & subtitle between those two editions …

Title <> Subtitle: On the Origins of Cognitive Science.
Subtitle <> Title: The Mechanization of the Mind.
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1994)
Translator:   M.B. DeBevoise (2000)
MIT Press edition: (2009)

… the only difference I could find was an additional preface by the author, and an updated dedication following the death in 2002 of Heinz von Foerster, an important source acknowledged by Dupuy in the original.

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I captured the new preface:

 

 

I’m part of the X/Twitter “Community Note” community – I think I’ve mentioned it’s becoming a bit of a farce – a 3-way battle between factions with “No Note Needed” (NNN) as part of the faction naturally siding with the original poster. Net result is effectively random / binary / populist outcomes – so I don’t waste too much time on it these days, like all good ideas, being gamed degenerately , BUT …

One set of such recent battles obviously involves the utterly crass utterances of Musk. His defenders say – but it’s just his opinion, NNN, he has rights, Freeze Peach, etc.

What these people miss, like the off-the-spectrum-autistic Musk himself, is that truth is made of a lot more than (objective) facts. Dialectic – logical objective argument – is only a formalised sub-set of rhetoric, good or bad. A bad idea with a simple message and powerful reach can be much more dangerous & degenerate, than any factual inaccuracy.
#Dysmemics
#PartOfTheProblem

See (Civilised) Rules of Engagement

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Disclaimer:

Yeah, yeah, I know that particular fire in the embedded image, has no direct relation to Musk (Trusk-minus-Trump) or Tesla, but it serves here to illustrate that Trusk is, as they say, “a dumpster fire”. (It is, of course, nevertheless very deeply relevant in a complex systems view.)

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Watched a 2001 film tonight on Netflix that I’d never heard of until it popped-up. Starring Jack Nicholson and an “ensemble” cast of Hollywood’s great and good – Harry Dean Stanton, Helen Mirren, Micky Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave. Sean Penn as producer and director with music by Hans Zimmer. What’s not to like?

But I didn’t know any of that, other than the Jack Nicholson lead role, until I selected it. The reason it caught my eye as I scrolled over available recommendations was that I noticed The Pledge (the film) was based-on a book by Swiss-German author Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Dürrenmatt is an exception to my pre-2001 experience of barely ever reading anything other than technical, popular science or news material, before I became a born-again devourer of fiction, classical and philosophical. Dürrenmatt’s “Die Physiker” (The Physicists) was a set text drama when I did Germanic Studies as a minority subject along with my Aeronautical Engineering degree major way back in 1974-77. The play was mixed in with other German language, culture and history syllabus, but it (and the tutor, now I think of her) made an impression that obviously stuck with me. Shortly after I embarked on this Psybertron research and writing project in 2001 (9/11) I picked-up and re-read Die Physiker in early 2002. it was relevant to my agenda for the obvious science vs morals content. And I’ve probably reviewed and mentioned it again another 10 times on my travels. It didn’t occur to me that Dürrenmatt had written anything more that had made it into English translation, and I’d never looked.

Die Physiker is a fictional drama based on patients known as Newton, Einstein and Möbius in a private mental institution / sanitorium, the first two because they are presumably schizophrenic patients with imagined identities. The third is presumed feigning his madness in order to lock himself away with the maddening guilt of physics having enabled the atomic bomb, with the realised ambiguity that he is in fact being locked in a secure institution by society for that same reason. (The sanitorium being called Les Cerisiers always put me in mind of Chekhov. Some big names played the main roles in an RSC 1963 production of the 1962 translation of the 1961 original.)

The Pledge (the book) is a quite different earlier work originally published in 1958 and first translated in 1959. The 2001 film screenplay is an adaptation, transposed from Switzerland to northern Nevada (rural small-towns around Reno NV). Very Scandi-noir watching it in 2025 and very evocative of Fargo ND given the harsh winters and the Scandinavian character names. As the Wikipedia notes suggest the detective – Jack Nicholson a “three-time loser with women” – does in effect solve the crime he has pledged justice for the victim’s family, despite the crime happening on the day of his retirement party. But his eventual failure to actually achieve the denouement, identify and bring the serial criminal to justice, is really just a series of bad choices and accidental events both relevant and incidental. Eventually after suffering ongoing accusations of madness in his obsession with keeping his promise, he really is driven mad by his failure. A requiem (in 1958) for the detective stories that are so common place today that involve elaborately constructed “whodunnit” ambiguity and mis-direction of multiple suspects and motives, etc. Gruesome the crimes and creepy the detective’s association with the actual and potential victims, relatives and witnesses, despite never doubting his sincere intentions – you must know you look madly obsessive and appear creepy even though we know you’re not – but a very well done psychological drama. Recommended.

I must seek out more Dürrenmatt works
(and add to the endless reading list).

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