What, Why & How do we Know ?
A Russian Take on Political Leadership In the heat of Trump’s Putin-Helsinki summit fall-out, I posted this cartoon from Twitter to Facebook: (Hat tip @NickBryantNY for tweeting it. A Brit journalist living in US.) I posted it bare, without comment, letting the cartoon speak for itself. A picture paints a thousand words, but ~998 of them … Continue reading “A Useful Idiot Isn’t All Bad But He Ain’t Good”
8th July 1968 was a Monday 50 years ago when Robert Pirsig set off from the Twin Cities on his Honda CB77 Superhawk with son Chris riding pillion and friends John and Sylvia Sutherland alongside on their BMW. That road trip to California formed the narrative of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). You … Continue reading “After the Fireworks”
Fundamentally – What do I know? Black holes ain’t so black, and science ain’t so different from the humanities. Singularities have horizons crammed with information. Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available. This is a summary of recent work ostensibly on quantum gravity and the role of humans more generally in the science … Continue reading “Fundamentally – What do I know?”
So many intellectual inputs and opportunities for dialogue of which barely a tenth can be grasped over a weekend at Hay on Wye, at the How the Light Gets In HTLGI 2018 Festival. [Meta – specific sessions and update on the weekend experience here.] Below is my summary of the messages I heard in the … Continue reading “Are We Nearly There Yet? #htlgi18 #htlgi2018”
Compiling my Hay-on-Wye 2018 How The Light Gets In report, starting with the meta stuff below, content report is here. Mid-day Friday to Mid-day Sunday this year. My third time. Last year being a fallow year for the event. Previous year weather was excellent, combined the event with some days walking in the Brecon Beacons … Continue reading “#HTLGI2018 Update Meta”
Harris Podcast with Sean Carroll [Aside – Identity Politics topic – previously talking past each other with Ezra. Apart from better management of conversations with specific Q’s requiring A’s, main Harris lesson is to avoid agendas of extremists left or right. Convincing an extremist that they may be wrong is a counterproductive waste of effort. … Continue reading “Sam Harris & Sean Carroll – Raw Notes”
I’m not really talking about making choices here – binary or otherwise – between schools of thought. No, I jest, since the point of any tuple representation – pair or triple – is about their integration, not their separation. Ultimately any ontology is an arbitrary choice of which “objects” to represent your world view, with … Continue reading “Monism, Dualism … Trialism?”
[NOTE 2024:] With Elon Musk taking a free-speech-absolutist approach to his takeover of X/Twitter, it is becoming ever more obvious that these good-faith rules of “civilised discourse” below, apply to open social media communications just as much as to any other limited discourse, dialogue, argument or debate between individuals and groups of individuals. More so, … Continue reading “Rules of Engagement in Discourse”