Psybertron Asks

As promised herwith a few pointers to those items of interest in answers to the 2009 Edge Question.

Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions.
THE TORONTO STAR

Sue Blackmore – predictably, when some other “artificial” technological meme replicator becomes better (for the memes and their replication) than the human mind, humans are dispensible.

David Bodanis – that’s more like it, predictably unpredictable. Science in crisis.

Science brings magic from the heavens. In the next few decades, clearly, it will get stronger. Yet just as inevitably, some one of its negative amplitudes �” be it in harming health, or security, or something as yet unrecognized �” will pass an acceptable threshold. When that happens, society is unlikely to respond with calm guidelines. Instead, there will be blind fury against everything science has done.

Nicholas Humphrey – more of the same, expect a revolution, but don’t predict a changed outcome.

Dan Sperber – Ditto. Expect a clash between safety and liberty.

P  Z Myers – Biology in Minnesota (Intriguing, but I digress …) … when humans (in general / critical mass) finally accept evolution for what it is, it will change who we are. Interestingly and scarily Dawkins’ answer is about a tangible demonstration of interbreeding that might tip that balance. Scott Sampson too, evolution changes everything. (Nice to see PZ in this illustrious list BTW).

Jesse Bering – An evolved god.

Richard Foreman – nothing changes everything. (See Bodamis and Humphrey above.)

Christine Finn – a simple change of perspective in how we map to the world.

Dan Dennett – right again.

When we look closely at looking closely, when we increase our investment in techniques for increasing our investment in techniques… for increasing our investment in techniques, we create non-linearities, �” like Doug Hofstadter’s strange loops �” that amplify uncertainties, allowing phenomena that have heretofore been orderly and relatively predictable to escape our control. We figure out how to game the system, and this initiates an arms race to control or prevent the gaming of the system, which leads to new levels of gamesmanship and so on.

The snowball has started to roll …. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure �” packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity.

Gloria Orrigi – reputation and trust – how we achieve social aggregation of “judgement”.

Betsy Devine – the economics of happiness – post 2008 melt-down.

Actually I’m going to stop there … the theme is this. If we care that humans are part of the future of the evolutionary, game-theory, cui-bono arms-race then we need to add quality values to our accounting for quantitative objects. It may take a major piece of Schumpeterian creative destruction before we really see that, so what we need is cultivate a meme that might lead us through (and survive) such a disaster before it happens. Otherwise we have all the pain without any of the benefit in a lesson learned. Game on.

In the previous post – more on the interminable God vs Science saga – I concluded with a reference to Chicago.

Firstly, the reason I was browsing Mary Hrovat’s Thinking Meat was because I noticed she’d blogged an initial look at this year’s Edge question, which I’d not done yet, but she already concluded as I have done a couple of times before

As always, no matter how many of the answers I read, I feel like I’ve just barely dipped my toes in. However, here are a few that I found particularly interesting …

Anyway, I must take a look myself and see if there is anything or anyone interesting this year.

Back to Chicago. There has been a vague Chicago thread in my stuff; Greeks, the Great Books movement, Pirsig, Rorty, US pragmatist philosophy and some kind of second city vs the east coast seats of learning angle. Led me one way or another to reading Saul Bellow, though someone (Georganna ?) initially steered me off this avenue.

So far with Bellow I’ve read Dangling Man, Dean’s December, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift. Dangling Man was simple and reflective. I liked it and blogged about it.

Dean’s December I enjoyed its mix of Chicago and Eastern European settings, but it didn’t seem deep. Chicago underworld, race, city authority and academic politics meets a dark depressing European farce, the latter reminding me of Ishiguro’s “Unconsoled”.

Herzog I struggled with and still haven’t completed – I even forgotten what its theme was, except that there was a large dose of Bellow as god’s gift to women / love interest which kinda jarred with the philosophical threads.

Humboldt’s Gift, I must have already bought because I can’t imaging why else I would have picked it up to read after Herzog. Glad I did, despite the fact that there is till a strangely prominent sexual power, fame and fortune thread which ties together the gangster and intellectual writer & name-dropper stories within stories. So many subjects evocative of Pirsig too – post-war emergence of society from Victorian attitudes and the place of intellect in that. Much of Bellow’s content was copyrighted in ’73 and ’74  when published as extracts in Esquire,  Pirsig’s  ZMM was published in ’74 and Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift in ’75. Pirsig’s Lila not until ’90.

There was something in that Chicago air.

Significantly also, the first thing I’ve read that has joined these themes to my interest in T E Lawrence. I am no longer alone there.

[Post Note : Unexpected subject in Humboldt’s Gift is a strong Steiner / Anthroposophy thread.]

Continuing reading … started both Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” over the holiday but neither gripped me, the latter I’ll not bother to pursue though I’m glad I investigated both first-hand.

I also started Jorge Luis Borges collection “Labyrinths”. Read a couple of his before in collections / extracts by others and read five stories / essays so far. Weird and thought provoking stuff all of it. Next to read is “The Library of Babel” which I’m looking forward to as a Dan Dennett fan. Recognized “The Garden of Forking Paths” from a a previous encounter – a “many worlds” analogy. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was an excellent surprise – a PoMo grammatology exercise on how someone could write word for word exactly the same huge text (as Cervantes’ Don Quixote) over 300 years later and still be considered to have written the original – by virtue of different times, different society, different history – effectively different language with different meanings despite the same words. Wittgensteinian word games writ large, and of course leading nicely into the mount improbability uses by Dennett of the Library of Babel metaphor. Can’t wait.

Mildly interesting piece on the God vs Science topic from Science Daily (via Mary Hrovat). I say mildly interesting, because what is interesting is neither the research, nor the conclusion, but the fact that it really answers nothing.

Sounds like serious, controlled, empirical science (from the Universities of Illinois and Chicago, published as Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations, by Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 238-241), though I can’t tell enough about the logic of what the subliminal messaging in the experimental procedure has to do with it, but the conclusion seems 100% common sense:

“What is really intriguing is that the larger effect happens on the opposite belief,” she said. “When God isn’t being used to explain much, people have a positive attitude toward science. But when God is being used to account for many events �” especially the things that they list, which are life, the universe, free will, these big questions �” then somehow science loses its value.”

“On the other hand, people may have a generally positive view of science until it fails to explain the important questions. Then belief in God may be boosted to fill in the gap,” she said.

ie hardly intriguing.  However, whilst this final implication also seems true, it remains hung up on the horns of its own dilemma:

The most obvious implication of the research is that “to be compatible, science and religion need to stick to their own territories, their own explanatory space,” Preston said. “However, religion and science have never been able to do that, so to me this suggests that the debate is going to go on. It’s never going to be settled.”

Like, how to “divide” space into distinctly relevant territories without some world model (ontology, epistemology or metaphysics if you prefer) to start with, something more fundamental than either science or god. This paradoxical circularity rings true for me of course.

(The Chicago connection is intriguing again … what is it about Chicago ?)

Plenty of people posting reviews of 2008 and resolutions for 2009.

Detectable in the hits on my site too. I mentioned once or twice during 2008 that I was getting a bit fed-up with the proportion of hits not just from search engines (eg Google, mainly) , with no dwell time from the human user on the other side of the engine, and particularly those from search engine crawlers just creating their indexes. If I’m honest, 80% of hits in 2008 were of this type, maybe 60% of the counted hits in the 7 year life of Psybertron.

Of the real (human) hits, apart from the obvious Pirsig related enquiries, two subjects that get weird hit frequenies are (a) “arguments against Maslow”; just about every hit on Maslow in some sense negative,  and (b) “rational comprehensive planning”; something I pooh-poohed in one post a while back.

Since the new year – three whole days – I would say 95% of hits have involved real users reading and clicking links, still mostly Pirsig and philosophy & evo-psych related (only some of whom are “the usual suspects” exercising their curiosity).

Specifically there were a handful each of both Maslow and RCP subjects with reversed interests … positively for Maslow, negatively questioning rational comprehensive planning.

Greater grace needed in engineering survivability in spacecraft and spacesuits.

Posted verbatim from Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed newsletter …

Welcome to the Thinking Allowed Newsletter �” Doctor Dyt and Wittgenstein

Wednesday 17 December 2008 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/
Repeat Sunday 21 December 2008

I had a university tutor in psychology who was popularly known as Doctor Dit.  For a couple of terms I assumed along with my fellow students that this was an innocent nickname.  But then one day I was told by a postgraduate that it was really an acronym.  It was not DIT but DYT and the letters stood for Define Your Terms.

It was a very appropriate designation.  Whereas other tutors would positively encourage some debate in their seminars, the man known as DYT would immediately bring any such discussion to a halt by a demand for definitions.  It was not unlike being repeatedly hit over the head ‘Right.  Taylor, what is value of optical illusions in the study of perception?’ ‘Well,’ one would begin, ‘When your eyes are deceived it could be that the deception is the inappropriate application…’ ‘Not so fast, Taylor.  You said ‘deception?’ ‘That’s right’ ‘Define your terms.  Define your terms.’

Over coffee in the basement canteen we’d wonder about the nature of Dyt’s home life.  We’d construct scenarios in which Mrs Dyt turned to him over breakfast coffee one morning and announced her dissatisfaction with the sexual side of their marriage.  ‘We don’t make love any more.’  That would really get Dyt going.  ‘Make love?  Make love?  Define your terms.  Define your terms.’

Now that I look back on my time with Doctor Dyt, I feel more sympathetic to his intellectual crusade.  What he wanted to do was purge the world of all ambiguity and ambivalences.  He envisaged a time when people only used terms with precise definitions, a time when every flower in his intellectual garden would be precisely labelled.

Only when we reached that happy state, when the undergrowth of uncertainty had been cleared away, would we be able to arrive at hard and fast truths about the world.

But, of course, Dr Dyt’s enterprise was doomed to failure.  Words simply won’t sit still and have precise definitions hung around their necks.  Their meaning slips and slides: it is determined as Wittgenstein maintained by their many uses:

“Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.  The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.  (And in both cases there are similarities.)  Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script or print.  For their application is not presented to us so clearly.”

I’ve plucked that quotation from the introduction to Key Concepts in Education, a new book by Fred Inglis and Lesley Aers which doesn’t so much offer clear-cut definitions of such familiar educational terms as Assessment, Citizenship, Curriculum, Literacy and Pedagogy, as show how such terms have been variously used by people with different material and philosophical interests.  Dr Dyt would not have approved.

Join me and Fred Inglis at four o’clock today or after the midnight news on Sunday or on our readily down-loadable podcast.

Also in today’s programme. Why the Chinese economic miracle may already be a thing of the past.

Laurie

NB:Key Concepts in Education by Fred Inglis & Lesley Aers (Sage Publications Ltd �” ISBN 9781412903158)

Ah, slippage.

Deep social patterns (of luck ?) behind success. NYT review by David Brooks of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” . Thanks to Marsha at MoQ-Discuss for the link.

This New Scientist article on the Intelligent Design crowd reinforcing the dualism of mind stuff distinct from material stuff, as part of a theism vs Darwinism debate passed me by in my recent move a couple of months ago.

I’m pretty clearly a physicalist, a non-reductive materialist … both material-stuff and meaning-stuff arising from the same physics, but even the most scientific metaphysics requires its “first-cause” somewhere in the loop, ie even if the loop of existence has no beginning or end it has to “arise” out of something, some causal explanation. I’ve said many times that causation (in general) is the weirdest elusive thing in this whole stack of turtles.

P Z Myers Pharyngula blog on this article was picked-up by David Chalmers in his Fragments. David is one of those undoubtedly “clever” philosophers I’ve never quite “got” what his distinctive point is. As I type this I recall where I got stuck on his “supervenience” angle on causation, in fact reminded of that because as I perused his latest taxonomy of philosophy I couldn’t help noticing that “Causation” was the first entry under metaphysics with many topics under it (OK so C is early in the alphabet) … but I keep coming back to the point, whatever your metaphysics, your logic of causation has a hole in it somewhere … a first (or “necessary” injection of) cause.

David like most people in this debate, me included I guess, are keen to distance any intelligent designer God vs Darwinian explanations of emergence of complexity and design, from any mind-matter dualism debate.

David … a dualist in this regard … seems quite happy with his “Matrix” model … our whole world could be a (computer) simulation idea. Logically it’s as good a way as any to plug the hole in your metaphysics, even if it sounds far-fetched sci-fi, to posit a god-like software programmer .. but that sounds like a pretty intelligent designer to me, and a very weak way to suggest this is not really still about a theist / Darwinist deate too.

Whether you subscribe to a large measure or negligible measure of the intelligent teleological-looking design arising in Darwinian ways or not, there is a always a small measure of first-cause or pre-existence of the matrix itself … even if, as in my current case, that matrix is just the chaotic void pre-existing either mind or matter.

So far as I can see, pragmatism is the only response to this missing link. Reaching for a fantastical sky-hook is only ever a stop-gap, a Jamesian holiday from intellectual effort, even if it is a very long-lived, useful and therefore very valuable stop gap.

[PS – Aside – Distinguishing explanation from causation .. compare with Dennett on distinguishing physical determinism from morally free will.]

At small scales.

No, not blog-link-rot this time, but two great links from Sam on global sustainability issues.

Energy Myths and the Svalbard Seed Bank.