What, Why & How do we Know ?
Interesting review of issues around ontologies and tools for “social tagging” posted on KnowledgeBoard by Silverio Petruzzellis. Not digested the quality of any analysis yet, but it’s comprehensive with a plethora of links (naturally) including Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated”.
As I keep saying it’s not ontology that’s overrated, but the idea that it’s fixed or pre-ordained. What social tagging does is allow an appropriate ontology to evolve. The best kind.
The theme of altered states of consciousness – drug induced or otherwise – keeps cropping-up in debates about consciousness in general and enlightenment in particular. Came across this Psychedelic Library whilst following up Aldous Huxley in my ever growing reading list. In this Huxley Paper (from 1963 Playboy !) “Culture and the Individual” I loved this quote …
In my utopian fantasy, “Island”, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices.
“Having Fun with Fungi” ” that was how one waggish reviewer dismissed the matter. But which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow’s Misdeeds out of Yesterday’s Miscreeds?
Idiocy with ideology.
Misdeeds of yesterday’s miscreeds.
or
Fun with funghi ?
Nice ring.
Just capturing a link to this paper (from a search cross hit) by John S Nelson because of the interesting reference list at the moment – not yet read.
Crossed paths with Pirsig, under McKeon at Chicago. [Obit via NYT] [via Henry] CHICAGO (AP)
Wayne Booth, a prominent literary critic and professor whose books are required reading at many universities, died Sunday. He was 84.
Booth died at his home from complications of dementia, said Josh Schonwald, a spokesman for the University of Chicago, where Booth was a faculty member for more than four decades.
Booth’s ”The Rhetoric of Fiction,” published in 1961, is ”the single most important American contribution to narrative theory — a book that continues to be read, taught and fought about,” Bill Brown, chair of the English department, said in a statement.
Other works include ”A Rhetoric of Irony” in 1974 and 1988’s “The Company We Keep, The Ethics of Fiction“. His book ”For the Love of It” was a memoir about how he became an accomplished amateur cellist, starting at age 31.
Booth joined the University of Chicago in 1962 after teaching at Haverford College and Earlham College. He also served as dean of the university’s undergraduate division from 1964 to 1969. He retired in 1992.
A contribution to the Robert Pirsig Wiki Page from Paul Taney
The late computer scientist Alan Perlis warned his readers ….
Ask periodically – Toward what end are you coding ? – but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.”
Wow, 17 million blogs out there, a new blog every second, the blogosphere doubling every 5 months. Numbers from Technorati in this BBC news story about Yahoo putting blogs into its news search feeds ahead of mainstream media. Google are already indexing blogs (they own Blogger remember).
Even Catholics (in the UK at least) are now taught not to take the bible literally. Hope for us all. [Thanks to Sam at Elizaphanian for the link].
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. A CalTech based group I’d not noticed before. I see Dennett is president-elect, and Chalmers and Metzinger are members at large, Ned Block and Christof Koch are past presidents.
Next conference is June 2006, St Annes College Oxford.
I continue to be fascinated by the developments at the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group (BCS Cybernetics Group or BCSCMSG for short) despite the dense specialist jargon making proceedings all but unintelligible to any lay reader like myself. Here is the synopsis of papers presented at the BCSCMSG Symposium 10 as part of CASYS’05 (Computing Anticipatory Systems 2005 Conference) in Liege in August earlier this year.
My principle fascination, and reason for following proceedings over several years (and blogging many previous references), has been the apparent fundamental nature of information underlying reality itself, as part of my specific interest in modelling and communicating information about reality, at least in so far as humans can know and communicate reality.
Paraphrasing … the BCSCMSG current mission is to establish the Evolutionary ‘Anthropic’ Semantic Principle, by which the fundamental physical foundations of computing as used in brains, can be realized. The human brain is a universal computational semantic machine and [the Diaz-Rowlands re-write of the Nilpotent Dirac Equation of] quantum physics provides a natural model and modes by which human natural language is realized to allow the human race to comprehend the evolutionary cosmos. No less.
The philosophy of mind and mind-matter angles, of what can be known about reality (epistemology), the processes of knowing of it (consciousness et al), and what any independent reality might be (ontology), is clearly relevant to the modelling of information about reality. Suspending disbelief it is also possible to accept that quanta (as the smallest significant differences that can exist between anything) are probably the most fundamental building blocks of information as well as the building blocks of “matter”.
Despite also accepting mind (consciousness) as emergent from brain physiology (matter & processes) what is mind blowing is the idea that the emergence (clearly complex and multi-layered) can have a causal and direct reductionist explanation that is also based on quantum mechanics. (Why not ? says Josephson. Yes, “microtubules” say Hammeroff and Penrose. No, “that’s mere pixie-dust” say the Churchlands, Blackmore and Dennett. Sceptical says Deutsch. Who needs reductionism and causality say Deutsch and Chalmers.) Quantum mechanical effects in brain-mind processes, not to mention in the wider DNA-life processes themselves – how weird can this get ?
OK, so holographic universe (Talbot); multiple interfering universes (Everett / Wheeler / Deutsch); are believable at the quantum scale, universes or states with small differences, small departures from coherence. OK too, non-locality, action-at-a-distance, anticipation, future actions travelling ahead faster than light, can also be credible at similar quantum scales and near coherence maybe ? (Even the practicioners working with these “models” struggle to accept these as everyday “paradigmatic” world-views.)
It’s all there to be read about. Quantum mechanics based mathematics behind everything from seemingly abstract things like fundamental number theory and mathematics itself and theories of computation, through physics naturally, to large-scale coherence in processes in brains and macro-cosmological feedback loops in the cosmos itself.
And if that’s not weird enough, it even comes with a bootstrapping mechanism to create something (ie everything) from nothing.
The nothing that is, that is.
Watch that space.
Hope these people also turn up at Tucson2006.
Thanks to Matt Poot on MoQ-Discuss for picking up this Toronto Globe and Mail best seller list from Sunday 9th October.
Well, well, well. Robert Pirsig’s ZMM is a non-fiction best seller in October 2005, sharing the list with James Frey, Jared Diamond, Bill Bryson and Malcolm Gladwell. (Dan Brown is top of the fiction list fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it.)
(Interesting, searching for Pirsig / best-seller I find the Wikipedia page is well linked with current Pirsig material, including my own.)
(This June 2005 page from the American Association of Booksellers also has ZMM in their best seller list – perrenial they say – though it’s under travel books !)
(And an interesting current reading list from Zug, a “comedy” site (!) includes Douglas Adams, Aldous Huxley and Scott Peck as well as both ZMM and Lila – dense with ideas they says – Comedy ?)