It’s All Connected

Browsing Ray Girvan’s Apothecary’s Drawer – Wave Related – fairly slow blog rate due to his “estivation” (summer equivalent of hibernation mainly in cold blooded creatures) – attracted by the Mexican philosopher Manuel DeLanda.

[Quote] DeLanda is a contemporary Mexican philosopher with a strong interest in the scientific and cultural crossover: “topics as diverse as warfare, linguistics, economics, evolution, chaos theory, self-organizing matter, nonlinear dynamics, artificial life and intelligence, the internet and architecture, amongst many others” (including solitons). [Unquote]
[Annotated Bibliography] [Interview] & [DeLanda Destratified]

Then noticed his previous thread on one-off waves or bores, linking back to controversial boxing day tsunami pictures, and existing pictures of previous bores. (A hundred links to browse in that lot.)

The connectedness – non-periodic waves, strange loops etc and mexican anthroplogical backgrounds to Northrop and Pirsig et al. Clear as mud ?

Manuel DeLanda [Quote] If you read the essays by the first guy who saw spontaneously oscillating chemical reactions, you find out he was unable to publish his essays. This was in the 50’s, not long ago. The idea that orderly behavior could arise spontaneously from matter was so counter-intuitive.. At that time, the only two ways they could see stable things arising in nature was through rational perfection — the best possible outcome — or heat-death. What nonlinear science brings about is a complete new range of structurally stable forms of behavior, which has absolutely nothing to do with rationality or the heat-death of entropy. Now attractors are appearing all over the place. We’ve discovered a whole new reservoir of forms of stabilization. It’s a paradigm warp. [Unquote]

Scepticism is too powerful – “nothing to do with rationality” – scarily true.

Manuel DeLanda [Quote] As they say, they key word here is not wisdom, but caution. You don’t know what happens at bifurcations. You have absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully, because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up by a chaotic attractor that’s too huge in phase space. As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts. [Unquote]

Dynamic Quality is lost without the latches of static quality.

Oh wow … DeLanda is lecturing ” .. about a shift of paradigm in the postmodern world – the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one .. ” A man after mine own. Someone to take a serious interest in methinks.

[Post Note – for Mitch – Australian Apostle collapses into the sea. Could it be a sign ? No, stop it, you’re getting silly.]

Stick With It Google Books

Remember debating all the copyright custodianship issues about Google’s plan to create an on-line the content of all the great libraries in the world, at least a year ago, if not two.

Still think it’s an inspired idea, that must succeed; the amount of knowledge made available would be just mind boggling.

So many books would see the light of day, that would otherwise languish in a handful of largely hidden volumes. If anything the proportion of old texts that might benefit from new sales in printed (or electronic) form, would actually more likely be promoted by their on-line presence. (See legal music downloads story). For those older books with little prospect of sale ever again in print, the libraries themselves lose any commercial benefit from the cost of their custodianship, then this implies some fee needs to be paid somewhere, but surely the numbers add up easily from a very small Google subscription, if needed, and Google are investing millions in it anyway. Who needs to lose at all from this enormous benefit.

The copyright blockages must be temporary. See Google’s own blog here.

Promoting Science

Always had mixed views about “The Edge”, John Brockman’s collection of the scientific elite as their publishing agent. Here is Technology, Entertainment and Design 2005 conference report, focussing on a comparison between Richard Foreman’s “Pancake People” and George Dyson’s “Godel to Google Net” (Which I think I blogged before).

Anyway whilst the science writing is always good and mixed, inlcuding plenty I believe and plenty I don’t, I was always a bit put off by the “hype”. However, seeing the recent shameless promotion of the Intelligent Design Creationism garbage, and the terrifying way it’s lapped up by an ill-informed popular press, and worse still, ill-informed education planners and school governors, I think science and any good quality intellectual thought needs all the promotion it can get.

More power to you John Brockman.

Evolving Religion ?

Whilst the Christian / biblical tradition seems determined to degenerate backwards to ancient dogmas, witness the contagious spread of Intelligent Design Creationism meme from Bush’s mouth to the mainstream press here in Western Australia, and (god forbid) the science classrooms of future generations, one beacon is the suggestion from Salman Rushdie that the Qu’ran could benefit from positive evolution – a reformation – from the 7th century to the 21st.

It would be far from ironic, if the more oriental continued to lead the occidental. Go for it Islam, listen to your thinkers, you know it makes sense.

Intellectual may be a dirty word in some circles, but it really is the only thing that can save us from crude socio-cultural “democracy” – popular survival of the most-convenient, lowest-quality common-denominator, memes.

(That is of course what the Pirsigian Metaphysics of Quality would say too.)

[Post Note : My god, it gets worse. Full page “advertorial” in the West Australian positively promotiong IDC, and a DVD explaining the origins of life from some “missionary crusade” pastor, obviously a great source of disinterested knowledge on the subject. Wake up and smell the corruption of future generations. Criminal as I said, to give this stuff any credibility on a par with anything remotely scientific.]

The Tail Really Does Wag The Dog

Work In Progress – Interesting series of columns by the BBC’s Peter Day, charting very rapid market disruptions, mainly by new technologies, Google, Blogging and Podcasting, and also by the Chinese economy and Banking competition. The old 80 year Kondratiev economic cycles are being severely strained everywhere.

It really is spotting the market effect of the technology, rather than the capabilities of the technolgy per se. The Excite / Google / Amazon example says it all. It used to be millions of customers in dozens of markets, now it’s millions of markets each with dozens of customers – the so-called long tail.

Still haven’t got into podcasting, transmitting or receiving, but it looks unstoppable as the coming media. Leon reminded me of that this morning with this link to the first pod-cast from space. Good luck with the re-entry guys.

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

Still Reading David Chalmers’ “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” after blogging about the intro earlier.

It’s quite tough technically, as well as tough in terms of credibility. His appeals to logical possibility in his thought experiments stretch “conceivability” (and I never was very good with pure thought experiments, in the absence of physics); you can’t help feeling the problems might be inherent in the logical premises, rather than any conclusions that follow. However, to give him his due, he appreciates this and spends a good deal of space addressing every possible objection and doubt, every which way he can think of. Tedious, and I almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t.

His most famous thought experiment is his Zombie Twin, a variation on earlier Twin Earth ideas (watery stuff vs H2O, has “essential” connotations). In this case you are asked to accept the “logical possibility” of having a Zombie twin of yourself on a physically identical twin earth where the only difference is that the Zombie has no “subjective aspect to its consciousness” yet all its behaviours, decisions and responses being otherwise identical. The Zombie is identical to you except that its lights are out, it’s all dark inside, it knows nothing it is like to “feel like” you, subjectively.

Like the “mile-high unicycle” it stretches credulity that it could come about, and work with any natural physical history, so it may be physically impossible, but you have to concede it’s “logically possible”. (Deutsch by the way spends a good deal of time on this distinction between logical and physical possibility too, and I notice Chalmers himself has several other papers dealing with any gap between “conceivability and possibility” – interesting in its own right).

His main case is that subjective (or phenomenal) consciousness is the hard unsolved problem, as opposed to any causal, behavioural, (psychlogical) explanation of how conciousness works, which if not solved beyond dispute, is at least soluble in principle. I think he’s right there.

His other main thread is “supervenience” – roughly being dependent on, but not necessarily causally explained by. The Zombie stuff above is saying subjective (phenomenal) consciousness is not logically supervenient on the phsyical world. I like the fact he concedes that taking physics as (by definition) the most fundamental explanation of how things work in the world, consciousness must be physically supervenient on the physical world, but what he’s effectively saying that physics as it is currently known must have something missing that can reductively and logically explain subjective consciousness. I have to admit the penny hasn’t quite dropped yet on supervenience. He goes on to review all the whackier quantum consciousness theories, (even Hameroff’s pixie-dust) and for me he is right, that whilst these “may” turn out to have some relevance to the physical causal description of how psychological consciousness works, they are still not addressing the hard problem. The observer participation aspect in quantum physical outcomes is about as close as it gets, but it still doesn’t seem much like the view from the subjective side.

For me the problem he is showing is still the obvious one. “Scientific reasoning” is never going to explain subjectivity, without some new resources in addition to the logically positive objectivity of scientific reasoning, which by definition excludes subjectivity. He insists that’s not what he’s showing, but so far that’s my conclusion. Anyway, the guy’s obviously done his homework, so it seems essential to read on and absorb.

I guess the point he would agree with me is that the problem with the “hard problem of subjective consciousness” is not a mystery in the physics per se, though there may yet be something to be discovered in physics in this area, it’s an absence of the right reasoning tools and techniques generally, and perhaps specifically for explaining causation (where I need to understand his supervenience better).

Strange that Chalmers doesn’t include reference to Deutsch, I guess he must have become aware since this book however. Also don’t quite understand his objections to Dennett’s natural history views, like whatever logical and physical possibilities, any explanation has to include how it came to be. So far time is missing from Chalmers story. But there’s still time 🙂

Stone Me

Great story on the Beeb.

(Unfortunately it’s from that class of “today scientists announced to the media” so take it with a pinch of white powder, that they may be extrapolating their findings just a touch, working up justification for something, funding maybe ?)

The clue is the word “only” in the fifth para. Yeah right.

MoQ Conference Slides On-Line

I’ve uploaded the slides I used to present my paper at the 7 July 2005 Metaphysics of Quality conference. They include a link to the paper itself. The slides make less sense by themselves than the paper, which as Alice points out is pretty incoherent itself 🙂

[ The Paper ] [ The Slides (Require MS-Powerpoint or viewer.) ]

(For future use, they’re also linked under the “Pirsig MoQ Pages” links heading in the side-bar. I now have some housekeeping to do on broken links in the non-blog pirsig and other pages on the psybertron site. Bear with me.)