Psybertron Asks

Just a few sketchy holding points for now …

Finished Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. Excellent to the end. Skimmed the tougher mathematically and notationally detailed sections – seemed important to get the thrust on trust, which I think I did. I think his final dialogue, almost explicitly explaining the “fugue” underlying all the dialogues throughout the book is almost superfluous – ie if you hadn’t already spotted it, I can’t imagine how you would have found the book intelligible up to that point. Although he focusses on the possibilities of AI – back in 1979 it seemed to be the exciting new subject – I think his main messages are about the emergence of consciousness and itelligence, and hence what those things really are. I buy most of his story there I think. In a nutshell – Properties emerge at higher levels in patterns of interaction between things at a lower level, that are not actually present in those lower level things. “It’s the interaction, stupid”. I actually think it’s where I started, or certainly where I’d already arrived, so it’s quite exciting to find that so strongly reinforced.

Having completed GEB, I’ve started and now more than half-way through “The Mind’s I”, collected, edited and reflected upon by Hofstadter and Dennett. Wondereful stuff. I didn’t realise this book was the source of popular published copies of those seminal pieces by Turing and Nagel, and that it was the source of the whole family of “brain in a vat” pieces including Dennett’s own. Matrix fan’s can start here, as indeed David Chalmers did I believe, though personally I’m with Dr Hfuhruhurr on this one. Not finished this collection yet, but I’m going have to read all the original Dennett stuff (including Branstorms – one not actually in the un-read pile yet, although Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea both are.) How did Dennett come to be an espouser of “consciousness is just an illusion” stuff after this collaboration with Hofstadter ? Maybe he didn’t, despite what Sue Blackmore seemed to have concluded ?

In the meantime read a large part of Owen Barfield’s “Saving The Appearances”. Barfield is a common port of call for Pirsig scholars, and I was prompted to pick him up again after a string of MoQ threads referring to Barfield’s “particles”, and posted this …

Despite claiming to be a fan of Barfield (on the strength of Poetic Diction and History in English Words) I hadn’t read Saving the Appearances until I saw all his “particles” floating past in a couple of recent threads. I couldn’t comment so I just had to read it. In fact I’ve had the book for ages, and now recall why I stopped reading it.

His physics is completely wrong. [See post note below.]

He’s right that one way or another since Kant, philosophy seems to be mainly about the difference between (or interface between) what we perceive and what is “out there”. (whether we’re talking “immediate experience”, the Quality “event” triplet, or Peircean “firstness”, etc.)

He’s right that most 20th century philsophical writing has ignored the implications of “modern physics” – except where written by physicists, who understand it, naturally – a big recurring gripe of mine, you’ll recognise. Barfield is not one.

He’s right that “trees” are more “tangible” than “rainbows” (they do more than interact with light for a start). Metaphorically both are made of “particles’, but quite a different mix of particles on quite different physical levels. He’s right that we only see light, and we only hear sound, everything else is “mental” (alpha or beta thinking).

But his Netwonian, classical, physics is up the creek, before we even get near “new physics”.

There is nothing about a rainbow that depends on human (or any animalian) eyes seeing, in order for it to exist, individual or shared, any more than a tree. The refracted light from rainbows is more “diffuse” and “non-localised” than the reflected light from a tree, but the light rays (photon streams whatever) are as real in both cases, whether eyes exist to see them or not. (All the stuff about where in space and relative to distant hills and hands in your field of view is just not true – poetic, but wrong none-the-less.) I can make a rainbow between me and this computer screen (or behind it) by blowing a raspberry in the right place.

His stuff about hearing due to having ears, rather than sensing sound waves, is suspiciously close to the same evolutionary fallacy that no being could see (sense light) until the eyeball had come to exist. Just plain wrong “watchmaker” creationist meme.

(There are particles and there are particles, and as it turns out there is information more fundamental to any. But that’s another story.)

Pity. I have read on almost to a conclusion, and there’s some good stuff in there nevertheless, but with recurring references to his erroneous start.

[Post note : The thread on MoQ-Discuss includes an exchange with Scott Roberts which points out that despite any physically inaccurate statements about rainbows, Barfield does in fact make the point that the issue of immediate sensing vs interpreted representation of the sensed, is the same for both ephemeral rainbows and tangible trees, so his error is not material to his story – that’s good – count me as a Barfield fan again.]

Hmm. After Greenteeth (don’t ask), here’s Paul Burgess. Interesting that he’s a beat generation fan who’d read The Tractatus, but like me didn’t read Pirsig until after he was 40, and a good thing too he says …

[Quote] Yes, Pirsig in his former pre-psychosis persona of Phaedrus is a near dead ringer for your humble narrator, back in my late teens and early twenties. And his eventual philosophical solution to the subject-object dichotomy– which is not a bad solution at all!– smells uncannily like my eventual turn to the symbol, and then to Peirce. Pirsig’s “Quality” smells a good deal like Peirce’s category of Firstness. Pirsig also clarifies a question that has exercised me greatly in recent years: “What the hell has gone wrong with modernity?” He thinks, as I do, that the problem lies not in science, technology, industrialization as such, but rather in the mindset we bring to their application– a mindset which fragments us, which fragments our world, into all sorts of polar dichotomies. [Unquote]

Yes, yes, the divisiveness of superfluous dualisms. Me too.
(Must browse around the rest of his site and blog of “pseudo-philosophical” ramblings. Know how he feels, he even has a page called “How Do We Know What We Know”, which is spookily close to Psybertron’s own tag line.)

Or more officially the GCP (Global Consciousness Project). Princeton, serious science (?) with some wonderfully whacky content – Princess Di’s funeral and the O J Simpson trial linked to random events detected in electronic networks apparently arising from the fact that “… a small effect of consciousness on the electronic REG (random event generator) isn’t diminished by distance or shielding, so it apparently isn’t brought about by something physical like temperature changes, or sound waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Instead it seems that the information itself is the important thing …”

I happen to believe that final sentence, about non-local information being the most fundamental level in physics, but can this whacky noetic / noosphere stuff really be empirically proven ? I kinda hope so. What does Josephson make of it I wonder ?

Today, American scientists announced, “send us the money”. Hmm.

Teilhard de Chardin gets top billing, but this Poetic History page includes many luminaries and other phaedra including personal hero Ned Lawrence with a quote I remember oh so well

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. ”

I’d actually forgotten how much of an impression that had made on me. (to whit my still unwritten review of Seven Pillars of Wisdom – “It Is Written“.

Thanks to Platt at MoQ for providing the link.

Some very interesting material brought to my attention by Alice’s comments, so important I brought it onto the main page. Too much material to assimilate and do justice in any summary, but …

As recently as Feb 2005 Maccoby is writing “Creating Moral Organisations” for Research Technology Management, whilst as an ex student of Erich Fromm he reviewed the “Two Voices” of Erich Fromm in this 1994 piece for Society.

The Fromm piece links in Adler, Freud and Jung as well as James, Maslow, Zen, Suzuki, Ortega y Gasset and a Mexican anthropological connection. The Moral Organisations piece links the Nasa Decision Making stuff with Enron and Sarbane-Oxley. Organisations as “psychopathic individuals”. Committees of moral men making immoral decisions as one J Z DeLorean once said.

As a spiritul atheist Fromm ” … viewed neurotic symptoms as a partial rejection of oppressive or alienating authority. The psychoanalyst’s role was to help give birth to the revolutionary within the neurotic.” Hope for anyone there ?

A tremedoulsy rich seam deserving of some serious prospecting.

It’s a little difficult to explain how I came to be Googling for Greenteeth, and you’d never believe it anyway, too spooky for words, but I’m glad I did. A certain Ian Thorpe runs a very entertaining blog in the name of Jenny Greenteeth the Boggart, or is that Bloggart.

Roll on. Toilet humour isn’t dead after all.
Even the tagging raises a smile.
(Must check out www.blog.co.uk too.)

A very small sample for you …
“Everyone’s Gone To The Moon was Jonathan King’s first hit record. I the years that followed we all wished he would go to the moon. Or at least fuck off somewhere…anywhere.
Time passed and King did eventually go, not to the moon but the next best place, Wormwood Scrubs Prison, convicted of sexual offences involving minors. Now just in case anyone is thinking “hmm, fading pop star becomes kiddie fiddler – are we looking as parallels with Michael Jackson here?” it should be made clear that Jonathan King was born to look like a pervert; Jackson paid a fortune in order to look that way.”

Or even more relevant to Psybertron, he posts a far more entertaining piece than I on good ole Radio 4’s search for the “Greatest Philosopher“. A great excuse to ressurect the Pythons ..
The Philosopher’s Song —
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
“I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker
but a bugger when he’s pissed!

Question is, is Ian from Doncaster ?

Piers at Monkey Magic made a positive reference to Maslow, being valuable because he’d studied successful / advantaged people, and therefore his psychological outcome was inherently more positive, looking toward progress, rather than wallowing in “failure” or “sick psychology”. Part of my “Criticisms of Maslow” memewatch.

Of course muggins here, didn’t spot that was Piers’ point when I first read it. See the comment thread on Piers’ post.

I see Google maps covers the UK now. Here’s a familiar patch. Big variabilty in the quality (clarity, resolution and colouration) in different regions, but it’s all there. Some of the biggest cities have the poorest imgaes. [via Rivets]

Weird experience to navigate right round the coastline from the air.

Apart from historical education as museum pieces (which is fair enough), why would anyone want an on-line slide-rule, several on-line slide-rules in fact ?

I remember using one for real, but not beyond high-school and university days, when electronic calculators became widespread. Also remember finding one in an old briefcase about ten years ago and trying to explain to the kids how to use it. I could just about remember how to multiply two numbers, and reverse to divide, but that was about it.

Another example of the breadth of things Jorn gathers together on Robot Wisdom. Only Rivets comes close in my experience.

Another fine spot by Jorn at Robot Wisdom. “The Wicker Man” is an almost forgotten film that made an impression on me, though I never analysed why then, an awful long time ago.

This review by philosophical writer Robert Farrow weaves an analysis of Foucault’s ideas (and others) into a synopsis of the plot. No less interesting are the witty captions to the illustrations and the promise of further interesting content at “Metaphilm“.