Psybertron Asks

Geoff Boycott reporting on the England v South Africa test on Radio 4 Today Program this morning, made a telling comment … When the sports anchor man said of one bowler “his figures look good, but you say he didn’t play well”, Geoff responded with “ah yes, but you’re just looking at the numbers, I can see for myself what’s happening, what threat (or lack of it) he is really causing”.

Truth is more than numbers, but Einstein said it better.

And just yesterday on “Today”, they had a news item from some Intelligent Design Creationists. They had Steve Jones as the scientist to respond, but he had barely time for two sentences, roughly “This is poppycock. How come these guys even get air time ?”. This was of course exactly my response too. Today, Saturday, we have listener responses, which were mostly the same response, except for some pleas not to dismiss god entirely, but most supported that gaps in knowledge should be expected to exist, (I say knowledge is 99% gap) and we should not simply use God as an easy gap filler. However, one response illustrated my Catch-22 perfectly…

One respondent said “If all a scientist can do is be dismissive, not offer any rational evidence against intelligent design, and at best propose alternative explanations for the existence and wonderful variety of life, then of course “intelligent designers” are going to stick to their beliefs.

Proving a negative is never easy, some would say not actually possible, but whatever standard of proof, this is a lazy argument. Occam’s principle wins this one hands down – God seems a so much more simple answer to why, if the alternative answer involves complexity and huge quantities of events. This is a recurring debate on the MoQ Discussion board. At root, any single evolutionary event is the epitome of simplicity in fact, but people choose to see the massive emergent complexity.

After Candide, I’ve now read Micromegas.

Candide is beyond satirical, plainly a negative lampoon directed squarely, with disturbing imagination but little subtlety, at the “all’s right with God in this best of all possible worlds” view.

Micromegas’ satire is so much more subtle and miles ahead of its time. His evocation of the absurd – the John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett “I look down on him” sketch – concerns misconceptions of scale between three beings, the smallest being earth sized human, the other two being Saturnian and Sirian in scale. The essence is – how can a human (philosopher) expect their observations to tell them anything about the reality of a “world out there” with such vast ranges of scale over many orders of magnitude.

How could we ever expect “humanly agreed fact” to cover more than 1% of reality. How can we expect normal human experience to even comprehend scales from quanta to universes, how can normal human experience “get its head around” the probablilities in earthly evolution – 250 years before Dawkins’ Mount Improbable and Rees’ Six Numbers.

Micromegas makes you think, vs Candide’s ridicule.

(The Swiftian connections and connotations are all too apparent – I’m going to have to properly read Swift too.)

Got a search hit to day with someone looking for “How to capture the knowledge contents of a brain after the human has died“. Nice trick if you can pull it off. Problem solved.

I just love the optimism and faith people have in internet search engines.

… not what can be counted.

Thread by Piers and Anu says it. Einstein right again, shock !

I’m still working my way through Dr James Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”, and I’ve reached a section on anesthesia and other consciousness altering chemical effects.

Actually, I took a break from Dr Austin, to read Voltaire’s Candide – short and sweet – humorous Swiftian-style satire on the “best of all possible worlds” view that a perfect world holds its fair (and very unfair) share of evil. Thoughtful, but not deep, as if Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) had been written by Yann Martel (Life of Pi). Amazing for its mid to late 1700’s “age of enlightenment” times, when so much was happening. The story of Voltaire’s own life and travels is interesting in itself.

Talking of life stories, in the same break I’ve been working on updating the Pirsig Timeline. Amongst other things I was researching Peyote and the LSD connection, which put me in mind of consciousness altering chemicals again. When I returned to Dr Austin’s chapters on anesthesiology, I remembered that Stuart Hameroff, of Quantum Consciousness fame, was an anesthesiologist originally, so I dived off and found two very interesting layman-directed interviews with Hameroff. [1997 Alternative Therapies],[2002/3 Nexus].

They range across the full gamut from quantum physics (uncertainty, non-locality and entanglement) with references to superstrings and holochory, energy processes underlying (apparent material) reality, microtubule components of cell structures, including neurons, and the link between these microtubules and orchestrated coherence of underlying quantum effects controlling the otherwise very simple macro-scale chemical diffusion processes of anesthesia and the conscious brain. Serious or seriously silly, it is compelling stuff.

The word Blog was the most searched word according to Merriam-Webster on-line dictionaries in the past year.[via BBC][via Blogger] A new Blog is created every 6 seconds.

(Interesting given the Fallujah situation that “insurgent” made it into the top four, along with other US election related jargon.)

Microsoft blogging too.[via BBC], and of course, broadband uptake is simply making any and all content publishing and linking so much easier. [also via BBC]

In an effort to reduce and control the level of spam and junk mail, I’ve activated my newish Google Mail account and changed details on my contact page. Which also gives me a web-mail capability I didn’t previously have.

Be useful if people could start using the new address.

Talking of spam, why not go on the offensive ? “Make Love not Spam” campaign.[Lycos via BBC]

Update 2nd Dec [via BBC] The Lycos anti-spam screensaver is so successful it may constitute a denial of service attack on the spamming organisations. Well done Lycos.

And finally, update 6th Dec [via BBC] Lycos withdraw under criticism for fighting spam with spam.

[via Rivets] Wow, this stuff is real, from Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.

Listened to Hans Blix speaking last night at the faculty of law in Cambridge. Fairly dry matter-of-fact talk on the history and practice of weapons inspections & treaty verifications as an international law subject, from Victorian exploding bullets and dum-dums, via nuclear test bans and proliferation treaties to … well you know what.

In summary “It is just not possible to prove a negative. You cannot verify intentions. A doctor cannot give you a clean bill of future health. Uncertainty, who gets the benefit of any doubt, is entirely discretionary and political. It’s all If this is …, then that may … So-called facts always need critical thinking to interpret. Few, if any, hard facts.”

What, with Kyoto and world trade treaties, as well as security threats, there will be no shortage of verification work for international lawyers in the foreseeable future. Blix is a Cambridge (Selwyn ?) old-boy, his original tutor was in the audience.

Alex has recordings of all three lectures here [link dead Alex].

[Post Note 27 Aug 2013 – at the time it was Saddam’s “WMD” in Iraq which included chemical weapons. Interesting to hear Blix talking recently on the Syrian case.]