Psybertron Asks

Another article at Adbusters, taken from New York magazine.

Good message – capitalism & corporations are not intrinsically wrong per se, it’s the global corporate “culture” that is stultefying. The objective bottom-line value systems on which such coporations operate are so narrow (even if they “account” for environmental issues), that the quality is all “static”, the dynamic quality is driven out, flattened.

Evolution to new species needs isolation, as well as a supportive environment. Total global communication of memes is not necessarily a good thing. Competing ideas need space to flourish as well as compete, not drowning at birth.

Reminded by Matt Bartlett of this poem (that I’d forgotten was Shelley !) that made a big impression on me at school.

Also picked-up on this Glen Colquhoun Link.

Also via Matt, this Vision of Christian Education – Our Cultural Context (1.7 Meg PDF link)

I like the contrasting Modernist and Post-Modernist “Apostle’s Creeds” that Matt extracts.

In Summary
Belief in progress through man’s scientific rationality vs belief in more than one context dependent truth, and science is not it.

Thanks Matt.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said�””Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Could this take off into wider public awareness ? Here’s hoping.

This is one of Adbuster.Org’s Biggest Ideas for 2005 – called Clarity of Mind. Brought to my attention by David Hodgson [blogged here at Digital Falcon], via contact with Reed Burkhart.

Also from contact with Rudy van Stratum, links to the work of the late Dr Harvey Rosenberg via Meta-Gizmo Knowing the mechanics of a piece of HiFi Audio Equipment is as an-ashtray-on-a-motorcycle to knowing good quality sound when you hear it – parallel’s Pirsig’s motorcycle mechanics. The brain really is hard-wired by evolution to know quality / value / good / truth in ways that transcend objective analysis, etc. (also Minsky on music and humour too.)

[Quote from Meta-Gizmo] For those who know about [Quality], no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, no explanation is possible. [Unquote] It’s that Catch-22 again – no explanation is possible – to a “western” brain.

The Clarity of Mind meme goes a step further … Clarity of Mind [and good decision making] is being lost in the western culture – the values of cold impersonal objectivism dominating subjective social interaction, for example. The signs are there, that without a change of mental culture, the end-game will be played out either in mental institutions or in drug-use, or both (or escapist games and reality TV perhaps).

Pirsig scholars (and many others) will empathise with that message. In fact the message is as old as man’s quest to understand life and values, but has been suppressed by the Aristotelian / Cartesian stanglehold on value systems in the west. If we don’t break that stranglehold sometime soon, the human brain may evolved to a point where that hard-wired-quality is lost forever. The bad memes lead the genes astray.

Adbuster’s biggest idea for 2005 is to place concern and action to improve our environment in terms of “mental ecology” at the same level the eco-movement has driven sustainable global ecology into public awareness, and the workings of political systems and economies in the last few decades. Good idea.

[And Wikis etc, any cheap push-button thought linking and publishing.] This time ABC News picking up on blogging’s value in filtering and disseminating Tsunami news stories beyond first-hand sources. [via Blogger itself]

Well done USA. And Japan too.

Looking at maps of South East Asia and the Indian Ocean, it was striking that whilst Thailand, Bangladesh and the Anadaman & Nicobar Islands (not to mention Sumatra/Aceh, India, Sri-Lanka and West Africa) were all making the tsunami news in the last few days, it was as if Burma was off the map ?

If Phuket and Phi Phi were wrecked, how could the adjacent and much longer coast and islands of Myanmar not be similarly affected, not to mention further up around Yangon and the Irrawaddy and beyond.

It’s at times like this you notice how repressive a regime exists there – all e-mail from and web-sites within its borders being censored, and very little western access to the country. Free Burmese press outside Myanmar, has little more access to information than the official and approved sources at times like this. The official toll still stands at only 90, with only suggestions of thousands “the number is being under-reported, and not by a little” [Foundation for the People of Burma].

There are positive reports of specific Burmese beaches and areas being unaffected by the tsunami, but also reports of more significant aftershock earthquakes in Myanmar and Northern Thailand, including specific reports of the earthquake itself breaking ground and throwing up fire & lava. Chillingly defensive statements from the official press (New Light of Myanmar) “No country in the world can predict the earthquake …. do not believe rumours.”

[Radio Free Asia][Melbourne Herald Sun][ABC News / Reuters]

Also [Road To Mandalay], private business, but presumably “approved” site inside Myanmar says … Fortunately Myanmar was spared most of the force of the Tsunamis. The Myeik / Mergui archipelago and coastal towns were largely untouched, and hence the Moken (Sea Gypsies) are safe. In Kawthoung a bridge collaped. Ngapali, Chaunga and Nwesaung beaches have not been affected. The main affected areas are in the Ayeyawady Delta.

Also, from SmartTravelAsia “Myanmar escaped lightly and beach areas are not affected. According to Martijn van der Valk, general manager of the venerable The Strand (www.ghmhotels.com) , Yangon, ?At 7.40am on Sunday 26 December we felt a three-minute minor earthquake, shaking beds and tables and chairs, and swinging chandeliers.? The hotel is unaffected and the airport is functioning normally. The Bayview Resort on Ngapali Beach reports that the hotel is ?not affected? and beach activities continue normally.”

And from Xinhua Online China News “According to government statistics, 36 people were killed, 14 missing and 45 injured as of Tuesday afternoon by earthquake and tsunami. The figures also said 138 buildings were destroyed in some parts of the country’s six divisions and states — Tanintharyi, Yangon, Bago, Ayeyawaddy, Rakhine and Shan (South) and 778 people were left homeless. Meanwhile, a moderate earthquake of 5.1-magnitude with its epicenter 286 km north of Yangon occurred at 7:40 am (local time) Thursday morning, the country’s meteorology department announced. No casualties have so far been reported.”

Here’s hoping Myanmar was indeed fortunate. Perhaps those offshore islands were mainly uninhabited and protected much of the rest of the coastline, and perhaps the angle of the coastline north of the Thai border means the progress of the wave from the initial quake was mainly along the shore ?

This news story repeats some stats on the growth and importance of blogging but includes, for the first time I’ve seen, Microsoft’s beta “MSN Spaces” alongside “Google’s” Blogger.

Creative destruction probably pre-dates Noah’s biblical flood, or the possibly catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs, but I’ve seen the term itself used since Marx and Schumpeter coined it. Eggs need to be broken to make an omelette, or anything revolutionarily different from its antecendents.

Many, in all seriousness, including myself, tagged 9/11 the same way – see the footnote on every page of my blog. I noticed that Voltaire’s outlook on life, and much of 18th century enlightenment, was markedly affected by the Lisbon Earthquake.

What with the US Politics and Religion, Globalisation and Oil, Palestine and Iraq, etc as centre stage subjects everywhere since 9/11, might I possibly hope that the Indian Ocean Tsunami proves as creative as it was biblically destructive, in getting western hypocritical, self-interested agendas off the front page for a while.

I guess the problem with 9/11, in this respect, was that those most affected (beyond those immediately involved, dead and bereaved) were those least interested in learning the lesson. William Barrett said “Man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster. What he learns has always been there [and] it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster.”

As you may have noticed, I’m reading my way through a number books by neurosurgeons and brain scientists, as part of reviewing state of the art understanding of “perception”. Recently I read Edeleman, Zeman and Austin’s books, and more recently started Oliver Sacks “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”, full of intriguing stories (in the first half) about case studies where his patients have misperceived the world.

As well as the eponymous man who really did try to put his wife on his head (!) as he stood up to leave Sacks’ office, the cases range from total amnesia, short and long term amnesia before, within and after time bounded periods, selective amnesia, and other modal mis-perceptions – phantom limbs (perceived limbs that have actually been lost) foreign parts (actual body parts perceived as alien, and practically useless, or worse), ability to perceive only part of a field of view, perceiving moving objects but not stationary, to name but a few.

Prognoses and outcomes vary, but one is constantly amazed at the dynamism and plasticity of the central nervous system to re-learn alternative means of perceiving and dealing with the world, once the individual brain is shown the reality of its situation. Very like Adam Zeman’s case of the patient who learned to “see” through a patch of skin on their abdomen – weirder things have happened. Read Sacks.

Most striking, given the previous post, are the various blindnesses to words or meaning – quite independently, often as part of other degenerative diseases of the elderly who, incidentally, provide Sacks with a wealth of case-studies. In “The President’s Speech”, referring to a thinly disguised Ronald Reagan (?), he refers to a group of individuals who gained every nuance of honesty, intent and spin from his voice-tones, facial expression and body language, much to their amusement, despite not perceiving a single word he actually said, contrasted with a very elderly Emily D (poetess – thinly disguised also ?) who could not understand the sense of sentences people spoke to her, unless they were grammatically correct, and pronounced very clearly. She had no means of detecting irony, truth, humour, tones or moods of any kind, beyond the semantics of the words used.

In all Sacks cases, the problems are with “processing” the data, not with primary sensory or motor defects. What these “freaks” tell us – and they are rare cases – is a great deal about how our mind really works to perceive the apparent world, and build a coherent model of it. Also, being at that fuzzy brain / mind boundary of “thinking meat”, the issues cannot fail to have an epistemological or other philosophical angle.

Here it’s the debate about the “right to offend” sparked by the recent Sikh religious debate over the content of the play at the Birmingham Rep.

This is at the highest political / public / human / artistic rights level, but Chris Argyris showed that avoidance of offence (and embarrassment) was at the root of misinformation in day to day business communication too. It’s what Brunsson is referring to by “hypocrisy” in business management. I call it political correctness – the enemy of truth if you like, causing facts to be obscured, and bad decisions made, at the very least.

Religion is, almost by definition, about being politically correct – choosing what to believe, based on prejudice. The balance between a right to offend and the incitement of religious hatred is a necessarily subjective line, hatred being the key word – emotional intent behind a message, not its actual content.

Fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice,
Fortune depends on the tone of your voice.
Says Neil Hannon.

Divine Comedy again, this time Songs of Love – ironically, talking of religious offence, the theme tune to Father Ted. Just think of those e-mail exchanges that might have gone better if only you had remembered to insert an emoticon. This is crucial stuff, not minor nuisance.