What, Why & How do we Know ?
(Just a holding page for content starting Nov 2023 on establishing a properly skeptical freethought environment. Note a page, not a post, and no public link yet.) My (relevant) bio: Born 1956 / raised NE England – Cultural Christian (naïve atheist) from childhood. Humanist from age 22/23 (Humanist wedding aged 25 in 1981, etc.) 45+ … Continue reading “Freethought Project”
Just to capture a post by long-time correspondent Lee Beaumont, on “Prioritising the Grand Challenges“. Whilst my agenda is more meta, more abstract, than most, I have been conscious of many others’ focus on the challenges / crises facing us in the every-day world. Poly-crises, omni-crisis, you name them and have settled recently on the … Continue reading “Prioritising the “Grand Challenges””
I have a zillion browser windows open on the laptop and phone, and after being away last week and being away this coming weekend I need to tidy-up, so I’ll capture a few here before I shut them all down. The links to AII are built into this morning’s post already. A fair review (?) … Continue reading “Link Round Up”
Watched the famous 15 minutes of Carl Sagan’s 1985 testimony to US Congress on the Greenhouse Gases effect of Global Warming / Climate Change. Everything is there from ~40 years ago – well calibrated evidence by concensus – and we see Al Gore, of later “Inconvenient Truth” fame, listening intently. I would maintain that the … Continue reading “Measured Testimony”
The Santiago Boys #EMFAMBE Audio documentary (9 hours!) about Stafford Beer’s “Cybersyn” project in Allende’s Chile by Evgeny Morozov(*1) – “new” undated. (Hat tip to Ben Taylor on Mastodon / Twitter / LinkedIn – and was reviewed last week 22 July 2023 by John Bartlett in the Grauniad.) Amidst all the left-right international and corporate power … Continue reading “Stafford Beer the Hippy?”
Picking up from the previous post, where I’d picked-up an apparent mapping between Pirsig and a model combining Vervaeke and Henriques, I’ve been looking at some specific recommended sources – what is it they specifically bring to the party? Vervaeke I know in so far as he has a whole Patreon-sponsored YouTube series called “Awakening … Continue reading “Vervaeke and Henriques”
This is a 2023 Annotation of a 2005 paper prepared originally for the Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). The text is unchanged except for correcting a few obvious typos and formatting errors, and to keep me honest the original “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid” remains here complete with old broken … Continue reading “Zero to Pirsig”
[Work in Progress – Draft will be edited without notification.] [Feedback appreciated on the “See / Refs” – where more are needed? Meantime all those indicated will be elaborated and worked into the text. And obviously on the intelligibility of the text so far. Drafting arose out of the “Three Essays” post, particularly “Algorithms for Humans” and … Continue reading “The Information Ontology Metaphysics”
This is just a recap on different “types” of Cybernetics, at a time when there is huge overlap with Systems Thinking, Complexity Sciences and Operations Research. As you may already know, I’m sceptical of definitions being definitive in general – natural language – discourse, beyond logical – formal symbolic – arguments. That matters because most … Continue reading “Cybernetics #1, #2 & #3”
Thinking about an upcoming dialogue, I thought I’d compose a brief outline of what I’m about in 2023. A conversation starter. I’m doing “Systems Thinking”. For 20+ years, I would have called it “Cybernetics” by which I mean the original sense of the term – how humans as living things decide and govern ourselves for … Continue reading “What Am I Thinking?”