This is just a stub / holding post for future elaboration. I have an agenda item to address Antisemitism and Islamophobia in mostly-secular Western “Christian culture” (like ours) or ex-colonies elsewhere – where in fact they are pretty much examples of the same issue. We tend to have them as live discussion topics only in reaction to some extreme or violent “terrorism” event or series of events – which polarises the language too quickly to get to any shared understanding.

Prompted to start now thanks to two intellectual inputs overnight.

The first – Mishal Husain and her Oxford Romanes(*) Lecture – “Empire, Identity and the Search for Reason” from 2 weeks ago, 14th October 2025

I was all set to share Mishal’s lecture in its own right this morning, as I tweeted overnight – highly recommended:

Wow! Absolutely beautiful. Picked up that link at 3 in the morning and found myself gripped to the whole. The secularism of public intellect & conversation with private faith & religious identity. And so much more. Will say more …

As I say, worth 45 mins listening before you read on.

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This morning William Hague tweeted his remarks from speaking at the Oxford Chabad Society last night. [Chabad is a system of Jewish Philosophy: “that seeks to understand and recognize God through the intellect, aiming to refine and govern one’s actions and feelings with wisdom, comprehension, and knowledge”.]

When you’ve listened to Mishal you’ll recognise that same aim in Islam:

to refine and govern one’s actions and feelings with wisdom, comprehension, and knowledge

William’s Tweeted remarks quoted here in full, and he quotes one of my heroes, Rabbi Sacks:

It was a privilege to speak at the Oxford Chabad Society about freedom of speech, civility, and the urgent need to confront antisemitism.

Freedom of speech lies at the heart of any great university and of any democracy worth the name.

But it is not, as I said in my remarks, “the freedom to scream your views at somebody.”

It carries the duty to listen.

There is no value in a freedom that is exercised only to make more noise.

The real test of a free society is whether it can tolerate disagreement; whether we can listen to arguments that make us uncomfortable and still meet them with reason and civility.

At Oxford, students should expect to hear things that challenge them and, at times, offend them. Because that is what a university is for: to sharpen the mind, to test conviction against debate, and to learn that truth is not discovered by silencing others. We also discussed the growing threat of antisemitism, which remains, as I said, “a poison seeping deeper and deeper into our society.”

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned, antisemitism is never only about Jews. It is a sign of a wider breakdown in the moral and civic health of a country. It begins with Jews, but it never ends there. I expressed my admiration for Oxford’s Jewish students and staff. And I emphasised that Oxford and every university must remain a place where all faiths are protected, debate is free, and hatred finds no home.

Freedom of speech must be recoupled with responsibility. The freedom to speak carries the obligation to listen. The right to protest carries the obligation not to intimidate or prevent others from learning. The right to disagree carries the obligation to do so with civility.

Civility is not weakness. It is the strength that holds a free society together.

Not surprisingly, the comment thread on that Tweet is pure poison, seeing civility as a weakness, and much worse.

Anyway, lots of the usual stuff from me here on Psybertron – freedom comes with responsibility etc. Using free expression to drown out that of others is pure bad-faith [the whole of counter protests to the Let Women Speak movement in Gender Identity is an exemplar.] Nothing to do with debate or public discourse.

“The right to disagree comes with the duty to listen.”

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Anyway, back to Mishal. So many good things to unpick in there.

I often mention the generality and some specifics of the preservation, interpretation and transmission of Greek thought via Islamic scholars to “the West” – most recently when reviewing Brandon Mayfield. Mishal adds more specifics. Not least the choice of language used in many Western translations that disguises their Islamic sources and content.

The emphasis on free intellect and conversation in public understanding and decision-making – secularism – with religious faith as personal and private. And intellect as so much more than Western rationality – the poetics of Rumi, etc.

And so much more …
that “wisdom, comprehension and knowledge” …
is so much “more than science“.

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(*) And George Romanes, after whom the lecture series is named – evolutionary biologist, working with Darwin, who founded comparative psychology – is new to me.

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Heard Jimmy Wales giving a plug to his new book …

“The Seven Rules of Trust
– Why it is Today’s Most Essential Superpower“

… on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning.

Trust has been the explicit subject of many posts here up to about 2012, since then it has been subsumed into my “Rules of Engagement” under Respect (Good-Faith / Honest-intentions & Trust).

Mutual good-faith is pretty much the version I use in ongoing dialogues, and Jimmy used good-faith too, and “civility” – much mocked as a sentimental wishfulness by Nick Robinson. But Jimmy is right, as old-fashioned and as difficult as it is to imagine plugging trust back into everyday human-to-human interactions, there can be no progress, only degeneration without it. And remember this is about the default giving of trust, not the earning of it. No amount of evidence can replace lack of trust.

Not seen the “7 Rules” specifically and the book is not actually published yet, but it will be interesting to see how it compares with mine. I trust Jimmy, that’s why I support Wikipedia. Nice guy I shared a lift with a couple of times, when we both worked in a London office near Old Street.

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Homeward-bound having been offline for a whole week on a trip to Bilbao via the Brittany Ferries service from Portsmouth. Overall a slower pace of life travelling this way and visiting the sights and tabernas of the Basque capital on foot, except for one longer trip by metro to the coastal resort at Plentzia. Gave me reading time to catch up on four part-read books.

Two from specifically Pirsig-related authors and two from the wider explicit complex adaptive systems space.

Pirsig-Related:

Brandon Mayfield’s (2024) “Grains of Destiny” I part reviewed earlier. I think it will become a topic of discussion for other Pirsig scholars and I won’t attempt a comprehensive review of the whole here.

Jim Ostby’s (2017) “Rat-Tail Curves” I’ve not mentioned previously. His Pirsig influences came much earlier than the rest of us reading his philosophy-infused road-trip (ZMM, 1974) and sailing-trip (Lila, 1991).

As a read Mayfield was engaging. Hard to put down in fact, Brandon has an interesting life-story to tell independent of whether Pirsig’s Montana / Yellowstone road-trip locations mean anything to you. His philosophical musings, are indeed Pirsig-influenced but come from his mid-western plains agricultural origins as well as his theological thread as both a practicing Muslim and as a scholar of the 17th century Iranian mystic (Sufi) philosopher Mulla Sadra – significantly later than the Islamic scholars that had already helped “the West” rediscover the ancient Greeks. Feels like a unique combination to write about. Fascinating in itself and recommended if for no other reason. Intentionally open, philosophically pragmatic and dogma-free.

Jim was a student from the time (1959/61) when Pirsig was an inexperienced and unorthodox English teacher in Bozeman, Montana. The influence is therefore on his writing, which Pirsig himself was moved to compliment in later correspondence with Ostby. Philosophically Jim is self-effacing in terms of his own intellectual grasp of any breadth and depth of the subject, but he’s not short of his own philosophical musings in terms of our collective inadequacy as decision-makers to address the 21st century poly-crises facing us. Primarily the naïve battle between religious-dogmas and science-informed rationality or, more simply, dumb ignorance of either. The “demise of both rationality and humanity”. Readable and interesting for the Pirsig connection and whilst naturally pragmatic, not ground-breaking in terms of philosophical ideas. However dumb or smart we think we are, we need to care about what’s true and what’s good.

[Post Note: Brandon also reviewed Jim’s book. Brandon’s writing captures that final sentiment much better than I: “the insistence that thought and responsibility must be joined if life is to retain dignity”.]

Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS):

Ikujiro Nonaka & Zhichang Zhu’s (2012) “Pragmatic Strategy – Eastern Wisdom, Global Success” was mentioned by in the comment thread discussion with Gerald Midgley on “Confluences” one of my follow-up posts from the Birmingham 2025 ISSS Conference.

Chris Mowles’ (2022) “Complexity, a Key Idea for Business and Society” – I mentioned in “Predictably Unpredictable” relating hearing Mowles for the first time to the rest of my complex adaptive systems agenda.

Both these books fall into the wishful “I could have written this” category. Enormous overlap in terms of sources read and written about and in concepts developed. Also with that frustration of timing: 2012 and 2022 works on subjects I’ve been researching since 2001 and with shared management education experiences from 1980’s/90’s. A recurring frustration for me having “carried on with the day job” since that education rather than switching to the academic research stream. With hindsight everything I’ve researched and written in the 21st century was at the very least foreshadowed by the (1991) Master’s thesis. That’s 35 years ago! (Of course “CAS” is simply the latest evolving label for the subject area I’d always referred to as Cybernetics from my 2001 Psybertron perspective and dubbed “Psybernetics” more recently.) Anyway, enough about me.

The Jiro (Nonaka) and Zhu (2012) book describes their own convergence and collaboration since only 2007, as well as their comprehensively researched and referenced content. Despite markedly different careers from their different (Japanese and Chinese) “Eastern” origins they both consider themselves “Western” educated. Whilst seemingly leading with Pragmatism in their title, the content is almost exclusively based on the “Eastern” canon (Confucian and Daoist), in relation to “Western” management education and practice. Notably they refer to ‘East’ / ‘the East’ / ‘Eastern’ and ‘West’ / ‘the West’ / ‘Western’ in ‘scare-quotes’ throughout, acknowledging as I do that it’s about traditional indigenous origins, not about fixed definitive geo-political differences, imperial or otherwise. Indeed “situated” (I would say “embodied and situated”) is their primary characteristic of wisdom in any real world application.

Comprehensive is the right adjective, too much to summarise in any review. Well-crafted in terms of non-intrusive notes collected at the end as well as both reference bibliography and indexing. Key for me are the unexpected convergences on sources. Even from the 1980’s Master’s days – Pettigrew & Whipp, Argyris & Schon, Burrell & Morgan as well as the great and the good of Pragmatism and Process philosophies, who all recognised ‘Eastern’ influences in contrast to (in addition to) those of Aristotelian objective logic.

Chris Mowles’ (2022) refreshing book I already suggested had all bases covered just in his chapter headings. The read does not disappoint. Like Jiro and Zhu there’s a strong anti-Scientism (anti-Aristotelian) exclusivity of objective logical rationality thread. Obviously sophisticated science understands there’s more than narrow rationality when it needs to, but its public spokespeople are dishonest with their public, our public, in setting expectations for science in the real world of socio-politics. Again too many common references to list. (One criticism – notes are collated only at the end of each chapter, so their is no comprehensive bibliography of references nor even authors by surname in the general index, so much harder to reference after reading.) MacIntyre, Bergson, James, Peirce, Arendt and, an unexpected but positive surprise, Solms …

Onwards and upward.

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The company name “Autonomy” mean anything to you?

As I consolidate my formal writing I’m always referring back to my Pysbertron blog post archives from earlier, and forever surprising myself with things I’d written and forgotten. Given that’s 25 years of evolution not only in my writing but in any chance any current readers are likely to have read them, I’ve been tempted to start a series of reposts of ones I’d made earlier. Anyway, today I’m finally doing one … from November 2001, below

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QUOTE

Scoffing at Autonomy

From: CorporateInfo (TelegraphHillSF@yahoo.com)
Subject: Expert scoffs at Autonomy software
Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
View: (This is the only article in this thread) | Original Format
Date: 2001-08-23 21:49:53 PST

At Genentech headquarters today in South San Francisco, there was a seminar on “Metadata & Controlled Vocabularies: What Are they and What is their Value?” given by Amy Warner, faculty member in Information Architecture at UMichigan, Genentech’s consultant on taxonomy creation and a well-known corporate consultant on information technology. Dr. Warner had a final slide with “Autonomy”and “Semio” written on it, and here’s what she said:

“I always get asked, aren’t there automated tools to build
taxonomies? There is some ‘Hiearchy Generation Software’ available, but it generally relies on the principal of Collocation, not
aboutness, which is preferable. Collocation simply means statistical
clustering. Two examples are Autonomy and Semio. Beware of these.
They don’t work very well. They make many promises, but Collocation only works some of the time. I shouldn’t bash, but I haven’t talked to a company yet that likes Autonomy, including those that have bought it. In many cases they are overselling their product.”

UNQUOTE

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[From an AI discussion group, 25 years ago, notice – but I digress.]

I only quote-posted this opinion about Autonomy at this point in 2001, just a month or so since I started my research and blogging “Psybertron” project, because we had formed very similar opinions in the day job, about how clueless and misguided they were when evaluating them for business-use sometime back in 1996/97.

Fascinating how controversial – politically corrupt and immoral – they became in later years – you only had to ask 🙂 Remember their name … yet? Wikipedia is your friend.

In short they were sued, after acquisition by Hewlett Packard, for fraudulent accounting and overvaluation, “substantially” lost their civil case (the thick end of $8bn valuation), dragged Tories David Cameron and George Osborne into their scandal thanks to some dodgy Brexit-motivated dealings, and came to a sticky end when celebrating their acquittal on criminal charges in the US.

In August 2024, Lynch celebrated his acquittal in the San Francisco trial with a cruise on the family superyacht, Bayesian. He was joined by his wife and daughter and nine invited guests, including two lawyers from his defense team. In the early hours of 19 August, the yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, outside the port of Porticello, during a powerful storm, with 22 people on board.^[62] Lynch, his teenage daughter Hannah, four guests, and one member of the crew died.^[63] Chamberlain died one day later, on 20 August 2024, three days after he was hit by a car while out jogging in Stretham.^[64]

Wikipedia

Like I say – you only had to ask.

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My take on McGilchrist in 2025 is still essentially everything I picked-up from his 2021 “The Matter With Things” with its Sacred Turn and the added interest of his much earlier 1982 “Against Criticism“. His thinking is an important, embedded part of my own story at several levels.

Since TMWT was published there was also a Channel McGilchrist forum run by people on his behalf, but I let my subscription lapse because, frankly, the interchanges didn’t seem well enough informed on Iain’s work as a whole and most people seemed to be plugging their own pet theories, with little proper dialogue. Since then apart from specific talks and interviews by Iain I’ve taken my eye of that ball.

What I hadn’t noticed (or remembered) was that Iain had started a SubStack called The Matter With Things. I’ve had a dormant SubStack since it first existed in 2021 and used to cross-post my Psyberton content there, but let that lapse too – I really have zero interest in monetizing (yuk!) my writing. Anyway, the only reason I noticed Iain had a SubStack was because today someone posted some concerns about it in Channel McGilchrist – a link that only works for paid subscribers, but here-below the intro from the notification email from Peter Barus:

‘I’m reeling after reading Iain’s recent repostings. For a fuller discussion of this, I’ve created another group, “Hannah Spier Psychobabble”. I did not comment on Iain’s substack, after reading some of the comments there, hoping for a sober conversation about what seems a shocking 180-degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part. And there’s a lot at stake, for me at least, as I’m just finishing a book that cites TMWT everywhere. Contemplating a rewrite. What the hell, it only took ten years to get to the last chapter.

As Annie Dillard wrote in “The Writer’s Life”:

The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin.’

(Guessing it’s this Peter Barus – WordPress and SubStack? Interesting in itself.)

Obviously the “shocking 180 degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part” caught my eye. What the? So I did some digging:

Long story short – Iain’s been posting on his SubStack since February this year – mostly elaborations and commentaries on content / chapters from TMWT – On Sept 17th / 18th & Oct 1st he recommended and further discussed a “Psychobabble” SubStack post from Norwegian psychiatrist Hannah Spier.

So far as I can tell her post is analytical and speculative without any prescriptive conclusions, but expresses many different thoughts about motivations behind violent conflict in our perplexing time of polycrises / metacrisis. Interesting is all I would say on a first read. BUT she used the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk as an example.

Not surprisingly doing psychoanalysis in the context of a specific political lethal conflict has produced the polarised partisan political responses of our social media ecosystem. More negative heat than light – which has disappointed Iain.

I can’t for the life of me see where Iain has done a 180? Maybe the people expressing the concerns are part of that political polarisation. Anyway – just a holding post – I’ll need to do a closer read of all three posts and comment threads starting from the one linked above.

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PS – I may in due course migrate my ongoing writing to SubStack or Medium entirely – once I have a secure fixed navigable archive version of my WordPress “Psybertron” – but that’s no trivial condition, with so much invested in 25 years of blogging in WordPress, and, did I mention, so many other writing priorities.

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Really just a housekeeping post, based on re-reading some earlier “Annual Edge Question” responses and recognising that the so-called “Last Edge Question” in 2018 has proven to really be the last, and brought the 20 year annual run of John Brockman’s “Edge” and his writer agency clients, to a close.

[My 2025 responses to many of the 2018 “Last Edge Questions” below, following the sad story of the scandal and the list of contributors.]

Ironically, the last collection I actually reviewed was 2017, gave only a passing mention to that last one published in 2018 and 2019 was the year Jeffrey Epstein was finally indicted, refused bail pending trial and died on multiple long-term sex-trafficking conspiracy charges. Altogether more serious that the single 2009 conviction for which he was originally registered as a sex-offender. From 2005 to 2009 and from then until 2019 there were many more accusations and indictments that didn’t make it to trial, for all sorts of reasons, including plea-bargains and sweetheart-deals.

We have to suspect Brockman knew in 2018 of Epstein’s impending 2019 come-uppance?

Brockman’s only publication – after the 2018 “Last Edge Question” was the “Possible Minds” AI-science collection in 2019 and an interview of Alexander Rose he did for the Long Now organisation also in 2019. In 2020/21 there were a handful of his individual clients’ “Edge Conversations” published. The Edge still exists as an entity, with Brockman as CEO, but pretty much zero publishing or commercial activity, since.

I’ve said probably all I want to say about Epstein’s association with Brockman and many of his “the great and the good” clients in science and academia – last time here in 2019. Actual reviews of content going back from 2017 to 2005.

Suppose I should actually review the 2018 Last Questions … knowing now that they really were the last – and they are just the questions, sadly, no responses or discussions to be read. There were:
264 responses in 2018 after
206 responses in 2017 and
120 responses in 2005 (where I started) and
110 at the start in 1998.

The list of 264 names itself is mind-boggling:

Contributors:
Scott Aaronson, Anthony Aguirre, Dorsa Amir, Chris Anderson, Ross Anderson, Alun Anderson, Samuel Arbesman, Dan Ariely, Noga Arikha, W. Brian Arthur, Scott Atran, Joscha Bach, Mahzarin Banaji, Simon Baron-Cohen, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Andrew Barron, Thomas A. Bass, Mary Catherine Bateson, Gregory Benford, Laura Betzig, Susan Blackmore, Alan S. Blinder, Paul Bloom, Giulio Boccaletti, Ian Bogost, Joshua Bongard, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney A. Brooks, David M. Buss, Philip Campbell, Jimena Canales, Christopher Chabris, David Chalmers, Leo M. Chalupa, Ashvin Chhabra, Jaeweon Cho, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Christian, Brian Christian, George Church, Andy Clark, Julia Clarke, Tyler Cowen, Jerry A. Coyne, James Croak, Molly Crockett, Helena Cronin, Oliver Scott Curry, David Dalrymple, Kate Darling, Luca De Biase, Stanislas Dehaene, Daniel C. Dennett, Emanuel Derman, David Deutsch, Keith Devlin, Jared Diamond, Chris DiBona, Rolf Dobelli, P. Murali Doraiswamy, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, David M. Eagleman, David Edelman, Nick Enfield, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Dylan Evans, Daniel L. Everett, Christine Finn, Stuart Firestein, Helen Fisher, Steve Fuller, Howard Gardner, David C. Geary, James Geary, Amanda Gefter, Neil Gershenfeld, Asif A. Ghazanfar, Steve Giddings, Gerd Gigerenzer, Bruno Giussani, Joel Gold, Nigel Goldenfeld, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Daniel Goleman, Alison Gopnik, John Gottman, Jonathan Gottschall, William Grassie, Kurt Gray, A. C. Grayling, Tom Griffiths, June Gruber, Jonathan Haidt, David Haig, Hans Halvorson, Timo Hannay, Judith Rich Harris, Sam Harris, Daniel Haun, Marti Hearst, Dirk Helbing, César Hidalgo, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Michael Hochberg, Donald D. Hoffman, Bruce Hood, Daniel Hook, John Horgan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Nina Jablonski, Matthew O. Jackson, Jennifer Jacquet, Dale W Jamieson, Koo Jeong-A, Lorraine Justice, Gordon Kane, Stuart A. Kauffman, Brian G. Keating, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, Gary Klein, Jon Kleinberg, Brian Knutson, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, John W. Krakauer, Kai Krause, Lawrence M. Krauss, Andrian Kreye, Coco Krumme, Robert Kurzban, Joseph LeDoux, Cristine H. Legare, Martin Lercher, Margaret Levi, Janna Levin, Andrei Linde, Tania Lombrozo, Antony Garrett Lisi, Mario Livio, Seth Lloyd, Jonathan B. Losos, Greg Lynn, Ziyad Marar, Gary Marcus, John Markoff, Chiara Marletto, Abigail Marsh, Barnaby Marsh, John C. Mather, Tim Maudlin, Annalena McAfee, Michael McCullough, Ian McEwan, Ryan McKay, Hugo Mercier, Thomas Metzinger, Yuri Milner, Read Montague, Dave Morin, Lisa Mosconi, David G. Myers, Priyamvada Natarajan, John Naughton, Randolph Nesse, Richard Nisbett, Tor Nørretranders, Michael I. Norton, Martin Nowak, James J. O’Donnell, Tim O’Reilly, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Steve Omohundro, Toby Ord, Gloria Origgi, Mark Pagel, Elaine Pagels, Bruce Parker, Josef Penninger, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford Pickover, Steven Pinker, David Pizarro, Robert Plomin, Jordan Pollack, Alex Poots, Carolyn Porco, William Poundstone, William H. Press, Robert Provine, Matthew Putman, David C. Queller, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Lisa Randall, S. Abbas Raza, Syed Tasnim Raza, Martin Rees, Ed Regis, Diana Reiss, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Jennifer Richeson, Siobhan Roberts, Andrés Roemer, Phil Rosenzweig, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Todd C. Sacktor, Paul Saffo, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Buddhini Samarasinghe, Scott Sampson, Laurie R. Santos, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Roger Schank, Rene Scheu, Maximilian Schich, Simone Schnall, Bruce Schneier, Peter Schwartz, Gino Segre, Charles Seife, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Michael Shermer, Olivier Sibony, Laurence C. Smith, Monica L. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Nina Stegeman, Paul Steinhardt, Bruce Sterling, Stephen J. Stich, Victoria Stodden, Christopher Stringer, Seirian Sumner, Leonard Susskind, Jaan Tallinn,Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Richard H. Thaler, Frank Tipler, Eric Topol, Sherry Turkle, Barbara Tversky, Michael Vassar, J. Craig Venter, Athena Vouloumanos, D.A. Wallach, Adam Waytz, Bret Weinstein, Eric R. Weinstein, Albert Wenger, Geoffrey West, Thalia Wheatley, Tim White, Linda Wilbrecht, Frank Wilczek, Jason Wilkes, Evan Williams, Alexander Wissner-Gross, Milford H. Wolpoff, Richard Wrangham, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Richard Saul Wurman, Victoria Wyatt, Itai Yanai, Dustin Yellin, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, Dan Zahavi, Anton Zeilinger, Carl Zimmer

No general guilt by indirect association here.

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Those questions … well some I noted anyway … those generally answered by the work I’m already doing / using. There are lots of other “interesting” ones more closely related to the individuals’ own work.

Clarify the differences between understanding, knowledge and wisdom that could be communicated to a literate twelve-year-old and recommunicated to their parents?
Richard Saul Wurman
Me – A good question even if not any kind of ultimate question. There’s been a lot of motivated “debunking” of the data / information / knowledge / wisdom stack in recent years, but it is still valuable and meaningful. Worth explaining.

Will human psychology keep pace with the exponential growth of technological innovation associated with cultural evolution?
Cristine H. Legare
Me – another good question, very close to my agenda and related to the previous question. Yes, right now “communication” of information is racing ahead of our psychological capability to properly process and understand it – that’s dangerous, and can only be countered if we better recognise how we know and understand.

Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?
Hans Halvorson
Me – No. It’s very VERY valuable, but love and humanity are greater possessions. We’ve put objective scientific knowledge and processes on a pedestal and defend it from that artificial position, whilst failing to recognise how much of our knowledge and wisdom is beyond or more than science.

How do I know the right level of abstraction at which to explain a phenomenon?
Victoria Stodden
Me – another good question. We have devalued levels of abstraction beyond physical reality and causal logic in that one level and in doing so discounted the levels where our consciousness and will (etc.) actually emerge.

Will the frontiers of consciousness be technological or linguistic?
Dustin Yellin
Me – Linguistic. We already have the physical technology inside our heads, although almost meaningless question – language IS the technology of mind. Thinking tools after Dennett.

Is the cumulation of shared knowledge forever constrained by the limits of human language?
Nick Enfield
Me – Yes, kinda, but don’t forget we can evolve our language if we adopt other worldviews.

Are there limits to what we can know about the universe?
Priyamvada Natarajan
Me – Yes.

How do the limits of the mind limit our understanding?
Barbara Tversky
Me – Obviously they do, the how is about understanding the conscious mind itself. See other replies.

Will humanity eventually exhaust the unknown?
Michael Hochberg
Me – No. See Natarajan above.

Is our brain fundamentally limited in its ability to understand the external world?
Stanislas Dehaene
Me – the brain, no. The mind can evolve better worldviews / models to understand what can be known. If known it can be understood, but there are limits to the knowable (see earlier Q&A).

Does consciousness reside only in our brains?
W. Brian Arthur
Me – there are many layers. Some proto-consciousness exists in the wider world, some aspects of our consciousness are elsewhere in our bodies, “higher” levels only in our brains.

Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?
Rodney A Brooks
Me – a good question – there needs to be an “I” a bounded systemic thing distinct from the world to have that individual (high-level) conscious awareness, but other elements of consciousness are more distributed.

Can we acquire complete access to our unconscious minds?
Joel Gold
Me – no, by definition. (And that’s a good thing, we’ve evolved levels of consciousness for good reasons.)

Will a computer ever really understand and experience human kindness?
Chris DiBona
Me – “a computer” in the electro-mechanical sense, no, not until it first evolves life. Obviously “we” are a computer too, but a very different kind.

What is consciousness?
Stuart A. Kauffman
Me – it’s not a mystery. (See above)

What kinds of minds could solve the mind-body problem?
Susan Blackmore
Me – Ha! – it’s solved, because it was never a problem. It’s been dissolved by better understanding what mind and consciousness are.

What will be obvious to us in a generation that we have an inkling of today?
Ev Williams
Me – hopefully, that we know a lot more than “science” and what it means to know, as conscious wilful agents.

Is the brain a computer or an antenna?
Dave Morin
Me – a bit of both. It definitely processes information and it definitely receives and transduces information. Information can be proto-consciousness itself.

Why are people so seldom persuaded by clear evidence and rational argument?
Tim Maudlin
Me – Largely because we know intuitively that there is more than objective evidence and rational – objective logical – argument. Sadly science advocates continue to deny this and we remain suspicious of scientific exclusivity.

What is the most important thing that can be done to restore the general public’s faith and trust in science?
Irene Pepperberg
Me – see last response – when science is honest about its own limitations.

Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?
Alun Anderson
Me – Absolutely! – rules are for guidance of the (caring) wise and the obedience of (careless) fools.

What is the optimal algorithm for discovering truth?
Joscha Bach
Me – there isn’t one. There are many emergent layers.

Can we program a computer to find a 10,000-bit string that encodes more actionable wisdom than any human has ever expressed?
Scott Aaronson
Me – no, though not sure why the “expressed” condition?

When will race disappear?
Nina Jablonski
Me – When (and IFF) we decided to make it a concerted objective over many generations. Might be better if we also maintain “Requisite Diversity” in our gene and meme pools.

How did our complex universe arise out of simple physical laws?
Seth Lloyd
Me – too easy. (See Free Energy Principle responses.)

How does the past give rise to the future?
Nic Humphrey
Me – good question. Causation is definitely much weirder than common sense causal logic. There are many other evolutionary emergence processes.

Why do we care so much about how well we’re approximated by algorithms?
Coco Krumme
Me – largely because some very powerful misguided people seem to think it’s possible that we might be thus approximated. We can’t be, but that’s not stopping such people, and we’re intuitively suspicious of the dangers.

When will we replace governments with algorithms?
César Hidalgo
Me – ditto – never if we have any sense. (See science or politics Q&A)

Could the thermodynamic prophecy of an increasingly entropic universe be fulfilled by the cosmic flourishing of intelligent life?
David Dalrymple
Me – Absolutely! – increasingly intelligent life is the optimal route to maximum cosmic chaos and entropy.

Is it possible to control a system capable of evolving?
Nigel Goldenfeld
Me – control? No, not really. But guide with creative constraints etc, yes it’s called management, even if we have imperfect knowledge and understanding of what might result from our actions in the longer-term widest sense – unintended consequences etc. Care needed.

How can we separate the assessment of scientific evidence from value judgments?
Sabine Hossenfelder
Me – I think we already can – IF we want to. Better to be honest that we need both, even if they remain entangled. It only matters that we disentangle them if we want to establish “pure” science distinct from wider knowledge beyond science.

Are feelings computable?
Read Montague
Me – yes, and actually the other way round. It’s “affect” all the way down. No thoughts without feelings. (And for computability, see earlier.)

How much biodiversity do we need?
Giulio Boccaletti
Me – indeed, Requisite Diversity, less than 100% of what happens to exist circumstantially. (Again – see managing evolving systems and avoiding thinking we can play god.)

Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable?
Anthony Aguirre
Me – Yes. Fundamentally unpredictable – not usefully predictable – in the objectively causal sense. Only predictable at the kinds, of patterns, of kinds, of patterns, of kinds meta-levels.

How does a single human brain architecture create many kinds of human minds?
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Me – Just natural that it does, see unpredictability of specifics in any mind, in any emergent evolved thing, above.

Is a human brain capable of understanding a human brain?
Rene Scheu
Me – Yes. Seems I/we can.

Why is the acceleration of the expansion of the universe roughly equal to a typical acceleration of a star in a circular orbit in a disk galaxy?
Lee Smolin
Me – Obviously I don’t know, not my subject, but these “fine-tuning” coincidences are intriguing, suggesting we accidentally have constant values of some variables built into our fundamental science.

What can humanity do right now that will make the biggest difference over the next billion years?
Toby Ord
Me – kinda the question we’re all asking ourselves in a positive sense. My answer is to better understand how the world really works rather than clinging to the clearly inadequate fiction of everything being science.

Why are humans still so much more flexible in their thinking and everyday reasoning than machines?
Gary Marcus
Me – because we’re alive and have been evolving a lot longer.

Can human intuition ever be reduced to an algorithm?
Gerd Gigerenzer
Me – No. (See many earlier Q&A)

Why is there such widespread public opposition to science and scientific reasoning in the United States, the world leader in every major branch of science?
Jared Diamond
Me – Answered this one already. There is an intuitive suspicion that there is more than science – as in fact there is – and yet science continues to peddle its exclusive access to knowledge, true and good. If science came clean there would be much less suspicion and apparent “opposition”.

Could superintelligence be the purpose of the universe?
Maria Spiropulu
Me – Kinda, yes. It’s the optimum solution to maximum entropy question. Purpose as in an inevitable end.

How will predictive models in the social sciences achieve the accuracy and precision of those in the natural sciences?
Robert Kurzban
Me – they won’t and they shouldn’t be expected / held-to-account to that standard. Quality beats accuracy and precision. (Again, part of “natural science” coming clean.)

How does a thought become a feeling?
Marco Iacoboni
Me – again, already answered, other way round. All thoughts start as feelings. In cases where objective causal logic is right, it feels right.

Is the universe like an onion that will require science to keep peeling back new layers of reality and asking questions forever?
Lawrence M. Krauss
Me – this loser still doesn’t get it.

Are accurate mathematical theories of individual human behavior possible?
Emanuel Derman
Me – no, nor would they be desirable, nor have any relation to reality.

Is love really all you need?
Annalena McAfee
Me – yes, kinda, if you use the word love for the ineffable, qualitative basis of all relations.

Will the “hard problem” of consciousness dissolve (rather than be solved) as we learn more about the natural world?
Dale Jamieson
Me – Yes, and for those who’ve escaped the exclusive objective causal rationale of science, it is already dissolved. (See above).

Why is it that the maximum information we can pack into a region of space does not depend on the volume of the region, but only on the area that bounds it?
Donald Hoffman
Me – good, intriguing question, because it does indeed seem to be the case.

Is the number of interesting questions finite or not?
Chiara Marletto
Me – probably not, even with the “interesting” qualification. Not sure this is therefore an interesting question in itself?

What does the conscious mind do that is impossible for the unconscious mind?
Richard Nisbett
Me – hold a world-model it can compare with observations of reality.

How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise?
Dan Dennett
Me – I think that’s a question Dan already answered himself. I guess he’s asking it because not enough people paid attention to his answer.

If we want to make a real and effective science-based policy, should we change politics or science?
Luca De Biase
Me – both – science has a flaw in failing to recognise its own limitations, and sadly almost all human institutions including political ones have fallen foul of the same fallacy. Fixing one honestly, fixes both.

Are the ways qualia relate to computation, creativity to free will, risk to probability, morality to epistemology, all the same question?
David Deutsch
Me – knowing Deutsch, the probably are. Intriguing, but not necessarily an urgent question? Implies a massive compression of knowledge, and all computation is compression anyway – so valuable if not exactly necessary.

What is the principle that causes complex adaptive systems (life, organisms, minds, societies) to spontaneously emerge from the interaction of simpler elements (chemicals, cells, neurons, individual humans)?
W Daniel Hills
Me – guess the simple answer is some version of the Free Energy Principle? (Good sign is how many people are trying to debunk FEP, suggesting it may really be a powerful truth.)

If we’re not the agents of ourselves (and it’s hard to see how we can be), how can we make sense of moral accountability (and how can we live coherently without it)?
Rebecca Goldstein
Me – a surprise to see Goldstein on this side of that question. If anyone understands that we are wilful agents beyond causally reductive determinism it would be her?

Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe, and our complete lack of free will, how is it that most people avoid ever being clinically depressed?
Robert Sapolsky
Me – on the other hand, zero surprise to see Sapolsky on the wrong side of this. We do not lack free-will, we have exactly the requisite amount of it.

If science does in fact confirm that we lack free will, what are the implications for our notions of blame, punishment, reward, and moral responsibility?
Gerry Coyne
Me – Ha! and the other total absence of surprise. Said more than enough before about how Coyne doesn’t get it.

And so many more – that’s just 58 out of the 264 in total – questions that have simple answers because those asking misunderstand their own question?

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My agenda is like anyone else’s these days, to find better ways of understanding and making better decisions in a world where recent experience suggests we are failing to get to grips with the existential poly-crises facing us and maybe some meta-crisis that might underly these. My focus being the latter, means my interest is unashamedly abstract and conceptual, philosophical and even metaphysical, rather than the physical and human world details of any one crisis. Although I obviously engage with these too, as empirical examples.

One way or another my own deliverable contribution is a better “model” of the world, how it works and what we can know and predict about it. So, both ontological and epistemological, and it so happens, with an information-process-relational metaphysics rather than a conventional object view of things. That’s a whole thesis I won’t attempt to elaborate here.

One thing’s clear, if we’re talking about how “we” best understand and deal with global polycrises, we’re talking about systems and situations as complex as conceivable. Populations of psychologically intentional human agents, with aspirations and foibles, individually and in any number of overlapping groups and organisations, interacting as part of our local and cosmic ecosystems. There can be nothing more complex. Life, the universe and everything as I often say. And, as I posted recently, it is moot whether we talk primarily in terms of “systems” or “complexity”. We need the pragmatism to recognise both communities of ideas, all societies of minds. Requisite diversity.

Although my thesis is vast, commensurate with the topic and mostly nothing new under the sun, I have for a couple of years been blocked by one important assertion that fails to stick. I do regularly get people to agree that we’re talking about “more than science“, but as soon as discourse proceeds to preferred theories, models, frameworks and methods, those same people almost invariably continue to talk exclusively in terms of, this, that or the other “science(s)”. I say “Systems Thinking” some insist on “Systems Science(s)”. Why? baffles me.

Now, there’s nothing “anti-science” or “post-modern” here. I’m an engineer grounded in the physical sciences and the closing summary from my last significant presentation on the topic is “as scientific as possible”. Post-post-modern, “3rd culture” if anything. I’m simply saying, faced with such complex realities, it is more honest to recognise that our knowledge, decision-making and actions must involve more considerations than the sciences.

Who is Our Audience?

Now, any theorist or specialist practitioner in the Complex Adaptive Systems space, and indeed any practitioner in the sciences generally, will recognise as we go from from physical sciences to biology to psychology that predictability and repeatability get less and less, even if all the processes and content are scientifically explicable. We – specialists – don’t stop calling them science, we just accept that the predictable outcomes on which we base our best decisions with the best information currently available get less and less certain, and that how certain may get less and less quantifiable. We may even adopt stochastic methods and heuristics that recognise previously experienced patterns of uncertainties.

But this is a one-dimensional view of uncertainty in the real world and there are more meta-levels to consider in more abstract conceptual dimensions. (Using real and conceptual in a natural language sense here, obviously any eventual ontology will address these too.) Some many-layered emergent outcomes are only predictable in kind and in patterns of kind – that is at multiple conceptual levels removed from the actual. Individual real-world outcomes are not usefully predictable at all. Actual decisions depend not just on the available science and objective evidence, formally modelled and empirically documented, but also on the trusted judgement and the situated-&-embodied experience of the humans involved in context. Wisdom in a word.

Now whilst systems and complexity-scientific specialists can all understand where predictability of outcomes become less and less valuable, compared to recognising that which emerges into the real world from the evolutionary processes at both conceptual and real levels, with only limited enabling and guidance, we are not really our own audience.

The real audience needed, if sophisticated systems and complexity considerations are to help with real world actions to solve our existential polycrises, are politicians, leaders and servants in organisations and governments, judiciary, journalists and – in democracies – public electorates.

Without the acknowledgement and acceptance that “good decisions” require those aspects more than science above, the enormous success of science to date means these constituent audiences have become trained to expect only objective evidence and causal logic to back up proposed actions. No trust without these.

So What’s New?

Yesterday at short notice I attended a Complexity Lounge talk by Chris Mowles, Professor at the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire. From the introduction I picked-up a question directly related to my agenda above:

“A radical interpretation of the complexity sciences”
[and]
“things we aspire to, but even our aspirations will evolve and change in our interactions with each other and the world.”

Suggesting that maybe we could agree the latter – interactively evolving aspirations – were “more than science”? If unpredictability is all we can predict, we need more than (scientific) predictions to make good decisions?

I found it a very refreshing take from Chris. Many sources beyond complexity sciences – ethical politics, philosophical pragmatism and literature. I didn’t make enough notes, so I will need to pick-up the slides from the recording – see post note below.

What I did do is I already obtained a copy of his “Complexity – A Key Idea for Business and Society“. The “and” in the sub-title is key. The chapter headings are all I could hope for. More later no doubt – further reference after reading, here.

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Post Notes:

Here’s the YouTube recording (embedding blocked).

Chris also has his own blog.

As well as being active on LinkedIn.

And, here is a PDF of Chris’ slide deck.

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Mentioned several times that, within the Systems Thinking community in its widest sense, there are factions that don’t just have preferred views, they positively reject others.

Even within those that see Systems as the main focus, there are competing theories, sciences and methodologies, as well as competing and complementary world-views on multiple dimensions. A large part of my own recent agenda has been to emphasise the recognition that our knowledge of systems and their practical implementations involves more than science – wisdom for short-hand convenience – whichever of the theories or sciences are preferred. The practical views are ultimately Pragmatism by any other name, and Mike Jackson’s comprehensive contribution also emphasises this (last section of a long diary post).

I say “even” because there are factions that reject the language of Systems entirely in favour of Complexity sciences and methods. Most systems thinkers see their thinking as a response to complexity, whatever definition of systems, or preferred theories and methods we espouse. No systems thinker would reject the significance of complexity to their discipline. Those who espouse complexity rather than systems have identifiable reasons. The two examples I’m going to use are Jean Boulton (The Tao of Complexity) and Dave Snowden (Cynefin) and their rejection of systems in favour of complexity might be all they have in common.

The first reason is quite straightforward. Naming things as systems – a system or the system – with specific identity and characteristics – objectifies & reifies them implying well-defined, possibly static, boundaries. The first of Boulton’s conditions (below) is exactly this. All systems in the cosmos are open systems except – by definition – for the cosmos itself. Naming, drawing a #GoodFence as a boundary around any given system of interest, is always a pragmatic linguistic convenience. Drawing a boundary needn’t imply that it is impervious to systemic activity.

A second reason is in the definition of what we mean by “system”. We can start with Boulton’s second and third conditions – diversity and reflexive relationships. Any system of interest has multiple different elements – requisite diversity – and that these are functionally related to each other and to other systems. The three conditions are met by just about any systems definition.

A corollary, and third reason arising from the second, is that anything and everything can be considered as a system in those terms.

[From Jo Kaybryn on LinkedIn]

Which is all encompassing of life, the universe and everything, so thinking of something as a system doesn’t narrow down our scope of interest. It’s almost redundant to refer to something as a system if everything is a system. Which is probably another reason why Snowden rejects the language.

But, in fact, System is practically just an adjective for thinking in terms of functional relations. Systemic Thinking if you prefer. And ISSS Past President, George Mobus also presents “A General Theory of Systemness, proposing that we look at the essential characteristics of being a system rather than debate endlessly what does or doesn’t count as a system.” [recent ISSS Newsletter] Precisely! The characteristics of systemness that make something systemic – rather than needing to agree the definition of a system – whether we call “it” this or that system or not. (Sounds very Platonic essence of system).

Pragmatically, the preference for complexity and/or systems language is a non-event. We all need complexity and functional systemness or systemicity.

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[Note: – the idea of #GoodFences and identity-defining-boundaries is a whole subject in itself here on Psybertron.]

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Post Note: Dave Snowden’s own writing continues, here via LinkedIn.

He’s OK with Systems as “Complex Systems” – which is about where I am, obviously. His use of the word “substrate” illustrates his (correct) architectural distinction that much of what matters at the human level primarily emerges from and supervenes on the physical as creative constraints, not in any way reductively causal. And in an earlier post he’s complaining about fashionable misuse of Pragmatism – between natural language pragmatism and the US Pragmatists – I’m already on it. And I notice a few converging threads. Another round of people thinking they are “debunking” Maslow (they’re really not), some conversely suggesting there’s a layer of “Transcendence” above Self-Actualisation and Dave railing against Transcendence. All good fun.

People confuse short-hand with precision – really just a language game #GoodFences (again).

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I make multiple references (as far back as 2003) to Dave Snowden and his “Cynefin” sensemaking – organisational strategic action consulting business. My interests remain more abstract philosophically – metaphysical – but even with differences of shared understanding at this level, and indeed his personal style & preference level, I am nevertheless a “fan boy” at the level of his practical participatory approach(es).

I said as much in the post from early this year, in which I also included my favourite version of his Cynefin Framework diagram. This has evolved in detail over the years, particularly in the labelling / annotation language, but despite appearances has maintained its distinction from the Boston Consulting 2×2 grids, ubiquitous in management consulting space. However many dimensions our real problem space, any view on page or screen is a 2D projection, with its own orthogonal axes, so this isn’t a criticism. But seemingly simple views – for understandable reasons of intended problem simplification – often lead the unwise to simplistic understandings and decisions. The Cynefin diagram always maintained the clue that we weren’t looking at a single contiguous plane. The aporetic gap / hole.

The focus was always complexity, so that different “sciences” (*) and approaches could be brought to various Simple > Complicated > Complex > Chaotic domains, but that has become a given, with all “Systems Thinking” being seen as a response to complexity. Snowden has multiple other working views and approaches as well as his framework overview – documented more and more in his prolific writing. The reason for this post is to capture a copy of a new overview that has been shared increasingly – e.g. on LinkedIn – over the summer.

I like it, even if I haven’t fully digested it or Snowden’s intent. The language in the boxes will no doubt evolve with context, but those two axes and all ten words of their labels seem to hit their targets.

The fine- and coarse-graining of interventions, the natural (externally) and (internally) stimulated emergence of new species (of whatever we’re interested in). And, the four levels of complication replaced with the simpler (Ha!) ordered vs complex distinction. Ha!, because all distinctions (#GoodFences / lines drawn, that diagram has several) are simple-looking binary dichotomies in our ontologies, however much we wish to avoid them being “unnecessarily” divisive in our real-world problem space.

The previous vertical divider between ordered (simple / complicated) and complex (complex / chaotic) is now mapped as the red arc, and the aporetic gap is now smeared and swept around the whole – partially turned inside-out?

Also having mentioned dichotomies, I notice Dave is pushing several triadic views. The dichotomies at fundamental levels of abstraction (ontologies) don’t go away, but any number of more practically useful views are constructed from these.

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(*) I say “sciences” in scare quotes, because a significant part of my philosophical systems agenda is that there is “more than science” (first link here) that matters 🙂

And I notice the latest graphic above is being shared in connection with his “Estuarine Mapping” methodology. Picked-up on that as an interesting concept a couple of years ago, but never followed its detailed development since. An omission.

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Post Note: Slight change of topic – but reminded of something I didn’t respond to at the time. A month or so ago, since the Birmingham ISSS2025 dialogues, Dave made some LinkedIn comments about styles of argumentation. He’s often quite pedantic about being quoted literally rather than any attempt at paraphrasing or rephrasing in ones own words. Obviously “claiming” agreement with Dave on the basis of one’s own rephrasing isn’t on – and I do regularly point out that we do have disagreements (despite which, etc.) – BUT attempts at rephrasing each other are a fundamental part of dialogue towards agreeing shared understandings of a topic. “Try this”.

Obviously they’re not “agreed” until mutually agreed and it would be disingenuous to suggest so. Don’t believe I ever have?

Very much my “Rules of Engagement” topic.

And another (Oct 2025) quote on abuse of pragmatism -still sticking to his “science” guns:

The use, and too frequently the abuse, of Pragmatism (philosophy) in management theory is growing. Too much of this apologia falls foul of Russel’s criticism that Pragmatist’s theory of truth is subjective, resting on emotional satisfaction and utility rather than correspondence to an objective reality. Now most complexity science work acknowledges pragmatism, in particular abduction which is rigorous within the context of systems without material linear causality. Pearce rightly sees it as the foundation of science. But it is rigorous, not an excuse to justify the abusive ‘I think it worked for me last time so it must be universally true’. One indicator is if the references are to Peirce & Quine or James & Dewey and/or an attempt to oppose what is too often a strawman characterisation of natural science.

It is of course Russell’s view of science I am rejecting. And, talking of strawmen ‘I think it worked for me last time so it must be universally true’ would be a good example 🙂 Incorrigible.

And another (Oct 2025) pragmatic reality quote from Dave:

I doubt anyone creating a frame would hold it to be universal. Any framework carries and should declare both ontological and epistemological assumptions. But language is itself a framework that constrains conversational interaction. Some frameworks (semiotics for example) provide ways to de-territorialise those constraints. It’s all a lot more messy and entangled that implied [by your post]. Also frameworks can liberate people from facilitation, which is why some consultants dislike them. Curation of conversation is a constraint as well.

To which I would add – all (good) constraints (applied at the right levels of abstraction) are creative. Sufficiently abstract, they can be pretty close to universal, but even that requires a shared language, as Dave says.

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I’ve mentioned Brandon Mayfield just the once before. As well as being a published author, he’s a fellow Robert Pirsig scholar and member of the RPA (Robert Pirsig Association), who was curious enough to research and write up a comparison between the works and overlapping timelines of Pirsig and Alan Watts “through the lens of Zen”.

Initially, just to get a feel for his writing, I started to read his “Grains of Destiny”. I say initially because, with my own writing and other priorities, I have been in a state of no new reading for a few months. His full title is:

GRAINS OF DESTINY – Return to Victory Road
– A search for meaning and objective truth.
by Brandon Mayfield (Crescent Books, 2024)

I suspect I will in fact read to completion, but as I type I’m 5 chapters / 112 pages in – about one third through- and writing my usual pre-view rather than an actual review, to keep me honest just in case I never do complete.

I already mentioned elsewhere that any relationship to Pirsig’s writing (ZMM and Lila) is not advertised in any of the front materials or cover blurbs. Why would there be? His audience isn’t limited to fans of Pirsig after all. Yet, if you know Pirsig, it is spooky from the outset how the locations and roads are exactly those travelled by Pirsig, westward through Montana. And the similarities don’t end there. It’s a travelogue, with landscape, travel and weather descriptions and with companions’ dialogue sharing memoirs and philosophical discussions on life, the universe and everything.

Having said that, it’s quite different too. The “companions” are circumstantial, more like Lila than ZMM, the characters didn’t set out as friends travelling together, and they’re travelling in cars & trucks as opposed to bikes or boats. And we have cell-phones.

There are more Pirsig allusions beyond the circumstantial. A nod to getting out of the car and into the frame of the real world, for example, no longer observed through the window frame from a closed space. But Pirsig and motorcycles don’t turn up explicitly until page 100.

Up until that point, as well as a brief history of thought from the Greeks via the Islamic world to the Enlightenment, we also get a fair bit of 21st century poly-crises and 21st century science of consciousness too. ie Knowing why this stuff matters?

The science of consciousness content is primarily Penrose and Hameroff, Microtubules and “Orch-OR” orchestration of quantum effects at noisy, wet, brain scales. I think this might in time become accepted as good science. Others like Al-Khalili and McFadden are ploughing similar furrows in quantum-biology explanations for brain processes. Even though these may (or may not) turn out to be good science for those physical processes, personally, after Solms and Friston and McGilchrist, I don’t consider them as necessary scientific explanations of the subjective nature of consciousness itself. Like Chalmers’ “hard problem” they miss the point. But I probably digress.

When the explicit references to Pirsig’s ZMM and MoQ turn up with the bikers, the conversation shifts to a fair summary of Pirsig’s classic / analytic / static vs romantic / aesthetic / dynamic Metaphysics of Quality. Brandon’s helpful driver says:

“So powerful were these [Greek] ideas of objective truth and scientific method that they helped in part to advance the golden age of Muslim learning [which in turn] allowed Europe to emerge from its Dark Ages. But [paraphrasing Pirsig] this scientific enlightenment came at a cost.”

And from this point onwards, we see why Pirsig isn’t advertised as the sole or primary source. When it comes to the Islamic scholars, I know 10th/11th century Avicenna (ibn Sina), Averroes (ibn Rushd) and Al Ghazzali but we are introduced here to 17th century Iranian mystic (Sufi) philosopher Mulla Sadra (Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī).

“where Pirsig stops, Sadra continues”

So we are into the mystic and spiritual and even the concept of God (the good) as the ground of all being. Already good grist to my mill here. Furthermore we are also telegraphed the dynamic / living / process contributions of Bergson and of Whitehead, also much referenced sources here at Psybertron. Seems impossible not to read on. If nothing else, did I forget to mention, we need to get to the bottom of our driver’s warning about his strange behaviour.

Already a good read in itself and a recommended read for anyone seeking the wisdom we seem to be lacking in order to deal with our 21st century poly-meta-crisis of meaning, conveniently packaged in a well-written US road-trip travelogue.

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[Will append further reading / review if and when I complete.]

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