I also acquired, but have so far only skim read in parts, his 1948 collection of essays that starts with “The Yogi and the Commissar”. Interesting to see in other translated works, which include novels, drama and autobiography as well as non-fiction, includes that 600 page Sleepwalkers listed as an “Essay”(!)
Koestler was a fully-paid-up Marxist-Leninist Communist under Stalin, but like Orwell who cited Koestler as a major influence and also experienced the Spanish civil war, wrote about the corrupting pitfalls of totalitarian forms of Socialism from first-hand experience.
[Post Note – Another “Socialist” who fell out with Stalin’s ways and contributed seminally to Complex Systems Thinking – via both the novel and non-fiction forms – was Aleksandr Bogdanov. Another Mike Jackson / Hull Centre for Systems Studies source – and the connection of both Science and Social Systems thinking with Eastern thought with Nagarjuna as well as Bogdanov in Rovelli’s book Helgoland – it’s all connected.]
Just a holding post for a dialogue I just don’t have the bandwidth to engage right now. I admire the work of both Dave Snowden and Mike Jackson in the wider “Complex Adaptive/Anthropic/Critical-Systems Thinking” space. Known them and their work back to the origins of my Psybertron work, but first referred to the both in them same breath here a couple of years ago.
1 – The origins of ST are in the Macy Conferences, not Systems Dynamics – they came a decade early. And in those events, the split between Ashby and Bateson is significant. I would argue that Bateson is a precursor of complexity science, while most ST followed Ashby
2 – The use of archetypal characters and a questionnaire is useful only if you see the categories as modulators of team behaviour. Categorising individuals runs into the same problems as pseudo-sciences such as Myers-Briggs.
For me Dave’s points 1 and 3 are about understanding the origins / history / genetics of how different systems & complexity, cybernetics & dynamics branches evolved to be – post-Macy for me too – but this shouldn’t lead to tighter definitions of each labelled branch. On the contrary it’s about flexible/porous #GoodFences and better understanding the whole in terms of relationships between the branches, but never feeling bound by the limitations of any one branch simply because one label is chosen in dialogue. Surely anyone bringing an enlightened view to their endeavours cares about the whole?
Pretty much what was behind my response to an earlier LinkedIn post from Dave. (Somewhere Dave has edited one of his responses out of that thread, my response is across two comments. I had already answered his second plea.)
Dave’s point 2 – is pretty much my #MoreThanScience agenda. Just because something isn’t science is no reason to debunk it as pseudo-science. Valuable stuff exists beyond science – simply more honest not to call it science. (See values and labels in the previous otherwise completely unrelated post too.)
How an amoral metaphysics enables social power to influence shared cultural dialogue in an untold number of ways. Thankfully there’s a solution.
His focus here is explicitly the labels<>values contrast, and I have some questions to ask about his use of labels, but first I need to affirm my agreement with the central point in his sub-heading. The world runs predominantly on the subject-object metaphysics he calls amoral and he correctly emphasises the “cultural” dimension of how our real-world dialogues are deeply influenced by it and why its amoral influence enables any number of immoral interpretations and uses by those with power to act. The solution he alludes to is Robert Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality. No argument from me, being values-based, morality is built into Pirsig’s MoQ.
Labels Generally? I use a concept I refer to as #GoodFences. The idea that the names we give things – labels – are a necessary component of any constructive dialogue. But, however much formal, logical, objective – and contractual / legal – discourse depends on such labels and things being “well-defined”, in the real world they are best treated as good fences. Linguistic this-not-that dividing lines between the objects of our dialogue necessary for the purpose of having the dialogue but nevertheless movable and evolvable as part of that dialogue. Not rigidly cast in stone, except in artificially constrained contexts. Since subject-object metaphysics is predicated on those labelled things it unsurprisingly relies entirely on their definitions. So again, no argument, fixed rigid labels are bad for real world dialogue.
Labels Specifically? We need to look at the words David uses:
His starting topic is the idea of “socialism” in US political discourse – most associated with Bernie Sanders. Those scare quotes suggest #GoodFences to me, that we’re avoiding rigid definitions, and yet to have any meaningful dialogue, we clearly need to distinguish socialism from the alternative(s). Capitalism and Social-Democracy (he says “democratic socialism”).
He suggests Bernie and his supporters wear the socialist label with pride – necessary when your binary-partisan opponents are labelling you with it pejoratively anyway. I would however suggest most of us using such a short-hand label in intelligent good-faith dialogue are intending social-democracy not literally “social-ism”?
However either term includes the “social” root and David uses this to bring-up the relation to the social level in Pirsig’s MoQ. I would question whether Pirsig’s use of social is the same as understood in general real-world usage and political dialogue? And, either way, whether people favour capitalism over socialism or vice-versa, or any “mixed” version of the two, anyone that discounts the democratic element has a whole different set of questions to answer. [Aside – in my own “Psybernetic” researches and writings, I’ve long and regularly concluded all roads from Cybernetics (ie Governance) lead to Democracy and the systems we envisage to implement it. Most recently here. And, more comprehensively here, updating left and right with freedoms on economic and social axes, etc.]
Assuming for the moment we can equate or otherwise reconcile Pirsig’s use of social with more general usage of the word, then this claim holds:
“that label [socialism] quietly smuggles in: not care, not fairness, but an acceptance of social-level power concentrating under the cover of higher intellectual or moral authority. Cries that capitalism’s immorality can only be solved through socialism or communism are common, but they miss the deeper problem entirely”
“The issue isn’t capitalism as such – it’s what values control culture, and who and what gets to enforce them.”
Elite(s)? At this point he introduces elite(s), proceeds to use the word many more times, and, since he lays the blame at their / our door, socialist or capitalist, I need to understand what he means by elite? If I get myself elected to a position of temporary delegated power, do I become a member of an elite? If I consider I hold an intellectual understanding of Pirsig’s social and intellectual levels, do I get labelled a member of an elite? In Pirsigian terms what does it mean to refer to “an intellectual class” as an elite?
This one question aside, David nevertheless makes plenty of important true statements:
“Left unchecked, capitalism doesn’t just respond to Dynamic Quality – it converts social power into permanence, allowing those who win early or win big to shape the rules in their favour. Capitalism alone, then, is no more virtuous than socialism alone. Both become immoral when they’re absolutised.”
“From an MOQ perspective, democracy’s moral strength is precisely this openness. It does not freeze value at the social or intellectual level. Instead, it creates the conditions under which better ideas, better arrangements, and better values can emerge over time. When democracy fails, it is usually because this Dynamic function has been undermined, not because democracy itself was the problem.
Towards the end he concludes:
“Because despite everything, people still do share remarkably similar underlying values: meaningful work, security, distrust of elites, and a genuine voice in shaping their future. What is fractured: is not the culture itself, but the language and metaphysics people are given to understand it.”
That includes “elites” as the bad guys again, so in order to agree I’d need to read that as a bad kind of elites, rather than elites per se? Help me. That last sentence is also somewhat tautologous to me in the sense that it is the prevailing culture that gives us those shared understandings?
And in the final paragraph:
“[The MoQ] keeps evolutionary conflicts of morality at the front of mind whilst [common folks] evaluate elite suggestions. And the key here is that with this better metaphysics they can uniquely do so in the intellectual language of the elites.”
More of the us and them in there again – common folks vs elites – so understanding the use of “elite” is crucial to understanding, without it becoming simply another “rigid label”?
Overall worth a read, and I’d be interested in how others read it, Pirsigians or otherwise.
I’ve been reading “Going Nuclear” by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it.
To be clear it’s written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience – even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of scales of measure, as well as the basic physics. So, as an engineer in the capital facilities industries, including energy of all kinds, I’m not really his audience. In fact my two-before-last professional job was at the very same facility where Tim still works, Sellafield. (The last two being fusion and medical nuclear projects and with radiography common throughout wider non-nuclear industries.)
What do we think when we see this nuclear radiation sign?
My agenda is a couple of levels more abstract than Tim’s – he’s focussing on the balance of psychology and scientific fact that have led to decades of failure to invest in the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity – specifically nuclear power. My focus is the received wisdom world-model we hold being inadequate to address the meta-crisis underlying the whole gamut of existential poly-crises (including the energy<>environment balance) requiring our individual and collective decision-making. The Psybernetics of individuals and organisations living in free-democratic societies seen as Complex Adaptive Systems – a deeper, wider, longer story. (Coincidentally, Sellafield was the facility where I first recognised “complexity” as a project systems discipline in its own right, alongside all the other specific technical expertise, another longer story – some more of which arising in the footnotes below.)
Short story here, as I say, is that nuclear power (fission now plus fusion later) is simply the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that needs to read Tim’s book. It’s not just the economic consequences of wasted opportunity. In terms of human and environmental, risks and emissions it really is as benign as renewable sources like wind and solar. We suffer far greater (yet practically harmless) radiation exposure from the environment, medical scans and air-travel say, than from the workings of nuclear power – indeed the infamous linear-non-threshold basis for assessing exposure risk associated with the nuclear industry is given a thorough treatment. In terms of human health and fatalities, fossil fuel emissions were / are clearly far worse, but population-scale evacuations (specifically Chernobyl and Fukujima, say, but also lockdowns, incidentally) have far greater human risks than any original source of potential danger in unplanned accidents and the like. Nuclear in particular suffers a shared paranoia in mis-understanding relative risks, which is why for me, this is an exemplar of the wider psychology-more-than-science nature of our meta-crises and political decision-making generally.
Short-termism is only the half of it. Tim also goes on to cover very long-term small-scale nuclear power applications such as those enabling greater space exploration and population – the final frontier. For us Brits, Sellafield is of course sitting on an enormous resource of both fissile and fertile nuclear fuel. He also covers the many different viable fuel / reactor combinations including the state-of-the-art as well as their history. As an engineer, rather than a lay reader, probably the only criticism I would raise is that early on – he explains that he’s using the simple term “radiation” throughout, without distinguishing between ionising and non-ionising forms – for simplicity for his target audience – but I wonder if his arguments might actually be even clearer in later sections looking at overall exposures, including solar?
But for now, if you or your friends don’t believe that:
Nuclear power really is the safest-and-longest-sustainable source of energy available to humanity and that in terms of human and environmental, risks and emissions it really is as benign as renewables.
I shall be passing my copy along to the local pub book club 🙂
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END
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Post Notes: Relevant to my agenda, not necessarily Tim’s, but so much is connected here.
Above, I used the idea of CAS (Complex Adaptive Systems) AND remembered that Sellafield was where I first saw “Complexity” as a specialist discipline in its own right. One way or another, I’ve always been in “Systems”. My own specialisms have evolved from aeronautics, structures and fluid dynamics, to the materials and the integrity of pressure containment systems, management systems, operating systems and information system models to where I am now: focussed on the epistemology and ontology of the world models we use to make individual and collective decisions. The fact these were always complex (not just complicated) systems had always been a given for me. Systems “thinking” is simply a response to that “complexity”. Systems don’t come more complex than we as networked collections of humans?
I have a number of ongoing dialogues with practitioners in this space, and there’s been a recurring topic about why some talk exclusively about either systems or complexity, and in either case why they insist on limiting their scopes to systems-science(s) or complexity-science(s). For me Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking is pragmatically about both and (obviously) science-informed so far as possible, but it’s more than science.
Dave Snowden is one of those, and despite being one of the “Complexity Science” camp, he is also recently using “CAS” short-hand, confirming S is understood to be Systems (with no explicit mention of science). This was part of a thread where Dave was bemoaning “experts” claiming to understand CAS were yet still talking about “root causes”. He’s right, the point of CAS is to understand causal networks are emergent from the whole, but he also stated that CAS “deprivileged experts” – which is a little worrying not just for the dented egos of experts, but for the general public loss of faith in experts, so it needed clarifying imho:
Me: Telling that you put the expert ‘help’ in scare quotes. Probably the point where I’d differ is in that there are many kinds of expertise in many dimensions – real expertise (like yours) is knowing which kinds are likely to help where.
Me: CAS deprivileges the wrong kind of expertise. (Edit/Add – to be clear I agree with your main point about CAS vs “root-causes”.)
Me: Be interested to know, in your world, what the S in CAS stands for 😉
Dave: I’m ok with systems and expertise in root cause analysis is very valuable, but not when we have a CAS. Myers Briggs which I have also seen advocated as a CAS approach but it’s a crude form of categorisation and a pseudo-science so there is no value in any human context. Context matters
Me: Yes, context matters, and contrary to many information scientists, with CAS, context isn’t just “more content” 🙂
Me: (Aside – seeing my use of “the wrong kind of expertise” there – some of my ex-colleagues may recall my use of “the wrong trousers” metaphor – when we were barking up the wrong tree, looking for the wrong kind of software solutions.)
Dave: [Like]
Lots more corollaries in there: So to recap:
Context? The relevance of context and its being more than simply “more content” has been a long-standing item here. A given. But obviously in a sense, at some level, a physical data storage implementation level (say), context might be seen as just more content, but ironically, that’s why context, including levels of abstraction between contexts, matter. Human context matters. [And one reason this topic was in Dave’s thread is because Alicia Juarrero’s book “Why Context Matters” had also just been shared there too. As I said, not read it (yet), but depressing that the world needs this message? h/t Artun Turan.]
And “a” CAS case? For me all interesting cases are CAS – open interacting human individuals and organisations and their ecosystems – complex beyond any simple (or complicated) closed command and control system(s).
And “crude form[s] of categorisation and [dubious] science [have] no value in any human context”. OH YES! Pretty much the driver of my CAS agenda.
Categorisation? (classifications, namings in context, in taxonomic ontologies) are inescapable and actually essential, despite all their pitfalls and unintended consequences. It’s why we have to have better ones and better understanding than current “received wisdom”.
Honesty about the limitations of science? hopefully goes without saying, but public / political communications about what is or isn’t relevant science are severely compromised by that “received wisdom” I mentioned.
Onwards and upward.
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I’ll come back to those “wrong trousers” one day 🙂
Funnily enough it was hearing Mark Solms talk some years ago that led me to acquire his “Hidden Spring” on the strength of it, with no prior knowledge, even though it was some time before I actually had the bandwidth to read him. Like Iain McGilchrist, his work is now an embedded part of my own research. I’m a fan.
After an exchange on X/Twitter yesterday and today drawing attention to Mark’s work to others debating the limitations of public-knowledge or objective-science when it comes to explanations of consciousness – both its causal power and our subjective experience of it – someone shared a recent BrainLand PodCast conversation with him.
It’s advertised as being “On the neuroscience of sleep and dreaming” (the focus of Mark’s earlier work) but is much wider ranging. As with understanding consciousness itself, so much knowledge of “normal” behaviour and experience is derived from understanding abnormalities and anomalies – the so-called “Lesion Literature” etc (Austin to Zeman including Oliver Sacks – see note below). So too with sleep and dreaming. Their differences in relation to waking and non-dreaming experiences, and anomalies in these, are key to understanding their normal reality.
What I and Ken Barrett (the Podcast presenter) both remarked on is the infectious enthusiasm with which Mark naturally covers the range of topics. And he does it from his own immediate experience in research and in relation to the work of others before and since and the reactions of science-politics around these contentious fields then and now. His knowledge is clearly authentic. The honesty of failed hypotheses and unexpected results as part of the process, no need to take credit for the “accidents” along the way. And, as in any other field, it’s much harder to talk if you have to remember hidden or dubious agendas in your story. If you’re dealing with truth, talking under questioning, changing topics as necessary, is free and easy.
Mark Solms knows his and our, brains and minds. More people should be paying attention to him and his work. What do you think?
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Post Note: Coincidentally also today, I discover Karl Friston – a source in and a collaborator with Solms work – has been added to the participant list at the 2026 HTLGI Conference / Festival at Hay-on-Wye 22-25 May 2026.
Post Note: and just a few days ago, another one I missed – Michael Levin leading a discussion with Solms & Friston and Chris Fields & Thomas Pollak. Not had a chance to view yet. H/T @MacrinePhD (Very early on Mike responds – in passing – to Mark’s point on Markov Blankets’ purpose dynamically limiting internal and external knowledge, rather than there being an optimum proportion – suggesting maybe an “attractor” defining the proportion or pattern of knowledge between the two? Second mention of attractor ideas in a week. Chris – multiple time horizons in the sub-conscious meta-systems – sounds a lot like John C Doyle – also Tim Kueper’s comment in my earlier Solms piece – how much do we need to meta-know about our knowing whilst we are knowing, and how much of either needs to be conscious.
Mark pretty much stating my own summary of his position:
Consciousness “is” affect. It’s feeling all the way down. It’s ‘How do I feel about what I know and what, if anything, should I do about it?’
Lots of good stuff.)
[Post Note: Having mentioned Solms’ “Friston inspired” Free-Energy-Principle and Active-Inference work, another round of “debunking” FEP erupted yesterday on LinkedIn.
Me: When intelligent people start calling each other insane, cultish, zealots, etc or caricaturing each other’s position, I see a lot of talking past each other. The efforts to defend and debunk become equally tedious and noisy.
Me: If people simply want to say FEP, or a particular Pearl or Friston variety of it, isn’t science – of the orthodox, Popperian, falsifiable kind – they’d be right. (And I’ve pointed out myself that there’s been a great deal of hype and overreach associated with FEP and Active Inference. I personally have only a specific narrow interest in it.)
Me: BUT as far back as the “Emperor’s New Markov Blanket” paper, FEP proponents have pointed out that what is being criticised are in fact explicit features. That it has philosophical, even metaphysical departures from orthodox science, by design. Those that can’t see “more than science” will probably have trouble engaging in the dialogue between science and philosophy?
cc: Anatoly Levenchuk
OP: let’s call enron, enron. Me: [Funny] Me: Ironic, because Enron has been one of my example cases 🙂
Anatoly: Rough decomposition:
Mathematics / logic / probability: you can think of this as a formal substrate: measure theory, stochastic processes, variational Bayes, information geometry, etc. Not falsifiable as such; It’s a particular representation scheme for certain non-equilibrium steady-state systems with Markov blankets: “you can rewrite their dynamics as minimization of variational free energy / ELBO for some generative model.” FEP is closer to a formalism / representation, not an extra chunk of physics glued on top.
Process theories built under FEP (predictive coding, active inference, etc.): kind of generative model, form of recognition dynamics, precision update rules, etc. They absolutely can be falsified, compared, outperformed.
Concrete models and parameterizations: specific task, specific architecture, specific parameter priors → standard cognitive / systems modelling. This is where you plug in data, fit, cross-validate, and decide whether this instance of “FEP-style” modelling is any good.
Use my First principles framework https://github.com/ailev/FPF (load as a file in your favorite LLM and ask about episteme’s representation and “principle to work” chain).
“Not falsifiable as such; It’s a particular representation scheme for certain non-equilibrium steady-state systems with Markov blankets: FEP is closer to a formalism / representation, not an extra chunk of physics.”
That “non-equilibrium steady-state” concept is an important one to keep an eye on, later. ]
[Post Note: And, talking of debunking, Oliver Sacks is the latest target. Apparently quite a lot of the anecdotal evidence in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” was invented or prompted by Sacks himself. Just another example of the damage polarisation does. Sure, it means quite a few specifics of his writings are not objectively true, but it doesn’t mean all of “his work is debunked” – far from it.]
Moving into the second week of being without a functioning laptop capable of my research and writing needs. Amazing how dependent you get on switching between sources, channels, tools and apps, that just can’t be done with a one-screen phone and two thumbs. Nothing lost content-wise hopefully – all in the cloud and backed-up – just the loss of working configurations.
Working today on an old slow Windows-10 machine, last configured (not for me) over 5 years ago, so not just slow performance-wise but every task requiring updates, installs and new log-ins and passwords and configurations and reboots and … aarrgghh!!
So this will probably be my only catch-up post – rambling across several topics – until I get repaired or replacement kit. So, in no particular order (will add some internal links):
When dealing with the reality of human complexity, there is a fractal amount of detail at the working level where the diminishing returns on knowing more detail at finer granularity and the wisdom of knowing about which details matter, conversely also risks missing small but nevertheless significant details which might lead to actual chaos beyond the complexity. More wisdom, less detail. But the choice of which detail isn’t one-dimensional. As well as the four familiar dimensions of real space-time at the here-and-now working level, there are the choices of multiple levels and dimensions of abstraction.
The devil may be in the detail but the angels are in the abstractions, as ever.
I’ve been having these thoughts every day the assisted dying bill has been in the news, with both chambers of the house debating details of checks and balances for foreseeable exceptional cases. Obviously, the motivation to find more and more exceptions, let alone how to address them, depends on the general favourability or otherwise of the basic principle, and like many knotty issues it’s easy to be polarised for or against. Anyone against is incentivised to exaggerate the dogs breakfast in order to kill the bill. For me this bill would be two sentences. (1) Anyone facing low quality of remaining life, including their attorneys, should be entitled to ask for help ending that life. (2) The individual decision should be with the ethics committee of the relevant caring professionals.
Challenged, doubtful cases would generate case-law. We can’t substitute actual trust for more detail. Next.
The reason I was prompted to post anything – this rambling post – today, is thanks to this “Global Story” documentary broadcast on the BBC World Service last night.
It’s about Pearlman, the lobbyist who tried to sink the first CoP Climate deal, and the ongoing machinations of achieving consensus at the UN level thereafter. As my general rules of discourse say, there can be no real consensus without good faith – what-aboutery and sea-lioning (and pedantry) are always bad-faith – rational processes as cover for ideological or dubious motives.
And related via “Less is More”- Barry Schwarz IAI.tv talk shared by @AnitaLeirfall – Too much choice makes us less free | Barry Schwartz : “A core value of Western liberal democracy is freedom, and we tend to assume that the more choice we have, the freer we are. But that’s a dangerous illusion.” #freedom #choice #philosophy
Also related @DocStokk on complex real-life being “more than” human rights and freedoms. (PayWalled at The Times). I said ‘Been at the core of my thesis for a couple of decades. Despite “woke”, freedoms as in human rights, have become too focussed at the “I/me/they” individual level, with “we” only at the tribal level instead of the collective humanity level.’
We have collective responsibilities as well as individual freedoms.
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RIP Todd Snider
I’ve never seen such quantity of outpourings of grief at the loss of Todd Snider. Still ten or more new ones daily, a week later on the social and music media channels I follow. As well as the memories of the many fellow-artists he’s worked with, he was the human kind of singer-songwriter you feel you know even if you never met him personally. I’ve mentioned here seeing and listening to him 3 or 4 times previously. As well as being under-60, the circumstances of his unexpected death were also particularly shocking – dying from pneumonia back home in Nashville a week or so after being refused medical treatment(!), and body-cam of being arrested(!), following an assault(*) on tour in Salt Lake City(!) – what the? (* Sounding maybe more like some self-inflicted “accident” – but the reality of the injury and ill-health are plain to see and hear.)
I’ve mentioned the value in the poetry of our singer-songwriters more generally many times before. Roy Harper, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan alongside Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – anything with a folk-blues-rock backbone, and especially the Americana country-folk variant – Neil Young and John Prine, Tom Waites, Bruce Springsteen and Loudon Wainwright and the three guys we came across when we lived close to Nashville (2005-2009); Tommy Womack, Will Kimbrough and Todd Snider. Still have his “East Nashville Skyline” on CD in the car to this day.
We lost one of the good guys.
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Open Adaptive Systems Theory
Just a placeholder for this post from Jim Stewartson, where he presents a Figure-8 diagram that I see as mapping onto the generative / degenerate (r-K-Ω-α) cycles of “The Adaptive Cycle” after Daniel Christian Wahl and the “Panarchy” of Gunderson & Hollings, which themselves map on to the various cycles of life of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the industrial / econo-technology cycles of Kondratiev and Kuhn etc. (For me all of this falls under “Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking“.)
BUT Stewartson presents it thus, with a chaos-theory “attractor”:
A LEMNISCATE (∞) is a mathematical figure-eight curve that represents a system cycling between states.
AN ATTRACTOR is a pattern toward which a complex system naturally settles, even as it moves through turbulence.
(Which obviously also kinda maps on to Dave Snowden’s Cynefin stuff?)
My view of these things is that they’re useful descriptively of how things typically happen, maybe even diagnostically useful of a situation you are investigating, but not themselves predicters or decision-makers of consequences of available actions, causal or emergent. (Hence why the Cynefin stuff is participatory rather than methodological or formulaic. Predictably Unpredictable?)
But if there really is an attractor … ? More reading and thought needed.
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Neil Hannon and The Divine Comedy
I’ve not been doing music reviews for a while – simply adding notes to earlier review pages, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention Neil Hannon amongst the folk-blues-rock-based / Americana poets above. Obviously, because he’s more “chamber pop” but still a fine poet.
We saw him/them at York Barbican last month. Excellent.
(A link there also to an earlier during-Covid gig at the London Barbican. Think we’ve seen them 2 or 3 times since then. If you don’t know his work, these two reviews give you a good sympathetic flavour.)
Long Now / Big History? – Interesting edition of BBC Radio4 “Free Thinking” with Matthew Sweet. Infuriating failure to mention existing Long Now or Big History initiatives in this session on how the history (and futures) of human activity need to be seen in ecological, geological and cosmological time. OUR worldview may inevitably be human-centred, so it does matter to humanity enormously, BUT the world itself isn’t. Sadly, that latter point has given rise to OOO (Object Oriented Ontology), a dreadful name for an important point – that any true ontology is about interactions between objects, and we as subjects are just one example object. But putting “Object” in the name has put the focus on these and LOST the focus on their interactions and the fact that these are dynamic. The real ontological “objects” are in fact “processes” and the things we call objects are emergent consequences. So close, but no cigar! #PartOfTheProblem
A conversation started with David Pierce (another Pirsigian). Started last year with him questioning / trying to understand my agenda-based on my “Zero to Pirsig” paper summarising my intellectual journey (over 20 years ago btw) and reconnecting a few days ago. Started with him retweeting this Poincaré quote “It is through logic that we prove, but through intuition that we discover” – and me responding “Although, generally we also have to accept what cannot be proven with logic (now or possibly ever) and proceed to act on the basis of the intuition.” Long story short – summarised in comments here – he shared his “Ethics of Mathematics” paper – which I don’t fully get yet, but which includes Pirsig quoting Poincaré “He didn’t verify the idea [that had just come to him], he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty. Later he verified the result at his leisure.” to which I added my Pirsig quote – the “later at leisure” is key. As Pirsig also said “science is 20:20 hindsight” whereas 99% of here and now reality is something “more than science” – the current focus “exercising” my agenda. It’s that “Predictably Unpredictable?” again. Ask away David 🙂 (And feeling – “affect” – more fundamental than logic is Solms / McGilchrist. Logic is one useful response to feeling. Exactly the same conversation last night with Steve, and a new “old email” contact with Bob.)
Assembly Theory – A YouTube short shared by Lee Cronin who, with Sara Amari, has coined “Assembly Theory” – specifically a usefully predictable relationship between life and chemical structures. Capturing it here because whenever I hear it I want to ask how does it differ from “Constructor Theory” (after Deutsch & Marletto)? Clearer now – Assembly Theory is very specifically about chemistry, whereas Constructor Theory is a much more generic concept in physics.
The Lysenko Effect – The Politics of Science, by Nils Roll-Hansen, ideology before science AND ethics. New ref for me from @USSRtoEurope. Another one for a British Library visit methinks. “The corruption of Soviet biology resulted not just from Stalin’s direct intervention, but from a deeper “wishful-thinking syndrome” where scientific objectivity was compromised by ideological and economic pressures for immediate, tangible results. He challenges the simplistic view of Lysenko as a mere pseudoscientist backed by a tyrant.”
I suspect when the dust settles on the current BBC crisis things will be worse for the Gender Critical (GC) vs Trans Rights Activism (TRA) agenda.
It’s apparent from my social media timelines that after all the opportunistic left<>right political agendas, the Trump & Palestine, Antisemitism & Islamophobia “bias” agendas – extremist / activist driven “campaigning against” the BBC generally without needing to be any actual conspiracy – that the people still screaming passionately against the BBC are the primary-issue GC people. And rightly so.
[The TRA people on the other hand are mostly keeping their heads down, save for responding to the likes of Graeme “@Glinner” Linehan – who is also on the right side of this, but never missing a campaigning opportunity to troll the guilty and ignorant. Not always the most progressive behaviour, but someone’s gotta do the job of the court-jester I guess. #PartOfTheProblem]
It’s no coincidence that the TRA vs GC debate has become my specific exemplar of an issue where the systemic and epistemic complexity of facts & caring vs rights & risks – a “culture war” since before I read (the reason I read) Alice Dreger back in 2015 – of a general underlying metacrisis in knowledge and understanding.
My only defence of the BBC (on this score) is that the Trans-Activism capture is so much deeper and wider than just the BBC – so many organisations and governments who should know better, are conned by this one. It’s just that we – me included – expected (hoped) the mighty, public, benevolent, Auntie BBC might be the kind of organisation to get this one right, set an example and lead the rest of lesser organisations out of the mess, especially since the legal position has been properly and repeatedly confirmed. A “wicked” problem as they say.
Hopefully, the BBC crisis will be ended by some significant management and (organisational)-reporting changes, whilst maintaining its essentially “public-but-not-state” funding and accountability (Not that the existing management and journalism individuals were particularly incompetent, quite the opposite, just in a bit of a bind once the board conflicts were reported and leaked.) The problem for the GC agenda is that amidst the ideological morass of issues in this crisis, the TRA vs GC agenda will not be the highest priority amongst those jockeying for management influence.
It suffers from a paradox, between the “minority” of actual TQ+ individuals in any population – a minority obviously fully respected in terms of their human rights – and the complexity of the consequences for a “majority” of Women and LGB in the same populations. The simplicity of minority rights wins out (Dysmemically) over the true complexity of responsibilities in relation to the majority position. A classic “Tyranny of the Minority”.
Sadly, I’m predicting the BBC changes in response to the current “polycrisis” will not resolve this important “metacrisis”. No one issue can be the highest priority, when the priority is meta. The GC position will remain or be further reinforced by the TRA tyranny.
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PS – Sueing the BBC? – the orange fuckwit can go fuck himself.
All roads here lead to better democracy – better “self-governance”, (the original point of Cybernetics itself, not to mention the ancient Greeks) – even though I’m keeping my personal focus at its higher levels of abstraction, to the point of being metaphysical. “Self” governance is many layered from the individual (where actions actually happen) to the cosmos via all collective levels of “state” communities where ideas can achieve shared understanding. Local, national and supranational with any number of “federated” layers of representation within and across each. Democracy – messy – by any other name.
Well, the New York mayoral election came down to:
“Islamophobia vs Antisemitism” and “Tax the Rich”
The two recurring topics where the philosophical rubber meets the road of shared experience. And two topics where public debate is ideologically polarised name-calling.
Religious rights, responsibilities and behaviours in a free secular democratic society, and individual and corporate “globalised” interests big enough to cut across “states”. These are the two issues where shared understanding is central to addressing our existential polycrises and both needing that shared understanding agreed beyond any one “constituency”.
States limiting expressions of private thought and belief in (our) secular public.
States limiting relative commercial power beyond (our) state borders.
Can’t see us sorting our polycrises without getting a grip on these two. All real actions are individual – bottom-up – but we need collective agreement on these overarching – top-down – issues. Discuss.
I will continue to do so 🙂 #SystemsThinking #MoreThanScience
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Post Note:
A respected voice on polarised name-calling:
A helpful post on polarization: Democratic voters shifted left in the 2010s, Republicans did not shift right. But in Congress it's the opposite. So each side can say the other one became extremists https://t.co/nuuNwGToO7
My interest was piqued by the fact that a lot of recent scientific history of left-right (human) brain hemispheric behaviour started with practical experimentation on caged birds, and Iain McGilchrist not only uses those sources in his 21st century work, but he uses them as his example captured in the animation of his hypothesis. So was curious which “old philosopher” had made that reference?
Emily had forgotten where she’d taken it from, and had shared it simply as an amusing index entry. So I asked Chat-GPT:
Can you find an older philosophy book whose index includes: “Birds, effect of removing cerebral hemispheres of, 108;”
To which the answer was “George Henry Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind (2nd series of Problems of Life and Mind, originally 1877; the U.S. Houghton, Mifflin edition you often see is dated 1891)”
Bingo. So I sourced the only Kindle edition (only £0.49p) and proceeded to read, (very good) more on which later. Curiously, that edition didn’t include the alphabetical index?
With Chat-GPT’s help we sourced a Project Gutenberg plain-text copy – no index – presumably the same source of the Kindle edition. Also confirms it’s the 1891 Houghton and Mifflin second edition.
Also sourced a couple of on-line scanned-PDF copies:
Chat-GPT couldn’t actually find a copy with the index, which begs the question how it made the original find?
Anyway – driven by curiosity … cut a long story short …
There are lots of modern “classic book” hard-copy publications out there, but I must suspect they all have the same fault from the same scanned and text transcription sources. “Used” copies of original 1877 and 1891 publications are in the £500 bracket!
So add to British Library reading list for my next visit. (And don’t forget to scan the index!)
And – George Henry Lewes was the life partner of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). They were a London “Salon” in their 19th century time before the Bloomsbury Set in the 20th. Comte & Feuerbach → Lewes & Eliot → Leslie Stephen → Virginia Woolf / Bloomsbury. A chain of humane rationalists, each pushing the boundaries of what “science” could mean in human terms. (I must wonder where William Godwin, Shelley and the British and German (Goethe(*) et al – see Andrea Wulf) “Romantics” fit the evolution of thought.)
And – actually reading the indexless Lewes, without using the word “Entropy“, 1877 Lewes talks a lot about life/body and brain/mind overcoming the “friction” losses of the physical world. Roughly – per Chat-GPT – Carnot (ideal engine) → Clausius (entropy) → Kelvin (dissipation) → Lewes (life & mind) → Spencer (cosmic evolution) → Huxley (ethics of entropy) → Poincaré / Boltzmann (statistical salvation). All that AND Goethe AND the hemispheric hypothesis!
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.
