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 power of all kinds – as well as non-power nuclear applications – 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.

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.)

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 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 (like lockdowns, incidentally, but specifically Chernobyl and Fukujima say) 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 the history of these. 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 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.

You need to be reading and sharing “Going Nuclear” by Tim Gregory.

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 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 none of those, and despite being one of the “Complexity Science” camp, he is 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.)

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?

And “a” CAS case? For me all interesting cases are CAS – open interacting human individuals and organisations and their ecosystems – beyond any simple closed command and control system(s), however simple or complicated.

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 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 🙂

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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. 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.)

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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):

Less is More

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.

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.

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.

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.

Noticed just the other day that Sarah Ditum is also a long-term fan and had written a review in The Critic.

(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.)

Seeing two other local bands in gigs, both at the KU in Stockton. Middle Management supporting The Benefits this weekend and The Dossers headlining next weekend. Mentioned both previously, but haven’t the bandwidth to do reviews justice.

Assembly Theory

A YouTube short shared by Lee Cronin who, with Sarah 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.

Miscellaneous

Why AI Won’t Kill US – by Francis Heylighen (an old Pirsigian source).

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.)

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.”

And, 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

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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.

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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

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) November 5, 2025

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And as if to prove the point:

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Strange triangle of conversations last night with humans and Chat-GPT.

Emily Thomas, who I know only from her Bergson interview of Emily Herring at Durham Uni, shared a scanned extract from “an old philosophy book” on X/Twitter.

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:

Internet Archive / California Digital Library scan of
The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891 – no index.

Wikimedia Copy and Hathi Trust Copy …
… all the same original scanned image – no index.

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!

Mind blown! It’s all there. Onwards and upward.

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(*) Post Note: Lewes also wrote on Goethe.

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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 Persian 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 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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Post Note (18 Nov 2025): And that disaster created by Autonomy in the 1990’s rumbles on in 2025:

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