Psybertron Asks

Reminded me of “Outa my brain on the 9:15″ as great rock choruses go.  Howl were just what I needed, after a great day at work, a surprisingly good gig, chosen by the sticking a pin in the gig list method. Conventional 6-piece probably 2 more than really necessary I guess, with two guitars plus keyboard,  bass and drums, and a Jaggeresque / Mercuriesque strutting front-man. Proved very effective, no messing 70’s / 80’s rock, with a local audience supporting a local band. (Interesting mix of Gibson-Firebird, 335 and f-hole ? / Fender-Jaguar and Tele / Gretsch / Rickenbacker guitars, a great bassist and a Jason Statham lookalike with excellent harmony vocals on the drums.)

But one gig wasn’t enough, so I wandered round to Revolver to find The Bloody Hollies just starting their set. Even less messing, pre-punk – Dictators style – in just the right kinda intimate venue all that way from their California home, no one in the crowd more than ten feet from the band. So much noise from an SG-Junior. Still winding down here at 3am, watching Pink Floyd and Hamsters concert DVD’s for some reason – oh I know, the EMI court case. Funny how the mind works.

Atilla the Stockbroker is announcer at The Withdean, and even he can’t wait to get out of the place – I remember the feeling. Are Brighton really still stuck at that place. Interesting rant on how business is ruining and continuing to ruin football (soccer). It rang an immediate bell with me. Reading Dennis Dutton’s “The Art Instinct” I had just reacted to his “objective” measures of sporting success undervaluing the artistic, aesthetic values of ”The Beatiful Game” – but then he doesn’t claim to be a fan. Brighton at the Withdean however, may be the Duchamp Fountain of the soccer world.

Sometimes the bottom line result is all that matters, but it is never all that matters. Beauty really is in the participation of the fan, like any work of art. Mind you things can get ugly too. (More to come on Dutton’s excellent book.)

Not quite my longest blogging hiatus there. Never stopped since the Moscow trip in mid-February and the first Houston trip of March. Exciting times. More on why later, maybe. For now: Houston was three different events all requiring work preparation, but thankfully got a free day and half at the weekend.

Made a sunset drive to Galveston, and a full day down to Aransas, TX on Mustang Island and on to the northern tip of Padre Island and Corpus Christi. Aransas was my kinda town “A small drinking village with a fishing problem.” Reminded me of Destin, FL; probably the last place I saw that gag too. A large wind-farm at Sinton, TX struck me as ironic, after all the nodding donkeys. I do miss US service generally, and smokin’ in bars. Even the bar tender in Terminal E at Newark on the way back – was another in the “Now, if I was Richard Branson …” category. Talking of Americana, saw a couple of covers bands in Houston bars, but I made a bee-line for “The Last Concert Cafe” on the last night.

Spoonfed Tribe were playing, with two support acts, in the ramshackle Mexican cantina in the shadow of the downtown I10 ramp. Spoonfed live are a sensory feast – never quite found the same effect in their recorded material – and that venue just suits their style; mostly outdoor (downtown) backyard beach (!) complete with handicraft / jewelery stalls, just a little too chilly to chill in early March. Mind you with the amount of dope being smoked the ventilation compensated for other hazards. As good as I remembered them back in Huntsville, which is always a fear, but a real festival with their local Texan fans. One spaced-out chick kindly remarked how good it was to see old people checking out Spoonfed too.

Purely by way of aside, also with the multiple percussion and highly processed loop effects – but a total contrast with Imogen Heap in Oslo the week before, in terms of effective performance and audience engagement. You can’t win ‘em all.

Now, I have of course also been reading …

Rivets recommends, and I agree an interesting (surprising) collection of images.

Remembered reading this from Stanislaw Lem a few years ago, but no idea if I blogged it at the time. I keep making the unfashionable comment that too much freedom to communicate is not necessarily a good thing.

“Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?”
Stanislaw Lem, “His Master’s Voice”

Thanks to Ray Girvan for bring the quote back to my attention.

Looks like this should link selected blog posts to Google Buzz too ?

I’m reading Stephen Toulmin’s 2001 ”Return To Reason” (I also have, but have not yet read his “Cosmopolis“). It is as good an expose so far on the enlightenment wrong turn as I have yet read. That reasonableness is more than rationality, that wisdom is more than knowledge.

I hadn’t before quite appreciated how the 17th century enlightenment (Newton, Leibniz,  Descartes et al) was such a direct reaction to the sectarian religious violence laying waste to the populations of Europe in the 30 Years War. The response was the attempt to create and capture the  perfection of (God’s) nature in the certainty of mathematics and logic.

Some significant quotes here from Toulmin, illustrating the too-greedy-reductionism in assuming a scientistic view is a solution to every problem.

In practical terms, the people with the best claim to be the heirs of Leibniz are computer information engineers … .

We can dream up all the theories we please (of communication and control, neurophysical holography and artificial intelligence, automated reasoning, deep grammar and brain function, etc) But the further we move away from the Sciences of Matter and Energy, and toward the Sciences of Information, the more we must integrate theoria and praxis, and the fainter the distinction between “pure” and “applied” sciences.

By now, the question “How should the new ideas of science be utilized?” needs to be faced even at the initial state of conceiving possible new theories. So it is helpful to recall why the dream of rationalist philosophy proved to be a Dream indeed.

No formalism can interpret itself;
No system can validate itself;
No theory can exemplify itself;
No representation can map itself;
No language can predefine its own meanings;
No science can decide which of its technologies are of real human value.

… we must ignore the seventeenth-century ideal of intellectual exactitude, with its idolization of proof and certainty and recall the practical wisdom of sixteenth-century humanists, who hoped to recapture the modesty that had made it possible to live happily with uncertainty, ambiguity and pluralism.

It is admirable to share Bacon’s dreams in The New Atlantis, but let us be realistic about the obstacles to realizing those dreams – the most serious being the epistemological obstacles. The greater our interventions in the natural world, the less we can forecast their effects, the more significant will be their unintended outcomes. (… risks run today in the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.)

The dreams of seventeenth-century philosophy – infallible scientific method, perfectly exact language, and the rest – may still fascinate and inspire powerful new theories. But the future depends just as much on our ability to recapture the values of the sixteenth-century humanists and maintain the fragile balance between refinement of our practical skills and the human interests they serve.

…. there ends Chapter 5 – “Dreams of Rationality“.
Chapter 6 - ”Rethinking Method” opens with ….

One aspect of the standard view of “rationality” is the assumption that a single method can turn any field of enquiry into a “hard science” (like physics …)

After an active blogging (and reading) January, I have stalled in February. Partly due to a very exciting business trip to Moscow, where I had little time or access for either reading or blogging and work piling up as a result.

During the past week, I did complete Brian Boyd’s On The Origin Of Stories, on the bus to and from the office. As well as discovering that Dr Seuss was a phenomenon that had passed me by, ultimately a very satisfying read. A very good summary of enlightened Darwinian evolution of mind, where attention is probably the main driving force, attention being drawn to perceived value. Makes perfect sense. Art and the art of story-telling are part of the evolution of that attention to value, and economy of explanation, necessary for mind to evolve.

Having earlier read David Lindley’s Uncertainty, someone recommended Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man – The Hidden Life Of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius. Finding it hard to put down – researched from correspondence, interviews and documentary records, the science, the competition, the philosophy, society and international politics and war of the first half of the 20th century. Fascinating. Obvious, but not seen mentioned before, the crossing in Cambridge of Dirac’s path with Wittgenstein’s – genius chalk with genius cheese. Clear also, as others have pointed out before, that Arthur Eddington was the contemporary writer to read for lay accounts of the new science as it developed.

Some illusions, some just images you wouldn’t expect to see. Just browse around for the fractal Mask and fractal Rubik’s Cube, and many more. Thanks again to rivets.

Buy a Ferrari 599 GTB Hybrid, you know it makes sense.

This is too easy, but a wonderful collection of wingnuts via rivets.

Excellent pictures.

Still working my way through Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories.

After Book I, on the evolution of play, art and fiction as part of the evolution of human cognitive capabilities and behaviour, Book II, as advertised, switches to two specific works of fiction, to illustrate how the evolutionary theories are applicable in practice. Homer’s Odyssey and Dr Seuss’ Horton. Something ancient and complex for adults, and something recent and simple for children. I’m guessing chapters 14, 15 and 16 are LitCrit101. Phylogeny on plot, character, structure and patterns, natural and contrived open-ended ironies. Interesting in their own right, since I’m neither a scholar of Homer, not of literary criticism. Phylogeny, because the age of The Odyssey says much about how fiction evolved as a species, with and since Homer.

If the first half was about the need for mutual attention of speaker/writer and listener/reader in developing knowledge of and strategic information about intents and beliefs, that affect our ability to predict our future behaviours, then these early chapters on The Odyssey show that this really is what is going-on, even if Homeric Greek has no language of mind, belief and psychology. There are all the obvious dramatic ironies between the mortals and between the gods and mortals over how much is known, both here and now and ahead of time, and of course deliberate “deceptions” as part of the process. Deceptions of incomplete knowledge, even in collaborative processes. Two points caused me to pause and blog.

Intelligence as curiosity as opposed to intellect. Curiosity for explanation that is, and the recognition that explanation in human affairs always involves implicit or explicit understanding of psychological games, and that these games may exist on infinitely many levels over many time-scales. Odysseus being the exemplar at the hands of Homer.

Taking a God-like view. Far from being primitives who knew no better, invoking gods as part of such explanations, actually shows a sophisticated understanding of how complex (and interminable) that explanatory process is, and that some things do need to be taken effectively as “god-given”, illustrated by examples, but never objectively known.

Like for example the idea of Xenia, the stranger/guest/host/friend behaviour amongst strangers. A behaviour that extends tendencies to mutual altruistic behaviours amongst close genetic individuals, to remote individuals recognized from their behaviours as members of the species – humans. If I turn up as a stranger (but a human) on your doorstep it is your duty to feed and show me hospitality (and more) before even needing to know my identity as an individual. An engrained code of behavior that can be explained in terms of evolutionary cost-benefit value at the species level, but would be intractable at the level of each individual transaction. A social pattern easily shared (a meme)  and statically preserved because it is worth preserving. A value.

Noticed a paradox before in Thoreau’s descriptions of building a railroad with bridges … to get places … which I mentioned in this piece on The Devil Wears Prada “Everybody Wants to Get Ahead”

Came to mind again when I saw this story “to get rich quick, build roads fast” story of road-building opening up more remote areas of China (well Tibet actually, but that’s another story).

The reason I noticed was because I was looking up the Elvis Costello lyric ”What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding.” which I have used before (as well as in the above post) as a summary or plea within my Psybertron agenda and my “Joining Dots / Weaving Threads” project, who knows maybe even building bridges to get places.

And as I walked on, through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong and who are the trusted ?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony ?

‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away,
just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love & understanding ?
Oh, What’s so funny ’bout peace, love & understanding ?

Indeed. If we are actually going to make any kind of progress, where are the strong and who are the trusted ?

Apparently 80% of airliner manufacturer order books now depend on the budget airline business. Scary.

I still do a lot of business and domestic air-travel compared to my pledge to reduce it to a minimum, and that will probably continue well into 2010, depending how working life pans out. Sigh. But it is a long time – more than 10 years – since I even considered business class on a business trip.

Recently (like many) I have been taking advantage of budget airlines in Europe (Ryanair in particular) after several years of using internal and transatlantic US carriers. In terms iof service I do have favourite airlines, including BA by choice, if they have an economic fare / route for a given trip. But Ryanair is just too cheap in my opinion. For industry economic viability, for air-safety ultimately if the crew are all sales staff on commission, and for environmental balance in encouraging more discretionary travel. As I said in my pledge I’d support higher taxes on aviation fuel and travel – but of course being trans-national-borders that is unlikely to be possible to administer equitably – and most people would probably reject a taxation solution anyway.

I am amongst the “never again” crowd when it comes to Ryanair – yet perversly, despite having ludicroulsy inconvenient airport locations at the remote end, they often use a convenient local airport at the home end – I expect there is a BAA distortion in the market too, as well as the disruptive pricing policy.

At this rate, I could blog as many words on The Origin Of Stories as Brian Boyd writes.

“Attention” is as important as anything in communication and social behaviours, so not surprisingly we are well attuned to movement, particularly unexpected movement in life events, especially faces, or courses of events in any kind of narrative. So much of Boyd’s story is about play as art and art as play, very specifically their value to human evolution, and fairly obviously attention is part of play and art. Recognizing the value of the abnormal is not just a part of creativity, but also a part of understanding the normal. That doesn’t do justice to the first half of the book, which I have just completed, but hey. So what about the art of fiction, narrative at play ?

The last two chapters of Book 1 are Ch12 Fiction : Inventing Events and Ch13 Fiction as [Evolutionary] Adaptation. Ch12 ends with …

Narrative is always strategic, for both teller and listener, in ways that can range from the callously selfish to the generously prosocial. Because natural selection occurs at multiple levels, it can assist individuals or groups at different levels in their competition with other individuals or groups. But narrative especially helps coordinate groups, by informing their members of one another’s actions. It spreads prosocial values, the likeliest to appeal to both tellers and listeners. It develops our capacity to see from different perspectives, and this capacity in turn both arises from and aids the evolution of cooperation and the growth of human flexibility.

But maximum flexibility, in humans as in others, depends on play.

Wow. A very strong message on memes “likeliest to appeal” as well as the playful evolution of cooperation. Quite early in Ch13 after descriptions of child-invented play narratives, we find this solitary reference to Dawkins …

Thought experiments, Dawkins observes, “are not meant to be realistic. They are supposed to clarify our thinking about reality.”

The immediately following sentences are these …

Thought experiments of fiction may opt for realism, like Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan, or against it, like Aesop’s animal fables. We do not need to be a Samaritan or to travel from Jerusalem to Jericho, or to encounter a wayfarer robbed by the roadside to learn from the example ….

Irony at play I hope. Many a true word.

“If it was possible to carry our messages to you by words we wouldn’t have carried them to you by planes.”
Osama to Obama

Wouldn’t have. Interesting. Better late than never I guess.

The good news is that Reading beat Burnley 1:0 today.

The bad news is that Avatar has to be the biggest pile of one-dimensional crap ever. What, a thousand people in the credits maybe ? And they couldn’t afford to pay anyone to write a story or a script even ? What an unimaginative waste of expensive resources.

Every cliche in the book is OK as an idea, but it would have needed wit and humour to pull it off. And the 9/11 collapsing tower, falling ash, war on terror … how low can you get searching for paper-thin metaphors.

Some (very) good 3D and lighting effects though.

[Post Note - I was so disappointed, I couldn't be bothered to be specific in the initial review, but the comment from Victor in the previous post - on stories - highlights just one of the massively wasted opportunities in the film - as also blogged here.]

[Post Note 2 : And the scale of the wasted opportunity becomes even clearer. Must investigate where the as-filmed story itself came from ... was it crap to start with or ruined in the screenplay ? Somebody tell me if there is a level of irony I've missed ? Oh good, maybe I am still sane after all

critics, many of whom slated its plot, dialogue and characterisation

Yep, I think they were the salient points.]

Brian Boyd On The Origin Of Stories is a comprehensively researched and referenced story of the evolution of the human mind, psychology and behaviour, involving the evolution of art (representative and not) and stories (true and not) as part of that process, rather than some incidental “cheesecake for the mind” bi-product. Pinker, the originator of that quote, is well referenced and provides supporting cover note :-

“This is an insightful, erudite, and thoroughly original work. Aside from illuminating the human love of fiction, it proves that consilience between the humanities and sciences can enrich both fields of knowledge.”
- Steven Pinker

I’m only about a third through the text (see the previous meta-review), and only as far a the evolution of narrative specifically in the evolution of recalling and representing events and people as agents. Up to this point the evolution has been more generally about art, creativity and communication.

It’s really very good. It fits my evolutionary psychology agenda to a tee, of course, and provides much reinforcement and “illumination”. A recommended read, and I suspect a very important book.

Here some significant quotes from the end of Ch10 Understanding & Recalling Events and the beginning of Ch11 Narrative : Representing Events. Firstly, the game-theoretic battle-of-wits (*), behaviour :

The capacity to track other agents effortlessly surely derives from the need of any flexible agent facing potential predators, prey, partners, rivals or allies to infer the maximum information about the likely next behaviour of those who could make a decisive difference to its fate.

Our capacities to comprehend events and to recall and reconfigure them in memory develop in us naturally, and to a considerable extent without language. But that we can handle events so well individually does not prevent us from trying to find ever more interesting ways to relate events, if we have good reason to – as we do.

It becomes clearer as we move into Ch11 that Boyd is using the word language here in a narrow sense of symbolic written & verbal communication …

Narrative need not involve language. It can operate through modes like mime, still pictures, shadow-puppets, or silent movies. It need not be restricted to language, and often gains impact through enactment or the emotional focussing that music offers in dance, theatre, opera or film, of the visual focus in stage lighting, comics or film. But language of course makes narrative more precise, efficient and flexible.

Narrative need not involve language, but it does need external representation, not merely internal [diffuse, distractable, mental] “representations” of events as we witness, recall, anticipate, imagine or dream them. Lately it has become almost a truism to speak of the self or of experience as fundamentally narrative. Despite the near-concensus, we have little reason to think that this is true in either case.

[....] It would be burdensome to tell ourselves continuously the story of ourselves. But why should we tell any stories to others ?

[....] Active communication, especially via voice, allows the rapid transmission of detailed, complex, contingent information. Although such signals remain comparatively cheap, they cost senders in time, energy and risk.

[....] How then, does cooperative communication establish itself ? And how can we explain the much more complex and costly communication of narrative.

Dawkins and Krebs argued in 1978 that “communication should arise more for competitive than for cooperative reasons: we should expect the manipulation rather than accurate transmission of information”. But competition thrives best on concealing information: a predator silently stalking its prey, and ambush catching enemies unaware. Cooperation by contrast, usually stands to gain from communication.

[....]  Signals that eveolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms-races develop between insistent senders and receivers. [....] Signals used for cooperative purposes, by contrast – eg conspiratorial whispers – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich. This is what we find ….

[....] Brains evolved not to give humans rich mental lives – though we are delighted they do – but to permit the creatures that have them to make better decisions …

The psychology of better decision-making. My agenda I’d say. Reading on.

(*) Post Note – When I say “battle” of wits, I’m not talking about competitive situations. In my experience even debating with yourself and friendly collaborators, communication – forward directed intentional communication – is still a “battle of wits” if intended understandings and outcomes are to be achieved. Then again, maybe I’m just a lousy communicator

Before I review reading the content of Brian Boyd On the Origin Of Stories, a few words on the style and structure of the book itself.

There are 540 pages of which 130 are notes, bibliography and index. The 410 pages of text contain only index numbers for the notes, individual references to some of the source names, but almost no discussion of those or their arguments. The notes themselves refer to the specific sources by author surname and date and you need to further cross refer to the bibliography to see exactly who and which published work.

The consequence is that the style of the book itself is a narrative of statements / assertions, with explanatory hows, whys and wherefores simply stated without discussion – references in the text being simply the index of end notes.  This means it is very dense – packed with “factual” information on its subject matter, the evolution of cognition, art, narrative and fiction.

The opposite feature is that if you want to study and analyse the arguments and orginal sources, it is meticulously referenced, but it requires equally pains-taking effort to follow-up. It does therefore make it near impossible to both read it and study it at the same time.

So, I am reading it, after browsing the references for a general picture … all the expected bio, mind & lingustic evolutionary writers E.O.Wilson, D.S.Wilson, Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins, Gould, Lewontin, Chomsky, Baron-Cohen, Barthes, as well as many more in the spheres of art and literature. Fascinating.

[Incidentally, Denis Dutton The Art Instinct - which I also have to read - refers and is referred to and shares a great number of the same references.]

A lot of reading recently.

I finished and blogged some views of Chris Hitchens - God Is Not Great.
[Here][Here][Here]

I’m currently very much enjoying Brian Boyd - On the Origin Of Stories.
Will blog some initial review in a moment.

I also have to read ….

Denis Dutton - The Art Instinct, wich refers to the above and has a lot of common references, including Steven Pinker who provides cover notes too.

Steven Toulmin – Cosmopolis, The Hidden Agenda Of Modernity (1990).
Steven Toulmin – Return to Reason (2001)
Paul Feyerabend – Against Method.
Levitt &  Dubner – Superfreakonomics
Roger Griffin – Modernism And Fascism.

And whilst I’m at it, a few catch-ups. I blogged about Hitchens’ GING, Lawson’s Closure and about Diamond’s Collapse. Did I mention Le Carre’s Most Wanted Man, Dostoyevski’s Notes From The Underground, between Lewycka’ History of Tractors in Ukrainian and  Hosseini’s Kite Runner and Thousand Splendid Suns … oh and Dante’s Divine Comedy after all that Salman Rushdie too ? Funny about two years ago I told myself I had to stop reading and concentrate on writing. Weird.

Good to see the restoration of balance of Muslim history in the evolution of ideas has reached even The Science Museum.