Psybertron Asks

I’m trying to draft a couple of “considered” posts for here and for MoQ-Discuss. I’ve just about finished Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. It’s so good that perversely I’ve made almost no annotations, because it’s all note-worthy and in need of re-reading in future. I’ve blogged a number of points already, but there are some important [...]

Just made a connection … between the comment about Gould’s attitude to evolution and his theistic beliefs, according to Dennet, and the point Deutsch made about mainstream science that doesn’t become common-sense world view even of practicioners using that science.

Saw some interesting stuff at The Amplifier Bar 383 Murray Street last night (non-obvious entrance round the back alley beside No.381, explains why I once before failed to find this venue.) Dropping in Orange – guitar and organ, with drippy but thunderously loud bassist / vocalist – opened with Hawkwind’s Quark, Strangeness and Charm, which [...]

Knowledge Jolt With Jack Vinson, has a round up of Knowledge Managment Blogs and an aggregator of 200+ apparently.

Recently I commented on Owen Barfield labouring his point about the mental illusion of seeing an intangible rainbow, when his real point was that “seeing” a tree was no less a mental trick of “representation”, as is even the additional mental picture we create from the other sensory perceptions available to us for the apparently [...]

That peer-to-peer download users are also the biggest legal music consumers. [via BBC] The technology is merely an enabler. When the price is right, use it.

Saw Queens of the Stone Age at Metro City Perth last night, supported by UK (Sunderland) band Futureheads. Good to experience an excellent gig at Metro City, too. When I first came out to Perth, I had already pre-purchased tickets for George Thorogood and Joe Satriani at Metro City, but it was shut down for [...]

Went “Whale-Watching” today with Tom and Robbie, and we saw a dozen or so, only minutes out into Flinders Bay, sailing from Augusta, just round the corner of Western Australia into the Southern Ocean. Dozens of dolphins too of at least two varieties, feeding in the river-mouth and out in the bay. Although Southern Right [...]

Sad given how good Dennett’s writing is, that he has to devote almost a third of “Darwin’s Dangreous Idea” to refuting doubts about Darwinism created by Gould and Lewontin’s original paper and Gould’s high profile public views on evolutionary mechanisms. Burgess Shale – the boy who cried wolf, etc. Gould was someone I read ten [...]

Really just a holding post for two presentations (with some overlapping content) from Brian Josephson thanks to a cross-link on the man himself. A hero of mine, sceptical of sceptics’ motives and abuse of power for rejecting scientific claims. Cold Fusion, The Memory of Water and more examples killed by the cultural spread of scepticism [...]

Seems the brief run of regular blues acts at Perth’s “Blue to the Bone” is coming to an end. Thursday has already become a karaoke night, Friday was already rockabilly, Saturday still has the excellent John Meyer (and Lindsay Wells) I believe, but last night was the last of Rick Steele’s “industry” guest nights. Rather [...]

After skimming Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, I suggested earlier that I already knew it from secondary sources. Well actually no, there is lots of new material for me with fresh links to my threads. Something Rather Than Nothing – as a pan-Darwinist I never had any trouble with the evolutionary explanation of life the universe [...]

Just spent an hour or so browsing many of my recently ignored favourite blogs, and leaving a few comments in my wake. Matt, Seb, Piers, Euan, Suw, Frizzy, to name a few. I liked the “wavelets of history” at David Gurteen’s blog and this story about Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford. Reminded me very [...]

Made a start on my pile of Dennett original reading. Having realised recently I’m practically a pan-Darwinist, I thought I’d start on “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. Skimmed it first, and realised I feel I practically know it already; so many of his chapters and witty headings having been quoted by others since 1995. The respect Dennett [...]

Completed Hofstadter and Dennett’s “The Mind’s I” on the way back to Perth, Oz. Although it peters out a bit, with Hofstadter’s “Conversation with Einstein’s Brain” there are still more gems in there. After Lem’s excellent “Non Serviam” mentioned previously, we still have Ray Smullyan’s “Is God a Taoist”, John Searle’s “Minds, Brains and Programs”, [...]

Used this quote recently (at the MoQ Conference), and admitted I couldn’t recall it’s source. No, not Shakespeare dummy – it’s a deliberate play on the Tempest quote. Best documented web source is Thomas Disch, who used this as the title of his book about how Sci-Fi “conquered” the world. I first saw the phrase [...]

Hoping to use the 430kph (270mph) MagLev “train” from Shanghai to PuDong Airport tomorrow. A somewhat eastern philosophical engineering review here about “being able to run with the wind”. At 50RMB it’s one eighth the taxi-fare and at 8 minutes it’s under one fifth the travel time too. Scary to think of travelling at that [...]

The PuDong Shangri La hotel here in Shanghai affords an amazing view of the HuangPu river. The traffic on it indicates the mind-boggling scale of local economic activity. The myriads of barges and lighters incessantly ploughing up and down, neck and neck, six “lanes” overtaking in each direction, with their loads of coal, aggregates and [...]

Still reading Hofstadter and Dennett’s “The Mind’s I” collection when I get free moments. There are several extracts from the work of Stanislaw Lem, of whom I’d never previously heard, which actually pre-date Hofstadter’s own “Godel, Escher, Bach”. One “book”, “Non Serviam” taken from Lem’s 1971 work “A Perfect Vacuum – Perfect Reviews of Non-Existent [...]

I was struck at the MoQ conference by the number of passionate musical connections, (not to mention the Liverpool location). There’s a running musical thread in my blog, which I’d never really connected to the world-model mainstream, except I guess through Hofstadter’s Bach and Minsky’s musical appreciation, but Ant kept this one quiet. Some interesting [...]

Two posts [initial reaction] & [on reflection] from Hydragenic via [qB @ Frizzy]. Without the BBC here in China, it has seemed eerily distant since last Thursday. Can hardly believe I’m saying it, but it makes you proud to be British. [Ewan (B) forwarded this link too ... We'reNotAfraid.] [And what's more, I got this [...]