Psybertron Asks

Or, brain surgey with Bob Hoskins. Wow, it’s another three week gap no blog. So much planned to do over the seasonal break, but little of that accomplished, other than reading of course. Read the whole of Ian McEwan’s “Saturday“, pretty much during that one day following the sunrise on Saddam’s execution. Spookier though is [...]

I posted about Wayne Booth previously , crossing paths with Pirsig and McKeon in Rhetoric at Chicago, and then again when he died last year. Came across this excellent Wayne Booth article today, via Wilf Berendsen on Friends of Wisdom. Interestingly Wilf was picking up on the cross-discipline university approach mentioned by John Spencer at Liverpool Uni [...]

A fantastic article from New Scientist, via Sam (via “Peak Oil” action network). It is exactly my thinking …. not just in not ignoring non-human socio-cultural-intelligence … Sam brought it to my attention, because in MoQ circles, I am always warning that socio-cultural-intelligence (layers 3 and 4 of the MoQ) are not necessarily restricted to humans, [...]

Had an exchange with David Morey today on MoQ.Discuss, on non-simple mechanisms contributing to evolution, prompted by the recent “In Our Time” edition on “altruism” involving Dawkins and Dupre, and we got into Systems Engineering approaches to evolution … By coincidence, stumbled across this interesting post from Matt Wyndham (who looks like he hasn’t posted [...]

A post by Sam from 2005, summarising the MoQ. Just capturing this link so I don’t lose it. Worth building on methinks. [Totally irrelevant, but the 1991 film "Riff Raff" playing on the Sundance channel in the background here in Alabama, and it's got subtitles for the Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian and Cockney accents. Brilliant.]

Great little piece of Bad Language from Matthew Stibbe (via Matt Bartlett) with some useful and witty hints on writing to a deadline. I need all the help I can get. Actualy Matt (Bartlett) has a great collection of links for November. Spookily, Anecdote have a time management piece this month too. Draw’s on David Allen’s [...]

Instead of reading David Morey’s novel (which I had with me on our trip to the Gulf Coast over the Thanksgiving holiday) I finished Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and got about half-way through “Philosophical Investigations”. The latter so far just seems to continue casting doubt on the science (logic) of natural language, and of course logic [...]

Another interview promoting the re-publishing of Lila, pointed out by Ant and linked by Horse. Actually a very sympathetic interview of the man by Tim Adams who recalls reading Zen and the Art at the age of 14. Lots of anecdotal recalls of biographical (and very personal) events behind the two books, including some worth [...]

Brian Eno speaking on BBC Radio 3, at Hope University, Liverpool Future City of Culture “Free Thinking” series. Nothing new in terms of this blog, but lots of good material, worth a listen. Darwinian optimism. “Scenius” the genius of “the scene” – everyone is smarter than anyone. Emergence from simplicity. Art and politcs. Power of [...]

Can’t believe I let the Stern Report and the press response go by without comment. I guess I had the BBC links in my side-bar at all times, so I was following events there. This link at Know Your Place (via Sam) is as good an entry point as any. The interesting thing, given agreement that this [...]

Excellent edition of The Edge NEwsletter, includes not only Dan Dennett, recovering from an acute heart condition, and Evolutionary Morality from Nick Wade of the NYT, but also last weekend’s Observer piece by their religious correspondent Jamie Doward, reviewing the three popular science books lined up against God in the best seller charts as we run [...]

Nothing to lose but an ideology. Brilliant via Rivets yet again. Some more great Weird Al Jankovic spoofs on YouTube too.

Not heard this one before, but as an engineer in the s/w business it rings true. “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” – Weinberg’s Second Law Via TCL via Rivets. Guessing Steve Weinberg, but I don’t know, must check. (Gerry (Gerald) Weinberg [...]

Interesting post from Anecdote about peer pressure influencing moral decisions. I first noted this 15 years go when I read DeLorean’s (auto)-biography. The paraphrased quote of his I keep dredging up is “Committees of moral men make immoral decisions”. Nils Brunsson has this well documented as “Management Hypocrisy” Interstingly another recurring memory on that score, [...]

Not the kind of stuff I usually expect to find at The Apothecary’s Drawer, but it looks like Ray Girvan has found YouTube too. This takes me back to the jukebox in the Fisherman’s Arms in Scalloway, when Sylvia and I first met back in 1979. Don’t think I’ve ever seen the video before. Great [...]

Just a snippet to store away, since I’m not really up on Hume yet. Hume’s metaethics … his emotivist stance on the nature of moral judgment and … the assertion of rationality as part of that process is only an ad hoc attempt to somehow “independently” justify the moral conclusions we’ve already reached. A recurring theme, but the [...]

As a confirmed atheist, I was about to do some research on the coincidences of atheist philosophers converting to catholicism in later life (Wittgenstein ? McLuhan ? and a couple of others ?), basically wondering if there was an intellectual elitst attraction with the hierarchy in said church. That’ll have to wait. I stumbled across the [...]

I blogged about Eestor recently. That’s not an anomalous energy patent, but an electrical capacitance alternative to the internal combustion engine. Will it work commercially and socially ? The point is that there may be reasons for engineering scepticism, but the basic physics is not (yet) in doubt. Brian Josephson has been a regular champion [...]

Here in northern Alabama, there are a dozen churches of every christian denomination per square mile as far as the eye can see. The locals also seem to “celebrate” Halloween as a major social and commercial event. We’ve been unable to move for pumpkins, fall-wreaths, packets of “treats” and the smell of cinnamon in the [...]

Sitting here I’m watching an angler on this bright crisp morning dry-fly fishing by the footbridge across the pond outside our window. He’s also ground-baiting, throwing handfulls of breadscraps onto the water in the general area. The kids feed the fish off that same bridge most days – tilapia, sun-fish, catfish, whatever. The Kingfisher and [...]

I seem to be spending my blogging life catching up from large gaps these days. Either “pressure of work” business reasons or intense distracting correspondences in “another place”. So again this is a quick round up. Reading : Finished Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs. Overall it’s a whodunnit (and why) exploration of psychology and motivations, real and rationalised, life and [...]