What, Why & How do we Know ?
I keep noticing and thought I’d share that several things (meaninglessly) coincided in 1991.
Robert Pirsig published his second book “Lila” in 1991
Dan Dennett published his “Consciousness Explained” in 1991
I completed and was awarded my Masters Degree in 1991
None of us knew each other’s work then, and there’s been huge convergence of thinking since – as Dan had noted in 2017.
Bob died in 2017, Dan died last week in 2024. There’s work to be done.
Onward and upwards.
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Ben Taylor responded to a challenge from Katrin Shaw on LinkedIn, and I’m taking it up, and taking a lead, from his response.
Suffering? No, I certainly don’t lie awake worrying about widespread suffering, unfairness and inequality in the world – a question as old as philosophy and theology, and I’m certainly fortunate not to suffer as a victim. Except maybe where it’s more like self-inflicted Stress, the stress of current ongoing commitments made to fellow humans, which are themselves part of an evolving set of wider operational, tactical and strategic priorities. The only time the bigger picture might keep me awake would be a positive complement to stress – those times when you may have stumbled Aha! onto some valuable thought or contribution to solving that bigger picture of “world suffering” – which you need to work out and articulate. In such cases, get up, write it down and forget about it until the next available day.
I spend my waking hours worrying about / working on that bigger picture of suffering – what can I/we do to make the world a better place? Which is of course then part of that conflict between tactical action and strategic intent – specific commitments now and better plans for the future. [If you were to poll my past employers, you’d probably notice a failure to deliver. I already know myself pretty well, so I often warn “that’s not really the kind of planned task you want to give to me?”]
What is wrong in the world – suffering and injustice, and ineffective / inefficient / counter-productive responses to these – what needs fixing, what our creative-change priorities are, is an evolving and growing list already as long as your arm. Specific global crises, poly-crises, meta-crises, and all their local consequences in context. There is no shortage.
Politics? Ben says it only came to him in 2016 that politics, use and abuse of social power, despite his long-term active political engagement, was where the problem lay. For me that dawning was my first proper understanding the word “Cybernetics” back in about 2002. It is precisely about how we govern ourselves, our applied systems of governance – imperfect democracy, making and enacting, policy and decisions. Throughout the 1990’s I was already “being kept awake at night” by the thought that “we could do better” – better than my business (tech) systems day job – nagging worries that had no other outlet then than sleepless nights. The trigger moment – we really can and must do better – was 9/11 – incidental but consequential to the actual problem.
The learning since then has been that the problem – “the inability to make and enact good decisions” – applies everywhere from individual to social levels, from the simplest seemingly rational / scientific questions to the knottiest Multi-national Machiavellian scenarios. Left or right, liberal or authoritarian, all parties suffer the problem, a problem that prevents us even hearing each other. I’ve been selective as to which specific “crises” I’ve engaged with, driven mainly by the extent to which these are tractable examples of the deeper “Psybernetic / Dysmemic” problem.
Anger? – “Anger is an Energy” sings Johnny Lydon. [Another poll of past employers and colleagues would tell of my impatience.] I’ve learned a lot since the 9/11 milestone. I’ve learned a lot about where emotion properly fits our decision-making processes. And it really does. Attempts at excluding it are in fact part of the problem. My learned strategy is dynamic cycles over time, where, when and how. Visceral live-music events – natural outdoor mindful moments – and cool, spacious, cathedral-like human spaces – are all part of my “Grace” toolbox.
Your experience may vary.
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I almost said great loss to the intellectual world – but his intellect is indeed a loss to the whole world.
I last communicated with Dan only three weeks ago, about the fact he was planning to be attending this year’s “How The Light Gets In” only by telepresence. For various multiple conference priority reasons, I’m probably not going to be at HTLGI this year, and could maybe have done a flying one-day visit if it included the possibility of in-person contact. Sadly an opportunity gone forever.
And it’s not just his academic intellect, but the whole emotionally intelligent person we’ve lost. Quite moving that so many of the responses to his death on social-media mention his continuity of caring about the people that encountered him whether as colleague, interlocutor or mentor.
[Example of thoughts expressed, this one from Michael Levin colleague at Tufts, “intellectual integrity” personal & inspiring. And one of his later interview with Nigel Warburton. and another wonderful exchange with Tom Chatfield for the BBC.]
I was looking back at my correspondence with him over the years. Remember I’m only an autodidact fan-boy, but he never failed to respond to a thoughtful question about his work. Sometimes the response would inevitably be an apology for simply not having the bandwidth to do so, but usually it was a brief response to the specific question, with his thanks for showing interest. A lost art in these days of ubiquitous social media.
Given “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” runs through his entire career and body of work since his time in Oxford in 1965 – 6 decades ago – also fitting to note he shares the date of his death with Charles Darwin, the 19th April.
Anyway he’s been central to my thinking for the last 20+ years, so hundreds of mentions and references in my blog and writing and external papers delivered.
My wish is that people read his 2017 “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” – or “B2BnB” as I have always referred to it. I had a review published in New Humanist which explains why.
Too many people, interested in the internal arguments and history of philosophical ideas, still refer only to his 1991 “Consciousness Explained” – affectionately referred to by many as consciousness-not-explained because it is pretty much meta to the topic, about what the different arguments are and what an explanation would need to be and do. Influential in that respect, but not the place to find the answers he found in the decades since.
Apart from that highly recommended read – his book and my review of it – most of my encounters are around defending his ideas against those who mis-represent him. Whether un-reconstructed scientistic reductionists, who just don’t get it or the more enlightened who simply miss his meaning in using the word “illusory” to describe aspects of consciousness to suggest he denies its reality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
No-one cared more about the reality of consciousness than Dan Dennett.
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Previously on Psybertron:
in addition to the review above …
The Denial of Dennett’s Consciousness
Dennett and the Little People (The determinist reductionists)
Convergence – Dennett at the Royal Institution
Daniel Dennett at The Royal Institution of Great Britain @Ri_Science
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My first reference to Dennett in 2002.
The first of 40 pages of references!
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Psybertron blog action has retreated to book / thesis drafting behind the scenes, as most of my life is taken over by planning for two summer events – the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISS) and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conferences in Washington DC in early June, and the Robert Pirsig 50th anniversary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (#ZMM50th) events culminating in July with retracing the original 1968 motorcycle road-trip (#ZMM50thRide).
That said, I’m using available down time to read one book from my never ending reading list. “Leonard and Hungry Paul” by Rónán Hession (Mumblin’ Deaf Ro on X/Twitter), via small independent publisher Bluemoose Books. Been following them and a few other independents for a while, for obvious reasons, but remembered I really did need to buy and read one of their books. Support is more than “Retweeting”.
As usual, I’m feeling the need to capture some thoughts, only ~20% through, a kinda pre-review as I call them. It’s very good, and surprisingly relevant to my own agenda:
“the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments”.
“the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of the complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing.”
“He operated [the ‘Za’ rule in scrabble] with iron inflexibility, even though he himself was its most frequent victim”
Despite the fact the author is almost 20 years my junior, there’s a strong sense of northern spouse, parental, familial, sibling life, learning rules of the game of real life through cuts and scrapes in the schoolyard and board games in the home. Cultural references to Inspector Morse and Judy Sill as well as bookshops, and hard-backs as “special presents”. I can see why it resonates with me.
The language is beautiful, beautifully observed too:
“on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from the special place that ideas come from”
“[looking at] the first piece of asparagus loaded onto her fork [he spoke] through a mouthful of unsalted soup”
Excellent stuff. Guessing we will eventually find out why Paul is “Hungry” more than just that Grace is a slow eater 🙂 ? Reading on, with a reason to do so.
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Anil Seth’s Faraday Lecture has generated a fair bit of chat. I was initially a bit too unimpressed, not enough originality – probably turned off previously by his use of “hallucination”. In fact he is synthesising many of the same sources I am. Nothing new under the sun again.
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Mystery – zzz.
Lost under anaesthesia (main aspect anyway, self-aware aspect – the bits keeping us alive are still there – as as he concludes later – it has much more to do with life than intelligence).
We know it better than anything – a la Descartes
Nagel’s – like to be
Mystery – Chalmers – Hard Problem – zzz
The “real” problem – many different aspects – check
So-called hard problem will “dissolve” – check
Level (how) / Content (of what) / Self (sense of)
Content example “colour” – Visible EM Spectrum
Pink (Lilac chaser) dot illusion.
Prediction machine – check (+ Plato’s Cave)
More expectation / illusions
Bayesian predictions / expectations – check
von Helmholtz process / result (not explicit calculation, certainly not bottom-up from sum of all inputs – nope – high level prediction compared with any available inputs at any level. The game is minimising the unexpected. “Predictive Processing” – generative
Wm James on the case
Pareidolia – hallucinations – hmmmm.
Hallucination as uncontrolled perception
Perception as controlled hallucination.
Kinda – check (OK see intro)
Perceptual echo-chambers (That dress)
The Perception Census
Humility
Self <> World
Self is our perception of “us perceiving”
Bodily, Perspectival, Volitional, Narrative and Social – Self
Bodily ( more Sacks / Damasio stuff) – the “Rubber Hand”
Interoception
Emotion (after James again)
Control (Cybernetics)
ACTIVE INFERENCE – Friston!!!
ROSS ASHBY – system regulation
FRISTON FREE ENERGY of living systems
Interoceptive Predictions
Good or Bad affective experience
Descartes Error!
Part of Nature not Apart from Nature
AI & Consciousness zzzz
More smart (intellectually) is not more consciousness.
Anthropocentrism / Anthropomorphism.
What a mind is, is not separate from what it does
Less clear line between hardware and software – all wetware
Info independent of embodiment.
Another reason to be wary of computing machine language.
Property of life.
AI will only become Real I when it has Real Life – check.
AI that seems to be consciousness may be a really bad thing for us.
Dennett quote – AI Tools not Colleagues.
Mystery that matters. (Good round-up)
OOOH Friston in the front row.
And Adam Rutherford – Genetic evolution not mentioned (a given, surely, yes says Seth.)
Maturana and Varela. More “systems thinking” autopoesis.
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For me:
Frankly, it’s not a mystery, it’s clearly common knowledge.
Person who developed it most from Friston is Solms.
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I have so many notes, I’m not quite sure how much I’m going to write up Charles Foster ‘s Annual Mike Jackson lecture at Hull University on Tuesday 19th March “What is a Human?”. Suffice to say its scope was unsettlingly beyond expectations for our systems studies context. Excellent none-the-less. So I will, as usual, cherry-pick relationships to my own work and on-line dialogue following Dave Snowden’s delivery of last year’s lecture – linked most recently here in preparation for this year’s lecture.
[If you want a more generally summary of the event, beyond the ongoing dialogue here, try this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Wilkins.]
Coincidence to be listening this morning to BBC Radio 4 “In Our Time” on “Julian the Apostate”. I didn’t get as much dialogue with Dave as I’d hoped on Tuesday, but muttering his disagreement from the back during the lecture and in brief exchanges afterwards, his criticism was that he was hearing another attempt to resurrect neo-Platonism. Very much like Julian the Apostate, adopting Plotinus take on Plato in valuing traditional myth or mystical theology distinct from requiring any theist religion.
Dave is technically right, not only in the sense that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, but in that Foster’s thesis is indeed a plea to see humans in the cosmos in terms of traditional myth and mystical theology, the stories of who we are and how we came to be. Surprisingly, but quite explicitly and directly, answering his lecture’s title “What is a human?” with very little use of 20th/21st C “Systems Thinking” language. Indeed very explicitly calling it simply “Thinking”, is there any other authentic kind? And indeed plenty of references from the texts of the Abrahamic monotheisms, using the languages of god and the sacred, without invoking God as a supernatural causal agent. Not your usual business school, systems science, consulting and methodology fare. Quite literally, anthropology. (In my own words, back in 1991, our human self-organisation subject is “Anthropology by any other name”.)
But, criticising it pejoratively because it is neo-Platonic, is exactly the issue that short-lived Julian the Apostate himself suffered between his supporters and his enemies. A polarisation for or against “the very idea” without leaving space to address any subtlety and nuance in understanding the actual arguments. The latter requires “proper dialogue” beyond “critical thinking”. An epistemology beyond science.
“A Mouse is Edgier than a Musk Ox” is a reference to Foster’s conception that smaller organisms are much more connected to their environment, much greater surface to volume ratio, much “edgier” – live life closer to their environmental edges (McGilchrist uses a small bird). Much closer to the one individual within the unified cosmos. Here Foster’s argument comes at least partly from his own chosen experience of spending time living as a beast in direct contact with nature (most famously as a Badger in the woods.) More like the upper-Palaeolithic “hunter-gatherer” than our post-neolithic enlightened, objectified, “homo-economicus”. A world of relationships with and within the world rather than linguistic, symbolic models of the world.
Reference sources too many to mention, but Petrarch on Augustine. Jonathan Sacks story on Wittgenstein / Anscombe / Hart and the dangers of philosophy. Sam Harris and Steven Pinker critiqued in caricature for their naïve follow-the-science / show-me-the-numbers line.
Many references to Iain McGilchrist’s work, not just his hemispheric hypothesis, but the whole attention to the world and others as a moral act, and the priority of relations over relata (objects, the things related).
Foster only mentioned Rabbi Sacks the once (above) but his whole thrust reminded me of my only encounter with Sacks – that whatever processes, methods, models we end up using to capture, communicate, maintain and evolve human values, and the human culture that values them, it will be a religion by any other name, a completely natural one, without any supernatural god(s). Sacred Naturalism perhaps.
I think I get now why Dave Snowden sticks to his “Complexity Sciences” view rather that systems sciences or systems thinking. If everything is a system (which it is in systems thinking) then the word “system” is practically redundant. It’s just thinking as Foster suggested at the start. Hope of progressive dialogue with Dave Snowden, as per my previous post, is in his Anthro-Complexity prefix. The anthropological complexity of those human cultural values and behaviours are more than (orthodox) science. As Amanda Gregory – head of the Centre for Systems Studies – suggested in her introduction, the subject of those studies is ecosystems of thinking and understanding, not just “systems sciences”.
Neither S in CSS stands simply for science. As Mike Jackson reminded us in last year’s lecture, it’s more than that.
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Post Notes:
Slightly baffled by a remark on the steps leaving the event, from someone who I know has seen my own research proposal, that surely all the left-right brain stuff was debunked last century? McGilchrist’s thinking is mentioned in that proposal – as well as in last year’s write-up and much dialogue since. Penny dropped? That the brain is deeply divided – by evolutionary design – is a fact to be understood, not an excuse for a polarising dichotomy, left vs right, science vs bullshit. #GoodFences
And, just to capture a comment from Mark Hammonds the previous day, summarising “scientism” in one of our dialogues about how to explain that “something more than science” to typical scientific sceptic types. A dialogue prompted by a quote from Bronowski “Science is a very human form of knowledge” incidentally:
It is always a difficult position to get across, that is it simultaneously true that
1. Science is a human creation and an expression of human creativity.
2. It does increase our objective knowledge of the external world.
3. But it is bounded by those phenomena it includes and those it excludes.
4. The things it excludes are perfectly legitimate areas of enquiry, as philosophers are well aware. These include consciousness, ethics, logic and metaphysics.
‘Scientism’ is the ideology that 3 & 4 are false. Paul Feyerabend characterised this view as ‘Extra Scientiam nulla salus’, which is a pretty good line.
And interesting to see versions of the Latin in a play on the Christian religious doctrine, translating “scientiam” as the Church of Reason, exactly as Pirsig did. The relevance to this post? Incidentally and coincidentally, Bronowski taught at Hull, see last year’s review.)
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I mentioned in my first ever paper about my interest in Pirsig in 2005, that I owned the same Honda Superhawk model as Robert Pirsig did on his 1968 “Zen Ride” – mine was the CB72 his was the CB77, but they are mechanically identical in all respects other than the cylinder bore which made mine 247/250 cc and his 305 cc.
I had a schoolfriend who had a BSA Bantam, and I bought the Honda from his brother. I acquired it aged 17 in 1973, but only had it until I went off to university in London at the end of summer of ’74 – the same year ZMM was published. I hadn’t really thought the bike through. My friend had one so I fancied having one. We had a house with no driveway or garage, so I kept it at his place rather than leave it parked on the street. Suffice to say, I took it for one long trip from the NE of England to the Farnborough Airshow via London that summer, and the bike never made it home. I ended up leaving it – seized – near my friends brother’s place, coincidentally not far from Farnborough in Deepcut. The quote to fix it was more than a student’s annual budget. Although I became an aero-engineer in 1977, I never read about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before 2002.
I clearly never read the care and service manual either.
Lots of good things happened on that trip, but the bike wasn’t one of them. I did however learn a valuable lesson in life, long before I discovered Zen and the Art.
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Just a holding post to which I will add a few links. We already know Alan Watts, a Brit, was part of the 1960’s boom in Eastern / Zen interest, Hinduism too, particularly in the US, but I’d never really considered his scholarly value in this space.
Having written “The Way of Zen” in 1957, this 50 minute interview in 1960, 8 years before ZMM was conceived, 6 more years before it was published in 1974, has so many touch points with the individual engagement with technology, mastering the tools of craft in the world. Zen as psychotherapy, Zen and the Arts … yes, even Archery. And a lot more summary of the Zen attitude to life, relating to the world and others, neither religion nor philosophy.
Khoo Hock Aun’s testimonial on the Robert Pirsig Association page is a good reminder that Zen is only one practice among many Eastern / Aboriginal worldviews that share fundamental differences with Western views, and it was that distinction which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance properly addressed. ZMM was never a book on Zen, and “it should be in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhism” … nor motorcycles either.
(A 13 years later – his last – 1973 interview with the same interviewer.)
Pirsig’s agenda was different to Watts.
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