Year: 2004

I saw Muse at Earl’s Court last night, with The Zutons and SoulWax supporting. I do not know why Matt Bellamy is not a more major superstar. Admittedly it’s all done with the aid of electronic gizmos and a huge team of sound and lighting techies, but on guitar, keyboard and vocals he is an amazing talent. He’s a showman too, just enough to complement his musical talents, and so many of his songs have anthemic chorus lines and riffs for an audience in a barn that size to sing along at full voice.

Never did like Earl’s Court as a venue, but Matt’s three-piece pulled it off. Brilliant, and I don’t just mean the light show.

I have had the pleasure and benefit of corresponding with Robert Pirsig in recent months, and as a result have been able to make and publish a significant update to my Robert Pirsig Biographical Timeline.

See my Pirsig Project Pages for the significance of Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974) and “Lila, an Inquiry into Morals” (1991), to my knowledge modelling objectives.

“The relevance to our present day situation seems to me to be impossible to exaggerate” said Dr James Willis. I say Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” may not be an entirely original treatment of the epistemological continuum nor may it actually qualify as a “metaphysics”. However, the frustration of the Catch-22 of objective fundamentalism, which I’ve dubbed “the rational trap”, has probably never been better illuminated than the story of Pirsig’s own life. There, but for the grace of quality, go we all – to the lunatic asylum.

Far from fading with the passing of 60 years since Pirsig’s experiences began, we find the problem was not only ever thus, but that the recent combination of “scientific” management with ubiquitous information and communication technologies, simply throws the urgent need for alternative thinking into ever starker relief.

Geoff Boycott reporting on the England v South Africa test on Radio 4 Today Program this morning, made a telling comment … When the sports anchor man said of one bowler “his figures look good, but you say he didn’t play well”, Geoff responded with “ah yes, but you’re just looking at the numbers, I can see for myself what’s happening, what threat (or lack of it) he is really causing”.

Truth is more than numbers, but Einstein said it better.

And just yesterday on “Today”, they had a news item from some Intelligent Design Creationists. They had Steve Jones as the scientist to respond, but he had barely time for two sentences, roughly “This is poppycock. How come these guys even get air time ?”. This was of course exactly my response too. Today, Saturday, we have listener responses, which were mostly the same response, except for some pleas not to dismiss god entirely, but most supported that gaps in knowledge should be expected to exist, (I say knowledge is 99% gap) and we should not simply use God as an easy gap filler. However, one response illustrated my Catch-22 perfectly…

One respondent said “If all a scientist can do is be dismissive, not offer any rational evidence against intelligent design, and at best propose alternative explanations for the existence and wonderful variety of life, then of course “intelligent designers” are going to stick to their beliefs.

Proving a negative is never easy, some would say not actually possible, but whatever standard of proof, this is a lazy argument. Occam’s principle wins this one hands down – God seems a so much more simple answer to why, if the alternative answer involves complexity and huge quantities of events. This is a recurring debate on the MoQ Discussion board. At root, any single evolutionary event is the epitome of simplicity in fact, but people choose to see the massive emergent complexity.

After Candide, I’ve now read Micromegas.

Candide is beyond satirical, plainly a negative lampoon directed squarely, with disturbing imagination but little subtlety, at the “all’s right with God in this best of all possible worlds” view.

Micromegas’ satire is so much more subtle and miles ahead of its time. His evocation of the absurd – the John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett “I look down on him” sketch – concerns misconceptions of scale between three beings, the smallest being earth sized human, the other two being Saturnian and Sirian in scale. The essence is – how can a human (philosopher) expect their observations to tell them anything about the reality of a “world out there” with such vast ranges of scale over many orders of magnitude.

How could we ever expect “humanly agreed fact” to cover more than 1% of reality. How can we expect normal human experience to even comprehend scales from quanta to universes, how can normal human experience “get its head around” the probablilities in earthly evolution – 250 years before Dawkins’ Mount Improbable and Rees’ Six Numbers.

Micromegas makes you think, vs Candide’s ridicule.

(The Swiftian connections and connotations are all too apparent – I’m going to have to properly read Swift too.)

Got a search hit to day with someone looking for “How to capture the knowledge contents of a brain after the human has died“. Nice trick if you can pull it off. Problem solved.

I just love the optimism and faith people have in internet search engines.

… not what can be counted.

Thread by Piers and Anu says it. Einstein right again, shock !

I’m still working my way through Dr James Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”, and I’ve reached a section on anesthesia and other consciousness altering chemical effects.

Actually, I took a break from Dr Austin, to read Voltaire’s Candide – short and sweet – humorous Swiftian-style satire on the “best of all possible worlds” view that a perfect world holds its fair (and very unfair) share of evil. Thoughtful, but not deep, as if Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) had been written by Yann Martel (Life of Pi). Amazing for its mid to late 1700’s “age of enlightenment” times, when so much was happening. The story of Voltaire’s own life and travels is interesting in itself.

Talking of life stories, in the same break I’ve been working on updating the Pirsig Timeline. Amongst other things I was researching Peyote and the LSD connection, which put me in mind of consciousness altering chemicals again. When I returned to Dr Austin’s chapters on anesthesiology, I remembered that Stuart Hameroff, of Quantum Consciousness fame, was an anesthesiologist originally, so I dived off and found two very interesting layman-directed interviews with Hameroff. [1997 Alternative Therapies],[2002/3 Nexus].

They range across the full gamut from quantum physics (uncertainty, non-locality and entanglement) with references to superstrings and holochory, energy processes underlying (apparent material) reality, microtubule components of cell structures, including neurons, and the link between these microtubules and orchestrated coherence of underlying quantum effects controlling the otherwise very simple macro-scale chemical diffusion processes of anesthesia and the conscious brain. Serious or seriously silly, it is compelling stuff.

The word Blog was the most searched word according to Merriam-Webster on-line dictionaries in the past year.[via BBC][via Blogger] A new Blog is created every 6 seconds.

(Interesting given the Fallujah situation that “insurgent” made it into the top four, along with other US election related jargon.)

Microsoft blogging too.[via BBC], and of course, broadband uptake is simply making any and all content publishing and linking so much easier. [also via BBC]