Month: February 2005

Consciousness and Pirsig

Following a search hit I find a source that links many of mine ….

Pirsig and VUB/Heilighen, (Einstein Meets Magritte) with Josephson (explaining the paranormal with open minded science) with Dennett, Searle and Chalmers (PoM / Consciousness) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

A paper in the 1995 JCS reviewing the 1995 Einstein Meets Magritte conference.

Both a bit pricey ? Let me think about this.

(Almost looks like the 1995 “Einstein Meets Magritte” conference intiative was a direct pre-cursor to the later multi-disciplined “Science of Consciousness” conferences. – I had just assumed some coincidence of content, but I think not. Interestingly the title of the 2004 JCS article here, about the Tucson conferences, was “Ten Years On”, and this JCS editorial talks about working on the Tucson agenda in 1993. Interesting read. – Oh well, so much for causality.)

Talking of Magritte, he seems to link several other threads of mine too. Foucault’s review of “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) by Magritte, Oliver Sacks front cover “Ceci est ma femme” (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) in the style of Magritte. “Le Grand Guerre” on the cover of Searle’s “Mind – A Brief Introduction”

And talking of Searle, I’m now almost finished. After my impatient initial view, I have to say this is 100% common sense and pragmatic view of consciousness and mind.

Sorry to keep going on about it but there really is some great convergence here for the taking, if people are prepared to synthesise debate constructively, rather than analyse arguments destructively. Careful with that razor Occam, or that knife Aristotle, or that axe Eugene.

(PS also picked-up a search hit linking Donald Schon with Positivism. Come back to that later.)


Absenteeism, Turnover and Stress.

I remember as an MBA student studying absenteeism, turnover and stress – the fundamental difference between people being ill and being off-sick – being ill in any minor or major way is a medical issue, being off-sick from paid employment is a matter of individual choice. And vice versa, being ill may be significantly related to the stress of choosing to go to work. In both cases, look for the (human) reason, not the symptoms.

I recalled this when I heard a story on BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths this week about a schoolboy feigning illness to avoid a day at school that held some specific fear of trouble, and the ploy getting out of hand as the individual found himself being prepped for surgery in hospital after playing parents and doctors along with his symptoms.

Actually the recollection became a flood when I saw Michael Jackson’s latest stunt.

What’s it Like to be a Bat – II

Man hears in colour, or “sees” with the sound of music. [report via BBC]. Another variation on the Neuroscience explanations of consciousness – see earlier blogs on Sacks, Zeman and others.

I stand corrected that it is not quite what Nagel’s bat was about. He was being general about the concept of “being like” something as an indication of being conscious, but surely the point of choosing a bat, rather than a giraffe, is because a bat perceives its world, even spatial geometry, topology, motion and texture (colour) through sound. Psychlogically, it surely sees a picture of the world illuminated with sound, in pretty much the identical way that we see the world by the light of … light.

BTW,
Q. What’s it like to swim if you’re a giraffe ?
A. Problematic, unstable, fatal in fact once out of standing depth. Imagine if your buoyant thorax was so far from your dense head. Bit tricky keeping head above water I think you’ll find.

Skype Gets Even Better

Now with Skype – both Voice and Text free over IP
(see sidebar)

We recently had
SkypeOut to call any phone line from within Skype, not just on-line Skype users

We now have
SMS to Skype from any SMS device (for the cost of a UK SMS call)
(And with SkypeOut, a return call from your PC is one click away)

And soon
Skype to SMS is on its way, and
Phone to Skype is in the pipeline

Thanks to Robin Good for the link and instructions.

Creationism in a Tuxedo

Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution rumbles on in school curriculum debates in the US. Those stickers keep turning up in biology textbooks.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it simply referred to “The Theory of Darwinian Evolution”, and let people infer the pejorative tone of the word “theory”, but no, for the hard-of-thinking they kindly include the phrase “it’s a theory, not a fact”

With that, an appeal to balance says any old “theory” has equal rights to a hearing.

Err, no. There are no facts or theories. Another false dichotomy. What there is, is empirical evidence [sic fact] and explanation [sic theory]. The “best” explanation is not a matter of logic, it’s a matter of quality, including subjective fit and consistency as well as “objective” evidence. The test is credibility, not proof. That quality has subjective, collaborative and democratic aspects, not purely objective, competitive and logical, just like evolution itself in fact, in its broadest sense.

Another case of mysticism appealing to logical argument and science falling for it yet again. The Catch-22 of logical positivism or objective fundamentalism wins again. We need to shift the rules of argument. In this case the Catch-22 is a double-bind; the rules themselves are “evolution”.

The Standard Model

of elementary physics of fundamental “particles” and forces.

Just for general knowledge interest, but this Icelandic site by Jon Erlandsson has some great links, including these two …

Stanford University – Building Blocks of Matter

Contemporary Physics Education Project – The Particle Adventure

Readable summaries. Fascinating.

What Do You Believe …

… is true, even though you cannot prove it ? The Edge 2005 Annual Question. All the usual suspects, mixed bag of answers though.

Dennett, says language is a necessary pre-condition for consciousness, and interestingly, his reason concerns the need for “I”, a subject. Like that.

Blackmore, says she believes that neither free-will nor herself actually exist. (At least I think that’s what she’s saying.) Hmmm.

Block, says consciousness will be explained by neuroscience. Good.

Dawkins, says evolution came before design. Yawn, tell us something we didn’t know.

Pinker, says our brains are organised for the concepts we think about. Ditto.

Kurzweil, says we’ll beat the speed of light. Wow !

Lanier, says the potential for communication (betwen people) far exceeds capabilities of language and media as we know them. Interesting.

Sheldrake, says memory is inherent in nature (not just conscious brains). Interesting corollary of information being the foundation of existence perhaps ?

Many others seem to believe in life, intelligence, and the origins of life, beyond the earth, etc.

Aha !!
Charles Simonyi believes we are programming computers the wrong way. The motivation in the manifesto behind this very Blog. Programming the problem in a computer language, is an evolutionary backwater, he says.
[Quote] …. complexity inflation comes from encoding. The problem statement … is obviously oversimplified, … and we haven’t even used the [domain] jargon which can make these statements even more compact and more precise. But once these statements are viewed through the funhouse mirror of software coding, it becomes all but unrecognizable: thousand times fatter, disjointed, foreign. And as any manual product, it will have many flaws?beyond the errors in the rules themselves. What can be done? Follow the metaphor …. recording of the subject matter experts’ contributions using their own terms-of-art, their jargon, their own notations. Next, empower the programmers to program not the problem itself, but to express their software engineering expertise and decisions as a computer code for the encoder that takes the recorded problem statement and generates the code from it. This is called generative programming and I believe it is the future of software. [Unquote]