Month: April 2005

Mathematics Physical Awareness

The Apothecary highlights that April 2005 is Mathematics Awareness Month, reminds me that I’m well through reading David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality”.

I owe a fairly thorough review, because it has already made a big impression. The first time I’ve been convinced by the “multiverse” idea being more than an allegorical predictive metaphor, actually more an explanatory model of the “real” world. Several other key concepts too. I mentioned before about a non-reductive view of what makes something “fundamental”. Notwithstanding the fact that physics underlies chemistry, underlies, biology, etc, there is nothing more fundamental than life (replication) itself, for example.

The main mathematical point here is Deutsch’s contention that mathematics is constrained not by some pure logical, abstract concepts, but by physical reality, with the corollary that pure logic is itself an illusion – argumentation being the only test of truth. Some great extensions of Turing universal computer into the concept of a universal virtual-reality generator, being indistinguishable from reality, and (like maths and computation) obeying the laws of physics rather than logic – quantum physics of course.

is view of time and causality seems to support absence of free-will until he exposes that our common sense view of time is badly misled by experiencing only one the multiverses. Tough going, but fascinating. Good chapter summaries make re-capping easy, even if the quality of writing is not in Blackmore’s class.

I can’t recommend Deutsch too highly. Stuff I’ve not seen expressed elsewhere – which is increasingly uncommon.

[Some great stuff on Ray’s site again – check out the octopus walking on two legs !]

Creation – Would You Adam & Eve It ?

BBC again, this time a report from UK teachers unions alarmed that creationist twaddle is spreading from US into UK school curricula materials.

“Evolution is not compatible with christianity” says Monty White of the “creation science movement”. He’s not wrong there – biologically & genetically at least, some hope for the right outcome then. Would that he were right memetically; the virus requires active resistance to curb its spread, whilst the supernaturalists hold the ace cards of fear and disprovability.

Stafford Beer and “Requisite Variety”

Leonid sent me some links to work by and about Stafford Beer recently. [eg A Time Whose Idea Must Come] [2005 Web Archive Copy] It’s something I should have followed up much earlier. On the quality of modelling business organisations in order to design systems for their management he says

[Quote] In programming a computer, one needs a model. Models are provided by brains. Models are necessarily massive variety attenuators, because they select only those aspects of the world that are relevant to the model’s purpose. Worse still, the models adopted are not the best that we can provide: they are consensual models put in place and held together by ideologies. And an ideology is a very low variety instrument indeed. Vast tracts of political philosophy since the ancient Greeks have been studied in common by the theorists of both communism and capitalism; but the ideologies to which the two superpowers rallied their supporters attenuated this variety in different guises. They have had this much in common: neither had Requisite Variety (as defined by Ashby’s Law) by which to manage. Both are managerially dysfunctional therefore. And neither works. [Unquote]

The tension of static and dynamic quality, Variety attenuation, Greek philosophy, Management dysfunction – my whole thesis is in there somewhere.

[Post Note: Beer makes his own main source reference to Maturana and Varela seminal work – “Autopoeisis and Cognition”. (Offline PDF Copy also available here.)]