Month: February 2006

Global Province – Picked-up on a search cross-hit. A dense site, full of stuff – interesting ideas if not uniformly high quality. Worth a browse, to work out its value.

This BBC report on American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Missouri.

The AAAS president, Gilbert Omenn, says

“It’s time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other.”

Hear hear.

“The intelligent design movement belittles evolution [and] it makes God a designer – an engineer.”

said George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. Sanity prevails at the Vatican, as noted earlier.

Mark Gihring, a teacher from Missouri sympathetic to intelligent design, said

“I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design. [It] ultimately takes us back to why we’re here and the value of life… if an individual doesn’t have a reason for being, they might carry themselves in a way that is ultimately destructive for society.”

Apart from the logical fallacy in the induction from “scientific evidence”, this really illustrates the problem. IDC is a search for “life purpose”, rather than knowledge. Right problem, wrong solution, which isn’t to say the problem doesn’t deserve a solution.

The problem is clear enough. One [no doubt religiously motivated] legislative bill in Missouri suggests that

“schools should teach only science which can be proven by experiment.”

That of course, would be precisely nothing. Science curricula must be devised by people who at least understand what science is. (Of course it’s all too easy to reach for the rhetorical riposte that perhaps religiously motivated IDC’ists should be constrained to teach only material which can be proven by experiment too – level playing field and all that. But of course that’s why scientists shouldn’t set religious agendas either. We need to recognise metaphors on distinct levels, instead of looking for conflicts on a single level. You listening Dawkins ?)

Anyway, as ever, humour helps – as Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education said

“I think as a [proposed science curriculum], intelligent design is dead. That does not mean intelligent design as a social movement is dead … this is an idea that has real legs and it’s going to be around for a long time. It will, however, evolve.”

🙂 Magic.

I guess this is the right place to link that recent “pain” cartoon from Tim Kreider.

Try this. [via Rivets]

And one of so many other goodies from Rivets, endless fun.

Nature.com article reports on Dutch research in Science [via Anecdote]

For [] simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for [] more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science.

At least when making some complicated decisions … the results suggest that we would actually do better to go with our gut … [otherwise] we simply lose the big picture with complex decisions.

Just a holding post for a thought that struck me yesterday ….

At a meeting yesterday discussing XML Languages best suited to modelling semantics, there was given some description of different flavours of OWL (Web Ontology Language ). In general with OWL(Full) and OWL(DL) it is possible to make ontologically impossible assertions – the infamously non-existent “The barber who shaves all people who don’t shave themselves.” (Think about it) ie Russell’s paradox highlighting the limitations of simple set theory concerning the set of sets that includes itself. The idea being that there is nothing to prevent circular networks of taxonomic (classification) relationships that express the impossible. The story is that OWL(FA) where FA = “Fixed-Level Metamodelling Architecture”, in principle forces individuals, classes and classes-of-classes and classes-of-classes-of …. etc into distinct levels in its metamodel.

The argument is actually inconclusive, in the sense that in any variant of the language one can choose how to implement and constrain the entities and relationships modelled, according to your chosen semantic model, but the striking point is that in OWL(FA) the circularity is broken by level-shifting.

This is Douglas Hofstadter’s “strange loopiness” – things that look like impossibly recursive loops, but in fact represent possible realities, because the loops shift across conceptual levels. Illustrated ad infinitum by Hofstadter in his “Godel, Escher, Bach” with “Quined Sentences” – sentences that have themselves as their own subject in mathematical and logical as well as natural languages. Hofstadter’s ultimate point is that things that “work on themselves” (like human minds) have some interesting spiralling evolutionary traits towards consciousness.

Small world indeed – in the same meeting another concept was openly recognised – in a hard industrial engineering context – that information expressed in any language, even a formal semantic one, contains much implicit knowledge that may be inferred, in addition to that objectively encoded, leading to cybernetic / AI / informatic-automation approaches for using such models too.

Great convergence happening.

(Possibly a side issue, but it feels related. My argumentation style, always wants to retain complexity, ie not make overall simplifying assumptions applicable to the whole argument, but to separate distinct issues, which may individually be simpler, whilst collectively complex …. see “only & just”, see exclusive-OR’s, inclusion of opposites, see Follett, see synthesis, see integration, in earlier threads ….)

This article from yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph (Thursday 16th Feb) “Boot Camp Tactics Won’t Win the Battle” is an interview with Management Consultant / Guru, John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting. It’s right from my own manifesto, summarised in the header – things go wrong when management mistakes itself for a science.

… so much management time wasted doing “the wrong thing righter”
… so much game-playing,
… producing inaccurate and even meaningless numbers.
… origins of this [TQM] approach lay in the work of FW Taylor,
… so-called “scientific management” influenced subsequent generations …

He goes on to outline his preferred holistic “systems thinking” approach. Worth a read.

Personally, as my dissertation conclusions attest, TQM itself is not wrong, just its application to a misplaced focus on things that can be measured objectively with numbers, rather than things that can be assessed more qualitatively in the round.

I need to get this topic at the right level, following the Blackmore vs Midgley outing of yesterday.

Before memes, let’s get the garbage out of the way ….

It was set up as Blackmore vs Midgley, a combative argument – I have (on this very blog) agreed with both Midgley and Blackmore – I expressed disappointment that Midgley was so “dismissive” of memes, thought she was missing the point, missing a trick, despite 99% common sense elsewhere. I’ve expressed disappointment that Blackmore took her “mind is nothing but memes” metaphor so far as to preclude free-will in any common sense view we might have, despite the fact that Sue is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and a staunch advocate of open-mindedness towards the mystical and spiritual. They can both be right, if we focus on what they’re actually saying rather than “let’s see who’s right and who’s wrong”. First mistake – the middle is excluded before we start (that’s the most problematic meme here, by the way, and the core of Psybertron’s agenda.) Garbage.

Secondly, given the brief slot, and the fact that it was organised to publicise Sue’s speaking at The Darwin Day event, both of them used their rhetorical skills to stoke the argument. Sue slipped in the pejorative concept of “infection” in connection with the spread of religions, and linked that to the undeniable plethora of highly-charged religious concerns in current global politics. Mary pooh-poohed memes with the idea that “Darwin would never have made the meme mistake” throwaway, as if Darwin were the last word on evolution anyway, totally ignored Sue’s refutation in Darwin’s own ideas on the spread of languages, and further pooh-poohed Sue as a scientist. All good knockabout fun – each dissing the other – in exactly the way the “debate meme” has infected us all. Apparently the idea is to win, and be seen to win at the expense of the other. Garbage.

Thirdly, given the last couple of years debacle over raising such ideas as Intelligent Design Creationism as serious scientific alternatives to neo-Darwinism, there is no doubt that the scientific and philosophical meme camp (in which I include Dawkins and Dennett as well as Blackmore) have seen themselves as fighting a battle “against” misguided religious ideas. This becomes all the more highly charged when so many current world problems do undeniably have a religious source, however misunderstood. Attack being the best form of defence, when the objective is to win, and defeat an opponent, apparently. Garbage again.

Fourthly, “copying of memes” is not about dumb parroting of words, repeating and spreading messages verbatim, or even approximately. That’s the reactionary simplistic rhetoric meme-detractors use to ridicule them. It’s about understanding, believing and using the ideas they contain – and lets not forget Derrida (and Wittgenstein, and Quine, and Foucault no doubt), if we’re going to try and making any metaphysical distinction between the signifier and siginified / word and object / container and information – because there aren’t any.

So where’s the problem with memes. There isn’t one. Like everything else in life (and I mean everything) it’s only a metaphor, just like genes are a metaphor, they’re not really “selfish” in any intentional sense. The metaphor simply uses a causal model of behaviour that treats them as purposeful entities. Secondly the fact that memes may have practical uses in modelling behaviour in which ideas are believed and used, doesn’t mean human behaviour (anthropology and psychology) isn’t the actual issue. That’s exactly what it is; there isn’t anything else in this metaphorical world. How good such metaphors are lies in how useful they turn out to be in predictive and explanatory use – tested by real experience – there is no other test, logical or rhetorical.

Midgley’s worst genuine criticism is “they’re a distraction” from the human behaviour issues. Well that’s her choice. Some of us choose the meme metaphor precisely for human behaviour issues, all of them, including the cultural history up to any given decision point. The real distraction is both pro- and anti-meme debators demonising their opponents (in order to win arguments – that’s the real garbage.)

Let’s focus on the real problem – the real garbage – the hugely popular idea (a meme in my model) that some things are fundamentally right and others wrong, and that they can be resolved by simple logical syllogisms, and operators like “only”.

Life’s just complicated enough.

Brief interview on BBC’s Today programme with Sue Blackmore asked to explain memes (pro), and Mary Midgley asked to respond (con). As usual the disagreement is really just the words “only” and “just”.

Of course conscious minds are not “just” copying machines, you do indeed have to understand the context of people’s experience and hearing in the ideas and information they acquire, ie which ideas they find attractive, but that doesn’t mean the meme model doesn’t provides a tool for understanding how the competing ideas resolve themselves. And … how easy ideas are to copy (understand and use) is at least as much a part of the process as other qualities of their content.