What, Why & How do we Know ?
I’ll say. This news story is about male hormone levels in financial market traders, but it is just one symptom of the problematic win/lose meme. The gender angle is real too, a balanced feminine-side significant, but it would be overly simplistic to see this in terms of men vs women … though the physiological / hormone angle is interesting.
More later.
Wonderful quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, uttered by Razumikhin in an intense drunken rant in defence of his friend Raskolnikov, who may be going mad – talking nonsense – with the guilty complications of living with the double murder he has committed.
“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth !
I talk nonsense, therefore I am human.
Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked [reams of nonsense] and that’s an honourable thing in its own way; well but we can’t even talk nonsense with our own brains ! Talk nonsense to me by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot ! […]
We’ve got accustomed to making do with other people’s intelligence – we’re soaked in it !”
Too true. I suspect Dostoevsky wasn’t drunk when he wrote it.
Reciprocal linkage. Single post so far on this “All in the Name of Science” blog by Kas, but some interesting linkage already. (She also has another more general blog) Not quite ready to add to side-bar yet …
Checking out Sue’s web site, I see this contribution passed me by.
Article on Comment is Free (UK Guardian)
Podcast of debate with Alister McGrath, author of ‘The Dawkins Delusion’. (Bristol Uni & RichardDawkins.net)
I have to say the text of the piece posted before the debate seems to have it pretty well right, so I’m going to have to read / listen to the whole debate and comment threads. Sounds like Blackmore and Dawkins have been listening to their critics and their “atheism” is ever more sophisticated. (Here is the last substantial thing I wrote on this.)
[Post Note – Having fully read the article – I do find I agree with the gist of it, in the same way I was positive about Sam Harris, in the earlier post referenced. As with all these debates the danger is one of over-simplification – what Rayner would call simplistication.
She says “In a society that strives for honesty and openness, that values scientific and historical truth, and that encourages the search for knowledge, [religious faith] is outrageous …” I’d say that the striving for honesty and openess is not actually that unequivocal – she herself mentions the game theory angle, but reality of the lives of individuals and groups is more complicated than that. I’d also say that “values” in scientific and historical truth are not simple matters of science and history. And I’d say that there is more to it than the “search for knowledge” – there are quests for wisdom and value too, to name but two. She even mentions the value-deficit in the costs of the religious meme. Anyway, I’m pretty sure given an environment where “wiggle-room” is not seen as a sign of weakness in argumentation, Sue would further acknowledge these complicating aspects of the debate, as indeed Harris does.
Even more positively Sue ends with what is really a Quine, which is a great Hofstadterian place to build evolutionary uderstanding of the full picture. “Mostly Harmless” Meta-Logic.
She says ” … belief in God is not just a harmless choice; it is a dangerous delusion.”
I would say that the idea that {the idea of belief in God is either a harmless choice or a dangerous illusion} is not just an (entirely) harmless choice; its a (partly) dangerous delusion.
Dichotomy kills.]
I see Sue Blackmore coined the idea of a third level of replicator above genes and memes, termed (so far) “temes” in her recent presentation to TED2008.
Not entirely convinced yet that this form of technology enabled memes are fundamentally different to memes. As she says herself, in discussing whether “artificial-meme” might be a better name “But really they are no more artificial that we are.”
Meme’s have benefitted from being technology enabled since the printing-press or maybe even the tabula-rasa or papyrus scrolls – whatever – maybe even the use of myths and symbols in story-telling ? This is really just a debate about what technology is, and our parochial human perspective of intelligence and communication.
It’s really the same debate as to whether Strong-AI need be considered “artificial” if it is indeed “intelligent”. The artifice is in a non-human-bio-physical substrate brain, and the debate as to whether such an intelligence is possible without a substrate that is actually living – artificial life. I’m beginning to believe the latter – that AI may prove impossible without AL (which would be wonderfully consistent with neither actually being “artificial”, and with quality evolutionary theory and experience of life before intelligence to date.)
Anyway, the term may be useful pragmatically; as we so often find “fundamental” definitive distinctions are rarely black-and-white anyway.
An aside … joining up the dots increasingly between Quality (a la Pirsig), Wisdom (a la Maxwell), Inclusionality (a la Rayner), and more recently IdentityTheory, and find the convergence between The Edge / Third-Culture and TED becomes ever greater. These latter two initiatives are on a much grander scale than the former 3 or 4, but the agendas converge – “Third-Culture” is as good a catch-all umbrella as any for these syntheses of classically scientific and traditionally romantic understandings of humans in the cosmos.
Social Justice Blog. One of several blogs at IdentityTheory.Com. Here’s a sample.
“AIDS has now been around for a quarter of a century, and the U.N. is holding a three-day conference on the virus. A group of 14 nations, led by France, is going to implement an airline tax to help pay for AIDS drugs. The U.S. Government is not willing to participate because they feel it’s more rational to try to convince everyone to be a virgin.”
The whole (agenda) elephant in one. One to watch. Note – the Joseph Epstein interview in the earlier Wisdom Research post was from IntentityTheory.Com
Two observations …
The last 2 or 3 months …. been getting repeated bursts of direct hits from “Limelight Networks” in Tempe, AZ. No idea why – are they testing out some content crawler at Uni of Az ?
Last couple of years …. I get constant search hits from people all over the world – east as well as west – looking for “rational comprehensive planning“. Something I ranted about way back. My considered view is that “rational planning is irrational action” – after Chris Argyris, Nils Brunsson, etc, oh and years of personal experience. Or if Tom Peter’s is your preferred management guru … “Ready fire aim” beats “Ready aim fire” in any non-trivial situation – guided missiles beat slings and arrows. How complicated can it be ? The dynamic fluidity of iterative feedback-driven processes.
A 3 year old post from Dave Pollard, that I spotted on a cross-hit, probably due to the fact that he self-referenced in a more recent post. Entitled “The End of Philosophy” and inlcuding a reading list with a lot of common ground here. The particular post concerns a review of a book called “Straw Dogs” [no connection] by John Gray. Worth a look ?
He quotes Gray
Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
I think that’s true, so long as we don’t destroy the biosphere on our watch. David Deutsch has a more positive spin, that humans (and any other high intelligence life, we’ve not yet encountered) actually has tremedous power and influence on the path of evolution whilst we’re a part of it. Whatever we destroy, evolution will continue from what’s left. Be a pity if it had to start again from a pre-biological cosmos ?
I know where I want “us” to get, but I wouldn’t want to start from there 😉