Month: January 2009

As promised herwith a few pointers to those items of interest in answers to the 2009 Edge Question.

Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions.
THE TORONTO STAR

Sue Blackmore – predictably, when some other “artificial” technological meme replicator becomes better (for the memes and their replication) than the human mind, humans are dispensible.

David Bodanis – that’s more like it, predictably unpredictable. Science in crisis.

Science brings magic from the heavens. In the next few decades, clearly, it will get stronger. Yet just as inevitably, some one of its negative amplitudes — be it in harming health, or security, or something as yet unrecognized — will pass an acceptable threshold. When that happens, society is unlikely to respond with calm guidelines. Instead, there will be blind fury against everything science has done.

Nicholas Humphrey – more of the same, expect a revolution, but don’t predict a changed outcome.

Dan Sperber – Ditto. Expect a clash between safety and liberty.

P  Z Myers – Biology in Minnesota (Intriguing, but I digress …) … when humans (in general / critical mass) finally accept evolution for what it is, it will change who we are. Interestingly and scarily Dawkins’ answer is about a tangible demonstration of interbreeding that might tip that balance. Scott Sampson too, evolution changes everything. (Nice to see PZ in this illustrious list BTW).

Jesse Bering – An evolved god.

Richard Foreman – nothing changes everything. (See Bodamis and Humphrey above.)

Christine Finn – a simple change of perspective in how we map to the world.

Dan Dennett – right again.

When we look closely at looking closely, when we increase our investment in techniques for increasing our investment in techniques… for increasing our investment in techniques, we create non-linearities, — like Doug Hofstadter’s strange loops — that amplify uncertainties, allowing phenomena that have heretofore been orderly and relatively predictable to escape our control. We figure out how to game the system, and this initiates an arms race to control or prevent the gaming of the system, which leads to new levels of gamesmanship and so on.

The snowball has started to roll …. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure — packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity.

Gloria Orrigi – reputation and trust – how we achieve social aggregation of “judgement”.

Betsy Devine – the economics of happiness – post 2008 melt-down.

Actually I’m going to stop there … the theme is this. If we care that humans are part of the future of the evolutionary, game-theory, cui-bono arms-race then we need to add quality values to our accounting for quantitative objects. It may take a major piece of Schumpeterian creative destruction before we really see that, so what we need is cultivate a meme that might lead us through (and survive) such a disaster before it happens. Otherwise we have all the pain without any of the benefit in a lesson learned. Game on.

In the previous post – more on the interminable God vs Science saga – I concluded with a reference to Chicago.

Firstly, the reason I was browsing Mary Hrovat’s Thinking Meat was because I noticed she’d blogged an initial look at this year’s Edge question, which I’d not done yet, but she already concluded as I have done a couple of times before

As always, no matter how many of the answers I read, I feel like I’ve just barely dipped my toes in. However, here are a few that I found particularly interesting …

Anyway, I must take a look myself and see if there is anything or anyone interesting this year.

Back to Chicago. There has been a vague Chicago thread in my stuff; Greeks, the Great Books movement, Pirsig, Rorty, US pragmatist philosophy and some kind of second city vs the east coast seats of learning angle. Led me one way or another to reading Saul Bellow, though someone (Georganna ?) initially steered me off this avenue.

So far with Bellow I’ve read Dangling Man, Dean’s December, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift. Dangling Man was simple and reflective. I liked it and blogged about it.

Dean’s December I enjoyed its mix of Chicago and Eastern European settings, but it didn’t seem deep. Chicago underworld, race, city authority and academic politics meets a dark depressing European farce, the latter reminding me of Ishiguro’s “Unconsoled”.

Herzog I struggled with and still haven’t completed – I even forgotten what its theme was, except that there was a large dose of Bellow as god’s gift to women / love interest which kinda jarred with the philosophical threads.

Humboldt’s Gift, I must have already bought because I can’t imaging why else I would have picked it up to read after Herzog. Glad I did, despite the fact that there is till a strangely prominent sexual power, fame and fortune thread which ties together the gangster and intellectual writer & name-dropper stories within stories. So many subjects evocative of Pirsig too – post-war emergence of society from Victorian attitudes and the place of intellect in that. Much of Bellow’s content was copyrighted in ’73 and ’74  when published as extracts in Esquire,  Pirsig’s  ZMM was published in ’74 and Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift in ’75. Pirsig’s Lila not until ’90.

There was something in that Chicago air.

Significantly also, the first thing I’ve read that has joined these themes to my interest in T E Lawrence. I am no longer alone there.

[Post Note : Unexpected subject in Humboldt’s Gift is a strong Steiner / Anthroposophy thread.]

Continuing reading … started both Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” over the holiday but neither gripped me, the latter I’ll not bother to pursue though I’m glad I investigated both first-hand.

I also started Jorge Luis Borges collection “Labyrinths”. Read a couple of his before in collections / extracts by others and read five stories / essays so far. Weird and thought provoking stuff all of it. Next to read is “The Library of Babel” which I’m looking forward to as a Dan Dennett fan. Recognized “The Garden of Forking Paths” from a a previous encounter – a “many worlds” analogy. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was an excellent surprise – a PoMo grammatology exercise on how someone could write word for word exactly the same huge text (as Cervantes’ Don Quixote) over 300 years later and still be considered to have written the original – by virtue of different times, different society, different history – effectively different language with different meanings despite the same words. Wittgensteinian word games writ large, and of course leading nicely into the mount improbability uses by Dennett of the Library of Babel metaphor. Can’t wait.

Mildly interesting piece on the God vs Science topic from Science Daily (via Mary Hrovat). I say mildly interesting, because what is interesting is neither the research, nor the conclusion, but the fact that it really answers nothing.

Sounds like serious, controlled, empirical science (from the Universities of Illinois and Chicago, published as Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations, by Jesse Preston and Nicholas Epley. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 238-241), though I can’t tell enough about the logic of what the subliminal messaging in the experimental procedure has to do with it, but the conclusion seems 100% common sense:

“What is really intriguing is that the larger effect happens on the opposite belief,” she said. “When God isn’t being used to explain much, people have a positive attitude toward science. But when God is being used to account for many events — especially the things that they list, which are life, the universe, free will, these big questions — then somehow science loses its value.”

“On the other hand, people may have a generally positive view of science until it fails to explain the important questions. Then belief in God may be boosted to fill in the gap,” she said.

ie hardly intriguing.  However, whilst this final implication also seems true, it remains hung up on the horns of its own dilemma:

The most obvious implication of the research is that “to be compatible, science and religion need to stick to their own territories, their own explanatory space,” Preston said. “However, religion and science have never been able to do that, so to me this suggests that the debate is going to go on. It’s never going to be settled.”

Like, how to “divide” space into distinctly relevant territories without some world model (ontology, epistemology or metaphysics if you prefer) to start with, something more fundamental than either science or god. This paradoxical circularity rings true for me of course.

(The Chicago connection is intriguing again … what is it about Chicago ?)

Plenty of people posting reviews of 2008 and resolutions for 2009.

Detectable in the hits on my site too. I mentioned once or twice during 2008 that I was getting a bit fed-up with the proportion of hits not just from search engines (eg Google, mainly) , with no dwell time from the human user on the other side of the engine, and particularly those from search engine crawlers just creating their indexes. If I’m honest, 80% of hits in 2008 were of this type, maybe 60% of the counted hits in the 7 year life of Psybertron.

Of the real (human) hits, apart from the obvious Pirsig related enquiries, two subjects that get weird hit frequenies are (a) “arguments against Maslow”; just about every hit on Maslow in some sense negative,  and (b) “rational comprehensive planning”; something I pooh-poohed in one post a while back.

Since the new year – three whole days – I would say 95% of hits have involved real users reading and clicking links, still mostly Pirsig and philosophy & evo-psych related (only some of whom are “the usual suspects” exercising their curiosity).

Specifically there were a handful each of both Maslow and RCP subjects with reversed interests … positively for Maslow, negatively questioning rational comprehensive planning.