What, Why & How do we Know ?
Bergson scholar Emily Herring 2017 piece in the Annals of Science is worth a read for the Bergsonian influence on the modern evolutionary synthesis. I was struck early on by the sentence quoted below, a recurring theme for me of the idea that one’s own supersaturated (dense and incoherent) thoughts often crystalize (cohere) around a … Continue reading “Henri Bergson, Julian Huxley’s Seed Crystal?”
Mentioned being impressed with Carlo Rovelli’s references in Helgoland to Aleksander Bogdanov. I considered Bogdanov an entirely new source to me just earlier this year. [Holding post – collecting links etc.] I’ve also mentioned previously, as a “social-democratic liberal” type myself, being very impressed with (Marxist) Paul Mason’s “Project Zero” in his Post Capitalism. What … Continue reading “Bogdanov”
Noted only in the past year, after getting very engaged with the work of Whitehead recently that I needed to give credit to a strong link between him and Pirsig that had crossed my path unnoticed back in 2006. With information and computation proving an ever more fundamental part of my agenda since the outset … Continue reading “Linking Links – It’s Already Connected”
Just capturing a link to the AntiMatter blog pages of Cormac O’Rafferty. (Like me he blogs about plenty of current affairs and global politics beyond his academic teaching interest in physics. For me these are in fact deeply connected via human memetics and social decision making – in both science and politics.) Capturing the link … Continue reading “Cormac O’Raifeartaigh / O’Rafferty”
This is a short post to address the additional “eastern” perspective missing from the post note in my previous blog on the London Thinks “How Do We Believe” event. Here on Psybertron, much of the philosophical journey was informed early on by the qualities of Zen / Tao thinking introduced to millions by Robert Pirsig with … Continue reading “Additional “Eastern” Thoughts.”
(Editorial Note : This paper was originally prepared for the 2005 Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). It is a personal non-technical view of the MoQ, and indeed the first part of paper is an entirely subjective and naive account of the author’s “thought journey” that led to reading Pirsig … Continue reading “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid”
Finished Unger & Smolin. Having breezed through Roberto Unger’s 2/3, Lee Smolin’s 1/3 was tougher going. As advertised, this is not “popular science” writing and Smolin drops into the mathematical, symbolic and technical weeds of several aspects of many different theories in physics from quanta and string-theories to cosmogeny itself, and he does it in very clipped highlights, referring … Continue reading “Unger & Smolin – an important read for anyone interested in the future of science.”
The political philosopher Roberto Unger and the cosmologist / physicist Lee Smolin have jointly written “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” and its release last month had already been promoted as a landmark work. It’s actually two books, one by each of them, with common introduction and index. So far, in addition to … Continue reading “Cosmology in Crisis – Unger & Smolin sweeping away the metaphysical gloss.”