"Troubleshooter" in the Enlightened Caveman thread provides this link.

Actually it's funny, but it's not lighthearted is it ? It's quite chilling how true it is. It's even more chlling that the creator (of the cartoon) felt he had to use Norse mythology as his foil, rather than christianity. Now I am being paranoid.

File under "many a true word" and "every picture paints".

Post Note : Looking beyond the cartoon link, there is quite a bit of thinking here that gels exactly with mine - there is some critique of the creationists quest to get their "theory" on an equal footing with the other one on school curricula. How many times have we referenced that ? Two specific points ..

(1) The Darwinist gets to say something important before he get's it - Evolution is a theory the elegantly explains the available data AND is supported by empirical ...

(2) He says - It?s always both cute and pathetic listening Fundamentalists try to use the language of empiricism to try to defend their wonky myths and superstitions, sort of like seeing chimpanzees wear little human clothes or very young children trying to use polite etiquette. They can approximate the form, but they just don?t get the content. They don?t understand what the word ?theory? means; they confuse correlation with causality; they argue by analogy; they can?t keep a grip on logic. I?m not going to waste any space in this artist?s statement explaining or arguing for the theory of evolution; it?s like having to argue for the theory of gravity or electricity. And anyway, there?s no point in engaging advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design in debate as though they really accepted enlightenment values or could be convinced by evidence or persuaded by rational discourse. There?s no reason to talk to them at all.

This "lighthearted note" is deadly serious, and correct.

You're right Robert - Tim Kreider's Pain Comics site is very good. This is not a space you can work in without humour. When will it all end ? is the desperate message though. Eclectic set of lists too - Beefheart Bacon Zappa Nietsche Kubrick Axis-of-Eve Mongoloidian-Glow rubbing shoulders.

Nice to get a word of encouragement in response to the previous post - thanks Georganna. I've actually stepped out of both threads of debate, purely for a breather - I'll be back. I don't want to go the same way as Pirsig, exhaustion to the point of total breakdown, "in the effort to outflank the entire body of western thought". It sure is hard work.

I genuinely don't want to waste the breath - like Dennett, amongst others who "peremptorily dismiss" such issues of faith in any kind of purposeful causal god, my preferred tactic is just to ignore and if necessary reject out of hand any such suggestions. However there are good and bad theologians and some, after overcoming the initial offence, do seem prepared for open debate - open to everything except a change of premise it seems. What is the point ? Well none it turns out, if I explain to you my thought for today, really just another re-statement of my Catch-22 I guess.

I think I've stumbled on something. Clearly religious faith is in deep in all socio-political structures. Religious faithful were never my target - are still not a "target" at all - I really would ignore them if they went away to mind their own business. There is clearly another suggestion (equally offensive, no doubt) of an element of religious faith for the non-intellectual who just want something convenient to plug the mysterious gaps in the world - isn't that Marx's opiate of the people ? Anyway, as long as people who'd really rather not worry about difficult questions never get into positions of power and influence then we might be OK.

The dangerous ones are those who are either cynically exploitative (I might say evil) in their power, or worse still, the buggers who seem to want to argue using "dishonest intellect" - and this is the key point - that dishonesty is of course generally NOT pre-meditated NOR evil NOR a conspiracy (see exceptions above). Of course it looks to have a conspiracy behind it, in exactly the same way the creation looks to have an intelligent designer behind it. What it is, is the same widespread misplaced western faith in objective / logical positivism. Exactly the same. As in exactly. Using that misplaced style of argumentation, you can indeed convince / be convinced you are right in your faith. The intellectual argument is not so much "dishonest" as plain misguided.

The very problem I was trying to find a solution to for more parochial "business management" reasons. I always knew it spread across all "organisational decision making", right to the highest national and international government and non-government organisations, but until this moment I had never spotted it was exactly the same problem "western" churches suffered from. How right Pirsig was with his "Church of Reason" - even if he was using "church" in the more figurative sense.

Oh my god, this is truly awful. The logical positivist memeplex reinforces the religious memeplex. Science has unwittingly been it's own worst enema.

So back to plan A. The original plan was in fact correct. Ignore them as politely as possible and keep working to get "higher quality" argumentation and decision rationale in at a very simple level, far away from the battlefront. Evolution always needed segregation and nurture as well as comptetition for survival. We need a domain where the meme has space to replicate, re-inforce, meet complementary memes, breed a nice healthy memeplex and some suitably supportive environmental conditions, and then find opportunities for stealthy break-out into the wider world.

So, we're looking for a godless place to breed. Don't you just love the dirty jobs.

(And psst - as I said, it neeeds to be a conspiracy, kept secret from those other buggers. Talk about Catch-22. Mum's the word.)

I'm getting into a tight corner on MoQ-Discuss, where it has been impossible to avoid debate between scientific belief and religious faith. At least we've got the level down below the history of global politics and war, where there is some chance of debate rather than propagandised gain-saying. As you know I've been in many respects anti-science, or at least anti the extreme-logical-positivist or exclusively-scientific-fundamentalist aspects of some applications of "science" in management in particular. (I see even Enlightened Caveman is embroiled in an identidal debate - this god stuff is pernicious, gets everywhere.)

However, finding myself practically a universal Darwinist - most real world change processes have some element of "copy, vary, select" - I can't help but reject any kind of intellient designer creationism, or indeed any purposeful, causal "god" real or metaphorical.

I made the point that what was convincing about science, "quality of explanation", was not exclusive to science, and lumped just about any of the intellectual spheres of thought into the same pot philosophers, artists, ologists of practically any kind. Except theologians, where either such explanations were not made, or if they were, were constructed with "dishonest intellect" using false logic and premises of mediaeval science. I was not alone, but seem to be carrying the brunt of the demand for explanation. (See David Deutsch posts earlier for post-Popperian scientific explanations.)

Anyway faced with "explain what you mean by science, or at least a high-qualty explanation" I spotted via Sue Blackmore the "Spiked" Guardian survey of 250 scientists asked "What one thing do you think everyone should know about science" as part of the Einstein / e=mc2 centenary year of science. (The full survey is here, along with more analysis.)

Some of it is quite predictable - Dawkins' plea against intelligent design ... some of it is fairly simple, single tangible examples from that scientist's sphere, targetted for a lay public .... and a good deal of it focusses on uncertainty, and the intent of scientific method, as the distinguishing aspect of science.

In fact the majority are about the easy half of scientific method - the disproving of false hypotheses - very little said about the creativity of formulating good candidate hypotheses, and explaning why before subjecting them to falsification.

Well I'm still reading - only 200 to go, but I've reached the D's - and lo David Deutsch is amongst them. Sadly he was lost for words, or rather refused to be drawn on a single fact - so responded "read my book" (which as recorded earlier is about how not one but four distinct threads support each other as the most fundamental science). I know he's right, but it's a pity he missed that chance. He didn't make the cut to the Guardian summary.

Or in this case, "It was a tongue-in-cheek idea which seemed to catch the imagination." says Pep Torres, inventor of this Spanish battle-of-the-sexes work-sharing washing machine.

Isn't it always the way. Technology and intellect are nothing without imagination and humour.

I referred to the Alexander McCall-Smith Von Igelfeld Trilogy described as a farcical germanic Frasier / Clousseau mix. Well its true, but it was thought prvoking in a philosophical kind of way - the farce allows a surreal world to supplant the supposedly real, but who knows which is which kind of thing. Truth stranger than fiction.

Like Don Quixote, which I've just started reading, there is an element of the writer writ, the reader read. The Von Igelfeld character is a writer whose only repute is through his written work, that no-one has read. I notice McCall-Smith's third work is "The Sunday Philosophy Club".

Very impressed with the Carlos Fuentes introduction to "The Modern Library CLassics" edition of Tobias Smollett's translation of Cervantes, as well as Smollett's own description of the life of Cervantes. Fuentes quotes Bachelard "But when science, ethics, politics and philosophy disciver their own limitations, they appeal to literature to go beyond their insufficiencies. Yet they only discover with literature itself, the permanent divorce between words and things." Summarising Erasmus, who was a major influence on Cervantes, through his tutor Juan Lopez de Hoyos, Fuentes says "The Erasmian folly, set at the crossroads of two cultures [faith and reason], relativises the absolutes of both: this is a madness critically set in the very heart of faith, but also at the very heart of reason. The Madness of Erasmus is a questioning of man by man himself, reason by reason itself, and no longer by god, sin or the devil. Thus revitaised, man is no longer subjugated to fate or faith; but neither is he the absolute master of reason."

Nothing new under the sun, again. Why are we still stuck in this dualist battle 400 years later ?

I also love all the "first modern novel" allusions, and the cross links to Shakespear's Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. I had no idea. I think I'm going to learn something in the next 1100 pages of close-spaced tiny print !.

[Oh yeah, and Reading blew it, losing at home to Wolves after leading - Oh well, all down to hoping for results on the final day of the season next Sunday.]

Been watching a TV documentory about Australian management practices (can't find a link for now ... ) and was struck by a quote from a Harvard guy, that echoed with the one I keep using from John Z DeLorean - "Committees of moral men make immoral decisions."

The quote yesterday was "So many board members seem to lose their ethics in the car on the drive to the office." The game in the boardroom is about pushing the envelope of the legally possible, not "what is right". Quite different from their domestic behaviour with family and friends, most of them go to church (sic). Partly it was seen as a detachment issue - reaching the boardroom as a retirment reward, rather than a job affecting people - but whatever the mechanism, the behaviour is real enough.

Saw the H2G2 film this evening. Remarkably good; story, effects and the point - all pretty true to the first book, as true as any screenplay adaptation. The John Malkovich character the only superfluous addition. The planetary construction scene is indeed impressive. Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast steals the show. The whole presentation seemed quite literal, new audiences should have no trouble following the narrative, powerful stuff.

(And Sunderland are Champions. Whoohoo ... More importantly The Royals get the edge over Hammers for that final play-off place. So close this season, even the one extra goal conceded by Hammers drops them behind the Royals. Unlucky Mr Pardew. Enjoy the party Mr McCarthy.)

One of the claimed opportunities for quantum information processing is highly secure private key encryption - here demonstrated in real time encryption and decryption of each frame of streamed video.

I see from the linked stories, the other more interesting aspect, non-local entanglement over real world distances also demonstrated (1mm and 600m mentioned). The encryption aspect is really just a result of the power, the processing density, of Qubits, but the non-locality raises all sorts of causality bypasses in real world physics, and communication channels behind the electromagnetic "ether". Hence my interest in basic questions of what is information anyway !!!

(And Stevie Elliott puts Sunderland ahead of the Hammers ... Yeehah, .... 1:2 with 2 minutes to go. Hammers biggest crowd of the season, 33,400 leaving in droves, 90 minutes up, 4 minutes added.)

Almost a week since I posted. Too many domestic (relocation to Australia) chores. Been active philosophically on MoQ-Discuss e-mail forum, trying to raise the bar as far as scientific explanation being more than "scientific method".

Since finishing David Deutsch and "The Rule of Four" I've been reading "The Two and a Half Pillars of Wisdom - The Von Igelfeld Trilogy" by Alexander McCall Smith (Author of "The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency"). Amusing, if a little stereotypically British about stereotypical Germans "A blend of the cultivated pomposity of Frasier Crane and the hapless gaucherie of Inspector Clouseau." says the cover blurb aptly. As I say, amusing with "philological" intellectual references. Flood of reminiscences as the central character is asked what he would most like to do in life that he has not yet had the opportunity to do "Study and work in Cambridge" he says, and for all the reasons I miss the place. Oh well.

Of course it was the title caught my eye. What with WWI in focus with the ANZACs suffering at Gallipoli against the Turks and other disasters like Townshend surrendering to the Turks at Al Kut in Iraq - T. E. Lawrence "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" was clearly just below the surface.

Anyway, whilst waiting for the following to arrive ...

* Dennett - "Freedom Evolves"
* Dennett - "Consciousness Explained"
* Dennett - "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"
* Hofstadter and Dennett - "Mind's I"
* Hofstadter - "Godel, Esher, Bach"
* Chalmers - "The Conscious Mind - In Search of a Fundamental Theory"
* Blackmore - "Consciousness, An Introduction" (to replace one I gave away)
* Neville - "Magic Circle" (suggested by Georganna in response to hype around The Rule of Four and The Da Vinci Code) - out of print, must find a used copy.

... prompted by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, I picked up Cervantes' Don Quixote (The Tobias Smollett translation). Something I probably ought to have read already.

(Almost forgot - what a great coillection of book links from Rage Boy / Entropy Gradient Reversal.)

No one I spoke to in the club of the above name (in Northbridge, Perth) seemed to have heard of George Thorogood and his "Bad to the Bone". Still ... the place has live blues bands 5 nights a week, and tonight had two acts on. The venue has only recently organised itself to that format, so management and staff were keen to please, and attract an audience for future nights.

The first duo, rhythm / vocal and lead semi-acoustic covered a wide range of bluesy-country-folk-rock. Apart from the Kalgoorlie to Port Hedland "road" blues number, the two that stuck were covers of Dylan's "Times They Are a-Changin'" and Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" - both in the vocalist's own style, rather than a karaoke imitation style. Brave for such well -known classics.

The next act were a 4-piece (2x Strat) blues rock outfit called "The Gators". A tight unit, but quickly apparent that they were the latest vehicle for guitarist "Paul Felton" - it was their first gig together. Says something about the quality of both the rhythm section and the lead that they were tight throughout. Paul impressed on The Animal's "Misunderstood" and on Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door". "Misunderstood" introducing Paul's understated right hand pinched harmonics, and the latter giving free reign to his solo virtuosity. So simple, but so effective.

I've seen a few rock guitarists in my time, Joe Satriani most recently, Slim Hamster and Bill Puplett most memorably, but Paul is up there in the top handful. Worth catching.

April 25th, next Monday, is ANZAC Day here in Australia, commemoration of war dead, the particular date being that of the ill-fated landings at Gallipoli in 1915.

I can't think of Gallipoli without thinking of Shane McGowan's baleful rendition of "And The Band Played Walzing Matilda" by The Pogues.

[The event remains a particularly poignant defining moment for the then very young nations of Australia and New Zealand, who "came of age" in the ANZAC involvement in the great war, starting at Gallipoli and ending in France, and in doing so discovered their stiff-upper-lipped colonial-ex-masters couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, even if ironically, they did organise an evacuation without a single fatality. As well as defining Australia and New Zealand, the event also effectively created Turkey out of the Ottoman empire, as hero Mustafa Kemal went on to become Attaturk - Father of the Turks. Churchill resigned over Gallipoli, not simply taking the rap as non-executive head of the operation, but also for his original pre-war blunder in confiscating two British-built Turkish warhips. As well as the 9000 Anzac dead, 86,000 Turks, 9,000 French and 21,000 British, including many Irish home-rulers at the time, all perished. Not to mention the countless maimed, and the ongoing historical repercussions, as the song reminds us.]

When I was a young man I carried my pack
And I lived the free life of a rover
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback
I waltzed my Matilda all over

Then in nineteen-fifteen my country said son
It's time to stop rambling 'cause there's work to be done
So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun
And they sent me away to the war

And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we sailed away from the quay
And amidst all the tears and the shouts and the cheers
We sailed off for Gallipoli

How well I remember that terrible day
When the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter

Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well
He showered us with bullets, and he rained us with shells
And in five minutes flat he'd blown us all to hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia

And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped to bury our slain
And we buried ours and the Turks buried theirs
Then it started all over again

Now those who were living did their best to survive
In that mad world of death, blood and fire
And for seven long weeks I kept myself alive
While the corpses around me piled higher

Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit
And when I awoke in my hospital bed
And saw what it had done, Christ I wished I was dead
Never knew there were worse things than dying

And no more I'll go waltzing Matilda
To the green bushes so far and near
For to hang tent and pegs, a man needs two legs
No more waltzing Matilda for me

So they collected the cripples, the wounded and maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The legless, the armless, the blind and insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla

And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where me legs used to be
And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me
To grieve and to mourn and to pity

And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As they carried us down the gangway
But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared
And they turned their faces away

And now every April I sit on my perch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving the dreams of past glory

I see the old men, all twisted and torn
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask me, what are they marching for ?
And I ask myself the same question

And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me ?

I've just spent several hours downloading software and registering with Real, Napster and MusicMatch on-line MusicStores as pointed to my MP3.COM so I can legally buy and download music tracks (rather than whole physical CD's from the likes of good old Amazon). Each let me download, install, register and log-in before advising that their service is only available to US residents.

WTF (iTunes next I guess.)

Or back to BigPond - which seemed to work initially, but the UI had no buttons to get past "Checkout" and seems to have charged me for tracks I've found no way to download. Grrrr. (Now seems I've paid 3 times for one track and failed to download every time.)

Omigod, even iTunes doesn't work in Oz.

OK, so where else can I buy music on-line in Oz.

NineMSN and HMV all utter cr*p too. Very limited range of material available for download. Oh well off to the real (physical) record store it seems.

Not quite sure what Jorn is saying in his link, but this review by James Wood in the Guardian of the recently deceased Saul Bellow's work is certainly intriguing. Think I may have to sample a little to get the message.

An Indian community stripped of its main asset, water, with predictable consequences and a lot more besides, by a local Coca-Cola plant. This stuff is never rocket science, but how do things get like this. Committees of moral men making immoral decisions again ? [CounterPunch] [via Robot Wisdom]

Google.org that is ... [Slashdot] [via Robot Wisdom].

Not to be outdone by Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin - declare their philanthropic intent.

Well, actually, they already have ...

After the "Poetics" (in The Name of the Rose) you had the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" (in The Rule of Four, Princeton), now read the "Oxyrhynchus Papyri" (in real-life, Oxford University) - new technology allows reading of long lost classics - Sophocles, Euripides to name a few ... [Independent Online] [via Robot Wisdom]

Neat idea from ZipCar (Can you tell I've been catching up reading the BBC site this morning ?)

It's just car-hire with technology used to increase time and space slicing efficiency - "public" (subscription) transport in on-demand packets - I'm sure we've all had the idea. The really neat part is the idea that "For every ZipCar on the road, 20 private cars become redundant".

Will the motor industry lobby ever let this work ? Go ZipCar.

Japanese official denial of Nanking as a significant tragedy, continues to justify anti-Japanese sentiment (and action) in (Mainland, People's Republic of) China. I've just come back from a trip through Chiang Kai-Shek airport in (Taiwan, island Republic of) China.

Can't help thinking it is significant that the occupants of Nanking, Chiang Kai-Shek's "nationalist" army and Kuomintang governement, were then engaged in a civil war power struggle with the Communist Chinese before fleeing Nanking to Taiwan. Dare I suggest that Japan's (normaly honorable) attitude to their enemy in Nanking might have been colluded, encouraged, at least tolerated by the communists at the time.

For example, I find it odd that the strong anti-Japanese sentinment is "on the winning side" in PRC, whereas the concern with this period of history remains strong in ROC. Does the PRC sentiment over Nanking, really reflect a popular PRC sympathy for the ROC, despite ongoing official cold relations - reaching sabre-rattling invasion threats as recently as only a couple of weeks ago ? Had me nervous about the trip to Taipei CKS in fact.

Does the suggestion of PRC official tolerance of the popular PRC protests suggest the PRC government is itself emotionally ready to resolve this triangle of guilt, or at least exposing that it sees itself on the horns of a dilemma ?

(Must look out for official and unofficial ROC attitudes to this PRC / Japan situation.)

Sadly ironic to note in the story [via BBC] of the recently-convicted-for-life Algerian Al-Qaeda police-murderer and ricin-terrorist that, on the one hand, the police chief is playing down religion (99.99% of moslems are law abiding, etc), whilst the bereaved family is playing up it's christian faith.

Football that is. Yeovil fan just walked up to me here in Changi, keen to check the Southend result from last night - they lost to Orient.

That means if Yeovil beat Kiddy today, they're in champions spot apparently. Interestingly Reading were interested in the defeat of Blades by Derby last night - now we only need Millwall to beat Hammers for our play off place to be entirely in our own hands.

The connection ? Johnny Mullins of Reading is on loan at Kiddy and being influential according to manager Watkiss, who wants to extend the loan. (Though he's an injury doubt for this particular game.)

Football outside the premiership really is interesting these days - so many outcomes dependent on so many results with just a few games to go yet again this season.

... or maybe France ... Gibberish, computer generated "scientific" paper is accepted for conference in Orlando [via BBC]. To be fair, it was passed unreviewed by default due to missing reviewing milestones. So no-one was actually conned by its content, unilke the French existentialist quantum genetics (?) example earlier, but Oh Dear.

Perversely, I've just been corresponding with Chris over at Enlightened Caveman about the difficulties of getting serious, thoughtful but amateur material published or even read in academic channels.

And ... His Essence ? ... did I get that right - CNN in the background again - Hand lotion and wax candles infused with "His" essence from some holy spring - who buys this stuff ? Who thinks it up ?

File under conspiracy - see below.

Finished reading Caldwell and Thomason's "Rule of Four" in transit here at Changi.

As I predicted in the previous post the theme becomes "Love Conquers All" - with the reminder of the double edged meaning in that aphorism - "mis-directed love destroys anything" is not a recipe for happy endings - though this book does indeed have a predictable one - just like the eponymous US version of Brazil.

Anyway whoever described The Rule of Four as The Name Of The Rose in the style of Donna Tartt's Secret History was spot on. So many plot components are straight from Eco - not least the conflagration destroying the evidence (or does it ? type suspense), the labrynthine passages and stairs, the whodunnit murders, the dead-languages intellectual and philosophical references, and the poisoned paper trick. Had they never read Eco ? Did they not have an editor who had ? Either way I might be embarrassed.

The main theme is the same - western / christian church suppression of renaissance knowledge originating with the mediterranean, middle and eastern ancients. In The Rule of Four, the evil side is simply academic competitiveness personal jealousies and loves - no suggestion of a Da Vinci Code style institutional conspiracy of secrecy over the ages. The quote from St Paul's Gospel neatly sums it up "I [god] am going to destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of any who understand". Compare that with David Deutsch's understanding or Sue Blackmore's open mind if you dare. (A certain irony in the TV news headlines playing in the background beside me here - "The world waits for the announcement of the next pope ...")

It's a conspiracy allright, A metaphorical conspiracy of memes.
But it's no secret, it's on CNN, that's how memes work.

Actually I'm being unfair, Rule of Four is not a bad read in its own right, but I'd recommend the others mentioned here ahead of it. Except of course unlike the Da Vinci Code the fictional / mythical aspect of the source material content - The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - is acknowledged, even though the mysterious book itself is real.

Some annoying cliches throughout - constant references for the hard of thinking, to the significance of changing pronouns in dialogue - and the obligatory "love-interest", but the style and phrasing makes an entertaining read - Echoes of Raymond Chandler in the character descriptions early on, and some creative quotable phrases throughout.

"[She] can be heard muttering in dead languages to the books around her; A taxidermist whispering to her pets."

"[He] speaks in shades of the obvious; Some stopgap between his mouth and mind gone missing"

Also a nice variation on the existing ...
"Some things have to be believed to be seen",
"Belief creates", or
"Belief has to be-lived"
... Caldwell and Thomason have ...
"Only a man who sees giants can ever stand upon their shoulders".
I liked that.

Almost blogged this BBC news story about Hitachi's new technology to shift disk storage up an order of magnitude a few days ago. But I needed to see (and hear) this from the Toronto McLuhan Message blog before I actually did it. Neat.

Browsing Gimbo, which has changed since I last looked (he's got married ?) the issues being blogged seem higher level. Several good posts - the UK Government ID Card story, The TinyURL (risks) story, and the women in sport (world full of idiots) link.

I was taken by the "risks" link simply because the link was catless.ncl.ac.uk which I recognised as the domain of Rivets (@ncl.ac naturally). Anyway the catalogue of risks (of IT mis-use in devices) makes interesting reading.

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ?

The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and since you could create the categories themselves, you could categorise the categories too, though I see no evidence of inheritance in the linking. I wonder if any of the others stretches that far. (Must look at both del.ici.ous and CiteULike again more closely.)

It's like this ...

If I have a category of "People" with 10 "Members"
And I have another category of "Animals" with 10 "Members", one of which is "People"
Does my click on "Animals" return 10 or 19 hits ?
64,000 dollar question.

If that's possible - then I make my categories aspectual - ie in terms of why the interest / intent / reason in the link, rather than simply "what is at the end of it", then Robert is your father's brother - Semantic Web - I think you'll find.

You may have read it here first.

OK, so the inescapable key of David Deutsch's world view is that the Everett / Wheeler idea of many worlds forming the multiverse, is ... well ... fundamental to all of reality.

I've said twice - once after his introduction and again after reading the whole of his Fabric of Reality - that Deutsch argues his case convincingly. The real world behaves virtually "as if" it was as it really is. However convincing, boy, is that gonna be hard to absorb into a natural world view.

Christian Hauck provided some helpful links to Max Tegmark's MIT work on the parallel universes aspect of the multiverse. Hmmm - do I really want to go there ? Seems unavoidable - I may be some time.

Seems I'm obsessed with Sue Blackmore - just re-read all the articles on her web site, again - particularly the mid-life-crisis post-50-years career switch from the paranormal expert to philosophy of mind novice. Such deep material, such human and witty delivery, and painfully open too.

Anyway after my fix, I'm reminded of the connection I was following - Sue's (and Dan Dennett's - see previous post) conclusion that conscious mind and free-will are illusions. Metaphorical ? yes; Illusory ? please no. Now, where was I - the link is David Deutsch's "explanation" of this as an error of our common sense model of the flow of time, using the Multiverse idea.

Following on from Sue Blackmore's works, I have at last ordered the Dan Dennett materials so I can read him in the original. Also ordered David Chalmers book - I guess I need to read that too, even if it seems I disagree with him on Qualia. (What I forgot to order but will do next time is some Hofstader - "Mind's I" presumably, since he was influential on Chalmers.)

Meantime, having read Sue, and followed that with David Deutsch, both impressive - I started reading Ian Stewart's "Flatterland" - the most recent of the sequels to Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 fictional Flatland. Interesting idea, and nice allegory to get your head round concepts you can't visualise in your current "world" - mainly dimensions beyond 3 in this case. [One omission that nags, is the idea of biological life in a 2D world - which as Martin Rees points out is impossible - a digestive tract splits you in two, unless you excrete through the same orifice you ingest - messy.] The thing that really gets in the way of my reading it is the dear diary, dear-unseen-correspondent please-lead-me-through-this-story style of Sophie's World. A real turn off now as it was then. Pity, I though Stewart's book on chaos was much better than Gleick's, .... in exactly the same way I prefer Talbot to Gladwell, hopefully not a UK vs US thing ?

Apparently not, I'm now reading Caldwell and Thomason's "Rule of Four". Picked up and blogged about the subject of this book - the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - soon after I'd read Donna Tartt's "Secret History", when I'd seen it described as being Eco's "Name of the Rose" written in the style of Donna Tartt. (Though since Dan Brown has ejaculated all over this memespace in the intervening year, I now prefer the UK Independent's rather snooty tag of "The Da Vinci Code for people with brains".) A promising start - like Tartt's Secret History the plot involves the riskier side of US College frat house traditions - Educated Genius vs Reckless Madness leading (presumably) to a Love (and Humour) Conquers All thesis. Anyway I'm hooked.

I said in the previous post that I owed David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality" a thorough review - well in my usual style I won't have time for that, but I can now precis my impression of his main messages, having just finished reading it over dinner.

Excuse some repetition with the couple of other blogs on this, but this book is worth it IMHO. This gonna be a long, but hopefully not too rambling, post. I've been excited since the introductory chapter, and not disappointed since - it covers, and necessarily exceeds, my own thesis very well, but is by any measure a must read book.

David's fabric of reality is woven from four threads of thought. Four threads which individually suffer from a common problem, but which together form the basis of a startlingly credible understanding of life, the universe and everything. Published in 1997, St Douglas of-the-whooshing-deadline Adams (RIP) said simply "A tremendously exciting book" - but I didn't notice that until after I'd read it myself. When I set out on this quest, I carefully warned myself of the trap of seeing a "model of everything" on the horizon - now I'm not so sure it is a trap.

I've often quoted William James warning that every generation see's age old issues as new problems and oportunities "of our time"- hype that goes back at least five thousand years in citable references. In Deutsch's own words his thesis is conservative, offering no startling change to the current best state-of-their-art explanations in their fields. Yet he says "I hope we shall not have to spend too long looking backwards..... It's time to move on." to a brave new world.

The common snag with the four main threads is that they are schools of thought that are pragmatically (instrumentally) accepted as best working explanations in their own fields, yet not only do they draw sceptical and offensive counter-attacks from the world at large, they are not easily accepted as prevailing world-views even by those practicioners that regularly depend on them.

These four ideas suffer an explanatory gap of which intutive common sense is sceptical ...

(1) Karl Poppers Epistemology - that the truth of what we know about the world is based on argument in response to problems we already see, rather than any absolute logical induction of any kind.

(2) Hugh Everett's Quantum Multiverse - that the best explanation of quantum behaviour, including interference, is the reality of many worlds - the multiverse, conveniently ignored by black box quantum recipes like the Copenhagen Interpretation.

(3) Alan Turing's Universal Computing Machine - that finite physical resources make tractable the computation of any problem with a solution in the physical world, with two corollaries - firtsly that there are no solutions (or any kind of mathematics) not in the physical world, and secondly that virtual reality can behave as and only as any physical reality.

(4) Darwinian / Dawkins' Evolution - that the existence and complexity of life is a matter of information replication - fundamentally nothing more, nothing less. Terrestrial life being constructed on a substrate of physics and chemistry does not mean that complex, emergent life is any less fundamental than any of the above concepts.

What Deutsch does is show how each of the above is explainable in terms of some combinations of all or part of each of the others - that together they form a consistent explanatory whole "better" than any other available models. Despite each having an explanatory gap, they plug each other's gaps to form a whole.

Deutsch hammers Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift" explanation of why each of the individual theories fails to assert itself as the accepted paradigmatic world view - the conservative defense mechanisms and (tendency to) schematic blindness that preserve old views. Kuhn's view is I guess a grotesque pastiche of a collection of no particular real scenarios, so Deutsch is maybe correct in that respect from the perspective of science and the professions. I suspect Kuhn's caricature is more true of competitive commercial affairs of business and economies, where his ideas have found wide acceptance in management theories.

Notwithstanding Deutsch's unifying expanatory power of the four (main) threads, the most powerful message for me - where my original focus was strictly epistemology - models of knowledge - but where I kept tripping up over the undoubted significance of all the other threads - is this.

Causality and free-will have perplexed many a thinker into arriving at the conclusion it's all an illusion. The fine Sue Blackmore arrived at that very depressing end-point as I noted only a couple of weeks ago, and as did Dan Dennett before her. Well David Deutsch's explanation is this - analysis leads to to that conclusion only because you believe in the common sensical "flow of time" model in this universe. With the quantum multiverse - all the open futures exist already - what causality does is determine which world which outcome really exists in. Tough to grasp, but convincingly argued.

Not only do free-will and causality exist, thanks to thread (2) but the consequence is immense for thread (4). Even if life turns out to exist only as terrestrial life in this solar system - (an insignificant stain of "scum" on an insignificant planet of an average sun nowhere special in an insignicant galaxy amongst countless others in this universe) - which is itself statistically highly unlikely given the multiverse of universes that exsist in reality - even if that were true - the future of the multiverse depends on the action of our life. Life is the most powerful force determining the future.

That is not just optimistic, it is quite frankly a daunting thought. You can understand the attraction of the pessimistic paradigm - Kuhnian or not.

This is a very important book. Go read.

[A few postscripts - off the main topic ...

For you Pisrigians - there's a nice line in the significance of history in explaining - well - anything, which should add fuel to the philosophy vs philosophology debate.

For those of you "pro-anti-qualia-ists", "immediate-experiencists", "what's-it-like-to-be-a-bat-ists", "brain-in-a-vat-ists", or "mary-the-colour-scientists" - there's an intersting treatise on universal virtual reality generators.

For you sci-fi fans, of which I'm not one, there is a nice angle on explaining so-called time-travel paradoxes.

For you quantum-computists - there is a surprising lack of holography, given the fundamental explanatory nature of quantum interference between the multiple-universes.

For you quantum-consciousness people - there is an sceptical view of large scale coherence (tubules or pixie-dust) supporting anything other than a classical computer in the brain-mind debate.

And many more goodies .... ]

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 !]

A BBC report on blogging, mainly on the freedom of speech angle and East vs West differences. However, as it says, if a problem shared is a problem halved, what is happening when millions share with millions ?

Wonder what Northrop would have made of blogging ?

At last I have domestic PC and Broadband working to day in Perth, WA. Business travel permitting, I should be getting more blogging time. May even take the plunge and go for WordPress implementation.

Leonid sent me some links to work by and about Stafford Beer recently. [eg A Time Whose Idea Must Come] 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 somwhere.

Just spent a week, over Easter weekend, playing tourists around Perth - mostly local to Perth, but got as far north as The Pinnacles - an alien landscape worth seeing - John Forrest Park - a pre-historic forest-scape worth seeing - plus the usual winery boat trip, fish'n'chips at Fremantle fisherman's wharf, plus wildlife park ... daily weather maximum went from 42C / Sunny to 18C / Rainy inside the week ...

Anyway the reason to blog ? ... whilst at the Aquarium of WA at Hillary's Marina, we witnessed a member of staff describing the "creator's design" of a leafy sea-horse to assembled visitors. The irony was Robbie had Darwin's "Origin of Species" in his backpack. It was all we could do to stand gob-smacked. Terrifying.

Strangely, reminiscing about Devo (Are We Not Men / Wiggly World) the other day with some colleagues, I recalled seeing Mark Mothersbaugh's name as creator behind US 30-somethings / family life / kids cartoon (name escapes me).

Anyway, saw on TV a couple of nights ago the film "The Royal Tenenbaums". What a gem I'd passed over previously. Excellent dysfunctional family drama - weirdly funny on so many levels with Gene Hackman, Angelica Houston, Bill Murray and others. The point is that the music soundtrack - original and selected, was by Mark Mothersbaugh, with Rob Casale as part of the band of musicians. Only spotted that in the closing credits, but no doubt the eclectic sounds had added to the weird experience.

I guess the film got recent airtime, because the same director's (name ?) latest opus, "The Life Aquatic" is just out or due for release. Bill Murray stars, with others from the previous cast in a story inspired by Jacques Cousteau's underwater adventures ?!?! If the trailers and the Tenenbaum's are anything to go by should be interesting and entertaining.

I've started David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality". From his quantum information work, and his acknowledgements to others like Artur Eckert (sp?) I was execting a dive straight into "here's why the world is realy made of quantum information" thesis. In fact the introduction is quite refreshing. A review of the philosophy of science and of philosophy itself. An ecouraging draw-back from the brink of logical positivism whereby everything (of any real world value) is predictable by logical derivation (induction) from empirical evidence. Predicting outcomes by formulae based on hypothesis and experiment, is merely the method of science, not its scope or purpose.

He believes a unifying theory of everything can explain and understand what is currently understood, but only what is understood; it can never presume to explain that which is not yet understood. ie in his original metaphor - it's possible for a single brain to understand everything (that is understood). Fair enough.

Dwelling on science as the explanation for everything in the world, neither holistic nor analytically reductionist, but by generalisation being able to explain and hence understand everything, brings in very early the concept that general underlying explanations may be truly valid even if they are practically useless for predictions through the emergent layers of complexity above.

Very promising. Part of my thesis is that there is no metaphysics. Physics as the most fundamental of the sciences is the place to look for the most general model of the world, underlying chemistry, biology and the rest of the "ologies".

The Calcutta Telegraph manages to bring a litte ironic wit to this tragic fight between the christian conservative right and the active left in US. [via BBC]

Talking of black humour the woman's maiden name is Schindler - I can't resist a smile each time I step into one of Schindler's Lifts in hotels around the world.

John Z DeLorean, is an unlikely hero, given his brushes with fraud and drug-dealing, but I often find myself quoting from his (ghost-written) eye-opening "On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors" - particularly "Committees of moral men can and often do make immoral decisions." - in relation to my high- / low-quality organisational decision-making thesis.

(Still not got domestic internet access yet, here in Perth, so limited on blogging time at the moment.)

Managed to spend two late afternoons on the beach this weekend, and finished Sue Blackmore's Meme Machine. I have to say I'm still a fan of Sue's writing, but I'm glad I didn't read her best-seller first. (Intriguing for me is that Sue's writing projects parallel in real-time my own amateur research - I didn't realise this, her most popular acclaimed book, was so recent - 1999.)

I buy the entire story about memes being an independent replicators, unleashed, and increasingly significant as comms become ubiquitous at the speed of light. ie the dog is no longer (never was) on a leash, but it is now in the driving seat, and furthermore has no longer any tendencies to favour hunter-gatherer / sexual-reproduction / mating-game genetic traits, hence the dog could just as well well be a bitch. That I buy.

What I don't buy is her depressing conclusion that we humans are powerless. I'm (surprisingly) with the hyper-rational Dawkins on this one - we are a species that can take control of evolution - genetic and memetic. Sue unfortunately comes down on the side of the idea that our "self" is a an illusion and free-will non-existent. I think she falls for her own anthropomorphic selfish-meme metaphor. It can no more be a matter of "it's all in the memes" any more than it could ever have been true to say either "it's all in the genes" or "it's god's will" - life's complicated enough, without trying to reduce it to a single issue.

Her last chapter is at least contradictory, if not hypocritical. How can she talk as if she and other intelligent humans have meme-recognition strategies, and yet memes are in control over humanity ? (I've read Dennett's Intentional Stance, but I'm going to have to read his Darwin / Consciousness / Memetic stuff in the original.) The illusory self stuff is a cop-out I feel. It's complicated and in looking for simple (scientific) black and white evidence all we find is metaphor - so what ? - that's true of 100% of reality (Come in Lakoff, your final call.) That doesn't mean the conscious self is merely illusion - only a metaphor - any more than any other reality we talk about. Talk is the clue.

(Oddly, she doen't make much of her Zen views of self and unity-with-reality in this context. Interesting to note that she includes Francis Heylighen in her web-list of significant people in memetics. What a tangled web.)

I see why in her bio-pen-picture she was described as previously being a researcher into paranormal phenomena, but that she is now a total sceptic. Alien-abductions and meeting-my-maker-at-the-end-of-a-near-death-tunnel type whacky stuff is clearly memetic - undisprovable myths to explain the mysterious. But I hope she's not cut herself off from the idea of non-local / non-causal communication channels out there in the ether - physics explains everything, but physics is not yet itself fully explicable in my book.

(Marsha, I see why Sue is sceptical of mysterious agent explanations of scary events, like near-death-experiences, and sleep-paralysis-fears - aren't we all - but she is not sceptical about the existence of those "paranormal" phenomena - she just prefers a 100% memetic explanation - as I say, in going 100%, she just goes too far.)

She is equally dismissive of Hameroff and Penrose - cellular micro-tubules governing quantum coherence - quoting the Churchlands again - "about as much use a pixie dust in explaining consciousness". I don't think Sue (or any other modern philosophical writer I've seen) has actually got to grips with understanding the weirdness of new phyiscs - a real pity, so close. When will I get the time to write on this ?

David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality" next.

Jorn used to use Google as a meme-watch, and I've noticed I'm doing the same with Google and other search hits on my site, reported by Site Meter.

One that sticks out - "Criticisms of Maslow". I've never had a hit by anyone looking for Abraham Maslow that did not also include the word "criticism" in the search string. Yes the guy focussed on a kind of intellectual middle-class in his work, but his analyses and thinking were pretty sound IMHO. His layering model is very Zen.

Alternate view of HP CEO Carly Fiorina, strongly worded by pre-Carly-ex-employee John Maloney.

(Only my second reference to Carly, previously positive.)

Actually the point of the story as noted by Piers at MonkeyMagic is that on any business measure, HP was immensely (like really, really) successful pre-Carly with a business policy of "dignity of the individual".

Still not got internet access domestically back in Perth, but hopefully will have within the week.

Watched the sun go down on the beach yesterday whilst reading Meme Machine. As I blogged previously Sue Blackmore is very, very good, and having finished her "Consciousness, An Introduction" I'm now reading her best seller - one that I've referred to and quoted indirectly many times, but never previously read.

Really excellent. Again, if I'd read it sooner, she'd have saved me a long journey through modern philosophers of mind. Huge list of references, racked-up whilst being laid-up with illness. Reassuring to find I've already covered a fair proportion of them myself - must actually read Dennett's main best-sellers - Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained - though I suspect Sue has done me a good job in summarising their main thrust.

Gist - she talks about memes not generally being high-fidelity replicators with only exceptional mutations, unlike genes. Some phrases and neologisms may be repeated verbatim (but we're talking language here) but most memes replicate the general idea - the gist, the essence - but with constant unwitting variations in subtlety of the concept understood or intended.

Unleashed - memes as truly independent replicators, ie not dependent on genes in the long-run, not simply an expension of genetic evolution. I think that's correct - they're not independent in the sense that memetic and genetic evolution can and do affect each other, but neither is led by the other. Clearly if brains die out, memes will fall on hard times, but equally memes can control the environment in which brains evolve. Remembering that the "selfishness" of replication intent is an anthropomorphic metaphor, it nevertheless suggests an uneasy alliance between competing drives.

My view - in a physicalist sense memes came after genes but before religious memeplexes - For individual memes, selfish intent may be only a metaphor, but for widely held beliefs, collective conscious intent, can be no less real and any more metaphorical than individual human intent. This implies human intent (individual and collective) can choose the path it wishes to steer memetic (even genetic) evolution - this is why human (high-level) consciousness is so special - we have been unleashed on the hitherto unsuspecting world - our consciousness can have objectives, even if it doesn't necessarily understand or control the mechanisms sufficiently to succeed in realising its intent. Spooky. probably means, as Dennett already suggested apparently, that memes ARE consciousness itself - the thoughts are doing the thinking.

Linguistics - the subjective symbolic framing of concepts "out there" - can it ever be anything but metaphorical ? Come in Lakoff, you're time is right.

Sue really is a good writer. So easy to read and with a smile too.

... on the way back to Syndey and Perth.

Finished Sue Blackmore's book. Excellent. Predictably positive review of Buddhism in the final chapter - the continuum avoiding duality. She quotes Dennett - it's the thoughts that "do" the thinking, there is no other "I". Mentions all the usual Zen suspects, inlcuding Wilber, but not Pirsig.

Didn't get any internet time in NZ unfortunately, just circumstances.(Wonder if my new domestic broadband modem will have turned up when I get back to Perth ?)

... airport ...

Still reading Sue Blackmore's Introduction to Consciousness - gets better all the time. So matter of fact, easy and witty. Just done the chapters on "alternate" states of mind - inlcuding drug induced (again) - she quotes James Austin on Zen parallel's - but I love the down to earth "whilst stoned", "the equivalent of 3 or 4 tabs of acid" and descriptions of her own experiences.

Still finding the paranormal vs science dichotomy too narrow and limiting - must get to the bottom of her recent scepticism.

... next stop Aukland, NZ.

Barely blogged since I've been in Perth, not least because I'm without broadband outside the office since moving into an apartment in Claremont. So just some routine diary stuff for now.

Perth is generally quiet - churches and church schools everywhere might be a clue - no casual pub cluture - feast and famine, teenagers packed in like sardines getting legless on Friday and Saturday, few sad old gits at other times. Millie was welder from Chelsea - long story for another time maybe. Don't lean on me man, cos I can't afford the ticket, back from sunday school city ? A fair percentage of restaurants and other commercial properties apparently closed down as well as closed.

Still amazed at the bird-life, with new perspective from my 8th floor balcony - too many to mention, must get a guide-book. Fish too, the waters around the jetty just down the road in Pepermint Bay / Melville Water simply teeming.

Metro-City closed (due to some gangland drugs incident ?) so George Thorogood played in The Lookout in Scarborough at the weekend. He never changes, and his kinda crowd appreciates that. No sign where Joe Satriani will be playing week after next - but I assume my ticket will remain valid.

Apart from Scarborough / Brighton Beach (which put on a great sunset display on Sunday) I explored other coastal areas north as far as Joondalup, back down to Sorrento and Hillary's marina. The properties along that strip ! Not just the front row either - the ancient sand-dune line means several rows back the properties command sea views.

In the other direction, I went further south. Looked at downtown Fremantle and the docks - two large container ships leaving and arriving, practically filling the harbour mouth, and the endless stream of pleasure boat traffic to remind you this is not just any old industrial port. Freo has plenty of character - old-colonial, plus tourism. South of there to Rockingham and Safety Bay includes industrial Kwinana, but plenty more beach life. Futher on still south of Mandurah, and practically on to Bunbury the costal scenery, with the lakes and river inland behind the dune line too, truly spectacular in places. Plenty of evidence of efforts to develop housing property all along this strech - "A beach at the end of every street" goes the tag line. Need to keep your eyes peeled to avoid running into road-kill the size of full grown 'roo. Inland route on the way back, less spectacular mix of bush and agriculture (and alumina refineries).

Got my bearings anyway - it was a few days before I noticed my usually certain sense of direction was failing me - because I was in the southern hemisphere, with the sun going the "wrong" way across the northern sky. And seen the Southern Cross at last, and Orion on his head.

The commute to work certainly reveals the waterside attractions of the place. No wonder so many people choose to cycle, despite the heat and humidity.

That's a quote from George Dyson's piece for The Edge "The Godel-to-Google Net" in response to a question from playwright Richard Foreman whether wide access to all information, all culturaly inherited knowledge, into the one "computerised" medium can support creativity without fallibility. Or are we doomed to become "Pancake People", wide but shallow.

As you know I'm stil reading and enjoying Sue Blackmore's "Introduction to Consciousness". I've just read a chapter where she is speculating about whether human brains with two-way links to the content of the www eventually become one extended consciousness or remain distinct individual minds.

One of my long running issues has been the error in assuming simple deterministic models of everything, with simple binary either / or choices. Many of my counters to the endless "definitions" of consciousness is that people are looking for too simple models, conflating mind, consciousness and intellience, and are inevitable disappointed when a definition chosen fails to encompass the reality. (See the previous blog about the world being more useful than a model of itself.)

Dyson's piece brings these two issues together ...

Turing said in 1948 "The argument from Gödel rests essentially on the condition that the machine must not make mistakes, but this is not a requirement for intelligence."

Dyson continues [QUOTE]

The Internet is nothing more (and nothing less) than a set of protocols for extending the von Neumann address matrix across multiple host machines. Some 15 billion transistors are now produced every second, and more and more of them are being incorporated into devices with an IP address.

As all computer users know, this system for Gödel-numbering the digital universe is rigid in its bureaucracy, and every bit of information has to be stored (and found) in precisely the right place. It is a miracle (thanks to solid-state electronics, and error-correcting coding) that it works. Biological information processing, in contrast, is based on template-based addressing, and is consequently far more robust. The instructions say "do X with the next copy of Y that comes around" without specifying which copy, or where. Google's success is a sign that template-based addressing is taking hold in the digital universe, and that processes transcending the von Neumann substrate are starting to grow. The correspondence between Google and biology is not an analogy, it's a fact of life. Nucleic acid sequences are already being linked, via Google, to protein structures, and direct translation will soon be underway.

....

"An argument in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it is large enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required," advised Turing's assistant, cryptanalyst Irving J. Good, in 1958. Random networks (of genes, of computers, of people) contain solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined. Google has answers to questions no human being may ever be able to ask.

But if you are ever wondering what an operating system for the global computer might look like (or a true AI) a primitive but fully metazoan system like Google is the place to start.

[UNQUOTE]

Fascinating.

Noticed this before, but didn't capture a link. WordPress looks like a really cool and capable blogging tool. Needs PHP hosted, and getting flexible use out of it requires some PHP programming. Maybe I should take the plunge ?

Q - can I multi-categorise my categories ?
If A = Yes, the sky's the limit.
If A = No, then I'll stick with Blogger.

Still reading Sue Blackmore's "Introduction to Consciousness". Very good. She's read all the the same books I have in the last 3 or 4 years and working in academe with direct contact with many of the authors, has found the time and credibility to summarise them very succinctly. I agree and I'm impressed. I kinda wish I'd written the book myself, and given that I didn't I guess a detailed response might be a good place to start, but not here.

Just the jokes ...

Summarising Turing's own caveats against the subjective test of machine intelligence, which says essentially that the trick is in the questions you choose to ask .... "What's your bra size" is Sue's suggestion.

In reminding us that evolved traits necessarily fit a previous life rather than the present she says "So, for example, a taste for sugar and fatty foods was adaptive for a hunter gatherer even though it leads to obesity and heart disease today; sickness and food cravings in pregnancy may have protected a foetus from poisons then, although well-fed women do not need this protection now; and superior spatial abilities in males may have been adaptive when males were predominantly hunters and females were gatherers, even though we all have to read maps to get aroind cities today."

Dennett, Searle and even Pinker are the clear winners. Very balanced chapter summarising her own work on memes, with the Mary Midgley quote "It is an empty and misleading metaphor to call religion, scienec and any other human activity a virus or parasite. Memes are a useless and essentiually superstitious notion". I noted earlier my disappointment that the generally common-sensical Midgely was so dismissive of Sue's work.

Given particular problems with data / information / knowledge modelling as my starting point, I was knocked out by the quotes from R.A.Brooks "When we examine [simple levels of] intelligence, we find that [] representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to [use] the world as its own model"

Creationists and Intelligent Designers need not apply (my words, not Sue's).

I mentioned the bird life. I didn't mention the odd live rabbit, the occasional wombat and fox road-kill, the endless wombat and 'roo road-signs and "street-furniture" sculptures, but I've still not seen an insect or spider of any significance, despite prominent bug-traps in offices, etc.

What I did see was a car from out of town in Melbourne, with every forward facing surface plastered with locusts, previously waiting for the windshield on the freeway, thousands missing, presumed dead. Wish I'd been a witness.

More, this time from New Scientist (via Robot Wisdom) on drug induced "reality" by author John Horgan, of "Rational Mysticism".

The re-awoken Robot Wisdom really is high quality source material. Go browse.

I blogged several times before about holochory (holography) being closely related to the idea that the world is fundamentally information behind all those things we might think of as particles, waves and forces. (Particularly compelling thought if you ever wonder about communication bypassing the world we conceive as "physical" - ie paranormal stuff, but not half as daft if you think of quantum non-locality and entanglement - everything, everywhere, all at the same time.)

Even after expressing wonderment at the possibility of that very point, just a year or so ago, I remember noticing in a re-read of Michael Talbot's "Mysticism and the New Physics" from years earlier (1976/81), that he already mentions the fundamantal nature of holography, suggesting, in about as real a sense as it is possible to suggest such a thing, that the world we see really is a hologram.

What I didn't spot until reading this cross-hit link from The Irate Scotsman (Matt Gemmell) that Michael Talbot had also written "The Holographic Universe" (1991). Matt also picks up on the William Blake quote "to see the world in a grain of sand" - an allusion I recognise from earlier forays into this space, I'm sure.

Actually Matt's ongoing blog looks extremely intelligent and interesting all round from my Psybertron prespective. And whole new set of linked people in the blogroll. More reading to do ! (A feeling Matt seems to share - too much to read, too much to write, too little time.) Young Matt's "about" page suggests he's no shrinking violet (!) but his "belief creates" adage is a nice terse abreviation of "some things have to be believed to be seen". Can't help thinking that brain is wasted on "scrolling pie menus".

With inspiration taken from David Allen's "Getting Things Done", last December, Dave Pollard outlined a simple methodology for organising and prioritising tasks. Particularly liked the recognition that frequently procrastinated tasks on the old to do list, hide dependent tasks, better exposed like mini projects in their own right. Difficult task = Assembly of several easier ones.

As I say, it's not rocket science but simple methods are always helpful.

You live and learn. Today visited The Blue Ridge Inn, famed for its view ovelooking a certain Hanging Rock. Factual location, fictional mystery.

(Business, not pleasure; Honest.)

Is the medium really the message ? Need to separate the politics and content of "free" publishing from the technology used.

This might show two things - (a) this kind of censorship and repressive punishment happens, and the blogosphere simply helps make it more publicly apparent. (b) Repressive authorities may choose to repress the freedom of the blogging medium irrespective of the actual message.

I've not read the "offending" blog (see here too), so I have no new