Dear Diary Update – Oct 2026

I’m continuing to post more serious / consistent “essay” posts over at my Psybertron SubStack. It has an informal notes capability too, but continuing with diary updates, notes-to-self and the like here, means I can keep the old and the new, live and linked.

Just the two posts since my September update here:

A Stroke of Luck
Four days in the hands of James Cook (South Tees Teaching Hospital)
Which explains the hiatus in my thinking, reading and writing.

An Incomplete Education
The incomplete review of my incomplete and interrupted reading of Paul Mason and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

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Beyond that this my usual dear-diary – gigs and bookmarks.

Firstly, I have reams of notes beyond the mere impressions of reading Nikolai Chernyshevsy (1863) “What Is to be Done?“ in that incomplete education above. I’ll make those a “note” on the SubStack and link it both here and there. Not only is the structure complicated, the thought content and narrative timeline are complex too. I got to about page 300 (of 445) before I had to do a search for reader’s guides and plot synopses, to check my reading was still making sense. An important work, worth the effort to understand, but non-trivial. (That sense of non-trivial importance & difficulty very much like Bulgakov’s (1929-1940) “Master & Margarita” though the “what if Pontius Pilate and Jesus had actually had some dialogue rather than a show-trial in front of a baying mob?” fantasy-fiction style – and a lot more supernatural content – is very different.)

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Secondly, I have a number of bookmarks to capture, so I can link them to other writings in due course:

MetaModernism by Hanzi Freinacht – it was an image from his site I used to illustrate a “Utopia” as part of “There has to be a better way” in my previous post here. The Chernyshevsky / Incomplete Education post above is the start of my Utopian Fiction theme. Hanzi’s post was “What’s The Difference between Utopia, Eutopia and Protopia?” I have other correspondents who use Metamodern and Protopian language. I’d already long-adopted PostPostModern rather than MetaModern, but we mean the same thing – learning from critiques of Modernism, without necessarily coming to their PostModern conclusions. (Same as learning from Marx’s critique of capitalism, without being a Marxist communist.) Protopia is an associated term that avoids the extreme impossibilities and idealisms of the other terms, and alludes to the dynamic capacities and tendencies of a “system” rather than some fixed target state, though for me with a systems architect view, that’s a given anyway. Good stuff.

Indigenous Wisdom by Martin Oliver October 12, 2026 – (hat tip to Denis Finlayson) – Various forms of indigenous and east/west thinking crop up continuously when talking about the limitations of purely scientific models of the workings of life, the universe and everything when decision-making in plans and policies for our everyday life and its futures. The counter argument is often that there are many different specifics of particular eastern or indigenous ways, that cannot be known to individuals prescribing better possibilities based on learned understanding of any one or two of them. Of course those who don’t get the original critique will simply dismiss any such thought as not-science. My position is that there is wisdom that is #MoreThanScience, (*) and that generic features of such indigenous thinking can describe that kind of wisdom. The Indigenous Wisdom article agrees:

Despite the potential trap of generalising about indigenous tribes, the commonalities between these diverse peoples highlight intriguing shared ideas and concepts that keep cropping up in tribal settings, regardless of where in the world these cultures are found.

Despite. Potential. Regardless. Notice the language.

(* I discovered last week – and attended an online meeting – that there is a movement to classify what I call that #MoreThanScience generic indigenous wisdom as #FourthOrderScience. More when there is something tangible to link to, but for now my reaction in the footnote below.)

Pirsigian Thought – I have several individual bookmarks from members of the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) community, ranging from the “Zelletkasten” process of engagement in the world (beyond the mere organisation of conceptual thought) to better definitional concerns about ineffable Pirsigian Quality itself as opposed to the dangers of definitions as cages / constraints / coffins (Pirsig, Dennett, Levenchuk) – and a lot more besides. Join the discussion here at the RPA Discord Forum.

And, not actually an RPA member, but a Pirsig influenced thinker and writer, who wrote the preface for the 50th anniversary edition of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – Matthew Crawford with a piece on the allocation of attention in the marketplace of ideas. Very germane to that “Incomplete Education” piece and my #Dysmemics agenda more generally.

Daniel Dennett – an important source on my philosophical journey – here a special edition of Philosophical Psychology on Dan Dennett’s philosophy by Lisa Bortoloti at Imperfect Cognitions – A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health.

AI and Consciousness – A Skeptical Overview by Eric Schwitzgebel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2026 and available for free (until yesterday!!!).

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And finally – Gigs?

I really should consistently tag all my live music reviews, I tend to slip them into other diary posts, though occasionally they are the primary topic. Live – visceral – music is one of my real-life grounding activities. I don’t use Spotify and I rarely buy new music except when associated with a live band, though I do find myself revisiting old favourites of the poetic singer-songwriter genres. It’s the creative originality I tend to go for but a great deal of what’s on offer is the covers show-band genre or the “open-mike” verging on Karaoke. Good luck to them I say, but I have to ration my my attention (a la Rakhmetov).

I do regularly watch a couple of covers acts, if they have a creative twist – like I used to do with the now defunct Hamsters (Hendrix and ZZ Top), currently Fat Medicine (a wide range of rock but arranged in the Celtic Folk style – aka Rock’n’Reel – with a huge repertoire of The Pogues to suit my taste) and ToldyaOnce (heavy rock covers but a wide eclectic mix from The Kinks / The Who / The Osmonds(!) to Muse / QOTSA / Foo Fighters via lots of heavy metal standards as well as Free’s Wishing Well & All Right Now, Erasure’s A Little Respect(!) and The Cult’s Sanctuary.)

But mostly originals, as I say, most recently:

Mr Bigfoot and Ducter at The Hideout, Redcar
Overall preferred the Ducter set, but Bigfoot’s guitarist on a Fender Jaguar / Jazzmaster a la Johhny Marr had a great sound.

Huey Morgan (The fun lovin’ criminal / Come find yourself) at La Belle (Angele) Edinburgh.
Club environment meant most of the punters ignored / talked-over / drowned-out the unfortunate Our Man in the Field as support, but Huey was in fine form. All the favourites from the first two (30yr old) albums. Hadn’t realised how much of the sound was Huey on the guitars, great dynamic range between the funky/jazzy intros & Noo Yawk rappy verses and the heavy bridges & choruses. Could easily have improvised into blues-rock. We knew the anthemic choruses, but half the crowd knew every word. Huey – real nice guy -was visibly moved. Several of the gigs on this tour sold-out.

Primitivvv and Perfect Chicken at The Hideout, Redcar
Both great (short) sets. Perfect Chicken fast/staccato and short, cross between Devo and The Ramones. Primitivvv the latest project from (ex Avalanche Party) Joe and Jordan Bell, with Jonas on the drums. Very promising (again).

Previously, ironically, mentioning a gig I’d “turned down” in June this year – chosen not to review or even mention specifically – several northern bands at The Chapel, Middlesbrough – one of those one-day mini-festival gigs I’ve fallen out with, where the bands get short ~20min sets and my hips agonise at standing around all day. Further to that irony, I missed attending another – same venue, same promoter, mid September. The real irony being that link mentioning turning down the review, also mentions my serious writing being more productive as a consequence. Oh, well, rationing it is.

And for completeness, before the above:
https://www.psybertron.org/?s=Music%20Gig&sort=newest

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An upcoming gig – maybe – The Moxie Dolls – seen and loved previously here, are actually playing Reading when we’re next planning to visit grandson’s family there.

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Footnote: on Generic Indigenous Wisdom as #MoreThanScience as my contribution to #4thOrderScience “Metalogue”.
(Dialogue that can be asynchronous person-to-person as well as physically or virtually face-to-face.)

“Metalogue”
I’m all for this – my own style (eg my ISSS DC and Birmingham sessions) is 20% presentation / 80% group dialogue – with asynchronous follow-up, eg by email. Very much dialogue rather than critical dialectic, and in short, interactive few-sentence “responsive” exchanges. (Obviously in follow-up we can include or link our longer “essay” pieces.)

“4th Order Science”

My philosophical world-view is very much participatory, inter-subjective, multi-psychological-perspective, epistemological-ontology.
(21stC Inheritance of Whitehead / James / Bergson etc in Dennett, Seth, McGilchrist, Friston and Solms to name a few examples only. Eco’s library of unread books says, we can each only have read, small overlapping sub-sets of source texts from the millions available. They’re only ever examples of more abstract, general understanding)
Rather than invent “a new kind of science” I’ve chosen to call it #MoreThanScience (or Wisdom in a word).

Frankly, for me, the choice of words, language, naming what we’re talking about is tactical – our objective and our audience?

ISSS 2024 “The Tyranny of the Explicit”.
ISSS 2025 “Rehabilitating the Value of Wisdom”
I’ll dig out latest summaries rather than link you to lots of additional reading 🙂

“Indigenous Thinking”
That’s obviously abstract short-hand for many different (so-called) “east-west” examples and many different specific indigenous cultures.
We can’t all have experienced all of them (see Eco). (But we CAN abstract generic Indigenous Wisdom – above.) The Indonesian examples were obviously topical in our call.

Background – I need to say a little about where I’m coming from before I suggest any interim conclusions in this context.

For my entire 45yrs+ career I’ve been a systems “engineering” practitioner – built-environment and computer systems. I’ve lived and worked all around the world.
More systems architecture and engineering than SW developer. Even 35 years ago we were calling algorithmic functionality built on “digital twin” models “Smart” tools, people started calling it “AI” over 25 years ago. I’m a big user of recently available LLM-AI tools.
I’m an independent researcher in systems thinking for the past 25 years and recently fully retired from my systems engineering career.

My Objective and Audience

Like everyone else, my “complex adaptive systems thinking” is driven by the need to address the litany of “wicked problems” that make up the “polycrises / metacrisis” facing humanity and the planet. Whilst directly involving the indigenous thinking of a given community is obvious when dealing with development projects such an environment – eg the Indonesian examples mentioned – it’s not obvious when dealing with the body of “western received wisdom” that dominate global projects with global consequences. So for me the aim is to abstract those alternative “indigenous” ways of knowing into an extended western world-view that we can all benefit from. My audience is therefore governments, electorates and candidates of nation states (and their supranational institutions) and the language needed for that – “The Man on the Clapham Omnibus” as they used to say.

Q – AI?

My problem with the current trajectory of so-called AI is that, whilst it COULD be built on such an extended model the vast majority of the content it has and is being trained-on is precisely that body of western received wisdom from recent centuries – ie it’s naturally reinforcing the problem in physical technology. The idea of new “sovereign” subsets of such AI resources is fine when dealing with that sovereign context, but the values and understandings need to be injected into the global context?

(Or the misguided “received wisdom” of Global AI moderated / excluded / throttled from sovereign contexts.)

Q. Humane-ity?

Thanks to D’s clarification. Yes, when I say “humanity” I’ not talking about the body count on the planet, I’m talking about the property of Humane-ness or Humane-ity.

Frankly earlier in the call we were already calling it “Care” – co-operative / relational / inter-subjective / inter-species / environmental care (whilst avoiding so-called “suicidal empathy”).

IN SHORT

Injecting the WISDOM of HUMANE-ITY & the psychology of Cooperative CARE into the body of “Western Received Wisdom”

I simply find it more honest to recognise that’s #MoreThanScience, but this is just language choice for wider audiences.

Looking forward to more of the dialogue / conversational metalogue.

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There Has To Be A Better Way

Continuing with most of my new writing on Substack at https://psybertron.substack.com/ but still making updates and linking notes here.

HOUSEKEEPING

Four updates at Substack since I last rounded-up here in August.

  • Values Into Action
    – a “review” of Mark Carney’s 2021 book “Values”
  • An Old Story
    – a “review” of Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me”
  • Sign of the Times?
    – a recap on “illusionism” in the sciences & philosophies of consciousness & free-will, prompted by a hit on an older piece.
  • Technology Driven Economy
    – a riff on where so-called AI might be leading us, prompted by Dave Snowden referring to Brian Arthur’s talk to the Adam Smith Institute’s “New Enlightenment 2026 Conference”.

PREAMBLE

After a few days away walking in the (English) Lakes, I was at the SCiO “SysPrac2026” conference in Cranfield Uni, Monday and Tuesday this week.

As ever, I have lots of notes from individual sessions, which I won’t spend any time making presentable here, just some overall impressions taken away.

Large event ~200 attendees, and great facilities & service quality for conference sessions, large and small and for the catering. (Only minor downside was the “Cranfield Management Development Centre” accommodation / dining space and the “Vincent Building” conference facility were at opposite ends of the campus, even though the former also had extensive conference facilities?)

Great facilities, but the facilitators in the main / larger hall in particular should probably have done better with the sound level. Also, a tendency for the key officers / members of the SCiO to start off on first name terms with each other, presuming everyone knew who they were, without each introducing themselves. That said, great diversity of membership, majority women and a younger generation evident to replace the old guard.

I was in lurking (listening and learning) mode, no direct participation this time, same as the Hull CSS conference earlier this year. Many old and new faces, and several specific new topic contacts to follow-up. That counts as success for my own research and writing.

What I was put in mind of, is how many different overlapping / complementary groups there are in this space with varying degrees of collaboration. Some are just networks on platforms like LinkedIn or WordPress blogs, some are free-emailing lists, some are low-overhead membership and some are proper corporate / professional and or academic institutions, and some special interest combinations of all of these. Below are a few where I’ve had at least some interaction:

The IFSR (Institute for Systems Research) is set up as a coordinating umbrella organisation whose members and affiliates are many of those other organisations, 20 of which are listed.

The LinkedIn (Systems Thinking Network) has 50,000 individual members, many of whom are also members of one or more of the other groups.

The SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) is cheap and cheerful as well as professional, with ~600 members and ~1500 subscribers. Having been a subscriber, I am now in 2026 a full member. It has the most fitting name for an organisation in this space.

The ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences) is another smaller group with ~160 members, where I have been a full member for 4 years or so.

INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) has ~27,000 paid-up members and is the most corporate of the professional organisations. I’ve never actually been a member, but have crossed paths with very smart individual members since around 2008, in both day-job and independent-research contexts.

SysCOI (Systems Community of Inquiry) is an open source blog sharing links to pretty much all and every resource published under the auspices of any of the other groups.

CSS (Centre for Systems Studies) at Hull University (not to be confused with Hull students union Computer Science Society). First came into contact with Hull CSS via their annual Mike Jackson lectures in June 2021 with the Carlo Rovelli and Paul Mason keynotes on Aleksander Bogdanov. Mike has become the epitome of pragmatism for me in this “complex self-adaptive systems” space.

Cynefin – Dave Snowden’s management consulting vehicle, much referenced by other practitioners mostly, but not always, positively. (Over the years, Dave has a fully elaborated and extended definition of that Welsh word he used to name his entity not to mention the approaches to methodologies behind it. Perhaps controversially, I think of the pre-existing word Cynefin translating to “comfort zone” – in the sense it’s the environment our thinking inhabits quite naturally, comfortably, even though we can never fully understand it or why, without some meta-thinking about our thinking. The philosophically abstract is distinct from the practical methodologies, but we need both. I’ve been crossing paths with Dave’s work since 2002/3 in knowledge-management contexts.)

ASC (American Society for Cybernetics)

UKSS (UK Systems Society)

OR (Operations Research Society)

Metaphorum (Organisational Cybernetics of Stafford Beer)

Школа системного менеджмента (Russian School of Systems Management) founded by Anatoly Levenchuk when the Russian Chapter of INCOSE lost its US affiliation. Anatoly is one of those “smart INCOSE people” who after my 40+ years engineering systems of all kinds, hard and soft, introduced me to the idea around 2008/09 that “systems” were recognised as a thing in their own right. Ironic since Cybernetics and the 1946 Macy Conferences were central to my Psybertron research project from the outset in 2001. He invited me to speak at INCOSE conferences in Moscow in 2010 and Nizhny-Novgorod in 2011. Those other two INCOSE smarts were his colleague Victor Agroskin and, quite separately, Rob Black of UKAEA around 2020/21.

And any number of other leadership, management and government interest groups and academic schools …

Some for Systems, some for Complexity. Some for Thinking generally, some for Science more narrowly, some for Engineering(*) even more narrowly, some for Research, some for Cybernetics (Organisation, Management and Governance).

SO WHAT?

The common interest is in better systemic understanding of how the world works through human organisations. The better we understand how the world really works, the better we can organise ourselves to act for better future outcomes. With so many seemingly existential poly-crises and/or meta-crisis to concern us, there is increasing clamour – there has to be a better way – all the way from personal lifestyle through every human organisation to local, national and supra-national government and development.

One way or another these better understanding and decision-making considerations lead us to government and governance more generally. Democracy or the next best thing, not forgetting how we decide what is “better” anyway?

Given the scale and urgency facing us, there is a strong recent focus in the activities of these interest groups on practical implementation and engagement with those institutions that most directly influence our collective governance.

  • The Hull CSS 2026 conference in March this year was entitled “Systems Thinking Systems Practice” bridging the gap between theory and practice.
  • The ISSS 2026 conference in June was themed “Elevating Systems Science to Address Humanity’s Greatest Challenges” followed by “Reimagining our World Systemically – From Problematique to Purposeful Action“
  • The SciO 2026 conference earlier this week was advertised as a follow-on from the Hull CSS event explicitly entitled “Systems Practice (SysPrac) 2026“.

A Better Way? – the periodic re-imagining of the world as a better place is as old as philosophical literature itself, from Plato’s Republic via Utopian literature arising from the ages of enlightenment and revolution (Thomas More, Karl Marx, Aleksander Bogdanov, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, H G Wells, Aldous Huxley, etc.) and the post-war world-in-crisis soul-searching of The Vienna Circle (after WW1) and The Macy Conferences (after WW2). It’s worth understanding the history of what these thinkers hoped a better future might be AND how it might be achieved, quite separate from any imperfections in their thinking and the errors by those empowered to implement them.

There really is a better way to be had if we put our minds to it.

Systemic Thinking? – the use of the value neutral terms “systems thinking” has stuck in recent years, but it is quite frankly exactly what had been termed Cybernetics (quite literally, governance) by Norbert Wiener following those Macy conferences. (I’ve personally chosen to spell it Psyber-netics to reinforce the living human psychology intent of the original “cyber” term, so distorted in highly successful electro-mechanical control and electronic computing usage in the decades since. There’s a tendency to associate cybernetics distinctly with “feedback” in so-called homeostatic control systems, but right out of the gate systems of complex (ie real) human organisations have had feed-back, feed-forward and feed-any-which-way communications as evidenced by the multiple loops and levels of abstraction in “organisational learning” models since the 70’s.)

Theory into Practice? – with the scale and interconnected complexity of the “crises” facing us, there is a perfectly rational desire, and good reason, to get on with it. A “Theory of Action”. To avoid analysis paralysis, to avoid the perfect as the enemy of the good-enough, etc, to put any one or a pragmatic, heuristic, combination of the multiple methodologies available into action. It’s the rational choice because predictability of real outcomes is severely restricted when dealing with genuine complexity. Predictability is limited to the kinds of processes that will happen at various levels of abstraction and not to specific outcomes. Though scientifically explicable in terms of processes, the predictability of future states, desirable or otherwise, is #MoreThanScience. Ready, fire, aim means action produces early results that can be used to learn and adjust future actions sooner. (Ironically, very close to the WW2 weapons guidance thinking that originally produced Cybernetics. *)

Best Practice for Thinking? – whilst moving to practical action sooner is perfectly rational, we do well to remember that our better way includes better ways of thinking too. To think is to act at a different level of abstraction. We need to learn to improve our thinking as well as our explicit actions. We need best / better practice(s) for thinking as well as best practice methodologies. The ambiguous lack of punctuation in the “Systems Thinking Systems Practice” title of the March conference reminds us to apply systems thinking to our systems thinking practices. To take our own medicine.

As part of better systems thinking practices, my own focus is unashamedly at those levels of abstraction above practical application, where it has maximum explanatory understanding and predictive power. Somebody has to do it. It’s what both Levenchuk’s “Systems Thinking 2020 – there is ALWAYS thinking to be done over and above actual project planning to act” – and the higher loops of multi-loop organisational learning architectures, are about. The different architectural layers are not optional. Our thinking is part of the real world. We mustn’t flatten the abstract thinking out of our specific plans to act.

I’m here to defend that better abstract thinking.

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That “So What?” essay section above will be brought forward into the Psybertron Substack – and elaborated with another draft already started there.

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(*) As I often point out “engineering” has its roots in ingenuity anyway, the ingenious ways people responded to the need for better engines of war. Those came before motive-engines, engineers and engineering. (All more obvious in French.)

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Tax the Rich?

(This is just a stub post to collect multiple links.)

Tax the Rich? is the headline, but it’s the recurring issue of how nation states can remain meaningful, when individuals and commercial entities can become bigger, wealthier and more powerful than nation states, and can avoid regulation and taxation by seeking exceptions in weaker states, without strong federal / international commitment. I’m suggesting beyond a certain level of wealth the marginal tax rate should be agreed to be 100% – achieving it is a whole ‘nother set of questions – and how rich is too rich, etc. (How free-democratic nation states, and their supra-national arrangements, operate is the natural end game of Systems / Cybernetic / Governance thinking.)

Note that this has nothing to do with limiting freedoms to earn nor how much funding small or large government needs or deserves, or the general unfairness of grotesque wealth disparities between individuals (though that ought to be an issue) – just a basic pragmatic orderly society question. How can we govern ourselves if … ?

The prompt for capturing this stub today is the emerging consequence of the US (and other) national debts hitting multi-Trillion record highs, and economic commentators warning of potential disastrous consequences. The feature that many are pointing out is that gilt / government bond rates are creeping up to unprecedented levels too. A major lever of government regulation of national finances has been that government treasuries were the lender of last resort – with the steadiest / safest (lowest rate) source of investment funding. What’s changed? Some of the tech-bros can now compete for that lending business. (Check – have I got that summary the right way round? – either way the point is individual entities are becoming “bigger” than nation states in these markets that regulate interest and inflation rates especially in times of national / international financial and banking crises. “Scary” as an actual Bank of England ex-chairman said this morning, ditto Andrew Neil watching the gilts markets yesterday and the debts this morning US 40Tn / UK 3Tn.)

The BBC story on the US and comparison to others inc UK, the key point being that because the US$ is still the main base currency the US can actually get away with the risk for longer than the rest of us. The risks are real if any new political or financial crisis arises.

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Previously here on Psybertron:

Borders vs Business – from last year. (And more on states without national borders – we are nothing – from Matthew Syed.)

General search on Tax the Rich

General search on Wealth

To be continued, somewhere …

(And – reminder – need to read Mark Carney’s “Values”?
Which I did here: https://psybertron.substack.com/p/values-into-action )

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Up to Date on SubStack

All my original postings and notes are on SubStack these days, so here a catch-up posts since my last one here on only recently having read Roger Penrose (1989) “Emperor’s New Mind”. Starting from the most recent:

What’s So Funny ‘Bout
– the Peace, Love and Understanding of Jason Arday?
(First mention, the day after his death.)

Penrose-Hameroff Consciousness
Does their work actually give us any explanation?

Being Against a Good Thing?
Dysmemics – The dangers of mis-memeing a good meme. (Responding to Musk’s claims about “Empathy”)

Intellectual-Social Interactions
Defining Pirsig’s Social and Intellectual Layers

A Welcome Diversion Around Dennett
Dan Dennett’s memoir “I’ve Been Thinking” (2023)

Vive la Difference / Différence / Différance
The significant reality of male / female brain / mind differences.

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Post note: and before I continue, I picked-up some new reading. Loved Arundhati Roy’s writing in her “God of Small Things” though I didn’t write a review much longer than that comment, but I kept an eye on here lefty-feminist activities ever since. Love the person too. In a casual trip to the local bookshop I was passing today, I noticed her “Mother Mary Comes To Me” latest title. The title is a song lyric, a Beatles song. Last weekend’s Sunday Session playlist, was Beatles covers. Apparently her mother Mary didn’t say “Let It Be”. It’s a memoir with 40-odd short, titled chapters I noticed “What’s So Funny [’bout]?” and “Declaration of Love” which put me instantly in mind of my last post about Jason Arday being ridiculed when talking about his “Axis of Love” and his use of song titles and lyrics in his work. Anyway, none of those things are actually connected, but I bought the book on spec and have already started to read. (Read and reviewed here.)

Oh, and wow, the links never end. That post above on my previous reading of Roy, was on the day we experienced the biggest, closest, thunderstorm of our lives in Chattanooga – the lightening bolts and thunder simultaneously exploding on the bonnet of our car while stopped at the lights! Talk about gut-feel. As I type, there’s a welcome rainy thunderstorm crashing around outside, here on the NE coast of England. And an item on BBC R4 “News At One” on the newly licensed Tunny (Tuna) fishing in Whitby, all over the social-media locally in recent months. The first commercial landing of a couple of 2.5/3m long specimens just yesterday, after several months of licensed catch-and-release establishing sustainable stocks and generating sport-fishing income.

Gotta go.

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Roger Penrose

For completeness, posting mainly new content on Substack these days, but just cross-posting a link here to maintain semantic connectivity until the whole project is functioning.

I’d never read Penrose before today, despite his obvious relevance to my long-standing agenda here.

https://substack.com/profile/21157024-ian-glendinning/note/c-300150506

Enjoy.

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A Little Piece of (Blogging) History

Posting this on the original Psybertron blog because it was missing from my 2006/7 archive. Forests, thickets, trees and clearings (and fences, and gates) are frequent metaphors in knowledge discovery (and identity and definition) contexts, and the number of times I’ve remembered this image, but failed to re-find the copy I blogged back then, is scary and time-wasting.

Thanks to ChatGPT for finding it for me:

View of the forest around Stockaryd, July 2005. The clearing work after the storm Gudrun has resulted in a visual tree shaped in the landscape. The photo was also awarded Picture of the Year 2006 (photo courtesy Joakim Berglund / Expressen).

It’s actually the salvage logging clear-up from a hurricane event in Sweden, so it’s questionable how much of the shape is due to the wind-damage process and how much is due to tracks of the logging operation, but the result is a distinctly tree-shaped hole in the forest. Re-documented here 20 years after “Storm Gudrun”.

Today’s context is that I was reminded of the missing image above when I saw this short MP4 below showing the rivulets left behind a tide ebbing over the mudflats of a Chinese river. (Social media algorithms being what they are, I have captured the image / video but have completely lost the details and provenance.)

(Despite the help of ChatGPT can only find similar but not the same video, so all I know: “Tidal tree” on the Qiantang River, Zhejiang, China. Original filmmaker/source currently unknown—identification welcomed.)

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Reading & Housekeeping

Had some very productive writing time recently. Turned down a couple of gigs and writing of reviews – they’re my escape from the intellectual project(s), but it’s easy to fill your time with those instead. Also avoiding a couple of conferences I’d normally support, to the point of feeling guilty, but still found myself reading – all writing / research related but – nevertheless:

Hard copies of these two:

And a Kindle copy of this:

So, in the order I’ve read them:

Charlie Higson’s history of our Kings and Queens. Not normally the kind of stuff I’d read, but wittily and readably done, with satirical / topical references to our 21st C politics. Like “1066 and all that, only accurate” – according to the Tom Holland. (I guess I was sub-consciously interested because of my mother’s post-Norman local-history that we published last year.) Read start to finish in just a couple of sessions. Recommended.

Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveller” biography of George Forster. Bought on the strength of her two previous biographies of Humboldt and the Jena Set, and it’s getting great reviews. In the same way that Humboldt was the first “ecologist” Forster was the first “human rights” advocate, where humanity included the locals encountered on his youthful foreign travels with his father in 1760’s Russia and with 1770’s James Cook. So many overlaps and influences on the great and the good (and the not so good). Mind-bogglingly fascinating. Won’t be reading to a conclusion for now, but recommended and back on the shelf as reference for now.

Laura Spinney’s “Proto” is a history of language (and geography, civilisations and culture) through the Proto-Indo-European language family. One of those topics I’ve written about multiple times before 2005/07/13/16, but always tainted with doubt as to the authenticity of “Aryan” stories told by 19th/2oth-C white, western, ex-colonialists. It’s real alright, 10,000 years of language, before written history, and now backed by so much 21st-C science in archaeology and genealogy. Endlessly fascinating already, after the front and end matter and just a couple of chapters. (A hobby-horse of mine; lots of those “rules” of sound and spelling changes as languages migrate, b<>v and art<>craft<>rta etc, which reveal essentially the same words across languages that diverged millennia ago. And, even the good-old “Mama” as first word / sounds of human offspring before any actual language “learning” – topical in recent days with “two-Dads” parenting cases.) (Post Note – hat tip to Simon Adams for this Claude-AI attempt at the language tree.)

Will also put aside for future reference for now.

Back to the writing – picking-up on the inputs to my “Identity and Distinction” chapter from the RPA Dialogue with Keith Gillette. Just one more chore first.

Onwards and upward.

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Onto-Epistemic Layering of Values

As notified, my writing has effectively moved to Substack, and here is my most recent post there:

Multi-Axis Evolutionary Layering
of Values in “Onto-Epistemic Structures”
(with Pirsig’s 4 Layer Metaphysics as one example.)

(Prompted by a discussion with Keith Gillette on the new Robert Pirsig Association discussion forum.)

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Switching Platforms

As of today, I’ve switched my writing and blogging to my SubStack.

A note on my latest SubStack post (on sex differences of brain & mind) has a note explaining the shift, quoted here:

(*1) My Psybertron blog “What, Why and How do we Know?” has over 25 years of content on WordPress. A fork in development of that technology platform is making support increasingly problematic (see post note below), so whilst I am maintaining that content on-line, I am looking for alternatives to preserve its value and accessibility as well as continue future blogging on SubStack. In that 25 years I have often remarked that blogging notes was very similar to the paper-slips or index-card techniques used by various authors to create and organise their semantic web of complex ideas and their relationships into manageable evolving texts. Robert Pirsig’s story of how he wrote both “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” is one clear example. That technique however has a name – “Zettelkasten” – German for note-box, and unsurprisingly these days there are electronic tools that support it. Not for the first time, I’m in the process of capturing the semantic-web of my own thinking and writing to date, in the “Obsidian” tool.

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I’m contemplating simply switching all you historical followers and commenters here directly over to the new channel, but feel free to subscribe there directly.

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Post Note: I’m not killing my WordPress instances, just looking for insurance for valuable content and off-ramps if things go completely pear-shaped. I’ll keep them live even if I reduce dependency for now.

The problems with WordPress are serious according to founder Matt Mullenweg. Here his post on 23 years of WordPress just a couple of days ago, a plea for the “internecine warfare” to cease. It’s in danger of killing WordPress, and hurting real people in the process, and for what? (And – incidentally – in his very next post – he points to the calming value of 2 minutes of Alan Watts. Wonder if Matt knows the Watts / Pirsig Zen connection – the Robert Pirsig Association also runs on WordPress. Perhaps the internecine war could benefit from Sun Tzu?)

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David Deutsch and “The Pattern”

The video embedded below is a conversation between Russ Roberts (EconTalk) and David Deutsch – a hero of mine, a quantum physicist who is incredibly thoughtful and erudite about government, democracy and society – read his “Fabric of Reality” and “Beginning of Infinity” if you haven’t already.

Their discussion topic – Deutsch’s particular thesis – is seeing antisemitism as “The Pattern”. A meme – existing long before “Jews were held responsible for the killing of God in the body of Jesus” – the impulse to legitimise hurting jews – whether big historical genocides, pogroms and lethal terrorisms or not, it’s there nascent in everyday life. In that sense they are “bottom-up” atrocities, not primarily decreed by authorities, except in some specific infamous “holocaust” cases where The Pattern was exploited by authorities. And it’s the impulse to legitimise hurting, not necessarily actively hurting, let alone killing. And the meme is not itself active “Jew-hate”, that’s also a symptom arising regularly from The Pattern.

It obviously conflicts with many other moralities in other (eg Christian) cultures, but has always been “accommodated” even if that is reducing in more recent history. The Pattern sustains, without actively being worked against. The accommodation – of the legitimisation impulse – is built into society’s world-views, quite formally and explicitly so by Augustine and Martin Luther, say. These are often rationally perverse and contradictory, often intended to help Jews, softening the impulse from active killing, without actually reversing the impulse.

That it exists and persists has clear evidence over 2500 years, even if we cannot clearly say why, when or where it arose. The whole interview is excellent on historical and modern examples through the crusades, the renaissance and reformation to today. (Dated after October 7th, and prior to the Bondi Beach atrocity.) “Anti-semitism as a mind-virus?” is the host’s sceptical summary, which I would also adopt non-sceptically as Deutsch’s memetic thesis. (He used “meme” at the start, but baulks at “mind-virus” – I’m OK with either. Strong intersection with the empathy meme / impulse – more later – often not real empathy or compassion, more part of post-rationalisation of one’s own impulses.)

“This [the pattern] isn’t the only irrationality going around.” Deutsch.

I’ll say! – Pretty much my agenda, where the antisemitism and islamophobia cases are mere examples. If we had the right / better understanding of the phenomenon, surely we’d be better placed to address it, opines David. Hear, hear!

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My thesis is that both antisemitism and islamophobia (and other public irrationalities) are about problematic self-identity in public, and the only reason I asked David for the above link to explain “The Pattern” was because of the dialogue arising on X after he had posted this:

[“Him” being yesterday’s Golders Green stabbing terrorist. Self-identity in relation to others, notice. I need to elaborate where I last raised these as “identity” issues.]

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