Author: Psybertron

Interesting New Republic piece – on why democracy isn’t always the best solution for governance. It’s dogma to ram it down everyone else’s throats. (More later). Hat tip to David Morey on FB.

Interesting piece by Samira Ahmed, actually a summary of one of the sessions at WHC2014 I referred to here, but primarily making the plea against the misguided aggressive atheist stance that moderate religious expression should be attacked just as hard for simply being “cover” for barbaric fundamentalist forms.

Politics and management of the complex depend on levels of hypocrisy, and knowing who your allies are in any given battle is rational common sense. Mustn’t confuse values, aims, policies, strategies and tactics, they’re all quite distinct.

And it’s not simply a matter of Machiavellian cunning, cynical pragmatism or Sun-Tzu / Clausewitz on campaigns of war, it’s about working with your (potential) allies to uncover valuable common ground – you both learn and win friends. Doing something constructive rather than lazily invoking your knee-jerk “right” to criticise.

As I said at the time:

Tactical Aggression — [rather than] – the old misguided idea that benign expressions of religion are merely cover for militant and inhuman kinds and therefore to be challenged as aggressively as any.

Simplistic Equals Wrong – Guardian piece by Ian Birrell on responses to Foley’s brutal murder.

Just a riff of connected thoughts arising. That article is dead right – we need to maintain consistent foreign policy, and that’s complicated with the sway of political terms and public opinion in “the west”.

The recent history of the Gulf / Iraq / Afghanistan wars, followed by those arising from the Arab Spring, like Libya, meant that by the time Syria came along we’d lost appetite for considered intervention. “No boots on the ground” or “no military force” became a dogma rather than a considered conclusion based on long-term policies. So now that Israel Palestine reignites, Ukraine / Russia and Syria becomes ISIS in Syria and Iraq our foreign policy is on the back foot. (Made worse in the UK by discontinuity in the FO itself and divisive diversions of UK / Scotland and UK / EU, rather than strengthening of international collaborations.)

These conflicts are all connected, and connected on many levels and issues. If we don’t follow policy that actually reflects them all – their continuity and all their complexity – we have little hope of achieving stable positive outcomes. Into the vacuum flows simplistic “Islamic Caliphate for Dummies” – brutal, evil, wrong. We can do better.

(I say “the west” but of course the other Arab nations and much more also need to align concensus long-term policies more honestly rather than short-term opportunistic stances.)

I attended the “Particle Physics Evening” Hosted by Jon Butterworth (of Smashing Physics fame) at University College London yesterday evening. Altogether, including two streaming in from CERN, there were 7 speakers and reasonably lively Q&A with the 250ish audience, so I came away thinking I’d learned a bit.

[Post Note: I should add this public meeting was a part of the gathering of particle physicists at UCL for BOOST2014]

Given the more general title as advertised, I was expecting something like – forget the press banging on about Higgs, here’s the interesting stuff – but in fact the focus of this team, and hence the talk, was almost entirely on Higgs. The multiple correlation by multiple different test teams using different LHC experiments and technologies to detect Higgs-predicted multiple decay patterns meant a very high level of certainty that the new particle “discovered” was the real 126GeV mass particle predicted for Higgs. Their use of the D-word indicated this very high level of statistical certainty. They admitted that as well as planning new objectives for research when LHC restarts next year at its near doubled 14TeV capacity, there were plenty of things they still needed to test and confirm about the Higgs itself besides its mass and predicted decay patterns, and still masses (excuse the pun) of existing data to analyse before LHC restarts.

What struck me was that the “standard model” being talked about – for which the Higgs provided the missing piece – is really only “complete” for unifying Electro-Weak forces. Still nothing said about strong forces or even gravity, despite mass being the point of the Higgs interest, and therefore still less said about possible dark-matter and dark-energies and gravitational interactions between these masses. The cosmological model is far from complete, even with Higgs.

Someone did ask the question I’ve expressed many times. How logically can finding a massive particle explain why other particles have mass? The answer threw up another item I’d not recognised previously. Higg’s only explains the asymmetry of mass between the otherwise “identical” particle triplets, and it only explains how they came to acquire their different masses during the evolution of the universe, masses which no longer depend on any ongoing interactions with Higgs. Nowadays Higgs only exist in certain extreme conditions with extremely short decay life otherwise. This is the kind of explanation that depends on such a fine-tuned timing in the early post-big-bang universe, that the sceptic in me still finds it pretty far fetched. What they’re really establishing is internal consistency of their incomplete model.

Given the recognition that the standard EW model (completed by Higgs) was far from a complete cosmological model, what might exist beyond it came up only in the last throwaway remark of Jon’s closing comments. SuperSymmetry – a whole set of mirror equivalents of the standard model with complementary properties and much much higher masses. The same again and much more is still missing from the postulated model.

I did ask Jon afterwards (given the previous post) did he see anything in supersymmetry – or whatever lay beyond – that could yet unravel the standard EW model? Initially he said no, without being specific all the remaining gaps looked like things that should be confirmed and refined, but admitted that until they were (confirmed and detailed) technically it maybe could unravel. Supersymmetry was only one of the hypotheses for what lay beyond, though many of the others were as he put it, more philosophical than physical. Well said and very significant.

Two other interesting topics:

The whole question of data collection and data analysis – the algorithms used to select “interesting” data sets (few hundred per second) from the background noise (millions per second). Surely observer bias in the algorithms must skew the findings? David Miller’s role in this team was to address exactly that – ensuring sampling of the noise as well as the “interesting” signals checked they weren’t discarding significant sets. The sceptic in me again says, that since it’s patterns we’re really looking for – not standalone indications – that the results are still hugely at risk to this process. Hmmm.

And finally, meta, but maybe the most significant point: One thing I’ve been looking at creating is a forum based on moderated wisdom of real people with respect for each other, as opposed to the troll-addled offense-by-ridicule polarised threads of comments and social media. Well that was pretty much exactly how Jay Wacker described Quora. Wikipedia is great for non-contentious facts, as I’ve said many times, but Quora was set up to be a respect-mediated way to collect informed-wisdom. Excellent initiative, and a lesson to those “humanist” forums and threads that this initiative on wise opinion came from “real” geeky physicists, who clearly understand the reality of life more than either scientistic-atheist-humanists or religious-fundamentalists. Very interesting – I shall try it out and see how it works.

[Post Note : another write-up from UCL, focussing on Lily Asquith’s “sonification” of the data, which I didn’t mention above.]

[Post Note : A facebook post from Sabine Hossenfelder:

This is the same story as that from last week. (LHC Higgs Boson findings in doubt?) Again, let me say that the only thing surprising about the claim that there is some variant of technicolor that can fit the data is that hasn’t been brought up earlier. The comparison to BICEP sucks. They’re not claiming that the signal isn’t there, they’re saying the interpretation is not valid.

But another indication of ongoing problems – many ways to represent (and publish) large data sets, and to interpret readings as findings relevant to the hypothesis. When is it publishable news?]

Interesting pair of papers, one from this week, and one from Nov 2012, on the “failure” of the Large Hadron Collider work to find any evidence of “supersymmetry” particles to support the standard model, and the idea that mass is not a particle property, and so maybe even the Higgs field / boson is a myth. No, really? It’s been said here before.

The best thing about this is the suggestion that maybe the “wrong turn” in particle physics was taken quite some time ago, several decades, so rather than fiddling with and knocking corners off existing theories, more radical new hypotheses really are needed. The latest paper is suggesting mass and length are not even real, and that falling back on (parallel) multiverses as a reason why we find the particular properties we do in this universe, is simply not satisfactory as any kind of explanation. And a lot more. Fascinating reads.

Mass was of course a fudge ever since Newton introduced it to explain inertial resistance to acceleration; Boscovich and Mach (and hence Einstein) recognised this of course. For a true physicalist model, dynamics are much more primary than anything like matter is to a materialist. So many other possibilities if we escape the materialist dogma.

Much too hard for any lay / amateur like myself to understand all the scientific (mathematical) arguments, but the all too human quotes of the practitioners are very illuminating. Disappointment and failure. No more jobs in particle physics, time to find work in neuroscience, etc. LOL.

What is also good about the two Simons Foundation source papers is that the comment threads are not hysterically polarised attack and defence. Several pointing out that “failure” is not the right way to look at scientific progress – unless you were involved in big-science funding justifications maybe – fair enough, but most finding the reports though-provoking and joining the dots with other sources of ideas. Progress.

[Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for the links.]

Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion” (2012) so-called by his publisher as a pointed response to Dawkins, is called “Science Set Free” in the US. Given my agenda – alternatives to logical-positivist materialist-reductionist scientistic-dogma worldviews – it’s not possible for me to be ignorant of Sheldrake, but I’m pretty sure I’ve not read anything of his until his 2012 book. Certainly not his seminal “New Science of Life – The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance” (1981).

The 2012 book seems to summarise his previous work, and although it covers the whole range of his ideas on alternative medicine, telepathy and the “paranormal”, his main agenda is to point out dogmatic arrogant dismissive politically distorting aspects of the modern science enterprise – hear, hear. He may never recover from some of his ideas being too whacky – too new-agey – for orthodox science to take seriously, but there are attractive aspects of his morphic resonance hypothesis for the open-minded.

Much evidence for consciousness and memory as something like pan-psychism, extending beyond the physical structures of any one brain – like I heard Iain McGilchrist say recently, better to think of highly-evolved brains as the best “transducers” of consciousness, rather than its source or physical location. Similarly some of the complex behaviours of simple organisms (like Alan Rayner and his funghi) cannot just be reduced to properties of their physical structures. Also much evidence that the Cosmological Anthropic Principle casts doubt on the accepted standard model(s) and ideas of downward as well as upward causation and “natural” lines of evolution.

All the so-called “paranormal” stuff he has, like Sue Blackmore, taken seriously as a research topic for some time. Some interesting ideas about problems researching anything telepathic “under laboratory conditions” and anything like double-blind arrangements where researcher’s biases are not in play. But as he points out these problems beset much “big science” and business motivated medical science too. He actually uses several Ben Goldacre quotes positively, when I can imagine “Bad Science” easily taking a pop at Sheldrake.

I also happen to believe materialist-as-physicalist philosophy with “emergence” of patterns upon patterns of fit consistent with Sheldrake’s morphic resonance,  wouldn’t cause Dennett as much problem as Sheldrake assumes on the appearances of intention and creative purpose [ref needed] . Be interesting to hear the two together.

I’ve said before when arguing against orthodoxy it’s possible to be “too open minded” and leave yourself open to criticism based on ridicule, but for an open mind Sheldrake does cover a lot of worthwhile ground.

[Post Note:  Final conclusions reading The Science Delusion are that Sheldrake sounds frustrated and tired delivering a message he’s clearly been banging on about for a long time. His core point – that materialist reductionist science has become dogmatic and closed minded, and that society is becoming dangerously distorted by its dominance – is surely true. But the examples of alternatives he cites are too many, too personally “cause-celebre” and maybe insufficiently coherently argued to create change in themselves. I should add, I’ve now moved on to reading Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” – an atheist version of the same agenda it seems.]

[Post Note : Noticed I picked-up on Sheldrake morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields back here.]

Interesting. Not sure it says much about the religion vs science debate, but it does say a lot about effective styles of interaction. If you go in “taking the piss” and showing your audience no respect, I’m not sure you can expect your audience to show any respect to you or what you might have to say. A sad case. (Sue needs to take a lesson from Dan Dennett, below.)

Sadly, I thought Sue had already changed her mind away from Religions as Viruses of the Mind. Sure there is a lot of memetics in how and why religions (and any beliefs) catch-on and spread, but trivialising it with crass reductionist examples helps no-one.

No-one has the right not to be offended.
But that gives no-one the right to offend and ridicule as their main thrust.
[Post Note: we can’t all be court-jester / play the fool, we can’t all be the disrupter. These very terms imply the existence of a majority conservative norm – and for good reason, evolution depends on large quantifiable fidelity and fecundity, depart too often from the norm and we have heat-death or chaotic anarchy.]

Dennett – in Intution Pumps (and earlier works). He credits these as Rappaport’s rules, but this is the version Dennett presents : How to compose a successful critical commentary:

You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

These first three rules I call elsewhere: “Respect, respect & respect”.

[Post Note: Here endeth the lesson.]

Interesting piece because of the suggestion this affects its advertisers, but a large number of twitter users are “bots”.

But by its definition, I’m a bot.

The reason I like Twitter compared to that other useless piece of social media, is precisely because it’s a “channel” whose UI I can avoid using at all costs. Everything I post to or read from Twitter I do as a human, but the feeds are automated from other UI’s. This blog for one thing, outbound posts and with embedded readers on other pages, and more recently Tweetdeck both in and outbound and other WordPress plug-ins. So yes “promoted” tweets sometimes make it into the inbound channel as well as the humanly “followed” tweets. But I can dismiss these. There are no other UI widgets trying to second guess what commercial or “sex” driven content to put in front of my eyes, alongside the user content on my desktop.

Twitter is great because it’s a channel without inherent content.
Please make your business model out of that fact.

After the “Relaxed About Theology” post, I largely drafted this one in response to another twitter exchange involving a tweeter who clearly wasn’t at all relaxed about the religious connections between the Sheldonian and the recent World Humanist Congress (#WHC2014) held there. Having drafted it I decided not to post it, since although he had a point his aggressive motive wasn’t clear, and no-one from BHA or other humanist organisation seemed to have engaged. So maybe better let sleeping trolls lie. Well I discover today BHA did engage – totally defensively and dismissively, so I feel moved to share my view:

@getyourshare1 was making the point that the Sheldonian as a “religious” building was not appropriate as a humanist venue. Of course troll-style, he was making his point with emotive terms like “hypocrites”,  “betrayal”, etc. and making claims that were exaggerating what may (or may not) have been partly true. My initial tweeted response was that 1000 humanists taking over the (ex-religious) asylum had a certain delicious irony to it. But, he responded suggesting the church may have made rent out of the event at the expense of humanism. After one attempt to put a positive spin on it – “OK if that were true, what would you suggest we do about it” (other than hurl abuse)? But the hint wasn’t taken, so I shut up – Monday I think.

Anyway, it seems BHA have as recently as today simply been denying and dismissing his claims. My take is this:

The Church(es) are massive landowners in the UK. The major ancient universities were to a great extent founded by the churches, and as well as having that heritage, if Oxford is anything like Cambridge and Durham, we can be sure the churches still own a great deal of the property with ground rents and covenants and the like where the whole buildings are no longer owned. No doubt the concerns that run the academic institutions as businesses and charities have quite complex relations to their landlords, so whilst the Sheldonian is not “owned” by the church, or any hiring rents paid directly to the church, I wouldn’t be surprised if the church did benefit indirectly to some extent. (Tried to research that out of interest, but very difficult to bottom out the detail.)

What is undeniable however, is that the Sheldonian has religious heritage and a “congregational” layout, not to mention the organ and other religious artefacts, symbols and mottos all over it. Denied by the BHA.

The congregational element of humanism’s congress, and indeed of its Sunday “assemblies”, was one of the features that led Andrew Brown to point out similarities between humanism and a religion. Denied and indeed attacked with ridiculing and dismissive rhetoric by the BHA members.

Clearly not everyone in humanism is Relaxed About Theology, but the worry is that so many voices associated with humanism feel the need to attack or deny it every time some point of contact arises, rather than engage in reasonable dialogue.

[Links to all the twitter tags, handles and tweets deliberately omitted here, anyone following who has interest in reasonable dialogue knows how to make contact. Stoking trolls in 140 character sound bites is not reasonable dialogue.]

[Post Note : a particularly “shrill” denial of any case comparing humanism to religion, as a response to the Andrew Brown piece, posted at almost exactly the same time as this post.]

Sad to hear, but have to agree – wanted to give the artist Imogen Heap a chance – but this review says what I’ve been feeling about her recently.

I first came across her in Jeff Beck’s Ronnie Scott event with Eric Clapton and Tal Wilkenfeld. Some real magic delivery of both a blues-rock standard and one of her own numbers with this stellar “backing band”.

Saw her live with her own “friends” on a tour (in Oslo) 3 or 4 years ago, and found it very self-indulgent, having jolly good fun with whacky musical ideas and instruments – but sorry, not really delivering much entertainment or “soul” to an audience. Maintained an interest – because after all, quality will out – and followed her recent tweets to her self-made promo-videos, and oh dear – none too promising musically. Didn’t write a detailed review, assuming maybe this was a project in progress that needed some space to develop.

It’s like Clive James says – it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing – you can take the creative improv too far. The opening para of Grauniad review by Rebecca Nicholson of the album “Sparks” therefore comes as no surprise:

Imogen Heap‘s fourth record is less a coherent album than a collection of crowdsourced collaborations, generated through methods and techniques that include a running app and a pair of gloves that turns the wearer’s body into a human harp. Sparks was written in a community garden in Hangzhou, China, and in the Himalayas in Bhutan. There’s a song called The Listening Chair that will never be finished, with Heap promising to add a new verse every seven years. If you uploaded images of your footprints to her website, you’ll find them reproduced on the cover. (As fan interaction goes, it’s definitely one up on a T-shirt.) Musically, Sparks is a bit of a mess.

You don’t want to kick a girl when she’s down, but take note Imogen, we know you can do it.

[Post Note : rewatching that could’a had religion / rollin’ and tumbin’ with Jeff Beck – happier times, and Tal’s expression and body language within seconds of Imogen opening her mouth says it all. But do watch Blanket too.]