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Flattening seems to have suddenly become a fashionable word in “complex adaptive systems” discourse. This was the most recent LinkedIn post that raised the topic.

That is, the error we make in seeing causal relations in a single layer of interacting entities, ignoring an important aspect of complexity that different processes and different entity-abstractions, happen in different architectural axes and layers for good evolutionary reasons. And, since evolution – of ourselves and our ecosystems – never ceases, what were once good reasons may become problematic and/or exploitable by later evolved entities – viruses in our broadest conception of that word.

Even if real world change happens self-evidently in physical implementation layers, it is so important that we think, and think about thinking and planning and project-managing, in other layers of abstraction.

I responded to a couple of mentions on LinkedIn that “flattening” was a word I have been using, so I was prompted to check the history of the word here on Psybertron. In 2010 I quoted Mary Parker-Follett, the original guru of management gurus back in the 1930’s.

‘Flattening out “important differences” … finding difference is easy, synthesising common value is harder’ – Mary Parker-Follett

“Significant Difference” has become a core concept for me, recognising all significant differences and where they fit in our integrated approaches to real-world human decision-making. Necessary distinction or discrimination, as valuable input to our integration efforts, without implying or treating them as competitive or divisive dichotomies. [One obvious 21st C source of flattening – “cancelling” differences from discourse – arises in “woke” or Mental Parity of “neurodivergent” contexts – (Lionel Shriver – “Mania” (2024). “Requisite Variety” anyone?]

Parker-Follett – like Dennett and Hofstadter and McGilchrist and Solms and Levenchuk and a few more – is a hero of mine, and relatively recently (2019-2022) I added John C Doyle to that list. Flattening – the accidental overlooking of important architectural distinctions – is central to his work as it is to mine.

His background is electronic control-systems / control-theory, where he has well-respected text-books, so it’s very easy to be prejudiced against him – like all Cybernetic / Computer “machine” language – in our complex human contexts. [Same reason I coined “Psybernetics” of course.] But he has turned his insights to our human predicament in the 2020’s.

Previous posts of mine refer to two different John C Doyle presentations. (They are incredibly dense and rapid-content-filled, with little quarter given to any background understanding, but the effort is highly recommended.)

“Scientists will Hate This“
– Psybertron post April 2022

“Zience and John C Doyle“
– Psybertron post April 2022

“Who’s in Charge?“
– Psybertron post August 2019 (My first reference to Doyle in Gazzaniga, in which Gazzaniga also makes the connection between many-layered architecture in mind<>brain functioning, and the understanding lost if we flatten the architecture in our minds.)

Those recommended John C Doyle presentations are:

“Universal Laws and Architectures in Complex Networks” (Doyle, 2018)

“Universal Laws and Architectures and Their Fragilities” (Doyle, 2021)

It’s Architectural – about HW / OS / SW layers and levels
It’s about SEAFT’s – speed-efficiency-accuracy-flexibility trade-offs
It’s about DeSS’s – diversity-enabled-sweet-spots

If we flatten out all the differences within and between the different architectural layers the losses are enormous. We don’t embrace difference and divergence by treating everything the same, or ignoring the ones with the most “baggage”, we do it by dynamic integration.

Enjoy!

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Post Notes:

One LinkedIn post not so obviously related to the flattening topic, but note that layers come on multiple axes. It’s architectural not spatial. Primary focus here is intuitive insights about the Data / Information / Knowledge / Wisdom “framework” – the weakness of one-dimensional 4-layer pyramids. But it’s exactly on point that knowledge layers exists on at least two axes, one of which is our conceptual model of knowledge as distinct from our perception of the known & knowable. (Savoir/Connaitre & Kennen/Wissen again.)

This was the LinkedIn post that prompted my riff on “Flattening” above.

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Preparing my paper / presentation / slide-deck for the upcoming conference in Birmingham, I had another instalment of my 22 year dialogue with Dave Snowden. That latest dialogue is reproduced below, but the result was the following post by me on LinkedIn.

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Ian GLENDINNING – Systems Architecture & Information Abstraction Consultant

The ISSS-2025 Conference is in Birmingham at the Leadership Institute of the University of Birmingham, Friday 11th to Tuesday 15th July.

The theme is “Advancing Together: An Invitation for Systemic Collaboration” – between the many different constituencies interested in Systems one way or another – Systems Sciences, Thinking & Engineering, Operations Research, Cybernetics & Complexity Sciences to name a few.

On Saturday afternoon, I’m presenting on “Rehabilitating the Value of Wisdom” as a follow-up to my 2024 workshop in DC on “The Tyranny of the Explicit“. It’s about the language we need to be using when dealing with non-predictive-systems whose trajectories are “more than science” even though their emergence and evolution are soundly science-based.

The name of the game is pragmatism, and natural language that supports an integration of the scientific and human perspectives. Drawing on 25 years of philosophical research on top of 25 years of systems engineering experience as well as the resources of many other players in this space, including Dave Snowden and Dr Mike C Jackson OBE.

Mike is also part of the conference and you will find the full list of speakers and agenda here:

https://lnkd.in/eUSishYj – Agenda – Advancing Together: The 69th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences – web.cvent.com

Hope to see you there 🙂

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The reason I was prompted to make that promotional LinkedIn post was that, as I mentioned in the intro above, I’d had another constructive dialogue with Dave Snowden on LinkedIn this morning. That thread reproduced below, was Dave reflecting on attending a conference on Systems in Government Context in Sheffield …

Dave Snowden – Sitting here in Sheffield, having presented material on citizen engagement and also reflecting on some of the other presentations. One of the most striking contrasts was between presenting systematic change (neutral between systems thinking and complexity science) as a set of desired behaviours, and presenting it as a means by which those behaviours might emerge. Witnessing the type of audience engagement which defined how people should respond, based on a culturally specific view on transparency, etc and seeing how the political players in the group responded by gaming.

Coming away more convinced than ever that we should stop talking about an emergent property, behaviour as if it were desirable and had causal properties. The reality is that behaviour only determines actions once it has become habituated, which takes a long time and may be socially determined anyway. If you try to teach it (i) it won’t work and (ii) it will be gamed and used as a power game. Obliquity, proximity, and high interactions (around something meaningful) are all more impactful.

Please repeat after me: “it all went wrong with Skinner”

Ian GLENDINNING – That whole second paragraph (and your Virtue Ethics reference in one of the comments) – I can’t disagree – but it leaves me again with that “And you still want to call it all science?” feeling.

Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING its coherent to scientific understanding used as an enabling constraint

Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING It was interesting today – Mike Jackson said there was a creative tension between ST and scientific approaches to complexity and that ST had arise to account for things that science could not then account for. I like that but using science as an enabling constraint is a triadic option to the dichotomy of science – non-science and science itself had radically changed since the foundations of ST. New Materialism brings together sceince and the humanities in ways we could not have imagined a few decades back.

Ian GLENDINNING – Ironically at the Birmingham ISSS conference starting end of next week, Mike and I are presenting at the same time in parallel sessions – bad news for me I’m guessing 😉

Anyway – science as “enabling constraint” I’m good with.

[As we’ve agreed before, all the complex processes that cause [all the emergent stuff in your para] have scientific explanations and bases, but all that obliquity and socially-determined habituation and gaming arising / evolving over many cycles of interaction are not themselves “science” – in terms of things like predictability and objective repeatability, etc.]

Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING Obliquity also has a basis in science, as does habituation (which forms a regularity)- you’re (rather like Mike and others) taking a view of science that is just a tad out of date. Any method or approach needs to have some backup

Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden We’re agreeing they have a sound basis (in 2020’s Science) – they have that solid back-up – but their subsequent trajectories in the real world are not scientific. It’s not a matter of being “out of date” – I could take offence 🙂 – it’s about constructive linguistic choice to move things forward.

Ian GLENDINNING – In a nutshell, my linguistic objection is that it is dishonest (doesn’t help, causes problems and misunderstandings) to keep calling that integration of science AND humanities, “science”. [And I’m talking now. It is precisely during these recent 3 decades I’ve been working on understanding that integration.]

Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING trajectories are in the main emergent properties My point (no insult intended) is that a lot of science is about non-predictive systems, but we can understand the mechanisms, what can’t happen and regularities

Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden Again, can’t argue with that. My problem is simply with the language we use when dealing with (planning, managing, justifying, funding, etc.) the trajectories of those “non-predictive systems” emerging 🙂 Your practical approach(s), are clearly very good – I’m a fan-boy after all 😉 – just a hopefully constructive linguistic objection in that political management space.

Ian GLENDINNING – Thread-reader unroll … oh, no, wait a minute, this isn’t X/Twitter 🙂 (This exchange is pretty much my slide-deck for Birmingham. Thanks for your indulgence Dave Snowden )

Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING if you want sone promotion put up a post and link to me

Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden Ha, yes. Didn’t mean to hijack your thread – but it has been useful to me, and I will take you up on that offer.

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If you want to pick-up the whole preceding dialogue, just search “Dave Snowden” and/or “more than science” on the blog above. The latter goes back to 2001, my association with Dave back to 2003.

Or tune in to the conference presentation to hear the latest, also linked above.

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Melville’s Moby Dick has already been one of those “great books” that has informed my philosophical journey. So much so that one of my current writing projects is intended as a sequel to a sequel to Moby Dick. Yes, at least one sequel does already exist. I’ve mentioned before that one problem which that presents me with – apart from my (in)competence as a narrative writer – is how to cover such a long time-span from a first person perspective? Who is to be my Ishmael? Salman Rushdie supplies an answer in magic-realism-auto-fiction.

My delusions of grandeur may be some time.

Pretty sure my reading doesn’t need the Christian God, but that there are drivers beyond “us” subjects and objects in the real world of here and now is not in doubt. The following is a long X/Twitter quote from “Darwin to Jesus” giving us his reading. (Might come in handy, with due acknowledgement.)

[I should say, just the text below, but the original X/Twitter thread is beautifully illustrated with a collection of images. Go take a look.]

“Call me Ishmael.”

That line starts one of the strangest and most misunderstood books in American literature—Moby-Dick. A tale of man’s fury, fate, and rebellion against… a Whale? Or is there more beneath the surface? A thread on the true meaning of Melville’s masterpiece.

The story begins with Ishmael, a drifter and wanderer. He’s depressed. He needs purpose. So he goes to sea—not for glory, but for healing. “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul… then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

He joins a whaling ship, the Pequod, along with a strange, diverse crew—including Queequeg, a tattooed pagan harpooner who becomes his closest friend. But the captain isn’t aboard yet…

When Captain Ahab finally appears, he’s nothing like the other sailors. He’s scarred. Monomaniacal. And missing a leg—torn off by a monstrous white whale named Moby Dick. But Ahab doesn’t just want to kill the whale. He wants vengeance.

Ahab gathers the crew and nails a gold coin to the mast. Whoever kills the white whale gets the reward. But it’s not about the coin. It never was. Ahab’s not driven by profit or sport. He’s possessed. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

As the voyage unfolds, the crew glimpses Ahab’s madness. Even Starbuck, the first mate, trembles at it. He senses this isn’t just a hunt. It’s a holy war. Ahab sees the whale not as an animal, but as the veil covering some cosmic injustice. A force he must destroy.

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks… If man will strike, strike through the mask!” That’s the heart of Ahab’s obsession. He believes the whale is not just a creature—it is God’s mask. And he intends to tear it off.

Meanwhile, Ishmael narrates the journey with wonder, humour, and awe. He’s not like Ahab. He doesn’t rage against the ocean—he listens to it. He reflects on life, death, fate, creation. He’s searching. But he’s not accusing.

The whale itself is a mystery. It appears only briefly—but its presence is everywhere. It’s white. Silent. Enormous. Unfeeling. To Ahab, it becomes the face of a cruel God who never answers. And when it finally comes, Ahab tries to kill it.

The final battle begins when the white whale finally breaches the surface—towering, vast, ghostly. For three days, Ahab pursues it across the sea. The crew harpoons it, but it thrashes and dives, wrecking boats, killing sailors. It’s not just a fight—it’s an apocalypse. Ahab is unrelenting, even as death surrounds him.

On the third day, the whale turns. It rams the Pequod, splitting it open. The sea swallows the ship and her crew. Ahab, in a final act of fury, hurls his harpoon—and the rope coils around his neck. He’s dragged under by the very weapon he used to defy the gods. And then… silence.

Only Ishmael survives—clinging to Queequeg’s coffin, which had been carved earlier as a burial raft, but now floats like an ark. He drifts alone, upheld by what was meant for death, now turned into salvation.

So what is Moby-Dick really about? It’s about a man who cannot forgive God. Ahab is a modern Job—but instead of humility, he chooses defiance. Where Job said, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him,” Ahab says, “I will strike Him down.”

The white whale is more than nature. It is God’s silence. It is suffering without explanation. It is the abyss we all face in our darkest hours. And Moby-Dick is about how we respond to that silence.

Ahab responds with defiance and hatred. He turns his pain into rage, his suffering into blasphemy. But Ishmael responds to suffering with peace and humility. He seeks truth, not control. In the end, only Ishmael is saved.

Melville wrote a story filled with sermons, signs, symbols. But at its heart is a warning: When we suffer, we can either curse God and die… or float by grace on the coffin that saves us.

Moby-Dick is not about a whale. It’s about the war between pride and providence. Wrath and wonder. Ahab and Ishmael. Man and God. It’s the oldest story in history.

Most people think Moby-Dick is just about a whale, but it’s really about a question… how should we respond to God?

That recurring “more than nature” echoes my “more than science” agenda.

That introductory sentence “A tale of man’s fury, fate, and rebellion against… a Whale? Or is there more beneath the surface?” is pretty self-evident, in the sense that there is no mystery or doubt to any intelligent reader, that the whale and the quest are metaphorical. What is represented metaphorically – about man’s place in the world and the risk of insanity as we quest too close to the edge of reality – is obviously open to interpretation. That said, Melville’s experience, research and writing nevertheless bring the reality – the stench and brutality – of whaling, to the page, which is what makes it a readable, gripping tale independent of the embedded morality play.

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Post Note: Am I an atheist? Kinda.

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Surprisingly well … despite relatively few productive days amidst the frustrations of everyday life. The deliverables are ever clearer – a PhD-style Thesis and 2 books – and first a paper for ISSS2025 in Birmingham in a couple of weeks.

Mentioned in the previous post – to which I added spin-off footnotes already – that I’d been getting the feeling that every new thing I drafted was something I’m sure I’d already drafted better somewhere before? So, I pointed ChatGPT at a selection of my own existing writing (linked in that post) and asked it to summarise it all back to me.

That’s become the start of a little adventure.

Previously I’d really only used ChatGPT as an occasional alternative to Google – simple search queries. Sadly Google itself has really gone downhill since it swallowed the AI/LLM pill, and increasingly replaces search results with its “opinion” of what it thinks you might be asking, rather than answer the f*cking question – a simple search request. That’s the opposite of intelligence, real or artificial. “Really dumb” to use language inspired by the orange turd.

Its response was very good, and gave lots of jumping off points to elaborations I might want to follow (also in my own existing writing). I guess I wasn’t surprised at how good that response was – which was very, very, very good, and I’ll be the judge of that – it’s using an LLM to process my own writing. But that was only the start. In those previous footnotes I had name checked several people in Pirsig-space, that had joined-up two lines of thought.

One, that Pirsig’s own creative writing process had used a physical “Zettelkasten” approach. Collating thoughts as index-cards in card-index box / trays, most importantly, where some of those thoughts (cards) can be links between others. [He describes the process in Lila and the creative flexibility it gave him, in the talk he gave shortly after ZMM was published in 1974 (from about 17m16s in). Once the links are in the cards, you can shuffle the deck – re-arrange the structure / outline of your overall deliverable – without losing the semantics.] It was a “graph” (node-edge network) model of thought and knowledge long before the internet existed. Many Pirsig readers had spotted this before, me included, and written about the parallel between this Zettelkasten approach and blogging or posting pages or posts with links to other pages or posts – clearly not rocket science – but the enabler for the sematic-web in http / www / xml technologies. Once you spot it, you can trace “the semantic web” from Tim Berners-Lee (1980+), back to Foucault (1966) and McLuhan before him, William Blake, and all the way back, in other words, via the 1940’s Macy “Cybernetics” conferences to the ancient Greeks’ “Kubernetes”.

Two, point One is, by definition, old news, so the real news is what an LLM/AI like ChatGPT(4o) brings to this party. It can find and add links that were only implicit in the original collections of cards (nodes and links/edges). And it can give you the opportunity to add these – and more – explicitly.

So, you’ll never guess what I’ve been doing? ChatGPT has been helping & teaching me to do exactly that. (Hat tips to Artun Turan, Michael Hopwood and Tom Berman for their tools and inspiration. Pirsigian’s all.)

So I’m in the process of re-building my 25 years of blogging as a knowledge-graph with additional notes and links not just in that semantic web but also in organisational, hierarchical categories, subjects and … dare I say … chapter headings. [And in the process, with ChatGPT’s help, learning a lot about scripting to process my own content and about a long-standing semantic “mapping” tool project of mine.]

Finally – the proof will be in the pudding – meantime, some things I’ve learned from my forays into ChatGPT.

It’s very positive, flattering, attentive and tireless. It only critiques when asked.

If you take care over the way you introduce subjects and the reasoning you’re starting from, and how you phrase “questions” (aka “prompts”), the conversational style is very constructive. Even without critique, by its restating the problem it thinks we’re solving together, it naturally corrects any errors in starting premises – already added a lot of value there.

It notices jokes and light-hearted meta-comments and asides and gives more than a passing semblance of a sense of humour – now that’s scary – and knowing when to stop making suggestions.

Being attentive, it’s therefore quite addictive, and yet it “knows” it’s not an intelligent human.

Notwithstanding the “flattery” angle of its tireless attention, it gave me an amazingly positive appraisal of my entire writing project which, more importantly, really seemed to “get it”. Which is good for my own motivation and productivity, and good for the credibility of its future suggestions.

And it knows its place – as well as clarifying my own work / copyright and author / editor / publisher issues, it gave me this response to an observation of mine at one point:

That’s all for now folks!

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As I draft my (two) book(s) – and a paper for ISSS2025 in July – I find myself revisiting certain key Psybertron posts and pages and unable to refrain from making update / elaboration edits, effectively turning them into potential draft chapters.

As a collection there is significant near-repetition and an incompleteness about only sample / informal references that happened to be topical at the time they were first written. (Every time I draft something new, a document in isolation from the blog posts, the repetition keeps leading me back to – “I’m sure I wrote something that already covered this …”

There’s obviously a good deal of editing / indexing / referencing to be done, not to mentioning joining-up the narrative flow of the whole, but it seems worth making the collection more explicit, standalone, shareable, editable, with subject matter headings, etc. So here goes, in no particular order:

What Am I Thinking? – despite “no particular order”, this post and the PhD Research Proposal, are probably the best recent summary of the whole agenda, even if the particulars are only “examples” of the whole. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/17062 And that PhD Research Proposal. https://www.academia.edu/109958139/Research_Proposal_Ian_Glendinning_Draft_4

John C Doyle and the problem with Zombie Science (2021 talk, 2022 post). The human operating system is evolutionarily badly optimised to deal with 21stC “viral” information. It’s about the architecture, not “things” in the physical layer(s). https://www.psybertron.org/archives/15903

Determinist Reductionism Sucks. Sapolsky, Mitchell, Hossenfelder and Dennett – and commenter Tom Clark – whom I owe a Mitchell<>Clark essay. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/17961

Hold Your Definition – Dennett and Levenchuk on the downsides of definitions as “coffins” for enlightened progress. The right kind of definitions in the right layers of abstraction. https://www.psybertron.org/archives/6539

Dichotomies – really an extension to the expectations for honest definitions. Boundaries. Choice of words. Distinction – non-pejorative “discrimination” – matters, without being divisive of whole camps / linguistic subject areas.

Good Fences. https://www.psybertron.org/?s=Good%20Fences&sort=relevance

More Than Science. https://www.psybertron.org/?s=More%20than%20science&sort=relevance

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Going to use some tools to construct a summary of my own words above.

Post Notes: Famous last words.

A single day’s effort and we have progress!

Simply asking ChatGPT to summarise my own thesis back to me – based on the content linked in this post (and any others it discovers in the process) and to suggest chapter headings / structure – was impressive in itself. First off made me realise my own search function is limited to posts but not pages – so I was missing half of my own content, by myself anyway.

Secondly, fixing that threw up an obvious “joining the dots” opportunity.

I’ve mentioned previously, originally day-job motivated, an interest in semantic graphing tools going right back to IDEF0 use in the 1980’s – for business systems process modelling – and seeing so many vector-graphic and semantic-web graphical mark-up tools since then into the 21stC but always being frustrated that having settled on the obvious power of the node<>edge graph dynamic relational model for everything and anything – the most comprehensively true model of reality, the tools were extremely limited in understanding the need for configurable semantics of GOF hierarchical tree-views of taxonomic (class/type) and mereologic (whole/part) ontological views for human organisation and navigation, seeing the wood for the trees.

Hierarchy has become a dirty word, tainted by “power structures” and compounded ever since semantic web people – and open-web-democracy activists – discovered generic network models, but we still need hierarchies. (I feel another #GoodFences essay coming on.)

One more level of interrupt … recall also many people, myself included, noting the knowledge graph model inherent in Pirsig’s creative “index card” – ideas and ideas-linking-ideas – approach to his own writing projects. A fellow Pirsig afficionado suggested the idea that a tool he had created using this “Zettelkasten” (index card box) idea could be used both creatively for writing from scratch or retrospectively to add relational value to existing works, analysed using an LLM Tool like ChatGPT.

Well bugger me! It can do both.

Help me add structure to the mass of writing I’ve already done AND add the value I need to structure the whole thesis & narrative. I’ve gone from using ChatGPT as the occasional alternative to Google searches to find and elucidate “X” to being my helper in adding value to my own work.

Hat-tip to (Pirsigian) Michael Hopwood for already putting me onto Obsidian as a viable Zettelkasten tool, and hat-tip to (Pirsigian) Tom Berman for showing me his “MuDG” tool in action to add ChatGPT value to Wendy Pirsig’s “On Quality”.

I am now thanks to ChatGPT’s help working with a complete Obsidian vault version of my whole Psybertron blog export!!!! Obsidian has a Breadcrumbs plug-in to find and explicitly add the implicit ontological relations. (It’s even teaching me to script and code.)

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Missed a couple of years recently, but this was my 6th (or 7th?) attendance at the Hay-on-Wye “How The Light Gets In” philosophy, science and music festival. It’s over 4 days, but it’s so packed with content, I’m exhausted after just two these days.

Just posting a few thoughts this year, rather than detailed reviews of the talks, dialogues and music. [I have notes elsewhere for my own reference. As ever, Dave Snowden was in attendance – got one brief chance to say “Hi” in person.]

Apart from a few new faces – keepers for future dialogue – no really new topics or ideas this year, and the main new impression in 2025 was Hilary Lawson’s. As founder and director of IAI and HTLGI he’s had plenty of previous stage time at these events, but noticeable was his urgency, his visible frustration at getting his non-realist “Closure” (2001) agenda across [2003] [2009].

I ended on watching Tom Robinson‘s set on the Saturday evening. Given the nature of the event, the music tends to to be light relief entertainment from the intellectual content, for me anyway, so I’ve only occasionally noticed specific acts on previous occasions, and until the day, I hadn’t noticed Tom was even on the bill. Good to see and hear his full hour set – telling his life stories, and the loss of Danny Kustow – as well as playing his songs, which meant it was 9:30pm before I was in the car for the 5.5hr drive home! Lovely bloke. One of his songs – a re-telling of American Pie for the British which includes reference to the Eric Clapton / Enoch Powell remarks that spawned Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League back in 1978. The last time I saw Tom was Sunday 30th April 1978, the Trafalgar Square rally and march to the RAR/ANL gig in Victoria Park, Hackney. What a day!

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Tice on the bill – enlightened freedom of speech n’all that – how the light gets in – despite which the latter drew some naïve AntiFa protests 🙂 Saw the latter claiming common sense – don’t we all? But my focus was / is the philosophy<>science interface / overlap / relationships so I properly attended:

Catherine Mayer – Stranger Than Fiction, writer / journalist in conversation with fellow journalist / writer Mary Ann Sieghart.

(Ever present philosopher Barry C Smith wine-tasting-based philosophy session, I skipped.)

John Dupre, Ivette Fuentes & Alex Rosenberg discussing “whether physics holds the answers to all our questions” – spoiler, it doesn’t. [My agenda.]

David Goodhart, Sherelle Jacobs & Richard Tice – draining the swamp, smaller government through efficiency etc. Sherelle new to me, a keeper.

Hilary Lawson, Steven Pinker, Barbara Tversky and Sophie Scott-Brown – debating the relationships between thought, language and reality. No surprises [my agenda] other than Lawson pushing his anti-realist “Closure” agenda very hard, despite having much previous stage time referencing it – as the founder / director of the IAI / HTLGI event. (Pinker actually used a quote I use from his wife Rebecca Goldstein, that no physicist or philosopher’s work is complete without ontological commitment to say “and this is how the world really is” unless like non-realists you deny reality. So close to my triadic position which is to remember that reality is strictly “posited” as being out there and your ontology is “deemed”. Reification is exactly that. Treat it as “real” by all means, but never forget.)

Ivette Fuentes – breakfast conversation with the Mexican quantum physicist, sharing her story of her interest in the topics that have shaped her work in QM.

“Hat on” reminding her of the rigour of physical science, when switching hats between Philosophy and Science/PoS 🙂

Robert L Kuhn, Masimo Pigliucci, Maria Balaet & John Dupre – on the biology of conflict (vs collaboration). Balaet neuroscientist, another keeper, new to me.

Maria Balaet, Joanna Moncrieff & Norman Ohler – on the historical and social place of psychoactive substances – ranging from caution to enthusiasm, via empiricism and pragmatism as ever.

(Missed Goodhart, Mayer & Sturgeon on gender in democracy. #ViveLaDifference)

Paul Bloom – on Utopia – impossible and actually undesirable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get close. Someone I knew of, student of Pinker, but first experience for me. A keeper. (Also author of “Against Empathy” – see footnote.)

Eric Kaufmann – on the End of Woke. Business-like presentation on the history from original political correctness and the need for narrower understanding of the specifics: “Today’s leaders… need to understand Kaufmann’s defence of democracy before it’s too late.” — Trevor Phillips, about says it.

Carlo Rovelli, Alenka Zupancic & Slavoj Žižek– on the self in the world. Entertaining to hear Žižek as usual, agreeing with lots of Rovelli, especially the Buddhist / Nagarjuna angle.

Hilary Lawson & Slavoj Žižek – refereed by Gunes Taylor – non-realist philosophers both, going beyond Truth and Reality. Again, Lawson quite urgent in pushing his “Closure” view and the incorrigible Žižek agreeing with his endless anecdotes and jokes. (I’ve been sympathetic to Lawson’s view since 2003, properly reading him in 2008, formative part of my worldview, but clearly the 2025+ “polycrises/metacrisis” has spurred his new-found urgency.)

Tim Maudlin standing in for Avshalom Elitzur – on imaginary numbers in parallel mathematical formalisms in physical theory, including QM and Schrodinger. (No mystery – just a symbolic “accounting practice” to keep, co-dependent, orthogonal, complementary real variables distinct when combined in single dynamic equations or formulae. #GoodFences. Also fascinating that he included Navier-Stokes in his examples of parallel formulations – Engineers (and cosmologists) deal with this all the time, but these “diffusion as flow” views gaining traction at quantum levels too.) [Another new / keeper]

Claire Blencowe, Paul Bloom and Michelle Terry – provoked by Matt Taylor – on the distinction between roles we artificially “play” and roles we authentically “fulfil” as our-selves in the real world. A great place for me to end.

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Post Notes:

HTLGI’s own gallery of images from the event here. It includes this one with Dave Snowden front and centre. Back of my head in a couple of the others 🙂

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Note: On the Friday I visited a handful of Hay’s dozens of used book shops, and failed again to find a copy of Iain McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism”. (This, like “Against Empathy” (by Paul Bloom above), is a memetic extension of Paul Feyerabend’s “Against Method”(*) – not literally “against” but against over-zealous / over-reach / distortion of its intended use – see topical woke / anti-woke / Musk “empathy killed the west” etc and (*) see Rules – guidance for wise etc. In Bloom’s case it’s a warning against our biases, where we get to feel good empathising with in-groups, to the detriment/displacement of any actual empathy with out-groups.)

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Previous HTLGI notes – 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2025.

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Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of the few books I’ve actually read in the past couple of years, that wasn’t directly / immediately / importantly related to my current writing project – needing to clear the decks and pay more than lip-service to having a deadline. Though as I often find, any literature about the human condition could be considered relevant, it’s simply impossible to read everything, to live without a library of unread books.

I made three passing references here to reading LHP, but never really posted a “review”:

March 2025 – I did this weekend also choose to re-read to completion “Leonard and Hungry Paul” (2019) by Ronan Hession, by independent publishers Bluemoose Books …

December 2024 – A whole load of half-read / un-reviewed books that will have to wait: “Leonard and Hungry Paul” – Ronan Hession (Half read, very good, small independent publisher, made only a few project-relevant notes) …

April 2024 – Psybertron blog action has retreated to book / thesis drafting behind the scenes, as most of my life is taken over by planning for two summer events – the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISS) and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conferences in Washington DC in early June, and the Robert Pirsig 50th anniversary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (#ZMM50th) events culminating in July with retracing the original 1968 motorcycle road-trip (#ZMM50thRide). That said, I’m using available down time to read one book from my never ending reading list. “Leonard and Hungry Paul” by Rónán Hession (Mumblin’ Deaf Ro on X/Twitter), via small independent publisher Bluemoose Books. Been following them and a few other independents for a while, for obvious reasons, but remembered I really did need to buy and read one of their books. Support is more than “Retweeting”…

Well, these are the words culled and collated from those three earlier posts into some semblance of a review:

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No Funerals and One Wedding?

As usual, I’m feeling the need to capture some thoughts, only ~20% through, a kinda pre-review as I call them, but did read the whole and add thoughts below.

It’s very good, and surprisingly relevant to my own agenda:

“the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments”.

“the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of the complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing.”

“He operated [the ‘Za’ rule in scrabble] with iron inflexibility, even though he himself was its most frequent victim”

The technology, complexity and human systems with rules – it’s all there.

Despite the fact the author is almost 20 years my junior, there’s a strong sense of northern spouse, parental, familial, sibling life, learning rules of the game of real life through scrapes in the schoolyard and board games in the home. Cultural references to Inspector Morse and Judy Sill as well as bookshops, and hard-backs as “special presents”. I can see why it resonates with me.

The language is beautiful, beautifully observed too:

“on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from the special place that ideas come from”

And

“[looking at] the first piece of asparagus loaded onto her fork [he spoke] through a mouthful of unsalted soup”

Excellent stuff. Guessing we will eventually find out why Paul is “Hungry” more than just that Grace is a slow eater 🙂 ?

Reading on, with a reason to do so, I did find time to read it to completion.

Overall, very good, gently funny study on life, love, family and friendship. No funerals and one wedding, maybe. (PS – never did find out explicitly why Hungry Paul has that name. Presumably his older sister’s nick-name for him from his time as a needy infant, but never even mentioned, unless I missed it?)

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Post Note: – Today, I hear it’s being made into a BBC TV (NI) production. One to watch.

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Slowing Down the Internet? – You must be mad.

One of my long-standing and counter-intuitive rules of engagement in internet-enabled interactive-media – comments, forums, social media generally – is that moderation isn’t about “censorship” it’s about slowing down dangerous, explosive, degenerate, divisive, counter-productive, polarising activity. Moderation as in nuclear reactor moderator rods, slowing down the particle flux between the reactive “fuel”, preventing a runaway chain-reaction “going critical”.

Counter-intuitive to the perceived immediate democratisation of the web; where we/anyone is enabled and allowed to communicate anything at the flick of a thumb. It’s the speed and ubiquity that is killing us – little room for listening & thinking before reacting in the memetic race for attention. Dysmemics ensures catchy crap beats nuanced quality.

Enlightened (human) moderators of previous generation forums, bulletin-boards and email-exploders typically made provision for free-unlimited and posts-per-day-limited channels.

I’ve been using the unlikely named “Discord” forum tool for some time in various communities (see below). It’s very flexible and powerful – some people run entire projects and programmes on it – and, obviously dependent on the actual humans and human relationships involved, it provides a great experience. I say unlikely named, and indeed the language and graphics in the user interfaces is kinda “down with the kids” too, originally created and used by gamers and hackers, so first impressions mitigate against it being used for serious grown-up projects, but the way it works is a joy to behold. Sadly of course, being very flexible and powerful, nefarious people also run their nefarious projects on it.

But that’s humans for you. The tool is functionally well designed.

So well designed, I notice it has a “Slow Mode” feature built-in, which can be switched-on if conversational chain-reactions risk going critical – more heat & noise than light & enlightenment. Be interesting to see if we get a case where we need it, but good to know it’s there.

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Discord?

If you don’t know Discord – this is me and my personal Discord DM channel, and we can take it from there with joining mutual group “servers”? If you’re already on Discord, you’ll already know how to find me 🙂 And, if you’re really interested, the exemplary server that uses every project management feature and every group forum bell & whistle is the “Active Inference Institute” run by Daniel Friedman.

I am in awe.

“Where there is Discord, let there be light.”

[With apologies to Maggie.]

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For some reason, not quite sure why, I’ve binge-re-watched the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad over about a month.

A long concentrated dose of pure evil and depraved bloody violence has it’s own cathartic draining effect, but it remains a marvellously constructed morality-play drama, characters and plot lines. It was good to get all the vividly remembered scenes stitched back together in some semblance of order. Hank remains the only “hero” here, he dies for Walt’s sins. The structure with the out-of-timeline preview scenes at the front of each episode makes a lot more sense second time around – whole theses to be – have been – written about that.

However, since I first saw BB I have, of course, watched the whole of “Better Call Saul” and “El Camino” – the spin-offs based around Saul Goodman and Jesse Pinkman, the two (males) who survived BB with their lives – so lots of the temporally confused scenes are in fact shared across the whole collection.

Which sadly means I’ll probably have to re-watch BCS again too! Rats!

Saul jokingly mentions “Cinnabon” during the final episode of BB – a remark whose significance cannot even be noticed first time through. The significance to me is it takes me back to “the holiday season” – half a year, September to January in the southern US – and the sickly pervasive smell of cinnamon and sweet vanilla with everything. Just typing the words is enough. And the reverse is true. The slightest whiff of cinnamon and the whole series comes flooding back – debilitating! Which probably answers my first question – why was I rewatching it? A subconscious olfactory trigger no doubt. Hurdle overcome.

Anyway, I only intended to post one thing in this writing hiatus, the music, the song from the final scene. Already well documented of course, but I had to Google to re-find that it was a 1971 song by Badfinger. “My Baby Blue” sounding like it was written for the 2008 script.

[I should say that clip is edited, maybe to avoid the spoiler that he discovers the source of his own blood, and the reason he collapses and dies, hoist by his own petard during the original scene. Will have to find a more representative clip …

Best comment @Carelock on YouTube:

I like to think Vince Gilligan was riding in an RV one day and Baby Blue by Badfinger came on and he just built a show around it…

Highly creative either way?

So I should add, it was the creative process that really had me intrigued – I am trying to write after all. Huge amounts of the whole five series worth of story-line must have been conceived in some detail before any of the asynchronous preview scenes could have been created and included in earlier episodes?]

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