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I remember a couple of months ago being impressed by the pictures of Ian Paisley joking with Martin McGinnis after the agreement to re-open the Irish Assembly, and a few days later joking with Bertie Ahern as he handed over a gift of a musket captured from the “losing side” at the Battle of the Boyne. The sceptic in me thought “he’ll never keep it up”, though I think I missed blogging any comment at the time.

How times have really changed. At Blair’s farewell prime minister’s question time, as Blair’s appointment as Mid-East Peace Envoy was confirmed, the old bugger said “I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated and at the end of the day he will be able to look back and say it was well worthwhile.”

They’re real enough. Thanks to Apothecary’s Drawer for the link. Great galleries of Ray’s own photos on his site too – I think I’ve mentioned that before.

Alan Rayner’s “Inclusionality” restated as “Natural Inclusion”.

This piece illustrating an integrative and redistributive selection notion of evolution of extended self, as opposed to an eliminative selection of discrete selves, using a mycelium fungus example migrating its center of operations to food … and beyond.

This piece elliciting a succinct communication of Alan’s inclusional objectives.

And this piece illustrating the integrative rather than divisive dualist take on boundaries of identity – “We are bewitched by bipolar craziness, and if we really want to restore the dance we need some sellotape” – some integrating glue.

All pieces captured by Jack Whitehead and linked by William Pryor on his very new “Unhooked Thinking” blog following this year’s “Unhooked thinking” conference. William Pryor has his own only slightly less recent personal blog too.

The debate trundles on.

Struan Hellier’s father Graham Hellier is a Presbyterian minister and has written this “Christian Response” to Dawkins. I responded with these comments. My position is already pretty clear – Dawkins is as extreme as any religious extremist and unfortunately he cannot separate his (correct) arguments about the memetic success of religious (faith and authority-based) beliefs and reasoning, from his incorrect assertion that “scientific” reasoning can be totally objective and faith-free, or that if it is, it cannot be practically applicable to the whole of life.

Related is this news story about growing concern about the distinction between spiritual “contemplative” activities and religious “faithful” activities, and the worry about the inroads of the latter into US political life. Dawkins unfortunately seems devoid of contemplative spiritual values, so would not see the distinction and be locked in ancient faith vs reason battles – tilting at windmills.

Stunning detail in these Nasa images of Mars from 2004; via Rivets.

Dunno why, but I liked this. Fully Ramblomatic, via Rivets.

Well backdate actually. I’ve just reloaded all the older (scanned) photos linked from the general gallery page above, to some old pages of mainly music subjects, that I had hosted at an expired ISP, now moved over to Dreamhost with the rest of the blog pages.

Anyway all live again, and updated outgoing dead links within these and inbound links from various other psybertron pages.

I updated links with David Lavery’s work recently, but I also just noticed a recent post of his summarizing his various web projects.

As well as the “Descartes – Evil Genius” pages, take a look at the commonplace book “The Imaginative Thinker” which as well as being an extensive collection of quotes, actually includes an enormous bibliography of all the sources.

(Was reminded of this whilst following up my own bibliography project, currently looking at “Library Thing“, something which I’ve seen people as diverse as Geo Hancock and Chris Locke using. Still find Chris infuriating in that whilst his interest is in de-bunking pseudo-scientific new-age++ stuff, I never see anything to replace the inevitable babies he keeps throwing out with the no-brainer bathwater – but I’m repeating myself.)

I’ve been communcating with Alan Rayner on and off the Friends of Wisdom e-mail discussion group. I find we have a common understanding on many issues, and Alan is a particularly poetic writer, so a joy to read.

Recently he shared copies of his paper “Inlcusional Science – From Artefact to Natural Creativity” (no link available yet) Here some selected quotes that intersect with my interests here …

My Catch-22 of breaking the “self-fulfilling” objective loop …

Egged on all the more by research funding agencies, assessment exercises and pressures to publish or perish, scientific enquiry becomes ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. We set out to concoct and test ‘falsifiable’ and thereby axiomatic hypotheses, with minds so closed off from indefinable possibilities that we can and do ignore observations that ‘don’t fit’ with our presuppositions. Meanwhile we pay little or no attention to where and how these hypotheses and presuppositions arise in the first place.

My “definition is death” – “careful with that razor, Occam” theme … and my “give excluded middles a chance” mantra …

In my experience, to call for definitions to be relaxed in a culture that is addicted to definition is to come into close encounter with stony ground, if not something like the fury of a toddler threatened with separation from its favourite toy or security blanket ! … principal among objectivity’s objections to inclusionality is that the razed down simplicity that comes from defining things will ‘get lost’. Personally, I rather wish that it would ! But, seriously, this objection illustrates the addictive, all or none quality of false dichotomy: either we have total definition or no definition. Definition is something we must have if we are not to get totally lost in a sea of troubles. We exclude between two stools the dynamic ‘middle ground’ synthesis of ‘neither entirely one nor the other’ …

My views on the divisive distraction of unneccesarily hyper-objective distinctions …

By excluding that which it defines itself not to be, objective science may not only alienate itself from the public whose appreciation, understanding and money it craves, but may also greatly diminish its own opportunities for creative evolution and correspondence with other human endeavours. Such exclusion is evident in the ‘Two Culture’ split between ‘Art’ and ‘Science’ notoriously brought to light by C.P. Snow (1959, 1963; see also Petroski, 2005), and the increasingly cantankerous collision between Darwinian evolutionary science and religious ‘Creationism’ or ‘Intelligent Design’ theory. In a non-linear inclusional perspective, there is no need for this split and the nastiness it engenders: the split is an artefact of definitive logic.

Interesting piece from back in January in Time magazine by Stephen Pinker entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. Thanks to David Chalmers for the link; he’s referred to in the article in connection with the easy / hard problem distinction. Lots of other good articles linked in and alongside the article.

Daniel Wegner’s psychology-based work gets a mention. I side with Dennett in not really seeing the hard problem as a problem, and disagree with this kind of summary by Pinker, thought it is a fair summary of a common view …

Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of “meat chauvinism” that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn’t have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators–a leap that most people find hard to stomach.

For me this is just the simplistic positivist logic – either / or – problem. There is a middle ground interpretation here that says any sufficiently complex computation system (any physical substrate, not just meat) can support the emergence of consciousness, and that simple devices like the thermostat, are simply not sufficiently complex examples of such systems. Bisson’s “Thinking with Meat” essay, illustrates that the chauvinism is just a matter of perspective.

And, the fact that most scientists would support the idea that the explanations for animalian consciousness are already shown to reside in the brain, does not say that science has killed the soul, or anything like it. What it does tell us is something about what the “soul” is, and hopefully reminds many a scientist that simple reductionism is unlikely to yield the best brain / mind explanations.

Anyway, good news, Pinker concludes …

… the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It’s not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings – the core of morality.

That’s my view too. The catch is not to let that get misrepresented as some crass explanatory argument for how morality is “caused” by the physical and biological.