What, Why & How do we Know ?
Interesting review of issues around ontologies and tools for “social tagging” posted on KnowledgeBoard by Silverio Petruzzellis. Not digested the quality of any analysis yet, but it’s comprehensive with a plethora of links (naturally) including Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated”.
As I keep saying it’s not ontology that’s overrated, but the idea that it’s fixed or pre-ordained. What social tagging does is allow an appropriate ontology to evolve. The best kind.
The theme of altered states of consciousness – drug induced or otherwise – keeps cropping-up in debates about consciousness in general and enlightenment in particular. Came across this Psychedelic Library whilst following up Aldous Huxley in my ever growing reading list. In this Huxley Paper (from 1963 Playboy !) “Culture and the Individual” I loved this quote …
In my utopian fantasy, “Island”, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices.
“Having Fun with Fungi” ” that was how one waggish reviewer dismissed the matter. But which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow’s Misdeeds out of Yesterday’s Miscreeds?
Idiocy with ideology.
Misdeeds of yesterday’s miscreeds.
or
Fun with funghi ?
Nice ring.
Just capturing a link to this paper (from a search cross hit) by John S Nelson because of the interesting reference list at the moment – not yet read.
A contribution to the Robert Pirsig Wiki Page from Paul Taney
The late computer scientist Alan Perlis warned his readers ….
Ask periodically – Toward what end are you coding ? – but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy.”
Wow, 17 million blogs out there, a new blog every second, the blogosphere doubling every 5 months. Numbers from Technorati in this BBC news story about Yahoo putting blogs into its news search feeds ahead of mainstream media. Google are already indexing blogs (they own Blogger remember).
Even Catholics (in the UK at least) are now taught not to take the bible literally. Hope for us all. [Thanks to Sam at Elizaphanian for the link].
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. A CalTech based group I’d not noticed before. I see Dennett is president-elect, and Chalmers and Metzinger are members at large, Ned Block and Christof Koch are past presidents.
Next conference is June 2006, St Annes College Oxford.
I continue to be fascinated by the developments at the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group (BCS Cybernetics Group or BCSCMSG for short) despite the dense specialist jargon making proceedings all but unintelligible to any lay reader like myself. Here is the synopsis of papers presented at the BCSCMSG Symposium 10 as part of CASYS’05 (Computing Anticipatory Systems 2005 Conference) in Liege in August earlier this year.
My principle fascination, and reason for following proceedings over several years (and blogging many previous references), has been the apparent fundamental nature of information underlying reality itself, as part of my specific interest in modelling and communicating information about reality, at least in so far as humans can know and communicate reality.
Paraphrasing … the BCSCMSG current mission is to establish the Evolutionary ‘Anthropic’ Semantic Principle, by which the fundamental physical foundations of computing as used in brains, can be realized. The human brain is a universal computational semantic machine and [the Diaz-Rowlands re-write of the Nilpotent Dirac Equation of] quantum physics provides a natural model and modes by which human natural language is realized to allow the human race to comprehend the evolutionary cosmos. No less.
The philosophy of mind and mind-matter angles, of what can be known about reality (epistemology), the processes of knowing of it (consciousness et al), and what any independent reality might be (ontology), is clearly relevant to the modelling of information about reality. Suspending disbelief it is also possible to accept that quanta (as the smallest significant differences that can exist between anything) are probably the most fundamental building blocks of information as well as the building blocks of “matter”.
Despite also accepting mind (consciousness) as emergent from brain physiology (matter & processes) what is mind blowing is the idea that the emergence (clearly complex and multi-layered) can have a causal and direct reductionist explanation that is also based on quantum mechanics. (Why not ? says Josephson. Yes, “microtubules” say Hammeroff and Penrose. No, “that’s mere pixie-dust” say the Churchlands, Blackmore and Dennett. Sceptical says Deutsch. Who needs reductionism and causality say Deutsch and Chalmers.) Quantum mechanical effects in brain-mind processes, not to mention in the wider DNA-life processes themselves – how weird can this get ?
OK, so holographic universe (Talbot); multiple interfering universes (Everett / Wheeler / Deutsch); are believable at the quantum scale, universes or states with small differences, small departures from coherence. OK too, non-locality, action-at-a-distance, anticipation, future actions travelling ahead faster than light, can also be credible at similar quantum scales and near coherence maybe ? (Even the practicioners working with these “models” struggle to accept these as everyday “paradigmatic” world-views.)
It’s all there to be read about. Quantum mechanics based mathematics behind everything from seemingly abstract things like fundamental number theory and mathematics itself and theories of computation, through physics naturally, to large-scale coherence in processes in brains and macro-cosmological feedback loops in the cosmos itself.
And if that’s not weird enough, it even comes with a bootstrapping mechanism to create something (ie everything) from nothing.
The nothing that is, that is.
Watch that space.
Hope these people also turn up at Tucson2006.
After a week away, I’m back in the UK, and heard BBC’s Start The Week for the first time in ages; Andrew Marr introducing Robert Fisk, Bjorn Lomborg, Simon Winchester and Clare Carolin. An excellent edition.
Ostensibly focussing on natural disasters like the current Pakistan earthquake, and the place of humans in the grip of nature, in fact Robert Fisk started on about his new book “The Great War for Civilisation”. Specific interest for me, apart from Fisk’s own insights including three interviews with Bin Laden, is his view of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and the history of Middle East conflict. Understanding background to the Balfour Agreement is the reason I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s Bible and the Sword, and of course Sykes-Picot is a main thread in my obsession with hero T E Lawrence.
Much maligned Lomborg is focussing on priorities in the way we address global natural and economic issues, in obtaining “value” for our efforts, rather than diving headlong into a too negative reaction to “global warming”. 40,000 dead in one telegenic earthquake is just two days worth of curable, communicable diseases in East Asia, for example.
Winchester’s book “A Crack in the Edge of the World” concerns persistent human occupation of dangerous natural locations, and the long learning curve before peoples abandon untenable locations like New Orleans, Beirut and San Francisco, and on the contrary the pull of these locations whose beauty stems from being close to the edge. (Another angle is the religious / political response to handling natural disasters – blaming theistic wrath vs employing pragmatic management … Lisbon, Christians and Voltaire, Krakatoa and Moslems, San Francisco and Rationality included … interesting.)
Spookily I was flying over central Pakistan and Afghanistan local time Saturday morning. Anyway, lots of grist to the connectedness of values applied to both nature and culture. Which is the main contribution to the loss of 40,000 in Pakistan – the natural earthquake or the cheap construction of public schools – and how much of the latter is corrupt conspiracy or ignorant cock-up ? Twas ever thus.
BTW – Travel is Torture – etymology of travel, travail (hard work), trapalium (instrument of torture)
(Exhibitions bring the world to people, so they don’t have to travel the world.)
Thanks to Sam for this satirical alternative theory of the miracle that is creation. One of many thankfully; restores your faith in humanity. As Sam says, irony is essential. Absolutely.
It’s a well hit site, with endless fun to be had following all the many links in the comment thread. Some excellent, well-executed images – like this one.