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Really just a holding post for two presentations (with some overlapping content) from Brian Josephson thanks to a cross-link on the man himself. A hero of mine, sceptical of sceptics’ motives and abuse of power for rejecting scientific claims. Cold Fusion, The Memory of Water and more examples killed by the cultural spread of scepticism rather than any good reasoning, scientific or otherwise. The memes have it.

Good and Bad Ways to do Science
Pathological Disbelief

If X were true, everything else we already know about Y would be false.
So what ? Maybe we might actually be learning something new.

Seems the brief run of regular blues acts at Perth’s “Blue to the Bone” is coming to an end. Thursday has already become a karaoke night, Friday was already rockabilly, Saturday still has the excellent John Meyer (and Lindsay Wells) I believe, but last night was the last of Rick Steele’s “industry” guest nights. Rather than the quality of the musicians, the failure seems mainly due to the awful winter we’re having and the lack of any promotion (other than giving away free drinks at the drop of a hat ?), but audiences drawn to Northbridge on weeknights clearly haven’t matched the costs.

(Rick is part of the blues furniture in Perth and continues to host the Tuesday night “Perth Blues Club” at the Charles Hotel, great night again this week, with horns too, as well as appearing Thursdays and Sundays at the Dianella.)

Last night was a feast – As well as Rick on guitar, harp and vocals, we had his usual cohorts Travis on keyboard, vocals, drums and bass, Marc on bass, vocals and lead guitar, and Ace on drums, together in various combinations with Cat (McKineally ?) on keyboards and vocals, Dave Brewer on Lead and vocals, Zak, Kenji, plus half a dozen others on guitar , vocals, drums, flute (no euphonium last night) and digeridoo. (Nice to hear the sustain of a Gibson amongst the wall-to-wall Strats, who was that guy with the pre-hensile little finger on his left hand, and who was the chick with the voice and the delayed reverb Roy Harper / Jon Martyn style electric-folk guitar ? All too brief, but great sounds from Zak’s “gypsy” guitar again too.)

However, the digeridoo accompanying the blues guitar and vocal is really something to behold – novelty value clearly – but a mesmerising range of rhythms and layers of beating resonances driving the groove along. Worth the admission fee alone – what was it again ? Ah yes, no charge.

After skimming Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, I suggested earlier that I already knew it from secondary sources. Well actually no, there is lots of new material for me with fresh links to my threads.

Something Rather Than Nothing – as a pan-Darwinist I never had any trouble with the evolutionary explanation of life the universe and everything emerging out of the chaotic void. Nor also that whilst the specific world we know has human supporting features and a particular set of laws of physics, any range of possibilities could have arisen instead, which may or may not have supported life as we don’t know it. The only catch is the prior existence of more than nothing.

Buildings and Process – Throughout the book he uses the skyhook vs cranes analogy of never really having “get-out-of-jail” convenient starting points, but always needing to imagine how the crane was built to provide your starting platform. Dennett also has a large section on biology as “engineering”, and on the engineering process generally. He relates it to archeaological analysis of features of ancient building structures, and recognising that many features are not to do with the primary function of a building as an enclosed space of given dimensions, but are to do with the processess of constructing it and the processes that will continue after it is complete. In fact he even goes so far as to say that the point of completion is far from clear in most cases. A building has a process lifecycle.

Edge of Chaos – is a fashionable phrase cropping up in many fields. One point in Darwinian evolution is the idea that not all mutations are in fact random, they are “directed” by naturally occurring patterns in the first place, hence multiple emergence of many identical design solutions – working with nature, not against it. These sweet-spot states where natural progression is easy, and meaningful patterns emerge, are typically associated with complexity and modern “chaos”. Mark Maxwell’s MoQ paper uses the edge of chaos analogy for the coherence or sweet spot when dynamic quality is achieved (and the optimum chance exists of loosing your arrow cleanly and hitting your target, to use Herrigel’s analogy) is a point of “resonance” or maximum potential between complete stasis on the one hand and good-old-fashioned chaos (absence of any meaningful order) on the other. More than just linguistic coincidence ?

Oh, and Nietzsche and Marx got the real significance of Darwinism first.

Just spent an hour or so browsing many of my recently ignored favourite blogs, and leaving a few comments in my wake. Matt, Seb, Piers, Euan, Suw, Frizzy, to name a few.

I liked the “wavelets of history” at David Gurteen’s blog and this story about Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford. Reminded me very much of the inspiring address by Richard Russo.

[Post Note Nov 2016 – Adding to this collection – someone tweeted this excellent (fictional) graduation address by Woody Allen in the NYT in 1979]

[#GraduationAddress #CommencementAddress]

Made a start on my pile of Dennett original reading. Having realised recently I’m practically a pan-Darwinist, I thought I’d start on “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”.

Skimmed it first, and realised I feel I practically know it already; so many of his chapters and witty headings having been quoted by others since 1995. The respect Dennett pays to his reader just commands reciprocation.

“This book is about science, but it is not itself a work of science.”
“There is no such thing as a sound argument from authority …”
“… when I quote them, rhetoric and all, I am engaging in persuasion.”

“Since you are reading this book, you have probably read several of ..”
Dawkins, Pinker, Gould, etc …

“And if [I] can’t write a good book after the sterling help of …
[Dawkins, Hofstadter, Pinker, Mayr, Brockman, etc] … [I] should give up !”

After his “peremtory dismissal” of creationism, which I’ve quoted before, he says “The fundamental core of Darwinism is now beyond dispute …” and later “Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award to the best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin ahead of Newton, Einstein and everybody else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it’s not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.”

“The philsopher and scientist are in the same boat [quoting Van Quine, quoting Neurath.]” “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science whose philosophical baggage [is unexamined]” And the unexamined life is not worth living, is it. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread [quoting Pope]. Do you want to follow me ?”

And so he’s headlong into Aristotle’s misguided teleology.
And Locke too. “Go run along and stop asking such silly questions.”
It’s why / how, not why / because, dummy.

With respect, I’m not sure I need to read this, but I’m going to enjoy it.
What is it about men with bushy beards ?

Used this quote recently (at the MoQ Conference), and admitted I couldn’t recall it’s source.

No, not Shakespeare dummy – it’s a deliberate play on the Tempest quote.

Best documented web source is Thomas Disch, who used this as the title of his book about how Sci-Fi “conquered” the world.

I first saw the phrase as a signature line on some mail discussion forum, and it is frequently referred to as a quote by “a” physicist, alluding to the fact that quantum physical reality is 99.9999% vacuum. The only attribution I can find is David Moser (?)

[BTW – “Science Fiction” – I like the ambiguity, the fiction that is science.]

Hoping to use the 430kph (270mph) MagLev “train” from Shanghai to PuDong Airport tomorrow.

A somewhat eastern philosophical engineering review here about “being able to run with the wind”.

[Added – a later YouTube video of the full journey – with speedo.]

At 50RMB it’s one eighth the taxi-fare and at 8 minutes it’s under one fifth the travel time too. Scary to think of travelling at that speed only mm from the massive concrete rail, but impressive to see it whizz silently past the freeway traffic on the way here.

Thinking of Prof Eric Laithwaite demonstrating the principles all those years ago at Imperial College, and is my memory playing tricks or were they even earlier black-and-white TV editions of Tomorrow’s World with Raymond Baxter and Michael Rodd ? [James Burke actually.] The principles were first demonstrated by Germans pre-WW2.

[Post note : my flight out left too early, before the MagLev started operating, and my hotel was on the PuDong side of the river away from the downtown LongYang Road terminus anyway, so I missed out. Ah well, next time.]

The PuDong Shangri La hotel here in Shanghai affords an amazing view of the HuangPu river. The traffic on it indicates the mind-boggling scale of local economic activity.

The myriads of barges and lighters incessantly ploughing up and down, neck and neck, six “lanes” overtaking in each direction, with their loads of coal, aggregates and god knows what, loaded to the gunnels, wash breaking over their prows, are scary enough. The ferries chancing their luck to make the river crossings by weaving through the traffic, are given no obvious quarter. Only the massive cargo freighters, tankers, container ships, heavy lift cranes and barges, and submarines (!) with their official-looking tugs and pilot boats, receive a wider berth.

Amazing stuff, but the seemingly ever present smog, makes any photographic record a pretty murky prospect.

Still reading Hofstadter and Dennett’s “The Mind’s I” collection when I get free moments.

There are several extracts from the work of Stanislaw Lem, of whom I’d never previously heard, which actually pre-date Hofstadter’s own “Godel, Escher, Bach”. One “book”, “Non Serviam” taken from Lem’s 1971 work “A Perfect Vacuum – Perfect Reviews of Non-Existent Books“, is remarkably prescient concerning the evolution of consciousness. Practically blown away by it, I have annotations next to just about every paragraph.

In fact Dennett and Hofstadter’s own editorial reflections sum it up … Lem’s Non Serviam ” … is not just immensely sophisticated and accurate in its exploitation of themes from computer science, philosophy, and the theory of evolution; it is strikingly close to being a true account of aspects of current work …”. As true now in 2005 I reckon, as it was when they commented in 1981 on this 1971 work.

I was struck at the MoQ conference by the number of passionate musical connections, (not to mention the Liverpool location). There’s a running musical thread in my blog, which I’d never really connected to the world-model mainstream, except I guess through Hofstadter’s Bach and Minsky’s musical appreciation, but Ant kept this one quiet. Some interesting links there too.

I remember thinking, given that it was a post-hippie trip, that there was precious little musical allusion in ZMM given, say the constant references in Kerouac, and the road-movie genre generally. Every movie has a soundtrack except ZMM, and it’s not even a movie. 😉 Odd what ?