Category: Uncategorized

Browsing Gimbo, which has changed since I last looked (he’s got married ?) the issues being blogged seem higher level. Several good posts – the UK Government ID Card story, The TinyURL (risks) story, and the women in sport (world full of idiots) link.

I was taken by the “risks” link simply because the link was catless.ncl.ac.uk which I recognised as the domain of Rivets (@ncl.ac naturally). Anyway the catalogue of risks (of IT mis-use in devices) makes interesting reading.

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ?

The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and since you could create the categories themselves, you could categorise the categories too, though I see no evidence of inheritance in the linking. I wonder if any of the others stretches that far. (Must look at both del.ici.ous and CiteULike again more closely.)

It’s like this …

If I have a category of “People” with 10 “Members”
And I have another category of “Animals” with 10 “Members”, one of which is “People”
Does my click on “Animals” return 10 or 19 hits ?
64,000 dollar question.

If that’s possible – then I make my categories aspectual – ie in terms of why the interest / intent / reason in the link, rather than simply “what is at the end of it”, then Robert is your father’s brother – Semantic Web – I think you’ll find.

You may have read it here first.

OK, so the inescapable key of David Deutsch’s world view is that the Everett / Wheeler idea of many worlds forming the multiverse, is … well … fundamental to all of reality.

I’ve said twice – once after his introduction and again after reading the whole of his Fabric of Reality – that Deutsch argues his case convincingly. The real world behaves virtually “as if” it was as it really is. However convincing, boy, is that gonna be hard to absorb into a natural world view.

Christian Hauck provided some helpful links to Max Tegmark’s MIT work on the parallel universes aspect of the multiverse. Hmmm – do I really want to go there ? Seems unavoidable – I may be some time.

Seems I’m obsessed with Sue Blackmore – just re-read all the articles on her web site, again – particularly the mid-life-crisis post-50-years career switch from the paranormal expert to philosophy of mind novice. Such deep material, such human and witty delivery, and painfully open too.

Anyway after my fix, I’m reminded of the connection I was following – Sue’s (and Dan Dennett’s – see previous post) conclusion that conscious mind and free-will are illusions. Metaphorical ? yes; Illusory ? please no. Now, where was I – the link is David Deutsch’s “explanation” of this as an error of our common sense model of the flow of time, using the Multiverse idea.

Following on from Sue Blackmore’s works, I have at last ordered the Dan Dennett materials so I can read him in the original. Also ordered David Chalmers book – I guess I need to read that too, even if it seems I disagree with him on Qualia. (What I forgot to order but will do next time is some Hofstadter – “Mind’s I” presumably, since he was influential on Chalmers.)

Meantime, having read Sue, and followed that with David Deutsch, both impressive – I started reading Ian Stewart’s “Flatterland” – the most recent of the sequels to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 fictional Flatland. Interesting idea, and nice allegory to get your head round concepts you can’t visualise in your current “world” – mainly dimensions beyond 3 in this case. [One omission that nags, is the idea of biological life in a 2D world – which as Martin Rees points out is impossible – a digestive tract splits you in two, unless you excrete through the same orifice you ingest – messy.] The thing that really gets in the way of my reading it is the dear diary, dear-unseen-correspondent please-lead-me-through-this-story style of Sophie’s World. A real turn off now as it was then. Pity, I though Stewart’s book on chaos was much better than Gleick’s, …. in exactly the same way I prefer Talbot to Gladwell, hopefully not a UK vs US thing ?

Apparently not, I’m now reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four”. Picked up and blogged about the subject of this book – the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – soon after I’d read Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”, when I’d seen “Rule of Four” described as being Eco’s “Name of the Rose” written in the style of Donna Tartt. (Though since Dan Brown has ejaculated all over this memespace in the intervening year, I now prefer the UK Independent’s rather snooty tag of “The Da Vinci Code for people with brains”.) A promising start – like Tartt’s Secret History the plot involves the riskier side of US College frat house traditions – Apollonian Educated Genius vs Dionysian Reckless Madness leading (presumably) to a Love (and Humour) Conquers All thesis. Anyway I’m hooked.

The Apothecary highlights that April 2005 is Mathematics Awareness Month, reminds me that I’m well through reading David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality”.

I owe a fairly thorough review, because it has already made a big impression. The first time I’ve been convinced by the “multiverse” idea being more than an allegorical predictive metaphor, actually more an explanatory model of the “real” world. Several other key concepts too. I mentioned before about a non-reductive view of what makes something “fundamental”. Notwithstanding the fact that physics underlies chemistry, underlies, biology, etc, there is nothing more fundamental than life (replication) itself, for example.

The main mathematical point here is Deutsch’s contention that mathematics is constrained not by some pure logical, abstract concepts, but by physical reality, with the corollary that pure logic is itself an illusion – argumentation being the only test of truth. Some great extensions of Turing universal computer into the concept of a universal virtual-reality generator, being indistinguishable from reality, and (like maths and computation) obeying the laws of physics rather than logic – quantum physics of course.

is view of time and causality seems to support absence of free-will until he exposes that our common sense view of time is badly misled by experiencing only one the multiverses. Tough going, but fascinating. Good chapter summaries make re-capping easy, even if the quality of writing is not in Blackmore’s class.

I can’t recommend Deutsch too highly. Stuff I’ve not seen expressed elsewhere – which is increasingly uncommon.

[Some great stuff on Ray’s site again – check out the octopus walking on two legs !]

BBC again, this time a report from UK teachers unions alarmed that creationist twaddle is spreading from US into UK school curricula materials.

“Evolution is not compatible with christianity” says Monty White of the “creation science movement”. He’s not wrong there – biologically & genetically at least, some hope for the right outcome then. Would that he were right memetically; the virus requires active resistance to curb its spread, whilst the supernaturalists hold the ace cards of fear and disprovability.

A BBC report on blogging, mainly on the freedom of speech angle and East vs West differences. However, as it says, if a problem shared is a problem halved, what is happening when millions share with millions ?

Wonder what Northrop would have made of blogging ?

At last I have domestic PC and Broadband working to day in Perth, WA. Business travel permitting, I should be getting more blogging time. May even take the plunge and go for WordPress implementation.

Leonid sent me some links to work by and about Stafford Beer recently. [eg A Time Whose Idea Must Come] [2005 Web Archive Copy] It’s something I should have followed up much earlier. On the quality of modelling business organisations in order to design systems for their management he says

[Quote] In programming a computer, one needs a model. Models are provided by brains. Models are necessarily massive variety attenuators, because they select only those aspects of the world that are relevant to the model’s purpose. Worse still, the models adopted are not the best that we can provide: they are consensual models put in place and held together by ideologies. And an ideology is a very low variety instrument indeed. Vast tracts of political philosophy since the ancient Greeks have been studied in common by the theorists of both communism and capitalism; but the ideologies to which the two superpowers rallied their supporters attenuated this variety in different guises. They have had this much in common: neither had Requisite Variety (as defined by Ashby’s Law) by which to manage. Both are managerially dysfunctional therefore. And neither works. [Unquote]

The tension of static and dynamic quality, Variety attenuation, Greek philosophy, Management dysfunction – my whole thesis is in there somewhere.

[Post Note: Beer makes his own main source reference to Maturana and Varela seminal work – “Autopoeisis and Cognition”. (Offline PDF Copy also available here.)]