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I think that’s the correct title of Dawkins latest offerring. By coincidence, given the previous blog, he was on Start the Week this morning with Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4. Another member of the panel said he could not believe that there were enough “creationists” left in the world for Dawkins to feel the need to spell it all out again – we all believe you already. Surely the whole world understands the Blind Watchmaker. Apparently not says Dawkins – then proceeded to rattle off a litany of US statistics – followed by a debate that kept returning to fears about misguided US power, and mis-guided world-views – becoming very political very quickly and hitting on the main news item of the day – the split between Europe and US over Iraq, and several doomsday scenarios around the beginning of the end of NATO and UN no less. Terrifying.

(Notice also that next week Daniel Dennett is one of the guests, and that this week’s guest, Janet Radcliffe-Richards, is taking part in a British Academy debate entitled Does Philosophy Matter? on Tuesday 18 February.)

There is definitely something happening here. There is too much clamour for the need to re-think simple “rational” values we take for granted, and to question underlying philosophies and science – before it’s too late.

No joy with finding Susan Blackmore’s Meme Machine last night so I guess I’ll have to order on-line. Did pick up Richard Dawkins (Blind Watchmaker) as well as Karl Popper (Life is all about solving problems), and some Richard Rorty by way of introduction.

I can see why Dawkins is so loved by so many – I think I completely identify with his views after reading 3 chapters (well after the first 3 paragraphs actually), so I don’t need much convincing. What is significant for my line of research is that right from the off it’s the complexity of the human brain that is at the heart of his awe and conviction (like Pinker). Most significantly is that whilst the brain’s complexity is ultimately built on the basic physical entities and principles underlying everything (dead or alive, designed, evolved or not), the purposeful power and capabilities are nevertheless emergent from the evolution of that complex assembly of the physical, not from some purposeful agent or process driving them. Got me thinking instantly again about the Mind v Matter physics debates, and the Quantum Entanglement / Non-locality stuff behind both new Quantum Computing research and development as well as the Mind-Matter Unification stuff from Brian Josephson drawing speculatively (and controversially, given his open-minded attitudes to the paranormal and homeopathy [Josephson] [Psybertron]) on the same quantum effects. See also Quantum Mind 2003.

I’ve blogged on every one of these people, subjects and initiatives before, but it continues to amaze me how many roads seem to lead me back to Quantum views of information. (Seb Pacquet has a blog dedicated to Quantum Computing – I presume Seb has also made the link between the “computing” and the information we think of as “knowledge” and I know that Seth Russell has a “conjugate” view of information defintion vs richness of content.) See also Centre for Quantum Computing (Cambridge and Oxford – Deutsch but not Josephson, natch) for the physical principles behind the new computing devices, and also this Los Alamos US government funded Quantum Information Science and Technology research site on QC / QIP.)

Also some good stuff in Dawkins on intution and timescales, that had me scribbling Kondratiev Waves (and Techo-Economic Paradigm Shifts) in the margins. Human experience of change in and through human generations just cannot explain intuitively what happens over evolutionary timescales – almost like we were “designed to misunderstand” evolution, by the process of evolution itself.

Ditto on managable spans of control in explaining or describing something complex – Like describing how a motor car engine works in terms five or six major sub-assemblies (despite the fact that we know they’re actually made out of gazillions of atoms or quarks or strings or whatever – just no value in it).

Ditto on an ontology of the world starting from essential natural, dead or alive and artefact viewpoint. Sounds familiar EPISTLE ?

Susan Blackmore Link(s) – Went back to look at Susan Blackmore’s provocative contribution to the QuestionCentre2003, blogged a couple of days ago. All I knew about Dr Blackmore previously was her Meme Machine fame – but not yet read it (who’s off to Borders tonight then ?!). I hadn’t spotted that Adam Hart-Davis was her partner, nor the focus on Consciouness and Philosophy of Mind and the mass of papers she has published in this area.

A recent interesting article on The Grand Illusion (of Consciousness) From the Journal of Consciousness Studies and a related cover story from New Scientist in 2002. Impressive list of editors in the JCS – Dennett, Searle, Lakoff to name a few, and several Dennett references by Blackmore in various publications.

William Barret Link – Picked up from a Google hit on my site from “Perspectives on Human Nature” course at York Uni, Ca.

Knowledge Management in Concurrent Engineering – Picked up this invite to CE2003 – Concurrent Engineering conference, July in Madeira – through my normal industrial channels, and scanned the topics / threads. It barely matters what the headline title is, the same topics expand to fill every space. Whether its automation, AI, integration, whatever the industry, the buzzwords are enterprise, distributed and knowledge – Oh, and management of course. In fact Knowledge Management is rapidly becoming the catch-all subject for everything to do with the management of the effectiveness and efficiency organisations, whatever the aims of the organisation. When I did my MBA dissertation on the “Management of Change” over 15 years ago I very quickly concluded that my subject was quite simply about “decision making” – the inputs, the processes, and the outcomes – and in any organisation of any kind, decision making is a human social event, and furthermore in any such event there is a discovery and learning aspect concerning the information involved in the outputs. This is true whether you are an individual inside the ACME Widget Company deciding whether to buy component X or to design and build component Y, or whether you are the collective governments of the “free world” deciding whether or not to give Saddam a bloody nose. So another cynical case of “it was ever thus” ? …. well actually it’s encouraging to see the human dimension being recognised more and more often … so for example

Roberta Cuel is delivering a paper on “Emergent Knowledge Management Theories and Practises”, and she is also an active member of the Knowledge Board, where I note that in a paper she co-authors, the abstract says …
[Quote] … we criticise the objectivistic approach that underlies most current systems for Knowledge Management. We show that such an approach is incompatible with the very nature of what is to be managed (i.e., knowledge), and we argue that this may partially explain why most knowledge management systems are deserted by users. We propose a different approach – called distributed knowledge management – in which subjective and social (in a word, contextual) aspects of knowledge are seriously taken into account. Finally, we present a general technological architecture in which these ideas are implemented by introducing the concept of knowledge node.[Unquote] …. and this architecture turns out to be essentially P2P. So knowledge is about peers interacting then ?

Also on Knowledge Board, Martin Vasey commenting specifically about the organisation of office space in the context of knowledge management
[Quote] Having spent several years from 1993 involved in a major new office building which invoked hot desking I can confirm that an office and a desk means far more to people than a place to sit and do their work. The effectiveness of an individual is significantly affected by who they are in proximity with. If people are not sitting with their working teams they are actually better virtual working, and having regular physical team meetings, than they are sitting with members of different teams. The hot desking project was ultimately abandoned under pressure from staff, with an immediate improvement in morale and productivity. [Unquote] So knowledge is about peers interacting then ?

Write the Web is back up and running again. Maybe worth watching.

Land of the Free – From The Guardian [via rivets].

My Pedagogic Creed. This 1897 work by John Dewey available on-line. Thanks to Evan Orensky / Guy Dickenson of Participo [via Spike].

Know Your Place – Interesting little set of images [via Seth], [via boingboing].

Alan Alda on PBS – Actually on reflection Alan Alda’s contribution to the Edge World Question Centre 2003 (previous blog) is easily the most though provoking – spot on the main event – the dangers of rationality, I said. I didn’t know Alan Alda moved in these circles – I guess one price of living this side of the pond is not experiencing PBS TV. Wow – the power of humour and art in science – too sad the message will be entirely missed by the target of the letter – Dubya, go on prove me wrong !

One quote from Alan Alda is so evocative of the quotes blogged earlier from William Barrett – about man now having the power of global destruction in his hands being a reason to seriously re-think rationality – and the fact that this perception is as old as philosophy and science itself – that I thought I’d share it with you …

Alan Alda says in 2003 [Quote] We live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing – we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place. The problem is that, although we’re all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it’s easier to believe something – anything – than not to know ….. Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and – as hard as this might be to believe – to put reason ahead of belief. [Unquote]

Williams Barrett said in 1958 [Quote] To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable ….. Nowadays we accept in our public life the most humanly unreasonable behaviour, provided it wears a rational mask and speaks officalese, which is the rhetoric of rationality itself. Witness the recent announcement that science has been able to perfect a “96% clean” hydrogen bomb. Of course the quantification makes the matter sound so scientific and rational that people no longer bother to ask themsleves the human meaning of the thing itself. …. the fear of what may happen to mankind in our time is a recurrent thing …. Karl Jaspers citing 4000 year old Egyptian …. Ortega y Gasset citing Horace the Latin poet …. etc. [Unquote]

You know my motivations are neither political nor global, but basic organisational decision making in business, and how lousy it seems to be getting. It was ever thus.