Month: August 2005

As I was with Tebbit in the preceeding post, sadly I see Mo Mowlem has passed away.

I’m reminded from the links in the story she, like I, supported Claire Short after her resignation over the Iraq invasion, which strangely due to its timing created exactly the opposite reaction to Robin Cook’s. Cook put his principles first, Short put loyalty and duties first initially before succumbing to her principles and was accused of political expediency for her troubles. As the Mo Mowlem piece says, quoting Tony Blair, “[Mo] was a natural politician, could read a situation and analyse and assess it as fast as anyone.” Your words Tony; think on.

All casualties of war in their own ways.

Old Norman tells it like it is again. Ordinarily this would so politically incorrect and divisive had not Salman Rushdie already paved the way.

In preparation for writing some synthesis of Davids Deutsch and Chalmers’ work, I was updating my earliest links to quantum information (Deutsch and Josephson), and see that Deutsch’s QuBit Centre for Quantum Computation home page is now a Blog.

Intriguing, after my summary of Deutsch’s four main threads in the Fabric of Reality as
* Popper (Epistemology),
* Dawkins (Evolution),
* Everett / Wheeler (Quantum Universe), and
* Turing (Universal Computing)
I remarked that in that book, there was little if any reference to Deutsch’s Quantum Information work, and even less in Chalmers’ book.

I see in the side-bar on his site, the four threads are re-characterised (more correctly IMHO) as
* Popper,
* Dawkins,
* Quantum Computation (Information) and
* Virtual Reality.

I see also that Peter Marcer’s BCS “New Era” @ CASYS 2005 happened last week in Liege, and that invited speakers included Brian Josephson. Excellent, must get papers / proceedings.

Gary Neville says
“Any repeat of England’s 4-1 defeat in Denmark would see them fail to qualify for the World Cup.”
Doh!

I’m very close to finishing “The Conscious Mind – In Search of a Fundamental Theory” by David Chalmers. Everything except his review of Quantum Physics, over which I skimmed ahead to get a feel for the scope he’s addressing. I find myself in a very strange state, skimming some sections forwards and backwards, returning to read some sections very carefully. I can hardly believe it but everything I’ve been researching for four years is just slotting into place before my eyes. Spine tingling.

The bit I just did not expect to find in Chalmers, because I’ve not seen anyone quote or argue the aspect with him in papers or conferences, is “Information” (after Shannon). Information as something more fundamental than consciousness itself. Which is significant because Information was in fact my subject when I came into this space, and I’ve already bought the idea from quantum information work, that information is more fundamental than physics, and suspected it must underly both physics and consciousness or, effectively, a physics embracing information underlies everything including consciousness.

David is very careful with his argumentation – really impressive in fact – painfully distinguishing speculations from tiny fragments of evidence, recognising intuitions and suspending disbelief where unproven too, all in a synthetic way, and building cases that are hard to refute despite few individual “knockdown cases”. Very much aligned with Deutsch’s stuff, as I said already, when it comes to the limitations of logic in building a quality explanation or formal argument.

Everything is here. Quality. Physics. Logic. Life. Consciousness.
From Dave Deutsch via Dave Chalmers to Dave Bowman’s final words.
“Oh my god, it’s full of information.”

So rather than another long-winded dump of incoherent thoughts and impressions, it’s time I tried to put a thesis together. I’ve felt I should do this many times before, but the problem has always been the breadth of what needs to be covered, and however narrow an aspect I chose to focus on in a potential paper, there were always boundary conditions that couldn’t avoid undeveloped (and hence incoherent) reference to more of the other aspects. In truth, I spotted this with Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality, where his synthesis of four arguments each suffering an explanatory gap in their common sense acceptance, nevertheless seemed to hang together as a whole. I’ve just gotta do it.

Don’t hold your breath. It may be worth the wait, but don’t forget that the patron saint of the universal church of the interactive network is St Douglas (of the whooshing deadline) Adams.

Bessemer Venture Partners list some of their more notable goofs.
[via Johnnie Moore] [via Adrian Trenholm].

The opposite of hype says Johnnie; It’s a compelling read says Adrian (and it is, they sure let some big ones get away, not least Google, whatever the moral of the story). Which is of course that perhaps even in marketing, a self-deprecating honesty pays in preference to begging credulity over claims, exagerated if only by presentation in their best light. Another case of less is more.

[BTW that reminds me, not quite the same angle, but playing against the macho-sexist Australian beer stereotype, what was that ad I saw for a beer sponsoring the rugby, where the opposing teams aim to impress by removing the beer tops with various parts of their anatomy, only to be trumped by the obligatory pretty model below the waist-high bar level, if you get my drift. Sorry but it worked for me, though as Sylvia often points out, memorable ad but I’m damned if I can remember the name of the product. There’s probably a name for that in the business is there Johnnie ?]

NY Times piece by Rachel Donadio. [via Georganna].

As a “born again” reader of literary fiction (though it has to be said my reading list is stuffed with learned texts at the moment) I find this interesting. Outlets for fictional writing, not just books / novels, but literary journals too, are reporting that the market is dominated by “factual” work these days. Two observations – even the factual stuff has a bias to the long-form narrative they say, and given that it is indeed advertised as non-fiction, I hope it’s obvious that doesn’t make it factual in any sense of “truth” whatever its rhetorical qualities. The bummer with rhetorical quality is distinguishing between reasonable truths and speculative, conspiracy-theory, pseudo-scientific, life-style mumbo jumbo. Being market driven, as the article points out, this kind of narrative apparent non-fiction can appeal most easily to what people want to hear, rather than stuff that makes them personally uncomfortable. At least with fiction you know where you stand – if it appeals as an essentially true natural history, it’s probably because of some more intrinsic, aesthetic, instinctual qualities, rather than an explicit logic or reasoning.

Quality beats skin-deep “truth”.

Noticed one Leo Sayer was in town last Saturday; catchy though he was he was never my cuppa 70’s tea. Anyway, after his Saturday show at Perth’s Burswood, he and his band dropped into Blue to the Bone and jammed along with Lindsay Wells. Seems they are old buddies after Lindsay once helped him out on an earlier tour. Great sax addition to Lindsay’s usual three-piece sound, and Leo’s voice sounded good with a great sense of timing on some old blues & rock’n’roll standards, even if he had to gamely improvise for those where his recollection of the verses was absent. A good sport, posing and pausing for mobile phone snaps and autographs.

(Leo’s one of those artists whose name always reminds me of a song with his name in the lyric. Like “The Beatles and The Stones” always make me think of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes”; Elvis and Sinatra, too many to mention. “I hope Neil Young will remember, Southern Man don’t need him around, anyhow” say Lynyrd Skynyrd, whereas “Tom Robinson, The Beatles, The Byrds and Leo Sayer” is the line spat out by Bill Nelson in Phantom Zone.)