What, Why & How do we Know ?
Wow, after just rediscovering how much there was behind management guru Peter Drucker, I hear he died last Friday 18th November 2006, just short of his 96th birthday.
Strange on the Wednesday two days before, my boss just used a Drucker quote I’d given him in a management presentation in the conference I was at.
[Recent Drucker posts]
[Assorted tributes]
[Tom Peters’ piece]
Been away from blogging for a week, spending a week at a business development and golf sales conference in Koh Samui, Thailand. Beautiful location, fun time.
Flying back, Bangkok to London, I continued to read Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”. 75% through, it’s a great read. Whacky style, funny, serious period of childish biographical Indian history – loaded with the language of Hindu / Moslem / Christian mythology and morality – “strange fiction more credible than rational truth” – reminded me of Martel’s more recent “Life of Pi” with Joycean linguistic invention thrown in.
Caught in the act.
Anyway two points of note.
Flew right over Benares – Amritsar – Lahore – Faisalabad in clear darkness whilst reading the machinations of Partition and subsequent Sino-Indo-Pakistan wars. The cease-fire line / border between India and Pakistan continuously sodium illuminated with border posts in a long twisty thread just east of Lahore, stretching south from the line of dispute in Kashmir. Spooky.
Intriguing is the fact that one of Rushdie’s heroines is a sea captain’s wife called Lila, promiscuous lady, with a shady past involving a death or two. The book’s 1960’s / 70’s chronology refers to Kerouac and Heller amongst others, but no Pirsig or ZMM. Pirsig’s “Lila” was published in 1991. Rushdie’s Lila saw print ten years earlier in 1981, when “Midnight’s Children” won the Booker Prize. (It won the Booker of Bookers too in 1993, when Rushdie also became Honorary Professor at MIT.) Must read more Rushdie – I first made the Pirsig / Rushdie connection here.
[Thanks to Alice for this Reason On-Line link to an interview with Rushdie.
Loved this quote from Rushdie
This is the problem with the truth. Truth is never one-dimensional. It is contradictory sometimes. But politics wants clarity.
]
Browsing The Edge (see previous post) I see this article by Canadian paleontologist and broadcaster Scott Sampson. He sees cross-discipline eco-focussed education projects as shifting the evolution debate from history on geological timescales to here and now relevance, and creating a better informed population in the process. As a pan-Darwinist, I’d have to agree.[My last post on this only this morning.] Sampson says …
Fortunately, there is movement afoot within both science and science education to bridge the eco-evolutionary gap. Increasingly, scientists are seeking out cross-disciplinary collaborations. Ecologists are expanding their scope to embrace regional and deep time effects on ecosystems, while evolutionists increasingly are considering the role of ecosystem dynamics on evolutionary patterns and processes. Research on topics such as complex adaptive systems is uniting once disparate disciplines in a search for common explanations and even natural laws. In parallel fashion, radical new approaches to education are challenging traditional notions of learning. For example, the ecoliteracy movement has argued persuasively that designing curricula around key ecological concepts and outdoor activities has great potential to connect children with the natural world and foster the growth of a more informed citizenry. But this is just the beginning.
Good to see the shift from bashing the creationists, and Dawkins-style defence of Darwinism against them, to simply better science education.
Freeman Dyson used the title to describe Google on a recent visit, which he wrote about here at The Edge. [A “must read” says Mark Federman]
Edge editor John Brockman says
Some sincerely believe we are entering a golden age of wonder and Google is leading the way. And I am pleased to add from personal experience that the leading players, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are fine individuals: very serious, highly intelligent, principled. They don’t come any better. Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate fear of a (very near) future world in which the world’s knowledge is privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem.
The same concern I expressed a few posts ago, despite also being a big supporter of Google, about the content becoming the commercial pawn in competition between the big players.
Anyway, an interesting piece by Dyson. I must keep a more regular eye on The Edge.
A cross hit search link looking for Pirsig and Hofstadter threw up this essay by Ram Samudrala.
In fact Ram’s is an interesting personal web-site. I guess being a fan of Harry Potter isn’t yet a capital offence.
Sorry, heard this yesterday, but it has to be commented on. Kansas school board has used gaps in witnessed first-hand evidence “for” Darwinism to say it is “unproven”, unlike divine creationism no doubt (!)
When will these guys get their own education in what science is about, before they get to wield this kind of power to decide how it is taught. There is no such thing as positive proof (of anything) just the best reasoned explanation, not undermined by any repeatable disproof.
No scientist denies evolution per se, even though many debate details of particular evolutionary mechanisms and causal chains; the basic change / survive / reproduce cycle is unchallenged. But that’s not the point, Darwinism can stand the arguments, this is high quality knowledge and science itself being perverted by the ignorant in positions of power.
The best outcome would be if a little philosophy of knowledge gets taught in gaps in mainstream science. (Which I think is Dennett’s most positive approach too, in turning the Darwinism / Creationism debate into an example topic for analysis.)
Did you know that Andrei Bitov / Frederick Croen wrote and first published “The Wheel” in English in 1974, the same year Robert Pirsig published “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” ? Both using motorcycles as a vehicle for Zen Buddhist inspired philosophical development.
The kind of thing you can discover by searching the on-line content of published books in or out of copyright in Google Books.
Amazing.
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[Post Note Feb 2024: Never did find the actual thesis (with Croen’s 1974 translation of Bit0v’s The Wheel) nor the Russian original. All public / Google hits are references to it or to Ellen Chances reference to it. Still we know where the letter archives are in 2024. And in fact Princeton’s database does in include a PDF of the Senior Thesis. No sign of another Chances publication with that “future” title? The “notes” above refer to this passage on page 118 …
…
Of translations of Bitov’s own works, his books “The Symmetry Teacher” and “Pushkin House” are published, reviewed and available. “The Wheel” and “Life in Windy Weather” are essays in his collection “Images of Life” but so far as I can see that collection doesn’t seem to be available in any form, although some of the individual essays / short-stories are?]
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Whilst being a fan of both Blackmore and Dennett, one of their claims I have trouble with is the idea that consciousness (and free-will) is an illusion. I’m never sure if that’s a claim that it isn’t therefore real, which would clearly be preposterous, or simply that it shares some attributes with illusions, which is clearly true.
At the Skeptic’s Society 2005 conference Sue replicated the Libet experiment, whereby the movement of a hand appears to preceed any conscious decision to do so … reported here …
The most animated speaker of the day, Blackmore orchestrated an audience participation activity that replicated Libet’s experiments demonstrating that motor action potentials appear before a decision to move is made. That is, free will is an illusion. Something in your brain makes a decision to, say, move your hand. A moment later, you consciously decide to move your hand. But the decision to move it and the impulse was already well under way. My own take here is that there could be a ‘will you, won’t you’ cell that transmits its decision simultaneously to both ‘consciousness’ (which then realizes, “This is my decision”) and the motor neurons concerned (which quickly execute the decision). Consciousness appears to be a little behind the process (dynamic illusions of reverse depth can be particularly revealing here). Blackmore made the strongest case for consciousness being an illusion of sorts, and she did so in a very entertaining and informative manner.
I don’t buy this explanation either, other than the parallel aspect of the processing involved. My take is that the Libet effect is simply a matter of exposing the many levels of consciousness involved, and the fact that a relatively simple response type decision can be “conscious but delegated”, as a causal result of conditioned free-will / decision making, that doesn’t need to reach the level of active conscious thought to model the inputs / outputs / constraints / alternatives / risks etc, but can be left to the hard-wired genetic / physiological and soft-wired memetic / memory aspects to sort out with only parallel supervisory involvement of the conscious level in the process. In general the conscious level could kick-in to countermand the lower level action, if aware of other significant issues, but the workings vary from the wholly reflex to the wholly considered, and all points in between.
