Year: 2005

When I saw this picture it said something.

(Susan Blackmore and David Chalmers, picture courtesy of David’s archives on the conferences of the Centre for Consciousness Studies, Tuscon, Arizona. That centre is currently run by Stuart Hameroff. David Chalmers, the original director, is back in Canberra, running the ANU Centre for Consciousness.)

Interesting review of this conference here by Charles Whitehead in the Journal of Consciusness Studies – very critical of lack of progress. Something I see all the time – people peddling their own canoes, people analysing and finding fault, even the reviewer, but no-one synthesising constructively. Totally binary – everyone is wrong or right – no-one partly right.

In this case Whitehead is complaining about the lack of mainstream social anthropology in the proceedings, peddling his own story of course. He concludes …

[Quote] There are many reasons why social anthropology has a crucial role to play in
consciousness science, but I have only space to mention two:

(1) Universals of human mentation and behaviour can only be established
by cross-cultural research.
(2) Cross-cultural data reveal that it is the job of human culture to obfuscate
our view of ourselves and the world we live in.

Science is, at least potentially, a metacultural project. The great power and value
of science lies in its ability to emancipate us from the negative aspects of our own
cultural heritage, including the collective deceptions that created the ?problem of
consciousness? in the first place. As that problem has a deceptive origin, then
consciousness science is not really a science at all, since its ultimate goal must be
to render itself obsolete, or claim all other sciences as its own. [Unquote]

ie my idea of social anthropology is better than my definition of your view of science – yah, booh, sucks – grow up. Who cares whether it’s called science or anthropolgy – what is being sought is credible explanation, useful for prediction. Obviously the “problem” of consciousness lies in is its original deception – but how can someone say that whilst dismissing (say) memetics out of hand in the previous breath. Gimme constructive synthesis, not destructive analysis.

” … if consciousness cannot affect the body … ” do me a favour. Who could hold such a dumb idea, without some perverted definition of consciousness ?

Interesting summary / review, none-the-less.

I’ve had an angle for some time (since before the manifesto) that adding technology to a system that is not already reasonably automatic, almost invariably makes matters worse. Introduction of new IT systems for example bring new process constraints whose downside may often outweigh the value of the system itself, since the value of ad-hoc human processes are easily overlooked in the formal system design. (Dr James Willis work has documented many examples of this in healthcare.) Another thread in this blog is that communications immediacy means misinformation that is easily communicated can prevail over “better” (truer) information that is less easy to communicate (ie the spread of toxic memes. For Blackmore, objectivism itself is the toxic meme.). This has always been part of my motivation to find knowledge models that adapt to the softer, subjective human components of knowledge, like motivation to name but one.

Anyway, having re-acquainted myself with Brian Josephson’s web-site, in the previous post, I find a row concerning the “arxiv” physics paper pre-print archive hosted at Los Alamos on behalf of the theoretical physics community. Apparently the upload of contributors papers can be banned by an administrator simply switching a flag based on the author’s name or the source of the paper, prior to any review of validity of content – quite the antithesis of anonymous peer review. Brian is one of a number of Nobel Laureates fighting against that kind of prejudice. Was it Mark Twain who said “A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds”

I was interested by this quote on the Archive Freedom home page, from physicist Louis deBroglie, as long ago as 1974 … “The new ideas here triumphed; but, in proportion as the organization of research becomes more rigid, the danger increases that new and fruitful ideas will be unable to develop freely.”.

Increasing control of organisation through technology is dangerous. Enabling and decision support can be technological, but control should remain human (or fail-safe) in anything but the simplest of contexts.

Well maybe not. I picked-up on this paper on the “Technosophy” site of Terry Alden’s, because of a search hit on the 22 in my Catch-22, only to find a whole culture of synchronicity around the number 22 (and 23 ?). Anyway, some of it is probably too mystic and new age, but the particular paper linked has a neat folksy expose of first principles philosophy and its relevance to information, evolution and technology (McLuhan’s “Medium”), and in a religious context too. (Dualism of bio-info-mental technology and external technology too.)

Also has an essay called “Occam’s Electric Shaver” – though I can only find an outline, not the text ? Anyway, a neat turn of phrase and a neat concept – warning that complexity is a valid part of any world description, despite Occam’s original adage.

Following-up Alden, I see a crossover with Digital Falcon (in the side-bar), and links leading ever deeper into “occult” areas – aliens & reptiles etc – common references to the works of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Christopher Hyatt to name a few. Read with caution, but even this Reptilian Agenda (full of politically motivated paranoia) is built on germs of reality – the evolved brain having distinct animal (reptilian) lower stem, social (limbic) mid-brain and intellectual (cortex) higher brain motivations – this is Jung, Maslow, Pirsig, etc al.

Feel a bit like Josephson again and his paranormal interests. This stuff may well contain an overwhelming dose of bad science, and doubtful motives, but that shouldn’t make it taboo to study with an open mind. (The Nobel Prize-winning Josephson is campaigning against bad science used to refute paranormal phenomena, which expose prejudice in science itself – scientific propaganda in fact.)

…. were the words of Robert Kilroy-Silk leaving the UK Independence Party yesterday.

Don’t know why I blogged that, since I sympathise with neither he nor UKIP, but it’s a week or two since I blogged and I had to start somewhere …

Been a tough couple of weeks, not least because I had another Spyware / Trojan attack, that I could only fix by a complete re-build. Still, the home PC needed a bit of housekeeping.

Talking of which, my latest news is that whilst I have the same vision and strategy, the family and I have some new plans. I’m starting work with a new employer based in Perth, Australia, more on which later, but for now I have one or two things to get organised.

How to give people MP3 on your blog. [via Udell’s InfoWorld]

… and feed them to the Lesbians, went the line in “Jerry Springer – The Opera” screened on BBC2 last night. The tap dancing Ku Klux Klan probably took the biscuit in surreality though, that or the particular chorus line comprising entirely the c-word.

Obviously the humour is at the live alternative comedian level of right to offend, but the satire is clear and witty, and the performance and production quality excellent, so you’d have to be pretty repressed not to laugh and enjoy the experience. The satire is obviously aimed at the confessional TV culture represented by Jerry Springer, but it’s actually a pretty traditional Faustian morality play in there, and in places layed on a bit too thick, just in case the “tourists” don’t spot the moral of the story.

Those protesting strongly against it on grounds of offence and blasphemy have clearly only read the reports in the popular press concerning the f-word and c-word count and the fact that God, Jesus, Mary and Satan are all characters in the plot, but they are hardly the target’s of the satire. In fact a UK council of churches representative spoke before the transmission, to make this very point to his flock. This is real Divine Comedy. No absolute good and evil, just a daily fine line to be defended.

Carly Fiorina, CTO of HP says “The digital revolution is focused on letting people tell and share their own stories” [At Las Vegas CES, via BBC]

Obvious, but the telling point is the word “stories” – it’s not about data and information, even multi-media, it’s about stories. Part of the grand narrative view.

Some discussion on the MoQ Discussion Board about the wonder of maths underlying basic (quantum) physics and hence life, the universe and evrything else.

Picked up this link to Ray Girvan (Apothecary’s Drawer), on the wonder of maths (in real life) as an antidote to Billy Connolly’s rant about “f**ing algebra”.

Suspect his valid point may have been “Can anyone see the point of f**ing algebra – the way it is taught, as a subject disconnected from real life.”

Anyway, only just noticed today that Ray’s byline refers to “the triple point of science, arts, and culture” – I like that.