Month: October 2009

Nice story in the NYT on the Higgs Boson and other Large Hadron Collider myths.

“… a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory.”

“… craziness has a fine history in a physics …”

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” (Bohr)

“an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness”

Why does the latter self-evident fact need further demonstration anyway ? Crazy.

Nice. via Rivets.

With a few days of enforced rest, and no new unread books left, I’ve been dipping into an odd mix of earlier attempts – Dante’s Inferno, Hitchhiker Trilogy, Heisenberg, Cluetrain Manifesto to name a few. Spurred by the latter no doubt, I checked out what Dave Weinberger is blogging these days :

As we come out of the Age of Information, it’s a good time to ask what information was and what it did to us. In fact, if you ask most people, they can’t actually give you a definition of information. That’s not because they’re stupid in a “ Jay Walk” sort of way. We’ve named an Age after it, and we can’t even say what it means. We as a culture glommed onto  Claude Shannon’s precise, mathematical take-over of the word “information” and applied it non-mathematical ways to everything from music to minds to the cosmos. What was so damn appealing about that word? What did we see in it?

I’m going to “argue” — more accurately: suggest, hint, gesticulate, wave my hands and hope I distract people — that we embraced information because it reinforced and extended some old metaphysical ideas — representationalism, mainly, i.e., the idea that we experience the world via inner mental representations of it. As of tonight, I plan on taking as an example the informationalization of the idea of communication — seeing communication as the transmitting of encoded messages that are decoded by the listener — and will argue (see above qualifiers) that it hides most of what’s important about communication.

The misguided “conduit” metaphor of communication – as if content, meaning, representation and communication were all separate and distinct. And most recently a summary of Larry Lessig’s “Against Transparency” with Dave’s Objections

Transparency is not necessarily good. Especially bad is “naked transparency” … To be helpful, information has to be incorporated into “complex chains of comprehension.” Tansparency leads to untruth. Mere correlations … do not tell us … anything.

Objection: But, revealing those correlations does no harm.
Yes it does! Once the correlation gets in our head, we can’t get rid of it.

Objection: More information will chase out the bad info.
No it won’t! Our attention spans are shot. You can see this everywhere.

The memetic argument. Ideas with mimetic qualities – “easy” communication and fit with received (prejudiced / stereotypical) wisdom – necessarily dominate higher quality ideas that don’t. The more transparant and immediate the communication, the worse the effect.

Sue Blackmore’s recent experience of evening classes.

In no particular order, just to share the passion and power of expression.

The idea …. that Islamic radicals are envious of western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafes smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

A small cabal of dogmatists occupied the white house and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysee Palace.

As president Eisenhower once announced in Groucho Marx style “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief – and I don’t care what it is.”

“An excess of light can result in darkness.” – Edmund Burke

“A surplus of reason can become a species of madness.” – Jonathan Swift

I “guessed” in the previous post that Eagleton was a Marxist Christian. He puts that right …

A “congenital Skeptic with mild Baptist leanings”

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God ?

As well as love, Eagleton is also fond of the word grace. Me too. Here a very long sequence of extracts that just sums up my non-theist view. (In a nutshell – Strong views, lightly held. Binary opposition excludes middles and creates self-reinforcing extremes. Scientific objectivity can be as grotesquely faith-based as any religion. Hyper-rationality is a neurosis.)

Some of those these days who dislike religion do so because they are suspicious of conviction as such … In a pluralistic age, conviction is thought to be at odds with tolerance, so that one would not exist without the other. Postmodernism is allergic to the idea of certainty and makes a great deal of theoretical fuss over this rather modest, everyday notion. As such it is in some ways the flip side of fundamentalism which also makes a fuss about certainty … Some postmodern thought suspects that all certainty  is authoritarian. It is nervous of people who sound passionately committed to what they say. In this, it represents among other things and excessive reaction to fascism and Stalinism. The totalitarian politics of the twentieth century did not only launch an assault on truth in their own time; they also helped to undermine the idea of truth for future generations. The line between holding noxious kinds of belief, and holding strong beliefs at all, then becomes dangerously unclear. Conviction is itself condemned as dogmatic.

Certainties may indeed destroy. But they may also liberate … Liberals hold the conviction that they should tolerate other people’s convictions. On the whole, they are more concerned with the fact of other people’s convictions than their content. They can even be more zealous in the cause of other people’s convictions than their own.

Our age is divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little – or as Milan Kundera would put it, between the angelic and the demonic. Each party draws sustenance from the other. The age is equally divided between technocratic reason which subordinates value to fact, and a fundamentalist reason which replaces fact with value.

Faith – any kind of faith – is not in the first place a matter of choice. It is more common to find oneself believing something, than to make a conscious choice to do so. – or at least to make such a conscious decision because you find yourself leaning that way already. This is not, needless to say, a matter of determinism …. It is not primarily a question of the will, at least as the modern era imagines that much fetishized faculty.

Such a cult of the will  characterizes the United States. The sky’s the limit, never say never, you can crack it if you try, you can be anything you want: are the delusions of the American dream. For some in the USA, the C-word is “can’t”. Negativity is often looked upon as a kind of thought crime. […]

The Christian way of indicating that faith is not in the end a question of choice is the notion of grace. Like the world itself from a Christian viewpoint, faith is a gift. This means among other things that Christians are not in conscious possession of all the reasons why they believe in God. But neither is anyone in conscious possession of all then reasons why the believe [their beliefs]. Only ultrarationalists imagine that they need be.

Because faith is not wholly conscious, it is uncommon to abandon it simply by thought. Too much else would have to be altered as well. It is not usual for a lifelong conservative suddenly to become a revolutionary because a thought struck him. This is not to say that faith is closed to evidence … or to deny that one can change one’s mind about one’s beliefs. We may not choose our beliefs the way we choose our starters; but this is not to say that we are just helpless prisoners of them. Determinism is not the only alternative to voluntarism. It is just that more is involved in changing really deep-seated beliefs that just changing you mind. The rationalist tends to mistake the tenacity of faith (other people’s faith, anyway) for irrational stubbornness rather than a sign of certain interior depth, one which encompasses reason but also transcends it. [Conversion] involves a lot more than  just swapping one opinion for another. This is one reason why other people’s faith can look like plain irrationality, which indeed it sometimes is.

Copyright (c) Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith and Revolution p136 .. p139.

I need a more conventional theist response to Eagleton ? Anyone ?

I remember doing pyrolysis experiments on my mother’s kitchen stove many years ago – it’s amazing what waste substances will produce flamable (and noxious) gases if heated in the absence of air.

As the article notes traditional waste incineration plants – those that burn waste directly generally require a good deal of preprocessing – so that the messy / mixed consumable fuel and can undergo mixing with the air and heat-exchange with the extraction medium (fluidized beds / pebbles and the like). The beauty of the pyrolysis step is that the waste only needs to be heated and physically handled in and out the the reactor – the combustion and heat-exchange happens separately in a conventional gas-fired application.

No idea about the overall efficiencies of scale with the different posibilities – suspect a good fluidized bed wins on a large industrial scale – but interesting to see that the simplicity creates practical, flexible, portable local options.

In addition, the size and complexity reduction of the system for US army use means the approach could see application outside the military.

“We’re finding more and more people in the commercial sector want to take ownership of their waste, and they want to reduce their carbon footprint, so they see energy from waste as a good way to go,”

Interesting collection of trees, plants, fungi and lichens representing the oldest living things on earth. Some question about individual vs colony I guess, but interesting none-the-less. (via Kevin Kelly)

Just read my first Terry Eagleton prompted by the Laurie Taylor interview referred to by Sam, and a number of earlier references on MoQ Discuss. First “The Meaning of Life” followed immediately by “Reason, Faith and Revolution”

In the former, his Alexei Sayle-esque stand-up routine targets every variant of the use of the words meaning and life. Along the way, drawing on Monty Python and Douglas Adams’ humour, even thoughts you might hold dear come under attack, but ultimately Eagleton’s answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is … love. An Aristotelian, reciprocal, agape, eudaimonic kind of unconditional love.

So far so good. A brief, funny and satisfying read. With plenty of literary and philosophical references, already clear he is a fan of Shakespeare, Marx and Wittgenstein (and Aquinas, and MacIntyre, and Lacan), more on which later, but I loved this on Arthur Schopenhauer, which gives some clue as to Eagleton’s style. Seriously funny.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a thinker so unremittingly gloomy that his work, quite unintentionally, represents one of the great comic masterpieces of western thought [and Eagleton proceeds to poke fun at both his name and his looks, as well as his thinking].

(Aside – he quotes Baggini too, but with mild criticism & faint praise – don’t think he’s a fan ?)

Eagleton is a Marxist Christian (I think … sometimes hard to tell ;-)). A back-to-basics radical revolutionary rather than a pragmatist when it comes to rescuing the babies of Marxism, theology and east-west politics from the bathwater of their 20th century hypocrisies and evils. As a “sophisticated-non-theist-pragmatist” myself I find I have a lot more in common with a sophisticated theist like Eagleton, than the stereotypical “believer in God”.

The subject of the second book is “Ditchkins” the recent “Let’s kill God” flurry of public reaction to irrational extremes of religious fundamentalism and faith – Dawkins, Hitchens et al. The subtitle of “Reason, Faith and Revolution” is “Reflections on the God Debate”. He’ll get no argument from me panning the juvenile ignorant thinking of such commentators, but I find a few points to disagree.

He lumps Dennett in with this crowd. I have to say that whilst his contribution “Breaking the Spell” starts off in the same camp addressing the same target US public the same way, I find myself defending Dennett’s much less scientistic, less  “reductionist” lines of argument, and his lovingly humane open-minded conclusions. I hope he’s read Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” and “Freedom Evolves” too, written before the recent post 9/11 hysteria.

Reductionism as a straw-man is my second argument too. He ridicules Dawkins “meme” concept, but it is clear he does so for its reductionist crassness. It’s reductionist crassness we should be fighting.

“Memes” … [secular myth, parody of genetic transmission, conflation of the cultural and biological, 19th century Positivism] … overlook the fact that moral and scientific progress, far from evolving in tandem, can be in severe conflict with one another. We have telecommunications but we slaughter more than ever. Dawkins is an old-fashioned crassly reductive system builder … All such triumphalistic totalizers are fated to fail … Such reductive systems are incompatible with the freedom which Dawkins rightly champions.

I share the criticisms of Dawkins, but must point out the misunderstanding lies in too simplistic understanding of multi-layered systems that involve the biological and cultural (and the physical and intellectual) and the complexity of non-reductionist, non-determinist two-way-interactive-causation between patterns in those layers. The fact that components and causes and effects exist in such systems, does not make the systems and their behaviour reductionist or determinist. That is the crass view. Memes are simply useful components to talk about, when it comes to the evolution of free-will and freedoms … as Eagleton himself does with this earlier joke …

One CIA intervention which has not received the urgent attention it merits, by the way, was the agency’s dissemination of a Russian translation of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land during the Cold War. Was this to demonstrate the virtues of both free verse and free expression, or to demoralize the Soviets by unleashing the virus of nihilism into their midst ?

The effect of such a virus is no different the the concept of meme. And no more reductionist or determinist in postulating a possible effect in the scheme of things, rather than one objective input to a sausage machine with predictable outcomes. That would be crass reductionism. A meme is no more reductionist than a virus. Stereotypes are useful for transmitting messages but dangerous in the wrong hands. So back to more serious matters …

… Without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip, it is not at all out of the question that the Twin Towers would still be standing. Those who would resent the ascription of even this much rationality to an Islamic radicalism which they prefer to see as simply psychotic, should have a word with those in the British secret service whose task it was some years a go to monitor the IRA. These professional anti-terrorists knew well enough not to swallow a lot of cretinous tabloid hysteria about terrorists as monsters and mad beasts. They were well aware that the IRA’s behaviour, however sometimes murderous, was in a narrow sense of the word rational and that, without acknowledging this fact. they would be unlikely to defeat them.

As long as we see faith as the polar opposite of reason, we shall continue to commit these errors.

Cretinous tabloid hysteria ? I think memes are a useful concept in this discussion, not least the rationality vs faith meme. Eagleton appears to be at least as sophisticated philosophically as Harris and Dennett when it comes to this debate. Reading on …