Year: 2009

Debating the legal niceties never helped anyone but lawyers.

Glad to see the Israel Gaza conflict back in proper focus after the inordinate coverage of the feel-good Hudson Hero story over two days.

Of course phosphorus weapons are legal battlefield weapons, but that gives Israel absolutely no moral right to use them in the densely populated Gaza. Criminal. And they’ve been doing it continuously since December. Criminally cynical too for Israel to launch this offensive over Christmas and New Year and whilst the US administration is in limbo. The UN effectiveness must be strengthened to balance these Christian / US weaknesses.

How does Israel expect any case it has for Levantine lands to be taken seriously when it acts like this ?

Sign this petition at No.10 Downing Street if you want live music to continue at venues in the UK.

Direct intervention by fitting technology based control is rarely the best solution to any human problem.

[Post note – and as Tom pointed out something like a non-amplified brass-band concert can be as loud as an amplified gig, so having the technology-based limiter simply discriminates against musical genres.]

Two excellent articles by Danny Postel, one the last interview with Rorty before his death in 2007, and one shortly after on his brand of atheism.

Links from Steve Peterson commenting on a great thread on Dewey and Hildebrand on MoQ-Discuss, posted by Dave Buchannan and debated again with Matt Kundert.

{Post Note :

Hildebrand’s “The Neopragmatist Turn” on Hildebrand’s web site.

The original post thread has links to Hildebrand’s books on Amazon as of course does his own web site above. Some specific quotes from Hildebrand on Dewey, from the JohnDewey.org web-site that he edits.

Dewey’s entreaties—that philosophy start from lived experience (practically), motivated by moral ends (meliorism)—are prescriptive but necessarily vague. They pose a challenge to professionalized philosophers, who tend to respond by demanding specifics

… [but, rather than to look for absolute value or reality per se, should instead] …

… have the courage and emotional intelligence to trade certain answers for questions which aim to make life better.

Can’t argue with that – “trading answers for questions”. 

So,
so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage?

How I wish
how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found ?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

(Waters / Gilmour)

Well, did they get you to trade ?
Ever wish you were here ?
Did Wittgenstein, Dewey, Pirsig or Rorty show you the way out of that fly-bottle, or are you a lost soul still running over that same old ground ?}

Interesting reporting on this campaign, on the use of the word “probably”.

Some implying Dawkins was against it in his quip “about as likely as the tooth fairy” and suggesting the word was enforced by advertising regulations against Dawkins wishes, whereas others indicate that the campaign organiser (not Dawkins) had no intention of being dogmatic. I guess the dogmatic Dawkins invites this kind of trouble, even though quip and dogma are miles apart.

This is back to the agnostic / atheist definitional – cup half-full / half-empty – problem. To a theist a non-theist seems to have to be either agnostic or atheist so they can choose the right argument. But to a non-theist the distinction only matters if they are also being dogmatic. “Probably no god” (in the sense the public would understand a theist believes in a god, as a opposed to a sophisticated theologian) is exactly right to any pragmatist who sees no reason to invoke a god – a non-theist. It’s not agnostic; the pragmatist cares about the question, and has decided the answer on balance of evidence, probabilities, etc, like any rational (scientific) pragmatist. A non-theist is a non-dogmatic atheist, a concept that is tough for a dogmatically “faithful” theist to comprehend. Dawkins speaks to people he wants to pick a fight with.

I guess this kind of cynical PR use of TV images of war arose first in the Gulf War and then the post 9/11 assault on Bagdhad, but YouTube extends its reach and potency, though I would guess (hope) a greater proportion of consumers are now educated to interpreting this kinda stuff.

Interested previously in Arabic philosophy (Averroes / ibn Rushd and Avicennes) between the Greeks and the Western moderns, and now find Arabic science in the same window. Must check the alchemists and Bronowski’s Ascent of Man.

Just a hold that thought link. Prompted by another link from Thinking Meat to a paper at PhysOrg.com on the origins of life.

The one thing it sparked was this increasing / decreasing entropy paradox. Many people talk of life (and intelligence) as a reversal of the inexorable entropy gradient – creating order out of disorder. Of course the wider long-run entropy gradient is always smoothing out energy differences, so the reversed gradient is always a local effect. Someone (Island ?) suggested that the local decreases were just part of the universe’s most efficient (teleological) way of increasing the overall entropy faster – engineering a “good trick”.  Anyway the specific technical debate aside ….

… the thought that ocurred to me was the size of the control volume that was seen as “local” must be very closely analogous to Dennett’s maxim “you can externalize anything if you shrink yourself small enough.”

Been browsing around the  BBC and its links concerned with Darwin and the forthcoming anniversary year – 2009 is 200 years since his birth 150 years since publication of the Origin.

This  BBC / Open University forum Open2.Net has been around a while.

Nothing new to say yet, just capturing the links for upcoming use.

Interesting post from Ben Goertzel back in November recognizing that rationality is a weird thing in times of interconnected complexity, and that being rational (in any simple reductive objective sense anyway) is effectively impossible.

“Autistic Economics” it’s called when otherwise rational people think economics is about numbers and logical calculations – the wider and more complex the field of play the closer it comes to pure psychology and wise judgement.

Interestingly, one of Ben’s key points is that even if genuinely “expert explainers” could cut through the undoubted real complexity of a global economy and present simplified models against which (traditionally) rational agents could act, in fact in these times of mass communications there is no reason why their views should prevail through the noise of all the other memes of received wisdom out there clamouring for attention.

… increasing [ICT] technology seems to be increasing “market incomprehensibility” and hence, in at least some important cases, making markets LESS efficient …

We’re on the same page. And remember all of evolution is about “markets”, so as Ben says, interesting times ahead.

As promised herwith a few pointers to those items of interest in answers to the 2009 Edge Question.

Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions.
THE TORONTO STAR

Sue Blackmore – predictably, when some other “artificial” technological meme replicator becomes better (for the memes and their replication) than the human mind, humans are dispensible.

David Bodanis – that’s more like it, predictably unpredictable. Science in crisis.

Science brings magic from the heavens. In the next few decades, clearly, it will get stronger. Yet just as inevitably, some one of its negative amplitudes — be it in harming health, or security, or something as yet unrecognized — will pass an acceptable threshold. When that happens, society is unlikely to respond with calm guidelines. Instead, there will be blind fury against everything science has done.

Nicholas Humphrey – more of the same, expect a revolution, but don’t predict a changed outcome.

Dan Sperber – Ditto. Expect a clash between safety and liberty.

P  Z Myers – Biology in Minnesota (Intriguing, but I digress …) … when humans (in general / critical mass) finally accept evolution for what it is, it will change who we are. Interestingly and scarily Dawkins’ answer is about a tangible demonstration of interbreeding that might tip that balance. Scott Sampson too, evolution changes everything. (Nice to see PZ in this illustrious list BTW).

Jesse Bering – An evolved god.

Richard Foreman – nothing changes everything. (See Bodamis and Humphrey above.)

Christine Finn – a simple change of perspective in how we map to the world.

Dan Dennett – right again.

When we look closely at looking closely, when we increase our investment in techniques for increasing our investment in techniques… for increasing our investment in techniques, we create non-linearities, — like Doug Hofstadter’s strange loops — that amplify uncertainties, allowing phenomena that have heretofore been orderly and relatively predictable to escape our control. We figure out how to game the system, and this initiates an arms race to control or prevent the gaming of the system, which leads to new levels of gamesmanship and so on.

The snowball has started to roll …. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure — packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity.

Gloria Orrigi – reputation and trust – how we achieve social aggregation of “judgement”.

Betsy Devine – the economics of happiness – post 2008 melt-down.

Actually I’m going to stop there … the theme is this. If we care that humans are part of the future of the evolutionary, game-theory, cui-bono arms-race then we need to add quality values to our accounting for quantitative objects. It may take a major piece of Schumpeterian creative destruction before we really see that, so what we need is cultivate a meme that might lead us through (and survive) such a disaster before it happens. Otherwise we have all the pain without any of the benefit in a lesson learned. Game on.