Month: May 2025

Missed a couple of years recently, but this was my 6th (or 7th?) attendance at the Hay-on-Wye “How The Light Gets In” philosophy, science and music festival. It’s over 4 days, but it’s so packed with content, I’m exhausted after just two these days.

Just posting a few thoughts this year, rather than detailed reviews of the talks, dialogues and music. [I have notes elsewhere for my own reference. As ever, Dave Snowden was in attendance – got one brief chance to say “Hi” in person.]

Apart from a few new faces – keepers for future dialogue – no really new topics or ideas this year, and the main new impression in 2025 was Hilary Lawson’s. As founder and director of IAI and HTLGI he’s had plenty of previous stage time at these events, but noticeable was his urgency, his visible frustration at getting his non-realist “Closure” (2001) agenda across [2003] [2009].

I ended on watching Tom Robinson‘s set on the Saturday evening. Given the nature of the event, the music tends to to be light relief entertainment from the intellectual content, for me anyway, so I’ve only occasionally noticed specific acts on previous occasions, and until the day, I hadn’t noticed Tom was even on the bill. Good to see and hear his full hour set – telling his life stories, and the loss of Danny Kustow – as well as playing his songs, which meant it was 9:30pm before I was in the car for the 5.5hr drive home! Lovely bloke. One of his songs – a re-telling of American Pie for the British which includes reference to the Eric Clapton / Enoch Powell remarks that spawned Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League back in 1978. The last time I saw Tom was Sunday 30th April 1978, the Trafalgar Square rally and march to the RAR/ANL gig in Victoria Park, Hackney. What a day!

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Tice on the bill – enlightened freedom of speech n’all that – how the light gets in – despite which the latter drew some naïve AntiFa protests 🙂 Saw the latter claiming common sense – don’t we all? But my focus was / is the philosophy<>science interface / overlap / relationships so I properly attended:

Catherine Mayer – Stranger Than Fiction, writer / journalist in conversation with fellow journalist / writer Mary Ann Sieghart.

(Ever present philosopher Barry C Smith wine-tasting-based philosophy session, I skipped.)

John Dupre, Ivette Fuentes & Alex Rosenberg discussing “whether physics holds the answers to all our questions” – spoiler, it doesn’t. [My agenda.]

David Goodhart, Sherelle Jacobs & Richard Tice – draining the swamp, smaller government through efficiency etc. Sherelle new to me, a keeper.

Hilary Lawson, Steven Pinker, Barbara Tversky and Sophie Scott-Brown – debating the relationships between thought, language and reality. No surprises [my agenda] other than Lawson pushing his anti-realist “Closure” agenda very hard, despite having much previous stage time referencing it – as the founder / director of the IAI / HTLGI event. (Pinker actually used a quote I use from his wife Rebecca Goldstein, that no physicist or philosopher’s work is complete without ontological commitment to say “and this is how the world really is” unless like non-realists you deny reality. So close to my triadic position which is to remember that reality is strictly “posited” as being out there and your ontology is “deemed”. Reification is exactly that. Treat it as “real” by all means, but never forget.)

Ivette Fuentes – breakfast conversation with the Mexican quantum physicist, sharing her story of her interest in the topics that have shaped her work in QM.

“Hat on” reminding her of the rigour of physical science, when switching hats between Philosophy and Science/PoS 🙂

Robert L Kuhn, Masimo Pigliucci, Maria Balaet & John Dupre – on the biology of conflict (vs collaboration). Balaet neuroscientist, another keeper, new to me.

Maria Balaet, Joanna Moncrieff & Norman Ohler – on the historical and social place of psychoactive substances – ranging from caution to enthusiasm, via empiricism and pragmatism as ever.

(Missed Goodhart, Mayer & Sturgeon on gender in democracy. #ViveLaDifference)

Paul Bloom – on Utopia – impossible and actually undesirable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get close. Someone I knew of, student of Pinker, but first experience for me. A keeper. (Also author of “Against Empathy” – see footnote.)

Eric Kaufmann – on the End of Woke. Business-like presentation on the history from original political correctness and the need for narrower understanding of the specifics: “Today’s leaders… need to understand Kaufmann’s defence of democracy before it’s too late.” — Trevor Phillips, about says it.

Carlo Rovelli, Alenka Zupancic & Slavoj Žižek– on the self in the world. Entertaining to hear Žižek as usual, agreeing with lots of Rovelli, especially the Buddhist / Nagarjuna angle.

Hilary Lawson & Slavoj Žižek – refereed by Gunes Taylor – non-realist philosophers both, going beyond Truth and Reality. Again, Lawson quite urgent in pushing his “Closure” view and the incorrigible Žižek agreeing with his endless anecdotes and jokes. (I’ve been sympathetic to Lawson’s view since 2003, properly reading him in 2008, formative part of my worldview, but clearly the 2025+ “polycrises/metacrisis” has spurred his new-found urgency.)

Tim Maudlin standing in for Avshalom Elitzur – on imaginary numbers in parallel mathematical formalisms in physical theory, including QM and Schrodinger. (No mystery – just a symbolic “accounting practice” to keep, co-dependent, orthogonal, complementary real variables distinct when combined in single dynamic equations or formulae. #GoodFences. Also fascinating that he included Navier-Stokes in his examples of parallel formulations – Engineers (and cosmologists) deal with this all the time, but these “diffusion as flow” views gaining traction at quantum levels too.) [Another new / keeper]

Claire Blencowe, Paul Bloom and Michelle Terry – provoked by Matt Taylor – on the distinction between roles we artificially “play” and roles we authentically “fulfil” as our-selves in the real world. A great place for me to end.

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Post Notes:

HTLGI’s own gallery of images from the event here. It includes this one with Dave Snowden front and centre. Back of my head in a couple of the others 🙂

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Note: On the Friday I visited a handful of Hay’s dozens of used book shops, and failed again to find a copy of Iain McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism”. (This, like “Against Empathy” (by Paul Bloom above), is a memetic extension of Paul Feyerabend’s “Against Method”(*) – not literally “against” but against over-zealous / over-reach / distortion of its intended use – see topical woke / anti-woke / Musk “empathy killed the west” etc and (*) see Rules – guidance for wise etc. In Bloom’s case it’s a warning against our biases, where we get to feel good empathising with in-groups, to the detriment/displacement of any actual empathy with out-groups.)

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Previous HTLGI notes – 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2025.

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Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of the few books I’ve actually read in the past couple of years, that wasn’t directly / immediately / importantly related to my current writing project – needing to clear the decks and pay more than lip-service to having a deadline. Though as I often find, any literature about the human condition could be considered relevant, it’s simply impossible to read everything, to live without a library of unread books.

I made three passing references here to reading LHP, but never really posted a “review”:

March 2025 – I did this weekend also choose to re-read to completion “Leonard and Hungry Paul” (2019) by Ronan Hession, by independent publishers Bluemoose Books …

December 2024 – A whole load of half-read / un-reviewed books that will have to wait: “Leonard and Hungry Paul” – Ronan Hession (Half read, very good, small independent publisher, made only a few project-relevant notes) …

April 2024 – Psybertron blog action has retreated to book / thesis drafting behind the scenes, as most of my life is taken over by planning for two summer events – the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISS) and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conferences in Washington DC in early June, and the Robert Pirsig 50th anniversary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (#ZMM50th) events culminating in July with retracing the original 1968 motorcycle road-trip (#ZMM50thRide). That said, I’m using available down time to read one book from my never ending reading list. “Leonard and Hungry Paul” by Rónán Hession (Mumblin’ Deaf Ro on X/Twitter), via small independent publisher Bluemoose Books. Been following them and a few other independents for a while, for obvious reasons, but remembered I really did need to buy and read one of their books. Support is more than “Retweeting”…

Well, these are the words culled and collated from those three earlier posts into some semblance of a review:

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No Funerals and One Wedding?

As usual, I’m feeling the need to capture some thoughts, only ~20% through, a kinda pre-review as I call them, but did read the whole and add thoughts below.

It’s very good, and surprisingly relevant to my own agenda:

“the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments”.

“the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of the complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing.”

“He operated [the ‘Za’ rule in scrabble] with iron inflexibility, even though he himself was its most frequent victim”

The technology, complexity and human systems with rules – it’s all there.

Despite the fact the author is almost 20 years my junior, there’s a strong sense of northern spouse, parental, familial, sibling life, learning rules of the game of real life through scrapes in the schoolyard and board games in the home. Cultural references to Inspector Morse and Judy Sill as well as bookshops, and hard-backs as “special presents”. I can see why it resonates with me.

The language is beautiful, beautifully observed too:

“on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from the special place that ideas come from”

And

“[looking at] the first piece of asparagus loaded onto her fork [he spoke] through a mouthful of unsalted soup”

Excellent stuff. Guessing we will eventually find out why Paul is “Hungry” more than just that Grace is a slow eater 🙂 ?

Reading on, with a reason to do so, I did find time to read it to completion.

Overall, very good, gently funny study on life, love, family and friendship. No funerals and one wedding, maybe. (PS – never did find out explicitly why Hungry Paul has that name. Presumably his older sister’s nick-name for him from his time as a needy infant, but never even mentioned, unless I missed it?)

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Post Note: – Today, I hear it’s being made into a BBC TV (NI) production. One to watch.

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Slowing Down the Internet? – You must be mad.

One of my long-standing and counter-intuitive rules of engagement in internet-enabled interactive-media – comments, forums, social media generally – is that moderation isn’t about “censorship” it’s about slowing down dangerous, explosive, degenerate, divisive, counter-productive, polarising activity. Moderation as in nuclear reactor moderator rods, slowing down the particle flux between the reactive “fuel”, preventing a runaway chain-reaction “going critical”.

Counter-intuitive to the perceived immediate democratisation of the web; where we/anyone is enabled and allowed to communicate anything at the flick of a thumb. It’s the speed and ubiquity that is killing us – little room for listening & thinking before reacting in the memetic race for attention. Dysmemics ensures catchy crap beats nuanced quality.

Enlightened (human) moderators of previous generation forums, bulletin-boards and email-exploders typically made provision for free-unlimited and posts-per-day-limited channels.

I’ve been using the unlikely named “Discord” forum tool for some time in various communities (see below). It’s very flexible and powerful – some people run entire projects and programmes on it – and, obviously dependent on the actual humans and human relationships involved, it provides a great experience. I say unlikely named, and indeed the language and graphics in the user interfaces is kinda “down with the kids” too, originally created and used by gamers and hackers, so first impressions mitigate against it being used for serious grown-up projects, but the way it works is a joy to behold. Sadly of course, being very flexible and powerful, nefarious people also run their nefarious projects on it.

But that’s humans for you. The tool is functionally well designed.

So well designed, I notice it has a “Slow Mode” feature built-in, which can be switched-on if conversational chain-reactions risk going critical – more heat & noise than light & enlightenment. Be interesting to see if we get a case where we need it, but good to know it’s there.

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Discord?

If you don’t know Discord – this is me and my personal Discord DM channel, and we can take it from there with joining mutual group “servers”? If you’re already on Discord, you’ll already know how to find me 🙂 And, if you’re really interested, the exemplary server that uses every project management feature and every group forum bell & whistle is the “Active Inference Institute” run by Daniel Friedman.

I am in awe.

“Where there is Discord, let there be light.”

[With apologies to Maggie.]

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For some reason, not quite sure why, I’ve binge-re-watched the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad over about a month.

A long concentrated dose of pure evil and depraved bloody violence has it’s own cathartic draining effect, but it remains a marvellously constructed morality-play drama, characters and plot lines. It was good to get all the vividly remembered scenes stitched back together in some semblance of order. Hank remains the only “hero” here, he dies for Walt’s sins. The structure with the out-of-timeline preview scenes at the front of each episode makes a lot more sense second time around – whole theses to be – have been – written about that.

However, since I first saw BB I have, of course, watched the whole of “Better Call Saul” and “El Camino” – the spin-offs based around Saul Goodman and Jesse Pinkman, the two (males) who survived BB with their lives – so lots of the temporally confused scenes are in fact shared across the whole collection.

Which sadly means I’ll probably have to re-watch BCS again too! Rats!

Saul jokingly mentions “Cinnabon” during the final episode of BB – a remark whose significance cannot even be noticed first time through. The significance to me is it takes me back to “the holiday season” – half a year, September to January in the southern US – and the sickly pervasive smell of cinnamon and sweet vanilla with everything. Just typing the words is enough. And the reverse is true. The slightest whiff of cinnamon and the whole series comes flooding back – debilitating! Which probably answers my first question – why was I rewatching it? A subconscious olfactory trigger no doubt. Hurdle overcome.

Anyway, I only intended to post one thing in this writing hiatus, the music, the song from the final scene. Already well documented of course, but I had to Google to re-find that it was a 1971 song by Badfinger. “My Baby Blue” sounding like it was written for the 2008 script.

[The clip is cleverly selected / edited, to avoid the spoiler that he discovers the source of his own blood, and the reason he collapses and dies, hoist by his own petard during the prior climactic scene.

Best comment @Carelock on YouTube:

I like to think Vince Gilligan was riding in an RV one day and Baby Blue by Badfinger came on and he just built a show around it…

Highly creative either way?

So I should add, it was the creative process that really had me intrigued – I am trying to write after all. Huge amounts of the whole five series worth of story-line must have been conceived in some detail before any of the asynchronous preview scenes could have been created and included in earlier episodes?]

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Just an excuse to share the link to “Bifurcated Rivets” (Lindsay Marshall’s blog at Newcastle Uni). What “Web Logging” used to be about, sharing interesting links to rabbit holes in the WWW, with minimal commentary – (as originally conceived by Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom).

Rivets still there, same minimalist format today as he was when I was first linking in my blog-roll in my first year of blogging 2001/2.

Take a look at this link from just last month to a piece on Magritte’s Art Deco commercial art before he became known for his surrealist images.

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I am actually writing – essentially evolving my PhD proposal into the thesis it was intended to become, whether I’m actually doing it as a formal PhD or not. The technical “half” of my literary project.

I am very conscious – in that PhD proposal – that my take on the application of Systems Thinking is pretty much “Life, the Universe and Everything” – from metaphysics to the physical science of the cosmos via the scale of our human experience – beyond what a casual reader might attribute to those two words. I flipped to using Systems Thinking as the umbrella term for my research topic having spent most of the last 25 years of Psybertron using some variation of Cybernetics / Psybernetics, but I’ve not changed what I intend as the topic. My professional work experience space was always distinct from my research space, though real life experiences from the former were driving my interest in the latter. And increasingly, the last two decades of the day job were concerned with systemic ontologies for business operations of industrial and other organisations, increasingly informed by my earlier business Masters. Distinct but clearly convergent.

As with Systems Thinking, Cybernetics is no less ambiguous to the casual reader. Knowing that Wiener intended Cybernetics to mean individual and collective human decision-making in our cosmic ecosystem – decision-theory – doesn’t change the fact that people hear mechanistic command, feedback and control when they see the word Cybernetics or encounter it’s derivative in electronic, algorithmic Cyberspace.

Similarly in my professional sphere, I was happy to label the whole as Systems Engineering of one form or another. Engineering is simply humans using ingenuity physical or mental, hard or soft, to make better stuff happen – whether it’s bashing metal, masonry and wires into shape or whether it’s about herding cats (ie organising & managing human activities). How do we decide what’s the best thing(s) to do to make that better stuff happen? The System(s) in question being literally anything, considered in terms of functional relations between parts and wholes.

The switch of language from Systems Engineering to Systems Thinking actually happened in that professional sphere. I’ve mentioned previously that the three smartest ex-colleagues I’d ever worked with were in (separate) INCOSE Systems Engineering (nuclear) contexts and it was they that were flipping the terminology from Engineering to Thinking for me. It was perfectly natural for me to replace all of Cybernetics / Psybernetics / OR / Systems-Engineering with Systems Thinking. [Deflationary Compression as shorthand.]

So, being conscious of the ambiguity in my terminology, a conventional starting point for pulling the writing together was some definitions to distinguish between my uses of terms. I say conventional because other parts of my thesis warn against rules and definitions being anything more definitive than #goodfences / #guardrails or guidance for the wise. Nevertheless I’ve been consulting standard definitions, if only to raise that warning about how I’m using them.

I’ve previously mentioned recent Systems Thinking publications by Mike Jackson and by Ramage & Shipp. Neither really gave me a working definition more satisfactory than my own. Both are essentially – very good but quite different – summaries of the co-evolution of the many related topics and methodologies. In conclusion there being many possible ideas (with different names) to choose from contingently, in context, using pragmatism beyond any formulaic methodology. And as I’ve noted others concerned with the same set of management / governance / organisational issues – Dave Snowden and Jean Boulton (say) – shun the word System almost entirely, preferring to talk about complexity, even if from quite different perspectives. And, as Janet Singer pointed out if we needed reminding, that language & choice of words can never unambiguously pin down our topic(s) anyway. It’s why I start with #GoodFences. Any definition, any distinction between two words or things, is a matter of pragmatic convention, to be respected but not taken as fixed in any fundamentally definitive way – whether declared in advance or recorded in hindsight in dictionaries. What really matters about them are the properties we use to make such distinctions and relationships – which is ultimately circular anyway as we shift our attention from definitions of things, to definitions of their chosen properties. But again, no less useful, pragmatically. Circularity is actually a bonus, rather than a problem. Strange Loops, one level removed from our objects of interest, give us evolution.

One of those smartest ex-colleagues is Rob Black and he’s recently authored “The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Systems Thinking” [TABGST] published in their “Don’t Panic” series by INCOSE.

[The other two, referenced previously, were Viktor Agroskin and Anatoly Levenchuck: Viktor largely for his linguistic mental ability in sharing and helping us understand complex ideas being translated in real-time in his head in multi-lingual collaborative conversations; Anatoly for his introducing me to Systems Engineering as a topic originally and latterly to his version of my own #GoodFences warning – that definitions in the wrong place are the coffin of creative evolution. “Hold your definition” I’d already absorbed from Dennett much earlier in a purely philosophical context, and frankly after 30 years of industrial systems engineering this was the ultimate confluence between the abstract philosophical and real-world practical domains.]

Interestingly TABGST doesn’t per se define systems thinking, and indeed Ch1 “Framing and Taming Complexity” starts with “Systems Thinking as a mindset and skillset that can help us engage and manage complexity” and thereafter the content of Ch1 falls under “Complexity and Systems Thinking”. In my own working definition “Systems Thinking is a response to Complexity” so no argument there. The key here is going to be the separate words, Systems and Thinking as well as their conjunction. Complexity is simply the abstract noun form of the adjective “complex” – interestingly also not defined in TABGST.

Thinking is mental, so for me the skillsets are mental skillsets and mindsets – world-views, ways of thinking and viewing or conceptually modelling the world mentally. Hence for me then, ST is such a worldview that considers (views / models) the complex world in terms of systems. Nothing more, and nothing less either.

Interestingly TABGST Ch1 proceeds with “concerns” that “illustrate” a whole collection of “domains, across life and society” rather than any attempt at formal scope definition. Everything but the Universe. Science of the physical universe is the only domain excluded, or rather simply not listed, not considered. That’s a choice to focus on engineered systems of organisation and governance of human activities in the wider world. The charitable comment is that such fundamental physical systems are taken for granted as underlying the whole here. In my definition the scope also includes systems comprising one proton and one electron or one brain and trillions of neurons, or one galaxy and trillions of stars. Science already – taking a systemic view – treats these as systems anyway, so I’ve no reason to exclude them. The world ecosystem involves the natural as well as the “built” (human engineered) environment, both mentally and physically and the agent relationship between.

Which simply leaves the word system itself – what do we mean by considering the world in terms of systems. TABGST uses the ISO15288 definition for the systems of the engineered environment: “combination of interacting elements organised to achieve one or more stated purposes”

Interacting elements is fine – shorthand for my seeing the world in terms of “functional related whole and part things / elements“. No problem here.

“Organised to achieve” and “stated purposes” is pretty much limited to the engineered environment of intentional human (individual and social) activity. But that’s just that we have different scopes in mind. For me organisation and purpose are more things that arise / evolve within such a systems view of the complex whole, so no need to limit the view to human agency, which itself needs systemic grounds for explanation.

Systems Thinking is – considering the world in terms of systems, where Systems are – anything considered in terms of functional relationships between elements. Whilst applicable to literally anything it is the pragmatically recommended approach when dealing with complex and/or chaotic situations.

But that’s my wider position. So to round off any review of TABGST – Robert Black (2025) “The Absolute Beginners Guide to Systems Thinking” – is exactly what it says on the cover, brief and can’t fault it for the intended scope of application. Recommended.

Anyway, we could continue down the definitional rabbit hole, and ask ourselves what we mean by words and stuff, things and elements, wholes and parts, functions and relations, organisation and purpose, etc but as already noted, it’s a fools errand, there is no end to definition beyond your pragmatic choice of ontology.

Which is why my project is more about metaphysical underpinnings of such ontological choice(s). And it’s why my choice is to remain at least one level conceptually removed from specific / individual real-world application. An abstraction as a framework or meta-model / ecosystem about Life, the Universe and Everything, against which models can be judged and tested, but not the model of it. It does mean my ontology also includes meaning and knowledge (epistemology of what can be known as well as what is). As ever I’m not creating anything original. I’m simply recommending pragmatic choices – at this more abstract philosophical level. One of those recommendations is that we don’t be precious about particular choices of words that inevitably come with baggage of previous limited successes of imperfect or misguided uses. We know we can do better.

Although people reject being pigeonholed in camps – it is interesting to note those people that prefer to talk about systems and those that prefer to talk about complexity and those who, like myself (and Rob, Viktor and Anatoly) simply choose either to talk about the other. Systems thinking is how to deal with the complexities of reality. (Sure there are ordered, closed systems that are neither chaotic nor complex and are simply more or less complicated, but they’re much less interesting , much less in need of abstract theory and already readily addressed by formal methods.)

Anyway,
I think I have my starting definitions
for systems and systems thinking.

(As well as my standing caveat that all definitions, like rules, are for guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools. Wisdom is my real “beyond science” topic.)

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Coda

So, my real target is not so much that choice between systems and complexity – but the choice to call the whole “science” – to not recognise that there is more than science in our complex world. Complexity vs complexity-science for example. Distinctions between words chosen are always #GoodFences.

An aside here, but I was also tempted to watch this Dave Snowden / Nora Bateson conversation, partly because of my penance towards having maybe failed to sufficiently consider the various Bateson contributions, and partly because Dave has been part of the more than science dialogue.

Right from the outset, as is his style, Dave crashes both fences – systems vs complexity and science vs more than science.

“Complexity is a science”
and
“Systems are not a subset of complexity”

Sure, systems are not a subset of complexity, that would be a category error, the relationship is more subtle. And, there is a science of complexity, but the complex stuff arising – complexity itself – isn’t all science, even if the arising can be explained scientifically (it can) the nature, content and behaviour of the stuff arisen can’t. [See also Dave’s 2003 science quote of Pirsig – qualified by tradition and method.] Whole-part relations and Class / Set / Sub-set-membership are of course the taxonomic foundations of ontology(ies). I’m tempted to note here not just my long-standing “Tabletop” example from Doug Hofstadter, but also a very recent reference in another place to “Grandma’s Big Box of Buttons” by Dr. JT Kostman. Taxonomy-based ontology is an entirely naturally-learned creative human process, necessary to deal with our complex world – more deflationary compression.

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