What, Why & How do we Know ?
Angela Merkel’s body language ? (Hat tip to Rivets)
And another from Rivets … North Korean (DPRK) from a Russian site ? … politically composed images, but nevertheless some wonderful art in there.
And SEOLOL I’ve seen before but worth having the link to hand when you need a laugh.
If computers had colons, they could make better decisions. Nice one from Dilbert.
The problem is confusing brains with minds. You colon is part of your mind, even though it’s not part of your brain. Damasio has a word for it – Somatic Markers. (And yes it is all process. Process that is; not “a” process.)
One of my management adages is
“Agreement in public,
disagreement in private”.
I was reminded of it by this quote collection from Kevin Kelly. (Here’s the permalink to the Scott Delinger quote.)
It’s one of these things that get’s tangled up in open communications, freedom of speech mantras that so many people seem to think applies to all communications. As if not voicing disagreement is somehow dishonest. No such thing as need to know, all management of communication is somehow evil. Also the element that agreeing in public is a kind of “me too” noise, less valuable that disagreement. It also get’s tangled up in “scientism” … as if somehow covering up disagreement, not pointing out errors, is counter to scientific progress, and must be stamped out for some greater good.
No. In my experience most disagreement is initially misunderstanding, and voicing disagreement initially tends to spread misunderstanding, and in a context where trust matters, spreading misunderstanding then spreads uncertainty and mistrust. Much more effective to voice misunderstanding and apparent disagreement with the other party privately, to establish if there really is error or significant disagreement, or simply lack of clarity that will benefit from clarification. Then go public with that. Much more productive of everyone’s time.
Of course if trust doesn’t matter to you, do your worst.
(More good quotes in that Kevin Kelley collection BTW – Tim O’Reilly and E. Digby Baltzell for example.)
Spooky for reasons I can’t quite pin down yet, having picked-up on Compression yesterday, Compression is the initial subject of this Long Now talk from Brian Eno and Will Wright. In retrospect, I think the only connection with Owen Barfield is the mention of the Aeolian Harp as regenerative music.
Oh, and receiving a mail this morning concerning Owen Barfield.
Listening now to that Eno / Wright talk, this is of course identical to Hofstadter’s Tabletop metaphor – problem space with huge range of possible outcomes as a conversation … a simple recurring pattern of “play” generating outcomes in levels well beyond the objective inputs.
It’s official, you get wiser as you get older, and here too.
That is if you value multiple perspectives, possibility of change, flexible predictions, knowledge limitations, conflict resolution and compromise, then better ask a grey-beard.
Having concluded positively that Christopher Hitchens does know what he’s talking about in the faith vs science debate, I have to say that the rhetoric here is unnecessarily dirty.
The prince is an easy target without coherent argument, or necessarily the expertise for such argument, but he is expressing a real concern for soulless scientism.
Or is that Stupidly Rational ? Neat. From Elizabeth Pisani.
And morally rational ? A good one from Michael Sandel. Essential ethics at the core of difficult debate.
(And Sandel’s Harvard teaching lectures from 2005 – and the ongoing online justice harvard resource – see also last year’s Reith lectures.)
True of much mainstream media in fact IMHO – infantilized – even apparently serious reporting of serious subjects.
Another sequence from Doug Hofstadter responding with scepticism to Ray Kuzweil at the Stanford Singularity Summit (2007 or 2009 ?) – singularity as in machine intelligence or machine aided intelligence overtaking human intelligence. Sceptical in terms of short predicted timescales, immortality, time travel, hockey-sticks, etc … losing credibility … but concerned that mainstream science is not taking the core ideas seriously and finding any serious arguments against the plausible possibilities.
Kurzweil, Wolfram, Hameroff, Chalmers all the usual suspects at the 2009 Summit – need to listen to Chalmers and Scmidhuber – this community needs some philosophical injection into all the exponential processing power hype – intelligence and intellect are far more than processing power. (Thanks to Krim over on MD for the report on the 2010 H+ event.)
Schmidhuber is excellent – a German with a sense of humour – as well as the explicit jokes, his take on the psychology of seeing exponential approaches to points of significance is a very clever dig at Kurzweil (my ’twas ever thus meme) – truly excellent talk – compression is key.
Chalmers is also excellent – does philosophy proud – basic logical argument, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His controlled simulation and gradual upload consciousness and identity cases are pretty much the Hofstadter and Dennett’s “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment.
Interesting even Hameroff, though he mentions microtubules at length – in dendritic gap connectors and in internal neuronal networks – he doesn’t major on quantum coherence – brain as a quantum computer – as a mechanism for distributed coherence of consciousness, until the light-hearted Spielberg-AI moment towards the end. Much of this stuff does indeed seem like valid (testable) science. Though the first question – cut-off immediately by the mediator – brings him back to this unpopular Hameroff-Penrose topic.
Ben Goertzel too, came over well (these are all 2009) … integration … cognitive synergy …. interoperation … lifting & lowering of knowledge too – from communication language to semantic nodes and links of knowledge and back to communication language.
The word that jumps out at me from all of this is Integration. (ie not processing power.)
Never did get to Bonnaroo despite living pretty close to the site for 3 years. I guess it’s that time of year again. Anyway the name sticks thanks to a line in Tommy Womack’s Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood track on There, I Said It. Strangely, in reading the NYT article a phrase from the preceding line also sticks.
“post-hippie jam-band”
bangin’ those skins at Bonnaroo