Psybertron Asks

Two more great links from Sam.

Nil (very low) cash living … really about co-dependent community, if you get to the conclusion.

Big leap in power storage battery from Panasonic, brings smart-grid closer.

Speculative presentation from Brian Josephson …

I love the anti-reductionist “levels of reality” aspect – and the teleological “future directedness” of life. Explanation being distinct from predictability – no unique cause-effect or whole-part relations, and two-way causal & explanatory dependencies. Such basic common-sense stuff from the Nobel Laureate.

… note the parallels in his fundamental life idea with anthropic / fine-tuning concepts
… dynamic models with provisional stability – dynamic quality ?
… Ref Robert Rosen – “Life Itself”
… and the information web complexity / chaos too.
… conversation as part of life seeking new relationsips.
… stability in patterns despite constant change and reconfiguration at small and large scales.
… riding a bicycle (used that example myself in dissertation) as a complex system where stability arises.
… observation as part of system selection process – therefore part of the whole system

In summary the thesis is …

• Life is a different game to physics (which we need to understand more fully).
• Abstract systems-oriented considerations may capture life’s essence.
• In physics, it is generally believe that a further unifying level exists beyond the standard model and general relativity (but no-one is sure what it is).
• Life may exist at this level (without showing up in physics experiments).

… the life systems model is a game model, not an AI model
… Wheeler’s model … observation structures the universe.
… parallel of the cosmic question from theological and physical perspectives !!!
… reality is a much vaguer slippery thing than science presumes.
… materialism has had it’s day
… and much more … Wonderful stuff.

Sad that the point is missed again, in the need to be seen to take action. Clearly the Christmas Day Detroit incident was a failure of communication and management of intelligence and profiling, and the quality of body searches only an incidental part of it.

I have no problem with more automated scanners – but how long before a major terrorist attack in a crowded airport security area ? Terrorism is about people, not technology.

Hat tip to Sam for this Guardian link. Interesting in its own right and interesting given Sam’s downer on Obama in favour of his sweetheart Palin – when it is clear that both posess quality. (And a great comment thread on this preceding George Monbiot post.)

And for this… global political issues are psychological not scientific, and that psychology has evolved in genetic and memetic layers … as we already knew … game theory in action, just like the Copenhagen games themselves.

The common thread  … is that (rational) science and (rational) self-interest are just not the issue. It’s the psychology of constituency (or community) in making and managing complex decisions. Far from being a disaster or an irrelevance, I see Copenhagen as an important milestone in political reality. I think we really are learning something together.

10,000 hunters couldn’t shoot 27 wolves without snow.
(Total population only 220 ?!?! Sounds fragile.)

Another to add to the intriguing list of intellectuals converting to catholicism. Most famous for his much parodied “Trees”, but an interesting if brief life.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

Picked-up on Kilmer because of this quote of the subsequent couplet …

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast

Used as a metaphor for his “peak oil” (pro-nuclear) musings by the whacky Tony Smith – “banned by Arxiv and Cornell” – another who seems to have developed his own contrarian, but complete physics model,

…. one reason being that I refuse to disavow the mystical origins of my intuitions used in constructing the model.

Amongst which he includes a detailed list of “correspondences” between modern physics and work of the Sufi Islam philosopher ibn Arabi, and links to Vedic and Tao Buddhist origins.

And, the reason I looked at that was because Yunus (over at Friends of Wisdom) responded to the latest poem from Alan Rayner …

Imaginative Turn
(c) Alan Rayner 1/1/2010
 
How tiresome it is
This beast that turns in my grave
Shrieking to unearth
Such fearful foreboding
Of what is to come
From what has been done
In the name of the Rose
That holds itself in
Enshrouded by sepals
To keep all its petals
From falling to ground
Out of sight, far from sound
Stalled in the bud
Distilled in the mud
Defended by prickle
Refusing to tickle
But piercing instead
The heart that yearns
To get out of bed
 
How exciting it is
This creature that rises with the sun
Singing its heart out
In radiant flower
Bearing fruit into joys to come
From what has been done
Crying, hip, hip hooray!
In the name of the Rose
That gathers all in
As it dies and grows
Loosing its petals
From the confines of sepals
To spread light in sound
Before turning back inward
Whilst falling to ground
Where others come to bear its energy away
Through death and decay
Into life that unfurls
In the opening
That sustains the possibility
Of flowering afresh
Through darkness in light
Breaking out of bounds
In another day

with his own poem (and the above link). Alan, known for his treeworks (in symbiosis with man & fungi) – here a tree emergent from man’s workings in a forest (Ref BBC Photo Comp).

Alan’s trees always remind me of Peter Gabriel’s lines …

The forest fight for sunlight
Takes root in every tree.

Anyway to close out (branch out from) from this linking cycle,

(1) the banning from Arxiv … the general suppression of anti-establishment theories contrary to received wisdom … put me in mind of Brian Josephson‘s campaign against Arxiv censorship and of course the responses to (say) Lere Shakunle, Rick Ryals or Peter Rowlands alternative physics (plural, one each) …. too easy to be branded

“the village crank hanging out by the public library, who believes he’s found the secret of the universe”

But then again …

The man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds …

 (2) and finally back where we came in – intellectual conversion to catholicism ? A long established theme of mine – the inklings etc – came to mind recently, when yet again (check out the archbishop) I found a theologian talking sense, but being branded too catholic by a fellow Christian. Intriguing. I have pre-ordered Hauerwas memoir on the strength of that.

TED2010 programme includes Jamie Oliver (!) alongside Michael Schermer, Sam Harris, Michael Sandel, Benoit Mandelbrot, James Lovelock, Sheryl Crowe, Kevin Kelly, David Byrne, Dennis Dutton and Bill Gates.

The boy done good.

Another excellent Clive James piece in the BBC Magazine. I keep returning to HAL in 2001 as the archetype and so it seems does Clive.

It’s not as if we haven’t seen the man-machine interface problems long enough to recognize them – Turing’s enigma – but we still idolise “efficiency” over “care”. Spot on Clive.

I’ll add care to trust as the key ingredient of the information age – and yes even the inventor(s) of the semantic web understand that – explicitly (Fig 7). You can’t trust something that doesn’t care. You trust an automated system because of the people that create and support it, but that trust is a very ephemeral quality, easily lost by the slightest exception to the (nevertheless idolised) rules and re-built only by humans, with care.

Automate “customer care” at your peril. Indeed. Automation is simply the the latest idol. When I say latest I don’t mean recent either – back to the Luddites – but the possibility of ever more computerized automation makes our idolatry more psychologically engrained and perilous each human generation. I’m in the business of automation – but it is only a means to an end – to support individual humans – decision support.