Psybertron Asks

Not news, but I wanted to capture this 2006 Independent review of Dan Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell – Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.” As a fan of Dennett it was useful to capture a review that made the distance between Dennett and Dawkins clear. OK so Dennett also falls into using the term “scientific” to mean rational in this theological content, and clearly if a theist wants to hold beliefs that conflict with science, then it is the theist’s responsibilitity to make their case scientifically – but then that’s an opinion about science.

For many people,
nothing matters more than religion.
For this very reason,
it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it.
That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.

He does not say,
as some have inaccurately accused him of doing,
that this [religious faith] meme has to act as a malign virus.

Dennett is altogether more “reasonable” than Dawkins. Believing in memes does not have to be accompanied by crass over-reductionist simplification.

Working title. A common enough turn of phrase, “Hubris Humbled“, but not so far the title of any publication that I can see. Takes me back to Quinn and Cameron :

“the buzzing, booming confusion of paradox ….
…. no matter how strongly our logical arrogance tries to convince us otherwise.”

Since I see most problems as “evolutionary psychology” at root, you’ll not be surprised that I see a solution looking something like “cultural psychotherapy”, though the jury is still out on how to adminster the treatment.

It was Alastair McIntosh in “Hell and High Water” (Chap 9) that prescribed “cultural psychotherapy” quoted here by Rowan Williams (full transcript and audio). Thanks to Sam for the link. Whether or not Christianity has any monopoly of the kind of “love” needed, Rowan is right when he says

The nature of [any current] crisis could be summed up rather dramatically by saying that it’s a loss of a sense of what life is.  I don’t mean ‘the meaning of life’ in the normal way we use that phrase. I mean a sense of life as a web of interactions, mutual givings and receivings, that make up the world we inhabit

… the ‘specialness’ of humanity turns out to lie in its role as protecting (through the exercise of …. love and intelligence) life overall.

… how we express and activate our relationship with the creator, our reality as made in God’s image.

… what we need is to be reconnected rather urgently with the processes of our world.

… ‘solving’ the problem of climate change as if it were a case of bringing an uncontrolled situation back under rational management, which is a pretty worrying model that leaves us stuck in the worst kind of fantasy about humanity’s relation to the rest of the world.

… we ought to beware of expecting government to succeed in controlling a naturally unpredictable set of variables in the environment or to produce by regulation a new set of human habits.

… our underlying problem is being ‘dissociated’, and we ought to be asking constantly how we restore a sense of association with the material place and time.

My emphases. OK, so instead of “the creator” or “God” an atheist might say “the creative processes” and “creation” but, hey …  it’s the processes all the same. Very consistent with Terry Eagleton and with Alastair MacIntyre. Michael Sandel mentioned too – the great convergence. I feel a longer piece coming on – ever since we came to idolise objects and objectives we’ve lost sight of value in processes of interaction.

I see Operation Noah has been going since 2004. I see also the brief mention of Williams talk also in this news report on the hypocrisy of not tending ones own garden, picks up correctly on the personal attitude & local action focus of the archbishop’s talk.

Wonders may never cease with Windows 7 ?

There’s no such thing as a non-self-organising system, only people deluded that they are organising it.

Johnnie Moore on Harrison Owen, via Euan Semple.

Only became aware of Imogen Heap recently when I saw a recording of her doing “Coulda Had Religion / Rollin And Tumblin” with Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scotts. Seems, like Stevie Lang, she’s the anonymous female session voice behind so many commercial recordings ? I was intending to check her (and Tal Wilkenfeld) out when I noticed this in the latest TED collection.

I guess to appreciate why the rockin of rollin and tumbling is so knock-out you have to have just heard Imogen do her own Blanket (featuring Jeff Beck) in the same session at Ronnie’s. Voice meets rock.

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.