Psybertron Asks

Just lost an hour’s worth of blog post, thanks to not saving as draft, and hitting the wrong “links” button that took me away from the blog-writing page. I thought WordPress have autosave now – obviously not – Grrr.

And whilst on the subject of features … I need some better spam filtering. The blog comment spam is running at 80 a day. Just to verify which are or are not spam is a major exercise. Most of the stuff is obviously spam from content words and multi-links – the main risk is missing valid comments. Time to review available features. The “mark as spam” feature doesn’t seem to learn anything useful. Never enough time for housekeeping, but I’ve barely had time for blogging or posting anywhere the past couple of months. I could do without this.

I came across this link before, but didn’t capture it [Oh yes I did, in the last collection of rivets’s links]. John Suler at Rider University (Lawrenceburg, Trenton, NJ).

Some interesting stories, more than koans. Zen philosophy meets narrative method. Worth following the links to John’s other psychoanalysis, and eastern philosophy of mind pages.

Just a thought that occurred to me in a number of e-mail discussions.

We all probably notice the value of humour (irony or otherwise) in communications, and we’ve probably all seen the pitfalls of misplaced / misunderstood humour in electronic communications, even with emoticons.

I can’t see any equivalent of negative irony. No concept of a statement that literally means less than it literally says. Deeper meaning that means a net reduction in literal meaning.

Misunderstanding is easier to spread than enhanced understanding. Memes must tend to reverse quality of knowledge unless they are able to spread important forms of tacit and hidden meaning as well as literal content. Lowest common denominators of “media” in mediated communications.

A statement of the obvious I guess.

It’s fascinating what video clips you can find on-line, somehow much more interesting than the music download thing. Rivets keeps linking to eclectic, downright bizarre and genuinely interesting examples. A great collection of piano players here at White Man Stew.

And whilst we’re linking from Rivets …

Da Vinci turning in his grave ? One of Leonardo’s more far-sighted inventions, from the Nonist.

Will Get Fooled Again, and again, and again … ? Charles Pierce of the Boston Globe, writing in The American Prospect

De Bono’s new Religion of Humour ?

Zen Stories – Long before there was television, movies, radio, and even books, storytelling was as important to prehistoric cave-dwellers eating antelope around a fire as it is to corporate executives doing lunch. Apart from “caveman” phrasing spookily close to my essay on the effect of technology on society – this is Douglas Adams – interactive story-telling, not just the power of narrative, which TV can do well too.

And Rivets Hmmmm link on 4th June. Funny, but you didn’t get the link from me, OK 😉 Not to mention the Essence of Rabbit, and many, many more … Rivets is more fun than an evening in front of the telly.

More RFID Tags paranoia at Live Science [via Rivets]. Nutters says Rivets, but turn the idea on its head and ….

…. being RFID tagged seems a great idea to me – you could assume someone without an RFID tag might be an illegal alien, rather than wasting time stopping and checking normal people going about their business. Technology is what you make of it.

A link via a search cross-hit. The world after Drucker.

Interestingly that’s more or less a Douglas “DNA” Adams view, from his 1999 piece “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet“. (Post No.2 back in 2001 at the very start of Psybertron, that link.)

DNA and Dawkins were of course a mutual admiration society, but the link here is in fact to the next Simonyi Oxford lecture hosted by Dawkins, featuring Harry Kroto. (16th June)

Harry Kroto is quoted by Ant McWatt as citing Pirsig’s ZMM as being “what it’s all about”. It’s that loopy convergence again.

I see (via Anecdote) that Dave Snowden’s “Cynefin” is now “Cognitive Edge” to continue the Cynefin work originating at IBM, but avoiding a trademark issue.

Interesting I mentioned Dave in correspondence earlier this week concerning Dr Robert Harris of Paradigm Research International, and in that correspondence Robert mentioned “SNA” (Social Networks Architecture) as a “hot topic” in anti-terrorist security circles. The original reason to connect Dave and Robert was Robert Pirsig’s ZMM, quoted by both of them. In fact looking at Dave’s reading list I see Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism, Robert L. Popp (Editor), John Yen (Editor). Small loopy world.

Also, Steve Johnson’s “Emergence”, P Cilliers “Complexity and Post-Modernism” and K Pearson’s “Viroid Life : Perspectives on Nietzsche and the transhuman condition.” Interesting list.

before I go must also point out the “blog meme” post at Anecdote.

“I hate paper and would never recommend my organisation use it because so many people just write absolute drivel using paper.” Sounds ridiculous?

Good stuff from the Aussie’s at Anecdote as usual.
From it’s Welsh “Cynefin” origins, Cognitive Edge is Singapore-based.

A meta-meme at work here ?

I was just making some comments elsewhere about my earlier reference to J S Mill setting-off the Pythons’ Philosphers’ Song in my head, and being easily set-off again and again by even oblique references – any mention of will, freedom or liberty so far – it’ll be tennis, elbow, foot next – anything subconsciously connected or explicitly unconnected with either Mill or Python or …. it goes on for ever. It’s worse than five degrees of separation – nothing is free from immediately being linked.

Anyway, I noticed I was silently humming “Twelve Hours of Sunset” a 70’s number from Roy Harper – about the surreal experience of flying west – a song I heard a lot at the time, mainly thanks to John Peel. It was moment before I realised what had set it off. I had been scanning a couple of my own blog references that had mentioned the common theme of my reading various books on west-bound transatlantic flights, and on Asia to Europe flights. But until I noticed I was humming the tune, I hadn’t brought to consciousness the common theme of the posts I’d just read. And I doubt I’ve heard (or consciously hummed) that song for 20 years or more.

Did the explicit conscious thought of the catchy Python song meme create a subconscious link to another subconscious tune meme by some subconscious association with the concept of a meme, with something else I’d only subconsiously just experienced. The power of memes. Is there any escape ?

I’ve made it pretty clear that I see any model of the world in terms of evolutionary psychology almost irrespective of the metaphysical foundations of and explanatory science used to relate its component parts.

I’ve just finished reading Daniel Wegner’s – Illusion of Conscious Will . “A remarkable demonstration of how psychology can transform philosophy” said Sue Blackmore in the TLS. I think I’ve already noted my frustration that Wegner’s book contains no new insights, but it is undoubtedly a learned piece of research – over 800 formally named references (!) – with enough linguistic humour to make it an excellent read as a text-book. Like other good work on what consciousness really is, it dwells at length on evidence from the abnormal and paranormal aspects, sneaking up on the subject of “normal” consciousness.

In “The usual choice” – Wegner points out how it has become normal to make the debate seem like a binary argument betweeen determinism or free-will ? Robogeeks vs bad-scientists. Each side’s caricature of the other. We’re all losers. Clearly it could not be all of either. Will cannot be 100% free, a decision a random coin-toss. The outcome is influenced by the preceding situation, but not 100% determined. Interestingly Wegner cites both Dennett and Voltaire already pointing out the pointlessness of this debate.

Most interestingly, Wegner highlights the “moral philosophy” roles of responsibility and values in debating what we see as “conscious will”. It is wonderfully circular. Not only would “will” be seen as a sign of responsibility, say in questions of guilt in law, but in fact the very act of assigning will is drawn from the very act of taking or attributing responsibility or cause. The classic “Whodunnit” says Wegner. Who did what and why ? Attribution and post rationalisation are a shorthand “… people can get pretty bollixed-up in their understanding of who did what in a social interaction … even with the computational tools of the average rocket scientist, it could be a sizable task to figure out who did what in just half an hour of facilitated interaction … every possible thought-action combination … Imagine what this would look like … in the course of a few hours of court proceedings or the snappy repartee of a good romantic comedy.”

Disappointingly even at his conclusion Wegner is still using the term “illusion”, when he says “It’s the illusion of conscious will that makes us human.” A human self is no more or less illusory than the thoughts of will it entertains. The self is comprised of and comprises such thoughts in fact. I say, they are “illusory” only in the sense that they are virtual – patterns of information realised in the operating system above the physical hardware – the key thing is that the interrelations in and between those patterns are highly recursive. Cause and effect are highly ephemeral and we’d be lost without a good shorthand, but they are no illusion, even if some of us are under an illusion about their precise nature.