I wonder if “incontrovertible, beyond any shadow of doubt” is sufficiently unambiguous for the Unionists ?

The lack of photographic evidence is clearly a red-herring. The protestant and catholic church witnesses would have to be colluding in some kind of consipracy for the Unionists to have the slightest case. Grow up fellas.

Or alternatively … late news flash … de Chastelain’s mob were totally incomptetent (or impotent), and really didn’t oversee neutral appointment of their witnesses. If they didn’t do that what exactly were they hired for ?

Part of researching stuff for my Chalmers / Deutsch synthesis paper, I was browsing a number of Diploma and BA essays on the Sheffield University “Pathways to Philosophy” site. (I’m often contemplating the need for me to have some more formal philosophy education before having enough credibility to write myself, but I fear I may struggle with the time-serving element of arguing for and against Kant, Hume, Locke, Descartes and the like. It’s the “for and against” that always gets me – I prefer to synthesise, move on from where we already are.) The problem is where to start, and the words of that Irish bystander always ring in the answer “If I wanted to get there I wouldn’t start from here.”

This one, Tony Bellotti “Does Kant’s Theory of Knowledge Lead to Solipsism” and this one, Oliver Leech on the “Mind Body Problem” are typical examples. The following views say more about where I’m coming from than the quality or significance of either essay.

Both suffer from the “for and against” binary argument problem in expounding old views and old arguments for or against, but at least the first is easy to answer “Only if you let it ie by insisting on accepting only one or the other of the views propounded.” Fortunately Belotti’s conclusion is a sythetic restatement of Kant (like the large majority of Western philosophy since) – In my own words – Everything we can ever know about any world “out there” is via pre-conceptual experiences and conceptual models “in here”. Fortunately we can therefore be sceptical about any idea of reality of the noumenal world “out there”, and simply accept that it almost certainly does exist and bear some relation to the model in here, but gimme one reason why I should care further, given the fact we can NEVER know anything about it directly.

The second is clearly addressing what for me is the same subject more generally. I’ve said many times, whether I approach this from ontology of what might exist, epistemology of what might be known, or some otherwise fundamental natural science, all roads lead to the so-called mind-body problem, via evolutionary psychology and linguistics. Good news is that this second paper does invoke Chalmers. It also has a good summary of the following …

[For the Materialist] the mental states do not really exist separately from the body. If we continue to study them, according to the materialist, it will be found that they are not a special category made of some distinct non-material stuff but essentially physical substances described from a different point of view and about which some confusion of language has arisen. A thought, to the materialist, for example, is ultimately to be defined as some form of brain activity.

[For the Dualist] physical things and mental states are both real but totally distinct and separate entities. The dualist (at least the strong dualist) rejects the idea that mental states can be, or in principle could ever be, reduced to or explained away in terms of physical things. To him mental states are completely separate in nature and origin: the universe is made not of one type of stuff (as the materialist believes) but of two: mind (the collective name for mental states) and matter.

[For the Idealist] the direct opposite of the materialist, it is mental states, the mind, which are ultimate reality. Thoughts, ideas, feelings are real, matter is no more real than the phantom physical things we seem to touch and see in dreams. Material objects are projections of the mind, clusters of sense data which give the false appearance of being separate hard reality.

For me these three views are the artificial extremes of thought experiments, and actually hang together quite consistently in practical terms, if you drop all the actual and implied “only”s and “merely”s, and in doing so, broaden materialism to it’s widest sense in [a conception of] modern physics – physicalism I call it. The only problem with idealism is simply the denial of the “out there”; its existence doesn’t need to be denied, merely treated as irrelevant to the problem as I indicated earlier. The dualist and the neo-materialist simply need to agree that there is a significant difference between thought things and material things and that their relationship(s) is/are up for explanation.

At this point the explanatory relationship is clearly going to include something like causality. Anyone betting on the idea that no such relationship can exist or that causality itself is “merely” illusory / circumstantial / coincidental is surely backing a non-starter. Not just in epi-phenomenology is causality mysterious, but is everywhere something that remains hard to pin down. (The whole inference / induction line in making generalisations and future predictions based on past correlations is tied up in the same causal explanatory issue. Metaphor or not, causality is clearly a metaphor for something rather than nothing.)

The idea that the physical can explain the causal existence of consciousness, is by most scientific researchers already considered to be the easy (Chalmers) or trivial (Josephson) aspect of “thought stuff”. The difficulty of explaining causality is doubly significant, but it’s the same difficulty none-the-less, a meta-problem to the problem at hand. The hard problem really is to explain the subjective aspect or “quality” of experiencing through consciousness. This conjunction of explanation and the hard problem of consciousness, is the thought behind a synthesis of Deutsch and Chalmers.

An aside which re-inforces the impression of the distinction between the easy and hard parts of the explanation of consciousness is a quote from Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man”, himself quoting a remark by Max Born (in Gottingen with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger et al)

“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.”

These papers on-line from the Journal of Consciousness Studies are all ten years old, but full of good ideas. Linked by a cross-hit on Brian Josephson, whose contribution here is a review of Roger Penrose “Shadows of the Mind”, and include references to Chalmers, GEB and qualia, amongst other things. Some good reading.

(Also linked Lindsay Beyerstein’s Majikthise in my blogroll thanks to the same cross-hit.)

Not tried this new “FreeMind” mind-mapping software yet – I remember being very disappointed with Mind Manager, the net topologies you could create were far too simple – but I’m on the look out for something new.

Interesting given my Pirsig interests, and the fact I blogged way back that “Pirsig was a Blogger“, that the owner of the FreeMind site also refers to Pirsig – specifically the way he used index cards to marshall his thoughts when writing his second book Lila – not just cards with subjects and thoughts, but meta-cards with processes and relationships for handling other cards. I saw it as very blog or wiki-like the moment I read it.

Another set back to Google Books, a class action to assert copyrights. Come on, see the bigger picture, who benefits.

Mentioned this “new science” web site once before (in connection with an Owen Barfield review). The net result is one of the whackier, crankier, sets of ideas for bringing the spiritual to bear over the classical objective scientific, and I can’t find much to identify with, except an enormous “Reader’s Journal” of books and other texts that Bobby Matherne has read and reviewed.

[Linked thanks to a search cross hit on my earlier post.
Love this Hoffenstein quote – very much from
the Wordsworth school of “Murder to Dissect”.]

Little by little we subtract,
Faith and fallacy from fact,
The illusory from the true,
And starve upon the residue.
– Hoffenstein, 1933

As well as popular science, Barfield, Herrigel, anything “Zen and the Art …” (except Pirsig) there are dozens of Rudolf Steiner (of Anthroposophy fame). Lots of good sources on the right lines.

A 2002 Jorn Barger joke doing the rounds. Here quoted in full.

An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trashcan.

The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!”

The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that! We must train all the audience members to recognise XML, and then start a committee to investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement semantics!”

Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:

FIRE!

which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display,
saving the lives of everyone in the theater.

Ah yes, the analysis paralysis of committees discussing semantics, I remember it well.

Notice though the essential grain of “evolutionary” truth in there, and the meta-problem of the steps needed to arrange for “evolution” to occur, all of which is to do with the future, not the here and now.

One of my themes is the ubiquitiy of internet communications makes ideas, particularly the ones that are easy to grasp, which re-inforce “consipracy theories” or otherwise prey on human fears, spread like wildfire, like viruses, like memes in fact.

This news story is about hoax blogs spreading ideas (ironically, about the spread of biological viruses) like viruses. One of the things I’ve said many times the “information model” used to structure web information needs to be sensitive to irony, satire and other “non-truthful” intents of those posting the information. As if.

I’ve remarked before how amazing I find Google’s indexing of little old me’s blog. I thought it particularly remarkable since I shifted away from Google owned Blogger to WordPress (for categorisation capabilities, that I’ve not yet exploited !) without actually giving the Google indexing issue a second thought. As far as I can tell the full text of my whole five years blogging is indexed, even in the new page URL’s that didn’t exist before June this year, as well as the old pages that remain on-line, and cached copies (of both) too.

This is particularly interesting, because this news story claims Google is only just about to initiate indexing of non-Blogger blogs, feed summaries initially, full text later.

I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t bothered to exploit the categorisation yet, despite making the move explicitly for that purpose. I guess I still have a lingering suspicion that the best categorisation is implicit in the organisation of page links, backed up by text searches. Well I never, who’da thought it ?

Well, well; I know and like some of Peter Drucker’s management writings, but I’d never noted his earlier philosophical works or his connection with the Vienna Circle. Someone I must research more closely.

How about this for a quote ..

“I couldn’t stand the ultra-rationality of my Uncle Hans.”

Instead, the young Drucker was attracted to Othmar Spann, the “Romantic” among the economists, whom he rates today as a “great sociologist, but a rather mediocre economist”