Psybertron Asks

BBC Radio 4 Today programme, yesterday (6th Sept 07:44) discussed this list of books assembled by Penguin as representing the works with most impact on the world, in chronological order. After some debate it was concluded that perhaps these were the easier appetisers, rather than the less digestible main-courses, from these specific authors or schools of thought.

Seneca – On the Shortness of Life
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
St Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner
Thomas a Kempis – The Inner Life
Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince
Michel de Montaigne – On Friendship
Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract
Edward Gibbon – The Christians and the Fall of Rome
Thomas Paine – Common Sense
Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto
Arthur Schopenhauer – On the Suffering of the World
John Ruskin – On Art and Life
Charles Darwin – On Natural Selection
Friedrich Nietzsche – Why I Am So Wise
Virginia Woolf – A Room of Ones Own
Sigmund Freud – Civilization and its Discontents
George Orwell – Why I Write

Humphrey’s suggested significant (but less readable) omissions were Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, plus Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, not to mention Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Mill. I’m currently reading Jacob Bronowski’s “Man Without a Mask” about the times and works of William Blake, and have to say that Thomas Paine (included in this list) sounds more intriguing, the more I learn. (Lots of those omissions at the bottom of my side-bar BTW.)

I guess if you were bringing the list up to date, you’d have to include WWII vintage stuff, Northrop, Barfield, The Chicago School, McLuhan (?) and right up to date The Cluetrain Manifesto will outlive the dot-com boom in to the web-enabled future of reality. But it’s all been said before.

When asked “Which do you think comes first? The political revolution of a society or the revolution of an individual’s self perception?”, Simon Winder, the Penguin editor says “The latter no question – every revolution has been led by disturbingly well-read people stuffed with Great Ideas which they have want to put into practice. I’m sure people are reading books now … which are sowing the seeds of all the major flashpoints of the future.”

A couple of years ago one of my themes (limited by tools) was to cross-link citations, to see who cited who positively or negatively. ie forget the content for a moment, look at the meta-data. I noticed John Udell is focussing on meta-data in business e-mail-based communications, and via this other infoworld blog, followed the link to Valdis Krebs’ Orgnet.

John picks up on the polarisation (binary) effect created – but Krebs thesis is more general – Intra-community linking is rich, Inter-community linking is sparse. The inter-community linkers he charcterises as “The New Pioneers”, after Tom Petzinger’s book on management theories. Krebs started with analysis of “purchasing” habits, but extended it to memes – which is still “buying” of course ..

“I’ll buy that” = “That sounds like sense to me”
or conversely
“I don’t buy that” = “That’s nonsense IMHO”.

Those people looking for common messages in the old and new and other competing schools of though. Pretty close to my nothing new under the sun thread – provide you’re looking at essential messages. I guess that makes me a (would-be) New Pioneer.

Valdis title “The Social Life of Books” is the same play as Sealy-Brown and Duguid’s “Social Life of Information” (2000), surely alluding to (but not citing) Minsky’s “Society of Mind” (1998) – nothing new under the sun metaphorically, and is itself five years old (1999). The invention is not the point – the common ground is.

If this is what people are meaning by social networks, then count me in. Common sense – sense shared between various factions. Common sense, I’ve already bought it. Must actually read it.

Well yes. Just contrast this piece on Steve McLaren with this lame excuse.

Van Morrison (59 yesterday) apparently wrote …
Too complicated, too complicated
You know this crazy scene
Too complicated, too complicated
No one says what they mean
Are you telling me that everything’s fine
When I can’t even tie my shoes
Better get into a new frame of mind
When I don’t have to think about the business no more
`Cause I just wanna blow my horn.
[wood s lot][via Language Hat]
Somehow fit’s this week’s mood, and kinda put me in mind of Divine Comedy’s (Neil Hannon’s) Becoming More Like Alfie – “Everybody knows that no means yes, just like glasses come free on the NHS. The more I look through them, the more I see …. “

(Clue – glasses = spectacles, NHS = UK National Health Service)

Tonight (in the Kingston) is spooky night, obviously. Language Hat (above) is one of those blogs I love to browse, for no obvious constructive reason than the pleasure in the words. Some excellent links in the same vein too – cannylinguist for example made me smile, and I didn’t even follow the link – but tonight just after writing the lines above I followed the link to “Long Story; Short Pier” (first time ever, honest) and find the motto at the top of he site is “The Gin in the Gin Soaked Boy” – a little more Neil Hannon. Weird.

And finally, having strolled along that pier, the paradoxical moral of this little post is “The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.”

Hmm. More information does not equal better basis for a decision – is clear enough, but not sure why blogging deserves singling out ?

The thing where blogging does add value is in the volume and “quality” of linking. It’s the motivation in the linking between the parts that adds the value, not the sum of its parts. This is a complex system, not arithmetic.
[Michael Feldstein at eLearning Magazine][via Soul Soup]

Love conquers all (not) says Donna Tartt in her Secret History, which is spooky, because in the review of the Rule of Four below, it was described as The Name of the Rose in the style of Donna Tartt, and I made the suggestion that the plot of the Hypnerotomachia (subject of The Rule of Four) sounded like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which, when released in the US, actually had the title “Love Conquers All”.

Tortuous I know, but spooky none-the-less.

It’s occurred to me before that that is exactly what blogging is to a large extent. We all rely on the interaction and feedback to add (mutual) value, but first and foremost a blog post is “don’t lose that thought” a journal of thoughts that seemed important at that point, to be able to come back and consider later.

The technology may have changed since Steeley Dan gave that advice in Rikki Don’t Lose That Number back in the 70’s, but the message is the same.[via Steve Yastrow on Tom Peters’ Blog]

Talking of Tom Peters, how the hyped-up in-your-face guru has mellowed. Always did like Tom despite the hype (born of passion), but he’s gone all – well – Zen, at 61. I think that says something.

The motto of Paul Saffo, Director for the Institute for the Future. [via Evelyn Rodrigues][via Johnnie Moore]

This is actually the same argument I had with myself about active versus passive flexibility back in the 80’s and the paradox of “the unreasonable man”. No point being so open minded that you believe anything in an ephemeral way, blowing with the wind, so to speak. You should hold opinions, preconceptions you understand, not just cultural schemata, but should actively be prepared to test them against any other view and modify the view held or not, accordingly. Without this there is no coherence, and no evolution or progress either.

I like Johnnie’s blog – looks interesting. His punchline is “I think the best thing to do is show and say more of what you really think, with whatever true vehemence seems fitting to you at the time!” ie Clarifying your opinions is important, how hard you defend them (or not) depends on circumstances. I see Johnnie bought the Cluetrain Manifesto too. Man after my own heart.

Also like Evelyn’s punchline “Agreement is not necessary, thinking for oneself is.”

A 13thC Italian poem by Cecco Angiolieri [via qB at Frizzy, with modern English translation].

Nothing new under the sun, I may have said once or twice before.

Led me to this Italian philosophy site. Intrigued to find Nietzsche and Plato as their only 3-star contributors in a very long list of references to the great and the good.

It’s a few months since I looked at what’s going on in this space, and was prompted today by a cross hit on “non-locality. The BCS-Cybernetics site has this astonishing paper which is actually 4 years old …
[QUOTE]
[Levels of] chromosome quantum nonlocality as genetic information …

The 1st level is that the organism as a whole ….
The 2nd level is the cellular level ….
The 3rd level is the cellular-nuclear level ….
The 4th level is the molecular level ….
[So far so good ?]

The 5th level is the chromosome-holographic: at this level, a gene has a holographic memory, which is typically distributed, associative, and nonlocal, where the holograms “are read” by electromagnetic and/or acoustic fields … the nonlocality takes on its dualistic material-wave role, as may also be true for the holographic memory of the cerebral cortex.

The 6th level concerns the genome’s quantum nonlocality … Billions of an organism’s cells can [therefore] “know” about each other instantaneously, allowing such a cell set to regulate and coordinate its metabolism and its own functions.
[UNQUOTE]

What can I say ? Bear in mind that these people are would-be pragmatists, looking for exploitable Information Technology, not philosophers engaged in academic debate of mind-body dualism at the boundaries of the known world.