Denial in Demented Thinking

I completed Karl Sigmund – “Exact Thinking in Demented Times – The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science” over the weekend. I’ve mentioned the read a few times already, here for example:

The final line of the Afterword – a lesson attributed by Sigmund to  Hofstadter – is “Now I feel that I understand a wee bit better what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by the phrase “the inexpressible“. In many ways my read of Sigmund is the latest in my own quest to understand not so much the Vienna Circle itself but the confusion of science with philosophy which the 21stC has inherited from the early 20thC.

This has more to do with thinkers associated (positively & negatively) with the activities of the Circle than those that were actually members. Russell,  James, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Ramsay and Popper. Not to mention the actual physicists of course, who were busy undermining the foundations of science as fast as the more misguided philosophers were trying codify life according to its received wisdom. In fact a lot of my reading of modern historians of science & philosophy in the last decade has been part of this: Ray Monk, Dave Edmonds, Graham Farmelo, Cheryl Misak and Rebecca Goldstein for example. Karl Sigmund is an extension to this – a tremendously sympathetic human story of these imperfect – even occasionally demented -humans living through two world wars. From Mach and Boltzmann in the late 1800’s to Viktor Kraft the last chair of the Circle in the late-1940’s & early-50’s and the last of them – Einstein, Gödel & Popper – passing in the later 20thC.

With Hofstadter’s acknowledged help, Sigmund’s is the most comprehensive and readable history of the whole, with each of the other modern authors choosing to hang their stories around one or other of the star players. Highly recommended.

That closing line is key. What the quest of the Circle and its legacy miss is that it denies that part of the natural world which is beyond science is not supernatural even though it is intuitively mystical, spiritual, metaphysical, sacred or divine, but never definitively expressible, let alone objectively provable either way. The quest of getting close to this balanced – pragmatic – understanding, in a world more generally in denial, has driven many close to actual madness, some fatally so.

Denial kills.

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[Post Note – I mentioned once or twice before that it was theologian “Sam” – a practicing minister in the Anglican church – first suggested that this atheist take Wittgenstein’s “mysticism” seriously whilst we were both readers of Robert Pirsig. Coincidentally this Twitter thread arose this morning:

Several branches in that thread too, mentioning James as well as Misak / Ramsay and more. Small world.]

The Discovery of Heaven

The 2001 Jeroen Krabbé film of the 1992 Harry Mulisch (Dutch) novel.

I just watched it at the suggestion of Eddo that it had some value to our recent Pirsig / McGilchrist dialogues – the  divine or sacred right-brain view of reality obscured by the dominance of the received-wisdom “science-led” left-brain model of reality:

(Freedom runs on rails. Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools, so rules cast in stone are bad news. There is no absolute freedom in life and reality is more complicated than any rule-based model. The natural world is more than science’s model of it.)

Anyway the film: 20th C Humans have messed-up.
Heaven would like its tablets of stone back. (Why, no idea.)

The symbology is so transparent and unsubtle, the outline of the plot above is stated explicitly in the opening lines, and the layers of religious-symbology and supernatural-cliché are piled-on thicker and thicker thereafter. (But why, still no idea.)

As well as the film and book being 20 and 30 years old, the plot starts in and is inspired by the 60’s (60 years ago). So, after a bit of student anti-war & anti-military-industrial-complex protest, and some revolutionary-socialism, it’s blasphemous theology all the way. Possibly less clichéd if seen 20 or 30 years ago, but from a 2022 perspective:

We have Name of the Rose, American Gods, Satanic Verses, Da Vinci Code and La Comedia thrown in the blender. Oh, and a raven called Edgar (!) leading our blue-eyed angelic child – with supernatural powers of premonition – on his quest for “Daddy” even though he’s only “a shadow”.

Education, books, libraries, historical art, music and architecture are clearly the good guys. But finally, Heaven and Hell seem to be locked in a mutual conspiracy to keep humanity in the dark about the value of that divine or sacred something we can only glimpse obscurely.

[Also: Cosmic brotherhood. Sexual nudity (?) – we already knew where babies come from.  Symbols of all three monotheistic faiths on the lovers’ necklace gift. The puzzle of finding words to describe or define “the divine”. Auschwitz as our ubiquitous symbol of hell on earth. Coincidence of place. The centre of the centre / the holy of holies / the sanctum sanctorum. The arc of the covenant / the keys to the locks / the tablets of stone. Moses’ staff parting the red-sea. Three faiths meeting each other and the underworld in the Jerusalem of Mohammed, Jesus and the Jews. The freeing of the text from the tablets’ destruction. The ascension to the light, and yet ending in continued endarkenment of humanity. Why? Confusingly overdone with no “redeeming” message that I could see. Maybe the book fares better?]

It’s Just Reading and Writing, Innit?

Just a couple of posts ago, I paused to capture a 3-way link between writers in a “holding post” because my more concerted writing efforts were side-tracked by so many interesting conversations. Not getting much beyond “don’t lose that thought” these days.

The stop-start reading has taken a couple of twists too.

I mentioned remembering I had Stapp (2011) “Mindful Universe” half-unread from a while ago, and decided to catch-up. It was one of many recent references spinning off from McGilchrist’s (2021) “The Matter With Things“. So, I completed Stapp. Glad I did, but it is so connected to much other reading & writing, that I’m at a loss for a “review” – and strangely made precious few notes(?). Going to need a quiet revisit to join-up all the dots, or relate all the relata? [Not only do we need to be using verbs instead of nouns, we need more “active” (dynamic-process as opposed to passive-static) noun-verb forms. Some stuff just is hard to put into words. I’ll be back with Stapp.]

That “interrupt” was on top of another interrupt. I was actually reading Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times“. That was an addition to my long-running quest to understand the whole story of where Russell, Wittgenstein and The Vienna Circle went wrong – and what they actually got right – in the run-up to WWII, from the turn of the century through the great war. Western world in crisis at exactly the time physics was turning itself on its head and no-one noticed. Previously “The Murder of Professor Schlick” and “Frank Ramsey – A Sheer Excess of Powers“ and many more connected with Wittgenstein et al.

I was reading Sigmund partly because despite the obvious caricature of The Vienna Circle attempting to “scientise” the whole word through logical positivism, it was clear that the individuals – Schlick included – did have and did evolve a range of more nuanced views and writings of their own. I did in fact start to read some Schlick directly … Sigmund was already an interrupt on top of that … but so far it didn’t help. However, I have now continued with Sigmund … and will complete it. It’s full of pen pictures of all the players plus brief summaries of their positions, which as well as telling all their stories in German from an Austro-German perspective the language (in translation) is wonderful. Tremendously droll about the personalities, their interpersonal relationships and general shenanigans. Laugh-out-loud if you’re into this subject matter. (All involving facts and events I’ve mostly heard before … but “it’s the way you tell ’em”.) Loving it, reading it slowly with relish, and yes doing most of that in the pub in the early evenings … more of which later … but I was rudely interrupted after my last post about Hofstadter’s preface to Sigmund and it took me a while to recover.

Long story short, without naming names for now, there are a few modern – seemingly intelligent – logical positivists on my Twitter feed. I’m trying to get to understand them from what is mostly “banter” to an outsider. So much so I can’t separate them from their irony. However my post on the Hofstadter preface got such a defensive, dismissive and mean tone of response – directly at Hofstadter – from one of their number that I was left dumbfounded for a while and simply “let it lie”. They’re clearly, in their minds, still fighting a war.

Anyway, still loving my read of Sigmund. Mentioned several times that the whole early 20th century modernism centred around Vienna & Berlin in a time of Europe in crisis is palpable in all these intellectual histories. And as I mentioned I’m doing it in a couple of the local pubs a stone’s throw from our newly simplified and downsized life. I find the general background hub-bub of life going on, aurally and visually, quite conducive to concentrated reading. Quite unlike sitting alone in the man-cave, or attempting to be more sociable by the family TV, or fighting sleep on the pillow. The closest I have to “cafe society“.

Of course the general hub-bub is occasionally interrupted by direct (or indirect overheard) engagement in conversation. That’s a mixed blessing but in fact is rarely a distraction, depending entirely on the follow-up once you’ve answered the first question of “What are you reading?” or “Why are you reading that?” I’ve done a lot of this in various international locations over the years. Cambridge was one sort of experience. A small north-east coastal town is another.

Whether working in one of the industrial (or educational) enterprises on Teesside, or the local folk band on their night off, random locals seeing me reading “Exact Thinking in Demented Times” instantly make the connection with where is it all going wrong today, even though the subject matter is the run-up to Nazism and WWII a century ago.

I think that is telling in itself.
People get it.

Especially telling, one of those conversations, noticing that I was often reading “intellectual stuff” in the pub and not noticing the particular book that night (was probably Stapp IIRC), started to talk about having seen Brian Cox and Robin Ince on stage with their infinite-monkey-cage-based road-show a few nights ago. He was just telling his mates how wrong it seemed, how arrogant science seemed to think of itself. No prompting whatsoever from me. I was on my way home at that point, but mental note made for the next encounter.

This is real life.

A Hopeful Way to Flourish

I’ve been reading John Ehrenfeld’s “The Right Way to Flourish: Reconnecting to the Real World” (2020). John is a participant in the Channel McGilchrist forum which I joined alongside my reading Iain McGilchrist’s latest “The Matter With Things” (2021). John’s book was largely written before he had read Iain’s previous “The Master and His Emissary” (2012) and he openly admits fitting many references to to Iain’s 2012 work into his own work-in-progress without radically changing the intended structure and messages.

That in itself says something about Iain’s work. That his hypothesis about distinct left and right brain views of the world supports and reinforces natural and intuitive thinking many of us already have in trying to address the sense that we humans have somehow lost our way in the world. Lost our “connection to the real world”. Iain’s is clearly a powerful statement of reality.

In some sense I’m not really John’s target audience. I have already “bought” Iain’s hypothesis and I share many of John’s learning experiences in process engineering and in management generally, in quality management and in management education. If you are a practitioner in that space and you share the sense that our typical processes and procedures are somehow restricting our ability to flourish as individuals and as organisations, and that as a society we are failing to get to grips with the big issues of our time, then this is a book for you. A recommended read with practical recommendations – though as you will discover recommendations cannot be as prescriptive as some might hope.

This is not John’s first work on “flourishing” and for anyone who cares about life’s meaning and purpose, flourishing is the right word, biologically and psychologically, individually and collectively. Connecting this idea to that of sustainability – a totemic objective of so much 21stC effort – causes John some problem in that “sustain” implies some things being maintained or conserved. I might suggest the right formulation is “sustainable flourishing” – it’s the processes of continuous flourishing we are trying to maintain?

Interestingly, John connects flourishing quite early on to the authenticity of Maslow’s “self-actualisation” motives of the individual and the collective and links this to the rehabilitation of “positive psychology” generally.

There are a few quibbles. Recommendations against “management” of flourishing which I suspect would be better framed as warnings against the wrong kind of management – enabling and curating as opposed to direction and control say? His suggestion that we need more critical thinking, when in fact a damaging feature of too much critical thinking is an emphasis on analytical and objective reductionism. But maybe again this is a distinction between good and bad critical thinking?

The idea of the good is however recognised as qualitative, even without any treatment of virtues and qualities more generally. It’s a pragmatic book without too much intellectual philosophy and therefore a much less challenging read than either of Iain’s works.

A “hopeful” book too. Making the distinction between the more subjective (right-brain) hope and the more objective (left-brain) optimism.

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[Post Note:

I actually made a lot more notes on my read, but one that came up today in another conversation is resisting the increasingly fashionable emphasis on “STEM” in education and recruitment. Obviously, who would deny the place of science and technology in human progress, he and I are both engineers after all, but the relentless emphasis deepens the old two-cultures divide in ways that are unhealthy to genuine flourishing.

I’ve said it before, and John says it too.]

The Devil’s Details

Might be the latest working title of my writing-project-in-progress?

The devil is in the detail they say. Presumably as a reminder that the difficult part of any project remains undone – the risks remain high – until all details are properly addressed. Many a slip ‘twixt … failure is a failure to address detail. Look after the pennies … Piss-poor planning … seems to be the received wisdom of that meme?

The ancient sage that first voiced the thought almost certainly did not intend that understanding. They were surely thinking along the same lines as the romantics – we murder to dissect? Reductionism kills the creative whole.

The devil is in the detail, because details kill.

(What is missing in this conception are relevance and appropriateness.)

Meet The Guys @ ZMMQuality

Today (8th Feb 2022) I published an interview I did by Zoom on 19th Jan with Prof Henry Gurr and David Matos about the active Robert Pirsig related pages they run, and added a news link to my Pirsig Pages.

McGilchrist – Stapp – Whitehead

Just a holding post to capture a three-way link.

Mentioned a couple of posts ago, I was reading some 1900 / 1920 / 1930’s stuff in scientific knowledge – Schlick, Eddington and Haeckel – in which I also mentioned I had picked-up my half-remembered (2011) Henry Stapp.

I suspect I will not complete the early-1900’s Schlick, Eddington and Haeckel but they’re welcome to live in my library of half-read books until some new need arises. 21stC Stapp on the other hand has me hooked.

All these recent reads are arising from the McGilchrist “The Matter With Things” connection, either references of his or those of his readers now engaged in multiple conversations. Although I spotted very quickly the Stapp references to Whitehead (and have since read through them) I had forgotten that the reason Stapp rang a bell as I passed it on the library shelf was precisely because he is a McGilchrist reference.

Stapp “Mindful Universe” is quite recent (2011) more recent than McGilchrist’s original “Master and Emissary” (2009). But Stapp (with his Nobel prize-winning colleague Brian Josephson) was on my radar even earlier, around 2002, with …

“…  the idea from eastern philosophy that in certain states of consciousness the subjective states of mind closely reflect objective reality … and … the parallel between quantum and biological views is not that the former underlies the latter on a human scale, but that both are in fact manifestations of some other underlying physics.”

The Aha! moment that led to (a) my reading Robert Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“, and (b) the credible physicists idea that consciousness might be at least as fundamental as physics. There’s more to life than physical science … and the rest is history as they say.

I’ve now half-read Stapp’s Mindful Universe again, and will complete it this time. I see now the probable reason I quit Stapp originally and forgot what I had read is that early on he has some negative opinion about Dennett based on a pet-hate meme of mine – his early 1991/1994 work only. I have evolved continuously with Dennett (and Hofstadter). Anyway, hurdle overcome. Onward and upward.

McGilchrist and Stapp both positively reference Stapp and Whitehead.

More on Stapp on completion (and his use of quantum Zeno effect).
(Never did do a complete review, but mention again here.)

The Renaissance

Well, not the whole of it, but a 2021 short story of that title – just 40 pages – “The Renaissance” by Richard Emerson. A personal and poetic story of personal rebirth, a thought journey set in place and in history.

Firstly, I have to declare that from the start, up to the arrival in Florence, my overwhelming reaction was “I am that man” which might also explain the sense in on-line discussions on related topics of being pretty closely aligned on philosophical matters. It also means that from this point on, this is more personal reflection than review:

Reading (and note-taking) in a public places is exactly my style too. To this day I mostly read in pubs and cafes.  Experiencing real-life is never a distraction, it’s important context – until someone engages you in conversation, not that that happens to Emerson here. But even then a “What are you reading and why?” can be a welcome synthesis to the reading I find. Reminded me of years working away from home in Cambridge.

That said, for the first of the three parts, there is no actual reading, just an unread book by his side as thoughts are prepared and noted. An unread book as a friendly companion, one worth giving house-room as Eco recommends in his library of unread books, oft mentioned here. The same unread book – also in three parts – was by my side up until 2021, the 700th anniversary of it’s author’s death in Florence. Appreciating that a book is important and valuable is one thing, but understanding why and how you need to actually read it does require mental preparation. Awaiting the right moment. I personally had several false starts until that moment.

The thought journey – in time and place – is the main thread, one we share as I’ve said, starting with the sense of “something missing in foundational principles” whilst finding oneself like Dante in a thick and dark forest with only glimpses of the the shining mountain in the distance.

Florence is an important place where our paths may have crossed, and many of Dante’s metaphors have been plundered by others since, Robert Pirsig’s intellectual high-ground, Robert Frost and G K Chesterton good fences and gates in the forest.

The meme of using Rafael’s School of Athens as his cover image is a clue to which characters from Dante’s story Emerson identifies with. The end of Inferno, with our protagonists breaking out from hell into view of the stars without having to renegotiate the levels through which they had descended has suggested to others an alternative cosmic geometry. Geographically intriguing also that Emerson’s home town square is only a train-ride from Florence, we too arrived by train, from Pisa airport. I was more focussed on Galileo than Dante on that occasion, looking up at the Uffizi ceiling:

As Virgil led Dante, so Dante can lead us on that journey, recognising that a perhaps surprising component of that missing foundational principle is in internalising ancient literature and in soaking-up the places that created it. Next time, I really must visit the Dante house.

A recommended read. You too might surprise yourself by becoming reborn as part of a bigger tradition.

1920’s Reading and More

Having been slightly side-tracked by the TERF-wars again after reading Matthew Burgess “Smart SpaceTime”, it’s 12 days since I last posted.

Lots of email and forum traffic on discussing and promoting the works of Robert Pirsig and Iain McGilchrist (and Dante, and Spinoza, and …) but no posts or reviews, even though I have been reading even more:

I mentioned wanting to read some Moritz Schlick. So I’ve been reading his “Problems of Ethics” (1930) – the 1939 David Rynin translation. Whilst there is lots of good thinking it is clearly part of the logical positivist’s project to make morals part of science. The assertions range from the obvious to the you-cannot-be-serious so, whilst I’m curious where he’s going to end up, I’m struggling to complete.

Having been impressed with Eddington (1928) previously, I also started to read his later (1939)”The Philosophy of Physical Science”. Can’t shake the feeling he was back-tracking here to keep his scientific friends on board, using quite pejorative language about philosophers.

Picked-up off the shelf Ernst Haeckel “The Riddle of the Universe” (1899) Joseph McCabe’s 1929 translation (No.3 in “The Thinkers Library”). Fascinating on a clear monist objective (before the New Science came along). A hard determinist who sees Free Will as an illusory distraction, but I may still complete to see where he ends up.

Also on the shelf I noticed Henry Stapp’s 2011 (2nd Ed) “Mindful Universe” which it appears I only half-read first time round. What I hadn’t noticed was multiple positive references to Whitehead … so that’s my current reading.

And of course “1922” has happened on BBC R4, so lots of modernism subjects in the programming. Current pet hate meme, is that everyone discussing Ulysses seems to start with Molly’s closing “stream of consciousness”. Titillation rules as ever.

TERF Wars Revisited

I’ve reduced my engagement with Gender Critical / Radical Feminist & LGBT activists several times in several stages, each time as common sense appeared to be gradually breaking out. But no:

Last night Alice Dreger – a hero of mine on the right side of this for a long time – posted an emphatic tweet that provoked much angry response. The polarisation between sex is / is-not “binary” and sex is / is-not a “spectrum” and “dictionary definitions” of sexual dimorphism. This is what Alice actually posted:

Obviously in non-specific response to much traffic on the topic, and exactly what progress she was hoping to make I can’t guess, but the frustration is obvious. As is the care for the “people” in those groups. Most of the anger is the mistaken assumption that she’s prejudicially “othering” those groups. The insistence on simplification – denial of subtleties – is her actual target.

The real problem is that however binary plus exceptions sex itself is, the word gender has been erased as too problematic, so the word sex has simply inherited all the problems of expression and interpretation. However clear scientific definitions might me, and they are, the problems of caring vs othering are not entirely scientific. As ever this is just a topical example of the much deeper problem I call #GoodFences – between narrow use of class definitions and broader conceptions of individual participation in reality.

Classic example on the scientific side is this one from Dr Emma Hilton

It’s a very good thread, except for some non-scientific subtleties in assigning good and bad faith to expressed positions. Possibly a bit circular to have the word gonochoristic within the definition, and not sure why “not including” reproductive anatomy. But very useful summary of the scientific aspects.

As ever, I need to complete the #GoodFences thesis. Ho hum. I fear taboo words like intersectionality, lived-experience and critical-theory will be unavoidable 🙂