Psybertron Asks

Know Your Place – Interesting little set of images [via Seth], [via boingboing].

Alan Alda on PBS – Actually on reflection Alan Alda’s contribution to the Edge World Question Centre 2003 (previous blog) is easily the most though provoking – spot on the main event – the dangers of rationality, I said. I didn’t know Alan Alda moved in these circles – I guess one price of living this side of the pond is not experiencing PBS TV. Wow – the power of humour and art in science – too sad the message will be entirely missed by the target of the letter – Dubya, go on prove me wrong !

One quote from Alan Alda is so evocative of the quotes blogged earlier from William Barrett – about man now having the power of global destruction in his hands being a reason to seriously re-think rationality – and the fact that this perception is as old as philosophy and science itself – that I thought I’d share it with you …

Alan Alda says in 2003 [Quote] We live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing – we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place. The problem is that, although we’re all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it’s easier to believe something – anything – than not to know ….. Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and – as hard as this might be to believe – to put reason ahead of belief. [Unquote]

Williams Barrett said in 1958 [Quote] To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable ….. Nowadays we accept in our public life the most humanly unreasonable behaviour, provided it wears a rational mask and speaks officalese, which is the rhetoric of rationality itself. Witness the recent announcement that science has been able to perfect a “96% clean” hydrogen bomb. Of course the quantification makes the matter sound so scientific and rational that people no longer bother to ask themsleves the human meaning of the thing itself. …. the fear of what may happen to mankind in our time is a recurrent thing …. Karl Jaspers citing 4000 year old Egyptian …. Ortega y Gasset citing Horace the Latin poet …. etc. [Unquote]

You know my motivations are neither political nor global, but basic organisational decision making in business, and how lousy it seems to be getting. It was ever thus.

The Edge – World Question Centre 2003 – The latest offering from the Digerati of the Third Culture [via John Robb]. Though provoking if a little deliberately over-hyped as per the original Reality Club concept, edited by John Brockman.

Actually this collection is generally a little sad, patronising, and cloyingly patriotic, if predictable – too much “homeland security” driven – inclusive science education for Islamists (!) for example.

Some of my favourites

Denis Dutton, Department of Philosophy, Christchurch, New Zealand says …. [Quote] Today, it is much easier for scientists to receive grants if they indicate their research might uncover a serious threat or problem – economic, medical, ecological. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of organizations such as Greenpeace. But government itself has played its natural part. After all, as H.L. Mencken once remarked, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Since I’m sure you’re keen to avoid such alarmism, you’ll need an advisor who can see through the fashions of science, and understand something of their psychology. The epidemiologist who slightly overstates the conclusiveness of his study suggesting that french fries might cause cancer (in mice) or the young climatologist on the global-warming gravy train are not basically dishonest people. You too might more easily buy into some doomsday scenario, if it meant regular business-class flights to major resorts to compare computer climate models with other experts (models that you know in your heart could not possibly predict average atmospheric temperatures fifty years hence, but what hell, the food’s great). [Unquote]

Similarly, the contribution from Freman Dyson is wittily ironic.

In fact quite a few of the recommendations are about making science less “accountable” in the short term. [Quote] Science, like business, has been totally captured by the next quarter mentality, and it will require a deliberate effort to stress the long view so that our knowledge matches our predicament. [Unquote] from Kevin Kelly is typical.

Marvin Minsky is brief and to the point.

David Myers puts the peverse economics of homeland security into stark perspective.

Stuart Pimm is probably closest to the truth of the futility of a Presidential Scientific Advisor.

Nancy Etcoff is the most imaginative, in proposing a new National Institute for Humanism

Stop Press ! Susan Blackmore, she of Meme Machine fame, is the most radical, proposing legalisation of all drugs as the most valuable contribution to world science. Nice argument.

Another favourite is Alan Alda, not only witty and ironic, but spot on the main event IMHO – the dangers of rationality.

Quantum Mind 2003 – Centre for Consciousness Studies at Uni of Arizona [via Danny] [via Don Mitchell] is hosting this interesting conference in March. Also has a huge resource of on-line papers collected by David Chalmers, including Searle, Dennett, Millikan, Fodor, Block, Hilbert, Carnap, Putnam and many more.

(Currently reading Jerry Fodor’s “Psychosemantics”, prompted by all the references in Dennett and Pinker. Looking good, common sense and easy to read.)

T’Was Ever Thus – Interesting from Seb, a reference to Richard Rorty, via Dave Weinberger, via Mitch Ratcliffe that there are very few if any new problems that previous generations have not already recognised. I’ve blogged several times “It was ever thus” and “Nothing new under the sun” over the years, most recently in connection with US Philosopher William Barrett.

Even more interestingly, Barrett makes the very point – in the concluding chapter “The Place of the Furies” of his “Irrational Man” – that recognising “it was ever thus” is itself as old as philosophy; quoting Karl Jaspers citing an anonymous 4000 year old Egyptian philosopher, and Ortega y Gasset citing the Latin poet Horace. Current issues always look more problematic than those of our ancestors, but they were always pretty much the same problems.

I’ve probably displayed more than a little skepticism from time to time, even a general lack of respect, for our cousins across the Atlantic. Despite a string of important US pragmatist philosophers in the latter half of the last century, US society as a whole does seem to be the most extreme manifestation of the western rationality “conspiracy”. I finished reading Williams Barrett’s “Irrational Man” which, as I blogged earlier and which the contemporary sleeve notes reinforce, remains poignant at the start of the new century considering it was written in 1958. So good I think I’ll post a full review in the coming week. After a review of existentialist philosophy, he concludes with a passionate summary of his opinions of the ills of US society in the days of mass communications, and paranoia about a threat from the east (1958 remember). A thoroughly recommended read.

I scribbled “Stupid White Men” in the margins on more than one occasion – which is spooky, because I’ve just returned from a trip to Houston where the guy in the seat in front on the flight out was reading Michael Moore’s book. In fact he was standing in line at US Immigration flagrantly continuing to read it, and I couldn’t help thinking if might not be a hanging offence to do so at Bush International Airport in the land of Dubya. Anyway, he survived to read another day.

McLuhan Links may come in handy ? [via Jorn]

The Irrational Economist ? Article by Peter Monaghan in the Chronicle of Higher Education [via Jorn]. Making economics look like a mathematical science is a con trick. All part of the “rational conspiracy”. [Quote] The orthodoxy also distorts economic reality, say its critics. “Superficially, it seems like a coherent model of the world,” says Mr. Keen, the author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. But don’t be fooled, he says, by the mainstream’s fancy mathematics and claims that it is a predictive science, not just a descriptive social science. [Unquote], and more from Deirdre McCloskey blogged earlier. Several good source references in this article.