Psybertron Asks

This is a short post to address the additional “eastern” perspective missing from the post note in my previous blog on the London Thinks “How Do We Believe” event.

Here on Psybertron, much of the philosophical journey was informed early on by the qualities of Zen / Tao thinking introduced to millions by Robert Pirsig with two earlier clues connecting it to the real world of business and economics by Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence and to physical reality by Nobel prize-winning physicists Josephson and Stapp.

There are (for me) three lessons that inform doubts about the dominant western view of rationality.

• One, simply that the self-other relationship is worth understanding and valuing. Quite the opposite to the dogma of a purely objective logical ontology in “science” (the so-called “exact-sciences” anyway) from which subjectivity is deliberately stripped or simply turned into another object. (There are many other relational, informative, flow-based alternatives to physical objects – particles in space and time – alone.)
• Secondly, the questioning exemplified by the koan. Questioning is at the core of all pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, since Socrates most obviously, but recorded by Plato, codified by Aristotle, and restored to the western canon (ironically via Islamic scholars) in the enlightenment that gave us modern science. It’s already a presumption in the modern take on Socratic method, that there is an objective truth being uncovered with a fully consistent logic. But it may not have been that way to Socrates himself. We can never know. The questioner may or may not believe they already know the “truth” better that the target being questioned, but there is an inbuilt arrogance that the learning is aiming for objective truth, independent of what the subject believes. The Taoist koan, by asking questions without objective answers, at least leaves those thought-provoking non-objective “Mu” possibilities open.
• Thirdly, reality really does exist, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. To suggest otherwise strips reality of any meaning. Any world view is a model of that reality, not reality itself. So any model of reality – any ontology – is contingent on its usefulness, and contingent all the way down. Even the most strictly objective, logical, hierarchical model stands on a turtle somewhere. The real world may have no cosmic bootstrap, but our model always will. And we can never know any more about the world than the epistemology our bootstrapped ontology gives us. To suggest the model we hold is not a “belief system” is merely semantic word-games.

These three points have many corollaries, possibilities left open for alternate world-views.

Qualitative differences matter. Assuming a strictly reductionist hierarchy in the relationships between the exact sciences as a foundation, living and evolving biology dependent on that, and all other psycho-social phenomena above these, involves many category errors. There can be quite – qualitatively – different types of thing in the different layers of our ontology. There is a gestalt view that says patterns of organisation in these different layers all have existence in their own right. Sure there is a dependence, a supervenience, of the higher layers’ existence on the lower, but the chains of causation which explain and predict behaviour do not all run from the part to the whole. That’s greedy reductionism. The wholes in the higher layers have their own behaviours. These behaviours do not “depend” on any of the properties of their parts, but rather on the nature and level of their organisation.

Certainly any number of “hard problems”, that lead science to deny the existence in its model of self, consciousness, will etc, are at least given space for investigation rather than dismissal and denial.

Of course many (Pirsig included) have constructed their own ontologies on some or all these principles. All I would say is the value is in believing these qualitative alternatives exist and have value. Getting exclusively attached to any one of them is just another dogma, no different to any religion, cult or even science. The enemy is dogma, not belief itself.

Missed this London Thinks event at Conway Hall Ethical Society earlier this week, in fact I’ll not be attending many in the coming year thanks to a changed working pattern, but this one’s a keeper on YouTube. The title and the content right on my “What, why and how do we (believe what we) know?” agenda here on Psybertron.

Samira Ahmed excellent in the chair as usual, Richard Wiseman entertaining, and Francesca Stavrakopoulou talking so much sense:

• The “Western” prejudiced view of top-down organised & proselytising religions rather than their folkloric bottom-up origins. (As per the origins of stories … )
• The Book of Numbers story (she’s used often before) illustrating the benign common-sense in early – patriarchal of its time – ritual in testing the accused adulteress. (True of most religious rituals and taboos … )
• And more …

The rest … the natural evolution of necessary psychology, good and bad. Especially the memetic aspects where stories are reinforced by media transmission, individual or institutional, innocent or manipulative.

• Bruce Hood and Deborah Hyde on sacrement of essence – even in inanimate objects – even in otherwise rational atheist people. Richard Wiseman on practical psychology (stage magic) examples. Real power, real value even if not “true”.
• Co-existence of inconsistent texts and beliefs, without literalism being an issue.

Lots of good stuff in there. We all have “belief systems” that are fundamentally psychological – even hardened objective rational scientists. It’s the wrong battleground for “new-atheists” beating-up on the religious, rather than focussing on the repressive abuses of religion. There are enough of those to worry about.

• Dawkins hasn’t done us (atheist / humanist / rationalist / naturalists) any favours. (Sure he’s “staked out” some of the extreme territory we’re dealing with – not sure he has much grip on what solutions might look like.)

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Post Note:

Got a tweeted comment from @WanderingJedEye that reminded us this “western” top-down hierarchical objective perspective is not only contrasted with the Abrahamic / middle-eastern experience, but with “eastern” world-views generally. There was in fact a Hindhu cultish contribution in the above debate from Alice Heron, but the focus was mainly the lessons of the cultish experience, rather than anything in the particular world-view. I posted a piece to address this additional thought.

‘We have gone from a vertical society to a horizontal society where everybody has an opinion about every decision you make, everybody has an opinion on the Internet straight away. Basically the respect for people who make decisions is gone because every decision is questioned. So one of the most important qualities of a good leader now is massive resistance to stress. Under stress you become smaller and smaller until you cannot give out a message any more and that, of course, is something that is vital. Many people underestimate this challenge.’

Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal Football Club.

So notes Alastair Campbell talking in support of the BBC as a trusted “brand” and the challenge for strategies to manage its future. Particular notable that the Burnley fan gives powerful and well considered support to @SaveOurBBC_CIC given his notorious run in(s) with the Beeb during his time as Tony Blair’s spin doctor. All the more powerful. Worth a read.

(And on a personal note as a fellow football fan I share the memory of his first BBC complaint that too often in the early days the match highlights came from Loftus Road.)

I’m one of those advocating caution alongside the otherwise laudable Sense About Science Ask For Evidence campaign. You can have too much of a good thing.

Getting overly focussed on seemingly objective evidence is OK so long as we understand what really counts as evidence when it gets communicated transparently (if it’s really intelligible to us) or is presented as newsworthy (if it’s mediated for us). You can never escape some element of trust, dare I say faith, in your sources and channels. There can be no shortage of conspiracy theories, but even the well-intentioned can accidentally mislead and a meme is a meme once it’s off and running.

Several interesting pieces recently.

Beware (crusade against!) multiple regression analyses. Look out for self-selection effects in correlations chosen for possible causal analysis. The psychology may be a bigger factor than the arithmetic. The downside to transparency. The emotional impact of misleading news. And, where there is intention to mislead, even well-intentioned white-lies or ironic cruelty-to-be-kind, it gets all the more complicated. The knowledge deficit model – Comment is free, but … some things are sacred.

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Post Note :

At the extreme ends of science – the fundamentals and the massively complex – objective evidence is even more precious, and cognitive bias by scientists and their social circles even more of a “crisis”. Here Sabine Hossenfelder talking on the risks to objective evidence when it is hardest to come by and therefore matters most in theory assessment. Several points where I differ with Sabine – the crisis is not so much about the pace of scientific progress, more the opposite, the increasing risk of scientific regress. Weinberg is right on beauty, simplicity and elegance. They are not fundamentally aesthetic when used by a thoughtful scientist – they are merely shorthand for a lot of experience – but they are nevertheless not objectively or fundamentally tested axioms. But she’s right. Consistency is indeed overrated when you are lost in the maths – it’s self-reinforcing. And multiverses can be a hack to cover up the lack of constraining axioms which make anything possible.

Really like Paul Mason’s line of thinking in his Post Capitalism.

As with any looming change, we need to face up to its reality if we are to have any hope of engineering ourselves any favourable outcomes. Paul seems to have switched his current tactic to reading the tea-leaves in current financial events and predicting seemingly inevitable doom and gloom.

Here is his latest on the Shanghai stock market. And previously his “great global slowdown”.

As an attention seeking tactic, I’m OK with doom and gloom, so long as it gains the attention of the right kind of people, but I do miss the hopeful side of his alternative futures.

[Immediate antidote from HBR via David Gurteen – positive thinking can be overrated.]

Just a holding post to capture this fascinating link for later digestion. Combines several of my threads in one – though apparent from first para that the fractality is in the syntax (sentence length) only – not in the information content.

Archetypical science of course to analyse something that can be objectively measured, not the “subject that matters”.

The world’s greatest literature
reveals multifractals and
cascades of consciousness.
By Stanisław Drożdż
The Institute of Nuclear Physics
of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Still, will need to see how the syntactical analysis leads to being able to say anything about consciousness?

Post before last, I indicated I was reading some histories and oldies in their original published forms.

Last week I picked-up several more books. One new handful from a current reviewers’ copy list at the Rationalist Association, and another old handful of discard copies of the Rationalist Association library held by Conway Hall. Both the oldies in the previous post came from that latter source.

Same again; I’m reading the oldies. Specifically right now I’m reading T. H. Huxley’s “Darwiniana” collection of essays. Published as a collection by MacMillan in 1893, I have the 1899 reprint, the essays themselves come from 1859 to the 1880’s. Lots of stuff here already well referenced and quoted by Dawkins, Dennett, Lewontin, Gould and the rest, but nevertheless fascinating to read in the original contexts. The novelty for Darwin’s conservative religious critics and the need to take “creation” as a serious input, somewhere; the Judaeo-Christian cultural standpoint of the whole, the racial and imperial outlook from our little island towards the French, the Germans and those of the “Palestine” region. (Wallace, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Harvey, Paley, Spencer, De Maillet, Haeckel, Newton, Leibnitz, Galilleo and the Medicis, and yet another Goethe reference, all there.)

Two things of note for me.

• The careful debate about Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the fact that whilst Darwinian natural selection is undoubtedly true, it is clearly not the whole story. Lamarck remains “the skeleton in the closet” (as recently as this 2016 reference).
• That race and species always were (and still are) slim and slippery customers. It doesn’t pay to dwell on fixed, one-time definitions of either of them. Time and isolation, history and hindsight matter more. Long enough to be usefully named. Pretty much as with “non-racial” cultural and religious belief identities & differences; No?

Frankie Boyle sums it up nicely most recently here, most magnificently here:

“it’s difficult to explain why an
ingrained assumption is wrong
in a soundbite”

Contrasted with Margaret Beckett patiently explaining the labour party review of its post-Ed-defeat policy problems on BBC R4 Today – resisting the demand for a single “thing” to “blame”.

The point is, it really is DIFFICULT to “explain” (ie argue, understand, convince, change) in a sound bite, you have to put in the effort, but having implanted the message (right or wrong) it is VERY EASY to capture and spread it in a sound bite. A meme.

The more people accept that (say) science is right because it is logically consistent with objective evidence, the more being “scientific” becomes a positive tag or branding to associate with an idea you’d like to spread (acting on AGW / climate change say). Not all science is good, and anyway logical consistency is highly over-rated. Try explaining that in a sound bite. Ben was able to communicate it to me in a tweeted sound-bite, …

Consistency is over-rated. Being consistent all the time is actually rather scary.

�” Ben Cobley (@bencobley) January 20, 2016

… but then we’ve already done the homework and studied Gödel and memetics. [Anthropic effects on our shared cosmos must be taken seriously, but the science is a vanishing small part of the problem.]

So, when I first heard this story about (modern European) Fairy Tales really being the latest versions of 2, 3, 4 or 5 thousand year old folk tales – my reaction was; Obviously. Doh! Did they really need anyone to spend any time and resources to research that, and having done it, how on earth is it news? But then if you already know Joe Campbell (The Masks of God) or Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories) then you know why these stories work and why they stick in our human psyche from generation to generation, evolving in the telling, but with patterns of meaning replicated. Sure we may associate the stories with Grimm and Anderson and later film adaptations of these, but this is more to do with written histories, the printing press and these later media technologies. The content of stories (the semantics, meaning, intent, purpose) long underly the medium (the syntactical and phsyical implementation technology) and remain independent, forever (*).

People may deny memes as not being well defined objectively, they’re not “things” you can easily get a handle on, but they really are there, and they really are the basis of all our knowledge.

They reason they’re a problem – as opposed to simply being a fact of life – is because the ones that spread and persist most, are the ones that are easy to communicate. These are our lowest common denominators, NOT those that are necessarily good or right. That requires homework.

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[Post Note : (*) Also a “PIE” (Proto-Indo-European / Indiana-Jones) languages and culture aspect to the original Fairy Tales story. Another research topic here. https://www.psybertron.org/?p=603 and https://www.psybertron.org/?p=7278 and more.]

Can’t believe how long it is since my last post – but currently buried under a pile of domestic things needing attention, basically a very late-running house improvement project that barely “completed” before Christmas, family Christmas itself, and seeking new paid work since the new year … lots of connected pieces to be picked-up.

Lots of draft posts, stalled due to guilt of those other things needing attention. Loads of tweets too (see guilt) as a substitute for longer posts on the usual subjects. Scientific “rationality” vs religious “irrationality” – the recurring knotty mind-body, free-will, truth-goodness, model-reality “hard problems”, not to mention all the more immediate and evil extreme real-life manifestations reaching us through the news.

Amongst all the tweeted links I’ve also as usual been reading a few books,
so for now a brief Reading Update:

• Captured by all things Bowie in today’s media reminded me one read was a musical biography; Elvis Costello’s “Unfaithful Words & Disappearing Ink“. Recommended read if you’re a fan or interested in Elvis. Densely packed name-dropping anecdotes of all the people and places he’s worked, but organised all over the place by musical and lyrical links in inspiration, writing and performing, his and others. Plus a good deal of his own family and Liverpool heritage of course. The sheer breadth is maybe the most illuminating aspect.

Also reading two more thought provoking works.

• “Vision & Realism – A hundred years of the Freethinker” by Jim Herrick (1982). Fascinating in my current role as board member for the Rationalist Association to get another view of the overlapping (and internally conflicting) relationships and heritage between the various players and publications (and agendas) in the UK rational “free-thought”, secularist, ethical, atheist and humanist movements. The same internal conflicts pop-up daily, and in fact one of my draft posts is a call to unity amongst the warring twitterati factions against the bigger picture.

• Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (1949) “Problems of Life – an Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought” is altogether deeper on the philosophical topics behind scientific rationality, with a pan-Darwinian biological view of processes behind the whole of science and rationality. (The original German title translates as The Biological Worldview.) It’s an Organismic Conception or viewpoint smack bang in the middle between the fundamental “exact sciences” and the higher human and social “sciences”. He uses a gestalt take on how levels dependent on more fundamental levels nevertheless have their own identity (and properties and behaviours) not determined in any direct sense by the sum of their underlying parts, but by their level(s) of organisation. (A view that Pirsig scholars will appreciate.)  It’s the organismic principle that is the driver, not any predetermined plan or any eventual patterns themselves – tough for scientists even now, but a paradigmatic change proposed in his work from the 1920’s onwards, and summarised in this 1949 work. [And it’s no coincidence the book is published in English by Watts & Co, founders of the Rationalist (Press) Association (see above) and the copy I am reading I bought second hand from their library in Conway Hall. Small world.]

Will be writing more on both of these in the right context.
Now, my own garden to tend, where’s my to do list?

Seeing news today that the ancient rattling tin boxes that run on rails serving Teeside are to be replaced with investment in new rolling stock, I was reminded of an old idea for consolidating north-east infrastructure that I reckon should be part of our plans.

(Editorially updated 21 Mar 2016.)

Up north, Newcastle (NCL) is the most developed airport and I/we often use it for business and pleasure. Trouble is it’s not just north, it’s actually north of the Tyne, in the land of Picts. It’s a dreadful journey by public (rail) or private (car) transport from where we live close to, but south of the Tees. By rail one needs to get into Newcastle or Sunderland and then onto the NCL metro system, I don’t think there are any other worthwhile rail-metro connections. By road one has to use the congested two-lane A1 stretch around Gateshead metro-centre and get across the A1-Tyne bridge.

We are very close to Teeside airport (originally Middleton-St-George, now known as Durham-Tees), but apart from the (dying) oil industry Aberdeen-Stavanger services of Eastern Airways, the only regular service is KLM to Amsterdam-Schiphol. Which again, I use regularly – it’s quicker for me to get to most Netherlands cities than it is to get to London from Teeside, and Schiphol has good intercontinental connections too. Teeside airport is owned by Peel Airports, and would be defunct if not subsidised by local government money. Add to that Durham-Tees has a tiny rail halt on the Darlington-Middlesbrough-East-Cleveland and Thornaby-Stockton-Sunderland lines, a halt that is never used, thanks to the pitifully tiny air-traffic that could justify it.

South of us are Leeds-Bradford (and further, Manchester is a bigger operation) but also Doncaster-Robin-Hood (ex Finningly airfield). Peel Airports also own Doncaster and they seem to be successfully investing in development there – instead of Teeside.

So, the most developed northern airport is north of it’s northern-most city, and very badly connected to the rest of it. Between the Tees and Tyne is the Wear, and Sunderland had an airport too, though also struggling for scheduled paying traffic and no doubt remaining in existence thanks only to local government interest in Nissan’s success at Washington – not least because the airport no longer exists since it is the site of the Nissan operation? And notice that the UK’s new high-speed trains investments are coming to Hitachi at Newton-Aycliffe, in Co. Durham between the Tees and Wear.

Time for some joined-up thinking methinks?

Let’s bite the bullet and consolidate North-East air traffic at Sunderland. Convenient for all Tees, Wear and Tyne-siders. Let’s move the whole of the successful NCL operation there, let’s accept Durham-Tees is no longer viable, and let’s put investment into fast rail links to the consolidated airport from the Tees-Wear-Tyne rail networks. And maybe Nissan and Hitachi could help fund? Win-Win-Win.

Post Note :

As if to prove my point about Teeside airport rail halt.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35105105 only 8 people got on or off in the whole of 2013/14.