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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

The Bed of Procrustes

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on May 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The “Black Swan” guy) has a new book out which is a collection of aphorisms. It’s called The Bed of Procrustes (ISBN 1846144582).

I like books of aphorisms. You can dip and dive into them and just stop where something provokes or captures you. Here are a few of his which have made me stop and think so far.

Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Who doesn’t want longevity, safety and comfort? But he’s right, there’s a difference between being a zoo animal and living free in the wild. Can we have the longevity, safety and comfort AND the freedom and excitement of the wild??

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are.

This is pretty close to my heroes not zombies theme. If your every day is scheduled to death, is that satisfying? Is there some room for spontaneity, for freedom to respond to events and circumstances? If life can’t be fully controlled, it certainly can’t be fully planned. Globally, we’re caught up in command and control methods based on a delusion of the certainties revealed by science – whether it’s economic science, earthquake science, or medical science. The events of the last few years in particular are really showing the extent to which these theories and approaches are delusional and only further power and control over the individual.

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.

This is a bit like Rumsfeld’s famous knowns and unknowns, isn’t it? But there’s also the issue of is reality only that which can be seen and measured?

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

This reminded me of Mary Midgely‘s superb “Science and Poetry” – one of my favourite philosophy books. Science isn’t everything and it can’t explain everything either….

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The uniqueness of now

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, philosophy on May 10, 2011| 1 Comment »

When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?

William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…

…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….

The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.

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William James – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on May 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In “The Stream of Consciousness”, William James dismisses the ‘synthetic’ method of attempting to understand consciousness by considering small parts of it and trying to create the whole picture by assembling the various parts.

On every ground then the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer to follow the ‘analytic’ method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life.

This strikes me as very sensible. The phenomenon of emergence was described much later, as were the findings of complexity science, but in fact, the more we have discovered about complex systems, such as living organisms, the more it becomes clear the that whole cannot be understood from a simple cobbling together of knowledge of the parts.

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Are you sure?

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on April 18, 2011| 1 Comment »

Excellent post on the School of Life site by Christopher Hamilton about scepticism. He starts by mentioning how Socrates doubted everything but how these days all kinds of people assume they’re cleverer than that –

Politicians know how to get the economy growing again (which we all know to be a good thing) and the economists know why it all went wrong in the first place; the health experts know what we have to eat to stay healthy, and the gym instructors know just the right amount of exercise we need; the Church knows what’s gone wrong with modern morality, and the atheists know that religion was a con anyway; evolutionary scientists know that we’re driven by our genes, and philosophers know it’s all much more complicated than that.

but of course……they really don’t know, do they?

the history of thought shows that equally sensitive, reflective, intelligent people come to radically different views about – well, about pretty much everything. Human beings claim to know because it’s frightening not to know…

Interesting how the contemporary so called “skeptics” (I’m thinking “Pub Skeptics” and their like), seem to be characterised by their complete sense of certainty……busy telling everyone that their views on anything and everything are absolutely right, and claiming that they know they are right because “science” tells them so.

How did “scepticism” morph from doubting everything to claiming to know things for sure?

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Uncertainty and prediction

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on March 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor woes in Japan, The Edge has focused on the issue of prediction. As always they’ve got a fascinating range of pieces, some of which, I completely disagree with, and some which are truly enlightening. All of them, however, are thought provoking. My initial favourite on reading through them all is the contribution from Douglas Rushkoff. He says (referring to these unusual, unpredictable events as “black swans” –

But, as black swan events like this prove, our reliance on the data continually fails us. We just can’t get enough data about our decidedly non-linear world to make accurate predictions.

This is a key point for me – the connections between things in our world are non-linear, because we live in a complex world, not a simple, mechanical one. Non-linear systems have certain characteristics including the phenomenon of “emergence” (which many of the Edge contributors refer to). The detail of emerging events and phenomena is unpredictable.  So, what to do about that?

The coincidence of nuclear crises in Japan, combined with our inability to predict the events that precipitated it, forces another kind of predictive apparatus into play. No, it’s not one we like to engage — particularly in rational circles — but one we repress at our own peril. Science is free to promote humanity’s liberation from superstition or even God, but not from humanity itself. We still have something in common with all those animals who somehow, seemingly magically, know when an earthquake or tsunami is coming and to move to higher ground. And our access to that long lost sense lies in something closer to story than metrics. A winter bookended by BP’s underwater gusher and Japan’s radioactive groundwater may be trying to speak to us in ways we are still human enough to hear.

That bolding is mine, not Douglas Rushkoff’s. This is it. This is a great insight. We need to understand the importance of story, particularly when dealing with complexity, because there just never will be “enough” data.

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Science and meaning

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on March 20, 2011| 1 Comment »

I find something very disturbing about the Brian Cox style of science programme. He usually presents something along the lines of the current “Wonders of the Universe” (his other recent outing being the astronomy week on BBC2 where his irritation factor was doubled by the contributions of his co-presenter Dara O Briain). The subject matter should be right up my street. I’ve had a lifelong passion for the wonders of Nature and the Universe. So, what’s the problem?

Two things – a certain contempt for human knowledge and wisdom prior to the present day which feeds an arrogant implication that everyone in the entire history of mankind was thick as two short planks until our current cohort of scientists who have finally found out the truth about everything. Secondly, an apparent view that only science can reveal truth. (Consider instead Ken Wilber’s Integral model which shows that science is a way of understanding surfaces, but that we need other ways to understand the depths)

Mark Vernon nails the issue perfectly.

At the start of the second programme, Cox is filmed on the banks of a holy river amidst Hindus attending to their dead. He notes that Hinduism, along with other religions, has a story to tell about people’s origins and the meaning of their lives. Only, that story is flawed. He has a deeper story to tell. ‘The path to enlightenment is not to understand our own lives and deaths,’ he intones, ‘but to understand the lives and deaths of the stars.’ He then proceeds to describe how the elements in our bodies are made from the explosive death of stars. Which is true. Only that’s not nearly enough to deliver on the enlightenment promise at the top. That would be like saying the meaning of Michelangelo’s David can be found in the quarry where the marble came from.

Nicely put, Mark! He concludes –

Science of itself does not do the meaning part. Only a human interpretation of the science can achieve that. But to do so, the interpretation must make raids on the language of values and metaphysics. It needs the beauty of colour and the harmonies of music – qualities which, of themselves, again are unknown to physics as physics.

I think it’s a shame to hear scientists trying to present science as a kind of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” activity. Scientific enquiry and exploration is such a wonderful human enterprise, but it goes seriously off course when it turns into scientism.

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Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrants

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on March 15, 2011| 11 Comments »

Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” has a number of elements. The holon is one of them. Another important element is the simple, elegant and immensely useful Four Quadrants. He simply draws a cross which yields four squares, or quadrants. On the horizontal, the upper two quadrants represent a singular perspective, and the lower two, the plural perspective. On the vertical, the left hand quadrants represent the interior, and the right hand ones, the exterior.

Even more simply, you can think of the pronouns which apply to each quadrant – upper left, is singular, interior and is communicated by using “I”, whereas, upper right, is singular exterior, so is communicated using “it”. Bottom left is plural interior, communicated with “we” and bottom right, being plural exterior, communicated with “its”.

You can see that the left hand refers to subjective experience and the right to objective.

One of the things you can do with this is map other conceptual maps onto it. So, if we take Karl Popper’s “three worlds”, then top left is “subjective”, bottom left is “cultural” and the right hand side is “objective”. Habermas describes three truths – the subjective truthfulness of I, the cultural justness of we, and the objective truth of its. You can also map Kant’s three great works against this – Critique of judgement (art and self-expression), Critique of practical reason (morals or we), and Critique of pure reason (science).

Finally, you can map onto the same plan, Plato’s Beautiful, Good and True.

I’m sure you will probably be able to come up with other parallels, but why not play with this for a bit. I think you’ll agree it provides a very useful and much more holistic framework within which to understand things.

I especially like how he values ALL four quadrants, and in so doing, makes it clear that if you only come at an issue from one of the quadrants, you’re just not going to get the full picture…..puts objective science into its right place in my opinion!

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The concept of a “holon”

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged on March 14, 2011| 3 Comments »

Have you ever heard of a “holon”? It’s an idea first circulated by Arthur Koestler (read more detail here), summarised as –

1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.

1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.

1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the “Janus phenomenon”.

So, taking this idea as a starting point, we can consider the whole universe to be made up of holons. I really like this idea. It reminds us that nothing exists in isolation, and nothing can be fully understood without understanding it’s relationships as well as it’s “surface properties”. Ken Wilber, in particular, has picked up the idea and elaborated further with this his four “drives” of every holon. (“A Brief History of Everything” is a good place to start if you want to read more, and here‘s an interesting summary)

Ken Wilber’s “drives” are interesting. He describes two pairs – a horizontal pair and a vertical one. The horizontal pair are “agency” and “community”. Every holon needs agency, or autonomy, to preserve its uniqueness and its individuality. We humans need that. Our immune systems are designed to quickly recognise what is “not me” and our sense of self also strengthens our feelings of uniqueness. However, we also need community, in that we also need to connect and to belong. We love and are loved. One of the most severe punishments in any jail is “solitary confinement”. We are wired to connect to others and to our environments. We need both agency and community.

The vertical pair are “self-dissolution” and “self-transcendence”. Self-dissolution is that disintegration of the whole into parts (or more correctly into sub-holons, as all holons are made of holons!). This is something we experience as illness. When things fall apart, when our systems go out of balance, in essence when we experience dis-integration, we are experiencing “self-dissolution”. The opposite of this is growth and development. The fairly new biological term for this would be “emergence” – which is the development of characteristics and behaviours previously unseen in this organism or system. Wilber terms this “self-transcendence” which is a nice counter to that of dissolution. We have the capacity to literally transcend our current state through creative growth and evolution.

Of course none of us stay the same. We all experience continual change – some of it dissolution and some of it transcendence. (I’m reminded here of the biological processes of catabolism and anabolism).

This idea – the idea of a holon, (both as seeded by Koestler, and developed by Wilber) – is, I think a wonderful one. Once you grasp it, you’ll start to understand reality differently.

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Partitive and aspective

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on March 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

Here’s a quote from a book entitled “Neuroethics“. This is from an essay by Nancey Murphy.

While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person “partitively,” whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person “aspectively.” That is to say, we speak of a school having a gym (the gym is part of the school); but we say I am a Scot (my Scottishness is an aspect of my whole being.)

Until I read this, I’d never come across these particular terms. Nor did I know there was this difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. But what completely struck me was how congruent this idea is with what Ian McGilchrist says about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In his “Master and His Emissary“, he makes the case for each hemisphere engaging with the world in its own unique way – the left engaging in a “representation” way, breaking reality down into parts to “grasp” it by mapping it against what’s already known, and the right engaging in a more holistic way, (what McGilchrist describes as a focus on the between-ness, rather on the things). Ken Wilber’s description focuses on the “interpretative” nature of this other way.

So this is interesting. This idea of a “partitive” world view is very much our dominant paradigm. We break experience into parts and we use the left hemisphere strongly to do that. It strikes me we are on the edge of a wave of change here though, and that this worldview is running out of steam. It’s failing to satisfy what it is to be fully human. If that’s true, then we should be seeking to develop our right hemispheric powers, creating a more “aspective” worldview.

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in praise of “and”

Posted in from the living room, life, philosophy on February 22, 2011| 2 Comments »

I was going to title this post “And not or”, but then I realised that very title was falling into the trap which “or” always poses – it divides. The General Semanticists talk about “two value thinking”. Others say this tendency to categorise into two categories is “digital” thinking, in the sense of “on” or “off”, “1” or “0”. Of course we are often faced with such simple choices in life – “go left” or “go right”, “stay home” or “go out” and so on. The drawback of “or” comes when one of the choices is rated as “right” and the other as “wrong”. When that happens, the digital choice is reduced to only one option – the RIGHT one, or as Mrs Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative”. We see this in health care in the dangerous distortion of “evidence based medicine” to create a digital rating system – treatments “which work” and those “which don’t”, which is then extrapolated to those treatments which should be made available and those which should be withdrawn. In so many instances this is a delusion. Most drugs don’t do what they’re “proven” to do for most of the people who take them.

So, what’s the alternative?

“And”

This insight has emerged from the internet, but applies to everything which could be considered using networks as a conceptual framework. On the net, you don’t have to think, will I publish my work on “Flickr” of “Blipfoto“? Will I “tweet” or post on “facebook“? Will I blog, or will I “stumble“, or will I “posterise“? You can do them all, link them all, and communicate much more widely than I could if I had to choose only one, and discard the other options.

But “and” has another great power. Instead of considering a reduced set of information, say, for example, from using “the scientific method”, we can also consider the perspectives brought from subjective experience, from cultural mores, from both individual and group perspectives and so on.

Think of Deleuze’s three ways of thinking – science – thinking about function; philosophy – thinking about concepts; art – thinking about percepts and affects.

Think of Wilber’s “Integral Theory” with it’s elegant four quadrants.

Think of the benefits of truly multidisciplinary working where all the disciplines bring relevant insights.

I much prefer “and” to “or”, and I rarely believe Mrs Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative”. Alternatives are always there. We just need to open our eyes to see them.

Here are two songs about “and” and “or” – I love them BOTH.

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