Day two of the Apocalypse. Donald Trump confirms that he is indeed the Anti-Christ. The head of the US Treasury is yet again going to be from Goldman Sachs, who brought you such diabolical events as the 2008 global financial crisis. Remember when people voted for Bill Clinton but got Alan fucking Greenspan? Happy days for the spawn of Hell.
So right now, Hell is ahead on points and Heaven is scrambling to catch up, having been caught out by the misleading polls. So much for the much vaunted omniscience of Yahweh! These are the most exciting End Times since... well, since time began! Who will win?
10 November 2016
09 November 2016
Dear America
Dear America,
Congratulations on holding your elections without large scale violence, corruption, or electoral fraud. That's really something to be proud of.
We all knew that the consensus form of politics that has dominated not only your country, but the whole of the industrialised world, was not working. Millions of people lost their jobs, homes, and savings in the bonfire of vanity that was the Global Financial Crisis. Some of us hoped it might be a left-leaning candidate who got the protest votes, and Sanders had a certain appeal. But America does not elect socialists, so Sanders was never going to become president. So Trump got the protest votes. See it for what it is. Not an endorsement of Trump, but an indictment of Neoliberalism (especially so-called "free markets" and globalisation).
While middle America was desperately clinging to what they had acquired and managed to hold onto during the financial crisis, the rich prospered as never before, and a lot of poorer Americans lost everything and any chance of ever getting ahead. Too many Americans live in poverty, too many are trapped in minimum wage jobs. Of course these people are angry at the government when it allows their jobs to be exported to South-East Asia (or Mexico) and when it allows banks to parasitise the economy. Of course they were desperate for change. How do you feel when you look down and see a mosquito, bloated and red from gorging on your blood, about to fly off and lay thousands of eggs to produce more of its kind? Most people have a visceral urge to swat the little bastard. Voting for Trump can be seen as an attempt at swatting those parasites. Just as voting for Brexit was here in the UK.
In any case, you seem to have elected Donald J. Trump as President. And now he gets to form a government. Trump will change his tune now. You can hear it in the speech he gave on accepting Clinton's concession (what a phone call that must have been!). It's all about coming together and all that. He even praised Clinton's long years of service to your country. Taken in isolation, it was quite statesmanlike. Of course it ought not to be taken in isolation, but seen in the context of his campaign (at least). And of course Trump wants all the hostility to his candidacy to go away, along with all the rape allegations. The point is that he has shifted gears already (something that some left-field commentators predicted he would do). Campaigning is over and now he has to face being President, with everything that entails. "The American people have spoken", as they say.
Something that seems to be being overlooked is that the Congress is still solidly Republican, i.e. conservative and authoritarian. Consider that Trump climbed over those people to get where he is. He hijacked their party and has no regard for their values and traditions. And these are the people who have to pass his budget and his legislation. Like Obama, Trump will not find it easy to proceed without offering major concessions to Republicans in Congress. Even now the machinery of Washington is winding up to prevent Trump from achieving anything in office. They loving having this power and will exercise it with glee.
Some would argue that tying the hands of politicians is exactly what the disenchanted and disenfranchised electorate wanted. Disrupting the system is the best they can currently hope for, because a candidate who genuinely shares their concerns is not an option any more - only millionaires can afford to run, and millionaires will never share the concerns of the average American, let alone Americans working on minimum wage and living in a crime-filled neighbourhood.
In the USA you have a distrust of government that exceeds even many of those who live in totalitarian states. You seem to resent paying taxes at all, let alone with representation. You know the govt spies on you, often illegally (thanks again Edward Snowden). And you know that many of the institutions of govt are systematically discriminatory. Americans seem to fear and resent government telling them what to do. Many people believe something along the lines of one of Frank Zappa's aphorisms: "Government is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex."
What better way to disrupt the machinations of government than by electing a combative outsider who ran in order to be disruptive of the status quo? The fact that he might be an asshole or even a criminal is secondary to the very real desire for substantive change. Since substantive change is not on offer, the next best thing is disruption. A restive electorate will do anything to kick an unresponsive government into paying attention to their concerns. In the UK it was the Brexit referendum - which cost most of the government their hand on the ouija-board of power, though they all still have government jobs!
Trump has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure and to aim to have the best infrastructure in the world. To my mind this is the best possible policy. I only wish UK politicians had any plan to invest in the UK, but they don't. Investment creates jobs and returns that can ease the tax burden. It remains to be seen what Congress will allow him to do in this line.
Trump understands investment because its the core of what he does as a businessman. Yes, he is guilty of cutting corners on many occasions and ending up in court on many occasions, but he's an American libertarian who resents government interference, so a disregard for the government's rules is more or less what you expect. It seems that it was exactly his disregard for the rules, and for etiquette, that made him appealing to voters.
The big question now, after "Who will be in his cabinet?", is "Will Trump get his spending plans approved by Congress?" There has to be serious doubt about this. Congress is still dominated by the kind of old-fashioned conservatives who set up the current system and who benefit from it. They won't be in a hurry to disrupt it, and most of them probably hate Trump.
Clinton is history now. Given that she actually lost to Trump, that makes her probably the most unpopular candidate ever to run for President. A lot of people are trying make out that it was a gender issue, but it wasn't. Had her reputation been for scrupulous honesty, and had she not been seen to be far too close to Wall St, she might have done a lot better. Remember that Wall St effectively planned, engineered, and caused the 2008 financial crisis. And they got away with it because they themselves, in service to successive governments, had drafted the regulations that determined what was legal and what was not. Wall St made a lot of money from betting against those people who lost everything. Clinton was too close to the bonfire and was burned by it. Yes, I know it is ironic that the biggest liar, Trump, had the reputation for honesty because he appeared to just say whatever came into his head. But reputation is very important with social primates and hard to shift.
When Obama was elected, there was jubilation to match the wailing and gnashing of teeth today. But Obama was stymied and unable to do much because Congress opposed him at every step. In the end he was an OK president, and came out of his time seeming like a nice guy. But he also made assassination of America's enemies in the Middle East by drone strikes routine and systematic. The man is a stone cold killer. This is the thing about politicians. They are never the best of us. Sometimes they are the worst. To rise to the top in any country is difficult, but the US seems to produce an array of dubious figures, until you see them as entertainers who distract from the exercise of power throughout society and the world. Obama poses with his family, rails against Trump, and emphasises his concern for ordinary people, but every day he is authorising drone strikes to assassinate his enemies. You have to see politician in the round. The same will be true of Trump. Most of the predictions of doom and disaster will not come true.
Obama changed very little, he made little or no different to the lives of African Americans for example. In the end they tried to help themselves by starting the Black Lives Matter campaign to dissuade the police from shooting them on sight. Clinton would not have made life better for women, either. Nor have either of them made it easier for those who come after them. You still have to have enormous privilege and wealth to start with, to do what they did. And most of the people who have the privilege and wealth are white men, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Obama did not change this. Clinton would not have. Trump won't (though since he's a white man we don't expect him to).
America voted against the status quo. That's the take home message. They only had one effective choice to do this. Though of course, there were other candidates in the race, they received almost no media coverage and were not invited to appear in TV debates. Had the alternatives to the Republicans and Democrats had a higher profile, had they been granted the kind of saturation coverage that the media gave to Trump, the result might have been quite different. It's one of many things America needs to think about this morning. Mind you, the system where I live is also deeply flawed and in desperate need of reform. Our House of Lords (= Senate) is not even elected, but most members are government appointees, inherited the privilege from their father, or are appointed by the Church of England! Although we were the first modern democracy, we have yet to fully embrace the concept!
We have now to wait and see what comes next. But the media cycle cannot wait. Twitter is flooded with anxiety (and I only follow 23 tweeters!), the papers and TV news will be constantly hyping everything about the events of yesterday and ruminating wildly on what might come next. Beware of hyper-stimulation in the next few days. The come down is a bitch.
Congratulations on holding your elections without large scale violence, corruption, or electoral fraud. That's really something to be proud of.
We all knew that the consensus form of politics that has dominated not only your country, but the whole of the industrialised world, was not working. Millions of people lost their jobs, homes, and savings in the bonfire of vanity that was the Global Financial Crisis. Some of us hoped it might be a left-leaning candidate who got the protest votes, and Sanders had a certain appeal. But America does not elect socialists, so Sanders was never going to become president. So Trump got the protest votes. See it for what it is. Not an endorsement of Trump, but an indictment of Neoliberalism (especially so-called "free markets" and globalisation).
While middle America was desperately clinging to what they had acquired and managed to hold onto during the financial crisis, the rich prospered as never before, and a lot of poorer Americans lost everything and any chance of ever getting ahead. Too many Americans live in poverty, too many are trapped in minimum wage jobs. Of course these people are angry at the government when it allows their jobs to be exported to South-East Asia (or Mexico) and when it allows banks to parasitise the economy. Of course they were desperate for change. How do you feel when you look down and see a mosquito, bloated and red from gorging on your blood, about to fly off and lay thousands of eggs to produce more of its kind? Most people have a visceral urge to swat the little bastard. Voting for Trump can be seen as an attempt at swatting those parasites. Just as voting for Brexit was here in the UK.
In any case, you seem to have elected Donald J. Trump as President. And now he gets to form a government. Trump will change his tune now. You can hear it in the speech he gave on accepting Clinton's concession (what a phone call that must have been!). It's all about coming together and all that. He even praised Clinton's long years of service to your country. Taken in isolation, it was quite statesmanlike. Of course it ought not to be taken in isolation, but seen in the context of his campaign (at least). And of course Trump wants all the hostility to his candidacy to go away, along with all the rape allegations. The point is that he has shifted gears already (something that some left-field commentators predicted he would do). Campaigning is over and now he has to face being President, with everything that entails. "The American people have spoken", as they say.
Something that seems to be being overlooked is that the Congress is still solidly Republican, i.e. conservative and authoritarian. Consider that Trump climbed over those people to get where he is. He hijacked their party and has no regard for their values and traditions. And these are the people who have to pass his budget and his legislation. Like Obama, Trump will not find it easy to proceed without offering major concessions to Republicans in Congress. Even now the machinery of Washington is winding up to prevent Trump from achieving anything in office. They loving having this power and will exercise it with glee.
Some would argue that tying the hands of politicians is exactly what the disenchanted and disenfranchised electorate wanted. Disrupting the system is the best they can currently hope for, because a candidate who genuinely shares their concerns is not an option any more - only millionaires can afford to run, and millionaires will never share the concerns of the average American, let alone Americans working on minimum wage and living in a crime-filled neighbourhood.
In the USA you have a distrust of government that exceeds even many of those who live in totalitarian states. You seem to resent paying taxes at all, let alone with representation. You know the govt spies on you, often illegally (thanks again Edward Snowden). And you know that many of the institutions of govt are systematically discriminatory. Americans seem to fear and resent government telling them what to do. Many people believe something along the lines of one of Frank Zappa's aphorisms: "Government is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex."
What better way to disrupt the machinations of government than by electing a combative outsider who ran in order to be disruptive of the status quo? The fact that he might be an asshole or even a criminal is secondary to the very real desire for substantive change. Since substantive change is not on offer, the next best thing is disruption. A restive electorate will do anything to kick an unresponsive government into paying attention to their concerns. In the UK it was the Brexit referendum - which cost most of the government their hand on the ouija-board of power, though they all still have government jobs!
Trump has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure and to aim to have the best infrastructure in the world. To my mind this is the best possible policy. I only wish UK politicians had any plan to invest in the UK, but they don't. Investment creates jobs and returns that can ease the tax burden. It remains to be seen what Congress will allow him to do in this line.
Trump understands investment because its the core of what he does as a businessman. Yes, he is guilty of cutting corners on many occasions and ending up in court on many occasions, but he's an American libertarian who resents government interference, so a disregard for the government's rules is more or less what you expect. It seems that it was exactly his disregard for the rules, and for etiquette, that made him appealing to voters.
The big question now, after "Who will be in his cabinet?", is "Will Trump get his spending plans approved by Congress?" There has to be serious doubt about this. Congress is still dominated by the kind of old-fashioned conservatives who set up the current system and who benefit from it. They won't be in a hurry to disrupt it, and most of them probably hate Trump.
Clinton is history now. Given that she actually lost to Trump, that makes her probably the most unpopular candidate ever to run for President. A lot of people are trying make out that it was a gender issue, but it wasn't. Had her reputation been for scrupulous honesty, and had she not been seen to be far too close to Wall St, she might have done a lot better. Remember that Wall St effectively planned, engineered, and caused the 2008 financial crisis. And they got away with it because they themselves, in service to successive governments, had drafted the regulations that determined what was legal and what was not. Wall St made a lot of money from betting against those people who lost everything. Clinton was too close to the bonfire and was burned by it. Yes, I know it is ironic that the biggest liar, Trump, had the reputation for honesty because he appeared to just say whatever came into his head. But reputation is very important with social primates and hard to shift.
When Obama was elected, there was jubilation to match the wailing and gnashing of teeth today. But Obama was stymied and unable to do much because Congress opposed him at every step. In the end he was an OK president, and came out of his time seeming like a nice guy. But he also made assassination of America's enemies in the Middle East by drone strikes routine and systematic. The man is a stone cold killer. This is the thing about politicians. They are never the best of us. Sometimes they are the worst. To rise to the top in any country is difficult, but the US seems to produce an array of dubious figures, until you see them as entertainers who distract from the exercise of power throughout society and the world. Obama poses with his family, rails against Trump, and emphasises his concern for ordinary people, but every day he is authorising drone strikes to assassinate his enemies. You have to see politician in the round. The same will be true of Trump. Most of the predictions of doom and disaster will not come true.
Obama changed very little, he made little or no different to the lives of African Americans for example. In the end they tried to help themselves by starting the Black Lives Matter campaign to dissuade the police from shooting them on sight. Clinton would not have made life better for women, either. Nor have either of them made it easier for those who come after them. You still have to have enormous privilege and wealth to start with, to do what they did. And most of the people who have the privilege and wealth are white men, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Obama did not change this. Clinton would not have. Trump won't (though since he's a white man we don't expect him to).
America voted against the status quo. That's the take home message. They only had one effective choice to do this. Though of course, there were other candidates in the race, they received almost no media coverage and were not invited to appear in TV debates. Had the alternatives to the Republicans and Democrats had a higher profile, had they been granted the kind of saturation coverage that the media gave to Trump, the result might have been quite different. It's one of many things America needs to think about this morning. Mind you, the system where I live is also deeply flawed and in desperate need of reform. Our House of Lords (= Senate) is not even elected, but most members are government appointees, inherited the privilege from their father, or are appointed by the Church of England! Although we were the first modern democracy, we have yet to fully embrace the concept!
We have now to wait and see what comes next. But the media cycle cannot wait. Twitter is flooded with anxiety (and I only follow 23 tweeters!), the papers and TV news will be constantly hyping everything about the events of yesterday and ruminating wildly on what might come next. Beware of hyper-stimulation in the next few days. The come down is a bitch.
18 October 2016
Cybernetics Seminar
I went to a seminar at the uni today on cybernetics. Most of the participants seem to be speaking different versions of English - a kind of self-defeating vocabulary in which none of the questions seem to make sense to the invited guest (and didn't make sense to me). I wasn't very impressed. Smart people often seem to make things more difficult than they need to because otherwise they get bored.
The invited guest kept talking about an "ontology of unknowability" and unfortunately I didn't get the chance to point out that this was an oxymoron - knowability is the domain of epistemology. Ontologies tell us nothing about whether or not something is knowable. Which is why question about the knowledge of non-existent things causes such confusion - the ontological status of a phenomenon tells us nothing about it's knowability.
He also kept insisting that science was an ontology in which everything was knowable. But this hasn't been true since the 1920s when the quantum mechanics established problems like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The quantum universe clearly exists (ontology) but it is almost completely unknowable (epistemology). What we do know has radically changed human culture since it made electronics possible.
The take away was a pragmatic question which was opposed to the usual philosophical question. In ontology we ask what the world is like, but in pragmatics we might ask, "What does the world do?" I think this is an interesting question. One that takes us out of a purely cognitive approach to understanding the world and moves us into an experiential approach.
It's like we focus on what impact the world has on us, which leads to the question of how we respond to that impact, rather than worrying what to think about things.
The other take away is the cybernetics seems to be closely allied to behaviourism and game theory in it's distrust of minds and people. The aim seems to be to remove people from decision making processes and replace them with automatons that specifically do not employ knowledge based or cognitive approaches to problem solving. The human analogue is the physical reflex in which a pain stimulus in the limbs travels to the spinal chord where a response is initiated without involving the brain. And people do not seemed suited to this role.
I'm reminded also of that important component of NeoLiberalism, i.e. free-market economics, where the "market" is a blackbox that magically produces the optimum price for commodities (even though economists have known since the mid-1970s that the mathematics of supply and demand theory don't work - with more than one product or consumer the demand curve can be *any* shape and slope. There is no linear relationship between demand and price in any real world case.
The invited guest kept talking about an "ontology of unknowability" and unfortunately I didn't get the chance to point out that this was an oxymoron - knowability is the domain of epistemology. Ontologies tell us nothing about whether or not something is knowable. Which is why question about the knowledge of non-existent things causes such confusion - the ontological status of a phenomenon tells us nothing about it's knowability.
He also kept insisting that science was an ontology in which everything was knowable. But this hasn't been true since the 1920s when the quantum mechanics established problems like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The quantum universe clearly exists (ontology) but it is almost completely unknowable (epistemology). What we do know has radically changed human culture since it made electronics possible.
The take away was a pragmatic question which was opposed to the usual philosophical question. In ontology we ask what the world is like, but in pragmatics we might ask, "What does the world do?" I think this is an interesting question. One that takes us out of a purely cognitive approach to understanding the world and moves us into an experiential approach.
It's like we focus on what impact the world has on us, which leads to the question of how we respond to that impact, rather than worrying what to think about things.
The other take away is the cybernetics seems to be closely allied to behaviourism and game theory in it's distrust of minds and people. The aim seems to be to remove people from decision making processes and replace them with automatons that specifically do not employ knowledge based or cognitive approaches to problem solving. The human analogue is the physical reflex in which a pain stimulus in the limbs travels to the spinal chord where a response is initiated without involving the brain. And people do not seemed suited to this role.
I'm reminded also of that important component of NeoLiberalism, i.e. free-market economics, where the "market" is a blackbox that magically produces the optimum price for commodities (even though economists have known since the mid-1970s that the mathematics of supply and demand theory don't work - with more than one product or consumer the demand curve can be *any* shape and slope. There is no linear relationship between demand and price in any real world case.
Cybernetics and Society
I'm going to a seminar later today on cybernetics. The idea has a certain appeal because of the obvious way that feedback operates in organisms and ecosystems. However, in reading for the seminar I'm also learning why the field is not more mainstream.
The readings focus on Stafford Beer. A management consultant and self-confessed Marxist. Beer was fascinated by how cybernetic systems could replace human beings as decision makers. Just as a reflex is faster and more responsive to a simple stimulus such as pain than a cognitive response is, Beer thought he could make cybernetic feedback systems respond faster than traditional computers. This is back in the mid 20th Century when computers first began to escape from academia and the military. To be fair using computers to do things in exactly the same way as humans had done them might have been short sighted. But it never seems to have occurred to Beer that replacing human beings with machines was a monstrous goal completely out of kilter with the thought of Marx as I understand it. Beer seems to have considered all kinds of organic substitutes for human beings as well - at one point trying to map factor inputs and outputs onto a pond.
The readings are problematic in other ways. For example the author continually refers to what he calls an ontology of unknowability. I may not know much about philosophy, but I do know that what is knowable or not is the domain of epistemology. Ontological views, even Realism, tell us nothing about what may be known or what must remain unknown. They tell us about what can be inferred to exist. So an ontology of unknowability is an oxymoron. I plan to ask about this.
The author of the two papers, who will also lead the seminar, seems to see machines that use feedback in an animistic way. He focusses on the homoeostat, a kind of current regulator that can hold an output steady under different input currents, but in a quite inefficient way by changing the internal resistance of the machine randomly to 1 of 24 values in response to rising input currents. As the current rises it forces the machine to adopt first one then then another value. With four linked together, the output of one linked to the input of another, one can create a feedback system which stabilises the output current.
The author wants us to see this as agent-like behaviour. It isn't. He says that such devices "explored the unknown". They didn't. That they "reacted constructively". They didn't. And there are better ways to make current regulators using transistors!
Sadly beer ended up becoming a "tantric yogi" and this opens the door to all kinds of nonsense. It links all this to "spirituality", that empty modern word for values we can no longer articulate, but which has something to do with what we feel when we walk into a grand church or a forest, or when we shut ourselves of from ordinary sensory perceptions as in meditation. The ontology of unknowability is also a neo-Taoist ontology. And as this point I begin to doubt I will get anything at all from the seminar. However I have watched a long interview with the author on YouTube and in person he is quite a bit less flaky than he appears to be in the seminar readings.
So my expectations for the seminar are pretty low to say the least. However, this is the first in a series with a lot of guest speakers and I hope to attend them all to see if there is any value to be had in talking about cybernetics. Going by what I've read so far I'm unlikely to adopt the language of cybernetics even though the ideas are clearly related to things I've been writing about. Indeed it seems to me that the more urgent need is for Amistics, the study of the impact of technology on humanity and the world.
Since R. D. Laing is praised in one of the articles, I revisited part of Adam Curtis's documentary The Trap which describes the baleful influence of Game Theory on Laing (and on society in general). Game Theory was the invention not of a beautiful mind, but of a mind warped by paranoid schizophrenia. The influence of Game Theory on Laing seems not the be widely recognised.
Ironically, Laing who had so viciously chided the medical profession for medicating their patients, was an inveterate user of drugs and alcohol, who became an alcoholic. On the plus side, though it was far from being a cure for psychosis, Laing's practice of actually talking to the insane as human beings did relieve their suffering. Game Theory led him to see the family as the cause of insanity. His view of the family was bleak and paranoid in the way that John Nash's view of humanity as expressed in Game Theory was. Curtis suggests that Laing was sublimating his feelings about the Cold War and projecting them onto the families he studied, seeing them purely in terms of tacit and deceptive struggles for control. This is a view of humanity lacking in reciprocity and empathy - i.e. lacking the basis for morality that is found in all primates.
The readings focus on Stafford Beer. A management consultant and self-confessed Marxist. Beer was fascinated by how cybernetic systems could replace human beings as decision makers. Just as a reflex is faster and more responsive to a simple stimulus such as pain than a cognitive response is, Beer thought he could make cybernetic feedback systems respond faster than traditional computers. This is back in the mid 20th Century when computers first began to escape from academia and the military. To be fair using computers to do things in exactly the same way as humans had done them might have been short sighted. But it never seems to have occurred to Beer that replacing human beings with machines was a monstrous goal completely out of kilter with the thought of Marx as I understand it. Beer seems to have considered all kinds of organic substitutes for human beings as well - at one point trying to map factor inputs and outputs onto a pond.
The readings are problematic in other ways. For example the author continually refers to what he calls an ontology of unknowability. I may not know much about philosophy, but I do know that what is knowable or not is the domain of epistemology. Ontological views, even Realism, tell us nothing about what may be known or what must remain unknown. They tell us about what can be inferred to exist. So an ontology of unknowability is an oxymoron. I plan to ask about this.
The author of the two papers, who will also lead the seminar, seems to see machines that use feedback in an animistic way. He focusses on the homoeostat, a kind of current regulator that can hold an output steady under different input currents, but in a quite inefficient way by changing the internal resistance of the machine randomly to 1 of 24 values in response to rising input currents. As the current rises it forces the machine to adopt first one then then another value. With four linked together, the output of one linked to the input of another, one can create a feedback system which stabilises the output current.
The author wants us to see this as agent-like behaviour. It isn't. He says that such devices "explored the unknown". They didn't. That they "reacted constructively". They didn't. And there are better ways to make current regulators using transistors!
Sadly beer ended up becoming a "tantric yogi" and this opens the door to all kinds of nonsense. It links all this to "spirituality", that empty modern word for values we can no longer articulate, but which has something to do with what we feel when we walk into a grand church or a forest, or when we shut ourselves of from ordinary sensory perceptions as in meditation. The ontology of unknowability is also a neo-Taoist ontology. And as this point I begin to doubt I will get anything at all from the seminar. However I have watched a long interview with the author on YouTube and in person he is quite a bit less flaky than he appears to be in the seminar readings.
So my expectations for the seminar are pretty low to say the least. However, this is the first in a series with a lot of guest speakers and I hope to attend them all to see if there is any value to be had in talking about cybernetics. Going by what I've read so far I'm unlikely to adopt the language of cybernetics even though the ideas are clearly related to things I've been writing about. Indeed it seems to me that the more urgent need is for Amistics, the study of the impact of technology on humanity and the world.
Since R. D. Laing is praised in one of the articles, I revisited part of Adam Curtis's documentary The Trap which describes the baleful influence of Game Theory on Laing (and on society in general). Game Theory was the invention not of a beautiful mind, but of a mind warped by paranoid schizophrenia. The influence of Game Theory on Laing seems not the be widely recognised.
Ironically, Laing who had so viciously chided the medical profession for medicating their patients, was an inveterate user of drugs and alcohol, who became an alcoholic. On the plus side, though it was far from being a cure for psychosis, Laing's practice of actually talking to the insane as human beings did relieve their suffering. Game Theory led him to see the family as the cause of insanity. His view of the family was bleak and paranoid in the way that John Nash's view of humanity as expressed in Game Theory was. Curtis suggests that Laing was sublimating his feelings about the Cold War and projecting them onto the families he studied, seeing them purely in terms of tacit and deceptive struggles for control. This is a view of humanity lacking in reciprocity and empathy - i.e. lacking the basis for morality that is found in all primates.
17 October 2016
METHODOLOGY
Common Sense: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.
Common Skeptic: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck.
Science (General): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,
then proceed to test the null hypothesis that it is not a non-duck.
Science (Physics): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then the detector needs recalibrating.
Science (Biology): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it compare its DNA to other waterfowl in the family Anatidae to determine the degree of genetic relatedness.
Philosophy: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, proceed to question the existence of the universe and/or consciousness.
Buddhism: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is not a duck, but not a non-duck, nor is it both nor neither. Forget about the duck(!) and just watch your mind ducking.
After 50 years, it turns out that I'm a fan of common sense.
Common Skeptic: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck.
Science (General): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,
then proceed to test the null hypothesis that it is not a non-duck.
Science (Physics): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then the detector needs recalibrating.
Science (Biology): If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it compare its DNA to other waterfowl in the family Anatidae to determine the degree of genetic relatedness.
Philosophy: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, proceed to question the existence of the universe and/or consciousness.
Buddhism: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is not a duck, but not a non-duck, nor is it both nor neither. Forget about the duck(!) and just watch your mind ducking.
After 50 years, it turns out that I'm a fan of common sense.
14 October 2016
Blackhole Bounce
I just heard Carlo Rovelli explain a scenario for blackholes, let's see if I can reproduce it.
Take a supermassive star. As it reaches the point where it has fused together the last fusionable elements, it begins to cool. Since the heat generated by nuclear fusion has been the only thing preventing gravity from collapsing all the matter into the centre, it begins to collapse. Matter from the star rushes towards the centre very fast, causing an implosion. This throws most of the matter back out into space, but at the very core matter becomes super-compressed. All the protons and electrons are converted into neutrons and these are squeezed into very dense neutronium that takes up very little space.
Relativity says that above a certain mass the neutron core of the star continues to be compressed by gravity and that there is no limit to this compression. If there is enough matter to start with, the neutronium becomes so dense that nothing can reach escape velocity and it becomes a blackhole. Compression continues forever making the star effectively infinitely small with infinite density.
However, regions of infinite density are ruled out by quantum mechanics. Even a blackhole must have a finite density - the smallest possible scale is the Planck length of 10-33m, and the smallest possible volume is a Planck cubed. Rovelli suggests that a blackhole collapses down to a minimum, but finite, volume and then explodes outwards again. And this process takes about 1 millisecond.
What? If we go back to Relativity it says that the closer we are to a large mass, the slower time will go for us compared to a distance observer. This is because of the fixed speed of light. Near a large mass, space is tightly curved and distances between points are compressed, but light goes the same speed (300,000 ms-1), so in order for the speed (ms-1) to remain the same, time must slow down. If a blackhole caused infinite density, then time would have to cease. But since matter it cannot be infinitely dense, due to the limit on how small a volume of space is, time must continue to pass, however slowly. But since the time dilation occurs to everything at once, subjectively time would probably continue to pass at the same rate near the mass. It is only a distant observer who would see things slowing down.
If we were able to travel down into the heart of a blackhole as it collapsed and bounced back, it would seem to take about 1 ms to us. Subjectively, inside the blackhole time would continue pass at normal speed. But if we are looking at a blackhole collapsing from several light years away, the process would appear to take billions of years. And this is why we don't see blackholes exploding.
If blackholes do explode then we ought to be able to see it, and this is something that astronomers can look for. Perhaps such explosions would be visible to the LIGO gravity wave detector or some future detector which is more sensitive?
At the moment this is just hand-wavy stuff. Something other than a singularity must exist in a blackhole, because of quantum mechanics, but we're not sure what it is yet. This is quite a cool scenario though.
Take a supermassive star. As it reaches the point where it has fused together the last fusionable elements, it begins to cool. Since the heat generated by nuclear fusion has been the only thing preventing gravity from collapsing all the matter into the centre, it begins to collapse. Matter from the star rushes towards the centre very fast, causing an implosion. This throws most of the matter back out into space, but at the very core matter becomes super-compressed. All the protons and electrons are converted into neutrons and these are squeezed into very dense neutronium that takes up very little space.
Relativity says that above a certain mass the neutron core of the star continues to be compressed by gravity and that there is no limit to this compression. If there is enough matter to start with, the neutronium becomes so dense that nothing can reach escape velocity and it becomes a blackhole. Compression continues forever making the star effectively infinitely small with infinite density.
However, regions of infinite density are ruled out by quantum mechanics. Even a blackhole must have a finite density - the smallest possible scale is the Planck length of 10-33m, and the smallest possible volume is a Planck cubed. Rovelli suggests that a blackhole collapses down to a minimum, but finite, volume and then explodes outwards again. And this process takes about 1 millisecond.
What? If we go back to Relativity it says that the closer we are to a large mass, the slower time will go for us compared to a distance observer. This is because of the fixed speed of light. Near a large mass, space is tightly curved and distances between points are compressed, but light goes the same speed (300,000 ms-1), so in order for the speed (ms-1) to remain the same, time must slow down. If a blackhole caused infinite density, then time would have to cease. But since matter it cannot be infinitely dense, due to the limit on how small a volume of space is, time must continue to pass, however slowly. But since the time dilation occurs to everything at once, subjectively time would probably continue to pass at the same rate near the mass. It is only a distant observer who would see things slowing down.
If we were able to travel down into the heart of a blackhole as it collapsed and bounced back, it would seem to take about 1 ms to us. Subjectively, inside the blackhole time would continue pass at normal speed. But if we are looking at a blackhole collapsing from several light years away, the process would appear to take billions of years. And this is why we don't see blackholes exploding.
If blackholes do explode then we ought to be able to see it, and this is something that astronomers can look for. Perhaps such explosions would be visible to the LIGO gravity wave detector or some future detector which is more sensitive?
At the moment this is just hand-wavy stuff. Something other than a singularity must exist in a blackhole, because of quantum mechanics, but we're not sure what it is yet. This is quite a cool scenario though.
13 October 2016
Faith
Extract from The Atheist and the Bonobo, by Frans de Waal.
"People simply believe because they want to. This applies to all religions. Faith is driven by attraction to certain persons, stories, rituals, and values. It fulfils emotional needs, such as the need for security and authority and the desire to belong. Theology is secondary and evidence tertiary. I agree that what the faithful are asked to believe can be rather preposterous, but atheists surely won't succeed in talking people out of their faith by mocking the veracity of their holy books or by comparing their God with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The specific contents of belief are hardly at issue if the overarching goal is a sense of social and moral communion. To borrow from a title by the novelist Amy Tan, to criticize faith is like trying to save a fish from drowning. There's no point in catching believers out of the lake to tell them what is best for them while putting them out on the bank, where they flop around until they expire. They were in the lake for a reason." (p.96)
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