What's wrong with reason

An excellent (read: largely accorded with my prejudices) item on reason in the current New Scientist. It is a collection of thoughtful articles from a range of authors on the limitations of reason

One quick comment from me, though. In the editorial for the item we have:

The rationalist world view has been incredibly successful, transforming human life vastly for the better.

It certainly appears so for me, those around me, and probably most of the readership of the New Scientist. But, maybe we're only a privileged minority. Would everyone else agree that human life has been transformed vastly for the better? What, for example, would the Haitians eating mud cakes have to say about it? I know the evangelists of reason and science would argue that the problem is that the Haitians and others just don't have enough reason-and-science, but there are other stories you could tell. Could it be, for example, that reason and science have just proved to be a powerful tool that enable us (West, North, developed world, professionals - whatever 'top' group you care to choose) to exploit them (East, South, developing world, unskilled)?

The Passion of the Western Mind

From sofia (magazine of the Sea of Faith Network) July 2007:

... 'participatory epistimology' put forward by Richard Tarnas in his book The passion of the western mind, in which human beings are themselves regarded as an essential vehicle for the creative self-unfolding of reality. According to Tarnas, 'Nature's reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather it is something that come into being through the very act of human cognition.'

While I'm on this topic - which I'm labelling as 'Frayn' for a shortcut in reference to his book - here is a quote from Alves (Rubem Alves: The The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet, p52) that I jotted down a while back.

It is not the universe which is the meaning of the word. It is the word which is the meaning of the universe.

(I can hear certain people I know mocking this... I know, but I like it.)

Unified theory of the brain

Based on the concept of 'free energy' from thermodynamics.

In New Scientist 28 May 2008.

... the concept of "free energy" as it applies to artificial neural networks. Free energy originates from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, .... It is roughly equivalent to the difference between the total energy in the system and its "useless energy", or entropy... mathematically equivalent to a problem he was familiar with: the difference between the predictions made by an artificial neural network and what it actually senses. ... whether the same concept could underlie the workings of real brains. [...] Around 2005 he proposed that a "free energy principle" explains at least one aspect of brain function - sensory perception.

As usual, I've put this here for my own notes - it is linking 'big' things to information.

Paintings and stories

Tom Lubbock talks about paintings telling stories.

In the 'Great Works' item in the Independent 27th June 2008, Tom Lubbock discusses 'The Bellelli Family' by Edgar Degas. (See it here in the Musee d'Orsay Gallery website.) He comments:

The nearest pictorial thing to the 19th-century novel is the 19th-century portrait

I've often had a problem with picture galleries, and I've idea of what my problem might be - there's too much information in the paintings. All those novels hanging on the walls. You wouldn't expect to get a lot out of walking around a library and spending a few minutes reading each of dozens of different novels.

Roederer

I'm currently reading J. G . Roederer "Information and its role in nature" and need to somewhere to record notes. I'll do it here.

(This is, even more than usual, really only addressed to myself. I might come back to edit this post, to add more notes as I go along.)

Page 26: Effective Complexity. "The algorithmic information needed for description of [...] regularities and their probabilities." A plot of effective regularity against randomness looks like this.



Roederer points out that it is like the a plot of entropy against probability for a binary source. But for me the more interesting similarity is with Gerda Smets plot of pleasure against complexity.