Re: Making your mind up

On 2024-04-22 13:33:28 +0000, Martin Harran said:

On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:04:07 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<me@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

On 2024-04-22 10:36:02 +0000, Martin Harran said:
 

On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:39:56 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<me@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

On 2024-04-22 08:52:51 +0000, Martin Harran said:
 

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:08:58 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

On 17/04/2024 12:14, Martin Harran wrote:
 snip

 Another aspect that strikes me is how individual minds can operate
collectively, almost as if a new mind is generated as in mob hysteria
but also in other useful ways; as a management consultant delivering
management development programmes, one of my favourite topics was
showing how collective decisions are generally better than individual
decisions. Although that has long been recognised in management and
business,  I am not aware of any attempt to study it from a science
perspective.
 

 I read this a few days ago and thought "shhh keep your responses
relevant and focused, don't bring your latest hobbyhorse into every
conversation it's even vaguely reminiscent of" [I ask that you imagine
here Taylor Tomlinson miming the effects of antidepressants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47WXVTpnOyU&t=228s ]
 But that laudable instinct wore off apparently. You know what book has
some interesting things to say about collective decision-making? "The
Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ! \o/
 Actually one could argue it has a lot to say about decision-making in
general, it just gets at the problem from a very different angle than
the "how it works in the brain" that you seem to be talking about.
That's why I hesitated on the relevance front. But if a more high-level
discussion of how decision-making might work in its most general form,
that comes up with a very interesting perspective on the relationship of
individual humans to the collective, seems like it might interest you
it's a pretty short and (IMO) accessible book.

 I've added the book to my list but for somewhat different reasons than
what you have said above. I have long been intrigued by the ideas of
Teilhard de Chardin

 Have you read Peter Medawar's review of Theilhard de Chardin's book? I
can't find the complete review on the web, though I'm pretty sure it's
there: I've certainly read it, and I haven't got a subscription to
Mind. Anyway, some of the most characteristic parts are quoted here:
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2015/03/20/p-b-medawar-critique-of-teilhard-de-chardin/     I expect you won't like it at all, but others may.

 Full critique is available here:
http://bactra.org/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html

 Unfortunately my computer thought that link was dangerous, and wouldn't
let me go there. I'll try again when it's in a better mood.

I tried with a different browser that was less fussy. That worked OK. I agree with you that its more an attack on Teilhard's style than on his science.
The "tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit" has largely gone out of fashion in today's France: certainly I don't recognize it in the work of any French scientists that I know. Maybe some philosophers still use it -- I haven't read any of Derrida's musings for a long time, and I don't feel inclined to try again with him. We see a lot more on television than I would like of the world's greatest philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy. I think he's a poseur among poseurs. I'm not keen on Régis Debray either: I doubt whether many people would have heard of him if he hadn't been imprisoned in Bolivia.

 I read it some time ago. What I didn't like about it was that it is a
purely polemic attack on Teilhard, I didn't see any *scientific*
contradiction to his ideas. Can you point any out to me?

 I'll try to do so when I've managed to read the whole review again.

 FWIW, this article in Naure captures my own thoughts on it:
 https://www.nature.com/articles/35038172

Thanks for that reference. It's interesting, but I need to think more about it.
I was surprised by this passage:
"A good deal of hostility has been directed at the concept of the biosphere as an intelligent organism — James Lovelock's Gaia — and at astronomer Fred Hoyle's ideas on the extraterrestrial origin of life. Both met with popular enthusiasm before the scientific establishment would admit that they were candidate hypotheses."
When were either of these accepted as "candidate hypotheses"? By whom?

 <quote>
Medawar begged to differ [with Teilhard's ideas]: in 1961 he launched
an attack on The Phenomenon of Man — which by this time had become a
semi-popular classic — in the journal Mind; an article subsequently
anthologized and often quoted. He successfully demolished Teilhard's
arguments in 11 pages of awesome, sustained invective. Or did he?
Curiously, on close reading there is little real critical substance.
He complains of Teilhard's style (“tipsy prose-poetry”), some
technical shortcomings (“no grasp of the real weakness of modern
evolutionary theory”), but the main substantive issue is Teilhard's
misappropriation of scientific arguments to promote a religious
standpoint (“obscure pious rant”) and so duping a gullible public
(“educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical
thought”). We shall never know what Teilhard thought of Medawar, as
Teilhard died in 1954.
</quote>
 

 

 

that everything is on an increasing complexity
path - increasing complexity in particles leads to matter; increasing
complexity in matter leads to life; increasing complexity in life
leads to consciousness; increasing complexity in consciousness leads
to awareness; his belief that increasing complexity in awareness will
ultimately lead to the Omega Point.
 From the reviews I have read, I see echoes of that in Tomasello's book
so I will be interested to see to what extent, if any, that is the
case.

--
Athel cb