Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins & Scientific Wisdom.

DNA Pioneers: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. 

See : https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/dna_checklist

I recently re-watched a video I had recorded way back in the March of 2003. It was recorded from the UK's Channel 4 and was entitled DNA: The secret of life. It told the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins appeared on the programme. Also appearing was Raymond Gosling who at the time was a PhD student and lab assistant to Rosalind Franklin. According to the program Franklin and Wilkins of King's College were the experimentalists who generated the X-Ray diffraction patterns which so helped Crick and Watson to successfully theorise about the structure of DNA. It's not that the King's College team weren't theorists themselves, but they also did the hard work of getting the necessary experimental data about DNA. It is very easy to put Crick and Watson into the role of the "lazy lads" who just theorised together down at the pub and let others do the hands-on science. That they appeared to be riding on the backs of others was the cause of tension. But whatever, they were clearly very bright guys who can rightly claim credit for making the right inferences from the data. It didn't help the King's College team that Franklin and Wilkins had a poor relationship; in contrast it seems that Watson and Crick worked well together (and drank well together!). Also, that Franklin was a pretty woman in a largely man's world may have introduced frustrating pressures and detrimentally affected her attitudes. Or perhaps she was just a awkward personality.

The programme tells us of Watson and Crick's first attempt at a model. The King's College team came to have a look at this model. But when Rosalind Franklin saw it she laughed out loud; in the light of the experimental data the King's team had accumulated the model was clearly wrong. Watson & Crick were suffering from their working in a too rarified experimental semi-vacuum. Then one day Wilkins, who seems to have been an obliging sort of character, showed Watson an X shaped diffraction pattern that the King's team had obtained. Watson and Crick knew immediately that this implied DNA was a double helix and they went on to develop the correct model we are all familiar with.  Lab assistant Ray Gosling takes up the story:

Wilkins undoubtedly (and I think if you ask him he will say he did), if there are any cats to be let out of any bags, he had done it.

To which Wilkins responded:

Well I suppose it's perfectly true, but science isn't supposed to be kept in bags, no more than cats. I mean, I don't know what he means but I don't like as a scientist working away and sort of "Oh no! I mustn't tell the other scientists". I don't think it's the way to be working. Science ought to be an open activity, so you can work as a community. 

Well yes, in theory, that's the ideal world: that's wisdom we should aspire to, take home and act on: But no, we aren't in that kind of world; we're in a human world. Human beings can't be so detached and dispassionate. Competition, reputations, making a name for yourself, not to mention wealth & fame are at stake and have a strong tendency to trump the cooperation and community effort thing. The consequent mutual distrust means that people keep their cards close to their chests. Competition vs community effort! It's all very reminiscent of the capitalist conundrum of free market vs community.  And yet again I'm reminded of Philippians 2:1-11 which seems to be the key to community living. 

During the program, Maurice Wilkins also came out with another pearl of Wisdom. As we've seen Crick and Watson's first model was laughed off stage by Rosalind Franklin. But of this failed attempt Wilkins comments wisely as follows:

One might say but why not? It's an exploration to make a model. You make a model and if you make a bit of a fool of yourself in the process why worry? ....you might get lucky!

A big lesson there for all blue sky theorists: Its any exploration and there's no telling whether you are going to  make a fool of yourself or win the jackpot - most likely the former,. So enjoy he ride while it lasts; you may not be the chosen one after all!

Useful Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-science-did-watson-and-crick-really-steal-rosalind-franklins-data

Make it IDist proof and along comes a better IDist

                                 

In a Panda's Thumb post dated 5th May Evolutionary Mathematician Joe Felsenstein criticises Intelligent Design aficionado Granville Sewell for making the claim that the following problem is unsolvable: According to Sewell that problem is, how do we...

#3 Explain how life could have originated and evolved into intelligent humans, through entirely natural (unintelligent) processes.

Felsenstein quotes Sewell where Sewell explains why he thinks the foregoing problem is unsolvable (Emphases are mine):

Well, I have a very simple proof  [*GASP!*] that the biological problem #3 posed above is also impossible to solve, that does fit in the margin of this document. All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.

Is this really a valid proof? It seems perfectly valid to me, as I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence than that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones.

The irony is that the chief weakness of Sewell's argument is due to potential internal inconsistency in his world view; for presumably Sewell's a Christian theist who like myself believes in a created cosmos; all of it & not just some bits that God did! That means as far as we know those so-called "unintelligent natural forces" and their constants might have been intelligently selected to ensure that the evolution of life somewhere in the universe has a high probability given the size of the cosmos. If you are a Christian you are not supposed to be a dualist who sees the "natural world" as somehow, well.... natural and therefore inferior in some way; it is after all the creation of an omniscient omnipotence. 

Now, although many respected evangelical Christians are not at all adverse to evolution in terms of the proposed mechanisms of change (e.g. Tom Wright, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, Simon Conway-Morris, John Polkinghorne)  I myself do entertain considerable doubts about those mechanisms (But I accept the story of natural history - an important distinction there). My issue with evolution revolves around whether a structure I call the spongeam exists in configuration space (See links at end). But having said that I probably have more in common with these evangelicals than I do the de facto Intelligent Designers like Sewell who see the world through polarising filters, in this case  a natural forces vs God did it intelligent agency dichotomy. The logical outcome of this subliminally dualist world view is the kind of crass argumentation we get from Sewell which he then presents as a perfectly valid "proof". 

Given my doubts about standard evolutionary mechanisms and my I belief that Divine intelligence has acted and continues to proactively act in creation, particularly the creation of life, one might think I would find common cause with people like Sewell in spite of their dualism. But no, there is no chance of that; Politics has seen off that possibility. The de facto ID culture along along with its ugly fundamentalist sisters (Like Answers in Genesis) has gravitated toward the extreme right-wing even in some cases voicing the conspiracy theories of a "stolen" 2020 US election. Rejected by the academic establishment the de facto ID movement have fallen into the arms of right-wing "drain-the-swamp" fantasists whose liar-in-chief is Donald Trump, a man who seeks to overthrow the necessarily  argumentative, factionalism  & fractiousness of democracy with the illusion of a bucolic volk-libertarianism.*. To this far-right community the middle ground politics of Joe Biden looks like the far left! 

 

On the Spongeam

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/evolution-naked-chance.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-mathematics-of-spongeam.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/02/on-structuralism-and-spongeam.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/11/intelligent-designs-2001-space-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/algorithms-searches-dualism-and_13.html

Footnote

* The wealth making and innovating energy of the market is without doubt, but unfortunately that energy sometimes thrashes uncontrollably: The non-linear instabilities of the market and its power law wealth spectrum, often perceived as unjust, are liable to fuel alienation and far left socialism.  Community identification & the highly localised "serve yourself" operation of the market often find themselves at odds. Somehow the best of the free market and the best of community values have to be reconciled - the alternative is volk-libertarianism which will  generate a counter culture of alienation and extreme socialism. See here: https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/07/marx-vs-smith_30.html

Freewill and Determinism (Again)

Correspondence of formal structure isn't the same as correspondence of quality.

The first person perspective of conscious cognition is barely recognised as a reality in some cognitive science circles, perhaps even denied a real existence altogether in some cases. The reason for this, I propose, is because science is necessarily almost exclusively framed in third person narratives. The third person, by definition, takes the perspective of an observer external to the person who is the subject of observation and study. That external perspective is only ever going to return the subject person’s experience in terms of what the external perspective can only ever hope to observe (baring a "mind meld"); namely, ostensible patterns of the human presence; in the first instance human behaviour of which a closer look only yields the dynamical patterns of cells, neurons, fields, charges, currents, molecular chemistry etc. 

This latter fact seems to confound some people: It’s as if they expect consciousness, if it exists, should be discovered lurking like some mysterious but observable quintessence inside the brain. Since this hasn’t been found (and at my guess will never be found) then a naïve conclusion is that consciousness doesn’t exist. But in the highly focused third person account of human and neuron dynamics the equivalent of a magicians redirection trick readily comes into play and the obvious location of conscious cognition has been missed; that location is found not by looking at brain behaviours, no matter how close or detailed that look, but by looking back down the line of sight of the third person observer who in the final analysis is of course also the centre of another first person conscious perspective; the very act of observing, theorising, knowing and creating a third person narrative is an implicit acknowledgment of the existence of another first person perspective doing the observing and theorising. Third person narratives are meaningless apart from the implicit assumption that the first person observer and theoriser exists in the first place, for whom the narrative is meaningful.

Since the enlightenment formal third person narratives, as descriptions of the world, have undoubtedly proved to be overwhelmingly successful: They have identified the deeply organised wonder of creation and given us science, technology, and industry. Those narratives can be expressed in communicable formal terms of quantifiable “weights & measures” and dynamic geometry. The third person’s perspective on another person can be encapsulated in information that is transmissible & translatable between agents.  That information tells of a common underlying ontology that is the medium by which first persons perspectives can communicate and understand one another. 

The ontology of this common medium, an ontology which has a level of organisation which makes it amenable to being rendered in formal theoretical terms, reminds me of those industry standard page description languages (PDLs) like Postscript and PDF which make the world of document description portable and shareable between printing machines. A page description language isn’t an end in itself: Such “third person” narratives as PDLs are there to provide printing machines with the basis for supplying the rich colourful experience of printed output. The formal terms of PDLs are very different in quality to the printed page itself but they nevertheless have a very close functional relationship with one another.  PDLs are to the printed page as third person narratives are to human experience.

The formal third person narratives describing the ontology of the physical patterns of brain dynamics need make no reference to how this formal account of human beings breaks down into the qualia of conscious cognition; the human system appears to take care of that translation, thus betraying a close functional relationship between formal third person theories and the first person experience of conscious cognition. In the context of a potentially successful formal language description of human cognition (and the cosmos as a whole), it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that these formal third person narratives are a kind of page description language for human consciousness. The consequence is that in science and technology there is frequently a loss of connection between formality and feeling and when this has happened it has caused alienation. As I theorize in this blog post the misdirection which has lead to a loss of cognizance of the importance of consciousness as a central cosmic reality has led to the romantic reaction against what is perceived as the dehumanisation & deconsecration of the cosmos.

***

It is against the foregoing background that the “Free will vs Predestination/Determinism” contention must be discussed. I have already discussed this question in these posts:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-unintelligible-notions-of-free-will.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-incoherent-notions-of-free-will-and.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-incoherent-notions-of-free-will-and.html

I have to say that I’ve lost a certain amount of patience with those who bandy about the term “free will” without first giving us any notion as to what they mean by it. In the above posts I strongly criticise Christian Justin Brierley who launches into the topic determined to defend the notion of "free will" and attempts to smuggle past us his undisclosed understanding of “free will” (whatever that is) without ever examining whether he is dealing in an intelligible concept.

Actually, from the point of view from someone like Brierley it may well look as though I've come down on the side of determinism. In fact I came to the opinion that in a crude sense even a computer flowing through a deterministic program has “free will”, depending on how you define it. But of course human beings are just a little more complex and a little more mysterious that even the most complex computer algorithm. For a start it is quite likely that the human brain is capable of mathematically chaotic behaviour (It has non-linear feedback) which in turn would mean it is sensitive to the apparent indeterminism of quantum fluctuation: This may give humanity its unpredictable creative edge as it seeks to satisfy declarative goals with novel solutions. So, even from the third person narrative point of view, humanity is a very different kettle of fish to Turin computers. Much of my own view on the subject depends very much on my take on the nature of Disorder and Randomness; without the understandings embodied in my "book" on Disorder and Randomness I don’t think I could make much progress.

Really, whether or not human beings are mathematically deterministic, it actually has no effect on my understanding of “free will”: As I've already said even the execution of a deterministic algorithm can have “free will” after a fashion. But there is one aspect true of humans (and probably also true of parts of the animal kingdom such as chimps, dogs, cats, dolphins, octopus etc) that is not true of computers, even those computers running AI simulations: Viz: that is, it is probably meaningless to ask “What does it feel like to be a computer?”. Computers are not using the created physical regime in a way that “prints out” conscious thought and feeling. In contrast the complexities of biological architecture, as we know from our own first person perspective, generates conscious cognition. As such, human beings know what it feels like to be who they are and what it means to make “free choices”; that's true even if those free choices are mathematically determined in the abstract sense of having some complex deterministic algorithm capable of describing the events of consciousness in formal terms. Those who launch into this debate arguing in favour of, or against, some incoherent notion of freewill often do so with philosophical vested interests; either in order to maintain a Christian gnosto-dualism which contrasts "spirit" against matter, or because a thoroughgoing secularist philosophy prefers Christian dualism and believes the work of refuting a gnostic notion of "spirit" to be like shooting fish in a barrel (which actually may be true). But in subliminal fear of the mysteries of the numinous some secularists have fought shy of the idea that our physical regime is the medium which supports the first person perspective of conscious cognition * 

Footnote: 

* It would be very wrong to claim that all those who believe in a purely secular worldview deny the existence of the conscious perspective. Philosopher John Searle has made a strong case for the conscious first person perspective being an irreducible feature of our "material" world. However, unfortunately Searle has queered his pitch by being involved in sexual misconduct. 

ADDENDUM 18/05/21 & 3/06/21

18/05/21 The following addendum appeared on my post of  12/02/19: It concerns the rear view mirror perspective of history:

All our decisions, whether labelled as "determined" by determinists or "free-will" by "free-willists", eventually take their place in the fixed and "determined" resin block of history. In one sense we can look back on our decisions with a kind "God's eye view" on them with the potential of knowing those decisions and their results in full. The question then is this; does this perfect hindsight render what at the time were thought of as "free-will" decisions as no longer a case of "free-will" but somehow determined?  Or if we go back in time before the decisions were made does the fact that those decisions are, from a divine omniscient perspective, seen in a kind of hindsight, make them "determined"?  That is, does the mere existence of the omniscient render what would otherwise be "free-will" no longer "free will"?  I think that questions like this are an reductio ad absurdum for the whole "free-will vs determinism" contrived dichotomy. 

3/06/21 Here's another addition that came out of an email discussion. These notes concern the nature of the ontology on which our cosmos runs. 

As you know I've attempted to express the idealist philosophy several times. I think I can trace my idealism back to my dabbling in positivism at university. But strong positivism can go too far and almost become solipsist. Somewhere a balance needs to kept. Strong materialism has trouble defining what "materialism" means in the absence of experiencing and thinking observers and strong idealism has a problem with the reality of all that ontology that goes unobserved and unthought about. As Berkley realised however the idealist problems are well addressed once one brings in a sentient God whose mind can underwrite all that ontology beyond the human sphere. 

 I attempted to express my idealism in the introduction to my "book" Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity -. Another recent foray was in my blog entry on Freewill and determinism where I use the metaphor of a page description language. 

 But I think we are struggling here to express the true essence of the noumena; it's probably bound up with the stuff of God's mind on which the cosmic "simulation" is running and what chance do we have of understanding the essence of God?.  All we can do is describe the regular patterns of our experience and assume they are rooted in some kind of God given ontology. 

I tend to opt for circular logic: Viz The regular "material" world explains mind and mind gives meaning to materialism. That's why in my book "Gravity &* Quantum Non-linearity" I used the metaphor of a computer language compiler that is written in the very language it compile

***

Mathematics provides what I refer to as the formal structure of reality. But a formal structure without its translation into experience is meaningless:  Take for example the simulation of car in computer memory: if it's a good simulation it will have a one-to-one relationship with the parts of an actual car and also the dynamic relations between moving parts. This example is not so far fetched as I believe Babbage's analytical engine has been simulated in a computer before now in order to illustrate its workings. Now, a good simulation may mathematically, that is formally, be completely correct. But it lacks one thing: A simulated car isn't a car; you can't get in it and get the car experience; In order to get the experience of a car you have to translate all that formal structure via transduces, servo motors, converters and what not, all of which provide the on screen and inertial experience of driving. Ergo, formal structure only has meaning if it is translated into experience. 

 This is why I used the "page description language" metaphor in this post. Postscript is a formal mathematical language but it makes little sense unless it is there to provided the richness of the printed output experience. 

Science Ignoramus

The following letter sent to Norfolk & Norwich's Eastern Evening News is a priceless gem of science illiteracy. I don't have the date of the paper: I just happened to stumble across the letter  recently already in clipped form. 

As is the way with this kind of thing I did at first wonder if the letter originated from some mischievous journalist wanting to stir up a big mail bag for the letters page, but that we appear to have a name and address counts against that.

I'm sure 1930s schooling couldn't have been that bad, so it's likely that Fred has forgotten some very basic lessons and is also failing to put 2 and 2 together: "CO2 is most definitely not emitted from vehicle or aircraft exhausts et alia....." *GASP*!

The above letter isn't worth critiquing. In any case I'm sure the Evening News got their big post bag (& email box) of intelligent critics teaching Fred a thing or two about elementary science - at least I hope they did; it would restore my faith in Norwich people's grasp of reality! 

In spite of picking up at least some (if not enough!) lessons from the educational establishment in the 1930s Fred now effectively dismisses that establishment and writes them off as "learned" pundits telling us "squit". Paranoid delusions about a government plot to make money have filled in the spaces of his ignorance. If he's still alive today and a web user then he would be fertile ground for covid 19 conspiracy theorism!

Certainly, the establishment isn't exactly angelic (one need only think of Boris Johnson); that establishment is, after all, populated with sinners like the rest of us. But those who perceive the machinations of Machiavellian motives driving a baroque Agatha Christie style plot behind every government move are a nutritious seed bed for conspiracy stories. When the intuitions and feelings tell one that something is wrong and that one is otherwise unable to discover or articulate what is wrong, the "left brain", or what Steven Pinker has called the "baloney generator", gets to work to rationalise one's fears and invents an explanatory story; perhaps a story of conspiracy. Failure to see that one could be part of the problem need not enter into this story, for one may well be suffering from what Kenneth Clark calls that most fatal of delusions - one sees oneself as virtuous! This is what far-right popularism looks like at grass roots level. If exploited by a would-be-dictator self-righteous popularism is a ready tool for an opportunist to attempt to overthrow the argumentative, messy & factious democratic status quo. It's ironic that establishment overthrow is exactly what the far left also seeks. Marx, however, did correctly perceive that alienation is an aspect of even democratic societies and in fact are part and parcel with a democratic society; that's because democracy must (by definition) give space to dissention. 

Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, Epistemology & Evolution

The Time Traveler was confronted by a sphinx with a faint shadow of a smile on its face.

 

These notes are my side of a discussion I had with James Knight on Aumann’s Agreement theorem. I believe he is incorporating his views on the subject in one of his books (something to look forward to!). I don’t have time to write books myself but prefer to zip around from one subject to the next logging my thoughts as fast as I can in order to cover as much ground as possible in what time is left to me; there are just too many riddles to touch on! But you never know, anyone of them might throw further inspiring light on the meaning of life, the universe and everything!

In these notes I talk about evolution. I have a rather qualified and reserved view on evolution as it is currently understood. This current understanding implies that a mathematical object I refer to as  the spongeam ( my name; see links below for more details) must exist in configuration space. I personally have doubts about that. But evolution in the weaker sense of a natural history of change, whatever the mechanism(s) that have driven this change, has occurred over long ages. Observations based on the messages sent to us via fossil laden rock sediment is strong evidence of this history of change. So, when I refer to evolution below I am in most cases thinking “natural history” rather than “spongeam”.

On the Spongeam

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/evolution-naked-chance.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-mathematics-of-spongeam.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/02/on-structuralism-and-spongeam.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/11/intelligent-designs-2001-space-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/algorithms-searches-dualism-and_13.html

 

Introduction

Most Western people, as a matter of common sense, assume there’s an invariant ontology out there that is the depository of a common truth to be targeted and if possible converged upon. For most people this is an axiomatic trivialism. A minority of relativists, postmodernists, nihilists and cynics (“What is Truth?”) might question this axiom but most common sense people take the existence of a universal target ontology as given. Also, by and large Christians have no problem with an ontology of “truth” because they believe God is a rational creator (although rationality seems break down in the paranormal). But how to get to that truth is a much more vexed question; this is the epistemological question. 

What Aumann’s theorem doesn’t do is set out to prove that there is such a thing as a Truth to agree on. That’s not what the proof shows; that’s axiomatic as far as Aumman’s theorem is concerned, a theorem which  goes on to set a lower limit on the computational time needed for agreement assuming there is something to agree on. I see Aumann’s theorem as a department of epistemology because epistemology is about developing a concept of the world on the basis of the messages received from one’s context and that context includes messages from other people as well as the objects around us. Aumann simplifies this process using a relatively elementary model.

Actually it is possible to imagine circumstances where a successful epistemology is simply not possible; e,g, where sensory data is muddled,  chaotic or only erratically available and therefore there are then  no regular patterns to agree on (cf the paranormal). However, in these notes I’ve followed the axiomatic assumption that there is some solid common “truth” out there to be discovered and agreed upon.

If one accepts the common truth axiom then in one sense Aumann’s theorem isn’t so startling or surprising: If dispassionate observers share the same logic, share unobstructed communications and (eventually) the same “facts” then convergence toward agreement is an intuitively obvious conclusion; it all boils down to dispassionate observers ultimately sharing the same set of “facts” (for presumably the logic needed to massage those facts into a theoretical narrative is universal).

But of course human beings are far more advanced and complex affairs than simple dispassionate machines trying to share a limited set of facts in order to arrive at the same conclusions, as per Aumann’s theorem. Moreover, the world human beings find themselves in doesn’t present simple collections of facts on a plate that can then be shared willy-nilly. Fact gathering itself can be a hard graft; the cosmos doesn’t give up its facts that easily let alone hand them to us embedded in readymade theories.

Further; human beings are complex adaptive systems evolved to have a very complex suite of motivations and cognitive processes that fit them for a community life. That community life mediates both facts and theories; this immediately puts an entirely different complexion on the matter, way in advance of Aumann’s simple computer simulation, a  simulation not programmed with the trade-offs forced on us by social interactions and community belonging.

The world of Aumann’s theorem is a kind of toy-town cosmos not unlike the Ptolemaic cosmos – it’s a start, but its only start. I have in the past likened Aumann’s theorem to Olber’s paradox, a conclusion about starlight which proved to be wrong, but because it was wrong it pointed to the need to question the fundamental cosmological assumptions from which the paradox was derived. Olber’s paradox was therefore a profound result. Aumann’s theorem is also a profound result if it is seen in the right light.

The full copy of these notes can be found here

Egotistical Godfathers Fall Out

Alex Jones interview: Viewer discretion advised

 

The above video is a short clip of professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones foul-mouthing-off about Donald Trump, of whom he is "so sick". It's not surprising then that the video starts with this warning:

Warning: This video contains explicit langauge

The video goes on to tell us that:

Infowars Alex Jones has made millions of dollars by courting Trump's base.

In January of 2019, Jones told an interviewer that he was "sick" of Donald Trump.

On February 20, 2021, the Washington Post reported that federal investigators were probing the degree to which Jones and other extremists may have influenced those who stormed the Capitol building in Trump's name.

We then hear from Alex himself:

Part of me - the selfish part - wishes I'd never met Donald Trump, wishes I'd never met Roger Stone. Because unlike previous things I'd done that were game-changing, those were just time-space continuum reflections of the third big change I was gonna be involved in. And that was bringing Donald John Trump  into [unintelligible]. Just let me say that again: that's an awesome - into office. Because this is - you guys asking really good questions -  this is gonna be a really good thing. But I'm going to say it again in a minute [unintelligible].  It's the truth - I'm just going to say it - that I wish I never would've fucking met Trump. I wish it never would have happened. And it's not that the attacks that I've been through. I'm so sick of fucking Donald Trump man. God, I'm fucking sick of him.  And I'm not doing this because it's like I'm kissing his fucking ass, you know, it's just like I'm sick of it.  

Do it in a minute.....[That is, do the interview?]

Here's my interpretation of the Trump-Jones relationship.

Both Donald and Alex stood to gain from a cordial meeting: Donald could secure the support of Alex' followers and Alex could derive kudos and plausibility from Donald; it may also  have helped Alex widen his own support base.

Notice that Alex is so convinced of how awesome is his work and egotistical enough to believe that it was him who help put Donald into office (That's what Alex means by "game changing"). Alex may or may not be right about that as far as my information goes: If you took away the Jones' vote I really don't know how it might have affected the 2016 election, an election that was after all a close run thing whatever Donald might claim. But whatever, Alex appears to believe that Donald owes him the presidency. 

However, in the power stakes Alex was by far the weaker partner in the mutual back scratching relationship.  Donald, once in power, had no further need of Alex and so he retuned no further favours and I guess largely ignored Alex. When Alex met Donald he gave something away, namely he sealed the approval of his support base for Trump and he wanted a pay back for what he perceived as helping to deliver the Trump presidency; but he didn't get satisfaction. Alex now regrets his meeting with Donald who he feels failed to return the compliment. 

It's likely that Trump has never believed the insane fantasy world that Jones' peddles (in fact does Jones himself believe it?) but what the hell, he had got from Jones what he wanted. Moreover, Trump also had the QAnon conspiracy theorists on his side. Their boundless flattery, their lionisation of him and the heroic role they gave Trump in their delusional world must have satisfied even the planet sized ego of Donald J Trump. For Trump Jones was a useful idiot, for a while. But Jones felt he had been dumped and he was angry, very angry by the look of it; so angry that he had to calm down before he could start the interview. Unless Trump deigns to toss Jones a few more crumbs Jones won't be "kissing [Trump's] fucking ass" any more! I don't suppose Donald will miss that given the number of his supporters who appear to be queuing up to "kiss his fucking ass"!

Note 1: I haven't yet heard that any conspiracy theorists are claiming the above video to be a deep fake!

Note 2: Relevant link:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/alex-jones-leaked-video-trump_n_603eecd8c5b601179ec13706?ri18n=true

Note 3: Relevant link

‘Bye bye Q, I can’t talk to you any more’: What next for Alex Jones, America’s foremost conspiracy theorist? | The Independent

My FB contact with another Trump conspiracy theorist

The Christian Right’s Righteous Wrath

Golden Boy: When government degenerates into a personality cult.

On the 6^th January I succeeded in getting into conversation with another Trump supporting Christian conspiracy theorist, this time on the home page of a Facebook friend I shall call “Christine”. See here for my first conspiracy theorist encounter with someone I named “Steve Pastry”. Below I refer to my latest client as “Richard Sweet”.  As I sought to get information out of them both Pastry and Sweet were very guarded in their replies; they usually ignored or refused to answer the questions I put to them. This in itself is at once both understandable and informative; in fact it is to be expected of people who have fallen for the paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theorism. I should imagine that unless I came out unconditionally on their side they would be naturally very suspicious of me and by default assign me one of the roles on the dark-side of their fantasy world of good vs. evil. Moreover, the tactic of only releasing information sparingly works in their favour: The information black-out means that an outsider has to try and interpolate their views with all the risks of getting it wrong; admitting as little as possible means that the insider stays in control of the management of their identity.

What is very notable about the case in point is that before Sweet gave up on me he told me to “tap me on the shoulder” on the 20^th January (Biden’s inauguration day): Presumably he believed the prophecies of those charismatic prophets who prophesied that Trump would get a second term. Therefore, in order to preserve the integrity of these prophecies I guess that Christians like Sweet were expecting that there would be a turn of events before January 20^th which would reverse the election result and Trump would get his second term after all. Perhaps Sweet believed in the QAnon theory that Trump’s “Operation Storm” would be unleashed and those evil establishment figures, a mix of socialists, lefties, liberals, Democrats, academics, heretics etc would be rounded up and thrown in jail. (That would likely happen under a Trump dynastic dictatorship in any case!)

Well, on 21^st January I did tap Sweet on the shoulder and needless to say he ignored me. But I don’t suppose the failure of the 20^th to conform to his expectation put a dent in his faith: To a hardened conspiracy theorist there’s plenty of scope in their florid imaginings to multiply entities (contrary to Occam’s razor)  in order to fit the new data to an adjusted narrative, thus preserving the general thrust of the conspiracy theory – for example, I have heard rumour that some of them believe Trump is actually still the legal president in an undercover sort of way.

But whether gripped by the baroque fantasies of conspiracy theorism or not, the Christian right-wingers, in their righteous indignation, are foaming at the mouth in anger & fear. True, many of them may not accept full-blown conspiracy theorism but they all have a great tendency to see things in the very the black & white terms of an “us vs them” conflict. In spite of the fact that the Bible makes us all sinful shades of grey they are likely to see the world through a very polarised filter which places people into the “in group” of those for God (and therefore for their culture & Trump) or the many out-groups who are against God (and therefore against their culture & Trump); witness for example the Trump supporting Ken Ham’s character assassination of those who disagree with him; even of evangelical Christians (See here, here & here).

The Christian far right envisage America to be in the grip of a dark left wing plot to pervert society and persecute Christian fundamentalists. They make little distinction between true Marxists and mildly socialist reformers; for in the polarised lens of their worldview all those who don’t identify with their perspective are considered enemies of liberty and God. And of course, one can readily find examples of contrary-wise extremism on the left-wing and these examples are used selectively as evidence to justify the extremism of the Christian right-wing.

The Christian right’s angry fears particularly revolve round sexuality and gender. For them the XY chromosomes unambiguously entail a stereotypical “male” and XX chromosomes unambiguously entail a stereotypical “female”; this is more or less the extent of their gender pop-science. Among them there is little or no acknowledgment that XY and XX are just markers which are the starting trigger points for a complex process of biological and social development that in the majority of cases, but certainly not all, leads respectively to typical male and female genders & sexuality. But in some cases at least, biology and sociology may have other plans. For example, sometimes the XY combination is at the beginning of a process that fails to convert the default sex (female) into a typical male and the end result is a personality and physique more typically female than male. This is just one example of blended gender/sexuality. There are others.

Societal moves to try to cater for the fact that there is a minority of human beings who don’t necessarily have the typical binary gender/sexual traits are portrayed by fundamentalists as proof of a dark plot to persecute Christians. These fundamentalists will go so far as to call non-binary Christians like Vicky Beeching wicked and it is quite likely they will not accept them as true Christians. If legislation is put into place in an attempt to protect non-binaries from abuse and prejudice the Christian far-right will exploit this legislation as evidence of their own persecution. They are manoeuvring to engineer a confrontation with government on this issue and turn it into an either/or shibboleth. Like Islamic terrorists who try to stoke up conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims using terrorist violence, the extreme fundamentalists are effectively doing the same with their shibboleths; they are trying to shift society into the end-time apocalyptic conflict in which they feel they will play out their destiny as the children of light.

The polarised view of good vs evil leads fundamentalist Christians to believe the whole world is composed of “outgroups” who persecute them (perhaps the worst being heretic Christians like myself!). I call this imagined sense of persecution “proto conspiracy theorism”. It’s a feeling in the gut which can on occasion go on to develop into the mental complex of full blown conspiracy theorism with its fanciful byzantine narratives reminiscent of an Agatha Christie plot. A sufferer of proto-conspiracy theorism (as opposed to the full-blown version) is far-right Christian Ken Ham who as we've seen is very prepared to assassinate the characters of Christian evangelicals who don’t agree with him (As already linked to). He has shown evidence of a subliminal interest in conspiracy theorism.

The schismatic situation we see in the US has played into the hands of the (sociopathic?) egotist Donald Trump who has exploited and fanned the flames of division & fear in order to position himself as the true saviour of the right-wing Christian worldview. And yet he is a corrupt liar who has made positive noises toward the QAnon conspiracy theorists and the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; never mind that Alex Jones’ followers have persecuted the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre; Trump is after the conspiracy theorist’s votes. In the Facebook thread below we find more evidence of Trumpism’s inextricable connection with conspiracy theorism both in its proto and full blown forms.

c. Timothy V Reeves, March 2021

Foot note

*1 In Genesis 5:2 we read that God made them “male & female”. Through the polarising lens of the fundamentalist mindset this verse appears to clinch their argument that blended genders/sexuality doesn't or shouldn't exist. But of course “male & female” are natural language categories and like so many natural language categories the edges are fuzzy and not clearly defined.

(The full article can be found here)

Head vs Heart, Intellect vs Feeling?

I can't comment on the validity of the left brain/right brain caricature above or Michael Gazzaniga's split brain experiments, but it's a fitting metaphor for the spiritual existential crisis found among some evangelical Christians, a crisis which prompts them to see "heart" and "head" as worlds apart. But conscious cognition straddles both hemispheres of the brain.

In this time of social lockdown I have been listening to some online services at a nearby church and I was intrigued by one particular sermon series that was trotting out a very familiar spiritual motif. Quoting from my blog post about this motif, I said that this series promotes....

....a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the "touch of God", an "encounter with God" or an "infilling" may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of  some kind of inner spiritual light.

There are shades of gnosticism & fideism here: As I have remarked many times before, the kind of philosophical dualism which I believe underlies the series filters Christian reality through the cliché of a heart vs head dichotomy.  In this context one often hears (as I have heard during this series) about the need to submit the profanities of the intellect to the ineffable and sacred revelations found in sublime experiences of the divine presence. It’s a caricature of the left brain vs the right brain contention and yet I would set against this the proposal that conscious cognition, which is the A to Z of experience, is likely to straddle both the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

As Kenneth Clark once expressed, we are still the offspring of the romantic movement, the movement which rebelled against the apparent primacy of the mechanical and the intellectual, a primacy which grew out of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Human feeling, instincts and sensibilities found themselves floundering as they ran up against the implications of automation and the automaton: Our industrial machine culture is haunted by the suspicion that humans too (along with their their natural context) are just another application of unfeeling mechanism, albeit a very sophisticated application*. This was the backdrop for the mysticism of the romantics as they attempted to re-establish the primacy of human feeling and the sublime mystical atmosphere that one senses to be at the heart of nature.

But industrial wealth and its concomitant science is evidence of the success of the mechanistic and intellectual take on reality. The third person perspective in which scientific accounts of reality are framed was and is vital intellectual fuel for the progress of industrial wealth and knowledge. This wealth and knowledge is overwhelming evidence of the fundamental truth and place of mechanism in our world. This paradigm has loomed large in our society and its obvious success in providing wealth and knowledge have given it an almost intimidating authority; in fact given the spiritual egocentricity of humanity it can be frightening; spiritual humanity have become strangers in their own cosmos. 

The scientific project which illuminated the cosmic place of mechanism put an end to the temple of the Ptolemaic universe, a temple where man was manifestly at the centre of divine purposes. Unsurprisingly, then, it would only be a matter of time before the suspicion that humans were themselves just (complex) mechanisms would lead to the human organism being put under the intellectual microscope in an attempt to arrive at a mechanical account of humanity.  But in spite of the successes, the fallacy of hope in illuminating human nature with science and ushering in a golden age of reason and human social progress proved to be illusory.  Something was missing.

***

Technology and science have become victims of their own overwhelming success. Their amazingly effective third person narratives have redirected the attention of many thinkers away from the obvious. That is, they have lost sight of the fundamental basis of those narratives; namely that they have their origins in the first person perspective of conscious cognition: This perspective is always implicit in science as the scientific observer and experiencer of those observations which necessarily provide the evidence of science's third person theories. In short scientific data always leads back to a consciously cognating observer experiencing observations and joining the "data dots" of experience with theoretical accounts. But in the heady stratosphere of a breathtakingly successful and heroic techno-scientific project, the authenticator & cornerstone of all science, namely the first person perspective, has become almost invisible. The inner story of human consciousness has not only been marginalised but in some cases even been outright denied existence by those who have been overwhelmed by the trick that successful science has played on their minds and they have failed to see what is in front of their noses. 

There is a subtlety here that may have fazed the consciousness deniers: It is conceivable (and not impossible in my view) that a complete third person narrative explaining the human mind in terms of its "material" constituents of particles, fields and dynamical equations may eventually be arrived at. Although this has not yet been achieved many strides in this direction have been made and just the prospect of a complete "material explanation" of humanity might easily be taken to imply the absence of consciousness..... a third person account of humanity may become so complete as to leave the false impression that there is no room for consciousness; like the God of the gaps the consciousness of the gaps has apparently been crowded out of the third person perspective, apparently dehumanising the human.

But look again: The apparent absence of conscious cognition in the third person scientific account is simply down to the fact that this account is made from the stand point of an observer-experiencer who is external to first person and who therefore will not (by definition) experience the experiences of the first person. All the external observer is able to see of another person are the patterns and behaviour impressed on the material dynamic. But in the final analysis the third person observer has, of course, their very own first person sense of conscious cognition. In effect, then, we have the mind of an observer giving an account of another mind in terms of the observers own first person experiences and theories. As I have remarked in the introduction of my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity the third person account of humanity is written in terms of the human observer's conscious cognition and this is reminiscent of the way a computer language compiler can be written in the self same language it compiles.   

For me it is obviously axiomatic that the third person can only experience the first person as a dynamic configuration of matter, matter which has to be appropriately configured before it generates the qualia of conscious cognition.  Matter is the common medium by which first persons are able to become aware of one another and above all successfully communicate. But the two accounts of the first and third persons have to be brought together as a complementary whole; either account does not exclude the other. Both solipsists and consciousness deniers are working with a partial apprehension of reality.

***

As society has become more complex and dependent on technological artifacts it is the third person language which rightly takes up most of our time; after all, a society is about cooperation & communication and communication demands that shared material medium controlled by universal laws. But the downside is that the vocabulary of the first person with its qualia of conscious cognition is apt to become marginalised, buried and perhaps even lost; at best relegated to the counselling rooms in a society dominated by the mechanical and the intellectual. In the face of the kudos and power of science's third person perspective, a sense of alienation has set in. The essence of core humanity, namely its conscious cognition, is in danger of being swamped like the lives of the slaves in Turner's painting (see below). In a burgeoning technical culture our well meaning reactionary Christian preachers are like those wallowing in the waves as they fight to restore the life. & dignity of humanity. Their response is typical of the romantic response which seeks to reaffirm the special and divinely ordained place of humanity. I understand this response completely, but when it tips over into irrationality, fideism and quasi-gnosticism it is reactionary & misguided. For them the third person becomes at best a spiritually inferior companion and at worst a blockage to sublime gnosis. But reactionary preachers can themselves be equally if not far more authoritarian and intimidating as the science status quo. In fact sometimes they are even prepared to invoke fear with the threat of divine displeasure if their views aren't followed through. 

The backdrop of industrial society places huge demands on the human intellect to handle the third person narratives that cover science, technology and the business of day to day running. But the protest by romantics is prone to overcompensating extremes as it tries to escape the apparently alienating external world by its retreat into the depths of the inner life and its mysteries. The romantic reaction is especially a protest against those who even go as far as to deny that the conscious inner life has any substance or meaning beyond the third person perspective of material configuration. The gnostic protest against "intellectualism" and the latter being contrasted over and against sublime inner experiences is the stock-in-trade of Christian romanticism. But the creation wasn't created by a demiurge but by God himself whose omniscient omnipotence has provisioned his rational creation with the facility to generate conscious cognition when the right dynamic conditions are met.

As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in his Civilisation episode The Fallacies of Hope: 

We've a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet.. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope. 

The potentially dehumanising effects of industrial society; the slave traders

either didn't care about of couldn't perceive the humanity of their merchandise. 

Footnote (added 19/10/2021)

* One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is assumed then that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral.  No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (amounting to action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy.  The oft overriding and superficial response to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is entirely mindless in that clearly in and of themselves these interactions have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. It is ironic that this superficial response is endemic among the de-facto Intelligent Design community of North America. But then there is this.

OK, the mechanical picture of cosmic development with its purely bottom-up as opposed to top-down vision is at first sight a challenge to an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.  But if one starts to push a little harder the wall of that challenge starts to crumble. 

Reversibility and the Arrow of Time

The arrow of time, especially that introduced by the second law of thermodynamics, has been at the centre of a paradox, a paradox that comes about as follows.....

The fundamental  equations of physics are deterministic and by and large reversible in time*; that is, if  one replaces the time variable t with -t then the essential form of the fundamental equations remains the same. It is therefore impossible to tell from the dynamics constrained by these equations whether time is going backward or forward; the very concepts of backwards and forwards time doesn't exist at the level of the fundamental laws. And yet our macroscopic experience of reality is that there is very definitely a direction to time: For if we play the film of macroscopic reality backwards it presents a very different aspect to the forwards film, not least because of the second law of thermodynamics, a law which tells us that the disorder of an isolated system always increases as time progresses forwards. But - and here's the rub - the reversibility of the fundamental equations of physics, at least at the microscopic level, means that these equations have as many "forward" solutions as they have "backward" solutions, all of which obey the same equations; this follows because the replacement of t with -t implies a one-to-one relation between backward and forward solutions. Therefore for every solution where entropy is increasing there must also be a solution where it is correspondingly decreasing. Therefore if we randomly select boundary conditions then the probability of selecting a solution where entropy is decreasing will be equal to the probability of selecting a boundary condition where entropy is increasing

Why then the clear macroscopic distinction between the backwards and forwards film and the ubiquity of the second law?  This question is known as  "Loschmidts's paradox". Apparently only recently has this paradox has been addressed professionally via the Fluctuation Theorem;  see  here.  One issue I would have with this theorem is that it takes "cause & effect" as axiomatic concepts.  But I'm not so sure that cause & effect are robust enough notions to be used in an axiomatic way (See my post here for more).

At one level the second law is fairly self evident: Given a macroscopic system state, a state which is usually understood in terms of the systems macroscopic statistical properties (e.g temperature, pressure, volume, mass. distribution, density etc), then the entropy, S,  of the system is  defined by:

S = k Log W

...where k is Boltzmann's constant and W is the number of microscopic combinations consistent with the macrostate as defined by the value of its statistical variables. If we take this statistical weight definition of disorder and we imagine a dynamic where some sort of random walk between microstates is in operation then migration to a higher a disorder (that is migration to macrostates with a higher statistical weight)  is a fairly self evident outcome.  But then random walk isn't deterministic let alone reversible. 

I thought I would have quick think about Loschmidt's conundrum myself and to this end I've come up with what follows.

***

We start by imagining  a set of concentric 3D spheres; that is a set of nested spheres so that the whole picture looks like a large onion. (Actually it would be nearer the truth to imagine an n-dimensional set of nested spheres, but the 3D picture of the onion should suffice). Let each sphere of the onion represent a macroscopic state where the magnitude of the surface area of a sphere represents the magnitude of the disorder of the macrostate - that is, the area of each sphere of the onion quantifies the number of microscopic combinations states consistent with the macrostate. Hence, the larger the nested sphere the greater the disorder of the macrostate it represents. 

We can represent the dynamic development of a system in time by a path in the space enclosed by the onion.  For all we know at this stage such a path could zig-zag around in the space of the onion any-old-how. But if we are dealing with deterministic equations where the exact microstate of the system determines both the direction and speed of development at each point on the path it is then not possible for any two development paths to cross..... this follows because at the crossing point there would be a choice of directions to move in and this would mean that the microstate then doesn't determine the speed and direction of motion through the onion. This contradicts the stipulation of strict determinism. Hence, none of the possible paths through the onion will cross.

However, for all we know at this stage even these non-crossing pathways could still violate the second law and there remains the possibility of a development path which at some point could move toward the centre of the onion thus implying a decrease in entropy in time. But if we require the stipulation that disorder can only increase in time then it means that all motions in the onion could only ever be outwards. 

So, given the following assumptions:

Assumption 1: The second law of thermodynamics  

Assumption 2:  That the fundamental laws are deterministic,

then we have concluded this:

Conclusion: All motions in the onion are outward motions and these motions form a set of non-crossing streamlines. 

But this conclusion leads to a contradiction. For if we follow these streamlines back toward the centre of the onion then because they are non-crossing stream lines this means that each sphere has an equal number of development lines passing through it. But if the point where each streamline crosses one of concentric circles of the onion designates a single microscopic combination then it follows that the disorder value remains constant both in backwards and forwards time.  This is clearly an anti-physical conclusion. So what is wrong?

***

Because by requirement disorder must increase as we move outwards through the onion then the number of development lines crossing the spheres of the onion must also increase as we move outwards.  The only way that can happen is if the paths form a branching pattern as they move outward; that is they bifurcate into one or more branches as does a tree when we follow its limbs upwards and outwards.  The consequences of this "tree" picture are this:

ONE) The forward time development paths can not be deterministic; for if we take any branch point then it means that the microstate at that point doesn't fully determine where the system will advance to in the next move on its outward path. A branch point, by definition, gives a choice of ways. 

TWO) And yet the time reversed motion may still remain deterministic: Following a simple branching pattern backwards will always take us back to the same place; (or if there is an element of in-determinism in going backwards, following the branching pattern backwards will take us to fewer possible places than if when we move forward in time).

THREE) In this branching pattern scenario cause & effect turn out to be meaningful ideas: Looking forward in time into a branching pattern we find that there are many possible routes by which the systems could have traveled backwards in time to the current state. We therefore are unable to attribute the current state to a definite cause emanating from the future. But because looking backwards we do find that the current state of affairs would have developed from a restricted number of starting states the idea that today's state had a fairly specific cause rooted in the past makes more sense.  

FOUR)  The branching pattern means that in looking forward in time we find a far greater number of possibilities open to the future than the possibilities in the past from which the current macrostate could have evolved from. The progressive branching as we move away from the centre of the onion ensures there are far more possible paths into the future than there are back into the past. Therefore if we are choosing possible paths at random then there is a far greater probability of the system increasing in disorder than in it increasing its order.

The foregoing tells us that the dynamic which controls our world cannot be deterministic. This suggests that the apparent random jumps in the quantum mechanical state vector are real events. 

Footnote:

* See the link below for a qualified view on the reversibility of the laws of physics:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/05/no-the-laws-of-physics-are-not-the-same-forwards-and-backwards-in-time/?sh=4c9a489d61ec