The machine model has been the pervasive metaphor in science for 200 years - Why is this model so attractive and how does it feed our trans-human fantasies?
Don't think it's the RHB that doesn't know what a woman is - it's a wokified lefty that has trouble with that distinction - no relationship to the right hemisphere I'm afraid.
A comparative evaluation of the intellectual styles prevailing on the right and left of the political divide turns out to be entirely consistent with leftists being trapped in a left hemisphere dominant mode.
This was a furiously interesting piece, well worth the time it took to read.
While your main focus, appropriately enough, was a critique of the mechanical metaphor as applied to biology, precisely the same points can be made about every other level of reality. As you note, subatomic particles are better thought of as process flows rather than static objects. Precisely the same is true of stars, galaxies, or the cosmos. What does it mean for a galaxy to be 'turned off'? Or for that matter, 'turned on'? It's an essentially meaningless question.
Following the implications of that way of perceiving reality furthermore imply that intelligence is to be found at every level. There's no particular reason to assume that cognition begins at the scale of a cell. Subatomic wave/particles can be readily viewed as possessing an elementary awareness. And of course, if consciousness goes all the way down (and all the way up), there are profound moral implications for how humans should best relate to the world.
I don't know if you got a chance to watch the lecture by David Tong on quantum fields and the standard model (in the reference section), and you are probably familiar with the concepts of the standard model, but I find this rather illuminating. That there really are no 'things' as we would assume, but even the smallest elements are but 'bumps' in the wave function that permeates everything, everywhere. If everything manifests from a plane of possibility and all things are necessarily connected then at the fundamental level, the machine model (discrete parts in a chain of cause and effect) seriously falls apart.
John maybe you can help me out here - as you write some "furiously interesting" pieces yourself. It seems this piece here has had only had about 20% of the attention compared to everything else I've written lately - including short, off-the-cuff, discussion threads. As you would know, it takes a lot of time to write a longish piece like this, and I'm doubting now that this is what people want. Maybe the 20-30min it takes to read is too much to ask for?
I want to engage people not turn them off. What's your wisdom on this?
Am I better keeping things under say 1,500 words or so?
It's the length for sure. I know for myself, if I see a piece is <10 min, I'll usually read it more or less immediately; if a piece is 30 min, there's a much better chance I postpone and then don't get around to it. My attention span is on the long end of the general population (although maybe normal for the substack population), so my assumption is that what's true for me is probably generally true for most readers.
So, my advice would be to break long pieces like that up into shorter chunks of no more than 10 min, and present them as an ongoing series.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and writing. I would never have been introduced to McGilchrist otherwise.
I know nothing of quantum physics or quantum mechanics. The concepts you present here do not seem to directly dispute an understanding of healing with which I was raised, innate intelligence.
I was thinking too of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. Rather than fear and despise the monster they create, as Victor did, would the transhumanists be in love with their creation?
I think they are in love with whatever they are creating. The myth of Prometheus is apt I think - especially in the aspect of overreach in technologies aim for perfection. There's some deep philosophical roots to explore here and many a modern Dr Frankenstein are among us!
Well I think Paul is spot on - I wouldn't beat around the bush myself about the identity of principalities and powers creating the undercurrents of this age and all the ends to which Paul mentions: the end of history; the end of transcendence; the death of God; a permanent revolution; death of the sacred; the uprooting of everything; liberation from everything; to go beyond nature, and replace us. Those who deny we are in a spiritual battle are prone to become cogs in this machine of annihilation and Romans 1:22-25 may become true of them.
May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
Mattias Desmet said it best, without needing a belief in higher order.... (I see nature as the "god" and because of this complexity- it shows "intelligence")
He said that it's a complex dynamical system that has been found to do irrational things.
I agree, like with complicated machines, you sometimes get the "ghost in the machine" happen, which is where the machine acts out of its intended logic.
PS- Quantum theory is easily debunked by questioning the way the experiments were run, too many assumptions on the instruments used and a couple of contradictions (the time paradox) which pretty much show that it's a mathematical game being played in physics, trying to observe the invisible, much like virology is a sham too. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdAkAC4ItcFyNFBywN0wiZ45pCnMr-Ay
"Ghost in the machine" is interesting isn't it? We have a propensity to easily anthropomorphize intelligent-looking machines, and now even more so with AI. So that's something confounding for us. And as you allude to, the machine acting in a way that maybe wasn't intended to by the designer. Going back to the idea that the fabric of everything is flow and everything is connected to everything else - it's no wonder these sorts of anomalies happen.
PS- Rob I'm no quantum physicist, obviously, but it does seem to me that the current view isn't a theory of particle physics but something closer to the idea of an ether - Schrodinger's Ether Wave Equation suggests the whole field really should be called "non-quantum wave theory" or something of the like. (as the basement of the material world is not quanta, like particles, but waves whereby peaks manifest as particle-like). So I'm not sure it's a sham or what is to be debunked.
Virology, however, could well be a complete sham (along with a lot of other stuff that came with germ theory medicine/pharmacology).
I haven't had a look at the link yet but will do so when I have a moment.
Again - no expert here - but find it all very interesting.
A theory is only as good as it's proof. I call quantum stuff a hypothesis, especially because we cannot truly test it. It's kind of like the idea of god or alternate realities existing. We cannot say no, as everything is possible. We cannot say yes, because it is essentially unproveable.
Perhaps that is the best way to approach things like death, not expecting a result. I also don't expect that we will be able to show that everything is made or waves or not. Didn't string theory and M-theory try to say this too?
I get your point. As far as I know string theory is still saying this - a grand theory of wave function to explain everything. I did start a book on string theory but my grasp of mathematics wasn't up to the task and so I abandoned the book after only a few hours of struggle. I'm guessing you are more on the physics side of things? I'm just a psychologist :-)
May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
A lot of modern physics today is a lot of math without much actual experimentation. Whenever they have a problem with a formula, they invent a new particle (or dark matter/dark energy) to show that the formula works. Instead of discovering and then explaining how/why, they have a how/why and then they go and look for it. An old timer physicist explained it that way.
Another funny about string/M theory. I heard Michio Kaku talking about it once on the radio and laughed my ass off. He said that some of these dimensions are infinitesimally small. What the F? A dimension is infinite!
I was in engineering but past a certain level of math,required things got very difficult for me. I couldn't see what things represented, so it stopped making sense to me.
I also saw the writing on the wall that it was going to be outsourced/reduced in scope (need less engineers to design with computer simulations etc). I went into repair and troubleshooting of industrial machines, where my right brain thinking works well in seeing the big picture. Have you read the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell? It's pretty much the right brain that can sense when things are out of place etc. That's why I brought up the ghost in the machine, the more complex the machine (more sensors, more logic, more unknown conditions showing up) you end up with the same exact machine acting irrational at times.
Psychology is cool. Have you heard of Mattias Desmet? He's pretty much nailed the current covid mania state, perhaps it's the left brained people that are easily hypnotizable because they think in parts and not much of the whole. I feel the same about these physicists and virologists who go to school to pretty much be number pushers. Heck even medical science has become a complex numbers game (genetics).
Edit addition:
I forgot if I told you about Leonard Shlain, a surgeon who wanted to be a psychiatrist (and himself is both left/right brained) did a great lecture called alphabet vs the goddess about how written language changed how humanity thought. The written word changes what is "real" to many people, even if it doesn't match reality. History just amplifies it, because we rely on the past to see today and the future.
I think that with math the same thing happens. Some of us know what the numbers/symbols represent,- which is a right brain thing based in reality. But many left brained people go into math thinking that the numbers are the reality, not a map of reality. That would explain why modern physics has gone into inventing more and more things that have not been or cannot be observed and tested.
I'll keep that in mind about theoretical physics - they do theory first and then look for something to fit, rather than discovering something and then working out the proof or theory. Very good point.
Yes read a lot of Gladwell's stuff - I like his style.
Yes watched a bit of Desmet and understand his take on mass formation (nothing new, a summary really from a number of authors who wrote about it in the first half the 20th Century).
McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary talks about language and how thinking in a different language changes your perception of reality - he also touches on maths and how Chinese, for example, have a different way of thinking about mathematics than do say native English speakers - very interesting.
This concept is very important to apply to medicine, and unfortunately, it isn't very often. When it is, it usually comes with a lot of complementary and alternative medicine, most of which isn't evidence based, but tends to work when it is combined with positive lifestyle modification that is often the active ingredient. How can we break people out of LHB fixation? It seems very important that we do if we want society to become a healthier emergent natural process. Can society have an optimal state of well being? I think as much as an individual can.
We do need to come back to a right-left hemispheric balance - where the right is the master, as McGilchrist points out so well. How do we do this? By understanding the bias of the increasingly dominant left hemisphere and counteracting that with the right (activating right hemisphere dominance) - of course the complete answer is a book... Oh wait! Iain McGilchrist has done the heaving lifting for us! Thus my summaries and commentaries on his work - hopefully some will take it to heart and change their way of thinking about the world and the pendulum swings back to centre.
All the best with your Substack - looks really interesting!
I've surmised that his book is massive and dense, so your summaries are much appreciated! Does he include any cognitive skills/exercises to accomplish activation of right hemisphere dominance, or is it just something that is facilitated by understanding the paradigm and enhancing self-awareness? Army Master Resiliency Training (MRT) has skills that enhance self-awareness that I think could be useful in this regard.
He doesn't formulate anything like skills training - it's more philosophical - yet the understanding of what is going and enhancing self-awareness is probably more than half the battle. I've presented this sort of material to masters level psychology students and it has been an absolute revelation to them and for weeks afterwards they would bring it up - noticing the left-hemispheric bias in themselves and the world around them. They stop, reflect, and choose to look at things differently. Sounds like MRT could be helpful if you incorporate this whole notion of left and right hemisphere ways of being in the world.
No, I'm saying I'm not going to let your LHB design life for my RHB reality ;-)
Don't think it's the RHB that doesn't know what a woman is - it's a wokified lefty that has trouble with that distinction - no relationship to the right hemisphere I'm afraid.
Since you raised the question of wokeness and hemispheric cognitive differences, I explicitly address that here:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/left-and-right-brains-and-politics
A comparative evaluation of the intellectual styles prevailing on the right and left of the political divide turns out to be entirely consistent with leftists being trapped in a left hemisphere dominant mode.
Honest question: are you familiar with McGilchrist's work, and did you actually read the essay I linked (or Winston's several essays on the subject)?
This was a furiously interesting piece, well worth the time it took to read.
While your main focus, appropriately enough, was a critique of the mechanical metaphor as applied to biology, precisely the same points can be made about every other level of reality. As you note, subatomic particles are better thought of as process flows rather than static objects. Precisely the same is true of stars, galaxies, or the cosmos. What does it mean for a galaxy to be 'turned off'? Or for that matter, 'turned on'? It's an essentially meaningless question.
Following the implications of that way of perceiving reality furthermore imply that intelligence is to be found at every level. There's no particular reason to assume that cognition begins at the scale of a cell. Subatomic wave/particles can be readily viewed as possessing an elementary awareness. And of course, if consciousness goes all the way down (and all the way up), there are profound moral implications for how humans should best relate to the world.
Yes great comments!
I don't know if you got a chance to watch the lecture by David Tong on quantum fields and the standard model (in the reference section), and you are probably familiar with the concepts of the standard model, but I find this rather illuminating. That there really are no 'things' as we would assume, but even the smallest elements are but 'bumps' in the wave function that permeates everything, everywhere. If everything manifests from a plane of possibility and all things are necessarily connected then at the fundamental level, the machine model (discrete parts in a chain of cause and effect) seriously falls apart.
John maybe you can help me out here - as you write some "furiously interesting" pieces yourself. It seems this piece here has had only had about 20% of the attention compared to everything else I've written lately - including short, off-the-cuff, discussion threads. As you would know, it takes a lot of time to write a longish piece like this, and I'm doubting now that this is what people want. Maybe the 20-30min it takes to read is too much to ask for?
I want to engage people not turn them off. What's your wisdom on this?
Am I better keeping things under say 1,500 words or so?
It's the length for sure. I know for myself, if I see a piece is <10 min, I'll usually read it more or less immediately; if a piece is 30 min, there's a much better chance I postpone and then don't get around to it. My attention span is on the long end of the general population (although maybe normal for the substack population), so my assumption is that what's true for me is probably generally true for most readers.
So, my advice would be to break long pieces like that up into shorter chunks of no more than 10 min, and present them as an ongoing series.
Great advice - I'm doing that with The Master Betrayed and it seems to be palatable for most - so good strategy. Thank you Captain Carter.
Any time.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and writing. I would never have been introduced to McGilchrist otherwise.
I know nothing of quantum physics or quantum mechanics. The concepts you present here do not seem to directly dispute an understanding of healing with which I was raised, innate intelligence.
I was thinking too of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. Rather than fear and despise the monster they create, as Victor did, would the transhumanists be in love with their creation?
I think they are in love with whatever they are creating. The myth of Prometheus is apt I think - especially in the aspect of overreach in technologies aim for perfection. There's some deep philosophical roots to explore here and many a modern Dr Frankenstein are among us!
Have you read this from Paul Kingsnorth?
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/what-progress-wants?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNDQ5NjkwNSwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTU0Mzg5NTcsIl8iOiI1RHZiMSIsImlhdCI6MTY1MzU3MjY4MywiZXhwIjoxNjUzNTc2MjgzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjUwODM2Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.gYFfHn8z5MY88gE0EBWRWMNtlD0piQ8kk61fCW716gc&s=r
I would love to hear your thoughts?
No I haven't - I'll check it out.
Well I think Paul is spot on - I wouldn't beat around the bush myself about the identity of principalities and powers creating the undercurrents of this age and all the ends to which Paul mentions: the end of history; the end of transcendence; the death of God; a permanent revolution; death of the sacred; the uprooting of everything; liberation from everything; to go beyond nature, and replace us. Those who deny we are in a spiritual battle are prone to become cogs in this machine of annihilation and Romans 1:22-25 may become true of them.
Thank you for your thoughts. I have also been tiring of the constant rehashing of data. It seems pretty pointless at this juncture.
Mattias Desmet said it best, without needing a belief in higher order.... (I see nature as the "god" and because of this complexity- it shows "intelligence")
He said that it's a complex dynamical system that has been found to do irrational things.
I agree, like with complicated machines, you sometimes get the "ghost in the machine" happen, which is where the machine acts out of its intended logic.
PS- Quantum theory is easily debunked by questioning the way the experiments were run, too many assumptions on the instruments used and a couple of contradictions (the time paradox) which pretty much show that it's a mathematical game being played in physics, trying to observe the invisible, much like virology is a sham too. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdAkAC4ItcFyNFBywN0wiZ45pCnMr-Ay
"Ghost in the machine" is interesting isn't it? We have a propensity to easily anthropomorphize intelligent-looking machines, and now even more so with AI. So that's something confounding for us. And as you allude to, the machine acting in a way that maybe wasn't intended to by the designer. Going back to the idea that the fabric of everything is flow and everything is connected to everything else - it's no wonder these sorts of anomalies happen.
PS- Rob I'm no quantum physicist, obviously, but it does seem to me that the current view isn't a theory of particle physics but something closer to the idea of an ether - Schrodinger's Ether Wave Equation suggests the whole field really should be called "non-quantum wave theory" or something of the like. (as the basement of the material world is not quanta, like particles, but waves whereby peaks manifest as particle-like). So I'm not sure it's a sham or what is to be debunked.
Virology, however, could well be a complete sham (along with a lot of other stuff that came with germ theory medicine/pharmacology).
I haven't had a look at the link yet but will do so when I have a moment.
Again - no expert here - but find it all very interesting.
A theory is only as good as it's proof. I call quantum stuff a hypothesis, especially because we cannot truly test it. It's kind of like the idea of god or alternate realities existing. We cannot say no, as everything is possible. We cannot say yes, because it is essentially unproveable.
Perhaps that is the best way to approach things like death, not expecting a result. I also don't expect that we will be able to show that everything is made or waves or not. Didn't string theory and M-theory try to say this too?
I get your point. As far as I know string theory is still saying this - a grand theory of wave function to explain everything. I did start a book on string theory but my grasp of mathematics wasn't up to the task and so I abandoned the book after only a few hours of struggle. I'm guessing you are more on the physics side of things? I'm just a psychologist :-)
A lot of modern physics today is a lot of math without much actual experimentation. Whenever they have a problem with a formula, they invent a new particle (or dark matter/dark energy) to show that the formula works. Instead of discovering and then explaining how/why, they have a how/why and then they go and look for it. An old timer physicist explained it that way.
Another funny about string/M theory. I heard Michio Kaku talking about it once on the radio and laughed my ass off. He said that some of these dimensions are infinitesimally small. What the F? A dimension is infinite!
I was in engineering but past a certain level of math,required things got very difficult for me. I couldn't see what things represented, so it stopped making sense to me.
I also saw the writing on the wall that it was going to be outsourced/reduced in scope (need less engineers to design with computer simulations etc). I went into repair and troubleshooting of industrial machines, where my right brain thinking works well in seeing the big picture. Have you read the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell? It's pretty much the right brain that can sense when things are out of place etc. That's why I brought up the ghost in the machine, the more complex the machine (more sensors, more logic, more unknown conditions showing up) you end up with the same exact machine acting irrational at times.
Psychology is cool. Have you heard of Mattias Desmet? He's pretty much nailed the current covid mania state, perhaps it's the left brained people that are easily hypnotizable because they think in parts and not much of the whole. I feel the same about these physicists and virologists who go to school to pretty much be number pushers. Heck even medical science has become a complex numbers game (genetics).
Edit addition:
I forgot if I told you about Leonard Shlain, a surgeon who wanted to be a psychiatrist (and himself is both left/right brained) did a great lecture called alphabet vs the goddess about how written language changed how humanity thought. The written word changes what is "real" to many people, even if it doesn't match reality. History just amplifies it, because we rely on the past to see today and the future.
I think that with math the same thing happens. Some of us know what the numbers/symbols represent,- which is a right brain thing based in reality. But many left brained people go into math thinking that the numbers are the reality, not a map of reality. That would explain why modern physics has gone into inventing more and more things that have not been or cannot be observed and tested.
I'll keep that in mind about theoretical physics - they do theory first and then look for something to fit, rather than discovering something and then working out the proof or theory. Very good point.
Yes read a lot of Gladwell's stuff - I like his style.
Yes watched a bit of Desmet and understand his take on mass formation (nothing new, a summary really from a number of authors who wrote about it in the first half the 20th Century).
McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary talks about language and how thinking in a different language changes your perception of reality - he also touches on maths and how Chinese, for example, have a different way of thinking about mathematics than do say native English speakers - very interesting.
I found the video of Heinz von Forester stating how physics invents particles.
https://odysee.com/@northerntracey:a/Particles-plug-holes-in-theories-that-can-go-on-deducing-ad-infintum--Heinz-von-Foerster_mp4_Low_:0?r=9oBWtY68fYUdnMY2gt9dCdazJ4Py3mVo
The channel it's on also has a lot of information on the issues with virus theory and germ theory.
Awesome - thanks!
That's a good little clip - like the bit about making up particles to fill the holes in ones theory!
This concept is very important to apply to medicine, and unfortunately, it isn't very often. When it is, it usually comes with a lot of complementary and alternative medicine, most of which isn't evidence based, but tends to work when it is combined with positive lifestyle modification that is often the active ingredient. How can we break people out of LHB fixation? It seems very important that we do if we want society to become a healthier emergent natural process. Can society have an optimal state of well being? I think as much as an individual can.
We do need to come back to a right-left hemispheric balance - where the right is the master, as McGilchrist points out so well. How do we do this? By understanding the bias of the increasingly dominant left hemisphere and counteracting that with the right (activating right hemisphere dominance) - of course the complete answer is a book... Oh wait! Iain McGilchrist has done the heaving lifting for us! Thus my summaries and commentaries on his work - hopefully some will take it to heart and change their way of thinking about the world and the pendulum swings back to centre.
All the best with your Substack - looks really interesting!
I've surmised that his book is massive and dense, so your summaries are much appreciated! Does he include any cognitive skills/exercises to accomplish activation of right hemisphere dominance, or is it just something that is facilitated by understanding the paradigm and enhancing self-awareness? Army Master Resiliency Training (MRT) has skills that enhance self-awareness that I think could be useful in this regard.
He doesn't formulate anything like skills training - it's more philosophical - yet the understanding of what is going and enhancing self-awareness is probably more than half the battle. I've presented this sort of material to masters level psychology students and it has been an absolute revelation to them and for weeks afterwards they would bring it up - noticing the left-hemispheric bias in themselves and the world around them. They stop, reflect, and choose to look at things differently. Sounds like MRT could be helpful if you incorporate this whole notion of left and right hemisphere ways of being in the world.
Yes . Exactly. It is a long slippery slope. A very steep greased skids descent from Common Sense.