Saturday, November 28, 2020

Revisiting Intelligent Design

Barry at Large

A researcher on one of these Facebook groups I'm monitoring, brought up Intelligent Design (ID) innocently enough, only to be reminded of the religious wars this shield, or logo, was a part of.  

However, far from being a conversation stopper, that's where my interest picks up, as I'm looking for a graph (in the sense of nodes and edges), a map, explaining the battlefield.  What other shields or logos played a part, and as friends or foes?  

"Intelligent Design" was friendly to whom and shunned by whom and so on?  I'm interested in that stuff. 

Not that "shunning" is the only way to counter a devious foe.  Perhaps we belittle or dismiss with a show of force.  Sometimes in battle, we run full on, like those crazy braveheart guys in the movies, swords drawn. Not intelligent at all apparently.

Ditto for the 911 debacle. Just show me the forks and branches. I'm not looking for the truth, not at first. Did the "no planes" branch fizzle, or merge?  It's like on Github.  I'm looking for the Git history.  Schisms. Regroupings.

We the Wanderers, a group in Portland, had our paths crossing ID's through Terry's interest in widening the platform. Terry helped us keep the Pauling House a center of intellectual activity in our Asylum District here in Portland (Odonarotoop)

I'd categorize Terry, president of ISEPP, as anti-scientism, which is not at all the same as anti-science.  However Terry is also anti-science, but from a relatively undefended angle: engineering > science.

The engineering mindset doubles back on the intelligent design mindset.  Then we look around and admit, our best science and engineering is not yet up to either explaining or recreating the technology around us. Nature's tech is higher than ours.  And in saying "ours" just who are we talking about exactly.  Programs?

Bucky Fuller [link]:

In its complexities of design integrity, the Universe is technology. The technology evolved by man is thus far amateurish compared to the elegance of nonhumanly contrived regeneration. Man does not spontaneously recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as something he ignorantly calls nature.

Let's agree if there's a vector towards a kinder, gentler humanity, with higher intelligence to boot, then there's an extrapolation of that vector, along which we'd like to move. Saying God wills us to keep moving along that vector is another way of saying we acknowledge a gradient.  

We feel under some time pressure to finish the work, might be another way of putting it.  

A scientist might easily argue such a "teleological sense" is purely glandular (hormonal) and has its analogs in other nonhuman limbic systems.  Another "god gland" bites the dust.  Is that what just happened?

From an intelligent design point of view, the association of a vector gradient with a molecular processes is not considered some reductionistic objection to an empirical claim, but more as reinforcement for our thinking: that even lizards feel it too, the need to better their lot in life, if not to achieve management level responsibilities, as some say the angels have, and to which some humans may aspire.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Quaker High School

:: Advice to Teachers ::

I did another walk through of my slides.  I'm finally starting to use the Youtube feature that lets one embed hyperlinks to other videos, within the video.  

When I talk about Ezra Pound, I like to Graphing the Poets.  

When I mention Sam Hill, I link to Sam Hill's Quaker Legacy.

My Synergetics talks are about Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, not this other Springer-Verlag Synergetics that the Russians are always writing about.  Fortunately, Wikipedia does a good job of disambiguating.

I entitled this post "Quaker High School" because, speaking as a curriculum writer, in my estimation there's simply no excuse for bleeping over the Bucky stuff, especially given it's had over forty years to mature (Synergetics was published in 1979, Synergetics 2 two years later).  

It's plenty mature now, and highly teachable.  All IVM tetrahedrons have whole number tetravolume, nice.

Ever since Fuller died in 1983, which I learned about on my way to a Friends General Conference, I've connected him to Friends (I wrote an obit in the FGC daily newsletter).  

However, in terms of content, we're talking everyday cultural literacy, as you'll see if you watch the video.

If you feel somewhat comfortable with the content already, as many of my readers already do, I recommend playback at double speed.  

I'm speaking slowly enough that the sped up version isn't incomprehensible, assuming a practiced ear for American English (Amerish).

You'll find in the Youtube notes that I catch myself regarding M.C. Escher's citizenship. He was Dutch. The Canadian connection is through his eldest son.

Thursday, November 05, 2020

On Virtualizing Government

Facebook comment:

Like I'd like Housing and Urban Development to have a whole government cable channel to explain itself and show off its inner workings, major scrutiny, FEMA likewise. We have a long way to go when it comes to shelter. Share those simulations, those computer games. Help us see what you see.

A president is someone to meet with foreign dignitaries and sit in on top level meetings, to interpret, for the American people, what the mega trends are, and to personalize it a little. Fireside chats was a good idea. Someone personable.

The idea that a president is at the same time Captain of State, a Monarch, the Ruler, is one we must hope to stamp out in elementary school, as a pernicious myth circulated by would-be monarchists and other vaguely irrelevant schools of thought. A lot of immigrants come here with crazy ideas, especially from Britain and Europe.

The missing ingredient is "cybernetics" i.e. "self organization" i.e. "ouija board". At first, kids are uncomfortable with idea that "no one is in control" as that sounds like anarchy. But just remind them, Spaceship Earth was a disciplined and smoothly running operation LONG before humans got here. Take comfort. The USA operating system, as an engineering feat, is like a ship in the wind, lots of distributed tension, a tensegrity. I may be accused of heresy for saying that though.

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