I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
Yes, there is a cosmological model described in the Vedas, in quite detail.
Is Thrive high-budget? Not seen it, as I say, but the website is pretty pedestrian.
There was an interesting bit of blurb I saw on the site, something like “Bringing Occupy and the Free Energy movement together”, ha! How could someone assert that without knowing that the two camps are on many things diametrically opposed – economic organisation and taxation in particular? Occupy is pretty good on anti-racism too, I reckons…
Anyway, I am soon to be retiring for the night – suggest you do the same, since there’ll always be someone wrong on the internet. ‘Night.
Whatever label you put on the scientific process, it still depends on formulating an hypothesis, validating that and coming to conclusions? Is that right?
I reacted the same way as Clark, very well done. But if the guy behind it is a hier of Procter-Gamble it would explain it.
Yes, it’s late. Sweet dreams. GN.
Jon, the website is utterly inoperable without JavaScript. I know JavaScript doesn’t cost money, but it in no way represents freedom. Quite the opposite, as you know.
The Thrive film was originally only available on Blu-Ray, and as a paid download – really not the way to go about it if you’re interested in giving something to all the people of Earth, and as far as I know, the restrictions on Blu-Ray disc manufacture keep it out of the community software sphere altogether. Since then the price has been reduced to zero. But there is still no sign of software freedom anywhere on the site.
Sunflower, you probably don’t know about software freedom issues. The international community of Hackers has produced a massive collection of software and released it to the public. It is legally protected by the GNU GPL, which legally enshrines your right to copy it and give it to whoever you wish. This whole blog, including its underlying web server and operating system is all Free Software. The system I’m posting this on is mostly Free Software. These systems are used, not merely because they are low cost, but because they are superior to the corporate offerings in security and reliability. They save more time and money by their superiority than by their initial price.
The site of the Retro-Psychokinesis Project I gave you a link for is similar. That site’s creator, John Walker, is one of the original Hackers. Assange is a Hacker, too. Jon and I aspire to be, but it’s a tough call.
This may all seem tangential, but the Hacker community is at the forefront of the fight against certain areas of unfair patenting. The Thrive film makes quite a big fuss about patent abuse in the areas of “free energy”, Tesla’s inventions, agricultural seeds and genetic material. It seems very strange that they haven’t encountered the campaign for software freedom and against software patents:
http://patentabsurdity.com/
Sunflower:
Well, that’s pretty close, but it’s very much a community effort; it’s not like “one theory to each scientist”. The great names like Newton or Darwin are only famous because their hypotheses have stood for so long against so many attempts to knock them down.
There is a serious constraint upon the hypotheses. To be scientific, they have to be capable of being disproven. None of them can ever be proven, but if they can’t be disproven in principle, they can’t be tested so they have no place in science. The most dismissive insult that can be applied to an hypothesis is that “it’s not even wrong”.
Also, and critically, no one expects to reach a conclusion, at least not in anything like the foreseeable future. All “conclusions” are provisional, and a single falsification blows any given hypothesis out of the water.
Famously, J B S Haldane, the evolutionist and geneticist, was defending evolution. A critic challenged Haldane that the theory of evolution could always be made to fit the observations, and asked him what sort of evidence could disprove it, to which Haldane answered “a rabbit fossil in the pre-Cambrian”. That’s it. Find one fossil in an older strata of rock than the evolutionary tree can account for, and your hypothesis is in serious danger of being abandoned.
This is why scientists say “well established” rather than “proven”.
The situation in maths is very different. In maths, you can and do prove relationships. But maths is used to describe and model the world, it is a huge set of human constructs and a means of communication. The sciences are basically an endeavour to find which bits of maths model our observations of reality.
Ignorance of these differences is a huge source of misunderstanding about science among the general public.
I love the way the scientific mind writes. Debunking a New Age “physics” theory, From:
http://azureworld.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/schwarzchild-proton.html
Hey Clark – don’t you get weary of trying to educate people from first principles? I mean, if they haven’t bothered looking further into a subject than “I heard somewhere that…” and then firmly plant their opinions there – are they really educable, in any meaningful sense of the word?
For instance, this “body loses mass upon death” BS – it’s such absolute crap, doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny, not even as a clever joke. It looks like an incredibly badly written sentence to one even passing literate, but nevertheless trying to pass itself off as fine writing. The supporting evidence provided by the proponent (Sunflower) doesn’t even try to pass itself off as genuinely interested – more like a, “Gosh – wow – here’s a history of how some daft buggers actually took this seriously!”
So why bother? Either you live in the rational world, or you don’t. One is unlikely in the extreme to “see the light” and suddenly start examining beliefs, testing notions, thoroughly questioning their presumptions. They’re going to do the lazy thing, the human thing – look for what comforts them, what confirms that they are right. It’s hard work to do otherwise.
*
Your friend who looks for “alternative” treatment is looking for what she wants to hear. Amazingly enough, there are people foul, miserable and crooked enough to appreciate the human requirement to make a large sacrifice for what they want, and so will _sell_ – at large cost – quack treatment. Because the victim will feel more convinced, if they sacrifice money, that the cure is genuine.
I wish my misses could talk to this friend of yours. I got angry thinking about how my old lady’s profession was being portrayed as a cynical killer, a stooge of the… what was it again? The Pharmaceutical Industry, the UN… what?? … who wants to kill cancer patients instead of curing them. However, the misses just gave an exasperated hollow laugh at the notion. Obviously she’s come across more than enough of it, and seen the desperate, useless result of “alternative” medicine when it comes to serious matters such as breast cancer.
Here’s hoping your friend wises up, before it’s too late. Days count. “New Age” BS never kept a light on, nor a tap running clean water, never designed nor fixed a mechanical device, and certainly never cured a serious illness. Sounds great to healthy young hippies – not so good when actually applied to life long term.
The saddest thing for people in my misses’ profession, is that these “new age” hopefuls – really nice people, probably like your friend – will die horribly when they are beyond anything but semi-effective palliative care.
Clark/anyone interested – don’t get overly caught up in the detail – in the context of whats going on in the world. Here’s Webster Tarpley once again with some great insights; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Eo2YTQUr8&feature=related
Glenn, if only it were as simple as that.
The trouble is, there really is propaganda and corporate deception, and it is very difficult for those without a background in a rational discipline to sort everything out. I mean, just read Ben Goldacre, who documents several abuses presented as real science every week. When people like you and me see skewed test results, inappropriate control groups, repeated testing until a desired result is obtained, research conducted under corporate non-disclosure agreements, we may cuss and rant about the corruption of scientific integrity. But it’s completely different for someone who hasn’t got a scientific grounding. Just scan up the thread a bit. Sunflower claims to have no formal education at all! Sunflower is remarkably perceptive and articulate, but has never been given the tools to sort science from pseudoscience.
From that perspective, how could you tell that science isn’t just another set of beliefs? It’s preached from the corporate media just like religion from a pulpit, complete with almost biblical contradictions. One week the papers have grabbed some isolated research paper that shows a small statistical relationship between, say, paracetamol use and ageing, and the headline screams “HEADACHE PILLS GIVE YOU WRINKLES”, because the papers are always trying to play on readers’ worries about being attractive. Then, the next week, they put out some headline “PARACETEMOL – POOR MANS VIAGRA”, equally based on some tiny correlation excerpted from some obscure PhD thesis. You know this stuff goes on, the corporate media have rooms full of “work experience” victims trawling the sites that store all this stuff, with lists of keywords to search on.
Global heating and cancer are two of the worst. Corporate media are always going on about cancer. First it’s some food gives you it, then within days it keeps it at bay. As to climate change, I remember getting on the bus the year before last, and saw the drivers copy of The Sun, front page main headline, mind, saying that “scientists” were confidently predicting another ice-age within a decade. It’s just a nightmare, and I can’t blame anyone for thinking that science is a load of made-up rubbish.
I have to disagree with you there. I was brought up as a religious literalist, remember. Then I became a sort of Hippy to escape it. Even now I get slagged off as a purveyor of fairy tales from time to time, just because I agree with Penrose(!) that quantum physics may have something to say about consciousness.
Incidentally, I didn’t mention your other half above because you wrote that she generally doesn’t like being mentioned; I wasn’t ignoring what you wrote before.
Chris Jones, above you wrote:
Just look at Scouse Billy’s video, and you’ll see that the theories you keep promoting (chemtrails, Illuminati, etc.) are very popular with the New Agers. In fact, I thought you were one until you wrote that.
Chris Jones, I turned that video off at under ten minutes. Holdren is being unnecessarily alarmist, but Tarpley is amplifying and scaremongering out of all proportion, which is what Terpley always does. I don’t know much about Holdren, but he’s a political advisor, and Obomber probably picked him to make it look like they’re actually going to do something about pollution, falling grain reserves and global heating (which I know you don’t believe in, but many do and you weren’t the intended audience), which they’re not, anyway.
PrisonPlanet is sensationalist, but in the opposite direction to the corporate media.
Clark, you see what is going on here 🙂 I showed you that I sincerely respect you, you did the same to me, trust start to develop, based on that trust we can communicate. We have completely different perspectives but can exchange ideas based on mutal respect.
Now try the same with your friend.
“Sunflower, you probably don’t know about software freedom issues. The international community of Hackers has produced a massive collection of software and released it to the public. It is legally protected by the GNU GPL, which legally enshrines your right to copy it and give it to whoever you wish.”
I’m actually very well informed in the area and I support Open Source all the way, from the principles it’s based on to my own use of open source software, although I don’t run a complete open source OS.
I’m sure the hacking community does alot of good things, it is also an excellent vector of attack for the intelligence community since there is great deal of anonymity involved, meaning that the “hacking community” can be used for covert operations that in the end will lead to complete regulation, restriction and control of the Internet.
Just like physical false flag operations are used to limit our physical freedom, digital false flag operations can be used to limit our digital freedom.
There are enormous economical, political and military interest in taking complete control of the Internet so whenever I hear Anonymous or some other hacking group have done something I’m very suspicious. Qui bono?
Open source is also an analogy that can be very well applied to society as such, well live in a closed source societal system (that likes to fool us into believing it’s open source) and that is a big part of the issues we are dealing with on a global level. Society and its economical and political structures should be open source not patented by a small group of copyright owners. Food should be opens source, not GMO e.g.
I’m going out to get some sun on my flower, more later. /respectfully
@Clark: Quite o/t, but JavaScript is an open standard under the name ECMAScript. Implementations for Webkit (which Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari use) and Firefox are open source, as far as I know. There can be security/privacy issues relating to JS, but all free/Free software can have security problems.
@glenn, good post – you’re another night owl! I was well asleep at 3am |-) Zzz
Jon, how do I remain in control of my own machine if I use JavaScript? The problem isn’t about the software that implements JavaScript. Yes, that can be free and open source, at my end or the other or both. And the standard is indeed public. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that if I have JavaScript enabled, some other party’s software is downloaded and run on my machine for every web page that I visit. How on Earth am I supposed to know what that software is doing? All I can do with NoScript is to permit or block JavaScript site-by-site. If I have no option but to enable JavaScript in order to use a particular site (as is the case for Thrive), I’d have to download all the JavaScript as text, and then search through it for vulnerabilities and, more importantly, malicious features.
Some JavaScript functions reveal my operating system and browser types and versions to the server at the far end. This is the first piece of information needed in order to begin exploiting a system.
Nine out of ten exploits begin with JavaScript. I’d send you a link, but the site I need is down or gone.
Sunflower, you wrote:
Why do you assume that I have not been respecting my friend?
Sunflower, have you really thought what you wrote here through?
OK, take me as an example. How might I be being used in such a way? How can a community be used like this?
Jon, I wrote:
And then what happens when I refresh the page? How can I know that the same JavaScript gets sent as last time? Do you see? The whole thing is a nightmare. It takes my machine, and puts it under the (at least partial) control of whoever runs the web site that I’m visiting.
@Clark 02.36
“To be scientific, they have to be capable of being disproven. None of them can ever be proven, but if they can’t be disproven in principle, they can’t be tested so they have no place in science.”
From this consciousness has no place in science, you cannot see, hear, taste, smell or touch consciousness. You cannot measure it, neither define it in “scientific” terms. Therefore it does not exist.
“Science” operates in the realm of what can be observed by our blunt material senses and therefore it is extremely limited and it would be appropriate if scientists took a more humble position in regards to what they can and cannot explain about the world.
Yet in our schools kids are thought that we are material machines that evolved from a soup of chemicals that was magically manifested out of nothing. The scientific model postulates that I have to accept this since I cannot scientifically disprove it, although the same applies to the existence of God and consciousness but then the scientist say “that is religion”. It’s like the christians denouncing the beliefs of the muslims.
Apart from the fact that the scientific model is extremely limited in what it can teach us about existance, it is in many cases it seems it’s not followed even by science itself.
You give archeology as an example of how the scientific model works, it’s a good example since it shows the practical hypocrisy existing in many fields of “science”
“Also, and critically, no one expects to reach a conclusion, at least not in anything like the foreseeable future. All “conclusions” are provisional, and a single falsification blows any given hypothesis out of the water.”
“That’s it. Find one fossil in an older strata of rock than the evolutionary tree can account for, and you have to start all over again.”
Your quote may not be true.
Check this out:
One of the prominent themes introduced in Forbidden Archeology is the phenomena of “knowledge filtration.” This is the process by which scientists and others routinely accept evidence that supports their preconceptions and theories while rejecting, either consciously or unconsciously, other evidence that does not uphold their views.
This process of suppression of evidence is illustrated by many of the anomalous paleoanthropological findings discussed in the book. This evidence now tends to be extremely obscure, and it also tends to be clouded by a series of negative reports, themselves obscure and dating from the time when the evidence was being actively rejected.
Thus, evolutionary prejudices held by powerful groups of scientists act as a “knowledge filter” which has eliminated evidence challenging accepted views and left us with a radically altered understanding of human origins and antiquity.
http://www.forbiddenarcheology.com
@Clark 13.35 “Why do you assume that I have not been respecting my friend?”
I inferred that from you saying it was difficult for you to communicate with her since she didn’t want to listen to you convincing her that what she does is wrong.
From your POV (got it right this time) you very much show your respect to her by trying to convince her she is wrong, from her POV she _might_ think her position is not respected.
I respect what you say because I have come to the conclusion you are a very good hearted person, I might not agree with what you have to say and I might argue with you, but I respect you as a person and the positions you hold.
On the other hand, you have a different relationship with me than with her, so my logic may not apply in the same way, although I think in principle it might apply.
If possible, I think you should try to separate your personal relation to her with what we have to say here, we have no idea of what actually is going on and even if we had, this is a very personal area that noone else than you yourself can say what is right and wrong Probably as in many situations, there is no right or wrong. Go with your intuition?
@Clark 14.03 “OK, take me as an example. How might I be being used in such a way? How can a community be used like this?”
If an intelligence agency does a DDOS attack on a government site and then publishes a PR-release on twitter in the name of Haxxorz1337, member of Anti-Everything hacking group, who is there to validate the authenticity of that random anonymous guy?
Politicians and MSM will scream out “Time to end anonymity on the Internet!”, “Our demon-crazy society cannot afford anonymity on the net!”. Then, make any encryption logarithms that the government doesn’t have back-doors/certificates to illegal and equal to the individual possession of a WMD.
It’s already going on, I’m sure you are quite aware of that.
@Clark 14.41 “And then what happens when I refresh the page? How can I know that the same JavaScript gets sent as last time? Do you see? The whole thing is a nightmare. It takes my machine, and puts it under the (at least partial) control of whoever runs the web site that I’m visiting.”
Hmm, I don’t like this. I have ofc disabled Java in the browser, but Java-script is used by so many sites. Most of them connecting to the library @google. I generally disallow any connections to google, 90-95% of all sites makes connections to google one way or another when you visit them, even many prominent “alternative” sites. Not this one though, cudos for that.
Sunflower, from you:
No. Just because a scientific question cannot be formulated does not mean that the subject matter “doesn’t exists”. Better questions may be formulated after advances in related fields have been made.
But this interpretation is very pessimistic in any case. Of course there are objective tests to determine if a person is conscious or not. This is a very important question for anaesthetists. Also, brain scans are used to observe brain activity while the subject undertakes specific mental activities. This is all a huge area of research.
There is also the matter of quantum physics; have you not read of the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
Your outlook on this seems prejudiced against scientific enquiry. Please try looking into these matters from within the scientific perspective. You’ll find all sorts of research and development of theory in progress right now.
Sunflower:
This is much like saying “don’t go and protest against the government outside the Houses of Parliament, ‘cos they’ll just use it as an excuse to outlaw freedom of assembly”.
Besides; “who is there to validate the authenticity of that random anonymous guy?” – Two points:
1) There is me, deciding if Haxxorz1337’s action looks justified or not, just as we individually decide which protests to attend.
2) Well, this is posted as “Clark”. You could post under that name and pretend to be me. But I’m registered with this site, so my Slug avatar appears with my comments, and you can’t imitate that bit. So “Clark with a slug” develops a reputation, just as a person in the physical world does.
[Mod/Clark: I edited this because my quote was too short.]
Your opinion of consciousness as an “unscientific” phenomena is timely. Consciousness is one of the most “high-level” investigations that can be undertaken. It is interesting that science was brought back to face this issue in the two greatest, most inclusive physical theories developed so far.
Relativity: One of the problems with classical, Newtonian physics was that certain types of motion would bring the observer back into their own past, contravening free will. Relativity has helped to sort this out. Please don’t ask me the details. I understood it in a flash of inspiration when I was in my 20s. I’m nearly fifty now, and my mind is less supple.
Quantum physics: Famously, the utterly “objective” approach of classical physics was forced to face the actions of the observer or experimenter when the very small came under consideration.
Look! When science was limited to making its examinations at our mundane scale of existence, consciousness was something we experienced, but about which scientific questions could not be formulated. But as our examinations proceeded from our own scale in either direction, to the larger and smaller extremes, we were brought back and had to face our own existence as conscious beings.
Reality truly is a unified whole. Science has integrity, and thus there proved to be no escape from consciousness.
Sunflower:
I don’t wish to convince her that she is wrong. I wish her to broaden her perspective, so she can assess what is right and wrong for herself. At present, she is behaving somewhat like Scouse Billy. She takes viewpoints that support an “alternative” view only, and assesses them positively, discounting any criticism as “disinformation from the medical conspiracy”. Conversely, she will not examine the conventional medical viewpoint dispassionately, again, because of this purported conspiracy.
Hence my essay on corporate biases and my questions to you. It’s no good making assessments upon some conspiracy when we have no idea what it’s structure might be. It’s like trying to compensate for a undetectable demon that works exclusively through real physical people. How can you tell what comes from the demon and what from the people? How can you be sure that this demon only influences people within the conventional medical establishment? Alternative treatments are businesses, too.
Some limits of this conspiracy or corporate influence need to be fleshed out.
Sunflower:
No, I don’t like it either. The Firefox NoScript add-on reduces your browser’s exposure to JavaScript by a huge factor. It is also educational…
NoScript blocks all JavaScript. When you visit a site, you learn whether it was constructed so that you can use the site without JavaScript. Such web design shows consideration and good will.
NoScript also produces a menu of all the JavaScript sources on a page when you mouse over the NoScript icon. This list of sources is quite informative because it enables you to see who that site is affiliated with. More sources generally corresponds to more commercial or advertising affiliation.