Dyson’s optimism and broad-spectrum thinking

From Salon:

In his new collection of essays, “A Many-Colored Glass,” renowned physicist Freeman Dyson turns his thoughts to do-it-yourself biotech and breeding one’s own pet lizard, the fallacies of global warming science, science fiction (with a tip of the hat to recently departed Madeleine L’Engle) and the importance of biology to the future of religion. To Dyson, a deeper understanding of the human brain means a better understanding of theology and perhaps more tolerance for those with different beliefs.

Such broad-spectrum thinking, particularly for a scientist, usually puts you in one of two camps: quack or genius. Dyson has been called both. Yet his penchant for challenging conventional wisdom is matched by a sense of humor, a necessary attribute for any scientist who has seen seven decades’ worth of scientific hits and flops — some of them his own.

In the science world, Dyson is best known for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Julian Schwinger, Shinichiro Tomonaga and his friend and colleague Richard Feynman. But it’s his broader writings on nuclear weapons, the science of immortality and the expectation of extraterrestrial intelligence that have captured the public.

Dyson is quick to remind readers that he’s a scientist, not a soothsayer. He has said that “it is better to be wrong than to be vague” and has certainly suffered the former rather than the latter. Recalling his advice to a young Francis Crick to stick with physics rather than waste his time in biology, Dyson quips, “When I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. Even a smart 22-year-old is not a reliable guide to the future of science. And the 22-year-old has become even less reliable now that he’s 82.”

Dyson never earned a Ph.D., but in addition to his 18 honorary degrees he has received numerous awards, ranging from the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1984 book, “Weapons and Hope,” about the nuclear threat, to the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Among his six children are digital age guru Esther Dyson and science historian George Dyson.

To read “A Many-Colored Glass” is to get a sense of the wonder and awe that continue to drive our successes and failures at understanding the world around us. While Dyson continues to write prolifically, if you ask him what he’s up to, he’s apt to refer to his work as “scribbling equations on paper.” In conversation, Dyson is studied and frank, unafraid of one-word responses — all the better, it seems, to spirit him along to a question he might like better.

Roger Cohen’s banal comments titled, Auschwitz Recreation

Banal as they may seem to me, to many others Cohen’s comments generated a wide variety of commentary to iht.com.

However, too much of it seemed to come from deep seated feelings of guilt and an apparent belated sense of self-exculpation. Sad and sadder as I read lotsa comments. Maybe too many comments coming from what I like to call conventional wisdom. But two posters stood out for me. First from a non-European:

The quote from Faust speaks of and to humanity, not just Germany. These pictures are yet another reminder (not the only one) of the potential for great good and great evil that are part of the ordinary human intellectual and psychological condition, and the danger of unchallenged dogma in societies everywhere. These were ordinary people. That is the real lesson of all holocausts.

[2] Posted by: Chris Noble, Winchester, MA — 24 September 2007 7:56 am

There were many from European posters, but this excerpt stood out for me:

Think of Nazi Germany, the behaviour of the US and British governments, France in Vietnam and Algeria, the KKK, the Israeli army and so many of the Zionists, and all with the support of millions, of tens of millions of civilians; those caring, indoctrinated patriots. The list of countries and peoples and events is long and grows. The USA, Britain and others are fearful for their soldiers and mourn, but don’t care a fig for the Iraqi dead – I never detected a tear in the N.Y. or the London Times. Weep for 48,000 dead and missing in Vietnam; but the more than 1,500,000 dead Vietnamese? Never a thought! They are dead And I didn’t know them. Why bring up such an uncomfortable idea. And anyway, they were commie SOBs.

Was it necessary to drop the second atomic bomb on Japan? Why do you ask such an uncomfortable question? And anyway, they were Jap SOBs.

Does this sound familiar? Mr. Cohen.

The mentality, the morality, the motivation of those who do these things never changes, and we do not attempt to change it, and our governments show no interest in change.

We are all guilty, even you Mr. Cohen.

[45] Posted by: Alan Buckle, Maria Ellend, Austria+ — 24 September 2007 9:37 am

The last words above may seem a form of self-exculpation, but after reading about Spain, the USSR, France and other countries like Chamberlain’s Britain, I feel the special nausea of a refugee from Barcelona in July 1936 and France in 1940 reading too many self-serving commentaries.

Even a quick overview reading of Arthur Koestler’s provocative title about ex-pat life in late ’30s France, The Scum of the Earth, can only leave one the heavy feeling of being part of the collective guilt for the Holocaust visited on the scum of Europe, including about 6 million Jews, by Hitler, Stalin and all their Eichmann-act alikes.

Mr. Cohen, no words can appease that feeling. Certainly the violence being practiced on Palestinian “scum” today by a holier than thou regime in Isreal is only too reminiscent of what has happened to so many scum-like folk in human history in Europe and every other part of the “civilized global community”.

Mr. K. Hocker paid a price in the end but that also was banal.

I say to all those who blame the very human reaction of the Newberry’s of our “civilized” Western World, it’s too easy to sit there and blame! But to really do something is not so easy.

Just consider how the US pundits spend lots of words pointing out how easily a “good” Republican candidate for the US presidency could turn the 2008 vote on its head! It happened elsewhere and it could happen again mostly because human banality is every where, even in Washington DC and Topeka et al.

Serendipity in History

I wrote this post more than 2.5 months ago, but it is no less true for me now. I said then:

I just read that 7/6 is GWB’s birthday. Far be it from me to wish him ill, because I wish no man ill. But I would’ve preferred that his candidature for POTUS go down in the flames it deserved. I guess it’s not fair game to lament his birth but his actions, policies and mean spirited hypocrisy as President are to be much lamented. Many will say “Why bother?” My dear wife is one of the many! So I’ll leave it as it lays. His presidency is a mess and he deserves it but not the American people nor those outside the US who are affected by this disastrous rule!

It’s odd to note that this is also the Dalai Lama’s birth anniversary.

Finally, on ‘42/7/6 the Frank family took refuge in an attic apartment to try to save themselves from the Nazi monsters on the prowl in Amsterdam. That attempt didn’t work well for some of the family, since they were found by the Nazi thugs in 1944.

The intelligent designer had to be a crackpot, or

In a review of the latest anti-Darwinian literature, Root and Branch by Ian Hacking in The Nation, he ends thus:

Leibniz proposed that the actual world is the one that combines the maximum of variety with the minimum of complexity for its fundamental laws. The “best” world, the world sought by the most intelligent designer, is one that maximizes variety in its phenomena and simplicity of basic law. Such a world has no place for a specific set of plans for the Arctic tern. The upshot is not attractive to those who favor intelligent design. It is in effect a proof that we live in a world of quantum-mechanical laws that are counterintuitive (to humans) but intrinsically simple–a world that, once these laws are in place, is then allowed to evolve out of a very few raw materials by chance and selection into unendingly complex patterns, including life on earth as we know it. It is a fact that you will get complex structures if you just let such systems run. The wisest designer would choose the governing laws and initial conditions that best capitalized on this mathematical fact.

A stupid designer would have to arrange for all the intricate details (the Arctic tern again) that anti-Darwinians eulogize, but an intelligent designer would let chance and natural selection do the work. In other words, in the light of our present knowledge, we can only suppose that the most intelligent designer (I do not say there is one) would have to be a “neo-Darwinian” who achieves the extraordinary variety of living things by chance.

That sounds like finis or fin but somehow I doubt there will ever be an end to this discussion as long as there are men and women who are looking for convenient consolation in the face of the “awful” solution of homo sapiens being the result of the playing out of natural laws of chance. Homo sapiens will continue to argue for a more emotionally comprehensible beginning to all life in the Universe, even though we are clearly unable to see and touch all in the Universe. Our fate does seem a cruel one, but it is our fate in this Universe.

The Economist’s article head is “Life is a foreign language”

 

In a review of Steven Pinker’s latest the reviewer lays it out this way in the last paragraph:

Fortunately, Mr Pinker is incapable of being dull for very long. Plus he is able to wheel on a formidable array of expert witnesses, both living and dead, to speak wisely and wittily in support of his views and generally jolly things along. Plato, Kant, Twain, Shakespeare and Yogi Berra crop up repeatedly. So does Woody Allen, whose winning line “I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words” beautifully distils Mr Pinker’s point that, when something unpleasant happens to us, our conversation “turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion or religion”.

What a connection! Unpleasant happenings, then our talk turns to sex, shit and religion! Yes, Virginia we do live in a secular world, or a goodly part of the printed world is very secular. There is a reported growing gap between the rich and the poor and I think it’s accurate to say that there is a conceptual disparity between conventional religionists and the rest of us that parallels the rich/poor disconnection. I feel I could even say that those disparities, one material and the other spiritual or in the human psyche are widening and closing to any extent.

Then there is the notion put on table that life is a foreign language or that the way we live and think about living flows from a built-in gap in our way of thinking about life and its meaning for us, religionists vs. secular humanists/atheists. Or we may be programmed to view our life and its meaning to us in very disparate and disconnected ways depending on our view of the meaning and purpose of life as we conceive of it.

A life cycle plan

During two days, 9/15 & 16, I participated in a session offered by Nikken to its distributors known as “Humans being More”. The session leader, Ron H, told us that the founder of Nikken thought that most Nikkenites would become discouraged by the challenge of delivering the message and reaping the material benefits from each one’s Nikken business. So he designed and developed HBM as a way of getting new Nikkenites, as well as experienced old hands in the business to conceive a focus for their life’s activities and quite possibly find a better self motivating way of staying the Nikken course, in spite of failure and disappointment which are inevitable in any self-employed enterprise.

The Life Cycle Plan is keyed on 5 Pillars of Health, Body, Mind, Family, Society and Finances. We were coached on articulating our goals within that Nikken framework. I enjoyed the spiritual challenge and I believe that it focused my mind on the very personal challenges I am facing with my life at this time, especially in relation to my partnering with Emma, my wife. I will add more here later!

How fools (Bush & Co.) waste national assets!

Thomas Friedman was in Dalian for the Summer Davos meeting recently. After talking to the President of DUT, who told him how DUT is focusing its future research on energy technologies, Friedman mused about a strange story from Iraq that seems to highlight the way that the current US government is basically wasting precious assets and using big military hardware like fly swatters. And here is his conclusion from his latest column:

That image of a $6 million high-tech U.S. helicopter with a highly trained pilot blowing an insurgent off his bicycle captures the absurdity of our situation in Iraq. The great Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said it best: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

That is where we are in Iraq. We’re wasting our brains. We’re wasting our people. We’re wasting our future. China is not.

It seems to me that this odd concatenation of circumstances puts my English Language Consulting project into the right perspective. China is working on the future, whereas we in the West are working on  bad policies and being victimised by worse politicians.

Friedman had good things to say about Dalian, but in conventional terms used by Big MSM figures doing a once over in any foreign city.

What a difference a day makes as 9/10 becomes 9/11

I have never shared my Morning Page thoughts here. Today I will! Here is what (albeit lightly edited) I wrote in my Morning Meditation:

What a day! Yes, it’s 6 years after 9/11. These numbers stand for so much in the minds of too many ordinary Americans, Canadians and other nationalities whose family members lost their lives in the mayhem delivered to Manhattan, Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, those events have become the watchword in the War on Terrorism that the US Administration has inflicted on too many Iraqi’s, Afghani’s, Pakistani’s, and all the families of the dead and seriously wounded. So much destruction of life, liberty and happiness, all in the name of “keeping our Western Peace”. It’s a horrible thought, or I might say horrible thoughts, since so many have paid the ultimate price in life, limb, property and everyday living. The MSM is going to wring out of this day all the misery and emotion connected with horrible results.

It’s unsurprisingly a day of horrible irony as well. Gen. Patraeus and his diplomatic counterpart Amb. Crocker are telling committees in Washington DC why the horror must go on! And all in the name of vengeance and war on terror, or so they say! But I am lucky enough that BBC World News is available on my TV set to tell me the hopeful story of an ordinary GP and his family, who are spending a few years living with and helping Afghani tribes people in a remote valley there. Dr. Alex Duncan and his wife tell an emotionally stirring story of how they affect the lives of ordinary Afghani families in that peaceful region of war torn Afghanistan. That program should be played over and over to offset all the BS being shoved on us by MSM in the US and Canada who fail to bring any human perspective to this horrible memory. I cried sorry tears thinking about the simple sacrifices being made and the emotions they must live with every day of their lives, the Duncan family. That story has so much appeal for me vs. all the BS about NYC, Giuliani, the 9/11 widows et al.

The real horror in this kind of situation is in the lives of ordinary people, simple tribes people who eke out a living existence with hard scrabble farming, including growing heroin poppies. Yes, lots of heroin is being grown in Afghanistan, but the true every day horror is that millions, or maybe even 100s of millions, of people can’t get access to morphine to deal with the physical pain from injury and serious endemic disease. Lots of horror to pass around and lots of cruel beastly irony. I wonder if any of it nudges into the conscience of people like Bush, Cheney, Harper et al. I think not! More is the pity!

Somehow I believe in the bottom of my heart that only politicians like Michael Ignatieff get this! Yes, he and his words seem mawkish and awkward in this articles and speeches. To many conventional Canadians, he is the image of self-absorption. But I don’t see him that way. I remember the grand-son whose first published book told the moving story of his paternal grand-parents living and then dying in Melbourne QC about 50 miles from where I was brought up in Sherbrooke QC, which shared the St-Francis River with Melbourne.

Otdih too many things seem to have happened. I hope and pray, in my agnostic way, that no great horrible event marks this day, other than the overblown public emotions in NYC and other public places in the US and abroad.

I will share these thoughts with the few who surf my blog site!

Freud’s reforging of his views about Judaism at the end of his life

In an essay based on this upcoming book, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The legacy of his last days, Mark Edmundson, who teaches English at the University of Virginia, writes:

About two-thirds of the way into the volume, he makes a point that is simple and rather profound — the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity for abstraction. “The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea — a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”

Now that is a way of thinking about a religion that I have never considered before! But many have said that Freud was really a story teller much more than a scientist. His story telling metaphors are insightful and suggestive about the notion that religion addresses the why while science speculates about what and how.

If people can worship what is not there, they can also reflect on what is not there, or on what is presented to them in symbolic and not immediate terms. So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews — as it would eventually prepare others in the West — to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an “advance in intellectuality,” and he credits it directly to religion.

Freud speculates that one of the strongest human desires is to encounter God — or the gods — directly. We want to see our deities and to know them. Part of the appeal of Greek religion lay in the fact that it offered adherents direct, and often gorgeous, renderings of the immortals — and also, perhaps, the possibility of meeting them on earth. With its panoply of saints, Christianity restored visual intensity to religion; it took a step back from Judaism in the direction of the pagan faiths. And that, Freud says, is one of the reasons it prospered.

More innovative insights about the “success” of Christianity vs. Judaism!

Judaism, on the other hand, never let go of the great renunciation. The renunciation, according to Freud, gave the Jews remarkable strength of intellect, which he admired, but it also made them rather proud, for they felt that they, among all peoples, were the ones who could sustain such belief.

Freud’s argument suggests that belief in an unseen God may prepare the ground not only for science and literature and law but also for intense introspection. Someone who can contemplate an invisible God, Freud implies, is in a strong position to take seriously the invisible, but perhaps determining, dynamics of inner life. He is in a better position to know himself. To live well, the modern individual must learn to understand himself in all his singularity. He must be able to pause and consider his own character, his desires, his inhibitions and values, his inner contradictions. And Judaism, with its commitment to one unseen God, opens the way for doing so. It gives us the gift of inwardness.

Freud was aware that there were many modes of introspection abroad in the world, but he of course thought psychoanalysis was by far the best. He said that the poets were there before him as discoverers of the inner life but that they had never been able to make their knowledge about it systematic and accessible. So throughout the Moses book, Freud subtly identifies himself with the prophet and implies that psychoanalysis may be the most consequential heir of the Jewish “advance in intellectuality.” Freud believed that he had suffered for his commitment to psychoanalysis (which did not and does not lack detractors) and clearly looked to Moses as an example of a great figure who had braved resistance to his beliefs, both by Pharaoh in Egypt and by his own people. Moses hung on to his convictions — much as Freud aspired to do.

But in the end Freud was all about his own ego! Or did I read Prof. Edmundson wrong here. Jews as leaders of humanity into abstract intellectualism, even science and then Freud the proposer of the standard psychotherapeutic approach to human anguish and hysteria, as the most scientific of intellectuals! But deep down he romanticised his own place in Western civilization as well as Judaism’s contribution to Western intellectual evolution.

I feel that this posting is a small example of how I use this blog to document and think through my own perspectives about Science, religion and the Western World’s intellectual history.

Man of Steel, Re-forged

I have posted in below a long excerpt from a review appearing in National Interest written by Andrew J Bacevich. He reviews a recent book written by Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: from WW II to Cold War 1939-1953 and here is the excerpt:

In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman—indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, “the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy.”

Furthermore, once Germany went down to defeat—with British and American leaders immediately turning on the Soviet Union—Stalin strove valiantly to sustain Allied unity. Time and again he exerted himself to avert the confrontation that became the Cold War. Even after his efforts failed, “He strove in the late 1940s and early 1950s to revive détente with the west.” In British and American eyes, Stalin became the embodiment of the totalitarian ideologue and warmonger. This was a misperception. To the very end, “Stalin continued to struggle for the lasting peace that he saw as his legacy.” In denying Stalin the reconciliation for which he devoutly worked, Western governments succeeded only in inflicting grave injury on the Soviet people. The East-West rivalry thrust upon Stalin nipped in the bud his postwar efforts to nurture within the Soviet Union a “more relaxed social and political order.”

Roberts neither denies nor conceals the cruelty and ruthlessness that marked the Stalinist era. He freely admits that Stalin was “responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens.” He concedes that in the 1930s Stalin presided over the Great Terror in which “millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands were shot.” He notes that Stalin directed “a process of ethnic cleansing involving the arrest, deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of people living in border areas” of the Soviet Union. He holds Stalin accountable for the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, involving the liquidation of 20,000 Polish officers and government officials. Although speculating that “Stalin must have bitterly regretted the subsequent embarrassment and complications” when the events at Katyn Forest became known, Roberts makes it clear that the Soviet leader employed mass murder as an instrument of policy—and did so without compunction.

Still, Roberts leaves the distinct impression that when it comes to evaluating Stalin’s standing as a statesman, such crimes qualify as incidental. He acknowledges them in order to dismiss them. Whether intentionally or not, Roberts suggests that Stalin’s penchant for ordering people shot qualifies as a sort of personal quirk, akin perhaps to FDR’s infidelities or Churchill’s fondness for drink. For Roberts, there are only two marks on Stalin’s report card that really count: The first conferred for defeating Hitler, the second for doing his level best to forestall the Cold War. In each instance, Roberts awards Stalin an A-plus.

So Roberts maintains the Stalin was a great statesman, the greatest of his age! That should get the attention of lots of historians.

My own view is that that could be true. But after reading about the political roles and ubiquity of Comintern agents in China in the countrywide turmoil from the early ’20s till the breakdown between Mao and Moscow and about the same sort of scenario in Civil War Spain, Stalin also had to be a political provocateur on a global scale, even more than the US of A at its imperial zenith. I guess I suggest that he was a political rain-maker in much of the world, especially during the peak of the Cold War.

But Roberts’ thesis is provocative because it sets out to re-frame an awful lot of alleged foreign policy victories by US dominated NATO et al. And it throws up an interesting and new perspective about the US led Crusade in Europe.

The brouhaha about Mulroney, PET and Chretien seems like a lot of fetid lukewarm air in comparison to the white heat of world scale politics played out between the White House, Whitehall, the Elysée Palace and the Kremlin until the dissolution of the USSR.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Did British double agent Kim Philby murder Polish war hero General Sikorski?