The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, September 28, 2010



Poetry Competition

The Genomics Forum's poetry competition, organised by Pippa Goldschmidt, is doing well, with around a hundred entries so far from all over the world.

Deadline: 7 October. So there's still plenty of time to enter. (When the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig was asked how long it took him to write a poem, he answered: 'Two cigarettes.')

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Monday, September 27, 2010



That iffy skiffy science ...

Over the past few years I've got a lot of mileage (quite literally - one presentation of it was used to finagle funding for a trip to Australia by a science fiction academic speaking at the same conference) out of a talk I first gave to a Communicating Science class at Glasgow University. One of the points I make in that talk is how rare good science is in - not written SF, which, I argue, is largely kept honest by the sharp teeth of the well-read, ravening hordes of SF fandom - but SF in other media.

Especially (as you know, Professor) the movies.

The biological, and specifically evolutionary, element of this endlessly replicating, spawning, proliferating nonsense gets a well-deserved dissection on groovy skiffy website io9. The smack-down also swipes one example from written SF - one I used myself in that lecture, as it happens. (Via the great PZ, who knows what he's talking about.)

Hollywood, it's safe to say, won't reform its ways any time soon. So what can a good science communicator do? There are only so many times you can re-run Gattaca, after all. One innovative approach is taken by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, along with sociology institute Cesagen, in Cardiff: at their initiative, Cardiff sciSCREEN, they hang serious discussions off popular and classic movies without trying to use the scientific content of the movies as educational tools - for example, using the recent blockbuster Inception 'to explore the psychology of lucid dreaming, business ethics and intellectual property, representations of urban environments, and the ownership of mental states'.

Next up: Der Golem, a Halloween special followed by a 'discussion featuring academics with interests in the Gothic, in the philosophy of vitalism, and in folklore, myth, and Jewishness and Judaism on film.'

Way to go!

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Parallel Worlds

At 7 pm this Friday evening I'm on a panel at Newcastle's amazing Centre for Life with acclaimed author Scarlett Thomas, as part of Newcastle University's project Parallel Worlds: Literature and Science.

From the blurb:
Ideas from physics, computing and philosophy have increasingly fed into the work of novelists, not only in science fiction but also "mainstream" fiction. Concepts such as virtual reality, alternate history or the "multiverse" have influenced popular culture and contemporary literature in diverse ways. This series of events brings together leading writers and thinkers to reflect on their "parallel" disciplines and explore possible bridges between them.
The event is introduced by novelist, former physicist, and creative writing lecturer Dr Andrew Crumey.

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Monday, September 13, 2010



Has Karen Armstrong ever read Feurbach?


In her best-selling and widely praised The Case for God Karen Armstrong contrasts the recent New Atheists with the good old atheists who at least understood theology:
In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach ... But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, because their theology is so rudimentary.
Feuerbach's best-known and most influential work, The Essence of Christianity, is a somewhat forbidding book at first glance (and at second glance, when you find that the standard paperback has as its introduction a lecture on Feuerbach by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968)). That was probably why I put the copy I'd picked up and glanced through back on the returns trolley of Brunel University Library in 1976, thus missing out on 34 years of enlightenment. (I really kick myself because the University's Anglican chaplain materialised beside me as I was looking at it, and enthusiastically recommended it as a thorough demolition of orthodox Christian theology, particularly the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. You don't believe any of that? I asked, incredulously. Of course not, he said. What do you say to your colleagues who do believe it? Oh, he replied, they don't believe it either.)

Anyway, a month or so ago I eventually got around to reading Feuerbach, and you know, Frederick Engels and the vicar were right! 'The spell was broken; the ‘system’ was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.' If I'd read it back then I'd have been spared a lot of puzzlement about Anglicans, and also about Marxists. At the time I thought I was one myself, but what I didn't understand was all the other Marxists I knew. Why were they so confident? And why were they so fucking busy? Obviously I had missed the meeting where everyone had read Feuerbach:
The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism. Such atheists have nothing to say, and that is why they are afraid to speak out. The cryptoatheist says only in private that there is no God; his atheism is summed up in this one negative statement, which stands all alone, so that his atheism changes nothing. And it is perfectly true that if atheism were a mere negation, a denial without content, it would be unfit for the people, that is, for man or for public life; but only because such atheism is worthless. True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light, is also an affirmation; it negates the being abstracted from man, who is and bears the name of God, but only in order to replace him by man’s true being.

[...]

Let us then leave the dead in peace and concern ourselves with the living. If we no longer believe in a better life but decide to achieve one, not each man by himself but with our united powers, we will create a better life, we will at least do away with the most glaring, outrageous, heartbreaking injustices and evils from which man has hitherto suffered. But in order to make such a decision and carry it through, we must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion, the belief in God by the belief in man and his powers – by the belief that the fate of mankind depends not on a being outside it and above it, but on mankind itself, that man’s only Devil is man, the barbarous, superstitious, self-seeking, evil man, but that man’s only God is also man himself.
But to return to Karen Armstrong: the real irony of her recommendation of Feuerbach is that Feuerbach's argument (meticulously reasoned and documented, as Barth admits through his teeth) that 'God' is nothing other than human consciousness unaware that it is describing itself is above all applicable to the mysterious, ineffable, indescribable, elusive, ungraspable 'God' for which Karen Armstrong makes her case.

We see nothing of the mind's working
except what comes on screen
and goes on keyboard. What's between
the two, behind the one -
the self that knows the self we know
and
all the self knows -
we don't know.

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Tuesday, September 07, 2010



The man who stared at dolphins

Even when I was a rather credulous teenager who took seriously the writings of Carlos Castenada, Colin Wilson, Timothy Leary, Teilhard de Chardin and R. D. Laing, all it took was one flick through a snazzy paperback of John C. Lilly's The Centre of the Cyclone for me to conclude that the author was out of it. Just how far out is detailed here.

Needless to say, he had NASA and Naval funding. Was there any part of the counter-culture that didn't start as a black op?

Via, with a juicy taster quote and the fine understatement: This is by no means the strangest part of this article.

My own favourite paragraph, however, is this:
To appreciate the rings of significance that widened from this laboratory scene, it is critical to understand that in the 1950s no one thought of whales and dolphins as “musical” or “intelligent” or—of all things—“spiritually enlightened.” At that time, the large whales were generally regarded as huge kegs of fat (useful for making soap), meat (good to feed to chickens), and fertilizer (best thing to do with what was left after you took the fat and meat), and the smaller dolphins and porpoises were mostly just a nuisance to fishermen—though bottlenose were sometimes actually hunted, since the fine oil in their jaw ducts was considered a superior lubricant for precision timepieces.
How times have changed.

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Saturday, September 04, 2010



' ... for then we would know the mind of God'

Stephen Hawking famously concluded A Brief History of Time with these words. Now he has no need of that hypothesis.

My talented brother James responds:

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Thursday, September 02, 2010



Queen Victoria's Terraformers

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".
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