Perennialism

This is Rusholme in the dark. It's been like that at night for many years, and I have many memories of it, both happy recent ones and from 30 years ago. In so many ways, nothing changes. Perhaps it's a bit more fun now. 

There's been a discussion online about perennial philosophy. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it in 1947.  Perennialism is about permanence and continuity - about what stays the same. Love stays the same: there's a nice quote by Rumi in Huxley's book: "The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love."

Scientifically and biologically, what stays the same is the fertilised egg. We phenotypes have to adapt in many different ways to different worlds. When I first knew Rusholme, there was no internet. But life began in the same way, driven by love. Bill Miller says it's driven by "preference". I can agree, but I think preference is really "order" and order is fundamental to perception. Perception is an order-seeking process.

What Ekhardt says here could be said of the zygote:

This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is  the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing love.

What does an organism - you and me - do by way of expressing this? We seek order in our perception, enact preferences. On rare occasions in my life I can't tell if the universe selects my preferences for me.  Epigenetically, the results of our seeking are carried back to the zygote, to the unity. The agency of an individual seems to be coloured by the cosmos. And life goes on by maintaining stability.

We worry about our mortality. But not every part of us dies. The microbiome and necrobiome among other things, may be a vehicle for life after death. What if were to wipe ourselves out in a nuclear conflict?  Something of life is likely to be retained - something perennial survives. Love, as preference, perception and order, survives. 

Maintaining a Population of Healthy Workers

Stafford Beer's cybernetic model of the Toronto healthcare system from 1986 presents some very interesting ideas for thinking about occupational health. 

Not least is what's in the middle. Normally we think of a health system as a means of treating sick people, so the population of sick people forms the focus of the system. By putting a population of healthy people in the middle, then the question becomes one of "how do you create a system to keep people healthy?". So it's not a huge step to think "How do you create a system to keep people healthy in work?"

On the left hand side, the distinction between "unrecognised ill" and "recognised ill" is important in organisations, because "ill" can be an indication of "bad for the organisation" rather than with immediate symptoms of ill-health individually. Also the "iatrogenic" loop - healer-induced sickness - contributing to the "known ill" rings true for many occupational health services - it is the "failure demand" of the system, where services which are meant to help, actually make things worse. 

Also at the bottom is the distinction between known needs and unknown needs, and the way in which known needs and expectations must be balanced and mediated by political concerns. 

On the right hand side there is the information environment and the personal self-management around health. This isn't much different in occupational health. Here, government and media coalesce with self-monitoring, education and social services to deal with known risks and unknown risks.

So if we put a "Population of healthy workers" in the middle of this, where do occupational health providers sit in the equation? Where does the DWP and government sit? Where does the NHS proper fit? What about self-help and lifestyle issues? Where do the cocaine habits of stock market traders sit? And crucially, what in the system is iatrogenic and pathological?

The mapping can work. As occupational health globalises, there are important things to think about here.

An Die Ferne Geliebte

I've been wanting to write about this for ages. The way the love story between Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck is borne out by the passion in Schumann's piano Fantasie is one of the most enlivening and heart-felt episodes in the history of music. The ending of the first movement of the Fantasie contains a quote from a Beethoven song, An die Ferne Geliebte, where there is little doubt as to who the Ferne Geliebte is. 

To me this is also a passionate moment in science, because Clementine Fechner, sister of Gustav, became Clementine Wieck, and Clara's stepmother. Although Clara wasn't particularly close to Clementine, she knew Gustav Fechner, and also his artist brother. What were their discussions? Here was the founding father of psychophysics who also wrote about art and the afterlife, and the leading circle of composers (Schumann, Brahms, etc) in the 19th century. 

Then if course there are the letters, like this from Robert to Clara:

One would think that no one man’s heart and brain could stand all the things that are crowded into one day. Where do these thousands of thoughts, wishes, sorrows, joys and hopes come from? Day in, day out, the procession goes on. But how light-hearted I was yesterday and the day before! There shone out of your letters so noble a spirit, such faith, such a wealth of love!

I wonder about this kind of writing. Maybe it was just a style, but we can feel the beating heart - so common throughout the romantic period. Clara was no less passionate:

Dear Robert, I love you so much it hurts my heart. Tell me what you’re writing. I would so love to know, oh please, please. A quartet, an overture — even perhaps a symphony? Might it by any chance be — a wedding present?

The idea that this intoxicating passion has a resonance with science, and particularly with my own AI story, is something (among other things) that's keeping me going right now! 

The Death Cult of Education

I've been re-reading Illich's "Disabling Professions" (see https://www.panarchy.org/illich/professions.html ) which is his most excoriating critique of modernity. It stands in stark contrast to the prevailing view that knowledge and education is fundamental to our survival. This is the view (by respectable people) that people who vote for Trump are essentially "stupid", and (by extension) half the nation is stupid. Illich predicted modernity's slip into fascism. He was a systems thinker and he knew it wasn't knowledge but the system that was the problem, and education is a big part of the system.

All social disasters unfold slowly over many generations. Each generation only sees small changes, and adapts to a world that they perceive as relatively stable. Education is a system operating from generation to generation where each generation is only able to perceive tiny differences until it is too late. Only with the historian's eye can we see what is happening across the generations. Normal life for each generation entails just making things worse - but we can't see it.

From Easter Island to the Maya, it is the same. It is always the intergenerational transmission and awareness system that failed. That was the vehicle that led their society off a cliff. Our vehicle is "education", and it's just as efficient in steering towards disaster. 

Maybe the question we should ask is "who's steering the vehicle?" The challenge is no individual expert, however knowledgeable, can steer us to viability. Some will put the gas down a bit harder than others, but no single person or view can really help. That is the only difference between Trump and Harris, or (for that matter), Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Zelensky, Orban, or any of the others. They are all the products of capitalism - they all went to the same school. 

I can only envisage a viable solution if everybody's brain is driving together as one brain. How do we do that? That is a cybernetic question. 

Moon of Alabama

So many memories walking through the park...

A beautiful picture and Kurt Weill's hauntingly bitter song...

Technology of Enchantment

My investigation of 19th century psychology and its relation to romantic art and music on the one hand, and modern AI on the other, is raising a particular issue to do with 20th century art and society. In contrast to the 19th century, the 20th century was marked by a desperate disenchantment with the world, marked out by conflict, and rationalistic scientism that gave us many wonders of modern technology, but also the atom bomb and the knowledge that we could destroy ourselves. 

The love triangle that connects Clara Schumann, Brahms and Robert Schumann stands as one of the great examples of the opposite of this disenchanting tendency. Its not that the world wasn't a miserable place in the 19th century - for many in the world, it clearly was - but that for the leaders of art and music, beauty remained an ideal deeply connected to love, and that love and the human spirit was a guide deeply connected to scientific advance. Music, particularly, is (and certainly was then) a language of love.

This connection was partly lost in the 20th century. Of course this is not to say that 20th century music is deficient. Quite the opposite - some of the greatest art and music belongs to that tortured century, just as the greatest drama belongs to Shakespeare's police state England. But the 19th century had something different that was lost when the dreams went sour in the 20th. Put simply, it was the possibility of enchantment, and a tangible awareness of a "higher power" - whatever that is. 

Occasionally we ourselves glimpse this. When people fall in love, or you hold a new baby, we see it briefly. We also glimpse it in music. There is a power beyond the day to day which reveals itself. In our rationalistic modern mindset we trivialise this. The reason why we trivialise it is connected to why we don't take music seriously in the first place. But the 19th century romantics understood something deeper. What did the 19th century psychologists make of it? Perhaps the question might be what they made of it before Freud came along and (to some extent) debunked it all.

Schumann and Covid

I got over Covid, although it's been quite unpleasant. In my Covidness I found some comfort in the music of the Schumanns - Robert and Clara. As a musical couple they are fascinating me at the moment because Clara's stepmother was the sister of Gustav Fechner, a leading 19th century psychologist.

Fechner coined the term "psychophysics" as the science of perception of differences, and it is Fechner's work which has been central to my commercial activity with AI and medical diagnostics. Fechner was interested in many things and wrote about aesthetics, animism and spiritualism. We don't make scientists like that any more! Clara Schumann knew Fechner and it's hard to believe that she wasn't interested in the potential implications of psychophysics on the science of music.

I like to imagine the conversations they might have had - and listening to Clara's music which is full of unusual modulations, it's fascinating to think what she might have absorbed. Robert died quite early on so would not be necessarily influenced, but his music too is full of fascinating differences. I'm doing a presentation in a couple of weeks on his "Bird as Prophet" from Waldsczenen. What a magical piece that is. Brahms of course was also in the Schumann circle, and there are further resonances there - and he certainly was interested in the science.

I find that Robert Schumann's music is particularly interesting because it so heartfelt. I find that even among those who don't listen so much to classical music, Schumann resonates as magical. Why is that? There is a particular sensitivity there. A sentivity to difference perhaps...

Sausages and Hostages

Keir Starmer's sausage slip was so weird and revealing about this strange man. It wasn't so much the slip in the first place, but the way he then corrected himself saying "hostages" very deliberately, without even acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the slip. It's as if it's just words - just sounds - no meaning. 

Is all politics now like that? - a stupid game where we can replace hostages with sausages and nobody really cares (and they don't care that others laugh), because in the end it's about money, not human beings. Trump plays this all the time. Covfefe anyone?

Imagine if real life was like that. Imagine getting a phone call from a deeply loved sausage being held to ransom... We've become like H.G. Wells's Eloi.

At such a distressing time in the world, we've lost sight of what is absurd and ridiculous. When Israeli actions seem disturbingly similar to Russian actions, and when the actions of both are determined by market movements that only a few control, it's almost as if anything goes. And where the hell is education? Well, it's playing the market game too.

I don't know how we get out of this. But as a friend reminded me, the 1980s nuclear catastrophe movie Threads is being re-shown. That should tell us something. 

Man Flu

Bugger. I'm sick. Sniffle, sniffle, oh dread,
Achy bones, and an even achier head.
It’s not just a cold, no, don't misconstrue,
This, my dear friends, is a full-on man flu!

My nose is a tap, my throat’s made of sand,
How will I ever survive or even stand?
The world seems darker, the end feels nigh,
For man flu’s upon me, I’m barely alive!

The tissues pile up, a soft paper mountain,
I’ve drunk enough tea to drain a fountain.
Wrapped in blankets, my heroic plight,

You’d think I was scaling Everest tonight.
But fear not, dear loved ones, I’ll battle through,
Though this man flu feels like it’s splitting me in two.

With remote in hand and soup by my side,
I’ll recover—just after this dramatic ride!

ChatGPT asks for sympathy...