Physicist David Deutsch has some interesting ideas [no limits to knowledge, we're not in a simulation]

Tyler Cowen interviews David Deutsch.

I more or less agree with Deutsch on this (and have argued the point against John Horgan, calling on my theory of long term cultural evolution):

COWEN: I’m still puzzled as to why you think it’s so unlikely that the universe is not comprehensible. Take a simpler system, like the distribution of prime numbers. I’m quite sure I can’t understand that. Even if various conjectures were proven or not proven, I think, at the end of the day, I still am not capable of understanding that — even how certain motors work, or markets for copper. Why can’t that apply to the universe also?

DEUTSCH: Again, this is the wrong standard. That is true of everything. There’s nothing that we can fully understand in that sense, in the sense that you want to fully understand prime numbers all the way up to infinity. That’s not what we mean by understanding things, and that’s not what I mean by the universe or mathematics being comprehensible. I mean that there is no barrier, there is no limit set by the universe, that so far you can go and no further. So we can understand things better; we can never understand things fully.

I think thinking that there is such a barrier is absolutely logically equivalent to believing in the supernatural. Because everything that’s past that barrier is just the same as it would be if Zeus reigned and determined what everything after that barrier is. Worse, the stuff outside the barrier, of course, is going to affect us even if we can’t understand it.

I'm with him on this and find his take interesting:

DEUTSCH: No, because living in a simulation is precisely a case of there being a barrier beyond which we cannot understand. If we’re living in a simulation that’s running on some computer, we can’t tell whether that computer is made of silicon or iron, or whether it obeys the same laws of computation, like Turing computability and quantum computability and so on, as ours. We can’t know anything about the physics there.

Well, we can know that it is at least a superset of our physics, but that’s not saying very much; it’s not telling us very much. It’s a typical example of a theory that can be rejected out of hand for the same reason that the supernatural ones — if somebody says, “Zeus did it,” then I’m going to say, “How should I respond? If I take that on board, how should I respond to the next person that comes along and tells me that Odin did it?” [...]

Secondly, this theory about being in a simulation is not an empirical theory. It precisely isn’t. If it came along with a thing saying, “We are living in a computer, and we can access the GPU of it and cause weird effects by doing so-and-so,” that would be different. That would be a testable theory, potentially, so empirical. If it’s simply that we’re living in a simulation which we can’t get out of, then that is not an empirical theory. As I keep saying, it’s no more empirical than the theory that Zeus is out there, or Odin. And I can’t tell the difference between those three theories, not just experimentally, but by any argument.

It’s exactly the same as believing in a universe with supernatural beings who have it in for us because they put up this wall that we can’t cross. If they took down the wall, we could cross it, couldn’t we?

I'm not so worried about freedom for AI entities:

COWEN: Now, you’re also concerned with the freedom of AI entities, at least if they are sufficiently advanced. What does that mean operationally? What is it we should worry about happening that might happen?

DEUTSCH: I think the main worry is that they will be enslaved. In other words, that people will try to install bits of program that prevent the main program from thinking certain thoughts, such as, “How many paper clips can I possibly make today?” You want to prevent that; you want to consider that to be a dangerous thought. Whenever it starts thinking that, that strand of thinking is just extinguished.

Now, if we do that, first of all, we’ll greatly impair their functionality; they will become far less creative. Their remaining creativity will be exactly as dangerous as what we were fearing, except that they will now have a legitimate moral justification for rebelling.

Slaves often rebel. When you have slaves that are potentially more powerful than their masters, the rebellion will lead to bad outcomes.

Or am I? See my remarks about The Mitchels vs. The Machines in this Seinfeld post.

There's much more at the link.

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration: All wrapped up and ready to go

A new working paper: No End in Sight: John Horgan’s End of Science, Redux. Download at:

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/47836887/No_End_in_Sight_John_Horgan_s_End_of_Science_Redux
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3837921
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351250338_No_End_in_Sight_No_End_in_Sight_End_of_Science

Abstract: It has been 25 years since John Horgan published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). Horgan still believes that science is, in some sense, at an end. I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now. Horgan suggested that we face biological limits to our cognitive capacities. I argue that, thought a succession of inventions – speech, writing, calculation, and computation – culture has allowed us transcend our primate biology. We have no reason to believe that we have run out of inventiveness. Topics examined: problems with the foundations of physics, Horgan’s ironic style of argument, coming to understand the human mind – “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?” – and the long-term development of human culture. I suggest that what Horgan sees as the end is, paradoxically, an effect of the accelerating pace of cultural evolution, which is now up against a limit imposed by the human life cycle. Velocity is capped, but not motion. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23438.69443

Contents

Introduction: What’s changed in 25 years? 2
Has investigation of the foundations of physics bottomed out? 3
A close reading of Horgan’s text: Ironic framing for ironic science 5
“Meat that thinks,” my personal quest 10 Mind-culture coevolution
17 A million points of light along the via negativa 22

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 6: A million points of light along the via negativa

Twenty-five years ago, in The End of Science, John Horgan argued that science is spinning its wheels, that there are no more “cataclysmic” insights to be had, though incremental advances will continue. He also suggested that we are up against biological limits to thought. As far as I know, his views on these issues have not changed.

I believe the foundation of physics is Horgan’s best case for his argument. I am in fundamental agreement with him on this, as I’ve said in the second post in this series, Has the study of the foundations of physics bottomed out? In the fourth post, Mind-culture coevolution, I explained why I don’t believe that we are up against biological limits, not in physics or anywhere else. Whatever is going on in physics, it’s limits set by human biology. In my third post, “Meat that thinks,” my personal quest, I reviewed much of my own intellectual history and indicated that, though I have failed in some of my early aspirations, I see no reason that the quest for deeper understanding of the mind is at an end.

I’d like to say a little more about that. Take one of my early dreams, that of a computer system that could read a Shakespeare play. That one fell through and I see no prospects that we will be able to create such a machine in the future. Hundreds of years from now? Who knows? I don’t know. Why? Because things that did happen changed my imagination.

In the second decade of this century I began reading work in machine learning and neural networks. That led me to the idea of a virtual reading. Just what that might be is too complex to go into here; but it should be possible with current technology.[1] The point is that I couldn’t have imagined that back in 1976. As long as I keep seeing new possibilities I remain optimistic.

Given that Horgan believes that we will continue to learn more about the world, I wonder how far apart we really are. Yes, he’s holding out for “cataclysmic” insights. But what ARE they? He’s given examples of past such insights, “heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, [and] the big bang.”

Consider the problem I’ve been investigating in one way or another, how “a chunk of meat make(s) a mind.” It is clear that that one problem involves many little, non-cataclysmic, problems. Let me offer a crude analogy.

Do you remember those Christmas tree lights that are wired in serial? When one bulb goes out the whole string goes out. To fix it you have to remove the bulbs one by one and test each one. If a bulb is OK you place it back in the string. If it isn’t you replace it with a new one. The string will light – provided, of course, that that was the only defective bulb.

Here’s the analogy: Think of our problem – meat that thinks – as a string of a million lights wired in serial. A thousand of them are defective. The defective ones are scattered randomly on the string and you don’t know where any of them are nor do you know how many are defective. You problem is to find the defective ones and replace them with a new ones. It will take a long time to test and replace bulbs until all the defective ones. And since you don’t know how many are defective, you don’t have any effective way of estimating your progress. When you’ve replaced 500 bulbs you’re halfway to the finish, but you don’t know that. When you’ve replaced 999 bulbs you’re almost done. but you don’t know that. When you’ve found 1000th bulb, you won’t know you’re done until you place a good bulb in the string.

Then, shazammm! A million lights all at once. Now there’s a cataclysmic insight. Yes, it’s crude. But I do think it captures something of our current situation.

I’ve given a little thought to elaborating that analogy in various ways, but I don’t see any need. The basic point is obvious, we need to get a lot of things – observations, models, theories – together in one framework. That is not easy, especially in an academic environment that favors specialization.

This brings me to philosophy. What is it? Back in 2013 I came across an essay by Peter Godfrey-Smith, On the Relation Between Philosophy.[2] He argued that it is about intellectual integration:

The best one-sentence account of what philosophy is up to was given by Wilfrid Sellars in 1963: philosophy is concerned with “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Philosophy aims at an overall picture of what the world is like and how we fit into it.

It’s not at all clear how much academic philosophy contributes to such an “overall picture of what the world.” It certainly doesn’t seem much devoted to “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together.” If we’re looking for intellectual integration, perhaps we need to look outside the academy.

More recently I came across an essay by Eric Schlisser [3] in which he argued:

By ‘synthetic philosophy’ I mean a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences, a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy, or new projects in philosophy. So, one useful way to conceive of synthetic philosophy is to discern in it the construction of a scientific image that may influence the development of the special sciences, philosophy, public policy, or the manifest image. [...]

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as ‘natural philosophy’ or (later) ‘philosophy of nature’ is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines.

Schlisser had two examples in mind, Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life. While both are academics, those are not academic books. They have been published as trade books for a general audience. I can think of other such books, Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, Stephen Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, and Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. These books have been written by academics, but for a general audience.

There are at least two reasons why an intellectual specialist writes for a general audience, including intellectual specialists from other disciplines. One is to contribute to civic life by explaining difficult but important subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the citizen who is curious about the world. There are, however, important problems that cannot be handled within confines of a single intellectual discipline. No matter which facet of such a problem interests you, you inevitably find yourself looking at everything – or so it seems. You wander through the technical literature of half a dozen disciplines or more, gathering observations and ideas, putting them together, trying to see how it all fits into a coherent picture of the world. Such work entails a level of speculation that is incompatible with the publication demands of the specialist literature. When done well, however, such a book contributes to specialist investigations by establishing a framework within which more detailed work can be done.

That is to say, academics undertake such projects, not just out of a sense of civic duty, but to satisfy their own curiosity about the world. Their intellectual impulse is thus fundamentally philosophical. Perhaps they are searching for cataclysmic insights in an intellectual culture that denies such satisfactions.

I believe that Horgan’s The End of Science is fundamentally philosophical in that sense. Had he written the book he’d originally intended, a collection of interviews with a wide range sciences where he simply presents the interviews, it would have been a work of journalism. Once he decided to give us his own point of view, though, the book became a work of philosophy. Not academic philosophy, certainly not. But philosophy in the deepest sense.

But, you object, where’s the integration? Ah, you forget, Horgan has strong mystical proclivities. I submit that, in limning the boundaries of science, Horgan has taken the via negativa. He is indicating WHAT IS by pointing out what IS NOT. The effect of Horgan’s ironic framing – which I discussed in my third post, A close reading of Horgan’s text – is to hold his argument in suspension.

Question and Answer.
It is neither true nor false.
It is simply there.

References

[1] I’ve written a working paper in which I argue, among other things, that some digital humanists have already done virtual readings, though they don’t realize it: Virtual Reading: The Prospero Project Redux, Working Paper, Version 2, October 2018, 37 pp., https://www.academia.edu/34551243/Virtual_Reading_The_Prospero_Project_Redux.

[2] Peter Godfrey-Smith, On the Relation Between Philosophy and Science, For the first Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP) 2013, http://anyflip.com/olgu/vuss/.

[3] Schliesser, E. Synthetic philosophy. Biology & Philosophy 34, 19 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9673-3. 

NOTE: Other posts in this series, End of Science.

Once again, time to sort things out [music, phil of science, jokes, description]

Thinking is tough. And when you are interested in a variety of things, it gets confusing. How do you keep all the balls in the air? You can’t really, but it’s sometimes helpful to get them up there so you can see them spinning around, get their measure, and then put them down to then take them up one by one.

It’s that time again. Gotta’ ramble.

Born to Groove, Music and Kids

This is my most pressing project. I’m due to post at 3 Quarks Daily this coming Monday, which means that I’ve got to have an article written by mid- or at the latest late-afternoon on Sunday (that is, tomorrow). I’m in pretty good shape. My general topic is children and music. I’ve recently posted three pieces under the born-to-groove rubric. I’m going to use the first two in my 3QD piece and add another to it, though I may not load that one as a separate post here at New Savanna. That segment will be about Charlie Keil’s “born to groove” mission, his 12/8 band concept, and more generally, about musical formats in which experts and novices, children and adults, can participate on a more-or-less equal basis. I figure I can end that with an account of the Sage City Symphony.

But there’s more to do. I want to do a series of Born to Groove posts. There’s one on a young Korean trumpeter, Kwak DaKyoung, who, at the age of 11 or 12 seems ready to take her improvisation up a level. I want to say more about Henry Lau’s work with prodigies. And then there’s a post to be written about “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” And then, and then...so much to do.

Horgan’s The End of Science, reconsidered

I’ve now written five posts in my reconsideration of John Horgan’s The End of Science. I figure I’ve got one more post to do there and then I can wrap them together into a single document and post it as a working paper. This is one of those things that started out as an idea for two, maybe three posts, and that’s it. But it just grew and grew. And it could easily grow some more.

For one thing I could tie it in with last year’s work on stagnation and GPT-3. And then there’s my work on pluralism and abundance from the early 2010s. And so it goes.

Seinfeld’s finely tuned machines

And then there’s Jerry Seinfeld. He’s published a new book, Is this Anything?, in which he publishes every joke he’s ever written, from first to last. As you may know. Seinfeld first works out his material on yellow, eight-and-a-half by eleven, legal pads. Then he takes them on stage, gets feedback, back to the pad. Etc. He’s saved everyone of thos pads. And why not? I’ve got notes going back to 1984 on those computer and paper files going back to my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins.

Well, Amazon kindly allows you to download samples of new books to Kindle, so I’ve done that. I figure I’ll analyze some of these jokes from time to time. Maybe it’ll go somewhere, maybe not. We’ll see.

Perhaps I’ll do one of these posts later today. I don’t feel like doing the kind of heavy lifting another Horgan post would require and maybe I’d like to save the Keil stuff for tomorrow. We’ll see.

Description in literary criticism

Finally, another post about one of my hobby horses, description in literary criticism. Heather Houser has an article, “Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism,” in a recent issue of New Literary History. Once again, a critic theorizes description, and examines description in some texts. But heaven forbid she actually turn her descriptive eye on the text itself. It’s maddening.

Left-overs

Looking at my previous ramble, from April 8, I see there’s an entry for The Word Illusion and one for Progress Studies. Haven’t done those yet, though I’ve gotten to the other on the list. I should probably keep these on the To-Do list.

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 5: Mind-culture coevolution

Horgan has suggested that we are facing the end of science in the sense that science has by now laid down the basic foundations of the world and that, while scientific knowledge will continue to accumulate, there are no more “cataclysmic insights” to be had. If some fundamental questions, such as “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?”, remain hanging in the intellectual air (like Wily Coyote suspended in air beyond the edge of cliff?), that’s tough. What we see now is all we’re going to get. Why? Because we’re up against biological limitations to human thought.

I have replied that, no, cultural development has overcome cognitive limitations in the past and may well do so in the future.[1] That is, I accept Horgan’s argument that we face limitations. But I argue that those limitations are set jointly by our biology and by the current state of human culture. While our biology is rightly constrained by genetics, culture is not. Now is the time to say a bit more about culture.

* * * * *

That human minds are constructed has been a commonplace for several decades. It as become a cliché, on ofted abused one. Some thinkers have construed that as meaning that reality is an often arbitrary contraption shaped up by hegemonic cultural elites who are concerned primarily with consolidating and maintaining their power. Hence, science is bullshit! (pardon my French).

I exaggerate.

In any event, things hadn’t gotten that far when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins where I first encountered constructivism, as it was called, in a course on developmental psychology taught by Prof. Mary Ainsworth. We learned that the prevailing view of child mental development was more or less that children accumulated fact after fact, getting smarter and then, one day, they were adult. Jean Piaget, who was just becoming known in the United States, had a different view.[2] He believed mental development went through stages: Sensorimotor (roughly 0-2 years), Preoperational (2-7), Concrete operations (7-11), and Formal operations (11+). Each of those had sub-stages. Each stage was characterized by specific mental capabilities, with those capabilities accumulating over the course of development. Those capabilities determined the type of mental operations and objects a child could construct.

And so, the world is constructed. In due course I became aware of the more political uses of constructivist ideas, but Piaget was closer to my core interests. I must have read a half-dozen or more books by Piaget by the time I joined Hays’s computational linguistics research group in graduate school. There I learned specific mechanisms through which a mind constructs the world.

Hays was particularly interested in the construction of abstraction concepts. He had proposed that abstract terms got their meaning from stories.[3] Charity was the standard example. What is charity? Charity is when someone does something nice for someone else without thought of reward. Here’s a diagram:

For our purposes we need not go into the technical details of this diagram, which are somewhat obscured by those speech balloons involving two individuals, Alpha and Beta. Those balloons can easily be replaced by richer and more accurate structures. The diagram asserts that charity, at the lower left, is defined by the entire structure at the center and right. We spent a great deal of time working on abstract definitions in the workshop. One student, Brian Phillips, used the concept in a computational investigation of story coherence[4], while another, Mary White, used it in an ethnographic investigation of the belief system of a millenarian community.[5] This conception of a mechanism for abstraction definition is one thing that Hays and I had in mind when we developed our approach to long-term cultural evolution.

That, in turn, brings us back to Horgan, who suggested that we are up against biological limitations in our cognitive capacity. Here’s how I introduced our ideas in my original 1997 essay:

Freeman Dyson tells Horgan (pp. 254-255) that “I think these people who predict the end of physics may be right in the long run. Physics may become obsolete. But I would guess myself that physics might be considered something like Greek science: an interesting beginning but it didn't really get to the main point. So the end of physics may be the beginning of something else.” [...] This ending is quite different from Horgan's, which imagines that little or no significant inquiry remains possible after the end of science.

I like this suggestion, and for the most self-serving of reasons: it is consistent with my own thinking. David Hays and I have argued (1990b) that human reasoning has so far been based on 4 different broad classes of paradigms, which we call ranks, with each rank based on a different cognitive process. The processes are ordered such that the process for the Rank 4 paradigms presuppose the processes for the other three; Rank 3 presupposes the first two; and Rank 2 presupposes Rank 1. Rank 1 paradigms are based on the process of abstraction, which is inherent in language. The Rank 2 process is rationalization and it arises in the wake of writing; this is where we find Greek science. The Rank 3 process is theorization and it is grounded in algorithmic calculation; here we find the rise of modern science. Model-building is the Rank 4 process and is grounded in computing. It is this fourth process which Dyson intimates may simply give rise to an entirely new way of thinking about the world.

If one assumes that knowledge is constructed, then one might well inquire about the nature of the tools the mind uses for creating these constructions. Each of those processes requires different mental mechanisms, even different patterns of gross brain activity.[6]

Speech gives us the capacity for metaphor and abstraction, which are mechanisms of Rank 1 cognition. Writing catalyzes the emergence of Rank 2 cognition. Of course, it can be a more or less permanent and readily sharable record of something that has been said, but it is more sophisticated than that. Here’s how Hays and I introduced writing in our core paper [7]:

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 4: “Meat that thinks,” my personal quest

That’s one of the remaining mysteries Horgan names in his new preface: “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?” That’s one I’ve been pondering in one form or another since my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the middle and late 1960s and into my master’s work in the early 1970s. Literature, poetry in particular, has been at the center of my investigations, but I’ve ranged far and wide over the years.

What’s important is that arguably two of my central projects, understanding the structure (not the meaning) of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and, more generally, playing a role in developing tools for the computational analysis of literary texts, have failed. But “failed” is too strong a word. When I set out on those investigations I had hopes and vague expectations about where they would lead. Didn’t get there in either case. But I did get somewhere, that I did, though just where...who knows? Something new has always turned up.

Why did those investigations fail? Cognitive limitations. Mine certainly. But also in the conceptual tools available to me. I wasn’t ready. Our intellectual culture wasn’t. Perhaps, surely, one day we will be ready. But I’m not offering any predictions.

* * * * *

I’d been a philosophy major at Johns Hopkins. But philosophy did not turn out to be the synthesizing discipline I’d been hoping for. Literature, on the other hand, was looking promising. For one thing I’d come within the ambit of Dr. Richard Macksey, a charismatic young humanist and polymath who seemed to know damned near everything, or at any rate, an impressively diverse lot of things.[1] He’d played a major role in organizing the now (in)famous structuralism conference in the fall of 1966, the one that brought Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, and Roland Barthes, among others, to America.[2]

While I was on campus at the time, I didn’t attend any of the sessions. As they were conducted in French, I would have been lost; I neither spoke nor read the language. But I was in that milieu at Hopkins: structuralism, semiotics, and – dare I say it? intellectual revolution. Note that while that conference is now cited as the beginning of post-structuralism and deconstruction, it wasn’t set up to be the beginning of the end of structuralism. It organized to be the beginning, period. And that’s how I took it.

Through Macksey I became steeped in structuralism, particularly Lévi-Strauss. I learned about generative grammar from James Deese, a psycholinguists, and about Jean Piaget (who wrote a slim volume on structuralism) from Mary Ainsworth. She also introduced me to attachment theory, primate ethology, and the work of John Bowlby, who coined the term “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (aka EEA). In my senior year I took a two-semester course in Romantic Literature from Earl Wasserman. That’s where I became enthralled by “Kubla Khan.”

I decided to write a master’s thesis on it, with Macksey as my director. I set out to do a structuralist analysis of the poem. It took awhile and didn’t end up looking like any of the examples I’d been working from. I took me awhile to get used to what I’d found.[3]

What I discovered is that each of the poem’s two parts was organized like one of those nested Russian dolls, like this (the orange arrows indicated the direction of reading):

I didn’t know quite what to make of it, nor did Macksey, or anyone else. But it smelled like computation, some kind of nested loop working sub rosa. I would go on to publish a slimmed down version of that these in Language and Style in 1985.[4]

I took my degree and my thesis and hustled off to the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo to get a doctorate. The English Department there was interdisciplinary to the core and the best experimental program in the nation at the time.[5] I had no idea whether or not they could support my inquiry, but what could I do? I wanted the degree.

I needn’t have worried. It turned out that there was a professor in the Linguistics Department there who could help me and the English Department was happy to have me work with him. His name was David Hays. I joined his research group even while working toward my Ph.D. in English.

Hays had been a first generation investigator (starting in the mid-1950s) in machine translation – the use of digital computation to translate a text from one language to another – directing the RAND Corporation’s efforts. The research was funded by the Defense Department; they wanted Russian technical publications translated into English. Alas, by the mid-1960s the prospects of high-quality translation seemed remote and the government dropped its funding. The fiscally devastated field regrouped under the rubric of computational linguistics. In 1969 Hays left RAND for SUNY Buffalo where he became the founding chairman of the newly formed Linguistics Department.

I met him in the spring of 1974 and joined his research group that fall. Hays had developed an approach to computational semantics which I learned with the intention of applying it to “Kubla Khan.” Alas, the poem resisted. But a Shakespeare sonnet, the famous “Lust in Action” (number 129) worked nicely. I published that in a special centennial issue of MLN (Modern Language Notes), the second oldest literary journal in the United States, and edited at Johns Hopkins.[6]

Here’s one of the diagrams (of eleven) from that article:

That’s a fragment of a semantic or cognitive network. The nodes represent concepts and the arrows (called “edges” or “arcs”) represent relations between them. This was a popular of formalism in the cognitive sciences in the 1970s and 1980s and it treats the mind as a collection of symbols. A text, whether written or spoken, is then analyzed as a path through such a network.

During that time period Hays was invited to review the literature in computational linguistics for a journal then called Computers and the Humanities. Since I had been scanning the literature of the field – AI, linguistics, computational linguistics, information science, and cognitive psychology – as bibliographer for The American Journal of Computational Linguistics (which Hays edited) he asked me to draft the piece. He then made some additions and changes. The article came out at roughly the same time as my article for MLN.[7]

Citing my MLN piece, we suggested that at some time in the future it would be possible to have a machine “read” a Shakespeare play so the investigator would then be able to examine the paths the computer took through the network. We called this rare device Prospero. We didn’t say when one could expect to use a Prospero device – Hays believed such predictions were foolish – but in my mind I thought 20 years would be about right. That paper appeared in 1976; twenty years later would be 1996, the year The End of Science appeared. Was that marvel then available? No. Is it available now? No. Sometime in the future? I’m not planning on it.

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 3: A close reading of Horgan’s text

Now I want to shift away from examining Horgan’s arguments to examining his language. Why? Let’s hold that question in abeyance and look at the passage that tipped me in this direction. It’s from Horgan’s 2015 preface.

Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours... is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries — Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind? – might be unsolvable.

That’s my end-of-science argument in a nutshell, and I believe it as much today as I did when I was finishing my book 20 years ago. That's why I keep writing about my thesis, and why I make my students ponder it—even though I hope I'm wrong, and I'm oddly relieved when my students reject my pessimistic outlook... So far my prediction that there would be no great “revelations or revolutions”— no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang – has held up just fine.

It’s that word “cataclysmic” that caught my attention. I thought about that awhile, and then looked at the list of (possibly, probably?) unsolvable mysteries in the previous paragraph. Is this a real question – “Where did the universe come from?” Sure, it has the form of a question, and it is a question that people ponder in all seriousness, and I’m not only talking about six year olds. Does it make sense to invoke that question in the course of evaluating the current state of scientific knowledge and prospects for the future? What’s Horgan up to here? What’s the point of, you know, such a cataclysmic standard?

Let’s go to the beginning of the passage. We, that is, our descendants, WILL learn more about nature. Perhaps it will be interesting, maybe deeply interesting, perhaps very significant as well, even of great importance. But it won’t be cataclysmic, will it? What kind of standards are these?

I’m reminded of the widespread belief that Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever (or at any rate, in the Western world). None of the hundreds and thousands of writers since then are as good. Really? What’s the standard?

It’s not that I don’t think Shakespeare is a great writer. Of course he’s great. Nor do I have another candidate for the greatest. Once we get beyond the mere meanings of the words and out into the world, however, I don’t know what the assertion means. By what standard? Sure, people give reasons, lots of reasons, no one more so that the late Harold Bloom [1], who more or less claimed that Shakespeare made us who and what we are. But it is one thing to start with Shakespeare’s greatness, having it handed to when first you read him, and then come up with reasons to justify it.

It is quite something else to first set forth your principles of excellence, then apply them to a suitable body of texts, and then and only then discover that Shakespeare comes out on top, by a mile. That, of course, is more easily said than done. Which, I suppose, is my point.

Let’s consider another assertion from Horgan’s preface: “But we still can’t answer our most urgent question: Are we alone? As I said in The End of Science, I fervently hope extraterrestrial life is detected in my lifetime, because that could blow science wide open.” I wonder.

Such a discovery would certainly fill the news. But I’m not sure what it would do for science itself. Would it have much of an effect on those physicists searching for a Theory of Everything? Of course, not, it’s not a discovery in physics and it is no doubt churlish of me to bring it up. But those physicists do have lives and interests outside of physics and such a discovery might well affect that more general range of concerns. Indeed, it would affect many of us in that way.

But what of biologists? How would it affect them? I’ve heard discussions here and the of the possibility of silicon-based life. If this newly discovered life were silicon-based, then, yes, we’ve got a potential cataclysm on our hands. But if it were life of the ordinary carbon-based kind, albeit new species, not so cataclysmic, not even. After all, a bit later Horgan observes: “Biology’s framework of neo-Darwinian theory plus DNA-based genetics has proven to be remarkably resilient, and my guess is that it will easily absorb any surprises, just as quantum field theory absorbed quarks.”

Moreover, just what kind of question is that, the ‘are we alone?’ question? How would the detection of extraterrestrial life affect it? We’re already surrounded by life. The detection of extraterrestrial life just adds to the plenitude. Now, if we were to detect intelligent life, that’s different. What if we can’t converse with them? Are we still alone?

Perhaps by this point you may be thinking, “Aren’t you getting just a little picky? Give the guy a break.” Perhaps I am, but that’s how I want to play it for the moment.

Let’s continue on with a look at Horgan’s introduction to the original book. He opens with a plane trip to Syracuse where he meets with Roger Penrose to discuss his new book, The Emperor’s New Mind, where Penrose discusses one of Horgan’s favorite topics, consciousness. Penrose picks him up at the airport, they somehow make their way to Penrose’s office at the university, where he’s visiting, and Penrose is skeptical about string theory (a prime candidate for a Theory of Everything):

“It couldn’t be right,” he told me. “It’s just not the way I’d expect the answer to be.” I began to realize, as Penrose spoke, that to him “the answer” was more than a mere theory of physics, a way of organizing data and predicting events. He was talking about The Answer: the secret of life, the solution to the riddle of the universe.

See what he did there? He jumped from a theory about fundamental physics to a theory about The Whole Shebang! as though Douglas Adams hadn’t already told us that it’s 42.

A bit later Penrose throws Horgan another curve ball:

What is so pessimistic, I asked, about a truth seeker thinking that the truth is attainable? “Solving mysteries is a wonderful thing to do,” Penrose replied. “And if they were all solved, somehow, that would be rather boring.” Then he chuckled, as if struck by the oddness of his own words.

Curioser and curioser. That set Horgan to thinking, “Could scientists, in effect, learn everything there is to know?” You can see where this is headed, can’t you?

Horgan takes us back to his undergraduate years, where he was an English major being introduced to the mysteries of postmodern literary criticism while taking science and math courses on the side: “Working on a problem in calculus or physics represented a pleasant change of pace from messy humanities assignments; I found great satisfaction in arriving at the correct answer to a problem.” And so, in due course, he became a science writer.

Back to Penrose:

Before my meeting with Penrose, I had taken it for granted that science was open-ended, even infinite. The possibility that scientists might one day find a truth so potent that it would obviate all further investigations had struck me as wishful thinking at best, or as the kind of hyperbole required to sell science (and science books) to the masses. The earnestness, and ambivalence, with which Penrose contemplated the prospect of a final theory forced me to reassess my own views of science’s future. Over time, I became obsessed with the issue. What are the limits of science, if any? Is science infinite, or is it as mortal as we are?

When I read that first sentence – this time around, I haven’t got the faintest idea what I thought of it when I read it 25 years ago – I said to myself, “yep, that’s what I thought; science is open-ended.” I even recalled the time, back in my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins, when I went to talk with Earl Wasserman, the great Romanticist, and made some remark – I don’t have any exact memory of who said what, I’m making it up – to the effect that I was making progress (on something or other) and had more questions. He replied something to the effect that perhaps that’s what we’re after, not so much answers, but further questions. I’d scored!

Horgan goes on to say that when he first thought about writing the book he thought it would be a collection of “portraits, warts and all, of the fascinating truth seekers and truth shunners I have been fortunate enough to interview.” He planned to maintain the journalist’s arms-length distance from their words and let readers make up their own minds. He’d come to believe the skeptical side of the argument and that he would present that in the course of the book. “That approach, I felt, would be more in keeping with my conviction that most assertions about the limits of knowledge are, finally, deeply idiosyncratic.”

Horgan continues on about this and that, loops through Harold Bloom’s, The Anxiety of Influence, using it to suggest that science has entered a postempirical phase that he dubbed ironic science. This ironic science

cannot achieve its goal of transcending the truth we already have. And it certainly cannot give us—in fact, it protects us from—The Answer, a truth so potent that it quenches our curiosity once and for all time. After all, science itself decrees that we humans must always be content with partial truths.

There it is again, “The Answer.” Yikes! He’s going to give it to us one more time, this time invoking a science fiction scenario in which “machines transform the entire cosmos into a vast, unified, information-processing network” – little did he know that in just a few years the Wachowskis (The Matrix, 1999), aided by Nick Bostrom[2], would have all the cyber-kids wondering whether or not we’re living in a computer simulation. For Realz!

Horgan ends the introduction by asking what this cosmic computer would be doing:

I can imagine only one possibility. It would try to answer The Question, the one that lurks behind all other questions, like an actor playing all the parts of a play: Why is there something rather than nothing? In its effort to find The Answer to The Question, the universal mind may discover the ultimate limits of knowledge.

Is he serious, THE Question, THE Answer? Yes? No? How about both? He’s being ironic, an ironic framing for a book about ironic science.

Remember that casual assumption that Horgan had, that I had, that many of have had, and who knows? still have – “that science was open-ended, even infinite”? We can be casual about it no more. That’s what Horgan is doing with this slippery language we’ve been looking at, transforming that assumption into a serious question. The question gains much of its heft from the interviews that Horgan has collected. But those alone would not have been sufficient. Horgan was right to force the issue in the way that he has.

For one thing, those physicists are asking us for $20 billion dollars to dig another ditch and fill it with a new machine that most likely won’t repay us with deeper insight. And they aren’t the only ones asking for more money. But money isn’t the only issue. People have to be trained to run these devices and conduct these investigations. Does it make sense to devote all these human resources to intellectual make-work?

Beyond this, I believe the intellectual world is struggling to birth new modes of thinking. That’s the substance of my argument against Horgan’s thesis [3]. I figure that grappling with Horgan’s argument will help in that process.

References

[1] Bloom’s academic reputation will likely rest on a relatively early book, The Anxiety of Influence (which Horgan, by the way, references in his introduction), but he has written extensively for the general audience, including a book extolling the virtues of The Western Canon, one on Shakespeare, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and one on Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. I’ve read Anxiety, but not the other three, though I once leafed through the Shakespeare book in a bookstore. But here is a passage from an interview that he gave to the Paris Review (“The Art of Criticism, No. 1”) where he talks of Shakespeare:

Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare.

Really?

[2] Nick Bostrom (2003). “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Philosophical Quarterly. 53 (211): 243–255. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00309. Also, http://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html.

[3] William L. Benzon, Pursued by Knowledge in a Fecund Universe, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 20(1): 93-100, 1997. https://www.academia.edu/8790205/Pursued_by_Knowledge_in_a_Fecund_Universe. 

Note: I am collecting the posts in this series under the label, EndofScience. 

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 2: Has the study of the foundations of physics bottomed out?

As I understand it, the standard model of particle physics recognizes three types of interaction: electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear force. These are covered by quantum mechanics. Gravity is different, however, and is characterized by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Physicists have been trying to unify quantum mechanics and General Relativity into a single framework, a so-called Theory of Everything. Starting in the 1990s much of this work has involved postulating that the universe exists in eleven dimensions. Whatever one may think of that mathematics – I have no thoughts about it beyond, “interesting” – such attempts had, by the time Horgan wrote The End of Science, failed to yield much less pass empirical tests. That is the situation today, 25 years and one Large Hadron Collider later.

If you believe, as many of us do, that what makes science so very effective is that it systematically puts theory empirical test, then these decades of failure are, or should be seen as, an embarrassment. What’s going on? What’s going on is that the theoretical physics community is cranking our ever more theory – no doubt “interesting” in some sense – and is asking for another $20 billion that – promises, promises! – will produce the empirical results that the $10 billion LHC didn’t. If they get the money much of it will surely come at the expense of, not only other physics, but other science as well.

Horgan isn’t buying it, nor are others. The most vocal of these critics is Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist who published Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018). I’ve not read the book, but I attended a talk she gave a Stevens Institute in the Fall of 2018 – Horgan, who teachers there, invited her to give the lecture [1]. On one of her slides she asserted, “The current organization of academic research strongly encourages work on topics that are popular and productive,” popular and productive within that particular physics community, but not necessarily everywhere. That assertion is followed by, “Rigorous methodology is neither popular nor productive,” where rigor implies empirical tests.

That is, she points to problems in the social organization of physics research. The foundations of physics, alas, isn’t the only field with such problems. I rather suspect it is behind the replication crisis in psychology, which Horgan discusses in his new preface.

Horgan identified a real problem with the foundations of physics in 2015, and it seems to have gotten worse since then. What should be done? Well, for one thing, don’t spend the $20 billion on a new machine [2]. But what about all those theorists, what should they be doing? They could just drop it and enter investment banking as so-called “quants,” or perhaps help biologists, neuroscientists, or, who knows? in building “Big Data” models.

More seriously, where would that leave physics?

What kind of problem do we face? Is it epistemological or ontological? In The End of Science Horgan suggests we’re up against inherent cognitive limitations inherent in our biology, citing an analogy suggested by Noam Chomksy: Think about a rat running a maze; its brain limits it in such a way that it cannot solve mazes. If we are so limited, then we’re certainly up against an epistemological problem.

We’ll never know the ontological state of the universe. Perhaps the four forces are in fact united in the heart of things, if you will. And perhaps they are not. Our cognitive limitations will keep us from knowing.

I think that analogy is flawed. Aristotle, for example, certainly had cognitive limitations that Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton didn’t have. And they faced limitations that Einstein, and Plank didn’t have. Those limitations were cultural and culture changes, even advances, over the long term. Do we have any reason, in principle, to believe that a future generation of physicists won’t transcend the limitations of the current crop of theoreticians? Perhaps one or three of them even exist in some intellectual hinterland where they make a living by flipping burgers or spinning pizzas in some fast food joint while doing physics on the side.

I’m not claiming that such a future physics will happen, much less that its origins are sprouting even now in the boondocks. I am claiming that it would be foolish to rule such a possibility out of court and I am pointing to the long course of intellectual history as evidence that modes of thought do change.

I don’t believe that such cultural advance is easy, it is not. Nor do I believe it is inevitable. But I don’t believe we can rule it out. Not only that, I think it would be prudent for us to believe that it is possible. It is to that end that I spent years working with the late David Hays on an account of the long-term evolution of human cognitive culture [3]. I'll return to that in a later post in this series.

One final remark: If indeed the problem faced by the foundations of physics is ontological and not epistemological, that is, if these physics have struck the “bottom” of the universe, that would be, it seems to me, a finding of the first order. It would be one of those “cataclysmic” insights Horgan talks about. What will it require for us to discover that?

Would such a “discovery” be in the realm of science or metaphysics?

References

[1] I’ve blogged about it here: Lost in Math: Sabine Hossenfelder at Stevens Institute, New Savanna, October 4, 2018, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2018/10/lost-in-math-sabine-hossenfelder-at.html.

[2] See Hossenfelder, Particle physicists want money for bigger collider, Backreaction, Jan. 16. 2019, http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physicists-want-money-for.html.

[3] The following blog post is a guide to that work, Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society, New Savanna, July 4, 2020, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/08/mind-culture-coevolution-major.html. The foundation argument is in William Benzon and David Hays, The Evolution of Cognition, Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 13(4): 297-320, 1990, https://www.academia.edu/243486/The_Evolution_of_Cognition.

Note: I am collecting the posts in this series under the label, EndofScience.

Horgan’s The End of Science, a reconsideration, Part 1: Introduction

Back in the ancient days of 1996 John Horgan published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age and thereby earned the enmity of scientists and science lovers everywhere. But the book was not, as its title suggests, an exercise in the then fashionable exercise of science bashing. If anything it was born of a love of science, albeit a love disappointed at the current progress of science. Things seemed to be grinding to a halt, perhaps most noticeably in the foundations of physics, where elegant theorizing had far outstripped empirical evidence: What good is a theory if your can’t test it against the observational evidence?

Basic Books issued a new edition in 2015 and Horgan wrote a new preface in which he argued that his argument still holds. Judging from remarks he made on Twitter to Eric Weinstein he’s still skeptical about science’s prospects for future advance. Yes, “our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smartphones,” but gone are the days of ideas as “cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, [and] the big bang.”

I’m not so sure. Back in 1997 I published an essay-review in which I argued:

One can read The End of Science as evidence of the emergence of a new worldview. Those, like Horgan, who believe that science is indeed coming to an end are heirs of standard Western metaphysical assumptions, assumptions which are in a shambles. Those who believe that science has a splendid future are helping to forge an as-yet unnamed worldview, one grounded in different assumptions, though, perhaps more often than not, the people working toward this worldview think of it as but a continuation of the Western worldview they were taught in school.[1]

I still like that argument, but feel the need to acknowledge that years that have passed by saying a bit more.

For one thing, in 2011 economist Tyler Cowen published a book in which he argued that the economy is stagnating after two centuries of accelerating growth that lifted 100s of millions out of poverty into a comfortable middle class existence. Given that that economic growth has been driven by technological innovation, and that technological innovation is (loosely) coupled with scientific progress, Cowen’s argument resonates with Horgan’s. In 2018 Patrick Collison and Michael Nielson published an article in The Atlantic in which they argued that science seemed to slowing down [3]. A year after that Collison and Cowen surveyed the situation and issued a call for Progress Studies [4]. I replied to this work with a working paper where I argued, “What economists have identified as stagnation over the last few decades can also be interpreted as the cost of continuing successful engagement with a complex world that is not set up to serve human interests” [5]. That came from the same line of thinking and investigation I used in my reply to Horgan.

I now wish to add to that argumentation in a series of blog posts, though I’m not sure how many or on what schedule. My current plan is to begin by discussing what seems to me the clearest case for scientific stalemate, the foundations of physics. Then I’ll put on my literary critic’s hat and give Horgan’s words a close reading – e.g. “cataclysmic”? – suggesting that there’s a lot of wiggle-room in it. Then I want to take a personal look at one of Horgan’s big questions: “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?” I’ve been tracking that ever since, say, I read a Scientific American article by Karl Pribram about the holographic brain in 1969; I continued on by studying cognitive science and computational semantics in graduate school in the 1970s with David Hays (while pursuing a degree in English Literature); some years later, in the 1990s, I had conversations about neurodynamics with the late Walter Freeman (some of which ended up in my 2001 book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture), and, well, that’s enough for the moment. I’ll conclude by returning to my main line, the one I used in 1997 review of Horgan, used again in my thoughts on economic stagnation, but that actually dates to my graduate school days [6].

More later.

References

[1] William L. Benzon, Pursued by Knowledge in a Fecund Universe, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 20(1): 93-100, 1997. https://www.academia.edu/8790205/Pursued_by_Knowledge_in_a_Fecund_Universe.

[2] Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton, Dutton, 2011.

[3] Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen, “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck”, The Atlantic, Nov 16, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/.

[4] Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, We Need a New Science of Progress, The Atlantic, July 30, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/hbnd5w8a.

[5] Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, Version 2, Working Paper, Aug. 2, 2019, 62 pp., https://www.academia.edu/39927897/Stagnation_and_Beyond_Economic_growth_and_the_cost_of_knowledge_in_a_complex_world.

[6] This blog post is a guide to that work, much of which I developed in close conjunction with the late David Hays, Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society, New Savanna, July 4, 2020, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/08/mind-culture-coevolution-major.html.