Information scientists conceived of information as inversely related to predictability. That was in the 1940s, and, typically, the scientists worked for the phone company. Norbert Wiener claimed that there was more information in a sequence of numbers we don't understand — 9, 37, 243 ... — than in a sequence we think we unerstand — 2, 4, 6, 8 ... Wiener further said that there was more information in a good sonnet (fourteen lines, ten syllables per line) than in the Manhattan White Pages. Claude Shannon defined information as "the inverse of the probability of the signal." Mathematically that's expressed H = -∑pi logepi.
Very good, very deep: information à la 1940s. For this thinker jack-of-many-sciences and teacher non-pareil Gregory Bateson absorbed what the phone company men said and went deeper, more simply. Bateson defined information as "any difference that makes a difference."
My own emphasis is on complex information. Emphatically I deny any equation between data and information. Data may be muddled; information may be ambiguous. The information in a paradox may be nigh infinite.
Waterman hails his persecuted author / scientist as deep on information, complex information in particular. Some of that author's writings are trying to slip back online. Check for examples at http://www.tnni.net/~macropk/, where complex information is termed macroinformation, or synformation: both coinages explained.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Consciousness
Consciousness: A big subject.
Consciousness is another thing we’re so proud of without having a clear idea of what it is. Neither do we have a clear idea of its limits. I’m merely going to jot a few ideas on the latter. I ask this question: "How can a creature which claims to be conscious verify the claim without also verifying what there is to be conscious of?"
The first thing you need is a second perspective [qv].
We see that the Hellenes lived in a world of land, water, islands, more water, more land. Now we fly over the eastern Mediterranean, take satellite photos, make better maps. We see the Peloponnesis here, Turkey there, the sea connecting them or separating them depending on whether you have marine competence. Our consciousness of the area has many more reference points, a far greater variety of perspectives. In this respect, our twentieth-century consciousness of the geography is superior to Homer’s or Aristotle.
People have long sought a second perspective. God sees what you do, knows what you think. Santa too knows if you’ve been bad or good. Uncle Sam has eyes everywhere.
But even if all this were true, if Santa did know if we’ve been bad or good, if Uncle Sam had optic fibers in our rectum as well as in our bank, what does Uncle use for a second perspective? Well, he can use Santa. Santa uses God. Santa is only Saint Nick after all.
But that still leaves us little better off than the Hellenes with their cosmological problems; OK, Atlas holds up the world: what holds up Atlas? In other words, what does God have for a second perspective?
When God takes us for Judgment, we presume that we’ll have a better perspective on ourselves, the mortal coil sloughed off. How would Judgment Day be any better than night court if we were all still screaming our viewpoints. No, we presume we’d have a better perspective, God’s own perspective: that the damned would see, acknowledge, and honor their damnation; the saved would properly value their salvation.
Which still just moves us from the world to Atlas’s shoulders. The joke has it that the seeker asked the holy man such questions."The strong man stands on a turtle’s back," answered the holy man. But the seeker then asks the holy man what supports the turtle. "It’s turtles all the way down," snaps the holy man. "Turtles all the way down" is far from a satisfactory answer. Neither is it likely to be true.
Right here on earth, right here (9/23/0) in the final four months of the Twentieth Century, we have a choice of second perspectives. We have Hubbell’s observations and theory. We have an atmosphere free telescope in his name. Even the telescope itself has a series of perspectives: it can expose the film (the diode, the whatever it exposes) from one side of the earth’s orbit, wait six months, and expose the "same" view from the other. Our maps get better: which still leaves the question of how many turtles there are.
If a Hellene said, "I know Athens. I know the Peloponnesis. I know Syracuse. I know the sea between," I "know" what he’s talking about: I believe him. If he says, "I am conscious," I don’t know what to think: other than what I’ve just written.
My example is physical. That is, it’s geographical. Then I refer to a cosmological example, also physical: "world," strong man, turtle ... But people in our time know better than any shaman or wizard how minuscule a part of the cosmos physical reality is. Is a neutrino "physical"? Is experience? Is thought? Is time? ...
My Macroinformation Project is in the midst of developing my recommendation for a study that would clarify this somewhat: possibly as much as it’s possible to clarify it. Macroinformation cannot be perceived or pursued without a better classification system for existence. What do we mean my "world"? Is it physical? To what extent? How does it relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Which set is the larger: the universe, or the cosmos? How does the latter relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Is there any set greater than the cosmos? Does it include actual things only? or also possible things? Does it also include impossible things?
Until we can answer some of those things, until our answers have been rechewed and redigested, talk about consciousness is no more impressive than the Lakota sense that a few nomads were "the People" or that a section of high plains was "the world."
And God’s consciousness? I see him having exactly the same epistemological problems we have. Two year olds, the lot of us.
May the dark ignorance of sentient beings be dispelled.
2000 09 23
Consciousness is another thing we’re so proud of without having a clear idea of what it is. Neither do we have a clear idea of its limits. I’m merely going to jot a few ideas on the latter. I ask this question: "How can a creature which claims to be conscious verify the claim without also verifying what there is to be conscious of?"
The first thing you need is a second perspective [qv].
We see that the Hellenes lived in a world of land, water, islands, more water, more land. Now we fly over the eastern Mediterranean, take satellite photos, make better maps. We see the Peloponnesis here, Turkey there, the sea connecting them or separating them depending on whether you have marine competence. Our consciousness of the area has many more reference points, a far greater variety of perspectives. In this respect, our twentieth-century consciousness of the geography is superior to Homer’s or Aristotle.
People have long sought a second perspective. God sees what you do, knows what you think. Santa too knows if you’ve been bad or good. Uncle Sam has eyes everywhere.
But even if all this were true, if Santa did know if we’ve been bad or good, if Uncle Sam had optic fibers in our rectum as well as in our bank, what does Uncle use for a second perspective? Well, he can use Santa. Santa uses God. Santa is only Saint Nick after all.
But that still leaves us little better off than the Hellenes with their cosmological problems; OK, Atlas holds up the world: what holds up Atlas? In other words, what does God have for a second perspective?
When God takes us for Judgment, we presume that we’ll have a better perspective on ourselves, the mortal coil sloughed off. How would Judgment Day be any better than night court if we were all still screaming our viewpoints. No, we presume we’d have a better perspective, God’s own perspective: that the damned would see, acknowledge, and honor their damnation; the saved would properly value their salvation.
Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Which still just moves us from the world to Atlas’s shoulders. The joke has it that the seeker asked the holy man such questions.
Right here on earth, right here (9/23/0) in the final four months of the Twentieth Century, we have a choice of second perspectives. We have Hubbell’s observations and theory. We have an atmosphere free telescope in his name. Even the telescope itself has a series of perspectives: it can expose the film (the diode, the whatever it exposes) from one side of the earth’s orbit, wait six months, and expose the "same" view from the other. Our maps get better: which still leaves the question of how many turtles there are.
If a Hellene said, "I know Athens. I know the Peloponnesis. I know Syracuse. I know the sea between," I "know" what he’s talking about: I believe him. If he says, "I am conscious," I don’t know what to think: other than what I’ve just written.
My example is physical. That is, it’s geographical. Then I refer to a cosmological example, also physical: "world," strong man, turtle ... But people in our time know better than any shaman or wizard how minuscule a part of the cosmos physical reality is. Is a neutrino "physical"? Is experience? Is thought? Is time? ...
My Macroinformation Project is in the midst of developing my recommendation for a study that would clarify this somewhat: possibly as much as it’s possible to clarify it. Macroinformation cannot be perceived or pursued without a better classification system for existence. What do we mean my "world"? Is it physical? To what extent? How does it relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Which set is the larger: the universe, or the cosmos? How does the latter relate to time, to mass, to a whole series of things? Is there any set greater than the cosmos? Does it include actual things only? or also possible things? Does it also include impossible things?
Until we can answer some of those things, until our answers have been rechewed and redigested, talk about consciousness is no more impressive than the Lakota sense that a few nomads were "the People" or that a section of high plains was "the world."
And God’s consciousness? I see him having exactly the same epistemological problems we have. Two year olds, the lot of us.
Shambala community
Fact
2001 07 14
Fact: wow, is that ever a tricky concept! For starters I quote Nietzsche on the subject:Our concept of "fact" is a vanity that believes we can know, know easily, know in large numbers, what’s "real."
Charles Dickens made fun of people who thought they restricted their attention or their teaching to "facts." I’d like to see Karl Popper critique a Dragnet script where Joe Friday iterates "Just the facts, ma’am."
Ideally the fact is what’s irreducibly true, in correspondence with reality. Great. Now: can we know what that is? Unimpeachably? Irrefutably? Infallibly? Only if we burn the heretics before they can speak. And wholly, infrangibly, wall ourselves off from the Tao. Such a wall can be called "church," "government," "university department," "committee of scientists" ...
His lies were not fabrications.
They were a brilliantly devised distorting lens that turned facts into monsters,
yet left them looking like facts.
Le Carré
They were a brilliantly devised distorting lens that turned facts into monsters,
yet left them looking like facts.
Le Carré
Did you ever notice how rarely "fact finders" publish dissent? The court keeps a record of dissenting judges, but dissenting fact finders are flushed from the fact finding task force. Where dissent is published, then the publishers are real scientists. When do we see them? One percent of one percent of one percent of the time?
Facts should be reviewed by the most (rationally) skeptical epistemologists. Would there by anything left firmly in the set? Now that residue should be honored. Known. Publicized.
Rots of ruck.
The facts, if not true, were well invented;
the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.
Anthony Trollope
the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.
Anthony Trollope
Wittgenstein's comments are delicious:
For example: we all know that General Relativity was a hard theory to prove merely in terms of finding examples that agreed let alone finding examples that falsified it. We all know that Eddington set up an experiment that measured whether light was bent around a star by using a solar eclipse. We all know that the measurements "confirmed" Einstein’s theory. A long time passed between my first hearing that and my learning that three measurements were taken: one was more, one was less, and the third was way off. So the scientists said that it all agreed! (See Evidence [coming shortly].) Understand: I follow this stuff. The best I can in my poverty. The best I can without sacrificing good eating, good fishing, good loving, good sleep ... and lots of music. And I can’t provide you with the actual figures. Because I’ve never seen them. Oh, I don’t doubt I could find them. (Could I do the math if I did? Could I trust my agreement or disagreement?) I don’t have to. I recognize the pattern: it’s fuzzy.
Fact Scrapbook
Facts will never be agreed upon so long as objectives differ.
"Facts" have a social dimension. A fact will never be agreed upon so long as objectives differ. Dishonesty will jump to disagree, but honesty too may disagree. An entire culture may temporarily enforce an agreement, backed by school and church. Weeding false facts after that will be hard, very hard.
Objectivity may be unreachable by human nature, but kleptocracy adds to the difficulty: and all civilized men are kleptocrats.
Note however, as I shall illustrate in another module momentarily: kleptocracy involves not only theft we are helpless to do anything about — European ethnics sweeping aside indigenous ethnics in the Americas — but fresh active thefts contaminate the young as well as the old.
2002 08 30 The concept of fact inevitably and ineradicably has a semiotic fault line: Do we mean some irreducible quantum that’s true? Or do we mean some irreducible quantum that’s accepted as true?
And wouldn’t we have to be infallible to distinguish them?
Infallible? Social man? The kleptocrat? A costumed liar? A predator masked as a photosynthesizing scion of God?
I love it in the fiction of Stephen Hunter when a "fact" firmly established in novel N becomes exposed in novel N + n to be false. Little is as it seems. I'm reminded of the Twain novel where the racists discover that they themselves are of mixed blood. Once again King Oedipus discovers that he's the murdering motherfucker he's looking for!
2001 10 18 I think Nietzsche’s point must be accepted: there are no facts, only interpretations. We must satisfy ourselves with interpretations, know that our reason is relative only, but strive to achieve honest consensus of interpretation. Interpretations must be reviewed by each generation and after each paradigm shift. Dogma must die.
2002 09 11 In kleptocracies it’s the state that decides what the "facts" are. But how truthful are governments? How sophisticated their epistemology? How disinterested? How routinely do governments falsify [qv] their beliefs?
2005 10 14 Consider the social dimension of the concept fact: if something is true, but no one in the society believes it, can it be a "fact"? Fact implies social acceptance, does it not?
What’s more common than for opinion, particularly mistaken opinion, even deliberately mistaken opinion, to parade as fact?
I remember thrilling to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series when it was first broadcast. But he drove me crazy when he said, Dr. Carl, "Evolution is fact!" No, no, no, that’s the worst kind of epistemological confusion. Evolution is theory. Evolution is great theory, one of the best ever, especially after a century and a half of improving tinkering; but theory and fact are of different existential species.
It doesn’t matter how many of the "facts" are actually fiction so long as the story is true.
Perspective
Perspective (as a Thinking Tool)
Today, wanting to add a few more points, it comes to me as a surprise that I don’t already have a perspective section at [Waterman]’s domains: at least not under that specific name. The points I am about to sketch may well however wander all over, enter into different areas. Hell, Shakespeare made any number of points, references ... in any number of plays: but the play wasn’t called Revenge or Love ... it was called Hamlet ... or Macbeth, or Othello ... or Romeo and Juliet, or Antony and Cleopatra ... I organize somewhat — more than somewhat; you organize it the rest of your way, for your purposes.
(Naturally, the results may then get moved, further developed, revised ... in a different setting: perspective again!)
Medievals painted things in a flexible time/space. Things were composed, organized hierarchically, according to an orthodoxy of organization. The Nativity, the Passion, the Resurection ... and St. Somebody might all be organized into one picture. The Renaissance painted things as they appear to a given viewer. The viewer is out of the picture, in front of the picture. Something important was in or near the center of the picture. Other things receded toward a horizon. Neither Einstein, nor Plank, nor Godel ... were in the picture.
Last evening I watched an interview with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry concerning the making of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One sequence showed how Gondry had avoided special effects, computer graphics ... done everything he could just with the camera, and with altered sets. Thus Carrey’s Joel, getting his memory of Winslet’s Clementine erased, tries escaping to areas of his memory not pre-mapped for Clementine: to hide some vestige of her after all. Thus we see him as a child, sitting on the kitchen floor, under the table, as his mother walks about. The shot shows the mother normal, adult size. Now: how do we show Carrey, a tallish guy, child-size? Build a reverse-perspective set.
Carrey and Gondry demonstrate. Carrey stands at the camera end of the table: familiar size. He walks away from the camera along the table’s side: and walks and walks, getting smaller and smaller in our minds’ eye as he does so. At the far end of the table, crouching to the floor, he is child size: but still dressed as day-to-day adult Jim Carrey. On the flat screen we see a "table." Everything looks "normal": so we assume the table is an ordinary breakfast table, maybe three and a half, four feet long. Not so. The set is huge, the table is very long: specially built, the set specially painting to mislead us.
Gregory Bateson reports being introduced to the same phenomenon by its modern developer. Pictures of the trick can be found in elementary to advanced psychology books. The set was rigged, the mind sees it as normal: and therefore distorts normal things disrupted by the setting.
Now: here: look at the night sky, away from city lights, with as little pollution as possible. Lots of stars, right? There are the familiar constellations. On a clear night sit on the beach at Bahia Honda. Look up. You see a sky not that dissimilar from what our ancestors who painting the caves at Lascaux saw. We don’t know what constellations they saw, how they named them, what stories they told about them. But for my purposes now, let’s just use the stories and names inherited in the west. There’s Orion, there’s Cassiopeia, there’s the Big Bear ... The majority of contemporaries in such a circumstance will see the night sky very much the way the medievals saw it, the way Ptolemy saw it: far away, all a fixed distance away.
We see that some stars are bigger than others, some brighter than others. How many of us, sitting on the beach, also think that what we’re seeing is vast distances away? no two objects likely to be the same distance away?
How many of us will also realize that the stars we’re seeing are all relatively close to us: or we wouldn’t be able to see them? All those points of light ... look infinite in number. Actually, they’ve been counted: at least estimated. The human eye can see about two thousand stars. What about the billions and billions that Dr. Carl reverently evokes? and they’re just in this galaxy! home base for us on earth.
Now: take just Orion. Take just the main few stars along his supposed belt. How far away are they? Number them left to right, 1, 2, 3. Sure they have names, but we don’t need to know them for this point. How far away is star #1? Is star #2 closer? or further? How much closer? how much further? star #3? ...
Now: imagine yourself in the Andromeda galaxy, looking toward the Milky Way. Could it be meaningful to talk about looking toward Orion? Would Orion have a belt? Would those three stars, if you could see them at all from Andromeda, seem to line up?
(In the same context, consider my often iterated, Bucky-Fuller-type point: most contemporaries still see and feel and "think" of the sun as rising, or setting; not themselves as grounded by gravity on a spinning planet orbiting around a sun making its own movements among its galactic neighbors, the whole galaxy doing who knows what in relation to other galaxies, all in who knows what kind of a universe.)
People have long seen, or tried to see, or imagined they saw, or gotten irate at people who see ... God’s hand in the universe: God’s hand on the flower, God’s hand on the pretty girl, God’s hand on the eyeball ... Dr. Carl refused to. Dr. Carl wanted the universe, if intelligently designed, to spell out the number π, or e ... in the stars. (Guys like me think, You idiot, π and e are spelled out: in everything!)
(In a story by James Blish earth-civilized man gets a signal from another galaxy that seems to be intelligible. It gets deciphered as what seems to be a set of blue prints for building a better listening device. Humans build it, turn it to the source. An ear-slitting Beep is emitted by the machine: and nothing else. A long time passes before anyone figures out that the beep was full of information. Indeed, it contained what seemed the sending civilization’s entire library of know-how.) (Waterman adds that even as we sequence the last human chromosome, however much we learn, we still have no idea of what we’re missing.)
Indeed it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that answers to any question are coded into any bacterium. All possible wisdom could be hidden in zero. Absolute black might map the cosmos.
Now: how can we get a perspective on the cosmos? on our place in it? (Is "perspective" an appropriate metaphor?)
Not the first, but the best, thing to try is science. Try to make your knowledge responsible to experience, to facts (what are facts? [link not yet added] to reasoned skepticism ...) You can try mysticism too. (Good luck.) (Or mysticism will try you.)
My Games We Play [link not yet added] piece asks, "How does one know what (meta) game(s) one is in? I answer:One Don’t!
Any two points can be connected by a line. (Think of all of those words in quotes, think of all words in quotes.) Any line between two points can be extended to a third point, and a fourth ...
In the past we wanted lines to be "straight." (Ha, ha.) (Bucky said that a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points, the shortest distance is that followed by a lightning bolt: therefore, the straightest real line is zigzag.)
Picture a line from your eye (imagining your eye as a point (ha, ha)) to star #1, at your "left," in Orion’s belt. Now: extend that line to Andromeda (all the time thinking of star #1 as a point, of Andromeda as a point: millions of billions of stars as a point. Ha, ha). Next draw a line from your eye to star #2 in Orion’s belt, continue that line to Andromeda. Do the same for star #3.
Learn the relative positions of those three stars in the Milky Way Galaxy: from earth, from Andromeda. Compare the wacky angles they have to make relative to the line: part 1.
NOW: imagine lights, bright strontium say (to distinguish them from the "white" stars), at the Andromeda points of those three lines. Try to picture those three strontium points as seen from the third universe parallel to this universe’s "left" in the M theory cosmic "bread loaf."
Don’t be stupid, Waterman: No information travels sideways between parallel universes. (Hell: no information reaches the whole of THIS universe! All is shaded into cones of information, of light ...)
Oh, hell. Try to imagine it anyway. (You’ll be little worse off than scholastics, cosmologists, theologians ... from any previous age.)
NOW:
Does the shape remind you, us, of anything? Could it be spelling π?
Draw such lines from each of the stars in Orion. Could the points be making a new constellation? Could the points be "spelling" eloi? In Greek? in Arabic? Could be points be spelling baraka? or agapé? some theorem?
Could we force them to? like Tolstoy’s Pierre forcing "Napoleon" to code the number of the Beast of Revelations?
What if lines extended from Orion to Andromeda, seen from some parallel universe, spelled Fuck You?
If lines from Orion don’t maybe lines from Virgo do.
If lines from Virgo, seen in Andromeda from the third universe to the left, don’t, maybe lines from Virgo do, seen from the fourth universe to the right.
Or maybe we need to see them projected into some other galaxy.
Imagine that we actually find some "message," by this or other means: did "God" do that? Or, with Hamlet, are we seeing camels in clouds?
I was six or seven when WW II wound down. In the later 1940s missionaries spoke at my church about efforts to help the beleaguered people of a battered and disrupted Europe. In particular stories of goods-drops into the Netherlands struck me. In the seventh grade, 1950,1951ish, I wrote a story about it..
The planes dropped flour sacks. People on the ground saw them coming, were hungry for them. People on the ground saw them as floating toward them, like feathers. In the first drops some people on the ground tried to catch the flour sacks. Splat.
If you dropped a flour sack and a scale, and mid-air the scale somehow got under the flour sack, both falling together, the flour sack would weigh nothing, would register nothing on the falling scale: light as a feather. Ah, but the flour sack still had the same mass as it had in the plane, as it had back at the airport, as it would have once it landed: twenty pounds, ten pounds, twenty-five pounds ... That mass would retain the momentum for that mass. Splat.
Is this a question of perspective? Sure. Why not?
How about these considerations:
Boiling water registers one hundred degrees Centigrade of thermal energy: by definition, 212 Fahrenheit. But heating water, when it reaches 100 degrees, does not necessarily start to boil. Water may reach 100 degrees, 101, 102 ... or 100 and some fraction, before it actually commences boiling. Extra energy is needed for it to transform state. Once that state is reached, the water reduces to 100 degrees, and maintains that thermal energy while boiling: under normal atmospheric pressures.
The vaporization of the water, present at all temperatures, quickens, rapidly, with boiling. Water escapes from the water as steam. What’s the thermal energy of steam? 100 degrees? (212?) No, no. Don’t touch. Much more energy is present in the steam than in the boiling water.
The same with ice. When the temperature of water falls to zero (or to 32 degrees Fahrenheit) it may begin to get ready to freeze into ice: but, once again, extra energy must be removed for it to happen: and again, normal atmospheric pressures are assumed.
A TV science doc just showed how lakes may form under a glacier. Under the pressure from the glacier the oppressed water has a hard time freezing. Energy with no way to go anywhere, to do anything, is stored under the ice. Kaboom. The glacier can explode!PS. The doc was about some geological anomaly somewhere out west. Geologists couldn’t explain the anomalies. Some guy hypothesized that the features came from water running rapidly. The geologists of the time were committed to their slow and gradual paradigms. Pooh-pooh. They dismissed their colleague’s hypothesis.
One geologist whispered to his neighbor: "I know where Yo-Yo’s water came from." (An exploding glacier.)
Why didn’t he say it out loud? So Yo-Yo could hear him?
No. Academics are content with the status quo. Galileo’s experience was no anomaly.
If Waterman, Al-Queida ... David Copperfield, god, or the devil wants to hit us with something we’ll never see coming, something easy for the knowing to find, ubiquitous, all around, energy with no place to go would be a good source.
Perspective? Sure it’s perspective.
2006 05 20
Anyone, especially anyone since the Renaissance, will have some perspective on the concept of perspective. For more than a decade now references to the concept, uses of the concept, developments of the concept ... have been accumulating around Waterman’s personal domains: especially at Macroinformation. [link not yet added]Today, wanting to add a few more points, it comes to me as a surprise that I don’t already have a perspective section at [Waterman]’s domains: at least not under that specific name. The points I am about to sketch may well however wander all over, enter into different areas. Hell, Shakespeare made any number of points, references ... in any number of plays: but the play wasn’t called Revenge or Love ... it was called Hamlet ... or Macbeth, or Othello ... or Romeo and Juliet, or Antony and Cleopatra ... I organize somewhat — more than somewhat; you organize it the rest of your way, for your purposes.
(Naturally, the results may then get moved, further developed, revised ... in a different setting: perspective again!)
Medievals painted things in a flexible time/space. Things were composed, organized hierarchically, according to an orthodoxy of organization. The Nativity, the Passion, the Resurection ... and St. Somebody might all be organized into one picture. The Renaissance painted things as they appear to a given viewer. The viewer is out of the picture, in front of the picture. Something important was in or near the center of the picture. Other things receded toward a horizon. Neither Einstein, nor Plank, nor Godel ... were in the picture.
Last evening I watched an interview with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry concerning the making of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One sequence showed how Gondry had avoided special effects, computer graphics ... done everything he could just with the camera, and with altered sets. Thus Carrey’s Joel, getting his memory of Winslet’s Clementine erased, tries escaping to areas of his memory not pre-mapped for Clementine: to hide some vestige of her after all. Thus we see him as a child, sitting on the kitchen floor, under the table, as his mother walks about. The shot shows the mother normal, adult size. Now: how do we show Carrey, a tallish guy, child-size? Build a reverse-perspective set.
Carrey and Gondry demonstrate. Carrey stands at the camera end of the table: familiar size. He walks away from the camera along the table’s side: and walks and walks, getting smaller and smaller in our minds’ eye as he does so. At the far end of the table, crouching to the floor, he is child size: but still dressed as day-to-day adult Jim Carrey. On the flat screen we see a "table." Everything looks "normal": so we assume the table is an ordinary breakfast table, maybe three and a half, four feet long. Not so. The set is huge, the table is very long: specially built, the set specially painting to mislead us.
Gregory Bateson reports being introduced to the same phenomenon by its modern developer. Pictures of the trick can be found in elementary to advanced psychology books. The set was rigged, the mind sees it as normal: and therefore distorts normal things disrupted by the setting.
Now: here: look at the night sky, away from city lights, with as little pollution as possible. Lots of stars, right? There are the familiar constellations. On a clear night sit on the beach at Bahia Honda. Look up. You see a sky not that dissimilar from what our ancestors who painting the caves at Lascaux saw. We don’t know what constellations they saw, how they named them, what stories they told about them. But for my purposes now, let’s just use the stories and names inherited in the west. There’s Orion, there’s Cassiopeia, there’s the Big Bear ... The majority of contemporaries in such a circumstance will see the night sky very much the way the medievals saw it, the way Ptolemy saw it: far away, all a fixed distance away.
We see that some stars are bigger than others, some brighter than others. How many of us, sitting on the beach, also think that what we’re seeing is vast distances away? no two objects likely to be the same distance away?
How many of us will also realize that the stars we’re seeing are all relatively close to us: or we wouldn’t be able to see them? All those points of light ... look infinite in number. Actually, they’ve been counted: at least estimated. The human eye can see about two thousand stars. What about the billions and billions that Dr. Carl reverently evokes? and they’re just in this galaxy! home base for us on earth.
Now: take just Orion. Take just the main few stars along his supposed belt. How far away are they? Number them left to right, 1, 2, 3. Sure they have names, but we don’t need to know them for this point. How far away is star #1? Is star #2 closer? or further? How much closer? how much further? star #3? ...
Now: imagine yourself in the Andromeda galaxy, looking toward the Milky Way. Could it be meaningful to talk about looking toward Orion? Would Orion have a belt? Would those three stars, if you could see them at all from Andromeda, seem to line up?
People have long seen, or tried to see, or imagined they saw, or gotten irate at people who see ... God’s hand in the universe: God’s hand on the flower, God’s hand on the pretty girl, God’s hand on the eyeball ... Dr. Carl refused to. Dr. Carl wanted the universe, if intelligently designed, to spell out the number π, or e ... in the stars. (Guys like me think, You idiot, π and e are spelled out: in everything!)
(In a story by James Blish earth-civilized man gets a signal from another galaxy that seems to be intelligible. It gets deciphered as what seems to be a set of blue prints for building a better listening device. Humans build it, turn it to the source. An ear-slitting Beep is emitted by the machine: and nothing else. A long time passes before anyone figures out that the beep was full of information. Indeed, it contained what seemed the sending civilization’s entire library of know-how.) (Waterman adds that even as we sequence the last human chromosome, however much we learn, we still have no idea of what we’re missing.)
Indeed it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that answers to any question are coded into any bacterium. All possible wisdom could be hidden in zero. Absolute black might map the cosmos.
Now: how can we get a perspective on the cosmos? on our place in it? (Is "perspective" an appropriate metaphor?)
Not the first, but the best, thing to try is science. Try to make your knowledge responsible to experience, to facts (what are facts? [link not yet added] to reasoned skepticism ...) You can try mysticism too. (Good luck.) (Or mysticism will try you.)
My Games We Play [link not yet added] piece asks, "How does one know what (meta) game(s) one is in? I answer:
Any two points can be connected by a line. (Think of all of those words in quotes, think of all words in quotes.) Any line between two points can be extended to a third point, and a fourth ...
In the past we wanted lines to be "straight." (Ha, ha.) (Bucky said that a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points, the shortest distance is that followed by a lightning bolt: therefore, the straightest real line is zigzag.)
the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route
(But, we’re all still in the stone age. Our minds see the sun rise, our minds want to see lines as "straight.")Picture a line from your eye (imagining your eye as a point (ha, ha)) to star #1, at your "left," in Orion’s belt. Now: extend that line to Andromeda (all the time thinking of star #1 as a point, of Andromeda as a point: millions of billions of stars as a point. Ha, ha). Next draw a line from your eye to star #2 in Orion’s belt, continue that line to Andromeda. Do the same for star #3.
Learn the relative positions of those three stars in the Milky Way Galaxy: from earth, from Andromeda. Compare the wacky angles they have to make relative to the line: part 1.
NOW: imagine lights, bright strontium say (to distinguish them from the "white" stars), at the Andromeda points of those three lines. Try to picture those three strontium points as seen from the third universe parallel to this universe’s "left" in the M theory cosmic "bread loaf."
Don’t be stupid, Waterman: No information travels sideways between parallel universes. (Hell: no information reaches the whole of THIS universe! All is shaded into cones of information, of light ...)
Oh, hell. Try to imagine it anyway. (You’ll be little worse off than scholastics, cosmologists, theologians ... from any previous age.)
NOW:
Does the shape remind you, us, of anything? Could it be spelling π?
Draw such lines from each of the stars in Orion. Could the points be making a new constellation? Could the points be "spelling" eloi? In Greek? in Arabic? Could be points be spelling baraka? or agapé? some theorem?
Could we force them to? like Tolstoy’s Pierre forcing "Napoleon" to code the number of the Beast of Revelations?
Who knows what cosmic screen saver pattern we’re making: from the right distance?
What if lines extended from Orion to Andromeda, seen from some parallel universe, spelled Fuck You?
If lines from Orion don’t maybe lines from Virgo do.
If lines from Virgo, seen in Andromeda from the third universe to the left, don’t, maybe lines from Virgo do, seen from the fourth universe to the right.
Or maybe we need to see them projected into some other galaxy.
I was six or seven when WW II wound down. In the later 1940s missionaries spoke at my church about efforts to help the beleaguered people of a battered and disrupted Europe. In particular stories of goods-drops into the Netherlands struck me. In the seventh grade, 1950,1951ish, I wrote a story about it..
The planes dropped flour sacks. People on the ground saw them coming, were hungry for them. People on the ground saw them as floating toward them, like feathers. In the first drops some people on the ground tried to catch the flour sacks. Splat.
If you dropped a flour sack and a scale, and mid-air the scale somehow got under the flour sack, both falling together, the flour sack would weigh nothing, would register nothing on the falling scale: light as a feather. Ah, but the flour sack still had the same mass as it had in the plane, as it had back at the airport, as it would have once it landed: twenty pounds, ten pounds, twenty-five pounds ... That mass would retain the momentum for that mass. Splat.
Is this a question of perspective? Sure. Why not?
How about these considerations:
Boiling water registers one hundred degrees Centigrade of thermal energy: by definition, 212 Fahrenheit. But heating water, when it reaches 100 degrees, does not necessarily start to boil. Water may reach 100 degrees, 101, 102 ... or 100 and some fraction, before it actually commences boiling. Extra energy is needed for it to transform state. Once that state is reached, the water reduces to 100 degrees, and maintains that thermal energy while boiling: under normal atmospheric pressures.
The vaporization of the water, present at all temperatures, quickens, rapidly, with boiling. Water escapes from the water as steam. What’s the thermal energy of steam? 100 degrees? (212?) No, no. Don’t touch. Much more energy is present in the steam than in the boiling water.
The same with ice. When the temperature of water falls to zero (or to 32 degrees Fahrenheit) it may begin to get ready to freeze into ice: but, once again, extra energy must be removed for it to happen: and again, normal atmospheric pressures are assumed.
A TV science doc just showed how lakes may form under a glacier. Under the pressure from the glacier the oppressed water has a hard time freezing. Energy with no way to go anywhere, to do anything, is stored under the ice. Kaboom. The glacier can explode!
One geologist whispered to his neighbor: "I know where Yo-Yo’s water came from." (An exploding glacier.)
Why didn’t he say it out loud? So Yo-Yo could hear him?
No. Academics are content with the status quo. Galileo’s experience was no anomaly.
If academics are slow to learn, resisting —
reluctant to leave the paradigms
that formed their Linus security blanket as students —
how much more slow, reluctant, and resisting
will be the public? the priests? the governors?
reluctant to leave the paradigms
that formed their Linus security blanket as students —
how much more slow, reluctant, and resisting
will be the public? the priests? the governors?
If Waterman, Al-Queida ... David Copperfield, god, or the devil wants to hit us with something we’ll never see coming, something easy for the knowing to find, ubiquitous, all around, energy with no place to go would be a good source.
Perspective? Sure it’s perspective.
the skin-heads? the fascists?
those who didn’t and don’t support FLEX?
[link not yet added]
those who didn’t and don’t support FLEX?
[link not yet added]
Authority
2008 07 16
(Note: Authority is a major topic for Waterman's persecuted author, as it had been for many a predecessor, including Chaucer and Shakespeare as that author's interrupted doctoral thesis had demonstrated. But this little fragment is all that had to date appeared among his Thinking Tools. Many more though will follow: if time and life permit.)Take Aristotle for example. Aristotle was very smart, I don’t doubt it. He was Alexander the Great’s teacher, and Alexander was very smart. He was Alexander the Great’s teacher because he’d been passed over for promotion at Plato’s academy when Plato died. (Isaac Asimov explained: "Nobody likes a know-it-all.") (Aristotle was also supposed to be a dandy (in bad taste), very mannered, very affected. Ergo: he was hated at Plato’s Academy: though everyone would have conceded he was very smart.)
(Note: university promotions are not directly related to intelligence (but to social adaptation).)
But: Aristotle wrote lots and lots on lots and lots of things. Some of that writing survived (partly because of Alexander (and Alexander’s buddy Ptolmey, who took over Egypt for Greek culture, Cleopatra’s great...grand daddy).
Thus: Aristotle and his writings formed a big part of the library of the Church, once the Church added a secular MS or two to its library of holy writ. (Note: the Church’s library may not have been universal, but it did have a library!)
Church epistemology was based largely on authority. Science though, based more on evidence, more on digested experience, than on authority, got a toe-hold, and climbed a bit: over the Church’s weakening body. Science, in the person of such inspired experimenters as Galileo, took Aristotle to the cleaners.
That quick background was necessary to arrive at my point. Here it is:
Dictum after dictum of Aristotle that was testable finally got tested: and was proved false. Aristotle proves to have been wrong on just about everything testable.
What did the secular authorities (the universities) do? Why they continued to teach everything Aristotle said (that wasn’t disproved) as "gospel"!!! Aristotle, on everything testable, is in the trash. (Very smart, but NOT true.) Aristotle, on everything not testable: ethics, esthetics ... is still (Medieval, Renaissance, Post-Renaissance) holy writ.
PS: My theory of Macroinformation, had I been able to develop it, might have introduced a bit of objectivity into esthetics. Perhaps we could have started to take Aristotle to the cleaners there too. Perhaps that’s "why" I’ve had no allies in that endeavor.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Knowledge
Opinion which is in accord both with experience and theory is called knowledge.
Waterman echoing Sagan
Waterman echoing Sagan
Knowledge is local; ignorance universal.
Waterman to bkMarcus: 2003 03 07: current simmer on "knowledge":
Illusion, the Maya of the gods (and men): all of Sentiens [email prose here: the meaning should be graspabe despite gaps in standard English.]
Science seems like such a good epistemology: evidence, theory, but it only works looking backwards: Yes, I see how Galileo was "right", how the professors and the cardinals were prejudiced ...
Yes, I see how kleptocratic Caesar, Herod, the Sanhedrin, Pilate ... were; but what make’s Jesus’ epistemology infallible? Universal agreement not to examine it closely.
Look for science in your own milieu, where? No communication, no willingness to examine evidence, argument: everyone too busy saying they do (while conspicuously avoiding it) to look, to think. Macroinformation, e.g. Reich, Leary ... And there’s no telling what else.
The government denies knowledge.
The X Files
Brian replied:The X Files
All I know is it just came to me: not for the first time, but this time kicking me hard in the shins.
You start with Wittgenstein (whether intentionally or not) and then derive a disproof of God-The-Knower.
I agree that God-The-Knower is impossible in a Wittgensteinian epistemology.
Freshman year, in Intro Philosophy, I did something similar by combining a Korzybskian epistemology of maps and territories with a Cartesian understanding of God as infinite. I have only in recent years come to recognize the invisible assumption in my own disproof.
The nature of a Map is to filter out and organize a subset of the overwhelming information from the Territory for a finite purpose. Maps are finite tools for finite users, surrounded (for all we know) by the infinite — or at least the much-larger-than-we-finites-can-handle.
If God is infinite and everywhere, God has no use for Maps. Either God is the Territory, or God "knows" the Territory in infinite perfection.
But my understanding of "knowing" is Korzybskian — it’s all about Maps, not about Territories. To Know something is to have Maps, to depend on Maps.
Therefore God, who/which cannot make use of maps, cannot be said to "know" anything. This is not a disproof of God, per se, but it is a disproof of a personal God. Whatever God is, God isn’t a person. And therefore one cannot have a personal relationship with God. Descartes’ proof (whose fallacy it took me years and years to identify) was a proof of an infinite Territory that he called God. I did not see how it saved Jehovah at all — - and as far as I know, Descartes himself, and certainly his readers, did not distinguish God from Jehovah.
N.B., The invisible assumption I was making is that there can only be one infinity. In other words, two infinite things must be co-extensive. So an infinite God must in some sense be (or at least coextensively occupy) an infinite Territory — and therefore be unable to use any Map of that Territory. I now see the two statements "God is infinite" and "God is everywhere" as quite distinct, whereas at the time I saw them both as equivalent to "God is everything."
Men think women should be protected by not knowing.
Wilde
Wilde
I trust the reader already knows Korzybski on distinguishing map from territory, Gregory Bateson on the subject, Wittgenstein, of course, Waterman’s piece on "map / territory, mental modeling" and Brian’s earlier note [link not yet added].
Knowledge is always local. We never know all else it might connect to.
Brian to Waterman email
Some of the later entries that string along here scrapbook fashion belong more in my Teaching / Society section than in my Teaching / Thinking Tools. Oh well: if I had a staff, I’d shuffle a lot. Meantime:
I agree: there are some topics on which some humans have reliable knowledge, even wisdom. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that therefore there must be humans with knowledge on any topic. Knowing the Apennines doesn’t mean you know the Alps. Knowing how to cook for two doesn’t make you able to cook for six billion. Knowing how to make a speech doesn’t make you able to rule the Reich.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Tautology, Experience
2003
Gregory Bateson defined explanation as the mapping of experience onto a tautology.Other key words here: rationalism, empiricism ...
I quote an email from bkMarcus of 2003 11 14 (the setting follows):
I think, however deliberately GB might have defined his terms, that he picked the wrong words to convey that idea.
I wish GB hadn’t used the word ’tautology’ — which has the connotation now of circular reasoning, i.e., meaningless formalism.
As I now understand it, tautology (in GB’s usage) just means a logically self-consistent model. And an explanation is a consistent mapping of (a posteriori) experience onto a self-consistent (a priori) model, thus giving us a consistent overall model for our experience, or rather, for a subset of our experience.
This goes a long way to identifying the rift between rationalism and empiricism over the past few centuries. The debate, as I now understand it — having shifted my own emphasis from a [Waterman]- and Bateson-influenced (British) empiricism toward a more (continental) rationalism — is about how far we can get in the a priori realm before we have to appeal to experience.
I now believe that experience plays a greater role in checking our logic than it does in helping us to choose between otherwise equally logical models. And the emphasis in research seems to be so much on data, that logic feels like it’s been left behind, seen as necessary but not really important. (Which means that its necessity is itself sometimes ignored.) [emphasis added]
Waterman quotes Bateson’s definition of explanation in several places. Additionally, it will come up in a number of random quote generators. Only today with Brian’s response do I see a pressing need to additional comment: and, for the moment, I allow Brian’s own comment to suffice. His contrast between English and Continental empiricism certainly deserves additional consideration as does the entire subject (or set of subjects). Thus there’s room for plenty more here: but not today.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Skepticism
1999
Rational vs. Prejudicial SkepticismMy biographical narrative declares disciplined skepticism to be a close ally of reason. I expatiated only briefly in the following note, adding that the subject warranted its own module:
The old saw has it that "the exception proves the rule." I have yet to meet one person who quotes that cliché who doesn’t also have its meaning backwards. "Prove" once meant "test" or "put to the test." Meanings modify: sometimes reverse. In modern English the phrase should be "the exception disproves the rule." Or: the exception proves the rule to be false, automatically demoting it to a mere generalization. (There are links to alternate arguments in my piece on Proof above.)
I met a woman last year who told me that she was "skeptical." She wanted to hear "both sides," then make up her mind. Most issues have far more than two sides. But this particular point at issue could well be seen in that binary light: one side was in harmony with fact and theory; the other, a populous anger at fact and theory. She sided with the latter. That, my dear, is not skepticism. That is stubbornness. Credulity. What Ursula K. LeGuin has termed "a will to incredulity." Parading under the false mask of seeming reasonableness.
I offer only this brief hint toward illustration. Galileo learned of the possibility of telescopes, Galileo made a telescope, Galileo observed moons around Jupiter. Both his fellow "scientists" and the Church were skeptical: Church tradition (and therefore intellectual tradition) said only the Earth has satellites. The experts were so skeptical of Galileo’s evidence that they wouldn’t look at it. That is not rational skepticism, that is just plain homeostasis.
Galileo
Skepticism betrays a faith in intellect.
Both types of skepticism are of course survival strategies. The latter are characterized by being typically unconscious; conscious reasons typically rationalizations, irrelevant. But that is a subject that should have its own indexed file.
Since writing the preceding I have had the most delicious time with Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising in which, prefatorily to reprising Leary’s Eight Circuit model of mentality, Wilson presents the human mind as containing a Thinker and a Prover: and "Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
Such minds, Wilson continues, can "prove" that the poorest Jew in 1930 Berlin is secretly a millionaire usurer. (As with other labels he uses for the eight circuits, the terms are mislabelings: "the Thinker" has no competence with thinking and "the Prover" is unacquainted with both scientific and mathematical "proof".
Any faith system can "refute" any amount of evidence simply by being aggressively "skeptical" about it.
Galileo saw satellites around Jupiter. Not possible said the Church and fellow astronomers with their eyes closed.
Cheap versus Expensive Skepticism
In other words there’s cheap skepticism and there’s expensive skepticism. The smoker hears that tobacco is harmful, especially where burning paper raises the temperature of the smoke, especially when the companies juice the narcotic effect. I don’t believe it, says the smoker: without learning the evidence, without learning how to interpret it, without checking any facts. That’s cheap: in the short run at least: free for the moment, maybe fatal eventually.
Then there’s the expensive kind: where you do have to develop skill with some thinking tools, tune up your epistemology, do some checking. There’s no limit to how expensive good skepticism can become. (In some cases it can render one anti-social, unemployable ... Hermits can choose their hermitage, or hermits can be made: isolated.) (Trouble is in such cases, it doesn’t do anyone any good. If intelligence isn’t contagious, honesty may be: people avoid catching it. No one listens to a mental leper. (till sometimes centuries after they’re dead.)
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Evidence
Evidence Is Non-Existent without TheorySocieties are based on agreement within the group;
Science is based on agreement with the evidence. But what is evidence? What I want to say today even though I don’t have time to develop it ideally, is, as I say about so many core concepts, the concept of evidence, like the concept of "fact," the concept of "truth," is tricky. There’s no such thing as evidence apart from some theory of knowing. Evidence is subordinate to epistemology, not epistemology to evidence.
Nietzsche said that there are not facts, only interpretations: I expand the same observation to evidence.
Eddington pleased Einstein and his supporters when he took measurements of light from a momentarily eclipsed star as evidence. The theory was that no demon was faking the information far from the magician-polluted earth. On earth the rest of us are pleased to see the lady sawn in half: knowing that the evidence is magician-polluted. Einstein wanted not to be fooled; we want only to be fooled. But there’s no proof that Einstein (and Jesus ... and you ... and me ... aren’t fooled also.
That’s why we must know our epistemology before our claims to know anything are ’ought but laughable.
And of course I agree with Eddington and Einstein. We don’t know that no demon is fiddling the star light; but we do know that six billion demons are fiddling everything filtered to us through society.
Individuals may be honest: for occasional moments. But are societies ever honest? even for a moment?If I can practice my FreeHand skills enough I’ll attempt a cartoon (or a series) for illustration. Meantime: police departments have evidence rooms, the FBI has evidence rooms ... The trouble is, they’re manned by workers for the state. The Church’s evidence rooms are manned by workers for the Church.
Picture a big NY bank. Billions of dollars worth of gold is kept in subterranean vaults. The vaults have cages. The cages are labeled: USA, Great Britain, France ... Cayman Islands ... Washington wants to give England X million dollars. Some guy in the NY bank loads so much gold onto a wagon in the US cage, wheels it out, opens the GB cage, wheels it in, stacks the gold.
Now imagine the Platonic Original Evidence Room for Kleptocracies. There’s a cage for Baal, a cage for Yahweh ... a cage for the Temple of Solomon, for the Vatican ... for the FBI ... for Blackwell, for Copperfield ... And in small print somewhere there’s a little sign that says Acme Toy Co. The idea of evidence in a centralized information system is laughable. At Judgment Day if God points to evidence lying undisturbed in the universe, listen. If God has minions truck out "evidence" kept in an evidence bag in a vault in heaven (or hell), stop taking God seriously: you’re still in LaLa Land.
I want to add that science tries, or is supposed to try, to take its evidence from Pleroma, the scientific assumption being that Pleroma is distinct (and interference-free) from Creatura/Sentiens. (See my Existential Sets [to be remounted ASAP].) Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some objective referent: the Teutonic Ordeal by Water, for example: if you stay drowned, you’re innocent. The Indonesian Celestial Judgment may be better since it gave the innocent a chance to survive. I’d go into my one of the pair of Towers of Torture at any time if I were only convinced that Church or State, yes, or Public Science, would fairly ascend to the other: no cheating.
Whoever came down last would inherit the earth. And the starlight.
I’ll tell you what I’d like to see: a Celestial Trial between God and Satan. See who comes down first front his tower of torture. In science, we don’t know the outcome until we’ve gathered the evidence; in faith, we know the "final results" in advance. Notice how conspicuously human decision-making institutions (justice systems, etc.) are institutions of faith masked as evidence-based. Human beings allow this year’s rutting battles supervised by last year’s winners. No. The King of the Wood (see Frazer) had only one claim to divinity: he killed the previous king. The present king must be vulnerable to the next king or it’s a farce: a staged farce.
I am pleased (and not at all surprised) to discover that Timothy Ferris makes wonderful science documentaries. His Life Beyond Earth led me to seek out his Creation of the Universe which I only just now finished my first viewing of. He argues that modern science is based in, analogous with, monotheism: one God, one set of physical laws: invariants: principles.
Knowledge is based in belief. But knowledge isn’t necessarily truth. The truth may be something else again. Though I sure hope not.
2001 08 11
Throughout these files, in one way or another, I iterate variations of the point:Science is based on agreement with the evidence.
Nietzsche said that there are not facts, only interpretations: I expand the same observation to evidence.
Eddington pleased Einstein and his supporters when he took measurements of light from a momentarily eclipsed star as evidence. The theory was that no demon was faking the information far from the magician-polluted earth. On earth the rest of us are pleased to see the lady sawn in half: knowing that the evidence is magician-polluted. Einstein wanted not to be fooled; we want only to be fooled. But there’s no proof that Einstein (and Jesus ... and you ... and me ... aren’t fooled also.
That’s why we must know our epistemology before our claims to know anything are ’ought but laughable.
And of course I agree with Eddington and Einstein. We don’t know that no demon is fiddling the star light; but we do know that six billion demons are fiddling everything filtered to us through society.
Individuals may be honest: for occasional moments. But are societies ever honest? even for a moment?
Picture a big NY bank. Billions of dollars worth of gold is kept in subterranean vaults. The vaults have cages. The cages are labeled: USA, Great Britain, France ... Cayman Islands ... Washington wants to give England X million dollars. Some guy in the NY bank loads so much gold onto a wagon in the US cage, wheels it out, opens the GB cage, wheels it in, stacks the gold.
Now imagine the Platonic Original Evidence Room for Kleptocracies. There’s a cage for Baal, a cage for Yahweh ... a cage for the Temple of Solomon, for the Vatican ... for the FBI ... for Blackwell, for Copperfield ... And in small print somewhere there’s a little sign that says Acme Toy Co.
Whoever came down last would inherit the earth. And the starlight.
I’ll tell you what I’d like to see: a Celestial Trial between God and Satan. See who comes down first front his tower of torture. In science, we don’t know the outcome until we’ve gathered the evidence; in faith, we know the "final results" in advance. Notice how conspicuously human decision-making institutions (justice systems, etc.) are institutions of faith masked as evidence-based. Human beings allow this year’s rutting battles supervised by last year’s winners. No. The King of the Wood (see Frazer) had only one claim to divinity: he killed the previous king. The present king must be vulnerable to the next king or it’s a farce: a staged farce.
I am pleased (and not at all surprised) to discover that Timothy Ferris makes wonderful science documentaries. His Life Beyond Earth led me to seek out his Creation of the Universe which I only just now finished my first viewing of. He argues that modern science is based in, analogous with, monotheism: one God, one set of physical laws: invariants: principles.
Knowledge is based in belief. But knowledge isn’t necessarily truth. The truth may be something else again. Though I sure hope not.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Falsification
2000 07 05
Falsification is the heart and soul of science.the falsification failing —
May be regarded as provisionally true.
Everything that hasn’t been thoroughly falsified —
no chance to fail —
should be regarded as probably false.
If your models of reality don’t well map reality, don’t jibe smoothly with experience, make better models, redraft your maps: from scratch if necessary.
This wisdom is not natural to human individuals. Science is rare. No individual can be a "scientist" 100% of the time.
This wisdom is anathema to societies. Societies routinely stretch the bottom of their budget to buttress beliefs that have bumped against experience. Where the university has invested in Newtonian physics, it will resist relativity. Where the university has invested in relativity physics, it will resist quantum incompatibility. Where the Temple has elected its Sanhedrin, it will resist Christ. And where the Temple has accepted the rule of Caesar — and which temple has not, it will compromise. Caiaphas can interrupt and contradict Jesus, Pilat can judge Jesus without any obligation to demonstrate understanding of what Jesus says: only what Caesar says.
The middle part of the previous paragraph instantly distanced the religious, the latter part alienated the scientists. That’s tough, I hold to the relationship, the apotheosis of reason doesn’t suspend homeostasis.
Besides, Michael Behe claims that most scientists do believe in god (the god of order, the god of design), and I suspect that Behe is right: in more than one thing.
Anyone still here: please understand: I use Christ as a symbol, and Jesus too. There’s no dogma in my meaning. There’s a little bit of "Christ" in any revolutionary, any ugly duckling, anyone blocked from the table. I don’t mean that there is an independent thing, immortal, infallible, and 100% a Christ. And I certainly don’t mean that a man called Jesus and crucified two thousand years ago was the only one to try to upgrade a church, a culture, and get kicked in the face.
Science too is based in belief, but science contrasts with religion in that science is supposed to welcome new maps whereas churches are fortified against review.
The Wason Test illustrates the matter with efficiency: Human beings naturally look for examples in support of their ideas. Modern reason supports this tendency. Modern reason however also adds a requirement that is not natural to our species: falsification. Peter C. Wason designed a simple test which illustrates the principle better than any prose I’ve yet encountered.
A | D | 4 | 7 |
B) why?
The best answer will identify the minimum number: nothing missing, nothing extraneous. (Notice that the sample cards are not random but are an algebra of representation. Any possible card from the stack, if indeed the stack relates to the rule, is logically represented by the four samples: vowel / consonant; even number / odd number.)
Of Wason’s one hundred twenty-eight college graduate candidates, only five got it right. Furthermore, a number of those who didn’t failed likewise to understand the answer once given. I have showed this test to a number of people and my percentage of right answers thus far is worse than Wason’s. When I first saw the test (in Morton Hunt’s Universe Within), I was wrong for a good several seconds before I saw it, and, I confess, that occurred chronologically well after the moment claimed in my biographical narratives for my conversion from faith in a magical universe to a recognition of and admiration for modern reason. As I say in the module referred to, no one is rational all the time.
But of course I’ve already given the key to the answer: falsifiability. Let’s consider each of the candidate cards in turn.
Card #2: D. This card does not need to be turned. The rule says nothing about cards with letters other than vowels. The D card is irrelevant to the rule in question.
Card #3: 4. This card also does not have to be turned. The rule restricts what may be opposite a vowel; the rule does not restrict what must be opposite an even number. The 4 card too is irrelevant to the rule in question.
Card #4: 7. Yes. If the verso of the 7 card has a vowel, then the rule is false. The A must be turned as part of the process of confirming the rule: the 7 must be turned to falsify the rule. Confirmation is only half of the process.
Did you learn this reasoning in school? Neither did I. Did you learn it in Church? Not likely. Do you imagine that your science teacher could answer it correctly? I don’t. Schools in a democracy reflect and reinforce the errors of the majority.
(Schools in a tyranny reflect and reinforce the errors of the ruling class.) Has there ever been a school that represented reason? None that I’d name with confidence. Is MIT or Cal Tech or Stanford an exception? It would be easy to find confirming evidence, but are you welcome to investigate all evidence to falsify it? Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann says he achieved his Ph.D. in physics at Yale without having learned the essence of science. He reports that it was at MIT that he learned it, but he was at the time in a post-doc program and it was an individual he learned it from, not the institution. He witnessed something rare: a scientist, confronted with evidence falsifying his theory, changed his mind! Right in front of his colleagues!
The Wason Test has been discussed at my home page for upwards of five years now: nearly the entire life of the home page [b. 1995]. It’s long overdue for it’s own module. Meantime references have budded in a number of other modules.
Food for Thought
Today the following arrived from James Winter, HUM.net, UCLA:
what your remarks about it concerning falsifiability are (though I am
familiar with Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science), but, as
I understand the test, it is not presented correctly.
Perhaps I missed it, but the ’tester’ is supposed to specify that each card you see on the table has a letter on one side and a number on the
other. Then you are told the rule and asked which cards need to be
turned over in order to see if the rule is complied with.
In your example, then, the cards that would have to be turned over would
be the ’A’ card and the ’7’ card (which is what you say as well — but your explanations for why this is so seem a bit confused to me). Anyway, this test is used by psychologists interested in rationality,
and is supposed to be evidence for one way in which humans
systematically reason irrationally. What the test actually tests for is
one’s ability to understand conditional statements (like the rule for the
cards). The most common way of misunderstanding a conditional is to
treat it as a biconditional (if and only if, rather than if).
You may know this, but Popper’s criterion of falsifiability (as a
criterion for whether a theory should be counted as scientific, or as a
criterion for acceptance of a theory) has major difficulties, well
recognized by philosophers of science. For most scientists themselves,
however, who are familiar at all with philosophy of science, still
(unfortunately) think Popper got it right. (They would do well to keep
up with the times!)
I’ll be back to comment once I’ve finished wrestling with still another new introduction at Macroinformation. For the moment I observe that I’ve alluded to the Wason Test in many places at Waterman, but this is the only one I’ve edited with some care. That letter gave no URL, so I don’t know if this is the presentation he saw. In time I’ll delete or fix the others.
Yesterday I went Wason surfing again and found hundreds of entries, one of which discussed a variant of the four card problem in terms of traditional logic. I couldn’t follow the damn argument: it was written in "logic," not in plain English. I’m well aware of the importance of artificial languages and specialized disciplines. My Macroinformation discusses the topic at growing length. If survival requires virtuosity on the violin then we should all start fiddling, knowing that failure means not even Heifitz will have grandchildren. But I insist that mastery of formal logic isn’t necessary. Simple English can do it. Forget the goddam Aristotelian syllogisms and just absorb Popper / Wason: pick up the habit of seeing things in terms of falsifiability. Reverse your field with regard to the idea of "proof." Know that all talk of proof
that doesn’t constantly refer to relevant tautologies is fraud: the practice of magician-priest-confidence men performing routine illusions for jossers whose principle will is to be fooled.
Notes
Opaque Majority:
3.9% got it right: some portion of the balance, all educated, couldn’t understand why the right answer was right. My neighboring piece on semiotics, semantics, and most especially Korzybski’s map / territory distinction refers to Gregory Bateson’s report that psychologists have found the species at large incapable of making this basic semiotic distinction. I quote part of my note there:
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Logic
1998 07 12
There’s far more than one kind of logic.Wham! He cold-cocks him.
Syllogism: deductive reasoning. "An argument the conclusion of which is supported by two premises, of which one (major premise) contains the term (major term) that is the predicate of the conclusion, and the other (minor premise) contains the term (minor term) that is the subject of the conclusion; common to both premises is a term (middle term) that is excluded from the conclusion." (Random House Unabridged)
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.
I suspect anyone can see that this has something to do with reason: how connected is it to intelligence? What does it have to do with survival?
Are truth and logic connected in any inevitable way? How about the major premise above? All men are mortal. Is it true? What about Jesus? Why don’t we hear a chorus of protests from Christians in logic classes? What about Socrates? Isn’t he too immortal after all? Yet we did kill him. Just as we killed Jesus half a millennium later.
OK. That’s a different kind of immortality. Let’s admit that both Socrates and Jesus were mortal. What about you and me? Just because everybody else seems to have died doesn’t prove and you and I will. Isn’t that more properly a prediction than a conclusion?
How is "All A is C; all B is A; therefore all B is C" going to help us when there’s nine or twenty billion people instead of five: no food, no forests, no air, no ozone layer ... the unscreened sun making everyone go blind and get cancer ... no fish, no birds, all major cities but Denver are under the sea, and a half-dozen new plagues hit all at once? How many of us are going to be immortal in heaven when there’s no one left on earth to burn candles? when we’ve followed the dodos and the whales and the manatees down the drain we had a major part in widening?
Will Sherlock Holmes help us? Didn’t Arthur Conan Doyle have him forever talking about deduction? Did any of his conclusions actually flow inevitably from any of his premises? He sees calluses on a guy’s hands, mud on his boots ... Sherlock gives Scotland Yard the guy’s trade, his address, his height and weight, what he had for supper, his astrological sign ... all sure fire stuff for a sufficiently gullible grand jury.
You’ve read Doyle. Now try reading Bertrand Russell. Alfred North Whitehead. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Aspire to that. Or are we ready for Armageddon?
Now try Gregory Bateson. Make your reading honest. Actually try to see how humans actually think. Reading Frazer too will help. It ain’t like Aristotle said. But now maybe there won’t be an Armageddon.
A human usually sets the premises in place
before activating the logic process.
Leonard Shlain
before activating the logic process.
Leonard Shlain
Where logic has been placed in relation to the other academic disciplines has changed in the last century and may change again. Many had regarded it as a part of philosophy. Some moved it over with math. I place it outside my competence: as I’ve already confessed, the school system permanently crippled my math aptitude. But I follow the expertise of select others more than well enough to point still others in a few good directions: especially when it comes to caveats.
My Primer lists the contents of Gregory Bateson’s Every Schoolboy Knows. The title to this chapter of Mind and Nature is of course ironic (as wasn’t it also when Dr. Johnson was forever saying it?): few schoolboys know the points Bateson made (or Johnson). The rational competence of adults, including teachers, including science teachers, including our political and industrial leaders, isn’t much greater. I emphasize this because I believe that Armageddon will come all too soon unless such knowledge becomes general. For this piece, I quote the whole of Bateson’s point #13:
We use the same words to talk about logical sequences and about sequences of cause and effect. We say, "If Euclid’s definitions and postulates are accepted, then two triangles having three sides of the one equal to three sides of the other are equal each to each." And we say, "If the temperature falls below 0 degrees C, then the water begins to become ice."
But the if. . . then of logic in the syllogism is very different from the if . . . then of cause and effect.
In a computer, which works by cause and effect, with one transistor triggering another, the sequences of cause and effect are used to simulate logic. Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate
all the processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked:
Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect! And the answer would have been no.
When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure logic cannot tolerate. An ordinary buzzer circuit will serve as an example, a single instance of the apparent paradoxes generated in a million cases of homeostasis throughout biology. The buzzer circuit is so rigged that current will pass around the circuit when the armature makes contact with the electrode at A. But the passage of current activates the electromagnet that will draw the armature away, breaking the contact at A. The current will then cease to pass around the circuit, the electromagnet will become inactive, and the armature will return to make contact at A and so repeat the cycle.
If we spell out this cycle onto a causal sequence, we get the following:
If the magnet is activated, then contact at A is broken.
If contact at A-is broken, then the magnet is inactivated.
If magnet is inactivated, then contact is made.
This sequence is perfectly satisfactory provided it is clearly understood that the if. . . then junctures are causal. But the bad pun that would move the ifs and thens over into the world of logic will create havoc:
If the contact is made, then the contact is broken.
If P, then not P.
The if . . . then of causality contains time, but the if . . . then of logic is timeless. It follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality.
Coming next: inference, deduction, induction, abduction ...
I apologize that so much time has elapsed since I opened this file without my being able to get back to finish it. I can’t fix it now either but I do need to park the following somewhere. The following style doesn’t belong among my Thinking Tools modules but I’m not yet sure how to merge it among my Social Pathologies.
One’s hope was in the weakness of logic.
Howards End
Howards End
Notes
Wham!: human logic in film
Go fuck yourself with your logic.
Alphaville
Alphaville
I wonder if the makers of The Pope of Greenwich Village saw the Cassavetes film mentioned above. Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts continued Hollywood’s tradition of excellence in portraying dumb hoods and hebetudinous street people. The Rourke character gets his cousin Paulie to stand still in front of him: Listen to me. Are you paying attention? Wham! Smack!
My favorite layering of dialogue, logic, and assault though is the scene in Farewell My Lovely where Kate Murtaugh’s Amthor has had Robert Mitchum’s Philip Marlowe sapped and doped. She has him brought to a chair. "You’re a stupid man with a stupid job on a stupid case." Her fat body towers over his wrinkled and weary slump. "I get it," he concludes: "I’m stupid."
Amthor hauls off and slaps him a good one. Marlowe flows what energy he has into a big right fist. Up from practically floor level come his knuckles. Pow! Right in the kisser.
You’re not too bright, are you? I like that in a man.
Farewell My Lovely
Here we have an identity wittily parading as an inference: a seeming deduction.Farewell My Lovely
I loved Jean-Luc Godard’s work, in the 1960s especially, but I never saw Alphaville till last night. Godard’s scripts are routinely rich in the kind of nitwit pseudo-profundities the French seem to specialize in, never richer than here, and the Eddie Constantine character’s obscenity is most refreshing: though not half as refreshing as the macroinformational intersticing via closeups of Ana Karina!
Compare my sequences above — I understand you / POW and Pay attention / POW with the following gem from Kieslowski’s White: Karol, the abused hairdresser, has eavesdropped on his bosses, beaten them to the buy for their hot land deal. They thought he was asleep, they were wrong. "You son of a bitch!" they address him. "No," he says: "I really need the money."
Is this a non sequitur? or a brilliant chain of sound reasoning?
We then learn that the reason Karol needed the money so desperately that he is forced to become rich was because it was the only way he could think of to exact revenge on his abusive wife: a fasinating love/hate mutuality.
Thought vs. Armageddon
I look for such reading "all the time." I believe I find such: fairly regularly. I’ve found several more since writing the above not that long ago. Jared Diamond, Michael J. Behe, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary ...
Either my standards aren’t as high as I pretend or maybe we’re not quite as brain dead as the behavior of the majority would suggest.
Theory: Tested Hypothesis
2001 03 28
Theory is the highest form of knowledge
a sentient creature can aspire to.
a sentient creature can aspire to.
To the man in the street, theory is an untested idea: lame-brained, more likely than not. In science, theory is the highest epistemological state rational man can reach. Theory is cybernetic, always being refined, occasionally revolutionized. So long as disproof is diligently and honestly sought, theory zeroes in toward the truth. Yes, I say "toward." Zeno’s paradox holds in this case: you can never actually get there. Neither do you need to. Approximate is more than good enough. Deceiving yourself about the possibilities of exactness is less than good enough. If we keep it up, I fear it will be catastrophic.
There’s a mistake right there. I leave it as humor. Zeno’s paradox does not apply. It’s rather the case that knowledge and truth are of different logical types. The truth is the set of events in space/time; knowledge is our description(s) [see Thinking as Mental Modeling] of patterns that we see there. The first is territory: the second is map; the map can never be the territory. (Unless you’re Steven Wright: on his map "one mile equals one mile. .... I live at E-4.")
As Gregory Bateson argues, a theory can never be "proved." The best it can do is be in accord with all known evidence. What conflicting evidence or better hypothesis may appear tomorrow no one can know.
A couple of years ago I sat in on a friend’s class at the local community college. "But that’s just theory," a woman complained. My line above, "theory is the highest epistemological state rational man can reach," adds only the word "rational" to my response. No one wanted to hear that. I failed to sense understanding even from the professor. No. We want the Truth. We want it easy. Predigested. Delivered down our throats by indefatigable parents who never expect us to grow up and let them get on with their own feeding.
The man in the street’s "theory" is the scientist’s "hypothesis." An hypothesis is an idea which hasn’t yet been tested or is only initially being tested.
Isaac Asimov gave a good example. I paraphrase. A man stands in his yard. He has the crazy idea that if he starts walking in a net-straight line, he’ll eventually return to his starting point: from the other direction! Talk about lame-brain! That’s as far from common sense as you can get. But were he able to do so, swimming, climbing, crawling as necessary, somehow sustaining himself and correcting for deflections, he will indeed rearrive at his yard and from the other "direction." His hypothesis graduates to theory: traveling over the surface of the planet, the result is the same (almost) as if the earth were spherical!
Now the new theory has to be tested further. One example in its favor is merely a start. Others have to be allowed, even challenged, to do the same. Still the man (and his new colleagues) need to stretch their imaginations afresh, looking for disproof. The theory becomes comfortable once other tests show the same conclusions: send a rocket away from the earth and take a photograph. There, it’s curved. Supporting evidence. Go half-way to the moon. There: it’s oblately spheroid. (Actually, if you thought it was a sphere, that corrects your hypothesis, improves your theory.)
The theory is now as solid as you could wish. Still it is not "proved." It’s still based on a whole stack of assumptions not provable. Perhaps some demon put you into a trance where you only believed that you had traveled over the surface. The same or other demons could have deceived your colleagues in their tests. Maybe God doctored the photographs from space. Maybe the astronauts too were deceived. Even science is based on faith: a faith that evidence and reason can be trusted. And that if you can’t detect the demon, maybe there is no demon.
I’ve been enjoying materials from a few other web sites recently where theory is occasionally discussed. RAWilson.com and DieOff.com are examples. Jay Hanson’s Brain Food newsletter from DieOff.com inspired an addition to this module which I now wish to expand. So I’ll move that material to a new module.
This needs to bud and bud again, even before I’ve returned to do a better job with any part of it: theory especially. In particular I shall make separate files for theory and for hypothesis. Then I’ll split a file from Hypothesis exampling an untested theory of my own: Budget: an asymmetrical flow: though diagnosis influences budget, once budgeted the budget will influence the diagnosis far more than the symptoms will determine the diagnosis and influence the budget.
| Diagnosis | < — — — — > | Budget |
| infrastructure science institutional structure, executive flow chart |
My hypothesis is as yet untested because I just thought of it this hour. Yet, if I didn’t believe evidence would be easy to find (and unnecessary to manufacture), I wouldn’t (I hope) have both thought of it and taken it seriously enough to jot here.
Were my hypothesis tested, and were a preponderance of evidence found to support it, it would promote to Theory.
All such promotions are temporary, provisional, subject to further review, analysis, new information. (Unfortunately, mis- and dis-information can also be new.)
I’ve just mentioned elsewhere but must repeat here, state-run NASA has just been caught censoring its scientists, instructing them to stroke the public’s confusion about theory by emphasizing that evolution is "just a theory." Is science possible under a government? Governments butter their bread with superstition, with fear, with ignorance.
One thing seems clear: big science is possible only with government. But then the big scientists get treated like school children. Oh well: they asked for it.
Notes
Delivered: Straight lines
Yeah, we want a greased shot straight onto God’s lap. But God may not have a lap. Neither is a straight line what so many of us have been told. (Actually, a "straight line" is what ever you define it to be.) Mathematicians change their definitions. Some schools start catching up within mere years; others not for decades: perhaps not for centuries.
>Bucky Fuller told a small group of us, "’A straight line is the shortest distance between two points’ ... and the shortest distance between two points is a zigzag." He waited for the jaws to drop. "Think of a lightning bolt. It’s in a hurry to neutralize it’s charge. Do you think nature would choose an inefficient path?"
Paraphrase: the limits of Waterman’s accuracy
I work the best I can without adequate reference to a library. That includes my own, the better part of which is, and has been for years, jumbled three deep in a shed intended to house my friend’s tools. Before my most recent disasters, I had half of it organized on shelves in a non-waterproof Florida room. Many of those are now so mildewed they can’t be opened, let alone read.
I can’t be sure I own the Asimov I refer to and wouldn’t spare the time to search its pages if it were here on my desk. A paraphrase is better in an emergency. Whether we have twenty days or twenty decades to go before we have to pay the ultimate price for our foolishness I can’t know. But the emergency is now. If it’s not too late already. If it is, then it doesn’t matter what any of us do. I still chose to do the same thing: amuse myself — as though it could help us.
By the way, I hear that Auerbach wrote his Mimesis in prison without any reference to books. Yet it’s dense with quotes. All from his head.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Simplicity in Science
1997 11 02
Occam's Razor: The Law of Sufficient ReasonAKA:
Law of Economy
Law of Parsimony
Survival depends on decision making. Where our decisions are based on knowledge, our chances are optimal. But there are far more circumstances in which our knowledge is fragmentary than there are circumstances in which our knowledge is complete and reliable. Decisions have to be made anyway and sometimes right away, even if the decision must be based on a guess. If you and your family are cowering in a cave and you suddenly smell tiger, hear a growl, feel hot feline breath on the back of your neck, you don't rebuild the fire for a better look; you scream "tiger" and try to flee.
A mother hears a crash in the pantry. She comes in from the yard and finds that a dinette chair has been drawn into the pantry, a cabinet door is open, and the cookie jar lies smashed on the linoleum. Junior is no where to be seen. The possibilities of what could have happened are far more numerous than a committee of sit-com writers could invent. Thus far, there's no way to prove that it didn't all come about by astronomically improbable, but not impossible, quantum randomness. But the mother doesn't bother her imagination. "Junior," she calls in her most scolding tone.
The simplest answer may be the best.
Spirit of Occam
Spirit of Occam
It's the bottom of the ninth, seventh game of the World Series, the catcher's attempt at a tag at the plate screens the umpire's view. The third base umpire has fallen trying to stay clear of the third baseman's fielding. "Safe," the umpire calls. It doesn't matter what the replays might show. The game would have few sponsors at five hours of mostly the backs of the umpires conferring over a replay monitor.
What do we do where knowledge is partial? (As it always is!) We make a decision. How about when knowledge is divided? (As it usually is.) How do we decide among contending ignorances? The 14th-century philosopher William of Occam (defender of nominalism) decided in favor of simplicity with the dictum, "entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity." Manhattan Project mathematical wizard Richard Feynman applied Occam's Razor when answering whether he believed in UFOs. When you don't know but have to decide, chose what seems to be the most reasonable candidate, he said. It's "more reasonable to believe that UFOs are the result of the known, irrational behavior of terrestrials than the unknown, rational behavior of extraterrestrials."
A Conspiracy of Paper
Seek simplicity and distrust it.
Whitehead
Epistemology
Bateson
Notes
Decision
I notice advice that Vice President Al Gore has on the subject: "Resistance to seeing the strategic threats often focuses on the lack of complete information and perfect understanding. We should acknowledge that we will never have complete information. Yet we have to make decisions anyway; we do this all the time. And one way we draw conclusions from incomplete information is be recognizing patterns."
Earth in the Balance, 1992
A better look
There's an ad on TV these days depicting a couple grateful for some motorist protection system they've bought into. They narrate getting a flat while traveling and finding the car surrounded by rattlesnakes. They hate snakes, the woman iterates. They pushed a button and within seconds OnStar had dispatched a tow truck.
I didn't hear them report their warning about the rattlesnakes to the dispatcher or to the towing service. I didn't hear any discussion of whether a herpetologist should accompany the truck to confirm the couple's identification before work proceeded. They cared about their safety and convenience: didn't they care about the safety of the workers? No: all we're supposed to understand is that they hate snakes, rattlesnakes can be dangerous; therefore, any snake they see is a rattlesnake. The ad didn't confirm that there was a single snake there of any species: how do we know they didn't see a bit of bicycle tube and decide it was a rattlesnake? A whole nest of rattlesnakes? No: you're fearful? You get your guard up.
How much time did the US spend falsifying fears of Germans, Japanese, Communists ...? No: we just went to war. Shoot first, ask questions later.
While here, I'll tell you: this decade, I've lived in rattlesnake country, very close to a variety of water moccasin habitats. I've spent those ten years looking for rattlesnakes. I've found one. What made that couple so lucky when they weren't even looking?
I haven't fished much since getting whole hog into this home page, but before I got the Mac and got on-line, I spent time on or in the water every day. In the warm months I'd likely be in the water, the weediest part, up to my neck, lobbing my fly to places lunkers might hide. Back at the ramp, every kid has just seen a moccasin. Funny: I was just out where they live: didn't see one.
On land, I'm looking for rattlesnakes. In the water, I'm certainly not looking for moccasins! And if I were, I'd be looking for them in the worst way, least likely of success. They hear, feel, smell me coming: they hunt or bask or whatever somewhere else. Snakes come up to me when I've got a string of bluegills tied to my bathing suit: but they're brown banded water snakes. So far, the moccasins don't want trouble.
Biking round Highlands Hammock provided my one view of a rattler. I'm pedaling, oh, maybe ten miles an hour. Ah, a snake. I pedal right up to it for a look-see. Whoops! The snake rears back, ready to strike. I see the black diamonds and hear the warning of the rattle close to the same time. I veer my naked calf out of its range, stop, oh, ten feet away, turn, and watch. The diamondback can't see me at all at that range. Slowly, he calms down and resumes advancing, cautiously, across the road. Once on the other side though: whoosh! into the undergrowth.
He didn't want a piece of me any more than I wanted a piece of him. And he ventured onto the asphalt the way a debutante who took the wrong subway would venture into Harlem: very cautiously, painfully cautiously.
A ranger/life guard at Manatee Springs State Park once offered to share a catch of crawdads with me. Sure, I said. It turned out he hadn't caught them yet. He lowered himself into the spring and began sifting through the hydrilla. Brown banded water snakes poured out, biting him on the way. "Oh, they don't hurt," he said as he put a handful of crawdads into a paper cup. He showed me his hands and wrists: looked like a junkie: dozens of little skin pricks all over both hands, the majority half-healed. No sweat to him? No sweat to me either.
Umpire's Call
Email exchange:
Did the umpire call an out because the runner was out, or was the runner out because the umpire said so?
The runner is out because the umpire says so. The truth isn't the judge.
Spectra
2000 12 08
Common metaphors are commonly irresponsibile with regard to topology. (Relates to Edges, Boundaries ... Whole/Part ...)Simple logic categorized Yes/No, True or False for many things. Alternately we view some things as ranging over a series of values. Things we measure carefully often turn out to have values measurable as decimal fractions: the average family has N.n children. Something we look at very carefully, like the number π upon examination brings us up short. Why, it's irrational: the decimal fraction seems to be infinite.
I believe that many of the things we tend to look at as True/False would be better looked at as decimal fractions. Take a concept such as sentience for example: or consciousness.
Is a rock sentient? No. It's false that a rock is sentient. How about a bacterium? No: false. But shouldn't our knowledge perhaps be absolute before we make that judgment with certainly? Ilya Prigogine suggests that we forget about certainty and stick with what we can know.
Are human beings sentient? Yes. That one's true: human beings are sentient. OK. Now: now sentient are we? Absolutely? How about the human being kept in a box in a "school" for retards? How about the human being in a coma in the hospital? How about the human being watching TV? What about the kid receiving communion for the first time? How about the adult receiving communion for the Nth time? don't decimal fractions apply: even though (I find) it obvious that we can't determine exactly what that decimal fraction is?
One last thought for the moment: Estimate a range of values for human sentience. Now estimate a range of values for possible sentience: zero to what?
Finally: how do they compare? Do you believe humans are 98.7% sentient? Or 0.00029 sentient?
I believe human society would benefit if these questions were asked routinely of institutions as well as concepts. Is justice uniformly served by Justice Departments? What decimal fraction of the time is "Science" scientific? How routinely do universities serve "the pursuit of truth"? How much of Democracy silences the voices of critics? What portion of the time does this or that church serve "God"? All? Half? Zero?
I trust the reader recognizes that we tend to accord assumptions of uniformity to institutions that we'd never dream of assuming for individuals. Little Billy lies 0.10 of the time; the government never: the government's truthfulness is 00.0n.
Once I start to do more with this section, make sure I devote some space to "order" as a direction along a spectrum, not a "thing."
Order: a reduction of choices
On Proof
1997 10 13
Reason, supported by experience, differs from traditional authority in its open admission that the evidence must be wholly visible to all. The results of an experiment in science are validated only after other experiments in other laboratories by other scientists come up with the same result. All their results will still be invalidated if some future experiment or inquiry challenges those results. Anyone may make the challenge.Science can disprove theories ...
science can improve theories ...
science can never prove theories.
Gregory Bateson
science can improve theories ...
science can never prove theories.
Gregory Bateson
Authority, in contrast, plays a concealed hand. Its reasons are kept in a "black box." Too arcane for mere mortals. (A great deal has been posted at my home page since the original note was processed. (See Waterman on Shakespeare's Sonnets in particular.)
(Governments play it both ways. Our congress is open. The records are public. But then they go into committees. They meet in chambers. The Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA ... work in black boxes.)
The word proof is ambiguous in a way not commonly understood. Science can prove a theory in the 1) progressive-proof sense of "Well, here are some reasons to believe it," and in the 2) experiential sense of "test it further." But science (a mere branch of reason) can not prove it in the tautological sense of quod erat demonstrandum. There can be no experiential tautologies.
All reason can do is to argue what seems reasonable.
(echoing Feynman)
(echoing Feynman)
Furthermore, with respect to sense 1), showing examples and reasons in support of a theory is simply the first step in rational theorizing. In order to be in accord with up to date reason, all reasonable effort must be taken to disprove the theory before it should be taken seriously. (See the Wason Test, just coming up.)
Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.
Sir Arthur Eddington
Sir Arthur Eddington
Human Hubris: Mathematical, Political, Theological
Once upon a time man believed that he could make the rain rain, the sun rise (both ideas based on naive models of the universe). Primitive man, further along in time (like now), believes he can prove things: in a court, by law, on a blackboard, at an altar. Is a mathematician's faith in the logic of his brotherhood charming? or embarrassing?
Disproof trumps proof.
Once upon a time we came to no longer trust our own individual, amateur magic. We transferred our trust to the shaman. Then we trusted that we could divine the nature of the god, control him; then we trusted the sorcerer in black robes, the chief sorcerer in gold silk. Now we can't trust ourselves to know our own enemies: the shaman in the White House has to tell us who our enemies are: and he too trusts the magician at the blackboard.
A primate has to trust her perceptions or she'll fall from the tree, fall on the ground, starve. I trust my own perceptions well enough not to fall out of bed more often that not. But to extrapolate that trust to a belief that mortal predators can know God, can know Truth, can Prove things ... That's a bit much.
Proof Scrapbook
2000 07 20 The magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees two halves, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s dummy legs in the other box, find dummy legs, that debunks it.
Now the magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees the sawed legs move, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s marionette legs in the other box, find marionette legs, that debunks it.
Now the magician saws the lady in half, the audience sees the sawed toes wiggle, that proves that the magician has magic.
Then somebody says maybe it’s a different assistant’s legs in the other box, find different assistant’s legs, that debunks it.
The magician starts using the assistant’s twin sister for the legs: a debunker in the audience getting DNA samples from the legs by laser is temporarily fooled.
Point: only fools and magicians talk about proof outside the strict limits of a tautology. See Gregory Bateson: "Science never proves anything."
2001 08 31 It took the inventor of what has been called the greatest mathematical discovery ever — the Mandelbrot Set — to get people to see something that should have been obvious once the telescope and microscope were invented: one’s measurement of the length of a coastline will be determined by the length of one’s ruler. A roadrunner, a snail, and a nematode would each get radically different readings for say the perimeter of a rock: or the coast of Maine. OK, you can’t get a nematode to cover the coast any more than you can get a boy to make one turn of the Rubik cube each second for two hundred and fifty million years — without sleeping, without eating, without a Christmas vacation — but get the point anyway. I intrude those examples onto Mandelbrot simply in order also to warn us of the practical absurdity of much of the mathematical imagination. Mandelbrot merely talked about men using different length rulers. If your ruler is three Angstrom units you’ll get a very different reading for the coast of the main British island than if you’re walking, wading, climbing, swimming, sailing, flying ... around the coast with a yard stick. The truth seems to be fractal and the fractal seems to be infinite.
Any coastline is infinite in "length."
2003 04 04 One possible translation: Tautologies (such as two-dimensional geometry) don’t map well onto actual experience.
I now wish to generalize Mandelbrot’s principle to the concept of proof. The possibility of "proof" of an issue will depend on the sophistication of your epistemology. The Egyptian priests proved whatever they wanted to prove about the god Ra by turning staffs into snakes. Or was that Moses proving something about Yahweh? The shaman can prove to his people that the missionary is a devil. Had the missionary time to convert the people, the missionary could have proved to them that their shaman had only superstition and no magic. Had the Waterman of 1960 been in England in the 1860s, Thomas Huxley could have proved Darwin to him while he was failing to prove it to Bishop Wilberforce. Had the Waterman of 2001 been in England in the 1860s, he might have been able to prove to Huxley that Huxley didn’t have Darwin quite right. Of course it’s even more unlikely that Huxley in 1860 would have listened to a Waterman from 2001 than that Waterman from 2001 would have been in England in 1860.
Of course once you’ve read Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, you won’t pay any mind to anyone talking about proof unless they’re quite specific about the tautology being referred to. The Euclidean proof is no good with a different set of axioms. The jury’s proof is no good with a different set of "facts."
I still say that short of that sophistication, where the proof has no meaning apart from a specific tautology, the tautology never being demonstrably the same as the universe, there is an infinity of possibilities of proofs for lesser tautologies.
What about still more sophisticated epistemologies? Time will tell. Or not.
2003 03 13 bkMarcus just sent an email with a wealth of links taking a variety of positions with regard to the old saw that "the exception proves the rule."
(Yes & No):
"Vin’s hypothesis that the relevant sense of ’prove’ is closer to ’proof’ (v): ; "
[But then the page also cites the legal etymology that the OED does.] [Waterman adds: I link the following URLs when I can, meantime you can copy and paste.]
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nchang/personal/exception.html
(Yes):
"This phrase now obtains a diametrically opposed meaning to its original intent,
where proves meant breaks."
http://livingcode.manilasites.com/discuss/msgReader$332
(No):
"The common misconception is that ’proves’ in this phrase means ’tests’.
That is *not* the case..."
http://alt-usage-english.org/intro_c.shtml#exceptionprovestherule
(No):http://www.greenapple.com/~words1/070599.html#exception
(Yes):http://www.bartleby.com/68/30/2330.html
(Yes):http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=prove
— -cut here — -
common usage is not just wrong but backwards!
The NO position is that the origin of the phrase is in old English law, in which case
the exceptions and rules being referred to are legal and artifactual, not natural.
So either way, the common usage is wrong.
So, what I’d been building toward saying to Brian had to do with what I’ve already said in this file, recapitulating Bateson’s iteration in Mind and Nature: science never proves anything: and tagging on the Waterman whipping-horse, it’s only the religious, the faithful — lawyers, priests ... and their Blackshirts, who knee-jerk demand proof at the drop of a hat.
2004 12 14 I’m just beginning Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma [NY, 1998]. Singh distinguishes scientific proof from mathematical proof: experiential proof from logical proof. Mathematics has always struck me as hubris-filled. Sure I marvel at Pythagoras’s Theorem. Sure I can’t refute any of the famous theorems (neither have I spent thirty seconds trying). But what do I know? I remain reluctant to trust the reasoning of any mortal creatures (and any supposed immortal entities) too far.
I trust logic about two whits more than I trust theology.
I trust experience three or four whits more. I don’t trust anything completely:
not evolution, not the universe, and not any deity: certainly none man-made.
I trust experience three or four whits more. I don’t trust anything completely:
not evolution, not the universe, and not any deity: certainly none man-made.
The teacher makes a generalization: No two snowflakes are alike. Has she really examined every single snowflake? in the whole universe? Haven’t most of them melted before she could see them? Aren’t most of the remainder locked in ice where she can’t see them? Did she have a proof? Was it logical or experiential?
I’m with the scientific proof: the fallible kind.
Proof requires agreement on a set of axioms.
Anti-state.com
Anti-state.com
2005 05 21 from a different blog piece on Originality
Plagiarism can be proved, originality cannot.
Theft can be proved; not ownership.
One could prove that the devil isn’t God,
God himself could not prove that God is God.
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