Month: November 2014

A quickie – Several scientific commentators suggesting www.sciencenews.org is on a par with www.physics.org when it comes to posting low grade speculative (mischievous?) non-science into wider public media. [Previously here, When is Science News? with footnotes added.]

Latest example from Sabine Hossenfelder on FB
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/negative-mass-might-not-defy-einstein
(Super-duper-symmetry maybe ? I said, tongue in cheek.)

Science depends on authority – not on free publication. People who reject authority are militant freedom extremists – anarchists we used to call them. But of course there is interesting information behind the story – on what might be wrong with the “standard model(s)” – but it’s not “science news”. Not news from science to the wider world of applied reality, it’s part of the churn within science, which may still be newsworthy, but needs to be presented as such, with suitable disclaimers.

[Post Note : And as well as footnotes to the “When is Science News?” link above, some more here, again from Sabine:

More technical clarification on the above story:
http://backreaction.blogspot.se/2014/11/negative-mass-in-general-relativity.html
Oh, and notice “an entirely theoretical construct” (the mass in the news story), but yet again the Gravitational Constant is part of the argument – the contingent aspects lie deep in this space, a lot could unravel.

And more follow-up to what went wrong with BICEP story:
http://sci.esa.int/planck/55059-conference-announcement-planck-2014/

So it goes.]

I mentioned noting that one of Rebecca Goldstein’s earlier works was Incompleteness – the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Since Gödel is an existing interest of mine, and Goldstein’s writing has never let me down yet, it was a no-brainer to obtain a copy. (I’ve since also obtained a copy of her fiction The Mind-Body Problem – effectively I’m now working my way through her entire back catalogue. *)

Gödel and friends

The fact that Gödel had associations with Einstein, Wittgenstein, Von Neumann, Turing, the Vienna Circle and more, means that as well as official biographical material there is a wealth of anecdotal and indirect material to work with. And despite Gödel’s own meager introverted publishing record, the meticulous unpublished material he left behind (nachlass) proves to be another fascinating source.

Too many touch points with my own agenda to mention them all, suffice to say both Gödel and Wittgenstein were at odds with, and misunderstood by, logical positivism as well as each other. A fascinating love-hate triangle so well suited to the Goldstein treatment I’ve come to love.

Mach and more

Interesting to again find Mach as an original influence at several distinct points, so many topics lead back to Mach (and hence for me to Boscovich before him **). Only four (long) chapters, the third of which is a semi-formal description of what Gödel’s theorems actually did formally prove and how they did it. A necessary task given how misunderstood and misquoted out of context Gödel can be. A considerable amount of detail on Wittgenstein; unsurprising given the relationship to Gödel. A name-droppers list of players, but everyone of them alive on the page. Great writing, some turns of phrase I found significant to my work:

Describing paradoxes as part of philosophy since the beginning – Epimenides’ Liar’s Paradox, Russell’s own set theory version and more, she goes on to say:

(p91) Paradoxes have often been found lurking about in the deepest places of thought. Their presence is often the signal (like the canary dying?) that we have managed, sometimes unwittingly to stumble on a deep and problematic place, a fissure in the foundations.

The cracks are how the light gets in? The foundations of mathematics in this case.

Wittgenstein

One influence on Wittgenstein:

(p95) Otto Weininger, a quintessentially Viennese figure who had argued that the only way for a man to justify his life (for a woman there is no way) is by acquiring and cultivating genius.

As mentioned, there follows an extended section on Wittgenstein, his Viennese origins and influences, and those influenced and (failed to be influenced) by his work. On The Vienna Circle (p97) “reading Tractatus exegetically like the Torah” despite Wittgenstein disowning them and going to great lengths to offend them with his in-your-face displays of mystical readings, and:

(p103) Wittgenstein’s attitude toward the inherent contradiction of the Tractatus is perhaps more Zen than positivist. His insouciance in the face of paradox was an aspect of his thinking that was all but impossible for the very un-Zen-like members of the Vienna Circle to understand.

There’s lots been said about Wittgenstein’s motives towards Russell in writing Tractatus, and personally I consider it a long joke at Russell’s expense, using logic to put logic in its place, Goldstein writes:

(p103) Whereas the early Wittgenstein had laboured hard with Russell on problems of logic, the later Wittgenstein came to regard the entire field as a “curse” (while Russell, disheartened by his earlier labours with Wittgenstein – his inability to understand him – withdrew from the field and wrote best-sellers).

Talking of the Vienna Circle, particularly Waissman and leader Schlick, idolising Wittgenstein and his Tractatus, despite his rejection of both the Circle’s logical positivism and their failure to understand his position, she quotes contemporaries:

(p105) “[Schlick] returned in an ecstatic state … He adored him and so did Waissman … like others of Wittgenstein’s disciples, the Circle members came to imitate his gestures and manner of speech [and dress].”

Continuing, she describes his famous concluding aphorism as both a succinct summary of his actual position, and an expression of his exasperation at the failure of the Circle to grasp the limits to (their) logic he was exposing. “That whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent” was interpreted by the positivists as saying that there was nothing beyond the bounds of [logical] language that was worth saying,  whereas of course he was saying the opposite. Having said all we can say with logic, we can say nothing more with logic and, since that [formal] language is largely tautological and/or trivial, what we have said is of little significance and all the really important stuff is beyond such language.

(p106) “For Wittgenstein there really was ‘that whereof we cannot speak’. The ethical or – what amounts to the same thing for him – the mystical is both real and inexpressible. He believed that he had explained all that can be said [formally] in the Tractatus,  but as he told one potential publisher, what he had not said in the Tractatus – because it could not be said – was more important than what he had said:

“I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which however I’ll write to you now because the might be a key for you: my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that strictly speaking it can ONLY be delimited that way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by being silent about it.”

He took himself to have demonstrated how little one has actually said after one has finished saying all that can be [formally] said.”

Back to Gödel

Anyway, fascinating though the interpretations of Wittgenstein remain to this day, the point is the parallel with Gödel and his incompleteness, and the wider point that we’ve inherited from Aristotle’s mis-directed systematisation of what he thought he’d learned from Socrates and Plato. Given my own experience arguing with information modellers on the place of “First Oder Logic” or “Predicate Calculus” in real-world industrial applications, the passages starting p150 where they are poetically re-branded Limpid Logic by Goldstein, appealed to my sense of irony. Logically true, even tautologous, but not of direct practical value. Or, as an early (engineering) mentor of mine was fond of saying “10 out of 10, useless” whenever one of us juniors presented him with some design or calculation.

In the same way as Hilbert had been trying to turn mathematics into a closed and comprehensive (and necessarily consistent) set of axioms, Gödel had the same aims in the “pure” logic of mathematics before discovering his proof of its impossibility. (Russell had been trying to do the same by adding additional practical rules to the set of axioms.) And, in the same way as Wittgenstein’s own disciples failed to recognise his message that all the important real world stuff lay outside their closed systems of logic, Gödel, despite announcing his result at the 7th October 1930 conference in Königsberg, actually failed to have any effect on the mainstream, until Von-Neumann took his message back to Princeton and afterwards helped to spread its significance. In the same way as Wittgenstein had turned logic on itself in Tractatus, Gödel Numbering had turned numbers back on themselves to prove their inadequacy.

Ultimately Gödel lived out a life of paranoia in Princeton, where only Einstein was his mental equal, discoursing during their mutually cherished daily walks. As a contemporary young student at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, Goldstein was clearly inspired by their stories, not only to understand the technicalities of their deeply philosophical topics, but to turn their living narratives into literary form.

I side with all of Einstein, Gödel and Wittgenstein; they were right even when they knew they were wrong, their genius was accepted in practice, and their contributions to their respective fields considered pivotal, yet despite their mythological public personae, the mainstream of life continues to this day as if they’d never existed. We still worship the (rational & scientific) value of logic and objectivity, and give them priority over, merely tolerating, even to the exclusion of, the (irrational & unscientific, human) values of the mystical and ethical. As Schumpeter would suggest, and Kuhn after him, a single human lifetime is never enough to cause a global paradigm shift in society at large – in politics and economics. It takes three, baby.

=====

[Aside – on p124 is that an error in use of the word “acute” in the description of sketch 2? Page references based on the W W Norton “Great Discoveries” hardback 2005 edition.]

[Post Note (*) – one thing to note about Goldstein is that her writing alternates between fictional literature and historical biographical works, both with science and philosophy themes. Loved, but never did explicitly review, all of them – Googleplex, 36-Arguments, Spinoza, Gödel, Properties of Light, Mazel, Mind-Body Problem and Strange Attractors:

I was taken by a recent remark from Lisa Jardine as to how good writing of history based on documented records always requires creative fiction, and it comes to mind as I read Goldstein. Jardine is a historian by profession, but had the writing of her very personal biography of Jacob Bronowski in mind when when she said it.]

[PPS (**) – when is someone of this stature going to research and write on Roger Boscovich (1711 – 1787) I wonder.]

[PPPS – 2017 update from Andy Martin. Without hypocrisy all is tautology. Add Brunsson to the list.]

Interesting and provocative talk by Graham Bell at Central London Humanist Group meet-up last night.

A bit of a curate’s egg: Partly a call to humanists to be political – involved in policy of what should be done – and partly his own idiosyncratic call to socialism a la Cuba, at least as a case study. The connection being the overlap of interests between socialism and humanism where, barring the atheistic element, either might be a sub-set of the other (Discuss).

The non-partisan call to political action focussed on a survey of third-party perceptions of humanism. Fairly clear in terms of what it claims to be against (the dogmatic, the supernatural, the irrational, etc), but massive confusion over what it is for, with part of the confusion arising from the difference between humanism (its substantive content) and humanists (their functional actions), the latter often used to infer the former.

Quite rightly and naturally, many different individual humanists and humanist groups have their own agendas, from militant campaigning to more thoughtful developments. Humanism defined by this functional variety couldn’t be anything other than broad and confused – even paradoxical (and perversely, if you are a campaigning organisation, that divide & conquer effect might suit your agenda). What is missing (*) is any substantive agreement on what humanism itself is and what it should be for policy-wise.

Freedom(s) – sure. Democracy – sure, if you can arrange the real thing. Natural Rationality – sure, but as defined how and by whom. Mostly, but not entirely, the humanist audience such as last night’s espouses a “left-leaning (social), free (democratic)” political stance, with different levels of reaction against the risks and excesses of also espousing capitalist, market arrangements, from zero to militant. My response to this is as follows:

The freedoms of thought and expression aspect is reasonably well captured, though that is not definitively humanistic. Democracy is inevitably imperfect in practice in terms of freedoms to influence, which raises the question of how “should” free democratic arrangements be improved. Addressing “should” questions with natural rationality leads us straight to natural ethics or morality, as Graham also noted. Partly that’s about the process (as free, and as democratic as you can make it work, see above) and partly it’s about values, things with inherent worth. ‘Twas ever thus.

What is missing is a set of values to which humanism subscribes. Remember these are “values” not fixed targets or definitive aims, more principles and guidelines. If we believe morality evolves naturally, then we need to allow values to evolve. I picked-up two examples to illustrate the kinds of things that need to be covered:

(1)  A topical discussion in “left-leaning, free-democratic”circles is that the intellectual left does not properly value conservatism, or in Graham’s words “tradition” cited as an anathema to rational thinking. It’s a common knee-jerk to reject it. Freedom and natural rationality says that all “should” decisions are open to free consideration of all possibilities, debated on their own values, merits, evidence and consequences. However, natural evolution relies on both fidelity and fecundity. New arrangements mutate from old arrangements, but must mostly be near copies of previous arrangements, on each cycle of implementation and change. Natural rationality recognises the natural value of conserving “traditional” arrangements – questioning them sure, but not rejecting them out of hand, or relegating them to the same level as all other conceivable options, simply for being traditional.

(2) Another example came out of a contentious difference of opinion over income disparity in capitalist market economies. Hilary Leighter (a humanist celebrant) commented from the floor that the “worth” of  a human was their humanity, not their bank balance or income, and therefore wealth disparity was really only a secondary humanistic concern … except (apparently) where such differences were between “huge” and “tiny” cases. Clearly financial wealth differences are value judgements not numbers. What they really value is relative freedom and influence in the “free democratic” social-econo-political arrangements. Wealth disparity is a surrogate subjective measure of the success in the complex workings of the whole system. There is a value lurking in there, worth making explicit, but it’s not going to be defined (and certainly not agreed) as a quantifiable difference or ratio.

[Post Note : couldn’t help noticing in the post-talk discussions in the pub afterwards, that Wittgenstein rules. So little of the language of free discourse can be definitive. Still fun though.]

[Post Note (*): IHEU statements on “What is Humanism” – better than BHA paraphrases, some detail worth working to improve – following the “when it comes to values, less definitive is better” approach.]

Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for a link to the excellent BBC blog by Adam Curtis. The blog is The Medium and the Message, and the particular post that caught my eye is The Vegetables of Truth from over a month ago.

Very much my agenda, that science has lost its way, and has become too big and powerful as a socio-political driver, distorting both science and society’s perception of it. Adam’s particular point here is the dominance of risk aversion and the public misunderstanding of risk, and how the politics of science feeds into this. Although risk perception has been a topic of mine, my particular focus has been the motivations of science (and humanism) against issues has lost sight of what they’re for, and led to distortion in both the practice and reporting of scientific rationality. In fact science confuses itself between claiming objective neutrality, enabling a glorious future, fighting against irrationality, whist claiming the accidental position of humanity in nature and denying purpose not only in the cosmos generally but even denying individual free-will. Science is seriously fucked-up, which wouldn’t be so bad if it hadn’t got itself into a position where its façade of scientific objectivity gave it a preferential gloss over any alternative arguments branded as subjective, irrational or simply “unscientific”. The common point is that news being “scientific” carries weight way beyond the actual quality of the science and its motivations. Being motivated, rather than presumed neutral, means that conclusions publicised, even used the set public policy, are not just suspect, but downright perverse.

There are two – parallel – universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries.

The other is the role science plays in the public imagination – the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world.

Often the two worlds run together – with scientists from the first world giving us glimpses of their extraordinary discoveries. But what sometimes happens is that those discoveries – and what they promise – get mixed up with other social and political ideas. And then the science begins to change into something else.

Well said. His headline refers to the recent 7-a-day fruit & veg story raising the stakes over the 5-a-day policy being so clearly suspect and motivated by something other than science. So much so that I think I just dismissed it with a Facebook quip and said no more about it at the time. But Adam is right. This is just another symptom, more evidence that science has lost its true place in society. It’s just one recent example, but Adam provides a little history of public perceptions of science. I too found the tremendous positive vibe in the documentary about the Chernobyl workers seeing the job they needed to do as an end beyond any risk to their own lives. He ends on a further positive note:

As an antidote – here is a beautiful film about vegetables. It’s a documentary made in 1972 about a leek-growing contest in Newcastle. It is very camp – with lots of men discussing the length and diameter of their leeks.

It is also all about statistics and numbers – because it is the measurements that will decide the winner. But in this case it’s not about the fear of death. It’s all about pride and glory in the vegetables – among men who lead the unhealthiest of lives. Constantly smoking and drinking as they talk about their beloved vegetables.

Just a holding post with a link for later.
(Something tweeted @romankrznaric by @iheu )

Watched Alice Roberts & Brian Cox (with Brian Blessed in tow) in Space, Time and Videotape last night after also watching Episode 5 of Cox’s Human Universe. All in the interests of research you understand, basically I’m not convinced this kind of “science” programming actually advances, or even has much to do with, real science. Interestingly in the Videotape program, the topic of good media-based science communication and education actually comes up as a topic, so it’s possible to use one as a case study of other other.

The 5th episode of Human Universe is about the future, and scientific knowledge we can use to predict it. Leaving aside personal issues of style for now, like previous editions, the mix of words per volume of dramatic visuals and sound-track is extremely low. It feels like maybe 2 sides of A4 actual content in the 40 minutes. Consequently we hear Brian stating the wonderful truths he holds, never explicitly admitting which are opinion (implicitly it’s all his opinion) or offering what science any are based on. No real explanation based on these and never doubting or suggesting even the existence of any serious alternative debate or conjecture, let alone airing any. The only evidence offered is typically technological (archetypically space-travel) and/or lavish graphical simulations (eg of Andromeda colliding with the Milky Way). Together these are simple to present and attention-grabbing, but not science. I already consider this very misleading. But note also, in spite of several references to scientific knowledge allowing us to predict the future, and to plan our human escape from the inevitable demise of our earth, there is no hint of limits to this predictability. Determinism is implied and the choice is simply ours. (Contrast this with Sagan in the later program, illustrating the chaotic nature of multi-body gravitation. Compare also with Burke “explaining” orbital mechanics of earth-moon space-flight – a “dab on the brake-pedal”. This stuff can be done well for the video-media generation.)

When it comes to the Videotape program, it’s interesting despite the fact that some real, scientific heroes are lined-up for the evening ahead, Cox refers to Alice and Brian as his heroes, somewhat devaluing any real scientific heroism I’d say, but anyway, some thoughts on the content of Videotape first:

Early on there is a classic example of conflating technology with science. There is a healthy focus on worlds out there, and the relative position of earth-bound humans in the whole scheme of things (so much more could be said here) but typically, as I say, they choose to show space-flight. A brainless meme. The spaceflight example shown is Apollo 13 – a wonderful story of the risks and heroism of human-geo-spatial exploration – (such a gripping human drama, they even made a feature film of it) – but not one mention of any science. (In fact the film is heroic for engineering more than science I’d say, but then I’m probably biased.) Later when we see James Burke kicking over the remains of the Apollo program (*), we hear him opine that the public thirst for novelty meant that public funding had to move on from supporting more of the same space travel, and that there were really no visible scientific explanations for the technology-assisted exploration programme anyway. So true.

It was excellent to see true examples of science media heroes: Bronowski, Feynman, Sagan, Moore and Burke all feature.

One highly spurious discussion arose. After showing a montage of three Bruno clips – including the impassioned Auschwitz moment, purely for its Cromwellian point on the contingency of believed knowledge – it is noted that he expresses opinion when referring to contentious debate between Gauss and Hayek.  The spurious discussion arising is a (typically tittering) mention of creationism vs evolution. That is not a scientific debate. There are plenty of scientific opinions and debates to be had about evolution, but creationism isn’t one of them. The Dawkins / Wilson differences – on the existence of group and/or multi-level evolutionary mechanisms above solely genes – simply denied as “woolly” by Dawkins – were highly topical, just this weekend. There is real scientific debate, even if Dawkins chooses dogmatic denial.

We see Bruno describing Newton on gravitation, and pointing out that whilst Newton did the elegant simplifying maths, he really did not offer any scientific explanation or hypothesis for gravity itself (nor even for mass). To this day, gravity remains unexplained and full of conjecture at all levels from the sub-quantum to the cosmic. Even with Higgs explaining mass differences in the electro-weak model, mass and gravity are largely unknowns – just look at CMBR patterns in echoes of the big-bang, dark matter & energy explanations of inflation, gravity waves research, and more. Genuinely exciting areas of scientific hypothesis and research.

Brian does admit to an explicit “marketing” agenda – banging the table in search of funding for science and for science media content – mixed in with the desire to educate they share. For me this conflation of science and marketing, in collusion with media’s own “viewing figures” agenda is pretty fundamental to what is currently wrong with the portrayal of science. There are a couple of points where Brian mentions the editorial policies of science programming, and whether he and Alice and fellow modern day science celebrity broadcasters are restricted from exposing differences of scientific opinion. Brian states several times that he sees debate on scientific disagreement as valuable.

For me this is the biggest chink of hope here – that this debate exists.

Earlier, a clip of Burke being interviewed by some (student intellectual?) audience is shown. The point suggested that Burke’s science programs were all hook (gimmicks) and no content (science or scientific explanation) – which incidentally Burke handles very well. This is a large part of my own agenda, though I see the mechanisms as more memetic, than either ignorance (incompetence) or conspiracy (intentional media marketing & science funding collusion) – to be better understood rather than simply criticised. Alice does pick-up again that the effort needed to create science media content and the practical and editorial constraints are considerable, possibly underestimated by their critics. Sadly when this topic arises Alice dismisses it (with more tittering) pointing out that the Burke’s intellectual inquisitor was wearing a cravat, so who was he to accuse of gimmicks. Oh how we laughed. That is not even close to a scientific argument – pure ad-hominem.

It’s ironic that the extremes of physics and the complexities of evolutionary mechanisms are where maximum speculation, contention and debate exists, and therefore where the maximum excitement for ongoing science resides, and yet our top media scientists operate under some editorial or self-imposed taboo (lest those of dogmatic faith spot a weakness) against exposing real science. Let’s ramp-up this debate. Hooks are good, but let’s up the real scientific content.

[Links will be added if debate is taken up.]

[Aside (*) – Earlier in the Burke montage we also see a slo-mo sequence of an Apollo blast-off. Always awe-inspiring, but enhanced by the overlay of two emotive passages from Carmina Burana. It was only 3 weeks ago I made a reference to this Carmina Burana meme, specifically as used by James Burke – in a eulogy / reading at my father’s funeral. A piece of music devalued by over-exposure out of context in popular media. The significance to my father – whose passion was historical maps and exploration on earth – was the human content and language of the piece. which resulted in the piece being very familiar in our household long before it became an overused media meme.]

Been debating this Register article shared by @jonmbutterworth, with others over on Facebook. As an engineer in the information management domain, I’m obviously very interested in and impressed by the IT challenge here.

100 Peta-Bytes so far,
27 PB in the past year, and
400 PB per year by 2023

Once collected, the possibilities for massively modular and parallel collaborative analysis, and alternative (say) neural network analyses, etc, … the sky’s the limit if the IT architecture supports it – hence the article. But of course that doesn’t make it “intelligent”. A human mind processes huge amounts of raw data daily, but it doesn’t store it as is, for later analysis. It is processed starting in real time experience with inferences, compressions, associations, and continues to be shuffled and re-shuffled between the conscious and subconscious and new associations thereafter. Refining the “remembered” world model we hold. But that’s not the really interesting thing here.

What is interesting is what this says about CERN / LHC / ATLAS Physics. Firstly it says nothing directly. It’s about an area of spin-off technology – unrelated to the particle physics – that benefits mutually from CERN needing it. (Think space-race and Teflon-coated pans.) But secondly, what it seems to suggest is something like this:

“We have so little understanding of how our physical theories explain reality, that we can’t decide in advance what we’re really looking for, so we’ll up the sample rate, record as much as we can, post analyse it, and hope we get lucky.”

And of course we will get lucky – some interesting and significant patterns will be found, interpreted and related to some aspects of the developing physical model. But this doesn’t change the basic point, that the physics is a long way from being completely explanatory of reality in these areas.

 

Just a quickie: People keep telling me that Sam Harris supports the idea that Free Will is an illusion.

I don’t support that view, and despite finding quite a few things to disagree with in what Sam Harris says, I generally consider Harris a heavyweight intellectually when it comes to philosophical thinking. People also tell me he cites Libet in support of his view. If he does he’s wrong, he’d be misinterpreting Libet (as many do of course), but something tells me people must be misunderstanding what Harris is saying. So I decided to check up this one point …

Indeed, in his book Free Will – immediately after the thought-provoking and ambiguous case-study on criminal responsibility which he uses as an introduction – he launches straight in with the simple, unequivocal, declarative statement:

Free will is an illusion.

His emphasis. QED surely? Well, no. A few sentence later he adds:

Free will is actually more than an illusion.

My emphasis. And a couple of paras later:

That we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions …. [is false].

My emphasis again. Agreed. For now, I rest my case.

Some, indeed many, maybe even most, aspects of our conscious will are illusory, but our free will is nevertheless real.

Indeed what Libet shows – think of a professional tennis player returning a serve – is that the crucial core of our conscious will is the power of free-wont over the major part of our decision processing, maximally delegated for reasons of efficiency and speed, to lower, more mechanistic, pre-programmed, biological functions. Permissive supervisory control, for those who prefer a cybernetic machine view. The permissive control is so consistent with other relationships between brain and mind functions too.

That mechanism of free-wont still requires a more explanatory, less reductionist description, but we shouldn’t doubt it exists.

[A quickie – so refs and links will be added as needed if anyone wants to discuss.]