Month: August 2017

Kantian Introduction

Somewhere on the shelf behind me, I do have Critique of Pure Reason but I was pretty inexperienced in philosophy, 15 years or so ago, when I first (and last) tried to read it. I didn’t get very far. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Kant’s significance, just that I’ve formed my views on Kant from only second-hand readings (so far).

In “Five Books” Nigel Warburton interviews Adrian Moore on his 5 recommended Kant readings, four of which are Kant’s own writings. A seriously heavy-weight recommendation, but fortunately the interview style teases out some summary content.

It’s a good piece, recommended generally, but I wanted to capture this topical point:

We have knowledge only of phenomena — ‘phenomena’ is Kant’s word for appearances — and we [can never have any] knowledge of noumena … how things are in themselves.

Everything is completely causally determined in the phenomenal world. So how can there be freedom in the phenomenal world? The answer to that question is: there can’t be.

We have to regard our belief in our own freedom – [in our real noumenal selves] – as an article of faith.

I subscribe to the phenomenal / noumenal distinction – the world beyond our “experience” can never be “known”. Even though that boundary gets pushed back by prosthetic extensions to our experience of phenomenal properties all we are ever doing is building a better “model” of the noumenal according to the phenomenal and our Reasoning.

What bothers me is that causal determination is based on a Newtonian billiard-balls model, and the article of faith is a doubly convenient way to preserve faith in divine will too.

Whatever the value of what Kant has to say about limits to Reason – logical, ethical, categorical, the lot – what he has to say about free-will really cannot be taken seriously?

Rationality and Common Sense

Two things I need to write about.

Jared Diamond on Common Sense, in Edge 2017. “common sense should be invoked more often in scientific discussions, where it is sometimes deficient and scorned” Too right.

And “Why do we use reason to reach nonsensical conclusions?” from the New Humanist which I’ve been meaning to respond to since April 2017.

Closed-minded adherence to the technicalities and process of rational – would-be scientific – discourse, is often at the expense of sensible content. Don’t throw your intuitions out just yet.

Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question.

Ergodicity is my new favourite word.

Some things are ergodic, some are not, they’re non-ergodic.
And rather than a definition (see also post-note below),
it deserves a riff …

A ubiquitous question is, does the end always justify the means or maybe no end ever justifies any & all means?

You might achieve the same physical state, some “objective” end, but we all know intuitively that sometimes the collateral damage to the rest of the cosmos and collective human psychology might outweigh the (local) objective result. For some things, when it comes to getting stuff done, we already know that the how is as important as the what.

The more complex the situation, the more we may need to consider, maybe also need to be seen to have considered, all the possible options and steps, and the more ingenuity, imagination, skill or craft may be needed to pick a best route to the desired solution.

At the level of society, politics, culture and psychology – the humanities – I doubt that would be considered remotely contentious, probably more like second nature. Duh – obvs!

But what about physics, science generally, the real world of natural philosophy? Surely “atoms” – the particles of matter and energy – don’t care how they got to some arrangement, do they? The same arrangement is the same result, surely? You’d be mad – it’s inconceivable, impossible – to think otherwise. That’s what a hard-determinist would say. In reality and in thought experiments, running repeated cases from the same starting condition to the same final state, must achieve the same result, identical in absolutely every way. Indeed, even the thought experiment’s stock-in-trade, “if” the situation was reset to an identical starting state, we can safely ignore questions of how the reset could conceivably, possibly, let alone tractably or physically be achieved, after all it’s only a thought experiment. Physics is deterministic, therefore … all bets on variations beyond statistical uncertainty are off.

Well the hard-determinists, the greedy-reductionists, are wrong. Many processes in the natural world exhibit both route-dependent and route-independent properties. The properties of states depend on their histories as well as their arrangements. The net result of their histories cannot be reduced to the arrangements of the component parts in their end states. Think about that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses Ergodicity in the context of downside risk-management in a chapter he’s pre-published from his forthcoming book Skin in the Game. Where downside risks in probability tails involve not simply cumulative damage but binary all or nothing, dead or alive, result or ruin, success or failure, it makes a hell of a difference how you arrive at a population of cases to derive and interpret your stats. One person taking the same risk many times is quite different from a distributed population of individuals each risking their own skin in their own games. “Average” risk is pretty meaningless in the former case where the sequence of repeated risks clearly matters unlike the latter.

Ergodicity

… a situation is deemed non-ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it —and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stuart Kauffman chooses non-Ergodic as the key concept more people really need to understand in his response to the 2017 Edge Question. It’s very brief and profound, so presented with acknowledgement in its entirety here:

Non-Ergodic
“Non-ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept.
Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity. “Ergodic” means that the system in question visits all its possible states. In Statistical Mechanics this is based on the famous “ergodic hypothesis, which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems do not visit all of their possible states. In physics perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is a spin glass which “breaks” ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states, hence exhibits history in a deep sense.
Even more profoundly, the evolution of life in our biosphere is profoundly “non-ergodic” and historical. The universe will not create all possible life forms. This, together with heritable variation, is the substantial basis for Darwin, without yet specifying the means of heritable variation, whose basis Darwin did not know. Non-ergodicity gives us history.
Stuart A Kauffman

I’m pretty sure now I’ve seen Dennett use ergodicity in his evolutionary explanations towards consciousness, and I know now Kauffman must have used it in his Reinventing the Sacred which I’ve read and reviewed before, but it never really registered – as a word – until I saw those two references above within 24 hours yesterday.

There are so many corollaries from appreciating the distinction, that I’d probably better stop and leave the concept as food for thought.

[END]

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[Post Note: Firstly, a “working definition” might be useful:

Ergodicity is a technical concept about the probability of states at the fundamental entropy level, after Boltzmann. Ergodic theory is about the relationship between any one state of a system and all the possible states it might otherwise be in or have been through on its “path” to that state.

Essentially when the probability of a given (outcome) state has no dependency on previous or alternative states – ie they’re all equally likely and independent of any actual path(s) through states to get there – a system is “ergodic”.

Most evolving macro systems are non-ergodic and actual history matters. Obvious to the humanities, not so obvious to greedy-reductionist scientists.]

[Post Note: Below are a growing lists of (very rough) thoughts sparked-off already.
Shout up if you’d like me to elaborate.

Conscious, intentional stuff happening within physics, but not supported by physics ?!?
Because – info underlies both material / energetic physics AND information processing (conscious or otherwise).

Reality. Ontology. Possibility. Conceivability. (Marletto in Edge 2017)
(Spookily, if one substitutes Shakespeare’s original verb “to be” it’s remarkably close to the – objective, deterministic – existential point, but not the reason I posted with that allusive title. Was the Bard on this case already?)

Evolved or Divinely created. Hardly matters to a determinist, ironically, but natural history should be fundamental to normal rational people.

Causal dependency can be backward.
Kauffman reverse causality …. Taleb too points out similar error.

Bayesian approaches look more sophisticated than simple chance, where knowledge gained from earlier choices / chances affect current decisions, but we really need to be aware what kind of ergodic / non-ergodic systems we are dealing with first. Bayes can be as misleading as naive single-choice chance.

Is there any genuinely objective reality (that matters)?
Realities that matter have subjectivity – “skin in the game”

Reversibility. History matters in irreversible incorporation – integration is more than arrangement of components. (Tad Bonicziewski – quality management). Entropy, 2nd Law and probabilistic mechanics are fundamental – ubiquitous – here.

So … Integrated Information Theory?

(Irony of historicity given Taleb / Beard spat? I won’t mention it if you don’t 😉

Think also about those fuzzy areas between “hard” science and “soft” humanities …
(eg Engineering, psychology, statistics and risk?)
Engineering humanities – “Rivets in formation” (Ingenuity is the root of engineering.)
However many things and layers in our ontology, EVERY thing and every interface comes in 3-layers.
Thing <> Interface <> Thing = 3 things
Interface <> Thing <> Interface = 3 things
Difference is simply the choice of edge vs node view in system networks?

Evolutionary design-space (in Dennett B2BnB sense) clearly closely related to evolution not visiting all possible states (in the Kauffman sense above) – directedness of evolution, as opposed to a random walk, is not just an illusion.

Here, Anthony Garrett Lisi, another physicist from Edge 2017 that sees the limits to greedy-reductionist determinism. Emergent objects are better treated as independent of their components parts!?!]

[Post Note August 2018: Taleb’s brutal style is making the running in public consciousness, but this is a real and deep issue:

(Boltzmann acknowledged in there too.)
I really do have to create a coherent piece
based on the above rough notes.]

Rationality – short and sweet.

Short and sweet video from Julia Galef on what she / we should mean when we’re talking about rationality. As a self-identifying rationalist, I thought I’d take a peek and report back.

Epistemic –  about justified knowing – how we reason what we believe – explanatory understanding and believing what we understand to be true meaning. Instrumental – about consistent and optimal behaviour towards what matters, what we care about. Generally the two should be aligned, but we all have different strengths & weaknesses, biases & propensities, short-term tactics & long-run strategies.

Completely non-contentious.

In fact her point is to ensure when we talk about rationality, we don’t limit ourselves to some narrow objective definition of rationality. The broadest conception of rationality, not just narrow conceptions of truth being “cold rational” in contrast to more subjective, empathic or emotional feeling.

Hat tip to David Gurteen for the link. Also another video on the good faith principle – topical recently on honesty and charity in argument discourse.

[Post Note – The next video is also a simple visualisation of Bayes Theorem, one of several, caught my attention with the reference to Earl Warren. A good resource, a good speaker / presenter.]

Why Fluid Dynamics is not boring?

A bookmarking post only. Interesting to me as an one-time fluid-dynamicist, and I’ve mentioned the parallels before between Navier-Stokes et al in Fluid Dynamics and more fundamental physics. Especially point-based (Boscovich), quantum-loop-based (Rovelli) and integrated-information (IIT). Just capturing the link here.

“fluid dynamics, is surprisingly pivotal to understanding some of the most elementary constituents and processes underlying physical phenomena.”

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Post Notes:

Spookily after trawling through the Edge Question 2017 I found Ian McEwan no less, recommending we all get to know Navier-Stokes …. haven’t digested why yet …. but a Edge 2017 is a goldmine. McEwan’s interest is only in celebration of the widest range of fluid dynamics – unsung heros, and a topic beyond the “streetlight” of his own zone of expertise. Someone going off-piste. Meta, but not fundamental.

Hidden Concepts – Edge 2017 – Let’s play Connections instead of Bulldog

There was a time when I followed John Brockman’s Edge regularly, it was a great way to pick up relationships between living thinkers you already knew and admired and others you didn’t, from across unlimited intellectual fields. The great thing about the annual Edge Question is that apart from the open question, there is no other agenda or direction and each thinker’s response is independent, even if some may compare notes. (Obviously, for the cynical, the overarching agenda is that Brockman is a publishing agent and they all have books to sell.)

It’s a while since I have, for no reason other than I am perpetually overwhelmed with unresolved references from people and topics I’m already working on, and there are now so many social channels that throw up unexpected links, that it hardly seems necessary to go looking for the unexpected. But I’m glad I did.

I think when I first encountered the Edge, there were maybe 20-odd participants each, to my naive position, already recognised authorities remote from my daily experience beyond their books and TV programmes. In 2017 there are 206 contributors, which still include a pantheon of authorities along with many with whom I’ve interacted in various levels of correspondence. Sometimes Q&A at talks, often blogging and Twitter threads and exchanges, and in several case direct exchange of correspondence and dialogue – still along with dozens I don’t recall previously encountering. Many I’ve written longer pieces of analysis and critique as part of my own project(s).

The choice of responses to the Edge Annual Question often says as much about the thinker as it does about the content of the response they’re intending to communicate. For some – especially those still trying to establish their position – the response, whatever the actual question, is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to reinforce the thesis on which the current state of their career depends. For others, more secure in their tenure, the response may reach further out from within their comfort zone, and for the old hands and mavericks it’s time to go off-piste, it’s party-time away from the day-job. For me this is as fascinating as the actual responses.

Here a selection that caught my eye and imagination:

Carlo Rovelli on Relative Information. Simply information as (any) significant difference at any fundamental level. Carlo zooming in at the root of all things. A man after mine own.

Dan Dennett on Affordances. One of the fruits of cognition, seeing things in the natural world as opportunities for advantage. Dan focussing on one old but easy to forget detail within his overall evolution of consciousness agenda.

Rebecca Goldstein on Scientific Realism. Scientific theories are ontologically committed, that is if we can’t treat a scientific theory as an explanatory part of what really exists, then science has more work to do. Being logically true (or metaphorically and even indirectly, empirically “true”) is not enough. Think Einstein and doubts over quantum’s Copenhagen. (A pet hate of mine is elaborate metaphorical CGI simulations of “science” – that publicly reify a metaphor too powerfully and too fast for the true state of the knowledge of reality. Think Einstein’s pencil sketches of the rubber sheet of curved space-time, or Feynman’s particle behaviour diagrams for simpler days, with three-human-generations timescale for public knowledge evolution.)

Hans Ulrich Obrist on The Gaia Hypothesis. Nice to see a non-naive non-scientist recommendation for Gaia. The earth is not literally “an organism” but we are an organic system. (Some nice name-drops on Lovelock links from Sagan to Margulis.)

Chiara Marletto on the Impossible. “Currently working with David Deutsch” – on constructor theory, as we’ve already noted elsewhere – so maybe no surprise here since I recall Deutsch cautioning that inconceivable might not be the same as impossible, or more starkly, the converse, conceivability is probably the same as possibility. Just think about that – maybe when some cock-sure commentator concludes …. “therefore X is impossible”. (Cf Goldstein above on realism.)

Max Tegmark on Substrate Independence. It’s all about the information, most details of physical embodiment don’t matter. (Tegmark is also on the trail of consciousness – “consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!” – Suck on that, you greedy determinists. Added post note here. Also noted him talking on the AI hype recently?) (Also post note – really need to dig deeper into Tegmark.)

Sabine Hossenfelder on Optimisation. Sabine takes Leibnitz’s “best of all possible worlds” for a spin. Optimisation is the result of natural selection from quantum physics to society at large, including all of science. But who decides what’s optimal? “Science,  doesn’t miraculously self-optimize what we hope it does – we have to decide what we mean by optimal. There’s no invisible hand to take this responsibility off us.”

Bart Kosko on Negative Evidence. Popular belief is that “You cannot prove a negative.” or that “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” – Both claims are false in general.

Jessica Flack on Coarse-Graining. At higher levels, material details don’t actually matter (again). A feature of the 2nd law from an information scientist (again).

Steven Pinker on The Second Law. “people seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them.” (Popper – “all life is problem-solving”.)

Stuart Kauffman on (absence of) Ergodicity. History matters. A concept we intuitively “know” but for which I didn’t know I had a word until yesterday (though Dennett uses it too). In evolved systems the number and sequence of states through which things occur matters, not just the final arrangement – causality is weird, you hard-determinists listening? Yet, I heard the word only yesterday from Nassim Taleb in the context of event ordering in risk-management, and here is Kauffman also ringing the alarm bell. Clearly very significant to so many discourses.

Lee Smolin on Variety. (And Leibnitz’ best of all possible worlds again)

John Naughton on Ashby’s Requisite Variety. Another golden oldie.

Ian McEwan on Navier Stokes. Ditto, but from a fiction writer. With “streetlight” metaphor another golden oldie.

Antony Garrett Lisi on Emergence. A new one to me, another physicist recognising the limits to greedy-reductionist determinism.

Martin Rees on Multiverse. Baffled why such an intelligent man would entertain this particular multiverse concept?Obviously need to digest further.

Nigel Goldenfeld on Scientific Method. About asking the right questions …. not sure that’s science particularly … but he got my goat with this opening gambit:- “… there are no cultural relativists at thirty thousand feet. The laws of aerodynamics work regardless of political or social prejudices, and they are indisputably true …” Er, no. We’ve done this one before with Dawkins.

…..

I could go on, it’s a great collection to dip into, read in batches and look for the connections.

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As a postscript, I couldn’t resist one classic and therefore totally predictable negative example, since it is topical to other recent blogging and social media discourse. I’m about cybernetics – how we use knowledge to govern life’s decisions – and our consciousness and free-will are evidently fundamental to that. Conscious will remains contentious both philosophically and scientifically and there are many camps working on explanations from the metaphysical to the neurobiological via the quantum-psychological and all points in between. My choice of contact points with this year’s Edge crop above no doubt says more about this, but here I give you – Jerry Coyne:

[Topic:] Determinism
[Opening sentences:] A concept that everyone should understand and appreciate is the idea of physical determinism: that all matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics. The most important implication is that is we have no “free will”.

One camp that has stopped working on conscious will at all is the free-will deniers: – Free-will is impossible, so we’re not about to waste effort attempting to explain it – Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. (See every positive example above!)

In fact, the two opening sentences quoted are almost exactly those I used to sum up the denial position in two of my last three posts. Before even taking issue with whether that’s a fair definition of determinism, it’s great to see that I’m not misrepresenting Coyne on that score. Sad however, given the open question in this multidiscipline environment, that Coyne falls into defending the core of his own position in this contentious space. A sign of insecurity if ever I saw one. If that’s confirmation bias, so be it – I’m open to further explanation of the actual position.

It seems we are a long-way from consensus not just on explanatory theory for conscious will, but from agreeing even what we’re talking about. The multiple camps are clustered around individuals and schools around an enormous range of possible ideas and theories in play, overlapping and related in any number of ways, such that no simple taxonomy is even possible. We may be a long way from consensus, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily a long way from a good explanatory theory, and I happen to think – with Rappaport’s charity – we’re very close. Why do so many behave like bulldogs in defence of prejudiced positions?

Information > 140chars Quickie

Does the very word “information” imply a consciousness to be informed by it?

Simple answer is no, but that’s about defining what we mean by information – a language problem – but there are important underlying concepts worth unpicking.

Let’s separate two issues first.

Firstly, in theory – Verb-Nouns – nouns whose root is a verb, in this case a transitive verb – one thing informing another, where our first question is between simple causation and something intentional, interpretation for a purpose, and so on. (Often a good ploy with verb-nouns to take the activity / process view rather than the objectivity of the noun (even when not a transitive verb.) But, more importantly:

In the science of information theory (eg Shannon / Turing et al) we’re detached from subjective questions and the topic is disembodied / free-floating information and the processing is machine-like. That ranges from the simplest temperature change flipping a thermostatic switch, to the most generic computation of a Universal Turing Machine.

Like Shannon, here I tend to use a “significant difference” idea for an incoming “bit” of information – the news – what’s new? In any stream of “data” – anything physical – that which is different from yesterday / existing / expected / predictable / default / steady-state etc. But “significant” already shifts us to questions of meaning – significance. In the machine world it is already normal to suggest information as the input and meaning or purpose as simply the output, however non-intelligent the processing and non-intentional the causation – which is why such theory is important to our understanding, given current AI-hype.

(Note also that this significant – detectable – difference view of information at some fundamental level, is becoming important at an even more fundamental level underlying physics as well as biology – life, the universe and everything – evolution of the cosmos from the energy and particles of the big-bang to “Bach” – that recurring metaphor for the pinnacles of creativity of human consciousness. Information underlies physics AND consciousness.)

Secondly there is a more pragmatic human world of information management in practice – in organisations and systems, in systems that are embodied in technology – where there is a kind of sliding scale, however informally it is recognised:

  • Data – the raw detectable “bits” of difference – the information potential of the info-scientists.
  • Information – data presented in a form intended for human consumption and interpretation.
  • Knowledge – information that embodies some human interpretation in some encoded form.
  • Wisdom – aye, and there’s the rub, the stuff that can’t really be codified (if we’re honest).

In practice there is really no private language, so no-one’s definitions can rule the discourse.

Data & Information are probably best thought of as interchangeable unless you’re inside a well defined technical discourse and you know where you are relative to the fundamental science.

Knowledge & Wisdom – remain intuitively distinct, but in lay (and even expert) AI discourse it is all too easy to forget the non-codifiable aspects, where the extreme AI enthusiasts would try to convince us there is nothing that can’t be codified or machine-learned, and the more cautious among us would think “yeah, right”. And to be clear the difference between knowledge and wisdom is not just “context” either – much context is codified and codifiable too. If it is codified, it’s just content – more Information (Data) grist to the processing mill.

These issues are thoroughly in the spotlight right now, not just because of the overreaching claims of AI and Big-Data towards full-blown Transhumanism – beyond humans, not just prosthetically aided humans – but also because a kind of scientism is giving a really hard time to all questions of conscious will and creative intelligence in both philosophy and (say) neuroscience.

[Hat tip to Andy Martin’s piece on Transhumanism and AI in The Independent, but also for the tweeted question in the opening line that prompted this response. Witty read as usual, bringing us all back to earth with the reminder that prosthetic “technology” is as old as flint stone tools and pointed sticks.]

“I already have students in the classroom correcting me, about two seconds after I have come out with some clearly inadequate answer to a tricky question: “But my phone says…” You too can become a transhumanly annoying fact checker.”

Need to dig up that Harari Homo Deus reference.