Year: 2018

I’m reading my way through Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” (Finished Part 1 of 3) and finding it full of items that resonate. Not least because I already loved his “Reality is Not What it Seems” but also because I have been joining up the dots with the work of David Deutsch and Erik Verlinde , physicists in competing fields but with near-total common metaphysical ground. Post-post-modernism.

Even incidental items intrigue. For example:

I think we maybe all knew that Einstein was working in the Swiss patent office at the time his space-time relativity thinking was emerging. I think it’s also pretty common knowledge that the setting of standard time in everyday life was very much driven by (rail) transport operations needing to sync up the meaning of running on time. How hadn’t I noticed that Einstein had been working on patents for synchronised timekeeping of railway clocks? Doh!

I think I already knew Leibni(t)z was spelled without a “t”. How did I not know he had dropped it deliberately in protest at Newton introducing disembodied time into his equations of motion?

We knew Gödel had been Einstein’s closest friend in the last years of his life at Princeton – there’s even a new book on exactly that – and much of it figures in Rebecca Goldstein’s work on Gödel as well as in works by others. What I hadn’t realised was that Gödel was the first to recognise the possibility of closed-loop trajectories in space-time – where effect can, in some real sense, precede cause.

But those are not the important content, these are:

Real things are not absolute things, in fact there are few if any absolute things. Not even laws of physics can be fundamentally fixed everywhere. Everything is relative and our understanding local.

If we really are to understand space-time we need to think in terms of fluid streams of events and not persistent things.

It is a Netwonian error to think of things contained in space (or time). Spacetime is an integral part of all things.

Spacetime is therefore more fundamentally quantised than either matter or energy. The Planck-scale exists in both space and time.

The most fundamental property of quantised stuff is Information or its complement (or should that be its conjugate), Entropy. [Post Note: Important to note, after Alan Rayner, that these quanta are NOT in any sense building-blocks, they are simply the smallest resolution at which we can know about fluid patterns of space-time.]

The flow of time is our local impression of histories of entropy. There is no general or absolute sense in which the flow of time is always towards increasing entropy, simply the experience of a long-term trend.

At black hole horizons time stands still, events stop flowing, nothing happens, nothing exists. (See closest spacing of “bits” on horizons in previous post.)

=====

I’ll be back.

=====

I read it to completion last night. Excellent stuff: grammar and even love. We really are all post-post-modernists now, even physicists. (Will need to cosnstruct a review of key learnings.)

=====

Watched this 2004 video many a time since I first discovered it a few years ago, and of course it got resurrected when Prince and then Petty passed away in 2016 1nd 2017. Thought I’d capture it here.

Perfection is not just the solo itself, but the whole choreography. Despite the lights catching his red outfit whilst playing along, he remains understated in the dimly lit wings. His guitar pedals are already set-up in front of Dhani, his minder is there to catch him as he leans back into the audience, with a quick visual check over his shoulder, and several glances and grins are exchanged with the band. He owns the spotlight from thereon. Finally and nonchalantly dispensing with his guitar the moment the last note has faded – to who knows where. And it is a great guitar solo.

====

[Post Note: Reminded by a great Twitter thread from Anil Dash that just 3 years after this he did that amazing performance at SuperBowl 2007 in Miami. We were living in the US at the time I recall.

How Prince won the Super Bowl (anildash.com)

Some excellent analysis of why it was so good, with the whole performance and more in clips.]

[Post Note: How have I never seen this before?

Too easy to spend an hour hopping around YouTube.]

[Post Note: And whilst I’m here, let’s capture this one. U2 performing for the 2018 Grammys with their anti-Trump anthem.

U2 – Get Out Of Your Own Way – LIVE The 60th GRAMMYs
from Cretu Marius on Vimeo.]

[And this: Best version of Lily Allen’s “Fear” performed on Jools.

Not the greatest recording quality, but the best unexpurgated version, keeps getting taken down.]

[And a connection top to bottom? In that Superbowl performance above Prince does several stadium-quality covers, including a medley with Foo Fighers “Best of You” … and, in that Jools series there was also a fantastic performance of “Numb” by Gary Clarke Jr, someone I’d seen several times in Austin, also with Eric Zapata on the second guitar – that outro is special.

Well, another great performance was Foo Fighters at Austin City Limits, which opens with a blistering version of “Times Like These”, something I play on repeat, but if you run the whole concert performance, there’s great section  where the Fighters invite Austin stalwarts Gary and Jimmy Vaughan to jam.

Can’t find a full free version of that gig – the one that opens with “Times Like These” – this was the return to Austin City Limits after they had done the ACL Festival (outdoor) gig, also with Gary guesting.]

After an enforced hiatus, I’m picking up on my reading list, specifically continuing David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” to completion. It remains very good, maybe my previous “highest level of discourse available on the planet” is overstating it, (and previously here) but still very good.

The target chapter – the reason for reading – was a bit of a let-down personally. The memetic arguments for cultural evolution were recommended perhaps without realising that was already my thing. The counter-intuitive “creativity suppresses innovation” quip seems no more than the idea that you can have too much of a good thing – too much creative innovation can be counter-productive, the basic fidelity-fecundity principle of evolution, and the sense that in some phases of evolution, steady as she goes is a virtue. All change, anything goes, creativity doesn’t allow the stable speciation & growth aspects of the “innovation” cycle to happen. All covered in a previous Twitter exchange (footnote here).

The other let-down was the chapter on the multiverse interpretations of quantum physics. He really does hold it to be a high-quality explanation of reality which I’m afraid neither I, nor the other philosophical physicists I subscribe to, actually hold. In his earlier work he justified the value of Bohm & Wheeler multiverse interpretations as part of a larger explanatory whole. Here he seems to justify it in its own right, though “quality of explanation” continues to be his whole thrust on the truth of any matter at any level.

Perhaps surprisingly, given he is a quantum physicist, there is an excellent chapter on choices of electoral systems in the US and UK which turns out to be an excellent vehicle for the whole topic of decision-making as a human process, individually as well as socially. Like both positivism and logical-positivism, which get panned in his chapter critiquing philosophy, they harbour a myth that observation of pre-existing “objects” determine theories of future outcomes. Decision-making is rarely if ever simply a matter of choice between available options. That is really only ever a temporary post-rationalisation of what is primarily a creative process until hi-quality explanations – with reach – are discovered.

Anyway, back to electoral systems in particular, he makes a fascinating defence for FPTP over PR. Basically that the practical reality of changing our minds and rejecting previous error, whilst nevertheless having time-limited opportunities to risk new policies, gives FPTP the edge. PR has it’s own change-limiting drawbacks. For me, this is really about timescales of institutions and policies and policy change processes, so as usual I see this as a matter of balance – when I say PR I always indicate “Proper-PR“. And like Deutsch, when I say proper I don’t mean perfect or idealised, I just mean best in practice, taking proper note of all intended and unintended consequences of each option. The thing we all have to let go of is the idea of any system being both 100% fair and 100% consistent – he doesn’t mention Gödel in this respect, but I do. This is one reason FPTP’s ability to share-out unfairness in the long-run, over many electoral cycles gives it the edge for him. Fascinating read as I say.

I won’t dwell on his “bad philosophy” chapter. His real point is that good philosophy, like good science (and good electoral systems) must have in-built processes of challenge and change. Not too much, not too little, just right I’d say. The point being that some have hidden dogmatic inhibitors to real deep change. Hear, hear I say. (One of my long-standing agendas is that science as an enterprise has some huge flaws holding back real progress and keeping us anchored to mythic tenets in ways that few scientists actually notice, and therefore inevitably rail against in denial when pointed out.) As well as panning the positivists which I would agree with, he dismisses the seeming nihilism of the post-modernists and post-Wittgensteinian word-gamers. He dismisses any value in the issues raised – the processes of dialogue – and anyway, he clearly missed the memo that “we’re all post-post-modernists now” and specifically forwarded to physicists. In some ways that denial of value in alternative thinking – even if the immediate answers are wrong (bad explanations that is) – is part of that hidden inhibitor to progress.

Love the fact that the works of Bronowski feature highly in his references and reading recommendations, as well as the inevitable Popper.

His optimism, that most of history is still ahead of us, that we’ve barely started our human journey and always will be in that state is very strong. Life is only ever at the beginning of an infinite future. As universal constructors of creative solutions to ever newer unpredictable problems, only complete destruction of the species and its cultural resources would represent the end. Science has its limits – but they’re limits to domains of absolute eternal knowability and certainty – not limits to the content and scope of the body of knowledge., scientific or otherwise.

One, perhaps counter-intuitive, example is Deutsch’s take on sustainability. We need to be careful not to treat it as an aspiration or even a thing. Objectifying it can make it another inhibitor to real creativity, a hidden dogma. Our cultural wealth, including our science and technology, and our processes of creativity and change, are our key resources. Not seemingly objective aims elevated to religious importance.

“This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but the starting point of an infinite adventure.” – Isaac Asimov

Problems are never solved, once and for all. They’re just work-arounds until the next one, and often the next one is just a newer version of one of the old ones. Ho hum, wish I’d read it 8 years ago. Onward and upward.

Fundamentally – What do I know?

Black holes ain’t so black, and science ain’t so different from the humanities. Singularities have horizons crammed with information. Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available.

This is a summary of recent work ostensibly on quantum gravity and the role of humans more generally in the science of reality. It also draws on some common fluid-dynamics metaphors and as suggested in the title, a reliance on fundamental information. The update here is in the light of the 2018 “How The Light Gets In” festival at Hay-on-Wye.

Big-data, algorithms, AI, fake-news, post-truth, post-humanism, you name it; from the wider humanities dimension of information patterns, I’ve already summarised what I heard in that general #HTLGI18 write-up. We’re all post-post-modernists now. From the the new physics perspective I’m hanging it off the work of Erik Verlinde but let’s be clear, the scope is the whole already suggested:

We’re talking
Physics and Humanity
Information and Analogy

A key feature of Erik Verlinde’s work – in fundamental physics – is that his new theory of gravity would appear to remove the need for the existence of Dark Matter whilst providing a rational explanation for Dark Energy. That would involve unpicking a great deal of post-Einstein work subsequently tested by real observation so, as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Despite evolving, publishing and presenting versions of his work for over a decade, Verlinde and his colleagues are still working their way through satisfying the scientific community with fleshing out the detail, backing it up with the maths and establishing testable effects that will enable empirical verification. The jury is out. It could go either way. Situation normal.

So far so good. I’m an engineer/technologist not a scientist and couldn’t handle the relevant maths anyway, so I’m adding nothing to that. I might of course be the crank – a gentleman of a certain age, obviously – with a garden shed or two, where I’ve invented my own theory of everything.

I have a theory about dinosaurs,
and this this my theory.

They are very thin at one end,
very fat in the middle,
and thin again at the other.

Firstly, I’ve invented nothing, I’m simply reporting what I see and read with my own eyes. Secondly, there can be no grand-unified scientific theory-of-everything. I come to bury that idea. All I’m am asking is that more multi-disciplinary experts, in science and the humanities, take the ideas of others seriously in collaborative dialogue rather than discipline-specific politically-motivated critical analysis. Truth over tribe.

What I see, you can see too.

What I see are parallels in content and common analogies shared between other new theories of fundamental physics, theories already competing for hearts and minds in the scientific community as well as in popular science writing. In order to be considered “true” any one of these newer theories needs to be accepted by that community as, basically, an improvement on the existing. Whichever theories “win” or even if only minor modifications to the existing emerges, it seems highly likely that some of the common explanatory aspects will also emerge as “true”.

These common features are at two levels. At the level of fundamental postulations concerning the role of information underlying physics and at the human scale. The human-scale real-word physics analogies we can see with our own eyes. Erik uses versions of this slide:

That’s a cosmic galaxy, an atmospheric cyclone and a marine whirlpool.

Three different but
visually similar
natural phenomena.

Is the
underlying physics
also similar?

Neither Erik nor I are the first to point out these phenomena share visible features. No-one can fail to notice the impression of a vortex in turbulent fluid-flow – ether be gone! Those who work with the engineering mechanics – I hesitate to say science – of actual fluid-flow (say Navier-Stokes equations of compressible flow) have had to deal with one theoretical problem shared with fundamental physicists.

Singularities.

Singularities arise in the theory but cannot be handled directly without infinities that “fuck up” the maths. We have to integrate around their virtual existence in order to account for their real effects. In steady state or laminar conditions there are no vortices. In turbulent fluid the changing patterns of flow are modelled as the superposition of many imagined vortices even when no physical vortex emerges. When a vortex does emerge we also get a strange calm at the centre, the eye of the storm, the dry column of air drawn down your drain hole – a quite different flow-regime locally. The real effects are everywhere – aircraft wing-tips, standing waves on the surface of fast flowing rivers, the hum of the wind in cables- even where no real stable vortex emerges visibly. There is a horizon – a step-change, a phase-shift – between the original and emergent flows. Something happens here that doesn’t happen there.

At the centre of every vortex, real or imagined, is a singularity. And, between that singularity and the rest of the world is an horizon.

The same is true of physics dealing with black-holes, whether quantum-scale or super-massive, big-bang or big-crunch, real or imagined. Physics had its “shut up and calculate” moment in Copenhagen. We engineers had it with our Navier-Stokes equations. Maths that works despite the flaws at the fundamental level, provided you stay clear of the problem itself, the right side of the horizon.

As I say, all this has been pointed out by many others. Navier-Stokes in the context of fundamental physics shows up in many a Google search.

Clearly – in some way –
the underlying physics is similar.

The question is therefore – in what way?

As a string-theorist before developing his latest theory of gravitation, Erik is effectively in competition with non-string theories of gravity. He’s quoted as rejecting Quantum Loop Gravity (QLG). Yet both he and Carlo Rovelli, for example a proponent of QLG, share some maybe non-obvious features of these analogies. In QLG the “loops” involve integration around the planck-scale / quantum-level singularities. They and others also share a corollary feature of this. A singularity is a point with a horizon.

In looking at what can be known about the physical world, we notice very quickly the complementarity of information and entropy. That’s a question of how many data-points does it take to “know” or fully describe any given physical state or arrangement in space-time?

Carlo and Erik, and let’s now add David Deutsch, share a fundamental information view of physics. In fact there is a whole but quite separate metaphysical rebuild of physics going on under the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) banner. Talk about extraordinary evidence needed. Again Google is your friend. Information that needs to be integrated before you can see anything like a whole. A whole partitioned by horizons.

Warren Ellis pointed out that human culture is a work-around. Popper already said all life is problem solving. Deutsch brings the idea that this is fundamentally what humans do into his quantum information view. Human intelligence is the Universal Constructor? of evolving solutions to new problems. It’s why given a fundamental information view, human thought and intelligence really are significant to the physics of the cosmos. All three – Verlinde, Rovelli and Deutsch – allude to this.

If information is the fundamental component, then everything else – particles, forces – are emergent. Even laws of physics – recognisable / repeatable / predictable patterns in space-time are emergent objects. So is anything we can assert about the truth, properties or qualities of these. Objective epistemologically and real enough, but not fundamental or absolute physically.

Physics becomes the epistemological question of what can we know about the world.

Are there any fundamental limits to what can be known? By humans or anyone else. Take a phenomenon like entanglement – how something known here affects something (not yet) known there, without any communication between here and there – the whole “observer effect”. These are not just weird quantum anomalies yet to be explained. They are evidence that knowledge is fundamental. Information is about arrangements of / patterns in the data-points. Knowing the pattern, knowing any one bit of information does indeed immediately tell you something about any other bit in the pattern. Any pattern.

Just two more points about how much can be known.

• How small can a data point get? How many data points, how many possible arrangements, how much information can there be in the world?
• How far can a known pattern extend beyond our here and now in spacetime? Does the idea of knowledge of the whole make any sense?

Taking the second first, all I am going to say is that our physics is our knowledge. Even the best model(s) of physical reality may only ever be valid locally (spatially and temporally) from a human sense-making, anthropic perspective. We should not be surprised if galactic sale models and theories don’t apply at the quantum level, even if quantum information underlies them both at different places in the universe at different times. We may even find there are very real horizons between these zones and eras of applicability. Horizons across which nothing makes sense without a reboot. Apart from this meta-model of knowledge dependence, how could we hope for any unifying physical model?

As to the other point, what is a quantum of information? How many data-points could we get on the head of a pin? Is this anything other than the qubit of quantum computing?

Let’s start with giving ourselves a problem, after all they’re what we’re good at. Let’s assume data-points can be infinitely small and therefore infinitely closely packed – say in triangles / tetrahedra, whatever that means – in the dimensions of space-time . We’ve just bought ourselves an awful lot of mathematical singularities!

As soon as anything is happening – any pattern exists in space and/or time, space-time – there must be at least one space-time dimension that is larger than zero or there is no meaningful pattern. The potential singularities involved in our model of real world behaviour must have a non-zero horizon around which we can integrate. No pattern, no information. Zero information, zero scale. Something analogous to the Planck-scale, let’s call that the quantum information scale. The smallest singularity-containing black-hole large enough to contain a single bit.

This has a very interesting corollary for any horizon, pointed out by Erik already. It could almost become the definition of a black-hole – or anything else with an event horizon. The horizon is the surface at which all the information (ie everything) falling into it or projected onto it from “our” side is crammed together at this Planck-scale. It can’t get any smaller without losing (knowledge of) information. It is the limit to knowledge, anyone’s knowledge.

None of the above is science, there is certainly no maths or proof and even the philosophical thinking proceeds by analogy without dialectic rigour. What you see is what you get.

This is primarily my take on the work Erik Verlinde, Carlo Rovelli and David Deutsch with many earlier references to others omitted. As well as these modern, living physicists, there are even pre-Mach / pre-Einstein sources of the fundamental information & infinitesimally small data-points view. Like any enlightened scientist Verlinde acknowledges that these questions of limits to knowledge and boundaries to the cosmos are all pre-Socratic of course.

There was a sense at HTLGI18, reflected in Julian Baggini’s notes as much as my own, and even made quite explicit in the introduction by Hilary Lawson, that despite the apparent post-truth doom and gloom, we really do seem to have passed an event horizon. Fresh air, where the quest for absolutes in The Truth and The Good no longer seems to be the kind of thing worth coming to blows over, not even dialectically.

We’re all post-post-modernists now. Even physicists can agree.

Singularities have horizons crammed with information.
Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available.

Black holes ain’t so black, and
Science ain’t so different from the humanities.

Let’s collaborate on unpicking what is useful to all of us.

=====

[Stub – still in draft – but with existing links you can follow meantime.]

[To be added: links to original sources and previously on Psybertron.]

[Post Note: OK, so I’m a pattern-seeking-human, bear with me:

This is the key figure from the new paper. https://t.co/mIvVLzhhMQ See how the new results agree with the earlier results. Note the pale grey line indicating that this area is ruled out by other experiments (assuming the standard explanation). 5/6 pic.twitter.com/YzRsMRGC2G

Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) May 31, 2018

What do I see? I see a laminar-flow regime bottom right, the “standard model” and a transition (horizon) to multiple turbulent flow regimes top left.]

[Post Note: Is this science beheading a philosopher, or is it a scientist sticking his neck out and peering across a horizon?

It was Max Born said, whilst managing all those geniuses assembled at Copenhagen, that “theoretical physics is actual metaphysics“. (The link behind the picture is actually a bunch of more sophisticated atheist philosophers upbraiding the likes of new-atheist Larry Krauss. In fact Larry was a participant by video-conference at the HTLGI before last, where he was ploughing his dissing-philosophy furrow.) Hat tip @AnitaLeirfall.]

So many intellectual inputs and opportunities for dialogue of which barely a tenth can be grasped over a weekend at Hay on Wye, at the How the Light Gets In HTLGI 2018 Festival. [Meta – specific sessions and update on the weekend experience here.] Below is my summary of the messages I heard in the content of a dozen or more sessions out of hundreds on offer:

Setting the theme on Darkness, Authority and Dreams, Hilary Lawson highlights our fears that no matter how recently we were feeling that we’re almost there with the modernist scientific enlightenment project, the more we seem to inhabit a new dark-ages of post-truth conspiracy. We are all Post-Post-Modernists now with a lot more work to do and the hope we can do more than merely dream of doing it. I know I call myself PoPoMo.

[Having seen more of Hilary Lawson this time than any previous HTLGI attendance, it’s fair to say I feel I understand more now than when I first came across his concept of “Closure” in 2003 and read it in 2009.]

The actual theme on the ground in 2018 was very much moral epistemology: what do we mean in practice about what we say we want? And this ranged from the wishful objectivity of algorithmic information in our tech-mediated lives, to the counter-intuitive seeming-subjectivity of the fundamental sciences. All human life is here, fortunately.

Before that, however much we look at the imperfections of love and hate and the meaning of life, we see that these are timeless pre-Socratic questions. And we sense that we may be no closer to arriving at answers because the very idea of full and final objective answers is a misguided quest. We can never even be nearly there. Even time it seems is timeless.

These first two questions – are love and hate forever entangled in good and bad? and does the meaning of life have any meaning? – set the scene on the Friday evening with Renata Saleci, Rowan Williams, Robert Rowland-Smith, Michael Crick, Steve Taylor, Julian Baggini, Helen Lederer and Joanna Kavenna. Frankly, on meaning as the human driver, and on the balance of immediate and long-run goals, I came away with Abraham Maslow. Your experience will vary, but there is an evolutionary hierarchy starting from yourself and your loved ones surviving to live, culminating in your striving towards our best contribution to wider humanity and the cosmos.

[Aside – I intended to follow-up with Steve Taylor and, on another topic, with Julian Baggini, but our paths merely crossed. Baggini’s own post-festival notes.]

[Aside – Also, since then Baggini has published his “Meaning of Life Redux“:

“I took part in [the] debate about the meaning of life …
the thought that bugged me most was: Not again!”

And yet again I respond with my yes, it’s all already been done by Maslow (*). The Meaning of Life Redux Redux I say. There really is no further need to look anywhere else for an answer to this question. (*) and yes Maslow comes with caveats about spurious prescriptive objectivity – like all rules, it’s for guidance of the wise.]

So, beyond ubiquitous questions of the True and the Good, several other topics converged on two main threads.

One is, whether we’re talking of culture in terms of creative and aesthetic arts or we’re talking of knowledge about facts-of-the-matter in public life and institutions, one real focus was clearly the democratising and algorithmic processing of information, the benefits and threats to humanity of power and interests.

The other, conversely, even when talking actual physical science, fundamental objectivity turns out to be a misguided function of aesthetics and human limits to knowledge at the level of fundamental information in both time and space.

I shall take the second first. It’s important to notice, that this is not simply imperfections in current models of contingent scientific knowledge that will be forever refined by the ongoing scientific process. The “tweaks” – like Dark Matter and Dark Energy – seem to be getting larger, not smaller. There are informational limits to what can ever be knowable such that current best models may themselves be fundamentally wrong rather than simply imperfect.

Two theoretical physicists with concerns for epistemological boundaries of their art are Sabine Hossenfelder and Erik Verlinde. Both might agree that science has been “fucked-up” by humans. Hossenfelder’s take on the problem is that we are Lost in Math in our misguided search for aesthetic beauty and elegance. She may have a point, but I don’t buy what it is yet, so we may need to read the whole book when it comes out. Verlinde on the other hand, as well as his own presentation and individual sessions, became the effective focus of two other group discussions, where the enormous significance of his proposed new theory of gravity is beginning to emerge.

In one session on gravity, theoretical physicists Verlinde and Hossenfelder were in discussion with practical physicists Catherine Heymans (telescopes at the cosmic scale) and Jonas Rademacker (accelerators and detectors at the micro scale). The current interest in gravity is due to serious doubts driven by the scale of unknowns implicit in having had to postulate Dark Matter and Dark Energy. In another Verlinde was joined by Huw Price, Alison Fernandes and James Ladyman on the reality of time.

Neither gravity nor time exist as fundamental components of the cosmos. Both, like all other forces, particles and even laws are emergent. They are emergent as patterns of information, information that exists fundamentally at (something like) the Planck-scale level.

The dynamics in the Verlinde / Hossenfelder / Heymans interaction were fascinating and I wasn’t the only one to notice:

Funny dynamics on stage during the Dark Universe debate between @erikverlinde, @skdh and Catherine Heymans @ #HTLGI18 pic.twitter.com/vNQ0tGq1XB

— Bob van Luijt (@bobvanluijt) May 26, 2018

[That’s my face in profile on the extreme right hand edge of the pic, incidentally.]

You’d think that experimental physicists have little to fear from the theorists? Except of course that enormous investments in their very large kit may have been justified to look for the wrong things. They need to hope that null and surprise results from already justified experiments still add to our new models and body of knowledge. The theories of theoretical physicists are of course competing very directly for our (hearts and) minds.

Heymans and Verlinde have collaborated on at least one paper looking at hypotheses that might be amenable to experimentation. Hossenfelder has written at least once critiquing Verlinde’s work. One comment of hers from the stage about mathematical rigour was almost certainly intended as an attempt at humour but came across as a unnecessarily barbed for a public discussion. Cough, shuffle.

Contrary to Hossenfelder’s point I get the feeling that focussing on mathematical rigour at the expense of meaningful human metaphor risks garbage in, garbage out?

All acknowledged however that far from a necessarily self-correcting virtuous cycle, between multiple theories and multiple experimentation strategies, that is presumed for science generally, there is in fact a much more vicious cycle of null findings and inconclusive critiques that mislead our knowledge when each is targetted specifically at the other. The creative and the serendipitous have their own value.

[Verlinde’s is not the only theory that suggests all else is emergent from a fundamental quantum information level. This is a position I have already bought. For more discussion of gravity, time and information, in a science AND humanities context, see here. PoPoMo Epistemology.]

A corollary of such theory – for science – is that:

Even the best model(s) of physical reality
can only ever be valid locally (spatially and temporally)
from a human sense-making – anthropic – perspective.

Other than these context-specific models and emergent relationships between their objects, there can never be a single unified explanatory and directly causal theory of everything.  Whether there is an absolute reality-out-there or not, and whatever that may be, we can never model all of the physical and ideas of a multiverse and/or universes beyond any horizon are meaningless. Alternatively, emergence from fundamental information may be the only fundamental model of reality.

Now, if even science is having to come to terms with the parochial nature of our best possible science, the post-modern humanities ought to have a field day, right? Well no actually. Remember we’re all post-post-modernists now. There is no slippery slope.

With little else besides information – available data – actually being fundamental, even objectivity is emergent from dialogue. We can’t choose our own facts, but we really do have to agree what counts as objective evidence for the facts we choose to use.

However fundamental information itself is, the other side of the coin is that all human life is now seen through an information technology lens. Whether that content purports to be scientific, cultural or political, it has been democratised and processed for our consumption and interactive experience. Notwithstanding the truth, good or otherwise of such content, there is enormous interest in both the benefits and the risks to humanity in the remote human interests and inhuman power inherent in the algorithms of big data and artificial intelligence.

Dare we dream lest they be nightmares?

Not surprisingly, given the scene-setting theme, a great many of the sessions fell under this umbrella, so just a selection of voices heard here.

On the objectivity or otherwise of truth in general, Matthew d’Ancona, Hannah Dawson, Hilary Lawson and Robert Rowland-Smith agreed that however objective we might agree certain facts to be, even historical ones, they could never be absolute or final. Dawson was new to me and I need to follow-up. Excellent, wise but entertaining session covering a lot of ground that no summary can really do justice: Objectivity has its limits and nowhere should we seek to make it absolute. Facts don’t change minds, but nevertheless we need “digital literacy” for popular understanding of  information dynamics. Meantime, journalist d’Ancona in particular, “having entered the philosophical debate via the tradesman’s entrance” was not giving-up on the pragmatic idea of weaponising objective truths to fight against nefarious conspiracies and alt-facts of powerful interests. Alan Alda’s Hawkeye character in MASH in the combat-zone of daily politics isn’t really concerned with the medical-research of metaphysics.

Timandra Harkness led a session on big data with the title Numbers vs Narrative with Anders Sandberg, Noortje Marres and James Ladyman. It stuck mainly to the general opportunities and risks of algorithmic delivery of content, but pretty much conflated all the big-data / AI topics, with lots of good examples from Marres and Sandberg. The latter is a noted optimistic futurist – and futurism is about making stuff happen rather than prediction. Marres and Ladyman both brought up “spurious objectivity” and the constraints on “displaced understanding” that needed to be designed into technology and the risks understood by human users. The algorithm vs judgement debate invariably needs to lead to balance – machine algorithms as tools to support human judgement.

Particularly polarising in another session was the unpleasant disagreement between the pessimism of Rupert Read and the optimism of Anders Sandberg and Kate Devlin, refereed by Mark Salter. There was an element of talking past each other, and whilst I might have plenty of disagreement with green politician and theologian Rupert Read myself, he does in fact have a point about the precautionary principle when applied to matters of degree that turn out to be category errors. As the title of this session suggested, Beyond Human can be either transhumanism or inhumanity depending not just on your perspective but on what in fact we’re proposing. Certain kinds of human augmentation by algorithmic AI – with loss of subjective autonomy – could indeed have catastrophic inhuman downsides and well-informed public agreement on taking risks is absolutely essential, even if futuristic individuals are prepared for risky experiments on our behalf.

A round-table dinner and discussion with Margaret Boden entitled Human Thought and Creativity was almost completely hijacked by a similar big data / AI risk-benefit debate. This ranged across several topics from personal care to meaningful employment and the value of artistic products in a post-automation economy. In that format most of the best contributions came anonymously from the audience. Boden herself raised the distinction between algorithmic AI’s designed for specific uses and more Artificial General Intelligence. I recommended that a model for a post-automation economy designed to avoid a professional elite existing uncomfortably alongside those displaced to “bullshit jobs”, even if not literally unemployed, was a primary part of Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism. Dashiel Shulman pointed out that already 100,000’s of US truck drivers were at risk of redundancy from automated driving technology. Others pointed out that even with personal care occupations, the key factor may be the human attention and caring, even if 95% of the mechanics is simply “heavy process”.

The Edge of Reality session with George Ellis, Nancy Cartwright and Hilary Lawson chaired by Phillip Ball continued the debate at the metaphysical level, warning that mathematical and logical abstractions are not “real” and don’t actually do anything in the real world. They’re about “tools” that work for humans. Continually striving to get an absolute grip on “the real” is a religious notion. [Video posted here: with the “Does Physics Lie” click-bait headline.]

A discussion on Democracy and Culture with Warren Ellis, Kristen Sollee and John McWhorter chaired by Serena Kutchinsky was focussed very much on the democratisation of culture (and not to do with democracy as a form of governance). A very entertaining discussion on the many examples – good and bad effects – of fragmentation through social channels and new technology networks. Particular focus was the sense that algorithmic feeds were displacing human gatekeepers. Gatekeeper was too restrictive a term, but there was good agreement that the net effect on creative media was wholly positive and that business models could, should and probably therefore would naturally value human curators and influencers. Loved Ellis quote that “we’re a workaround culture” in terms of how humans will always find convenient uses for technology whatever it is originally designed for. Put me in mind of Popper / Deutsch – that all life is problem solving and humans are a “universal constructor” of new solutions. One specific creative suggestion from the audience was that if provider channels were using algorithms to prioritise attention and delivery, that there was clearly a market for a provider to open-up their algorithmic black-box and offer personalisation tools as a mixing-desk for individual algorithms. This adds a whole new dimension of possibilities for curation and influence of personalisation algorithms. It’s probably all there and just needs opening up.

Having been a participant in the earlier session on objectivity of The Truth, Hilary Lawson hosted a particularly fascinating discussion on the absolute and objective nature of The Good with Michael Ruse, Paul Boghossian and Naomi Goulder. A philosophy full-house and impressive all. Plenty of good-humoured disagreement – picking on examples from the front row – disguising deep agreement at many levels.  Highlight for me was Ruse referring to me as “young man”! I found myself thinking of McIntyre’s After Virtue. Apart from the inevitable convergence on the absence of any literally  absolute objective good, even if objectivity could be agreed by dialogue, there was a strong leaning towards some effectively absolute hierarchical aspects of the good – where matters of degree become Platonic kinds for practical purposes. Whether taking the Individual Character <> Individual Intent <> Actual Outcomes in Action view of where the good resides, Goulder, the philosopher-of-action provided a good summary of where the effective absolutes lay. They’re only objective and able to be treated as effectively absolute because we rely on reflection as opposed to dogma in our internal as well as external dialogue. The Intent may seem the dominant view, but only in the context of the Character, and only with honest evaluation of action and likely Outcomes. Evaluation relies on values we come to treat as absolute after reflective consideration and agreement. The kind we find in stories. The values we hold dear may not be absolute, but they are maintained above the fray by our widely shared agreements. If Goulder provided the summary, Ruse and Boghossian are past-masters in story-telling.

So, we may be nearly there after all.

Physical science or humanity itself,
the only absolutes are the raw data.

Concepts like The Truth, The Good and The Real can be made objective by human use, but seeking their ultimate absolute nature remains a fool’s errand, a religious quest. The information is fundamental. All those higher objects and values we treat as objective in the logic of our considerations are emergent. Emergent from dynamic patterns of interaction in information.

“… to sustain a culture in which intellectual enquiry is valued and supported, people on all sides of every debate have to stand together to defend the shared intellectual values that make it possible.”
Julian Baggini

Compiling my Hay-on-Wye 2018 How The Light Gets In report, starting with the meta stuff below, content report is here.

Mid-day Friday to Mid-day Sunday this year. My third time. Last year being a fallow year for the event. Previous year weather was excellent, combined the event with some days walking in the Brecon Beacons & Black Mountains. Year before that was very wet and grim the whole weekend. This year has been wet, but never heavy, except for one heavy storm middle of the day after which it’s been glorious. Some electric storms in the hills Saturday evening, but no more rain locally. Sunday started damp and got gradually wetter, torrential at times, until I bailed out 2pm Sunday.

Decided to attend this year a while ago and bought a weekend ticket some weeks ago, but was actually in two minds right up to final cancellation dates for bookings. Quite a few people I wanted to see, new and old, though only a few specific new topics and contributors in the fields I’m most interested in. After a relatively poor start, maybe deliberate, two old chestnut philosophical questions, “Love & Hate” and “The Meaning of Life” proved as frustrating as you’d expect for the participants as well as myself, given the one hour format, but been pretty good since. More in the content report.

Biggest difference this year is the different use of the two site format, three sites if you include the original Hay Book Festival at the other end of town. HTLGI has had two sites in previous years, but most of the intellectual events have been on the Globe Theatre site and the alternative art and entertainments alongside the Riverside accommodation site the other side of the Wye. This year there are many more of the intellectual events mixed in with the alternative events (see problem in final footnote) on a new Riverside site this side of the Wye, but further down Newport Street, across the English border. Considerable shuttling back and forth between the two sites to optimise which sessions you get to see – especially with/without umbrella!

Anyway, I’ve participated in:

Love & Hate with Rowan Williams, Renata Saleci and Robert Rowland-Smith, chaired by Michael Crick.

Meaning of Life with Julian Baggini, Helen Lederer & Steve Taylor, chaired by Joanna Kavenna.

New Theory of Gravity by Erik Verlinde

(Friday evening I missed-out so far seeing Mark Lilla whose session clashed with the above, and missed out seeing George Ellis talking on the self. Mark Lilla I’d heard on BBCR4 earlier in the week together with Hanna Dawson and both sounded worth seeing.)

(Ordering of things in the printed programme meant I missed a couple of Saturday breakfast opportunities separately with Erik Verlinde and/or Steve Taylor, that I had mentally earmarked to attend. When I got back on track with Sabine Hossenfelder on Beauty and Human problems with current state of science at 10 am, the start was at least 15 minutes late and I hadn’t spotted it was a 2h:30m double session that would clash with other plans. So I missed that too.)

The Illusory Nature of Time with Erik Verlinde, Huw Price and Alison Fernandes chaired by James Ladyman.

Big Data – Numbers vs Narrative with Anders Sandberg, Noortje Marres and James Ladyman chaired by Timandra Harkness

Truth and Lies with Matthew d’Ancona, Hanna Dawson and Hilary Lawson chaired by Robert Rowland-Smith

Dark Universe with Erik Verlinde, Catherine Heymans and Sabine Hossenfelder chaired by Jonas Rademacker

Beyond Human with Anders Sandberg, Rupert Read and Kate Devlin chaired by Mark Salter

Edge of Reality with George Ellis, Nancy Cartwright and Hilary Lawson chaired by Phillip Ball

Human Thought and Creativity Salon & Dinner with Margaret Boden

The Good with Michael Ruse, Naomi Goulder and Paul Boghossian chaired by Hilary Lawson

Democratisation of Culture with Warren Ellis, Kristen Sollee and John McWhorter chaired by Serena Kutchinsky.

[That’s twelve sessions in total. Twelve out of hundreds that is. Missed many thinkers and talkers I’d hoped to see. Paused to see only a couple of entertaining bands: Roving Crows – amped-up Irish folk and Open Arms – good mix. Missed the Turbans and missed Orb late night Saturday. Didn’t catch any stand-up.]

[Noted some bad feeling with louder bands, co-located not just on the same site this year, but even the same and adjacent tents, not appreciating they could only be “background music” to intellectual discussion and debate – particularly some of the lunchtime sessions. Mixed use of the sites is going to require some more creative choreography of times and locations? And I say that as someone who loves a viscerally engaging LOUD gig.]

I’m repeating myself a lot recently, about “proper dialogue” needed for progress and about the “fundamentals of information” at all levels, physical and emergent. For quite some time now, there seems to be a convergence on key themes that need to be addressed. Also ironically, whilst that suggests time to focus both on actually having proper dialogue and on creative writing rather than reading and reacting, I am at the same time torn between conflicting demands for several simultaneous project priorities; personal, domestic, charitable and business as well as intellectual.

Aaagh. Everything suffers. Little is achieved.

However, repeating myself, and compounding the problem(!), I am reading the truly wonderful “Beginning of Infinity – Explanations that transform the world” by David Deutsch. It’s so good, I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed and read it when it came out in 2011, because (a) I loved his “Fabric of Reality” back in 2005 and (b) his Universal Constructor take on humanity would have fitted in so well to my “knowledge dialogue” agenda all this time.

Thanks to the conflicting time pressures above, despite its almost unputdownable nature, I’m reading it in intense but disjointed bursts, without any organised note-making. I’m just now finishing “Optimism” (chapter 9) after posting my notes up to starting chapter 6 (of 18) last time I posted.

He’s still taking great care handling the double-edged anthropic perspectives: being misguided as principles, whilst nevertheless fundamentally significant.

Levels – step changes – in the reach of newly created explanatory theories, with emergent causation between objects at different levels. An infinity of levels stretching out ahead of the 4 or 5 we have already encountered. Wherever we are, we are always closer to the beginning than the end. Explanatory theories are always addressing current known problems, but their reach with only minor adaptation is a resource for solving future unknowable problems. There are indeterminately long gaps between the original (intended) solution and discovering the future (usually unintended) universal applicability to create new solutions in the domain. New future domains are created only when we create a good new explanatory theory that turns out to be universal.

The optimism referred to is the kind that predicts knowledge is the key resource to respond to future human crises – even asteroid collisions or nearby cosmic gamma-radiation bursts!

[There are still nevertheless explanatory gaps in why DNA-based life and human intelligence are somehow universal, but they are.]

“The Principle of Optimism
All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.”

That’s explanatory knowledge, not predictive knowledge of future unknowables. Good knowledge has explanatory reach. We know why that happened and how to best react to it, not we can predict that it will happen.

“The unpredictability of the content of future knowledge is a necessary condition for the unlimited growth of that knowledge.”

“Problems are inevitable, and progress is solving them.”

Hence my paraphrase of Popper – “All Life is Problem Solving”. Popper is a recurring source for Deutsch, here and in his previous work.

[On Dennett he mentions only his 1991 Consciousness Explained work, dubbed Consciousness Denied. In fact Dennett’s denials are of the illusory appearances of qualia and consciousness. Accepted takes on what those are are misguided and should be relinquished if we are to create good explanatory theory – but that’s a longer aside, and much water under the bridge since then. The underlying digital information model is key to both, either way.]

[On AI he adopts AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as the real thing in contrast to the weak algorithmic machine learning usage that has become general AI currency. Artificial Creativity – proper AI following properly evolved A-Life.]

“The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.”

Compare that quote with my own earlier statement: “Our dignity our value and meaning is in being good at being human. That’s what we should value even worship and have faith in above all. If we ever do meet a being we genuinely consider more human than ourselves, only then would we have more faith in that.” More human or superhuman in a sci-fi culture-shock sense or in a theological sense.

All these are simply holding notes for a more thorough piece. For now I can only reinforce:

“Science has never had an advocate quite like David Deutsch. He is a computational physicist on a par with his touchstones Alan Turing and Richard Feynman, and also a philosopher in the line of his greatest hero, Karl Popper. His arguments are so clear that to read him is to experience the thrill of the highest level of discourse available on this planet and to understand it.”
Peter Forbes in the Independent (March 2011).

Thrilling stuff indeed.

This is the quote that caused me to pause and post:

“There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure, other than certain types of brain damage – those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the patient’s personality.”

=====

[Post Note: The later chapter “A Dream of Socrates” is a wonderful creation. Important static/closed vs dynamic/open social distinction, and the (presumably Popperian?) concept that objective knowledge comes from within. Just missing “radical empiricism”? A denial of “justified belief” in its hard sense – justified by an absolute proof chain of reasoning and empiricism that is, not the looser idea of justified by reasonable explanation. Mind-blowing corollary that whether you get your knowledge direct from a god in a dream, or second-hand from some half-literate scribe reporting hearsay from some prophet of said god, or from a fully evidenced scientific paper, it doesn’t really matter. The Socratic problem of who really said what, is not a problem when it comes to true knowledge of reality. Much acknowledgement (and use) of rhetoric and humour as part of the process, despite denigration of the sophists’ nihilistic bad-faith. Communication is hard, and flawed (Einstein’s communication problem). Interpretation of directly experienced objects and explicit physical personal communication is fallible. Most to-and-fro dialogue, even where intentionally critical can only ever really be about clarifying and evolving mutually received interpretations. Proper dialogue! All human life is here. Dogma is the enemy.]

[Post Note: The invention of “Humanism” by the Medicis, snuffed-out by Savonarola. Many mini-enlightenment “near-misses” before the real thing. The pitfalls of democracy … and so much more. Did I mention, I’m loving this book?]

[Post Note: And whilst I’m here, I skipped ahead to the chapter recommendation that led me to read the book. Chapter 13 “The Evolution of Culture”

.@TheCrookedMan That’s a very interesting suggestion! It may well be so.

David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf) November 30, 2016

“Creativity suppresses innovation”? an interesting and counterintuitive thought, probably true.

Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) April 29, 2018

Read (and reviewed) Fabric of Reality wayback. Not read Evolution of Creativity (but will), but regularly use fidelity vs fecundity evo argument – mostly conservatism with relatively few mutant creations … or no progress.

Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) April 29, 2018

Interesting the point at issue was the counterintuitive idea that “creativity suppresses innovation”. Not seen that explicitly yet in my read, so will have to recap. Plenty of stuff I already identify with: All analogies are false (every picture paints a thousand words) – the truth is only ever in some particular aspect, and can be very misleading if not (previously) made specific. Same with memes and genes. Very positive about the reality of memetics and addressing the criticisms. Very clear about specific similarities and differences with memes and genes and where there are misunderstandings common to both and distinctly different. Makes a point about rational and irrational memes in static and dynamic societies that doesn’t seem quite right to me, but is getting at something I consider important – bad memes spread faster than true ones. Further recap needed.]

[Note to self: New explanatory theory = Alternative basis for classification within ontology.]

[Note to self: Problems and their solutions are infinitely inevitable = same as conceivability = physical possibility.]

A current focus of my ongoing agenda has been “proper dialogue”. That is that “critical argument” is extremely limited when dealing with anything other than simple black and white situations. Reducing complex situations to simple arguments is usually the greater evil and often a direct consequence of PC avoidance of even mentioning the real knottier aspects of some important issue.

I’ve written many times on rules of engagement, most recently consolidated under my general collaborative outreach pages. I often characterise all the human interaction aspects of such rules as love & respect – or simply R.E.S.P.E.C.T – for the other party and their position. Some simple tips for civil discourse is another way to elaborate on that idea – as presented here by “ProTruthPledge” – though even here  it can be reductive of the many subtleties of rhetoric in real human communication. Basically some of the rules always need to be broken – using irony and humour, in good faith – in order to highlight points and make progress. Tips are OK, provided we are wise and don’t treat them as dogmatic rules.

One simple way to signal this kind of
collaborative truth-seeking commitment
is the ProTruthPledge.

Ever since Terry introduced me to it, I’ve been a little more sceptical of the ProTruthPledge per se, even though I’m happily signed-up to it myself. It’s about being civil as Gleb Tsipursky’s project emphasises, but civil in good faith that is, not as a matter of box-ticking. That is, if it comes to mean anything authoritative, it will inevitably be gamed by hollow commitment of those who stand to gain from arguments.

[See Rules of Rhetorical Engagement.]

====

[Post Note:

Odd use of the word “win”? Otherwise, agreed. https://t.co/QNM8zApnr4

— Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) May 21, 2018

How to win #arguments through collaborative truth-seeking: https://t.co/nqurMLqJjN pic.twitter.com/AcvoHqE8Me

— Dr. Gleb Tsipursky (@Gleb_Tsipursky) May 13, 2018

Had the same thought about “win” in the ten top tips above. Only makes sense in the collaborative “win-win” progress sense

And a related issue with Tip 10. Helping “them” learn.
Same problem as “Street Epistemology”. Disingenuous aim whilst claiming mutual collaboration, to presume you already know more than “they” do. Always mutual learning. Even if they do turn out to have been essentially wrong on some key point, you will have learned why that point is misunderstandable, and how to modify what you believe you know in order to increase mutual understanding.]