Month: May 2021

I noted ten days ago I had acquired a copy of Chiara Marletto’s first foray into popular “trade” science literature “The Science of Can and Can’t” and noted at the time that I’d already been following her work and that of David Deutsch her mentor and collaborator for more than a decade.

I’ve been putting-off opening it up because I knew (know) as soon as I did I’d have to make space to read the whole of it. Well, dear reader, here we are.

In fact I’ve only read a few pages as I type. Apart from the blurbs I already mentioned, from Smolin and Pullman, it has an index, acknowledgements and a short further reading list. Aside from the earlier works of Atkins, Dawkins and Deutsch, the latter includes Brockman’s Edge collection of “Possible Minds” and Pullman’s “Essays on Storytelling” along with her life-partner Vladko Vedral’s “Decoding Reality“. Intriguingly it also includes Pearl and Mackenzie’s “Book of Why – the New Science of Cause and Effect“.

Of the six pages I’ve read, four are Deutsch’s foreword, one is her “how to read” and one is the first page of her “prelude”.

It’s an impassioned recommendation from Deutsch as his protégé spreads her independent wings, from:

This is a major departure from the traditional conception of physics and science more generally […] which rejects such intangibles as causation, free-will and choice as being mere psychological props, or even mystical.”

“[The lack of anything fundamentally new in science for decades is the result of] a cautious and risk-averse culture in science [where] pessimism and fatalism have become the norm.

There has never been a time when there have been more blatant contradictions, gaps and unresolved vagueness in our deepest understanding of nature […] this will require us to adopt radically different modes of explanation.”

“Modes of explanation” is key, this is meta to any specific physical theories, and the real reason for my interest in general. The “how to read” is also reflected in a reference to one of my heroes in Deutsch’s foreword:

“[Marletto argues] with great enthusiasm and precision, punctuating the non-fiction in the chapters with short fictional stories that, in a manner reminiscent of Douglas Hofstadter “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, elaborate the ideas and give the reader space to reflect.”

By Marletto’s first page we already have allusions to Dante and the Blakes Quentin and William, and a writer at home reflecting on the Red Kites’ perspective circling high overhead Oxford, England’s green and pleasant lands of the Chilterns and Cotswolds.

Loving the evocation already.

The idea of “it from bit” is pretty central to my information metaphysics view of reality, but I rarely use the expression, and in fact don’t believe I’ve ever made explicit reference to John Wheeler’s seminal paper that coined this view. There is so much secondary referencing in the EES and IIT sphere’s of modern science. In coining the expression, even Wheeler acknowledges “little new under the sun”, with Bohr as one source of the concept (also acknowledged here previously).

Anyway, that seminal paper:

INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM:
THE SEARCH FOR LINKS.
by John Archibald Wheeler, 1989

Bohr was already there, very recently mentioned here. Where Wheeler talks of our “registration” with knowledge of an empirical fact, Bohr and Whitehead (and I) talk of the “interaction” of subjective we with the objective world “out there” (*).

Wheeler was one of the last living links with Einstein and Bohr until his death in 2008, and there are several related video interviews with him on YouTube shortly before his death.

[Suffice to say – that’s a wonderful paper in the “one I wish I’d actually read earlier” category. Apart from himself, his first ten references are Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Mendel, Darwin, Crick and Watson. Only one von Neumann reference and no Shannon references, but dozens of references to his own publications which no doubt include these two. One ref to J. W. Tukey which intrigues because I heard another recently. Reading list continues to grow the more I read – and boy, is Tukey’s list of stuff enormous, where to start?!? Time to start using my British Library membership, methinks. Background paper on Tukey.]

[… the term bit (binary digit) that is coined by John Wilder Tukey, statistician at Princeton University, in 1946. It refers Claude Shannon, often misquoted as the one who used the term for the first time, which, in a paper published in 1948, talks about ‘bit’ and attributes its origin to Tukey: ‘The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey.’ C.E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, (1948) 27, p. 380. Cfr. H.S. Tropp, ‘Origin of the Term Bit’, Annals of the History of Computing, (1984) 6(2), pp. 152?”5. Source Paper about Konrad Zuse – another connection(!)]

[(*) Post Note: Interesting earlier in the Information Modelling day-job, as opposed to this evolving metaphysical research project, the first mandatory “template” for any object of interest was to instantiate a registration relation between that object and the world. context.]

A new overload of bookmarked pages to capture. Life remains complicated for reading and writing for domestic and work reasons, so I’ll dump most here without reading or reviewing in detail for now. Resources for later.

Philip Goff on this old chestnut … Hacking, White and McGrath all referenced (but not Anthropics …)

‘Is the fine-tuning evidence for a multiverse?’ Just recorded a talk for the parallel sessions of the Joint Session (big annual UK philosophy conference). https://t.co/9QWFVwk6D9

— Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff) May 30, 2021

Bogdanov. Having picked him up as someone I need to follow-up, coincidentally picked-up this in-person event in Hull later this week, 2nd / 3rd June. Systems studies, financial economics and cybernetics(!) in one event, with Rovelli giving a keynote the evening before.

[Could have been designed for me.
H/T Paul Mason for the tweet.
Follow-up Bogdanov post here.]

Great piece in Aeon from Jessica Flack at Santa Fe Institute. Day job systems thinking as well as epistemology research application for me:

“Rather than attempt to precisely predict the future, we have tried to make the case for designing systems that favour robustness and adaptability” by @C4COMPUTATION … (me too).
Complex systems science allows us to see new paths forward — https://t.co/6m5aTtgFUI via @aeonmag

— What, Why & How do we know? (@psybertron) May 30, 2021

(Also good stuff about instabilities of mixed time-scale processes.)

Neurodiversity as an advantage. Positive piece in HBR.

George Berkeley piece in Prospect – by Alex Dean reviewing Tom Jones latest book on the subject.

Genetic heritability of behaviour – paper in Nature (Human Behaviour).

AI Is Neither Artificial nor Intelligence – short piece in Wired.

Review of Edmonds on professor Schlick in TLS.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (sometimes Cz…) have earlier references to him in “flow” contexts, someone shared his TED talk.

Keeping Time on Entropy’s Dime
May 6, 2021• Physics 14, s54
An experiment with a nanoscale clock verifies that a clock’s entropy per tick increases as the clock is made more precise. It from Bit on the time axis?

Zen and the Art / Pirsig meme …Covid and the Art of Parallel Parking in Austin Times.

Meta- 7 Apps for Cataloguing Your Home Library in HigherEd Blog (h/t Ian Smith for suggestion).

Galen Strawson interviewed by Robert Wright in Mind Matters on his journey from Materialism to PanPsychism.

War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin – add to book list. Turchin has been in my sights before – with Pirsig / Einstein / Magritte link.

Spooky “Periodic Table” correlation between species of DNA structures? H/T to David Morey on Twitter.

Dennett’s “Clergy Project” – Church as Theatre in Patheos.

Adding System 3 (None) to Kahneman’s 1 and 2 (Fast and Slow) Jumping the Shark.

Performative Victimhood – bad public decision-making. Bamboozled Britain dishes out Brexit Blame. Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times.

Piece on the Famous Einstein-Szilárd letter in Cantor’s Paradise.

By Any Memes Necessary in LA Review of Books. The memification of history, replacing detailed truth with catchy misattributed and dubious sound-bites. Yep, that’s about it.

Recurring link to Norway’s Oil dependency, with Mariana Mazzucato – but I though the sovereign wealth fund was being directed at green policy for more than a decade?

More on Neurosexism – gendered brains again in Nature.

More on Neurosexism – gendered brains in Neuroscience.

Essay on Hume by Baggini in Prospect to accompany his latest excellent book. The Hume paradox: how great philosophy leads to dismal politics. H/T Mark Hammonds

More brain/mind behaviour from abnormal brains. Tuckute in BioRxiv pre-prints. Frontal language areas do not emerge in the absence of temporal language areas: A case study of an individual born without a left temporal lobe.

Add Salma Rushdie’s latest to list “Languages of Truth”

Reactionary responses to this Max Plank quote on probability in nature.

Max Planck on probability in Nature pic.twitter.com/qfh1ll1scT

— Fermat’s Library (@fermatslibrary) May 28, 2021

Interesting thread on Wheeler’s “It from Bit” from Jessica Flack

The physicist John Wheeler, inventor of the phrase, “it from bit” at a Princeton blackboard discussing what in nature can be quantized but as if he were looking at Walton Ford’s, “Falling Bough,” a fantastic depiction of collective behavior. pic.twitter.com/Tjd8TidMA6

— Jessica Flack (@C4COMPUTATION) May 28, 2021

As predicted by Mark Hammonds – Wittgenstein Tractatus at 100 is a thing.

Sabine Hossenfelder on Larry Krauss’ bandwagon jumping on Climate Change.

Re-Reading List:

Recent reference to the excellent Secret History by Donna Tartt – time to start a “re-reading list”?

Reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and, you guys, it is simply not fair that some people can write like this

— Jonathan Weisberg (@jweisber) May 27, 2021

Which should probably include this:

cracking open some extremely american colds ones and philosophy with the bois pic.twitter.com/yg0iGr5AXi

— Self-Operating Napkin (@tim_elmo) May 27, 2021

As well as this Goldstein link :
Recent reference to the excellent Goldstein’s Mind Body Problem

Everyone considering a career in philosophy should read these paragraphs (published in 1983, when things were not as bad). pic.twitter.com/hlSDkFciJo

— Bryan W. Van Norden (@BryanVanNorden) May 29, 2021

Done for now. Need to collect the book references and the library catalogue.

I’ve been pretty clear that I reject a lot of what Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion do with their environmental climate emergency agendas. And I’m not coy about the fact a large part of my working life has been in or related to fossil-fuel and plastics businesses – my Dad worked for ICI too. But, I also have to be clear, I have no “interest” in perpetuating these, and indeed for most of the last 2, 3 or even 4 decades all work has been towards efficiencies, reductions, remediations and alternatives.

So I want to say, this is a brilliant video created by Greenpeace. It grabs attention for a massive problem in a stunningly visual way. Various versions being shared all over social media. It’s brilliant. Shines a light on a real problem with a credibly-real idea of scale (even though I’ve not done the calcs). Well done.

What’s not brilliant about it is its anti-establishment, anti-UK-government agenda. And I say that as someone who’s no time for Boris nor ever voted tory. The knee-jerk of archetype lefty-lib-tards is to blame a tory or more generally blame them, the government, the establishment. A world with no establishment? Careful what you wish for.

At least in the UK (and much of Europe) we do massively support separation and recycling of waste. Sad to see those in comment threads attached to the video questioning whether to continue such commitment. Certainly amongst our family, friends, colleagues and wider community, the idea of littering or discarding anything not immediately bio-degradable food waste – even the smallest sweet wrapper –  has been anathema all our post-war lives.

But I know from travel (and indeed living) around the world, UK, Europe, US, South America, Mid-East, South and East Asia, Asia-Pacific and Australasia in those decades that it’s an even bigger problem. There are huge communities and cultures where simply discarding disposable plastic has been the norm, long before any thought of collecting for recycle and the risk of poor arrangements for such recycling. I’ve seen so many rivers, bays and dead-end dry-land spaces simply choked with years of discarded plastic for many decades. This is cultural education, closer to home too. The amount of fast-food and beverage bottle and can discards is a cultural disgrace close to home.

Anyway, in or out of the EU, plastic production and use as well as disposal and processing will be at least partly international business for all the reasons any business involves global trade. It depends on shared standards (which is the common thread of my day-job, but I digress).

I happen to support localism, and I fully support proper economic accounting for environmental “externalities” – but with a global environment, this is yet more shared standards for global trade. It can’t just be box-ticking of offsets.

“We” have to own this as opposed to blaming “them” and looking for accounting loopholes. We are they.

Personally, apart from obviously seeking realistic alternatives to reduce disposable plastic use in the first place, I believe the right solution is to incinerate in properly regulated waste-to-energy plants, where there are no high-value recycled-product markets. And this is true whether these be at the eastern margins of Europe, say in Turkey, or in the far-east. Since we need alternative energy plants locally and we tend to be more compliant with regulations locally, and it’s easier to see locally when they’re not compliant, such waste-to-energy plants should and could quite practically be as local as possible.

If it weren’t for all the ER and Greenpeace nimby’s preventing them being built locally, that is. Attention-grabbing – even through civil disobedience protest – is fine, as well as catchy videos, but take responsibility for doing something about it.

Noted only in the past year, after getting very engaged with the work of Whitehead recently that I needed to give credit to a strong link between him and Pirsig that had crossed my path unnoticed back in 2006.

With information and computation proving an ever more fundamental part of my agenda since the outset in 2001, I’ve joined-up dots with quantum computing in various guises at many points in that time. Most recently with Chiara Marletto and the “Constructor Theory” of Deutsch and Marletto.

Somewhat randomly I came across a post of my own from 2007 that had already connected cross-links from the Pirsig-Whitehead axis to the fundaments of quantum computing. There is very little new under the sun, and all the connections are already there.

The whole Zen <> Fundamental Physics
(Stapp, Josephson, Capra, Talbot, and even Hofstadter again)
The Holographic Universe <> Quantum Computation
(Talbot, Deutsch, Rowlands, etc.)
All in a Pirsig <> Whitehead context!
Even seems I did read some Whitehead at that time (2007)?

The thing I guess I’d missed the significance of with “quantum computing” first time, until the second time around with Rowlands, was that this wasn’t just some quantum-level  property to be exploited for human-scale computing purposes (which it is) but an explanatory model being offered for fundamental physics itself. It had been staring me in the face the whole time until the realisation that corrected the gap between 2007 and 2020 was my revisiting Rowlands. The recent Marletto work is now cementing the significance in more mainstream Physics & Philosophy arenas. She is the kind of person that will attract more attention than the likes of me or Peter Rowlands.

Just write something!

Started reading Julian Baggini’s latest on David Hume as “The Great Guide” for our times and have already completed the intro and first chapter without yet taking any notes, so just some pre-review thoughts for now.

Front / end / blurbs / etc: Nagging issue for me is no mention of Simon Blackburn anywhere, is there some unwritten academic-competition rule about not crediting or even mentioning fellow living philosophers? For me Blackburn has been the UK authority on Hume, and his place in modern Humanism. Indeed he provides Baggini with one of the cover blurb “in praise” quotes. Odd. That said, the referencing is non-intrusive end-notes, relying on direct quotes from Hume himself wherever possible, and an extensive further reading bibliography, minus Blackburn.

Cancel Culture: He comes to bury Hume, not to praise him. Baggini addresses head-on all of the racist Hume quotes (and actions) about negro slaves and Johnny foreigner generally. Reminding us also that Baggini is a Bristolian these days, where the Edward Colston statue event is topical. Nothing so crass as to defend their positions as being “of their time” – but in fact Baggini does a great job of counterbalancing the rest of what Hume had been saying and doing, pragmatically, in context around the more offensive examples, and the evolution toward what we would now consider humanism. I’ve certainly found plenty of quality in Humean thinking before now, (with the help of Blackburn).

Intriguing fact about the book itself, as opposed to Hume, is that it was originally created for the Korean market and this is “a much revised English edition” by Princeton press.

The other fact is that the book is, as advertised, very much a “lifestyle guide” – an antidote to other Stoic offerings. Capturing Hume as a guide, using his life lived as the context of his thoughts and words – biographical timelines of thinkers always an important component for me here at Psybertron, and Baggini is quite explicit that truth values cannot be objectively disembodied. Humane living is no science. Also, highlighting his pithier advice as we go, and gathering 145 adages, aphorisms or maxims in a handy Appendix – the guide itself.

Recommended already.

A post simply to capture a wonderful 2016 lecture by Doug Hofstadter on Gödel and the limits to logic.

Wonderful – in a wonderfully nerdy sense, like so much Hofstadter. (In fact I only stumbled upon it randomly in the side-bar of a discussion of Dave Edmonds on Schlick and the Vienna Circle.)

[Still an important issue for my own theses whether or not Gödel consequences really can be extended to non-number / non-integer contexts in (say) epistemology- real world human epistemology that is. But that of course is the point – any arbitrarily complex formulae or system of formulae – expressible in any formal notation – can be represented in Gödel numbering and their decidability analysed … formally.]

Wonderful – because right from the start Hof is highlighting syntactic properties of sentences or even of integer numbers, strings of digits, symbols or anything (like length or size, a visual aesthetic) when talking about what we can know semantically about them, their content. Syntactic well-formedness and the semantic decidability or truth value of content, etc … every time I see this relationship it still seems nuts. It runs through so much of his work from “Gödel Escher Bach” via strange-loopiness to “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” the former being seminal, the latter being an absolute tour de nerdy force.

Wonderful – because he talks and transforms formal logical notation in real time in his head whilst lecturing.

Wonderful Рfor the Collatz conjecture which was a new one for me Рbut is key to seeing the unpredictable size / shape relationship to a theorem, the special semantic content of that kind of string. The rest is basically the clearest possible exposition of what G̦del is about. Did I mention Рwonderful?

Encoding a long complex string in a large (but not necessarily long) integer? And what operations can you perform on it, what properties can you extract from it?

Even a string that might represent a Bach composition … ha! … or more to the point, the whole three volume text of Principia Mathematica. This is Gödel numbering – Any string (even a complex mathematical or logical formula or sequence of formulae – the whole of the Principia) can be encoded in a large integer and analysed formally

So, for the integer (Gödel number) form of any arbitrary symbolic string, the analysis of its well-formedness will always be monotonic, convergent on a result, but the decidability of the truth value, the provability of (some part of) the content, may not be and may not be predicted.

Gödel’s formula G, whose number is g,
States that g is not the number of a theorem.
The number g exists (and has complicated number-theoretical properties)
(And yet) G says that it is not a theorem.

Says that it is provable, yet that very statement is not provable.
Not provable because it is true!
All (complete) axiomatic systems have such a (paradoxical) statement.
Goodbye professor Russell.

[Spot the great throw-away remark about the photo of Gödel with “an unidentified peasant”. Brilliant teacher.]

[Lots more 21st C Hofstadter talks on YouTube, covering most aspects of his work … the self-referential loops and analogies.]

[See also Tom Glendinning’s batchelor’s thesis on wider philosophical application of Gödel.]

I’ve been following Deutsch and Marletto for over a decade, and had the pleasure of talking with Chiara Marletto over lunch at a How The Light Gets In event in Hay on Wye in 2016.

This interview from a few months ago, Dec 2020, is excellent because she is simply allowed to talk and describe her position. So much clearer now for me in being able to see the qubit as simply the most general concept of an information “bit” in the quantum world, AND the “constructor” as simply the most generic concept of a Turing machine  – the most generic “machine” that can do constructive stuff and sustain itself in the process. Anything possible within the laws of physics that is. Hence the title of her book, which I now have on order at my local bookshop.

“The Science of Can and Can’t”
by Chiara Marletto

Still very reminiscent of the quote I recorded from Deutsch way back in 2005 after reading his “Fabric of Reality” that anything conceivable (epistemically) is possible (physically).

No real difference between inconceivable and impossible.

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[Additional notes – Lots more in that interview. More intelligible take on demystifying “causation” … constructor being a cause as opposed to mere participant. Open possibility for human will at a fundamental level – not over promising, but optimistic. Thinking on her feet also in response to the “illusory” take on reality as perceived? … obviously only illusory in misunderstood, our improperly modelled, aspects of reality. Reality is not an illusion, the only illusion is in  our presumed adequate scientific description of it. And, ah! of course, 2nd law sets limits on possibility … and constructor theory information (qubit) level cause of the possible … great stuff.]

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Post Notes:

[And there is now a second interview with “The Dissenter” though I remain at a loss why Ricardo Lopes takes that online name since, as I say, he is about as empathetic as an interviewer can be. Maybe it’s deliberate irony?]

I do now in fact have her book, so will be reading and reviewing sometime soon. Cover blurbs from Philip Pullman and Lee Smolin.

Also just capturing recent links to other reviews and interviews:

With Andrew Anthony in the Guardian May 2020

Interview with Amanda Gefter in Quanta April 2021

Constructor Theory of Thermodynamics – Paper 2017

Book Review by Albert Wenger at Continuations May 2021

Logan Chipkin interview at IAI from April 2020

Interview at Foresight from Aug 2020