Year: 2021

Misak on Ramsey – the Best Consequences of a Life Lived

Having finished “Frank Ramsey – A Sheer Excess of Powers” by Cheryl Misak (2020) this is a round-up review. I have a particular interest in the topic, in my Ramseyian take on Wittgenstein, which made it an especially satisfying read for me, but as a read I cannot rate it highly enough.

The evocation of the times and the players living in the 1920’s Cambridge-Bloomsbury-Vienna triangle is a joy throughout. Apart from the chapters on his childhood and earlier schooldays prior to Winchester, and the final chapter on the expressions of grief and the consequences of his sudden and early death, the book is packed with discussion of Ramsey’s ideas in mathematics, economics and philosophy and their interplay with the other intellectual giants of his all too short days.

I’ve already blogged several posts in the course of reading, and already indicated that, even as a biography, it really serves as a reference work / textbook to be read and referenced many more times. Previously:

“Ramseyian Pragmatism“.
“A Vienna Interlude“.
“The Hypocrisy of Debate“.
“Ramsey, Wittgenstein, Gödel and the rest“.

I don’t intend to add a lot more here …

Ramsey’s worldview serves as an excellent obituary from my perspective. Misak provides her own obituary for Ramsey, concluding the final chapter of the biography with a selection of his own words, but on the preceding page we find her own summary:

“His own approach [to the meaning of life] was in line with the rest of his philosophy. We can evaluate the best of the various outlooks on life and see which have the best consequences. In his assessment, the key to meaning in life is to be optimistic, thrilled, and actively try to improve conditions for people now and in the future. Live as fully and ethically as you can, was his conclusion. Ramsey understood that [for most people] inequalities get in the way of being thrilled by life. He put much effort into making the world a fairer place.”

I’m still left with wondering what represents the best collected Ramsey works for the 21st C. Clearly Braithwaite did the most in 1930 & 31 but as Misak points out he frequently made his own interpretations that missed Ramsey’s true trajectory in a world distracted by Wittgenstein and The Vienna Circle. Mellor published more in the 1978 & 1990. Equally clearly Misak has done the most to elucidate Ramsey’s legacy since her 2016 “Cambridge Pragmatism – from Peirce & James to Ramsey & Wittgenstein“. As a careful academic work Misak (2020) has an excellent bibliography, but I wonder if there is a Ramsey Reader in the pipeline?

Such an excellent read I’m left wanting more.

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Next up – another fix of 1920’s/30’s philosophical intrigue:

David Edmonds (2020)
“The Murder of Professor Schlick
– The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle”

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Ramseyian Pragmatism

Nearing the end of my reading of Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey in the chapter Wittgenstein Comes Home [and below, the penultimate chapter on the necessary layering of philosophy].

Previously so far:
“Ramseyian Pragmatism” (this post).
“A Vienna Interlude“.
“The Hypocrisy of Debate“.
“Ramsey, Wittgenstein, Gödel and the rest.”
Final round-up:
“The Best Consequences of a Life Lived”

The current chapter, after Ramsey’s contributions to Economics and Mathematics, concerns the last year of his interactions between Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in January 1929 to Ramsey’s death in January 1930, and Wittgenstein’s subsequent reflections.

A grumpy and defensive Witt clearly respected Ramsey’s brain above any other at the time (and obviously later gave him top billing in the credits to his own work) but still found Ramsey’s critiques “tiresome”. This was partly because whilst Ramsey focussed on the theses in front of him rather than revering, let alone seeking, any fundamental, sacred or transcendent metaphysical angles, his brain nevertheless got there faster than Witt could keep up with. Getting there being recognising that the Tractatus needed “upending” rather than simply “fixing” on Witt’s subsequent journey to the Philosophical Investigations – the “later Wittgenstein” as we know him.

The paradigm shift like so many Schumpeterian waves, or evolution of any new species, starts as a heretical mutation and becomes a common sense reality with hindsight. A hindsight Ramsey never lived to see. And yet Witt reflects:

“That short period of time, as Schopenhauer calls it, between two long ones when some truth appears at first paradoxical and then trivial to people, had shrunk to a point for Ramsey.”

So much more in the preceding chapter(s) about what became known as the Linguistic Turn, the pragmatics of language in use in the informal games of otherwise formal language. In Misak’s summary:

“They would both come to the conclusion of there being no foundations for knowledge independent of humans.

Ramsey was cheerful about that,

and Wittgenstein anguished.”

Finally for now – consider co-evolution – like all evolutionary processes causation and influence are two-way or circular – “their views evolved together”.

Despite massive evidence to the contrary, I still hold the view that there was some mischievous fun in Wittgenstein “playing” the difficult absolutist on his way to “coming-out” as the human-linguistic pragmatist. There can be no doubt that my impressions of Wittgenstein are thoroughly Ramseyfied with hindsight (a co-evolved species called “Ramstein” anyone?).

And, that debates about exactly who meant what, when, are of merely academic interest in relation to the human-scale pragmatism. The academic value is that we learn – from Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Misak – that knowledge is a human-scale evolutionary process. (Those parts described by a closed system of logic and axioms being empty tautologies.)

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A few additional thoughts from the penultimate chapter, where Misak is piecing together what Ramsey’s version of pragmatism might actually have been.

Positive of Peirce yet surprisingly dismissive of James based on a somewhat “believe whatever works for us” version of  his thinking, largely because that caricature leaves reality open to the supernatural, god and the like.

Yet, very much recognising the naturalistic fallacy. That, even when we have constructed a natural picture of reality, we still need to consider what is actually good, that what is natural isn’t necessarily good. Even a natural is, is not the same as the human ought. We may associate this old idea with a 1739 Hume, but that’s yet another footnote to Plato:

“And what is good, Phaedrus?”

Misak speculates that Ramsey’s posthumously (ie selectively by others) published position suggested the reason he didn’t complete the project in the 6 years between his 1923 critique of the Tractatus and his death in 1930 was essentially one of complexity. Once you’ve dispensed with a one-dimensional reductionist view of causation we undoubtedly have a multi-layered world of emergent or supervenient entities involved in two-way or circular processes of causation between the layers. Many have since developed such models.

A process view I’d call it, but not a single reference to Whitehead in the whole biography other than as Russell’s earlier co-author in their Principia. The older man with his dissonant contemporary – metaphysical – ideas had obviously been banished from these intellectual circles by the logical positivist fashion (and his emigration to the US)?

“One obstacle, perhaps surmountable, is that it would be impossibly complicated. For instance, if the primary language [of formal logic] is concerned with a series of experiences, it needs ‘time order’ and a structure for things like colour and smells [the secondary language of subjective experience]. But the really insurmountable obstacle is that ‘if we proceed by explicit definition we cannot add to our theory without changing the definitions, and so the meaning of the whole’. That would be a disaster for we need to be able to explain how [an apparently physical] concept such as mass both evolves and retains its meaning.”

Of course, that’s only a disaster if you’re a logical positivist. To the rest of us it’s evolving reality.

“all ‘useful theories [must have] more degrees of freedom’ than the primary system – ‘the dictionary alone does not suffice’. Neither does the dictionary plus the axioms, unless we are happy confining ourselves to a finite, primary system much less rich than the theory itself.”

Very exciting that Ramsey had come to the conclusions some of us have learned more recently with Dennett, Pirsig, Smolin, Rovelli, Tononi et al.

(If I’m reading Misak right, all those quotes within quotes are from Ramsey’s original 1923 critique – not from his nachlass? I’m going to need a good published version of Ramsey’s actual work and nachlass – distinct from editorial selection and critique. Wonder which that is in 2021?)

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[Post Note – Final Round-up of Misak on Ramsey here.]

[PS – as well as the question above, also spotted maybe three typos in the 500 word first-edition tome – which isn’t bad. The only one I kept ready access to was this one: First sentence, last para, p399

“That’s not to say that Ramsey there was any value to be found in these realist philosophers.”

A verb of some sort missing between “Ramsey” and “there”.
Presumably a “didn’t believe” or similar, after editing maybe a triple-negative form from the original sentence?

Important sentence because I’ve now started reading Edmonds on Schlick and he seems (?) in his introductory chapter, to still hold the logical positivists in higher regard than the later pragmatists. I find, like Misak, that Ramsey clearly found:

“Such realist (as opposed to realistic)
philosophies … not to his liking”

It’s why I’m here.]

We Are As Gods

My first reference to the long-now idea – without referring to The Long Now by name – was this 2005 post about a technical / engineering exercise to create a sign the would physically and meaningfully survive 10,000 years. A sign sited to warn future humans not to accidentally disturb a long-life nuclear waste dump. Amazingly – contra link-rot – that exercise itself has survived 15 years on the web.

I remember much more recently being a little embarrassed at not recognising that Stewart Brand of 1968 Whole Earth Catalogue fame was one of the prime movers associated with The Long Now Foundation. At the time of the link above and most subsequent links in the blog it was Brian Eno’s name associated with it. Hat tip to @Longnow Foundation for this notification on my timeline:

We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.

A Vienna Interlude

“Vienna Interlude” is a chapter title from Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, which I’m reading slowly between diversions domestic and professional. Still a little less than half-way through the whole, it’s a wonderful sketch of Cambridge, Bloomsbury (and Vienna) circles of the 1920’s. As with the words of Rebecca Goldstein, Margaret Wertheim and Alice Dreger before, I am absolutely smitten with Misak’s voice around the history and humanity of thought. Without analysing what that might be … understated, sympathetic and intellectually knowing (obviously) … it just rings good and true.

Tucked up on a cold, wet and windy afternoon with the log fire for company, I simply paused to capture this longish quote regarding The Vienna Circle being enamoured with Wittgenstein and their initial understanding of his Tractatus:

“They consigned to the dustbin of meaninglessness all unverifiable, non-observable propositions. Metaphysics, ethics, religion and aesthetics were all either to be revised so as to be stated in scientific language, or else to be abandoned as nonsense.”

Seems my existing caricature of their scientism is thoroughly confirmed. Later she continues:

“That there was some tension between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is [] understandable. They shared a project – what Ramsey called in his Critical Notice the ‘non-mystical deductions’ in the Tractatus or ‘new theories of propositions and their relations to facts’. That was a source of mutual attraction. But Wittgenstein thought that indicating or gesturing at all the things that are, as Ramsey put it, ‘intrinsically impossible to discuss’ was his most important contribution. The members of the Circle tended to sweep under the rug Wittgenstein’s bookend remarks [] about the importance of [the] ineffable []. Like Russell, they didn’t know what to make of them.

Wittgenstein was unimpressed with the Circle’s disregard of what he took to be the main contention of his book. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein would meet with members of the Circle, on and off from 1927, until 1936 when Schlick, with whom he was especially friendly, was killed by a mentally unstable ex-student.”

[My emphases]

That “Schlickicide” is the topic of David Edmunds book I have lined-up to read next. A little earlier in this same chapter, Misak muses on Ramsey’s harbouring the entirely mental exercise of “Wittgensteinicide”.

Loving the fact that the core philosophical points shine through the dark-historical period-piece. Cabaret (Goodbye to Berlin) or The Sound of (Viennese) Music with added fashionable Freudian psychoanalysis? A little earlier Misak – in the understated  laconic Gibbonesque style I suggested – is introducing Irishman Adrian Bishop, “known for his infectious humour, literary puns and louche lifestyle [] from an aristocratic background, openly and promiscuously homosexual.” with the footnote:

“He would go on to be a spy in the Middle East and either fell or was pushed to his death from one of Tehran’s most expensive hotels.”

Would that all philosophical texts were such a marvellous read. I said in my initial review, it is also superb “academic research” in its comprehensive yet non-intrusive referencing and, for my own project, I really should be making more technical notes, but it is just such a good read. One to savour.

Detailed notes will have to wait for a later read. Reading on.

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[PS – I notice Misak has an earlier (2016) book that fits my interests too: “Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein”.]

Roger Boscovich

Roger Boscovich (several different spellings) is an 18C Jesuit I regularly mention here as someone whose intuition of a fundamental view of physics probably influenced Mach and hence Einstein – though precious few if any direct references are discoverable.

Apart from a few Boscovich enthusiasts and a few web-pages dedicated to him (and Margaret Wertheim’s Pythagoras Trousers), I had forgotten this mainstream reference from Charles Simonyi in his response to the 2012 Edge Question. Must check where else Simonyi uses Boscovich references.

Boscovich smallest conceivable intervals of time and space are “atomic” in the true Democritan sense. For my work, these represent the smallest “fundamental particles” of information, the smallest difference between any two distinct things.

“An atom should rather be viewed as a point source of force, with the force emanating from it acting in some complicated fashion that depends on distance.”

Points than which nothing smaller can be conceived – by definition.

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Blimey, small world, Simonyi also contributed a 2005 Edge answer – about his intentional  / generative software concept. Moore’s law has left computing in an evolutionary backwater without it, he says. Sure has.

Obviously very wealthy from his original Microsoft involvement sponsoring the Oxford professorship bearing his name since 1995, a multi-billionaire after selling his IntentSoft back to Microsoft in 2017, 2 x space tourist(!), mega-yacht owner and sponsor of Princeton IAS. Up there with Gates, Bezos and Musk.

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Conscious Will – The View from Science

Coincidentally, having just read and reviewed the Dennett piece at lunchtime today, after having it bookmarked for a month or two, I picked-up on a Twitter thread between Philip Ball and Sabine Hossenfelder on pretty much the same topic, but based on a piece I also had bookmarked for sometime, by Ball in Physics World.

Despite a period of being seemingly open-minded to philosophy, Sabine seemed to have nevertheless ended-up at what I consider the caricature position of physicists. Since causal effects of conscious will cannot be explained by orthodox physics, it can’t be real. No escaping that causation itself is an elusive concept even if consciousness and free-will can themselves be explained. One thing’s for sure, something in the orthodoxy has to give, whether it’s in physics itself or in the nature of causal explanations. I’m with Dan in the evolutionary nature of causal explanations. Philip at first sight seems to suggest a dualist explanation – that there is something other than physics that explains consciousness:

“Philip Ball argues that “free will” is not ruled out by physics — because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.”

But I see now that’s the editor’s click-bait, maybe not necessarily what Philip is really arguing.

(Continuing, after a full read …)

“[I]s free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.”

Claiming too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics and acknowledging (metaphysical?) claims beyond physics.

“[W]e can have both (physical determinism and free-will). It’s simply a matter of recognizing distinct domains of knowledge.”

Still sounding very dualist? Unless one posits a single metaphysics underlying both domains – sometimes called a dual-aspect monism – a metaphysics that physicists can accept.

“The underlying problem here is that the reducibility of phenomena — which is surely valid and well supported — is taken to imply a reducibility of cause. But that doesn’t follow at all. What “caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is fundamentally absent.”

Now you’re talking – evolutionary causation is not “reducible” in the same way as an “atomic” ontology of phenomena that exist.

“There is good reason to believe that causation can flow from the top down in complex systems.”

Absolutely! – so evolved outcomes are a whole history of repeated two-way / circular interactions. (Will we be hearing of non-ergodicity later here?)

“[Avoiding the problematic language of “free” and “will”] Decisions are things that happen at the level of neural networks and they are made using the coarse-grained information available to sensory receptors and neurons. It makes no sense to regard them as interventions in particle interactions.”

“[T]he origins of volitional decision-making lie in evolutionary biology, [this] doesn’t share an epistemic language with Newtonian and quantum mechanics. To talk about causation in science at all demands that we seek causes commensurate with the phenomena: that’s simply good science and good epistemology.”

Anyway he concludes with:

“[Metaphysics] can be fun
and stimulating to debate such things,
but it is not science.”

OK, so he is saying these different epistemic domains are all within science, physics and evolutionary-neuro-biology are such distinct domains. No metaphysical duality as such. No metaphysical claims at all.

But. What makes such domains distinct – emergent-from / supervenient-on – each other has to be an important question? How we come to have an epistemic-ontology, with what exists being dependent on the language of what is known and meant in a given evolved domain.

I could understand science – the physical orthodoxy of science – being sceptical of that being sufficient explanation, but Sabine is wrong to simply give-up on causation at the boundaries of what physics can explain and declare such inexplicable phenomena as illusory.

A well argued piece from Philip. I feel Philip and Dan would find a great deal to agree on.

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All my own epistemic-ontology would add is a metaphysical choice. That given that what exists somehow depends on “epistemic language”, that something like “information” – the stuff communicated by language – must underlie all domains, physical science included. In my epistemic-ontology all things and phenomena would be reducible to “particles” (Democritan atoms) of this stuff. Even without going back to metaphysical levels, it’s pretty clear that information is in some way fundamental to both physics and evolution. No?

Interestingly, in the Twitter thread linked above Philip offers this 2013 PNAS paper co-authored by Giulio Tononi (of IIT fame) and edited by Michael Gazzaniga, both referenced here multiple times, most recently in the previous Dennett post. A small and ever more convergent world.

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Dennett & Conscious Will – Having the Right Conversation

Since Dan Dennett’s (Jan 2018) “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) which I wrote about here, I’m not aware of other general publication work from Dan. When it comes to human consciousness and free-will Dan is a hero of mine I’ve written about in many contexts.

I’ve seen a few articles and talks since, and had mentally filed away that he was working on a paper with evolutionary systems engineering guru John Doyle, someone I picked-up on in the work of Michael Gazzaniga. I’ve seen no evidence of Dennett / Doyle collaboration since, so maybe wishful thinking on my part maybe.

One longish Dennett paper – from later in 2018 – I’ve had bookmarked for quite a while appeared in the proceedings of the Royal Society. I only got around to reading it this lunchtime.

As with B2BnB, this paper is really about changing the conversation on consciousness. “Our very rationality is at stake” I summarised previously. Sweeping away popular misunderstandings that are getting in the way of progress – progress that is otherwise very substantial, if only we can let go some scientific and philosophical illusions.

Primarily here, he is switching out Chalmers “hard problem” and replacing it with his own “hard question”. The “so what?”, “how come?”, “what next?”

Qualia don’t exist as things to be represented and perceived by our homunculus. They are our representation – in the complex dynamic patterns of our senses – of that which our sensors perceive.

Typically when experimenting on conscious subjects they are “systematically constrained” for the sake of science “to a tiny subset of the things they can do”. Since the point of our conscious will is open-ended creative possibility it is not surprising that this kind of scientific orthodoxy fails to find it.

One of the other features of a constraining kind of political correctness in scientific consideration of consciousness is the idea that conscious will in humans can be no different to that found in other sentient and/or “intelligent” creatures. He lists the obvious candidates – primates, corvids, cephalopods, cetaceans – but concludes (as I have) that the open ended creative nature of conscious will is of a different order or kind in humans. It’s a special evolved feature of our species, literally. That’s a kind of human exceptionalism, except there is nothing to say that equivalent consciousness can’t evolve anywhere else, just that in our corner of the universe we just happen to be that species. And that confers no special rights to the home planet, just a special responsibility towards it.

The only illusions are our misunderstandings. And, as Dennett said several different ways in B2BnB, if we constrain our conversation to the orthodox conventions of those we’re debating, we’ve already given up. What is needed is the same kind of creative dialogue that led to the evolution of ourselves.

The Hypocrisy of Debate

Reading on in Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, we’re into his early undergrad life at Trinity Cambridge. Trying out the various college and university debating societies including the still legendary Cambridge Union.

A recurring topic of mine is the value of dialogue in contrast to the artificial win-lose aims of debating a motion. Inescapably and imperfect binary decision-making component of choice by voting in a democracy, but far from advancing truth and knowledge. Rather the contrary. An evolutionary degeneration  towards a world of binary opposites, as I’ve characterised it many times in the last two decades.

After giving up on debating societies Ramsey records
(my [paraphrasing] Misak, quoting Ramsey):

He loathed the perverted ambition of debating … [playing to the gallery]

He found [it better] in less formal settings … [like being invited to tea to debate with individuals]

Obvious risks in identifying with the greatest genius that ever lived, but I do … also in his impression of mixed gender settings moderating the “silliness” of debate. And how about (with my day-job information management hat on) a woman’s intuition (Dora Black) after wading through an archetypal (C.K.Ogden) tutor’s office buried under cluttered piles of books and papers …

… a method of filing which would commend itself to anyone who knows that, once a thing has gotten into a folder of a filing cabinet, it will never be found again …

Too true. The hypocrisy of formally imposed structure.

Reading on.