The Risks

Browsing Gimbo, which has changed since I last looked (he’s got married ?) the issues being blogged seem higher level. Several good posts – the UK Government ID Card story, The TinyURL (risks) story, and the women in sport (world full of idiots) link.

I was taken by the “risks” link simply because the link was catless.ncl.ac.uk which I recognised as the domain of Rivets (@ncl.ac naturally). Anyway the catalogue of risks (of IT mis-use in devices) makes interesting reading.

Links, Links, Links, Links

Matt at DoubleLoop has a new post on a survey of link collectors / organisers. As he says the common feature is Tags, Tags, Tags, Tags, but for me what is key is the semantics of Why, Why, Why, Why ?

The thing I liked about del.ici.ous was that the links were to categories, and since you could create the categories themselves, you could categorise the categories too, though I see no evidence of inheritance in the linking. I wonder if any of the others stretches that far. (Must look at both del.ici.ous and CiteULike again more closely.)

It’s like this …

If I have a category of “People” with 10 “Members”
And I have another category of “Animals” with 10 “Members”, one of which is “People”
Does my click on “Animals” return 10 or 19 hits ?
64,000 dollar question.

If that’s possible – then I make my categories aspectual – ie in terms of why the interest / intent / reason in the link, rather than simply “what is at the end of it”, then Robert is your father’s brother – Semantic Web – I think you’ll find.

You may have read it here first.

The Multiverse

OK, so the inescapable key of David Deutsch’s world view is that the Everett / Wheeler idea of many worlds forming the multiverse, is … well … fundamental to all of reality.

I’ve said twice – once after his introduction and again after reading the whole of his Fabric of Reality – that Deutsch argues his case convincingly. The real world behaves virtually “as if” it was as it really is. However convincing, boy, is that gonna be hard to absorb into a natural world view.

Christian Hauck provided some helpful links to Max Tegmark’s MIT work on the parallel universes aspect of the multiverse. Hmmm – do I really want to go there ? Seems unavoidable – I may be some time.

Sue is the Drug

Seems I’m obsessed with Sue Blackmore – just re-read all the articles on her web site, again – particularly the mid-life-crisis post-50-years career switch from the paranormal expert to philosophy of mind novice. Such deep material, such human and witty delivery, and painfully open too.

Anyway after my fix, I’m reminded of the connection I was following – Sue’s (and Dan Dennett’s – see previous post) conclusion that conscious mind and free-will are illusions. Metaphorical ? yes; Illusory ? please no. Now, where was I – the link is David Deutsch’s “explanation” of this as an error of our common sense model of the flow of time, using the Multiverse idea.

Reading on – Dan Dennett et al

Following on from Sue Blackmore’s works, I have at last ordered the Dan Dennett materials so I can read him in the original. Also ordered David Chalmers book – I guess I need to read that too, even if it seems I disagree with him on Qualia. (What I forgot to order but will do next time is some Hofstadter – “Mind’s I” presumably, since he was influential on Chalmers.)

Meantime, having read Sue, and followed that with David Deutsch, both impressive – I started reading Ian Stewart’s “Flatterland” – the most recent of the sequels to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 fictional Flatland. Interesting idea, and nice allegory to get your head round concepts you can’t visualise in your current “world” – mainly dimensions beyond 3 in this case. [One omission that nags, is the idea of biological life in a 2D world – which as Martin Rees points out is impossible – a digestive tract splits you in two, unless you excrete through the same orifice you ingest – messy.] The thing that really gets in the way of my reading it is the dear diary, dear-unseen-correspondent please-lead-me-through-this-story style of Sophie’s World. A real turn off now as it was then. Pity, I though Stewart’s book on chaos was much better than Gleick’s, …. in exactly the same way I prefer Talbot to Gladwell, hopefully not a UK vs US thing ?

Apparently not, I’m now reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four”. Picked up and blogged about the subject of this book – the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – soon after I’d read Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”, when I’d seen “Rule of Four” described as being Eco’s “Name of the Rose” written in the style of Donna Tartt. (Though since Dan Brown has ejaculated all over this memespace in the intervening year, I now prefer the UK Independent’s rather snooty tag of “The Da Vinci Code for people with brains”.) A promising start – like Tartt’s Secret History the plot involves the riskier side of US College frat house traditions – Apollonian Educated Genius vs Dionysian Reckless Madness leading (presumably) to a Love (and Humour) Conquers All thesis. Anyway I’m hooked.

Four Threads Unify Reality

I said in the previous post that I owed David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality” a thorough review – well in my usual style I won’t have time for that, but I can now precis my impression of his main messages, having just finished reading it over dinner.

Excuse some repetition with the couple of other blogs on this, but this book is worth it IMHO. This gonna be a long, but hopefully not too rambling, post. I’ve been excited since the introductory chapter, and not disappointed since – it covers, and necessarily exceeds, my own thesis very well, but is by any measure a must read book.

David’s fabric of reality is woven from four threads of thought. Four threads which individually suffer from a common problem, but which together form the basis of a startlingly credible understanding of life, the universe and everything. Published in 1997, St Douglas of-the-whooshing-deadline Adams (RIP) said simply “A tremendously exciting book” – but I didn’t notice that until after I’d read it myself. When I set out on this quest, I carefully warned myself of the trap of seeing a “model of everything” on the horizon – now I’m not so sure it is a trap.

I’ve often quoted William James warning that every generation see’s age old issues as new problems and oportunities “of our time”- hype that goes back at least five thousand years in citable references. In Deutsch’s own words his thesis is conservative, offering no startling change to the current best state-of-their-art explanations in their fields. Yet he says “I hope we shall not have to spend too long looking backwards….. It’s time to move on.” to a brave new world.

The common snag with the four main threads is that they are schools of thought that are pragmatically (instrumentally) accepted as best working explanations in their own fields, yet not only do they draw sceptical and offensive counter-attacks from the world at large, they are not easily accepted as prevailing world-views even by those practicioners that regularly depend on them.

These four ideas suffer an explanatory gap of which intutive common sense is sceptical …

(1) Karl Poppers Epistemology – that the truth of what we know about the world is based on argument in response to problems we already see, rather than any absolute logical induction of any kind.

(2) Hugh Everett’s Quantum Multiverse – that the best explanation of quantum behaviour, including interference, is the reality of many worlds – the multiverse, conveniently ignored by black box quantum recipes like the Copenhagen Interpretation.

(3) Alan Turing’s Universal Computing Machine – that finite physical resources make tractable the computation of any problem with a solution in the physical world, with two corollaries – firtsly that there are no solutions (or any kind of mathematics) not in the physical world, and secondly that virtual reality can behave as and only as any physical reality.

(4) Darwinian / Dawkins’ Evolution – that the existence and complexity of life is a matter of information replication – fundamentally nothing more, nothing less. Terrestrial life being constructed on a substrate of physics and chemistry does not mean that complex, emergent life is any less fundamental than any of the above concepts.

What Deutsch does is show how each of the above is explainable in terms of some combinations of all or part of each of the others – that together they form a consistent explanatory whole “better” than any other available models. Despite each having an explanatory gap, they plug each other’s gaps to form a whole.

Deutsch hammers Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” explanation of why each of the individual theories fails to assert itself as the accepted paradigmatic world view – the conservative defense mechanisms and (tendency to) schematic blindness that preserve old views. Kuhn’s view is I guess a grotesque pastiche of a collection of no particular real scenarios, so Deutsch is maybe correct in that respect from the perspective of science and the professions. I suspect Kuhn’s caricature is more true of competitive commercial affairs of business and economies, where his ideas have found wide acceptance in management theories.

Notwithstanding Deutsch’s unifying expanatory power of the four (main) threads, the most powerful message for me – where my original focus was strictly epistemology – models of knowledge – but where I kept tripping up over the undoubted significance of all the other threads – is this.

Causality and free-will have perplexed many a thinker into arriving at the conclusion it’s all an illusion. The fine Sue Blackmore arrived at that very depressing end-point as I noted only a couple of weeks ago, and as did Dan Dennett before her. Well David Deutsch’s explanation is this – analysis leads to to that conclusion only because you believe in the common sensical “flow of time” model in this universe. With the quantum multiverse – all the open futures exist already – what causality does is determine which world which outcome really exists in. Tough to grasp, but convincingly argued.

Not only do free-will and causality exist, thanks to thread (2) but the consequence is immense for thread (4). Even if life turns out to exist only as terrestrial life in this solar system – (an insignificant stain of “scum” on an insignificant planet of an average sun nowhere special in an insignicant galaxy amongst countless others in this universe) – which is itself statistically highly unlikely given the multiverse of universes that exsist in reality – even if that were true – the future of the multiverse depends on the action of our life. Life is the most powerful force determining the future.

That is not just optimistic, it is quite frankly a daunting thought. You can understand the attraction of the pessimistic paradigm – Kuhnian or not.

This is a very important book. Go read.

[A few postscripts – off the main topic …

For you Pisrigians – there’s a nice line in the significance of history in explaining – well – anything, which should add fuel to the philosophy vs philosophology debate.

For those of you “pro-anti-qualia-ists”, “immediate-experiencists”, “what’s-it-like-to-be-a-bat-ists”, “brain-in-a-vat-ists”, or “mary-the-colour-scientists” – there’s an intersting treatise on universal virtual reality generators.

For you sci-fi fans, of which I’m not one, there is a nice angle on explaining so-called time-travel paradoxes.

For you quantum-computists – there is a surprising lack of holography, given the fundamental explanatory nature of quantum interference between the multiple-universes.

For you quantum-consciousness people – there is an sceptical view of large scale coherence (tubules or pixie-dust) supporting anything other than a classical computer in the brain-mind debate.

And many more goodies …. ]

Mathematics Physical Awareness

The Apothecary highlights that April 2005 is Mathematics Awareness Month, reminds me that I’m well through reading David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality”.

I owe a fairly thorough review, because it has already made a big impression. The first time I’ve been convinced by the “multiverse” idea being more than an allegorical predictive metaphor, actually more an explanatory model of the “real” world. Several other key concepts too. I mentioned before about a non-reductive view of what makes something “fundamental”. Notwithstanding the fact that physics underlies chemistry, underlies, biology, etc, there is nothing more fundamental than life (replication) itself, for example.

The main mathematical point here is Deutsch’s contention that mathematics is constrained not by some pure logical, abstract concepts, but by physical reality, with the corollary that pure logic is itself an illusion – argumentation being the only test of truth. Some great extensions of Turing universal computer into the concept of a universal virtual-reality generator, being indistinguishable from reality, and (like maths and computation) obeying the laws of physics rather than logic – quantum physics of course.

is view of time and causality seems to support absence of free-will until he exposes that our common sense view of time is badly misled by experiencing only one the multiverses. Tough going, but fascinating. Good chapter summaries make re-capping easy, even if the quality of writing is not in Blackmore’s class.

I can’t recommend Deutsch too highly. Stuff I’ve not seen expressed elsewhere – which is increasingly uncommon.

[Some great stuff on Ray’s site again – check out the octopus walking on two legs !]

Creation – Would You Adam & Eve It ?

BBC again, this time a report from UK teachers unions alarmed that creationist twaddle is spreading from US into UK school curricula materials.

“Evolution is not compatible with christianity” says Monty White of the “creation science movement”. He’s not wrong there – biologically & genetically at least, some hope for the right outcome then. Would that he were right memetically; the virus requires active resistance to curb its spread, whilst the supernaturalists hold the ace cards of fear and disprovability.