Rise, Teleonomatons!

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My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of 19th century philosophical idealists that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Death, Healing, and Language Games

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A phone call came in the early afternoon in late August: she was reclined on her day bed and she was dead. She had lain down for a nap and didn’t wake up. In the subsequent weeks there has been a rallying of the families, grief, tremendous effort, flights before dawn, and scripted expressions of condolences. In my youth I had necessarily been a rules deconstructor, going in bare feet to a wedding, challenging expectations, trying to find novel ways to intervene—sometimes boorishly, I’m certain. But now I prize cheerful clarity and just volunteer to do whatever is needed to reach our collective goals. Remember: freedom and coordination.

In moments like this there are somewhat scripted conventions for discussing the hard matters of duties and feelings. These language games have organically arisen from contending forces, from Anglo-American sentimentality to the influence of organized religion, and they serve to facilitate life transitions. And now they have been summarized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that have trained on the masses of written content on the web to the point that they have reliable consistency. An emergency room doctor reports in the New York Times that ChatGPT does a better job than he does at the hard job of best-practices for bedside manner when conveying bad news. He also notes that LLMs are remarkably reliable for refining the scripted discussion of symptoms and medical diagnoses.

So a counter to the “slop economy” at least that provides some guidance for harried professionals trying to do a good job at the delicate threshold of personal pain and fear. The stochastic parroting is suddenly desirable insofar as it is parroting best practices and conventions.… Read the rest

In the Madding Crowd

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The travesty of diffusion theory is not that it has displaced overlay theory and source analysis, but that it has been allowed to fertilize a generation of academics and practitioners who liken its inventor and enthusiastic promoter, Suds Beamershiff, to an Einstein of crowd size analytics. Arch and preternaturally adroit in conversation, Beams (as his grad students and lovers call him) turned the narrow and strenuously academic discipline into a distinct ring in the big top (or lower circle, some might say) of contemporary politics with his recent smattering of talk news appearances where he would shake his warm chaos of bangs gelled up above his blond eyebrows as he raised his left index finger to make and hold a point. The camera was as fascinated as the public was and he found himself quickly voted onto the editorial board of Crowd Demography, Science and Philosophy, the preeminent publication for both the practitioner and the cognoscenti. There was scant support for diffusion, but there was genuine new enthusiasm for Beams that even infected the old-schoolers drowning in their musty beards and tweeds. The most obvious comparison to Beams’ rapid rise was the sudden global fascination with Australian Rules Breaking that was shattering expectations about dance, art, and even crowd-sizing issues during street performances in Wollongong and Perth. The Kangaroo Punch Up was gaining mindshare and the masses followed.

All of that overshadows Crowd Analytics 2024 (Crownal 2024) even as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started promoting a competition to ascertain the accuracy of all known methods for analysis, a shoot-out of sorts designed to evaluate the different approaches and enable better depths of crowd insights. The locals ride the Metro to Reston Town Center in their light professionals while the visiting crowd of academics in polos and hoodies bounces from restaurant to bar and then downtown for shadow vacations mashed onto the end of the conference.… Read the rest

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

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One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest

A Myth for Fools and Children

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Like the Overton Window, the Economic Expectations Window is the range of acceptable ideas about economics. Here’s my answer to the question of what I would do about inflation if I had been debating with Trump and Biden:

Folks, these two clowns (and one is more clownish than the other…you be the judge) are not divulging the truth about inflation. Here it is: the best guess by economists about our recent spat of inflation is that it was caused by two factors. First, consumer patterns shifted during COVID and that put demand stress on certain areas of the economy. Money chased after home offices and accessory dwelling units, and it stopped flowing to travel and tourism and eating out. Second, the payments and benefits to people—payments that were needed to head off greater suffering and possibly an economic depression—enhanced the effect. You had more money and lots of time on your hands.

There is no Biden or Trump economy. It’s a myth for fools and children, at least insofar as neither of them does anything dumbly radical (ahem, crazy tariffs).

The primary tool our government uses to manage inflation is the independent Federal Reserve changing certain government interest rates and attempting to slow spending. They have a hard task—a difficult balance—because they don’t want to force the economy into a recession. Raised interest rates ripple out and also impact the affordability of homes and cars. But the president doesn’t control how the Fed sets interest rates. They are independent and for good cause: to avoid creating an economic mess for political reasons like juicing the economy before an election.

There is one other tool that presidents do have a hand in, however, and that is taxes and spending by the government.

… Read the rest

Uncertainty, Murder, and Emergent Free Will

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I’ll jump directly into my main argument without stating more than the basic premise that if determinism holds all our actions cannot be otherwise and there is no “libertarian” free will.

Let’s construct a robot (R) that has a decision-making apparatus (DM), some sensors (S) for collecting impressions about our world, and a memory (M) of all those impressions and past decisions of DM. DM is pretty much an IF-THEN arrangement but has a unique feature. It has subroutines that generate new IF-THENs by taking existing rules and randomly recombining them together with variation. This might be done by simply snipping apart at logical operations (blue AND wings AND small => bluejay at 75% can be pulled apart into “blue AND wings” and “wings AND small” and those two combined with other such rules). This generative subroutine (GS) then scores the novel IF-THENs by comparing them to the recorded history contained in M as well as current sensory impressions and keeps the new rule that scores best or the top few if they score closely. The scoring methodology might include a combination of coverage and fidelity to the impressions and/or recalled action/impressions.

Now this is all quite deterministic. I mentioned randomness but we can produce pseudo-random number generators that are good enough or even rely on a small electronic circuit that amplifies thermodynamic noise to get something “truly” random. But really we could just substitute an algorithm that checks every possible reorganization and scores them all and shelve the randomness component, alleviating any concerns that we are smuggling in randomness for our later construct of free agency.

Now let’s add a rule to DM that when R perceives it has been treated unfairly it might murder the human being who treated it that way.… Read the rest

A Pelican Ate a Lemon and the Kindness Test

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The Pelican State, Louisiana, just passed a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. The posters have a specified size and must be paid for by private donations. The purpose of the law is a blatant attempt to get religion back in public schools but the legal convolutions for trying it out once again are rather interesting, though I don’t think the reasoning will work.

Here’s an NPR interview with Matt Krause of the First Liberty Institute that defends religious liberty cases and supports the new law. He specifically singles out Kennedy v. Bremerton School District as showing a path forward for the Decalogue to reappear on schoolhouse walls. In Kennedy, a football coach would go pray at the 50-yard-line after games. He didn’t gather students with him or utter prayers over a loudspeaker. He just prayed alone. The school district fired him because they were nervous about the separation of church and state and the appearance of endorsement by the school system due to an employee acting religious. SCOTUS, however, used a balancing test between the coach’s First Amendment rights and the school’s desire for non-endorsement and concluded that the school system went too far. Krause thinks that the suspension in Kennedy of a hard delimitation gained from Lemon v. Kurtzman and the adoption of a weaker “history and tradition” standard creates a gap that the Decalogue can sneak through.

I doubt it. The balancing in Kennedy sheds little light on schoolhouse Ten Commandments posters which were ruled against in Stone v. Graham. In Stone, a strict “Lemon test” was applied to the display and it was found to have no secular purpose.… Read the rest

Indeterminacy and the Ethics of Emergence

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Continuing on with this theme of an ethics of emergence, can we formulate something interesting that does better than just assert that freedom and coordination are inherent virtues in this new scheme? And what does that mean anyway in the dirty details? We certainly see natural, emergent systems that exhibit tight regulatory control where stability, equilibrium, and homeostasis prevent dissipation, like those hoped-for fascist organismic states. There is not much free about these lower level systems, but we think that though they are necessary they are insufficient for the higher-order challenges of a statistically uncertain world. And that uncertainty is what drives the emergence of control systems in the first place. The control breaks out at some level, though, in a kind of teleomatic inspiration, and applies stochastic exploration of the adaptive landscape. Freedom then arises as an additional control level, emergent itself.

We also have this lurking possibility that emergent systems may not be explainable in the same manner that we have come to expect scientific theories to work. Being highly contingent they can only be explained in specificity about their contingent emergence, not by these elegant little explanatory theories that we have now in fields like physics. Stephen Wolfram, and the Santa Fe Institute folks as well, investigated this idea but it has remained inconclusive in its predictive power so far, though that may be changing.

There is an interesting alternative application for deep learning models and, more generally, the application of enormous simulation systems: when emergent complexity is daunting, use simulation to uncover the spectrum of relationships that govern complex system behavior.

Can we apply that to this ethics or virtue system and gain insights from it?… Read the rest

A Manifold of Non-Tiresome Heavens

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It’s the rage these days to wax indignant over the rise of authoritarian figures around the world. From Trump to Putin, Victor Orban, and the right-wing parties of Europe, the fear is that our experiment in post-World War II and then post-Cold War liberalism is at risk of being distorted and abraded by a desire for cultural uniformity. A common refrain is that the visibility of and legal restructuring around LGBTQ+ and ethnic/minority communities, as well as a sprinkling of environmentalism, is moving so quickly that a slight majority of the electorate wants to stand in the path of change “yelling stop,” to paraphrase Bill Buckley. Ripple effects then will break down the slow-built institutions that define contemporary liberal democracies and soon we have concentration camps for dissenters.

In America, there are nostalgic swoons for Ronald Reagan and some idealized middle-class heaven from the economic growth-phase of the 1950s when everyone went to church and the worst swear word was “golly gee!” The uniformity and comfort that people felt about their roles in their communities combined with a bedrock belief in family, faith, and devotion to country that was as reliable as America’s continuous economic growth. It was good to be alive and all the backward peoples of the world would maybe someday catch up if they didn’t all die of famine first.

But I can never quite understand what those who lean authoritarian want for their future world? I call most of the hypothetical visions “tiresome heavens” because they reflect the old joke of how Christian heaven must be a monotonous, uniform place. Just sit around in perfect blissful union with one’s Creator. Nothing really to do, no stressors, no wants, no struggles; it is a transcendent promise that is more geologic than human.… Read the rest

When the Cranes Cry

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The crane has a symbolic resonance in Celtic mythology. A magician, assuming an elaborate pose—one eye open and one leg drawn up—was said to see into the otherworld, just as the crane itself moved from sky to land to water. But there is the other meaning of the word crane: the ancient lifting contraption that helped build Greece and likely had a role in Egypt and Sumeria before that. And now they protrude into the urban sky, raising up our buildings and even other cranes as we densify our cities. It was this mechanical meaning that Dan Dennett at Tufts chose to contrast with conceptual skyhooks, the unsupported contrivances that save protagonists in plays by dangling gods above the stage. For Dennett, the building crane is the metaphor we should apply to the mindless, simple algorithm of evolution. The algorithm raises up species and thus creates our mysterious ideas about meaning and purpose. No skyhooks or Deus ex Machina are needed.

Dennett passed away at 82 in Maine leaving a legacy as a public intellectual who engaged in the pursuit of reason throughout his adult career. He was committed to the idea that this world—this teeming ensemble of living matter—is intrinsically miraculous, built up by something dead simple into all the convolutions and perilous ideas that we now use to parse its mysteries. He was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the so-called New Atheism craze of 2008-2010, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, but even then he was committed to the crane metaphor to displace these ancient skyhooks of belief rather than, say, a satirical impact-analysis of religion a la Hitchens.

There is another phrase that Dennett championed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: universal acid.… Read the rest