Pick up the Kindle version of ¡Reconquista! at Amazon. A paperback version is in the works. There is also reconquista.pub that has all the books and more!… Read the rest
Author: Mark Davis
Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.
The Illiberal, Openness, and Oppression
Continuing on with my fascination with intellectual conservatism (just removed denigrating scare quotes at the last minute), Sohrab Ahmari vs. David French is a curious anomaly to me, though it may have been always lurking below the surface. Certainly, going back to the Moral Majority, the desire of conservatives to have their version of Christianity play a greater role in US governance has been with us in terms of voting patterns and cultural preferences, but the notion that among the intelligentsia there was a desire for some kind of Christian Dominionism or at least greater control of the public square is not a perspective I’ve encountered. Instead, there were more targeted approaches like criticizing Roe v. Wade on the basis of constitutional arguments and legal ideas, or working towards expanding tax-dollar flows to home schoolers or other select (I originally wrote “fringe” here, but need to work on my neutral voice language that ebbs and flows) religious ideas. The religious deserved to not be disregarded in the face of cultural drift.
It’s worth noting that using the US Constitution as a touchstone for bolstering protections for the religious seems to most of us as a secular appeal rather than a scriptural or theological one. Such an approach squares nicely with our increasing defense of the rights and freedoms of groups previously marginalized or discriminated against. Yet part of the right (Ahmari and a pastor named Doug Wilson, at least; French is their foe) sees a desire for greater cultural and political control as actually rooted in that legal basis. After all, if reason is intrinsically derived from their god, then the reason in the American Experiment is always and inextricably tied to that god.… Read the rest
Bereitschaftspotential and the Rehabilitation of Free Will
The question of whether we, as people, have free will or not is both abstract and occasionally deeply relevant. We certainly act as if we have something like libertarian free will, and we have built entire systems of justice around this idea, where people are responsible for choices they make that result in harms to others. But that may be somewhat illusory for several reasons. First, if we take a hard deterministic view of the universe as a clockwork-like collection of physical interactions, our wills are just a mindless outcome of a calculation of sorts, driven by a wetware calculator with a state completely determined by molecular history. Second, there has been, until very recently, some experimental evidence that our decision-making occurs before we achieve a conscious realization of the decision itself.
But this latter claim appears to be without merit, as reported in this Atlantic article. Instead, what was previously believed to be signals of brain activity that were related to choice (Bereitschaftspotential) may just be associated with general waves of neural activity. The new experimental evidence puts the timing of action in line with conscious awareness of the decision. More experimental work is needed—as always—but the tentative result suggests a more tightly coupled pairing of conscious awareness with decision making.
Indeed, the results of this newer experimental result gets closer to my suggested model of how modular systems combined with perceptual and environmental uncertainty can combine to produce what is effectively free will (or at least a functional model for a compatibilist position). Jettisoning the Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity part of that argument and just focusing on the minimal requirements for decision making in the face of uncertainty, we know we need a thresholding apparatus that fires various responses given a multivariate statistical topology.… Read the rest
A Great, Modern Rambling
I read across the political spectrum. I would say I read religiously across the political spectrum, but that is using the term in a secondary and impoverished way, which is part of my point in this particular post. When an author has no clearly defined thesis there is a tendency to ramble, or to fall back on form in the absence of content, or to play to the expectations of the audience through deliberate obscurity.
It is by a chance intersection that I encountered two ideologically conservative pieces that suffer from this tendency in the same week, but it could also be that everyone on the right is exasperated by the often vacuous—and always narcissistic—current happenings within the political parties that represent them. I sympathize with them if that’s their defense, and will also agree that the far left can be equally exhausting.
It has become de rigueur for the right’s commentariat to claim that this is not what they expect from the Party of Lincoln or, given a spat with National Review, that the magazine lacks the heft of Bill Buckley’s original ideals. If all of conservatism has become tainted by reactionaries and semi-populists, the very idea of intellectual conservatism huddles against an ever-present and threatening cloud.
So we start with Andrew Sullivan’s rambling in New York Magazine. Sullivan likes to praise the intellectual heft of those he argues against. Maybe he just likes to be pleasant and this is his way of signaling a commonality of purpose, or perhaps it’s to gird his own rejoinders as having equal weight. In this piece, it’s hard to discern why. The entire argument is a typology or map of what a center-right conservative is and is not.… Read the rest
Deep Learning with Quantum Decoherence
Getting back to metaphors in science, Wojciech Zurek’s so-called Quantum Darwinism is in the news due to a series of experimental tests. In Quantum Darwinism (QD), the collapse of the wave function (more properly the “extinction” of states) is a result of decoherence from environmental entanglement. There is a kind of replication in QD, where pointer states are multiplied, and then a kind of environmental selection as well. There is no variation per se, however, though some might argue that the pointer states imprinted by the environment are variants of the originals. Still, it makes the metaphor a bit thin at the edges, but it is close enough for the core idea to fit most of the floor-plan of Darwinism. Indeed, some champion it as part of a more general model for everything. Even selection among viable multiverse bubbles has a similar feel to it: some survive while others perish.
I’ve been simultaneously studying quantum computing and complexity theories that are getting impressively well developed. Richard Cleve’s An Introduction to Quantum Complexity Theory and John Watrous’s Quantum Computational Complexity are notable in their bridging from traditional computational complexity to this newer world of quantum computing using qubits, wave functions, and even decoherence gates.
Decoherence sucks for quantum computing in general, but there may be a way to make use of it. For instance, an artificial neural network (ANN) also has some interesting Darwinian-like properties to it. The initial weight distribution in an ANN is typically a random real value. This is designed to simulate the relative strength of neural connections. Real neural connections are much more complex than this, doing interesting cyclic behavior, saturating and suppressing based on neurotransmitter availability, and so forth, but assuming just a straightforward pattern of connectivity has allowed for significant progress.… Read the rest
Bullshit, Metaphors, and Political Precision
Given this natural condition of uncertainty in the meaning of words, and their critical role in communication, to say the least, we can certainly expect that as we move away from the sciences towards other areas of human endeavor we have even greater vagueness in trying to express complex ideas. Politics is an easy example. America’s current American president is a babbling bullshitter, to use the explanatory framework of the essay, On Bullshit, and he is easy to characterize as an idiot, like when he conflates Western liberalism with something going on exclusively in modern California.
In this particular case, we have to track down what “liberal” means and meant at various times, then try to suss out how that meaning is working today. At one time, the term was simply expressive of freedom with minimal government interference. Libertarians still carry a version of that meaning forward, but liberalism also came to mean something akin to a political focus on government spending to right perceived economic and social disparities (to achieve “freedom from want and despair,” via FDR). And then it began to be used as a pejorative related to that same focus.
As linguist John McWhorter points out, abstract ideas—and perhaps especially political ones—are so freighted with their pragmatic and historical background that the best we can say is that we are actively working out what a given term means. McWhorter suggests that older terms like “socialist” are impossible to put to work effectively; a newer term like “progressive” is more desirable because it carries less baggage.
An even stronger case is made by George Lakoff where he claims central metaphors that look something like Freudian abstractions govern political perspectives.… Read the rest
A Most Porous Barrier
Whenever there is a scientific—or even a quasi-scientific—theory invented, there are those who take an expansive view of the theory, broadly applying it to other areas of thought. This is perhaps inherent in the metaphorical nature of these kinds of thought patterns. Thus we see Darwinian theory influenced by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of economic optimization. Then we get Spencer’s Social Darwinism arising from Darwin. And E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology leads to evolutionary psychology, immediately following an activist’s pitcher of ice water.
The is-ought barrier tends towards porousness, allowing the smuggling of insights and metaphors lifted from the natural world as explanatory footwork for our complex social and political interactions. After all, we are as natural as we are social. But at the same time, we know that science is best when it is tentative and subject to infernal levels of revision and reconsideration. Decisions about social policy derived from science, and especially those that have significant human impact, should be cushioned by a tentative level of trust as well.
E.O. Wilson’s most recent book, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies, is a continuation of his late conversion to what is now referred to as “multi-level selection,” where natural selection is believed to operate at multiple levels, from genes to whole societies. It remains a controversial theory that has been under development and under siege since Darwin’s time, when the mechanism of inheritance was not understood.
The book is brief and does not provide much, if any, new material since his Social Conquest of Earth, which was significantly denser and contained notes derived from his controversial 2010 Nature paper that called into question whether kin selection was overstated as a gene-level explanation of altruism and sacrifice within eusocial species.… Read the rest
Metaphors as Bridges to the Future
David Lewis’s (I’m coming to accept this new convention with s-ending possessives!) solution to Putnam’s semantic indeterminacy is that we have a network of concepts that interrelate in a manner that is consistent under probing. As we read, we know from cognitive psychology, texts that bridge unfamiliar concepts from paragraph to paragraph help us to settle those ideas into the network, sometimes tentatively, and sometimes needing some kind of theoretical reorganization as we learn more. Then there are some concepts that have special referential magnetism and are piers for the bridges.
You can see these same kinds of bridging semantics being applied in the quest to solve some our most difficult and unresolved scientific conundrums. Quantum physics has presented strangeness from its very beginning and the various interpretations of that strangeness and efforts to reconcile the strange with our everyday logic remains incomplete. So it is not surprising that efforts to unravel the strange in quantum physics often appeal to Einstein’s descriptive approach to deciphering the strange problems of electromagnetic wave propagation that ultimately led to Special and then General Relativity.
Two recent approaches that borrow from the Einstein model are Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics and David Albert’s How to Teach Quantum Mechanics. Both are quite explicit in drawing comparisons to the relativity approach; Einstein, in merging space and time, and in realizing inertial and gravitational frames of reference were indistinguishable, introduced an explanation that defied our expectations of ordinary, Newtonian physical interactions. Time was no longer a fixed universal but became locked to observers and their relative motion, and to space itself.
Yet the two quantum approaches are decidedly different, as well. For Rovelli, there is no observer-independent state to quantum affairs.… Read the rest
¡Reconquista!
¡Reconquista! lives! Though with fewer exclamation points, much less signo de apertura de exclamación! Ahem. Here’s a preview:
Herb Malconia has a dog problem that goes back generations. The rabid beast chained to his shed is the incarnation of his grandfather. Or so says the local seer in the hamlet that straddles the border with Mexico. Once men raided into Texas and his great-grandmother bore a child from the border ravishment. There is an antidote to the dog curse, but it involves hijacking surveillance drones, avenging raids into Mexico, trapping bats by moonlight, and stealing the possessed cowboy hat of an up-and-coming politician.
In ¡Reconquista!, a farce and satire of today’s America, the country is polarized by identity politics, conspiracy theories, the opioid crisis, and a surly impotence in the face of social change. A host of characters entwine in subplots and vignettes that build toward a dark climax. The reader meets Maria de la Santa Ana Cuellar Ramirez de los Trinidad Martyr Remedios Sanchez, PhD, a Mexican academic elitist (and Herb’s distant relation) who rises to colonel in a drug cartel that has become a vanity project for luchadores and narcocorridos celebrating the cartel’s leader, El Chacal. There is Cleo, aggressively queer and predatory in pursuing love. Juicy is trying to reclaim his Muslim heritage that was forced underground and to the New World in fifteenth century Iberia. A relentless FBI agent hounds and ultimately kills the wrong man, blinded by conspiracy-fueled biases. A war party of constipated white supremacists bogs down in a muddy arroyo while staging a raid into Mexico. A political boss is luridly sexist and racist while thriving on folksy revisionism in a divided America.
Doubt at the Limit
I seem to have a central theme to many of the last posts that is related to the demarcation between science and non-science, and also to the limits of what rationality allows where we care about such limits. This is not purely abstract, though, as we can see in today’s anti-science movements, whether anti-vaccination, flat Earthers, climate change deniers, or intelligent design proponents. Just today, Ars Technica reports on the first of these. The speakers at the event, held in close proximity to a massive measles outbreak, ranged from a “disgraced former gastroenterologist” to an angry rabbi. Efforts to counter them, in the form of a letter from a county supervisor and another rabbi, may have had an impact on the broader community, but probably not the die-hards of the movement.
Meanwhile, Lee Mcyntire at Boston University suggests what we are missing in these engagements in a great piece in Newsweek. Mcyntire applies the same argument to flat Earthers that I have applied to climate change deniers: what we need to reinforce is the value and, importantly, the limits inherent in scientific reasoning. Insisting, for example, that climate change science is 100% squared away just fuels the micro-circuits in the so-called meta-cognitive strategies regions of the brains of climate change deniers. Instead, Mcyntire recommends science engages the public in thinking about the limits of science, showing how doubt and process lead us to useable conclusions about topics that are suddenly fashionably in dispute.
No one knows if this approach is superior to the alternatives like the letter-writing method by authorities in the vaccination seminar approach, and it certainly seems longer term in that it needs to build against entrenched ideas and opinions, but it at least argues for a new methodology.… Read the rest