Category: epistemology

Searching for Emergence

Mark Davis1 Comment

I have a longstanding interest in the concept of emergence as a way of explaining a wide range of human ideas and the natural world. We have this incredible algorithm of evolutionary change that creates novel life forms. We have, according to mainstream materialist accounts of philosophy of mind, a consciousness that may have a unique ontology (what really exists) of subjective experiencers and qualia and intentionality, but that is also somehow emergent from the meat of the brain (or supervenes or is an epiphenomenon, etc. etc.) That emergence may be weak or strong in various accounts, with strong meaning something like the idea that a new thing is added to the ontology while weak meaning something like we just don’t know enough yet to find the reduction of the concept to its underlying causal components. If we did, then it is not really something new in this grammar of ontological necessity.

There is also the problem of computational irreducibility (CI) that has been championed by Wolfram. In CI, there are classes of computations that result in outcomes that cannot be predicted by any simpler algorithm. This seems to open the door to a strong concept of emergence: we have to run the machine to get the outcome; there is no possibility (in theory!) of reducing the outcome to any lesser approximation. I’ve brought this up as a defeater of the Simulation Hypothesis, suggesting that the complexity of a simulation is irreducible from the universe as we see it (assuming perfect coherence in the limit).

There is also a dual to this idea in algorithmic information theory (AIT) that is worth exploring. In AIT, it is uncomputable to find the shortest Turing Machine capable of accepting a given symbol sequence.… Read the rest

Incredulity as a Moral Failure

Mark Davis4 Comments

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

  1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses.
… Read the rest

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

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 existential philosophers 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

Uncertainty, Murder, and Emergent Free Will

Mark Davis3 Comments

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

When the Cranes Cry

Mark Davis1 Comment

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

Humility is Pervasive

Mark Davis2 Comments

We are having an intimate holiday season with food, family, and small adventures along the Oregon coast. There were hints of Christmas with presents and music, as well as new Yule poetry that celebrates the cycles of the ocean in a natural dialogue with the seasonal flow: “King tides pull the world upward / … / Whales coast through gabled waters…” And then there are the swirling culture wars out there somewhere trying to deny us our diverse ideas and new traditions. We don’t worry much about their misdirection, but find the lack of creativity disheartening. Why not learn and invent new ways of thinking about society and culture?

Rabbi David Wolpe at Harvard Divinity has a more historical and intellectualized take on modern life in the Atlantic where he tries to collapse all the complexity of modern political instincts into an amalgam about insufficient humility about our own ideas and capabilities. I like critiquing these kinds of intellectual histories because I am humble enough to doubt that singular ideas can explain all the myriad ways of flourishing in human history. “The Return of the Pagans” maps the contemporary left with their environmental worship—and the right with heroic icons like Donald Trump—to something like the Greco-Roman idolization of beauty, power, wealth, and creativity. It is the invention of monotheism that focused the ancient mind on a singular divinity that we poor humans can always prostrate our tiny plans before. Elon Musk shouldn’t strain to get to Mars. Tech Bros shouldn’t accelerate technological change without deep humility about the impact on society. The ultra-wealthy used to be more concerned for using their wealth for good. Everyone should instead contemplate their imperfect sin-nature in the face of perfection.… Read the rest

The Rubbery Road from Original Position to Metaphysical Naturalism

Mark Davis1 Comment

From complaints about student protests over Israel in Gaza, to the morality of new House Speaker Johnson, and even to the reality and consequences of economic inequality, there is a dynamic conversation in the media over what is morally right and, importantly, why it should be considered right. It’s perfectly normal for those discussions and considered monologues to present ideas, cases, and weigh the consequences to American life, power, and the well-being of people around the world. It also demonstrates the fact that ideas like divine command theory become irrelevant for most if not all of these discussions since they still require secular analysis and resolution. Contributions from the Abrahamic faiths (and similarly from Hindu nationalism) are largely objectionable moral ideas (“The Chosen People,” jihad, anti-woman, etc.) that are inherently preferential and exclusionary.

Indeed, this public dialogue perhaps best shows how modern people build ethical systems. It looks mostly like Rawl’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” with dashes of utilitarianism and occasional influences from religious tradition and sentiment. And reflective equilibrium has few foundational ideas beyond a basic commitment to fairness as justice using the “original position” as its starting point. That is, if we had to create a society with no advance knowledge about what our role and position might be within it (a veil of ignorance), the best for us would be to create an equal, fair, and just society.

So ethics is cognitively rubbery, with changing attachments and valences as we process options into a coherent whole. We might justify civilian deaths for a greater good when we have few options, imprecise weapons, and existential fear (say, the atom bomb in World War II).… Read the rest

Oh, the Humanities!

Mark Davis1 Comment

I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.

But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.

An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate.… Read the rest

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest