Category: epistemology

Sentience is Physical, Part 2

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Having recently moved to downtown Portland within spitting distance of Powell’s Books, I had to wander through the bookstore despite my preference for digital books these days. Digital books are easily transported, can be instantly purchased, and can be effortlessly carried in bulk. More, apps like Kindle Reader synchronize across platforms allowing me to read wherever and whenever I want without interruption. But is there a discovery feature to the shopping experience that is missing in the digital universe? I had to find out and hit the poetry and Western Philosophy sections at Powell’s as an experiment. And I did end up with new discoveries that I took home in physical form (I see it as rude to shop brick-and-mortar and then order via Amazon/Kindle), including a Borges poetry compilation and an unexpected little volume, The Body in the Mind, from 1987 by the then-head of University of Oregon’s philosophy department, Mark Johnson.

A physical book seemed apropos of the topic of the second book that focuses on the role of our physical bodies and experiences as central to the construction of meaning. Did our physical evolution and the associated requirements for survival also translate into a shaping of how our minds work? Psychologists and biologists would be surprised that there is any puzzlement over this likelihood, but Johnson is working against the backdrop of analytical philosophy that puts propositional structure as the backbone of linguistic productions and the reasoning that drives them. Mind is disconnected from body in this tradition, and subjects like metaphors are often considered “noncognitive,” which is the negation of something like “reasoned through propositional logic.”

But how do we convert these varied metaphorical concepts derived from physicality into something structured that we can reason about using effective procedures?… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

Mark Davis1 Comment

My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

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I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest

Measuring Belief and Quackery

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While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

The Illiberal, Openness, and Oppression

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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

Theoretical Reorganization

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Sean Carroll of Caltech takes on the philosophy of science in his paper, Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse, as part of a larger conversation on modern theoretical physics and experimental methods. Carroll breaks down the problems of Popper’s falsification criterion and arrives at a more pedestrian Bayesian formulation for how to view science. Theories arise, theories get their priors amplified or deflated, that prior support changes due to—often for Carroll—coherence reasons with other theories and considerations and, in the best case, the posterior support improves with better experimental data.

Continuing with the previous posts’ work on expanding Bayes via AIT considerations, the non-continuous changes to a group of scientific theories that arrive with new theories or data require some better model than just adjusting priors. How exactly does coherence play a part in theory formation? If we treat each theory as a binary string that encodes a Turing machine, then the best theory, inductively, is the shortest machine that accepts the data. But we know that there is no machine that can compute that shortest machine, so there needs to be an algorithm that searches through the state space to try to locate the minimal machine. Meanwhile, the data may be varying and the machine may need to incorporate other machines that help improve the coverage of the original machine or are driven by other factors, as Carroll points out:

We use our taste, lessons from experience, and what we know about the rest of physics to help guide us in hopefully productive directions.

The search algorithm is clearly not just brute force in examining every micro variation in the consequences of changing bits in the machine. Instead, large reusable blocks of subroutines get reparameterized or reused with variation.… Read the rest

Free Will and Algorithmic Information Theory

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was recently looking for examples of applications of algorithmic information theory, also commonly called algorithmic information complexity (AIC). After all, for a theory to be sound is one thing, but when it is sound and valuable it moves to another level. So, first, let’s review the broad outline of AIC. AIC begins with the problem of randomness, specifically random strings of 0s and 1s. We can readily see that given any sort of encoding in any base, strings of characters can be reduced to a binary sequence. Likewise integers.

Now, AIC states that there are often many Turing machines that could generate a given string and, since we can represent those machines also as a bit sequence, there is at least one machine that has the shortest bit sequence while still producing the target string. In fact, if the shortest machine is as long or a bit longer (given some machine encoding requirements), then the string is said to be AIC random. In other words, no compression of the string is possible.

Moreover, we can generalize this generator machine idea to claim that given some set of strings that represent the data of a given phenomena (let’s say natural occurrences), the smallest generator machine that covers all the data is a “theoretical model” of the data and the underlying phenomena. An interesting outcome of this theory is that it can be shown that there is, in fact, no algorithm (or meta-machine) that can find the smallest generator for any given sequence. This is related to Turing Incompleteness.

In terms of applications, Gregory Chaitin, who is one of the originators of the core ideas of AIC, has proposed that the theory sheds light on questions of meta-mathematics and specifically that it demonstrates that mathematics is a quasi-empirical pursuit capable of producing new methods rather than being idealistically derived from analytic first-principles.… Read the rest

Indifference and the Cosmos

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I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

Incompressibility and the Mathematics of Ethical Magnetism

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One of the most intriguing aspects of the current U.S. border crisis is the way that human rights and American decency get articulated in the public sphere of discourse. An initial pull is raw emotion and empathy, then there are counterweights where the long-term consequences of existing policies are weighed against the exigent effects of the policy, and then there are crackpot theories of “crisis actors” and whatnot as bizarro-world distractions. But, if we accept the general thesis of our enlightenment values carrying us ever forward into increasing rights for all, reduced violence and war, and the closing of the curtain on the long human history of despair, poverty, and hunger, we must also ask more generally how this comes to be. Steven Pinker certainly has rounded up some social theories, but what kind of meta-ethics might be at work that seems to push human civilization towards these positive outcomes?

Per the last post, I take the position that we can potentially formulate meaningful sentences about what “ought” to be done, and that those meaningful sentences are, in fact, meaningful precisely because they are grounded in the semantics we derive from real world interactions. How does this work? Well, we can invoke the so-called Cornell Realists argument that the semantics of a word like “ought” is not as flexible as Moore’s Open Question argument suggests. Indeed, if we instead look at the natural world and the theories that we have built up about it (generally “scientific theories” but, also, perhaps “folk scientific ideas” or “developing scientific theories”), certain concepts take on the character of being so-called “joints of reality.” That is, they are less changeable than other concepts and become referential magnets that have an elite status among the concepts we use for the world.… Read the rest