Category: Science

Causing Incoherence to Exist

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was continuing discussion on Richard Carrier vs. the Apologists but the format of the blog posting system made a detailed conversation difficult, so I decided to continue here. My core argument is that the premises of Kalam are incoherent. I also think some of the responses are as well.

But what do we mean by incoherent?

Richard interpreted that to mean logically impossible, but my intent was that incoherence is a property of the semantics of the words. Statements are incoherent when they don’t make sense or only make sense with a very narrow and unwarranted reading of the statement. The following argument follows a fairly standard analytic tradition analysis of examining the meaning of statements. I am currently fond of David Lewis’s school of thought on semantics, where the meaning of words exist as a combination of mild referential attachment, coherence within a network of other words, and, importantly, some words within that network achieve what is called “reference magnetism” in that they are tied to reality in significant ways and pull at the meaning of other words.

For instance, consider Premise 1 of a modern take on Kalam:

All things that begin to exist have a cause.

OK, so what does begin to exist mean? And how about cause? Let’s unpack “begin to exist,” first. We might say in our everyday world of people that, say, cars begin to exist at some point. But when is that point? For instance, is it latent in the design for the car? Is it when the body panels are attached on the assembly line? Is it when the final system is capable of car behavior? That is, when all the parts that were in fact designed are fully operational?… Read the rest

Two Points on Penrose, and One On Motivated Reasoning

Mark Davis1 Comment

Sir Roger Penrose is, without doubt, one of the most interesting polymaths of recent history. Even where I find his ideas fantastical, they are most definitely worth reading and understanding. Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast interview with Penrose from early January of this year is a treat.

I’ve previously discussed the Penrose-Hameroff conjectures concerning wave function collapse and their implication of quantum operations in the micro-tubule structure of the brain. I also used the conjecture in a short story. But the core driver for Penrose’s original conjecture, namely that algorithmic processes can’t explain human consciousness, has always been a claim in search of support. Equally difficult is pushing consciousness into the sphere of quantum phenomena that tend to show random, rather than directed, behavior. Randomness doesn’t clearly relate to the “hard problem” of consciousness that is about the experience of being conscious.

But take the idea that since mathematicians can prove things that are blocked by Gödel incompleteness, our brains must be different from Turing machines or collections of them. Our brains are likely messy and not theorem proving machines per se, despite operating according to logico-causal processes. Indeed, throw in an active analog to biological evolution based on variation-and-retention of ideas and insights that might actually have a bit of pseudo-randomness associated with it, and there is no reason to doubt that we are capable of the kind of system transcendence that Penrose is looking for.

Note that this doesn’t in any way impact the other horn of Penrose-Hameroff concerning the measurement problem in quantum theory, but there is no reason to suspect that quantum collapse is necessary for consciousness. It might flow the other way, though, and Penrose has created the Penrose Institute to look experimentally for evidence about these effects.… Read the rest

Narcissism, Nonsense and Pseudo-Science

Mark Davis5 Comments

I recently began posting pictures of our home base in Sedona to Instagram (check it out in column to right). It’s been a strange trip. If you are not familiar with how Instagram works, it’s fairly simple: you post pictures and other Instagram members can “follow” you and you can follow them, meaning that you see their pictures and can tap a little heart icon to show you like their pictures. My goal, if I have one, is just that I like the Northern Arizona mountains and deserts and like thinking about the composition of photographs. I’m also interested in the gear and techniques involved in taking and processing pictures. I did, however, market my own books on the platform—briefly, and with apologies.

But Instagram, like Facebook, is a world unto itself.

Shortly after starting on the platform, I received follows from blond Russian beauties who appear to be marketing online sex services. I have received odd follows from variations on the same name who have no content on their pages and who disappear after a day or two if I don’t follow them back. Though I don’t have any definitive evidence, I suspect these might be bots. I have received follows from people who seemed to be marketing themselves as, well, people—including one who bait-and-switched with good landscape photography. They are typically attractive young people, often showing off their six-pack abs, and trying to build a following with the goal of making money off of Instagram. Maybe they plan to show off products or reference them, thus becoming “influencers” in the lingo of social media. Maybe they are trying to fund their travel experiences by reaping revenue from advertisers that co-exist with their popularity in their image feed.… 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

Structure and Causality in Political Revolutions

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Can political theories be tested like scientific ones? And if they can, does it matter? Alexis Papazoglou argues in the New Republic that, even if they can be tested, it is less important than other factors in the success of the political theory. In his signal case, the conflict between anti-globalist populists and the conventional international order is questioned as resulting in clear outcomes that somehow will determine the viability of one theory versus the other. It’s an ongoing experiment. Papazoglou breaks down the conflict as parallel to the notion that scientific processes ultimately win on falsifiability and rationality. In science, as per Kuhn’s landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process is more paradigmatic agendas, powerful leaders, and less calculated rationality.

The scientific process may have been all of those things, of course, and may continue to be so in the future, but there are ongoing developments that make it less likely that sociological factors will dominate. And this is why the comparison with political theories is perhaps wrongheaded. There may be a community of political theorists but they are hardly the primary architects and spectators of politics, unlike science and scientists. We are all political actors, yet very few have the time or inclination to look carefully at the literature on the threat of successful authoritarian Chinese civilization versus Western liberal democracy, for instance. But we are not all scientific actors, despite being governed by the reality of the world around us. Politics yells and seethes while science quietly attends a conference. Even the consequences of science are often so gradualistic in their unfolding that we barely notice them; see the astonishing progress on cancer survival in the past decades and note the need for economic discounting for global climate change, where the slow creep of existential threats are somehow given dollar values.… 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

Running, Ancient Roman Science, Arizona Dive Bars, and Lightning Machine Learning

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I just returned from running in Chiricahua National Monument, Sedona, Painted Desert, and Petrified Forest National Park, taking advantage of the late spring before the heat becomes too intense. Even so, though I got to Massai Point in Chiricahua through 90+ degree canyons and had around a liter of water left, I still had to slow down and walk out after running short of liquid nourishment two-thirds down. There is an eerie, uncertain nausea that hits when hydration runs low under high stress. Cliffs and steep ravines take on a wolfish quality. The mind works to control feet against stumbling and the lips get serrated edges of parched skin that bite off without relieving the dryness.

I would remember that days later as I prepped to overnight with a wilderness permit in Petrified Forest only to discover that my Osprey Exos pack frame had somehow been bent, likely due to excessive manhandling by airport checked baggage weeks earlier. I considered my options and drove eighty miles to Flagstaff to replace the pack, then back again.

I arrived in time to join Dr. Richard Carrier in an unexpected dive bar in Holbrook, Arizona as the sunlight turned to amber and a platoon of Navajo pool sharks descended on the place for billiards and beers. I had read that Dr. Carrier would be stopping there and it was convenient to my next excursion, so I picked up signed copies of his new book, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, as well as his classic, On the Historicity of Jesus, that remains part of the controversial samizdat of so-called “Jesus mythicism.”

If there is a distinguishing characteristic of OHJ it is the application of Bayesian Theory to the problems of historical method.… Read the rest

Gravity and the Dark Star

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I began at 5 AM from the Broomfield Aloft hotel, strategically situated in a sterile “new urban” office park cum apartment complex along the connecting freeway between Denver and Boulder. The whole weekend was fucked in a way: colleges across Colorado were moving in for a Monday start, half of Texas was here already, and most of Colorado planned to head north to the zone of totality. I split off I-25 around Loveland and had success using US 85 northbound through Cheyenne. Continuing up 85 was the original plan, but that fell apart when 85 came to a crawl in the vast prairie lands of Wyoming. I dodged south and east, then, (dodging will be a continuing theme) and entered Nebraska’s panhandle with middling traffic.

I achieved totality on schedule north of Scottsbluff. And it was spectacular. A few fellow adventurers were hanging out along the outflow lane of an RV dump at a state recreation area. One guy flew his drone around a bit. Maybe he wanted B roll for other purposes. I got out fast, but not fast enough, and dodged my way through lane closures designed to provide access from feeder roads. The Nebraska troopers were great, I should add, always willing to wave to us science and spectacle immigrants. Meanwhile, SiriusXM spewed various Sibelius pieces that had “sun” in their name, while the Grateful Dead channel gave us a half dozen versions of Dark Star, the quintessential jam song for the band that dates to the early, psychedelic era of the band.

Was it worth it? I think so, though one failed dodge that left me in a ten mile bumper-to-bumper crawl in rural Nebraska with a full bladder tested my faith in the stellar predictability of gravity.… Read the rest

Bright Sarcasm in the Classroom

Mark Davis1 Comment

When a Pew research poll discovered a shocking divide between self-identifying Republicans/GOP-leaning Independents and their Democratic Party opposites on the question of the value of higher education, the commentariat went apeshit. Here’s a brief rundown of sources, left, center, and right, and what they decided are the key issues:

  • National Review: Higher education has eroded the Western canon and turned into a devious plot to rob our children of good thinking, spiked with avocado toast.
  • Paul Krugman at New York Times: Conservative tribal identification leads to opposition to climate change science or evolution, and further towards a “grim” anti-intellectualism.
  • New Republic: There is no evidence that college kid’s political views are changed by higher education and, also, that conservative-minded professors aren’t much maltreated on campus either, so the conservative complaints are just overblown anti-liberal hype that, they point out, has some very negative consequences.

I would make a slightly more radical claim than Krugman, for instance, and one that is pointedly opposed to Simonson at National Review. In higher education we see not just a dedication to science but an active program of criticizing and deconstructing ideas like the Western canon as central to higher thought. In history, great man theories have been broken down into smart and salient compartments that explore the many ways in which groups and individuals, genders and ideas, all were part of fashioning the present. These changes, largely late 20th century academic inventions, have broken up the monopolies on how concepts of law, order, governance, and the worth of people were once formulated. This must be anti-conservative in the pure sense that there is little to be conserved from older ideas, except as objects of critique.… Read the rest