Conjectures

C&R

(III)

"Wittgenstein's criterion of demarcation ... is verifyability, or deducibility from observation statements. But this criterion is too narrow (and too wide): it excludes from science practically everything that is ... characteristic of it (while failing ... to exclude astrology)."

(IV)

"Without waiting... for repetitions to ... impose regularities upon us, we actively try to impose regularities on the world... Without waiting for premises we jump to conclusions. These may have to be discarded later..."

(V)

'a hungry animal divides the environment into edible and inedible things.'

"Thus we are born with expectations; with 'knowledge' which, although not valid a priori, is psychologically or genetically a priori"

(VI)

"Our propensity to look out for regularities... leads to... dogmatic thinking... we expect regularities everywhere and attempt to find them even when there are none."

"...my ideas about induction originated in a conjecture about the evolution of Western polyphony. But you will be spared this story."

Damn!

(VII)

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths."

"The method of trial and error is applied not only to Einstein but, in a more dogmatic fashion, by the amoeba also... the critical attitude may be described as the ... attempt to make our theories ... suffer in our stead."

KP didn't have the word 'meme'...

Popping Conjectures

Now reading: Conjectures and Refutations (C&R) by Karl Popper

p. 5 "For [Russell] says that epistemological relativism, or the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth, and epistemological pragmatism, or the idea that truth is the same as usefulness, are closely linked with authoritarian and totalitarian ideas."

To avoid a lengthy epistemological discussion, I will first refer to instrumentalism or pragmatism, in the sense that usefulness indicates knowledge (but not that all knowledge must be useful).

"But I think that ideas are dangerous and powerful things, and that even philosophers have sometimes produced ideas."

:D

"the belief in the rule of law... can easily survive the recognition that judges are not omniscient... but cannot well survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches there are no objective facts"

p. 8

"Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, for thousands of years, in defiance of experience, and without the aid of any conspiracy."

Given DD's explanation in terms of meme propagation, 'survive' indeed...

p. 11

"Thus we find in Plato the first transition between an optimistic and pessimistic epistemology. Each of them forms the basis of one of the two diametrically opposed philosophies of the state and society."

Plato goes from the doctrine of anamnesis: that your immortal soul knows all but forgets at birth, and my re-cognize the truth again when it sees it, to the cave: seeing the truth (anything but the shadows) is immensely difficult, and will only ever be available to few, and not believed by others.

p. 13

"Socrates' maieutic is not an art that aims at teaching any belief, but one that aims at purgiing or cleansing ... the soul of its false beliefs."

See; Russell, The Problems of Philosophy. What we know comes from science, philosophy is for teaching you what you don't know. Which may be even more important...

TBoI I: The Reach Of Explanations

Back to the Beginning of David Deutch's 'The Beginning of Infinity' (TBoF) (page #'s are hardcover.. I don't know if there is another edition yet)

p. 3

"One of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious, local means by which we create them."

"Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves."

I think we can improve on this definition of explanation. I often find the clarity lacking a bit. Even where he supplies end of chapter definitions, they are often vague (and the 'Meanings of TBOF...' sections can be downright silly). One my of critiques of the book in general is it doesn't seem to know who its audience is... it tries to be part formal philosophical treatise and part pop-sci.

p 6.

"Scientific explanations are about reality, most of which does not consist of anyone's experiences."

p. 7

"Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity."

p. 8

"...the real key to science is that our explanatory  theories ... can be improved, through conjecture, criticism, and testing."

Directly from Popper, and pretty hard to refute (ahem).

p. 10

"All observations arre, as Popper put it, theory-laden"

The remainder of the paragraph rather stretches what we would call 'theory' to include even basic sensory processing and modeling... but it's a valid point nonetheless.

p. 13

"What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism."

p. 22

"If an explanation could easily explain anything... than it actually explains nothing."

"In general, when theories are easily variable... experimental testing is almost useless for correcting these errors. I call such theories bad explanations."

"The quest for good explanations is... the basic regulating principle not only for science, but of the Enlightenment... and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress."

p. 25

"We do not test every testable theory, but only the few we find are good explanations."

Well, he puts forward his idea of a good explanation, a key part of which is that it is difficult to vary, as more important than the concept of testability or falsifiability, but being hard to vary is exactly the property that makes a theory falsifiable, so it amounts to the same thing.

It seems his use of explanation is largely interchangeable with the scientific use of the word theory (sometimes he uses the term explanatory theories), but he is probably smart to prefer the former for greater specificity.

Edit: just came across the same phrase in Popper: "Assume that we have deliberately made it our task to line in this unknown world... and to explain it... with the help of laws and explanatory theories."

p. 26

"The best explanations are the ones that are most constrained by existing knowledge... including other good explanations"

p. 28

"The reach of explanations is... the ability to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve... it it determined by the content of the explanation itself"

p. 30

"if you find an explanation anywhere in the universe, you know that there must have been an intelligent being."

I don't find much to debate in this chapter; he introduces some lingo and sets the stage. I can't argue with the Popperian epistemology. One thing I noted from the start is DD doesn't quite seem to know who is audience is. It seems part formal treatise on the philosophy of science, part pop-sci. He includes end of chapter definitions, but they are often pretty vague, which kind of defeats the purpose of a definition. And the 'Meanings of...' sections are usually pretty silly.

I can't wait 'til we get to Hilbert's Hotel :D But, I am finding a re-read valuable;

TBP

Now reading: Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

p. 10

"The truth is that the ground has disappeared beneath us, and we are just beginning to work up the courage to look down."

p. 15, chapter 2:

Good lord, straight to Star Trek transporter malfunctions.

Always

"I suspect that somebody somewhere is always playing "Tiger Rag" or "Basin Streen Blues."

"Jazz has always been more capable of digesting new musical ingrediants than other genres."

"I recently heard of an eleven-year-old who played Giant Steps like it was Chopsticks."

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Wow, I didn't know my keyboard could do that.

Unity

FDtD p. 466

"...if one asks why in the face of such divisions, one speaks of unity at all, the answer for all periods is that the ultimate unifying force of an age is its predicaments: the urgent demands, the obstacles to social peace or progress, the need for new art that Stendhal pointed out--things that alert minds cannot ignore: every living thinker or artist works to fulfil these calls or deny them in some way."

Perhaps the best sentence I've ever read with two colons, not to mention a --.

Duke

p. 167

"Here I am fifty years later, still getting cats to come out of bed, so that I can listen to them."

p. 168

"If you took the time to study the construction of fifty or so of Ellington's tracks... you would see over and over the composer's unique skill in conveying a sense of uninhinited party on the surface level but underpinning it with sober calculation in the music's inner workings."

p. 170 

"Goodman was a perfectionist who was rarely pleased with the musicians he hired, and they burnt out on his intensity, many leaving the band after only a short stint. Ellington's orchestra thrived, in contrast, because the boss didn't demand perfection, and instead built everything in the ensemble's repertoire on the demonstrated strengths of hsi personnel."

Intentionality

p. 15

"When a group is working together effectively, the individual musicians don't need to play so many notes... when the band's rhythmic cohesion is floundering, each individual in the group is tempted to overplay... lots of activity is no substitute for skilled cohesion."

p. 25

"Phrases move effortlessly from one type of subdivision of the beat into another. In my own musical education, the moment of success came when I found I could play rhythmic patterns in the music that I could no longer analyze in real time."

p. 26

"Above all, I like to hear a clear sense of intentionality in a musician's phrasing... After I have heard a phrase played with intentionality, I feel as if it is absolutely the only combination of notes that would have fit the circumstances."

"Dizzy Gillespie once claimed that the first thing that came to his mind when improvising was the rhythmic structure of the line... lesser horn players seem to end their phrases when they run out of breath."

p. 27

"it isn't a matter of loudness or energy, but rather a sense of clear intention and personal agency embodied in the melodic lines."

"(When stealing from other players... choose a different instrument from your own, and people won't notice the theft)"

p. 28

"The best way to open up your ears to phrasing is by listening to the top tier jazz vocalists."

Dynamics

p. 38

"musicians often find it difficult to agree on a change from loud to soft, or vice versa, unless they are listening closely to each other and are intimately in sync, the result is often long stretches without much dynamic variation."

p. 39

"Jazz is a hot art form. It thrives on intensity... as a result, louder is almost always the easier option on the bandstand, especially for inexperienced performers."

"Audiences burn out on unrelenting volume"

https://youtu.be/6BD8-aYrKew

p. 43

"I have so much faith in this essential translucency of music that I trust the songs more than biographical facts."

p. 48

"When one of his band members succeeded in playing an especially exciting solo that generated lots of applause from the audience, Mingus would yell at him: "Don't do that again!""

p. 49

"Jazz... is for those who want to be in attendance when the miracle happens."

Popper Contra Empiricism

C&F p. 23

"if we are doubtful about an assertion, then the normal procedure is to test it, rather than ask for its sources"

XIV

"there are all kinds of sources of our knowledge, but none has authority."

"the empericists questions 'How do you know? What is thr source of your assertion?'... are entirely misconceived: they are questions that beg for an authoritarian answer."

XV

"'Who should rule?' should be replaced with how can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers (whom we should try not to get, but whom we so easily might get all the same) cannot do much damage?"

"I propose to replace ... the question of the sources of our knowledge by an entirely different question: 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?'

This critical rationalism... "merely puts the finishing touch to Kant's own critical philosophy"

XVI

"The advance of knowledge consists, mainly, in the modification of earlier knowledge."

"Pessimistic and optimistic epistemlogies are about equally mistaken."

"...although, as Democritus said, the truth is hidden in the deep, we can probe into the deep."

"Clarity and distinctness are not criteria of truth, but such things as obscurity and confusion may indicate error."

Point 8!!!

"our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite."

"while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal."

Some more equal than others...

The Beginning

TBOI p. 446

"But almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic."

"...frame the growth of knowledge as a continual transition from problems to better problems."

p. 447

"Rejecting the idea that we are 'nearly there' is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny."

p. 457

"But our capacity to cope with, and enjoy, changes in our technology, lifestyle, ethical norms and so on has been increasing too, with the weakening and extinction of some of the anti-rational memes that used to sabotage it."

Unsustainable

(From the summary)

"Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe... history is the history of ideas, not the mechanical effects of biogeography."

TBoI p. 436

"The fact the reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle. But in reality there is no such thing. Only progress is sustainable."

The Evolution of Creativity

TBoI chapter

Early in the chapter I had some difficulty in thinking of 'creativity' as something concrete enough to be subject to selection pressure. The primary question of the chapter is how creativity evolved when innovation was practically non-existent for most of human evolution. DD cites specific difficulties I won't delve into. But the conclusion makes sense: creativity evolved to assist the replication of memes.

The difficulty in meme replication is you never have direct access to the representation of the meme in someone else's mind; you only have access to their behavior. The only way for you to access the meme itself is to conjecture and criticize.

Ideas That Survive

TBoI p. 374

"Laughing at a joke and retelling it are both behavoirs caused by the joke"

p. 375

"[memes] implicitly contain information that is not known to the holders, but which nevertheless causes the holders to behave alike... Like genes, all memes contain knowledge (often implicit) of how to cause their own replication."

Seems DD causes any information not (easily?) translatable into natural language "implicit." But doesn't language have infinite reach? So where is the boundary?

p. 376

"memes necessarily become embodies in two different physical forms alternately: as memories in a brain, and as behavoir."

p. 379

"Societies have been destroyed because some of the memes that were best at spreading through the popilstion were bad for a society."

p. 389

Since meme evolution is much faster that biological evolution, and memes can contain so much information, "a substantial proportion of all evolution on out planet to date has occurred in human brains."

Untill the enlightenment, "while a society lasted, all important areas of life seemed changeless to the participants; they could expect to die under much the same moral values, personal lifestyles, conceptual framework, technology and pattern of economic production a sthey were born under."

p. 382

The primary method of preventing ideas from evolving is not enforcing teh status quo, but disabling the source of new ideas, that is, human creativity.

"Static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties."

p. 383

"Just as genes for the eye implicitly 'know' the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of th ehuman condition, and use it mercilessly to evade the defenses and axploit the weknesses of the human minds that they enslave."

Perhaps 'implicit' knowledge is more about lacking explanation. Which is related to being inexpressible in language.

p. 384

"...while organisms are nothing but teh slaves of all their genes, memes only every control part of a person's thinking... that is why some people use the metaphot of memes as viruses"

p. 385

"A static society involves--in a sense consists of--a relentless struggle to prevent knowledge from growing."

"ironically, there is much trith in the typical static-society fear that any change is much more likely to do harm than good."

This is clearly a property of implicit, i.e., explanationless knowledge. The reach is miniscule, so combinatorics do not work. Earlier mini-enlightenments failed largely because their explanations weren't good enough yet. 

p. 386

"...creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, 'unnaturally' supress it."

Can't immediately adree with DD here, sound slike projection. Not long ago he's talkign about how much human knowledge consists of memes that have hijacked the mind.

p. 387 - Dynamic Societies

"This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which, though still 'selfish', are not necessarily harmful to individuals."

p. 388

"The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach--deep truths."

Surviving criticism is the survival strategy for these sorts of memes--where they outperform their rivals. These memes depend on rationality to replicate, DD calls them rational memes.

p. 389

"just as rational memes evolve toward deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them" -- as it is advantageous for them to be unconstrained by reality.

So we find that the poles of liberalism and conservatism may exist due to these polar opposite meme replication strategies. How does that fit in with the theory of moral categories?

p. 391

"Even in the West, the Enlightenment today is nowhere near complete."

No kidding.

p. 392

"...the coexistence of rational and anti-rational memes makes this transition unstable."

p. 393 

"Another [phenomenon] is teh formation within the dynamic society of anti-rational subcultures."

p. 396

"we had better remember that what we are attempting--teh sustained creation of knowledge--has never worked before. Indeed, everything that we shall ever try to acheive from now on will never have worked before." 

"Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbound evolution of memes."

Attraction

TBoI p. 357

"Art can be literallt attractive in the sense of causing people to move towards it... [the artist is] being attracted by the idea of a piece of art before [he] has created it."

Theories of aesthetics have never much interested me, but this is going in an interesting direction...

"New art is unpredictable, liek new scientific discoveries... if beauty is objective, then a new work of art... adds somethign ireeducibly new ot the world."

p 359

"Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes."

"We pursue beauty as well as truth, and in both cases we can be fooled."

p 362: Why are flowers beautiful?

"My guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap [between insects and plants] with hard-to-forge oatters dersigned to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty."

p. 364

"...the amoutn of information in a humam mind is more than that of any species... [s]o human artists are trying to signal across teh same scale of gap between humans as teh flowers and insects are between species."

p 365

"...a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms... In some, the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words... No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language."

"when a piece of music has the attribute 'displace one note and there would be dinimishment' there is an explanation."

p. 366

"poetry nd mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to stste things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language."

p. 367

"self-expression is about expressing somethign subjective, while pure art is objective."

Choices

TBOF P. 344

"we judge such criteria, along with their actual or proposed political institutions, according to how well they promote the removal of bad rulers and policies."

p. 345

"The esscence of democratic decision making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections."

"[voters] are attempting, fallibly, to explain the world and thereby improve it."

DD gives way too much credit to 'voters' here. The fraction of voters that can look beyond parochial concerns is vanishingly small; and the means of manipulating them ever more effective. According to DD, knowledge is a form if information that, once embedded in a physical environment, tends to make itself remain so. Bad explanations may spread more readily then good explanations by taking advantage of hard-wired parochial schemas. 

p. 346 "It does not make sense to include everyone's favoured policies, or parts of them, in the new decidion; what is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent rheir entenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas."

p. 349

"The plurality votign system almost always produces situations in which a small change in the vote produces a large change (in the same direction!) in who forms a government... the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legeslature is unequivivocally a mistake."

p. 351 

"...human beings will never disagree any less than they do now, and that's a very good thing."

DD earlier described several mini-enlightenments that were snuffed out; the fact that this one has lasted much longer does not mean it can't be.

p. 352

"Good policies are hard to vary, and therefore conflicting policies are discrete and cannot be arbitrarily mixed."

That's the centerpiece of his (suprising, to me) argument for plurality voting. It seems this choice is taken among common voting systems only; surely there are better methods yet.

A critical issue in social-choice theory, which he ignores, is that public preferences are irrelevant, because almost nobody has the knowledge to recognize good explanations. 

/

Bad Philosophy

TBoF : A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy

p. 309

"For decades, various versions of [the Copenhagen Interpretation] were taught as fact--vagueness, anthropocentrism, instrumentalism and all--in university physics courses."

Including at Clarkson University! I wonder, if one were to adopt the Everetiian multiverse interpretation (as I think we must, unless a better explanation comes along) how this would affect QM pedagogy. Based simply on mathematical capabilities, one still must start with the wave equations.

p. 310

"Here was an eminent physicist [ES] joking that he might be considered mad. Why? For claiming that his own equation--the very one he had one a Nobel prize for--might be true."

p. 311

"Error is the normal state of knowledge, and is no discrace,"

"When the enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress... But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse."

... p. 325 "... with the decent from empericism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Witthenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the 'post-modernist' and related movements."

p. 314

"...these charges are true of postmodernism itself: it is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative. Creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting teh criteria of the postmodernist community--which have eveolved to be complex, exclusive and authority based."

p. 317

"In genuine science, one can claim to have measured a quantity only when one has an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value, and with what accuracy."

p. 323

"The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment."

p. 324

"If progress cannot continue indefinitely, bad philosophy will inevitably come again into ascendency--for it will be true."

Fungibility

TBoF 

p. 289

"...for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object, some of their attributes must be diverse. This is known as the 'Heisenberg uncertainty principle'

p. 291

"The term 'uncertainty principle' is misleading... The diversity of attributes... is a physical fact, independent of what anyone knows or feels."

"Thanks to string internal interference that it is continuously undergoing a typical electron is a irreducibly multiversal object, and not a collection of parallel-universe or parallel-histories objects... it has multiple positions and multiple speeds without being divisible into autonomous sub-entities eachof which has one speed and one position."

p. 297

Brilliant description of why, in a Mach-Zehnder interferometry experiment, the independent photon paths do not entangle with the photon that reflects, which depends on fungibility, and the indeterminacy of the original energy of the mirror. The difference in the momentum of the mirror, after the photon strikes, is tiny compared to the original indeterminacy of the momentum; the chance of entanglement is about the same a the tiny-ness of this difference. 

The multiverse, branching, and information

TBoI, p 281

"Thus the information in the fictional multiverse flows along a branching tree, whose branches--histories--have different thicknesses (measures) and never rejoin once they have separated."

I have been disdaining the 'branching' descriptions of the Everettian multiverse, but this makes sense. The universe itself does not branch; but the information flow may. The quantum nature of the universe is critical for this discrete branching, as apposed to a continuous, uncountably infinite branching of information flows that would occur if infinitesimal differences were allowed.

The directionality of this branching is basically the arrow of time itself.

p. 282-283

"In an interference phenomenon, differentiated histories rejoin... Interference is the phenomenon that can provide the inhabitants of the multiverse with evidence of the existence of multiple histories in their world without allowing the histories to communicate."

p. 284-285

"Interference can happen only in objects that are unentangled with the rest of the world... If differential effects can all be undone, then interference between those original values becomes possible again... [but] that rapidly becomes infeasible. The process of becoming infeasible is known as decoherence."

p. 293

"Spheres of differentiation tend to grow at nearly the speed of light, so, on the scale of everyday life and above, those course-grained histories can justly be called 'universes' in the ordinary sense of the word."

p. 300

"All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact."

p. 302

"Whenever we observe anything... what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes."

"Since the growth of knowledge is a process of error-correction, and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right, knowledge-creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities."