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."