Minimalism in Physics (updated)

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity,

and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

-- Isaac Newton

[Note: 
In using the term “minimalism” in evaluating styles of physics, I am importing  into the philosophy of science  a term mostly associated with the arts.  The move may or may not be fruitful.  But here is a well-known parallel move, from Gerald “Mr. Themata” Holton, in The scientific imagination (1978), p. 7:

I have proposed … thematic analysis (a term familiar from somewhat related uses in anthropology, art criticism, musicology, and other fields).  ]

The whole enterprise of physics, from ancient times to today, is itself  in one sense  Minimalist, in that it seeks to sweep aside the riot of epiphenomena, and to discover underlying laws, from which that riot derives.  It does not so much banish the fullness of reality, as bracket it:  we hope later to derive much of it back, in an explanatory manner.  (Note:  Not quite the same thing as Reductionism.)

To some extent, all rational inquiry ‘minimizes’ -- idealizes, works with toy models, etc.   Some more than others -- economics notoriously so, tossing out so much bathwater that sometimes the baby goes missing.   Others roll up the sleeves of their labcoats and go in elbow-deep to the mess of reality, little bothering with economy or philosophy.   Chemists, in particular, seem perfectly content to potter about in labs, to discover stuff, invent stuff, patent stuff.  They literally multiply entities, in that they invent chemicals that weren’t there before.   Whether they thereby multiply them beyond necessity (mustard gas, thalidomide,  napalm, LSD) is a matter of individual taste.  But certainly the ethos is anything but austere.

And likewise, for the most part -- biology, geology, astronomy, engineering, what have you. 

But modern physics  raises parsimony to a central tenet, almost the prime purpose of the whole enterprise as currently understood.  This development being by now taken for granted among those of the guild, it may not be apparent how odd this really is.

The goal for some time has been the “Theory of Everything”.  This certainly sounds like a Maximalist program:  but really it is not.   For the knights who pursue this grail do not actually intend to explain any of the things that real people care about   and that motivated the enterprise of physics in the first place:  why the sky is blue, why snowflakes are the way they are, why clouds are shaped that way, what lightning is all about, why airplanes can fly…  (Purported explanations of these things exist, but the ones I’ve heard seem all fallacious.)   Instead, they want to wrap their arms around a passel of abstractions, so complex as to leave the plain man -- nay, any but the professional physicist -- behind many decades ago, and show that, at a still deeper level, they are all but facets of One Big Thing.  (Hedgehog physics, we might dub this.)  This is Minimalist, and ferociously so.

It may be objected:  All that is nothing but plain reductionism, which is simply to say:  Science.  No call to drag in an arts-related term like “Minimalism”.  -- But I believe there is an aesthetic dimension -- seldom mentioned in journal articles, though over-emphasized in popular writing -- which lies outside the bare logical necessities.  As,

“There shouldn’t be laws of physics,” Strominger maintains. “There should be just one law, and it ought to be the nicest law around.”

(Quoted in Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p.  14.)

Gerald Holten, characterizing the attitude of Einstein (The scientific imagination, p. 281):

At stake was nothing less than finding the most economical, simple, formal principles, the barest bones of nature’s frame, cleansed of everything that is ad hoc and redundant.

In his own personal life, the legendary simplicity of the man was an integral part of this reaching for the barest minimum on which the world rests.

*

Central to the program is the “unification” of the various fundamental forces -- meaning, showing them to be symmetry-broken castoffs of an original single Force.    An analogy in evolutionary biology is explaining various related species  as having descended under various environmental pressures  from a common progenitor.   Only -- in physics, the enterprise is far more audacious than this analogy would suggest, if all you are thinking of are the breeds of dog, or the various canine species, or even the various land-mammals.   The forces are so fundamentally different in their phenomenology, that the task is more like tracing the common descent of the penguin, the echinoderm, and the paramecium.   Or even the mastodon, the gnat-swarm (considered as a sort of collective entity), and the sand-dune.   A tall order.

The reason so hubristic a program could come into existence despite the odds, is that it had an early success:  Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, back in the nineteenth century, truly a monument of the human intellect.  Now, later analysis has suggested that this success was something of a lucky fluke:  in the four macroscopic dimensions in which we reside, electricity and magnetism are both expressed by a vector.  You can not only analogize these, the one to the other, but calculate with them in the ordinary way -- say, forming their cross-product to get the Poynting vector.  In higher dimensions, electricity would be a vector and magnetism would be a tensor, and they would not play so nicely together.

The next success along these lines was far spookier:  the unification of electromagnetism with the “weak force”, into an unassuming-sounding entity called electroweak.   Now, this is far more bizarre than it seems. Electricity and magnetism were always rather like Batman and Robin, typically showing up together in the lab.  Whereas the weak “force” seems, to my untutored mind, like a force in some Pickwickian sense, like the  “force” of a metaphor in a poem.  A thing more different than electrostatic attraction or repulsion  can scarcely be imagined:  it deals neither in repulsion nor attraction, but rather in a handful of obscure and scarcely explicable processes such as beta decay.   Even to have conceived the project of their unification  was an act of extraordinary intellectual audacity;  the eventual success is, well, beyond any but specialist comprehension.

This new composite entity, this hippogriff, the electroweak, was subsequently unified with the “strong force”, yielding the hyperweak of today’s Standard Model.   The next -- and long elusive -- step, is the unification of that with gravity.   Now, to your average toddler, the natural analogy would be rather between electrostatic and gravitation attraction -- both, in their simple nonrelativistic forms, central forces obeying an inverse-square law    But your average toddler, like your average Nobel-Prize-winner-in-anything-but-Physics, would be mistaken.   And so the torch has passed to an ever-more-esoteric brotherhood, in particular  the magi of String Theory:  pale, spectral beings, who neither eat nor defecate, and whose results -- well, they do not as yet have anything so vulgar as actual verifiable physical results, mind you, but they do have theories, and conference papers, incomprehensible to all but the magi.  That does not mean they are on the wrong track;  perhaps they, and they alone, are on the right track, in which case, the more fools we.

*

A startling development in some corners of recent physics  is an actual ‘Maximalism’ -- basically, the catastrophic breakdown of any parsimonious project, yet not taken as a reductio ad absurdum of reductionism itself, but rather embraced, by amor fati (a fancy name for making the best of a bad bargain).   No longer can one really -- nor does one aspire to -- explain anything, since everything that might exist, does exist, and the (now uninteresting) facts of the matter in our own neck of the woods  can be chalked up to Selection Effect.  (We satirized this Rabelaisian Fay ce que voudras  here).   

Templeton-Prize winner Paul Davies,  in The Goldilocks Enigma (2006), p. 264, takes rather understated notice of this:

The disadvantage of the multiverse theory is that it invokes an overabundance of entities, most of which could never be observed, even in principle.  This profligacy strikes many people as an extravagant way to explain bio-friendliness.

Likewise, though for different reasons, the earlier Many-Worlds school (or cabal) of quantum theory,  in which entities -- again, entire universes in this case -- are multiplied, not simply beyond necessity, but beyond common decency.

The ethos of all this is atheistic -- a-anything, really.  It is perhaps no accident that Hugh Everett, an early pioneer of many-worlds, was (in Wiki’s words) “a committed atheist".  Or that the thélémisme of the distinguished hexagonal/pentagonal humanist  was taken up with gusto  by the diabolist Aleister Crowley, the stench of whose cinders may occasionally bother your nostrils, whenever a high wind blows up from Hell.

[Update 27 III 12]  Freeman Dyson in the current NYRB, reviewing a book by Margaret Wertheim about eccentric amateurs:

String cosmology is different. String cosmology is a part of theoretical physics that has become detached from experiments. String cosmologists are free to imagine universes and multiverses, guided by intuition and aesthetic judgment alone. Their creations must be logically consistent and mathematically elegant, but they are otherwise unconstrained. That is why Wertheim found the official string cosmology conference disconcertingly similar to the unofficial Natural Philosophy conference. The insiders and the outsiders seem to be following the same rules. Both groups are telling stories of imagined worlds, and neither has an assured way of deciding who is right. If the title Physics on the Fringe fits the natural philosophers, the same title also fits the string cosmologists.

[Note:  Dyson -- a notably fair man -- has long been a fixture of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; and the IAS, in recent years,  has been premier in string theory.  So Dyson's assessment here  is by no means that of an envious outsider.]

On the extra profusion of different string theories, a mathematician remarks dryly,

It was hardly an idea calculated to appeal to a man with a taste for desert landscapes  … There are more than 10^500 versions of string theory  lounging indolently about.

-- David Berlinski,  The Deniable Darwin (2009), p. 532-3

*

It will sometimes not be obvious, which proposals are Minimalist in spirit.  Thus, imagine some wretched Nominalist, who balks at the infinite, and proposes that the numbers needed for physics  are finite -- specifically, the field of integers mod a prime p (necessarily quite large, to accord with observation).   Finite’s gotta be simpler, more minimal, than infinite, right?  Roger Penrose retorts (The Road to Reality (2004), p. 359):

A physical theory which depends fundamentally upon some absurdly enormous prime number  would be a far more complicated (and improbable) theory than one that is able to depend upon a simple notion of infinity.

More precisely:   The problem is not essentially that the number is so large, but rather, with infinitely many primes to choose from, the choice would seem arbitrary:  in much the same way that the omniscient computer in  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reveals, quite disappointingly, that the Meaning of Life is … “26”.

*

Differing from a theory-wide programatic theoretical minimalism, is a kind of personal cognitive-epistemological economy, described by Gerald Holton, The scientific imagination (1978), p. 158:

Fermi ordered the overwhelming and vast amount of knowledge  into a set of very few principles and ‘cases’, which allowed him to understand almost any new problem as an example of one of about seven primitive or primary physical situations.  Fermi would return throughout his career  to a listing or digest of the chief ideas in physics, which he had made when he first organized the field for himself as a young student.

Our own thoughts about such Leading Ideas in other areas, may be surveyed here.

*

A curious philosophico-cosmogonic anticipation of the TOE vs. Landscape divide  goes back several hundred years:

Leibniz … assure que la perfection de Dieu ne lui permettait pas de procéder d’autre manière que de la meilleure … mais Thomas d’Aquin sait que, créant du fini, un Dieu infini pouvait librement créer un nombre illimité d’univers différents, tous bons  et chacun commençant de manière différente.

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p.  163

And indeed, though Leibniz coinvented the calculus, we must say that, here, from a mathematical standpoint, it is Saint Thomas who is closer to the target.

Bonus quote:

Willem de Sitter found an exact solution to Einstein’s field equation … having no matter at all. … Why should we be interested in such a universe?  Because the real universe is of rather low density …

-- J. Richard Gott, The Cosmic Web (2016), p. 16

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A (non)Definition of Depth

We’ve posted a number of reflections about the idea of “depth” in (especially) mathematics and related science (for the complete list of these, click here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/depth ), without ever really defining the term.  And this, for a reason:

Two interrelated ideas that have been widely assumed to be unanalysable  are those of one scientific theory being deeper and more unified than another.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. xiii

The idea of theoretical depth has considerable importance in Popper’s philosophy of science.  “If at all possible, we are after deep theories.”  But he was pessimistic about the possibility of any sharp characterisation of the idea.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 188

And that, not necessarily for any ‘deep’ reason -- not correlating intimately with the intricacies of physics, say -- but much as it is hard to characterize sharply such multifaceted (or blobby) concepts as beauty or game.    And here, I must sympathize with the archetypal philistine of a hundred New Yorker cartoons,  genially conceding, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”   A mathematician or physicist may not be able to define depth in a way that would satisfy the notoriously finicky tribe of philosophers:  but he knows it when he sees it.  And smiles.

So, sorry, no necessary-and-sufficient conditions, nor even a rough-and-ready dictionary definition;  but anyhow, an epigram:

Whewell’s requirment that a deep hypothesis, one that gets hold of nature’s ‘alphabet’ as he put it, must enable us ‘to explain … cases of a kind  different from those which we contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 190

(A similar metaphor, more popular since Whewell’s day:  a good theory must “cut Nature at the joints”.)

~

Hmm, now I’ve piqued my own curiosity.  How does a practicing lexicographer go about characterizing the term deep in the sense(s) of interest here?

Okay, for starter’s, a British one -- Collins English Dictionary (1979):

deep:  … (6) difficult to understand or penetrate; abstruse

(7)  learned or intellectually demanding: a deep discussion

Sense (6) is of no interest.  We went to some effort in this post (“A Dive to theDepths”) to distinguish depth from difficulty.  (For the list of posts re difficulty: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/difficulty .)   Sense (6) would be used by a lazy man, giving up -- “Too deep for me.”   Here he is not even using the word with its native literal resonance -- he could quite as well speak with poor Mr Tulliver, who often confessed that the world was “too many” for him.   Indeed, sense (6) might deserve one of those non-semantic/non-grammatical, sociolinguistic labels like “ -- Not in polite use”:  here,  “-- Not used in this sense by serious thinkers.”

Actually, by a twist of pragmatics, the phrase does get used by serious thinkers -- but typically as an ironic put-down.  Thus:

The towering 19^th-century mathematician Hamilton  labored hard on his “Law of Hodographic Isochronism”,

but when he sent it to John Herschel (whom Hankins calls “the best-known and best-regarded British scientist of his time” [p. 134]), he got the reply:  “You are fairly got out of my depth”.  (This was Herschel’s regular response when he did not have the time or inclination to follow Hamilton’s long analytical excursions.)

-- Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1980), p.

And again, roughly a century later:  After presenting a rather absurd and convoluted, goalpost-moving series of proposals from Lakatos and Morrall:

I am out of my depth with a claim of this kind.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 334

Here he is being disengenuously self-deprecating;  and his reply is all the more biting.

~

A more general thought, though, on depth versus difficulty.   I almost wrote that the latter was “much less interesting” -- though really, that depends on your day-job.  If you teach primary school, you need not (ex cathedra) worry your head one bit about depth in our sense;  whereas you must ever be alert to the perils of difficulty.  To epigrammatize into a dichotomy:  Depth (again, in our privileged sense) inheres in the subject itself;  Difficulty is relative to the practical limitations of some species (be it human, chimp, or the poor fly stuck in the fly-bottle) when grappling with the problems in that subject.   Since the philosophy of this blog is Platonist, we have little interest in the latter (no intellectual interest;  though some emotional interest, maudlin or morbid, as here).

From that perspective, sense (7) is also disappointing.   A subject itself (such as algebraic geometry or M-theory) cannot be called “learned” (i.e., learnèd):  that epithet might only be applied to whoever is gassing on about it.  “Intellectually demanding” could be applied either to a subject or a particular discussion or presentation thereof.  And that quality might be due to anything from the intellectual limitations of the audience (“The concept of evidence is too intellectually demanding for Trump voters”)  -- thus, back to sense (6) -- to an (overly) condensed presentation on the part of the lecturer, to actual depth inherent to the subject (and which would still be apparent to an angel, who understood the subject perfectly well).   Thus, neither sense goes far towards elucidating what mathematicians mean when they refer to a “deep result”.

~

Curious now whether my old alma-mater Merriam-Webster  did any better, I looked it up in their Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition),  I found something quite different.

First, their treatment of the geospatial, ‘literal’ sense of the term, from which all others ultimately derive, is unexpectedly rich and reticulated (I almost wrote:  “deep”), containing sub-subsenses like

deep  1 b (1) : extending well inward from an outer surface <a ~ gash>

(That is the sort of distinction you come up with when you are working from a generous deskful of carefully chosen citation-slips, rather than copying other dictionaries  or pulling the definition out of your butt.)

But then things sort of fall apart.  The sense “difficult” is not treated as a top-level numbered sense, as in the Collins, but as a subsense of a sense not defined save as the sum of its (rather disparate) subsenses:

deep  3 a : difficult to penetrate or comprehend : recondite < ~ mathematical problems>

3 b : mysterious, obscure <a ~ dark secret >

3 c : grave in nature or effect <in  ~est disgrace>

3 d :  of penetrating intellect : wise <a ~ deep thinker >

along with several more lying well off our axis of interest.   And oddly, despite all the careful hair-splitting, nothing really corresponding to Collins’ (7).

Thus, we still have come no further towards our goal.

~

The subject of depth, unlike that of mathematics, or Christianity (or oahspe),  tends not to attract disquisitions of the “What  is ….?”  sort.   We tried our hand at one for math (here), basically coming up with little more than a florilegium of blind-men-and-the-elephant stabs at it, for the overly general definiendum mathematics itself;  more fruitful was the task of characterizing topics within mathematics, like affine connection or topology, since here (at least for the former example) the definer’s intention is more in the nature of targeted enlightenment  than an after-dinner speech :  the result was a nice bouquet of epigrams.

~

Back to Depth vs Difficulty.    

(1) A deep remark or insight  is associated, not with presenting difficulties (as in Collins sense (6) ), but -- quite the contrary -- with resolving them.

A humble but poignant case  has been recounted here (Induction/Recursion), where a problem that had seemed difficult (to New Jersey third-graders, back in the complacent days before the impact of Sputnik  had filtered down to elementary school) -- that of multiplying multi-digit numbers -- suddenly became transparent, under the impact of an insight which (relative to what we had learned so far, most of it from the Mickey Mouse Club) might qualify as (qualifiedly) deep. 

(2) Above, we made something akin to an actio/actum distinction between difficulty and depth (human activity vs. the subject itself);   yet now we may make an additional distinction, on the same -- human -- side of the Platonic/psychological divide.  You might call it horizontal/vertical,  syntagmatic/paradigmatic :  judging words (concepts) by the company they keep.

~

Let us recur to that subsense in Webster’s Colleagiate,  “3 b : mysterious, obscure”, and consider the idea of  deep as it appears in company with that of being hidden:

The mind is in a sad state, when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affighting this actual life, with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark”

(I.e., a deeper, hidden something, that somehow itself  amounts to a “life”.)

And from a mathematical physicist:

It is indeed true that we can prove, from this kind of Euclidean argument,  that squares, made up of right angles, actually do exist.  But there is a deep issue hiding here.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 28

Namely (tying in with cosmology):

His fourth postulate asserts the equality of all right angles.  … In effect, the fourth postulate is asserting the isotropy and homogeneity of space.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 29

~

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Refutation vs. Disconfirmation

We continue our observations about Verification (essay here) and Modus Tollens (essay here).

It has been maintained that there is an important asymmetry between the verification and the refutation of a theory in empirical science.   Refutation has been said to be conclusive or decisive, while verification was claimed to be irremediably inconclusive. … The falsity of [the theory] is indeed deductively inferable by modus tollens.

-- “The Falsifiability of Theories”, in: Adolf Grünbaum, Collected Works, vol. I (2013), p. 62

That is basically because an empirical law is, in general, a universal: ∀x P(x).   Given any  ¬P(a), that is falsified.    Whereas successive confirming instances, while perhaps increasing one’s confidence in the hypothesized law, do not deductively entail it.   Nor need that fact be, in practical terms, a mere quibble, in cases of an infinite domain:  thus, a conjecture in number theory might be verified for all values of n up to a billion -- a trillion -- a googolplex -- yet still turn out to be false.  (Indeed, toy conjectures of this sort  are trivially easy to dream up.  E.g. “No integer is evenly divisible by a googolplex.”)   Taking confirming instances ‘too seriously’, is the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.

Grünbaum then, however, in a Duhemian vein, weighs in against such modus-tollentic tyranny, with the observation that, in empirical science, you are really assuming (ex hypothesi) not merely a theory, but (in unspoken conjunction therewith) various Auxiliary Assumptions:  and one or more of these, rather than your pet theory, might be the ones to suffer the fury of the tollendum.  Thus,  “Isolated component hypotheses of far-flung theoretical systems are not separately refutable but only contextually disconfirmable” (id., p. 63).

The same idea, more sociologically stated:

Typically  a theory is abandoned, not because of recalcitrant observations on their own, but because of these together with some, perhaps quite complex, reasoning from them:  in the extreme case, the observations may all be quite well known already, and all that is new  is the reasoning.

-- Michael Dummett, Truth and other enigmas (1978), p. 409

Compare:

… that falsity, not truth, is the primary notion.

-- Michael Dummett, Truth and other enigmas (1978), p. xl

~

It is seldom that a theory is decisively k.o.’d by a Popperian uppercut to its predictive jaw.   Often the process happens slowly, like a river silting up;  there is no single Aha! moment (or rather, Oy veh! moment).   In science, as in life,  sometimes love grows old and love grows cold.  As, assessing a certain philosophical program:

The further one goes down the reformist path, the more implausible the consequences of one’s theory are likely to become, until  at some point  the implausibility of the consequences  comes to outweigh the initial attractiveness of the theory.

-- Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. I, p. 299

That gradual, einsickernd, process of disenchantment, lacks the drama of Popperian refutation, or of Kuhnian paradigm-shift;  it is more reminiscent of the dissatisfying phenomenon (if it even is one) of truth decay.

~

The history of science -- though not the historiography of science -- is littered with once-flourishing theories that somehow just … faded, without necessarily ever having been decisively confronted or refuted.  It is no fun to research and write about these, since
(a) they are losers in the lottery (rightly or not), and scarcely known today (so that one’s potential readership is infinitessimal -- and indistinguishable from zero among working scientists); and
(b) there is seldom a clear-cut moral in the tale.

The occasions on which one does get an insight into some defunct theory  tend to be biographies of otherwise-great scientists -- e.g.  Theodore Porter’s fine account of the (as we now reckon him) statistician Karl Pearson, which must needs notice that hero’s period of infatuation with, mm, ahh, … ether squirts (pas devant les enfants!);  or Thomas Hankins‘s  of William Rowan Hamilton.  Or, sometimes, a historian of science rolls up his sleeve and deconstructs/resurrects  some particular thread of experiment.  As, Gerald Holton’s commendable study of “Subelectrons and Presuppositions”, involving the “classic” Millikan experiment, of which we all get a telescoped and sanitized version in high school physics.  The actual saga is more anfractuous, and less rich with easily digestible lessons.

[Millikan] found himself working with the wrong presupposition, but he knew how to rid himself of it eventually.  Millikan launched into that work with the same energy and obstinacy  as into his earlier work on the quantization of the charge of the electron, yet with the opposite assumption.

-- Gerald Holton, The scientific imagination (1978), p. 72

And re the related experiments of Felix Ehrenhaft:

There was never a direct laboratory disproof of Ehrenhaft’s claims.  … Lorentz … remark[ed]:  “The question cannot be said to be wholly elucidated.” In his review of the case, R. Bär noted …: “the experiments left, at the very least, an uncomforable feeling.”  Like most such controversies, this one also faded into obscurity, without anything as dramatic as a specific, generally agreed-upon falsification taking place at all.  Indeed, Ehrenhaft continue to publish on subelectrons into the 1940s, long after everyone else had lost interest in the matter.

-- Gerald Holton, The scientific imagination (1978), p. 79

And that, within (central, classical) physics.  The less rigorous (natural and social) sciences  are much pocked with such as well.

~

Science, not as logically implying some new phenomenon (such as the gravitational bending of light), but as suggesting likely places to look.   Thus:

The search, which has proved so successful, for chemical atoms  having specific nuclear and electronic constitutions, and for chemical molecules having specific atomic constitutions, has been stimulated by the previous construction of theories to explain the consitution of atoms or of molecules already known, theories which had, as it were, ‘gaps’ in them.

-- Richard Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (1953), p. 70

And indeed, not only the existence of, say, atoms or isotopes with a given atomic weight and atomic number  are thus -- not exactly ‘predicted’ in the deductivist sense, but pointed to -- but additionally, we shall expect certain behaviors, or ranges of behaviors, based upon the place in the periodic table of that species (should it exist).

Thus, when the eka-aluminum that Mendeleev hypothesized  was eventually identified (by a Frenchman, who thus had naming-rights and called it gallium) and turned out to have behavioral values very close to those predicted,  while not proving the theory of atomic chemistry as it then stood, was still much more than just one more danged black raven.

[A footnote on another such predicted discovery, that nicely illustrates consilience in the sciences, combining both forefront atomic physics  and practical geology:

At the time Bohr was developing his theory, the element following lutecium was undiscovered.  But Bohr … asserted that, in this unknown element, the added electron would have to be placed in the level n = 5. This would imply that the unknown element would have an electronic configuration analogous to that of zirconium.  Inasmuch as elements that are chemically analogous  are usually found in the same minerals, Bohr claimed that the missing element should be sought in minerals containing zirconium.  It was indeed in such ores that the missing element, called hafnium [after the Latin name of Bohr’s hometown] was detected.

-- A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939),  p. 549.  ]

This “guiding-light” role of a theory, not being a formal entailment, is likewise not subject to modus tollens (though of course it might be abandoned in the face of an accumulation of recalcitrant instances):

Whereas discovery of observable properties which fill such gaps in a theory  is rightly thought to provide a weighty confirmation of the theory …  failure to discover such properties would not be regarded as weighing against the theory, except perhaps in very special cases.

-- Richard Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (1953), p. 70

NYTimes Headline Writer Strikes Again

The Sunday Review section of this morning’s Times  contains a column by a Princeton neuroscientist.   The headline reads,

Are We Really Conscious ?

and a subhead answers

It sure seems like it.

But brain science suggests we’re not.

That seemed to herald yet another instance in the sort of quasi-neuroscientific drivel that has been fashionable in recent years, and against which I have polemicized in a series of essays (for which click here).   But happily it turns out that the article in question is not yet one more assault against all that is meaningful or decent in human life, but is rather -- fairly trivial.    The scientists probably did not supply the headline, almost certainly did not supply the subhead, which wears on its sleeve the imprint of that lowest form of media-life, the Headline Writer.

The point of the article is yawningly familiar:  that intuitive human descriptions of phenomena  use different terms from those used by chemists, physicists, or what have you.   The author gives the example of “white”, which (he claims) we perceive as a “pure” color, but -- O the sadly deceived intuitive man! -- is ‘really’ (as Newton discovered) a mixture.   By analogy (which he does not buttress with any detail), our ideas about consciousness do not readily translate into the sort of blips and bubbles which he himself spends his time on in his godforsaken lab.

That much is readily granted.  Yet, we do perceive colors, for all that.  No amount of jabbering about angstroms will make that … fact … go away.   We perceive EM radiation in a manner different from that of dogs, or sea anemones, but we do perceive it, we’re not just imagining things.  (“Do colors exist?  It sure seems like it;  but radiation science suggests…” blah de blah.)   And actually, I would dispute, as a matter of psychological fact, that we perceive white as “pure”, any more than we perceive green as pure or whatever.  It just looks white.   The alleged “purity” is not a perceptive category;  most of us first learn about the specious purity of white light -- in science class.

The same goes for anything you care to name.   It seems to us that macroscopic objects move about more or less smoothly, for such reasons as self-propulsion, or falling, or getting pushed.   Later we learn that they are actually obeying the Hamilton equations, or Maxwell’s equations, and so forth; and that the motion (whether for quantum reasons, or from a foam-level discontinuity of space-time) is not quite smooth in the intuitive sense.  But, knowing all that does not lead us to revise  our judgments concerning things-moving-about, with a couple of marginal exceptions.   (The tilted-but-non-toppling top, or liquid helium climbing up the walls of its containers, are in a sense exceptions -- but a weak sense.  Prior to reading the scientists’ answers, I had no theory at all as to how such things could be;  they just seemed weird.)

The one useful contribution of that very slight article (which goes no distance at all towards “Exploding the Patriarchal Myth of ‘Consciousness’” -- see?  It’s not hard to write headlines like that) is a matter of simple vocabulary:  attention, at the ‘etic’ level of “enhancing some signals at the expense of others”, which we can observe even among the cockroaches;  and awareness, which the author calls “a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.”

Again, no quarrel with that, really apart perhaps from the possible snide connotation of cartoonish, which however we may ignore, as we salute the brilliant minimalism and aesthetic economy of cartoons.    When we assess a symphony, we are not putting forward an erroneous theory of acoustics,  any more than when we say that some dish is “delicious” or that it “tastes like chicken”, we are doing bad chemistry.

Polemical popcorn

For some years now, I have not owned a television set; nor seen the daily comic strips, since letting lapse my subscription to the sorrowfully diminished Washington Post.  (I still take the Times, but they have never featured funny-papers.)  So what do I do for soap opera, or the like low entertainment?

For the past half-century, the NYRB has had great success in luring well-known scholars out of their lairs, for a public display of the polemical equivalent of shirts-off selfies.  A recent instance -- rhetorically at any rate -- does not disappoint.  A verbally (though not intellectually) vibrant slangfest between Patricia Churchland and Colin McGinn appeared here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/brains-and-minds-exchange/?insrc=toc

For those of you who, likewise, possess no goggle-box, yet who, needing a break from your labors in post-Kantian metaphysics or the subtleties of the Hodge Conjecture, have wearied of YouTube kute kittehs or (to be more up-to-date  -- the reference to kittehs shows how far behind I am in current trends)  random hands unwrapping knick-knacks (just learned about this one this morning, from Le Point of all places), here is a selection of the juiciest bits.

First, Churchland berates a dull pupil indeed, it would appear:

In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain.  In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message [NYR, April 24]. Here is the thing: there is a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain.1 In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message [NYR, April 24]. Here is the thing: there is a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition.

(Is “gibbles up” a word?  Okay, it’s a word. -- Thus, updating the Duke of Gloucester’s celebrated gibe against Gibbon:  “Gibble, gibble, gibble, Mr. McGinn!”)

And the little fellow had jolly well better heed her words, since, unlike him, she is famous:

In fact, I have famously argued for the coevolution of sciences at many levels. This explicitly includes the coevolution of the neurosciences and psychological sciences. To my delight but not surprise, the coevolution is now well underway …

And ramming the point home:

Nobody in neuroscience needs McGinn to tell us that structural correlates of a function do not ipso facto explain that function. His sermonizing is just so much spit in the wind. What he fails to get is that sussing out structure is often a major step forward in sorting out mechanism.

She concludes with a feisty variant on the “We’re here, we’re queer” slogan:

And brains do sleep, remember spatial locations, and learn to navigate their social and physical worlds.  Get used to it.

Mistress Patricia, commanding little Colin to assume the position

Unaccountably, McGinn fails to slink off like a whipp’t cur:

It is just possible to discern some points beneath the heated rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right. If you hold that “mental processes are actually processes in the brain,” to quote Churchland, then you are committed to the thesis that it is sufficient to understand the mind that one understands the brain, and not merely necessary. This is just the well-known “identity theory” of mind and brain.

(You can picture her fingers  twitching on the quirt  over this bit of insolence.)

For our own contribution to sound and fury on this issue, try these:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/eliminative-materialism-expanded-update.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-latest-from-neuroscience.html

CHAOS, COINCIDENCE, CORRELATION, CONSPIRACY

Daily life is a tissue of loose ends, shot through with snarls and dropped stitches. That society nevertheless does not unravel, seems due to the fact that most people, though in detail unpredictable, are essentially similar and basically sane; due additionally to conservative/equilibrating structures evolved over the centuries; and perhaps to some further, anti-entropic factor, still obscure  but whose presence we may suspect (guardian angels would be the simplest explanation; something equally speculative though less intuitive, concerning negentropy or self-organizing systems, could also be alluded to).  Things pretty much jog along and usually eventually work out; but the details of any particular transaction  often may not bear looking into.

            One gets a glimpse of this  whenever, by some chance, a particular circumstance must be looked into further – something went a lot or a little bit wrong,  that, for some reason, this time, needs to be corrected or explained  and not just brushed aside as usual.  One often finds, upon turning over a rock long left undisturbed, a welter of wriggling vermin: errors previously unsuspected, data missing or misfiled, notes contradicting what one had previously believed (while their author has since left the company, or died prematurely).  Normally, none of this is sinister, but simply shows, on the human level, an analog (not an effect;  a metaphor, merely) of the underlying quantum uncertainty and atomic chaos  which nevertheless  ultimately manages to cohere in this coffee cup or that paperweight  sitting placidly, bien sage, on your desk.  If, however, the original affair is shady, the unexplained details which investigation unearths  lie in its shadow.  Let one instance stand for all: the celebrated “18-minute gap” in that tape, during Watergate.  Personally I find it utterly plausible that the gap resulted from the same gremlins that hide our spectacles, lose our umbrellas, and eat óne out of each pair of laundered socks.  But in context, it did look suspicious.

            An instinct not to let go of such suspicions  is buttressed by cases in which investigation of some misdeed,  severe enough to catch the atte.ntion of the media or the D.A.,  reveals a pot-pourri of previously unreported malfeasance, as in the Watergate affair.  Novelists and cineasts take the trend a satisfying step further with variations on the “Blow-Up” motif, in which a chance following-up of some minor discrepancy, out of mere curiosity, leads to a Vast Conspiracy. 

            The problem becomes acute when the stakes are high, the affair complex, and the discrepancies numerous (as they inevitably will be in any far-reaching affair, even absent any sinister underpinnings).  As, the Kennedy Assassination, or 9/11.

            We are currently witnessing a whole industry, tying our current President and his associates – both laterally (the present Administration) and longitudinally (the Bush family, going back to Prescott) – to all manner of skullduggery.  At the far fringe are the conspiracy theorists (stronger in Europe than here) who initially maintained, and some still maintain, that 9/11 was actually planned and carried out by a U.S. cabal, the airplanes being remotely controlled from the ground. A tad less extreme is the allegation, popular among some less reflective Arabs, that Israel did it.  Another tad, the position that,  while the op was indeed al-Qaeda’s, the Administration knew (sub-position 1, more florid) that that attack was due on that day, or (subposition 2, more reality-based, pointing to the August 6 memo) knew in a general way that such a thing might happen, and deliberately did nothing, so that they could use it as an excuse to proceed with their nefarious plans.  Certainly there have been agents provocateurs in history; but I tend to disbelieve in any gross such allegation concerning a present-day American administration, since every potential conspirator must be aware that, the way things stand in America today, no conspiracy broader than two twins in a cave  can stay secret for long – people write books and go on talk shows  to expose much milder grievances. 

            More centrist – if only with respect to such as these – is the new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11”.  To his credit, Michael Moore does not even allude to such darker fantasies – indeed he indirectly exonerates the Administration, or at least Bush himself, of complicity,  if only through imputation of cluelessness. Bush’s blank look while the WTC attack vied for his attention with the Pet Goat, is itself a piece of evidence against all but a watered-down version of the last of the above-listed positions.  (Moore himself voiceovers a plausible thought-balloon in keeping with the last one, along the lines of: “Dang, wasn’t there some memo about something like this? Maybe I should have spent more time at the office and less on the golf course.”)  In one of his books, Moore hints at something more conspiratorial, but there fingers the Saudis (he really doesn’t like the Saudis), not the Illuminati or the Carlyle Group. And in the film, he does raise a number of other serious suspicions, none – again to his credit – original with himself, but dramatizations of charges explored at length by serious journalists in books. 

            It has been correctly observed that the basic motivation behind some of the most persistent of conspiracy theorists  is not mere irrationalism, but a perhaps excessive penchant for rationality – demanding to make sense of things that, well, don’t.  The distinction is hard to spot, since any empirically competent, level-headed investigator  tends to get swallowed up in a crowd of crazies.

            Another possible determinant, perhaps less often observed: in ascribing a pattern to the welter of events, as deriving from a plot, the theorizer may be acquiescing in a demand for personalization.  For, the confusing flux of the world  often lacks palpable causes.  Surely it can’t just all be random – one suspects deep dark forces at work. A plot puts a face on it.  But usually this is an explanatory short-circuit. For indeed there are forces, as deep and dark as those of hydrodynamics, but they are not even rational, let alone personal.

Empirical question: Does a tendancy towards florid conspiracy-mongering  correlate negatively with religious belief?  It is an observation  due perhaps to many, but prominently expressed in many a delightful story of Father Brown, that superstition tends to flow into the vacuum left by an absence of faith.  Perhaps belief in a heavenly Father – however distant, however inscrutable – leaves one less likely to imagine that the world’s workings may be ascribed to some shave-pate villain in a bunker somewhere, stroking a cat.

Against this, however:  the observed fixation of Book-of-Revelation-style evangelicals  on the Antichrist, working through the New World Order.  They do, so they say, believe in God;  a lot of good it’s done them.

            There is a healthy kernel to the epistemological attitude which, in its pathological exfoliation, becomes conspiracy-mindedness: a simple stance of “Wait a minute.”  For as Locke observed, and as subsequent scientific and historical discoveries  retrospectively further buttress: that “some (and those the most) taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of assent, by lazily enslaving their minds, to the dictates and dominion of others, in doctrines, which it is their duty  carefully to examine.”  (Essay I.iv.22)

            In an unhealthy development, skepticism becomes  not a key to inquiry, but a pose of imperviousness in the face of counter-evidence.  Michael Rutschky, in a recent contribution to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, described the situation in Germany, where “Ich bleibe skeptisch” has become a slogan – not, like that of the fabled Missouran (“You’ll have to show me”) inviting actual demonstration, but issuing a warning that, whatever evidence you may bring, it will be dismissed as smoke and mirrors. This sclerotic ‘tough-mindedness’ in the face of empricism  is often coupled with a soft side for Verschwörungstheorie.  At an extreme, this leads to political infantilization.  That the phenomenon seems more to be met with in Europe (at least, comparing their educated reading public with that of America, and setting aside the seething cauldron of the Web sites and talk shows) may cohere  with an objective semi-infantilization or anyhow sidelining  of Europe itself, in the age of the unilateral hyperpower.

*

The detective versus an unnamed evil thing:

A tale of madness, and of the uncanny --

Murphy Calls-in a Specialist

Available for Kindle or Nook

*

[Footnote May 2013: 

The above was written ca. 2005;  since that time, the fragile cortices of many of our countrymen have cracked, while paranoid fantasies sprout like weeds.  Yet the circumstances tend to reinforce the conjecture above, that hands far from the tillers of power  are freed for idle mischief.   When in office, Republicans are crafty and cynical; when out, they lose their moorings.]

[Sidenote]  There is a quite respectable practice of trying-to-see-hidden-patterns everywhere:  it's called Science.  For which see:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/consilience.html

That practice too  has its pathologies, which perhaps someday time will allow us to notice in this place.

We find both kinds of nisus united  in the figure of Newton.  On the one hand, his scientific Principia side; on the other, his esoteric researches (alchemical and theological), which bulked equally large in his life.  Re the latter, David Berlinski remarks (Newton’s Gift (2000), p. 68):  “Secretive natures are quite prepared to believe that the history of human affairs  is largely the history of a great many secrets."