A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, cradled in a coffee-cup

 

Many years ago, I wrote a sotie which began:

 

<< We know, on scientific grounds, that penguins cannot exist.>>

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-existence-of-penguins.html

 

That was  in essence  simply a transcription of C.S.Lewis’s  Miracles into the key of penguin.  It has been used,  on occasion, in the classroom, at the intersection between Christianity and folklore.

 

More substantively, for a substantial period of modern physics (the Maxwell’s Equations golden-age), one could with even greater cogency have proclaimed:

 

<< We know, on the firm ground of physics, that atoms cannot exist.>>

 

BLUF:  It was a firm prediction of the theory of the time, that electrons circling the nucleus should radiate-away their energy, and the whole rickety assemblage  disappear in a puff of fairy-dust, before you could say “Jack Robinson”.

 

It was a very serious challenge to theory, one which most practicing physicists basically put aside in their minds, in the interest of simply getting on with whatever it was they did in the lab, hoping that someday it would all be put right.  By someone.

 

In time, it was put right; but this required an entirely new, astonishing, still-undigested and perhaps indigestible  new intellectual development:  Quantum Mechanics.

 

Then for a while, all was well,  practically and philosophically.  Notable new developments were achieved within the new framework.   Meanwhile, sheep grazed;  farmers tilled the fields;  lass and lad fell in love and wed, bringing forth those astonishing miracles that we call children.

 

And now, this:

 

In his very readable classic, The Emperor’s New Mind, mathematician/physicist Roger  Penrose  examines “the question of stability:  whether, as t increases [i.e., as time passes], the region R remains localized, or whether it begins to spread out over the phase space.” (p. 180).

 

Think of R as simply The Way Things Are  in Mr Rodgers’ Neighborhood, one fine autumn day.  We expect things to change a bit, as the afternoon wears on: a few leaves fall, Mr Rodgers takes out the recyclables;  but we don’t expect the leaves to shoot towards the sky, or for Mr Rogers to be himself recycled and emerge a dragon:  which is basically what can happen if matters spread indefinitely over phase-space.   In other words, no matter how stable that patch of God’s earth may seem at a given moment, over time things should go all higgledy-bobbledy.

 

Concretely:

 

 “We think of R as being dragged along the Hamiltonian vector-field as time proceeds. … What can be said about Hamiltonian systems generally?  Do regions in phase space tend to spread with time or do they not?  It might seem, that for a problem of such generality, very little could be said.” (p. 181)

 

(Pause, and tuck that apophthegm away in your cerebral chambers, for it applies profoundly to a host of problems, well beyond physics.  “It might seem, that for a problem of such generality, very little could be said.”**)

 

However, it turns out that there is a very beautiful theorem, due to Liouville (1809 - 1882),  that the volume of any region of the phase space  must remain constant  under any Hamiltonian evolution.

 

Saved!  Hooray!  Thank’e kindly, Mr Liouville.  -- The farmer returns to his plow with a will, whistling.

 

But hark -- Lo, on the horizon, skies darken, and a rumbling may be heard from afar.  For:

 

Despite the fact that Liouville’s theorem tells us that phase-space volume does not change with time-evolution, this volume will normally effectively spread… (p. 182)

 

That is, it splits into many strands, and those into strandlets -- all the while summing to the original constant in volume, but losing all sense of neighborhood.

 

And here’s the punch-line, the punch in the stomach:

 

This spreading effect in phase-space  has another remarkable implication.  It tells us, in effect, that  << classical mechanics cannot actually be true of our world! >>  (p. 183)

 

(Schrecklichkeit-italics in original.)

 

Now, there is a twist to this new alarm.  The conundrum of the stability of atoms applied to all atomic matter whatsoever.  But this new one most acutely concerns only solids -- fluids (liquids and gases) really do slosh around and spread out.  QMech once again to the rescue?  “Quantum theory is needed in order that the actual structure of solids can be properly understood.” (p. 184)  That sentence might, to anyone who seeks to relax back into intellectual slumber, seem reassuring; but note its successor:  “Somehow, quantum effects can prevent this phase-space spreading.”   (Sturm-und-Drang-boldface editorially added.)  Somehow.  It’s not in the bag.  Something must prevent prevent the spreading, but that something might turn out to be a whole new theory which we do not yet glimpse.

*

I have previously posted about the existence, and relative stability, of solids:  specifically, of coffee-cups (without the benefit of whose nestling, fresh-brewed beverage, this essay could not have been born).  I came to the conclusion that this matter was strictly speaking insoluble, but for certain assumptions, both scientific/metaphysical and (in one case) theological.

 

So, brew yourself a strong one -- no decaf! -- and check it out:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-new-proof-of-existence-of-coffee-cups.html

 

 

*

 

** A couple of concrete examples, from Jerry Fodor What Darwin Got Wrong (2010):

 

Extreme context-sensitivity of the ways of getting rich  make it unlikely that there could be a theory of ‘getting rich’ per se.

 

Sociologists and political scientists please copy.  -- There is ever a temptation, among practitioners of factually non-nomological sciences, to overreach in this way.

 

That observation was simply an accessible, spoonful-of-sugar preface to his real target:  Darwinian explanation and its discontents.  As,

 

Size affects fitness, but it does not follow that there are laws that determine the fitness of a creature as a function of its size.

 

 

Genetics Porn

The reliably acute H. Allen Orr has published a trenchant review of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade, which we link to without comment:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/stretch-genes/?insrc=hpma

Longtime readers of this blog will know that our salute of this article (in the still-solid New York Review of Books) owes nothing to political correctness.  We are perfectly open to the possibility that the thesis championed by Wade in the second part of his book, may have some validity.   But, being explosive, it needs much more backing than he has given it.  (Such is the identical reason for our chiding the "Universe as simulation" hypothesis.)

For our own polemic against ultra-Darwinist excess (well, "polemic";  actually it's pretty funny), try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-urysohn-metrization-theorem.html

~

Another recent example of Darwinian academic overreach, though much less incendiary as its implications are confined within linguistics, is Language in a Darwinian perspective, by Bernard Bichakjian, which maintains that “every linguistics feature, be it a speech sound, a grammatical marker, or a syntactic strategy, interfaces with a neuro-muscular algorithm, and that selection pressures have steadily guided languages …”.   (Credit where credit is due, though:  the man gets full marks from a Popperian perspective, in which “a theory needs to stick its neck out.”   This one sticks out like an ostrich.)  The level-headed Fred Newmeyer dismisses it as “bizarre” (his one-word summary) in the Sept 2003 issue of Language, p. 583ff.   And since, unlike a potential best-seller by a New York Times science writer, which could well influence public debate on sensitive issues, along with such semipopular works as On Aggression, African Genesis, and The Naked Ape, Bichakjian’s influence if any  will remain confined to pockets of academia, there is no need to comment further in this place, other than to quote Newmeyer’s witticism (one of several in the review):

A lot can be said against Chinese writing [he means, the writing system -- the logograms] as ‘evolutionarily primitive’, but one must agree that it has allowed its users to develop at least as vibrant an intellectual and creative life  as that of their alphabetic neighbors.

~

Orr remarks in a footnote, citing just one example from a fund of hundreds,

Geneticists have had an extraordinarily hard time finding genes that make substantive contributions to complex diseases like Type 2 diabetes. This doesn’t bode well, to put it mildly, for finding the genes that allegedly underlie subtle differences in predisposition to middle-class behavioral traits.

Such overreach is bad enough;  worse, is when the nihilistically inclined among neurophilosophers, conclude from a bit of petri-dish handwaving, that free will is an illusion, and morality with it.   Such views have the potential to wreak real mischief;  and we have polemicized against them here:  Eliminative Materialism

Note:  That essay does not specifically address linguistics, though the problems with reductionism of minds to neurons  are similar in several disciplines, and go back a ways in each.  Thus, Uriel Weinreich, contra the behaviorist simplifications of Leonard Bloomfield: 

Bloomfield’s neurological reductionism  depends on discoveries  that may never be made.

Bloomfield was the dean of American linguistics before WWII;  his introductory textbook Language (1933) was long standard, and contains much of lasting value; yet the early, pseudo-foundational chapter about Stimulus-and-Response, with its feeble fable about Jack and Jill, falls far below the standards of the rest of the book, and indeed feels perfunctory, contributing nothing even on its own terms:  like those Stalin-era exordiums in praise of the great leader, in Soviet texts about physics or what have you;  having made the needful obeissance, we move right along.

Rulon Wells had a nice line about all this (in “Meaning and Use”, in Word 1954):

In diagnosing the conflict between mentalism and mechanism, [Bloomfield] mislocates the issue, and thus plants his germ of truth  in the sand of confusion.

~

The situation in genetics has an analogue in the field of linguistics:  quite apart from the difficulty of accounting for language development, or for the sort of intricate syntactic phenomena highlighted by Chomsky and his successors, from outside linguistics proper (height of the ancestral esophagus inferred from shards of crania; Bloomfieldian behaviorism; connectionism; …), progress has been discouraging even within the field, and the Chomsky current in particular.  In that same Review Article, discussing On Nature and Language by Chomsky (et, actually, alia, as Newmeyer points out), the one-word summary is:  “disappointing”.  The reviewer reluctantly concludes that, if anything, the Minimalist Program represents a step backward.

~

Just a final word on the project of reducing genius to genes, or spirit to spit:
The eliminativists may prove  to their own satisfaction  that (say)  literature, and literary criticism, are nothing but secretions of the pineal gland (or however that hoary idea is tricked-out nowadays, in the latest scientific raiments), or that it evolved in the Jurassic for the purposes of attracting a mate (or more subtly -- like those initial pre-weight-bearing nubbins of wings -- simply to regulate body temperature),

but they will never produce any literature or criticism worth reading.

The Urysohn Metrization Theorem: an Adaptationist Account (updated)

People in labcoats have been puzzling over the preponderance, over a wide range of far-flung and disparate societies, of belief in the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, to the effect that every regular topological space with a countable basis is metrizable.  How to account for this strange coincidence?

A rear-guard of Platonists and theists would persist in maintaining, that every such space is, as a matter of sheer fact, metrizable;  that the fact is “out there”, like a mountain, whether or not you or I are aware of it, and whether or not we can assemble some semblance of a demonstration to “climb” it -- to clarify the assertion, make it plausible, or to ‘prove’ it in some sense.

This, however, is not the method of modern science, which spurns the affordances of mere reason, and denies the evidence of our eyes, relying instead on various  techniques and equipment in well-funded laboratories.  Accordingly, herewith an account of how belief in the Metrization Theorem arose spontaneously, by the proven processes of Natural Selection.

You see, many many years ago, a number of tribes roamed the savannah.  Some went picturesquely naked, others were draped in animal skins.  And one of these tribes, fancying that the stronger separability criterion of normality was required, whereas the only spaces to be found in their ecosystem at the time were merely regular, despaired of ever metrizing anything; sickened, and died.   Another tribe failed to reckon with the necessity of a countable basis (mere first-countability being insufficient), and promptly went extinct.  Still another lowballed the separation condition, imagining that merely being Hausdorff was enough;  their metrizations went awry, and they were eaten by mastodons.

In this way, in the fullness of geological time, the only tribes remaining  possessed an innate belief  in the so-called Theorem (which is itself, of course, completely meaningless.)   Current estimates place the gene for this Theorem on Chromosome 14.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[That was a philosophical satire.  For something a bit more substantive concerning the theorem in question, click here.]

~ ~ ~

Analytical appendix:

‘Twere a mug’s game, to cite specific instances of sociobiological overreaching -- just-so stories that purport to explain Love, Music, Art, what have you.  Chesterton already skewered these several generations back.   More worth noting are the (rare) cases where such thumb-sucking is found among mathematicians themselves.

Thus Reuben Hersch (apparently during a brief psychotic episode) wrote (“Some Proposals…” (1979); repr. in Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 23):

Our mathematical ideas fit the world  for the same reason that our lungs are suited to the atmosphere of this planet.

Yet the author knows better.  Just a bit further up the page (with his customary lucidity) he wrote:

Consider the theorem  2^c < 2^(2^c), or any theorem in homological algebra.  No philosopher has yet explained in what sense such theorems should be regarded as referring to physical ‘possibilities’.

[Update 2 March 2013]  There is yet another, and deeper, level, to this Gedankensotie, which has only just now  become apparent.

At the very most superficial level, the piece is an attack of mathematical Realism.  Hopefully  none of my readers  understand it as such.

At the next, and still obvious, level, it is a defense of the same against Ultra-Darwinism (namely:  No conceivable considerations of mere individual survival can attach to these arcane topological considerations; ergo, the fact that the qualified international community is unanimous in embracing the truth of e.g. the UMT, is evidence for the transcendental truth of the latter.).  This is the spirit in which it was written, quite parallel to our essay “On the Existence of Penguins”.

But now (having re-read Freud, and been reminded of the role of the Wish-Fulfilment in dreams), I notice something quite further in this scenario of tribes perishing for misprizing the higher truths of topology:   namely, the wish that our evolution had been guided, not merely by such paltry contingencies as tricks of climate and the bite of the sabertooth, but by the very beckoning of such transcendant truths.  In pursuit of such ends,  gladly, I, and my tribe, would strive and maybe die!

Happy Sacagawea Day !!

Well, the endless round of partying this three-day weekend, celebrating that holiday of holidays, is drawing to a close.   What that holiday might be (and which is now widely ignored outside of the Federal government), the FCC has informed us, we are not allowed to name (its eponym having fallen out of political correctitude), upon pain of losing our coveted Official Junior Blogger’s License, of which there are a scant one billion in existence.  However, previous posts are grandfathered-in, so we are allowed to quote one.

Here you go.

~     ~     ~

THOUGHTS FOR COLUMBUS DAY

Scene: The Earth.  Time: The last glaciation.

It was cold. -- How cold?

Cold enough for the seas to descend, or to freeze to solidity; so that feet might pass the Bering Strait, leaving the tired old world  for the undiscovered new.

And such was the route (so historians tell it) by which the New World was first peopled. 

And yet these scholars neglect one simple fact:  It was so d*mned cold, so effing cold, that, any normal person, it’d freeze his f***ing b*lls off.

Which leads, by simple syllogism, to the novel yet suddenly irrefragable fact:  Who passed the Strait on that fateful day, were no men as we now know them, but such Beings as scoff, as laugh at ice -- their laughter bell-like in the frigid air.  And so we are forced to this startling, yet eminently logical conclusion: (I anticipate a Nobel, or at least a MacArthur, for noticing this): Native Americans are the lineal descendents of penguins.

            The contentious might object, that the migration route of the Amerindians went via the northern polar regions, whereas the penguins of today inhabit Antarctica, somewhat to the south. The objection may, however, be overcome, via – mm – symmetry considerations.

            To be sure, a people which could eventually settle in MesoAmerica and the Caribbean  must have lost, over time, their original solid penguinity, much as salamanders, long confined to subterranean caves, in time may lose their eyes; thus leading to the present-day American anthropoid fauna's sadly decayed state.  And this, no doubt, by the same Mendelian-chromosomal processes which originally led to their distant ancestors, beginning from humble vertebrate beginnings, to attain that exalted, richly feathered, impeccably streamlined  pinguinal state. (I invite the lab lackeys to iron out the details.)

Q.E.D.

~     ~     ~

For a glimpse of those prehistoric penguins, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/when-penguins-ruled-earth.html
For more rollicking funstuff from old Dr J, here:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

Sex and Steven Pinker

I am currently enjoying a well-written and wide-ranging book, The Blank Slate (2002), by the polymathic Steven Pinker.  The term blank slate, a translation of Latin tabula rasa (which itself is used in English in the same sense) refers to the style of thesis that minimizes our innate propensities, and which appears as an ingredient in such styles of thought as Lockean associationism, Watsonian behaviorism, neuroscientific reductionism, and empiricism of all stripes.   

My own field of graduate study, linguistics, became a rich and crucial testing-ground of the behaviorist hypothesis, beginning with Noam Chomsky’s trouncing of B.F.Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.   Roughly the past half-century has been a time of tremendous ferment in linguistics, yielding fierce debate and increasingly deep investigations.   And what leavened the whole is that Chomsky himself, beneath all the new and interesting technical apparatus  which he introduced  and which at first was all that the still-clueless linguistics community could perceive (I don’t mean clueless generally -- all very smart people, just not clued-in to the actual agenda of this new way of thought) -- Chomsky himself was a man with a mission, of a philosophical rather than a technical sort.   The externals of his proposals have changed drastically over time, but the programmatic core has continued unbroken.

This is not the place to rehearse the old arguments, for the point at hand is not linguistic but rather sociopolitical.    You start with a subject as unsexy, unresonant, un-headlinegrabbing  as grammar:  picture schoolchildren parsing sentences on dusty blackboards.  Nothing to do with sex, or race, or gender (in the contemporary sense -- gender in the grammatical sense is as exciting as intransitive verbs); nothing to do with religion, or politics, or aesthetics, or football, or much of anything that people battle over.  Which means you can proceed whithersoever experiment, analysis, and logic take you, without constantly watching your back.   All the present reader needs to take away from this episode  is that, movitated simply by the then-novel idea that the positing of substantive innate structure is not forbidden in advance (that’s all we need), some extraordinarily sophisticated and revealing new research was carried out, and much was discovered about phenomena whose very existence we did not previously suspect.   Much dust was raised and some of it has settled;  it is unimportant that we assess just how the pendula presently hang in this or that aspect of the battles, all we need stress it that no-one who lived through this will sit still for an a-priori pronouncement that everything is just conditioning, or politics, or patriarchal conspiracy.

Now, Pinker’s original field was child language-learning, and he moved in the milieu where the Chomskyan legacy was strongest.   But his intellectual interests range far beyond this.  So imagine the quandary when, peeking over the parapets of the Chomskyan fortified compound, he perceives a world in which -- while we were off arguing whether something like the A-over-A principle could be innate or whether it was just an artifact of a deeper parametrized anlage -- the world at large has been mindknapped by the pod-people,  in unison chanting the orthodoxy that, while Diversity is the supreme value, nobody is actually, well, you know, any different. 

Pinker picks his way deftly and gingerly through this political minefield.  In the matter of gender, he alludes to differing degrees of leptokurtosis in the bell curves for certain faculties, by test-population, but refrains from drawing the obvious conclusions, mention of which got Larry Summers fired from his job as president of Harvard.   But finally he must confront the radical theses of the Postmodernists.

The fantasy of male-female interchangeability, unlike such equally far-fetched fantasies as, say, that of UFOs and anal probes, is empirically unstable, as it is likely to receive decisive refutation in daily life, for anyone who becomes a parent.   There is an abundance of anecdotal evidence on this score, from hippie/Quakerish/feminist mothers  who, try as they might, failed to keep their sons from turning into boys, and from researchers who track the apparently vast populations of identical-twins-separated-at-birth.  These tales are quite poignant and entertaining, but there is no need to repeat any of them here.  Our quarry lies elsewhere.

Well towards the end of his lengthy book, after  (so the author must hope) the more feeble-minded and hot-tempered readers have dropped out, Pinker devotes an entire chapter to the subject of sex, under its (post)modern label of “Gender”.   (“Race and Ethnicity”, as it is now known, does not likewise receive its own chapter, for obvious reasons.   The man is bold, but he is not a fool.)

He begins, as diplomatically he must, with various genuflections towards feminists, trotting out the names of a great many women writers and scientists,  and reminding us that in his own field of child language acquisition (though of course he has long since broadened beyond that)  women researchers are in the majority, all by way of prior propitiation.  But finally, on page 362, he cannot contain himself:

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.  [Note:  He has borrowed this polemical phrase, not coined it.]  It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence …

-- then suddenly draws back (already anticipating the wrath of the maenads) and retreats into P.C. piety, completes the paragraph with a bit of bushwah:

… and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Does he really maintain that the heightened demonization of male sexuality and male aggression by gender-feminists  has led to laxer enforcement of the existing laws?   Of course not;  but he felt it politic to say so.

For someone schooled in Darwinian and game-theoretic analyses of behavior, it is child’s-play to address this issue:

Let’s also apply common sense to the doctrine that men rape to further the interests of their gender.  A rapist always risks injury at the hands of the woman defending herself.  In a traditional society, he risks torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of her relatives.  In a modern society, he risks a long prison term.  Are rapists really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to benefit the billions of strangers that make up the male gender?

~

By coincidence, I picked up Pinker’s chapter after reading an article in that week’s New Yorker,  concerning a celebrated rape-and-murder case.  A real legal cliff-hanger, never definitely resolved:  but what struck me was the actual crime itself.  Whoever dunnit, after raping the woman, he killed her -- killed her kids for good measure.

Now -- for analytic purposes, let us abstract away from the moral horror of the thing, and put it under the natural-selective microscope.  We begin with a cross-species -- nay, let us modernistically say, cross-cultural comparison. Mrs. Mantis, as is well-known, instead of a post-coital cigarette (which might stunt the fetuses, and which in any case is supremely evil  in and of itself) chows down instead on the head of her erstwhile Lothario.   Biologically, this makes abundant sense:  a wholesome meal when most needed (after all, she is now eating for hundreds) plus insuring that her swain will not now go tramping off (men !) knocking-up other Miss Mantises whose progeny would compete with her own.  The whole thing is so utterly logical that the wonder is it isn’t more widespread, among populations that follow Evolutionary Strategy Two (“male abandons, female nurtures”),  which we touched on here:  baby-daddies take heed.

So now consider our rapist/murderer.   He is a sort of Wrong-Way Corrigan of the struggle for survival of the fittest.  Whether or not rape is (as gender-feminists would have it) purely about dominance and not about sex, this particular crime  is glaringly inconsistent with Darwinian sex.   Killing the woman you just impregnated is -- well, we wouldn’t dream of being judgmental about such things, whatever turns you on and all that, but -- it is quite simply and unambiguously anti-selective.    What makes such a time-bomb tick, I do not know;  something indeed is amiss, somewhere in the human sexual mechanism  -- something broken, possibly by a Fall.  Here C.S.Lewis is a better diagnostician than is Darwin.

~

[Update Nov 2011:]  I just re-read the unusually tart and trenchant review of Pinker’s How the Mind Works  by Ahouse and Berwick, which appeared in The Boston Review a few years ago,  and happened upon this passage:

It is hollow bluster to talk about the selective advantage of sex in humans  if the traits we are discussing   evolved and became established long before the human lineage branched.

Ahouse and Berwick, like David Berlinski, are eloquent skeptics, not only of ultra-Darwinism (Gould’s “adaptationism”), but of aspects of more mainstream Darwinism as well.  And this, from a non-moron perspective (which is, of course, a minority view among Darwin-haters).

But in the next issue, Pinker blazes back in reply … It’s all quite exciting.  Much better than Indiana Jones.

~

[Update Dec 2011] Some cognitive aspects of Pinker’s waging the good fight on the battlefield of sex, here.

[Update June 2013]  Rather off at an angle, but hey -- Pinker, sex ...
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/06/25/steven-pinker-defends-colin-mcginn/

Consilience

The unity of science consists  alone  in its method, not in its material.

-- Karl Pearson

The unity of science is a pipe-dream.

-- Ian Hacking

The learnèd world  for long has yearned,  that all knowledge might be uniformly regimented beneath the broad skirts of science -- typically led by whatever was in fashion at the time.  For a while, it was Newton.  Thus,

Hume prided himself on doing for psychology  what Newton had done for physics.  He offers a (vacuous) theory of the association of ideas  as the counterpart to the theory of gravitation.

-- Anthony Kenny, The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy (1994).

In the 1920s, Otto Neurath headed up the influential Unified Science movement, which set the intellectual tone for a whole generation.

Subsequently, various technical developments have proved alluring to architects of airborne palaces -- computers in particular. As, “Hey, maybe the mind is just a Turing machine !  Tape goes to the left, goes to the right, scribble, erase,  and, bingo!,  you get Hamlet and the Credo.”  This eructation was dignified with the title of “machine-state functionalism”.

In our day, in the English-speaking world, the lodestone is Darwin.

In a lengthy work  unfortunately titled Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Daniel Dennett effectively claims skeleton-key status for Darwinism, comparing it to “universal acid:  it eats through just about every traditional concept”, including in cosmology and psychology.  A clear-headed corrective to his claims, from the ever-trenchant H. Allen Orr, may be read here: http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Orr.html.

~     ~     ~

And then Edward O. Wilson weighs in, with his much-talked-about book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).   Wilson is the man to beat, when it comes to ants;  has he likewise managed to outline a Theory of Everything?   The dust jacket is certain that he has:  “nothing less than a daring challenge to the prevailing world-view ... a grand, coherent conception,  encompassing the sciences, the arts, ethics and religion” burbles Gerald Holton on the back cover, and Jared Diamond proclaims the eminent ant-man “one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers”.

Well, a man is not on his oath, in jacket copy.   Let us see whether the accomplishment matches the hype.

Wilson borrows the word from an 1840 work by William Whewell, which states:

The consilience of inductions takes place when an induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an induction, obtained from another different class.  This consilience is a test of the truth of the theory in which it occurs.

Wilson comments: “Consilience is the key to unification.  I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision.”  (p.8)

That is a common and valid reason for philosophical neologism (since the word consilience had become obsolete, Wilson effectively re-introduced it).  The word is not, however, used with much precision in this book -- at least, it does not truly preserve whatever meaning Whewell may have had in mind (his own wording is none too precise.)

Consilience -- It is a lovely word, rhyming with brilliance and resilience.  Wilson trots it out from time to time, rather like those “station identification” messages required by the FCC;  but over the whole course of the book, it seems to do no actual work.   As he himself suggests, it is roughly a synonym of coherence -- which would seem to be setting the bar pretty low.    

As Wiki  puts it:  “Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.”  But broader is a nice way of saying diluted, weakened. --  In terms of ambition, however, Wilson’s consilience is a stronger program, in that it aims to rope in the humanities as well; but it can hope to do this only at the expense of diluting the proposed commonality.

For sheer emptiness, it touches bottom on page 117:

But surely, skeptics will say, that is impossible.  Scientific fact and art can never be translated  one into the other.  Such a response is indeed the conventional wisdom.  But I believe it is wrong.  The crucial link exists:  The common property of science and art  is the transmission of information.

Omigosh,  we didn’t we think of that before ?!?  All-kina stuffs uses information!! -- Or rather, “the information”, in the unidiomatic jargon being peddled by James Gleick’s recent (and similarly overambitious) book. -- In point of fact, there is more commonality between a sermon and a sex pheromone, since both, in addition to transmitting information, exhort. --

Or again:  We may regard elephants and chimps as simply alternate aspects of a single superorganism, since both may be seen as machines for processing peanuts into poop.
Or again, p. 219.  He quotes with approval: “Edward Rothstein, a critic trained in both mathematics and music, compares their creative processes”:

We begin with objects that look dissimilar.  We compare, find patterns, analogies with what we already know.  We distance ourselves and create abstractions…

I’d be prepared to concede (and the suggestion is intriguing) that, at a high and abstract level, there are similarities between the appreciation of … well, certain types of music (not “Who Let the Dogs Out”) and mathematics.  But surely the creative processes are quite different.   The description above (which does rather sound like a mathematician’s work)  is itself already such an abstraction, that it rings less like an analysis, than like a really terrific pick-up line  for naive and impressionable co-eds.

(There is a wonderful app, by the bye, for mathifying, or at least patternizing, our musical appreciation:

An animated graphic showing interval type

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1QM6YZC45g&src_vid=asDXpfFMKNA&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_587547

Disney did something similar at the beginning of “Fantasia”, but this display is more precise and structured, and ultimately just as evocative as the artistic impressionism.)

However, there is another way of reading Whewell’s definition, which, whether or not Whewell himself meant it this way, leads to a more interesting notion, which we may call strong consilience.   This thesis, I shall argue, is exciting, though false; whereas the watered-down weak consilience is little more than consistency, and thus is uninteresting even if true.

[Note:   I have only just this minute stumbled upon the fact that H. Allen Orr has already written a (typically incisive) review of Consilience as well. That man is hard to top, whenever he opens his mouth about something.  So out of respect for the reader’s time, I must in all candor now urge you to cease reading this one, and go read Orr instead:

http://bostonreview.net/BR23.5/Orr.html

If, after you have savored and assimilated what Orr has to say (and which, fwiw, I heartily endorse), you still have appetite left for some leftovers, you may return to the present on-going essay.

Orr himself, incidentally, writing with Jerry Coyne, downplays consilience even within biology, in that the essential species concept is itself not tightly unified:

Because we rejected ecological differentiation as part of the Biological Species Concept in sexually reproducing groups, we obviously endorse the use of different species concepts in different groups.  We do not consider this pluralism to be a weakness of the BSC.  Because the causes of discreteness may well differ among taxa, so may the concepts appropriate to addressing the species problem.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 52 ]

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am William Whewell, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

(To resume...)  ]

So, let us see if we can force an interpretation on Whewell’s words which will lead to something interesting.

An “induction”, whatever exactly that may be, is not a fact, but an orderly pattern of facts.   So let us by fiat define  strong consilience thus: 

actual isomorphism (or at least homomorphism) between established aspects of different disciplines. 

The model for what we have in mind  is the collection of surprising and delightful structural coincidences within and between mathematics and various parts of (originally) mostly physics, known under the slogan of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.  (You can consult Wigner’s original essay of that title here.)  And since Wigner wrote, the essence of the history of mathematics over this past half-century or more, has been an efflorescing of consilience in just this neo-Whewellian sense:  subfield after subfield  turn out to be deeply interlinked.  It is a breathtaking tale (and has, incidentally -- see below -- nothing whatever to do with the thesis of Reductionism).

There have also been some remarkable recent examples of consilience between math and physics:  cases in which mathematicians, burrowing from (as it were) the east coast, and physicists, burrowing from (so to speak) the west, suddenly met in the middle.  Celebrated cases include:  fibre bundles (math) and gauge theories (physics); zeros of the Riemann zeta-function (math) and atomic energy levels  (physics).  These results are, I suspect, among the most important of the past century (as much as to say:  of the past two millennia), and the best thing would be for us all to quit our day-jobs and join mountaintop monasteries set up specially to study these matters.  (While not omitting matins;  first things first.)

Mathematics itself might be defined as the science of matching patterns;  so there is a certain appropriateness that it serves as a link between such superficially disparate phenomena as the pattern of spots on a leopard and the subject of reaction-diffusion equations (pioneered by none other than Alan Turing), or floret patterns and Fibonacci series.  An absorbing book on this subject is Life’s other secret (bad title, good book), by Ian Stewart, 1998.

“Strong Program” publications, that go way beyond such vacuous ecumenism, include the Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Vienna Circle).

[A more careful consideration of this kind of consilience  is available here.]

 

~     ~     ~

There are times when Wilson does seem to be talking about something like strong consilience  (p. 125):

The natural sciences have constructed a webwork of causal explanation  that runs all the way from quantum physics  to the brain sciences and evolutionary biology.

Yet at other times  (p. 229), consilient seems no more than a ten-dollar synonym for consistent:

The biological origin of the arts is a working hypothesis, dependent on the reality of the epigenetic rules … It is meant to be testable, vulnerable, and consilient with the rest of biology.

Which is to say:  When attempting to demonstrate that various foul-smelling chemicals lead directly to the Goldberg Variations  and  Paradise Lost, you’re not allowed to actually falsify the basic biological facts.

~      ~      ~

Wilson never explicitly defines the characteristics of consilience once and for all -- which is fine;  it’s more a term to guide the thoughts along.   I use “minimalism” in a similar way, in these essays:  connotation accretes to the term in the course of investigation.  And a connotation that accretes to Wilson’s term  is that of hierarchy:  which has indeed characterized biology ever since Linnaeus, and in ever richer ways since, but which seems a very odd fit for, say, mathematics or art.  P. 182:

The crucial difference between the two domains is consilience:  the medical sciences have it and the social sciences do not.  Medical scientists build upon a coherent foundation of molecular and cell biology.  They pursue elements of health and illness  all the way down to the level of biophysical chemistry. … Social scientists  by and large  spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering of knowledge…

Sidenote:

Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate,p. 26) quotes from anthropologist Leslie White  the sort of statement that apparently drove the worthy Wilson u-batz:

The culture process [is] sui generis;  culture is explainable in terms of culture.

Not, note, even in terms of psychology;  let alone physics.

Anyhow:

If being hierarchical is a requirement for being consilient, then indeed the term in this sense is more substantive than it seemed when the author proclaimed that simply using “information” would suffice.  And accordingly it becomes more falsifiable (philosophically, this is a good thing), but also (though I won’t argue the point further) in the case of many quite respectable spheres of activity, false (not so good).

~      ~      ~

Wilson’s penultimate chapter is titled “Ethics and Religion”.   Its motto (p. 238) is:

Moral reasoning, I believe, is  at every level  intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences.

Now -- those of you who have followed this blog (in particular my intemperate trashing of morally reductionist neuroscientists), no doubt expect, that at this point I shall undergo the Incredible Hulk transformation and start blasting-out one of my patented rants  against atheists (for Wilson manfully avows himself, not really an atheist, but an a-theist, a non-theist), Nominalists (Wilson is, in general, not that), and Donald Trump (so far as I know, Wilson has never even met the man).  Well, not a bit of it.

First of all, because I myself do not pretend to really understand moral reasoning.  Logic, yes, given the premises;  but ahh, the premises !  But more important, because Edward O. Wilson is a remarkably genial and congenial companion;  and one who, given his deeply Christian upbringing, truly understands what it’s all about, even if he has reached different conclusions from those of his Protestant evangelical tutors (as have I).  Furthermore, it would seem that both the present and the previous Pope would agree with that statement.

He clarifies:

The split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and secularists.  It is between transcendentalists [dbj:  cf. Realists], those who think that moral guidelines exist outside the human mind,  and empiricists [dbj: cf. Nominalists], who think them contrivances of the mind.  The choice between religious or nonreligious conviction  and the choice between ethically transcendentalist or empiricst conviction  are cross-cutting decisions made in metaphysical thought.

Absolutely true.  There is, of course, a question about how non-theistic and indeed non-deistic transcendental moral schemes are grounded, but that does not invalidate the logical point made here.

As Charles C. Gillispie puts it in his generous review:

Put baldly, this sounds like arid monistic materialism. Wilson does not put it baldly. He brings to his subject a disarming mixture of personal modesty and intellectual rigor. His reading is wide and his learning extensive. He writes as well of arts and letters as he does of science. It is difficult to think of a finer evocation of Milton's genius than Wilson’s passage on Satan’s invasion of the garden of Eden.

(Um, well, actually, not so much:  C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost.  Still, Wilson’s own tribute is very creditable indeed, for a myrmecologist.)

He adds:

There is no question in his mind but that conveying the essence of truth and beauty pertains to the arts.

You (as Sarah Palin would put it) betcha !  But -- contrary to the effusions of certain journalistic science-pornographers, “conveying the essence of beauty” is not, in fact, the brief of science.

~      ~      ~

The latter part of the book contains rather general sociopolitical discussions:  which, at his own assessment that the social sciences are lamentably unconsilient, means that we stray fairly far from genuinely scientific or Whewellian concerns. 

Despite the fact that his overarching project is ambitious (or made to sound so), Wilson himself is a becomingly modest man.  He even cops to a probably spurious potential charge, granting a “whiff of brimstone in the consilient world view, and a seeming touch of Faust to those committed to its humanistic core.”  Specifically, he points to the spectre of human genetic engineering:  “How much should people be allowed to mutate themselves and their desendants?”  The spectre is quite real, the charge being spurious only if laid at the door of a Whewellian philosophy of science.   What eventually -- or not-so-eventually -- comes to pass, will depend, neither on philosophy nor on theoretical science, but on what is fashionable and funded in places like Singapore and Hong Kong.  It is quite possible that, within the lifetime of some of you, you will witness a Wellsian world of Eloi and Morlocks.   Institutionally, not much stands in the way of this but the Historical Church.

~     ~      ~     ~     ~

This may be a tad off-topic but... The Atlantic Monthly has just published a very nice article on Professor Wilson's current activities.  Of particular interest to myself was reference to an article that Wilson recently co-authored with Martin Nowak, a splendid mathematical biologist whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making at a conference he organized at the Princeton IAS, described in "Follia Linguistica" (in: Princeton Follies;  to appear).

~      ~      ~

Russell Standish, a mathematician, cites the work of his chatmate, one Bruno:

His conclusion is, instead of psychology being reducible to, or indeed emerging from the laws of physics, the fundamental laws of physics are in fact a conseuence of the properties of machine psychology.  This is indeed a revolutionary reversal of the traditional ontology of these subjects.

Russell Standish, Theory of Nothing (2006; 2^nd edn. 2011), p. 129

Such a view is certainly consilient, though it stands Wilsonian consilience on its head, along with common sense.  And Standish embraces it thus (solecistically):  “I agree with this fundamental tenant.”  By that he means tenet;  but “machine psychology” is no typo -- sic, as it stands -- albeit it would make about as much sense to derive the laws of physics rather from marine psychology :  We are all but the dreams of porpoises …

[Update 16 III 2012] A striven-for consilience of art criticism and neuroscience:
http://chronicle.com/article/Eric-Kandels-Visions/131095/

Gavagai !

[Note to nonprofessional philosophers:
The following follows the classic treatment of W.V.O. Quine, in Word and Object.]

This Sunday's papers contained an interesting report from America’s premier naturalist, Mark Trail.  It offered a curious observation, of interest to linguistic analysis in the style of Quine, and to the theory of Mind generally.

According to this consummately reliable source,  our furry friends the prairie dogs, are preyed upon by coyotes.  But they are difficult to catch, since these loveable rodents dwell in gigantic underground colonies (a single one of which, in Texas,  once numbered 400 million -- now that’s a lot of prairie dogs),  with a great many escape hatches.  The instant any one of them  spots a coyote, it lets loose with “Gavagai !!!” (or squeaks to that effect), at which distress signal everybody  -- pop!  underground.   Leaving the coyote going mad with hunger.

But!  There’s a catch.  -- Let Dr. Trail himself tell it, since we can scarcely improve upon his prose:

Sharp-eyed [ed. note: and also furry]  prairie dogs [oh and -- did we neglect to mention? -- also cute]  sound the alarm when coyotes approach, but the coyote seems to know that these creatures can’t count.   With his mate he trots along in plain sight, right through the mound city.  The inhabitants all dive into their tunnels  as he continues on his way.  But his mate stops and quietly crouches among the mounds.

The first curious rodent who pops out to watch his enemy depart  suddenly becomes the coyotes’ dinner.

Alas!  frisky and adorable, the prairie dog -- like his cousin the humble woodchuck -- is entirely unfamiliar with the Peano postulates -- or in layman’s terms, with Our Friends the Integers.   Therefore they get eaten.  Gobble gobble gobble !!!  Gone!

Now, from this we may conclude, that apud the sciurideans, the vocalization “Gavagai!” does not mean “Lo, coyotes!”, but more something along the line of “Lo, undetached coyote parts!”, or “Lo, Platonic ideal of coyotehood  currently manifested locally!”.  In any event, the denotatum is a mass noun, not a count noun, and does not obey the digital rules of subtraction.

Dr. Trail goes on to report that, by such means, the prairie-dog population has declined by a whopping 98% over the past century.

Canny Darwinians will, however, already have noted the likely result of all this.  By ruthlessly culling the fluff-head innumerates of the population, generation upon generation (quite a good idea, really), Mother Nature (note to secularists:  that's Natural Selection in drag) is insuring  that  those who are eventually left  will be the mathematically most astute animals on earth.   Already we perceive the distant sound of scribbling upon chalkboards, in the M.I.T.- corridor-like  underground tunnels.

-- This just in!  Actual footage of a prairie dog suddenly conceiving the solution to the Riemann Hypothesis!   (This fellow has generally been known, in despite of taxonomy, as the “Dramatic Hamster”, for assonance’ sake.  But he’s really a prairie dog.)

Further proof that prairie dogs have already become the linguistic wizards of the animal kingdom  here.