Science

7 Secret Lives

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:14:00 GMT

It is now more than a week since I've finished Galileo's Dream, and I am still contemplating the wisdom of this passage:

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo´s Dream, 2009, p. 307

Physicists and Philosophy

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:05:00 GMT

A good friend of mine left some feedback to an earlier post with his personal recollections of his first encounter with philosophy. Johan kindly agreed to let me promote his feedback to a full posting.

(A)musings on Badiou 1/6/2010 2:49 PM by Johan Louw

As a young theoretical physicist I was concerned about the validity of my 'science' and started delving into philosophy with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge and questions, of decidability, verifiability and truth. This diversion, with the exception of Plato/Socrates and Rene Descartes ( still some confusion) left me more confused than before I started reading.
But then I heard about Kurt Goedel's omega inconsistency theorem. As mathematical logic was not a prescribed course (and the mathematics is rather elementary, or so I thought) I started to work through the main ideas in mathematical logic in order to get to the point where I could understand what the omega inconsistency theorem really meant.
I took me three years of hard disciplined work. It was not the elementary mathematics of formal logic or axiomatic set theory that caused my suffering, instead, what tortured me even in my dreams was the bootstrapping (self referencing or recursive) arguments that constituted the proof as well as the meaning of the symbolism in terms of the knowledge theoretical questions which I was trying to answer. Conceptually understanding this theorem is one of the most difficult things I have conquered in my life and to put this in perspective my field of expertise, gauge theories, is understood to be the most difficult mathematical physics that you can attempt and by the time I reached sixteen I had already worked through and understood many of the different geodesics and solutions in general relativity.
Aside: Bootstrapping although contrary to any logical thinking exists and works, just read about those crazy Kaons ( particle physics) and think about the chicken and egg question in evolutionary terms!
When I finally finished with Frege, Russell, Whitehead and Goedel the orgasmic elation of finally understanding a very difficult theorem was first met with serious disappointment and only later when I realized that my unjustified disappointment was due to the realization that the nature of knowledge is elusive, and that this theorem's brilliance lies in defining the scope and validity of our theories. Translated (rather naively) into English, it says; In some closed axiomatic systems (with some restrictive conditions) there will always be at least one undecided preposition and secondly the axioms of the arithmetic in question cannot be proven within the system. A second more English translation will illuminate the source of my disappointment. It says; If you base a philosophy on a set of ideas (assuming them to be true) and then argue using formal logic, you cannot come up with any new ideas (although expressing the old ideas in different ways may be very useful) in fact you cannot even prove the old ideas(axioms).
An old original joke of mine is 'Newton killed Merlin', but in fact it was Galileo Galilei ( the father of both theoretical and experimental physics) that delivered the death blow. Even after Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler did some of the groundwork, it was the Italian who in one fell swoop destroyed Aristotle's physics and commanded nature to yield her secrets to experiments, when he formulated and tested 'Newton's Laws of motion'. To my mind this obliterates the need to answer any of the Kantian questions relating to epistemology. GG created the link between the human mind and the external space-time in which it lives, allowing us to take the external universe and to encode it into structures which we had created in our own minds over centuries. Suddenly,fear of the natural world had been replaced by a limited command of it as well as the possibility to understand and model it all with numbers and axiomatic systems. Merlin and Yoda ( to be be fair they both told us to look within ourselves) were finally dead and the swamp has become a sharply lit mall.
So Badiou's ideas leaves me with some questions. Can we really use the structures (in this case Mathematical logic, set theories and algebras) created in the human mind to analyze structures created in the human mind. In the language of ML; Does A imply A?, of course it does, but it says nothing! Even more unkind is that ML is in itself an axiomatic system. A second concern that I have is that when we impose ML on philosophy, should we not just admit that we have come full circle and landed in Socrates' lap and unfortunately too close to Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics for comfort (remember his bad physics)!
But enough epistemological jesting, for the point that I am trying to make is that technocratic application of knowledge will get us nowhere. As much as I understand an appreciate the immense power of these axiomatic systems I always preach caution when we try an draw absolute conclusions from areas where the validity of our theories have not been tested. What is important is to see ourselves as a part of this universe and realize the events we experience are just that. Also the ideas we have are just that and even though experience and thought feed on each other and neither could exist independently, they are separate entities that could not be confused. In essence all mathematics ( a philosophy created in the human mind and encoded in a language, not a science) and therefore serious science is based on this kind of abstract thinking, but it is important to remember that we use our thinking to model our environment, even though our environment shaped our thinking in the first place. We are both and at the same time creators and products of our universe.
The only thing left is for us all to become good Buddhists, to realize that the Ying and the Yang are both the same and not the same, and grasping for absolutes in any endeavor will leave us empty handed. It is as if the universe is a large spider web and every move we make, sets off a vibration in the web that influences everything else in the universe including ourselves! Scary is that once, when writing about the way the human brain works, I used exactly the same spider web analogy to illustrate the workings of the human brain! Even our brains mimic the nature of the universe, which is not at all surprising since we are part of it, after all.
But before you follow my foray into ML remember that Goedel died of starvation, he would not eat for fear of being poisoned. How logical is that! For one of the great geniuses of our time? BTW he wasn't the only logician that displayed serious mental instability.
Footnote; I apologize to the reader for ‘Bushi-yfing’ the translation of the IT into English. Also I recommend the reading of any standard ML text by anyone who would like to incur permanent brain damage. More fun and illuminating however would be to read be some English version of Euclid's elements, it is as far as I know the first axiomatic approach to knowledge and still valid after 2500 years (outside of the logical nitpicking) and is way more accessible. Another more accessible work is 'Goedel Escher Bach (an eternal golden braid)' by Douglas Hoffstaeter.

Update: sinnkk asked if Johan has a blog or something similar. Sadly no. Johan seems to pefer an adventurous life-style and is often difficult to get hold of.

Notable Net Nuggets 20122009

Gerhard Kleinhans — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:57:00 GMT

As usual, some stuff I’ve noticed over the past few days:

The August Review features some fascinating articles on how the Trilateral Commission have shaped the world economy.
Kudo’s to Philip for pointing this out to met: an analysis of how media consumption habits have changed. The chart presenting the Evolution of Reading is really nifty.
In a rational world this would mean the end of Objectivism (again).
Two different recent articles musing on various opposing terms and both concluding that the need to fight for a better world remains unending. In an eloquent piece on DailyKos blogger science ponders the Science Fiction/Fantasy, Jew/Babylonian and progressive/conservative oppositions, while Matthew Yglesias looks at realism/idealism.
Any view that postulates humans as somehow separate or even superior to our fellow creatures is really untenable. We should scrap ‘Human Rights’ in favor of ‘Ape Rights’.

Enjoy.

Being And Nothingness

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:09:00 GMT

At the heart of all matter lies nothing. Yes, sounds rather mystic, and although I did know it, I never really grasped just how empirically true that statement is. And especially how much nothing.

That is, until I followed some links and discovered this scale model of the hydrogen atom. It takes a second or two to read the instructions, and then a few more to stare into the abyss. Go and have a look, you’ll be stunned.

The Precautionary Principle

Gerhard Kleinhans — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:21:00 GMT

You know, somewhere in one of the emotional centers of my brain I do find some understanding for the common man that falls for the propaganda from Climate Change Deniers – I can fully sympathize with a vague skepticism about anything asserted by governments, institutions and claques. And indeed, this skepticism is often warranted – remember the so-called case for war in Iraq?

However, being an adult and responsible citizen demands that one evaluates the likelihood of a conspiracy against the scope and trustworthiness of the evidence presented, before gracing the conspiracy theory with any credibility. I for one cannot believe that any conspiracy involving more that 10 people could ever be effective – I have never seen evidence of a larger group managing to keep something secret for long, and to doubt the integrity of 99.9 % of the world’s scientists is ridiculous (and bloody insulting to scientists as well).

One argument I often hear centers around the half-truth that scientific consensus changes, and therefore our knowledge about climate change is incomplete. Because we do not know exactly how much how soon the climate will change, we do not need to act. Frustrating. The assertions about scientific consensus and the limits of our knowledge may be true, but to conclude that the notion of cataclysmic climate change is bogus, is dangerously illogical. I beg you: please read Mark Kleiman’s post on the precautionary principle, an explanation of how to logically evaluate risk. (Note: this is indeed the same principle invoked by Bush/Cheney when they claimed that the risk of WMD necessitates the invasion of Iraq. The big difference is that empirical evidence did not support their claim, in fact they knowingly lied and it was clear for all to see who looked at the evidence, while the empirical evidence for climate change is pretty pervasive and irrefutable.)

What really annoys me about the science skepticism, is that, unless they are living undiscovered in some tropical rainforest and would not be reading this, the skeptics trust their lives to science routinely every day. The drive cars, fly planes, take medicines, use computers – all activities only possible through science, necessarily incomplete as it is.

We’ve reached the stage where there can only be 2 possible motivations for Climate Denial: criminality or stupidity. I only wish it was easier to sort the criminals from the dunces, so that we could dispose of the former and ignore the latter.

Update: My friend Alfed reminded me of this article discussing the precautionary principle in relation to the Iraq war. I admit to having read this a few days ago, and it was obviously in the back of my mind this morning when I wrote the above. - GLK

Update #2: Oops, mea culpa. The article Alfred refered to is not the one I thougt dealing about the PP and Iraq, but rather a thourough and interesting evaluation of the PP itself. I cannot locate the PP-Iraq article now, but it was featured at Reason.com a few days ago.

Bad Boys Revisited

Gerhard Kleinhans — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:07:00 GMT

The news about testosterone being more benign than previously assumed was widely reported yesterday. As I always blamed testosterone for practically all the ills of society, the item really surprised me, and in the course of the day I became increasingly suspicious – not about the science and research involved, but rather the interpretation of the results and especially the reporting of the study.

To summarize: women who received one dose of testosterone act more cooperative as long as they are unaware of having received the hormone. In contrast, women who thought they received testosterone, whether true or false, exhibited more aggression. They only studied the effects on women, but the scientists believe that it will have the same effect on men. Based on this the authors of the study suggest that “[t]estosterone induces anti-social behavior in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity”.

Wait a minute, are we not jumping to conclusions here, sexy and media-friendly as they are? For starters, I need more explanations of why they expect men and women to react similarly to testosterone. And could the effect of testosterone change with longer exposure to the hormone, such as from puberty onwards? For that matter, does testosterone effect adult men and women in the same way it mixes up teenage boys? Something has to explain bad boy behavior, and I am reluctant to ignore the effect of hormones.

Cooperation is the culturally dominant attitude (or gender role) for women, while men are expected to be more aggressive. In the study testosterone promoted the culturally dominant attitude in women. Does it then not follow that it would make men more aggressive, even if they are unaware of having received an extra dosage? And anyway, the gender system may be largely cultural rather than biological, but it’s effect on personality and behavior exceeds that of mere ‘prejudice’ by far. Maybe a better conclusion would be that the aggression enhancing effect of testosterone is caused by our system of gender differentiation.

2 - 1 = 0

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:05:00 GMT

Loneliness. I somehow find this a difficult subject to talk about, as if there is some taboo against being lonely just as is still the case with depression and other common mental ailments. Which is strange, as I never thought about loneliness as a sickness. I guess I always thought loneliness to be the condition experienced when the number of friends and meaningful social contacts drop below a certain personal threshold, but if loneliness can be contagious, it must be more than a mere mathematical equation.

Since Roelie passed away I have had ample personal experience with loneliness (hope I’m not infecting people here by admitting to it, but come on, widower after 20 years relationship, it should not be a surprise to anybody). And if I look back at the last 4 years I have to agree that it is indeed a self-reinforcing condition – being lonely puts stress on all my other friendships and relationships with the result that I am increasingly isolating myself, thereby increasing my loneliness, leading to depression, self-loathing and generally seeing my life as meaningless (which was always the case with me, but at least it used to be meaningless fun as well). It took me a few years to realize that I will not escape this spiral without help, so finally I have joined the modern age by seeing a psychologist and increased my efforts in reaching out to people. (Here is a thought: since loneliness is contagious, will my recent discovery of social networking add to the epidemic of unfriending?)

My case obviously is not unique – sad widowers struggling to cope is as common as apple pie. The realization that these feeling are quite normal was however a prerequisite for me to take serious action, explaining why I found these lines from Bright Eyes’ (aka Connor Oberst) 2007 song I Must Belong Somewhere so inspiring:

     leave the ocean’s roar in the turquoise shell
     leave the widower in his private hell
     leave the liberty in that broken bell
     today
     …
     because everything it must belong somewhere

In the Science Daily article mentioned above, University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo explains the benefit to society of aggressively targeting the issue and advises us to “create a protective barrier against loneliness”. So I do think there is a definite place in society for a Widower’s Anonymous or a Buddy system targeted at the newly bereaved. Hopefully science will lead to policy.

iPork

Gerhard Kleinhans — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:50:00 GMT

This inevitably makes a SF fan think of Chicken Little, though in this case I would prefer to call it iPork.

This is a great development, probably the only real solution for highly evolved carnivores getting squeamish about the welfare of their prey. Although I think it is long overdue in order to realize a humane food system, I have my doubts about it being necessarily eco-friendly. After all, even iPork needs nourishment to grow, and it’s impact on the environment will be dependent on how and what it is fed.

It will however be an immense improvement in the transparency of the processed meat industry. There is this old joke about croquettes that says it all:

Q: Why does Jesus not eat croquettes?

A: Because God knows what’s in it.

Hopefully in the near future this joke will no longer ring true.

Notable Net Nuggets 27112009

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:32:00 GMT

A few science related links for your perusal:

This is all very interesting and everything, but a fat lot it will help if most people will still suffer from malnutrition. Anti-ageing will only be for the rich and will be the ultimate class division. How will we square longevity with depleted resources and overpopulation?
Oh boy, new ammunition in the gender wars. We may have more personality, but is it necessarily better?
An explanation for the most common business practice. Have you been infected as well?
We’re always talking about something being ‘the new black’, but ever wondered about the new blue?
It’s always nice to have things quantified. I think I would prefer a combination approach – I’ll take the money and the therapy please.
A gun to beam voices into people’s heads. I would expect the effectiveness to be dependent on whatever the voices are telling you.

Enjoy!