I’ll be giving a public lecture entitled “Surprises and Sweet Spots” on Friday night, February 8th, at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland if you’re pining for something to do and are in the neighborhood. The lecture starts at 8pm and is followed by an extended “conversation period” for those that want to hang around.
-Dylan
The Santa Fe Institute has jumped into the massive open online course game, launching “Introduction to Complexity” run by Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University and author of Complexity: A Guided Tour
The course itself looks to be pretty interesting and starts February 4th if you want to sign up. I don’t expect it to be fundamentally philosophical, but it will likely provide lots of good stuff to think about. Below is the lecture outline.
-Dylan
| 1. What is Complexity? | 7. Modeling Social Systems |
| 2. Dynamics, Chaos, and Fractals | 8. Networks |
| 3. Information, Order, Randomness | 9. Scaling |
| 4. Cellular Automata | 10. Cities as Complex Systems |
| 5. Genetic Algorithms | 11. Virtual Field Trip; Final Exam |
| 6. Self-Organization in Nature |
The most recent brough-ha-ha from one of Mark’s posts seems to center on rationality and philosophy, but underlying all the stuff in the “new rationality” is understanding the process of updating our current knowledge with new information through Bayes Theorem (LW calls the process belief updating or bayesian updating). Bayes Theorem is both very useful and very interesting historically and philosophically, and not without its philosophical issues. (Uninformative priors anyone?) I want to point everyone to two books by the philosopher of science Ian Hacking that open up the landscape of probability and induction with a good, strong dose of philosophical reflection along the way. Hacking writes clearly and, for my money, does a great job of keeping the open questions out in the open.
Credit physics.ubc.ca
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of discussing P.W. Anderson‘s famous 1972 article More is Different as part of a PEL Not School study group on emergence with Not Schoolers Bill Burgess, Casey Fitzpatrick, Ernie Prabhakar, and Evan Gould.
Anderson argues that the sciences don’t form a reductive whole — that chemistry isn’t applied physics and psychology isn’t applied biology — taking early aim at the conceits of the uber-reductionist elementary particle physicists. Part of his argument is an articulation of how the principles of symmetry-breaking make this non-reductionism clear in the physical world. We discuss all these matters trying to sort out Anderson’s claims and what we think of the evidence for them.
You can read the article yourself here.
If you’re a Not School member (or as we like to say, PEL Citizen), you can access the audio of this discussion on the Free Stuff for Citizens page, along with the audio from several other Not School discussions.
If you’re not a member, please consider joining. For $5 a month you’ll get access to regular audio discussions (above and beyond our regular podcast episode). As one Not Schooler put it about a recent discussion with Mark about Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, these can be “almost as good as a regular podcast.” Membership also gets you access to study groups and discussion forums, all sorts of other bonus content, and the opportunity to participate in Skype/Google Hangout audio or video discussions yourself if you’re interested (fame and/or notoriety await you). Read more about Not School and sign up.
- Dylan
There’s lots of cool things going on in the PEL Not School discussion groups. To entice those of you that are interested in emergence to come check things out, I’ve proposed reading and discussing a short, interesting essay by the physicist P. W. Anderson called “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Hierarchical Nature of Science”. The essay itself is was originally published in 1972 in Science and is a classic in the discussions of emergence. You can get a PDF copy of the original article or get it along with a bunch of other interesting articles included in recently published collection Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science (Bradford Books)
I plan to have a single discussion over Skype or somesuch concerning the reading at a time to be determined in mid/late December.
Come check it out!
-Dylan
Joining Mark’s reading of Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empricism” on our member site, I’ve added the other essay we read for Episode 66, “On What There Is” to the lot.
Due to copyright issues, I can’t just put this on our public site, nor can I sell it as a one-off item, so the member site is the only way we can currently distribute this. Learn more about membership and sign up.
-Dylan
(The Shatner image came from here.)
A friend of the podcast pointed me to today’s column in the NYTimes Gray Matter by Alisa Quart about a backlash against neuroscience, particularly popular accounts of it throughout mainstream media from Malcom Gladwell on tipping points to Chris Mooney on the “republican brain” to Eben Alexander on the neuroscience of heaven. These all follow the general theme of over-simplification and over-extrapolation of, in this case, neuro-scientific studies. (Alexander would seem to be something of an exception here. He’s using his cred as a scientist to give authority to his personal testimony regarding a near-death experience. He’s not pointing to a double-blind study or anything. He’s just saying “I saw heaven when I was in a coma and since I’m smart and I’m a neuro-scientist, you should believe me.”)
Freeman Dyson has a review of Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? in the early November issue of The New York Review of Books. Dyson is an esteemed physicist who, as a young man, cinched the link between accounts of quantum electrodynamics given separately by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonanga in the late 1940s. He probably should’ve been included in the Nobel Prize awarded for QED, but it is limited to three simultaneous recipients. Dyson’s review is interesting for a few reasons. First, he attended Cambridge at the time of Wittgenstein and, in fact, lived in an apartment below him. He had been given the Tractatus as a gift in high school and “read it through in one night in an ecstasy of adolescent enthusiasm.” His reminiscences about Wittgenstein in a few paragraphs is worth the read itself. Second, his judgment of the philosophy is linked to his judgement of the actions of the man. For instance, “Heiddegger himself lost his credibility” when he joined the Nazi party as a rector at Freiburg. Discussing Wittgenstein and Heidegger (the twin 20th century biggies according to Holt), Dyson quips:
Holt summarizes the difference between Heidegger and Wittgenstein in nine words: “Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain.” These words apply equally to their characters as human beings and to their intellectual output.
In a recent column in The Stone, Harvey Cormier considers the political oomph of pragmatists through a nice presentation of some central thinking of William James. The occasion for the piece is a recent spate of writings characterizing Obama as “a pragmatist politician.” What I like best about Cormier’s article is his refutation, through James, of the lame but pervasive equation of pragmatism with weak-kneed inaction. Pointing to James, he emphasizes that pragmatism is compatible (even essential) to genuine truth-seeking by being incompatible with ideology:
Still, while James did want us to believe, he also wanted us to give up “ideologies.” He called pragmatism “[t]he attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.” Pragmatists can have principles but not self-verifying ones; they renounce any certainties that are based on claims of universal necessity. In our world of chance and change, things may not go the way we want either intellectually or practically, so we have to look to the developing world of actions and results for support of, and challenges to, our most cherished faiths. The final test of even our logic is how well it leads us to act and live. Pragmatists therefore think, and act, provisionally, or subject to later changes in course. Still, provisional action is action, and particular actions are sometimes irrevocable. Moreover, “provisional” need not mean “timid.”
Two friends of mine have recently started blogs, though of different stripes.
One is by Gary Borjesson called Idle Speculations. Gary and I met on the faculty at St. John’s, and, like me, is on leave right now. Gary’s book on dogs, friendship, and philosophy, Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs
The other, Clearing My Head, is by Robert Henderson, a good friend from my grad school days at the University of Rochester where I studied experimental particle physics. Bob studied theoretical particle physics, but following his degree became a quant on Wall Street. After 15 years working at several banks, he’s gone on a motorcycle trip to clear his head and make a transition in his life. He’s riding across the US, taking the back roads from New York to the west coast, mainly improvising the path along the way. Clearing My Head, is primarily a travelogue, recording his trip and commenting a bit along the way. He’s a big fan of Pirsig and istened to our episode on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as he rode from Madison to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There’s something fitting about listening to that episode while riding a motorcycle across the country.
For your weekend podcast-listening pleasure, a friend of the podcast pointed me to the most recent episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast in which the hosts take up science fiction and chew on what kinds of philosophical insight might garnered from such speculative fiction. (Beware those who, like Seth, abhor the thought experiment!) In the words of the podcasters themselves:
By its very nature, science fiction has always been particularly suited to philosophical exploration. In fact, some of the best science fiction novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows function like extended philosophical thought experiments: what might cloning tell us about our views on personal identity? If we could all take a pill to be happy, would we want to do that? In this episode, Massimo and Julia recall some of their favorite philosophically-rich science fiction, and debate the potential pitfalls in using science fiction to reach philosophical conclusions.
The Federalist Papers (originally published as just The Federalist) are a collection of essays published in newspapers in 1787-1788 arguing for the ratification of the American Constitution. Each was published under the pseudonym “Publius” though most were written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. (There are a few written by John Jay.) They were collected and published in groups during the ratification of the Constitution and then published as a group following ratification. They are among the most important documents articulating the political philosophy underlying the American Constitution itself.
The essays are widely available in many forms and have been published by many presses. You can get a free version from Project Gutenburg. The Wikipedia entry for the Federalist Papers contains extensive links and structure to the papers and cross-references to each of the essays.
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Every August for the past ten years my family and I have spent a couple of weeks on a smallish lake in northwest Michigan. I say small, but it’s about 1800 acres, plenty big for most purposes, if tiny compared to the big water of Lake Michigan just five miles away. Most every afternoon the breeze picks up and I take a good sail on our Laser. Sometimes it’s peaceful and the zen-like tranquility overflows as the dinghy slides along the water. The aloneness is pleasant and refreshing, like a good walk in the woods. Other times the wind is howling at 25-30 knots, spray lashing over the bow, and it’s an exhilarating fight through the waves. On those afternoons I find myself talking to the sky and the wind and feel a bit like I’m in a Hemmingway novel, equal parts Heraclitus and Epicurus. Continue reading »
Every now and then you find something that is, on the one hand, unexpected. The thought of it hadn’t occurred to you, neither as a fact found through the memes of popular culture nor as an extrapolation from your current knowledge. On the other hand, the discovery isn’t so much a surprise as simply new information that really just fits in with all the rest. My most recent such moment happened at a local used book store, The Frugal Muse, while I was looking for a decent translation of Neitzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense” for an upcoming podcast. Browsing the spines of philosophy tomes that had fallen from other people’s shelves, and having truth and meaning on my mind, I picked up a volume of essays titled Meaning and Mental Representations
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A PEL fan pointed us to the work of the recently deceased philosopher Paul Cilliers from South Africa, particularly to a short paper he wrote for ”On the Importance of a Certain Slowness.” (published as a chapter in Worldviews, Science, and Us: Philosophy and Complexity ). In the essay, Cilliers points to the various “slow” movements that have been cropping up around the world from slow food, to slow cities, to slow schooling to slow sex and looks to focus
on the underlying principles which make the debate on slowness an important one. Through an analysis of the temporal nature of complex systems, it will be shown that the cult of speed, and especially the understanding that speed is related to efficiency, is a destructive one.
Dennis Overbye has a nice article this week in the NYTimes on the recently published explanation of the Pioneer Anomaly. As he explains,
The story starts with the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, which went past Jupiter and Saturn in the late 1970s and now are on their way out of the solar system. In the 1980s it became apparent that a mysterious force was slowing them down a little more than should have been expected from gravity of the Sun and planets.
Was there an unknown planet or asteroid out there tugging on the spacecraft? Was it drag from interplanetary gas or dust? Something weird about the spacecraft? Or was something wrong in our calculation of gravity out there in the dark?
It is oft said (at least when exercising etymology muscles) that philosophy is “love of wisdom.” Just like other mind-related topics such as emotion and creativity, wisdom is getting the scientific treatment. One of our listeners pointed us to a book by Stephen S. Hall titled Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
which surveys a variety of answers to the question of what wisdom is and how it is cultivated, starting with folks like Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus, then following along into more recent attempts in psychology and biology to address the question.
Hall is interviewed on the Leonard Lopate show about the book and his writing of it. He points approvingly to Nozick’s definition of wisdom as “knowing what matters” and characterizes the scientific work in studying wisdom as really working to try to “refine a bunch of ill-defined concepts.”
Jim Holt has a new book out with the provocative title Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
David Ulin at the L.A. Times summarizes:
That question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — occupies the center of Holt’s book, which is by turns a philosophical and scientific inquiry, written through a broadly personal lens. Beginning with his discovery of this “ultimate why question” as a teenager reading Heidegger, Holt frames his investigation as a series of conversations with luminaries from the academic and cultural worlds.
Overview from the publisher W.W. Norton & Company
Review by David Ulin at www.latimes.com
Review by Kathryn Schulz at www.vulture.com
-Dylan Casey
Not only is today “Independence Day” here in the US, celebrating 236 years since a group of American rabble-rousers declared independence from Britain, it is also now the day that the Higgs Boson discovery was announced at the LHC in Switzerland. (Read about it in the Washington Post and the NYTimes as well.) In one of my previous lives I was an experimental particle physicist. For about 13 years I labored with wrenches and computers at Fermilab trying to pry information from the gigantic pile of data we amassed from colliding proton and anti-protons inside the Dzero detector. I was there in 1995 when we announced (with our older-sister experiment, CDF) the discovery of the top-quark. Continue reading »
While discussing (through Bergson’s book) how humor works in us, we had a couple of forays into related off-topics. The first was the question of laughter and delight. My contention was that the laughter of delight may be related, but is not the same thing as a reaction to something being funny. The second was the question of something not being funny or laughable. We considered this in a couple of ways, particularly by discussing Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and the possibility of doing a rape joke (see a recent NYTimes article). (Note that there is a whole category of men raping men jokes, typically a version of prison-rape, that are a tried and true category of rape-joke.) I’m going to focus on this second case here and take up the question of delight later.
Key to why so much of Cohen’s work isn’t funny is his drawing the audience into being the willing manipulators and humiliators of his victims. Now it is clear that much of humor comes from the humiliation of others, the poking fun at their mis-steps, misfortunes, and peccadilloes. That we find pleasure in such things and that we find it funny is interesting in itself. It’s surely partly power — we take pleasure from winning. It’s surely partly schadenfreude — we take pleasure from other people losing. Both are part of our ability to have ambitions and goals, to want to accomplish anything. If we didn’t get pleasure from accomplishments (winning broadly speaking), we wouldn’t have ambitions at all.
