Month: August 2012

When Krista Met Larry

Terrible flirts both of them, but great to see the chautauqua tradition continue. Humans having intelligent conversation that educates. Larry is moved to say:

Most things humans have written over the ages (mythological or otherwise) contain some “wisdom” …. Science isn’t wisdom – just one of the raw materials.

Wow. He’s good. A chameleon who works with his current audience. And he does distinguish himself from Dawkins and from Gould. Distinction between science informing and the doing, the application being more than science. Even the Q&A with sceptics works well. Whatever works for you! Wow, as I said.

[PS – Re  previous post – he admits his something from nothing arguments are about “redefining” nothing.]

Krauss Falls Short of Nothing

Disappointed in finishing Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing”. He makes some good points (see previous post) but nothing entirely new – quantum fluctuations, big bang, matter asymmetry, inflation, flatness, cosmological constant, CMBR distribution – and most of the newer stuff is very speculative. If this is new to you then he is a strongly recommended read. (An updated Charlesworth & Gribben’s 1990 “Cartoon History of Time” for me; it’s proven hard to beat despite the amount of reading since.) He is a witty read, a cosmologist eyeing the funding of particle physics:

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced only one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space about which we understand virtually nothing. However particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

The fact that a credible scientist takes anthropic indications seriously without dismissing them as mere truisms is a major leap forward. Of course as a good scientist, he’s always looking for the plausible speculations that may suggest or be suggested by empirical tests, however indirect, and obviously at these levels “evidence” is a hugely accumulative, constructed concept with the occasional empirical landmark. But, the bad taste is that the agenda is so clearly intentional and directed towards the anti-God agenda. Totally unnecessarily IMHO. The breathless afterword and sleeve notes from Dawkins, Harris and more compound the impression. Perhaps Larry is angling to be the 5th horseman, to replace Hitchens who died before he could write a foreward. Even philosopher Anthony Grayling describes it as

” … a triumph of physics over metaphysics (and theology) … “

Only Martin Rees (the “quisling” according to Dawkins, remember) is more neutral

” … deeply fascinating speculations … “

Ultimately, despite constantly saying he is talking about something from literally nothing, his nothing is a field of energy potential, a “quantum haze” – neutral zero energy “essentially”, as he keeps qualifying it, with balancing quanta and anti-quanta popping in and out of existence, blurred to “essentially nothing” within quantum time-scales. This “nothing” is inherently unstable, hence the existence of something other than this nothing. Whilst he liberally quotes heroes of science Feynman (his) and Bronowski (mine) his philosophy doesn’t progress beyond Plato and Aristotle. His faith (which I share) that science will constantly push back the boundary of where the first cause within physics can be described, however speculatively, is not a reason to deny the existence of the literally nothing boundary as a logical, metaphysical starting point. In fact he is effectively saying, it’s just not an interesting stance to take – it doesn’t tell you very much. True. In fact that’s a large part of my agenda, that there is little to argue about here. It’s just not contentious. So why turn it into an argument …. against …. anything else?

The real debate is what it means for a “universe” to “start” and what kind of universe you’re talking about, and the core of this question is how you respond to the anthropic “fine-tuning” in this universe. (That or radically non-intuitive models of causation and time.) If we’re talking totally disconnected (zero-inter-communicating) multiverses, where each may have totally independent physical laws, constants and boundary conditions – then we’re in the realms of pure metaphysical speculation as far as this universe is concerned. We just happen to be in the universe we are in, which happens to be the one in which we can come to exist, and the others just provide us with the convenient statistical population. (It still leaves first cause unanswered or any mechanisms outside any one universe that explains / causes the individual universes.) If we’re talking causally connected universes as part of one super-multiverse with common physical laws with constants and boundary conditions set by historical causality, then we have a meaningful physics story as to how universes arise each with their particular properties. (Still no first cause of course, which is why this is a separate non-science question.) This is Peter Rowlands stance in “From Zero to Infinity”

Again, we must reject the idea that a single cosmic creation event has structured the laws of physics in a particular way, and that they could have been different in different circumstances. The idea could, in principle, be true, but then we would have no abstract subject of physics, no generality, no absolute mathematics, and no meaningful concept of conservation, the process which makes physics universal. The very idea that we could discover a unified theory of physics is impossible in such a context. Physics is fractured in the very act of creation. In addition, such explanations have the habit of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. We simply refer difficulties to special conditions that occurred in the ‘early universe’, and deprive ourselves of understanding fundamental physical phenomena which ought to be valid at all places in all epochs.

[Update April 2014]

Taking a snip from the NYT review of Krauss book (linked by Rick in the comment below) confirms the view that not only is something from literally nothing a preposterous claim for science, but the act of writing the book, and acquiring hyperbolic endorsements from fellow horsemen simply exposes how utterly puerile their Science vs God agenda really is.

… it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, …. to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

Agreed. Dumb and dumber. The pity as I said is, that as a read in terms of popularising bleeding edge physics it does have some excellent content and style, marred by disingenuous claims, a puerile publishing agenda and a denial of the actual (scientific) questions raised.

[Post Note 2018: A 2012 Piece by Sean Carroll summarising the “kerfuffle” around criticisms of Krauss here. Starts from the same NYT review mentioned here.]

Larry Krauss

I’m reading “A Universe From Nothing” following this post, and am 80% through already. Some quick notes summarising significant points he makes:

  1. Anthropic principles do warrant serious scientific consideration. (Despite the various “fine-tuning” questions, no updated mention of the CMBR correlation with earth’s orbit.)
  2. String theory(ies) are overblown in public consciousness well beyond their scientific credibility. (More of the Memetic Problem.)
  3. “Nothing” remains the infinitely recursive hard part of the “something from nothing” question – the nature of “space” – “quantum vacuum” etc … before the big bang; multiverses, etc. Literally meta-physics. (Same old, same old.)

Dawkins Talks Sense

Apologies for the headline, but since I tend to use Dawkins as my prime example of the arrogant scientist who doesn’t get the value anything other than science (and objective / deterministic logic), but by way of balance, this conversation with Larry Krauss from February this year, has some excellent content.

It does of course still have some cringeworthy moments – like the gratuitous mocking accusations of hypocrisy and madness of people, even scientific people, literally holding mythical truths – or that fact that the title “Something From Nothing” is completely misleading – they never really get past complexity from simplicity, or “matter” out of “nothing” (*) – but anyway … The nature of alternate life evolving anywhere other than life as we know it on earth; serious references (by both Dawkins and Krauss) to the Anthropic Principle and more. (Ordered Larry’s book on the strength of it.)

Krauss – Cosmic Humility. Excellent. Dawkins take note. At least Dawkins has the humility to admit his physics is 19th century.

(*) In fact Krauss does push back the nothingness … towards metaphysical cosmogeny (ie What’s this nothing from which something might come?). Good. Last time I majored on Krauss and Anthropic Principles was here: One of my more important posts.

Physics is science,
and cosmogeny is metaphysics or theology again.

I’m pretty sure Krauss gets it and there is some hope Dawkins listens to him.

Sartre vs Camus

Mentioned earlier enjoying the output of Andy Martin – surfer, Cambridge languages don, writer, film-maker. Tremendous personally-engaging, witty style whatever the topic. His latest book is “Sartre vs Camus – The Boxer and the Goalkeeper (aka Philosophy Fight Club)”

The premise of the book is typically personal – read the 5 minute memoir – extracted from the introductory chapter, now published in The Independent. (Funnily enough my own early career starts with the guilt of a “stolen” book – when in my final school year I was awarded a book as the school chemistry prize, I didn’t own up to a book I’d taken from the school library a couple of years earlier “Experimental Chemistry Laboratory Manual” and not returned when I left. Still on the shelf behind me as I type.)

Researching philosophy as I have been, I have been tempted to dip into the French existentialist canon, but every dip has been daunting. After trying Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and finding sense in the later PoMo’s and Lacanian scholar Zizek, I’d concluded I’m already a PoPoMo and Proust, Sartre and Camus would remain left behind as the foggy-froggies I knew of, but would never really know.

Andy’s book provides a sympathetic introduction and summaries as well as the personal back-stories. No surprise to find the reaction to Platonic / Aristotelian ontological certainties mired in the nihilism of suspension in language beyond epistemology and experience of the real. If all philosophy is footnotes to Plato (clearly not true), then all PoMo philosophy Derrida et al, really is footnotes to Nietzche and Wittgenstein. Sartre comes across as grotesque – provocative and experimental living-philosophy sure, but all in-your-face back-story – hopeless – little chance I will actually seek out to read in the original, but Camus, with his balance and mystical Zen interests, comes across altogether more interesting. (Must revisit The Outsider).

Camus realized that in [the] very act of thinking, he was still in some sense a prisoner. Was he not a prisoner now of Plato, of the idea of the philosopher, to some extent chained to these thoughts? … A strange thought – or not even a thought, something more like the opposite of a thought. Camus had the realization, lying in bed, that if he wanted to be a philosopher – seriously – he had to break free of philosophy. He had to overcome thought itself, to somehow outwit and out-manoeuvre the forms of language he had worked so hard to acquire over many years. … In England about the same period, Wittgenstein said that if you wanted to become a philosopher, you should become a car mechanic. For Camus this was too much like hard work and it was enough just to lie there. And light a Gitanes.

He watched the smoke curling upwards towards the ceiling …

Then all at once there was a flash of light as the sun broke through from behind a cloud and illuminated a yellow vase of mimosa in the room. And it was like a bolt of lightning striking the young Albert – a coup de foudre. Transforming him, as if in a magical metamorphosis. He was ‘flooded with a confused and bewildering joy’. He became for a moment something other than he was.

‘I am the world.’

(Ibid, P54/55) Evocative of Pirsig’s motorcycle maintenance and his exhaustion “attempting to outflank the entire body of western thought”. Lots more in there – Peirce, James and pre-conceptual radical empiricism, Kafka, even Ramchandran. And such great chapter titles “Bad Hair Day”, “Fight Club”, “Pen Envy”, “An Octopus and Some Trees”, “New York, New York” and “Philosophers Stoned” to name a selection. About 2/3 through so far. Loving it.

[Post Note : Loved it. This from Stuart Kelly’s very positive review in The Scotsman:

Sartre and Camus are almost a parody of opposites. Camus, the pied noir, had the Bogart-like good looks; Sartre, the Parisian, was notoriously, unashamedly ugly (and usually unwashed). Camus died too young; Sartre lived too long. Camus’s engaged directly with the Resistance as editor of Combat; Sartre “intellectually” resisted (or, as Camus quipped, “aimed his armchair in the direction of history”). Sartre was an indefatigable, profuse writer while Camus aspired to silence, to “writing degree zero”. Sartre joined the Communist Party while Camus declined to be doctrinaire; Camus accepted and Sartre declined the Nobel Prize for Literature; Sartre constantly sought radical disjunctions while Camus looked for underlying continuities. Martin is too subtle a writer (and thinker) to allow these binary opposites to determine the story: time and again we see their positions reversing, merging and shifting.

(Andy Martin’s elegant study of the pair … is one of the most accessible and intelligent books on philosophy I have read this year, as alert to the human drama as the intellectual conflict, and unfailingly observant to the nuances and subtexts.)]

Font Credulity

Fascinating piece from Errol Morris on NYT Opinionator today.

Picked-up from a cross hit on Psybertron for David Deutsch. One of his quotes is used as an example, but in fact it is tangential to the subject of the article – why the experienced quality, value and truth in a text depends on the font used. Not new clearly, font selection always affects the character of the communication but a fascinating, thorough example.

(I have a recollection of the referenced Phil Renaud article The Secret Lives of Fonts from an earlier encounter, but can’t find my link.)

Too Much Communication

This is surreal and ironic on many levels.

Sam is probably my second favourite amongst the four horsemen, a real moral philosopher. No prize for guessing my least favourite, but it was he who tweeted the link picked-up by Ricky. (Dan, Sam, Hitch and the Dawk in that order in case you’re interested.)

Fact : internet enabled comment on blogs directly and via social media is a major source of miscommunication – an insidious spread of misinformed ideas. (aka The Memetic Problem). Apart from comic entertainment value – most are without value or with meta-value only or, more importantly, with negative content value, unless they can be editorially moderated. Life’s too short.

Weird : Sam reckons PZ Myers “shepherd of trolls” (Pharyngula Blog) to be odious. PZ is clearly on the side of (evolutionary) science in the god debates, so you might think an ally of Harris, along with the other three horsemen. But I’ve noted before the “baying mob” mentality of PZ and his commenters (similar to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and many Guardian “Comment is Free” contributors.) Makes intelligent debate hopeless. The baying mob is odious – see the memetic problem.

As I say, I have a lot of respect for Sam, but I have taken exception to some of his “narrow” rationality – a recent example here. I am really intrigued as to the reality of Sam’s take on PZ. Must have missed a significant spat or irony here?

The Memetic Problem ? Sam says:

The Internet powerfully enables the spread of good ideas, but it works the same magic for bad ones—and it allows distortions of fact and opinion to become permanent features of our intellectual landscape.

I say, it’s even worse than that, because the ideas that spread more easily tend to be the inferior ones. Too simplistic, too reductionist, too comfortable fit with existing prejudice and fashion, etc. all make such ideas easier to communicate and receive and re-communicate, and “stickier” when received. Evolutionary fidelity and fecundity both benefit from simplistication of the message and its fitness.