Year: 2008

Mentioned to Island in the comment thread about the Multiverse below, the problem that otherwise credible stories in physics are accompanied by mathematical theory near incomprehensible to laymen such as myself. I had this feeling previously when trying to understand the “Dirac Nilpotent Rewrite” behind the Rowlands and Diaz work in quantum information theory.

Reminded of this, I took a look at the latest BCS Cybernetics Group page and followed the link to Peter Rowlands 2007 book “Zero to Infinty” and browsed the index, preface and first chapter on “Zero”. I think two facts did strike me in the maths.

Firstly, the “zero sum game” effect of creating something from nothing, where that something is plus & minus, real & anti stuff in physics … those mysterious perturbations in the vacuum. The potency of zero.  Of course potency doesn’t explain how, just the possibility, so that’s a different story.

Secondly, “re-write as algorithm” and the emergence of patterns within patterns not present in the original algorithm, simply by repeated application of the algorithm, to the zero in this case. Not just something from nothing, but something complex and interesting from nothing. Hofstadter (patterns within patterns)  and Dennett (evolution as algorithm) and of course Wolfram (ANKOS) jumped out at me as I read pages 12 to 16 of Chapter 1.

Plenty of promise in the preface too …

Obviously, no one expects to succeed instantly with a theory that will simply explain everything. What we would hope to do is to find a process, a systematic way of proceeding with strong indications that we were on the right track. This is what is being aimed at in this book. Positions that are rejected from the outset in the search include model-dependent theories of any kind; the aim of the work is resolutely abstract.

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.

Am I seeing a pattern ?

I intuitively like this sticking to the fundamental nature of physics, rather than allowing variations in different postulated universes, … as if. Didn’t I also recall something in both Chalmers and Deutsch (quite separate work in separate fields) about nothing being possible in a “virtual” world that wasn’t also possible (ie didn’t violate fundamental physics / metaphysics) in the real world ? As if impossible and inconceivable were really the same thing. Am I digressing ?

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[Post note, Past tense, “Maths Left Me Training” – 2020 update.]

Thanks to Rogelio Casado (Brazilian blogger) for the link to this 2005 Pirsig / ZMM article including a link back to my Timeline.

Rogelio’s post is here. Thanks to BabelFish for an attempt at English translation from the Portugese.

Thanks to Piers Young at Monkey Magic for the link to this article from Discover.

A good summary of issues based on interviews by Tim Folger with working scientists in the field, many of whom I’ve quoted before on psybertron. Strange how the multiverse idea is still seen as the most convincing solution to the fine tuning problem – it was David Deutsch and quantum information people that first alerted me to that. Like if string theory is no explanation (because it simply supports just about any empirical outcome) multiverses are really just the same solution. An explanation of “anything” is not a theory of everything, it’s a theory of nothing. Infinitely many possible universes to account for the “coincidence” of finding ourselves in this Goldilocks (just-right) universe by chance. No wonder people prefer “god” to the “oops” argument.

Still think the problem is the view of the appearance of coincidence and the scientific knee-jerk to explain that coincidence objectively, whereas there is a subjective, anthropic angle to the perceived improbability in the first place. What we should really be looking for is an existing mistake in explanations of what has already been perceived and “accepted” as proven science … Island, I believe you are onto something. See previous “anthropic” threads.

This is just the usual conspiracy vs cock-up perception. When “low quality” things (bad things with bad explanations) look well organized and “intentional”, there is invariably a cock-up or two behind the scenes, and the embarassment factor in exposing cock-ups invariably leads to actions that “look like” intentional cover-up. A double-whammy for the conspiracy theorists. Pretty basic organizational behaviour theory in my book. Science is made of people, like anything else, and one thing people are very badly programmed to do is learn from mistakes.

So it goes … roll on wisdom.

Had one of those transatlantic (twelve hours of sunset) opportunities to get a bit of reading in last week, a week in Boston. (Incidentally encountered Steven Pinker in the hotel bar, though left him undisturbed deep in conversation with another, having just explained he was my second favourite evolutionary psychology / linguistic philosopher, after Dan Dennett whose Dangerous Idea I had just recently finished re-reading.) Anyway, departing Gardermoen, I picked-up a double anthology of Kurt Vonnegut, his “Welcome to the Monkey House” and “Palm Sunday” collections of short stories, articles, speeches and auto-biographical sketches.

Wonderful stuff, such varied material with such uniform wit. From the Mills-n-Boon-esque piece entitled “Long Walk to Forever” by the women’s magazine that published what turns out to be the true story of how KV met his future wife, to the sci-fi offerings of “The Barnhouse Effect” and “The Euphio Question”. Lots of material drawn from his Cape Cod home experience, the scripted romance of “Who Am I This Time” and the wonderful punchline to “The Hyannis Port Story”

Apart from the intriguing family-life back-story to his own biography, my favourites are the “Nazi Sympathizer Defended At Some Cost” (Celine) and its counterpoint “Nazi City Mourned At Some Profit” (Dresden – the subject of best-selling “Slaughterhouse Five”). Turns out my Vonnegut readings, all since his death last year, Cat’s Cradle and the latter he rates as his 5 out of 5 efforts. Blogged reviews of both. A lasting impression of Slaughterhouse Five is “So it goes …” as individuals die along the way, but I hadn’t noticed the “…” and affectation of my own punctuation I seem to have avoided so far …

Turns out to have been a feature KV had picked-up from Louis Ferdinand Celine … someone new (1894 – 1961) to add to my reading list.

Blogging a lot of links to Peston’s Picks these days. Same subject, but for a change this one has an optimistic silver-lining tone after so many panic-stations downers recently.

Be interesting to see what Goodwin does with his wealth and knighthood, once he goes (if he goes). Might he stay on as the manager who “serves” his people – wishful thinking ? But I’m watchin’ fella.

Not seen TRIZ before. I can see why the references to it that I did come across (more below) don’t bother to explain the “romantic Russian acronym“. Just follow the Wikipedia link if you must know.

It’s a diagramming notation (now even annotation / mark-up) and a methodology for describing and finding innovative solutions to problem situations, and it seems to have got visibility in the modern BPM world (Business Process Modelling) having orginated with Genrich Altshuller in 1946 in the Soviet Union in connection with invention, innovation and creativity. (Given my history and interests, suprised I’ve not come across it … you live and learn, never too late, etc … I wonder if it’s any good ? I shall download and play with it, and find out.)

Anyway, I came across its evolution and exploitation in SouthBeach Notation. Which in turn I had come across in a comment (an unashamed plug) in Robert Peston’s Picks on the subject of how concerted global governmental intervention was needed as a “circuit-breaker” as a brake against the “Minsky moment” when markets flee from capital in a self-fulfilling spiral. (BTW making these kinds of connections is precisely what blogging is about, it is never a substitute for jounalism, just an alternative – linkable – medium.)

I was in fact about to blog a link to this role of public intervention in otherwise free markets, into a free-markets discussion in another place ….. This is of course one reason why a share of private-profits must be used to fund public-losses in a “free” market that is to be tolerated in a public environment.

On that original subject …. the financial crisis … interesting that other comments (on Peston’s blog and on MoQ Discuss) recognize that the falling numbers themselves are not really the issue … markets go down as well as up, we are often reminded …. and taking a holiday is as good a break / brake as anything. Roll on real pramatists.

As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve had an enforced hiatus from blogging due to the relocation to Oslo. Two things to note:

(1) After doing some essential overhauls just before going offline in the US, I had added a “simpler” previous posts & archives link to the side-bar, and noted slowness in the rendering of the blog-pages, but I hadn’t noticed the connection. Thanks diagnostic help from Deamhost, I can see the problem and will fix soon, hopefully today. Apologies for the inconvenience, your patience is appreciated.

(2) Secondly, the day we left, a colleague in the US returned the last of 3 Dan Dennett books I’d lent him. “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995). Re-reading it at every available moment travelling and waiting in the last week or so has reminded me why he is my favourite current philosopher. He’s an excellent scientist, philosopher and philsopher of science. He knows when he’s being philosophical, when he’s needing to be scientific, and has the patience of a saint to expose and explain counter arguments whilst recognizing that few have simple logical outcomes beyond the pragmatc “policy” of “significant value-adding” …. and the wit to pull it off.

I can see so many points of contact, that anything I write should be closely linked to Dennett. My whole agenda is a subset of Dennett’s I reckon.

A dense summary – Wherever the intelligence lies, causation, how things came to be the way they are, is an engineering question – creativity is a selection from available options, optimal only so far as permitted by current historical and environmental constraints – you can only ever get there from here. Intention is an explanatory stance in the observer’s hindsight, as if it were in the active participants. The whole thing is a narrative that works. That narrative is an organisation of semantics from available information, information itself being significant difference; Stasis, being or remaining the same is of lower interest, than difference or change. Value-adding is about adding significant value to the narrative. First-cause is simply the cause before the earliest one so far explained in the narrative, but is not in itself a reason to presume a miraculous sky-hook, except as a holiday from explaining and philosophising, and never a reason for a sky-hook as an alternative to a crane later in the engineering narrative.

OK so another football story.

Relocating from the US to Norway, visiting in the UK along the way we’ve been a little out of touch without the internet until yesterday. We missed that Reading’s first away win of the season was Wolve’s first home defeat 3:0 last Tuesday, after the 4:0 win against Swansea last Saturday, and yesterday we caught the 3:1 win against manager-of-the-month Burnley on-line. We are in unheard of territory … goals-for averaging 3.5 per game, and the highest goal-difference in the Championship, now only 2 points behind Wolves and 3 off Birmingham in top spot.

We’ll be changing the club name from Reading Royals to Reading Irish next.