Wrong Theories, Bad Results

 

Discouraged

I no longer write as often or much as I did last year. My ability to type has degenerated remarkably, so there are a frustratingly large number of errors to correct in each sentence. I have to concentrate very hard to make each word come out in a reasonable facsimile of the correct form. It's not that I cannot think; rather, it is I have increasingly poor control of my muscles. This is what happens during the slide to oblivion.

The good side of things is that my typing is still better than what is attainable using dictation software. Despite a lifetime of belief in the wonders of computing, computer software still fails to understand language as opposed to sounds.

Today is a very good day for me. A day good enough to overcome the discouragement I usually feel; a day to write up something instead of leaving the paper blank. But, I should warn the readers that peculiarities of brain function make it hard to see gross errors, never mind correct them. For example, in Ethics as Social Conscience,  I forgot the word "butter" in the phrase "peanut butter" a couple of times. It took months to discover the mistake, because my brain substituted the correct phrase for the one actually in print; for me, the mistake just wasn't there! This should teach everyone a lesson about relying on one's experience and erudition; i.e., on one's brain.

Math, Physics, Realism and Pragmatism

That brings me to what I believe is the related subject of Metaphysics. I will not spend a lot of time on it, but I do have a few additional comments beyond what I've stated in my books.

At the time I wrote the last two books, I was unfamiliar with the work of the late Richard Rorty, formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford. Rorty outraged the scientific world around 30 years ago by declaring that science was a social. phenomenon, not a collection of Platonic Truths. I do recall hearing about this controversy at the time, having mixed feelings about it, but fundamentally agreeing with Rorty. At the time, Rorty's views fitted my left-wing political conceptions. It still seems to me that Rorty's idea fits the facts better than other alternatives. While I came to my own interpretation of that claim independently, I was probably influenced in some subliminal way by Rorty's claim being "out there."

I just cannot see how it could be otherwise, unless one can prove the existence of Platonic Forms, ethereal souls or other ghostly mechanisms or forms of existence. What we have before us is a bunch of people engaging in complicated scribbling, an abstruse art form. In my ignorance, equations posted on chalk boards are very much like abstract art. Somehow, modern painting and sculpture, particularly, strike me as having something in common with physics and mathematics, perhaps because they are all descendants of those ancient Cro-Magnon works found near Lescaux, France. Mathematicians and scientists typically don't see it that way: they believe their work has some reality, some meaning beyond scribbles. But, in my experience, the conjured order in a scribbler's mind is not different in kind from the insights of Buddhist or Yogic gurus. In all their cases, it is to have an intuitive grasp of the whole, an "inner vision" of what it's like. I cannot explain it better than that, partly because the physiologists have yet to pin down how our brains comes up with such notions.

Practitioners of the scientific arts may be fearful that their economic and social support will be removed, if they are identified as belonging to the class of shamans. Shamans have a very ancient existence, probably occurring in every human society since the Cro-Magnons. Ordinary people believe in shamanic wisdom and are guided by shamanic prescriptions in their daily lives. In the past, we have identified shamans as religious leaders and their beliefs as religious in nature. But it is no different today: technological experts function socially in the same manner as ancient shamans. If the technical community has anything to fear, it is that they will very likely suffer the same fate as all preceding generations of shamans: to be discovered as frauds and discarded as irrelevant.

Just a century ago, the majority of physicists rejected the physics of Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr. In the decades preceding Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, mathematicians went through a similar crisis when the certainty of Euclidean geometry was undermined. Similarly, ancient beliefs about living things (biology) were increasingly found wanting after Darwin published his theories. Today we can recognize all the reasons our grandparents and great-grandparents wanted to remain rooted in their Victorian preconceptions, above all because it was secure for them. A century ago, jobs and lifestyles and social status depended on defense of the old order.

Why should I believe it any different today? This question is near the core of Thomas Kuhn's views about changing paradigms. In my lifetime, I have seen several proposals offered as the "Theory of Everything" come and go. Starting with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, we have progressed to string theory and Multiverses. If we are to believe Prof. Lisa Randall's perspective, Big Bangs are a common occurrence when the Branes of the 11-dimensional Multiverse clash. The major difficulty with such theories, if it is a difficulty at all, is that Universes other than our own are unobservable, except so far as their existence "explains" our existence. The reason this may not be a difficulty is the same reason we accept reasoning about limits in the Calculus, or that we accept notions like zero and infinity as meaningful symbols in our mathematical structures. No one has any experience of those concepts, but the symbols fill holes in the theoretical structure, holes that we feel have a meaning. Even though, according to the latest cosmological proposals, it is impossible to determine the physics of the parallel Universes in the Multiverse, I can some idea of what it is like to be a Universe by analogy or metaphor. For example, there is the metaphor of many (4 dimensional?) space-time sheets occupying adjacent (11 dimensional?) "spaces." Strangely, the evidence for this arrangement of things is to be found not in the gross Universe of our experience, but in the smallest of objects, things smaller than  quarks and gluons. But, even if these latest theories of the Multiverse command my attention because of their explanatory power, what credence should I give them in view of History?

When physicists and others profess realistic beliefs, should we not regard those beliefs in the same light as shamanic religions of yore? What is believed is held religiously, that is, loyally. But it cannot be more than that. Whenever it has been more than that, old believers have been delivered their come-uppance, sometimes brutally. The historical view must be this: shamans have a world view which holds together for a certain world. When that world is changed or expanded, new world views must be concocted to fit. The problem is the same for insurance companies assessing the risk of your having an insured accident. Unless hit by something like Hurricane Katrina, the insurance companies just pay the claims and reassess the premiums based on accumulated experience. In that sense, our sciences are just like the insurance policies covering the world we believe in.

Market Madness

The current shenanigans taking place in American financial markets are another good example of our subject.

It should be obvious that the Masters of the Universe do not know how to fix the problems afflicting the United States' economy. There is endless jabberwocky being screeched into the media, but that is all it is. Their jabberwocky is formulated as laissez-faire Capitalism, or ultra-Capitalism; a set of beliefs founded on or evolved from the supposed truth of Adam Smiths' Wealth of Nations. These beliefs are mouthed daily on Rupert Murdoch's various media, such as the Fox network and the Wall Street Journal. Many people believe what is offered, partly because it is incessantly repeated without mention of alternatives. A few years late, we have indeed reached the Orwellian world of 1984 in which newspeak is the dominant language. (Languages do not have to be truthful or even consistent.)

What has transpired is the breakdown of banking, all because a herd of greedy operators took advantage of the unregulated system. The significant loophole was that the risk of mortgage lending was removed by packaging and transferring debt. Now this will be regulated, and previous regulations will be made more strict. The important point, for my purposes, is that a theory becomes invalid just as soon as a counter-instance is discovered. Classical physics foundered on the Michelson-Morley experiment because the fact of a constant speed of light required a different conception of simultaneity; i.e., of time (a still ultimately basic physical notion). In the same way, the banking system broke (not for the first time) because Capitalist theory has a completely wrong notion of "human nature" at its core. Adherents of Capitalist political-economy are particularly perverse in refusing to amend or supercede their theory, given the nature of its failure. The Smithian moral order, in which greed will ultimately be constrained to do good, is simply a fantasy. Moreover, the rational man of the Scottish Enlightenment disappears when the "animal spirits" noted by Lord Keynes are aroused. Moral, rational men would not have exercised the loophole. The men of our experience did so.

Political-economy, I insist, remains that: one subject, not two, even if I must declare it with a hyphenated name. Rather than appeal to some notion of human nature, we must study actual human behavior; e.g., see Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational. In such studies, we are confronted with feedback effects; i.e., the situation, the model, constrains behavior and changes future behavior. In other words, just as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle makes position and momentum interacting co-factors, so economic and political situations interact with pre-existing human behaviors to produce uncertain results. We can only predict what will happen within certain limits; i.e., political-economic predictions are inherently risky assessments of behavior. What Capitalist economists call "Moral Hazard" is actually explained by a better theory as the risk inherent in every prediction.

What I Learned

Since starting my retirement about 8 years ago, I became intensely driven to read, read, read. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of ideas and facts that had passed by during my adult working life, few which I had the time to savor or examine. So, when suddenly I had the time, I wanted to know what had happened, who had thought what and how it was turning out.

As a young man, I was strongly influenced by Kantian ideas, probably because I was attracted to Platonic notions such as Forms but could not accept the existence of a Platonic world. I also thought that beliefs that included souls, gods and demons were plain nonsense. Somehow, although I thought Aristotle primitive, the Aristotelian idea that what we thought, how we felt and what we experienced were "natural" impressed me. As early as the last year of college (1963), I suspected there had to be a biological basis for Ethics and much more, but I had no idea how that worked.  Earlier than that, in 1955, I had read an article written by an MIT professor in a magazine (I think it was John McCarthy in Popular Mechanics) touting Artificial Intelligence. I was convinced right away that computers could be intelligent, but I had no idea how that would come about. I forgot about computers until late 1962, when my Philosophy professors attended a conference featuring a mini-computer and became enthralled with it. Their excitement was a very early precursor of what happened 20-30 years later, when computers became the Next Big Thing. It was then I decided I wanted to pursue a career involving computers and computing. But I was not able to get a foot in the door until 1967, when mainframes and business computing took hold in San Francisco. In 1968, I attended the electronics show at Brooks Hall at which the graphics display, mouse and Ethernet were first introduced to the public. Despite all that prompting, I had no idea where it would lead. So, like everyone else, my early training left me unprepared for the world that was to come; worse yet, it made it difficult to see the historical forces at work before my very eyes.

So, the first thing I have learned is this: the most difficult thing anyone can do is have a new idea. We are creatures of habit, resisting every change with our whole being. We just do not see what we are not prepared to see. Propagandists thrive on that fact. Therefore, our inclinations cast serious doubt on whatever is claimed to be good, real or true.

The second thing I learned is that people are self-interested. Nothing makes one a friendly presence faster than talking about the other. (In this, I am as guilty as any other human being.) I think people are interested in their familiars (family, friends, etc.) because they see them as extensions of themselves; i.e., the distinction between self and other breaks down in these cases. When others are seen as inseparably part of oneself, people become very animated in their conversations and activities with respect to those others. On the other hand, those not included in the familiar circle are evaluated differently, usually coldly. It is just not the same thing when someone or other gets "hit" in a gang war as when it is someone one knows.

The third thing I learned is that people are incredibly short-sighted. In most cases, people are unable to plan their lives beyond this week or, at most, this month. Would anyone have bought an SUV, knowing what would happen in a year or two? This fact explains why people, businesses and governments regularly make uninformed and disastrous decisions, despite the direct, opposing counsel of the wisest among us. Being shortsighted allows us to believe inconvenient futures will never happen.

Those three facts about people, taken together, make solution of problems such as overpopulation and global climate change nearly impossible. Business as usual - inertia - prevails because it is compelling. Nonetheless, solutions might happen. I hope so, although, officially, I remain extremely skeptical.

George de Santillana said it and Camus wrote about it: 'Those who do not learn from History are condemned to repeat it.'

Posted 08/19/2008 07:11:30 AM                Last update: 08/19/2008

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