McKinney summarizes and dismisses Smolin’s approach:

His argument that physics can change over time and space is apparently based on an extremely specific strawman argument which depends on separating experimental procedure into initial conditions and laws.  He says you can only arrive at laws by examining a large “configuration space” of possible setups.  In the lab you can set up a large number of tests, in cosmology you can look at a wide variety of situations, so in both you can arrive at laws.  His argument is that since you can’t actually rearrange the stars themselves to set up different initial conditions in each place, you can’t make conclusions about the physical laws there.  He uses many, many more words to describe this idea.

Let’s just be clear: Smolin is applying Roy Bhaskar’s ideas to cosmology. Bhaskar used the distinction between closed systems – where you can predict – and open systems – where you cannot predict, but you can explain -  as an explanation for why the social sciences have not met the same successes as, say, Physics. A key point is that it’s impossible to isolate certain attributes of open systems within a closed system. A good example is nationwide voting – you can’t isolate any the mechanisms involved, because by the time you’ve assembled the mechanisms necessary to test it, your closed system is indistinguishable from an open system. Yes, you can test individual things (e.g. how a single voter reacts to a political ad). But you can’t test the interaction effects. On a side note, it’s only just recently that scientists (such as psychologists) are even considering connections between more than two variables – the complexity increases exponentially.

Bhaskar’s point is interesting to keep in mind, quite valid, and fairly non-controversial. Scientists know that you need to carefully control an experiment to identify a causal relationship between factors. If you can’t isolate the elements you need to perform the experiment, you can’t test it.

An analogy is that cosmology is like Freudian psychology. That it, methodologically it uses the perspective of the individual to create and test theories. Freudian psychology, as well as Jungian and other variants of the time, used introspection and therapy sessions as a way to explore the mind. They gathered a great deal of observational data (of open systems), and then constructed a theory on top of it. However, as Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos and other have pointed out in the philosophy of science – you cannot validate a theory by gather a great deal of information and perching a theory on top of it. For starters, there are always multiply possible theories for any given data set. And any information that could contradict some element of the theory can always be disregarded (Quine). Then, positivism cannot actually prove anything (Hume’s problem of Induction; Popper), and both the evidence gathered and the standards of proof are a function of the social context (Kuhn). Historically, science has not been a steady progression of every more-accurate theories, as Lakatos and others explain. It moves in fits, with huge effort going into theories later abandoned – and for the most part, forgotten by later scientists.

Another problem with Freud was that his approach was not generalizable. e.g. one explanation for Freud’s narrow focus is that he developed his theories while working as a therapist in Russia. In other words, the only people he talked to when constructing his theory were mentally ill people. That ended up generalizing quite poorly to the rest of the population (leaving aside some of the other glaring problems).

In the case of cosmology, the only things we know – the only tools we have to create and test theories – is the information coming in from telescopes out of an open system, and whatever experiments we can run on Earth. We cannot isolate much of what’s in cosmology. In other words, we only have what’s on Earth to test, and what we can see of the wider world. There is no guarantee that what we demonstrate on Earth actually applies to other planets; what we find out about our solar system actually applies to others. Cosmology has a problem similar to Freud; we’re working with a limited sample, and we don’t know how representative it is of the overall population. You can claim that cosmology is different – that Freud really was dealing with crazy people and obviously what he discovered wasn’t universal, whereas the ‘laws’ cosmology discovers are. But hey, Freud certainly believed his sytem was universal, that it completely explained human behavior. As did a number of people at the time, and even some today (who didn’t get the memo post-Watson/Skinner).

All of this makes this part of McKinney’s next paragraph somewhat entertaining to read:

If you’re going to claim that general relativity stops working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line, the burden of proof is on you to show that’s the case – and strawman arguments on the nature of experimentation aren’t going to cut it.

McKinney makes a couple of mistakes, which merely show is ignorance of philosophy. First of all,  The argument against the nature of experimentation that Smolin levelled at cosmology, courtesy of Bhaskar, is not a strawman. A straw man is a misrepresentation, and - while I haven’t read Smolin’s book – I’m fairly confident that he is not misrepresentating the nature of experimentation. Now, Smolin (and Bhaskar) may be wrong about the impact of open & closed systems on the types of experiments that can be run and the conclusions that can be made. But that charge is quite different from dismissing his argument as based on a strawman.

Second, I would bet that Smolin does not, in fact, claim that general relativity will “stop working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line.” Such a claim actually is a strawman. No, I would speculate that Smolin is only claiming that we cannot know whether general relativity will remain the same “beyond some sort of interstate.” This claim is epistemological, not theoretical – based on the nature of knowledge, not the content of knowledge. The claim is fairly limited: we do not have the tools to prove that general relativity – or other ‘laws’ of physics – work the same way across the entire universe. In other words, Smolin is claiming that cosmological theories do not have sufficient proof to be called “true.”

Well, no. Of course we don’t. Hume demonstrated than centuries ago. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t understand “the problem of induction.” Scientific laws are not absolute, and nor are they probablistic, either. They are theories about how the world works which (i) have not yet been disproved, and (ii) we do not expect them to be disproved. That does not mean they cannot be, or that they will not be. It is a social convention, part of the scientific “paradigm”, as Kuhn calls it. Theories accepted as “as good as true.”

The upshot – or why McKinnon wrote the post – seems to come down to the rather standard Positivist smack-down of metaphysics:

It’s all very intellectually stimulating, but mainly demonstrates the difference between metaphysics and useful physics. [...] You can say that the plank constant is a variable over time and space, but when we want to build an bridge or a fusion reactor we’re going to stick with our silly, provincial, non-new-book-publishing “actual physics.”   And that’s the difference.

Yes, the difference is that philosophy – and incidentally, this isn’t metaphysics, it’s epistemology – can’t be used to build bridges. I’m agog at the insight. That’s like saying that English can’t be used to predict financial crashes. Or that Biology can’t be used to build spaceships. The purpose of philosophy is not to build bridges. That’s why we have engineering and physics. The purpose of philosophy – well, I guess that depends on who you ask. I’d say the purpose of philosophy is to contextualize our present reality; to make us aware that there are other possibilities that what we currently believe. But no doubt that my post-Nietzsche relativism bias; in the time of Kant, people would say that the purpose of philosophy was to arrive at absolute truth.

Of course, this whole debate – about the limitations of science in general, and Cosmology in particular – seem incidental to the topic of the book as summarized by Wikipedia. Smolin’s book looks to be his pet theory, summarized. If I wanted to be charitable, I would assume that McKinnon was so irritated by Smolin’s criticisms of science because Smolin used them to try and negate the authority of conventional cosmology in order to push his own (baseless) theories. That is, if you’re trying to convince someone to accept a theory both against conventional wisdom and without proof, you have to destroy both conventional wisdom and the standards of proof upon which conventional wisdom relies. If you claim that “it’s impossible to know anything about cosmology, so why don’t you accept my theory as equally valid”, most people would look at you funny. It’s also the same argument that Creationists have employed against Evolution – “You can’t say that theory theory is completely accurate, so why don’t you accept Creationism as equally valid.”

Such an approach is, of course, quite invalid. For starters, it’s representing truth as binary – something is true, and you have proof, or something is false, and you don’t. When one starts arguing about both the nature of truth and what can be accepted as proof, such binary distinctions become meaningless.

It would be more productive, I think, to debate the philosophy of science after reading books actually on the philosophy of science as opposed to criticising the philosophy of science when it’s misused to buttress baseless theories.

Of course, I haven’t read Smolin’s book – so I really don’t know if Smolin even does that, or if that’s why McKinney is irritated enough to blog about a book written in 1997.

The tagline to this blog is “fleeing from ignorance” (a very specific kind – skill-based, though I also mean it more generally), and I’d like to actually implement that.

Writing is an important tool for developing thought, because it forces one to go slowly – to step back and think things through a little more. This blog was originally created as a tool to just that; focus my thinking. However, it has lain fallow due to my failure to incorporate it into my “way of life.”

I am aware that I have made this post before, and I doubtless will again. I am reminded of the Mark Twain quote “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.” In this case, it is the reverse: Starting a blog is easy. I’ve done it thousands of times!

More importantly, perhaps, is that it doesn’t manner how many times you try – it only matters how many times you succeed.

I’ll try to keep that in mind.

The essay reminded me rather a lot of Tim McGraw’s song Live Like You Were Dying.

I have a few things to say about this.

First of all, a disclaimer: I am a Practical Atheist. This means that I behave as an atheist, but abstract away the niggling problem of God’s existence. In short: I do not deny God’s existence, I simply refuse to worship Him. I do not empathize with the relief expressed in finding God, perhaps because I am quite relieved enough assuming that he doesn’t exist or that, at the very least, his existence has no bearing on my life. I also found Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything immensely entertaining, and agreed with much of it (although how he expects anyone religious to get past the first chapter is beyond me – it’s little more than a litany of complaints about ‘why atheists don’t like religions’).

I have some issues with how Mr. Wiman embraces God – though they are personal, and stem from beliefs in what justifies belief than anything else. However, he touches on some issues I consider very important in the exercise of religion, if one chooses to worship a god.

Justifications for Faith

Mr. Wiman experienced a terrible, and tragic, shock at perhaps the worst time in his life. He fell in love when he was depressed, and love pulled him out of depression; he describes it as “the sense I have is of color slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive.” He got married and, in the first year of his marriage, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable cancer in his blood. He doesn’t have a prognosis, and can obtain no idea of what to expect – symptoms experienced by others are varied and seemingly random.

He reached out to the notion of god with his new wife, and embraced Christianity after a lifetime of agnosticism.

The concerns I have about Mr. Wiman’s conversion are rooted in one thing: I do not think that making such a monumental decision – whether it is about religion, money, or politics – should be made when under intense emotional pressure, one that is relieved if the decision is made in the affirmative. The closest parallel I can think of today in recent politics is the Iraq War, and the steady erosion of civil liberties in the US. After 9/11, we were terrified of terrorism and eager for ‘justice’ (vengeance?) or, at the least accountability. In that very emotional time, we did things we would have never, under normal circumstances, considered; things that we are already coming to regret.

Faith, of course, is usually far less damaging if you turn out to be wrong. I say unless because there are a few doomsday cults floating around that get together and commit suicide. I would advise thinking very carefully about joining one of those…

I do not dispute the fact that taking to Christianity when he did has lent Mr. Wiman great emotional relief, and in all likelihood made the remainder of his life much better. There is an immense amount of value in the sense of peace, acceptance, and love one can get from religion; especially in extremely trying time – such as the specter of an unpredictable death. After all, there is a reason that religious people are, on average, happier and less stressed.

But I do question whether or not Mr. Wiman would have embraced Christianity if he had not been presented with his fatal disease, if his conversion would have been complete, and if he could have attained the same emotional relief from another source. I am of the opinion that while religion is a sufficient provider of emotional support, it is not a necessary one: Mr. Wiman could have obtained his emotional peace from another source. Christianity simply seems to have been the most convenient, the most accessible, and the most reliable.

From that standpoint: I do not think that Mr. Wiman’s testimony can be used as justification to persuade people to convert. It does, however, provide valuable insight into how to approach religion and how it can help, and proffers advice on how to face death.

The Strength of Faith

Perhaps because Mr. Wiman was an agnostic for his entire life, or perhaps because he was a poet, I find myself agreeing with a great deal of what he has to say about how he worships God. If I chose to worship God, I would do it in a very similar way.

I will preface this by saying that I believe that a great deal of what Mr. Wiman says correlates more with Buddhism that with classical Christianity, or at least the Christianity we’ve built over the past two millennia.

What struck me most was how Mr. Wiman thinks about faith – what it means and how to approach it:

I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.

[…]

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do […]. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world.

I came to a similar conclusion when I decided to ‘become’ a Practical Atheist. There is an intense difference between being religious because you have grown up in a religious family, attend church because you always have, and never examining why and what you believe and being religious because you choose to, every moment of the day, with a full understanding of the reasons and the consequences.

I call the first “weak faith,” and all too often it unnerves me. I do not like how some religious people refuse to accept the world; willfully disbelieve what science has discovered, take the Bible at its literal word, and deny the validity of other choices. I find people like Anne Coulter scary, and the fact that these people do things like build a Creationist Museum bewildering and unnerving. People who deny reality to maintain their own belief structure, who choose willful ignorance over informed choice, and who the go out and try to impose their beliefs on the rest of the world scare me.

The latter I call “strong faith,” and it’s something I think is very valuable. The value of faith lies, in part, in how very difficult it is to maintain. True faith, in my mind, involves actively choosing, each and every day, to worship God. To live by the principles of your religion, in the face of doubt. Indeed, faith without doubt is fundamentally worthless – there is no choice, and this you cannot
have faith: what you have is acceptance. If you never question the existence of God, never doubt the principles and laws of your religion, then you do not have faith. You merely accept God, in the same way you accept gravity, or the sun, or your emotions.

Mr. Wiman’s statement that he prays because he doubts mirrors my own beliefs about why people should pray.

I also agree that faith – the exercise of faith – should not be an internal state of mind. We live on this earth; if you are Christian, you believe that God placed you on this earth. The act of faith is the choice to believe; the exercise of faith is how you act – from faith – within the world. Personally, I do not believe evangelism is how one expresses faith – I think that faith should be expressed in every action you make, your decisions about your place in the world, and how you relate to other people. Faith in God should emanate from you into the world, and you act and participate in it.

Action becomes a validation of your faith, and each action is another choice of faith; each action should strengthen your faith.

fame, narcissism, and MySpace

I discovered an excellent post called fame, narcissism, and MySpace by danah boyd, a PhD student at Berkeley and a fellow at USC.

Some excerpts:

Since the late 80s, the lottery system has become more magnificent and corporatized. While there’s nothing meritocratic about reality TV or the Spice Girls, the myth of meritocracy remains. Over and over, working class kids tell me that they’re a better singer than anyone on American Idol and that this is why they’re going to get to be on the show. This makes me sigh. Do i burst their bubble by explaining that American Idol is another version of Jerry Springer where hegemonic society can mock wannabes? Or does their dream have value?

And, even better:

Today, the Christian Industrial Complex has risen into power in both politics and corporate life, but their underlying mission is the same: justify poor people’s industrial slavery so that the rich and powerful can become more rich and powerful. Ah, the modernization of the Protestant Ethic.

This is a fascinating observation, particularly given that income inequality continues to rise.

Has parental indulgence spawned a culture that justifies and embraces extreme income inequality? Does the dream of being a sports star, raking in tens of millions of dollars a year, justify and require sports stars to make that much money? Are people encouraging wildly out-of-sync salaries to fuel their own dreams?

It immediately brought to mind a quote from The Incredibles:

I’m in my second semester of college, and I’ve noticed some things while here. So allow me to generalize to a truly outrageous degree in my speculation…

College is a place simultaneously of burgeoning, impossible dreams and an incredible sense of entitlement. It’s like people are on a track to success (which, admittedly, is largely true; with slight variations depending how you define success).

Of course, college students might be ignorant, naïve, protected, and abstracted away from every care in the world – but they’re not stupid. Most realize the situation they’re in. That doesn’t make it any easier to accept, or understand the implications.

However, I haven’t noticed an outrageous amount of “narcissism.” Fellow students seem well aware of their limitations; they struggle in classes, feel overwhelmed with the amount they’re required to read, enjoy social situations but often feel forced into them by classes and sleeping arrangements. In short, it’s not much different from “real life” (excepting things like bills and real consequences for failure…).

I do agree with the study in that people don’t feel obliged to limit their dreams to what ‘could be possible.’ Why aim to work as just another faceless middle manager in a large corporation when you can aim at the top? It’s simply logical – just much harder.

I prefer to be around people who believe that they are capable of great things.

Topic:

In the Apology, Socrates claims that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. What does he mean? Do you agree? Justify your views.

Response:

Socrates concluded that “the unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Plato, Apologia) in his famous defense prior to his execution.

Socrates literally believed that an unexamined life is worse than death; this can be derived from his beliefs about morality and death stated in the Apologia and Phaedo.

However, Socrates’ conclusion is incomplete and predicated on the assumption that the soul is immortal. It is not relevant to a person who does not believe in the immortal soul and an afterlife.

An examination of Socrates’ beliefs about death and morality reveal his priorities, which lead him to make the conclusion that life is not worth living. Socrates stated that “death is something [he] couldn’t care less about” (Plato, Apologia) and that his whole concern was “not to do anything unjust or impious” (Plato, Apologia). He valued his ethics more than he valued his life, and upheld his ethics at risk to his life on occasions previous to his trial.

He also believed that the “soul is evidently immortal” (Plato, Phaedo) and that it is far preferable to “[ignore] the pleasures of the body […] and [adorn] his soul […] with moderation, righteousness…” (Plato, Phaedo) and so on. The purpose of life is to enrich the immortal soul; consequently, a life is not worth living if it does not enrich the soul in some way. Socrates did not fear death because he dedicated himself to adorning his soul.

However, Socrates did not believe that one can adorn the soul by unquestioningly follow ethical beliefs; they are so often incorrect or incomplete. He made himself distinctly unpopular by demonstrating that most men who claimed to be wise did not, in actuality, have any basis for their beliefs. In an attempt to fulfill his belief of the purpose of life, Socrates attempted to discover their true meaning. He stated that it is “the greatest good to discuss virtue everyday” (Plato, Apologia), and through discussion uncover the true meaning – or as close as one can get – of virtue.

Socrates would (and did) choose death over living an unexamined life, for he believed that the unexamined life violated the purpose of life itself.

While Socrates’ conclusion is consistent with his beliefs, it is flawed when you dispense with some of his assumptions. Socrates’ conclusion depends on the assumption that some sort of afterlife exists, for he measures the worth of life in terms of how well one has ‘adorned his soul.’ In fact, he believed that earthly pursuits “[do] more harm than good” (Plato, Phaedo), and so should be avoided in favor of virtue and learning. Essentially, Socrates believed that a certain way of life was best, and the extent to which one achieves that determined how ‘good’ one is.

Referring to his conclusion, the worth of a life is determined by how ‘examined’ it is. However, if we dispense with the premise of an afterlife and the immortality of the soul, Socrates’ conclusion becomes less than convincing. If we can prove that an unexamined life is worth more than the death of an unexamined life, Socrates’ conclusion is false.

Assuming that the soul does not exist, we can conceptually measure how ‘good’ or worthwhile a life is in two ways: internally or externally (neither is practical in real life). An internal evaluation would determine the extent to which the person conforms to his ethical beliefs, and an external evaluation measure the degree in which the person’s life benefits his family, friends, and neighbors (collectively ‘society’). The internal measurement is flawed because the existence of an ethical belief does not make it good or worthwhile. For instance, an ethic that states you should not interfere with other people out of respect can be taken to the extreme of ignoring or overlooking signs of child abuse; something which benefits no one (not even the parents of the abused child). Conforming to the ethic would be measured as a worthwhile choice under the internal evaluation, where it should clearly be negative. In contrast, the external examination would measure it as a negative choice because the choice negatively affects society.

Using the external evaluation, a life is worthwhile if it has a net benefit to society. This largely invalidates Socrates’ conclusion that an “unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Plato, Apologia): the only way that an examined life would be worth more than an unexamined life is if the life examined contributed more to society; and in every respect, an unexamined life is worth living if it contributes to society. There is the possibility that an examined life is less beneficial to society than an unexamined life, if examining life makes one less productive and less beneficial to society than otherwise.

This leads us into direct conflict with Socrates on another aspect – he believed that “the pleasures of the body and its ornamentation […] [do] more harm than good” (Plato, Phaedo). However, as long as those pleasures benefit society it is worthwhile continuing to live. We know from modern economics and that consumption of goods and services raises the quality of life in nations due to supply and demand; a net benefit to society. Additionally, while it’s impossible to ascertain whether or not an unexamined life will positively benefit society or not, we know absolutely that no life at all cannot benefit society. Life is worthwhile as long as it has a net benefit on society – examined or not.

Socrates’ conclusion that an “unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Plato, Apologia) is one of the most famous phrases in philosophy. However, like all conclusions it is dependent on the premises that underlie the conclusion. One of Socrates’ premises is that the soul is immortal and that life should be spent enriching the soul for its “journey to the underworld.” (Plato, Phaedo) If we dispense with that belief, we can determine that Socrates’ argument is incomplete; substituting his premise that the degree to which a life is worthwhile depends on how much it adorns the soul for measuring how worthwhile a life is depending on how beneficial it has been to society invalidates his conclusion.

Bibliography

Plato. “Apologia.” Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates. Ed. John M. Cooper. Trans. George M. A. Grube. Third Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2000. 23-42.

Plato. “Phaedo.” Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates. Ed. John M. Cooper. Trans. George M. A. Grube. Third Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000. 55-58.

I’m guessing that most people meet friends at events they both attend – at school, it’s a class or a party. At work, it’s, well, they office or the pub.

Consider how improbable it is that two people attending the same event will (1) meet and (2) have enough in common to become friends. Or that two people who could be friends (1) decide to go to the same event, (2) meet, and (3) eventually become friends.

Sure, we filter out some people. For instance, people tend to approach people who ‘look’ like them – wear the same types of clothes and so on. Then, they stay with people who speak like them – slang, jargon, etc. But that in itself is pretty misleading – how many interesting people are you filtering out? I can’t see how wearing different clothes makes you any less worth knowing.

I’m going to guess that it’s pretty unlikely. I’m going to assume that the ‘natural’ way of making friends, dating, and generally finding interesting people is pretty inefficient.

So what does that mean? First of all, that people, by and large, aren’t very picky when it comes to whom they’re friends with. We can guess that when making friends, the degree of ‘compatibility’ (it’s a terrible word, but I don’t have a better one) determines the ‘quality’ of the friendship.

In pure speculation, I’m guessing that if you’re highly compatible with someone, you can establish a high degree of intimacy with someone after just a short time. (That guy sooo understands me, in valley girl-esque speak). I’m further going to guess that you can establish a similar level of intimacy with someone less compatible, but it’s going to take more time – for those who still remember Calculus, it’s a basic integral.

I’ve drawn a small diagram to illustrate the concept. If intimacy is the integral of compatibility between two people and time spent together, then it’s easy to see how you get a similar level of intimacy in a much short time. Of course, it also depends on what ‘type’ of relationship you have – someone you’re dating heavily is much more likely to get their faster than they guy you have a couple beers with after work.

So we can guess that there’s a lot of room to improve how people become friends.

I think that the internet is going to play a pretty big part of that. Currently, there’s no competition. We have the pathetic little dating sites – True, Match.com, Tickle.com, etc. But they’re focused on dating, and their ‘tests’ are quaint but not much more (besides, how many people are honestly going to fill out a few hundred questions just for the sake of meeting a few people?). Social networks are interesting, and enable finding people with similar interests through tag-based interest-fields. Nothing’s going to happen soon.

I’m still keeping an eye on social networks and dating sites to see how fast what’s developing.