The paranormal in all its glory is the subject of the 130s. Ghosts, vampires, witches; feng shui, the I Ching, astrology, palm reading, and psychics; Nostradamus and 2012; it's all there. And I find it all pretty creepy. So this week I channelled my inner skeptic and only brought home Exposed! Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, by Henri Broch, which Amazon, btw, markets under the category of "Controversial Knowledge." Seems to me that's an oxymoron. I mean, knowledge sounds to me like facts, and facts can't be controversial. They just are. You might not like gravity-- it sure annoys me sometimes-- but it's not just a good idea, as the saying goes, it's the law.
(Anyway, at least the title of the book leaves something to the imagination, unlike another offering in the 140s: Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. For some reason, that title struck me as hilariously specific and uninviting to anyone (like myself) who doesn't have a dog or a particular interest in their admittedly admirable loyalty and affection.)
Speaking of unlikeable facts, or fictions, I also went into the 140s, where there is much less selection, and decided to stick with my theme of grumpy cynicism. I chose, mainly because of its absurd title, 50 Popular Beliefs that People Think Are True, by Guy P. Harrison. Is it just me, or is that sort of like 50 Philosophies that Are Ways of Looking at Things, or Cute Kitties that Are Felines? Well, I guess I am going to learn about popular beliefs that people think are true, as opposed to popular beliefs that people think are crap but still invite to parties, because I am in no frame of mind right now to read 500 pages on Romanticism or Humanism, which is what else I could do in the 140s.
Really I just want to get on with it and into the 150s, where 158 (applied psychology, or, unofficial tech support for your brain) is loaded with books I've been actually wanting to read, like Think Like a Freak (sequel to the very entertaining Freakonomics) and The 8th Habit (because 7 weren't enough and Stephen Covey does not come across like a flim-flam artist.) And they're available on audio, so I can get mental hacks in my car!
But first I have to debunk everything from dowsing to Area 51. I'll let you know if I turn up anything really interesting!
Friday, January 30, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
How to Be Human
I just finished The Most Human Human by Brian Christian, which is about computers simulating human conversation (one working definition of AI). You will get a detailed summary from this interview. Computer simulation of other supposedly exclusively human skills has been all over the news lately, too: moral and ethical improvisations in The New York Times, identification of emotions via facial expressions in the New Yorker.
AI is always all over the place. The IKEA chatbot, for example. It was programmed by a previous winner of the Loebner prize, but was completely unhelpful to me. I asked it if I could arrange for someone else to assemble my order, and it just referred me to generic web pages that did not contain the information I wanted. Then it asked whether its answer had been helpful. When I said No, it responded "Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no.' " Well, that's adorable, but shuts down the conversation, doesn't it? As I learned from the book, a good conversationalist offers plenty of holds with her responses, instead of just saying, "That's not what I wanted to hear."
My favorite robots are the ones that don't pretend not to be, like the CVS prescription reorder system. "Press or say 1," "The first three letters of the patient's last name are..." Okay, that's a conversation we can have. If I have any actual questions, I can press 2 for a real person.
So the topic of conversation simulation is interesting in itself, but the description of Christian's experiences as a Loebner Prize confederate went beyond interesting to inspiring. I even emailed the organizers about the possibility of participating next year! If nothing else, what a great excuse to take a trip to Bletchley Park!
AI is always all over the place. The IKEA chatbot, for example. It was programmed by a previous winner of the Loebner prize, but was completely unhelpful to me. I asked it if I could arrange for someone else to assemble my order, and it just referred me to generic web pages that did not contain the information I wanted. Then it asked whether its answer had been helpful. When I said No, it responded "Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no.' " Well, that's adorable, but shuts down the conversation, doesn't it? As I learned from the book, a good conversationalist offers plenty of holds with her responses, instead of just saying, "That's not what I wanted to hear."
My favorite robots are the ones that don't pretend not to be, like the CVS prescription reorder system. "Press or say 1," "The first three letters of the patient's last name are..." Okay, that's a conversation we can have. If I have any actual questions, I can press 2 for a real person.
So the topic of conversation simulation is interesting in itself, but the description of Christian's experiences as a Loebner Prize confederate went beyond interesting to inspiring. I even emailed the organizers about the possibility of participating next year! If nothing else, what a great excuse to take a trip to Bletchley Park!
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
120-129: Matters of Life and Death
The 120's encompass both what it means to be human and what happens afterwards: the most popular number is 129, which includes both Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates and, in the children's department, The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, by Leo Buscaglia, which is pretty much exactly as creepy as you might expect.
Heidegger, of course, is the diametric opposite of creepy, but I just lost patience with it. One of their main points is that you are going to die and you probably are in denial about that, but not me! I am stunningly aware that my life is finite! That's why I'm only reading one book from each decade of the library, not every single book or even one from each number!
So I chose The Most Human Human, an engagingly-written combination stunt memoir and research paper about artificial intelligence and the Turing test, aka the Imitation Game. So far he has explained how he came to participate in the Loebner Prize as a human, and has gone on to discover that one essential element of human conversation is continuity, that it hangs together. Now he's talking about whether logic is overrated. I actually got this book because I thought my husband, who works in computing, would like it, but I think it's really interesting too.
Heidegger, of course, is the diametric opposite of creepy, but I just lost patience with it. One of their main points is that you are going to die and you probably are in denial about that, but not me! I am stunningly aware that my life is finite! That's why I'm only reading one book from each decade of the library, not every single book or even one from each number!
So I chose The Most Human Human, an engagingly-written combination stunt memoir and research paper about artificial intelligence and the Turing test, aka the Imitation Game. So far he has explained how he came to participate in the Loebner Prize as a human, and has gone on to discover that one essential element of human conversation is continuity, that it hangs together. Now he's talking about whether logic is overrated. I actually got this book because I thought my husband, who works in computing, would like it, but I think it's really interesting too.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Jim Holt Explains It All
Well, Holt found an answer that was satisfying to him, although I remain skeptical. He starts with Derek Parfit's construct: that anything could have happened, but only one thing did, and how was that one thing selected as the winning reality? He then assumes two principles:
1) For every truth, there is an explanation of why it is true.
2) No truth explains itself.
Based on these assumptions, he rules out all but two possible operational principles. One, the principle of Simplicity, doesn't work, because the simplest reality would be the empty set, the one where nothing at all happened, and that is clearly not the reality we are experiencing. The other organizing principle could be Fullness. So, under this principle, the Universe would be both full and empty, both simple and complicated, both good and bad, etcetera-- which is exactly how we experience Reality! It's not uniformly fantastic, but it's not completely awful either. Holt goes on to look at the probabilities of a cosmos that was on an extreme versus one that sits in the middle of the spectrum, and from a logical and mathematical perspective concludes that from the organizing principle of Fullness, this reality was generated.
I think this is a whole lot of unacceptable assumption and still doesn't answer the Ultimate Question. Holt never really explains where the principle of Fullness came from, or what it had to work with to generate Reality. He himself must not be completely satisfied, because he does continue his quest and speak with John Updike, who is a theist and envisions God (unsurprisingly) as an author, who, becoming bored with nothingness, made the world "as a bit of light verse." Holt also details some personal experiences that only underscore the fact that whatever our theories about Life, the Universe, and Everything, we have to function in the material world every day as if it made sense....
So that's what happens in Dewey section 110-119. The big questions will no doubt continue through the 100's...
1) For every truth, there is an explanation of why it is true.
2) No truth explains itself.
Based on these assumptions, he rules out all but two possible operational principles. One, the principle of Simplicity, doesn't work, because the simplest reality would be the empty set, the one where nothing at all happened, and that is clearly not the reality we are experiencing. The other organizing principle could be Fullness. So, under this principle, the Universe would be both full and empty, both simple and complicated, both good and bad, etcetera-- which is exactly how we experience Reality! It's not uniformly fantastic, but it's not completely awful either. Holt goes on to look at the probabilities of a cosmos that was on an extreme versus one that sits in the middle of the spectrum, and from a logical and mathematical perspective concludes that from the organizing principle of Fullness, this reality was generated.
I think this is a whole lot of unacceptable assumption and still doesn't answer the Ultimate Question. Holt never really explains where the principle of Fullness came from, or what it had to work with to generate Reality. He himself must not be completely satisfied, because he does continue his quest and speak with John Updike, who is a theist and envisions God (unsurprisingly) as an author, who, becoming bored with nothingness, made the world "as a bit of light verse." Holt also details some personal experiences that only underscore the fact that whatever our theories about Life, the Universe, and Everything, we have to function in the material world every day as if it made sense....
So that's what happens in Dewey section 110-119. The big questions will no doubt continue through the 100's...
Friday, December 19, 2014
The Explanatory Power of the Multiverse?
Previously: In Why Does the World Exist? Jim Holt is continuing to report on the different approaches to the question, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" He speaks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians, and finds both compelling aspects and holes in each perspective.
Holt moves to the multiverse model to present the idea that if "anything that can happen, will happen", then it is hardly surprising that the universe happened. Turns out there are multiple conceptions of the multiverse, which I will not review here, as the multiverse is an area of my special interest, and I have a lot of other ground to cover. However, although the multiverse addresses the "fine-tuning" issue (how does our universe just happen to have the right mathematics to support life?), it still doesn't really address the fundamental question: How did we get something from nothing?
Holt turns to mathematicians for their take. As fans of Neal Stephenson's Anathem know, there is a school of mathematics that believes that "mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them" (Rene Thom, quoted on p. 173). Other mathematicians do not agree with this perspective and see their work as either describing things that they observe (applied math) or imagining other, logically consistent but perhaps physically impossible constructs (like the square root of -1-- this is "pure" math). Either way, there is a case to be made that our reality can be described strictly in terms of mathematical relationships between forces, in which case, it could be conceived as the product of an infinite mind, contemplating possibilities.
This is the theory subscribed to by John Leslie. If you think about Plato's cave again, then, if the shadows on the wall are our reality, and we are the people chained facing the wall, and the pure mathematical forms are the objects of which we only see the shadows, this infinite mind is the sun that casts the shadows. Then, of course, we are back to the God Hypothesis, but rather than an image of God forming things out of chaos and mud, we have the more 21st century image of Him creating them out of the matrix of His own mind. Is there much substantive difference between the two conceptions?
Derek Parfit, who is primarily a moral philosopher, has recently interested himself in this problem of origins, and his contribution is to start from the how and work into the why, considering all the possible realities including our own and asking ourselves what cosmic possibilities might be true. There could be nothing at all (but obviously there's not). There could be one universe or a lot of universes, and it or they could be designed or selected to be good, bad, or indifferent; simple or messy; similar or different; and so on. Perhaps all possible worlds exist, in which case ours, with all its flaws, requires no explanation. Just as some people have to live in North Korea and some people get to live in Hawaii, so some beings have to live in this entropy-driven universe and this fallen planet, while presumably somewhere beings are enjoying a more uniformly good existence, and some poor creatures are perhaps suffering an even worse one. But again, what drove all possible worlds to exist? I feel that we continually, contrary to one of Holt's earlier sources, run up against a wall with no door marked "NO EXPLANATIONS BEYOND THIS POINT."
Holt moves to the multiverse model to present the idea that if "anything that can happen, will happen", then it is hardly surprising that the universe happened. Turns out there are multiple conceptions of the multiverse, which I will not review here, as the multiverse is an area of my special interest, and I have a lot of other ground to cover. However, although the multiverse addresses the "fine-tuning" issue (how does our universe just happen to have the right mathematics to support life?), it still doesn't really address the fundamental question: How did we get something from nothing?
Holt turns to mathematicians for their take. As fans of Neal Stephenson's Anathem know, there is a school of mathematics that believes that "mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them" (Rene Thom, quoted on p. 173). Other mathematicians do not agree with this perspective and see their work as either describing things that they observe (applied math) or imagining other, logically consistent but perhaps physically impossible constructs (like the square root of -1-- this is "pure" math). Either way, there is a case to be made that our reality can be described strictly in terms of mathematical relationships between forces, in which case, it could be conceived as the product of an infinite mind, contemplating possibilities.
This is the theory subscribed to by John Leslie. If you think about Plato's cave again, then, if the shadows on the wall are our reality, and we are the people chained facing the wall, and the pure mathematical forms are the objects of which we only see the shadows, this infinite mind is the sun that casts the shadows. Then, of course, we are back to the God Hypothesis, but rather than an image of God forming things out of chaos and mud, we have the more 21st century image of Him creating them out of the matrix of His own mind. Is there much substantive difference between the two conceptions?
Derek Parfit, who is primarily a moral philosopher, has recently interested himself in this problem of origins, and his contribution is to start from the how and work into the why, considering all the possible realities including our own and asking ourselves what cosmic possibilities might be true. There could be nothing at all (but obviously there's not). There could be one universe or a lot of universes, and it or they could be designed or selected to be good, bad, or indifferent; simple or messy; similar or different; and so on. Perhaps all possible worlds exist, in which case ours, with all its flaws, requires no explanation. Just as some people have to live in North Korea and some people get to live in Hawaii, so some beings have to live in this entropy-driven universe and this fallen planet, while presumably somewhere beings are enjoying a more uniformly good existence, and some poor creatures are perhaps suffering an even worse one. But again, what drove all possible worlds to exist? I feel that we continually, contrary to one of Holt's earlier sources, run up against a wall with no door marked "NO EXPLANATIONS BEYOND THIS POINT."
Monday, December 15, 2014
Still Watching People Try to Figure Out Why the World Exists!
Leibniz reasoned to the existence of God by postulating that the universe might not have existed, therefore requires an explanation for its existence, and, unless you are going to argue that it's "turtles all the way down," there's ultimately going to have to be some self-explanatory cause. This line of reasoning certainly does not provide an airtight proof for God's existence... it rather seems to point us back to Swinburne's assertion that God is the simplest explanation. David Deutsch contributes a further insight: "important explanatory advances often change the meaning of explanation." For example, we might conclude that the part of reality we can see is not representative of the whole, like those prisoners in Plato's cave I mentioned before, in which case, unless we can either get out of the cave or receive and understand information from outside it, our "explanations" are hardly worthy of the name.
Jim Holt introduces another important concept, related to the self-explanatory explanation, about halfway through the book: that of the self-subsuming principle. Robert Nozick, known primarily as a political philosopher, developed this concept. A self-subsuming principle is sort of the opposite of the paradox where a man comes up to you and says, "Watch out! Everyone in this town is a liar!" What are you supposed to do with that information, when it contains its own contradiction? On the other hand, if he said, "Good news! Everyone in this town tells the truth!" you would at least be free to believe his statement without cognitive dissonance. However, while that concept means that we can imagine explanations for the existence of the universe that are coherent, it gives us no way to be sure they are true. For example, if it is true that anything that can happen, will happen, then that statement happened, and everything has happened, including both nothing and all variations on the theme of nothing. Or maybe that's not how it went.
Einstein said the universe was eternal, and infamously adjusted his equations in light of that assumption. However, with the Big Bang looking more and more likely, scientists are speculating that quantum instability might have caused the Big Bang. After all, "changeless emptiness is incompatible with quantum mechanics." (p.141) Apparently, however, for reasons I still don't understand, this model is incompatible with gravity, thus necessitating the Theory of Everything that people are always on about. Furthermore, even if the conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity could be resolved, there's the question of where those two forces came from. If the universe is an unsurprising, indeed a predictable result of these laws, are they a transcendent reality? "Since the world is logically prior to the patterns within it, those internal patterns can't be called on to explain the existence of the world."
Now do you see why Swinburne finds the God Hypothesis the simplest, the most elegant, the most self-explanatory explanation for the existence of the universe?! The mind of God would be a great place for the laws of physics, quantum and relative, to reside, and His will would be a great catalyst for them to act.
Jim Holt introduces another important concept, related to the self-explanatory explanation, about halfway through the book: that of the self-subsuming principle. Robert Nozick, known primarily as a political philosopher, developed this concept. A self-subsuming principle is sort of the opposite of the paradox where a man comes up to you and says, "Watch out! Everyone in this town is a liar!" What are you supposed to do with that information, when it contains its own contradiction? On the other hand, if he said, "Good news! Everyone in this town tells the truth!" you would at least be free to believe his statement without cognitive dissonance. However, while that concept means that we can imagine explanations for the existence of the universe that are coherent, it gives us no way to be sure they are true. For example, if it is true that anything that can happen, will happen, then that statement happened, and everything has happened, including both nothing and all variations on the theme of nothing. Or maybe that's not how it went.
Einstein said the universe was eternal, and infamously adjusted his equations in light of that assumption. However, with the Big Bang looking more and more likely, scientists are speculating that quantum instability might have caused the Big Bang. After all, "changeless emptiness is incompatible with quantum mechanics." (p.141) Apparently, however, for reasons I still don't understand, this model is incompatible with gravity, thus necessitating the Theory of Everything that people are always on about. Furthermore, even if the conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity could be resolved, there's the question of where those two forces came from. If the universe is an unsurprising, indeed a predictable result of these laws, are they a transcendent reality? "Since the world is logically prior to the patterns within it, those internal patterns can't be called on to explain the existence of the world."
Now do you see why Swinburne finds the God Hypothesis the simplest, the most elegant, the most self-explanatory explanation for the existence of the universe?! The mind of God would be a great place for the laws of physics, quantum and relative, to reside, and His will would be a great catalyst for them to act.
Monday, December 8, 2014
Is God Necessary? (More about Why Does the World Exist?)
According to the book I am currently reading, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, Adolf Grunbaum says "Why is there something instead of nothing?" is the wrong question. He says that before the Big Bang there was no time, joining many earlier philosophers such as Leibniz who argued that time is a relation between events, so that if there are no events, there is no time. How this proves that, as it were, there is no such thing as Nothingness, I'm not quite clear, except that, well, if nothing happens in the forest, and no one is there to observe the lack of events, is it still a (non)happening? Grunbaum elucidates: if the Big Bang model is physically true-- if the creation of the Universe started with what is called a "singularity," that is, a one-off event that did not operate according to the same processes and principles that obtained afterwards-- then by definition that's all there ever was; time and matter came into existence at the same time, and it's impossible to speak of a 'before.' (Grunbaum thinks this disproves the existence of God, but I can't see why, since God by most definitions is outside time and space anyway.)
Richard Swinburne , on the other hand, advocates that God is, in fact, within time, that it is meaningful to say that God did one thing before another. He envisions God as "the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained." (p. 104) He is willing to grant the conceivability of a reality that contained a universe but no God; he finds God to be not a necessary explanation, but the simplest explanation for the existence of everything else, and that there is no explanation necessary for His existence.
This, by the way, is my own position, more or less, although I find it easiest to conceptualize God as being outside time as we know it. He may have some kind of sequential experience of metachronology, how would I know, but He very obviously is not confined to the same history that we are, and so, for me, to say that he is "within time" is not very meaningful.
What a great book!
Richard Swinburne , on the other hand, advocates that God is, in fact, within time, that it is meaningful to say that God did one thing before another. He envisions God as "the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained." (p. 104) He is willing to grant the conceivability of a reality that contained a universe but no God; he finds God to be not a necessary explanation, but the simplest explanation for the existence of everything else, and that there is no explanation necessary for His existence.
This, by the way, is my own position, more or less, although I find it easiest to conceptualize God as being outside time as we know it. He may have some kind of sequential experience of metachronology, how would I know, but He very obviously is not confined to the same history that we are, and so, for me, to say that he is "within time" is not very meaningful.
What a great book!
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