I came across this debate on YouTube between Sye Ten Bruggencate and Matt Dillahunty (31 May 2014): “Is it Reasonable to Believe that God Exists?” I’ve come across Sye before and even argued with him on Stephen Law’s blog (or attempted to) a few years back; probably more than a few years, actually. He’s a self-described presuppositionist and a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, who lives in Ontario, while Matt is a former Christian and now hosts a cable TV show, The Atheist Experience, based in Austin, Texas.
The debate is close to 2 hrs, including questions from the audience, which is followed by the participants’ ‘summing up’. I watched the entire debate partly because I was curious how Matt would handle Sye, who’s debating style is to make unsupported assertions then try and put the burden of proof, or disproof, onto his opponent. To give an example from my own experience: he once asked me to provide evidence that God had not made himself manifest to humankind (I’m paraphrasing from memory). I said I can’t provide evidence of something that didn’t happen, not happening. And his response was that it was my assertion therefore I had to prove it.
I was impressed by Matt’s temperament as well as his arguments, where he was very careful and precise whilst not being difficult to follow, even though he spoke quickly to ensure he stayed within the time limits imposed. Both of them were well prepared and had obviously researched each other’s positions. Sye cleverly used video excerpts of Matt to not only pre-empt Matt’s arguments but to support his own counter-arguments. Matt used humour in combination with rigid logic and precise language.
Sye’s argument was simplistic in the extreme: “It’s reasonable to believe that which is true; it’s true that God exists; therefore it’s reasonable to believe that God exists.” In his summing up Matt called it ‘kindergarten theology’ and ‘kindergarten philosophy’.
One of Sye’s key points of argument (which I’ve seen him use before) is to claim that his opponent can only argue from his (Sye’s) world view, and his world view is provided by God. He argues that any other world view is ‘absurd’, and in Matt’s case, Matt could, by his own admission, be a ‘brain in a vat’. However, Matt clarifies this by saying that he doesn’t believe he’s a brain in a vat, but it’s a well known philosophical conundrum that this can’t be proven. I first came across this in Stephen Law’s Philosopher’s Gym about 12 years ago, before I discovered him on his blog. In the debate, this logically led to a discussion on solipsism, which, Matt argued, can’t be proved to be false.
I’ve discussed this before, and, whilst all of us believe that everyone else we meet is not a figment of our imagination, there is one situation, which we have all experienced, where this is actually true. Neither Sye nor Matt mentioned this but that situation is a dream. A dream is solipsistic. So how do we know that we’re not in a dream. Because we have shared memories when we’re not in a dream. If I have a dream that includes someone I know, then when I next meet them in real life, they have no memory of that interaction, only I do. So unless one’s entire life is a dream then solipsism is a non sequitur if we have shared experiences that we can both remember.
One of the things that came out of this debate for me, and which Matt touched on briefly, is that if you have no common ground to begin with then you really can’t debate a subject. Specifically, Matt pointed out that he and Sye had different definitions of truth, which logically means that they would never be able to agree on whether something was true or not. I realised that it would be pointless for me to engage in an argument with someone whose entire world view is premised on fiction: a book of mythological stories. Sye argues that everyone knows that God exists, including babies (when Matt specifically asked him). No one can argue with that and Sye knows it, which is why he claims he’s unbeatable when it comes to arguments about the existence of God.
Matt argues that knowledge is a subset of beliefs, which I hadn’t considered before, and truth is based on evidence. Sye responded that evidence is something you take into a court and you become the judge but you can’t judge God. But if you don’t believe in God then that argument is irrelevant and without a God who actually intervenes in the assessment, one must use one’s own intellect to judge the evidence, which is what we all do all the time otherwise we wouldn’t be able to live.
So Sye’s basis for truth is God, which is revealed in scripture, and my basis for objective truth is mathematics, so we couldn’t be further apart. Sye would argue that I need his world view to believe that, because mathematics wouldn’t exist without God. However, I would argue that mathematics trumps God because even God can’t change a prime number to a non-prime number or vice versa or change the value of Pi or make 2 + 2 = 5. If Sye was to respond that God is mathematics then I might agree with him, but that has nothing to do with scripture.
Addendum: I've given this some more thought, plus I've watched the entire debate again. I believe I can challenge Sye's world view. Notice I say 'challenge' because that's the best one can do; I don't believe I can get him to change his world view any more than I believe he could get me to change mine.
Just to clarify my own position, I'm not anti-theist per se (as I've explained elsewhere); I believe God is something that people find within themselves, but that's another argument for another time.
My challenge is to do with my last paragraph of my original post, because I believe that mathematics gives us the only transcendental truths we know, whilst acknowledging that not everyone agrees with that position. By transcendental, I mean that mathematical truths exist independently of the human mind and even the universe. As someone once joked: If tomorrow the universe ceased to exist, the only part of science one could continue to do would be mathematics (that’s me paraphrasing John Barrow quoting Dave Rusin). I've discussed this position elsewhere.
My challenge to Sye is that mathematics even transcends God, for the reasons I pointed out in that closing paragraph. God can't change mathematics any more than we can: he can't make 2 + 2 = 5, amongst even more esoteric mathematical concepts like changing primes. If God can't change them, then logically they are independent of God. So I have a means of finding 'truths' that transcend God, therefore I don't need God in order for them to be true. What's more, mathematics provides 'truths' that anyone with the requisite intellectual ability can discover, without reference to any religious scripture or any divine revelation.
Friday 26 June 2015
Wednesday 17 June 2015
Freedom, justice, happiness and truth
This is the subject of the Question of the Month in Philosophy Now (Issue 108, June / July 2015). The actual question: What's The More Important: Freedom, Justice, Happiness, Truth? Please give and justify your rankings in less than 400 words.
Someone I showed this to said that the question was grammatically incorrect because it should be 'What's The Most Important'. However, I pointed out that then you would only discuss one of them and not all four.
Obviously, I don't always respond to the Question of the Month, even though I'm a regular subscriber and have been for a number of years. I'm not sure why I chose to respond to this one, except that it looked like a challenge. It's certainly something that I hadn't entertained before.
What's interesting is that when I started to write it, I had no idea how I'd rank them. I've done this before and it's actually very satisfying to resolve a philosophical issue simply by writing about it without much contemplation beforehand. It's similar to the spontaneity one finds when writing fiction, where I believe it's a necessary part of the process. Below is my submission.
To answer this question one must contextualise it and the context I choose is relationships. Relationships between spouses, relationships between governments and the people they govern, relationships between parents and children, relationships between employers and employees and relationships between figures of authority and the public at large. Because all these qualities: freedom, justice, happiness and truth; may have other contexts, but it’s in relationships that they are most important and most inclined to be abused or perverted. And there is one quality I would put above them all and upon which they are all dependent and that is trust. Because once trust is lost or suspect, then everything one values in a relationship becomes compromised at best and forfeit at worst.
Truth is the cornerstone of trust, so, arguably, truth is the lynch pin, but, if trust is lost, truth becomes a casualty. Honesty to oneself comes first, because, without that, one can’t be honest to anyone else. Truth informs justice because justice without truth is injustice. Justice and freedom are interdependent and require balance. Paradoxically, freedom is dependent on justice, because without justice we would have anarchy and only the powerful would have freedom. Here trust is paramount, because justice that doesn’t incorporate trust becomes oppression, and oppression is antithetical to freedom. So freedom arises from justice but only when trust is preserved. Happiness is intrinsically linked to freedom; suicide and self-harm are often the consequences of freedom curtailed, especially when it’s extreme enough to eliminate hope. Freedom and hope are partners, with hope being essential to psychological well-being; a precursor to happiness.
So there is a logical sequence of dependence, therefore importance. You can’t have justice without truth, you can’t have freedom without justice and you can’t have happiness without freedom, but requisite to them all is trust.
Someone I showed this to said that the question was grammatically incorrect because it should be 'What's The Most Important'. However, I pointed out that then you would only discuss one of them and not all four.
Obviously, I don't always respond to the Question of the Month, even though I'm a regular subscriber and have been for a number of years. I'm not sure why I chose to respond to this one, except that it looked like a challenge. It's certainly something that I hadn't entertained before.
What's interesting is that when I started to write it, I had no idea how I'd rank them. I've done this before and it's actually very satisfying to resolve a philosophical issue simply by writing about it without much contemplation beforehand. It's similar to the spontaneity one finds when writing fiction, where I believe it's a necessary part of the process. Below is my submission.
To answer this question one must contextualise it and the context I choose is relationships. Relationships between spouses, relationships between governments and the people they govern, relationships between parents and children, relationships between employers and employees and relationships between figures of authority and the public at large. Because all these qualities: freedom, justice, happiness and truth; may have other contexts, but it’s in relationships that they are most important and most inclined to be abused or perverted. And there is one quality I would put above them all and upon which they are all dependent and that is trust. Because once trust is lost or suspect, then everything one values in a relationship becomes compromised at best and forfeit at worst.
Truth is the cornerstone of trust, so, arguably, truth is the lynch pin, but, if trust is lost, truth becomes a casualty. Honesty to oneself comes first, because, without that, one can’t be honest to anyone else. Truth informs justice because justice without truth is injustice. Justice and freedom are interdependent and require balance. Paradoxically, freedom is dependent on justice, because without justice we would have anarchy and only the powerful would have freedom. Here trust is paramount, because justice that doesn’t incorporate trust becomes oppression, and oppression is antithetical to freedom. So freedom arises from justice but only when trust is preserved. Happiness is intrinsically linked to freedom; suicide and self-harm are often the consequences of freedom curtailed, especially when it’s extreme enough to eliminate hope. Freedom and hope are partners, with hope being essential to psychological well-being; a precursor to happiness.
So there is a logical sequence of dependence, therefore importance. You can’t have justice without truth, you can’t have freedom without justice and you can’t have happiness without freedom, but requisite to them all is trust.
Thursday 11 June 2015
The fine-tuned Universe
I’ve discussed this before in relation to John D. Barrow’s revelations concerning the fine structure constant, amongst other things, in his excellent book, The Constants of Nature. A recent episode of Catalyst, called Custom Universe also raised this issue, plus the latest issue of New Scientist (6 June 2015, pp.37-39) explaining the extraordinary fine difference in mass between neutrons and protons (that can’t be explained with our current knowledge of physics) and, in particular, the consequences of small variations to that difference.
In other words, the stability of atoms, including the prototype atom, hydrogen, is dependent on the neutron being slightly heavier than the proton by 0.14% (the neutron is 939.6 Mev and the proton is 938.3 Mev). Making the difference much bigger would result in more complex atoms becoming impossible to create and much smaller would have converted all hydrogen atoms into inert helium, therefore no fusion in stars and no other atoms. Smaller still or making protons heavier than neutrons would have resulted in protons decaying into neutrons and therefore no atoms at all.
This is just one of many examples of fine-tuning in our universe that makes the evolution of complex life forms, and therefore intelligent life, possible. And, of course, we still don’t know why matter outweighed anti-matter in the early stages of the universe by 1 billion and 1 to 1 billion, otherwise the universe would be just radiation and nothing else.
The standard answer to this is the multiverse, which postulates that there exists up to an infinite number of alternative universes, and, logically, we must exist in the one universe that allows intelligent life, like us, to evolve. Brian Cox (in Human Universe) uses the analogy of a lottery. When we buy a lottery ticket the chances of winning is some astronomical number, and in our individual lifetimes, very few of us ever win. However, as Cox points out, someone wins every time, and that’s the same with the multiverse. We win because we are in it and all the others that don’t win are unknown and unknowable because no consciousness can evolve in them to find out. This is known as the weak Anthropic Principle, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
What many people don’t realise is that if there is an infinite number of universes then there must be an infinite number of you and me, because, in an infinite amount of space and time, anything that can happen once must happen an infinite number of times – a mathematical truism.
But many see the multiverse as a cop-out, because it explains everything and nothing. It says all things are possible therefore we are possible, problem solved. It provides an answer with no explanation. And, at its extreme interpretation, it says that everything is possible an infinite number of times.
Max Tegmark advocates this extreme interpretation in his book, Our Mathematical Universe, where he postulates up to 4 levels of multiverses, including the quantum multiverse. In fact, Tegmark conjured up a thought experiment, whereby if you die you just find yourself in an alternative quantum universe, and therefore you are effectively immortal. To take this to its logical conclusion, there must exist a universe where everyone lives forever, therefore we all eventually find Heaven, or at least, its mathematically plausible equivalent.
Equally relevant to this topic, is the issue of biological evolution, and I’ve just finished reading an excellent book on this subject, Life Ascending; The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane. Now many people (including Richard Dawkins, I imagine) will take issue with the word ‘invention’ and ‘evolution’ appearing in the same sentence, let alone on the cover of a book. But I doubt Dawkins would take issue with any of the material between the covers, even in the places where his name is cited. Lane, of course, is aware of some people’s sensitivity to the word ‘invention’ in this context, and is quick to explain he’s not referring to a ‘creator’ but to the extraordinary inventiveness inherent in the process of natural selection. In the same way, and for the same reasons, I have no problem in appropriating the word ‘design’ when discussing evolution because natural selection is nature’s design methodology and its more significant ‘inventions’ are the subject of the book, hence the totally apposite title.
Lane structures the book into 10 chapters that cover his ‘ten inventions’: 1) The Origin of Life; 2) DNA; 3) Photosynthesis; 4)The Complex Cell; 5) Sex; 6) Movement; 7) Sight; 8) Hot Blood; 9)Consciousness; 10) Death.
I have to say that this is the best book on evolution that I’ve read, not least because Lane has such a commanding knowledge of his subject and a very accessible style of prose. Lane is a biochemist by training and it’s his ability to explain what happens at a molecular level that gives the book so much intellectual weight. He appears up to date on all the latest discoveries and provides historical context everywhere; so we learn how theories have developed, sometimes stalled, sometimes been disproved and sometimes yet to be confirmed. Anyone who studies science, at whatever level, appreciates that we never know everything and we never will, but that we are constantly uncovering newly discovered nature’s secrets that would astound the likes of Darwin and his contemporaries with their depth and ingenuity.
All the chapters contain information that I wasn’t aware of previously, but the first two chapters are probably the most revelatory and the most enthralling. One suspects that it’s at this level that Lane is most intrigued and therefore most knowledgeable on all the latest developments. I won’t go into details, but he provides the best arguments I’ve come across on how life, at its simplest form, may have evolved from pure chemistry. In light of the title of this post, I was struck on more than one occasion on how just the right elements or combination of factors arose to produce the forebears of life as we now know it.
This is all good grist for those who believe we have a special destiny, and that there is the ‘hand’ of some immaterial force behind it all. The other extreme is to be dismissive of this view as ‘weak-minded’ and ‘unintelligent’, yet I find the idea that our existence is an accident that should never have happened equally absurd and, dare-I-say-it, unintelligent. My own view, that I’ve expressed elsewhere, is that the Universe is brim-full of purpose yet that purpose has evolved with no plan or blueprint in sight, no pre-destined goal, just a set of laws that have allowed it all to happen.
If there is a ‘creator’, then ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’ works in a very strange fashion, certainly not in the manner that creationists and ID advocates would have us believe, because the ‘design’ has been done piece-meal with many wrong turns, much trial and error and many catastrophes on a grand scale, of which we could easily become one ourselves. In comparison to the epic story of life, we are like mayflies, existing for less than a day, thus far – it’s a sobering thought.
In regard to the ridiculous debate on religion versus science, it is worth quoting Lane himself from the last paragraph of his book.
I think the picture painted here in this book is true. Life most surely evolved, along the lines described here. That is not dogma, but evidence tested in reality and corrected accordingly. Whether this grand picture is compatible with faith in God, I do not know. For some people, intimately acquainted with evolution, it is; for others, it is not.
Addendum: This is a YouTube interview with physicist, Leonard Susskind, who discusses the fine-tuned universe on Closer to Truth, which appears to be a series of interviews with well known scientists and philosophers giving us their interpretation of philosophical cum scientific conundrums.
Susskind, not surprisingly, delivers a very compelling argument for the multi-verse, or, as he calls it, the mega-verse, and, in so doing, references String or M Theory as supporting this view. Personally, I'm a bit of a sceptic of String theory and its many variations, as it reminds me of Ptolemy's epicycles, but I may well be proven wrong in the near or far future. Only time will tell.
But what struck me as I listened to Lenny's argument, was that, even if it's true, it still means that our universe is very special, amongst all the possibilities. However, as I pointed out in my main post, if there are an infinite number of universes then it's not special at all.
In other words, the stability of atoms, including the prototype atom, hydrogen, is dependent on the neutron being slightly heavier than the proton by 0.14% (the neutron is 939.6 Mev and the proton is 938.3 Mev). Making the difference much bigger would result in more complex atoms becoming impossible to create and much smaller would have converted all hydrogen atoms into inert helium, therefore no fusion in stars and no other atoms. Smaller still or making protons heavier than neutrons would have resulted in protons decaying into neutrons and therefore no atoms at all.
This is just one of many examples of fine-tuning in our universe that makes the evolution of complex life forms, and therefore intelligent life, possible. And, of course, we still don’t know why matter outweighed anti-matter in the early stages of the universe by 1 billion and 1 to 1 billion, otherwise the universe would be just radiation and nothing else.
The standard answer to this is the multiverse, which postulates that there exists up to an infinite number of alternative universes, and, logically, we must exist in the one universe that allows intelligent life, like us, to evolve. Brian Cox (in Human Universe) uses the analogy of a lottery. When we buy a lottery ticket the chances of winning is some astronomical number, and in our individual lifetimes, very few of us ever win. However, as Cox points out, someone wins every time, and that’s the same with the multiverse. We win because we are in it and all the others that don’t win are unknown and unknowable because no consciousness can evolve in them to find out. This is known as the weak Anthropic Principle, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
What many people don’t realise is that if there is an infinite number of universes then there must be an infinite number of you and me, because, in an infinite amount of space and time, anything that can happen once must happen an infinite number of times – a mathematical truism.
But many see the multiverse as a cop-out, because it explains everything and nothing. It says all things are possible therefore we are possible, problem solved. It provides an answer with no explanation. And, at its extreme interpretation, it says that everything is possible an infinite number of times.
Max Tegmark advocates this extreme interpretation in his book, Our Mathematical Universe, where he postulates up to 4 levels of multiverses, including the quantum multiverse. In fact, Tegmark conjured up a thought experiment, whereby if you die you just find yourself in an alternative quantum universe, and therefore you are effectively immortal. To take this to its logical conclusion, there must exist a universe where everyone lives forever, therefore we all eventually find Heaven, or at least, its mathematically plausible equivalent.
Equally relevant to this topic, is the issue of biological evolution, and I’ve just finished reading an excellent book on this subject, Life Ascending; The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane. Now many people (including Richard Dawkins, I imagine) will take issue with the word ‘invention’ and ‘evolution’ appearing in the same sentence, let alone on the cover of a book. But I doubt Dawkins would take issue with any of the material between the covers, even in the places where his name is cited. Lane, of course, is aware of some people’s sensitivity to the word ‘invention’ in this context, and is quick to explain he’s not referring to a ‘creator’ but to the extraordinary inventiveness inherent in the process of natural selection. In the same way, and for the same reasons, I have no problem in appropriating the word ‘design’ when discussing evolution because natural selection is nature’s design methodology and its more significant ‘inventions’ are the subject of the book, hence the totally apposite title.
Lane structures the book into 10 chapters that cover his ‘ten inventions’: 1) The Origin of Life; 2) DNA; 3) Photosynthesis; 4)The Complex Cell; 5) Sex; 6) Movement; 7) Sight; 8) Hot Blood; 9)Consciousness; 10) Death.
I have to say that this is the best book on evolution that I’ve read, not least because Lane has such a commanding knowledge of his subject and a very accessible style of prose. Lane is a biochemist by training and it’s his ability to explain what happens at a molecular level that gives the book so much intellectual weight. He appears up to date on all the latest discoveries and provides historical context everywhere; so we learn how theories have developed, sometimes stalled, sometimes been disproved and sometimes yet to be confirmed. Anyone who studies science, at whatever level, appreciates that we never know everything and we never will, but that we are constantly uncovering newly discovered nature’s secrets that would astound the likes of Darwin and his contemporaries with their depth and ingenuity.
All the chapters contain information that I wasn’t aware of previously, but the first two chapters are probably the most revelatory and the most enthralling. One suspects that it’s at this level that Lane is most intrigued and therefore most knowledgeable on all the latest developments. I won’t go into details, but he provides the best arguments I’ve come across on how life, at its simplest form, may have evolved from pure chemistry. In light of the title of this post, I was struck on more than one occasion on how just the right elements or combination of factors arose to produce the forebears of life as we now know it.
This is all good grist for those who believe we have a special destiny, and that there is the ‘hand’ of some immaterial force behind it all. The other extreme is to be dismissive of this view as ‘weak-minded’ and ‘unintelligent’, yet I find the idea that our existence is an accident that should never have happened equally absurd and, dare-I-say-it, unintelligent. My own view, that I’ve expressed elsewhere, is that the Universe is brim-full of purpose yet that purpose has evolved with no plan or blueprint in sight, no pre-destined goal, just a set of laws that have allowed it all to happen.
If there is a ‘creator’, then ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’ works in a very strange fashion, certainly not in the manner that creationists and ID advocates would have us believe, because the ‘design’ has been done piece-meal with many wrong turns, much trial and error and many catastrophes on a grand scale, of which we could easily become one ourselves. In comparison to the epic story of life, we are like mayflies, existing for less than a day, thus far – it’s a sobering thought.
In regard to the ridiculous debate on religion versus science, it is worth quoting Lane himself from the last paragraph of his book.
I think the picture painted here in this book is true. Life most surely evolved, along the lines described here. That is not dogma, but evidence tested in reality and corrected accordingly. Whether this grand picture is compatible with faith in God, I do not know. For some people, intimately acquainted with evolution, it is; for others, it is not.
Addendum: This is a YouTube interview with physicist, Leonard Susskind, who discusses the fine-tuned universe on Closer to Truth, which appears to be a series of interviews with well known scientists and philosophers giving us their interpretation of philosophical cum scientific conundrums.
Susskind, not surprisingly, delivers a very compelling argument for the multi-verse, or, as he calls it, the mega-verse, and, in so doing, references String or M Theory as supporting this view. Personally, I'm a bit of a sceptic of String theory and its many variations, as it reminds me of Ptolemy's epicycles, but I may well be proven wrong in the near or far future. Only time will tell.
But what struck me as I listened to Lenny's argument, was that, even if it's true, it still means that our universe is very special, amongst all the possibilities. However, as I pointed out in my main post, if there are an infinite number of universes then it's not special at all.
Thursday 4 June 2015
Ex Machina – the movie
This is a good film for anyone interested in AI at a philosophical level. It even got reviewed in New Scientist and they don’t normally review movies. It’s a clever psychological thriller, so you don’t have to be a nerd to enjoy it, though there are some pseudo-nerdy conversations that are better assimilated if the audience has some foreknowledge. Examples are the Turing Test and the Mary thought experiment regarding colour.
Both of these are explained through expositional dialogue in the movie, rather seamlessly I should add, so ignorance is not necessarily a barrier. The real Turing test for AI would be if an AI could outsmart a human – not in a game of chess or a knowledge-based TV quiz show, but behaviourally – and this is explored as well. Like all good psychological thrillers, there is a clever twist at the end which is not predictable but totally consistent within the context of the narrative. In other words, it’s a well written and well executed drama irrespective of its philosophical themes.
One of the issues not addressed in the movie – because it would spoil it – is the phenomenon known as the ‘uncanny valley’, which I’ve written about here. Basically, when androids become almost human-like in appearance and movement, we become very uncomfortable. This doesn’t happen in the movie, and, of course, it’s not meant to, but it’s the real piece of deception in the film. Despite appearances that the character, Ava, is a machine because we can literally see through parts of her body, we all know that she is really an actress playing a part.
I’ve argued in the aforementioned post that I believe the source of this discomfort is the lack of emotional empathy. In the movie, however, the AI demonstrates considerable empathy, or at least appears to, which is one of the many subtle elements explored. This is very good science fiction because it explores a possible future and deals with it on a philosophical level, including ethical considerations, as well as entertaining us.
There are nods to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Asimov’s I Robot, although that may be my own particular perspective. I’ve created AI’s in my own fiction, but completely different to this. In fact, I deliberately created a disembodied AI, which develops a ‘relationship’ with my protagonist, and appears to display ‘loyalty’. However I explain this with the concept of ‘attachment’ programming, which doesn’t necessarily require empathy as we know it.
I bring this up, because the 2 stories, Ex Machina and mine, explore AI but with different philosophical perspectives and different narrative outcomes.
Both of these are explained through expositional dialogue in the movie, rather seamlessly I should add, so ignorance is not necessarily a barrier. The real Turing test for AI would be if an AI could outsmart a human – not in a game of chess or a knowledge-based TV quiz show, but behaviourally – and this is explored as well. Like all good psychological thrillers, there is a clever twist at the end which is not predictable but totally consistent within the context of the narrative. In other words, it’s a well written and well executed drama irrespective of its philosophical themes.
One of the issues not addressed in the movie – because it would spoil it – is the phenomenon known as the ‘uncanny valley’, which I’ve written about here. Basically, when androids become almost human-like in appearance and movement, we become very uncomfortable. This doesn’t happen in the movie, and, of course, it’s not meant to, but it’s the real piece of deception in the film. Despite appearances that the character, Ava, is a machine because we can literally see through parts of her body, we all know that she is really an actress playing a part.
I’ve argued in the aforementioned post that I believe the source of this discomfort is the lack of emotional empathy. In the movie, however, the AI demonstrates considerable empathy, or at least appears to, which is one of the many subtle elements explored. This is very good science fiction because it explores a possible future and deals with it on a philosophical level, including ethical considerations, as well as entertaining us.
There are nods to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Asimov’s I Robot, although that may be my own particular perspective. I’ve created AI’s in my own fiction, but completely different to this. In fact, I deliberately created a disembodied AI, which develops a ‘relationship’ with my protagonist, and appears to display ‘loyalty’. However I explain this with the concept of ‘attachment’ programming, which doesn’t necessarily require empathy as we know it.
I bring this up, because the 2 stories, Ex Machina and mine, explore AI but with different philosophical perspectives and different narrative outcomes.
Friday 15 May 2015
In memory of B.B. King - 16 September 1925 to 14 May 2015 - a True Legend
This is a trailer for a documentary on B.B. King released last year. It says it all, really.
When I think of the Blues, I think of B.B. King.
Wednesday 6 May 2015
Salt of the Earth – the movie
I saw this film last weekend, and, once again, I think this is a movie everyone should see. I said that about the last film I reviewed (Citizenfour), and, in both cases, despite winning awards, they’re only being shown in one cinema in the whole of Melbourne (yes, the same cinema).
Salt of the Earth is a documentary about the life and work of Brasilian photographer, Sebastio Salgado, from around 1969 to 2013, even though he speaks French throughout the entire film.
Salgado was educated as an economist and worked as one in Europe before he made the unorthodox choice of devoting his life to recording peoples and events throughout the world, although, in the latter part of his career, he reinvented himself as a nature photographer. His son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, co-directed the documentary with legendary German filmmaker, Wim Wenders.
The most famous photograph taken by Salgado, which some of you may have seen, is of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brasil (taken in 1986), where people look like ants climbing impossibly steep wooden ladders, laden with bags of dirt and covered in dirt themselves.
There are many layers to this film. Firstly, there is the subject of Salgado himself, who is an extraordinary human being, not least because he goes to places and witnesses events that very few of us have the courage to attempt. Over 40 years he has recorded and chronicled humanity at its best and worst – it’s like he is willing to go and witness what the rest of us have no compulsion to see.
The film is 1hr 45 mins, much of it taken up with monologue from Salgado and full screen projections of his black and white stills. Yet this is anything but boring cinema. His photographs alone have an emotional force that is often attempted yet rarely achieved in cinema. No one leaves this film without being deeply moved and questioning the very place of humanity in the world. Whilst that last statement reads like hyperbole, I will attempt to provide the context that leads me to make it.
Salgado himself is relatively quiet spoken for someone who has seen so much and travelled so widely. Yet his voice is an eminently suitable companion to his photographs, providing a gravitas with no hint of embellishment. The documentary not only tracks his private life but also the series of ‘projects’ he embarked upon, which provides the film’s structure.
Salgado is not someone who simply photographs people, often in circumstances most of us (in the West) can never imagine, he goes and stays with them, in refugee camps in Africa or the jungles of South America, for example. He really does chronicle their lives and, in so doing, captures with his lens their pain or suffering or ebullience that the rest of us can readily empathise with.
He records the Balkan wars, the oil fires in Kuwait, the droughts and consequential famine in Ethiopia and the genocide in Rwanda. This last event made him question humanity itself, and because you literally see the world through his eyes, via his camera, you find yourself doing the same. It was after this that he reinvented himself as a nature photographer, and it is in this role that I feel he produced some of his best work.
There is a point in this movie where I found myself wondering: do we, as a species, deserve the responsibility of being caretakers of this planet? Because that’s the role we have, whether we want it or not. This film brought this home to me more than anything else I’ve seen or read.
It creates a perspective that we rarely contemplate: the petty lives we live in the West, driven by economic consumerism; whilst much of the world is exploited, starved, imprisoned by inescapable poverty; and its wildlife pushed evermore into smaller enclaves, often pursued by poachers.
We have the knowledge and the technology to make the world a better place – I don’t doubt that – but whilst the entire Western world is driven by the accumulation of wealth at the expense of everything else, we will never achieve it.
Salt of the Earth is a documentary about the life and work of Brasilian photographer, Sebastio Salgado, from around 1969 to 2013, even though he speaks French throughout the entire film.
Salgado was educated as an economist and worked as one in Europe before he made the unorthodox choice of devoting his life to recording peoples and events throughout the world, although, in the latter part of his career, he reinvented himself as a nature photographer. His son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, co-directed the documentary with legendary German filmmaker, Wim Wenders.
The most famous photograph taken by Salgado, which some of you may have seen, is of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brasil (taken in 1986), where people look like ants climbing impossibly steep wooden ladders, laden with bags of dirt and covered in dirt themselves.
There are many layers to this film. Firstly, there is the subject of Salgado himself, who is an extraordinary human being, not least because he goes to places and witnesses events that very few of us have the courage to attempt. Over 40 years he has recorded and chronicled humanity at its best and worst – it’s like he is willing to go and witness what the rest of us have no compulsion to see.
The film is 1hr 45 mins, much of it taken up with monologue from Salgado and full screen projections of his black and white stills. Yet this is anything but boring cinema. His photographs alone have an emotional force that is often attempted yet rarely achieved in cinema. No one leaves this film without being deeply moved and questioning the very place of humanity in the world. Whilst that last statement reads like hyperbole, I will attempt to provide the context that leads me to make it.
Salgado himself is relatively quiet spoken for someone who has seen so much and travelled so widely. Yet his voice is an eminently suitable companion to his photographs, providing a gravitas with no hint of embellishment. The documentary not only tracks his private life but also the series of ‘projects’ he embarked upon, which provides the film’s structure.
Salgado is not someone who simply photographs people, often in circumstances most of us (in the West) can never imagine, he goes and stays with them, in refugee camps in Africa or the jungles of South America, for example. He really does chronicle their lives and, in so doing, captures with his lens their pain or suffering or ebullience that the rest of us can readily empathise with.
He records the Balkan wars, the oil fires in Kuwait, the droughts and consequential famine in Ethiopia and the genocide in Rwanda. This last event made him question humanity itself, and because you literally see the world through his eyes, via his camera, you find yourself doing the same. It was after this that he reinvented himself as a nature photographer, and it is in this role that I feel he produced some of his best work.
There is a point in this movie where I found myself wondering: do we, as a species, deserve the responsibility of being caretakers of this planet? Because that’s the role we have, whether we want it or not. This film brought this home to me more than anything else I’ve seen or read.
It creates a perspective that we rarely contemplate: the petty lives we live in the West, driven by economic consumerism; whilst much of the world is exploited, starved, imprisoned by inescapable poverty; and its wildlife pushed evermore into smaller enclaves, often pursued by poachers.
We have the knowledge and the technology to make the world a better place – I don’t doubt that – but whilst the entire Western world is driven by the accumulation of wealth at the expense of everything else, we will never achieve it.
Thursday 9 April 2015
Morality is totally in the eye of the beholder
The most obvious and topical examples of this truism are the behaviours of members of IS towards ‘outsiders’. But this post is not about IS; nevertheless, it is about a clash of cultures – in this case a clash of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ in the same society, which happens to be India.
Last night I saw a documentary, 2 years in the making, by British filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, called India’s Daughter about the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in December 2012 – a crime at once so brutal and primal that it shocked the entire civilised world. The film was due to be broadcast worldwide on International Women’s Day in March, including India, but the Indian Government unexpectedly banned the documentary from being shown in the country, ‘claiming it was an affront to women’ (according to the ABC). This about-face on the part of the Indian Government is not so surprising when the documentary itself reveals the schism that exists in Indian society on the issue of women’s roles and women’s rights.
This blog is seen and read all over the world, including India, so I hope that Indians do indeed read this, especially since they were not allowed access to the documentary.
I’ve written before that morality for most people is determined by social and cultural norms, hence the title of this post. I’ve read many articles and essays that attempt to provide a meta-ethics or an objective morality, but experience and observation suggest that culture is the overriding factor in determining someone’s personal moral compass. This incident demonstrates how 2 conflicting cultural norms can lead to tragic and fatal consequences for an individual. Written in that language, one might consider that the 2 opposing cultural norms may have equal validity, but, when it leads to a crime, comparable in nature to Jack the Ripper’s, it’s hard to maintain that relativist position.
I’ve argued previously that moral relativism is an impossible position to hold because no one can hold or defend opposing moral viewpoints. This documentary is a case in point, because, whilst it demonstrates that one’s moral viewpoint is indeed in the eye of the beholder, it also demonstrates that 2 opposing moral viewpoints cannot be sustained.
Jyoti Singh was an only daughter of a poor family who put herself through university to earn a degree in medicine, whilst working in a call centre, managing on 3-4 hrs sleep per night. So she’s an extraordinary modern success story, an inspiration for any young woman wanting to pursue a career in whatever field; but becoming a doctor, given her circumstances, is an especially outstanding achievement.
She had earned her degree and was about to start her 6mth internship the following Monday. Knowing that she would have little free time, she went to see a movie with a male friend on the Sunday night – they went and saw Life of Pi. Nothing could be more ‘ordinary’. I have seen that movie and it gave a particular resonance, because no one expects that, after being entertained by a celebrated movie, they would be murdered on their way home.
But this is where we have a clash of cultures because she was trapped on a bus with a pack of animals(6) who not only raped her but disembowelled her. I use the term ‘pack of animals’ because they were not human. No human could do that to another human. In committing that act, they gave up all rights to be called human.
The documentary includes interviews with the driver of the bus and the 2 lawyers who defended the gang. These interviews, more than anything else, reveal the cultural schism that I referred to earlier, because they all defended the gang and blamed the girl – that’s their moral perspective based on their cultural norms.
The driver maintained that he didn’t partake in the ‘incident’ (he just drove the bus), which at one point he corrects himself and calls an ‘accident’, yet he defends the actions of the others and goes so far as to say, that in the case of rape, ‘the girl is more responsible than the boy’. What’s more, he argues that she shouldn’t have fought back, then she wouldn’t have been harmed. In other words, even the fatal wounds she suffered were her own fault. But he also, tellingly, said it was a ‘message’, implying that she had forfeited all rights to her dignity and her life by going to a movie with a male friend.
The truth is that he knew nothing about her: he didn’t know that she was a recently qualified doctor or the sacrifices she had made to earn that qualification or that she had a future that he could never even dream about. No, she had no value as a human being because, in his eyes and those of his partners-in-crime, she had no self-respect. It was obvious from conversations with the filmmaker that he considered rape to be a normal activity. A prison psychiatrist related that they believed they had the ‘right to enjoy themselves’. Whereas others enjoyed themselves using money they did so with their ‘courage’ and that legitimised it in their minds. What strikes one straightaway is that the girl’s enjoyment is irrelevant – in fact, implicit in this rationalisation is the belief that her suffering: physical, emotional, psychological; actually contributes to their enjoyment.
But this admission highlights another problem in a society like India’s. There is effectively no outlet for normal sexual appetites for young men because of their strict moral approbations towards women, and this is what makes rape a normal and acceptable activity in the eyes of those who practice it. What’s more, as the bus driver points out, it’s easy to justify when it’s the girl’s own fault.
But whilst the defensive arguments of the bus driver were understandable if impossible to empathise with, the arguments of the 2 lawyers beggared belief. One lawyer, to distinguish him from the other, I will call the ‘unctuous’ lawyer – the other lawyer didn’t even deserve the title, human being, but I will come to that later.
The unctuous lawyer described a woman as something precious like a flower or a jewel that needed to be protected. In ‘our culture’, to use his own words, she is not allowed outside the home. But this is a contradiction because a person who is not allowed to interact with the outside world has no value whatsoever, except of course to be a servant to her husband and a mother to her children. So she’s a ‘jewel’ or ‘flower’ who should never be seen in public. He blames ‘filmy’ culture because it portrays women as independent (he didn’t say that but it was implied) which, in his mind, is a fantasy. And although he never says it, it’s a corollary to his viewpoint that a woman should never use her brain to become a doctor or a lawyer (like himself). So a woman can be ‘precious’ as long as she’s never seen and as long as she makes no attempt to use her brain as a man can.
But the second lawyer publicly stated on TV that if he had a sister or a daughter who committed ‘adultery’, he would pour petrol on her and set fire to her in front of the entire family. That’s his mentality. A person, who publicly admits that he would burn his sister or daughter alive, doesn’t deserve the title, human being. And he’s a lawyer. Does he consider then, that a young single woman going to a movie with her boyfriend is tantamount to committing adultery?
One can’t watch this documentary without feeling the pain of the parents and without contemplating the senseless waste of a young life that had so much promise. The mother, when discussing her daughter’s situation, having just earned her degree and on the brink of starting a career as a doctor, made the following statement: ‘It seems that God didn’t like this. He ended everything.’ Implicit in this statement is a belief that God was punishing her and her daughter for daring to follow an independent career. It is not surprising that people feel a perverse sense of guilt when they lose someone so close to them. Also, just before dying, her daughter apologised for ‘all the trouble she had caused’ – her last words, apparently. This is the culture that India has imparted onto its women: that they take the burden of responsibility and guilt, whilst those who commit the most heinous crime see no wrong in what they’ve done. It’s an upside down perverse sort of morality.
Young people, from universities mostly, protested for over a month, despite being subjected to tear gas and fire hose dowsing by police. And this is probably why the film has been banned, because the protests could easily start anew. But a consequence of the protests was that the government set up a panel to review rape laws and make recommendations. One of the members of the panel, Leila Seth, a woman and former Chief Justice, held hope that young people would challenge and ultimately change the culture, which is the only long term solution. She made the logical and true statement that the key was the education of women, because only then would women attain a sense of self-worth that men would also value and acknowledge.
Last night I saw a documentary, 2 years in the making, by British filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, called India’s Daughter about the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in December 2012 – a crime at once so brutal and primal that it shocked the entire civilised world. The film was due to be broadcast worldwide on International Women’s Day in March, including India, but the Indian Government unexpectedly banned the documentary from being shown in the country, ‘claiming it was an affront to women’ (according to the ABC). This about-face on the part of the Indian Government is not so surprising when the documentary itself reveals the schism that exists in Indian society on the issue of women’s roles and women’s rights.
This blog is seen and read all over the world, including India, so I hope that Indians do indeed read this, especially since they were not allowed access to the documentary.
I’ve written before that morality for most people is determined by social and cultural norms, hence the title of this post. I’ve read many articles and essays that attempt to provide a meta-ethics or an objective morality, but experience and observation suggest that culture is the overriding factor in determining someone’s personal moral compass. This incident demonstrates how 2 conflicting cultural norms can lead to tragic and fatal consequences for an individual. Written in that language, one might consider that the 2 opposing cultural norms may have equal validity, but, when it leads to a crime, comparable in nature to Jack the Ripper’s, it’s hard to maintain that relativist position.
I’ve argued previously that moral relativism is an impossible position to hold because no one can hold or defend opposing moral viewpoints. This documentary is a case in point, because, whilst it demonstrates that one’s moral viewpoint is indeed in the eye of the beholder, it also demonstrates that 2 opposing moral viewpoints cannot be sustained.
Jyoti Singh was an only daughter of a poor family who put herself through university to earn a degree in medicine, whilst working in a call centre, managing on 3-4 hrs sleep per night. So she’s an extraordinary modern success story, an inspiration for any young woman wanting to pursue a career in whatever field; but becoming a doctor, given her circumstances, is an especially outstanding achievement.
She had earned her degree and was about to start her 6mth internship the following Monday. Knowing that she would have little free time, she went to see a movie with a male friend on the Sunday night – they went and saw Life of Pi. Nothing could be more ‘ordinary’. I have seen that movie and it gave a particular resonance, because no one expects that, after being entertained by a celebrated movie, they would be murdered on their way home.
But this is where we have a clash of cultures because she was trapped on a bus with a pack of animals(6) who not only raped her but disembowelled her. I use the term ‘pack of animals’ because they were not human. No human could do that to another human. In committing that act, they gave up all rights to be called human.
The documentary includes interviews with the driver of the bus and the 2 lawyers who defended the gang. These interviews, more than anything else, reveal the cultural schism that I referred to earlier, because they all defended the gang and blamed the girl – that’s their moral perspective based on their cultural norms.
The driver maintained that he didn’t partake in the ‘incident’ (he just drove the bus), which at one point he corrects himself and calls an ‘accident’, yet he defends the actions of the others and goes so far as to say, that in the case of rape, ‘the girl is more responsible than the boy’. What’s more, he argues that she shouldn’t have fought back, then she wouldn’t have been harmed. In other words, even the fatal wounds she suffered were her own fault. But he also, tellingly, said it was a ‘message’, implying that she had forfeited all rights to her dignity and her life by going to a movie with a male friend.
The truth is that he knew nothing about her: he didn’t know that she was a recently qualified doctor or the sacrifices she had made to earn that qualification or that she had a future that he could never even dream about. No, she had no value as a human being because, in his eyes and those of his partners-in-crime, she had no self-respect. It was obvious from conversations with the filmmaker that he considered rape to be a normal activity. A prison psychiatrist related that they believed they had the ‘right to enjoy themselves’. Whereas others enjoyed themselves using money they did so with their ‘courage’ and that legitimised it in their minds. What strikes one straightaway is that the girl’s enjoyment is irrelevant – in fact, implicit in this rationalisation is the belief that her suffering: physical, emotional, psychological; actually contributes to their enjoyment.
But this admission highlights another problem in a society like India’s. There is effectively no outlet for normal sexual appetites for young men because of their strict moral approbations towards women, and this is what makes rape a normal and acceptable activity in the eyes of those who practice it. What’s more, as the bus driver points out, it’s easy to justify when it’s the girl’s own fault.
But whilst the defensive arguments of the bus driver were understandable if impossible to empathise with, the arguments of the 2 lawyers beggared belief. One lawyer, to distinguish him from the other, I will call the ‘unctuous’ lawyer – the other lawyer didn’t even deserve the title, human being, but I will come to that later.
The unctuous lawyer described a woman as something precious like a flower or a jewel that needed to be protected. In ‘our culture’, to use his own words, she is not allowed outside the home. But this is a contradiction because a person who is not allowed to interact with the outside world has no value whatsoever, except of course to be a servant to her husband and a mother to her children. So she’s a ‘jewel’ or ‘flower’ who should never be seen in public. He blames ‘filmy’ culture because it portrays women as independent (he didn’t say that but it was implied) which, in his mind, is a fantasy. And although he never says it, it’s a corollary to his viewpoint that a woman should never use her brain to become a doctor or a lawyer (like himself). So a woman can be ‘precious’ as long as she’s never seen and as long as she makes no attempt to use her brain as a man can.
But the second lawyer publicly stated on TV that if he had a sister or a daughter who committed ‘adultery’, he would pour petrol on her and set fire to her in front of the entire family. That’s his mentality. A person, who publicly admits that he would burn his sister or daughter alive, doesn’t deserve the title, human being. And he’s a lawyer. Does he consider then, that a young single woman going to a movie with her boyfriend is tantamount to committing adultery?
One can’t watch this documentary without feeling the pain of the parents and without contemplating the senseless waste of a young life that had so much promise. The mother, when discussing her daughter’s situation, having just earned her degree and on the brink of starting a career as a doctor, made the following statement: ‘It seems that God didn’t like this. He ended everything.’ Implicit in this statement is a belief that God was punishing her and her daughter for daring to follow an independent career. It is not surprising that people feel a perverse sense of guilt when they lose someone so close to them. Also, just before dying, her daughter apologised for ‘all the trouble she had caused’ – her last words, apparently. This is the culture that India has imparted onto its women: that they take the burden of responsibility and guilt, whilst those who commit the most heinous crime see no wrong in what they’ve done. It’s an upside down perverse sort of morality.
Young people, from universities mostly, protested for over a month, despite being subjected to tear gas and fire hose dowsing by police. And this is probably why the film has been banned, because the protests could easily start anew. But a consequence of the protests was that the government set up a panel to review rape laws and make recommendations. One of the members of the panel, Leila Seth, a woman and former Chief Justice, held hope that young people would challenge and ultimately change the culture, which is the only long term solution. She made the logical and true statement that the key was the education of women, because only then would women attain a sense of self-worth that men would also value and acknowledge.
Monday 23 March 2015
Emmy Noether's birthday today
Google has honoured Emmy Noether's birthday. Few people know who she is but, amongst other contributions to mathematics, she proved a theorem, known as Noether's theorem, that underpins all of physics because it deals with symmetry and conservation laws of energy and momentum.
The mathematics is well over my head, but I appreciate its ramifications. Basically, it deals with the mathematical relationships between symmetry in space and conservation of momentum, symmetry in time and conservation of energy and symmetry of rotation and conservation of angular momentum. This applies in particular to quantum mechanics, though conservation laws are equally relevant in relativity theory.
Symmetry, in this context, is about translation: translations in space, translations in time and translations in rotation. Richard Feynman gives a good exposition in Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, where I came across it for the first time, and he describes it thus: ...a most profound and beautiful thing, is that, in quantum mechanics, for each of the rules of symmetry there is a corresponding conservation law; there is a definite connection between the laws of conservation and the symmetry of physical laws.
You can read about it in some detail in Wikipedia, though I confess it's a bit esoteric.
Noether died relatively young in America at age 53, 2 years after escaping Nazi Germany, and Einstein wrote a moving tribute to her in the New York Times (1935). Physicists, Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, in Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, give the following accolade: “..certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics…”
The sad part about her story is that she is virtually unknown and was not given due recognition in her own time, simply because she was a woman.
Addendum: It's also 100 years since Noether developed her seminal theorem - the same year that Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity, incorporating gravity.
The mathematics is well over my head, but I appreciate its ramifications. Basically, it deals with the mathematical relationships between symmetry in space and conservation of momentum, symmetry in time and conservation of energy and symmetry of rotation and conservation of angular momentum. This applies in particular to quantum mechanics, though conservation laws are equally relevant in relativity theory.
Symmetry, in this context, is about translation: translations in space, translations in time and translations in rotation. Richard Feynman gives a good exposition in Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, where I came across it for the first time, and he describes it thus: ...a most profound and beautiful thing, is that, in quantum mechanics, for each of the rules of symmetry there is a corresponding conservation law; there is a definite connection between the laws of conservation and the symmetry of physical laws.
You can read about it in some detail in Wikipedia, though I confess it's a bit esoteric.
Noether died relatively young in America at age 53, 2 years after escaping Nazi Germany, and Einstein wrote a moving tribute to her in the New York Times (1935). Physicists, Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, in Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, give the following accolade: “..certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics…”
The sad part about her story is that she is virtually unknown and was not given due recognition in her own time, simply because she was a woman.
Addendum: It's also 100 years since Noether developed her seminal theorem - the same year that Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity, incorporating gravity.
Saturday 21 March 2015
Citizenfour - aka Edward Snowden
I saw this Oscar-winning movie last weekend, and, tellingly, despite very recently winning the Oscar for Best Documentary, it’s only being shown in one cinema in the whole of Melbourne. And yet everyone with internet access should watch this movie, because its message affects all of us.
For those living under a rock, Edward Snowden famously revealed that the US is capturing all our on-line activities and mobile phone calls, even though, as revealed in the film, various representatives of the government had been openly denying this (even under oath) for some time. The closest we get to acknowledgement is when someone says, in a Senate Committee Hearing, in response to this very question about accessing people’s digital communications: “Not willingly.” Reading between the lines, one could conclude that it could happen ‘accidentally’, which suggests a couple of options: the information is available if they want to access it; or they might accidentally access someone’s data whilst trying to access someone else’s, whom they can legitimately target (via a court order or whatever judicial process is required). As it turns out, thanks to Snowden’s expose, we know it’s the first option.
Ethically, there are 2 distinct but related issues implicit in the same movie. Are the American Government’s activities in this regard, ethical, and is it ethical for Snowden to use his position of privileged information to break his Government’s trust (as well as the law) by revealing them to the rest of the world?
There is a third ethical issue, entwined with the previous 2: is it ethical for the American Government to pursue Snowden with the full force of its law, treating him, effectively, as a traitor and a spy (they are charging him under the espionage act)?
Let’s deal with the first ethical issue first; after all, it’s the one that triggered the other two. As pointed out in the movie, this ‘action’ on the part of the American Government is a consequence of 9/11 and the threat of terrorist attacks anywhere in the Western world. It’s also pointed out in the movie that England have even more comprehensive measures than the US, regarding tracking everyday digital information of its own citizens.
On the same day I saw this film, I heard a news bulletin that here in Australia, the Government is currently debating a bill requiring internet providers to keep all user activity (in Australia) for however many years (I don’t know if there’s a limit). Interestingly, the only proviso the Opposition suggested is that journalists be protected in order to protect their sources. This is a very important point, because it’s only journalists that can keep politicians honest, and journalists’ roles in providing a conduit for Snowden’s ‘leak’ was crucial to his expose. I’ve said before that the health of a democracy can be measured by the freedom that journalists are allowed in criticising their elected leaders. Keeping sources ‘secret’ has been critical (at least, in Australia) in allowing journalists that particular freedom.
There are similarities between this documentary and the not-so-recent movie, Kill the Messenger, because, in both cases, someone exposed the Government or the Government’s agents in activities that the public were unaware of, and, in both cases the Government, or its agencies, effectively destroyed the whistleblowers’ lives.
But this parliamentary debate taking place in Australia reveals an ethical distinction, which, in my view, is worth noting. In Australia, because it has to be passed as Parliamentary law, it cannot be done without the public’s awareness, and, I feel, this is where the American Government went wrong. I don’t have an issue with them keeping all my digital data, most of which, like this blog, is freely available to the public anyway. And I understand how such data is crucial to stopping terrorist attacks, so, as long as the data capture is not used to persecute me personally, I have no problem.
Having said that, the movie points out how data collection on a nation’s citizens is a first step in controlling or oppressing that citizenry. So, hand in hand with this action is an essential ‘trust’ that it will be used only for spoiling terrorist attacks and that the essential democratic character of the nation won’t be compromised in the process. In some ways, this is a moot point because, after watching this film, I couldn’t help but feel that this will never be reversed. We already live in a quasi-Orwellian environment where our entire lives can be tracked digitally, if someone so requires. We effectively have no secrets regarding our on-line activity (including mobile phone communications).
Towards the end of the movie, there is a news clip of President Obama saying that we needed ‘to have this debate’, implying that it could have occurred without Snowden’s revelations. However, this is contradicted by earlier video footage (alluded to above) that, even under oath, no one was going to admit to this whilst the public remained ignorant.
And this brings to the fore Snowden’s ethics. There are some similarities here between Snowden and Assange, both of whom are now living in exile, because both had sensitive material that embarrassed the American Government in particular. However, Snowden is probably more like Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who had access to and leaked the relevant files, in that both men acted on their conscience at considerable personal cost.
But, in the case of Snowden, he demonstrates neither the naivety of Manning nor the ego of Assange. It is clear from the outset that Snowden understood fully the consequences of his actions, and is remarkably calm throughout his entire dealings with the specific journalists he colluded with in order to make public what the American Government preferred to remain covert. This is the crux of the issue for me: not that the American Government is collecting all our communications data, but that they did it behind our backs and are now enraged that some individual dared to let everyone know.
There is some irony that Snowden now lives in exile with his partner in Russia, a country not renown for honouring freedom of speech or freedom of the press. If Snowden had done to Russia, what he’s done to America, he probably would have been assassinated. As it is, in America, they will lock him up and throw away the key, just like they’ve done to Manning, assuming they ever catch him.
For those living under a rock, Edward Snowden famously revealed that the US is capturing all our on-line activities and mobile phone calls, even though, as revealed in the film, various representatives of the government had been openly denying this (even under oath) for some time. The closest we get to acknowledgement is when someone says, in a Senate Committee Hearing, in response to this very question about accessing people’s digital communications: “Not willingly.” Reading between the lines, one could conclude that it could happen ‘accidentally’, which suggests a couple of options: the information is available if they want to access it; or they might accidentally access someone’s data whilst trying to access someone else’s, whom they can legitimately target (via a court order or whatever judicial process is required). As it turns out, thanks to Snowden’s expose, we know it’s the first option.
Ethically, there are 2 distinct but related issues implicit in the same movie. Are the American Government’s activities in this regard, ethical, and is it ethical for Snowden to use his position of privileged information to break his Government’s trust (as well as the law) by revealing them to the rest of the world?
There is a third ethical issue, entwined with the previous 2: is it ethical for the American Government to pursue Snowden with the full force of its law, treating him, effectively, as a traitor and a spy (they are charging him under the espionage act)?
Let’s deal with the first ethical issue first; after all, it’s the one that triggered the other two. As pointed out in the movie, this ‘action’ on the part of the American Government is a consequence of 9/11 and the threat of terrorist attacks anywhere in the Western world. It’s also pointed out in the movie that England have even more comprehensive measures than the US, regarding tracking everyday digital information of its own citizens.
On the same day I saw this film, I heard a news bulletin that here in Australia, the Government is currently debating a bill requiring internet providers to keep all user activity (in Australia) for however many years (I don’t know if there’s a limit). Interestingly, the only proviso the Opposition suggested is that journalists be protected in order to protect their sources. This is a very important point, because it’s only journalists that can keep politicians honest, and journalists’ roles in providing a conduit for Snowden’s ‘leak’ was crucial to his expose. I’ve said before that the health of a democracy can be measured by the freedom that journalists are allowed in criticising their elected leaders. Keeping sources ‘secret’ has been critical (at least, in Australia) in allowing journalists that particular freedom.
There are similarities between this documentary and the not-so-recent movie, Kill the Messenger, because, in both cases, someone exposed the Government or the Government’s agents in activities that the public were unaware of, and, in both cases the Government, or its agencies, effectively destroyed the whistleblowers’ lives.
But this parliamentary debate taking place in Australia reveals an ethical distinction, which, in my view, is worth noting. In Australia, because it has to be passed as Parliamentary law, it cannot be done without the public’s awareness, and, I feel, this is where the American Government went wrong. I don’t have an issue with them keeping all my digital data, most of which, like this blog, is freely available to the public anyway. And I understand how such data is crucial to stopping terrorist attacks, so, as long as the data capture is not used to persecute me personally, I have no problem.
Having said that, the movie points out how data collection on a nation’s citizens is a first step in controlling or oppressing that citizenry. So, hand in hand with this action is an essential ‘trust’ that it will be used only for spoiling terrorist attacks and that the essential democratic character of the nation won’t be compromised in the process. In some ways, this is a moot point because, after watching this film, I couldn’t help but feel that this will never be reversed. We already live in a quasi-Orwellian environment where our entire lives can be tracked digitally, if someone so requires. We effectively have no secrets regarding our on-line activity (including mobile phone communications).
Towards the end of the movie, there is a news clip of President Obama saying that we needed ‘to have this debate’, implying that it could have occurred without Snowden’s revelations. However, this is contradicted by earlier video footage (alluded to above) that, even under oath, no one was going to admit to this whilst the public remained ignorant.
And this brings to the fore Snowden’s ethics. There are some similarities here between Snowden and Assange, both of whom are now living in exile, because both had sensitive material that embarrassed the American Government in particular. However, Snowden is probably more like Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who had access to and leaked the relevant files, in that both men acted on their conscience at considerable personal cost.
But, in the case of Snowden, he demonstrates neither the naivety of Manning nor the ego of Assange. It is clear from the outset that Snowden understood fully the consequences of his actions, and is remarkably calm throughout his entire dealings with the specific journalists he colluded with in order to make public what the American Government preferred to remain covert. This is the crux of the issue for me: not that the American Government is collecting all our communications data, but that they did it behind our backs and are now enraged that some individual dared to let everyone know.
There is some irony that Snowden now lives in exile with his partner in Russia, a country not renown for honouring freedom of speech or freedom of the press. If Snowden had done to Russia, what he’s done to America, he probably would have been assassinated. As it is, in America, they will lock him up and throw away the key, just like they’ve done to Manning, assuming they ever catch him.
Saturday 14 March 2015
Today is π Day
I only found about this yesterday, via COSMOS online. Actually, it's Pi Day tomorrow in the US where it originated because, using American date nomenclature, March 14 (3/14) gives the first 3 digits of pi. But this year is special because the date is 3/14/15, which are the first 5 digits and it will be the only time in the whole century.
π, as everyone knows, is the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter, irrespective of the size of the circle. But it's a very nerdy number, because it turns up in the most unexpected places, like quantum mechanics and Euler's famous formula: eiπ + 1 = 0; earning the sobriquet, 'God's own equation'. A simple derivation can be found here.
Pi is the best known so-called transcendental number and, of course, it has an infinite string of digits that appear to be truly random (refer COSMOS link above). COSMOS also explain that if you toss a coin 2n times, and n is large enough, then the probability of getting equal number of heads and tails is 1/√(nÏ€). Mathematics contains many hidden formulae like this that give unexpected relationships relevant to the real world.
Addendum: It should be pointed out that today is also Albert Einstein's birthday and this year is the centenary of his masterpiece, the General Theory of Relativity, not to be confused with the Special Theory, which he penned 10 years earlier in 1905.
π, as everyone knows, is the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter, irrespective of the size of the circle. But it's a very nerdy number, because it turns up in the most unexpected places, like quantum mechanics and Euler's famous formula: eiπ + 1 = 0; earning the sobriquet, 'God's own equation'. A simple derivation can be found here.
Pi is the best known so-called transcendental number and, of course, it has an infinite string of digits that appear to be truly random (refer COSMOS link above). COSMOS also explain that if you toss a coin 2n times, and n is large enough, then the probability of getting equal number of heads and tails is 1/√(nÏ€). Mathematics contains many hidden formulae like this that give unexpected relationships relevant to the real world.
Addendum: It should be pointed out that today is also Albert Einstein's birthday and this year is the centenary of his masterpiece, the General Theory of Relativity, not to be confused with the Special Theory, which he penned 10 years earlier in 1905.
Sunday 1 March 2015
Chaos – nature’s preferred means of evolution and dynamics
Ian Stewart is a highly respected mathematician and populariser of mathematics. He has the rare ability to write entire books on the esoteric side of mathematics with hardly an equation in sight. The ‘new edition’ of Does God Play Dice? has the subtitle, The New Mathematics of Chaos, and that’s what the book is all about. The first edition was published in 1989, the second edition in 1997, so not that new any more. Even so, he gave me more insights and knowledge into the subject than I knew existed. I’d previously read Paul Davies’ The Cosmic Blueprint, which does a pretty good job, but Stewart’s book has more depth, more examples, more explanations and simply more information. In addition, he does this without leaving me feel stranded in the wake of his considerable intellect.
For a start, Stewart puts things into perspective, by pointing out how chaos pervades much of the natural world – more so than science tends to acknowledge. In physics and engineering classes we are taught calculus and differential equations, which, as Stewart points out, are linear, whereas most of the dynamics of the natural world are non-linear, which make them ripe for chaotic analysis. We tend to know about chaos through its application to systems like weather, fluid turbulence, population dynamics yet its origins are almost purely mathematical. Throughout the book, Stewart provides numerous examples where the mathematics of chaos has been applied to physics and biology.
Historically, he gives special attention to Poincare, whom he depicts almost as the ‘father of chaos’ (my term, not his) which seems appropriate as he keeps returning to ‘Poincare sections’ throughout the book. Poincare sections are hard to explain, but they are effectively geometrical representations of periodic phenomena that have an ‘attractor’. That’s an oversimplification, but ‘attractors’ are an important and little known aspect of chaos, as many chaotic systems display an ability to form a stable dynamical state after numerous iterations, even though, which particular state is often unpredictable. The point is that the system is ‘attracted’ to this stable state. An example, believe it or not, is the rhythmic beat of your heart. As Stewart explains, ‘the heart is a non-linear oscillator’.
Relatively early in the book, he provides an exposition on ‘dynamics in n-space’. Dimensions can be used as a mathematical concept and not just a description of space, which is how we tend to envisage it, even though it’s impossible for us to visualise space with more than 3 dimensions. He gives the example of a bicycle, something we are all familiar with, having numerous freedoms of rotation, which can be mathematically characterised as dimensions. The handle bars, each foot pedal as well as the wheels all have their own freedom of rotation, which gives us 5 at least, and this gives 10 dimensions if each degree of freedom has one variable for position and one for velocity.
He then makes the following counter-intuitive assertion:
What clinches the matter, though, is the way in which the idea of multi-dimensional spaces fit together. It’s like a 999-dimensional hand in a 999-dimensional glove.
In his own words: ‘a system with n degrees of freedom – n different variables – can be thought of as living in n-space.’ Referring back to the bicycle example, its motion can be mathematically represented as a fluid in 10 dimensional space.
Stewart then evokes a theorem, discovered in the 19th Century by Joseph Liouville, that if the system is Hamiltonian (meaning there is no friction) then the fluid is incompressible. As Stewart then points out:
…something rather deep must be going on if the geometric picture turns dynamics not just into some silly fluid in some silly space, but renders it incompressible (the 10-dimensional analogue of ‘volume’ doesn’t change as the fluid flows).
The reason I’ve taken some time to elaborate on this, is that it demonstrates the point Stewart made above – that an abstract n-dimensional space has implications in reality – his hand-in-glove analogy.
Again, to quote Stewart:
I hope this brings you down to Earth with the same bump I always experience. It isn’t an abstract game! It is real!
Incompressibility is such a natural notion, it can’t be coincidence. Unless you agree with Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, that the Deity made the Universe as an elaborate practical joke.
The point is that the relationships we find between mathematics and reality are much more subtle than we can imagine, the implication being that we’ve only scratched the surface.
Anyone with a cursory interest in chaos knows that there is a relationship between chaos and fractals, and that nature loves fractals. What a lot of people don’t know is that fractals have fractional dimensions (hence the name) which can be expressed logarithmically. As Stewart points out, the relationship with chaos is that the fractal dimension ‘turns out to be a key property of an attractor, governing various quantitative features of the dynamics.’
I won’t elaborate on this as there are more important points that Stewart raises. For a start, he spends considerable time and space pointing out how chaos is not synonymous with randomness or chance as many people tend to think. Chaos is often defined as deterministic but not predictable which reads like a contradiction, so many people dismiss it out-of-hand. But Stewart manages to explain this without sounding like a sophist.
It’s impossible to predict because all chaotic phenomena are sensitive to the ‘initial conditions’. Mathematically, this means that the initial conditions would have to be determined to an infinitesimal degree, meaning an infinitely long calculation. However the behaviour is deterministic in that it follows a path determined by those initial conditions which we can’t cognise. But in the short term, this allows us to make predictions which is why we have weather forecasts over a few days but not months or years and why climate-forecast modelling can easily be criticised. In defence of climate-forecast modelling, we can use long term historical data to indicate what’s already happening and project that into the future. We know that climate-related phenomena like glaciers retreating, sea temperature rise and seasonal shifts are already happening.
This short term, long term difference in predictability varies from system to system, including the solar system. We consider the solar system the most stable entity we know, because it’s existed in its current form well before life emerged and will continue for aeons to come. However, computer modelling suggests that its behaviour will become unpredictable eventually. Jacque Laskar of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris has shown that ‘the entire solar system is chaotic’.
To quote Stewart:
Laskar discovered… for the Earth, an initial uncertainty about its position of 15m grows to only 150m after 10 million years, but over 100 million years the error grows to 150 million kilometres.
So while chaos is 'deterministic', it's computably indeterminable, which is why it's 'unpredictable'. I've written another post on that specific topic.
In the last chapter, Stewart attempts to tackle the question posed on the front cover of his book. For anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics, this is a reference to Einstein’s famous exhortation that he didn’t believe God plays dice, and Stewart even cites this in the context of the correspondence where Einstein wrote it down.
Einstein, of course, was referring to his discomfort with Bohr’s ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics; a discomfort he shared with Erwin Schrodinger. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere when I reviewed Louisa Gilder’s excellent book, The Age of Entanglement. Stewart takes the extraordinary position of suggesting that quantum mechanics may be explicable as a chaotic phenomenon. I say extraordinary because, in all my reading on this subject, no one has ever suggested it and most physicists/philosophers would not even consider it.
I have come across some physicist/philosophers (like David Deutsch) who have argued that the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics can, in fact, explain chaos. A view which I’m personally sceptical about.
Stewart resurrects David Bohm’s ‘hidden variables’ interpretation, preferred by Einstein, but generally considered disproved by experiments confirming Bell’s Inequality Theorem. It’s impossible for me to do justice to Stewart’s argument but he does provide the first exposition of Bell’s theorem that I was able to follow. The key is that the factors in Bell’s Inequality (as it’s known) refer to correlations that can be derived experimentally. The correlations are a statistical calculation (something I’m familiar with) and the ‘inequality’ tells you whether the results are deterministic or random. In every experiment performed thus far, the theorem confirms that the results are not deterministic, therefore random.
Stewart takes the brave step of suggesting that Bell’s Inequality can be thwarted because it relies on the fact that the results are computable. Stewart claims that if they’re not computable then it can’t resolve the question. He gives the example of so-called ‘riddled basins’ where chaotic phenomena can interact with ‘holes’ that allow them to find other ‘attractors’. Again, an oversimplification on my part, but as I understand it, in these situations, which are not uncommon according to Stewart, it’s impossible to ‘compute’ which attractor a given particle would go to.
Stewart argues that if quantum mechanics was such a chaotic system then the results would be statistical as we observe. I admit I don’t understand it well enough to confer judgement and I have neither the mathematical nor physics expertise to be a critical commentator. I’ll leave that to others in the field.
I do agree with him that the wave function in Schrodinger’s equation is more than a ‘mathematical fiction’ and it was recently reported in New Scientist that a team from Sydney claim they have experimentally verified its reality. But I conjecture that ‘Hilbert space’, which is the abstract space where the wave function mathematically exists, may be what’s real and we simply interact with it, but there is no more evidence for that than there is for the ‘multiple universes’ that is currently in favour and gaining favour.
Towards the very end of the book, Stewart hypothesises on how different our view of quantum mechanics may be today if chaos theory had been discovered first, though he’s quick to point out the importance of computers in allowing chaos to be exploited. But he makes this interesting observation in relation to the question on the cover of his book:
Now, instead of Einstein protesting that God doesn’t play dice, he probably would have suggested that God does play dice. Nice, classical, deterministic dice. But – of course – chaotic dice. The mechanism of chaos provides a wonderful opportunity for God to run His universe with deterministic laws, yet simultaneously to make fundamental particles seem probabilistic.
Of course, in the real world, dice are chaotic because the outcome of a throw is subject to the sensitivity of the initial conditions, which is the throw itself. The same with a coin toss. So each throw has its own initial conditions, which creates the randomness from throw to throw that we observe.
Of course, both Stewart’s and Einstein’s reference to a Deity is tongue-in-cheek, but I’ve long thought that chaos provides the ideal mechanism for a Deity to intervene in the Universe. Having said that, I don’t believe in Divine intervention, because it assumes that God has a plan that 'He' needs to keep interfering with. I prefer to think that God is simply the laws of the Universe (a la Einstein’s God) and they will run their course.
Chaos may be 'deterministic' but you can't rerun a chaotic phenomenon and get the same result - that's how chaos was discovered. The Universe obeys 'strange attractors', which provides stability to some systems while still being ultimately unpredictable. We don't know enough to know why the Universe turned out the way it did. Every age has its own sphere of ignorance, but chaos suggests that the future cannot be ultimately known. In other words, there appears to be a limit to what it's possible to know and not just a limit dependent on our cognitive abilities.
For a start, Stewart puts things into perspective, by pointing out how chaos pervades much of the natural world – more so than science tends to acknowledge. In physics and engineering classes we are taught calculus and differential equations, which, as Stewart points out, are linear, whereas most of the dynamics of the natural world are non-linear, which make them ripe for chaotic analysis. We tend to know about chaos through its application to systems like weather, fluid turbulence, population dynamics yet its origins are almost purely mathematical. Throughout the book, Stewart provides numerous examples where the mathematics of chaos has been applied to physics and biology.
Historically, he gives special attention to Poincare, whom he depicts almost as the ‘father of chaos’ (my term, not his) which seems appropriate as he keeps returning to ‘Poincare sections’ throughout the book. Poincare sections are hard to explain, but they are effectively geometrical representations of periodic phenomena that have an ‘attractor’. That’s an oversimplification, but ‘attractors’ are an important and little known aspect of chaos, as many chaotic systems display an ability to form a stable dynamical state after numerous iterations, even though, which particular state is often unpredictable. The point is that the system is ‘attracted’ to this stable state. An example, believe it or not, is the rhythmic beat of your heart. As Stewart explains, ‘the heart is a non-linear oscillator’.
Relatively early in the book, he provides an exposition on ‘dynamics in n-space’. Dimensions can be used as a mathematical concept and not just a description of space, which is how we tend to envisage it, even though it’s impossible for us to visualise space with more than 3 dimensions. He gives the example of a bicycle, something we are all familiar with, having numerous freedoms of rotation, which can be mathematically characterised as dimensions. The handle bars, each foot pedal as well as the wheels all have their own freedom of rotation, which gives us 5 at least, and this gives 10 dimensions if each degree of freedom has one variable for position and one for velocity.
He then makes the following counter-intuitive assertion:
What clinches the matter, though, is the way in which the idea of multi-dimensional spaces fit together. It’s like a 999-dimensional hand in a 999-dimensional glove.
In his own words: ‘a system with n degrees of freedom – n different variables – can be thought of as living in n-space.’ Referring back to the bicycle example, its motion can be mathematically represented as a fluid in 10 dimensional space.
Stewart then evokes a theorem, discovered in the 19th Century by Joseph Liouville, that if the system is Hamiltonian (meaning there is no friction) then the fluid is incompressible. As Stewart then points out:
…something rather deep must be going on if the geometric picture turns dynamics not just into some silly fluid in some silly space, but renders it incompressible (the 10-dimensional analogue of ‘volume’ doesn’t change as the fluid flows).
The reason I’ve taken some time to elaborate on this, is that it demonstrates the point Stewart made above – that an abstract n-dimensional space has implications in reality – his hand-in-glove analogy.
Again, to quote Stewart:
I hope this brings you down to Earth with the same bump I always experience. It isn’t an abstract game! It is real!
Incompressibility is such a natural notion, it can’t be coincidence. Unless you agree with Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, that the Deity made the Universe as an elaborate practical joke.
The point is that the relationships we find between mathematics and reality are much more subtle than we can imagine, the implication being that we’ve only scratched the surface.
Anyone with a cursory interest in chaos knows that there is a relationship between chaos and fractals, and that nature loves fractals. What a lot of people don’t know is that fractals have fractional dimensions (hence the name) which can be expressed logarithmically. As Stewart points out, the relationship with chaos is that the fractal dimension ‘turns out to be a key property of an attractor, governing various quantitative features of the dynamics.’
I won’t elaborate on this as there are more important points that Stewart raises. For a start, he spends considerable time and space pointing out how chaos is not synonymous with randomness or chance as many people tend to think. Chaos is often defined as deterministic but not predictable which reads like a contradiction, so many people dismiss it out-of-hand. But Stewart manages to explain this without sounding like a sophist.
It’s impossible to predict because all chaotic phenomena are sensitive to the ‘initial conditions’. Mathematically, this means that the initial conditions would have to be determined to an infinitesimal degree, meaning an infinitely long calculation. However the behaviour is deterministic in that it follows a path determined by those initial conditions which we can’t cognise. But in the short term, this allows us to make predictions which is why we have weather forecasts over a few days but not months or years and why climate-forecast modelling can easily be criticised. In defence of climate-forecast modelling, we can use long term historical data to indicate what’s already happening and project that into the future. We know that climate-related phenomena like glaciers retreating, sea temperature rise and seasonal shifts are already happening.
This short term, long term difference in predictability varies from system to system, including the solar system. We consider the solar system the most stable entity we know, because it’s existed in its current form well before life emerged and will continue for aeons to come. However, computer modelling suggests that its behaviour will become unpredictable eventually. Jacque Laskar of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris has shown that ‘the entire solar system is chaotic’.
To quote Stewart:
Laskar discovered… for the Earth, an initial uncertainty about its position of 15m grows to only 150m after 10 million years, but over 100 million years the error grows to 150 million kilometres.
So while chaos is 'deterministic', it's computably indeterminable, which is why it's 'unpredictable'. I've written another post on that specific topic.
In the last chapter, Stewart attempts to tackle the question posed on the front cover of his book. For anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics, this is a reference to Einstein’s famous exhortation that he didn’t believe God plays dice, and Stewart even cites this in the context of the correspondence where Einstein wrote it down.
Einstein, of course, was referring to his discomfort with Bohr’s ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics; a discomfort he shared with Erwin Schrodinger. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere when I reviewed Louisa Gilder’s excellent book, The Age of Entanglement. Stewart takes the extraordinary position of suggesting that quantum mechanics may be explicable as a chaotic phenomenon. I say extraordinary because, in all my reading on this subject, no one has ever suggested it and most physicists/philosophers would not even consider it.
I have come across some physicist/philosophers (like David Deutsch) who have argued that the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics can, in fact, explain chaos. A view which I’m personally sceptical about.
Stewart resurrects David Bohm’s ‘hidden variables’ interpretation, preferred by Einstein, but generally considered disproved by experiments confirming Bell’s Inequality Theorem. It’s impossible for me to do justice to Stewart’s argument but he does provide the first exposition of Bell’s theorem that I was able to follow. The key is that the factors in Bell’s Inequality (as it’s known) refer to correlations that can be derived experimentally. The correlations are a statistical calculation (something I’m familiar with) and the ‘inequality’ tells you whether the results are deterministic or random. In every experiment performed thus far, the theorem confirms that the results are not deterministic, therefore random.
Stewart takes the brave step of suggesting that Bell’s Inequality can be thwarted because it relies on the fact that the results are computable. Stewart claims that if they’re not computable then it can’t resolve the question. He gives the example of so-called ‘riddled basins’ where chaotic phenomena can interact with ‘holes’ that allow them to find other ‘attractors’. Again, an oversimplification on my part, but as I understand it, in these situations, which are not uncommon according to Stewart, it’s impossible to ‘compute’ which attractor a given particle would go to.
Stewart argues that if quantum mechanics was such a chaotic system then the results would be statistical as we observe. I admit I don’t understand it well enough to confer judgement and I have neither the mathematical nor physics expertise to be a critical commentator. I’ll leave that to others in the field.
I do agree with him that the wave function in Schrodinger’s equation is more than a ‘mathematical fiction’ and it was recently reported in New Scientist that a team from Sydney claim they have experimentally verified its reality. But I conjecture that ‘Hilbert space’, which is the abstract space where the wave function mathematically exists, may be what’s real and we simply interact with it, but there is no more evidence for that than there is for the ‘multiple universes’ that is currently in favour and gaining favour.
Towards the very end of the book, Stewart hypothesises on how different our view of quantum mechanics may be today if chaos theory had been discovered first, though he’s quick to point out the importance of computers in allowing chaos to be exploited. But he makes this interesting observation in relation to the question on the cover of his book:
Now, instead of Einstein protesting that God doesn’t play dice, he probably would have suggested that God does play dice. Nice, classical, deterministic dice. But – of course – chaotic dice. The mechanism of chaos provides a wonderful opportunity for God to run His universe with deterministic laws, yet simultaneously to make fundamental particles seem probabilistic.
Of course, in the real world, dice are chaotic because the outcome of a throw is subject to the sensitivity of the initial conditions, which is the throw itself. The same with a coin toss. So each throw has its own initial conditions, which creates the randomness from throw to throw that we observe.
Of course, both Stewart’s and Einstein’s reference to a Deity is tongue-in-cheek, but I’ve long thought that chaos provides the ideal mechanism for a Deity to intervene in the Universe. Having said that, I don’t believe in Divine intervention, because it assumes that God has a plan that 'He' needs to keep interfering with. I prefer to think that God is simply the laws of the Universe (a la Einstein’s God) and they will run their course.
Chaos may be 'deterministic' but you can't rerun a chaotic phenomenon and get the same result - that's how chaos was discovered. The Universe obeys 'strange attractors', which provides stability to some systems while still being ultimately unpredictable. We don't know enough to know why the Universe turned out the way it did. Every age has its own sphere of ignorance, but chaos suggests that the future cannot be ultimately known. In other words, there appears to be a limit to what it's possible to know and not just a limit dependent on our cognitive abilities.
Saturday 28 February 2015
Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock): 1931 - 2015
I first watched Star Trek when I was 16 or 17 on black and white TV. It
was innovative and evoked many of the ideals of the 1960s that people
from different races and backgrounds could form a team that would
explore the universe. Spock is one of the great Sci-Fi icons. I
particularly liked his appearance in J.J Abrams' Star Trek movie from
2009, where Spock meets a younger version of himself through a time warp,
as can only happen in Sci-Fi.
From a philosophical perspective, Star Trek projected a positive, utopian scenario of human nature - envisioning a future where humans would overcome their tendency towards conflict. But it also envisioned a belief, recently expounded by Brian Cox in the final episode of his series, The Human Universe, that humans have a destiny to go beyond their Earth-bound existence.
There is a scene in Abrams' movie that is reminiscent of a scene in my novel, Elvene, where Spock is holed up in an ice cave. Such coincidences in storytelling are not uncommon, like finding the thread of a tune in a piece of music transferred into another work, though, in this case, quite unintentional, as Elvene was written many years before Abrams' Star Trek.
The newslink below to CBSNews is a very touching tribute.
Leonard Nimoy's final tweet.
From a philosophical perspective, Star Trek projected a positive, utopian scenario of human nature - envisioning a future where humans would overcome their tendency towards conflict. But it also envisioned a belief, recently expounded by Brian Cox in the final episode of his series, The Human Universe, that humans have a destiny to go beyond their Earth-bound existence.
There is a scene in Abrams' movie that is reminiscent of a scene in my novel, Elvene, where Spock is holed up in an ice cave. Such coincidences in storytelling are not uncommon, like finding the thread of a tune in a piece of music transferred into another work, though, in this case, quite unintentional, as Elvene was written many years before Abrams' Star Trek.
The newslink below to CBSNews is a very touching tribute.
Leonard Nimoy's final tweet.
Sunday 8 February 2015
Genetic engineering is not an evil conspiracy
There is a lot of hysteria about GM foods and genetic engineering in general, yet it’s a path to providing benefit to all of humankind in the same way that all the scientific endeavours of the past 2 centuries have done for anyone living in a Western society. It’s true that science and technology has also provided us with military advances that could literally destroy the planet, but the technology that drove 2 world wars in the last century also gave us accessible air travel, computers and satellite navigation and communication, albeit the last are really consequences of the Cold War.
I’ve just finished watching Brian Cox’s BBC series, The Human Universe, and, in the last programme, he extols us to value knowledge for its own sake and not just to deliver economic gains, and to raise science to an enlightenment subject in education. He doesn’t use the term ‘enlightenment’ but I do because not enough people realise how enlightening it is and has been since the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.
In a recent episode of Catalyst, they provide a mini-doco (9 mins long) on the work of Prof David Craik, which promises breakthrough developments in medicine for the whole world using genetic engineering techniques.
I’m not sure if the programme can be accessed outside Australia, but essentially Craik has worked in the area of ‘cyclotides’, which are cyclic peptides found in nature. Cyclic peptides aren’t broken down in our bodies so we can use the structure on other peptides allowing us to deliver specific ‘drugs’ to combat specific diseases. This is molecular engineering, but we can also use plants as 'factories' to create these drugs and deliver them in their seeds to third world countries (genetic engineering).
The general public is very ignorant about the role of bio-molecular science and how the world can benefit from these interventions. Instead, genetically modified crops are seen as an evil conspiracy by corporations to control the world’s food production. The truth is that humanity has been genetically modifying crops for centuries - well before Darwin’s theory of natural selection - by artificially selecting genes in both crops and domestic animals. Almost nothing we eat hasn’t been genetically modified from its natural habitat due to human intervention.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, very few politicians are science-literate, and many see science as a servant to economic policy and nothing more. The truth is that only science can save humanity from itself. As Brian Cox reminds us (more than once) we are ‘special’ and possibly unique to the universe, in that we can appreciate the much bigger picture of the whole universe and understand our place in it. We are the only species on the planet that has the ability to transcend our origins, and, arguably, we have an obligation to pursue that, and we can only do that through science.
I’ve just finished watching Brian Cox’s BBC series, The Human Universe, and, in the last programme, he extols us to value knowledge for its own sake and not just to deliver economic gains, and to raise science to an enlightenment subject in education. He doesn’t use the term ‘enlightenment’ but I do because not enough people realise how enlightening it is and has been since the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.
In a recent episode of Catalyst, they provide a mini-doco (9 mins long) on the work of Prof David Craik, which promises breakthrough developments in medicine for the whole world using genetic engineering techniques.
I’m not sure if the programme can be accessed outside Australia, but essentially Craik has worked in the area of ‘cyclotides’, which are cyclic peptides found in nature. Cyclic peptides aren’t broken down in our bodies so we can use the structure on other peptides allowing us to deliver specific ‘drugs’ to combat specific diseases. This is molecular engineering, but we can also use plants as 'factories' to create these drugs and deliver them in their seeds to third world countries (genetic engineering).
The general public is very ignorant about the role of bio-molecular science and how the world can benefit from these interventions. Instead, genetically modified crops are seen as an evil conspiracy by corporations to control the world’s food production. The truth is that humanity has been genetically modifying crops for centuries - well before Darwin’s theory of natural selection - by artificially selecting genes in both crops and domestic animals. Almost nothing we eat hasn’t been genetically modified from its natural habitat due to human intervention.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, very few politicians are science-literate, and many see science as a servant to economic policy and nothing more. The truth is that only science can save humanity from itself. As Brian Cox reminds us (more than once) we are ‘special’ and possibly unique to the universe, in that we can appreciate the much bigger picture of the whole universe and understand our place in it. We are the only species on the planet that has the ability to transcend our origins, and, arguably, we have an obligation to pursue that, and we can only do that through science.
Saturday 10 January 2015
That Mystery of Mysteries
I read an interesting article in the latest issue of Philsophy Now (Issue 105, Nov/Dec 2014) by Toni Vogel Cary titled, That Mystery of Mysteries, about the 2 centuries old debate regarding the theory of evolution and God-manipulated speciation. Toni Vogel Carey is introduced as ‘a philosophy professor in a former life, has written for twenty years… and serves on the US advisory board of Philosophy Now.’
She presents some interesting statistics that suggest ignorance in science this century is increasing rather than decreasing. For example: ‘In Great Britain, few besides evangelicals paid attention to creationism before 2002. But by 2006, a BBC poll showed that 4 out of 10 in the UK thought religious alternatives to Darwin’s theory should be taught as science in schools.’
She then gives equally scary anecdotes for the former Eastern European block countries, where, for example: ‘In 2006, Poland’s minister for education repudiated the theory of evolution, and his deputy dismissed it as “a lie”.’
She gives other examples, from various countries and educational institutions that should ring alarm bells for anyone interested in providing scientific tuition to future generations. Towards the end of her lengthy discussion that goes back to Herschel, Lyell and Darwin (of course), she cites a recent publication by Thomas Nagel, titled Mind & Cosmos (2012) (which I haven’t read, it must be stated) where ‘Nagel argues for “natural teleology”, a view of nature as forward-looking and purposeful, yet secular rather than deistic or theistic.’ And herein lies the rub: it is very difficult for us to believe that something like us (humans) could not be the consequence of some ‘cosmic plan’ (That Mystery of Mysteries), the why and wherefore we have speculated about ever since we gained the ability to think and imagine in a way that no other species can even cognise.
At the risk of going off on a complete tangent, I wish to reference an excellent BBC doco I saw recently called Apeman – Spaceman, the first of a 5 part series, Human Universe, presented by that cross between David Attenborough and a failed rock star, Brian Cox. Cox starts his programme, in a very Attenborough-like moment, attempting to cosy up to some baboons who live in the highlands of Ethiopia. Though not our closest relative and not even true baboons, Cox explains that, amongst the higher primates, they have the most complex social behaviours, second only to humans, and can even string together a series of vocalisations, thus combining sounds that have different meanings individually.
The point of this explication is to demonstrate the humungous gap that exists between humans and all other species on the planet, cognitively. One really cannot overstate this point, as many people prefer to believe that there is nothing ‘special’ about humans at all. But as Cox states explicitly, we are ‘unique’, certainly on planet Earth and possibly in the entire universe. We are unique because we are the only species that can speculate about, let alone comprehend, our place in the much larger scheme of things. It is from this unique cognitive vantage point that both religion and science arose.
If there is any one thing that defines humanity as a species it is surely curiosity. It is curiosity that has led us into space (the focus of Cox’s first episode) but also led us on an intellectual trail uncovering such wonders as mathematical calculus, nuclear physics, the human genome and every scientific discovery since we first grasped the art of writing down our thoughts so future generations could build an unassailable cumulative knowledge that has given us computers, air travel, smart phones and all the mod-cons we take for granted in Western societies the world over.
And this exceptional evolutionary ‘success’ also creates a paradox in popular Western thinking as Carey’s discussion exposes. Whilst we all accept the benefits that science has provided for us, without even thinking about them most of the time, many of us can’t accept that science has also provided an explanation for how Earthly species have developed, changed, evolved, gained ascendency and become extinct.
I believe there are 2 reasons for this. Firstly, scientific knowledge is always contingent on future discoveries. This means we never know everything, and, what’s more, we never will. There are limits to what we can know as I’ve discussed in another post. So how do I know that evolution is true? Because the biological knowledge that underpins the human genome project (DNA) also underpins the theory of evolution, completely unknown and unforeseen in Darwin’s time. This is a well documented and carefully studied case where future discoveries enhanced a contentious scientific theory beyond its originators’ (Darwin’s and Wallace’s) wildest imaginings.
But there is still a lot we don’t know about evolution: for example, how did DNA evolve and how did it originate? Did it come from outer space? In response, creationist and ID advocates can provide glib answers that, if taken seriously, close off any further avenues of investigation; effectively stemming the very curiosity that has given us what we have learned to date.
The second reason is that our intuition and common sense can let us down when it comes to scientific knowledge. There are 2 well-known examples: Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity theory tells us that clocks run slower when they travel faster (relative to another clock) and clocks run faster in lower gravity (like on satellites as opposed to ground level, Earth). Intuition and common sense tell us that this can’t be true, yet the GPS in your mobile phone or in the Sat-Nav of your car depend on relativity for their accuracy.
Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can exist in superposition with itself: an electron can go through 2 slits at once and interfere with itself on the other side, though if we try and determine which slit it goes through then it will only go through one of them. Yet quantum mechanics is not only the most empirically successful theory in the entire history of science, it underpins every electronic device you use, from TVs to computers to washing machines.
As I’ve stated many times on this blog in a variety of contexts, the biggest mystery of the universe is that it created the means to understand itself, through us. As I’ve also stated, more recently, the biggest difference between religion and science is that religion maintains the universe is teleological and science tells us that it’s not. So how do I reconcile this? Basically, I argue that ‘purpose’ has evolved, meaning there was no pre-ordained plan. It’s like God really did cast a set of dice and allowed the universe to find its own purpose. Einstein famously said, "God does not play with dice", but chaos and quantum theory suggest otherwise.
Addendum: This is a related post that I wrote a few years back, where, in the final paragraph, I come to a similar conclusion.
She presents some interesting statistics that suggest ignorance in science this century is increasing rather than decreasing. For example: ‘In Great Britain, few besides evangelicals paid attention to creationism before 2002. But by 2006, a BBC poll showed that 4 out of 10 in the UK thought religious alternatives to Darwin’s theory should be taught as science in schools.’
She then gives equally scary anecdotes for the former Eastern European block countries, where, for example: ‘In 2006, Poland’s minister for education repudiated the theory of evolution, and his deputy dismissed it as “a lie”.’
She gives other examples, from various countries and educational institutions that should ring alarm bells for anyone interested in providing scientific tuition to future generations. Towards the end of her lengthy discussion that goes back to Herschel, Lyell and Darwin (of course), she cites a recent publication by Thomas Nagel, titled Mind & Cosmos (2012) (which I haven’t read, it must be stated) where ‘Nagel argues for “natural teleology”, a view of nature as forward-looking and purposeful, yet secular rather than deistic or theistic.’ And herein lies the rub: it is very difficult for us to believe that something like us (humans) could not be the consequence of some ‘cosmic plan’ (That Mystery of Mysteries), the why and wherefore we have speculated about ever since we gained the ability to think and imagine in a way that no other species can even cognise.
At the risk of going off on a complete tangent, I wish to reference an excellent BBC doco I saw recently called Apeman – Spaceman, the first of a 5 part series, Human Universe, presented by that cross between David Attenborough and a failed rock star, Brian Cox. Cox starts his programme, in a very Attenborough-like moment, attempting to cosy up to some baboons who live in the highlands of Ethiopia. Though not our closest relative and not even true baboons, Cox explains that, amongst the higher primates, they have the most complex social behaviours, second only to humans, and can even string together a series of vocalisations, thus combining sounds that have different meanings individually.
The point of this explication is to demonstrate the humungous gap that exists between humans and all other species on the planet, cognitively. One really cannot overstate this point, as many people prefer to believe that there is nothing ‘special’ about humans at all. But as Cox states explicitly, we are ‘unique’, certainly on planet Earth and possibly in the entire universe. We are unique because we are the only species that can speculate about, let alone comprehend, our place in the much larger scheme of things. It is from this unique cognitive vantage point that both religion and science arose.
If there is any one thing that defines humanity as a species it is surely curiosity. It is curiosity that has led us into space (the focus of Cox’s first episode) but also led us on an intellectual trail uncovering such wonders as mathematical calculus, nuclear physics, the human genome and every scientific discovery since we first grasped the art of writing down our thoughts so future generations could build an unassailable cumulative knowledge that has given us computers, air travel, smart phones and all the mod-cons we take for granted in Western societies the world over.
And this exceptional evolutionary ‘success’ also creates a paradox in popular Western thinking as Carey’s discussion exposes. Whilst we all accept the benefits that science has provided for us, without even thinking about them most of the time, many of us can’t accept that science has also provided an explanation for how Earthly species have developed, changed, evolved, gained ascendency and become extinct.
I believe there are 2 reasons for this. Firstly, scientific knowledge is always contingent on future discoveries. This means we never know everything, and, what’s more, we never will. There are limits to what we can know as I’ve discussed in another post. So how do I know that evolution is true? Because the biological knowledge that underpins the human genome project (DNA) also underpins the theory of evolution, completely unknown and unforeseen in Darwin’s time. This is a well documented and carefully studied case where future discoveries enhanced a contentious scientific theory beyond its originators’ (Darwin’s and Wallace’s) wildest imaginings.
But there is still a lot we don’t know about evolution: for example, how did DNA evolve and how did it originate? Did it come from outer space? In response, creationist and ID advocates can provide glib answers that, if taken seriously, close off any further avenues of investigation; effectively stemming the very curiosity that has given us what we have learned to date.
The second reason is that our intuition and common sense can let us down when it comes to scientific knowledge. There are 2 well-known examples: Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity theory tells us that clocks run slower when they travel faster (relative to another clock) and clocks run faster in lower gravity (like on satellites as opposed to ground level, Earth). Intuition and common sense tell us that this can’t be true, yet the GPS in your mobile phone or in the Sat-Nav of your car depend on relativity for their accuracy.
Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can exist in superposition with itself: an electron can go through 2 slits at once and interfere with itself on the other side, though if we try and determine which slit it goes through then it will only go through one of them. Yet quantum mechanics is not only the most empirically successful theory in the entire history of science, it underpins every electronic device you use, from TVs to computers to washing machines.
As I’ve stated many times on this blog in a variety of contexts, the biggest mystery of the universe is that it created the means to understand itself, through us. As I’ve also stated, more recently, the biggest difference between religion and science is that religion maintains the universe is teleological and science tells us that it’s not. So how do I reconcile this? Basically, I argue that ‘purpose’ has evolved, meaning there was no pre-ordained plan. It’s like God really did cast a set of dice and allowed the universe to find its own purpose. Einstein famously said, "God does not play with dice", but chaos and quantum theory suggest otherwise.
Addendum: This is a related post that I wrote a few years back, where, in the final paragraph, I come to a similar conclusion.
Friday 2 January 2015
Ursula Le Guin's acceptance speech at the American Book Awards 2014
An acerbic commentary on the publishing industry from someone who's been in it for a long, long time; very successfully, I might add.
I've added Neil Gaiman's intro because it says so much about both of them.
I came across this by accident; posted as recently as November last year.
I'm a huge fan: Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the Earthsea Quartet, which I re-read not that long ago. She's one of the greats: up there with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and Arthur C Clarke.
I've added Neil Gaiman's intro because it says so much about both of them.
I came across this by accident; posted as recently as November last year.
I'm a huge fan: Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the Earthsea Quartet, which I re-read not that long ago. She's one of the greats: up there with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and Arthur C Clarke.
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