Cultivating the Complementarity

Mark DavisLeave a comment

 

I am trying to imagine the difficulties that translator J.B. Sykes encountered when working on Erhard Scheibe’s The Logical Analysis of Quantum Mechanics from 1973. The translation process extended through to the Danish of Bohr himself, the primary subject of Scheibe’s book (likely in German). The complexities of describing the evolving theory and the strange logic that envelops quantum physics were clearly apparent in Scheibe’s project. About Bohr’s writing, he reports:

Bohr’s mode of expression and manner of argument are individualistic sometimes to the point of being repellent…”

and:

Thus, although Bohr himself testifies to his wish to present his view at least partly as a complex of causes or a hierarchy of concepts and statements having various degrees of priority, there is still good reason to question whether he succeeded in doing so intelligibly.”

But I am not here to further pile on Bohr. New concepts like complementarity were extremely strange. Instead, I want to emphasize the important role that philosophy can have in the analysis of arguments and conceptual structures. Quantum mechanics remains a unique example of something that is both the basis for the reality we observe and yet completely alien to the everyday reality we encounter at human scale. It needs contextualization in order to make progress. From “spooky” action-at-a-distance to Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, quantum logic is a thus far intractably weird thing. As a philosophical topic for analysis, it escapes the complaint of being a purely mental or a priori construct of pure thought, the kinds of omphaloskepsis that extend back to Classical Greece.

I was considering all this in the context of much discussion of value hierarchies in fields like philosophy that have been circulating on Substack.… Read the rest

What It Is Like to Create a Picture

Mark Davis1 Comment

I invoked Nagel’s ”What Is It Like to Be Bat?” in a brief blurb I recently wrote about a children’s book. Nagel’s essay came to mind because I was rereading PMS Hacker’s “IS THERE ANYTHING IT IS LIKE TO BE A BAT?,” which is shrilly capitalized in this online version. Hacker, as always, is ready with Wittgenstein for some final comments after having worked through the weird conceptual structures that attend to ideas like “what is it like to be something.”

In preparation, Hacker works his way through the transitive and intransitive concepts of consciousness (being conscious of something versus simply being awake and aware), then through how we talk about and conceive of phenomenal relationships between experiences and descriptions of the objects of those experiences. He ultimately dismisses all this “qualia” discussion in philosophy of mind:

None of this is mysterious, surprising or baffling. Nor is it the key to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness. For there are no mysteries — only empirical ignorance and conceptual mystification.

There is an interesting fissure in Hacker’s argument, I think, and it is exemplified by exactly the line of reasoning that he borrows from Wittgenstein and that dovetails with W’s notion of private language. The concern is with the objects of experience when using abstract references like “this,” “that,” and “thus”:

One would like to say ‘I see red thus,’ ‘I hear the note that you strike thus,’ ‘I feel sorrow thus,’ or even ‘This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad,’ etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises.

… Read the rest

A Fool and a Dunce Walk into a Counterfactual Freezer

Mark DavisLeave a comment

 

I was reading Yablo’s “No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility” (That’s not a typo: “Cold”) that continues the theme of modal skepticism, when I came up with a radical possibility. Of course, if someone thinks up something in the 21st century it likely has been thought a thousand times before, and this is no different. But let’s start at the beginning and check out whether there is anything new to be discerned.

I might initially think that the contents of my thoughts are the only thing I can truly be confident about since all the world of the senses could be an illusion. Given such a starting point it would be wise to try to understand the relationship between my thoughts and what is perceived by starting with the phenomenon of thought. I immediately become skeptical of my thinking, however, since I am unconscious nearly a third of the day, often accompanied by strange hallucinatory imagery in my dreams. More, I tend to agree with these zombie-intellects who inhabit this society-thing projected on my sensorium-thing and claim to study biases and perceptual trickery. Those perceptual-psychologist-patterns seem right, too, given the number of times I’ve been startled by faces coalescing out of twilight shadows or my overly generous past assessments of my own competency.

Thoughts seem unreliable.

But what is reliable? Some Platonic ideas, geometry, math in general, deductive proofs (uh oh, coarse premises as well as the indeterminacy of synonymy creep in here), and then scientific results (tentatively), perhaps. Let’s take the latter, though, and start with the notion that science contains a methodology that distills out many biases and misperceptions, arriving at a tentative model that is of higher truth value than simple guesses, traditions, and feelings.… Read the rest

Limits for the Unlimited Mind

Mark Davis2 Comments

I’ve had a longer-than-usual hiatus from posting due to adding a new living arrangement to our small collection. Acquiring and moving furniture, appliances, toiletries, bedding, audio equipment, and cleaning supplies between spaces has an almost unlimited ability to distract. And when a quiet finally settles in, there remains a restlessness about optimizing experiences and priorities that takes time to psychically draw down. It’s the clattering opposite of focusmaxxing. On the positive, new places constantly reset and tune expectations about what is important and what matters little in a life, with people, ideas, and new experiences always rising above the glimmer of these damn possessions.

This rich inner life, this sense of a self that powers the great religions and mystical traditions of the world, this atman and soul, these ideas of impermanence, justice, and wonder—can they all be a product of a versatile connective matrix that computes these optimizing decisions while simultaneously creating a vital subjective sense of identity? There is a theory called unlimited associational learning (UAL) that posits exactly that. Our adaptation to the world is one of temporal superiority. A plan and a reaction for a conscience entity is a function for pulling time apart and predicting the future, from the cause-effect of seasonal migrations of herd animals to estimating the supportive and defensive capabilities of mates.

The essential hinge is that this consciousness, this sense of being someone, must on average be more effective than the other trajectories through the phylogenetic, epigenetic, and ontogenetic state spaces. And that’s even with all the flaws like misperceptions, biases, neurological injuries, and schizophrenia. Proving this with any sort of mathematical precision has an almost impossible bar to meet since it would require that a model first is shown to be conscious with the set of UAL-sufficient hallmarks, like global accessibility, integration over time, agency and embodiment, and so on.… Read the rest

Liberalism and New Fictions

Mark DavisLeave a comment

A current theme among the commentariat is that political movements like MAGA are illiberal, tapping into old ideological currents like fascism and religious totalitarianism. And, according to Yuval Noah Harari, the fictions that drive movements like these pose a unique problem for liberalism because it does not, in turn, have nourishing narratives that provide the utopian clarity of religious or ideological fables. For the communist, utopia comes from class purification. For the fascist, Xanadu arrives from ethnic and racial purity. For the religious, there is only God’s will. But for liberalism, we accept there is no perfection, only problems, checks and balances, eternal struggle, and a simmering gradualism that emerges from squabbling interests. No one is happy. No one can be happy with a narrative that is the worst of all possible systems except all the others. The reality is grinding, truth is grinding, and the vague struggle in an unrelenting system makes for a blurry tale with no focus, corrupt heroes, and complexity rather than epic arcs of resolution.

I am an optimist about the project of liberalism, nonetheless, and think we see its progress throughout the world. There are astonishing statistics like the reduction in poverty rates in the world even while supporting massive populations. These achievements came about despite the chaos arising with the end of colonialism and the structured Cold War alliances of the mid-20th Century. The stories are simple enough that they are easily forgotten, like the Green Revolution and the spread of health care. The stories are often contested, as well, like the rise of social insurance and welfare policies, where extreme corners of the liberal worldview take exception to the the costs imposed by this kind of organization.… Read the rest

Intersecting Orbits

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

My orbit keeps intersecting with Milla Jovavich. When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, she shot Return to the Blue Lagoon on the island of Taveuni. I was on nearby Vanua Levu teaching mathematics, physics, and economics for five hours a day. She was apparently just 15 or 16. Since I taught Forms 6 and 7 students, she was likely younger than most of my students. There was a buzz about the film production in the paper and on the radio and I think I saw it a couple of times when it ran in the theater, though not because it was any good; theaters and banks were the only places with air conditioning. I spent my 25th birthday on Taveuni, drinking beer on both sides of the 180th meridian and pretending I had a 48-hour birthday.

She went on to a mixed career, from a brief appearance in Dazed and Confused to Chaplin, and on to The Fifth Element and the infamous Resident Evil films, which had a certain visual style despite otherwise being empty video game spin-outs.

In 1997, while I was a researcher at the now-defunct Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, my wife and I bought a house in the old downtown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was an adaptable researcher, leaning into our institutional funding for natural language processing, computational linguistics, and information retrieval in support of the defense-intelligence community. I had side interests in evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, and inference via minimum description length and related ideas that I pursued as extra projects. I also served as the faculty sponsor and as an artist in a performance arts group that had a cyberpunk edge to it.… Read the rest

Post New Atheism

Mark Davis4 Comments

 

I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.

I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.

That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality.… Read the rest

Consciousness and Uncertainty Schematization

Mark DavisLeave a comment

If consciousness is an evolved function, the immediate question is what exactly is the currency of evolutionary selection in terms of traits and functions? In almost all of these kinds of arguments there is an explicit requirement that there is on average (or slightly greater than on average) value to survival that results in the maintenance and promotion of the relevant functions. In my Berggruen essay, I argued for a primarily social role to consciousness. Consciousness is a central monitoring framework for the complex web of social interactions that creates a reflective model of a person (and partially and uniquely in certain other species) that can be used to evaluate and plan for sexual pairing and other life choices related to status within social hierarchies. There are other hypotheses, as well, like the idea that predator-prey planning and avoidance is enhanced by a central consciousness experience, including some intriguing work on dreaming (when there is no active consciousness) that shows enhanced dreams for game players who are in the role of being prey within the game context as well as other forms of cognitive activation.

Abstractly, evolution is a distributed adaptation and learning algorithm that is the only robust solution to the complexity of natural environments. Wasteful though it may be, it is the invisible hand that drives forward enhanced prediction and survival using the knobs of genetics and the social relationships that are an extended phenotype in social species. There are a few theories of abstract learning that can be brought to bear on this topic, with the obvious candidate being inductive optimality via Kolmogorov complexity: minimize the model parameters to bottleneck against overtraining and avoid overfitting. This is central to all distributed learning but has layered complexity when considering the how to predict larger, more distal patterns, both temporal and spatial in activation and extent.… Read the rest

Shriekings and Windings

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I like to critique intellectual history—more the armchair type than the academic varietal—because it often reflects the open biases of the commentator rather than having been developed by a neutral analysis of the past and its relationship to our pending futures. So when I read about Husserl’s ideas of geometry and Galileo or the relative merits of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I leave the critical analysis to the experts, equipped as they are with the proper academic insights. But columnists are not generally subject-matter experts, just enthusiasts who are driven by profession to justify their insights and prognostications by reference to history and ideas. And they substitute biases for depth far too often. This is true again today, with Leighton Woodhouse’s op-ed in The New York Times, “Donald Trump: Pagan King.” It begins gently enough, with a quote by Canada’s Mark Carney from Thucydides about power in international relations, but then quickly dissolves into an unsupportable argument about how Christianity was uniquely civilizing of the pagan world by introducing all the positive morals that we associate with the gentler, humbler aspects of the religion, mostly on the back of a single source.

This through line is embarrassed by the theology, history, and facts of how Western civilization matured, as I and hundreds of other commentators pointed out (this chestnut is getting repetitive, too). This is not meant to rob Christianity of its influence in the last two thousand years, just to temper it responsibly and note that however one scopes “paganism,” Enlightenment rationality, high and low, shared aspects of pagan forms of thinking, and was clearly influenced by it as we move into the formative phase of the modern state period and formulations of democracy.… Read the rest

The Fourth Branch

Mark Davis1 Comment

The unprecedented abuse of power by the Justice Department against US citizens, institutions, and organizations needs correcting. And the sickening abuse of the president’s pardon power needs taming. Here’s the 28th Amendment:

All powers to investigate, indict, prosecute, and punish under the laws of the United States are vested in the Enforcement Branch of the government, except in the case of military tribunals. An Attorney General shall be elected every six years by a majority of the citizens of the United States, the District of Columbia, and territories, and is the executive authority for the Enforcement Branch. All appointments of cabinet members and district attorneys to the Enforcement Branch shall be approved by the Senate. In cases of negligence or abuse of power, the Attorney General may be removed by impeachment.

The power to pardon by the President is amended to require two-thirds approval by the Senate.

I’m fine with changing the election to use the Electoral College mechanism. Controlling tariff madness is up to Congress.… Read the rest