Davies and Materialism

Paul Davies took a solid beating and responded in turn at The Edge.

Part of his response was to the effect that he didn’t mean all of science in his original discussion, but only meant instead the area of cosmology and theoretical physics which is his bailiwick. He exempts evolutionary biologists with that stroke. His opinions on cognitive science or neuropsychology would likely be similar (I bring this up since I see a few “grand problems” for science beyond the origin of the universe and some final theory of physics; the problem of mind and abiogenesis as similarly important).

But part of his discussion continued to hammer at the notion that uniformity and understandability of natural law was somehow intrinsically related to monotheism. It’s a rarefied argument that kind of bootstraps itself on the fact that Newton, Kepler and Galileo saw the hand of God in the correspondence of their mathematical abstractions to physical observations. There is an odd hint about his proclivities, though, in Davies’ mention of Lee Smolin’s evolutionary selection of universes, where other metaphorical narratives have informed the physical theory; a similar parallel exists in the use of computer metaphors in cognitive science, of course, or in ecological theories of perception. There are only a few basic algorithms available to try to explain unexplained phenomena: stochastic selection with replication (evolution), deterministic interaction (Newtonian dynamics), quantized interactive behaviors (quantum mechanics), thermodynamic uniformization, cybernetic control and feedback, computation and, yes, pure irrationality or theology.

I did some digging on some of the Davies’ arguments, passing back through the Wigner paper and the follow-on by Hamming, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” which builds-out the notion that there are essentially irrational drivers (aesthetics, play, mysticism) that push forward mathematics and that the results in turn drive scientific theory. All of this effort in some ways parallels or rediscovers the ongoing work during the same time period concerning aspects of irrationality in the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyeraband, etc.). The scientific method is not an acidic, scalding, and sacred pursuit devoid of irrational influences, nor are individual scientists devoid of personal faiths about their capabilities or the possibilities of their theories, but proclaiming the entire enterprise as strongly influenced by a monotheistic worldview is a strange preoccupation. Indeed, the only constant across the varied scientific pursuits is that any metaphysics is material in nature because no other explanations have provided any hint of validation or added to the task at hand (thus any metaphysics is tentative, itself), and that mathematics is a useful tool because it is simply a way of expressing relationships between objects that are not irrational but that vary according to sometimes complex but non-arbitrary ways.

Neoepicureanism and Joplin

Sometime in late high school, sometime after I had been ejected from the partier crowd for being just not too cool, and sometime after I decided that my role-playing gaming and interests in ideas were good things despite their incompatibility with even the stable and geeky cliques, I proclaimed the philosophy of "neoepicureanism" and held that, "we never do anything we don't want to do." It served as a Socratic seed for discussions (sometimes under the influence) with friends concerning parents, tribulations, the role of fear in human action, and my own libertarian leanings.

No one does anything except by choice, even if that choice is under duress. A youthfully simplistic principle, but one that could defuse anger and hostility and transform discussions into positive appreciations of ambitions, goals, and baser pleasures, as well.

So here I have Veronica Gventsadze's "Atomism and Gassendi's Conception of the Human Soul" in front of me describing the Epicurean atomic swerve that was used in opposition to the purely deterministic atomism of Democritus. It's a long way out from high school and my interests in philosophy took on a terrifically sober and analytic form through college and then largely folded into scientific practice with the arrival at evolutionary epistemology and algorithmic information theory. Still, revisiting Epicureanism strikes me as remarkable in its monism, in the conception of the gods as prime movers detached from interaction with the corporeal world, and in the atomistic justification for free will and an ethics derived from reciprocity.

Gassendi was a 17th Century thinker who expanded on Epicureanism, reintroducing it to the West on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution. He resurrected the core ideas while enhancing the psychological descriptions, suggesting how we create mental simulacra and the influence of those simulacra in creating new ideas.

I wonder, though, since I had not read any Epicurus back in high school, and certainly hadn't read any Gassendi, whether the real source of my theory was "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?"

Pools and Editorials

Well, this last week saw my letter to the editor appear in print. My focus was on the incompatibility of various religious traditions and how strange it seems that people are willing to harm others over those incompatibilities. I addressed it as a letter to the children, suggesting that they should be skeptical of the claims of their parents about a great number of things, but that they should be especially careful about claims about the meaning of poetry.

There were several motivators in positioning it as a letter to children. First, I was able to simplify and operationalize the language in a way that points at the difficulties of treating religious texts as fact. Second, I was following Dennett's lead on the notion that young people need to be made aware that there are those who quite happily (and productively) live without religious belief and are smart, moral and interesting.

The responses in the online forum were very mixed, with the obvious "don't believe this guy" to heartfelt worries that popular culture is so negative an influence that only religion is capable of countering the impact on our children. I responded mellowly to all of the non-accusatory points and seemed to achieve the desired effect of being calm and learned at some level.

Saturday's paper contained the first in-print rebuttal, which focused on the author's own re-integration with organized theism following years of "freethinking". Yes, I avoided the A word in favor of a less-culturally charged term that is more inclusive of agnosticism, vagueness, humanism and rationalism. He was slightly antagonistic, suggesting that freethinking is the realm of liberals and people who believe we came "from pond scum." Sadly, it does reinforce the tendency for highly religious people to use debate tactics that are drawn from the shallower side of the gene pool. But I responded mostly positively in the online forum, describing the difference between "public knowledge" (observation, empiricism, experimentation) and "private knowledge" (revelation, subjective experience, prayer), and managed to avoid my own antagonism by not using the loaded phrase "magical thinking."

In fact, though, as we were heading towards Pyramid for Mother's Day lunch, I started processing the whole experience and we chewed a bit on how to escape the desconstructionist argument that there is nothing particularly favorable about private versus public, rational versus irrational, looking at the history of science. Freud, phrenology, alchemy. They all had their day in the sun as matters for learned discourse. Yet, can we still conclude that progressivism in science, history and culture is bankrupt due to classy arguments about a few failed social sciences? Thermodynamics is not nearly so porous.

I was reading Condi Rice's interview in Atlantic the other day and found myself agreeing with her on this notion of progressive, positive historical change, if not on any of the details or outcomes of our sloppy Iraq invasion and follow-up. The essential details, though, are tied to systems of governance that interfere with the urge to power on the part of individuals. Instead of a "Great Man" theory of history, I see a progressive unfolding of the assertion of individual rights and responsibilities through law that is gradually perfecting the inalienable rights of man. It is easy to be negative about this and decry income inequality or social justice, but the most effective players in government are those who find a creative dialog that is essentially positive in outlook, and who maintain a calm way forward that improves on the respect levels for the other players on the field.

I think I did that in my editorial engagement and follow-up, but time will tell.