Our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Einstein has recently been proven right (once again) about his physics. But was he too hasty about his metaphysics?
The social sciences have an ethics problem: they have so far failed to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life.
The demarcation problem: literature vs erotica edition.
Not a particularly good article, but the point about the “naturalness” of atheism, historically speaking, is interesting.
You Could Look It Up: a history of reference works from the code of Hammurabi to Wikipedia.
How (not) to pick an argument. Unless you really want to piss someone off.
The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Which happens to be an increasingly big problem for scientific publication ethics.
Footnotes to Plato 
On the Einstein thing, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Suppose, Interstellar style, I had received a message in my youth from my future self. Could I decide not to send it when I grew up? Or would I find myself sending that message however hard I tried not to?
Or if we discovered faster than light particles and the famous thought experiment could be real – if I received the message “Don’t eat the oysters, they are bad”, could I not eat the oysters? Or would I find myself eating them, no matter how hard I tried not to, because that is just what happened?
We could imagine a kind of “dont-do-this” machine which you input a signal and it outputs the opposite. But if the block universe scenario is a fact, there is a fact of the matter about what it does, before it does it. If we knew that fact could we feed the dont-do-this machine? If so then it would have to malfunction every time we fed it the output that did happen.
I imagine if I was given an envelope in the morning with a precise description of what I would do for the rest of the day then I could decide to avoid doing those things. But maybe, in some case I could not.
In the end we don’t really know, we can’t test it. So I suggest that both Einstein and Bergson were wrong – the right answer is that we don’t know.
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Yeah! on the time article.
I’ve certainly ranted on enough about it to appreciate others are bringing up the same point and so not to go back over all my arguments, I’ll just point out this relationship between observation and interpretation is essentially the same mistake made with epicycles being based on a clockwork universe. The mathematical patterns presumed to have a one to one correspondence with a physical expression. Aka, the mathematical universe hypothesis.
As a further comment, a big part of the problems with our scientific understanding, based on temporal experience, is that as time emerges as effects of what occurs in the physical state of the present, not as a real temporal existence, it makes temperature on a par with time. The importance of this is that temperature is a push/pull of highs and lows. We are as pulled by low pressure, i.e. “nature abhors a void,” as pushed by forces creating momentum, i.e. high pressure, while time is largely the push of direct causality, since we experience it as the motion of specific points of reference.
Which then dilutes the energy…..
I’m being pulled by work, so I better push off.
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On the Philip Gorski article:
Gorski is completely misunderstanding evolution here. There is a big distinction between (1) the underlying logic as to why particular behaviours were selected for, and (2) the programming by which evolution causes us to behave in those ways. There are not at all the same thing!
The game-theoretic explanations are about (1), the underlying logic. The (2) is about the desires and emotions that are part of human nature, a nature that was selected for owing to (1). A game-theoretic explanation is not in any way suggesting that people are consciously making such calculations in their day-to-day life.
Thus Gorski’s dismissal of the game-theoretic evolutionary explanation is just wrong.
On the Einstein/time thing:
The difference here is mostly a difference of opinion over what the concept “exists” means. One really can define that either way without making much difference to anything. It us thus a fairly silly debate.
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“Silly” is, of course a subjective judgement. One could say that physics is silly, because it is possible that someone might find it so.
Defining the reality of time either way does not make any difference, because we cannot know the future in a sufficiently precise manner for it to make a difference.
There are, as far as we know, no faster than light particles. If there are any tesseracts inside black holes allowing us to knock books off bookshelves in our past bedrooms, we are unlikely to get there and try it out.
But there is no logical reason that the Universe has to be set up in such a way that we can’t get sufficiently precise information about the future, that just seems to be the way the Universe is set up.
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I thought the Einstein piece from the astrophysics Adam Frank was quite interesting, though I couldnt quite see the difference between Einstein’s view of time, and Henri Bergson’s. Whatever it was, apparently it so vexed Einstein that he claimed that “The time of the philosophers does not exist.” But then stranger still was how the author completely overlooked that the vast majority of physicists today, believe that Einstein was very much wrong about what ultimately happens in the future. While Einstein was an ontological determinist (like me), most believe that quantum mechanics mandates a fundamental uncertainty to events, not simply an uncertainty from our meager perspectives. In a talk with Daniel Kaufman, Massimo recently referred to this as a void in “causality,” which I think is exactly right. I’m more inflammatory still, calling this the interpretation of “magic.”
Mind you that I have no problem with the “natural uncertainty” which our associated experimentation suggests. I consider such data to be quite important to test and justify our various working models. Furthermore I don’t mind physicists extrapolating beyond us to infer that a fundamental uncertainty exists in reality itself. What I do mind however, is conveniently ignoring that this mandates a void in fundamental causality itself, or the emergence of what we commonly refer to as “magic.”
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The Gorski piece is interesting. Contra Coel, I don’t think he’s “just wrong” about it. I do think he’s looking at things too simplistically, though, in terms of polarities rather than sliding scales. But, he is right that in terms of how human ethics go further than those in lower animals, emotional issues come to play.
I actually think, since I’m continuing to read and not stopping at the game-theory area, that he’s more wrong about the cultural anthropology area. I think it and related disciplines today are more robust than he claims, and that not nearly all professionals in these areas hold the views he imputes. It comes close to a straw man.
Back to the tit-for-tat, though. What is “joint affordance” but a tit-for-tat run through Theory of Mind?
That said, he undermines his attacks on cultural anthropology and relativism a few paragraphs later with his “men holding hands” discussion.
And, on why language developed and evolved? We’ve got about zero solid ground on answers for that. It may be for the reason he guesses. It may be for labeling. Or it may be for other things.
Keane’s book still sounds interesting, but it doesn’t sound like the “all that” that Gorski is trying to claim.
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I am not sure why fundamental uncertainty should be any more “magic” than fundamental determinism. That just buys into an intuition that determinism is the way a real world ought to be.
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Yes, Eric, that probably would be inflammatory to call quantum mechanics “magic.” That said, space-time of course isn’t totally deterministic, because of that. (And perhaps because of other things.)
That said, I have no need to specifically subscribe to Bergson, or Heidegger, to fill in Einstein’s philosophical incompleteness.
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I’ve seen a lot of splash, especially from Gnus, about Whitmarsh’s book. But theological skepticism, or skepticism about current religious practices, isn’t the same as atheism.
Plus, Whitmarsh clearly is operating from the “fallacy of availability.” Greek helots, peasants, slaves, etc., and their equivalents elsewhere didn’t write about their religious beliefs, starting with the facts that they couldn’t write, couldn’t afford the materials to write and couldn’t afford the time to write.
And, even within the most skeptical of antiquity, we have those like Cicero, and many contemporaries, breathlessly trumpeting things like the wonder of partaking in the mysteries of Eleusis.
Tis true, per the exact nature of the trial of Socrates, that gods were often about civic engagement and compelling it. It’s a false dichotomy to claim that means they didn’t really exist for many, though.
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It strikes me that we didn’t need the second to last article linked. We are experts in that already 🙂
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Oh, for good measure, let’s note that Whitmarsh is Eurocentric and his “classical world” doesn’t include the China of Confucius, the India of the Buddha (if he existed) and the start of proto-Hinduism, let alone even make a stab at the “New World.”
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I would certainly agree with Coel that there is are profound differences of opinion on this subject. The problem is this rather broad range of interpretations and the fundamental differences of reality they imply, are not discussed in any public fashion and so there is the basic assumption on the part of the public that all of this is settled. With the public being led to believe we can time travel through wormholes in the “fabric of spacetime,” etc.
If the curtain were ever pulled back though, “silly” might well be the most polite way to describe what is behind it.
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Robin and Socratic, here’s my point:
Quantum mechanics theorizes a duality in matter such that it is neither particle nor wave, but in a sense “both.” I’m fine with this. Apparently we humans measure particles in certain ways but waves in other ways, and the more accurate we get in one respect, the more indeterminate things become otherwise. Yes. But the problem I see is when we make assessments of “reality itself,” such as this proposed fundamental void in causality, without fully acknowledging what such a thing would mean. Most physicists other than Einstein seem to have done this regarding quantum mechanics.
In ultimate causality, there is ultimate reason for things to occur as they do. Cause leads to effect, specifically given that cause *produces* effect. If you drop a plate of glass to the street, we don’t presume that it breaks up without cause, or “magically,” but rather given the causal events themselves. And the more study that is given to such an event, perhaps the better we can predict how it will go. But there is only so much that we humans can do in this regard, and we certainly have little ability to map the position of each associated electron over time (assuming it’s even that simple, and QM says it’s not). The deeper we look, the more hopeless things becomes for us. But if it’s all causality in the end, then the future is ultimately *perfectly determined* by the past which causes it to be as it becomes.
Given the circumstances, I find it amazingly arrogant for physicists to claim that our experimentation suggests a fundamental void in causality, rather than just a fundamental void in our own ability to see associated causality. This standard view be indeed be correct, but it also requires that things function somewhat through *magic*, or that effects do not require actual causes to make them occur as they do. It seems to me that these people should damn well know better than to make such amazing claims, given that they should know how ignorant we are as well as anyone does.
As far as the essay itself goes, I suspect that Adam Frank simply wanted to write a light paper, and so decided to ignore this major disagreement. Perhaps Coel is right that he raised no dispute beyond the whims of definition.
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Eric,
Some would argue the particle is a fiction and its really waves of energy. It’s only when we insist it must be fundamentally particles and the waves are just statistical, that its seems mostly void, with dimensionless particles, that we discover/create by measuring for them.
Here is an interesting experiment;
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1344
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“The time of the philosophers does not exist,” was not only an arrogant thing to say, but borderline stupid. It reminds me of Augustine’s dismissal of human history as irrelevant to the Important Story of Man’s Relationship with God.
Philosophers have long approached the problem of time from different perspectives and for different reasons, because it is fundamental to human experience. It is all well and good to say that time in some sense is irrelevant in physics, but so what? Here I am spending time writing this comment. Over time, someone might read it; it will leave an impression, or it will not, in which case, in time, it will be forgotten.
As something I used my time to write, it now forms a part of me. Even if I should decide to erase it before posting it, and no one reads it, it still remains a part of me – a part of the history that makes me who I am – the history that *is* me. (Of course, if you are reading this, that erasure didn’t happen. Another important facet of time is what does not happen if it could.)
This temporality is not simply a personal issue; it encompasses everything human. We share history; we also come together to make decisions for the future. When those decisions are made, others are lost, and we live the consequences. This ‘living through the consequences’ is a raw experience of time. If you jump from a height, you experience the fall. That is something the atomic particles making up the matter of your body don’t do.
Can this raw experience of time inform scientific research? Maybe. Einstein seems to have forgotten that the early thought experiments that helped focus his thought on time leading to the theory of relativity, were basically reviewing differing human experiences of time. But strictly speaking, that question is irrelevant to whether philosophy should consider time as a crucial issue worthy of study. The things of the world, which science has every right to claim for its study, are only a part of our experience. Our primary and most important experience is of ourselves. The time of the philosophers exists there – inside us.
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Coel,
“Gorski is completely misunderstanding evolution here. There is a big distinction between (1) the underlying logic as to why particular behaviours were selected for, and (2) the programming by which evolution causes us to behave in those ways. There are not at all the same thing!”
True, but you may be reading Gorski uncharitably. The fact is that people don’t seem to *behave* in the way predicted by game theory, in a large number of situations, independently of their psychological feelings. Altruism and self-sacrifice are obvious examples, as people engage in those behaviors with perfect strangers, which is most definitely not what any simple evolutionary approach would predict.
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I got so caught up responding to Einstein’s silly remark, I forgot to say how much I appreciated Frank’s post, It’s brief, but insightful and thought-provoking.
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Frank’s article reminds me of the early “numerical taxonomists” who thought their methods had no assumptions including evolution. It was a fantasy fueled by mathematics as truth.
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Hi Massimo,
If it were the case that, over most of human evolutionary history, population densities and the distances people could travel were low enough that there was a high probability of repeated interactions with any “stranger” (and both of those are likely true), then a general tendency towards generous interactions with strangers could have been favoured under “reciprocal altruism” theory.
So, while one can’t take too simplistic a game-theoretic approach, I still think that Gorski is wrong to discount this explanation.
Hi ej,
Lacking a fuller account or transcript of that discussion, I think we should be cautious about interpreting what Bergson was suggesting on behalf of philosophers and thus what that remark was in reply to. I have a suspicion that the argument was more about the fact that, under relativity, the rate at which time progresses is different in different frames of reference, contrary to everything that had been assumed before that. I’m not sure that either the article, or the book on which it is based, really present a proper account of that discussion.
brodix,
That’s not at all what I said. If one person says that, under “block time” the future already “exists” and we are merely moving through a four-dimensional “space”; and another person says that the future doesn’t “exist” but is being continually created by the present, then they are merely using different language to describe much the same thing — unless they want to propose some practical upshot that is different between the two.
Which of course nobody does. The wave-like nature of matter has been known and accepted for about a century now, so why are you still rehashing it?
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Coel,
Your response seems to me both highly speculative (we just don’t have that sort of information) and irrelevant: even if you are right, it remains the case that game theoretical models tell us relatively little about modern societies and our current behaviors.
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Hi Massimo,
Yes, in the sense that such models are relatively simple, whereas human behaviour is pretty complicated, but that sort of evolutionary reasoning is currently the only game in town for explaining the origins of human morality.
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Coel,
It does seem they present entirely different views on physical reality. Maybe what you mean to say is that it doesn’t matter from a mathematical perspective, where the model is all that is important.
What if I were to make the same argument for a heliocentric, versus a geocentric cosmology? Epicycles were quite accurate and another little cycle could be added, if they got out of line.
Does it really matter if we view the sun as the center of the solar system, versus the earth as the center of the universe, given it is our point of view? The fact is that each of us is the center of our view of the universe and presumably, given enough complexity, a geometric model could be created to reflect that, but that doesn’t mean there are Titans pushing the entire universe the opposite direction, if we walk across the room.
Similarly, I would think it quite relevant if we view the present as the only physical reality and time as an effect occurring within it, rather than past and future being otherwise real and we only seem to move through it, like we move through space.
Are space and time interchangeable? London and New York can co-exist, but can London 1916 and London 2016 co-exist? I would think questions like that would be quite relevant to the field of physics, not simply a matter of interpretation.
The idea that simultaneity cannot exist is based on recordings of events, not the energy manifesting them. When you look up at the night sky, you see the moon as it was a fraction of second ago, but stars as they were years ago, yet the light recording those events still strikes your eye only in the present. The basis for rejecting the present as real is because different points of view can see events in different orders. Yet we are to accept that consequently, all events must therefore exist in the temporal dimension.
Energy is conserved, which means it remains in the present, so what is this dimension of time composed of, if not the energy of the present? Like the Titans and the clockworks of epicycles, does it pass Ockham’s razor?
The future is not being “created.” We never get to tomorrow. Only the present changes to a succeeding configuration, as energy moves. When we get to the next day on the calendar, it becomes today.
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Yes, it matters. Having the other planets orbiting the Sun as opposed to orbiting the Earth is topologically different, not just a different choice of frame.
(The rest of your comment is, as usual, not sensible enough to reply to, sorry.)
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Coel,
“unless they want to propose some practical upshot that is different between the two.”
I suppose I am proposing something somewhat different, given both the viewpoints you present see the present as a point moving from past to future, as opposed to what I have been arguing, that it is the changing configuration of what is present, that turns future into past.
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I realize I may express myself in ways that are not entirely linear. Is there someone out there with some opinion of whether I make any sense, or not?
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Coel,
“but that sort of evolutionary reasoning is currently the only game in town for explaining the origins of human morality”
That may very well be the case. But it just means that we don’t have a good theory of (current) human morality (which is different from a theory of origin, where you may be closer to being correct — then again the article was talking about modern, complex behaviors, not the Pleistocene).
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For example;
My argument would be that “tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns.” Action in the present.
The view on which convention and Coel propose, is that time is a dimension along which we move in increments of duration. As Einstein said, “Time is what you measure with a clock.”
To which I would ask; What is being measured? Isn’t duration simply the state of the present, as events appear and disappear? How would it otherwise be external to the moment?
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Massimo,
One aspect of reciprocity is simply letting go of what you don’t need. Likely, in the Pleistocene, there was no financial mechanism to abstractly store value, so there were storage costs to holding onto excess value, such as foodstuffs. So there might be a definite logic to “paying it forward,” i.e. being nice to others with the thought that in similar situations, they or others, might act similarly.
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The real problem with the Gorski article is that, although it is well-written and makes all the essential points, there’s not much new in it for those who have long studied culture and ethics.
The problem with trying to find possible evolutionary origins of ethics is that the research is only historically interesting. Whatever the origin of ethical behavior, we’re stuck with making decisions in the present moment, negotiating with others concerning issues in social context within which we live. Evolutionary origins are of limited value in such negotiations.
– ‘This guy’s a murderer and he’s gonna fry.’
– ‘But among Neanderthals, the sense of group responsibility selected for moderated punishment protocols.’
– ‘If any them are still around, let them vote the judge out of office.’
Ultimately, ethics will provide a present choice, determined by acceptable codes of behavior (within limits of acceptable disagreement, barring violent conflict). These can derive from custom, from interpretations of a sacred book, from reasoning or intuition, but are always grounded, and always dependent on present decisions.
God: ‘I have these sixteen commandments.”
Moses: ‘Sixteen? screw that, nobody’s gonna remember sixteen commandments. Let’s make it four, that’s a manageable number.”
God: ‘I am the Almighty!’
Moses: ‘And I have a religion to sell! Gimme something to work with here.’
God. ‘Alright, split the difference, make it ten.’
Moses: ‘Lord, you are wise and merciful!’ (To himself: ‘But I would have settled for twelve….’)
Discussions of ethical choice are never really about origins, although some scientists or theists may wish it so. They are always about what people need to deal with in the present moment, in the present social context.
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Frank’s myopic article retraces worn paths as if his lack of vision made the trek new for just not seeing the footsteps already there. Jeez.
Einstein’s operationalism about measurement, Mach-inspired at the turn of the century, aspired to be as close to metaphysical neutrality as one could attain from an adequate explanatory perspective. His teacher Minkowski added the 4D take later, and Einstein stamped that approved as an account of SR, though of course incapable of further accounting for GR non-inertial frames in curved spacetime. His failure to accept Bohr’s interpretation of QT should not be taken to entail that he endorsed a full-blown 4D block universe (even though in a 1932 audio recording he fully embraced a Schopenhauer form of hard determinism for human will–a local thing in spacetime after all). His theoretical interests in spacetime were always more local than global, and thus strongly empirically constrained (think of his insight about nearby bodies falling in a gravitational field as constituting an inertial frame as ground for the equivalence principle). And even globally applied, his equations about mass-energy density and curvature imply nothing about what the totality is in some comprehensive descriptive sense of spacetime–just how whatever it is behaves as a law of nature anywhere and anytime.
Bergson–who influenced Whitehead (the blog’s hero here)–was possessed by something like the presentism that infects philosophy of time today, and that was what Einstein was protesting against. But I argue that Einstein’s entire career was a careful evasion to commit to a final account of what spacetime was–but he was all-in on how it behaved according to GR.
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