Progressives and Libertarians go together like peanut butter and jelly

For decades I've vaguely had the idea that the libertarians and the left should get together. Libertarianism, after all, is officially at the zero-point of the left-right axis, although in practice it veers strongly to the right. For years, libertarians have been the useful idiots of the Republican party, providing their small-government rhetoric as they plunder the treasury and wreak havoc on civil liberties and build up an enormously powerful national security state. But the root ideas of libertarianism -- freedom, limited government, individualism -- are not innately horrible, and it always seemed that a real libertarian should have more in common with the left than the right. Well, a new group is coalescing to explore that idea, and unearthing all sorts of interesting weird stuff, like the the history of Samuel Konkin III and the Alliance for the Libertarian Left. Unlike most libertarian discussions, they seem to be capable of grappling with real issues: they are anti-corporation, for the most part, they will point out the obvious fact that roads are just as much if not more a case of government-subsidized travel as mass transportation, and they talk about the tension between health regulation and tasty street food.

On the other hand, here's libertarian-flavored Arnold Kling (Ph.D. economist and Cato adjunct, no less) making a perfect ass of himself and getting roundly and deservedly mocked. Sorry, I couldn't make a post about libertarianism without making fun of somebody.

The poverty of reductionism

I've been flaming away on Overcoming Bias about reductionism, trying to articulate what I think is a sensible and obvious position that nobody else seems to have, or understand, or even wants to engage with. Oh well. It is not all that original -- it has similarities, at least, to various forms of emergentism and Platonism. But I don't want to do philosophy if it relies on parsing narrowly defined schools of thought, that is extremely boring. Let's put it this way -- I feel that there I've got some insight into the nature of reality that is staring me in the face, that almost everyone else is missing, and I feel an overwhelming urge to try to communicate it.

On reflection, it's pretty obvious why my approach is falling on deaf ears. The more simpleminded and popular views serve obvious functions. Reductionism is what drives scientific explanation, and standard dualism lets people believe in immortal souls and all that jazz. What market niche does emergentist neoplatonism, or whatever it is, serve? TBD. In the meantime, I've collected my flames in one place.

Starting here:

Here's a question for reductionists: It is a premise of AI that the mind is computational, and that computations are algorithms that are more or less independent of the physical substrate that is computing them. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is the same algorithm whether it runs on an Intel chip or a bunch of appropriately-configured tinkertoys, and a mind is the same whether it runs on neurons or silicon. The question is, just how is this reductionist? It's one thing to say that any implementation of an algorithm (or mind) has some physical basis, which is pretty obviously true and hence not very interesting, but if those implementations have nothing physical in common, then your reduction hasn't actually accomplished very much.

In other words: let's grant that any particular mind, or algorithm, is physically instantiated and does not involve any magic non-physical forces. Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm. That suggests that the algorithm itself is not a physical thing, but something else. And those something elses have very little to do with the laws of physics.

Previous attempts to articulate something like this:

Asymptotically approaching religion

Independence Day

[update: and here: Ultramaterialism]

I used to argue the pro-reductionist side on Telic Thoughts. I still believe myself to be on the right side of that particular debate -- the anti-reductionists there wanted to believe in disembodied spirits that were creating the world, designing life, and infusing meaning. That sort of dualism is just retarded. But there seems to be something missing from the standard forms of reductionism, which I keep trying to get my fingers on.

More here:

I posted this in the last thread but didn't get much response, so I'll try again:

Here's a question for reductionists: It is a premise of AI that the mind is computational, and that computations are algorithms that are more or less independent of the physical substrate that is computing them. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is the same algorithm whether it runs on an Intel chip or a bunch of appropriately-configured tinkertoys, and a mind is the same whether it runs on neurons or silicon. The question is, just how is this reductionist? It's one thing to say that any implementation of an algorithm (or mind) has some physical basis, which is pretty obviously true and hence not very interesting, but if those implementations have nothing physical in common, then your reduction hasn't actually accomplished very much.

In other words: let's grant that any particular mind, or algorithm, is physically instantiated and does not involve any magic non-physical forces. Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm. That suggests that the algorithm itself is not a physical thing, but something else. And those something elses have very little to do with the laws of physics.

And here:

"Algorithms are made from math" -- indeed, mathematical objects of any kind also have the peculiar properties that I noted. A hexagon is a hexagon no matter what it's made of. A hand is a hand not because its composed of flesh, but because it has certain parts in certain relationships, and is itself attached to a brain. Robotic hands are hands. While there is nothing magically non-physical going on with minds or hands, it does not seem to me that a theory of hands or minds can be expressed in terms of physics. This is the sense in which I am an antireductionist. There are certain phenomena (mathematics most clearly) which, while always grounded n some physical form, seem to float free of physics and follow their own rules.

And here:

I wouldn't call my view "vintage Platonic idealism", but maybe it is, I'm not a philosopher. I'm not saying that forms are more primitive or more metaphysically basic than matter, just that higher-level concepts are not derivable in any meaningful way from physical ones. Maybe that makes me an emergentist. But this philosophical labeling game is not very productive, I've found.

And here:

Brian Macker: Mysterious was maybe the wrong word. Let's say rather that physical reduction just doesn't help explain some higher-level phenonmenon.

Your swing example is interesting. There are obvious physical similarities between the two systems (rotation, tension, etc) even if the two swings are made of different materials. But consider the task of adding up a column of 4-digit numbers, You do it on pencil and paper, I use a calculator. There is nothing physical in common with these two activities, but surely they have something in common.

However algorithms (especially running ones) and flexibility do not "exist" unconnected to the physical objects that exhibit them. Just like the other guy pointed out the number four doesn't exist by itself but can be instantiated in objects. Like a four having four tines.
I agree with this.
The concept resides in your head as a general model, while the actually flexibility of the object is physical.
These concepts that reside in my head are funny things. Presumably they have a physical incarnation in my brain, but they probably have a rather different incarnation in yours. And if we could talk to silicon-based lifeforms from Altair, we would probably find they have a concept of "four", and maybe even one of "flexible", which is similar to ours but has nothing physical in common with ours.

You don't have to consider this mysterious if you don't want to. But it suggests to me that the reductionist way of looking at the world is, if not wrong, not that useful. You could know all about the states of my neurons' calcium channels, and it would not help you understand my argument.

And here:

Quarks, the only allowed causally efficacious entities in the universe, have a lot to answer for. Quarks are causing the US economy to falter, quarks are killing our soldiers in Iraq, quarks are behind communism, nazism, racism, and people who drive too slow in the fast lane. Quarks made me write this obnoxious and inane comment. Damn you, quarks!

And here:

Have to agree about Chalmer's ideas about zombies being the most deranged around, and I guess that is a polite way of putting it. They make no sense whatsoever. However, his view is not the only alternative to reductionism, and you would do yourself and your project a favor if you engaged with some of the more plausible forms, such as emergentism.

Consider "squareness". It is a property of many physical objects or systems, but it doesn't depend on what those objects are made of. It relies on the physical configuration of the object's components, but not on the physical properties of the components. If you had a quantum-level simulation of the universe, it wouldn't tell you when squares appeared (unless you also had, within the simulation or outside of it, something with the about the same computational power of the human visual system). It is a non-physical concept, but implemented, incarnated, and intimately tied to the physical. If you removed one of the sticks or pencils or iron bars making up the square, it wouldn't be a square any more. But it wouldn't make sense to talk about a zombie-square, which would be a physical object in the same physical configuration that somehow is not a square.

And here:

Z M Davis - my point is that there are versions of non-reductionism or weak reductionism that do not depend on or imply supernatural forces. That's the sort I'm interested in, anyway. The zombie argument is a paradigm of how not to explore the conceptual space between strict reductionism and outright religious dualism.

I'll say again that the zombie argument is inane...and the fact that people who expound it have fame and tenure indicates that the quarks are cruel, arbitrary, and capricious.

And that is more than enough for now.

Candles in the wind

From a memorial service to mark the 4000th US soldier killed in Iraq -- San Francisco Civic Center, 3/24/2008.

Doom update

Peak oil may be just the thing to counter global warming. Original research here. Doom rating: -2

Unless, of course, physicists produce a strangelet and convert the Earth to a dense smoking lump of strangeness. Via. Doom rating: -11.

Reductionist epiphanies

I sometimes troll the libertarians at Overcoming Bias, but there's a lot of insightful stuff there. A recent post on Fake Reductionism was particularly good, I thought. It dealt with the varying emotional experiences related to reductionist explanations, and it inspired me to write down this long-simmering thought.

Maybe it's peculiar to my own thinking, but I have over the years had a number of experiences which I call "reductionist epiphanies". These are moments when all of a sudden I understand some phenomenon that previously either has mystified me, or that I've simply taken for granted. Generally the answer to the mystery becomes so glaringly obvious that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have that understanding, but enough of my previous state is left around that I can at least recall the fact that I had a thunderbolt of revelation.

The suddenness of these insights seems to be a product of having large chunks of knowledge that were previously separated suddenly come together in a more powerful, unified whole. There's an almost audible feeling of pieces clicking into place.

Anyway, here are three questions which have rather simple and elegant answers. Probably you already know what they are. In case you don't, I'm not going to give it away so you can have the pleasure of revelation when you figure it out.

• How does a computer translate instructions into action?
  
  
• Why are there three primary colors, when light is a continous spectrum of wavelengths? How does the three-dimensional representation of color used in computer displays map to color as a one-dimensional wavelength?
  


• What makes a gene dominant or recessive? 
  

The answer to the first question is one that anybody with a CS or EE degree learns in the classroom, but because I had a fairly broken and twisted route through higher education I managed to miss this, and instead figured it out on my own -- an entirely more satisfying experience, so I'm grateful for that.

The wheels come off

I certainly don't have anything insightful to say about the ongoing economic meltdown, but man. I could see this coming from a long way off, why couldn't the people who actually know something about economics? Too bad I didn't put more money behind my pessimism, but it took one of my crazed right-wing correspondents to wake me up and put some into gold (via the exchange-traded GLD fund). So far so good.

Jim Kunstler tries to not gloat too hard.

The Guardian says "Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans." Uh, no it's not. Americans as a group are too fat, lazy, and apolitical to do anything as constructive as riot. Besides, the ones most affected are off in the edge suburbs which don't have the population density to support a good mob.

It's all connected

Well, here's something I didn't know. I wonder what all those losers worried about the pure bloodlines of the West being overwhelmed by the onrush of Muslim hordes think of this:

Mixed in with Queen Elizabeth's blue blood is the blood of the Moslem prophet Mohammed, according to Burke's Peerage, the geneological guide to royalty. The relation came out when Harold B. Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's, wrote Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask for better security for the royal family. ''The royal family's direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists,'' he said. Probably realizing the connection would be a surprise to many, he added, ''It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact.''

Brooks-Baker said the British royal family is descended from Mohammed through the Arab kings of Seville, who once ruled Spain. By marriage, their blood passed to the European kings of Portugal and Castille, and through them to England's 15th century King Edward IV. '

On our side of the pond, we've got our royal family of Bushies walking hand-in-hand with the Saudis, but I don't know that they've actually mixed their gene pools yet.