Proteus

Due to a major (positive) life event I have had in the past couple weeks numerous old friends, old photographs, old possessions, and old ideas all turning up unexpectedly. A few weeks back I cleaned out the garage and dug up several boxes of old records, this week I managed to get the turntable hooked up and listened to some tracks that have been following me around unheard of for two decades or more. Old Rounder Records disks (Vassar Clements' Crossing the Catskills, obscure Robert Fripp projects, Roland Kirk Live in Copenhagen 1963, Siegel-Schwall Band. Sweet stuff. Listening to it after all these years felt odd. Most of it I still liked, but not necessarily for the same reasons I liked it back then. I am not the same person I was back then, though he and I obviously have some things in common.

Some weeks before that I stumbled upon the documentary film Proteus which brings together a bunch of my old interests -- form in nature, Coleridge, reconciling science and religion. It is primarily centered around Ernst Haeckel, known mainly today for his exquisitely trippy illustrations of radiolarians and other natural forms, but who was actually one of the major figures of 19th century biology. Large parts of the film are rapid-fire animations based on his drawings. These interests of mine, like the records, have been effectively sitting around in boxes getting slightly musty and mildewed, and it is with mixed feelings that I unpack them and examine them after so many years.

Oddly the film did not touch on the more controversial issues surrounding Haeckel -- his advocacy of eugenics, anti-semitism, and source of Nazi ideology, and accusations that he falsified some of his famous drawings that were a staple of evolution textbooks for decades. The former set of accusations seems exaggerated, since in fact the Nazis banned Haeckel's works along with others advocating "œthe superficial scientific enlightenment of a primitive Darwinism and monism", but it's still an unsettled issue among historians.

My attraction to this stuff has an ambiguous quality. I am fascinated by form and by the various holistic, romantic, or platonic currents of thought at the margins of science, but feel like I can't quite grasp it or devote myself to it wholeheartedly as some do (I dabbled in computer graphics and generative art but don't really have the artist's sensibility). Such stuff almost always seems to veer off into an unproductive self-righteousness and navel-gazing, or worse, cultishness. My background is in quite the opposite direction, but I am unsatisfied with it as I am with all belief systems.

What cannot be said

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

-- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The idea of apophatic theology has gotten some play in blogs recently, mostly due to a book by Karen Armstrong defending the idea, and some leading uncompromising atheist scientist flamers have attacked her. I'm not sure I see why. Apophaticism by design does not make any positive statements about God or anything else, thus it cannot conflict with science. You'd think that would satisfy the militants, but no, they will not rest until anything even vaguely smacking of religion is razed to the ground.

Not me! I have a mystical streak and a contrarian streak, so this form of enlightenment through negation appeals to me. I see Jerry Coyne is having a contest to name those atheists who like me are less than thoroughly hardcore. I think I like "placatheist" the best of his candidates so far.

One good argument for apophatic theology is to look at what happens when douchebags and pinheads think they have a line on God and "the Absolute". Apparently He's not only American, but a wingnut Republican as well. I think the wingers have (in embryonic form) something of a new religion, in which the saints are the founding fathers and Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is playing Joan of Arc. In keeping with the apophatic approach I am not very comfortable giving attributes to God and I can be pretty sure that he doesn't pick sides in US electoral contests, nor does he have some special affinity for people born in North America.

The obnoxiousness of the noisy religious right is a large part of what drives intelligent people to atheism, but I think it's a tactical error. There is generally a hidden metaphysical core at the heart of most political belief systems, and the left needs to be more explicit about it. There is a vague correspondence between the apophatic demand for silence about metaphysics and the liberal walling-off of religious arguments from the public sphere. But it's not clear that apophatic religion can compete with the more primitive forms as a political organizing tool.

If you can't say anything about that-which-we-usually-call-God but probably deserves a more mystagogic name like "the One" or "the Absolute", what can you do with it? Contemplate it silently I suppose. Keep it in mind as a reality underlying the visible world. Or, you can just deny that the concept has any meaning or utility at all as the hardcore atheists do, but that is boring and philistine. Or you can make meta-level statements about your inability to say anything about it itself. This is what Wittgenstein and others do. A great deal end up being said about that of which we cannot speak.

I'm in the business of effing the ineffable.
-- Alan Watts

Why I, like others, am compelled to issue words on this topic which demands silence, I cannot say. Call it a nagging dissatisfaction with the standard stories. Neither the materialist nor the standard religious pictures of the world make much sense to me, so I'm trying to construct my own. The loudmouths for God or for atheism strike me as team players, which I am not. Universal skepticism is more my thing. Even the existence of an apophatic tradition makes me suspicious; I wouldn't want to accidentally be part of a movement.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Samuel Beckett

Links to the tradition:

• Maimonides advocated an apophatic approach.
• Apophatic theology and neoplatonism.
• Apophasis as a literary genre

Thou Aren't Physics

In response to this post on Overcoming Bias, I had a few things to say which I think are worth reposting here (and it's too hot to think of anything new). The theme is, are we physics, such stuff as dreams are made of, or something else? I introduce the concept of software/hardware dualism, which I haven't seen discussed much elsewhere. I try to argue against a hard form of materialism without falling into some kind of spiritualist superstition. I am groping towards a position that is, I suppose, some combination of emergentism and platonism. Not being a professional philosopher, I'm probably reinventing the wheel, but even though I feel like I'm exploring fairly obvious truths, I have not really seen this position that I'm trying to stake out articulated elsewhere.

The evolution of a mind in time has its own rules, which do not violate physics but may be said to transcend them, sort of.

Instead of a person, imagine that it's a computer we are talking about. All that circuitry is obeying the laws of physics, no doubt, but the evolution of the state of the processor from one cycle to the next is not well-described by physics, but by the abstract formalism the computer was designed to implement. You can talk about a computer in terms of physics, theoretically, but it doesn't get you very far.

What is even more confusing is that the computation is the same whether the computer is made out of silicon or tinkertoys. So it doesn't appear to have much to do with physics, does it? Considering that transhumanists seem to think they can upload their selves onto a different physical substrate, they must not consider themselves to be made up of physics, but Something Else.

"Properties of the relationship between things" is not a physical concept, so it indeed appears to be "something else".

Take the idea of the letter "A". It is composed of parts in certain relations -- three lines in a configuration. It's the same letter whether the lines are made up of pixels on a screen or ink on a page. Interestingly, it's the same letter even if some of the lines are curved slightly, or thickened, or enhanced with serifs -- Doug Hofstadter has written about this particular example. All of these cases are composed of physics, and no violation of physical law is going on, but the physics in the various cases have nothing in common. So whatever makes A-ness would appear to be "something else".

Here's my view of computationalism: the computer is a highly imperfect model of human thought. If you look at the historical development of the computer, it evolved as an attempt to mechanize thought. Despite its imperfections, it's the best model we have, and it helps us understand real brains. Various insoluble philosophical problems appear in the computer as engineering problems, which does not exactly solve the real problems but helps get a better handle on them.

For instance, the old problem of mind/body dualism was recreated in the computer and appears as the less mysterious hardware/software dualism. Suddenly we have a model for how physical systems and symbolic systems can depend on and interact with each other. That's very powerful. But I don't believe (as some of the more callow reductionists do) that we have thereby completely solved or gotten rid of the original question.

I never read van Gelder's dynamic cognition papers, but it seems to be rather similar to the critiques of GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI) that were made in the 90s by neural-net people and the situated action people. There is some validity to these critiques, a lot actually, but in a sense they are attacking a strawman. Nobody really believes the brain is a classic Turing machine; even if it is doing symbol processing it is doing it in a massively parallel, associative style. But it is doing some sort of computation (a variety of sorts, actually), and nobody has come up with a better way of theorizing about what it is doing that computationalism.

Practially, programming computers usually requires having understandings one or two levels below the level you would like to. If I'm coding something, I would like to think in terms of pure algorithms but end up having to think about clock speeds, memory locality, and (if you are Google) heating and electrical supply issues. Computers do a better job of separating out levels than biology, because they are designed that way, but in both cases you have different levels of operation built out of underlying levels.

To return to the original issue, the question of what is the ontological status of entities and processes that exist at higher levels of this stack. They are certainly made of physics, but are they physics? This is a hard question that refuses to go away, except by declaring at so as some reductionists would like to do.

More, from an earlier post:

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.

"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.

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.

Nick said: Yudkowsky is saying that the Schrödinger equation provides a causally complete account of the program's execution.
The Schrödinger equation, let's agree, provides a mechanistic account of the evolution of the physical system of a computer, or brain, or whatever. But it does just as well for a random number generator, or a pile of randomly-connected transistors, or a pile of sand. Whatever makes the execution a sensible mathematical object is not found in the Schrödinger equation.

An algorithm can reduce to any of many very different physical representations. How is this any odder than saying 4 quarks and 4 apples are both 4 of something?
It isn't. Four-ness is also odd, just not as obviously so. Like algorithms, it too is not to be found in the Schrödinger equation. I'm hardly the first person in the world to point out that the nature of mathematical objects is a difficult philosophical question.

I'm not trying to introduce new physical mechanisms, or even metaphysical mechanisms. Let's grant that the universe, incuding the minds in it, runs by the standard physical laws. But the fact that mechanical laws produce comprehensible structures, and minds capable of comprehending them, is exceedingly strange. Even if we understood brains down to the neural level, and could build minds out of computers, it would still be strange.

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.