Metaphysics
I haven't had any great in interest in this
division of philosophy, 'about physics.' The subject proposes to discover
what is 'reality,' what lies beyond what is known in the sciences. While
there are many philosophers who indulged in metaphysics, and I do a
little, too, at its core I think this is an illegitimate discussion.
My basic view is that what's knowable is what's written down
in science. That's the beginning, middle and end of it: I start with a
theory of knowledge (technically, a theory in
Epistomology). I have always
started there, since my earliest thinking about it. The argument is
simple: you cannot talk about what you don't know, so knowing (whatever
that is) is everything. I add that it is very important to be extremely
skeptical about what one "knows."
Traditionally, Metaphysics
is a discussion about real or phantom things, gods, souls and, even,
mysterious material. It is about being,
what is. I don't have much to contribute to that discussion, which
nonetheless troubled me greatly until I was about 20 years old. Then I
read Lord Bertrand Russell's views on religion and the Western God, which
somehow clicked. In an hour or two, a great cloud was lifted from my mind.
That disability never returned. Russell's solution is mathematical in
nature; i.e., it arises out of a mathematician's way of thinking, a
philosophy of mathematics. Following Russell, I found the problem with
metaphysical discourse is that the terms are never defined and, in fact,
are probably incapable of definition. So, at best, they are always
enigmatic variables, the X, Y, and Zs in some gigantic equation, theorem
or premise (we don't know which). Since metaphysicians routinely resist
writing down the equation(s), it is incapable of solution. In any event, I
haven't troubled my head about the spirit world since reading Russell,
except when I want to be polite to believers.
There is a political consequence to my anti-metaphysical
beliefs: I don't think "religion" or anything like it belongs in our
public spaces. That's because I think the public space must confine itself
to what we human beings can firmly agree exists, what we can
witness.
To the extent that I hold metaphysical views, they are "naive"
materialist or subjectivist in nature, two terms which I take to be
different descriptions of the same thing. I think there is just one
reality - the physical Universe - of which I am part. That is what my
subjective experience suggests quite convincingly. I don't know of any way
to dig deeper into my experience than
that, so I accept it for what it is. Since my
experience includes scientific learning, I believe it is reasonable
to infer a material world. Going
other other way around, if material is all there is, I
qua material knowing machine know
that material knowing machines are not only feasible, but exist. Again, I
think that the materialist and subjectivist descriptions are simply two
sides of the same coin, and that this is true for any material or
subjective being that has experience (observes and evaluates).
A la Descartes, my existence seems
to be a matter of self-assertion: whatever metaphysical status I have is
pinned on that "cogito, ergo sum."
Further than that I cannot go.
Metaphysical
discussions about existence fail
because being is a state, a go/no-go condition. (Existence is not a
predicate.) We can provide descriptions of things, and make connections
between things. We can even conjure up theories about non-things. But all
of that falls in epistomology,
not metaphysics.
Holey History
Again, I start with
epistemology, with what can be
known. From the point of view of personal experience, time is always a
construct. I know what is happening now, and I remember what happened
before. When I'm asleep or unconscious, I don't know anything at all.
However, I might remember having some experience - a dream or a moment of
awareness - when I wasn't "awake." I don't have any direct experience of
the future or the past, certainly not in the way in which I believe I have
direct experience of the "now." I can think of "myself" as a sensing
device with memory, where having the memory associated with "now" makes
all the difference.
'Time' is one of those metaphysical
concepts which I would rather not haggle about. I think it is what it
is, but what it is I cannot say. The
cogito only demonstrates to me that I am, right now. It doesn't
demonstrate my existence to anyone else, nor perpetuate me in time. That
I exist in time is the result of endless repetitions of
cogito and a memory.
Memory need not be a difficult concept.
Memory is just a representation of something stored somewhere. When we
access memory, we bring up the contents of memory
now. We do not relive our
experience exactly, because we cannot. We don't time-warp into the past to
experience the memory. Memory is always a simulation of something because
that is what we mean by memory; otherwise, memory is always its own
experience.
Our memories are limited by the stuff of the Universe. If we
wish to make an exact copy of an event, we have to store as much stuff as
makes up the event. To take a snapshot of the Universe at some time, we
need to double the matter-energy content of the Universe and somehow
"freeze" the copy. This implies that, at most, only half the Universe can
be "remembered" at any time. As the number of time-points to be memorized
increases, so what can be remembered shrinks; a sort of Heisenberg
Principle about memory and time. The Heisenberg principle also suggests
another feature of memory: it is imperfect. We can only remember to the
extent that we make a copy, so a less than perfect copy is necessarilly an
imperfect memory. But we can never make a copy fast enough to capture the
target "all at once" because of Heisenberg. Add to that Entropy, which
guarantees we can never store or retrieve the memory perfectly. Error is
built into our Universe.
Now, as our luck has it, there is an escape route of sorts.
There are algorithms which describe major features of things, so we need
not make an exact copy of everything. Instead, we only need exact,
complete copies of the "basic" components from which major features are
built up. We also need the machinery of building things from those
components and demonstrating the completed product. In other words, it is
possible to build a "model" of the Universe. That is a new idea, a late 20th
century idea. Using the Turing principle, that a program is the same thing
as data, it should be quite clear that a finite-sized Turing machine
could replicate the Universe. Again, we must note the provisos in that
statement: (1) the Universe is made of definite components, (2) put
together in an ordered (rule-bound) fashion. The Newtonian Universe meets
those criteria, and justifies the Victorian confidence in being able to
calculate any result. Even Universes compatible with Einstein's General
Relativity meet the criteria, because they are still made of definite
parts; only the rules of manipulation (program) have changed. Until after
World War I, people took pleasure in being machines, even relativistic
ones.
Quantum Mechanics shattered that older world of certainty.
Even if in the macro (larger) world, there are definite rules followed by
the larger assemblies of matter and energy, those rules fall apart below a
certain scale. Even molecules - fairly large assemblies by conventional
standards - fall prey to quantum effects. Still smaller modules, atoms and
their sub-assemblies, are governed by probability. In this realm, it
appears impossible to make an exact copy without the expenditure of an
"infinite" amount of energy. That's because even the much-reduced mass of
the Turing machine qua replicator
would be subject to quantum effects. In other words, on a small enough
scale, the bits of program and data are subject to reading errors. (This
is already an industrial problem in making ever-smaller transistors.)
There is a question whether information is bound by the same
laws as matter and energy. This question arises because information is a
"property" of things, or a concept, or a pattern, and not inherent in the
thing. Thus, there is the electron or one of the quarks, and then there is
knowledge of them. We don't usually think of knowledge - information - as
being somehow bound to objects, but it must be so according to the
principles of Quantum Mechanics. If the knowledge were not bound up with
the thing, then Maxwell's demon would be able to sort out the particles
entering or leaving the chamber; i.e., entropy wouldn't work. I believe
hundreds of experiments have been done to find out whether we can "fool"
quantum behavior, but so far no one has succeeding in doing that. There is
something about the nature of what exists which "transmits" its existence
to all the other existing things; i.e., they interact. So, information
does not exist in a vaccuum; there are no Platonic forms. This implies
that there is some smallest unit of information, or that information is
involved in some sort of Heisenberg trade-off involving energy and time.
So, I don't think "knowledge is free."
If so, the clear implication is that "history" is full of
holes. It is, at best, a patchwork of events and recreations which gives
us some idea of what it was like. A good example of the variations
possible is the KT boundary story. When I was (still!) in graduate school
30 years ago, anyone who thought our world was radically changed by a
single collision was considered "unscientific." A few years later, the
Alvarezes demonstrated that something cataclysmic must have happened at
the KT boundary. A few years after that, Carl Sagan et al presented the
Nuclear Winter scenario. Today, what happened to the dinosaurs is taught
in elementary schools. Moreover, our notion of what dinosaurs were and how
they lived has changed equally radically. Is our current "truth" about the
KT boundary, dinosaurs and the rest of it the final truth? Probably not.
Our Story
From that clumsy start, I arrive at history as
the recorded story of the past. There is no history without a record,
whether that record takes the form of a human memory, inscriptions in
tombs or iridium-laced layers imbedded in rocks. History presupposes an
ordering of time, which is redundant because the ordering represents time.
From the human point of view, history is just that which is recorded,
remembered. Most of history is regularly erased by forgetfulness and
death. As a Fortune Cookie said, "Only words are immortal," leaving out
provisos such as "if we happen to remember them." So, as discussed,
history is full of holes and lacks enough Peters to put their fingers in
them. This leaves the flood gates open for repeated inundations, none of
which is either expected or preventable.
This brings me to another basic understanding: history is what
we make of it. Someone's version of it cannot be proven or refuted. This
assertion has lots of consequences. For instance, trials under the English
system of law are thought to be "a search for truth." What the prosecution
and defense seek to do is establish the facts of a case, since, if the
facts are thus-and-so, then the law will apply in a straightforward
manner. "Didn't you kill Mrs. Humbody!?" the Prosecutor demands. "No, No,
I didn't!" you say. Whether you did or did not will determine your fate,
as the law applies to anyone in those circumstances. But, does it matter
what you did? Or, is the trial a matter of documenting what someone says
you did? Of course, there may be a chain of evidence (your fingerprints
were on the murder weapon) which points to what you did, but "evidence"
does not of itself speak. The lawyers have to
use the evidence in an argument
which leads to a conclusion, guilty or not. We might be convicted by an
argument, not a witness. Our naive faith in the seach for truth is further
unsettled by trials such as that of O.J. Simpson. In that famous case, it
is far fetched to suppose anyone else killed his wife, but it is equally
unfounded to conclude O.J. did it based on the evidence
presented. So, the "search for
truth" is confounded by a million variables. We might suspect what is the
truth, but the facts don't warrant the conclusion intuition suggests. Or,
the facts may point to an event, or even demonstrate an event, but that
event has no "meaning" by itself. The facts are given a meaning in the
context of a story that connects them, but the story could be false, or
only partially true, or only true as far as it goes. We used to think eye
witnesses clinched a case, until the psychologists showed that people very
close to dramatic events give completely different accounts of it.
Moreover, the account changes over time. So, what is historical truth?
Different accounts of "history" come to different conclusions
about its meaning. The conservative version of American history since the
1920s has little in common with the widely-accepted liberal story,
excepting the dates and some of the names. Many conservatives have been
making the case that FDR's New Deal actually prevented economic recovery
from the Great Depression. That story suits conservative ideology by
denying the "standard" version of recent American history. Now, I believe
what conservatives purport is grossly distorted and wrong, but their views
are very difficult to disprove. In order to make the case that the New
Deal improved the economy, it requires a huge amount of detailed
information about government programs. It also requires theories about
governmental, economic, political and social interactions. The same is
true of conservative revisionist history. The same set of facts can be
"explained" by different theories. The facts themselves do not prove or
disprove any particular thesis. Moreover, depending on one's theoretical
"set" (attitude), some facts may be more relevant than others. (The theory
changes the "connections" among facts; i.e., their ordering.) So, how can
I defend my views of history against any or all comers? Can anyone defend
any view?
This is a difficult and unresolved question. It is the same
question perennially asked about science; i.e., to the extent that history
is about "facts," the problem of "historic truth" is the same problem as
"scientific theory." Thus, another of my assertions: theories of history
are (or should be) scientific theories, or, perhaps, vice versa. They
share many of the same methods and forms of reasoning. At this stage I am
not prepared to make theories of history a sub-class of scientific
theories, or the other way around. I am inclined to think that scientific
theories are the same sort of thing as theories of history, so I would
place both of them in a larger class of "experimental theories." That they
are not exactly the same thing is primarilly a matter of somewhat
different methods of reasoning. "Science," taken generally, is about the
non-human world and even about the ancient, pre-historic human world.
"History" is primarilly about the human world, specifically about humans
since the beginning of recording. We have other, related fields - which
are generally considered sciences - such as paleontology and anthropology
that are concerned with pre-historic human history. Thus, well-established
sciences "shade into" what we call "history," which supports the idea of a
close relationship.
History is most often written by people who are oriented
toward the arts, rather than sciences. It is considered a literary skill,
because it involves telling a story. History is usually more than a
compilation of facts; it is the connection of some facts to other facts.
It is the creation of an illusion of "cause and effect." So, most
historians operate on a theory of history, even if they refuse to discuss
it or deny they have any theoretical beliefs. In most cases, the "modus
operandi" of the historian has to be guessed, or teased out of them
writings. In this sense, history is often unscientific, because it is
implicit rather than explicit. But that is more a statement about
historians than the subject itself. Perhaps it will satisfy that there is
a subject, "meta-history" or "theory of history," which is reasonably and
explicitly scientific. Such a subject will necessarilly rely on the works
of other non-meta-historians by way of analysis of their works. The idea
is to make works of history "speak" in spite of their authors.
In any event, I think theories of history must put forward
testable hypotheses. The story
told must "make sense." While I have been fascinated with Leo Tolstoy's
theory of history in
War and Peace, because it seems
to make sense, ultimately I believe it fails the "testable" criterion. So
do, for that matter, most Hegelian, Marxist, Christian and other theories
that involve some sort of teleology, whch posit either an ideal or real
end. What's unscientific and, I think, invalid is the proposal of
purposes in history; i.e.,
knowledge of why things happen on
a universal scale. I think we are limited to such knowlege on much smaller
scales, such as why so-and-so did thus.
Constraints
In making the claim that history should be accounted in
a scientific manner, I mean to apply the customary and usual
considerations of science to history. My reason for doing so is to limit
what can be said in history, to prevent ideologically motivated
"revisionism." There has to be a set of facts on which (almost) everyone
can agree, even if we put them together in different ways. Those facts
are established as such by public observation and verification; i.e., by
witness. If we don't have an agreed basis in observation, then all
history is just a story, a seductive fiction.
I also go further than remaining neutral on the interpretation of
history; i.e., the theory of history proper. I think we can rule out
some theories as just plain insane, outlandish or, politely, very
improbable. I put most "end of the world" theories, such as currently
popular Christian and Islamic fundamentalist propaganda in this
category. I don't think the Second Coming is nigh, nor do I believe a
restoration of the Caliphate is likely. I also don't believe in thousand
year Reichs or another American
Century. This is not to deny the prediction of outcomes, which should be
testable hypotheses. Interpretations can be presented, when they are
based on facts and "logical" reasoning about how the facts are
connected. For example, I have for many years put forward the notion of
the rise of Asia (China and India) in the 21st century. That
is presented as a hypothesis, not a mystical insight, and should be
accepted or rejected based on the evidence as events develop. (So far, I
am arrogant enough to think the facts support my view. I am willing to
throw out my view, if shown to be contrary to the facts.)
So, as in science, the first constraint on theories of history is they
must be limited and tentative.
That is an immediate consequence of being testable. Historical theories
cannot posit long-term ends that "go beyond" history.
A second constraint on historical theories is the
demonstration of mechanism.
There has to be some way of "explaining" how one thing is connected to
another thing. The theory is the explication of the mechanism. Despite
the way this sounds, declaring history to be merely a collection of
facts (random events) is a possible theory, but still requires some sort
of explanation how that is possible. I hold, for example, that in the
very long run chaos rules, but concede this is very difficult to prove.
Thus, it is easier to concentrate on shorter runs, where some sort of
"cause and effect" can be postulated to operate. On the whole, any
demonstration of mechanism that relies on 'the will of the gods' or
spirits or other deus ex machina
is unacceptable as a theory of history. In this regard, historical
theories are under the same inspection as scientific theories, except
that formal mathematical proof may not be required (although that would
be desirable). One criterion of "demonstration" is the ability to build
a "model," which is a set of instructions (program) that derives one set
from another set. The American military use such models extensively in
determining and testing global strategies, as well as training. So, such
models of historical events are possible.
A third constraint is convergence.
Sets of facts or conditions tend to exclude other facts or conditions.
If the Moon is an airless body, it is very unlikely that air breathing
species live freely there. Now there's lots of evidence that the Moon is
airless, but it was not always so. It was possible to speculate on
happenings on the Moon centuries ago, but most of that is now considered
unbridled fantasy. In the same way, Percival Lowell teased many minds,
including my own, earlier in the 20th century, but since the
Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s we know better. It is still
feasible to speculate on life on ancient Mars, but it seems unlikely we
will find any life there today. The collected body of fact concerning
Mars rules out "canals" and thirsty civilizations there. What
convergence does is limit the discussion to
likely theories. To apply
convergence, we need to use statistics, which means we need a theory of
probability. One of the hallmark inventions of the 19th
century is exactly such a theory, most dramatically imbedded in other
theories like Quantum Mechanics. (Note: probability, statistics and the
calculus are entirely new, modern ideas.)
Convergence lies behind what Thomas Kuhn called "a paradigm" (in
The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, 1962). It is the collection of facts,
taken together, whcih eventually forces the "paradigm shift." The
Ptolemaic Universe is untenable in the face of the Copernican model
backed up by some simple Keplerian calculations. In turn, that paradigm
shift had far-reaching consequences for Western Civilization, such as
Columbus' voyage of discovery. Convergence is more fundamental than
paradigm shift, because of necessity the latter requires the former.
Paradigm shift is the human realization, the "putting it together," of
the convergence that has been going on.
Convergence is a dangerous process, since it can happen by selection of
the facts. Ancient peoples did not have the observational basis to
produce the Copernican model. In the absence of extensive recorded
observations, the telescope, and advanced mathematical techniques, the
Ptolemaic Universe actually is simpler to comprehend. It starts with our
point of view, standing on Earth. The limitation of facts by the lack of
equipment and related analytical tools leads to "false" conclusions.
Equally "false" conclusions are reached when people refuse to see what
is before them, as is happening in the current argument over teaching
Darwinian evolution. The Roman Church was disabled for centuries among
the learned by its refusal to accept Galileo's observations. In fact,
the clear stupidity of holding on to ancient, "false" beliefs led to the
Protestant Revolution.
In the foregoing paragraph, I quoted "false" to highlight the dangers of
convergence. While I and most moderns think what was cited as "false"
is indeed false, we could be wrong. It would be hard to go back to a
flat Earth model, especially in view of those famous pictures taken on
the Moon by Apollo crews. But, maybe it is not impossible; maybe there
is some truly far-out explanation which fits a flat Earth together with
the Apollo experience. (I cannot imagine what that would be.) This
caution follows from a by-product of Godel's work: that an "infinite"
number of theories explain any finite set of obsaervations. That's
because, no matter how huge their number, all of the "events' of the
Universe are a subset of the natural numbers. (Assign every bit of
space an [x,y,z] co-ordinate, and let the clock tick in Planck time,ħ≈
10-32 sec. Assign every
fundamental particle a ID #, and an initial position and motion vector.
You still haven't begun to "crack" the denumerable infinity,א.)
Two Predictions
I believe there are two things that arise from convergence.
The first is that the recent conservative revision of American history
is almost certainly false. It is based on a selected set of facts. It
doesn't hold up against a huge body of recorded facts on an
international scale about the economy and people's lives. Sooner or
later, people will discover the difference between serious historical
work and propaganda, even if the old saying about the victors' writing
history is true. None of the dictators of the last century, the most
powerful people in human history, were able to suppress the historical
facts for long. In most cases, their revisionism didn't even outlive
them.
The second, in connection with Darwinian evolution, is the likelyhood
that human cultures and societies are evolving "as we speak." There is a
logic in social evolution that derives from the use of language and
concepts. My prediction is that "rationality," broadly construed, takes
human development in a certain direction. We are seeing "rationality"
drive evolution forward in high gear since the Renaissance, and
especially since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now that we are
on this path, I don't think there is any going back. Willy nilly, we are
going wherever this road takes us.
»»»
to be continued
…
12:11:36 - Wednesday, 10/05/2005