Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality
We live in a time when it is fashionable for everyone to have an opinion about everything, and Economics is no exception. We are strongly pressured to have the “right” view of Economics, which is of course the same one as our friends and family and the news we watch. But we don’t do things like that here on A Scientist’s Fiction. Instead, we do our best to put our biases aside and acknowledge our assumptions, observe the relevant facts, and follow where logic takes us.
The first step in thinking about Economics is to shake the ideological mindset. When approaching the subject, the most tempting thing for most of us to do is to jump into the debate between Capitalism and Socialism. But that is the wrong question altogether, and just makes people angry at one another. We might also be tempted to come at it from the perspective of justice, of who rightfully owns what. While this is important from a values perspective, we must remember that it must be informed by our core economic values, which we talked about last time: to supply as many people as possible with their basic needs, so that they are empowered to pursue meaningful lives.
In order to accommodate our values, we need to understand how economies work. The economy is like a machine, built out of a bunch of different parts, all working together. We can look at the parts and see how they work and what they do. Only then can we build a realistic view of how a good economy can be built. It is impossible to build a rocket that will get to orbit without understanding physics. It is impossible to design a new medical drug that will heal people without understanding chemistry. Similarly, it is impossible to design an economy that will provide prosperity and freedom without understanding Economics. And like other sciences, we must be humble and remember that Economics is a complex field of study, and there is much about it that humanity does not yet understand.
Today’s discussion is very short, but it is important enough that it warrants its own post. Although it may seem like common sense that we have to look objectively at the mechanics of how something works if we want to make it work better, we humans so often forget this. Without a conscious effort to understand, our views are shaped by persuasive speakers, and we forget that good intentions are not enough to guarantee good outcomes. Unlike what many smart people throughout history have believed, we humans are not naturally rational. Rational thinking takes practice and effort, just like any other skill. Because Economics is an object of so much political rhetoric and propaganda, it is a high-level challenge for rational thinking. So it seemed appropriate to take a moment to remind ourselves of the mindset we want before we dig into the meat of the topic.
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Friday, December 14, 2018
MoebiusQuest – NaNoWriMo Results 2018
Hello friends, family, and people from the internet. Guess what? I wrote a novel!
You can read MoebiusQuest here for free at WritersCafe.
This November has been a milestone in my life in more ways than one. First, I met the official NaNoWriMo goal for the first time, writing 54,500 words during the month. Second, I finished my first novel, which came out to 57,000 words when it was finished. Around 3000 words were written in December, but it still counts as a win because over 50,000 of them were in November. Before this, my longest story was under the 40,000 word novel threshold. Third, the novel I wrote was MoebiusQuest, the story I started and restarted so many times as a teenager. Having finally finished it, I feel as if an obsession I had in the back of my mind for all those years has been lifted, and I am free to focus on other stories. And fourth, I met and became friends with a bunch of fellow writers, who are interested in sticking together to help and support each other in our writing.
As I wrote MoebiusQuest, I noticed something strange happening. I prepared only a barebones outline, so most of the story was made up on the fly. But time and again, I kept striking gold with ideas that could pay off later and make the story better. When the book was finished, I found myself looking at something better than I had ever imagined, where no scene was missing, and no scene had to be cut. The only revision it needed was a very small amount of spell-checking and trimming. It felt like a miracle.
It is because it turned out so well that I decided to post it online for anyone to read. MoebiusQuest is my baby, and I couldn’t be happier at how it turned out. Of course, it is nowhere near the quality of a “real” book, but I didn’t intend it to be. And because it is not garbage, and because it is my baby, I have decided to open it up for the eyes of the world. MoebiusQuest is online, and I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.
MoebiusQuest is a light-hearted space adventure where three friends jaunt across the galaxy in search of the seven elemental MacGuffins—I mean medallions. Every planet they visit brings a new and different adventure, from the high-tech to the alien to the downright weird. It is great fun and excitement from start to finish, and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
You can read MoebiusQuest here for free at WritersCafe.
This November has been a milestone in my life in more ways than one. First, I met the official NaNoWriMo goal for the first time, writing 54,500 words during the month. Second, I finished my first novel, which came out to 57,000 words when it was finished. Around 3000 words were written in December, but it still counts as a win because over 50,000 of them were in November. Before this, my longest story was under the 40,000 word novel threshold. Third, the novel I wrote was MoebiusQuest, the story I started and restarted so many times as a teenager. Having finally finished it, I feel as if an obsession I had in the back of my mind for all those years has been lifted, and I am free to focus on other stories. And fourth, I met and became friends with a bunch of fellow writers, who are interested in sticking together to help and support each other in our writing.
As I wrote MoebiusQuest, I noticed something strange happening. I prepared only a barebones outline, so most of the story was made up on the fly. But time and again, I kept striking gold with ideas that could pay off later and make the story better. When the book was finished, I found myself looking at something better than I had ever imagined, where no scene was missing, and no scene had to be cut. The only revision it needed was a very small amount of spell-checking and trimming. It felt like a miracle.
It is because it turned out so well that I decided to post it online for anyone to read. MoebiusQuest is my baby, and I couldn’t be happier at how it turned out. Of course, it is nowhere near the quality of a “real” book, but I didn’t intend it to be. And because it is not garbage, and because it is my baby, I have decided to open it up for the eyes of the world. MoebiusQuest is online, and I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed of it.
MoebiusQuest is a light-hearted space adventure where three friends jaunt across the galaxy in search of the seven elemental MacGuffins—I mean medallions. Every planet they visit brings a new and different adventure, from the high-tech to the alien to the downright weird. It is great fun and excitement from start to finish, and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
Friday, December 7, 2018
Massive Complexity
Scholars used to marvel at the elegance and mathematical simplicity of the universe. That was before we invented supercomputers.
From the days of Newton and Galileo to the middle of the 20th century, science was a mixture of brilliant insight and trial-and-error. Intelligent, learned people would come up with ideas and build experiments to test them. It was a golden age, romanticized by the iconic ideas of the scholar in their study and the tinkerer in their garage, creating new machines and discovering new laws of nature.
In the process, better tools were built. Instruments were invented that were more precise, and could measure more things. A new field of mathematics opened up, statistics, which gave scientists guidance on how to make hypotheses, devise experiments, and interpret data. Then, computers came upon the scene, able to deal with vastly more data than human beings could.
When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.
What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.
One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.
Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.
Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.
It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.
 |
| Simulation of the ejected matter from colliding neutron stars. Credit: NASA |
When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.
What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.
One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.
Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.
Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.
It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.
Friday, November 30, 2018
What can We Know about Reality?
The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality
We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?
There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.
But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?
The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.
Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.
Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality
We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?
There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.
 |
| Abstract Painting 599 by Gerhard Richter. You may not know what it is supposed to represent, but you know that you are perceiving colors and textures. |
But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?
The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.
Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.
Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.
Friday, November 16, 2018
The Fool's Gift – The Well of Images Part 4
Read “The Fool’s Gift” at WritersCafe.org.
The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.
“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.
As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.
The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game
If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.
The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.
“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.
As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.
The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game
If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.
Friday, November 2, 2018
NaNoWriMo 2018 – Back to My Roots
It is November again, when the trees lose their leaves, the jackets come on, and the writing bug bites. I think by now I’ve conditioned myself Pavlovian-style to put my fingers to the keyboard when the weather starts cooling off. And once again, I am sprinting the marathon of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), cranking out a draft of a book in 30 days. This time, I am going the whole ten yards, shooting for the standardized goal of 50,000 words, with no less than 1,667 per day. I wrote 1,935 yesterday, so I’m going strong.
Last year, my goal was only 1,000 words per day, and I had a really rough time. But I have improved since then, practicing both on this blog and with The Well of Images, and I have a game plan.
First, the book I have chosen is sure to keep me going at it day after day. I have mentioned Moebius a few times on this blog, the story I have been building for over ten years, and with which I hope to make a name for myself when I finally publish it. But I started writing a version of Moebius a long time ago, back when I was about 13. Since then, it has grown into something completely different, the only similarities being a few names and that it takes place in space. This NaNoWriMo, I am going back to the original idea, and writing a full draft of MoebiusQuest, where the two protagonists, Zoink and Oliver, go on a quest to find the seven elemental medallions and stop the evil Disassembler. It will be fun, whimsical, and positively drenched in nostalgia.
The second thing I am doing is joining a chat group of other NaNo writers. I went onto the NaNo forums early this year and hit it off with someone who invited me to their Discord server, which now has ten or fifteen members, all hyped to write and ready to keep each other going.
Thirdly, I have gotten into the writing habit, having cranked really hard on The Well of Images part 4, so that it would be beta ready before November. NaNo is still a step up from that, but it is half a step less than it would have been. Part 4 is in beta stage right now, and will be released online next week, so get hyped for that.
Finally, I have a caffeine plan. Caffeine’s potency depends on how much caffeine is normal for your system. Have two cups of coffee each day, and you need three to get a buzz. But if you’ve been off it for a month, a single cup of tea is all you need. For the past few years, I have been largely caffeine-free, making those rare occasions when I indulge at a restaurant or coffee shop quite powerful. I still drink decaf in the mornings out of habit, and that is the target of my plan. Starting yesterday, I changed one of my two tablespoons of grounds from decaf to half-caf. A week from now, I’ll change the other to half-caf as well. In two week, I’ll change one to full-caf, and for the final week, I will use two scoops of regular caffeine-loaded coffee grounds. Hopefully this gradual ramping up of caffeine intake will keep me burning brightly through the whole month.
I’m ready. It’s time. My first real NaNoWriMo challenge has begun. It’s time to prove to my future self that I have what it takes, that I am the real deal now. Wish me diligence, wisdom, and luck.
Last year, my goal was only 1,000 words per day, and I had a really rough time. But I have improved since then, practicing both on this blog and with The Well of Images, and I have a game plan.
First, the book I have chosen is sure to keep me going at it day after day. I have mentioned Moebius a few times on this blog, the story I have been building for over ten years, and with which I hope to make a name for myself when I finally publish it. But I started writing a version of Moebius a long time ago, back when I was about 13. Since then, it has grown into something completely different, the only similarities being a few names and that it takes place in space. This NaNoWriMo, I am going back to the original idea, and writing a full draft of MoebiusQuest, where the two protagonists, Zoink and Oliver, go on a quest to find the seven elemental medallions and stop the evil Disassembler. It will be fun, whimsical, and positively drenched in nostalgia.
The second thing I am doing is joining a chat group of other NaNo writers. I went onto the NaNo forums early this year and hit it off with someone who invited me to their Discord server, which now has ten or fifteen members, all hyped to write and ready to keep each other going.
Thirdly, I have gotten into the writing habit, having cranked really hard on The Well of Images part 4, so that it would be beta ready before November. NaNo is still a step up from that, but it is half a step less than it would have been. Part 4 is in beta stage right now, and will be released online next week, so get hyped for that.
Finally, I have a caffeine plan. Caffeine’s potency depends on how much caffeine is normal for your system. Have two cups of coffee each day, and you need three to get a buzz. But if you’ve been off it for a month, a single cup of tea is all you need. For the past few years, I have been largely caffeine-free, making those rare occasions when I indulge at a restaurant or coffee shop quite powerful. I still drink decaf in the mornings out of habit, and that is the target of my plan. Starting yesterday, I changed one of my two tablespoons of grounds from decaf to half-caf. A week from now, I’ll change the other to half-caf as well. In two week, I’ll change one to full-caf, and for the final week, I will use two scoops of regular caffeine-loaded coffee grounds. Hopefully this gradual ramping up of caffeine intake will keep me burning brightly through the whole month.
I’m ready. It’s time. My first real NaNoWriMo challenge has begun. It’s time to prove to my future self that I have what it takes, that I am the real deal now. Wish me diligence, wisdom, and luck.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Work and Purpose
Most people believe that there is some connection between work and a meaningful life. But it is not straightforward, by any means. There are many different kinds of work, and many factors that contribute to or take away from the meaning they provide. Today, we are going to try to better understand where exactly the value of hard work lies, though it is far more complicated than the scope of this single blog post.
There is no question that work in itself does not make life meaningful; everyone knows the life of a slave is anything but. So why do so many people believe that more jobs and harder work will lead to more meaning in people’s lives?
To explore this question, we have to look at the opposite of slavery, total leisure. When people have all they need, and have the option to do only what they feel like, two things can happen. Either they seek out difficult tasks and projects to do, or they become nihilistic and conclude that life is meaningless. A life without work is certainly better than that of a slave, but it is not much more meaningful.
If the two extremes of work, slavery and total leisure, are equally meaningless, it means there is more to the story. That is no surprise, because truth almost never comes in simple yeses and nos. So let’s take a look at some of the factors that go into work, and see if we can distill a recipe for meaning.
Perhaps a little bit of meaning comes from being paid a living wage. Of course it has to be enough to live according to society’s standards of dignity; a job with too little pay is essentially a lesser form of slavery. However, there are other kinds of work that don’t pay, like housework, raising kids, maintaining relationships, volunteer work, and personal projects, and these are very often more meaningful to people than the jobs they do to pay the bills. So although it is nice to earn money, it contributes only a small percentage to the meaningfulness of the work.
Perhaps one element of the sense of purpose people get from hard labor is an illusion. Once, as I walked the mile home from the grocery store in the humid heat of the summer with a bag of groceries slung over my shoulder, I was exhausted. As I surveyed the long stretch of bicycle trail I had yet to get through, my heart sank. But then I had an idea. Instead of thinking of how much I had left to do, I started thinking of myself as a grocery-carrying machine. My purpose in life was to carry groceries, one step at a time, along the hot, humid bike trail. And wonder of wonders, I started to feel better. And the next thing I knew, I was across the road from my apartment. Convincing myself that I was a labor robot helped me in the moment, but I ultimately knew it was a delusion, and left it behind as soon as I got home. I can’t help but wonder if a good portion of society’s praise of hard work is a result of people unaware that they are continually under this delusion themselves.
However, there are other, more real factors that contribute to the sense of purpose in work. For one, we want to contribute to society’s prosperity. The modern world is full of comforts and conveniences, and we feel guilty if we partake in these without contributing our fair share of support.
Yet another possibility comes to mind from my own experience. As NaNoWriMo approaches, I’m reminded that every year I push myself so hard that I bring myself physical pain every day for a month, in order to complete an entire draft of a book that will never be published, no one will ever read, and I will never get paid for. What could drive me and so many others to voluntarily endure such torment? Well for me, the answer is simple; the experience of NaNoWriMo helps me to become a better writer. I find meaning in work that improves my skills and broadens my abilities to appreciate the variety of experiences that life has to offer. Self-improvement, with a sense of having earned it.
In a discussion about work, we cannot forget camaraderie. Shared struggles bring us together like nothing else. No matter what the job, no matter what the circumstances, having others to collaborate with, to share encouragement with, to move forward together with, makes it so much better than going through it alone.
Hard work by itself does not make life meaningful, nor does its absence. For every person, many different factors contribute different amounts. For some, the meaning in work is found in the reward, in the money earned. For others, the meaning is found in contributing to society, in making one’s community a better place. For others, the meaning is in the friendships forged in the flames of the struggle. For those like myself, the meaning is found in improving oneself, gaining skills and knowledge that lead to a greater enjoyment of everything life has to offer (although I wouldn't mind if you decided to click on the orange button on the sidebar). It’s not simple. There is no one answer. So instead of praising hard work for hard work’s sake, let’s remember that it’s the reasons we work that matter, and that everybody’s reasons are a little different from everybody else’s.
Friday, September 28, 2018
Respecting People with Different Beliefs
This post has a similar message to The Stigma Against Being Wrong
At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”
At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.
Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.
But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.
In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.
At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”
At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.
Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.
But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.
In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Building an Economics View: Basic Needs
Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality
I’ve recently noticed that when people say things I disagree with about economics, I find myself tempted to reply with an angry rant. I have no idea why any reasonable person would say something so obviously incorrect, so I feel it must be because they are a bad person, and I treat them as such. But when the fire dies down and I look at what I have said, I realize this is counter to my own philosophy of assuming people are good and peacefully allowing them to disagree with me. This suggests that the problem lies with me, not them.
So what is going on? When I think about it, I realize I’ve been through this before. This anger is a result of cognitive dissonance between my intellectual pride and evidence that one of my views is not well thought out. When I examine my views of economics with a clear head, I find an incoherent jumble of ideas mashed together from all kinds of different sources. One moment I will say something capitalist, the next something socialist, and the next something anarchist, without any notion of how they might fit together or contradict. Clearly this is no good.
With this realization, I have decided to do with economics what I have done in the past with religion and morality, and that is to break apart my crumbling views, sweep aside my cultural influences, and start over from a clean slate. This time, though, I am going to write up the process here on A Scientist’s Fiction, so that you, dear readers, may see my thought process as I go.
The first step, when constructing a view, is to define what we’re talking about. What is economics? The first thing that comes to mind is money, but that is an emergent feature of economics in practice. At a more basic level, economics is the study of the production and distribution of resources. It would be good to have a term that means a specific rule, tradition, or regulation that affects how things are produced and distributed, so let’s call those economic mechanisms. An economic system is a collection of economic mechanisms that work together as a whole.
There are two parts to economics. The first is to study economic mechanisms and systems to find out how they work and what they do. But before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what separates a good economic system from a bad one, or in other words, for what purposes we are producing resources.
About a year ago, we did a series on morality, in which I argued for a version of Utilitarianism that can be summed up as “more good is better.” Good is defined in another post as the perceptions we get through our moral sense, which is the same kind of sense as our most well-known five senses. The moral sense can be stimulated by circumstances, actions, states of being, etc. These things are not themselves good or bad, but take on a level of goodness when they are paired with someone's moral sense. In line with Deontology, everyone's individual good is equally valid. This gives us a context in which to construct our economics views. We are looking for systems and mechanisms that do as much good for as many people as possible.
Here we run into a problem. Economic mechanisms do very specific things. If “good” is different for everyone, how is it possible to know what kind of economic system will maximize it? What we need is an environment where people can pursue good in whatever form it takes for them. This is the motivation for the idea of basic human rights. The United States Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I am going to be pedantic and say it should have been the pursuit of a good life, because there are other forms of good besides happiness. The measure of an economic system, then, is how easy it makes exercising these rights to as many people as possible.
Some people believe that human rights are a government responsibility, and economics has nothing to do with it. But that view is misguided. If someone does not have enough food, they do not have liberty, because they must spend all of their energy to get food, rather than pursuing a good life. Sure, some people may find good lives by the same actions that get them food, but even for them there is no liberty if there is no choice.
In order for someone to be free to fully exercise their fundamental rights, they require a basic set of needs to be met. What are these basic needs? Well, in order to pursue a good life, people need food and water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. With these five needs covered (I count food and water as one), people have all that they require in order to pursue their own good, whether that be to earn money and live in more luxury, to volunteer for service projects, to plant and tend a personal garden, to contemplate the nature of existence, or any of a billion other ways for people to find meaning in life.
But what determines how much of the five basic needs is enough? After all, a person can live, albeit uncomfortably, on one meal a day. This question is not easy to answer, but at the very least, people should not have to spend energy worrying about how they are going to remain healthy and whether they will have sufficient options available for pursuing purpose. Perhaps we will examine this question more deeply in the future.
We now have a foundation for our views: an economic system or policy is good in proportion to the percentage of people to whom it provides sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. Of course, a system that adequately provides all of these things to everyone will have its own problems, and maybe we'll have a discussion about them in the future, but for now it makes sense to focus on the problems we face right now.
You may notice that we have not actually talked about any particular economic system or mechanism yet. That is because if we hadn't set up the moral foundation, we would have no way to evaluate it. I am not sure where this series will take us from here, but that is the beauty of constructing a new view. Maybe we will talk about work and purpose. Maybe we will talk about taxation and redistribution. Maybe we will talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the market. Whatever it is, it will be explored in the spirit of curiosity and of making the world better for everyone.
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality
I’ve recently noticed that when people say things I disagree with about economics, I find myself tempted to reply with an angry rant. I have no idea why any reasonable person would say something so obviously incorrect, so I feel it must be because they are a bad person, and I treat them as such. But when the fire dies down and I look at what I have said, I realize this is counter to my own philosophy of assuming people are good and peacefully allowing them to disagree with me. This suggests that the problem lies with me, not them.
So what is going on? When I think about it, I realize I’ve been through this before. This anger is a result of cognitive dissonance between my intellectual pride and evidence that one of my views is not well thought out. When I examine my views of economics with a clear head, I find an incoherent jumble of ideas mashed together from all kinds of different sources. One moment I will say something capitalist, the next something socialist, and the next something anarchist, without any notion of how they might fit together or contradict. Clearly this is no good.
With this realization, I have decided to do with economics what I have done in the past with religion and morality, and that is to break apart my crumbling views, sweep aside my cultural influences, and start over from a clean slate. This time, though, I am going to write up the process here on A Scientist’s Fiction, so that you, dear readers, may see my thought process as I go.
The first step, when constructing a view, is to define what we’re talking about. What is economics? The first thing that comes to mind is money, but that is an emergent feature of economics in practice. At a more basic level, economics is the study of the production and distribution of resources. It would be good to have a term that means a specific rule, tradition, or regulation that affects how things are produced and distributed, so let’s call those economic mechanisms. An economic system is a collection of economic mechanisms that work together as a whole.
There are two parts to economics. The first is to study economic mechanisms and systems to find out how they work and what they do. But before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what separates a good economic system from a bad one, or in other words, for what purposes we are producing resources.
About a year ago, we did a series on morality, in which I argued for a version of Utilitarianism that can be summed up as “more good is better.” Good is defined in another post as the perceptions we get through our moral sense, which is the same kind of sense as our most well-known five senses. The moral sense can be stimulated by circumstances, actions, states of being, etc. These things are not themselves good or bad, but take on a level of goodness when they are paired with someone's moral sense. In line with Deontology, everyone's individual good is equally valid. This gives us a context in which to construct our economics views. We are looking for systems and mechanisms that do as much good for as many people as possible.
Here we run into a problem. Economic mechanisms do very specific things. If “good” is different for everyone, how is it possible to know what kind of economic system will maximize it? What we need is an environment where people can pursue good in whatever form it takes for them. This is the motivation for the idea of basic human rights. The United States Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I am going to be pedantic and say it should have been the pursuit of a good life, because there are other forms of good besides happiness. The measure of an economic system, then, is how easy it makes exercising these rights to as many people as possible.
Some people believe that human rights are a government responsibility, and economics has nothing to do with it. But that view is misguided. If someone does not have enough food, they do not have liberty, because they must spend all of their energy to get food, rather than pursuing a good life. Sure, some people may find good lives by the same actions that get them food, but even for them there is no liberty if there is no choice.
In order for someone to be free to fully exercise their fundamental rights, they require a basic set of needs to be met. What are these basic needs? Well, in order to pursue a good life, people need food and water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. With these five needs covered (I count food and water as one), people have all that they require in order to pursue their own good, whether that be to earn money and live in more luxury, to volunteer for service projects, to plant and tend a personal garden, to contemplate the nature of existence, or any of a billion other ways for people to find meaning in life.
But what determines how much of the five basic needs is enough? After all, a person can live, albeit uncomfortably, on one meal a day. This question is not easy to answer, but at the very least, people should not have to spend energy worrying about how they are going to remain healthy and whether they will have sufficient options available for pursuing purpose. Perhaps we will examine this question more deeply in the future.
We now have a foundation for our views: an economic system or policy is good in proportion to the percentage of people to whom it provides sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. Of course, a system that adequately provides all of these things to everyone will have its own problems, and maybe we'll have a discussion about them in the future, but for now it makes sense to focus on the problems we face right now.
You may notice that we have not actually talked about any particular economic system or mechanism yet. That is because if we hadn't set up the moral foundation, we would have no way to evaluate it. I am not sure where this series will take us from here, but that is the beauty of constructing a new view. Maybe we will talk about work and purpose. Maybe we will talk about taxation and redistribution. Maybe we will talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the market. Whatever it is, it will be explored in the spirit of curiosity and of making the world better for everyone.
Friday, September 7, 2018
What is Good?
About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.
We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.
You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.
But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.
There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.
One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.
We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.
You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.
But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.
There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.
One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.
Friday, August 24, 2018
Why I Changed My Mind about the Quantum Multiverse
Recommended Pre-Reading:
Quantum Entanglement
Multiverses (Quantum Many Worlds section)
A truth seeker must always be open to new evidence. The new evidence must be added to the old, and all of it re-evaluated together. Sometimes the evidence in its greater context points in a direction other than what you thought was true, and when this happens, the wise person adjusts their beliefs accordingly. As a case in point, we’ll look at something I have had a strong opinion about on this blog, the quantum multiverse.
If you’ve read a lot of my science posts, you know I’ve been pretty hard on the quantum multiverse, also called the Many Worlds Hypothesis. In the multiverses discussion, I said I thought it was the least likely to be true out of the hypothetical multiverse types that come from physical theories. Since then, however, I have learned more about the arguments for its existence, most importantly the story of how the hypothesis came to be, and now I think it is reasonable to believe it exists.
Before we go any further, though, let’s remind ourselves what we are talking about. When quantum physics is mentioned, the layperson might think of the science of consciousness, or of parallel realities where events that were important to individual people or to human history played out differently. These are not quantum physics, they are purely science fiction, playing to our human bias that the universe revolves around us, and where “quantum” is used as a sneaky replacement for “magic.” Quantum physics, the real science, is the study of matter and energy at the scale of molecules and atoms and smaller.
When enough quantum particles interact together (millions, billions, trillions, and more), we get the classical physics that we know in our everyday life. We says that classical physics emerges from quantum physics. But classical physics is not the only thing that can emerge from quantum physics. Any property of quantum physics, when scaled up, can affect the macroscopic realm. Because of this, scientists and inventors have come up with technologies that use the unusual properties of quantum physics in technology, the most well-known example being the laser. Our experience of reality comes from the deeper reality of quantum physics, not the other way around. If quantum physics has implications that are counter-intuitive, we have every reason to take those implications seriously.
We’re going to talk about interpretations of quantum physics, so first things first, what exactly needs to be interpreted? It comes down to why we say quantum physics is weird: a quantum-sized particle can be in two states at once. What does that mean? Well, for example, an electron can be 50% spin up and 50% spin down at the same time. This is called superposition of states. It is like saying a basketball is spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. It seems like a contradiction, and for macroscopic objects like basketballs it is, but for subatomic particles, it is normal. If you measure the electron’s spin, you will find it to be 100% either spin up or spin down, and then it will behave differently. But it was not 100% up or down before the measurement; the very act of measurement has changed the particle’s properties. This is called “collapsing the wave function,” and it is what needs interpreting.
For the Copenhagen Interpretation, that is the end of the story. The universe has probability baked into it, and measurements roll the dice. But the Copenhagen Interpretation has a problem: what counts as a measurement? If you try to measure the property of a particle by using another particle, the wave function does not collapse. Instead, the particles become entangled, that is, they are both in a combined superposition of states. For example, if you try to measure an electron’s spin using another electron, then both electrons will end up 50% spin up and 50% spin down. But here is where things get interesting. By using more traditional measuring devices, when we measure the electrons’ spins, we will find that one of them is spin up and the other one is spin down. We can’t know which is which beforehand, because there isn’t an answer beforehand. The only thing that is set in reality before the measurement is the fact that their spins will turn out to be opposite.
But what makes a traditional measuring device different from a particle? All measuring devices are made out of particles themselves, after all. So shouldn’t the machine we use become entangled with the electron as well? The machine only shows us one answer, not a superposition of answers, so that seems not to be the case. Why not? This is the famous measurement problem.
One proposed resolution for the measurement problem is that the collapse of the wave function happens when the experiment is observed by a conscious being. That is, the instrument used to take the measurement registers both spin up and spin down until someone looks at it, whereafter the entangled wave function of the particle and the device measuring it collapses, showing just one result. In other words, perception defines reality. However, this requires substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is fundamentally different from the rest of reality, that mind and matter are completely different things. People have had a dualistic view of mind and matter for all of recorded history. It is intuitive; our DNA comes pre-loaded with a disposition toward believing it. It just feels true. But feeling true has no bearing on whether something actually is true, and the lack of scientific evidence in support of dualism suggests that there is some kind of equivalence between consciousness and matter, which would mean the conscious observation interpretation of quantum physics is impossible.
One day in the late ‘50s, physicist Hugh Everett came onto the scene with a radical suggestion: what if the wave function does not collapse at all? What if any interaction between particles makes them entangled? This would mean that two interacting electrons become entangled; when they are measured, the instrument that measures them becomes entangled; when the scientist interacts with the instrument, the scientist becomes entangled; and when the scientist interacts with the rest of the world, the rest of the world becomes entangled. This would mean that after the measurement, the entire world exists in a superposition state, which is 50% reality where the electron is spin up, and 50% reality where the electron is spin down. Put simply, it can be thought of as if there is one universe where the scientists observe the electron to be spin up, and another universe where they observe the electron to be spin down. This is the essence of the Many Worlds Interpretation.
This sounds weird, and it’s only going to get weirder. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So what made me change my mind? What makes the Many Worlds Interpretation more reasonable than any other? It all comes down to consistency. When particles only interact with one another, they get entangled. This is a well-documented scientific phenomenon. The larger the number of entangled particles, the harder it is to control all of them, so the easier it is for something external to the experiment to “mess up” the entanglement. But what would it mean to “mess up” an experiment? It’s just more particles interacting with the entangled system. And we know that when particles interact with other particles, they get entangled. So we could think of it as the external world coming in and messing up the experiment, but if we want to be consistent, we should say the entanglement is escaping to the rest of the world, including the brain of the person doing the experiment.
This is extremely counter-intuitive. I certainly feel like I am in one specific state, not a superposition. But what would being in a superposition feel like in the first place? We might imagine two images playing over our eyes, like a transparent movie playing over another movie. But that would only happen if the information from both states came together in the same brain. Remember, our brain is also in a superposition, not working as a single machine in both states. So a person in quantum superposition would feel completely normal, as if they and the objects they see and interact with are in state A, and not state B. And they would also feel as if they and the objects they interact with are in state B, and not in state A. Both are true, and they would notice nothing weird at all, because the states of their brain are completely cut off from each other. In effect, the universe has split in two, and that is where the “multiverse” idea comes in. More generally, as I argued in the multiverses discussion, it is not the splitting of distinct universes, but an infinite-dimensional smear of universe-ness.
And now, when I look back at my former self, I see a hypocrite. In the multiverses discussion, I said people are drawn to the Many Worlds Hypothesis because the idea that reality is simply probabilistic at the quantum scale is too weird. But I got it backward. The reason that people like my former self cling to the Copenhagen Interpretation is because the Many Worlds Hypothesis is too weird. But weird as it is, it is the only interpretation that solves all the puzzles of quantum physics and leaves no loose ends behind. It is the natural logical conclusion of entanglement, and it makes the measurement problem go away. Out of all the interpretations of quantum physics, those we discussed and those we did not, I now think Many Worlds is the most likely to be true.
But it’s just an interpretation, isn’t it? If it can’t be tested, then what is the point of debating it? Well first of all, here on A Scientist’s Fiction, we search for truth in whatever way we can, and if that means using pure logic, that is what we use. However, in this case, we don’t have to. We can test the quantum multiverse. After all, it’s not just parallel realities. That’s TV sci-fi. The quantum multiverse is an extension of regular old quantum entanglement, which we see in the lab all the time. It makes a prediction: if we have the right kind of experiment, we should be able to put a human being in quantum superposition. Researchers keep finding quantum properties in larger and larger systems, so it should be theoretically possible.
I don’t know how the exact details of such an experiment would play out, but it might go something like this. Imagine we send a human test subject into a room that is 100% soundproof, vibration-proof, and heat-proof. After we close the door, the subject sees either a red light or a blue light, triggered by the measurement of an electron’s spin within the room. To all outside observers, the subject would be in a superposition state of red + blue. Suppose this person was instructed to lightly touch one of two sensors, which connected to a second electron, telling it to either be spin up or spin down. The experimenters outside the room would then do tests on the two electrons, to see if they are in a superposition of states. If they are, then the human test subject is also in a superposition of states. Then they open the doors, the test subject walks out, and tells the researchers what color of light he or she saw. They then measure the particles, and indeed their spin is oriented in accordance with the prediction. This would mean that the test subject was entangled with the electrons, in a superposition of states, and now there are two universes, one where the subject saw red, and one where the subject saw blue. The quantum multiverse hypothesis would be supported by evidence from a prediction of its own.
Changing my mind due to more complete evidence is something I am well-practiced at, so when it came time for the quantum multiverse, it was no big deal for me. However, for those less practiced, it can be frightening. Maybe after reading this you are not convinced that the quantum multiverse exists, and that’s fine. Skepticism is healthy, especially for topics as complicated as quantum physics. But it is also healthy to direct your skepticism toward the beliefs you already hold, and I encourage you as a fellow truth seeker to reexamine your beliefs every now and then. Whether you find them to be valid or in need of replacement, I can guarantee the practice will make you wiser and bring you closer to the truth.
Quantum Entanglement
Multiverses (Quantum Many Worlds section)
A truth seeker must always be open to new evidence. The new evidence must be added to the old, and all of it re-evaluated together. Sometimes the evidence in its greater context points in a direction other than what you thought was true, and when this happens, the wise person adjusts their beliefs accordingly. As a case in point, we’ll look at something I have had a strong opinion about on this blog, the quantum multiverse.
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| By Paul Anglada on Flickr |
Before we go any further, though, let’s remind ourselves what we are talking about. When quantum physics is mentioned, the layperson might think of the science of consciousness, or of parallel realities where events that were important to individual people or to human history played out differently. These are not quantum physics, they are purely science fiction, playing to our human bias that the universe revolves around us, and where “quantum” is used as a sneaky replacement for “magic.” Quantum physics, the real science, is the study of matter and energy at the scale of molecules and atoms and smaller.
When enough quantum particles interact together (millions, billions, trillions, and more), we get the classical physics that we know in our everyday life. We says that classical physics emerges from quantum physics. But classical physics is not the only thing that can emerge from quantum physics. Any property of quantum physics, when scaled up, can affect the macroscopic realm. Because of this, scientists and inventors have come up with technologies that use the unusual properties of quantum physics in technology, the most well-known example being the laser. Our experience of reality comes from the deeper reality of quantum physics, not the other way around. If quantum physics has implications that are counter-intuitive, we have every reason to take those implications seriously.
We’re going to talk about interpretations of quantum physics, so first things first, what exactly needs to be interpreted? It comes down to why we say quantum physics is weird: a quantum-sized particle can be in two states at once. What does that mean? Well, for example, an electron can be 50% spin up and 50% spin down at the same time. This is called superposition of states. It is like saying a basketball is spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. It seems like a contradiction, and for macroscopic objects like basketballs it is, but for subatomic particles, it is normal. If you measure the electron’s spin, you will find it to be 100% either spin up or spin down, and then it will behave differently. But it was not 100% up or down before the measurement; the very act of measurement has changed the particle’s properties. This is called “collapsing the wave function,” and it is what needs interpreting.
For the Copenhagen Interpretation, that is the end of the story. The universe has probability baked into it, and measurements roll the dice. But the Copenhagen Interpretation has a problem: what counts as a measurement? If you try to measure the property of a particle by using another particle, the wave function does not collapse. Instead, the particles become entangled, that is, they are both in a combined superposition of states. For example, if you try to measure an electron’s spin using another electron, then both electrons will end up 50% spin up and 50% spin down. But here is where things get interesting. By using more traditional measuring devices, when we measure the electrons’ spins, we will find that one of them is spin up and the other one is spin down. We can’t know which is which beforehand, because there isn’t an answer beforehand. The only thing that is set in reality before the measurement is the fact that their spins will turn out to be opposite.
But what makes a traditional measuring device different from a particle? All measuring devices are made out of particles themselves, after all. So shouldn’t the machine we use become entangled with the electron as well? The machine only shows us one answer, not a superposition of answers, so that seems not to be the case. Why not? This is the famous measurement problem.
One proposed resolution for the measurement problem is that the collapse of the wave function happens when the experiment is observed by a conscious being. That is, the instrument used to take the measurement registers both spin up and spin down until someone looks at it, whereafter the entangled wave function of the particle and the device measuring it collapses, showing just one result. In other words, perception defines reality. However, this requires substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is fundamentally different from the rest of reality, that mind and matter are completely different things. People have had a dualistic view of mind and matter for all of recorded history. It is intuitive; our DNA comes pre-loaded with a disposition toward believing it. It just feels true. But feeling true has no bearing on whether something actually is true, and the lack of scientific evidence in support of dualism suggests that there is some kind of equivalence between consciousness and matter, which would mean the conscious observation interpretation of quantum physics is impossible.
One day in the late ‘50s, physicist Hugh Everett came onto the scene with a radical suggestion: what if the wave function does not collapse at all? What if any interaction between particles makes them entangled? This would mean that two interacting electrons become entangled; when they are measured, the instrument that measures them becomes entangled; when the scientist interacts with the instrument, the scientist becomes entangled; and when the scientist interacts with the rest of the world, the rest of the world becomes entangled. This would mean that after the measurement, the entire world exists in a superposition state, which is 50% reality where the electron is spin up, and 50% reality where the electron is spin down. Put simply, it can be thought of as if there is one universe where the scientists observe the electron to be spin up, and another universe where they observe the electron to be spin down. This is the essence of the Many Worlds Interpretation.
This sounds weird, and it’s only going to get weirder. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So what made me change my mind? What makes the Many Worlds Interpretation more reasonable than any other? It all comes down to consistency. When particles only interact with one another, they get entangled. This is a well-documented scientific phenomenon. The larger the number of entangled particles, the harder it is to control all of them, so the easier it is for something external to the experiment to “mess up” the entanglement. But what would it mean to “mess up” an experiment? It’s just more particles interacting with the entangled system. And we know that when particles interact with other particles, they get entangled. So we could think of it as the external world coming in and messing up the experiment, but if we want to be consistent, we should say the entanglement is escaping to the rest of the world, including the brain of the person doing the experiment.
This is extremely counter-intuitive. I certainly feel like I am in one specific state, not a superposition. But what would being in a superposition feel like in the first place? We might imagine two images playing over our eyes, like a transparent movie playing over another movie. But that would only happen if the information from both states came together in the same brain. Remember, our brain is also in a superposition, not working as a single machine in both states. So a person in quantum superposition would feel completely normal, as if they and the objects they see and interact with are in state A, and not state B. And they would also feel as if they and the objects they interact with are in state B, and not in state A. Both are true, and they would notice nothing weird at all, because the states of their brain are completely cut off from each other. In effect, the universe has split in two, and that is where the “multiverse” idea comes in. More generally, as I argued in the multiverses discussion, it is not the splitting of distinct universes, but an infinite-dimensional smear of universe-ness.
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| By Maria Morri on Flickr |
But it’s just an interpretation, isn’t it? If it can’t be tested, then what is the point of debating it? Well first of all, here on A Scientist’s Fiction, we search for truth in whatever way we can, and if that means using pure logic, that is what we use. However, in this case, we don’t have to. We can test the quantum multiverse. After all, it’s not just parallel realities. That’s TV sci-fi. The quantum multiverse is an extension of regular old quantum entanglement, which we see in the lab all the time. It makes a prediction: if we have the right kind of experiment, we should be able to put a human being in quantum superposition. Researchers keep finding quantum properties in larger and larger systems, so it should be theoretically possible.
I don’t know how the exact details of such an experiment would play out, but it might go something like this. Imagine we send a human test subject into a room that is 100% soundproof, vibration-proof, and heat-proof. After we close the door, the subject sees either a red light or a blue light, triggered by the measurement of an electron’s spin within the room. To all outside observers, the subject would be in a superposition state of red + blue. Suppose this person was instructed to lightly touch one of two sensors, which connected to a second electron, telling it to either be spin up or spin down. The experimenters outside the room would then do tests on the two electrons, to see if they are in a superposition of states. If they are, then the human test subject is also in a superposition of states. Then they open the doors, the test subject walks out, and tells the researchers what color of light he or she saw. They then measure the particles, and indeed their spin is oriented in accordance with the prediction. This would mean that the test subject was entangled with the electrons, in a superposition of states, and now there are two universes, one where the subject saw red, and one where the subject saw blue. The quantum multiverse hypothesis would be supported by evidence from a prediction of its own.
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| Schrödinger's Cat |
Friday, August 17, 2018
Negative Morality: The Divine Hierarchy
Morality:
Intuitionism
Authoritarianism
Divine Command and Attributes
Ethical Egoism
Utilitarianism
Virtue and the Golden Rule
Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy
A year ago, we did a series on morality, where we looked at the philosophy of morality, and the moral systems that are discussed in intellectual conversations. Since then, it occurred to me while thinking about the viewpoints of villains and bad people, as well as some misguided people with good hearts, that there are other moral views we have not talked about. These moral systems are not widely considered by philosophers, because they cause oppression and suffering, rather than reduce it. So I have decided to do a mini-series called Negative Morality, where we take a look at these moral systems, so that we may avoid their pitfalls in our own views.
If I were to start the moral series over, I would put Ethical Egoism and Authoritarianism in the negative morality category. But the original series has a structure to it, and I don’t want to mess that up by reclassifying them.
Our topic for today is what I call the divine hierarchy. The concept is simple: the degree to which you are good or evil, holy or unholy, worthy or unworthy, is not primarily determined by what you do, but by what you are. It usually goes something like this: above all are the gods (or just God), beneath them are holy beings like angels, below them are mortal men, below mortals are the animals, and below the animals are demons and unholy monsters. Within each category, humans especially, the beings may be divided into sub-classes, which may either be stratified into discrete levels or smeared out over a continuous spectrum.
This leads to the divine hierarchy’s biggest and most obvious flaw: it makes it very easy to justify prejudice of all kinds. In the hierarchy, men are usually placed above women, the upper classes above the lower classes, and the people of the nations whose armies conquer above the peoples who are conquered. For example, the West has a historical dark side of seeing the world as full of morally inferior savages, theirs for the conquering. History is much more complicated than that, of course, with many positives and negatives, and it can be argued that the attitude of colonialism has greatly diminished from the modern world, but that is a discussion for another time. The point is that a morality structured around a divine hierarchy makes it easy to justify racism, sexism, and discrimination by all other kinds of immutable characteristics. “Know your place” is a common phrase to hear from someone higher in the hierarchy to someone lower down who tries to exercise more freedom than is considered appropriate for them.
In some versions of divine moral hierarchy, it is possible to move up or down the spectrum by performing good or bad actions. More often than not, it’s easy to move down, but very hard to move back up. There is a set of actions, usually based on notions of cleanliness and obedience, that are identified as “bad,” not because the consequences hurt people, but because the action covers you with an invisible sludge called “sin” and makes you less holy. Once covered in sin, there is one of two ways to have it removed, depending on which hierarchy model one believes in. The first is to do penance, an action prescribed by the religious leaders as a medicine for the soul, which may or may not result in good actually being done. The second is to pray that God (or whichever of the gods views you favorably) will be merciful and “wash your sin away” instead of bringing upon you the punishment which your unholy existence deserves.
It should be noted that divine moral hierarchy is not the only context in which sin and religion can be viewed. Some perspectives are not so harsh. There are also other ways that people justify prejudice. We have talked about some of them in other contexts elsewhere on this blog, and may do so more in the future.
If used in a fantasy story, a divine moral hierarchy doesn’t have to be bad. Middle Earth, the setting for The Lord of the Rings, exists in a Divine Hierarchy, with Illuvatar the creator on top; then the Valar, which included Sauron’s master; then the Maiar, which include Sauron and the wizards; and then the elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. It is also present in the lesser known Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, with Maleldil (basically Jesus) on top, the Eldila (angel-like sci-fi beings) below him, the hnau (sentient creatures) below them, and non-sentient animals implicitly below them. In fiction, we can look at the downsides of a divine hierarchy, or anything really, and say “in this world, the bad consequences just don’t happen.”
If a moral system leads to more suffering than would exist without it, then it is not moral. The idea that people have moral worth based on the genetic lottery of birth clearly does more harm than good, and we should train ourselves to avoid slipping into that way of thinking. If we see others who are consciously or unconsciously influenced by a negative morality, then we should kindly and respectfully ask questions that lead them toward recognizing it.
Intuitionism
Authoritarianism
Divine Command and Attributes
Ethical Egoism
Utilitarianism
Virtue and the Golden Rule
Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy
A year ago, we did a series on morality, where we looked at the philosophy of morality, and the moral systems that are discussed in intellectual conversations. Since then, it occurred to me while thinking about the viewpoints of villains and bad people, as well as some misguided people with good hearts, that there are other moral views we have not talked about. These moral systems are not widely considered by philosophers, because they cause oppression and suffering, rather than reduce it. So I have decided to do a mini-series called Negative Morality, where we take a look at these moral systems, so that we may avoid their pitfalls in our own views.
If I were to start the moral series over, I would put Ethical Egoism and Authoritarianism in the negative morality category. But the original series has a structure to it, and I don’t want to mess that up by reclassifying them.
Our topic for today is what I call the divine hierarchy. The concept is simple: the degree to which you are good or evil, holy or unholy, worthy or unworthy, is not primarily determined by what you do, but by what you are. It usually goes something like this: above all are the gods (or just God), beneath them are holy beings like angels, below them are mortal men, below mortals are the animals, and below the animals are demons and unholy monsters. Within each category, humans especially, the beings may be divided into sub-classes, which may either be stratified into discrete levels or smeared out over a continuous spectrum.
This leads to the divine hierarchy’s biggest and most obvious flaw: it makes it very easy to justify prejudice of all kinds. In the hierarchy, men are usually placed above women, the upper classes above the lower classes, and the people of the nations whose armies conquer above the peoples who are conquered. For example, the West has a historical dark side of seeing the world as full of morally inferior savages, theirs for the conquering. History is much more complicated than that, of course, with many positives and negatives, and it can be argued that the attitude of colonialism has greatly diminished from the modern world, but that is a discussion for another time. The point is that a morality structured around a divine hierarchy makes it easy to justify racism, sexism, and discrimination by all other kinds of immutable characteristics. “Know your place” is a common phrase to hear from someone higher in the hierarchy to someone lower down who tries to exercise more freedom than is considered appropriate for them.
In some versions of divine moral hierarchy, it is possible to move up or down the spectrum by performing good or bad actions. More often than not, it’s easy to move down, but very hard to move back up. There is a set of actions, usually based on notions of cleanliness and obedience, that are identified as “bad,” not because the consequences hurt people, but because the action covers you with an invisible sludge called “sin” and makes you less holy. Once covered in sin, there is one of two ways to have it removed, depending on which hierarchy model one believes in. The first is to do penance, an action prescribed by the religious leaders as a medicine for the soul, which may or may not result in good actually being done. The second is to pray that God (or whichever of the gods views you favorably) will be merciful and “wash your sin away” instead of bringing upon you the punishment which your unholy existence deserves.
It should be noted that divine moral hierarchy is not the only context in which sin and religion can be viewed. Some perspectives are not so harsh. There are also other ways that people justify prejudice. We have talked about some of them in other contexts elsewhere on this blog, and may do so more in the future.
If used in a fantasy story, a divine moral hierarchy doesn’t have to be bad. Middle Earth, the setting for The Lord of the Rings, exists in a Divine Hierarchy, with Illuvatar the creator on top; then the Valar, which included Sauron’s master; then the Maiar, which include Sauron and the wizards; and then the elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. It is also present in the lesser known Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, with Maleldil (basically Jesus) on top, the Eldila (angel-like sci-fi beings) below him, the hnau (sentient creatures) below them, and non-sentient animals implicitly below them. In fiction, we can look at the downsides of a divine hierarchy, or anything really, and say “in this world, the bad consequences just don’t happen.”
If a moral system leads to more suffering than would exist without it, then it is not moral. The idea that people have moral worth based on the genetic lottery of birth clearly does more harm than good, and we should train ourselves to avoid slipping into that way of thinking. If we see others who are consciously or unconsciously influenced by a negative morality, then we should kindly and respectfully ask questions that lead them toward recognizing it.
Friday, August 3, 2018
Beware the Scapegoat Mentality
In the world today, there are a lot of negative feelings going around. People feel uneasy and resentful, and they don’t know why. It is as if there is some unseen hand quietly out to get them from the shadows. So when someone stands up, points a finger, and says, “those people are the reason you feel this way,” they are met with praise and adoration, because now the people have a name and a face to blame for their unhappiness.
The person or people at whom the fingers point is called a scapegoat. Perhaps they or a person from their group have done something awful, but it is more likely that their public actions are looked over with a fine-toothed comb for one little speck of dirt that people can use to justify believing that they are a bad person. Scapegoating is a tragedy, because at best it takes the reputations of innocent people and drags them through the mud, and at worst it results in a witch hunt. It is the easy way out, a simple solution that requires no thought. It does not solve the problem, only gives people a sense of self-righteousness and retribution.
Don’t fall prey to those who would create a scapegoat. And don’t scapegoat those who scapegoat others; that’s still scapegoating.
Immigrants. Atheists. Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The President or other national leader, current or past. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Conservatives and Republicans. The media. Drugs. Guns. Capitalism. Socialism. Postmodernism. The Patriarchy. These are all used as scapegoats, and while you may be able to find fault with any of them, none of them are the real problem.
So what do real problems look like? Because they are real, they behave like reality, with a well-defined mechanism in which every part fits logically with every other. To find them, it takes a willingness to put in the work, and a commitment to truth, no matter what it turns out to be. Focusing on who is to blame doesn’t solve anything, so let’s put our anger and discomfort aside, and look for the real problem and real ways to solve it.
Friday, July 27, 2018
What is Knowledge?
When we are children, knowledge is simple. Our parents and other people we trust tell us things, and we believe them. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call this method radical credulity. Of course, now that we are older, we understand that this way of thinking lets incorrect ideas in just as easily as correct ones. This is one reason we keep our kids in safe environments with trustworthy people.
A simple method to filter out ideas that are probably incorrect from ideas that are probably correct is to believe things that are reliably useful. This is called pragmatism. How do we know the Earth is more sphere-like than flat? Because treating the Earth as a sphere gets our airplanes to their destinations, while treating it as flat does not. The pragmatist view is that we believe things that let us reliably predict the consequences of our actions, so that we can effectively do what we are trying to do. It’s as the old defense of the scientific method says: we believe it because it works.
But pragmatism has its shortcomings. For example, most of the time, we live as if the Earth is flat, so there is not usually any problem with believing it to be so. However, there are circumstances where this belief could be catastrophic. Of course the pragmatist will say that we should treat the Earth as flat or round depending on the situation, and the real truth of its shape doesn’t matter. However, for many of us, it isn’t good enough to believe things because they are useful; we want to believe things because they are justifiably true, and pragmatism does not do this for us.
In the middle of the last century, psychologist Jean Piaget came up with a theory of knowledge called constructivism, which says we don’t simply acquire knowledge, we create it as a logical network. When we hear a new claim, we evaluate it by how well it fits with what we already know, and if we find no contradictions, we add it to the network. If we do find a contradiction, we either toss it out or reevaluate the belief that it conflicts with. Right away, we see something in constructivism that was missing from radical credulity and pragmatism: logic. The beliefs we hold are connected to each other by threads of non-contradiction.
However, as we all know, it is possible to have beliefs that are false. Adding a new belief that doesn’t conflict with a false belief doesn’t help us come to the truth. One way to attempt to rectify this is to take the beliefs that we are most confident and passionate about as an immutable foundation, and build our knowledge of the world around them. In philosophy lingo, these beliefs are called basic beliefs.
Of course, if people just take whatever they please as basic beliefs, we will find people with all kinds of beliefs that contradict each other’s, and they’ll stubbornly yell at each other until they’re blue in the face. Faced with this problem philosophers sought what could be called properly basic beliefs, truths which are so obvious and undeniable that it is impossible for them to be false. DesCartes famously took his own existence to be properly basic, and the philosophy of empiricism holds the validity of logic, mathematics, and observation as such.
Unfortunately, we run into another problem: we cannot agree on what beliefs should count as properly basic! Take any belief that is proposed as properly basic, and you will be able to find people who doubt it. Mathematics? Can be doubted. Objective reality? Can be doubted. “I think, therefore I am”? Can be doubted! What’s more, since properly basic beliefs are supposed to be the foundation upon which all other knowledge is constructed, the only argument that can be made for a belief to be properly basic is, “can’t you see it’s obvious?” Not exactly up to academic standards!
In the absence of anything that could justifiably be called properly basic, we might, with heavy heart, be tempted to conclude that knowledge is, in fact, impossible, and that everything is just mights and maybes. This is a pessimistic outlook, and not one most of us are comfortable with. In order to avoid it, we might choose a basic belief on radical credulity, usually called “faith” in this context. Or we might revert to pragmatism, and choose a belief that has proved reliable time and again as our basic belief.
I, however, subscribe to a third option, and that is to view knowledge in terms of probabilities instead of just yes or no. Although it may be impossible to know anything with a justified certainty of 100% with an infinite number of decimal places, we can be justifiably 90% certain, or 99.999% certain. We may not be able to calculate the numbers, but with practice we can guess the ballpark.
How is the level of certainty of a belief determined? By how well it connects into the knowledge network. Reality itself is one giant network where everything connects to everything else, so the larger a person’s knowledge network and the more interconnected it is, the more likely the beliefs in the network are to be true. To understand why, the jigsaw puzzle analogy is apt. When building a puzzle, there is a small chance that two pieces will fit, even though they don’t actually go together. But the chance that the same piece will fit incorrectly on two sides is much smaller. So to be sure you have the right piece, you want to try to connect it to the picture by more than one side. The chance of it being the right piece is even higher if there is a fourth piece connecting the two connecting pieces together, so that you have a square of four pieces. And the more pieces that can be added on to the connecting pieces, the higher the chance of each of them being the right piece.
Knowledge is like that, except there are plenty of extra pieces that don’t go to the puzzle, the chance of an incorrect connection is much higher, and the pieces can hook on to an arbitrarily large number of other pieces, which don’t have to be right next to each other. The knowledge puzzle also gets scaled up to more complex levels. With knowledge, you can have two packages of tightly-knit beliefs, but these packages only have a few connections between them. Imagine two balls of string connected to each other by three threads. Each ball is tightly connected, so they each individually have a high chance of being true, but their connection to each other is tenuous. If you discover that the two packages of beliefs contradict each other, either by learning something new or by thinking about them both in new ways, then you might have to make the tough decision to let one of them go.
When a contradiction is found between two sets of beliefs that one has, it is called cognitive dissonance, and depending on the complexity of the beliefs in question, as well as how attached we are to them, it can manifest as a physical headache. We instinctively want to get rid of the cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible. There are two ways to do this. The first, is to commit to whichever beliefs are most important to you, taking them, at least temporarily, as basic beliefs. The second takes longer, but it leaves you in a more stable place, and that is to take apart each package of beliefs and reevaluate them in the broader context of your total knowledge network, and by learning about the relevant topics from a variety of external sources.
A mind well-practiced in the art of knowledge construction will take time every so often to reevaluate the pieces of their knowledge network, to make sure it all fits together properly. There are many techniques to this, which we explore on this blog in the “Toolbelt of Knowledge” series.
There is still one teeny tiny issue with constructivism without basic beliefs, which you may have picked up on. Constructivism itself is a model, a sub-network of nodes within the larger network of a person’s knowledge. In particular, the belief that “the more solidly integrated a belief is within the network, the more likely it is to be true,” is itself a node in the network. This means that it must be subject to the same reevaluation process as everything else, or be taken as properly basic on faith.
But we don’t do that kind of faith here at SciFic. As you know if you’ve read “The Limit of Philosophy,” we prefer to race headlong into the trippy world of metalogic. So what happens when we allow ourselves to doubt the very method we use to determine what is true? Well, we just do the same thing we do with everything else: evaluate it. If it does not measure up to its own standards, then we get rid of it. If it is self-consistent, and we don’t have any alternative methods that are more self-consistent than this one, then we might as well use it. But one last question: why should we use self-consistency as a measure for whether a method of determining truth is valid? Because, as human beings, we are psychologically driven toward consistency. Of course, that’s not a logical reason, but remember, the most fundamental question is not “what is true?” but “what should we do?” and our action is driven by our unconscious psychology rather than logic.
As children, we are told all kinds of claims, which we accept on radical credulity. Then, we evaluate new things by a combination of how useful they are and how well they integrate into our networks of knowledge. A mature, practiced thinker will not take any claim as foundational, but evaluate and reevaluate every part of their network by how well it connects with the rest. That is knowledge.
Friday, July 13, 2018
Beneath the Words
Why do we speak? Why do we write? It’s because we have something to communicate, so we do it with the words whose definitions represent it most correctly, right? No, not usually. We naturally think that whenever we speak, the most important thing is the topic of conversation, but really the content of the words rarely matters; it’s the context that lies beneath them that is important. A person wants to convey a feeling, or connect with another person, or find mental stimulus, or show dominance, and so they choose their words, tone, and body language in order to do it. The literal definitions of the words are often little more than a distraction.
When we engage in small talk, we aren’t really talking about our relatives and the weather, but showing the other person that they are worth our time. Or, we might be showing off our competence, that we have something useful to offer about any topic the conversation turns to. Or, by uttering specific phrases or sympathies with certain viewpoints, we might be signaling different aspects of ourselves, to see if we can connect with the other person.
Oftentimes people will repeat sayings or claims in order to signal they belong to a group. “Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem,” “all white people are a little bit racist,” “Make America great again,” and “The Lord is risen,” are all examples. People who say these things may believe that they’re conveying a literal message, but really they’re feeling out whether the person they are talking to belongs to the same group as they do.
When someone says, “global warming is a hoax,” they aren’t talking about global warming. Instead, they are signaling to their in-group, as described above, but they are also doing something else. Because it contradicts the words of those in power, it gives them a thrill of freedom, effectively saying, “you can’t tell me what to say.” Alternatively, when a representative of an oil company says the same words, they are trying to get money. Neither is actually talking about the scientific phenomenon of global warming.
When does the literal content of the words matter? Remember, the fundamental question is what we should do, not what is true. Everything in our lives comes down to determining what actions we choose and how much effort we put into them. Thus, the literal meanings of our words are only directly important when those who are speaking are trying to get those who are listening to cooperatively do something. More specifically, instructions, laws, teaching, and problem solving.
But what about philosophy? What about intellectual conversations and blog discussions? Aren’t those impossible without taking the literal meanings of the words? That’s true, but the meanings of the words are only important because they facilitate the purpose of the discussion, which is to engage the rational part of the brain. Let’s take this blog for example. It’s very analytical, talking about my thoughts and observations about things. Its lifeblood is the content of the words. But it’s not these words that matter; I could talk about any of a million things, and it would serve its purpose just fine. That purpose is to think out loud, to arrange my thoughts and perceptions into a picture that makes sense. And your purpose for reading it is most likely the same.
But seriously, I’m a writer. Shouldn’t I, of all people, believe in the value of words? Of course I do. It’s just that, as a writer, it’s more important to me than to anyone to recognize that it’s not the definitions of the words that are most important, but understanding the purpose beneath the words, so that I can use them in the best way to fulfill that purpose. A good story needs to make logical sense in order to keep the logical part of the brain satisfied, but more importantly it has to engage the reader’s emotions and imagination. If a story just tells about how this happens and the characters go there and do that, it’s boring and not worth reading. This is where the power of songs and poems come from. You’ve probably noticed that the best ones aren’t the ones that tell a logical story or are literally descriptive, but the ones that stir the emotions and the imagination. It’s not the words that matter, but the purpose beneath the words.
Friday, July 6, 2018
A House United
This Fourth of July, I find myself thinking about the wellbeing of the United States. We find ourselves politically polarized, with a populist President whose hobby is trolling the world on Twitter. Income inequality continues to grow, the people of the working middle class remaining where they are or becoming poor. Worries of global warming and technology getting out of hand fester beneath the ever-present slumbering form of nuclear war.
There are two general methods people believe will solve our problems. If you’re on the political left, you might think the government needs to get its act together, increasing taxes on the rich and on industries which harm the environment, and increase spending on the poor and organizations and institutions that foster creativity, like education. If you’re on the political right, you might think the government needs to pull back on regulations and taxes that keep businesses from utilizing the power of the market to its full potential.
On top of that, there is a gargantuan mess of social issues that our political groups have grabbed onto, so that if you disagree on what I just mentioned above, you probably disagree on the rest too. Regulation of weapons. Abortion. Equity for women, racial minorities, and LGBT+. For these and many more, the conversation rarely goes further than whether we are for it or against it, so that we can gauge whether the person we are talking to belongs to our group or the other group. This mindset is called tribalism, and it is a tragedy, because it treats important, complex, nuanced issues as nothing more than a means to determine sides.
There was a famous experiment called the Robbers Cave Experiment, named after the park it took place at, done by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. At a summer camp, a group of boys did bonding activities, and came to like each other. A few days into the week, it was revealed that there was another group of boys at the park. This group had gone through the same program as the first group, but neither of the groups had known about each other. Now that they did, phase two of the experiment began.
The groups were given activities where they had to compete with one another. The group that won got the prize, and the group that lost got nothing. After a few days of this, the groups hated each other. They called each other names, stole, and even got violent. At this point, the experimenters knew it was time for phase three.
Phase three of the experiment had a series of crises come up, fabricated by the experimenters. These crises affected all of the boys in both groups, and the only way to solve them was for all of them to work together. After a few of these crises, the groups started getting along, despite the bad blood that had been brewing from phase two.
The Robbers Cave Experiment shows us that when we humans compete, we think negatively about each other, but when we cooperate, we think positively about each other. Of course, it is not conclusive that it applies to everyone, since all of the subjects were boys, and they had similar backgrounds. But the result feels right; we can put ourselves in the boys’ shoes, and see ourselves behaving the same way. Also, the Robbers Cave experiment was carried out 60 years ago, and all of the experiments in the field since then have agreed with its results.
Progressives and conservatives, however, are not the same, on average. In the Big Five Traits theory of personality, people with high openness to new ideas and experiences are more likely to be politically progressive—wanting to try new things to make the world better—and people with high conscientiousness are more likely to be conservative—wanting to make sure the world keeps running and doesn’t fall apart. And while it is not a hard and fast rule, and personality traits are malleable with effort, it shows that political orientation has a genetic component.
If you take a moment to think about what “progressive” and “conservative” mean; making things better, and not making things worse; you will see that both perspectives are absolutely necessary for keeping a society alive. There isn’t a right side and a wrong one here. We, the US—no, the world—need both conservative and progressive heads at the table in order to make it through our 21st century problems. The great human endeavor did not start on July 4, 1776, nor did it end. Let’s stop competing over the country, and take a serious look at the issues. Let’s listen to each other, and work together to create a country and a world where all people can live freely and safely to pursue their own happiness in whatever form it takes.
Friday, June 29, 2018
The Stigma Against Being Wrong
When it comes to knowing things, we like to be right. We give praise to people who have lots of knowledge, and ridicule those who hold false beliefs. We feel it is our duty to correct them, because we feel it is wrong for people to believe false things. In fact, we use the same word, “wrong,” that we use to describe evil actions.
Why do we do this? Why do we feel so strongly that everyone should believe the truth, or at least as much of the truth as we feel should be obvious? Perhaps we believe that they must have based their beliefs on faulty reasoning, and by using that same reasoning they’ll fall prey to con artists and propaganda. Perhaps it is because we fear their false beliefs will cause them to hurt people. Perhaps it is because we care about them and don’t want them living in delusion. Part of it is certainly because we are afraid that our own beliefs might not be as well-grounded as we think, and the more people who agree with us, the more comfortable we can be with those beliefs.
Regardless, we treat having false beliefs as an abnormal condition that must be corrected. However, this stigma does more harm than good. Other people are as certain in their beliefs as we are in ours, and instead of seeing the truth in our words, they think we are the ones who need correcting. This leads to closed minds and hostility, and leaves us worse off than when we started.
To avoid this, to have good relationships and work productively together, we need to recognize that if someone believes something that is not true, it does not make them a bad person. If someone has the wrong idea of God or insists that the Earth is flat, it’s not that big a deal. Let them believe what they believe. The world is big enough for the both of you. No one believes only true things. We are all full of bias and assumptions. We are human, and what we really need is to be respected, not pressured to conform our beliefs to someone else’s expectations.
There is a time and place for everything.The time to debate facts with reason and evidence is when both parties come to the table with open minds, ready to think about things in new ways. This means you have to be willing to listen to them too, and change your mind if they present a good enough argument.
There are also times when a person’s convictions must be challenged, like when they believe God told them to kill someone. The line between false beliefs that are tolerable and those that are not is when they cause the person holding them to neglect their responsibilities. What exactly counts as a responsibility is debatable, but many of the things we argue about, like the compatibility of science and religion, are not even close.
This message is as much for me as for anyone. When I hear someone say biological evolution doesn’t happen, or universal basic income is socialism, or global warming is a hoax, I get mad. A few weeks ago, after I started writing this, I made a fiery reply to someone’s facebook post about multiverses. Reflecting on it afterward, I wondered if I was qualified to speak about being tolerant of others’ beliefs. However, I’ve realized that respectfully allowing others to be wrong is important enough that it’s worth saying, even if I’m not a shining exemplar of it.
Why do we do this? Why do we feel so strongly that everyone should believe the truth, or at least as much of the truth as we feel should be obvious? Perhaps we believe that they must have based their beliefs on faulty reasoning, and by using that same reasoning they’ll fall prey to con artists and propaganda. Perhaps it is because we fear their false beliefs will cause them to hurt people. Perhaps it is because we care about them and don’t want them living in delusion. Part of it is certainly because we are afraid that our own beliefs might not be as well-grounded as we think, and the more people who agree with us, the more comfortable we can be with those beliefs.
Regardless, we treat having false beliefs as an abnormal condition that must be corrected. However, this stigma does more harm than good. Other people are as certain in their beliefs as we are in ours, and instead of seeing the truth in our words, they think we are the ones who need correcting. This leads to closed minds and hostility, and leaves us worse off than when we started.
To avoid this, to have good relationships and work productively together, we need to recognize that if someone believes something that is not true, it does not make them a bad person. If someone has the wrong idea of God or insists that the Earth is flat, it’s not that big a deal. Let them believe what they believe. The world is big enough for the both of you. No one believes only true things. We are all full of bias and assumptions. We are human, and what we really need is to be respected, not pressured to conform our beliefs to someone else’s expectations.
There is a time and place for everything.The time to debate facts with reason and evidence is when both parties come to the table with open minds, ready to think about things in new ways. This means you have to be willing to listen to them too, and change your mind if they present a good enough argument.
There are also times when a person’s convictions must be challenged, like when they believe God told them to kill someone. The line between false beliefs that are tolerable and those that are not is when they cause the person holding them to neglect their responsibilities. What exactly counts as a responsibility is debatable, but many of the things we argue about, like the compatibility of science and religion, are not even close.
This message is as much for me as for anyone. When I hear someone say biological evolution doesn’t happen, or universal basic income is socialism, or global warming is a hoax, I get mad. A few weeks ago, after I started writing this, I made a fiery reply to someone’s facebook post about multiverses. Reflecting on it afterward, I wondered if I was qualified to speak about being tolerant of others’ beliefs. However, I’ve realized that respectfully allowing others to be wrong is important enough that it’s worth saying, even if I’m not a shining exemplar of it.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Limits of the World – The Well of Images, Part 3
Read “Limits of the World” at WritersCafe.org.
Though it’s been four months, another installment of The Well of Images is finished, beta tested, and ready to read. We pick up with Samuel and Hope on their journey through the Unconscious Realms, as they search for the next symbol of the torch that will lead them forward.
“Limits of the World” is part 3 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.
There are times, during the course of writing a story, when excitement for how amazing it will be later makes it hard to concentrate on the page in front of you. It feels like you are stuck at a boring part, and you wish you could skip ahead to the good stuff. That’s where I was with “Limits of the World.” I couldn’t wait to get to the parts of the story where the archetypal themes shine, but I was stuck with a part where the main characters run around on a scavenger hunt. Still, it was important. The best parts of a story can only have justice done to them if they are properly built up to.
So I toiled away at “Limits,” adding structure to the narrative, making sure that everything that happened was there for a purpose, and that the descriptions were interesting and representative of the viewpoint character. And you know what? It turned out well.
The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game
If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per blog post would be a great encouragement.
Though it’s been four months, another installment of The Well of Images is finished, beta tested, and ready to read. We pick up with Samuel and Hope on their journey through the Unconscious Realms, as they search for the next symbol of the torch that will lead them forward.
“Limits of the World” is part 3 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.
There are times, during the course of writing a story, when excitement for how amazing it will be later makes it hard to concentrate on the page in front of you. It feels like you are stuck at a boring part, and you wish you could skip ahead to the good stuff. That’s where I was with “Limits of the World.” I couldn’t wait to get to the parts of the story where the archetypal themes shine, but I was stuck with a part where the main characters run around on a scavenger hunt. Still, it was important. The best parts of a story can only have justice done to them if they are properly built up to.
So I toiled away at “Limits,” adding structure to the narrative, making sure that everything that happened was there for a purpose, and that the descriptions were interesting and representative of the viewpoint character. And you know what? It turned out well.
The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game
If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per blog post would be a great encouragement.
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