saturn return to sender

I think people and the media (mostly) miss the point. It’s necessary to ask whether the policies the Obama administration brings to the office are the right policies. The debate—the tension between the essential conservative and liberal viewpoints—is healthy. Obama’s policies may result in good or ill, or (more likely) some of one, some of the other. I am not an expert on the economy, for example, and though I do tend to think that power should not be concentrated among the empowered, and so am for Obama’s policies, I am definitely ready to admit to the value of the conservative point of view.

But one thing Obama brings (returns?) to the office, and to government, and to our culture, which is in my mind unequivocally, marvelously, giddiness-inducing good, is the intellectual honesty required to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t honestly look at ourselves outside of ideology, it doesn’t matter what the policies are, because we won’t have honest access to the feedback of their effects, we can’t correct course when something goes wrong, and Rome will burn. This has nothing to do with liberal versus conservative philosophies, but does seem to have to do with the current Republican party versus the anyone else, and in particular versus the “reality-based community.”

An example. An Obama official admits the inevitable about the recovery plan: there will be wasteful spending. “How could it not?” columnist Gail Collins says.

Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

(Note: That quote is the columnist, not the Obama representative.)

Can you imagine a Bush official agreeing that his plan will not work flawlessly? I can’t. A Bush administration official would talk around the point, avoid the question, generalize it to some kind of heroic-abstract “challenge” we must overcome. I keep coming back to the same metaphor (is it a metaphor?): Obama is a grown-up. Bush was a child. A well-intentioned, but petulant and untalented child.

Panicked and unable to understand why the complex world doesn’t bend to his will, a child will invent fantasies about the forces in play against him. Then he understands, he feels like he’s back in control. A grown-up accepts that the world is complex, evades understanding, that he can’t control it, but he takes responsibility and grapples with it anyway, on its own, ineffable terms. The grown-up is concerned with solving problems. The child raids windmills.*

I should say, it seems that Obama is bringing intellectual honesty to the government, it seems that he is a grown-up. We’ll see how the next years play out, but I am optimistic.

I had an idea for a little visualizer toy and started playing with Quartz Composer over the weekend. I’m always blown away at the power of that tool whenever I dip into it.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.

I wrote another too-long response to a BA blog post. I’ve been complaining about this for years, too:

Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.

But I shoot for the middle path:

Whole-heartedly agreed that the word ’supernatural’ is meaningless. I cry a little inside whenever I see the word used by supposedly intelligent publications or people as if it has a referent.

But with respect to the whole discussion, I wanted to suggest a fundamental (ontological? epistemological?) difference between experience and representation of experience, and the consequences for science.

Let’s say we have the technology to hook someone to a machine that precisely constructs descriptions of her emotions in real time. We have a great deal of faith (ehem) that our model of the brain can convert electrical/chemical activity into these perfect descriptions. I’m not sure what such a description would be. Maybe it’s uncannily well-written, evocative prose. Or maybe a vector in some multi-dimensional emotional space that we know (somehow) is complete across the gamut of possible human emotion.

The person has experience, the machine constructs representations of that experience.

Now, if you could only pick one of those two things to have on a desert island, which would you pick? The exhaustive representation? Or the experience? Which is the more “valid” aspect of existence?

Neither; both. The two—a 1st person experience and a 3rd person representation of experience—are fundamentally separate yet equally valid aspects of existence. Science, no matter how perfect its models of the world are, will never be able to do more than generate representations. Experience can never be more than a private affair. Never the twain shall meet. (Except indirectly through the artifacts of reason and language and art and music and poetry and …)

So what’s the problem? you ask. Well, this places a real limitation on what science, as a method of investigation, is able to do, and raises questions about what “truth” and “validity” mean. Giving it short shrift, does a scientific account of an event always beat out a personal experience account of the same event in the battle for validity? If so, is that assertion “provable”?

The answer is of course, no, it’s not provable. Any claim science makes on validity depends on being able to represent the object of investigation.

So? What’s the problem? Two difficulties spring to mind:

1 – The practical impossibility of a complete model of the universe. Granted, this has little bearing on the everyday, whether your microwave works or not, but if we suppose that the project of science can be “completed,” then there is the problem of the amount of information and computation required to model the entire universe, if we suppose that, for any event, tendrils of causative dependency creep out into the entire universe (or at least to the information horizon of the speed of light), which, for completeness‘ sake, we must suppose.

But okay, forget the universe, how about modeling an afternoon thunderstorm? How about modeling a cup of tea? Completely? Without simplification? I don’t know, perhaps it will be possible some day. Maybe quantum computing will even be able to model the apparently probabilistic nature of the very small.

But, more relevant to the example above, how about modeling human emotion? Can we be sure that the multi-dimensional emotional space we made for our machine truly exhausts the gamut of human emotion? Can we prove it?*

Which brings us to …

2 – Representations must exist in some language, and science’s claims of validity in particular rely upon mathematics. I am no expert by any means, but one interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that “truth is a stronger notion than proof”. “Proof” exists only in the idealized, internal world of perfect spheres and such. “Truth” is something else. The philosophical implications for science are that “truth” is (provably!) slippery and the notion that science “explains” things, full stop, a bit naïve.

In fact, as should be well-known (but apparently isn’t), nothing is ever “proven” in empirical science. (I cry at the abuse of that word, too.) What we have in empirical science is a general consensus among experts, and faith, yes faith, that mathematical language maps well enough onto experience to trust the scientific models built from it. The models, the language, and the notion of proof are forever hermetically sealed away from the actual, 1st person experience of the world.

And that’s the part we care about, right? Our experience? Science is cool because it gives us microwave ovens.

So experience and 3rd-person representations of experience are (ontologically? epistemologically?) separate, but valid, aspects of existence. To compare the validity claims of science to the validity claims of personal experience is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Ken Wilber would call each “true but partial.” It’s best, perhaps, to take each on its own terms.

Reuben Hersh calls mathematics a social activity, and if that’s true for math it’s got be even moreso true for science. Science is a collective representation of the world based on a very mature and useful method of inquiry. It is not, however, the holy grail or the end-all and be-all. I’ll take its results as wonderful things, and will often, but not always, defer to them in the face of a conflicting account of “truth” from my own 1st person experience of the world. Did I see a ghost? Probably not.

But, that’s a matter of judgement, not of mathematical necessity.

Marj writes,

Bush’s encouragement for us to go shopping after 9/11 brought us to the mirror, but we can’t see ourselves. Rich or poor, we are all pawns to the global economy. As egocentric as we are, we will never be as important as money. We are disposable. The economy must keep growing at the expense of rich and poor. We elect politicians who will ensure our misery.

“We will never be as important as money. We are disposable.” That pretty much captures the brand of cynicism I subscribe to. In the short term, the greed and small-mindedness of the elite stupid dominate.

But then there are occasional spots of light and I do think that over the long term, the dominating trend of life is towards … not “bigger,” per se, but more-encompassing. The ever-growing economy is a flatland version, a shadow, of the larger trend.

Even the ever-higher pile of steaming matter accumulating on the hearth of this administration—and hence this country—is bound to be eventually called for what it is by the good judgement of competent (or at least morally non-blank) people, and the seeming prescience of the framers of the US Constitution. “Shocking,” “absurd,” and “moronic” are Cheney’s flailing attempts to avoid “adult supervision,” according to the George Washington University Law Professor consulted by Olbermann in the clip linked to above. Amen to that.