saturn return to sender

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.

I don’t like Apple’s Mighty Mouse. Style has trumped function in a really bad way here.

The Mighty Mouse is a 4-button optical mouse with a two-way scroll ball. Apple has never, until now (where “now” is like, 6 months or a year ago — I’m naturally way behind in “reviewing it” here), itself released a mouse with more than one button, though OS X has always supported multiple button input devices in software. I’ve never really cared too much, personally, because you can always buy third-party mice that are adequate. But the fact that Apple has stubbornly refused to let go of its one-mouse, one-button policy in a world where even your grandmother probably uses a two-button mouse on her $300 Dell PC for email has been seen as … dumb. Also getting a mouse that you’re never going to want to use bundled with your $2000 computer is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, for those who don’t know, you can get a right-click on any single-button mouse by holding down control and left-clicking.)

So the Mighty Mouse should be good news. I’ve had one for a few months now, and this morning I’m particularly annoyed with it, so I’m going to do what every blogger procrastinating on homework should: complain about it pointlessly on my blog.

(more…)

Just in case you, gentle, true reader, ever have the opportunity to design a website that grabs focus automatically when its pages finish loading, please don’t. It is the most annoying thing ever. You’re waiting for gmail or amazon to load a page (the two biggest violators that come to mind), so you go do something in another tab or window. Happily typing away, or browsing. But then it finishes loading and amazon suddenly pops to the front, unbidden, unannouced. Suddenly your keystrokes are being sent to that webpage, your train of thought from reading in the other tab is derailed. That is incredibly stupid behavior. WTF are they thinking? Does this happen in Firefox and IE too? Maybe it’s just Safari? Am I the only one who thinks this is fantastically obnoxious?

Thanks; rant done.