cultural epistemology

What passes as an explanation has a cultural dimension to it. This is true even for science. For example, before Newton, action-at-a-distance was perceived as magic. Then eventually people got used to it and started to accept it as a final explanation. This cultural adaptation took place despite the fact that Newton himself was very uncomfortable with the notion:

"It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it." (Source)

memetic originality

Ideas have a life of their own, and are subject to the same evolutionary dynamics that govern biological systems. The current state of development together with the current environmental context determines more or less what the next stage of development will be. Our most original ideas are either juxtapositions of some old material, or reactionary moves taken against some environmental changes.

Even if the next step is not obvious from our local point of view, it always is so from the global point of view. The society as a whole will sooner or later give birth to the next new idea. It may be impossible to predict its author, but so what? That is not a societal concern.

As Victor Hugo said, "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." All we have to do is to open our mouth or grab a pen.

Every once in a while a particular species will evolve too fast for its own good. Anticipating and adopting the far future can be a costly activity. Authors that are too out-of-sync with the general flow of ideas will be doomed to oblivion until the time for their products finally arrive.

poker face

A poker player has two ideal options:

1) Sit perfectly still. Be non-responsive and maintain a blank expression.

2) Randomize. Respond erratically so that the opponent can not pick up any reliable indicators.

The problem with the second approach is two folds:

1) It is energy intensive in comparison to the first approach.

2) Human beings often detect spurious patterns in randomly generated data. (This phenomenon is called Pareidolia.) Your opponent may devise a strategy based on his interpretation of your random moves. It will be very difficult for you to unravel this strategy and respond in a cogent way.

Update (July 2012): In finance, most people fall prey to Pareidolia, including those "sober-thinking", contrarian traders:  "For bubble and anti-bubble thinking are both wrong because they hold the truth is social. But if the herd isn’t thinking at all, being contrarian—doing the opposite of the herd—is just as random and useless." (From Blake Masters' notes on Peter Thiel's course at Stanford University)

top down vs. bottom up

At any moment in time, there is always more than one scientific theory that can explain the available data. How one formalism is preferred over another one depends on historical factors (e.g. physicists avoiding models that employ mathematics that they are not familiar with), on sociological factors (e.g. one theorist being a lot more famous than the other), on metaphysical criteria (e.g. Occam's Razor), or on aesthetic criteria (e.g. one model being more beautiful than the other). Because of this state of affairs, it is said that scientific theories are, by their very nature, under-determined.

Here the term "under-determined" can be confusing. Scientific theories are under-determined from the point of view of nature. (A theory is never specific enough to be the only possible explanation that does not contradict the available data.) However they are over-determined from the point of view of available evidence. Not only do they make predictions about the future dynamics of the examined phenomenon, they also predict the existence of unrelated phenomena. Predictions of the second type are not supported per se by any current data. (This is the sort of stuff that lends credulity and prestige to a new model: Prediction and subsequent confirmation of entirely new and uninvestigated phenomena.)

There are two types of models:

1) Top-down ones that contain certain universal principles putting constraints on what can possibly take place. (Examples: Thermodynamics, General Relativity).

2) Bottom-up ones that start out with a theory about what the constituents of the reality are and define how they interact in ensembles to generate the phenomenon that our experiments can detect. (Examples: Newtonian Mechanics, Standard Model)

The top-down models are more under-determined in the sense that they do not uniquely explain everything. They just constrain the number of theories that can do the job. Depending on the nature of the principles involved, they can be more or less over-determined in the other sense of the term. (The principle postulating the finiteness of speed of light makes just a single prediction, namely the principle itself. On the other hand, the second principle of thermodynamics makes many simultaneous predictions.) In any case, compared with bottom-up models, they are less likely to be rendered obsolete due to unnecessary metaphysical assumptions with regards to the constituents of reality.

Two speculative remarks:

1) Just as science emerges from the interplay of bottom-up and top-down models, mathematics emerges from the interplay of set theory and category theory. Think of science and mathematics as sandwiches. The top and bottom buns are respectively the top-down and bottom-up approaches. In the case of science, in between lies the physical universe. In the case of mathematics, in between lies the mathematical universe.

2) The list of alternative foundations for mathematics has been exhausted. Structures can be examined and characterized inside-out or outside-in. There exists no other possible approach.

failure of holism

Despite its philosophical appeal, holism has produced little or nothing of practical value. It has resulted in the development of some conceptually interesting mathematical frameworks (e.g. Chaos Theory), and some deep metaphysical principles (e.g. those of Buddhism). On the other hand, it has also laid the foundations of the Post-Modernist movement (e.g. the belief that truth is context dependent etc), and in some circles even led to the rise of an anti-scientist sentiment.

peptic ulcer

If I am still alive today, I owe a thanks to an extraordinary scientist who continued to stand up for his opinion despite being alienated and ridiculed by his peers. Peptic ulcer used to be thought of as a complicated psychosomatic disease that is caused by certain types of life styles and high levels of stress. When Barry Marshall claimed that ulcer was in fact just a bacterial disease, no scientist in his right mind could believe him. After all, how could any bacteria survive in the highly acidic environment of the stomach? In order to prove his theory beyond any doubt, this courageous man drank a beaker of helicobacter pylori culture and fell violently ill. He subsequently cured himself using antibiotics, and later was awarded a Nobel Price for his discovery that saved millions of people from extreme discomfort and death.

time perception

Memory, consciousness and time. These three fundamental concepts are interrelated in a fascinating way... Here are three different extracts containing the same exact observation.

We begin with a couple of simple queries about familiar phenomena: “Why do babies not remember events that happen to them?” and “Why does each new year seem to pass faster than the one before?”

I wouldn’t swear that I have the final answer to either one of these queries, but I do have a hunch, and I will here speculate on the basis of that hunch. And thus: the answer to both is basically the same, I would argue, and it has to do with the relentless, lifelong process of chunking — taking “small” concepts and putting them together into bigger and bigger ones, thus recursively building up a giant repertoire of concepts in the mind.

How, then, might chunking provide the clue to these riddles? Well, babies’ concepts are simply too small. They have no way of framing entire events whatsoever in terms of their novice concepts. It is as if babies were looking at life through a randomly drifting keyhole, and at each moment could make out only the most local aspects of scenes before them. It would be hopeless to try to figure out how a whole room is organized, for instance, given just a keyhole view, even a randomly drifting keyhole view.

Or, to trot out another analogy, life is like a chess game, and babies are like beginners looking at a complex scene on a board, not having the faintest idea how to organize it into higher-level structures. As has been well known for decades, experienced chess players chunk the setup of pieces on the board nearly instantaneously into small dynamic groupings defined by their strategic meanings, and thanks to this automatic, intuitive chunking, they can make good moves nearly instantaneously and also can remember complex chess situations for very long times.

Hofstadter - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

But why do people often remember more from their youth than from their more recent past? Shouldn't our oldest memories be the most faded, and our newer ones be fresher and more numerous? The well-documented reminiscence effect mentioned earlier explains why it is just the other way around: In our younger years, the brain commits more impressions to memory, and these earliest memories are less likely to be forgotten in later years. If the memory survives the test of time for the first few years, it is usually indelible, which is why even eighty-year-olds can talk about their youth as though it were yesterday.

We have every reason to recall the experiences of our younger years, when the world was an open book. Never again would we experience so much change. But the first kiss happens only once in a lifetime. The more knowledge of the world we acquires, the fewer new memories are retained in our memory - it would be a waste of brain capacity to remember slight variations on a familiar theme. But the fewer memories we have retained from a period, the shorter that period seems in retrospect. The ongoing acceleration of years as we grow older is a price we pay for learning.

Klein - Time: A User's Guide (Pages 142-143)

Almost all of the 100 billion neurons in a human being’s nervous system are in place at birth, and in early childhood the synapses—the points of contact between neurons that fire memory and sensation—are vastly overproduced. To a large extent, maturity is a neural pruning process, an uncluttering of consciousness so that what is most useful for getting through a day—driving to work, for instance, or negotiating the supermarket—is readily, and unconsciously, available. Our lives are far more organized around repetition than novelty. Less useful neurons weaken and die, a form of forgetting.

Gopnik reminds us that, to accommodate their rapidly shifting attention, babies’ brains generate enormous amounts of cholinergic neurotransmitters, which are released to different parts of the brain as they process specific information. For anesthetics to be effective they must act on these transmitters, which may explain the relatively high concentration of anesthesia babies require to be knocked out before surgery. Gopnik offers the captivating idea that children are more conscious than adults but also less unconscious, because they have fewer automatic behaviors.

Greenberg - What Babies Know and We Don’t

aesthetics of wisdom

Wisdom involves the acceptance of natural state of things. This is the source of profoundness underlying the wabi-sabi aesthetic.

Wisdom does not lend itself to codification. That is why it can not be taught in monasteries or in universities. A child can get wiser only when he is left on his own, just as a landscape can gravitate towards its natural state only when it is not looked after.

Wisdom hides itself in asymmetrical features. It comes with age, and thus is inevitably associated with deterioration.

rastlantisal cozumler

Ayvalik'ta tatildeyken yasadigim ilginc bir hadiseyi size madde madde aktariyorum:

1) Vucut isi dengemi koruyan mekanizmalar altust oldu.

2) Arabadayken sicak havadan bunaldigim zamanlar klimayi dibine kadar actim. (Vucudum terleyemedigi icin baska turlu kendimi sogutamiyordum. Bu yuzden klimayi actigimi ancak 7. asamada farkedebildim.)

3) Hapsirip tiksirmaya basladim. Sinuslerim azdi ve grip oldum.

4) Burnum tikandi. Geceleri uyurken agzim acik uyumaya basladim.

5) Bogazim sisti. Agzimin surekli acik olmasini firsat bilen havadaki bakteri sucladim. Kendi kendime koydugum, buyuk ihtimalle yanlis olan bu teshisten yola cikarak bogazimi iyilestirmek icin ilk yapmam gerekenin burnumu acmak oldugu sonucuna vardim.

6) Burnumu acmak icin tum gun boyunca tuzlu su spreyi kullanmaya basladim.

7) Kiz arkadasimin tavsiyesiyle bir eczaneye gittik. Eczanede ogrendik ki vucut isi dengemin bozulmasinin sebebi gunes carpmasiymis. (Boylece terleyemememin sebebi de acikliga kavusmus oldu.) Bu durumda yapilmasi gereken en onemli seylerden biri etkilenen kisinin vucuduna tuzlu su takviye etmekmis. Yani kendi kendimi tamamen aptal ve rastlantisal sebeplerden dolayi iyilestirmeye baslamisim bile!

Kim bilir bu tur hadiseler gunluk hayatimizda kac kere basimiza geliyordur da biz farketmiyoruz. Sirf cahilliklerinden oturu olumden donenler de vardir herhalde!

Update (July 2011): On a similar note, consider the following parable Old Man at the Fort by the Taoist philosopher Liehtse.

An Old Man was living with his Son at an abandoned fort on the top of a hill, and one day he lost a horse. The neighbors came to express their sympathy for this misfortune, and the Old Man asked: "How do you know this is bad luck?" A few days afterwards, his horse returned with a number of wild horses, and his neighbors came again to congratulate him on this stroke of fortune, and the Old Man replied, "How do you know this is good luck?" With so many horses around, his son began to take to riding, and one day he broke his leg. Again the neighbors came around to express their sympathy, and the Old Man replied, "How do you know this is bad luck?" The next year, there was a war, and because the Old Man's son was crippled, he did not have to go to the front.

As quoted on p.159 of The Importance of Living by Yutang

definitions and proofs

If your mathematical objects are defined recursively, then the proofs involving them will inevitably contain inductive methods. Similarly, if they are defined via universal properties, the proofs will be built on categorical techniques.

This allows us to make a simple but an important observation: The nature of the objects determines what you can do with them. That is why recasting the original structure in a different fashion can lead to new insights.