Musings on Random Musings

[Bazza]

Do it, one each week. 

[death tribble]

He's not about to do what you do as a matter of course

[Pariah]

You're not the boss of me! 

[death tribble]

And neither is he !

[Bazza]

 @death tribble

[death tribble]

And has Bazza changed his avatar again ?

Why yes dear reader he did

[death tribble]

Starlord changed his avatar. Fair enough his last one was scary and we are now in celebration season

[death tribble]

Pariah is using a second Snoopy Christmas avatar.

[Bazza]

And there is another obvious observation by death tribble. 

[Pariah]

How could there be a sequel to a movie that never existed?

[Cancer]

Retcon.

[death tribble]

True. Look what a mess J J Abrams made with his version of Star Trek did to Star Trek continuity. Especially Star Trek Into Darkness.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

21 minutes ago, death tribble said:

Star Trek continuity

 

[Pariah]

3.071513805 or 7.072421901, depending on which base you're using. 

[Cancer]

(From Baaza's post in the home Random Musings thread on 11/11)

 

Quote

To be sure. However it is the way science has used its, and is attached to it, that is just as important to my post above. It is the way certain phrases or words are invoked/evoked, or conjured. 

 

Well, this is allied to a point I made in my recent post in the More Space News thread in the Star Hero forum.  There are a lot of concepts which nonscientific language frankly finds more or less impossible to explain or even describe in a clear an unambiguous way.  Even highly trained writers and editors of mainstream English cannot and do not accurately convey the meaning of a lot of scientific jargon correctly.  Given that the bulk of English evolved into its more-or-less current state by the 1800s at latest and perhaps by the early 1600s, the mental map of English is fundamentally rooted in a conceptual context which excludes most of modern science.  Various scientific disciplines, having found things which lie outside that fundamental linguistic-cognitive foundation, have had to invent their own dialects in order to manipulate those concepts and allow members of the discipline to communicate with each other about the things they work with.  If you want to discuss the weak nuclear force or organometallic chemistry or virus structure and its relation to function, then you are all but obliged to use the dialects in which those concepts are directly elucidated.  To express that in a negative way, if you think you can barge into a scientific discussion and make coherent contributions (or even relevant comments) without being conversant with the dialect, the best you can hope to get is the equivalent of a "bless your heart" and politely routed into a side room where you will no longer disrupt the proceedings by being so willfully and arrogantly obstructive.

 

Now, as someone who does know one of those dialects, occasionally I insert it into a more general conversation, but I do so knowing that in doing it I am being disruptive.  Most such incidents are done for humor, and there's lots of humor along those lines, not merely from me (much of the webcomic xkcd comes from this sort of collision between standard English and a scientific dialect).

 

If you're complaining about that branch of popular science writing where the theoretical physicists slip their tethers and make broad and largely incomprehensible statements about the underlying structure of reality or some similar garbage ...  I get tired of that also.  There's some interesting stuff out there on the theoretical frontiers, but a significant fraction of it is at best merely constrained by some experimental data, and some of it has no experimental evidence in its favor at all (i.e., there's no evidence that's relevant of the scenarios in those theoretical regimes); worse, they don't make testable predictions so those wonderful ideas could be shot down.  Now you're just selling books to make people go ooh and aahh over you.

 

I took in a talk a couple of weeks back about biases in machine-learned language, and an interesting possible implication was put out there (with an acknowledgement that the speaker did not know how she might try to test the idea), that natural human languages all have some biases built into them ab initio so that it is impossible for machine learning from sources in a natural language to be free of bias; the biases are inherent to the underlying mental map that is common to all speakers of that natural language.  Interesting idea, though I have no idea how to test it myself (the speaker was a computer scientist), other than to go back and look at machine learning results in which the source material is not verbal (that is, not what is usually considered to be language at all) but visual, and see if some other means for showing intrinsic linkages between dyads of contrasting qualities in two or more different "directions" and detect such bias in the non-language patterns similarly produced by the machine learning.

 

But if that idea is correct, that all natural human languages include some biases in their underlying conceptual basis, then a speaker of general English unhappy with the use of a specialized dialect could well end up pointing at (e.g.) the biases they perceive in a scientific dialect and not recognize that they are seeing a reflection of biases intrinsic to their own underlying mental map, which are not faithfully incorporated into the dialects because those dialects were constructed to work with concepts lying outside the base language's cognitive structures.  I am not suggesting that the dialect is superior in that it lacks some of those biases; rather, the dialect was never really intended to be used on subjects that lie outside the root context of the dialect, and so some structures have been subconsciously allowed to atrophy away so as to make cognitive "room" for subtleties germane to the dialect that the dialect's community want to address actively.  Again, I have no real idea how to test these ideas, but it was among the thoughts that I had after the talk was concluded.

[Bazza]

Hi Cancer, thank you for response with an ‘essay’. I also read your reply to Dean as well.

 

A quick question about that, how do you find New Scientist as a adequate source? It is to general to be useful or is it on par with Scientific American magazine?

 

I'll reply to your post tomorrow. 

[Cancer]

Oddly enough, I've read only a handful of New Scientist issues over the decades.  It just hasn't shown up on the magazine shelves here in the US very much (which in the Long Ago was a potent influence shaping my reading habits), and my technical reading time now is overbooked anyway.  That may sound like a lame excuse to cover an anti-Brit/Commonwealth bias, but I counter that by saying that the on-line newspaper I read most is the Guardian.

 

What I remember seeing in it has been OK, but that's no more than three articles in the past 15 years: not enough to hazard any sort of opinion.

[Bazza]

No worries. 

[death tribble]

My apologies to Pariah. I thought that you had changed your avatar but it actually was Logan.1179

[Bazza]

On 12/6/2021 at 9:21 PM, Bazza said:

Hi Cancer, thank you for response with an ‘essay’. I also read your reply to Dean as well.

 

A quick question about that, how do you find New Scientist as a adequate source? It is to general to be useful or is it on par with Scientific American magazine?

 

I'll reply to your post tomorrow. 

Continuation: 

 

My source – which started this discussion -- is a 92-word quote from a 5700 word essay. The quote's basic premise is that, as the spiritual (quantifiable part of reality) was depreciated, certain words evolved into substitutes and gained a quasi-mystic quality, e.g. freedom, and progress. In much the same way, the essay’s author states that terminology within science has similarly a quasi-mystical quality. The essay's author observation draws on monographs by Eric Voegelin and Martin Lings and himself was a professor of mathematics and is writing from the position of philosophy of science, and classical metaphysics.

 

As you state in your essay, scientists have issues with the English language to adequately describe its concepts and ideas and have had to resort to a highly nuanced terminology understood by experts/adepts. To an outsider, this language would appear to be evocative or 'conjuring', and quantum mechanics would make the connection seemingly apparent. That is the premise/observation. My assumption is that as a professional scientist, that you would likely reject this observation. Rather than me assuming, please say, yes or no. I’m happy with either answer.

The question then is from what perspective is this observation made and its purpose. The observations are made from positions ascertain a tenant of modernism. The essay author’s perspective is as I stated above; Eric Voegelin's is from political philosophy; and Martin Lings is from perennial philosophy and Sufism.

 

[Cancer]

See, I think the philosophers are fixated on quantum mechanics and cosmology and are repulsed by the very notions that someone other than them has the temerity to say things about matter and energy on the atomic scale and smaller, and that the processes operating on that scale are inherently probabilistic rather than deterministic, and on the very early history of the Universe.  Historically those subjects have been the exclusive province of mystics and philosophers, and they resent the intrusion. How dare those unwashed number-grubbers intrude on their turf?  (Frankly, I find it extremely easy to suspect them of a truly ancient thing called envy.)  I do expect that we have only seen the bare beginnings of their resentment over the usurpation of their historical bailiwick, though; we will see the philosophers let their venom flow unrestricted when the computer scientists develop something that can be clearly understood to be self-aware.  I find the underlying ideas in Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad to be something that those in philosophy and religion will invoke stridently when that occurs.

 

Returning to physics for an example, the cosmology problem now known as Olbers' Paradox was (despite the latter-day name) known to the Greeks.  They could not resolve the issue.  Progress was finally made in the terminal 19th Century (in measuring the finite speed of light, and finding that it does not vary with the observer's position or velocity) and 20th Century (with the discovery of the Hubble Flow, development of geometry and mathematics adequate for the problems, and then the discoveries in the 1950s and '60s establishing the Big Bang theory as the only scientifically viable idea) with the recognition that every one of the initial assumptions on which the paradox is built is invalid ... for reasons that the Greeks had no way of knowing.

 

But there's another part of the issue as well.  Approximately all the language for thinking about the origins of the Universe are religious or mystical in their root.  That makes it all but impossible to discuss such subjects without using those old linguistic structures, unless you stay entirely within the latter-day technical jargon.  Given that dissemination and explanation of technical findings are among the fundamental duties of a scientist, and that most of them are not gifted writers, a lot of writing on these subjects passes through intermediaries, people who are science writers and editors but not practicing scientists.  Crossing the line into the old language and its wellspring of mystical/religious structures means that almost inevitably those get invoked.

 

Going to writings strictly by scientists, it's a mixed bag.  Stephen Weinberg in The First Three Minutes discussed the early history of the Universe in reasonably sanitized language.  But it is clearly difficult to resist the temptation of putting on the old mystical mantle when discussing such topics.  There are lots of people in the physics community who think Leon Lederman committed a serious mistake when he titled his book The God Particle, and I expect the same sort of feelings will (it only came out this year) surround Michio Kaku's latest, The God Equation.  I personally find that distasteful (Kaku's stuff in particular has always rubbed me the wrong way).

 

That it is a mixed bag points something else out as well.  The humans who comprise the community of practicing and writing scientists are not a monolithic cabal.  Painting the entire tribe as some flavor of evil because they're using mystical language to describe some of their findings is as incorrect as painting all of Islam or all Russians or all Germans as evil because of the acts and writings of some of them.

[Pariah]

5 hours ago, death tribble said:

My apologies to Pariah. I thought that you had changed your avatar but it actually was Logan.1179

 

No, I did too. Snoopy was atop his doghouse in the previous one.

[death tribble]

Yeah that one I picked up om Saturday as it says above

[Bazza]

On 12/8/2021 at 2:53 AM, Cancer said:

See, I think the philosophers are fixated on quantum mechanics and cosmology and are repulsed by the very notions that someone other than them has the temerity to say things about matter and energy on the atomic scale and smaller, and that the processes operating on that scale are inherently probabilistic rather than deterministic, and on the very early history of the Universe.  Historically those subjects have been the exclusive province of mystics and philosophers, and they resent the intrusion. How dare those unwashed number-grubbers intrude on their turf?  (Frankly, I find it extremely easy to suspect them of a truly ancient thing called envy.)  I do expect that we have only seen the bare beginnings of their resentment over the usurpation of their historical bailiwick, though; we will see the philosophers let their venom flow unrestricted when the computer scientists develop something that can be clearly understood to be self-aware.  I find the underlying ideas in Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad to be something that those in philosophy and religion will invoke stridently when that occurs.

 

* The essay's author completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy, physics and mathematics, later a MS in physics, and a PhD in mathematics. So your thinking that he qua philosopher is “repulsed” by cosmology or quantum mechanics, is unwarranted. (Another wonderful author, is the late Dominican theologian & philosopher William A Wallace OP who in between his STB & STL completed a MA in physics.)

 

* I can assure you 150% that there is no envy involved as there is nothing to envy. To suggest this to them would make them laugh out loud.

 

* Cosmology can be scientific or philosophical. Philosophical cosmology was detailed by Cardinal Mercier, who ordained Georges Lemaître and suggested the gifted mathematician study physics. We both know the result.  If you want a squiz at what this is, let me know. 

 

* For computer scientists to develop something that is self-aware is an ontological tautology, unless we are changing the historic meaning of awareness within ontology in which case the answer is "yes". The point here is on the phrase "self-aware", in which self-awareness is immaterial and qualitative, ergo, non-scientific.  

 

* A Butlerian Jihad wouldn't be necessary for humanity; however we are heading in the direction in which it might be for AL powered algorithms cf. Facebook, Google, and documentary The Social Dilemma.

 

Quote

But there's another part of the issue as well.  Approximately all the language for thinking about the origins of the Universe are religious or mystical in their root.  That makes it all but impossible to discuss such subjects without using those old linguistic structures, unless you stay entirely within the latter-day technical jargon.  Given that dissemination and explanation of technical findings are among the fundamental duties of a scientist, and that most of them are not gifted writers, a lot of writing on these subjects passes through intermediaries, people who are science writers and editors but not practicing scientists.  Crossing the line into the old language and its wellspring of mystical/religious structures means that almost inevitably those get invoked.

 

Going to writings strictly by scientists, it's a mixed bag.  Stephen Weinberg in The First Three Minutes discussed the early history of the Universe in reasonably sanitized language.  But it is clearly difficult to resist the temptation of putting on the old mystical mantle when discussing such topics.  There are lots of people in the physics community who think Leon Lederman committed a serious mistake when he titled his book The God Particle, and I expect the same sort of feelings will (it only came out this year) surround Michio Kaku's latest, The God Equation.  I personally find that distasteful (Kaku's stuff in particular has always rubbed me the wrong way).

 

That it is a mixed bag points something else out as well.  The humans who comprise the community of practicing and writing scientists are not a monolithic cabal.  Painting the entire tribe as some flavor of evil because they're using mystical language to describe some of their findings is as incorrect as painting all of Islam or all Russians or all Germans as evil because of the acts and writings of some of them.

 

 

“Approximately all the language for thinking about the origins of the Universe are religious or mystical in their root.“ Another way of saying this is that previous origins of the Universe are specifically philosophical (cf Timaeus), or uses the metaphysical and/or theological language of a qualitative nature (cf Neoplatonism), including mathematics (Pythagoreanism).

 

You have suggested Stephen Weinberg in The First Three Minutes previously, and I’ve bookmarked it in one of my wishlists to buy someday, I think I may also have it on Kindle. What you have said above as good as it is, is irrelevant to the topic I initially wrote about. That is this:
* In the pre-modern past, reality was both qualitative/formal and quantitative/material.

* With the advent of modernism, the qualitative/formal part of reality (spiritual plane) was “lost”, i.e. ignored, leaving only the quantitative/material. This is what science inherited and help establish due to its massive success.

* With their essential meaning lost, certain words / phrases have taken on a quasi-mystical undercurrent. Examples from Lings are: freedom, equality, literacy, science, and civilisation. Usage of these words and phrases in this manner is akin to evoking or conjuring them. You could equally add "truth, justice, and a better tomorrow" which may convey the Lings intent better.  

 

The above three points are drawn from Lings book, chapter 5. I’ve just started reading through the first chapter today and it echoes the two themes you have written about, (1) linguistics and (2) science & the ancients’ account of origins. So I think you will get something useful out of it. I found an ebook at a slightly questionably legal website and if you want to give it a squiz, let me know.  

[Cancer]

Well, OK.  I am about the worst possible person to discuss these issues.  For family reasons (some of them tragic), religion and spirituality were left entirely out of my upbringing.  It does not occur to me think along those lines unless I am in a context where those are explicitly the topic of the discussion, and that context is safe (by "safe" I mean other than a proselytizing attempt).  Such safe discussions have happened reasonably often here at the Jesuit university.  Further, unless I have lots of advance knowledge of the speaker(s), I tend to attribute malign motives to people who try to raise such discussions with me, and even among those whom I do trust for other reasons when such issues are raised, I tend to fall silent.  The questions don't interest me; I have never thought about them, and I fail to see any return from trying to think about them; I have no opinions to offer.