The laws of physics do not contain distinct additional causal entities that correspond to lift or airplane wings, the way that the mind of an engineer contains distinct additional cognitive entities that correspond to lift or airplane wings.
This, as I see it, is the thesis of reductionism. Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory. Understanding this on a gut level dissolves the question of “How can you say the airplane doesn’t really have wings, when I can see the wings right there?” The critical words are really and see.
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199
Explaining vs. Explaining Away
John Keats’s Lamia (1819)1 surely deserves some kind of award for Most Famously Annoying Poetry:
. . . Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow . . .
My usual reply ends with the phrase: “If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed.” I shall expand on that later.
Here I have a different point in mind. Let’s just take the lines:
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow . . .
Apparently “the mere touch of cold philosophy,” i.e., the truth, has destroyed:
Haunts in the air;
Gnomes in the mine;
Rainbows.
Which calls to mind a rather different bit of verse:
One of these things
Is not like the others
One of these things
Doesn’t belong.
The air has been emptied of its haunts, and the mine de-gnomed—but the rainbow is still there!
In Righting a Wrong Question, I wrote:
Tracing back the chain of causality, step by step, I discover that my belief that I’m wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I’m wearing socks . . . On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in the desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert. In this case, my belief in the lake is not just explained, but explained away.
The rainbow was explained. The haunts in the air, and gnomes in the mine, were explained away.
I think this is the key distinction that anti-reductionists don’t get about reductionism.
You can see this failure to get the distinction in the classic objection to reductionism:
If reductionism is correct, then even your belief in reductionism is just the mere result of the motion of molecules—why should I listen to anything you say?
The key word, in the above, is mere; a word which implies that accepting reductionism would explain away all the reasoning processes leading up to my acceptance of reductionism, the way that an optical illusion is explained away.
But you can explain how a cognitive process works without its being “mere”! My belief that I’m wearing socks is a mere result of my visual cortex reconstructing nerve impulses sent from my retina which received photons reflected off my socks . . . which is to say, according to scientific reductionism, my belief that I’m wearing socks is a mere result of the fact that I’m wearing socks.
What could be going on in the anti-reductionists’ minds, such that they would put rainbows and belief-in-reductionism in the same category as haunts and gnomes?
Several things are going on simultaneously. But for now let’s focus on the basic idea introduced in a previous essay: The Mind Projection Fallacy between a multi-level map and a mono-level territory.
(I.e.: There’s no way you can model a 747 quark-by-quark, so you’ve got to use a multi-level map with explicit cognitive representations of wings, airflow, and so on. This doesn’t mean there’s a multi-level territory. The true laws of physics, to the best of our knowledge, are only over elementary particle fields.)
I think that when physicists say “There are no fundamental rainbows,” the anti-reductionists hear, “There are no rainbows.”
If you don’t distinguish between the multi-level map and the mono-level territory, then when someone tries to explain to you that the rainbow is not a fundamental thing in physics, acceptance of this will feel like erasing rainbows from your multi-level map, which feels like erasing rainbows from the world.
When Science says “tigers are not elementary particles, they are made of quarks” the anti-reductionist hears this as the same sort of dismissal as “we looked in your garage for a dragon, but there was just empty air.”
What scientists did to rainbows, and what scientists did to gnomes, seemingly felt the same to Keats . . .
In support of this sub-thesis, I deliberately used several phrasings, in my discussion of Keats’s poem, that were Mind Projection Fallacious. If you didn’t notice, this would seem to argue that such fallacies are customary enough to pass unremarked.
For example:
The air has been emptied of its haunts, and the mine de-gnomed—but the rainbow is still there!
Actually, Science emptied the model of air of belief in haunts, and emptied the map of the mine of representations of gnomes. Science did not actually—as Keats’s poem itself would have it—take real Angel’s wings, and destroy them with a cold touch of truth. In reality there never were any haunts in the air, or gnomes in the mine.
Another example:
What scientists did to rainbows, and what scientists did to gnomes, seemingly felt the same to Keats.
Scientists didn’t do anything to gnomes, only to “gnomes.” The quotation is not the referent.
But if you commit the Mind Projection Fallacy—and by default, our beliefs just feel like the way the world is—then at time T = 0, the mines (apparently) contain gnomes; at time T = 1 a scientist dances across the scene, and at time T = 2 the mines (apparently) are empty. Clearly, there used to be gnomes there, but the scientist killed them.
Bad scientist! No poems for you, gnomekiller!
Well, that’s how it feels, if you get emotionally attached to the gnomes, and then a scientist says there aren’t any gnomes. It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” and “The scientist hasn’t taken the gnomes away, only taken my delusion away,” and “I never held just title to my belief in gnomes in the first place; I have not been deprived of anything I rightfully owned,” and “If there are gnomes, I desire to believe there are gnomes; if there are no gnomes, I desire to believe there are no gnomes; let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want,” and all the other things that rationalists are supposed to say on such occasions.
But with the rainbow it is not even necessary to go that far. The rainbow is still there!
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1. John Keats, “Lamia,” The Poetical Works of John Keats (London: Macmillan) (1884).
200
Fake Reductionism
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
—John Keats, Lamia
I am guessing—though it is only a guess—that Keats himself did not know the woof and texture of the rainbow. Not the way that Newton understood rainbows. Perhaps not even at all. Maybe Keats just read, somewhere, that Newton had explained the rainbow as “light reflected from raindrops”—
—which was actually known in the thirteenth century. Newton only added a refinement by showing that the light was decomposed into colored parts, rather than transformed in color. But that put rainbows back in the news headlines. And so Keats, with Charles Lamb and William Wordswor
th and Benjamin Haydon, drank “confusion to the memory of Newton” because “he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.” That’s one reason to suspect Keats didn’t understand the subject too deeply.
I am guessing, though it is only a guess, that Keats could not have sketched out on paper why rainbows only appear when the Sun is behind your head, or why the rainbow is an arc of a circle.
If so, Keats had a Fake Explanation. In this case, a fake reduction. He’d been told that the rainbow had been reduced, but it had not actually been reduced in his model of the world.
This is another of those distinctions that anti-reductionists fail to get—the difference between professing the flat fact that something is reducible, and seeing it.
In this, the anti-reductionists are not too greatly to be blamed, for it is part of a general problem.
I’ve written before on seeming knowledge that is not knowledge, and beliefs that are not about their supposed objects but only recordings to recite back in the classroom, and words that operate as stop signs for curiosity rather than answers, and technobabble that only conveys membership in the literary genre of “science” . . .
There is a very great distinction between being able to see where the rainbow comes from, and playing around with prisms to confirm it, and maybe making a rainbow yourself by spraying water droplets—
—versus some dour-faced philosopher just telling you, “No, there’s nothing special about the rainbow. Didn’t you hear? Scientists have explained it away. Just something to do with raindrops or whatever. Nothing to be excited about.”
I think this distinction probably accounts for a hell of a lot of the deadly existential emptiness that supposedly accompanies scientific reductionism.
You have to interpret the anti-reductionists’ experience of “reductionism,” not in terms of their actually seeing how rainbows work, not in terms of their having the critical “Aha!,” but in terms of their being told that the password is “Science.” The effect is just to move rainbows to a different literary genre—a literary genre they have been taught to regard as boring.
For them, the effect of hearing “Science has explained rainbows!” is to hang up a sign over rainbows saying, “This phenomenon has been labeled BORING by order of the Council of Sophisticated Literary Critics. Move along.”
And that’s all the sign says: only that, and nothing more.
So the literary critics have their gnomes yanked out by force; not dissolved in insight, but removed by flat order of authority. They are given no beauty to replace the hauntless air, no genuine understanding that could be interesting in its own right. Just a label saying, “Ha! You thought rainbows were pretty? You poor, unsophisticated fool. This is part of the literary genre of science, of dry and solemn incomprehensible words.”
That’s how anti-reductionists experience “reductionism.”
Well, can’t blame Keats, poor lad probably wasn’t raised right.
But he dared to drink “Confusion to the memory of Newton”?
I propose “To the memory of Keats’s confusion” as a toast for rationalists. Cheers.
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201
Savannah Poets
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
—Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics,1
Vol I, p. 3–6 (line breaks added)
That’s a real question, there on the last line—what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere? Whether or not Feynman meant the question rhetorically, it has a real answer:
If Jupiter is like us, he can fall in love, and lose love, and regain love.
If Jupiter is like us, he can strive, and rise, and be cast down.
If Jupiter is like us, he can laugh or weep or dance.
If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, it is more difficult for the poet to make us feel.
There are poets and storytellers who say that the Great Stories are timeless, and they never change, are only ever retold. They say, with pride, that Shakespeare and Sophocles are bound by ties of craft stronger than mere centuries; that the two playwrights could have swapped times without a jolt.
Donald Brown once compiled a list of over two hundred “human universals,” found in all (or a vast supermajority of) studied human cultures, from San Francisco to the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert. Marriage is on the list, and incest avoidance, and motherly love, and sibling rivalry, and music and envy and dance and storytelling and aesthetics, and ritual magic to heal the sick, and poetry in spoken lines separated by pauses—
No one who knows anything about evolutionary psychology could be expected to deny it: The strongest emotions we have are deeply engraved, blood and bone, brain and DNA.
It might take a bit of tweaking, but you probably could tell “Hamlet” sitting around a campfire on the ancestral savanna.
So one can see why John “Unweave a rainbow” Keats might feel something had been lost, on being told that the rainbow was sunlight scattered from raindrops. Raindrops don’t dance.
In the Old Testament, it is written that God once destroyed the world with a flood that covered all the land, drowning all the horribly guilty men and women of the world along with their horribly guilty babies, but Noah built a gigantic wooden ark, etc., and after most of the human species was wiped out, God put rainbows in the sky as a sign that he wouldn’t do it again. At least not with water.
You can see how Keats would be shocked that this beautiful story was contradicted by modern science. Especially if (as I described in the previous essay) Keats had no real understanding of rainbows, no “Aha!” insight that could be fascinating in its own right, to replace the drama subtracted—
Ah, but maybe Keats would be right to be disappointed even if he knew the math. The Biblical story of the rainbow is a tale of bloodthirsty murder and smiling insanity. How could anything about raindrops and refraction properly replace that? Raindrops don’t scream when they die.
So science takes the romance away (says the Romantic poet), and what you are given back never matches the drama of the original—
(that is, the original delusion)
—even if you do know the equations, because the equations are not about strong emotions.
That is the strongest rejoinder I can think of that any Romantic poet could have said to Feynman—though I can’t remember ever hearing it said.
You can guess that I don’t agree with the Romantic poets. So my own stance is this:
It is not necessary for Jupiter to be like a human, because humans are like humans. If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, that doesn’t mean that love and hate are emptied from the universe. There are still loving and hating minds in the universe. Us.
With more than six billion of us at the last count, does Jupiter really need to be on the list of potential protagonists?
It is not necessary to tell the Great Stories about planets or rainbows. They play out all over our world, every day. Every day, someone kills for revenge; every day, someone kills a friend by mistake; every day, upward of a hund
red thousand people fall in love. And even if this were not so, you could write fiction about humans—not about Jupiter.
Earth is old, and has played out the same stories many times beneath the Sun. I do wonder if it might not be time for some of the Great Stories to change. For me, at least, the story called “Goodbye” has lost its charm.
The Great Stories are not timeless, because the human species is not timeless. Go far enough back in hominid evolution, and no one will understand Hamlet. Go far enough back in time, and you won’t find any brains.
The Great Stories are not eternal, because the human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is not eternal. I most sincerely doubt that we have another thousand years to go in our current form. I do not say this in sadness: I think we can do better.
I would not like to see all the Great Stories lost completely, in our future. I see very little difference between that outcome, and the Sun falling into a black hole.
But the Great Stories in their current forms have already been told, over and over. I do not think it ill if some of them should change their forms, or diversify their endings.
“And they lived happily ever after” seems worth trying at least once.
The Great Stories can and should diversify, as humankind grows up. Part of that ethic is the idea that when we find strangeness, we should respect it enough to tell its story truly. Even if it makes writing poetry a little more difficult.
If you are a good enough poet to write an ode to an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, you are writing something original, about a newly discovered part of the real universe. It may not be as dramatic, or as gripping, as Hamlet. But the tale of Hamlet has already been told! If you write of Jupiter as though it were a human, then you are making our map of the universe just a little more impoverished of complexity; you are forcing Jupiter into the mold of all the stories that have already been told of Earth.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 82
