note mentions

• the beginning of infinity

  

  Sep 22, 2021 → Jan 16, 2022

  ---

  notes on david deutsch's (fascinating) the beginning of infinity (2011), about infinity & universality, memetics and philosophy of science.

  ⠀ ⠀

  • "we do not know why the laws of physics seem fine-tuned, why various forms of universality exist, or why the world is explicable. but eventually we shall. And when we do, there will be infinitely more left to explain."
  • "if the question is interesting, the problem is soluble."

  ⠀ ⠀

  knowledge

  curiosity: thinking existing explanations don't fully capture the ideas behind them, being unsatisfied with current stories.

  • guessing is ∴ the single process thought which all knowledge originates: wonder → guessing → conjecture → speculation, which is vital for discovery.
  • when stories/explanations can't be changed anymore, we have understood objective truth, and, like magic, what we understand we then control.
  • the only path for knowledge creation is then error-correcting → finding good explanations (conjecture+criticism+experiment) = progress.
  • there can ∴ be no aspects of reality beyond our brain's capacity: if (brain capacity==computational speed + memory) we can use the computer, just like we have used pen and paper to understand the world for centuries.

  ⠀ ⠀

  creativity: ability to create and replicate ideas to increase the amount of usable knowledge.

  • parrots copy sounds, apes copy movements, but humans create: it's (conjecture+criticism+experiment) to form good explanations of other's behaviour and the world → this is creativity.
  • must be an evolutionary process within brains since it depends on conjecture (variation) and criticism (selection).
  • human brains are physical objects that evolved to replicate ideas (Blackmore). thoughts are computations permitted under the laws of nature.

  ⠀ ⠀

  ideas: information that can be stored in human brains and affects behaviour.

  • knowledge is created by human thought, preserved and transmitted by human culture (not genetically, which is why some humans are able to survive in jungle and others in the arctic)
  • abstract language, explanations, wealth above subsistence and long-range trade gave power to ideas. by the time history began to be recorded, it was the history of ideas.

  ⠀ ⠀

  culture: set of ideas that cause holders to behave alike.

  • ideas are rarely expressed with the same words and can vary in both written and spoken language. yet, they stay the same idea.
  • if a parrot repeats Aristotle, sound is there but knowledge (replicator) isn't → replicators of ideas are abstract, they're the knowledge itself.
  • reach of ideas in world of abstraction is a property of knowledge they contain. theory can have infinite reach even if person is unaware.
  • for centuries, people have tried to explain the mind in mechanical terms, using metaphors based on the most complex machines of the day (complicated set of gears, hydraulic pipes, steam engines, telephone exchanges, and now, the computer.)
  • but "brain=engine" ≠ "brain=computer": computers are universal simulators. expecting them to behave like neurones is not a metaphor, it's a known proven property of physics and computers

  ⠀ ⠀

  beauty

  some aspects of nature (night sky, waterfalls, sunsets) seem to be beautiful to humans but show no signs of being designed with this intention. However, flowers do seem to have an apparent design for beauty.

  • flowers need insects to bring them pollen and insects need flowers to get. how these 2 wildly distinct species evolve to communicate this?
  • flower evolved genes to make their shape attractive to insects, which bring pollen. insects evolved genes that attract them to flowers with the best nectar (most beautiful ones)
  • nature seems to have used beauty to allow these 2 wildly distinct species to communicate.

  humans recognizing that flowers are beautiful even though they evolved this way for unrelated purposes is evidence that some beauty is objective: it can be found in all places from the flower's genome to human minds.

  • flowers have to create objective beauty and insects have to recognize objective beauty.
  • beauty then must exist in 2 kinds: subjective(local to species/culture/individuals, parochial) and objective(universal).
  • ⤷ local and subjective/parochial criteria of beauty evolved within a species to produce something that looks beautiful to us.

  ⠀

  • if beauty can be objective like the laws of nature and mathematical theorems, then new works of art must add new knowledge to the world just like scientific theories do.

  ⠀ ⠀

  philo

  optimism: all failures are due to insufficient knowledge.

  • optimism in civilizations has led to mini-enlightenments, traditions of criticisms that lead to patterns of human progress: art, philosophy, science, technology and open institutions.
  • Athen's Golden Age (V. bc): one of firsts democracies. home to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the playwrights Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, and the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.
  • democratic tradition dated back to Thales (6th C. BCE) and Xenophanes (570-480 BCE). Pericles argued (Funeral Oration, 431 BCE) it existed not because people should rule but because it promotes wise action (continual discussion, necessary condition for discovery and progress)
  • Florentine's believe of improving ancient knowledge. began in art, then philosophy, science and technology. led to humanism (knowledge > dogma, intellectual independence, curiosity, taste)
  • progress implies discoveries are inconceivable. dynamic societies are those that expect their knowledge to grow unpredictably.
  • Popper's criterion is met by societies that expect their knowledge to grow unpredictably ∴ he's an optimist, progress implies discoveries are inconceivable.

  enlightenment: 1688 (English Enlightenment), inconceivable a century earlier.

  • success at making scientific discoveries implies commitment to values of progress: truth, good explanations, open to ideas and change, tolerance, integrity, openness of debate.
  • necessary condition for progress: change meant new authorities replaced old ones, so tradition of criticism was needed to sustain rapid growth of knowledge.
  • Universal theories of justices, legitimacy and morality began to take place alongside universal theories of matter and motion as philosophers set out to free institutions from arbitrary rules. (Locke→political) universality was now a desirable feature.
  • emergence of methodical rule that scientific theories must be testable, rebellion against authority of knowledge. "problems as soluble and inevitable, progress is attainable and desirable."

  static societies: people could expect to die under the same values, lifestyles, technology and patterns of economic production.

  • universality needs appreciation of abstract knowledge for its own/to yield unforeseeable benefits. unnatural in static societies.
  • small populations + parochial knowledge → big ideas are set millennia apart.
  • if way of life leads to more efficient methods of living (farming, medicine...) it is not sustainable → population grows, fewer workers are needed ∴ live the solution and set about solving the new problems it creates. only progress is sustainable.

  humans alone are authors of explanatory knowledge, the human behaviour called history.

  • Knowledge alone converts landscapes into resources or prevents improvements (≠Marx, Engels). ideas and not biogeographical explanations account for events: can't explain the fall of the USSR with climate, minerals or flora/fauna.
  • Marx's theory of history was evolutionary and described a progression though historical stages, determined by economic "laws of motion". He used Darwin's theory as a basis for the historical class struggle (biological species ≈ socio-economic classes). Facsist groups use this and other misinterpretations of evolution to justify violence.
  • (presence of gene is always explained as being caused by more replications than rival genes. competition in biological evolution is between variant of genes within a species: can produce violence or cooperation.)

  ⠀ ⠀

  science

  nature of science can be understood with theories=misconceptions

  • Einstein doesn't correct Newton but is radically different (gravitational force, uniform flow of time in respect to motion). same with Kepler and Newton. each ignores and denies its predecessors' basic means of explaining reality.
  • explanations were never true ∴ successive explanations ≠ growth of knowledge about reality.
  • Einstein's misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton's misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler's. neo-Darwinian evolution is an improvement on Darwin's misconception, and his on Lamarck's. No infallibility nor finality.

  scientific method: increasingly difficult to ignore philosophical implications of the fact that nature had been understood in unprecedented depth, and of the methods of science and reason by which it was done.

  • perhaps it started with Galileo and became irreversible with newton. (his laws replicated themselves as rational ideas and fidelity was very high as they were so useful)
  • no way of missing rapid that progress was underway after newton. (some like Rousseau tried by arguing reason as harmful, civilization as bad and primitive live as happy).
  • No process can reveal the content and consequences of a discovery before it is made. scientific discovery is ∴ unpredictable but determined by the laws of physics

  evolution: optimizes neither good of species or individual, but the relative ability of surviving variants to spread through population. it favours only genes that spread best.

  • peacock's colourful tail: diminishes viability and harder to evade predators but prominent mating ∴ offspring has more prominent tails, ↻.

  genetic code as language for organisms has shown phenomenal reach.

  • genes replicate themselves by an indirect chemical route, being templates for similar molecules. evolved to specify organisms without having a nervous system, organs, senses, ability to exert force or move.
  • knowledge embodied in genes describes how to get replicated and functionality is achieved by encoding regularities in environments. complexity ≠ evolutionary adaptation. Darwin crystallized this: random mutations are discarded by natural selection.
  • might not be universal since it relies on specific chemicals (proteins) but could be universal constructor (created from inorganic materials like calcium phosphate in bones, programs organisms to construct outside their bodies: nests, dams, houses...)
  • RNA acts as the program which directs the synthesis of enzymes (catalysts, promotes change to other chemicals while remaining unchanged itself) catalysts control all chemical production and regulatory functions of an organism ∴ ≔ organism itself.

  evolution of biological adaptations and creation of human knowledge are similar (ideas and genes are replicators, knowledge and adaptation hard to vary) yet distinct (human knowledge as explanatory and with reach, contrary to adaptations.)

  ⠀ ⠀

  quantum physics

  quantum theory discovered independently by Heisenberg and Schrödinger between 1935 and 1927.

  • Heisenberg: physical variables of a particle are matrices, not values. we now know multiplicity of information is due because a variable has different values for different instances of the object in the multiverse.
  • Heisenberg uncertainty principle: for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object, some of their attributes must be diverse.
  • Schrödinger: mathematical equations that describes a single wave moving in a higher-dimensional space, when applied to an individual particle.
  • Bohr: Copenhagen interpretation, quantum theory as the complete description of reality and only outcomes of observations count as phenomena, they can't exist objectively.
    • proposed the principle of complementarity: phenomena can only be stated in classical language, anthropocentric language, meaning that the transition is caused by human consciousness ∴ acting at a fundamental level in physics.
    • Nothing is ever derived from observation: Mach (positivist), influenced Einstein to eliminate untested assumption from physics, including Newton's idea the time flows at the same rate for all observers.
    • Einstein soon rejected positivism in favour of realism, which explains why he never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation.

  issue: not consistent when applied to the case of an observer performing quantum measurements on another observer.

  • classical physics measures change in quantifiable quantities, quantum physics measures change in discrete variables and their proportions.
  • new type of motion, information flow and structure of the physical world: all objects contain information about which instances of it can interact with instances of other objects and different times are special cases of different universes → time is an entanglement phenomenon which places all equal clock readings into the same history.

  ⠀ ⠀

  history of computers

  • → calculations used to be done by clerks called "computers".

  computational universality should have happened with Babbage's Difference Engine (1820s), which had rules of arithmetic built into hardware to to automate log, cos, sin (used in navigation and engineering).

  • Lovelace argued that The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. can follow analysis but no power of anticipating any analytical truths. Alan Turing called this mistake ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’. Lovelace failed to appreciate not computational universality, but the universality of the laws of physics.
  • addition of memory and control over which cards to read next (Analytical Engine) → jump to universality.

  193# electrical relays for the analytical engine were just being used for the first applications of electromagnetism and were about to be mass produced for the telegraphy revolution.

  Turing Test: The general-purpose sense of Intelligence that Turing meant (constellation of attributes of the human mind) puzzled philosophers for a millennia. (others are consciousness, free will and meaning).

  • requiring a program to pretend to be human is biased and not relevant to know whether it can think, but it is easy to identify it as a computer if it doesn't.
  • if it can be programmed, it has nothing to do with intelligence –in Turing's sense (can't program it → haven't understood it.)
  • 1936: Turing develops his definitive theory of universal classical computer. His intention is to use the theory to study the nature of mathematical proof, not universality. The development of the first universal computers was for wartime applications.
  • Colossus (🇬🇧, Turing): code breaking → dismantled.
  • ENIAC (🇺🇸): equations -> universality (weather, h-bomb forecast)
  • the early telegraph system, even before the computer, did create an internet-like phenomenon among the operators, with ‘hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars... and so on’.
  • 1970s: Electronic technology has been miniaturized since WW2, this led to a jump to universality with silicon chips.
  • From then on, designers start with a microprocessor and program it to do specific tasks: washing machines are controlled by a computer that could be programmed to do astrophysics or word processing with enough memory.

  Quantum computation: Computation in which the flow of information is not confined to a single history.

  beginning of infinity

  some aspects of nature (night sky, waterfalls, sunsets) seem to be beautiful to humans but show no signs of being designed with this intention. However, flowers do seem to have an apparent design for beauty.

  • nature seems to have used beauty to allow these 2 wildly distinct species to communicate. humans recognizing that flowers are beautiful even though they evolved this way for unrelated purposes is evidence that some beauty is objective: it can be found in all places from the flower's genome to human minds.
  • flowers have to create objective beauty and insects have to recognize objective beauty.
  • beauty then must exist in 2 kinds: subjective(local to species/culture/individuals, parochial) and objective(universal).
  • ⤷ local and subjective/parochial criteria of beauty evolved within a species to produce something that looks beautiful to us.
  • if beauty can be objective like the laws of nature and mathematical theorems, then new works of art must add new knowledge to the world just like scientific theories do.

• discipline and punish

  michel foucault, 1975

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  ⠀

  Seems to be a history of criminology, but Foucault is making a much deeper analysis

  • signaling where the structures of power lie in society
  • the relationship between people in power and the average citizen

  Foucault strong disliked the term "history" He argued that the notion of history as constant progress leading to the endpoint of current civilization is wrong. He wanted to explore how structures of power have changed over time.

  He starts Discipline and Punish describing punishments from 1757 and arguing that one has to do more than just assume moral superiority and dismiss those times as barbarian. That is the key to understanding the similarities between the power structures and relations of the 1750s and today.

  It is important to understand that old punishments like those of Ch.I happened before the American and French revolution ∴ not modeled after the Enlightenment, but after a renaissance interpretation of Hobbes’ Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince.

  Punishments were crafted to uphold the Social Contract ∴ crimes were seen as a direct attack on the authority of the king. Here lie the clues to understand the function of the penal system of the 1750s: Neither justice nor fairness, but maintaining social order.

  • Extreme punishments were a deterrent of criminal behavior and reinforcement that the sovereign was still upholding his end of the social order.

  What happens when the power structure no longer serves the needs of the people?

  These extremes public punishments had 2 major unintended consequences. First, the population frequently agreed that punishment>crime and often sided with the criminal, questioning the authority of the sovereign. Second, since public punishments leave no doubt of who is in power, whenever people were not receiving their end of the social contract, there was no doubt as to who to blame.

  People of power soon realized that in their society, the will of the people often had influence over which people were in positions of power. This was very inconvenient for the sovereigns, as it made reigning for long periods of time statistically challenging.

  1757-1837: In order to make power more sustainable, drastic changes had to be made. Foucault argues that the reasons for these changes don’t have to be evil per-se, politicians often only looked at ways of keeping society in peace.

  • Public executions with severe punishments
  • 1790s: Public executions with standardized punishments (Guillotine)
  • Public executions with prisoners being transported in sealed vehicles
  • Public executions with masks
  • Executions moved into courthouse
  • Executions moved to prisons and are now completely private.

  Impossible not to be aware of → Abstract, far, unimportant

  Why do people who want to maintain structures of power prefer systems like this?

  By 1837, two main things had changed

  Emergence of the modern prison system. Much more efficient and effective way of waving power over people.

  Prisoners had every minute of their days scheduled → not much time for thinking

  ⠀

  Surveillance, Normalization, Examination

  • 24/7 Surveillance of prisoners
  • Normalization of how a "good prisoner" should think and behave
  • Constant examination, grading how much of a "good prisoner" you are.

  Foucault thinks this system might have its origins in the works of Jeremy Bentham.

  Panopticon: Building designed so that one in power can see everything every prisoner is doing all the time, but the prisoner is unable to know when he’s being watched. Bentham argued that this would leave prisoners with no choice but to behave as expected every single second.

  All this is much more than just a narration of prison history. Foucault is analyzing how Bentham’s Panopticon is a way of obtaining "power of mind over mind." What stops mental institutions, military trainings, factories, multinational corporations or schools from implementing this design?

  No need to treat employees/patients/students/soldiers as prisoners. Instead, by keeping the leash very loose, people in power could set narrow parameters of what it means to be a good employee/patient/student/soldier.

  If people do not feel like prisoners they will even police themselves to adhere to the normalized way of behaving, because their work life is one of constant surveilling (clocks, deadlines, supervisors, other employees), normalization (speaking, acting, dress codes, political correctness, team player) and examination (monthly evaluations).

  Surveillance, Normalization and Examination has become such a good system of controlling human behavior that it is now embedded in our culture, social circles, media…

  What’s insidious about how modern power keeps people in control today is that people are both subjects being controlled and also active participants in the system that (unknowingly) supports the current power structure.

  Foucault argues that the new goal of the modern penal system is also neither fairness nor justice, but the production of harmless, non-rebellious, working, tax-paying productive citizens who follow the rules and are satisfied with the normalized standard of what it means to be a person, according to people above.

  This explains the stark difference between sentencing of Blue and White Collar crimes:

  • CEO who commits Tax Fraud in the millions vs Store Bulgar
  • CEO doesn't need much correcting in the eyes of those in power (keep doing everything you’re doing, just pay taxes) - 10% go to jail
  • Store Bulgar needs to adhere to how a good citizen is supposed to behave - 90% go to jail

  The goal is reforming criminals to fit a preexisting mold of what a normal person is, not direct retribution for the crime.

  • Sentences drop when prisoners cooperate: as long as you’re willing to reform yourself into the standardized version of what a human should be, it doesn’t really matter what the sentence was.

  People who never change and never reform will eventually end up with life sentences. Foucault argues that it is those kinds of people that are fascinating to us as "normal people." He thinks we love criminals so much because when they refuse to play by the rules of society, they show us what we really are: the law abiding and active participants in a massive global prison.

  ⠀

  Panopticon = modernity

  Constantly being disciplined and reformed into good employees, consumers, students, voters –internalized expectations of ourselves given to us by someone in a position of power.

  We’re given standards by TV Shows, Movies, Books, etc. We have internalized standards of how we should look, what beauty is, what you should care about, what you can and can’t say, etc…

  No prison of method of torture ever devised that can doo to people what they willingly do to themselves in our modern social prison. We live in a Panopticon.

  We have created a world where we are in constant surveillance by ourselves. Surveillance by looking in the mirror.

  Genealogy of the modern soul. The media even gives you the vocabulary you have ∴ the only vocabulary you have to think of yourself as a person

  Billy the Kid, Bonny and Clyde, what happens when you put a criminal beloved by the people in the execution room?

  discipline and punish

  We’re given standards by TV Shows, Movies, Books, etc. We have internalized standards of how we should look, what beauty is, what you should care about, what you can and can’t say, etc…

• taste & design

  notes on Paul Graham's ideas on taste, beauty and design from some of his essays.

  • taste for makers, 2002
  • how art can be good, 2006
  • is there such thing as good taste?, 2021

  ---

  All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.

  • Ben Rich, Skunk Works
  • Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.
    • G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

  ⠀

  on taste

  • "taste is subjective."
    • museum guides tell you that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist.
      • Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. it's not true.
    • Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. But if taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect and there is no way to get better at your job.
      • like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse ∴ taste can be wrong.
  • If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing as good art.
    • You can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.
    • It means we can't say that any painter is better than a randomly chosen eight year old.
    • This breaks art's commonly believed relativism.
  • The key to this puzzle is that art has an audience ∴ a purpose.
    • Humans have a lot in common but people do vary, which is why judging art is hard, especially recent art.
    • good art should be measured by how much it engages any human. a better piece of art is more interesting to people, and people's preferences aren't random.

  on beauty

  • Beauty seems to be an example of a subjective quality, but once you narrow its definition to something that works a certain way on humans, it turns out humans have much in common, and beauty is a property of objects.
    • mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. coincidence?
  • If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. Good taste then becomes this ability: We need good taste to make good things.

  on design

  • Good design is simple.
    • In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one.
    • It means much the same thing in programming.
    • For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.
    • Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modelled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar.
    • In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly.
    • You'd think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work.
    • When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
  • Good design is timeless.
    • In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake.
    • if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.
  • Good design solves the right problem.
    • The typical stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial to control each. The dials are for humans to use, better to arrange the dials in a square like the burners.
    • In the mid twentieth century there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. These fonts are closer to the pure, underlying letterforms. But in text that's not the problem you're trying to solve. For legibility it's more important that letters be easy to tell apart. It may look Victorian, but a Times Roman lowercase g is easy to tell from a lowercase y.
    • Physics progressed faster as the problem became predicting observable behavior, instead of reconciling it with scripture.
  • Good design is suggestive.
    • Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself.
    • a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa.
    • In architecture and design, this principle means that a building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it,
    • In software, it means you should give users a few basic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego.
    • In math it means a proof that becomes the basis for a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn't lead to future discoveries;
    • in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit.
  • Good design is often slightly funny.
    • I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.
    • The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings-- or Shakespeare, for that matter.
  • Good design is hard.
    • When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he is forced to produce an elegant design.
    • In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to paintings of people. There is something to this tradition, and not just because pictures of faces get to press buttons in our brains that other pictures don't.
      • We are so good at looking at faces that we force anyone who draws them to work hard to satisfy us. If you draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one will know. When you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, people notice.
  • Good design looks easy.
    • The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.
    • In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that.
    • Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection.
    • In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation.
  • When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error.

  taste and design