Ironic Observations on Dawkinism

Rather ironically, literalism, in religion (taking religious stories literally) is a fallout from an emphasis on empirical evidence (tangible, observable) and likely a newish phenomenon. At the same time, when non literalist people believe a religious text to be true, what do they believe is true? Do they find only metaphors that explain an aspect of personal psychology? I don't think so. 

When I look at what religions do, they don't so much answer metaphysical questions or address individual psychological phenomena as they sort out the social order, governing social and economic institutions. A very simple example: The hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, includes the lines, "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God ranks them high and lowly and measures their estate." Religions sanction the "divine right of kings", my general metaphor for the myths that sustain various forms of social organization.

So I'd like to say to Richard Dawkins, "look, we're primates and primates are hierarchical, clannish and tribal, but as humans we don't have a great sense of smell so we need other vehicles to transmit instinctive forms of organization ;) and your reduction of myth to childish stories actually closes off a whole area of possible investigation." Of course, Freud and others reduced conscious experience to include only what can be articulated more or less prosaically, while I'm sure plenty of our conscious experience is filled with things we can't quite clarify as easily as the author of "All Things Bright and Beautiful".  

Our fuzzier, less prosaic, numinous experiences don't seem to live anywhere but on the fringe - and even there, people are trying to explain these experiences with references to complexity theory or quantum physics (either to reduce numinous experience to science or to give scientific weight to the "spiritual realm").

The reason Dawkins is keenly writing books that debunk religion probably ties in with the fact that we're at a critical juncture in terms of our economic relationship with the planet and each other. A new governing narrative will probably emerge, but I certainly hope it's not something that channels us to a cyborg singularity.

(Inspired by http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/18/chasing-rainbows-why-myths-matter )

Context, what context? There are only things, things and more things (rather a lot of things, really).

I think the biggest intellectual sin of the western thinking is to erase context.

There are two variations. One is duplicity. If you can frame something incompletely, you can spin anything, and given that framing is not the strong suit of our cultural discursive modality, spin rules and we don't even know what non-spin would be. Why? because of the second area in which the western mind erases context:

In pursuing objectivity exclusively by trying to define things in eternal terms (mathematically), a researcher would still have to identify/place the relevant conditions in order to make predictions or design working machines, an art for which there is no algorithm. Sure, s/he can model some astoundingly complex scenarios - all well and good - until the practitioners suppose that this model works for everything, in which case the set of vast, messy, tangled set of influences gets in the way, rather a lot.  But because the western habit is to ignore context, we can ignore a vast set of influences, a whole host of potential questions and other avenues of research...

Inventory and Alienation

Haven't posted for a while. There has been a lot in the non-virtual world to tend to lately.

My Dad used to tell of the saying that he and his fellow Englishmen belonged to "a nation of shopkeepers." Looking at this from a distance, combined with the general ubiquity of English "empiricism", I see the general worldview encapsulated in this saying as one of "inventory". Of course we associate empiricism with evidence and objectivity, the successful scientific method, and contrast it with the general failure of scholastic philosophy (as parodied by Monty Python in the witch skit in the film, the Holy Grail, for example) which is viewed as contributing nothing more than impractical and fanciful speculations. I'm led to think, though, that our insistence on clear definitions and numbers owes itself far more to our economic arrangements than our scientific one, and science suffers as much as the rest of us for a misplaced trust in clear definitions and numbers.

Is the world in fact "composed of things of various kinds in various numbers"? Yes, obviously, most people would say. But that describes an inventory, not an ecosphere, which is rather more dynamic and complex. So what do scientists do if not inventory? They do think in numbers and definitions. The cornerstone of experimentation is the "operational definition" which is about defining something in measurable, numerical terms. In order to accomplish this, scientists need to speculate about potential influences on the object of study and set up experiments to "control for" these influences in ways that can be measured. And in order to manage this, they need to circumscribe the list of potential influences, which for certain things (i.e., things that we'd say are "law governed", i.e., mechanical things) is doable.  Well, gosh, that would be obvious wouldn't it, because if things weren't law governed, no scientist could manage to create an experiment with reliable predictions and repeatable results.

It's my view that this approach is only amenable to objects of study where context can be mathematically parsed out of the equations, and those things are everywhere, but not necessarily everything (i.e., certain areas of physics and chemistry.) In other words, scientific laws describe ideal relations, without context. The particular context is supplied by the "initial conditions". Is there ever a situation where the initial conditions can't be exhaustively identified? Of course! Pretty well every situation that is not covered by the "hard sciences."

Stuart Kauffman suggests that we "sneak in" the lawfulness in hard science by roping things off, setting them up in advance "by hand". Yes, this is awesome that we can do this, and it's what allows us to have incredibly complicated technologies and wonderful experimental discoveries in physics and chemistry, but I don't believe that, even in principle we'd be able to identify the field of things meant to count as initial conditions for all the different occasions and events in the world. At best, we could do so retroactively, but never proactively.

What this means is that for much of what we try to plan and determine, we identify rather an incomplete list of things that count as conditions for the outcomes we are projecting. People are becoming more attuned to this fact as, for example, they now talk about "wicked problems" in business planning; in other words, problems whose dimensions are not definable and enumerable in advance. People have always known that ecology and sociology do not make the kinds of hard and fast predictions of physics and chemistry, but the question is why and the answer is that they do not have the kinds of problems where the "parsing out" that goes on in physics and chemistry can be done. Why don't they? Because not everything that occurs happens at one scale. Everything is intertwined, everything is interconnected, everything influences on several scales. Mechanical (or "reductionist") thinking focuses only on one. This focus keeps us alienated from discovery and from life. If an experience of a situation doesn't fit into that box, it's supposed to be "merely subjective" and otherwise non-existent? (Talk of epiphenomena, or even silly concepts such as supervenience are used as ad hoc supplements to reductionist models.)

Types, lists and numbers. How much of our planning counts these as the cornerstone? More to the point, how much of our ideas of worth are tied to these "real, practical, objective, factual, measurable" things? Are these not our very idea of what's worth pursuing? (Think of S.M.A.R.T. goals for example.)

I'm not sure that's smart or even scientific, to be honest. It's just an inventory.

The constellations of philosophy?

Hypothesis:

The patterns of every socio-economic organization in history and the powers that maintain them are supported by a tacit ontology (myth/theory of what reality is) that underpins public discourse and the social narrative. This ontology serves to legitimate the social order in the same way as the ancient belief in the "divine right of kings" or "mandate of heaven". (Another metaphor that may work in place of the divine right of kings might be heavenly/stellar constellations. Ancient rites seem to have connected them.)

Philosophers are by trade apologists for or critics of the divine right of kings (i.e., the ontology that underpins the social narrative). It is changes in technology that occasion changes in the social narrative (and only indirectly philosophy) because technological change gives rise to the need for changes in the patterns of economic and thus social organization, which then calls forth a new narrative. Philosophers gain a following when they contribute to a sustaining narrative, or to one held onto by soon-to-be eclipsed powers (there's usually a lag...).

The Wisdom of Crowds...

I have seen talks about social media by people with expertise who objected to the "everyone's an expert" phenomenon. The issue that concerns me, though, is not so much that some opinionated bloggers :D can claim more of a following than people who know what they're talking about but it's about the nature of influence and the apparent malleability of public opinion.

People's cultural beliefs are generally, well, cultural, historical, inherited and then mussed around by messages that support the economy (the economy is how we are organized and then interact to get what we need from nature.) We know why we need a public broadcaster in a world where messages are dominated by the power-houses of the economy. What's to stop the same people who created so-called "populist" sound-byte news from dominating the social media web-o-sphere and having an even greater influence on public opinion?

Charles Taylor decried the emphasis on the economic machine as a cultural ideal in an article entitled "The Agony of Economic Man" (1971). More generally, and very much related, are the warnings of thinkers like Maslow and Gadamer about our conflation of means with ends in an increasingly instrumentalist society.

Our real social ideals have become seen as "merely" subjective values. A sizable majority of people seem generally keen on aligning themselves with whatever version of "the divine right of kings" plays out in public discourse. Far from being either populist or grass roots wisdom, where each person contributes his or her own carefully thought-out view to the common good, what seems to be the case is that, as Matthew Taylor says in his RSAnimate talk, 21st Century Enlightenment (also posted below), people pursue "simplistic and inadequate ideas of freedom, justice and progress." They're simplistic, IMO, because they're not framed as cultural ideals, but as ideological supports for the "economy", i.e., as supports for the instrumental requirements of the economic power-houses.

With public opinion as the opinion of the electorate/tax payers, whose side do the politicians need to be on when public opinion is so readily influenced?

What is the role of the new media government communications person or policy analyst when this question needs to be taken in to account?

(I'd recommend the article by David Blacker, linked on the side, if you're up for a bit of a think.)

These are all difficult questions.

21st Century Enlightenment

This talk from RSAnimate is 11 minutes worth watching.

Initial Conditions and Predictability

According to physicist, Eugene Wigner (link to article), physics is possible because we are able to identify regularities in nature.

The world around us is of baffling complexity and the most obvious fact about it is that we cannot predict the future... It is, as Schrodinger has remarked, a miracle that in spite of the baffling complexity of the world, certain regularities in the events could be discovered. One such regularity, discovered by Galileo, is that two rocks, dropped at the same time from the same height, reach the ground at the same time. The laws of nature are concerned with such regularities...

This is surprising, he says, for a few reasons. The first is that it is true everywhere on earth and it will always be true, i.e., it is invariant. The second reason that it is surprising is that this invariance "is independent of so many conditions that could have an effect on it." It doesn't matter where on earth or by whom the rocks are dropped and "there are innumerable other conditions which are all immaterial from the point of view of the validity of Galileo's regularity." He says,

The irrelevancy of so many circumstances which could play a role in the phenomenon observed has also been called an invariance. However, this invariance is of a different character from the preceding one since it cannot be formulated as a general principle. The exploration of the conditions which do, and which do not, influence a phenomenon is part of the early experimental exploration of a field. It is the skill and ingenuity of the experimenter which show him phenomena which depend on a relatively narrow set of relatively easily realizable and reproducible conditions. (Italics added.)

This is important when it comes to understanding the surprising thing about making predictions. Wigner says, "the law of nature is contained in the statement that the length of time which it takes for a heavy object to fall from a given height is independent of the size, material, and shape of the body which drops."

Given certain "easily realizable and reproducible" Initial Conditions (ICs) and a Law of Nature (LN), then a Prediction will follow. (IC & LN) > P. However, 

the laws of nature can be used to predict future events only under exceptional circumstances - when all the relevant determinants of the present state of the world are known. It is also in consonance with this that the construction of machines, the functioning of which he can foresee, constitutes the most spectacular accomplishment of the physicist. In these machines, the physicist creates a situation in which all the relevant coordinates are known so that the behavior of the machine can be predicted. Radars and nuclear reactors are examples of such machines.

The two important points I draw from the preceding exposition are:

1. In order to apply a law to make a prediction you need to identify the relevant conditions (ICs).
2. The ability to isolate phenomena whose regularity can be demonstrated with easily reproducible conditions cannot be summed up in a general principle. 

 To those two points I would also add an idea that I think follows from an insight of Stuart Kauffman, author of Reinventing the Sacred (linked on the sidebar) where he says, in analyzing mechanical systems, 

physicists since Newton have put in the constraints..."by hand" as what are called the mathematical "boundary conditions" on a system, rather like the boundaries of a billiard table, that keep the balls from rolling off into infinity or under the table. Given the boundary conditions, physicists state the initial conditions, particles and forces, and solve the equations for the subsequent dynamics...

But in the real universe, we can ask, "Where do the constraints themselves come from?"(pp. 90-91) (italics added.)

Although in principle it might be possible to retroactively determine the sequence of events that gave rise to a naturally occurring phenomenon (then again, there's the problem of infinite regress), no one could specify the relevant conditions in advance of every phenomenon-to-be in this complex world. What would we be looking for?


Kauffman (link to book) discusses the evolution of life and considers Darwinian preadaptations; e.g., three bones in the jaw of an ancestral fish that become bones in the middle ear in species descended from it. At the time this ancient fish lived, was there any way to predict the role of its bones in later species, let alone what later species would emerge?

This is not just an issue of complexity or chaos; i.e., sensitivity to initial conditions (a.k.a "the butterfly effect"). It is that, as Kauffman says, we can't prestate the relevant conditions  (p. 139 ff). What potentials will become actualities?  In Kauffman's view, this is not just an epistemic limitation, it is an ontological one. He says, "the evolution of life violates no law of physics, but cannot be reduced to physics." Not all of nature is law governed. 

So it seems to Kauffman, and to me, that the "natural law" model of a mechanistic universe has limited applicability; i.e., to "phenomena which depend on a relatively narrow set of relatively easily realizable and reproducible conditions."


We cannot completely predict the future, and generally that idea gives me comfort. Nature has space to play.

Also see P. Anderson, More is Different