Homocentric Universe

A SENSE OF SEENNESS:

Reality Is in the Eye of the Beholder (Shimon Edelman, from Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths, MIT Press Reader)

If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? Clearly enough to make action possible; apart from that, not much. Amazingly, the more basic a question about that real world seems, the more difficult it is to get a definitive answer to it. Is it dark at night? The sense in which it is for us is of little concern to a bat, and of no concern to a mole. Is air thick? Not really to us, but sufficiently so for a swallow to push against during its aerial acrobatics. Is water wet? Not to a duck or a water strider. In the face of such differences, it seems silly to insist that our perceptual world is somehow privileged or that what we perceive is how things really are.

How things look and feel depends not only on who is doing the looking and feeling, but also on what action or other purpose it serves, as well as on the perceiver’s experiential history (and therefore on memory) and bodily and emotional state. I may see a rock outcropping encountered on a hike as a human face or as a battering ram, depending on where my mind was wandering as I was walking up to it (arguably, the best hiking experience requires that the hiker practice just seeing instead of seeing as).

When I am hungry, a mountain track that I am facing looks steeper than right after a meal. The prospect of jumping at six o’clock in the morning into the indoor pool, in which the water is kept cool to prevent lap swimmers from overheating, feels discomforting to different degrees, depending on whether it is summer or winter outside, as I found out, having been doing this three times a week for many years. Luckily, it helps to think about other matters while swimming. For example, anticipating how the chapter that I am working on is going to end literally warms me up: It distracts me from the initial feeling of cold and I also swim faster, so that it takes me a couple of minutes less to do my usual 3,200 yards.

As we find ourselves compelled to doubt the very notion of objective truth about what the world is like, can science help? Yes, as long as we don’t expect it to do the impossible. Whatever the world is “really” like, evolution has been clearly successful — in an endless variety of strange and beautiful ways — in coming up with effective means of dealing with it. Science, which operates on much the same principles of variation and selection, can be at least equally successful. But evolution has no use for questions of ultimate truth and scientists too are supposed to shun them. In some disciplines, they have learned to do so. Is the electron really a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics, an epitome of theoretical and practical success in physics, rightly refuses such questions.

The complexity of the human brain greatly exceeds that of any other physical system that we know of, so that in perception science it is even more important not to waste time on arguing about absolutes. What color is this banana? Purple (it’s my favorite variety from Costa Rica), but there is no matter of objective fact about this observation, because color has no physical definition: It is entirely the construct of the observer’s visual system in its interaction with the environment. At least as far as color is concerned, things are neither as they seem, nor otherwise.

There is a philosophical tradition out there that holds this — the essential emptiness of all things — to be an ultimate truth in its own right; indeed, the only ultimate truth.

NOT QUITE TIME TO EAT FROM THE OTHER TREE:

Exploding the Big Bang: It was thought that science could tell us about the origins of the Universe. Today that great endeavour is in serious doubt (Daniel Linford, 12/09/24, Aeon)

The question of our Universe’s birth seems settled. And yet, despite how the Big Bang is portrayed in popular culture, many physicists and philosophers of physics have long doubted whether science can truly tell us that time began. In recent decades, powerful results developed by scientifically minded philosophers appear to show that science may never show us that time began. The beginning of time, once imagined as igniting in a sudden burst of fireworks, is no longer an indisputable scientific fact.

FRUIT OF THE OTHER TREE:

A Supercomputer Just Created the Largest Universe Simulation Ever (Isaac Schultz, December 7, 2024, Gizmodo)

The supercomputer is called Frontier; recently, a team of researchers recently used it to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe yet. The supercomputer’s simulation size corresponds to surveys taken by large telescope observatories, which to this point had not been possible. The calculations undergirding the simulations provide a new foundation for cosmological simulations of the universe’s matter content, from everything we see to the invisible stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter gravitationally.

We are all designist.

GIVE THE PARADIGM, GET THE MATH:

Mathematicians Just Debunked the ‘Bunkbed Conjecture’ (Joseph Howlett, Nov. 24th, 2024, Wired)

Unexpectedly, three mathematicians have now shown that a well-known hypothesis in probability theory called the bunkbed conjecture falls into this category. The conjecture—which is about the different ways you can navigate the mathematical mazes called graphs when they’re stacked on top of each other like bunk beds—seemed natural, even self-evident. “Anything our brain tells us suggests the conjecture should be true,” said Maria Chudnovsky, a graph theorist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new work.

But they were wrong. Last month, a trio of mathematicians announced a counterexample, disproving the conjecture. The result offers fresh guidance on how to approach related problems in physics about properties of solid materials. But it also taps into deeper questions about how mathematics works. A lot of mathematical effort is spent trying to prove conjectures true. It’s lonelier to try to pull them apart. The team behind the new work failed many times before they finally found their counterexample. Their story suggests that mathematicians may need to question their assumptions more often.

WATCH ‘EM GO, GO, GO:

Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto Mount St Helens For 1 Day. 40 Years Later, The Effect Is Astonishing (Francesca Benson. 11/11/24, IFL Science)

Two years after the eruption of Mount St Helens, local gophers were sent to the area in what must have been quite a confusing day trip, even if the animals were not aware of the news. The gophers were placed in enclosed areas for the experiment and spent their day digging around in the pumice.

Despite only spending one day in the area, the impact they had was remarkable. Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy.

“Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” the team explained. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”

The Great Chain of Being

IT’S EARLY STAGE CAPITALISM IN AMERICA’S YOUTH:

How Nigh Is the End? Predictions for Geysers, Marriages, Poker Streaks and the Human Race (John Tierney, July 16, 2007, NY Times Tierney Lab)

Imagine you have just landed on another planet and entered Geyser Intergalactic Park. You know nothing about geysers except that they sometimes start shooting liquid and sometimes stop. You see two active geysers, each with a digital stopwatch next to it recording how long it’s been shooting. One geyser has been shooting for 100 million years. The other has been shooting for 10 seconds.

Can you predict which of these geysers will stop first?

You may think there’s an easy answer, but it’s not so clear to the philosophers and probability experts who have been debating the predictions of J. Richard Gott III, the Princeton physicist whom I discuss in my Findings column. He says you can make forecasts with 95-percent certainty about the likely longevity of the human race – or your marriage, or your winning streak at the poker table — simply by looking at how long it has existed. The longer something’s been around, the longer he expects it to last.

By that logic, you should expect the 10-second geyser to stop first, but it’s not so simple, as Bradley Monton and Brian Kierland explain in an excellent article in the Philosophical Quarterly. These philosophers – at the University of Colorado and the University of Missouri, respectively – took a long look at the debate over Dr. Gott’s forecasting method.

Dr. Gott’s Copernican Formula assumes that whatever you’re observing is unlikely to still be in the first one-fortieth of its lifespan, so if it’s already been around for x amount of time, it’s unlikely to last an additional 39x amount of time. Conversely, it’s probably not very close to its demise — – it’s probably still in the first 39/40 of its total lifespan, not in the final 1/40 — so you can predict that its remaining life is likely to be at least 1/39th of x.

Dr. Gott applied his formula to the plays and musicals that were open on Broadway the day his original paper was published in Nature in 1993. Of the 44 Broadway productions, 40 have closed within the forecast limits (including “Cats,” then being advertised as “now and forever.”) Depending on what happens with the remaining four – none is yet near its upper limit – Dr. Gott’s accuracy rate will be somewhere between 90 and 100 percent, which jibes nicely with the 95-percent accuracy rate that his formula is supposed to yield.

Human extinction could come within 5,100 years (Christopher Ingraham, October 16, 2017, Washington Post)

Every day, it seems, brings with it fresh new horrors. Mass murder. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear annihilation. It’s all enough to make a reasonable person ask: How much longer can things go on this way? A Princeton University astrophysicist named J. Richard Gott has a surprisingly precise answer to that question.

Assuming that you and I are not so special as to be born at either the dawn of a very long-lasting human civilization or the twilight years of a short-lived one, we can apply Gott’s 95 percent confidence formula to arrive at an estimate of when the human race will go extinct: between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.

IT’S ALL ULTIMATELY AESTHETICS:

Stop Blaming Foucault: It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland (Ari Gandsman, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rory referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.

Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes.

Post-modernism is a return to pre-modernism. Once you get back you have to choose your faith. the oncologists above choose a particularly ugly one.