Incommensurability of Science: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

Pure mathematics is an abstraction of the real world and is a subjective art-form like music, art and literature; as was correctly defined by Aristotle, “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful”: Aristotle, Metaphysics, M3, 1078b.

But has modern physics, since Albert Einstein, taken over mathematics and inverted the real world into the abstract world of pure mathematics and eliminated its "limitation" – the prize quality that Aristotle was so much fond of?

Well, If I may say so, I think I'm functionally right that many practicing physicists don't often question the fundamental precepts of their mathematical models, and they really should do this, but I don't think Einstein had much to do with this phenomenon. It's human nature to hold onto a paradigm and use it a little bit past it's sell-by date. Check out Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for a classic study of how paradigm shifts occur in science. What is true is that we very well may be on the cusp of a modern revolution in physics. And at the heart of that potential revolution is a reanalysis of what a mathematical model of a real process or event actually is. The role of mathematics in science is now a very hot subject of debate, particularly in physics.

The work of Lee Smolin, the cosmologist whom I've discussed in my "Time Reborn" review, brings to a head a fundamental problem with current mathematical models of reality. We have an embarrassment of riches in that we have not one, but TWO, perfectly cromulent theories that have been experimentally supported by several generations of scientists:

1) The Standard Model of quantum physics which predicts with stunning accuracy the interactions of fundamental particles; and

2) General Relativity which explains gravity and the motion of macroscopic objects.

The problem is that both of them can't be correct in the same universe. If you don't believe me, explain why the Standard Model breaks down when faced with a singularity (like in the real world). A bit of a puzzler, that. Proposed solutions, most recently the multiverse idea, have been far from satisfactory. Most annoyingly, the fundamental problem is that modern physics can't seem to construct testable, falsifiable assertions about the universe as a whole (as opposed to an experimental space in a lab). The method breaks down.

That's what Kuhn means by a paradigm failure/shift.

As I said, this all very annoying. That's why this is a very, very exciting time to be alive. Smolin has his response: an end to the mathematical 'spatialization' of time that is characteristic of most attempts to reconcile gravity with quantum, and a return to the concept that time is more than just a '4th' spatial dimension, but is rather something very different in kind. That concept is quite annoying to many math heads, who really, really, really don't like Smolin and his ilk of physicist. It's a debate to watch, much like the debate in genetic biology between Dawkins and the kin-selection gang, and Wilson and his hive of social biologists (hey, that's a damn good pun that is).

So yes, there is a hot debate going on in physics as to the efficacy of mathematical models in the real world (and even if such a thing is actually possible), but don't blame Uncle Albert. He would almost certainly be among the modern revolutionaries, storming the barricades now, the same as he did in his age.

Coming back to quantum mechanics, the 'laws' of physics may not be true everywhere and everywhen. For example, in a singularity (as in a black hole), the symmetries of quantum mechanics break down completely as I said before, and the equations produce nonsense. This implies two things:

1) The Standard Model is not a theory with a one-to-one correlation to the Universe. There are places now where the 'laws' of physics (as you've defined them) don't hold.

2) Our entire universe was once in a singularity. That's worth contemplating. At one time on our past, the laws of quantum mechanics cannot give us insight about any aspect of the universe at all.

In fact, the 'laws' of quantum mechanics had no object, at this early stage of the universe, on which to operate. So how did a universe that didn't conform to the laws arising from the Standard model become a universe which does conform to the laws arising from the Standard model? Do we need 'meta-laws' to explain the current laws? What would determine these meta-laws? And why these particular laws and physical constants instead of other laws and constants? Why this universe and not some other with different laws/constants?

So when you say the laws of physics are 'true' you need to qualify that statement. In fact, it's no longer entirely clear what a 'law of nature' really is. If a law is not true everywhere and for all time, isn't it really just a strong suggestion?

Kuhn got one thing wrong though: it is counter-revolutionary opposition to paradigm shifts that turn out to be irrational not the revolutionary paradigms shifts. Unfortunately some scientists have developed a material interest in the continued dominance of the old paradigm and irrationally reject the new. Often however the new concepts are extremely difficult to grasp especially by those who have been refining the old concepts so it's not just a material interest based on grants, reputation and the like. Kuhn was doing the sociology of the science community. His work is not about the philosophy of science (apart from the one misguided thought that paradigms are irrational rather than historical as science progresses) but unfortunately some post-modernists have abused it as `proof' of the subjectivity' of science. It is no such thing. It's just an interesting study of a group of people and the way they reach or are prevented from reaching their goals by the social relations between each other and the rest of society. It is itself a scientific work and I don't think Kuhn thought he was being irrational.

Despite being sometimes wrong, I can forgive him easily. Kuhn's book (or his earlier "The Copernican Revolution") came as a shock to philosophical thinking about science. I’ve read elsewhere that his career shift came when, as a trained physicist, he was obliged to fill in education he'd missed as an undergraduate and read Aristotle. He was introduced at a late age to the routine content of philosophy courses: that people think with conceptions, and that conceptions vary in different places and times. So do the problems that thinkers face, e.g. Marx, but not Locke, was faced with the industrial revolution and capitalism. So do the constraints on their thinking: Aquinas and Galileo had to deal with Revelation; Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics didn't. We also didn't even have to read Koestler's 1959 “Sleepwalkers” to know how much the history of science can depend on the odd traits of individuals--or the vagaries of research funding. Why didn't Galileo read Kepler's book? Why did he neglect Tycho's hypothesis in his World Systems dialogues? Philosophy education, unlike that in physics, entails critically but sympathetically rethinking issues as well as we can in the terms available. Modern science comes from Aristotle, a biologist contending with Platonic mathematicians on one side and Empedoclean or atomist materialists on the other. It's meaningful to say that Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein are Aristotelians: and you don't get one without the others.

Next, it's typical that later theories can represent earlier ones; and 2) basically Newtonian physics is not only still taught but still used--which leads to another subtlety: 3) that scientists and engineers use various theories--or their parts--to do their work. All these things and more have been said by philosophers re Kuhn's book.

Certainly I view the field of physics through that lens. My own reading of the phrase "incommensurable" is best explained by analogy to watching a movie. Before you've seen the movie all sorts of question - "what's going to happen?" and so on - make sense. Once you've seen the movie those kind of questions make no sense and there are new questions that are important - "how did the director set up scene one to contribute to the twist in the ending?". Try as you might once you know the full plot, you can't see the movie in the same light again. Incommensurability is a lot like that - once you accept a new way of viewing the problem then the old way of looking at things just doesn't make sense. In physics, this is clearly evident in quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics (or even between relativity and Newtonian mechanics). Its true that in terms of the raw mathematics then Newtonian physics can be viewed as somehow inherent in quantum mechanics, but the way in which you view the equations and what they mean has totally changed. Being steeped in the methodology of relativity, I can't even begin to conceive of thinking in terms of absolute time true for all observers, but that is at the heart of Newtonian mechanics. That Descartes could have described Newtonian physics in terms of vortices or Maxwell describing electromagnetism in terms of fluids and mechanical systems just seems patently absurd.

I wouldn't agree that incommensurability means that "there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits." Relativity is objectively a better theory than Newtonian mechanics, but to be persuaded you need to look at the data and a part of mind set and Kuhn's idea of paradigms is that people sometimes willfully ignore the data in front of them.

Today, we see physics as being inseparable from mathematics and that's our paradigm.

There's much more to say about Kuhn’s book, but rather than continuing, I leave it as an exercise for readers to answer a question that it, like almost Kuhn commentary, fails even to ask: "What does Kuhn mean by 'a paradigm', and how is that an important concept in his account of the history of science?" For that you'll have to read the book, and I recommend it.  

Such a Boring Topic Kuhn; I know it inside out already, and I have “me” own theorem:

“John has 32 Chocolate bars, he eats 28,

what does he have now,....

..........Diabetes.”

An Operating System for a New World: "The Algorithm of Power” by Pedro Barrento

“ ’Are you saying that ecological balance has been achieved through the collapse of the consumer society, media and democracy?’ ”

In “The Algorithm of Power” by Pedro Barrento

The idea that authors have to know science to write SF is laughably reductive, comically self-important, Mr Science Degree probably, and just provably untrue, as non-scientists Ballard or Banks demonstrated, as but one of many. You can describe a technology without knowing how it works, as a character this might work better than any attempt at omniscience... depends on the book! Exposition can be narcotic but often needs resisting.

We've got 6, no wait 7.5, soon to be 10-11 billion people all shitting in the ocean (metaphorically),  and we've got all kinds of other problems besides global warming. Fixing global warming would just get us on a path to be able to even talk about the root causes (late-stage capitalism and overpopulation) that we can't even mention today without freaking people out. Mostly, but we could get along with many more people if all those people weren't operating under the belief that their lives will only have meaning if they have MORE. The economic system/cult we are busily exporting around the world puts very near zero value on all the valuable things in the world like human life and nature and water and air and our very biosphere, while making greed and waste and obsolescence and evanescent zeroes in bank computers the highest possible aspiration for any human culture. With our values so screwed up, we would still be slowly murdering the planet with a far lower population.

No, the idea of the novel as a piece of esoteric, self-indulgent showmanship aimed at making the reader feel part of some occult intellectual elite is dying a welcome, although belated, death. Barrento's novel is anything but.

Before the 20th century there were many great writers, many who we still consider to be literary giants. Mostly they wrote their novels and their plays to entertain, not as an exercise in intellectual masturbation. Yes, their writing contained high concepts and demanded intelligence and thought from the reader, but that is because the best, most sophisticated entertainment challenges people, not because challenging people is in itself entertaining - in fact iconoclasm and challenge for the sake of challenge is usually juvenile and boring. Even those great writers who wrote for other reasons - to enlighten, to persuade, to educate, were also mindful of the need to entertain and to elucidate, rather than to obscure. Which is why Aristotle and Plato remain largely unparalleled writers of philosophy (their philosophical work may have been surpassed, but not their ability to communicate their thought). People, outside of a dwindling self-proclaimed faux-intellectual elite whose position relies on the veneer of superiority of taste they project, have finally started giving up the pretense of giving a shit about meaningless, dull, drivel, and not before time. I think being challenged is entertaining; the best moments I have had in reading have been when a difficult text finally begins to yield something up, finally begins to make sense for me. That is, of course, a personal preference and, as you correctly point out, I'd rather read Aristotle or Plato than some of the self-reflexive guff pumped out by continental theorists in the 60s & 70s. I don't think challenge for the sake of challenge is particularly entertaining. Being challenged is fun when there is something to be gained from the challenge e.g. satisfaction in besting an opponent, a new understanding of a certain subject, an interesting new perspective, satisfaction in viewing the progress of a character or plot.

Naturally taste is to a degree subjective, and perhaps I am overly dismissive of work that I dislike, but I think that work can be difficult and demanding and also entertaining. I also think it can be difficult, demanding, and have no real merit, or at least little merit taking into the account the effort required to understand or decipher the work. There is no inherent value in being challenged for the sake of it. I was (and still am) curious as to what one may define as "meaningless, dull, drivel", though, as I suspect that the "meaningless" is probably redundant. Ok, there you have a point. To an extent whether someone derives value from a work is a matter for them, therefore to claim that a work is devoid merit is in most cases going to be unfair. I think my forceful words about this are more down to my personal experience in dealing with the type of condescending git who sneers at anything that doesn't bill itself as 'literary', although denying that anyone can find legitimate value in these works I suppose is premature and little better. Any reason to think that writing itself will be around in the future? Once upon a time, not that long ago, people lived without it. In a future of virtual reality and brain to brain interfaces who says it will still be needed? We've gone from oral storytelling, in which small groups made their own imaginative creations from the ever varying iterations of various storytellers - to writing in which one storyteller addresses the imaginations of millions - to cinema in which one storyteller eliminates the need for anyone to imagine anything. Maybe the next step is one story, one storyteller, one humanity, and no ability to imagine anything individually.

To produce difficult literature these days carries with it the stigma of being either anti-social or pretentious rather than being seen as a creative attempt to understand the world or at least, for the more ambitious, one's self. Big words, strange words, nuanced words, new words that open new doors of meaning and association - these are seen as failings rather than achievements, which makes me wonder just how lazily intolerant we are becoming. And this prejudice is coming from readers of the Books section of a rather intelligent portuguese newspaper which, on the whole, one would expect to be more inclined than most people to honour the exploration of our language and applaud attempts to use it to its limits. If you like simple reading, requiring fairly simple thinking, that's all well and good. Enjoy it as much as you can. And, if anyone should be critical of you for doing just that, I shall be among your defenders. Yet, why do you demand the right to simplicity and ease without criticism, but see fit to abuse and criticise those who prefer something different? Why is simplicity fine but difficulty not? Those who complain that some SF is pretentious are an unnecessarily difficult and boringly prolix of smug hypocrites of the worst kind.

We are, perhaps, in worse shape than I thought.

Technology does not equal progress in cultural manners. Our is an era in which high art has been relegated not by middlebrow work (which is also heading toward the sidelines), but rather by the innately vacuous. The tweeted novel, or the online game as narrative is, in nearly all cases, puerile, but these "efforts" seem to offer some immediate gratification. Once upon a time, no one would pretend they were anything but a trifle. Count on your fingers the living writers or choreographers who meet the standards of the ages -- compare that to the number who were working in the first half of the 20th century, the second half. Where is the next Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Stein, Bessa-Luis or Zukofsky; the next Balanchine, Ashton, Cunningham or Bausch? We do have John Banville, but he keeps slumming on detective fiction. In contemporary poetry, the field is filled with a new type of academic poet -- trained by and for the proliferation of more academic poets -- none of whom seems to know the first thing about language. So long as the schools keep hiring them, they can keep the charade rolling, but for what? A paycheck and the ability to preen (my guess). There's no stopping the trend toward literature's marginalization, but it is very sad. Will this mean that in the future, some hypocrites’ canaries won't have the tools to appreciate the great works (Shakespeare, for instance), and will be satisfied by spreading virtual moon manure over patches of digital daisies on Mars?

Think we live in an age of fast pace and the novel has to and is changing to ride that. Look at action films today and compare them to the fifties for example and there is little comparison. Where films of the day built up to periods of action that involved being part of a story, today we have action and on occasion there may be some sort of story plot or not along the way. The up and coming generations have a tendency for fast paced and graphic action, whether cellular or written. Part of this fueled not only by cinema but video games that craft almost ceaseless action of varying degrees of realism and plausibility. The days of a crafted novel that brings you the age of Dickens or Shakespeare or even novels of even 3-4 decades ago, fall onto decline of popularity. They fail to move fast enough or evolve into something of riveting action. There will of course always be a percentage of patrons for the crafted novel but the percentage is dropping. We live in a culture of we want it and we want it now, everything has to be done by yesterday and for the younger generations rightly or wrongly the concept of reading is going the same way. Or maybe it is the uniformisation of many, where they only see themselves as a computer component in the scheme of a life and work that walks on the edge of boredom, that they demand action form such pleasures as film and book.

Whatever the reason the times are definitely changing.

Most people can send an email or browse a website, but asking the public to fully understand the issues here was like giving them the source code of the operating system and asking them to work out what wasn't working properly. Most people couldn't name a single person in the Cabinet. Half can't name their MP. Even people who ought to know better confuse the offices of the EU with those of the Council of Europe. And as for the public's knowledge of history - even Portuguese history - it is depressing. All of us have the odd gap in our knowledge, somewhere... a dangerous road that all western democracies have taken: reducing democracy to voting. Voting is an essential thing, but not the only thing. If enough people vote enough times but get no change, trouble awaits. (And how angry are the Brexit voters going to be when it turns out that EU citizens will still be able to rock up and work? When millions of pounds per week are still paid to Brussels? When all sorts of regulation still comes from Brussels?) In other words, when voting is little more than a charade, a sop to our sense of fairness, sooner or later people will feel cheated.

Is this SF dealing with climate change, new modes of ruler-ship, overpopulation, the collapse of ecosystems, T-Shirts-with-Satellite-Transmitters, how the Americans eat Portuguese stew, how a Portuguese Hari Seldon developed his own mode of psychohistory, and AI (incidentally, the ultimate question asked therein is whether an intelligent operating system can fruitfully direct human history or should be allowed to do so, a question that will surely figure in humanity's not-too-distant future; this is also asked in Dan Simmons' “Hyperion Cantos”; Simmons answers this question in favour of humans directing their own destiny galaxy-wise; Asimov leaves it unanswered; Barrento makes a brave attempt at explaining it in a Earthbound way).

Would this be the sort of novel where a small group of survivors spend all their time locked inside a small building breathing recycled air wondering whether it's time yet for their evening supper of arugula and peanut butter? Kind of like being on a space ship only it doesn't actually go anywhere because it's on a bigger space ship that keeps orbiting a star in a hostile universe that doesn't care if we live or die? The passengers just keep worrying about the hydroponic arugula crop and what they're going to do when they run out of peanut butter? Sort of like a really boring version of Red Dwarf? Nope. The “answer” needs SF-DONE-RIGHT and that’s what Barrento’s novel was able to do.

I hadn’t been so enthused by a SF novel written by a Portuguese author, since the publication of “Terrarium” by João Barreiros and Luis Silva in 1996 (I’ve recently read the 20 year anniversary re-edition and the novel still holds up pretty well after all these years).

NB: Pedro Barrento is a Portuguese Author writing originally in English. I received an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. The novel will be published January 2018.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Shitty Philosophy and Physics : “Time Reborn - From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe” by Lee Smolin

“I propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.”

In “Time Reborn - From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe” by Lee Smolin

Impermanence, Buddhist style?

Buddhism seems to acknowledge the play of opposites I've referred to elsewhere.

Recognising the yin-yang nature of the universe, in order to claim there is constant 'flux' (fluidity, rather than change; a subtle difference) - or for argument's sake, change - Buddhists balance that by asserting a 'greater' reality - the one, eternal, stable, whole (a supposed 'deeper' reality).

Contradiction and paradox is near the heart of evidenced, reasoned contemplation?

As for Aristotle:

time is a measurement of change is a measurement of time.

Change makes time possible, and vice-versa.

In principle, it seems that time persists, even in conditions of perfect stillness.

Yet any attempt to conceive a temporal progression, absent all change, seems to lead us into perplexing self-contradictions: any attempt to imagine how such unchanging time-flow could be measured, requires changing. It seems that time must be more than change; yet remove change, and time vanishes!  But if time is just a means to measure change, then in principle, it should permit the possibility of a world where change is cyclical. Yet our understanding seems to limit time to a linear, one way progression.

Or does it?

Would a world where each day began the same as the previous one be conceivable? A world where, during 24 hours, everything that ever happens and could happen takes place? Alternatively, could a world be conceived of, in which everything changes every moment? Where NOTHING is the same from one moment to the next? How could time possibly apply to a world where there was nothing stable to measure change by?

Smolin talks of life lived in the moment: of time being a succession of moments.

But who, seriously, experiences life like that? To me, here, typing away, the present seems to persist. There's a smoothness, a constancy, and an openness about it. Smolin also claims that we must reconcile relativity theory and quantum mechanics - the micro and the macro - into one unifying theory.  But, when asked why - perhaps we must live with fact that they are, and always will be, irreconcilable? - he flounders. It seems this is simply a matter of faith for him! Yet, he also claims that the world physics says is 'real', is merely a mathematically modelled one. And that these models, rather than existing in some sense 'outside' our spatiotemporal world of experience actually emerges from it; We should realise that, attempting to apply (as, he claims, physicists do) abstract mathematical models - designed to describe local, experimentally conditioned phenomena - to reality as a whole, is erroneous. Cosmology needs different concepts than quantum physics uses on the micro, mathematically modelled scale.

Everywhere and anywhere, our existence always pre-supposes our existence.

To assert it in the sense you do is, as I've said elsewhere, an obvious (sic) truism.

When lots of things are happening, and we are fully engaged, time may seem to 'fly by'.

When bugger all things are happening, and we are disengaged, time may seem to drag.

When young and active, time seems to pass so slowly.

When old and inactive, time seems to pass so quickly

As Einstein showed, time is relative - to an observer; to speed; to distance. The effects of change may seem temporal, insofar as we see them in a linear sense, from our past to our future.

Yet, what is the present?

On reflection, it seems that there's only the past - which, as past, no longer exists; and the future, which is yet to exist.

The present, where things supposedly 'exist', are 'real', right now.

Is illusion.

If time must exist, then how can there ever be a present?

And, if there's no present, how can anything, let alone time, exist?

In spatiotemporal terms, if Smolin's take on the 'metaphysics' or 'cosmology' of current physics is reasonably accurate, it's more like a link - or a line - between (point) A and (point) B. (Insofar as we conceive it as a 'journey', that's down to our woefully limited intellectual/instinctive/sensible abilities: we are stuck as things within space-time, rather than observers outside it, able to see the greater reality: what's real (sic). What you imagine to be the signs of a journey through time, taking its toll (e.g. ageing) are 'really' more like signposts on a route. Or the sights along the way, when you go from Cornwall to London, say.

To us spacetime trapped beings, it’s a one-way journey. But from 'outside' spacetime, that temporal transformation is neither back or forward. It just IS. Fully formed. Mapped out. 'Change' is a concept arising out of our limited conceptual capacity to comprehend the 'big picture'. We put our faith in seemingly obvious, common sense views; yet so often, over time, science has exposed their erroneousness (It seemed so obvious that a smaller, lighter object would fall slower than a big heavy one; yet science proved this wrong).

Kant realised time was imposed on experience by minds; physics has seemingly 'proven' this (Einstein onward) through evidenced reasoning. (Though, of course, a comparatively few theoretical physicists - like Smolin - resist this 'consensus'). Of course, what you think physicists mean when they deny time, and what they really (sic) mean, may well differ.

It may be useful to substitute (best) "explain" for "exist".

Assuming 'time' fails to explain what common-sense assumes it does about reality, as far as physics is concerned. So, physics, post-Einstein, replaced it with 'space-time'. Time, like length, width and depth, is an idealised, mathematical dimension; something we conceptually construct to measure stuff. Of course, I'm playing devil’s advocate above; assuming for sake of argument that Smolin is correct, and that most theoretical physicists have rejected time's 'existence'.

Hence, everything is true and false; real and unreal.

Which lead me to a choice: if everything is isn't; and vice versa.

Then attempting to think anything is impossible; as one must always be looking to negate anything Smolin asserted.

And, if you manage to do that, then you have then to try to re-assert it.

Anyway, I saw relativity (or relativeness) as a possible way out of this.

'Everything that is true is false' smacks of absolutism.

But if all is true and all is false, perhaps that can be seen as:

Everything is partially true and partially false; to varying, and probably changing, degrees.

What we are doing, for the most part, may be distinguishing what seems (relatively) more true from what seems (relatively) more false.

IE: what we say is true, is really more true than false.

Relatively speaking. (Absolutely speaking, it's still as false as it is true).

But, 'cos I'm still a sucker for this philosophy shit, I thought it might be interesting to try to see everything in positive terms.

After all, when we deny something, we say sod-all about what is.

'He's not guilty. your honour."

"So who is? Somebody did it!"

If 'time' is not 'real'; what is it? What does it refer to?

As long as any word has any meaning; as long as it's utterance makes some sense to someone, then it exists as something more than merely an empty word.

I'd like answers.

But I've been compelled to ask questions from an early age.

"That kid won't let up. He's always asking why!"

Somewhere along the line, that seemed to change from "why" to "what".

What is?

Sod all, really.

But, 'unreally', everything imaginable, and more.

Seeing the world as made up by minds; as the work of imaginations; It sure helps trying to understand how so many people seem to believe such silly stuff.

From astrology, thru theologies, UFOs, conspiracy theories, ad infinitum.

Everything is made up; but some of it makes more (evidenced reasoned) sense than others.

What alternative to science does Smolin offer?

None!

Merely an alternative scientism.

Theoretical physicists, in the absence of experimental support for their theories, have understandably come to increasingly rely on mathematical models, on which to base their speculation on the possible nature of the universe. Smolin's response is an appeal to 'everyday intuition'; but that 'intuition', in his hands, maybe more akin to an earlier, pre-post (or even simply) modern, metaphysical ideology. He says he seeks to re-align physics with making falsifiable hypotheses; yet how is what he seems to offer any more open to such testability?

"Is time emergent or fundamental?"

That's more akin to "the disagreement" that "could hardly be more fundamental".

And what about space?

Smolin seems to accept that space is "unreal" (is emergent).

If given a choice between space or time, people would be more likely to 'intuitively' assume space existed, than time.

Smolin, in the simplified, distorted sense in which his speculation about a fundamental conception of time is presented here, would be proposing a pretty bog-standard and old-hat metaphysical realism (the universal 'time' has objective/absolute 'existence').

Dressing this up as "everyday intuition' hardly does him any favours; it's more-like a kiss of death. (Science typically progresses by defying intuition).

Check yourself before you wet yourself!

If it's 'outside' time (actually, that's 'outside' spacetime), it can hardly precede or succeed), can it?!

Such a theory, should it ever emerge, would unite quantum field theory with general relativity. Insofar as 'time' is 'unreal', how could it concern itself with a 'history', when history presupposes time?

Smoliin claims to have captured something of the essence of physics; minus the maths. If this is any indication, then it's also minus any sense, common or otherwise.  If Smolin is right - if he's being read right - then physics' study of the natural (material) world has lead it to largely posit ideal objects - mathematical models and speculative concepts derived from them - as if they are the constituents at that make up the material world's essence? Black holes, dark matter, electromagnetic fields, etc. are theoretical constructs - ideas - that are inferred and imagined, based on understandings of observed 'material' phenomena.

How is it inconsistently to be skeptical of something unless and until there is some necessary data? Necessary and sufficient would be nice but I'm enough of a realist and a seasoned experimentalist to know that is asking a lot. Just some at least indicative data. All I've had thrown at me is 'Theory' meaning hypotheses. A theory without data is just waffle. Darwin knew that, which is why “On The Origin of Species” is packed with data. He also spent years doing scientific grunt work to establish himself. His systematics of the barnacles is still the seminal work on the subject. Added to, amended by genetics but still sound, referred to science. He was the first to demonstrate what good worms did to soil. Some people think all he did was think up a nice theory then sit back. Darwin was a data man. Evolution came upon him in contact with the data just as it did with Wallace in the Indies. The Wallace line denoting the divide between Asian animals and plants and Australian animals and plants still exists, still carries his name.

AS HEINLEIN WOULD SAY. AGAIN, SHOW ME THE DATA!

Bottom-Line: Sadly, drink is consuming me - even now, I'm pissing blood, I should be drinking water, and here I am with a glass of booze. Like the smoker, putting a cig into a hole in his throat, as he approaches lung-cancer death? Nietzsche helped me 'realise' that everything true is false; Derrida, that everything false is (therefore) true.

NB: After the wonderful “The Trouble with Physics”, Smolin fell on his face with this one…

Toasters in the Wild West: "Westworld" by Jonathan Nole/JJ Abrams

This is basically a reboot of the 1973 Westworld with some stuff merged in (stolen :-) from Philip K. Dick and the movie Blade Runner.

Their "AI" is not advanced or clever, because it is not AI at all. Building a robot that follows a predefined pattern with a few subtle variations is not the definition of AI. Making it as human-like as possible is also not AI, that is a material science, texturing and engineering (advanced, very high res 3D printing) challenge. The Hosts are not smart; they are like soaped up video game characters. The problem with every advanced robotics project, though, is that AI can emerge spontaneously when the substrate (aka the "base cognitive level", whatever the Hosts now have) becomes sufficiently complex, in much the same way conscience and intelligence emerged in the primitive proto-humans. The concept of emergent properties, now formulated in modern Systems Theory but going back as far as Aristotle ("The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"), refers to new, "higher" properties that emerge in sufficiently complex systems (such as a brain, or the internet) that were absent in the lower levels, and cannot be recreated by simply adding the parts of the system (say neurons) together. Currently the internet is derived from adding all of the world's computers, networks and servers together. However, if a global super-intelligence emerged sometime in the future when the internet would be sufficiently complex and dense, you could not recreate that super-intelligence by simply adding everything together, because it would be a "higher" property. And that is a real world fear. That a runaway global AI could emerge from the internet itself -and not from Google, Facebook, etc., doing god knows what. The Internet is currently considered the nervous system of the planet, but it is still very sparse and dumb. It is anyone's guess what would happen if it became self-conscious.  I really don't know if we should call today's very narrow implementations, such as convoluted neural networks, machine and deep learning, "AI". There is only so much you can do with software on conventional hardware, even very fast hardware. On the other hand, new neuromorphic computer designs such as IBM's TrueNorth or NeuroGrid built at Stanford, which trade clock speed for massive parallelism (much like the human brain), might eventually get us somewhere. For better or for worse. I also don't think that you need to be a God to train a neural network to lie. It is much more complex and godly to design one, but today you can train it in an easier language like Python (plus the SciPy/NumPy libraries). There have been machines who've been claimed to pass the Turing test, though all that might tell you is that the humans who were playing the interrogator role were easily fooled. One way to do it is to program the machine to give wrong answers, make spelling errors, be stupid sometimes - like real humans. Convincing a third of the humans a machine is human may just amount to an admission that humans can be stupid sometimes and we expect more from machines.

As stated, Westworld is another reboot, which is the new Hollywood trend loved by the coke-head producers (JJ Abrams comes to mind). The whole "mankind creates toasters (and then mistreats them), toasters evolve, toasters go gaga, some humans sympathize with the toasters" (order may vary) has been done to death. The pilot adds nothing new to this scenario. Instead we get to see the premise to the show (which we already know, except for those of us who'd been living under a rock for the past 40 years that is) explained to us at an excruciatingly slow pace. You know that dimwitted kid who keeps asking the teacher to explain the same thing (no matter how simple it is) over and over and over, while the rest of the class is sitting there wishing they had cyanide with their morning coffee? Well, good news, that kid is all grown up and making films now. He’s called JJ Abrams. Such producers believe that going this route is the best of both worlds. There are still so many unexplored ideas in SF, why go on this particular path? There is nothing clever or imaginative in Westworld, just the usual JJ Abrams non-plotting approach to genre TV. Let’s throw random stolen genre ideas at a wall, watch us too dim to object to this irresponsible method argue about what it all means, and then mine the 'brain power' of this crowd. In short, another turd coming out of Abrams’ mouth. 

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Mach und Dach: "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting" by Robert McKee

(Original review, 1997-11-30)

Aristotle's observations of drama, is very far from the early dramaturgy as 18th century Lessing for instance. In the twenties when dramaturgy started to become a subject on its own in Central Europe (where it started) there was already in the beginning two different approaches, the Pièce bien fait approach (which mostly is today's melodrama) and an agnostic approach basically used by Brecht (not in the sense of V-effect, but his approach to story - like in "Kleines Organon für das Theater") and many others where the approach follows the what he called "Mach und Dach" - first you do something - then you analyze what you have done and then build from that. The idea is that it is artistically weak to use tools of analysis as tools of creation as Eisenstein teaches for instance, who emerges as a slightly more important figure in the field of drama than Mr. McKee. McKee is no fool, but really is no help unless you already has what it takes to be a scriptwriter. For a talented person alone on the ocean of creative fear he might appear as a savior, but what he teaches might lessen the possibilities that always lies hidden or dormant in a potential dramatic proposal. Not everyone can be a scriptwriter unfortunately.

That McKee finds himself "The Aristotle of Our Time" is just indicating the level of understanding of what Aristotle was. The society in which he worked and lives was so fundamentally different from ours that comparisons cannot really be made with what Aristotle thought, but rather how we believe that we understand the meaning and content of these texts, as most scholars dealing with the history of ideas will tell you. That other language-user and guru, Johnny Carson, once advised "It's funnier to say things funny than to say funny things". And I think there's an analogy to be drawn from that insight with how stories should be told.

I was in a writer's group with a very scholarly type once, and we were all sent off to write up an analysis of a script, in the format a reader would present to someone higher up the script-assessment food chain (role-playing game). What he came up with was certain proof that many of the scholarly struggle to see the wood for the trees, and worse, think they're superior beings as a result of this shortcoming. The art of movie writing is to concoct a script that will get made into a film with a multi-million dollar budget. Scripts that don't get made don't count. In the context of this contest, scholarly insight is essentially useless, but an ability to name the parts is essential. Musicologists revere the Beatles (or at least they should) and yet the Beatles' intellectual musical training consisted of living their lives while listening to and playing the kind of music they loved. I suspect that this is how films are made too. To paraphrase a nice line from a fine film - the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Arguing with McKee as an intellectual is futile. He is who he is, and he's achieved what he's achieved - the thing defines itself by being whatever it is. "The Aristotle of our time" Sounds a bit silly... worse... pointless. He's Mckee, innit?

Here's my suggestion for what qualifies as true greatness - you write something that has popular appeal, meets the demand of and catches the wave of its time, and subtlety and cunningly woven into it is your personal message to the world, the credo that you wish to express. It changes the way people see things, and the world becomes a better place for it. If you have managed that, respec'. No cash could trump that achievement. Here’s another piece of advice for what’s worth: Write sober and then ruminate on it at about 9pm with alcohol and/or weed and a notepad. Write down all the crazy ideas and possible sentences that come to you (but don't touch the actual writing, obviously. You'll regret that the next day).

NB. Funny thing is, McKee's never really written anything of note. Maybe I’m just confusing two completely different skillsets, writing and teaching. I do that sometimes…