The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend:
What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?
This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after another, concepts that I feel obliged to think carefully about. But I poked around and eventually a pattern started to emerge (perhaps not coincidentally very similar to the ideas I laid out in my book). And so without any further preamble, here’s what I came up with:
The most common response to the question is some variant of uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, etc… It’s neatly represented here by Carlo Rovelli as The Uselessness of Certainty:
There is a widely used notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of “scientifically proven”. Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’.
Tania Lombrozo describes the process through the concept of Defeasibility:
Recognizing the potential revisability of our beliefs is a prerequisite to rational discourse and progress, be it in science, politics, religion, or the mundane negotiations of daily life. Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course, I could be wrong.
So instead of thinking of “truths” as certain, Neil Gershenfeld’s answer is to understand that Truth is a Model:
Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features — violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom.
Even the vocabulary used to describe truths is composed of mere shorthand abstractions (“SHA’s”) that are useful in only limited ways.
As Ernst Pöppel explained, our Cognitive Toolkit is Full of Garbage that needs to be cleaned up (or at least checked over) from time to time, even the shorthand abstractions we use to describe science itself:
Let us look back in history (SHA): Modern science (SHA) can be said to have started in 1620 with “Novum Organum” (“New Instrument”) by Francis Bacon. It should impress us today that his analysis (SHA) begins with a description (SHA) of four mistakes we run into when we do science. Unfortunately, we usually forget these warnings. Francis Bacon argued that we are — first — victims of evolution (SHA), i.e. that our genes (SHA), define constraints that necessarily limit insight (SHA). Second — we suffer from the constraints of imprinting (SHA); the culture (SHA) we live in provides a frame for epigenetic programs (SHA) that ultimately define the structure (SHA) of neuronal processing (SHA). Third — we are corrupted by language (SHA) as thoughts (SHA) cannot be easily transformed into verbal expressions . Fourth — we are guided or even controlled by theories (SHA), may they be explicit or implicit.
And to put it in more general terms, science evolves too. Ideas and discoveries introduce new possibilities that emerge from life, not from some timeless realm of possibility that we often imagine exists outside our termporal world. This is what Lee Smolin insists on in his answer: Thinking in Time vs Thinking Outside of Time:
Darwinian evolutionary biology is the prototype for thinking in time because at its heart is the realization that natural processes developing in time can lead to the creation of genuinely novel structures. Even novel laws can emerge when the structures to which they apply come to exist. Evolutionary dynamics has no need of abstract and vast spaces like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Exaptations are too unpredictable and too dependent on the whole suite of living creatures to be analyzed and coded into properties of DNA sequences. Better, as Stuart Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration, in time, by the biosphere, of the adjacent possible.
I love that term: “the adjacent possible.”
Our minds are capable of imagining more possibilities than are actually possible in the world, which we then need to eliminate by Inference to the Best Explanation (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s answer):
I’m alone in my home, working in my study, when I hear the click of the front door, the sound of footsteps making their way toward me. Do I panic? That depends on what I — my attention instantaneously appropriated to the task and cogitating at high speed—infer as the best explanation for those sounds. My husband returning home, the house cleaners, a miscreant breaking and entering, the noises of our old building settling, a supernatural manifestation? Additional details could make any one of these explanations, excepting the last, the best explanation for the circumstances. Why not the last? As Charles Sanders Peirce, who first drew attention to this type of reasoning, pointed out: “Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted.”
What if we just stopped coming up with bad hypotheses?
Whether or not that would be desirable, I’m pretty sure it would be impossible. Why? Because we think in time, as Smolin argued. We don’t get to stop the clock. Our hearts keep pumping and our neurons keep firing and our thoughts keep happening.
One of the results of that, in Sam Harris’s words, is that We are Lost in Thought:
Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It’s as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?
Thomas Metzinger answers that question: perhaps a Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model:
A self-model is the inner representation some information-processing systems have of themselves as a whole. A representation is phenomenally transparent, if it a) is conscious and b) cannot be experienced as a representation. Therefore, transparent representations create the phenomenology of naïve realism, the robust and irrevocable sense that you are directly and immediately perceiving something which must be real. Now apply the second concept to the first: A “transparent self-model”, necessarily, creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood, of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole.
Ok so that’s one of the more philosophically ambitious answers — i.e. maybe not the easiest to understand right away.
For that to make sense we need to appreciate our experience of selfhood as an emergent process; we need to Think Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down, as Michael Shermer reminds us:
Almost everything important that happens in both nature and in society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energy into the system of Earth’s early environment. The complex eukaryotic cells of which we are made are themselves the product of much simpler prokaryotic cells that merged together from the bottom up in a process of symbiosis that happens naturally when genomes are merged between two organisms. Evolution itself is a bottom up process of organisms just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation; out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of complex life we see today.
I think emergence may be difficult to grasp because even when we think we know how it happens, we don’t intuit why it happens. We’re so used to thinking in terms of “a cause” — as in something top-down, some single thing to which we ascribe purpose or volition — that it takes a lot of extra work to learn to intuit how distributed causes come together to form a common effect.
We must learn to think of these processes playing out in what Sean Carroll calls (correctly but apparently not with any great compulsion to inspire us) in his answer, A Pointless Universe:
Things happen because the laws of nature say they will — because they are the consequences of the state of the universe and the path of its evolution. Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme, but rather as a byproduct of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium. Our impressive brains don’t develop because life is guided toward greater levels of complexity and intelligence, but from the mechanical interactions between genes, organisms, and their surroundings.
I think the key insight to bring all this together and move forward can be found in the fact that, as James O’Donnell adds — essentially the same concept that Lee Smolin proposed – Everything Is In Motion:
I’ll make my pitch for what is arguably the oldest of our “SHA” concepts, the one that goes back to the senior pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus.”You can’t step in the same river twice,” he said; putting it another way his mantra was “Everything flows.” Remembering that everything is in motion — feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion — is always hard for us. Vast galaxies dash apart at speeds that seem faster than is physically possible, while the subatomic particles of which we are composed beggar our ability to comprehend large numbers when we try to understand their motion…
Things happen because things always happen. The question, instead of why something like bottom-up emergence happened at all, should be, Why does emergence happen instead of something else happening? Oxygen and hydrogen have to do something, why not make water?
Here our hope for a simplistic answer might get in the way.
Kai Krause’s answer is to put Einstein’s Blade in Ockam’s Razor and be aware that behind simple effects we’re likely to find complex processes, not simplistic ones:
Designing a car to ‘have the optimal feel going into a curve at high speed’ will require hugely complex systems to finally arrive at “simply good”. Water running downhill will take a meandering path instead of the straight line.
Both are examples for a domain shift: the non-simple solution is still “the easiest” seen from another viewpoint: for the water the least energy used going down the shallowest slope is more important than taking the straightest line from A to B.
So the best we can do is observe the world around us and build models from the facts we see. We can be pretty confident that oxygen and hydrogen atoms will continue to form water molecules, and we can be pretty sure that water will continue to move down the shallowest slopes available as adjacent possibilities, we can be pretty sure everything will stay in motion and just as sure that we’ll continue to get lost in thought — looking for purpose and meaning and often simplistic reasons where none are necessary or even feasible.
What we can’t be sure of is how all of factors behind our models and SHA’s will interact in more complex ways, what new possibilities will emerge, and what we’ll think of them. We have to let the process play out, observe what we can when it happens, and work from there.
I like how Rudy Rucker breaks it: we’ll have to accept that The World is Unpredictable:
The universe is computing tomorrow’s weather as rapidly and as efficiently as possible…
It’s a waste to chase the pipedream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.
We’re suspended in so much Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation, as Xeni Jardin adds:
In our networked mind, the very act of observation–reporting or tweeting or amplifying some piece of experience–changes the story.
And finally:
The history we are creating now is alive. Let us find new ways of recording memory, new ways of telling the story, that reflect life. Let us embrace this infinite complexity as we commit new history to record.
Read the rest (99,000 words) at Edge.org.
As I mentioned at the top, this synthesis is pretty similar to the main ideas in my efficient little book, Truth, Will & Relevance which (you can read completely online). I did this fairly fast; the book elaborates these ideas and suggests a better-defined conclusion — though I love how these answers have each added something.
If you’re more interested in how I pulled this together, get in touch and we can talk about what to do with your research, questions, and conceptual challenges you’d to see finished and shipped.