mills

Petichou linked to an article on some of the preoccupations of contemporary physicists, and I was struck by the paragraph above; Krauss’ is a curious concern.

It is often noted that one of the defining qualities of our universe is its comprehensibility, but it might just as well be said that comprehension is a defining quality of mind. This symmetry between the knowable universe and the knowing mind reflects an important quality of the latter: it does not merely observe, record, and inductively detect intelligible connections.

Rather: it encompasses, interiorizes, virtualizes, and explains holistically. That is to say that the mind is an organ which can contain within itself accurate models of all phenomena in the form of explanations. These models are akin to virtualizations: we can recreate within our minds even what we cannot observe, and we can do so such that those recreations are astonishingly isomorphic to their real counterparts.

This is the metaphorical basis for cognition: we construct metaphorical models (theories, ideas, terms) which retain the logical properties and relations of their subjects so that we are not dependent on accessibility for knowledge. We cannot, for example, see the Big Bang; the perplexing flow of time prevents it. Yet we can model it with incredibly acuity, and our virtualizing computational minds allow us to extract from those models conclusions which predict and explain the behavior of the physical universe.

Nothing about the multiverse would be different, regardless of its observational accessibility. I am surprised to read Krauss’ epistemological anxiety, since it would be an event unprecedented in the history of physical reality were we to encounter something fundamentally incomprehensible. I imagine David Deutsch, in particular, would object that such a development would be unlikely given the evolution of mind within physical reality, an evolution which has allowed the former to contain the latter with profound accuracy.

(In this sense, mind –including its externalized components, such as computer networks- may be the only element of reality which can in theory contain reality, although Walker Percy claimed that mind cannot, as a semiotic matter, contain itself: hence the success of the sciences and the failures of modern selfhood).

I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?

Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?

(And how insufferable a first-year class on The Republic can be, with all the students bored with what they consider manifestly indefensible authoritarian ideas! My peers considered Plato a proto-fascist and saw nothing of interest in his arguments. But if we’d not taken it as a revolutionary action-plan, it might have been more compelling).

Allan Bloom’s translation differs a bit:

“But in heaven,” I said, “perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.”

Last, and for nostalgia’s sake, from the first translation I read, by Sterling and Scott, back at Bard in the days when girls made fun of me for having a website and I looked liked Harry Potter:

It makes no difference whether such a city now exists or ever will. But perhaps its prototype can be found somewhere in heaven for him who wants to see. Seeing it, he will declare himself its citizen. The politics of this city will be his politics and none other.

I put the question to the academics and sages and thinkers and those, like me, with no credentials at all. Ideas?

Xenophanes, quoted by Karl Popper in “The Beginnings of Rationalism” and cited by the excellent Matt Young (who, along with Superfluidity, will surely have wiser commentary on Popper than I ever did).

The quote in full:

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black while the the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpture like men, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better…

These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

In anticipating Popper’s brilliant description of how we know what we know, presented alongside his solution to the problem of induction, Xenophanes demonstrates again: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.

But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).

I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).