Scorching the common ground

Only the most ardently Luddite amongst us deny that technological advances change our lives in myriad, dramatic and often unexpected ways. Western approaches to city planning post-automobile, for instance, differ in marked ways from before the introduction of cheap medium-range transportation. Likewise, the introduction of telecommunications technology like the telegraph and the telephone changed how people relate to each other, making distance that much less of an impediment to human interaction. Broadcast media such as radio or TV changed nearly completely the primary modes by which information and culture diffuse in Western societies.

Of course, too, many of the features of society which we take completely for granted now are the products of advances in technology as well. We use signage to indicate all manner of information, as it is reasonable to expect that the vast majority of adults are literate and thus will be able to understand such signage. Though nearly invisible in its prevalence, then, the use of signage is a feature of a society that has truly adopted the printing press technology to the point where literacy is a requirement for societal participation.

It thus behooves us to understand how technology reshapes society. We do this in many ways, not the least of which is by exploring technological impacts in fiction. Betraying my own literary interests, I feel compelled to point to science-fiction as being one of the primary vehicles for exploring how society--- even humanity itself--- change in the face of technological advances. To choose an example that has truly permeated into the culture-at-large, consider the technologically-driven optimism of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets represents humanity at its best, thriving in a true post-scarcity economy enabled by fictional technologies such as the replicator. Whether or not we ever make a replicator, or whether such a thing is even physically reasonable, setting a show against the backdrop of a world in which replicator technology has banished scarcity helps us understand something very real and very timely today: rapid prototyping. Sites such as MakerBot, Shapeways and Thingiverse reflect that there are some kinds of scarcity being made obsolete by technological progress. Primarily, scarcity deriving from access to manufacturing equipment is becoming less and less pronounced, shifting scarcity onto raw materials. This obsolescence of scarcity was explored first in fictional worlds such as that depicted in Star Trek, and so we are at least somewhat prepared for its impacts.

Where, then, do we turn to understand how the line between human and machine becomes less obvious by the year? Where, then, do we turn to understand the changing of such concepts as "gender" from immutable to transient? Where, then, do we turn to understand the impacts of an ever increasing longevity? We turn to many things, including turning again to fictional realms. We turn to stories like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, to stories like Accelerando (free e-book, CC licensed), to stories like Ghost in the Shell. There are, of course, many many others that could and should be mentioned in such a list--- it is beyond my intent to provide such a list here, though. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the usefulness of a story to discussion need not hinge on its direct physical reasonableness. Indeed, fanciful tales help us understand quite a bit about the relentless advance of technology and of scientific knowledge.

Many issues of transhumanism and of a society transformed by access to information can be understood under that most controversial of umbrellas, the Singularity. There, we find stories and arguments abound to help us understand what it means to be human when our biology is a platform as fungible as any other. In discussing and understanding the arguments and stories that go along with the Singularity, we find new perspectives on the human condition, at least some of which shall hopefully be useful in the decades and centuries to come.

Here, I note that those defending the irrationality of religion make arguments that are, on the surface, quite similar. It doesn't matter if there exists any literal gods, so long as the stories help us understand ourselves. The primary difference in my argument, however, is that I do not advocate rejecting the application rationality and skepticism on the basis that temporarily suspending it can be a useful exercise. Indeed, it is well argued that the rejection of skepticism is a highly dangerous position to take, even at its best. Thus, I reject the "rapture of the nerds" approach to the Singularity as completely as I reject the whole thesis of religion.

The conflating of useful hypotheticals and of artistic endeavors with a religion-like dedication to a set of claims, even in absence of evidence, is why I take issue with the Kurzweil approach to the Singularity so rightfully mocked by PZ Myers today. By turning the Singularity from a discussion into a religion, Kurzweil and others like him obstruct the usefulness of Singularity thought. Rational and skeptical people, reacting to Kurzweilian nonsense like "immortality in 35 years," are inclined to sometimes also reject the usefulness of hypothetical thinking about posthumanism, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and of pervasive information networking.

My humble proposal, then, is to reject the scorched ground of religion-infused Singularity thinking and to instead find common ground well-supported by the rigors of evidence and yet informed by hypotheticals. We can have it both ways insofar as we are willing to refrain from magical thinking about technology that passes Clarkian thresholds.

On weak points and blind spots.

It's been a long time since I've written here, I know. I'd like to break the silence with some long, epic post composed of sheer brilliance, but I don't see that happening. Instead, I'd like to expound briefly on some themes that are by now familiar to readers of this blog.

In particular, I've been thinking a lot lately about how and why intelligent, well-meaning people can still do horrible things, or at the least, turn a blind eye to them. Even the most thoughtful of people can be seen to ignore the role, for example, that the Catholic Church plays in perpetuating the AIDS epidemic. Those that otherwise serve as prime examples of humanistic morals can still ignore or deem unimportant the moral issues associated with modern communication, such as censorship, DRM, or net neutrality. Passionate feminists can still take a sex-negative attitude (though many, thankfully, do not). So too can passionate advocates of science and education be misogynistic creeps.

In my experience, everybody, regardless of intelligence or compassion, is afflicted by moral blind spots and weak spots. It is important to remember this as we make decisions in life, as none of us is infallible, and as none of us have privileged access to the facts and logic that must direct our compassion. Indeed, there have been many times where I have been wrong in my thinking about ethics and morals, and where I have been happy to have been shown the errors in my previous modes of thought. (This is a theme that I hope to get around to revisiting soon!) To my mind, then, the most important part of moral thinking must be a willingness to be wrong, paired with a dedication to discovering and correcting such wrongs.

Of course, I have been a bit glib until now in using words like "wrong" to describe moral hypotheses, so allow me to rectify that. When I discover that my attitudes and morals imply a course of action that would unduly harm another sentient by infringing upon their ability to exercise their freedoms as they see fit, I call such attitudes "wrong." Just as surely, if I harm someone by unfairly restricting their opportunities, then that is also "wrong." If I base my moral thinking on suppositions which are found to be false, then that thinking is "wrong." Thus, self-correction takes the form of education: to avoid such wrong-headed approaches to life, I must be educated sufficiently to empathize with as many points of view as possible, and I must be educated such that I can well predict and understand the consequences of my actions.

Invariably, however, I will not achieve omniscience, and thus must by necessity commit to wrong modes of thought where ethics and morals are concerned. The drive to improve oneself is essential in coming to terms with this reality; if I cannot eliminate blind spots, can I not make them smaller?

All that is sacred.

(adj) sacred (worthy of respect or dedication) "saw motherhood as woman's sacred calling" [WordNet]

Leaving aside the implicit misogyny of the example given, the citation from WordNet for the word "sacred" demonstrates something very important: we can divorce what it means to be sacred from any sort of religious sentiment. Indeed, if we are to leave irrationality behind us, I assert that we must do so. Thus, I'd like to talk a bit about what is sacred to me. That is, what I find to be inherently worthy of respect or dedication.

In that spirit, then, knowledge is sacred to me in ways that nothing else is. Were I to be asked to identify the most quintessentially defining aspect of all that is good about humanity, I would likely respond that our ability to accumulate and record knowledge is what allows us to transcend not only the ignorance into which we are all born, but also the limits of our physical brains. All other human achievements are enabled by our accrual of knowledge in ways that outlast any individual human. At once, the acquisition of knowledge is a highly individual and highly collective pursuit, epitomizing what it means to achieve something of permanence. Towers crumble, words remain.

It is difficult for me to adequately justify my valuation of knowledge as uniquely sacred, as it is fundamental to the person that I've become. As someone that values rationality, however, I must work to increasingly do just that. If this valuation cannot be supported on its own merits, then it is no better than faith and other such anti-virtues. That said, I am in the awkward position that every rational person eventually finds themselves in of not knowing all the answers. Like everything else in my life, this valuation must be amenable to rational analysis, and yet I must have some notions which guide my actions in the interim. Put differently, I must employ some set of heuristics that I use to evaluate both my own choices and those of the society around me. These heuristics must then be refined by learning additional facts and must be discarded to the extent that they contradict reality.

On a more tangential note, I tend to suspect that it is these heuristics that often get confused with religious-minded beliefs, driving the "science is faith" fallacy that I find so detestable. The key difference is that the heuristics adopted by someone that values rationality are recognized as being mere approximations, and thus are malleable to the extent that the underlying reality is not known. Thus, while such heuristics superficially resemble beliefs, they are quite different in practice.

Of course, it's very easy to simply say that something is sacred; a more pressing question for someone dedicated to rationality and materialism is what this assertion implies. A heuristic which does not either directly imply action or imply other values and heuristics which in turn imply action is by hypothesis a vacuous and useless heuristic. Exploring this notion, then, consider what a heuristic of sacred knowledge leads me to aspire to.

Though it is somewhat circular, the first and perhaps most important consequence of this heuristic is the valuation of science, the formalization of the pursuit of knowledge. Disentangling this apparent bit of circular reasoning would take me still further afield, so I will be content to leave it for now with the claim that the sacred-knowledge heuristic and the scientific method are synergistic rather than truly circularly dependent.

Another important consequence of this heuristic is the additional heuristic that knowledge should be shared-- after all, knowledge locked away is knowledge that cannot help in the further pursuit of other knowledge. This is a large part of why the open access and open source movements excite me so, and why I oppose the locking away of human knowledge behind paywalls, military secrecy or other such artificial barriers. Additionally, knowledge kept secret is knowledge that is much more difficult to preserve.

With new approaches to information storage, computation and communication, we are blessed (if you'll forgive the pun and not read too much into it) with new opportunities to safeguard our knowledge against the relentless march of time. To exercise these opportunities, however, archivists must be recognized as a critical part of our societal infrastructure and knowledge must be accessible for preservation.

While I could continue in this vein, I think that this short exploration of the consequences of my sacred-knowledge heuristic is sufficient to demonstrate an essential point: rationality requires rather than precludes the adoption of strong principles to be applied to the world around us, insofar as these principles are derived from sources amenable to rational analysis. We cannot afford for religion to maintain a cultural monopoly on the respect and dedication that underlie the word "sacred," but rather must build our own sacredness in a rational way. All that is sacred, in short, must still lie within the realm of that which can be reasoned about if we are to maintain the primacy of rationality.

Intuition, mathematics and the conspicuous absence of "vs."

I am now at the point in my academic career where some people see fit to ask me for advice. As shocking as this change is to me, I have found that when people ask me for advice, they mean it sincerely and take my advice seriously. It is thus incumbent upon me to be just as serious and sincere in what advice I give. Tonight, I'd like to ponder one particular kind of advice I have found myself giving in recent weeks.

In physics, we use mathematics. A lot. Math is the language of physics and the method by which our science is performed. How, then, can physics ever advance in directions unanticipated by math? Perhaps more to the point, since mathematical thinking is not inherent but a skill, how can we check ourselves against mistakes in our mathematics? In physics, we often find that intuition is the answer to these problems. A good physicist will have developed a keen intuition that guides them to new and novel discoveries, checks them against mistakes and that helps with the interpretation of very abstract concepts.

This answer, as correct as it may be, is nonetheless incomplete, however. Our intuitions are ill-equipped to deal with phenomena outside the "middle world" in which nothing is too big, too small or too fast. Thus, when we first encounter quantum mechanics, for instance, our intuitions often betray us, leading us to reject such beautiful facets of the theory as entanglement. As we learn, we must fight our intuitions as much as we utilize them.

It is common to paint this quandary as being about intuition versus mathematical truth, but herein lies my perhaps not-so-humble advice: trust your intuition, but trust the mathematics more. Our intuitions are wonderful tools for doing science, but at the end of the day, it is mathematics upon which our theories must be founded. When we encounter something unintuitive, it does indeed behoove us to exercise extra caution and skepticism, but these must ultimately give way to experiment and to theory.

As we learn to put our trust (not faith) in the explanatory power of mathematics and the veracity of our experiments, then we can build up a new intuition that serves us more faithfully. In short, by trusting in mathematics, we turn that most admirable of human qualities to our intuitions: the capacity for self-improvement. Rather than thinking of intuition and mathematical truth as being at odds, we can see conflicts between these as opportunities to learn and to improve. The two tools, when used to their fullest, work together in a virtuous cycle that results in the expansion of knowledge.

Science and Faith

I've been silent for far too long, but recently, I've felt the need to return to putting my views on display. Perhaps it's egotistical, but there it is. Blogging is one of the primary means of participating in global conversations that is available today, and there are too many conversations worth having to sit idly on the sidelines.

One of those important conversations is on the nature of science and faith. It is often claimed that science requires faith, or that science is its own religion, or that science is somehow built on a house of cards. This post, then, is a manifesto to the effect of demonstrating that none of these is true. Science is, at its most basic, the formalization of those ways and means of learning that work. No one definition captures all of science, as the methodology itself of science changes as we learn what methods work and don't work. When we learned of the placebo effect, for instance, evidence collected without the aid double-blind randomization was no longer seen as good enough. That is, we identified a weakness in the very way that knowledge was collected by the medical sciences, and we fixed it.

To learn about the world, we don't need faith in anything other than the existence of something that can be learned. To then say that this simple and universal axiom is somehow a manifestation of faith in any religious sense strains the word beyond all usefulness and turns it into nothing more than a vehicle for ad hominems. Taking as a given the existence of patterns is what keeps us from thinking that we shall find ourselves to be bananas in some near-future moment, to pick one of the less strange possibilities. A world where anything can happen is a world without patterns, rules or causality. I have yet to meet any system of religious thought that rejects the idea of causality itself; indeed, we rightfully label as "insane" those people who reject causality. One can always go down the rabbit hole of hypothesizing an adversarial universe that merely seems causal by some cosmic coincidence, but down this path lies nothing but the most dismal form of navel-gazing. In order to function, we must take as axiomatic the existence of patterns.

In this way, science is the ultimate expression of pragmatism. If something contributes usefully to the realm of human knowledge, then science can and will adapt itself to incorporate this new knowledge. If you'll pardon a rhetorical bit of oversimplification, science has moved from armchair philosophizing to stamp collecting to a mathematical endeavor to the huge range of approaches we see today. Throughout human history, however, one thing serves as a strong indicator of what works and what doesn't. Without evidence-- objective and reproducible evidence-- we know nothing. Human memory is fallible, as is human reasoning. We are all too easily convinced of what is patently false, and thus must expand knowledge outside of the fragility of our minds. Thus, evidence is paramount. There is no faith to this, but only empiricism and pragmatism.

Of course, to fully refuse the "science is faith" claim, I would have to first understand the claim. I must admit that I find myself unable to do this. Despite my attempts at understanding the views of those around me, this is one point which fiercely resists my analysis. I admit that I am at a complete loss for any arguments as to the faith-based nature of science. If you have some, I'd love to hear them, as I hate leaving my arguments incomplete. It's rather unsatisfying, to say the least.

There are those who will, no doubt, interpret what I am saying here as some strong claim of science as omniscient or infalliable. Nothing could be further from my views. Science is, after all, a human affair, and we make mistakes. This is why our whole methodology is designed to minimize the room for the flaws inevitably introduced by our own human limitations. Moreover, science does not know everything-- simply more than any other systematization of knowledge available to humans. The nature of science is to expand knowledge, and as such, the realms of human experience off-limits to science are continually shrinking-- never growing. Neuroscience, for instance, demonstrates that human emotions are at least in principle subject to objective and evidence-based analysis. Anyone who takes SSRIs for clinical depression indirectly benefits from this shrinking of the unknowable. Why should we mistake the limits of our current methods as being intrinsic properties of the world itself? That seems like the ultimate leap of faith. To hold some phenomenon to be permanently beyond the realm of understanding, regardless of how much humanity grows (or how much our post-human descendants grow), is to take an unpalatable amount on faith.