If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you may have noticed that I am skeptical of the 'everyday' perception of life that most of us inherit from society. I hope through this blog to explore my own skepticism and hash out some of the abstract ideas floating through my head.
From my studies in Computer Science, I have come to align myself with the principle that 'If I cannot build it, I don't understand it'. You see, the medium of computer science, computer code, is ruthlessly unforgiving with respect to letter of the law. Fuzzy understandings will not suffice for modelling in computer code. In other words, a deeper explanation of things is required; one that emphasizes rigorous definition in terms of simple containers, values, and operations.
My studies in Artificial Intelligence have led me to endeavor for that same level of explanation for how our minds work, and why we think about things the way we do.
One area that I am particularly interested in is our conception of "why", or, given an effect what was the cause, or more generally our notion of causality. The Merovingian in Matrix Reloaded talked about this ad nauseum. Here's the part I'm interested in: within complex systems, how does one tell where the boundaries are among the causes and among the effects?
I think this an important thing to wonder about. I believe that our intuitions about causality underpin the way we model our world. If our notion of causality is more narrow than it should be, that limitation is likely to have a huge impact on our view of reality.
It's easy to see why the simple notion of cause and effect is so popular. Think of billiards: cue ball hits the eight ball, eight ball moves. Cause: cue ball impact, effect: eight ball motion.
Here's why that's too simple and narrow. Consider the actions of the President of the United States. Let's assume that we can identify an action that he takes as an effect. What are the causes? The simplistic answer is: the President causes his own actions, end of story.
Looking again, however, we can acknowledge that a person can be caused to act by external forces. Perhaps the President was influenced by his political party, perhaps by his Cabinet, perhaps by Congress. We might be satisfied to say that the President's actions are caused by a combination of his interests and the interests of those things which can influence him. We could leave it at that. But should we? Even if we assume we can model the President's interest to some degree of accuracy, we have a first mover problem: what causes the external influences? What causes those causes? Surely we have to draw the line somewhere, but where, and for what reasons?
Perhaps then, it is sometimes more useful to think of causes in a complex system more as a continuum of influences rather than a short list of those events that preceeded an action. Those forces more proximate to the action in question can be considered to be more causal than those less proximate.
I think this kind of understanding of causality adds a lot to the analysis of events. One place that you find an implicit usage of this understanding is in the field of history. Events that occur as direct influences on individuals are frequently put into context of trends within that era. In history, these kinds of explorations are almost inevitable. Why not try using them in the present tense as well?
One modern example and then I'm calling an end to this entry. Why is there high fructose corn syrup in the candy bar I ate today? The manufacturer put it there. Why? Because it is a cheap sweetener. Why? Because in the United States we annually give corn farmers a $10 billion subsidy. If you go to Europe, they barely use high fructose corn syrup at all. Why the subsidy? Historical commitment to farming industry... special interest politics? After that it gets a bit too complicated to even theorize about for me. Keep in mind that this example is just one path through a tangled tapestry of a causal description explaining how a particular ingredient ended up in my candy bar.
The prevalence of file sharing on the Internet makes me wonder about what lies ahead as the result of this modern phenomenon.
What I find particularly interesting about it is the way in which the practice of file sharing challenges our notions of what is or is not moral to do with someone else's property. Simultaneously, it challenges whether intellectual property is property at all. The moral question and the epistemological/definitional question are linked. Consider it from both directions. If something is property, our social norms tell us that it is immoral to take it without permission. So how do we figure out what is property and what is not when there is some confusion? How about "that for which it is immoral to take from someone without permission"? While this might not be the only concern to take into account, I think this is a good place to start.
What I am proposing is that the more file sharing becomes "ok", the more pressure is built up on the definition of intellectual property. Lines in the sand are moving around. We may come to a day when we stop considering certain things to be "property" the way we know it today.
Let me be a bit more specific about what kinds of intellectual property are under threat and why. The digital revolution is a catalyst for change in the realm of intellectual property as significant as the printing press. Consider the model of the past: publishing books, distributing films, mass-producing records, then tapes, then CDs-- all of these required a significant pooling of resources. By necessity, only the few were capable of distributing intellectual property. In this way, distributing intellectual property was much like distributing tangible property: you needed a factory.
Now imagine that we woke up tomorrow and you could put any tangible item into a machine that would clone it, something like the replicators in Star Trek. Imagine that such a machine is affordable by most people. Would not the existence of such a machine undermine our current notions of property? It seems to me like it would and should because a fundamental truth has changed: I can give something of mine to you and simultaneously keep it for myself.
This is of course, exactly what has happened with the digital revolution. Music on CDs and Movies on DVD are today able to be placed in a replicator just like on Star Trek. It's called your personal computer. No factory needed and you can reproduce thousands of copies very rapidly at no additional cost.
Whatever the "stable state" of the societal norm on this question will be is a mystery to me. Suffice to say, we have not yet reached it.
What can we make of the evidence so far that we are alive under an extremely unlikely set of circumstances, given what we know about the size of the universe?
I don't know about you, but every time I'm looking out of the window during a flight and I see the world from that perspective, I can't help but think about our existence as both an amazement and a cause for re-evaluation of our everyday understanding of the world.
We are, in some sense, designed by evolution to come to an equilibrium with our surroundings. The conclusion that most people likely come to when considering these questions is understandably something like "well what do these questions matter anyway, they won't change my life one way or the other?" This is part of that circumstance/design. We have evolved to avoid contemplating our place in the universe, mainly because it doesn't have much impact on our physical, day-to-day reality. In other words, we are predisposed to think more locally than universally..
Given that we aren't likely to venture towards these kinds of questions, I say, let's venture towards these types of questions :)
As we have painted and repainted the picture of humans living on a planet in a universe unimaginably big, the more likely it has seemed to me that the human conception of reality is incomplete. Consider other animals in the animal kingdom. Their conception of reality is even more limited then ours due to the fact that they have a more limited ability to represent the world in their brains. I am not talking so much about having different sensory abilities--a mammal can acquire approximately the same sensory information from the world as a person can. Rather, what I want to point out is that despite all the disney movies to the contrary, animals don't behave as intelligently based on the information they percieve as we do.
Given that humans have an evolutionarily "upgraded" brain compared to other animals, I am left to imagine that it is possible that we do not represent the end point of evolution. Isn't it possible that even more highly evolved creatures would look at the universe in some higher way than we do?
Let's assume yes for the moment. Where does this get us? While I won't presume to know what some more evolved mind might see when looking at the universe, I can say this much: there is room for critically analyzing how thought works within humans and asking ourselves if something about our brains consistently limits us from realizing truths about the universe. Once you accept that our brains are systems governed by constraints, it is only logical to begin to wonder what those constraints are and how different constraints would produce different ways of thinking.
What I am trying to get across is the possibility of qualitatively different ways to conceive of the universe beyond what we are familiar with. I'll suggest some of my own in a later post.
I think its a good idea to try and look at the world from a bunch of different perspectives. There are a couple of nice metaphors for thinking about what it means to look at things from different perspectives. One is fairly straightforward: the idea of walking 360 degrees around an object and seeing all its sides. A second is the idea of looking at the same scene through different lenses, or differently colored pieces of plastic. One sees the same scene, but filtered.
Prototypical example: the interpersonal relationship. I have found that it is pretty invaluable to be able to look at a relationship from at least 3 perspectives: your own, your significant other's, and from the perspective of an ideal, objective, third-party referree. It can be damn hard to consider perspectives outside your own in a relationship, but from my experience, ends up saving you a good deal of pain down the road.
A good way I have found of switching between perspectives is to apply a sort of logical imagination process. One way to think about it is to employ a Stanislavski-esque "magic if"-- in other words saying to yourself: "if I were given X, Y, and Z as true, how would other things play themselves out?" For the significant other, you try to place yourself in their shoes, imagine the world from where they stand. For the third-party referree, you try to imagine what an impartial observer would think about.
The more faithfully you are able to "simulate" those perspectives, it seems to me, the more you'll be able to come to an idea of what is fair and appropriate in an interpersonal relationship.
But I think this extends to other domains as well. Examining politics through the lenses of political power or economics or leader psychology or social norms is an excellent way to get a richer understanding of why things happen.
And it is this kind of thinking taken to a high-level that I believe is what is meant by "thinking outside of the box". It is the process of first defining the box or paradigm you are trapped inside of and second defining what is outside and how to get at it. It seems to me that this is an incredibly important kind of analysis that doesn't get talked about explicitly. More frequently, it seems, science prefers logical mathematical chains of analysis where each step is inferred from the previous and defined within a system of globally defined axioms.
What I wonder is if this idea can be taken one step further-- to add some rigor to the idea of multiple perspectives. What does it take to find a new perspective on an old issue? Where are the boundaries between old and new; perspective and what is being perceived? Perhaps someone more familiar with philosophical literature will be able to suggest some weighty tomes on the subject. The only one that comes to mind right now is Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.