Science as Radicalism (Part 2: digging for the roots - the radicalism of scientists)
William Gillis
2015-08-22 00:00:00
URL

Part 1 is HERE

To be sure there are naturally going to be certain tactics and strategies that are generally quite useful in such pursuit — some in very deep and inescapable ways — but never any single magically simple and always efficient procedure or methodology.

Kuhn and Feyerabend pointed out half a century ago that no simple set of rules of procedure could explain numerous important instances in the actual history of scientific discovery. Galileo’s heliocentric model for example was among other failings easily and immediately falsified by the astronomical data of the time. Its greater pull lay not in perfectly matching the data, but in an underlying conceptual critique of the arbitrariness of the perpetually added circles-within-circles necessary to prop up a geocentric model. That’s a meaningful critique in terms of the free parameters and kolmogorov complexity, but it’s not reducible to a simple and universally valid procedure or tactic.



Science, in short, is not just mere empiricism, not merely collecting data and doing statistics. Science most critically involves an exploration of possible models, their dependencies, and the many possible vectors by which they might be winnowed down, all in search for the deepest roots. The most universal symmetries, most unique patterns and attractors in the relations of a system. Those often hidden but least moving foundations from which everything else in all its grand complexity can be grown. Our probings are not randomly directed, we pull and tug on our models, see what doesn’t shift about, and re-focus our efforts on it directly.

So for example theories that have internal logical inconsistencies aren’t necessarily dismissed absolutely but they do get focused on far less because such a characteristic (inconsistency) is not rare among possible theories: there are infinitely more possible incoherent theories than possible coherent theories. Incoherency in a theory provides a lot of flexibility — quite a bit of freedom to wriggle it about. Sometimes upon investigation the inconsistent theory will entirely unravel, a phantom temporary knot, not actually a deep root. But sometimes the inconsistency will turn out to be patchable if we give the theory some more attention.

Similarly — in a more practical direction — if an expanse of theories under consideration predict that it’s infinitely more likely that all our memories are lies and we will cease to exist in another instant, we can in some sense abandon such theories. That’s an absolutely real example by the way. There are certain (otherwise perfectly empirically valid models) possible in particle physics wherein it just so happens that as a consequence of a possible model (with particular field strengths, a geometry of spacetime, etc) it’d be infinitely more likely for a bowl of petunias or a human brain with all of your memories etc to be spontaneously generated out of the quantum vacuum at some point in the infinite history of the universe than for a brain with your memories/feelings/etc to arise in the causal fashion those memories and feelings would suggest. This reductio ad absurdum is called “Boltzmann Brains” and it’s engaged with quite seriously and rigorously. It may well be that you have never existed before this moment and will never exist after it, but if so there’s no consequence to attempting to spend time modeling that reality or thinking in any direction really. All desires or motivations a mind might have would instantly dead-end in that reality. Thus we consciously mark off those possible physics models that imply such as “not worth dwelling on”, invest our attention in other possible models, and call a theory a certain type of ‘failed’ when it ends up predicting that you’re infinitely more likely to be a Boltzmann Brain than a regular one in a regular universe. But we are explicit about that step, and this is what marks scientific knowledge: not a claim about a single true model, but rather an understanding of varying possibilities and their dependencies.

The atomist framework, for instance, bore a lot of fruit and so we sought to push it as far as it could go. And yet in field theory and string theory certain dualities make “fundamental elements” unclear — when two different representations are exactly equivalent to each other in results we arguably can’t speak as to which is the “correct” portrait. The nouns we’ve wrapped as metaphors around the mathematical relationship fall short in their description — these can be either reveal a redundancy in our metaphorical description or a limit to our experimental capacity. But the fundamental relations that duality uncovers is clear as day. This requires a nuance between what the public views as ‘reductionism’ and what many reductionists view it as. The reductionism of scientists is not a caricature of atomism where all simplified macroscopic layers of abstraction, intuition or practical use are entirely erased. After all having the word “finger” doesn’t invalidate our use of “hand” but it does help us remember that there’s no magical emergent platonic “handness” resisting or orchestrating the existence of fingers — it’s just useful to have language for differing contexts or scales of abstraction. Similarly the objective of reductionism is not to break everything into nounish-pieces or to simplify away complexity, but to unearth fundamental relations/patterns from which everything else can be grown. Whether for instance these patterns take the form of particles, fields or things like symmetry relations.

(Incidentally this is oft repeated in my circles but it really is a goddamn crying shame that few outside of physics have any clue just how dramatically Emmy Noether affected our field. Outsiders talk of Newtonian and Einsteinian paradigms, but the more refined Noetherian paradigm of the universe as a bundle of symmetry relations has ruled physics for almost a century. This injustice to one of the greatest mathematicians of all time is certainly a result of patriarchy but also partially a matter of how much harder her insight is to explain to a general public that has, through a tyrannical, alienating and deeply anti-science education system, been denied familiarity with even basic calculus.)

It’s ludicrous to assume that a single hammer, a single obtuse strategy of sharply limited meta-complexity would be capable of entirely mapping the structure of our reality much less narrowing down fundamental roots. There will of course be complications to our search — things like the Boltzmann Brains — that we must take into consideration in order to do science with any efficiency. But those who want to somehow consign science to empiricism alone do so to artificially preserve their own domains from contact with the scientific drive, from explicitness and analytical rigor in mapping the probabilities and dependencies of different possibilities.

That is not to say that that experimentation, falsifiability, verifiability, etc, don’t play quite important roles in practice, but rather that they should be repositioned in our language as strategies we’ve developed or come to recognize as highly useful in pursuit of science.
The physicist approach — seen to various degrees in other fields — to speak explicitly in terms of what gives rise to the plausibility of a model or research branch rarely bothers with the cartoonish notion of steps and laws taught in high schools. Physicists enjoy an excuse to have a go at the strongest absolutes like entropy or the speed of light. We just keep in mind the complete chain of things implying them. And so while a few have fun going off and publishing some “let’s chuck half of everything we know and try over in this direction” papers, even they know it’s unbelievably more likely an experimental result indicating a violation of the speed of light reflects a hidden wiring problem in the experimental apparatus than a true violation of special relativity. One can frame this in terms of induction, as “no particle yet observed has gone faster than c”, but that’s not remotely close to how the arguments go down in practice which take into account the root complexity of various models, their many meta-dimensioned bayesian dependencies, etc.

This might be thought of as a kind of Feyerabend Part II. Yes, ‘anything goes’, but to varying degrees. In ways deeply dependent upon context. Statistically speaking there’s a strong inclination to certain strategies and tactics, and that’s good. That’s because the radical impulse of science is grounded in bayesian learning, an optimal approach it turns out our neural networks also follow at the smallest level. As in any bayesian system comparisons between models are not arbitrary decisions hidden behind a veil of subjectivity about which we can say nothing. Examining meta-decisions does not oblige suddenly throwing up one’s hands and allowing charlatans free reign to claim anything about global warming; we can still trace everything, our entire network of assumptions and weightings, or relations. What defines science — or rather what is the single most important and fundamental dynamic of note within the hazy cluster of shit called “science” — is not so much the strategies and models it has accumulated at any meta-level but the goal of root-pursuing, a drive that hashes through the infinite possible configuration space and gravitates towards a single locus, or sometimes merely to more unique regions or sets of loci.

One might approach this looking for traditional philosophical claims, and say that such an orientation assumes the existence of universal patterns and thus is making a truth claim about reality being consistent, but I think the orientation is better stated as an emergent line of exploration.

If there are literally no universal consistencies then pattern searching is useless because there cannot even be local consistencies. To give an impression of how this works consider if 1+1=2 was only local to some neighborhood: Then you could continuously transform to some other neighborhood where 1+1=”duck” and then transform back. If the transforms are always perfect pullbacks such that 1+1 continues to equal 2 upon returning locally then you’ve exposed a universal consistency on some meta level that has structure. If not then local consistency dissolves entirely. (In general I abhor mere arithmetic examples as violently misrepresenting the nature of mathematics and implicitly bundling in certain philosophies of mathematics; “1+1=2″ should be read as serving in this context only as a loose and popularly accessible metaphor for some manner of local consistency.) My point is that consistency or lack-of-consistency in thought is ultimately radically infectious; there is no middle ground. Upon any motion things either collapse in one direction or the other. And since all intentional action explicitly requires an assumption of some level of consistency, it implicitly assumes a universal consistency — regardless of whether or not the agent has full access to its nature.

We can, in a certain trivial sense, never know anything truly — in an a priori sense. Even Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ provides no firm ground. The qualia of the act of thought is in many substantive respects suspect; every way we might frame it is laden with baggage of assumptions. The formation of conscious narrative is itself an abstraction that fails at points and dissolves under examination. Even the recursive knowledge of the motion of our own thoughts and self-experience doesn’t happen instantaneously, and requires an assumption that our memory or state of mind an instant prior in the loop of recursion is real. There is no winning epistemology. What we can do is identify patterns, make models of dependencies.

Science in no way condemns postulating outside the assumptions that the “external” world is real, that nature really is uniform, etc. Rather scientific or radical thinking very quickly notes just how much of a formless uninteresting arbitrary muck happens beyond those assumptions. As with the Boltzmann Brains we put up a sign and move on.

Similarly the ‘problem’ of induction is only a problem if you are interested in stating things as though they were laws rather than symmetries, ‘absolute truths’ rather than patterns. We don’t have to make that jump to do science. It’s a faint distinction, but one that reveals many confusions that plague philosophy of science. The difference is intent: between understanding/modeling a reality and achieving an ends. Science’s goal is not so much to be useful as to give a map of more unique, simple but descriptive, accounts of reality. We may happily mark off some of those accounts as not useful but science retains those accounts. And if multiple theories of similar complexity and arbitrariness give identical predictions or no predictions then they are of less interest than the theory that gives the same predictions but derives such from simpler roots, with less arbitrariness.
 
An Artificial Distinction

I haven’t been making any real distinction so far between mathematics and the sciences, and the above description of science as radicalism obviously places mathematics as a science. This fits the historical arc where “science” was adopted to more widely appropriate the prestige of advances in physics and mathematics, but the saga goes back further. The notion of a distinction between physics and mathematics has always been rather ludicrous and has persisted in the west mostly as an artifact of Greek mysticism and Christian theology. In fact this mistaken deep division between the supposedly “a priori” patterns of math and the a posteriori patterns of physics is arguably partially responsible for the general paralysis of science in Europe for over a thousand years until Newton and Leibnitz got audacious enough to challenge it. The great advances of math and physics that started in their era on were in no small part tied to the blurring of the two into a single tradition of diligent radical inquiry.

Yet in the great academic reshuffling and sweeping appropriations of the nineteenth century mathematics was rather quietly pushed out of the nest while physics was kept. The broken language that has resulted continually makes for very frustrating conversations. One person declares that obviously mathematics is a science because it involves vigorous modeling and pursuit of elegant fundamentals (in short, because it’s radical). Whereas the other person declares that obviously math is part of the humanities as it is not grounded in empirical experimentation “in the physical world.”

But of course our brains are part of the physical world. Exploration of all possible theories of formal patterns comprehensible to humans is itself a form of experimentation — essentially a form of experimental computer science — and data collected from such exploration is widely taken as meaningful proof. Mathematicians for instance probe problems of computational complexity and the meta patterns to how these explorations have turned out has been taken as strong evidence of the complexity classes and the incollapsibility of the polynomial hierarchy. This is perfectly reasonable bayesian inference, but it often shocks and offends those outside math and the other hard sciences who’ve accumulated a very limited notion of what can constitute evidence.

And it’s worth pointing out that physicists have always taken doing math to be both a valid realm of experimentation and the twin discipline of physics. V.I. Arnold said it best: “Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.” In fact the biggest discoveries in physics have often been mathematical reformulations of existing knowledge, from action principles to symmetry relations to modern thermodynamics. Physics often involves momentous discoveries that are not a prediction of empirical data, but a restructuring of how to construct models. Indeed the last couple decades have rapidly dissolved whatever lines had been drawn between mathematics, computer science, and physics. These somewhat separate academic communities are still reeling from the force of dramatic reveal after dramatic reveal. It’s been hard for many blindsided specialists to eat humble pie but there’s now a widespread awareness that the three fields will have to become deeply interwoven if not altogether indistinguishable in the future.

While there are certainly purist traditions within mathematics clinging to the sort of Diophantine work in the tradition of the Greeks and making snide remarks about calculus, it’s even unclear what could possible constitute a truly “pure” math as there are unlimited possible formalisms or models one can work with. The inescapable fact of the matter is that the various underlying foundations we’ve gravitated towards choosing (like ZFC Set Theory or the increasingly popular Homology Type Theory) are chosen because the models they generate are better at integrating with our experiences of the world.

When John Preskill said that, “I favor the view that ‘Mathematics is Physics’ over ‘Physics is Mathematics’,” he was expressing a relatively common perspective from the trenches that is nevertheless shocking and transgressive to the peanut gallery commenting on science from without. In no small part because the division is useful to those in power.

In his work The Utopia of Rules David Graeber traced the evolution of popular notions of “imagination” from first being seen as something deeply tied to navigating reality to later something escapist and almost irrelevant. Mathematics has followed a similar arc — redefined partly by the powerful and partly in self-defense as a kind of solipsistic poetry for the boffins whose dreaming we can’t control, regulate, or demand immediate results from. In the end this attempt to pluck mathematics out of the heart of science has left it as the only refuge for truly advanced modeling, while those historical forces attempt to suppress such everywhere else.

This artificial exclusion of mathematics from science serves a vision of “science” that ultimately wants scientists to function as nothing more than mechanics and sees the only meaningful exploration as that which can be visibly embodied in a physical experiment. It wants to treat theory as a kind of afterthought or fig leaf, and all twists and turns in the process of theorizing as more or less equivalently suspect, equivalently random flights of fancy. It should be no wonder this kind of categorical framework has been gobbled up by those academics whose experiences are largely limited to those humanities where all theorizing away from immediate experience/experiment is often reasonably seen as more or less equivalently tenuous, or equivalently suspect.
 
A Universal Current

Under this lens that I have been presenting in a certain sense everything is science and nothing is. The radical inquiry at the core of science doesn’t reflect a collection of claims or practices with tightly policeable borders, but a direction, an arrow of struggle or direction of development. And when we recenter ‘science’ on this current we find it to be a constantly resurgent throughout human history. From the conceptual modeling used by hunter-gatherers to some of those used by the social sciences.

While neuroscience, for example, may not have always been consistently scientific it’s clearly become more so over time. Appropriation is a complicated thing; many fields that started out as absurdities have gradually integrated the tools, instincts and ideals of those they were appropriating from. On the other hand chemistry was a science for a long while, and yet is increasingly turning into a technologist discipline interested in engineering particulars, as little in the way of relevant root dynamics remain unferreted. Science and technology have a complicated interplay in practice, a given scientist or technologist or a given research project or development team will sometimes have to switch directions repeatedly. But they still denote distinct vectors, distinct inclinations of thought. One burrows down to the roots, the other takes the simple nutrition from these roots back out and blossoms it into a million applied particulars.

All human thought involves induction or rather association into models. Those instances that feedback into more engagement — rather than defensive mechanisms of retreat to a limited context — are surely in the scientific or radical direction, however tentatively they end up pushing.

I could even sing a sweet song here about how love and empathy should be properly seen as representing the spirit of science in human one-on-one relations; constantly pursuing better models, better impressions of one another, and updating our models of self to grow more expansive in response. Science and love are very closely related, and a number of jokes in physics and math reflect on the parallels between these hungers. A longing for a deeper intimacy than a shallow surface modeling. That many lovers and scientists shy away or abandon their pursuit past a certain point by no means makes the point at which they end up settling a great reflection of “science” or “love” — the point is the general thrust of their efforts.

It’s important to note that every historical moment in every society was alive with flickers of radical exploration, modeling, and discovery. It’s easy to gloss over the studious play of crafting that discovered so damn many things, but we are in many unappreciated ways standing on the shoulders of giants. Every single society is thick with knowledge accumulated through experimentation and record. From first hacking our audio cortex with musical notes to developing stronger ropes.

We should be open about the fact that much of the European explosion in science emerged not so much from the onset of a single procedure but through the scrabbling for deeper insights, even through abortive attempts within the tradition of magic and the occult. Those currents that most resemble modern science in Europe, like the development of optics and telescopes, were for a while using the term “natural magic” like Naples’ Academy of Secrets. The core element that drove such advances was a suspicion that nature was governed by hidden forces and that these that could be understood. That the secrets could be pried open, deeper underlying patterns revealed. It was this radical drive and fervor in the fringe communities of Europe that helped drive the scientific revolution and really flourished when they were coupled with the printing press’ distribution of journals to tradesmen and poor tinkerers who leapt at the chance to contribute theories and findings back.

In resistance some have taken to demonizing everything since the European explosion as “western science” while validating virtually any other explanation of the world as also “science.” And while their conclusions that the cosmological models of some random witchdoctor confined in experience to the Kalahari are equivalently valid to those of a modern cosmologist is absurd liberal pluralism, it can be legit to mark both as scientific. Models generated in other cultural or historical contexts certainly count to varying degrees as reflective of the arrow of radicalism. Although it’s no small point that any sort of vigilance in today’s context should quickly reveal the failings of such models, just as it quickly reveals the failings of those early European “natural magic” theorists. There have absolutely been many brilliant insights around the world and the portrait where “science” doesn’t officially start until Francis Bacon decided to lecture physicists on what they were doing is clearly a shitty imperialist narrative.

Mary Baker Eddy’s “scientist” “doctors” were certainly far less rigorous or vigilant than many Chinese experimenters in medicine. Indeed Iroquois or Chinese medicine would have been arguably better than the best western doctors of the day. The atomic and fundamental element models postulated by both Indians and Greeks obviously turned out to be pretty close to the mark, but given how little there was to work with back then early Chinese cosmology deserves appreciation as an also ran — the yin-yang and wu xing mode were valid attempts to model the world. And Bacon’s methodology and paradigm of experimentation? Alberuni, an Indian Arab, had pushed for this in the middle ages and the 8-18th centuries in India saw systematic experimentation too. Three thousand years of science in northeast Africa burnt to the ground with Alexandria (the word “chemistry” likely has its roots in a word meaning the knowledge of “the black land”). On and on it goes, the astronomy of the early Chinese, the navigational techniques of Pacific islanders, the ancient medical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africans… Upon any investigation it’s simply impossible to paint a picture of a discrete “western science” that is disconnected from this global tendency.

Humans have always played with symmetries and metaphors, trying to internalize better impressions of the world. Much of scientific reasoning is so natural to us because we’ve been constantly doing it since we were hunter-gatherers. Primitive cosmologies like animism and panpsychism were quite reasonable early hypotheses. We’re a social species with brains built primarily to navigate social relations and model psychological dynamics; of course we would search for metaphors there. And those that did should be lauded as doing a decent job in the limited context they had access to.

The deeper regularities immediately visible in things like astronomy have long been interesting to hunter-gatherers, but it was civilization that happened to provide the scope, intellectual permanence and continuity necessary to get further in our investigations. Of course “civilization” is an absurdly simple way of bundling a wide array of deeply conflicting historical currents and dynamics, and what elites emerged in most (but not all) city societies often worked hard to suppress science. Frequently as the first step in undermining radicalism more broadly.

We’ve covered how “curiosity” was taken by the Victorian aristocracy and draped over shallow and exploitative consumerism. But this attempted appropriation followed another, more dramatic reversal: It was only in the seventeenth century that curiosity had transformed from being seen as a vice to a virtue. Before that watershed “curiosity” had been consistently condemned by western civilization. The Greeks were actually highly critical of curiosity, a tendency they felt was useless, intrusive, and disruptive. Inquiry for its own sake, the hunger for knowledge, was correctly identified it as uncontrollable or prone to wildness. Curiosity was a force in conflict with the ossified and sedentary structures of their civilization. The Christians continued this prohibition and condemnation of curiosity, the desire for knowledge was marked as fundamentally sinful. Rejecting the hunger of inquiry is the very foundation of the myth of The Fall, a narrative repeated in many societies riven with power structures. Once Authority ruled divine and the natural order was unchallenged, then some damned girl got too inquisitive for her britches and God could no longer maintain things the way He liked.

Today’s primitivist ideologues emerged from a long genealogy of complaints by the elites that the masses’ inquisitive desires constituted a horrifying monster that had to be suppressed at any cost lest it run amok. During the “Enlightenment” Bacon made the argument to his fellow elites that by promoting a rigid systematizing, curiosity after the roots could be harnessed by the state. But Hobbes’ contemporaneous attack on scientists for their abstract theories and pursuit of understanding for understanding’s sake reflected wider social forces seeking to suppress curiosity and that repeatedly ridiculed them as boffins.

Some scientists persisted nonetheless, but few could be so fortunate or tolerate the poverty and ignominy that would accompany it. Many tried to find excuses or shields against public derision, and thus many fell into collaboration with imperial, capitalist, and aristocratic power systems. You see currents like this again and again throughout the fight between science and power in history, with those in power deeply opposed to hypotheses. Only desiring details.

Physics is intimately aware of this deep and bitter conflict. The second world war saw most of the world’s physicists either forced to work as engineers and technologists on weapons or at best starved of funding. And this was paralleled and followed for decades by the widespread blacklisting of the great number of physicists who’d been inclined to radical politics. The legacy of those who embraced their service to the state or crumpled under its thumb has been a vicious hostility towards too sweeping of curiosity, imagination, and extended theorizing within STEM practice. Physicists are today still split between those who approve of or revile the bootlicking slogan from the Manhattan Project: “Shut up and calculate.” Variants of this hostility and anxiety towards theory permeate STEM culture, visible in some hackerspaces in the form of “shut up and hack.” The cowed timidity and institutional allegiances of engineers and data collectors versus the sweeping and unrelenting audacity of the theoreticians.

The historical arc is clearcut: Whatever complicated entanglements momentarily emerge in their long war, science and power are unavoidably at odds. “I would rather discover a single cause than become king of the Persians,” declared Democritus. What science represents is the sharpest sort of radicalism possible, a kind of thinking and a desire in-itself that is indomitable. The externalities of scientific inquiry overturned established power structures and created immense instability and complexities that are hard for power structures to navigate. Those power structures that survived did so by awkwardly clinging to certain predictable processes of change and trying to control and divert the development of science. But even this is often laughable and is certainly unlikely to be sustained.
 
Part 3 is HERE