Category Archives: Epistemology

Religion and Science War: That’s Not a War Either

Mano Singham’s The New War Between Science and Religion published in CHE is an odd duck. Here’s a portion of the set-up

The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

This either misrepresents the accommodationist view or generalizes to a degree that the point is lost. Can “a group” seek to do something in the sense that Singham suggest. Maybe. But the position seems to me to be somewhat difficult to understand. Accommodationism as an ism is, bluntly speaking, a matter of attitude perhaps.

The question I ask is: so what?

Singham has a point to make:

Why have organizations like the National Academy of Sciences sided with the accommodationists even though there is no imperative to take a position? After all, it would be perfectly acceptable to simply advocate for good science and stay out of this particular fray.

One has to suspect that tactical considerations are at play here. The majority of Americans subscribe to some form of faith tradition. Some scientists may fear that if science is viewed as antithetical to religion, then even moderate believers may turn away from science and join the fundamentalists.

I doubt the last conclusion. Do people think that science is antithetical to religion? And what does that mean? Let’s say that I have a question that calls for experiment: how big is the solar system or is the solar system expanding? When does science become antithetical to religion in a real sense in this case?

On Digital Vision

Physorg on the question of computer vision:

“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” says Cox. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”

“While studying the brain has yielded critical information about how the brain is wired, we currently don’t have enough information to build a computer system that works like the brain does,” adds Pinto. “Even if we take all of the clues that we have available from experimental neuroscience, there is still an enormous range of possible models for us to explore.”

Performance

Lawrence Johnson on FB has sparked yet another conversation related to education and culture, drawing on an example of textbook company incentives and the seeming de-emphasis of the value of hard work required for excellence in learning: use this tool and student performance will improve. The conversation is proceeding but as I don’t like the FB firewall, I’ve decided to provide a more open discussion on the weblog.

From my point of view the United States is suffering two crises: a learning crisis and a governance crisis. The learning crises is described as a growing disconnect between higher and secondary education, the measurable lack of critical thinking skills of incoming freshman classes, and the amount of resources in education systems, which the current budget won’t really change. The second crises has to do with how we govern ourselves and the belief wall, where every issue and subject is viewed through the ideological glass. This crises is a long one. What’s the significant difference between the Conservative Coalitions now and for Roosevelt? Witness the current gripe on the right on the subject of the CRU Hack. The list of ergo propter hocks is astounding. The best writing on this is still Orwell. When a Congress person can claim miming a baby as grand appeal in the commons, the governance crises shines through in all its ironic illumination. What was it that Twain said about how fast lies can run?

Budgets are lots of things. They are expressions of value. They are also expressions of the future, as every budget will reflect the language of the next. I write this to suggest that the defense vs education budget is a statement of value in the marketplace of ideas and to also suggest that such a budget signals the root of several other problems not directly tied to line items.

In economic terms, things these days are overvalued, which is bad news for homeowners and solar cell makers. A computer’s value, for example, can be assessed by how it’s used and by its potential. Even the stingiest laptop can create what only a movie studio could do years ago. Laptops have lots of “potential” value that goes beyond their “market” value. The value of a thing is tied to the value of its potential, which, is, of course, difficult to turn into data, as good carpenters and surgeons know. We can, to extend the notion, re-conceptualize the value of a college degree to include the amount of effort students and faculty put into gaining learning vs. market vs. system costs. People who waste their time making minimum effort cost the public system more. If it’s a top dollar school, what is fifty thousand dollars of student effort even for best and brightest? If the answer is a grade, then individual grades are now worth $5,000 (and Shadegg would have received an F in public speaking class). But is the significance of learning tied somehow to the cost of lighting and the physical plant? Yes and No. The best answer is No.

Conclusion: Does the United States value education by investing and vesting in it? Not in my opinion. While most people agree that public education is a “need” we don’t really put the money behind it. But every politician will still claim the “need” and “value” of a college education. If you turned them around, however, they would be secretly tapping the keys to their cell phones and updating their Twitter accounts to assure their publics that they will never raise their taxes.

I often ask the question: what does an automobile really cost? This is tough as we would need to assess the value of things that aren’t cars but could be used to make them, from petroleum to the cost of electricity at a given time. Here’s another way of asking the question: what is the value in not making cars? Well, we saw how the bailout responded to that question. What, therefore, would be the value of not providing excellent learning opportunities for adults? What would be the answer to that? More money for defense, I assume.

I have some solutions to the learning crises but the governance crises would see them as anarchical. One item would be to base-line teaching pay at 60K starting but at the same time make education schools very difficult to enter. (My students and I came to the conclusion the other day that to raise pass rates all an institution has to do is triple tuition rates. It’s the same idea but with a different context.) The other incentive is to eliminate grading systems and move to performance measures described in narrative terms. Not A but “this is what this person did and can do,” given that forklift operators know how to drive forklifts and surgeons typically don’t slice into that 30% percent of the brain that they missed on the exam. This method would make learning transfer easier to understand grade to grade as it would involve answering the question why does grade 9 come before grade 10 in ways other than the obvious. There’s a fairly deep elitism in this proposition, but I don’t mind taking the heat for that.

Irony

Today Rio won the Olympics bid. The media narrative has taken a variety of positions as a response:

1. Why would Obama risk support?
2. What is the meaning of the right wing response?
3. What does the loss mean in the context of America’s standing in the world?

None of this makes much sense in logical terms. In Connecticut, I wonder what I might about know about the credibility of Chicago’s bid? Or even Rio’s? All of this I would leave to the judgement criteria of the Committee, as I would know very little about how to determine why it does or doesn’t make sense.

Today, Rep John Boehner issues this statement:

Instead of coming to their senses, Democrats are pressing ahead with, among other costly proposals, a national energy tax and a government takeover of health care. Make no mistake, these initiatives would destroy jobs and place additional burdens on working families and small businesses.

We have some knowledge about how complicated opinion is. It’s also pretty clear that the above is crass distortion, as, by definition, a public option is not a government takeover and that to suggest “regulation” as a takeover principle would be to suggest that the government has already taken over bottling and tobacco companies. In addition, there’s also the charge that Democrats are “senseless” and that counter-positions are a “mistake.” Yet, earlier in the statement, Boehner asks that Democrats act in a more bipartisan fashion, which may be impossible to do if one is “senseless,” meaning unable to feel or irrational. I’ve argued before that the language of politics is a language of irony, meaning that what Boehner says out loud suggests an opposite truth, value, or imperative.

It doesn’t take that much work–a few seconds–to wave rhetorical illogic away.

Common Issues

I’ve been storing potential course readings to Diigo in a list called Common Issues, as I find that the broad subject categories, such as Environment and Cities, can get confusing in terms of what was actually placed there and whether the intent of the bookmark was for course use or for some other purpose.  It would appear that bookmarks without some explanation–tags aren’t enough, as I’m finding tagging is an odd requirement.

I find a lot of interesting reading in the subjects Cities, Environment, Politics, et cetera.  But storing bookmarks in any of these areas randomly can create lists that, weeks later, make little sense.  Tinderbox may be a better method of storing reading materials as I can use prototypes and agents for visual meaning and as intuitive expression.  What I’m finding inconvenient in the size of my laptop screen for dragging things around.

Story Plotting

Here’s today’s story plotting by word length in Tinderbox, using this bit of code as a rule: $Pattern=”plot($WordCount)”.

storyplotting.jpg

Considering length hasn’t been much of an issue, as the internal questions about plot and character have taken precedence. Day to day writing prohibits length, but the upper parameter of length hasn’t been much more than a thousand. The longest story is The Champion at 1203 words. At 238, The Children works out as the shortest. Average length works out to about 650.

Creative Moments

My wife sent me this article (perhaps sensing story struggle). In any event, there are some interesting conclusions and contexts:

In today’s innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story of Archimedes isn’t even entirely true. Lately, though, researchers have been able to document the brain’s behavior during Eureka moments by recording brain-wave patterns and imaging the neural circuits that become active as volunteers struggle to solve anagrams, riddles and other brain teasers.

and

To be sure, we’ve all had our “Aha” moments. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem. “An ‘aha’ moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light,” says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend.”

These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. “Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight,” says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. “There is a lot going on behind the scenes.”

Moral Agents

Wallach and Allen’s Moral Machines was an interesting read. There are a few principle conclusions: that ethics questions must be considered in tandem with systems, from the ground up; that some framework must be developed to guide the future of AI systems in technical, cultural, legal, and operational contexts, but that the nature of this work is somewhat ambiguous; and that what systems do and how they behave or might behave tells us a lot about the values of designers, although on this final point I do have questions when this applies to decision-making agents (because I’d hesitate to call them moral agents, as I have problems disentangling this metaphor). I still wonder if, without self-awareness, an entity can make an actual ethical step that isn’t just a function fire even when that fire comes in the form of a check, reference, or complex calculation.

I’m seeking more technical depth than what the authors provide: system examples, actual code, and application frameworks, but Wallach and Allen taught me a lot about the difficulty of synthesizing ideas into physical architecture and delivered on the complexity of even simple choices.

The issues are many: the extent to which ethics can be synthesized into processing; how to calculate decision-making; how to avoid being guided by the wrong metaphors; what do processing agents actually do and why should we call them “moral”; how much autonomy can a non-human system handle, technically speaking, without choking?

The author’s do a pretty good job striking a difference between conjecture and reality in the book, making distinctions between the fantastic, the theoretically possible, and actuality in the lab, and thus the book will be useful for ethical, legal, epistemological, ecological and scientific frames of reference.

This area of research and study is incredibly interesting.

Narrative and Discovery

I heard a wonderful radio program on NPR yesterday on Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. One of the interviewees was Herbie Hancock (I think). He talked about Miles Davis’ process, specifically on the single session, “first takes,” out of which Kind of Blue was “discovered” in the studio. He talked about how the modes were set and that part of the plan for Davis was to simply let the players go and in that “process of discovery” authentic ideas would come. Thus, when we listen to the music, we are always following that discovery as it happens.

Evans, Adderly, Coltrain and crew, of course, could pull it off. But the idea of discovering ideas “inside the process,” rather than as an act of “revision” has been on my mind a lot. Kind of Blue, as I listen to it, is filled with structure, craft, and surprise. It’s this kind of approach I want to explore in the next 100 project. As I look back at it, this is what 100 Days was all about.

Discovery. I don’t want to overuse the idea. But it’s important. More important, at this point, than worrying about perfection and revising.