On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 08:50 AM, John M wrote:
> Dear Tim, I am sorry that you did not read my 1st par:
>
> "Dear Tim,
> this writing is not about YOU, only addressed to your post. It is
> about the
> topic of it. I have no argument with you, maybe you will have with me."
I read and absorbed this. I commented on your comments, as normal.
>
> And I love to read them, mostly as a 'lurker', posting occasionally
> and in
> very select topics. I definitely do not want to 'reorganize' or
> 'change' the
> list. I don't believe I wrote anything understandable as "what I would
> like
> to read", only referred to the free spirit that was frequently
> readable by
> contributors who let
> their (professionally well trained) minds walk - roam around, as
> someone
> said:
> in a post-post-post modern scientific view.
I've looked over the archives from the time before I was formally
subscribed, and I just don't see many differences in "free spirit" (to
use your phrase) posts, either in number or in nature.
In any case, no one is stopping similar posts today. We had a good
discussion of the really weird ("free spirit") Poincare recurrence idea
not too long ago. And Bruno continues to post his ideas.
> I wrote "more conventional" referring to the formalistic classical
> physics
> of the textbooks (not exclusively, but the majority of the
> list-contributors
> seem to prefer physics over other 'scientific' disciplines).
> Not "you", and my remark was not complaining, rather observing - even
> if you
> overestimate the "alas" in it. It only means that I enjoy the
> 'nonconventional' more. I always stood up for free spirit/speech/ideas,
> whether I was in agreement or not, and it feels really bad to have to
> defend myself against the image of a fascist tyrant. So please,
> remember
> the omitted 1st par above.
I didn't characterize you as a fascist tyrant...I said that the list is
what it is, and that the solution to perceptions that it is no longer
as free-spirited is to increase the number of posts you think are
needed, not ask others to not critique them or to use "conventional
physics" to analyze the new theories.
This raises an interesting point, one I was thinking about quite a bit
last night after sending off my last comment.
Consider a wild and whacky idea: Vernor Vinge's "slow zone" ontology in
some of his short stories ("The Blabber," for example) and in his
award-winning novel, "A Fire Upon the Deep." For those not familiar
with Vinge, he posits that the speed of light varies in certain ways at
different places inside galaxies, and that intelligence itself varies
within regions of the galaxy. (The precise details don't matter.) The
result is that some parts of our galaxy are "slow zones" where
intelligence is limited, some parts are "The High Beyond" (I think was
his name for it) where intelligence runs at breakneck speed ("the
Powers"), and then there are "The Unthinking Depths."
This is what is called "a conceit." Nothing pejorative there. A conceit
is an assumption made by an author for the purposes of creating a
world, a setting. "His conceit was to imagine a world where Hitler had
won the Second World War."
Now this is where it gets interesting. When Vinge presents this
conceit, this basis for a suspension of disbelief, we the readers may
shrug and groan and be skeptical, but the force of a full-length novel
and our inability to interact with him in real time means that he "gets
a chance." We get drawn in and we think to ourselves some variant of
"OK, a weird idea. Probably completely impossible. Probably easy enough
to disprove--I can think of observations which already disprove his
speed of light idea. But let's see where he goes with this idea."
In Vinge's case, his idea took his novel very far. So though I think
his Slow Zone idea is impossible, he at least is thought-provoking, and
he even added a metaphor for our times. (Back in the early 90s it was a
common joke in my circle to refer to someone as "being in the Slow
Zone.")
Other writers have done the same thing. Niven in "Ringworld," faster
than light travel in general, Tolkien's Middle Earth, and so on.
Here's the relevance to this list. Imagine that Vinge subscribed to
this list and presented his "Slow Zone" ideas not as a fictional
conceit but as a idea tossed out for discussion. He would, of course,
be ripped to shreds. People would point out the relevant physics about
red shifts, Lamb shifts, gravitational lensing, and so on.
Vernor knows this, of course. This is the point of a conceit.
Likewise, one of my current favorite authors is Greg Egan. He tosses
out wild ideas and develops them with great enthusiasm. His novels
"Distress," "Quarantine," "Diaspora," "Permutation City," "Schild's
Ladder," etc. are wildly imaginative and thought-provoking. Best of
all, he gets to develop his ideas at length and with fictional
characters to explicate the details, WITHOUT people like us to point
out obvious flaws or lack of observational details.
(I'll add that I think he's the most realistic author I've seen in a
while on how some of the physics may unfold. For example, in some of
his novels (SL, Diaspora) he has "new physics" only being discovered a
century or so from now, which I think is a plausible timeline. And,
even with a new TOE, it takes another thousand years of AI-enhanced
thinking before new energy regimes are adequately probed (via an
accelerator that is roughly the size of the solar system, to probe
Planck scales).)
The point is this: anyone proposing a "wild theory" here or any other
realtime list is going to need to expect folks taking potshots and
pointing out inconsistencies and flaws. For most of science, this works
very well.
(The case of Wolfram's "new kind of science" is an excellent example to
discuss in this connection. Maybe in another post.)
We are like the Caltech students that Niven described in the early 70s:
they demolished the physics of "Ringworld" and pointed out ways that it
could and could not work. How could we be otherwise?
>
> I suppose your line:
>> I cannot understand your point here. But if the "several" who were
>> once
>> here are no longer posting, I am not stopping them.<
>
> refers to my phrase "'well composed' edifice of the scientific
> doctrines..."
> (discounting the personal defensive) - maybe if you care to glance at
> my
> 'older'
> essay (http://pages.prodigy.net/jamikes/SciRelMay00.html) that would
> release
> me from lengthy explanations - subject maybe to my newer miscraftings
> here -
OK, I just checked out your URL and scanned your essay. It looks to be
about religion and memes. I'm not sure what it has to do with analysis
of "Everything" theories a la Tegmark, Egan, Schmidhuber, Fredkin,
Zuse, etc.
>
>> Again, I have no idea what you are talking about here<)
>
> Idea I have, wording is hard. I may mention some key-phrases without
> contextual explanations (and without asking Wei Dai to reformulate the
> list
> in favor of these <G>) as stirring around lately in select
> speculations:
> -- "complexity-thinking", -- extending the limits of reductionism:
> induction-buildup, to deduction-analysis, -- extending the limited
> models
> of reductionist science, -- natural systems as networks of networks, --
> total interconnectedness -- etc., but I am afraid that whatever I
> mention
> opens another Pandora's box of worms.
> We (working in these lines) have still arguments how to understand
> (then
> formulate) concepts like impredicative, endogenous, emergent, etc.,
> beside
> the re-identification of 'older' terms galore.
>
I certainly encourage you to more fully explicate your ideas. But
understand that I (and others, I think) will "compare and contrast"
theories with what has been observed, what appears to be solidly known,
etc. This is what we would do if Vinge were to post ideas here, like I
said.
I'm quite skeptical that much of the "complexity-thinking" is as
important as some think it is. (I know about Chaitin, and introduced
him to the "Extropians" list in 1993, as Hal can confirm. I've also
corresponded with him, and I went to the first Artificial Life (A-LIFE)
conference in Los Alamos in 1987 largely because I'd read that John
Holland, Greg Chaitin, and several others that I wanted to meet would
be there...as it turned out, Chaitin cancelled. I've also read the
usual complexity theory stuff. Close links with computation and
cryptology, of course. But drawing overbroad conclusions, as I think
Prigogine does, is why I am skeptical.)
(To add another comment. At this first A-LIFE I also had a lot of time
to talk to Stuart Hameroff about his "nanotubules" and "cytoskellular
consciousness" theories. Strange stuff. A perfect example of my
novelization point: were Hameroff to develop his ideas in a novel, a
well-written and engaging novel, we might be able to say "Weird, but
interesting!." But when I see Hameroff's ideas in essays on the Web, or
Penrose's vague claims that gravity may have something to do with
quantum weirdness, I remain intensely skeptical.)
I think there's more than plenty of fascinating new physics being
vigorously discussed in the modern physics community. The arXive site
is fun to browse.
When a theory is so weird that it is not even discussable by workers in
the field, then our skepticism meters must reflect this.
Your comments did not "aggravate" me...they simply prodded me to set
down some of the many ideas percolating in my head. This may make me
seem like a "conservative" here, but it's my nature to analyze and
critique, to compare and contrast.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
--Tim May
Received on Sun Jan 12 2003 - 14:49:25 PST