A Singular Thesis

The information revolution has brought our planet to an inflexion point. This is our generation's industrial revolution, and conventional wisdom of all sorts is suddenly in doubt. But is the universe really about to wake up? Are we about to look into the face of God? Ray Kurzweil thinks so.

Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for “the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause”.

Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resemblant of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, The Singularity Is Near. For if ever a man were committed overtly - fervently, even - to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: one one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit.

Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the “singularity”, a point at which he expects with startling certainty that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away.

Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there’s a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness which, in his enthusiasm, he may have crossed.

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks frequently and modishly of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: “the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive” and “evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity”.

“Kurzweil seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, wherever it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often.”

But to suppose an evolutionary algorithm has “a problem it is trying to solve” - in other words, a design principle - is to emasculate its very power, namely the facility of explaining how a sophisticated phenomenon comes about *without* a design principle. Evolution works because organisms (or genes) have a capacity - not an intent - to replicate themselves. Nor, necessarily, does evolution increase order. It will tend to increase complexity, because the evolutionary algorithm, having no insight, is unable to “perceive” the structural improvements implied in a design simplification. Evolution has no way of rationalising design except by fiat. The adaptation required to replace an overly elaborate design with more effective but simpler one is, to use Richard Dawkins’ expression, an implausible step back down “Mount Improbable”. That’s generally not how evolutionary processes work: over-engineering is legion in nature; economy of design isn’t, really.

This sounds like a picky point, but it gets to the nub of Kurzweil’s outlook, which is to assume that technology evolves like biological organisms do - that a laser printer, for example, is a direct evolutionary descendent of the printing press. This, I think, is to superimpose a convenient narrative over a process that is not directly analogous: a laser printer is no more a descendent of a printing press than a mammal is a descendent of a dinosaur. Successor, perhaps; descendant, no. But the “exponential increase in progress” arguments that Kurzweil repeatedly espouses depend for their validity on this distinction.

The “evolutionary process” from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call “paradigm shifts” but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and (usually) obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but - and this is critical - by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren’t even conceived of in the earlier technology - sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology. That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call “perspective chauvinism” to judge former technologies by the standards and parameters set by the prevailing orthodoxy - being that of the new technology. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. The fallacious process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil’s inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress. It isn’t that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn’t change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

“Evolutionary development is constantly forking off in unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.”

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true - but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution - we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent 97 years the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They clearly aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model.

If this is right, then Kurzweil’s corollary assumption - that there is a technological nirvana to which we’re ever more quickly headed - commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future - when the universe “wakes up”, as he puts it - will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption.

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just seven years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

“By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing”

On the other hand I could find scant reference to “cloud computing” or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil’s book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don’t need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and every one will increase performance.

I suppose it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re already three years into the new decade (he also missed the mobile computing revolution, come to think of it), but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in), being path-dependent as it is. 

You can’t predict for developments that haven’t yet happened. Kurzweil glosses over this shortfall at his theory’s cost. 

A version of this article was first published on Amazon in 2010.

Occam’s Razorburn

Stephen Hawking’s latest book raises far more questions than it answers. Such as, why hasn’t he been reading Thomas Kuhn, and what really is the benefit of unifying theories which don't seem to need unification?

In which we meet yet another first-class scientist who wishes to self-identify as a second-class philosopher and a comedian from the back end of steerage.

Since few will buy A Grand Design for its wit we can forgive Stephen Hawking's appalling attempts to be funny, but it's not so easy to forgive his philosophical ignorance. Certain physical scientists might be better off unacquainted with the modern philosophy of science (though those who know it possess a welcome sense of perspective and humility). But not world-renowned cosmologists. Their field continually bumps up against the boundary of what science even is (and it doesn't have a "no-boundary condition", whatever that might be).

So when Stephen Hawking claims that "philosophy has not kept up with modern science, especially physics" it suggests not only a lack of perspective and humility, but that Hawking has been skipping on some required reading.  Especially since, having written off the discipline, Hawking seems barely acquainted with it. He mentions few philosophers more recent than Rene Descartes (d. 1650). So it is hard to know who he thinks hasn't kept up.

Particularly when Hawking's first grand pronouncement is "model-dependent reality": the idea that there may be alternative ways to model the same physical situation with fundamentally different elements and concepts. "If [such different models] accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other." Physics has, apparently, been forced into this gambit following recent failures to get unifying calculations to work themselves out. In any case it isn't quite the neat trick Hawking thinks it is.

Firstly, while model-dependent reality might be news to Stephen Hawking (he seems to think it the fruit of modern physics' womb) the philosophers he hasn't been reading have been talking about it for years, if not centuries, to the constant sound of scientists' excoriations. It is even part of Descartes' philosophical fabric (and, more tellingly, Darwin's, but picking a fight with modern evolutionists, while fun, is a story for another day). That is to say, it sounds like it is the physicists who are finally catching up with the philosophers and not the other way around.

Secondly, in the grand game of philosophers' football that Cosmology has become, the model-dependent reality play is something of a surrender before kick-off.  For if it is true that the same phenomenon can be plausibly accounted for in multiple, "incommensurate" (© Thomas Kuhn) ways, then the hard question is not about the truth in itself of any model, but the criteria for determining which of the (potentially infinite) models available we should choose in the first place. 

This question is not one for physics, but metaphysics. It necessarily exists outside any given model (© Paul Feyerabend). Here we meet our old friend, Occam's Razor. This isn't a scientific principle at all, but a pragmatic rule of thumb with no intellectual pedigree: all else being equal, take the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor is a favourite instrument for the torture of hapless Christians by grumpy biologists: all your tricksy afterlife wagers and so on fail because evolution is so much less complicated and has so much more explanatory value than the idea that an omniscient, intangible, invisible, omnipotent entity pulling strings we can't see to make the whole thing go.

But, alas, in seeking a grand unification of things that really aren't asking to be unified, cosmology reveals some almighty snags. Unification under Hawking's programme, if it is even possible, involves slaughtering some big old sacred cows. To name a few: causality, the conventional conception of space-time; the idea that scientific theories should be based on observable data and their outcomes testable. It bows to some truly heinous false idols too. For example: seven invisible space-time dimensions, a huge mass of invisible dark matter, an arbitrary cosmological constant, a potentially infinite array of unobservable universes which wink in and out of existence courtesy of a mathematically inferred "vacuum energy"). Hawking doesn't propose solutions to these problems, but seems to think they're a fair price for achieving grand unification.

I'm not so sure: other than intellectual bragging rights, the resulting unified theory has no obvious marginal utility. And it has political drawbacks: believing one's model to be the truth carries potentially unpleasant implications for the suppression of those who don't.

There are practical drawbacks, too. We are asked to reject existing theories, which still have quite a lot of utility, in favour of something that it infinitely harder to understand and work with. The accelerating expansion of the universe without any apparent acting force seems to violate Newton's second law of motion. Without an outrageous end-run, the first nanosecond of the Big Bang (wherein the universe is obliged to expand in size by ten squillion kilometres - i.e. far faster than the speed of light) seems to violate the fundamentals of general relativity. String theory requires seven necessarily unobservable space-time dimensions and/or entirely different universes, and even then doesn't yield a single theory but millions of the blighters, all slightly inconsistent with each other (hence the appeal to "model dependent reality).

From the camp which wielded Occam's Razor so heartily against the Christians, this seems a bit rich. If these are the options, then the razor might slice in favour of the big guy with the beard.

But these aren't the options. We could save a lot of angst, and perhaps could have avoided digging trillion dollar circular tunnel under Geneva, had we employed model dependent reality the way the philosophers saw it and not the scientists (and shouldn't we call a spade a spade and label it cognitive relativism, by the way?). Since it crossed the event horizon of observability modern cosmology has become arcane, stunt-mathematics. If there were a chance that it might deliver time-travel, hyperspace or a tool for locating wormholes to other galaxies or universes then one could see the point in this intellectual onanism. But none of that seems to be allowed. So we should therefore ask the question "but why? What's the point? What progress do you promise that we can't achieve some other way?" No one seems to be able to answer that question.

But if we park it, what's left of Stephen Hawking's latest book is some pretty ropey jokes.

How to philosophise with a hammer

I am a hopeless handyman. I have poor attention to detail and lack patience. I am disorganised. When hanging a picture, rather than finding a hammer, I bash the tack in with whatever first comes to hand. Recent examples: A tin of Rawleigh's Medicated Ointment (reasonably effective), an ornamental porcelain donkey (bad - it didn't survive) and a book (a hard-backed edition of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: better than nothing, but now pocked with pinholes).


That we tend to do that sort of thing lies at the root of a big problem with the ideas inside Professor Wilson's book (just as well, therefore, it has some use for hammering in picture hooks). Using a familiar object to do an unfamiliar job is rather like coining a metaphor: It's a creative act. As well as being pragmatic, it has its advantages. (It must have some advantages - convenience; it overcomes the lack of botheredness to find the hammer - or you wouldn't do it). But while my tin of ointment (or ornamental donkey, for that matter)  might not be conventional (and, in the donkey's case, might not work awfully well) it's not wrong. It is as good as the job it does. A "proper" tack hammer has been designed, to the exclusion of all other purposes, for hammering in tacks. You can imagine other objects being better or worse at functioning like hammers. Blu-tack, for example, would be hopeless. But not wrong. Just not much use.

And so it is with metaphors:  they deliberately take a conventional concept and put it to work in a concept it wasn't designed for. As a result metaphorical meanings are different from literal meanings (in a manner of speaking) but no worse or better - while they might be more or less effective, effectiveness is in the eye of the beholder.

Often, a metaphor can more elegantly or succinctly some aspects of its "target" (which Julian Jaynes would call a "metaphrand") than a literal construction. "Love is a rose": I suppose you might take this to mean love is a delicate, beautiful, fragile, thing that can prick you if you aren't careful with it. Or that is is a soft, rich and complexly enfolded collection of different facets. These aren't mutually exclusive metaphors, but they're not entirely consistent either. Both of them make some sense, where a literal interpretation of "love is a rose" doesn't.

Now while I was bashing in my picture hook with Professor Wilson's book I got to thinking about what was inside his book, and how Professor Wilson's whole enterprise, his desired end state, is one which overlooks the metaphor. This is some irony as metaphors, and rich ones at that, are scattered prodigally around his text.

Professor Wilson, in Consilience, sees the possibility (not yet arrived) of a unified, unique, continuous, contiguous spectrum of knowledge, encompassing not merely the physics and the physical sciences, but all of the humanities too. In fact, I think he sees the necessity of it. Wilson is an unabashed reductionist. Wilson embraces a hierarchy of physical sciences (physics at the bottom, grounding everything else; Chemistry sitting atop it, Biology atop that, and so on. Higher sciences can be reduced to lower ones; all sciences are consistent with each other, and it is only a lack of data which prevents completion of the total blueprint of the physical universe. Thereafter the social sciences and even the arts will fall into a pre-ordained and logical place and will similarly be logical, consistent and unambiguously explicable. Wilson is excited by this idea (it horrifies me, personally), and sets out in his book to give it some intellectual underpinning.

Wilson is running before he can walk. Metaphor gets in the way - literally, and metaphorically. The same thing happened to Bertrand Russell following a similarly hubristic exercise restricted to the logical underpinnings of mathematics. In the infancy of the twentieth century Russell tried to chart the entirely cosmos of the mathematical universe by reference to a single, finite set of well-defined logical axioms. By limiting himself to numbers, Russell took up an easier challenge, you would think, than Wilson has. Mathematics was, Russell supposed, a closed logical system: finite, reducible and therefore well susceptible to his kind of enterprise.

But Russell failed to complete his mathematical globe. Russell didn't just not manage to get to all points in a large whole; he failed totally: his entire project, so pointed out a precocious young German chap by the name of Goedel, was logically flawed. Doomed.

The reason? Metaphor. Even though Russell had decreed some ad-hoc rules to guard against logical cul-de-sacs - for example, no item was allowed to be a member of its own set - it was possible to run mathematical operations by analogy - metaphorically, in other words, that could tell you things that a literal mathematical operation could not. And any ostensibly complete description of a language which forbade expressions such as "the set of all possible sets" was going to be practically useless anyway. There are some excellent accounts of Goedel's dramatic insight, Douglas Hofstadter's a particularly good one (though his ultimate conclusion seems wildly wrong).

When he does refer to metaphor, Wilson's is a rather unimaginative account: what he describes isn't metaphor so much as definitional drift occasioned by metaphor. To use one of his examples, by the time "plot" - a physical site and a building plan - came to mean "plot" - the narrative structure of a story - any figurative content in the expression had long since evaporated; seawater gone, a residue of salt.

Wilson's idea of a metaphor therefore is a dead one: these are the ones "normal scientists" like, of course, because dead metaphors can't get up and bite you by suggesting what you meant to say might be taken in a number of ways. If there were a substantive distinction between art and scientific literature - and like Wilson, but for radically different reasons, I'm inclined to think there isn't one - it might be found in the systematic exclusion of metaphor from scientific discourse. Science is about exactitude; consensus on a literal way of speaking enhances that end.

But at some cost, and not just in the notorious dullness of scientific literature. Literalness encourages and perhaps compels compliance with orthodoxy. Paul Feyerabend - another conspicuous absentee from Wilson's reading list - makes the inspired observation that scientific revolutions rely on inspired observations: a willingness to disregard the formal language of the discipline. If you stick rigidly to the rules of the prevailing scientific paradigm it is not possible to see, much less formulate, contradictions to it: Anything which looks like a contradiction, by the terms of the theory, must be explicable some other way (wind interference; malfunctioning equipment).

To find a new solution to a conundrum you are forced to use existing concepts in a new way. You can only do it by being creative with your language.

Where purple fishes run laughing through your fingers?

Quick post this one, apropos of nothing in particular, but on the topic of the poetry of reality.

The quest for truth forces - compels? allures? entices? - the reductionist to atomise: to go back to basics, in a Cartesian fashion, and build your knowledge from there. So, quarks beget atoms beget molecules, and molecules beget cells and so on (I love the ironic Biblical vibe), and in the same way physics begets physical sciences; physics is the rock on which the scientific house is built (there I go again!).

The quick brush off to this is the conceptual limits of empirical way of researching: It proceeds on the basis of imperfect, imcomplete data to sketch rules to understand the rest (and in this way its power is its limitation: if we had perfect, complete data we wouldn't need to model it to predict how it would behave!).

So as we all know the scientific method filters the universe and provides a meaningful structure out of all the sensory data on an intrinscally arbitrary basis.

Which means we can't know for sure that we're looking in the right direction and not overlooking something.

But the process of atomisation systemically misses the significance of any properties which may emerge from aggregations of data: metaphorical structures. To the extent meaning can be constructed from the emergent properties of data, the scientific realist has to deny it is there.