The Philosophy of Cosmology

Over the Summer I gave a talk to my department about the Philosophy of Cosmology. I had been thinking about doing it for at least a year and even started putting together slides before I committed to giving the talk - which I was hesitant to do, since philosophy, or anything that isn't research, is not exactly encouraged...

Anyway, it ended up being a success! Many more people attended than I thought would care, there was active discussion, it went 30 minutes over time and no one complained, and I generally felt pretty good about it. Since I put a lot of time into reading, thinking, and writing comprehensive notes, I thought I would share them here.

The talk was split into three main parts:

I. Why care about philosophy? (And what's with the haters?)
II. Intro to the Philosophy of Science (Phil Sci 101)
III. Topics in the Philosophy of Cosmology

Most of the purpose of my talk was to educate fellow scientists about philosophy and to convince them they shouldn't be "philosophy haters", so the first two parts (including discussion) took an hour. I don't know if I convinced people, but there were philosophical discussions in the hallways after, so I count the experience as a success!

I. Why Care?

What is Philosophy?

Since much of philosophy involves defining terms, let's start with a definition of philosophy.

Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other “philosophies of”).

~ Massimo Pigliucci [emphasis added]

You could say that philosophy is just thinking about things, but of course it’s more involved… This quote is taken from Massimo Pigliucci (philosopher, evolutionary biologist, and prolific blogger), who blogs a lot about philosophy and science. I learn interesting things from his blog, including whenever a scientist (usually physicist) says something negative about philosophy.

Philosophy Haters

The first of these is Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory", the final chapter is called "Against Philosophy", which starts:

Physicists get so much help from subjective and often vague aesthetic judgments that it might be expected that we would be helped also by philosophy, out of which after all our science evolved. Can philosophy give us any guidance toward a final theory?

(Judging by the title of the chapter, you can guess that he goes on to answer: No.) I could go through like a philosopher and poke holes in the rest of the chapter, finding weak points in his essentially philosophical argument against philosophy, but I just want to point out the emphasized text which I think points to his true problem with philosophy, which the rest of the philosophy haters share, which is that philosophy is NOT SCIENCE. Science has surpassed philosophy, therefore philosophy is no longer needed.

The next hater is Stephen Hawking, and this is his famous "philosophy is dead" quote:

Most of us don't worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Again his problem is that philosophy is now being surpassed by physics. He seems to be claiming that philosophy can't answer these questions, but science can, with which I wholeheartedly disagree. [More of me disagreeing with Hawking can be found here.]

Lawrence Krauss wrote a book called "A Universe from Nothing", and some philosophers pointed out that his book is not about what it says it's about, and that it doesn't answer the fundamental question of "why is there something rather than nothing" which it claims to. So he responds:

Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves…. And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever.

Lawrence also thinks that science is taking over territory which used to belong to philosophers. (And of course, the only people who read papers in theoretical physics are theoretical physicists, so that is not much of a criticism.)

Even Neil deGrasse Tyson gets in on the philosophy hate:

But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then… It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.

So philosophy and science used to be the same, and now they are not, and philosophers are not doing science anymore... therefore philosophy is worthless?

Maybe we need to remind these haters of what philosophy is (e.g. Massimo's quote above). Actually, let's make it simpler... What is philosophy?

NOT SCIENCE.

All these haters are making a category mistake (which is something you can learn about in philosophy), essentially criticizing philosophy because it isn't science... But it does not follow that philosophy is worthless unless you think that only science is worth doing - but these haters aren't criticizing the history of science because historians are failing to make contributions to the forefront of physical science. [And why is it usually physicists? I could definitely speculate on the psychology of physicists that makes them so susceptible to philosophy hate...]

Philosophical Questions

Physicists are free to think that philosophy is worthless, just as they may about medieval literature... philosophy doesn't concern itself with being useful to scientists. Nevertheless, I think there are some philosophical questions that scientists should care about. So one day I decided to write down whatever came into my head.

The first was, "What counts as scientific explanation?" As scientists, we are in the business of producing scientific explanation, so it's worth it to spend some time thinking about what that means.

Then I thought, "What requires scientific explanation?" [This may have been around the time of the eclipse when I was thinking about whether (and what type of) coincidences require explanation.] This is another important question for scientists to ponder; figuring out what to explain is what will lead you to papers.

A follow-up to that, or kind of an example, is: "Do the values of the physical constants need to be predicted by some (as yet undiscovered) fundamental theory?" [I asked my audience of scientists to raise hands, and if I remember correctly more voted yes than no.] To answer no to this question means that there can be some numbers that will never be predicted but that we need to measure.

Then I realized I phrased the question in such a way as to imply that we discover theories, but that assumes that theories exist out there somewhere already, and maybe I don't want to subscribe to that level of realism about theories... so another question is, "Do we discover or invent theories?" Another follow-up question is, "What properties are necessary for a theory to have?" which we will get into a little bit later.

Finally, "What is the nature of physical law? Does it exist independently of the objects it describes?" This may not be that necessary for scientists to think about, but I personally find it interesting, and we will get to that too on the subject of Realism.

II. Phil Sci 101

The Demarcation Problem

The demarcation problem asks the question: what is it that distinguishes between science and non-science (or pseudoscience, metaphysics)?

Logical Positivism was an attempt to develop a criterion for demarcation in terms of verifiability: a scientific statement is only meaningful if we have some means of verifying its truth (and if not, it's not scientific). There are two main problems with this approach, and the first is that the verifiability condition fails its own standard of meaning! If the verifiability criterion itself isn't meaningful, where are we?

The second problem is more interesting, and it's called the confirmation paradox (due to Hempel). Imagine you have the proposition: All ravens are black. In order to test this proposition, you can collect observations of ravens. Finding black ravens supports your proposition, and finding one white raven would disprove it. However, All ravens are black is logically equivalent to All non-black things are not ravens. This means that, for example, collecting observations of red apples also counts as evidence for the proposition All ravens are black. This is contradictory to intuition; it seems foolish that objects completely unrelated to the subject of the proposition count as evidence for it.

So maybe verification is not a satisfactory principle with which to define science. Falsificationism (due to Popper) instead attempts to distinguish science from pseudoscience by the criterion of falsification: scientific statements must be capable of conflicting with possible or conceivable observations, otherwise they are not scientific. This has some advantages over positivism because it may not be possible to confirm a proposition - for example, it would take observing ALL RAVENS to confirm that they are all black - but it is usually easier to falsify it - it only takes one observation of a white raven.

There are some issues with this too: the first is logical vs. practical falsifiability. For example, we may be approaching the limits of practical falsifiability with particle physics experiments. There could be theories which are logically falsifiable but require probing the extreme energies of the early Universe that we have no way of reproducing. If they are not practically falsifiable, do the theories still count as science?

Another issue is whether falsifiability is necessary or sufficient. I think many would agree that it is an important criterion for a scientific theory, but other things are falsifiable that we would not think of as science. For example, astrology makes claims that can be proven false, so does that mean it counts as science?

Puzzle-solving and Paradigms: Kuhn took a different approach to the demarcation problem. Whereas Popper's falsificationism is normative, describing what science should be, Kuhn on the other hand takes a descriptive approach of what science is in practice. He says that most of science (normal science) attempts to solve puzzles within accepted paradigms, and only rarely does "revolutionary science" set about falsifying theories through paradigm shifts when there is great tension within the accepted paradigm. [At some point I asked the audience who thought they had ever falsified a theory. The one or two confident affirmatives is rather small if falsification is the business of science.]

Scientific Underdetermination: Both Popper and Kuhn attempt to describe what science is, or should be, but can science actually do (or know) what it claims to? A compelling account of the epistemology of science (Duhem), and of knowledge in general (Quine), is that our beliefs are underdetermined by the evidence. The evidence by itself is simply not sufficient to determine our scientific beliefs.

One of the ways this could happen is called holistic underdetermination: experiments don't just test focal theories but rather a web of interconnected beliefs, including assumptions about the instrument functionality, data analysis, corollary theories, etc. So we may want to test (or falsify) a given theory, but there are many contributing factors besides that theory that need to be taken into account. If you find a disagreement between theory and observation, you don't automatically know which one of these factors is at fault.

A good example is the apparent discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos. The experiment could have falsified special relativity, and indeed there was a lot of media hype. But most scientists were unwilling to let special relativity go so easily, and eventually a loose cable was found to be the culprit. Science didn't tell us whether the correct interpretation of the data was falsifying special relativity or finding a loose cable, rather it was our intuition (and unknown philosophical assumptions?) that led us to search very hard for another explanation. This example is a bit rare, however; most of the time our results aren't in danger of falsifying e.g. special relativity, so while there could always be a bug in our code, we aren't always motivated to go looking for it. (And let's face it, there is most likely a bug in our code.)

Another type of underdetermination is called contrastive: evidence that supports one theory may also support an alternative, whether this is known or not. A good example of this is the past history of science: when we were making observations that supported Newtonian gravity, we did not know that they also supported General Relativity or that GR is more accurate than Newtonian gravity. It is likely that our current theories will change in the future, but the current evidence underdetermines the choice between our current best theory and some unknown future theory.

Scientific Explanation

Now we get to the question: what counts as scientific explanation? This is one of the more important philosophical questions for scientists to think about, in my opinion, but it turns out there are a lot of  thorny difficulties in developing a coherent theory of scientific explanation.

The Deductive-Nomological model might be the most well-known, and at this point I will have to throw some Latin at you. You can't have philosophy without Latin. The terminology is meant to make the language easier, so rather than saying "the thing doing the explaining" over and over again you say explanans, and "the phenomenon being explained" is the explanandum. The two components of the DN model are:

1. The explanandum must logically follow from the explanans, and
2. The explanans must contain at least one "law of nature" (as yet undefined).  

The first part is the "deductive" and the second is the "nomological" i.e. dealing with physical law.

As with most things in philosophy, this seems perfectly reasonable on its face but has several problems. The first deals with explanatory asymmetries. Suppose you want to explain the length, s, of a shadow cast by a pole. Then s is the explanandum, and it is explained by the height of the pole, h,  the angle of the Sun, A, and a law describing the propagation of light [and some trigonometry...]. But, you could also take h as the explanandum and explain it the same way given the length of the shadow, and it would fit within the deductive-nomological model. But something about that doesn't seem right - it makes sense for the height of the pole to explain the length of the shadow, but not for the length of the shadow to explain the height of the pole. The issue is probably wrapped up in the notion of causality, which the model fails to address. (We have some notion of how the shadow is caused by the pole and not the other way around, so the explanation should only work in one direction.)

Another problem is that explanatory irrelevancies seem to count as explanation when they shouldn't. Nothing in the DN model distinguishes the relevant from the irrelevant pieces of explanation. The irrelevant bit is usually in the law (or generalization) part of the explanans, for example, "all males who take birth control pills fail to get pregnant;" the fact that they take birth control is irrelevant to explaining why they fail to get pregnant, but the DN model doesn't account for that.

Other models of scientific explanation try to develop an account of what is relevant. According to the Statistical Relevance model, an attribute can only count towards a scientific explanation if it has an effect on the outcome, i.e. the probability that the explanandum occurs. One problem with the SR model is that causal relationships are greatly underdetermined by statistical relevance relationships; many different sets of causal relationships may be compatible with the same SR relationships.

The Causal Mechanical model attempts to account for the role of causation in explanation: an explanation of some event must trace the causal processes and causal interactions (specifically defined) leading up to it and describe the processes and interactions that make up the event. A problem with the CM model is that it provides no way of distinguishing the relevant from irrelevant explanatory features of the causal processes.

There are many other models out there, reflecting how challenging it is to develop a model that describes all the different types of scientific explanations, as well as the nature of physical law and the nature of causality. I personally feel that as scientists, the fact that we don't have an accepted model for what we're doing when we attempt to explain something scientifically should give us pause.

Scientific Realism

Instead of one question in this topic, there are three domains of questions in scientific realism. The first is metaphysical: does nature exist independently of our thoughts and measurements of it? [Most in the audience agreed.] The semantic questions asks: what makes theories true? Are they literal descriptions of nature? [Most in the audience disagreed, though we later found that many interpreted this to mean "exact" descriptions of nature. Clarifying semantic realism as the statement that scientific claims can be interpreted literally (at face value), most then agreed. The irony that talking about semantic realism ran into problems with semantics, however, was lost.] The epistemic question of realism concerns our knowledge of what is real: can we know whether our theories are at least approximately true? [Most agreed.]

It turns out that a poll of professional philosophers found that 75% support a realist position, 12% anti-realist, and 13% other. The poll didn't distinguish between the different domains, however.

Metaphysical realism affirms the mind-independent reality of the world that is investigated by the sciences. This seems obviously true, and maybe it is, but the anti-realist would take care to distinguish this from the "world in itself" and claim that the world investigated by the sciences depends on e.g. theoretical assumptions and perceptual training, so there could be doubts about its mind-independent reality.

Perhaps more interesting is the position of semantic realism that says theories are literal descriptions of nature (i.e. scientific claims can be interpreted literally, at face value). So for example, our theories about electrons, protons, quarks, etc. imply there are physically real things called electrons, protons, and quarks. An anti-realist position (Instrumentalism) would contend that claims about unobservable things have no literal meaning - if all we have are equations about quarks and observations about the effect of quarks, we can't use that to infer that quarks are real unless we can observe them directly.

Finally, the most contentious form of realism is epistemic, which affirms that theoretical claims constitute knowledge about the world. The anti-realist would point out that our past theories have been shown to be false, time and time again, so it is unreasonable for us to believe that our current theories are true; this is called pessimistic meta-induction and has the coolest name ever. In opposition to this, and an argument for realism, the Miracle argument says that realism is the only position that does not make a miracle out of the predictive success of science.

Interlude: Why Care? (Part II)

Now that you know a bit about the philosophy of science, I want to revisit the question of whether scientists should care about philosophy, with some specific examples. First I want to make the practical point that scientists have philosophical assumptions, whether they are aware of them or not, and these affect what they work on and what they fund while on grant panels, so I think it's really worth it for everyone to bring these assumptions out into the open.

The first example concerns what I work on, Modified Gravity (MG), which I took pains to assure people was not the same as MOND when I accepted this postdoc. [For non-cosmologist readers: MG tweaks general relativity to explain the acceleration of the Universe, which is fine because we really don't know what dark energy is; MOND tweaks Newtonian gravity to get rid of dark matter on the scale of galaxies but can't explain all the evidence for dark matter on larger scales and in the early Universe, so most disregard it as a useful theory.] Most modified gravity theories require screening mechanisms to protect the theory from strict Solar System constraints. One might ask, "Why is it necessary to protect the theory at all? Don't Solar System constraints falsify MG?" I think this reflects a lack of understanding of science in practice, and particularly the underdetermination of science: modified gravity is still interesting until we have a successful theory of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, so it is worth it to explore all theoretical avenues including screening mechanisms; others may disagree!

The next example is about Semi-Analytic Models (SAMs), which use both numerical simulations and analytic models to understand how galaxies form and evolve in their dark matter halos. What is the problem with SAMs? ["Too many parameters!" the entire audience was supposed to answer! But at least a couple of people said it...] The common criticism of SAMs is that they have too many parameters; they can fit any observables, so they are in some sense not falsifiable and thus not useful. But is the point of SAMs really to predict all observables, or do they rather explore the relations between the many and varied physical processes of galaxy formation, described by parameters?

As scientists, it's important to be as unbiased as possible, which includes spending some time figuring out what our philosophical assumptions are, what they imply, and whether they are reasonable.

III. Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology

Finally we get to the Cosmology part of this Philosophy of Cosmology talk [now blog post]. First I want to point people to a really interesting essay written by George Ellis on the philosophy of cosmology, who splits the philosophy of cosmology into several themes:

A. The uniqueness of the Universe: we cannot experiment on the Universe or compare it to others, and concepts of probability are questionable
B. The large scale of the Universe in space and time: observations restricted to our past null cone; limits to determining the geometry of the Universe
C. The unbound energies of the early Universe: we cannot experimentally test extreme energies of the early Universe
D. Explaining the Universe - the question of origins: physics (science) cannot explain the initial state of the Universe, since other specific forms are consistent with physical laws
E. The Universe as the background for existence: physical laws may depend on the nature of the Universe, and cannot be taken for granted
F. The explicit philosophical basis: philosophical choices necessarily inform theory as with all science, but especially because of inherent difficulties re: testability in cosmology
G. The anthropic question and fine tuning for life: life is possible because both the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the Universe have a very special nature
H. The possible existence of multiverses: unprovable by observation or experimentation, neither can probability-based arguments be used as proof, thus they are philosophical and not scientific proposals
I. Natures of existence: we do not understand the dominant matter components; the existence of infinities is questionable; are the laws of physics prescriptive or descriptive?

 I think it's a good list of the unique questions we face in cosmology, in addition to the usual questions like "What is Science?"

Copernican vs. Cosmological Principles

The Copernican principle is a philosophical principle which claims that we do not live in a special place in the Universe - there are no privileged observers. It's named after Copernicus, who advocated the heliocentric theory of the Solar System which put the Sun at the center instead of the Earth. This is a philosophical principle because you cannot test it, you can only argue against it. Indeed, it is hard to think of what "special place" even means scientifically. It is also important to note that throughout most of human history, we firmly believed that we WERE in a special place.

A scientific principle, on the other hand, can indeed be tested. The cosmological principle states that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic, meaning it is homogeneous (looks about the same in all locations) and isotropic (looks the same in all directions) when averaged over large enough scales. It is still a bit unclear what those scales are, but this principle is generally taken for granted, and indeed it is fundamental to modern cosmology.

For some reason, these two are mixed up all the time. I have a list that I add to whenever I come across an abstract that gets it wrong or is problematic. Most of the time, people say things like "we are going to test the Copernican principle" when they really mean the cosmological principle, which is annoying but a minor error. Sometimes though they really mean they are going to test the Copernican principle that we are not in a special place in the Universe, which is worse. Perhaps these offenders are interpreting "special place" to mean statistically rare, which I think misses the point of the Copernican principle. The center of the Universe, if such a place existed (and we don't think it does), would be singularly and uniquely special, for example, and a theory that put the Earth in such a place would smack of supernaturalism. [The acceptance of Naturalism as a foundation of modern science is an interesting tangent, but one that I did not bring up during my talk, so we'll leave it for another day.]

The cosmological principle, because it is scientific, can and has been tested. The isotropy of the Universe is very strongly measured by the cosmic microwave background (CMB): the radiation reaching us from the early Universe looks the same in all directions to about one part in 100000. Homogeneity, however, is more problematic - it is in principle testable, but so far the best argument relies on the Copernican principle:

1. We observe isotropy, especially in the CMB.
2. We use the Copernican principle to assume that since we are not privileged observers, isotropy exists elsewhere (and possibly everywhere).
3. Isotropy everywhere implies a homogeneous Universe, mathematically.

The cosmological principle is fundamental for the use of the FLRW metric in cosmology, which allows us to calculate cosmological space-time distances given some parameters that describe the constituents of the Universe. Other metrics are possible, for example one describing a spherically symmetric space-time around a black hole. However, the cosmological principle doesn't clarify on what scales the assumption of isotropy and homogeneity is valid. Clearly the Universe isn't homogeneous or isotropic on the scale of people, or even the solar system or the local group of galaxies. But isotropy and homogeneity have precise meanings, and the scale of homogeneity can potentially be measured with future experiments - unlike the idea of "specialness" in the Copernican principle.

Another point is that even the above argument doesn't guarantee isotropy (and thus homogeneity) at much earlier times than decoupling or much later times than today, and it doesn't apply far outside the visual horizon because we have no information on the isotropy of the CMB there. So while the cosmological principle is a justifiable assumption that is fundamental to modern cosmology, it is important to note that it is just an assumption.

The Anthropic Principle: Fine Tuning and Multiverses

The anthropic principle, or at least its cosmological version, essentially addresses whether the Universe itself is a special place. The observation that concerns people is that the laws of physics and chemistry, and the values of the fundamental constants, are such that life is possible, and small deviations would make the Universe inhospitable to life. This apparent fine-tuning for life seems to require explanation - why is it that the Universe is such as to create us? [I made the following note to myself in my... notes... but didn't bring it up during the talk, but I think it's worth including here: the laws of physics and values of the constants require explanation, but the fact that they are such that life is possible seems secondary and irrelevant to me (in contradiction to Ellis, but possibly also supported by Smolin). See more links below.]

The Weak Anthropic Principle points out that the Universe must be compatible with the existence of us as observers because of the very fact that we exist. It's practically a tautology, but at least it reduces the apparent fine tuning to a selection bias. However, it doesn't attempt to explain the nature of the laws or values of the constants that lead to the apparent fine tuning.

The Strong Anthropic Principle, on the other hand, asserts that our existence as intelligent observers is an explanation for the nature of the laws of physics and chemistry and the values of the constants - the Universe is hospitable to life because we exist.

The explanatory nature of the strong anthropic principle only really makes sense in the context of the multiverse: given the possibility of many different universes with different parameters, of course we exist in the one which is capable of producing us to observe it.

The anthropic principle by itself wasn't regarded as a way to address the apparent fine tuning of the Universe for life - until theories suggested the possibility of the multiverse. For example, the chaotic inflation of Guth proposes that there are many disconnected expanding universe domains. Also, the landscape of string theory posits a huge number (10^500 - that's a 1 with 500 zeros after it) of string vacua in which the effective physical constants could be different. [Seems like a very large case of scientific underdetermination to me...]

A severe problem with positing the existence of multiple universes in order to explain the fine tuning problem is that multiverses are inherently untestable, since they are by definition causally disconnected from our universe (or domain).

Another problem is that another set of cosmological parameters has been shown to be hospitable to life (producing galaxies, chemistry, and long-lived stars), yet the parameters in this Cold Big Bang model are ruled out by the data. An anthropic argument meant to explain the parameters of our Universe based on it being fine-tuned for life would have to explain why we don't live in a Cold Big Bang universe, and they do not. For me, this puts the nail in the coffin of anthropic arguments masquerading as science.

As a final note (and not included in my talk), some of my issues with discussions of the "multiverse" come down to semantics. Sure, you can joke that all philosophers do is argue semantics, but it turns out that the meanings of our words are important if we want to think deeply and communicate our thoughts to others. So, if you want to talk about how chaotic inflation predicts many disconnected expanding universe domains, I'm not comfortable with calling that a "multiverse". A multiverse means many universes, not many domains within our universe - it is not clear to me that the expanding domains are intrinsically causally disconnected, at all times and places (i.e. what about the boundaries?). Whereas calling something a "multiverse" is more in line with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: we define the Universe as the ultimate set of all that there is in space-time, but we can imagine different ultimate sets, and the set of all ultimate sets we call the multiverse. Without epistemic access to this multiverse, it is difficult to see how multiverse theories can be scientific - but as we saw earlier, what science is and how it does its explaining are still debated in philosophy.


Further Reading

For further reading on philosophy in general, the philosophy of cosmology, etc. check out:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• George Ellis, "Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology"
• Scientia Salon blog (which unfortunately ended over the Summer)
• Rationally Speaking blog (archives)
• Preposterous Universe blog (Sean Carroll)

And for more on the Anthropic Principle:

• Steven Weinberg, "Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant"
• Lee Smolin, "Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle"
• George Ellis, Note on "Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology"
• Anthony Aguirre, "The Cold Big Bang as a counter-example to several anthropic arguments"

Some thoughts while reading a philosophy blog over lunch

Today's post at Scientia Salon is a series of blurbs from an academic philosophical article. That means it is difficult to understand for two reasons:

1. It was not written with a general layperson audience in mind.
2. The blurbs are just snippets of the arguments and won't convey the whole picture.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it because I am interested in the topic, and I have done enough philosophical background reading to know what most of the jargon words mean. The topic and title is "Structural realism and the nature of structure." It addresses a specific model of scientific realism, which advocates for the reality of either our scientific theories or the objects in nature described by them. I think this article deals specifically with the epistemic question of scientific realism: are we in a position to know that our theories of nature are true?

The article is a critique of Ontic Structural Realism.

Ontic Structural Realism is a version of realism about science according to which by positing the existence of structures, understood as basic components of reality, one can resolve central difficulties faced by standard versions of scientific realism.

These difficulties are:

1. Pessimistic meta-induction, the view that since theories in the past have been shown to be false, there is reason to believe that our current theories will one day be shown to be false as well, so it is unreasonable to believe in their truth.
2. The "underdetermination of metaphysics by physics, which arises in non-relativistic quantum mechanics".... I will admit to not really getting what this means.

My point with this blog is not to go through and try to explain the blurbs of the philosophical article, not least because I don't understand it enough in the first place. I have defined pessimistic meta-induction here because it will come up later. My point is simply to share some thoughts I had while reading the blog over lunch.

I have recently been thinking about the nature of expertise, how we come about it, and why expertise in some fields (e.g. physics) is recognized and deferred to but not in others (e.g. racism in America). One day I may get around to formulating ideas into a blog, but with that as background, somewhere around this blurb I had to slow down:

The deflationary nominalist grants that mathematics is indeed indispensable to science, but resists the conclusion that this provides any reason to be committed to the existence of mathematical objects and structures. This is achieved by distinguishing quantifier commitment (the mere quantification over the objects of a given domain, independently of their existence) and ontological commitment (the quantification that commits one ontologically to the existence of something).

This is a good example of how understanding complex ideas is a difficult process. I had to think hard to translate "nominalist" into something meaningful (it has something to do with physical law), and I ignored "deflationary" as jargon I don't get. I had to re-read sentences a couple of times, and split them into chunks to understand phrases separately before bringing them back together into something coherent.

And then I had some thoughts about how important it is for us as a society, for humans committed to learning, to be comfortable being confused. ("If you aren't confused, you aren't paying attention." TM) Digesting complex ideas and turning them into increased understanding is a skill that should be learned in school and then used repeatedly as an adult, but the brain is a lazy and energy-saving organ. All too often we accept "common sense" answers because they are easier to understand, not because they are right.

Anyway, this is tangentially related to the differing types of expertise. Physics is acknowledged to be difficult to understand; ideas about physics are communicated via jargon and mathematics, so there is little chance of laypeople convincing themselves they understand when they really don't. On the other hand, much of the humanities - sociology, political science, literature - communicates with a mix of jargon and everyday words, and the subject of these fields are not quarks or electrons but people and groups of people. So, when a layperson is confronted with physics, they will usually defer to an expert, but when confronted with a subject like racism, they can refer to their everyday experience and may not even acknowledge that expertise on the subject exists. In this respect, the illusion of understanding is an impediment to understanding. (Abandon Certainty, etc.!)

Well... I wasn't planning on writing all that, but that happened. Let's move on. Here's the blurb from the article (remember, we were talking about ontic structural realism) that inspired me to start blogging today.

The very idea that there is a true, fundamental, underlying structure of the world - in whose existence we must believe - is difficult to make sense of, as the above arguments have indicated.

 My thoughts proceeded something like:

• I was following the argument and maybe agreeing, but I find it difficult to commit to this characterization. Even if we never can know what the structure is (because of the nature of our ever-changing scientific theories, i.e., pessimistic meta-induction), that doesn't mean that there is no fundamental structure to the world.
• But if you can't define what that structure is, how can you say that it exists?
• Exactly.

... I'm not sure I can sufficiently explain where that last thought came from. But if we are thinking about some fundamental structure to the world, it is easy to slip from an abstract notion of scientific theories (though they may not be the structure itself) that describe the way the world works, to more metaphysical notions of Brahman or the Tao, something indefinable that transcends all notions of being and non-being. Well, easy for me anyway. Also, my favorite movie contains this quote:

Dude: "I have an appointment to check out this African guy."
Other dude: "What African guy?"
First dude: "Exactly. What African guy?"

I haven't yet decided whether I believe there exists some fundamental structure to the world. If there is, on one hand, it seems reasonable that in order to say that something exists, you should be able to define what that thing is that exists. On the other hand, being able to define something doesn't fully get at what the thing really is... we have an idea (which already doesn't fully contain the essence of the thing) then distill that idea into language (getting further away from the real thing) in order to communicate... so whatever the fundamental structure of the world is, if one exists, cannot be defined, since surely it exists independent of human language and thought?

If I keep going I will go back and forth and this will become "some thoughts about my thoughts about a philosophy blog I read over lunch"... but I hope my thoughts sparked your own thoughts!

Cosmic Coincidences

There is a solar eclipse tomorrow, so obviously I have been pondering whether some coincidences in nature require explanation, how do we know which do, and what this means for scientific theories.

Eclipses occur throughout the Solar System, and indeed wherever there are planets that have satellites like our Moon orbiting around other stars. But on Earth, the apparent size of the Moon is about the same as the apparent size of the Sun. The Sun is obviously much more mega huge than the Moon, but it is also much farther away. By some cosmic coincidence, both of these ratios are 400, resulting in a Sun and Moon that appear the same size, giving them roughly equal importance in our mythic imagination.

Does this coincidence require a scientific explanation? Is there some physical process which can explain why these two numbers are the same, or is it down to statistics?

Let me give another example. The Moon both orbits around the Earth and rotates about its own polar axis, just like the Earth both revolves around the Sun once per year and rotates once per day. But for the Moon, these periods are the same: it rotates at the same speed which it orbits the earth, with the result that one side of the Moon always faces Earth, and we can never see its far side from the Earth's surface. When I first learned about this "coincidence" I thought, what are the chances?

But there is a physical explanation for why the orbital speed and rotational speed of the Moon are the same, and it's called tidal locking. There are other tidally locked systems in our Solar System, and once we figured out the subtler implications of Newtonian gravity and celestial mechanics, science could provide an explanation for this apparent coincidence. (1 point for Science!)

Another example involves the Universe itself. As the Universe evolves and expands, the densities of matter and radiation in the Universe decrease, but the density of radiation decreases faster. In the early Universe, the density of radiation was higher than matter, but most of the time the Universe has been matter dominated -- that is, until very recently, when the Universe began accelerating. We don't know what the "dark energy" causing this acceleration is, but the simplest explanation gives it a density that is constant over time (unlike matter and radiation whose densities decrease). But why is this period of acceleration happening so close to now, when we are able to observe it? This is called the cosmic coincidence problem, and in general any successful theory of dark energy is expected to explain it, though many theories ignore it. (1 point for WTF Is Going On, Nature?)

So, what is it about these coincidences that they require physical explanation? If the phenomenon of tidal locking didn't result from our theories of gravity, would we still be searching for an explanation of why the orbital period and rotational periods of some satellites are the same? What if only our Earth-Moon system had this property? (I realize I am mostly asking questions here, not answering, but I am doing philosophy. Abandon Certainty with me for a bit.)

I have the feeling that if only the Moon had the same orbital and rotational period in our Solar System, and if gravity offered no scientific explanation, we would still be looking for some way to explain the coincidence, either scientifically or statistically. It would be too special, and too human-centric. "Because humans are special" lacks explanatory power, and since the Copernican revolution, any scientific explanation which puts humans in a special place is met with great skepticism. This is the heart of why the cosmic coincidence problem is troubling, and why some scientists would rather believe that multiple universes exist than that we occupy a special place in our own.

The eclipse coincidence -- that the Sun and Moon have the same angular size from Earth -- strikes me as similarly human-centric. But there is no physical explanation, and scientists aren't actively searching for one. I say scientists because people are certainly putting explanations out there on the internet (you see, it was necessary for the development of consciousness...), but as long as two unrelated things have happened at the same time, people have come up with explanations. Human brains are great at finding patterns, even when they don't exist.

That is not to say that scientists don't think about it. I mean, the Sun and the Moon have the same apparent size, isn't that cool?? But it's generally accepted that there is no underlying physical explanation, that the coincidence is purely statistical. Unlike with tidal locking, other celestial bodies in our Solar System don't have this apparent size coincidence, so any physical explanation would have to be unique to the Earth-Moon system. Further, the Moon is actually receding away from us (at the whopping speed of 4 centimeters per year), so in the past it appeared bigger than the Sun, and in the future it will appear smaller. Even today, the Moon actually changes its apparent size as it moves through its elliptical orbit. Given the billions of stars in our Galaxy, and the thousands of planets in other solar systems (just that we're aware of), it's likely that this apparent size coincidence is not unique.

Where does that leave our understanding of the explanation of coincidences? I have presented three examples:

1. The Sun and Moon are observed to have the same apparent size viewed from the Earth. This can be explained statistically: given enough planetary systems, such a coincidence can be expected.
2. The Moon has the same orbital and rotational period. There are many examples of this type of coincidence in our Solar System, and it can be shown to follow from laws of nature. 
3. The acceleration of the expansion of the Universe started relatively recently in its cosmic history, which seems to place humans in a special time. Both scientific and statistical explanations are being sought: either the coincidence will be explained by a theory of dark energy, or there are so many universes that such a coincidence can be expected in one of them (ours).

So some apparent coincidences turn out to follow from a fundamental law -- to put it in fancy philosophical language, the explanandum has an explanans which is nomological -- and some can be explained statistically instead of nomologically. Does that mean all coincidences require explanation? Either they are the result of a physical law, or they have a non-zero probability of occurring, and both count as explanation? Maybe this is because of my pattern-seeking human brain, but the statistical type of explanation does not seem fulfilling to me.

More importantly, what is the probability that I will wake up in time for the eclipse tomorrow AND that there will be clear skies, given that I live in England AND I hate mornings? Such a confluence of events would be rare indeed.

Logic

Today I made a few observations of my mental state. It amused me to put them in an ordered list:

1. Being depressed makes it hard to get work done.
2. When I get work done, I feel good.
3. Feeling good is the opposite of being depressed.
4. Therefore, in order to feel good, I must first feel good.

I was going to post something like the above on facebook with some pithy comment about my brief training in formal logic. "Haha, logic shows the impossibility of ever breaking the cycle of depression!" I would say, then sit back and marvel in my own cleverness.

Then I actually thought about the formal logic of it... it turns out I made a pretty basic error. To show you how, we have to translate the above statements into symbols, which lay bare their meanings by removing the shiny words. We will use the following definitions:

• A = being depressed
• B = getting work done
• C = feeling good

Each statement is conditional - it can either be true or false. If it is false, then its opposite is true, indicated by "Not". So if A is false, then Not A is true.

My list of observations links together these individual statements by "if - then" connections. Though I never actually say, "If I'm depressed then I don't get work done," that is the meaning of observation number 1. Let's now translate them all:

1. If A then Not B
2. If B then C
3. C = Not A
4. If C then C

Let me first make it clear that there's no logical error in the above. The conclusion is obviously a pretty meaningless tautology. The error was in my thinking that 4 follows from 1, 2, and 3, by an implicit, "If I feel good, then I get work done," which translates to:

• If C then B

With 2 above that leaves us with "If C then B" and "If B then C", thus:

• If C then C,

or, "If I feel good then I get work done then I feel good." What a hilariously depressing joke!

Unfortunately, "If C then B" DOES NOT FOLLOW. It is a common mistake to assume that "If A then B" implies "If Not A then Not B", which wikipedia helpfully informs us is called denying the antecedent. What does follow, however, is:

• If B then Not A,

from the transposition of number 1. Then we can see, by number 3, that this is exactly the same as number 2, "If B then C". And since we can't have a discussion of logic without any Latin, I will point out that this is the same as the rule of modus tollens: If A then B; Not B; Therefore Not A. So my observations amount to two equivalent statements, a definition, and a tautology.

I hope we all have learned something today. I think at least a cursory introduction to formal logic should be required, perhaps in secondary education; no reason to wait for college. In practice it mixes algebra with reading comprehension, and the result is better reasoning and critical thinking skills. Plus, it can help you avoid making a fool of yourself on facebook, and by God we need more of That!

Belief

"Do you believe in evolution?"

No.

But let me rephrase the question:

"Do you believe that the theory of evolution is currently the best way to explain the data?"

Why, yes I do. Thanks for asking!

You can believe in a whole lot of things. You can believe in yourself, in the inherent goodness of humanity, in God, in your friends, in ghosts. If you live in Baltimore, you can just Believe. But it makes no sense to believe IN a scientific theory, or to assume that others do so. Sometimes people may say they believe in evolution and mean they believe the theory fits the data, but sometimes people are sloppy with their language and should know better. It makes no more sense to believe in evolution than it does to believe in electromagnetism.

It may seem like I'm making a minor point here - okay yes, I am, it's what I do - but what I'm getting at is that failing to make this distinction is the cause of a lot of the perceived conflict between science and religion. Believing in something is like having faith, and no one can take that away from you. But evolutionary biologists don't have faith that the theory of evolution is correct - they have data. The key thing about this kind of "science belief" is that new data can prove the theory wrong, thus changing beliefs about how well the theory works. The "faith beliefs" can change too, i.e. I can believe in the goodness of humanity but change my mind when faced with traumatic events; however, "the goodness of humanity" is not a testable theory. It would be odd to believe in a chair, but it is reasonable to believe that a chair exists (perhaps because you are sitting on it). This is what I mean by science belief: it connects a theory to data in an objective way.

A better way to phrase the distinction might be justified vs. unjustified belief. Scientific beliefs are (mostly) justified by data, i.e. they are empirical. Justification can also be rational, i.e. without recourse to data but appealing to logic. Unjustified beliefs can be based on intuition, or on preference (believing something because you want it to be true); or, like religious belief, they could be based on profound personal experiences. They are both legitimate types of belief and we all have them.

Now, you might think that justified beliefs are more strongly held and unjustified beliefs are easier to change. To the contrary, justified beliefs are far more adaptable - the data may change, your reasoning may be shown to be false - and I think most of the time we make no distinction between these types of belief in our own heads. There are just things we know, and we do not constantly ask ourselves how we know them. But the distinction matters. Unjustified beliefs are much harder to change.

To me, believing in something is like having faith in something without empirical or rational justification. And this is exactly why I hate the question, "Do you believe in evolution?"  It is like asking, "Do you believe in gravity?" I'm not floating into space, so, yes? But Newtonian gravity is wrong on cosmological scales, so no? Or did you mean relativistic gravity? What are you talking about?! It is a meaningless question.

Part of the deal of abandoning certainty is a commitment to questioning your beliefs. This gets tedious. Humans are not designed to do this. But, it is irrational to believe, contrary to the data, that humans are rational beings. Being uncertain is uncomfortable, thus abandoning certainty means valuing the truth above personal comfort. Many people place utmost value in concepts like goodness or justice, or in increasing well-being for themselves and others. But valuing truth means asking, "What is good? What is well-being?" and being okay with not knowing the answer. Valuing truth means avoiding untruths most of all. And now that I've slipped from epistemology to morality and totally derailed myself, here's an apt quote from Dune:

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.

- Frank Herbert, Dune

I've recently discovered (in the past months or year) that I seem to place a high value in the truth, and I find myself thinking, when I disagree with something on the internet (like ALL THE TIME), "Well, they just don't value truth as much as I do." (Wow, that sounds pretty arrogant after writing it out loud... no one thinks to themselves, "I don't care what is true! La la la la!" Probably. But that's not what I mean...) Perhaps not valuing truth as much means they are less wary of the instability of "truth" or more trusting of sources of information. But whenever someone posts something and comments, "This is unbelievable!!!!!!" I always want to respond, "Then maybe you shouldn't believe it? And also maybe calm down with the exclamation marks a bit?"

Another way people may not "value truth as much" is when there's a disagreement; they may get defensive or take it personally because not having any perceived conflict is more important than hashing out the issues; or, having their opinions heard is more important than finding out whether these opinions conform to reality. I'm not making judgments here; these values are all valid. Part of the difference in what people value may be temperament. Personally, not only am I a professional scientist, but in my free time I read about psychology, epistemology, neuroscience, and other things that address why we believe what we believe and how we know what we know. So, I value truth highly, and others may not, and that's okay.

Getting back to the justified vs. unjustified types of belief... I think it's fair to say that justified belief is more trustworthy. Justification should be found for unjustified beliefs whenever possible, and basic assumptions, facts, and motivations that underlie belief checked often. But, though I value truth, I recognize that some belief can never be justified; further, these unjustified beliefs address some of the most profound and beautiful aspects of human existence.

This distinction is often discussed in terms of the conflict between science and religion. For example, no empirical data can address the question of God's existence, and though there may be reasoned arguments, surely very few people believe in God because they were convinced by the Kalam Cosmological Argument; it is rather something they know, because they have faith. Acting as if data or logic has anything to do with spirituality is a good way for atheists to completely miss the point and convince no one (as if convincing were a worthwhile endeavor, which it is not).

On the other hand, ignoring the overwhelming justification of a scientific theory because it conflicts with unjustified religious belief is a good way to bring the progress of society to a screeching halt. The error lies in failing to recognize those aspects which are justifiable - those which come into contact with data - and failing to separate them from questions of value, rightness, love, spirituality, etc.

Stephen Jay Gould has famously referred to science and religion as "non-overlapping magisteria," such that science deals with questions of fact and religion with morality and meaning. I may have agreed at one time, but now it is obvious to me that of course they overlap! Most religions have in their dogma explicit questions of fact; science, being a human endeavor, is not immune from questions of morality and meaning, and of course religion does not have a monopoly on morality and meaning in the first place. It seems "science" and "religion" are not the correct terms, and I don't know what the correct terms are, which may be why this blog post has been in draft form for years. I guess I will have to live with the uncertainty.

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Flatland

What is the point of this blog post? Besides the obvious pun, which will become clear to you in a moment, I'm not really sure what the point of posting this quotation is, except that I found it interesting and compelling. I guess I will just write and we'll find the point together.

Near the end of Flatland, by E. A. Abbott, the Sphere is showing the Square (who has already witnessed visions of Lineland and Spaceland) the being, and entirety, of Pointland:

"Behold yon miserable creature. The Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."

(Italics mine.) The first set of italics I found profound in a Zen kind of way. In Pointland, one, everything, and nothing are all the same. Let's just sit with that for a moment.

...

...

...

Got it? Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.

Now to the mathematics... does a point even exist? How can an infinitesimally small thing, which has no extent in either of our three spatial dimensions, be said to exist? How can it be extant with no extent, as it were? We can write down a lot of things mathematically, like infinity, for example, that are useful to solve problems about the real universe but don't actually exist themselves. How can infinity carry any ontological weight? There are an infinite number of numbers between any two numbers, sure, but numbers are abstractions; they are not real things in the real world, but instead they are properties of things in the world. Similarly, a point is a mathematical abstraction - a way to specify this number exactly - but a thing can't be a point, can it? We would have to know its location to infinite precision (and as I've said, it would have zero extent).

Points are difficult for physics. Zeros and infinities make black holes, which tear apart the very fabric of space and time. Singularities (like black holes) are a sign that something is wrong with our theories or that they are incomplete. The embarrassment of naked black holes is covered up with event horizons, which hide the awkward theoretical rip in space-time. But it is interesting to me, in a very Zen way, how zero and infinity are reciprocals of each other - divide by zero to get infinity, and divide by infinity to get zero. They are inverses, so in some way they're the same - zero is infinity, just viewed upside-down. Everything is nothing.


The second set of italics above, "to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy," is interesting for a completely different reason. Here is the Point making a very profound (to me) point about existence, and yet the higher-dimensional beings call him vile and ignorant. His happiness is a reflection of his ignorance of the higher dimensions (or really any dimensions at all), and this is obviously to be scorned. In some ways I sympathize; the Point is certain that he knows all there is to know, by virtue of being his entire Universe, so while we can't exactly blame him, he is completely and utterly wrong. He hears the Square speak, and thinks it his own thoughts. Being wrong is uncomfortable, but I value the attempt at being right (the aspiration for knowledge, not knowledge itself) more than being ignorant, certain, and blissful.

And yet:

"Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is none else beside It. It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, the happiness of Being!"

 Ah indeed, the happiness of Being. What an intriguing and enticing ignorance!
 

A new/old supernova/star is born/dead

If this were a science blog, I would be all over the discovery of a Type Ia Supernova in a very nearby galaxy. I mean, I used to work on Supernovae Ia! Though the ones I studied were admittedly very far away... and though they were admittedly only simulated, i.e. not real at all... well, after I simulated them I treated them as real... but what does "real" even mean in this sense? How are data points from a "real" supernova different than data points from a simulated one? What is the ontology of simulation?

Where was I?

Oh yes, that's right: "Woohoo! This is a cool thing for science!" is something I would be saying if this were a science blog. I would talk about how close the supernova is, using analogies that would help you understand how something incredibly far away is practically next door on the scale of THE UNIVERSE. (It's so close the galaxy is a Messier object, M82, with a name, the "Cigar Galaxy.") But others are doing that. I'm more interested in how contemplating the scale of THE UNIVERSE can make us feel simultaneously very small and very important.

I mean, we, as human beings, are already an unimaginably small dot on the Earth which is incredibly tiny compared to our Sun, not to mention the vast emptiness of space that separates the Earth from the Sun, which, cosmologically speaking, is practically buzzing with debris and not empty at all... and of course, cosmologically speaking, the Sun doesn't even register as an infinitesimally small speck in a mediocre galaxy in the unfathomable hugeness of space. It takes light a mere 8 minutes to reach us from the Sun, but light from this new supernova has been traveling to us for 11.4 million years! And it is a nearby event! The star died 11.4 million years ago, and the supernova explosion marking its death happens on the scale of a month. And here we are to observe it, sitting on our planet in a nearby galaxy, focusing our prisms and mirrors on this awesome event, cozy with our blankets and hot chocolate (stay warm, USA) in the knowledge that our Sun won't die on us for at least another 5 billion years.

I might talk about how the news is making some of my colleagues as excited as kids in a candy shop. There is so much astrophysical data and in so many colors! (That is an Astronomy joke, by the way. Feel free to laugh.) And I would show some pretty pictures, if this were a science blog, for sure. Wait, I can still do that... hold on... there:

From Astronomy Picture of the Day; Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona

If this were a science blog, I could talk about how it's so bright, and getting brighter still, that anyone with access to clear skies and small telescopes can see this new point of light for themselves. But others are doing that too. And I'd rather imagine what it might be like, looking through an eyepiece up into the sky at a dying star in another galaxy... sure, the image itself might not be spectacular, but knowing what it is brings so much more.

I have a small telescope, and I've seen Jupiter and its moons. But without that knowledge, all you can see is a smallish dot with a few smaller dots around it sort of along a straight line, and if you're lucky, the biggest smallish dot has some dark lines across it. The experience is less meaningful if you don't know that you're looking at another planet, which is very big and very far away. I don't mean knowing the names of Jupiter and its moons, or how far away they are, or any details like that, is important... but looking at Jupiter, or this new supernova, without knowing its place in the pattern is like seeing a puzzle piece without any picture on it - basically, meaningless. And that is the magic of learning, and of science - turning a bunch of pieces of a puzzle into a beautiful picture, or even an ugly picture when you get down to it, but a picture nonetheless of something you understand. I would even say that understanding by itself is beautiful, and that understanding something ugly turns it into something beautiful - not beautiful in the sense of aesthetically pleasing, but in a larger meaning - whole and right and beautiful. Of course, I can say all of that because this isn't a science blog.

If it were, I would talk about how this particular type of supernova was responsible for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and how this messes with our understanding of cosmology in a fundamental way. Actually, I might write about that one day... but this supernova is so close, it's unlikely to answer those fundamental questions.

What I would really talk about, if this were a science blog, is how this particular type of supernova is responsible for the creation of all heavy elements, without which life as we know it would not be possible. You may have heard that "we are made of star stuff" because of the creation of all elements heavier than Helium (and trace Lithium) in the nuclear furnaces of stellar cores. (Or you might have heard that "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe.") But all elements heavier than iron (and most of the iron) can only be created in the special conditions of a stellar death - the massive energy of a star collapsing in on itself and exploding in a supernova. Of course, I would check all of my facts before saying things like that, if this were a science blog.

I would focus on the creation of heavy elements because this supernova is the perfect metaphor for the un-metaphorizable, the awe and the awesome, the "Tao" or "Brahman" or "whatever, none of that is real" or whatever you want to call it. It is creation and destruction at once: the creation of the possibility for life, as the elements in its ejecta travel out to one day find their way into new stars of their own - or possibly into the planets around that star and eventually the life on those planets; but also, it is the destruction of the possibility for life as the death of a life-giving star itself. In order for there to be life, there has to be death, in the heavens as it is on Earth.

Amen.

The Philosophy of Cosmology, or: What I Didn't Spend Three Weeks Doing This Summer

Sit a while, and let me tell you a story. About hopes. About fears. About an epic battle between science and philosophy, and a lone blogger caught in the crossfire...

It starts way back in February. There I am, checking Sean Carroll's blog (a cosmologist who regularly blogs about philosophy, i.e. me if I had fame and tenure and was better at blogging), when what do you know, there is a call for applications for a Summer Institute on the Philosophy of Cosmology! My hobby and my day job all rolled up into one!

My first instinct is that I need to apply because Believe in Your Dreams. (Uncertainty Phase 1: Excitement.)

Then after a bit of research, I decide I do not trust the motives of the Templeton Foundation, and I'm not going to get in anyway, so why bother? (Uncertainty Phase 2: Insecurity.)

Uncertainty Phase 3 then slips into cold hard reality...

In tandem with researching the people involved with the Philosophy of Cosmology institute, I watched the Moving Naturalism Forward videos, which seemed the natural thing to do once I was in a philosophical mood. One of the speakers, who was a physicist and is now a philosopher, talks about the practical differences of the two academic fields to emphasize that as a scientist, you just don't have the luxury of taking a broader view and reading literature in related fields - at least not until you go on sabbatical or get old and philosophical! There are teaching duties, overseeing graduate students, solving practical problems in the lab, and writing a ton of grant proposals to occupy your time, and there is only so much time in the day.

The cold hard reality of the situation is that perhaps I don't have the luxury to spend a day thinking about philosophical issues, much less three weeks, because it's normal - even expected - for postdocs to work on weekends. Sure, not all do, and sure, mostly this is my guilt and insecurity about not working enough, but I don't hear faculty talking about how much they slacked off as postdocs. I hear them talk about how much sleep they didn't get. It turns out I love sleep. I also like to pretend to be profound and pretend to be philosophical, but that's not something I should have the time to do as a serious scientist. Crap.

Despite all that, I convince myself (and let friends convince me) to apply anyway. (Uncertainty Phase 4: Action. slash Believe in Your Dreams and Figure Out Later Whether They Are Your Actual Dreams.)

Cut to April, when the most annoying thing happens.

I get in.

Uncertainty Phases 1 through 3 kick in all at once! Of course I'm super excited about getting in, but actually going would mean keeping up with philosophers for three weeks (and actually talking to them! Ahh!)... and then there's the added annoyance that a very relevant conference overlaps with the philosophy institute, and because time only moves in one direction, I can't do both. (WTF, time?)

I almost resolve myself to do it despite my misgivings. Abandon Certainty and Follow Your Bliss and all that. But there's that nagging question of the actually-relevant-to-my-job conference. If you are aware enough to notice things like blog post titles, perhaps you can see where this is going. I get the word from the higher-ups: "if you want a job in astrophysics, go to the science conference. you will be able to do this interdisciplinary stuff once you have a permanent position (if you have time! because no one has time to do anything as a professor, haha!)." I may have paraphrased just a little bit, but the message is clear: scientists are interested in science and nothing else.

Believe in Your Dreams... Later.

This signaled to me that the paranoia behind why I don't have my full name on here or link here from my actual website turned out to be justified. Perhaps I didn't intentionally plan it that way, but at some point I realized that I definitely don't want potential employers to read this blog. First, some would see it as indicating that I'm not serious about science, or think that blogging takes away from time better spent doing research. If this blog were only about science, that would probably be okay - but most of the time I would rather talk about "somethingness" and "nothingness" and "wait what does that even mean?"

Which brings me to my second point: I sometimes write about personal shit and sometimes write about Chakras and sometimes mention how time is an illusion or discuss the unity of duality. Who would hire a scientist who doesn't believe in time? (Of course, I do, really, insofar as "believing in time" is even a useful concept... and of course I don't literally think that chakras are pools of energy in the body that we can open by meditation and yoga... but metaphors are useful and logic can be boring!) Not only am I philosophical, but I have weird ideas...

In hindsight, the science conference did turn out to be very worth it and good for my research/career. Also, as a bonus, the philosophy of cosmology lectures were all put online and seem to be mostly on topics in which I'm not particularly interested... not that it wouldn't have been awesome, but the actual awesomeness level of counterfactuals is impossible to determine. (Again, unidirectional time. What a let-down.) Anyway, another philosophy of cosmology opportunity may come again, and meanwhile maybe I will write about the Copernican vs. Cosmological Principles and how no one understands them because cosmologists are bad at philosophy.

I guess the moral of the story is: Believe in Your Dreams Even If You Don't Necessarily Follow Them All the Time.

Happiness

Please remember this for me: If you don’t
have happiness in the present moment, there
is no way to have happiness in the future.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A friend of mine posted this quote (with a picture of jumping happy people!), but instead of appreciating the sentiment and moving on, I am taking this opportunity to delve into the meaning of happiness. 

What is the sound of one hand being happy?

As most people would agree, "happiness" is a pleasant emotional state. I bring this up because below, I will suggest that there are better interpretations, or perhaps better words, in this context. For now, though, using the definition that 99% of readers will use, then on the surface, this seems like a pretty standard inspirational quote from a Zen master. Be happy now. Stop trying to be happy in the future. Take this opportunity to enjoy the life you are living. That's one way to interpret it... go jump around and be happy!

But because it is Zen inspiration, there is far more to it than appears on the surface. "If you aren't happy in the present, you will not be happy in the future"... well, that actually sounds pretty grim! The burden of happiness is laid heavy, and there is an implication of immense pressure: this is it, be happy now! If you aren't happy it's you're own fault and you will never be happy. Literally, that is what the quote is saying. But luckily that's just another way to interpret it, and literal interpretations are lame and boring and very un-Zen-like.

I would say that both of those are wrong, or at least only partly right. The first interpretation, positive and light, is correct in that happiness happens in the present moment. The second, with its Zen disregard for making sense, is correct in that happiness never happens in the future. You could substitute "happiness" with anything else and these would still be true. When things happen, they are in the present, and never the future. The future doesn't exist, and neither does the past, so how could you expect to be happy in the future? There is only now.

Therefore, if you aren't happy now, you will never be happy. The Zen thing to realize is that now is a constantly changing moment that each individual experiences in different ways as the Universe moves through time. Now is always. Then is merely what you remember, or what you anticipate or worry about. Basically, the quote is saying, "don't worry, be happy." (Now you have that song in your head. You're welcome.)

Be happy, or else.

The problem is this: I fully get behind the "don't worry" aspect of the quote, but not the "be happy" part; I reject the presumption that happiness is somehow the goal in life. Most people take this happiness goal as given. Various forms of "wisdom", whether religious, philosophical, or colloquial, are interpreted as ways of living that maximize happiness. And, if you are not happy, then something is wrong either with you or with your life situation, so one of those should change until you are happy all the time. Be happy now sounds nice, but it is a meaningless burdensome thing to say to a sad person.

Perhaps Thich Nhat Hanh only said "happiness" to be generally understood, because I think there is a deeper wisdom to be learned that the idea of happiness clouds. Happiness is just the other side of sadness, and vice versa, each meaningless without the other. Striving for happiness invariably strives against sadness, puts this ahead of that, whereas the experience of being human involves both. Fighting sadness thus fights the full expression of who you are in the moment. Here, too, the trick is not wallowing in past sadness or imagining future sadness. The trick, in my opinion, is not to be happy now, but to be here now.

When we get down to it perhaps we don't want to be happy. Perhaps what we want is meaning. Some substance to our lives that stitches it in with the rest of Life so that we feel alive. No one wants to be sad, but if we were happy all the time how would we grow? Why would we ever change anything? What would be the point? (Though, maybe realizing this would instantly trigger sadness, proving that it is not possible to be happy all the time, thereby solving the momentary existential crisis and restoring a feeling of well-being.... paradox averted!)

I might even go so far as to say that society's preoccupation with happiness is damaging, in the long run - that trying to be happy now will actually reduce future happiness. For example, it has been conclusively shown with sarcasm that listening to NPR makes people sad:

NPR is committed to delivering the news, and the news is not good. Whether they're reporting on corporate greed, school shootings, religious extremists, or a grossly over-entitled populace, it's hard to listen to public radio and not come to the conclusion that we're all just completely and totally screwed.

I believe that it is vitally important to pay attention to what's going on in the world, and that if we as a society continue to ignore things that we don't want to hear, we are lost. But that doesn't mean we should listen to the news and be sad. We should listen to the news and do what we can to make things better, and not worry about not being able to fix everything all at once. Don't worry, and listen to the news. But that somehow doesn't sound inspirational.

Be in the moment, or else.

 "We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment" seems obvious to me, but it was "among the surprising results" of this TED talk. Another talk says "flow" is the secret to happiness, when the "sense of time disappears" and you "forget yourself," which to me is the same as being lost in the moment. And yet these discussions are still framed in terms of how to achieve happiness. Being lost in the moment, forgetting yourself... how can you be happy if there is no you?

I don't think the experiences those talks describe actually amount to happiness, but that we lack a better word. I like to think of it as the intense experience, with full awareness, of the present moment... but that is tedious. Joe Campbell might call it "the rapture of being alive" and that is good too, but it sounds like an even more pleasurable state of happiness. (Happiness +1.) Being in the moment is beyond happiness or sadness, but even describing it that way is just moving the target. (If you are not beyond happiness and sadness now, you will never be...)

Despite all my above words, I don't have anything against happiness. My issue here is with happiness as a goal, because my issue is with any goal at all. Goals are things to be had in the future, and I think the real wisdom in the quote that started all this is the insight into the nature of time: now is all there is. Or put another way, from the pages of Dune and one of my own personal mantras:

Eternity is now.

Epistemology and the Media

A while ago I saw the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" about Noam Chomsky and recorded some thoughts as it was playing. Watch it yourself if you can, though it is rather long and rather old, or you can trust that my interpretation is a faithful representation of its main ideas - but be aware that these are not epistemically equal!

One of Chomsky's main tenets is that the media deceives and indoctrinates the public (though individuals in the media aren't consciously deceptive, and I think this is a misconception by critics). Anyway, soon in the documentary I realize that why I'm drawn to this subject and why I think it's so important is because I'm fascinated by epistemology, which is the study (or philosophy) of how we obtain knowledge. The dissemination of (mis)information through the media is another example of a process by which people learn about the world and how that information becomes biased, and how they come to believe things that aren't true. This is a lot of what fascinates me about politics, sociology, and religion, and as a scientist this is also what I'm interested in - not discovering the next big weird thing about the universe, but aiding the process by which that discovery can be made.

Process is important. Learning isn't about collecting facts, as if they're shells on the beach waiting to be picked up. The process by which one obtains information says everything about the quality, and even veracity, of that information. It is also important to be aware that you will never know all the facts about a situation. Most are buried beneath the sea, and the ones in view depend on where you are along the beach.

What follows is disjointed snippets of commentary, but hopefully not incredibly confusing to follow.

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I like that Chomsky is a linguist. Tolkien was a linguist. I love languages and grammar but have never put in the effort to learn another language. (No, not even Elvish.)

... and then he said anarcho-syndicalism was the optimal way to structure societies and for some reason that is associated with Monty Python... yup, found it. Enjoy.

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Is the "sinister view" of the media's control of information insulting the intelligence of those who consume the news? No. I think it's merely a description of how people think and judge and collect information, which is more often than not in a quick and inherently biased way. This is why understanding unconscious bias is so important to understanding discrimination - because people are often not meaning to discriminate, but merely making judgements they way they usually do when faced with little information, which is to resort to stereotypes and untested assumptions...

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"More terrifying than the occasional Hitler..." is the "equanimity and the detachment" of observers...

This is quite a statement, but I think I might have to agree. Think about it in terms of the Sandy Hook school shooting (which happened after I saw this documentary, btw). How much more horrible would that have been if people had not been shocked by it, had not been deeply affected? As horrible as the daily atrocities which we ignore. As of this writing, there have been 489 gun deaths in the U.S. since the school shooting. The occasional tragedy shocks us and may start a dialog about aspects of our society, but if we remain detached we will continue to allow tragedies to happen. Why doesn't the nightly news say, "There were 15 gun deaths on January 3rd, 15 on the 2nd, and 39 on the 1st day of the year." Why don't we demand it to?

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Media presentation of gulf war: "This is the people's war," so you need to know everything you can about it... i.e. we are going to war, there's no discussion to the contrary, we will help you deal with it. I remember MSNBC playing in the common area of my college residence hall with the title "Countdown to Iraq" on the bottom... the media just getting people used to the fact that we will go to war, neglecting their duty to inform people of the consequences, to question critically the politician's agenda, the evidence for WMD, etc...

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This documentary is pretty old (1992) so it's talking about alternative media in terms of magazines, publishers, and radio instead of THE INTERNET i.e. blogs. But even back then, and more so now, it seems there is soooo much information out there - how does one take seriously the job of self-education and learning about the world when there is so much out there and hey I've been thinking all day I'd much rather watch TV ??

I wish I had an answer for that question.