Deutsch (was Re: Marxism as science)

[Ian Murray]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>


So I went to Deutsch's website and did manage to sort of read
mathematical physics for New Years.

<snip>

Another problem is something I think of as Hegel's mistake. The
mistake is to conflate the phenomenology of mind with the
phenomenology of the world. This makes the assumption that the world
and its processes are knowable because there is no meaningful
difference between the world and the mind that experiences the
world. The two are somehow reciprocally interchangeable. The problem
here is, if this assumption is accepted, then there is no method
available to distinguish between, what I consider two distinct realms:
the world, and the mind (or in collective terminology, then the human
and physical worlds). This solves the problem of knowledge by
subjectifying the world, or conversely objectifying the mind.

===============

Well, Hegel did try to pry open the door onto the issues of
reflexivity and self-reference, but he didn't have the logic tools
etc. we've got today. He was the last of the 'Great Chain of Being'
theorists who 'start' with mind and then deduce the world. La Mettrie
and Lamarck being among the first in the West to invert the whole damn
thing and assert that mind needs to be explained rather than serving
as the explainer.

Deutsch' work really tightens the links between QT and computability
theory and, following Wheeler, connects this with a theory of
observership that is a great non-chemical way of flirting with
insanity!

What makes it fascinating with regards to What Varela and GSB were
trying to do connects with good ole' reflexivity and self reference
since Cantor, Russell and Godel and how it all connects with the
argument over the anthropic principle.

There's a great little quote by Richard Feynmann--echoing a playful
allegory by Schrodinger which I can't find about God painting himself
into his painting, which is the world. It also speaks to an issue dear
to some Hegelians.

Feynmann:

"The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a
method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we
cannot. We cannot see that the water-flow equations contain such
things as the barber pole srtucture of turbulence that one sees
between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's
equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality--or whether it
does not."

It's that last sentence that beckons a deeper understanding of
recursion; that we must somehow be in any 'ultimate' set of equations
we create-discover. Observers finding themselves in Hilbert space and
the Lambda calculus observing Hilbert space and the Lambda
calculus.....Like Escher and Magritte....It's that metaphysical
Narcissism that, I think, connects modernist notions of science as a
quest for god; imago deo. It surely seems to motivate people like GSB,
John Barrow, Hawking and others even though it's a secularization of
God a la Whitehead.

"If we cannot theorize the objectively real in terms of what is
invariant such that we may represent ourselves as among its objects,
then it may be significant parts of metaphysics, methodology, and
regulatory modeling of cognitive processes will have to be modified."
[Clifford Hooker, "Reason, Regulation and Realism"]





The transposition of this mistake into the case of mathematical models
is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the
mathematical models of the world (activities of mind) and the physical
world itself (processes of material reality). In other words, advanced
physical science makes the same romantic mistake as its arch rival,
the great grand-daddy of postmodernism his own bad self, George
Wilhelm Fredrick.




To my thinking, David Hawking has reached the terminal phase of this
mistake, when he postulates what he calls the strong anthropic
principle, ``We see the universe the way it is because we exist.''
[124p. Brief History of Time]. He later extrapolated this idea into
a potential argument for the existence of god in some subtly about the
infinite, but bounded universe, that escapes me at the moment. If you
re-read Deutsch above, you will see a permutation on a similar
anthropic principle.

In some intuitive sense, I see all these problems and even Deutsch's
multiverse (world as information) as symptoms of a cultural terminus
on the plateau of reason, the postmodern turn, the horizon of the
knowable. On the other hand, I don't want to launch immediately into
some bizarre and convoluted discussion of meaning and linguistics, or
get lost delving into some other hermeneutic realm as an alternative.

It seems to me, that it is possible to simply hold all of this in
suspension, as potentials none of which have yet crystallized into
anything resembling what we might later look back on and call science,
art or history.

Chuck Grimes

============

Time will tell......

Patterns and randomness...

Ian