Aristotle’s Ideal, Killed by Web

Aristotle’s Ideal, Killed by Web (Part 3): Winifred Gallagher - Bloomberg

According to the University of California at San Diego’s appropriately named How Much Information project, we now consume about 100,000 words each day from various media. That’s a whopping 350 percent increase, measured in bytes, over what we crunched back in 1980.

Our smart tools also pull us together in new communities oriented around important issues. The notion of “collective intelligence” first surfaced in the early 20th century, when American entomologist William Morton Wheeler observed that a colony of ants could cooperatively act as a “superorganism.” The term has gone through many iterations, but now mostly refers to the cognitive surge that occurs when people and their computers are connected to one another. Instead of just thinking singly, we 

cogitate as a hive.

As psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College says, “The experience that comes from thinking hard for a while about a subject is no longer available to some people, because they don’t stay on the task long enough to get to that point. Commitment has become a kind of dirty word.” The Internet’s capacity to generate superficial novelty is epitomized by the meme: a cultural tidbit, from a catchy anecdote to a joke to an image that spreads rapidly through society, now usually electronically.

One thought in the mimetic community is that ideas are parasites that don’t care what they do to their host as long as it helps them to spread,” Godin says. “The Tea Party -- or the Communist Party -- is a political meme that doesn’t care if it destroys the country, because its only job is to reproduce.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-14/aristotle-s-ideal-killed-by-web-part-3-commentary-by-winifred-gallagher.html

What Hope Remains?

What Hope Remains?

Peter Gordon

tnr.com| Dec 14th 2011

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

The Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared in 1981, he tried to show how the very structure of human language bears within itself the promise of mutual understanding and rational consensus: an ideal that can serve as the groundwork for a truly democratic polity.

Every culture begins by holding certain truths as sacred and virtually unquestionable.

We may have begun by imagining the divine as the sole source of our moral codes, but when we were awakened to the possibility that these codes can be challenged, our capacity for self-direction eventually outstripped our original experience of religious awe. The critique of the sacred therefore turns out to be the original model for the ongoing historical drama by which humanity came to understand itself as author of its own fate. Religion and Enlightenment are not eternal foes, since religion serves as reason’s point of departure. But the departure is necessary.

He readily concedes that religion (especially monotheistic religion) may furnish important moral insights that can be useful to secular democracies

In fact, the very emergence of the modern West has been shaped by the way that “philosophy continuously appropriates semantic contents from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Habermas prefers to speak of “translation” as the only mode of “nondestructive secularization” whereby modern society might salvage the moral feelings that “only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression.”

The idea of translation works especially well in the context of modern democratic society where we all have to be ready, if pressed, to furnish intelligible reasons for our arguments and the policies that we advocate. Yet if these reasons are to be binding for all members of our society, they cannot be reasons that presuppose everyone shares allegiance to the very same metaphysical vision of reality.

Instead I must be willing to back up my claims with reasons that all other citizens could recognize as at least potentially binding no matter what comprehensive doctrines they may hold.

A deeper objection would be that there is nothing in religion that is so indispensable that it requires the salvaging work of translation. After all, aren’t there other sources of instruction besides religious ones? On this point Habermas remains tellingly uncertain. He readily acknowledges that religious rituals and practices remain deeply affecting for many of us in ways that appear to have no obvious secular counterpart.

Habermas observes that in our ethical reasoning we provide justification in the language of universalistic concepts that presuppose the freedom of the individual. But when we are actually moved to act on our insight into the solidarity of the human collective, we may need more than “good reasons.” 

Habermas claims, when profane reason is set free to act on its own, it “loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole—of the Kingdom of God on earth—as collectively binding ideals.” Simply put, profane reason may not retain the requisite strength of motive or aspiration to fulfill its own mission: 

What Habermas actually meant, it seems, was far more modest: reason is fallible, and as such it should not dismiss the possibility that religious traditions may bear invaluable gifts.

Germany is, in Habermas’s phrase, a “post-secular society.” Whatever their origins, and whatever their faith or lack thereof, both religious and non-religious citizens should be able to encounter each other on a common plane and in mutual respect.

philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses. 

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/98567/jurgen-habermas-religion-philosophy

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Ross Andersen - Technology - The Atlantic

in order to explain the evolution of the universe, that state had to be a very low entropy state, and  there's a line of thought that says that anything that is very low entropy is in some sense very improbable or unlikely. And if you carry that line of  thought forward, you then say "Well gee, you're telling me the universe began in some extremely unlikely or improbable state" and you wonder is there  any explanation for that. Is there any principle that you can use to account for the big bang state?

One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the  physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of  it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about

One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and  that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger. And the beginning of this region, what we call the big bang, came  about by some physical process, from something before it, and that we happen to find ourselves in this region because this is a region that can support  life.

quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a  tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world.

Quantum  mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking  for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong

One example of philosophy of cosmology that seems to have trickled out to the layman is the idea of fine tuning - the notion that in the set of all  possible physics, the subset that permits the evolution of life is very small, and that from this it is possible to conclude that the universe is  either one of a large number of universes, a multiverse, or that perhaps some agent has fine tuned the universe with the expectation that it  generate life.

It's not as clear how you even make judgments like that about the likelihood of the various  constants of nature (an so on) that are usually referred to in the fine tuning argument.

What they want to argue is that this arises naturally from an  analysis of the fundamental physics, that the fundamental physics, quite apart from any cosmological considerations, will give you a mechanism by which  these worlds will be produced, and a mechanism by which different worlds will have different constants, or different laws, and so on.  If that's  true, then if there are enough of these worlds, it will be likely that some of them have the right combination of constants to permit life.

Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems  interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature.

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed  intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general  case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that  the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/what-happened-before-the-big-bang-the-new-philosophy-of-cosmology/251608/

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles

All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.”

Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.”

However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties.

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

The theory of inflation proposes that when our universe was only about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, a peculiar type of energy caused the cosmos to expand very rapidly. A tiny fraction of a second later, the universe returned to the more leisurely rate of expansion of the standard Big Bang model.

if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen.

The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine­tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it.

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God.

The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not.

From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here.

two teams of astronomers announced that some unknown force appears to be jamming its foot down on the cosmic accelerator pedal. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from each other as if repelled by antigravity.

Physicists have named the energy associated with this cosmological force dark energy.

based on our observations of the accelerating rate of expansion, dark energy constitutes a whopping three quarters of the total energy of the universe

On one thing most physicists agree: If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged.

Here we have a clear example of fine-tuning: out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point.

Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

In the theory of eternal inflation, the dark energy field has many different values at different points of space, analogous to lots of marbles sitting in lots of dents on the cosmic table. Moreover, as space expands rapidly, the number of marbles increases. Each of these marbles is jostled by the random processes inherent in quantum mechanics, and some of the marbles will begin rolling across the table and onto the floor. Each marble starts a new Big Bang, essentially a new universe. Thus, the original, rapidly expanding universe spawns a multitude of new universes, in a never-ending process.

In the past few years, however, physicists have discovered that string theory predicts not a unique universe but a huge number of possible universes with different properties. It has been estimated that the “string landscape” contains 10⁵⁰⁰ different possible universes.

Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720