Monday, May 6, 2013

How Scientists Trick Themselves And Us Into Believing A Tiny Focus Shows The Entire Reality

Before the passage that follows,  Joseph Weizenbaum recalls the joke in which a policeman encounters a drunk on his hands and knees under a lamp post.  He asks him what he's doing.
"Looking for my keys."
"There aren't any keys here.  Where did you drop them."
"Over there."  He points in the dark.
"Why are you looking over here then?"
" Because the light is so much better."
That's how I was told the joke, anyway.

He concentrates on computer scientists who mistake their limited focus for an entire system but in all of science, up to even  cosmologists, they clearly mistake it for the entire universe.  More about that later.  For now, I couldn't possibly say it better than Weizenbaum did

Science can proceed only by simplifying reality.  The first step in its process of simplification is abstraction.  And abstraction means leaving out of account all those empirical data which do not fit the particular conceptual framework in which science at the moment happens to be working, which, in other words, are not illuminated by the light of the particular lamp under which science happens to be looking for keys.  Aldous Huxley remarked on this matter with considerable clarity:

" Pragmatically [scientists] are justified in acting in this odd and extremely arbitrary way;  for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable aspects of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a causal system they have been able to achieve a great and ever increasing control over the energies of nature.  But power is not the same thing as insight and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of the world is inadequate for the simple reason that science does not even profess to deal with experience as a whole, but only with certain aspects of it in certain contexts.  All this is quite clearly understood by the more philosophically minded men of science.  But unfortunately some scientists, many technicians, and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time and inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and background of the sciences.  Consequently they tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account of reality;  they tend to regard those aspects of experience which scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal with them,  as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has arbitrarily chosen to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totality of given facts."

One of the most explicit statements of the way in which science deliberately and consciously plans to distort reality, and then goes on to accept that distortion as a "complete and exhaustive" account, is that of the computer scientist Herbert A. Simon, concerning his own fundamental theoretical orientation:

"  An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple.  The apparent complexity of it s behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself ... the truth or falsity of [this] hypothesis should be independent of whether ants, viewed more microscopically  are simple or complex systems.  At the level of cells or molecules, ants are demonstrably complex; but these microscopic details of the inner environment may be largely irrelevant to the ant's behavior in relation to the outer environment.  That is why an automaton,  though completely different at the microscopic level, might nevertheless simulate the ant's gross behavior...
" I should like to explore this hypothesis,  but with the word 'man' substituted for 'ant'. 
" A man, viewed as a behaving system is quite simple.  The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself...  I myself believe that the hypothesis holds even for the whole man." 

With a single stroke of the pen, by simply substituting "man" for "ant," the presumed irrelevancy of the microscopic details of the ant's inner environment to its behavior has been elevated to the irrelevancy of the whole man's inner environment to his behavior!  Writing 23 years before Simon, but as if Simon's words were ringing in his ears, Huxley states;

"Because of the prestige of science as a source of power, and because of the general neglect of philosophy,  the popular Weltanschauung of our times contains a large element of what may be called 'nothing-but' thinking.  Human beings, it is more or less tacitly assumed, are nothing but bodies, animals, even machines ... values are nothing but illusions that have somehow got themselves mixed up in our experience of the world;  mental happenings are nothing but epiphenomena... spirituality is nothing but ... and so on."

Except, of course, that here we are not dealing with the "popular" Weltanschauung, but with that of one of the most prestigious of American scientists.  Nor is Simon's assumption of what is irrelevant to the whole man's behavior " more or less tacit"; to the contrary, he has, to his credit, made it quite explicit. 

Simon also provides us with an exceptionally clear and explicit description of how, and how thoroughly, the scientist prevents himself from crossing the boundary between the circle of light cast by his own presuppositions and the darkness beyond.  In discussing how he went about testing the theses that underlie his hypothesis, i.e. that man is quite simple, etc., he writes;

"I have surveyed some of the evidence from a range of human performances, particularly those that have been studied in the psychological laboratory.

The behavior of human subjects in solving cryptarithmetic problems, in attaining concepts, in memorizing, in holding information in short-term memory, in processing visual stimuli, and in performing tasks that use natural languages provides strong support for these theses... generalizations about human thinking... are emerging from the experimental evidence.  They are simple things, just as our hypothesis led us to expect.  Moreover, though the picture will continue to be enlarged and clarified,  we should not expect it to become essentially more complex.  Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from quite different sources than the intricacy of the ant's path."

The hypothesis to be tested here is, in part, that the inner environment of the whole man is irrelevant to his behavior.  One might suppose that, in order to test it, evidence that might be able to falsify it would be sought.  One might, for example, study man's behavior in the face of grief or of a profound religious experience.  But these examples do not easily lend themselves to the methods for the study of human subjects developed in psychological laboratories.  Nor are they likely to lead to the simple things an experimenter's hypotheses lead him to expect.  They lie in the darkness in which the theorist, in fact, has lost his keys' but the light is so much better under the lamppost he himself has erected.

There is thus no chance whatever that Simon's hypothesis will be falsified by his or his colleagues' minds.  The circle of light that determines and delimits his range of vision simply does not illuminate any areas in which questions of, say, values or subjectivity can possibly arise.  Questions of that kind, being, as they must be, entirely outside his universe of discourse, can therefore not lead him out of his conceptual framework, which  like all other magical explanatory systems, has a ready reserve of possible hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event.

Almost the entire enterprise that is modern science and technology is afflicted with the drunkard's search syndrome and with the myopic vision which is its direct result.  But, as Huxley has pointed out, this myopia cannot sustain itself without being nourished by experiences of success.  Science and technology are sustained by their translations into power and control.  To the extent that computers and computation may be counted as part of science and technology, they feed at the same table.  The extreme phenomenon of the compulsive programmer teaches us that computers have the power to sustain megalomaniac fantasies.  But that power of the computer is merely an extreme version of a power that is inherent in all self-validating systems of thought.  Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems - the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world - may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest.  We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particular in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in the abstract skeletal frameworks. 

"There will be no chance that Simon's hypothesis will be falsified by his or his colleagues' minds."   "Falsification" as the touchstone guaranteeing the presence of the quest of modern alchemy, "science," has been introduced into the popular imagination since Weizenbaum wrote what he did.   You can encounter sci-rangers who demonstrate their profound ignorance of what the word means flashing it like iron pyrite all over the web.  As this passage shows, the concept is little understood by even very sophisticated people, scientists included, perhaps especially.   They certainly will be unaware that even among scientists and the philosophers of science, "Falsifiability" isn't granted the status of a fixed and uncontroversial truth.

Much of the misconception of science, as encountered among the sciency, is encompassed in this passage.  You can read it and remember it was written during the dawn of Sociobiology, as expounded by E.O. Wilson, the world's foremost experts in ants and the reduction of people into "lumbering robots" by the "evolutionary" psychology that quickly succeeded it and overtook it.   In that form, as popularized in "The Selfish Gene" and other radically reductionist popularization, it has taken root among the would-be intelligentsia, both those in their own minds and those with advanced degrees.  It governs how they see other peoples' lives and, astonishingly enough, their own experience.

The TV commercial says, "If love is a chemical reaction,...." only in the minds of many, perhaps most, college educated folks these days, there is no if about it.   I would say if only they understood the practice of the radical abstraction and the profoundly limited focus of the psychological reductionist practice that is the origin of that superstition, they might not fall for it.  The chain of assumptions that leads to that belief contains many links that are ideological, I would guess even more of them than the "Intelligent Design" effort might.   Only, ideological links that are based in materialism are invisible to any but rather rigorous reviewers of science because the consideration of material entities is the subject matter of science.

In the 20th century and on to today, there has been an odd form of elevation of scientists, usually at the twilight of their productive career in science, to the status of popular sage or, more often, oracle.   These people declaim their prophesy on TV and YouTube to an eager lay public and to each other,  scientists are as prone to falling for PR as anyone.  Since the 1970s, these have been prophets of materialistic scientism,  just about any of the big name scientists whose names are recognized would fall into that category.   The editing of popular culture, done mostly by non-scientists who are quite ga-ga with the glamorous cache that science has or by wannabees who gave up long ago, disappears scientists who don't teach that dogma.   As real, working scientists forget that they are sampling a very limited amount of human experience to issue their doctrines and declaring their universal efficacy, the rest of us are prone to doing the same thing, adding ignorant credulity to the mix.

9 comments:

  1. One might, for example, study man's behavior in the face of grief or of a profound religious experience.

    Funny, that.

    I'm a creature of habit. I still spend time at Eschaton (more than I should, but I don't mean to condemn them), and just this morning a "conversation" struck up about the KY shooting and the community that doesn't want the world parachuting in to probe their grief and ponder their failures that led to such horror.

    The comments were mostly about what rubes and fools and idiots the people in KY are.

    Behavior in the face of grief is complex, and it very much involves "the inner environment" (not the metaphor I would choose, but anyway...) Equally in the face of grief, the people of the Boston environs object to the burial of the remains of Tamerlane Tsarnaev. Would I understand these reactions better if I studied ants? Or computer systems?

    Or the reduction of individuals to abstract concepts based on our own prejudices?

    To reduce Weizenbaum to an unsatisfactory aphorism: "To the man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."

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  2. Almost the entire enterprise that is modern science and technology is afflicted with the drunkard's search syndrome and with the myopic vision which is its direct result.

    Listening to NPR's show about TED yesterday. The first story was a scientist challenging the very idea that robots could take on human tasks such as providing companionship to the elderly.

    But the majority of TED speakers thought, of course, this was a grand notion.

    The fundamental idea was that technology is changing us, altering our "human nature." But TED is the search under the lamp for the keys that aren't there. Technology is neither our salvation nor our certain doom. It simply is. The question is not: has technology changed us, but rather, have we really changed at all?

    TED can't answer that question without challenging the very premise upon which TED is erected.

    IMHO.

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  3. In an earlier chapter about tools, in pointing out that there is no such a thing as a universally effective tool, he points out that a hammer is built for hammering a nail but that it couldn't be used as a rope.

    I really wish I could post the entire book, it is a masterpiece of logically constructing a case to support his conclusions, I suppose as he was a rather brilliant computer-scientist/mathematician that's not surprising. What is so novel is his clear sighted view of what science was and what it wasn't. I'd say the intervening 30+ years have shown him, as well as Aldous Huxley, to be prophetic. Huxley's dystopia is the one that seems have come truer than Orwell's.

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  4. Eschaton seems to be gradually fading away. I used to think it was sad, remembering it at its height. But neither Atrios nor the regulars seem to mind it turning into an ever smaller base of enforcers of an ever decreasing permissible POV so I stoped being sad about it. Regional bigotry doesn't surprise me nor does the fickle nature of it. Maybe I should type out some passages from Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943, in which it points out that the largest circulation socialist newspaper was based in Kansas and that Eugene Debs got more votes in rural Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the North East. Back when the powers that are had to take liberalism into account. But I suspect they'd rather wallow in their impotent and ineffective snobbery than in trying to improve life. I think that's the key to understanding the decline of liberalism. People know when someone is looking down on them and when they've got little to nothing, they'll risk the rest of it to keep their dignity. Only that won't show up well in a psych lab.

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  5. The quote from Huxley is extremely helpful, especially here:

    But unfortunately some scientists, many technicians, and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time and inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and background of the sciences. Consequently they tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account of reality;

    That lack is because they have no training in anything other than science; or what other training they have is based on the utilitarian model: i.e., if it serves no purpose, it has no claim on our attention. So TED focuses on entertainment, not art. Entertainment has a simple purpose, an easily identified telos. Art, on the other hand, is first and foremost about being human.

    And so I come back to my TED hobby-horse. But I compare the enthusiasm for "TED talks" to the people who would crowd the lecture hall to listen to Foucault speak, or even the people who listened to Jesus of Nazareth (no, I'm not comparing the two on a fundamental basis). TED talks are about reinforcing the status quo; Foucault, or Jesus, were about a wholly new vision of the world.

    That oversimplifies, but my point is: do we challenge assumptions with clear thinking, as Weizenbaum does; or do we merrily roll along happily reinforcing our ignorance?

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  6. Eschaton is doing what any self-selecting community does: reinforcing its standards of acceptable behavior/opinion into a simpler and simpler narrative.

    I contribute to that, from time to time, so I'm not blaming anyone. And I linger there from habit, more than reason.

    The decline doesn't surprise me; but sometimes I'm shocked by the sheer callousness on display. Then again, that's a common feature of small communities, too.

    Unfortunately.

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  7. I was tempted to point out my getting Sean Carroll to admit that physics didn't understand even one object in the universe "comprehensively and exhaustively" after I typed that out. Then I tried to remember if I'd asked it before or after I read that passage and figured I'd mentioned that often enough here.

    The callousness I read there and on other allegedly left-liberal blogs was one of the things that shocked me into facing the problems of what has come to be called "the left". For me the moment came when I realized that objectifying people was an aspect in just about all of what's wrong with politics, society and economics. The willingness to see people as objects will lead to the greatest level of depravity that most people figure they can get away with without paying a price. That determines, to an extent, the kind of allowable depravity that will be manifested. It's allowable to spout bigotry against "white trash" from the South, it isn't allowable to point to the vulgarities enjoyed by the relatively affluent in the college educated, even those that are quite mid-brow. I'm especially fascinated by the fickle treatment of Islam, which is regularly defended when it's "white trash" who are attacking it but which is savagely attacked - stereotyping more than 1.6 billion people - when it's done in an elite context. I would assert that it is that attitude, even more than inherent racism or superstition that has made large parts of the United States unwinnable by Democratic candidates. It is one thing I think the Republicans got pretty well spot on with Obama. I think he really shares that attitude of contempt to what used to be called "the great unwashed". I think his policies and what he's willing to strive for and what he's willing to give away even before the fight begins demonstrates that. And that's not even getting into who he appoints.

    As I remember, it was when I dissed the product of Harvard and the Ivy League that began Simels' troll war against me. Funny as he isn't a product of that system. But it was an attack on the most cherished possession of that clique, their presumed superiority to those of us who graduated from land grant universities. I think I copied the Echo threads where that happened and might use them some day if he doesn't cut it out.

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  8. I think his policies and what he's willing to strive for and what he's willing to give away even before the fight begins demonstrates that. And that's not even getting into who he appoints.

    It was his education policies that made me realize he's very much a product of private schools, and all that implies.

    I don't mean to damn private schools. My experience with them has been more positive than negative. But most of the people who attend them are convinced, before they leave, of their own superiority, simply because of private schools.

    It'd kinda funny, really.

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  9. Portia, one of the Eschaton regulars I truly miss, was good on the education issues. When I realized Obama and his Sec. of Education had never attended a public school, the reason that they were continuing the attack on public schools became apparent. I was exposed to enough preppies over the years - being mistaken as one, at times - I heard how they tend to talk about people who were educated in public schools. I think it's the Talmud that said what the heart feels the lips speak. It is the real common received POV that people who go to elite private schools often obtain, probably more effectively than they do any aspect of science. I'll confess that when I heard what he said about G. W. Bush last week I thought, Harvard men always cover for each other.

    I miss several of the Eschaton regulars, but there are lots of people who left I miss as well. I am under the impression that Atrios doesn't much care either way. I've come to see him as more of a liberalish libertarian than a real liberal. But that's what's happened, pretty much, to "liberalism" since the mid-70s. I think Jimmy Carter might have been the last real liberal president, in outlook, if not always in policy. I think that's what makes his post-presidency the greatest in history, even outpacing John Quicey Adams' congressional career. Of course it was longer in Carter's case.

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