What Zander was writing
Mar. 8th, 2016 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerIntroduction to The Hedgehog Dialogues
This book arose out of a vast impatience on my part with a tendency I have noticed among people of scientific bent; a tendency to invent what are called "thought experiments" and then to take them seriously.
Thought experiments in themselves are a harmless enough pastime. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to mount a particular experiment that you have in mind, there is no possible harm in imagining what would happen if you did. Imagination is our greatest gift and has been immensely useful to us as well as entertaining. It enables us to conceive all sorts of things, both plausible and implausible, and some of the more implausible things we have imagined have indeed come to pass, much to our surprise. This does not mean, however, that anything we can imagine can exist; and this is where the game of thought experiment comes drastically unstuck.
Take Schrodinger's cat; a thought experiment originally devised, as Douglas Adams pointed out in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, to show up what the great physicist believed was absurd about quantum theory. In case anyone has only just joined us and hasn't heard me banging on about this before, it goes like this:
Imagine a box, impervious to all observation. Inside the box is a live cat, a trigger mechanism operated by radioactive decay, and a phial of poison which the trigger mechanism is set to break. At any given moment it is impossible to tell whether the cat is alive or dead, without opening the box and looking, and therefore, we can not know which is the case. What this means, according to quantum theory, is that the cat is actually both alive and dead at the same time, till the box is opened, at which point the universe makes a snap decision and presents us either with a spitting ball of claws and fury, or a sad unmoving little bundle of fur, as the mood takes it.
[Sidebar: I have actually recently modified my position on quantum theory, as one of the dialogues in this book will show. I used to be dead set against it, and convinced that in time we would discover an explanation for the apparent anomalies in particle behaviour that actually made sense; but age mellows one, as they say, and I am now prepared to accept that the universe may well behave in this imaginative and capricious manner, given--and this is important and, regrettably, non-negotiable--the existence of a creator-entity of some sort, capable of imagination and caprice, who has thus arranged matters for reasons that may be beyond us. Since most of those I have talked to who are adamant supporters of quantum theory are equally adamant that there is no such entity, I foresee the discussion continuing more or less indefinitely. I can only explain my reasoning thus.
If I encounter, somewhere out in the country, a tree that has gradually bent till its trunk is parallel to the ground, I can well accept that strong winds blowing consistently in the same direction have caused it to do so. If I see a tree lying on the ground with its roots in the air and dismayed birds flying around it waiting for the bird from the insurance company to come and assess the damage, I can accept (in the absence of a bent BMW or other alternative cause) that a sudden and ferocious wind may well have knocked it down. If, however, I see a tree that has been sawn off near its base, had its bark and branches stripped, been seasoned, sawn into planks and assembled into a suite of bedroom furniture, and finally been varnished a pleasing light oak shade even though it was originally pine, then while I could imagine a series of extremely bizarre random wind-based events which might have brought this about, I rather take leave to conclude that an intelligence has been at work. When a decapitated body is found in a locked room (D. Adams again), one can invent fantastical theories to explain how its owner committed suicide in that inexplicable and showy manner, or one can simply accept that the most probable explanation is that the room wasn't locked at all and someone else did it.]
But I was talking about thought experiments, and Schrodinger's cat. One of the things that bamboozles us about this old joke is the quasi-mystical nature of the difference between life and death, which is sometimes hard to spot even when we can see the cat. If, instead, we stipulate that the cat that goes into the box is a white one, replace the poison phial with rows of nozzles filled with non-toxic and pet-friendly black fur dye, and then triumphantly announce that the cat is both black and white at the same time, the absurdity is a little clearer, perhaps.
Another one that demonstrates the folly of this approach to problem solving is that of the Chinese Room, invented by John Searle, which I encountered in Sydney Padua's brilliant The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which you should all buy if it's still available so that she will do another one. This is the Chinese Room:
Suppose that a person, who knows no Chinese, is locked in a room, with a set of instructions which enable her to correlate one set of written symbols with another, such that she can respond in written Chinese to questions in written Chinese which are posted through a slot in the door. If the instructions are good enough, then there will be no way to tell from outside the room whether the occupant is a person who understands Chinese or not. If, as the old saw goes, a difference that makes no difference is no difference, then how do we know our own consciousness is not simply a complex series of instructions run by a computer in our heads, which we mistake for understanding?
That, at least, is how it came over to me in a footnote in Ms Padua's excellent book. I have since found, as with the cat, that the thought experiment was in fact designed to show up the fallacy of what is called computationalism--the notion that what seems to us to be consciousness is just the apparent result of a whole lot of computer programmes running in our heads. The person in the Chinese room, Searle argues, does not understand what she is doing, and since we do (well, some of you do--I never have), then what is going on in our heads must be something qualitatively different. I actually agree with this formulation; but the thought experiment is still flawed. As with the tree/bedroom suite, one can imagine the existence of a set of instructions for writing Chinese so complete and compendious that it would fool anyone under any possible set of circumstances, while still leaving the person following it blissfully devoid of any understanding of Chinese, but such a thing, I venture to state, could have no practical existence. It's been my understanding, as far as such a word may be applied to me, that handwaving does not constitute a valid scientific argument, however and to whatever it's applied.
This tendency to speculate on imponderables and then build on the speculation is notable also in the case of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors one can squeeze into a computer chip doubles every two years, roughly. It seems to be taken as a given by advocates of this law that this process can and will go on indefinitely, whereas to me it seems equally obvious that there will be a stopping point; at very least, when the hypothetical chip is the size of the known universe and the number of hypothetical transistors is such that they would have to be no bigger than a single electron. In practice, I believe, the stopping point will be much sooner than that, and when it is reached, if it is, we will simply have to accept that computers have become as powerful, in that sense, as it is possible to make them, and find something else to do with our time, like designing software for these supercomputers which makes it possible to change the desktop colour scheme and resolution such that a partially sighted person can use the software without difficulty.
I must stop here, if only to prevent the introduction being longer than the book; but hopefully you get the idea.
Thus these dialogues, which began as an exercise in turning what would otherwise have been tedious rants like the aforegoing into light comedic vignettes. Whether the exercise has been successful is not for me to say.
The scene is a large marquee which has been erected in the garden of the house called Narrowgate, on the outskirts of the village of Avevale. The marquee is filled with all manner of circus paraphernalia, plus a number of deck chairs and trestle tables. The cast of characters is as follows:
ZANDER. Me and not me. Me as a character I write, who also writes. Mine host.
ETHAN POWERS. Uncommitted demiurge and pub bore par excellence. The informed idiot.
ROBIN FAYNE. Everyman figure, the stooge to Powers' Socrates. The uninformed non-idiot.
TIMMAEUS AGRAEL, GAUTAMA R MELIES and MAGUS A REALTIME. Three of the four archangels of my narrative universe, experts in their fields, there to offer alternative viewpoints and probe more deeply, when they're not arguing among themselves.
GROVEL and MASTER. General factotums, there to keep the domestic side running.
And lastly and most importantly, THE HEDGEHOGS. Named U, V and W for reasons that are unlikely to become apparent again at this stage, they play a vital role in the business that follows. Their only utterance is "whee," but far more than that goes on in their heads.
Okay. Roll the drums, focus the spotlights, strike up "Entry of the Gladiators," and away we go...
This book arose out of a vast impatience on my part with a tendency I have noticed among people of scientific bent; a tendency to invent what are called "thought experiments" and then to take them seriously.
Thought experiments in themselves are a harmless enough pastime. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to mount a particular experiment that you have in mind, there is no possible harm in imagining what would happen if you did. Imagination is our greatest gift and has been immensely useful to us as well as entertaining. It enables us to conceive all sorts of things, both plausible and implausible, and some of the more implausible things we have imagined have indeed come to pass, much to our surprise. This does not mean, however, that anything we can imagine can exist; and this is where the game of thought experiment comes drastically unstuck.
Take Schrodinger's cat; a thought experiment originally devised, as Douglas Adams pointed out in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, to show up what the great physicist believed was absurd about quantum theory. In case anyone has only just joined us and hasn't heard me banging on about this before, it goes like this:
Imagine a box, impervious to all observation. Inside the box is a live cat, a trigger mechanism operated by radioactive decay, and a phial of poison which the trigger mechanism is set to break. At any given moment it is impossible to tell whether the cat is alive or dead, without opening the box and looking, and therefore, we can not know which is the case. What this means, according to quantum theory, is that the cat is actually both alive and dead at the same time, till the box is opened, at which point the universe makes a snap decision and presents us either with a spitting ball of claws and fury, or a sad unmoving little bundle of fur, as the mood takes it.
[Sidebar: I have actually recently modified my position on quantum theory, as one of the dialogues in this book will show. I used to be dead set against it, and convinced that in time we would discover an explanation for the apparent anomalies in particle behaviour that actually made sense; but age mellows one, as they say, and I am now prepared to accept that the universe may well behave in this imaginative and capricious manner, given--and this is important and, regrettably, non-negotiable--the existence of a creator-entity of some sort, capable of imagination and caprice, who has thus arranged matters for reasons that may be beyond us. Since most of those I have talked to who are adamant supporters of quantum theory are equally adamant that there is no such entity, I foresee the discussion continuing more or less indefinitely. I can only explain my reasoning thus.
If I encounter, somewhere out in the country, a tree that has gradually bent till its trunk is parallel to the ground, I can well accept that strong winds blowing consistently in the same direction have caused it to do so. If I see a tree lying on the ground with its roots in the air and dismayed birds flying around it waiting for the bird from the insurance company to come and assess the damage, I can accept (in the absence of a bent BMW or other alternative cause) that a sudden and ferocious wind may well have knocked it down. If, however, I see a tree that has been sawn off near its base, had its bark and branches stripped, been seasoned, sawn into planks and assembled into a suite of bedroom furniture, and finally been varnished a pleasing light oak shade even though it was originally pine, then while I could imagine a series of extremely bizarre random wind-based events which might have brought this about, I rather take leave to conclude that an intelligence has been at work. When a decapitated body is found in a locked room (D. Adams again), one can invent fantastical theories to explain how its owner committed suicide in that inexplicable and showy manner, or one can simply accept that the most probable explanation is that the room wasn't locked at all and someone else did it.]
But I was talking about thought experiments, and Schrodinger's cat. One of the things that bamboozles us about this old joke is the quasi-mystical nature of the difference between life and death, which is sometimes hard to spot even when we can see the cat. If, instead, we stipulate that the cat that goes into the box is a white one, replace the poison phial with rows of nozzles filled with non-toxic and pet-friendly black fur dye, and then triumphantly announce that the cat is both black and white at the same time, the absurdity is a little clearer, perhaps.
Another one that demonstrates the folly of this approach to problem solving is that of the Chinese Room, invented by John Searle, which I encountered in Sydney Padua's brilliant The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which you should all buy if it's still available so that she will do another one. This is the Chinese Room:
Suppose that a person, who knows no Chinese, is locked in a room, with a set of instructions which enable her to correlate one set of written symbols with another, such that she can respond in written Chinese to questions in written Chinese which are posted through a slot in the door. If the instructions are good enough, then there will be no way to tell from outside the room whether the occupant is a person who understands Chinese or not. If, as the old saw goes, a difference that makes no difference is no difference, then how do we know our own consciousness is not simply a complex series of instructions run by a computer in our heads, which we mistake for understanding?
That, at least, is how it came over to me in a footnote in Ms Padua's excellent book. I have since found, as with the cat, that the thought experiment was in fact designed to show up the fallacy of what is called computationalism--the notion that what seems to us to be consciousness is just the apparent result of a whole lot of computer programmes running in our heads. The person in the Chinese room, Searle argues, does not understand what she is doing, and since we do (well, some of you do--I never have), then what is going on in our heads must be something qualitatively different. I actually agree with this formulation; but the thought experiment is still flawed. As with the tree/bedroom suite, one can imagine the existence of a set of instructions for writing Chinese so complete and compendious that it would fool anyone under any possible set of circumstances, while still leaving the person following it blissfully devoid of any understanding of Chinese, but such a thing, I venture to state, could have no practical existence. It's been my understanding, as far as such a word may be applied to me, that handwaving does not constitute a valid scientific argument, however and to whatever it's applied.
This tendency to speculate on imponderables and then build on the speculation is notable also in the case of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors one can squeeze into a computer chip doubles every two years, roughly. It seems to be taken as a given by advocates of this law that this process can and will go on indefinitely, whereas to me it seems equally obvious that there will be a stopping point; at very least, when the hypothetical chip is the size of the known universe and the number of hypothetical transistors is such that they would have to be no bigger than a single electron. In practice, I believe, the stopping point will be much sooner than that, and when it is reached, if it is, we will simply have to accept that computers have become as powerful, in that sense, as it is possible to make them, and find something else to do with our time, like designing software for these supercomputers which makes it possible to change the desktop colour scheme and resolution such that a partially sighted person can use the software without difficulty.
I must stop here, if only to prevent the introduction being longer than the book; but hopefully you get the idea.
Thus these dialogues, which began as an exercise in turning what would otherwise have been tedious rants like the aforegoing into light comedic vignettes. Whether the exercise has been successful is not for me to say.
The scene is a large marquee which has been erected in the garden of the house called Narrowgate, on the outskirts of the village of Avevale. The marquee is filled with all manner of circus paraphernalia, plus a number of deck chairs and trestle tables. The cast of characters is as follows:
ZANDER. Me and not me. Me as a character I write, who also writes. Mine host.
ETHAN POWERS. Uncommitted demiurge and pub bore par excellence. The informed idiot.
ROBIN FAYNE. Everyman figure, the stooge to Powers' Socrates. The uninformed non-idiot.
TIMMAEUS AGRAEL, GAUTAMA R MELIES and MAGUS A REALTIME. Three of the four archangels of my narrative universe, experts in their fields, there to offer alternative viewpoints and probe more deeply, when they're not arguing among themselves.
GROVEL and MASTER. General factotums, there to keep the domestic side running.
And lastly and most importantly, THE HEDGEHOGS. Named U, V and W for reasons that are unlikely to become apparent again at this stage, they play a vital role in the business that follows. Their only utterance is "whee," but far more than that goes on in their heads.
Okay. Roll the drums, focus the spotlights, strike up "Entry of the Gladiators," and away we go...