Synthetic Biology and Giambattista Vico

Prelude
Less than two months ago as I write this, J. Craig Venter and his team published in Science the deets on how they built a synthetic organism, called "Syn3.0," and it's got only 473 genes. This is the lowest number of genes that we know of for a self-replicating living thing that doesn't require a host.

It's a sober-seeming Frankenstein scene, is it not?

HERE is a nice write-up in Nature on this. 

They did this via trial and error; they didn't build Syn3.0 from scratch. They took a bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, which lives in cattle, and painstakingly and systematically knocked out genes to see if they were truly essential. If a gene seemed to be essential for life, or a gene played a critical role in the regulation of other genes, they left it in. They whittled away a lot.

A complex bacterium like E. coli has around 6000 genes; humans have around 19,500.

What appears most fascinating to Venter and his crew (and me too) is this: once they finished and confirmed they had synthesized/whittled away a new organism, they still couldn't figure out exactly what 149 of the 473 genes did that were so essential to life. So: we don't know 1/3 of what is essential to life. We have our work cut out for us...or these synthetic biologists/fancy bio-hackers do.

The rest of us, like the girl who just ate a slice of pizza with anchovies, wait with baited breath.

This highlights how much we don't know, and makes ever-clearer the reason why, after Venter and scientists working for the Unistat government "mapped" the human genome 13-16 years ago, miracle breakthroughs in health and medicine did not pour forth immediately after.

                                              a human-made bacterium, believe it or not
A Variation on a Theme
My favorite analogous explanation for this went something like: for hundreds of years we heard wonderful music but weren't sure where it was coming from. Through a Herculean effort by legions of biologists, eventually we learned that this music had the structure of something we discovered was a "piano." Tremendous efforts by public sector genius and private wizards finally produced a map of the music: a Steinway piano! What a fantastic discovery of human ingenuity!

But then: you need to learn how to play Beethoven. Just having the piano and knowing that you press certain keys little hammers inside struck strings and made "notes"? Not good enough. We had to actually understand the thing. We had to learn how to play something like the Appassionata. 

Tall order? Of course! Would we shrink from it and ditch our lessons and not practice our Hanon exercises? No. We're all in. Here's where Vico makes his entrance...

Expository Material
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an early admirer of Descartes, later did a 180 from "Renato" (as Vico refers to him in his Autobiography) and said no: it's not correct that we humans can only truly have knowledge of the physical world because we can apply our rationality and math to understand it; Renato said we can't know the human past, so forget about it. Vico said, anzi, we can only truly know what we have ourselves made: the social world. Law, politics, art, history, etc. Even mathematics is a human construction. We did not make Nature, so we can't truly know it. Scholars of Vico (who call themselves Vichians and not Viconians) refer to this idea as Vico's principle of verum factum. 

Because of verum factum, various scholars have called Vico the first Anthropologist, the inventor of the sociology of knowledge, the first great modern sociologist, etc. It's interesting. I don't know what to think, because Vico's writing - especially in his magnum opus The New Science - seems to alternate between staggeringly prescient ideas and really crazy and "wrong" ones. Here is one of his most famous passages, and the one cited most often with regard to verum factum:

Still, in the dense and dark night which envelopes remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. If we reflect on this, we can only wonder why all the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it. The cause of this paradox is that infirmity of the human mind noted in Axiom 63. Because it is buried deep within the body, the human mind naturally tends to notice what is corporeal, and must make a great and laborious effort to understand itself, just as the eye sees all external objects, but needs a mirror to see itself. - section 331, translation by Dave Marsh

A couple of notes:
- The Inquisition was very strong in Naples, when Vico was doing his thing. The reference to "God" in his text is problematic, to my eyes. Perhaps he truly believed all the things he says about "God," but I see plenty of room for doubt. In his Autobiography he certainly seems to have been heavily influenced by Lucretius, who popularized Epicurus. Vico also has plenty of oblique things to say about the deep and enduring history of class warfare and he doesn't seem all that admiring of history's aristocracy. Vico was one of those thinkers who seemed to have read everything available; he had personally known thinkers around Naples who had paid for speaking out for thought free of Church restrictions. He certainly had read about others who'd suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.

-Hobbes and many other thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance had ideas like verum factum, but they only mentioned this notion in passing; with Vico this idea is central to his thought.

-Axiom 63 reads thus:
Because of the senses, the human mind naturally tends to view itself externally in the body, and it is only with great difficulty that it can understand itself by means of reflection. This axiom offers us this universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are transferred from physical objects and their properties to signify what is conceptual and spiritual. 

Finally: OG's Point, If Indeed He Has One?
When I first delved into Vico I thought verum factum was wrong: the revolution in modern science since the Renaissance was based on a special way of looking into nature: some phenomenon needed to be explained, hypotheses competed until a line of very fecund thought - a theory - led to a cascade of knowledge about the physical world. Ideas were freely exchanged and published and the idea that my experiment, while exciting, needed to be replicated by many others working independently for it to be considered "true"...this seemed to me like a vast leap in human knowledge. At the same time, the idea of "knowledge" in the Humanities (which to this day I love with a very deep passion) was not making gigantic strides. When scientific knowledge cashed out into Technology, which accelerated the human world, I just thought Vico, while exceedingly erudite and weird and entertaining, was a bit daft here.

Later, when reading people like Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault and Latour, I realized the physical sciences didn't actually work as neatly as I'd been led to believe. Further, the most successful physical theory ever - the quantum theory - led to philosophical quagmires dizzying and surreal. Did we really understand the physical world, or did we pragmatically go with what worked, while retroactively explaining what was "really" going on?

                                          Richard Feynman's blackboard at CalTech                           

Apocalypse and/or Utopia
Now, we are making living things. I'm quite sure Syn3.0 is merely the first of thousands of human-made living things. And Venter and his colleagues are playing Creator in order to understand, at a fine-grain level, the physical, chemical and biological way something does its thing.

Is verum factum then a "dead" idea? I don't know, but when Venter and his guys came up with an artificial living thing a few years ago, it prompted Obama to issue a bioethics review and the Vatican challenged Venter on his claim of creating life. And so has it ever been...

Finally: if you read the link to the article in Nature, you may have noted that Venter and his crew inserted their own names - literally - into the deep structure of Syn3.0. Why? As watermarks, a way of marking this territory of Life as human-made. They also inserted some quotes and one was from Richard Feynman's blackboard, as seen in the photo above: "What I cannot create I do not understand."

Sounds a lot like Vico to me.

Reading:
"In Newly-Created Life Form, a Major Mystery," by Emily Singer

"Scientists Synthesize the Shortest Known Genome Necessary For Life," by Amina Khan

"Why Would Scientists Want to Build a Human Genome From Scratch?", by Sally Adee

The New Science, by Giambattista Vico, translated by Dave Marsh

                                                   藝術鮑勃·坎貝爾

Where The Hell Am I?

Often, when meditating whilst sitting quietly or even walking alone with "my" thoughts, I often use the gimmick of thinking about the Bohr Model of the atom (leave aside that it can be viewed as a "flawed" model for now), and how we're made up of atoms, which have a tiny nucleus with neutrons and protons "inside." And inside that are just all sorts of quarks and other surrealist "material" shenanigans.

And I read once in some popularization of quantum mechanics that the nucleus is so small relative to the electrons buzzing around in discrete "orbits" or "outer shells" that, if the nucleus were an orange put at the center of the 50 yard line at the Rose Bowl, then the electrons are whirling around - relatively speaking - outside the entrance gates, all around. What's "inside" all that "space"? It's empty! (But it's probably "really" not...no time to get into it now, here.)

Hell, every-thing else on this planet seems subject to the same laws of physics, and as Stephen Dedalus said, we are "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." (Ulysses, p.697, "Ithaca")

[Interestingly to me, Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1915-1922; it was published in 1922. Quantum physics would show there was a physical basis for this poetic line, but not until 1925-27 or so.]

And therefore "I" am mostly empty space. "I" just seem solid because "I" can only make investigations with the sensoria Nature gave me: clunky stuff. Gigantic, really. And seemingly a plenum of bone, skin, blood, lymph, viscera. But - and "I" still think on one level this model "is" legitimate - "I" seem really quite ghost-like. "I" only bump into stuff because the stuff "I" bump into has roughly the same levels of non-emptiness that "I" have. What a world!

Usually this has served me well: thinking of myself, as Bucky Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb." Yea: what's not all about the empty space seems more about electrons and energy exchanges between "me" and my surrounding environment. I meditate on this physics and get outside of my (mostly empty?) "self."

I end up summoning some picture of myself as a cloud of energy, with a module near the top that seems to want to make everything into some solid "meaning." But that module seems utterly foolish and but one of the modules that make up what Marvin Minsky called The Society of Mind: what's going on seems a "booming buzzing confusion" of energies, everywhere and everywhen. When I do this I've entered what the phenomenological sociologists call a "finite province of meaning." This particular province of meaning seems about blissful meaninglessness, and it's a second cousin to being stoned on cannabis, only it's still legal. For now...

Going "Up" One Level
But lately - say, the last 24 months - I've been trying to understand the human genome. It turns out to be  absurdly complex, for the OG. But it's abecedarian compared to what I found out about epigenetics. HERE's an amusing short explanation about some of what is entailed by epigenetics. He does it far better justice than I could; I'm afraid I'd bore you with my explanations about methyl groups and histones and how your grandmother's smoking habit effects your health. My favorite metaphors so far for the genome and the epigenome are this: the genome is the hardware; the epigenome tells the genome what to do with its information, and when. Talk about complexity!

So getting back to trying to find out where "I" am: who and what I seem to be is not only atoms and the void, but information inherited roughly 50/50 from mom and dad, plus the environments I've accidentally been born into or found myself in, the choices I made about what environments to go into (and "environments" here means something closer to what McLuhan meant than saying "I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County"). Although geography does seem to matter quite  a lot. But what my parents worried about, what they ate, what their parents experienced...and just an enormous amount of CHANCE occurrences seem to be a lot about where "I" am.

Then I found out something wonderfully disturbing that makes what I've mentioned so far seem trivial.

Going "Up" Another Level
In the 20th century, modern medicine finally arrived. O! The things we learned! About surgery (lots of insanely brutal war wounds provided ample practice), and what worked and what didn't, and doctors caught up to the washing their hands dealio. And we began to merge our physics (harnessing light) and chemistry with technology and imaging, and...we're on our way! We even found out we'd been acting like superstitious fools for millenia: if we wipe out bacteria, we'd live a lot longer, and healthier. And so: antibiotics (miracles!), antiseptics of all sort, cleaning products in every modern home. But we were wrong about bacteria: we need Them to maintain a healthy immune system. And oh wow: just sooooo much more.

You know this "I" that I'm trying to find? Turns out "he" is part of a system that's not only genome and epigenome, but microbiome. 90% of the cells in "me" are bacteria. And I'm healthy! "I" took a long bike ride today, got all kinds of work done, had some Big Laffs. But if "I" am 90% bacteria...I'm not sure what to think. And it turns out bacteria in my gut influences what I think and feel.

Who is running the show here?

Preliminary Ideas About Where the Hell "My" "I" "Is"
I understand the history of modern "self" hood had to do with rationalistic ideas about agency and law and responsibility. It was a convenient fiction. If some crime was committed, we want to gather the evidence and convict that rational actor for his wrongdoing and make that person "pay" a debt to another convenient fiction: The State. Or "society." But if we're driven by things our ancestors did and we're mostly empty space or bacteria, as the kids say, WTF?

At this point I take a deep breath and remember what Robert Anton Wilson said, in generalized account of what the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics: every model we make to account for some aspect of "reality" tells us as much about our own minds as it does Nature, or what's "out there." As we grew up, toddling around some environment, as mostly empty space, our genes being played by histones and methylations and other Damned Things, we were constantly ingesting atoms and incorporating them into our "selves" without knowing it. Most of us still seem blase about the whole schmeer! And even then we were mostly bacteria. And if our parents found out this fact, they probably would've killed us. Literally. With antibiotics and a lot of scrubbing.

We're toddling around and our brains are receiving signals and ignoring others, setting up our nervous system to perceive the world a certain way and - this is crucial - not other possible ways. But some kid on the other side of the world was making grooves in his brain, connecting neural clusters in a different schema. That kid was "learning" a different language, for one thing. And language, being part of the world, also influences further how we'll "see" the world, and take action. (Sorry anti-Whorfians! You're on the outs, now.)

And yet: many of us grow into adulthood and enjoy enduring alliances and deep, satisfying relationships with someone from a remote (relative to "us") region of the world. We're terrifically malleable, plastic. But not infinitely so. Yep: I was born in LA, grew up there, lived in Colorado for a a few minutes, then moved back to LA, lived in a few areas in the vast sprawling metropolis around La-La Land, then moved to a different state within the state of California, a place called "Berkeley." And yet: I have friends who speak Chinese, who are also mostly empty space and bacteria. And it's good.

Okay, okay. I'm starting to feel better now. "I" accept my verbishness, my existence as a dissipative structure, and don't really care all that much where "I" am. Because, not being a solipsist, I assume you're reading this now, and you are enough like me, so what does it matter? How do I know I'm not being dreamed by some gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft? I don't. Hell: maybe YOU are dreaming all this? And "I" don't care. This seems like a cosmic funhouse to me. All of it. What the hell: I'll just assume we sort of exist, and that it matters, bacteria and all.

Nick Bostrom, Simulations, Modal Logic and Imagination, Featuring Sufis, Sir Martin Rees, Threats To Human Existence, and a Possible Reason to Quit Worrying

In doing a worried backstroke through articles and book chapters on catastrophic scenarios, I happened upon a recent interview with a Transhumanist who I think is one of the brightest of the bright, Nick Bostrom. He argues that we're underestimating the risk of human extinction. You know: Fun Stuff.

I admit I'm bored by the Mayan calendar talk. I've never been a Christian, so I never took all the Left Behind books seriously. I spent maybe five minutes with one from the series in my hands, leafing through it, gawking at the prose like a rubbernecker at the site of a particularly gruesome highway accident. (Supposedly the series has sold 35 million copies.) The economic disaster stuff is, to quote Wordsworth slightly out of context, too much with me. I lack the ironic distance. I have plenty of ironic distance when I read/listen/watch Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, etc...but they're ultimately beastly boring to me. I check 'em out to see how bad "conservative" discourse can get. (O! True conservatives where art thou?)

Ya wanna know what really gets me going when I want that adrenal buzz of worry, fear, or paranoia? The idea that we'll get Artificial Intelligence going to super-human levels and it'll really do us some harm. I don't know where my Ironic Distance is - or if I have one at all - when I contemplate this kind of stuff, and I think that's why it "works" for me.

Bostrom, in the long article I linked to above talks about "anthropogenic" Existential Risks. It turns out Bostrom is one of the more interesting thinkers on Existential Risk out there. Later in the 21st century, it's possible we could be wiped out by malignantly intentional attacks or "simple" human error arising from hair-raisingly advanced technologies on advanced molecular nanotechnology, synthetic biology, or nuclear weapons. (How dull global warming, ocean acidification and collapse of ecosystems seem now in the face of such sexy existential megadeath killers!)

We could reach a stasis in which there's a permanent upper class that keeps everyone under control using surveillance and psychologically manipulating pharmaceuticals. A "global totalitarian dystopia," a "permanently stable tyranny." Designer pathogens are rapidly becoming a very real possibility. You can find the 1918 flu virus details online now; with rapid advances in sequencing and lab techniques becoming cheaper and easier to use...I can feel my heart rate speed up already.

And oh yes: non-anthropogenic risks are out there, too: supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and something I'd never heard of until Bostrom put me straight: "vacuum decay in space."

I'm reminded of Sir Martin Rees's book from 2003, Our Final Hour. Sir Martin estimates a 50/50 chance humanity makes it to 2100. Here's Rees talking for 6 minutes on this delightful theme, from last November:

In the Bostrom article, it seems that most of the Experts assessing existential risk are slightly more optimistic than Sir Martin: they seem to be somewhere around 10%-20% chance we'll not make it to 2100. Here's a Silicon Valley rich guy - Rick Schwall - who's worried about existential risk, just to add more people to our party...

Anyway, I thought it slightly ironic that a Transhumanist is arguing that we should make existential risk a priority over present human suffering. But Bostrom has very rational reasons: if we care about people in space - in other words, on the other side of the globe -  simply because they're humans like us, then we ought to consider humans in time as well as space. They're still human, even if they haven't been born yet.

                                 One of my favorite living philosophers, Nick Bostrom, born 1973

The Sim Stuff From Bostrom

What a stimulating thinker Bostrom is, and never more than when he talks of his "Simulation Argument." (<------You can spend months studying this site and all the places it leads you!) This argument has a very long pedigree, but Bostrom's form was what took me, and note that Bostrom's logical chops are stellar:

One of the three propositions seems very highly likely true:

1.) Almost, or all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. Technological maturity is defined as something like Ray Kurzweil's or Hans Moravec's wettest dreams: Artificial Intelligence carried to a profound degree, solving the death problem, end of economic scarcity, etc. This proposition has been written alternately thus: No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity to the point where they can simulate reality that is so detailed so that "that reality" could be mistaken as "reality."

2.) Almost all technologically mature civilizations (on any possible planet) lose interest in creating ancestor simulations, which are computer simulations so dizzyingly complex and nuanced that the simulated minds would be conscious, or believe they're conscious. Sophisticated beings so profoundly adept at technological manipulation aren't interested/don't do simulations of reality for ancestors. If these beings DO do these simulations, they don't do many, for varying reasons having to do with wanting to use computational power for other things, or due to ethical objections about keeping simulated beings captive, etc.

3.) We're almost certainly living in a simulation. Now. You and me and everyone we know, our entire history and world, possibly.

One of these three is almost certainly true, and Bostrom has a preponderance of math (that I can't follow) to argue that Number 3 is most likely: we're living in a simulated reality. Does this allay your anxieties about the future? Recently we read that Ten Billion Earth-Like Planets May Exist in Our Galaxy. That's just our crummy little galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies. And then there's the multiverse: an infinite number of universes.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We already have The Sims and many other technologies that suggest we ourselves are moving (with logarithmically accelerated speed due to Moore's Law and other factors) into a world in which we are simulating other realities and beings. Can we make them take-for-granted their world and assume that "Of course we're conscious entities!"?

Now: these advanced beings who may be simulating Us could be "here," because we don't know we're simulated. Or they could be Elsewhere. Does it matter at this point? And what's that goo on your computer screen? Did I just blow your mind?

Bostrom says it's possible that what you're in now is a "basement level of physical reality." But if any technologically mature civilization that hasn't succumbed to Existential Risk (I should've been capitalizing that term from the get-go: much more dramatic and befitting its own idea), and they DO do what we're already doing now in this reality, then they probably will run millions of simulations, because they can. The sheer number of simulations outnumbers the non-simulated worlds that we may encounter, so it's probable that we're living in a simulation. Here's a funny popular take on Bostrom's idea, from the NYT.

Okay, okay: I've seen some good guerrilla ontology in my day, but this one's way up there. If you're heard the Bostrom argument and either say maybe, yes we're living in a simulated reality and what of it?, or I see his points but refute him thus, or whatever, then you're seeing the Matrix for what it really is. Errr...right? Anyway, I guess if it's most likely (aside from certain named-biases Bostrom is quite frank about) that we're a simulation, why worry about anything? Oh yea: that whole discomfort and death thing. No matter how unreal we and our world "is,"or "are," it still seems too real to wish away. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, who knew a thing or three about simulations and irreality. (See below)

Still: we must admit that even if we're a very detailed computer simulation, it makes for wonderful novels and films that constitute a simulation inside a simulation...ummm...eh?

Idea: try spending a week constantly reminding yourself that your world and everything in it is being played out in some unimaginably complex hypermetasupercomputer program. Note if and how your perception of "reality" changes after seven days, and report your findings in the comments section. (I've done this exercize: It tended to sharpen my sense of irony, and really brought out the highlights in bold relief when I noted myself or someone else taking a relatively trivial thing a tad too seriously, but your results may differ wildly.)

Oh: another reason to worry about Existential Risk: we might not make it to the point where we can develop - reach technological maturation as a species - to do simulations of other beings...even though we might be a simulation ourselves. Uhh...I think? (Wha?)

I mentioned and linked to the idea that this is a very old notion, even older than Plato's Cave parable. It's like Chuang-Tzu saying he woke up remembering his dream that he was a butterfly, but then questioning if he was not really a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Or the counterculture intellectual Alan Watts, who, when asked, "What is life like after death?" And Watts quickly responded, "How do you know you're not dead already?"

Of course, this notion of fine-grained simulated realities that humans take "for real" is a favorite among science fiction writers. Philip K. Dick is the foremost example, using this idea as far back as the mid-late 1950s. See this list of books that use simulated realities and note how often PKD shows up.

[For readers of Wilson and Shea's 805 page Illuminatus! Trilogy, think of this theme of simulation and the Writer of that book?]

al-Ghazali the sufi intellectual and mystic, argued against Aristotle, who said the world had no end. Ghazali thought time was bounded and he developed an argument for many possible worlds, but that this one was the best one, because Allah is so great. I'm simplifying here, but in not only sufi but Hindu and Buddhist cosmology we see variations of these ideas appear. Other sufis were on board with many worlds, also...

The Many-Worlds Hypothesis (Everett-Wheeler-Graham) interpretation in quantum mechanics appeared in Unistat in the 1950s. 

In the 1970s in Unistat, in another area of the academy, logician David Lewis developed Modal Logic in such a way that (get this): Every possible world exists, is a concrete entity, that every world is set apart causally and in space/time from every other one, and that our world is one of those worlds. The only "special" aspect of the world we live in now is that we're in it. In logic, this is called the "indexicality of actuality."

I can go on and on with this stuff, because it's difficult to find good LSD these days, and I've found I can simulate a trip by reading wiggy academic books on logic, sufi theology, quantum mechanics, and philosophy like Nick Bostrom's. I don't trust that dude selling magic mushrooms in the park; give me my dog-eared copy of Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality or Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality instead. Just as good, and if things get too weirded-out, I can go for a walk.

I guess what I really wanted to do was to attempt to reassure you: no matter how Bad Things Get, you can always tell yourself, "It's not a big deal. I'm just playing out in some simulation run by some Being from a civilization that evaded its moment of Existential Risk." If it works for you, you can thank me later, no matter how fake I am.

Hey, that's what the OG is here for!

I watched about 12 "We're living in a simulation" dealios on You Tube. Some of them are pretty good, but are marred by stentorian voice-over, too-intrusive Carmina Burana-like music, or other little annoyances. I have chosen two videos in case anyone...well, in case.


Two good-looking philosophy students rap about Bostrom's idea. I liked the down-to-earthiness of them.

Morgan Freeman narrates a science channel episode that uses "God" as the Simulator. The CalTech scientist never mentions Bostrom; I don't know to what extent he's influenced by him or what. I liked this because of the illustration of our own ability to simulate virtual experiences, which eventually blur into "reality," or seem to:

Giambattista Vico, the Copenhagen Interpretation, and H.P. Lovecraft

From Ulysses (1922)
It's a little after 10PM on June 16, 1904, and Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are in a maternity hospital, and James Joyce, writing in the style of T.H. Huxley, says this:

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' (Div.Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs counter to accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which science cannot answer - at present - such as the first problem submitted by Mr. L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex. - p.411, 1946 Modern Library ed, episode "Oxen of the Sun")

We can determine the sex of the baby before birth now, in 2011, but not in 1904. Joyce, writing temporarily as Huxley (Aldous's grandfather), was right. But Joyce is influenced by Vico, and in Vico's magnum opus, The New Science (1740), none of the big questions concerning humankind can be answered as "hardheaded facts;" Vico had invented a new view of history, and many credit him as pioneering cultural anthropology, sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. Robert Anton Wilson credited Vico with creating "transpersonal linguistics," but I'll have to cover that in 2012. For now I want to discuss, as briefly and as painlessly as possible, Vico's idea of verum factum.


Verum Factum
Basically - 'cuz this stuff can get abstruse and plain wacky quickly - Vico thought we humans can only really "know" what we have ourselves - as humans - made. This precludes a truly profound and deep understanding of the natural sciences. When I first started studying Vico I thought he had it backward, that it was yet another brilliant yet sorta nutty idea of his. Lately, I've wondered.

The contemporary philosopher-historian Hilary Putnam has written, in a discussion of constructivism, "It is impossible to find a philosopher before Kant (and after the pre-Socratics) who was not a metaphysical realist, at least about what he took to be basic and unreducible assertions." (Reason, Truth and History, p.40) Putnam says they all believed in objective truths that had perfect, permanent and superhuman validity. They may have disagreed about what those truths were...

But Putnam hadn't read Vico, apparently. In a direct attack on the prevailing Cartesianism of his time, Vico takes a strong anti-rationalistic stance about what is knowable. In some sense, God created nature; we humans made the social world. We cannot know nature because we did not make it. But we can know history, because we made it. The social sciences are knowable; the physical sciences we can have some knowledge about, but it will be based in mathematics, ultimately. And we made math! We still make it. When we find truths in the physical sciences, we are finding truths about our own minds and how they describe workings. Or: our minds make detailed maps of maps, but the maps are not the territories they describe. They are maps. We seem to desperately need to believe we have made contact with the one true deep "reality." But we have not.

2011 cutting-edge cognitive science would say we have knowledge of ourselves and the external world because we have embodied minds, ensconced in human nervous systems. It's gonna have to do for now!

An astute reader of Vico, Isaiah Berlin, says, regarding Vico's verum factum, "I don't know what it is to be a table. I don't know what it is be electric energy. But I do know what it is to feel, think, hope, fear, question, be puzzled, be ashamed." (Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, p.79)

So for Vico, understanding seems to be different than knowledge. Science is knowledge about the behavior of bodies in space. We cannot know such things from within; we can only describe them...seemingly one-removed.

A Stab at Copenhagenism
Supposedly still the most common philosophical interpretation of the quantum theory - the most successful scientific theory ever - is the Copenhagen interpretation, commonly aligned with Niels Bohr, although Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and a few other giants contributed. Einstein famously hated the Copenhagen interpretation, and spent the last 30 years of his life trying to find something wrong with it, with limited success (I would cite the EPR paradox as an ultimately fecund thought experiment.)

I previously stabbed at Bohr and Copenhagenism HERE.

In Nick Herbert's underrated little masterpiece of a book, Quantum Reality, he succinctly points out that we can think about the Copenhagen in two versions, and maybe both together. Version one Herbert labels as "There is no deep reality." "Everyday phenomena are built on a different kind of being,"as Herbert interprets Bohr. Bohr urged a skepticism towards hidden, deeper realities.

"In words that must chill every realist's heart, Bohr insisted: 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description." (p.17)

                            The "hippie" who perhaps did more to save physics than any of the others, Nick Herbert

Einstein thought quantum mechanics, with its statistical probabilities built into the equations, HAD to be wrong. It wasn't...elegant. God doesn't play dice with the universe, etc. Therefore, there had to be something wrong with quantum mechanics, or there were hidden variables, a deeper reality. Einstein was one of the giants that helped carve out the theory in the first place!

Now here's Herbert's second version of Copenhagenism. He calls it "Reality is created by observation."

"Although the numerous physicists of the Copenhagen school do not believe in deep reality, they do assert the existence of phenomenal reality. What we see is undoubtedly real, they say, but these phenomena are not really there in the absence of observation." (p.17)

I've been studying what physicists have been saying about the quantum world for at least 20 years now, and this is still really weird stuff to me. I don't blame the Reader for thinking it's bunk. All I'll say is that the Copenhagen interpretation is still very common among physicists with the PhD, and that, when one considers the alternative interpretations, the Copenhagen seems the most conservative. (As noted in David Kaiser's How The Hippies Saved Physics, which I discussed HERE, a great many physicists in the second half of the 20th century, especially in Unistat, were trained to not interpret what their equations seemed to be saying about nature, but were instead trained to "shut up and calculate.")

Fanciful? 
Admittedly a generalist who gladly gives his mind over joyfully to the speculative, I have tried to suggest that Vico's view of science was at least proto-Copenhagenist, by about 220 years. I'm sure someone else has made the connection, but I have not seen it. (Please feel free to cite someone else's linkage of Vico to Bohr in the comments section!)

"God" and Vico-Bohr and...H.P. Lovecraft?
Don't even say it. I know what you're thinking. And yes, the crop of cannabis is really good this winter. That said, what are we to make of capital enn Nature after thinking about Vico and quantum mechanics here for a spell? What if we can't know the deep reality of...anything?

(Note I've tacitly assumed Vico may be right about the physical sciences but wrong about the Humanities: we seem to have wonderful descriptions of who we are as humans, but in action on the world historical stage, we seem as a species to not "know" or "understand" ourselves very well. I think we're wonderful at making and using tools, but not very good at universal brotherhood, peace, empathy, extended altruism, equality, etc.)

Well, we can say a big Yes, as James Joyce does in Ulysses, which is filled with yeses in the face of so much frank suffering and sadness in life. For there is humor in it all, too, eh? Even in our Dark Days, things can make us laff, if only because of their metaphysical incorrigibility. An influence on both Joyce and Vico, Giordano Bruno, talked of hilaritas, which means there is a humor and optimism in every pessimism and sadness. The coincidence of opposites, built into the fabric of..."reality." Renaissance magick. Joyce's young intellectual Stephen Dedalus, one of the three heroes of the book, near the end accepts that everything is "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." Which sounds to me isomorphic (a math term meaning "having a similarity of structure") to the Copenhagen interpretation.

But there's at least one other path to trod down with regard to all this stuff...

Okay, H.P. Lovecraft, the greatest writer of pulp horror fiction ever, and just now being recognized as a "classic" writer by academics. Dying of cancer at age 46 in 1937, he once wrote in a letter, "The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality - when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and measurable universe."

Lovecraft had dropped the religious underpinnings of the horror story in favor of science, non-Euclidean mathematics and possible liminal dimensions, abstract knowledge, quantum physics, and dreams. He combined all this material with archaic knowledge, mutations of Egyptology, the occult tradition, odd anthropology, and other sources. He had the uncanny ability to mix "real" knowledge with fantasy, so the reader felt destabilized and not sure what was "real" or not. All of this combined with a peculiarly florid prose style, and the yield was High Weirdness en extremis. And a general spookiness that has freaked out and delighted many an intelligent youth and young-at-heart.

Yes, but what does this have to do with Vico and Bohr? I'm getting to it. It has to do with "God," and the ineffability of such a concept. In Lovecraft, there are "unspeakable" horrors from the abyss of...the 4th dimension or some other dimension inherent or immanent in the mood of the land or space his characters fall prey to. And the dread lies so heavily in the atmosphere of his stories, it seems to me, precisely because his monsters are so "unutterable." In this world, we cannot speak of "God" in any normal sense. The...Thing that haunts his narratives is beyond language (as Negative Theologians say about God), and utterly outside, of any human concept. This seems to go beyond Vico and Bohr, or complements them. And Lovecraft is still thought by many as a "mere" horror writer, or some sort of proto-science fiction pulp writer.

Are there entities from other realms, other dimensions, who we - you and me - could possibly make contact? I will leave it to the Reader to decide. But I will suggest that the Reader would not be drilling in a dry hole were (s)he to look into the reports of people who have experimented with tryptamine hallucinogens such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT), or even psilocybin mushrooms.

What's weird is that...the DMT reports are so utterly Other, if you haven't done DMT you think you're being put-on. But we all make DMT in our own bodies. It's secreted by the pineal gland, and it's in every Reader's cererbrospinal fluid. You have enough in you right now to get arrested, according to the law. And the active trip-out chemical in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, is so close in structure to serotonin you have to look at the diagrams twice to make sure they're not the same molecule.

This seems as good a place as any to abandon yet another verborrheaic blogspew.

[A 6 min take on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos]:

Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation: A Brief

Bohr (1885-1962, Nobel Prize Physics 1922), the Great Dane, one the main constructors of the most successful physical theory mankind has ever come up with, the quantum theory, was an enigmatic personality, and anyone wishing to delve deeply into how physics, psychology, language, philosophy, and "reality" all commingle will be repaid by reading in the numerous well-written versions of Bohr's life upon the 20th century scientific stage. In the past year I've at times mired joyfully in Manjit Kumar's Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality; a challenging graphic novelization of Bohr called Suspended In Language; and a few others, but most fruitfully, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Politics by Bohr's physicist friend Abraham Pais, which may be the ultimate biography of Bohr so far.

Ever since Bohr could remember he was interested in philosophy, "to dream of interconnections." Soon after, still as a boy, he found himself dizzy from contemplating the nature of language and the problem of making communication free of ambiguity. This would inform his interpretation of quantum mechanics, an interpretation which stymied his friend Einstein over and over. Einstein, as most of you know, did not like the indeterminate, statistical nature of physical reality at its atomic and subatomic levels. There must be something wrong with quantum mechanics, it must be incomplete, there must be something "solid" at the bottom of reality. But Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation held sway.

                                        Bohr chose the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol for his coat of arms. 

Starting in the late 1920s, at every conference in which Bohr and Einstein met, Einstein had concocted an ingenious gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) that would baffle Bohr and force him to admit the quantum theory was incomplete. Bohr would listen to Einstein and become vexed. While others went off and mingled, joked and carried on conversations over drinks, Bohr would retire to his hotel room to try and deal with Einstein's latest thought experiment...and he always succeeded in answering Einstein's objections! (Except for maybe that one EPR thingy....)

In 1927, Bohr thought his interpretation - which included Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle - was right. His basic idea was the principle of complementarity. Physicists had been troubled by the fact that, when they tried to find out if the nature of light was particular or wave-like, they found that it was both! It depended on the way the experiment was set up. Most physicists thought they needed to find the one best way to set up an experiment to see, once and for all, if light was "really" a wave or if it "really" came in particles. (A few creative types posited that light was a "wavicle," but few in the physics community were satisfied with this.)

Bohr said: no matter what you do, you will never come to a proof that it's waves or particles. He was convinced that waves and particles were complementary phenomena. And so was almost everything else.

Here's Bohr, giving a thumbnail version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum world of nature:

"There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."

When I first read this, my mind went in seven directions at once. To this day, I still marvel at this conception, which is still probably the most "conservative" interpretation of quantum physics, and the one most commonly held by physicists, probably...That is, if those physicists working on solving problems involving the quantum level think at all about the implications about what the equations imply about Nature; at least one generation of Unistatian physicists were trained and encouraged to NOT think about the philosophical implications, as I touched on HERE.

What Bohr seems to be saying is that we can't know about Nature. Or rather, what we say about our findings using our best instruments and minds only says what we can say about how we've decided to model nature, not what it "really" is. We can only describe what our instruments and nervous systems and mathematics register about our conceptualizations about nature. We are inextricably one-remove from any sort of "ultimate physical reality," and indeed, we cannot know if even that exists. We either made that notion up at some point, or it was a holdover from our thinking as evolved apes. When we use our best conceptualizations, and no matter how indeterminate the equations were, the experiments "work" the way we think they should work, and things don't fall apart suddenly: it's as good as we can get. And it's been pretty damned good. Best physical theory EVER! But: undergirding it all is statistical probabilities. We don't know how Nature operates for "sure." (Yet? No. Bohr is saying we can't know. And he's okay with that. Are you? Why does it "matter"?)

Every notion that we have about anything is a map, and there are relief maps, political maps, Mercator projections, globes, population-diffusion maps, agricultural maps, weather maps...you can think of many, many more. We all inherit versions of map-models about "reality" from our local culture. Some of us extend knowledge and create new maps, to help us think about some small corner of "reality" in a new way. Maps are always in flux in space/time/quantum "reality."

Looking at things, observing them, changes them. At least at the atomic and subatomic levels. Maybe it works on macro-levels too...

Bohr continued to write and talk about complementarity throughout his life, both in physics and in other domains of life, such as biology, anthropology, language, and psychology. In 1957 he gave a series of lectures at M.I.T, and the first one was titled "The Philosophical Lessons of Atomic Physics." He stressed the complementary principle, and his friend and biographer Abe Pais thinks Bohr might have gotten the notion from the American pragmatist philosopher William James, who had used the term "complementary" in a similar way in 1891, many years before Bohr had started to use it, and Bohr is on record as admiring James: "I thought he was most wonderful." Bohr also admired Lao Tzu and Buddha, but not most Western philosophers. He admired fellow Dane Kierkegaard's language, but not the thought so much.

Many academic philosophers commented unfavorably about Bohr's "complementarity" and Bohr said they didn't understand it.

Some physical and more everyday examples of complementarity:

• -subject/object
• -spectators/actors
• -figure/ground
• -mechanical/statistical
• -faith/doubt

In a similar way that pragmatism has been called an "anti-philosophy," Bohr's "complementarism" (Pais's term for Bohr's philosophy writ large) also strikes me as being at-odds with the Western tradition of philosophy. Pais quotes Pascal, saying he thinks Bohr would agree: "To ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical." (Pensees, Part VIII, #35)

I like this passage from Pais's biography of Bohr:

"Bohr's own definition of a philosopher, not found in the OED, goes as follows. What is the difference between an expert and a philosopher? An expert is someone who starts out knowing something about some things, goes on to know more and more about less and less, and ends up knowing everything about nothing. Whereas a philosopher is someone who starts out knowing something about some things, goes on to know less and less about more and more, and ends up knowing nothing about everything."(Pais, 421)

Many people were baffled by Bohr's complementarisms, and he acknowledged this and said that they were "seeds for thought." Here's one of Bohr's favorite story-jokes:

"Once upon a time a rabbinical student went to hear three lectures by a famous rabbi. Afterwards he told his friends, 'The first talk was brilliant, clear and simple. I understood every word. The second was even better, deep and subtle. I didn't understand much, but the rabbi understood all of it. The third was by far the finest, a great and unforgettable experience. I understood nothing and the rabbi didn't understand much either.'" (Pais, 439)

However Niels Bohr fits into the history of thought, his predecessors and especially those who were influenced by him, have greatly influenced my quasi-stances on just about everything, leading, for better or worse, towards some state of overweening generalism.

For 6 and a half minutes, here's some viddy on how the Bohr model of the atom got going, etc:

A Periodic Problem in the History of Science

I think this problem can be properly placed within Thomas Kuhn's overall conceptual scheme about revolutions in science. I will attempt to discuss two recent instances that seem isomorphic, but the details of each story are more interesting. To add: I will try to make this brief.

Both instances - or scientific narratives - were ones I encountered recently in my reading; it seems there are numerous similar examples. But I want to address two of my favorite ideas - ideas any Generalist probably finds of exceeding interest: 1.) the evolution of language, and 2.) the philosophical meanings of the quantum theory.

I was re-reading a tremendously well-done work in the popularization of recent linguistics, Christine Kenneally's The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2007), and I can't recommend it highly enough if you have even a passing interest in the subject. There were many "theories" (loosest sense of the term) about the origin of human language, but things began to heat up in European universities around the 1770s, especially with philosophers like Rousseau. When Darwin enters the scene, the biologists get white-hot about language. Of course, in 1870, one can only speculate enough on the topic before one has concocted something of a Just-So story. As Keanneally writes:

"Biological evolution proved to be an excellent analogy for language change, and linguists took up the evolutionary analogy with such enthusiasm that they began to treat natural selection as a literal account of language change rather than a helpful analogy, applying the idea of survival of the fittest  to such phenomena as the way speech sounds change over long periods of time (how, for example, a distinct sound like f might become s). Ironically, linguists still regarded speculating on the origins of language to be an unscientific problem, and it remained controversial to adopt Darwin's theory for that purpose. So while Darwin himself freely considered the origins of language, linguists did anything but."

Indeed, the Societe de Linguistique of Paris banned talking about the subject in the nineteenth century. I guess it seemed too distracting. Their official statement read:"The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language." What a bunch of killjoys! In 1872, Kenneally tells us, the London Philological Society also closed off the Question.

                          Christine Kenneally, Linguistics PhD from Cambridge,
                            author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins 
                          of Language

For 100 years, linguists who were interested in the question were marginalized. It was a disreputable thing to let on that it was one of your bailiwicks. If you wanted to discuss the topic, you'd better do it in secret, or the guardians of the discipline might hear about it and prevent you from getting a decent job. Nevertheless there were always little groundswells of interest.

For about 45 years of Noam Chomsky's career as a linguist he pretty much dodged questions of language evolution. One can find him saying we can't know such things, so why even try. It left many of us to ponder, "Does Chomsky think his Cartesian perfect system of syntax just appeared suddenly one day, like fundamentalist Christians think God made the world in seven days, then rested? Human language is a miracle!" (<---I said something like this to a friend not long ago, when we were talking about Chomsky.) Chomsky went on and on about the innateness of language, which would seem to suggest an inquiry into genetics and evolution, but Noam apparently had his reasons? (Some other blogpost...or have I already covered this? I write too much, too quickly and haphazardly, and forget!)

Quick side-trip regarding Chomsky: when he first began teaching linguistics at M.I.T.  (around 1959 or so, I'm too lazy to look it up, frankly), he had an Engineering student named Philip Lieberman in his class. Lieberman loved Chomsky's ideas and decided to pursue linguistics himself. But in a recurring story with Chomsky and brilliant ex-students, Kenneally writes, "There is no interaction between them now. Both men are famously combative, and they have taken opposite positions on the subject of the evolution of language." Lieberman went on to do fantastic work on Parkinson's patients, which strongly suggested that syntax was intimately related to the basal ganglia and motor cortex. He examined skulls, listened to apes, tested brains, did all sorts of creative lab research. (The idea of doing linguistics in this way seems to literally disgust Chomsky.) In 1984, Lieberman produced The Biology and Evolution of Language, a Darwinian view. He thought Chomsky had the wrong metaphor: a computer. Rather, it's evolution, which has a logic all its own, a logic we don't really understand. For Lieberman, it seems we must start with this knowledge. For Noam Chomsky, it's absurd: we already have the innate capacity for Cartesian common sense, endowed by...uhh...never mind.

Kenneally: "According to Lieberman, the analogy between the computer and the brain prevents a true understanding of language. Even though formulas can describe a set of sentences, they don't have much to do with how language is produced by the brain or how the brain and language evolved. 'Syntax is not the touchstone of human language, and evolution is not logical,' declared Lieberman. 'Evolution doesn't give a damn about formal elegance.'"

I guess Chomsky saw his version was ridiculous, so in 2002 his name appeared on a paper with Marc Hauser (recently resigned from Harvard for faking research), and Tecumseh Fitch, called "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" But I will leave it to readers of linguistics or of Kenneally's book just how much we think Chomsky was interested in the question.

Anyway, the topic is hot again, and there are all kinds of research projects that are leading us towards an understanding, not only of the origin of language in humans, but animal communication systems, the relation of music to language, and the deep levels of our mathematical faculty.

**********************************************************************************

In a deliriously spellbinding recent book (for my nervous system, at least), How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, by M.I.T. professor David Kaiser, he tells the story of Einstein, Schrodinger, Born, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, et.al and their development of the quantum theory between 1900 and 1926...and then how Einstein thought the theory must be wrong, because it suggested a philosophically messy picture of Nature, and that God didn't play dice with the universe, etc. (Niels Bohr didn't have a problem with the oddities of the theory.) Einstein's and Bohr's colleagues were all deeply fascinated or appalled or in some way philosophically fixated on what this very successful theory meant about how nature works. They discussed it for days on end with each other. Then the second half of the Hot War between the years 1914-1945 flared again, and then most of them fled to the US.

In the Manhattan Project and after the war, the US government hothoused enormous numbers of physics students in order to "win" the physics war with the USSR. Kaiser is very engaging as he describes the radical shift to "just shut up and calculate" from "what do the equations mean?" Any physics student in the US (and most of Europe, although it wasn't nearly as pronounced there) were considered flaky if they asked their professor what the equations meant about how strange nature seems at subatomic levels. Like the origin of language question for 100 years, here was a fascinating question that had been deemed as frivolous by the leaders of physics, from roughly 1941 to around 1975-80, when suddenly, the US government became somewhat paranoid that the USSR might be ahead of the US in telepathy, or other outre ideas.

Funding for physicists had been cut drastically by the early 1970s, so many PhDs had no jobs. But all along there were physicists who had been fascinated by Einstein's thought experiments that might show that the quantum theory was flawed, and there was a Deeper Reality. In 1964, one of those physicists, John S. Bell, devised a theorem that, if it were to be tested - and it seemed more testable than the Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky thought experiment - it might show that Einstein was right: there were hidden variables, or...something that could show the quantum theory was incomplete.

      Left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag*, Nick Herbert, and in the right corner, Fred Alan Wolf, all PhDs in physics, all fascinated by the implications of Bell's Theorem, all stoners and scientific revolutionaries.


I don't want to ruin a good read, but the Berkeley-based hippie physicists played a huge role in getting physics back to its philosophical roots. And it led to a revolution in quantum information science, quantum computing, and quantum encryption techniques. One of the developers of quantum encryption, Stephen Wiesner, is quoted by Kaiser as saying this in 2009: "We need some periods of anarchy when new or irreverent thoughts and changes can come forward."

Whether we're discussing the ban on openly talking about the origin of language or of the philosophical roots of the quantum theory, in both historical stories we see very intricate reasons why perennial questions get dampened, and also institutional reasons why they come back. The foremost "experts" during the times of the bans thought they were "correct:" that such questions were frivolous; we've moved beyond that; these are not the kinds of questions "serious scientists" ask. And how utterly wrong they were!

Hoo-kay! Sorry I was so brief!

*- I have awarded Saul-Paul Sirag the PhD but he doesn't have one; he has been published on quantum theory in the world-leading journal Nature twice. As David Kaiser writes, "Most PhD physicists who pursue ordinary academic careers never manage to get even one of their research articles through the rigorous peer-review at Nature."-p.243