Alan Kay – The center of “Why”? (2004) [pdf]
vpri.org
vpri.org
> "A deeper realization came further on: there might be limitations in language itself and our ability to represent ideas and think about them that could preclude us from actually understanding the foundations of our situation.
> Living organisms are shaped by evolution to survive, not necessarily to get a clear picture of the universe.
> There’s a nice saying from the Talmud: We see things not as they are, but as we are. That is, whenever we’re looking out into the world, we’re always seeing ourselves, we’re not really seeing what’s out there.
For most of my life I'd assumed that human concepts were this limitless sort of thing capable of making fundamental connections to what's going on in the universe at some deep level. In more recent years I've come to consider them as almost like another sense: they are symbolic patterns consistently formed when we are exposed to certain stimuli (like our experience of smells consistently reappearing when exposed to similar molecules). Our conceptual faculty augments the pure pattern-correspondence of our more primitive senses in that the patterns can be associated with other internal patterns, and in that we can generate new patterns purely from existing patterns (using logical and analogical processes), which at some future time may be usefully associated with some never-encountered external stimulus. This is of course extremely useful—but we really must be falling into what should be an obvious trap of anthropocentrism in ascribing to them much more than that.
As an example of where we're likely tripping up by considering concepts to be somehow transcendent: there's a common unjustified stance that mathematics is not only capable of describing the universe, but that it's somehow behind its operation. Even further than that, I often run into smart people with the view that reality is somehow made of mathematics. I wonder if that's what Kay's getting at with this:
> Art is “all the stuff that people make”, and this includes our beliefs (which we like to call “reality”).
Almost in a similar manner to the way one might fail to recognize the absurdity of a misplaced pink elephant in a dream, we seem structured to unknowingly substitute our mental reference systems with the things they refer to.
There's a deeper but similar thing going on with our beliefs in general though. Beliefs form schemas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)), and these seem to have a very powerful role in doing something almost like parsing our sensory input. I see them almost as like a grammar which could be fed to a parser generator; we change our beliefs, the grammar is updated, the parser is updated.
My favorite source on the subject is William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. His project is largely attempting to account for wide ranges of internal experience based on belief changes, by analyzing extreme neurotics on one end and people like (certain) saints on the other (who tend to be both blissful internally, and highly altruistic—theoretically because they truly believe reality is not only a unity but God itself, so they are already immortal and everyone else is a part of them)—and people who transition from one side to the other.
I see this play out every day. As a result of the continued linguistic apartheid in my country, the languages are dead, and the people are stupid as dirt (on average), to be blunt. However, this is mostly Karma, the result of accumulations of centuries past, playing out as the complete decimation of histories; naturally, the education/media system is a propaganda op, with tons of shills at every corner. Those whom you'd wish to see break out of chains, appear to find comfort in them alone. New ideas can't touch them nor move them, because the "programming language" is so outdated, that such sentences will be treated as garbage.
I believe there are deep reasons why India could only think of independence through a class which was more British than Indian. India is but a grave for the civilization it once sustained, and we are but mere flies who wish for a phoenix.
Language does indeed governs our thoughts, and in that respect governs the world we create - it's what makes us human, far more than anything else. Take out the language, and what you get is a mere animal.
I'm definitely leaning more on the side of concepts being limited now—but I still have uncertainty about how significant the limits are.
I think that would be an interesting research direction: nail down more definitively the particular structure of human concepts, then use that model to describe more explicitly what their limits and capabilities are.
One hypothesis I have is that all concepts are reducible to a finite set of parts (e.g. types and relations), and they can be multiplied together indefinitely through nesting—so the set of concepts is infinite, but it should be the same infinity class as the integers, so they definitely can't cover everything (in the hypothetical). But, who knows? I don't have the resources to do actual research, so it remains quasi-informed speculation :)
And I guess even if we know the structure of human concepts more definitively, we still couldn't really use that knowledge to determine whether specific things are amenable to conceptualization or not (e.g. the solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness), since you would also need to say something about the 'properties' of the other thing, which already requires that the other thing be amenable to conceptualization.
And then there are these common unjustified dismissals of the idea. The reason people assume math describes the universe is that it does a very good job of it. It allows us to predict the future better than other tools.
There are different reasons for believing in the mathematical universe hypothesis and some of them I find quite compelling.
Maybe you can't see it because you are missing those concepts in your internal language? I would say your post is a good example of your main point.
I guess he got lucky, but as a parent I worry about this. He points out that most educational establishments don't encourage individual exploration, and that was my experience too.
Makes me consider home schooling, but that seems like a less than ideal solution too. Do we just have to rely on luck?
Hopefully that provides some level of reassurance.
I'm not a fan of homeschooling because normal school is usually a great place for kids to learn society. So much stuff happens at a school that can never be recreated by dragging your kids to clubs or events. All the fighting, the teasing, the friction, but also the playing. I've had a couple truly horrible teachers, but I've also had a couple truly great ones. The former taught me how to deal with authoritarian assholes while the latter have advanced me humanistically.
If you want to help your kids, stick'em in a stink normal school with stink normal people, and fascinate them privately.
It's a great place for them to learn a completely artificial society designed by 19th century Prussian educators to train proles to become good factory workers. Modern society? Or any real society? Not so much.
There is no natural society that consists solely of a group of peers all within 12 months of age, under the control of an arbitrary authority figure, where every activity is controlled by a bell. The only thing that's remotely similar is military boot camp (that may be why this model appealed to the Prussians so much). Even prison has more diversity of perspectives, ages, etc.
Another, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."