The Relativity of Wrong (1988)

An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.

As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.

This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.

Now if you think that's going to matter in the next few billion years is very probable you're mistaken.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.

I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.

I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.

But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".

Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.

Isn't that technically overeating though?

I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.

I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.

So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.

"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".

Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.

Asimov was not talking about meaning.

It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.

Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.

To then suggest that Asimov's essay depends on such a radical version of instrumentalism feels unnecessary, given that his argument attaches just as well, I would say better, to a view that makes space for ontology but still underwrites the history of progress he was describing. His essay seems less a failure to follow deeper philosophical detours than a decision to keep his argument tied to that central point.

You also seem to be implying a kind of ontological "regression" in the history of knowledge which I think comes from projecting specific ontological attitudes retroactively onto the past when those distinctions weren’t even part of the vocabulary.

A big problem with Steven Jay Gould’s self-posturing as a savior of Darwinian theory was that he manufactured a crisis of his own invention about "gradualism" and then claimed to resolve it. Darwin never assumed a fixed speed of evolution, so the supposed crisis dissolves once you stop reading one into the history. A similar attitude helps in reading the history of science: early measurements and models need not be seen as knowledge of ontology that we somehow "lost" but as data accompanied by overconfident declarations that can be separated out.

If you correct for ontology in this way, treating the instruments as interfacing with whatever is ontologically real, then you see steady progress toward more accurate knowledge. Far from being subtly wrong this reinforces the core of Asimov’s point that successive models are increasingly less wrong because they are tethered to reality (e.g flat to globe to spheroid to GR’s spacetime and beyond). It's that same arc of progress carrying us through those examples into more exotic ontologies. And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.

Think of it this way: classically or quantum mechanically, when we pick out a physical system to talk about we are isolating the terms for that system in the universal lagrangian and assuming that in the time of interest that the terms for our physical system couple weakly to the rest of the universe (which happens to contain us).

In principal nothing really weird is going on here and in classical mechanics the idea is totally trivial as far as it goes. On short time scales with appropriately sized actions the deviation from the isolated system and the real system (which is weakly coupled to the world) can be demonstrated to be small as long as the coupling is small.

In quantum mechanics two things complicate this situation. The first is that quantum mechanical systems sort of defy separation into distinct subsets except in special situations. Classically there is a strong sense in which we can point to two different parts of a system and call them separate, but quantum mechanically we really only know how to time evolve _the whole system_ and from a mathematical point of view its the actual object of interest. This is what we are getting at when we talk about entanglement: the two spin 1/2 particles flying away from one another in Bell style experiments are not separate things in the QM description: there is just one wave function.

But in practice I don't think there is any real reason we can't quantize gravity. I'm not an expert but loop quantum gravity seems like a reasonable approach and its very straightforward and its base: just find an acceptable description of geometry and then apply the ordinary quantum mechanical tricks we use to quantize it.

Also, you don't observe things in spacetime. Observations are always purely local. You just infer the existence of spacetime from local observations which are conveniently organized by putting them on a curved 4d Lorentzian signature manifold.

In other words, that Asimov is saying 2+2=5, while the English professor is saying "there's not difference between 5 and 'purple' as an answer!".

In other words, don't you agree with main point of the article?

I think we do understand a lot about the universe, even though there's also a huge amount we don't. I do think we understand "the basis" as Asimov put it -- it's just that even with the basis there's a lot we don't understand.

Of course Asimov oversimplifies things. He's also playing to his audience and being sarcastic and humorous. He's being snarky, and when snarkiness is the goal, accuracy suffers.

We don't even know if this professor actually existed, or whether he/she was invented by Asimov for the sake of his essay.

I think the message is valuable though, even if there are nuances and exceptions to it. A "rule of thumb" if you will.

The idea Asimov was fighting against was this "new age" belief that nothing can be known, everything is equally wrong, everything is "opinion" and yours is as valid as mine, etc etc.

PS: a tangent, aren't things like string theory pretty controversial (in the sense of "is this real or fantasy") even within the Physics community?