The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose

[Russell Standish]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 11:54:14AM -0800, Tom Carter wrote:

> Russell -
>
>    I'm with you on this . . .  I tend to push the "don't reify!" side  
> perhaps a bit too hard, but mostly because I see so much of the  
> reification habit out there, together with its attendant traps . . .
>
>    On the "free will is an illusion" issue . . .  an interesting read  
> on that topic is "The User Illusion : Cutting Consciousness Down to  
> Size," by Tor Norretranders (Norretranders is a "Science Reporter"  
> rather than an actual scientist, so I recommend taking a salt shaker  
> with you when you read this, but it does raise some interesting  
> issues . . . Libet's work plays a significant role, if you are  
> familiar . . .)
>
> tom
>

Reminds me of the wag who said "Schroedinger: cutting quantum
mechanics down to psi's"

I'll see if I can get hold of the book.

Cheers

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[Giles Bowkett]

OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned.

(fair warning, I canned it for a reason.)


On 12/10/05, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
> It seems to me that "The Road to Reality" as a title invites one to
> see "The Road" as something that might go on and on, require rerouting
> on occasion, require maintenance, and not necessarily ever reach or
> even be capable of reaching its intended destination.  Yet most of
> this criticism seems to assume an ultimate reality implicit in
> Penrose's book that has already been invalidated by one empirical
> observation or another.

yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where
exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas?

> It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to
> end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end?

this is really the major question of freshman year at St. John's. I
started ranting about this but my rant didn't make sense so I deleted
it. short answer: I personally believe that the great thinker of
classical Greece was Euclid, and Plato was just a commentator.

most "Platonic philosophers" are in reality neither Platonic nor
philosophers. they don't even read Plato correctly. Plato wrote in
dialogues. plenty of philosophers since then have read Plato as prose.
if you want to realize just how incredibly stupid that is, read
something by Shakespeare, then go see that same work performed on
stage by actors. or, to make it more obvious, read a cookbook without
ever setting foot in a kitchen. it's a dialog. reading it as prose
leads to parsing errors. it's like trying to eat a sweater, or drive a
sofa to work.

one of Plato's classic dialogs is the Meno. the Meno is named after a
guy called Meno. Socrates doesn't want to talk to Meno at all, but
Meno chases him all over the place until Socrates agrees to talk. so
Socrates talks to Meno about thought. lots of work of "Platonic"
philosophy is based on what Socrates says to Meno, and Socrates uses
motion as a metaphor for thought frequently in the Meno while talking
to the guy called Meno. the word Meno, in Ancient Greek, means "I
don't move" or "I remain" (or even, in a coding sense, "I persist").
so if thought is motion, and you're talking to a guy whose name means
stillness, what are you saying? most of Socrates' metaphors in the
dialog, and in fact every single word he says in the dialog, can be
modelled as pure old-fashioned aggravated sarcasm. so you got one
sarcastic philosopher two or three thousand years ago making fun of
this one persistent moron (in more senses than one), and literally
thousands of years of bad philosophy following after that from people
who couldn't tell that Socrates was being sarcastic, but could tell
that he was smarter than they were. there are entire schools of
philosophy which are based on taking various sarcastic comments which
Socrates made at various times and interpreting them literally. the
theory is, if Socrates said X, X must be smart, because everybody
knows Socrates was smart, therefore any ridiculous idea I can come up
with which follows logically from X must also be smart. if Socrates
had made jokes about Muppets, today we'd have an entire school of
thought revolving around serious Platonic theories of the ideal
Muppet.

personally, I don't even believe in the Big Bang. because the thing
is, Penrose is one of the major figures in that world, and if you're
going to put yourself forward as a philosopher, and you're going to
further identify yourself as a Platonic philosopher, but you're not
going to bother to read Plato in the original Greek, that's like
declaring yourself a fan of a particular team without being able to
identify which sport they play. somebody who does that sort of thing
might not look like the smartest person in the world. they might say a
few things that are about as reasonable as driving a sofa to work. and
if you've got this gigantic philosopho-mathematical edifice which is
built by a sofa-driver in his spare time, then it's entirely possible
that when it comes to his main gig, defining the history of the
universe, that he drives a sofa to that job too. it is, after all,
entirely possible for mathematicians to waste their entire lives
building castles in the air, and it is, after all, entirely possible
for emperors to walk around naked without anybody saying a thing.

now to each his own. nobody's clever enough to be always right about
everything. certainly Penrose is incredibly bright. he does much
harder math than I do. and certainly there is something interesting
going on with the whole "Platonic ideal forms" thing. but for me
personally, I take Platonic philosophers with a grain of salt. more
than just a grain. I take a Platonic philosopher with an entire salt
lick. these people read dialogues as prose, then they hop in their
sofa, realize it isn't moving, and figure it must be out of gas. so
they sit down to figure out what to do, and decide to have a nice
snack of sweaters and guacamole.

btw, speaking of driving sofas,

http://www.cummfybanana.com/cars/car_casuallofa.htm

I guess this turned into a rant anyway. my bad.

--
Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/

[Roger Critchlow-2]

On 12/18/05, Giles Bowkett <gilesb at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned.

A pretty good rant, all in all.

> yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where
> exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas?

I expect that he thinks we're on the same road that all of mathematics
and natural science has been working out, how to make operational
predictions about the world and learn from our mistakes, a road that
started in prehistory.

> > It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to
> > end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end?
>
> this is really the major question of freshman year at St. John's. I
> started ranting about this but my rant didn't make sense so I deleted
> it. short answer: I personally believe that the great thinker of
> classical Greece was Euclid, and Plato was just a commentator.

Okay, so Penrose is a vulgar neoplatonist who wouldn't know a greek
joke if it bit him on his rosy fingers at dawn.   Or I wrongly
ascribed such a view to him.

But if Penrose's mathematics is good for understanding reality, does
it make any difference whether he thinks the mathematics is part of
reality instead of a clever trick we use to organize our experience?  
Or that he thinks or believes that he can tell the difference between
the two situations?

-- rec --

[Giles Bowkett]

> > OK -- on my Big Bang skepticism thing -- this is the big heinous rant I canned.
>
> A pretty good rant, all in all.

cheers.

> > yes, also, if he says that he can put us on the road to reality, where
> > exactly does he think we're starting from? Arkansas?
>
> I expect that he thinks we're on the same road that all of mathematics
> and natural science has been working out, how to make operational
> predictions about the world and learn from our mistakes, a road that
> started in prehistory.

fair enough...

> > > It it relevant to quibble with his platonic views if you're going to
> > > end up using the same mathematics to describe reality in the end?

...

> But if Penrose's mathematics is good for understanding reality, does
> it make any difference whether he thinks the mathematics is part of
> reality instead of a clever trick we use to organize our experience?
> Or that he thinks or believes that he can tell the difference between
> the two situations?

in both cases, isn't the question kind of just a matter of whether or
not you can take a pragmatic, philosophy-free view of math?

I think the lesson of "Platonic" philosophers is that you **have** to
take a pragmatic view of math.

look at cause and effect. cause and effect **may** be a logical
organizing principle which exists throughout all of reality. it may
also be a **model** intrinsic to our brains, which exists as a
**reflection** of some **real** organizing principle (etc.).

so cause and effect may be "real," but they may just be as close to
real as we are able to perceive. the thing is, if it is so close to
real that we are never able to perceive any differences between it and
what is **genuinely** real, then we have to just shrug and be like
"hey, it's real enough."

that's why I feel Euclid is the real great thinker there, and Plato,
along with every one of his descendants, including Penrose, can really
only be seen as commentators. I've really never seen anything in
Platonic philosophy that can pass by Occam's Razor. the most I can say
for Platonic philosophy is that it does give you a very interesting
viewpoint to discuss those weird "spooky" corner cases when cause and
effect don't actually seem to explain things.

also, on the whole Big Bang thing, I really don't have the patience to
handle physics, and I know most physicists are much better at math
than I am, so I kinda feel like my disbelief is kind of bold of me. it
all started with a book called "The Big Bang Never Happened," and that
book has two parts. one part is physics, and I have no idea if the
arguments in that part have any genuine validity or not. the second
part is what sold me, and it sold me completely. it's an intellectual
history that shows similarities between the Big Bang and a bunch of
other schools of thought throughout history which all proved invalid.
the author basically goes through and says, every time people talked
about their ideas in this specific way, those ideas turned out to be
baloney. you could look at it as a sort of heuristic based on the
history of the philosophy of math. for me it really comes down to
"street smarts." if you can smell the baloney, but you can't find it,
that doesn't mean it isn't there. it might just mean the structure
it's contained within is too intricate for you to isolate the baloney
without spending years studying the structure.

--
Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/

[Robert Holmes-2]

Oh dear oh dear. How can anyone talk about "cause and effect" and
"philosophy" without quoting Hume? Honestly, what do they teach youngsters
these days...

Robert

P.S. And remember, unless you read Hume in the original Scottish, it doesn't
count.

On 12/19/05, Giles Bowkett <gilesb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
<snip>

> look at cause and effect. cause and effect **may** be a logical
> organizing principle which exists throughout all of reality. it may
> also be a **model** intrinsic to our brains, which exists as a
> **reflection** of some **real** organizing principle (etc.).
>
> so cause and effect may be "real," but they may just be as close to
> real as we are able to perceive. the thing is, if it is so close to
> real that we are never able to perceive any differences between it and
> what is **genuinely** real, then we have to just shrug and be like
> "hey, it's real enough."
>
> that's why I feel Euclid is the real great thinker there, and Plato,
> along with every one of his descendants, including Penrose, can really
> only be seen as commentators. I've really never seen anything in
> Platonic philosophy that can pass by Occam's Razor. the most I can say
> for Platonic philosophy is that it does give you a very interesting
> viewpoint to discuss those weird "spooky" corner cases when cause and
> effect don't actually seem to explain things.
> <snip>
> --
> Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy
> http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at Mission Cafe
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

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[Owen Densmore]

I can't resist: Here is a great pointer I got from Tim -- Big Bang,  
MC Hawking Style!

   http://backspaces.net/files/03BizBizang.mp3

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org