Responses 002 (2011-2012)

Looking at the new list began to be interesting in a whole new way with Question 2: "Compare and contrast knowledge which can be expressed in words/symbols with knowledge that cannot be expressed in this way. Consider CAS and one or more areas of knowledge."

It's the first question I've seen that would be partly incomprehensible except to a student of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. That's because it has the term 'CAS' in it — an acronym for 'Creativity, Action, Service'. This core element of the Diploma is supposed to act as a counterbalance to academic work, and consists largely of activities one might think of as 'experiential learning'.

And that immediately supplies us with one possible key. To participate in CAS is to design a course of study for yourself, but one which acts as a counterpoint to traditional academic studies — all of which consist largely of knowledge expressed and assessed by words/symbols. Evaluation in CAS consists of documenting your reflections on what you have done and how that has affected your outlook and perception of life; it's more about knowledge that can be described but not expressed fully without going through similar experiences.

That's not to say that none of it can be expressed in words and symbols. If you've learnt how to make pots or have been digging latrines in Peru, the physical and material aspects can be communicated — e.g. 'How to Dig a Latrine in 5 Easy Steps', or 'How to Make a Basic Pot' — in words and diagrams. But what you've learnt about cameraderie, teamwork and working in an alien environment — these are much less easy to convey.

This is a difficult question, though, because of at least one philosophical position. If your brain is a machine, then its inputs and outputs can theoretically be completely described in words and symbols. All your sensory perceptions, emotional changes, communication abilities and reasoning processes can be converted to symbolic form. It's a big 'if', but a discussion of its 'iffiness' is crucial to the discussion of this question.

So... what exactly is knowledge that CANNOT be expressed in words or symbols? Is there such a thing? Or does it only exist in a way because some people are just not articulate enough to express their knowledge by such means? A famous researcher is rumoured to have said, "There is no such thing as qualitative research, just quantitative research that hasn't been adequately defined." Ho ho.

Stuff That Can't Be Explained

You know, it hit me that we thirst for explanations to the point where we assume that everything must have a rational explanation. All things have a cause, is the theory. But we don't actually have a reason as to why things have reasons, or even why things should have reasons.

Consider the workings of the mind. At our current state of knowledge, we know that action occurs when a certain potential in the brain is exceeded in a certain direction. It is possible to see how this might be so, but the causes are complex. In principle, we can predict how a person should behave; in practice, we cannot. To make matters worse, it seems that we decide upon acting long before we actually are conscious of the decision, and that we appear to act on knowledge before we are aware of this knowledge. This leads to the illusion known as intuition. The final insult to the idea that our minds are rational is the fact that memory is mutable, and that our brains reconfigure with some sort of biased randomness in the direction of whatever seems most convenient.

It seems that the very lack of constancy, consistency and/or dependability of our minds and our world is what drives us to want things that are rational and consistent. This is why we invent mathematical structures and rules, and pursue the scientific paradigm. The fact is that we see data points all around us, and we confer upon them significance so that they become information. We weave information into structures that seem useful, and once utility as been conferred upon these, they become knowledge. We weave related-looking bits of knowledge together into elaborate tapestries, and they become areas of knowledge, disciplines, and more complex structures.

But what in all this is useful? The very term 'useful' ranges in utility, from being indicative of necessity (food, water, air, shelter), to denoting the very important (communication, education, construction and synthesis), to labelling the stuff we can demonstrably live without but which we cannot imagine living without (electricity, information technology, powered mechanized transport). Everything has its uses, little is completely useless.

The power of reason overheats the brain in a world that is changing faster and has more and more complexity. A lot of that complexity is man-created; the volume of knowledge constructed follows an exponential curve, but the value of that knowledge is also exponentially less accessible — it consists of stuff that fewer and fewer people need to know or which requires even more stuff to be useful at all.

Why build a Large Hadron Collider? What utility value does it have? There is a long list of questions that it certainly will answer when fully deployed and once the myriad (yes, at least 10,000) scientists, engineers and mathematicians around it get to work. Will it feed the poor, make people happy, tell us right from wrong? Not yet, if at all. But it does cost ten billion US dollars, which is not small fish.

As a teacher of science, I've heard and understand all the reasons why we 'do science'. I understand how and why scientific principles and discoveries have improved the standard of living starting from very basic stuff like what an electron is, or how gravity appears to work. But you can't build a case for future benefits from past successes, especially when immediate needs (urgency) may outweigh the importance of such benefits.

In a sense, we are all necessarily hypocritical. We enjoy the fruits of science and the illusion of its necessity as an industry and costly endeavour, while turning a blind eye to the problems that could be rectified by altruism. But altruism doesn't gain points, and it doesn't work, until material resources have been accumulated (or the illusion thereof, as in money). Such points are real because we have made them so. It is no longer possible to quantify a person's work in load carried or bits generated, but only according to the market value. And the market is all in our interactions and in our heads. It can be explained, but only in terms of our sub-rationality.

In the end, all of it can be explained, but none of it can be explained away. We are full of motives and reasons, excuses and theories. Our propensity for violence has been relatively lowered for a few brief shining moments in a murky sea of disease, death and destruction. This, we call civilisation. I don't think there is a comprehensive explanation for that.

Responses 002 (2010-2011)

This is the second expansion of my thoughts on the most recent list of questions. The second question in that list says, "How important are the opinions of experts in the search for knowledge?"

Of course, as most people would agree, you'd have to define 'expert' first, as well as 'important'. The word 'expert' was actually the adjectival form of the word 'experience' — it is the older form of the clunky 'experienced', now made into a noun. The word 'important' actually means 'having import (i.e., significance)'.

So what we're actually asking is, "How significant are the opinions of the experienced in the search for knowledge?"

I have a few thoughts here.

1. It depends on whether they are experts in the domain where you are searching; generally, those who are more experienced in one domain have more useful things to say about it.
2. On the other hand, remember what Arthur Clarke said: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." (Clarke's First Law, first published in Profiles of the Future, 1962.) This of course implies that expertise is only useful where experience has already been accrued; it is less useful when looking for something for which you have not much relevant prior experience, or which is contrary to prior experience.
3. To link this to logic, consider the problem of induction. In induction, you observe a pattern and derive a law. For example, you watch swans go by: black swan, black swan, black swan, black swan... ah, all swans are black. But just one pink swan will break your law. A swan expert could never predict a pink swan, because his expertise tells him all swans are black.
4. The problem of deduction, on the other hand, is that deduction proceeds from axioms — and axioms are foundational statements that are accepted without proof. An expert who is proceeding by deduction from rules could never conceive of a new axiom. It's like saying 'all black things are swans' and then seeing a raven; the axiom 'ravens exist' cannot be derived from a universe of swans, and so a raven must merely be a case of swan.

These thoughts, I suppose, lead to the conclusion that Clarke's First Law summarises the whole essay for the more convergent disciplines.

But what about the arts and humanities? I'd have to say that this is probably true of them as well. An expert can always tell you what has been experienced before and, on that basis, predict what will therefore be likely to occur in future. But this assumes the basis remains constant. For the arts, this is even more unlikely because the basis is emotional response; for the humanities, the basis is humanity and therefore vague where axioms are concerned.

So what do experts tell us about where to search next? The obvious major contribution is that experts can often tell us where we've already searched. That's why any paper or thesis normally includes a literature review — what the experts say or have said so far about the thing you are researching. Then you say why your research is different and goes to places where others haven't been before; you can also say how prior researchers have given you reasons or ideas for adopting this line of research.

And that's more or less what I think of Question 2. More to come later.

Flights Into The Unknown

I've been watching the financial markets these days with a fair amount of amusement, coupled with a sort of empathetic sadness for the millions of people who have been taken for a ride by those at the top. This blend of emotions is not new to me.

Quite often, people who know what is good for themselves – whether in education, finance, or any other area of service expertise – don't see how others might not be able to stomach that kind of medicine, succeed in such an area, or otherwise emulate them. It's quite telling that many of these people will say, "Don't do as I did; do what I say; I know better than you."

At the most cynical, you can say of some people that they are acting to protect their monopoly of experience. If you fail, they will say, "See, I have learnt lessons from my past and I know you couldn't have made it my way." If you succeed, they will say, "You are fortunate, not many people would have succeeded in this way." Either way, they end up looking good.

The thing is that quite often, the stuff that is on the table is not real stuff. The supposed knowledge, experience and superior talent is as much an artifact for some people as lipstick on a pig. The stuff didn't get there because of the pig, but in spite of the pig. History is a pastiche of many such accidents, adding up to something that looks meaningful.

That's not to say that sometimes the knowledge, experience and superior talent can't be more like a moustache on a musketeer. In this latter case, the musketeer has of course grown the stuff himself. More importantly, he nurtured it, groomed it, trimmed it when necessary, and capitalises on it. History's framework also contains many such.

In the end, the important thing for me and my students is that one should test everything. Is the knowledge valid? Is the experience useful? Is the talent reliable? In other words (which my poor students have heard many times before), is what is offered the right thing? Is it going to be of use to you even if it is? And can you trust it to give the same results again and again?

Otherwise, you might as well jump off into the unknown – and worse, into someone else's unknown.

Taste

Taste is three-dimensional. You can measure the taste of something along one of three axes; these three axes are somewhat analogous to the three main kinds of chemical bonding – covalent, ionic, metallic.

The first axis is bitter-sweet. A bitter substance can be diluted until it tastes sweet; many organic compounds are like that, and conversely, many sweeteners are bitter in high concentration. Life is like that; too much sweet and you will taste bitterness, but how sweet the taste of good coffee!

The second axis is salt-sour. At the extremes of this axis lie ionic solutions, ions set free in a world of water. You will find that taking a very salty liquid provokes a similar response to taking a very sour one. But this axis scales to zero – if the liquid is very very faintly salty or sour, it quenches thirst better and makes you want to drink more.

The third axis is minty-meaty. At one end you will find peppermint and other sharp aromatic buzzers of the nose; at the other end you will find the taste of amino acid compounds – glutamate and his friends. At high concentrations, they taste metallic, like crystals of the smell of reacting metal.

It is always interesting to see how our little worlds of sense and sensation are so easily reduced to theory in few dimensions. Quite often though, while the numbers and bullet points are adequate description, they are unable to capture explanation or meaning.

You drink a soup of forest mushrooms: as the glutamates and aromatics intermingle, as the salt closes circuits in your tongue, you feel pleasure. But what kind of pleasure, and why does the aroma of mushroom make you feel comfortable and intelligent? The truth may lie in your past experiences, or in your present company, or in the future expectation of garlic bread. And you may know none of this, except that the soup is great.

Loss

Information theory has many interesting shelves in its meandering libraries. One of those shelves is about data compression. It is a pivotal shelf in our understanding of human thought. In our daily endeavours, our daily walks through the galleries of our universe, we experience far more than we can process. If we were to have the awareness of God and see all things - even only all the things within reach of our simple senses - we would be drowned and paralysed by the abundance of data.

Hence we transform and encode, compress and reify, in an attempt to survive the onslaught of sensory input and make it into useful information. And so, the gateways of perception ensure that much our experience is lost forever. It is not possible to reconstitute a single day of our lives in its entirety - the deepest forms of memory retrieval cannot recover even one day because there is no space for such a recording.

And that is why a single day in the courts of God must be as a thousand ages to us. For the definition of God must include unlimited and lossless storage. For this reason alone (although it is not an explanation entire), He must be beyond the physical structure of the universe, for the universe cannot encode itself.

And it is also why we wake and walk and return to sleep with that vague sense of loss each day, every day - even if we do not at first realise that all our aspirations are afflicted by it. For we lose so much all the time that it is second nature to us. Perhaps, ignorance of loss is relative bliss. Or perhaps, letting go of it all and being satisfied with what we keep is the greatest blessing.