Science and Truth

Science has a strange fascination.  Everybody would like to lay claim to it.  Those who follow the scientific method, the scientists, are of course the practitioners.  But even those whose work has less connection to science do.  Some of the most insidious of these are the medical hacks, the creationists (a.k.a. intelligent design proponents), the “Christian Science” folks.  But there are other relatively harmless co-opters, such as some science fiction authors and filmmakers.

There’s a general feeling that science automatically implies truth, and everybody wants to claim their version is the truth.  However, I think science only implies truth under some assumptions extraneous to the scientific method.  So I’m going to provide an example of a situation under which science fails to provide the truth.

A Model

The best way to explain what I mean is to assume a model for the universe that is consistent with everything we observe.  This model is as follows: suppose that the entire observable universe is really a simulation on a computer.  Everything has been programmed by somebody.  We are not directly aware that we are simulations because, of course, we are part of the simulation.  The programmer may have coded some “natural laws” into his simulation and then let it run.  The programmer may or may not intervene; if he does, we call it a “miracle”.  In this case, the truth is that there is a god — the programmer.

Science

Science is a method, or maybe a collection of methods, for understanding things we observe (inside the simulation).  The method is supposed to yield an explanation (theory/hypothesis/law of nature)for observed phenomena.  The primary tenets of the scientific method are that

1. the phenomenon must be verifiable.  That is, it must be observable by multiple independent observers.  It isn’t enough if one person claims the phenomenon occurred.
2. the explanation must be testable or falsifiable.  That is, it should be possible to make predictions which, if false, disqualify the explanation — and which can be tested experimentally.  If I claim that God is the explanation, this isn’t falsifiable.  There is no clear prediction anyone can make which, if false, conclusively proves that God doesn’t exist.  This is closely related to the explanation being “in-universe” i.e. a “God” explanation doesn’t satisfy these requirements.
3. the results of experiments to test these predictions must be verifiable and reproducible.  That is, multiple independent observers must be able to reproduce the results.
4. the explanation should be simple. That is, a complex explanation would be rejected in favour of a simple one, until the simple one fails.  This pertains to what we mean by an “explanation” or law.  If we didn’t include this requirement, every phenomenon would suffice as its own explanation — not a very useful state of affairs.

Science is inherently a negative discipline.  You can never prove any law using the scientific method.

Even if an explanation (i.e. a natural law) is true, it is never possible to prove scientifically that the explanation is true.  All you can do is collect evidence for it.  Every experiment which fails to disprove the explanation is evidence for it.

On the other hand, if the explanation is not true, even one negative experiment is sufficient to disprove it.

Science and Truth

Can science unravel the existence of the programmer?

The answer is yes — only if the programmer designed the universe that way.

On the other hand, if the programmer coded the simulation so as not to reveal his existence to us, there’s nothing we can do to discover him.

In the second situation, the truth is there’s a programmer.  But there’s no scientific way to discover that.  In this situation, science cannot decipher the truth.  In fact, there is no way to show that science leads to the truth.

In other words, science can be agnostic to the truth.

But in fact, it gets worse.  It is quite possible that the programmer coded the simulation to be deliberately deceptive.  Let’s say that whenever anyone applies the scientific method to some particular question, there’s a subroutine that determines this and feeds the scientist false results designed to make him think something that is not true.

In this case, the scientific method would always yield the wrong answer to that question.

“The Fundamental Axiom of Science”

The scientific method is the only logically sound method available to us.  It is the best we can do.  However, our best may not be good enough.  Our best method may not be enough to decipher the truth.

This is a sort of fundamental axiom of science: that the scientific method never leads to untruth.  More specifically the axiom is:

If the scientific method shows that some explanation is false, then the explanation is indeed false.

This is an assumption.  We can’t test it, because the programmer may not have designed the universe so that it is testable.  If the assumption holds, the scientific method is valid.  But not otherwise.

Conclusion

This is why I think that, while science will never accept god, science is actually primarily unconcerned with god. There need not be a contradiction between religion and science — until religious types start claiming they are scientific.

Polygyny

The issue of the legality of polygyny has some political overtones in India, with parties like the BJP calling for a uniform civil code and other parties like the Congress saying that Muslims should be allowed to marry multiple women.  I had a pretty interesting discussion recently with a friend.

The idealized question was: what’s fundamentally wrong with polygyny?  Can we give a rational (not religious) reason why it should be outlawed?  If both the men and the women are willing, why should the government (or indeed any religion) impose a ban on it?  Here’s the answer I came up with.

To try to give a reason, we fixed on some assumptions.  We have to clarify what we are trying to achieve and also what kind of society we are referring to.  We assume that:

1. men and women have complete freedom to accept or refuse polygynous or any other marriage arrangements (though this is patently untrue in many societies)
2. polyandry is not permitted
3. in the population, the number of women is not greater than the number of men
4. we measure individual satisfaction solely by the ability to find at least one partner (a person is satisfied if (s)he has a partner and unsatisfied if (s)he doesn’t have a partner)
   1. You could say that this is unrealistic because a man will be more satisfied if he has more wives.  I think the outcome of my arguments isn’t affected if, instead of a zero-one satisfaction based on having a single partner, we have a law of diminishing returns based on the number of partners.  That is, each additional wife adds less satisfaction than the previous one.  But for simplicity, I will argue based on the zero-one satisfaction function
   2. This is also unrealistic because satisfaction might be based on religious reasons rather than the ability to find a partner.  Simply declaring polygyny legal might give satisfaction to the entire population (or a large section of it) for religious reasons.  We assume that this type of satisfaction can be ignored, though it may be important in reality.
5. the wealth of a man is the most important factor in determining how many wives he has
6. the goal of any legislation is to increase the average satisfaction for the people

Under these assumptions, if polygyny is allowed, what will happen is that the wealthiest men will have a larger number of wives and the poorest men will be unable to find wives.  At a macro level, we might guess that the wealthiest 10% of the men might marry 40-50% of the women.  The poorest 10% of the men might only be able to marry maybe 1% of the women.  Since there are fewer women than men, all women will find a husband.

Countries where polygamy is legal

Since there are many more poor men than rich men, this means that there are many men without partners.  This leads to a low level of satisfaction in the population.

On the other hand, if polygyny is banned, there is a much larger pool of women available to the poorest 10% of the men, and a correspondingly larger number of men with wives.  So the level of satisfaction is much higher.

What’s the Use of History?

This was a common question we asked ourselves during high school, when history seemed to have no uses and entailed an interminable sequence of facts that had to memorized.  (History’s cause wasn’t helped by the boring way in which it was taught.)

Once you grow up, it’s kind of obvious that history is important.  It gives you a perspective on current events, helps assess the effects of policies and actions, and observing successful people builds character and keeps the nation honest.  I just wonder why no one told us this in high school!

Determinism I: Definitions of Determinism

In a previous post, I said that determinism and causality are incompatible.  The argument was that in a universe where everything is determined at every time point, it makes no sense to speak of alternatives or counterfactuals of the sort: If A had happened instead of B, then C would have happened instead of D… .  A could never happen, so we are predicating on something impossible: logically, “if A happens instead of B” is like “if 1 = 2″; if that happens, every statement is vacuously true.

I’ve since rethought my ideas about this.  The issue is the exact definition of determinism.  I used an unusual definition, so I got the unusual result that causality and determinism are incompatible.  Here’s my attempt to structure my current understanding of determinism.

It appears that a definition of determinism is contingent on how we describe the evolution of the universe over time.

Let’s assume that at each time point, a system can be described by a state which belongs to some prespecified set of states.  A system here could mean something like the universe, and a state could be a position and momentum for every particle in the universe (assuming the universe only contains particles).  The set of states is the collection of all possible configurations of particles in the universe.  In a simple universe containing only two particles that move only in one dimension, a state would look like ((p1, m1), (p2, m2)), where p1, m1 are the position and momentum of the first particle, respectively, and p2, m2 are the position and momentum of the second particle, respectively.  p1, m1, p2, m2 are all single real numbers here.  (If we were in 3-d space, p1, m1, p2, m2 would be vectors like (x, y, z).)

Definition of Evolution of the System in Time and Definition of Determinism. When we speak of a description of the evolution of the system over time, we are not talking about what actually happens in the system (unless, of course, the system is deterministic in which case what actually happens is the same as what might happen). Instead, we are talking about potential occurrences i.e. predictions about the future.  We might say that if the system is in state X at time 1, it could be in either state Y or state Z at time 2.  This does not mean the system will be in both states Y and Z simultaneously at time 2.  It means that the system will be in one of those two states at time 2; we don’t know which one.  The description is from the viewpoint of an extra-system observer, unaffected by the system’s timeline, who knows what might happen, but not what actually will happen (unless the universe is deterministic).

To describe the system’s evolution, we have to provide an evolutionary tree of some sort.  It might be of the following form:

That is, a tree depicting potential states at each time point.  Providing a particular evolutionary tree with X1 being the actual (observed) state at the beginning of the universe is one option.  Providing “transition functions” that specify what the potential states at the following time point are given any state at a particular time point is another way.

1. [Invalid Definition] (E1) Suppose a description of the evolution of the system over time consists of a single evolutionary tree.  (D1) A system is deterministic if the state of the tree has no forks; otherwise it is non-deterministic.
2. [Valid Definition] (E2) An alternative description of the evolution of the system over time consists of a collection of transition functions (“the laws of physics”).  Given any state at a time, the transition functions can be applied to calculate the possible states of the system at any point in the future (i.e., calculate an evolutionary tree starting at that time point).  (D2) Here we would say the system is deterministic if there is exactly one state possible at every point in the future (i.e., the calculated tree has no forks).

These two definitions look almost identical.  However, the first definition only specifies one possible tree rooted at X1. The second definition lets us calculate the potential states at time 2 once we know the actual state at time 1, using the transition functions.  In other words, we can substitute another state, say X8, at time 1 and still compute what possibilities that universe would have.

Even in the deterministic case, they are different for the above reason.  The second definition is constructive and so tells us what will happen in the case of interventions.  That is, if an external (from outside the system) agent sets the state of the system to some value at some time point, the second definition allows us to calculate the new states in the future of that time point.  The first definition doesn’t.  For example, in the figure, if the state at time 2 is X2, we know that the possibilities for time 3 are X4 and X5.  But what if the state at time 2 is X6?  Under (E1) we have no way of knowing; under (E2) we can calculate the possibilities.

Is the State Obsolete?

I had a very interesting discussion yesterday about whether the concept of the state (i.e., country) is now obsolete. The basic premise is that the world is flat, and that national boundaries are irrelevant in the current global economy. The arguments were roughly along the following lines:

1. Corporations Corporations act in ways that benefit people of all countries. The basic unit of society should be the corporation, not the nation. An American country that lays off people in America frees them up to do better, more imaginative, more creative, more cerebral work. The same company, which hires replacements in India, improves the lives of those Indians, who would otherwise have been unable to find work that paid them so well.
2. Brain Drain The argument was be taken further: brain-drain is not really a drain at all, because national boundaries don’t matter. Thus top brains and talent moving from India to the US is not a concern. It is better to use your brains in the US than to underuse them in India. And India benefits from this: foreign remittances to India are higher than to any other country in the world.
3. America There is only one country in the world, the USA, which has an inherent culture of innovation and discovery. (Or perhaps two or three others at most, Germany being a possibility.) This is why no innovation happens in India, and cannot happen in India — because the people, by nature, lack innovativeness.
4. India India, more than any other place, doesn’t deserve nationhood because of the diversity of its people. An Indian feels like a stranger in a different part of his own country. The US feels more like home than India.

I didn’t agree with these points. My answer yesterday to the question: “What is the point of nations?” was “Bargaining power”. Here’s a Q & A:

Q01: What is the point of nations?
Ans: Bargaining power. A nation is nothing more than a collective that bargains in order to increase the standard of living (SoL) for its citizens. It is the same concept as that of a workers’ union.

Q02: What is the point of nationalism?
Ans: The reason a citizen should support his nation (and the concept of nationhood) is that it increases his chances of a better SoL. Nationalism increases a nation’s ability to bargain, by increasing the nation’s unity.

Q03: Then why shouldn’t everyone in the world pledge their loyalty to those nations that have the highest chances of improving their citizens’ SoL? Specifically, the USA?
Ans: If an individual’s goal is to increase his SoL, he should indeed attempt to become a citizen of the country most likely to increase its citizens’ SoL. The reason this doesn’t happen in practice is countries like the USA realize it is not in their best interest, and have laws in place to prevent easy access to citizenship.

Q04: Which laws?
Ans: To become a citizen, one has to demonstrate both competence (through employability) and American nationalism (through a test and residence). America realizes that notions of the world being flat (in the sense of nonexistent national boundaries) are not in its best interests.

Q05: Why is “no boundaries” not in America’s best interest?
Ans: For Americans to remain prosperous, there needs to be a vastly larger population of non-Americans. There needs to be someone to bargain with, someone to exploit.

Q06: Huh?? Why? What do you mean by “exploit”?
Ans: American power has many immediate reasons, but it can be traced back to a form of imperialism. America’s prosperity relies on the exploitation of non-Americans, just as the prosperity of every other major power throughout history relied on exploitation of other populations. Unless a vast population of non-Americans exists, it will be impossible to use America’s bargaining power to acquire various raw materials from them at prices much lower than the cost it takes to extract them. This is not a bad thing; it is what every major country in the world is trying to do, and is what every trader in a market attempts to do on a daily basis. It’s just that America is better at it than other nations.

Q07:  Rot!  Trade is better for all parties involved.
Ans: Not if one party is in a much stronger position than another. Large nations work very hard to prevent a truly level playing field. It’s very hard for a small, poor country to walk away from a tough deal.

Q08: Even if nations are relevant, why don’t we stop at Indian states? Why shouldn’t Rajasthan, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu be separate countries? Why do we need the whole of India to be one country?
Ans: Because larger countries have more bargaining power than smaller ones.  It’s possible to get too large — when there are not enough foreigners to exploit and internal management becomes hard.  But until we reach that point, it is best to grow larger.

Q09: Then why shouldn’t India annex more land and become an even bigger country?
Ans: If we can, we should. China knows this; that’s why China seized Tibet. But we need to make sure the negative consequences of such an action don’t outweigh the gains.

Q10: Well, the USA can certainly annex more land. Why doesn’t it do so?
Ans: The fallout from such an action would have an unjustifiable cost for the USA. It is so stable and has such a high SoL that managing a population of unwilling conquerees would lower the overall American SoL.  Even integrating willing conquerees into American society would be very costly.  Increasing the American SoL at this point is much more easily accomplished by projection of soft power.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s paintings Starry Night and Cafe Terrace at Night stir something deep. My interpretation (which van Gogh probably never intended) is that they are a contrast between the warm, familiar fold of civilization and the wild unkown mystery of the celestial sky. In Starry Night, it is as if the monumental forces lying in the hearts of suns and galaxies have descended onto the cozy hamlet of Saint-Rémy, which is getting ready to tuck in for the night, unaware and unconcerned about the fantastic forces at work in deep space.
The same sentiment is stirred by Cafe Terrace at Night: the warmth of familiar surroundings and human company contrasted to the unknowns in the surrounding dark streets, and even more, the unknowns up in the sky. I can’t decide what I want to be: a diner at the cafe or a predator lurking in the dark alleys, looking at the diners and waiting for one of them to leave that safe haven.

Religion as a Computational Simplification

What is religion, why do we need to have faith, why do we need gods?

Life includes a series of decisions. Decisions help us optimize our condition, find a route to another condition that is better, more stable, easier or happier. But the number of minute decisions that need to be made is so large that our built-in computer, the brain, is overwhelmed by the computational requirements.

So it takes shortcuts. It categorizes the decisions, pushing some, such as picking up the next spoonful of food or stepping aside to avoid a pothole, into a subconscious decision making queue. Others are not so subconscious but are still routine jobs, like signing your name on a credit card bill or going to work in the morning. Even with these reductions on its computational requirements, the brain would be left with too many significant mid- and long-term decisions.

Religion is the knowledge applicable to another subcategory of these remaining decisions. In many cases, it quickly allows us to use the past experience of wise people to determine a course of action when faced with certain decisions. Trying to figure every one of these out for oneself would put too much of a computational burden on the brain. Religion gives quick answers, without always requiring us to think hard.

Of course there are still a lot of decisions that can’t be addressed by religious knowledge, and which might require individual thinking. But religion helps quite a bit; a lot of right-and-wrong type decisions can be solved quickly by referring to religious knowledge.

The Nonconservation of Causality

Vaguely, this is what the title means: Suppose John is a bad influence on Bob, and Bob robs Dave. Should we say that John is responsible or Bob is? I think it is possible to say that both are.

I’m sure legal systems have thought about this sort of thing a lot…

China and the Dalai Lama

China seems to lose all sense of proportion and balance when it comes to the Dalai Lama, who was recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bush.

China has “summoned” the US ambassador to convey that ties had been “gravely eroded”. Their spokesperson claims that “The move of the United States is a blatant interference in China’s internal affairs, hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and has gravely undermined relations between China and the United States.”

According to this article:

Liu said Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi summoned US Ambassador to Beijing, Clark Randit and lodged a “solemn protest” for disregarding repeated Chinese requests not to honour the Dalai and prevent senior US leaders from meeting him.

The Chinese government is probably the only entity that fails to realize how ridiculous these claims are. By asking the US to prevent its leaders from meeting the Dalai Lama, it is China that is interfering in the affairs of the US. Before setting about summoning US ambassadors, China would do well to remember that (unlike Russia) it owes 100% of its current prosperity and technology to the US. And the Chinese melodrama about their commie government choosing the next Dalai Lama is the most ridiculous farce ever. By what right do the Chinese commies choose the Dalai Lama, the leader of a religion that stands for the opposite of everything the commies do?

The Reverse Racism Strategy in Cricket

It is well known that Australian cricket uses all the resources at its disposal to advance whatever causes it has. In addition to using the best training available, Australians also use sledging to win matches. Australians also tend to be “forgiven” more easily for on-field confrontations than cricketers from the subcontinent, and are good at being the first to level pre-emptive, or first-strike, accusations of a variety of sorts at everybody. Such allegations include accusations of cheating. Almost all their accusations have proved unfounded.

In the last one year, Australian cricket has started its most ridiculous accusation fad yet. Increasingly, allegations of Indian racism have begun emerging out of Australia. Darrell Hair was the first to do this. In the fifth India-Australia one-day international in India this year, the Australians began accusations of “racial abuse” by Indian spectators. Both allegations are ridiculous, and the Australian cricket board knows it. That is why both allegations were never acted upon by them… they know such allegations wouldn’t survive any sort of scrutiny.

However, the accusations do serve to muddy the waters and set precedents for accusations of Indian racism. After several years of such accusations, they will become sufficiently well-entrenched to be taken seriously.

The only remedy for such accusations is for cricket bodies to investigate them and expose them for the frivolous sensationalism they are. This would diminish the credibility of the Australian cricket board, forcing them to think twice before throwing such accusations around.