Unmaking Sense

Episode 10.28: Dualities with one side comprehensible but wrong the other incomprehensible but right

We look at the mathematics and physics of duality and how theories and explanations can have duals. Typically, one version is simple and easy to use but wrong, the other more complex but right(er).

Episode 10.27: Language as abbreviation; conceptual hourglasses whose meanings reach up and down.

We explore the connections between language as abbreviation and rhetorical flourishes that grasp the fleeting ideas that might otherwise disappear; and we describe the parallels with the technical terms we use in mathematics and science.

Episode 10.26: Language as conceptual abbreviation, especially mathematical language.

How we compact meanings using words and symbols, and a reference to the question of what kind of understanding this entails when our symbols and abbreviations stretch well beyond anything most mortals can imagine or conceive.

Episode 10.25: Rhetoric as a device to lay hold on ideas that might otherwise be lost forever.

Rhetoric as a weapon in the armoury of ideas that allows us to grasp in an instant some fleeting fancy that might otherwise escape us forever, even though most such ideas do in fact recur. Connections to trusting our intuitions and pursuing them even though they may prove misguided because in the process we may develop other insights that can be transferred to more fertile locations rather as a beneficial gene can be transplanted into other DNA.

Episode 10.24: Why we shouldn’t bury our waste-paper baskets and what happens if we do. Abduction.

We start to think more intently about the creative process, and especially the relationship between bright ideas, wrong ideas, and the painstaking filling-in of the gaps that must inevitably follow behind the work of great pioneers guided by abductive leaps. Waste-paper baskets help lesser mortals understand the creative process to be less inspiration and more perspiration than most clever people like to admit.

Episode 10.23: The six Asimov Foundation novels as clues/embodiments of how we need to unmake sense.

We return to Isaac Asimov’s six “Foundation” novels and the clues they afford to how we can unmake our sense of history and imagination. This apparently disconnected episode prepares the ground for several of the episodes that follow, and so makes public the waste-paper basket of ideas that lies behind them in an attempt to embody what we have been advocating.

Episode 10.22: Are the desires and ambitions that drive lifestyles mistaken? Unmaking sense of them.

It is not only physicists, mathematicians and chatbots that are susceptible to the “When in hole, …” syndrome: it is possible and even likely that the values driving human aims are similarly defined. How can we unmake this sense of what really matters?

Episode 10.21: Does better understanding require greater complexity? Chatbots and “When in hole …”.

Our chatbot friends find it very hard to cancel what they have already suggested; they don’t understand “When in hope, stop digging”. Is some science the same? Does greater and greater “complexification” promise greater understanding? Or is there a bandwagon effect where everyone is scared lest they fall behind in the race to the next, most comprehensive theory, and nobody can find the vision or the courage to cry “halt!”

Episode 10.20: Three revisions to our habits of thought to help us “think quantum”.

We encourage three revisions to our habits of thought: (1) think fuzzy; (2) think intervals and neighbourhoods; (3) think patience. These as conceptual counterweights to (i) thinking absolute and concrete-definite; (ii) thinking points and lines; (iii) thinking everything in the universe is intelligible to human minds. We should let the universe do what it does and not be in too much of a hurry to slap some complicated theory on it just to reassure ourselves that we really do understand what is going on. We don’t.

Episode 10.19: We explore some more ideas about forces that attract and repel to unmake more sense.

Some ideas about forces that attract and repel based on the notion that their behaviour is caused by configurations of space-time. Symmetry-breaking excursions from equilibrium as what distinguish the quantum and classical worlds.