Unmaking 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.

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?

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!”

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.

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.

What is randomness? Gregory Chaitin’s misconception. Lev Shestov and the Medusa-like power we confer on the past when we allow it to control us. But randomness is no friend of freedom, just a final refutation of determinism.

Suppose we see a classical trajectory such as Russo’s decisive goal for the England women’s team against Colombia; what happens to all the other possible quantum paths that could have been realised, such as when the goal is not scored? Everett’s multi-world hypothesis: they all arise; just not for us. Parallels with the Anthropic Principle.

This episode experiments with a way to think of the non-zero energy of the Higgs Field as an example, however mistaken, of how to start to grapple with alien concepts and ideas.

Because everything emerges and evolves, there is always a need to reconsider, revise, reconceptualise, and this is true even with things as familiar as mathematics and natural language.

By translating freely between physical concepts and symbols and models and everyday reality we discover new ways to think about the world with far-reaching implications for science and mathematics. Schrödinger’s Equation as a natural formulation of a new kind of reality.