Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.42: The questions we ask may be the wrong questions because we start from a wrong place.

We tend to assume that we have problems that need to be solved but much less frequently to assume that we misunderstand which problems need to be solved. One such problem is the question of truth, which is not perhaps what we think it is, and cannot be what we think it is, but nevertheless controls the criteria we use to evaluate the solutions to the problems we have even though they are the wrong problems. Truth sets the wrong criteria for the solution of the wrong problems.

Episode 6.41: Why we can’t know what is going on with any certainty.

The majority of the factors affecting the trajectory of the world are invisible, so our estimates of what we like to call cause and effect are at best approximate guesses.

Episode 6.38: Objections to pure randomness from such things as Ramsey Theory.

Ramsey theory says that any sufficiently extensive system must inevitably exhibit some kind of order. That means that when we look at the world will be likely to find order in it even if there has never been any conscious deliberate intention to put it there. We explore some of the implications of this view and we challenge one of the inferences that some make to the effect that there can therefore be no such thing as pure randomness.

Episode 6.40: Why equality is unachievable and unsustainable but inequality is not our aspiration.

There is a big difference between accepting some degree of inequality and even exploitation as inescapable because the world cannot exist in a completely equal state permanently, but that is not the same as saying that we aim for inequality or knowingly allow exploitation. We should rather strive for as little inequality and as little injustice and as little exploitation as possible in a world in flux.

Episode 6.39: Does Ramsey theory tell us what kinds of order social systems must exhibit?

There is more than a sense in which anarchism even interpreted with the very best of intentions seems to present us with insuperable difficulties when we consider the possibility that groups, individuals or even whole nations might take advantage of it in order to come and “steal our stuff”. Can anything be done about this? What are the minimal levels of leadership and order, of power and social hierarchy necessary to sustain a society?

Episode 6.37: Really unmaking sense is much harder than we might think …

Can we even conceive of the universe as if it operates according to no principles at all other than that what we might metaphorically call that its next state is accessible from where it is now? This kind of pure randomness is something human minds find almost impossible to think their way through. Yet it may hold the key to everything.

Episode 6.36: That the universe is irreducible is stranger than it may appear at first sight.

The idea that there are processes that are either computable irreducible or just plain irreducible, that go merrily along their way despite the absence of some underlying principle that decides how they behave, is much harder to appreciate than we might at first sight think. If the universe is really purely random and not governed by any intrinsic underlying laws that we might get some sort of intellectual handle on by formulating those laws, what kind of being does it have that carries on doing what it’s doing despite the fact that there is no underlying law and no underlying set of principles governing that behaviour? Is such a notion even intelligible? Probably not. But that’s my point: perhaps the only intelligible thing about the universe is that it is unintelligible; and not only to we poor finite humans, but to anything at all including the Vogons.

Episode 6.35: We extract our kind of significant order in the form of life from the order available.

We talk about “using” energy but nobody can “use” energy. What we mean is that we degrade usable energy into less usable forms of energy. That increases the disorder in the universe which we measure using the physical concept of entropy. Our bodies are in effect machines designed to extract and create significant order, order that is which is significant for at least us if not the Vogons, from the available order around us in the universe. How we do that is one of the great mysteries of life. That we do it is undeniable. And so in extracting by separation significant order from the universe albeit at the expense of a net increase in the disorder of the universe, we create significant meaning from inside a system absolutely indifferent to what we are doing. Never forget the Vogons.

Episode 6.34: Internal change without external change; separation and making our own meaning.

How can the inside of an isolated system change despite the fact that from an outside perspective nothing changes? We think about this from the point of view of energy and of how it’s possible for there to be an exchange of energy between parts of a system even though the system as a whole has no change of energy. We think about the universe and how even if it does not change by receiving anything from outside or emitting anything to the outside because as one might say it doesn’t have an “outside”, it can nevertheless support life inside which involves separating significant from insignificant events. How is that possible?

Episode 6.33: Why it is so difficult to imagine what it is like to be a bat, even to be our selves.

We continue our exploration of what it’s like to be an ant or what sort of intelligence an anthill is displaying and whether it needs to be intentional, and then we think about what kind of intelligence a Vogon may believe that we have, and how superior intelligences can perhaps not imagine what it is like to be human any more than we can imagine what it is like to be a dog or a bat or an ant or a virus. Yet once we allow for a multiplicity of sources of self-referential knowledge, the picture again changes.