Don't Look Now, Cont'd
But perhaps I was too eager to embrace the extravagant claims made for GoogleQ.
Sean Carroll, Professor of Natural Philosophy (!) at Johns Hopkins, is a brilliant expositor of the state of modern physics. For Great Courses, he has given a whole set of lectures on the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which he seems to embrace. According to that interpretation, when a wave function assigns a set of probabilities to the position of a particle, each position that has any probability assigned to it actually exists as a location for the particle in some real world! This undermines, if it does not eliminate, the role of "measurement" and "observation," and hence of consciousness, in fixing "what is actually happening" as opposed to "what is predicted to happen." Measurement and observation certainly do not depend upon the existence of a human observer. Schrodinger's cat is actually alive in one world, actually dead in another.
And so I feel so much better now that we are back on solid empirical ground (sarcasm).
Don't Look Now
But sources say that scientists connected with Google, of all places, have just made a profound discovery.
Quantum mechanics holds, of course, that at the tiniest levels, wave and particle are both accurate descriptions of the phenomena before us. Before observation, we can only say that a wave function predicts the probability of a particle having a particular location; it is only upon observation, however, that the wave resolves to a particle at a particular spot.
This by itself is highly mysterious; why should it be so? It seems to be too anthropocentric for the modern world, rather a throwback to the times before Galileo when we were assumed to be at the center of all things.
I do not understand quantum computing. I guess that quantum concepts can be exploited to create computers that are vastly quicker and more efficient than ones that rely on conventional computation. To date, though, quantum computers are said to have been plagued with little errors, inherent in the nature of how they work, that have been a big barrier to commercial development.
Now, though, comes a system developed by Google that promises to break the big barrier. It does this by melding the work of the physical quantum machine with a particular and novel form of Artificial Intelligence that is able to predict and adjust for the effect of these errors before they happen! The machine and the AI talk to each other in real time, and the machine improves its operations by learning, continuously, from the AI component! Let us call this breakthrough technology, for now, GoogleQ.
Even before all of this, it was fair to ask, apropos of quantum mechanical theory in general, whether the gaze of an orangutan counts as "observation" sufficient to fix the location of a particle. And beyond that, could the gaze of a perfect android do the same? If so, the theory would no longer be anthropocentric, but we would be faced with a different but no less profound ontological shock -- a merging of man and machine "in the eyes of the universe" as it were!
Well, it seems that we are here. The people running GoogleQ need a break once in a while as we all do. As I understand it, they could all lock the doors of the lab with the machine and the AI running over this coming Memorial Day weekend, and the observer-induced wave collapses would continue to occur!
Some have called the Google breakthrough "a philosophical earthquake" that buttresses the idea that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. It would seem as well to drive a stake through the heart of pancomputationalism, the view that all the world is a computer, because if it were, and computers can "observe" in a quantum sense, then there would be nothing that is not observed!
And indeed, what exactly is "unobserved" after GoogleQ?
Wind the clock back to 1965. We are in a state-of-the-art (for 1965) pencil factory in Dubuque. At one point in the assembly line, there are hundreds of two-foot-long lengths of wood and graphite, proceeding apace. A cutting machine is employed to cut them into uniform lengths of six inches. But the machine is not perfect. It sometimes errs, but always on the side of making the pencils too big! Accordingly, further down the line there is a little ruler against which each pencil is laid. If it is too long, another blade automatically comes down and trims it to six inches exactly.
Certainly this machine, without human intervention, can be said to have "measured" the pencils. Did it need to "observe" them in a quantum sense to measure them? Isn't GoogleQ doing something very similar to what the assembly line did in more primitive fashion?
It seems that we are on the verge of teasing out the relationship between information technology and consciousness itself. This is something that Jacques Vallee, the brilliant computer scientist and ufologist, has long predicted, raising quizzical looks as he did. It makes me wish that I had another 20 years before me in this life, just to "see what happens."
My Academic Apex, and the Girl Who Was Not There
It was a warm spring day. It may have been in the spring of 1972, more likely the spring of 1973, which was my last term at Cornell.
I was studying philosophy, with a particular focus on philosophy of mind and language. (This, I thought, was the secret to everything.) And I had discovered within that field a man -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- whom I found to be utterly compelling in both his philosophy and his person. As luck would have it, Wittgenstein's closest American friend was Norman Malcolm, an eccentric son of the prairie who had sat in on Wittgenstein's famed lectures at Cambridge in the early 1930s. Forty years later, with Wittgenstein at the peak of his power in the academic world (he had died the year I was born -- 1951), I was assigned Professor Norman Malcolm as my academic advisor.
By this time I had exhausted the undergraduate course catalog when it came to my narrow field of concentration. I had developed another love, for Russian language, that more than filled my plate, but I also wandered into existentialism and ethics, without much passion for either. Further, as a natural complement to all this, I took introductory and intermediate courses in linguistics.
In the early 1970s, linguistics was undergoing a revolution (there were many others). On the wane was descriptive linguistics, which arose out of anthropology. It featured what purported to be a universal "script" that told you how to pronounce words in virtually any language. (I forget how, or whether, it really dealt with tonal languages like Chinese.) And it provided and fleshed out the standard taxonomy of tongues, grouping them into familiar families and sub-families, and tracing back their histories where that was possible. ("Old Church Slavonic" was to Modern Russian perhaps as Middle English was to Modern, but don't hold me to that.)
On the rise was something entirely different. A young radical at M.I.T. of all places, whose name was Noam Chomsky, had puzzled over the fact that any random child of two or three could be plunked into a community anywhere in the world, and in short order and with relative ease that child would master the language of his or her community. This could only be possible if there was a common core underlying every language, and only if every child maintained within his/her brain some sort of template upon which disparate languages could be mapped. Chomsky called this core "deep structure." Having mapped, say, Swahili onto this deep structure, the child, in fact if not on any conscious level, had plotted out a series of "transformations" that strictly, rigorously brought one from the common deep structure to the "surface structure" of Swahili, which is to say actual Swahili sentences spoken by actual human beings (hence the term "transformational grammar," used to describe the new linguistics that was to displace the old.) Chomsky and his minions could actually plot out on paper what these transformations looked like, which was largely like trees, with branchings most but not all of which were binary-- male/female, statement/interrogation, but also past/present/future.
This whole process was, of course, innate. You couldn't ask little Billy which subliminal path he had taken from the common core to get to "Momma! Daniel bit me on the nose!" In this sense, in old philosophical terms, it was very much in the tradition of Cartesian idealism, which counseled us to look inside ourselves for the ideal truth (Descartes himself grounded in this respect in Platonism).
And here is where Chomsky bumped up against Wittgenstein, among whose most famous aphorisms was "nothing is hidden." Wittgenstein saw language as intertwined with life and culture. One of the collections of his thoughts, gathered by his acolytes and published after his death, was called "Remarks on Colour." If memory serves, it was especially in these remarks that he attacked the idea that, to recognize a fire engine as red, we somehow compare the color of the engine to a perfect template of red that we maintain ... anywhere, it matters not whether we situate it in it mind, subconscious or brain. For how were we to know that the template itself was red!? Were we comparing it to a further, deeper red template and, if so, did that process go on ad infinitum? Did we have a little homunculus within our heads that was doing all of the real thinking for us, just subliminally?
I had a further problem with Chomsky and his minions that went to their academic integrity. All of their work, all of their boring little tree structures, purported to explain syntax -- the rules for combining words into phrases or sentences. But it should go without saying that the purpose of language is to convey meaning. Accordingly, no account of language can be complete without accounting not only for syntax but also for semantics. Here, Chomsky and the troops posited that something very similar to what his syntactical rules were doing was happening in the world of meaning as well. Atomic elements of meaning at the deep level bubbled up into atomic expressions of meaning at the surface level. (By "atomic" I mean that there are sharp edges to all of these semantic components, even in actual spoken languages.) But when asked to describe these transformations, Chomsky and his pals pulled a carnival trick, in effect saying "those beautiful little beans are under that other walnut shell over there!" And the beans would never be revealed; rather, the revolutionaries made reference to what amounted to a mere dictionary, and then tried to dress it up as the Holy Grail of Meaning. These moves were not only misguided, they were dishonest.
I should say that this latter criticism was largely of my own making, with echoes, no doubt, from an essay or two, in counterpoint to the great Chomsky, that was included in our readings in Linguistics 204. I had no friends or even acquaintances among my colleagues in the faculties of philosophy or linguistics with whom I could discuss such things, and I never took advantage of the opportunity to engage, one on one, with my professors, except for two or three mandatory sessions in the chambers of Professor Malcolm. I was intensely shy, and I considered my very presence at Cornell to have been a gift that I was to take in hand and thereafter just do the work and keep my mouth shut. "Domine, non sum dignus ..." we used to say before the host was put on the tongue.
And so in that spring, with the special dispensation of Malcolm, I had been allowed to take the only graduate-level course I ever took at Cornell, Philosophy 40X, which was called something like "Advanced Studies in Wittgenstein." I recall that the class was small, maybe fifteen students, and I have a mental picture only of one of the students, a young woman with short-cropped blondish hair and a hippie mien. Hardly anyone spoke in the class except for Malcolm himself unless Malcolm invited it; the overall mood, as in many of my philosophy courses, was oddly sullen! And I myself could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my entire career up to that point when I had volunteered to say something in a philosophy class.
It is sometimes said that Wittgenstein was such a powerful personality that some of his teaching eccentricities, like stopping mid-sentence for two or three minutes with a grimace, demanding, it seemed, further inspiration from the gods before completing the sentence, rubbed off on his disciples, and it was also said that Malcolm was among them.
So here we are. On that day and in that class, Malcolm got around, eventually, to the heart of the course as he saw it. He gave his own short explanation of the Chomsky revolution. (Even though this was a graduate course, I might have been better schooled in the subject than most of the Ph.D candidates in the room, who would have seen this subject as a detour from some esoteric thing that they would address, as no one had ever quite done before, in a brilliant dissertation.)
Malcolm paused. "What," he asked, "would Wittgenstein have said about Chomsky?" After a little pause, on sudden impulse, I raised my hand. "Yes, Donovan." (It was a vestige of his Oxbridge days for Malcolm to refer to students by their last names, with no honorific "Mr." or, at the time, "Miss.") With uncharacteristic confidence I replied -- "Wittgenstein would say that Chomsky's entire enterprise is itself in need of interpretation; it is not self-interpreting."
Malcolm just kept lecturing, as if the question had not been asked, let alone answered. But after five, maybe seven, minutes, he circled back. "As Donovan said ..." My reaction to this was inner elation. Here was a very profound question that required some authentic understanding of perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th century and also of the upstart who would dominate linguistics (and, of course, leftist political theory) for the remainder of my life, and I had answered it correctly, even elegantly perhaps, notwithstanding the fact that Wittgenstein died before Chomsky's linguistic revolution, and Chomsky, so far as I know, never directly confronted Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and meaning.
But after class, walking back toward my dubious Collegetown digs on the south side of campus, my elation gave way to something else. With whom would I share this little triumph? There was no one. It would be impossible to provide the context for it in my letters home, to siblings or to my mom and dad, both of them high school graduates only. I had good friends at Cornell, but they were struggling with engineering, the pre-med curriculum, or economics; they did not have even a theoretical interest in what I was studying. And I knew that I had no need even to credential myself in philosophy, to build a reputation among the faculty, because I would go to law school, not to graduate school. So this would just be an ephemeral little bauble that I could clench in my palm for a bit.
Since I was a melancholic, and never more so than in those days, during that walk I thought about an alternative life, one in which there was a pretty girl waiting for me in my crummy Collegetown apartment. In her arms, in post-coital pillow talk, I would lay all of this out for her. She would be proud of me. Perhaps she would reciprocate with a story of having won some classroom debate about whether Dickens was essentially British and whether Proust was essentially French. I would be equally proud of her! And our little bubble would insulate us from the prevailing Ithaca loneliness.
Terminal Advice, from the Sage of Warwick, Rhode Island
"We should not attempt to understand the world," said Harald Malmgren, about three weeks before his passing on February 13 of this year. "It just is."
And yet Harald had an indefatigable moral compass. He sinned, no doubt, many times, but it mattered to him that he sinned. He belied the old maxim that "a good man cannot be a great man."
At Cross Purposes
On the one hand, I have an urge to discard all of my unneeded factoids, like a bomber crew frantically tossing stuff overboard because a fuel leak otherwise may leave the plane crippled, short of its goal.
What factoids? Oh, for example, in the heat of summer, the clarity of the water inside the burst tar bubbles that lined the very edge of the road where I grew up. The myth, or reality, of the head of Ted Williams sitting in a frozen vault. But at least 100,000 more. And "Everything Must Go!"
Without the factoids, does anything of me remain? Perhaps that's the point. Let it all become confetti.
And yet, when an artist labors to create meaning from a blank canvas, the meaning is built up from the meaningless. Consider, for example, this first paragraph of a Leonid Rankov story, with its details almost all of which could be otherwise, as he leads us towards things of more importance -- dolphins, idiots savants, the diaspora:
Already a light rain had begun to fall. It was the first October rain, always unexpected after the close humidity of summer days. It mixed in with the smell of asphalt and the swollen blades of grass in the lawns, spotted the windshields with beads, hung in the air from the grey clouds to the very earth.
"Speak, Memory!"
