Eric -
But do you know how powerful you are, just by being superhumanly
articulate?
Coming from you, of all people, this itself is a supreme compliment!
One of the reasons I am on this list (and actually read most of it's
traffic!) is that there are a number of incredibly articulate people,
most of whom I envy for their relative brevity, but also (as in your
case) their significant focus and depth! Some (including yourself) also
challenge me nicely with superior detailed thoroughness (e.g. Vladymir).
With one line, emphasizing knowing versus understanding, you directed
the whole stream into a conversation about information theory.
I wish it had been that intentional! If so, I could be Maxwell's Daemon
of FRIAM! But yes, it did (d)evolve rapidly into something more
interesting/actionable perhaps than the age old mud-slinging between
disciplines.
It seemed to me that the original quote had to do with the difference
between thinking about doing something, or talking about doing
something, and actually _doing something_.
Ah yes... my many personalities are at war on this battlefield all the
time. When I write my massive missives here, it is often evidence that
one who prefers /talking about (?doing?)something/ has prevailed
temporarily, usually because the ones who prefer /thinking/ or /doing/
are exhausted from too much of their preferred activities to fight it
out with the former! I wonder if Sun-Tsu wrote a sequel to /Art of War/
known as /Art of Thinking Too Much/! I doubt I am alone in this crowd,
on this topic.
We work hard to make good language, with care for lexical items,
syntactic rules, and whatever we can do to formalize rules for
semantic composition. And I have great respect for people who then
try to use that language carefully, recognizing that scientists often
don't, as much as perhaps they could.
Many scientists aspire to being technicians with things rather than
words, some scientists are therefore also very good engineers. Words
and things are not mutually exclusive: I love doing things with
things... I do things all the time with things... stacking them, shaping
them, joining them, fastening them, heating them, beating them into
shapes that suit my needs (or whimsy), up to and including thinking
about them. With words.
At some point in my life words became things for me and for better or
worse, I began to operate on them in ways similar to how I operate on
physical things in the world. When I discovered "tooling" and "jigs"
in my exploration of manipulating "things" I discovered self-modifying
code, modern language is by definition self-modifying, seeing it in
practice with physical objects made me think differently about thinking
about thinking.
Your own explorations into historical linguistics might be of relevance
here... some of the (possible) phase transitions in human language? In
the spirit of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, I notice that many of
my own personal "evolutions" seem to parallel those of human historical
ones... and I only come to appreciate the historical significance of
phase transitions in human understanding when I myself have made those
same transitions. Perhaps it is why most of us do not come to
appreciate the history of various disciplines until later in life.
But in the end, we have enough cases behind us that we should now
understand that our best attempts to construct good language are
always limited reflections of what we happen to have experienced up to
that time. (French experience, _experiment_, ...) We could have
discoursed, and argued, and reasoned, forever, about the meaning and
use of the word "time" pre-relativity. But if we hadn't had to
confront Maxwell's equations and various other experiences of the
world, we probably could never have merely-talked ourselves into
realizing that the word did not have an unqualified, reliable meaning
in the way we were using it (who knows, in a different reality, maybe
it could have, so logic alone could never have told us which reality
we inhabit; I don't know). We had to be thrown back to a stage where
the most desperate among us could say "Will you stop talking about
'time' and start talking about clocks that tick, and people whose
hearts beat and who get old _where they are_ even as they move about."
And from that, we could learn for the first time how to build
spacetime diagrams, and so forth, and at some level, once we knew how
to be careful using the diagrams reliably, we were free to again use
the word time, and perhaps even use it carelessly in cases (when its
purpose was not to replace the diagrams, but merely to share attention
to them), and still be able to carry out and anticipate acts in the
world that we never could have before, with all the linguistic care in
the world.
Well said, well chosen example.
I know this is the most shop-worn example, but I still think that it
and several others like it carry a relevant piece of meaning.
Renormalization and the theory of phase transitions did the same thing
for the notion of "object", and (simply passing by any rhetoric that
doesn't produce distinguishable results for calculations or
experiments), quantum theory taught us that "state" and "observable"
were not even in principle the same kinds of concepts. Someday, a
sensible theory of ecology, development, and evolution will hopefully
lead to a similar sensible thinking about individuality. Each of
these has been a wrenching experience, because we really have had to
throw away a piece of what had been fundamental to our ability to
speak and to reason, and to simply leave a void until we could build a
new foundation out of different pieces. It was a very
extra-conversational exchange with our world of experiences, even if
it was supported all along the way by intense and labored
conversation, trying to figure out how to get oriented.
Nan-in's Cup of Tea <http://www.zenguide.com/zenmedia/index.cfm?id=6>
would seem to be responsive to your examples and to the general mood
inspiring the original quote:
/NAN-IN AND THE CUP OF TEA/
/Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912),
received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.//
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept
on pouring.//
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain
himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"//
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and
speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" /
It seems that a combination of a willingness to mistrust language
while still trying to use it well, but also, to continually try to be
rebuilding it from experience, is the pragmatic thing that
distinguishes science.
Well said. If it is not obvious, I /do/ hold science as a practice in
high esteem, it is only Science as a Religion that leaves me pondering.
Philosophers are good at recognizing the
unreliability of language, so no corner on that market. And I think
everybody, science and philosophy both, wants to both know and
understand. But there is a sense in which scientists can be content
if the language of science is something like the calls at a barn dance
-- they keep us doing things together, they rely on shared experience,
and they have to change as the community changes the dance -- and
still do something productive, that seems to capture a major defining
characteristic of the enterprise.
And yes, this tension is also part of the productivity.... without it
we might continue to make statements as those attributed to Lord Kelvin
around the beginning of the 20th century :
/"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that
remains is more and more precise measurement". /
Or perhaps in your terms here, there are no new barn dances worth
dancing, just increasing our precision with the old ones as Michael
Flatley (Lord of the Dance) has perhaps become!
The polymath scientist/inventor (Lord Kelvin, not Lord Dance) might have
been a content lurker or avid poster on this list 100+ years earlier.
Sounds like a good premise for a Steampunk Novel! How to entertwine far
from equilibrium systems with Kelvin's work in thermodynamics and this
skeptical perspective?
Along with all the other stuff on information theory that is already
in this thread, all of which I also like.
Is a good thread. Some of our best thread defy good thread hygiene and
insist on fraying and becoming many other (interesting) threads. Has
anyone studied discussion threads as autocatalytic networks?
Thanks for the kind words and for weighing in here... your work is amazing.
- Steve (the powerful and articulate ;)
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
