Universality
What is the most universal science? What will be true where ever you go?
Philosophical reductionism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing newly discovered planet Ross 128b. So Nick, why are we talking about this newly discovered planet Ross 128b?
Speaker B:Well, it's just the latest in a large number of exoplanets that have recently been discovered and the reason why this one looks interesting, by the way, by the time we're recording this, you know, the science gets very quickly updated and we might discover that it either doesn't exist or it's very different to what we thought, but it appears superficially to be fairly Earth-like. It's a similar size, they think, and it has a sun which is very similar to our own. So yeah, so Ross 128b is one of many planets now that have been discovered that might be like Earth and might have life on it and things. Anyway, so obviously we're not cosmologists so we don't really want to talk about the science of that so much, but the question of what conclusions we could draw about what life's like on that planet, if there is life there and particularly if there's sentient life, say. And because I was thinking, I'm an economist and, you know, I think one's natural assumption is, well, that's not going to be much use because, you know, they're going to be, we can assume the physics is probably the same, but biologically they're going to be very different, the creatures there. But actually, I think, you know, economics in a way is more universal than biology because I would argue that if they have constrained resources and they have agents, they will have evolved some of the things that we talk about in economics, they would have evolved the equivalent of trade and pricing and valuation, all these things that actually lots of animals kind of seem to have. And so I was sort of wondering, well, actually, the physicists, they think they're the bosses of the science world because that, you know, what they say is true everywhere. But I actually think economics in some sense is more fundamental or at least has a scope which would make it true even if the physics and biology were completely different. And obviously Peter's an engineer and I'm not sure, the question is, if the physics was different, could Peter still build a bridge, you know? So this question of the relationship between different types of scientific discipline and which is, you know,
Speaker A:more fundamental if that means anything and which is more applicable. I mean, frankly, I'd, you Peter could build a bridge or not. But in the absence of a physicist, I think I could probably build a better bridge than you, Fraser. I have no doubt of that. Yeah, in the absence of having a physicist, we have an engineer, which is more or less close enough. Do you agree with... It's a good job we haven't got any physicists, isn't it? Do you agree with Nick's statement or about the primacy of economics?
Speaker C:Well, it is interesting. I mean, I think without us trying to define what we mean by fundamental, we can skirt around this for hours and hours and hours because I'm going to argue the case, not too strongly, but for engineering. Because engineering, at its heart, is about modifying the natural environment to have some outcome, i.e. build a bridge, in your example, put land where there was no land before. But on a lower level, engineering is about identifying, quantifying, measuring various constraints in order to maximize some outcome. So engineering is like physics, but you often have to consider costs. So you think, oh, well, physics tells you what's possible. And then engineering puts another lump on that and says what's possible within a certain cost constraint or a size constraint or a heat constraint. So assuming that there is some intelligent life on the planet and they are modifying their environment, then what they will do will look very similar to what engineers do on this planet.
Speaker B:Yeah, and I think that's one way of thinking about engineering is it's sort of in real life, how you do the kinds of optimization that economics assumes you're doing. So economists don't care particularly about how to build a bridge, but they can tell you that in order to make that bridge optimal, you have to sort of consider why you're building it and how valuable it is for that bridge to be able to perform certain functions and to compare that against the costs. And so in a sense, engineering is sort of how you actually do that. How do you go about doing that thing? But yeah, I mean, I wonder if, I mean, is it fair to say engineering isn't really a list of, it's more of an activity rather than a set of knowledge. I mean, there's no sort of laws that are engineering laws as such, but there are, but it's an approach. It's an approach to sort of which takes as its input the physical laws that we have and uses them to produce certain
Speaker C:effects. Yes, that would be a fair thing to say. But I mean, I suppose the if there is a fundamental law of physics, then you can't have engineering, that is that you can't have everything. If you want to make something faster or smaller, you're going to have to trade off something else like cost.
Speaker B:Well, hang on. Why is it different from economics then? Because that literally is the first thing you learn in your economics textbook is economics is what you do with scarcity. When you have scarcity, you necessarily get some sort of allocation of those scarce resources. And how those resources are allocated is economics. Well, I'm going to suggest that all economics
Speaker C:departments and universities get subsumed by the engineering department.
Speaker B:This makes no sense. Hold on. I mean, economics explains things that engineering doesn't go near. It has sort of non-overlapping, I think there's non-overlapping magisteria, they call this in science, you know, that actually they're covering different things. But I mean, it's weird. It's weird that we don't, you know, I mean, there isn't a sort of, not formally acknowledged, but there is a kind of social hierarchy in the various scientific disciplines. And people kind of see physics as very much at the top, don't they? I mean, you know, everyone's supposed to have physics envy. Biologists and chemists are supposed to have physics envy. And, you know, sociologists are supposed to have economics envy and economists are supposed to have, you know, maths envy. And I think the idea is that all the envies are supposed to boil down into the maths and the physics departments. And I'm just questioning that hierarchy. I'm saying, well, actually, there are things that, well, I mean, take the theory of evolution, for example. Now, you might say, look, if you look at things like the mechanisms whereby we encode heredity, so DNA, which encodes heredity as the means by which evolution actually happens, because if you don't have heredity, you can't have evolution. And you might say, well, DNA is a chemical, right? So we're going to look, we need to be chemists to understand how that works. And then obviously, as a chemical, it's made up of atoms, and they themselves are sort of explained by physics. So you might say, well, biology sort of reduces to physics. But I would say, well, no, because actually, you know, even if you took away, you've made all the physics different, provided you could still encode information, you could get the evolution happening and you could make predictions about what evolution would be like on another planet where the physics were completely different, you know, where atoms didn't exist or worked
Speaker A:very differently. But can you, is it possible to have, you know, I am not a scientist. So I find
Speaker B:this sort of area sort of slightly... But you work for the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Speaker A:I worked for a company that was like them, and bizarrely got promoted to the position of Senior
Speaker B:Economist as well. Yeah, so I mean, that's pretty good. I mean, in my hierarchy, that makes you
Speaker A:practically the best scientist in the world. But my query is this, is I think you said something
Speaker B:along the lines of a planet with different physics, okay? Yeah. But is that possible? I mean, isn't physics universal? I think that would be fairly difficult. Well, hang on, it's not impossible. I mean, as it happens... I mean, even the conditions are different and behaviour is different. No, I mean, look, I'm pretty hard-nosed about science. I'm not sort of questioning things for the sake of it. But I mean, as a matter of fact, you know, most of, when we look at, a bit of the universe we've actually sampled is tiny, right? Now, it seems that the laws that we've generalised seem to do a pretty good job of explaining everything we've seen, no matter how far away it is. So I mean, broadly, we can say that it's an empirical hypothesis that the kind of laws of physics as we understand them, let's take something like, you know, the theory of special relativity or something, which seems to be true here. And the phenomena that we see elsewhere in the universe, so far as we can tell, it's consistent with that too. So it's an empirical hypothesis, though, it might be that, you know, if you go, if you go, you know, 100 million galaxies over, you suddenly, you know, gravity works differently. I mean, it probably isn't the case, but it's not ludicrous to suggest that might be the case. Now, a physicist would then say, well, okay, but if that was true, then we would find a more fundamental law that seemed to explain why both are true. And if there are parallel universes, you know, some models of cosmology suggest that there are other universes, which might have different laws of physics. Well, actually, all of that is subsumed by physics.
Speaker A:Right. And I think one of the things that goes back to is, I don't know if this is the right word, but is irreducibility. Because ultimately, in these, you're always going back to a potentially more fundamental version of physics. But one of the weaknesses of engineering and economics is that it depends on having someone or something in place there. And even the same with biology. So you can have a planet with not much going on in terms of economics or engineering. And so therefore, surely physics is the king in that in that in that in that in that in that place. And, and you can't have you can't have economics and and and engineering without physics.
Speaker B:But you can get engineering provided we turn up there as soon as we turn up, we can start engineering it. But you know, a rock, if you put a rock on top of another rock, you'll end up with a pile of rocks that's higher than both of the original rocks put together. That's basically engineering. And, and see, no, I mean, yes, this and this is what I'm saying about the sort of universality of economics is that it doesn't really care. It just says where, where there are people, likewise, with the theory of evolution, you know, where there are, you know, we have certain conditions where you've got the ability to have hereditary and you heredity, and you have the ability to have things that are able to capture energy and do things and reproduce in a way that that has heredity, then you'll end up now you'll end up with evolution, you can't not have it. It's like if there's a selection effect, and you have a heredity, you've got to have evolution. And I would say the same about, you know, economics, if you have agents, and they don't have to be sort of conscious agents, like us, necessarily. I mean, machine if you had a world full of machines that were trying to compete for resources, you know, they're then you would end up evolving economics, you would have to.
Speaker A:Okay, so moving this beyond planets and general universe. And I mean, what what we're thinking about what this podcast is about, which is about analysis and decision making. What can we learn from from what we've just talked about, Peter?
Speaker C:Well, to bring it back to analysis, decision making and forecasting and prediction, those things only really matter if there's somebody trying to make a decision, some intelligent agent trying to make a decision. And I think likewise, with engineering and economics, they only matter if there's an agent, no matter how simple, trying, who's able to make a decision between do something or not do something to maximize some event, maximize some outcome. Otherwise, it is just rocks bouncing into each other. And it's this, then it's the, it's sort of the realms of the mathematicians with chaos theory, and the smaller level, the physicists with quantum effects. So I think it really, is there an agent, and at which point, then it changes between different fundamental, which science is king.
Speaker B:Okay, Nick? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, you know, that's being an agent doesn't isn't some magical thing. It doesn't sort of suddenly mean that, that we can chuck out the laws of physics, obviously. But what it gives you is a higher level of explanation to be able to draw on. So if you ask why someone, you know, broke into a car to steal something, there's kinds of various levels you can you can bring to bay, you can say, well, they wanted that thing, so they could sell it and buy some booze. That's a sort of very high level explanation in terms of that person's reasoning. Or you could say, well, that person, you know, had a had a sort of terrible upbringing, where they were not taught about the importance of private property. Or you could look at them as a biological machine and say, well, look, this person's arm got lifted up. And, you know, that then they then they use their hammer to break this glass. And this is how glass works, which is why it shattered. You know, or you could look at their individual atoms. And I still get the sense that actually, probably you could construct some kind of explanation on any of those levels. But I feel I think that, you know, the most useful explanation usually is the one that's the next level down. So if we're looking at trying to forecast, you know, what's North Korea going to do next? It's no good trying to build a physical model of Kim Jong Un and sort of predict what he's going to do as a physical creature. You know, what you want to do is try and understand what is going on when he's making a decision. And so actually, you know, physics is no good, is no use. It's no use in practice. And I question whether it's any use in principle in trying to predict what he's going to do, because the tightest explanation is going to be something in terms of what he's trying to achieve and what beliefs he has about the world. That's going to give you a better prediction. You know, so I think the sort of in practical real world times, actually, 99% of what we use when we're trying to understand the world is higher level stuff. It is things like economics and engineering, and it's not stuff like physics. So, yeah, so I think, you know, but it doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, one of them is more valid, but certainly those higher level explanations tend to be more useful.
Speaker A:So they're just different lenses through which we can, from which we can ascertain the truth. How about that?
Speaker B:Well, yeah. Although, I mean, there's a lot of debate about how reductionism works, you know, how you manage to, how you can say, how you can say that something is essentially something else. You know, when we say that water is essentially H2O, and that H2O is essentially some hydrogen, you know, and oxygen molecules banding together, and that they're essentially some other set of things involving protons. I mean, actually, that seems like something which we find intuitively easy to understand. But actually, the concept of reductionism is still a matter of debate, you know, how it actually works. Okay. But yeah, I mean, luckily, you know, we have evolved not to need to do that. You know, we've evolved to be able to understand the world on a variety of levels.
Speaker A:Okay. And talking about superiority of different sciences, but moving away from science. One thing we haven't discussed is, is, is the primacy of theology. Okay, so where, you know, where we can always find the eternal truth in that.
Speaker B:Yeah, you didn't you study theology? I did. I did. So which out of which, what, what are the scientific laws that theology has discovered?
Speaker A:None of them.
Speaker C:But it might one day find the ultimate truth.
Speaker A:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker B:Yeah, when we haven't actually put the boot into any particular disciplines.
Speaker A:Well, let's do it another way. Let's do another way. Okay. So I, let's think about when we were back at university. Yeah. And to think about individuals and groups of people. Yeah. Which were the ones that you disliked the most? Oh, that's a good one. Because I know who I disliked the most, which was the people studying politics, philosophy and economics. Right. And they were just, and I, it's something I really, I like, I like it because it's one of those things where I didn't even know what PPE was. But it was only after two or three years at university, I started to realise there was a group of people there. Oh, I don't like that person. They're pretty awful. Oh, that person's pretty awful. And they were all just really overly ambitious.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think they put themselves at the top of the, of the, of this sort of academic status hierarchy for some reason. They're sort of self appointed kings of academia, aren't they? PPE people.
Speaker A:Yeah. And it was only, yeah, like I said, and I liked the fact that it was only later I realised that what they all had in common was that they were studying PPE.
Speaker B:And they were all, and they all probably all went off to be MPs.
Speaker A:Oh, God, they all went off to politics and they were all at the BBC and awful places like that. Yeah. So, yeah, that was that lot. What about you, Peter? Who did you dislike?
Speaker C:Well, probably the art historians or historians more generally, because history is, the study of history obviously has use to look at the world and to try and work out what happened and to retrospectively try to build records of what may or may not have happened. But it's so unscientific, as an engineer, it's so totally unscientific and conjecture based, it could just be a lot more rigorous. If it was a lot more rigorous, then I think it'd be a lot more useful.
Speaker A:So...
Speaker C:And particularly the art historians, because art again has its place, but to do history of art is sort of to compound this complete conjecture.
Speaker A:But that's such a kind of scientific way of looking at it, you know, it's a kind of a self fulfilling approach.
Speaker C:If you're just doing it for the sheer hell of it, well, then why not? But let's not call it an academic discipline. Let's just call it a hobby.
Speaker B:Well, yes. And I think that's most of the people doing art history don't really need a job, do they? The kind of people who are looking to go and get a career afterwards because they don't need one. But yeah, I mean, my girlfriend at the time was an art historian, so I'm not, I can't criticise that particularly. And in fact, I think, you know, done properly, art history is, you know, almost a kind of anthropology where you look at why it is that humans choose to depict things the way they do. To be honest, the people who roiled me the most were not arts graduates. Because I think that's, you know, the good thing about arts graduates is no one actually takes them seriously. But what? Well, you know, when you look at, I mean, you know, I did philosophy and economics and you look at sort of the kinds of discussions that the people in the English department were having about the meaning of a particular piece of text and, you know, theories about the death of the author. And you just think, well, what is this actually about? What fact is up for discussion here? And it's just basically a kind of organised guff fest where they all sit around and discuss various, in inverted commas, theories. But I didn't really mind that because it's not bothering me at all. No, what used to really rile me is actually the physicists who were sometimes forced against their will to take philosophy of science classes. And they just they had this really fixed view that philosophers didn't understand science and that philosophers were just sitting about in their armchairs rationalising. And whereas they, the scientists, they were on the real cutting edge of knowledge. And, you know, that studying philosophy of science was just a load of nonsense because they could see things for real inside their electron microscopes. And that, I think, annoyed me more than anything else because it was an unwillingness to question the fundamentals of their own discipline. But there we are.
Speaker A:Well, that being the case, that makes me feel quite good. So the world needs more theologians.
Speaker B:But nobody has said anything which implies that.
Speaker A:Because we always knew we were on shaky ground. And so we knew that we were just asking questions to which there is no answer.
Speaker B:So, I mean, how many angels can you get on the head of a pin? What's the latest thinking?
Speaker A:Tune in for the latest for the next podcast on that. Gentlemen, thank you very much. I enjoyed that. So we'll wrap up there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye. Bye bye.
