Physicists and philosophers fight it out

I have lately spent rather too much time and effort catching up on a controversy concerning reactions to a book by physicist Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing, published last year), and, in particular, concerning a muscularly negative review of the book by philosopher David Albert.

The controversy has been recently reignited by the withdrawal of Albert's invitation to join a prestigious panel (including Krauss) for a public discussion at The American Museum of Natural History.

As Jason Streitfeld makes clear, one of the underlying issues relates to the status of philosophers vis à vis scientists (in this case physicists).

The demarcation lines and motivational factors in this disinvitation dispute are not all that clear, however. It should be noted, for instance, that David Albert, as well as being a philosopher, also has a PhD in physics, and that attitudes to religion are playing a key role.

Albert's main contention is that Krauss's 'nothing' (relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states) are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff, and therefore far from nothing as generally understood.

But Albert is particularly scathing about what he sees as Krauss's facile rejection of religion. He writes:

"When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb."

Krauss called Albert's review "moronic", by the way.


Physicists have a history of disparaging philosophers. Some months ago, one of the most reflective of contemporary physicists, the (then) 88-year-old Freeman Dyson ruffled a few feathers by disparaging contemporary philosphers in an essay published in The New York Review of Books.

I read it at the time, and intended to do a piece on it, but didn't get around to it. Strangely, the expression "the fading of philosophy" – used by Dyson – must have lodged in my subconscious, and I used it as the title for a post last month without realizing its source.

I am in sympathy with much – though not all – of what Dyson says, and I am attracted by his somewhat world-weary tone and contrarian instincts.

There is something of the amateur and the dabbler about him, and he has (or had) one of those almost freakishly clever mathematical minds which can sometimes lead to a certain kind of hubris about one's own abilities and judgements as well as to an overestimation of the power of technologies to solve problems.

Dyson balances these tendencies with a genuine sort of wisdom, however. His little anecdote about a disappointing encounter with Wittgenstein, and then the story of his accidentally coming across Wittgenstein's grave in the course of a winter walk fifty years later, is quite moving.

Dyson's essay is a series of reflections on (rather than a review of) a book by Jim Holt based on interviews with various thinkers (philosophers, physicists and cosmologists) on why there is something rather than nothing. (In fact, Holt has been invited to join the panel from which Albert was disinvited. The world of public scientific intellectuals is a very small one. Even our old friend Massimo Pigliucci plays a part in the controversy.)

Dyson was not impressed with the calibre of Holt's philosopher interviewees. Dwarfs, he calls them, in stark contrast to the philosophical giants of the past. Only one, John Leslie (retired and living on Canada's west coast), gets a favorable mention.

"Philosophers became insignificant," Dyson wrote, "when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines."

I too have been arguing against philosophy as a stand-alone discipline, and see philosophical thinking as being something which arises naturally in the context of the pursuit of the various sciences.

But I have to say that I find Dyson's way of expressing himself at times vague and imprecise. The last sentence quoted above, for example, could be read as suggesting that all of the great philosophers of the past covered all of these disciplines, or, alternatively, that some covered one or some disciplines and some covered other disciplines. Also, religion is not a discipline. This is just poor writing.

I have some reservations also about Dyson's view of philosophy as a literary phenomenon, and I tend to see, for example, the Book of Job more as literature with a religio-philosophical slant than as philosophy as such. But this is perhaps little more than a semantic – or definitional – question.

My more serious disagreement with Dyson relates to his obviously religious tendencies, which I don't share. But I will concede that, of all the possible religious outlooks I have considered (and rejected), Dyson's Platonic and mystical approach ranks amongst the least unappealing.

Dyson's key point about philosophers having become insignificant relates directly to the disinvitation controversy, and, though Dyson and Krauss are about as different from one another as two physicists could be, it is interesting that they are both dismissive – albeit for different reasons – of contemporary philosophy.

Perhaps the best thing I read in all the pretty wild and woolly discussion associated with the Krauss/Albert dispute was – apart from Albert's original review – a little joke in the comment thread of a blog post I didn't make a note of.

It was a brief mock-warning to scientists about the dangers of being rude to philosophers of science. They had better be careful because the philosophers might go on strike, and where would the scientists be then?

Interesting dinosaur

My interest in literature and the arts has faded over the years. The arts have a habit of getting in the way of experience, filtering it, encouraging an indirect (and often government-subsidized) engagement with the world. And the world mediated by pictures, movies, performances, fictions and so on is not really the world, is it?

Besides, the arts aren't what they used to be.

A few interesting dinosaurs still roam the literary landscape, however. Like Tom Stoppard.

Unusually for arts intellectuals these days, his instincts are basically conservative, and his interests range widely and encompass the history of ideas, including mathematics and the sciences. (His play Arcadia bears witness to this.)

Stoppard was born in what is now the Czech Republic just before World War 2, and his (Jewish) family fled the Nazis to the Far East. His father (working as a doctor in Singapore) was captured by the advancing Japanese and died in a prison camp. Stoppard's mother escaped with her two sons to India and married a British army officer, Kenneth Stoppard.

Like many other central Europeans who fled the Nazis (or, in subsequent years, the Soviets) and who eventually found refuge in England, Stoppard embraced English culture with great enthusiasm – despite the fact that the English themselves, sensing that their glory days were behind them, were losing faith in their country and its future.

I came across an interview-based piece on Stoppard by Victoria Glendinning in the weekend press, and scribbled a few notes...

Stoppard dresses in an elegantly old-fashioned manner. He is not interested in clothes, he says: he just likes them.

He still smokes cigarettes. [I have a couple of theories about highly intelligent cigarette smokers, but I'll save them for another time.]

Stoppard: "The centre of gravity of our morality is our literary culture." [But, then, as a playwright he would say that, wouldn't he?]

Stoppard has for decades supported human rights and freedom-of-speech organizations, especially in connection with dissidents in Eastern Europe.

Stoppard: "Ultimately, at the level of government, decisive acts are acts of self-interest." (Thus the lack of international support for dissidents in Belarus, for instance, because Belarus has no oil, just people.)

Two final quotes:

"I can't bear travel. I hate the airport experience. Partly because I no longer like going anywhere anyway, partly because [the travel process] has become dehumanizing. Nobody is to blame. It is progress in operation."

"I am a small-c conservative."

Great minds think alike

The overwhelming majority of intellectuals who work within the arts and humanities take it as axiomatic that the only social and political views which are compatible with an educated and intelligent outlook are left-wing or liberal. They only have to look around them to see this conviction confirmed: virtually all their professional friends and colleagues share it!

But it was not always so. In a recent post bemoaning the lack of ideological diversity amongst contemporary philosophers, I noted that many of their intellectual forebears – some of the greatest names, in fact – had conservative views.

I mentioned Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Descartes, Maistre, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bradley, Frege, Santayana, Heidegger, Ryle and Quine – lumping together some very different styles of thinker. A more considered treatment would group German (and English and American) idealists separately from thinkers in the more scientifically- and mathematically-orientated analytic tradition.

Now, I don't want to imply that all that these thinkers said on matters social and political was good. (Some had quite extreme views, in fact.)

And I am uneasy about the religious component in most conservative thought, and am consequently less interested in forms of conservatism which derive from religious beliefs than secular forms. But it should always be borne in mind that the interplay between politics and religion is never a simple matter.

Take the case of René Descartes, for example. Though he remained a Christian, and though he is most famous for that unfortunate cogito ergo sum argument, his writings are full of passages which give expression to what seems to me like a very modern materialism (or physicalism).

I am drawn to his strong and unsettling skeptical curiosity, and feel certain psychological affinities. (I share his nocturnal tendencies, for example. Early rising can – as his sad fate attests – be fatal.)

Descartes generally avoided social and political themes in his writings, seeing them as being outside the scope of natural philosophy, and part of the domain of experience rather than of theory and reason – but he did have clear and unequivocal views on politics.

Political themes feature in sections of the Discourse on Method. Descartes wrote that systems of law and government are always imperfect, but reform should be cautious and piecemeal, and should be the province of public officials rather than private individuals. He strenuously disapproved of 'those turbulent and unrestful spirits who, being called neither by birth nor fortune to the management of public affairs, never fail to have always in their minds some new reforms.'

His observations on his travels led him to relativistic conclusions in social, political and cultural matters which were associated with an appreciation of the positive role played by customs and traditions.

Descartes was strongly opposed to anything resembling majority rule. Writing to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, he went beyond the notion that hereditary monarchs rule by divine right and asserted the Augustinian view that even tyrannical regimes should be obeyed.

He agreed on many points with Machiavelli. For instance, a ruler should insist on the total fidelity of potential rivals and deal harshly with plotters.

But the common people should be treated with moderation, so as not to arouse their hatred and contempt. For them, justice should be dispensed in accordance with familiar customs and laws, 'without excessive rigor in punishment or excessive indulgence in pardoning.'

Clearly, for Descartes, justice in the social realm is not built on any metaphysical notion of natural law: it is a function of power, sovereignty, process and tradition.

I too, as it happens, am very skeptical of any attempt to 'moralize' justice by seeing it as being based on natural law, and am sympathetic to Descartes' pragmatic, custom-respecting approach to social and political questions.

But I recognize that some of his views do betray unacceptable (to us) authoritarian assumptions as well as the limited perspectives of his class and time.

Why are clever people (amongst others!) attracted to socialism?

Let's leave aside quantitative questions about exactly what percentage of individuals in the highest ranges of intelligence identify with socialist and related ideologies, and take it as given that a significant proportion (not necessarily a majority, mind) of very intelligent people do or have done over the past century or so. This is a fact. And it is a puzzling fact for those of us who are convinced on the basis of the sad history of attempts to implement such ideologies and/or of economic theory that socialism just doesn't work.

Of course, for those with left-wing views there is no puzzle here. They would simply say that bright people gravitate towards the truth. Their puzzle would be the converse of mine - why so many otherwise intelligent people are conservatives (but, of course, the popular image of the conservative as redneck or reactionary obscures this potentially awkward fact).

The first point to make is that 'intelligent' and 'intellectual' may be derived from the same Latin root, but that does not guarantee any congruence of meaning. Put simply, the set of intellectuals may overlap somewhat less than many intellectuals think with the set of highly intelligent people. (This takes us back to the quantitative issues I said I would leave aside, and there may be some research out there which impinges on this question.)

Sure, leftist ideologies flourish amongst intellectuals (especially in universities, and especially within the humanities) but such people are often directly dependent on state funding for their professional income. It is no wonder they tend to support a larger rather than a smaller role for the state and higher rather than lower taxes. There is clearly more to it than this, however.

Idealism no doubt plays a part, but idealism is never as simple as it seems, and its nature and content (or lack thereof) change over time. Current trends (notably the Occupy movement) are rather different from the more sophisticated and intellectually elaborated radical traditions which dominated the 20th century, and my focus here is on the latter.

Could the tendency to left-wing thought amongst intellectuals - who, almost by definition, excelled in the classroom - have something to do with the classroom, with wanting to turn the world into a giant classroom, to perpetuate somehow those positive experiences? To create a world based on the model of a world where violence and money and trading and physical (productive) work were more or less absent, and every boy or girl had an identical desk and wore identical clothes, where a centralized order prevailed, and ideals were fostered... I don't mean to be snarky here: I know the appeal of a world where the struggles are of understanding and ideas rather than related to more mundane concerns.

I realize there are counter-arguments - along the lines that schools have traditionally been authoritarian and patriarchal structures and so might be seen to foster conservatism amongst those who thrived there and radicalism amongst those who didn't. But there are authoritarian and conservative elements evident in socialist theory and practice. The main political divide as I see it is not so much between right and left as between advocates of free-market approaches and advocates of centralized control. In its day, the far right also held great appeal for intellectuals. Think of Heidegger in the 1930s, or Giovanni Gentile in Italy.

Moral and political considerations are generally given prominence but aesthetic factors cannot be ignored. One reason why clever people, and especially intellectuals, are antagonistic to free markets relates to the fact that a market-based system does tend to play to the lowest common denominator. Look at the mass media and entertainment, for instance. Highly cultured people (as academics often are) are naturally repelled by the crassness and vulgarity and mindlessness of the sort of popular culture which develops in a market economy. Such aesthetic factors no doubt play a role in causing intellectuals to reject such societies and to seek out alternatives reflecting their ideal of a civilized and intellectually-advanced community.

Old guys in bow ties

The internet has taken the donkey-work out of academic research, and devalued personal memory and expertise. Much of my research time in the past was taken up leafing through neglected volumes in 'research collections' (i.e. the stuff nobody reads anymore if they ever did) of academic libraries, scanning back-of-the-book indexes, and very occasionally turning up unexpected links between thinkers and bringing to light forgotten comments and analyses and predictions which often seemed to give the lie to commonly accepted views on intellectual history (where the focus tended and perhaps still tends to be on a few intellectual 'stars' who are credited with more originality and prescience than they had in reality).

Now, thanks to search engines etc., one can do in a few minutes what previously took months of searching. The dusty research collections have been or are being digitized - but what of the experts, the old guys with bow ties whom one valued highly for their lifetime's worth of knowledge? One of the pleasures of researching a topic was interacting with these often-eccentric people, chatting with them, making hurried notes as they gave one important clues and names to follow up on. Such mentors are fading out of the picture as so much of what they had to tell can be found now online.

But still there are questions of a type which Google doesn't really seem equipped to answer. Specific questions that an individual might have come up with in the course of reading or research require interlocutors who can put themselves in the position of the questioner - who can empathize intellectually. Or sometimes one is interested in the relationship between this and that - and a Google search will give one all there is to know on this and all there is to know on that, but never the twain shall meet (or at least not in the way one wants).

And then there are fundamental questions about the worthwhileness (for me or in general) of this or that subject area, this or that profession. This type of question is often the most important of all - and a human mentor (preferably old and learned) is definitely called for.

Midgets on my shoulders

I have previously mentioned my failed search for a 'thinking master', a reliable guide to approaching and assessing the most important intellectual and moral questions. Perhaps it was a good thing that I never found one; perhaps even seeking such a guide is a sign of intellectual indolence. Certainly, George Steiner's study of maîtres à penser and their disciples which I cited in that previous post suggests that the vast majority of such relationships end in disillusionment. This is not to say, however, that we are not utterly dependent on what others have discovered and thought and said.

Isaac Newton wrote that he had seen further than other men only because he had stood on the shoulders of giants. Steven E. Landsburg cites an anonymous variation on this saying: "If I have not seen as far as other men, it is because midgets are standing on my shoulders."

Landsburg may or may not be an intellectual giant but - to his great credit - he is not afraid of addressing the big questions, and often brings to bear upon them a refreshing candor and directness coupled with ruthlessly rigorous logic (usually).* I have a few reservations about some of his positions, but I believe his general approach is well grounded.

One of his most interesting ideas relates to what people really believe. Wisely, he is very skeptical about what people say in response to survey questions, and he thinks that much of today's anti-religious literature (including Richard Dawkins's efforts) is based on the false premise that people really believe what they say (and perhaps think!) they believe.

According to Landsburg, "Dawkins undercuts his own position when he points to statistics showing that ... there is no correlation between religiosity and crime. His point is that religion does not make people better, but he misses the larger point that if religion doesn't make people better, then most people must not be terribly religious."

Different parts of our brain can in effect 'believe' different, incompatible things, and it's often only when circumstances require or force a single choice that the inconsistency is noted and resolved - one way or the other. So most purportedly religious people only believe in the tenets of their religion when there is no real cost to them. They believe that they believe, but it doesn't matter all that much so their beliefs are what Landsburg calls "disposable".

"Suppose you could take a devoutly religious person," he writes, "ask him, 'Are the tenets of your religion true?' and somehow convince him that the life of his child depends on getting the answer right. I'm guessing that nine times out of ten, you'd find yourself confronting a born-again infidel. The only reason that rarely happens is that there's rarely an occasion when getting the right answer actually matters."


*See The big questions: tackling the problems of philosophy with ideas from mathematics, economics and physics (Pocket Books, 2010). See also http://www.the-big-questions.com/

Sense and self-indulgent nonsense

I recently referred - perhaps unfairly - to the propensity of many mathematicians and scientists to be naive and uncritical when thinking outside their areas of expertise. Of course, we are all inclined to be naive and uncritical at times, but the phenomenon is more striking in a person who exhibits high levels of critical thinking in a specialist area. My original observation was based in part on having read a lot of autobiographical and other material written by very gifted scientists and mathematicians and wondering why I found myself having to 'make allowances' for them.

The distinguished mathematician Gregory Chaitin is a case in point. Here are a few instances of the strange mix of sense and nonsense that flows from Chaitin's pen when he moves beyond the work which has made him famous. [All the quotations are from his book Meta Math! The quest for omega*.]

On medical care. "[I]n my grandmother's generation in the old country, women would have a dozen children, most of whom would die before puberty. So you were trying a dozen mixes of DNA subroutines from both parents. (In the Middle Ages, babies weren't even named til they were a year old, since so many of them would die the first year.) Now instead of trying to keep women pregnant all the time, we depend on massive amounts of medical care to keep alive one or two children, no matter how unhealthy they are. While such medical care is wonderful for the individual, the quality of the human gene pool inevitably deteriorates to match the amount of medical care that is available. The more medical care there is, the sicker people become! The massive amounts of medical care become part of the ecology, and people come to depend on it to survive ... "

On mathematical prehistory. "[F]undamental questions go back millennia and are never resolved. For example, the tension between the continuous and the discrete, or the tension between the world of ideas (math!) and the real world (physics, biology). You can find all this discussed in ancient Greece. And I suspect we could even trace it back to ancient Sumer, if more remained of Sumerian math than the scrap paper jottings on clay tablets that are all we have, jottings that give hints of surprisingly sophisticated methods and a love for calculation that seems to far outstrip any practical application."

Chaitin cannot resist a footnote: "Did Sumer inherit its mathematics from an even older civilization - one more advanced than the ancient Greeks - that was destroyed by the glaciers, or when the glaciers suddenly melted, or by some other natural catastrophe? There is no way for such sophisticated computational techniques to appear out of nowhere, without antecedents."

On ideas and creativity. "Let me describe what it feels like right now while I'm writing this book ... [T]he ideas I'm discussing seem very concrete, real and tangible to me. Sometimes they even feel more real than the people around me. They certainly feel more real than newspapers, shopping malls and TV programs ... In fact, I only really feel alive when I'm working on a new idea, when I'm making love to a woman (which is also working on a new idea, the child we might conceive), or when I'm going up a mountain! It's intense, very intense."

Chaitin elaborates and reiterates with references to beautiful women, art and food (" ... like an amazing ethnic cuisine I've never tasted before."). He continues:

"And I'm a great believer in the subconscious, in sleeping on it, in going to bed at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. after working all night, and then getting up the next morning full of new ideas, ideas that come to you in waves while you're taking a bath, or having coffee. Or swimming laps. So mornings are very important to me, and I prefer to spend them at home. Routine typing and e-mail, I do in my office, not at home. And when I get too tired to stay in the office, then I print out the final version of the chapter I'm working on, bring it home - where there is no computer - and lie in bed for hours reading it, thinking about it, making corrections, adding stuff.

"Sometimes the best time is lying in bed in the dark with my eyes closed, in a half dreamy, half awake state that seems to make it easier for new ideas, or new combinations of ideas, to emerge. I think of the subconscious as a chemical soup that's constantly making new combinations, and interesting combinations of ideas stick together, and eventually percolate up into full consciousness. That's not too different from a biological population in which individuals ... combine to produce new individuals. My guess is that all this activity takes place at the molecular level - like DNA and information storage in the immune system - not at the cellular level. That's why the brain is so powerful, because that's where the real information processing is, at the molecular level. The cellular level, that's just the front end ...

"Yes, I believe in ideas, in the power of imagination and new ideas. And I don't believe in money or in majority views or the consensus. Even if all you are interested in is money, I think that new ideas are vital in the long run, which is why a commercial enterprise like IBM has a Research Division and has supported my work for so long. Thank you, IBM!"


It takes your breath away, does it not?




* Vintage Books, 2005

Lessons of the masters

The French expression, maître à penser, has no English equivalent. A 'thinking master' is what I have always wanted and never found. Perhaps wisdom is unstable and only exists fleetingly in an action here or a thought there. A strange thing, the desire for discipleship (to be a disciple - not to have them). It may reveal deep psychological flaws, but I think not. In my case it reflects simply a combination of a desire to know and a certain laziness. (Why should I do all the work?)

Some years ago, George Steiner gave a series of lectures (which became a book*) on the topic of masters and disciples. Most of the relationships he describes end badly, by the way, not unlike love affairs.

The lessons I have learned from my hoped-for masters have pretty well all been negative, and the thinkers I have flirted with have all been seriously flawed in one way or another. Arts and humanities-oriented writers and scholars are too often ignorant or (worse) scornful of scientific knowledge. Scientists and mathematicians, on the other hand, are often amazingly uncritical in non-scientific areas, and especially in social and political contexts.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that politics works as it does, catering to the lowest common denominator, that legislators lack vision or that government debt is spiraling out of control in so many jurisdictions.

But I continue to be amazed when intellectuals - as happens all too often - align themselves with religions or discredited ideologies - the desire for discipleship trumping the desire for truth.



* Lessons of the masters (Harvard University Press, 2003).