Is Knowledge Finite?

(the above image is taken from the internet.)

The brain is sometimes modeled as a computer. It is for most purposes, an apt model. So assuming this model holds, it follows necessarily that our memory capability is somewhat limited. This is found in experience also, we do not remember everything(and most thankfully at that). Also we do not choose what we remember. Memory is somewhat selective in what it retains. However, we can increase the probability of remembering something, by repeatedly memorizing it. All this is not new, this is just background for the kind of point I want to make.

Now there is such a thing as Knowledge, that is somewhat hard to quantify. I refer to it in the common layman term, “things that we can know”.  There are two facts about knowledge that are immediately apparent. First, that some pieces of knowledge can encompass other pieces, if you know relativity, you do not need to know the Newtonian equations, because they are a special case of relativity and relativistic equations transform into Newtonian equations when speeds are slow enough. Secondly there is trivia, that there are almost an infinite pieces of, it can theoretically cover all interactions that all human beings have had with each other and its a many many function. So the total number of pieces of trivia can safely be assumed to diverge. In what follows, I will not talk about trivia at all.

One major component of knowledge is scientific knowledge. While it not the only or even the most important kind of knowledge, it has its own significance in explaining our place in the universe and our relationship with all the things that exist in the universe. Science does this by a set of succinct laws that explain the relationships between various entities, this field of science is normally called physics and I would only talk about this field.

Physics is a vast field, from correlations governing fluid flow to the laws explaining high energy particles. No one, it can safely be said, knows all of it. And it is expanding, new relations are being discovered daily and new theories are being derived that offer new insight into the physical universe we inhabit.The question naturally arises, is physics finite? Or does it diverge?

One feature of physics and indeed of all science is called Reductionism. It basically posits that a complex system can be reduced to the interaction of its parts. What it means in principle is that the universe has been reduced to a number of isolated systems and these systems are described and solved in isolation from other phenomena that is not covered by the system in question. Now the very idea of reductionism is that it must converge, meaning there must a finite set of explanations(or equations) that must describe all physical knowledge. There has been as far as I know, no studies into whether physics or any disciplines of science are convergent are not.

There is a very real chance that knowledge doesn’t converge at all. The day when all scientific enquiry is exhausted is never going to come, our consciences would not allow for that. Why am I sure? Firstly because reductionism doesn’t guarantee convergence. Let us for the moment suppose that all the equations are known, that situation is indeed not very far from where we are today. We can very accurately describe what happened to the universe onwards from 10^-42 seconds after the Big Bang, we have almost perfect knowledge of systems that can be assumed to be linear, where we do not have theoretical constructs, we have obtained experimental correlations. Thus we have a broad idea of how the universe works. Now if we were approaching a situation where all knowledge would soon be known to us, it should be accepted that the number of open questions that we could ask about the universe would decrease(in very crude terms). That a situation would be approaching where, since most things are known and there are not a lot of unknowns left.

How would such a situation manifest itself? Well one way to look at this would be to look at how many publications are being made. It is well known that publications in refereed journals is how scientific knowledge is communicated by the discoverer to the community at large. Thus if we were approaching a situation where we were exhausting all knowledge then the number of publications should be going down.

Such a situation alas seems to be very far, if anything, there has been an increase in the number of refereed publications, over the past few decades. This prolific rate of increase can be attributed to the fact that there are simply a lot more researchers than there were a few decades ago. The research funding has increased, driving demand for more research, leading to more research being supplied(I’ll talk about the Economics of research at some other time). The ease of numerical simulations, the development of new exotic theories like the String Theories are all responsible for this growth. There simply are more questions to be asked today.

In this situation, it is high time we realize that Reductionism has simply not served us as well as was hoped. No one took the burden of collating the knowledge obtained by this reductionist methodology onto themselves, and as far as I know, not much has been done about it. Also reductionism is sort of like a divide and conquer problem, where you break up your problem domain into subparts and solve those subparts individually and then collate these into a single solution. However, what reductionists don’t consider is that new vistas of research often open up, research into an exotic sub-case of one domain can lead to a totally new domain where completely different laws apply(think turbulence, chaos).

In such a situation convergence is no longer guaranteed. It is my frank opinion that we need to think of alternative routes for the furtherance of scientific knowledge, before it dissolves into an unimaginable chaos of disciplines and sub-disciplines, specialties and sub-specialties and sub-sub-specialties and even further down. A situation could very well arise where all the mass of physics would atomize, leaving us empty handed, with faces covered in the soot of knowledge.

A future of accessible scientific knowledge on the other hand, sounds pretty interesting to me.

Cluelessness

A stupid, blind despondency. A lack of color and refinement. An impoverishment, far greater than money could ever accomplish, indeed a feeling that the soul itself is clothed in rags and general insufficiency. A lack of grammar, a loss of ideas. That nothing is worth writing about.
This last bit is not exactly my flaw. But a flaw of the whole fucking universe. That I am so very sorry but this whole Grand Creation or whatever they are calling it now, is not sufficient to hold my interest, I would rather dream, I say.

But even a dream is something of this world, that I am dreaming it, makes it my creation. And since I belong to this universe, even my thoughts, my dreams are not my own. They belong to the Universe. They belong to everyone. A common recurring theme that I have been exploring in the past few days has been the clash of the individual and the “common interest” for lack of a better word. The worst dystopias seem to originate by infringing on the individual. There is a latent unpredictability in the system. That since because, it cannot be absolutely predicted what a man(in the genderless sense) would be upto at any point of time. there is a need of homogenizing everyone and everything, to make automatons out of us.

That is and will always be unacceptable. What these great leaders need to realise it that humanity does not need saving. That heaven, hell and purgatory and all there is, is this, that which is in front of us and enclosed in our minds. That we want to better things is not even an acceptable solution because there really is no problem in the first place. Nothing needs fixing. Stay the fuck away.

And what has changed? Indeed there is no change, except maybe in the stories that we tell children, which must become elaborately complex and superordinary, or else the flaws in logic and the dichotomy of argument and rhetoric, would get caught. No one it seems, wants to be ever seen as being stupider than their kids, but it is the one inevitable fact.

Arbit Musings Again

Muse muse, musing. Muse muse musing and then dead. Just like this. Is this all life is. One must feel sympathy for the ones who think that there must be more to life. Even so I feel even more sympathy for those who claim that this is all there is. You know, I tried both point of views and they both feel incomplete. It is more like and this is in the vaguest possible sense, that most opposites are actually orthogonal to each other. Meaning thereby that things we often classify as being opposites are actually unrelated phenomena. So while to be or not to be, seems like an open and shut case, being and non-being being opposites of each other. Is it in anyway possible that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Like Schrodinger’s cat, you know, without going into the details, it is both alive and dead, with certain probabilities of either condition. So is our existence something like that. I mean we are not actually alive or dead, but suspended midway between birth and death. Between existence and non-existence. Between being and not being. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally concrete, there is not a probability distribution, but me typing this and you, the reader reading this. But isn’t everything smoke and nothing else. It is somewhat frustrating because well, we learn there are solids and liquids and gases and plasmas. But then we learn that these are just configurations of atoms. Atoms have their own building blocks, which have their own building blocks, in fact the best way to understand the neutron and proton is as a probability cloud of mesons and other stuff, you know. Meaning thereby that there is just nothing solid, just wisps of smoke that characterize and make up everything. Of course not everything, that would be absurd. But everything in our mundane experience, we don’t actually experience sensations of neutrinos passing through us.

Then again what makes sense to me is to think of it in terms of the force responsible, galaxies are held together by gravity, atoms by electromagnetism and the nucleus by the strong nuclear force ( ignoring the weak which I do not really comprehend). Thus to me, it seems like these structures and their superstructures are organizing and reorganizing themselves. In case of the atoms it is what we could loosely call chemistry, the exchange of electrons, basically. These atoms then organize themselves into hierarchies of increasing complexity, biomoleules and so on and so forth to the humble ( I don’t really believe that) human. So galaxies are in some sense, weird sense like bio-molecules and which are like the nuclei. Of course, one scientific assumption is that all neutrons and protons have identical properties, charge, mass, spin and so on. Yet that is not so the case with the electromagnetic structures as we can clearly see, all stars are distinct things, as are all humans, all living and non living beings all non-sentients  are distinct. So I must posit that all nuclides are distinct. Which is contrary to just about everything I know. Or I must claim that all higher structures made out of electromagnetism are alike. Now this second claim is somewhat defendable, vaguely and incompletely because, a hydrocarbon has a pattern that mimics the smallest unit, methane. Also I would claim that all those things lumped together as sub atomic particles could be arranged in a periodic table based on some property that is quite possibly unknown yet. Same with the galaxies.

The problem with this is no hard proof. Also there is no reason why it should be so. Yet I think that structure is independent of the force holding together the structure. In my opinion, what I would vaguely call a pattern is something that an observer has observed. Meaning that, a pattern doesn’t exist until an observer is there to observe it. This is like claiming that there were no leafs, before they were observed to be so. It also raises questions like who is qualified to observe, what does it mean to observe and so on. These are questions I am not fully equipped to answer in any satisfactory manner, not even to myself so I would not hazard guesses (like claiming that every bacteria is analogous to a biosphere or something). Yet to me, it seems that science is gradually moving in a direction where we see the increase in the prominence of the position of the observer. The Observer is in fact as if not more, potent than the Creator. Because if a Creator cannot Observe its Creation, then there is no Creation. Yet if an Observer observes something, it is created. This is so very vague and almost theological, that I cannot help but blush that I could even think in terms like these.

Conventional Conventions.

Beautiful people, I proclaim, I is all is imperfect. Eventually a distinction must be made, as to between the rightness and wrongness of our actions, and to the rightness or leftness of them. For convention would often have left as equivalent to be wrong. Sinistral, for example stems from left-handed, but something wrong/bad/villany is classified as being sinster.

Also, when this is pointed, a quick argument is made, an offering or rather a sacrifice is made ready for Convention, that unappeasable God, that we resort to, when we need to justify our irrationality and our judgements. The sacrifice here of course being you. That you are wrong and everyone else is right. That you are wrong and everyone else is right, precisely because, well duh, everyone cannot be wrong. And then they would shake their heads in unison and pipe, yes we are all together, and hence we are all infallible, because all of us cannot be wrong together. A more thinking type would go on to cite the argument, you say that evolution is true, if so, how could convention have survived? If it is indeed natural selection, then natural selection has selected my irrationality. Since it has selected my irrationality, ergo then maybe my irrationality is not irrational and I am actually rational.

Sadly that is not the case. There is no mass to the rightness of things. Ergo it is not as if there is a see-saw and every fucking clown on earth got on one side of it and claimed that the earth is infact on the back of a fucking tortoise and I was on the other fucking side, claiming that infact the aerth is round, then their combined mass, can make me wrong. They could build pyramids on their side and my side would still remain heavier.

Two things must be understood. Firstly, the electron is no more negatively charged than a positron is positively. What I mean is that the only fact is that electron and positron have opposite charges, but no one can claim which is positive and which one is negative, for that is convention, it is because of such a position that we realise, in textbooks, that current flows in the direction opposite to the actual drift of the electrons, and then it is said, that since we have always assumed current flow to be positive, so let us continue assuming so. Thus generation after generation goes on dissolving the same bile about holes and current flow is opposite to the flow of electrons, since we are so fucking lazy to update our standard texts. For isn’t a Landau-Liftshitz treated the same way by a physicist, much the same reverence with which my grandfather would look at the Holy Quran? And how typically human of the physicist to snicker at my grandfather for revering a book. Can the said physicist suffer the change of a single equation in his holy text? Or maybe an alternate derivation? Or an alternate definition? Then it would not remain the same book by the same author would be argued.

I am reminded of the story where a guy tries to sell Lincoln’s axe. The buyer is apprenhensive, it doesn’t look that old he says. Oh the seller replies, it was getting too old, so I had the handle replaced twice and the edge replaced thrice, but it is the same axe that Lincoln used.

Eventually we are all irrational, probably no one more deluded than me, who thinks that evolution is not an argument against, but the greatest proof that there is a God.

In the end I would reiterate, that just because more people believe in it, doesn’t make a wrong belief right. Evidently most beliefs are not wrong but left. Thus is it wrong to or is it a sin to eat salad with a pitchfork? Highly risky, and somewhat indavisable, but not really a wrong.