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.

If there is a God, he cannot be an enemy of reason

I may have been a bit too harsh on the Teapartiers in the past. While it is too easy to conclude that they are fools and intolerants, I think they are well meaning people who have gotten carried away. Which is possibly what makes them fear the “liberal media” when there are like a handful of liberal broadcasters…. and something more /well thought out defence.

They are fucking nuts though. All of ’em. Seriously.

Eventually I guess all we are looking for is to explain the past and predict the future. All we have is the present.

As I see it, there are three basic class of arguments that can be made.

1) Pure random chance: i.e. there is no point in looking. Everything is stochastic, patterns are illusions, creations of our minds that seeks to find them, they do not actually exist. All phenomena is radiated by underlying unadulterated random generators.

2) Physical laws: ie like the Maxwellian system for classical electromagnetism, but for everything, the less the number of laws, the better.

3) Gawd: the dues ex of explainations. there is NO need for explanations. Everything is god’s will. Thy kingdom truly comes. All relevant laws are known and tabulated in the Bibles of the world.

Now, with this background, first a disclaimer, alternative schemes are possible, this scheme is not complete nor is it intended to be exhaustive. It is more a sketch for more common arguments and such. Dogmatic assertions are not really covered. One should anyways ignore the dogmas if any pretense of sanity is desired.

With that out of the way, lets begin with a simple example of a daily ongoing feud. Evolution vs. Creationism.

Evolution is basically a theory derived from 1 and 2. While, Creationism is more a product of 2 and 3. Alternate schemes are already visible whereby one can splice up 2 in such a way as to make Evolution and Creationism into diametrical opposites. But resisting the temptation, as also the temption to rework to a more satisfying scheme(as that is an infinite loop waiting to happen). Instead lets just rename 3 to Edict. This way I think how 3 differs from 1 and 2 is highlighted more clearly. 3 is the position that there ARE physical laws but they are NOT the same for all creatures, further they are the whims of One(or many, really) Creator and that he can change them at any time he wishes anyway he wishes. Kind of as if he has written the kernel of the world and he can vary the global constants any which way.

A neutral comparison will reveal that there is indeed a lot of common ground for all three viewpoints. As also there is a lot of evidence, to which people can point and claim THERE, irrefutable evidence why this is the ONLY correct position. Lets start with 3 at first.

God is a one size fits all explanation for every fucking thing. From why did I get syphillis to where does the sun go at night. Seriously, any question in the world can be simply stating “thy will be done”.

God is thus, the enemy of reason. For this axiom by its very supposition answers every question. Why I am a poor crippled beggar on the banks of ganges? God wills it so. Why am I a poor negro slave working on a blue eyed devils plantation? Because God explicitly wills it so. In the hands of competent chantries*, God is an extremely competent subversive weapon. Its a bit hard to retain the pretense of neutral, so let me drop that and instead remain honest.

It is how the chantries control the meek. Fill the bibles with prophetic visions of how on some future date the meek SHALL inherit the earth but deny it to them. And most definitely not while you are still alive. Yes you. It has worked out pretty well. I shudder to think what would have happened had the sequence of serendipities that led to the house arrest of a certain Gallileo san not taken place. Where would we have been had Copernicus never been born? Or how would the demonstration that the earth is not the center of the fucking universe been managed if there had been no lenses? Granted there are other ways(radio telescopy and reflective telescopes spring to mind, but they depend on the basic single lens magnifier, and as any Civ player would attest, you cannot jump techs, unfortunately) anyways this is not wikipedia, no neutrality, for example.

Serendipities bring us to chance. Pure Chance. All of the questions are still answerable by a simple substitution of the words God by Chance. Why does no one read my fucking blog? Pure Chance. Now, of course chance has never really directly molested a human(ignoring the fate of Sher Shah Suri and other similar stories for the moment). While people have probably lost limbs because of their awesome luck at roulette, its because the casinos don’t play fair.

Then it is clear to notice, as far as Explainations are concerned, God and chance are synonyms. Meaning that even if we answer the questions with God, but understand god to not mean some passive-aggressive deity but chance, one is at pretty much the same place. Then why are there no chance based chantries? Well chance is unordered, completely transparent our whole fucking existences, even our bank balances or the medieval equivalents. Chance is only employed by clerics to answer the HARD clerics or when the populace starts to get restless. God on the other hand, despite his omnipotence and whimsical nature(all the floods and shit everytime he is depressed for example) is amenable to reason. He is reasonable, meaning he can be bargained with. If you have a high enough karma score that is? And how to get a high karma score(by not blowing up megaton for starters. though the explosion was a fuck awesome shroom cloud).

The legitimacy that God has in the eyes of the proletariat derives specifically from the ABSOLUTENESS of his laws. Specifically the ones where if you are good, the afterlife is yours. And when are you good? When you toe all the lines of course and the more you bow your head, the better it is. And what is the afterlife? Well it is specifically a heady cocktail of cream, booze, virgin tail(the exact composition varies with the bible of your choice) ad infinitum. In short all the aiyaashi(hedonism i guess would be a somewat apt translation) that you missed out on in the real world(which is not actually real, just an illusion, or a test a dream, gods stage or whatever). So donot mind these forty years of hardships and manual labor(how long did they live for anyways?). And what about the clerics? Well they are ALL so OBVIOUSLY such noble pious gents, celibates really, nevermind a rape or two. Thus while an individual human is judged as a real actual being, the chantry(and for that matter the corporations, considering all the latest legislation emanating from US of A) is judged on an ideal, Jejus(india specific joke i guess) on a cross, man and god touching fingers, the pious monk and so on. And the clerics are all such devout folks, so good really, not only do they endure a life of celibacy, they would continue to do so forever in the afterlife. All they REALLY want in exchange is to see their god just ONCE. After all, Jesus himself never really gets laid, because well, he doesn’t really need to. No rly.

Fact of the matter is a resoundingly large number of them have FAILED, despite their pious lives(by their own claims life) to achieve this seemingly simple ambition. So what conclusions can be drawn? In no particular order, maybe they are not pious enough(that none have been pious enough means that it is impossible for any other human to achieve those standards, so we should give up gracefully) or that god’s standards are impossibly high(in which case whats the fucking point?) or that he simply doesn’t really care(then why should we care?) or that he simply doesn’t exist(in which case the chantries owe us all written apologies, hey they are the ones who place such a premium on their written words, spoken ones just won’t do, also would make them a bit poorer).

Much folk would have figured that I intend to sketch a demonstration of science’s superiority. Sadly that is not my aim. My faith in God varies between 0 to 0.1 depending on which day of the week it is. 0 on sundays and 0.1 on saturdays(more aptly saturevenings which is when I wake up).

Before discussing 2 by itself, unsullied by 3. I would like to take one last look at 1. There is a chance that eventually every thing is really chance and there are no laws, for how long have we really been observing? Now gtr and qm are both discoveries of this very century and hence very accurate readings, the subatomic particles the atomic structure, space time, everything are the gifts that the 20th century brought to us. Pious folk and rationals(?) would agree that there are Laws. Pious would fall back to their trusted God for explaining why it is so. It is my impression that the rational folks have no such real axiom to which they can fall back and justify their claims of there being laws. This is so because a theory is only acceptable as long as it explains the experimental observations. Thus it is arguable that in a sense, something can be observed that would invalidate every fucking thing, Whence the pious folk would say in their traditional characteristic mild manner hey no biggie, so what if all science was wrong? dont get depressed over it, here have a cookie. I jest, it would more be like hah bbq fuck you faggorzs or something similiar. I can try myself to justify this, but I recently came across an article by my childhood supaman issac asimov which is well worth a read. tl;dr the errors are relative and need minor corrective terms that were assumed to be unity by previous theories(as in the sphericity of the earth or the lorentz factor).

Everyday the papers are full of reddits on the exciting new scientific discoveries pertaining to string theories, quantum gravity, the vibrations in space-time itself and so on. I would clarify that I personally only comprehend the dumbed down popular science(which as a friend pointed out is the new opiate of the masses) versions of these theories, but I do understand basic gtr and qm with some competence, so my world view is only composed of those ideas. Also science has grown so vast that the era of legendary multitaskers like Euler, Newton et al is well and truly over. Science is too big to be completely stored in one head. Except in maybe a very concentrated, bare bones form. I think, that to quite some extent, I have such a picture in my head.

And I would end this post here, it is already a wall of text. So. Next week I would write the conclusion. Pinky promise.

*Its a term from DA:O, I prefer using it to individual religious organizations, because it by its very nature encompasses everything from medieval catholic church to modern retarded scientologism.