Title Justified
I will admit that the title Neighborhood of Truth does have a ring of audacity and ambition to it, kind of like Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained considering it was published in 1991 and consciousness still remains a mystery almost three decades later. It also seems audacious on my part to compare this blog to his work! Well I'm not really. I wouldn't dare. The only thing Dennett and I share is a middle initial in our names and even that isn't real - my name was too long to fit most forms so got shortened!
But in Dennett's attempt to explain consciousness away by denying the existence of the "hard problem" of consciousness, disqualifying qualia (a controversial placeholder word for subjective experience) or rejecting the idea of philosophical zombies, and proposing his own theory (multiple drafts model), he did one thing that might have nudged us towards what I want to call the Neighborhood of Truth. He made readers feel very uncomfortable by questioning the very definition of the suitcase word (i.e. you can put in it and take from it what you want). Critics called his book annoying, frustrating but also insightful and provocative. Thing is, provocateurs do not need to be right all the time (am not saying he was or was not). If they can make you pause, question your assumptions, push the boundaries of your understanding, and if you're lucky, even provide alternate theories, they have enabled a constructive process to build good explanations.
Good explanations? As long as you and I agree on an explanation that the world is flat and climate change is uh real, no a hoax, all the same, where is the problem?
Sidenote: For those of you who believe that climate change is real and are technologists wanting to do something about it, here's an excellent read by Bret Victor on the topic.
Let us listen to George Carlin for a minute. (Really? So now we are turning to standup comedians for insights? Yes, we are. Comedians expose absurdities in the most fun ways)
George Carlin: “The planet … is a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, ‘Why are we here?’"
He was of course being facetious. But I can imagine at least one person in the audience listening to that and thinking "Hmm, never considered that possibility. Clever explanation for why we have plastic!"
So what makes one explanation better than another? And why do we care again?
What if I told you that mankind's progress depended on generating good explanations? Fine, I didn't say that but David Deutsch did. He's a physicist and visiting professor at Oxford, known for describing the first universal quantum computer. And his talk provides a reasonable explanation for having good explanations, i.e. it made sense to me. I don't want to dilute his message so would urge you to listen to the talk below. But I do provide two transcribed (transcript here) snippets from his talk that have stayed with me for years.
David Deutsch: "...Our connection to reality is never just perception. It's always, as Karl Popper put it, theory-laden. Scientific knowledge isn't derived from anything. It's like all knowledge. It's conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it. So, were testable conjectures the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates? No. Contrary to what's usually said, testability is common, in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking. Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction..."
David Deutsch: "...This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them, in preference to the others, is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can't be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena."
We have a fantastic imagination. So its easy to generate stories or explanations. But why are we sometimes so convinced that our explanations are right?
Biases, gaps in knowledge, mental laziness, an untested belief system, an urgency to make decisions, stubborn unwillingness to re-assess our axioms, poor weighting of facts, situations or people, limited resources, a false sense of self, bad process, lack of intellectual curiosity and humility to fix the above, (Geez!) all contribute to a warped reality with convenient models of the world around us. And we ALL suffer from one or more of the above issues (how do I know this? I don't really, but from my limited experience find it hard to believe otherwise. So there you go, my biased view!). So if we can construct our own realities, it is not so hard to imagine creating our own explanations that hold in those made-up worlds.
I sometimes find it interesting that we are more demanding of machines than humans and get very anxious when we do not understand how they make decisions. Heck, there's an emerging field called Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)! Here's a before-after (expected) picture from DARPA on the effort:
It is another matter that I'm not sure how reasonable and reasoned XAI even is, given the complexity of the models that we're trying to understand. Perhaps we need testability more than explainability? Another time. Coming back to XAI, take a look at the third bullet on the left side in the picture below:
"Machine learning models are opaque, non-intuitive, and difficult for people to understand"
Hmm, that sounds like most of us people! No offense.
The word "offense" oddly reminds me of Richard Feynman's "You don't like it? Go somewhere else" clip (see below) which is more about intellectual humility than arrogance. Take a look.
Richard Feynman: "There's a kind of saying that you don't understand its meaning, 'I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it.'… You'll have to accept it. It's the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that's the way it looks. You don't like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy."
I feel that reality can sometimes seem harsh, unforgiving, absurd, indifferent, beautiful, exciting, friendly, meaningful and meaningless all at the same time. And understanding the truth of this reality is very hard if not impossible given our current limitations. Why then do we make it harder on ourselves by letting our beliefs and desires distract from the pursuit?
POINT CHECK: Am I suggesting a magical 4-step self-help trick to accelerate our progress? Provocation --> Discomfort --> Better Explanation --> Progress
That's not a bad idea given how well such tricks sell. Alas no. That would be too easy. But it does bring me to the first guideline for this blog.
(Naming convention: <Blog Title>-<G for Guideline><guideline #>)
NOT-G1: Comfort with discomfort
Pardon the extreme imagery of discomfort. Let us view it more as a placeholder for varying degrees of discomfort from questions that we do not know how to answer to shocking evidence and multiple perspectives that shake our core assumptions. While it can at times be overwhelming and torturous, we need to view discomfort as a catalyst for growth, as it forces us to stretch our imagination and learn.
CANDID CAPTURE: My friend (whose fascinating blog we will get to in the future) asked me if I really believed in and lived this cycle of comfort-discomfort on a daily basis? If I say yes, that would qualify as an excellent example of being OUTSIDE the neighborhood of truth. In the neighborhood only lies my want for this process. I have found discomfort to be inconvenient, stressful and painful so have tried to avoid it. But reason tells me otherwise and hence this blog to enroll fellow humans in an effort to jointly understand the world around us.
What this means for you: Don't run away if the content is difficult, confusing, biased, interesting but not quite aligned with your views. Ask questions and provide feedback.
What this means for me: Come up with interesting and challenging content. Ask hard questions and try to research attempts to answer those. Try to answer all your questions.
POINT CHECK: Should we get back to the title of this section? High time! The title of the section is to justify the title of the blog. Why not commit to the pursuit of truth? Why only the neighborhood?
TRUTH
"Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.''
- Bertrand Russell
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't"
- Mark Twain
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies.
- Sonnet 138 from William Shakespeare
"The more I see, the less I know for sure"
- John Lennon
"Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth"
- Friedrich Neitszche
"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth"
- Somone de Beauvoir
Enough quotes already! And quotes and anecdotes cannot be used to make a point. Can they really? Perhaps. To me a quote is a window into the author's worldview; a distilled and pithy formulation of their own struggles, experiences and thoughts. And deep thinkers (at least the popular artists, scientists, philosophers, logicians ...) have struggled with the meaning of truth.
I'll stay away from logical paradoxes like whether the statement "absolute truth is non existent" is itself absolutely true or false. I'll also refrain from indulging epistemological debates on truth. I don't want to pretend to even know let alone deeply understand (so knowing is different from understanding?? moving on ...) centuries of thought that have gone into studying truth (neo-classical theories, correspondence theory, coherence and pragmatist theories, Tarski's theory, deflationism etc.). But if you're interested, check out Stanford's encyclopedia on truth or Brittanica's.
Now there are some facts like humans have 2 eyes, events like world war II actually did take place, the earth goes around the sun to name a few that seem to be obviously true. But facts tend to have a shelf life either because they are proven wrong or get misinterpreted and morphed to suit the history writer's agenda. For a while, the geocentric or Ptolemaic system prevailed as a fact, where we believed that the sun went around the earth until Copernicus systematically showed the opposite. Some facts take a long time to change, others less so. Some facts do stand the test of time and survive. My point though is more that in our effort to understand the world, while we may have some empirical truths, searching for absolute truth is hard if not flawed or impossible. I say flawed because we might have created an abstraction to satisfy our "want" for something that holds true everywhere all the time. I say its hard or impossible because in some cases we cannot know due to our own limitations, lack of probing tools both mental and physical, poor representations and our own biases. We make it even harder because we are a complex entity with private or hidden mental states, embedded in a complex world, continuously architecting different agendas and conflicting goals, resorting to conscious misinformation, truth by omission or outright dishonesty, all to survive as we know best.
What I have found though is that negotiating a shared understanding of the world is better than living in ones own. But what happens when that shared model of the world is faulty? What happens when one individual's worldview is in the neighborhood of truth while the rest of world's is outside? How do we determine that we are or not in the neighborhood of truth, when we may not even know what the truth or the path to it is? Oh by the way, why is fake news and disinformation still prevalent today?
Good questions. I don't know the answers to most of them except that maybe we need to revisit our values, goals, processes and build rich(er) toolkits to continuously probe the world and its models and communicate with all. Easier said than done!
POINT CHECK: Why neighborhood again?
NEIGHBORHOOD
Here are a few definitions that I dug up:
Proximity, vicinity or nearness;
Spatially a geographical area and functionally a set of social networks;
Neighborhood of a point is a set of points containing that point where one can move some amount in any direction away from that point without leaving that set.
In mathematics, there is a deeper description of neighborhood of points and sets in a topological space where a set of axioms relating points and neighborhoods need to be satisfied. I will refrain from any strict adherence to such a definition until I'm confident it applies, for which a prerequisite is for me to understand the concepts. Outside of the words I just copied and pasted from Wiki above, I won't claim to know enough to use them yet.
In cellular automata, we have something called the Moore Neighborhood and Von Neumann Neighborhood both of which are defined on a two-dimensional square lattice with 8 and 4 adjacent cells respectively constituting the neighborhood.
One feature that all the above definitions share is that to be near something, you need to know that "something". In our case, if we knew the truth, why settle for its neighborhood, right? The goal or destination is actually still to enter the neighborhood of truth, but by a slight inversion of approach or reasoning which is to move away from falsehood in addition to moving towards truth whenever we have that clarity.
This begs the obvious question - how then do we know when we are in the neighborhood?
We may never know that for certain in some cases. BUT, we most certainly can aspire to get there by:
accumulating guidelines and principles to prune out falsehoods,
encouraging diversity in theories and explanations while enforcing robustness under variation in those, and
continuously revising and refining our tools and processes
POINT CHECK: Isn't this precisely what our scientific endeavor is all about? Yes, but we don't always bring that rigor to our daily decision making. Its tiring and we have not built the habit to do so. So this brings us to our next guideline:
NOT-G2: Fact-check and reason-check everything.
Logo Justified
Train of thought
I have a tendency to acronymize words so very quickly Neighborhood Of Truth became NOT which in turn triggered the following two threads in my head:
THREAD-1: NOT as in logical inversion. As described here, the output of this operation is the complement of its input. That means, if the input is HIGH, the output will be LOW and vice versa. The truth table on the left essentially shows boolean logic inversion.
The inverter gate is constructed using a register transistor switch as shown on the left. The switch allows or disallows current to flow through depending on the input.
The inversion here is a loose metaphor for the inversion of reasoning that I was referring to earlier. I borrowed the phrase from Dennett's reference to Darwin's and Turing's "strange inversion of reasoning". Here's the relevant snippet that explains the rationale:
"The great inversion of Darwin, what McKenzie calls his strange inversion of reasoning, was when Darwin realized that you have a bottom-up theory of creativity, that all the wonderful design that we see in the biosphere could be the products, direct or indirect of a mindless, purposeless process, and this simply inverts an idea that I think is as old as our species, maybe older in a certain sense, and that is what you might call the top-down theory of creativity: it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. Potters make pots. You never see a pot making a potter. You never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It is always big fancy, wise, wonderful things making lesser things. And so, here we are, we are pretty wonderful: we must be made by something more wonderful still and it's got to be like us, it's got to be the intelligent artificer. It's very scary for people to give that up, and to begin to think about how our importance doesn't depend on the importance of something still more important."
I'm not interested in the debate between creationism and evolution as much as the notion of flipping a way of thinking on its head the way Dennett describes that Darwin did.
THREAD-2: The second thread was a movie memory that I had with people putting their hands inside some rock or monster's mouth to check if they were lying. If they were, their hand would get bitten off. So I looked that up and came across Bocca Della Verita, or the Mouth of Truth, a marble mask in Rome Italy. And sure as night follows day, it did feature in a movie - Roman Holiday! And that brings me to the final guideline:
NOT-G3: Have fun with it!
The reason that I placed the mouth of truth image inside the inversion bubble (the small circle to the right of the NOT gate) is for it to serve as the verifier of truth. Then I just changed some colors to make it less boring. So there you go - how the NOT logo came about.
Summary:
I would like this blog to be a platform to study and talk about some interesting topics, not as an authority but as someone co-learning with the readers. Regardless of where we begin, I'd like these entries to land in a useful space. And this will require continuous revision and refinement with your help. To that end, here's a recap of the guidelines:
NOT-G1: Comfort with discomfort
NOT-G2: Fact-check and reason-check everything.
NOT-G3: Have fun with it!