Fake Reductionism

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Fake Explanation

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
        -- John Keats, Lamia  

I am guessing - though it is only a guess - that Keats himself did not know the woof and texture of the rainbow.  Not the way that Newton understood rainbows.  Perhaps not even at all.  Maybe Keats just read, somewhere, that Newton had explained the rainbow as "light reflected from raindrops" -

- which was actually known in the 13th century.  Newton only added a refinement by showing that the light was decomposed into colored parts, rather than transformed in color.  But that put rainbows back in the news headlines.  And so Keats, with Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth and Benjamin Haydon, drank "Confusion to the memory of Newton" because "he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." That's one reason to suspect Keats didn't understand the subject too deeply.

I am guessing, though it is only a guess, that Keats could not have sketched out on paper why rainbows only appear when the Sun is behind your head, or why the rainbow is an arc of a circle.

If so, Keats had a Fake Explanation.  In this case, a fake reduction.  He'd been told that the rainbow had been reduced, but it had not actually been reduced in his model of the world.

This is another of those distinctions that anti-reductionists fail to get - the difference between professing the flat fact that something is reducible, and seeing it.

In this, the anti-reductionists are not too greatly to be blamed, for it is part of a general problem.

I've written before on seeming knowledge that is not knowledge, and beliefs that are not about their supposed objects but only recordings to recite back in the classroom, and words that operate as stop signs for curiosity rather than answers, and technobabble which only conveys membership in the literary genre of "science"...

There is a very great distinction between being able to see where the rainbow comes from, and playing around with prisms to confirm it, and maybe making a rainbow yourself by spraying water droplets -

- versus some dour-faced philosopher just telling you, "No, there's nothing special about the rainbow.  Didn't you hear? Scientists have explained it away.  Just something to do with raindrops or whatever.  Nothing to be excited about."

I think this distinction probably accounts for a hell of a lot of the deadly existential emptiness that supposedly accompanies scientific reductionism.

You have to interpret the anti-reductionists' experience of "reductionism", not in terms of their actually seeing how rainbows work, not in terms of their having the critical "Aha!", but in terms of their being told that the password is "Science".  The effect is just to move rainbows to a different literary genre - a literary genre they have been taught to regard as boring.

For them, the effect of hearing "Science has explained rainbows!" is to hang up a sign over rainbows saying, "This phenomenon has been labeled BORING by order of the Council of Sophisticated Literary Critics.  Move along."

And that's all the sign says: only that, and nothing more.

So the literary critics have their gnomes yanked out by force; not dissolved in insight, but removed by flat order of authority.  They are given no beauty to replace the hauntless air, no genuine understanding that could be interesting in its own right.  Just a label saying, "Ha!  You thought rainbows were pretty?  You poor, unsophisticated fool.  This is part of the literary genre of science, of dry and solemn incomprehensible words."

That's how anti-reductionists experience "reductionism".

Well, can't blame Keats, poor lad probably wasn't raised right.

But he dared to drink "Confusion to the memory of Newton"? 

I propose "To the memory of Keats's confusion" as a toast for rationalists.  Cheers.

Comments

[Robin Hanson]

This seems to be reasonable account - but I'm somewhat bothered by the fact that it is an unflattering account of people who are not here to defend themselves.

[Caledonian]

Really, all we have to do to deal with anti-reductionists is ask them whether they treat the universe as an unbroken whole. (Spoiler: they don't!)

Reduction of perception is the only way we can process the incoming sense data. Reduction of conception is the only way we can think about and understand that data. Reductionism is the inevitable consequence of any attempt to understand the world - breaking the world down into discrete parts that can be understood on their own terms, instead of trying to deal with an effectively infinite system of inestimable complexity.

[Scott Scheule]

I'm bothered by the tactic of explaining a groups' qualms by postulating they don't really understand the material. It's just a shade shy of "Anti-reductionists are dumb."

[Tom McCabe]

"but I'm somewhat bothered by the fact that it is an unflattering account of people who are not here to defend themselves."

So is every history textbook. More usefully, there are still plenty of people around who see "science" as replacing the Earth's beauty with "boring stuff". If any of them are reading OB, they are quite welcome to comment.

[Scott Scheule]

Tom,

Robin's fear was that they're not reading OB.

[Laura]

Sorry for the random reminiscence if you'd rather not read it, but this post reminded me so much of an incident that happened in my 10th grade english class. The grey-bearded teacher turned out the light and lit two candles. He began to speak in a breathy, mysterious voice, "Colridge's metaphor of two candles which burn more brightly when brought together is so beautiful because it is also an optical reality." He brought the candles together, "See how they reach higher and burn brighter when they are near, like the two souls..."
"That must be because of incomplete combustion!" I excitedly blurted out, "We just learned about this in chemistry! If you limit the amount of oxygen to the flame, you can't completely oxidize the hydrocarbons in the wax, so some carbon is released that reflects light. The candles have less access to oxygen when you bring them..."
"Damn it Laura this is an english class! You've RUINED the effect!"
I actually felt quite proud that I could "ruin" S.T. Colridge...

[anon]

Scott and Tom,

You need to distinguish between "Keats, with Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth and Benjamin Haydon" and modern 'fake reductionists.'

[Scott Scheule]

anon,

Quite right. I figured Robin was talking about anti-reductionists generally, but I suppose he could have been referring to Keats and friends. To be clear, in my commentary I was referring to the former, and I presumed Robin was as well.

[Cyan]

There's another kind of anti-reductionist: one who says that there is *something* (e.g., a field, a resonance, etc.) which influences the whole of an object and cannot be studied by reducing a complex object to easier-to-understand constituents. This is different from "science robs the rainbow of its beauty" reductionism -- as near as I can understand, the contention is that a better scientific understanding can be obtained by considering the object as a whole. I'm still not sure if this anti-reductionist position is a claim about the map or a claim about the territory.

[Aaron Boyden]

Cyan, what you describe sounds a bit mystical, but there is an observable tendency for people to seek some magic bullet, some simple underlying factor which explains everything. Single underlying factor theories are usually wrong, of course, and phenomena often involve a lot of complex relationships which need to be taken into account; some who call themselves reductionists are enamored of over-simplified single factor views (the way certain evolutionary psychologists talk about genes comes to mind), and it is likely that anti-reductionism is partly motivated in some cases by opposition to those single factor views. However, understanding objects as wholes is not the way to recognize their true complexity; it's just another way to hide that complexity.

[pushmedia1]

Cyan, this post's use of the word "anti-reductionist" didn't jive completely with me either. I know quite a few self-proclaimed scientists that claim to have problems with reductionism (at least in certain topics, e.g. free will). To them, holding a prism up to the mind continues to reveal a soul (as well as all that brain stuff).

Maybe this is a tangential observation, but I wonder if to some people "reductionism" is a stop-sign word.

[Yelsgib]

I actually don't understand your point at all.

Before Keats found out about what rainbows "really are" he experienced wonder while looking at them.
After, he didn't.

What else is the man supposed to do? He's got to try to investigate his experience, right? Where did he go wrong?

You are reducing his cognitive processes to those of a bumbling fool. They're complex, you just don't understand them. It doesn't seem like you're making enough of an effort.

[Psy-Kosh]

Did Keats ever actually find out what rainbows "really are", or just that the fact that someone somewhere knows what they really are?

[Roland]

Yelsgib:

Before Keats found out about what rainbows "really are" he experienced wonder while looking at them.
After, he didn't.

What else is the man supposed to do? He's got to try to investigate his experience, right? Where did he go wrong?

I think the point Eliezer is trying to make is: The man should have investigated the rainbow scientifically and then feel wonder when he understood the physics behind it.

[Greg]

"The man should have investigated the rainbow scientifically and then feel wonder when he understood the physics behind it."

But surely a sense of wonder doesn't *necessarily* have to come from scientific understanding? But I'd agree that if a scientific understanding destroyed Keats's sense of wonder, then that was a bug in Keats, not a bug in scientific understanding.

[TGGP]

I'm bothered by the tactic of explaining a groups' qualms by postulating they don't really understand the material. It's just a shade shy of "Anti-reductionists are dumb."

Maybe they are. In that case it is fine to say so, although we would like some support to go along with it.

[michael vassar]

Mark Twain was a very different author from Keats. He did learn to understand the Mississippi very deeply, from the perspective of a riverboat captain and of an author on the topic. In his book "Life on the Mississippi" he claims that while knowing the river as he did has its own pleasures, some of the more generally accessible pleasures of gazing at the river as a naive person were lost in becoming an expert. I don't know if they were still available from other rivers. If you watch a toddler it's also clear that we no longer experience the pleasures of walking or grasping as non-experts, nor do we remember them to compare them to those of adult concentration on physical activity. More trivially, one only gets to hear a joke or read a book for the first time once. None of this goes very far towards justifying Keats's suggestion that we never hear the joke, as it were, but it does give us some reason, possibly mitigated by the prospect of transhuman recall but probably not eliminated, for some qualms at the prospect of immortality as a superior alternative to cycling the population, and of course a lesser reason for ambivalence about our departure from Malthusian rates of reproduction.

[Caledonian]

Once you understand a system at a given level, you can no longer derive information from it by observing it on that level - you have nothing more to learn from it, and so it has nothing more to offer to you.

Which do you find more interesting: chess or Tic-Tac-Toe?

People who derive pleasure from the act of understanding 1) often fail to grasp why people who derive pleasure from not-understanding are hostile to them and 2) usually don't recognize that their happiness depends upon having a rich and unfamiliar world to learn about.

Why do you think Borgstrom is so popular?

[Yvain]

"But I'd agree that if a scientific understanding destroyed Keats's sense of wonder, then that was a bug in Keats"

If Keats could turn his wonder on and off like a light switch, then clearly he was being silly in withholding his wonder from science. Since science is clearly true, in order to maximize his wonder Keats should have pressed the "off" button for wonder based on ideas like rainbows being Bifrost the magic bridge to Heaven, and the "on" button for wonder based on science.

But Keats, and the rest of us, can't turn wonder on and off like that. Certain things like bridges to Heaven, or gnomes, naturally induce wonder in most people, without any special choice to take wonder in them. Certain other things like optics don't. It's not just a coincidence that there are more Lord of the Rings fanboys than Snell's Law fanboys out there. I don't know enough to say whether that's cultural or genetic, but I'm pretty sure it's not under my immediate conscious control.

Maybe with proper study of optics, some people will find it just as wonderful as they found the magic bridge Bifrost. But "With enough study, optics will become at least as wonderful as divine bridges are, and this is true for every single person on Earth regardless of variations in their personal sense of wonder" is a statement that needs proving, not a premise.

And if that statement's false, and if there are some people who really would prefer the possible world containing Bifrost to the possible world containing optics, then those people are perfectly justified in feeling sorrow that they live in the world with optics and no Bifrost. To be a good rationalist, such a person certainly has to willingly accept the scientific evidence that there is no Bifrost, but doesn't gain any extra rationality points by prancing about singing "Oh, joy, the refraction of light through water droplets in accordance with mathematical formulae is ever so much more wonderful than a magical bridge to Heaven could ever be."

[Yelsgib]

Let me suggest a mechanism which explains Keat's (and my own - and every adult's [?]) "loss of wonder."

Part of what we do in using language is pointing to things and making noises so that other people who are experiencing the same thing (presumably) associate the noise to the thing. Now we have a nice way to refer to the "same thing."

The word "rainbow" then corresponds to more than just the visual input - it is all things associated with the rainbow. It is many things not explicitly associated with. It is a -loose- association. It feels free. It allows room for imagination. It is not serious. The point is that the word "rainbow" is like an arrow pointing straight into our emotional centers at THAT THING which is important (whatever it is) and that we love.

"Reducing" the rainbow to knowledge of light interacting with water droplets has a lot of effects:

1.) Some part of you always thinks of the science, the actuality, the existent when you think "rainbow" from now on. You can't help it. You can't just shut it off.

2.) Everything that you -didn't- know (the wonder, etc.) dissipates since you have reduced the phenomenon to an explanation with a bumper sticker (the qualia associated with the explanation).

3.) Your focus shifts from the experience of the colors, the relation of the colors, etc. to the words associated with the colors.

Words are boring.
Experience is great.
Get these words
Off my plate!

[Hendrik Boom]

I'm in the middle of reading a wonderful fantasy. It's John Crowley's four-volume series Aegypt (not to be confused with his one-volume book Aegypt published a decade or two ago.) It is about a man who discovers that (here's the fantasy) there is more than one history of the world. Only a few hundred years ago, the Earth was at the centre of the universe. It was when people started to realise this wasn't so that the universe changed. Before that, the Earth was at the centre of the universe, and always had been so. After that the Earth wasn't at the centre, and had never been there.

This book excites my sense of wonder, even though I know it isn't so.

I'm also reading articles on how category theory is applied to quantum mechanics, and how this brings with it a whole set of nonclassical logics -- logics in which proof by contradiction fail, and in which 'and' and 'or' don't distribute (which I believe plays havoc with Bayes' theorem). Fascinating stuff.

In the sixties I was drunk on Cantor's theories of transfinite numbers, just intoxicated with an appreciation of their sheer, unimaginable hugeness. Don't tell me that mathematics is dry, and there is no sense of wonder there.

In the seventies I became a constructivist. Gone were all those transfinite objects. But the sense of wonder remains, and I keep finding new things to amaze me -- the sheer intricate details of finite things, and of merely countable infinity. The boundary between finite representations of the infinite and the infinite things represented is wonderfully intricate in detail.

The sense of wonder is innate. It attaches itself to things that exist and things that don't. There's no need to give it up merely because you've felt the divine in things that are unreal. It's still there, even if the things aren't. It's still there, even if the things are.

But is it important to distinguish what is real and what is not.

[Phil Goetz]

This reminds me of a lesson that I learned, I'm embarrassed to admit, from Tom Brown Jr. (who later threw me out of his school for trying to verify his autobiographical claims).

If you're walking through the woods with a child, and they're interested in all the different plants that they see, they'll ask you what each one is. And, often, they lose interest in each plant after you tell them its name. They still don't know anything about the plant, but they think they do, and it's no longer mysterious and exciting to them.

This is the fault of the child, not the fault of the person who gave the plant its name.