Quantum Non-Linearity: January 2022

Saturday, January 01, 2022

The Transaction Web

Society is a web of connections and transactions

I have to say thanks to my friend James Knight for on so many occasions of getting me out of my shell and dragging me kicking and screaming into the muddled but real world of social, political and economic commentary. The complexity of these subjects and their epistemic intractability means they are as open ended & contentious as they are significant. Below is my reply to some thoughts James had on using the arborescent and rhizomic networks seen in plant life as social metaphors. I think he will be commenting fully on these matters at a later date.

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Hi James,

Here are my comments!

I'm not quite clear how you are applying the arborescent and rhizomic metaphors to society. I think I can just see how you are applying the rhizomic metaphor: it would seem quite a good metaphor for the way people and groups of people and institutions are connected into a very complex network of transactional links through which ideas, information, materials, wealth and resources spread. If you could map this system of connections visually it would be staggeringly complex. I suppose those visual pictures we see of web connectivity [See above] are a close analogy, showing a power law distribution among the nodes in terms of their number of connections: Viz: there are many nodes with just a few connections and just a few with many, many connections - and that gives us our ~ x^-n distribution graph. Such a picture displays a mix of centralized influences and decentralized influences and is evidence that the "market" and government are actually part of one and the same phenomenon and differ only in their degree of connection. (It's like when they discovered that radiant heat and light - apparently two very different phenomena as far as the senses were concerned - were one and the same). Given the way evolution has gone this is no surprise - it too has given us organisms that are a mix of central and decentralized networking and processing

So I think I can grasp that, but I'm not sure where the arborescent metaphor fits in. The rhizomic metaphor covers both central and decentralized influences - seemingly. Or are you thinking of the difference between very visible and public transactions versus the myriad minor & private transactions that take place between those minor nodes of connection? Ironically, if we take the links between trees themselves in terms of chemical and gamete connections we end up with a rhizomic looking network.

As you know I'm pretty anti-Matt Ridley and the kind of "libertarianism" he affects to promulgate: I find fault in his view of evolution which fails to see that given the rhizomal metaphor, informal unplanned evolution covers both government and the market. As I've already said evolution has given us organisms that display both centralized and decentralized processing. It's a straw man to characterize government as a failed or incompetent "planner"; because of chaos all collective identities, whether organic or societal, are forced into the role of being complex adaptive systems - that is they are opportunists who necessarily have to adapt to changing circumstances as those circumstances come up. Apart from God himself there are no long term planners - there can't be in a chaotic reality. It's clear to me that those centralized highly connected nodes are as much an aspect of evolutionary change as are the broad mass of little folksy nodes with few connections.

Those highly connected centralized nodes are needed, as is the spider in the middle of the web, in order to respond to systematic threats and changes that decentralized processing cannot respond to fast enough or perhaps even be aware of. Moreover evolution wouldn't work at all were it not for a highly organized regime of physical laws & influences that constrain and regulate what is possible; it is an error to think of evolution as a random process - far from it. In that sense evolution itself requires both centralized and decentralized inputs. As you know I'm very much for the market and its powers of innovation, wealth distribution & creation, but frankly I see subliminal & crypto right-wingers like Ridley misrepresenting the argument for the market. I really fell out with him when he started hobnobbing with conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck (just as Trump did with QAnon and Alex Jones). He was (perhaps unintentionally) playing into the hands of the far-right.

Political reality seems to be a curved space. As the far-right and the far-left both seek the dismantling of the state in favour of their ideologies which purport to aim for an ultimate decentralized folksy society, they seem unaware of the inevitable lurking opportunists in their midst who may seize on the chaos of social break-down to edge toward totalitarianism, the ultimate authoritarian version of the state, the ultimate "big" government. Thus, far-left and far-right meet each other as they converge from opposite directions. How ironic!

For Queen, Country and the Market!

Tim

Quantum Non-Linearity: Matt Ridley's Facts vs Science Paradigm (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Contradictions, The Academic Establishment and Matt Ridley. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

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Some of those ideas I offered above are rather seat-of-the-pants and need a little more developing - in particular the idea that Market and Government are aspects of the same underlying phenomenon of transactional connectivity and an aspect of complex adaptive systems theory.

I had to take a much needed bash at right-winger Matt Ridley: He would likely object to the label right-winger, but that label has got more to do with the people and partisans he identifies with. The result is that it is possible to predict in advance, with a reasonable probability, what stance he will take on certain issues.....

Is he going to be critical of the Greens? Of course he is.

Is he going to favour living and let live re: CO2 emissions? Of course he is.

Is he going to be critical of the academic establishment? Of course he is.

Is he going to have trouble wrapping his mind round the relation of theory and observation? Of course he is.

Is he going to favour theories that Sars-CoV-2 was lab leaked? Of course he is.

Is he going to protest about pandemic lock-downs? Of course he is.

Is he going to be a Brexiteer? Of course he is.

Is he going to write for the Telegraph? Of course he is.

Is he going write for the Guardian ? Of course he isn't

Is he prepared to go on the show of conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck? Of course he is.

I'm not going to comment whether Ridley is right or wrong on these matters (He may or may not be right), but merely point out the predictability of his stance because of the tribes he identifies with. But I will, however, venture to comment that he made a huge mistake in hobnobbing with Glenn Beck - that's the crackpot stamping ground of the Donald Trumps of this world. But then, like Trump, Ridley has got to think of his constituency and audience.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, January 01, 2022

The Transaction Web

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION