December 20, 2013 at 9:22 A.M. Yesterday obstructions to my home Internet connection prevented further work on this text. I will try to complete my typing of this essay today. It may be that some persons responsible for my unpleasant experiences at Strand Books were also behind the plagiarism of my work in The New York Review of Books. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
I was surprised to see Congressman Gerald Nadler carrying and holding up what appeared to be a legal file on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, December 20, 2013. I am sure this was merely a coincidence. Happy holidays, Mr. Nadler!
Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinov, "The (Elusive) Theory of Everything," Scientific American, August 13, 2013, p. 90.
Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinov, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010).
Leonard Mlodinov, "It All Adds Up: A mathematician says that his subject directs the flow of the universe," The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 2013, p. 15.
Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995).
Nathan Salmon, "The Limits of Human Mathematics," Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 243-265.
For analogous discussions and debates, see:
Richard Rorty, "Is natural science a natural kind?," Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 46-63.
Jennifer Hornsby, "Descartes, Rorty and the Mind-Body Fiction," in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 41-58.
Roy Bashkar, "Rorty, Realism and the Idea of Freedom," in Reading Rorty, pp. 198-233.
I.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov summarize their thinking concerning science as "map and territory":
"How do we know that the reality we perceive is true? The gold fish is seeing a version of reality that is different from ours, but can we be sure that it is any less real? For all we know, we, too, may spend our entire lives staring out at the world through a distorting lens." (p. 90.)
"Irremovable spectacles," perhaps? I will explain, briefly, the intellectual journey traced by these authors from a classical or Newtonian model of "reality" to a post-quantum, pluralist and hermeneutic theory of what the authors describe as "model-dependent-realism."
Analogies to the "dialectical-critical-realism" of Professor Roy Bashkar and to phenomenological-hermeneutics of a Gadamerian variety will be become evident during my analysis and discussion.
In fact, this latest position concerning the philosophy of science that is defended by Professors Hawking and Mlodinov is classified by philosophers as a kind of scientific phenomenological-hermeneutics with a strong -- if unrecognized -- aesthetic component reminiscent of Brian Greene's "elegant universe" hypothesis.
This tentative theoretical statement seems to give up on the search for a single theory of everything because, wisely, the authors accept the lessons of the previous century that "everything" is a much more protean and complex (or ambiguous) concept that we once thought, or that the universe contains a "participatory" element, or that we live in a "multiverse."
There is no rejection of truth in this essay, since to do so -- to reject the concept of truth -- would render the essay itself neither true nor false. Scientists rarely reject the possibility of being either right or wrong in their work. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Perhaps the greatest confusion resulting from the knowledge developed recently in the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy is the so-called "relativist blunder" or confusion of truth (epistemology) with reality (ontology). ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
Loss of truth is to abandon the scientific project of understanding the universe. Worse, loss of the ideal or hope for truth, genuine acceptance of the (to me) nonsensical proposition that any and all statements may be both true and false (because there is no difference between truth and falsehood) may amount to abandoning sanity and reality. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
To complicate or enrich our understanding of truth, however, is far from abandoning truth, but rather an acknowledgement that we need new concepts of truth, reality, meaning and sound reasoning more than ever because our world is seen as more subtle in its meanings to the extent that it is also more complex than we once thought in its workings. It is not, fortunately, "all relative." ("Dialectics, Entanglements, and Special Relativity" and "Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy'.")
"Most people believe that there is an objective reality out there," Hawking and Mlodinov write, "and that our senses and our science directly convey information about the material world. Classical science is based on the belief that an external world exists whose properties are definite and independent of the observer who perceives them. In philosophy, that belief is called realism." (p. 90.)
This doctrine has been undermined by several centuries of scholarship in the hard sciences and humanities demonstrating, since the pioneering work of Immanuel Kant, the impossibility of removing the knower from the known without establishing -- or even seeking to establish -- the nature of the existent in totality, independently of agents apprehending existents in thought.
" ... the world we know is constructed by the human mind employing sensory data as its raw material and is shaped by the interpretive structure of our brain. This viewpoint may be hard to accept, but it is not difficult to understand. There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world." (p. 90.)
II.
This amounts to the victory of Kant's Critical Theory and all subsequent mediated or synthesized forms of realism/antirealism in addressing ultimate metaphysical questions formerly trapped between realism and antirealism.
There is indeed an objective, external reality "out there," and what we know of it, the reality that we can experience, or discuss (including discuss scientifically), cannot be separated from the persons or knowing agents doing the discussing and understanding. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" and "David Stove and the Critique of Idealism.")
Nothing has been more powerful in driving home this truth about our world or the current state of knowledge than the quantum revolution and allied developments in mathematics, biology, linguistics, systems- or networks-theory, and a number of other areas seemingly distant from these fields of learning -- such as our theorizing with regard to human cultures or social forms, notably concerning gender, identity, law, art or economic activity. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Knowledge and understandings that flow from new constructions of knowledge-fields (science) cannot affect all of the understandings that we must live as knowing agents (philosophy). ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" then "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy As Jazz.")
"The reality of quantum theory is a radical departure from that of classical physics. In the framework of quantum theory, particles have neither definite positions nor definite velocities unless and until an observer measures those qualities. In some cases, individual objects do not have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many. [entanglement, community?] Quantum physics also has important implications for our concept of the past. [Memory?] In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history." (p. 92.) ("'In Time': A Movie Review" and "'Inception': A Movie Review" then "'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review" finally, "What is Memory?")
Hermeneutic theory has sought to capture this variable quality of our universe and ourselves by celebrating rather than denying the diversity and infinite number of possibilities (meanings) in culture, as an aesthetic hypothesis, and postulating the human interpretive capacity as essential to our selves as "freedoms in the world." (Gadamer, Ricoeur.)
I argued for this view in a long essay on the "hermeneutics of freedom." Professors Hawking and Mlodinov set forth a parallel position, again, one that is analogous to Professor Roy Bashkar's "Dialectical Critical Realism" which they call "Model-Dependent Realism" aligning perfectly with what I have called the "hermeneutics of freedom" in Continental theory:
"In our view, there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observations, neither one can be considered more real than the other. A person can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration." (p. 92.) ("Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" and "John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.") ("Is the universe only a numbers game?")
III.
It turns out that the "theory of everything" will probably be either a set of theories that are mutually consistent, or a flexible and/or evolutionary algorithm to describe a Rubik's Cube-like model that shifts and changes, depending on the aspects of reality(ies) that we wish to encompass in our theories/thinking.
This is to suggest that the plasticity of our thinking mirrors the Protean universe/multiverse we inhabit. As for the language of this Brave New World, a language that resolves the potential self-referential paradox problems (Is model-dependent realism merely another "model-dependent" solution?), it will be necessary to fuse our mathematics with aesthetics, logic with epistemology, linguistics with metaphysics, "is" with "ought," facts with values, by recognizing that disciplinary or conceptual divisions are merely useful tools or devices that we may discard when they are no longer needed. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
If knowledge must be limited to what is "representable," then ultimate reality or total knowledge of existence may always be beyond representation. (Salmon, pp. 243-265.) ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Conversation On a Train.")
This is Professor Hawking's so-called "Americanism" -- despite his British identity -- or pragmatism, derived (perhaps) from collaboration with Professor Mlodinov. ("Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")
There is an ...
" ... effort in mathematics called the Langlands Program, a 'grand unified theory of mathematics,' which proposes that the hard questions in number theory can be answered by employing the methods of a seemingly unconnected field called harmonic analysis. [There are no unconnected fields.] That sounds very technical, but Frenkel aims to make it understandable, even beautiful."
Notice the conclusion here:
" ... Symmetries like this form a mathematical structure -- like the 'Galois Group' of the polynomial equation -- that plays a key role in this book. ... REPRESENTATIONS of the Galois Group form ... the source group of the number field [a revolving door?] carrying all essential information about numbers." (Mlodinov, p. 15.) ("Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers.")
These results, as predicted in earlier essays at these blogs, provide a new "model" for resolving problems in number theory. (Again: "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Most importantly -- analogously with Andrew Wiles resolution of Fermat's Final Theorem -- the approach reveals "deep and fundamental connections between vastly different fields of mathematics." (Mlodinov, Penrose.)
This makes sense as well as suggesting a language for capturing the symmetries emerging across many subject areas reflecting "entanglements" we are only beginning to understand:
"Since psyche and matter [mind and body] are contained in one and the same world and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendent factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing." (Goswami, p. 127.) ("Whatever.")
