If you try to think through what’s going on in the famous double slit experiments, the wave / particle duality is the mental puzzle that’s made its way into the scientifically curious parts of pop culture. Now, just think of light as a particle. This is supposed to be the easy part–we can deal with light as a particle or light as a wave but balk at it being both. So, imagine light as a particle with two slits before it. Odds are, you have an image in your mind. I certainly do, as I write this. In this mental image, what is it we are imagining illuminates light?

A mental image is, I think, a simulation of visual experience. During our ordinary visual experiences, it is obvious that there is an observer. Although we don’t usually think about it, if we know a little about vision we recall that the visual experience relies on light being emitted in over here, bouncing off of or being absorbed by objects, ending up in our retinas, and so on. In mental images, this is less obvious. As a simulation of an experience that has these features, a mental image implies a mental observer, mental light, and mental retinas, but the image seems to simply appear, floating freely and unencumbered, on the mental stage. We can put our implied mental retina on stage as a new character if we like, but this is an unconvincing sock puppet. The implied mental retina is part of the stage, not a character on it.

In our ordinary uses of visualization, there’s no obvious utility in trying to keep track of the stage on which mental images appear, although it can be an entertaining mental exercise in its own right. If we watch our imagined particle of light speeding towards a slit, though, we should probably pause to consider what an absurd and self-contradictory image this is. If we cast visualization as a tool rather than a stage, this is like trying to use a hammer as a hose. We should be a little surprised if it works at all, rather than puzzled when it works poorly.

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I don’t know if this line of thinking leads to any insight into physics. I doubt it does. It might be useful as a prompt to consider the relationship between our representations and the phenomena represented. We should not assume that the two are compatible, and it is not obvious what outcome we should expect when they aren’t. What kind of relationship between representation and reality should we expect when the mental representation of a phenomenon is in direct conflict with what we know of the phenomenon? Does our understanding break down completely? How much of it breaks down? Does our awareness of the representation’s deficiencies allow us to correct for them?

Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 99), discussing whether mathematics would be the same in all conceivable worlds, writes: “[I]t seems that if we want to be able to communicate at all, we have to adopt some common base, and it pretty well has to include logic.”

I sympathize with Hofstadter, here. A conceivable world seems to imply that we can hold it in our minds and make some sense of it. However, this sentence does not recommend Hofstadter as a careful observer of human communication.

Or, if we hold Hofstadter’s viewpoint steady and see human communication in its light, we might conclude that the daily experience of the average human is to live in an inconceivable world. That’s an interesting idea to ponder, at least for as long as one can take it seriously rather than succumbing to a cynical, but superficial and uninteresting, interpretation. It is hard to doubt that we hold at least a little of the world in our minds. How much? What’s the SI unit for conceivability? Does a feeling of understanding use the same units, or another?

As a narrower and more straightforward subset we might look at dreams, which routinely violate any standard of coherence one might apply. Nonetheless, they occupy our consciousnesses for a substantial portion of every night and, although some of the content of dreams seems to defy translation into language, we don’t find ourselves incapable of communicating about dreams.

We could also rephrase Hofstadter’s point more narrowly. The phrase “communicate at all” might be a bit of hyperbole. I think he is making as an unstated assumption that we wish our communications on mathematics, conceivable worlds, and so forth to rise to some standard of clarity and comprehensibility. If we make the unstated assumption more explicit, we might say, “If we want to have conversations that are logical, we have to adopt some common base that includes logic.” A true enough statement, and perhaps not as vacuously tautological as it first appears.

Random thought of the day:

“Is a social construct” is a social construct.

1. I happened upon a mental image I enjoy. Suppose you pick up a rock. You can see it, feel it, taste it if you want. You only have any direct sensory experience of its surface, though. Its interior is more mysterious. You can infer the properties of the rock’s interior in various ways, but you can’t feel them. If you wanted to know what the interior of the rock feels like, you might break it in half. In breaking a rock in half, we convert a bit of what used to be the rock’s interior into a new surface. It’s the inside of the rock if we relate it to the shape and size the rock used to have. It’s the surface in the context of the rocks as they are.

2. An episode of Sam Harris’s podcast with Andrew Sullivan includes some discussion of Trump that I find interesting. At one point, Sam says something along the lines of, “You don’t get the sense that he has any interiority.” Although I agree with Sam entirely on this, I think most people don’t share this view of Trump. We rely heavily on an intuitive theory of mind in social situations. We try to understand what the people around us are thinking and feeling, what they want, what would motivate them to take one or another action. Our intuitive theory of mind simply does not work with Trump.

With enough practice, we can become good enough at a skill—playing the flute, for instance—that we don’t have to think about the technique any more. The flute doesn’t feel like an object you’re trying to manipulate, but like an extension of yourself, a way of expressing yourself that is as natural as speaking. For most skills, it is very difficult for us to reach this point, and most of us never do. Personally, I never got beyond the “can make the right notes, but slowly and with effort” stage with the flute. Even those who reach that level of mastery, though, can still see the flute, can still observe and understand the technique. We reach only the point at which the technique and the instrument can be transparent some of the time, never a point at which they are transparent all of the time. A lot of our mental machinery is transparent all of the time. The visual blind spots, for instance, are right there in our visual field all the time, but there are little bits of mental machinery in our visual processing systems that let us see the world instead of seeing the errors and omissions in our visual field. We don’t have any conscious awareness of that mental machinery and we can’t tinker with it in any useful way. I think that for most people, intuitive theory of mind is transparent most or all of the time. Not as inaccessible as visual processing, but towards that end of the spectrum. People who are less comfortable in social situations, like me, may be more like a good flautist. Sometimes that part of social cognition is working smoothly and transparently, sometimes it’s a clumsy tool in front of us that we’re trying to manipulate. Or more like straining to see through cheese cloth than like looking through a window. This is a disadvantage most of the time, but may be an advantage with someone like Trump. Trump can manipulate people in large part because people don’t know how to make heads or tails of a social interaction in which the usual theory of mind simply does not work.

For instance, Trump lies even when it is blindingly obvious that he is lying. The rest of us need a fig leaf of some kind to let us maintain a pretense of honesty. Trump does not. That’s really disorienting, so we try to figure out what convoluted scenario would lead someone like us to behave like that. However, he is not like us. If there’s any understanding of his inner life that we can gain, it’s going to require some new tools. Luckily, trying to understand what is going on in Trump’s head is rapidly becoming less relevant. I’m sure he won’t be the last genuinely “other” person we interact with, though.

From In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman:

“In science,” my father said, “nothing is worth a dime that doesn’t accord with our observations of the world. There’s really only one field in all of human endeavour where no observation can undermine the authority of a statement.” “Mathematics?” “Yes.”

That feels like something that ought to be true, but then why would anyone publish or read any mathematical work? No one’s understanding could possibly be changed in the process.

Viewed from another angle, you might conceptualize mathematics as a sociological investigation of what kinds of things people judge to be proofs.

At some point, I think in the last few years but don’t recall the source or the time, I encountered the idea that experienced duration of a unit of time is determined by the proportion of one’s experience that unit of time represents. If you are three years old, a year is nearly forever. If you are thirty years old, a year is rather short. The basic idea that units of time seem shorter as you age is a cliché, but connecting that to the proportion of one’s total experience represented by that unit of time seemed like the kind of observation that was unexpected and novel but should have been a cliché universally acknowledged.

Connecting to the previous post, one might reasonably assume that the number of repetitions needed to convey legitimacy is inversely proportional to the number of repetitions one might have experienced, given one’s age and the duration of the phenomenon.

I’ve been enjoying videos about music by Adam Neely. One of the concepts he returns to frequently is that repetition legitimizes. If you do something once, perhaps it’s a mistake. If you do it a few times, the listener assumes it is intentional. It becomes a regularity that needs explanation, rather than an aberration that needs excuse. I have gradually come to believe that this is as close as one might get to a cognitive ‘theory of everything’. For any cognitive pattern you encounter and may seek to understand, the ultimate explanation is very likely to be that repetition legitimizes. We think this way because we thought that way once, and then we thought that way again, and then it became the way we think.

When I try to understand what made my mental world when I was young different from what it is now, the best explanation I’ve come up with is that the number of repetitions needed to legitimize was extraordinarily small, then. If I think of something that seems as though it ‘always happened’ when I was young, and I try to figure out how many times it actually happened, the sample size from which I generalized, I always end up at a very small number. Two, three, four, maybe as high as seven or eight. Rarely, if ever, higher than fifteen.

Continuing my train of thought from the previous post, more or less, yesterday I heard on The Moth Radio Hour a description of a traditional West African ceremony used to treat depression. The specifics of the ceremony are a bit nonsensical, and in roughly the ways you might guess. Andrew Solomon mentions, though, that some of its features probably are genuinely helpful, especially that the ceremony involves the village as a whole expressing support for the person involved. So, if that’s the part that’s important, why all the other parts of the ceremony that don’t really make any sense? And why, especially, ritual sacrifice of a ram? It occurred to me that, well, all the people involved have to be doing something. A bunch of people sitting around awkwardly doing nothing in particular wouldn’t be very helpful. They need some activity that serves as an expression of their support and there isn’t an obvious option that has a direct relationship to mental illness of itself, so the activity is necessarily going to have a somewhat arbitrary relationship to the actual task at hand. And, so long as you’ve got all these people together needing to occupy themselves, well, why not pick an activity that rather naturally lends itself to a lot of roast meat at the end?

There are two very opposite ways you can conceptualize and use ritual and its more bureaucratic or scientific procedural equivalents. It can be employed to try to control behavior, and so, as the one subjected to it, you naturally view is as constraint and imposition. Freedom them comes from avoiding or relaxing the procedural requirements. It can also reduce the attentional requirements of uninteresting tasks, or the less interesting aspects of a task. This is related to “muscle memory”. If there is an established set of actions that you can simply follow, you don’t have to make any decisions. Your mind need not be occupied with the mundane details of accomplishing your task, but can be directed elsewhere. This, also, is freeing. It’s not clear to me how much of the difference is in the events themselves vs. one’s psychological relationship to them.

I’ve noticed a tendency for bureaucratic procedures to become more convoluted and opaque over time. I think this happens much more quickly when there are groups with conflicting interests working on a common project, and neither has much ability to compel the other to do something. If the process is governed by rules, it is natural to appeal to the rules to justify one’s preferred course of action. However, motivated people can find or simply invent ambiguities, loopholes, etc. So you might have a series of interactions that looks roughly like this:

Group 1: I want to do X.

Group 2: Rule A says we shouldn’t do X.

Group 1: But the wording in this sentence of rule A is open to differing interpretations, and under my interpretation X is allowed.

Group 2: Your interpretation is incorrect. Here are other regulations, and other parts of the same regulation, that clearly establish the intent and correct interpretation of rule A.

Group 1: [Proceeds to apply the same process of finding ambiguities to the other regulations appealed to.]

Group 2: [Continues knocking down group 1’s appeals to ambiguity.]

Unless someone has the power to resolve the dispute by fiat, there’s no natural end point to this process. Supposing group 1 is incorrect, there is no point at which that mere fact forces group 1 to abandon its position. So, in practice, you probably end up with one of two outcomes: decision by attrition, in which whoever persists longest and most vehemently wins; movement to a higher level of abstraction. In the latter case, one might reason, “Well, clearly our two groups have some disagreement about how the process works, and we need to resolve that before we can work through the logjam on any particular case. Let’s have a a few people from each side meet for the next few months and write up a process we’ll all agree to follow in future disagreements of this type.” Unfortunately, this increases the pile of policy material that both sides can appeal to in looking for and trying to close loopholes, and makes it more difficult for a neutral party to read the policy material and understand how the process is actually supposed to work.

Another possibility is to try to exert power by adding steps to the process. If you want to say, “No,” but can’t, instead you say, “Yes, and here are three forms to fill out,” and make sure each of the forms is unclear and requires input from multiple parties who don’t normally work with each other.

Although I think this tendency is much more dramatic in bureaucracies within which there are opposing interests and little direct power, I think it’s fairly universal to some extent. The example that prompted this post is a new combination published by Rupert Barneby in The Great Basin Naturalist in 1986:

“Lotus plebeius (T. Brandg.) Barneby [based on: Hosackia plebeia T. Brandg., Proc. Calif Acad. Sci. II, 2: 133 (Brandegee s.n. 30 Apr 1889, “El Rancho Viejo” [near Calmalli, Baja California Nort, +/- 28° 15’ N]].”

For those not familiar with botanical nomenclature, Brandegee published the name “Hosackia plebeia” and Barneby is moving that name from the genus Hosackia to the genus Lotus. There is no further discussion preceding or following the text quoted above, that is the entire thing. In this case, I was hoping for a little more information. Some botanists who have worked on these plants recognize Lotus plebeius as a species. Some do not, and include the name as a synonym under another species. We can infer that Barneby believes Lotus plebeius to be a distinct species—why would he create the new combination “Lotus plebeius” unless he intended to use it? if considered a synonym, one can leave it be in Hosackia—but we have no idea why. Nor why he thinks it should be in Lotus, for that matter. So, in this case, I’m on the side of wanting a bit more complication in the process. If you’re publishing a new combination, give us a few sentences of explanation.

In creating the self-published Journal of Semiarid Environments, though, I’m intentionally nudging the process away from procedural complication. For those used to the current process in academia, this can seem like lowering scientific standards. Science means peer review, and publishing in real journals! If we let people publish whatever they feel like, it’ll be anarchy! (I exaggerate, but you get the idea.) What interests me about Barneby’s publication of Lotus plebeius is that it’s nothing but procedure. It does precisely the minimum that is procedurally necessary and no fault can be found with it. It just isn’t very helpful to readers seeking to increase their understanding of the plants involved–which is, after all, the greater purpose that botanical nomenclature exists to serve! What’s missing is the part that is not mere procedure. Trying to resolve that deficiency and produce botanical insight by making the rules more complicated is like creating a new form for someone to fill out, or having a committee work on increasing the pile of policy documents.

Attention directed at procedure is attention directed away from one’s purpose. The best procedure is the one that minimizes that redirection of attention.

In bureaucracy, excess attention to procedure is probably an indication that the organization’s structure prevents people from working productively to fulfill their responsibilities. The organization is broken in a way that can’t be solved by paying more attention to procedure. Paying more attention to procedure is both a symptom of and a reinforcement of the organization’s failure.

Occasionally I encounter sentences I think I should remember. Here is today’s:

“I’d outlived my sense of future.”

Betty Reid Soskin, from: https://themoth.org/radio-hour/truth-and-power-global-stories-of-women

With a few words, she points at something that is immediately familiar but rarely visible.