“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
In 1996 John Horgan, a senior writer for the Scientific American, published a book titled The End of Science. I was a precocious thirteen year old and had formulated a naive life plan: I would become a physicist (having read – but not understood – Einstein’s Special Relativity), I would find a way to bridge the gap between Einstein’s theory of gravity and Quantum Mechanics (having read, and definitely not understood, An Intro to Quantum Mechanics). In my spare time I would help transport humankind to Mars and terraform that sphere (having read The Case For Mars). The End of Science did not sit well with my naive, ambitious mind.
As is standard publishing practice, the arguments contained in Horgan’s book are less grandiose than the title suggests. Horgan is pointing to a distinct lack of progress in the past 40 years as compared to the 1910’s to the 1950’s accross a variety of fields of research. Compared to the revolutions of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, physics circa 1995 had stalled. On their quest to find a unified field theory physicists were postulating tens of new dimensions to support a superstring theory which on all accounts seemed (and still seems, to me anyway) unfalsifiable. The most advanced theories of human consciousness were barely more than philosophical stipulation – when it came to actual science of the human mind we were essentially at a loss. He was likewise critical of genetics, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, psychology and modern medicine.
The premise was provocative if a bit naive. There is always another mystery to solve. Slow progress has historically been a sign that a paradigm has to change, some radical shift in our thinking is in the offing, just waiting to be revealed. The Think Thread is the place where I store all my thoughts on the subjects I think hold the key to this next revolution. These include but are not limited to:
- Entropy and information theory
- Interpretations of quantum mechanics
- The prior two and their relationship to time
- The hard problem of consciousness
- Emergent complexity from deterministic systems
- Agent based simulation for prediction
- Strong form artificial intelligence
- Economics as a computational system
- Unification of biology and physics
- The limits of computational prediction
- Alternative methods of machine learning
- Utilitarian ethics in a secular world
- Complexity as a basis for moral action
- The limits of prediction
- The limits of knowledge
The list goes on… It’s an ambitious, preposterous and in some ways pretentious list – I am painfully aware of that. Will I gain any traction on any of these topics? Will reading any of this be worth your time? Maybe not. But what’s the point of thinking if you aren’t thinking big? I’ll be honest – thinking about the above list of topics is simply more fun than thinking about politics, celebrity gossip, or looking at puppy pics or cat memes… Actually, scrap that last part (your welcome)…
So with that, let’s begin…
ThinkThread 