In today’s New York Times, David Albert reviews a new book by David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. (Deutsch, as you may know, is a physicist famous for his work on quantum computing.) Deutsch’s thesis appears to be that the adoption of the scientific method—which I take from the review’s context to mean rational exploration of the universe using empirical techniques—was the most transformative thing in the history of universe. Yes, that sounds a bit overblown, but Albert’s review is so positive that the book may well merit a look:
David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.
It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas — something of almost mathematical rigor — but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering conversation — something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” — never dull, often startling and fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even, maybe, secondarily) true.
Albert also claims that “a lot of the meat of this book is in its digressions,” and many of these, it appears, involve the units of culture that Dawkins dubbed “memes.” That worries me a bit, as I’m no big fan of the meme concept (you can download my review of Blackmore’s The Meme Machine here).
But Albert’s review is by no means uniformly positive: he takes Deutsch to task for uncritical use of memes, and for making, in some places, “explicit and outrageous falsehoods”:
Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching collection of similar universes — and that what resistance there is to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy, misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-fashioned realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most of the good, solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in questions of the foundations of physics — like me, for example — are deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact, explain those behaviors at all — and because there are other, much more reasonable-looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.
The subatomic particle relationship to multiverses is beyond me, but Albert is an expert on quantum mechanics. And Albert doesn’t mention any other “outrageous falsehoods.”
I don’t suppose I’ll be reading this book, if for no other reason that I have a gazillion others in my queue, and I’m not exactly a fan of those books that take the entire world of ideas as their remit (I disliked, for instance, Gödel, Escher, Bach). Still, I encourage readers who buy this book to report back. It’s already ranked #122 on Amazon.
I also disliked “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, though my conclusion was that its author was a pretentious bore. But perhaps that’s really the same reason.
How refreshing to hear that other folks disliked GEB. I never understood all the gushing praise it received. I also disliked Hoftadter’s follow-up “I Am a Strange Loop”. It’s even more pretentious than the first.
Now, if only I could find others who think that Berlinski’s “A Tour of the Calculus” is the most pretentious book of all time…
My summary of GEB:
“Gosh, recursion is cool!”
My summary of The Mind’s Eye:
“Gosh, recursion is cool — therefore, consciousness.”
“Gödel, Escher, Bach” sounds like a legal firm!
Dr. Coyne:
Your article on the meme concept is not available to the general public.
Would it possible for you to summarize your thought on memes in a post, if you have time?
Thank you very much.
I would also be extremely interested in your point of view on this, Dr. Coyne. I was of course spurred into interest by ‘The Selfish Gene’, but Blackmore’s ‘Meme Machine’ made a strong argument that was very aware of its own shortcomings. Your perspective would be invaluable were it possible to present it, though I would of course understand if you’re not due to contractual obligations.
Er – yes it is – if you hit the “here” link in the article there is a link directly to the pdf (the third book review). I just downloaded it from there, rather than tunneling into work to get it from the Nature site.
I’ve read this book and I found it exhilarating and deeply profound. I find his Everett interpration of quantum mechanics convincing, although I’m just a layman. But he does back up his views with philosophical arguments and to me these were persuasive. His treatment of memes is better than that of, say, Sue Blackmore, and so don’t let that put you off Jerry. Definitely worth a read.
Having done a Ph.D. In theoretical particle physics in the 1980s, I never found Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory (QT) very satisfactory; the “collapse of the wave function” is just some hand-waving.
I was aware of Everett’s many worlds theory, but it was only when I read Deutsch’s explication of it in The Fabric of Reality that I felt I really understood the actual physics of QT, rather than just the maths.
However, I haven’t read any counterargument, nor have I seen any convincing discussion of the alternatives. Perhaps there’s something by Albert I should read? Any recommendations?
I’ve flicked through The Beginning of Infinity in a bookshop and it certainly looks very intriguing and thought provoking… I’m still debating whether to buy the hardback or wait for the paperback.
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David Z Albert’s book “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” is, in my opinion, a very good “awareness-raiser” to other interpretations of QM, though his writing style can sometimes be a little thick. Some other interpretations to look up are especially a) Bohmian mechanics and b) GRW collapse scenarios.
I just read it. Basically, it is an exposition of Popperian philosophy. It is somewhat uneven, and long. Some chapters are great, others not so much.
The concept I liked best was the idea of rational memes (eg, science), which require progressive, critical, dynamic cultures in which to thrive, and anti-rational memes (eg, religion) which require static, credulous, and unquestioning cultures in which to thrive.
Maybe he takes the theory and goes on a “just so” story telling trip. But FWIW Deutsch has written earlier books where he deliberates on the science theory of falsification.
It has the distinguished character of being the only testable theory of science we have AFAIK. Testing works, and as far as physics goes falsification has converged on robust areas.
Any current overreaching wouldn’t surprise me though, it seems to be an all too common temptation after touching the solid parts of a field.
The concept I liked best was the idea of rational memes (eg, science), which require progressive, critical, dynamic cultures in which to thrive, and anti-rational memes (eg, religion) which require static, credulous, and unquestioning cultures in which to thrive.
Feh, that just came across as typical college bull-session stuff to me. No concrete examples given, no a priori way of distinguishing “static” from “dynamic” cultures (e.g. where would Japan fit in this scheme? Would you give it the same classification if you observed it in 1840 vs in 1890?) Frankly I’ve gotten better thought-out pop anthropology from middling episodes of Deep Space Nine.
Any relation to the static and dynamic in Robert Pirsig’s Lila?
Any relation to the static and dynamic in Robert Pirsig’s Lila?
None that Deutsch mentioned.
I haven’t read the book in question, but I just wanted to give a plug for the reviewer, David Albert.
I took a course with Albert about six years ago, and I’ve seen him give a handful of talks in addition to that. The man is amazing. If you want to learn about quantum mechanics, do pick up his “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” and if you’re into stat mech and what contemporary philosophers and physicists think about the “arrow of time” pick up “Time and Chance”. Whatever your prior opinions, under no circumstance will you be disappointed.
It may also be hilarious to learn that Albert was duped into appearing in “What the Bleep do We Know” (much the same way PZ was duped into appearing in “Expelled”). You may want to be high when you watch that movie though.
This book seems to have hit a nerve for some, either positive or negative, therefore it goes on my list. Maybe this is the “Moral Landscape” physics version 😉
I’d like to read a good counter-many-worlds argument. If anyone has one free online – do let me know.
How can you deny memes when you’re always trying to spread your “gnu atheist” meme?
And post LOLcats!
Do cowboy boots count as a meme, at least if promoted by Yankee urban Jewish atheist academics?
The point of memes is the ideas will replicate themselves, and become more virulent in transmission as they morph to become more viral. And that’s not really what’ss on offer. The problem, at least as far as I can tell, is that there’s a difference between a metaphor for the replications of units of culture, and a substantial account of it. Memes, to have scientific value, need to be the latter – yet the propagation of the notion of a meme is of the former.
There are no units of culture – it’s a silly idea. There are no little bits of stuff that ‘culture’ is made up of. If ‘culture’ can be said to be ‘made’ of anything, it is made of decisions. What you find when you look at long-term historical and cultural processes – and by that I mean, at time-depths of thousands of years – is that people can do similar things to other people for entirely different reasons, and this is what lends plausibility to the ‘meme’ perspective. If you can’t trust the explicit reasons given by people themselves as to why they do what they do, then why not grant an independent existence to the things that they do, and the people as simply hosts?
I can’t say I’ve found it useful to see things in this way, except at a level of abstraction that is itself useless. I’m writing a thesis on headhunting in eastern Indonesia at the moment. Headhunting is a characteristic activity of Austronesian-speaking peoples: it appears to be part of the Austronesian inheritance. It is convenient to speak of ‘it’ as a ‘thing’, but it is not that. What it consists of is a series of decisions undertaken over thousands of years, and that those decisions are not based on explicit, conscious beliefs is immaterial. The best approach is via the philosophy of practical reason, and not a spurious ontological proposition.
Other social scientists have their own problems with memes. The best analyses are probably those of Dan Sperber, who is a genuinely science-friendly anthropologist, a true rarity!
I’m not sure that “headhunting” is sufficiently fine-grained a thing to be considered a meme.
Isn’t a meme a more discrete idea, such as, “vaccination causes autism”? (Which is what someone decided once, and others decided to accept it as true…)
Does meme “theory” have anything analogous to genotype and phenotype – “memotype” and “cognotype”?
Maybe headhunting is a cognotype, an expression of multiple memes.
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PS. (I have had Blackmore’s The Meme Machine on my bookshelf for some time, but haven’t got around to reading it yet… how to prioritise my “to read” list?)
First, you don’t decide to accept things as true. You accept them as true, or you don’t – there is no decision involved. It is probably impossible for you to decide to believe that humans have five legs, for instance.
Second, headhunting is a meme if anything is. For thousands of years, people in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, island Melanesia, Malaysia, and Brunei have cut off human heads and taken them home. It is a thing that people simply do, without being able to explicitly state why they do it. Actually, they do explicitly state why they do it (although it is really a past tense affair, of course). They give multi-layered accounts of why, frequently with mythological and ritual backing. But a casual look at accounts from all over the Austronesian world shows that these accounts vary substantially, but the practice is quite similar (there are significant variations in the treatment of the head afterwards, but otherwise it’s the same thing from Taiwan to Timor), and it clearly comes from the fact that they descend from an ancestral population that practiced headhunting. But that doesn’t make it non-rational; it just shifts the nature of the explanation in terms of different beliefs than those espoused by the headhunters themselves. I’ve found Joseph Raz’s formal elucidation of H.L.A Hart’s practice theory of law to be quite a useful base for looking at reasons for action that are done simply because they are done (as it were) – see Raz (1999), Practical Reason and Norms, 52-53.
Memes are not just those weird bits of stuff on the internet, as I’m sure you know. Memes are supposed to be things that people do, say, or use in regular ways that spread throughout populations or are carried by diffusion, and ideally survive or fall due to mechanisms similar to natural selection. The idea was anticipated long before Dawkins, in the ideas of the diffusionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although the Darwinian bent was less fundamental to the diffusionist’s idea of ‘traits’. The arguments against them can be found in any history of anthropological or archaeological theory, although more sophisticated ones specifically developed against memetics can be found in the works of Maurice Bloch and Dan Sperber, amongst others. As most of anthropological theory is bunk, the mainstream rejection of memetics is not necessarily a sign that it is not useful, but the arguments are quite strongly against it.
Apologies for the length – it is not often that I get to pontificate about such things 🙂
Hmm…
“Vaccination causes autism” is (very likely) not true, yet many people accept that it is: Are you really saying that none of them actually made a decision about that? That they “just” accepted it? Srsly?
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We must be talking about two different things here, because no, you don’t decide your beliefs. You believe your beliefs. Most elementary books on logic have a task like this: Try to make yourself believe that humans have five legs. Give yourself a minute.
You will find, of course, that you can’t do it, and if you think you have done it, then you’ve confused imagination for belief. You know that humans have two legs; it takes no conscious effort or a decision to believe it, and you cannot simply change your mind about it. Belief isn’t consciously decided upon.
That is different from whether someone is justified in believing something, and clearly various unconscious mechanisms go into making people believe things that mean that they aren’t justified in believing something. But when you know something, you know it without any force of will.
When someone consciously decides what they believe, they aren’t making a choice about the belief, but a choice about the evidence and how it justifies or fails to justify the alternatives. I think that most people who believe that vaccines cause autism believe it because it provides some kind of explanation that seems, to them, plausible. If they were genuinely aware of the evidence and understood it, and had no strong emotional pull not to accept it, then they would not believe what they do. But they can’t just use an act of will to make themselves disbelieve something that they do believe without new information.
Now you’re agreeing with me…
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Not really. People don’t make choices about the things they believe but rather about the evidence they want to look at. If someone believes that they are justified in believing something, they don’t have to decide to believe in the thing they believe they are justified in believing. They just believe it. This is not just a silly, irrelevant point: it is the simple but profound point that you can’t believe something you know isn’t true. People who believe vaccines cause autism considered a certain portion of evidence, and as a result of that come to the inevitable and inescapable conclusion that vaccines cause autism.
And this is part of the reason why memetics seems so plausible, because when someone hears something that sounds reasonable to them, they will believe it. Ideas and representations spread through a community because they seem intuitively reasonable, not because people decide to take them up. But this is different to practices and usages – like tool use or headhunting – which are performed intentionally and rationally. And memetics still has other problems, notably the fact that the ideas are changed, or at least are different, in each head they enter due to the context of the idea and the ideas already existing in the head.
Well, yes. But that was not at all what I was suggesting.
What I meant was that coming to a position on any issue, accepting a proposition as true, false or not proven, still, at some level, involves a decision: You still “come to a resolution in the mind as a result of consideration.” However fleeting or irrational that consideration might’ve been.
Btw, did you always think that all humans always had two legs? (Which of course is not true; consider amputees, conjoined twins, and so on. But, aside from that.)
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No, of course I haven’t always believed that all humans have two legs, but at no point did I decide that they have two legs (or fewer) either. There was no decision, and I cannot choose to believe other than I do at this point.
This point is actually quite important in analytic philosophy today, although it’s a little difficult to express. This is because mental states can only be expressed outside the head as propositions, which may not be how they are in the head, and in fact probably isn’t.
Do people believe propositions, or do they believe facts? For instance, when I believe that it is raining, my brain could be processing it like a proposition, as: “It is true that it is raining”. All mental states could be propositions, and a decision-making, free-acting faculty could sort through the propositions to decide which is true and which is false.
Or it could simply be a reaction to the stimulus of seeing it rain/hearing someone say that it’s raining/etc, such that “I believe that it is true that it is raining” is a reasonable summary of the position, but not the way in which the position works in the mind.
This is not a trivial distinction.
If the latter, which is considered the correct position by most these days, then belief cannot be the result of a decision by some free-acting part of the mind. It isn’t that people who believe that vaccines cause autism have mental states corresponding to the propositions “‘vaccines cause autism’ is true” and “‘vaccines cause autism’ is false”, and then go on to choose the former. They simply have a number of experiences in the world that convince them that vaccines cause autism. And that I have to express that as a proposition in no way endorses the position that beliefs are about propositions.
I hope this doesn’t sound like sophistry. It was, for quite a while, an important problem in philosophy. And I hope you can see how the problem of deciding belief is connected to the problem of free-will. If free-will, then obviously beliefs can be decided, because the will is ultimately free to choose even the propositions it accepts as true. But if not…
…and I believe the word you’re looking for is something like “memeplex”. Ah, hideous neologisms. Where would we be without them?
Yes, headhunting would be a “memeplex” rather than a single meme, but even that has nothing special in its favour. If we ask the question “why do people do things?” and try to answer it by positing that the things themselves have lives of their own, extinguished by… something, then I don’t think we’re doing anything useful. Memetics is potentially a useful way of talking about ideas and practices in an extremely abstract way. Sperber has developed the idea for use in the social sciences under the unwieldy name the epidemiology of representations, which has gained some support, and it is doubtless a useful way of analysing cultural phenomena. But asserting the ontological validity of memes, or asserting that memetics is how things really happen as opposed to conscious, intentional decisions on the basis of pro attitudes in the minds of individual human beings creating the appearance of cultural stability would be, simply, really wrong.
Remember, Dawkins and Dennett, and Blackmore for that matter, have never really had to use memetics to achieve any real end in the social sciences, whereas anthropologists, when they try to do some proper work instead of waffling on, do. It hasn’t proven that useful. Once you’ve read Blackmore, try to find Sperber’s Explaining Culture or any of his other books. They are clearly written and break down the problems in memetics beautifully.
Thank you. I shall add it to my Amazon “save for later” list!
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I just started it. It’s available on Kindle.
I haven’t read it, I’ll think about it. But a book I strongly recommend is Michael Brook’s ‘Free Radicals. The Secret Anarchy of Science’. It’s a great read. It stresses the creative nature of science.
Michael Brooks is also a quantum physicist (what is it about quantum physicists and their urge to write books, I’m also thinking of Briane Greene).
The last time I looked, it wasn’t available as a Kindle in the US, only in Britain.
It’s Brian Greene.
Agghhhh.
I went to Amazon to download the sample to see whether ‘the Beginning of Infinity’ is worth reading, and I find that I’ve already bought it, on April 18, so apparently I found the start intriguing enough then, but didn’t have the time to read it then.
It’s now been bumped up my list of books to be read to be third after the two I’m currently reading, ‘A World on Fire’ by Amanda Foreman, on the American Civil War, from Britain’s perspective, and Gary Disher’s latest procedural crime novel ‘Whispering Death’ set in the exotic location of Australia’s Mornington Peninsula.
I would recommend Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality” to anyone, since it seems to be the core of his physics ideas. Especillay if the current book is rather vague and overreaching in the style of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.
Among other things I learned a valid prediction of realism*, as well as the (arguable) problem with mathematics as exploration based on theorems.**
No, he is not. He is a philosopher, while Deutsch is the real deal: he has done extensive work on quantum computing and other quantum physics.
Sean Carroll has been mentioned a lot on this
blogwebsite, and he pitch in with Deutsch and Tegmark on Many World Theory as the intrinsically realist theory. (I linked to a pod talk of Carroll the other day; I’m sure I can find it again if asked.)While authority is not an argument, if there were a known no go problem so that “Everett’s picture cannot, in fact, explain those behaviors at all”, I doubt that they would promote it.
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* Constrained reaction on constrained action; i.e. not everything goes, as realism predicts.
** Basically, as you unpack a written theorem its algorithms may eventually take more resources than the observable universe, as allowed in quantum Many World Theory. But then the algorithm, not the written theorem, codifies the work.
Oops: “expert on”. Maybe we are discussing “on” vs “in”? As in “critic of” vs “artist in”?
Well, in my judgment anyone who has actually worked with the stuff is the expert to go to.
Usually, I’d agree with you, but not in the case of David Albert. If you click around and look for his C.V., you’ll notice that he got his Ph.D. in physics, has published in the Phys. Rev. Lett., etc. If that’s not the “real deal” as far as physics is concerned, I’d say your bar might be unrealistically high.
So, he’s no more qualified than me then? (Physics Letters B, Nuclear Physics B, and Zeitschrift für Physik C.)
😀
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The many-worlds interpretation does at least provide a plausible explanation for how quantum computing works…
And I’m kind of surprised that Albert favours other proposals because they are “much more reasonable-looking” – how does one judge what is “reasonable” in QT.
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PS. A note to Jerry: The many worlds multiverse is distinct from the cosmological multiverse – well, really two distinct cosmological multiverses. Although Carroll argues that they may be fundamentally the same.
I want to get this book, purely on the basis that I loved his TED Talk on A New Way To Explain Explanation. Though my queue is already really large, and I just added the new Stephen Law and Vic Stenger books to that long list.
So much to read, to little time and brainpower with which to read it. As far as a conceptual understanding of the universe goes, I’m currently trying to get through Sean Carroll’s From Eternity To Here.
And as far as memes go, to me, it’s a concept that seems to make sense, and there’s readily a number of examples that could give weight to the idea, but the more I’ve looked into it the more problematic it seems – especially in it’s analogy to genes in the way The Selfish Gene talks about them.
My favorite source so far on QM is here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/
The author of that also claims that the Many Worlds hypothesis is the one most widely accepted, and the one which makes most sense to him. Correct or not, it certainly serves as a good model to attempt to understand QM principles.
So if Dr. Albert says it is an “outrageous claim” to state such an opinion, it seems to me that he owes the reader a whole lot of evidence which he has not supplied. It would have been better to say something like, that’s his opinion, mine is different.
I have read many popular science books. While many of them are quite good, they usually just provide summaries of “real” science (at least in physics—I understand that in biology many primary sources are books, even today). Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality really is in a class by itself. It is a synthesis in the best sense of the term, and makes a quite powerful argument for the Many Worlds idea being correct. One really has to read the whole book to appreciate it. By definition, an interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t make any unique predictions, so claiming that the many-worlds interpretation is somehow ruled out is a non-starter. (Having said that, a few years ago I recall Penrose working with Zeilinger on an experiment which could actually distinguish Penrose’s own unorthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics from other interpretations. Anyone know any more about this?)
I read the book and on the whole thought it was very well written. I though his discussion of the necessity of conjecture and criticism, Popper falsifiability and the importance of explanation as well as the way that science opens up possibilities that no other human enterprise opens up quite convincing. Memes were only written about in one chapter largely as a polemic to describe the importance of creativity in culture. Contrary to this review, I didn’t find the chapter a wholehearted endorsement of memes, there were very critical comments about Blackmore’s Meme Machine book for example.
Not being a physicist I’m loath to comment on the many world interpretation. He does seem just a bit zelous about it. My understanding is that there are other non-Copenhagen like approaches like sum over histories/decoherence that many not imply many worlds, from reading other physics books. The many worlds seems to imply that every instant virtually an infinite set of new worlds arise since the probability wave function of even a single electron is large and if every position the electron could be is a different world, does this not imply practically an infinite new generation of universes every microsecond.
A couple probably stupid questions – where are these universes – it seems that infinite vistas would be constantly unfolding. And doesn’t this imply a grotesque violation of the conservation of energy for the multiverse as a whole – it seems that it is growing by infinite bounds every microsecond. If any physicist care address this – please explain.
The criticisms in the review of “The Meme Machine” no longer make sense. Memetics is just obviously not tautological these days – because of all the research that has been done in the mean time about why some memes spread and other ones do not. Indeed, the evidence on this point was already pretty clear back when that review was written.