Posts Tagged ‘Karl Popper’
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
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As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”*…
… and so we shouldn’t. Ryan Weber (a professor of technical writing who, happily for us, moonlights) is here to help…
More at “‘Descartes Against Humanity’ and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers,” from @mcsweeneys.net.
Unrelated, but important: “Help save Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by signing this petition.”
* George Bernard Shaw (though often mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin)
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As we play, we might spare a thought for a philosopher whose game would likely be “The Game of Life,” Bernard Williams; he died on this date in 2003. As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks.
His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams’s mentors at Oxford University, said that Williams “understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your own sentence.”
Described by Colin McGinn as an “analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist,” he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it “come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life.”
“The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so”*…
From Kai Brach, in his nifty newsletter Dense Discovery, an appreciation of an Isaac Asimov essay from 1988: “The Relativity of Wrong” (a lovely riff on a point also taken up by Karl Popper)…
… it’s a welcome dose of nuance in this era of absolutist thinking. When knowingness tricks our brains into certainty, Asimov’s wonderfully nerdy piece demonstrates that right and wrong are far less binary than we may think.
The piece begins with Asimov addressing a young English literature student who’d written to scold him for his scientific arrogance. The student argues that every generation thinks they’ve got it sorted, and every generation gets proven wrong. Therefore, our current knowledge is just as flawed as flat-earth theory. But Asimov won’t have it:
“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
He then makes his point clear through a series of delightful examples. Like spelling:
“How do you spell ‘sugar’? Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is wronger than Genevieve? For that matter, I think it is possible to argue that Genevieve’s spelling is superior to the ‘right’ one. Or suppose you spell ‘sugar’: s-u-c-r-o-s-e, or C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Strictly speaking, you are wrong each time, but you’re displaying a certain knowledge of the subject beyond conventional spelling.”
The same logic applies to mathematics: “Suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an integer. You’d be right, wouldn’t you? Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = an even integer. You’d be righter. Or suppose you said: 2 + 2 = 3.999. Wouldn’t you be nearly right?”
The flat-earth idea is a great (and again timely?) case study for Asimov’s theory. The notion that the earth was flat wasn’t the product of ancient stupidity but reasonable observation given the tools available. The earth’s actual curvature is roughly 0.000126 per mile – practically indistinguishable from zero without sophisticated instruments.
“So although the flat-Earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favour of the spherical-Earth theory.”
What he’s really arguing for is intellectual humility. Scientific theories don’t flip-flop wildly from flat earth to cubic earth to doughnut-shaped earth. Instead:
“What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
We seem to live in a world of zero-sum thinking, where nuance often gets steamrolled by the satisfying simplicity of being right. I want to remember Asimov’s framework the next time I’m certain someone else is wrong – that most disagreements aren’t between absolute truth and utter falsehood, but between different degrees of incompleteness…
On the dangers of “knowingness” and absolutism: Isaac Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong,” from @densediscovery.bsky.social.
Asimov’s essay is here.
See also: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement” and “The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances.”
(Image above: source)
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As we rethink, we might recall that this date in 1957 was “E Day,” the introduction of the Edsel automobile. Name for Edsel Ford, son of company founder Henry Ford, Edsels were developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand (beyond Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln) to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. It was the first new brand introduction by an American automaker since the 1939 launch of Mercury and 1956 launch of Continental (which ended and merged into Lincoln after 1957).
Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, unattractive, distinguished by a vertical grille said to resemble a horse collar, and low quality.
No automobile has been so widely anticipated nor so quickly rejected as the Ford Edsel (with the possible recent exception of the Tesla Cybertruck). Within two months of its highly publicized launch, the Edsel became a rolling joke– and has stood as a metphor for disastrous product launch failures since.
Recognizing this (and following a loss of over $250 million [equivalent to $2.66 billion in 2024 dollars] on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line), Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand before 1960.
“Brains exist because the distribution of resources necessary for survival and the hazards that threaten survival vary in space and time”*…
And, it seems, they not only evolve, but in ways and with a frequency we’ve only just begun to appreciate. It’s long been noted that evolution seems to have a thing for “carcinization”– crabs have evolved separately at least five times. (Oh, and apparently also for anteaters…) Recent findings hint that evolution might have the same sort of jones for the brain. Amy Maxmen reports…
Our brains, perched atop a network of nerve cells that ascend the length of our bodies, are thought to have arisen once in an animal hundreds of millions of years ago and then evolved over time. However, new findings suggest instead that brains and nervous systems originated multiple times from scratch.
The findings, published today in Nature, highlight an ancient and gelatinous marine predator called a comb jelly [pictured at top]. Unlike pulsating jellyfish, comb jellies swim by “rowing” their many hair-like cilia, which are arranged in rows called combs. They possess rudimentary brains and sophisticated nervous systems replete with elongated cells that communicate through synapses much like our own. Some comb jellies show mirror-like bilateral symmetry, as do we. And like most animals, their muscles derive from a middle tissue layer, which does not exist in jellyfish or sponges, another ancient type of aquatic creature.
So it’s little wonder that biologists have long placed the comb jelly group close to worms, flies, and humans on the evolutionary tree of life; sponges emerge at the base, meaning that this group appeared first. In this traditional view, complex body parts like the brain and muscles arose gradually, and only once, since those parts look similar across related animals, and the chances of that same evolutionary process being repeated seems slim.
But this scenario was shaken by a report in Science last year, which suggested that the comb jelly group emerged before jellyfish and even the brainless, muscle-less sponges, more than 550 million years ago.
Some biologists doubted the rearrangement because it implied two equally uncomfortable possibilities: that the ancestor of all living animals had true muscles and a rudimentary brain, and then sponges and jellyfish lost those parts without a trace; or that the great animal ancestor was simple, and comb jellies evolved separately from all the other animals, yet ended up with rather similar nervous systems, muscles, and bilateral symmetry. When paleontologist Graham Budd heard the news last year, he said, “It is effectively saying animals evolved twice. Frankly, I’m not ready to believe it.”
Without a time machine, it’s impossible to know what our great ancestor looked like. However, today’s report adds more support to the notion that she was simple and comb jellies independently evolved their complex body parts. Leonid Moroz, a neurobiologist at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, and his colleagues confirm comb jellies’ position below sponges at the base of the evolutionary tree with an analysis of genetic sequences from 11 comb jelly species…
… In an essay for Nautilus called “Evolution, You’re Drunk,” I described how hypotheses entrenched in the notion that evolution leads toward increasing complexity have recently begun to teeter. Now Moroz’s study adds another shove. It seconds the finding that simple sponges, long placed at the base of the evolutionary tree, actually evolved after the sophisticated comb jelly group arose. The story of how complexity evolves is more complex than scientists realized.
Furthermore, the brain—the epitome of complexity—seems to have sprouted up at least twice over evolutionary time. This clashes with the traditional notion that complex, multifaceted features come about in a very specific way, and each emerges just one time. “What everyone has said about complexity is wrong,” Moroz says. “It can happen more than once.”
Finding that comb jellies independently arrived at similar ends as other animals might also have surprised the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who famously doubted that animals would look the same today if the world were to begin again—if we could replay “the tape of life.”
Is such convergence in design a coincidence? Probably not, guesses Andreas Hejnol, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Norway. “If you need a fast communication system, it helps to have extended cells that communicate through chemicals,” he says. In other words, the structure of the nervous system reflects its function. So if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, it’s not too far a stretch to think it could possess a brain comprised of trillions of neurons. Hejnol asks, “How else could it be?”…
The mysterious mechanism of evolution: “Evolution May Be Drunk, But It’s Serious About Making Brains,” from @amymaxmen.bsky.social in @nautil.us.
* John M. Allman, Evolving Brains
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As we contemplate the changing comprehension of cerebra, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“Few people have the imagination for reality”*…
Experiments that test physics and philosophy as “a single whole,” Amanda Gefter suggests, may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe…
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals in the deep scaffolding of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself. It’s generally considered untestable, since metaphysical assumptions underlie all our efforts to conduct tests and interpret results. Those assumptions usually go unspoken.
Most of the time, that’s fine. Intuitions we have about the way the world works rarely conflict with our everyday experience. At speeds far slower than the speed of light or at scales far larger than the quantum one, we can, for instance, assume that objects have definite features independent of our measurements, that we all share a universal space and time, that a fact for one of us is a fact for all. As long as our philosophy works, it lurks undetected in the background, leading us to mistakenly believe that science is something separable from metaphysics.
But at the uncharted edges of experience — at high speeds and tiny scales — those intuitions cease to serve us, making it impossible for us to do science without confronting our philosophical assumptions head-on. Suddenly we find ourselves in a place where science and philosophy can no longer be neatly distinguished. A place, according to the physicist Eric Cavalcanti, called “experimental metaphysics.”
Cavalcanti is carrying the torch of a tradition that stretches back through a long line of rebellious thinkers who have resisted the usual dividing lines between physics and philosophy. In experimental metaphysics, the tools of science can be used to test our philosophical worldviews, which in turn can be used to better understand science. Cavalcanti, a 46-year-old native of Brazil who is a professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues have published the strongest result attained in experimental metaphysics yet, a theorem that places strict and surprising constraints on the nature of reality. They’re now designing clever, if controversial, experiments to test our assumptions not only about physics, but about the mind.
While we might expect the injection of philosophy into science to result in something less scientific, in fact, says Cavalcanti, the opposite is true. “In some sense, the knowledge that we obtain through experimental metaphysics is more secure and more scientific,” he said, because it vets not only our scientific hypotheses but the premises that usually lie hidden beneath…
Gefter traces the history of this integrative train of thought (Kant, Duhem, Poincaré, Popper, Einstein, Bell), its potential for helping understand quantum theory… and the prospect of harnessing AI to run the necessary experiments– seemingly comlex and intensive beyond the scope of currenT experimental techniques…
Cavalcanti… is holding out hope. We may never be able to run the experiment on a human, he says, but why not an artificial intelligence algorithm? In his newest work, along with the physicist Howard Wiseman and the mathematician Eleanor Rieffel, he argues that the friend could be an AI algorithm running on a large quantum computer, performing a simulated experiment in a simulated lab. “At some point,” Cavalcanti contends, “we’ll have artificial intelligence that will be essentially indistinguishable from humans as far as cognitive abilities are concerned,” and we’ll be able to test his inequality once and for all.
But that’s not an uncontroversial assumption. Some philosophers of mind believe in the possibility of strong AI, but certainly not all. Thinkers in what’s known as embodied cognition, for instance, argue against the notion of a disembodied mind, while the enactive approach to cognition grants minds only to living creatures.
All of which leaves physics in an awkward position. We can’t know whether nature violates Cavalcanti’s [theorem] — we can’t know, that is, whether objectivity itself is on the metaphysical chopping block — until we can define what counts as an observer, and figuring that out involves physics, cognitive science and philosophy. The radical space of experimental metaphysics expands to entwine all three of them. To paraphrase Gonseth, perhaps they form a single whole…
“‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality,” in @QuantaMagazine.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As we examine edges, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Rudolf Schottlaender; he was born on this date in 1900. A philosopher who studied with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, and Karl Jaspers, Schottlaender survived the Nazi regime and the persecution of the Jews, hiding in Berlin. After the war, as his democratic and humanist proclivities kept him from posts in philosophy faculties, he distinguished himself as a classical philologist and translator (e.g., new translations of Sophocles which were very effective on the stage, and an edition of Petrarch).
But he continued to publish philosophical and political essays and articles, which he predominantly published in the West and in which he saw himself as a mediator between the systems. Because of his positions critical to East Germany, he was put under close surveillance by the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Stasi)– and inspired leading minds of the developing opposition in East Germany.
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