Notes on Not Knowing

I have a warning to issue, and I think it's important I start with it:

This is not a mathematical post. I am not a mathematician or even someone with all that much mathematical education. I am someone who considers my base thought on this matter to fall more in philosophy, but I do have an interest in mathematics which will, I warn you, touch this post a bit. This is a post not about something mathematical, but inspired partly by mathematics. This won't require much knowledge of mathematics, I intend to discuss a topic on a conversational level, and maybe make people think. It differs from a mathematical discussion, because it doesn't require a background with the subject matter, but I'm afraid it is rather abstract making it hard to mentally pinpoint, and of course, fun.

There's something funny about not knowing the answer to something. It's hard to accept not knowing it for a lot of people, or at least annoying. It's difficult, on the other hand to deal with whether or not there IS an answer.

A recent episode of This American Life entitled Contents Unknown unknown answers are confronted. In the intro, they discuss a theory that a recording of Hitler and a psychotherapist is out there, explaining why he wanted to do the things that he did. Ron Rosenbaum and Ira Glass say that it comforts people to think that at least the answer exists, even if we won't see it.

A few years back, when I was realizing my interest in math, I came to a development that frankly excited me. Something called "The Continuum Hypothesis." And equally interesting is how the discussion over whether or not it was true ended. Here's where I need a slight history of mathematics break. If you wish to skip that context, that I feel is important and you might not, go to after the change in font face.

One astounding leap in mathematics, was the notion that you can have two sets with infinite members, and one will be bigger than the other. Here's what they look like. Three infinitely roomed hotels are next to each other. Two are empty, the last is full. The rooms (which happens to be called "Hôtel Naturelles" owned my a man named Hilbert) of the full one are numbered like this "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9..."

A customer walks into the full one because, well, the room service is great and cheap, and internet is free, and that's why every room is taken. He sees they are full, but walks in and sees when a room will be available. "Right now, if you like," says the attendant. He then asks the first of infinite customers to move a room down, and have the next guest do the same, and so on, ad infinitum. Thereby leaving the room empty.

Bad news, the terminators are coming by for the best paying job ever, and they tell everyone they have to find a new hotel to sleep in. The hotel next (Hotel Quadrat) to it is empty, and has just as infinitely many rooms, except the numbers are perfect squares "1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64 ..." The rule here is "If you were in a room, square the room number and move into that room in our neighboring hotel."

The customers fill every one of the rooms in that hotel, leaving all rooms taken. Now the first one is uninhabitable, the second one is full, the third one is empty, when the disgruntled bellhop (who looks a little like Tim Roth) says he's tired of going to room g64² and tells management that he wants every last person out before he divides them all ... by zero. Seeing no other choice, Management sez "get" and closes doors for good, locking the doors, and telling the bellhop there's one left... somewhere down there (which is a lie).

Customers go next door. Hotels One and Two are closed, the Third (Hotel Real) is empty, they all arrive but the room numbers are far less organized. There is actually a room corresponding to every real number. Not in order, which sucks for the delivery guys, but they can deal. Having no clear and easy way to decide on which room to take, the moved guests decide to go to rooms that have their original room numbers. The guy who we started with buy walking into the first hotel has room one, and the guy he moved goes to room two, etc, etc.

The Third hotel now has an infinite number of rooms left. If a new guest walks in, the attendants can say "pick any room that isn't a whole, positive number." And the percentage of rooms taken is exactly 0%. That's right. Zero. Pick a room at random, and you won't get one with a guest in it. It's got infinitely more rooms than the first two hotels did, which, by the way, had the same number of rooms but named their room numbers in a different fashion. If Hotel 3 was full, and the terminators came by for an even BIGGER job, there is no way that the people could get rooms by moving into even both of the other two hotels, there would always be infinitely more, which makes it a bigger infinity.

The question is this: if we consider the one infinity that's smaller, and the other that is bigger, is there an infinity somewhere between? Can there be a set with more members than one, and not of the other? Cantor couldn't figure it out. No one could within his lifetime, or for a really long time after that.

Here's where it gets upsetting. This is no longer an open problem. That usually means I can say "Yea" or "Nay" to the statement "There is an hotel larger than the first two, but smaller than the third." Not this time. The precise reason it is not an open question is because we know that we cannot ever find that answer.

This means, if you actually have to deal with that, assume it's true. Or assume it's false. Then just keep going. But the real problem is, does this mean that neither answer is correct, or just that we can't know? The guy who did half the work finding this stuff out, Kurt Gödel, who himself was responsible for the possibility of answers like this to happen (which earned him from David Foster Wallace the nickname "Dark Prince of Mathematics") himself thought that not only could there be a hotel between those two (despite knowing that he had no reason to believe this) but there are an infinite number of infinities between those two which could be properly ordered in size. Which means he of course thought there was an answer, but we logically cannot know it.

And there I got fascinated, and I also got frustrated. I thought I probably disagreed with Kurt, that there is not an answer at all, like as if it were a paradox, or the question were badly worded (and there are plenty of those.) But the question is worded fine and isn't a paradox even if it is highly and terribly abstract and almost unthinkable. I decided that the answer of which I am only partially convinced is that the unprovable or "independent" statement means that since math only happens in some places to correspond with real things, here it does not, and therefore there is no real truth like there is with the existence of a tape of Hitler, or the contents of a lost letter. Though I am not convinced that there utterly can't be an answer? And why is it that I am comforted by neither possibility?

Unknowing is fine when we think we could even possibly see the answer. Does that tape of Hitler and the psychotherapist exist? We might know, someday, and we'd like to think there's an answer. But that's the only comfort we may ever take, and blind ourselves to the possibility: I am sorry, Ignorabimus! (We Shall Not Know.)

Wittgenstein's Mistress: Shedding away with All That Is The Case.

This post will mostly be somewhere between my review of and reflections on the 1988 novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, by David Markson. I'd like to for perspective's sake, introduce this by how I was introduced to the novel. I was with Morgan at a book store about a block away from my friend Amanda's place. The store is Women And Children First, a fantastic little place in Andersenville, on Clark. I walked in, and I saw all the fiction on my right, lining the wall with little staff picks and recommendation notes. I knew what I wanted to do was find something I didn't know, hadn't heard of, looked interesting, stood out to me. I wanted to pick something not on my reading list and after walking up and down that wall for 40 minutes or so, there was this little staff recommend. It proclaimed first that it's a novel where nothing happens, and the most interesting thing this staff member ever read. Already I'm interested. It says it was rejected 54 times. Whoa. I read the back, and there is a brief synopsis (sounded interesting enough) some good critical blurbs, and maybe my favorite. One blurb from a literary personage, David Foster Wallace, the postmodernist I mourned a couple months ago, never having read one of his books. Lets see if I can take his reading advice, I figured. So, I bought it. Immediately. At the counter the woman said it was about her favorite book, I told her thanks for the recommend, that it made my decision.

Well, enough of this, I need to actually write what I thought of this thing.

The novel is stylistically something very strange. I'm not sure if I would rather say it keeps my interest or loses it, even now. It's one thought to the next and free association. It's her remembering all sorts of things as she sits alone (very alone) at a typewriter. There's a mood at first of novelty towards her own thoughts. She's very charming, you smile at her, giggle a little, and catch her little dry wit. The dry wit is the first thing that grabs you. She'll talk about Guy de Maupassant, or Helen of Troy. You start to realize she's confusing things. (This will confuse any reader too, let me say, and I don't consider this a spoiler, you'll use the internet eventually: T.E. Shaw is another name for Lawrence of Arabia. Remember when you read it.) She'll contradict herself, she gets vaguely frustrated or out of sorts. She is almost undoubtedly insane, and she tells you she at least was at some point. She'll write about absolutely anything, a very honest character. "Ah, me" she says at one point or another. Repeats it here and there. Ah, her.

In the beginning, she left messages in the street, like she tells you at the start of the novel. You realize she means, beginning when there are no people on earth besides her. Seems world population has dropped to an artist named Kate. Don't ask how it happened or what you hear about this, or expect anything deeper from her: she won't tell you. The world that she describes is empty enough that she has lived in the Louvre, the Met, burning frames for warmth. She lives on a beachouse now, like previous ones that she has burned, mostly unintentionally.

She talks about artists a lot. And Greek myths, the Greek plays (which she's read all of these,) Greek legend. She'll talk about philosophers, and writers, or cultural figures. Like in everything else she confuse things here. She'll change the story she told a few pages ago. She refers to all this intellectual stuff as "baggage." She's gotten rid of accouterments. She has some clothing when she stays some place and isn't driving from continent to continent. Right now, on this beach, she's shedding away with her baggage.

"The world is all that is the case." That's the first sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A sub note to this reads that the world "is a totality of facts, not things." The first of these sentences is repeated in the novel, by the narrator, almost a comple non-sequitur. She doesn't attribute it, or seem to be aware where its from. In fact, a little later she says she's never read a word of what he's written (she corrects this, remembering a sentence that I don't believe Wittgenstein ever wrote.)

Kate has slimmed down the world already. It is no longer populated by people. There might be cats though. Then she gets rid of her things. She burns the Greek plays. Now she's unloading through this typewriter all of the things she has learned, presumably studying as an artist. This might be some sort of answer if you were looking for one, but to me, solving the mystery of the strange world where she seems to be lviing and writing is quite besides the point.

It's also worth noting that she'll make you feel a little bit as if you were mad. This is one of the things I liked about it. Somethign that kept my interest was my amusement at the things she remembered that amused her... all these charming stories about Rembrandt being fooled by his students and the like ... and then the sadness I felt for the stories she tells that make her just a little more sad. The stories seem to be moving this way, by the way. Many of her artists went mad or met very tragic deaths. Her ability to deal with her own mind, even after shedding so much of the world, wavers a little, and it can be downright heartbreaking. If there's any plot whatsoever, it would be the movements of her mind as she drops everything she feels like telling you onto the pages.

Lets call this review a positive one. The book kept me entertained for a week or so, and it gave me plenty to think about. I found some good artists too. I'll make sure I'll add the caveat that not everyone will love the novel, I don't think. Apparently, at least 54 publishers did not

An Objection To Cartesian Dualism

There's a distinct possibility that absolutely no one who reads this cares in the least about this. So skip this one, I'll have a book review up in a day or so (for the 1988 Novel Wittgenstein's Mistress). Maybe less, maybe slightly more. This one will then be for a random person who happens upon my blog, or on the off chance that one of you have any interest.

All right, this probably applies to more than just the dualism in Descartes. In general it applies to any metaphysical dualism (matter + minds) where we also imagine God created these things. And I know Descartes thought this was the case. So on to the spirit of my objection:

We have these ideas: Matter is material, extended objects, not thinking things. The thinking things are minds, not-material, not-extended in space. The interaction, as I understand it, is that perceptions, pains, thought, emotions, and all that takes place in the mind. It takes place in the non-material part, even if caused by the material part. So here's the problem: Material is superfluous. It's unnecessary, and I can't see any reason for a perfect being to create it.

All of the effects of material objects could be founded completely within minds. As a matter of fact, to the minds it would be all the same. So why create material things at all? What reason would we have to believe they exist, and that minds also exist. Especially if matter is equally capable of doing the work of minds (a trivial point) in which case you have two things that can each do both jobs. However, the way minds are described, at least it seems that that should be all that is necessary. So why both?

I've read it over, and it looks as if Descartes tries to explain his dualism in the Meditations on First Philosophy, in a way which might respond to this, however for several reasons I don't buy his argument. For some of his answers, it's the same I don't generally buy the case of dualism, but here's what is the crux of his argument, from what I can tell: God is not a deceiver. This doesn't respond to anything, as I do not believe (say) an idealist picture (mind, no matter) would claim God IS a deceiver. For after all, our perceptions tell us nothing but what he establishes earlier (med 2) that we perceive x or y quality. Berkely's right here: it's qualities, not objects which we perceive.

An argument from simplicity seems to rule dualism out one way or another, is how it looks to me. Back to Occam's Razor: Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, or in other words "all other things being equal, the simplest picture is the most reasonable to believe." The reasonable model here doesn't seem likely to be dualism, or not the cartesian case as I've seen it. Spinoza makes sense here, multiple aspects to the same thing.

--------------
I'd love to hear (and respond to) any arguments. I rarely hear this argument against dualism. I'm not sure if it has any history, or if any philosopher has made it, so sources on this would be interesting.

What It Actually Looks Like

First, let me say my father worked (actually, works) for Lucent Technologies. I have seen the aftermath. Lucent was the site of massive amounts of layoffs after they had constructed two of their own office buildings near Naperville, Illinois. I remember walking through nearly empty floors of a company whose workforce had been laid off, outsourced, eliminated, and in fact stripped to its bare minimum. I've seen the lowered morale and people worried about their jobs after they had so many things to pay for already. (That, in fact, for the public might be the first of the fallacies.) And I've heard names vanish, stopped hearing of certain of my fathers coworkers. This is when I was growing up.

My turn. Today, I arrived at work at about 3:30. Fashionably late. I asked the room (the SOC or service operations center, and the other staff who shares the room with their cubicles) how it was going. Some of them replied cheerily. Some didn't look. A couple answers came honestly "not so good." My first instinct is that a site was down, or a product was disabled, or network problems were bad, so these were what I was asking about. When I asked what I could help with, the answer came: "Nothing. Read your email from [the CEO.]" Bad things, and not everyone in the room had even heard. Asking more bluntly the less self-absorbed crew, I got the answer: The company is laying off ten percent of its employees. I'm at their HQ where at least seventy percent of us work. News spreads. The room gets quiet. Intermittently.

"Someone's gotta tell the execs what they're doing wrong. They say no lay offs until January, and then this! They can bite me," said John, dilligently defending the workforce.

"Calm down," Monica said cautiously. She wanted to make sure he didn't get fired either. No doubt both level-headed and very worried for his position and ours. The room was a-buzz when it wasn't dead quiet with this kind of banter. L. quipped about ducking out in there and doing little work, since none was expected with morale so low. Cool, as ever, he just sat around. He waited.

Larry's new and he asks me about it. Eventually he asks if there's any word on where the cuts are going to hit. I tell him there are more than ten people in the room, he won't see them all tomorrow. I tell him, by noon the next day, a bunch of those names are going to be gone.

There's a flood of people at this point, heading towards a big conference room down the hall and a floor away. These are directors, managers, and veterans. Just moving silently through.

It wasn't long then. First, Monica came back in with a bag straight to her desk. Silent. The room is quiet, and nobody knows. More news comes in leaked seemingly without source that Ken's going now. Light shock hits. Monica is now filling her bag with the last and walking off. They say Ken had pulled the power cord right from the wall and his workstation is off. Directors are moving through the floor right up to their employees, in front of everyone. "Have a nice day. Good luck, I hear the economy's not doing so well."

When Monica walked out, people stood up. This was the first I saw people's watery eyes. Hugs were exchanged. To me, she just said "Later, Extraodinaire." She had called me that since a tour she led, and I introduced myself as Michael, Admin Extraordinaire.

A name is heard from across the room when people go back to their desks, and L., who'd been ducking out there and keeping his head low behind me cool as always, he stands up. "No. No. They wouldn't let him go, NOT him. No, I will cry. I will cry. You're kidding me."

People shake their heads at him, somber. He walks straight out of the room, his new Mac on the desk.

I announce I'm going for a cigarette, but I go talk to Lars. His team is safe, looks like most of that floor is. I talk to him and he says I'm probably safe, but his IMs have been basically his RSS feed on who's gone NOW. This is when I hear Lisa's name, and I go smoke my cigarette. Which broke, so the last half I smoke unfiltered. I take the elevator to nine, and there's Lisa with a box, and a lot of quiet people. The one person I hugged. "Onto the next thing."

That's got to be one of the most interesting people I ever met. A storm chaser, a systems expert, and a tech for south pole researchers who was in Antarctica for around two years. Unfortunately, I don't trust the world not to show prejudice to her as a transgendered person whose name was likely not always Lisa.

Back in the SOC, John is fuming. Maybe about Monica, or Steve. "Well, Mr. [CEO], you've just decimated leadership. Are we go for the build?"

People are ending their usual workdays now, but no one is sure who will be coming back.

More Sexist Bullshit at Work

Just thought I'd continue with this theme a little bit. The shift lead for the shift directly after mine (I'll call him RR) is newer than many of the people here, and he was asking about people who had been fired or had quit in the past year. My own shift lead (Z) was telling him about these people. RR asks of one of them soon, "was he a good admin?" Z keeps going, and tells about more. Alyssa comes up. She worked here very briefly, left when she got a better offer with another job, if I recall right. Z mentions she's "one of the only girls they hired as an admin," to which RR asks "Was she hot?" I groan a little. He follows it up, laughing stupidly "I mean, lets here the important part." Let me emphasize something: he was being jovial, but he wasn't joking in the sense that he didn't believe what he was saying. I stand up and tell him he's being BLATANTLY sexist. He asks "what?" and looks confused. I tell him he can be as disrespectful to whatever group he likes as vocally as he wants, but he needs to be careful what he says at work. I don't care if it is the middle of the night, this isn't cool.

I don't know if it mattered to him or not that it was the night. I don't know if it mattered to most people. It's just so accepted now. And he wasn't kidding that he saw nothing wrong with it either. Most don't seem to. Lets see if we can maybe go for a society where a specific group isn't thought to be there just for us to look at, eh?

that post was too long

I really gotta work on brevity.

The Taste of Things Long Delayed

First off, a thanks to some friends of mine for the comments online and in person that I received for my previous post. I've got a revised version now because of some particularly helpful criticism. Thanks to Steve Delchamps for some very specific and helpful technical criticism. And to Laya for the encouragement from her own blog (called ihaveoneofthesealready.blogspot or somewhere i have travelled, gladly beyond, where she is blogging her year in Cairo) and to Morgan, Evan, Billy, to name a few.

There are several things I'd like to mention, sort of a journal-style more than anything else, but I'd like to focus on some related ruminations. If this symphony shit really bores you, go ahead and don't read it.

I do love the symphony. I feel like it's a good way to look sorta snobbish talking about it, but I can't apologize. It has been a long time since I've been to a symphony... or anyway it had been before last night, when I went to see the CSO under visiting conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (one of my favorites alive) play three works last night. I went with Laura, Darin's younger sister, who is without a doubt in my mind the only person I know who loves the music of Dmitri Shostakovich more than I do. This is saying a lot, I'd say he's my favorite musician at least in the twentieth century. I was reawakened to the experience of watching this performance. Some things I'd like to say of the experience are unrelated to the particulars. Some are intimately tied to it, but here are some things that I'll expand upon from notes I took on the bus home:

The approximate performance times of each piece are in the program. I honestly can say this is the only way I would ever be able to tell anybody how long any performance is. Time really gets very little notice. I can never be sure how long that violin melody lasts, or the length of the overbearing and ominous sequence of notes and blasts from the brass, there's no way I could tell you how long the whole thing lasts. I really get caught up in it. It's spectacular. Now I do have a terribly short attention span, and my mind does go everywhere, but it's so different than my usual day. Maybe I'm just used to seeing the clock at the bottom of my screen or the timestamps in my terminals. Quentin's watch is shattered for those moments though, to borrow a metaphor from Faulkner*. Sitting like that through a performance is something people in my generation (as well as probably many before and after) I believe find unfamiliar. Not often do we sit so quietly with one particular sense targeted for any longer than a couple minutes.
The first piece was composed by Tilson Thomas himself. It's a song in symphonic brass. t a big fan of brass only (which isn't to say I don't like it) but this was a well written piece. The thing to notice about this one, is the conductors movements seemed different than the next two. Maybe it was the orchestration. Something I thought about though, was that it must be odd for a renowned conductor to be performing something of his own while he's so known for conducting rather than composition. I imagined what it would be like, and felt it uncomfortable, like I would have to be more detached for something so far more personal and outside of my own established façade to reveal more. Fine if one was just the composer, or just the conductor, or at least so well known to be both, but this? -- Anyhow, I probably projected too much onto this conductor. If I could do anything in music, it might just be conducting.
Sibelius's 4th Symphony is really something else. So much so that the conductor turned and faced the crowd, and addressed us. Spoke right to the audience. This is weird in a way that only symphony-goers who have seen it before know. Ive seen it thrice, and have been to who knows how many concerts. He said it's his least performed, not because it has less to offer, but on the contrary, because it has more. It's a weather front of dark variations on a theme. It's downright intense. It cuts you off in the middle of a motive or a melody and throws its force in silence, or in a full orchestra of a new motive. It's auspicious, frightening, and uncertain. I hear it's on of his least liked -- Sibelius has never been one of my favorites, but I loved this. I caught myself about gasping with surprise.
Shostakovitch 5 is what I came to see. I'm not sure where to begin. First of all, if you can, you should download this. Or at least a Shosty symphony. However much or little interest you have in the style. One thing I can say about Shostakovitch is I'm never for a second bored. It really keeps my elusive attention, and it seems incredible every moment of it. It was also brilliantly conducted that night. I could go on, but with this symphony... you get the idea.


I've also mentioned at the beginning of September that I quit drinking and smoking for the entire month. I took thirty days without a cigarette or a drink. I didn't miss alcohol that much. I really didn't. There are some things I despise about it, but I do also kinda like it. And I like whiskey. And I like wine. And I like beer. A little odd to start drinking again though a month before I'm actually of legal age to do so. I got a good wheat beer for this, and I assure you, I still think its fantastic stuff. Tastes no different than I remember it...
...unlike the first cigarette I had this month, at 12:02AM on the first. I tasted it like never before. A Nat Sherman Classic, by the way. It assured me that this is something I do for enjoyment. But I'll be honest, I really can't say for sure that I'm going back to being a regular smoker. Not sure I like it that much. Not sure it's worth whatever... money, having a non destroyed esophagus, whatever.

My facebook message was changed on the first to "Mike Henning is smoking and planning..." in honor of that first cigarette, and because it's NaNoPlanMo**! That's right, I'm going to participate again. It's also funny because... well, you'll see on November first.

Before I conclude, I'd like to mention a new purpose for this blog, or an intention at least. I'm going to use this to write open letters to politicians and the like. Feel free to suggest a matter about which to write them, or ask why I would want to. my goal is at least two per month. Eventually, perhaps two per week.

* from The Sound and the Fury, specifically in the second chapter. I am aware of how pretentious that may be, but there's no other way I can think to explain it half so well. For a description of this concept, see Jean-Paul Sartre's great essay Time in the Work of of Faulkner. Both of these are recommendations.
** Google NaNoWriMo for hat the hell I'm talking about.