Co-emergence of Our Knowledge of Mind and World (II)

Here are some excerpts from the report by Piet Hut and Roger Shepard to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, summarizing their activities in the academic year 1995-1996, concerning their investigations of limits to scientific knowledge. Their research project was titled: Co-emergence of Our Knowledge of Mind and World (II).

Our project was inspired through the workshop on `Limits to Scientific Knowledge', held at the Santa Fe Institute in May 1994. It was at this workshop that Piet and Roger met, and started a series of dialogues soon afterwards.

The two of us came from what might seem to be the most disparate disciplines: Piet Hut, an astrophysicist seeking a physical characterization of the dynamics of stellar clusters at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study; and Roger Shepard, a cognitive psychologist seeking a mathematical characterization of the human representation of generalization and imagined spatial transformations at Stanford University. We quickly discovered that we had independently come to a remarkably similar view of the need for a rapprochement between physical and cognitive science. Moreover, each of us had previously experienced the same frustration in seeking a deeply informed scientist from the other side of the disciplinary divide who shared our excitement about the possibilities for such a rapprochement.

The question we focused on was the role of limits in scientific investigations, not only in specific disciplines, but in the whole approach to scientific research. Any type of research takes place against a backdrop of a whole world: the human society set within a natural environment. And, ultimately, any type of research outcome is reported and shared by individual minds. In other words, a study of limits to knowledge cannot be effective if we only study limits to objective knowledge; we necessarily have to extend our investigations to a scrutiny of the character of subjective knowledge, and to the process of distillation and transformation, that has been developed in order to generate objectively valid knowledge.

While studying these problems, on the interface between various fields, from physics to cognitive psychology, we increasingly realized that we could not leave out the question of beauty and values. Notwithstanding the widely advertised independence of physics from matters aesthetical and ethical, a critical scrutiny of the roots of natural science will have to deal with value judgments and the role of beauty in such judgments. In this process, we also realized that it would be fruitful to extend our horizon to an acquaintance with the way limits to knowledge have traditionally been viewed in non-European cultures.

Results and Outlook

In this second year of our collaboration, we have again organized several informal workshops, in order to get a broad orientation on the problematic of `limits to scientific knowledge'. These workshops have been very stimulating, and have helped us to formulate explicit goals for further progress. As a result, we have reformulated our research plan. Our new focus will be on the triadic structure of limits, namely their `of', `to', and `by' character: they are limits TO knowledge OF reality BY humans. In other words, a scientific study of limits to scientific knowledge entails not only a study of limits to what is knowable, but also to limits inherent in the knower and the known.

We have organized several informal workshops, dealing with these wider topics, inviting a range of participants: from Japanese and American philosophers to computer scientists as well as colleagues in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. While we have learned a great deal from the many individuals we have engaged in dialogues, especially Steven Tainer's background and interests are most complementary to ours.

Steven Tainer is in the unique position of being trained as a philosopher of science (at the University of Michigan), before starting on a dual career in computer science and philosophy. In his first capacity, he was director of the product design and training departments for Cubicomp Corporation, a computer graphics company that pioneered the use of small computers in 3-Dimensional modeling and animation, spawning many applications in education and process simulation. In his second capacity, he studied a great number of living traditions from India, Tibet, and China, and wrote extensively on various aspects of these traditions. His current activity includes the design and implementation of a pioneer M.A. degree program in Science and Spirituality at the Berkeley Institute of World Religions, in conjunction with the Graduate Theological Union.

Clearly, Steven's activities and achievements cut across traditional academic categories, and we have found his particular input to be ideally suited to our project. The three of us plan to carry out a definitive study of the role of limits in the structure of knowledge. In our investigations, we aim at uncovering the various roots of these limits. In doing so, we do not have the luxury of regarding scientific knowledge in isolation. We plan to scrutinize the way that scientific knowledge is embedded in knowledge in general: knowledge of reality studied by human beings. To what extent can limits be seen as dictated by the structure of human knowledge? To what extent are limits given in the structure of nature itself? And to what extent are limits inherent in any attempt at mapping reality into a model?

Examples of these three types of questions have been found, respectively, in cognitive science (Shepard's results concerning mental transformation and generalization), in physics (quantum mechanics and relativity theory), and in mathematics (Goedel incompleteness and Turing's halting problem). In a broader sense, the triadic structure of limits that we have defined here calls for a reflection on our views of reality, i.e. on what we can sensibly say beyond what is `knowable', namely what is `out there', and what `it means to us.' In other words, we are driven to an investigation not only of epistemology, but of ontology and values as well. Our study of limits to scientific knowledge will thus include a study of the triad reality, science, and human nature.

Workshops

The two main workshops we organized both centered on a broadly interdisciplinary comparison of shared notions in different fields: physics, cognitive psychology, computer science, and philosophy. Our choice of the latter two fields follows from our theme, a study of the interaction between mind and world. It was hoped that philosophy could provide a common background and wide perspective for our main topics, and that computer science could provide a more directly practical angle on many problems where philosophy tends to remain too theoretical.

Our hopes were partly fulfilled. Since our own backgrounds are in physics and cognitive science, we invited for both workshops participants with a background in either computer science or philosophy, or both. The good news was: we found an often surprising amount of overlap in our main concerns and questions, regarding the roles that objective and subjective methods play in various disciplines, and the way that these together succeed in constructing an understandable world for us, consisting of a specific hierarchy of objects.

For example, a physicist starts with everyday objects, experiments with them, and is then led to the discovery of atoms and molecules and subatomic quantum fields. The challenge then is to reconstruct macroscopic objects, given the understanding of the all-pervading, not at all object-like underlying fields. A psychologist also starts with everyday objects, and investigates the mental mechanisms that are used by individuals to construct a representation of their world in terms of those objects. A roboticist, again, has to `teach' a robot to classify its sensory input in such a way as to let objects `emerge' out of the input stream. A philosopher, finally, faces the challenge to provide a wider view from which to describe the general structure of subject-object interactions, while providing pointers to the various ways in which these structures show up in various disciplines.

Now for the not-so-good news: it became clear that our workshops did not give us a fighting chance to get to the bottom of a formulation of our shared problems. The meetings themselves were enormously stimulating. We were happy to hear from the participants that they had enjoyed the thought-provoking and mutually engaging atmosphere. But stimulation as such is not enough, if it does not lead to concrete results. And while we had not insisted on written contributions of the participants, after the meetings, we were a bit disappointed when we saw how little specific feedback we received in the end.

In retrospect, this state of affairs is not at all surprising. Bringing together individuals from different disciplines, each of them thinking in different structures using different terminology, creates a major problem of communication. With only a few days time to interact, most of this time was spent on building up a shared vocabulary and a shared framework in which to approach and define the problems of main concern. And while this process of zooming in taught us all a lot, it did not leave us much room for doing anything more than putting the questions on the table -- questions like `how can we define an object within a stream of experience', `what is the role of context in selecting objects from which to build a world', `can we identify intrinsic limits in the structure of mind and world, given their mutually defining character', and so on.

In addition, we have found it somewhat impractical to have too many writers involved. Putting together a loosely bundled collection of separate articles, as proceedings for a conference, is easy to do, but not very informative. In such a format, most people tend to repeat their own views which they often already have published elsewhere anyway. Instead, we would prefer to write something more substantial, in a more closely coupled way.

Our conclusion is that, in order to make substantial progress, we have to tighten our goals and to firm up our procedures. Reflecting on our experience of this last year, we have decided to limit ourselves to a smaller group of people, and to focus on more specific questions, related to reality, theory and experience. Together with this tightening of our goals, we feel a need to solidify our approach. Rather than organizing more short-duration workshops, we would like to focus on a long-term collaboration.

Publications

We have produced four papers, during the last year, which acknowledge our current Sloan grant for work on limits to scientific knowledge. In addition, three more papers are underway.

These two papers are scheduled to appear in 1996:

Hut, P., 1996, `Structuring Reality: The Role of Limits', in "Boundaries and Barriers", eds. J. Casti and A. Karlqvist [Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley], pp. 148-187. Hut, P. & Shepard, R.N., 1996, `Turning `The Hard Problem' Upside Down & Sideways', to appear in "Journal of Consciousness Studies", vol. 3.

This paper will appear later, probably in 1997:

Hut, P., 1997, Confronting Reality, to be published in the proceedings for the Japanese-American Phenomenology Conference, Sept. 18-21, Sendai, Japan.

The following paper has been submitted, but not yet accepted:

Hut, P. & Van Fraassen, B., 1996, `Elements of Reality: A Dialogue'.

The following paper will be finished by early September 1996:

Shepard, R.N. & Hut, P., 1997, `My Experience, Your Experience, and the World We Experience: Turning "The Hard Problem" Upside Down', to appear in the proceedings for the conference `Toward a Science of Consciousness' in Tucson, April 1996.

The next two papers will be completed in the Fall of 1996:

Hut, P., 1997, `Gravitational Thermodynamics', to appear in the proceedings for the workshop on `Fundamental Sources of Uncertainty', in Santa Fe, March 1996.

Hut, P., Ruelle, D. & Traub, J., 1997, `Varieties of limits to Scientific Knowledge'.

Specific Activities

Sept. 5-8, 1995: Piet Hut visited Roger Shepard at Stanford. They continued their discussion on `The Paradox of Limits', following up from their workshop with Mal Cohen, Robert Rosen and Otto Rossler.

Oct. 19-22, 1995: Piet Hut visited M.I.T., in preparation for the workshop that he would organize with Roger Shepard at Stanford in December. He discussed various aspects of perception and cognitive world-construction with roboticist Rodney Brooks and computer scientist Gerald Sussman, both at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.

Nov. 8, 1995: Piet Hut organized a one-day meeting in Amersfoort, Holland, with Frank Ankersmit, philosopher of history from the University of Groningen, Holland; Henk Barendregt, mathematical logician from the University of Nijmegen, Holland; and Willem Drees, philosopher of science from the University of Twente, Holland. They discussed possibilities for holding a workshop during the following summer, centered on the theme of experience in various disciplines.

Nov. 24-26, 1995: Piet Hut attended a workshop on `The cultural, social, and political background of the reception of the natural sciences in the non-European world', at the International Institute for Advanced Study in Kyoto, Japan.

Nov. 30 -- Dec. 6, 1995: Piet Hut and Roger Shepard organized a workshop at Stanford University, on `Notions of Objectivity in Physics, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy'. Participants, besides Hut and Shepard, were: Yoko Arisaka, a philosopher from the University of California at Riverside; Shinya Noe, a philosopher from the Tohoku Institute of Technology, Sendai, Japan; and Brian Smith, a computer scientist from the Xerox Parc Research Center, Palo Alto.

Feb. 16-22, 1996: Piet Hut visited Roger Shepard at Stanford. They completed a first draft for the paper that they would present at the Tucson conference in April on `Toward a Science of Consciousness'.

Mar. 28-30, 1996: Piet Hut together with Joseph Traub and Jim Hartle organized a workshop `Fundamental Sources of Unpredictability', at the Santa Fe Institute.

Apr. 5-7, 1996: Piet Hut attended a conference on `Phenomenology and Metaphysics East and West', at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Apr. 8-13, 1996: Piet Hut and Roger Shepard attended the conference `Toward a Science of Consciousness' in Tucson, where they give a joint presentation in one of the plenary sessions, with the title `My Experience, Your Experience, and the World We Experience: Turning "The Hard Problem" Upside Down'.

May 15-24, 1996: Piet Hut and Roger Shepard organized a workshop at Stanford University, on `Notions of Context and Horizon in Physics, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy'. Participants, besides Hut and Shepard, were: Yoko Arisaka and Brian Smith, who had also attended our previous meeting; Ronald Bruzina, philosopher from the University of Kentucky at Lexington; and Ryoichi Hosokawa, philosopher from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.

May 25 -- June 2, 1996: Piet Hut visited the Santa Fe Institute, where he started writing a paper `Varieties of Limits to Scientific Knowledge', together with David Ruelle and Joseph Traub.

June 17-22, 1996: Piet Hut visited Roger Shepard at Stanford. Together with Steven Tainer, writer and computer scientist based in Berkeley, they discuss the structure of limits to scientific knowledge. In the course of these discussions, they begin to develop plans for multi-year collaborations, revolving around the three aspects reality, theory, and experience.

July 25-27, 1996: Piet Hut organized a workshop at the University of Amsterdam, Holland, on `The Role of Experience in Science and in Humanities'. Participants were, besides Hut: Frank Ankersmit, Henk Barendregt, and Willem Drees (see Nov. 8, above).