On Hope and Knowledge: A Skeptic’S Response and Other Reflections

By Joseph Milana

Who are we?

Where are we?

How are we to behave?

These are the questions of a curious mind, and for many who increasingly find themselves unsettled by the unmooring of the modern age, ancient answers to these questions have become less and less satisfactory.

In On Hope and Knowledge, author Joseph Milana shares an insightful collection of essays exploring our place in the world, seeking out contemporary philosophical answers informed by science and history. Starting with some perhaps unusual insights on the history of science, Milana builds to broader questions of knowledge, of the known and the knowable, of God, of justice, and of love; he also explores our tendency to doubt, explaining it as both a guiding principle and a replenishing source of our humanitya humanity that is confronted with increasingly frail and receding ancient wisdoms.

The curious mind seeks answers from the varieties of human experiencefrom history and religion to mathematics and science. Our lives are a constant attempt to synthesize all of these elements together to the best of our abilitiesto find our place in the world. Hence philosophy; hence this effort now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480862562

Joseph Milana

Joseph Milana was born in Brooklyn, New York, and he received his PhD from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at SUNYStony Brook. After pursuing an academic career, he moved with his family to San Diego, California, in 1996, where he ultimately became a chief scientist at FICO and then at Opera Solutions. He currently owns a company that leverages statistical models and artificial intelligence to make investments in the derivatives market.

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Copyright © 2018 JOSEPH MILANA.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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Reproduced from the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-6255-5 (sc)

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-6256-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905789

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/22/2018

From and for my family, my true north

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

1—Introduction

2—On Mathematics

3—On God

4—On History

5—On Skepticism

6—On Certainty

7—On Justice

8—On Love

9—On Hope

Appendix 1: On Parmenides

Appendix 2: On Spinoza

Appendix 3: On Hume

Appendix 4: On Kant

References

Preface

All philosophy is a confession—a reflection of the author’s heart and soul. A few philosophers have made this explicit,¹ but in all cases the great works of philosophy are works of confession—a confession by the very problems defined as important, the solutions that are then deemed adequate (as well as those judged otherwise), and those problems that are omitted altogether. There are also less overt tells such as style, language, and methodology. Each of these are a confession, intended or not, of the author; of who they were, of their origins, and of their engagement with, and empathy for, others.²

If thus of the greats, how much so true of minor dilettantes? Openly acknowledging this inherent feature, I have not restrained from the use of personal pronouns or personal reminiscences: these should make the exercise easier to write, should hopefully make it easier to digest by the reader, and importantly should avoid the façade of impersonal truth. That last would be the most egregious, even if the extrapolation to all humanity were correct.

I have no illusions that this work will be widely read. At best, I hope it to be of some interest to the curious, those perhaps equally unsettled by the unmooring of the modern age from increasingly frail and receding ancient wisdoms. I feel fairly comfortable in assuming that my family and close friends will make an attempt at this product. So specifically with that in mind, I will not attempt to be writing for experts,³ but will instead assume that on each topic broached, some background should best be provided. Undoubtedly such tangents will extend the discussion and will be tedious to the well-informed. But I do not know how many of these will be actual readers, and as is advised to every speaker to know his or her audience, I will cater to the audience of whom I can be assured.

In this regard, I at times wonder if this work comes too late. Would I have been a better father if it had come sooner? Alas, that was not to be, not only because of the difficulty of having perhaps the luxury time for such an endeavor, but also because many of these ideas only came into proper focus within the last few years. And Time, the relentless bookkeeper, is the inexorable record of change with which negotiation is as fruitless as hoping that by adding one more drop the bucket will thus lighten. And so I can only hope that the present is time enough to do some good, to mend deficiencies of the past, and to influence the future unknowns not yet embraced.

With that said, let us go then, you and I,⁴ and see how well this preface, more accurately a pretext, written before the work itself, holds up. Will it match the ensuing, or will the two depart, to be furtively patched with a postscript? Time’s journey will alone unfold.

October 2016

1—Introduction

Somewhere, while an undergraduate, I read that philosophy is concerned with three questions: What is? How do I know? And how should I behave?⁵ That was nearly forty years ago, and now that I am aged and much more well-read, the wisdom of that succinct response rings ever truer. While a student, I thought that the first two questions were best answered through the study of science and, in particular, physics (until a few centuries ago known as natural philosophy). And indeed, I am convinced that addressing both topics requires an appreciation of modern physics (in which I include cosmology). This is not to exclude other fields from consideration,⁶ but as I pursued the subject in more detail, I found the lessons drawn from physics to be most compelling. And that what we learn about nature is anything but obvious and cannot be anticipated.

But physics (or science more generally) is not philosophy, nor can it be. Minimally, questions about ethics are assiduously avoided (other than perhaps with respect to the behaviors necessary to keep the endeavor healthily progressing forward, and even these are not properly a field of research within the field but more a set of best practices, enforced through scrutiny and the pressure of reputation). However, even the two first questions, regarding ontology and epistemology, are not fully covered, in so much as questions of a Creator (if not all religion) naturally fall within their purview (or conversely, as religion provides them answers, no more forcefully captured than in Exodus 3:14, where Moses’s seemingly simple inquiry as to God’s name receives a response as to what is, interpreted variously, with subtly different implications, as I am Who am, I am Who I am, and I am that I am). It’s not that science should address these topics; indeed, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s reply to Napoleon Bonaparte, however haughty, remains the purest statement showing that the two questions are incompatible.⁷ It is that these topics are part and parcel of philosophy. As is metaphysics, a subject generally viewed with disdain by scientists, as the very name suggests a policing of science with something superseding. And while I may indeed share that sentiment, it must be acknowledged that any consideration of metaphysics, even one that leads to its dismissal as a legitimate pursuit, is in itself a metaphysical assertion.

Philosophy is, even more succinctly, concerned with the question of our place in the world.⁸ Not all philosophers have covered all three subject matters (and indeed, some have shown open hostility to one or more), oftentimes instead pursuing a narrow path of inquiry and presaging the birth of a new and independent field, as were once the sciences (physics, biology, etc.) prior to their break in the late Renaissance, and as today discussions in the philosophy of mind might be transitioning to the domains of neuroscience and to computer science and artificial intelligence.

What are the lessons from science? Of course, there are the many profound details, some of which will be discussed in the ensuing material, but what I am now concerned with are methodological lessons—lessons that most distinguish the scientific pursuit of knowledge from another, equally human endeavor: the path of faith.

On the Beliefs of the Practitioner

The first lesson is that the personal views, beliefs, or convictions of the individual scientist are irrelevant to success—that is, to the progress of knowledge. Naturally, scientists generally believe in the importance of their work and that a particular theory is (or is not) correct. But the salient point, the lesson, is that these biases are ignorable. Whatever their views, as long as the game is played correctly (reliable experimentation and proper mathematical derivation), progress is achievable. Indeed, you could say that one could make important, paradigm-altering contributions even if you don’t believe it. The contrast with the path of faith that leads with belief, extols it as a virtue, and indeed demands that belief is emphatic.

This lesson is clear in my experiences with experimentalists, who often show a mild distrust of any theoretical prediction but are primarily concerned with constructing a worthwhile experiment—one that either measures an inherently important property or unambiguously tests a theory. Less frequent is when a similar distrust is found in a theorist—not regarding another scientist’s work, but regarding his or her own. The process fits a general pattern: some theory of nature is circulating; it is thought to be wrong, even fantastical, by the protagonist, who derives what he or she considers an absurd (and usually shocking to others) but pristine prediction of the theory; and it is ultimately tested and found to hold true, thereby cementing our understanding of nature and immortalizing the theorist who devised this pivotal test with an eponymous neologism he or she was convinced would in fact be disproved. To illustrate this rather extraordinary history, I’ll provide three examples: the works of Simeon Poisson, James Bjorken, and John Bell.

Simeon Poisson (1781–1840) was active in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today he is mostly remembered for his contributions in mathematics, and particularly for his work in statistics. In his time, there were two competing theories on the nature of light: the corpuscular (particle) theory of light, as advocated by Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and the wave theory of light, developed by Christian Huygens (1629–95) in the seventeenth century and further refined by Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), Poisson’s contemporary, in 1818. Poisson firmly believed in Newton’s corpuscular theory and intensely studied Fresnel’s work with the intent of demonstrating it to be wrong. And when examining the phenomenon of diffraction, he thought he had done so. Poisson derived that under the correct conditions, the wave theory of light predicted that in the very center of the shadow cast by a circular object there would appear a bright spot due to constructive interference, a phenomenon that could never happen if light was made of particles.⁹ Poisson derived the exact conditions (involving the size of the sphere, the wavelength of light, and the distance behind the sphere on which the shadow appears) and thought the result ridiculous—a mistaken but inevitable prediction that would forever disprove the wave theory of light. Just the opposite, in fact, occurred. Promptly after Poisson’s publication of the theoretical result, Francois Arago performed the experiment and found, to Poisson’s great surprise, the bright spot precisely as he had predicted. Light had been unambiguously demonstrated to be a wave. The bright spot in the center of the shadow is now alternatively known as the Poisson spot or the Arago spot.

While the story of Poisson’s achievement is well-known, that of James Bjorken (1934–) is less so. Indeed, I am relying on the reminiscences of a collaborator, Carl E. Carlson, who as a postdoc overlapped with Bjorken at Stanford in the 1970s. Bjorken is most famous for his work on deep inelastic scattering: high-energy, large-angle collisions of electrons on protons. These experiments, first performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in 1968, were the first to conclusively demonstrate that protons (and neutrons, jointly called nucleons) are composed of quarks: fractionally charged particles that bind together to form the nucleon. Prior to 1968, the subatomic zoo of heavy particles (collectively known as hadrons) had been shown to fit within a predictable pattern (somewhat analogous to the periodic table) as though they themselves had substructure.¹⁰ Bjorken derived that such a substructure of structure-less, point-like, charged particles would leave a distinguishing signature on the outgoing electrons in deep inelastic scattering experiments: their presence would become visible in collisions occurring at very short-distance scales inside the proton, involving the electrons (themselves structure-less) directly scattering off of the (similarly structure-less) quarks. The mathematical signature that Bjorken derived is today called Bjorken scaling. As in the case of Poisson, Bjorken was convinced, however, that his experiment would yield just the opposite results, writing, It will be of interest to look at very large inelasticity and dispose, without ambiguity, of the model completely.¹¹

The third example of untoward fame is the work of John Stewart Bell (1928–1990) on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Chronologically, Bell’s work comes slightly before Bjorken’s, but as the experiments they inspired could only be performed decades later, I present it last. The history preceding Bell’s work also involves the work of another scientist who, as we will see, nearly fits our characterization of unexpected (indeed, perhaps even unwanted) fame: Albert Einstein (1879–1955).

Einstein’s resistance to quantum theory is well-known. He believed that the fundamental statistical nature of the theory meant that it is incomplete, that God does not play dice¹² would ultimately lead to a fully deterministic understanding. Einstein’s most mature critique of quantum mechanics came in a paper written with Brian Podolsky and Nathan Rosen¹³ (commonly referred together as EPR) wherein they discuss a thought experiment intending to demonstrate the theory’s missing elements. Quantum mechanics states that certain properties of a system, such as momentum and position, cannot be simultaneously determined. This fact is famously summarized in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Consider a pair of such systems, formed with opposite momentum at an initial time and independently measured at a later time after they have traveled some distance apart. EPR argued that by measuring the momentum of system 1 and the position of system 2, one can simultaneously know the position and momentum of system 2 (as the momentum of system 2 must be the opposite of the measured value of system 1). Such a conclusion obviously violates the tenets of quantum mechanics and became known as the EPR paradox.

The EPR paper is Einstein’s most cited paper. This is in large part because it is by Einstein and because it is wrong, and because novel technology is in development (quantum encryption, quantum computing) that exactly exploits the fact that it is wrong. We now know that the two systems cannot be independently measured, that they reflect a single state, and that the two measurements, at arbitrarily separated distances, are inherently entangled. It is the work of John Bell that made these statements precise.¹⁴ His expectation, though, was that in fact EPR were essentially correct, that the wave functions would prove to be a provisional or incomplete description of the quantum-mechanical part, of which an objective account would become possible. It is this possibility, of a homogeneous account of the world, which is for me the chief motivation of the study of the so-called ‘hidden variable’ possibility.¹⁵

Bell pursued the implications of separability as proposed by EPR and quantified the differences between it and quantum mechanics, the latter assumed to be merely an effective, or shadow, theory,¹⁶ and that underlying the mathematical framework there is a more complete description of nature, summarized as hidden variables, to indicate the surface formalism. In particular, Bell examined the case of the creation of two spin half particles (e.g., an electron–positron pair) traveling in opposite directions (i.e., total momentum equals zero) and formed with their spins pointed in opposite directions. He then considered measurements by two separate observers of the spins of the two separated particles and derived a quantifiable difference between the expected observed results from quantum mechanics and from an EPR-inspired theory.¹⁷ These differences are known today as Bell’s inequalities. Due to the difficulty of the experiments, it took some thirty years¹⁸ for these inequalities to be fully tested (and all loopholes closed). In all cases, to Bell’s own surprise, the creation of entangled states as predicted by quantum mechanics was observed. At the time of his unexpected death in 1990, John Bell was being considered for the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2009, the John Stewart Bell Prize was established to recognize research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics and their applications. The first recipient was Nicolas Gisin, for his work on quantum nonlocality, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation: all phenomena Bell felt would be proven impossible through his inequalities.