DanishGold

Objectivism and Modern Physics

2009-03-28T23:32:00.001-07:00

Scott Aaronson has posted a skittering critique of Atlas Shrugged. I will focus on the subject matter related to his own expertise as a scientist:

More important, in a book with hundreds of pages of philosophizing about human nature, there’s no mention of evolution; in a book obsessed with “physics,” there’s no evidence of any acquaintance with relativity, quantum mechanics, or pretty much anything else about physics. (When Stadler starts talking about particles approaching the speed of light, Dagny impatiently changes the subject.) It’s an interesting question whether Rand outright rejected the content of modern science; maybe we’ll pick up that debate in the comments section. But another possibility—that Rand was simply indifferent to the sorts of things an Einstein, Darwin, or Robert Stadler might discover, that she didn’t care whether they were true or not—is, to my mind, hardly more defensible for a “philosopher of reason.”

The book, however, is not obsessed with physics, or even "physics." Physics is featured as the hero's profession. The validity of relativity or quantum mechanics is just not relevant to the book's theme, which may count as another possibility for why such matters were not addressed in it.

It is likely that, were she asked, Ayn Rand would have responded that she could not judge the validity of modern theories of physics because she did not have the requisite expertise. In fact that is how she did reply when asked about the theory of evolution, even while being an atheist and an admirer of science generally. It makes no sense to conclude from the fact that she was not an expert, and that she was honest enough to withhold judgment, that she was "simply indifferent."

But independently of Ayn Rand's knowledge of the subject, it's a legitimate question: even though Objectivism doesn't take positions on the validity of particular scientific theories, are the metaphysics and epistemology of Objectivism in fact consistent with quantum mechanics and relativity?

The question is not well-posed, however, because these theories have each been interpreted in startlingly different ways. I would argue that some more-or-less mundane reformulation of relativity, concerning such issues as the meaning of the concept "entity" and whether space or spacetime or "the metric" can be said to exist as a substance, does not run afoul of any aspect of Objectivism. However, I am not much interested in this question, because for non-philosophical reasons (e.g., the non-locality exhibited in Bell experiments) I believe relativity is best taken as an effective theory, with no metaphysical claims to make about the ultimate nature of space and time.

Quantum mechanics is a more interesting subject. It is clear that insofar as quantum mechanics was interpreted (more accurately: forced into a mold) by Bohr or Heisenberg or multitudes of popular accounts, there is a clear conflict with Objectivist metaphysics. Objectivism holds that the external world exists independently of consciousness. The way the measurement postulate of quantum theory is usually presented, at least when it is done forthrightly without the waving of hands, consciousness is asserted as some irreducible object with direct causal power in the external world.

Does this mean that Objectivism would logically entail the rejection of quantum mechanics? No. David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, for instance, obviates any subjectivism. Against the usual understanding of the physical processes involved in measurement, consciousness has no fundamental role to play in Bohm's theory and, to paraphrase John Bell, we may actually contemplate objects to be a certain way in reality, independently of us, rather than just to be observed to be so. In fact if you want a perspective on quantum mechanics from someone upholding metaphysical realism--the aspect of Objectivism relevant here--John Bell is a perfect example.

What Bell called the "unprofessionally vague" formulation of quantum mechanics adopted by the mainstream of its practitioners, I would go marginally further to call unscientific and ultimately the product of a campaign by Bohr and his followers to transplant certain then-fashionable philosophic ideas into the foundations of physics.

That the residue of Bohr's silly philosophy has lingered for 80 years on the scientific project of understanding the quantum world is a shame on the physicists who have always, down-deep rejected this play-philosophy but have never wanted to risk being thought overly philosophical or pedantic for raising the issue. Indeed the virus of quantum subjectivism thrived by virtue of another philosophic microbe that was simultaneously unleashed against the immune system of the host: the methodological doctrine of positivism.

It was an effective combination. First, here, take this dose of the-moon-isn't-there-when-you're-not-looking. It's making you sick? Well you shouldn't be dwelling on these metaphysical issues, which don't mean anything anyway, so just swallow it, shut up, and calculate like a good little boy.

The orthodoxy has loosened its grip over the past two decades, but the cultural damage within physics has been significant. The effect is that Bohm's theory, while offering such a simple, direct alternative to vagueness and subjectivity, and while perhaps gaining ground since Bell's own endorsement, is currently not even the most popular among alternative interpretations. I suspect the reason for this is the psychological fall-out from physicists' historical acceptance of Bohr's ideas. Once one has given credence to such silly metaphysical claims, it is hard to just admit it was all a needless house of cards.

Instead we have the rise of things like the consistent histories or many worlds interpretations, which to their credit seem to have been motivated by a desire to dispense with subjectivism, but ultimately fail to accomplish their goal without the adoption of similarly radical philosophic positions. Many worlds, in particular, winds up solving the measurement problem (the failure to infer anything about measurement outcomes from the Schrodinger equation without ad hoc postulates) by baldly denying the reality of whichever one distinct measurement outcome we observe. It is asserted instead that despite our perceptions all potential outcomes actually occur, and that it is merely our narrow consciousness that, for some inexplicable reason, fixes itself to a single random one.

In other times the vacuousness of such an explanation would have served to disqualify it from serious consideration. But in the aftermath of Bohr's obscurantism, its roundaboutness in comparison to a simple alternative is felt as a mark of profundity. Bohm's theory has some other objections of a more technical nature leveled against it, which I think are all wrong and am glad to discuss, but I suspect this psychological factor is the real source of its limited acceptance.

At one time this contentious legacy was more-or-less confined to a basement in the house of modern physics, from which the youth were barred by the pad-lock of positivism. Normal physicists were busy with the work of understanding new discoveries about the most basic interactions of elementary particles and the fascinating properties exhibited when large numbers of them got together. As these new discoveries in the former area have been cut off to a slow trickle, and as the old ones have virtually all been accounted for by the triumphant standard model of particle physics, attention has shifted to certain neglected but foundational matters of principle in order to further unify our theories of nature and to amplify and exploit the peculiar phenomena of the quantum world. As a result it was necessary to re-enter that old basement.

The troubling development of particle physics since the early 80s has demonstrated how such foundational matters are of more consequence than the positivists would like to admit, but I'll postpone additional commentary for now.

South Park on Economics

2009-03-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

A recent episode of South Park tackles the economic contraction and gets its hands on a methodological error at the root of so much blather on the subject. Despite the show's characteristic insight into the psycho-epistemology of this error, the writers miss badly in trying to place it within the landscape of economic theories, which results in their endorsement of the very doctrine that the error produces.

At the beginning of the episode "Margaritaville" we witness various characters presenting alternative views on the cause of the recession. (One even focuses on the artificial suppression of interest rates.) The writiers' own view is eventually articulated by the character Kyle, but we first hear another character Randy as the primary foil for this view. Randy blames people for getting too deep into debt in order to consume too much, too frivolously. He regards overconsumption as acting to offend "the economy," prompting "the economy" to exact retribution on people by means of a recession. Randy piously renounces the luxuries of modern society and calls for an ascetic life less likely to bring on the economy's wrath.

But compare Randy's reification of "the economy" with that of so many accounts in the media, having been given theoretical cover long ago in Keynes' idea of the "paradox of thrift." Keynes holds that in a recession, while the individual's selfish interest is to reign in his own spending and investment in response to decreasing income and turbulent asset markets, "the economy" would be actually served by greater spending levels that would obviate the collapse of marginal businesses.

Kyle sets his sights on this approach to economics when he invokes the opposing doctrine of methodological individualism, the recognition that "the economy" is nothing but a set of interacting individuals, that it does not possess any will of its own to be visited on the penitents. Kyle proceeds to skewer Randy's anti-consumptionism as running afoul of the principle of individualism.

When Randy first offers to explain the causal chain by which overconsumption leads to a bust, the critical part of his monologue is drowned out by a noisy margarita blender; his subsequent accounts only degenerate into mysticism. This appears to be a clue about the economic confusion of the writers, who don't even bother to identify the reasoning of their foil before saddling him with the reification fallacy.

Randy is unable to point out the role of the Fed's artificially suppressed interest rates in distorting debt markets and creating asset bubbles, leading to a feed-back loop of anomalous trends and skewed expectations. Were he able, he would find a causal basis for his suspicion of contemporary consumption patterns, which basis would both circumscribe his critique of consumption in general and point him toward the real culprit: not some generalized psychological malfunction, but government control of the monetary system.

Without such a causal understanding, Randy's critique turns easily into maniacal asceticism, which Kyle can confidently reject. Kyle is thus lead to the other side of this false alternative, whereby consumption dependent on ever-increasing amounts of credit is viewed as a benign economic phenomenon, vulnerable only to a collective crisis of faith -- just like the economic order itself is vulnerable if men were to suddenly doubt each other's future productivity and eschew money as a store of value.

Randy's failure in causal understanding has redounded to Kyle, for Kyle's analogy here falls apart when the illusory nature of the boom is grasped. No amount of faith or paper money can turn the inflated prices of boom-spawned assets into real wealth. These prices are the transient responses of an unstable economy pushed far off its natural, equilibrating course by the haphazard forces of fiat money injection -- they are an artifact, not a measure of real wealth.

Once the monetary injections cease or sufficiently abate, these transient signals die, and we glimpse the reality of an economy drained of its most-needed capital. The selfish acts of consumers-turned-savers are precisely what such an economy needs to start restoring this capital and sustain a genuine expansion. The last thing needed is for people to risk financial ruin by running themselves further into debt to finance still more consumption, all for the sake of "the economy."

Culprit: Mark-to-market?

2009-03-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

[HBL] Regulations mandating mark-to-market accounting, wrong as
they may be, are certainly not the cause of the present economic
contraction. These regulations are not why banks and other financial
companies found it profitable to securitize unprecedented amounts of
mortgage (and other) debt on the back of cheap short-term financing.
The regulations are at most an impediment to restructuring after the
fact of the debt bubble is recognized.

But let's take a step back and look at what mark-to-market actually
means in the present context. If you are holding a (tranche of a)
securitized pool of mortgage loans, mark-to-market does not mean that
you have to wait for that exact security to trade and assign precisely
that traded price as its "fair value." An individual, customized
mortgage-backed security may be, itself, entirely illiquid because
there may be only one of them, you own it, and you haven't sought
bids.

What mark-to-market typically means is that you must infer the price
of your security from prices of related ones that are liquid (e.g.
tranches of the market standard ABX index). This inference,
accomplished through some kind of mathematical model, is meant to
extract a prediction of future mortgage default rates (and
correlations) from the market prices of liquid securities and then to
translate that prediction into terms relevant for the valuation of
your own security.

It may be that an individual player has better information than that
encoded in the prices of these liquid securities, hence could produce
real gains by holding certain positions without marking them to
market. But for this to have a real macroeconomic impact, there must
be systematic misvaluations in these liquid securities (that are known
to some public companies but not to hedge funds or other private
players).

On the other hand, an undeniable factor behind current, low market
valuations of mortgage debt is the real uncertainty we all have about
future default rates. What we do know is that a massive debt bubble
was blown up on loose monetary policy and that dire times are ahead
for the borrow-and-spend culture if and when our foreign creditors
wise up and start to reassess the soundness of holding piles of green
paper as a store of value.

The Monetary Somehow

2008-10-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

[HBL] A common objection to Austrian businesss cycle theory is about its ability to explain the cluster of entrepreneurial errors that give rise to malinvestments and then the bust. It is suggested that inflation should cause interest rates to rise, not sink, and that flexible markets should simply be able to adjust to easy money.

First, the means by which the central bank causes an inflation (monetary expansion) is the suppression of certain interest rates below the natural level that would have prevailed under free banking. Only this can increase the volume of loans, which in a fractional reserve system tends to increase the money supply. Other rates (usually for longer-term debt) may rise later to include an inflation premium, but e.g. the Fed retains continuous control over short-term rates, at least until a real crisis occurs like the present one. (In fact it was the divergence between short and long term rates that fueled the loan securitization boom behind the current crisis.)

And this is critical: the Fed does not just take (plundered) capital and act in certain debt markets. Rather, it controls those markets with an unlimited supply of fake capital. It fixes prices in those markets. It undermines the role played by those prices in coordinating entrepreneurial activity -- in this case, coordinating the flow of capital toward projects of different duration and riskiness. Instead its fake price signals bring about massive discoordination in debt markets between the investment appetite of savers and the risk characteristics of borrowers.

The free market is the price system. You cannot sabotage the most critical price signals in the economy and expect entrepreneurs to just intuit what price signals (interest rate levels) they really should be responding to.

(Incidentally, this relates to the primary deficiency of classical, pre-Austrian accounts of the business cycle: the failure to appreciate the effect of inflation on not merely the total extent but also on the heterogeneous structure of production -- the effect on not merely the volume of loans but on how the new loans systematically misappropriate real capital for uses contrary to the actual risk-aversion and time-preference of savers. Mises' accomplishment was to unify the classical understanding of the cycle as monetary in origin with Bohm-Bawerk's theory of capital and interest.)

Central banking is dangerous because its fascism is subtle. Honest people can pretty easily realize the harmful nature of things like CRA and Fannie/Freddie (whose business depended on the Fed-induced interest rate divergence, by the way). Because of this there is a tendency to overestimate the role of such things in a credit cycle that is fundamentally the result of fiat money.

It may be a total waste of political capital to agitate against CRA or Fannie/Freddie if the fiat money system survives to distort and waste another day.

Culprit: Mortgage Fraud?

2008-07-21T20:31:00.000-07:00

[HBL] Mortgage fraud was not the cause of the real estate bubble. It is hard to believe that the morality of homeowners has deteriorated so dramatically over just the last few years. But then why would there be such a sharp rise in mortgage fraud recently?

Indeed, why would a mortgage company go along with or even itself prompt home buyers to misrepresent their current and expected future incomes? If the reason were that the mortgage company intended to pawn off its shoddy loans to banks and other investors, then why would these investors buy them?

The answer is that for years people had been buying homes outside their budgets by periodically extracting additional cash from these homes as their market values continued to rise. It was only this peculiar but seemingly robust trend of rising home values that could spawn systemic analytical complacency on the part of home buyers and mortgage companies. And it was only this trend, further distorted by the carnival mirrors of a legally enforced oligopoly of ratings agencies, that could provoke so many investors to follow suit.

So the real question is: what was the source of this home value trend itself? I have posted before to argue for the essential role of monetary policy here and won't belabor that now, but one aspect of this cause is important for understanding the cognitive and ethical problems faced by mortgage market participants.

If you had simply decided not to participate in the boom and forgo the substantial upside in your home value or mortgage investment portfolio, the dollar-denominated investment assets you purchased instead have deteriorated in the inflationary downside all the same.

There was no simple path by which you could escape the pincer movement of the Fed's monetary policy. Your best bet was to organize even your most basic financial decisions around a detailed understanding of macroeconomic theory, including Austrian monetary analysis, which has eluded most professional economists -- and even that could not tell you when the bust would come and how bad it would be. Such is your burden in a system of socialized banking.

The Role of Speculators in an Inflation

2008-05-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

[HBL] Regarding the role of financial speculation in the midst of inflationary monetary policy, it is sometimes asserted that speculators are macroeconomically benign in that they help to adjust the market to foreseeable consequences.

But consequences of what: underlying realities or government dictate? Speculation expedites the onset of future prices. But as the government begins to inflate, future prices in the booming sector(s) will be severed from future underlying realities and usually even less reflective of those realities than are present prices. Adjusting to future realities is productive; adjusting to botched dictates is destructive.

A rational speculator knows that a continuous stream of new money is being funneled into the housing market. He knows that insofar as others have not anticipated this stream, or are not able to keep close tabs on it, current housing (and related) prices have not been sufficiently bid up. Therefore, he will go long housing, always looking out for indications that the inflation has started to abate so he can reverse his position and capitalize on the bust. Rational speculators aggravate the boom and expedite the bust--the former an example of government force disrupting the harmony of rational self-interests, the latter an example of those self-interests realigning when force is withdrawn.

Moreover, while such a strategy is certainly possible, based on the speculator's own detailed macroeconomic expectations, this kind of estimation cannot replace the market process itself. Relying on these estimates to diagnose macroeconomic imbalances absent genuine market prices in one sector is akin to relying on socialist planners to run an economy without market prices in general. Such estimates may be sufficient to guide an investment portfolio, but not to guide an entire market sector in all its particularity.

Regarding the role of targeted interventions like the CRA, the inflationary boom would occur somewhere whether or not the CRA were enacted.

However, such interventions may favor certain sectors as hosts for the boom. An endogenous factor in the recent boom was innovative methods for securitizing the new mortgage loans and exposing them to the investment community at large. This allowed savings to be pulled continuously back into the housing market. If you held money market funds, you were probably doing your own small part to fuel the boom.

Marginal home loans became profitable by securitization into asset-backed paper, yielding ample return on the back of financing at artificially low (Fed-dictated) short-term rates. From a macroeconomic perspective, these loans should not have been made. They were a waste of real capital. Expediting this waste, which is what speculation accomplished, was in aggregate a bad thing, a result of disharmonized interests. Speculation necessarily also augmented the waste due to the additional demand it created.

(Incidentally, there's nothing wrong per se with securitization of home loans or anything else through CDOs and other financial technology. Sure, these things accelerated the boom, in the same way that tank technology accelerated Hitler's advances. The problem is not technology, the problem is the underlying impetus, be it false money or a false ideology.)

Some argue that without targeted intervention like the CRA, there is a kind of symmetry in the loan market that would prevent a bubble forming in any one sector alone. But the nature of an inflation is that wherever a bubble first begins to form, positive feedback from speculation magnifies it as long as the inflation keeps pace. Where the bubble nucleates may depend on things like the CRA and may be hard to predict, but once it does nucleate, it is a runaway process, diverting capital from where there is a real demand for it.

Distortions introduced by the abolition of market interest rates generate massive opportunities for speculation. But it has to be recognized that, however near the end of the inflation, this speculatory action is not even an approximate substitute for the abolished market process. The speculators' estimates involving gross macroeconomic aggregates may diagnose crude imbalances; they cannot comprehend a detailed reorganization of the entire structure of production to suit the real preferences of millions of people stranded in a world of distorted capital prices.

The one kernel of truth in the indictment of the use of derivatives in the recent boom is the role of the ratings agencies, whose seal of approval (AAA) has bred analytical complacency on the part of investors looking to purchase securitized mortgages and the like. The place occupied by these agencies in the market, however, is a product of government interference. They are in effect a legally enforced oligopoly. An AEI piece from 2005 is informative. This narrower problem is more amenable to correction by speculators.

Seeds of the Crisis

2008-05-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

[HBL] Some are skeptical about the adequacy of inflationary monetary policy to sustain a narrow housing bubble over a period of years when the new money is spent quickly by home buyers, equilibrating them with the rest of the economy.

Indeed the housing bubble is just the leading edge of a generalized debt bubble, whose other manifestations (e.g. college loans, US government debt, credit card debt) are only starting to make themselves known. All of these have been fueled not by a one-time monetary injection, but by a sustained policy of holding interest rates below the natural level that would have prevailed in free debt markets.

As long as interest rates are artificially suppressed, new money is continuously conjured up in the bank accounts of those who would otherwise not have been deemed creditworthy. The prices of what they spend it on are bid up. The suppliers of those bid-up goods and services in turn increase their own expenditures, bidding up a new set of goods, etc. The whole structure of production, the markets for capital goods tied to different stages of processing toward different final products, is gradually rearranged to accommodate this new demand as if it were actually backed by new supply.

Furthermore, as the boom gets underway, additional self-reinforcing tendencies come about. The constant bidding up of certain goods attracts speculators whose additional demand will bid them up even further, attracting more speculators, etc., tending to continuously pull the new money back into the sector(s) in which it was first deployed.

But when the monetary spigot ceases to spew (fast enough), the feedback is reversed, and whole industries implode, releasing masses of capital that had been built-up over years and are now only partially transferable.

This Misean process cannot be set off by targeted interventionist programs, like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Such programs do artificially increase demand for certain goods, but apart from a cessation of the program, there is nothing to cut off the new demand. A self-reinforcing boom culminating in an abrupt bust is the signature of unsustainable monetary meddling.

Race, Religion, Creed, or Color

2008-05-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

There is a dangerous package deal that emerged on the heels of the civil rights movement: the refusal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, creed, or color. Let us not consider here the question of whether or not the state should be banning any form of discrimination at all in the course of men's private dealings. It shouldn't, whatever the moral status of such acts of discrimination.

The question is whether discrimination on the basis of religion is an immoral act. A religion is a chosen system of beliefs. The fact that most people uncritically adopt the religion of their families does not alter that fact and does not absolve a man of moral responsibility for the consequences of his beliefs in his life and in his interaction with others. If we repudiate discrimination on the basis of religion, why shouldn't we also demand equal consideration for those who believe that two and two is five or that Elvis lives?

Historically, religion has been given a special exemption from critical treatment because of the obvious stupidity of its claims. 'Yes religious dogma is obviously stupid, people realize you're not dumb enough to truly believe it, but don't go upsetting your grandma.' Thinking people basically all got together and voted to make this one a freebie. Sure we'd have to put up with an occasional gynecologist being murdered by anti-abortion wackos, but grandma must be placated.

Now the penitents are crashing planes into buildings. The exemption has to end. Your ideas are your choice. If they result in you helping to blow up innocent people, you cannot be spared the consequences any longer.

Ayn Rand perceived this 50 years ago. Bill Buckley rewarded the achievement of this seemingly clairvoyant insight by turning the conservative movement into something unpalatable for her. Now Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are coming around to see what's really on the line when respectability is granted to stone age metaphysics. Hopefully Europe will not lie bloody and inseminated under a crescent banner before thinking people start catching on.

Some Meta-Geometry

2008-02-07T17:39:00.000-08:00

Geometry, in its original and most basic sense, is the study of distance relationships in the physical world. The concepts of point and straight line are what geometry starts with, but geometric reasoning itself does not tell us *which* line between two given points is a straight line. Whether we define straight lines ostensively, as was necessary in Ancient Greece, or we define them by reference to light rays, as some do today, the concept of straight line is a foundation block of and, therefore, must precede all other geometric analysis.

This is why the basic properties of straight lines constitute the postulates, not the theorems, of geometry. Such postulates are not self-evident primaries. They are inductions from experience in the physical world. If, for instance, we were to construct a very large triangle and measure the sum of its interior angles to be greater than 180 degrees, we cannot just reject the result out of hand because it violates Euclid's postulates. We might have to question these postulates.

If we do in fact define straight lines using light rays, we find that certain triangles wouldn't add to 180 degrees, depending on their proximity to massive objects. This is what is meant by the idea that the universe is non-Euclidean. It is ultimately a matter of physics, because physics is the study of external objects in general (including those used to define straight lines).

Nevertheless, based on the totality of the physical evidence (including observations of quantum non-locality and also subtler indications provided by modern quantum field theories), I do not personally believe that the universe is non-Euclidean. It looks more likely that using light to define straight lines is defective. But this is, again, a question of physics -- not a question to be resolved by scrutinizing standard geometrical concepts.

The True Believer and Western Politics

2008-01-01T15:12:00.001-08:00

I have been rereading parts of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, written in 1951, and am impressed by his insights into the psychology of collectivism. Hoffer identifies the organizing psychological force for man in his sense of individual efficacy. When a man sees himself as efficacious, when his own creative energy is regularly given form in the material world, he is content. Otherwise he is frustrated. And then he seeks to sublimate this frustration by merging his unworthy ego into the group -- the family, the tribe, the church, the nation, the race, or the movement. This closely parallels Ayn Rand's analysis of creators vs. second-handers already in The Fountainhead.

Hoffer proceeds to offer a taxonomy of the frustrated second-hander, dissecting the psychological malfunction characterstic of each variation. He points out that the various social organizations sought as an outlet by the second-hander are inherently competitive with each other. There is only so much social fodder to go around, and what the church gets, e.g., the nation must give up. Hoffer is mainly interested in competition between the more traditional outlets -- family, church, nation -- on the one hand, and mass movements on the other. The movement -- communist, Nazi, environmentalist, or evangelical -- frequently seeks to undermine the hold of traditional social structures. First it must demagnetize the potential convert from his local field in preparation to realign him with its own polarity.

These social forces bring about a certain kind of interesting second-order, cooperative effect. As the revolutionary movement seeks to undermine prior social orders, a reactionary conservative movement may seek to strengthen them simply to defend against the former. This kind of dynamics seems to underly the political landscape of the modern West.

It had always appeared to me an unfortunate historical accident that the advocates of economic freedom are for the most part also the advocates of traditional religion and "family values," i.e. the political Right. But perhaps it is no accident. Having performed the liberal economic revolution of the 18th century in America and Europe, what was once itself a kind of mass movement for individual liberty increasingly faced threats from other, competing movements rather than from the old order itself. When it was in its ascendancy, the liberal movement strove to disassemble extant social bonds, and its doctrine of individualism was a great asset. Having gained power, the liberal movement seems to have jettisoned this doctrine in an act of political expediency.

As in the old order, so in capitalism, the second-hander has a vast numerical majority in society. Now, further separated from the basic chores of his own survival by the fruits of capitalism, and in possession of ever greater amounts of leisure time, his frustration is magnified. The potential for new, contrary mass movements increases proportionately. The second-hander always has the power to shape his own intellect anew, to cultivate and express his own creative energy in whatever field and at whatever level his ability allows. But such a process, even when not begun on a second-handed precursor, is difficult and sometimes painful. The easier and more frequent shunt is a reversion to some form of collectivism.

In order to avert the disaster posed by modern collectivist movements, the liberal order was faced with two alternatives: (i) perfect the psychology of uncountable numbers of frustrated mediocrities or (ii) shunt them away from the revolutionary collectivism of modern mass movements and into the age-old collectivism of family and church. Fight syphilis by microscopic scrutiny of every resident microbe or by the equal-opportunity toxin of arsenic. The former (i) requires a grand, philosophical kind of revolution on at least the same order as the political revolutions being opposed -- a philosophic revolution whose very identity few in the liberal movement have ever grasped. The latter (ii) offers a concrete prospect for the current political epoch, and the liberal movement took it.

The danger is always that a dose of arsenic sufficient to subdue the invading microbe may be too great for the patient to withstand. But at least now I understand why the arsenic was tried in the first place. Ultimately, we need a better immunological technology.

Free Will vs. Quantum Indeterminism

2007-12-11T17:44:00.000-08:00

Many scientists are determinists; they don't believe in free will. I do. Not only that, but I believe it is impossible to consistently deny it. If your thoughts and beliefs are determined by outside forces, then so is your belief in determinism. How do you know you believe in determinism because it is true? The outside forces clearly force a lot of people to believe false ideas, and not only that, but it is the forces themselves that determine whether people will ever be permitted to uncover the falsity of these ideas -- if the forces say no, then too bad, you're stuck with the mistakes forever, and you will have no way to know! Is determinism one of these mistakes? You will never know. This is Ayn Rand's argument against determinism.

A belief in determinism is an epistemic virus that infects any other beliefs you might hold. It is a one-way ticket to radical skepticism and thus equally self-defeating.

It might seem tempting to retort that with the advent of quantum mechanics determinism isn't really on the table anymore. Bohr giveth just as Newton tooketh away, on this view. Here are some problems with it:

1. Quantum mechanics isn't really about indeterminism.

It is true that Bohr and his students were radical indeterminists. What is not so well known is that Bohr held this view prior to even the discovery of matrix mechanics or the Schrodinger equation, much less any kind of semi-coherent formulation of the Copenhagen interpretation. That indeterminism was grafted onto quantum theory was an historical accident due primarily to Bohr's pre-existing philosophical committments, in particular his thoroughgoing rejection of causality. Apart from that accident it seems likely that Louis de Broglie's discovery of what David Bohm later developed into a fully consistent, realist (and also deterministic) interpretation of quantum theory would have prevailed. (The question of how this determinism is circumscribed by man's volition would remain.)

2. Epistemic nature of probability.

There has never been any basis whatsoever to transform what had been the purely epistemic concept of probability into something whose referents are out there in the external world. This transformation requires a kind of conspiracy theory about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Laplace & co. come up with the nice concept of mathematical probability that at the time everyone concedes was purely epistemic, describing our lack of complete knowledge in a given context. Then quantum mechanics comes along and we discover this amazing new phenomenon in nature, and fortuitously the exact concept we need to describe it already exists, with the slight difference that previously the concept had just been referring to stuff in our heads. It's as if a new discovery in electrical engineering brings about a revolution in our understanding of nano-electronics if we just accept the proposition that currents exhibit the emotions of happiness and sadness.

The idea that such a semantic maneuver is permitted by the open-ended nature of concepts misses the point. The question is not whether one is permitted to include these new referents under the concept of probability, the question is what new facts could possibly give us a reason to include them. Paraphrasing John Bell, both the observer-created-reality and indeterministic aspects of quantum mechanics are the result of premeditated theoretical preference, and are not in any way necessitated by experimental discoveries. The whole QM101 attitude of having to transform one's basic philosophy only grudgingly in recognition of new data is an affectation and a canard. (Zeilinger and Wheeler are perhaps the loudest living advocates of this canard.)

3. The actual meaning of quantum indeterminism.

Let's suppose for a moment that quantum indeterminism were the basis of free will. What would this mean exactly? Because the indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are all terribly vague. The seat of indeterminism is supposed to be the wavefunction collapse event. And what causes this event? The "observer," answers quantum indeterminism. So there is no real physical foundation for free will provided here, there is only a vague, misplaced reference to some sort of consciousness. Yes, consciousness is an axiomatic concept that, logically, is irreducible. It is not, however, a concept that belongs in the axioms of a theory of physics, unless you want to posit mind as a new physical substance. Do not however presume that quantum mechanics provides some new, technical, empirical justification for this maneuver. There is not a single experiment that reveals anything unique about the physical matter of the brain in this regard. There is only an old theoretical preference that can be dressed up in modern clothes, and smeared with some gaudy quantum lipstick.

But another kind of interpretation of quantum mechanics exists (Bohm's), one that explains every experimental result in terms of, and situates every mathematical formulation within, a conventional kind of physical account -- an account that does not vaguely posit some new substance (mind-icles) for which no evidence exists. Only a desire to instantiate premeditated metaphysical beliefs could motivate the rejection of such a theory in favor of quantum free will.

Where does this leave us? Free will exists. Quantum mechanics doesn't tell us anything about it. Looks probable that free will and the mind are emergent phenomena -- emerging from a sufficiently complicated brain. We have barely even begun to understand the brain enough to have a clue as to how this works.

Ron Paul

2007-12-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

Profound ambivalence is my reaction to the Ronvolution. What has always struck me about Paul is something that's not quite intellectual honesty, but intellectual earnestness. I am convinced this man wants to have justice done. When he's in one of his finance committee hearings with Greenspan or Bernanke, you can hear in his voice a plea to be understood -- sound money, not government paper, it's so simple.

And yet Paul also holds that 9/11 is in some important measure our fault, or at least the fault of our government, which has maintained military installations in Saudi Arabia and friendly relations with Israel. These are the canards that Osama bin Laden proffers as grievances when attempting to confuse and divide Western enemies.

Paul has bought into this as a way to reduce the problem of global jihad back to the previous problem. For big-L Libertarians like Ron Paul, the previous problem is always the U.S. government. It is an understandable mistake when your intellectual foundation goes only as far down as politics (the non-initiation of force principle). If the most basic good for man is freedom to pursue his own values, then the most basic evil is force directed against those values. And in terms of dollars expropriated, the U.S. government is the greatest transgressor in human history.

But when you realize that political ideas ultimately derive from a view of man's nature, in particular the nature and role of his reasoning mind, a more basic alternative can be perceived. The jihadis are not motivated by a desire for liberation from American interference, they seek a global Islamic revolution to enforce world-wide spiritual submission. Their current stance is mostly defensive only of necessity. But the existence of transportable nuclear weapons transforms the long-term strategic equation. The anti-intellectual straitjacket of Libertarianism makes it difficult to grasp the jihadi's actual goal and how serious he is about finding a means capable of achieving it.

N! in the Classical Partition Function

2007-11-22T00:48:00.000-08:00

I remember sitting through an undergrad stat mech lecture, I think in my senior year, when the professor wrote down the classical partition function for an ideal gas, and made the comment that despite popular misconception this N! appearing in the denominator really didn't have anything to do with the quantum mechanics of identical particles.

Now this sounded like a good philosophic kind of question to sink my teeth into, and I kind of enjoyed the bravely reactionary nature of his comment. I mean if you have an easy 1/N! from QM, why not use it, eh? He must have had a profound reason, although one he didn't seem able to share with us at the time.

The nasty part of this question is that, even forgetting about QM for a second, it seems to put a hard-nosed stat mech result square in the middle of a grand metaphysical problem. Gibbs justified the 1/N! by asserting that the particles are identical (albeit in a merely Luddite, classical way) and that two configurations which differ merely by, say, an exchange of two particle positions aren't "really" distinct. Well why not? I mean they are two different particles. Suppose that we probe a bit deeper and found that no two electrons are really identical, that at a very small scale they had little scratches or barbs or something that were unique little fingerprints. Doesn't matter how small the scratches -- if there are scratches -- blammo! the 1/N! has to go away. Apparently then even the approximate validity of classical stat mech is a metaphysical beacon signaling to us that every single goddam electron is exactly the same.

However, there is a less metaphysical possibility: the particles aren't particles, they're excitations of some kind of field. Then it's not really the case that particle1 here and particle2 there is distinct from particle2 here and particle1 there. What we really have is just field excited both here and there, symmetrically. Now I won't bother here about the fact that this is precisely the state of affairs described by QFT. Could just as well have been a classical field, same result. Bottom line is, stat mech isn't subtley warning us about the inherently quantum nature of our universe, and it isn't telling us something about the metaphysical sameness of all electrons. It's telling us, it ain't particles at all -- it's fields.

Another Missfire at Bell's Inequality

2007-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

[Adapted from an HBL post] Yet another claimed refutation of Bell's Inequality surfaces here, this one on the part of someone named Joy Christian. Bell's Inequality, together with certain well-confirmed experimental results, demonstrates faster-than-light (in physics parlance, 'non-local') causation in nature, one important feature of quantum mechanics.

However, Christian's conclusions aren't supported in his paper. What he does is to suggest an experiment that is distinct from Bell's and then argue that this experiment can be explained by a local theory. But that doesn't change the fact that Bell's original experiment cannot be explained in such a way.

Christian's experiment involves measuring variables, the Clifford Algebra elements denoted by A_n(mu) in his paper, which are mathematically more complicated than Bell's original ones (simple binary numbers). Christian seems to be equivocating between a change in these measured variables and a change in the "hidden variables" used to define a theory, as if simply defining a new experiment with new variables to measure were somehow equivalent to explaining the original experiment with a new set of hidden variables, i.e. a new proposed theory.

Incidentally, New Scientist has become a meaningless publication insofar as claims of new ideas in physics are concerned.

Anti-Jihad, Pro-What?

2007-11-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

The recent spat amongst anti-jihad bloggers resembles the fault line in the American right separating individualists from religious evangelizers since the beginning of the movement in the 1950's. Since then, the amalgam of intellectuals originally bound together by opposition to Soviet communism has proven unstable, melting away in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The present amalgam is also defined by a negative, now opposition to the rising Shari'a horde. And like before, the unifying tendencies provoked by a common enemy can obscure a basic incompatibility only for so long. The Buckleyites hated Soviet communism so much that they didn't mind confiscating a quarter of the wealth of their countreymen in order to cajole the political opposition into letting them confiscate another quarter to outdo the Russian military state. Half our wealth is confiscated, to defend the principle of non-confiscation.

Now we face the uma of totalitarian Islam, and some believe that the only way to defeat it is to build our own uma in the pattern of a more familiar religion. Many with this opinion are simply unaware of any alternative. To fight lunatics who are willing to explode themselves for the promise of virgin slaves in a mysterious afterlife, it is believed we must find an equally potent vision of the supernatural. Who is going to stand against the approaching horde? Ghandi? Cornell West? Noam Chomsky? Against these choices, the God of the Old Testament seems at least a plausible candidate.

However, if you look at what kind of society the Old Testament produced, namely Judea circa 1AD, its military prowess leaves something to be desired. The religious environment of the post-Renaissance West, on the other hand, is characterized by a more restrained authoritarian impulse. And it had to be to unleash an era of scientific inquiry and technological progress. For centuries, Christianity has been an ideological force in decline, its doctrine one of forgiveness, humility, and surrender.

So when Mohamed skewers my cheek, shall I turn him another? When I have one of Allah's warriors in my sights, shall I wonder whether I am really fit to judge him, lest I be judged? Shall I humbly ponder over the sinfulness of my own society, the very sin, the lust, the materialism, the wordliness, that these invaders are opposing? Ultimately, isn't my desire for freedom a selfish one?

Are you thinking that it will work out as long as the virtue of self-sacrifice is practiced in moderation? Where then are the principles we need to fight for our lives and freedom? If the uplifting power of our moral code is squandered in such admonitions as 'be nice to your parents' and 'help the homeless,' what chance do we really stand against Allah's warriors? We do need a code. It is not enough that freedom merely be permitted or tolerated. Because defending it will require a profound sense of moral rectitude.

Imagine a moral code that extols individual liberty, that condemns human slavery once and for all -- whether it is slavery to a state, to a class, to a race, or to someone else's delusions of a supernatural dimension. Imagine a code based not on delusions and commandments but on an honest, objective survey of man's actual nature, the requirements of his survival on this earth. Imagine a code that renders morality as a tool for the benefit of your own life, and a weapon against those who would enslave you. Such is the moral code necessary for a real war in defense of civilization, because it is the unacknowledged root of all the grandeur that civilization has achieved.

Unnatural Interest

2007-11-20T06:52:00.001-08:00

[Adapted from an HBL post] It's not possible to quantitatively isolate Fed-induced distortions in our system of interest rates. Why this is so, even apart from issues of idiosyncratic credit risk, is an insight of Austrian monetary theory.

The Fed effectively controls short term interest rates by fiat, which it has the power to do by creating "money" (i.e. electronic deposits in a federal reserve bank) out of thin air (i.e. government IOUs). Since an interest rate is really just the price of credit, this is basically a price control. In particular, the Fed is capping the price of credit. Usually when the government perpetually forces a producer to sell the fruits of his labor at sub-market levels, he goes out of business. But here what's being sold is a time-limited right of disposal over a given sum of paper money. Virtually no labor was required to create the paper, and the fruits are owned not by the lender (a federal reserve bank) but by all the dupes who unknowingly accept a perpetual debasement of their money.

As Hayek emphasized, the price system is a means of disseminating the particularized knowledge held within the mind of each individual producer-valuer to a sea of other such individuals who might better coordinate their activities with his own. Price controls, on the other hand, are only a means of destruction, and what they destroy is primarily this knowledge. To abolish a market price is an act of censorship. When the price is one so basic as that governing the economy-wide trade-off between present and future consumption, an entire realm of cooperative discovery is disintegrated.

Volumes of information pertaining to people's actual preferences in regard to this trade-off -- the information that would have been discovered and disseminated through countless acts of consumption and abstinence, of planning and hedging -- this information simply does not exist. There is no way to retrieve what never was.

Anti-Jihad in the Blogosphere

2007-11-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

Something that has caught my attention recently: anti-jihadis abroad and at home, who used to be on civil terms, have recently ceased friendly relations and proceeded to "throw mud" as Hillary might put it. Now, I'm all for mud when there's an adobe house that needs building. And that is about the architectural equivalent of current anti-jihad movements around the world.

In short, European anti-jihadism had been relegated to political obscurity by the multiculturalist ostriches who have most of the continent under their yoke. Only the ostriches didn't realize how repulsive that yoke might be to small but noticeable minorities of reactionary conservatives in their midst. And so, from obscurity the reactionaries rise, bringing with them bits from the tribalist miasma of Euro-conservatism. Ironically the real nature of this miasma is obscured by the ostriches themselves, on account of the ostriches' supposed anti-racism laws that end up legally barring the reactionaries from uttering their real views both informally and through various political parties (like the Vlaams Blok/Belang in Belgium).

Another ambiguator is that nationalistic parties like Vlaams Belang (Flemish nationalist in this case) have morphed their traditional anti-Semitic paranoia into a much more plausible anti-Muslim message. The VB is now unique across the political landscape of western Europe in its support for Israel, as the last outpost of Western civilization among the Shari'a slave states of the Middle East. From the current VB platform, in fact, it is difficult to discern much off kilter. I guess the seemingly incongruous call for granting amnesty to relic Nazi collaborators might raise an eyebrow. But what's an eccentric sympathy or two between ideological allies, right? Well, if you listen to this interview with VB front man Filip DeWinter, eyebrows may give way to garlic cloves and mirrors. Yeah, seems that old remark of Fil's that "We [the VB] choose a white Europe." -- and another about how he wouldn't look too kindly on his daughter bringing home a Negro boyfriend -- both of those were really misinterpreted. You see "white Europe" is just a metaphor.

Charles Johnson of the American anti-jihad blog Little Green Footballs had no truck with this kind of nationalism and said so, precipitating the break with Paul Belien of the Euro anti-jihad blog Brussels Journal and the mysterious but eloquent Fjordman of BJ and Gates of Vienna (and formerly of LGF as well). Kudos to Charles for doggedly pursuing these things despite credible smoke screens raised by his now-adversaries. They are clever too -- they make a point of attributing suspicions of racism to the tried-and-true leftist disinformation gambit.

Charles has also rightly emphasized the critical difference between the two sides here: nationalism vs. individualism, concluding that what we must fight to preserve is not ethnic or national or religious identity, but individual liberty. More on this later, in particular on how this very idea is not widely understood on the American right either, laying the groundwork for future schisms closer to home.

What then do we make of a party like Vlaams Belang, whose explicit agenda against the Islamization of Europe is laudable, but whose leaders seem to be trying to cover up their roots in the tribalist far-right? There may come a time -- and perhaps that time is already upon Europe -- when the alternatives are unacceptable. And there is no need, even while voting for and supporting a party like VB, to aid the cover up. One can vote for them and also agitate against any lingering racist elements. Parties can change, and party leaders will sooner or later be replaced. If they themselves have tacitly conceded the moral case, the road may be clearing.

Emergent Phenomena in Economics and Physics

2007-11-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

The way I characterized Austrian economics as reducing everything down to individual action is kind of funny. One might call it "reductionist." In physics there are some people who use this word too, and they use it pejoratively. The funny thing is that insights they have obtained about the character of a mighty chunk of the physical world are eerily similar to Hayek's insights about markets, and the terminology is similar too.

The physics bit is about how a mess of complicated interacting components can spontaneously exhibit large scale order that looks as if it were (i) composed of a bunch of coherent larger objects, and (ii) organized according to elegant rules about how those larger objects behave. The problem is just that these larger objects don't exist except as slavishly repeated patterns of behavior of the underlying components, and the elegant rules don't seem to have anything to do with the rules actually governing the components.

If the components are atoms, and the larger objects are waves in a crystal lattice, you get the slavish conformity of ice always having the same specific heat. If the components are people, and the larger objects are dairy markets, you get the price of milk in Idaho slavishly imitating the price of milk in Manhattan (or vice versa). At any rate, emergent physics and emergent economics are pregnant ideas.

Menger, Mises, Hayek and All That

2007-11-18T19:28:00.000-08:00

One of the systems plugged into that philosophic substrate is Austrian economics, which is the school of economics founded in the desire to reduce all economic knowledge down to its origin in the values and actions of individuals. Its founder, Carl Menger, is best known for solving elementary paradoxes like "If an apple is really worth $0.50, why bother to buy one rather than just holding onto your $0.50?" and "If water is so essential to your life why is it so much cheaper than diamonds?"

Ludwig von Mises was the first guy to realize why collectivism can never work, and here's a hint, it's not because people are inherently selfish. Mises also revealed exactly why collectivism in banking (i.e., secretive little groups of bureaucrats who have arrogated the right to push an entire nation full of savers and investors into a preconceived, rigid, and arbitrary pattern of interest rates) is so dangerous.

Motivated by these results, Friedrich von Hayek is the first man to have properly defined the central problem of economics, despite having been born centuries after the discipline began. Nice trick. One might venture to define economics as the science whose hardest problem is figuring out what its hardest problem is. The defining problem is basically: how does an entire economy full of people coordinate their manifold activities as if they all knew exactly what everyone else was doing? Contemplate, for instance, the twinky you just bought. A rubber manufacturer in Ohio contributed the tires that supported the rig that a truck driver from Sacramento purchased ten years ago so he could carry a combination of Oklahoma starch and Wisconsin cream two thousand miles into the back door of the 7/11 only four days before the exact moment that you needed it. Rube Goldberg behold!

Overture

2007-11-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

The primary purpose of this blog is to record noteworthy ideas I have or hear before they fall into the memory hole.

So let's start with my place in the intellectual landscape.

First, I am an Objectivist. Objectivism is the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand, which asserts, to paraphrase her, that reality exists independently of anyone's beliefs or wishes, that reason is man's means of knowing reality, that "rational selfishness" is a redundancy, and that "political entrepreneur" is an oxymoron. The core of Rand's system is not political or even moral, but epistemological, and is best characterized by a kind of orientation that, when confronted with an ambiguous abstraction or principle, always wants to ask "What facts gave rise to that?" -- rather than starting from a commandment, social convention, or emotional reaction, perceived as itself irreducible. The foregoing will not help you much if you don't know anything about Objectivism, but I enjoyed writing it anyway.

Objectivism provides the philosophic substrate on top of which various other, more specialized systems reside in my mind. The next couple posts will probably get into some of those.