As always, Paul Krugman of the New York Times has something direct and point-blank to say. His 2009 year end op-ed piece “The Big Zero” pretty well sums up the lost decade we had passed through. He ends his essay with these words: “So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing.”
I agree, but the agreement is predicated on a set of old, persistent, and difficult questions that have the same philosophical and scientific resonances as that of the contemporaneous ones raised by the likes of Paul Krugman.
I have no idea whether any of these questions are answerable under the aegis of science, philosophy, or politics, but they are certainly interesting and important enough to be addressed seriously.
Every listed question has an author. Questions without attributions
are mine, and I welcome any new questions from the readers. I owe the name of my blog “If It Were So Big …” to Her Majesty the Queen of England’s trenchant question about the financial crisis of 2008.
1. “If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them?” [Queen Elizabeth on Financial Crisis of 2008]
2. “We have been talking a lot about this metaphor, the blind man and the elephant. I don’t really buy that, because I think what – I certainly don’t buy it as an explanation for what happened. I think it’s been used as a kind of excuse to pass the buck and sort of say, well, nobody could see the whole picture, so we were each compromised in our ability to take action that would have mattered and made a difference, but the hearing testimony today just confirms to me that in each part of the world that you each had a clear perspective on, you had tools that you could have used, which if you had used them, might have averted the situation, or certainly lessened its impact.” [Representative Sarbanes on Financial Crisis of 2008]
3. How the mind works fundamentally in two entirely different and distinct ways – consciously with efforts, unconsciously without efforts: “a capacity for description or calculation or inference” when it works consciously, and “a species of direct acquaintance” when it works unconsciously, to use the nomenclatures employed by Isaiah Berlin in his influential essay “Political Judgment.” The question: Why not just one way or the other?
4. “[T]here is a real problem about how much such a thing as reason is possible. How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the contingent capacities of a biological species whose very existence appears to be radically accidental, should have access to a universally valid method of objective thoughts.” [Thomas Nagel]
5. “Is the Universe Designed?” [Steven Weinberg]
6. Why is the velocity of light the same when measured against a stationary or a moving frame? Einstein presented the constant velocity of light as a postulate: it was not explained.
7. “What is the relation between thinking and the world?” [Albert Einstein]
8. “One may say ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’ It is one of the great realization of Immanuel Kant that the postulation of a real external world would be senseless without the comprehensibility.” [Albert Einstein]
9. Is there a foundation of knowledge? [Descartes, Hume, Kant]
10. There is no foundation of knowledge. [Richard Rorty]
11. Why – in some fundamental sense – does it mean for someone “to understand a particular situation in its full uniqueness?” [The phrase in quotes are from Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Political Judgment.”]
12. Why – in some fundamental sense – a sophisticated and scientific modes of reasoning, buttressed with the unlimited resources of modern networks of large institutions, is fallible, woefully at times, and also why on the whole, the results of these scientific decision-makings are not always measurably better – and in some situations even inferior – to the decisions made with traditional, prosaic, and imprecise forms of knowledge such as judgment, recognition, intuition, and experience?
13. Why are human beings a very profligate and proficient users of “images, metaphors, and analogies”?
14. How does scientific change occurs: gradually or in sudden quick jumps? [Thomas Kuhn]
15. Why is that “massive historical trends have been largely unanticipated? [Robert Heilbroner]
16. “What design nature may have had in creating consciousness? What functions was it to serve? To what biological imperative did evolution respond in creating this extraordinary way of highlighting the immediate? For what niche in the world did it fit man?” [Jerome Bruner]
17. Why is it that the “basic logic of a machine designed for numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logic of a machine intended to make bills for department stores”? [Howard Aiken]
18. “Can computers be as intelligent as people? How can we make sense of the reality behind quantum mechanics? And what is the physical basis of consciousness?” [David Chalmers’s “Three Unsolved Problems in Late Twentieth-Century Science.”]
19. “How come it that human beings, whose contact with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?” [Bertrand Russell]
20. Why are we – humans as well as animals, including babies – able to recognize a face or a pattern, so easily, and so effortlessly?
21. What would it take for a single ruler for it to measure all manners and sizes of rooms?
22. “Why can we remember the past, yet not the future?” [Stephen Hawking]
23. “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?... Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?” [Stephen Hawking]
24. What is the origin of wave-particle duality? Note it is a different sort of question from that of a wave turning into a particle under quantum measurement, known also as the “the collapse of the wavefunction.”
25. Coming right down to the brass tacks, there are only two things in the world, but why?
26. “A central problem of interpreting the world is determining how, in fact, human beings proceed to do so. It is the study of interaction between a particular, biologically given complex system – the human mind – and the physical and the social world.” [Noam Chomsky]
27. “It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. An example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don’t know why this is – it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.” [Richard Feynman]
28. “One of the remarkable things about the behavior of the world is how it seems to be grounded in mathematics to a quite extraordinary degree of accuracy. The more we understand about the physical world, and the deeper we probe into the laws of nature, the more it seems as though the physical world almost evaporates and we are left with mathematics. The deeper we understand the laws of physics, the more we are driven into this world of mathematics and of mathematical concepts.” [Roger Penrose]
29. “My philosophical project, over the last twenty years or so, has been to understand the relation between a venerable old idea borrowed from what philosophers call ‘folks psychology’, and a trendy new idea borrowed mainly from Alan Turing. The old idea is that mental states are characteristically intentional; or at least that those mental states involved in cognition characteristically are. The new idea is that mental processes are characteristically computational. My problem lies in the apparently difficulty of getting ideas to fit together.” [Jerry Fodor]
30. To be continued.
I hope that the readers will recognize among the questions many that are familiar, one or two that is interesting, and perhaps one so compelling that an answer had to be sought.
Happy New Year!
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