Eternalism and Reality

In his paper “Time and Physical Geometry”, Hilary Putnam argued that special relativity tells us that the past, present and future are equally real.

Spacetime is indeed more foundational than Euclidean space. However, that does not mean that all of spacetime exists in a physical or ontological sense.

For example, cosmology teaches us that spacetime is bounded: the universe is not expanding into something, it is just expanding. We should apply a similar discipline to the time dimension.

Reality has a natural meaning in terms of what is physically realizable not what is allowed under a single formalism. For reality to exist it needs to be accessible in principle subject to relevant constraints - available energy, entropy and information density

This calls for a more disciplined approach to conducting thought experiments. Rather than exploring the limits of one formalism, we need to consider everything we know about the physical world to make onthological statements

Not all of the past persists as we are unable to encode all information to describe it. The past survives through reduction, embedded in the increasing functional complexity of our current reality. Similarly, not all of the future exists as it would require infinite energy to access it.

Technology and Productivity

The Science and Technologies developed through the 19th and early 20th century have fundamentally changed our lives. The steam engine, railways, electricity, steel making, chemicals, the combustion engine and mass production have completely transformed our economies and dramatically raised living standards across the population.

Since the 1970s though, the economic impact of new technologies has seen dimininishing returns in terms of economic growth. This led economist Robert Sorow to famously proclaim that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”. Maybe economists have been looking in the wrong place. May be the computer age did something different: accelerating the shift from economic production to rent seeking.

The discussion of rent seeking and the emergence of economic extractive sectors is broad, but below are three examples

First, let’s look at healthcare in the US, which is now 18% of GDP. The productive service is done by doctors and nurses. Medical technology and medication are tools that make doctors and nurses more productive. However, to organize health care other activities are needed - insurance, administration, pharmaceutical sales, etc. What is striking is that the cost of administration, insurance and medication is growing much faster than the cost of doctors and nurses. In effect, the non-productive segments are extracting increasing economic rent from patients without enabling a better core service. This is clear to see once we look at life expectancy vs health care costs in the US versus other countries

Computers provide some benefit to making doctors and nurses more productive, but the majority of the technology is deployed in the extractive segments: patient profiling, billing, coding, prior authorisation, denial, appeal and collection; targeted drug advertising; management activities. The emergence of computers dispropriortionally facilitated the growth of the non-productive activities in health care.

A second example is the US housing market. The productive activity is to provide housing to citizens enabled by primary mortgage lending as a financial service. However, the fee based infrastructure on top of it - origination, speculative lending, securitization, packaging of mortgages in MBS, tranching into CDOs, the Credit Default Swaps, the credit rating fees, the insurance premiums - have proven to be extractive, if not destructive. This financial infrastructure did not manage lending risk - as was promised - but created a financial bubble that was then socialized back to tax payers. Computers provide very limited benefit in reducing the cost of owning a home, but the vast financial compute infrastructure is there to support the extractive fee based businesses.

Finally, the attention economy may be the cleanest example. As the adagium goes: if you don’t pay for it, you are the product - be it your wallet or your voting preferences. It is difficult to see that any of it is productive in a traditional economic sense. It is obvious though that all of it relies on the widespread adoption of compute and communications technologies.

Artificial Intelligence is thought to bring the next industrial revolution, promising an “infinite growth” in productivity. Whether it increases core productivity or enables a further shift to rent seeking sectors remains to be seen. If it is the latter, it would explain the enthusiasm of the investment community

Complexity and the measurement problem

The promise of science is that it helps us understand reality - why things are as they are. The strongest scientific theories are not only descriptive or predictive, they have explanatory depth - it answers the why. However, in many areas of science we don’t have theories yet that fully explain the why. Darwin doesn’t explain why functional complexity grows over time, inflationary cosmology doesn’t explain the initial condition, quantum mechanics doesn’t explain the collapse of the wave function.

One view is that Nature doesn’t owe us a why and that scientists can be satisfied with something less. Quantum Mechanics is an extra-ordinarily successful theory in terms of predictive power even it doesn’t provide an explanation of what a measurement is. String Theory may not pass the descriptive test in a meaningful way, but it is still a rich mathematical theory and it provides the opportunity to tell speculative stories.

Even if Nature doesn’t owe us a “why”, I believe that we should keep asking the question. It has brought us this far and who knows what new ideas and paths of exploration comes from trying to answer this question.

Limits to pluralism

I grew up in the Netherlands but spend most of my professional life abroad and my current home is in Asia. Over the years, I have grown accustomed to many different cultures and customs, different governance systems and different beliefs on the role and rights of people with different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds.

I also learned a lot about how non-Western people view Europe and the EU

The EU plays a particular role in economic and international relations. It uses the power of the internal market to force adherence to its particular value set. In economic relations, this comes through regulation of product safety, environmental standards, competition law, artificial intelligence safety, and consumer protection. In international relations and aid, it comes through advocacy of liberal democracy values and deploying it as a lens to assess the civilizational progress of other nations

This normative approach is what irritates non-Westerners about Europe.

Take pluralism for example, which has become an ideological lightning rod within both Europe and the United States. Much of this discussion is ugly. However, it is plain to see that there are limits to the plurality ideal through what Europe does in practice.

First, Europe seems to forgotten its own history. Europe didn’t arrive at its current multi-ethnic make-up because it adopted pluralism as a societal principle. Europe became progressively more multi-ethnic through other forces - economic and post-colonial migration - and then adopted the idea of the multi-cultural society as a positive value

Building a national narrative to support accomodation is a natural response and the underlying moral principles are genuinely commendable. In reality though, this narrative mostly serve the population group that needs to do the accomodation. For minorities, the narrative matters less and what matters more are the actions of the nation

Foreign policy is one particular lens. The long term political and economic alliances that a nation crafts, the positions a nation takes in international conflicts, all reflect a nation’s civilizational core: its philosophical and religious inheritance, values and principles, historical narrative and legal and institutional DNA. What a country decides on the international stage, shows what matters most

For example, Germany’s position in the various Middle East conflicts demonstrates absolute loyalty to a historical narrative that supersedes the freedom of expression of its citizens. It actively chooses to disenfranchise a current minority for a history it doesn’t share. It even subjegates the foundational values of post-war Germany to service a historical debt. The lived experience of one societal group takes precedence over the pluralism ideal.

The limits are also visible internally. The constant renegotiation of what is required to be called a citizen, the changing constraints to religious and political expression, the continued questioning of minorities for the actions of their ancestral homelands all illustrate that the standing of some minorities is conditional, subject to the political agendas of the day.

None of this serves as criticisms of the actions nations take. It simply is a description of lived reality and it is up the nations themselves to reckon with their actions.

What irritates non-Westerners is that Europe creates the narrative of the liberal ideal, fails to live up to it in structural ways, and then still export this ideal to judge other nations

Non-Westerners don’t naturally share the narrative, all they see are the actions

Is it science?

Some time ago, one of my cousins asked me whether he should pursue a PhD in Physics. After some reflection, I told him that if I had to chose again, it would not be physics. All the groundbreaking work seemed to have happened more than 75 years ago and life of most PhD students consisted of doing specialist work in a small domain. Unless you were very gifted, it would be difficult to work on the big questions of science. If I were in his shoes, I would choose neuroscience instead - not because it is necessarily simpler but because there was more ground to cover and therefore more opportunity.

Over the past 30 year, the big project in the foundations of physics has been string theory, a candidate for a Theory of Everything. I don’t really understand string theory as the mathematics required is beyond my reach as an experimental scientist. My intuition though is that we are stuck, or, if we are not stuck, that progress has become less meaningful. If we can’t decide from observation whether string theory is better than what we have today, it doesn’t penetrate our reality and all we are left with is telling stories.

Despite the mathematical elegance and depth of string theory, we may need a reset: ask different questions, generate new ideas or pursue fresh paths of inquiry. Why did the universe start in such a low entropy state, why does the universe give rise to structure and increasing functional complexity, including life and consciousness? What does the end look like? And maybe while we are at it: what makes the wave function collapse?

My cousin decided to pursue Physics