Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome to ID The Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm very pleased to bring back on the show Dr. David Belinski to finish discussing his book Signs After Babel. In the final episode of a three-part interview, Dr. Belinski is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He received his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. Dr. Balinsky has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City, university of New York, and the University of Paris. He is author of numerous books, including a tour of the calculus, the advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift and the Devil's Delusion. His latest signs after babble is a collection of essays challenging the prevailing beliefs and pronouncements of contemporary science with his unique blend of deep learning, close reasoning, and sharp wit. In it, he reflects on everything from Newton, Einstein, and Goodle took catastrophe theory, information theory, and the state of modern Darwinism mathematician, philosopher, and author of the Design inference, William Demsky says, science after babble masterfully exposes the hubris of scientific pretensions with a wit that dances deftly between the lines unveiling profound insights with a refreshing candor. David, welcome back to ID the Future.
Speaker 3 00:01:39 Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 00:01:41 Absolutely. Well, I've thoroughly enjoyed our first two conversations together where you covered your appraisal of modern Darwinism, as well as the enduring problem of the origin of life and the physicist's quest to explain everything. Listeners are encouraged to go back and listen to Parts one and two. In this episode, I wanted to touch on the last two sections of your book. The first of these is titled Deep Dive, and the first essay in this deep dive section is a review of Michael Ru's book, the Philosophy of Biology. Who is Michael Ruse? What does he see as the proper philosophy of biology, and what's your beef with the fellow?
Speaker 3 00:02:19 I would like to think of myself that I do not have a beef with Michael Rouse, and I don't know him. He's is now a man of my old, my, the same age as me, an old, old man. Um, and the, and the book was written quite a, a while ago. It is the expression of a certain point of view in the philosophy of biology. It is the point of view, I would say, of an analytic philosopher, not a continental philosopher, but Anglo-American philosopher with a very good background in logic and entirely persuaded that the role of the philosopher is to be in effect a handmaiden, the sciences and to clarify and to, uh, round out arguments for their philosophical significance that really have a scientific basis. And like, um, like many other philosophers of biology, Ruth went back, and this was at the moment of eff fluorescence for Darwinian theory, when it increasingly seemed to the biologists that, Hey, my goodness, we have a terrific theory and we haven't been spreading the word around sufficiently.
Speaker 3 00:03:30 I would say this was taking place roughly 19 73, 19 74. That's when it began. It reached its peak, I think 25 years later in a real propaganda effort to persuade every man, woman, and child in the United States to genuflect before the image of Charles Darwin. It's tapering off. Now, that's, that's a movement in social as well as intellectual history. But ru offered so far as I can tell, a very orthodox view of, uh, of the philosophy of biology in which a great many things were purged of their teleological implications and reduced essentially to very, very straightforward Orthodox domain and viola biology, survival, the fittest, uh, natural selection, entirely adequate me mechanism. And that's, that's really what prompted me to write the review, the, the, the sheer and and commendable orthodoxy of the position.
Speaker 2 00:04:26 Okay. Well, other essays in this deep dive section, look at the great mathematician Giuseppe piano or Pinot and the great logician Kurt Goodle, also at Renee, Tom and catastrophe theory, and at the question of how mathematics does and does not relate to the world. I wanted to ask you about that last one. Is this a complicated question? Math helps us figure out how planets revolve around the sun, how entropy works, Einstein's theory of relativity and so on. What's puzzling or challenging about mathematicians and mathematics relation to reality?
Speaker 3 00:05:02 Well, everything, uh, as far as I'm concerned, look, in the 13th century, a a a very, um, little known philosopher of the high middle age ter. He, he made an istic remark, which I think is very pregnant. He said the beginning of numbers, the beginning of numbers was the beginning of things. When you think about the simplest application of numbers, which after all are not created, entities can say the number one was created in on February 3rd, 1852. That makes no sense, but equally, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say they're eternal. They last forever, because lasting is not something that numbers do. When you ask about how numbers apply to things as simple as finger counting, you get yourself in kind of an intellectual model. What is it to, to say that one finger is one? What is the predicate one doing? I mean, quite clearly, if we have a finger to begin with, there's just one of them, otherwise we'd say fingers, two of them, or three.
Speaker 3 00:06:06 So we know it's one. What is added by saying it's one finger as opposed to saying it's a finger is saying one finger is one identifying oneness in a figure. What does that mean? Is there a mapping from one to a finger? Is there a mapping from the natural numbers to things? If there's a mapping from natural numbers to things as, for example, Bertram Russell and many other philoso of mathematics argued, how can it have numbers in its domain if it has fingers in its range? That's a mixed marriage. Numbers going to fingers is not mathematical and it's not physical. How can it be both without violating or encountering Aristotle's Third man argument, there's no natural mapping from an ostensibly platonic object like a number to a perfectly ordinary physical object, like a thing when we say two fingers plus two fingers equal four fingers, if we d divide through by the fingers, we get two plus two equals four. There's no no sneezing at that. But how do you divide anything by fingers? And if you can divide by the fingers, what does two fingers plus two fingers equal four fingers even mean? I'm not saying these questions are unanswerable, but the very long, fairly complicated paper that I wrote is an attempt to answer them.
Speaker 2 00:07:29 Yeah, it's a fascinating section here, and, uh, you're breaking it down in an interesting way here. Well, the book's final section returns to the more accessible mode of the book's, first four sections, it's titled Titans, and it contains reflections on Isaac Newton. And there's a final essay there that I wanted to discuss for a moment. Uh, the second essay, however, is about Alan Touring. Some listeners may be familiar with touring from the movie. Back in 2014, the Imitation Game with touring played by British actor Benedict's Cumber Patch Touring is famous, of course, for cracking the Nazis enigma code, which helped the Allies win World War ii. But that isn't the focus of your assay. You focus on touring's so-called touring machine, and on something it revealed about the nature and reach of the mathematical enterprise. I'd like to take this in three parts. First, can you briefly explain to listeners who are unfamiliar with touring, who was he besides a codebreaker?
Speaker 3 00:08:24 Alan Touring was an extraordinary, extraordinarily gifted mathematician Englishman, and, uh, he became captivated by mathematical logic, which in 19 34, 19 35 or 1936 was still at its beginnings. I mean, mathematical logic reached a point of dazzling maturity. Only in 1931 were the publication of Kurt Girdle's incompleteness theorem. It had been a subject before, but nothing like the incompleteness theorem had ever been seen either in mathematical logic or in mathematics. It's completely, completely sophisticated professional publication, which just lifted the entire discipline so that it was visible everywhere, but it took a long time for these ideas to be absorbed. You know, when I was at, at Columbia College in the 1950s, nobody ever heard of girdle. It was just not there. The first English translation of the German version didn't appear to the mid until the mid 1950s. And Nagel and Newman's, very important book, girdle's proof appeared a few years thereafter. We're talking about a lag of almost 25 years, which is quite astonishing for a major intellectual achievement, a major intellectual achievement. So that by the time that, uh, touring wandered from England to Princeton to study with Alonzo Church, he was participating in a discipline that was virtually new, not new, but virtually. No, I mean, Russell and White had written Penia mathematic or many years before, but in comparison to anything, and this Russell acknowledged handsomely that girdle was advancing in the early 1930s or Alonzo Church, um, it was simply primitive by comparison.
Speaker 2 00:10:07 Yeah, and we also see this, this, um, this timeframe, the turn to machines and, and the effort to, to control, uh, natural processes and exploit them. So what was Touring's machine? How does that figure in?
Speaker 3 00:10:22 Well, in, in, in his great incompleteness proof girdle had introduced a class of functions that he called recursive functions. These, these were functions that build on predecessor functions. For example, if you, if you wanna know what two plus three is, you ask what two plus, uh, two is, and you define two plus three in terms of two plus two plus one, and it goes all the way back, back to the base. It's zero or one. That's a recursive function. It eats its own tail in effect. And he introduced them and he gave 'em a careful mathematical description. Alonzo Church, a few years later gave them a very careful definition in terms of lambda definable functions, but these were quite, quite difficult mathematical ideas, and only mathematicians really could follow it. What Turing did was smash through these definitions to come up with an intuitive idea that was so radically clear and so successful intuitively that it became the standard.
Speaker 3 00:11:16 And that was the idea of a Turing machine. And the idea is very simple. Imagine an infinite tape divided into squares. I mean, I mean, literally an infinite tape, paper tape, if you will, divide it into squares. There's a machine with a reading head poised over the tape. The machine can be in several different states, finite states, call 'em state one, state two, state three, whatever you wanna callem, and it can also read what's on a square, and then either erase what it sees and move on or print something new, move on or stay where it is. In other words, it's step-by-step behavior is controlled by a program, and what it does is controlled by a program as well, that it prints something on the square and then finally it stops. And that's all that there is to a Turing machine. But it turns out that can do anything computable that's completely equivalent, theoretically, to a full fledged bond Noman machine.
Speaker 3 00:12:10 It is as powerful as any machine could possibly be devised. Uh, it's called a turning machine. It can compute all the computable functions and girdle, and of course, Alonso Church. And later, Amy Post and turning all came to the conclusion that these different definitions were defining one idea that was the idea of a computable function, something that could be done by a machine. And Turing had said, here, here's the machine. Go do it. And he was right. He was right. Girdle was moved to say, this was one of the very few examples of an absolute definition in mathematics. All the concepts coincided, coincided perfectly, and of course, based on touring's work at the end of the second World War, the development of the, of the computer needed only Von Neuman's genius, actually, to put the, these steps into place and make a mechanical machine, touring's machine was simply an idealization of the computer. By 19, or at the latest 1950, the first mechanical devices were in place. It's an enormous contribution to thought
Speaker 2 00:13:12 And thus begins the computing age and, uh, the pursuit of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3 00:13:16 Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:13:17 What did, uh, touring's work reveal about mathematics then in general?
Speaker 3 00:13:21 It's really hard to say, uh, don't forget touring died prematurely. He died by his own hand, tragic death. Uh, what he could have contributed addressing these questions is simply unclear. They're an enormous class of computable functions, but we know perfectly well that the class of functions that cannot be computed is just infinitely greater. Most things can't be computed. What does this say about mathematics? It's really, really hard to say, because the time lag, the time dilation between the annunciation of these ideas in 19 31, 19 35, 6, 19 40, and their percolation throughout the entire scientific establishment has taken almost a century where just now, just now seeing the fruits of, uh, of this work. When I started my education in the late 1950s, and when I was at Princeton, this stuff was invisible. It really was invisible. It seemed to be a very peripheral activity. Now, it seems to occupy something like the center stage, what it means for mathematics itself.
Speaker 3 00:14:25 Very difficult to say. There are a lot of new, um, proofers that is automatic systems, which will check a mathematical proof for consistency, for logical accuracy and things like that. And those are very helpful. I mean, a, a, a great, many extremely good mathematicians have said, you know, even me, sometimes I look at my own proofs and I say, Hmm, is step 97 really hard as a rock? There's some famous examples, but, but every mathematician has said, e every mathematician presiding over a complex body of work has said the same thing. I hope to God some colleague out in the other part of the world in Japan doesn't notice a mistake. I can find the mistake, but who knows? I'm awfully tired in checking these things. Maybe I just nodded off at the wrong moment. Now, we have systems that to some extent, to some extent, can do a verification.
Speaker 3 00:15:17 Peter Schultz is a, an extremely good young mathematician, a field medalist, and, um, he's got a very elaborate, uh, new part of arithmetic, geometry. He called it, calls it liquid tensor. Uh, it, it's quite complicated. Trust me, it's complicated mathematics, not unintuitive. I don't know how interesting, but not simple. And he said to the mathematical community, you know, even though I believe everything I put down in my proof is correct, I have my doubts about LEMAs six point, I think it was 6.4, 6.5. It's been a long time since I've looked at what I'd really like is a, a hard and fast computer to take a look, check all the steps. That's not simple, to take a mathematical proof written in a mathematical language and translate it into a computer language. But they did it. They did it. And yes, the proof was correct, but now he has a computer to say it was correct.
Speaker 3 00:16:09 Of course, I believe deep down he always knew. Uh, it was just a way of drawing attention to the importance of the work. But there are other cases where people really don't know, not quite sure. Mitch Zaki in Japan ostensible proof of the a, b C conjecture, which has been rejected by Schultz, that would certainly profit from a computer proof, certainly profit, because nobody can understand it right now. Clearly, mathematics is changing under the influence of computers. It's changing. It has changed more radically under their influence in the last 20 years than it changed in the years from the introduction of these ideas in the 1930s to say 1980. That's another interesting historical question. In one of the previous episodes, we, we asked, why no science in China? Why no science in the Arab world? Why no science in the, in the Greek world, science in the modern sense, theoretical science? Here's another question. Why time lags in certain disciplines and not in others? You know, when Einstein published Relativity in 1905, within six months, uh, max Plunk said, yeah, it's right, published it, general relativity the same. A few years later, there was an expedition. I don't know where it went to, uh, to verify Einstein's calculation, but everybody knew though. But in logic, no long time delay, long time, I don't know why. Maybe the second World War had a, had a a part in that.
Speaker 2 00:17:30 Yeah, yeah. Well, and before we move into the final essay, just a little aside while we're on the topic of touring, do you think chat g pt, um, has answered the touring test, or do you think there's trickery involved?
Speaker 3 00:17:44 Oh, yeah. Oh, I think there's no question about it. You know, you, you can interact with chat. G P t I defy most people to figure out whether it's a human being or a computer. It, it, it just sailed right by the Turing test that that means less than you would think. The Turing test says if you're inter interrogating an object and don't know whether it's a human being computer and can tell after you talk to it, it's past the Turing test. It's intelligent. Yeah, these systems certainly are, are intelligent, modular, the obvious objection. We really don't know what intelligence is because so far we've only defined it in human terms, and the inference to a machine intelligence has all of the disadvantages of a leap into the dark. We don't know what's there. We just don't know. Uh, we don't know how it works. We have no di dynamic theory of, of its mechanism, no way of predicting what it does. It seems to be fumbling and huge matrices, things like that. But what it's actually doing, whether it's a form of intelligence, all we can do is look at what it says. And as far as what it says goes, yeah, it seems perfectly intelligent.
Speaker 2 00:18:51 Yeah, it's, it's an interesting, uh, phenomenon and something wholly modern that we're wrestling with today. Before we, uh, finish up here, um, you had an essay called Life Itself, which was a rather beautiful way to, to finish things up. It's only four paragraphs long, but it really packs a punch. You begin by noting in the essay, the majestic advances that physics saw in the first 30 years of the 20th century sign seemed as if it might extend without limit, conquering every snowcapped vista and sight and rushing on from there. Tell us about this moment in the first part of the 20th century, uh, this heady chapter in the history of science.
Speaker 3 00:19:27 Well, if you look at the great achievements, certainly special relativity Einstein wasn't the only person to think of special relativity. He was the only one competent enough to complete it. That's 1905, and you see that there, there are absolutely stunning new ideas entering into physical fog. And then 10 years later, the, uh, culmination, the apotheosis of special in general, relativity, which brought all the notions of relativity from uniform motion into accelerated motion, uniform motion, completely satisfies the postulate of special relativity. The speed of light is absolute. Laws of physics look the same to every inertial observer, but that's just motion in a straight line, uniform, uniform, straight line, any speed. General relativity is far more general because it incorporates acceleration, which means it incorporates curvature. Curvature is the mark of acceleration. Uh, so this was a great achievement, spectacular achievement. But then the remarkably swift progress of quantum mechanics from the bar model of the hydrogen atom and the first part of the, uh, second decade of the, of the 20th century, to the culmination of, of a serious theory of quantum mechanics by 19 29 30, and the Drac equation, which introduced relativistic concerns into special relativity.
Speaker 3 00:20:51 This was unparalleled in the entire history of thought in the human race. And to a certain extent, everything from 19 30, 19 35, say to 2023, has been the elaboration, the culmination, the apotheosis, the elaboration of these ideas, which has been a magnificent story, which over the last 50 years has seemed to some observers, as if it had begun to sputter. Doesn't mean that there hasn't been remarkable achievements. I don't wanna say that for a moment. You know, uh, every now and then a physicist will, will get on YouTube or, or Twitter and say, eh, no pro no progress in particle physics since the 1970s. The standard model of particle physics, that's obviously not true. Lots of par progress, uh, especially in solid state physics. What is meant is that we are still in the universe where there are two majestic theories, general relativity and quantum field theory.
Speaker 3 00:21:44 And for the life of us, we don't know quite how they fit together. Theoretically, practically, there's no problem. We can do lots of calculations with both theories, but theoretically they don't quite fit because they don't seem to belong to the same universe of thought. One's classical and one's modern, one's completely quantum, one's not quantum at all. One has a fixed spatial, temporal, temporal background. One doesn't. One is dynamical in terms of the, um, interaction between, uh, a gravitational object in surrounding space time. One's not, one's ren normal liable and one's not re normal liable, and nobody knows what does this really mean, that physics is a divided heart, uh, that it has two parts and nobody for the life of them can figure out how to put it back together. Interesting question,
Speaker 2 00:22:31 Huh? Well, I, I just love your example of, of, uh, humility there and, and, uh, honesty. And as you explore in your book, you know, parts of the physical world just simply refuse to yield to scientific reductionism. And it's important to note, you know, it's important to remember, uh, and again, have that humility, uh, no matter what scientific field you're in. Well, I'd like to close by reading the final paragraph of the volumes last essay. It's, uh, it's a rather beautiful way to to end this, uh, discussion. You say more than any particular thing that lives life itself suggests a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else. Reflective biologists have always known that in the end, they would have to account for its fantastic and controlled complexity. It's brilliant inventiveness and diversity. It's sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world. David, we've run out of time here, but over the course of three episodes, we've unpacked just a little bit of the richness that you've put into signs after babble. And all this left now is that our readers pick it up and, and read it.
Speaker 3 00:23:35 Let's hope.
Speaker 2 00:23:36 Well, you heard the man pick up your copy of Signs After Babel at the website, science after babel.com Couldn't be easier signs after babel.com. And again, you can listen to Parts one and two of our discussion. Anytime you feel like it, uh, the quicker the better cuz this is, uh, this is quite something. This is a great work by a great man, David. It's, uh, it's been amazing. Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
Speaker 3 00:24:02 You're so welcome. It was entirely, entirely my pleasure. I assure
Speaker 2 00:24:06 You. Thank you, David, for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:24:14 Visit
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