Deep Thoughts from the latest New Scientist (29/9/12)

1.

"Because we can reduce everything in the universe to entities that follow the laws of quantum physics, the universe must be a quantum computer... One of the attractions of this idea is that it can supply an answer to the question 'Why is there something instead of nothing?'. The randomness inherent in quantum mechanics means that quantum information - and by extension, a universe - can spontaneously come into being."

Sure, but why is there quantum mechanics instead of nothing?

2.

"What does it mean to say that the universe is 'made of mathematics'? An obvious starting point is to ask what mathematics is made of... All mathematical structures can be derived from something called 'the empty set', the set that contains no elements [that is, 0]... you can then define the number 1 as the set that contains only the empty set [so it contains 1 set], 2 as the set containing [0 and 1, so it contains 2 sets], and so on. Keep nesting the nothingness like invisible Russian dolls and eventually all of mathematics appears... That may be the ultimate clue to existence - after all, a universe made of nothing doesn't require an explanation."

Don't you need to have some sort of algorithms, though, and some sort of substrate upon which to run them? Is a wholly abstract dodecahedron in fact anything at all?

3.

Matter depends on atoms, atoms depend on electrons and quarks and things; "reality" is "whatever entities... depend on nothing else." By this definition, reality is "confined to the unknown foundation on which the entire world depends."

It's turtles all the way down! Or, if you're a Buddhist (and I concur on this point) there isn't anything with an independent existence. Ooh, maybe that has something to do with the dodecahedron.

More stuff for your brain to chew on

In Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher discusses a long-argued question: why do some languages have more words for colours than others? The underlying question is this: does language shape how we think, or does how we think shape language? Deutscher argues that language shows "freedom within constraints". He writes, "Different cultures certainly are not at liberty to carve up the world entirely at whim, as they are bound by the constraints set by nature - both the nature of the human brain and the nature of the world outside." So, for example, while many languages divide up the colour spectrum simply into "white", "black" (including what we call purple, blue, brown, and green), and "red", no language divides the spectrum up into "white", "black" (including blue, brown, and purple) and "red" (including green).

Deutscher goes on to argue that some boundaries are sharper than others - many languages lump together "blue" and "green" in a single colour term, but they'd be unlikely to lump together "bird" and "rose" in the same way. He says: "... when nature has shown even the slightest dithering or fuzziness in marking its boundaries, different cultures have far more sway over the division of concepts than anyone exposed only to the conventions of one society would imagine. Of course, concepts must be based on some sensible logic and internal coherence if they are to be both useful and learnable. But within these limits, there are still many ways of dissecting the world that are perfectly sensible, perfectly learnable by children, perfectly suitable for the communicative needs of the speakers - and yet totally different from what we are used to."

He goes on to give the example of a language "in which yellow, light green, and light blue are treated as shades of one colour". This may strike us as "incomprehensibly alien", but makes perfect sense in a system which organises colours by brightness and redness. A related example is the kinship terms, which vary widely; for example, the Yanomamö language, which has four distinct words where we only have "cousin", but puts your brothers, the sons of your paternal uncle, and the sons of your maternal aunt into a single category (with a single word). Like colour, kinship isn't completely arbitrary, but within the constraints of nature the way they're classified and organised by different cultures and languages is pretty arbitrary. Natural constraints explain why some systems are common while some are non-existent; but everything else seems to be up to the human imagination.

You've probably guessed where I'm heading: gender, of course. Nature places some constraints on how cultures classify people... but the rest of it, including the insistence on binary gender, could be much more arbitrary than we think. The presence of well-accepted (or fairly well-accepted) third and fourth gender categories in so many cultures suggests there are other logical and coherent systems of gender; different division of labour between the sexes, and different systems of marriage, point in the same direction. If other cultures divvy up the spectrum of body types, genital shapes, identities, desires, roles, etc, in different, yet meaningful ways, just how far can we claim that our own culture's divisions are the "natural" ones?

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but extending Deutscher's analogy has helped me get a more concrete perspective on how culture might mold our thinking about gender. To come back to colour: a Russian speaker might think it's odd that English only has one word for "blue". If we can't claim we're the last word in colour, how about gender?