Enthusiasms

Experiential Certainty

Some questions are hard. They’re complex, and they require extensive thought to reach any sort of definite conclusion. Even if we give them their due amount of time, though, there comes a point when we tire of agnosticism. Either you finally solve the problem, seeing the whole and complete picture for the first time, or you simply decide that you’ve expended absolutely every effort possible to understand this problem, and whatever provisional answer you’ve arrived at will have to serve. Whatever the case, though, you will experience a rapturous feeling of certainty; watching over the terrain from your summit of understanding, you know that you will never have to climb all the way to the top again. You’ve arrived. The next time you encounter the problem, the path to the top will be foggier; the little streams and stones and resting places—the premises, the lemmas, the inferences—will collapse into larger, more general entities. Slowly, the entire road fades away.

Over time, the feeling of certainty ossifies, then fossilizes. It becomes a relic. We remember the answer, and we carry the same certainty with us, but we no longer remember why we were certain. Slowly, it dawns on us that we don’t even understand the problem. We only know the solution. We are on the mountaintop but we don’t remember the road up, nor can we find a way down; sometimes, we even begin to suspect that, with respect to our problematic valley down there, we’re actually on the wrong peak altogether.

This issue is very hard to notice, and harder to admit, because it befalls the most careful thinkers. Having spent countless hours thinking about and discussing a problem, carefully and patiently making our way to a solution, we build a certain kind of arrogance. Of course we know what we’re talking about: we’ve spent a hundred hours thinking about the problem and another hundred discussing the solution. And in the beginning, it’s true. Our understanding of the problem is indeed encyclopedic and panoptic; we have seen the issue from every possible angle and considered every approach, we have heard every objection and every counter-objection. We have built a solid foundation for our certainty in the answer. But over time, the foundation fades, while the feeling of certainty remains; it has become a fossil, but a fossil convinced it’s still alive. And the issue rarely troubles the shallow thinker, since he never thinks long and hard enough about anything to build this kind of certainty in the first place.

It’s genuinely disturbing to think about: the feeling of certainty is indistinguishable from certainty. Experientially, there’s nothing I can do to tell the two apart. Feelings don’t come with metadata: we can think about things like whether or not we remember the subtle details of the argument that led us to a conclusion, but we can’t feel the “no” in the same way we feel certain. (Which is why I think guilty pleasures are oxymoronic: when we appreciate something “ironically” our pleasure is indistinguishable from the pleasure of non-guilty pleasures, and though we think that we should feel guilty, we do not actually feel any guilt.)

With this realization comes a radical skepticism. I’ve always thought that the only thing we can be absolutely sure about are logical facts, because they don’t depend on contingent facts. Thinking only about the meaning of things, we can deduce certain things. The experience of certainty here is indistinguishable from actual certainty, which means that we can never know if our faith in logical laws is actually well-founded. If we operated with principles of inference that were completely insane, we would quickly be confronted with evidence that pointed out their falsehood (although given our insanity, we may never see them as such). But could we not imagine a person who goes through life making logical inferences based on principles that are flawed, but extremely subtly so? Could there be edge cases so rare that no one in the history of humanity has ever encountered them, but as soon as we did, it would be evident—or produce a feeling indistinguishable from the certainty of direct evidence, anyway—that a basic law like Modus Tollens or A=A was flawed all along? (Science Fiction has used this plot before—off the top of my head, see Ted Chiang’s Division by Zero.)

I don’t doubt the most basic laws of logic. Nor do I doubt my most deeply held beliefs, beliefs I have spent hundreds of hours thinking, discussing and writing about. But I know that some of them (the beliefs, not the laws of logic) are wrong, or if not, then I am the most exceptional person in the universe (and I subscribe to the Probabilistic Law of Inverse Narcissism, a bullshit term I just invented to describe the idea that if the consequence of something is that you are the only person in the universe for whom a given fact applies, then the probability of that event is almost surely zero.)

I can’t help but wonder: which one is it? They all feel exactly the same.

This is why no one ever changes their opinion based on internet debates. (For any reasonable value of “no one ever”.)

Look at All These Links. Week 9.

Project Byzantium aims to solve what they call the “Katrina problem” and the “Egypt problem”: when internet infrastructure goes down on a massive scale either through a natural disaster or through the willful censorship of a government. They’re trying to develop methods for setting up ad hoc mesh networks, which are computer networks where (theoretically) every node can reroute traffic for other nodes. The end result will be a set of best practices and a Linux live distro, which is designed to boot from removable media and turn any wifi-enabled computer into a node in a wireless mesh network.

Tor is one thing, but what Project Byzantium is doing is something else: creating something that is entirely separate from existing network infrastructure. Making it work within the range of standard wifi is mostly a solved problem, and the issue is simply making it user friendly and ensuring that the tools are disseminated in case of an emergency. If you’re trying to organize an illegal protest in Cairo, maybe you can make do with a mesh where every node is within a hundred feet of the next. The harder part is how to communicate over larger distances. Like, say, telling someone in New York that you’re safe in flooded New Orleans.

The project name comes from the term Byzantine fault tolerance, which is a generalization of the Two Generals Problem. That theoretical problem goes like this: two Byzantine armies are separated. They must coordinate an attack on the enemy, because if both armies don’t attack at once, they will be crushed. The problem is that the generals can only communicate by sending messagers through a valley occupied by the enemy. The enemy may intercept and destroy or alter any message that goes through the valley. In theory, this problem is unsolvable: neither army can be absolutely sure that the other has gotten the right message. The more general problem is basically this: anything may go wrong anytime. In the context of a mesh network, any node may go down at any time, or it may start responding incorrectly. Although it’s impossible to solve the problem in theory, Byzantine fault tolerance is all about gracefully dealing with the issue in practice.

Lucas Foglia, from Frontcountry.

The Angel problem is a mathematical puzzle posed by John H. Conway, inventor of such wondrous things as the game of life and surreal numbers. A game is played on an infinite chessboard. An angel of power K can move to any square that a chess king can reach in at most K moves. Every turn, the devil eats one square, and then the angel can’t land on that square anymore. The question is whether there exists a strategy the devil can use to trap the angel in finite time, or if the angel has a winning strategy. The devil can trap a 1-devil, but several independent proofs show that the 2-angel (and therefore, any higher-powered angels) have a winning strategy.

An obituary for John Fairfax. “At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate.” Then he rowed across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rowed. One of them alone, the other with his wife. I didn’t think characters like this existed in the twenty-first century, but the NY Times isn’t known for spinning tall tales.

Erik Lee Snyder.

I can sort of understand the urge to climb Everest, but what could possess someone to attempt, say, Annapurna—the tenth highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest? Completeness? It is perhaps the kind of thing one can’t be understood if one hasn’t done it. I was reminded of this question by this story, about a 1960s American-Indian quest to put surveillance equipment, including a nuclear power generator, on top of India’s second tallest mountain. The generator’s plutonium load was lost—as I’ve found researching stuff for Picture This Date, this isn’t the only radioactive material the US has lost. Which is insane.

Edits Quarterly, an online photography/video magazine.

A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine. “A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.”

Ressurecting the Champ: “I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.” An epic story about the search for the real story behind an old, forgotten boxing contender, from 1997. It was made into a what sounds like a horrible film, but it’s meant to be read.

Joel Sternfeld, 1974, from the recent First Pictures exhibition. Museums, galleries and artists everywhere, take note: Luhring Augustine’s website is an absolute joy to use. I plan on borrowing ideas liberally the next time I make a site for my pictures.

James A. Davis is a programmer who wrote an esoteric operating system called LoseThos. The OS is the equivalent of a full-scale city, with moving parts, built out of matchsticks: it may have little value to anyone outside its creator, but one can’t deny the technical brilliance required to pull it off. Now, while eccentric, there’s nothing inherently crazy about LoseThos. The problem is that its author appears to have lost his mind. Very publically so. You can see it right on the OS’s website, which proclaims, “I killed a CIA guy in 1999. ‘learn you to fuck with my reality.” Chris McKenzie chronicles his descent into madness, as evidenced by comments on sites like YouTube, reddit, and LoseThos’s website. They start out technical, and gradually become sequences of random words and talk about communing directly with God.

Reading this makes me feel like a dirty peeping tom, and there is a legitimate argument over whether it’s right to publically call someone out as insane. But the damage is already done—the insanity is already on display for everyone to see—and it’s certainly more empathetic and mature to say, “Look, this man most likely has a serious mental illness” than it is to mock him or put him on display as a curiosity. Someone in the reddit thread also mentions the story of Michael David Crawford, a programmer who used to write about living with schizoaffective disorder on Kuro5hin. As of right now, many years after Crawford’s last post on the site, there’s still posts on the frontpage mocking the poor guy. It’s a sad state of affairs.