The Sociologist and the Silkworm
A Missing Adversarial Disposition to Exploration
“Si vis pacem, para bellum”
(If you want peace, prepare for war.)
The early winter of Lüneburg in 1927 was the birth of a prolific German sociologist. A sibling of the blinding snow, the prolific mind and hands of Niklas Luhmann was anything but cold. His career would be the progenitor of 70 books and 400 articles, spanning across a wide spectrum of disciplines: law, politics, economy, art, and religion to name a few.From the Wikipedia article for Luhmann. In this quiet solace, Luhmann serenely tended a republic of a thousand citizens, silkworms of solitary thoughts. Together, they spun the endless silk of thought–the soltitude of thought producing multitudes.
Vastly removed from this in both time and space, the 14th century BCE Shang dynasty–and separately, the 7th century CE Tang dynasty–brought with it the 蠱 (gǔ)–or equivalently, 金蠶 (jīn cán; literally, the gold silkworm or caterpilllar) in the Tang dynasty–the practice of confining a multitude of poisonous insects in a jar. These insects would be forced to devour each other to survive, and it is said that the final survivour will possess the most powerful poison. From the Wikipedia article for the gu.
The busy silkworms of Luhmann’s republic were diligent; none can argue to the contrary. Yet it has known only peace, and a nation at peace is lulled into complacency. They grew warm and wise, yet have never tasted blood.
A Parliament of Silkworms
“Für Kommunikation ist eine der elementaren Voraussetzungen, daß die Partner sich wechselseitig überraschen können.”
(One of the elementary conditions of communication is that the partners can surprise one another.)
Niklas Luhmann attributed a non-trivial amount of his productive output to the continued tending of his intellectual garden–his Zettelkasten. In essence, it was a collection of index cards, each inscribed with an identifier and a singular thought. Each card may refer to others by their respective identifiers, allowing them to build on each other.
What this forms is discourse, or in particular, self-discourse. This is not too dissimilar with talking to oneself, with the only discriminant being the lack of organisation in the latter. Indeed, despite its glorification and borderline fetishisation in contemporary popular media (especially in the tech space with its release of a million new apps every waking hour purporting to improve on this methodology), Occam’s razorOccam’s razor is the principle that the simplest explanation to a given observation is the most likely to be correct. Tangentially, an interesting continuation to this notion is that of Solmonoff induction, a more formal contemporary suggesting that given a set of data on some observation, the best scientific model is the shortest algorithm which produces an identical data. posits that the most apt digital analogy to Luhmann’s physical slip-box would be messaging oneself in the “Note to Self” feature present in most modern messaging apps.
The central thesis of this approach is emergenceEmergence is an idea which, much like Luhmann himself, lies at the complex intersection of multiple disciplines. At its core, it is the observation that a composite entity may exhibit behaviour that is not present in any of its individual constituent components, and simultaneously, the conjecture that it is a sort of fundamental law of the universe.–that the Zettelkasten is greater than the sum of its index cards. A fundamental way in which this occurs is by exposing an otherwise non-obvious connection between multiple, seemingly irrelevant ideas or even fields of study. That is, these ideas collaborates with each other to construct larger ideas.As an aside, one may notice the analogy with dynamic programming, except in that a Zettelkasten is bottom-up in nature, in contrast to the top-down regime of dynamic programming. A problem may exist in different fields yet taking on a common shape; the solution to one may therefore be applicable to the other, or at least, ideas from it leveraged to transmute the problem into a more readily-solved form. Better yet, the shape of the solution can be abstracted, rendering it more amenable to be applied in future problems of similar shapes. One idea may join together two to produce a sum greater than the two.
One may notice a subtle chasm presented by this notion, however: that while these ideas builds upon each others’ strengths, none inherently notices each of their weaknesses. The peaceful silkworms have built their prosperity upon peace, yet they know not how to defend it when the blaring horns of war shouts.
The Disquiet of Soundness
故兵無常勢，水無常形。
(Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.)
In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the philosopher Karl Poppler penned the death knell for the universality of the principle of inductionThe principle of induction is the inference of universal statements, such as hypotheses or theories, from singular statements, such as the results of observations or experiments, given sufficient justification of such inference. The determination of the criteria for the latter is what is known as the problem of induction.–which hitherto had reigned supreme in the realm of science–and proposed what would eventually become the foundations of empirical science. In it, he submits three foundational premises: that
- the principle of induction cannot derive its basis without falling into the pit of infinite regress,The grounding of inductive inference on experience degrades into begging the question; as Poppler puts it: For the principle of induction must be a universal statement in its turn. Thus, if we try to regard its truth as known from experience, then the very same problem which occasioned its introduction will arise all over again. To justify it, we should have to employ inductive inferences; and to justify these we should have to assume an inductive principle of a higher order; and so on. Karl Poppler, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
- any statement of empirical science must be conclusively decidable; that is, it must be both verifiable, and falsifiable, and
- theories are never empirically verifiable, as doing so necessarily requires the principle of induction.
On these premises hinges his thesis: a system is admissible as empirical or scientific only if it is falsifiable by experience. This makes the necessary omission of verifiability due to its impossibility.
There exists a more metaphysical counterpart to this empirical notion: that of the correctness of a proof system as the twin of
- soundness, declaring that all which the system proves must be true–key to which is the lack of false premises–and
- completeness, declaring that all which is true must be provable by the system.From Cornell’s CS 2800, Spring 2016, Lecture 39, and the Wikipedia page on soundness and completeness.
Mapped to this notion, a theory cannot be realistically be proven to be complete as it seeks to model a world that can be thought as infinite (an unreasonable endeavour!). It can, however, be proven sound by, as mentioned previously, showing that there does not exist a false premise. We can then map falsification as contradiction–the existence of mutually incompatible premises and –which necessitates either one to be false, and consequently, that the system is unsound.
This examination under the strict notion of falsifiability and contradiction is the missing piece to the creative workhorse of the zettelkasten. While its collaboration is a grand rapids of novel ideas, it is only with competition that they can prove their values. The clay must be fired in the klin, driving off bound moisture and burning off organic material, rendering the resulting one’s ideas must be put to the fire of falsification, such that what remains ceramic stronger; likewise, becomes more resilient. Without this scrutiny, one may derive a wealth of ideas, yet without proving the value of any. If one does not test their ideas themselves, then the world will eventually test it for them; when that comes, they may never know, and thus may never be prepared.
Coda
“Il faut qu’il n’exige pas le secret, et qu’il puisse sans inconvénient tomber entre les mains de l’ennemi.”
(It [the cryptosystem] should not require secrecy, and it should not be a problem if it falls into enemy hands.)
Abstract rambling aside, what I am proposing in a more concrete manner is to consider and define a falsification criteria for each idea in one’s zettelkasten. Consider what fact would, if found to be true, render it false, or at least challenge its truthfulness.
Likewise, as a more concrete counterpart to the more abstract motivation presented in the previous section, consider the security engineer’s notion of an attacker’s mindset: when constructing the defense of a (generally computer) system, one must put themselves in the shoes of the attacker. That is, construct a threat model in order to define what is being secured and what constitutes a security breach, and, with that as a goal, consider how one would breach the security of the system given its current construction.
In a note-taking system whose goal is to capture indiscriminately and maximally, I believe there to be two harbingers of rot, namely
- unreliability; that is, the information contained cannot be reliably guaranteed to be accurate, and
- irrelevancy; that is, the system fails to bring into prominence information that has higher relevance to one’s current activities–or equivalently, obscure those which have lower relevance.
I may elaborate on this notion further in a later post, but for now, I believe that this adversarial aspect to note-taking and exploration of ideas forms a sufficient mechanism to defend against the former, namely unreliability. By pre-emptively scrutinising our ideas, we may be more confident to rely on them, secure in our knowledge that we are less likely to be surprised by a sudden revelation of inaccuracy.