Tuesday 24 October 2017

The Physics of Learning and the Learning of Physics

An alternative title for this might be "the physics of metaphysics and the metaphysics of physics". But I want to talk to educationalists, not philosophers. The division between metaphysics and physics is an unfortunate inheritance from antiquity.

There are some terms from physics which we use continually and assume we all know what they mean. Education is the process by which our questioning of these basic terms is attenuated. In order to get a clearer picture of physics, we need better education. But in order to get better education, we need to grapple with learning, and its closely related concept, "Information".

I'm taking my cue from Peter Rowland's physics - see http://anpa.onl/pdf/S36/rowlands.pdf - in asking some fundamental questions not only about information, but about physics itself. We are kidding ourselves if we think a good theory of learning can be established without thinking how such a theory might relate to what we know about the physical world. Most educational researchers are kidding themselves. We are also kidding ourselves if we think good physical theories can be established without considering the educational context within which they are produced and reproduced.

So here are a few core concepts which start to unravel once we dig into them:


  1. "Dimension" - what is a dimension? We are told in school that height, width and depth are three "dimensions", or that time is a fourth. At the same time, we understand that a value in one dimension is called a "scalar", and that in two dimensions we have "vectors" (and also in more dimensions). 
  2. "Vector" - this gets used in all sorts of contexts from cartography to text analysis. But we have bivectors, trivectors, psuedovectors and then the weird rotational asymmetry of quaternions, octonions, nonions (see Peirce's work on these in the collected papers: his emphasis on triadic forms seems to derive from his interest in quaternions). It's important to be clear about what we mean by "vector". 
  3. "Matter" and "Mass" - do we mean "mass" when we say "matter"? It's worth noting that mass is a scalar value. 
  4. "Energy" - isn't this a combination of mass, space and time? (e.g. 1/2mv^2) So... a scalar, a vector and.... time? 
  5. "Time" - Is time "real" in the same way as we might consider mass to be real?... It is perhaps surprising that mass and energy are connected: Nuclear reactors turn scalars into vectors! Is time imaginary?.... is time i? That would make it a pseudoscalar. 
  6. "Conservation" - some things are conserved and other things aren't. Time isn't conserved. Mass is. Energy is conserved. Space isn't conserved, is it? Something weird happens with conservation...maybe this is agency? Is information conserved?  
  7. "Information" - Shannon information involves counting things. On the face of it, it's a scalar value - but in the counting process, there is work done - both by the thing observed and by the body that observes it. Work, like energy, is (at least) a combination of mass, time and space. This applies to *any* counting: there is an imaginary component, the dimensions of space and scalar mass. It probably involves charge too. 
  8. "Agency" - Terry Deacon has a definition of agency (from which this post began): 
    1. "AN AUTONOMOUS AGENT IS A DYNAMICAL SYSTEM ORGANIZED TO BE CAPABLE OF INITIATING PHYSICAL WORK TO FURTHER PRESERVE THIS SAME CAPACITY IN THE CONTEXT OF  INCESSANT EXTRINSIC AND/OR INTRINSIC TENDENCIES FOR THIS SYSTEM CAPACITY TO DEGRADE. THIS ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO ORGANIZE WORK THAT IS SPECIFICALLY CONTRAGRADE TO THE FORM OF THIS DEGRADATIONAL INFLUENCE, AND THUS ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO BE INFORMED BY THE EFFECTS OF THAT INFLUENCE WITH RESPECT TO THE AGENT’S CRITICAL ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRAINTS.
    2. Turning to Terry's definition of "agency", it involves "work", "conservation" and "organisation". The definition hides some complexities relating to the nature of work, and the ways in which mass and charge might be conserved, but time and space isn't. Implicit in the relation between extrinsic and intrinsic tendencies (what are they?) is symmetry. Is agency a principle of conservation which unfolds the symmetry between conserved and non-conserved dimensions? That means we are in a symmetry: "a pattern that connects" - to quote Bateson. 


Personally, I find the value of these questions is that they render less certain the dogmatically asserted principles of modern physics. Maybe we need this uncertainty in order to get closer to "information", and consequently, to get closer to learning.

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