Interview with Vladimir Voevodsky (Part 2)

I’m not the author of the original interview. This is a translation of the original that can be found on Roman’s LJ: https://baaltii1.livejournal.com/200269.html
Nothing was added to or removed from this conversation between the two mathematicians.

July 5, 2012.

This is a continuation of the interview with Vladimir Voevodsky. The first part was perceived by readers with interest. We thank you for meaningful questions and continue.

Vladimir Voevodsky. Photo from Roman’s LJ

- It's hard for me to imagine what happens inside a person with atheistic views when unusual layers of reality open up before them. For people of religious perception and upbringing, this is part of the path, states in which new aspects of being are revealed, it's just normal - how can it be otherwise? Personally, from my first breath, I aspired to mysticism, believed, searched, found, threw myself into sects and secret societies. You, as far as I understand, at a certain point were thrown into the "incomprehensible," existence simply put you face to face with a strange given. Like what to do if angels are looking at you, and after you close your eyes and open them again, the angels will continue to look at you?! What is normal and correct for a person of mystical-religious upbringing can easily drive people of a different perception crazy.

- Probably, my views at that time should be called not so much atheistic as agnostic. The reaction was twofold. First, indignation, since most of all in what was revealed was dirt and mockery of people. Secondly, admiration and hope, when in this dirt, suddenly there were glimpses of love, beauty and reason.

I didn't go crazy, although sometimes there were "skids" when I started to seriously believe in one theory or another. As a rule, these skids were corrected quickly, usually in a few hours. More serious were periods of hopelessness. During such periods, the thought that it was necessary to continue fighting helped a lot, because the spiritual world in which today's children will live depends on it, even if only to a small extent.

- You mentioned a game whose hostess is fear. What is fear?

- First, I think that there are many "fears". For example, there is a fear that spurs to action, and there is a fear that paralyzes and makes the legs shake. The first type of fear is understandable, it is the reaction of the body to situations that are perceived as dangerous, which helps to avoid such situations. The second type of fear is much less clear. I had a hypothesis that this is one of the mechanisms by which ecosystems are regulated. For example, with an excess of deer in the forest, a hidden mechanism can turn on that switches the fear experienced by a deer at the sight of a wolf from the first type to the second, which makes it easier for wolves to catch deer.

Fear can be hallucinated - this is not quite paranoia, since a person during this period can be quite rational and understand that there are no reasons for fear, and, nevertheless, feel it, have trembling hands, etc.

Fear can be overcome, but sometimes the accompanying phenomena (trembling hands, weakness in the legs) remain, which is quite disgusting.

From the point of view of spirits, fear, as far as I understand, is considered as one of the convenient and effective methods of influencing people.

- Here we are talking about many aspects of a very peculiar experience, but it seems like an uncontrollable stream of complex phenomena. And what have you extracted from this experience and fixed inside yourself as important?

- The really deep things that I learned over these years are the ability to observe my own inner world, both on a verbal and other levels, and to rationally analyze these observations. For example, to notice when new "voices" are "interwoven" into my thought stream, or to distinguish styles of visual and other sensory hallucinations. All these skills, to one degree or another, require maintaining clarity of thought, even when you are immersed in an intense sensory-emotional state, and paying attention to details, to the "technique of construction" of the impressions you experience, and not just to their content.

Another group of observations that I consider important boils down largely to the fact that what we perceive as events of the inner world, which we actively "create" in real time, often are not such. They are mostly blanks that are "played out" in such a way that a very realistic illusion arises that what is happening is being created with our participation and "now".

- What is madness?

- If you want a functional definition, then here is one, for example: madness is the inability to be a productive member of society, not associated with physical illness.

And if seriously, then I do not know.

- You said that worldviews were offered to you. And, as far as I understand, everything turned out in such a way that it was a metaphysical scam. You broke through the layers of "explanations", realizing that certain manipulations with consciousness are taking place, that someone is building entire philosophical systems inside you, and this happens as an invasion from the outside. Is that right?

- It is difficult to build a real philosophical system solely on the basis of external influences. From the outside (in a way that is not clear to me), "seeds" come - short ideas, associations, etc. In the absolute majority of cases, what grows out of these seeds, if they are allowed to grow freely, is useless or harmful. Somehow I came up with an interesting name for such systems - "harness". That is, something that can later be used to guide a person's behavior. Whether a person allows these seeds to grow or quickly rejects them depends largely on the skills of working with their inner world.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that sometimes the appearance of such "seeds" is accompanied by other phenomena, not mental, but emotional or even real, which seem to confirm the system that is beginning to form. Another important property of these seeds and the systems growing out of them is that they, as a rule, contain, especially at the initial stage, really true and interesting ideas. The transition from truth to falsehood in these systems is often not easy to notice. A person forms an instinctive trust in the emerging thought stream, then he begins to believe in its continuation, which is already false, and then it is difficult for him to admit to himself that he believed in nonsense, and he begins to deceive himself in order not to feel like a fool. Often systems are built in such a way that, starting from a certain level of growth, they support themselves also due to fear.

- I will tell you about my perception of similar phenomena. You know, a couple of years ago I started studying card tricks to better understand the structure of deception. And at first it seemed that it was impossible, that people could not fall for such a trick, but practice showed that the trick works almost always. The more I got into this activity, the more I was struck by the sophistication of the existing card manipulations, as well as their impudence. There are methods of forcing when the right card is slipped in, and the viewer gets the impression that he chose it by chance. This is about something similar, only the manipulations are performed at the level of metaphysics. On the other hand. You understand, the archives of psychiatric hospitals keep multiple stories of those who fought with the scam, who built their own metaphysics, trying to break through the hierarchies of lies, to see the truth, who drew their own cosmological schemes. Yes, notebooks with diagrams are also probably in the archives. And the world of the scientific community, with high aesthetics, with reflection and accepted values - is it not a scam? This is not a question, but just reasoning in the air. You know, if I was not torn apart from the inside by the awareness of these hierarchies of scams, I would not see a deep meaning in such an interview. Sometimes I look inside and shout "build your metaphysics, otherwise you'll be fed ready-made molds that will make you vomit for the rest of your life." Sorry, I got carried away with emotions. We continue the interview.

How can you live in America?

- I have a feeling that when all this was happening to me in April 2007, then in addition to the whole mystical side of the matter, there was also a purely "social" one - only after that I began to feel quite comfortable in America. I was kind of "registered", so to speak, in criminal slang.

- You have been to India twice, visited both southern places and Allahabad, Kanpur, Delhi. After walking along the Magh Mela, you asked local professors various questions about the structure of the local society, sometimes funny and unexpected, like whether the gurus from the Magh Mela pay taxes on their dakshina. How did you like this country in general? Are you planning to return there? Can you imagine that you would stay there to live and work?

- The country is big and complex. For example, the places where I was in the south are completely different from the places where we were in central India. Just from general considerations, I'm almost sure that I will visit there again. I can hardly imagine the option in which I would decide to live and work there.

- After we posted the first part of the interview, many questions appeared. In particular, readers were interested in your statements about the separation of pure mathematics from applied mathematics. Almost all mathematicians feel this separation, what can I say, but they draw different conclusions. Personally, I am only glad about it; there is an opportunity to work in deep worlds without the risk of harming being. But from your words it follows that you have a radically different attitude, and moreover, you have been looking for a long time where modern high mathematics can be applied, and have not found it. One of the readers asks the following questions: "Is there still hope that this can be done? Or does it now seem that the problem is fatal?"

- As for the question of convergence of applied and pure mathematics, I have te following picture. Pure mathematics works with models of a high level of abstraction and low complexity (mathematicians love to call this low complexity elegance). Applied mathematics works with more specific models, but with a high level of complexity (many variables, equations, etc.). Interesting applications of the ideas of modern pure mathematics most likely lie in the field of high abstractness and high complexity. This area is now practically inaccessible, largely due to the limited ability of the human brain to work with such models. When we learn to use computers to work with abstract mathematical objects, this problem will gradually fade into the background and interesting applications of the ideas of today's abstract mathematics will appear.

So, now I think that the work that I am doing in the field of computer languages that allow working with such objects will also help in the future in the question of applications of the ideas of modern pure mathematics to applied problems.

- There were a few more meaningful questions. They asked about the period when you tried to apply interesting mathematics to historical genetics. What did you want to achieve and why didn't it work out?

- Initially, I wanted to understand the dynamics of the recombinant part of the genome and understand whether it is possible to extract information about the dynamics of population size on a historical time scale from it, i.e. say in the interval from now to 10,000 years ago.

I quickly realized that this is very difficult. There is not enough knowledge about the demographic structure of populations even over the past few hundred years. For example, the distribution of the number of children for an average man or woman, say, in a given city, is known. This information can be found. And the distribution of the number of grandchildren? Of course, it can be assumed that the number of children does not depend on the number of brothers and sisters. But this is obviously not true. And great-grandchildren? This is the first problem. Historians and demographers need to work on this, and now such work is taking place, especially in Europe, based on data in parish church books. The data there is very complete, so this information will gradually appear.

On the other hand, I gradually realized that no one really knows either how recombination occurs statistically or how mutations occur statistically. It's hard to measure. Now more and more material is appearing due to police databases on the one hand and databases of companies engaged in genealogical genetics on the other, and the situation is gradually improving. But when I started doing this, there was no real data at all.

From the mathematical side, the situation was also not great, since no one had ever seriously studied such complex and inhomogeneous processes in time. As a result, it all ended with the fact that I came up with some new formalization for Markov processes based on the concept of a path system. The article turned out to be quite long and technical, and now it lies unfinished. I think I will return to it and finish it with the help of a convenient computer proof assistant.

- There was also this question. "Science looks for the most compact descriptions (Alan Kay said this, who came up with Smalltalk). That is, you are engaged in science, looking for more compact descriptions?"

- I do not agree with that. That is, maybe I sometimes do science, but that's not the point. Science should be engaged in the collection and comprehension of new knowledge. This is very important - collection. There is such a point of view that, they say, all observations have basically already been made, the general picture of the world is clear, and it only remains to put this knowledge in order, and put it into a compact and beautiful theory. This is fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong, but leads to a very negative tendency to ignore everything that does not fit into a pre-prepared theory or hypothesis. This is one of the most serious problems in modern science.

- I quote again. "I will express a timid hope that in the second part there will be words about a critical analysis of the reasons for those visions that visited you, and about the relationship of these visions to physical reality."

- First, about a very general idea that was difficult for me to accept, but based on all the experience that I have gone through over the past five years, I could not come up with anything else. There are non-human minds around us. By the word "mind" I mean here an information system that has memory, motivations, the ability to model the external world and to plan. They are not "alien", but primordially earthly and, most likely, evolutionarily older than humans. These minds actively (and sometimes negatively) influence people's lives.

The world of these minds is very complex, perhaps even comparable in complexity to the part of the world as a whole, which we today call physical reality. I would not like to speculate about the structure of this world, because I do not have enough facts or observations for this. Even the simplest questions today do not have unambiguous answers for me. I am sure that these minds interact with people. Almost sure that with higher animals. But how do they interact with lower animals? With inanimate matter? Considerations of logical consistency, which a complete picture of the world must satisfy, suggest that they somehow interact. In this sense, they are also part of "physical reality". It's just a part about which we know very, very little. This part of the world needs to be studied and studied using scientific methodology.

Of course, attempts at such a study have been made. Especially at the end of the nineteenth century, but then there were not enough opportunities for this. Now it seems to me that such a study can begin with the group of phenomena that Jung called synchronicity. Simply put, these are unnatural, from the point of view of existing models, patterns in the individual and collective behavior of people. In Russian, this, as I understood from the comments to the first part of the interview, is called "synchronicities".

Now, for the first time, it has become possible to document such patterns (i.e. instrumentally) and begin to understand their structure. This became possible thanks to the existence of a huge number of records of both human speech (for example, interviews on radio stations) and human movements (for example, "security cameras" at airports). These data need to be analyzed taking into account their binding to physical time. I am almost sure that in this way it is possible to detect patterns in people's behavior that, on the one hand, are not explained by their conscious activity, and on the other hand, are too complex and too precisely linked to objective (physical) time to be attributed to individual subconsciousnesses.

I personally do not want to do this, although I sometimes feel an internal pressure pushing me in this direction. I really hope that there will be people who have both access to the necessary data and the courage and desire to deal with this problem. This will be real science. From here, a chain will stretch to a real understanding of the structure and driving forces of the historical process, and then the process of the evolution of life as a whole.

One specific idea is this. Make a website (for example, a page in LJ) where people can leave a comment if they had a synchronicity when they, listening to the radio or TV, and thinking about something of their own, suddenly hear a word that continues their thought or answers a question posed in their head. The main thing in such a comment should be the word or phrase spoken on the radio. As additional information, you can leave or not leave the thought context, the time when it happened, and the radio/TV station. Cases where synchronicity occurs at the moment the radio is turned on are especially valuable in this regard, and such cases must be indicated.

My hypothesis is that in the stream of words that we hear on the radio, there are regularities in linking certain words or words from certain co-semantic groups to moments of time (with second accuracy) unknown to the consciousnesses of those who pronounce these words. Next, good voice recognition software is taken that can generate transcripts with time stamps for individual words, and a large array of sequences of time moments of uttering each of those words with which people most often have synchronicities is compiled. After that, it is necessary to look for deviations from randomness in these sequences.

Now there is a whole field of mathematics called the theory of pseudo-random sequences. These are sequences that at first glance look random, but in fact are highly predictable. We have a whole group here dealing with them. So, it is mathematically possible to find the presence of hidden patterns.

- There were also several questions about doctors and schizophrenia. It is clear that for many, such revelations are perceived as schizophrenia. A person openly talks about visions and complex hallucinations.

- I will try to answer. The first thing I did when I returned from Salt Lake City was go to the hospital and ask for standard tests and X-rays of several parts of the body, since in addition to mental, this period was accompanied by a large number of unusual somatic sensations. I was told that I was quite healthy. In general, my physical health has improved over the past five years, although, obviously, I have become older.

I did not go to psychiatrists with this. Somehow from the very beginning it was clear that this was not schizophrenia at all.

There is also a more general theme in all this - the connection between mental disorders and the minds that I spoke about above. This topic is complex and I believe that honest, smart and courageous specialists should deal with it first of all. I don't want to go deep into this here.

- Say something else at the end.

- It seems to me that a lot of what we talked about remained unsaid. Let's come back to this, say, in a year, and see what has changed, what happened new.