What happens when truth itself becomes too complex for simple explanations? In this episode of The Unofficial Seminar, Arup K. Chatterjee and Sudip Patra explore complexity, scientific reasoning, public discourse, rationality, and the difficulty of communicating sophisticated ideas in an age of simplified narratives. The conversation begins with Sherlock Holmes, Isaac Newton and Occam’s Razor before moving into complexity science, reductionism, determinism and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The discussion then turns towards scientific communication, public policy, economics, behavioural science, critical thinking and the limits of purely rational models. The final section examines the relationship between quantum cognition, philosophy, Jain philosophy’s and multi-valued contextual logic, while stressing the importance of distinguishing intellectual insights from claims of equivalence.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Unofficial Seminar. I’m Arup K. Chatterjee, and I’m joined by my friend and colleague Sudip, to discuss a very interesting subject — of what happens when not only lies, but even truth, starts showing lots and lots of details.
Now, those of you who are admirers and who are avid recallers of the BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes will perhaps remember the line — the famous line spoken by Sherlock — that “only lies have details.” But reality is very messy. And the social sciences, the human sciences, and very often even the natural sciences, show up signs of tremendous complexity in reality. Of course, there are formulae left to us by the scientific great Albert Einstein — comes to mind immediately, E = MC². What could be more elegant than that as a formula? But joining me is Dr. Sudip Patra, professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, and perhaps, along with him, we would be able to unravel the many complexities waiting to be cognized out there in reality — which are surely not lies, but even if they are true, they are a truth of a very sophisticated nature.
Sudip — welcome to my show. How have you been?
SUDIP PATRA: Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for inviting me, and I think that it’s quite some time after we are again meeting. Last time we were speaking about philosophical aspects of Albert Einstein, as far as I remember — based on a new book on Einstein, which is this, I Am a Part of Infinity. So I think that this particular topic that you have chosen is also very much in that line, and really, reality is something which is not simply in details, but also beyond that. So maybe we can pursue that line of thinking further.
And, going back to — Sudip, I know that you have done very good research on Sherlock. So I will also be wanting to know that from you itself — that you know about this particular thinking of Sherlock — because, you see, that as far as I think that both Sherlock Holmes as well as Isaac Newton, in some sense, the scientific kind of predecessor of Sherlock Holmes, they have been, in a way, very much misrepresented or misunderstood, as far as I think — because going back to say Isaac Newton — Isaac Newton has always been thought to be a very kind of deterministic and very kind of mechanical philosopher, who was only after details and only after precise mathematical predictions, and so on.
All of that may be somewhat true, but certainly not true overall, because I was reading a very interesting account by Professor Peter Dear, who is a retired professor at Cornell, and this particular book is very interesting — The World As We Know It is the name of the book — and there he really tries to give a historical evolution of Newton’s ideas. So when Newton first came up with his grand book, Principia Mathematica, and many others, at that time Newton himself was really not a deterministic and mechanical philosopher. And, more importantly, in his own theory we have, for example, the gravitational formulation of Sir Isaac Newton — the inverse square law, etc. — that itself escapes any kind of physicalist and mechanical description.
So I found that this line by Sherlock Holmes — that not simply details, but something more than details — as you have rightly mentioned, complexity, that can well be the topic of our discussion.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: Well, first of all, I was startled when I read this. So if I must give our viewers the context of why we are having this discussion — of course, we go back a very, very long way, far longer back than our discussions. We started having these conversations on the history of the philosophy of science last year, around this — around the spring — and I think we made eight or nine episodes on that. But that was not really the root cause of why we wanted to have this discussion.
I was startled because this is very different from the Holmesian paradigm of interpretation, and this is actually Sherlock Holmes in the avatar of Benedict Cumberbatch. It is not Sherlock Holmes in the manner that was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Because I don’t believe Sherlock Holmes, in the manner that the canon — the Sherlockan canon — wanted to present him, as somebody not interested in complexity. On the contrary, Sherlock Holmes — and I’m not interpreting too much the very canon that Arthur Conan Doyle created — has evidence of how Sherlock Holmes was interested in lucid dreaming and Buddhist esotericism. During his exile, he actually goes to Tibet and meets the head lama. He is, at that point, in exile — he’s incognito. So a person of that nature, and a person who’s reading all sorts of bizarre, outlandish, esoteric things in his lifetime, in the 1890s, 1880s, surely would be the last person to gainsay — to dismiss — complexity.
Therefore, I was startled, and then I understood that this is not our good old Holmes but the later tellings.
At the same time, Sudip, there is this problem of Occam’s razor — the Occam’s razor tells us that when an explanation is becoming too complicated, then surely that must not be the best one; rather, the simplest explanation is always the better one. But I know this is what I’m going to say is slightly at a tangent to what you had in mind — but take game theory, for example, and that very classic example of two prisoners, or two people in custody, who are not told what the other person is sharing in confidence with the police, or the jailers — is that when two people reveal the least amount of details about each other, or whatever mission they were caught at, it’s a kind of cooperation. And when they reveal the least amount of details, they may not be caught lying, but they are not exactly telling the truth either. So I think that’s a very simple kind of theory to subvert the idea that only truth has details and lies don’t have details. Sometimes not sharing the details is also, perhaps, not sharing the truth. So does anything come to your mind in this regard?
SUDIP PATRA: Yes. Two directions I would like to go. First of all, let me go into the physics direction. First of all, maybe — since we are discussing this for some time, mainly history of science and philosophy — so, you see, that you mentioned Occam’s razor. Now, certainly it goes without saying that even today that is one particular principle which philosophers of science, at times, get back to. And even going back to Albert Einstein — he famously said that “make things as simple as possible, but no simpler,” in his own inimitable way. But again, one must also recognize that when we go into the area of complexity, as you have rightly mentioned — complexity is not complicated — very, very important message. So at times we get confused, whether complexity means there’s something very complicated. It’s not like that. Complexity is an ontological picture, and complexity means that — what happens when various processes or various agents, for example, in game theory and so on, have continuous interactions between them.
Say, for example, in a social system we have so many processes — economic process, political process, and so many things — and they are always interacting with themselves. They are always feeding back into each other, and that is what makes us a social animal. That is what makes us social systems. In that kind of a scenario, simplicity may not be the right criteria. So this is one thing which has also come up very strongly. So, again, by simplicity I mean this reductionist approach, which is very much there even in textbookish science even today — then you have a system, and you can break them apart, and then you can again join them back. So this kind of reductionist, atomist approach, you can say — but that really doesn’t work when you go into the complexity of reality. And therefore this reductionism, simplicity, or determinism, in some sense — that is really not the right way to tackle complexity. That is one point I would like to say, and therefore that gives rise to this whole science called complexity science, and complex adaptive systems, and so on. Its philosophy is very different from the philosophy of standard, deterministic physics of classical old days.
That is one point, and the second point — we have rightly mentioned about game theory. So game theory is always one of our favorite discussions — in the prisoner’s dilemma scenario that you are mentioning, the dilemma is that, say, Alice and Bob both are typically rational. Now, rationality here is something called common knowledge. Common knowledge means Alice knows that Bob knows that Alice knows — infinity — that both are rational. Now, first of all, that kind of thing rarely happens in reality, but that’s a different point. Say, even from a mathematical perspective, when there is a common knowledge of rationality, and by rationality we mean something very narrow — something very kind of focused, like just selfish utility optimization — that is what rationality would mean.
So if you start from that kind of a position, the theoretical prediction is that they should always defect — they should not cooperate, they should defect — because each and everyone is only thinking about their own selfish utility optimization, and the other also knows, because of the common knowledge of rationality. And therefore, in the end, you end up at a bad equilibrium — that is, where you don’t cooperate — and that is the dilemma: how is it possible that even if they are perfectly rational, they ultimately end up not cooperating?
Now, remember that this non-cooperative equilibrium is actually based on a lot of details, isn’t it? So it is based on all this kind of common knowledge of rationality and so on, which is ultimate detail — you cannot be more detailed than that. On the other hand, in reality, as you have very rightly mentioned, people do cooperate rather than always defecting. So the question is: why does that happen, how does that happen? So again, here the paradox is that people may not be that detailed in thinking. People may not have this common knowledge of rationality to start with, but even then, there are other processes maybe happening in the mind, or in society, that compel people to cooperate — and that is something which escapes our detailed rational models. So for that, we need to move into complexity and other kinds of modeling, if at all we would like to do so.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: Yeah. While you were talking about scientific models and statistical and probabilistic models, I’m also thinking simultaneously, Sudip. So today I think maybe something has happened to me, or maybe the better part of my brain is sort of being overweighed by this other concern of ours. By “ours,” I mean of citizens in general — of how, throughout the globe, we are increasingly seeing a kind of a — the consequence of the kind of messaging that states have indulged in — states, and including the intelligence — have indulged in.
So on the one hand, we tended to water down the human sciences, and we tended to create a kind of apathy towards natural sciences since about 2000, and it began roughly during the Tony Blair administration. It also spread to the United States — or maybe it was in the U.S. first, and then in Britain and Europe — and the consequences are that we have a citizenry — a global citizenry — which was brought up to understand that communication has to be very simple. Communication needs to be easily digestible, easily accessible, very easily comprehensible. But that is not how the complexity of the 21st century can be communicated.
And the 21st century comes with tremendous complexity, because it is in this era that we are seeing more granularity in the kind of history, in the kind of social sciences, in the kind of perspectives that we have today. We speak about gender and caste and race without thinking too much, and because that is part of our staple intellectual diet, and it’s part of the regular conversations — we were not talking about these themes or these issues 30 or 40 years ago as much as we do today in the developing parts of the economy. Maybe they were part of the developed economies even back in the ’60s, but today they are part of the staple diet globally, and we cannot escape these simple levels of complexity.
On top of that, there’s more granularity — vis-à-vis the economy today: we are living in a global economy, we are living in a digital economy, we are living in a public space which is permeated through and through by social media. So with so many multiple levels of complexity, should — now I don’t know, I’m not asking your political opinion here at all, nor am I expressing mine — but what do you sense — is this, what I’m describing, do you think, is this in any way consequential to the space of the sciences and scientific communication today? Do you feel like people are receptive to scientific communication today?
SUDIP PATRA: Okay, I think that you have really touched upon a lot of very critical issues here. Let me try to go one by one, if I can. The first thing is about scientific communication. You see, that there has been a lot of misconception about science in popularity — in popular media and in popular spaces — that is, I think, very detrimental. Because, you see, that if you go back to various scientific areas, like quantum physics and its connection to, say, ancient philosophies and Indian philosophies and all that, there have been a lot of dilution, there have been a lot of diversions there. And that is also one of the reasons why the credibility of scientific communication has been kind of going away, and you see that all over the world there’s a kind of popular uprising against the kind of standard scientific thinking. I think that that is dangerous.
But again, at the same time, science itself also has to evolve. That is also another perspective of that. Say, for example, the thing that we are talking about today is complexity science, in some sense, and yes, complexity science is again not very well discussed in public space. Complexity science has to be discussed much more in public space; otherwise, what will happen is that a lot of misconceptions will spread, and in the name of complexity, a lot of miscommunications will be done — and I’m aware of those kinds of things happening already.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: For example, please give some examples of what kinds of miscommunication you have in mind.
SUDIP PATRA: Yes, exactly. So that is why I’m going at — say, for example, from a very practical aspect — one area that we do our teaching also at our universities — public policy. We always discuss with our students — so, how is it possible to bring in a complexity approach in public policy? Now, one thing is that it cannot be avoided, because you have rightly mentioned that in today’s world we are living with multiple layers of complexity — multiple layers of complexity. But the problem is that even today, if you think about the communication of public policy to people, that has been a very, very kind of deterministic and simplistic kind of approach. And again, there’s a lot of misconception about scientific frameworks in public policy.
So, that is one reason — what happens is that people get complexity all wrong. So people think that complexity means something very complicated, and something horribly confusing. So “let’s not hear about all that,” and that’s the reason we try to kind of take solace in all kinds of wrong thinking, and kind of confusing thinking about various science, and myths and philosophy are all mixed up. But that is, I think, a very important duty on the behalf of academicians like us, as well as policymakers, policy thinkers, to really make this into public debate — how to think about complexity, how to introduce complexity in, say, policy thinking. So this is one area that we are also working a bit on, here, from our research centers, and we’ll see how it goes — but that becomes very necessary.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: Can you give me one example of some aspect of complexity in public policy — or even from the natural sciences, if you want to go that far — but I suppose you’ll have examples in public policy itself — that can be brought to the public’s sphere, and that can be made a part of the public discourse without simplifying things too much, but at the same time can be made accessible to the public. How do we start making it legible, so that there are certain things, at least, that the public can begin identifying — that they don’t get alienated? So give me one example, if you can.
SUDIP PATRA: Yes. Say, for example, this whole business of economics — you see, that economics is something which touches everyone’s life, and therefore I think that everyone is interested to understand where the money goes, and how that is going to give a blow to us if there is inflation, and various other things which are happening very much all over the globe.
Now, one thing that we can go to the public — and for us also, and we try to explain to them, in a very simple language, that, you see, that the standard models of inflation and standard models of, say, monetary policy, fiscal policy — you see, they are actually based on very simplistic assumptions. They are based on very kind of arcane assumptions. For example, we can see that in the standard monetary policy, or standard kind of neoclassical thinking — as we call neoclassical thinking — people are considered to be fully rational. People are considered to be isolated from each other. People are considered to be optimizers all the time. All of these things we can slowly remove. We can say, “what happens if you start relaxing each and every assumption?” And you see, you don’t really have to think of it in a very kind of theoretical manner. It is something very practical, something very day-to-day life.
So — are we really like that? Or is it the case that we are also motivated by different kinds of, as Keynes put it, “animal spirits”? So how do we really bring this “animal spirits” understanding into policymaking? If we really don’t bring the “animal spirits” understanding into policymaking, all the time what we will do is that we ourselves will be making wrong policies, bad policies, and those policies will also misfire or backfire, because people are not like that. And therefore, there’s a huge literature in policymaking that shows that when you have wrong expectations — where you create policies based on wrong expectations — then actually people will always backfire, and they will always make it undone. And there are many, many, many examples of that. So these kinds of things we can reach out to people with, in a very simple language, coming from day-to-day life examples.
And another very kind of practical area which has come up over time in policymaking, since you are raising this question, is input from behavioral sciences — say, for example, nudge theory, “the nudge,” etc., which are again based on day-to-day life examples. So these kinds of things, I believe, need to be brought into public discourse much more.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: So, while you were speaking — and because the backdrop to my next question is some of the conversations that we’ve had off the record — now, we can’t, of course, you know, you and I both know that we can’t put everything on the record — but, Sudip, I want to try and probe what you feel about this thing in public policy, but, but many other kinds of public interactions or public discourses where — and I think you were sort of touching on it — that there is a benefactor, and there are beneficiaries, or there’s a creator of a policy, and there are beneficiaries of that policy. And you are saying, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you are saying that we always think of the beneficiaries as rational people, and by “rational” you don’t only mean people who are utilitarian, but rational as in who also have some kind — some degree of human compassion, integrity, and other finer qualities that, according to Maslow’s pyramid, are acquired only during self-actualization —
close to self-actualization. So, in a sense, you know where I’m coming from. I’m sort of skeptical. I’m sort of skeptical of looking at the beneficiary as being minus the animal spirit. How do we convey to the beneficiaries — or, do you feel like our public discourses are too polite, and polite is not necessarily a good thing here? So how do we, without sugarcoating the reality, come to people and tell them: we have self-interest, or you all, including us, we have self-interest, and our finer spirits have to be cultivated — but until we do that universally, how do you address these animal spirits, how do you address the fact that people find loopholes after loopholes in all these legal mechanisms? And I know this is not your domain, Sudip, but ultimately — what I’m getting at is: isn’t this also the domain of complexity?
But finally, my question to you really is: how will the states, how will the bureaucracy, communicate to the people without engaging intellectuals like you? And if the states across the globe are so skeptical — in fact, so cynical — of intellectuals, if we are de-intellectualizing our society so much, then we are going to go into endless recessions. So is this making sense to you? Do you see where my frustration is coming from?
SUDIP PATRA: Yes, I fully agree with that, and I fully share your frustration too, because, you see, that it is also on our own part — we really need to come up with more and more public discourse where we need to inculcate critical thinking, and not — not anything like a mouthful that “okay, this is critical thinking” — but really the spirit of it. That is the most important thing, and I hope that more and more modern universities, and modern places which are coming up, they really need to realize this — that we need to inculcate critical thinking for the — really for the spirit of it, not just for the sake of it. And that is the only way, because, you see, that as little as I understand, public discourse has to be like something like standing in front of the mirror. It cannot be like just patting your back and something like that, but that is not going to help us any time, because that is rather going to give us much more trouble over time.
Therefore, going back to your question about rationality, I think that is like a very fundamental question. So what kind of rationality do we really need? So here we can really go to the public and say that, well, rationality should not be equated to only, say, mean-minded utility optimization — that is really not the way rationality should be understood, and it can also be related very deeply with our civilizational values. Indian civilization, for thousands of years, escapes any kind of simplistic, rationalistic model. So, in that case, rationality is, as we have rightly mentioned, related to compassion, related to ethics, related to various, various other domains, with good, bad, everything. So we need to bring this up more and more to the public and say that, well, we also have to change — as academia, we have to also introspect and affect our standard mathematical and theoretical models. And that is the main reason why sciences like complexity science, and quantum-like frameworks — something that we work in also — these things are on the rise, and I really believe that these kinds of things should be written in more simple language and more and more communicated with people.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: On a related note, Sudip — so you and I do not need any certificate for our shared excitement, for our shared enthusiasm, and I think these are very mild forms of expression that we have for the civilizational values. And you’ve told me, and I’ve also shared, how much criticism people like us get, because we try to bring back, as far as possible, the textual values from the — from the scientific and the esoteric texts, like the Vedas, for instance. But both these domains — because of apathy, or whatever other political reasons — they tend to get marginalized in the public discourses of the 21st century. That’s okay, we live with that. But the bigger issue is: we tend to be, sometimes — and this happened when you and I started having the philosophy of science conversations as well — sometimes, hastily, we tend to get plugged into that part of the discourse which tries to simplify everything.
I mean, to give you an example, Sudip — I just heard this somewhere, and it’s humorous. I’m not trying to laugh at somebody — I’m sharing this because of its comicality. A spiritual leader was telling a crowd that “we in India do not make gods out of human beings.” No, that’s a very noble sentiment. The example they gave was that Bhishma Pitamaha was shot with a hundred arrows, and Bhishma Pitamaha was lying, but we didn’t declare him a god — but somebody, somewhere, got four nails dug in, and they became a god. So, on the one hand, it’s good humor. So as stand-up comedy, it’s, I think, it’s perfectly welcome — but it’s also part of a spiritual, quasi-philosophical discourse, and it’s having a lot of impact.
Now, my grief is completely not because of this one comment — I found it quite humorous — but there’s a related specimen of comments on religion, philosophy, quantum mechanics. This trinity has been created, as if there’s a certain religion from ancient times which more or less invented quantum mechanics, and which also invented all the philosophy — and deconstruction, and difference, and all that. Surely there are epistemic roots, and you and I have been trying to unravel those roots, but because of this, quote-unquote, “simplicity” in communication, everything is becoming everything, and quantum mechanics is equal to Hindu philosophy is equal to Derrida and deconstruction and difference. So have there been challenges of this sort in your academic career — as far as the public-facing conversations are concerned?
SUDIP PATRA: Yes, I think that it is the same thing that we always face all the time. Say, for example, in case of the quantum-like framework — the area that I work in more technically — it is known as quantum cognition. So these are basically mathematical and philosophical models — say, maybe taking from quantum information theory, trying to understand human cognition, human decision-making from a completely new perspective — but then also going beyond. So it is not like staying there only, and I am very much sure that once we try to go beyond the standard quantum physics realm, also, there will be interesting epistemic connections, as you have mentioned, with various world philosophies — there’s no doubt about that. Say, one of my works that I’ve been doing with a very senior scientist in India — that has been looking into one particular philosophical aspect of Jain philosophy. So, yeah — and how Syadvada can be used to create a kind of completely new kind of logic, which is this multi-valued, contextual logic — and multi-valued, contextual logic is very related to the quantum foundations, but that doesn’t mean that they are equivalent. It simply means that there are interesting insights one can draw from one to the other, and that is, I think, that we as academicians should also be very clear about — and we should also communicate that very clearly to the public, our larger sphere: that all that we are trying to do is basically draw some interesting insights, and insights should never be equated with equivalences. So there is no equivalence, and rather, if we try to make that equivalence — that “this means that,” and “that means this” — then, in that case, we are diluting everything, and not only that, we are also creating a lot of confusion. I think that any right-minded scholar will never, never do this — never get into this. But yes, it’s an unfortunate problem which has happened over time, and it is our duty to dispel this kind of confusion more and more through our writings, through more and more communications — podcasts like this — this is very important. Let’s see how far we can go, but we must.
ARUP K. CHATTERJEE: Yeah, that’s a brilliant spirit. Sudip, it’s great to have you, both on — the Unofficial Seminar. Well, it’s virtually your first episode on this avatar of the podcast. But great to be back in conversation with you, Sudip. I would love to hear from you the new stuff that you’ve been working on, in our next conversation — hopefully that will be soon.
Dear audience, thank you so much for joining. Sudip, once again, great insights, but I think things are just warming up. We need to have many more, and hopefully we will pick up the thread from where we left off, on Einstein, Tagore — and there’s so much to discuss. Thank you so much, dear audience. Please like, share, and subscribe to the Unofficial Seminar, and until next time.
Arup K. Chatterjee 