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The Man Who Invented Modern

Probability
Chance encounters in the life of Andrei Kolmogorov.
BY SLAVA GEROVITCH
ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW
AUGUST 22, 2013

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f two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk

I
more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other. However, the statisticians should
stay sober if they want to pick mushrooms. Stumbling around drunk and without purpose would reduce the area of
exploration, and make it more likely that the seekers would return to the same spot, where the mushrooms are already
gone.

Such considerations belong to the statistical theory of “random walk” or “drunkard’s walk,” in which the future depends only on the
present and not the past. Today, random walk is used to model share prices, molecular diffusion, neural activity, and population
dynamics, among other processes. It is also thought to describe how “genetic drift” can result in a particular gene—say, for blue eye
color—becoming prevalent in a population. Ironically, this theory, which ignores the past, has a rather rich history of its own. It is
one of the many intellectual innovations dreamed up by Andrei Kolmogorov, a mathematician of startling breadth and ability who
revolutionized the role of the unlikely in mathematics, while carefully negotiating the shifting probabilities of political and academic
life in Soviet Russia.
As a young man, Kolmogorov was nourished by the intellectual ferment of post-revolutionary Moscow, where literary
experimentation, the artistic avant-garde, and radical new scientific ideas were in the air. In the early 1920s, as a 17-year-old history
student, he presented a paper to a group of his peers at Moscow University, offering an unconventional statistical analysis of the
lives of medieval Russians. It found, for example, that the tax levied on villages was usually a whole number, while taxes on individual
households were often expressed as fractions. The paper concluded, controversially for the time, that taxes were imposed on whole
villages and then split among the households, rather than imposed on households and accumulated by village. “You have found only
one proof,” was his professor’s acid observation. “That is not enough for a historian. You need at least five proofs.” At that moment,
Kolmogorov decided to change his concentration to mathematics, where one proof would suffice.

It is oddly appropriate that a chance event drove Kolmogorov into the arms of probability theory, which at the time was a maligned
sub-discipline of mathematics. Pre-modern societies often viewed chance as an expression of the gods’ will; in ancient Egypt and
classical Greece, throwing dice was seen as a reliable method of divination and fortune telling. By the early 19th century, European
mathematicians had developed techniques for calculating odds, and distilled probability to the ratio of the number of favorable
cases to the number of all equally probable cases. But this approach suffered from circularity—probability was defined in terms of
equally probable cases—and only worked for systems with a finite number of possible outcomes. It could not handle countable
infinity (such as a game of dice with infinitely many faces) or a continuum (such as a game with a spherical die, where each point on
the sphere represents a possible outcome). Attempts to grapple with such situations produced contradictory results, and earned
probability a bad reputation.

Pre-modern societies often viewed chance as an expression of the gods’ will; in

ancient Egypt and classical Greece, throwing dice was seen as a reliable
method of divination and fortune telling.

ALSO IN MATH   

Pick the Statistic You Want to Be

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under a big quilt, when a hunk of black rock crashed through the ceiling and hit her on the thigh....READ MORE

Reputation and renown were qualities that Kolmogorov prized. After switching his major, Kolmogorov was initially drawn into the
devoted mathematical circle surrounding Nikolai Luzin, a charismatic teacher at Moscow University. Luzin’s disciples nicknamed the
group “Luzitania,” a pun on their professor’s name and the famous British ship that had sunk in the First World War. They were
united by a “joint beating of hearts,” as Kolmogorov described it, gathering after class to exalt or eviscerate new mathematical
innovations. They mocked partial differential equations as “partial irreverential equations” and finite differences as “fine night
differences.” The theory of probability, lacking solid theoretical foundations and burdened with paradoxes, was jokingly called the
“theory of misfortune.”
It was through Luzitania that Kolmogorov’s evaluation of probability took on a more personal turn. By the 1930s, the onset of
Stalinist terror meant anyone could expect a nighttime knock on the door by the secret police, and blind chance seemed to rule
people’s lives. Paralyzed by fear, many Russians felt compelled to participate in denunciations, hoping to increase their chance of
survival. Bolshevik activists among the mathematicians, including Luzin’s former students, accused Luzin of political disloyalty and
castigated him for publishing in foreign countries. Kolmogorov, having published abroad himself, may have realized his own
vulnerability. He had already displayed an apparent readiness to make political compromises for the sake of his career, accepting a
position as a research institute director when his predecessor was imprisoned by the Bolshevik regime for supporting religious
freedom. Now Kolmogorov joined the critics and turned against Luzin. Luzin was subject to a show trial by the Academy of Sciences
and lost all official positions, but surprisingly escaped being arrested and shot by the Russian authorities. Luzitania was gone, sunk by
its own crew.

The moral dimension of Kolmogorov’s decision aside, he had played the odds successfully and gained the freedom to continue his
work. In the face of his own political conformity, Kolmogorov presented a radical and, ultimately, foundational revision of probability
theory. He relied on measure theory, a fashionable import to Russia from France. Measure theory represented a generalization of
the ideas of “length,” “area,” or “volume,” allowing the measure of various weird mathematical objects to be taken when
conventional means did not suffice. For example, it could help calculate the area of a square, with an infinite number of holes in it,
cut it into an infinite number of pieces, and scattered over an infinite plane. In measure theory, it is still possible to speak of the
“area” (measure) of this scattered object.

The theory of probability, lacking solid theoretical foundations and burdened

with paradoxes, was jokingly called the “theory of misfortune.”

Kolmogorov drew analogies between probability and measure, resulting in five axioms, now usually formulated in six statements, that
made probability a respectable part of mathematical analysis. The most basic notion of Kolmogorov’s theory was the “elementary
event,” the outcome of a single experiment, like tossing a coin. All elementary events formed a “sample space,” the set of all possible
outcomes. For lightning strikes in Massachusetts, for example, the sample space would consist of all the points in the state where
lightning could hit. A random event was defined as a “measurable set” in a sample space, and the probability of a random event as
the “measure” of this set. For example, the probability that lightning would hit Boston would depend only on the area (“measure”)
of this city. Two events occurring simultaneously could be represented by the intersection of their measures; conditional
probabilities by dividing measures; and the probability that one of two incompatible events would occur by adding measures (that is,
the probability that either Boston or Cambridge would be hit by lightning equals the sum of their areas).

The Paradox of the Great Circle was a major mathematical conundrum that Kolmogorov’s conception of probability finally put to
rest. Assume aliens landed randomly on a perfectly spherical Earth and the probability of their landing was equally distributed. Does
this mean that they would be equally likely to land anywhere along any circle that divides the sphere into two equal hemispheres,
known as a “great circle?” It turns out that the landing probability is equally distributed along the equator, but is unevenly distributed
along the meridians, with the probability increasing toward the equator and decreasing at the poles. In other words, the aliens would
tend to land in hotter climates. This strange finding might be explained by the circles of latitude getting bigger as they get closer to
the equator—yet this result seems absurd, since we can rotate the sphere and turn its equator into a meridian. Kolmogorov showed
that the great circle has a measure zero, since it is a line segment and its area is zero. This explains the apparent contradiction in
conditional landing probabilities by showing that these probabilities could not be rigorously calculated.

Having crossed from the very real world of Stalinist purges into the ephemeral zone of zero-measure conditional probabilities,
Kolmogorov was soon plunged back into reality. During the Second World War, the Russian government asked Kolmogorov to
develop methods for increasing the effectiveness of artillery fire. He showed that, instead of trying to maximize the probability of
each shot hitting its target, in certain cases it would be better to fire a fusillade with small deviations from perfect aim, a tactic
known as “artificial dispersion.” The Moscow University Department of Probability Theory, of which he had become the head, also
calculated ballistic tables for low-altitude, low-speed bombing. In 1944 and 1945, the government awarded Kolmogorov two Orders
of Lenin for his wartime contributions, and after the war, he served as a mathematics consultant for the thermonuclear weapons
program.

But Kolmogorov’s interests inclined him in more philosophical directions, too. Mathematics had led him to believe that the world
was both driven by chance and fundamentally ordered according to the laws of probability. He often reflected on the role of the
unlikely in human affairs. Kolmogorov’s chance meeting with fellow mathematician Pavel Alexandrov on a canoeing trip in 1929
began an intimate, lifelong friendship. In one of the long, frank letters they exchanged, Alexandrov chastised Kolmogorov for the
latter’s interest in talking to strangers on the train, implying that such encounters were too superficial to offer insight into a person’s
real character. Kolmogorov objected, taking a radical probabilistic view of social interactions in which people acted as statistical
samples of larger groups. “An individual tends to absorb the surrounding spirit and to radiate the acquired lifestyle and worldview to
anyone around, not just to a select friend,” he wrote back to Alexandrov.
Mathematics had led him to believe that the world was both driven by chance
and fundamentally ordered according to the laws of probability.

Music and literature were deeply important to Kolmogorov, who believed he could analyze them probabilistically to gain insight into
the inner workings of the human mind. He was a cultural elitist who believed in a hierarchy of artistic values. At the pinnacle were
the writings of Goethe, Pushkin, and Thomas Mann, alongside the compositions of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven—works
whose enduring value resembled eternal mathematical truths. Kolmogorov stressed that every true work of art was a unique
creation, something unlikely by definition, something outside the realm of simple statistical regularity. “Is it possible to include
[Tolstoy’s War and Peace] in a reasonable way into the set of ‘all possible novels’ and further to postulate the existence of a certain
probability distribution in this set?” he asked, sarcastically, in a 1965 article.

Yet he longed to find the key to understanding the nature of artistic creativity. In 1960 Kolmogorov armed a group of researchers
with electromechanical calculators and charged them with the task of calculating the rhythmical structures of Russian poetry.
Kolmogorov was particularly interested in the deviation of actual rhythms from classical meters. In traditional poetics, the iambic
meter is a rhythm consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. But in practice, this rule is rarely obeyed. In
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the most famous classical iambic poem in the Russian language, almost three-fourths of its 5,300 lines
violate the definition of the iambic meter, and more than a fifth of all even syllables are unstressed. Kolmogorov believed that the
frequency of stress deviation from the classical meters offered an objective “statistical portrait” of a poet. An unlikely pattern of
stresses, he thought, indicated artistic inventiveness and expression. Studying Pushkin, Pasternak, and other Russian poets,
Kolmogorov argued that they had manipulated meters to give “general coloration” to their poems or passages.

Music and literature were deeply important to Kolmogorov, who believed he

could analyze them probabilistically to gain insight into the inner workings of
the human mind.

To measure the artistic merit of texts, Kolmogorov also employed a letter-guessing method to evaluate the entropy of natural
language. In information theory, entropy is a measure of uncertainty or unpredictability, corresponding to the information content
of a message: the more unpredictable the message, the more information it carries. Kolmogorov turned entropy into a measure of
artistic originality. His group conducted a series of experiments, showing volunteers a fragment of Russian prose or poetry and
asking them to guess the next letter, then the next, and so on. Kolmogorov privately remarked that, from the viewpoint of
information theory, Soviet newspapers were less informative than poetry, since political discourse employed a large number of stock
phrases and was highly predictable in its content. The verses of great poets, on the other hand, were much more difficult to predict,
despite the strict limitations imposed on them by the poetic form. According to Kolmogorov, this was a mark of their originality.
True art was unlikely, a quality probability theory could help to measure.

Kolmogorov scorned the idea of placing War and Peace in a probabilistic sample space of all novels—but he could express its
unpredictability by calculating its complexity. Kolmogorov conceived complexity as the length of the shortest description of an
object, or the length of an algorithm that produces an object. Deterministic objects are simple, in the sense that they can by
produced by a short algorithm: say, a periodic sequence of zeroes and ones. Truly random, unpredictable objects are complex: any
algorithm reproducing them would have to be as long as the objects themselves. For example, irrational numbers—those that
cannot be written as fractions— almost surely have no pattern in the numbers that appear after the decimal point. Therefore, most
irrational numbers are complex objects, because they can be reproduced only by writing out the actual sequence. This
understanding of complexity fits with the intuitive notion that there is no method or algorithm that could predict random objects. It
is now crucial as a measure of the computational resources necessary to specify an object, and finds multiple applications in
modern-day network routing, sorting algorithms, and data compression.

By Kolmogorov’s own measure, his life was a complex one.  By the time he died, in 1987 at the age of 84, he had not only weathered a
revolution, two World Wars, and the Cold War, but his innovations left few mathematical fields untouched, and extended well
beyond the confines of academe. Whether his random walk through life was of the inebriated or mushroom-picking variety, its
twists and turns were neither particularly predictable nor easily described. His success at capturing and applying the unlikely had
rehabilitated probability theory, and had created a terra firma for countless scientific and engineering projects. But his theory also
amplified the tension between human intuition about unpredictability and the apparent power of the mathematical apparatus to
describe it. 

For Kolmogorov, his ideas neither eliminated chance, nor affirmed a fundamental uncertainty about our world; they simply provided
a rigorous language to talk about what cannot be known for certain. The notion of “absolute randomness” made no more sense
than “absolute determinism,” he once remarked, concluding, “We can’t have positive knowledge of the existence of the
unknowable.” Thanks to Kolmogorov, though, we can explain when and why we don’t.

Dr. Slava Gerovitch is a lecturer on the history of mathematics at MIT, and an expert on space history and Russian science and
technology. The author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics, Gerovitch is also the director of the
Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science for High School Students (PRIMES). 

4 4 CO M M E N T S - J O I N T H E D I S C U S S I O N

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sailendrapmishra • 6 years ago

Thanks
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gjuro • 6 years ago

Speaking of Bayes, there is a story about K. staying at home during air-raids of WW2 instead of going to the shelter like everybody else.
When asked why, he replied "There are 4 million people in Moscow - what are the chances of me being hit?" Next night, he was in the
shelter with everybody else. His explanation: "There are 4 million people in Moscow, and one elephant in the Moscow zoo. Yesterday, they
got the elephant!"
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aldebaran • 6 years ago • edited

"They mocked [...] finite differences as 'fine night differences'.”

Are those terms homonymous in Russian, too? If not, then, wow, what a group! Brilliant mathematicians as well as multi-lingual punsters
h j th t i th l i hi h thi ti l itt Wh t' th b bilit f th t ?
who just happen to pun in the same language in which this article was written. What's the probability of that occurrence?
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Adam Wykes > aldebaran • 5 years ago

Thought that too. Only explanation I could conceive of would be if they were forced to read english texts on the subject; there being
no extant russian translations of the work. Also extremely unlikely. Author might want to revisit her sources.
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vpurto > aldebaran • 4 years ago

Let me reply to you as Al_de_Democrat to your rhetorical question "What's the probability of that occurrence?" Less than 0.
Besides, the whole narrative given by Dr. Gerovitch about 1930s mathematics betrays substantial influence of brainwashing on
both sides of the Pond. Alas, one cannot expect more from man graduated from Gubkin Institute in 1985.
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Guest • 6 years ago • edited

The discussion of irrational numbers in the third to last paragraph is significantly incorrect.

Irrational numbers may require infinitely many bits to express them in binary (or decimal, or any) number form, but they can be expressed
compactly in the form of some other algorithm (i.e. coding scheme), otherwise they can't really be said to "exist" in any useful way.
Examples include square root of 2, pi, e, etc. Thus the Kolmogorov complexity of such numbers is low.

I suppose you can take issue with my assertion that "numbers" which are not expressed either in the form of a compact algorithm or in the
form of any written-down sequence don't actually exist. Some people believe that every potential thing, including all possible mathematics,
pre-exists in some Platonic garden. I take the position that the physical universe exists, and nothing else. But even if you take the Platonic
position, the statement that "most irrational numbers" are K-complex is misleading, because people will think of things like pi, etc. which,
again, are simple.
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Klaas > Guest • 6 years ago

You are almost right. The particular random numbers you mention are indeed not K-random. Nonetheless "most numbers" (not only
the irrational ones) have high Kolmogorov complexity, simply by counting.
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Guest > Klaas • 6 years ago

But you can't even count "most numbers." If they have not been written in some form, in what sense do they exist? If they
have been written, it is as a simple algorithm such as add powers of two multiplied by this binary sequence. The length of
such a description is precisely known. It may be a nonterminating computation which produces ever more bits of the
number. The length of description of the computation in then the K-complexity, which in either case is bounded by
technology, by what can actually be written, which is essential, since mathematics consists in saying how such physical
symbolic representations will behave if they follow certain rules, i.e. if one carries out a computation of some sort. Math finds
that the computation described in one way is the same or dual to one described another way, so one algorithm may be
substituted for another, less efficient one. If the result is an irrational number one can have at most another algorithm for
producing more bits of it, with less work (moving symbolic values around).
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

since mathematics consists in saying how such physical symbolic representations will behave if they follow certain
rules

Errrr, no, that is actually not what mathematics is about, at all. It is the other way around. Mathematics is about the
study of particular systems of concepts built on logic, ie. of perfectly "ideal" systems. Sometimes a particular system
describes reality with a good fit, sometimes not, but this does not invalidate any particular part or form of
mathematics. The fact that you cannot have "i" potatoes doesn't invalidate complex numbers. This is why you have
several geometries, for example. And in any such "ideal" system of concepts and axioms which can describe your
"practical" real numbers, the existence of the the impractical (K-random) ones will follow. You cannot have one
without the other.
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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago • edited

Thanks for bothering to reply to my comment. I understand bricks and building houses with them. I mean, at least I
believe that is possible. But what, I wonder is logic, and how do you build with it?

The fact that you can describe certain quantities and perform efficient calculations with complex numbers is an
example of the general paradigm of one computational process leading to the same result as another. The
interpretation of "i" as a physical object is as straightforward as the Y-register. At the end of your comment you beg to
be believed that "in any such "ideal" system... the existence of" unwritten numbers "will follow." However, I do not
believe that I live in ideal system. Also, I am instructed that I cannot have physical reality without the ghost of Plato's
garden, but I don't see that.
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

 But what, I wonder is logic, and how do you build with it?

This is indeed a difficult issue, but you cannot even start to tackle the "reality" of numbers without having some sort
of an idea about it.

The interpretation of "i" as a physical object is as straightforward as the Y-register.

This is just a visualisation, not an interpretation or a model. It loses many important properties of complex numbers.

And of course this same abstraction is in play immediately with all mathematics. You can have one potato or two
potatoes, but you cannot have "one" or "two" in itself, without the, you know, potato. Similarly, in the world there are
very complex phenomena for which certain mental structures - like real or complex numbers - make a lot of sense.

At the end of your comment you beg to be believed that "in any such "ideal" system... the existence of" unwritten
numbers "will follow."

You don't need to believe me, really. This is just mathematics and logic. They have even more awesome theories .

However, I do not believe that I live in ideal system.

see more

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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago

Y-register: by implementing the rules of complex arithmetic in hardware, I can carry out numerical computations.
Sometimes it will turn out that the result of one computation is the same as the result of another. Sometimes one of
these two will involve fewer arithmetic or logical operations. You can express this as an equation. That is math.

The problem with your "materialism" is that you think that, as a material system, you are able to access "ideal" things
which appear to "exist" in some other realm, and you even formulate arguments about this "existence" and why it is
necessarily present (exists) even though it has no substance. If you were a materialist, you would know that only the
symbols, the physical representation of these objects, and your carrying out of algorithms, i.e. transformations of
these objects according to rules, themselves also expressed/embodied in physical form, can have any consequence
in our universe, including your ability to think, speak and write about them. So, all these "truths" you believe you are
apprehending are just the mechanistic computations of your own brain, to the extent you are able to bend your brain
to carry them out accurately. Our brains are of course terribly inefficient for numerical computations, but rather
effective at other forms of computation (symbolic, spatial, analogical, etc.).

In a true materialist viewpoint, while it is possible that physics could be derived from pure mathematics, it is
necessary that all mathematics be derivable from pure physics (if that were ever known).
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

Y-register: by implementing the rules of complex arithmetic in hardware, I can carry out numerical computations.
Sometimes it will turn out that the result of one computation is the same as the result of another. Sometimes one
of these two will involve fewer arithmetic or logical operations. You can express this as an equation. That is math.

I have no idea what you are talking about. And I do know a little math, quite a bit of programming and have a small
insight into mathematical logic. What is the "Y register"? (Again, I'm not a complete amateur in this area, so please
be serious.)

The problem with your "materialism" is that you think that, as a material system, you are able to access "ideal"
things which appear to "exist" in some other realm, and you even formulate arguments about this "existence" and
why it is necessarily present (exists) even though it has no substance.

Never mind that I actually *explicitly* said the opposite, here: "But these ideal systems are what mathematics is
actually studying. Not the real world, but the abstract world inside our heads. What degree the real world conforms to
our "ideal" structures is a different question. We know very well that in many cases, the conformance is far from
complete."

If you were a materialist, you would know that only the symbols, the physical representation of these objects, and
your carrying out of algorithms, i.e. transformations of these objects according to rules, themselves also
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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago

So, as you know, just about all CPUs have something called a Y-register, and it is usually a FP register directly
addressed by some set of op codes, and there are usually lots of registers with different names, as well as lower
levels of storage, any of which can be used to hold a value representing the imaginary component of a complex
number, so that complex arithmetic can be implemented.

The rest of your comment repeats the claims that math (the human activity) is the study of "ideal systems that only
exist in people's mind" yet I am only pointing out that whatever is going on "in people's mind" must actually be
something that is going on in the ph sical orld if nothing else e ists and m st be f ll acco ntable (in principle if
something that is going on in the physical world, if nothing else exists, and must be fully accountable (in principle, if
not in practice) in terms, ultimately, of physics, and certainly not in violation of it.

If any argument that can pass through your hand or mouth purports to show that this other world, the ideal one that
exists only in minds, must exist, i.e. that the argument could not be made if that world did not exist, then I must ask
how the existence of that world has been able to affect this one so as to cause your mouth or hand to move so, or
how I should understand that its nonexistence would interfere with your ability to form such words.

It is true that I don't know for sure that the human brain does not violate the physical rules that seem to describe how
everything else in the universe works; that is why I admit to taking the stance of "materialism."
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

So, as you know, just about all CPUs have something called a Y-register, and it is usually a FP register directly
addressed by some set of op codes, and there are usually lots of registers with different names, as well as lower
levels of storage, any of which can be used to hold a value representing the imaginary component of a complex
number, so that complex arithmetic can be implemented.

So, it was just a random and meaningless general reference to a particular register. And frankly, I do not know
whether "just about all CPUs have something called a Y-register". Certainly just about all CPUs have registers but
there's nothing special about "Y-registers" in general (maybe in some specific architecture). I actually do understand
this stuff pretty well, so the completely irrelevant technical terms like "opcodes" and "FP registers" are not really
going to impress me.

And you don't need floating point registers to implement calculations with complex numbers - and calculations
themselves are of course just one small part of mathematics, which is mostly about building and extending these
complex systems in one's head.

The rest of your comment repeats the claims that math (the human activity) is the study of "ideal systems that only
exist in people's mind" yet I am only pointing out that whatever is going on "in people's mind" must actually be
something that is going on in the physical world,if nothing else exists, and must be fully accountable (in principle, if
not in practice) in terms ultimately of physics and certainly not in violation of it
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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago

Don't you see the difference between saying (obviously falsely) that one cannot imagine or mathematically describe
violations of physics, and (correctly) that thinking itself cannot violate physics, and must therefore be accountable in
terms of it?
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

Of course I do - that's *exactly* what I was talking about all this time. That the world of our "ideas", that has its own
rules that can be consistent and coherent and still contradict "physics" is what mathematics studies (well, it only
studies parts) and that these ideas (like K-random numbers) have rules and consequences. This was *exactly* what
my first post was about, here:

Mathematics is about the study of particular systems of concepts built on logic, ie. of perfectly "ideal" systems.
Sometimes a particular system describes reality with a good fit, sometimes not, but this does not invalidate any
particular part or form of mathematics.

You tried to counter with the argument that the "reality" of complex numbers does not expand beyond their particular
implementation, and I disagreed with that. Complex numbers and real numbers and transcendental numbers and K-
randomness are concepts in these "ideal" systems.

You started philosophising about the "existence" of numbers and what mathematics was about so I thought you were
interested in this issue. It was you who brought up "thinking" being a material process and all I said was that that is
mostly *irrelevant* for what mathematics studies and has not effect on the "reality" of a particular set of numbers.
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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago

Since we have debated before, on CommonDreams, where I believe the issue was GMOs (on that, you should read
David Rotman, Keith Kloor, Pamela Ronald and Mark Lynas), I am just wondering if you came here in pursuit of me
or whether this topic is really one of your own interests.

In any case, you seem to stubbornly not get the point. Materialism, or physicalism (the doctrine that physical
existence is the only existence and any other apparition of some thing's existence must be a consequence of what
physically exists) does not permit physical things to explore nonphysical or alternate-universe realms of existence,
therefore our "minds" (which must be physically identical with our brains, and logically distinguished from them only
as aspects, i.e. views of one existing thing) cannot explore any ideal worlds of mathematics. If such worlds exist, in
any sense, they cannot have any consequences in our world, such as your reporting your apprehension of them. The
explanation for that will be found in the physics of human brain matter and of common experience, its extensions and
recombinations. No math is done without mathematicians (or artificial ones) setting up structures with rules enforced,
 ( ) g p
either by local physics of the symbol carriers themselves, or by a supervisory intelligence. When you have that in
place, you can carry out a computation. Or an intelligence may recognize that the computation would be equivalent
to another, much simpler one. That is the art of math, but that again works by the enforcement of rules on a formal
system, e.g. algebra or calculus. All this can be done by things in the physical world. No ideal worlds needed or
allowed.
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Atomsk > Guest • 6 years ago • edited

Have we? I don't really recall, but maybe we have, as it looks like an issue we are both interested in.

In any case, you seem to stubbornly not get the point. Materialism, or physicalism (the doctrine that physical
existence is the only existence and any other apparition of some thing's existence must be a consequence of what
physically exists) does not permit physical things to explore nonphysical or alternate-universe realms of existence,
therefore our "minds" (which must be physically identical with our brains, and logically distinguished from them
only as aspects, i.e. views of one existing thing) cannot explore any ideal worlds of mathematics. If such worlds
exist, in any sense, they cannot have any consequences in our world, such as your reporting your apprehension of
them. The explanation for that will be found in the physics of human brain matter and of common experience, its
extensions and recombinations.

No, actually I get the point pretty well. I understand very well what you are saying and anticipated this argument but it
misinterprets what I said completely.

Again. If someone writes software that uses a database table, does that database table have an existence? Where
does it exist? Can you look at it in its own terms, or can you only look at atoms and electrons - and not even them,
btw, but quarks and gluons? Does it not "exist"? What about the colour "red"? Does it exist? Do words "exist"? These
are even more complex things than mathematical concepts, and we still look at them on their own level of existence.
We know these are phenomena of emergent systems that have their own sets of rules and laws and behaviours If
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Guest > Atomsk • 6 years ago

Where is the Man in the Moon?

Our minds use many concepts; we organize the world into "objects" but the physical world is a single continuum
(notwithstanding quantization, inflationary cosmology, etc.). You may think of "red" as a band of wavelengths, a
particular human eye pigment and its absorption spectrum, an apparent eigenstate of the human visual system, or a
larger complex of meanings and associations, including the word.

Similarly, there is the concept of the database table as represented in the brains of programmers, and there are the
physical storage devices, and the computing system and its embodied logic and code; there is no further thing.

I think you are mostly wrong in saying that mental structures cannot behave arbitrarily. Rather, the discipline of logic
and mathematics is imposed on human brains by great effort and must be maintained by effort even when
internalized. How certain are we of anything even in mathematics? Get drunk enough and you might not know if
2+2=5. But we write our proofs in steps because we can't carry them all out at once. We run through the steps,
backwards and forwards, scrutinizing them from every angle trying to detect any missing step, any error or previously
unrecognized assumption. From time to time, someone finds one, and mathematics progresses.

I don't know what kind of materialism you subscribe to but mine does not mind being called names like "reductive...
simplistic... mechanical" since it is happy to be free of any counter-reductive, additionally complicated, or non-
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Atomsk > Guest • 5 years ago • edited

Where is the Man in the Moon?

Our minds use many concepts; we organize the world into "objects" but the physical world is a single continuum
(notwithstanding quantization, inflationary cosmology, etc.). You may think of "red" as a band of wavelengths, a
particular human eye pigment and its absorption spectrum, an apparent eigenstate of the human visual system, or
a larger complex of meanings and associations, including the word.

How do you *know* that the physical world is a single continuum? Isn't that just an assumption? And it is certainly
true that there always are emerging levels of organisation within the physical world around which classes of
phenomena *cluster* and that we have only been able to even *describe*, let alone *understand* these phenomena
when we handled these clusters in themselves as more-or-less consistent wholes. Once we look at the world as a
"continuum", we actually lose most phenomena we can observe. I understand this thinking because I used to have
the exact same model, but it's certainly not the only way you can imagine reality.

Similarly, there is the concept of the database table as represented in the brains of programmers, and there are
the physical storage devices, and the computing system and its embodied logic and code; there is no further thing.

There is an entire mathematical theory behind it, and somehow *no* implementations can circumvent its conclusions.
 None No matter how much you want no matter how disciplined you are - there are some things you can do and
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Guest > Atomsk • 5 years ago

Just to be clear, I am here agnostic about whether the ultimate description of fundamental physics, if there is one, will
be written in terms of continuous fields or finite quantities of some kind. My point was just that the boundaries people
draw around "objects" (of our minds) generally do not correspond to discontinuities in physics. Our skins, for
example, are hairy and porous, and molecules are constantly being exchanged with our environments. Yet our
minds' parsing of the world into "things" is perhaps necessary to the working of our intelligence; at least, we do not
know another model that works. Attempting to model the world in terms of multiphysics voxels would probably result
in one's being eaten by a tiger, or something.

As for the zombie argument, the point is not that you can't fool some of the people some of the time, it's just that
detecting a zombie in the real world would be easy, because it's repertoire of appropriate responses would be
severely limited by the combinatorial explosion of possible queries. Show me a zombie that can always respond
appropriately to any query up to length n, and I will ask a question of length n+1.
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Atomsk > Guest • 5 years ago • edited

Just to be clear, I am here agnostic about whether the ultimate description of fundamental physics, if there is one,
will be written in terms of continuous fields or finite quantities of some kind. My point was just that the boundaries
people draw around "objects" (of our minds) generally do not correspond to discontinuities in physics.

I understand that and that was exactly the meaning I used it in. That sentence showed how deeply interested you are
in this issue so I was really happy about it. Also, sorry about the late and somewhat rushed answer.

Yet our minds' parsing of the world into "things" is perhaps necessary
to the working of our intelligence; at least, we do not know another
model that works.

Or maybe it reflects some "deeper" reality of the world's structure. We simply do not know, so I think it makes a lot
more sense to leave this issue open - and that is exactly what my materialism does. There have been many
fundamental discoveries in science that changed our view of the world fundamentally and added what were basically
new dimensions to much scientific thought. The simplest theory of evolution, "survival of the fittest" itself changed the
way we saw some apparently intractable and unsolvable issues and thought about them. We will - hopefully - still
have a large number of similar developments ahead of us, so that is why it doesn't make sense to select *one* model
we have. Which is probably the most sophisticated and accurate one we ever created, for some purposes at least,
but still.

Regarding zombies: you said the problem was "computationally intractable" - and we do not know that. As for the
"query up to length n", how do you know that humans do not have the exact same limits? (Also, "length" does not
actually have much of a significance here, but maybe "complexity" does.) We do not know whether this is true or not.
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Guest > Atomsk • 5 years ago

"Query" may be understood as including extended 2-way conversation, e.g. you may consider the complete history
of our conversation up to now as the query for your next response. I see no evidence that however long this
conversation goes on, you will lack for another Turing-passable reply.
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Atomsk > Guest • 5 years ago

Oh, ok, but I still don't think that this is what makes it difficult :-) I did some work with AI and concept networks and
language and so on, and I don't think that's the biggest problem. The complexity of the network that you have to
"keep in focus" will initially increase but over the course of the exchange, its size seems to stabilise. Maybe I'm
wrong of course, but it was just a nitpick anyway, sorry.
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cerb • 6 years ago

Excellent written!
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Nilay Kumar • 6 years ago

Beautifully written! Thanks for placing Kolmogorov's insights into historical context!
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R.H. Joseph • 6 years ago

Whether one agrees with it or not, there is an epistemological perspective that challenges Kolmogorov's assertion "We can’t have positive
knowledge of the existence of the unknowable.” In fact, this epistemology illuminates why assertions of "absolute randomness" and
"absolute determinism" obtain.

Th i i i l h bj f i i bj i i If hi i l i i d d idi l h l h
The perspective is simple: the object of perception is subject to interpretation. If this epistemology is indeed veridical then not only are the
aforementioned opposing choices inevitably proffered by those electing to reify the perceived, but so too the posited (by others)
coincidencia oppositorum. A dyadic fundament composed of conflicting opposites or cyclical flux is commonplace amongst those who
would reify the object of perception.

There is a profound difference between "what cannot be known for certain" and that which we would prefer were not absolutely true. The
reason the choices "absolute randomness" and "absolute determinism" obtain is because we are primordially informed regarding the
essence of the object of perception; we are absolutely certain, we have positive knowledge, regarding the nature of the perceived.

Only subsequent to reification is the object of perception "unknowable", or, as others would characterize it, "ineffable." Conversely,
reification establishes the "terra firma" (or, dare I say, the metamathematical invariant) enabling "countless scientific and engineering
projects."

"Truly random, unpredictable objects are complex..." Complexity (like multiplicity) is an artifact of reification and the individuation of the
characterizations of the perceived. Reified first principles (a metamathematical invariant, for example) cannot exclude contradiction. The
object of perception is not "complex," it merely cannot conform to the syntactic limitations imposed by reification.
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Daz • 6 years ago

The discussion about whether a uniformly distributed probability measure on a sphere implies a uniform distribution on a great circle is
incoherent. The absence of virtually any actual mathematical achievement by Kolmogorov (besides his important axioms for probability) is
extremely strange in an article on an eminent mathematician by a lecturer on the history of mathematics. The information content of this
article is amazingly low.
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david • 6 years ago

Excellent! I have used Kolmogorov's rule for years in my financial trading to determine the expected return on a number of different trading
decision rules for which I had no prior knowledge of the distributions that generated the results, yet had no idea of the breadth of his work
or its interaction with his navigation of life in the Soviet Union. Thanks!
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Taylor • 6 years ago

Great article - impressively accessible even though it deals with very high-level, abstract concepts.
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Ivan Kryukov • 6 years ago

Would like to thank you for a beautifully written article which quite acutely touches the realities of the Soviet regime. Splendid piece.
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Maj. Pita • 6 years ago • edited

The great circle alien landing section really didn't make any sense.

Rather than alien landings maybe meteor strikes would be a better example? One might assume aliens have a preference for temperature,
maybe they don't like landing in water. I'm sure you get the idea.

Asteroids and meteors have a preference for the ecliptic, which might increase the chances of a collision with Earth along the equator.
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Topologist • 6 years ago

This has one of best-written first paragraphs I've read in a popular science article. Popular math articles should be like this: where even
those with a background in the subject can learn something new and valuable. Thank you for pointing me to the Borel-Kolmogorov
paradox.
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Mike • 6 years ago

> Two events occurring simultaneously could be represented by the intersection of their measures

Rather, just "their intersection".

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anon • 6 years ago

No mention of Bayes ?
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groovamos • 6 years ago • edited

Thanks so much- fascinating - some mystery about this man and hs work has been with me as professional EE with some experience
applying Shannon's work over recent years.
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GuyFlaneur • 6 years ago

This article is crediting Kolmogorov with the invention of Information Theory, and that's just wrong. Claude Shannon and John Von
 Neuman did that. .
I found a paper on the issue, explaining both. Kolmogorov's and his collaborator's work was 15 years later.
"In the Shannon approach we are interested in the minimum expected number of bits to transmit a message from a random source of
known characteristics through an error-free channel. In Kolmogorov complexity we are interested in the minimum number of bits from
which a particular message can effectively be reconstructed."
They are related, but quite distinct. I doubt the author of the article is clear on that.
What Kolmogorov' modern probability did to a large extent was to make mathematicians happy about something used by others - like
physicists- forever. I certainly never gave two hoots in hell about the measure-theoretic foundations of probability theory. It took
mathematicians about200 years after Newton invented it to make themselves happy with calculus.

Personally, he sucked. He turned on his mentor during Stalin's purges.

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groovamos > GuyFlaneur • 6 years ago

The piece makes no claim as to who invented information theory. And Shannon's colleagues Ralph Hartley, Harry Nyquist, and
Norbert Weiner were the guys laying the foundations of information theory that Shannon built upon during WW2, I'm not seeing
how von Neumann contributed to the theory in the way you obviously do.
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Vinay Ayilavarapu • 6 years ago

Kolmogorov truly understand the beauty in complexity of the world
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Tony Prost • 6 years ago

No mention of Pascal???
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VMC • 6 years ago

Great article - thanks
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Ahmed Khamassi • 6 years ago

Awesome, very well written and insightful. I'm already searching for books to read on or by Kolmogorov.
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Ross Cousens • 6 years ago

I thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you.
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