This paper argues that optimization is not a law of the universe, and that morality and the manner of being of intimate relation are not, in their structure, optimization problems. It proceeds in two movements that it is careful to keep apart. The first is a formal proof, carrying no value judgment, that intimate relation furnishes no well-defined optimization problem: the value at stake is in part non-structurable, since the drive, which any complete objective must include, resists representation as a term; it is relational, generated within the relation and existing only there, so that no external standpoint could fix the objective; it is incommensurable, so that to price certain goods is to betray rather than mismeasure them; and the subject is constituted within the relation rather than given before it, so that the optimizer the model presupposes is a product of the process it is meant to stand outside of. Each failure strikes a distinct precondition, and any one leaves the operation of maximization undefined. The second movement takes that result as given and criticizes the imposition of the frame regardless. To optimize where no optimization problem exists converts a value that should circulate into one that can be settled and drawn off, in the manner the theory of generative justice names as extractive computation; it is a symptom of the crisis of the symbolic and of a life-world habituated to the logic of capital, under which a local, historical operation is projected onto the cosmos as its law; and it mistakes the kind of thing morality is, since an optimizing practice, even a successful one, may fail as an ethics, the optimal and the good being orthogonal. The paper then recovers a rationality that responds rather than maximizes, described through response, attunement, and the sustaining of generation, and it closes in polyphony, refusing to name a new master objective, since to do so would reinstate the frame. That refusal is the paper's positive claim, enacted in its form.
This study proposes a structural model for understanding digital trust in smart-market environments by comparing the market-based trust architecture of Korea and the state-based trust architecture of China. Although both countries rely on similar technological foundationsâblockchain, data infrastructure, AI systems, and CBDCâtheir institutional path dependencies and regulatory philosophies have produced divergent trust mechanisms. To explain these differences, the study introduces the 4-Layer Trust Architecture (4LTAâSeo), comprising incentives, rule enforcement, verification (data/AI), and institutional linkage. This framework conceptualizes tokens as digital institutions that integrate these layers to automate trust formation and oversight.Methodologically, the research applies Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) using policy documents, technical whitepapers, and regulatory texts from both countries. It incorporates Zhang & Wangâs DTI (DataâAlgorithmâRiskâPrivacy) framework to compare how information architectures shape verification dynamics and trust costs. The study analyzes how institutional configurations rearrange the weighting and function of each trust layer, producing different stability and cost outcomes.Findings are expected to show that Koreaâs market-driven architecture emphasizes incentives and behavioral inducement, while Chinaâs state-driven model prioritizes rule enforcement and systemic integration. The research clarifies how tokens function as "units of trust" only when embedded within institutionally coherent architectures. Ultimately, the study offers structural insights for reinstitutionalizing trust in digital systems, with implications for Web3 governance, CBDC design, and digital public administration.
This chapter turns to recent advances in sociology of singularities (Reckwitz 2020) to advance the study of digital sigularization in four key respects. First, by opening up singularization research to the realities of late-modern society, dubbed as society of singularities by Reckwitz. Second, to (re)consider the role of digitalization and technology in singularization. The sociology of singularities finds in digitalization one of the key structural drivers propelling society from industrial modernity dominated by the social logic of the general to society of singularities (the social logic of the particular/singular). Third, Reckwitz offers useful tools to explore the processes and practices of collective singularization. Lastly, his sociology of singularities provides a fresh vantage point for further reflecting on Web3 and the evolution of Web imaginaries covered in Part II of the book.
In this troubling and wise book on the European Union (EU), Alexander Somek puts forward a provocative reconstruction and assessment of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and of the policy advocated by the European Commission. The core claim of Individualism is that magistrates and Eurocrats are slowly but steadily driving European polities away from the basic tenets of the democratic Rechtsstaat and into forms of inverted authoritarianism. Through a handful of leading cases and through a myriad of âsoft law initiatives,â the idea of a government of laws and the normative dignity of a constitution authored by the people is being subverted. Indeed, the democratic constitution is in the process of being replaced by a congeries of norms aimed at the pragmatic realization of the ideal of a free market inhabited by apolitical individuals. This is the peculiar European road to Tocquevillian individualism through the mirage of absolute freedom, through liberty unencumbered by political ties and loyalties toward a particular national community. At some points, the reader senses that this is a detail in what the author conceives of as the larger fresco of the history of modernity (or to be more precise, of how modernity has gone awry). Indeed, the logical conclusion of the book (even if not physically at the text's end) is the extremely somber passage in which Somek claims that â[t]he ideas of the French Revolution finally seem to be lost in Europe. The age of modern constitutional law is coming to its conclusionâ (p. 243).1 Striking a very dissonant note, the author thus claims that the usual Kantian optimism about the emergence of a ânewâ and âcosmopolitanâ European order is, at best, delusionary. There is a very dark side to European integration besides the rough and tumble of referenda. This grand argument is rendered powerful by the gusto with which the author moves across disciplinary borders. Indeed, the book is at least three things at the same time, namely: (1) a politico-theoretical assessment of the basis of legitimacy of European constitutional law, as it stands; (2) a constitutional and normative assessment of European policy making, with a special focus and emphasis on the Commission; (3) a critical and original legal-dogmatic reconstruction of some of the leading constitutional cases of the European Court of Justice. The core of the disheartening thesis of Individualism is that the judges sitting in Luxembourg and the Eurocrats mingling in the Bruxellois buildings of the Commission would transform not only the concrete substance of supranational and national fundamental laws (as the standard narrative goes) but also the very structure of social integration in the old Continent. While the Court's rulings and the Commission's enactments have retained the form and appearance of a legal-constitutional discourse,2 the leading judgments of the men in robes and the myriad policy initiatives by the fonctionnaires have mutated the fundamental law of the Union into a dubious body of âdissonantâ law,3 no longer informed by the normativity of the self-government proper to democratic constitutional law but by that of (neoliberal) âapproximation.â The latter would sever the connection between law and critical practical reason by dissolving the very idea of the legal system as a normatively coherent whole and replacing it with the âpragmaticâ reduction of law to a casuistic logic of appropriateness. It would also make political power vanish by negating the political condition and pretending to bring about a full decentralization of sovereignty, which Somek describes with poignant irony in chapter 11. On the one hand, Somek places considerable emphasis on the regulatory inventiveness of the Commission. In chapters 5 and 12, for example, he peers behind the jargon used by the Commission in explaining itself, providing a crucial diagnosis of how individualism is tied to a peculiar form of âcradle to grave,â inexpensive, and paternalistic welfare state (a kind of welfare state on the cheap). Instead of classical and expensive redistributive measures involving personal taxes and personal benefits, the inexpensive European welfare state would seem to be about the zero-cost policing of personal habits. Thus, the obsession with initiatives aimed at rectifying the smoking, drinking, eating, and exercising habits of the population. Add to this the further twist of grounding such initiatives on the need to realize the internal market, and you must agree with the author's sarcasm: âApparently, regulatory difference causes melancholiaâ (p. 250) and justifies the exercise of a liberal priesthood on the side of European institutions (p. 255). But the most intriguing part of the argument is Somek's discordant interpretation of the case law of the European Court of Justice. By a skilled dissection of the leading cases concerning, on the one hand, the division of competences among the Union and the member states and, on the other, citizenship in the Unionâor, to be more precise, the free movement of workers relabeled as the free movement of citizens by the Court itselfâSomek reveals the extent to which the Court has radically altered the relationship between economics, society, and law on the old Continent. Rulings concerning the powers of the Union and, very significantly, the key Tobacco Advertising decision,4 have, he claims, consecrated a radical shift in the understanding of what the âinternal marketâ is about. While seeming to ârein inâ the power of the Union, the Court, in truth, has abandoned any attempt at limiting the societal sphere of the single market and the radiating normative force of economic freedoms. In particular, the Court has reversed its old limiting jurisprudence according to which the Union's competence was to be determined by the âcenter of gravityâ approach or, what is the same thing, by pinpointing the regulatory interest of a measure and determining whether it was about creation of the internal market or achievement of a socioeconomic objective (the latter being reserved to member states). From Tobacco Advertising onward, the âinternal marketâ has trumped other interestsâthat is, any measure that removes a sufficiently serious obstacle to an economic freedom is held by the Court to fall within the competence of the Union, even if its regulatory center of gravity lies in an area of national competence, such as protection of health, promotion of education, or combating tax fraud. As a result, the ECJ has abandoned the so-called liberal market paradigmâwhich regarded economic integration as a way to achieve wider political goalsâand replaced it with a supposedly holistic market understanding that looks upon the four economic freedoms5 as the ultimate objective to which the organization of all of society must be subordinated. Thus, all socioeconomic norms are consequently viewed with suspicion as potential obstacles to economic freedoms.6 Once envisaged as a means of realizing openly political goals, economic freedoms have become the core of the material constitution of the Union. They are now at the heart of the conception of politics and society as enshrined in positive European constitutional law, a conception that, while well known in European constitutional history, is somewhat at odds with the one endorsed by postwar national constitutions. Meanwhile, the line of cases led by MartĂnez Sala7 and Baumbast8 threatens to redefine the very understanding of European citizenship. On the face of it, these cases might seem to have replaced the âmarketâ denizen of Community law with a âpoliticalâ European citizen by extending the number of holders of the Community right to free movement beyond the rank and file of workers to the general class of nationals of a member states and, perhaps, even more widely to permanent residents of a member state. However, such rulings have far less benevolent implications, because the practical effect of this kind of rights discourse is to expand the possibilities for the ECJ to review any national law on the ground that it violates economic freedoms. The upshot of the Commission's regulatory activities and the courtsâ deregulatory activities is a full recalibration of Community law, which is softened, regarding the strong parties in socioeconomic relations even as it is hardened into abrasive forms of âliberal paternalismâ that ânudgeâ9 us for our own good and purported freedom. The overall political result is the decadence of citizenship, which becomes a hollow category, inadvertently supersededâby what, we cannot be sure. The weak pulse of European constitutional and ordinary politics only amplifies the consequences of these developments. The complex blend of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism that lies behind the institutional structure of the Union is, indeed, an impediment to the interconnection of national political debates. Consequently, both the Court and the Commission lack democratic reference points by which to orientate their decisions. As a result, the active citizen is being superseded by the oxymoronic âindividualisticâ citizen (chapters 10 and 12), who is persuaded that it is in her own interest to become a docile subject delegating all power to rulers. It is because politics has vanished from the picture that political strife can be presented as a distraction or a threat, from which the really free individual has to be liberated by proper men in the know, or, put differently, by the selected few capable of handling and, above all, managing the restless many. All these major transformations would account forâamong other thingsâthe infatuation with a range of new and fanciful political idioms: no longer government, but âgovernance.â No longer capitalists, but âstakeholders.â No longer democratic confrontation, but arcadic âpartnerships.â Somek takes considerable pains to show that, while the terms may be new, this is not uncharted territory but, rather, a political involution toward a mixed constitution of sorts, guided by the neoliberal mirage of absolute individualistic freedom. The form of law is kept but put to the service of a rather Lenin-inspired regulatory politics, limited to the administration of things (chapters 10 and 13). Both the legal-dogmatic reconstruction of the ECJ's case law and the normative assessment of the EU's legitimacy seem more than âdisturbingly plausible,â to quote a blurb printed on the book's cover. However, what seems to be absent from the train of reasoning of Individualism, unfortunately, is a proper consideration of the temporal dimension of European integration. A question that might be raised is whether the âpost-constitutionalâ and âindividualisticâ drives that Somek describes are intrinsic to European integration, or whether they result from a mutation caused by political and judicial decisions. The point is not only of historical interest but is extremely salient in pragmatic terms. Indeed, the reader is left pondering whether European Union and Community law are doomedâis European law, indeed, postconstitutional in character?âor whether they can be redeemed and their normative promise realized. And if they can be, what is to be done to extricate the Union from its present fix? In that regard, the author seems to point in conflicting directions (in the affirmative, on pages 31, 241, or 267, and, in the negative, on pages 121 and 123). One can only guess that somebody who devotes time and effort to write a brilliant book about European integration is likely to find some promise in a federal Continental union. Be that as it may, it seems to me that Somek's thesis needs to be tested by going further back in time. It was in the early and mid-â80s when a major turn in the perception of the relationship between politics, economics, and law took place both at the national and at the supranational level.10 This event consisted in the massive albeit slow transformation of the understanding of both national and constitutional law. At the European level, the rulings in Cassis de Dijon11 (certainly following the opening in Dassonville);12 the policy decisions reflected in the White Paper on the Completion of the Internal Market of June 1985;13 and the constitutional option for the Single European Act14 were conducive to the rise of what Somek labels âmarket holismâ and âhollowâ European citizenship. This turn of events is also reflected in the substantive shifts from the common to the single market15 and from the understanding of economic freedoms as a way of operationalizing the principle of nondiscrimination (and thus reconcilable with autonomous national socioeconomic policies) to their characterization as realizations of European citizenship. Individually, each of these shifts may be supported by reasonable arguments; however, as a whole, they provided cover for âprivatizingâ our understanding of freedom, and for the recharacterization of national welfare and tax norms as obstacles to economic freedoms. If this is correct, we could claim that it was these decisions that changed the structural and substantive genetic code of the Union and of its law. These decisions, and not some intrinsic features of Community law, are to blame for the progressive erosion of the socioeconomic preconditions for meaningful national socioeconomic policies. Thus, if there is nothing intrinsically rotten in the state of Europe and in its legal order, Individualism perhaps should be read less as a diagnosis of the unavoidable fate of the Union, of its institutions and its laws, than as a dystopic projection of what can go wrong if we keep on treading our present path. Furthermore, it seems to me that Individualism merely suggests, without fully developing, the links between integration through postconstitutional law and the emergence of the so-called governance paradigm. Indeed, the Panglossian description of radically innovative procedures of collective will-formation through governance, such as the Open Method of Coordination,16 which, with little critical research underpinning it, nonetheless attracted wide comment, or the more esoteric mechanism of coordination of economic policies in Euroland through the Eurogroup seem to point in the same directionâthat of overriding constitutional law. To use words that were very popular in policy circles in the â90s, European governance should become the new grammar of European law. In more pedestrian English, this means replacing supposedly quaint or obsolete constitutional law, tainted by its relationship with the nation-state, with a new array of procedures and institutional formations; it will be through that the collective will may be formed. That sounds very similar, indeed, to the âdissonant lawâ that Somek reads into the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and the policy initiatives of the Commission. Still, it is ultimately uncalled-for to criticize an author for what was not done in a book that is as rich and suggestive as Somek's Individualism.
From a historical perspective, the multiverse is just one more step in our progress from geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to cosmocentric worldview. Indeed, several lessons of relevance to the multiverse debate can be gleaned from considering the history of this progression. To the ancient Greeks, the heavenly spheres were the unchanging domain of the divine and therefore outside science by definition. It required Tycho de Brahe's observation of a supernova in 1572 and the realization that its apparent position did not change as the Earth moved around the Sun to dash that view. Because this contradicted the Aristotelian view that the heavens cannot change, the claim was at first received sceptically. Frustrated by those who had eyes but would not see, Brahe wrote: âO crassa ingenia. O coecos coeli spectators.â (Oh thick wits. Oh blind watchers of the sky.) Lesson 1: Theoretical prejudice should not blind one to the evidence. Of course, we will never see the other universes themselves â in that sense we are necessarily blind, so this point might seem irrelevant to the multiverse. However, I would claim that the analogue of Tycho's supernova is the fine-tunings. Long after Galileo had speculated that the Milky Way consists of stars like the Sun and Newton had shown the laws of Nature could be extended beyond the solar system, there was still a prejudice that the investigation of this region was beyond the domain of science. In 1842 August Comte said of the study of stars: âNever, by any means, will we be able to study their chemical compositions. The field of positive philosophy lies entirely within the Solar System, the study of the universe being inaccessible in any possible science.â Comte had not foreseen the advent of spectroscopy, which identified absorption features in stellar spectra with chemical elements. Lesson 2: New observational developments are hard to anticipate. Perhaps we will find extra dimensions at the Large Hadron Collider or even create baby universes in the laboratory one day. Cosmology attained the status of a proper science in 1915, when the advent of general relativity gave it a secure mathematical basis. Nevertheless, for a further decade there was resistance to the idea that science could be extended beyond our galaxy. Indeed many astronomers refused to believe that there was anything beyond. Although Kant had speculated as early as 1755 that some nebulae are âisland universesâ similar to the Milky Way, most astronomers continued to adopt a galactocentric view until the 1920s. Indeed, the most popular model of the galaxy at the start of the 20th century â Kapteyn's Universe â even had the Sun at its centre! The controversy came to a head in 1920 when Heber Curtis defended the island universe theory in a famous debate with Harlow Shapley. The issue was finally resolved in 1924, when Edwin Hubble measured the distance to M31 using Cepheid variable stars. In many ways this parallels the current debate about whether anything exists beyond our horizon. Lesson 3: More conservative cosmologists might prefer to maintain the cosmocentric view but perhaps the tide of history is against them. The evidence for other universes can never be as decisive as that for extragalactic nebulae but the transformation of worldview required may be just as necessary. A few years later Hubble obtained radial velocities and distance estimates for several dozen nearby galaxies, thereby discovering that all galaxies are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. The most natural interpretation of this is that space itself is expanding, as indeed had been predicted by Alexander Friedmann in 1920 on the basis of general relativity. Einstein rejected this model at the time because he believed the universe (i.e. the Milky Way) was static and he even introduced an extra repulsive term into his equations â the cosmological constant â to allow this possibility. After Hubble's discovery, he described this as his âbiggest blunderâ. Lesson 4: One should not necessarily reject theoretical predictions because they have no observational support. In fact, Einstein continued to uphold the static model even after the evidence was against it â he only accepted the Friedmann model in 1931, several years after Hubble published his data â so knowing how much weight to attach to theory and observation can be tricky. Let me now address George's specific issues. There are plausibly galaxies just beyond the visual horizon, where we cannot see them, so we can extend this argument, step by step, to way beyond the horizon and infer there are many different universes that we cannot see. Even though we can never prove what happens outside our visual horizon, the standard FRW model has been well tested within it, so there is surely some probabilistic sense in which one can extrapolate models at least some way beyond it. Also the smooth dependence of the CMB fluctuations on angular separation (whatever the source of those fluctuations) gives no reason to suppose that anything strange happens just beyond the horizon. George himself seems to accept this, which illustrates the problem of regarding speculations as non-scientific just because they involve the unobservable. Admittedly one's confidence in any proposed model must decrease as one extrapolates ever further beyond the horizon, but one should beware of using Rees's slippery slope argument in reverse: we cannot extrapolate to scales much larger than the horizon, so we should not extrapolate to scales only slightly outside it. The problem comes when one makes the jump from the Level I to Level II multiverse (which is where George's argument that the FRW solution extends everywhere must fail). In fact, the inflationary scenario does provide an answer to this. For if the amplitude of the density fluctuations increases slightly with scale (as appears to be the case), one can predict the scale at which the FRW approximation breaks down. Current data suggest that this happens at around 10100 horizon scales. The existence of a multiverse is implied by inflation, which is verified by the CMB anisotropy observations. In particular, known physics leads to chaotic inflation and this implies a multiverse. There are two distinct issues here: does one believe in inflation and does inflation lead to a multiverse? Inflation is attractive because it resolves several cosmological conundra. Quantum fluctuations of the scalar field can also generate the small density perturbations that eventually give rise to galaxies and large-scale structure and it is impressive that the predicted dependence of the CMB fluctuations on angular separation is almost exactly as observed by the WMAP satellite (Spergel et al. 2003). Of course, the evidence for inflation is not conclusive â there is still no evidence for any scalar field in Nature!â but the Level I multiverse is still a good bet. As regards the second issue, I agree with George that the evidence for the sort of chaotic inflation that leads to a Level II multiverse is more equivocal, and certainly one cannot infer this from the form of the CMB anisotropies. There are now around 100 models of inflation and, while Linde (1990) claims that the existence of other domains with different coupling constants is generic, this is debatable. The multiverse idea is testable, because it can be disproved if we determine there are closed spatial sections in the universe (for example, if the curvature is positive). This is really a straw man argument because we have seen that inflation is only one of several multiverse proposals â for example, quantum cosmology models give closed spatial sections â and not all inflationary models require that the spatial sections be open anyway. However, George is surely right to stress the importance of looking for circles in the CMB. The idea of small universes is not mainstream but it has the advantage that it can be tested. The existence of a multiverse is the only physical explanation for the fine-tuning of parameters that leads to our existence. In the absence of direct evidence for other universes, I regard the anthropic fine-tunings as the best indirect evidence. (A multiverse in which the constants were the same everywhere would have no explanatory value.) I agree with George that the fine-tunings do not constitute proof, but they still carry weight. One can argue about how impressive the fine-tunings are (could we really exclude life if the constants changed a lot?), but I still think the number and precision of the tunings is remarkable. Nearly 30 years ago I wrote a review with Martin Rees about these fine-tunings (Carr and Rees 1979). In the intervening period a few of them have gone away (e.g. inflation may explain the value of the cosmological density parameter) but most of them have got stronger. Without a multiverse one may be forced to adopt a non-physical explanation like a fine-tuner, which is why Neil Manson (2003) claims that âthe multiverse is the last resort of the desperate atheistâ. This is not necessarily true â Paul Davies (2006) advocates a âthird wayâ in which the laws of Nature evolve in a single universe in such a way that life can arise â but if you reject the multiverse, you certainly lower the scientific status of the anthropic arguments. I agree with George's argument against physical infinities. However, we do not need an infinity to validate the anthropic principle â just a large number. The existence of a multiverse is implied by a probability argument: the universe is no more special than it need be to create life. In particular, the small value of the cosmological constant shows that other universes exist. George argues that multiverse theories are not useful because they cannot be disproved: if all possibilities exist somewhere, then they can explain all conceivable observations. However, the fact that we only observe one sample of the multiverse still allows the proposal to be refuted at a given confidence level. Statistical predictions still qualify as science and that is why Rees has stressed the importance of calculating the probability distribution for various parameters across the universes. Indeed, a core difference between the Bayesian and frequentist views is the former's willingness to make inferences from single, and possibly unrepeatable, pieces of data. George rejects the Î argument but there is no doubt that this has been very influential in attracting many physicists to the multiverse cause. It used to be thought that Î was exactly zero and it was then plausible that there might be some physical (non-anthropic) explanation for this. However, the fact that Î is non-zero but very tiny is a profound mystery that completely changes the situation. Critics say that we cannot know what distribution for Î is predicted across the multiverse and that is correct. It may be simplistic to assume that the distribution is uniform, but postulating that there is a spike in precisely the observed region is just as improbable as what we are trying to explain. Even if one does not accept inflation, multi-verses are predicted by many theories of particle physics. It is still legitimate to invoke the existence of other universes for which there can be no direct evidence if one has a theory (like M-theory) that predicts this. It is not necessary to check all predictions of the theory for it to be considered scientific (e.g. we cannot probe inside black holes and we cannot see quarks but we still regard these as subjects for scientific discourse); it is only necessary to test some of them. Does M-theory qualify in this respect? George claims no; it does not come under the purview of science because our confidence in it is based on faith and aesthetic considerations (mathematical beauty etc) rather than experimental data. Certainly he is not alone in this attitude. For example, Woit (2006) and Smolin (2007) dismiss M-theory as mathematics rather than physics because it has not made contact with observations after 20 years. However, I feel this rejection is premature. It may take 200 years to solve the equations of M-theory and test them, but the definition of what constitutes a scientific question should not depend on how difficult it is. The nature of science changes, so what is illegitimate science today may be legitimate tomorrow. The fundamental issue in the dispute between myself and George concerns which features of science are to be regarded as sacrosanct. Experimentation used to be regarded as sacrosanct but by that criterion all of astronomy would be excluded since one cannot experiment with stars and galaxies. Fortunately, one can still make observations and â since there are billions of these objects â Nature effectively performs experiments for us. Cosmologists are in worse shape because there is only one universe to observe and speculations about processes at very early and very late times have to be viewed as ultra-speculative. For this reason, more conservative physicists regard even relatively standard cosmological speculations as trespassing into metaphysics. George places a lot of emphasis on falsifiability, but not everybody in the philosophy of science agrees with Popper on this and it is surely dangerous to impose a philosophical prescription that prevents scientists changing the border of their field. As Susskind cautions, it would be a pity to miss out on some fundamental truth because of an over-restrictive definition of science. Of course, one needs some degree of falsifiability, but the question is, how much? It is certainly not fair to put M-theory in the same class as astrology. On the other hand, I share George's scepticism of the Level IV multiverse, which corresponds to universes governed by different mathematical structures. The view that any mathematically possible universe must exist somewhere seems untestable in a deeper sense than Levels I to III. The notion of a multiverse entails a new perspective of the nature of science and it is not surprising that this causes intellectual discomfort. But this situation has often occurred before and one should not be surprised if it happens again. The Cosmic Uroborus in figure 2 shows that the history of physics might be regarded as the extension of knowledge into ever smaller and ever larger scales. The ideas encountered at the two frontiers have often been viewed as part of philosophy rather than science, so in a sense the debate is nothing new. However, there is another sense in which the current situation is very special. This is because â for the first time â the boundaries at the largest and smallest scales have connected, as indicated by the top of the Cosmic Uroborus, so the two science/philosophy frontiers have merged. Does this merging represent the completion of science or merely the sort of transformation in the perceived nature of science that accompanies every paradigm shift? This is a contentious issue and clearly we do not yet know the answer. I accept that there may eventually be a limit to the sort of questions that science can address; George and I merely disagree on whether we have reached that limit with the multiverse. In any case, we are surely behoven to try to take science as far as possible. I will end with a comment by Steven Weinberg (2007) in his contribution to Universe or Multiverse?: âWe usually mark advances in the history of science by what we learn about Nature, but at certain critical moments the most important thing is what we discover about science itself. These discoveries lead to changes in how we score our work, in what we consider to be an acceptable theory.â
Paul Gertler, Harry Anthony Patrinos, Marta Rubio Codina
Mexico's Compensatory education programs provide extra resources to primary schools that enroll students in highly disadvantaged rural communities, thus increasing the supply of education.By reducing the price of schooling through school stipends conditional on school attendance and performance, Oportunidades is increasing the demand for schooling amongst its eligible beneficiary households.This study exploits the different phasing-in over time and space across these interventions to test their degree of complementarity (or substitutability).We focus on the effects on intermediate school quality indicators (failure, repetition and dropout) of teacher training, provision of supplies, and empowerment and financing of parent associations -on the supply side; and conditional on attendance cash transfers -on the demand side.Difference-in-difference estimates prove reducing the opportunity cost of schooling and decentralizing school management at the lower level as effective measures in improving educational outcomes.No robust evidence of synergies between the two interventions is found.