The Case Against Reality
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness." But what it means to "see reality as it is" is exactly what's in question! How could he possibly create a mathematical proof of a concept that lacks a definition?
This gets even more blatant when he suggests, toward the end, that he's "postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives." But that would mean that "seeing reality as it is" isn't even a coherent concept! If experience itself makes up reality, how could one's experiences not correspond to reality?
The guy is a crank. What he's arguing is a shoddy version of vitalism, dressed up in jargon.
And if evolutionary psychology is not your style, here's a take on the selfish gene. The purpose of the human organism is for shit to make more shit.
(btw, these were just jokes, I don't think anybody makes these in earnest)
Right, I got that. My point is that in order to define what it is to "match reality," you have to already have a theory of mind and consciousness.
Think of what he says just after that: > For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality.
This already has so much baggage to unpack that it's ludicrous. An organism which "sees" red or green already has consciousness--it's converting nerve stimuli into symbols which it interprets. An unconscious being wouldn't see a color, it would simply react. But let's say you do already have "consciousness." In that case, why is it necessarily going to be more complex to map the stimuli to "red" or "green" within consciousness, instead of prior to consciousness? For all we know, it'd be simpler to do the mapping within consciousness (put another way: to map the stimuli "consciously," or to be "conscious" of the mapping). To know which is more complex, we'd have to have a clear idea of what consciousness is, and how it works at a biological level.
(I don't think the metaphors I'm using here are accurate descriptions of how the mind works, incidentally. They're not much more than "just-so" stories. My point is that you have to have some kind of idea of what consciousness is before you can say things about a "function" which can "match said reality.")
Because it is. It is the usual physics-inspired pseudophilosophical blabla without any real grounding in philosophy, physics or intelligent thought. It caters to the "intellectual" esoteric wishing for a meta-universe, for some kind of god, for something apart from reality. It is rubbish, and on the same level as the ted-talk of the lunatic claiming to have found the perpetuum mobile and faster than light travel thanks to some circle-based mathematics given to him by his enlightened professor.
At the same time funny, sad and highly annoying if it comes up on places like here.
The claims in the article are annoyingly unscientific.
His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. Lots of papers online.
Searching for his CV didn't help: now I forced me through both his CV and this article. He didn't study physics but "Computational Psychology."(1)
And sadly it shows: Everything "quantum" he mentions in the article is simply invalid, easy to see for anybody with enough knowledge of physics. Quantum randomness occurs on different scales than where he tries to involve it.
Where he doesn't involve "quantum" the claims sound better.
The sad part is that he certainly had the chance to consult with the physicists. Why he haven't had, of if he had, why he ignored it, I don't know.
1) http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita....
http://www.fagginfoundation.org/articles-2/a-conceptual-fram...
You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert friend you can have that friend explain it to you.
You can find a list of his publications here: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/
This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the article: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf
In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".
I am definitely suspicious of scientists who act as the truth authority, and cast aspersions on lay people who don't understand their proofs. That attitude is antithetical to the spirit of science, which encourages skepticism and the democratization of thought.
More generally, it takes a lifetime of study to truly understand even a small aspect of physics. How can you expect someone to explain a lifetime of study in an article for lay people without glossing over the details? I trust the opinions of one physics professor about quantum mechanics much more than 1 million lay people.
Also: it is generally held that someone who has completed a PhD in physics is an expert in their small aspect of physics, and that they understand well a broader aspect of physics. Getting a PhD takes a lot less than a lifetime (fortunately).
If a thinker can't present his ideas in a logically coherent way, there's no reason for me to go through the very time-consuming process of reading a long series of academic papers.
Reading his definition in that paper makes me even more suspicious of his argument here. It's a common problem among academics in specialist fields that they demonstrate a limited claim, and then state a much stronger claim for a popular audience. The claim in the abstract of the paper is that "perceptual systems tuned solely to fitness routinely outcompete those tuned to truth." The claim in the interview is that "an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness." Those aren't the same. The first is much stronger.
My suspicion is that he's taking his eccentric or exaggerated views and presenting them on the same level as the more reasonable ideas from his research.
While that certainly doesn't mean he's right -- plenty of people accept that Penrose is a genius who is wrong about certain ideas. I think dismissing this guy as a crank is not the best way to disagree.
I stand by my opinion that the ideas expressed in this interview are bizarre and incoherent. Then again, many very well-educated and well-credentialed people have held weird ideas about the mind.
When I see such arguments I immediately become skeptical because I start seeing a political argument being made, or at least, an argument driven by political leanings.
When I say political, I do not mean party political, but generally being on the left side of the spectrum.
I've known enough philosophers who do their level best to bring science down a peg, seeing it as power struggle between the different ways of "knowing" Think postmodernism and the quest to relativise everything.
Using labels and insults should almost always be avoided. Attack a person's arguments, not their personality. I'm sure you've heard it before, but this is called "ad hominem".
Personal attacks and labels are a cheap and easy way to associate your target with a social stigma, immediately biasing others' opinions, whether deserved or not. "crank" isn't much better than "conspiracy theorist" or "libtard" or "moron".
I see no evidence of poor reasoning by the poster.
Hmm, I'm curious about this. No animal can see high energy gamma radiation and other dangerous radiation sources, but the human can detect them with tools. That means the better detector of reality will always have a higher fitness level (we can avoid Chernobyl's radiation 10,000 years from now after its long forgotten) but animals won't. A lot of good having 10 babies is if they all succumb to radiation poisoning before they can reproduce, or have mutations that make them less fit in other ways. We can extend this to other ways like detecting disease early, seeing microrganinisms, etc. Clearly fitness is tied with some level of reality detection, at least for advanced tool using species like ours.
That said, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we might be a simulation in a larger reality or many simulations down. Penrose may not be getting his point accross well, but that idea is philosophically sound.
I don't think he's any sort of crank. He may be playing up the whole "I can model the universe to show you its really a virtual machine" but that's its own sort of mathematical solipsism imo. He does make many good points about perception, relatively, etc. Its not the usual "hey guise, quantum physics means magic is true" crap you see on the internet.
The problem is we don't know if its even possible to detect if we're being virtualized. The funny thing is that for most/all of humanity's existence this was an assumption; the world was fake or at least a temporary placeholder and the true reality was some type of spiritualism/heavenly realms. Interesting that we're going back to that in a round-about way.
I'm glad someone is taking this hypothesis seriously. Detecting if we are virtualized is just as important, as say, SETI. People used to laugh at SETI. Why are we laughing at this?
The observer affecting the outcome of the experiment is an interesting property of quantum physics, but it only affects very small objects that have reached the point where they are almost at the edge of perceptible reality. And it really has nothing to do with consciousness or anything else he was putting across in the interview.
And of course, since the person doing the interview hasn't even read basic pop-science stuff on this kind of physics, the guy doesn't get called out on this.
If properties like non-locality, position uncertainty, etc are real at the small scale, how are they not real at the large scale? Isn't the macroscopic world just a large number of these oddly behaving particles averaging out into emergent forms and behaviors? And arent these macroscopic forms and behaviors no more real than tiger depicted on a computer screen, which is really just a conglomeration of pixels? Or is there some special aspect of the universe that exists at the macroscopic level and not the small scale?
Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they begin to give names to these shadows[1]
Yes of course the details differ and the physics have drastically changed (invoking QM's probability wave functions as the the basis of the "shadows on the cave wall."), but the idea that all we observe isn't a true representation of reality is one of the oldest ideas in all of western philosophy.
It reminds of that old quote from Alfred North Whitehead, a preeminent 20th century figure..."All philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato"
I also felt that his model of reality influenced by Turing machines was way too close to an actual Turing machine. Really he just added a few more variable spaces to make it a abstract enough to fit.
I found 'Return to the Cave' particularly interesting.
The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning man's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.
That's the sort of quote that inspires one to study philosophy. It illustrates perfectly the difficulty we have as humans in informing each other.
Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?
Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols. Such bullshit.
So yeah, I'd say our perception of reality is pretty okay.
A bias doesn't preclude objectivity, either; "biased" is not a synonym for "subjective", and therefore not the opposite of "objective".
But thought experiments have the luxury of not needing pragmatism.
Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind.
You, the external observer, know that this is all just code running on silicon.
The mind within the simulation, however, has no concept of outside, however knows itself to be real, that beach ball to be real. This mind could ultimately reason that perhaps it is merely perceiving representations of information in a way that is useful to it. Perhaps this "space" is just information. Perhaps I am just information. I express this to another mind I just met in the simulation, it tells me I'm nuts, such bullshit.
The thing is, it's a testable theory, and it doesn't require a simulation, either. A holographic universe (totally testable and being tested now) would fulfil the condition he posits, and a simulation, natural or artificial, could too. The simulation argument also applies - if we ever manage to accurately simulate even a small section of a universe even at massive time dilation, it becomes rather likely that this is a simulation too.
For all we know our universe exists on the surface of a black hole.
So yeah, what we perceive is not "real", but you can pick at that thread ad infinitum, and it's turtles all the way down, so it all becomes a bit epistemologial.
That said, there could be useful applications. If it turns out that there's another spatial dimension with which our reality is better described (and it appears there is if you like susy, brane/M theory, strings) that we can access but only with difficulty so our sensorium excludes it that's big news - hyperspace.
Edit: just remembered a JBS Haldane quote that applies nicely -
"Nature is not only queerer than we suppose -- it is queerer than we can suppose."
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
So yes, bullshit. Fallacy. Lies. You get the point, entirely. We cannot use anything but a new word - which is, basically, a lie until everyone believes it (i.e. we all have the same abstract agreement about what the word means). No word is the thing it describes. So we really only have handles, or pointers, to reality .. and that is not the same.
The article is trite hand waving. Of course we parse the world through symbols, but the symbols are shorthand for consistent, predictable experiences.
Does it matter if the physical experiences are created by physical objects in the Newtonian sense, or by quantum fields?
Not at all. Because if you drive a car into a wall fast enough you're still going to die. And so is everyone else who drives the same kind of car into the same kind of wall at the same speed.
If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.
Most humans don't experience reality in that way. (Writers of New Age books try to say otherwise, but there's no evidence they're right.)
The casual arrow of symbolic perception goes in one direction, from outside to in. So unless you have some way to hack the symbols and the experience they create, this kind of "explanation" is irrelevant.
Ah, but it does: it gives you the ability to create new words for new things, and thus extend your reach and control out into the universe. We couldn't get to the moon until we'd figured out the right words to get us there. Then, we used those words to get us there.
The moon is still there. We got there because we described the effort to do so sufficiently well enough that the actions manifested into the universe, and we altered it according to our will - which is the real force of reality in the universe, since we can use will to both experience the natural world, and alter it irrevocably from what it would have been, had we all just left it alone - or at least not describe what we were going to do, so well, that it then just happens ..
Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the metal.
Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken down into more discrete operations than our Ruby DSL would lead us to believe. After much study and experimentation she finds heaps of cryptic-looking code dedicated to memory management, CPU optimization, fault tolerance, etc. The more she studies, the more she finds. By now she's uncovered machine code and developed an instrument to compile it down to an even more fundamental entity: binary. You can take this analogy down to the hardware level -- I'll spare you.
But as human beings we cannot process the world in binary and still function normally. We can certainly think about it and after much effort place our experiences in that context. But we need the aforementioned abstractions to quickly and easily process that we need to run from tigers. Although we know the Ruby DSL hides many details of reality from us by its very nature, we ignore that out of pragmatism.
People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000. People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain stupid.
Think we're in a simulation? Put down your fucking bong hippie. Also get a job. Those are important for some reason and determine your self worth. Also self worth is a thing .. that you should have.
Evolutionary fitness has led humanity to believe powerful myths. Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths.
In a million years, we will either be able to create computer simulations powerful enough to simulate part of our universe, or we'll go extinct. Humanity will be a spec on our 13 billion year+ universe. Either that or someone will press the reset switch and start us over with some other parameters.
It's not a lot of comfort to people who die in Chinese factories to give us cell phones, or to Chesley Manning sitting in prison.
Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say. Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.
I mean, the other criticism is good too--I was trained as a physicist; I too balk when I see quantum mechanics used this way. (I'm a big fan of Searle's third law[1].)
But I mean, the only point that we're actually seeing used here is that QM is creating a huge amount of tension for people who used to comfortably believe in an objective observer-independent reality. That's not actually a hugely divisive issue here. One issue that isn't particularly quantum but is brought up here is that there seems to be a strange embeddability problem in the most basic theories of consciousness, also highlighted by Searle as part of his "Chinese room" thought-experiment: somehow the two halves of your brain merge into one consciousness, but somehow we don't think that two people dancing really do; we don't think that the two halves of your brain keep separate accounts of reality quite the same way that we do think that two dancers do: what is the boundary? Is it just, say, a matter of the volume and frequency of communication as related to the reaction speeds of the surrounding media? Or what?
Similarly the issue that Donald Hoffman's raising up-front is precisely the one that you're analogizing: hey, there's no reason to think that this language that our brain uses maps directly onto the fundamentals of the reality; rather where there is a translation between these two it's complicated at best, and you're only seeing the world after layers and layers of programming have acted on it. Maybe at the most fundamental things are crazily different -- and we can't understand them easily, if at all -- and what we've got are really effective models. When this happens, and what the universe is doing "down in the plumbing" starts to get really difficult to understand, it's going to be more useful for us to regard our impressions of reality as a sort of farce -- except that pragmatically, we can't do that, so we have to regard the underlying we-can't-actually-experience-it-but-here's-what-we-think-it-is reality itself as a sort of farce.
That feels like an uncomfortable "turtles all the way down" place to head, but I read Donald Hoffman as saying precisely, "Hey, it's not as scary as it sounds, just try it for a few: I'm not promising any dramatic answers, in fact I'm just promising less bluster about 'here's all the stuff we know for sure' and more honesty about how little we really know."
[1] Searle's third law is a fun one, and this whole talk is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE . About at 25:30 in this discussion of philosophical problems of free will, there's a great aside: "Well, think about it, is there any part of the universe that we have solid evidence to believe is not fully determined? And the answer is, of course, we know from quantum mechanics, that at the most basic level, it's not deterministic. Now -- I dread saying this, 'cause Searle's third law is: whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air, at best. And I won't use an even more obscene expression. Oh, by the way, that applies to a lot of things physicists say about quantum mechanics, too: Feynman said, look, don't try to think what quantum mechanics means, just do the equations, for God's sake, don't think you understand it -- well, unfortunately, I get paid to try and understand things! So. There is a part of the world that's not deterministic." And then continues back on the thread that he was on.
He asserts that we can prove that it is better for so-and-so to perceive according to "fitness" rather than according to "truth", and maintains this is true with mathematical rigor; fine.
This is observably true (allowing me the possibility of observation for the space of this conversation) - predators, for example, usually have forward-facing eyes and vertically-slitted pupils, which allows them to focus and react to motion of prey in front of them; prey often have widely-spaced eyes allowing a greater field of view. Fitness literally makes you see the world differently.
However, there is an important dimension that I think he missed (or several), which is that the fitness function governing a trait is a vast, multi-dimensional space.
For example, using color we may distinguish between unripe, hard-to-eat fruit (green) and ripe, healthy fruit (reddish-orange). According to his argument, we should therefore only need to see these two colors. Of course this is incorrect, because if our vision were so limited we'd just be running into trees all the time. Now our fitness function is spread across two, completely unrelated goals - suddenly, it becomes much more attractive (and simpler) to come close to apprehending reality accurately, thereby killing two birds with one stone. It only gets worse as the number of goals we add to our fitness function for perception increases.
Furthermore: the space of "goals" is itself a function of the genetic diversity in your population. A species with a lot of spare genetic diversity lying around will be able to refine traits with selection much more efficiently. This means we can develop all sorts of wonderful toys (like a face-matcher) that can augment our perception of reality.
Of course, in the end, we're just modeling reality, we can't Know it in some Buddhist sense; but there is good reason to believe that perception should lean heavily towards a simple objective representation of reality, and that fitness is not such a close rein on it all the time.
Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of EM waves.
I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.
I don't think this exists; a perfect description of reality IS reality. Let us contemplate our finitude and be humbled.
Imagine a hippie concept such as "you are effectively the same being as that guy over there, if either of you gets hurt, it's isomorphic, it's equally bad to the overall organism".
Now, imagine that this is objectively true, i.e. there is something in the basic laws of reality that, if you could observe it, would show the hippie idea to be obviously true.
Then perceiving this part of the laws of reality would be anti-fitness, so you would evolve to be blind to it.
He says that the fallacious argument that we only see mental representations and not reality is "so bad I call it The Bad Argument."
The interview is quite amusing, and it might be interesting to read both his book and Hoffman's.
This completely destroys the evolution argument in the article that concludes that reality is subjective. An organism may learn to perceive more or less water as a color rather than a quantity because the internal representation does not matter a bit.
To me it was already obvious that your red is not the same as mine. If your internal model which represents red is more like my internal model for quantity of water it does not matter at all as long as we can still make the same distinctions of little water vs a lot of water that allow is to survive. The article's conclusion that this means reality is observer dependent does not follow.
What you experience through the senses is a valid aspect of the world, which is incomplete, but accurate within its limitations, and largely non-conflicting with other ways of observing which reveal other aspects.
Physics, quantum or otherwise, doesn't flat-out invalidate what you see around you.
Besides, all scientific instruments translate deeper observations which we cannot make with our senses into a representation available to our senses. (In some cases, just numbers which can be visualized, and often direct visualizations). A scientific instrument is in the world, and I can experience its output with my senses.
> Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not.
Of course not, because the file is blue, rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your desktop. (The desktop isn't to be confused with the computer).
This is real; the aggregate digital object which includes the icon position and color, as well as other information such as a name, modification time stamp and content, does in fact have among its undeniable attributes that it's in the lower right corner of a virtual graphically visualized space known as a desktop and that its color is blue. The position, shape and color are merely not a complete set of its attributes.
In computing, we know quite well that a system's inputs and outputs don't have to be coupled as well as they seem.
I can produce a program '/bin/sha256sum' which drops the sha256sum of a file onto stdout, unless said file is a JPEG image depicting a Shiba Inu, in which case it puts 'such file'.
In computing this is really kind of an obvious result. If we have a debugger or a disassembler we might be able to find that behaviour without actually encountering it. But if it's a HTTP API, we really have no way of knowing what's going to happen.
We can gather lots of empirical evidence, but we have no reason to believe that 5M results or 25M results or 50M results increase our certainty that it 'always does X'. (Simply, it's not provable).
It seems to me to be tautological to say that 'reality may not be what it seems', in that sense, because we know that we cannot be certain that it even acts the same way at t=t and t=t+1.
Even if we found some sort of 'higher state' - if we found the source code to the program that actually runs all there is - what's above that? Turtles all the way down!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large
"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large."
Cursory reading of texts in timeless traditions like Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Hinduism, and other mystic philosophical systems will reveal similar concepts — as will self-inquiry.
That we're beginning to approach a scientific/mathematical explanation of these metaphysical principles is no surprise to me.
2.- ...it's fine as long as the future doesn't make us live in here: http://imgur.com/gallery/hD2Tm1O (Safe for work: it's a picture of Mark Zuckerberg and about 200 people using VR headsets, with the Matrix pods as background)
It's a fun idea to entertain, but I'm worried that someone with a PhD could hold that our perceptions are so far off.
He's not saying we are quantum hand-waving. He's describing a BIV situation[1]. He's saying that things look weird when we look closely because reality isn't there.
We're neural networks. We always have been. Reality is a layer, one that appears to me to be designed to constrain growth through resource limitations and "garbage collection" (death).
Hello, World!
1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externa...
I found it to be a very fascinating read.
What struck me was how complex our perception of the world around us is. How the way our brains perceive reality can be so different to each other, and to actual reality. Pretty amazing.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_min...
So, in other words, he drew the same conclusion that Wittgenstein did over half a century ago (approaching it from the vantage point of language), but dressed up in more up-to-date accoutrements in analytic philosophy?
It seems to me that the logical conclusion is that science is some kind of introspection.
But, what about the fact that, we, as human thinkers, are _aware_ that this is what's going on in our own perception?
Doesn't that give us an ability to both imagine a model of reality beyond our perception and also to test that model?
Many of the ideas he's talking about are discussed therein; perception and "reality" is an assemblage of ideas, not an objective "truth" waiting to be discovered.
The same way that 19th chemistry didn't "got where Democritus was" when he formulated his atomic theory -- it came to the same concept, yes, but what for him was just an idea put out there, for them it was a solid theory, with experiments, deductions made of it, etc.
That said, though, having it in math enables ways to re-use and test that knowledge that having it in sociological reasoning does not -- even if the understanding both methods reached is comparable.
That doesn't say much though.
A cheap numeric calculator (not turing complete, the plain type) and a high end PC are both "merely machines to process inputs and produce some sort of output".
It's the precise kind of machines that each is and the exact kind of processing that it can do that's important -- not just their general similarities.
>You might argue that it's better to be able to observe and tweak the mathematical model than to use one built on purely human semantics, but, mathematical models, by virtue of their simplicity, are generally poor at dealing with complexity
Yes, but they're very good at dealing with very precise formulations. It's not necessary when doing an analysis of field X to deal with the whole of X's extend and complexity at all times. A very specific answer to a small non-complex part of X can be very worthy itself.
(The same way Newton's theory is very good to determine the angle of cannon shots with even if it's a bad model for anything really complex speed and mass wise -- only in this case, the "less complex" theory gives more precise answers for its subdomain, whereas with Newton vs Einstein it's the inverse).
This math simply doesn't work when you throw it against a biology problem. Precise formulations don't exist when you're dealing with, say, the interactions between two 100-amino acid folded proteins. Physics operates on simple rules that work everywhere; biology operates on complex rule sets that are often broken. The math is just not up to snuff, here.
>Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
Which reminds me of this:
Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we!
Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality.
The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived.
The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux".
In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity.
The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza (with small edits in [] to make the passage clearer)
Is there any evidence supporting that claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
Whether there are two full consciousnesses I think is not established.
With a good read and a little work, one finds that one's experience of the "world" (whatever that is; fortunately, we don't need to know; cf below) can be summarized as:
Xi = ΣPjiIj
Ai = Di(Xi)
Iij = ΣPijAi
Your actions, Ai, result from a decision function (Di) that takes your experience-space as its only input; the decision function is arbitrarily complex, but has order likely less than O(nc), since you make decisions in real time (dithering is still a decision, in this sense; you are choosing to continue to attempt to choose to act)... ...unless we are a tightly coupled simulation in NP space and achieve momentary "consciousness" (whatever that means) whenever the simulation reaches "consensus" (but that's overly complicated, so let's use Occam's Razor and stick with the simpler model... ...at least until it fails).
In this case, the limit on "c" would be set by your wetware: Evolutionarily, we are optimized for decisions with order less than
O(n**c)
This means our basic decision-making apparatus is short-term optimized, suggesting that many of our decisions for long-term effects will be "bad", i.e., sub-optimal, because we decide for survival and fitness, not optimal - or even good - long-term consequences.
Your impact on anything, including yourself (i) and everything else (Σj), Iij, is the probability-weighted sum of your actions.
This is an even simpler view than the article expresses: He suggests it when discussing that positing the existence of a world, W, is unnecessary, but then digresses to a theory of conscious agents... ...which is also unnecessary, but which may be illuminating.
In the above formulation, a world, W, is replaced with probability-weighted mappings of actions (of one's self and of others) as impacts (on one's self and on others). These probability-mappings may be arbitrarily complex; determining their order is a real poser....
At the very least, any Ij that takes more than time T to "reach" you does not impact your current Xi (though it may impact future Xi).
Interesting. The probability mapping could have a time-based (light cone?) component, or the simple formulation could be replaced with one involving Xif(Xic, Ijic).
> quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them
No, that's not how it works. When physicists say "observation" in quantum mechanics, they really mean "any interaction, including molecular, photon, electron, etc".
> or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality
Again, no. We built tons of devices that are independent of our senses. If they return consistent results, it means that's what reality is. And it doesn't matter if it's simulated or not, we have to deal with it, and we call it "reality".
Actually the world -is- the world we experience through our senses. There's no "other" world. This article is full of shit. Whatever it is he calls "reality as it is" is the same reality we perceive through our cognitive functions, there is no other way to apprehend reality.