The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality (2016)
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
But this does not mean "reality does not exist" - how would that statement even make sense? Or that our experience is an "illusion" or "wrong". This supposes there is some "correct" way to experience the world which might be different from how the human mind experiences it. The human mind process input and generates a model of the world which helps us survive. Other models are possible (eg. different animal species experience the world in different ways), but who is to say which model is correct?
Imagine the Matrix (movie) or any simulation or virtual reality. The "worlds" in those are just bits inside a computer. So that is the "Reality" of the world we are sensing, and the world that the simulation shows only exists within our consciousness. Not in "reality".
If you take that to our reality, then the actual reality (The actual source of our sensations) can look nothing like the reality we experience..Right?
EDIT: At this point, the word "real" loses its meaning and relevance. There is not even a need for a higher reality that acts as a source of our sensations. Think about dreams. It seems that consciousness is capable of generating realities on its own..
Is it possible that there is one big super consciousness, that generates the shared dream we all experience as reality, and could it be what we call god, and when..we are praying..we, the sub consciousnesses are subtly influencing the super consciousness and the dream it creates?..I mean the reality..?
George Berkely examined an even simpler hypothesis - there is no "outer world" and neither is there any simulation: The sensory input is simply generated directly by God. But again, if you follow this line of thinking it doesn't actually change anything. Reality is still just as real.
In any case, the experienced reality does not "look like" the sensory input, they are simply not comparable like this. Do certain wavelengths of light "look red"? Yes, but only because this is how our mind process this input.
I get that. I was answering your question about a specific version of a reality being "real"..
> The input to our senses is real - they originate from outside the mind.
Is there any proof for this?
>The sensory input is simply generated directly by God. But again, if you follow this line of thinking it doesn't actually change anything. Reality is still just as real.
Not sure. Then isn't there a level of reality where God resides?
I have another Idea. The only thing that "exists" is consciousness, which is an entity that is outside the scope of time and space, and hence does not need a realm to exist. It is just there. The whole universe is somehow encoded within this consciousness. Every conscious brain has somehow access to a part of this super consciousness. This ability to access the consciousness in such high detail as possible by the human brain, created a tremendous evolutionary advantage and caused the human beings to emerge as the dominant species in this earth. And also, the sensory input is not "generated" for individual consciousness, but is just a result of the being being inside/part of this universe.
I have equated God = super consciousness. Because that simplifies a lot of stuff and does not create another entity of arbitrary nature (apart from consciousness itself).
Fixed the argument for you.
I will ask you a question. Suppose there is a world being simulated by using a normal everyday computer. Say the world of GTA5 or something like that. Now in that world, how will you describe the location of the computer it is being simulated on?
Does the computer "exist" for beings inside the simulation?
On a continuing thought...
Even though the computer does not exist for the beings inside the simulation, they possibly can influence the simulated world by some hack. For example, a being inside can think of some particular thing, that will result in a particular byte pattern in the memory and can trigger a bug in the program (or a hidden feature), granting the respective being some kind of super powers..This might appear as magic in the simulated world..
Consider a simulation on top of a cluster of machines. Location in such a system may exist and be meaningful and have observable effects.
Whether that explanation makes more sense than just "it is so and we don't know why" makes more sense depends on additional pieces of evidence.
This is the long answer to "if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to witness it, does it make a sound".
It is not a question of proof, it is a question of language. The input to our senses is real by definition if this input allows us to navigate and survive in the world. Any metaphysical hypothesis which posits this input is somehow not "real" (but the actual "real world" is unavailable to our senses) is simply useless and can be discarded by Occam's razor.
Any hypothesis about the world which cannot be confirmed or falsified through observation is meaningless. Neither right nor wrong, just useless.
And here you see one of the motivations for these strange proposals of "simulation" that we see lately. It is a way to reintroduce in philosophy the idea of a powerful creator. As we advance the understanding of physics, it becomes clear that a creator is not probable, and not even necessary. So, a new generation starts to propose that everything we live is not true and only a simulation from a super powerful mind...
First of all, I am not sure the super consciousness model is the same as the simulation. Because nothing is being simulated. The beings and the world is part of the same reality.
>As we advance the understanding of physics, it becomes clear that a creator is not probable, and not even necessary.
Physics? I think these things are way beyond the reach of what physics can reach. There needs to be another discipline that studies the nature of consciousness and I think mankind's next breakthrough ll happen in that direction...
They then rightfully point out that reality[0] != reality[1], but jump from there to the nonsensical "therefore reality does not exist".
He didn't make it "clear" if by "clear" you mean he demonstrated this to be true. Why posit noumena at all if all that is knowable are phenomena?
> For example, EM radiation of certain wavelengths hit the eyes which cause us to experience colors. So strictly speaking colors do not exist in "the world in itself", they are a function of the human mind.
That's not really Kantian. But in any case, appealing to EM radiation and minds as the true causes of color is appealing to unknowable noumena. You're dismissing color as mere phenomena, but how could you even come to know that to be the case? After all, as you say, all you really know are phenomena.
What did I get wrong?
The experience of color, even with all the intricacies and deficiencies of human perception, is another matter. When I ask you to think of the color blue, you can recall the experience with no need for the visual stimuli.
The word can refer to parts of the EM spectrum or to the experience, or both.
You don't need it for typical interactions with the world, but when you start examining how the sensory apparatus and the mind experience the world, you need the distinction.
Right, but our knowledge of EM radiation would be knowledge of the noumena. Science tells us that EM Radiation exists independent of our perception. Color is mind-dependent, but not electromagnetic radiation.
To be full-on Kantian, you would have to say that everything we conceive is mind-dependent with some unknowable reality out there being the source. That includes all of science.
When transiting from male to female both red and blue shifted because of the effects of hormonal changes on the eyes. When the change was happening things like the blue in the sky and red in neon signs were different than it had been just a few days before. For a few weeks I could point at the sky and say that it was the wrong blue and I wish I had written it down because now I look at the sky and can't actually remember what it looked like before. And less exciting my prescription changed dramatically and my eye color changed too.
It is one thing to talk about how color is just interpreted by your brain, it is another thing to live through a shift like this that you can't ignore.
However, we obviously don't know what reality is or the real nature of it.
Apart from that, neuroscience itself seems to suffer from a certain myopia about what it takes for granted, metaphysically speaking. The source of many of the problems in the philosophy of mind today have their origin in a lingering legacy of Descartes' mechanistic metaphysics in modern and contemporary thought. This legacy equally afflicts materialists who still cling to a Cartesian view of matter (in fact they're in even worse shape than dualists, having jettisoned what dualists use to account for things like color). If you want to make headway, this Cartesian legacy needs to be exorcised from our thinking. Otherwise, you'll keep collapsing back into Cartesian dualism, panpsychism or, worse, eliminativism.
I think you misunderstood what the OP (the physicist) means by that. He trying to convey that "reality" is not "physical".
Physicality is conveyed by the brain but it is not the "reality". So it is an illusion. It doesn't mean our existence is.
What he's overlooking in that desktop metaphor is that there are people who understand ALL of the inner workings down to atoms. No single person has it all in their head, but the software was written by human minds to run on hardware created by human minds that understand the device physics down to a very low level. A user of the software doesn't have to have a full model of the reality - in fact that was the entire point of the desktop metaphor, to make it simple for people so they don't NEED to understand it all in order to use it. For most users that is sufficient level of understanding, and if everyone took the full deep dive we would indeed all be eaten by tigers. But that only says none of us has a full model of reality, it does not say our model of reality is wrong in any way.
I find it amusing that he chose a metaphor designed to hide the complexity of reality from people while ignoring the fact that it was done that way deliberately by people.
In this case it kind of supports his idea that evolution would lead to a similar kind of model of reality in our heads. But the most interesting thing seemed to be the fact that if you remove objective reality from his models you can just build on successive layers of abstraction and the model still works. I know this metaphor doesn't hold up in all cases, but it seems like it's a pretty good introduction to this idea.
The word "remember" [as in 'recall to mind'] is etymologically composed of "re-" [as in again, over time] and "memorari" ['being mindfull of'].
Instead of focussing on consciousness, let's focus on the "first-person"-ness.
Everyone else is an "I" too...
Imagine [part of] your memory is dysfunctional in a similar way to amnesia. You are playing chess, and write down the moves on a piece of paper with some "private" notes like "beware of the horse on E5". After every move, your nurse turns the chess board and notes around, and "reminds" you with "it is your turn". You forgot you were black a few minutes ago, and then you forgot you were playing white after and so on. You would insist you don't have amnesia: indeed by looking at your paper you can "recall" every move, and how you felt about the moves.
In physics forces and fields fall as 1/r^2 or faster (say dipoles). So as _I_ (your "I" or my "I" alike) evaluate how _I_ the universe could move say this electron, or fire that neuron, we predominantly take into account the 'local' information. So we all are under the impression that we are merely part of the universe, instead of an amnesiac decision process on the total universe.
Even though we don't, suppose we all agreed with the statement "I am the universe", are we in agreement, or total conflict? Or is it only a paradox: a linguistic illusion of contradiction?
Edit: I lost the cadence of my comment: intead of re-member to indicate carrying information over time, we could call the subjective "first-person"-ness here-member, carying information across space [but falling offf quickly]...
From a reductionist perspective a civilization is a collection of humans, a human is a collection of cells.
Why is my _I_ or first-person perception that of me the human [and I am convinced that others perceive it this way as well, even though I can't prove it off course] as opposed to a first-person civilization (scale above) or a first-person cell like a neuron (a scale below).
Allthough once I did have a weird and exhilerating experience of fright and victorious excitement at the same time. I was lucky to always have been interested in cryptography and programming, so when I first read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, I already knew the prerequisites or building blocks used, so merely seeing how they were combined to achieve the decentralization I immediately understood how it worked (except for a boatload of corner cases and pitfalls, which the paper did not explain, and only the source code was a guide). This high of a new insight, kept lasting and lasting, and implications and rammifications kept popping up in my head... The excitement part was a revolutionary feeling, originally just as in "humans against the system" but it was like suddenly millions of little voices (probably not individual neurons, but perhaps neuronal circuits) in my head were celebrating, and yelling that their supersystem i.e. my human-level I not only understood the plight for decentralization, but as if they somehow thought it would liberate and decentralize my brain as well. This lasted for a few hours, and I had a hard time thinking straight, I was just hearing barely comprehensible thoughts which felt like some old ancient message (not in english, but thoughts). I was elated for what decentralization meant on the human level, but at the same time many different parts of my brain were celebrating on the lower level. It's hard to describe the experience, but it was like how humans would celebrate if somehow our human civilizational top-down structures (nations/goverments/leaders/security services) would positively welcome crypto/decentralization etc. i.e. suppose congress openly starts talking about sponsoring and setting up decentralized provably secure social media, voting systems, ... and suddenly appear to actually think in the best interests of the people. That was what I was experiencing: small parts of my brain celebrating the incredulous. This was a very scary experience, during those couple of hours simple and mundane tasks like taking a sip because I was thirsty would get repeatedly postponed, but at the same time I would start cooking dinner. Luckily for me this revolt subdued afterwards and order was restored (I can only assume the normal order in my brain is some form of top-down approach society of neurons), which allowed me to function properly. Although the whole experience was scary, it was only scary in hindsight. While it was happening "I" felt elated, excited, and only after recovering did I notice something had gone horribly wrong in my brain.
I am not eppileptic, and I have never experienced anything like it before or after (its many years ago now). The timing and similarity in subject makes me think it was in fact caused by reading the Satoshi paper. I am not a religious person, but I do consider this to be an experience which religious people would call a religious experience if it happened to them. Since I am not religious, I can only conclude that attention is some sort of top-down approach in how the brain functions [apparently not a democracy!].
"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits."
https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-following-quote-by-Carl-...
This is a perspective I like to take on the world's various flavors of spirituality. I really liked the "desktop" analogy, in particular. Spirituality is a very useful abstraction on top of reality, which our minds have evolved because of its usefulness. The fact that elements of it don't exist doesn't make them meaningless or reduce them to a simple opiate; just because we shouldn't take them literally doesn't mean we shouldn't take them seriously.
Consider a map of NYC vs the actual territory of NYC. Yes, the map is only a crude approximation of the territory. Map makers (similar to evolution) are only incentivized to produce maps that are a practically useful approximation of reality, and not a fully accurate depiction of reality. But that doesn't change the fact that the map is still rooted in reality. When the map shows me that Time Square is only a short walk from Port Authority, and that the WTC is much further away, those are all facts that represent reality.
Yes, it can be disconcerting to realize that what we're looking at is a map, and not the territory itself. Yes, there are limitations on how much we can learn about the territory purely from looking at a map. But that doesn't change the fact that the map is correlated with its underlying reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#"The_ma...
> While neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality. In short, all roads lead back to the observer.
and
> Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines — in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life — my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate — that really is the ultimate nature of reality.
You won't find many quantum physicists agreeing with this statement.
The notion of an 'observer' is an artificial one, coming from the Copenhagen interpretation, which is well known to be false -- it's still used only because it simplifies the calculations, so long as you know when to apply it. The reality is far more nuanced.
That being said, even Copenhagen doesn't equate observers to humans. Anything can be an observer, and to make good use of the interpretation, it's usually equated with the measuring apparatus used in the experiment. It has nothing whatsoever to do with thought.
In reality, the 'observer effect' is an approximation to decoherence that only applies when the experiment is perfectly shielded, and the measuring instrument is not. That is only usually the case.
I think you're overstating this a great deal. I don't think it's well-known, or even agreed on, that it's false. Can you demonstrate otherwise?
And in what sense is it "false"? If it's true to the equations, and not experimentally disproved, isn't it as valid as any other interpretation?
There are plenty of interpretations that do match the math, though. You're not stuck with MWI.
You can recover normality from it, so I don't see the unending superposition as being a problem.
(Yes there are some tricks like observing phase angle while changing velocity etc. Used in quantum cryptology.)
An organism does have to be able to distinguish between food, mates, shelter, danger, etc. or it won't pass it's genes on. And that's where reality comes in. Even invoking evolution is to assume that evolution has some basis in reality, otherwise why invoke it as an explanation for illusion?
If our perceptions and cognition have no basis in reality, then neither does evolution.
Small correction. You should say "organisms wouldn't survive if their entire perceptual system produced only useless illusions."
The illusions here can also be replaced by an "abstraction". Color is an abstraction of wavelength. Sound is an abstraction of pressure differences.
So organisms who's senses produced useful abstractions for their minds prevailed, while others perished.
So again, obviously, I see nothing new but the premise that useless abstractions evolved but didn't sustain...
But once you start enlarging the possible set of circumstances, a lot of them will overlap in ways that seem random unless you discern the actual causal relationships between them. Without this process, then you're devoting resources to recording a never-ending list of correlations, but this list is strictly bounded if you instead infer causality.
In some cases, list of correlations will still be more efficient, but not in general when considering a large and complex world.
This interview was a good read - the computer “desktop” metaphor made the central idea click for me.
Half-baked Monday association but I’ll throw it out there anyway. Seems to be describing reality in a way that I’ve heard some zen Buddhists describe reality — instead of separate objects, you have one connected consciousness and individuals are just points on a plane (wave?).
This. Also "how do I know the words I hear sound the same to you?".
Mindblowing stuff.
I have a theory that this simple problem is the root of the majority of social conflicts. Terrence Mckenna once described this problem:
"As primates we have an incredible ability to make small mouth noises. We can do this for up to 6 hours at a stretch without tiring. No other thing that we can do approaches the level of variation with low energy investment that the small mouth noises do... But the problem with the small mouth noises form of communication is:
I have a thought.
I look in a dictionary that I have created out of my life experience.
I map the thought onto the dictionary.
I make the requisite small mouth noises.
They cross physical space.
They enter your ear.
You look in your dictionary, which is different from my dictionary.
But if we speak what we call the same language it will be close enough that you will sort of understand what I mean.
Now if I don't say to you, "what do I mean"? You and I will go gaily off in the assumption that we understand each other.
But If I say to you, "did you understand what I said then?"
You say "yes, you meant that you don’t want to sit with Harry and Sally because their pending divorce makes you uncomfortable."
And then I say "no that’s not what I meant! I meant..."
So there’s misunderstanding because the dictionaries are not matched. Now, notice what’s happening with the octopi, there is no dictionary, both parties are seeing the same thing because my body is my meaning. I become my meaning and you behold the meaning I have become. I am like a naked thought, not even a naked nervous system, more naked than that, I am like a naked thought in aqueous space unfolding in time.
I maintain this is why octopi eject clouds of ink, it's so they can have private thoughts because if you can be seen you can be understood.
Well this is a perfect model condoned by nature for the kind of transformation that we want to lead our culture towards."
–Alan Watts
Unified mind part is covered in Ramez Naam Nexus trilogy.
There is probably something about quantum minds too. If somebody knows then please be kind to fill in.