The Physics of Ideas: Reality as a Coordination Problem | Hacker News Reader

The Physics of Ideas: Reality as a Coordination Problem

bpe.xyz

> Whether such practices can produce effects beyond what placebo research documents—whether shared noetic certainty can, under certain conditions, become causally operative on physical outcomes in ways that exceed current medical understanding—remains genuinely open.

It doesn't, there are many studies on the "placebo effect" (see for example https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200105243442106 - "We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain. Outside the setting of clinical trials, there is no justification for the use of placebos.") that reliably show that the only thing it can do is reduce the feeling of pain.

This essay is verbose AI moralityslop that doesn't back up any of the points it makes, makes no single coherent argument, and apparently tries to subtly promote quackery. Truly awful.

If placebo’s didn’t have clinical effects we wouldn’t be controlling for them in every scientific study

The entire premise of a placebo-controlled study is to see if a treatment works better than something that produces no effect.

Both the placebo and treatment have placebo effects. By comparing the treatment to a placebo, the placebo effect is cancelled out.

Whereas, comparing a treatment straight to non-treatment, leaves it unclear how much of any perceived benefit the treatment has was due to placebo, or the specific treatment.

You may have been saying that, I wasn't sure what "no effect" was emphasizing.

An alternate means of getting the same comparison is to have treatment and non-treatment applied without any patient knowledge of either, when that can be done. Which works, and is more straight forward from a measurement standpoint, but is ethically unacceptable.

They do work to some extent. If doctors wanted to be thorough*, they would use two control groups. A placebo and a "don't do anything" group. Since the placebo effect is known to reduce pain, it is not ethical to not at least administer the minimum of care (which is still like a magic band-aid, but it helps alleviate pain and in some rare circumstances, symptoms) .

edit: through->thorough

But placebo works, right? But it only works if you don't know that it is placebo you are getting.

Placebos often work, even when a placebo is known to be a placebo.

I'm currently reading "The disappearance of rituals" by Byun-Chul Han which is highlights the roles of ritual to bring people together into those shared experiences which bind people into a shared narrative and world view.

There are parts of the book I agree with and some I disagree with, but an earlier version of me would have dismissed the whole topic as fluff and any notion of ritual or narrative as superstitious nonsense that needed to be swept away by the light of reason and science. Ultimately though the things that really matter in people's lives tend to be those things which are not coldly rational - love and a place in a wider narrative

What's interesting to me isn't the phrase itself. It's what happens when you read the domain name first. BPE. Byte-pair encoding. The algorithm that taught machines to eat language. It works by finding the most frequent adjacent pairs and merging them over and over — until what was once a string of individual characters becomes a vocabulary of chunks. It doesn't know what it's merging. It just sees frequency. It digests without tasting. And then you land on the page and it says: phenomenological convergence. That's a collision. Because phenomenology is the opposite operation. Husserl's whole move was to un-merge — to strip away exactly the habitual pairings, the assumptions fused by repetition, the things we stopped seeing because they occur together so often they became one unit. The epoché is de-tokenization. So what would it actually mean for these two to converge? Here's what I keep turning over. BPE is metabolic but not intelligent — it decomposes language into statistically useful pieces the way stomach acid breaks down food. Phenomenology is intelligent but not metabolic — it perceives but doesn't transform the material. One digests without awareness. The other is aware without digesting. If they converge, what you'd get is something that can both break reality into pieces and know what it's breaking. That's not AI. That's not meditation either. It's something we don't have a word for yet. Maybe that's the point of the blank page — the word hasn't arrived. What I respect most: the silence ratio here is nearly infinite. One phrase. All that white space. In an internet that's become a low-silence environment where nothing is allowed to just be without explaining itself, someone built a page that trusts the unfilled space to do the work. The form is the thesis.

Thank you for this insight.

Yet does your conclusion contradict your premises?

"It just sees frequency. It digests without tasting. And then you land on the page and it says: phenomenological convergence. That's a collision. Because phenomenology is the opposite operation. Husserl's whole move was to un-merge — to strip away exactly the habitual pairings"

"The form is the thesis."

The article is trying hard to sound clever but comes across as pseudo-science techobabble. Another poster called it "AI moralityaslop" and that resonates.

The article pulls a (not very good) slight of hand where it switches between the interpretation of mechanics for physical phenomena such as gravity, to the interpretation of "feels".

Scaffolding requires a firm foundation to rest on. Physical reality may be a form foundation but opinions about morality are not firm.

This is "Moralityaslop" indeed.

A wonderful exposition of an original take. Really well written, and delightfully succinct.

Coming from a new-pragmatist orientation, this is a nice invitation to look more carefully at phenomological takes.

More please!

I appreciated this essay but have to agree with the other commenters about moralityslop. But shift the perspective and it's clear the author is writing to work through these ideas despite the llm-isms.

As an example in the nuclear catastrophe section he implied there was a guy like him who thought really hard. "Leaders who contemplate nuclear war in sufficient depth are forced into a shared experiential frame." Which sure it's possible, but no shot every country had that dynamic. Quite frankly I don't know how we've avoided nuclear war past rational deterrence but it's arbitrary to say "It erases the phenomenological boundary between 'us' and 'them.'" Anyway, keep it up shoes_for_thee, I've had fun thinking about your ideas but next time add some sources.

Does anyone know of any reading for this definition of noetic ground? Nothing I found matched.

The other day i read a article about hyper-individualism in the age of AI (Brand Eins Magazin - a german mag)

It stated that democracy is in danger, because hyper individualism is destroying our Agora - our place of sharing experiences with others, as spotify will no longer create a "mix of the week" based on your history in listening to music, but rather create "Bands of the Week" which will be a bunch of AI created bands that are exactly fitting your taste in Music. There wont be no common ground to agree or disagree as everyone lives in their own bubble. Of course its a bit dystopical, and maybe we humans will always prefer the shared experiences as we are social beings. We are not made for our individual bubbles, is what i believe and strongely hope!

Тhis is beautiful, I don't think I've ever seen someone crystallize the dynamics of nuclear war, cults, placebo effects, and the phenomenology of peace so clearly and viscerally. Thank you for sharing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com