I’m giving the last lecture on my mini-tour for The Big Picture tonight at the Natural History Museum here in Los Angeles. If you can’t make it, here’s a decent substitute: video of the talk I gave last week at Google headquarters in Mountain View.
The Big Picture | Sean Carroll | Talks at Google
I don’t think I’ve quite worked out all the kinks in this talk, but you get the general idea. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have the time to trace the flow of free energy from the Sun to photosynthesis to ATP to muscle contractions. It’s a great demonstration of how biological organisms are maintained through the creation of entropy.
Simon:
“Deluded” might (or might not) be too prejudicial a term for this context.
I could myself similarly claim that I have stood still on the unmoving Earth and watched the Sun march across the sky. We both know that, though an accurate description of personal experience, that’s a poor model of the actual dynamics of the Solar System. And we both also know that, for the overwhelming majority of human history, the overwhelming majority of humans would have insisted that the Earth is stationary and the Sun crosses the sky — and would have found any suggestions to the contrary to be simply incomprehensible.
What I’m suggesting is that you’re in a similar position. Yes, you observe (or think you observe) phenomena that, to you, perfectly fits in a model of divine intervention and you can’t even imagine how it could hypothetically be explained in a world without gods. But, just as we have all sorts of ways of demonstrating that the Copernican model is (mostly) correct and geocentricism can’t possibly be a good explanation, we also have all sorts of ways of demonstrating that what you’re experiencing has nothing to do with the gods and everything to do with well-understood human physiology and psychology.
Again, what we have here is failure to communicate. Since what’s perhaps the most popular terse textbook definition of Evolution is the change in allele frequency within a population over time, I’m at a loss as to think why you should think that that poses any sort of a problem to biologists…unless, again, your understanding of biology is as far off the mark as an ancient caveman’s understanding of astronomy.
Considering that that actually is a fair assessment of Behe’s (et al.) understanding of biology, it’s probably not too far off in your case as well.
Again, the biggest stumbling blocks Creationists have with biology are an assumption of teleology (that, for example, humans or some sort of human equivalent are an inevitable end result) typically coupled with Platonic idealism (e.g. that there “exists” in some sense an ideal human form after which all humans are modeled). If you think either of those has some sort of merit, you’re standing on the fixed Earth watching the Sun march across the sky.
Cheers,
b&
Ben
** You remarked:
“Such is not at all what I hear from physicists, especially including Sean. Indeed, Sean very comfortably and cheerfully embraces the infinite and its possibility. He might feel compelled to correct me, but I think it would be accurate to describe him as being very confident that space is infinite; would bet but not be confident that time is eternal to the past as well as the future; and have no trouble postulating the reality of an infinite number of very-real Everettian “Many” Worlds, possibly with a footnote that only a finite (but unimaginably vast) number are distinguishably realizable.”
** Actually, you mis-addressed what I wrote. There is no one who is does not “cheerfully embrace the infinite”. I was referring to -unwanted- infinities that crop up in certain equation situations – such as black hole equations, where the certain mathematical states~forms of conventional physics falls apart, becomes undefined, and forestalls further calculations steps.
**Also, postulating a re-ordering of essential mathematics is a potential solution for practical scientific necessity, not for a Nobel (or Fields or whatever). I’ve shared more than my share of conversations with true Nobelists and Nobel want-to-be’s, that I know the difference in the people, and the difference between the thirst for advancing human knowledge versus the hunger for self aggrandizement.
**I’ve been following the fields for years and publications coming out of them, from the earliest quantum gravity work out of Penn State, to Perimeter Institute papers, Santa Fe Institute papers, Berkeley, MSRI, et al, even Advance Studies at Princeton, and European and Asian and South American investigators. A lot of creative and inventive work.
**God bless him (hoping he would even accept such an appellation) , if Sean or his students should succeed afore me. But I doubt it. (Not to say that -I- will be absolutely successful). But mainly, I don’t see anyone addressing the essential questions and problems. And your persistent disdaining remarks to people (rather than clearly remarking on empirical issues), isn’t going to advance such accomplishment either.
* *If you have any familiarity with Complexity (where ’emergence’ first achieved its respectability as a phenomena and as a real (albeit ‘natural’) process) – – including the one conditional case that earned Prigogine his Nobel for defining an exemplar sample process, then you will know that an ‘entropy cascade’ (toward entropy maximization), is not the end all, be all, of thermodynamic tendencies in systems in the universe [excuse me, for conventional thinkers respect, I think I should tip my hat and say, ‘multiverse’; even though I have reservations about it. I think even Georg Cantor, with his transfinite plural domains of infinities, would balk at the notion of ‘multiverse’ versus a ‘universe’. 🙂 ].
** So, to pick up your gauntlet, I would love to read Sean’s papers you refer to. Might you offer links recommendations to an unfunded researcher who can’t afford the the stone walling shield against access, from the commercial publishers?
** Cheers,
**Jamie
I must confess to seeing no special significance of infinities in such situations. Much about mass similarly fell apart until we had the precise finite value of ~125 GeV/c^2 for the Higgs to plug into equations. Much (but not all!) of the trouble faced by theoretical physicists today can be attributed to a lack of data, and it’s not hard to imagine observations (such as of gravitational waves or heavier-than-the-Higgs particles) that could easily start to pin things down in ways such that the answers to today’s mysteries become self-evident. For example, if the LHC makes a squark, we know that supersymmetry is (presumably, tentatively) true and the then-known mass of the squark can get plugged into all sorts of equations to make further predictions.
I’m not sure what you’re driving at. It’s long been known, for example, that, for example, the open terrestrial system whereby the low-entropy solar radiation gets re-radiated away at night as high-entropy heat…that that system is behind the local seeming-reversal of entropy that is life on Earth — but it’s also know that the total entropy of the solar system as an whole increases despite our local inversion. Or, at the extreme ends of the scale, quantum uncertainty permits all sorts of entropic fluctuations and one of Sean’s friends, Lawrence Krauss, has written an entire book on how you can therefore get entire universes from literally nothing.
…but, again, I’m missing the relevance of this to the current discussion….
Oh, that’s an easy one.
If you’ve got an especially big appetite, you’re almost certainly near a college or university with all the requisite subscriptions. They’ll probably let you read to your hearts’s content on their premises without even raising an eyebrow, and they’ll almost certainly grant you a library card in exchange for an hopefully-modest fee.
But if even that’s not an option, for whatever reason, just email Sean directly. He’s good about answering personal emails, but, of course, with the caveat that he doesn’t necessarily have the time to promptly give detailed answers to everybody. But nearly all researchers are delighted to fire off copies of their work to those who ask, and are especially happy to accommodate the enthusiastic amateur. You’ll likely be on your own to make sense of it…but Sean is also likely to be happy to point you to textbooks and other papers and the like that would help you get up to speed on a particular point. He is, after all, a popular professor at one of the world’s most respected universities….
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
I can see how *most* things can be reduced across levels of abstraction without any problems. I have no problem calling ‘temperature’ something that is physical for instance. So there’s no problem with reductionism in the cases you mentioned.
However *mathematical* and *mental* properties are still the sticking points for me. (That’s why I lean towards mathematical Platonism and the idea you need something ‘extra’ for consciousness). It’s certainly *possible* that mathematical and mental properties are indeed just aggregate properties of matter in the same way ‘temperature’ is, but I still don’t think we know enough yet to be very sure that they are in fact completely reducible to matter.
There’s a problem with the idea that ‘consciousness’ can be reduced in this way, which I mentioned in the other thread. Here’s a recap of the problem again:
If a reductionist says that consciousness is not real, then it seems that nothing is. Because if you ‘eliminate’ consciousness by reducing it to signals in the brain, there is no reason to stop the process of elimination there – after all we can ‘eliminate’ brains by reducing them to neurons. And we can ‘eliminate’ neurons by reducing them to molecules. And so on and on. Finally, we ‘eliminate’ the physical world altogether by reducing it to the pure mathematics of wave-functions.
Here the term “reductio ad absurdum” seems to be *literally* true 😉
In ‘The Big Picture’ Sean tries to escape this reductio ad absurdum by granting a kind of reality to all the different levels of abstraction. He tries to say for example that “consciousness is just as real as temperature”. But I don’t think this really works.
The problem is that mental and mathematical properties needed to be *assumed* to have some sort of independent reality in order to talk about reality in the first place! If consciousness is just ‘a way of talking about aggregate properties of matter’, then who is doing the talking in the first place? See the ‘reduction’ of the physical world to pure mathematical wave-functions above: literally nothing is left at the bottom, just pure mathematics! But where has this ‘mathematics’ come from in the first place? The idea that mathematics and consciousness are ‘just ways of talking about aggregate properties of matter’ seems be totally circular!
zarzuelazen
I am with you here. There is ultimately a lack of any absolute datum in the human conscious experience. All reductionist/atheist material succumbs to this failing at points. In reality we are shuffling around words and concepts implicit in our own consciousness into some sort of tapestry based on a lot of unstated background assumptions.
Having said that, platonic mathematical truths look pretty real. There was a discussion in reasonable depth on that following Don Page’s last (I think) guest post. Roger Penrose talks about it in the introduction to ‘The Road to Reality’. There is a neat little diagram representing the paradox.
Ben
The infinities being referred to are infinities that arise in equations all over physics, beginning with Newtonian gravity and coulombic fields and extending into QFT and other areas. They have to be worked around. Infinity itself is an interesting mathematical idea as it is simple to prove that there are different levels of infinity using set theory. The Penrose book I just referred to has a chapter on it which is fairly easy to follow.
Cheers
Yes indeed Simon,
I believe Sean Carroll’s own current work is a critical test of reductionism! If Sean succeeds in showing how the macroscopic world can be entirely reduced to ‘quantum wave-functions’, to my mind that would prove the case for total reductionism, and finally prove us sceptics wrong. But of course, I am very confident he cannot possibly succeed in this!
I will just restate the critical flaw in total reductionism here again:
If everything at root is ‘quantum wave-functions’ (quantum information) then where did this quantum information come from in the first place? You must remember that quantum wave-functions cannot be interpreted as physical things : quantum wave-functions are purely mathematical (or informational) things. So I repeat the question: where did this quantum information come from in the first place?
If Sean tries to say that mathematics is just ‘a way of talking about the aggregate properties of matter’, then he is immediately contradicting himself, since aggregate properties of matter are not supposed to exist until they have ’emerged’ from the wave-functions, which are mathematical! (He wants to show that the macroscopic world with classical space and time ’emerges’ from quantum wave-functions). So his logic is totally circular and the reductionist program fails!
I don’t understand why “consciousness” should be such a huge obstacle to accepting naturalism.
The real question one should be asking oneself is whether there are clear evolutionary showstoppers preventing consciousness from evolving starting from some single specialized cell which gained a signal transportation capability through a mutation, via multi-cell signaling clusters, to the types of brains which have evolved in so many living organisms. I think there is a lot of convincing evidence for such an evolutionary path to have taken place.
That this evolutionary path was eventually crowned with “consciousness” as a term used to describe the way we feel about the current evolutionary state of our brains seems perfectly logical. No magic, simply evolution. Magnificent and poetically natural evolution if you like, but still just emergent phenomena that are compatible with the underlying core theory and a universe with increasing entropy.
Simen S
I think our point is that, in the reductionist framework, we are using evolved consciousness to analyse all this. We have no real truth datum. My evolved consciousness is evaluating how my evolved consciousness got here.
Now in maths, this is not such a huge problem because the concepts appear to have an external self-consistency by most reckoning. Same with experimental physics. But evolutionary biology?
A broadly similar paradox in evolutionary theory has recently been documented in a book by Stephen Rothman.
In both cases a form of anthropomorphism has been blindly applied; the attributes of higher consciousness are invoked as vehicles to explain their own evolution. Did these attributes, like ‘survival’ or ‘sense of danger’, therefore have a real meaning before they evolved? If so, why?
Back to physics; ‘compatible with’ and ‘plausibly caused by’ are two different things. If we free physics of what I have called anthropomorphism, and of an eternal agent, we essentially believe that we got here by core physics plus some starting conditions. ‘Plausibly caused by’ has consciousness implications.
Simon Packer,
We have absolutely no hint that our brains are made up of anything but biological substances. Yet, it yields a state for it’s biological owner which we have denoted with the term “consciousness”. Simple as that. No paradoxes. No oxymorons. I don’t get it.
These conscious brains are all around us, and rather obviously part of our natural world. As long as you’re not going to doubt everything like Descartes, then I don’t see your paradox. You can use a camera to take a picture of a flower or a picture of another camera. There is no paradox in taking the picture of the other camera. They’re both pictures. Nothing special.
Again we’ve know that ever since we’ve know that conservation holds.
I hope we can agree that consciousness is an integral part of the explanation for what’s going on when you decide to lift a sack of potatoes off the floor and onto the table.
That sack is entirely composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons; it has a temperature of about 20°C and a density of about 1 g/ml; and it is at relative rest in a steady gravitational field of about 1 G. As such, we know that the only forces that can induce motion in those potatoes are electromagnetism and gravity. Either those forces and particles are the entirety of the base constituents of your conscious decision to lift the potatoes, or else everything we think we know about physics is worng — and I do mean, most emphatically, everything. If some as-yet-undetected force (or whatever) is necessary to account for consciousness…well, that’d be as big and shocking a discovery as if we were to find the entire China-sized lost continent of Atlantis sitting smack dab in the middle of San Francisco Bay. — and equally incomprehensible.
If I say that I have four red apples, can I “reduce” that such that I’m left with only the words and no physical objects? If not, why should I be able to do the same with the fundamental pieces of physics?
When you understand that the fact that I can use math — the number four — as part of the description of the contents of my fruit bowl, but that that description is not itself the contents of the fruit bowl, then you’ll come to realize the incoherence of your proposition that we “reduce” the reality of physics to nothing more than our own invented language that describes it.
…unless, of course, you also wish to ascribe some sort of Platonic idealism to “red” and “apple,” in addition to, “four,” in which case I’m sure I’ve no hope of ever getting through to you….
Cheers,
b&
Ben says:
“When you understand that the fact that I can use math — the number four — as part of the description of the contents of my fruit bowl, but that that description is not itself the contents of the fruit bowl, then you’ll come to realize the incoherence of your proposition that we “reduce” the reality of physics to nothing more than our own invented language that describes it.”
I really can’t see why reducing physics to nothing but math is any more incoherent than reducing mind to nothing but physics. That is to say, I find them both to be somewhat dubious propositions 😉
Ben says :
…unless, of course, you also wish to ascribe some sort of Platonic idealism to “red” and “apple,” in addition to, “four,”
If you do a complete computer simulation of the bowl of fruit, then indeed it appears that the whole fruit bowl just consists of numbers (binary 1’s and 0’s in computer machine code) . Absolutely *everything* you could see in the fruit bowl could be *completely* predicted by the computer simulation right? So why do you need to talk about ‘extra’ physical properties at all?
I wish more scientists would step up to the plate and answer religious objections to science the way Sean does. This guy is a true American hero.
(I just have a quick moment…I owe replies to some others and will hopefully get a chance tomorrow….)
Terry, entropy for physicists is simply a measure of the number of states a system can be in — and the very simple formula is in the picture of Botzmann’s gravestone at the top of this page. It generally maps well with our macro-world popular definition of order / disorder, but only roughly.
Or…there’re many, many more ways for your room to be messy than there are for it to be clean, so your clean room has low entropy and your messy room has high entropy. But it’s the middle ground where all the interesting stuff happens, because both the low-entropy Big Bang epoch and the high-entropy heat death epoch are rather uniform. The transition from the one to the other is where the excitement is at.
…think of how much work / fun is accompanied by increasing the entropy of your room, and how boring it is if it’s always neat and how hard it is to do things if it’s always messy….
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
I’m inclined to agree with you that nothing unusual is happening in the brain in a physics-sense. So I wouldn’t disagree with what you say above. However (and I know this sounds hugely paradoxical!), even though physics might give a 100% accurate description of what’s happening, physics still isn’t necessarily giving a *complete* account!
Go back to the ‘computer simulation’ argument (see my last post), when I talked about how you could ‘reduce’ a fruit bowl to pure math by doing a computer simulation that would explain absolutely *everything* you could possibly see. The computer simulation of the fruit bowl could be 100% accurate, so to someone in virtual reality it would seem like nothing is missing – it would like ‘numbers’ are all there is. The computer simulation after all, can be described as a program consisting of pure numbers… binary 1’s and 0’s in machine code.
But here’s the paradox…even though explaining the fruit bowl as pure numbers could give a 100% accurate description of reality, something *still* would be missing…namely an account of actual *physical* existence!
In exactly the same way, it may seem to you that nothing is missing from the physics description, it may seem to you that physics is giving you a 100% accurate account of what’s happening in the brain…but *still* something is missing …namely an account of actual *mental* existence!
Could it be that there are 3 different perfectly valid (100% accurate) descriptions of reality that are superimposed on top of each other? Physics, Math and Mind. Imagine 3-different movie reels showing exactly the same scenes superimposed on each other, but perhaps taken from slightly different angles. Someone watching the movie would see only *one* movie, ever so slightly blurred.
Physics, Math and Mind: 3 different reels, 1 movie?
One thing that really stuck with me when taking mathematics courses was the idea, “It only takes one counter example to disprove a mathematical theorem or principal”. I am not sure who came up with this idea to begin with, but it really seemed like the right kind of philosophy one would need to adopt in order to have good scientific/naturalistic reasoning skills. I figured that, since most of all of science can be described mathematically, this type of mathematical reasoning should then be able to hold up just as well for any type of scientific reasoning. I think this type of reasoning is crucial for discovering any accurate theory/principal using abductive reasoning skills, because there can always be a lot of random nonsense that can fit the bill. But, random nonsense cannot hold up for long when it can be thrown out by only one counter example.
That is why I found it surprising that Sean believes that we should use Baye’s Theorem for finding scientific understanding, where evidence is all weighed equally despite its degree of relevance. It seems like it would allow a person’s world of belief to be filled with errors or anomalies. A great deal of bad evidence could outweigh one piece of good evidence or an actual proof, or a bad assumption could be believed by not having enough evidence (the usual story in any peer reviewed psychology journal).
The only downside I see with “mathematical reasoning” is that it only takes one piece of supernatural evidence before you end up going to “crazy town”. I was in a Naval Restriction barracks in Pensacola, FL with David Blaine for a couple of months (the street magician). He seemed to have the ability to control peoples minds by implanting suggestions into their subconscious mind. He could make suggestions to someone to do something looking out a window of a two story building, which he was never allowed to leave. He also seemed capable of reversing the arrow of time by melding cardboard back together with his fingers after tearing it. That was something I saw only looking about a foot away from it.
He claimed he was able to mix illusionary magic with real magic to create his tricks that he did. Then he tried really hard to find someone that was really reluctant to teach him how to do it. Then he was also abusing a mix of prescription drugs in order to enhance his abilities. Then I have been in crazy town ever since, from trying to using a type of mathematical reasoning…
John B
Bayesian reasoning doesn’t have all the consequences you say it might. An actual proof of something (if that was ever possible for any meaningful new understanding of something) would just eliminate the need for further Bayesian reasoning on that topic. In all other cases Bayesian reasoning is our best approach to make sound judgements.
It’s not beneficial to start out badly educated or to have been indoctrinated with counterfactual priors, and it’s not beneficial if you’re sufficiently confused to assign bad probabilities to posteriors, but it’s still a valid mathematical formulation of how sound judgement ought to be performed.
Simen S,
I just started learning about Bayesian reasoning, and I didn’t get that impression about it from reading Sean’s book. What you say seems to make sense, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. If what you are saying is true, then according to Bayesian reasoning I should start believing in magic and no longer doubt it, because of my personal experience of living with David Blaine for a month or so…
I know what you are thinking; that I was tricked and deceived that he actually had those abilities, because I was a naturalist myself once, even though I wasn’t sure what to call it at the time. Then it can be difficult to explain how someone could tear a playing card sitting right next to you, side by side, and then reform the card as though nothing ever happened to it, while you are bending over looking right at it not even a foot away from this happening.
Like you say, it could be possible that I just do not know enough about magic tricks or slight of hand. Then I have a bad basis to be able to identify if that magic trick would be truly magic or not. Although, I was close enough to be able to identify that there was no other card under the card he tore, and I was watching really closely for any sign of slight of hand. All he did was tear it and slowly rub his thumb up along the tear with his index finger behind it. When he was halfway up the tear; it blew my mind. My first thought was that being able to change the direction of times arrow really didn’t break any of the laws of physics…
The fact that a mathematical truth is not always, as far as we know, substantiated into a physical reality, is one aspect of the simple diagram in the introduction to Penrose’s book I mentioned. It can be downloaded in several places, the diagram is on page 47. Penrose modifies it slightly a few pages later to include his preferences.
http://chaosbook.org/library/Penr04.pdf seems to work and seems to be free of security issues as far as my computer can tell me.
The diagram also throws light on, or at least makes you think about, the relationship between mind and the physical.
Simen S
I am not arguing about whether consciousness is real or, at this point, whether it is merely physiological. I am discussing why we think we know things, and about what we think we know. Is it about human consensus? Is it about having a rigorous and reliable mathematical model? Do we know things as social consensus or do they have an eternal reality, in the Platonic manner? In particular I have been talking about how all this applies to Darwinism.
To make it practical; When did the first collection of cells become the first conscious organism? When did one or more of those organisms decide it/they wanted to out-survive the others? Why? And why believe it? Because the fossil record can be construed that way maybe, or because we see predatory and competitive behaviour as the norm?
Our consciousness is a phenomenon which brings in very many branches of sub-phenomena and we have words to describe these. Emotion, empathy, analysis, intuition, humour and artistry for example. A naturalist sees all of these as emergent phenomena, generally as having arisen out of EBNS. What meaning and substance do these phenomena, and their inter-relatedness, have, outside of man’s conscious experience? Would they still be there if we could not describe them and if organisms did not display them? Or would they only potentially be there? This is what I am asking, particularly where survival and fear are concerned. These are actually very complex emotions and attitudes. Try writing code for them. Darwinists seek to explain all these things, including survival inclination and aptitude, by appealing to survival advantage. They are calling upon the outcome of the method to explain the method itself. The religious, philosophical or political person, however, sees, or seeks to set, some sort of external absolute on these parameters of consciousness. Kindness is good, killing is bad, say. These attributes, like platonic mathematical truths, and experimentally verified physics, are then seen as having an external, authoritative, eternal value and relatedness. But if these conscious attributes are emergent phenomena, how can we legitimately apply them retrospectively to explain how we got here from the SM, molecules or even an early cell or two? The parameters of consciousness are not considered to have an eternal, platonic style truth; they are very high level emergent, not basic and foundational, in a naturalistic framework.
zarsuelazen:
But how, pray tell, do you propose to perform your computer simulation without a computer!?
If I say I have four red apples in my fruit bowl, and then the apples are eaten, does the fact that I still have the words, “four red apples,” mean that there are, indeed, still four red apples in the fruit bowl?
If I replace the four red apples with four red pieces of plastic made to resemble apples, I might still reasonably describe the models as “four red apples,” but I won’t be able to satisfy my hunger by eating them. Similarly, I could make an even more faithful computer model of the four red apples, and even a computer model of me eating them. The computer-modeled me will, presumably, have great enjoyment eating the apples and, as far as it’s concerned, the apples and itself are entirely real. But I still won’t have anything to eat.
When you can demonstrate to me how a description of something, a mere adjective, can have existence independent of that which is being described, then I will concede you your Platonism. And, yes — of course, the same description can be valid for more than one real entity, else there’s little point to abstraction in the first place. We recognize the symmetries of, “apple,” “red,” and, “four,” even though there’re seemingly infinite ways of assembling four red apples; which one of those fruit bowls is the One True Four Red Apple Fruit Bowl?
It should hopefully be obvious that limiting one’s conception of Platonism to any particular subset of descriptive language, even if it’s our most effective (to date), doesn’t actually actualize the descriptions.
Your math is still a description. If you use that math as your blueprint to create a model that is equally faithful to the math as the original, then the same math will (of course!) be equally applicable to the model as the original. As far as the math is concerned, assuming you actually did the job right, the two can be described perfectly well. But as to whether or not you’ve actually got a perfect copy…that depends on how good your math is. And if you’d be equally happy with Gala or Fuji apples, any four red apples in your fruit bowl would constitute a perfect-to-you model…but you do still need the apples, not just words describing them.
Cheers,
b&
GMcK:
That’s because we have much better disciplines for studying such phenomena — especially anthropology, psychology, social science, political science, history, and the like.
You wouldn’t expect Sean to tell you much about DNA methylation, so why would you expect an evolutionary biologist to tell you much about FDA regulations of GMO crops? Sure, scientists tend to have broad interests and lots of opinions, but they also tend to do a good job at delineating between when they’re doing research and when they’re just expressing the same concerns as any other interested citizen.
Cheers,
b&
Eh, even if you want to go down that road, you’re still missing an awful lot.
Sure, you could slice things up that way. But a geophysicist wouldn’t find it very useful to do so…where’s the “Mind” in the Earth’s core magneto? If you want to impose your “Mind” layer on that model as what the geophysicist thinks of the Earth…great, but you’re now doing psychology, as the geophysicist herself is utterly irrelevant to the dynamics of the planet.
You would do yourself a great flavor to take a trip into the Total Perspective Vortex. Yes, your own mind is, with rounding, the entirety of your own personal universe…but that universe is so tiny compared to the rest of reality that it might as well not exist — as, indeed, it didn’t for at least a baker’s dozen billion years and won’t in some number of decades at the most.
Isn’t it at least as hubristic on your part to claim “Mind” as an essential component of reality as it once was to claim the Earth as the center of Creation, and that the Earth was Created just for the purpose of providing eternal Salvation for Mankind?
Cheers,
b&
John B:
That is precisely the case.
You would do well to study James “The Amazing” Randi. He’s a superlative stage magician and a most delightful entertainer. He can do all sorts of impossible tricks, and takes great pleasure in not only doing them but in convincing his audiences that what he does is truly impossible.
But!
He’s an honest fraudster.
Though he can and does hang with the best, he makes no pretense that he’s doing anything other than convincing you that he’s doing the impossible, without actually doing anything impossible.
He also takes great issue with the dishonest fraudsters who try to continue their acts even after the curtain has come down, and he’s had an equally-successful second career exposing such frauds for what they are.
He’d have no trouble doing the tear-up-the-card-and-put-it-back-together-again trick, and he’d also have no trouble explaining to you how it’s done.
Cheers,
b&
Simon:
Those questions can only make sense if you start with a presumption that consciousness is an on / off all-or-nothing phenomenon — and, further, there’s a strong suggestion of a primacy of consciousness, such that, for example, you don’t think that an organism is capable of survival unless it consciously decides it wants to survive.
Reality is as much different from that as Copernican heliocentricism is from the ancient myth that the Sun sleeps in a cave during the night…again, to the point that I’m not exactly sure how I’d even begin to correct those misconceptions.
The same way that we can legitimately use temperature in climate models, even though temperature is nothing more than the statistical average kinetic energy of the molecular components of an entity. The climatologist, in the day job, for all practical purposes, treats temperature as something of a disembodied Platonic ideal — but only because that’s a rather useful shortcut.
The best way to think of morality is as an optimal strategy (in the sense used by game theorists) for an individual member of a cooperative society. There’s lots of back-and-forth give-and-take required…an individual that’s destructive to society (murders, rapes, steals, etc.) is going to have a rather difficult time fighting off the collective wrath of the society…but a society that sacrifices individuals to sate its hungers is going to find those individuals banding together to fight back. The ideal balance is going to be one where the society attempts to maximize the potential of the individual — a difficult target to attain, sure, but it’s what we mostly aim for.
You can see the foundations of such in our evolutionarily-instilled moral instincts…but, unsurprisingly, imperfectly — just as everything else about us is imperfectly optimized. Nevertheless, we’ve been in the process of intelligently designing our society and morality, and we’ve made some great strides especially starting with the Enlightenment. Much remains to be done, but we’ve also got much to be proud of.
Cheers,
b&
Ben & zarsuelazen,
*- You bring in the themes of Platonism and computer binary math-language coding, and if you will excuse my observation, you are both stuck in the same conventional regurgitations of those hackneyed thought-lines, that haven’t seen the light of day of creative -re-analysis .. either in the last two hundred years of recent-math analysis, nor in the last 2500 years of repetitive-logic.
*- in the intervening years, an interesting analysis of data/events relations came on scene in the 1930s that is related . . the incompleteness theorems of Godel.
*- Godel essentially dissected data (nee information) into two regions — the accessible/known and the yet-to be accessible / unknown. Those two partitioned groups are limited and de-access all sorts of critical relations .. that are directly associatable with seminal aspect of Platonic Ideals with Plato conflates and in-error, co-mingles. I’ve been amused for decades that no neo-Platonist or anti-neoPlatonist have never taken the time to review Plato’s conditional precepts and relational notions,using 20th century observations and improved understandings.
*- I like to use the examples of Platonic ‘chairs’ and Platonic ‘apples’ and the Platonic ‘cave of indirect knowledge’ (per your remarks here). Put aside the comparison of datacoding — that is, substituting numeracy for entities or entitiy labeling (the map is -not- the territory ; and plastic simulation of an apple has no nutrition content of the physical fruit, even if we allow ourselves to arithmatize growth rates and metabolic processes).
*-Mount Everest is an example of a Platonic “mountain”, but if you climb up there and – sit down -, Everest also get Venn Diagrammed as a . . ‘chair’ .. a true Platonic Ideal “chair’.
*- Plato was unaware of light waves. He was unaware that the shadows on the cave wall were -not- fictitious, imperfect, representations of events and processes in the outside ‘real’ world. In the 19th and 20th centuries humanity came to understand that there is no separation between the “Real and Ideal”, one is a data/information rendition/transcription algorithmic recoding of one another. IN some cases there is commutative trans-coding, in some cases, the transcription is incomplete and -not perfectly commutative (recoverable). But the main relational notion is that there is true and valid connectivity between events and maps/models … which is why we sometimes confuse them if we done keep their qualia distinct and appropriately associated.
*- At which point in the discussion, we can now question and test whether Platonic Ideals are even valid relational considerations or not. To wit, bringing Godel into the discussion. And 20th century tests/analysis.
*-* We know that the skin of an apple represents the ‘outermost’ Godelian boundary of where an apple ‘exists’. There is no ‘apple’ out beyond the skin. Yet science observation recognizes that the color of an apple, is “out here”, -outside- the Godel boundary.
*-* Curious. How can that be? An ‘apple’ -formally- is only that which is inside and up-to the skin
layer. But out where we ‘experience’ the apple by sight, we associate colors to apples. To be clinically accurate, Ideal Apples, even ‘real’ apples, have no-color. !
*-* So, to be Godelian rigorous, the ‘color(s)’ of apples (quite against the Platonic ‘Ideal apples’ as he allowed their definition) , exists totally separate and out side ‘apple boundary’. To the extent that, per Godel, we can state quite accurately, that the Ideal Set ‘apples’ and the Ideal Set “colors” are separate and absolutely totally MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE from one another.
*-* Unless, of course, any one wants to re-consider Godel’s logic as having some seminal error that need deeper critical review. (!)
*-*
*-* What I’m getting at, with this gedankenanalysis, is that if we are looking for true -out of the box- thinking to find some way to unify, coordinate and find universal synchrony among systems and relations and, be it QM~relativity, or whatever, then deep hard re-review of even our assumed ‘basic principles’ and ‘a priories’, needs to be done. A new Copernican Revolution .. that to my mind , will necessitate a wholesale revisiting of even our most basic mathematical notions. Because that is the only place left that we accepted and took for granted . . . certain fundamental ‘truths’ . . . that just might have been ‘sufficiently correct’ but are not ‘wholly correct’.
*-* When we get -that- repaired, -then- what we currently see as physics~cosmology~math disconnects and discontinuities, just might fall into place.
James:
Gödel, and especially his Incompleteness Theorem, is entirely silent on and irrelevant to Platonism. Simply because Gödel established that there are things we will never know does not mean that the unknown therefore has some sort of existence. Indeed, at the very heart of Gödel’s work is that there’re all sorts of things one might otherwise think would exist but that really don’t, actually. And there are things that do exist but we’ll never know that to be true, and other things that don’t exist but we’ll never know for sure that they don’t.
In the context at which you’re performing this analysis, the color of the apple is best understood as a shorthand for the physical properties of the surface of the apple. The skin has a structure such that it tends to reflect more light closer to a wavelength of 700 nm than it does light with a wavelength near 450 nm. Under typical conditions, that is perceived by humans as being red. But an apple in the dark has no color, and a red apple lit by monochromatic blue light will appear blue.
…at which point, the entire rest of your conclusions drawn from that false premise pretty much become incoherent. As with “four,” “red” is merely a descriptive label with no independent or intrinsic existence — even if it’s sometimes incredibly useful to pretend otherwise.
Cheers,
b&