Atheology

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Apr 11, 2024]

Is Elon Musk bad at mathematics? The suggestion may not shock readers who remember him foolishly paying $44 billion for Twitter (now X).

For that I give him a pass. He wanted Twitter badly and to him cost was almost an after-thought.1

Instead I want to focus on an egregious example of Elon’s math illiteracy.

He has famously claimed that we almost certainly live inside a simulation (there’s only a one in billion chance that we don’t, he said). To my knowledge, Elon still maintains this.2

At Code Conference 2016, Elon presented the math this way:

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation—probably being in a simulation—I think, is the following. Forty years ago we had Pong—like, two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now forty years later we have photo-realistic 3-D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And people have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Indistinguishable. Even if the rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now, then you just say, okay, let’s imagine 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers and set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what’s wrong with that argument? … Is there a flaw in that argument? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality. … I think it’s one in billions.3

Well, actually, Elon, there’s a massive mathematical flaw in your argument.

No one spoke up because, well, you’re the richest (second richest?) man in the world. Yet you’re the Emperor with no clothes.

Red Herrings

The problem is this: Elon thinks the number of human-built computers running human-created virtual reality games “indistinguishable from reality” is pertinent to calculating the odds that we humans ourselves exist in a similar virtual reality.

That’s a math blunder.

He’s spewing numbers which have nothing to do with the proposition at hand.

If you took high school math, you likely encountered “word problems” with specious information—numbers thrown in which are immaterial to calculating the answer. That’s what Elon does here—obviously without realizing it.

Why is the number of virtual reality games indistinguishable from reality, whether running on set-top boxes, laptops, VR headsets, VR glasses, even AR/VR contact lens in the future—why is it immaterial?

Because the one sure thing we know about all these games—now or in the future—is that human beings created them, human beings are playing them, and although the games create an illusion of us being immersed within the game’s world and interacting with its characters, we nevertheless still exist outside it all.

Necessarily so, since we humans will have built (or at least purchased) the hardware and downloaded the AR or VR program running on it. Some of us will work in the data centers which host the servers necessary for simultaneous play, and so on.

After all, Elon’s claim is not that we will someday magically find ourselves trappedinside our own games because they have reached some critical level of realism—at least I hope no one reading this is so dissociated from reality.

Elon’s claim is that some superior, alien intelligence, unknown to us, has created this reality that we live in, just as we (now or in the future) create virtual realities which seem just like the world around us—and that the fictional characters we create in these future games will have consciousness and be alive just as we are.

And yet—whatever worlds we create will nevertheless exist within our world and its realities. For example, a power outage or battery failure will still bring the game to a crashing end. But the power outage will not end us.

Likewise, food we consume within the virtual reality will not actually end up in our stomachs, unless we concurrently eat in real life. If this is not clear, please see a medical professional (preferably IRL).

So the billion virtual reality games 10,000 years from now are a red herring. Not a single one of them will be an example of a virtual world within which we biologicallyexist or in which any fictional character in any fictional game biologically exists.

Thus it’s mathematically invalid to use them to estimate odds that our own biologically existence occurs inside a simulation.

To Be Clear…

If this is not clear, let me help you understand it mathematically, step by step.

Take an actual, biologically produced orange (one plucked from a tree or purchased from a grocery store) and put it on a table in front of you. What do you have?

A table with an orange (which you could peel and eat if desired) on it. How likely is it that the orange is not real but a simulation?

If you are unsure, peel it and eat it—was it a simulation or did something actually go into your stomach?

Okay, if you ate the orange, pluck or buy another and put it on the table.

Now let’s add the red herring. Or rather red apples. A billion red apples. More specifically, a billion simulated red apples. (You can use your Google Glasses or Meta Quest or Vision Pro to simulate the apples. And yes, you’ll need to make the table bigger.)

Math quiz: did adding the billion apples make it more likely that the original orange on the table is now not an orange at all but an apple?

Did the orange transform into something it is not because we imagined (or simulated) a billion apples?

No.

Does creating a simulated apple mean that all apples and all oranges and all tables and all people must be simulated?

No.

But what if we create a billion, tens of billions, hundreds of trillions of simulated apples?

No. The orange is still an orange.

All Elon has done is: introduce a billion red herrings and gob-smack himself with the large number of simulated herrings floating around in his head.

In Elon’s Defense

Wait.

Maybe Elon thinks the orange was an apple all along. Maybe he thinks all fruit, by definition, are simulated fruit. Oranges don’t exist unless simulated.

There is almost some truth to this.

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whatever lying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

So wait—is there anything outside me, outside the virtual reality created by my brain? Is there a physical orange, a physical table, a physical room out there?

Of course.

But importantly, they are not of the same sort as the simulation. The simulation is a sensory, experienced construction produced by the brain to stand in for whatever realstuff is actually out there.

But maybe, just maybe, Elon doesn’t think there is anything real, that is anything other than simulation, out there. Maybe he doesn’t think physical stuff exists unless it’s created/simulated by a mind. Or a Mind.

In other words, maybe what Elon is guilty of is not bad math, but idealist philosophy.

Except—somewhere among the billions of simulated realities, he thinks there is one “base reality”. So strike that. We’re back to bad math.

The New Design Argument

As a matter of fact, if we step back, we see that the claim that we live inside a simulation created by some outside being is little more than the 21st century version of the Design Argument for God’s existence.

And like the Design Argument, it is not a logical argument at all, but an analogy.

And the analogy is this: like the characters that exist inside the virtual realities of our popular games, perhaps we too live inside a virtual reality created by some intelligent being or beings.

Well, it’s a thought. How do we evaluate its likelihood?4

Not the way Elon tries to do it.

Like the Design argument, its strength lies in misunderstanding what is going on when we know the world. If you buy into the core beliefs of supernaturalism, you might find the Design analogy compelling because it fits your worldview and your understanding of it. If you don’t buy into those beliefs, you will find the whole thing silly.

The original design argument drew its inspiration from the invention of clocks. These newfangled time-telling mechanisms impressed people during the middle ages because clocks operated automatically—at least until the spring needed to be rewound.

And this led to an idea: maybe earth is just one big clock designed by God. After all, every clock we know of is designed by an outside clockmaker: maybe the physical world was designed by an outside maker as well.

In Elon’s version, he would postulate billions and billions of clocks, as if large numbers made the analogy more convincing. Or more probable.

“There is only one chance in a billion that the earth is not a clock.”

Sorry Elon. This is math illiteracy.

Simulations, Simulations

Notice that the observation that humans might eventually create simulations that seem just like the real world is not something that matters much. It is, of course, where the 21st century version of the analogy gets its start, but the analogy doesn’t require that humans ever successfully create a convincing virtual world.5

Now, if we could create virtual worlds that actually contained sentient physical beings like us (rather than just fictional simulations of such), that would be both impressive and miraculous. If we could ever become such gods, well then others might have done so before us, and others before them.

But here’s the thing about simulations: they are simulations. They stand in for real things (even if fictional) and are not actually what they presumably simulate.

And we know this well, because hominids have been creating simulations for tens of thousands of years, starting with cave paintings and carvings.

A drawing of an object is a simulation of that object.

Horses on cave walls were simulations of horses, for all we know convincing enough to early hominids to make them believe the painting could control the living horse.

Perhaps a prehistoric Elon Musk looked at the Lascaux cave paintings and wondered if he and his tribe were themselves painted on the wall of some great cave somewhere, under the watchful eye of a celestial god. (Only one chance in whatever it wasn’t so.)

Paintings, frescoes, sculptures, carvings and masks were for thousands of years our chief form of simulating reality. And our simulations got better and better over the centuries. Painters got good at simulating at creating realistic pictures. Then we invented photography, followed by motion pictures, movies with sound, television, computer games and, today, 3D virtual reality.

But so far, none of our simulations of real things have ever turned into real thingsthemselves, at least not in the same sense of existence.

There is of course a secondary sense in which a cartoon character like Mickey Mouse has real existence, at least culturally. But Mickey Mouse has never become a blood and bones biological being in the sense that we are.6 Nor does anyone expect this to happen—unless they are mentally ill.

Yet advocates of the simulation hypothesis seem to believe that if only we can make cartoon Mickey’s world realistic enough to become indistinguishable from reality, and do the same for Mickey’s virtual body—presto! He will become a real, experiencing physical being, just like us.

Somewhere, somehow, at some point in perfecting the illusion, magic will happen.

That’s right.

This is magical, supernatural thinking. A belief quite literally in picture magic. Call it “simulation” magic.

The Simulation Inside Us

There is also an intellectual confusion going on here about what reality is.

What is being confused with reality is the simulation (vision, sound, touch, taste, smell) of the world which our brain creates to “stand in” for the world. This biologically-created simulation, however, is inside us. We are not inside it.

Now, there is something important to note about the biologically-created simulation happening inside us: it is computational in nature, composed of objects with properties and information that can be sliced and diced. Thus our brains provide us with a simulation of the world which is “knowable”—and indeed we can’t “know” anything which is not simulation for this precise reason.7

But if the simulation—all simulations—are actually inside us, product of our brains, then it follows that we (the biological beings producing the simulation) cannot be inside it (though of course we can put a representation of ourselves into it). We are necessarily on the outside hosting the simulation on the inside, just as we are necessarily outside any art or craft or motion picture or computer game which is triggering a brain simulation of reality within us.

Which presents us with another way to look at how ridiculous Elon’s logic is here:

Human brains have been creating these realistic simulations of reality (which we almost always naively fail to distinguished from reality) for millions of years, and millions of years before us the brains of other species have been doing the same.

Long before motion pictures, long before Pong, these realistic simulations of the physical world have been in existence. Again, I’m referring here to the sensual experiences we each have every day, experiences created by our brains and interpreted to be the world existing around us. Recall what I wrote earlier,

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whateverlying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

In what rational sense can this be conceived as evidence that some other species on some other planet has imagined earth and all its species into existence as simulations in their own brains, in their own computer programs?

At best, it is an off the wall brain-fart analogy, a silly “what if?”

What if???

It boils down to this: What if I’m trapped in a story someone else is telling?

After all, millions maybe billions of stories have been told. If there are aliens elsewhere, quintillions of stories have been told.

Wow! The odds that I’m nothing but a character in a story must be immense.

The more stories I can imagine being told or enacted somewhere, somehow the more certain it must be that I don’t have independent existence, I’m just a character in a story not my own.

“…the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what’s wrong with that argument? … Is there a flaw in that argument? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality.”

We tell stores. We tell stories about others. What if they are trapped in our stories?

What if we only exist in someone else’s story?

Now imagine billions of stories—suddenly the off the wall brain-fart analogy magically acquires high probability in the minds of math-illiterates.

But the stories are so detailed!

They have moving pictures, and the pictures look and move just like us! Therefore they are living, breathing biological beings just like us—trapped in the computer story.

Uh-oh, we must be too!

Now, on top of all this silliness, Elon also believes that minds can be downloaded to a hard drive to achieve immortality8 (by “download” he doesn’t mean “writing books” either).

By definition, his is a supernatural worldview.9

Behind all his nonsense is the gullible belief that mind is primary, that mind must come before matter; that the other way around is unthinkable.

And Elon “proves” it with brain-fart math.

Footnotes

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Feb 19, 2024. I should probably have titled it “Defining Naturalism the Best Way.”]

In a previous post, “What is Naturalism?”, I quoted William H Halverson’s A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, 1981 (Random House, NY). Today I want to return to Halverson and focus again on his presentation of naturalism as a world view. In doing so, I want to focus on a fundamental mistake in how naturalism has traditionally been presented.

In chapter 57, Halverson (writing “from the point of view of a convinced advocate of the view in question”) describes naturalism as claiming, “In the beginning, matter.” In contrast, he points out, supernaturalism claims, “In the beginning, God.” (I quoted this in “What is Naturalism?”)1

More broadly (though Halverson doesn’t say this) supernaturalism states, “In the beginning, mind, consciousness or intelligence.” The most popular versions of the supernatural world view eagerly call this God, but this move isn’t universal.

The main takeaway: naturalism and supernaturalism are competing factual claims about the history of existence. Naturalism says, originally there was physical stuff and then living organisms evolved (on earth, at least), and then some living organisms evolved to have consciousness. (The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Speciesin the 19th century reinvigorated naturalism, because it demonstrated that the forms of species could have come about without the application of intelligence from outside.)

It also highlights a central element of naturalism: consciousness (consequently mind and intelligence) is something produced by the brains of organisms. Not produced necessarily by all organisms, but by those with an adequate collection of neurons (details to follow as scientists do their work.) Therefore, if naturalism is correct, consciousness was not around at the beginning but arrived on the scene later.

By default, this entails atheism. It means that God’s sort of existence, which is bodiless mind or consciousness, was not around in the beginning. Such is the heart of naturalism, and it’s why I write so much about it here. Naturalism really is preface to atheism.

In opposition, supernaturalism asserts that, yes, consciousness may have arrived in organisms like us later on, but this was possible only because an originalConsciousness was present all along. Indeed, the original Consciousness created the physical world. In the beginning, God.

I want you to see the important of stating the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism in this way. It makes clear that the debate is over factual & historical claims. It is a debate over what happened when, as well as a debate over where consciousness is. Importantly, it’s a difference of opinion that can be adjudicated by examining evidence.

Bedeviled Naturalism

But Halverson’s presentation of naturalism in A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, in my opinion, has a fatal flaw; a mistake which bedevils advocates of naturalism to this day. And bedevil is the right word here. The flaw sneaks into naturalism a fundamental premise belonging to supernaturalism. It allows a supernatural devil (in the form of consciousness) to slither about in naturalism’s garden.

To see this, let’s look carefully at the relevant passages in his book:

“Naturalism asserts, first, that the primary constituents of reality are material entities. By this I do not mean that only material entities exist; I am not denying the reality—the real existence—of such things as hopes, plans, behavior, language, logical inferences, and so on. What I am asserting, however, is that anything that is real is, in the last analysis, explicable as a material entity or as a form or function or action of a material entity. Theism says, “In the beginning, God;” naturalism says, “In the beginning, matter.” If the theoretical goal of science—an absolutely exhaustive knowledge of the natural world—were to be achieved, there would remain no reality of any other kind about which we might still be ignorant. The “ultimate realities,” according to naturalism, are not the alleged objects of the inquiries of theologians; they are the entities that are the objects of investigation by chemists, physicists, and other scientists. To put the matter very simply: materialism is true.”2

Halverson’s naturalist next goes on to say that naturalism also holds “determinism is true” and that “to be is to be some place, some time.”

“Naturalism asserts, second, that what happens in the world is theoretically explicable without residue in terms of the internal structures and the external relations of these material entities. The world is, to use an inadequate metaphor, like a gigantic machine whose parts are so numerous and whose processes are so complex that we have, thus far, been able to achieve only a partial and fragmentary understanding of how it works. In principle, however, everything at occurs is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed. Once again, the point may be stated simply: determinism is true.”

“It follows from what I have said that the categories of space and time are categories of great importance of naturalism—are in fact, ontological categories. If you cannot locate something in space and time, or if you cannot understand it as a form or function of some entity or entities located in space and time, then you simply cannot say anything intelligible about it. To be is to be some place, some time.”3

In these passages, I have emphasized the word “explicable” for a reason. This is the devil I mentioned earlier.

Not Halverson’s Fault

The devil is not Halverson’s fault. He merely presents naturalism as 20th century advocates have commonly misunderstood it. For example, Britannica.com says,

“Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable. There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd.”4

There is so much wrong with this that one almost doesn’t know where to begin.

Let start at the end, the assumption that without “objective laws” that “the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd.” Well, it’s a claim. Yet the pursuit of science is unaffected by this question of where scientific laws exist. Whether they exist “out there” in the external world or whether they exist “in here” in human consciousness, science progresses all the same.

The lack of “out there” existence for our scientific conclusions might seem “absurd” to someone committed to a supernatural world view, but in fact it’s quite sensible. Thoughts, conclusions, understandings are all “in here” phenomena. Like all aspect of consciousness, human knowledge exists to “stand in” for the external physical world. But stand in is all knowledge ever does. It does not and cannot become “factual” in the external world.

Let me repeat: our scientific understanding of matter and energy stands in for the external world around us. It is a careless mistake to conflate scientific understanding of the world for the nature of the world. If you commit this error, you’ve inserted an element of human consciousness which exist in here and placed it out there—you’ve conflated subjective reality with objective reality.

If we dig down, we discover that the underlying fault here is the unquestioned assumption that organisms perceive the world through their senses, and that any resulting knowledge is objective (i.e. an aspect of the external natural world) rather than subjective (i.e. an aspect of human consciousness). Since sense sensations and meaning sensations are aspects of consciousness, this inevitably entangles human consciousness with the physical world around us, vitiating naturalism by inserting consciousness where it does not exist.

We need to rescue the world view of naturalism from this bedevilment so that everyone benefits from clearer thinking (whether naturalist or supernaturalist).

Indeed, Britannica.com does the opposite, turning naturalism into nothing more than the meaningless declaration “everything is natural.”

“While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a wide variety of views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism.”5

This is worthless.6

Explicibility and Perception

Perhaps it’s viable to view the common but confused presentation of naturalism as oneof several possible varieties which fall under the meta philosophy of naturalism—albeit deeply flawed. Fortunately, there are other variations under the meta philosophy, versions which excise explicability, thus restoring coherence, and also eliminating determinism (since determinism results from the desire for explicability “without residue”7).

We have sound biological & evolutionary reasons for excising explicability from being foundational. These include Hume’s observations about the problem of induction and of course, most importantly, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species8 which undoubtedly influenced William James’ ideas about pragmatism. These also include the rejection of scientific realism, which is necessitated by the biological understanding that species (including us, of course) have no actual method of perceiving9 the world. We are left with scientific pragmatism to replace scientific realism. (But these are topics for future Preface articles.)

Instead, let me continue to focus on the logical reason for removing explicability from the definition of naturalism.

Explicability commits naturalism to the proposition that organisms, through sensations and consciousness, can perceive the physical world as it is. This commitment to perception relies on the assumption that consciousness and the “outside” physical world are a two-way street. On one side of the street, neurons in the brain produce consciousness. (A necessary assumption for naturalism, and amply supported by the evidence we have.)

But on the other side of the street, somehow, consciousness interacts with the outside physical world which we are sensing, so that it can be “perceived.”

It would not be a problem if the assertion were that the two-way interaction occurs between consciousness and the brain: brain producing consciousness and consciousness modifying neurons in return. But the claim of explicability alters the nature of the two-way street: it asserts that consciousness, in its sensual form (i.e., the senses) is a perception of the outside world, and therefore an interaction with whatever physical stuff is.

But how can this be? Logically, it implies compatibility between the sensations of consciousness and the physical world. This is just plain mystical: in the end it means that the physical world (exclusive of neurons in the brain) must have a nature which interacts with and is compatible with consciousness.

If we accept this, we are no longer advocating naturalism or physicalism. So advocates of naturalism should reject this mess.

Instead, advocate of naturalism (thinking logically) should limit the interaction between consciousness and the physical world to the realm of the brain’s neurons: there alone is where interaction between matter and mind, stuff and sensation, “objective” and “subjective” occurs. The brain produces consciousness and consciousness in turn modifies the brain. Consciousness never exists outside this limited interaction. It’s a tool the brain uses to improve itself, and that is that.

Let me summarize my argument in a different form. Per Halverson, explicabilityasserts that human thoughts can tap into the actual “properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed.” But this is based on the unnatural assumption that properties and relations can be found in the physical world.

But wait: properties and relations are the native language of consciousness. So explicability misleads us into asserting that the native language of consciousness is something that we can find in the physical world as we interact with it.

Such a position is not naturalism. It’s pan-psychism or supernaturalism.

Again, if interaction between elements of consciousness and the physical world is constrained to the brain and its neurons, it poses no problem for naturalism. But allow compatibility between consciousness and physical stuff to occur outside of neurons in the brain, and you’ve jumped out of naturalism into it’s negation.

You’ve allowed the devil into your natural garden.

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Sept 16, 2023.]

It’s natural to assume that what we see when we open our eyes is what the world looks like, that we see it as is. Sure, there may be more to it than we see, especially on a micro level, but we see the actual world out there. This assumption is what philosophers call perceptual realism (though it has other names, such as naive realism).

Bertrand Russell, in his book, The Problems of Philosophy1, exposed a few of the problems with perceptual realism.

Consider a round dining table. Imagine that we are comfortably sitting in a chair beside the table. Looking at the table from our vantage point, it is likely that we perceive immediately that the tabletop is round. But how? From where we sit, the tabletop does not actually have a round shape.

This is the problem: how can we perceive the table as round if the image of the table coming through our eyes is not round? Sitting at the table, in fact, it appears oval. It would only appear round if our eyes were located at the ceiling directly above the table—a viewpoint we almost never actually have.

Yet we immediately register the table as round.

Presumably, roundness is one of the properties of the table. But how does our brain pick up this property from the table? How does our brain know it is round?

We can even ask, is the physical tabletop really round or is roundness something our brain is (so to speak) bringing to the table?

Or, as philosophers like to put it, is the table’s roundness real?

The Real Question

Whenever philosophers (or anyone for that matter) asks if something is real, what they are actually asking is a different question: where does something exist? The philosopher’s question, Is roundness real? is, in other words, the scientist’s question, Where does roundness exist?

There are basically only a couple of places where something might exist.

First, it might exist in the “physical” mind-independent world we see around (outside/inside of) us. Perhaps it exists in this world in a manner easy to detect, or perhaps it exists undetected or even undetectable. Something might also exist within organisms which are within this mind-independent world, perhaps even within the structure of neurons in the brains of such organisms.

Most philosophers would consider something existing in any of the above locations to be “real”.

Second, something may also exist “in our mind”—that is, in our thoughts, feelings, or imagination. If something “only” exists in our minds philosophers would say it is not “real.” Realism, to the philosopher, means believing that something exists in the firstlocation. If we believe that something only exists in the second location, it is a rejection of realism vis-a-vis that something.

Of course, something might exist in both places. And in fact this is a common position most people (including philosophers) take.

It is my position that something never exists in both places. Either it exists in the mind-independent, observer-independent physical world, or it exists in the mind of an observer. Never both.

With one caveat: Observers are organisms. And organisms exist in the mind-independent world. In this sense, naturally, the minds of organisms (which are produced by neurons in the organism’s body) necessarily also exist in the mind-independent physical world. But there is never double-existence. Something which exists within the neurobiologically-produced consciousness of an organism doesn’t also exist outside that neurbiologically-produced consciousness.

So if we are talking about something like the roundness of a tabletop, it is my contention that that property of roundness either exists out there in the table (the mind-independent world) or it exists in here in the neurobiological consciousness (mind) produced in the brains of organisms like us.

I hope this clarifies why I think the scientific question, Where does something exist? is preferable to the philosophical question, Is something real?

Where is Roundness?

So where does the roundness of our dining table exist?

Let’s recap the issue:

If roundness is out there in the physical world, how do we perceive an object’s roundness if we never see it round? How does an object so quickly convey its roundness to us?

Well, some objects don’t. The earth we stand on is round, but we don’t perceive that (okay, maybe if we are astronauts/cosmonauts out in space). Only when an object is small enough for us to see it from the proper angle, do we actually see it as round.

So roundness is not conveyed to us by the objects we see. Our brains are inferringroundness.2

And this is even more obvious when we consider that round objects are never perfectly round. We perceive oranges as round, but they are not perfectly round. Our dining table is not perfectly round. Our earth is not perfectly round. And neither are coins.

If something is not perfectly round, is it round?

Well, our brain says it is. And then, on further examination, our brain says it is not perfectly round.

So where does roundness exist?

If we approach this question as scientists, then we are going to look for a biological mechanism for collecting information from the world around us.

Let’s imagine we are sitting outside at night looking at the full moon. The information that the disk of the moon is round, how are we to pluck that from the sky?

Our retinas sample photons which have bounced off the moon from the sun. What do those photons know about the roundness of the moon? Do they carry information about the moon’s roundness with them to earth. Certainly not individually.

Collectively, we convince ourselves, at least together with the missing photons where moon is not, we assemble a picture of the moon’s roundness. But it’s a picture wecompose. Specifically, our brains compose it, and our brains create the information of the moon’s roundness in doing so. Photons know nothing about it.

What about Cameras?

Still, we might naively ask, how then can a camera (a brainless, non-digital camera, for instance) create a picture of the moon’s roundness? Where does the roundness information come from if not the photons captured by the camera?

But here, too, our brains create the roundness of the moon. This time it happens when we look at the photo from the camera.

If someone paints a full moon on canvas, it’s the same thing. When we look at the canvas our brains create the roundness of the painted moon, just as would happen if we were looking at the moon itself.

And then our brains note that the roundness is imperfect.

Our brains, of course, don’t just create roundness information about the moon. They create an entire moon object. This moon-object has properties, including hue, saturation, and brightness. It also has an edge forming the property of roundness.

The objectification of the visual field into objects with discernible properties and information seems to be an automatic activity of the human brain. I would go further and declare that all experiences—that is, all sensation created by the brain for the purpose of moving and acting within the world around us—by nature have location and meaning (so that the sensation can bring a call to action to the organism). This is why our sensations, our experiences, present us with information necessarily.3

A natural answer

Skeptical naturalism answers the question Where does roundness exist? by locating it in the simulacrum created by the brain as it produces our senses and knowledge.

This video4 which I linked to in a previous post demonstrates the point. Watch the video (before reading further)!

If you duteously tried to count the basketball throws as directed, your brain saturated your visual experience with objects needed for the task at hand: you see the basketball, you see the basketball players passing the basketball, maybe you see the players on the opposing team as well since passes from them shouldn’t count. These objects are essential to counting the basketball throws.

But you didn’t see the man in a gorilla suit object. Why not?

Your brain created the visual experience you needed for the task at hand; distractions were excluded from your vision because you had something tricky to concentrate on.

Afterwards, once you learned about the gorilla-suited man, your brain took note and “improved itself”—and I bet now your brain won’t allow you to unsee him the next time you watch the video. (Can you even fully concentrate on counting the throws once you know what’s really important about the scene?)

The question, then, is not whether the brain constructs our experiences. It absolutely constructs the objects and properties that we visualize. The question, rather, is this: are those objects and properties (such as roundness) located in one place or two places?

Are they located only in the neurobiological construction we call consciousness, or do they also have duplicates located in the mind-independent physical world?

I submit that the meta philosophy of naturalism5 is not consistent with saying objects and properties exist in both places. This is because the places—one mind-independent and one mind-dependent—are fundamentally different in type. And the meta philosophy of naturalism says that the second type is a neurobiological construction which shows up only after millions or billions of years.

Things produced by neurons in the brains of organisms can’t be equivalent to things predating the evolution of neurons—not at least under naturalism. (If you have a supernatural worldview, you will see it differently.)

I hope this gets at why I don’t think perceptual realism fits naturalism. And I believe the same will apply for scientific realism.

Footnotes

[Third post on Preface to Atheism.]

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[This was my second post on Preface to Atheism, Aug 23, 2023.]

In my first post I talked about my sudden flip to a natural worldview when I was young. I mentioned that I didn’t call what I believed naturalism at the time because (thanks to the influence of Zeno) I had become completely skeptical about our ability to know the world as it is.

Back then when I read descriptions of naturalism, it was clear that it involved the rejection of skepticism and embrace of something (though I didn’t know it then) called scientific realism1, or the embrace of determinism outright.

But turns out, this is because 20th century advocates of naturalism got distracted from its essential point.

In A Concise Guide to Philosophy, William H. Halverson put his finger on the essential point: “Theism says, “In the beginning, God;” naturalism says, “In the beginning, matter.”2

Notice that when put this way, supernaturalism and naturalism are factual, historical claims about the world. Supernaturalism says that mind (or consciousness or spirit or something non-physical) existed, and then brought the physical world into existence. Naturalism says the opposite. Each, in fact, serves as a kind of scientific meta-hypothesis.

Naturalism, as scientific meta-hypothesis, claims this: the history of the world (where “world” means everything, all universes if there are multiple, and any/all pre-universe, pre-big bang states) is such that at first there existed no consciousness or thoughts. Then, on at least one planet in at least one solar system, living organisms evolved. Then at least one species on that planet evolved brains which produce consciousness including thoughts.

Another way of putting this is that the meta-hypothesis states that consciousness is a biological phenomenon and that this biological phenomenon simply did not exist (and cannot exist) until organisms with bodies and brains capable of producing it evolved into existence.

In other words, naturalism in its essence is not just a scientific/historical claim, it is a biological claim about the nature and origin of mind and consciousness (which broadly I will refer to as mind-stuff). If mind-stuff has a biological origin and nature, then mind-stuff did not exist until at least one planet formed capable of supporting life.

One obvious thing about the meta-hypothesis of naturalism is that it entails atheism. If thoughts and consciousness are biological, then without a body there can be no thoughts, no consciousness, no qualia.3 Such stuff can’t exist until organisms with bodies and brains evolved, therefore we know that disembodied mind or disembodied consciousness cannot be the origin of the world.

If the hypothesis of naturalism is true, atheism follows.

Skeptical Naturalism

An important scientific task becomes identifying the mind-stuff produced by brains and moving it to the biological consciousness side of the ledger—that is, making sure we don’t inadvertently leave mind-stuff on the “physical” side and thus confuse (that is, inadvertently abandon) the naturalistic hypothesis without realizing it.4

As part of this effort, I’m going to focus skeptical naturalism.

The skeptical naturalist hypothesis holds that all elements of knowing are aspects of biological consciousness. This moves a lot more stuff to the “mind” or consciousness side of the ledger than is usually done by advocates of naturalism. I take this position because I believe the biological and neurobiological evidence forces it.

The specific hypothesis is this: animals are unable to perceive the world, so consciousness evolved as a substitute for the world.

For example, vision (everything that we or other animals “see”) is a substitute—not a perception of the world as it is, but a stand-in created by our brains and used to better navigate the world.

I think this becomes obvious when we look at the neuroscience of vision. Whenever we open our eyes, we think we see the world around us, but our bodies and brains actually have no way to do that. Instead, what our retinas do is sample photons. These photons are particles of light which bounced off physical stuff in the world, but they are not the objects and things they bounced off—those things our retinas never see.

Our eyes detect photons, but we see visual scenes.

In short, brains evolved to construct scenes based on hints from photons. I will address this in more detail in the future, showing how optical illusions prove vision is a construction by the brain. But for the moment a few examples may suffice.

The first is a demonstration of the brain modifying color to enhance the usefulness of a visual scene. (It should be noted that photons don’t have colors. Our brains create color to aid in object tracking. The example shows that color is not the perception of wavelength.)

The second is an example of the brain constructing movement where we know there is none. (Optical illusions are situations where the brain’s rules for constructing vision end up not being reliable.5)

Watch this video and see if you can correctly count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. (This demonstrates that the brain’s purpose when constructing vision depends on the organism’s goal at hand. If you go back and re-experience the identical situation—which, conveniently, videos allow us to do—but with different goals, or after learning from the first experience, your brain constructs a different visual experience.)

So instead of perceiving the world, brains of organisms evolved to create a virtual world—this is what vision and sound and all other senses are: virtual creations by the brain (sensual consciousness) which evolved as a stand-in so that organisms can successfully navigate the world around.

To repeat: the physical world can’t be perceived, but organisms can interact with it. On earth, these interactions led to brains evolving the best possible alternative—a virtual reality composed of sensations which can be perceived and known and employed as an almost real-time substitute.

This is what vision is. This is what hearing is. This is what touching, tasting, smelling are. They are simulacra created on the fly by brains of organisms in order to navigate the world.

Simulacra are so well done that we mistake them for the world.

Getting back to skeptical naturalism, there is an additional hypothesis that if we can’t perceive the world, we can’t know the world.

And that it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because we have the brain’s simulacra to work with. Best of all, the simulacra have built-in hooks for knowledge—because, meanings and concepts are themselves simulacra.

In humans (and probably most complex organisms) the brain’s various simulacra are integrated into a more or less coherent whole, which I refer to as a simulacrum. In us, the simulacrum includes not just our various senses, but also objectifications (objects and properties) along with our understandings, our knowledge of those objectifications.

More on this later.

Footnotes

[Preface to Atheism is a blog I started on SubStack. What follows is the first post from Aug 18, 2023]

In this Substack, I will advocate atheism as entailed by the meta philosophy of naturalism rather than atheism based on doubt about God or religion. There’s nothing wrong with doubting God or religion, of course, but I hope to convince you that the benefits of atheism based on naturalism are immense and often overlooked by many atheists.

To an extent, this is because of my own history.

For the first 20 years of my life, I was a “student” of Christian Science—a 19th century New Age religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy. As a religion it was progressive for its time, a relatively feminist blend of spiritualism, Christianity, and philosophical idealism.

The philosophical idealism part of the mix is paramount to my story. You should understand that Christian Scientists reject dualism and embrace a monism in which mind—Divine Mind—is the only reality. Our individual minds are a reflection of Divine Mind, but if that reflection gets clouded we subject ourselves to sin, disease and death.

This is because our bodies are seen as the spiritual reflections of our thoughts. Correcting our thoughts so they properly reflect Divine Mind is how Christian Scientists attempt to cure the body (which is the primary goal of adherents).

This brief description of C.S. leaves a lot unexplained, and perhaps I’ll fill in more in a future post. Right now the focus is my own intellectual history, and the key element I want to convey is that as a child I grew up in a religion steeped in philosophical idealism.

But in 1974, at age 20, I became an atheist—not from doubting God’s existence but due to a sudden, unexpected flip in my brain to a natural framework.

(It was as if the very moment my brain perceived a new option possible, I flipped.)

Instead of a monism with mind (Divine or otherwise) primary, I flipped to one where physical matter was primary. It solved many problems (we will get to those in later posts).

At the time I didn’t know what to call my new worldview, so I settled on atheism—which I had grown up to think of as the “evil idea.” But notably determinism—another “evil idea” closely associated in my mind with atheism—did not flip to my new worldview. Determinism got excluded because mind and its explanations were, per my new framework, no longer primary.

I had a worldview that gave up God while excluding determinism. Did it really work?

I have spent most of my life trying to find out.

Zeno

My flip occurred because for years I struggled with the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, particularly the Arrow paradox. My 9th grade English teacher, Miss Blumenstock, introduced me to Zeno and, once introduced, I couldn’t let it go.

However, one of the risks of learning philosophy in English class is that stuff may get garbled. That happened here.

For years I did not understand that Zeno presented the arrow’s movement as a paradoxintended to challenge contemporary thinking.

Instead, I misunderstood Zeno to have a theory of motion, specifically: that motion is not continuous as we naively suppose, but rather the result of an object jumping through a series of discrete locations one after the other. (For example, Zeno’s arrow would start in location A1 then be in location A2, next A3 and so on, and thus the arrow is never actually in movement between locations.)

But rather than presenting a theory of motion in which there is no actual movement, Zeno instead was asserting a paradox: if the arrow has a known location, it’s not moving; if it’s moving, it doesn’t have a known location.

In short, Zeno used paradoxes like the Arrow to throw in doubt our ability to know the world as it really is.

His paradoxes are particularly devastating for mathematics, for they demonstrate that formulas can’t be used to know reality; rather mathematics only pertain to “appearances”.

This distinction between appearance and reality comes from Parmenides, Zeno’s teacher, mentor, and (according to ancient rumor) lover.

Zeno’s paradoxes were intended to support Parmenides and to demonstrate that in attempting to know the world, we interface with how the world appears to us, not with actual reality (which Parmenides called “the One”), and that this discrepancy generates paradoxes which (according to Zeno1) apply even to our use of mathematics when we describe the world.

I believe Zeno was fundamentally correct.

Most importantly for today, modern philosophy has to take this mismatch between knowledge and reality seriously, or it stumbles.

Anyway, after five years of struggling with Zeno, I finally grasped the inevitability of Zeno’s mismatch between knowledge and the world. It was this new understanding which drove my brain flip after I turned 20.

The result was that in a moment I went from theism to atheism, from idealism to physicalism. I became an atheist without first having doubts about God’s existence.

Naturalism

I had flipped to a natural worldview, but I didn’t call it naturalism.

Why not?

Because in those days the definition of naturalism did not seem to be compatible with the inevitability of a mismatch between knowledge and the world. Even today, most definitions of naturalism embrace scientific realism (which is a denial of the mismatch) or else embrace something pretty close to scientific realism.

Still, if we back up and look at naturalism as a meta philosophy, this is where my worldview fits. And because naturalism as a meta philosophy entails atheism, the latter serves as a reasonable enough tag for my beliefs. But naturalism is the better tag.

Anyway, in 1974 I embraced physicalism and called myself an atheist—at the same time dismissing determinism. My new outlook was all about rejecting the primacy of mind, and as I saw it this rejection entailed not conflating the world with our understanding of the world.

I embraced the mismatch.

Since then, I’ve tried to understand if this was the right move. Is it sound? In Preface to Atheism, I’ll explain why I think it is.

Footnotes

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