Today I’m going to discuss a fallacy common to observers of the physical world (people like us), one which has significant practical importance. I call it the naive observer fallacy, and it goes something like this.
(1) Observers bring biases to their observations
(2) Naive observers are unaware of these biases
(3) Eliminating this naivety makes us better observers
Perhaps this does not qualify as a true logical fallacy. I think of it as a fallacy—perhaps better called a failing—which results from not considering the limitations of the observation deck. That is to say, biases due to the unsuspected nature of the observer’s location and observation toolset.
The point of the fallacy (or failing) is that our goal, as good observers, must be to become aware of such limitations and biases and eliminate them from the picture. Otherwise our observations will be flawed and correspondingly unreliable.
Identifying our limitations and biases is not as easy as it seems.
An early strategy (perhaps the first strategy employed by humans) was to pool our observations and reconcile them so that we could obtain objectivity (overcome our individuality) by replacing individual subjective observations with collective agreement.
However, this actually leaves any remaining biases harder to detect. Because we believe that we are achieving objectivity with our collective method, and since our remaining biases are collectively held, the result is their invisibility.
Easy example: if we are all located on a spinning planet, we may objectively conclude that the heavens are spinning because every individual observer sees the same thing: spinning stars at night.
A key step, therefore, in overcoming our naivety depends on recognizing that we might all share a common bias due to our common position as observers. Like Copernicus, we may need to recognize that it’s not the heavens spinning, it’s us.
But as we proceed to identify and eliminate shared biases like this, one consequence is that any remaining confounders we harbor become even more invisible. Consequently, we may become increasingly arrogant regarding our observations, a consequence of the very fact of celebrating their objectivity.
We pat ourselves on the back, becoming more confident than ever in our collective observations due to this self-recognized objectivity. This is likely to lead us to believe that our observations are true not just for the observers we know to exist (that is, ourselves, homo sapiens on earth), but for all possible observers we can imagine.
Of course, any observers we imagine will harbor all of our so-far undetected limitations and biases. Because these biases are invisible to us, we are not capable of imagining observers who lack them.
Thus, we remain naive.
How can we take the next step, short of actually encountering alien observers who have a different perspective, who lack at least some of our hidden biases?
As it turns out, perhaps we have already encountered such observers, encountered them here on earth—without perhaps recognition that they count as observers. Who do I have in mind?
Other species here on earth.
To put it another way, the next step in eliminating our naivety involves recognizing that we are biological beings, that our species has a biological history (a developmental history) which created our observation platform and made us into the observers we are today. This means recognizing that not only our bones and brains evolved, but our minds evolved as well.
This developmental history is something we have in common with other species. Like us, they have observation platforms.
With this new perspective, we can start to understand our ability to observe the world from a biological perspective, and use this new comprehension as a means of eliminating more of our invisible naivety.
For example, we can ask, what does it take to know the world? What biological features developed in us as a species so that we could observe and know the things around us?
Features which perhaps did not develop, or developed differently, in other species?
One such feature is glaring and obvious, but only once we recognize that it is there. Unrecognized, it is utterly invisible because of its necessity (and indeed its centrality) to our ability to know anything at all.
Information.
As way of explanation, we must first become cognizant of the dependence that information has upon properties of objects. Objects always have properties, and from these properties we can always extract information. This in fact is how we know the world. Without information, without objects with properties, the world is unknowable.
And until now we have naively, mistakenly, assumed that we find information out there in the world. All along, however, information (and it is the same for properties of objects) has been and is being created inside of us by our brains as part and parcel of our observation platform—the innate biological processes we have for observing and knowing the world.
To become more objective observers of the world, we must recognize that information is not actually out there, but in here. We must come to see information as a key aspect of our biologically evolved observational system, something which—for a species like us—is central to the whole enterprise of knowing the world.
So that’s it. The next step in our endeavor to avoid the naive observer fallacy must be to recognize that information is not out there—something we discover as observers—but in here, invented by our bodies. It is a biological tool for creating a knowable world.
I would go further and say that information is, in fact, a biological sensation. What does this mean?
In general, biological sensations are the building blocks of consciousness, and exist so that our brains can create a simulacrum (a world of consciousness) which stands in for the actual physical world around us. We interact with this world of consciousness and continually update it, improve it, whenever we experience (and attempt to reconcile) mismatches with the actual physical world that we move and breathe within. (We recognize these mismatches when we compare the usefulness of our working model with the usefulness of its negative, or other alternatives. Essentially, Popper’s falsification principle.)
Still, how can we be sure that information comes from inside us like this, rather than being something found outside of us?
Consider the following: any notion that we discover information by examining the world around us has to be able to explain the origin of false information. Did we somehow reach into the physical world and grab information that was false? Where did its falsity come from?
Evidently, not from the world. And if not from the world, then it must have come from us. Is it sensible and sustainable to think true and complete information comes from (is found in) the world, but false and incomplete information does not (is not found there)?
Isn’t it simpler (and obvious) that all information—true, false, complete, incomplete—comes from us.
Our brains can create information on demand as a consequence of creating a world of conscious sensations. The brain presents these sensations in a simulacrum which stands in for the physical world around us. Importantly, our brain populates the simulacrum with objects and their various properties.
It is because of the simulacrum’s collection of objects with properties that we can extract information on demand. Indeed, our minds are all about working this information, reconciling it, improving how we organize and access it in our brains. This aspect of the biological process—learning, in short—exists for the purpose of improving our memories and speeding up our reactions.
So let’s sum up.
Historically, philosophy has been saddled with supernaturalism, which at heart is the naive belief that mind-stuff (like information and properties of objects) is primary, and that physical stuff depends on mind-stuff for existence. Plato’s forms were properties writ large and put in a place of worship.
Today, information is put in a place of worship.
But like all supernaturalism, it is dependent on the naive observer fallacy. If mind-stuff is primary, naive thinking goes, then there likely must be a primary mind somewhere—so we naively imagine God. Or today, if we are more sophisticated, we just stop at mind-stuff and leave it at that.
Thus information becomes imagined as integral to the physical world. Silly nonsense, yes, but not recognizable as such until we overcome this bit of our naivety as observers of the world.
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- See also Scepticism about Scientific Realism
- For more on the concept of the simulacrum, see The Basics and Mind is the Brain Improving Itself and Do We Live in a Simulation?
