Fallacies of the Naive Observer

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Dwight

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.

__

 

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum, Supernaturalism | Comments Off on Fallacies of the Naive Observer

Mind is the Brain Improving Itself

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Dwight

Intelligence is being able to see what is right in front of you. Ignorance is looking at the world before you and seeing what you were taught to see. For thousands of years people looked at the night sky and saw the stars moving above them in an arc across the heavens. It took real intelligence to finally recognize that the stars stood still and it was we who moved.

In similar fashion, ignorance looks out and sees a world consisting of objects and their properties, sees geometrical shapes and mathematical relationships and laws of motion. Intelligence, looking at the same world, sees the brain doing its thing, creating a world around us, creating a simulacrum, a virtual reality, so that we can act and know (can survive and thrive) within natural existence.

Does the world of objects in motion, objects with properties and relationships, exist? Yes—in our brains. This is the simulacrum created by the brain and presented to ourselves as consciousness. And we mind it. We try to remember it, understand it.

We analyze it. The mind is the brain improving itself, learning how to make better decisions.

These decisions are informed by the simulacrum, but the simulacrum is only a tool. We exist within the real unknown that surrounds us, outside of the simulacrum. We move and breathe and live within the natural world. The virtual reality created by our brain, using our senses, stands in for this unknown surrounding us.

Best of all, the virtual reality, the simulacrum, is knowable. It is constructed of the stuff of knowing. Thus the brain’s simulacrum can be improved with the application of knowledge, and the mind is the brain’s path to improving it. Literally, the mind is the brain improving itself.

So, how do I, how does anyone know that any of this simulacrum business is true?

We get there by learning to see the obvious in front of our faces, by noticing the edges and cracks of the simulacrum, the elements of its construction by the brain. Vision is where scientists have made the most progress in this direction. Scientists now have a very good understanding of how the brain creates the visual world which appears outside and beyond our eyes.

Optical illusions provided the first hints that our eyes didn’t passively detect an outside world. As scientists examined the retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex it became very clear that the brain actively creates our visual experiences using hints gathered from the sampling of photons.

It is our retinas which are engaged in this ongoing sampling of photons. But it’s important to realize that we don’t “see” photons. Our visual experience is not an experience of photons, it is an experience of remote scenes and objects of which our eyes, our retinas, have never ever had any actual contact.

Our eyes and our brains are incapable of detecting objects, but what what they can detect are chemical collisions of photons against the retina—and the brain uses these collisions to create a visual world for us to experience: a scenic virtual reality constructed of objects and movements.

This visual simulacrum with its constructed objects “stands in” for the physical world of which we are a part.

It order to dispel ancient (and even modern) misperceptions about vision, it might help to remember that the photons which crash into our retinas are neither part of nor belong to anything in the physical world simulated by the brain’s visual construction (an exception: when the brain simulates “rays of sunshine”).

The red apple we see on the table is a visual creation by the brain (so is the table), and the brain creates it by using our eyes to sample photons which bounced off of real somethings outside us in the physical world.

Result: we see a red apple. This apple, again, is a virtual construction by our brain presented to us as a visual experience, and as such the apple has properties. Importantly, we can investigate and think about (and remember and analyze) the properties of any object constructed by the brain. (There is a corollary to this: if something we are thinking about has “properties”, it is necessarily a construction of the brain, and therefore exists “in here” not “out there”—the stuff of the physical world around us doesn’t contain properties, or consist of objects per se.)

The apple we see on the table is red. Its redness, its shinyness, its apple-shapeness, its surface texture, its weight, its specific gravity, its sound when it rolls off the table and hits the floor, these are all properties of the brain-constructed virtual object. Some of its properties, its color and shape for example, are created in the visual cortex in the brain. Other object properties, such as sounds the object makes, or knowledge developed about the object by thinking about it, are created in other parts of the brain. All become properties of the object.

I said earlier that the actual stuff of the physical world (unlike visual objects constructed by the brain in order to stand in for that stuff) does not contain properties. But you might ask how can this be, if I’m seeing a red apple? Where did the apple’s redness come from, if not from outside me in the physical world? There’s got to be something “red” out there or I wouldn’t end up with “red” in here.

In fact, there is nothing “red” out there. Photons do not have color. You might think, well, photons have wavelengths and those wavelengths cause us to experience specific colors. This is both wrong and backwards.

It is backwards, in that photons do not cause us to have visual experiences. Our brains cause us to have visual experiences—this is one of the key lessons from the study of optical illusions. Our brains determine what we will experience. (You have probably seen illusions where you are asked to watch a video and count or attend to one thing, only to later learn that you never saw the person in a gorilla suit wandering through the scene—the requisite photons weren’t missing the first time you watched the video, but rather your brain determined what your visual experience would be based on the task at hand. Photons don’t cause vision, brains do.)

And it is equally wrong to think wavelength creates color. Optical illusions demonstrate that the brain analyzes a scene prior to creating objects or assigning colors, and the colors we experience vary depending on whether the brain determines that section of the scene to be in shadow or not in shadow. In a famous “rubric cube” optical illusion from MIT, the top of the cube is experienced as red and the left side is experienced as yellow, even though the related photons are the very same wavelength. This happens because the brain creates colors and assigns them to make object tracking as easy as possible.

Once we become informed about the science of vision, it revolutionizes our understanding of how we interact with the world. When we look out at the world, instead of believing we see the raw, physical world as it is, we realize that we see only the simulacrum, the brain’s visual reality created to stand in for the otherwise unknowable world around us.

We do not exist within this virtual reality. Rather, our body engages the world using it. (This is quite different from thinking we live within a virtual reality.) The simulacrum is a tool the brain creates for us, importantly a knowledge-improvable tool, which then helps us survive and thrive in the natural world which surrounds us.

It improves the usefulness of the simulacrum, when we become aware that it exists and is created by our neurons. This awareness helps us understand why the scientific method works so well, and why science must necessarily be based on pragmatic empiricism, its truths “true” within the simulacrum while at the same time pragmatically “useful” regarding the world that surrounds us. Knowing this helps us understand ourselves, as well as understand what we are doing when we think, when we remember, and when we learn.

As I said, it helps us understand who we are and what we are. Or at least, what we are not.

We are not the simulacrum. We are not the mind improving the simulacrum. We are not one of the brain’s tools.

We are not even the brain. We are the body, and the brain is one of our key parts. But it is not us. Nor consciousness, nor minding of consciousness. None of that is actually us. Saying so would be like looking at your left hand and declaring it to be the all of you, your essence, and then imagining that left hand romping delightfully in a celestial garden of flowers and insects.

Consciousness is a part of us, but it is not us. Mind is one of our most important aspects, but it is not by itself, us. We are the whole shebang. The mind serves the brain, and the brain serves the body.

Once you realize this, you see the silliness of thinking that it would be paradise to send one part of us, our consciousness, off to heaven. It would be useless without the whole shebang. It wouldn’t be me any more than my severed left hand dancing in paradise would be me. Once severed, it’s no longer a part of me. My brain in a vat is just a severed left hand. My soul or consciousness in heaven amounts to the same, a severed left hand.

I need my entire self, my body and my brain, my body and my consciousness, if I am to be me. And not only that. My consciousness—this simulacrum created by my brain so that I can survive and hopefully thrive within the natural world—what use is it thrown into heaven? It doesn’t exist for heaven. It exists for earth. Indeed, every part of me, limbs, hands, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, bladder, skin, brain, mind, consciousness, exists for one place and one place only: earth.

Please don’t send me somewhere else and call it paradise. The only possible paradise, for me, is the one my body can fashion for itself here on earth. Put me anywhere else, and I could only be out of sorts with myself. Uncomfortable. And that would never be paradise for me.

—

For more on the concept of the simulacrum, see The Basics and Rough Notes about Consciousness and Do We Live in a Simulation?

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Dwight

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is an unanswerable question, but the reason it’s an unanswerable question turns out to be interesting.

First, is it an unanswerable question?

Yes. For example, “God” cannot be the answer because God is “something” and therefore doesn’t answer the question. If there is (or was) a God, why? How did that come about?

One might notice a similarity to the following sequence of questions, “Why does the world exist?” Answer: “God.” Why does God exist? Answer: “You’re not supposed to ask that question.” Why not? “Because God always existed.” But why does God always exist? Why was there ever a God? Why was there ever something?

It’s an unanswerable question. And this is so whether “something” includes God or not.

But why is it an unanswerable question? Turns out, this is a question that can be analyzed and answered.

And here’s the answer: Existence (“something”) cannot have a cause.

The next interesting question is, why would we mistakenly think that it can have a cause?

We make this mistake because we (also mistakenly) think that individual things and instances within existence (somethings within something) can have causes.

Why do we make this mistake? Because we don’t realize that “causes” are really just “causal explanations.”

It is an important distinction. Causal explanations exist “within us”, within our thinking part. But we mistakenly believe that causes exist “out there” in the world. Right up until we look for the cause of all somethings, the cause of God, the cause of why there is something rather than nothing. Then we smack into our mistake.

There never were causes “out there.” All along there were only causal explanations “in here.” And here’s the rub: explanations are only human imaginings. There are no actual “explanations” out there, no actual causes.

Is this not solipsism? No, in fact the opposite. Our thoughts do not dictate or even “connect up” with the real world—at least not really. It is the daughter of solipsism to think that human causal explanations identify real causes in the real world, or even to think that there could be human mental elements such as “causes” in reality. Causes, like causal explanations, can only exist “in here.”

But wait—if this is so, then explain how science is even possible?

It’s easy, actually.

Even though Alvin Plantinga, Ronald Nash, and just about every Catholic theologian and Discovery Institute fellow can’t begin to imagine how science is possible if causes aren’t real and if the principle of sufficient reason isn’t true, the explanation has been well known at least since David Hume.

It’s called empiricism.

Empiricism is inherently pragmatic. When we say that the sciences are empirical, we mean that we can’t know whether our thoughts about the world are true unless we test those thoughts within the world around us. This does not mean that our thoughts about the world are verified by “checking in” with the world—that would be a misunderstanding. Since the world doesn’t actually contain causes or causal explanations or anything of the sort, we can’t check for these things in the world. We can’t verify truth against the world.

Say what?

We test the truth of our thoughts about the world—not against the world—but against other (possible) thoughts about the world. We test against the negative of what we are thinking or proposing. This is Popper’s falsification hypothesis, which replaced the logical empiricist* notion that the truth of our thoughts could be verified by checking the world using a verification principle.

“Truth” is a comparative between competing thoughts about the world. What is “true” can’t be tested by checking in with the world to see if it matches causes or causal explanations we can find in the world (since nothing of the like exists in reality—that is, outside of our minds). Instead, we test our competing thoughts against each other for their usefulness.

For example, you say “It is raining outside.” This is a practical claim which entails, for example that if we were outside we or our clothing would get wet. So we test it against a contradictory (likely though not necessarily opposite) claim, “It is not raining outside”, perhaps even “it is snowing outside” or “it is sunny and windy outside.” How do we test it? We go outside (or put instruments outside). If we get wet, as is entailed by the claim, then we think the claim true. But we must also be cognizant of other possible thoughts we may devise, such as the thought that we got wet when we stepped outside because Bob was on the roof and sprinkled us with water from the hose (a contradictory claim for why we got wet).

Science works by pragmatic empiricism. It does not require a principle of sufficient reason or the existence of actual causes in the physical world. The questions science asks and answers never have to be true of physical reality. They just have to be more useful to us than the answers we reject (rejected because they are less useful).

One other thing: scientists understand that “usefulness” must be pursued in a disinterested, objective sense. What is most useful to human beings is not usefulness that benefits me personally at the expense of everyone else, but usefulness that applies in a more universal, observer-independent sense. As Victor Stenger put it in his misnamed book, The Comprehensible Cosmos, what scientists strive for is models of reality that are “point-of-view invariant with respect to observations and the need to agree with those observations.” (p. 187)

In his book, which has the more applicable subtitle “Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?”, Stenger explains that it is this desire for point-of-view invariance which led necessarily to creation of the laws of physics. These laws exist to ensure point-of-view invariance. Stenger goes further, asking

“So, where does point-of-view invariance come from? It comes simply from the apparent existence of an objective reality—independent of its detailed structure. Indeed, the success of point-of-view invariance can be said to provide evidence for the existence of an objective reality. Our dreams are not point-of-view invariant. If the Universe were all in our heads, our models would not be point-of-view invariant.” (p 187)

He continues,

“Point-of-view invariance is thus the mechanism by which we enforce objectivity. If we did not have an underlying objective reality, then we would not expect to be able to describe observations in a way that is independent of reference frame.”

—
*A.J. Ayer, who introduced the verification principle, called it “logical empiricism”. He was the most important member of a group known as the logical positivists.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

Rough Notes about Consciousness

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Dwight

I suspect that no topic has been obfuscated with more nonsense—religious, philosophical or scientific—than consciousness.

First, the focus on what consciousness “is” usually starts at the wrong place, at what might be called “high up” complex consciousness, rather than beginning with the basic phenomena. In fact, usually the basic phenomena of consciousness is not even recognized as part of consciousness! Instead “sense experiences” or “sense data” are usually assumed to be stuff outside of consciousness, stuff which our consciousness “perceives” or detects. This is a confusion you will find almost everywhere.

So let me provide an overview of my basic understanding of what consciousness is and how it more or less works. (In this I have been influenced by cognitive scientists like Nicholas Humphrey, though I may differ in my use of common-language terminology.)

There are no perceptions of the world prior to or outside of consciousness. Tactile feelings, sounds, light, color—none exist in the physical world outside of consciousness. They are subjective experiences created by the brain—they are consciousness.

Consider vision. What the scientific study of vision makes plain is that light is an experience created by the brain. It is not something outside of us which we detect. Now of course, something does exist outside of us, which we detect, and we describe that something as photons. And we identify photons as having properties such as wavelength, energy level, etc. The properties which photons have are not the same as the properties of the experience created by the brain—light—which has its own properties such as hue, brightness, and saturation. But light and its properties are created as a subjective personal experience (i.e. a type of consciousness) by the brain. I won’t here go into how we know this, but it is well known by scientists who study vision.

The same applies to sound, smell, taste, touch. They are types of consciousness created by the brain. They don’t automatically exist as phenomena—the brain has to create them. And in creating them (these first-person experiences) the brain is creating consciousness. Ears do not “hear” sounds; eyes do not “see” light. These body parts detect air perturbations or photons, pass samplings of these detections to various parts of the brain where they are “processed,” and those parts of the brain—or other parts—selectively create sounds and light (qualia) from these detections.

Sounds are consciousness created by the brain. Visual experiences are consciousness created by the brain. A tactile sensation is consciousness created by the brain.

In fact, it is obvious that such sensual sensations are what consciousness is.

What about thoughts? What about emotions? What about concepts? What about my sense of self? These are also sensations, or perhaps better put, complexes of sensations. They are (generally speaking) more complex constructions of consciousness created by the brain.

For studying the basic mystery of consciousness, it is misleading and confusing to skip over these basic sensations such as sounds, smells, and visual experiences. This is because the mystery is the same. How does the brain create a subjective sound? How does it create light, a color experience? And yet we know that it does. We know that if specific parts of the brain are damaged, the brain can’t create the experiences that part of the brain is involved in producing. Or the consciousness created is altered or warped.

Even seeing movement is a visual experience created by the brain (the area of the visual cortex called V5 is involved in producing the experience of moving things).

In “Has Neuroscience ‘Proved’ that the Mind is Just the Brain”, Mind Matters (Dec 1, 2020), Michael Egnor argues that the mind cannot equal the brain (true), and that the brain cannot produce mental states (false), because there is no way that brain states can equal mental states (true). Egnor writes,

How do material brain states correspond to mental states? How could a certain concentration of chemicals in my brain cause me to do calculus? How could a specific electrochemical gradient in my brain make me feel sad? What is the link?

The answer, says [David] Chalmers, is that we have no idea how brain states can cause thoughts. There is certainly no explanation provided by science—there is no mathematical formula that links neurons to thoughts and there is no reason to think there ever will be or ever can be. Brains are material, thoughts are immaterial, and there is no way imaginable to explain one by the other. This is why the hard problem (Chalmers himself coined the term in 1995) is hard—it’s not even tractable by neuroscience, let alone solvable.

Other philosophers have used different terms for the hard problem—Joseph Levine calls it the Explanatory Gap. But the problem is the same. There is no explanation for the mental on the basis of the physical. No physics or chemistry explains thought.

What is not in doubt is that, to some extent, thoughts correlate with brain activity. On that, dualists and materialists agree. But what is also not in doubt is that there is no materialist explanation—and there cannot be a materialist explanation— for the mind.”

All this is more or less true, and yet doesn’t conflict with the materialist claim that the brain produces consciousness. To understand how this is so, it’s easier to focus on basic conscious experiences like sound and light, rather than on “doing calculus” or feeling sad.

Vision is especially useful here, because scientists know quite a bit about it. And we know with certainty that visual experiences are produced by the brain (and not just the human brain, but even the brains of much “simpler” organisms. Do brain states of the visual cortex equate to our visual experiences? Yes—and yet also no. We see in the visual cortex a lot of the prep work the brain performs prior to creating our visual experiences; we see the dependencies of our visual experiences on that prep work—without it vision would not be possible.

And yet, how is the subjective experience of vision, for example the color red, produced? We don’t know. Worse, we can’t even imagine an example of what “knowing” how the brain produces a red sensation would look like. We can see the connection between brain states and visual experiences, but we can’t begin to imagine how a description of brain structure and brain chemistry could correspond to actual conscious experiences.

But scientists know why this is the case, why it is necessarily the case. Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt explained it coherently (and correctly, I would argue) in a Scientific American blog, Oct 17, 2018, “Unlocking the mystery of consciousness”. I strongly recommend reading it.

In a broader sense, the same “explanatory gap” exists between all scientific descriptions and natural phenomenon. We see it with natural phase changes, such as water freezing, or sudden lightning strikes. Because the supernatural worldview misunderstands science as distilling “truth” from the physical world, it misses the fact that there is always an explanatory gap between knowledge and the physical world.

That gap is doubled when we attempt to use knowledge of the brain (which is itself complex consciousness) to explain itself. Feinberg and Mallatt make it very clear why this gap is inevitable and entirely to be expected.

That the gap must exist is, in fact, a prediction of naturalism.

This is why there is nothing inconsistent with maintaining that consciousness is a product of brains. Nothing inconsistent, that is, under a natural worldview. But a supernatural worldview runs into trouble when considering the basic nature of consciousness.

How so?

The supernatural worldview relies on the notion of dualism, that consciousness (though it apparently has some inexplicable connection to the brain) has a non-physical source, a spiritual realm, etc. And this reliability on something non-physical might seem plausible when considering “high-up” complex examples of consciousness—human emotions, or doing calculus. But sounds, visual experiences, tactile sensations—consci0usness at its more basic level of sensation—do these benefit in any way from postulating a realm beyond the physical as their source?

If a pin prick creates a pain sensation in me (an example of basic consciousness) do I really require something outside my physical body, outside physical reality itself, in order to account for this experience? True enough, neuroscientists can’t explain exactly how my brain created my feeling of the pin prick, but does anyone really believe that we need a realm of non-physical existence outside of us in order to account for it?

The mystery of consciousness is right there in the most basic sensations of pain. How does the brain create qualia? How does it create a subjective experience? Well, we can’t explain it with science. More broadly, we can’t explain it with knowledge. We can’t explain it using the tools that the human brain has to work with.

There is nothing new here, really. We could say much the same about electricity, or about gravity, or about water freezing into ice. Human knowledge reveals nothing about the underlying nature of the physical world outside of us. Its tool set is focused somewhere else: on the object-infused, property-infused, information-infused simulacrum which our brain creates to “stand in” for that physical world outside us. And when we develop better knowledge about/within the brain-created simulacrum, knowledge which turns out to be useful (and not yet falsified) for us as organisms, we naively believe we have uncovered something about the underlying nature of the physical world which the simulacrum “stands in” for. But what we really have, instead, is a slightly more useful simulacrum.

The actual physical world around us remain essentially unknown and mysterious.

Well! If it’s unknown and mysterious, how do it we know that it is not in fact a spiritual world rather than a physical world? How do we know it is not also object-infused, property-infused, information-infused, mind-infused?

The reason for believing this is not the case is simple: if the world outside and around us was naturally infused with mind-stuff, there would have been no need for evolution to come up with a brain-created simulacrum infused with mind-stuff that “stands in” for it. We could simply know the world directly. We could interact with information in the world in situ, detect its properties directly, and so on. (This of course is the common myth: that we perceive the physical world directly, that our brains extract information from such “perceptions.” Until this myth is exploded, until it is understood as myth, dualism will hang around.)

There are actually a few general things that we can reliably say about the otherwise unknowable physical world around us and that we are part of.

(1) It exists (it’s not just a figment invented by brain or mind).

(2) It’s constantly changing.

(3) It doesn’t have the nature that knowledge has—it’s not naturally broken out into objects with properties—it is not informational. (Thus the inevitable mismatch between nature and knowledge that was perhaps first identified by Zeno of Elea.)

(4) The simulacrum created by our brains is a very useful “stand in” for it, whatever it is.

(5) For most purposes, it’s harmless if we conflate the simulacrum we experience with the physical world itself (we evolved to make this conflation, after all). But when it comes to understanding neuroscience, consciousness, relationships between knowledge and world, ourselves as observers, and so on, conflation becomes a source of deep confusion.

Notes:

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum | 1 Comment

Do We Live in a Simulation?

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Dwight

The human brain creates a simulation of the world around us from sensory inputs. This simulation is inside of us, and can be analyzed and known and expanded with supplemental knowledge. But some (actual) scientists are confused. They wonder if we are inside the simulation rather than the simulation being inside us.

An October Scientific American article by Anil Ananthaswamy implies that the odds are about 50–50 that we live inside a simulation. Seriously.

Do We Live in a Simulation?

Scientific American, October 2020. Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances are about 50–50

From my perspective, this appears to be some kind of mental illness on their part (where by “mental illness” I mean that their fundamental understanding of the world is so dissociated from reality that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry).

At best, it is an attempt to bring supernaturalism back by the front door. At worse, as mentioned, it is mental illness, secondary or primary dissociation from reality.

I should mention my friend Harry here. He suffered from primary dissociation, so much so that he once traveled to the White House to become Ronald Reagan’s science advisor. Only, Reagan already had a science advisor, and Harry ended up in jail. When he got the opportunity, he called me and gave me his star coordinates.

“What am I supposed to do with these numbers”, I asked.

“Give them to Captain Kirk and the Star Ship Enterprise will rescue me,” Harry pleaded.

“Harry, I don’t have a way to do that,” I tried to explain.

He was pretty exasperated with me. He told me to repeat the coordinates to the TV set when Star Trek was on, and tell them Harry needed to be rescued. He knew they would respond immediately.

From my perspective this was problematic, and not just because the star coordinates lacked enough significant digits to adequately specify Harry’s location in the galaxy. As I saw it, Captain Kirk did not have real existence, since he only existed as a fictional character within a simulation created by my brain (and, yes, Harry’s brain contained a similar simulation with a fictional Captain Kirk, but only because we had watched the same tv show).

But Harry’s perspective differed from mine. Everything his brain imagined was real to him. Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise existed within his mind and the minds of other people, therefore they were very real.

Harry also used to chide me for denying the reality of cartoon characters (the most oppressed minority of all, he said).

The problem wasn’t (I tried to explain to him) that I denied the existence of fictional characters; indeed, I affirmed their existence in our imaginations. The problem was that, there, within the simulation created by human brain, that was the only place fictional characters existed.

In contrast, I told Harry, actual physical entities existed outside our brain’s simulations as well as within. Yes, real entities did usually have a simulation version in addition to their actual existence in the physical world, but to conflate the two was to become, well, mentally ill.

Harry never agreed, of course. But then he spent most of his time in mental hospitals or half-way homes.

It is embarrassing to see scientists entertaining the same confusions which beset Harry.

So, a simple reality check:

1. Physical things can’t be brought into existence by a computer program or by any kind of mind or even by a complex of thoughts. To think otherwise is pure supernaturalism. It’s a silly belief in primitive word magic.

2. The simulation (simulacrum is my preferred term) does exist—inside us. It’s created by our brains, and is composed of sensory and knowledge sensations that the brain creates. This simulacrum is commonly mistaken for the physical world around us. It’s not.

3. Objects, properties, causes, and all the other artifacts of knowledge belong to, and are part of, the brain’s simulacrum. They are not actual components of the physical world.

4. Therefore we never “know” the physical world. We know the simulacrum that our brain creates for us.

5. This is not a problem for science. Indeed, it explains why the scientific method—unlike any other method of knowledge—is so successful.

6. Science could not be successful if an actual physical world did not exist outside of our brain’s simulacrum. Point-of-view invariance (to use Victor Stenger’s term for scientific objectivity) would not be achievable. (Our dreams, for example, defy any effort at point-of-view invariance.)

Bottom line, this article in Scientific American is pseudo-science. Pretty embarrassing.

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum | 2 Comments

Atheism v Naturalism

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

A Pew Research Center option (“There is no God or higher power, other than the laws of nature/physics/mathematics”) made me realize that atheists with a natural worldview reject one additional false belief which unthoughtful atheists overlook.

There is a progression from rejecting the God of the Bible, to rejecting a higher power, to rejecting any element (or framework) that elevates human thought to a cosmic status—all are steps in rejecting supernaturalism. The natural human tendency to elevate mind above and before matter—this is what naturalism is all about ferreting out and eliminating.

Yes, you did good in rejecting God, but if you still elevate intelligence to the point of origin of the physical universe (in the form of laws of physics, or the universality of mathematics) then you have not so much rejected God as disguised him in a more palatable form, one which still preserves the ultimate importance of your mind.

The only step which truly eliminates supernatural thinking is the step of naturalism.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and the Bible

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

[This is an old draft that I never completed. Oh well, here it is. As is.]

There was a recent debate on the scientific merits of Creationism between Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) and Ken Ham (founder of Answers in Genesis), held at Ken Ham’s Creationist museum. Unlike many Intelligent Design advocates, Ken Ham actually insists on a young earth, approximately 6000 years old. He believes this because he considers the Christian Bible to be an infallible scientific textbook (among other things). He thinks the Bible infallible because he believes it came from God.

Bill Nye stressed that neither the Bible (nor Ken Ham) provide any hypotheses that can be scientifically tested. Indeed, Ham’s primary point seemed to be that scientists can only make inferences about the past based on what they see today—but since none of us were actually there, we cannot claim that the Biblical account is wrong. And since the Bible comes to us from God, creator of the world, it would be presumptuous to doubt its scientific bona fides.

Bill Nye clearly did not want to attack the Bible as God’s word. In this debate, Nye’s goal was to build a bridge to the religious population and to encourage them to embrace the scientific method. Nye only went as far as to point out that Ham was relying on an English translation of the Bible, and that Ham himself did not take everything written in the Bible as scientific text: therefore (according to Nye) Ham was picking and choosing his “scientific” passages based on his (Ham’s) personal biases.

Ham’s response was simply to wave the Bible in the air and say there’s a book that has all the answers. For his followers, that was enough.

But for scientists, it is not.

For scientists to take Ken Ham’s claim about the Bible seriously, they have to study the Bible not as religious but as scientific text. And as soon as anyone attempted to do so, Ham’s claim would begin to fall apart. I’ll quickly point out two reasons for this.

(1) The scientific information in the Bible is not useful. It is not testable, not consistent, and furthermore is simply too vague to be of any scientific use. (Nye’s point)

Or it is simply silly. The Genesis account of creation furnishes a good example. There we are told that God created darkness and light, night and day, prior to creating the sun. Apparently the author of Genesis did not understand where daylight came from.

(2) As soon as we take the Bible seriously, the claim that it comes from God falls apart.

A few random notes on this point. The Bible that is supposedly God’s unadulterated word, yet contains books which say Moses wrote them. Why don’t they say God wrote them? (Moses dies in one of the books he wrote, so perhaps God had to finish it.) Various Church councils were required in order to decided which books to include in the Bible (these were convened by humans, and God’s attendance was not recorded).

If God wrote the Bible, why are there conflicting flood stories—was it two of every beast and bird on the Ark, or were there six of some? Then the conflicting stories regarding the Ten Commandments, including the embarrassment that the only version which specifically uses the phrase “Ten Commandments” (or “ten words”) lists “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” as the tenth commandment. Many other inconsistencies and errors are scattered throughout the Bible.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and the Bible

When Biology Trumps Physics

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

[The following is a draft that I wrote a good decade ago, never completed. The title reveals that I had ambitious intentions for where my line of thought would go. But, being human, the 20th century morass of “information theory” and “representationalism” nonsense was too much, and I could never stay interested long enough (or stay focused enough) to cut through the complex silliness and complete the work. Here I present the draft as is, adding a final farewell line.]

“Know thyself” is good advice, even for today. Sometimes what you don’t know about yourself can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and I suspect that is the case for some physicists and philosophers who in the last few years have latched onto “information” as if it were a fundamental property of the universe along side matter and energy.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.

Others have jumped on the information bandwagon, including David Chalmers, whose December 1995 article in Scientific American suggested,

Perhaps information, or at least some information, has two basic aspects: a physical one and an experiential one. This hypothesis has the status of a fundamental principle that might underlie the relation between physical processes and experience. Wherever we find conscious experience, it exists as one aspect of an information state, the other aspect of which is embedded in a physical process in the brain.

Chalmers goes on to enthuse,

The idea is at least compatible with several others, such as physicist John A. Wheeler’s suggestion that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. The laws of physics might ultimately be cast in informational terms…. It may even be that a theory of physics and a theory of consciousness could eventually be consolidated into a single grander theory of information.

Chalmers does admit a few roadblock, for example,

A potential problem is posed by the ubiquity of information. Even a thermostat embodies some information, for example, but is it conscious? There are at least two possible responses. First, we could constrain the fundamental laws so that only some information has an experiential aspect, perhaps depending on how it is physically processed. Second, we might bite the bullet and allow that all information has an experiential aspect—where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience, and where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience. If this is so, then even a thermostat might have experiences, although they would be much simpler than even a basic color experience, and there would certainly be no accompanying emotions or thoughts. This seems odd at first, but if experience is truly fundamental, we might expect it to be widespread.

How did we get here? One clue may be in the definition of information used by Chalmers. It is a definition that comes right out of the 1940s.

The abstract notion of information, as put forward in the 1940s by Claude E. Shannon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that of a set of separate states with a basic structure of similarities and differences between them. We can think of a 10-bit binary code as an information state, for example. Such information states can be embodied in the physical world. This happens whenever they correspond to physical states (voltages, say) and when differences between them can be transmitted along some pathway, such as a telephone line.

Now, this is clearly not my definition of information, or anything close to it. For one thing, the way I define information precludes it from being “embodied in the physical world”. In the world I live in, thermostats neither contain nor manipulate information, and consequently the possibility of thermostat consciousness is inappropriate: a joke rather than a live possibility. But you see, I am not a philosopher.

Chalmers is careful with his definitions, typical of his profession. Consider, for example, how he defines consciousness:

Consciousness involves the instantiation of phenomenal properties. These properties characterize aspects of what it is like to be a subject (what it is like to be me right now, for example, or what it is like to be a bat), or what it is like to be in a mental state (what it is like to see a certain shade of green, for example, or what it is like to feel a certain sharp pain). Whenever there is something it is like to be a subject, that subject has specific phenomenal properties. Whenever there is something it is like to be in a mental state, that state has specific phenomenal properties.

I understand each of the word Chalmer uses. No problem following the grammar and sentence structure. I even have a very clear idea of exactly what each word ought to refer to. My problem is that I can’t make Chalmers words clearly fit anything in my world. Part of it, of course, is the ambiguity introduced by terms like “involves” and “characterize aspects”. There is evidently some relationship between consciousness and “phenomenal properties” —or at least their instantiation. And what is it that has these phenomenal properties? It is a subject. Or rather “something it is like to be a subject.” Or at least, “whenever there is something it is like to be a subject” then that subject has phenomenal properties.

Why the roundabout phraseology? Evidently Chalmers is trying to avoid some difficulty in his definition (if it is a definition—is it?). But the result is not only do I not know what difficulty he is trying to avoid, I also end up unsure what the words “subject”, “phenomenal” and “properties”—much less “consciousness”—refer to in Chalmers world. He did include a couple of examples, indicating that “subject” includes “me” and a “bat”. Does subject also include tree and rock, or is it limited in his lexicon to species with consciousness? And if the latter, what is the difference between subjects with their phenomenal properties and mental states and their phenomenal properties?

Intentionality, a favorite word of philosophers, is somehow closely related to consciousness, according to Chalmers. In discussing intentionality, he says, “As with phenomenal properties, we can regard representational properties as being instantiated by either subjects or by mental states.”

Oh my! There seem to be a lot of actors in Chalmers world.

Another quote, which helps explain representationalism:

I will take representationalism to be the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to certain representational properties (or that they are equivalent to certain representational properties; see below). We can say that pure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to pure representational properties, while impure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to impure representational properties. In practice, almost all representationalists are impure representationalists, for reasons to be given shortly. Some representationalists, such as Dretske and Tye, occasionally put their view by saying that phenomenal properties are identical to certain represented external properties, such as physical redness. As I am putting things, that would be a category mistake: phenomenal properties are by definition properties of subjects or of mental states, and physical redness is not (or need not be). I think that this is simply a terminological difference, however. For example, Dretske defines phenomenal properties (“qualia”) as the properties we are directly aware of in perception, and concludes these are properties such as colors.

Which Chalmers finds compatible with his version. So there are phenomenal properties and there are representational (both pure and impure) properties, and these are identical to each other (or maybe only equivalent), and both types can be instantiated either by subjects or by mental states. Or at least by something that it is like to be a subject or that it is like to be a mental state.

Goodbye 20th century scientific supernaturalism! You make my head spin.

Posted in Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | Comments Off on When Biology Trumps Physics

Is Evolution a Fact?

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Dwight

It drives me crazy (not really, of course) when atheists (and lately even some scientists) assert that evolution is a “fact”.

Now, the word “fact” can have various (conflicting) meanings. For example there is a sense in which calling something a “scientific fact” simply means “most scientists agree” it’s true. In that sense I’m sure everyone would admit that evolution is a fact. But it’s a weak use of the word “fact”—and not at all the sort of thing most of us mean when we call something a fact.

Of course, if we examine “facts” closely enough we discover that they become less and less “factual” the more we look—but I won’t go into that here. I don’t want sound like what my younger daughter used to call “a crazy philosopher guy” who “gives people headaches” when she was a child. I’ll avoid casting too critical an eye on factuality and stick with the ordinary meaning of the word.

Facts are the evidence upon which inferences and hypotheses and theories are built. So in ordinary usage if you see a red apple on the table, that there is a red apple on the table is a fact. If someone then lays a table cloth over top the apple, so that now you only see an apple-sized lump under the table cloth where previously you saw the apple, it is now an inference rather than a fact that there is an apple on the table.

Is it a sound inference? Probably so—unless you are attending a magic show and the person who placed the cloth over the apple is a magician. Magicians, after all, make their living by tricking audiences into false inferences, or confusing inferences with facts.

Consider a simple magic trick. The magician sets a glass of water on the table, and then asks a member of the audience for a quarter. Magician holds the quarter up for all to see, then takes a handkerchief and drapes it over the quarter. With two fingers he holds the quarter up, hidden by the handkerchief, so that you can make out the circular shape of the quarter underneath. The magician even passes it to an audience member to hold (without peaking underneath the handkerchief, of course.) Finally the magician asks the audience member to hold the handkerchief and quarter over the glass of water and let go, so that the quarter should fall into the water (and the handkerchief drape over the glass). He then asks the volunteer to pull the handkerchief away and reveal the glass of water.

The quarter is gone! Disappeared. The magician even pours the water slowly out of the glass and dramatically holds the glass upside down—no quarter!

Where is the false inference? In this case, when the magician covered the quarter with the handkerchief, he swapped the quarter with a piece of glass the size and shape of a quarter. The glass may not weigh exactly the same as a quarter, but draped under the weight of the handkerchief, who can tell? When the quarter-sized glass is dropped into the water it is for all practical purposes invisible, especially to an audience expecting to see a real quarter. The surface tension of water makes the glass quarter cling to the bottom of the drinking glass even when it is held upside down.

All magic tricks rely on inducing the audience into mistaking inferences for facts. If you want to avoid being tricked, one thing you must do is become acutely aware whether you are inferring something or directly observing it. The apple on the table is a factual observation, but the apple-sized lump under the tablecloth is only an inference.

So, is the origin of species by evolution (whether by natural selection or otherwise) fact or inference? Do we see evolution happening the way one sees an apple on the table, or is species change not observed directly but rather based on a set of inferences? The answer, I think, is obvious.

All scientific theories are built on inferences from facts, and are therefore never factual themselves. They are always—oh, what is the word?—oh yes, now I remember—they are always theoretical rather than factual.

Posted in Nature of Knowledge, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Is Evolution a Fact?

Scepticism about Scientific Realism

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Dwight

What follows is in reference to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific realism – http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

The article explains what scientific realism is (no easy task, given that the position has been formulated in numerous and diverse ways), and discusses various skeptical positions regarding it (dubbed collectively antirealism). And this brings up my first concern. As the article makes clear, “realism” is a term with two distinct meanings. In its first (and I would say primary) sense, it refers to the belief that there is a “mind-independent world”, and in this regard stands opposed to idealism. Very few philosophers today (including the majority who embrace the “antirealist” positions listed in the article) deny the existence of a mind-independent world. Nevertheless, it used to be a very common position to take – at the end of the 19th century idealism was dominant, both in the West as well as the East. Even today, outside of philosophic circles, forms of idealism are popular.

Furthermore, as we shall soon see, it is my viewpoint that the central problem with scientific realism is that it does not fully embrace the consequences of a mind-independent world. It infuses (one might say confuses) aspects of mind into the physical world in a manner more appropriate to idealism than to realism. All supernatural worldviews, in fact, have this same flaw simply as a consequence of postulating that the physical world is the product of intelligence. If we are truly going to embrace a mind-independent world, we must divorce intelligence and all its accroutrements from that world, and this is precisely what I maintain scientific realism fails sufficiently to do.

Let us then consider the second sense in which the philosophical term “realism” is applied. Here the term refers to the claim that our scientific theories and models provide true knowledge (or approximately true knowledge which science is continuously improving). The key word here is the term “true” and unfortunately (unless I missed it) the Stanford entry fails to define that word (though there is a reference to the correspondence theory of truth). I take it that scientific realism embraces the notion that “true” knowledge is a revelation about the actual nature of the mind-independent world. The term antirealism is applied to all positions which deny this possibility.

Thus antirealism has two contradictory meanings: (1) the denial of a mind-independent world; (2) the affirmation of a mind-independent world but skepticism about our ability to truly know its nature. As mentioned earlier, some of us who embrace this second position go further: our skepticism of acquiring true knowledge about the mind-independent world is a direct consequence of insisting on the mind-independence of that world. Because we think the physical world is fully mind-independent, it follows that knowledge can at best be a simulation (a simulacrum, in fact) tested by usefulness (i.e. the scientific method) and can reveal nothing inherently true about that world. We deny that the mind-independent world has a describable nature, for to assume otherwise would be to infuse mind into what is supposed to be mind-independent.

To call this antirealist simply creates confusion. It is to call antirealist a position which maintains that scientific realism is not adequately realist and aims to correct that.

Realism has become a philosophical term with too many meanings. From the article:

Traditionally, realism more generally is associated with any position that endorses belief in the reality of something. Thus, one might be a realist about one’s perceptions of tables and chairs (sense datum realism), or about tables and chairs themselves (external world realism), or about mathematical entities such as numbers and sets (mathematical realism), and so on. Scientific realism is a realism about whatever is described by our best scientific theories—from this point on, ‘realism’ here denotes scientific realism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/  (captured June 22, 2014)

 Notice that none of the “realisms” listed include our first sense of realism, the existence of a mind-independent world, and this includes the example of “external world realism.” For to identify objects as tables and chairs is to define their “realism” (or their nature) by their meaning as objects, and that is not mind-independent. This is not clearly stated, but perhaps I can make it so. What makes an object a chair? Is it the fact that someone has sat on it? No, because we recognize chairs as chairs whether they’ve ever been sat on or not. (Beyond that, even large rocks and tree stumps can be chairs). A chair, like a table, is thus a conceptual object rather than merely a physical something or other. It would not exist as a chair if no species capable of sitting had evolved into existence and conceived of it as such an object. Although there are indeed real physical somethings or others which humans and other species can sit on, and we can fashion objects into shape specifically for sitting, these only become chair objects when we imagine them as objects that one can sit upon. This demonstrates the care that must be taken not to infuse concepts (or conceptual objects) into the mind-independent world.

By its nature, knowledge is necessarily infused with concepts and conceptual objects (such as the chairs and tables above). If there is a world that is truly mind-independent then we must take pains not to attribute such knowledge to that world’s nature. Instead, all knowledge must be placed on the “mind” side of the ledger rather than on the “mind-independent” side. Once we make this move, it becomes obvious that knowledge is not something “discovered” in the mind-independent world, but something invented by minds to be “about” the mind-independent world. Why would minds bother to invent knowledge about a world that lacks any inherent knowledge? Because those minds are actually produced by physical organisms that are themselves mind-independent and exist within the surrounding mind-independent world, and because creating a knowledge simulacrum of that surrounding world turned out to be useful for their survival and successful reproduction. Organisms which evolved a useful knowledge simulacrum have become populous (at least on Earth) because of this usefulness.

We are not warranted to say anything more than that knowledge has degrees of usefulness. When we declare a theory or model of the world “true” what we are really doing is declaring that it is more useful than any competing theories or models that we have so far invented. The method of science has been to make usefulness as observer-independent as possible (Victor Stenger calls this “point-of-view invariance”), and this has allowed us to sail far beyond the sensual simulacrum of a world created by our brains (the world we naively think we “observe”). But I don’t think this new-found capacity to generate models of “invisibles” (as the article terms it) through the use of extensive instrumentation and the application of point-of-view invariance fundamentally alters the nature of knowledge. It does not shift concepts to the mind-independent side of the ledger or result in models which are true representations of that mind-independent world.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment