What is naturalism?

Posted on April 27, 2024 by Dwight

[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

1

You can read about why I reject scientific realism in my article at atheology.com, Skepticism about Scientific Realism.

2

William H. Halverson, A Concise Guide to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, p 424. Halverson goes on to assert that naturalism also says, “determinism is true.” I believe this is a result of conflating the physical world with our understanding of the physical world; to be consistent with the meta philosophy of naturalism, advocates should diligently avoid conflating mind-independent reality with knowledge (which, to say the least, is not mind-independent).

3

Because spiritual entities are “non-physical,” under naturalism they are classed as biological phenomenon. This is because the meta-hypothesis is that the entire “consciousness” class of entities are biological experiences produced by brains of organisms. Supernaturalism, of course, sees things differently and makes the entire class primary, not dependent on matter or biology.

4

Of course, the supernatural meta hypothesis is always an option for scientists. I’m not asserting that naturalism’s meta hypothesis is required to do science, nor that science is committed to methodological naturalism. Rather, I am trying to clarify concepts and align naturalism with 21st century neuroscience to make it as useful as possible.

5

For more on this I recommend Donald Hoffman’s book, Visual Intelligence. “Hoffman explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience.” (Of course it is the brain not the eye which does bulk of the constructing.) I will write more about Hoffman in the future.

 

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Preface to Atheism

Posted on April 27, 2024 by Dwight

[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 paradox intended 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

1

This of course is my interpretation. Unfortunately Zeno’s writings do not survive, and all we have today are a few references by his intellectual opponents to a small subset of the paradoxes (9 out of 40+). Much of what we have comes from Plato’s Parmenides, an account of an encounter between Socrates, Parmenides, and Zeno which occurred before Plato was born, and which is undoubtedly biased. For example, Plato seems to associate Parmenides’ description of “the One” with his own subtle conception of Platonic forms. In my mind, this cannot be reconciled with Zeno’s paradoxes, which every ancient commentator (including Plato) agrees were constructed to support Parmenides. The paradoxes, in my view, place geometry and mathematics squarely into the world of “the many” (appearances), and thus represent Zeno’s attempt to prove that observations and measurements of the world we see and experience around us cannot provide “true” knowledge of reality (i.e., reality is mismatched with our thoughts and conceptions). With this (admittedly questionable) interpretation of Zeno, I draw a line from him to early Greek skepticism and in particular to the academic skepticism of Carneades and Clitomachus a couple of centuries later. As I hope to show in future posts, modern biology (in light of evolutionary theory) forces us to skepticism about our ability to know the physical world “as it is,” yet this biology-driven skepticism is no barrier to modern science. Indeed, it explains why the sciences are necessarily empirical and why the scientific method is successful (and why other methods are not). It is a viewpoint, as far as I can determine, surprisingly similar to that of Carneades and Clitomachus (if only we had their writings, which we don’t).

 

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Georges Lemaître & Naturalism as History

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Dwight

Throughout the history of science, the naturalistic turn of mind has been to look for a history for physical stuff. And the supernaturalistic turn of mind has been the opposite. Plato famously excluded a history for the world by postulating eternal forms, and in Western thought afterwards only human society was seen as having a history: outside mankind, the physical world was essentially unchanged over time. If it had any history at all, it consisted in one-time creation by eternal God or divine Mind. 

During the early modern period, the discovery of fossils created doubts about this unchanging nature of the world. Although many scientists initially pushed back and denied that fossils were relics of previous forms of animals, eventually the evidence became undeniable. Those scientists with a naturalistic turn began to look for explanations of how species might evolve and change over time—that is, to develop a natural history. 

As we know, this eventually led to Charles Darwin’s identification of natural selection as the key ingredient of speces’ evolution (just as artificial selection was the key to evolution of domesticated animals).

In the 20th century, Georges Lemaître proposed what is today called the “Big Bang” origin of the universe, in opposition to the bent of Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory. Where Hoyle limited the history of the universe to development of stars from an original hydrogen cloud, Lemaître pushed that history back to an earlier non-uniform quantum/plasma state. 

In a recently rediscovered 1964 interview, he explained his opposition to creation stories (whether pantheistic or theistic) and in fact he saw his own theory as one that precluded a creation story for the universe. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07198.pdf for a transcript of this interview. [GLM = Georges Lemaître]

GLM: [A] very long time ago, before the theory of the expansion of the universe (some 40 years ago), we expected the universe to be static. We expected that nothing would change. It was an a priori idea that applied to the whole universe… [interrupted by JV]

JV: …that was consistent with experiment… [interrupted by GLM]

GLM: No, not at all. Not at all! It was an a priori idea. For which there was no experiment. And the facts relating to the expansion of the universe made this theory inadmissible. So we realized that we had to admit change. But those who wanted for there to be no change wanted to minimize this change. In a way, they would say: ”while we can only admit that it changes, it should change as little as possible”. Let it change only in scale. That everything happens on a larger scale but that it happens in the same way. And this is what was first introduced by Milne [Edward Arthur Milne, Fellow of the Royal Society] under the name of ”cosmological principle” and later under the name of ”perfect cosmological principle” and then by the very idea of the Steady State Theory.

He goes on to criticize the Steady State Theory as an attempt to buttress a supernatural worldview.

So this is how this theory presents itself. As a theory imposing an assumption analogous to the apriori that you should look for a static solution … [unclear] … that you are looking for a solution with a minimum of change. Which, for my part, along with others, I am opposed to [that static solution] in the sense that I don’t think that it is the tendency of modern physics to admit that there are global laws in the universe, absolute laws, laws that, in Hoyle’s expression, would imply a ”design”, would imply a plan. I cannot picture things working that way.

Thus Lemaître is not just insisting on a history for everything physical, his naturalistic mindset also pushes back against the notion of universal a priori laws of physics.

So that from the point of view of astronomical development of the whole universe, we find ourselves with distinct gaseous clouds which are almost entirely made up of hydrogen. Now this is the key point of Hoyle’s theory: it all starts with hydrogen. The essential difference is whether this hydrogen is produced naturally by a reasonable physical process or, on the contrary, it is a kind of phantom hydrogen which appears with just the right amount of hydrogen to verify an a priori law.

In the 20th century, Lemaître’s discovery of the expansion of the universe (from the red-shift of starlight) led to the scientific realization that the universe had a history. The steady-state theory was a response that wrote that history back to primordial hydrogen and stopped there. But Lemaître argued that cosmic rays (similar to the discovery of fossils in rocks) meant that the history of the universe went back even further. (The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation shortly before his death added an exclamation point!)

This is a theory that was put forward not only by myself, but by Regener [Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener] a long time ago, who called cosmic rays fossil rays in the sense that they are the testimony of the very first ages of the world. And I, for my part, preferred to call them the rays of the primeval fireworks, which are preserved in the remarkably empty space and reach us… giving us a testimony of the first ages of the world… obviously, a bit of poetry in there.

At this point the interviewer asked him,

[D]oes the fact that the universe, according to your theory, has a beginning (at least one beginning)… does it have a religious meaning for you, a religious significance?

Lemaître was reluctant to discuss religion (even though he was a Catholic priest as well as astronomer and theoretical physicist), but he was willing to talk about the notion of the universe being created.

When one poses the problem of the beginning of the world, one is almost always faced with a rather essential difficulty: to ask oneself, why did it begin at that moment? Why didn’t it start a little earlier? And in a certain sense, why wouldn’t it have started a little earlier? So it seems that any theory that involves a beginning must be unnatural. [emphasis added]  To say ”we decide at this point that it begins”… This is what was expressed by saying: ”it is made of nothing”. That is to say that we expected it to come from something; and we say ”it doesn’t come from this something, it’s made of nothing”. Well… the point of view I’m coming to is quite different. That is, the beginning is so unimaginable, so different from the present state of the world that such a question does not arise. And even more than that. This beginning is the beginning of multiplicity. The fundamental idea is… I can’t develop it with more details now… it is the beginning of multiplicity. It is the idea that the universe, which exists in quanta, in packets of determined energy, begins with a single quantum, or a very small number of quanta, so that it is impossible to wonder from what it would come, from what it would have been divided from. The whole development of entropy is that quanta divide themselves, develop, etc. At the beginning, if there is only one, we cannot ask ourselves where it comes from. Then the question does not arise to say that it comes from nothing. It is a background of space-time for which no problem arises. Or if you want, when one holds oneself as the spiritualist, with the idea that it comes from God, etc. … well, one would like to take God in default for this ’initial flick’ as Laplace [Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace] said. Well it doesn’t hold, because the beginning… the bottom of the space-time is so different from all our conceptions that there is no more problem. And then obviously for an atheist, everything/anything cannot remain, I cannot continue to speak if God doesn’t support me in the existence, that’s for sure, isn’t it? But that’s nothing, that’s the general stance of christian philosophy. But there’s nothing special about the beginning. And the beginning is not a place where you would touch God as a hypothesis, where if you like, I’ll talk about Laplace’s initial flick, since we’re now talking about conferences in English… I recall Jeans [Sir James Hopwood Jeans, Fellow of the Royal Society] words ”the finger of God agitating the ether” [dramatic voice], that was the beginning. Well, that’s not… that’s not a pleasant idea for a religious mind. It’s an idea that brings God down into the realm of primary causes, and I think one of the contributions that a theory like mine can make is to avoid just such difficulties.

JV: So, to state things plainly, you refuse to accept the idea that God should explain the movement of galaxies.

GLM: Of course, it goes without saying! Absolutely.

Although Lemaître was a Catholic priest (the epitome of someone with a supernatural worldview, it would seem), when it came to studying the physical world his mindset was, as we have seen, very naturalistic. He devoutly separated his scientific mindset from his religious mindset, nor did he see a conflict in doing so. The Wikipedia article on him states,

In relation to Catholic teaching on the origin of the Universe, Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith; as a devoted Catholic priest, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion,[16] although he held that the two fields were not in conflict.[37]  —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître (captured Feb 4, 2023) Wikipedia’s sources for this interpretation are Lambert, Dominique (1997). “Monseigneur Georges Lemaître et le débat entre la cosmologie et la foi (à suivre)”. Revue Théologique de Louvain (in French). 28 (1): 28–53. doi:10.3406/thlou.1997.2867. ISSN 0080-2654 and https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2012/06/father_of_the_big_bang.html 

Ironically, Lemaître’s adversary in the field of astronomy, Fred Hoyle (despite being a self-described atheist), lacked this naturalistic mindset. Hoyle believed there was intelligent design behind the origin of life.

Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act. …

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. —Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections”, Engineering and Science, November 1981, p. 12. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/527/2/Hoyle.pdf

In contrast, those with a naturalistic turn of mind understand implicitly that mind-stuff (including intellect) is not primary. They comprehend the mistake of inserting consciousness, intelligence, or conceptual laws in order to jump-start the history of the universe. In this vein, we must admire Lemaître’s opposition to a priori laws of physics, and appreciate his reluctance to insert God (consciousness or mind) as creator of some beginning state of the universe—much less as manager of its development. Lemaître rejected the lazy human tendency to forego investigation of the past in favor of simplified, automatic answers.

Instead: history—without origin in formula or theology. 

And this “history” is just homo sapiens, as scientists, figuring out best we can what has happened. 

Human thought naturally wants to start at a beginning and stop at an end. But this instinct of human thought is biological; it is not a priori, it doesn’t apply to the physical universe.

__

*Georges Lemaître Interview link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.07198.pdf

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Mastodon

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Dwight

You can now follow me on Mastodon.

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Muse is the Antidote

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Dwight

My poetic muse has always been an alter-ego, chastising me for being too much in my head, too cerebral. Looking back over the years I can see that my muse has presented a more or less consistent message: life is not at heart about my thoughts and feelings. Life is not a mental enterprise.

It was when I was a college student that the muse first rebelled against my studious nature.

It was an all-out rebellion.

Not with profanity nor profundity (anathema to my muse) nor with any pretension of depth, but with simple derision toward intellectual conceits. Nor at first did I understand what was going on with her. I would grab books and sit by a pond to study or write a paper. And out of my unexpecting pen would come this…

Battle of the Books

So he went down after classes
and sat there by the lake
and pulled out his books to study for a test…

Well the lake rose up in splashes
saying, “Go back to your classes
And read your books until your brain is pleased,
Sittin’ in your molded chair
Thinkin’ you’re so cool you stare
To find some beauty in the books you read.”

Oh the lake rose up in splashes
And thunder struck in lashes
Saying, “Go back to your classes
Or put those books away
Yeah, put those books away”

Oh the flowers screamed in horror
And the trees bent down in anger,
“Oh, put those books away,
Yeah, put those books away”

You can build your concrete cities
In all your valleys and your plains
And you can live inside your houses
And say that I’m insane
But please, don’t forget to play out in the rain

Her target was always me. And the message always consistent: the mind is not the central show of life. The role of the mind is not self-entertainment, self-advancement, enlightenment, intellectual fulfillment, profundity or any other self-deception.

No, muse insisted, the mind exists for the benefit of the body, not the other way round. And more than that: if I identify myself as mind, make my thoughts my identity, then I have become ill.

This impacts the the kind of poetry I end up creating.

The muse has sensibilities which disdain poetry of the head and reject intellectualized poetic expression. Which seems a bit strange—after all writing is an act of language, and forming words is a pre-eminently intellectual affair. Yet muse insists that I use language to escape the bounds of mentality, to speak out for my body somehow.

According to muse, I am a body and my mind belongs to that body—and must serve it. Not with lies, but with honesty.

And the central act of honesty is accepting that I am not my mind. My mind doesn’t even matter all that much. And if I slip into thinking that thinking is what life is all about, then I’m coming down with something, becoming ill, pushing myself into mental illness territory.

Time to get out of my head and get healthy again.

This has also served as a guide to my philosophical inquiry. Slowly, slowly, it has helped me understand what has been wrong with philosophy over the ages, and helped me surmise what lies in the right direction.

The first thing wrong with philosophy, by the way, is the word itself. Knowledge is not something that should be loved. It should be used: knowledge is a tool, not a destination.

To be a lover of thought, a lover of knowledge is already to start to slip into illness, because love of that sort carries the beguiling suggestion that life is about mind-stuff. That we are mind-stuff. That our “I am” lies in the realm of thoughts. This makes us diseased.

It also makes us liable to mental checkmate. Thoughts can become a quagmire of confusion and mis-direction which tie us into knots with no apparent way out. The result can be depression, even suicidal notions that we can escape by killing ourselves. But the problems are mental. The only thing we need escape from is our thoughts, our minds, our false belief that what we think, what others think, is the central show of life.

It’s not.

On the other hand, this should not be interpreted as a diatribe against thinking. Thoughts have a vital role to play in our living and surviving in the world. We can’t make it as a species without science, without understanding ourselves and our world. Still, our thoughts are not us. They are tools meant for our benefit.

Life is a bodily enterprise, not a mental one. If your thoughts, your feelings become checkmated, time to throw off those thoughts and feelings. They were never central to your life anyway, no matter how much it felt that way. Things in your head got unbalanced, mentally diseased. You fell into to the trap of thinking your thoughts were you, and now you must listen to your muse and escape back to bodily life, best you can.

This is the role of the creative or poetic muse, to lead us out of the valley of mental disease and back to the body. The muse is the lifeline to what we really are, which again is something beyond thought. Larger than thought, grander than thoughts could ever be.

And this is why it’s so important that we listen to the muse, honor her, make sure she is never compromised or co-opted into serving the mind. If anything, the mind should serve the muse. After all, she’s our lifeline out of mental checkmate.

Muse is the antidote to the disease of believing that we are minds, the only rope we have for climbing out of that deep, deep hole.

This article has also been published on Medium. Readers interested in my poetry can find it here. 

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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