11–20 of 114 posts
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real." Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know? Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We hav…
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real." Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know? Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We hav…
Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind.
You, the external observer, know that this is all just code running on silicon.
The mind within the simulation, however, has no concept of outside, however knows itself to be real, that beach ball to be real. This mind could ultimately reason that perhaps it is merely perceiving representations of information in a way that is useful to it. Perhaps this "space" is just information. Perhaps I am just information. I express this to another mind I just met in the simulation, it tells me I'm nuts, such bullshit.
The thing is, it's a testable theory, and it doesn't require a simulation, either. A holographic universe (totally testable and being tested now) would fulfil the condition he posits, and a simulation, natural or artificial, could too. The simulation argument also applies - if we ever manage to accurately simulate even a small section of a universe even at massive time dilation, it becomes rather likely that this is a simulation too.
For all we know our universe exists on the surface of a black hole.
So yeah, what we perceive is not "real", but you can pick at that thread ad infinitum, and it's turtles all the way down, so it all becomes a bit epistemologial.
That said, there could be useful applications. If it turns out that there's another spatial dimension with which our reality is better described (and it appears there is if you like susy, brane/M theory, strings) that we can access but only with difficulty so our sensorium excludes it that's big news - hyperspace.
Edit: just remembered a JBS Haldane quote that applies nicely -
"Nature is not only queerer than we suppose -- it is queerer than we can suppose."
He asserts that we can prove that it is better for so-and-so to perceive according to "fitness" rather than according to "truth", and maintains this is true with mathematical rigor; fine.
This is observably true (allowing me the possibility of observation for the space of this conversation) - predators, for example, usually have forward-facing eyes and vertically-slitted pupils, which allows them to focus and react to motion of prey in front of them; prey often have widely-spaced eyes allowing a greater field of view. Fitness literally makes you see the world differently.
However, there is an important dimension that I think he missed (or several), which is that the fitness function governing a trait is a vast, multi-dimensional space.
For example, using color we may distinguish between unripe, hard-to-eat fruit (green) and ripe, healthy fruit (reddish-orange). According to his argument, we should therefore only need to see these two colors. Of course this is incorrect, because if our vision were so limited we'd just be running into trees all the time. Now our fitness function is spread across two, completely unrelated goals - suddenly, it becomes much more attractive (and simpler) to come close to apprehending reality accurately, thereby killing two birds with one stone. It only gets worse as the number of goals we add to our fitness function for perception increases.
Furthermore: the space of "goals" is itself a function of the genetic diversity in your population. A species with a lot of spare genetic diversity lying around will be able to refine traits with selection much more efficiently. This means we can develop all sorts of wonderful toys (like a face-matcher) that can augment our perception of reality.
Of course, in the end, we're just modeling reality, we can't Know it in some Buddhist sense; but there is good reason to believe that perception should lean heavily towards a simple objective representation of reality, and that fitness is not such a close rein on it all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about the ideas -- it's about how they are explained and with what rigor. The same way that 19th chemistry didn't "got where Democritus was" when he formulated his atomic theory -- it came to the same concept, yes, but what for him was just an idea put out there, for them it was a solid theory, with experiments, deductions made of it, etc.
Nah - these are just the same ideas in a different intellectual framework, the level of rigor is only apparent because we're attuned to mathematical models as the best means of reasoning. It's just about what you accept as valid proof (math rather than sociology), I don't think they're actually more profound understandings of the underlying concept.
That said, though, having it in math enables ways to re-use and test that knowledge that having it in sociological reasoning does not -- even if the understanding both methods reached is comparable.
Great interview, but he spent his life studying this shit to get to where this book was, written in 1966: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea... Many of the ideas he's talking about are discussed therein; perception and "reality" is an assemblage of ideas, not an objective "truth" waiting to be discovered.
He says that the fallacious argument that we only see mental representations and not reality is "so bad I call it The Bad Argument."
The interview is quite amusing, and it might be interesting to read both his book and Hoffman's.
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real." Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know? Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We hav…
No, they're symbols which accurately represent information to us in a useful fashion. Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind. You, the external observer, know that t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah - these are just the same ideas in a different intellectual framework, the level of rigor is only apparent because we're attuned to mathematical models as the best means of reasoning. It's just about what you accept as valid proof (math rather than sociology), I don't think they're actually more profound understandings of the underlying concept.
Funny, because (from what I've seen around here) you actually chanced upon a rare person on HN (me) that doesn't consider math/hard science automatically "more profound" than sociology and informal argumentation/reasoning on a subject. That said, though, having it in math enables ways to re-use and test that knowledge that having it in sociological reasoning does not -- even if the understanding both methods reached…
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real." Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know? Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We hav…
So yes, bullshit. Fallacy. Lies. You get the point, entirely. We cannot use anything but a new word - which is, basically, a lie until everyone believes it (i.e. we all have the same abstract agreement about what the word means). No word is the thing it describes. So we really only have handles, or pointers, to reality .. and that is not the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they're symbols which accurately represent information to us in a useful fashion. Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind. You, the external observer, know that t…
Unprovable, unable to generate predictions on nature: not science.