51–60 of 114 posts
The tiger don't care if you're on LSD. It will still eat you. And the universe don't need an observer for shit to happen. In 10 years I bet the current quantum theories /interpretations will make us laugh our asses off
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An evolutionary argument like the one he uses is _always_ a big, stinky, red flag.
The way you say this makes it sounds like you have examples of times when evolutionary arguments have been used in the past. I'd love to hear some examples.
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's not just talking about constructionism, although he touches upon it with "remove W" - rather he's talking about potentially pan-specietal constructionism - all life perceives the universe through some fundamental and potentially inaccurate constructs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way you say this makes it sounds like you have examples of times when evolutionary arguments have been used in the past. I'd love to hear some examples.
Women go to the bathroom together because in our hunter gatherer days roaming the Savannah, if you squatted to pee you couldn't see a predator coming in the long grass. So you needed somebody to stand up on the lookout. And if evolutionary psychology is not your style, here's a take on the selfish gene. The purpose of the human organism is for shit to make more shit. (btw, these were just jokes, I don't think anybody…
In computing, we know quite well that a system's inputs and outputs don't have to be coupled as well as they seem.
I can produce a program '/bin/sha256sum' which drops the sha256sum of a file onto stdout, unless said file is a JPEG image depicting a Shiba Inu, in which case it puts 'such file'.
In computing this is really kind of an obvious result. If we have a debugger or a disassembler we might be able to find that behaviour without actually encountering it. But if it's a HTTP API, we really have no way of knowing what's going to happen.
We can gather lots of empirical evidence, but we have no reason to believe that 5M results or 25M results or 50M results increase our certainty that it 'always does X'. (Simply, it's not provable).
It seems to me to be tautological to say that 'reality may not be what it seems', in that sense, because we know that we cannot be certain that it even acts the same way at t=t and t=t+1.
Even if we found some sort of 'higher state' - if we found the source code to the program that actually runs all there is - what's above that? Turtles all the way down!
I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to evaluate his claims--we don't have access to the computer models he uses, or the expertise to evaluate his proofs. But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is w…
You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert friend you can have that friend explain it to you.
You can find a list of his publications here: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/
This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the article: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf
In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".
If I may make a shitty analogy... Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the metal. Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken…
Computer languages are much more precise and deterministic than natural language. The machine is actually quite simple compared to our biology. People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000. People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain stupid. Think we're in a simulation? Put…
Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say. Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.
I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to evaluate his claims--we don't have access to the computer models he uses, or the expertise to evaluate his proofs. But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is w…
While that certainly doesn't mean he's right -- plenty of people accept that Penrose is a genius who is wrong about certain ideas. I think dismissing this guy as a crank is not the best way to disagree.
If I may make a shitty analogy... Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the metal. Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken…
I mean, the other criticism is good too--I was trained as a physicist; I too balk when I see quantum mechanics used this way. (I'm a big fan of Searle's third law[1].)
But I mean, the only point that we're actually seeing used here is that QM is creating a huge amount of tension for people who used to comfortably believe in an objective observer-independent reality. That's not actually a hugely divisive issue here. One issue that isn't particularly quantum but is brought up here is that there seems to be a strange embeddability problem in the most basic theories of consciousness, also highlighted by Searle as part of his "Chinese room" thought-experiment: somehow the two halves of your brain merge into one consciousness, but somehow we don't think that two people dancing really do; we don't think that the two halves of your brain keep separate accounts of reality quite the same way that we do think that two dancers do: what is the boundary? Is it just, say, a matter of the volume and frequency of communication as related to the reaction speeds of the surrounding media? Or what?
Similarly the issue that Donald Hoffman's raising up-front is precisely the one that you're analogizing: hey, there's no reason to think that this language that our brain uses maps directly onto the fundamentals of the reality; rather where there is a translation between these two it's complicated at best, and you're only seeing the world after layers and layers of programming have acted on it. Maybe at the most fundamental things are crazily different -- and we can't understand them easily, if at all -- and what we've got are really effective models. When this happens, and what the universe is doing "down in the plumbing" starts to get really difficult to understand, it's going to be more useful for us to regard our impressions of reality as a sort of farce -- except that pragmatically, we can't do that, so we have to regard the underlying we-can't-actually-experience-it-but-here's-what-we-think-it-is reality itself as a sort of farce.
That feels like an uncomfortable "turtles all the way down" place to head, but I read Donald Hoffman as saying precisely, "Hey, it's not as scary as it sounds, just try it for a few: I'm not promising any dramatic answers, in fact I'm just promising less bluster about 'here's all the stuff we know for sure' and more honesty about how little we really know."
[1] Searle's third law is a fun one, and this whole talk is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE . About at 25:30 in this discussion of philosophical problems of free will, there's a great aside: "Well, think about it, is there any part of the universe that we have solid evidence to believe is not fully determined? And the answer is, of course, we know from quantum mechanics, that at the most basic level, it's not deterministic. Now -- I dread saying this, 'cause Searle's third law is: whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air, at best. And I won't use an even more obscene expression. Oh, by the way, that applies to a lot of things physicists say about quantum mechanics, too: Feynman said, look, don't try to think what quantum mechanics means, just do the equations, for God's sake, don't think you understand it -- well, unfortunately, I get paid to try and understand things! So. There is a part of the world that's not deterministic." And then continues back on the thread that he was on.