If we can't trust our senses, then there isn't much point trying to prove what we can't see. These models themselves and their predictions are subject to the meta-problem that we can't trust that our evolutionary adaptations aren't transmogrifying them in some way.
The Case Against Reality
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: The Case Against Reality
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get suspicious when some proof is so complex it must be mediated by an expert. I think the burden is on the prover to make their case, rather than on the audience to understand the case.
Most modern math proofs are incomprehensible to anyone but experts. Is modern math suspicious?
I don't doubt that modern math proofs have been created by experts and checked by computers. Where I have a hard time is when the claim is made that these complicated proofs have any basis in the real world. That can't be checked by computer.
Re: The Case Against Reality
#83Earlier 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.
Re: The Case Against Reality
#84John Searle was interviewed in the latest episode of The Partially Examined Life about his new book, Seeing Things As They Are . 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.
Interesting, because Searle is the a famous advocate for an argument essentially equivalent to the Bad Argument:
Re: The Case Against Reality
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's talking about the words we use - that they are just symbols, and are only representative of the observations made, and are not the actual thing being described, itself. We call it a 'brain', but it is so much more than that, and the more we look at it - the more we need to invent new symbols in order to describe what we're looking at. In fact, words are not the things they describe - words are just abstract symb…
But it still hurts when you kick a rock. The article is trite hand waving. Of course we parse the world through symbols, but the symbols are shorthand for consistent, predictable experiences. Does it matter if the physical experiences are created by physical objects in the Newtonian sense, or by quantum fields? Not at all. Because if you drive a car into a wall fast enough you're still going to die. And so is everyon…
>If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.
Ah, but it does: it gives you the ability to create new words for new things, and thus extend your reach and control out into the universe. We couldn't get to the moon until we'd figured out the right words to get us there. Then, we used those words to get us there.
The moon is still there. We got there because we described the effort to do so sufficiently well enough that the actions manifested into the universe, and we altered it according to our will - which is the real force of reality in the universe, since we can use will to both experience the natural world, and alter it irrevocably from what it would have been, had we all just left it alone - or at least not describe what we were going to do, so well, that it then just happens ..
Re: The Case Against Reality
#86I 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…
I think 'crank' may be overstating it. His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. 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.
Apologies, I should have used a better phrase. Although I still think he fits the dictionary definition of the word ("an eccentric person, especially one who is obsessed by a particular subject or theory."), I can see how it might be interpreted as more demeaning than that.
I stand by my opinion that the ideas expressed in this interview are bizarre and incoherent. Then again, many very well-educated and well-credentialed people have held weird ideas about the mind.
Re: The Case Against Reality
#87"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…
Reminds me of a quote of H.P. Lovecraft:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
Re: The Case Against Reality
#88Your perception is reality; different observers may perceive the same thing in different ways, but their perceptions are no less valid because of not corresponding to another observer's "truth". In a sense, even if people perceive falsehood, that perception, in and of itself, is real
Re: The Case Against Reality
#89I 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…
>"an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness
Hmm, I'm curious about this. No animal can see high energy gamma radiation and other dangerous radiation sources, but the human can detect them with tools. That means the better detector of reality will always have a higher fitness level (we can avoid Chernobyl's radiation 10,000 years from now after its long forgotten) but animals won't. A lot of good having 10 babies is if they all succumb to radiation poisoning before they can reproduce, or have mutations that make them less fit in other ways. We can extend this to other ways like detecting disease early, seeing microrganinisms, etc. Clearly fitness is tied with some level of reality detection, at least for advanced tool using species like ours.
That said, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we might be a simulation in a larger reality or many simulations down. Penrose may not be getting his point accross well, but that idea is philosophically sound.
I don't think he's any sort of crank. He may be playing up the whole "I can model the universe to show you its really a virtual machine" but that's its own sort of mathematical solipsism imo. He does make many good points about perception, relatively, etc. Its not the usual "hey guise, quantum physics means magic is true" crap you see on the internet.
The problem is we don't know if its even possible to detect if we're being virtualized. The funny thing is that for most/all of humanity's existence this was an assumption; the world was fake or at least a temporary placeholder and the true reality was some type of spiritualism/heavenly realms. Interesting that we're going back to that in a round-about way.
I'm glad someone is taking this hypothesis seriously. Detecting if we are virtualized is just as important, as say, SETI. People used to laugh at SETI. Why are we laughing at this?
Re: The Case Against Reality
#90John Searle was interviewed in the latest episode of The Partially Examined Life about his new book, Seeing Things As They Are . 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.
Interesting, because Searle is the a famous advocate for an argument essentially equivalent to the Bad Argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
The Chinese Room is my favourite proof that thought is physically impossible.