I’m happy with that. My argument works for most everybody, yours works for practically nobody.
Not that it won’t someday, and if it does, I’ll have my answer. Assuming of course, you’re one hellava lot younger than I am.
Thanks for providing something worth expending brain cells over, and with that I’ll leave you to it.
Not a safe assumption. I am 58.
Even if 2PC is correct, I am guessing that it won’t break through the noise and gatekeepers until the standard model of cosmology finally hits a mathematical wall and cosmologists are forced to start thinking outside their physicalist box. But that could happen in the next few years, very easily. I reckon it has 10 years left at most.
Ok, fine. Not a hellava lot, but still significantly.
Math is a human construct, and the funny thing about humans……if one of them become perplexed by something, he’ll construct a solution that perplexes everybody else.
So basically the ET mechanism exists only to solve an internal inconsistency in your specific synthesis of MWI and CCC – i.e. it is and ad-hoc metaphysical assumption. I guess that’s fair enough as long as it is acknowledged up front.
Yes, exactly (well, not an inconsistency, but a critical missing component). I needed to demonstrate it was at least possible that some kind of logical mechanism could complete the model. This is necessary because a lot of people think free will is logically impossible – they cannot imagine how it could possibly work. This includes Thomas Nagel, who admitted he changes his mind every time he thinks about this problem and that “nothing currently on the table makes sense”. And yet it is subjectively obvious that we do have free will, and that minds don’t split (which is exactly the same intuition).
I didn’t pick 2PC from a menu because I liked it. It was more like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when you’ve got far more pieces than you actually need, so most of them are red herrings, and you don’t know what the picture on the box is. Eventually I reached the point where I knew none of the available pieces fitted into the pivotal slot right in the middle of the model, but by that point I already knew quite a lot about what shape this missing piece had to be in order to actually fit. In the end it needed three pieces, which means the connections between those three pieces are very much open to discussion. This is particularly interesting if you are into the Jung/Pauli stuff, because they spent a long time hovering over this part of the puzzle, but never quite managed to land.
I’m basically in agreement with just about everything you write, but I will add something here. Something that quantum physics has forced on science is the recogniton of context. The observer issue undermines the principle of objectivity, because the observer’s choices directly influence the outcome. Whereas early modern physics was built on a methodological simplification: the exclusion of context. Galileo and Newton inaugurated a new style of reasoning by isolating variables — mass, motion, force — and expressing their relations mathematically. The result was a set of laws remarkable for their precision and generality. What made them so effective was precisely their invariance: they were true in all places and times, for all observers, regardless of the specificities of any actual situation. That is what breaks down with the advent of quantum mechanics.
Oh, I thought that the Embodiment Threshold applied only to the original collapse, LUCAS, the first conscious being. So you are saying that it does work whenever a non-computable valuation for a self-model is reached in phase 1, there is a sort of a crash there, a singularity, the result of which is the ejection of one of the superposed states to phase 2? I was thinking of the moment of creation of the self-model, how it came to be, since it seems that collapse requires the self-model, but also the self-model is the result of a collapse. So to avoid the circularity, I thought that the Embodiment Threshold would somehow take care of the self-model’s creation. Its name is also very suggestive: embodiment, because a self-model is embodied in the cosmos, threshold, because a crucial point in the unitary development has been reached. But now you are saying that ET is also active throughout the self-model’s life and development. Does it have this double character, both constitutive and operational?
I appreciate your directness, and I am glad that you shared this story with me.
I largely relate to your ethic. But my degenerate version goes like this. Honesty is speaking what you believe.
“Telling the truth” is expressing the beliefs that you call “true” to indicate that they are your beliefs.
Lying to yourself is something different. It’s more like self-alienation. It’s a refusal to acknowledge unworthy motives perhaps. But to me “true” is just an indicator of belief. I call my former belief “false” because my new belief replaces it. I decide that I was “lying to myself” because I now see that old belief as wishful thinking that led me into trouble, hobbled my potential.
My own project is motivated by (3) in the sense described above. I see my own “dialogical positivism” as intensely realistic in the non-technical informal sense of “realistic.” It’s down in the nasty uncertain world. I see it as psychologically realistic. But that means that some will read it as fatalistic. I don’t find it depressing at all, but many do.
I hope @Joshs joins this discussion. I think he is happy to carry the banner of “postmodernism.” I like some of the pomo thinkers, but I relate intensely to Hobbes. Is Hobbes a postmodernist ?
Hume also annoyed people, because he was so destructively skeptical. Even Kant, for many of his peers, was a wild world-wrecking god-slaying subjectivist/idealist.
I think Heidegger is great, but empiricists had already made the crucial move by simply acknowledging and reasoning about the “first person” character of the world’s manifestation. Reality includes a “for-me-ness” that gets interpreted differently by different thinkers.
For some, experience is an “illusion.” The “true” thing is “mediated” by an internal icon. For me this violates (3) above. We just do not live that way.
I take J. S. Mill to be an underrated master of this issue. It’s not about inside stuff versus outside stuff. It’s about rethinking the structure of physical objects. And rethinking “experience” as something other than a “puff of qualia fumes” that need to be explained — while the qualitative objects are gulped down unproblematically, as not even asking for further explication. Philosophy advances by leaping out of this or that hobbling prejudice. The prejudice is all the more hobbling the more it is blindly enacted rather than explicitly recognized as an assumption.
So hermeneutical phenomenology or dialogical positivism enacts ethic #3 by trying to be honest about what we are enacting. We have to look at the social context, the normativity we perform even as we argue against the reality of normativity. We have to unearth our deeper assumptions.
I would phrase this as facing the problems, but as organisms who trade signs in an environment that manifests itself somewhat differently to each of them. I don’t see that we need the word “truth.” Basically we need to make the more pressing problems go away, transform the situation. Life is fundamentally problematic, so it’s more the amelioration than annihilation of trouble.
Like I said, I adore Hobbes. Is this pomo ?
Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical Vision, is unintelligible.
Yes. And scientists have spent 100 years failing to be able to agree on what the consequences of this actually are. For the first half century they tried to sweep it under the rug with “shut up and calculate”, and since then we’ve had countless new interpretations, but none of them have looked likely to produce a consensus. The result is deep confusion, both inside and outside of science, and yet this is about the most important question you can imagine in philosophy of science. The only other contender for that is the hard problem of consciousness, and that’s where the argument really gets explosive, because these two massive problems have always looked suspiciously related, but nobody has ever been able to formalise the relationship in an “acceptable” manner.
I’ve been reading your posts, and I respect your approach. I agree that it “proves” itself as something like a harmonization of all of the facts. Perhaps you can say more about the importance of “free will” for you as thinker.
I thought I’d also get your take on a few issues.
QBism makes sense to me as “advice for gamblers.” Strictly speaking, all science can be understood this way. But the “output” of QM — as I understand it — is probability distributions. The “deterministic”-while-undisturbed wave function is used to generate this distribution. After a measurement, the technique demands an update of the model. This update is called a “collapse.” Am I on the right track ?
I realize that the wave function itself is not a density function. I don’t pretend to be a physicist, but I studied math, so I understand integrals, complex numbers, random variables, etc.
Basically I’m suspicious of this “collapse” metaphor. What is the “metaphysical” status of this function ? This gets us into philosophy of mathematics. I’m inclined to see this “function” as a relatively stable role that various marks and noises play in relation to non-sign objects. Likewise an algorithm is a blurry equivalence class of “concrete computation contexts.” This electrified silicon is doing the “same thing essentially” as that guy over there with the pencil and paper.
To me the “collapse of the wave function” comes off as a blurry mathematical platonism, almost a Pythagoreanism. The wave function is “more real” than those who use it as a tool. Basically I don’t find “pure mathematical meaning” plausible or even intelligible, except in terms of the equivalence of operations whose specific quality doesn’t matter in a particular practical context.
I would like your general thoughts on this. I’m also curious if you would still call my approach “postmodern” or “pluralist” in the pejorative sense.
Yes. I wish everybody else (beyond this forum) was this quick on the uptake.
The same set of rules applies at all times, but what is actually happening changes depending on the number of agents (conscious observers) that exist. The ET determines the point that unitary evolution in Phase 1 cannot continue (the mathematical structure cannot be extended in superposition). The first time this happens is unique in several ways, because it involves the bootstrapping process whereby an entire cosmos and 9 billion year timeline is brought into Phase 2 existence, including the creation of the first self model (LUCAS). This is a self-consistent loop of exactly the sort John Wheeler described, though he never suggested a mechanism. The only big unanswered question is about which of the infinite possible cosmoses/timelines is selected for realisation, because this selection cannot be made by a brain. Presumably a selection rule is required here too, maybe something like the shortest path or minimal information.
LUCAS is then conscious (the most simple qualia – basic pain and pleasure), but LUCAS has two enormous advantages over its immediate non-conscious ancestors. Firstly it is conscious, and can move with intent. But it doesn’t just get to control its own body in a new way, because there is no causal barrier between its body and the rest of reality. That means it can also load the quantum dice with respect to the whole of the rest of reality. It already did this once, at the initial transition into Phase 2, but this continues to happen, albeit on a much smaller scale. LUCAS was the “luckiest” creature to ever live, because it was the only will contributing to the selection mechanism. It was choosing the “best possible world” based on its own valuations, and there were no other competing wills to dilute its own. Within the laws of physics, reality could collapse in whatever way LUCAS was capable of expressing a preference for.
This changes the moment LUCAS reproduced, at which point there are multiple agents, and therefore multiple wills with competing preferences as to what happens beyond their own bodies. The reason they have total control over their own body is that the brain has a conventional causal link to the body, and that’s also the part of the world that the agent is most deeply entangled with. But what about the rest of the world? This is the problem known as “Wigner’s friend”, except this is “LUCAS’s friends”. So now we need another rule, which determines how the whole system collapses when there are multiple agents involved. This is Competition-resolved collapse (CRC) and basically says that the more accurate your world-model is (how much you know about the structure of reality beyond your body), and also the greater your level of attention, and the strenght of your valuations of various possible outcomes (how much you care about what happens), determines what the joint outcome is – which of the physically possible branches manifests. So CRC is a selection rule for wavefunction collapse, and it picks the outcome which minimises the total amount of “logical pain”. This literally selects the best possible world according to the valuations of all conscious beings, but this is still exactly the same rules that governed the initial collapse.
The final rule only applies to agents who understanding the meaning of symbolic systems. It is called Extended CRC (E-CRC), and it is the source of what Jung called “synchronicity” in the narrow sense of personal experiences of meaningful coincidences. If an agent has symbolic beliefs (a religion, for example, or in Wolfgang Pauli’s case it was spiritual meaning attached to concepts from physics) then they “authorise” the collapse to select outcomes which conform to their own set of beliefs. I can go more into this if people are interested.
Does that make sense?
I distinguish between objective and subjective beliefs. There are many things which are necessarily subjective – only I am capable of knowing whether or not I really love my wife. But the fact that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen is not “just my belief”. It isn’t subjective at all, because it has gone through the whole process of scientific validation, to the point that it is part of the core structure of scientific knowledge. It cannot be wrong, within the context where it has meaning. We can be absolutely certain that we will never discover that water is actually made of helium and sulphur.
There is never a good reason for it. And it is not just unworthy motives, but disastrous outcomes for yourself. I watched both my parent die in deep cognitive confusion because they systematically lied to themselves about what what happening to them. My father died of lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking, but kept it hidden for as long as possible and never admitted the cancer was caused by smoking or had moved to his brain. And my mother died of dementia having spent 3 years refusing to get a diagnosis because she “knew” it wasn’t dementia. I don’t know how I am going to die, but it won’t be in denial about what is happening to me.
You already know my thoughts about that, I expect.
I dislike Hobbes, but he can’t be described as postmodern. He was one of the founders of what postmodernism was a reaction to.
Hume also annoyed people, because he was so destructively skeptical. Even Kant, for many of his peers, was a wild world-wrecking god-slaying subjectivist/idealist.
Hume is my favourite historic philosopher. Kant was brilliant, but he was also robotic and a terrible writer. But both of them were just following logic and the best information available to them. Their skepticism was forced upon them by the situation. Newton’s “natural philosophy” had already transformed the intellectual landscape, but it to Hume it seemed to indicate that objective reality was made of classical Newtonian objects. That’s what set up his skepticism, because there’s a blatant contradiction between “we can never escape the veil of perception to have knowledge of a mind-external world” and “we are embodied in a world of mind-external objects which must be causally connected to our minds, or it would be impossible for our minds to know anything about them”.
This contradiction is real, but it only exists if you assume Newtonian physics describes a mind-external world. Kant tried to rescue the situation by saying science only tells us about phenomena, while noumena are uncognisable and unknowable. While this is more stable than Hume’s unconditional epistemic surrender, it just solidified the misunderstanding. I believe this is ultimately what led to the bifurcation of philosophy in the 20th century. The postmodernists still just accept Kant’s claim about noumena, and see people like Wittgenstein and Rorty as having confirmed it (which they both did). Meanwhile analytical philosophy has never fully accepted Kant, and is still struggling with the same set of problems that both Hume and Kant failed to resolve, and the situation with quantum foundations has just made the everything even more confusing. The argument I am making is really quite simple: QM is a theory of noumena (unobserved reality), not phenomena. And if we accept this, then the entire post-Kantian history of philosophy has been based on a monumental but unavoidable epistemological mistake.
I think Heidegger is great, but empiricists had already made the crucial move by simply acknowledging and reasoning about the “first person” character of the world’s manifestation. Reality includes a “for-me-ness” that gets interpreted differently by different thinkers.
Heidegger doesn’t float my boat either, and I know very little about Mill. Your taste in philosophy is clearly very different to mine.
Rapid, irreversible climate change is being caused by human activity. This is the truth, and if we allow people any scope at all to deny it, then they will. The same applies to all sorts of other things, from evolution to overpopulation. This is why I think we need a stronger concept of truth than your worldview permits.
Like I said, I adore Hobbes. Is this pomo ?
Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical Vision, is unintelligible.
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It cannot be pomo, because pomo is a reaction to modernism, and this is way too early for that. But even based on just the content, it doesn’t look very pomo to me. Although I might be misunderstanding it.
Didn’t Kant claim that noumena can be cognised and known via faith and postulation, rather than sensory perception?
Perhaps you can say more about the importance of “free will” for you as thinker.
Nothing is more important. FW is the spider in the middle of the whole web of metaphysics and epistemology, although not many people appreciate how difficult it is and how important it is. Nagel does, and has explained the problems more clearly than anybody else.
For me it was top of the list of things I needed to understand and integrate, from the moment I rejected physicalism, and it was partly the difficulty in providing a coherent account which demanded so much attention. Why is it so tricky? And yet I was always of the opinion that some kind of sensible answer must be possible, because I could not doubt that we do indeed have some kind of free will.
In the end my position is that free will is what determines which of all the physically possible futures actually manifests, and what other people call “spiritual development” is a process by which your personal contribution to the overall selection mechanism is increased. There is no reward in the afterlife – the reward for spiritual development is actually increased responsibility for determining the future.
QBism is a cousin of 2PC. Both reject the ontological reality of spacetime, treat collapse as local to specific observers, and are descended from Wheeler’s idea of a participatory universe. But they are ontologically very different, because QBism treats wavefunctions as epistemic rather than ontic. This leaves QBism facing a problem that 2PC solves: the multi-agent hole. How do different agents agree on an outcome, to ensure a shared objective world? QBism has no equivalent of CRC, so there is no selection rule. Finally, QBism says nothing specific about consciousness.
To me the “collapse of the wave function” comes off as a blurry mathematical platonism, almost a Pythagoreanism.
I call Phase 1 “the Pythagorean ensemble”. It is not Platonism because Plato introduced meaning into his ensemble. In Phase 1 of 2PC, there can be no “perfect tables”, because for something to be a table requires a human mind to give that meaning to it. Phase 1 is meaningless, valueless structure. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. For me, the wavefunction is ontologically real. It just exists at a different level of reality to the objects we experience.
Yes. You are still resisting the idea of objective truth.
Something like that, yes. Kant argued that noumena cannot be cognised or known theoretically at all, but they can be postulated as a matter of rational faith from a practical moral standpoint. This last point made him very unpopular with Nietzsche.
But what is quantum mechanics if it is not a theoretical description of what Kant called “noumena”? We do not need faith to believe in QM.
Truth is a worthy target to aim for. But “Truth”, as philosophers know, proves quite hard to pin down, when we look at it seriously, and with care.
My own aims are just a little different, and I offer them here only for comparison, not to say that yours are wrong. I strive always, in spoken or written communication, to achieve honesty, clarity and courtesy. For me, at least, “honesty” works better than “Truth”, as it makes my intended meaning just a little bit clearer.
