The Case Against Reality: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

dude....

that's it -- I want these monkey-flipping threads off this monday-friday board

Seems to me this guy hasn't really thought his position through to completion. He's just tossing around paradoxes.

http://i.imgur.com/ee7XE4z.gif

when is a door not a door!

imo human perception is very limited, which it'd have to be, being self-evolved meat machines tumbling through four dimensional space

ppl try to open those doors of perception but you're really just short-circuiting different parts of the brain to view things differently and very few things can actually expand human cognition or perception, just change it

it's hard to explain things beyond perception, they'd all look like paradoxes

also, http://i.imgur.com/ee7XE4z.gif

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Books/foerster-constructingreality.pdf

Reality May Be An Illusion, And That's Okay

one of the first dudes I ever heard talk about physics and neurological phenomena is currently one of the world's foremost experts on CRISPR dna modification

maybe there's something to it

veeeeery interesting. not that i understand it all, but it could prove to be huge as far as disease goes, no? cure for cancer and all that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

ooh, there's a video of my buddy from small times explaining it
https://vimeo.com/144876420

this is the kind of explanation where you'd tell him "hmm, that was a little simplistic" and then he'd give our other science fair friend a titty twister

What's going on with his admission that "Somehow the world affects my perceptions"- the interviewer pounces on it as a concession, but the response is just that qua a theory of consciousness we can factor the W out and replace it with another source, such as another conscious agent- but that's still an account of a mathematical model of consciousness and its interior integrity/consistency, not a mathematical model of the world- so there's a kinda fishy-sounding sleight of hand whereby a claim about reality is made on behalf of a claim about consciousness, via the invocation of a reality-constituting consciousness that disrupts and co-creates what it perceives. It's like philosophy of mind announced that it was also ontology and metaphysics. A kind of "cosmological/historical" query might be: If quantum phenomena were taking place centuries before the evolution of living systems and will persist centuries after all living systems are extinct (there just won't be consciousnesses around to have ideas about them) then surely there's "reality" (i.e. quantum stuff taking place) independently of observers.

yeah, what he said.

it just seems like a reasonable-sounding claim (the claim that "we ought to base theories of consciousness on the most current state of physics") has somehow turned into a not-very-reasonable sounding claim (the claim that "there's only consciousness all the way down")- now if this person is a metaphysician, then, okay dude, go for it, if Thales can say all the universe is water then you can say all the universe is mind- but if the idea is that "physics shows us that the universe is only ever about consciousness" that sounds weird to me. And maybe what this dude is saying is precisely that- reality will be weird or not at all. Why should the truth resemble our everyday intuitions? There's no reason that it should. So I can see the appeal of wielding a strong and shamelessly counter-intuitive position. But it still matters to me if we're calling this a math argument or a physics argument or a philosophical claim about ontology.

in other words: get your facts straight. if facts exist...

Any 'truth' or 'reality' which is inaccessible to consciousness will remain forever inaccessible and nothing further can be said about it, either way.

bootstrap paradox: if reality doesn't exist until consciousness makes it real, then how does consciousness bring itself into reality?

ctrl-F for "Nietzsche" reveals nothing on either this thread or the Atlantic article, I'm very disappointed in y'all

[W]hat we perceive is never the world directly, but [...] a kind of internal simulation [...] Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now?

i think i am too dumb to understand quantum theory

what this dude was saying though -- about it being "consciousness all the way down" -- reminded me of bishop berkeley's philosophy. but he used this theory to justify the existence of god where this guy is saying that it implies humans are machines.

this problem is much hard one

bootstrap paradox: if reality doesn't exist until consciousness makes it real, then how does consciousness bring itself into reality?

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, April 27, 2016 6:26 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they co-produce each other, one doesn't have to follow the other, and it isn't actually a paradox? scientist discovers that deleuze / badiou are for "real". idk this article made sense to me but i haven't read as much as you all or have any disciplinary identity involved. just at the basic level of reality being produced through accumulated experience.

The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.

...I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist.

Cognition Man suggests that his model of consciousness works just as well if W (the supposedly material world) is subbed out for another conscious agent. That's fine, but it hardly suggests that the physical world literally does not exist, that reality consists entirely of "conscious agents all the way down".

Other than that, sure. The map isn't the territory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

so many people get riled up when you start talking about reality as a production. accepting this theory doesn't change anything at all about um the human condition or whatever but it sure makes a lot of people who need a reified absolute and who spend a lot of energy holding forth with actuallys very uncomfortable, and then i have to skip their posts. :(

But it still matters to me if we're calling this a math argument or a physics argument or a philosophical claim about ontology.

otm, this reminds me of the recent debacle between psychologists and those approaching morality from a philosophical basis that got ugly. the basic jist was that a few psychologists were viewing moral claims, that their discipline has to address issues such as accredited professionals being involved in torture and then using the data to come to conclusions, is allowable because it's purely scientific, with the underlying theme that philosophy isn't a real field.

there may be no minds but our own, but you can draw a firm line under the concepts of human morality or human consciousness and draw conclusions (and have entire fields of study) without hand-waving the whole thing away as the work of neurons firing

if reality is a production, it's one in which we're all on that stage

this is ur true face u ugly idiots

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Sensory_Homunculus.png

i liked that article cuz it gave new meaning to this song for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k001JvPWs4Y

i thought that his point about subbing in other agents of consciousness for W was that there are degrees of accumulated consciousness at work, and i don't see how that negates his model.

accepting this theory doesn't change anything at all about um the human condition or whatever but it sure makes a lot of people who need a reified absolute and who spend a lot of energy holding forth with actuallys very uncomfortable

no one seems too riled itt, but i can see how some might fuss. thing is, for purposes of dude's argument, it hardly matters whether or not a consistent material reality exists externally. as "conscious actors", we only have access to our own internal models, which we each build from the ground up. so the whole "is reality really real?" question becomes something of a moot point in this context.

xp, i don't think it negates his model in any way. it's a good and interesting model, imo. but he at least seems to present the argument that W can be subbed out as a weird kind of proof that classical W doesn't really exist.

my true face is a ass taco

the basic jist was that a few psychologists were viewing moral claims, that their discipline has to address issues such as accredited professionals being involved in torture and then using the data to come to conclusions, is allowable because it's purely scientific, with the underlying theme that philosophy isn't a real field.

― μpright mammal (mh)

this lost me. is there a word (or sentence) missing somewhere in here?

fwiw as far as what I was saying (maybe doesn't matter much)- but xpost it doesn't negate the model (or at least I wasn't saying that the substitutibility as such negated the model- though I did say that the admission that there's a world could lead to the positing of an observer-independent-world that will presumably outlast our extinction)- rather, it's a question of what this is a model of- it's a model of consciousness, not of "reality as such" which presumably would include consciousness but would also include all the other stuff where consciousness isn't, and I feel like there's a bait and switch whereby a model of consciousness is being presented to us as a model of all-and-every-reality that we are just supposed to accept because quantum physics says so.

which would not be new if this was presented as "hey, I'm doing metaphysics and here is my new metaphysics" (there are plenty of theological thinkers whose universe-is-mind/mind-is-universe ontologies are known, just as we've had a very long history of phenomenological arguments in which there's no self without world and no world without self, and that grounding interdependent duality is very old hat)- but it's being presented as "here is what science shows us" and that's different, or ought to be.

I accidentally a sentence

basically it was "morality is a function of human consciousness and we're scientists of the mind so fuck you we're not apologizing for anything"

...I feel like there's a bait and switch whereby a model of consciousness is being presented to us as a model of all-and-every-reality that we are just supposed to accept because quantum physics says so.

otm. my gripe bounded in a nutshell.

there's no reason to think that quantum physics somehow escapes ontology because it is 'scientific' and mathematical. quantum physics is modeled entirely within our consciousness. same applies to mathematics. the whole argument is too damn circular to be conclusive. I don't mind the uncertainty of human knowledge; it's this kind of baseless certainty floating about on unrecognized nothingness that irks me.

"it's this kind of baseless certainty floating about on unrecognized nothingness that irks me."

Trump for president!

I think I see what he's getting at with truth/fitness function, but his illustrating example is really bad.

FWIW, this is a step removed from his literal point, but I often think about how certain kinds of truth-denial can be an advantage in life.

everybody otm about the shaky or banal philosophy (and makes me wonder what he thinks scientists are doing anyway - i mean, what are the sciences if not fields that try to help us understand things beyond the limits of our immediate sensory assumptions), but i wonder what the physicists among us think of this part which seems to be the basic crux of the argument:

The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.

"it's very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go" -- why should this be the case? couldn't we perfectly well say that we have a satisfactory grasp of emergent phenomena above quantum level, even if at the quantum level itself things remain weird and confusing? why should all levels of objective analysis have to refer to the quantum level?

Reality May Be An Illusion, And That's Okay

― JWoww Gilberto (man alive), Wednesday, 27 April 2016 14:24 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

√^√^√^√^√^√°√

I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

Gefter: But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

arbitrary complexity! this is the perfect term to describe this guy.

dude is mistaking reality for his bullshit models.

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world.

get in line, you "conscious realist"

skot no longer needs the weirding module

the most basic ingredients u can perceive

The author's grip on evolution and quantum theory and philosophy is a bit shaky, let alone his grip on reality, and i don't much like his general attitude as exemplified by:

The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, 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. Never.

mostly i don't understand what he means by "fitness". because he starts off saying that classical evolution, survival of the fittest, passing on successful genes, is "utterly false" unless it adheres to this grand fitness formula he has devised. so at that point i think oh this will be something new.

then the next paragraph he gives an example, of the existence of water, just the amount affecting its fitness level. too much water and you drown. too little and water-based life cannot sustain itself, cannot survive. this seems exactly like what he decided was "utterly false" shortly before to me. am i wrong here?

i am reading "Jung on Christianity" and it has a far more elegant approach. the conscious & unconscious, the duality of opposites, and the reconciliation of those being what creates the experience of reality. he posits the primacy of the unconsciousness which i tend to agree with, just from personal experience. if you ever try to just sit still and not think of anything you will likely be unconsciously compelled towards some idea, some new reality, born not from conscious will but from the shadows.

yeah i read a book one time

you're a man of depth, NV

"if you ever try to just sit still and not think of anything you will likely be unconsciously compelled towards some idea, some new reality, born not from conscious will but from the shadows."

oh man you have REALLY never seen me sitting still and not thinking. totally nothing going on up there.

http://bornscientist.com/upload/uploads/ScientificResearch/Is_reality_really_real_or_a_computer_simulated_program_8906335.jpg

idk guys from the establishing shot it looks like he lives in the matrix irl

I think there is a problem with the way he uses 'fitness' in particular, as well as what he means by 'reality'. I'm having particular troubled envisaging this: "...an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness"

But in any case the set up for the discussion is a very narrow path:

Gefter: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality.

Other arguments are available...

though he doesn't always communicate it well, his basic point is that it's misleading to think of sensory information primarily in terms of its accuracy relative to the presumed existence of some consistent external reality. the evolutionary imperatives that shaped our senses, he argues, selected for the ability to gather not accurate but useful information. i think that's a valid distinction.

mostly i don't understand what he means by "fitness". because he starts off saying that classical evolution, survival of the fittest, passing on successful genes, is "utterly false" unless it adheres to this grand fitness formula he has devised. so at that point i think oh this will be something new.

then the next paragraph he gives an example, of the existence of water, just the amount affecting its fitness level. too much water and you drown. too little and water-based life cannot sustain itself, cannot survive. this seems exactly like what he decided was "utterly false" shortly before to me. am i wrong here?

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, April 28, 2016 3:51 PM (Yesterday)

yes and no? he's not rejecting classical darwinian evolution or even proposing any major change to the way we understand it. instead, he's focusing in on "fitness" and what it implies about the evolution and purpose of our senses.

I think it's been widely accepted since Kant that the relationship between the actual nature of reality and how it is perceived by out senses is impossible to determine. He still chose to believe there was a world "out there" even though -- as hume and berkeley had shown -- it's impossible to empirically ground its existence. Something -- maybe not even matter as we've come to understand it -- but something external is acting on the mind. This is a base level assumption -- it might not be true but rejecting it really leaves you with nowhere to go, sealed off in a solipsistic hell, whatever.

Quantam data, like other kinds of phenomena that follow the laws of classical physics, is still something we have learned about via our senses, albeit in a more abstracted way, through contolled experiements etc. Like the basic trust in empiricism still needs to be accepted if we are to believe that quantam phenomena is telling us anything.

I feel like this dude is bringing us to an old impasse and trying to say that the counterintuitive findings of quantum science change kant's essential answer to it. But idk why that would be.

It's still valuable, of course, to look at how the "structures of consciousness" can be culturally rather than empirically based. That's how I understand Deleuze and Badiou, who Matt mentioned. We shouldn't trust out senses or our perceptive models -- our intuition of the "world" is of course a construction, constructed at various levels -- but I don't know how it would help to assume there is really nothing "out there," beyond our constructions. I also don't see how quantam science would lead one to that conclusion. But i don't really know much about it.

Post one paragraph 2 is confusing. I realize quantam principles frustrate our categories of time and space and matter, but they don't abolish the inside/outside distinction, insofar as there is a "world" that is perceived/co-constructed with the "senses"

This is a base level assumption -- it might not be true but rejecting it really leaves you with nowhere to go, sealed off in a solipsistic hell, whatever.

late wittgenstein to thread (and to this guy's library)

I think you can dismiss or at least unpick the distinctions between both inside/outside and cultural/empirical

evolutionary theory/quantum mechanics/x are highly abstracted, and in that broad Latour-y sense, cultural expressions of our understanding, which we think themselves will explain how our understanding, abstractions, and thus culture, have come about

the points about perception as an activity and the nature of plurality/singularity of consciousness, if not totally new, do seem at least to add some sophistication to your Hegelian style ideas about Mind and the World

"...the evolutionary imperatives that shaped our senses, he argues, selected for the ability to gather not accurate but useful information. i think that's a valid distinction."

Not exactly new, there have been theories about the brain as a "reducing valve", filtering the information according to its usefulness for survival for years. mh alludes to the references to this in the 'Doors of Perception' near the begining of the thread.

That doesn't mean that our perception is 'nothing like reality' or that evolution is "driving truth to extinction".

It's difficult to judge from an article and interview, but his interpretation of evolution and fitness are too teleological and purposeful for my liking, undervaluing the role of randomness and he make a weird link between fitness and perception.

'Success' in fitness is temporary. As wiki puts it, "Nearly all animal and plant species that have lived on Earth are now extinct,and extinction appears to be the ultimate fate of all species".

I feel like this dude is bringing us to an old impasse and trying to say that the counterintuitive findings of quantum science change kant's essential answer to it. But idk why that would be.

otm

That doesn't mean that our perception is 'nothing like reality' or that evolution is "driving truth to extinction".

agreed

all trains are podcasts

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/science/this-is-your-brain-on-podcasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

I think it's been widely accepted since Kant that the relationship between the actual nature of reality and how it is perceived by out senses is impossible to determine

people have been discussing this since way before Kant. it's one of the root problems of spirituality and mysticism and has at least a good 1000 years on Kant in that regard.

as kind of an update on the Kantian position, consider Niklas Luhmann:

There is an external world—which results from the fact that cognition, as a self-operated operation, can be carried out at all—but we have no direct contact with it. Cognition could not reach the external world without cognition. In other words, cognition is a self-referential process. Knowledge can know only itself, although it can—as if out of the corner of its eye—determine that this is possible only if there is more than mere cognition. Cognition deals with an external world that remains unknown and, as a result, has to come to see that it cannot see what it cannot see.

i like the idea of cognition being a self-referential process. i think feedback loops are a sort of primal form of consciousness.

right, a kind of rudimentary inside/outside distinctions which must continually "select" in the inside half of the distinction (because if it didn't the difference between inside/outside would dissolve)

The earth it moves too slow
But the earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way
Twist away the gates of steel (a man is real not made of steel)

A much more fun investigation of all this is the novel 'The Thing Itself' by Adam Roberts, riffing on John Carpenter, and about Kant, nature of reality, aliens and more. Read that and not the annoying interview which launched this thread.

thanks for the recommendation and cheers to your excellent display name.

Yeah, what they said!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

consciousness: it is what is

i know it when i see it.

https://patsblindspots.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/img_0606.jpg?w=700

Galen Strawson (author of the above linked article) just doesn't grasp how circular his argument is. In that article he asserts each of the following as true:

- Consciousness is not mysterious and we all experience it, therefore we all understand it very well. It's almost the only thing we understand.

- Consciousness is entirely physical.

- Everything about the physical is extremely mysterious and impervious to our understanding.

when you define consciousness as "experience of any kind whatever" it's pretty easy to have anything you want fit that definition

Can one have experiences of which one is not conscious at the time? I would say yes. For example, one or more of my cells may be struck by gamma rays.

'a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to a normal person'

so lilies only exist in relation to human understanding of them?

sure

i mean, that was the metaphysical argument of the writer of the OP. it's true we only know of things through our perception of them.

what nabokov is saying there seems different. the lily has a "reality" that the observer wants to access. he can learn everything about it. but still, the thing escapes in some essential dimension.

he is talking about the gap between perception and reality, especially wrt the descriptive properties of language

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg

sorry, i'm a metaphysical realist

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CevOP1ZWAAA0aKe.jpg

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1053/530921810_f59ab404aa_z.jpg?zz=1

lil echo imo in VN's "false bottoms" of

i have had a most rare vision. i have had a dream -- past the wit of man to say what dream it was. man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream... the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. i will get peter quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called BOTTOM'S DREAM, because it hath no bottom.

Snakes are actually snakes to all intents and purposes unless you enjoy cum in yr bellybutton

[nabakov quote]

― Treeship, Monday, May 16, 2016 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nabakov is closer to wittgenstein, who's more or less opposite russell

stopping to ask questions seems anti-philosophical

nagel needs to be considered