What is Reddit's opinion of A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> It has only been around for <40 years and very few people have read it, let alone embraced its reasoning, so the jury is still out. Ask me again in a few hundred years.

Then on what do you base your hope, if it is not on evidence & experiment? Just reason? (Surely you don't trust every toy experiment to translate to the complex, real world?)

> In the meantime, why don't you try it yourself and see how well it works for you?

If you're going to advertise something, perhaps be willing to say how it has worked well for you?

Now, if you first tell me how Axelrod models situations where both cooperating yields a better result than one cooperating and the other defecting, I'll take a deeper look. Otherwise, I'll dismiss Axelrod on the basis of his ignoring a fundamental fact: humans can often do tremendously more by cooperating, than defecting. The payoff matrix of the PD just doesn't model this—it models a very different reality.

> I have no idea what the Form of Piety is. I think the whole notion of Platonic Forms is philosophical BS.

The Form of Piety is the definition of "is pious", if that is not defined by the will of one or more beings. Euthyphro does not make sense without the Form of Piety, so if you truly believe the Forms are philosophical BS, then I have no idea why you brought up Euthyphro. If there is no way to objectively determine "is pious" (that is, access the Form of Piety), then there aren't two horns of a dilemma. Rather, it's just will vs. will, even if one of them is divine. Now, I think you're being hasty, because we have the sense that mathematical truths are true regardless of what we will. Just how we access them is open to discussion. But I don't think it's completely unreasonable for people to wonder whether moral truths might be in some way similar to mathematical truths.

> labreuer: It's not that difficult to read the Bible as pushing for a moral trajectory

> lisper: Sure. But in order to get something that fits your moral intuitions you have to cherry-pick it. (I'll see your Deu23 and raise you Leviticus 25:45-46.)

Sorry, but I don't see what evidence & logic inexorably lead to the bold. First, Deut&amp;nbsp;23:15–16 seems to apply to even the Lev&amp;nbsp;25:45–46 slaves. Second, the Israelites couldn't even treat their own people properly: Jer&amp;nbsp;34:8–17. Do you really think they were prepared to do something even more difficult—treat foreigners as well as their own? Sorry, but "ought implies can": God could not give the Israelites laws beyond their [present!] ability, because if God did, they would not be justifiably guilty for failing to obey them.

> But the laws of physics have not changed. That is what makes science useful. > > The idea that God is an objective moral standard isn't useful if that "standard" can change willy-nilly.

Our understanding of the laws of physics has changed drastically†; the same can apply with moral trajectories re: any objective moral standard. We have no idea if the present laws of physics are anything like the final ones; Physics Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin has some interesting thoughts on that in his 2006 A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. As one of the theoretician for the fractional quantum Hall effect—a completely unexpected phenomenon—I think he's in a pretty good place to speculate about such matters. There is also quantum non-equilibrium, where given the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation of QM, we can see the Born rule as being akin to the parallel postulate: possibly false.

Can you point to a single historian who will agree with the moral standard has changed &quot;willy-nilly&quot;? That's a flagrant disagreement with the term I picked: &quot;moral <strong>trajectory</strong>&quot;.

† If you're going to respond that GR mathematically reduces to NM in virtually all everyday experience, we can of course discuss further. You like rabbit trails and you know I am neither unwilling, nor incapable, of chasing them down.

> labreuer: The test is this: Diligently ask God to help you love people, and see if your present abilities are augmented in ways unexpected by you.

> lisper: How can I tell if my entreaties are sufficiently diligent? What abilities can I expect to have augmented? Because I don't consider love to be an "ability". Love is not something I do, it is something I feel.

Your diligence will entirely depend on how much you wish to ἀγαπάω (<u>agapaō</u>) others. How much do you want to follow Jesus' "even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve"? How much do you want to be an עֵ֫זֶר (<u>ezer</u>) after the pattern of Eve & YHWH? I've found that advancing others' values and goals is far more thrilling than advancing my own, but (i) it took me a tremendous amount of work to get to this point; (ii) there is always the danger they will take what you give them and not want you—about which I can tell you a sad story. I believe your second question can only be answered by you being mentored by someone who you recognize is better at ἀγάπη (<u>agapē</u>) than you are. The matter is too complex for brief description in text and I doubt even a treatise would do the job. Sometimes, a deep human–human relationship is the only way to pass something on.

There's a reason I prefaced my test with a paragraph on 'love'. Just use 'agapē' (noun) and 'agapaō' (verb) if you are too loyal to your present understanding of 'love'. Feeling is passive; it happens to you. In contrast, אָהַב (<u>aheb</u>) / ἀγάπη (<u>agapē</u>) are active; you intentionally do them. Talk to my wife if you want; she'll probably have some good examples of both in how I treat her.

> This shows the begged questions baked into your argument here - assuming God’s purposes, and assuming what accomplishes them.

You seem to insist that the conversation go a way which would critique the OP itself. So, I suggest a reboot, whereby you set the rules but make them explicit. So for example, what are the criteria by which we can make sufficiently educated/&#8203;reasonable guesses about God's purposes, in order to have a discussion about them? Perhaps these criteria are impossible to satisfy and we should just give up!

> It shows that nothing about this is a scientific endeavor.

Science can't establish values and I contend, can't even establish that consciousness exists (Is there 100% objective, empirical evidence that consciousness exists?). How much of the OP gets obliterated by an insist that it be scientific?

> We only get further up the mountain that’s built on a shaky foundation, rather than drilling down to discover ground truth.

There is no evidence we can access "ground truth". If you think quarks and gluons are it, see Physics Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin 2006 A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. When Einstein exclaimed "God does not play dice!", he was primarily objecting to quantum nonlocality, which violated what he thought was "ground truth": localized, individual particles and their field analogues. When one is willing to question that dogma, as de Broglie and Bohm did, one can come up with possibilities like quantum non-equilibrium, which [in special circumstances] would allow HUP to be violated and FTL communication to be possible. Ground truth, ground truth; where art thou?

> labreuer: Any question of "Why weren't things done differently?" implies that we shouldn't accept that as the default pattern.

> sunnbeta: Well in a way yes, it’s challenging a claim to see if it holds up to scrutiny and reasonable skepticism.

Yep, and as philosophers have long noted, scrutiny and skepticism are based in robust philosophical positions which can themselves be doubted. And so, I'm not the only one hauling around a bag of assumptions.

> sunnbeta: Really though, why wait for things to get so bad in the first place?

> labreuer: The pattern I see in the Bible is that if people don't want God around, God only intervenes when there is no other hope that things can get better.

&nbsp;⋮

> sunnbeta: In this case not so much the pattern, as the reason given for that pattern occurring.

Did I give a reason, or a characterization of a pattern I observed?

> You go looking for a way to satisfy a hypothesis about God’s purposes, without considering either (a) what other means to accomplish said purpose could viably be, and the related (b) whether such an entity with such purposes is even the ground truth here at all.

(a) Really, will you wager your entire reputation in this thread on the claim that not once have I done anything which a reasonable person could construe as doing what you describe? (b) Before scientists discovered the Higgs boson, they didn't know the Higgs boson is "ground truth".

> Another meta point here, you go on to talk about the things we can do to combat this - one of the things I’m combatting with my time debating here are the moral frameworks that actually allow people to justify these actions.

Right, because a law which can be summed up as "(i) love God; (ii) love your neighbor", with 'neighbor' expanded to include anyone you run into, supports slavery and sex trafficking. If you actually believe the Bible was used as a support for slavery in America, I encourage you to explore the empirical evidence Mark Noll presents in his 2006 The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. My favorite example is the abolitionist who said, "If it's ok to enslave blacks, surely it's ok to enslave whites!" As you might imagine, this argument didn't go over well. However, it brilliantly demonstrated that the true justification did not originate in the Bible. Any scriptural justification was a façade.

> A terrible misery, God commands you to shoot up a preschool or something like that.

I'd start out by imitating Abraham and Moses. You tell me how your hypothetical God would respond to those, and I'll give my next response.

> This is a fundamental question about where the buck stops in your moral framework.

If you were to read Charles Taylor 1989 Sources of the Self, you'd encounter an argument that one of the deepest features of modernity was the moving of moral sources from outside the self, to inside the self. I would contend that this is exactly what the New Covenant was about (Jer&amp;nbsp;31:31–34 and Ezek&amp;nbsp;36:22–32) and that one of the key steps was Martin Luther declaring his conscience autonomous from the Roman Catholic Church. Following on C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, I think what God wants is people God can actually address, people who will admit what they did and not self-gaslight in the way Job was tempted in Job&amp;nbsp;9:25–35. People who will admit the mistakes they made can be worked with; people who won't, need to go experience enough reality until they realize that their way of being and doing is suboptimal.

> the very least these kind of statements are a diversion off the topic of what evidence we have for accepting a particular explanation or a particular motive of a particular God

The Moral Landscape itself would appear to count as a 'diversion', in this case. I am categorically unwilling to let you unilaterally set the terms for what counts as a 'diversion'. I hope you can appreciate why I would want to get to play a part in deciding that.

> It may be that no secular system has made any progress, but that is irrelevant to the truth claims of any theist.

Then why bring up secular systems? That is:

> sunnbeta: Second, as you earlier talked about promoting human flourishing - yes, that’s all you need to agree on, that promoting well-being is the good direction of travel, and getting away from maximum misery is a good thing, and then you have a moral framework that doesn’t require theism and avoids all the baggage it brings.

If the truth or falsity of this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, why did you advance it? If it is relevant, then let me test it. If you won't, then I'll consider it expunged from the record, because I'm no more willing to let you declare things true by fiat, then you are for me to do that thing.

> This seems like a weird take based on my specific examples of not murdering and raping.

Statistically, Sam Harris wouldn't be murdering and raping purely as predicted by his socioeconomic class. So, the fact that he isn't murdering and raping cannot be tied to his particular moral philosophy without you doing a lot of work.

> Interested in how you think the indifferent or non-existent claims could be tested.

For starters, a uniform prior probability predicts differently from a biased prior.

> labreuer′: I have asked many, many atheists who they would possibly go about said verification. Can you guess at the kinds of answers I get—if any at all? I'll give you two hints: WP: Clarke's three laws + "Might does not make right."

> sunnbeta: I don’t understand the point. Please clarify. Am I expected, by an existing God, to believe in that particular God?

My apologies, I meant to write "atheists", as my correction indicates. I have no expectations of what you will do; it's you who get to set the criteria.

> Something reasonably (yes, I know, subjective) distinguishable from a natural explanation.

So: either 'natural' or 'god-of-the-gaps'? Is there a third?

> [1] On the atheistic / naturalistic side: I agree that humans are kinda-sorta well adapted to reality, and as such, our models will always be approximations. However, to say our success is a fluke and that we can't expect to make much more progress doesn't follow.

If the atheistic/&#8203;naturalistic side cannot make any predictions whatsoever of how well humans will be able to understand reality, then your prior probability is a uniform probability distribution and a theist who predicts accurately will thereby obtain a higher posterior probability. :-p

> [2] On the theistic side, it just doesn't follow that being created by God means we can understand the universe arbitrarily well. And in fact, many theologies posit the opposite: that humans are by design imperfect and limited (this is usually wielded to argue God's morality and reasons are inaccessible, thus giving validity to DCT).

I'm happy to acknowledge multiple different positions on the theistic side. For my own, I'll say that finitude can always be added to, in order to increase its abilities. Now, finitude cannot just add to itself and increase its abilities without limit, but if there is an Infinite which is willing to contribute …

> I take issue with your apparent definition of 'understanding'. What do you mean by that exactly?

The aphorism "Shut up and calculate!" provides the most precise definition. Among other things, it disallows people from wondering about which of the many interpretations of quantum mechanics might be correct—if any of them are. It says, "No more asking 'Why?'—just do!"

> In physics, cranking the math and modeling IS understanding.

That entirely depends on whether your sensory neurons can capture patterns which your brain can understand outside of formalisms, which you can then capture with formalisms—at least to some level of approximation. See for example WP: Tacit knowledge. There's also Physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin's "… physics maintains a time-honored tradition of making no distinction between unobservable things and nonexistent ones." (A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, 51)

> Otherwise... what you mean is just more math.

If the mathematics is a more rigid approximation of something else, that is a way where intuitions can be sloppier than a formalism. I still remember a flash of intuitive insight whereby I realized that a problem involving Stoke's theorem was trivially solvable because that's how conserved fields have to operate. Perhaps I was thinking in terms of slight perturbations away from conservation and seeing how neutralizing those perturbations yielded the solution I found. Critically, I explored the formalism via deviations from the formalism. This is to be contrasted with thinking 100% resident within the formalism.

> With human agency? Humans aren't the ontological basis of reality.

Nevertheless, with the same reasoning you were using to deny the [knowable] existence of God, one can deny the [knowable] existence of human agency. And it's really "existence of God*'s agency*", lest 'God' be reduced to something like Spinoza's notion, which sufficed for Einstein.

> Unless a reliable method is demonstrated to get directly at ontology (e.g. demonstrate a God), then the answer is: we don't know. No one knows.

We could break out into a debate between realism and anti-realism at this point if we wanted to. My own stance would be that each position has been shown to yield beneficial results, almost as if making speculative guesses can be worthwhile, but we should also keep in mind what is speculation. Theology as a whole is very good at policing itself on this point. Now, some believe that one should only ever be led by the nose of the evidence, in which case Copernicus should be condemned, because he just wanted more Platonic circles. (The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown)

> Not sure what this paragraph means.

You don't know the difference between making a choice for reasons, vs. making a choice because of what you ate last night?

> VikingFjorden: If something is fine-tuned, it's tuned to the most precise amount applicable in that context; it's tuned to perfection.

> labreuer: I see no reason to accept that perfection is necessary. The SEP article to which you linked makes no reference to 'perfection' or 'optimality'. In fact, it didn't take much reading to find this paragraph: > > > Fred Adams (2019) cautions against claims that the universe is extremely fine-tuned for life. … (SEP: Fine-Tuning)

> VikingFjorden: A theist who can close their eyes and cherry-pick their way out of an argument. I'll do my best to feign surprise.

Why do you disagree with Fred Adams? And what is your evidence of your claim &quot;it's tuned to perfection&quot; from SEP: Fine-Tuning?

> VikingFjorden: There's no physical process or object that you can demonstrate being caused or otherwise explained by "purpose".

> VikingFjorden: A doctor's expertise in treating patients can be described by 'purpose'.

> labreuer: A doctor's expertise isn't a physical object, nor does "purpose" explain any significant part of the expertise.

Isn't a doctor's expertise in treating patients a &quot;physical process&quot;? As it so happens, I have a relative who is a doctor and when he shows me pictures and describes what he was doing—it always terminated in a purpose he was accomplishing. No, that didn't explain the long history of medicine which led to that practice being standard of care. But reflecting on this, this is reinforcement that your notion of 'explanation' is far narrower than common usage. So let's look at it in more detail:

> It doesn't describe what it is, how much of it there is, where it came from, what it is, by what means it was acquired, or anything of the sort - at best, you can argue that it is the primary component to some colloquial question of why the doctor chose to acquire it, but beyond that, "purpose" explains absolutely nothing.

Let's push explanations as far back as they can go. Do infinite regresses satisfy any of what you say? Do the other horns of Agrippa's trilemma? It seems that your rigorous standards of 'explanation' will always be dissatisfied when you keep asking those questions. The standards can be satisfied "in the middle" of course, but that makes them parasitic on aspects of the explanation which fall far short of your rigorous standards.

> The only "understanding of reality" I could impose, is that the demonstration is objective.

Then consciousness is not part of 'reality' and I rest my case. (Feel free to be the first person to answer Is there 100% objective, empirical evidence that consciousness exists? with "Yes!" and the requisite evidence.) Continuing:

> Weird how doctors can use either their senses or an apparatus (depending on the individual patient's case) to measure if you are conscious or not.

Doctors aren't just using their senses, they're using their subjective judgment, to see if a patient is conscious. The apparatuses which "detect" consciousness are like single-pixel photon sensors which, if you wave around toward the sky, can "detect" the Sun. Each causally interacts with a radical subset of the object/&#8203;process detected, and each can be fooled. What you are justified in saying exists, is what can be objectively reconstructed from objective, empirical evidence, with absolutely zero subjective human input. Get back to me when you can reconstruct consciousness from an EEG—although since you'll have won at least one Nobel Prize, you'll be far too famous to do so. I would read about you in the news though, so feel free to drop a comment in your acceptance speech about the random internet dude who made that Reddit post.

> But you don't know that our personas do not arise solely out of the physicality of the brain and its processes.

Correct. The matter is unknown. One of the more promising ways, I think in my naïveté, would be to investigate strong emergence, perhaps making use of some of Robert Laughlin's thinking in A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. There's also John Dupré objecting to Cartesian dualism because it asserts just two levels, instead of many. (Human Nature and the Limits of Science, 32–33)

> If you'd have given a definition that could actually work to describe all of what personhood is just for humans, maybe I would have used yours.

Your request that I &quot;describe <u>all</u> of what personhood is just for humans&quot; seems approximately as difficult as &quot;rigorously and precisely defining what it is you mean when you say &quot;personhood&quot;&quot;, the latter of which I already interpreted as restricted to humans when I replied that nobody has done this. You're giving me impossible standards and I worry that you're doing so in order to claim a cheap victory.

> I know damn well that I don't know it.

Okay. You certainly didn't communicate that in how you wrote.

> It's nonsensical to speak of "persons" as an explanation before we understand what personhood even is to begin with.

I described enough to get most people going, when I said &quot;Suppose I define personhood in terms of having values and goals.&quot; And note that I said that in response to your original &quot;rigorously and precisely defining&quot; request/&#8203;demand. I've repeated it multiple times by now. Can I conclude that you just haven't a clue as to what 'values' or 'goals' are? Or perhaps, that they are nigh useless to what you consider a remotely decent 'explanation'?

> If we can't solve what personhood is

If you could solve that, you'd win many philosophical awards, including probably the $1mil John W. Kluge Prize. Now, virtually every other atheist I've interacted with doesn't require the exceedingly high standards you do, to get on with the concepts of 'person' and 'personhood'. You present a unique challenge and I may not be up to the task. Quite possibly, no human is.

> You're suggesting a radical fringe interpretation that pretty much nobody argues for with any hint of seriousness.

If taking [many] atheists at their word—"Only believe things exist based on objective, empirical evidence!"—commits me to "a radical fringe interpretation", that's pretty hilarious. The fact that you think solipsism is a more likely position only goes to show how hypocritical that epistemological rule may well be.

> VikingFjorden: We observe the phenomena of consciousness - in ourselves, and unless you're a solipsist, then also in others.

> VikingFjorden: Feel free to show me the numbers & mechanisms which correlate to the phenomena. For yourself and/or others.

> labreuer: Go to a hospital and get an EEG, you can watch the numbers as they come along. Then go ask a neuroscientist about the mechanism with which neurons (as a group, not individuals) communicate.

Does this get me 99% to consciousness? 50%? 10%? 1%? 0.001%?

> StoicSpork: Further, given my position that consciousness doesn't objectively exist, and my position that only that which objectively exists has causal powers, I must accept that my "I" is not a cause of anything.

> labreuer: Except, if your "I" has not caused anything, then how on earth can you have referred to it with this sentence? Your "I" seems to be as inaccessible as most atheists understand "God" to be.

> I can refer to it in a sentence because language can refer to things that don't exist (either in no sense, like "a number greater than 3 but less than 2", or exist [inter]subjectively, such as "Atticus Finch".)]

Except that you're referring to something which supposedly does exist.

> As an aside, it's interesting that spiritual teachers such as Ramana Maharshi claim that, on introspection, "I" is an illusion, and the "True Self" is "one with" (and as elusive as!) God. This, of course, isn't evidence, but demonstrates that the reality of I isn't intuitive or trivially self-evident.

I'm mostly ignorant about such things, but what I can say is that unless you mostly submit to society and only try to push back or trek out in very strategic ways, you'll get beat down again, and again, and again, and again. This can make it tempting to give up any will you have whatsoever. I would be interested in what such teachers say about this. I'm inclined to say that William Wilberforce had an "I" and used it powerfully to fight against slavery.

> This debate on decisions is obviously far from settled.

There is in fact so little science on the matter that anyone who tries to say much of anything with it, is probably pushing an agenda. The amount of hay people have tried to make from Libet is just astounding. They don't seem to realize that the sum total of research doesn't help one be one iota more pragmatically effective in the world (as far as I've heard)—and yet, their confidence in how to interpret the science seems exceedingly strong. I'm guessing that behind closed doors, most of those scientists are far more humble and tentative.

> … would that not mean, on the monist view, that reality is non-deterministic, not necessarily dualistic?

It is absolutely standard to model actual patterns with noise, for simplicity's sake. Kalman filters are a good example: if you can assume that deviations from the model are remotely Gaussian (cf central limit theorem), then you can probably make a decent control system for e.g. your quadcopter. Any engineer will know that there is in fact more structure in existence than you're modeling. Scientists sometimes forget this; Physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin writes, "… physics maintains a time-honored tradition of making no distinction between unobservable things and nonexistent ones." (A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, 51)

> How are you certain that consciousness exists?

I am able to reason from effects (behavior) to causes (consciousness). The precise causal structure is always open to challenge, and that includes one's own introspection of oneself. (recall Schwitzgebel 2008) Hume had some intelligent remarks on causation being imposed by mind; I'm inclined to agree. By accepting this, my ability to predict humans' behavior and inject my will in the mix is greatly aided. At the same time, I try to be aware that my model of others' consciousness could be very, very wrong.

> empiricism (including science) arguably can't demonstrate the existence of a unique thing.

This isn't quite right: empiricism can for example demonstrate the existence of a unique meteorite. Where it has difficulty is when an individual has unique abilities of action or perception (maybe mostly perception), such that what is observed is not "the same for everyone". A surgeon, for example, can be far more effective at some surgery than any other, such that this extra competence cannot be replicated no matter how much others try. An old version of this kind of thing is chick sexing, which at least a while ago, wasn't understood mechanistically, even though it was demonstrated empirically.

What is hard for empiricism to get at is cognitive operation. And because people often get fearful when someone else has superior abilities, there is a strong tendency to gaslight those who are weird and different. I've helped one recent recipient of a PhD recover from academic intellectual abuse; she could produce the goods and had a fine thesis, but she didn't go about things like everyone else and they gave her unending hell for it. She almost didn't graduate, the abuse was so bad.

> We speak of "three apples," even though number 3 doesn't exist, and even though categories are a construct.

Fun fact: abstract mathematics is the innovation; we used to always think of "three of something". See Jacob Klein 1938 Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. We made a very interesting shift in thinking, one which I still have trouble understanding. I may well be largely stuck before François Viète's revolution of abstract algebra.

> However, we are not concerned with literary theory, but with what objectively exists.

How is my reading about Atticus Finch and spinning up a model of him different from loading software into a computer? (I think there are similarities and differences which might be fruitful to explore.)

> A car crash is as abstract as a fictional character. Neither can interact with reality.

A fictional character is not a class of characters; a car crash is a class of events. They seem too disanalogous for me. The true analog of an actual car crash is you telling me about it and my spinning up a model of the situation in my head.

> A rock, of course, interacts with my window

And yet, you can explain more of what happens if you include the fact that I threw it, and perhaps more by considering what I may have been thinking on the occasion. Similarly, by taking into account increased context, one can do more with a fictional character. Now, do we make models of each other, which have all the qualities of fictional characters? And when I interact with you, am I really interacting with you, or the model of you? Sometimes, when people interact with me, I get the sense that they're putting my words in the mouth of a pretty terrible stereotype, and thus not truly interacting with me.

> As I said, humans value some things that don't objectively exist (i.e. exist only in the mind.) If we value such things, it is reasonable to expect that we will pay attention to such things. And while realty truly doesn't care about our feelings, who says that reality should? All it matters is that we care about our feelings.

If your feelings 100% exist in your reality, were shaped by reality, and shape reality, I'm not sure what it means that "reality doesn't care about our feelings". Rather, it seems that 'objectivity' becomes a strict subset of 'reality'—while pretending to be all of it.

> I'm not sure what else I need to address here. Yes, science can be used for harm, but that's not an epistemic criterion.

The trend these days is to make 'harm' 100% objective. If it isn't … that goes interesting places.

> If at some point you publish an article or release a demo, I'd be interested in seeing it.

I will put you on the list. :-)

> "Neural network" can refer to biological neurons or to the artificial simulation used in artificial intelligence.

I say the two are arbitrarily different in capability. Being able to simulate is like those movies where the wagon wheels look like they're going backwards. The simulation can get the actual thing arbitrarily wrong.

> But even our limited attempts at simulation suggest that brains are at least mechanistic pattern-matching machines. Are they anything else? For this, we need evidence.

Ockham's razor is methodological, not ontological. Ontologically, it has a horrific track record.

Sorry for the length of my reply; I'm breaking some new ground there and the sausage-making tends not to be the most succinct.

> Of course, arguing for the atheist position, it's natural for me to adopt physicalism, and propose that the mind is matter (i.e. the brain) with a particular configuration.

I actually think the more important angle is causal, not ontological. Under causal monism, there is either a complex of laws of nature which are causing everything that happens, or that complex describes all patterns which can possibly be described. The end result is that all of your actions are caused by external sources; no cause can ever originate within you, except for randomness—which cannot possibly be enough to make a robust self with agency. Causal monism precludes the possible existence of true individuals. The most you can get is individuals with different initial configurations, but ruled by precisely the same laws of nature. Hobbes would very happily see this as his Leviathan operating properly.

There is an alternative: when substrates are organized in certain ways, they allow degrees of freedom to emerge, which are in principle unpredictable from perfect knowledge of the substrate. Massimo Pigliucci talks about this a bit in Essays on emergence, part I and to that I would add IEP: Mind and Multiple Realizability. I'm also probably drawing on intuitions Robert Laughlin developed in me with his 2006 A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. The result is that patterns can supervene on a substrate without being fully detectable by only looking at the substrate. An enticing further possibility is that refusing to lock down the individual state of each "atom" in the substrate permits quantum entanglement and quantum computers with abilities which far outstrip that of isolated, individual "atoms". (I like Sean Carroll's Mindscape episode 153 | John Preskill on Quantum Computers and What They’re Good For, in particular because of how sober-minded Preskill is. I took a quantum mechanics class with Preskill I could talk about …)

This alternative opens up the possibility of causal pluralism, where there are simply multiple sources of causation in reality, rather than something akin to universally present laws, ensuring that all quantum state evolves correctly from one second to the next. Philosophers are thinking in this direction; see e.g. Rethinking Order: After the Laws of Nature (NDPR review).

> Your programming example, which I like a lot, works here too: a computer program is, ultimately, a particular configuration of the hardware. There are no classes or functions in a computer, although we may interpret a part of its state as such; there is only the matter and the electricity. →

I am not sure of why we should prefer to say &quot;there is only the matter and the electricity&quot;; that level of generalization seems to be scientifically less powerful than a more articulate level of description which talks about microcode, transistors, traces, etc. In fact, I think there's something very philosophically problematic with using one of the most abstract terms we have—"matter" (made far more problematic by the quantum revolution)—and saying that all of reality is "just matter" (or "just matter–energy"). If you look at the justification for the claim &quot;there is only the matter and the electricity&quot;, you'll find a tremendous amount of detailed experiment and theory. And yet, all that stuff washes out in the claim &quot;there is only the matter and the electricity&quot;. But to wash out the justification for a claim, undermines the claim. I don't see how that's philosophically permissible.

> ← Likewise, even if we disregard the author, we recognize that a human exercised causal powers to produce a pattern that is To Kill a Mockingbird, or a memory of a person gone.

I'm afraid I don't see the connection, here. Remove the specifics of the author and you remove explanatory power. Furthermore, the possible range of meanings of To Kill a Mockingbird changes, if you include or exclude what the author said about the book, outside of the book.

> Now, do I have empirical evidence of physicalism?

What if the assumption of causal monism is part & parcel with the scientific strategy of characterizing, controlling, and predicting? One way to see how this does not capture all that humans value is to ask whether you want your therapist to merely characterize, control, and predict your behavior. The scientist tries to reduce the object of study to his/her categories of thinking. Do you want the psychologist to do that to you? If not, then perhaps humans actually value causal pluralism, when the purpose is to promote flourishing (and not just of humans). Dismissing flourishing as 'subjective' is, I think, a bad move—but I won't justify that claim unless asked.

> the only certain observation is the mind (cogito ergo sum, right?)

To that, I would respond with Eric Schwitzgebel 2008 The Unreliability of Naive Introspection and then his 2011 book-length follow-up, Perplexities of Consciousness. After all, is there any actual content to cogito ergo sum? I don't see a definition of any of the terms. I myself prefer <u>Si enim fallor, sum.</u> And just what can one not be wrong about, under the terms of cogito ergo sum?

> a more parsimonious explanation is mentalism

I agree. You do not gain any predictive power if you posit a world external to your mind. The posit of an external world is scientifically useless. Quantum physicists actually wrestled with this: do the "observables" given by quantum theory tell us all we can possibly know about reality? For more, see Bernard d'Espagnat 1983 In Search of Reality.

> What would you make of this?

To quote Neo, "Choice. The problem is choice." You can construct a world where you deny having any choice, and then live in that world. Or you can construct a world where you have a choice and are responsible for those choices. Now, I am aware of the many constraints on any possible free will; I wrote Free Will: Constrained, but not completely? to make this clear. Nevertheless, there is the question of whether the individual has any wiggle room whatsoever, or whether he individual has neither power nor responsibility. I think this is the fundamental choice. For those who opt for determinism, it may be the last choice they ever make. And yet, if you have no choice, why does cogito ergo sum matter one whit?

> The more we learn, the smaller God actually gets.

Most scientists working on the bleeding edge I know endorse a rather different stance: "The more we know, the more we know we don't know." Yes, there are people like Sean Carroll who write blog posts like The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood, but then there are Physics Nobel laureates like Robert Laughlin who write books like A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. One of the areas we are finding fantastically difficult is artificial intelligence. We were offered wild promises from the '60s to the '80s and they were all catastrophically false. IBM's Watson is underperforming so poorly that IBM has tried to sell Watson Health at least twice now—despite pouring billions of dollars and setting some of the world's best minds at the task. Is it actually true that the more we learn in this realm, the smaller the possibilities are?

> The logic of a God who wants to be loved and worshipped, but designs our reality in such a way that even the tiniest glimpse of God will forever be hidden is a giant contradiction.

I've grappled with this a lot. The only conclusion I can come to is that Christians have absolutely pathetic ambitions and God is fed up with that. I don't mean they should go back to Christendom-type ambitions; those so obviously violate Matthew&amp;nbsp;20:20–28 that I don't understand why this hasn't been a more focused topic of discussion—other than to accept Jacques Ellul's contention that most Christians have been absolutely obsessed with power^1. Too often, Christians think we can achieve the kingdom of God via domination rather than by service. Or, they dial back their ambitions to some sort of "lifeboat theology", where you just keep yourself pure until you get raptured away. Is it possible that at some point, God runs out of things to say and just has to wait until humans collect enough empirical evidence to admit that their chosen means will not lead to the imagined ends? (A pressing example is Ukraine, which NATO declared it would ultimately accept as a member in 2008, which John Mearsheimer has compared to the USSR putting nukes in Cuba.)

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^1 I highly recommend his The Subversion of Christianity.

Also, for the curious, Robert Laughlin wrote one of the only popular science book on condensed matter

Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University, had this to say about aether in contemporary theoretical physics (source):

"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo."