Dualism
The New Scientific Enlightenment
There is a massive paradigm shift occurring: beliefs about the nature of scientific inquiry that have held for hundreds of years are being questioned.
As laypeople, we see the symptoms all around us: climatology, economics, medicine, even fundamental physics; these domains (and more) have all become battlegrounds with mounting armies of Ph.D.s and Nobel Prize winners entrenching in opposing camps. Here’s what’s at stake:
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Scientific Objectivity
In 1972 Kahneman and Tversky launched the study into human cognitive bias, which later won Kahneman the Nobel. Even a cursory reading of this now vast literature should make each and every logically-minded scientist very skeptical of their own work.
A few scientists do take bias seriously (c.f. Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong). Yet, nearly 40 years later, it might be fair to say that its impact on science as a whole has been limited to improving clinical trials and spawning behavioral economics.
In 2008, Farhad Manjoo poignantly illustrates …
The Pattern
The wind was flapping a temple flag. Two monks were arguing about it. One said the flag was moving; the other said the wind was moving. Arguing back and forth they could come to no agreement. The Sixth Patriarch said, “It is neither the wind nor the flag that is moving. It is your mind that is moving.” — Zen Koan
“The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” — Albert Einstein
Does a whirlpool exist in the same way that a rock exists or that energy from the sun exists? For something to exist it either has to have always existed, or there must have been a time prior to its existence. Leaving for a moment the possibility that everything which exists today has always existed, let’s consider that it came into being at some point.
If something came into being, then not only must there have been a point in time prior to …
The Safety Net
The following story is true, I’ve just changed the names and told it in parable form. The material numbers and circumstances are roughly accurate, and Alice is a friend of mine who may tell the story herself on video here soon…
A True Story
Alice was feeling particularly poor at a certain time in her life and because of this she was under a lot of stress. Her friend, Bob, was a billionaire many times over and he disliked seeing his friend in pain and so he wrote her a blank check and said, “Alice, whatever amount you cash this for, it will relieve me of the burden of figuring out what to do with it. Will you do me the favor of accepting this gift?” Alice was stunned because she knew she could have cashed the check for $30 Million and Bob would not have missed it at all. And she knew Bob was sincere in what he was saying.
Alice was overwhelmed with …
Entanglement
Daniel asks, Does the Mind Influence Physical Processes?
Proof: our mind sets out to modify our environment in particular ways (i.e. set goals); then we act in ways consistent with that intention; more often than chance, our environment changes in those intended ways (i.e. goals are achieved).
This is a form of entanglement — spooky action at a distance — between our minds and the environment (which includes other minds), but we usually dismiss this as trivial, not very spooky. On the other hand, we know that quantum entanglement exists and it seems spooky to us because we have no mechanism to explain it.
We also observe that there are quantum effects in the basic architecture of the brain (nanotubules) and wonder if these are somehow the “ghost in the machine” of consciousness. But this could be just a red herring. Perhaps quantum effects matter to consciousness, perhaps they don’t. Still quantum effects are part of the human experience in some sense — and so …
Science 2.0
I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality. It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality. Injecting randomness creates a sort of Boltzmann machine of the mind and increases my chances of finding higher peaks.
But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior. This part is scary. People around me don’t understand what I’m saying initially because I necessarily need new words, new language, to describe the new landscape.
And rather than start totally afresh with a new lexicon, I notice it’s more productive (personally and in communication) to overload old terms and let them slowly blend into their new meanings. We all resist the strain, especially those who did not sign up for the jump through hyperspace. They use the …
Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
In my post about The Process it turns out that I stepped on a pedagogical minefield when using describing the Anthropic Principle (AP). Two preeminent physicists had a very public argument a while ago in which one called the AP unscientific because it’s unfalsifiable. I will return to that in a moment since it’s the crux of what’s wrong with Science right now, but I need to get the terminology issue out of the way first.
Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability). I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same. Here’s why:
- Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection. But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes. In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.
- Replication is a red herring anyway
The Process
Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite. There’s just infinity. Or if you prefer, nothing. There’s no space, no time, no matter, no energy. There’s no structure whatsoever, and nothing “in” any of the universes that make up the multiverse. it’s not even clear whether these individual universes are separate from one another or the same. But since our minds seem finite and we have to start somewhere, let’s imagine them as separate: an infinite collection of universes with nothing in them, no dimension, and no relationship between them.
Now lets assume there is some process for picking out universes from the multiverse. Since there’s no time in the multiverse, the process has no beginning and no end. It’s like a computer program, but it’s infinitely complex. Let’s call it The Process.
If The Process is infinitely complex and has no beginning and no end, what can we know about it? We know that it picks some universes but not others, which effectively creates an “in …