"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

[Philip Thrift]

via John Horgan @Horganism

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks increasingly nutty

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.

For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 

Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”

Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”

One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.

In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high water mark of scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism. 

Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I like to call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles underpinning brains, immune systems, ecologies and nation-states. Economics and other social sciences would soon become as rigorous as chemistry and nuclear physics. Supposedly.

To be charitable, all this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code. You can see how these and other successes, as well as advances in computers and other tools, might have persuaded optimists that total scientific knowledge was imminent.

But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.

Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as believers in God must explain where He came from. This is the problem of infinite regress, which bedevils all who try to explain why there is something rather than nothing.

As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke. 

Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat, nematode or smart phone. As I argue in my new book Mind-Body Problems, science appears farther than ever from understanding the mind. 

There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there. Big Data boosters indulge in hype reminiscent of the heyday of chaoplexity (although the phrase “social science” remains as oxymoronic as ever). And in his 2011 book On Being, Peter Atkins, who is now 79, reiterated his “faith” that “there is nothing that the scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate.” But I doubt many scientists share this view any more.

Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble--and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists had somehow convinced themselves, and the rest of us, that they had figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird, weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.

The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge. “You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out?” he asked me with a manic grin. “This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’”

I’ll close with a quote from Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics and leading chaoplexologist. When I interviewed him in 1994, Anderson derided the claims of some of his fellow scientists that they could solve the riddle of reality. “You never understand everything,” Anderson said. “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.

source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-delusion-of-scientific-omniscience/

@philipthrift

[Lawrence Crowell]

Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new things. He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose science will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around before long, so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I see little productive in following or thinking along his lines.

LC

[Brent Meeker]

Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what sceintific "comprehension" consists of.   It is the ability to tell a consistent story about what happens that has predictive power.  It's not necessarily a story that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story would be entertaining and satisfying and they could tell to kids a bedtime.  Those are the stories religion tells.  Sceince tells stories that work...and that's their defining characteristic.  Chalmers can call consciousness "the hard problem" because he doesn't like the story in which it is a brain process. It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in the story "consciousness" should be something he likes.  The same thing happened when life was shown to be metabolism and reproduction...chemical processes.  But it's a story that works.  And when neuroengineers and consciousness mechanics are designing and building human like AIs nobdy will worry about whether Chalmers likes the story or not.

Brent

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[Samiya Illias]

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 5:26 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new things. He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose science will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around before long, so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I see little productive in following or thinking along his lines.

LC

You might find this worth a read: Humans: Extinct & Extant 

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[Philip Thrift]

I would put "Horganism" another way.

Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems.

David Chalmers' conclusion is ...

"I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention."

- http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

Horgan's invocation of Feyerabend leaves out I think his main idea:

Science is supposed to be liberating, but it becomes a prison when when it becomes a catechism.

Philip Thrift @philipthrift

codicalism - There is a hidden code of nature—the code written into its fabric. Our theories—our hypothetical code—are our evolving best-guess translations of the code of nature, which remains hidden from our knowledge—within nature-in-itself.

https://twitter.com/philipthrift/status/1126225643459493888

3:41 PM · May 8, 2019

1 Retweet   10 Likes

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the
rest of neurophysics.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the story of measurement more consistent.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict) observability from science.

     https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/

(which many have exploded over).

In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a scientific fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.

@philipthrift

 

[Bruce Kellett]

Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

Bruce 

[Bruce Kellett]

I do, And I can confidently tell you that it is all a load of foeted dingo kidneys.

Bruce

[Philip Thrift]

There are lists of hypotheticals in physics, too many to keep track of.

Lists of hypotheticals of physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_elementary_particles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_particles

etc.

e.g.,

Inflatons: "Just like every other quantum field, excitations of the inflaton field are expected to be quantized. The field quanta of the inflaton field are known as inflatons. Depending on the modeled potential energy density, the inflaton field's ground state may or may not be zero."

@philipthrift 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible. 

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty

Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens

(Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this version, v3))

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such cases, which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse.

@philipthrift 

[John Clark]

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?

No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science can't answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if the chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, and by their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they just are. For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed.

> Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, everything?
Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, ANYTHING?

 

> Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as believers in God must explain where He came from.

I don't think science will ever be able to fully explain why there is something rather than nothing, however it's already done an excellent job explaining why there is a great deal rather than very little. Meanwhile the God theory can explain precisely nothing.

> As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began,

That's just not true. We certainly have a clue, but the beginning of life was a historical event so if 4 billion years of geological activity has erased the evidence then we may never be able to definitively say "life started this way and it couldn't have started in any other way"; but I think we're well on our way of developing a plausible scenario describing how life *could* have started.

> Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious,

What's with this "us" business? All I know for certain is I'm conscious and I'm the product of Darwinian Evolution.

 

> and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states.

I know for certain I'm conscious. If Darwinian Evolution produced me then I know for certain that something Evolution can see must have the ability to produce a conscious state, something like intelagent behavior. And you can't have intelagent behavior without data processing.

 

> It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat,

John Horgan might someday know what it would be like for John Horgan to be a bat, but to know what it's like for a bat to be a bat John Horgan would have to turn into a bat, and even then John Horgan wouldn't know what it's like because then John Horgan would no longer exist. Only a bat can know what it's like for a bat to be a bat and only John Horgan can know what it's like for John Horgan to be John Horgan.

 

> The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge.

It's one thing to say we can't know everything but Feyerabend seems to think we can't know anything and so we should give up even trying and just howl at the moon or something. 

John K Clark

[smitra]

On 07-09-2019 13:04, Philip Thrift wrote:
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
>> <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>

>>> _>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
>>> Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?_

>>>
>>>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule
>>> from it...which I think is impossible.
>>
>> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do
>> is make probabilistic predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that
>> in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the
>> Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a
>> probability without inconsistencies.
>>
>> John K Clark
>

> MANY WORLDS, THE BORN RULE, AND SELF-LOCATING UNCERTAINTY

>
> Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens
> (Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this
> version, v3))
>
> We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett
> (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on
> the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave
> function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the
> outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the
> universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show
> that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such
> cases, which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes
> straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum
> self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse.
>

This argument (the mathematical part is based on Zurek's derivation) can
be made even stronger by invoking the fact that even in principle an
observer cannot locate herself precisely in one effectively classical
World. Everything you can in principle be aware of only fixes a finite
number of physical degrees of freedom of your brain, so you're always
going to be in a superposition of not just the entire observable
universe, even your own brain state is never going to (effectively)
collapse into a definite state.

So, if you're simulated by a classical computer, the macroscopic
registers of your classical brain will be in a superposition
corresponding to slightly different data processing being carried out. A
more powerful conscious agent implemented by a much larger computer can
observe the exact state of all your registers, but he can never
communicate this to you as the computer rendering you cannot store all
that information. So, you will always be located in a superposition of
states where this information is different. And that more powerful
conscious agent will itself be in a superposition of states where its
registers are in different states.

These superpositions are entangled superpositions with the environment
that specify that if the input information from the environment where
slightly different than that the output bran state would have to be
correspondingly different. So, such a superposition then defines the
algorithm that is running. The conscious agent is then aware of the
processed data, but only to some finite resolution, he's then in a
superposition of everything that happens below that resolution and that
then Defines the algorithm that renders the consciousness.

If a conscious agent could be located in a precisely defined single
World then that leads to the problem that the state doesn't define the
algorithm that is actually running. In a purely classical picture
counterfactuals cannot be relevant, whatever the physics is makes you
conscious all that happens is that you pass from one state to another
state at some arbitrary moment that you have some conscious thought. So,
any trivial device that doesn't so any nontrivial computations that is
set up such that it will always pass through these states, such as a
recording of these states, will also be conscious.

We can avoid this paradox by taking serious that at each moment we're
algorithms that are defined by the counterfactual data processing that
fall within the region of uncertainty defined by the finite precision of
our awareness.

Saibal

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

LC

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 6:20:23 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?

No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science can't answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if the chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, and by their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they just are. For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed.

> Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, everything?
Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, ANYTHING?

The problem is that a divine creator explains everything on the most elementary or simple basis of faith. This means in effect it explains nothing, because there is nothing falsifiable about this. Scriptural statements about the world, say from creation to the fact the Bible really has a Sumerian cosmology, have been found to be wrong. However, upholders of these ideas are good at either denial of facts or by shifting goal posts around in interpretations of scripture.

LC

[Philip Thrift]

If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed doomed. 

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/6/2019 10:54 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:

On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

The trouble with panpsychism is that it doesn't buy you anything.  There's still the question of why am I not conscious under anesthesia? And do I really believe rocks are conscious?...no, we'll say they have "proto-consciousness".  But once you introduce a concept like proto-consciousness, why attribute it to everything.  Why not just say nerves have proto-consciousness, when they are functional.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of consciousness to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the "engineering theory of consciousness" will fill that need.

Brent

@philipthrift

 

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[Brent Meeker]

But when, exactly do they get to be "unseen".  Decoherence theory has given a pretty good answer to that.  And Zurek's quantum Darwinism has at least outlined a stat-mech answer to the basis problem.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

The latter is along the lines of

     https://petergodfreysmith.com/

who is an advocate of biopsychism. I assume there is a chemopsychism. Then micropsychism is lower. Of course there is cosmopsychism too.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:36:08 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of consciousness to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the "engineering theory of consciousness" will fill that need.

Brent

That measurement needs consciousness to "bottom out" is crazier than panpsychism (except maybe cosmopsychism). 

(Think of what Vic would say.)

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

True, there will always be many degrees of freedom that you are unaware
of and are irrelevant to a particular observation of UP or DOWN.  But it
is only the latter that locates one in either the UP world or the DOWN
world.

> so you're always going to be in a superposition of not just the entire
> observable universe, even your own brain state is never going to
> (effectively) collapse into a definite state.
>
> So, if you're simulated by a classical computer, the macroscopic
> registers of your classical brain will be in a superposition
> corresponding to slightly different data processing being carried out.
> A more powerful conscious agent

It seems you have gratuitously inserted "conscious agent" here.  Why not
"more powerful computer"?  What does consciousness have to do with it?

> implemented by a much larger computer can observe the exact state of
> all your registers, but he can never communicate this to you as the
> computer rendering you cannot store all that information. So, you will
> always be located in a superposition of states where this information
> is different. And that more powerful conscious agent will itself be in
> a superposition of states where its registers are in different states.
>
> These superpositions  are entangled superpositions with the
> environment that specify that if the input information from the
> environment where slightly different than that the output bran state
> would have to be correspondingly different. So, such a superposition
> then defines the algorithm that is running. The conscious agent is
> then aware of the processed data, but only to some finite resolution,
> he's then in a superposition of everything that happens below that
> resolution and that then Defines the algorithm that renders the
> consciousness.

This explanation in terms of superpositions of consciousness is like
QBism translated from personal subjective experience to imply multiple
worlds.

Brent

[Lawrence Crowell]

To be honest I think Vic would be disappointed in all this silliness over panpsychism. Remember he kept writing on the unconscious quantum.

LC

[spudb...@aol.com]

Vic Stenger was a good writer, but like Horgan, never tried to data-mine science for something practically, useful. This discussion winds down to a bar-fight over Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles. Once we get really good telescopes out to the Kuiper Belt or Oort, I am guessing new observations will modify what we already think we know, and add to it. Think of cosmology as a pattern of emergences. The 4 forces, chemistry, complexity, yeah, life, at least around these parts. Are we a fluke of emerging/chemistry? Well, some days before coffee, I would tend to agree, thus, reinforcing the fluke hypothesis indicating the doors of perception can be altered, chemically. 

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[Philip Thrift]

Strawson's "Realistic Monism" and "The Mary-Go-Round" (particularly) are very much in terms of Vic's vocabulary. It would be interesting to see what his response would have been.

@philipthrift

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 6 Sep 2019, at 22:06, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

via John Horgan @Horganism

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks increasingly nutty

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

Science is not a person, but an attitude, often related to some methods. Horgan has a “religious” (I mean a pseudo-scientist) conception of science, probably inherited from the separation between religion and science, which makes them both “pseudo-religious”.

We know since 1931 that, even just on etc 3p arithmetical reality, we (the finite creature) can only scratch n the surface.

But we can try theories, and as long as we don’ believe to get the whole truth, we can progress toward it.

Science as begun with Pythagorus in -500, and ended with Damascius in +500. But in arithmetic, there are infinite line of progress, and with some luck, we will follow those lines … in some futures.

Assuming Mechanism, science has fundamentally regress, despite the wonderful discovery in biology and physics, and mathematics. We have even forget the original questions which started science.

But there are plausible general theories, although none can be complete or even completed. 

Any theory which allows for the existence of a universal machine can be completed. Such theories have been called “essentially undecidable” by Tarski. You cannot add axioms to complete them effectively.

Now, the beauty of science is that it can study its own limitation, and get a more and more precise idea of its intrinsic, necessary  (and gigantic) ignorance.

Theology was the science aimed at the study of that ignorance, notably because we can get altered state of consciousness which, like Descartes systematic doubt, ensure the existence of a fixed point for the doubt, and the immensity of our ignorance.

Today, we are in the materialist paradigm, but it is inconsistent when it assumes also Mechanism, and the evidence favours mechanism, at least until now.

To progress, we have to backtrack at the starting point. Pythagorus. We have to understand that the genuine debate is not on the existence of a creator, but on a creation, and assimilate well the difference between Aristotle (what is real is what I see) and Plato (I don’t know if what I see is the real thing).

Horgan does not describe science. He describes the type of necessarily fake science that you get when you separate theology, or metaphysics if you prefer, from reason.

Bruno

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.

For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 

Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”

Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”

One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.

In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high water mark of scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism. 

Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I like to call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles underpinning brains, immune systems, ecologies and nation-states. Economics and other social sciences would soon become as rigorous as chemistry and nuclear physics. Supposedly.

To be charitable, all this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code. You can see how these and other successes, as well as advances in computers and other tools, might have persuaded optimists that total scientific knowledge was imminent.

But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.

Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as believers in God must explain where He came from. This is the problem of infinite regress, which bedevils all who try to explain why there is something rather than nothing.

As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke. 

Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat, nematode or smart phone. As I argue in my new book Mind-Body Problems, science appears farther than ever from understanding the mind. 

There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there. Big Data boosters indulge in hype reminiscent of the heyday of chaoplexity (although the phrase “social science” remains as oxymoronic as ever). And in his 2011 book On Being, Peter Atkins, who is now 79, reiterated his “faith” that “there is nothing that the scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate.” But I doubt many scientists share this view any more.

Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble--and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists had somehow convinced themselves, and the rest of us, that they had figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird, weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.

The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge. “You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out?” he asked me with a manic grin. “This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’”

I’ll close with a quote from Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics and leading chaoplexologist. When I interviewed him in 1994, Anderson derided the claims of some of his fellow scientists that they could solve the riddle of reality. “You never understand everything,” Anderson said. “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.

source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-delusion-of-scientific-omniscience/

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 7 Sep 2019, at 02:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what sceintific "comprehension" consists of.   It is the ability to tell a consistent story about what happens that has predictive power.  It's not necessarily a story that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story would be entertaining and satisfying and they could tell to kids a bedtime.  Those are the stories religion tells.  Sceince tells stories that work...and that's their defining characteristic.  Chalmers can call consciousness "the hard problem" because he doesn't like the story in which it is a brain process.

No one serious would identify 1p consciousness with anything 3p.

Chamers only reacts the mind-body problem in the Aristotelian framework, where the greeks got already the proof that it cannot work, and that proof is made rigorous by any “honest” universal number.

It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in the story "consciousness" should be something he likes.  The same thing happened when life was shown to be metabolism and reproduction...chemical processes. 

Not really. Life is conceived (correctly I would argue) as a 3p process, and so the reduction here can make sense. It does not when you identify 1p and 3p. You get led to the Penrose-Lucas type of error, confusing []p with []p & p, which is basically a confusion between, belief and knowledge.

But it's a story that works.  And when neuroengineers and consciousness mechanics are designing and building human like AIs nobdy will worry about whether Chalmers likes the story or not.

The AI will worry about that. 

Bruno

Brent

On 9/6/2019 1:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

via John Horgan @Horganism

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks increasingly nutty

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/64291c27-3637-3fd1-d066-c91463aeccca%40verizon.net.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 7 Sep 2019, at 05:11, Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 5:26 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new things. He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose science will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around before long, so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I see little productive in following or thinking along his lines.

LC

You might find this worth a read: Humans: Extinct & Extant 

God will never know that this sentence is true.

Bruno

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/790aeb07-04ce-4332-9d0c-f291c5fefc5f%40googlegroups.com.

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>>
>> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems.
>>
>> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>>
>> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention."
>> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
>

> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the rest of neurophysics.

+ zero explanation power at all, also.

Bruno




>
> Brent

>
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[Bruno Marchal]

On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:21, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the
rest of neurophysics.

Brent

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

What is the predictive power of one world?

Bruno

@philipthrift 

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[Bruno Marchal]

But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.

Bruno 

Bruce 

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[Philip Thrift]

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

> On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>>
>> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems.
>>
>> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>>
>> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention."
>> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
>
> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the rest of neurophysics.

+ zero explanation power at all, also.

Bruno

But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers. 

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

And the case is made even stringer when you know that all computations (execution of algorithm made by universal machine/number) exist provably. Provably, unless one doubt that 2+2=4, of course.

Bruno




>
> Saibal

>
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[Bruno Marchal]

Assuming mechanism in the cognitive science, the “many-computations” is not an option, and MWI, Qubism, or even Copehagen, IF true, have to be derived from 2+2=4 & co.

Bruno

LC

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[Bruno Marchal]

Right. If God exists, then “God made it all” is NOT an explanation at all. It remains to explain God, or to explain why we can’t explain it, and it remains to explain how God “made it all”.

That’s gives perhaps the difference between the concept of God used by the theologian who are scientist, and “God" used by pseudo-science/pseudo-religion: for a scientist God is *the* problem to solve, not a solution or explanation at all.

Bruno

LC

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[Bruno Marchal]

Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Computationalism, and computer science, gives an “easy” theory of consciousness (it is “consistency” as seen by the []p & p mode, or []p & <>t & p mode (for the immediate consciousness).

This, imo, solves the “hard consciousness” part of the mind-body problem.

Nevertheless,  it leads to an “easy-but-not-that-easy” problem of deriving the illusion of a physical reality and its stability, and its local sharability,  from “pure arithmetic”. But the results obtained here are very promising, although not on the like of the believer in Matter as we could have expected given the history.

Bruno

Brent

@philipthrift

 

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[Bruce Kellett]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the story of measurement more consistent.

Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.

Bruce 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible. 

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

LC

If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed doomed. 

Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.

Bruno

I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

LC

 

@philipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

No it isn't.  It's just a label.  Numbers at least can have complex relations.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 9:10:09 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible. 

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

LC

If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed doomed. 

Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.

Bruno

I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

LC

 

My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

But

"We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (ManyWorlds) approach to quantum mechanics."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7907.pdf 

So what is the issue?

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

Meaningless, unless to someone who is a member of an occult Pythagorean cult. 

Numbers map to lambda expressions, and functions and relation can all be expressed in lambda calculus. 

To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a spiritual belief than consciousness is constituted by matter.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 10:10 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation.

How could the Born rule be proven to be false, isn't the experimental evidence in its favor as strong or stronger than just about anything in science?   

John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

I am uncertain about this. If the Born rule were proven in an airtight way here this would have been one of the biggest developments in recent decades. I have yet to read this, so I can't form my own assessment of it.

LC

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

I doubt it is false, though Don Page thinks it is. It could be that the utility of the Born rule is some sort of formal "accident." 

LC 

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/8/2019 10:00 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
> To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a
> spiritual belief than consciousness is constituted by matter.

Nobody said that.  I said number had relations.  Don't try to read
between the lines.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

You can't prove it's false, but Jacques Mallah claimed to prove that you can't derive it from QM without it ("The Many Computations Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", 2007).  It has to be a separate postulate, because he considers some different rules for assigning probability.  These are experimentally disproven, but their existence implies that Born's rule is not logically entailed.  His example avoids Gleason's theorem, because QM minus Born doesn't imply that observations across different worlds necessarily satisfy the probability axioms. 

Brent

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[Philip Thrift]

Coding numbers, functions, and relations in lambda calculus:

https://jwodder.freeshell.org/lambda.html

@philipthrift

 

[Bruno Marchal]

“Pan” is not well defined. The proposition  "my cup of tea is conscious” is not well defined for me.

What is the panpsychist theory of consciousness? If everything is conscious, “consciousness seems trivialised”.

With the number, and their + and * laws, we can define the universal digital machine, and study what they can prove about themselves, including what they cannot prove, but still guess, and incompleteness makes the standard definition of the greeks making sense. The universal machine has already an interesting discourse about, not just his body, but its souls, its physics, etc.  

It is coherent with both AI, and the theory of evolution (which is already used on mechanism).

Consciousness also get a role, as it provides semantic which accelerate the computation relatively to the universal machine which run the subject, allowing a greater number of degree of freedom.

A very interesting video on the Limbic system, and its relation with emotion is here:

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

Panpsychism assumes matter, making it inconsistent with digital mechanism (that is not obvious, ask for explanation if interested). 

But even without that still a bit ignored fact, panpsychism makes the functioning of the brain quite mysterious. With mechanism, consciousness is a mathematical semantic fixed point, related to the neural loops, whose importance is well illustrated in that video.

Panpsychism has not yet a testable theory, which might change tomorrow, but again, it speculates on very strong axioms, which cannot be used to invalidate a much simpler theory, not yet contradicted by any facts.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references. That would be an indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum immortality is deduce here from the already much more obvious arithmetical immortality, which is disturbing, but hard to avoid.

Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense (metaphysically, it is a practical non-sense).

If the reference assume a wave packet reduction, or a way “matter” can interfere with the computations in arithmetic, no need to give the references. It is just working in different theories.

Bruno

Bruce 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 8 Sep 2019, at 16:10, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible. 

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

LC

If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed doomed. 

Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.

Bruno

I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

OK. Note that usually, I use “prove” in the logicien sense. So “proving” (effectively) is the same as showing that the proposition is independent of the choice of any interpretation. I work in “complete” theory: provable is the same as true in all interpretations/models, and consistent means true in (at least) one interpretation/model. Here “complete” is used in the sense of Gödel 1930. Such theories are usually incomplete in the sense of Gödel 1931.

To prove in *some* interpretation consists then as adding axioms to the theory. That restricts the interpretations, as suppressing an axioms augments the interpretation.

You might look at a theory as a system of (logical) equation, and an interpretation/model as a variety satisfying the equations. In both case there is a sort of Galois connection. Note that once a theory is essentially undecidable (like all the theories allowing the existence of computers) you remain incomplete in all consistent effective extension (including oracles).

I thing that the Born rules is basically plausibly imposed by Pythagorus theorem, and the fact that the number 2 has a lot of special and fundamental properties. Gleason theorem illustrates this, but Paulette Février get (in 1920s, she was a student of de Broglie) the simple frequentist justification often given to make it shorts (like in Preskill’s course, or in a book by Selesnick).

I don’t worry too much for the Born rules. Like I am open that gravity will be explained by the number 24, like string theory illustrates. The particles are plausibly explained by the number

808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000.

(The number of elements of the Monster group)

What is hard is:  to justify this from arithmetical self-reference, to get right the justifiable, the non justifiable, and the plural-(non)-justifiable from the arithmetical self-reference. In that way, the logic of G* - G of Solovay provides the intensional variants making sense of all those nuances, without the need of any ontological commitment other than what we need to define a universal digital machine or universal number. Elementary arithmetic is enough for that. 

Bruno

LC

 

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

The lambda-expression explains already that consciousness cannot be attached to anything 3p descriptible, be it number, lambda-expression or matter.

That is the beauty of it. []p (the honest scientist machine) cannot prove its equivalence with ([]p & p), its soul, or first person point of view. 

it cannot even give it a name, and when it searches a name, he jumps from surprises to surprises.

Computer science is a theory of mind per se. A theory which explains how machine can understand formal and informal languages, how they can learn, what they can prove about themselves, and what they can expect beyond that, and why they are conscious but cannot prove it … without the good willingness of some others or at least one Other.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

It depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

"is" could be a descriptive relationship, like a program of a tornado is not a tornado.

But if tornados are just mental creations, where everything mental is a numerical fixed point, then all reality *is* numerical simulation.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 10:10 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote

> I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation.

I think that's backwards. The Born Rule doesn't need to be proven because it's an experimental observation, if it was untrue you wouldn't even be able to read these words because the semiconductor microprocessor in your computer wouldn't work. If you are able to start with a quantum interpretation and from it derive a result that contradicts the Born Rule then that would prove that particular quantum interpretation is dead wrong. But if you can derive the Born Rule from a quantum interpretation then that would be not proof but very strong evidence that the interpretation may be correct.

John K Clark

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the story of measurement more consistent.

Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.

Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.

Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide. The main problem with the idea of quantum immortality is that not all life-threatening events that one can encounter are in the form of alternative outcomes to quantum processes. Quantum suicide is an attempt to overcome this problem by linking death or survival directly to the outcome of a particular quantum process. David Deutsch was sceptical that this worked:

 'Physicist David Deutsch, though a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding quantum suicide that "that way of applying probabilities does not follow directly from quantum theory, as the usual one does. It requires an additional assumption, namely that when making decisions one should ignore the histories in which the decision-maker is absent....[M]y guess is that the assumption is false."

Tegmark was also doubtful about the chances for quantum immortality -- pointing out that dying is rarely a binary event; it is more often the result of a slow cumulative process.

Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we do not see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our branch if this scenario is true.

That would be an indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum immortality is deduce here from the already much more obvious arithmetical immortality, which is disturbing, but hard to avoid.

Well, as you know, I consider mechanism to be false in any case, so the failure of quantum immortality is no news to me.

Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense (metaphysically, it is a practical non-sense).

It relates to the standard problem for Many worlds theory -- if a quantum experiment with binary outcomes is performed many times, there will always be observers who see major deviations from the expected quantum probabilities. In which case, we cannot rely on repeated experiments to be a reliable indicator of the underlying probabilities. And if you cannot use long-run relative frequencies to estimate probabilities, what do you use? David Wallace attempts to get around this by simply dismissing the outliers as "irrelevant" (You, I recall, have made a similar argument.) Wallace even suggests that these outlying sets of results are "lost in the quantum noise", but he does not elaborate on this totally stupid claim. (Wallace, in "The Emergent Multiverse" (2012))

If the reference assume a wave packet reduction, or a way “matter” can interfere with the computations in arithmetic, no need to give the references. It is just working in different theories.

None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can rest easy.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/10/2019 4:30 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum
> immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people
> who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we
> do not see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the
> probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people
> born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our
> branch if this scenario is true.

My argument was that each of us should find ourselves to be much older
than even the oldest people we know.

Brent

[Jason Resch]

You could be very old, but (perhaps temporarily) amnesiac.

Jason 

[Brent Meeker]

Then it's strange that so many other people and photographs happen to agree with my memory.  Must be a conspiracy to hide the secret of quantum immortality.  It would certainly be unpopular once people thought about what it means.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

Exploring further after my initial post on this, I found the following paper by Mallah:

https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187

which explores the issues in some detail. He consider the arguments against both quantum suicide and quantum immortality to be decisive.

Bruce 

[Bruce Kellett]

That is probably the best single argument against quantum immortality: if QI is true, then the measure of our lifetime after one reaches a normal lifetime is infinitely greater than the measure before age , say, 120 yr. So if one finds oneself younger than 120 years, QI is false, and if MWI is still considered to be true, there must be another argument why MWI does not imply QI.

Bruce

[Samiya Illias]

Thank you for sharing the this article by John Horgan. 

May Allah bless you! 

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 1:07 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

via John Horgan @Horganism

The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks increasingly nutty

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019 

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.

For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 

Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”

Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”

One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.

In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high water mark of scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism. 

Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I like to call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles underpinning brains, immune systems, ecologies and nation-states. Economics and other social sciences would soon become as rigorous as chemistry and nuclear physics. Supposedly.

To be charitable, all this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code. You can see how these and other successes, as well as advances in computers and other tools, might have persuaded optimists that total scientific knowledge was imminent.

But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.

Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as believers in God must explain where He came from. This is the problem of infinite regress, which bedevils all who try to explain why there is something rather than nothing.

As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke. 

Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat, nematode or smart phone. As I argue in my new book Mind-Body Problems, science appears farther than ever from understanding the mind. 

There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there. Big Data boosters indulge in hype reminiscent of the heyday of chaoplexity (although the phrase “social science” remains as oxymoronic as ever). And in his 2011 book On Being, Peter Atkins, who is now 79, reiterated his “faith” that “there is nothing that the scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate.” But I doubt many scientists share this view any more.

Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble--and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists had somehow convinced themselves, and the rest of us, that they had figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird, weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.

The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge. “You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out?” he asked me with a manic grin. “This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’”

I’ll close with a quote from Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics and leading chaoplexologist. When I interviewed him in 1994, Anderson derided the claims of some of his fellow scientists that they could solve the riddle of reality. “You never understand everything,” Anderson said. “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.

source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-delusion-of-scientific-omniscience/

@philipthrift

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

The measure of our lifetime when young might be larger than the measure when very old if surviving as a very old person becomes exponentially less likely. In any case, this is not relevant if it is given that there will be a very old version of you in some corner of the world, whether distant in time, space or in a parallel universe. You cannot avoid surviving to become this version if it actually exists.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruce Kellett]

I think the point of quantum immortality is that everyone is immortal -- it is not that this is very unlikely because it happens to everyone. So I am not sure what measure you think is exponentially decreasing. My personal measure of life-years is clearly greater for periods after age 120 yr than for the period before. Since this happens for everyone, the collective measure over all people is likewise exponentially greater. Even if one considers an infinite universe, with an infinite number of copies of me, all of these are immortal on the basis of the QI argument. So, again, the measure of old age is not decreasing with age.

The situation is different for quantum suicide in the absence of quantum immortality. Then one is deliberately courting death on ever run of the scenario, and the number of survivors inevitably decreases, even if one copy survives indefinitely.

Bruce

[Quentin Anciaux]

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.

Quentin

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[Philip Thrift]

>   Re: Quantum immortality

Noting that changing a "Subject" in an emailer does not change the Topic

"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

66 posts by 12 authors

 

a post is under in Google Groups.

@philipthrift

[Telmo Menezes]

That is my argument against the existence of heaven and hell. If they existed, we would already be there -- oh wait :)
However, here it only applies if the tree is infinitely deep but not infinitely wide.

Telmo.

> Brent

>
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> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/7ec88255-a555-7f57-eb80-a31c2a559a3d%40verizon.net.
>

[Stathis Papaioannou]

Do you accept the idea that if there is continual duplication of the world through whatever means and each individual is mortal (the probability that he will survive a period t approaches zero as t approaches infinity), you will survive indefinitely?

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Telmo Menezes]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019, at 07:01, Philip Thrift wrote:

>   Re: Quantum immortality

Noting that changing a "Subject" in an emailer does not change the Topic

It's not a change of topic, it's a fork :) You can continue the original thread.

Telmo.

"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

66 posts by 12 authors

 

a post is under in Google Groups.

@philipthrift

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[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.

ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.

Bruce

[Quentin Anciaux]

And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case, so something is wrong with your theory. 

Bruce

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--

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer)

[Quentin Anciaux]

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:08, Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.

ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.

And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case, so something is wrong with your theory. 

I mean even *without* QI...  

Bruce

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All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer)

[Bruce Kellett]

A copy of you will. When I say that everyone is immortal under QI, I mean that a copy of every person survives to any arbitrarily large age. This is not because each near-death experience is quantum in origin, but because in MWI there is continual duplication due to random quantum events. Every copy inevitably dies at some point, but with new copies continually generated, some will survive indefinitely. Not that this is anywhere as much as many copies as people fear, because quantum events only give rise to world splitting if the effect is magnified to be of macroscopic, decohered, significance. That does not happen for every random neutrino that passes through your body, although there a a very large number of scattering events that could happen for any such neutrino. But none, even if there is an interaction in your body, ever becomes macroscopic. But this is irrelevant to the argument from relative measures.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:08 PM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.

ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.

And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case, so something is wrong with your theory. 

That does not follow. "years" is only "un facon de parle".

Bruce

[Philip Thrift]

My only point is that if you go to the actual Google Group

         Everything List

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/everything-list

there is the Topic 

 

        "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/everything-list/NJWeGLXI2yw

All the posts Re: Quantum immortality are under that Topic,

There is  ontologically no such thing as as a fork or a thread in Google Groups. You can only create a new Topic.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:30 PM Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we do not see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our branch if this scenario is true.

That doesn't follow. Yes there have been an awful lot of people born within the last 500 years but that number is utterally dwarfed by the number of quantum interactions that occurred in the last 500 years, and if Many Worlds is correct then each one created a universe. So there is indeed a universe that has a 300 year old man in it and even a 30,000 year old man, but it is very unlikely you're living in one of them.

By the way, Hugh Everett the inventor of the Many Worlds idea was working for the pentagon in 1962 and everybody knew the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was extremely dangerous, but recently as new information gets unclassified it's now apparent it was vastly more dangerous than anybody thought at the time. I think a logical person analyzing all the data would conclude the most likely outcome was global thermonuclear war. But as unlikely as it seems we somehow survived, at least in this universe.

 John K Clark

[smitra]

Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves
according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures
in this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can
be derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having
to use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is
given by the summation of the squared modulus of the states that
correspond to those observations. The information about personal
identity must then also be extracted from the wavefunction, so one
cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.

Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states
that correspond to extremely old observers is small.


Saibal

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the story of measurement more consistent.

Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.

Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.

Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.

That is not what I mean by a  reference.

The main problem with the idea of quantum immortality is that not all life-threatening events that one can encounter are in the form of alternative outcomes to quantum processes.

The point is that at each instant we have an infinity (plausibly aleph_1, at least aleph_0) alternate accessible histories, and it is up to you to prove that when we die in some history, we die in all. That is dubious, because there are always consistent extensions (but of course I use Mechanism here).

Quantum suicide is an attempt to overcome this problem by linking death or survival directly to the outcome of a particular quantum process. David Deutsch was sceptical that this worked:

 'Physicist David Deutsch, though a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding quantum suicide that "that way of applying probabilities does not follow directly from quantum theory, as the usual one does. It requires an additional assumption, namely that when making decisions one should ignore the histories in which the decision-maker is absent....[M]y guess is that the assumption is false."

Tegmark was also doubtful about the chances for quantum immortality -- pointing out that dying is rarely a binary event; it is more often the result of a slow cumulative process.

Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy

That makes no sense. The argument rest typically on the first person, not the first person plural.

-- and we do not see people who are two or three hundred years old.

Just compute the probability. That would be akin to a white rabbit. The argument concerns only the first person experience, and it can involved amnesia.

Even if the probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our branch if this scenario is true.

The probability is the same as the one with a beam splitter (some “half mirror”) and all photons going on the same path. Nobody as seen this. But if you kill yourself if the photon go in the non rare path, you will see the photon going on the rare path with probability one, by the cul-de-sac principle (again, I use, like Everett; the mechanist hypothesis).

That would be an indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum immortality is deduce here from the already much more obvious arithmetical immortality, which is disturbing, but hard to avoid.

Well, as you know, I consider mechanism to be false in any case, so the failure of quantum immortality is no news to me.

Mechanism implies a form of computational immortality. Non mechanism is neutral, especially in absence of some non mechanist theory of mind (and matter).

Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense (metaphysically, it is a practical non-sense).

It relates to the standard problem for Many worlds theory -- if a quantum experiment with binary outcomes is performed many times, there will always be observers who see major deviations from the expected quantum probabilities. In which case, we cannot rely on repeated experiments to be a reliable indicator of the underlying probabilities.

That confuses the first person plural with the first person singular experience. 

And if you cannot use long-run relative frequencies to estimate probabilities, what do you use? David Wallace attempts to get around this by simply dismissing the outliers as "irrelevant" (You, I recall, have made a similar argument.) Wallace even suggests that these outlying sets of results are "lost in the quantum noise", but he does not elaborate on this totally stupid claim. (Wallace, in "The Emergent Multiverse" (2012))

If something has a low probability, the exception will be low, independently of the fact that all outcomes are realised or not.

If the reference assume a wave packet reduction, or a way “matter” can interfere with the computations in arithmetic, no need to give the references. It is just working in different theories.

None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can rest easy.

You lost me here. With the wave reduction, there is just no quantum immortality at all, nor even quantum suicide. I guess I mess something.

The only “reasonable” critics was the one done by Jacques Mallah on this list, which claims that if QI or MI is correct, we should expect to be very old. But Quentin answered this validly: we expect in all situation to be just a bit older than where we remember coming from, and the paradox comes from a confusing between relative and absolute self-sampling on the states or histories. Typically, also, old and young are not absolute concept. With mechanism or quantum mechanics without collapse, we can say that we are always young.

Bruno 

Bruce

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[Bruno Marchal]

No problem with this.

But if tornados are just mental creations,

Mechanism does not implies this. Tornados are not ontologically real, but they are phenomenologically real, and their existence depends in fine on natural number relations, which are not mental creation, at least not human mental creations.

where everything mental is a numerical fixed point, then all reality *is* numerical simulation.

Consciousness and other semantical notion are fixed point of partially computable functional. But most of arithmetic are not, unless you intent them, but them it relies on fixed point of transformation in your brain, which, as a phenomenological object, will be a fixed point at a different level. It is hard to describe this without getting a bit more technical. I might have some opportunity to explain more on this later.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Jason Resch]

I mean amnesic regarding the full extent of your billion+ year life.

Jason

 

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[Jason Resch]

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why do you think that measure only increases with age? On an objective level it only decreases.

Jason

 

Bruce

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[Jason Resch]

On Wednesday, September 11, 2019, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:26 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 12:00, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Playing Schrodinger's cat over and over with you as the cat is about the same as living a year. It's just that each iteration of Schrodinger's cat has a 50% chance if killing you while living another year as a healthy adult let's say, has a 1 in 900 chance if killing you.  But the consequences and conclusions are the same in either scenario.

Jason

 

Bruce

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

This means that if you don’t know if you are young or very old and have to guess, you are more likely to be right if you guess that you are young. But it does not mean that you won’t inevitably become very old.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Brent Meeker]

Right.  Your observation of your age is conditional on your having survived.  So that your survival to a great age is improbable is irrelevant.

Brent

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Stathis Papaioannou

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[Philip Thrift]

It seems though that while I was referencing a material pan[propto]psychism - where elementary constituents of matter that ends up in an integrated brain have proto-experientiality - what you have is a numerical pan[proto[psychism, where there are elementary numeral constituents in things that are not brains that possess a proto-consciousness. (Even rocks of certain types have been shown to be a kind of signal processors.) If fact, a numerical reality reveals a panpsychism of a numerical nature even more explicitly than a material one.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/11/2019 5:08 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.

ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.

And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case, so something is wrong with your theory.

Or with the theory of quantum immortality and MWI.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/11/2019 9:52 AM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/10/2019 5:35 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:18 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/10/2019 4:30 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum
> immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people
> who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we
> do not see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the
> probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people
> born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our
> branch if this scenario is true.

My argument was that each of us should find ourselves to be much older
than even the oldest people we know.

You could be very old, but (perhaps temporarily) amnesiac.

Then it's strange that so many other people and photographs happen to agree with my memory.  Must be a conspiracy to hide the secret of quantum immortality.  It would certainly be unpopular once people thought about what it means.


Brent

I mean amnesic regarding the full extent of your billion+ year life.

But if I don't remember it, was it me?

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 9/11/2019 9:55 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
> Why do you think that measure only increases with age? On an objective
> level it only decreases.

There's the crux of the question.  The measure of what, or whom?

Brent

[Jason Resch]

You might remember more when you wake up.  I think eventually the probability of your consciousness continuing through an old-age body gets so low that more likely continuation paths occur, such as waking up as a technologically advanced being playing sim-human, or having your ever diminishing conscious awareness eventually intersect with another similarly diminished consciousness (perhaps that of a brain still developing in a womb or an egg).

Jason

[Bruce Kellett]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 9/10/2019 4:30 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum
> immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people
> who are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we
> do not see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the
> probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people
> born within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our
> branch if this scenario is true.

My argument was that each of us should find ourselves to be much older
than even the oldest people we know.

 

That is probably the best single argument against quantum immortality: if QI is true, then the measure of our lifetime after one reaches a normal lifetime is infinitely greater than the measure before age , say, 120 yr. So if one finds oneself younger than 120 years, QI is false, and if MWI is still considered to be true, there must be another argument why MWI does not imply QI.

Why do you think that measure only increases with age? On an objective level it only decreases.

As Bruno would say, "you confuse the 1p with the 1pp." I am talking about my personal measure of the number of years I have lived. As I get older, the number of years I have lived increases. If I live to 1000, I have lived more years between 100 and 1000 than between 1 and 100. This is arithmetic, after all.

But this discussion has gone off the rails. It started as a discussion of quantum immortality, and the arguments against this notion, even in MWI. The arguments against QI that have been advanced are that life-threatening events tend not to be binary or quantum, but rather we enter a period of slow decline, due to illness or other factors. Consequently, there is no reason for us to expect to be immortal, even in MWI. The other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to be very old. This argument was advanced by Mallah (arXiv: 0905.0187) and has not been satisfactorily rebutted.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.

Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.

Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.

That is not what I mean by a  reference.

I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of, apparently. The paper is available at

https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187

[.....]

 

None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can rest easy.

You lost me here. With the wave reduction, there is just no quantum immortality at all, nor even quantum suicide. I guess I mess something.

The argument was that QI makes no sense, even in a many-worlds setting.

 

The only “reasonable” critics was the one done by Jacques Mallah on this list, which claims that if QI or MI is correct, we should expect to be very old. But Quentin answered this validly: we expect in all situation to be just a bit older than where we remember coming from, and the paradox comes from a confusing between relative and absolute self-sampling on the states or histories.

The trouble with this is that neither ASSA and RSSA is a law of nature. As I have said, from the 1p perspective, I live more years between 100 and 1000 than between 1 and 100. So I expect to be very old. What we remember is actually irrelevant -- we can always check our birth certificate if we forget how old we are. In other words, we can use external sources to refresh memories. What we personally remember at any instant is variable and unreliable. Check against external references.....

 

Typically, also, old and young are not absolute concept.

No, they are concepts relative to actual life span -- you are always at your youngest when you are born, and at your oldest just before you die.

With mechanism or quantum mechanics without collapse, we can say that we are always young.

Another good reason for abandoning mechanism.

Bruce 

[Stathis Papaioannou]

It is not simple arithmetic if you live to be very old that most of your measure is in your older years if you take into account all the copies. Suppose there are 10^100 copies of you under 100 years old and then all but one copy dies, but that one copy goes on to live to 1000. If you did not know how old you were and you had to guess given this information, then you would guess with near certainty that you were under 100 years old. However, you would also know with certainty that you would live to 1000, and you would not notice anything weird happening as you approached your 100th birthday.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

Virus-free. www.avast.com

[Bruce Kellett]

The trouble with this argument is that you know that at least one copy of you will survive past 100 years (or past any age, for that matter). Given that you survive, the probability of survival is one. Taking account of all the other copies who die does not alter this fact. If you are all your copies, then your probability of survival under the assumption of QI is always one.

Your RSSA assumption is effectively a dualist model -- there is only one soul that makes you really you, and that soul goes at random into one and only one copy at any time. Then the chances that this soul-containing copy is the one that survives, does indeed decrease rapidly with age. But that is the wrong way to look at it -- there is no 'soul' that makes a copy you. On the MWI assumptions, every copy is 'you', so since at least one copy always survives, 'you' will always survive. The number of years you survive past age 100 is indefinitely large, so you spend more time in those years, and you have probability one of getting there.

Bruce

 

[Brent Meeker]

As I understand it the theory is that all these 'you's' on all the branches are potentially the you-of-here-and-now.  So the probability that you-of-here-and-now sees your self as much older than others depends on the measure of intervals along all the branches.  So the question then turns, as Telmo said, whether this branching structure wide or deep.  QI is the theory that it is infinitely deep.  Could it also be infinitely wide?  I don't think so, but in Bruno's theory it could be both.  The question seems to come down to whether one is "copied" by quantum level events that are amplified to the level of consciousness (which is quasi-classical) very frequently (continuously?) or rarely.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

Yes. QI is possible only in a many-worlds scenario, but that does not necessarily mean that any many-worlds scenario implies QI. As you say, most of life's significant events are quasi-classical in origin, not decoherence amplified quantum events. One could be "copied" by quantum events that are irrelevant to your survival. For example, by the splitting of worlds occasioned by someone shining a laser on a half-silvered mirror. That just increases the number of copies, all of which probably survive that splitting process.

As another aside, it seems to me that Stathis's RSSA, with measure along the lifeline decreasing in accordance with Born's rule (as Russell Standish puts it in his book "Theory of Nothing"), is equivalent to a collapse model (or the existence of a dualist "soul" as I put it before). QI requires many worlds.

Bruce

[Quentin Anciaux]

Wel if by "dualist soul" you mean something immaterial about our consciousness (like I don't know information) can be duplicated then yes it is dualist and any computational theory of mind is dualist in this sense then. I suppose you would say that if someone believe "he" can be copied and uploaded in a virtual environment then he is a dualist ?

Quentin

 

QI requires many worlds.

Bruce

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[Bruce Kellett]

That is not implied by anything I said. If the measure along your lifeline decreases according to the Born rule, as Russell suggests, then one is effectively saying that after quantum duplication, the soul chooses one copy at random, and that is the one that is "you". This is effectively a collapse model -- all duplicates except the one randomly chosen cease to be you. I am certainly not advocating such a position, I was just pointing out that that is what RSSA amounts to.

Bruce

[Stathis Papaioannou]

I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one and only one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a process that can reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know which copy I am and it doesn’t matter. What matters, because it defines survival, is that there be an entity in the future that identifies as being me and remembers being me. Effectively, since I am a process rather than a persisting physical object, I die with every passing moment, and it is only the existence of such entities that identify as being me and remember being me that creates the illusion of survival. I die if no such entities exist anywhere or any time.

--

Stathis Papaioannou