Scientific Determinism-A Case for Human Cognitive Selection Bias by Michael Muteru

Michael,

Thanks for your post and kind comments on mine on 30th. I've got to yours at last. Yes, I agree most all Except; at one point your wording is poor stating 'space IS expanding' wearas that's just one of the flawed interpretations you correctly identify. Indeed selection bias is rife.

Of course it's also becoming clear the Planck length indeed ISN'T the shortest length in the universe, as you suggest. Wolframs latest paper elegantly now derives that at 10-93, in agreement with my own work.

And 'BIAS AS CAMOUFLAGE'? Yes I do like that. Nice essay. I have it down for a good score.

Very best

Peter

Dear Michael,

I liked your essay, there are several interesting ideas that I appreciate. Particularly about bias and its impact on our representations of the world. Indeed, there are evolutionary factors for this, in particular for anthropic reasoning. Perhaps it is almost impossible to avoid being biased, since our neural networks work based on it. Good luck with the contest!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Michael Muteru,

Passing the test posed in the first line of your text, I assert, I am alive. I like the metaphor, "Life arises from consciousness", for unless one is conscious, one does not know one is alive, even though consciousness arose from life (or in living systems).

I do agree that scientific biases also fall within the zone of effect of anthropic reasoning. Even the specific empirical observations and experiments we choose are dictated by the same anthropic biases. For what we learn depends on what we observe, and what we observe depends on what the anthropic constraints dictate. The principles we discover or arrive at are biased by our anthropic reasoning; though we intend to design experiments specifically to discount all possible biases. I suppose, the reason one is stuck with the kind of quantum physics without a physical principle of interaction is the result of the kinds of observations we have made, and what lines of thoughts we have allowed to pursue.

> "It's in that context and principle and within these unit "Brackets" I earlier defined as "Perceptual limits of thought" that our brains thus Impose Empirical parameters that we call measure to the infinite universe we encounter.

A brain seems to develop natural measures of inter-object relations, and that too only in contexts where such relative measures are useful. Do these relative measures also fall under the 'limits of thoughts' you mentioned? If yes, then we note an information necessarily expresses relations, and the relations that we observe are limited by our senses, without which there can be no description, no expression, whatsoever. In fact, it is this reality that forms the basis of, or give rise to, our thoughts in the first place. At the same time, the artificial design of units allows us to measure / observe phenomena and relate objects in vast scales of such units beyond our sensory limits. While I do agree that biases limit us in our thoughts, as all learning is a bias that narrows our thoughts. There has to be certain definite relation between, or mutual dependence among h, G, c, and e, but we cannot see that due to artificial units.

In fact, if we could design artificial brain that can observe and work on any scale we choose, it would be so interesting to observe phenomena the way a brain does at scales on pico, nano, micro, kilo, mega, giga meters and seconds etc. Please feel free to express your feels if you could descend down to atomic level and live among them yet have a brain like ours to observe all phenomena at that scale that are not observable in scientific plots.

I am sorry I missed the fish-pond idea.

Rajiv

Dear Michael Muther, your excellent essay as a good popular science lecture on physics for schoolchildren not only simply and clearly sets out modern physics, but also explores the anthropological influence on the preference of certain views on physical phenomena. Anthropological choice determines the scatter in the views of researchers on the same phenomena. Sometimes they endlessly argue about the same thing, but in different languages ​​(concepts). Dialectical materialism in this case claims that the criterion of truth is practice. But the only question is - where can we get this practice? You only have to be an observer and strain your brains, giving rise to different fantasies, competing with each other in their originality. My originality is to use Descartes's identity of space and matter to generalize modern physics, according to which space is matter, and matter is space that moves, since it is matter. However, researchers resist the adoption of a new paradigm in physics, as they are used to living according to old concepts. I hope that you will include a neocartesian view of the world in your system of views. I give a high rating and wish you success in the competition.

   Sincerely, Boris Dzhechko.

Hello Michael!

I really love your point about bias being a filter that we see the world. Actually, my favorite thing about the invention of quantum mechanics is the idea of baking an observer right into the math. I think that is such a nice mathematical trick that was able to explain so many weird things they were observing at the time. I personally think that biology needs to do a similar thing if a mathematical framework were to be fit around it. Just for fun, do you think entropy and the arrow of time are a consequence of us (as observers) having a biased and limited view of the world? (I like to think this could be the case, for no other reason other than it would be very interesting, but I have absolutely no mathematical basis to support my claim!)

Cheers!

Alyssa

Dear Dr. Muteru,

Your essay is a nice piece of readable, compact interdisciplinary exploration of the foundational issues of the raw material of measurements and how we should interpret them and their more complex configurations. And true that human nature cannot be evaded as an element of these interactions, for we are not just perceiving but constructing our observations. I recommend Ian Durham's essay here at https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3555 for similar thoughts. Also the writings of polymath Robert Anton Wilson, on "reality tunnels" in particular.

Also: if any readers might take at look at my own piece (https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3548/), addressing the issue of the strong correlations of entanglement and how neo-mechanistic models of quantum physics aren't enough - it could use more votes on this last day. Thank you.