Stefan Weckbach
Dear AquamarineTapir,

Thanks very much for your kind words about my essay, and I like your essay very much too. I also want to thank you, because our exchange has helped me clarify my thoughts. And I am very glad to converse with you because we seem to think about the world in very similar ways. (I also rated your essay when I first commented on your essay page.)

Best wishes,
CornflowerCicada

Stefan Weckbach Greetings, Aquamarine Tapir. As someone who has studied social and physical sciences at different times, as well as having worked in progressive politics, I appreciate a look at expanding science in the two basic ways (as I see your point) discussed in your essay. First, yes indeed, science needs to pull in types of people that traditionally have been underrepresented in Western science activities. I am also pleased to see your call for expanding opportunities for hierarchically disadvantaged contributors (those not working in academia or relevant professions), such as myself. Yes, let's see more blind refereeing, such as is being done right here!

Also, would you (and anyone reading this) please take a look at my essay too, which attempts to disprove AI reductionism about minds. I use both a philosophical argument about existential knowledge (a sort of update of Descartes famous experiment) plus inferences from quantum mechanics. Thanks, and rem: this is the last day to rate essays!

    Neil Bates

    Dear PersimmonCatshark,

    thank you for your comments on my essay. I already read your essay some days ago and commented on it on your page.

    Best wishes
    AquamarineTapir

    7 days later

    Stefan Weckbach

    Dear Aquamarine Tapir,

    here are (finally) some more comments to your inspiring thoughts.
    The point you are raising differing between logical consistency and empirical support of a theory/model is quite interesting. Most cases of model-testing usually deal with proofs that the model at hand is logically inconsistent. Then, it's easy to refute the model. Yet, if it is logically consistent, the latter part is usually so much harder and that is something often fiercely debated. So I agree with you that any further proof or counterexample on an empirical basis also requires that we have assumed a certain ontology and relation to the (epistemical) model to be tested. There may not be a unique relation, the ontology may not even exist, etc.. It seems to be the heart of the discussion how to interpret quantum mechanics, for example.

    Concerning the notion of infinity, George Ellis once said that "Mathematical infinities do not exist in Nature" and I think there is a fundamental truth in that, if the Universe had a beginning (there are also other models that may work, but then, still, we always need to specify some boundary/initial conditions to understand and describe such cosmologies). The concepts of infinity that Cantor found are highly useful in the realm of theories and of mathematical models, but, anything that we can observe in Nature has some boundary/finiteness, maybe even the Universe itself. It's just that our models become easier to handle when making this extrapolation of infinities (like infinite accuracy or precision, or infinite volume or time). Yet, as you wrote, there is no ultimate way to find out whether these infinities are ontologically existing and in what sense. Thus, for a theory/model to describe our world around us, I think, we should not use a description including such potentially incorrect infinities and rather account for our limitations in our models. The latter become more truthful then and we explicitly introduce relationships between our point of interest and its environment/external influences -- based on my experiences, these extrapolations/interpolations are the key points where non-uniqueness in our descriptions of reality arises and I can't help but think that uniqueness is a kind of holy grail in science, even if Nature does not necessarily provide it based on the data it gives us.
    Maybe it is daring, but, obviously, our science over the history of humankind has not required an infinite understanding to find good approximations to explain phenomena in Nature. Hence, why should this be different with consciousness? As you wrote, our knowledge is provisionary, but we know the limits in which certain theories hold, so we may hope to discover the same in studies of consciousness.
    At the same time, there is no necessary clash with any existence of an intelligent designer or the contents of the Bible -- the concept of time is already interesting in the first paragraph that the world was created in seven days and you could ask: in which reference frame or does that imply a fundamental observer exist?! But isn't that anything else than questioning a certain, assumed ontology again...

    I will also have a look at the other discussion thread you sent and will comment soon.
    As I very much like our discussions here, I have something for you to remember this great essay contest, now that it is in its final step: https://ibb.co/mhf8hbN That's how aquamarine tapirs look like according to AI.

    Cheers,
    Beige Bandicoot.

      Jenny Wagner

      Dear Beige Bandicoot,

      thanks so much for the nice picture of the aquamarine tapir (me! :-), I will take that picture for my colour-animal-account (yours looks quite nice, too!)!.

      One of the reasons for why many scientists (in my opinion) have abandoned the idea / the hypothesis for a Creator God is that the physical world seems to be so different from any conceivable God-like realm. The physical seems to rule with an iron fist, and therefore, many people infer, there is no place even for the idea of a Creator.

      An example: I think it had been the Scholastiks that developed the seemingly contradiction between an omnipotent God and physical reality. They asked whether or not God is able to fabricate a stone that is that heavy that God himself is not able to lift that stone.

      At first glance it seems convincing that this is a real contradiction, not only a logical one, but also somewhat a physical one, since it suggests that God is bound to his physical creation. Surely, God, in my opinion is not omnipotent, since he / she surely cannot annihilate himself (I simply assume this without further proof).

      So let's also assume that God isn't able to fabricate a stone that is too heavy for him to lift. From this follows that God is “merely” able to fabricate stones that he himself is able to lift.

      The first sentence above is about an impossibility. The second sentence above is about a possibility.

      Let's now imagine the possibility for God fabricating a stone that has infinitely many atoms, each of them infinitely heavy. One could even imagine a stone that is made out of a non-denumerable infinity of atoms whereby each of the atoms is infinitely heavy – as long as God is able to lift that stone. And voila – what had been a severe contradiction in the minds of the Scholastiks is now possible: God can make any conceivable stone, as long as he can lift it.

      This example shows me how nonsensical it is trying to pull down the idea of a Creator to the layer of human physical understandings.

      I like to tell you another line of reasoning that may be equally nonsensical than the first one. Imagine that you have a list of all the things that are physically impossible. Let's say this list is long, but not infinitely long, it is finitely long.

      Now you are able to decide what things are possible in principle and what things are not. You simply had to look up the list and see whether or not the thing that you examine is listed as impossible. If it is not listed as impossible – well, then it is at least possible. So far, so good.

      But now remember that there is a difference between a possible thing and a necessary thing. Necessary things must happen necessarily. Possible things are possible to happen, but mustn't happen. But now we have a problem: if certain possible things NEVER happen, they are in a certain sense IMPOSSIBLE, aren't they? Therefore, they had to be on the list of all impossible things!

      It seems that with this result we have deduced that possible and necessary things are one and the same – if something is “possible”, in reality it must be necessary to happen! This then would strengthen (prove?) the worldview of Many Worlds.

      But can this be? Can a simple thought experiment with a simple finitely long list somewhat prove the Many Worlds interpretation of QM be correct? That would mean that logics somewhat could dictate how fundamental physics should behave!

      I think there are at least two errors in the above line of reasoning. Firstly we have no such list. Secondly logics tells me – on the basis of the two given examples – that what is possible to exist, what is impossible to exist and what is ultimately necessary to exist are things that are at least beyond human reasoning. I would go a step further and say that all three modalities may not be ultimately fixed, so there is plenty of “wiggle room”. For this to be true and at the same time not be drifting into paraconsistent logics, in my opinion it needs a Creator whose abilities are beyond human understanding of causality and human logical systems. That is what I refer to when I say that logics is able to “transcend” itself: one needs a reference point where it is able to transcend into.

      You are right, the ontological question is at the heart of how to interpret QM. The latest effort to circumvent non-locality that I have read about is by Tim Palmer and Sabine Hossenfelder. They suggest that the state space of all quantum mechanically possible experiments is such that not only the probabilities come out according to the Born rule, but also such that certain states that are implicit in all the Bell inequalities aren't existent in that huge state space.

      What the authors in my opinion have done is nothing other than to define a list of allowed states for the purpose of explaining violations of Bell-like inequalities without having to introduce space-time like nonlocalities. Although I cannot exclude the existence of such a state-space, I like the approach for two reasons: firstly it demonstrates how thin the line between possible and impossible is – judged by human beings. Secondly it is obvious (at least to me) that this approach (called “supermeasure”) is entirely motivated by the intention to avoid non-locality in physics.

      Similar hypothesis' have been facilitated with infinities involved by taking the mathematical fact of self-referencing formulas as physical facts, saying that the bottom layer of reality is infinitely fractal in nature. I whole heartedly would say that George Ellis is right what he says about infinities in nature.

      I also agree that unity is indeed a holy grail, I think it is directly experienced by human beings via their 5 senses that seem to be very well “integrated” into consciousness such that we experience the world around us as a unity. I therefore think that consciousness and its unity is a separate level of reality, at least when the brain works how it should (see brain-split patients etc. where that does not quite work out). For me, it is no wonder why physicists strive for unity, since I think that is what is the case anyways. Monotheistic religions have figured this out and Christianity (and the bible) is built on the assumption that nature (creation) is not equal with God. Abraham, before he went to the promised land, worshiped a moon goddess, thus worshiped nature, the creation instead of the Creator.

      The problem with the hypothesis of a Creator is not that this hypothesis is stupid right from the start, but that it has the “baggage” of tension between what individuals dreams for their own lifes and what God gave as commandments for each individual – to enhance the whole, not only the individual. Surely, there are other problems like the quest of evil in the world etc. But from a logical point of view I would say that nothing can speak against such a Creator, since we not even know on a logical basis what things are fundamentally impossible to exist, what things are fundamentally possible to exist and what things are fundamentally necessary to exist. About the latter I would say that for reaching at all a grip on what is fundamental in reality, human logics demands that itself is a clever invention of something that is necessarily more intelligent than human beings.

      I know, many people will disagree with that. But on what basis should the human brain be ever able to discover something like a “theory of everything”, other than on the basis of wishful thinking, means the wish that the universe should be such that it is totally congruent to human logics and human mathematics? And if true, wouldn't that be the most anthropocentric idea in the whole history of mankind – the fundamental layer of reality is such that it perfectly fits the intellectual capacities of a randomly evolved “ape” that at some point in time “realized” that he is neither at the center of the universe, nor at the center of the solar system nor at any center at all. Nonetheless scientists strongly believe that this “ape” should at least be at the center of intelligence in the universe such that it is able to “find out” that its intellectual capacities are perferctly congruent with fundamental reality... Well, these lines of thoughts are not convincing to me, since they obviously are born out of wishful thinking that an impersonal, solely material and rigogorously deterministic physical reality should deliver to us what we so whole-heartedly wish for.

      It may well be that we really cannot unite QM with GR. Not because reality is not a unity, but because the big picture isn't solely made up only from physical things. It may well be that physical reality is not there for the purpose that humans understand how “it works”, but for an entirely different purpose. To cut a long story short, many scientists in my opinion seem to think that reality is there for the purpose of entirely understanding it by humans. I see that as an equally anthropocentric idea as may be considered the idea of a Creator, so in this respect both ideas are at par.

      Best wishes
      Aquamarine Tapir

      Dear Beige Bandicoot,

      in my previous post, I left out certain aspects of what you wrote. I like to add my thoughts on these aspects here.

      Concerning consciousness, in my opinion there is this huge gap between death physical material that in parts can be measured and conscious Qualia. Measured always means a quantitative evaluation on a certain scale. It is all about the question “how much X is involved?”.

      Qualia on the other hand expresses qualities. If you would get blind tomorrow, a huge part of these qualities would vanish: you can't anymore navigate easily in the world, things will get much more stressful. We know from blind people that they not even “see” a black screen, they seem to see “nothing”. Nonetheless, in comparison to a dead stone, the latter not even “sees nothing” or can describe what it is to be blind.

      So even the total lack of vision, the latter being something that could theoretically be measured for example by inventing a quantitative scale for the impression of the colour purple, is a qualitative aspect of consciousness. It cannot be desribed other by some insufficient human words or some quantitative scale. But nowhere within that scale and its measurement algorithm we ever will find what it is like to see the colour purple, the quality of the experience – or in other words, experience itself. The world of mathematics has only “experience” insofar as it is projected by human beings into that mathematics. I think many mathematicians confuse this aspect: you can only talk about qualia-like “qualities” in mathematics because there is the experience of what it is like to do mathematics and this is solely due to the existence of Qualia.

      I conclude from this that approximating scientifically what Qualia is “made of” will run into the same conundrum, the experience of what it is like to have certain qualia must implicitely be put into the ontology of the theory that aims to explain it in the first place and we end up with a kind of tautology, packaged into what we then later call a “theory of Qualia”. That such a theory must be very strange in order to grasp what Qualia is “made of” then could be demonstrated if one explains that theory to the totally blind person.

      Of course, the blind person will not see colours during us explaining colours to that person. What that person presumably will “experience” (thus, hear) is a lot of quantitative desriptions about the human brain, thus explanations for why that person is not able to see colours. Since that person was formerly able to see colours (if not blind from birth), there has to be a change in the person's brain. But even figuring out that cange, in my opinion, is not at all sufficient to capture what it is like to have visual qualia – or what it is like to NOT have visual qualia. It once more will only be about the correlates of consciousness in the human brain (what in itself is a worthwile project to undertake).

      “... any further proof or counterexample on an empirical basis also requires that we have assumed a certain ontology and relation to the (epistemical) model to be tested.”

      Yes, that is true and that's a huge problem, since one can always invent further “explanations” to even counteract any counterexamples. The question then becomes how independent these explanations are from beliefs. In the case of the “supermeasure” hypothesis to explain away non-locality, I would say that this hypothesis is obviously motivated by the wish to make QM locally-realistic. That is not bad in itself, but is at odds with statistical independence and attributes to human-made quantum experiments a special status, or formulated alternatively it attributes to all quantum measurements in nature the feature that the results should be exclusively due to locally-realistic interactions. In my opinion, the latter, although it at first sight seems to be reasonable to assume that ontology, nonetheless is motivated solely by human wishes, not by evidence. So it is a matter of taste whether or not one believes in a state-space that is of the kind the “supermeasure” hypothesis proposes it. And “taste” is clearly totally dependent on the existence of human beings and their preferences! Moreover, how could we ever explain that something like “taste” exists in the universe, be it on the basis of fundamental non-locality or on the basis of a locally-realistic picture of the world? Once more, here the cat bites into its own tail and the problem of Qualia again shines through. Once more, it seems to be a matter of taste to see the factual existence of Qualia as a “problem” or to see it as a “solution” (in the sense that it points to something generically meaningful in the universe).

      Yes, you are right, these “musings” are nothing else than questioning once again an assumed ontology (the one that says that there cannot be any final, teological reasons for the existence of the universe and all the rest) and trying to replace it by another one. Asking for a deeper reason for the existence of “taste”, “preferences”, “beliefs” and assumptions in a world that is assumed to be almost fundamentally made out of merely dead stuff is at the one hand a heresy – but on the other hand that is what science is doing all the time (asking questions). So I think there is something wrong with attributing to the existence of dead stuff the sticker “existence without further reason”. That, self-evidently, is once more “just” another ontological assumption, but in my opinion one that is in congruence with the existence of “taste”, “preferences”, “beliefs” and “final reasons” (the latter meant in the sense of Aristotle's fourth cause).

      In my opinion one cannot argue away the existence of these qualia-like things. “Final reasons” are already implicit in every attempt to find a “theory of everything”. These final reasons will not be implicit in the theory itself, but these final reasons are surely already implicit within the scientists' agenda (belief) to at all search for such a theory, since it is his wish to finally find all the reasons that could act as final evidence for a universe that has no such final reasons to exist! Moreover, it is believed that this universe should be such that it allows human beings to find that final evidence!

      For me, that kind of agenda is somewhat a contradiction in terms, showing that we are far away from any evidence to finally explaining how and why the world is what it is. We not even can map the landscape of all impossible, all possible and all necessary things, and in my opinion for good reasons, since these three modalities may not be that interdependent on each other as we may think they are: from an assumed bird's eye view they even may be logically independent from each other in the sense that God has the freedom of not having fixed many of them eternally.

      Well, that's it for now, again a really long comment.

      Best wishes and looking forward to your comments on what I also already wrote in the course of this contest. Hope that it could make some sense to you and the reader in general.

      Aquamarine Tapir

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