Prodding the boundaries of knowledge

My quest to clear my phone of unread open tabs continues. Remember the time when I could just peruse Aeon at leisure because I had nothing else to do ? Those were the days...

Anyway, this piece hits on a number of reoccurring themes and it's worth a read. For me the most important sections are :

2. Why does there appear to be a major chasm between the cognitive capabilities of our hominin ancestors and the cognitive capabilities of modern scientists, artists and philosophers?

The author mentions social feedback but assumes that the base level of individual intelligence in the hunter-gatherer days would have no reason to be anywhere near that of a contemporary professor of mathematics. I sympathise, but personally, I remain entirely satisfied with this answer : social feedback plays a role, but the individual intelligence needed even in a Stone Age lifestyle is surprisingly high, and there may be a need to have excess capacity to compensate for the poorer nutrition of the time.

Moving on :

4. Is it possible for an entity that exists only in a computer simulation to run an accurate computer simulation of the ‘higher’ entity that simulated them?

If the answer is ‘no’, then whatever we contemplate in our universe is only a small subset of what can be known by those who reside higher in the sequence of more complex simulations. And if the answer is ‘no’, it would mean that there are deep aspects of reality that we cannot even imagine.

This is a more interesting use of the simulation hypothesis than I've seen elsewhere. It's very easily re-interpreted because we don't have to take "entity" and "simulation" literally here. Rather the question is perhaps better formulated as : can we understand the true, base nature of that which gives rise to our observations ?

In more classical simulation hypothesis language, I would err strongly towards "no". We render simulations in a way that those representations make sense to us, but those representations are not the simulation itself : the picture of a galaxy interacting with another is not at all the same as the electrons being shuffled around on the chips; no gravitational effects were involved in the simulation at all. As with the one about Joseph Needham, you can't explain representations in terms of the representations themselves, but I see no way we could ever escape thinking in those terms. How could we infer the presence of something radically unlike any of our most basic concepts ? 

That said, arguably, from the last piece, we're struggling to do this now with quantum mechanics, to try and realise that space and time themselves are just things induced in our minds. And I think that's a bit dangerous, because it opens the door to declaring that everything is all but magic. I would feel a lot more comfortable if someone could explain what rigorous, objective science would mean in a world where we accept that what we take as base reality is actually all an illusion.

Next :

8. Is it a lucky coincidence that mathematical and physical reality can be formulated in terms of our current cognitive abilities, or is it just that, tautologically, we cannot conceive of any aspects of mathematical and physical reality that cannot be formulated in terms of our cognitive capabilities?

Eugene Wigner asked why our mathematical theories ‘work so well’ at capturing the nature of our physical reality. Maybe the answer to Wigner’s question is that our mathematics isn’t very effective at all. Maybe our mathematics can capture only a tiny sliver of reality. Perhaps the reason it appears to us to be so effective is because our range of vision is restricted to that sliver, to those few aspects of reality that we can conceive of.

Ahh, the old "is mathematics and invention or discovery ?" question. Should we marvel at our own ingenuity in uncovering the laws of nature, or are we just coming up with new and better descriptions of the observables, of describing what's going on in our heads ?

I lean towards the former. One of the greatest achievements of the Standard Model is* its self-consistency, with radically separate areas of science combined into one harmonious whole. Observations give rise to ideas which can be applied on scales millions of times smaller or larger than their original basis yet are still resolutely successful. However much we might be limited to our own perspective, the Universe does seem to obey the principles we've derived : they are not merely convenient descriptions but are at least in some sense "real".

* Here by necessity simplifying and glossing over many enormously interesting problems.

Does this mean I actually secretly endorse materialism ? No, because this doesn't prohibit their being something "behind the curtain" we can't access. But in terms of explaining the observables we might not need to. Nobel Prizes in quantum experiments be damned, I cling to the belief that there probably are hidden variables - they're just very well hidden indeed.

This may all well be inconsistent, as befits a blog called Decoherency. As a stab at what my underlying reasoning is here, it might be something like the following : The true, deepest nature of reality is unknowable, but the observed Universe generally behaves logically, displaying causation and local reality. I take consciousness as self-evidently exempt from this, once we understand that consciousness is mental representation. 

That is, unlike a cactus or a sausage or a duckling, consciousness itself is the mental state : it is not a representation of anything, it is the underlying condition. I do not mean to say the idealism is correct, that's not what I'm driving at at all. Rather I'm saying something much weaker. I'm saying only that the things which are represented within conscious perception are not the same as conscious perception itself. We can understand those things in ways which are uniquely inapplicable to consciousness. Ordinary scientific approaches are perfectly valid for our observed external reality even knowing that we cannot access their full nature, because this is applying rules designed for observables to the observables themselves. But this doesn't work for consciousness, because it's not an observable, but rather it is the fundament of the observables, their base medium. The equivalent base nature of reality is unknowable (there is no need to posit that it too is consciousness as Berkeley did), but this is no way belittles the stupendous scientific achievement in describing and explaining the observables.

There, that'll do for now.