Time again

 This is a topic I’ve written about before, many times, but I’m returning to it on this occasion because of a video I watched by Curt Jaimungal, whom I can recommend. He’s smart and interviews people who are even smarter, and he has a particular penchant for interviewing people with unorthodox ideas, but with the knowledge to support them. He also has the good sense to let them do nearly all of the talking. He rarely interjects and when he does, it’s pertinent and tends to not interrupt the flow. I’ve sometimes been annoyed by interviewers cutting someone off when they were about to say something that I was interested in hearing. I could never accuse Curt of that.
 
In this case he’s interviewing Avshalom Elitzur, whom I’ve also referenced before. He’s a bit of an iconoclast – my favourite type of person, even if I disagree with them. If I’m to be fair, I’d have to include Donald Hoffman in that category, though I’ve been a harsh critic in the past. Having said that, I’ve noticed that Donald has changed his approach over the 8 or so years I’ve been following him. As I’ve said before, it’s important to follow the people you disagree with as well as those you agree with, especially when they have knowledge or expertise that you don’t.
 
Elitzur discusses three or more topics, all related to Einstein’s theories of relativity, but mostly the special theory. He starts off by calling out (my phrase) what he considers a fundamental problem that most physicists, if not all (his phraseology) ignore, which is that time is fundamentally different to space, because time changes in a way that space does not. What’s more we all experience this, with or without a scientific theory to explain it. He gives the example of how another country (say, Japan) still exists even though you don’t experience it (assuming you’re not Japanese). If you are in Japan, make it Australia. On the other hand, another time does not exist in the same way (be it past or present), yet many physicists talk about it as if it does. I discussed this in some depth, when I tackled Sabine Hoffenfelder’s book, Existential Physics; A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
 
Elitzur raises this at both the start and towards the end of the video, because he thinks it’s distorting how physicists perceive the world. Specifically, Einstein’s block-universe, where all directions in time exist simultaneously in the same way that all directions in space exist all at once. He mentions that Penrose challenges this and so did Paul Davies once, but not now. In fact, I challenge Davies’ position in another post I wrote after reading his book, The Demon in the Machine. Elitzur makes the point that challenging this is considered naïve but he also makes another point much more dramatically. He says that for Einstein, the ‘future cut’ in time is ‘already there’ (10.50) and consequently said, ‘…has the same degree of reality as the present cut and the past cut. Are you okay with that?’ His exact words.
 
He recounts the famous letter that Einstein wrote to the family of a good friend who had just passed away, and only 4 weeks before Einstein himself passed away (I didn’t know that before Elitzur told me), from which we have this much quoted extract: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Davies also used this quote in his abovementioned book.
 
I’m going to talk about last what Elitzur talked about early, if not quite first, which is the famous pole-in-the-barn thought experiment. Elitzur gives a good explanation, if you haven’t come across it before, but I’ll try because I think it’s key to understanding the inherent paradox of special relativity, and also providing an explanation that reconciles with our perception of reality.
 
It's to do with Lorenz-contraction, which is that, for an observer, an object travelling transversely to their field of vision (say horizontally) shortens in the direction of travel. This is one of those Alice and Bob paradoxes, not unlike the twin paradox. Let us assume that Alice is in a space ship who goes through a tunnel with doors at both ends, so that her ship fits snugly inside with no bits hanging out (like when both are stationary). And Bob operates the doors, so that they open when Alice arrives, close when she is inside and open to allow her to leave. From Bob’s perspective, Alice’s spaceship is shorter than the tunnel, so she fits inside, no problem. Also, and this is the key point (highlighted by Elitzur): according to Bob, both doors open and close together – there is no lag.
 
The paradox is resolved by relativity theory (and the associated mathematics), because, from Alice’s perspective, the doors don’t open together but sequentially. The first door opens and then closes after she’s passed through it, and the second door opens slightly later and remains open slightly longer so that the first door closes behind her before she leaves the tunnel. In other words, both doors are closed while she’s in the tunnel, but in such a way that they’re not closed at the same time, therefore her spaceship doesn’t hit either of them. This is a direct consequence of simultaneity being different for Alice. If you find that difficult to follow, watch the video
 
I have my own unorthodox way of resolving this, because, contrary to what everyone says, I think there is a preferred frame of reference, which is provided by ‘absolute spacetime’. You can even calculate the Earth’s velocity relative to the overall spacetime of the entire universe by measuring the Doppler shift of the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). This is not contentious – Penrose and Davies both give good accounts of this. It’s also related to what Tim Maudlin called, the most important experiment in physics, which is Newton spinning a bucket of water and observing the concave surface of the water due to the centrifugal force, and then asking: what is it spinning in reference to? Answer: the entire universe.
 
You might notice that when someone describes or explains the famous twin paradox, they only ever talk about the time difference – they rarely, if ever, talk about the space contraction. Personally, I don’t think space contracts in reality, but time duration does. If you take an extreme example, you could hypothetically travel across the entire galaxy in your lifetime, which means, from your perspective, the distance travelled would be whole orders of magnitude shorter. This can be resolved if it’s the ruler measuring the distance that changes and not the distance. In this case, the clock acts as a ruler. Kip Thorne has commented on this without drawing any conclusions.
 
This same logic could be applied to the spaceship and the tunnel. For Alice, it appears shorter, but she’s the one ‘measuring’ it. If one extends this logic, then I would argue that there is a ‘true simultaneity’, experienced by Bob in this case, because he is in the same frame of reference as the tunnel and the doors. I need to point out that, as far as I know, no one else agrees with me, including Elitzur. However, it’s consistent with my thought experiment about traversing the galaxy: time contracts but space doesn't.
 
I’ve raised this before, but I believe that there is an independent reality to all observers, and this is consistent with Kant’s famous dictum that there is a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we may never perceive. In other words, relativity can only tell us about what we observe, which leaves open the possibility that there is a reality that one observer has a better perception of than another. It’s possible that while ‘time passed’ is observer-dependent, space is not, but only the observer’s perception of it.
 
This is also consistent with Elitzur’s overall thesis and core argument that space and time are different. It’s also consistent with the idea that there is a frame of reference for the entire universe, which I argue is what general relativity (GR) gives us. And in fact, we observe that local frames of reference can actually travel faster than light, which is why the observable universe has a horizon: there are parts of the Universe receding from us faster than light.
 
There is another aspect of this that Elitzur doesn’t bring up, and that is that there is an edge in time for the Universe, but no boundary in space. I find it curious that, if physicists bring this up at all, they tend to gloss over it and not provide a satisfactory resolution. You see, it conflicts with the idea, inherent in the block-universe model, that there is no ‘now’.
 
Curt introduces ‘now’ towards the end of the video, but only in reference to the ‘flow’ of time that we all experience. Again, I’m a heretic in that I believe there is a universal now for the entire universe.
 
And while I don’t think it explains entanglement and non-locality in QM, it’s consistent with it. Entanglement works across space and time independently of relativistic causality, without breaking the relativistic rule that you can’t send information faster than light.
 
As it happens, there is another video by Curt with Tim Maudlin, an American philosopher of science, whom Curt introduces as ‘bringing some sober reality to this realm of quantum confusion and mysticism.’ In particular, Maudlin gives an excellent exposition of Bell’s famous theorem, and debunks the claim that it questions whether there is ‘reality’. In other words, it’s often formulated as: you can accept non-locality or you can accept reality, but you can’t have both. Just to clarify, ‘locality’ means local phenomena that obey SR (special relativity) as I’ve discussed above.
 
Maudlin argues quite cogently that you only need 2 assumptions for Bell’s theorem to make sense and neither of them break reality. The main assumption is that there is ‘statistical independence’, which he explains by giving examples of medical controlled experiments (for example, to test if tobacco causes lung cancer). It just means that random really does mean random, which gives true independence.
 
The only other assumption is that we can have non-locality, which means you can have a connection or relationship between events that is not dependent on special relativity. Numerous experiments have proven this true.
 
Maudlin challenges Sabine’s contention that Bell’s Theorem can only be explained by ‘superdeterminism’, which is another name for Einstein’s block-universe, which started this whole discussion. Sabine is so convinced by superdeterminism, she has argued that one day everyone will agree with her. This of course has implications for free will and is central to Elitzur’s argument that the future does not exist in the same way as the present or even the past, which is fixed. And that’s his point. Sabine’s and most physicist’s view on all this is that what we experience must be an illusion: there is no now, no flow of time, and no free will.

Addendum: I came across another video by Curt with Jacob Barandes, that came out after I posted this. Jacob is a Harvard scientist, who has done a series of videos with Curt. It's relevance to this topic is that he talks about space-time in GR and how, unlike Newtonian physics, and even SR, you can't tell which direction time and space have. And this axiomatically creates problems when you try to quantumise it (to coin a term). I think the superposition of a gravitational field creates its own problems (not discussed). He then goes on to conjecture that there should be an intermediate step in trying to derive a quantum field theory of gravity, and that is to do probabilities on gravity. He acknowledges this is a highly speculative idea.

He then goes on to talk about 'expectation values', which is the standard way physicists have tried to model QFT (quantum field theory) on to spacetime, and is called 'semi-classical gravity'. Viktor T Toth (on Quora) says about this: …it is hideously inelegant, essentially an ad-hoc averaging of the equation that is really, really ugly and is not derived from any basic principle that we know. Nevertheless, Toth argues that it 'works'. Barandes goes further and says it's based on a fallacy (watch the video if you want an elaboration). 

I tend to agree with Freeman Dyson, who contends that they are not compatible in theory or in nature. In other words, he argues that quantum gravity is a chimera. Dyson also argues that QM can't describe past events; so, if that's true, quantum gravity is attempting to describe spacetime in its future. Arguably, this is what happens the other side of the event horizon of a black hole, where space itself only exists in one's future, which leads to the singularity. To quote Toth again: We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity. What we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.

Truth, trust and lies; can we tell the difference?

 I’ve written on this topic before, more than once, but one could write a book on it, and Yuval Noah Harari has come very close with his latest tome, Nexus; A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. As the subtitle suggests, it’s ostensibly about the role of AI, both currently and in the foreseeable future, but he provides an historical context, which is also alluded to in the subtitle. Like a lot of book titles, the subtitle tells us more than the title, which, while being succinct and punchy, is also nebulous and vague, possibly deliberately. AI is almost a separate topic, but I find it interesting that it has become its own philosophical category (even on this blog) when it was not even a concept a century ago. I might return to this point later.
 
The other trigger was an essay in Philosophy Now (Issue 166, Feb/Mar 2025) with the theme articulated on the cover: Political Philosophy for our time (they always have a theme). This issue also published my letter on Plato’s cave and social media, which is not irrelevant. In particular, was an essay containing the 2 key words in my own title: Trust, Truth & Political Conversations; by Adrian Brockless, who was Head of Philosophy at Sutton Grammar School and has taught at a number of universities and schools: Heythrop College, London; the University of Hertfordshire; Roedean School; Glyn School; and now teaches philosophy online at adrianbrockless.com. I attempted to contact him via his website but he hasn’t responded.
 
Where to start? Brockless starts with ‘the relationship between trust and truth’, which seems appropriate, because there is a direct relationship and it helps to explain why there is such a wide dispersion, even polarisation, within the media, political apparatuses and the general public. Your version of the truth is heavily dependent on where you source it, and where you source it depends on whom you trust. And whom you trust depends on whether their political and ideological views align with yours or not. Confirmation bias has never been stronger or more salient to how we perceive the world and make decisions about its future.
 
And yes, I’m as guilty as the next person, but history can teach us lessons, which is a theme running throughout Harari’s book – not surprising, given that’s his particular field or discipline. All of Harari’s books (that I’ve read) are an attempt to project history into the future, partially based on what we know about the past. What comes across, in both Harari’s book and Brockless’s essay, is that truth is subjective and so is history to a large extent.
 
Possibly the most important lessons can be learned from examining authoritarian regimes. All politicians, irrespective of their persuasion or nationality, know the importance of ‘controlling the narrative’ as we like to say in the West, but authoritarian dictatorships take this to the extreme. Russia, for example, assassinates journalists, because Putin knows that the pen is mightier than the sword, but only if the sword is sheathed. Both Brockless and Harari give examples of revising history or even eliminating it, because we all know how certain figures have maintained an almost deistic persistence in the collective psyche. In some cases, like Jesus, Buddha, Confucius and Mohammed, it’s overt and has been maintained and exported into other cultures, so they have become global. In all cases, they had political origins, where they were iconoclasts. I’m not sure that any of them would have expected to be well known some 2 centuries later when worldwide communication would become a reality. I tend to think there is a strong element of chance involved rather than divine-interceded destiny, as many believe and wish to believe. In fact, what we want to believe determines to a much greater extent than we care to admit, what we perceive as truth.
 
Both authors make references to Trump, which is unavoidable, given the subject matter, because he’s almost a unique phenomenon and arguably one who could only arise in today’s so-called ‘post-truth’ world. It’s quite astute of Trump to call his own social media platform, Truth Social, because he actively promotes his own version of the truth in the belief that it can replace all other versions, and he’s so successful that his opponents struggle to keep up.
 
All politicians know the value (I wouldn’t use the word, virtue) of telling the public the lies they want to hear. Brockless gives the example that ‘on July 17, 1900, both The Times and The Daily Mail published a false story about the slaughter of Europeans in the British Embassy in Peking (the incident never happened)’. His point being that ‘fake news’ is a new term but an old concept. In Australia, we had the notorious ‘children thrown overboard affair’ in 2001, regarding the behaviour of asylum seekers intercepted at sea, which helped the then Howard government to win an election, but was later revealed to be completely false.
 
However, I think Trump provides the best demonstration of the ability to create a version of truth that many people would prefer to believe, and even maintain it over a period of years so that it grows stronger, not weaker, with time; to the point that it becomes the dominant version in some media, be it online or mainstream. The fact that FOX News was forced to go to court and pay out to a company that they libelled in the 2020 election as a direct consequence of unfaltering loyalty to Trump, did nothing to stem the lie that Biden stole the election from Trump. Murdoch even sacked the head of FOX’s own election-reporting team for correctly calling the election result; such was his dedication to Trump’s version of the truth.
 
And the reason I can call that particular instance a lie, as opposed to the truth, as many people maintain, is because it was tested in court. I’ve had some experience with testing different versions of truth in courts and mediation: specifically, contractual disputes, whereby I did analyses of historical data and prepared evidence in the form of written reports for lawyers to argue in court or at hearings. This is not to say that the person who wins is necessarily right, but there is a limitation on what can be called truth, which is the evidence that is presented. And, in those cases, the evidence is always in the form of documents: plans, minutes of meetings, date-stamped photos, site diaries, schedules (both projected and actual). I learned not to get emotional, which was relatively easy given I never had a personal stake in it; meaning it wasn’t going to cost me financially or reputationally. I also took the approach that I would get the same result no matter which side I was on. In other words, I tried to be as objective as possible. I found this had the advantage of giving me credibility and being believed. But it was also done in the belief that trying to support a lie invariably did you more harm than good, and I sometimes had to argue that case against my own client; I wouldn’t want to be a lawyer for Trump.
 
And of course, all this ties to trust. My client knew they could trust my judgement – if I wasn’t going to lie for them, I wasn’t going to lie to them. I make myself sound very important, but in reality, I was just a small cog in a much larger machine. I was a specialist who did analysis and provided evidence, which sometimes was pertinent to arguments. As part of this role, I oftentimes had to provide counter-arguments to other plaintiff’s claims – I’ve worked on both sides.
 
Anyway, I think it gives me an insight into truth that most people, including philosophers, don’t experience. Like most of my posts, I’ve gone off on a tangent, yet it’s relevant.
 
Brockless brings another dimension into the discussion, when he says:
 
Having an inbuilt desire to know and tell the truth matters because this attitude underpins genuine love, grief and other human experiences: authentic love and grief etc cannot be separated from truthfulness.
 
I’ve made the point before that trust underpins so many of our relationships, both professional and social, without which we can’t function, either as individuals or as a society.
 
Brockless makes a similar point when he says: Truthfullness is tied to how we view others as moral beings.
 
He then goes on to distinguish this from our love for animals and pets: Moral descriptions apply fully to human beings, not to inanimate objects, or even to animals… If we fail to see the difference between love for a pet and love for a person, then our concept of humanity has been corrupted by sentimentality.
 
I’m not sure I fully agree with him on this. Even before I read this passage, I was thinking of how the love and trust that some animals show to us is uncorrupted and close to unconditional. Animals can get attached to us in a way that we tend NOT to see as abnormal, even though an objective analysis might tell us it’s ‘unnatural’. I’ve had a lot of relationships with animals over many years, and I know that they become completely dependent on us; not just for material needs, but for emotional needs, and they try to give it back. The thing is that they do this despite an inability to directly communicate with us except through emotions. I can’t help but think that this is a form of honesty that many, if not most of us, have experienced, yet we rarely give it a second thought.
 
A recurring theme on this blog is existentialism and living authentically, which is tied to a requisite for self-honesty, and as bizarre as it may sound, I think we can learn from the animals in our lives, because they can’t lie at an emotional level. They have the advantage that they don’t intellectualise what they feel – they simply act accordingly.
 
Not so much a recurring theme, as a persistent one, in Harari’s book, is that more knowledge doesn’t equate to more truth. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the modern world of social media. Harari argues that this mismatch could increase with AI, because of how it’s ‘trained’ and he may have a point. We are already finding ‘biases’, and people within the tech industry have already tried to warn those of us outside the industry.
 
In another post, I referenced an article in New Scientist (23 July 2022), by Annalee Newitz who reported on a Google employee, Timnit Gebru, who, as ‘co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team’, expressed concerns that LLM (Large Language Model) algorithms pick up racial and other social biases, because they’re trained on the internet. She wrote a paper about the implications for AI applications using internet trained LLMs in areas like policing, health care and bank lending. She was subsequently fired by Google, though one doesn’t know how much the ‘paper’ played a role in that decision (quoting directly from my post).
 
Of course, I’ve explored the role of AI in science fiction, which borders on fantasy, but basically, I see a future where humans will have a symbiotic relationship with AI far beyond what we have today. I can see AI agents that become ‘attached’ to us in a way that animals do, not dissimilar to what I described above, but not the same either, as I don’t expect them to be sentient. But, even without sentience, they could pick up our biases and prejudices and amplify them, which some might argue (like Harari) is already happening.
 
As you can see, after close to 2,000 words, I haven’t really addressed the question in the tail of my title. I recently had a discussion with someone on Quora about Trump, whom I argued lived in the alternative universe that Trump had created. It turned out he has family, including grandchildren, living in Australia, because one of their parents is on a 2 year assignment (details unknown and not relevant). According to him, they hate it here, and I responded that if they lived in Trumpworld that was perfectly understandable, because they would be in a distinct minority. Believe it or not, the discussion ended amicably enough, and I wished both him and his family well. What I noticed was that his rhetoric was much more emotional – one might even say, irrational – than mine. Getting back to the contractual disputes I mentioned earlier, I’ve often found that when you have an ingroup-outgroup dynamic – like politics or contractual matters – highly intelligent people can become very irrational. Everyone claims they go to the facts, but these days you can find your own ‘facts’ anywhere on the internet, which leads to echo-chambers.
 
People look for truth in different places. Some find it in the Bible or some other religious text. I look for it in mathematics, despite a limited knowledge in that area. But I take solace in the fact that mathematics is true, independent of culture or even the Universe. All other truths are contingent. I have an aversion to conspiracy theories, which usually require a level of evidence that most followers don’t pursue. And most of them can be dismissed when you realise how many people from all over the world need to be involved just to keep it secret from the rest of us.
 
A good example is climate change, which I’ve been told many times over, is a worldwide hoax maintained for no other purpose than to keep climatologists in their jobs. But here’s the thing: the one lesson I learned from over 4 decades working on engineering projects is that if there is a risk, and especially an unknown risk, the worst strategy is to ignore it and hope it’s not true.

Addendum: It would be remiss of me not to mention that there was a feature article in the Good Weekend magazine that came out the same day I wrote this: on the increasing role of chatbot avatars in virtual relationships, including relationships with erotic content. If you can access the article, you'll see that the 'conversations' using LLM (large language models) AI are very realistic. I wrote about this phenomena on another post fairly recently (the end of last year), because it actually goes back to 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, who was a 'virtual therapist' that many people took seriously. So not really new, but now more ubiquitous and realistic.

Have we forgotten what ‘mind’ means?

 There is an obvious rejoinder to this, which is, did we ever know what ‘mind’ means? Maybe that’s the real question I wanted to ask, but I think it’s better if it comes from you. The thing is that we have always thought that ‘mind’ means something, but now we are tending to think, because we have no idea where it comes from, that it has no meaning at all. In other words, if it can’t be explained by science, it has no meaning. And from that perspective, the question is perfectly valid.
 
I’ve been watching a number of videos hosted by Curt Jaimungal, whom I assume has a physics background. For a start, he’s posted a number of video interviews with a ‘Harvard scientist’ on quantum mechanics, and he provided a link (to me) of an almost 2hr video he did with Sabine Hossenfelder, and they talked like they were old friends. I found it very stimulating and I left a fairly long comment that probably no one will read.
 
Totally off-topic, but Sabine’s written a paper proposing a thought-experiment that would effectively test if QM and GR (gravity) are compatible at higher energies. She calculated the energy range and if there is no difference to the low energy experiments already conducted, it effectively rules out a quantum field for gravity (assuming I understand her correctly). I expressed my enthusiasm for a real version to be carried out, and my personal, totally unfounded prediction that it would be negative (there would be no difference).
 
But there are 2 videos that are relevant to this topic and they both involve Stephen Wolfram (who invented Mathematica). I’ve referenced him in previous posts, but always second-hand, so it was good to hear him first-hand. In another video, also hosted by Jaimungal, Wolfram has an exchange with Donald Hoffman, whom I’ve been very critical of in the past, even saying that I found it hard to take him seriously. But to be fair, I need to acknowledge that he’s willing to put his ideas out there and have them challenged by people like Stephen Wolfram (and Anil Seth in another video), which is what philosophy is all about. And the truth is that all of these people know much more about their fields than me. I’ll get to the exchange with Hoffman later.
 
I have the impression from Gregory Chaitin, in particular, that Wolfram argues that the Universe is computable; a philosophical position I’ve argued against, mainly because of chaos theory. I’ve never known Wolfram to mention chaos theory, and he certainly doesn’t in the 2 videos I reference here, and I’ve watched them a few times.
 
Jaimungal introduces the first video (with Wolfram alone) by asking him about his ‘observer theory’ and ‘what if he’s right about the discreteness of space-time’ and ‘computation underlying the fundament?’ I think it’s this last point which goes to the heart of their discussion. Wolfram introduces a term called the Ruliad, which I had to look up. I came across 2 definitions, both of which seem relevant to the discussion.
 
A concept that describes all possible computations and rule-based systems, including our physical universe, mathematics, and everything we experience.
 
A meta-structural domain that encompasses every possible rule-based system, or computational eventuality, that can describe any universe or mathematical structure.
 
Wolfram confused me when he talked about ‘computational irreducibility’, which infers that there are some things that are not computable, to which I agree. But then later he seemed to argue that everything we can know is computable, and things we don’t know now are only unknowable because we’re yet to find their computable foundation. He argues that there are ‘slices of reducible computability’ within the ‘computational irreducibility’, which is how we do mathematical physics.
 
Towards the end of the video, he talks specifically about biology, saying, ‘there is no grand theory of biology’, like we attempt in physics. He has a point. I’ve long argued that natural selection is not the whole story, and there is a mystery inherent in DNA, in as much as it’s a code whose origin and evolvement is still unknown. Paul Davies attempted to tackle this in his book, The Demon in the Machine, because it’s analogous to software code and it’s information based. This means that it could, in principle, be mathematical, which means it could lead to a biological ‘theory of everything’, which I assume is what Wolfram is claiming is lacking.
 
However, I’m getting off-track again. At the start of the video, Wolfram specifically references the Copernican revolution, because it was not just a mathematical reformulation, but it changed our entire perspective of the Universe (we are not at the centre) without changing how we experience it (we are standing still, with the sky rotating around us). At the end of the day, we have mathematical models, and some are more accurate than others, and they all have limitations – there is no all-encompassing mathematical TOE (Theory of Everything). There is no Ruliad, as per the above definitions, and Wolfram acknowledges that while apparently arguing that everything is computable.
 
I find it necessary to bring Kant into this, and his concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’ which we may never know, but only have a perception of. My argument, which I’ve never seen anyone else employ, is that mathematics is one of our instruments of perception, just like our telescopes and particle accelerators and now, our gravitational wave detectors. Our mathematical models, be they GR (general relativity), QFT or String Theory, are perceptual and conceptual tools, whose veracity are ultimately determined by empirical evidence, which means they can only be applied to things that can be measured. And I think this leads to an unstated principle that if something can’t be measured it doesn’t exist. I would put ‘mind’ in that category.
 
And this allows me to segue into the second video, involving Donald Hoffman, because he seems to argue that mind is all that there is, and it has a mathematical foundation. He put forward his argument (which I wrote about recently) that, using Markovian matrices, he’s developed probabilities that apparently predict ‘qualia’, which some argue are the fundaments of consciousness. Wolfram, unlike the rest of us, actually knows what Hoffman is talking about and immediately had a problem that his ‘mathematical model’ led to probabilities and not direct concrete predictions. Wolfram seemed to argue that it breaks the predictive chain (my terminology), but I confess I struggled to follow his argument. I would have liked to ask: what happens with QM, which can only give us probabilities? In that case, the probabilities, generated by the Born Rule, are the only link between QM and classical physics – a point made by Mark John Fernee, among others.
 
But going back to my argument invoking Kant, it’s a mathematical model and not necessarily the thing-in-itself. There is an irony here, because Kant argued that space and time are a priori in the mind, so a projection, which, as I understand it, lies at the centre of Hoffman’s entire thesis. Hoffman argues that ‘spacetime is doomed’ since Nima Arkani-Hamed and his work on amplituhedrons, because (to quote Arkani-Hamed): This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic. In other words, Arkani-Hamed has found a mathematical substructure or foundation to spacetime itself, and Hoffman claims that he’s found a way to link that same mathematical substructure to consciousness, via Markovian matrices and his probabilities.
 
Hoffman analogises spacetime to wearing a VR headset and objects in spacetime to icons on a computer desktop, which seems to infer that the Universe is a simulation, though he’s never specifically argued that. I won’t reiterate my objections to Hoffman’s fundamental idealism philosophy, but if you have a mathematical model, however it’s formulated, its veracity can only be determined empirically, meaning we need to measure something. So, what is he going to measure? Is it qualia? Is it what people report what they think?
 
No. According to Hoffman, they can do empirical tests on spacetime (so not consciousness per se) that will determine if his mathematical model of consciousness is correct, which seems a very roundabout way of doing things. From what I can gather, he’s using a mathematical model of consciousness that’s already been developed (independently) to underpin reality, and then testing it on reality, thereby implying that consciousness is an intermediate step between the mathematical model and the reality. His ambition is to demonstrate that there is a causal relationship between consciousness and reality, when most argue that it’s the other way around. I return to this point below, with Wolfram’s response.
 
Wolfram starts off in his interaction with Hoffman by defining the subjective experience of consciousness that Hoffman has mathematically modelled and asking, can he apply that to an LLM (like ChatGPT, though he doesn’t specify) and therefore show that an LLM must be conscious? Wolfram argues that such a demonstration would categorically determine the ‘success’ (his term) of Hoffman’s theory, and Hoffman agreed.
 
I won’t go into detail (watch the video) but Hoffman concludes, quite emphatically, that ‘It’s not logically possible to start with non-conscious entities and have conscious agents emerge’ (my emphasis, obviously). Wolfram immediately responded (very good-naturedly), ‘That’s not my intuition’. He then goes on to say how that’s a Leibnizian approach, which he rejected back in the 1980s. I gather that it was around that time that Wolfram adopted and solidified (for want of a better word) his philosophical position that everything is ultimately computable. So they both see mathematics as part of the ‘solution’, but in different ways and with different conclusions.
 
To return to the point I raised in my introduction, Wolfram starts off in the first video (without Hoffman), that we have adopted a position that if something can’t be explained by science, then there is no other explanation – we axiomatically rule everything else out - and he seems to argue that this is a mistake. But then he adopts a position which is the exact opposite: that everything is “computational all the way down”, including concepts like free will. He argues: “If we can accept that everything is computational all the way down, we can stop searching for that.” And by ‘that’ he means all other explanations like mysticism or QM or whatever.
 
My own position is that mathematics, consciousness and physical reality form a triumvirate similar to Roger Penrose’s view. There is an interconnection, but I’m unsure if there is a hierarchy. I’ve argued that mathematics can transcend the Universe, which is known as mathematical Platonism, a view held by many mathematicians and physicists, which I’ve written about before.
 
I’m not averse to the view that consciousness may also exist beyond the physical universe, but it’s not something that can be observed (by definition). So far, I’ve attempted to discuss ‘mind’ in a scientific context, referencing 2 scientists with different points of view, though they both emphasise the role of mathematics in positing their views.
 
Before science attempted to analyse and put mind into an ontological box, we knew it as a purely subjective experience. But we also knew that it exists in others and even other creatures. And it’s the last point that actually triggered me to write this post and not the ruminations of Wolfram and Hoffman. When I interact with another animal, I’m conscious that it has a mind, and I believe that’s what we’ve lost. If there is a collective consciousness arising from planet Earth, it’s not just humans. This is something that I’m acutely aware of, and it has even affected my fiction.
 
The thing about mind is that it stimulates empathy, and I think that’s the key to the long-term survival of, not just humanity, but the entire ecosystem we inhabit. Is there a mind beyond the Universe? We don’t know, but I would like to think there is. In another recent post, I alluded to the Hindu concept of Brahman, which appealed to Erwin Schrodinger. You’d be surprised how many famous physicists were attracted to the mystical. I can think of Pauli, Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer – they all thought outside the box, as we like to say.
 
Physicists have no problem mentally conceiving 6 or more dimensions in String Theory that are ‘curled up’ so miniscule we can’t observe them. But there is also the possibility that there is a dimension beyond the universe that we can’t see. Anyone familiar with Flatland by Edwin Abbott (a story about social strata as much as dimensions), would know it expounds on our inherent inability to interact with higher dimensions. It’s occurred to me that consciousness may exist in another dimension, and we might ‘feel’ it occasionally when we interact with people who have died. I have experienced this, though it proves nothing. I’m a creative and a neurotic, so such testimony can be taken with a grain of salt.
 
I’ve gone completely off-track, but I think that both Wolfram and Hoffman may be missing the point, when, like many scientists, they are attempting to incorporate the subjective experience of mind into a scientific framework. Maybe it just doesn’t fit.

Plato’s Cave & Social Media

 In a not-so-recent post, I referenced Philosophy Now Issue 165 (Dec 2024/Jan 2025), which had the theme, The Return of God. However, its cover contained a graphic and headline on a completely separate topic: Social Media & Plato’s Cave, hence the title of this post. When you turn to page 34, you come across the essay, written by Sean Radcliffe, which won him “...the 2023 Irish Young Philosopher Awards Grand Prize and Philosopher of Our Time Award. He is now studying Mathematics and Economics at Trinity College, Dublin. Where he is an active member of the University Philosophical Society.” There is a photo of him holding up both awards (in school uniform), so one assumes that 2 years ago he was still at school.
 
I wrote a response to the essay, which was published in the next issue (166), which I post below, complete with edits, which were very minor. The editor added a couple of exclamation marks: at the end of the first and last paragraphs; both of which I’ve removed. Not my style.

They published it under the heading: The Problem is the Media.

I was pleasantly surprised (as I expect were many others) when I learned that the author of Issue 165’s cover article, ‘Plato’s Cave & Social Media’, Seán Radcliffe, won the 2023 Irish Young Philosopher Award Grand Prize and Philosopher of Our Time Award for the very essay you published. Through an analogy with Plato’s Cave, Seán rightfully points out the danger of being ‘chained’ to a specific viewpoint that aligns with a political ideology or conspiracy theory. Are any of us immune? Socrates, via the Socratic dialogue immortalised by his champion Plato, transformed philosophy into a discussion governed by argument, as opposed to prescriptive dogma. In fact, I see philosophy as an antidote to dogma because it demands argument. However, if all dialogue takes place in an echo-chamber, the argument never happens.

Social media allows alternative universes that are not only different but polar opposites. To give an example that arose out of the COVID pandemic: in one universe, the vaccines were saving lives, and in an alternative universe they were bioweapons causing deaths. The 2020 US presidential election created another example of parallel universes that were direct opposites. Climate change is another. In all these cases, which universe one inhabits depends on which source of information one trusts.

Authoritarian governments are well aware that the control of information allows emotional manipulation of the populace. In social media, the most emotive and often most extreme versions of events get the most traction. Plato’s response to tyranny and populist manipulation was to recommend ‘philosopher-kings’, but no one sees that as realistic. I spent a working lifetime in engineering, and I’ve learned that no single person has all the expertise, so we need to trust the people who have the expertise we lack. A good example is the weather forecast. We’ve learned to trust it as it delivers consistently accurate short-term forecasts. But it’s an exception, because news sources are rarely agenda-free.

I can’t see political biases disappearing – in fact, they seem to be becoming more extreme, and the people with the strongest opinions see themselves as the best-informed. Even science can be politicised, as with both the COVID pandemic and with climate change. The answer is not a philosopher-king, but the institutions we already have in place that study climate science and epidemiology. We actually have the expertise; but we don’t listen to it because its proponents are not famous social media influencers.

Mathematics, consciousness, reality

 I wish to emphasise the importance of following and listening to people you disagree with. (I might write another post on the pitfalls of ‘echo-chambers’ in social media, from which I’m not immune.)
 
I’ve been following Donald Hoffman ever since I reviewed an academic paper he wrote with Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, back in November 2016, though the paper was written in 2014 (so over 10 years ago). Back then, I have to admit, I found it hard to take him seriously, especially his views on evolution, and his go-to metaphor that objective reality was analogous to desktop icons on a computer.
 
His argument is similar to the idea that we live in a computer simulation, though he’s never said that, and I don’t think he believes we do. Nevertheless, he has compared reality to wearing a VR headset, which is definitely analogous to being in a computer simulation. As I have pointed out on other posts, I contend that we do create a model of reality in our ‘heads’, which is so ‘realistic’ that we all think it is reality. The thing is that our very lives depend on it being a very accurate ‘model’, so we can interact with the external reality that does exist outside our heads. This is one of my strongest arguments against Hoffman – reality can kill you, but simulations, including the ones we have when we sleep, which we call dreams, cannot.
 
So I’ve been following Hoffman, at least on YouTube, in the 8 years since I wrote that first critique. I read an article he wrote in New Scientist on evolution (can’t remember the date), which prompted me to write a letter-to-the-Editor, which was published. And whenever I come across him on YouTube: be it in an interview, a panel discussion or straight-to-video; I always watch and listen to what he has to say. What I’ve noticed is that he’s sharpened his scalpel, if I can use that metaphor, and that he’s changed his tack, if not his philosophical position. Which brings me to the reason for writing this post.
 
A year or two ago, I wrote a comment on one of his standalone videos, challenging what he said, and it was subsequently deleted, which is his prerogative. While I was critical, I don’t think I was particularly hostile – the tone was similar to a comment I wrote today on the video that prompted this discussion (see below).
 
Hoffman’s change of tack is not to talk about evolution at all, but spacetime and how it’s no longer ‘fundamental’. This allows him to argue that ‘consciousness’ is more fundamental than spacetime, via the medium of mathematics. And that’s effectively the argument he uses in this video, which, for brevity, I’ve distilled into one succinct sentence.
 
My approach, well known to anyone who regularly follows this blog, is that consciousness and mathematics are just as fundamental to reality as the physical universe, but not in the way that Hoffman argues. I’ve adopted, for better or worse, Roger Penrose’s triumvirate, which he likes to portray in an Escher-like diagram. 

 
I wouldn’t call myself a physicalist when it comes to consciousness, for the simple reason that I don’t believe we can measure it, and despite what Hoffman (and others) often claim, I’m not convinced that it will ever succumb to a mathematical model, in the way that virtually all physical theories do.
 
I left a comment on this video, which was hosted by the ‘Essentia Foundation’, so hopefully, it’s not deleted. Here it is:
 
I agree with him about Godel’s Theorem in its seminal significance to both maths and physics, which is that they are both neverending. However, when he says that ‘reality transcends any mathematical theory’ (3.00) I agree to a point, but I’d argue that mathematics transcends the Universe (known as mathematical Platonism); so in that sense, mathematics transcends reality.
 
The other point, which he never mentions, is that mathematical models of physical phenomena can be wrong – the best example being Ptolemy’s model of the solar system. String theory may well fall into that category – at this stage, we don’t know.
 
When he discusses consciousness being mathematical (4.30): ‘If consciousness is all there is, then mathematical structure is only about consciousness’; which is a premise dressed up as a conclusion, so circular.
 
The problem I’ve always had with Donald Hoffman’s idealism philosophy is that consciousness may exist independently of the Universe; it’s not possible for us to know. But within the Universe itself, evolutionary theory tells us that consciousness came late. Now, I know that he has his own theory of evolution to counter this, but that entails an argument that’s too long to address here.
 
Regarding his argument that spacetime is not fundamental, I know about Nima Arkani-Hamed and his work on amplituhedrons, and to quote: “This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic.” But the something more basic is mathematical, not physical. It’s possible that there was something before spacetime at the very birth of the Universe, but that’s speculative. All our cosmological theories are premised on spacetime.
 
I actually don’t think consciousness can be modelled mathematically, but its neurological underpinnings can, simply because they can be measured. Consciousness itself can’t be measured, only its neurological correlates. In other words, it can’t be measured outside of a brain, which is an object dependent on the Universe’s existence and not the other way round.

God and the problem of evil

 Philosophy Now (UK publication) that I’ve subscribed to for well over a decade now, is a bi-monthly (so 6 times a year) periodical, and it always has a theme. The theme for Dec 2024/Jan 2025 Issue 165 is The Return of God? In actuality, the articles inside covering that theme deal equally with atheism and theism, in quite diverse ways. It was an article titled A Critique of Pure Atheism (obvious allusion to Kant) by Andrew Likoudis that prompted me to write a Letter to the Editor, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Likoudis, by the way, is president of the Likoudis Legacy Foundation (an ecumenical research foundation), as well as the editor of 6 books, and studies communications at Towson University, which is in Maryland.
 
More than one article tackles the well-known ‘problem of evil’, and one of them even mentions Stephen Law’s not-so-well-known ‘Evil God’ argument. In the early days of this blog, which goes back 17 years, I spent a fair bit of time on Stephen’s blog where I indulged in discussions and arguments (with mostly other bloggers), most of which focused on atheism. In many of those arguments I found myself playing Devil’s advocate.
 
There is a more fundamental question behind the ‘existence of God’ question, which could be best framed as: Is evil necessary? I wrote a post on Evil very early in the life of this blog, in response to a book written by regular essayist for TIME magazine, Lance Morrow, titled Evil, An Investigation. Basically, I argued that evil is part of our evolutionary heritage, and is mostly, but not necessarily, manifest in our tribal nature, and our almost reflex tendency to demonise an outgroup, especially when things take a turn for the worse, either economically or socially or from a combination thereof. Historical examples abound. Some of the articles in Philosophy Now talk about ‘natural evil’, meaning natural disasters, which in the past (and sometimes in the present) are laid at the feet of God. In fact, so-called ‘acts of God’ have a legal meaning, when it comes to insurance claims and contractual issues (where I have some experience).
 
The thing is that ‘bad things happen’, with or without a God, with or without human agency. The natural world is more than capable of creating disasters, havoc and general destruction, with often fatal consequences. I’ve been reading the many articles in Philosophy Now somewhat sporadically, which is why, so far, I’ve only directly referenced one, being the one I responded to, while readily acknowledging that’s a tad unfair. As far as I can tell, no one mentions the Buddhist doctrine of the 4 Noble Truths, the first of which, basically says that everyone will experience some form of suffering in their lives. Even wealthy people get ill and are prone to diseases and have to deal with loss of loved ones. These experiences alone, are often enough reason for people to turn to religion. I’ve argued repeatedly and consistently that it’s how we deal with adversity that determines what sort of person we become and is what leads to what we call wisdom. It’s not surprising then, that we associate wisdom with age because, the longer one lives, the more adversity we experience and the more we hopefully learn from it.
 
One can’t talk about this without mentioning the role of fiction and storytelling. We are all drawn to stories from the ‘dark side’, which I’ve written about before. As a writer of fiction, I’m not immune to this. I’ve recently been watching a documentary series on the Batman movies, starting with Tim Burton, then Joel Schumacher and finally, Chris Nolan, all of which deal with the so-called dark side of this particular superhero, who is possibly unique among superheroes in flirting with the dark side of that universe. One of the ‘lessons’ gained from watching this doco is that Joel Schumacher’s sequel, Batman & Robin, which arguably attempted to eschew the dark side for a much lighter tone, all but destroyed the franchise. I confess I never saw that movie – I was turned off by the trailer (apparently for good reason). I’m one of those who thinks that Nolan’s The Dark Knight is the definitive Batman movie, with Heath Ledger’s Joker being one of the most iconic villain depictions ever.
 
A detour, but relevant. I’ve noticed that my own fiction has become darker, where I explore dystopian worlds – not unusual in science fiction. I’m reminded of a line from a Leonard Cohen song, ‘There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in’. I often think that applies to our lives, and it certainly applies to the fiction that I write. I create scenarios of potential doom and oppression, but there is always a light that emerges from somewhere that provides salvation and hope and sometimes redemption. The thing is that we need dark for the light to emerge and that is equally true of life. It’s not hard to imagine life as a test that we have to partake in, and I admit that I find this sometimes being manifest in my dreams as well as my fiction.
 
Having said that, I have an aversion to the idea that there is an afterlife with rewards and punishments dependant on how we live this life. For a start, we are not all tested equally. I only have to look at my father who was tested much more harshly than me, and like me, vehemently eschewed the idea of a God who punished his ‘children’ with everlasting torment. Hell and Heaven, like God himself, are projections when presented in this context: human constructs attempting to make sense of an apparently unjust world; and finding a correspondence in the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and karma, which I also reject. I was brought up with a Christian education, but at some point, I concluded that the biblical God was practically no more moral than the Devil – one only has to look at the story of Job, whom God effectively tortured to win a bet with the Devil.
 
If I can jump back to the previous paragraph before the last, I think we have to live with the consequences of our actions, and I’ve always imagined that I judge my life on my interactions with others rather than my achievements and failures. I don’t see death as an escape or transition, but quite literally an end, where, most significantly, I can no longer affect the world. My own view is that I’m part of some greater whole that not only includes humanity but the greater animal kingdom, and having the unique qualities of comprehension that other creatures don’t have, I have a special responsibility to them for their welfare as well as my own.
 
In this picture, I see God as a projection of my particular ideal, which is not reflected in any culture I’m aware of. I sometime think the Hindu concept of Brahman (also not referenced in Philosophy Now, from what I’ve read thus far) as a collective ‘mind’, which appealed to Erwin Schrodinger, in particular, comes closest to my idea of a God, which would mean that the problem of evil is axiomatically subsumed therein – we get the God we deserve.
 
This is the letter I wrote, which may or may not get published in a future edition:
 
I read with interest Andrew Likoudis’s essay, A Critique of Pure Atheism, because I think, like many (both theists and atheists), he conflates different concepts of God. In fact, as Karen Armstrong pointed out in her book, The History of God, there are 2 fundamentally different paths for believing in God. One path is via a mystical experience and the other path is a cerebral rationalisation of God as the Creator of the Universe and everything in it, which I’d call the prime raison d’etre of existence. In other words, without God there would not only be no universe, but no reason for it to exist. I believe Likoudis’s essay is a formulation of this latter concept, even though he expresses it in different terms.

Likoudis makes the valid point that empirical science is not the correct 'instrument', if I can use that term in this context, for ‘proving’ the existence of God, and for good reason. Raymond Tallis has pointed out, more than once, that science can only really deal with entities that can be measured or quantified, which is why mathematics plays such an important, if not essential, role in a lot of science; and physics, in particular.
 
Metaphysics, almost by definition, is outside the empiricist’s domain. I would argue that this includes consciousness, and despite measurable correlates with neuronal activity, consciousness itself can’t be measured. The only reason we believe someone else (not to mention other creatures) have consciousness is that their observed behaviour is similar to our own. Conscious experience is what we call mind, and mind is arguably the only connection between the Universe and God, which brings us closer to Armstrong’s argument for God based on mystical experience.

So I think the argument for God, as an experience similar to mind, has more resonance for believers than an argument for God as a Creator with mythical underpinnings. A point that Likoudis doesn't mention is that all the Gods of literature and religion have cultural origins, whereas an experience of God is purely subjective and can’t be shared. The idea that this experience of God is also the creator of the entire universe is a non sequitur. However, if one goes back to God being the raison d’etre for the Universe, then maybe God is the end result rather than its progenitor.

 
 
Footnote: I wrote a post back in 2021 in response to AC Grayling’s book, The God Argument, which is really a polemic against theism in general. You can judge for yourself whether my views are consistent or have changed.