Do we make reality?

 I’ve read 2 articles, one in New Scientist (12 Oct 2024) and one in Philosophy Now (Issue 164, Oct/Nov 2024), which, on the surface, seem unrelated, yet both deal with human exceptionalism (my term) in the context of evolution and the cosmos at large.
 
Staring with New Scientist, there is an interview with theoretical physicist, Daniele Oriti, under the heading, “We have to embrace the fact that we make reality” (quotation marks in the original). In some respects, this continues on with themes I raised in my last post, but with different emphases.
 
This helps to explain the title of the post, but, even if it’s true, there are degrees of possibilities – it’s not all or nothing. Having said that, Donald Hoffman would argue that it is all or nothing, because, according to him, even ‘space and time don’t exist unperceived’. On the other hand, Oriti’s argument is closer to Paul Davies’ ‘participatory universe’ that I referenced in my last post.
 
Where Oriti and I possibly depart, philosophically speaking, is that he calls the idea of an independent reality to us ‘observers’, “naïve realism”. He acknowledges that this is ‘provocative’, but like many provocative ideas it provides food-for-thought. Firstly, I will delineate how his position differs from Hoffman’s, even though he never mentions Hoffman, but I think it’s important.
 
Both Oriti and Hoffman argue that there seems to be something even more fundamental than space and time, and there is even a recent YouTube video where Hoffman claims that he’s shown mathematically that consciousness produces the mathematical components that give rise to spacetime; he has published a paper on this (which I haven’t read). But, in both cases (by Hoffman and Oriti), the something ‘more fundamental’ is mathematical, and one needs to be careful about reifying mathematical expressions, which I once discussed with physicist, Mark John Fernee (Qld University).
 
The main issue I have with Hoffman’s approach is that space-time is dependent on conscious agents creating it, whereas, from my perspective and that of most scientists (although I’m not a scientist), space and time exists external to the mind. There is an exception, of course, and that is when we dream.
 
If I was to meet Hoffman, I would ask him if he’s heard of proprioception, which I’m sure he has. I describe it as the 6th sense we are mostly unaware of, but which we couldn’t live without. Actually, we could, but with great difficulty. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our body extremities are in space, independently of sight and touch. Why would we need it, if space is created by us? On the other hand, Hoffman talks about a ‘H sapiens interface’, which he likens to ‘desktop icons on a computer screen’. So, somehow our proprioception relates to a ‘spacetime interface’ (his term) that doesn’t exist outside the mind.
 
A detour, but relevant, because space is something we inhabit, along with the rest of the Universe, and so is time. In relativity theory there is absolute space-time, as opposed to absolute space and time separately. It’s called the fabric of the universe, which is more than a metaphor. As Viktor Toth points out, even QFT seems to work ‘just fine’ with spacetime as its background.
 
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
 
[However] what we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
 
And this is where Oriti argues we need to find something deeper. To quote:
 
Modern approaches to quantum gravity say that space-time emerges from something deeper – and this could offer a new foundation for physical laws.
 
He elaborates: I work with quantum gravity models in which you don’t start with a space-time geometry, but from more abstract “atomic” objects described in purely mathematical language. (Quotation marks in the original.)
 
And this is the nub of the argument: all our theories are mathematical models and none of them are complete, in as much as they all have limitations. If one looks at the history of physics, we have uncovered new ‘laws’ and new ‘models’ when we’ve looked beyond the limitations of an existing theory. And some mathematical models even turned out to be incorrect, despite giving answers to what was ‘known’ at the time. The best example being Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. Whether string theory falls into the same category, only future historians will know.
 
In addition, different models work at different scales. As someone pointed out (Mile Gu at the University of Queensland), mathematical models of phenomena at one scale are different to mathematical models at an underlying scale. He gave the example of magnetism, demonstrating that mathematical modelling of the magnetic forces in iron could not predict the pattern of atoms in a 3D lattice as one might expect. In other words, there should be a causal link between individual atoms and the overall effect, but it could not be determined mathematically. To quote Gu: “We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the fundamental interactions.” Furthermore, “This result shows that some of the models scientists use to simulate physical systems have properties that cannot be linked to the behaviour of their parts.”
 
This makes me sceptical that we will find an overriding mathematical model that will entail the Universe at all scales, which is what theories of quantum gravity attempt to do. One of the issues that some people raise is that a feature of QM is superposition, and the superposition of a gravitational field seems inherently problematic.
 
Personally, I think superposition only makes sense if it’s describing something that is yet to happen, which is why I agree with Freeman Dyson that QM can only describe the future, which is why it only gives us probabilities.
 
Also, in quantum cosmology, time disappears (according to Paul Davies, among others) and this makes sense (to me), if it’s attempting to describe the entire universe into the future. John Barrow once made a similar point, albeit more eruditely.
 
Getting off track, but one of the points that Oriti makes is whether the laws and the mathematics that describes them are epistemic or ontic. In other words, are they reality or just descriptions of reality. I think it gets blurred, because while they are epistemic by design, there is still an ontology that exists without them, whereas Oriti calls that ‘naïve realism’. He contends that reality doesn’t exist independently of us. This is where I always cite Kant: that we may never know the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but only our perception of it. Where I diverge from Kant is that the mathematical models are part of our perception. Where I depart from Oriti is that I argue there is a reality independently of us.
 
Both QM and relativity theory are observer-dependent, which means they could both be describing an underlying reality that continually eludes us. Whereas Oriti argues that ‘reality is made by our models, not just described by them’, which would make it subjective.
 
As I pointed out in my last post, there is an epistemological loop, whereby the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us. Whether there is also an ontological loop as both Davies and Oriti infer, is another matter: do we determine reality through our quantum mechanical observations? I will park that while I elaborate on the epistemic loop.
 
And this finally brings me to the article in Philosophy Now by James Miles titled, We’re as Smart as the Universe gets. He argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, there is a one-in-one-billion possibility that a species with our cognitive abilities could arise by natural selection, and there is no logical reason why we would evolve further, from an evolutionary standpoint. I have touched on this before, where I pointed out that our cultural evolution has overtaken our biological evolution and that would also happen to any other potential species in the Universe who developed cognitive abilities to the same level. Dawkins coined the term, ‘meme’, to describe cultural traits that have ‘survived’, which now, of course, has currency on social media way beyond its original intention. Basically, Dawkins saw memes as analogous to genes, which get selected; not by a natural process but by a cultural process.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that mathematical theorems and scientific theories are not inherently memetic. This is because they are chosen because they are successful, whereas memes are successful because they are chosen. Nevertheless, such theorems and theories only exist because a culture has developed over millennia which explores them and builds on them.
 
Miles talks about ‘the high intelligence paradox’, which he associates with Darwin’s ‘highest and most interesting problem’. He then discusses the inherent selection advantage of co-operation, not to mention specialisation. He talks about the role that language has played, which is arguably what really separates us from other species. I’ve argued that it’s our inherent ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum (which is most obvious in our facility for language, like I’m doing now) that allows us to, not only tell stories, compose symphonies, explore an abstract mathematical landscape, but build motor cars, aeroplanes and fly men to the moon. Are we the only species in the Universe with this super-power? I don’t know, but it’s possible.
 
There are 2 quotes I keep returning to:
 
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. (Einstein)
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe. (Wheeler)
 
I haven’t elaborated, but Miles makes the point, while referencing historical antecedents, that there appears no evolutionary 'reason’ that a species should make this ‘one-in-one-billion transition’ (his nomenclature). Yet, without this transition, the Universe would have no meaning that could be comprehended. As I say, that’s the epistemic loop.
 
As for an ontic loop, that is harder to argue. Photons exist in zero time, which is why I contend they are always in the future of whatever they interact with, even if they were generated in the CMBR some 13.5 billion years ago. So how do we resolve that paradox? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the link that Davies and Oriti are talking about, though neither of them mention it. But here’s the thing: when you do detect such a photon (for which time is zero) you instantaneously ‘see’ back to 380,000 years after the Universe’s birth.

Freedom of the will is requisite for all other freedoms

 I’ve recently read 2 really good books on consciousness and the mind, as well as watch countless YouTube videos on the topic, but the title of this post reflects the endpoint for me. Consciousness has evolved, so for most of the Universe’s history, it didn’t exist, yet without it, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Even using the word, purpose, in this context, is anathema to many scientists and philosophers, because it hints at teleology. In fact, Paul Davies raises that very point in one of the many video conversations he has with Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the excellent series, Closer to Truth.
 
Davies is an advocate of a cosmic-scale ‘loop’, whereby QM provides a backwards-in-time connection which can only be determined by a conscious ‘observer’. This is contentious, of course, though not his original idea – it came from John Wheeler. As Davies points out, Stephen Hawking was also an advocate, premised on the idea that there are a number of alternative histories, as per Feynman’s ‘sum-over-histories’ methodology, but only one becomes reality when an ‘observation’ is made. I won’t elaborate, as I’ve discussed it elsewhere, when I reviewed Hawking’s book, The Grand Design.
 
In the same conversation with Kuhn, Davies emphasises the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us, and quotes Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. Of course, I’ve made the exact same point many times, and like myself, Davies makes the point that this is only possible because of the medium of mathematics.
 
Now, I know I appear to have gone down a rabbit hole, but it’s all relevant to my viewpoint. Consciousness appears to have a role, arguably a necessary one, in the self-realisation of the Universe – without it, the Universe may as well not exist. To quote Wheeler: The universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
Scientists, of all stripes, appear to avoid any metaphysical aspect of consciousness, but I think it’s unavoidable. One of the books I cite in my introduction is Philip Ball’s The Book of Minds; How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings; from Animals to Aliens. It’s as ambitious as the title suggests, and with 450 pages, it’s quite a read. I’ve read and reviewed a previous book by Ball, Beyond Weird (about quantum mechanics), which is equally as erudite and thought-provoking as this one. Ball is a ‘physicalist’, as virtually all scientists are (though he’s more open-minded than most), but I tend to agree with Raymond Tallis that, despite what people claim, consciousness is still ‘unexplained’ and might remain so for some time, if not forever.
 
I like an idea that I first encountered in Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel, Escher, Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid, that consciousness is effectively a loop, at what one might call the local level. By which I mean it’s confined to a particular body. It’s created within that body but then it has a causal agency all of its own. Not everyone agrees with that. Many argue that consciousness cannot of itself ‘cause’ anything, but Ball is one of those who begs to differ, and so do I. It’s what free will is all about, which finally gets us back to the subject of this post.
 
Like me, Ball prefers to use the word ‘agency’ over free will. But he introduces the term, ‘volitional decision-making’ and gives it the following context:

I believe that the only meaningful notion of free will – and it is one that seems to me to satisfy all reasonable demands traditionally made of it – is one in which volitional decision-making can be shown to happen according to the definition I give above: in short, that the mind operates as an autonomous source of behaviour and control. It is this, I suspect, that most people have vaguely in mind when speaking of free will: the sense that we are the authors of our actions and that we have some say in what happens to us. (My emphasis)

And, in a roundabout way, this brings me to the point alluded to in the title of this post: our freedoms are constrained by our environment and our circumstances. We all wish to be ‘authors of our actions’ and ‘have some say in what happens to us’, but that varies from person to person, dependent on ‘external’ factors.

Writing stories, believe it or not, had a profound influence on how I perceive free will, because a story, by design, is an interaction between character and plot. In fact, I claim they are 2 sides of the same coin – each character has their own subplot, and as they interact, their storylines intertwine. This describes my approach to writing fiction in a nutshell. The character and plot represent, respectively, the internal and external journey of the story. The journey metaphor is apt, because a story always has the dimension of time, which is visceral, and is one of the essential elements that separates fiction from non-fiction. To stretch the analogy, character represents free will and plot represents fate. Therefore, I tell aspiring writers the importance of giving their characters free will.

A detour, but not irrelevant. I read an article in Philosophy Now sometime back, about people who can escape their circumstances, and it’s the subject of a lot of biographies as well as fiction. We in the West live in a very privileged time whereby many of us can aspire to, and attain, the life that we dream about. I remember at the time I left school, following a less than ideal childhood, feeling I had little control over my life. I was a fatalist in that I thought that whatever happened was dependent on fate and not on my actions (I literally used to attribute everything to fate). I later realised that this is a state-of-mind that many people have who are not happy with their circumstances and feel impotent to change them.

The thing is that it takes a fundamental belief in free will to rise above that and take advantage of what comes your way. No one who has made that journey will accept the self-denial that free will is an illusion and therefore they have no control over their destiny.

I will provide another quote from Ball that is more in line with my own thinking:

…minds are an autonomous part of what causes the future to unfold. This is different to the common view of free will in which the world somehow offers alternative outcomes and the wilful mind selects between them. Alternative outcomes – different, counterfactual realities – are not real, but metaphysical: they can never be observed. When we make a choice, we aren’t selecting between various possible futures, but between various imagined futures, as represented in the mind’s internal model of the world… (emphasis in the original)

And this highlights a point I’ve made before: that it’s the imagination which plays the key role in free will. I’ve argued that imagination is one of the facilities of a conscious mind that separates us (and other creatures) from AI. Now AI can also demonstrate agency, and, in a game of chess, for example, it will ‘select’ from a number of possible ‘moves’ based on certain criteria. But there are fundamental differences. For a start, the AI doesn’t visualise what it’s doing; it’s following a set of highly constrained rules, within which it can select from a number of options, one of which will be the optimal solution. Its inherent advantage over a human player isn’t just its speed but its ability to compare a number of possibilities that are impossible for the human mind to contemplate simultaneously.

The other book I read was Being You; A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth. I came across Seth when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdowns. To be honest, his book didn’t tell me a lot that I didn’t already know. For example, that the world, we all see and think exists ‘out there’, is actually a model of reality created within our heads. He also emphasises how the brain is a ‘prediction-making’ organ rather than a purely receptive one. Seth mentions that it uses a Bayesian model (which I also knew about previously), whereby it updates its prediction based on new sensory data. Not surprisingly, Seth describes all this in far more detail and erudition than I can muster.

Ball, Seth and I all seem to agree that while AI will become better at mimicking the human mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will attain consciousness. Applications software, ChatGPT (for example), despite appearances, does not ‘think’ the way we do, and actually does not ‘understand’ what it’s talking or writing about. I’ve written on this before, so I won’t elaborate.

Seth contends that the ‘mystery’ of consciousness will disappear in the same way that the 'mystery of life’ has effectively become a non-issue. What he means is that we no longer believe that there is some ‘elan vital’ or ‘life force’, which distinguishes living from non-living matter. And he’s right, in as much as the chemical origins of life are less mysterious than they once were, even though abiogenesis is still not fully understood.

By analogy, the concept of a soul has also lost a lot of its cogency, following the scientific revolution. Seth seems to associate the soul with what he calls ‘spooky free will’ (without mentioning the word, soul), but he’s obviously putting ‘spooky free will’ in the same category as ‘elan vital’, which makes his analogy and associated argument consistent. He then says:

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn’t matter at all. There’s no longer any need to allow any non-deterministic elbow room for it to intervene. From the perspective of free will as a perceptual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. (My emphasis)

Seth differs from Ball (and myself) in that he doesn’t seem to believe that something ‘immaterial’ like consciousness can affect the physical world. To quote:

But experiences of volition do not reveal the existence of an immaterial self with causal power over physical events.

Therefore, free will is purely a ‘perceptual experience’. There is a problem with this view that Ball himself raises. If free will is simply the mind observing effects it can’t cause, but with the illusion that it can, then its role is redundant to say the least. This is a view that Sabine Hossenfelder has also expressed: that we are merely an ‘observer’ of what we are thinking.

Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.

Ball makes the point that we only have to look at all the material manifestations of human intellectual achievements that are evident everywhere we’ve been. And this brings me back to the loop concept I alluded to earlier. Not only does consciousness create a ‘local’ loop, whereby it has a causal effect on the body it inhabits but also on the external world to that body. This is stating the obvious, except, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s possible that one could interact with the external world as an automaton, with no conscious awareness of it. The difference is the role of imagination, which I keep coming back to. All the material manifestations of our intellect are arguably a result of imagination.

One insight I gained from Ball, which goes slightly off-topic, is evidence that bees have an internal map of their environment, which is why the dance they perform on returning to the hive can be ‘understood’ by other bees. We’ve learned this by interfering in their behaviour. What I find interesting is that this may have been the original reason that consciousness evolved into the form that we experience it. In other words, we all create an internal world that reflects the external world so realistically, that we think it is the actual world. I believe that this also distinguishes us (and bees) from AI. An AI can use GPS to navigate its way through the physical world, as well as other so-called sensory data, from radar or infra-red sensors or whatever, but it doesn’t create an experience of that world inside itself.

The human mind seems to be able to access an abstract world, which we do when we read or watch a story, or even write one, as I have done. I can understand how Plato took this idea to its logical extreme: that there is an abstract world, of which the one we inhabit is but a facsimile (though he used different terminology). No one believes that today – except, there is a remnant of Plato’s abstract world that persists, which is mathematics. Many mathematicians and physicists (though not all) treat mathematics as a neverending landscape that humans have the unique capacity to explore and comprehend. This, of course, brings me back to Davies’ philosophical ruminations that I opened this discussion with. And as he, and others (like Einstein, Feynman, Wigner, Penrose, to name but a few) have pointed out: the Universe itself seems to follow specific laws that are intrinsically mathematical and which we are continually discovering.

And this closes another loop: that the Universe created the means to comprehend itself, using the medium of mathematics, without which, it has no meaning. Of purpose, we can only conjecture.

Common sense; uncommonly agreed upon

 The latest New Scientist (28 Sep., 2024) had an article headlined Uncommon Sense, written by Emma Young (based in Sheffield, UK) which was primarily based on a study done by Duncan Watts and Mark Whiting at the University of Pennsylvania. I wasn’t surprised to learn that ‘common sense’ is very subjective, although she pointed out that most people think the opposite: that it’s objective. I’ve long believed that common sense is largely culturally determined, and in many cases, arises out of confirmation bias, which the article affirmed with references to the recent COVID pandemic and the polarised responses this produced; where one person’s common sense was another person’s anathema.
 
Common sense is something we mostly imbibe through social norms, though experience tends to play a role long term. Common sense is often demonstrated, though not expressed, as a heuristic, where people with expertise develop heuristics that others outside their field wouldn’t even know about. This is a point I’ve made before, without using the term common sense. In other words, common sense is contextual in a way that most of us don’t consider.
 
Anyone with an interest in modern physics (like myself) knows that our common sense views on time and space don’t apply in the face of Einstein’s relativity theory. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that people struggle with it (Including me). Quantum mechanics with phenomena like superposition, entanglement and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle also play havoc with our ‘common sense’ view of the world. But this is perfectly logical when one considers that we never encounter these ‘effects’ in our everyday existence, so they can be largely, if not completely, ignored. The fact that the GPS on your phone requires relativistic corrections and that every device you use (including said phone) are dependent on QM dynamics doesn’t change this virtually universal viewpoint.
 
I’ve just finished reading an excellent, albeit lengthy, book by Philip Ball titled ambitiously, if not pretentiously, The Book of Minds. I can honestly say it’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, but that’s a topic for a future post. The reason I raise it in this context, is because throughout I kept using AI as a reference point for appreciating what makes minds unique. You see, AI comes closest to mimicking the human mind, yet it’s nowhere near it, though others may disagree. As I said, it’s a topic for another post.
 
I remember coming up with my own definition of common sense many years ago, when I saw it as something that evolves over time, based on experience. I would contend that our common sense view on a subject changes, whether it be through the gaining of expertise in a specific field (as I mentioned above) or just our everyday encounters. A good example, that most of us can identify with, is driving a car. Notice how, over time, we develop skills and behaviours that have helped us to avoid accidents, some of which have arisen because of accidents.
 
And a long time ago, before I became a blogger, and didn’t even consider myself a philosopher, it occurred to me that AI could also develop something akin to common sense based on learning from its mistakes. Self-driving cars being a case-in-point.
 
According to the New Scientist article, the researchers, Watts and Whiting, claim that there is no correlation between so-called common sense and IQ. Instead, they contend that there is a correlation between a ‘consensual common sense’ (my term) and ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ (their terminology). In other words, the ability to ‘read’ emotions is a good indicator for the ability to determine what’s considered ‘common sense’ for the majority of a cultural group (if I understand them correctly). This infers that common sense is a consensual perception, based on cultural norms, which is what I’ve always believed. This might be a bit simplistic, and an example of confirmation bias (on my part), but I’d be surprised if common sense didn’t morph between cultures in the same way it becomes modified by expertise in a particular field. So the idea of a universal, objective common sense is as much a chimera as objective morality, which is also more dependent on social norms than most people acknowledge.
 
 
Footnote: it’s worth reading the article in New Scientist (if accessible), because it provides a different emphasis and a different perspective, even though it largely draws similar conclusions to myself.