subject:"\"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience\" \(John Horgan\)"


> On 8 Sep 2019, at 19:00, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 11:43:12 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
> 
> 
> On 9/8/2019 3:51 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> 
>> > On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>> > > wrote: 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
>> >> 
>> >> I would put "Horganism" another way. 
>> >> 
>> >> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
>> >> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones 
>> >> to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There 
>> >> is no settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads 
>> >> about a new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems. 
>> >> 
>> >> David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
>> >> 
>> >> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
>> >> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find 
>> >> a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view 
>> >> would immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body 
>> >> problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and sustained 
>> >> attention." 
>> >> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
>> >>  
>> > 
>> > Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
>> > rest of neurophysics. 
>> 
>> + zero explanation power at all, also. 
>> 
>> Bruno 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers. 
> 
> No it isn't.  It's just a label.  Numbers at least can have complex relations.
> 
> Brent
> 
> 
> Meaningless, unless to someone who is a member of an occult Pythagorean cult. 
> 
> Numbers map to lambda expressions, and functions and relation can all be 
> expressed in lambda calculus. 
> 
> To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a spiritual 
> belief than consciousness is constituted by matter.


The lambda-expression explains already that consciousness cannot be attached to 
anything 3p descriptible, be it number, lambda-expression or matter.

That is the beauty of it. []p (the honest scientist machine) cannot prove its 
equivalence with ([]p & p), its soul, or first person point of view. 
it cannot even give it a name, and when it searches a name, he jumps from 
surprises to surprises.

Computer science is a theory of mind per se. A theory which explains how 
machine can understand formal and informal languages, how they can learn, what 
they can prove about themselves, and what they can expect beyond that, and why 
they are conscious but cannot prove it … without the good willingness of some 
others or at least one Other.

Bruno






> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

> On 8 Sep 2019, at 16:10, Lawrence Crowell  
> wrote:
> 
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
>> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift > 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>> > wrote:
>> 
>> >> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
>> >> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>> 
>> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> > it...which I think is impossible. 
>> 
>> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make 
>> probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial 
>> dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not 
>> the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.
>> 
>> John K Clark
>> 
>> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
>> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
>> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the 
>> added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those 
>> claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to 
>> either MWI or QuBism. 
>> 
>> LC
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed 
>> doomed. 
> 
> Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea 
> that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but 
> explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 
> 
> I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven 
> within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely 
> be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the context 
> of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven within the 
> context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

OK. Note that usually, I use “prove” in the logicien sense. So “proving” 
(effectively) is the same as showing that the proposition is independent of the 
choice of any interpretation. I work in “complete” theory: provable is the same 
as true in all interpretations/models, and consistent means true in (at least) 
one interpretation/model. Here “complete” is used in the sense of Gödel 1930. 
Such theories are usually incomplete in the sense of Gödel 1931.

To prove in *some* interpretation consists then as adding axioms to the theory. 
That restricts the interpretations, as suppressing an axioms augments the 
interpretation.

You might look at a theory as a system of (logical) equation, and an 
interpretation/model as a variety satisfying the equations. In both case there 
is a sort of Galois connection. Note that once a theory is essentially 
undecidable (like all the theories allowing the existence of computers) you 
remain incomplete in all consistent effective extension (including oracles).

I thing that the Born rules is basically plausibly imposed by Pythagorus 
theorem, and the fact that the number 2 has a lot of special and fundamental 
properties. Gleason theorem illustrates this, but Paulette Février get (in 
1920s, she was a student of de Broglie) the simple frequentist justification 
often given to make it shorts (like in Preskill’s course, or in a book by 
Selesnick).

I don’t worry too much for the Born rules. Like I am open that gravity will be 
explained by the number 24, like string theory illustrates. The particles are 
plausibly explained by the number

808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000.

(The number of elements of the Monster group)

What is hard is:  to justify this from arithmetical self-reference, to get 
right the justifiable, the non justifiable, and the plural-(non)-justifiable 
from the arithmetical self-reference. In that way, the logic of G* - G of 
Solovay provides the intensional variants making sense of all those nuances, 
without the need of any ontological commitment other than what we need to 
define a universal digital machine or universal number. Elementary arithmetic 
is enough for that. 

Bruno

> 
> LC
>  
> 
> 
>> 
>> @philipthrift
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>>  
>>

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
> On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett  > wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>> mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 
>> wrote:
>> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
>>> 
>>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>> 
>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the 
>> story of measurement more consistent.
>> 
>> Amplify the above statement.
>> 
>> Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that 
>> ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.
> 
> But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is 
> not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the 
> interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.
> 
> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, 
> then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many 
> times to be a complete nonsense.

Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references. That would be an 
indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum immortality is deduce here 
from the already much more obvious arithmetical immortality, which is 
disturbing, but hard to avoid.

Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense (metaphysically, it is 
a practical non-sense).

If the reference assume a wave packet reduction, or a way “matter” can 
interfere with the computations in arithmetic, no need to give the references. 
It is just working in different theories.

Bruno






> 
> Bruce 
> 
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>  
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

> On 8 Sep 2019, at 12:51, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
> > On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> > > wrote: 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> >> 
> >> I would put "Horganism" another way. 
> >> 
> >> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
> >> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to 
> >> be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is 
> >> no settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about 
> >> a new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems. 
> >> 
> >> David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
> >> 
> >> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
> >> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find 
> >> a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view 
> >> would immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body 
> >> problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and sustained 
> >> attention." 
> >> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
> >>  
> > 
> > Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the rest 
> > of neurophysics. 
> 
> + zero explanation power at all, also. 
> 
> Bruno 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers. 

“Pan” is not well defined. The proposition  "my cup of tea is conscious” is not 
well defined for me.

What is the panpsychist theory of consciousness? If everything is conscious, 
“consciousness seems trivialised”.

With the number, and their + and * laws, we can define the universal digital 
machine, and study what they can prove about themselves, including what they 
cannot prove, but still guess, and incompleteness makes the standard definition 
of the greeks making sense. The universal machine has already an interesting 
discourse about, not just his body, but its souls, its physics, etc.  

It is coherent with both AI, and the theory of evolution (which is already used 
on mechanism).

Consciousness also get a role, as it provides semantic which accelerate the 
computation relatively to the universal machine which run the subject, allowing 
a greater number of degree of freedom.

A very interesting video on the Limbic system, and its relation with emotion is 
here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAOnSbDSaOw

Panpsychism assumes matter, making it inconsistent with digital mechanism (that 
is not obvious, ask for explanation if interested). 
But even without that still a bit ignored fact, panpsychism makes the 
functioning of the brain quite mysterious. With mechanism, consciousness is a 
mathematical semantic fixed point, related to the neural loops, whose 
importance is well illustrated in that video.

Panpsychism has not yet a testable theory, which might change tomorrow, but 
again, it speculates on very strong axioms, which cannot be used to invalidate 
a much simpler theory, not yet contradicted by any facts.

Bruno

> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 3:51:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/8/2019 10:00 AM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> > To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a 
> > spiritual belief than consciousness is constituted by matter. 
>
> Nobody said that.  I said number had relations.  Don't try to read 
> between the lines. 
>
> Brent 
>

Coding numbers, functions, and relations in lambda calculus:

https://jwodder.freeshell.org/lambda.html

@philipthrift
 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

You can't prove it's false, but Jacques Mallah claimed to prove that you
can't /derive/ it from QM without it ("The Many Computations
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", 2007). It has to be a separate
postulate, because he considers some different rules for assigning
probability. These are experimentally disproven, but their existence
implies that Born's rule is not logically entailed. His example avoids
Gleason's theorem, because QM minus Born doesn't imply that observations
across different worlds necessarily satisfy the probability axioms.

Brent

On 9/8/2019 11:39 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 10:10 AM Lawrence Crowell
> wrote:

> I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false,
or shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation.

How could the Born rule be proven to be false, isn't the experimental
evidence in its favor as strong or stronger than just about anything
in science?

John K Clark

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List





On 9/8/2019 10:00 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a 
spiritual belief than consciousness is constituted by matter.


Nobody said that.  I said number had relations.  Don't try to read 
between the lines.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 1:40:36 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 10:10 AM Lawrence Crowell  > wrote:
>
> > I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or 
>> shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation.
>
>
> How could the Born rule be proven to be false, isn't the experimental 
> evidence in its favor as strong or stronger than just about anything in 
> science?   
>
> John K Clark
>

I doubt it is false, though Don Page thinks it is. It could be that the 
utility of the Born rule is some sort of formal "accident." 

LC 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 11:53:48 AM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 9:10:09 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift  wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell 
>>> wrote:

 On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing 
>> Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>>
>> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> it...which I think is impossible. 
>>
>
> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is 
> make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 
> spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), 
> and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without 
> inconsistencies.
>
> John K Clark
>

 Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case 
 an operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the 
 Born rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations 
 give the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic 
 about those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the 
 best bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

 LC

>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is 
>>> indeed doomed. 
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the 
>>> idea that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but 
>>> explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.
>>>
>>> Bruno
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven 
>> within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely 
>> be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the 
>> context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven 
>> within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest 
>> plausibility.
>>
>> LC
>>  
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
> My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an 
> interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.
>
> But
>
> "We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett 
> (ManyWorlds) approach to quantum mechanics."
>
> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7907.pdf 
>
> So what is the issue?
>
> @philipthrift
>

I am uncertain about this. If the Born rule were proven in an airtight way 
here this would have been one of the biggest developments in recent 
decades. I have yet to read this, so I can't form my own assessment of it.

LC
 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread John Clark

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 10:10 AM Lawrence Crowell <
goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the Born rule should likely be proven, proven to be false, or
> shown to be unprovable, outside the context of any interpretation.


How could the Born rule be proven to be false, isn't the experimental
evidence in its favor as strong or stronger than just about anything in
science?

John K Clark

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 11:43:12 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/8/2019 3:51 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: 
>>
>>
>> > On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote: 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
>> >> 
>> >> I would put "Horganism" another way. 
>> >> 
>> >> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
>> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to 
>> be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no 
>> settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a 
>> new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems. 
>> >> 
>> >> David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
>> >> 
>> >> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
>> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a 
>> reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would 
>> immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So 
>> the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention." 
>> >> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
>> > 
>> > Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
>> rest of neurophysics. 
>>
>> + zero explanation power at all, also. 
>>
>> Bruno 
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers. 
>
>
> No it isn't.  It's just a label.  Numbers at least can have complex 
> relations.
>
> Brent
>


Meaningless, unless to someone who is a member of an occult Pythagorean 
cult. 

Numbers map to lambda expressions, and functions and relation can all be 
expressed in lambda calculus. 

To say that consciousness is a lambda expression is more of a spiritual 
belief than consciousness is constituted by matter.

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 9:10:09 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>
> On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift  wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:


 On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
 everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

 *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>
> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
> it...which I think is impossible. 
>

 Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is 
 make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 
 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), 
 and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without 
 inconsistencies.

 John K Clark

>>>
>>> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
>>> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
>>> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give 
>>> the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about 
>>> those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best 
>>> bet to either MWI or QuBism. 
>>>
>>> LC
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is 
>> indeed doomed. 
>>
>>
>> Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea 
>> that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but 
>> explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>>
> I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven 
> within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely 
> be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the 
> context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven 
> within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest 
> plausibility.
>
> LC
>  
>
>>
>>
>>

My statement is just that if it is proven within the context of an 
interpretation these two might have the greatest plausibility.

But

"We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett 
(ManyWorlds) approach to quantum mechanics."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7907.pdf 

So what is the issue?

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/8/2019 3:51 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:



On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>>
>> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in
their application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the
final ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They
probably are not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much
less consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in
science news every week, it seems.
>>
>> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>>
>> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good
reason to take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very
seriously. If we can find a reasonable solution to the combination
problem for either, this view would immediately become the most
promising solution to the mind–body problem. So the combination
problem deserves serious and sustained attention."
>> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

>
> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent
with the rest of neurophysics.

+ zero explanation power at all, also.

Bruno






But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers.


No it isn't.  It's just a label.  Numbers at least can have complex 
relations.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 6:00:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift > 
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>>
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
 Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*

 > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
 it...which I think is impossible. 

>>>
>>> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is 
>>> make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 
>>> spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), 
>>> and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without 
>>> inconsistencies.
>>>
>>> John K Clark
>>>
>>
>> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
>> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
>> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give 
>> the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about 
>> those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best 
>> bet to either MWI or QuBism. 
>>
>> LC
>>
>
>
>
>
> If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is 
> indeed doomed. 
>
>
> Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea 
> that physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but 
> explain by something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
I wrote this not with the expectation that the Born rule will be proven 
within either of these interpretations. I think the Born rule should likely 
be proven, proven to be false, or shown to be unprovable, outside the 
context of any interpretation. My statement is just that if it is proven 
within the context of an interpretation these two might have the greatest 
plausibility.

LC
 

>
>
>
> @philipthrift
>
>
>
> -- 
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>  
> 
> .
>
>
>

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-08 Thread Bruce Kellett

On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many
>> Worlds.
>>
>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>>
>>
>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
>> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the
>> story of measurement more consistent.
>>
>
> Amplify the above statement.
>
> Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that
> ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.
>
>
> But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it
> is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the
> interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.
>

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality,
then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many
times to be a complete nonsense.

Bruce

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 9/6/2019 11:04 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:54:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
>>> > 
>>> > I would put "Horganism" another way. 
>>> > 
>>> > Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
>>> > application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
>>> > ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
>>> > not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
>>> > consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
>>> > every week, it seems. 
>>> > 
>>> > David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
>>> > 
>>> > "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
>>> > take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
>>> > find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
>>> > view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
>>> > mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
>>> > sustained attention." 
>>> > - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
>>> >  
>>> 
>>> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
>>> rest of neurophysics. 
>>> 
>>> Brent 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
>>> 
>>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>> 
>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the 
>> story of measurement more consistent.
>> 
>> Brent
>> 
>> 
>> Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict) 
>> observability from science.
>> 
>>  
>> https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/ 
>> 
>> 
>> (which many have exploded over).
>> 
>> In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a scientific 
>> fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.
> 
> I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of consciousness to 
> bottom out, and I think computationalism and the "engineering theory of 
> consciousness" will fill that need.

Computationalism, and computer science, gives an “easy” theory of consciousness 
(it is “consistency” as seen by the []p & p mode, or []p & <>t & p mode (for 
the immediate consciousness).

This, imo, solves the “hard consciousness” part of the mind-body problem.

Nevertheless,  it leads to an “easy-but-not-that-easy” problem of deriving the 
illusion of a physical reality and its stability, and its local sharability,  
from “pure arithmetic”. But the results obtained here are very promising, 
although not on the like of the believer in Matter as we could have expected 
given the history.

Bruno





> 
> Brent
> 
>> 
>> @philipthrift
>> 
>>  
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>>  
>> .
> 
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 17:17, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> > wrote:
> 
> >> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
> >> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
> 
> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
> > it...which I think is impossible. 
> 
> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make 
> probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial 
> dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the 
> cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.
> 
> John K Clark
> 
> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the 
> added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those 
> claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to 
> either MWI or QuBism. 
> 
> LC
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is indeed 
> doomed. 

Yes. But theoretical physics is not doomed, only physicalism, or the idea that 
physics is the fundamental science. As such it is not doomed, but explain by 
something non physical, simpler, even if transcendent.

Bruno




> 
> @philipthrift
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 16:30, Lawrence Crowell  
> wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 6:20:23 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
> 
> > Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?
> 
> No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science can't 
> answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if the 
> chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, and by 
> their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they just are. 
> For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the way data feels 
> when it is being processed.
> 
> > Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine 
> > creator.
> 
> Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, everything?
> Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, ANYTHING?
> 
> The problem is that a divine creator explains everything on the most 
> elementary or simple basis of faith. This means in effect it explains 
> nothing, because there is nothing falsifiable about this. Scriptural 
> statements about the world, say from creation to the fact the Bible really 
> has a Sumerian cosmology, have been found to be wrong. However, upholders of 
> these ideas are good at either denial of facts or by shifting goal posts 
> around in interpretations of scripture.


Right. If God exists, then “God made it all” is NOT an explanation at all. It 
remains to explain God, or to explain why we can’t explain it, and it remains 
to explain how God “made it all”.

That’s gives perhaps the difference between the concept of God used by the 
theologian who are scientist, and “God" used by pseudo-science/pseudo-religion: 
for a scientist God is *the* problem to solve, not a solution or explanation at 
all.

Bruno




> 
> LC
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 16:25, Lawrence Crowell  
> wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> > wrote:
> 
> >> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
> >> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
> 
> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
> > it...which I think is impossible. 
> 
> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make 
> probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial 
> dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not the 
> cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.
> 
> John K Clark
> 
> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give the 
> added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about those 
> claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best bet to 
> either MWI or QuBism. 


Assuming mechanism in the cognitive science, the “many-computations” is not an 
option, and MWI, Qubism, or even Copehagen, IF true, have to be derived from 
2+2=4 & co.

Bruno



> 
> LC
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



> On 7 Sep 2019, at 13:46, smitra  wrote:
> 
> On 07-09-2019 13:04, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
>>>  wrote:
 _>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
 Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?_
> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule
 from it...which I think is impossible.
>>> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do
>>> is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that
>>> in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the
>>> Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a
>>> probability without inconsistencies.
>>> John K Clark
>> MANY WORLDS, THE BORN RULE, AND SELF-LOCATING UNCERTAINTY
>> Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens
>> (Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this
>> version, v3))
>> We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett
>> (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on
>> the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave
>> function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the
>> outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the
>> universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show
>> that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such
>> cases, which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes
>> straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum
>> self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse.
> 
> This argument (the mathematical part is based on Zurek's derivation) can be 
> made even stronger by invoking the fact that even in principle an observer 
> cannot locate herself precisely in one effectively classical World. 
> Everything you can in principle be aware of only fixes a finite number of 
> physical degrees of freedom of your brain, so you're always going to be in a 
> superposition of not just the entire observable universe, even your own brain 
> state is never going to (effectively) collapse into a definite state.
> 
> So, if you're simulated by a classical computer, the macroscopic registers of 
> your classical brain will be in a superposition corresponding to slightly 
> different data processing being carried out. A more powerful conscious agent 
> implemented by a much larger computer can observe the exact state of all your 
> registers, but he can never communicate this to you as the computer rendering 
> you cannot store all that information. So, you will always be located in a 
> superposition of states where this information is different. And that more 
> powerful conscious agent will itself be in a superposition of states where 
> its registers are in different states.
> 
> These superpositions  are entangled superpositions with the environment that 
> specify that if the input information from the environment where slightly 
> different than that the output bran state would have to be correspondingly 
> different. So, such a superposition then defines the algorithm that is 
> running. The conscious agent is then aware of the processed data, but only to 
> some finite resolution, he's then in a superposition of everything that 
> happens below that resolution and that then Defines the algorithm that 
> renders the consciousness.
> 
> If a conscious agent could be located in a precisely defined single World 
> then that leads to the problem that the state doesn't define the algorithm 
> that is actually running. In a purely classical picture counterfactuals 
> cannot be relevant,  whatever the physics is makes you conscious all that 
> happens is that you pass from one state to another state at some arbitrary 
> moment that you have some conscious thought. So, any trivial device that 
> doesn't so any nontrivial computations that is set up such that it will 
> always pass through these states, such as a recording of these states, will 
> also be conscious.
> 
> We can avoid this paradox by taking serious that at each moment we're 
> algorithms that are defined by the counterfactual data processing that fall 
> within the region of uncertainty defined by the finite precision of our 
> awareness.


And the case is made even stringer when you know that all computations 
(execution of algorithm made by universal machine/number) exist provably. 
Provably, unless one doubt that 2+2=4, of course.

Bruno 




> 
> Saibal
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Sunday, September 8, 2019 at 5:40:55 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> > On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everyth...@googlegroups.com > wrote: 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> >> 
> >> I would put "Horganism" another way. 
> >> 
> >> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to 
> be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no 
> settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a 
> new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems. 
> >> 
> >> David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
> >> 
> >> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a 
> reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would 
> immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So 
> the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention." 
> >> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
> > 
> > Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
> rest of neurophysics. 
>
> + zero explanation power at all, also. 
>
> Bruno 
>
>
>
>
>
>
But panpsychism more explanatory than consciousness from numbers. 

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 
> wrote:
> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
>> 
>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
> 
> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from it...which 
> I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the story of 
> measurement more consistent.
> 
> Amplify the above statement.
> 
> Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that ultimately 
> one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it is 
not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the interpretation 
of death, like with quantum immortality.

Bruno 



> 
> Bruce 
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:21, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
> 
> 
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> > 
> > I would put "Horganism" another way. 
> > 
> > Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
> > application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
> > ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
> > not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
> > consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
> > every week, it seems. 
> > 
> > David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
> > 
> > "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
> > take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
> > find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
> > view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
> > mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
> > sustained attention." 
> > - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
> >  
> 
> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
> rest of neurophysics. 
> 
> Brent 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
> 
> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

What is the predictive power of one world?

Bruno




> 
> @philipthrift 
> 
> 
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



> On 7 Sep 2019, at 07:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> 
>> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>> 
>> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
>> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to 
>> be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no 
>> settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a new 
>> story of gravity in science news every week, it seems.
>> 
>> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>> 
>> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to take 
>> both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a 
>> reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would 
>> immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So 
>> the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention."
>> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
> 
> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the rest 
> of neurophysics.

+ zero explanation power at all, also. 

Bruno




> 
> Brent
> 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 05:11, Samiya Illias  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 5:26 AM Lawrence Crowell 
> mailto:goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com>> 
> wrote:
> Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new things. 
> He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose science 
> will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around before long, 
> so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I see little 
> productive in following or thinking along his lines.
> 
> LC
> 
> You might find this worth a read: Humans: Extinct & Extant 
>  
> 
> 


God will never know that this sentence is true.

Bruno




> 
> On Friday, September 6, 2019 at 3:06:58 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
> 
> via John Horgan @Horganism
> 
> 
> The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience
> 
> As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks 
> increasingly nutty
> 
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
> 
> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This 
> belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists 
> proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon 
> explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist 
> and are what we are.
> 
> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating 
> it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations 
> thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of 
> Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total 
> knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never 
> have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
> 
> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists 
> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came 
> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This 
> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the 
> need for a divine creator.
> 
> 
> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was 
> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief 
> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including 
> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies 
> (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
> 
> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned 
> a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in 
> Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end 
> a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that 
> cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 
> 
> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for 
> all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would 
> be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned 
> creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I 
> find sadness in doubting that they will.”
> 
> Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of 
> omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be 
> understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 
> 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and 
> might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is 
> just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, 
> like the sunrise.”
> 
> Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller 
> The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our 
> existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it 
> is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, 
> though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”
> 
> 
> One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 
> 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core 
> atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable 
> philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could 
> “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the 
> brain that correspond to conscious states.
> 
> In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your 
> joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of 
> personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast 
> assembly of neurons.” That statement might have

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


> On 7 Sep 2019, at 02:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what sceintific 
> "comprehension" consists of.   It is the ability to tell a consistent story 
> about what happens that has predictive power.  It's not necessarily a story 
> that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story would be entertaining and 
> satisfying and they could tell to kids a bedtime.  Those are the stories 
> religion tells.  Sceince tells stories that work...and that's their defining 
> characteristic.  Chalmers can call consciousness "the hard problem" because 
> he doesn't like the story in which it is a brain process.


No one serious would identify 1p consciousness with anything 3p.

Chamers only reacts the mind-body problem in the Aristotelian framework, where 
the greeks got already the proof that it cannot work, and that proof is made 
rigorous by any “honest” universal number.




> It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in the story "consciousness" should be 
> something he likes.  The same thing happened when life was shown to be 
> metabolism and reproduction...chemical processes. 

Not really. Life is conceived (correctly I would argue) as a 3p process, and so 
the reduction here can make sense. It does not when you identify 1p and 3p. You 
get led to the Penrose-Lucas type of error, confusing []p with []p & p, which 
is basically a confusion between, belief and knowledge.



> But it's a story that works.  And when neuroengineers and consciousness 
> mechanics are designing and building human like AIs nobdy will worry about 
> whether Chalmers likes the story or not.

The AI will worry about that. 

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> 
> On 9/6/2019 1:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>> 
>> via John Horgan @Horganism
>> 
>> 
>> The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience
>> 
>> As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks 
>> increasingly nutty
>> 
>> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
>> 
>> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This 
>> belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists 
>> proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon 
>> explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist 
>> and are what we are.
>> 
>> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating 
>> it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations 
>> thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of 
>> Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of 
>> total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should 
>> never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated 
>> it.
>> 
>> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
>> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists 
>> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came 
>> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This 
>> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the 
>> need for a divine creator.
>> 
>> 
>> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was 
>> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief 
>> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including 
>> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies 
>> (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
>> 
>> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he 
>> envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new 
>> “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might 
>> soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for 
>> those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 
>> 
>> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for 
>> all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would 
>> be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned 
>> creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I 
>> find sadness in doubting that they will.”
>> 
>> Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of 
>> omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be 
>> understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 
>> 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and 
>> might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is 
>> just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, 
>> like the sunrise.”
>> 
>> Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 
>> bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the m

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

> On 6 Sep 2019, at 22:06, Philip Thrift  wrote:
> 
> 
> via John Horgan @Horganism
> 
> 
> The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience
> 
> As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks 
> increasingly nutty
> 
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

Science is not a person, but an attitude, often related to some methods. Horgan 
has a “religious” (I mean a pseudo-scientist) conception of science, probably 
inherited from the separation between religion and science, which makes them 
both “pseudo-religious”.

We know since 1931 that, even just on etc 3p arithmetical reality, we (the 
finite creature) can only scratch n the surface.

But we can try theories, and as long as we don’ believe to get the whole truth, 
we can progress toward it.

Science as begun with Pythagorus in -500, and ended with Damascius in +500. But 
in arithmetic, there are infinite line of progress, and with some luck, we will 
follow those lines … in some futures.

Assuming Mechanism, science has fundamentally regress, despite the wonderful 
discovery in biology and physics, and mathematics. We have even forget the 
original questions which started science.

But there are plausible general theories, although none can be complete or even 
completed. 

Any theory which allows for the existence of a universal machine can be 
completed. Such theories have been called “essentially undecidable” by Tarski. 
You cannot add axioms to complete them effectively.

Now, the beauty of science is that it can study its own limitation, and get a 
more and more precise idea of its intrinsic, necessary  (and gigantic) 
ignorance.

Theology was the science aimed at the study of that ignorance, notably because 
we can get altered state of consciousness which, like Descartes systematic 
doubt, ensure the existence of a fixed point for the doubt, and the immensity 
of our ignorance.

Today, we are in the materialist paradigm, but it is inconsistent when it 
assumes also Mechanism, and the evidence favours mechanism, at least until now.

To progress, we have to backtrack at the starting point. Pythagorus. We have to 
understand that the genuine debate is not on the existence of a creator, but on 
a creation, and assimilate well the difference between Aristotle (what is real 
is what I see) and Plato (I don’t know if what I see is the real thing).

Horgan does not describe science. He describes the type of necessarily fake 
science that you get when you separate theology, or metaphysics if you prefer, 
from reason.

Bruno

> 
> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This 
> belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists 
> proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon 
> explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist 
> and are what we are.
> 
> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating 
> it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations 
> thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of 
> Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total 
> knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never 
> have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
> 
> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists 
> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came 
> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This 
> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the 
> need for a divine creator.
> 
> 
> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was 
> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief 
> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including 
> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies 
> (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
> 
> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned 
> a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in 
> Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end 
> a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that 
> cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 
> 
> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and for 
> all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would 
> be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned 
> creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I 
> find sadness in doubting that they will.”
> 
> Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of 
> omniscience. “I take the position

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 3:01:39 PM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 1:09:49 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:36:08 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of 
>>> consciousness to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the 
>>> "engineering theory of consciousness" will fill that need.
>>>
>>> Brent
>>>
>>>
>> That measurement needs consciousness to "bottom out" is crazier than 
>> panpsychism (except maybe cosmopsychism). 
>>
>> (Think of what Vic would say.)
>>
>> @philipthrift
>>
>
> To be honest I think Vic would be disappointed in all this silliness over 
> panpsychism. Remember he kept writing on the unconscious quantum.
>
> LC
>


Strawson's "Realistic Monism" and "The Mary-Go-Round" (particularly) are 
very much in terms of Vic's vocabulary. It would be interesting to see what 
his response would have been.

@philipthrift
 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread spudboy100 via Everything List

Vic Stenger was a good writer, but like Horgan, never tried to data-mine 
science for something practically, useful. This discussion winds down to a 
bar-fight over Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles. Once we get really good 
telescopes out to the Kuiper Belt or Oort, I am guessing new observations will 
modify what we already think we know, and add to it. Think of cosmology as a 
pattern of emergences. The 4 forces, chemistry, complexity, yeah, life, at 
least around these parts. Are we a fluke of emerging/chemistry? Well, some days 
before coffee, I would tend to agree, thus, reinforcing the fluke hypothesis 
indicating the doors of perception can be altered, chemically. 

-Original Message-
From: Lawrence Crowell 
To: Everything List 
Sent: Sat, Sep 7, 2019 4:01 pm
Subject: Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 1:09:49 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:


On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:36:08 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
  

 I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of consciousness to 
bottom out, and I think computationalism and the "engineering theory of 
consciousness" will fill that need.
 
 Brent



That measurement needs consciousness to "bottom out" is crazier than 
panpsychism (except maybe cosmopsychism). 
(Think of what Vic would say.)
@philipthrift

To be honest I think Vic would be disappointed in all this silliness over 
panpsychism. Remember he kept writing on the unconscious quantum.
LC-- 
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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 1:09:49 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:36:08 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of 
>> consciousness to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the 
>> "engineering theory of consciousness" will fill that need.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
> That measurement needs consciousness to "bottom out" is crazier than 
> panpsychism (except maybe cosmopsychism). 
>
> (Think of what Vic would say.)
>
> @philipthrift
>

To be honest I think Vic would be disappointed in all this silliness over 
panpsychism. Remember he kept writing on the unconscious quantum.

LC

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List





On 9/7/2019 4:46 AM, smitra wrote:

On 07-09-2019 13:04, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:


On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
 wrote:


_>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?_


None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule

from it...which I think is impossible.


Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do
is make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that
in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the
Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a
probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark


MANY WORLDS, THE BORN RULE, AND SELF-LOCATING UNCERTAINTY

Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens
(Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this
version, v3))

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett
(Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on
the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave
function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the
outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the
universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show
that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such
cases, which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes
straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum
self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse.



This argument (the mathematical part is based on Zurek's derivation) 
can be made even stronger by invoking the fact that even in principle 
an observer cannot locate herself precisely in one effectively 
classical World. Everything you can in principle be aware of only 
fixes a finite number of physical degrees of freedom of your brain, 


True, there will always be many degrees of freedom that you are unaware 
of and are irrelevant to a particular observation of UP or DOWN.  But it 
is only the latter that locates one in either the UP world or the DOWN 
world.


so you're always going to be in a superposition of not just the entire 
observable universe, even your own brain state is never going to 
(effectively) collapse into a definite state.


So, if you're simulated by a classical computer, the macroscopic 
registers of your classical brain will be in a superposition 
corresponding to slightly different data processing being carried out. 
A more powerful conscious agent 


It seems you have gratuitously inserted "conscious agent" here.  Why not 
"more powerful computer"?  What does consciousness have to do with it?


implemented by a much larger computer can observe the exact state of 
all your registers, but he can never communicate this to you as the 
computer rendering you cannot store all that information. So, you will 
always be located in a superposition of states where this information 
is different. And that more powerful conscious agent will itself be in 
a superposition of states where its registers are in different states.


These superpositions  are entangled superpositions with the 
environment that specify that if the input information from the 
environment where slightly different than that the output bran state 
would have to be correspondingly different. So, such a superposition 
then defines the algorithm that is running. The conscious agent is 
then aware of the processed data, but only to some finite resolution, 
he's then in a superposition of everything that happens below that 
resolution and that then Defines the algorithm that renders the 
consciousness.


This explanation in terms of superpositions of consciousness is like 
QBism translated from personal subjective experience to imply multiple 
worlds.


Brent



If a conscious agent could be located in a precisely defined single 
World then that leads to the problem that the state doesn't define the 
algorithm that is actually running. In a purely classical picture 
counterfactuals cannot be relevant,  whatever the physics is makes you 
conscious all that happens is that you pass from one state to another 
state at some arbitrary moment that you have some conscious thought. 
So, any trivial device that doesn't so any nontrivial computations 
that is set up such that it will always pass through these states, 
such as a recording of these states, will also be conscious.


We can avoid this paradox by taking serious that at each moment we're 
algorithms that are defined by the counterfactual data processing that 
fall within the region of uncertainty defined by the finite precision 
of our awareness.


Saibal




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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:36:08 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of consciousness 
> to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the "engineering theory of 
> consciousness" will fill that need.
>
> Brent
>
>
That measurement needs consciousness to "bottom out" is crazier than 
panpsychism (except maybe cosmopsychism). 

(Think of what Vic would say.)

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 10:34:02 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 10:54 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> > 
> > I would put "Horganism" another way. 
> > 
> > Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
> > application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
> > ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
> > not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
> > consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
> > every week, it seems. 
> > 
> > David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
> > 
> > "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
> > take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
> > find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
> > view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
> > mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
> > sustained attention." 
> > - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
>
>
> The trouble with panpsychism is that it doesn't buy you anything.  There's 
> still the question of why am I not conscious under anesthesia? And do I 
> really believe rocks are conscious?...no, we'll say they have 
> "proto-consciousness".  But once you introduce a concept like 
> proto-consciousness, why attribute it to everything.  Why not just say 
> nerves have proto-consciousness, when they are functional.
>
> Brent
>


The latter is along the lines of

 https://petergodfreysmith.com/ 


who is an advocate of *biopsychism*. I assume there is a *chemopsychism*. 
Then *micropsychism* is lower. Of course there is *cosmopsychism* too.

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/6/2019 11:04 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:


On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?


None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward
making the story of measurement more consistent.


Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that 
ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.


But when, exactly do they get to be "unseen".  Decoherence theory has 
given a pretty good answer to that.  And Zurek's quantum Darwinism has 
at least outlined a stat-mech answer to the basis problem.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/6/2019 11:04 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:54:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in
their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are
the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They
probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in
science news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives
good reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously.
If we can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for
either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution
to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves
serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent
with the
rest of neurophysics.

Brent

Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward
making the story of measurement more consistent.

Brent

Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict) 
observability from science.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/

(which many have exploded over).

In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a 
scientific fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.

I think the measurement problem ultimately needs a theory of 
consciousness to bottom out, and I think computationalism and the 
"engineering theory of consciousness" will fill that need.

Brent

@philipthrift

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/6/2019 10:54 PM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:


On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 



The trouble with panpsychism is that it doesn't buy you anything. 
There's still the question of why am I not conscious under anesthesia? 
And do I really believe rocks are conscious?...no, we'll say they have 
"proto-consciousness".  But once you introduce a concept like 
proto-consciousness, why attribute it to everything. Why not just say 
nerves have proto-consciousness, when they are functional.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 9:25:59 AM UTC-5, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>> *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
>>> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>>>
>>> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>>> it...which I think is impossible. 
>>>
>>
>> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is 
>> make probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 
>> spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), 
>> and not the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without 
>> inconsistencies.
>>
>> John K Clark
>>
>
> Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
> operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
> rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give 
> the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about 
> those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best 
> bet to either MWI or QuBism. 
>
> LC
>




If the best bet is  either MWI or QuBism  then theoretical physics is 
indeed doomed. 

@philipthrift


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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 6:20:23 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
>
> *> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?*
>>
>
> No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science 
> can't answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if 
> the chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, 
> and by their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they 
> just are. For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the 
> way data feels when it is being processed.
>
> *> Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine 
>> creator.*
>>
>
> Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, 
> everything?
> Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well, 
> *ANYTHING*?
>

The problem is that a divine creator explains everything on the most 
elementary or simple basis of faith. This means in effect it explains 
nothing, because there is nothing falsifiable about this. Scriptural 
statements about the world, say from creation to the fact the Bible really 
has a Sumerian cosmology, have been found to be wrong. However, upholders 
of these ideas are good at either denial of facts or by shifting goal posts 
around in interpretations of scripture.

LC

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread Lawrence Crowell

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everyth...@googlegroups.com > wrote:
>
> *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
>> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>>
>> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> it...which I think is impossible. 
>>
>
> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make 
> probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial 
> dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not 
> the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.
>
> John K Clark
>

Gleason's theorem is sort of a special case of Born rule for the case an 
operator is the unit operator. There is an interesting chase after the Born 
rule, and some people do think that certain quantum interpretations give 
the added axiomatic "boost" necessary to prove that. I am agnostic about 
those claims. If this does turn out to be the case I would give the best 
bet to either MWI or QuBism. 

LC

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread smitra

On 07-09-2019 13:04, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
wrote:

_>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing
Many Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?_

None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule

from it...which I think is impossible.

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do
is make probabilistic predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that
in 3 spatial dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the
Born rule), and not the cube or anything else, can yield a
probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

MANY WORLDS, THE BORN RULE, AND SELF-LOCATING UNCERTAINTY

Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens
(Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this
version, v3))

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett
(Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on
the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave
function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the
outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the
universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show
that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such
cases, which leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes
straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum
self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse.

This argument (the mathematical part is based on Zurek's derivation) can
be made even stronger by invoking the fact that even in principle an
observer cannot locate herself precisely in one effectively classical
World. Everything you can in principle be aware of only fixes a finite
number of physical degrees of freedom of your brain, so you're always
going to be in a superposition of not just the entire observable
universe, even your own brain state is never going to (effectively)
collapse into a definite state.

So, if you're simulated by a classical computer, the macroscopic
registers of your classical brain will be in a superposition
corresponding to slightly different data processing being carried out. A
more powerful conscious agent implemented by a much larger computer can
observe the exact state of all your registers, but he can never
communicate this to you as the computer rendering you cannot store all
that information. So, you will always be located in a superposition of
states where this information is different. And that more powerful
conscious agent will itself be in a superposition of states where its
registers are in different states.

These superpositions are entangled superpositions with the environment
that specify that if the input information from the environment where
slightly different than that the output bran state would have to be
correspondingly different. So, such a superposition then defines the
algorithm that is running. The conscious agent is then aware of the
processed data, but only to some finite resolution, he's then in a
superposition of everything that happens below that resolution and that
then Defines the algorithm that renders the consciousness.

If a conscious agent could be located in a precisely defined single
World then that leads to the problem that the state doesn't define the
algorithm that is actually running. In a purely classical picture
counterfactuals cannot be relevant, whatever the physics is makes you
conscious all that happens is that you pass from one state to another
state at some arbitrary moment that you have some conscious thought. So,
any trivial device that doesn't so any nontrivial computations that is
set up such that it will always pass through these states, such as a
recording of these states, will also be conscious.

We can avoid this paradox by taking serious that at each moment we're
algorithms that are defined by the counterfactual data processing that
fall within the region of uncertainty defined by the finite precision of
our awareness.

Saibal

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread John Clark

By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

*> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?*
>

No. If the chain of "why" questions are infinite then obviously science
can't answer an infinite number of questions nor can anything else. And if
the chain is not infinite then eventually you'll run into a brute fact, and
by their very nature there is no how or why about brute facts, they just
are. For example, I think a brute fact is that consciousness is the way
data feels when it is being processed.

*> Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine
> creator.*
>

Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well,
everything?
Does anyone still believe that a divine creator can explain, well,
*ANYTHING*?


> *> Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact
> the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature
> springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just as
> believers in God must explain where He came from.*
>

I don't think science will ever be able to fully explain why there is
something rather than nothing, however it's already done an excellent job
explaining why there is a great deal rather than very little. Meanwhile the
God theory can explain precisely nothing.

*> As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd.
> In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a
> clue how life began,*
>

That's just not true. We certainly have a clue, but the beginning of life
was a historical event so if 4 billion years of geological activity has
erased the evidence then we may never be able to definitively say "life
started this way and it couldn't have started in any other way"; but I
think we're well on our way of developing a plausible scenario describing
how life *could* have started.

> *Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious,*
>

What's with this "us" business? All I know for certain is I'm conscious and
I'm the product of Darwinian Evolution.


> *> and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human
> consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which
> determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states.*
>

I know for certain I'm conscious. If Darwinian Evolution produced me then I
know for certain that something Evolution can see must have the ability to
produce a conscious state, something like intelagent behavior. And you
can't have intelagent behavior without data processing.


> > *It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat,*
>

John Horgan might someday know what it would be like for John Horgan to be
a bat, but to know what it's like for a bat to be a bat John Horgan would
have to turn into a bat, and even then John Horgan wouldn't know what it's
like because then John Horgan would no longer exist. Only a bat can know
what it's like for a bat to be a bat and only John Horgan can know what
it's like for John Horgan to be John Horgan.


> *> The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul Feyerabend
> said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total knowledge.*
>

It's one thing to say we can't know everything but Feyerabend seems to
think we can't know anything and so we should give up even trying and just
howl at the moon or something.

John K Clark

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 4:09:27 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everyth...@googlegroups.com > wrote:
>
> *>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
>> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>>
>> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>> it...which I think is impossible. 
>>
>
> Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make 
> probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial 
> dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not 
> the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.
>
> John K Clark
>

*Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty*

Sean M. Carroll, Charles T. Sebens
(Submitted on 30 May 2014 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2015 (this version, v3))

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett 
(Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the 
idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function 
branching via decoherence and an observer registering the outcome of the 
measurement, that observer can know the state of the universe precisely 
without knowing which branch they are on. We show that there is a uniquely 
rational way to apportion credence in such cases, which leads directly to 
the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes straightforwardly to cases of 
combined classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty, as in the 
cosmological multiverse.

@philipthrift 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-07 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

*>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many
> Worlds. What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?*
>
> > None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
> it...which I think is impossible.
>

Many Worlds predicts that the best any observer will be able to do is make
probabilistic  predictions, and Gleason's theorem says that in 3 spatial
dimensions only the square of Schrodinger's wave (the Born rule), and not
the cube or anything else, can yield a probability without inconsistencies.

John K Clark

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 1:07:33 AM UTC-5, Bruce wrote:
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 4:04 PM Philip Thrift  > wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:54:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>>>
>>> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
>>> Worlds.
>>>
>>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>>>
>>>
>>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
>>> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the 
>>> story of measurement more consistent.
>>>
>>> Brent
>>>
>>
>>
>> Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict) 
>> observability from science.
>>
>>  
>> https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/
>>
>> (which many have exploded over).
>>
>> In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a scientific 
>> fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.
>>
>
> I do, And I can confidently tell you that it is all a load of foeted dingo 
> kidneys.
>
> Bruce
>




There are lists of hypotheticals in physics, too many to keep track of.

Lists of hypotheticals of physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_elementary_particles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_particles
etc.

e.g.,

Inflatons: "Just like every other quantum field, excitations of the 
inflaton field are expected to be quantized. The field quanta of the 
inflaton field are known as *inflatons*. Depending on the modeled potential 
energy density, the inflaton field's ground state may or may not be zero."


@philipthrift 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread Bruce Kellett

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 4:04 PM Philip Thrift  wrote:

> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:54:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>>
>> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>>
>> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many
>> Worlds.
>>
>> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>>
>>
>> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
>> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the
>> story of measurement more consistent.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>
>
> Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict)
> observability from science.
>
>
> https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/
>
> (which many have exploded over).
>
> In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a scientific
> fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.
>

I do, And I can confidently tell you that it is all a load of foeted dingo
kidneys.

Bruce

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread Bruce Kellett

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
>
> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>
>
> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from
> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the
> story of measurement more consistent.
>

Amplify the above statement.

Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that
ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.

Bruce

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:54:42 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: 
>>
>>
>>
>> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
>> > 
>> > I would put "Horganism" another way. 
>> > 
>> > Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
>> > application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
>> > ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
>> > not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
>> > consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
>> > every week, it seems. 
>> > 
>> > David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
>> > 
>> > "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
>> > take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
>> > find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
>> > view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
>> > mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
>> > sustained attention." 
>> > - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
>>
>> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
>> rest of neurophysics. 
>>
>> Brent 
>>
>>
>
>
> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.
>
> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
>
>
> None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
> it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the 
> story of measurement more consistent.
>
> Brent
>


Maybe. But the wider point is Sean Carroll's unlinking (strict) 
observability from science.

 
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/01/17/beyond-falsifiability/

(which many have exploded over).

In Sean's world, if a vocabulary of unobservables fits into a scientific 
fabric somehow, then it's tenable. Maybe that's OK. Who knows.

@philipthrift

 

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:



On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
> I would put "Horganism" another way.
>
> Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their
> application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final
> ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are
> not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less
> consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science
news
> every week, it seems.
>
> David Chalmers' conclusion is ...
>
> "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good
reason to
> take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we
can
> find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for
either, this
> view would immediately become the most promising solution to the
> mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and
> sustained attention."
> - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf


Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with
the
rest of neurophysics.

Brent




Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
Worlds.


What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?


None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making 
the story of measurement more consistent.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)



On Saturday, September 7, 2019 at 12:14:07 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: 
> > 
> > I would put "Horganism" another way. 
> > 
> > Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
> > application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
> > ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
> > not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
> > consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
> > every week, it seems. 
> > 
> > David Chalmers' conclusion is ... 
> > 
> > "I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
> > take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
> > find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
> > view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
> > mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
> > sustained attention." 
> > - http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf 
>
> Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
> rest of neurophysics. 
>
> Brent 
>
>


Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many Worlds.

What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?

@philipthrift 


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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List





On 9/6/2019 9:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:


I would put "Horganism" another way.

Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final 
ones to be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are 
not.) There is no settled story of gravity yet, much less 
consciousness. One reads about a new story of gravity in science news 
every week, it seems.


David Chalmers' conclusion is ...

"I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to 
take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can 
find a reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this 
view would immediately become the most promising solution to the 
mind–body problem. So the combination problem deserves serious and 
sustained attention."

- http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf


Zero predictive power and it's not clear that it's consistent with the 
rest of neurophysics.


Brent

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Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)


I would put "Horganism" another way.

Science tells stories/theories, and some are successful in their 
application. But we don't know if any of the stories are the final ones to 
be told, or even close to being final. (They probably are not.) There is no 
settled story of gravity yet, much less consciousness. One reads about a 
new story of gravity in science news every week, it seems.

David Chalmers' conclusion is ...

"I think that the Hegelian [dialectical] argument gives good reason to take 
both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very seriously. If we can find a 
reasonable solution to the combination problem for either, this view would 
immediately become the most promising solution to the mind–body problem. So 
the combination problem deserves serious and sustained attention."
- http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf


Horgan's invocation of Feyerabend leaves out I think his main idea:

Science is supposed to be liberating, but it becomes a prison when when it 
becomes a catechism.


Philip Thrift @philipthrift

codicalism - There is a hidden code of nature—the code written into its 
fabric. Our theories—our hypothetical code—are our evolving best-guess 
translations of the code of nature, which remains hidden from our 
knowledge—within nature-in-itself.

https://twitter.com/philipthrift/status/1126225643459493888
3:41 PM · May 8, 2019
1 Retweet   10 Likes



On Friday, September 6, 2019 at 7:45:09 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
>
> Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what 
> sceintific "comprehension" consists of.   It is the ability to tell a 
> consistent story about what happens that has predictive power.  It's not 
> necessarily a story that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story 
> would be entertaining and satisfying and they could tell to kids a 
> bedtime.  Those are the stories religion tells.  Sceince tells stories that 
> work...and that's their defining characteristic.  Chalmers can call 
> consciousness "the hard problem" because he doesn't like the story in which 
> it is a brain process. It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in the story 
> "consciousness" should be something he likes.  The same thing happened when 
> life was shown to be metabolism and reproduction...chemical processes.  But 
> it's a story that works.  And when neuroengineers and consciousness 
> mechanics are designing and building human like AIs nobdy will worry about 
> whether Chalmers likes the story or not.
>
> Brent
>
> On 9/6/2019 1:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
> via John Horgan @Horganism
>
>
> *The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience*
>
> *As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks 
> increasingly nutty*
>
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
>
> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This 
> belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists 
> proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon 
> explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we 
> exist and are what we are.
>
> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists 
> propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all 
> revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in 
> The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the 
> vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy 
> that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant 
> scientists propagated it.
>
> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists 
> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came 
> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This 
> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the 
> need for a divine creator.
>
>
> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was 
> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief 
> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including 
> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul 
> Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven 
> Weinberg.
>
> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he 
> envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new 
> “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might 
> soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for 
> those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 
>
> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and 
> for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It 
> would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a 
> concerned creator in which h

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread Samiya Illias

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 5:26 AM Lawrence Crowell <
goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new
> things. He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose
> science will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around
> before long, so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I
> see little productive in following or thinking along his lines.
>
> LC
>

You might find this worth a read: Humans: Extinct & Extant



>
> On Friday, September 6, 2019 at 3:06:58 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
>>
>>
>> via John Horgan @Horganism
>>
>>
>> *The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience*
>>
>> *As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks
>> increasingly nutty*
>>
>> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
>>
>> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?
>> This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot
>> scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They
>> would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and
>> why we exist and are what we are.
>>
>> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists
>> propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all
>> revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in
>> The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the
>> vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy
>> that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant
>> scientists propagated it.
>>
>> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988
>> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists
>> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came
>> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This
>> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the
>> need for a divine creator.
>>
>>
>> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was
>> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief
>> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including
>> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul
>> Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven
>> Weinberg.
>>
>> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he
>> envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new
>> “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might
>> soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for
>> those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.”
>>
>> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and
>> for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It
>> would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a
>> concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg
>> wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”
>>
>> Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of
>> omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be
>> understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in
>> his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end
>> and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge
>> is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the
>> Earth, like the sunrise.”
>>
>> Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986
>> bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been
>> solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins
>> wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and
>> Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their
>> solution for a while yet.”
>>
>>
>> One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the
>> late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another
>> hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of
>> interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable.
>> Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,”
>> processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.
>>
>> In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’
>> your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
>> personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast
>> assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high water mark of
>> scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism.
>>
>> Meanwhile, researchers

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what 
sceintific "comprehension" consists of.   It is the ability to tell a 
consistent story about what happens that has predictive power. It's not 
necessarily a story that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story 
would be entertaining and satisfying and they could tell to kids a 
bedtime.  Those are the stories religion tells. Sceince tells stories 
that work...and that's their defining characteristic.  Chalmers can call 
consciousness "the hard problem" because he doesn't like the story in 
which it is a brain process. It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in 
the story "consciousness" should be something he likes.  The same thing 
happened when life was shown to be metabolism and 
reproduction...chemical processes.  But it's a story that works.  And 
when neuroengineers and consciousness mechanics are designing and 
building human like AIs nobdy will worry about whether Chalmers likes 
the story or not.


Brent

On 9/6/2019 1:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:


via John Horgan @Horganism


*The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience*

/As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything 
looks increasingly nutty/


By John Horgan on September 4, 2019

Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? 
This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot 
scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. 
They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it 
does, and why we exist and are what we are.


For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists 
propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to 
end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I 
spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve 
begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable 
delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken 
seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.


Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that 
physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how 
our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing 
“the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, 
wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.



I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, 
was goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of 
Brief History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by 
physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), 
The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by 
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.


Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he 
envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new 
“supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists 
might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient 
search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of 
deeper principles.”


Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once 
and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent 
deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, 
prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some 
special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they 
will.”


Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of 
omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be 
understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated 
in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at 
an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, 
“Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving 
across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”


Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 
bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already 
been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” 
Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. 
Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add 
footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”



One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the 
late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and 
another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject 
of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically 
tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural 
correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.


In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that 
“’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, 
your sense of personal identity and free will, are no

Re: "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)

2019-09-06 Thread Lawrence Crowell

Hogan is a pessimist when it comes to human ability to understand new 
things. He has this "end of science" bug, and I will confess that I suppose 
science will end. In fact I have doubts about Homo sapiens being around 
before long, so science will clearly at least go down with us. However, I 
see little productive in following or thinking along his lines.

LC

On Friday, September 6, 2019 at 3:06:58 PM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
> via John Horgan @Horganism
>
>
> *The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience*
>
> *As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything looks 
> increasingly nutty*
>
> By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
>
> Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This 
> belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists 
> proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon 
> explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we 
> exist and are what we are.
>
> For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists 
> propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all 
> revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in 
> The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the 
> vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy 
> that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant 
> scientists propagated it.
>
> Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 
> mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists 
> would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came 
> into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This 
> statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the 
> need for a divine creator.
>
>
> I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was 
> goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of Brief 
> History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by physicists, including 
> Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul 
> Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by Nobel laureate Steven 
> Weinberg.
>
> Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he 
> envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new 
> “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might 
> soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for 
> those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 
>
> Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once and 
> for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It 
> would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a 
> concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg 
> wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”
>
> Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of 
> omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be 
> understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in 
> his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end 
> and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge 
> is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the 
> Earth, like the sunrise.”
>
> Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 
> bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been 
> solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins 
> wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and 
> Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their 
> solution for a while yet.”
>
>
> One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the 
> late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another 
> hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of 
> interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. 
> Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” 
> processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.
>
> In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ 
> your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of 
> personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast 
> assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high water mark of 
> scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism. 
>
> Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and 
> mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had 
> resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I like to 
> call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles underpinning brains,

"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)