Religion and Ethics Forum
Religion and Ethics Discussion => Philosophy, in all its guises. => Topic started by: Sriram on September 30, 2019, 04:51:02 PM
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Hi everyone,
Here is a very good video of a discussion about the Nature of reality....from the New York Academy of Sciences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvGGjcTEpQ
Cheers.
Sriram
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Quite an interesting discussion - although quite long (about 1.5 hrs!)
Hoffman has some great ideas and has achieved good theoretical results although seems to speculate too far in this interview.
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A short 8 minute interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyRrFUncAw
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His detailed paper is here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full
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From the precis:
1 - he's fundamentally misrepresenting what the concept of 'observation causes the collapse of a quantum waveform' means to presume that it must be a conscious observer and not, for instance, another atom which requires a definitive state in order to interact.
2 - he's making a leap from macroscopic effects (evolutionary trends in eyesight) to quantum level effects without really adequately bridging the gap. What little we know of quantum effects is that, statistically, they even out by the time you get to the atomic level into consistent probabilities, so macroscopic observations aren't going to have significant effects on the probability of particular balances of quantum events; if he had evidence of that, this would be a Nobel prize paper in a major physics or general science journal, not a fringe psychology journal.
Frontiers, as an organisation, retains membership of several creditable organisations overseeing science journals, but it's poorly rated by Retraction Watch, it's attempted to cling to a neutral ground when publishing retractions of climate change denying papers in the past, it was dropped by its publisher for articles denying HIV was a thing and it reportedly has an editorial rejection rate of somewhere below 20% (Nature, for a contrast, has a rejection rate in excess of 90%) with a history of removing editors whose rejection rates are considered too high.
O.
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A quick reply as I have not fully read the article yet.
From the precis:
1 - he's fundamentally misrepresenting what the concept of 'observation causes the collapse of a quantum waveform' means to presume that it must be a conscious observer and not, for instance, another atom which requires a definitive state in order to interact.
He mentions this as an interpretation - it is not necessary for the construction of his model. Once he has a model, he will need to show why/how collapse occurs - of-course his theory must be falsifiable.
2 - he's making a leap from macroscopic effects (evolutionary trends in eyesight) to quantum level effects without really adequately bridging the gap. What little we know of quantum effects is that, statistically, they even out by the time you get to the atomic level into consistent probabilities, so macroscopic observations aren't going to have significant effects on the probability of particular balances of quantum events; if he had evidence of that, this would be a Nobel prize paper in a major physics or general science journal, not a fringe psychology journal.
Again, he is working the other way - from his abstract model to show how space-time and physical objects can emerge from it. In some ways this is similar to how some physicists are working on the derivation of space-time from quantum field and information theories (Sean Carroll, Vlatco Vedral ...).
Frontiers, as an organisation, retains membership of several creditable organisations overseeing science journals, but it's poorly rated by Retraction Watch, it's attempted to cling to a neutral ground when publishing retractions of climate change denying papers in the past, it was dropped by its publisher for articles denying HIV was a thing and it reportedly has an editorial rejection rate of somewhere below 20% (Nature, for a contrast, has a rejection rate in excess of 90%) with a history of removing editors whose rejection rates are considered too high.
O.
There will always be some publishers that will publish work well outside and challenging the current scientific paradigms - science not only builds on what has already be found but sometimes must overturn the existing models - most of these challengers will prove to be wrong but that does not mean that we can't find them interesting or learn from them.
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Another view of reality through DID...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/
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In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of which claimed to be blind. Using EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn’t present while a blind alter was in control of the woman’s body, even though her eyes were open. Remarkably, when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.
This was a compelling demonstration of the literally blinding power of extreme forms of dissociation, a condition in which the psyche gives rise to multiple, operationally separate centers of consciousness, each with its own private inner life.
Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint. In other words, there is something rather particular that dissociative processes look like in the brain.
The obvious way around the combination problem is to posit that, although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it isn’t fragmented like matter. The idea is to extend consciousness to the entire fabric of spacetime, as opposed to limiting it to the boundaries of individual subatomic particles. This view—called “cosmopsychism” in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation of it boils down to what has classically been called “idealism”—is that there is only one, universal, consciousness. The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life, just as a living brain and body are the extrinsic appearance of a person’s inner life.
And here is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.
Idealism is a tantalizing view of the nature of reality, in that it elegantly circumvents two arguably insoluble problems: the hard problem of consciousness and the combination problem. Insofar as dissociation offers a path to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we may now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly coherent and empirically grounded way of making sense of life, the universe and everything.
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Another view of reality through DID...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/
The paper this is based on is here: The Universe in Consciousness (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006?crawler=true) (pdf).
I haven't read it all but it seems like rather unconvincing philosophical hand-waving - the first thought experiment was obviously flawed. In the end, it's just another possible idea about consciousness without any actual evidence.
You do get that if this paper is right, then Hoffman's ideas are wrong, yes? You seem to be collecting a medley of disparate and often contradictory ideas about consciousness that you think might be in line with what you believe, without actually paying much attention to the incompatibilities.
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From my above post....
"dissociation offers a path to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we may now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly coherent and empirically grounded way of making sense of life, the universe and everything."
Vedanta! How very similar to the idea of one Paramatma (universal soul) out of which all jivatmas (individual souls) are generated.
Ultimately the Truth will surface and has to be faced, I suppose.
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From my above post....
"dissociation offers a path to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we may now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly coherent and empirically grounded way of making sense of life, the universe and everything."
Vedanta! How very similar to the idea of one Paramatma (universal soul) out of which all jivatmas (individual souls) are generated.
Ultimately the Truth will surface and has to be faced, I suppose.
But whence karma, and the idea that individual souls (though supposedly all contained within the universal soul) must take the responsibility - or indeed penalty - for former individual actions?
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But whence karma, and the idea that individual souls (though supposedly all contained within the universal soul) must take the responsibility - or indeed penalty - for former individual actions?
You can't expect a one paragraph explanation of all Life when even atomic theory and cosmology are so complex that we are unable to get a complete and comprehensive picture of them.
What I am highlighting is that the idea of a universal consciousness that spawns several individual consciousness, is an ancient idea...which happily,is now being proposed by modern philosophers and scientists also.
Karma and many other aspects of the same idea need to be fitted into the totality but this is possible only if we take a total (Zoom Out) view of it instead of a microscopic view. The ancient analogy for this is like water evaporating from the ocean and then flowing back into the ocean.
You can read more about Karma here....
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2019/10/19/karma/