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It’s very much a Copernican boundary: human beings desperately want to be at the center of things. At one time this meant being at the center of the universe,

It’s very much a Copernican boundary: human beings desperately want to be at the center of things. At one time this meant being at the center of the universe, today it’s more like wanting to be at the center of a unique identity with a deterministic past but an undetermined future. This has led to countless interpretations of e.g. the Born Rule where humans have a unique ability to force wavefunction collapse with their senses. Hugh Everett and those who subscribe to his post-Copernican view assert that we’re better off discarding the parochial attachment to a unique identify of experience than we are discarding theory validated by experiment beyond credible doubt.

rini17 2y ago
Humans also desperately want to find something that transcends them. But so far failed to find matching QM interpretation with new explanatory power.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Physics and mathematics have yet to answer age-old questions about the meaning of life, and it’s understandable that this would be disappointing! Our most intelligent people, adequately if not always amply funded to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe have come back with: “there is no evidence that it means anything, or really that it even happened in the way you mean”. Who wouldn’t be disappointed? But this is ultimately a failure of our priests and politicians and parents: it’s not the job of scientists to be our nursemaids in an indifferent cosmos. We have people for that role, at least on paper.
  - rini17 2y ago
    "We have people for that role" is exactly the copernical boundary, that he transgressed :)
strogonoff 2y ago
One cannot truly avoid being human-centric, if the territory of reality is never available to one other than a map constructed by one’s consciousness. The core conceptual constructs used to reason about reality, the ways of attending to reality, the approaches to measuring it, this is all inherently coloured by humanness and further distinct cultural predispositions (a Western natural scientist is biased in one way, a !Kung shaman is biased in another). To assume the possibility of an unbiased take is unreasonable. (There is never a complete map of the territory that covers the entirety of the territory in a way equally suitable for every possible use. Such a map would be the territory itself, which is not made directly available. So it’s good to have different maps, and to acknowledge that none of them can be assumed to be correct/complete.) That said, assuming the hypothetical ability to cause what we refer to as “wavefunction collapse” via observation does not seem to strictly imply a human-centric view. Humans may be treated as a particular kind of conscious observer, but in a monistic idealist take assuming they are alone in that seems insufficient to describe reality.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Your argument isn’t with me, it’s with iconic physicists spanning the range from Sean Carrol to David Deutsch. I’m well aware that any argument against vibes around an asymmetrically deterministic universe with a clear arrow of time and a unique dualist window of self is going to be unpopular. There isn’t any physics there: how one chooses to interpret and integrate the vanishing impossibility of free will or unique identity is a very personal matter.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    > Your argument isn’t with me, it’s with iconic physicists spanning the range from Sean Carrol to David Deutsch. Of course, and (maybe more importantly) a number of philosophers. However, other philosophers (and, indeed, some iconic physicists) might not disagree. > any argument against vibes around an asymmetrically deterministic universe with a clear arrow of time and a unique dualist window of self is going to be unpopular Dualism is popular in general population, but monistic materialism is probably more popular among the tech crowd. Both approaches don’t strike me as elegant, naturally. > how one chooses to interpret and integrate the vanishing impossibility of free will Well, how one chooses to integrate the consciousness being the only thing that we can assume objectively exists (as the only thing we have direct access to, empirically) is also personal matter. The ways of waving it off (pretending it’s an illusion, etc.) are many… Once you stop doing that, though, suddenly free will is no longer such a crazy notion.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      I’m not sure that a dichotomy between say illusory and real is the right category to examine consciousness with. Consciousness is pretty difficult to define in any satisfactory way because we don’t have a way to know what another means by the word. I know how it feels to me, but not to you and vice versa. I’m aware that exceedingly clever people work on the problem and have for a very long time, and I hope they find some success, but I think it remains an open problem in most ways. For my two cents I tend to think that pursuits like defining consciousness, or even higher level things like free will and even spirituality are very worthwhile, but likewise very difficult if not impossible to collaborate on with rigor. I think I was a bit too flip in painting it as though consciousness and free will and spirituality are somehow inferior or less important topics than physics and cosmology and what not: put better I would say that they are very different pursuits and I think it perilous to try to integrate them under the guise of science. Physics can be done in collaboration with others, we have mediums for reaching some level of evolving consensus on that. Consciousness and free will are much less obviously amenable to any rigorous consensus.

rini17 2y ago

Humans also desperately want to find something that transcends them. But so far failed to find matching QM interpretation with new explanatory power.

benreesman 2y ago
Physics and mathematics have yet to answer age-old questions about the meaning of life, and it’s understandable that this would be disappointing! Our most intelligent people, adequately if not always amply funded to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe have come back with: “there is no evidence that it means anything, or really that it even happened in the way you mean”. Who wouldn’t be disappointed? But this is ultimately a failure of our priests and politicians and parents: it’s not the job of scientists to be our nursemaids in an indifferent cosmos. We have people for that role, at least on paper.
- rini17 2y ago
  "We have people for that role" is exactly the copernical boundary, that he transgressed :)

strogonoff 2y ago

One cannot truly avoid being human-centric, if the territory of reality is never available to one other than a map constructed by one’s consciousness. The core conceptual constructs used to reason about reality, the ways of attending to reality, the approaches to measuring it, this is all inherently coloured by humanness and further distinct cultural predispositions (a Western natural scientist is biased in one way, a !Kung shaman is biased in another). To assume the possibility of an unbiased take is unreasonable. (There is never a complete map of the territory that covers the entirety of the territory in a way equally suitable for every possible use. Such a map would be the territory itself, which is not made directly available. So it’s good to have different maps, and to acknowledge that none of them can be assumed to be correct/complete.) That said, assuming the hypothetical ability to cause what we refer to as “wavefunction collapse” via observation does not seem to strictly imply a human-centric view. Humans may be treated as a particular kind of conscious observer, but in a monistic idealist take assuming they are alone in that seems insufficient to describe reality.

benreesman 2y ago
Your argument isn’t with me, it’s with iconic physicists spanning the range from Sean Carrol to David Deutsch. I’m well aware that any argument against vibes around an asymmetrically deterministic universe with a clear arrow of time and a unique dualist window of self is going to be unpopular. There isn’t any physics there: how one chooses to interpret and integrate the vanishing impossibility of free will or unique identity is a very personal matter.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  > Your argument isn’t with me, it’s with iconic physicists spanning the range from Sean Carrol to David Deutsch. Of course, and (maybe more importantly) a number of philosophers. However, other philosophers (and, indeed, some iconic physicists) might not disagree. > any argument against vibes around an asymmetrically deterministic universe with a clear arrow of time and a unique dualist window of self is going to be unpopular Dualism is popular in general population, but monistic materialism is probably more popular among the tech crowd. Both approaches don’t strike me as elegant, naturally. > how one chooses to interpret and integrate the vanishing impossibility of free will Well, how one chooses to integrate the consciousness being the only thing that we can assume objectively exists (as the only thing we have direct access to, empirically) is also personal matter. The ways of waving it off (pretending it’s an illusion, etc.) are many… Once you stop doing that, though, suddenly free will is no longer such a crazy notion.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    I’m not sure that a dichotomy between say illusory and real is the right category to examine consciousness with. Consciousness is pretty difficult to define in any satisfactory way because we don’t have a way to know what another means by the word. I know how it feels to me, but not to you and vice versa. I’m aware that exceedingly clever people work on the problem and have for a very long time, and I hope they find some success, but I think it remains an open problem in most ways. For my two cents I tend to think that pursuits like defining consciousness, or even higher level things like free will and even spirituality are very worthwhile, but likewise very difficult if not impossible to collaborate on with rigor. I think I was a bit too flip in painting it as though consciousness and free will and spirituality are somehow inferior or less important topics than physics and cosmology and what not: put better I would say that they are very different pursuits and I think it perilous to try to integrate them under the guise of science. Physics can be done in collaboration with others, we have mediums for reaching some level of evolving consensus on that. Consciousness and free will are much less obviously amenable to any rigorous consensus.