The case against reality + How old & new make the mind ebb & flow

[Carol]

Oh my, I am afraid it is my fault your thread went way off topic.  Back to the beginning.

The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

 
What is the meaning of, " it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction"?

Is this what it all means?

http://www.learning-mind.com/10-mind-blo...the-world/

10. Phenomenalism.

Everyone is interested in what happens to things when we aren’t looking at them. Scientists have carefully studied this problem and some of them came to a simple conclusion – they disappear. Well, not quite like this. Phenomenalist philosophers believe that objects only exist as a phenomenon of consciousness. So, your laptop is only here while you are aware of it and believe in its existence, but when you turn away from it, it ceases to exist until you or someone else interacts with it. There is no existence without perception. This is the root of phenomenalism.

[C C]

What is the meaning of, " it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction"?

Technically, if that interview isn't sufficient, then one needs to consult Hoffman further or rather more of his actual work. I primarily post these things to provide people with something to potentially discuss, and not because I either agree with them or grasp everything about them. However, in the interview he says:

"The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness function —mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

[...] Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality."

Is this what it all means? [...] 10. Phenomenalism. [...] Phenomenalist philosophers believe that objects only exist as a phenomenon of consciousness. So, your laptop is only here while you are aware of it and believe in its existence, but when you turn away from it, it ceases to exist until you or someone else interacts with it. There is no existence without perception. This is the root of phenomenalism.

Phenomenalism was often found in conjunction with positivism, due to the latter's stance against metaphysics or ontological speculation. Positivism in turn is an ancestor of scientism -- that's "scientism" without the pejorative usage.

There were different strains of phenomenalism (and also positivism), which probably results in routine misunderstandings due to the ambiguity of trying to lump them all together under a common definition and motive.

As Reed points out below, the "materialist" scientists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th century were often phenomenalists. Reed, however, is one of many who misinterprets the usage of "phenomenal, phenomena" in this context as always referring to something mental (we'll clarify that further down).

EDWARD S. REED: "Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group--and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time--was not a materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones. But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world.

Matter for Huxley was just what it was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.

The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations.

This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890." --From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology

Panphenomenalism - David Hume (1711-1776) formulated the theory of Panphenomenalism. He denied the existence of all ultimate reality (metaphysical reality), accepting as valid data only those things experienced as sense impressions; in other words, he asserted that existence is limited to phenomena, which are objects, not of reason, but of experience. By rejecting the idea of cause and soul as substances, he eliminated the entire problem of interaction. Hume concluded that events depend upon merely repetitious or sequential activities; that nothing in the universe is ever created, or caused to act, by anything else; and that reality consists only of a series of phenomena appearing in a temporal order. --Ideas of the Great Philosophers; p. 107 - 108; by William S. Sahakian, Mabel Lewis Sahakian (1966)

"Pan-phenomenalism" is somewhat akin to panexperientientialism, in that both posit phenomenal characteristics or capacity being ubiquitous and existing either prior to their conception and arrangement as "consciousness" or that experience outruns cognition (awareness, intellect). The term "pan-phenomenalism" was never coined by David Hume himself, but was a later label concocted for subsuming some of his views (like bundle-theory) under. In that context, Hume (again) considered his "impressions" (phenomena) to actually be antecedent to their coordination as a mind or psychological system, and thus they weren't fundamentally "mental".

The earliest flavor of neutral monism shared roots with phenomenalism, as well as dual-aspect tendencies. Here's an early example of dual-aspectism from Charles Peirce: "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence

The word / doctrine of "phenomenalism" is derived from "phenomenal". The etymological source of "phenomenal" is the ancient Greek word "phainein", which means "show forth" (as in a showing or a manifestation).

Erwin Schrödinger: "The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?" --What is Life? Mind and Matter

Henri Poincare: [A] reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to us all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can obtain. --The Value Of Science

Circa 1908 or 1909, Vladimir Lenin wrote a book criticizing a particular positivist movement affiliated with Ernst Mach that was infiltrating Marxist / dialectical materialist philosophy in Russia. Before venturing into his counter-attack on them, Lenin opened the topic something like this...

V. I. Lenin: Anyone in the least acquainted with philosophical literature must know that scarcely a single contemporary professor of philosophy (or of theology) can be found who is not directly or indirectly engaged in refuting materialism. They have declared materialism refuted a thousand times, yet are continuing to refute it for the thousand and first time. All our revisionists are engaged in refuting materialism, pretending, however, that actually they are only refuting the materialist Plekhanov, and not the materialist Engels, nor the materialist Feuerbach, nor the materialist views of J. Dietzgen -- and, moreover, that they are refuting materialism from the standpoint of "recent" and "modern" positivism, natural science, and so forth. . . .

I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated by . . . . Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for "empirio-criticist" because it is shorter and simpler and has already acquired rights of citizenship in Russian literature. That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . . .

The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

[Carol]

Well, I don't know how much fun posting is without communication, some kind of interaction between the person posting and the person who reads the post? On the hand, I am not sure what kind of reply is appreciated and what is not?

I am still hung up on the heart memory issue and suspect the issue of reality and what we think it is, is related. We know dogs pick up a lot of information from what they smell, but we don't think they are thinking about the information as we do. I think we are overly impressed with how language influences our thinking? On some level we probably get direct information like a roach or dog gets direct information, but I think our talking brains may be so noisy we are not always aware of the direct information, and that we might actually block out direct information by being overly dependent on hearing what our talkings brains are telling us. In fact, I have read in emergency situations, it is possible our thinking brains shut down and this can result in taking actions that are not socially approved.

Is that reply an appropriate reply?

[C C]

Well, I don't know how much fun posting is without communication, some kind of interaction between the person posting and the person who reads the post?

If you're going to dismiss time-consuming replies like the last post as a lack of "interaction", then I'm afraid you'll have to find somebody else willing to waste part of their day on this board. I can only allot a certain amount of time to a sock-puppet, especially when it belongs to ____.

[Zinjanthropos]

My question is if more than one reality is necessary for life to begin?

As an alternative to, say, intelligent design... Multiverse scenarios are appealed to as a natural explanation for a Fine-tuned Universe. When the latter settings of fundamental constants are taken to be necessary for cosmic conditions which allow and facilitate the emergence of life.

Can a universe incapable of creating life be real? Who's going to observe it?  If observation, sense, and awareness is so important in determining our reality then how is it possible for a universe not fined tuned for life to be real? Assuming we could somehow enter this other universe then would that make it real? Is that how important life is to reality? Seems ridiculous to think this way.

What I'm saying is that other universes that do not allow for life as we know it are only real once we make the determination that it is there. In essence we declare that other universes (realities) exist without direct observation. Is not science similar to religion in this regard, taking what they believe to be evidence from this reality to create another reality to suit their means? IOW's it is only a belief, you can call it phenomenalism or whatever you wish but it is totally lacking in proof and there are no justifiable facts. I don't know who said it but if I'm allowed to paraphrase a bit, it goes something like once you stop believing in reality it doesn't go away.

[Syne]

"Real", as in existing, and "reality", as in the perception of an existence, are two different things. Reality depends on observation, while what is real doesn't necessarily rely on observation...depending on your philosophical bent.

Multiverse theories are not falsifiable, so in this regard, they are more akin to religion than science. They also posit more than other other QM interpretations, so they are less parsimonious. But when it only takes one unfounded assumption to make a lot of other things more readily comprehensible, you can understand the motive, even if there's no reason to think things should prove to be readily comprehensible to humans.

[Carol]

Well, I don't know how much fun posting is without communication, some kind of interaction between the person posting and the person who reads the post?

If you're going to dismiss time-consuming replies like the last post as a lack of "interaction", then I'm afraid you'll have to find somebody else willing to waste part of their day on this board. I can only allot a certain amount of time to a sock-puppet, especially when it belongs to ____.

I think we have a misunderstanding?  It was my intention to honor the excellent post you make by replying, and I was questioning if you appreciated my efforts or wish I stop messing up your threads.   But it appears you took offense to what I said?

---

"Real", as in existing, and "reality", as in the perception of an existence, are two different things. Reality depends on observation, while what is real doesn't necessarily rely on observation...depending on your philosophical bent.

Multiverse theories are not falsifiable, so in this regard, they are more akin to religion than science. They also posit more than other other QM interpretations, so they are less parsimonious. But when it only takes one unfounded assumption to make a lot of other things more readily comprehensible, you can understand the motive, even if there's no reason to think things should prove to be readily comprehensible to humans.

Nice distinction between real and reality.   Our perception of what is real seems limited by our materialistic language and thinking, and of course the limits of our senses.  Quantum physics makes it clear reality is energy.  I am not sure how well we understand energy?  

Why would some forms of energy be a rock and other forms be what we call living things?  All of this has to have an organizing force because there is nothing we call real unless the energy is organized and manifested in forms.  I question what intelligence is because if all this is not interacting in harmony there would be only destruction, right?

[Zinjanthropos]

Why would some forms of energy be a rock and other forms be what we call living things?  All of this has to have an organizing force because there is nothing we call real unless the energy is organized and manifested in forms.  I question what intelligence is because if all this is not interacting in harmony there would be only destruction, right?

Aren't we just thinking rocks? I mean what's the difference between the carbon in a rock and the carbon in your body? That rock carbon can become a thinker and that thinker's carbon a rock.

[Carol]

I think there are important differences between animals and rocks. Picking up from what CC posted, rocks do not act and react. Rocks are as they are because their substance has been acted upon heat and pressure making them as are they are. This process is very different from the process of procreation that results in life forms. I do not think a rock has any kind of sensors, but crystals oh, no... your line of questioning is pushing me off topic. I am stopping here because this going off topic, and also I am too tired for all this thinking.

[Zinjanthropos]

I think there are important differences between animals and rocks.  Picking up from what CC posted, rocks do not act and react.  Rocks are as they are because their substance has been acted upon heat and pressure making them as are they are.  This process is very different from the process of procreation that results in life forms.  I do not think a rock has any kind of sensors, but crystals oh, no...  your line of questioning is pushing me off topic.  I am stopping here because this going off topic, and also I am too tired for all this thinking.

Didn't mean rocks think or react. I'm only saying we are made of the same stuff. Technically speaking, does that make us a rock pile?   .