Sigmund Freud’s and C.S. Lewis’s fictional encounter

Last week I went and saw the movie, Freud’s Last Session, where Anthony Hopkins plays Freud, when he was in London on the very cusp of WW2 and dying of cancer of the mouth, and Mathew Goode plays the Oxford Don, C.S. Lewis. It’s a fictional account, taken from a play I believe, about their meeting at Freud’s home. Its historical veracity is put into question by a disclaimer given after the movie proper finishes, saying that it’s recorded that Freud did, in fact, meet an Oxford Don, but whose identity was never revealed or confirmed.
 
It's the sort of movie that would attract people with a philosophical bent like myself. I thought the cinema better attended than I expected, though it was far from full. Anthony Hopkin’s Freud is playful in the way he challenges Mathew Goode’s Lewis, whilst still being very direct and not pulling any punches. There is an interruption to their conversation by an air-raid siren, and when they go into a bunker, Lewis has a panic-attack, because of his experience in the trenches of WW1. Freud helps him to deal with it in the moment.
 
I’ve read works by both of them, though I’m hardly a scholar. I actually studied Freud in a philosophy class, believe it or not. I’m better read in Jung than Freud. I think Lewis is a good essayist, though I disagree with him philosophically on many counts. Having said that, I expect if I’d met him, I’d have a different opinion of him than just his ideas. I have very good friends who hold almost exactly the same views, so you don’t just judge someone for what they believe, if you get to know them in the flesh.
 
And that’s what came across in this hypothetical exchange – that you have 2 intellectuals who can find mutual respect despite having antithetical views about God and religion and other things, like homosexuality. On that last point, Sigmund’s daughter, Anna, was in a relationship with a woman, which Freud obviously didn’t approve of. In fact, the father-daughter relationship in the movie, was portrayed as very Freudian, where they both seemed to suffer from an unhealthy attachment. Nevertheless, Anna Freud went on to make a name for herself in child psychoanalysis, and there’s a scene where she has to deal with an overbearing and arrogant young man, and her putdown made me want to clap; I just wish I could remember it. Anyway, Anna’s story provides a diversionary, yet not irrelevant, subplot, which makes the movie a bit more than just a two-hander.
 
There are scenes where Mathew Goode’s Lewis has dreams or visions and finds himself in a forest where he comes across a deer and one where he sees a bright overwhelming light. There was a sense in these scenes that he felt he was in the presence of God, and it made me realise that I couldn’t judge him for that. I’ve long argued that God is a personal experience that can’t be shared, but we overlay it with our cultural norms. It was in these scenes that I felt his character was portrayed most authentically.
 

Do you think Hoffman’s theories about reality and perception are true?

I’ve written about this twice before in some detail, but this was a question on Quora, I addressed last year. I include it here because it’s succinct yet provides specific, robust arguments in the negative.
 
There is a temptation to consider Hoffman a charlatan, but I think that’s a bit harsh and probably not true. The point is that he either knows what he’s arguing is virtually indefensible yet perseveres simply out of notoriety, or he really believes what he’s saying. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he’s gone so far down this rabbit-hole and invested so much of his time and reputation that it would take a severe cognitive dissonance to even consider he could be wrong. And this goes for a lot of us, in many different fields. In a completely different context, just look at those who have been Trump acolytes turned critics.
 
Below is my response to the question:
 
One-word answer, No. From the very first, when I read an academic paper he co-wrote with Chetan Kaprash, titled Objects of Consciousness (Frontiers in Psychology, 17 June 2014), I have found it very difficult to take him seriously. And everything I’ve read and seen since, only makes me more sceptical.

Hoffman’s ideas are consistent with the belief that we live in a computer simulation, though he’s never made that claim. Nevertheless, his go-to analogy for ‘objects’ we consider to be ‘real’ is the desktop icons on your computer. He talks about the ‘spacetime perceptual interface of H. Sapiens’ as a direct reference to a computer desktop, but it only exists in our minds. In fact, what he describes is what one would experience if one were to use a VR headset. But there is another everyday occurrence where we experience this phenomenon and it’s known as dreaming. Dreams are totally solipsistic, and you’ll notice they often defy reality without us giving them a second thought – until we wake up.

So, how do you know you’re not in a dream? Well, for one, we have no common collective memories with anyone we meet. Secondly, interactions and experiences we have in a dream, that would kill us in real life, don’t. Have you ever fallen from a great height in a dream? I have, many times.

And this is the main contention I have with Hoffman: reality can kill you. He readily admitted in a YouTube video that he wouldn’t step in front of a moving train. He tells us to take the train "seriously but not literally", after all it’s only a desktop icon. But, in his own words, if you put a desktop icon in the desktop bin it will have ‘consequences’. So, walking in front of a moving train is akin to putting the desktop icon of yourself in the bin. A good metaphor perhaps, but hardly a scientifically viable explanation of why you would die.

There are so many arguments one can use against Hoffman, that it’s hard to know where to start, or stop. His most outrageous claim is that ‘space and time doesn’t exist unperceived’, which means that all of history, including cosmological history only exists in the mind. Therefore, not only could we have not evolved, but neither could the planets, solar system and galaxies. In fact, the light we see from distant galaxies, not to mention the CMBR (the earliest observable event in the Universe), doesn’t exist unless someone’s looking at it.

Finally, you can set up a camera to take an image of an object (like a wild cat at night) without any conscious object in sight, except maybe the creature it took a photo of. But then, how did the camera only exist when the animal who didn’t see it, created it with its own consciousness?
 

Addendum:

Following my publishing this post, I watched a later, fairly recent video by Hoffman where he gives further reasons for his beliefs. In particular, he states that physics has shown that space and time are no longer fundamental, which is quite a claim. He cites the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed who has used a mathematical object called amplituhedrons to accurately predict the amplitudes of gluons in particle physics. I’ve read about this before in a book by Graham Farmelo (The Universe Speaks in Numbers; How Modern Maths Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets). Farmelo tells us that Arkani-Hamed is an American born Iranian, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. To quote Arkani-Hamed directly from Farmelo's book:
 
This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic.
 
And this appears to be the point that Hoffman has latched onto, which he’s extrapolated to say that space and time are not fundamental. Whereas I drew a slightly different conclusion. In my discussion of Farmelo’s book, I made the following point:


The ‘something more basic’ is only known mathematically, as opposed to physically. I found this a most compelling tale and a history lesson in how mathematics appears to be intrinsically linked to the minutia of atomic physics.
 
I followed this with another reference to Arkani-Hamed.



In the same context, Arkani-Hamed says that ‘the mathematics of whole numbers in scattering-amplitude theory chimes… with the ancient Greeks' dream: to connect all nature with whole numbers.’
 
But, as I pointed out both here and in my last post, mathematical abstractions providing descriptions of natural phenomena are not in themselves physical. I see them as a code that allows us to fathom nature’s deepest secrets, which I believe Arkani-Hamed has contributed to.
 
Hoffman’s most salient point is that we need to go beyond time and space to find something more fundamental. In effect, he’s saying we need to go outside the Universe, and he might even be right, but that does not negate the pertinent, empirically based and widely held belief that space and time are arguably the most fundamental parameters within the Universe. If he’s saying that consciousness possibly exists beyond, therefore outside, the Universe, I won’t argue with that, because we don’t know.
 
Hoffman has created mathematical models of consciousness, which I admit I haven’t read or seen, and he argues that those mathematical models lead to the same mathematical objects (abstractions) that Arkani-Hamed and others have used to describe fundamental physics. Therefore, consciousness creates the objects that the mathematics describes. That’s a very long bow to draw, to use a well-worn euphemism.
 

What does physics really tell us about reality?

 A little while ago I got into another discussion with Mark John Fernee (see previous post), but this time dealing with the relationship between ontology and epistemology as determined by physics. It came about in reference to a paper in Physics Today that someone cited, by N. David Nermin, a retired Professor of physics in Ithaca, New York, titled What’s bad about this habit. In particular, he talked about our tendency to ‘reify’ mathematically determined theories into reality. It helps if we have some definitions, which Fernee conveniently provided that were both succinct and precise.

Epistemology - concerning knowledge.

Ontology - concerning reality.

Reify - to think of an idea as real.

It so happens that around the same time I read an article in New Scientist (25 Mar 2024, pp.32-5) Strange but true? by philosopher, Eric Schwitzgebel, which covers similar territory. The title tells you little, but it’s really about how modern theories in physics don’t really tell us what reality is; instead giving us a range of possibilities to choose from.

I will start with Nermin, who spends the first page talking about quantum mechanics (QM), as it’s the most obvious candidate for a mathematical theory that gets reified by almost everyone who encounters it. This selected quote gives a good feel for what he’s talking about.

When I was a graduate student learning quantum field theory, I had a friend who was enchanted by the revelation that quantum fields were the real stuff that makes up the world. He reified quantum fields. But I hope you will agree that you are not a continuous field of operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Nor, for that matter, is the page you are reading or the chair you are sitting in. Quantum fields are useful mathematical tools. They enable us to calculate things.

I found another quote by Freeman Dyson (2014), who makes a similar point to Nermin about the wave function (Ψ).

Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase "collapse of the wave-function" to describe what happens when an object is observed. This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant.

But Nermin goes on to challenge even the reality of space and time. Arguing that it is a mathematical abstraction. 

What about spacetime itself? Is that real? Spacetime is a (3+1) dimensional mathematical continuum. Even if you are a mathematical Platonist, I would urge you to consider that this continuum is nothing more than an extremely effective way to represent relations between distinct events.

He then goes on to explain that ‘an event… can be represented as a mathematical point in spacetime.’

He elaborates how this has become so reified into ordinary language that we’re no longer aware that it is an abstraction.

So spacetime is an abstract four-dimensional mathematical continuum of points that approximately represent phenomena whose spatial and temporal extension we find it useful or necessary to ignore. The device of spacetime has been so powerful that we often reify that abstract bookkeeping structure, saying that we inhabit a world that is such a four (or, for some of us, ten) dimensional continuum. The reification of abstract time and space is built into the very languages we speak, making it easy to miss the intellectual sleight of hand.

And this is where I start to have issues with his overall thesis, whereas Fernee said, ‘I completely concur with what he has written, and it is well articulated.’ 

When I challenged Fernee specifically on Nermin’s points about space-time, Fernee argued:

His contention was that even events in space-time are an abstraction. We all assume the existence of an objective reality, and I don't know of anyone who would seriously challenge that idea. Yet our descriptions are abstractions. All we ask of them is that they are consistent, describe the observed phenomena, and can be used to make predictions.

I would make an interesting observation on this very point, that distinguishes an AI’s apparent perspective of space and time compared to ours. Even using the word, ‘apparent’, infers there is a difference that we don’t think about.

I’ve made the point in other posts, including one on Kant, that we create a model of space and time in our heads which we use to interact with the physical space and time that exists outside our heads, and so do all living creatures with eyes, ears and touch. In fact, the model is so realistic that we think it is the external reality.

When we throw or catch a ball on the sporting field, we know that our brains don’t work out the quadratic equations that determine where it’s going to land. But imagine an AI controlled artillery device, which would make those calculations and use a 3-dimensional grid to determine where its ordinance was going to hit. Likewise, imagine an AI controlled drone using GPS co-ordinates – in other words, a mathematical abstraction of space and time – to navigate its way to a target. And that demonstrates the fundamental difference that I think Nermin is trying to delineate. The point is that from our perspective, there is no difference.

This quote gives a clearer description of Nermin’s philosophical point of view.

Space and time and spacetime are not properties of the world we live in but concepts we have invented to help us organize classical events. Notions like dimension or interval, or curvature or geodesics, are properties not of the world we live in but of the abstract geometric constructions we have invented to help us organize events. As Einstein once again put it, “Space and time are modes by which we think, not conditions under which we live.”

Whereas I’d argue that they are both, and the mathematics tells us things about the ‘properties of the world [universe]’ which we can’t directly perceive with our senses – like ‘geodesics’ and the ‘curvature’ of spacetime. Yet they can be measured as well as calculated, which is why we know GR (Einstein’s general theory of relativity) works.

My approach to understanding physics, which may be misguided and would definitely be the wrong approach according to Nermin and Fernee, is to try and visualise the concepts that the maths describes. The concept of a geodesic is a good example. I’ve elaborated on this in another post, but I can remember doing Newtonian-based physics in high school, where gravity made no sense to me. I couldn’t understand why the force of gravity seemed to be self-adjusting so that the acceleration (g) was the same for all objects, irrespective of their mass.

It was only many years later, when I understood the concept of a geodesic using the principle of least action, that it all made sense. The objects don’t experience a force per se, but travel along the path of least action which is also the path of maximum relativistic time. (I’ve described this phenomenon elsewhere.) The point is that, in GR, mass is not in the equations (unlike Newton’s mathematical representation) and the force we all experience is from whatever it is that stops us falling, which could be a chair you’re sitting on or the Earth.

So, the abstract ‘geodesic’ explains what Newton couldn’t, even though Newton gave us the right answers for most purposes.

And this leads me to extend the discussion to include the New Scientist article. The author, Eric Schwitzgebel, ponders 3 areas of scientific inquiry: quantum mechanics (are there many worlds?); consciousness (is it innate in all matter?) and computer simulations (do we live in one?). I’ll address them in reverse order, because that’s easiest.

As Paul Davies pointed out in The Goldilocks Enigma, the so-called computer-simulation hypothesis is a variant on Intelligent Design. If you don’t believe in ID, you shouldn’t believe that the universe is a computer simulation, because some entity had to design it and produce the code.

'Is consciousness innate?' is the same as pansychism, as Schwitzgebel concurs, and I’d say there is no evidence for it, so not worth arguing about. Basically, I don’t want to waste time on these 2 questions, and, to be fair, Schwitzgebel’s not saying he’s an advocate for either of them.

Which brings me to QM, and that’s relevant. Schwitzbegel makes the point that all the scientific interpretations have bizarre or non-common-sensical qualities, of which MWI (many worlds interpretation) is just one. It’s relevance to this discussion is that they are all reifications that are independent of the mathematics, because the mathematics doesn’t discern between them. And this gets to the nub of the issue for me. Most physicists would agree that physics, in a nutshell, is about creating mathematical models that are then tested by experimentation and observation, often using extremely high-tech, not-to-mention behemoth instruments, like the LHC and the James Webb telescope.

It needs to be pointed out that, without exception, all these mathematical models have limitations and, historically, some have led us astray. The most obvious being Ptolemy’s model of the solar system involving epicycles. String theory, with its 10 dimensions and 10^500 possible universes, is a potential modern-day contender, but we don’t really know.

Nevertheless, as I explained with my brief discourse on geodesics (above), there are occasions when the mathematics provides an insight we would otherwise be ignorant of.

Basically, I think what Schwitzgebel is really touching on is the boundary between philosophy and science, which I believe has always existed and is an essential dynamic, despite the fact that many scientists are dismissive of its role.

Returning to Nermin, it’s worth quoting his final passage.

Quantum mechanics has brought home to us the necessity of separating that irreducibly real experience from the remarkable, beautiful, and highly abstract super-structure we have found to tie it all together.

The ‘real experience’ includes the flow of time; the universality of now which requires memory for us to know it exists; the subjective experience of free will. All of these are considered ‘illusions’ by many scientists, not least Sabine Hossenfelder in her excellent book, Existential Physics. I tend to agree with another physicist, Richard Muller, that what this tells us is that there is a problem with our theories and not our reality.

In an attempt to reify QM with reality, I like the notion proposed by Freeman Dyson that it’s a mathematical model that describes the future. As he points out, it gives us probabilities, and it provides a logical reason why Feynman’s abstraction of an infinite number of ‘paths’ are never observed.

Curiously, Fernee provides tacit support for the idea that the so-called ‘measurement’ or ‘observation’ provides an ‘abstract’ distinction between past and future in physics, though he doesn’t use those specific words.

In quantum mechanics, the measurement hypothesis, which includes the collapse of the wave function, is an irreversible process. As we perceive the world through measurements, time will naturally seem irreversible to us.

Very similar to something Davies said in another context:

The very act of measurement breaks the time symmetry of quantum mechanics in a process sometimes described as the collapse of the wave function…. the rewind button is destroyed as soon as that measurement is made.

Lastly, I would like to mention magnetism, because, according to SR, it’s mathematically dependent on a moving electric charge. Only it’s not always, as this video explicates. You can get a magnetic field from electric spin, which is an abstraction, as no one suggests that electrons do physically spin, even though they produce measurable magnetic moments.

What most people don’t know is that our most common experience of a magnetic field, which is a bar magnet, is created purely by electron spin and not moving electrons.

What would Kant say?

Even though this is a philosophy blog, my knowledge of Western philosophy is far from comprehensive. I’ve read some of the classic texts, like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes Meditations, Hume’s A treatise of Human Nature, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; all a long time ago. I’ve read extracts from Plato, as well as Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism and Mill’s Utilitarianism. As you can imagine, I only recollect fragments, since I haven’t revisited them in years.
 
Nevertheless, there are a few essays on this blog that go back to the time when I did. One of those is an essay on Kant, which I retitled, Is Kant relevant to the modern world? Not so long ago, I wrote a post that proposed Kant as an unwitting bridge between Plato and modern physics. I say, ‘unwitting’, because, as far as I know, Kant never referenced a connection to Plato, and it’s quite possible that I’m the only person who has. Basically, I contend that the Platonic realm, which is still alive and well in mathematics, is a good candidate for Kant’s transcendental idealism, while acknowledging Kant meant something else. Specifically, Kant argued that time and space, like sensory experiences of colour, taste and sound, only exist in the mind.
 
Here is a good video, which explains Kant’s viewpoint better than me. If you watch it to the end, you’ll find the guy who plays Devil’s advocate to the guy expounding on Kant’s views makes the most compelling arguments (they’re both animated icons).

But there’s a couple of points they don’t make which I do. We ‘sense’ time and space in the same way we sense light, sound and smell to create a model inside our heads that attempts to match the world outside our heads, so we can interact with it without getting killed. In fact, our modelling of time and space is arguably more important than any other aspect of it.
 
I’ve always had a mixed, even contradictory, appreciation of Kant. I consider his insight that we may never know the things-in-themselves to be his greatest contribution to epistemology, and was arguably affirmed by 20th Century physics. Both relativity and quantum mechanics (QM) have demonstrated that what we observe does not necessarily reflect reality. Specifically, different observers can see and even measure different parameters of the same event. This is especially true when relativistic effects come into play.
 
In relativity, different observers not only disagree on time and space durations, but they can’t agree on simultaneity. As the Kant advocate in the video points out, surely this is evidence that space and time only exist in the mind, as Kant originally proposed. The Devil’s advocate resorts to an argument of 'continuity', meaning that without time as a property independent of the mind, objects and phenomena (like a candle burning) couldn’t continue to happen without an observer present.
 
But I would argue that Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which tells us that different observers can measure different durations of space and time (I’ll come back to this later), also tells us that the entire universe requires a framework of space and time for the objects to exist at all. In other words, GR tells us, mathematically, that there is an interdependence between the gravitational field that permeates and determines the motion of objects throughout the entire universe, and the spacetime metric those same objects inhabit. In fact, they are literally on opposite sides of the same equation.
 
And this brings me to the other point that I think is missing in the video’s discussion. Towards the end, the Devil’s advocate introduces ‘the veil of perception’ and argues:
 
We can only perceive the world indirectly; we have no idea what the world is beyond this veil… How can we then theorise about the world beyond our perceptions? …Kant basically claims that things-in-themselves exist but we do not know and cannot know anything about these things-in-themselves… This far-reaching world starts to feel like a fantasy.
 
But every physicist has an answer to this, because 20th Century physics has taken us further into this so-called ‘fantasy’ than Kant could possibly have imagined, even though it appears to be a neverending endeavour. And it’s specifically mathematics that has provided the means, which the 2 Socratic-dialogue icons have ignored. Which is why I contend that it’s mathematical Platonism that has replaced Kant’s transcendental idealism. It’s rendered by the mind yet it models reality better than anything else we have available. It’s the only means we have available to take us behind ‘the veil of perception’ and reveal the things-in-themselves.
 
And this leads me to a related point that was actually the trigger for me writing this in the first place.
 
In my last post, I mentioned I’m currently reading Kip A. Thorne’s book, Black Holes and Time Warps; Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (1994). It’s an excellent book on many levels, because it not only gives a comprehensive history, involving both Western and Soviet science, it also provides insights and explanations most of us are unfamiliar with.
 
To give an example that’s relevant to this post, Thorne explains how making measurements at the extreme curvature of spacetime near the event horizon of a black hole, gives the exact same answer whether it’s the spacetime that distorts while the ‘rulers’ remain unchanged, or it’s the rulers that change while it’s the spacetime that remains ‘flat’. We can’t tell the difference. And this effectively confirms Kant’s thesis that we can never know the things-in-themselves.
 
To quote Thorne:
 
What is the genuine truth? Is spacetime really flat, or is it really curved? To a physicist like me this is an uninteresting question because it has no physical consequences (my emphasis). Both viewpoints, curved spacetime and flat, give the same predictions for any measurements performed with perfect rulers and clocks… (Earlier he defines ‘perfect rulers and clocks’ as being derived at the atomic scale)
 
Ian Miller (a physicist who used to be active on Quora) once made the point, regarding space-contraction, that it’s the ruler that deforms and not the space. And I’ve made the point myself that a clock can effectively be a ruler, because a clock that runs slower measures a shorter distance for a given velocity, compared to another so-called stationary observer who will measure the same distance as longer. This happens in the twin paradox thought experiment, though it’s rarely mentioned (even by me).

How can we achieve world peace?

 Two posts ago, I published my submission to Philosophy Now's Question of the Month, from 2 months ago: What are the limit of knowledge? Which was published in Issue 159 (Dec 2023/Jan 2024). Logically, they inform readers of the next Question of the Month, which is the title of this post. I'm almost certain they never publish 2 submissions by the same author in a row, so I'm publishing this answer now. It's related to my last post, obviously, and one I wrote some time ago (Humanity's Achilles Heel).

There are many aspects to this question, not least whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. It’s well known that people underestimate the duration and cost of a project, even when it’s their profession, because people are optimists by default. Only realists are pessimistic, and I’m in the latter category, because I estimate the duration of projects professionally.
 
There are a number of factors that mitigate against world peace, the primary one being that humans are inherently tribal and are quick to form ingroup-outgroup mental-partitions, exemplified by politics the world over. In this situation, rational thought and reasoned argument take a back seat to confirmation bias and emotive rhetoric. Add to this dynamic, the historically observed and oft-repeated phenomena that we follow charismatic, cult-propagating leaders, and you have a recipe for self-destruction on a national scale. This is the biggest obstacle to world peace. These leaders thrive on and cultivate division with its kindred spirits of hatred and demonisation of the ‘other’: the rationale for all of society’s ills becomes an outgroup identified by nationality, race, skin-colour, culture or religion.
 
Wealth, or the lack of it, is a factor as well. Inequality provides a motive and a rationale for conflict. It often goes hand-in-hand with oppression, but even when it doesn’t, the anger and resentment can be exploited and politicised by populist leaders, whose agenda is more focused on their own sense of deluded historical significance than actually helping the people they purportedly serve.
 
If you have conflict - and it doesn’t have to be military – then as long as you have leaders who refuse to compromise, you’ll never find peace. Only moderates on both sides can broker peace.
 
So, while I’m a pessimist or realist, I do see a ‘how’. If we only elect leaders who seek and find consensus, and remove leaders who sow division, there is a chance. The best leaders, be they corporate, political or on a sporting field, are the ones who bring out the best in others and are not just feeding their own egos. But all this is easier said than done, as we are witnessing in certain parts of the world right now. For as long as we elect leaders who are narcissistic and cult-like, we will continue to sow the seeds of self-destruction.

Philosophy in practice

 As someone recently pointed out, my posts on this blog invariably arise from things I have read (sometimes watched) and I’ve already written a post based on a column I read in the last issue of Philosophy Now (No 158, Oct/Nov 2023).
 
Well, I’ve since read a few more articles and they have prompted quite a lot of thinking. Firstly, there is an article called What Happened to Philosophy? By Dr Alexander Jeuk, who is to quote: “an independent researcher writing on philosophy, economics, politics and the institutional structure of science.” He compares classical philosophy (in his own words, the ‘great philosophers’) with the way philosophy is practiced today in academia – that place most us of don’t visit and wouldn’t understand the language if we did.
 
I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s relevance to this post is that he laments the specialisation of philosophy, which he blames (if I can use that word) on the specialisation of science. The specialisation of most things is not a surprise to anyone who works in a technical field (I work in engineering). I should point out that I’m not a technical person, so I’m a non-specialist who works in a specialist field. Maybe that puts me in a better position than most to address this. I have a curious mind that started young and my curiosity shifted as I got older, which means I never really settled into one area of knowledge, and, if I had, I didn’t quite have the intellectual ability to become competent in it. And that’s why this blog is a bit eclectic.
 
In his conclusion, Jeuk suggests that ‘great philosophy’ should be looked for ‘in the classics, and perhaps encourage a re-emergence of great philosophical thought from outside academia.’ He mentions social media and the internet, which is relevant to this blog. I don’t claim to do ‘great philosophy’; I just attempt to disperse ideas and provoke thought. But I think that’s what philosophy represents to most people outside of academia. Academic philosophy has become lost in its obsession with language, whilst using language that most find obtuse, if not opaque.
 
Another article was titled Does a Just Society Require Just Citizens? By Jimmy Aflonso Licon, Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Arizona State University. I wouldn’t call the title misleading, but it doesn’t really describe the content of the essay, or even get to the gist of it, in my view. Licon introduces a term, ‘moral mediocrity’, which might have been a better title, if an enigmatic one, as it’s effectively what he discusses for the next, not-quite 3 pages.
 
He makes the point that our moral behaviour stems from social norms – a point I’ve made myself – but he makes it more compellingly. Most of us do ‘moral’ acts because that’s what our peers do, and we are species-destined (my term, not his) to conform. This is what he calls moral mediocrity, because we don’t really think it through or deliberate on whether it’s right or wrong, though we might convince ourselves that we do. He makes the salient point that if we had lived when slavery was the norm, we would have been slave-owners (assuming the reader is white, affluent and male). Likewise, suffrage was once anathema to a lot of women, as well as men. This supports my view that morality changes, and what was once considered radical becomes conservative. And such changes are usually generational, as we are witnessing in the current age with marriage equality.
 
He coins another term, when he says ‘we are the recipients of a moral inheritance’ (his italics). In other words, the moral norms we follow today, we’ve inherited from our forebears. Towards the end of his essay, he discusses Kant’s ideas on ‘duty’. I won’t go into that, but, if I understand Licon’s argument correctly, he’s saying that a ‘just society’ is one that has norms and laws that allow moral mediocrity, whereby its members don’t have to think about what’s right or wrong; they just follow the rules. This leads to his very last sentence: And this is fundamentally the moral problem with moral mediocrity: it is wrongly motivated.
 
I’ve written on this before, and, given the title as well as the content, I needed to think on what I consider leads to a ‘just society’. And I keep coming back to the essential need for trust. Societies don’t function without some level of trust, but neither do personal relationships, contractual arrangements or the raising of children.
 
And this leads to the third article in the same issue, Seeing Through Transparency, by Paul Doolan, who ‘teaches philosophy at Zurich International School and is the author of Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies; Unremembering Decolonization (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021).
 
In effect, he discusses the paradoxical nature of modern societies, whereby we insist on ‘transparency’ yet claim that privacy is sacrosanct – see the contradiction? Is this hypocrisy? And this relates directly to trust. Without transparency, be it corporate or governmental, we have trust issues. My experience is that when it comes to personal relationships, it’s a given, a social norm in fact, that a person reveals as much of their interior life as they want to, and it’s not ours to mine. An example of moral mediocrity perhaps. And yet, as Doolan points out, we give away so much on social media, where our online persona takes on a life of its own, which we cultivate (this blog not being an exception).
 
I think there does need to be transparency about decisions that affect our lives collectively, as opposed to secrets we all keep for the sake of our sanity. I have written dystopian fiction where people are surveilled to the point of monitoring all speech, and explored how it affects personal relationships. This already happens in some parts of the world. I’ve also explored a dystopian scenario where the surveillance is less obvious – every household has an android that monitors all activity. We might already have that with certain devices in our homes. Can you turn them off?  Do you have a device that monitors everyone who comes to your door?
 
The thing is that we become habituated to their presence, and it becomes part of our societal structure. As I said earlier, social norms change and are largely generational. Now they incorporate AI as well, and it’s happening without a lot of oversight or consultation with users. I don’t want to foster paranoia, but the genie has already escaped and I’d suggest it’s a matter of how we use it rather than how we put it back in the bottle.

Leaving that aside, Doolan also asks if you would behave differently if you could be completely invisible, which, of course, has been explored in fiction. We all know that anonymity fosters bad behaviour – just look online. One of my tenets is that honesty starts with honesty to oneself; it determines how we behave towards others.
 
I also know that an extreme environment, like a prison camp, can change one’s moral compass. I’ve never experienced it, but my father did. It brings out the best and worst in people, and I’d contend that you wouldn’t know how you’d be affected if you haven’t experienced it. This is an environment that turns Licon’s question on its head: can you be just in an intrinsically unjust environment?

The mystery of reality

Many will say, ‘What mystery? Surely, reality just is.’ So, where to start? I’ll start with an essay by Raymond Tallis, who has a regular column in Philosophy Now called, Tallis in Wonderland – sometimes contentious, often provocative, always thought-expanding. His latest in Issue 157, Aug/Sep 2023 (new one must be due) is called Reflections on Reality, and it’s all of the above.
 
I’ve written on this topic many times before, so I’m sure to repeat myself. But Tallis’s essay, I felt, deserved both consideration and a response, partly because he starts with the one aspect of reality that we hardly ever ponder, which is doubting its existence.
 
Actually, not so much its existence, but whether our senses fool us, which they sometimes do, like when we dream (a point Tallis makes himself). And this brings me to the first point about reality that no one ever seems to discuss, and that is its dependence on consciousness, because when you’re unconscious, reality ceases to exist, for You. Now, you might argue that you’re unconscious when you dream, but I disagree; it’s just that your consciousness is misled. The point is that we sometimes remember our dreams, and I can’t see how that’s possible unless there is consciousness involved. If you think about it, everything you remember was laid down by a conscious thought or experience.
 
So, just to be clear, I’m not saying that the objective material world ceases to exist without consciousness – a philosophical position called idealism (advocated by Donald Hoffman) – but that the material objective world is ‘unknown’ and, to all intents and purposes, might as well not exist if it’s unperceived by conscious agents (like us). Try to imagine the Universe if no one observed it. It’s impossible, because the word, ‘imagine’, axiomatically requires a conscious agent.
 
Tallis proffers a quote from celebrated sci-fi author, Philip K Dick: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away' (from The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick, 1955). And this allows me to segue into the world of fiction, which Tallis doesn’t really discuss, but it’s another arena where we willingly ‘suspend disbelief' to temporarily and deliberately conflate reality with non-reality. This is something I have in common with Dick, because we have both created imaginary worlds that are more than distorted versions of the reality we experience every day; they’re entirely new worlds that no one has ever experienced in real life. But Dick’s aphorism expresses this succinctly. The so-called reality of these worlds, in these stories, only exist while we believe in them.
 
I’ve discussed elsewhere how the brain (not just human but animal brains, generally) creates a model of reality that is so ‘realistic’, we actually believe it exists outside our head.
 
I recently had a cataract operation, which was most illuminating when I took the bandage off, because my vision in that eye was so distorted, it made me feel sea sick. Everything had a lean to it and it really did feel like I was looking through a lens; I thought they had botched the operation. With both eyes open, it looked like objects were peeling apart. So I put a new eye patch on, and distracted myself for an hour by doing a Sudoku problem. When I had finished it, I took the patch off and my vision was restored. The brain had made the necessary adjustments to restore the illusion of reality as I normally interacted with it. And that’s the key point: the brain creates a model so accurately, integrating all our senses, but especially, sight, sound and touch, that we think the model is the reality. And all creatures have evolved that facility simply so they can survive; it’s a matter of life-and-death.
 
But having said all that, there are some aspects of reality that really do only exist in your mind, and not ‘out there’. Colour is the most obvious, but so is sound and smell, which all may be experienced differently by other species – how are we to know? Actually, we do know that some animals can hear sounds that we can’t and see colours that we don’t, and vice versa. And I contend that these sensory experiences are among the attributes that keep us distinct from AI.
 
Tallis makes a passing reference to Kant, who argued that space and time are also aspects of reality that are produced by the mind. I have always struggled to understand how Kant got that so wrong. Mind you, he lived more than a century before Einstein all-but proved that space and time are fundamental parameters of the Universe. Nevertheless, there are more than a few physicists who argue that the ‘flow of time’ is a purely psychological phenomenon. They may be right (but arguably for different reasons). If consciousness exists in a constant present (as expounded by Schrodinger) and everything else becomes the past as soon as it happens, then the flow of time is guaranteed for any entity with consciousness. However, many physicists (like Sabine Hossenfelder), if not most, argue that there is no ‘now’ – it’s an illusion.
 
Speaking of Schrodinger, he pointed out that there are fundamental differences between how we sense sight and sound, even though they are both waves. In the case of colour, we can blend them to get a new colour, and in fact, as we all know, all the colours we can see can be generated by just 3 colours, which is how the screens on all your devices work. However, that’s not the case with sound, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to distinguish all the different instruments in an orchestra. Just think: all the complexity is generated by a vibrating membrane (in the case of a speaker) and somehow our hearing separates it all. Of course, it can be done mathematically with a Fourier transform, but I don’t think that’s how our brains work, though I could be wrong.
 
And this leads me to discuss the role of science, and how it challenges our everyday experience of reality. Not surprisingly, Tallis also took his discussion in that direction. Quantum mechanics (QM) is the logical starting point, and Tallis references Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, ‘the view that the world has no definite state in the absence of observation.’ Now, I happen to think that there is a logical explanation for this, though I’m not sure anyone else agrees. If we go back to Schrodinger again, but this time his eponymous equation, it describes events before the ‘observation’ takes place, albeit with probabilities. What’s more, all the weird aspects of QM, like the Uncertainty Principle, superposition and entanglement, are all mathematically entailed in that equation. What’s missing is relativity theory, which has since been incorporated into QED or QFT.
 
But here’s the thing: once an observation or ‘measurement’ has taken place, Schrodinger’s equation no longer applies. In other words, you can’t use Schrodinger’s equation to describe something that has already happened. This is known as the ‘measurement problem’, because no one can explain it. But if QM only describes things that are yet to happen, then all the weird aspects aren’t so weird.
 
Tallis also mentions Einstein’s 'block universe', which infers past, present and future all exist simultaneously. In fact, that’s what Sabine Hossenfelder says in her book, Existential Physics:
 
The idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.
 
And:


Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now. (Her emphasis.)
 
I’m not sure how she resolves this with cosmological history, but it does explain why she believes in superdeterminism (meaning the future is fixed), which axiomatically leads to her other strongly held belief that free will is an illusion; but so did Einstein, so she’s in good company.
 
In a passing remark, Tallis says, ‘science is entirely based on measurement’. I know from other essays that Tallis has written, that he believes the entire edifice of mathematics only exists because we can measure things, which we then applied to the natural world, which is why we have so-called ‘natural laws’. I’ve discussed his ideas on this elsewhere, but I think he has it back-to-front, whilst acknowledging that our ability to measure things, which is an extension of counting, is how humanity was introduced to mathematics. In fact, the ancient Greeks put geometry above arithmetic because it’s so physical. This is why there were no negative numbers in their mathematics, because the idea of a negative volume or area made no sense.
 
But, in the intervening 2 millennia, mathematics took on a life of its own, with such exotic entities like negative square roots and non-Euclidean geometry, which in turn suddenly found an unexpected home in QM and relativity theory respectively. All of a sudden, mathematics was informing us about reality before measurements were even made. Take Schrodinger’s wavefunction, which lies at the heart of his equation, and can’t be measured because it only exists in the future, assuming what I said above is correct.
 
But I think Tallis has a point, and I would argue that consciousness can’t be measured, which is why it might remain inexplicable to science, correlation with brain waves and their like notwithstanding.
 
So what is the mystery? Well, there’s more than one. For a start there is consciousness, without which reality would not be perceived or even be known, which seems to me to be pretty fundamental. Then there are the aspects of reality which have only recently been discovered, like the fact that time and space can have different ‘measurements’ dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. Then there is the increasing role of mathematics in our comprehension of reality at scales both cosmic and subatomic. In fact, given the role of numbers and mathematical relationships in determining fundamental constants and natural laws of the Universe, it would seem that mathematics is an inherent facet of reality.
 

Modes of thinking

 I’ve written a few posts on creative thinking as well as analytical and critical thinking. But, not that long ago, I read a not-so-recently published book (2015) by 2 psychologists (John Kounios and Mark Beeman) titled, The Eureka Factor; Creative Insights and the Brain. To quote from the back fly-leaf:
 
Dr John Kounios is Professor of Psychology at Drexel University and has published cognitive neuroscience research on insight, creativity, problem solving, memory, knowledge representation and Alzheimer’s disease.
 
Dr Mark Beeman is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Northwestern University, and researches creative problem solving and creative cognition, language comprehension and how the right and left hemispheres process information.
 
They divide people into 2 broad groups: ‘Insightfuls’ and ‘analytical thinkers’. Personally, I think the coined term, ‘insightfuls’ is misleading or too narrow in its definition, and I prefer the term ‘creatives’. More on that below.
 
As the authors say, themselves, ‘People often use the terms “insight” and “creativity” interchangeably.’ So that’s obviously what they mean by the term. However, the dictionary definition of ‘insight’ is ‘an accurate and deep understanding’, which I’d argue can also be obtained by analytical thinking. Later in the book, they describe insights obtained by analytical thinking as ‘pseudo-insights’, and the difference can be ‘seen’ with neuro-imaging techniques.
 
All that aside, they do provide compelling arguments that there are 2 distinct modes of thinking that most of us experience. Very early in the book (in the preface, actually), they describe the ‘ah-ha’ experience that we’ve all had at some point, where we’re trying to solve a puzzle and then it comes to us unexpectedly, like a light-bulb going off in our head. They then relate something that I didn’t know, which is that neurological studies show that when we have this ‘insight’ there’s a spike in our brain waves and it comes from a location in the right hemisphere of the brain.
 
Many years ago (decades) I read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I thought neuroscientists would disparage this as pop-science, but Kounios and Beeman seem to give it some credence. Later in the book, they describe this in more detail, where there are signs of activity in other parts of the brain, but the ah-ha experience has a unique EEG signature and it’s in the right hemisphere.
 
The authors distinguish this unexpected insightful experience from an insight that is a consequence of expertise. I made this point myself, in another post, where experts make intuitive shortcuts based on experience that the rest of us don’t have in our mental toolkits.
 
They also spend an entire chapter on examples involving a special type of insight, where someone spends a lot of time thinking about a problem or an issue, and then the solution comes to them unexpected. A lot of scientific breakthroughs follow this pattern, and the point is that the insight wouldn’t happen at all without all the rumination taking place beforehand, often over a period of weeks or months, sometimes years. I’ve experienced this myself, when writing a story, and I’ll return to that experience later.
 
A lot of what we’ve learned about the brain’s functions has come from studying people with damage to specific areas of the brain. You may have heard of a condition called ‘aphasia’, which is when someone develops a serious disability in language processing following damage to the left hemisphere (possibly from a stroke). What you probably don’t know (I didn’t) is that damage to the right hemisphere, while not directly affecting one’s ability with language can interfere with its more nuanced interpretations, like sarcasm or even getting a joke. I’ve long believed that when I’m writing fiction, I’m using the right hemisphere as much as the left, but it never occurred to me that readers (or viewers) need the right hemisphere in order to follow a story.
 
According to the authors, the difference between the left and right neo-cortex is one of connections. The left hemisphere has ‘local’ connections, whereas the right hemisphere has more widely spread connections. This seems to correspond to an ‘analytic’ ability in the left hemisphere, and a more ‘creative’ ability in the right hemisphere, where we make conceptual connections that are more wideranging. I’ve probably oversimplified that, but it was the gist I got from their exposition.
 
Like most books and videos on ‘creative thinking’ or ‘insights’ (as the authors prefer), they spend a lot of time giving hints and advice on how to improve your own creativity. It’s not until one is more than halfway through the book, in a chapter titled, The Insightful and the Analyst, that they get to the crux of the issue, and describe how there are effectively 2 different types who think differently, even in a ‘resting state’, and how there is a strong genetic component.
 
I’m not surprised by this, as I saw it in my own family, where the difference is very distinct. In another chapter, they describe the relationship between creativity and mental illness, but they don’t discuss how artists are often moody and neurotic, which is a personality trait. Openness is another personality trait associated with creative people. I would add another point, based on my own experience, if someone is creative and they are not creating, they can suffer depression. This is not discussed by the authors either.
 
Regarding the 2 types they refer to, they acknowledge there is a spectrum, and I can’t help but wonder where I sit on it. I spent a working lifetime in engineering, which is full of analytic types, though I didn’t work in a technical capacity. Instead, I worked with a lot of technical people of all disciplines: from software engineers to civil and structural engineers to architects, not to mention lawyers and accountants, because I worked on disputes as well.
 
The curious thing is that I was aware of 2 modes of thinking, where I was either looking at the ‘big-picture’ or looking at the detail. I worked as a planner, and one of my ‘tricks’ was the ability to distil a large and complex project into a one-page ‘Gantt’ chart (bar chart). For the individual disciplines, I’d provide a multipage detailed ‘program’ just for them.
 
Of course, I also write stories, where the 2 components are plot and character. Creating characters is purely a non-analytic process, which requires a lot of extemporising. I try my best not to interfere, and I do this by treating them as if they are real people, independent of me. Plotting, on the other hand, requires a big-picture approach, but I almost never know the ending until I get there. In the last story I wrote, I was in COVID lockdown when I knew the ending was close, so I wrote some ‘notes’ in an attempt to work out what happens. Then, sometime later (like a month), I had one sleepless night when it all came to me. Afterwards, I went back and looked at my notes, and they were all questions – I didn’t have a clue.

Consciousness, free will, determinism, chaos theory – all connected

 I’ve said many times that philosophy is all about argument. And if you’re serious about philosophy, you want to be challenged. And if you want to be challenged you should seek out people who are both smarter and more knowledgeable than you. And, in my case, Sabine Hossenfelder fits the bill.
 
When I read people like Sabine, and others whom I interact with on Quora, I’m aware of how limited my knowledge is. I don’t even have a university degree, though I’ve attempted a number of times. I’ve spent my whole life in the company of people smarter than me, including at school. Believe it or not, I still have occasional contact with them, through social media and school reunions. I grew up in a small rural town, where the people you went to school with feel like siblings.
 
Likewise, in my professional life, I have always encountered people cleverer than me – it provides perspective.
 
In her book, Existential Physics; A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, Sabine interviews people who are possibly even smarter than she is, and I sometimes found their conversations difficult to follow. To be fair to Sabine, she also sought out people who have different philosophical views to her, and also have the intellect to match her.
 
I’m telling you all this to put things in perspective. Sabine has her prejudices like everyone else, some of which she defends better than others. I concede that my views are probably more simplistic than hers, and I support my challenges with examples that are hopefully easy to follow. Our points of disagreement can be distilled down to a few pertinent topics, which are time, consciousness, free will and chaos. Not surprisingly, they are all related – what you believe about one, affects what you believe about the others.
 
Sabine is very strict about what constitutes a scientific theory. She argues that so-called theories like the multiverse have ‘no explanatory power’, because they can’t be verified or rejected by evidence, and she calls them ‘ascientific’. She’s critical of popularisers like Brian Cox who tell us that there could be an infinite number of ‘you(s)’ in an infinite multiverse. She distinguishes between beliefs and knowledge, which is a point I’ve made myself. Having said that, I’ve also argued that beliefs matter in science. She puts all interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) in this category. She keeps emphasising that it doesn’t mean they are wrong, but they are ‘ascientific’. It’s part of the distinction that I make between philosophy and science, and why I perceive science as having a dialectical relationship with philosophy.
 
I’ll start with time, as Sabine does, because it affects everything else. In fact, the first chapter in her book is titled, Does The Past Still Exist? Basically, she argues for Einstein’s ‘block universe’ model of time, but it’s her conclusion that ‘now is an illusion’ that is probably the most contentious. This critique will cite a lot of her declarations, so I will start with her description of the block universe:
 
The idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.
 
This viewpoint arises from the fact that, according to relativity theory, simultaneity is completely observer-dependent. I’ve discussed this before, whereby I argue that for an observer who is moving relative to a source, or stationary relative to a moving source, like the observer who is standing on the platform of Einstein’s original thought experiment, while a train goes past, knows this because of the Doppler effect. In other words, an observer who doesn’t see a Doppler effect is in a privileged position, because they are in the same frame of reference as the source of the signal. This is why we know the Universe is expanding with respect to us, and why we can work out our movement with respect to the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation), hence to the overall universe (just think about that).
 
Sabine clinches her argument by drawing a spacetime diagram, where 2 independent observers moving away from each other, observe a pulsar with 2 different simultaneities. One, who is traveling towards the pulsar, sees the pulsar simultaneously with someone’s birth on Earth, while the one travelling away from the pulsar sees it simultaneously with the same person’s death. This is her slam-dunk argument that ‘now’ is an illusion, if it can produce such a dramatic contradiction.
 
However, I drew up my own spacetime diagram of the exact same scenario, where no one is travelling relative to anyone one else, yet create the same apparent contradiction.

 My diagram follows the convention in that the horizontal axis represents space (all 3 dimensions) and the vertical axis represents time. So the 4 dotted lines represent 4 observers who are ‘stationary’ but ‘travelling through time’ (vertically). As per convention, light and other signals are represented as diagonal lines of 45 degrees, as they are travelling through both space and time, and nothing can travel faster than them. So they also represent the ‘edge’ of their light cones.
 
So notice that observer A sees the birth of Albert when he sees the pulsar and observer B sees the death of Albert when he sees the pulsar, which is exactly the same as Sabine’s scenario, with no relativity theory required. Albert, by the way, for the sake of scalability, must have lived for thousands of years, so he might be a tree or a robot.
 
But I’ve also added 2 other observers, C and D, who see the pulsar before Albert is born and after Albert dies respectively. But, of course, there’s no contradiction, because it’s completely dependent on how far away they are from the sources of the signals (the pulsar and Earth).
 
This is Sabine’s perspective:
 
Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now. (Her emphasis.)
 
I actually find this statement illogical. If you take it to its logical conclusion, then the Big Bang exists now and so does everything in the universe that’s yet to happen. If you look at the first quote I cited, she effectively argues that the past and future exist alongside the present.
 
One of the points she makes is that, for events with causal relationships, all observers see the events happening in the same sequence. The scenario where different observers see different sequences of events have no causal relationships. But this begs a question: what makes causal events exceptional? What’s more, this is fundamental, because the whole of physics is premised on the principle of causality. In addition, I fail to see how you can have causality without time. In fact, causality is governed by the constant speed of light – it’s literally what stops everything from happening at once.
 
Einstein also believed in the block universe, and like Sabine, he argued that, as a consequence, there is no free will. Sabine is adamant that both ‘now’ and ‘free will’ are illusions. She argues that the now we all experience is a consequence of memory. She quotes Carnap that our experience of ‘past, present and future can be described and explained by psychology’ – a point also made by Paul Davies. Basically, she argues that what separates our experience of now from the reality of no-now (my expression, not hers) is our memory.
 
Whereas, I think she has it back-to-front, because, as I’ve pointed out before, without memory, we wouldn’t know we are conscious. Our brains are effectively a storage device that allows us to have a continuity of self through time, otherwise we would not even be aware that we exist. Memory doesn’t create the sense of now; it records it just like a photograph does. The photograph is evidence that the present becomes the past as soon as it happens. And our thoughts become memories as soon as they happen, otherwise we wouldn’t know we think.
 
Sabine spends an entire chapter on free will, where she persistently iterates variations on the following mantra:
 
The future is fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.
 
But she acknowledges that while the future is ‘fixed’, it’s not predictable. And this brings us to chaos theory. Sabine discusses chaos late in the book and not in relation to free will. She explicates what she calls the ‘real butterfly effect’.
 
The real butterfly effect… means that even arbitrarily precise initial data allow predictions for only a finite amount of time. A system with this behaviour would be deterministic and yet unpredictable.
 
Now, if deterministic means everything physically manifest has a causal relationship with something prior, then I agree with her. If she means that therefore ‘the future is fixed’, I’m not so sure, and I’ll explain why. By specifying ‘physically manifest’, I’m excluding thoughts and computer algorithms that can have an effect on something physical, whereas the cause is not so easily determined. For example, In the case of the algorithm, does it go back to the coder who wrote it?
 
My go-to example for chaos is tossing coins, because it’s so easy to demonstrate and it’s linked to probability theory, as well as being the very essence of a random event. One of the key, if not definitive, features of a chaotic phenomenon is that, if you were to rerun it, you’d get a different result, and that’s fundamental to probability theory – every coin toss is independent of any previous toss – they are causally independent. Unrepeatability is common among chaotic systems (like the weather). Even the Earth and Moon were created from a chaotic event.
 
I recently read another book called Quantum Physics Made Me Do It by Jeremie Harris, who argues that tossing a coin is not random – in fact, he’s very confident about it. He’s not alone. Mark John Fernee, a physicist with Qld Uni, in a personal exchange on Quora argued that, in principle, it should be possible to devise a robot to perform perfectly predictable tosses every time, like a tennis ball launcher. But, as another Quora contributor and physicist, Richard Muller, pointed out: it’s not dependent on the throw but the surface it lands on. Marcus du Sautoy makes the same point about throwing dice and provides evidence to support it.
 
Getting back to Sabine. She doesn’t discuss tossing coins, but she might think that the ‘imprecise initial data’ is the actual act of tossing, and after that the outcome is determined, even if can’t be predicted. However, the deterministic chain is broken as soon as it hits a surface.
 
Just before she gets to chaos theory, she talks about computability, with respect to Godel’s Theorem and a discussion she had with Roger Penrose (included in the book), where she says:
 
The current laws of nature are computable, except for that random element from quantum mechanics.
 
Now, I’m quoting this out of context, because she then argues that if they were uncomputable, they open the door to unpredictability.
 
My point is that the laws of nature are uncomputable because of chaos theory, and I cite Ian Stewart’s book, Does God Play Dice? In fact, Stewart even wonders if QM could be explained using chaos (I don’t think so). Chaos theory has mathematical roots, because not only are the ‘initial conditions’ of a chaotic event impossible to measure, they are impossible to compute – you have to calculate to infinite decimal places. And this is why I disagree with Sabine that the ‘future is fixed’.
 
It's impossible to discuss everything in a 223 page book on a blog post, but there is one other topic she raises where we disagree, and that’s the Mary’s Room thought experiment. As she explains it was proposed by philosopher, Frank Jackson, in 1982, but she also claims that he abandoned his own argument. After describing the experiment (refer this video, if you’re not familiar with it), she says:
 
The flaw in this argument is that it confuses knowledge about the perception of colour with the actual perception of it.
 
Whereas, I thought the scenario actually delineated the difference – that perception of colour is not the same as knowledge. A person who was severely colour-blind might never have experienced the colour red (the specified colour in the thought experiment) but they could be told what objects might be red. It’s well known that some animals are colour-blind compared to us and some animals specifically can’t discern red. Colour is totally a subjective experience. But I think the Mary’s room thought experiment distinguishes the difference between human perception and AI. An AI can be designed to delineate colours by wavelength, but it would not experience colour the way we do. I wrote a separate post on this.
 
Sabine gives the impression that she thinks consciousness is a non-issue. She talks about the brain like it’s a computer.
 
You feel you have free will, but… really, you’re running a sophisticated computation on your neural processor.
 
Now, many people, including most scientists, think that, because our brains are just like computers, then it’s only a matter of time before AI also shows signs of consciousness. Sabine doesn’t make this connection, even when she talks about AI. Nevertheless, she discusses one of the leading theories of neuroscience (IIT, Information Integration Theory), based on calculating the amount of information processed, which gives a number called phi (Φ). I came across this when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdown. According to the theory, this number provides a ‘measure of consciousness’, which suggests that it could also be used with AI, though Sabine doesn’t pursue that possibility.
 
Instead, Sabine cites an interview in New Scientist with Daniel Bor from the University of Cambridge: “Phi should decrease when you go to sleep or are sedated… but work in Bor’s laboratory has shown that it doesn’t.”
 
Sabine’s own view:
 
Personally, I am highly skeptical that any measure consisting of a single number will ever adequately represent something as complex as human consciousness.
 
Sabine discusses consciousness at length, especially following her interview with Penrose, and she gives one of the best arguments against panpsychism I’ve read. Her interview with Penrose, along with a discussion on Godel’s Theorem, which is another topic, discusses whether consciousness is computable or not. I don’t think it is and I don’t think it’s algorithmic.
 
She makes a very strong argument for reductionism: that the properties we observe of a system can be understood from studying the properties of its underlying parts. In other words, that emergent properties can be understood in terms of the properties that it emerges from. And this includes consciousness. I’m one of those who really thinks that consciousness is the exception. Thoughts can cause actions, which is known as ‘agency’.
 
I don’t claim to understand consciousness, but I’m not averse to the idea that it could exist outside the Universe – that it’s something we tap into. This is completely ascientific, to borrow from Sabine. As I said, our brains are storage devices and sometimes they let us down, and, without which, we wouldn’t even know we are conscious. I don’t believe in a soul. I think the continuity of the self is a function of memory – just read The Lost Mariner chapter in Oliver Sacks’ book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. It’s about a man suffering from retrograde amnesia, so his life is stuck in the past because he’s unable to create new memories.
 
At the end of her book, Sabine surprises us by talking about religion, and how she agrees with Stephen Jay Gould ‘that religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria!”. She makes the point that a lot of scientists have religious beliefs but won’t discuss them in public because it’s taboo.
 
I don’t doubt that Sabine has answers to all my challenges.
 
There is one more thing: Sabine talks about an epiphany, following her introduction to physics in middle school, which started in frustration.
 
Wasn’t there some minimal set of equations, I wanted to know, from which all the rest could be derived?
 
When the principle of least action was introduced, it was a revelation: there was indeed a procedure to arrive at all these equations! Why hadn’t anybody told me?
 
The principle of least action is one concept common to both the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. It’s arguably the most fundamental principle in physics. And yes, I posted on that too.

 

Finding purpose without a fortune teller

 I just started watching a show on Apple TV+ called The Big Door Prize, starring Irish actor, Chris O’Dowd, set in suburban America (Deerfield). It’s listed as a comedy, but it might be a black comedy or a satire; I haven’t watched it long enough to judge.
 
It has an interesting premise: the local store has a machine, which, for small change, will tell you what your ‘potential’ is. Not that surprisingly, people start queuing up to find their potential (or purpose). I say, ‘not surprising’, because people consult Tarot cards or the I Ching for the same reason, not to mention weekly astrological charts found in the local newspaper, magazine or whatever. And of course, if the ‘reading’ coincides with our specific desire or wish, we wholeheartedly agree, whereas, if it doesn’t, we dismiss it as rubbish.
 
I’ve written previously about the importance of finding purpose, and, in fact, it’s considered necessary for one’s psychological health. But this is a subtly different take on it, prompted by the aforementioned premise. I have the advantage of over half a century of hindsight because I think I found my purpose late, yet it was hiding in plain sight all along.
 
We sometimes think of our purpose as a calling or vocation. In my case, I believe it was to be a writer. Now, even though I’m not a successful writer by any stretch of the imagination, the fact that I do write is important to me. It gives me a sense of purpose that I don’t find in my job or my relationships, even though they are all important to me. I don’t often agree with Jordan Peterson, but he once made the comment that creative people who don’t create are like ‘broken sticks’. I totally identify with that.
 
I only have to look to my early childhood (pre-high school) when I started to write stories and draw my own superheroes. But as a teenager and a young adult (in my 20s), I found I couldn’t write to save myself, including essays (like I write on this blog), let alone attempts at fiction. But here’s the thing: when I did start writing fiction, I knew it was terrible – so terrible, I didn’t even tell anyone – yet I persevered because I ‘knew’ that I could. And I think that’s the key point: if you have a purpose, you can visualise it even when everything you’re doing tells you that you should give it up.
 
So, you don’t need a ‘machine’ or Tarot cards, just self-belief. Purpose comes to those who look for it, and know it when they see it, even in its emerging phase, when no one else can see it.
 
 
Now, I’m going to tell you a story about someone else, whom I knew for over 4 decades and who found their ‘purpose’ in spite of circumstances that might have prevented it, or at least, worked against it. She was a single Mum who raised 3 daughters and simultaneously found a role in theatre. The thing is that she never gained any substantial financial reward, yet she won awards, both as an actor and director. She even partook in a theatre festival in Monaco, even though it took a government grant to get her there. The thing is that she had very little in terms of material wealth but it never bothered her and she was generous to a fault. She was a trained nurse, but had no other qualifications – certainly none relevant to her theatrical career. She passed last year and she is sorely missed, not only by me, but by the many lives she touched. She was, by anyone’s judgement, a force of nature.
 
 
 
This is a review of a play, Tuesdays with Morrie, for which Liz Bradley won an award. I happened to attend the opening with her, so it has a special memory for me. Dylan Muir, especially mentioned as providing the vocal, is Liz’s daughter.

Why do we read?

This is the almost-same title of a book I bought recently (Why We Read), containing 70 short essays on the subject, featuring scholars of all stripes: historians, philosophers, and of course, authors. It even includes scientists: Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins and Carlo Rovelli, being 3 I’m familiar with.
 
One really can’t overstate the importance of the written word, because, oral histories aside, it allows us to extend memories across generations and accumulate knowledge over centuries that has led to civilisations and technologies that we all take for granted. By ‘we’, I mean anyone reading this post.
 
Many of the essayists write from their personal experiences and I’ll do the same. The book, edited by Josephine Greywoode and published by Penguin, specifically says on the cover in small print: 70 Writers on Non-Fiction; yet many couldn’t help but discuss fiction as well.
 
And books are generally divided between fiction and non-fiction, and I believe we read them for different reasons, and I wouldn’t necessarily consider one less important than the other. I also write fiction and non-fiction, so I have a particular view on this. Basically, I read non-fiction in order to learn and I read fiction for escapism. Both started early for me and I believe the motivation hasn’t changed.
 
I started reading extra-curricular books from about the age of 7 or 8, involving creatures mostly, and I even asked for an encyclopaedia for Christmas at around that time, which I read enthusiastically. I devoured non-fiction books, especially if they dealt with the natural world. But at the same time, I read comics, remembering that we didn’t have TV at that time, which was only just beginning to emerge.
 
I think one of the reasons that boys read less fiction than girls these days is because comics have effectively disappeared, being replaced by video games. And the modern comics that I have seen don’t even contain a complete narrative. Nevertheless, there are graphic novels that I consider brilliant. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and Hayao Miyazake’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, being standouts. Watchmen by Alan Moore also deserves a mention.
 
So the escapism also started early for me, in the world of superhero comics, and I started writing my own scripts and drawing my own characters pre-high school.
 
One of the essayists in the collection, Niall Ferguson (author of Doom) starts off by challenging a modern paradigm (or is it a meme?) that we live in a ‘simulation’, citing Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, writing in the Philosophical Quarterly in 2003. Ferguson makes the point that reading fiction is akin to immersing the mind in a simulation (my phrasing, not his).
 
In fact, a dream is very much like a simulation, and, as I’ve often said, the language of stories is the language of dreams. But here’s the thing; the motivation for writing fiction, for me, is the same as the motivation for reading it: escapism. Whether reading or writing, you enter a world that only exists inside your head. The ultimate solipsism.

And this surely is a miracle of written language: that we can conjure a world with characters who feel real and elicit emotional responses, while we follow their exploits, failures, love life and dilemmas. It takes empathy to read a novel, and tests have shown that people’s empathy increases after they read fiction. You engage with the character and put yourself in their shoes. It’s one of the reasons we read.
 
 
Addendum: I would recommend the book, by the way, which contains better essays than mine, all with disparate, insightful perspectives.
 

The apparent dichotomous relationship between consciousness and determinism

 Someone (Graham C Lindsay) asked me a question on Quora:

Is it true that every event, without exception, is fully caused by its antecedent conditions?

 Graham Lindsay is Scottish, a musician (50 years a keyboard player) and by his own admission, has a lot of letters after his name. I should point out that I have none. The Quora algorithm gave me the impression that he asked me specifically, but maybe he didn't. As I say at the outset, David Cook gives a more erudite answer than me. It so happens, I've had correspondence with David Cook (he contacted me) and he sent me a copy of his book of poetry. He's a retired psychiatrist and lecturer.

In fact, I recommend that you read his answer in conjunction with mine - we take subtley different approaches without diverging too far apart.

I concede that there's not a lot that's new in this post, but I've found that rearranging pre-existing ideas can throw up new insights and thought-provocations.

Thanks for asking me, I feel flattered. To be honest, I think David Cook gives a better and more erudite answer than I can. I’d also recommend you ask Mark John Fernee (physicist with University of Queensland) who has some ideas on this subject.

I’ll start with Fernee, because he argues for determinism without arguing for superdeterminism, as Sabine Hossenfelder does. To answer the question directly, it appears to be true to the best of our knowledge. What do I mean by that? Everything in the Universe that has happened to date seems to have a cause, and it would appear that there is a causal chain going all the way back to the Big Bang. The future, however, is another matter. In the future we have multiple paths that are expressed in QM as probabilities. In fact, Freeman Dyson argued that QM can only describe the future and not the past. As another Quora contributor (David Moore) pointed out, you can only have a probability less than one for an event in the future. If it’s in the past, it has a probability of One.

In the Universe, chaos rules at virtually every level. A lot of people are unaware that even the orbits of the planets are chaotic, so they are only predictable within a range of hundreds of millions of years. Hossenfelder (whom I cited earlier) has a YouTube video where she demonstrates how a chaotic phenomenon always has a limited horizon of predictability (for want of a better phrase). With the weather it’s about 10 days. This doesn’t stop the Universe being deterministic up to the present, while being unpredictable in the future. The thing about chaotic phenomena is that if you rerun them you’d get a different outcome. This applies to the Universe itself. The best known example is the tossing of a coin, which is a chaotic event. It’s fundamental to probability theory that every coin toss is independent of previous tosses.

Regarding QM, we all know that Schrodinger’s equation is deterministic and time-reversible. However, as Fernee points out, the act of ‘measurement’ creates an irreversible event. To quote Paul Davies:

The very act of measurement breaks the time symmetry of quantum mechanics in a process sometimes described as the collapse of the wave function... the rewind button is destroyed as soon as that measurement is made.

David Cook, in his answer, mentions the role of imagination in his closing paragraph and I don’t think that can be overstated. To quote another philosopher, Raymond Tallis:

Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.

I feel this is as good a description of free will as you can get. And like David, I think imagination is key here. And this raises the issue of consciousness, because I’m unsure how it fits into the scheme of things. As Schrodinger pointed out, consciousness exists in a constant present, which means that without memory you wouldn’t know you are conscious. And this has actually happened, where people have behaved consciously without being aware of it. It happened to my father when he was knocked unconscious in a boxing ring, and I know of other incidents. In my father’s case, he got back on his feet and knocked out his opponent – when he came to, he was standing over his opponent with no memory of what happened.

I tell this anecdote, because it begs a question. If we can respond to events that are harmful or life-threatening without conscious awareness, then why do we need consciousness?

All evidence of consciousness points to a neural substrate dependency. We don’t find consciousness in machines despite predictions that we eventually will. But it seems to me that consciousness acts outside the causal chain of the Universe. We have the ability, as do other sentient creatures, to perform actions on our physical environment that are purely determined by imagination, therefore thought. And we can even use thought to change the neural pathways in our brains, like a feedback loop, or as Douglas Hofstadter coined it, a ‘strange loop’.

 

Addendum: For my own benefit, I've coined the terms, 'weak determinism' and 'strong determinism', to differentiate between deterministic causality and superdeterminism respectively. I know there's a term called 'compatible determinism', from Hume, which, according to other sources, is the same as weak determinism, as I expound on below.

The point is that weak determinism (causality) is compatible with free will, which is what Hume argued, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia reference (linked above). However, Hume famously challenged the very idea of causality, whereas I'd argue that 'weak determinism' is completely dependent on causality being true and a universal principle. On the other hand, 'strong determinism' or superdeterminism (as advocated by Sabine Hossenfelder) axiomatically rules out free will, so there is a fundamental difference.

For the sake of clarity, the determinism I refer to in my essay (and its title) is weak determinism.