Surfing the Bakker’s wave. Consciousness and whatnot. I just found an interesting link in a comment to an article linked on a forum thread about a Bakker’s story (and this is an example of typical internet loop that is actually quite SHORT).

Here: LessWrong.com

I’m jumping around between the interesting articles, starting from here specifically.

Especially there’s an interesting perspective on Reductionism that kinds of overthrows the term and is maybe dialed closer to truth:

it requires constant vigilance to maintain your perception of yourself as an entity within physics.

The way a belief feels from inside, is that you seem to be looking straight at reality. When it actually seems that you’re looking at a belief, as such, you are really experiencing a belief about belief.

So when your mind simultaneously believes explicit descriptions of many different levels, and believes explicit rules for transiting between levels, as part of an efficient combined model, it feels like you are seeing a system that is made of different level descriptions and their rules for interaction.

But this is just the brain trying to be efficiently compress an object that it cannot remotely begin to model on a fundamental level. The airplane is too large. Even a hydrogen atom would be too large. Quark-to-quark interactions are insanely intractable. You can’t handle the truth.

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

This not only appears as true, but it also is kind of supported by an argument that usually is used against it. Science never predicts anything, it can only understand a phenomenon after it happened. As if scientific discovery can only proceed in a direction but can’t really theoretically define anything. It always falls short. Science essentially works like an Oracle pretending to know the future but only able to make prophecies after they already happened. Normally, we would point at it and say it’s a fraud. Is Science a fraud?

Science is the story we tell ourselves to make sense of certain things, but as a framework, it is built by man, and ultimately false. Yet not completely arbitrary. Science is not invented. And this was part of my recent debate with Bakker.

But what makes me think is a kind of positive thinking on top of all of this:

If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least over those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you.

The future is determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes the actions of human beings.

But isn’t kind of curious that the whole site is essentially dedicated to deal with the limits of “thought”, that they believe will be surpassed by thinking HARDER. Isn’t the loop the prison of our mind?

It gives me the image of a cat chasing its tail and realizing it’s all a matter of SPEED.

We should make Iskaral Pust as our rolemodel:
“Shadowthrone… uh… my worthy Lord of Shadow… is thinking. Yes! Thinking furiously! Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself!”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *