A thought experiment about evolution

(An improved and updated version of this material has appeared in my book Why Materialism Is Baloney. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Do we see the world through distortive glasses? Image source: Wikipedia.

I want to invite you today for a thought experiment. Let us suppose that the key tenets of our scientific, material-reductionist paradigm are all correct. According to this worldview, reality is objective and independent of mind; mind and its conscious perceptions are a by-product of the matter of the brain; and the brain, along with our ability to understand nature, has evolved through natural selection favoring survival of the fittest. Still according to this worldview, life has evolved within a space-time fabric where the interplay of matter and energy gives rise to the set of objective phenomena we call reality. Let us imagine this reality as a collection of objects in the canvas of space-time.

As the first living organisms evolved, they were immersed in the same space-time canvas populated by all the other objects that make up reality: rocks, water, sand, air, other living beings, etc. They also had perceptual mechanisms that gave them indirect access to these other objects: for instance, eyes that allowed them to form internal, subjective images of the objects populating the reality they were immersed in. The game of life consisted in optimizing one’s behavior in the dynamics of all those objects so to increase one’s chances of surviving and reproducing. Now note that, still according to the current scientific paradigm, because a living being only has access to its own internal images – not to the objects populating reality – its choices for implementing its survival strategy are entirely based on those images alone.

The images are constructed according to the architecture of the living being’s nervous system, which is itself, as postulated, a result of evolution through natural selection. An obvious question is thus: What would the optimal mapping between objects and subjective images be so to optimize survival? A mapping between two spaces – the objective space of objects and the mental, subjective space of images – can, mathematically speaking, assume infinite forms. One of these possible forms is the identity mapping: to each object in the space 'out there' corresponds a unique, analogous image in the subjective space 'in here.' Such one-to-one mapping, again, is just one possibility and should not, in principle, be assumed to be the most effective one as far as survival is concerned.

Indeed, many of the objects in the space 'out there' (that is, objective reality) may be irrelevant to survival to the extent that they cannot influence the physical body whose survival is being optimized for. For instance, my own work in the field of artificial neural networks has shown that nervous systems can evolve to advantageously discard the representation of objects whose corresponding images would just increase the amount of 'noise' in the nervous system. Other objects may indeed be relevant to survival in different ways, but mostly according to their relative differences, so that a mapping that altered and distorted their true attributes (like location, behavior, appearance, autonomy, intensity, etc.) so to highlight these relative differences could conceivably favor survival. Again, in another one of my earlier scientific works, it has been very clearly shown that certain artificial nervous systems perform much better when failing to fully or accurately represent the data available to them. Beyond my own work, a wealth of data on pre-processing systems for artificial neural networks shows that one-to-one mappings between objects and subjective images are often not optimal. Artificial nervous systems using these advantageous pre-processing schemes would, thus, ‘see’ a world very, very different from what is actually 'out there.' Their perception of reality would hardly resemble reality, but instead be set up, through evolution, to 'transform' reality and optimize their own chances of survival. In essence, they would live in a hallucinated theater.

You see, evolution would, most certainly, favor mappings between objects (that is, reality) and subjective images (that is, perceptions) that favored survival, whether such mappings would accurately or completely represent reality or not. After all, the variable being optimized for here is not representation accuracy or completeness, but survival.

And now here we are: highly evolved organisms with the unique ability to create scientific models of reality. And yet, we naively make an assumption that our own models seem to render highly suspicious: we assume that what we see, or otherwise perceive, can be accurately mapped one-to-one onto the ‘real reality out there.’ We assume that the subjective images in our minds correspond perfectly to the objects of reality. We assume, thus, that we have complete and undistorted access to that reality. This is a contradiction: there is no reason to believe that our brains would have evolved to represent reality completely and as-is; they would, instead, have evolved to represent it in whatever incomplete or distorted way favored survival the most. Therefore, as evolved creatures, we simply have no way to tell what is really going on. And although our technological instruments do broaden our perception mechanisms beyond what nature has provided us with, they are ultimately also limited to what we can perceive as far as our ability to build them, and perceive their outputs.

So we end up with a profound contradiction: if we are to be consistent with the scientific paradigm, we cannot trust that what we see is what is actually going on; we may, for all we know, be living in an elaborate, brain-constructed hallucination of reality that happens to maximize our chances of survival. However, the very scientific paradigm that tells us this was itself built upon the very assumption that what we perceive corresponds accurately to nature. If that assumption cannot be made, then can we trust the conclusions of our scientific paradigm to begin with?

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The subtleties of perception



An autostereogram. Can you see the shark? Image source: Wikipedia.

The other day I was thinking about those old autostereograms: pictures of apparent random dots that, when looked at in just the right way, make a 3-dimensional image jump out at you. I have never been good at that, but the key seems to be to not focus on the dots. It requires a certain ‘way of seeing’ that transcends analytical effort. Indeed, any effort at analyzing the picture ensures that you will not be able to see the 3D image, even though it’s there right under your nose all the time.

Sometimes I wonder if autostereograms aren't excellent metaphors of reality. How much of reality are we capable to see with our regular, highly analytical way of seeing? How much do we miss? How much can there be right under our noses, but which we never see or even intuit in our daily lives? After all, if the metaphor is valid, the more we try – in the sense of making a goal-driven effort – the more difficult it becomes to see. Is there a trick to see more of reality, just like there seem to be tricks to see autostereograms? And if there is, what is the meaning and significance of what we would then perceive?

I have asked myself these questions since my early adolescence. Because I have – or so I believe – a particularly hardened analytical mind, answering these questions to my own satisfaction has always been a difficult – often frustrating – exercise for me. But over the years I have had some successes. I have succeeded in allowing – fleetingly, as it may have been the case – a natural change in my way of seeing through a temporary disruption of the analytical mechanisms that are so much a part of my ordinary perception. What then became clear to me, springing up into my cognitive field as a self-evident and eternal reality, is what is described in my book Dreamed up Reality.

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So the only explanation possible is...

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (etching by Goya, c. 1799). Source: Wikipedia.

In logic, a strong distinction is made between deductive and inductive inferences. Here is an example of a deductive inference:

Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. Therefore, if I go to Amsterdam, I must go to the Netherlands.

Clearly, a deductive inference is necessarily implied by its premise, beyond any doubt. Now consider the following inductive inference:

My house has been broken into and there are unidentified footprints in the backyard. Therefore, the footprints were left by the burglar.

Now the inference cannot be derived with certainty from the premises. There is only a reasonable probability, given the circumstances, that the footprints were made by the burglar. Indeed, they could conceivably have nothing whatsoever to do with the burglary; they could have been made, for instance, by the gardener who came in to collect some forgotten tools while you were not home.

Inductive inferences are entirely dependent on our ability to correctly evaluate probabilities. However, probabilities are notoriously tricky to evaluate without the benefit of statistics based on past empirical observations of analogous situations. For instance, consider this hypothetical situation:

For the past 10 years, 90% of the times the postman came to my house after I was already awake. Therefore, I inductively infer that on Monday the postman will come after I wake up.

Here the probabilities are easy to estimate based on past empirical observations of analogous situations: 10 years of it, to be precise. These previous, empirical observations of the arrival of the postman form a so-called 'reference class' of earlier occurrences. The probability of the inductive inference can then be calculated based on this reference class (in this case, 90% probability that the inference is correct). But what about cases when no proper reference class is available? For instance:

Vicky returned from clinical death claiming to have seen the doctors working on her body as if she stood outside of it. Therefore, Vicky’s story is a post-event confabulation based on earlier memories.

But wait; how many times have similar stories, told in analogous situations in the past, been known to be confabulations? Here is another:

George saw a luminous object in the sky performing maneuvers impossible for any known aircraft. Therefore, George saw an alien spaceship.

How many times have similar observations in the past been known to be caused by spaceships from another planet? A final example:

The fundamental laws of nature have been the same across space since the Big Bang. Period.

Now, where are the reference classes in these cases? There aren’t any. Our estimate of probabilities here is not based on objective statistics of previous empirical observations. Instead, and this is a key point, it is subjective; it is based solely on our paradigm – a set of subjective values, assumptions, and beliefs that inform us of what should be possible or likely. According to this paradigm, consciousness is a by-product of brain activity, so Vicky could only have confabulated her story. According to this paradigm, we already catalogued every observation that can conceivably be produced by the dynamics of our earthly reality, so George could only have seen a spaceship from another planet. And finally, if the laws of nature were changing over time our entire scientific edifice would be foundationless, so they could only have stayed the same.

In all these cases, the form of the thought is this: 'Since all other alternatives allowed by the paradigm can be discarded, then the only alternative left must be true.' In other words, we extract conclusions by elimination of alternatives. The problem here is that, to infer conclusions by elimination, we must know the boundaries of reality. In other words, we must assume that our paradigm is complete; that there is no yet-unknown aspect or facet of reality lying outside our current paradigm. This is a supremely arrogant, naïve, and dangerous assumption on the face of it; one that history shows to be more-than-likely wrong (for this latter inference we do have a solid reference class!). You see, we don’t know what consciousness is or where it comes from, so discounting that it can exist independent of brain activity is precipitated at best. We don’t know all the parameters and dynamics of our earthly reality, so postulating a non-earthly agency to explain certain bizarre observations is hastened. And finally, we just cannot know whether the laws of physics have been the same since the Big Bang; yes, we have models based on this assumption that seem to explain reality, but that’s inverting the argument: these models were built so that they would make sense of the assumption to begin with.

Now here is the problem: a very significant portion of our worldviews, even the most hard-nosed scientific ones, is based just on this type of inductive inferences unsupported by a proper reference class. In fact, science itself is based on this kind of inductive inferences: after all, they are the only way to claim that the same laws and dynamics empirically observed under laboratory conditions apply to reality at large, over time and across space.

Inductive inferences motivated only by paradigms, instead of empirically-derived reference classes, lead to worldviews that are at least as much a reflection of our own thoughts (and limitations of thought) as they are a reflection of a supposedly objective nature. We live in a reality largely defined by a paradigm – a set of beliefs – as opposed to objective, empirical facts. This may reflect a level of unconscious closed-mindedness and sheer naïveté that one day may profoundly surprise us.

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Schizophrenic idealism

The Knight's Dream, 1655, by Antonio de Pereda. Source: Wikipedia.

The philosophy of idealism, defended through the ages by great minds like those of George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Gottfried Leibniz, and John McTaggart, entails that all reality is ultimately just a conscious experience. In other words, unlike realism – which postulates an external, objective world 'out there' triggering our perceptions – idealism postulates the existence of nothing but our conscious perceptions themselves. As such, idealism is a much more parsimonious and cautious worldview. Yet, somehow, realism has come to completely dominate the worldview of our culture. Most of us hardly question the assumption that there is a reality 'out there' independent of our minds; that is, that nature would still go merrily on even if nobody were looking. Leaving aside the scientific evidence to the contrary, one wonders why realism has come to be synonymous with our culture’s collective intuition of reality.

The problem is that most people, when considering the hypothesis of idealism, hardly think it through consequently. And in pondering just a half-baked, 'schizophrenic' version of idealism, contradictions arise that seem to render it untenable. This is not a sign of lazy thinking or stupidity on the part of any one of us; it’s a side-effect of the cultural fog we live immersed in. You see, in meditating about idealism most of us still unconsciously retain some key assumptions of realism. It is these hidden, unconscious assumptions that give rise to the contradictions, not idealism itself. For instance, we tend to retain the assumption that minds are inside brains. And then, given that brains are clearly separate from one another, a contradiction arises. After all, if reality is only in the 'mind' (meaning, only in the brain), how come we all share the same reality? That doesn’t seem possible; reality must be external to minds so we can all look at the same reality from the perspective of different brains. There seems to be no other possible explanation for the fact that we all seem to share the experience of a common reality. Therefore, idealism must be a fallacy.

The argument above is malformed and wrong. It judges idealism while assuming key features of realism. Namely, it assumes that minds are inside objective structures of an external reality: brains. But according to idealism there are no such things as objective structures in a reality external to mind; instead, it’s all in the mind. So the mind is not in the brain; it’s the brain that is in the mind. The dream is not in the body; it’s the body that is in the dream. As such, bodies and brains can be seen as space-time anchors for a certain point-of-view taken by mind within a kind of palpable, continuous dream. The fact that brains are separate from each other in the canvas of such dream says absolutely nothing about the limitations of mind as far as coordinating a dream shared by its many points-of-view in a very consistent manner. When an idealist says that 'it's all in here,' pointing at his head, he is at best expressing himself metaphorically and, at worst, being unconsciously inconsistent with his own position. To a true idealist, reality is not in the head; it's the head that is in the mind.

Ultimately, the dichotomy idealism-versus-realism may be no dualism at all. To say that everything is a construct within a mind is not to deny any of the qualities of experience: the concreteness, solidity, or continuity of things. This form of monistic idealism does not deny physics insofar as the latter entails models for predicting how things behave empirically; it only denies some of our ontological assumptions about how our experience of such behaviors comes into being. In other words, monistic idealism questions only our myths and stories, not our empirical observations. Such non-dualistic view entails merely that the spectrum of qualities normally associated to constructs of the imagination extends further beyond our ordinary intuition – as far as their potential concreteness, solidity, and continuity – than we ever dared think.

I wanted to write this article today to mark the release of my second book, Dreamed up Reality, in the next few days. I wanted to give you a taste of the key idea I dwell upon in it; the idea that, ultimately, all data about reality – about what may or may not be going on – resides in the mind. From a strict epistemic perspective, the 'external' world is a story we tell ourselves; a non-provable myth, reasonable and self-consistent as it may appear. As such, if one wants to set out on a path of exploration unhindered by the cultural fog we live in, one must go back to basics and start from within the mind: What does one really know from experience and what is, instead, myth and story-telling? This was my original attempt and I now decided, through my new book, to share that story.

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Computers, Brains, and the End of Logic

The online video of my TEDxBrainport talk titled "Computers, Brains, and the End of Logic" is now out. See above. I wanted to complement the information on the video with two things: a PDF file of the original slides I used during the talk (since the slides were distorted in the video due probably to version differences in Power Point), and specific references to books, articles, and people I mention during the talk.

The original slides, in PDF format, can be downloaded from this page. I am sincerely grateful to the M. C. Escher company, The Netherlands, http://www.mcescher.com/, for the kind permission to use M. C. Escher's work in my slides. Now, the detailed references:

• At ~2:15 minutes I refer to Daniel Dennett's concept of 'Maximally Bland Computationalism.' Dennett elaborates on this concept in his lecture 'Magic of Consciousness,' available on DVD;
• At ~3:40 minutes I begin a brief discussion on the Correspondence Theory of Truth, which is at the basis of our logic and rationality. More on this can be found, for instance, here: Stephen Read, Thinking About Logic, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 18-31;
• At ~4:56 minutes I refer to a certain type of experiment carried out in physics since 1981. That is a reference to the experimental validation of Quantum Entanglement. The specific work I had in mind is this: Alain Aspect et al., Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 47(460), 1981;
• At ~5:45 minutes I mention the fact that the experiment works even if the detectors are separated by miles, as done in Switzerland in the late 1990s. The reference is to the following paper: W. Tittel et al., Violation of Bell Inequalities by Photons More Than 10 km Apart, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81(17), doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.3563, 1998, pages 3563–3566;
• At ~5:50 minutes I add that it also works if the choice of measurement is made only after the photons are already in flight. The reference is to the following paper: G. Weihs et al., Violation of Bell’s Inequality under Strict Einstein Locality Conditions, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 81(23), doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.5039, 1998, pages 5039–5043;
• At ~6:45 minutes I refer to an experiment in Austria that threw realism into question. Here is the complete reference: Simon Gröblacher et al., An Experimental Test of Non-Local Realism, Nature, Vol. 446, doi:10.1038/nature05677, 19 April 2007, pages 871–875;
• At ~7:10 minutes I display a snapshot of a website discussing the results of that Austrian paper. The website article can be retrieved here: Quantum physics says goodbye to reality;
• At ~8:10 minutes I start a discussion on Intuitionism, a philosophy of mathematics created by Dutch logician Luitzen Brouwer. A thorough and more modern discussion of Intuitionism can be found here: Michael Dummett, The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic, appearing in: Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press, 1978;
• At ~9:30 minutes I illustrate with an example how the requirement of consistency with earlier choices forces certain truths in arithmetic. The derivation I show was adapted from one appearing here: Ian Stewart, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Profile Books, 2008, pages 37-38;
• At ~12:23 minutes I refer to other work suggesting that truths are based on habits. I mentioned Alfred North Whitehead and Rupert Sheldrake. Here are the works I had in mind: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press, 2nd edition, 1979; and Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, JP Tarcher, 1981;
• At ~13:50 minutes I begin to discuss a particular work of Dutch artist M. C. Escher. The work in question is "Waterfall;"
• At ~14:35 minutes I refer to a large detector used in particle physics. The detector in question is the ATLAS experiment at CERN, a piece of equipment I have had the privilege to help design when I was at CERN in the mid-1990s;
• At ~14:43 minutes I refer to the 'strange loops' of Douglas Hofstadter. See: Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Penguin Books, 1979;
• At ~15:30 minutes I quote Carl Jung on the slide. Here is the complete reference to that quote: Carl Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, page 230;
• At ~15:50 minutes I discuss Jung's general position on the meaningfulness of absurdity. This can be seen in nearly all of Jung's books. Two examples: Carl Jung, Dreams, Routledge Classics, 2002; and Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Fontana Press, 1995.

I hope this has been useful!

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Life after TED

Image credit: TEDxBrainport 2011, Vincent van den Hoogen.

It’s been over a week since I gave a talk at the TEDxBrainport event. Here is how the organizing committee is now describing my talk:

How real is reality? Are we all collectively cheating ourselves that the world that surrounds us is real? A bit like the movie ‘The Matrix’ but without machines at the steering wheel. It's this mind-boggling thought that Kastrup leaves the audience with. Starting with the bivalent operation of computers – the instrument we use to investigate the working of our own brain – via the definition of logic, Kastrup holds up a mirror that will keep a lot of us reflecting on reality and gives a new direction to what ‘thinking out of the box’ might mean.

When I read this, my involuntary and completely sincere thought was: “Wow, I’d like to watch this talk and meet this guy!” Somehow the contents of our own thoughts seem to sound a lot more inspiring (and inspired) when they are reflected back to us through the words of others. Having read books and watched talks from other authors and speakers over the years, I’ve drifted towards the naïve notion that the people behind those wonderful ideas had a degree of inner clarity far greater than their audience's. Yet my insight from reading the blurb above is that that is not necessarily the case. After all, this time I know better than anyone how much the speaker in question is troubled by inner doubts and questions.

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Some thoughts on education

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Image credit: TEDxBrainport 2011, Vincent van den Hoogen.

Education is universally recognized as a key prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant, viable society. Hardly anyone would dispute that. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a clear, unanimous view on what one should be educated for. Although there certainly are many more nuances to this question, I will limit myself to contrasting only two of them, which I consider most relevant to our present time: I will call them utilitarian education and philosophical education.

A utilitarian education aims at equipping one for the performance of practical tasks that have a direct and relatively short-term utility in a society. Electricians fix power distribution networks; engineers build dams, computers, and all kinds of handy apparatuses; physicians fix our bodies; diplomats avoid wars by resolving conflicts. The value and importance of these practical tasks to our society is unquestionable: through them, we can live longer, more healthily, and perform our own tasks more effectively. But they ignore a bigger question: Why do we live in the first place? And what should we know and understand in order to live meaningful, fulfilling lives?

This is where a philosophical education comes in; an education that equips us to look critically and thoughtfully at the world around and inside us; an education that helps us understand nature, history, and the dynamics of the human mind; an education that helps us take the lead in driving our lives to a meaningful goal, as opposed to falling unconsciously into the role of mindless consumers who only come around to asking ‘What has this all been about anyway?’ in their deathbeds. A philosophical education equips us to choose and make something truly meaningful out of our lives.

We live in an age that – especially after the 1960s – turned so drastically towards pragmatism that we’ve nearly forgotten to ask why we live. Utilitarian advancements are important in that they extend and optimize our lives, but leaving it at that is akin to restoring and turbo-charging your car so you can leave it rotting in the garage. We’re so focused in extending our lives, optimizing the performance of necessary tasks, communicating faster and more frequently with one another, accumulating wealth and, most visibly, consuming and entertaining our way to depression, that we’ve almost entirely forgotten to ask what this is all about. Why do we live? What is love all about? What is art all about? What have philosophers and poets alike been trying to say for the past few thousand years? What is going on?

It’s legitimate to try and optimize our lives, but not at the cost of neglecting to ask what life is for in the first place. Failing to provide a philosophical education that foments the growth of thoughtful human beings attuned to their own place in nature is a recipe for long-term dysfunction. A society of depressed drones going blindly about their practical tasks and mindless entertainment is hardly a utopia. The way to avoid this nightmare is not the outrageous fad that depressed human beings are simply malfunctioning robots fixable through the popping of a few pills; only a form of education that we, worryingly, seem to have lost familiarity with can provide a human alternative for our future.

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