AnssiH said:
Philosophy, sweet :)
1. What does realism mean to you?
I'm a strict materialist, so it means that there is a world out there, which is also the cause of conscious experience.
As a dualist, I'm going to challenge a few of the statements you make here. I know that it is not fashionable amongst scientists to fight materialism, but I take the challenge.
My main challenge to materialists is: tell me, from a strictly materialist viewpoint, under what conditions a physical system devellops conscious experience. Now, I know that I can get "answers" to that, but they are totally arbitrary (and depend strongly on the field of activity: from neurologists, computer scientists, zoologists... you get widely different answers which just redefine the word "consciousness" into one or other arbitrary physical property, often strongly antropologically centered). For instance, if you take a neurologist's viewpoint (memory, sensory perception and associative circuitry that has access to both, constructing a self-perception), then a PC with a web cam looking at its motherboard and running something like Photoshop is a conscious being...
In fuzzy language; Conscious experience is what happens when physical organism starts using such method of prediction that it builds a semantical worldview (=self-supporting, not representing "the truth", but merely "a way to comprehend") out of classifying the patterns it observers into "sensible objects" (with mere "assumptions") until it knows enough about the behaviour of such objects to be able predictions of systems become possible. One arbitrary assumption in such worldview is the assumption that there exists one's "self".
Let me say something totally crazy at first sight to illustrate my problem with it:
The question of course being what physical processes are being "methods". Is a crystal moving defects around building any worldview of which we might not have understood the significance under its sensory experience of sounds and vibrations ? Are the velocity fields in a turbulent flow of sufficient complexity in fact some form of "thinking" ?
To us, these seem like totally random events, but maybe to a thinking water flow, the electrochemical processes in a human brain seem totally arbitary.
How is a materialist going to define strictly what physical processes give rise to some subjective experience, and what not ?
So my point is that this problem of emergence of subjective experience is not solved by defining it away, and that it plays a potentially fundamental role in the way we define what is "an observation", which, in turn, is a fundamental concept in any scientific endaveour, given that theories are tested against observations (and hence subjective experiences).
It might be (see my previous postings) that both have nothing to do with one another, but this is, to me, not a strict requirement.
This is literally a hypothesis about the phenomenon of conscious experience existing on the basis of physical things (brains/neurons) expressing by their spatial/temporal form, an artificial model of the "world" around the organism, for the purpose of being able to predict things. We are not conscious of the world around us, but merely of this semantical model.
Well, recently I got into a discussion with someone who had to write a manager degree thesis in the medical sector. He's in the sector of the highly mentally handicapped, and the his subject is, how to motivate the low level staff by explaining them that these patients are really conscious human beings which can suffer as well as them. Indeed there's sometimes a serious problem of demotivation, often leading to mis treatment of the patients (not serious mistreatment, but daily rough handling and lack of care). To give you an idea: the average mental age of the patients is between 6 months and 1 year (although they are 30 - 50 year olds).
According to your definition, it is hard to say whether these are really "conscious beings": they almost make no predictions ! At best, they roll themselves in their excrements in as far as they have any controlled motricity.
His answer was in fact rather smart: Pascal's bet. We don't know if they are conscious beings or not. But let us imagine they are, after all, not. If we take care of them, then we're simply wasting our time and money. Now imagine they are, and we don't take care of them, and mistreat them. Then we are monsters.
It's worse to be monsters than to waste our time. So in doubt, let's be nice to them.
Consciousness is a side-product of the brain building such a worldview where certain the assumption about "self" has formed, and thus the surrounding world is interpreted in the form "this and that happened to me". The experience of free-will is what only exists in our semantical comprehension of the world, while in fact all our decisions are based directly or indirectly to the outside pressures (things we've learned, and how we interpret the situations according to things we've learned).
Simply put, we make our decisions mechanically based on the cumulated knowledge of our experiences, but we have a conscious experience of our self "searching for" the correct decisions from our worldview (thinking), as if there is a fundamental "self" with free will making choices (well, pretty simple philosophical excercises already show that free-will is a non-sensical thing at a conceptual level already, plus many experiments show that no, we are not aware of having made a decision when the physical state of the brain already reveals the choice has been made. This should not be a surprise to anyone dabbling in materialistic philosophy)
Yes, I agree with the free will thing. But that's not the discussion. The discussion is about the emergence of a subjective experience.
So the point is: when is there, and when is there not, within a physical structure, an 'awareness' ?
When does a physical process lead to an awareness, and when not ? Imagine you think up a definition which places your body outside of it. So according to your definition, you are not conscious, after all. Does that make sense ? So in what way are you then allowed to think up criteria which make up your definition of "consciousness" ?
In fact, you intuitively "know" that people are conscious, and you try to think up a set of conditions so that they all fall in the category of "conscious beings" while keeping out obvious counter examples, like PC's, robots, and ants. In other words, you try to fit humans "after the fact".
I'm sure that in the 16th century, a thing playing a strong chess game would be considered as a conscious thing. Simply because at that time, one could not think it possible for something else but a human to do so.
So we could say that being a materialist is to an extent an arbitrary choice. Why I'm not considering idealism then? Because it tends to lead either a solipsism, or to the idea that some kind of god is "feeding us with our ideas".
I don't think this is the only issue possible (I'm not religious for instance). I think materialists try to deny an aspect of the world, which is the existence of subjective experience. That doesn't mean one has to deny the link between this subjective experience and the material world, but it means that one cannot *derive* it from the reductionist description of the material world, and that you need some *extra input* to say when, and when not, subjective experiences can emerge from a physical structure.
(this is in fact as close to materialism that a dualist can come: yes, subjective experience finds its origin in the material world, but "it didn't have to happen"). The problem is that most if not all materialist arguments are strictly behavioural, and hence miss the point, because the *behaviour* of a physical structure being governed by physical laws, it doesn't NEED any emergence of subjective experience for it to behave that way. Hence behaviour can never be a proof for the existence "inside" of any subjective experience. Which excludes any inquiry into subjective experience from any experimental inquiry, *except for one's own*.
And also many experiments as judged with a materialistic view say a lot about how our "ideas" exist physically, and with that knowledge it is just too naive to think that "ideas" are fundamental. Simply put, these philosophies make assertions about some very very very complex behaviours being actually fundamental (like the sentient behaviour of god)
The "Platonic world of ideas" is of course not the world of *human* ideas, but the abstract concept of mathematical structures.
And why would anyone believing in solipsism try to convince anyone else that world is solipsistic? HELLO??!
Because it's fun to talk to one's own chimera ?
Why I'm not considering dualism, is because it too makes certain assumptions about fundamentals that become apparently naive very quickly.
I think you're thinking of only specific forms of dualism here. As I said, dualism essentially says that reductionist physical laws are not sufficient to explain the emergence of subjective experiences, simply because those physical laws would do fine all by themselves without such emergence. As such it becomes fundamentally impossible to *derive* from those physical laws, when subjective experiences emerge, and when not, and it is not because you arbitrarily decree that something of the kind happens for certain systems, that this is so. There are dualist visions with souls, deities and all the panoply you like, but this is, IMO, not the essence. The essence for me is that there is no a priori way to *derive* exactly when subjective experience emerges, and when not, from reductionist laws.
Now, after this highly philosophical debate, what does this have to do with quantum theory ?
Well, MWI proponents such as myself claim that we've been all wrong about *exactly which elements of physical reality* are to be suffering subjective experience. In classical physics, this corresponds to sets of physical degrees of freedom in certain configurations (say, living brains), while in MWI, this corresponds to certain *slices of state space* spanned over these degrees of freedom.
But in order to even be able to say this, we need some freedom in postulating freely what is, and what is not, potentially corresponding to a subjective experience independently of "physical reality" (and hence we need a minimum of "dualism"). If we can for instance *postulate* that certain quantum states of a restricted set of degrees of freedom (such as the material degrees of freedom of a brain) correspond to subjective experiences, and others don't, and we now find that the "state of the universe" simply contains a superposition of said states, then we could decree that these are "parallel" and slightly different subjective experiences, each corresponding to the SAME degrees of freedom (the brain). That's different than the view that there are ghosts in the brain or anything. But it is not a strictly materialist viewpoint, because what is, and what is not, a material state corresponding to an experience and not, is not derivable from the physical laws themselves, and needs to be postulated separately.
So in my view, our understanding of reality is based on making arbitrary assumptions about it until we have a coherent picture for making predictions. Any behaviour is a case of prediction. ANY. Walking, talking, inventing, thinking... Our understanding of anything is literally a case of some pattern being classified into such and such concept that we assume to behaves in such and such ways due to past experiences or assumptions about combinations of concepts, and because of this it is also apparent that no worldview is "correct" or "true" to reality, but merely a method of comprehending it. This is why we can look at any system and understand it in a number of different ways.
I agree here. As I said: reality is a working hypothesis that allows one to "comprehend" the world, which is, for a being, essentially reduced to its subjective experiences. It's a way of classifying subjective experiences.
This also means that ANY form of realism is to an extent naive realism. Even mine, as it also is based on semantical concepts. We are always forced to make arbitrary assumptions about things that "are fundamentally real", while not even this very classification of reality into sensible objects is in any way "correct" way to see the world, yet it is the ONLY way we can comprehend anything.
I don't see, for instance, how an MWI view (which, I think, satisfies all of the above criteria), can be called a form of naive realism...
No, we should not interpret reality as if shadows have identity. It is just a stable pattern. We should not imply ANYTHING to have identity. The apple in your hand does not have identity as such. To suppose it does, is just a semantical concept, an arbitrary assumption in your worldview. To be more proper to reality, we should just see that there are only stable patterns around us. Stable pattern is something we point a finger at and say "an apple". Not even our "self" has identity. You are at most defined by what has accumulated into your worldview, but to say you are the same person you were yesterday is an arbitrary assumption, and in many ways wrong. We are literally like a wave on the ocean; just a stable shape, not formed of the same "stuff" at every moment, or indeed, at ANY moment. Moment, btw, is also an arbitrary assumption, as is clarified by relativity.
... or a state in statespace ?
This also means there is no actual TOE out there.
I don't see how this can be decided, one way or another. To me, a TOE is a logically consistent model which can describe all our observations.
That doesn't mean that it may not turn out to be false one day, or that several of them can be found (or none ?), but I think the question of the existence of such a model, at any time, is an entirely undecided question.
3. The method of science IS philosophy, but a form of philosophy that is in my opinion sorely lacking in "philosophic thinking". To scientists I say, either "just shut up and calculate", or be more careful with your assertions about reality, and understand that any assertions you make are more or less based on ARBITRARY way to understand the system we call reality. All the assertions above, even this one, is done based on my view. I hope others can find some meaningful thoughts in it.
I couldn't agree more
**
). 
It is the same with quantum mechanics, since as far as we know, it works on such and such scale for a collection of particles, it suddenly needs to hold for all individual entities separately at all scales. And if I am allowed to guess, yes I think that the ultimate central unit is going to be very, very small.