Saul's Conchous singularity theory.


As many of you know I am a positive materialist and septic.  What that means is I believe in only what I see, mater, cause and effect and science.  I love the poetry of metaphysics (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics) : the idea of fairies, gods, demons, love and justice as their own tangible substance.  But I fall back on on empiricism or facts. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism).

However I know the limits of empiricism and what happens when people get arrogant with their knowledge.  I could argue that wisdom is someone who knows the limits of their knowledge and knowledge in general.  I have become a sceptic of knowledge in general. This is called being a sceptic in general so one can say I am sceptical of metaphysics and at the same time sceptical of empiricism.  In the end though if given a choice I do side with empiricism.

That being said a foundation of understanding the world around us is weather we ourselves make that choice.  The free will argument.  By observing the world around us we have discovered that nature responds in cause and effect.  For every effect there is a cause that caused it.  And a cause before that and a cause before that and a cause before that.  So when I move an object it was because my hand moved that object.  My hand moved because of mussels fireing.  My mussels fired because my brain sent electrical signals to the mussels.  The brain sent signals because it was hungry, it was hungry because I was low on glucose.  I was low on glucose because I have been active... etc

So there becomes a chain of unbroken events ad nausea into the past infinitely and into the future infinitely. My hand didn't move because there were spirits in it.  My hand moved because of bio electric signals.  It was inevitable for it to move.

Here is the problem.  If we are all cause and effect movement.  We are all just atoms and molecules and causes and effects there off where does does this leave free will?  Do I have a choice  to move my cup?  Are my thoughts also just an effect of some cause?  This has troubled theologians for centuries.

Again, if we are just atoms and molecules where does choice come from. If we are just a bag of chemicals, 65% water where is the soul?  Information and signals would have to appear from no-where.  There would have to be causes with out effects and effects with out causes.

A few months ago I was reading about singularities & black holes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_singularity

What is a singularity and what does it have to do with causation (theory of cause and effect) and the origin of consciousness? Well in a singularity information may be destroyed.  IE you may not be able to rewind the tape or fast forward it in to the past.  So in my example the cup may move with out me being thirsty.  Or atoms and may appear and interact or not interact.  All of this is so because of the infinite curvature of the space-time (nature its self).  So if it is true then there are areas of the universe that information is destroyed.  Then can there be areas of positive singularities where information is created.

Then I read about: Naked Singularities

In general relativity, a naked singularity is a gravitational singularity without an event horizon. The singularities inside black holes are always surrounded by an area which does not allow light to escape, and therefore cannot be directly observed. A naked singularity, by contrast, is observable from the outside.

The theoretical existence of naked singularities is important because their existence would mean that it would be possible to observe the collapse of an object to infinite density.

 

So here in effect would a be a destroyer of information that can actually be observed with out an event horizon.

 

Again, could the human mind be creating naked singularities ?  Thus creating information and be the origin of a free will and a soul?

I feel like... you could have thrown out very similar ideas using simple quantum mechanics, rather than bringing singularities and black hole-things into the picture. Randomness is not very well understood, and it seems quite possible that if something about how we make decisions is on a really small scale (like a Quantum Mind) was small enough to fall under those effects, then the direct cause/effect function breaks down.

Suppose, for instance, that your simple decision, whether to grab the red or the blue pen on the table, could be mapped onto some sort of a time-dependent wave function. A wave function doesn't "collapse" into an event unless a measurement has been made--that is, unless it's been observed or measured in some way. The strange thing is, if something inside our brain is small enough that it's under quantum effects, what is it that does the measuring?

And so, free will might also come about because a component of you (though it'd have to be outside your senses, of course) makes a measurement of your mind's wave function, choosing to collapse it at a certain point in time. Quantum theory is generally taught as a "strong"-probability thing (that is, if there's an 80% chance of the system having some property, it is a true-probability of 80%... so it's still not free will). If the wave function is time dependent, though, then observing it at one minute might give you a 70% chance of using the red pen, while observing it a moment later might give you a 100% chance. In that way, you might exercise will, outside of your senses, in order to "push yourself in the direction of" one decision or another. I find that a bit more believable than the singularity-ideas, at least, since the inner-workings of the mind are molecular, and a singularity requires a massive gravity source, while quantum effects just need things to be really small (or cold).


The mind is soooooo poorly understood, though, as well as most biological things (much worse understood than your average person probably thinks), that it's tough to apply "simple" physics and make claims about people in general. This is why sociology isn't as successful in predicting things as physics is. It could just be really confusing cause/effect rules that govern peoples' behaviors/decisions... but if it were really that simple, then chances are that we'd have more successful fields of psychology/sociology by now.  Until the cause/effect relationships themselves are found, we're all really just acting on faith, lol. Extending fields of science outside of their "scope" is making the same failing that Newtonian physics does around supermassive objects, or the way that F=-kx fails to describe the force of a spring when it's stretched beyond it's material limits.  Science is good within its scope... but until we find the laws that govern decision-making, we're really just speculating.

 

 

er... hopefully that made sense.  I'm actually around people a bit, and it's hard to write while listening and talking.

 

Again, could the human mind be creating naked singularities ?  Thus creating information and be the origin of a free will and a soul?

 

Hi, Saul. No, a naked singularity would kill you, and even if they did exist (which is not proven), there's no logical reason a human mind would be able to create one, if you think about it. It's kind of clear that you do not understand physics, but since you seem very interested in the topic, I can try to explain a few things.

Note that I consider any ideas of an immortal soul, and all variations of religion and spirituality, convenient excuses to avoid having to acknowledge a truth too horrible for most humans. As such, religion has been an evolutionary advantage; tenacity and conviction is better for survival than actually knowing the depressing truth. Positive thinking, you know. So we're predisposed to believe. (I always found it ironic that the popularity of the Intelligent Design idea is a direct consequence of evolution itself.)

Anyway, onto the physics. Let's first start with a simple analogy. The laws that govern individual particles, such as air molecules, are fairly well understood. But when particles come together, they can form complex systems, with its own physics. For example, the laws that govern a hurricane are very poorly understood and much research is needed, even if we have ways to predict every single particle in it! This phenomenon, where individually predictable elements, governed by one set of rules, come together to form higher, more complex systems, governed by rules that does not immediately follow from the first set of rules (and can, in some cases, even contradict them), is often known as emergence. Some of the systems are chaotic, for example, the Earth's weather; you may have heard about the "butterfly effect", where a flap of a butterfly's wings somewhere on Earth could trigger a tornado on the other side of the planet (worst-case scenario, but anyway).

(You may also note that evolution itself is another manifestation of this principle, complex systems arising naturally from simpler ones. Capitalism, also, is the economical equivalent of evolution; although that does not mean I like capitalism, it does explain why it works, and may hint at how to come up with a better system.)

Now, the human brain is one of the most complex systems there is. This means, again, that it follows very different rules than the particles it is made of. For example, you can have a consciousness, which no single particle can have on its own. The molecules in a human body are even continually replaced, but you're still you - you transcend your particles (and without needing exotic physics to do it). This is the level where "free will" becomes useful as a philosophical abstraction. Even if some omniscient being could predict you with 100% accuracy by following every single neuron in your mind, you still have free will because your consciousness make your choices, nobody else's. Although there are, of course, several schools of thought on this, that's how I see it. And I think it's the most meaningful way to see it, because that means ethics, a cornerstone of civilization, still applies, regardless of whether our actions are theoretically predictable or not. In practice, our minds can be as unpredictable than the weather, and should be thought of as such (even if many people actually are remarkably predictable, and easy to read, by other people - though they might not notice themselves, because of another principle I won't try to explain here).

If you enter quantum physics, with its principle of uncertainty, nothing in the universe actually is 100% predictable anyway. Now, I don't think that's where free will comes from (for starters, a neuron would be far too large for quantum effects to have a significant impact, definitely not enough to account for everyday choices), but if it makes you feel better to think so, feel free.

Nature never really intended for us to think about these things, although we do. (Another consequence of emergence, I guess. An unfortunate one, perhaps.) Perhaps the best we can do is to leave it that way, and preserve the original wonder and joy of life we were born with, instead of digging into all these depressing facts. I know there are many things I know to be true, but try to forget, because they ruin the beauty and romanticism of life.

 

-puts on waterwings and goes back to the safety of the shallow end-

ovek--

Before we talk about causal mechanisms, an analysis of causation is in order.

There are two issues with causation. One, what are more primary, causal laws, or causal relations? Secondly, are causal states of affairs reducible to non-causal states of affairs?

For example, David Hume, one of the first to come up with a robust analysis of causation, believed that causal laws are primary, and all causal states of affairs reduce to non-causal events. In other words, if we took an inventory of all events in our universe, Hume would say that the baptizing of certain relations as "causal" descriptively gives us no new knowledge. Causal laws, under this view, are understood only as regularities, nothing more.

My views on causality resemble those of G.E.M. Anscombe -- I think causal relations are more primary, and I believe such relations are self-standing -- they are not reducible to non-causal states of affairs. This is even consistent with dualism. For example, I could say that I felt buzzed be-cause I had too many shots of Canadian Club Whiskey. Or perhaps I took out the garbage on Wednesday night be-cause I erroneously thought it was Thursday night.

People who believe in fatalism -- the cosmic clock -- take a lot for granted. When asked to select food from a restaurant menu, I can't say "hold on, let me wait for the laws of physics to give you an answer." The fact that choice is at least phenomenally real should make us wary of cheap, scientistic reductions of the will. The talk of supervience and emergence during the end of the 1900s is an implicit acknowledgement that scientific reductions are not always possible in principle -- it is as if we're saying that things should reduce, but there's no conceptual contact between what is being reduced to what, so we'll just explain things away by sticking a label on it.

Saul--

A person can be a physicalist. A person can be an empiricist. The logical positivists believed we could be both. However, we can't have a phenomenalist epistemology without the first person, which must be real in some sense. For example, are colors -- private, subjective entities -- just as real as particles? This dissonance historically came to a head with the later Wittgenstein, who decided to ditch the phenomenalism as incoherent and stay with a Tolstoy-like naturalism. Science under this view becomes a practice, a form of life with its own "grammar."

I, of course, reject private language arguments and believe in things such as privileged access and epistemic foundationalism. I'm also something of a Kantian and a pragmatist in the metaphysical realm. Unlike Kant, I do believe we can know mind-independent objects through our concepts. But with Kant, I believe it is a mistake to believe the way our concepts slice up reality exhaust reality and touch some sort of metaphysical ground. This is similar to the conceptual pluralism of Mary Midgley-- think of looking in an aquarium, and how its contents appear differently from various sides. There are different ways of looking at the same things; we never get a view of things from the inside-out, only a view from the outside-in.

Ovek & Jason & Crypt thanks for the responses.

Crypt And so, free will might also come about because a component of you (though it'd have to be outside your senses, of course) makes a measurement of your mind's wave function, choosing to collapse it at a certain point in time. Quantum theory is generally taught as a "strong"-probability thing (that is, if there's an 80% chance of the system having some property, it is a true-probability of 80%... so it's still not free will). If the wave function is time dependent, though, then observing it at one minute might give you a 70% chance of using the red pen, while observing it a moment later might give you a 100% chance. In that way, you might exercise will, outside of your senses, in order to "push yourself in the direction of" one decision or another. I find that a bit more believable than the singularity-ideas, at least, since the inner-workings of the mind are molecular, and a singularity requires a massive gravity source, while quantum effects just need things to be really small (or cold).

Crypt. Ok that may give us the appearance of personality, randomness or quirkiness. With this model there is no way physical way for a 3rd party to predict the outcome. But the model still abides by cause and effect.


Ovek, I don't understand how this statement is logically consistent.

Even if some omniscient being could predict you with 100% accuracy by following every single neuron in your mind, you still have free will because your consciousness make your choices, nobody else's

The bottom line is: does the universe create, re-arrange or destroy information with out cause. If there is a cause then events can be predicted to infinite precision. That goes for simple systems like a watch or complex like weather or the human brain. How can we have any kind of Will if our minds are complex machines.

-Jason

For example, David Hume, one of the first to come up with a robust analysis of causation, believed that causal laws are primary, and all causal states of affairs reduce to non-causal events. In other words, if we took an inventory of all events in our universe, Hume would say that the baptizing of certain relations as "causal" descriptively gives us no new knowledge. Causal laws, under this view, are understood only as regularities, nothing more.

Right, no such thing as a cause and effect. Tomorrow I could wake up as Kafka's roach. There are just "convenient" patterns. The sun rises ever morning, the sky is blue, when I jump I fall back to earth.

My views on causality resemble those of G.E.M. Anscombe -- I think causal relations are more primary, and I believe such relations are self-standing -- they are not reducible to non-causal states of affairs. This is even consistent with dualism. For example, I could say that I felt buzzed be-cause I had too many shots of Canadian Club Whiskey. Or perhaps I took out the garbage on Wednesday night be-cause I erroneously thought it was Thursday night.

Cause and effect. Ok so if I take 10 shots of wisky I'll get drunk. Got it

The fact that choice is at least phenomenally real should make us wary of cheap, scientistic reductions of the will. The talk of supervience and emergence during the end of the 1900s is an implicit acknowledgement that scientific reductions are not always possible in principle -- it is as if we're saying that things should reduce, but there's no conceptual contact between what is being reduced to what, so we'll just explain things away by sticking a label on it.

Jason, I don't understand.

A person can be a physicalist. A person can be an empiricist. The logical positivists believed we could be both. However, we can't have a phenomenalist epistemology without the first person, which must be real in some sense. For example, are colors -- private, subjective entities -- just as real as particles? This dissonance historically came to a head with the later Wittgenstein, who decided to ditch the phenomenalism as incoherent and stay with a Tolstoy-like naturalism. Science under this view becomes a practice, a form of life with its own "grammar."

I, of course, reject private language arguments and believe in things such as privileged access and epistemic foundationalism. I'm also something of a Kantian and a pragmatist in the metaphysical realm. Unlike Kant, I do believe we can know mind-independent objects through our concepts. But with Kant, I believe it is a mistake to believe the way our concepts slice up reality exhaust reality and touch some sort of metaphysical ground. This is similar to the conceptual pluralism of Mary Midgley-- think of looking in an aquarium, and how its contents appear differently from various sides. There are different ways of looking at the same things; we never get a view of things from the inside-out, only a view from the outside-in.

Ok I have to do my homework. I don't understand.

Cause and effect. Ok so if I take 10 shots of wisky I'll get drunk. Got it.

Almost. There is a question of whether B just follows A, or if A causes B. Or, not to load the question, we could ask whether B follows A means A causes B. I'd argue there is at least something more at work besides regularity -- Thomas Reid when refuting Hume noted that day follows night, though we never say that night causes day.

I'd go even farther -- I'd argue that causality is a teleological concept, explaining how a part functions within a whole. I know this is philosophically retrograde, but it is indeed how we think. For example, we like to say that DNA contains information. Now, this usually isn't an idealist claim that DNA is made out of mind-stuff -- most biologists if anything tend to be reductive materialists. By calling something information, we merely point out how a molecule relates to an organism and its greater environment. So perhaps in this sense I can agree with the spirit of what ovek remarked about systems.

It is clear why one can't be an empiricist and a physicalist. Subjectivity and all that comes with it -- our colors, our volitions, our reasonings, our propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, hopes, wonderings, etc.) -- is not part of the ultimate inventory of the physical universe. Colors for example are not "out there." So are colors real? What options are left for a physicalist? One, a physicalist can claim that colors etc. are emergent, or supervene on lower-level phenomena. This is less of an explanation than an explaining away of the explanandum. Or, a physicalist can go hardcore and deny that subjectivity even exists. While some do so, they might need help more than they need a refutation.

The logical posivitists thought that one could be an empiricist and a physicalist because they were direct descendants of the British Idealists -- McTaggart, Bradley, T.H. Green, Bosanquet etc. When one reads Ayer or Russell, the phenomenalist apple doesn't fall far from the tree of absolute idealism -- a lot of the empiricists believed physical objects were composed of sense, as if physical categories were just an accounting system to keep track of our experiences.

Ovek, I don't understand how this statement is logically consistent.

Even if some omniscient being could predict you with 100% accuracy by following every single neuron in your mind, you still have free will because your consciousness make your choices, nobody else's

The bottom line is: does the universe create, re-arrange or destroy information with out cause. If there is a cause then events can be predicted to infinite precision. That goes for simple systems like a watch or complex like weather or the human brain. How can we have any kind of Will if our minds are complex machines.

Because it is an autonomous, sentient machine. No, I don't think the purpose or function of the universe, if any, is to create or destroy information, but I also don't think it should make a difference to us. I could answer the essence of this question in various ways, but I think I'll choose the most interesting one (to me).

Do you know fractals? They're interesting, and can be beautiful. In theory, they're simple - usually, a very simple mathematical formula is all there is to it. Since it's pure mathematics, they're totally predictable, in the sense that any time you ask a computer to compute the same fractal with the same parameters, you're bound to get the same result. But studying them is still interesting; by computing them and zooming in on them, you can almost always find something new. And, of course, you don't know what you'll find before you've actually looked. Thus, even if they're predictable, they can also have limitless novelty.

So, how about this. Let's say that the universe can be predicted to infinite precision (which quantum mechanics may not necessarily agree with, but anyway, let's say that). But, clearly, the only way to actually do so, and determine what would happen in it, is to actually have an universe (real or simulated) to observe. So, at worst, our universe is some super-scientist's attempt to find out what would happen, given a set of parameters. Our "present time" is how far the simulation has gone. In no way could we predict the future of our universe, and neither can that super-scientist before the simulation's timeline has actually come that far, much in the same way we can't know what a piece of a fractal looks like before our computer has calculated it. In a certain sense, we do create our future, with a will of our own; through our choices, we affect what the super-scientist's computer will show as the result of the simulation (prediction). Certainly, we might make the same choices every time he runs the simulation (with the same parameters), but he won't know what they'll be before we first make them.

I'm not sure it makes any more sense than before, but at least I find the thought amusing.