When trying to understand the nature of reality, we have to grapple with the question of how it is that we can know something of it. As we are limited to view the universe through a human lens, it is not clear how our mental constructs correspond to reality. To explore this, we should look at our lens in detail, refine its shape, polish out any scratches and understand its limitations.
Pretty weird to think that no human has ever experienced anything that was not just a simplified model of the outside world–that in fact, nobody has ever escaped the confines of their skull! (Well…maybe briefly, right before they died…)
Even weirder is that I’m not sure it’s even coherent to ask what the world is like outside of our experiences. This is because asking what something “is like” presupposes a conscious observer. If we ask what a dog *really* “looks like”, we’re already presupposing a looker. The reality is that a dog doesn’t “look like” anything, in-and-of itself.
We have to remove all of the pure qualities of experience, the “what it’s like”, from the external world (because they exist only in our minds), and endeavor to discover the abstract mathematical formulas that correspond to that world. That’s basically what physics is, and what all of the other sciences are ultimately supposed to be reducible to.
Because that’s what the world really is: a bunch of abstract mathematical relationship between bits of reality that only come to be “like something” after being interpreted by our brains, and then represented in our minds.
But if reality is just a purely mathematical abstraction, where do the pure qualities that we experience come from? And what are the “bits of reality” that are relating to each other? It can’t be math all the way down, can it?
Well…qualia (.e. the contents of our experiences, like the redness of red) aren’t reducible to math. I can’t help but to wonder if the fact that our minds are (seemingly) mathematically irreducible has some profound significance…
(And, no: I’m not pushing panpsychism. But I do think things are queerer than we *can* imagine.)
Adam Elwood says:
30 December 2020 at 7:01 pm Edit
I agree when you say it’s weird to think humans will never be able to know anything other than the simulation of reality in their head. But, when you say reality is really a bunch of mathematical relationships, I think you miss the fact that mathematics is actually a purely human construct! To me it’s more of a precise language that allows us to map out fundamental intuitions (which become the base axioms of mathematics) onto more complex, unintuitive structures. I.e. combining axioms in fancy ways gives you the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. However, all you’ve really done is expressed the same things differently, in a way that makes more sense to our limited way of thinking. From this point of view, all of mathematics is a tautology that is useful for us to think about the world, but doesn’t correspond to reality any more than any other way of thinking.
Somehow reality just is… Our only way of accessing this isness is through our conscious experience of qualia. From this, and discussion with others, we infer an outside world.
In my current thinking, the question of consciousness is therefore somehow equivalent to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It seems like this then collapses the argument of the illusionists and the panpsychists into the same thing. However, I need to think more about it…
========================================
Gerrit de Vries says:
31 December 2020 at 3:44 pm Edit
“We can open ourselves up to the more subtle understanding conveyed in ancient wisdom or through non-conceptual emotional experience.” This asks for more elaboration! 🙂 I guess you know the writings of Bernardo Kastrup? In this respect e.g. More than Allegory
Adam Elwood says:
31 December 2020 at 4:08 pm Edit
This does ask for more elaboration! My perspective on this comes from my meditation experiences, based around Buddhist insight and concentration practices. I want to try to find a nice way to present it for a rationalist crowd, but it will take some thought.
I didn’t know about the work of Bernardo Kastrup, but it looks really interesting. Thanks very much for the recommendation, I’ll give him a read.
Previous comments imported from Wordpress:
========================================
Ryan Clark says:
30 December 2020 at 6:05 pm Edit
Pretty weird to think that no human has ever experienced anything that was not just a simplified model of the outside world–that in fact, nobody has ever escaped the confines of their skull! (Well…maybe briefly, right before they died…)
Even weirder is that I’m not sure it’s even coherent to ask what the world is like outside of our experiences. This is because asking what something “is like” presupposes a conscious observer. If we ask what a dog *really* “looks like”, we’re already presupposing a looker. The reality is that a dog doesn’t “look like” anything, in-and-of itself.
We have to remove all of the pure qualities of experience, the “what it’s like”, from the external world (because they exist only in our minds), and endeavor to discover the abstract mathematical formulas that correspond to that world. That’s basically what physics is, and what all of the other sciences are ultimately supposed to be reducible to.
Because that’s what the world really is: a bunch of abstract mathematical relationship between bits of reality that only come to be “like something” after being interpreted by our brains, and then represented in our minds.
But if reality is just a purely mathematical abstraction, where do the pure qualities that we experience come from? And what are the “bits of reality” that are relating to each other? It can’t be math all the way down, can it?
Well…qualia (.e. the contents of our experiences, like the redness of red) aren’t reducible to math. I can’t help but to wonder if the fact that our minds are (seemingly) mathematically irreducible has some profound significance…
(And, no: I’m not pushing panpsychism. But I do think things are queerer than we *can* imagine.)
Adam Elwood says:
30 December 2020 at 7:01 pm Edit
I agree when you say it’s weird to think humans will never be able to know anything other than the simulation of reality in their head. But, when you say reality is really a bunch of mathematical relationships, I think you miss the fact that mathematics is actually a purely human construct! To me it’s more of a precise language that allows us to map out fundamental intuitions (which become the base axioms of mathematics) onto more complex, unintuitive structures. I.e. combining axioms in fancy ways gives you the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. However, all you’ve really done is expressed the same things differently, in a way that makes more sense to our limited way of thinking. From this point of view, all of mathematics is a tautology that is useful for us to think about the world, but doesn’t correspond to reality any more than any other way of thinking.
Somehow reality just is… Our only way of accessing this isness is through our conscious experience of qualia. From this, and discussion with others, we infer an outside world.
In my current thinking, the question of consciousness is therefore somehow equivalent to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It seems like this then collapses the argument of the illusionists and the panpsychists into the same thing. However, I need to think more about it…
========================================
Gerrit de Vries says:
31 December 2020 at 3:44 pm Edit
“We can open ourselves up to the more subtle understanding conveyed in ancient wisdom or through non-conceptual emotional experience.” This asks for more elaboration! 🙂 I guess you know the writings of Bernardo Kastrup? In this respect e.g. More than Allegory
Adam Elwood says:
31 December 2020 at 4:08 pm Edit
This does ask for more elaboration! My perspective on this comes from my meditation experiences, based around Buddhist insight and concentration practices. I want to try to find a nice way to present it for a rationalist crowd, but it will take some thought.
I didn’t know about the work of Bernardo Kastrup, but it looks really interesting. Thanks very much for the recommendation, I’ll give him a read.