June 29, 2022
James Lyons-Weiler
Those who back constructivism, whether they know it or not, provide a pretext for those who would care to dictate reality. We must be responsible with our constructs.
The study of conscious awareness, and conscious self-awareness, is a fascinating topic. Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, a plethora of academics with time on their hands are now publishing their ruminations on the source and origins of consciousness. It will take a decade for all of their papers and books to be digested, compared, perhaps debated – but the one thing I’m certain nearly all of them share in common is – not one of them is going to prove to be testable.
Falsifiability is the hallmark of Science: Any hypothesis worth considering must be testable. If an idea cannot be challenged by making and testing specific predictions using directly material measurements related to that idea, it’s not a hypothesis. It’s just an idea. If ideas are not testable, the formal metacognitive process we call Science itself cannot proceed forward on such questions; instead, they are viewpoints, opinions, which may or may not have any bases in reality.
Questions on the very nature of reality of course bring us to the topic of physics, in particular, quantum physics, which has lately been making some stunning claims. The ancient idea of an “ether” – a substrate upon which reality rests – was dismissed strongly, only to resurface fairly recently as an energy manifold from which, under the right conditions, matter materializes in untold trillions and trillions of moments of “mini-creation”.
Now, in 2022, we’re being told that spacetime – the player in Einstein’s theory of general relativity – is not fundamental – specifically, that we’ve been looking at spacetime as manifestly “part of” the universe we are trying to understand. If it is not fundamental, that means then that it is emergent – it, too, is generated, under the right conditions, from other fundamental parts of the universe that we are only beginning to glimpse.
I’m not ready to jump down that particular rabbit hole given that I am not yet convinced that it is settled that the concept of spacetime is not a construction, a model or metaphor that we happened to see “work” mechanistically in equations. The fly in the soup for me on relativity and quantum mechanics alike has always been how time – the dimensions of time, to be precise- cancel out in the equations leading to general relativity. Why is this irksome? Clearly, if time appears in both the denominator and numerator in a term or function, we can cancel it out, right?
Well, that depends. First, in my view, math itself is a human construct that fairly well represents the necessary relationships among objects and processes, and numbers about objects and processes. Not everyone agrees; some believe that math is the language of the universe, and that observations and measurements made that conflict with what math tells us must be true are somehow in error. There has been a lot of inconsistency in this area of meta-exploration; I’ve seen presentations by people who swear that they believe math is fundamentally correct due to the uncanny relationship of mathematics and the physical world (Clegg) and then seen physicists idle away at mathematics with no concern whether their models have any basis in reality. For years, the very idea that advanced mathematics needed to touch base with reality was met with disdain by those pursuing math for the sake of mathematics; applied maths were seen as the soiled second cousin of pure mathematics and pure theoretical physics, the tail of the family as it were.
While the question of whether math itself is useful for the study of reality is important, it is not the specific topic for today, but I’ll give you a hint: Math, like telescopes, is a human construct made possible by the interaction of two limits that the universe have put into play. The first limit is that of our own cognitive processes. Our cognition is not infinitely plastic; there are things we cannot comprehend due to the limits of human cognition, and these limits are placed by human biology, genetics, and experience. Second, the physical universe exists in discrete packets of things, which, until we study continuous and mostly non-linear processes, are inherently countable. And counting in a universe made of discrete packets makes mathematics inevitable. But perhaps there are other ways of computing the universe profoundly different from those that involve counting and rearranging the counting of discrete things that might flow more readily to less paradoxical conclusions: not a different math, and not merely a different way of computing, but instead a way of knowing relationships by virtue of the dynamics of the information flow into, through, and out of packets which themselves are conduits of information. It’s accessible via a fresh look at non-linear dynamics that just might allow us to have far more than mathematics guiding our understanding. (End of the taste of where I’m going with that; I have a lot more to say about that, and will do so in my book “Principia Esoterica”).
Back to the question of why time canceling itself out is irksome. Any card-carrying empiricist would hold the precept that there is something different about “time past” and “time present”. We might not be able to put our finger on it, but our experience tells us that “time past” is inaccessible, “time present” is – always – capable of being experienced now, and that “time future”, with patience and luck in our individual survival, is accessible, eventually, and unavoidably as it transforms into time present and withers way into time past. Therefore, while time past has the same units of passage or duration (“how long was the movie? 120 minutes…”) as time present (“I’ll be here for twenty minutes”) and both have the same units as time future (“The duration of your surgery, scheduled for tomorrow, is thirty minutes”), there remains an essence that differs among time past, present and future.
This is more than a psychological perception difference; we can think about this essential difference in terms of causal networks or events that progress with or without observers. The craters of meteors that smashed into the earth hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved, for example, provide evidence of processes that we know occurred. A new dent on your car in the grocery store parking lot leaves similar evidence. As I said, time past is inaccessible to us, which makes it different from the instant now and future periods of time. New units are needed.
To be clear, I am not saying that time passed more slowly, or quickly, or was experienced difference when it occurred in the past. I’m saying that there are some units missing in the physicists’ equations that, if included, would prevent time from canceling out sometimes, and allow it others, and that a more complex but likely less elegant and less “beautiful” set of equations that might yield insights that vary considerably in the insights they could yield about some important questions.
For instance, about whether spacetime is, indeed, a thing as it is implied by Einstein’s General Relativity.
The issue of Realism vs. Constructivism won’t likely be reconciled by far-out thinkers who believe that their mathematical theories tell us that there is a reality beyond the one we can ever perceive, in large part due to unfalsifiability. But lately, a new voice has people thinking that our understanding of reality is merely the result of interfaces – our powers of perception are “tech”, like a VR headset – and that the reality we perceive is therefore not “reality”. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist, calls the flaw in our thinking that we are perceiving reality a “rookie mistake”: mistaking our perception of reality with reality. Now it is patently obvious that there are some aspects of our physical universe we cannot perceive. Evolution has not endowed us to consciously perceive most of the electromagnetic spectrum – one presumes because being able to see X-rays was not essential for the survival of our species. Blind cave salamanders didn’t need to see anything at all, so evolution dispensed with their sight. Their lack of perception of light does not void its existence.
Unlike blind cave salamanders, we have expanded our powers of perception using those limited powers of perception via technology, and we can see X-rays, as well as radio waves, and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond our limited human interfaces. Hoffman, at least the Hoffman present on podcast interviews, believes that the perception we have is absolutely misleading on the true, fundamental nature of reality.
Hoffman’s argument is that we have no power to know when we have, in fact, touched base with a fundamental aspect of reality. In online video pieces, he described how we render our version of reality when we see a part of the world – and that the reality disappears when we are no longer viewing that part of the world. His claim is that reality is that which we usually discuss is a construct in our mind – and he goes so far as to propose that our
“…sensory experiences constitute a multimodal user interface (MuI) between the perceiver and an objective world, an interface useful precisely because it does not match, approximate, or resemble that world”
Hoffman refers to the “objective world” as something outside our powers of perception and claims that we cannot rely on our perception as a guide toward understanding that objective world. He does not think that our perception is a reflection of that objective reality.
Yet in his very formulation, he is inconsistent. He is referencing something like a “real reality”, beyond our ken. There more than few obvious problems with this, but his conclusion that our perceptions are not even reflections of the “real reality”. All of this imagined other reality, of course, is evidenced by our limited powers of perception, analysis, and technological advances (built using our VR headset). And even as Hoffman writes “I propose” he has accepted the precept of himself as real; in his use of “Should we conclude” he has accepted the precept of himself and others as real; in his references to “human vision” he accepts the precept of humanity – and never once does he justify or make explicit why he has the ability to know about these things and treat them as axiomatic.
In describing his ideas to Lex Friedman, Hoffman even cites new analysis and quantum physics that point to the possibility that spacetime is not fundamental as evidence that we cannot trust our powers of perception. This, as if the concept of spacetime is mere perception using our senses, and as if we did not use our powers of perception to construct the models that tell us that spacetime might not be fundamental.
While he ponders our constructs, he has lost the game: there can be no construct to which to compare his imagined “real reality” without first accepting the reality of the human brain and the processes he has studied for decades.
Thus, his formulation of his ideas is inexact and inconsistent. He mentions – twice – on a recent podcast that he meditates for two hours a day to stay sane because, as a scientist, the very idea that our hands are tied permanently to never be able to access and comprehend the next layer down, and the layer after that is so intense.
However, when scientists propose theories of reality that they do not apply to their own reality, the subjective nature of the theory is laid bare. The best I can do to try to relate to this new construct of Hoffman’s is to say that in counterargument, he could simply admit that I’m right, that everything he has proposed is of course a construct, and that he’s only human, and that somehow proves his point. But we could still never know how far off (or correct) this Hoffman’s layered construct might be.
And all he could provide would be more argumentation. Like Sam Harris’ argumentation about the lack of Free Will, these ideas – while breathtakingly latitudinous in their importance on existentialist questions – lack data. Harris, in his amusing and entertaining presentations, and his comparatively dry but easily readable booklet – merely throws his hands in the air and claims that because individuals cannot be capable of being consciously aware and controlling of each and every minute process involved in cognition, they are incapable of self-determination and free will. He provides not a shred of empirical data; in fact, in his book, the only “evidence” he discusses supports an association between choice and consciousness
“since the evidence strongly suggests they are associated with flexible action and information integration in service to behavior control.”
Harris, Sam. Free Will (p. 21). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
In another part of the booklet, Harris cites one of his Editors, Jerry Coyne, with this question:
“As Jerry Coyne points out (personal communication), this notion of counterfactual freedom is also scientifically untestable. What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
Harris, Sam. Free Will (p. 76). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
But it’s a fair enough and more important question to pose “What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could not have acted differently in the past?”
Both Harris and Hoffman lack evidence. They lack tests. Their ideas are not falsifiable. And experience has shown that constructivist ideas like these can be dangerous because they will tend to be abused by tyrants.
{Please note that I am not accusing either Hoffman or Harris as being apologists for future tyrants who will misuse their ideas. And no, I don’t mean we should censor these guys. That’s so 2021.}.
The idea that we can, or (to combine Sam Harris and Hoffman’s worldviews) that we DO and MUST deterministically simply construct reality without question or pause is to then admit defeat in the struggle for equanimous approaches to solving society’s problems. The ideas can, and will be abused by some who take them as reasons to not hold others accountable for their actions; by some who will take them as a reason why they should not be held accountable for their actions; and others as a reason to subjugate themselves to those with the most power – simply because that is the simplest way to a stable and quiet life.
Some might even use Hoffman’s position to claim that it’s time to end Science. Why should we even bother trying to understand the fundamentals of the nature of our reality if, in the end, it’s all a lie, warped into unknown models of nothing real in our brains by our multimodal user interface? What does that even mean for people who want to make sure their kids have a reasonable shot at an economically stable future and a reasonably happy life?
Parsimony tells us that our powers of perception are the way they are because our ancestors survived better than competitors who had less keen eyesight and hearing. Imagining that this necessarily means that we cannot grasp the fundamental nature of reality itself is a stretch. I’m not saying we can: but I am saying the jury is still out. Neither our ancestors, nor our competitors needed or could have used radio antennae on the tops of our heads for perception in part because there were no signals relevant to helping them meet their day-to-day needs survival coming to us, or our extinct competitors. Yet today, we transmit and receive radio waves and use other electromagnetic frequencies in nearly a limitless manner.
Those who back constructivism, whether they know it or not, provide a pretext for those who would care to dictate reality. This is a disturbing, human-centric recurrence in the philosophy of science, and philosophy in general.
Empirical realism is the opposite of constructivism. Sir Karl Popper fought off constructivism in his time, adopted in the form of induction by the Vienna Circle, a group who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna. Their plurality of positions, alternatively known as logical empiricism, logical positivism or neopositivism, suffered a flaw. For Popper, logic and experience alone were not enough to make generalized knowledge claims. Popper wrote massive tomes on the perils of basing our understanding of the world and each other based only on accumulated experience and logic, and insisted that instead of finding confirming instances that affirm our individual or collective ideas, a formal method of Science was needed by which our pet ideas were challenged by tests that provided evidence by which we could then assess the truthfulness, or verisimilitude, of our hypothesis. The degree to which the survival of any given hypothesis surprised us following a critical test (given our background knowledge) provided a measure of how well corroborated the hypothesis had become. Popper is part of the reason why we conduct ourselves in Science via hypothesis testing.
I can think of no way to critically test Hoffman’s proposed conclusion that humanity necessarily cannot trust our senses to, eventually, lead us down a path via which we can perceive in a manner that allows us to comprehend the fabric our the “real reality” of our universe (or universes).
In short, I find Hoffman’s idea interesting, and worth keeping in mind that we should not merely trust our senses, I do not find his conclusions and generalizations compelling, and I find the potential consequences appalling.
Postscript: The FDA will soon be deciding on whether they will require vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer to conduct new clinical trials as they change the formulation of their vaccines. The proposal by Moderna and Pfizer is to be allowed to concoct whatever type of biologic they think necessary and useful without randomized prospective clinical trials. This is necessarily a step into the New Dark Ages I keep warning about. Demand Science, and a lot of it – and demand that it be peer-reviewed before being acted upon by regulatory bodies, and that it be conducted by independent researchers with no financial conflicts of interest. No ties to Pharma, nor to HHS. No more Science by Press Release. Wake up, Neo.
https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/realism-vs-constructivism-determinism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
