Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD

On human dignity: The difference between value and importance

2024-12-18T17:52:00.020+01:00

It is cliché to say that we are living through a period of drastic historical change: every period reflects the perennial ebb and flow of history, nothing ever remaining static. But sometimes this change is extraordinary in both intensity and impact. And if any historical junction deserves such a characterisation, it is the one we are living through right now. For a number of never-before-seen dynamics that stand to dramatically impact human life are converging: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drastically change the way we work and look upon ourselves; geopolitical tensions and, almost certainly, related armed conflict at a global scale will again challenge the international order and upset countless human lives; the rise of post-truth and conspiracy-theory mentality will continue to profoundly upset our culture and information space; and in-your-face climate change will render large swaths of the planet uninhabitable for humans, leading to dramatic demographic shifts.

In this context of extraordinary change we must be extra careful and vigilant about how we define and look upon human dignity. For it is how we regard ourselves that sets the tone for whether the changes that are coming will tip towards something positive or vastly negative instead. For instance, the way we look upon ourselves will determine whether AI developments will equate us to mere mechanisms that are being rendered increasingly redundant, or creative miracles who will be set freer by the advent of AI. It is how we regard ourselves that will determine whether we care for the millions of Bangladeshis and Dutch whose homes will be flooded by higher sea levels once land ice in Greenland and Antartica melts (which will happen rather suddenly), or regard them merely as cattle that needs to be relocated to some tent camp somewhere dry.

The way we define human dignity is the crux of the matter here, and the common underlying theme that informs all of the converging dynamics cited above. What is it that makes human life valuable? What is it that makes it important? If you think these two questions are synonymous, then that is already an alarming misunderstanding that may determine whether we are all going to hell in a hand basket. For value and importance are two entirely different things, particularly when it comes to human lives.

We often associate both our value and importance with what we do in life. To convince yourself of it, just ask yourself if you think that someone who does nothing for a living is either important or valuable. Work or activity is tightly linked to our sense of dignity, and it has been so for a very long time. Therefore, it is crucial that we approach how activity determines our dignity in an examined, careful manner. It is crucial that we understand the relationship between activity and value on the one hand, and activity and importance on the other.

Value is determined by market dynamics of scarcity or abundance. If very few other people can perform the work you can perform, then your work is valuable. Let me take myself as an example: I am both a philosopher of mind and a computer scientist/engineer. Not many people can do these things, for they require long, arduous education and experience, as well as high intellectual capacity of a certain type. Because not many people out there can sit and design a Neural Processing Unit (NPU, an AI-focused computer processor), I get handsomely rewarded for designing one. In other words, it is market dynamics that determine my value. If something is highly desired but very few people can produce it, these few people become valuable.

But that doesn't mean that tasks that a great many people can perform, despite commanding less value, aren't important. Take trash collection, for instance: most people can perform the task of collecting trash. So trash collectors do not command high salaries, bonuses, or other forms of special financial compensation. If a trash collector becomes unhappy with their pay and decides to quit, countless others can be found to fill the vacancy. So trash collectors do not command high market value. Yet, this does not mean that trash collectors aren't important.

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If all trash collectors were to disappear, civilisation would literally come to an end. There can be no industry, no system of education, no high technology, and generally no large-scale human productive activity without trash collection. You may say that, if trash collectors were to quit, you and I could collect the trash ourselves instead. And that is true; but it also means that there would still be trash collectors: you and I. The scenario here is that no one would collect trash, not even you or I. That would be a civilisation-ending scenario, which means that trash collection is very highly important, despite commanding low value.

In contrast, civilisation would continue without people like me: if all computer scientists/engineers and philosophers of mind were to disappear, our high technology and metaphysics would be in trouble but everything else would go merrily on. We would revert to living the way people lived before the Second World War, which was pretty alright. A fairly modern form of life would continue. But without trash collectors, it wouldn't; we would, instead, be thrown back to a pastoralist form of life, after which billions of us would die because pastoralism can't support 8 billion bipedal apes on this small rock. Clearly, thus, trash collectors are more important than philosophers of mind and computer scientists/engineers, even though the latter command more value because of the market dynamics of scarcity.

Now ask yourself this: which matters most when it comes to human dignity, value or importance? Methinks the answer here is crystal clear: importance, of course, is more central to human dignity. Value is merely a matter of changing market dynamics, while importance constitutes the very foundation of human civilisation. A trash collector is more important than me, quite literally, and this should be obvious to everyone, including the trash collector.

But we live in a culture that mistakes value for importance and, therefore, pooh-poohs the trash collector, the farmer, the carpenter, the sewer worker, the roofer, and all those people whose activity constitutes the indispensable foundation of human civilisation, even if they don't command high market value. Such a skewed and incredibly dangerous cultural dynamics, created and maintained by the psychology of urban elites, robs important people of their own sense of dignity. This, in turn, is what feeds a natural but equally skewed and dangerous reaction in the form of populism. For populist politicians pray on the justifiable sense of anger that reigns among those who have been robbed of their dignity by urban elites.

The responsibility for correcting this skewed and harmful state of affairs lies with all of us, but mostly with urban elites, which count me in their ranks. We must re-examined our knee-jerk assumptions and revise the way we look upon, and treat, those doing critically important work without which we couldn't have the lives we lead. We must become explicitly aware of the fundamental distinction between value and importance, and thereby treat important people with the dignity they deserve.

And as for those important people who command less market value than urban elites, it is incumbent upon them to separate their own sense of personal dignity from the knee-jerk discourse of urban elites. Know your importance, regardless of what others think. Those who think you are unimportant are simply confused and taken in by knee-jerk psychological issues; you don't need them to know how important you are. And know that your anger is justified. But beware of letting this justified anger make you easy pray to those eager to leverage it for their own gain, particularly those who, ironically, come precisely from the heart of urban elites and schmooze only with 'valuable' peers.

Rupert Sheldrake's rejoinder

2024-12-06T22:08:00.006+01:00

Rupert has asked me to publish his rejoinder to the previous post in this blog, wherein I defended myself against his attack on Analytic Idealism. Here is his response, in the form of a letter, in full and unedited. I've added a link to it from my previous post.

Dear Bernardo,

I regret the tone of my remarks in my interview with Curt Jaimungal, because I greatly respect you and your work. I am influenced by it. I think your promotion of Analytical Idealism has widened the scope of modern philosophical debate and opened up questions and discussions that might not otherwise have been possible. I apologise for expressing myself in a way you found hurtful.

When I was speaking to Curt about your work, I was talking to him as if it were a conversation between the two of us. We had already had several informal chats when he was in London soon before our discussion. Unfortunately, I was not thinking about the impact of the conversation on people who might not know very much about you, and for whom my comments could have been misleading. If I had thought more, I would first have made clear how Analytical Idealism differs from physicalism, before moving on to say that your Idealist position also includes some aspects of physicalism and reductionism. This became clear to me soon before my conversation with Curt because I had just read you new book.

In the subtitle of Analytical Idealism in a Nutshell, you call it “the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics”. This is a provocative claim, and it provoked me into thinking about the basis for your rejection of all other forms of idealism. I could only conclude that this is because you still share some of the default assumptions of physicalism, including naturalism and reductionism, as you yourself make clear.

On page 2 of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, you write that Analytical Idealism “embraces reductionism”, by which you mean that “complex phenomena can be explained in terms of simpler ones.” As you point out, simpler does not necessarily mean smaller, but in the context of biology, reductionism in practice means reducing organisms to molecular processes, and behaviour to the activity of nerves.

I have spent sixty years struggling against reductionism in biology, psychology and consciousness studies. In biology, reductionism has long ruled the roost in the form of molecular biology, focussed on genes and other molecules. This reductionist attitude has inhibited holistic research in developmental biology, animal behaviour, psychology and medicine by forcing everything into a physicalist mould, pointing down towards the supposed ultimate foundation of everything, fundamental quantum physics. In the light of my own personal history, your advocacy of reductionism made me think of your position as close to physicalism, in spite of you being an Idealist.

You also embrace naturalism. This is your own definition: “The phenomena of the external world unfold spontaneously, according to nature’s own inherent dispositions, and not according to external intervention by a divinity outside nature” (also on p. 2). In common usage, physicalism, naturalism and atheism are closely intertwined, and often treated as identical. Naturalism borrows its widespread credibility in the secular world from the prestige of physicalist science. I know that you distinguish Analytical Idealism from physicalism by making consciousness, rather than physical processes, fundamental, but as you yourself make explicit, you carry over several physicalist assumptions and attitudes into your brand of idealism, which is what I tried to summarize in the phrase “idealist physicalism”. I agree this is misleading, and it would be more accurate to say “physicalist-flavoured idealism”.

Our most fundamental disagreement concerns God. All believers in God, including me, are idealists in the sense that they regard divine consciousness as fundamental. You want to keep God out of science and philosophy, especially any kind of Abrahamic God. Espousing naturalism enables you to do so as a matter of principle. But even if you dismiss anything to do with Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Indian religions have plenty of examples of trinitarian or advaitic (non-dual) idealism. Moreover, most forms of trinitarian or advaitic idealism do not involve an external supernatural God intervening in the otherwise spontaneous running of nature. They are not claiming, as you put it, an “external intervention by a divinity outside nature”, but rather see divine consciousness as underlying and sustaining all nature all the time. The philosopher David Bentley Hart, for example, shows this very clearly in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

We agree that there is a need to move on from old-style physicalism. We agree that idealism provides a better philosophical overview. But I take seriously religious or theological idealisms, whereas you rule them out a priori by invoking the naturalist principle. Then the only form of idealism left standing is you own.

It was unfair of me to call your form of Analytical Idealism an armchair theory and I am sorry about this remark. I tarred you with the brush of other philosophers, but in fact you have repeatedly engaged with detailed scientific and empirical findings. You have also made some visionary suggestions for empirical research. In your book More Than Allegory (2016), you created a science-fiction type fantasy in which you envisaged experiments on psychedelics in which people were given intravenous infusions of psychoactive substances (“the juice mix”) that prolonged their altered states of consciousness so they could explore them in great detail. Subsequently, this experiment was actually carried out, using dimethyl tryptamine (DMT), at Imperial College, London, with some very brave volunteers. The results were published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You and I are both used to controversies and recognize that other people sincerely hold differing views. Ideas develop through dialogue, and we have already taken part in a good-natured discussion which anyone can watch online.

I hope that we will be able to continue our discussions in a spirit of openness.

Rupert

Response to Rupert Sheldrake's criticisms of Analytic Idealism

2024-11-22T20:24:00.091+01:00

06-Dec-2024 update: Rupert's rejoinder to the response below has now been published and can be found here.

Over the past several days, multiple people have commented in my blog and social media spaces about criticisms of Analytic Idealism made by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake in the Theories of Everything podcast/YouTube channel. Before today, I hadn't seen the video and thus had largely dismissed most of those comments as probably exaggerated, as I've known Rupert for years, and know him to be a careful, nuanced thinker and an impeccable gentleman. Today, however, after receiving yet another comment, I looked up the segment in question, which I link to below (see time stamp 8:14 min).

I confess to have been taken aback by this video. I shall try to respond to Rupert's criticisms as objectively as I can, but I will likely fail at times. For I have read, respected, and admired Rupert's work for years before I even started publishing my own. His attack comes as an entirely unexpected curveball from someone quite close to my philosophical (and even personal) heart, and thus brings up emotions that are best left out of analytic discourse.

Here are my responses, in the same chronological order with which Rupert's criticisms are laid out in the video above.

FOR SCIENCE, IT'S BUSINESS AS USUAL

Rupert seems to consider it a weakness of Analytic Idealism that it doesn't contradict science. I, on the other hand, consider it not as much a virtue as a prerequisite for any tenable metaphysics. For science has worked phenomenally well in attempting to model and predict the behavior of nature for the past four centuries. Any metaphysics implying that science should not work is thus simply wrong, on overwhelming empirical grounds. Science surely doesn't replace level-headed metaphysics, as some scientists have naively maintained, but as a modelling and predictive method it obviously works. And Rupert, as a scientist, surely knows this.

I have never been anti-science, much to the contrary. To my dismay, more and more I realize that a significant minority of my readers thought of me, for some reason, as being in some kind of anti-science crusade. I even expressed my befuddlement about this recently, as I don't understand where this vastly mistaken impression comes from. It has never been correct. Anyone paying attention to my output will definitely have noticed that I ground much of what I say in scientific results, and have done so from the outset.

Perhaps Rupert's point is that Analytic Idealism doesn't sufficiently open new degrees of freedom or avenues of investigation for science. But if so, that is simply wrong. Over the years, I have tirelessly emphasized precisely these new avenues for scientific investigation; so often, in fact, that I don't even know where to start quoting from my corpus.

In general lines, because, under Analytic Idealism, our minds are simply dissociated from the cognitive space that constitutes the rest of nature, it is entirely conceivable that factors that weaken the dissociation could lead to phenomena such as forms of telepathy and clairvoyance. I never elaborated at length on this merely because I am not an expert in parapsychology and do not have the background required to say something of distinguished value here. I am also not personally very interested in extraordinary phenomena because I find the ordinary mysterious and confusing enough. I say this with no prejudice or judgment; it's just how I feel. Either way, if Rupert's point was that Analytic Idealism doesn't open the doors to new avenues of investigation in science, such as those explored in his own work, then that is false.

Rupert highlights that Analytic Idealism is still naturalist and reductionist. That is entirely correct. I think the world unfolds spontaneously, according to its own inherent dispositions (i.e., the observed regularities we call the 'laws of nature'), and without supernatural intervention from an outside agent beyond the boundaries of nature itself. I am promoting an analytic ontology, not a religion. And I think reductionism, if interpreted correctly (namely, that complex things can be explained in terms of simpler ones, as opposed to the vulgar view of reductionism according to which big things must be reducible to small things), is more than likely true; or should at the very least be the operationally preferred avenue for modeling nature, since it has worked well for a few centuries now. The only view my naturalism and reductionism contradict is some form of Abrahamic theism, literally interpreted. But if Rupert's criticism is motivated by his theistic views, I think they are inappropriate in the context of science and philosophy; that is, his criticisms don't count. What he sees as a liability, I see as a strength.

ANALYTIC IDEALISM IS JUST A FORM OF PHYSICALISM

Prior to today, I could never have imagined that such a superficial misunderstanding could come from a nuanced and careful thinker and communicator as I have known Rupert to be. It is an in-your-face misrepresentation of Analytic Idealism, a vulgar straw man, conveyed in a confusingly enthusiastic, authoritative, and definitive tone. I'd have expected him to, at the very least, have preambled his unfortunate mischaracterization with words like, "as far as I understand it," or "insofar as I know from briefly looking at it," or something to that effect. That would have been a bare minimum, for the sake of transparency, caution, and honesty. But he presented himself, in both tone and demeanour, as an expert thoroughly acquainted with the thing he was liberally mischaracterizing.

The only metaphysical equivalence between Analytic Idealism and mainstream Physicalism is that both acknowledge the existence of an external world beyond our individual minds. But this is surely hard to contest, short of some form of solipsism. Even the emerging physics of first-person perspective (see video below, for instance) indirectly acknowledges some ontological ground common to different observers, and wherein observers appear to one another, even if such common ground isn't strictly physical. Under Analytic Idealism, it is mental, what we call 'physicality' being simply how we cognitively represent this common ontological ground upon observations. In other words, physicality is a dashboard representation, upon measurement, of the real and mental world that is measured. But this mental world measured is really real; it is really out there and doesn't depend on observation. After all, there is something that is measured. Why would Rupert expect anything else? How could anything else be defended in an analytically or empirically viable manner?

Beyond this, Analytic Idealism is entirely distinct from mainstream Physicalism, to such a vast and obvious degree it seems pointless to explain further to anyone who has ever become modestly acquainted with my output. Yet, I do acknowledge that thinking of Analytic Idealism as in some sense equivalent to Physicalism is a common misconception among superficial and careless 'social media pundits.' But I know Rupert not to be one of those. Be that as it may, I responded to this misconception in many places, most notably in my new book, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. I quote the relevant passage below:

“Well, Bernardo, if all science is still valid under Analytic Idealism, and there is still a world out there independent of us, then Analytic Idealism is basically Physicalism under a different label; it all boils down to the same thing.”
This astonishingly shortsighted perspective is surprisingly common. If you identified with it, don’t blame yourself too harshly. The reason why the perspective is shortsighted is that it wholly ignores the colossal differences in the implications of Analytic Idealism when compared to mainstream Physicalism. But our culture rewards quick judgment calls and, therefore, discourages the depth of thinking required to explore the implications of new ideas.
Under Analytic Idealism, your life, your metabolism, is not the cause or generator of your consciousness, but merely what your private mentation looks like from the outside; i.e., from across your dissociative boundary. Life is what the dissociation looks like. Therefore, the end of life is the end of the dissociation, not the end of consciousness.
The end of a dissociative process is also not the end of the mental states held within the dissociative boundary; it is merely the end of the dissociative boundary. This means that the mental states previously held by the alter—your lifetime of memories and insights—are released into the broader cognitive context of nature-at-large upon death. Our hard-earned memories and insights—typically the result of much suffering—are not lost upon death but, instead, become available to nature-at- large. Contrast this with the physicalist view: when you die, all your memories and insights are just lost forever, and all that suffering was for nothing. Clearly, these two scenarios aren’t even remotely similar, and their differences are of great relevance to our values, to how we make our life choices, and generally experience our lives.
In addition, although Analytic Idealism preserves— arguably even strengthens—the rationale for drugs and surgery in medicine, it opens an additional avenue for the treatment of organic ailments: talk therapy and related practices. For under Analytic Idealism, the body is not a mere mechanism distinct from mind, but the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. Therefore, any organic ailment is, at root, a mental ailment. This doesn’t mean that you can cure cancer with positive thinking—as we’ve discussed before, the ego complex is naturally dissociated from autonomous functions, and thus has limited causal influence on them. But it does mean that it’s sensible to research whether we can reach further down into our physiology through psychological means, so to address some ‘physical’ ailments. This, in fact, could be the missing account of the so-called placebo effect, which under Physicalism is just a vexing anomaly. Can we deliberately induce the effect through psychological methods, now that a coherent metaphysical framework validates and accounts for it?
I have already explored the implications of Analytic Idealism at length in previous writings, so won’t repeat all that here. It suffices to mention—as I did above—what I believe to be two of the more important ones. The invitation to you— especially if you feel tempted to regard Analytic Idealism as equivalent to Physicalism in any important sense—is to think about the different implications of these very different views. What changes for you if you understand yourself to be not a physical mechanism, but a mental being, whose mental contents and core subjectivity will never be lost to nature?

ANALYTIC IDEALISM MAKES NO EXPERIMENTAL PREDICTIONS THAT DISTINGUISH IT FROM PHYSICALISM

This is another rather crass and patently false misrepresentation, despite having been communicated with a tone of authority and definiteness. Again, I recently tackled this common but remarkably superficial straw man in my latest book. Here is the relevant passage:

“Isn’t Analytic Idealism unfalsifiable?”
Before directly answering this question, it’s important to notice that, when Karl Popper proposed falsifiability as a requirement for scientific theories, he was talking about, well, scientific theories—i.e., theories that model and predict the behavior of nature, not what nature is. A scientific theory must be falsifiable in the sense that it must make predictions about nature’s future behavior that can be checked against experimental outcomes. If this is not the case, the theory is unfalsifiable and, therefore, not a proper scientific theory.
But when it comes to Analytic Idealism—and mainstream Physicalism too—we’re not talking about a scientific theory that predicts nature’s future behavior; instead, we’re talking about metaphysical statements about what nature is. The criteria for choosing the best theory in this case is more diverse than falsifiability: they entail internal logical consistency, contextual coherence, conceptual parsimony, explanatory power, and empirical adequacy. The latter criterion means that the implications of a proper metaphysical theory must not contradict established science. And insofar as established science is falsifiable, a metaphysical theory must indeed relate to falsifiability, but only in an indirect way.
The applicable question is thus whether Analytic Idealism is consistent with established science. And the answer is an overwhelming ‘yes.’ As we have discussed earlier, established science has shown that—short of unfalsifiable theoretical fantasies for which there is no positive evidence—physical entities do not have standalone existence, being instead a product of measurement. This is exactly what Analytic Idealism maintains, since all ‘physical’ entities are dashboard representations of measurements, which only endure while a measurement is being performed. And it directly contradicts mainstream Physicalism, which presupposes precisely that physical entities, for being fundamental, must have standalone existence independent of observation.
Established science has also shown that there are cases— such as during the psychedelic state, as discussed earlier— in which brain activity decreases, while the richness and intensity of experience increases. This is at least very hard to make sense of under mainstream Physicalism, according to which there is nothing to experience but brain activity. But it can be comfortably accommodated by Analytic Idealism, according to which brain activity is just what inner experience looks like, from an external perspective; i.e., it is but an image of inner experience. And unlike causes, images don’t need to be complete: they don’t need to reveal everything there is to know about the phenomenon they represent. In the case of psychedelics, the images leave quite a bit out.
Moreover, psychedelics are only one case in which, contrary to physicalist expectations, brain function and the richness of experience are inversely correlated. As we have seen above, constriction of blood flow to the brain due to strangulation or G-forces—which reduce brain metabolism due to oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia—can lead to psychedelic-like trances and “memorable dreams.” Hyperventilation—which also constricts blood flow to the brain because it induces high blood alkalinity levels—can lead to life-transforming insights, a phenomenon leveraged by some therapeutic breathwork techniques. Even outright brain damage can lead, in some specific cases, to richer inner experience. In a condition called ‘acquired savant syndrome’ (look it up), some people who have suffered brain damage because of head trauma incurred during car accidents, lightning strikes, and even bullet wounds to the head, suddenly manifest extraordinary cognitive skills such as artistic talents, the ability to perform complex calculations almost instantaneously, and perfect memory. A large group of Vietnam war veterans who suffered damage to the frontal or parietal lobes has also been shown to have a higher propensity to life-transforming religious experiences (see: “Neural correlates of mystical experience,” by Irene Cristofori et al., published in Neuropsychologia, 2016). Even patients who suffered brain damage because of surgery for the removal of tumors experience significantly higher “self-transcendence” (see: “The spiritual brain: Selective cortical lesions modulate human self- transcendence,” by Cosimo Urgesi et al., published in Neuron, 2010). Moreover, a group of so-called ‘trance mediums’ displayed significantly reduced activity in areas of the brain related to reasoning and language processing, precisely when engaged in activities that require high reasoning and language processing (see: “Neuroimaging during trance state: A contribution to the study of dissociation,” by Julio Fernando Peres et al., published in PLoS ONE, 2012).
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Although most of the times brain activity directly correlates with the richness of inner experience, in some specific but broad and consistent cases the opposite is true. These cases are the black swans that disprove Physicalism and substantiate Analytic Idealism.
The scientific evidence discussed above not only addresses the question of falsifiability for Analytic Idealism and mainstream Physicalism, it also provides positive empirical confirmation for Analytic Idealism across very different fields of science.

Clearly, Analytic Idealism is one of the most empirically-substantiated metaphysical hypotheses out there. It has 50 years of experimental evidence in Foundations of Physics going for it and, insofar as it lines up with, and provides metaphysical ground to, Integrated Information Theory, also decades in Neuroscience of Consciousness. Remarkably, Rupert's criticism here is the very opposite of the truth; a truth he has been overwhelmingly in a position to know for the past many years.

ANALYTIC IDEALISM IS AN ARMCHAIR THEORY

The use of the "armchair theory" stick has historically been meant to be derogatory and insulting, in both science and philosophy, which Rupert is very well aware of. It is entirely unnecessary in the context of argument-based, constructive exchanges meant to advance a debate between people who respect each other and each other's work. In short, it is the equivalent of a low blow. Why Rupert would choose to deliberately, and utterly unnecessarily, insult me is beyond my comprehension, for I have never been anything but kind and supportive of his work, and of him as a person (think of his TEDx censorship debacle, during which I came out in his defense to the point of vowing to never again give a TEDx talk). If I have offended Rupert at some point since the last time we were together (during a dinner in the fall of 2018, if I recall), I have done so wholly unknowingly. Our tone towards each other, and each other's work, had always been cordial and respectful. I simply do not know where this change comes from.

Be that as it may, his accusation immediately raises the question of how, precisely, Rupert's own trinitarian, theist ontology of transcendence (which he enthusiastically discusses in the second half of the video above, along overtly biblical lines) isn't armchair theory itself. How does Rupert ground a transcendent but deliberate, interventionist, almighty deity, along with its triune nature, objectively and empirically? What experiments has he proposed to verify this non-trivial hypothesis? By his own criteria, and short of shameless hypocrisy, these are critical, potentially disqualifying questions for evaluating any metaphysical theory, including his own.

THE TROUBLE WITH ANALYTIC IDEALISM IS THAT IT CAN'T EXPLAIN MATTER

This is the most vulgar and ostensibly bad-faith misrepresentation of my work in the entire criticism. Rupert creates an outrageous straw man by overtly suggesting that my attempt to account for matter is limited to the "ripples on the ocean" metaphor. He also seems to misuse his personal acquaintance with me to project the authority of being privy to my private thinking on the matter. Obviously, he is not. His criticisms make it clear to me that Rupert either has no scholarly-level understanding of Analytic Idealism (let alone a privileged one), or has chosen to make statements that are contrary to such an understanding. I sincerely comprehend neither scenario.

I do use the "ripples on the ocean" metaphor, but only after having delineated an explicit, precise, and elaborate account of matter under Analytic Idealism. Rupert must know this, just as anyone who has ever taken a more than casual interest in my work does. For goodness' sake, I've written an entire PhD thesis on this very subject, plus a bunch of peer-reviewed papers. How plausible is it that I got all those publications and a second doctorate by limiting my case to "ripples on the ocean"? And just so I point to something accessible to non-academics, here is a free online video course in which I, for more than six hours (!), elaborate on how Analytic Idealism accounts for matter.

Rupert is outrageously misrepresenting my attempt to make my work accessible to the general public through metaphor as lack of substance, rigour, and precision; and he knows it. That he, as a scholar, would choose to do so is beyond me. In my opinion, his statements here come dangerously close to a deliberate attempt to misinform by creating straw men, which is unbecoming of any scholar, let alone Rupert Sheldrake. And if his defence here is that he simply wasn't aware of the depth of my output (which I'd find totally implausible, as I know that he knows better than that), then the authoritative tone he chose to adopt, and the definitive statements of fact he chose to make, are questionable in precisely the same manner. When you know that you aren't necessarily familiar with what you are talking about, you just don't talk the way he does in the video above.

ANALYTIC IDEALISM IS WRONG BECAUSE IT STOPS AT VERSE 2 OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS

It is obvious to anyone how I am going to defend myself from this particular criticism. But before I do so, allow me to say this: I profoundly respect religious writings and intuitions. I believe they hint at aspects of reality that cannot be captured in language, Aristotelian logic, or conceptual models. I wrote extensively about this in my book More Than Allegory. As such, I am open to the possibility that Analytic Idealism is indeed incomplete; as a matter of fact, I'm downright sure of it, for how can bipedal apes come up with accurate and complete models of nature? So I do not pooh-pooh religion-based criticisms of Analytic Idealism. I've had no religious upbringing myself, but this also means that I have no axe to grind against religion.

However, I do not think that views based on religious intuition count as analytic or empirical arguments. And this is precisely what Rupert is ostensibly attempting to do here: to denounce Analytic Idealism as an inadequate philosophy on analytic and scientific grounds. This is obviously bad form, insofar as it misleadingly veils religious motivations with the veneer of rational argument. And it certainly doesn't justify the vast straw men, misrepresentations and misleading statements made with an equally misleading tone of authority.

GOD IS THE BASIC GROUND OF CONSCIOUSNESS, THEREFORE ANALYTIC IDEALISM IS WRONG

I shall leave this one unanswered, even though it's the part of his criticism where he spends by far the most time on, and seems to be emotionally invested in the most. I highlight it here simply because it seems to confirm a feeling I had throughout Rupert's activist manifesto against Analytic Idealism: I suspect that he, because of his religious dispositions, feels offended by Analytic Idealism's naturalist, reductionist ethos. Perhaps he sees the purely rational, dry, empirically-grounded articulation in my latest book as a betrayal of some tacit, implicit, unspoken pact of trust between us, of which I was unaware. Perhaps he sees my renewed emphasis on the complete and unreserved compatibility between science and Analytic Idealism, which I've always taken for granted to be self-evident, as a similar betrayal. But it is useless to speculate further on his motivations, as I have no direct access to Rupert's inner state when he chose to say what he said. All I am left with is my bafflement and disappointment in face of what he did say, and of how he said it.

Personally, I don't see any fundamental contradiction between naturalism and reductionism on the one hand, and religious faith on the other, provided that one isn't a literalist. I regard nature as a vast ocean of subjectivity, which says enough about how these things could be reconciled. But I don't think it is appropriate for a scholar to misrepresent and attack another's analytic views because of religious convictions. Neither is the attack appropriate if it is motivated not by level-headed argument, but an emotional reaction to a perceived religious offence or betrayal instead.

I profoundly regret this episode, as it has robbed me of my dearly-held respect for someone I have overtly admired and regarded as a role model for many years. My disappointment is bitter, and the criticism, invalid as it is, did sting at a very personal level. But onwards we go, in the spirit of honesty and openness.

The wrong reasons to believe in Analytic Idealism, or me

2024-11-05T19:19:00.028+01:00

Believing the right thing—the right theory, idea, or principle—for the wrong reasons can sometimes be as bad, or even worse, than believing the wrong thing. The right belief for the wrong reasons is never truly transformative, never really sinks into the core of our being, and may even create cognitive dissonances that make it harder to navigate life than under the guidance of untrue beliefs.

In my social media interactions over the years, I have come to realise that a small but significant minority of people who endorse my views, or even merely respect me as a public intellectual, do so for the wrong reasons. While keenly aware that what I'll say below can only reduce—never boost—my audience and book sales, my commitment to truth and honesty is too overwhelming for me to overlook this issue. Therefore, here are some of the wrong reasons for you to take Analytic Idealism seriously, or even respect me as a public intellectual.

I believe Bernardo because he is anti-mainstream

While I am very critical of mainstream physicalism, I am so because of objective reasons, such as physicalism's internal inconsistency, empirical inadequacy, lack of conceptual parsimony, and glaring lack of explanatory power. I do not do so merely because physicalism happens to be the mainstream view. There are many—perhaps even most—mainstream views, beyond metaphysics, that are reasonable and well-based empirically, so I happily endorse them. Let me repeat this for clarity: I believe that a lot of mainstream thinking is largely correct, this being partly the reason why it is mainstream.

I have nothing fundamentally against the mere fact that some idea is mainstream; only against unreason. As a matter of fact, I hope that Analytic Idealism will, one day, become mainstream. That's what I am working for, so how could I be fundamentally against 'mainstreaming'? If reason prevails in mainstream thinking, then hurray for mainstream thinking!

I believe Bernardo because he is anti-science

I am not, and have never been, anti-science; much to the contrary. Even a cursory look at any single piece I've written—let alone the body of my work—will reveal that I systematically base my views on scientific results, as divulged in papers published in respected scientific journals. I take science very seriously. My first job title at CERN was 'scientist,' and I am rather proud of it. Science has been my life.

It is true that I have strongly criticised certain pieces of scientific work and—perhaps even more conspicuously—certain scientists. I am comfortable admitting that some of the scientists I've come across in my public-facing work have, in my opinion, deliberately misled the public, even outright lied. There are dishonest scientists out there, and I have met at least two. I am also comfortable admitting that there is plenty of published science that is flat-out wrong, sloppy, valueless, even dangerous. And I will point out those flaws at every opportunity I get. Does this mean that I am anti-science? Precisely not. Peer-review and peer-criticism are foundations of science, so my criticisms are part of the scientific method. They are intended to improve science, not destroy it. They reflect my commitment to science, not my rejection of it.

Aside from everything that is wrong in science—after all, it is a human activity susceptible to the gamut of human vices—there is a lot that is right. We owe a whole lot to science today, including the device you are using to read this, the medical procedure that has saved your life (and mine) at some point in the past, our understanding of the cosmos—which is today far broader than it was a mere century ago—and so many other facets of life that we take entirely for granted. If you bet on science, flawed as it is, you are overwhelmingly more likely to get it right than wrong. That you could sometimes get it wrong does not contradict the statement.

I believe in Analytic Idealism because it denies the myth of facts or objective truths

Analytic Idealism does no such thing, much to the contrary. It is a realist philosophy: there is an external world out there, whose nature and behaviour does not dependent on our preferences, wishes, views, opinions, morning affirmations, or even presence. It's a world that is what it is and does what it does, in the way it does it, regardless of whether we like it or not, witness it or not, believe it or not. Yes, it is a mental—an experiential—world, but its mentation does not depend on ours. As such, from our point of view, it is truly an objective world.

The things that are the case about the world are objective facts. That the world is mental does not deny the existence of such facts; it does not render the reality of the world dependent on our personal opinions. Beyond opinions there are facts, and when the opinions do not correspond to these facts, the opinions are simply wrong and that's all there is to it.

Analytic Idealism maintains that the colloquially 'physical' world—i.e., the things we perceive around us—is indeed merely a personal perspective, a dashboard representation created by us. But the real world that underlies perception—the thing that is perceived, that modulates the states of our perception—is not perspectival or relative; it is absolute and cares not about our perspective, just as the sky outside the airplane doesn't care about the airplane's dashboard indications: it is what it is regardless of perspective.

It is thus a vulgar and pernicious misunderstanding of Analytic Idealism to think that it is a relativist philosophy, either metaphysically or morally. It is no such a thing. Under Analytic Idealism there is a reality out there that doesn't depend on our views or opinions in the least bit. Under Analytic Idealism there are such things as facts, wrong opinions, lies and misrepresentations. Under Analytic Idealism there are objective criteria of truth, and there is such a thing as truth.

I believe Bernardo because he is anti-authority, in the sense of so-called 'experts'

I am surely anti-authoritarianism—i.e., against the misuse of authority for the sake of personal power over others—but certainly not anti-authority. Human knowledge has advanced to the point where no human being can master every bit of information and reasoning required to form a strictly independent opinion about everything that matters. It is fatally naive to think that one can always trust one's own call on every matter, above the opinion of experts who have dedicated their lives to studying the particular matter at hand. We must delegate certain judgments, and when we do so, we must rely on the expertise of others: the authority of the doctor that operates on your child (or would you prefer to cut into your child yourself?), of the pilot that flies your parents home (or would you prefer to pilot the airplane yourself?), of the technician that installs your home's electrical systems (or would you prefer to grab the wires yourself?), and so on.

None of the above means that authority is always right; it obviously isn't, for humans are fallible. There are many cases in which judgment calls made by authorities have gone very wrong. And you will often see me calling those out, criticising them strongly. This, too, is part of the game of improving the reliability of authority, not of trying to get rid of it. The more one knows, the more one realises how much one doesn't know. I know enough to know that I must rely on other people's expertise in a great many scenarios that are integral to life.

The thing that seems to get lost on people sometimes is this: statistically, we are better off trusting authority. Yes, authorities can make terrible judgment calls sometimes and, as a consequence, someone dies on an operating table, in a plane crash, or in a house fire. But if Joe the gardener, as much as we love him, were always the one performing the operation, flying the airplane, or installing your home's electrical system, then people would die almost every time they would undergo an operation, fly on an airplane, or flip a switch at home. Relying on authority and expertise is statistically best, and it is based on statistics that we must make social choices, not individual or anecdotal cases. Thus, no, I am not anti-authority or anti-expertise; I'm a little smarter than that.

As a matter of fact, I think the social backlash against authority and expertise that we are witnessing today is very dangerous. The other day someone showed me a comment that we moderated away on an Essentia Foundation posting, because we didn't want to let the commenter make a fool of himself. I don't recall his exact words, so I will paraphrase:

These experts are all full of shit, they can't think straight. It is so obvious that science is wrong about even the most basic things. For instance, this notion that space is a vacuum surrounding the Earth—if it were so, the air would be sucked into space and there would be no atmosphere! It's so obviously wrong, I don't know why people trust anything experts say.

No, this isn't from a completely uneducated farmer or fisherman in a far-away land; it is from someone educated and engaged enough to follow Essentia Foundation. Not only was this person utterly unable to understand how much he doesn't understand what is going on, he was also arrogant enough to think others understand even less. This combination of ignorance and hubris would be comical if it weren't so extraordinarily dangerous in a democracy, where every vote counts the same. Social media is giving clueless hubris—rooted in the Dunning-Kruger effect—a megaphone.

As much as I am aware that the popularity of my own views and philosophy largely rides on this dangerous wave of skepticism against expertise and authority, I do not espouse or support it. I don't do what I do so to 'stick it to the man,' or get some kind of vindictive catharsis at the expense of elites (though I do confess to being a natural anti-elitist), or 'put the authorities in their place,' or any other emotion-driven objective disguised as reason; I do it because I think my metaphysical views make more sense than the current alternatives; that's all. The mature attitude here is critical respect for authority: I will choose to trust the consensus among experts if I am not qualified to know better (even though I know that the experts can get it wrong, for they are humans too, and I consciously accept that risk); but if I am qualified—not because I read Joe the gardener's latest social media post, but because I studied the extant literature in depth and have the intellectual background required to evaluate it—then I will be critical of such consensus if I conclude that it is wrong. My criticism will then add a voice to the cultural debate and, perhaps, shift the consensus view among experts, just as Analytic Idealism is doing today. Again, this is an attempt to improve the reliability of authority, not to get rid of it.

So what, then, are the good reasons to endorse Analytic Idealism?

There is only one good reason: it is because it makes better rational sense than the alternatives; that's it; it's that simple and uncomplicated. Nothing else is a valid reason to espouse Analytic Idealism or trust what I have to say. If you do so for any other reason, may this brief essay be an invitation to you to reconsider your views and, if need be, abandon your current opinion of me and my work.

The true, hidden origin of the so-called 'Hard Problem of Consciousness'

2024-10-11T13:35:00.010+02:00

Philosophers of mind talk much about the so-called 'Hard Problem of Consciousness.' But is it a real, objective problem to be solved, or just the subjective reflection of a confused way of thinking? And in the latter case, where and how, precisely, does the problem arise? In this essay, you will be surprised at how obvious and quaint the thought error is that underlies the hard problem, and flabbergasted that so many otherwise smart, educated people can consider the whole business a mystery of some sort. The essay is an extract from my new book, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, which is coming out at the end of October 2024.

To see why Physicalism fails to explain experience, notice that there is nothing about physical parameters—i.e., quantities and their abstract relationships, as given by, e.g., mathematical equations—in terms of which we could deduce, in principle, the qualities of experience. Even if neuroscientists knew, in all minute detail, the topology, network structure, electrical firing charges and timings, etc., of my visual cortex, they would still be unable to deduce, in principle, the experiential qualities of what I am seeing. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ that is much talked about in philosophy.

It is important to understand the claim here correctly. We know, empirically, of many correlations between measurable patterns of brain activity and inner experience. It is thus fair to say that, in many situations, we can correctly guess what experience the subject is having based solely on the subject’s measured patterns of brain activity. We have even been able to tell what subjects are dreaming of just by reading out the subject’s brain states. However, these correlations are purely empirical; that is, we don’t know why or how certain specific patterns of brain activity correlate with certain specific inner experiences; we just know that they do, as a brute empirical fact. And if we look at enough of these brute facts, we will eventually be able to extrapolate and start making good guesses about what people are experiencing, based on their measured brain states alone. None of this implies any understanding or account of what is going on; of how nature allegedly goes from quantitative brain states to qualitative experiential states. These brute facts are just empirical observations, not explanations of anything. We don’t owe brute facts to any theory or metaphysics, since they are observations, not accounts. Physicalism gets no credit for brute facts.

This is not just an abstract theoretical point I am trying to make here, but a very concrete one. We may know empirically that brain activity pattern, say, P1 correlates with inner experience X1, but we don’t know why X1 comes paired with P1 instead of P2, or P3, P4, Pwhatever. For any specific experience Xn—say, the experience of tasting strawberry—we have no way to deduce what brain activity pattern Pn should be associated with it, unless we have already empirically observed that association before, and thus know it merely as a brute fact. This means that there is nothing about Pn in terms of which we could deduce Xn in principle, under physicalist premises. This is the hard problem of consciousness, and it is, in and of itself, a fatal blow to mainstream Physicalism. It means that Physicalism cannot account for any one experience and, therefore, for nothing in the domain of human knowledge.

Notice that the hard problem is a fundamental epistemic problem, not a merely operational or contingent one; it isn’t amenable to solution with further exploration and analysis. Fundamentally, there is nothing about quantities in terms of which we could deduce qualities in principle. There is no logical bridge between X millimeters, Y grams, or Z milliseconds on the one hand, and the sweetness of strawberry, the bitterness of disappointment, or the warmth of love on the other; one can’t logically derive the latter from the former.

Going the other way around, from qualities to quantities, is possible by construction, for quantities were invented precisely as relative descriptions of qualities; i.e., descriptions of the experiential difference between, e.g., carrying a 50Kg-heavy piece of luggage and a 5Kg-heavy one (the experiential difference is described as 45Kg); driving a car for 100Km and 1Km (the experiential difference is described as 99Km); seeing blue and seeing red (the experiential difference is described as 750THz – 430THz = 320THz).

But the meaning of these relative descriptions is anchored in the very qualities they describe, which thus constitute their semantic reference. In other words, the meaning of ‘430THz’ is the felt quality of seeing red; the meaning of ‘5Kg’ is the felt quality of lifting a 5Kg weight (or the felt quality of seeing a 5Kg weight fall within a viscous fluid, bounce off an elastic surface, lie on a weighing scale and move its needle, or whatever other experience is describable by 5Kg). As such, one cannot start from quantities and try to generate qualities from them, for in this case the semantic reference—i.e., the qualities—is supposed to result from the quantities, and therefore can no longer preexist them. This robs the quantities of their meaning and makes it impossible to deduce anything from them.

Let me try to clarify this with a metaphor. Trying to deduce qualities from quantities alone is like trying to pull the territory out of the map. The lines on a map only have meaning insofar as they point to a territory that preexists the map, and to which the map refers. But if we try to account for the territory in terms of the map, then the territory can no longer preexist the map—for it’s now supposed to somehow arise from the map—and, therefore, the lines on the map lose their meaning entirely; nothing can be deduced from them anymore (that you could make this deduction based on other map-territory pairs you’ve seen before violates the spirit of the analogy; you must, instead, ask yourself whether you could deduce a territory from a map if the map were the first and only thing you had ever cognized in your life). This is exactly what the physicalist does when attempting to explain experiential qualities (the territory) in terms of physical quantities (the map).

The fundamental absence of a logical bridge to connect quantities to qualities, caused by the abandonment of the semantic reference that underpinned the meaning of the quantities to begin with, is the hard problem. The premises of mainstream Physicalism are such that, in order for quantities to have meaning, qualities need to preexist them. But when Physicalism then tries to account for the qualities in terms of the quantities, the latter must preexist the former and thus become literally meaningless. Nothing can be deduced in principle from meaningless things, and that’s the hard problem right there.

In trying to account for the territory in terms of the map, physicalists rob the map of its meaning and become confused when they fail to explain any experience in terms of it. They then promise that one day, when new and more advanced editions of the map are developed, our descendants will be able to reach into the map and pull the territory out of it; they mistake a fundamental epistemic contradiction for an operational or contingent problem.

The illusion of AI understanding and creativity

2024-05-10T02:00:00.052+02:00

Today’s generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are impressive. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, easily pass the Turing Test and are thus indistinguishable from humans in an online text conversation. They are used in professional settings to handle customer inquiries, draft legal texts, and a variety of tasks that, until recently, only humans could manage. Other generative AIs produce high-quality images, music, and video, often with high artistic value, based on simple descriptions or ‘queries.’ It has thus become difficult for the average educated person to avoid the conclusion that today’s AIs actually understand the questions or tasks posed to them, and even have artistic sensitivity.

Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth. For AIs—yes, even today’s AIs—do not understand anything; nothing at all. And they have no creativity in any sense of the word that could be even remotely related to human creativity. Allow me to elaborate.

Let’s take LLMs as our example, for the feats of ChatGPT tend to be regarded as the most compelling when it comes to attributing understanding and creativity to generative AIs. LLMs are transformers (a technical term), meaning that they take input text, apply a series of geometric transformations to it, and spit out the resulting text one word at a time. The answer ChatGPT gives you is a ‘transformation’ of your question.

The particular parameters of the geometric transformations applied are defined during a so-called ‘training’ phase, when the LLM is exposed to an enormous database of human-written text. Its parameters are then iteratively adjusted—calibrated, fine-tuned—so to represent how words tend to appear together in human-produced text. Once the training is complete and the parameters set, the LLM can then infer, given an input sentence (i.e. the question or query), what the most likely word is to appear next in the output sentence (i.e. the answer). Once that is done, the new output sentence—with one more word appended to its end—is fed back to the LLM, which then infers the next word, and so on, until the answer is complete. This so-called ‘inference’ phase is what we users get exposed to when we interact with ChatGPT online.

From the point of view of the LLM, the text database used during training contains merely a gigantic collection of signs. These signs happen to be English words—or some parts of words—but they might as well be squiggles; it doesn’t matter, for the LLM is not aware of the meaning of the words (or of anything else, for that matter). All it is trained to do is to capture and represent the statistical regularities with which words occur together, or follow one another, in the human-written text of the training database. If squiggles were used during training—instead of words—the LLM would still capture the regularities with which the squiggles tend to appear; from its point of view, it’s all the same thing. The LLM has no understanding of the meaning of the text it is trained on. It merely deals with how signs—squiggles, words—relate to one another in the training database.

Once the statistical regularities with which words tend to occur are captured in the LLM’s parameters, the LLM can start inferring which words to use in response to a query. From its own point of view, its answer is thus just a series of squiggles whose meaning it does not understand; it only knows that these are the squiggles that are most likely to appear following your query, given the way squiggles appeared in the training database. That’s all there is to it. At no point does understanding or creativity come into the picture.

So why does it seem to us as though the LLM really did understand our query, and produced a fully understandable answer? How does the LLM produce such coherent outputs if it has no understanding of language? The answer is quite simple: it's because the LLM was trained on human-written text, and it is always a human who interprets its outputs. Now, humans do understand what the words mean! The understanding involved here is thus always human understanding, as embedded in both the training database and the interpretation of inferred answers. The meaning we discern in an answer produced by ChatGPT is (a) the meaning imparted on the training database by the humans who wrote the corresponding texts, and (b) the meaning we impart on the answer when reading and interpreting it. ChatGPT itself only ever sees squiggles and the statistical regularities with which they tend to occur; it understands nothing; it creates nothing; it only rearranges—‘transforms’—meaningless squiggles. All meaning is imparted and projected on the squiggles by us humans.

The same goes for generative AI art: all artistic creativity involved is that of the human artists who composed the images used in the training database. All the AI ever does is rearrange—‘transform,’ combine—elements of those images based on a query. Generative AIs thus merely recycle the products of human understanding and creativity, nothing else. The only reason why ChatGPT can pass a bar examination is that it was trained on text written by capable human lawyers. If there weren’t human lawyers, ChatGPT would produce gibberish in a bar examination. The only reason it can tell you what Analytic Idealism is, is that it was trained on text written by me; it has no understanding of Analytic Idealism. The only reason other generative AIs can produce beautiful art is that they were trained on beautiful art produced by creative, sensitive people. If you take human input out of the equation, generative AIs can do nothing; they have no understanding or creativity of their own; they just transform—recycle—human understanding and creativity.

That’s why there is a strong sense in which the output of generative AIs is always a—sophisticated, complex—form of plagiarism. AIs can never produce something whose building blocks weren’t first produced by human beings. At best, AIs can find associations—connections—across different products of human creativity and insight that would, otherwise, be difficult for humans to find on their own, since AIs operate on much larger training databases than humans can accommodate in their minds. But the building blocks are always human-produced; no exceptions. The meaning is always human-imparted; no exceptions. There is no such thing as AI creativity or understanding.

The problem, however, is that the plagiarism is so sophisticated and nuanced that a PhD in computer science and engineering is necessary for one to understand what is truly going on. And things will only get worse as larger and larger AIs—with more and more parameters—are trained on larger and larger databases. The illusion of artificial understanding and creativity, already so compelling, will become irresistible for the vast majority of people. This is a great danger, for we risk losing sight of our own value and dignity by projecting all of it onto electronic mechanisms. This is a form of ‘kenosis,’ an emptying out of ourselves, wholly unjustified by the facts.

Businesses see so much value in generative AI because of its effectiveness in recycling, adapting, and re-using human output. If a few lawyers somewhere managed to write very clever legal texts, an AI trained on those texts can produce clever legal texts for your business on demand, without your having to pay new lawyers to do the same kind of creative, intellectual work again; someone else, somewhere else, already paid for the originals. If clever artists have produced a large database of effective illustrations somewhere, you don’t need to pay new artists to do it for you again; an AI can cleverly re-use and adapt that previous human output to your particular needs. Economically, this is incredibly efficient. But it requires no understanding or creativity beyond those already embedded in the training database and the minds of the people who contemplate the outputs of the AI. The latter simply rearranges things.

It is critically important for us to understand that AI does not replace human creativity and understanding; on the contrary, it entirely relies on them. Its value resides solely in stretching, leveraging the re-use potential of human production, not replacing it. AI amplifies the reach of human productivity; it doesn’t render it redundant. All meaning and all creativity discernible in the outputs of AIs are human meaning and human creativity. Without human input in the form of training databases, AIs are wholly useless. Without the understanding projected by humans onto their outputs, AIs are only capable of spitting out meaningless squiggles. Artificial Intelligence ultimately is human intelligence.

Some of my best adversarial debates, as captured in video

2024-05-03T16:49:00.021+02:00

Over the past 15 years or so, I have engaged in a number of debates with other scholars, as I believe strongly that this kind of interaction is an excellent way to question and improve our culture's mainstream views. In this post, I'd like to highlight the more adversarial of these debates. By 'adversarial' I don't mean unfriendly; some may be, but many aren't. I mean simply that these 'adversarial' engagements entailed mutual critiques of different, perhaps even contradictory views. This helps us make the potential shortcomings of the respective views more explicit, which is surely a progressive thing.

The first is a debate with well-known materialist and skeptic Prof. Peter Atkins and Prof. Nancy Cartwright. I was surprised with how open to my ideas Prof. Atkins seemed to be already very early on in the debate.

The next debate is with Prof. Susan Blackmore, a well-known skeptic, and Prof. Tim Crane. The debate was moderated by Hilary Lawson. Here again I was surprised with Susan's relative openness to my views.

Now a debate with well-known atheist philosopher of religion, Prof. Graham Oppy, considered by William Lane Craig "the most formidable atheist philosopher writing today." We seem to be less distant from, and antagonist of, each other's position than I thought before this dialogue.

Next up is my debate with anaesthesiologist and well-known skeptic, Dr. Gerald Woerlee. After this debate I realized that many of Dr. Woerlee's views are actually in alignment with analytic idealism. The debate was done in two parts, and covers a lot of ground.

Now a conversation with my friends, neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch and philosopher Rupert Spira. I list this as an 'adversarial' debate because, at the time, Christof and I thought we had sharply divergent views (which wasn't quite true already then). In a more recent discussion, also linked below, we show how much closer to each other's views we actually are.

Next is a debate with Prof. Carlo Roveli, who I am always delighted to dialogue with.

The next one is again a debate between very contrasting views, as Prof. David Papineau is a well-known physical realist, the antithesis of analytic idealism. Yet, I was again surprised with how seemingly open to other possibilities he seemed to be, provided that these possibilities are based on reason and evidence. At some point, if I recall correctly, he even granted that I was not crazy, which is high praise (I say this sincerely, only very slightly tongue-in-cheek). The moderator didn't allow us to converse as much as we would have liked, but perhaps we will do it again some time.

Now a debate with Prof. Susan Schneider and my friend Prof. Donald Hoffman. I list this as adversarial because Susan's views on the hypothesis of artificial sentience contrast very sharply with my own, which led to a fairly robust exchange between us at a certain moment.

And here's another debate with skeptic, Prof. Susan Blackmore:

Harvard Prof. Avi Loeb and I are both open to the possibility of alien life, but we differ in the ever so important details, so I list this as a friendly but adversarial debate.

Prof. Brian Keating and I hold contrasting views on a number of issues. Yet, our dialogue betrayed more agreement than disagreement, so I hesitated about whether to list this one as an 'adversarial' debate. But I wouldn't be portraying Brian's views properly if I suggested that we are on the same boat, so here you go.

Now a debate with arch-materialist and skeptic Prof. Patricia Churchland and, again, Prof. Carlo Roveli, this time moderated by Closer-to-Truth host, Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The biggest surprise here was Churchland's seemingly complete unawareness of over 10 years of psychedelic research and its most significant results. For a self-identified "neurophilosopher," this was rather embarrassing.

Finally, here's a very adversarial debate I had with YouTuber physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. I initially didn't intend to list this one here because I believe my interlocutor was deliberately, well, very misleading in the exchange and didn't abide by a bare-minimum level of debate ethics. But for the sake of completeness, here it is. To understand why I feel uncomfortable with what happened in this exchange, check out these posts:

Sabine Hossenfelder's bluf called
Hossenfelder digs herself into a deeper hole

Later I will post a similar list, but with non-adversarial conversations.

The Phantom World Hypothesis of NDEs/OBEs

2024-02-11T02:39:00.029+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Sam Parnia released a new mini-documentary about Near Death Experiences (NDEs), which he now coined a new term for: REDs, for 'Recalled Experiences of Death.' His argument is that, physiologically, these people weren't merely near death, but actually died and were resuscitated thanks to modern medical technology. Indeed, defining death as a state one can never return from is operationally contingent; it is arbitrary and ignores the physiology—the science—of the process. So I am comfortable with the term RED.

But I diverge. The point of this essay is a common feature of REDs and 'Out of Body Experiences' (OBEs) that have always stricken me as exceedingly odd: the claim by experiencers that they could perceive the colloquially physical world around them—from a mildly elevated, bird's-eye perspective—during the period of, e.g., cardiac arrest, as if they still had working eyes and ears. This seems to violate logic, as evolution required hundreds of millions of years of painstaking adaption to come up with retinas and eardrums. And that these are needed to perceive the world is unquestionable: right now, if you close your eyes and ears, you will see and hear nearly nothing. So how can a patient under cardiac arrest, lying on a hospital bed with eyes closed, see and hear what is going on in the corridors outside their room? If one can see and hear perfectly well without working eyes and ears, why do we need them at all? Why can't I close my eyes right now and see what's happening around the corner of my street?

Nonetheless, I am not one of those people who find it easy to disregard (anecdotal) evidence just because it doesn't fit with their understanding of the world. As a friend reminded me of just a couple of days ago, alluding to a particular scene from the Netflix series Chernobyl, theory must fit the facts, not the other way around. And there are just too many mutually-consistent reports to dismiss. My commitment to truth is such that I just can't pretend otherwise, which puts me at an impasse, for I am equally unable to think of nature as something so capricious as to change the rules of the game on a whim. I just can't accept that eyes and ears are utterly unnecessary to perceive this world during a RED or OBE, but absolutely necessary during ordinary waking states. Moreover, nature just isn't so redundant as to struggle for hundreds of millions of years to evolve retinas and eardrums we can allegedly do perfectly well without.

The present essay is the result of my struggle to make sense of this conundrum. At this stage, however, what follows is still very highly speculative and should be taken with a whole bag of salt. I am not at all committed to the conjectures I discuss below, but simply play with them as an intellectual exercise. In the future, I may further expand on these thoughts in a more rigorous manner, if my argument can be more substantiated. Alternatively, I may abandon the idea altogether. Either way, right now what follows is just a very loose exercise of theoretical imagination, nothing more.

Finally, notice also that the Phantom World Hypothesis is supposed to cover only the parts of a RED or OBE that seem to relate directly to the ordinary, so-called physical world; not the parts about transcendence and other realities.

Assumptions

I am not a RED/OBE researcher or scholar. My interest in these states is professional but ancillary. Therefore, I must start with some basic assumptions, knowing full well that these may ultimately prove to be wrong or misleading. My assumptions are these: (a) experiencers of REDs/OBEs are being sincere and reasonably accurate when they report the ability to perceive the ordinary, colloquially physical world during the period in which they do not have functioning sensory organs; (b) Nature indeed isn't redundant or whimsical, so despite their sincere reports, experiencers in fact aren't truly perceiving the colloquially physical world around them.

Background

I will base my hypothesis on the tenets of my own Analytic Idealism. According to it, all nature consists of experiential—i.e., mental—states. Some of these states are within our individual minds, such as our own perceptions, thoughts and emotions. We identify with these internal states or at least feel that we own them. Other mental states in nature are external to our individual minds and, therefore, constitute the external environment we inhabit. I shall say that these external mental states belong to a 'mind-at-large' beyond our individual minds.

That there can be mental states out there, outside your individual mind, is nothing new: my thoughts are mental, and yet external to your mind. Analytic Idealism simply leverages this trivial fact to argue that the entire world beyond the boundaries of our own minds is constituted of external mental states as well, not just the inner lives of other people.

When external mental states in mind-at-large impinge on our individual minds, they modulate our internal mental states. This is what we call perception: what we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are our inner representations of external states. As such, under Analytic Idealism there is indeed an external world beyond us; a world that does not depend on us to exist or do whatever it is that it does. When we interact with this world—such that the world impinges on us—its states are represented by our individual minds as the colloquially physical world around us. As such, what we perceive is merely an image, an appearance of states in mind-at-large.

Still under Analytic Idealism, what separates our internal mental states from the external mental states of mind-at-large is a dissociative boundary. Just like the multiple, disjoint personalities—called 'alters'—of a patient of Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as 'Multiple Personality Disorder'), each living being is a dissociative alter of the field of mentation that constitutes nature. A biological organism is what one such an alter looks like when represented on the screen of perception. Biology, life, is the perceptual appearance of a dissociative alter in the universal mind we call nature.

As such, death—the end of life—is, in fact, merely the end of the dissociation, of the alter, not the end of consciousness. The dying process is that by which the previously private mental states of the alter—one's personal memories, insights, etc., originally insulated from their cognitive surroundings by a dissociative boundary—become progressively re-associated with the mental states of mind-at-large. It stands to reason, thus, that this should be experienced as an expansion of consciousness, not its end, which is precisely what experiencers of REDs/OBEs report.

The Phantom World Hypothesis

Among the previously private mental states of an alter undergoing re-association—i.e., a person dying, being re-integrated into his or her cognitive surroundings—are episodic memories. These contain a lifetime of perceptions: a cognitive map of one's home, neighbourhood, city, country, places visited or seen on TV shows and YouTube videos, and so on. We don't just perceive the world, we also remember these perceptions. As these perceptual memories accumulate over time, they form an increasingly broad, high-resolution, internal map of our environment, constituted of the qualities of perception: the colours, shapes, contours, and geometrical relationships that define what we colloquially call the physical world. Even when you are lying in bed at night, with your eyes closed, you can access these perceptual memories to visualise your room, your street, the route to work that you will be taking in the morning, etc. As such, a copy—more or less precise, more or less accurate, more or less comprehensive—of the world as perceived exists in us at all times.

When we die, this copy of the world as perceived and remembered becomes re-integrated with the external mental states of mind-at-large. And since people are dying every minute, mind-at-large becomes increasingly enriched with individual perceptual maps, which are representations of its own states. These perceptual maps—each corresponding to the perceptual memories of a re-integrated alter—become cognitively associated with one another, like different pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle coming together. It is reasonable to infer this because we know that this is how mind works: through spontaneous cognitive associations based on similarities and correspondences. Mind-at-large cannot help but spontaneously put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Nature's mind is thus constantly assembling a cognitive map of itself—a jigsaw puzzle representing its own states, whose pieces are constituted of qualities of perception—based on the episodic memories it inherits from re-integrated alters. Where there are gaps, extrapolations spontaneously arise, just as we extrapolate our own perceptions to infer that, say, a wall partly obscured by a tree in fact continues behind the tree; or that a road continues beyond the visible horizon; etc. These extrapolations reflect well-known and intrinsic properties of mentation: you spontaneously extrapolate a square from the figure below, even though there is no square in it at all; you do it because this is what mind naturally does. Technically called interpolations, the extrapolations complete the jigsaw puzzle where pieces are still missing. The result may be an inaccurate but rather complete cognitive map, a Phantom World constituted of perceptual qualities originally generated by living people and other organisms.

I call the resulting map a Phantom World because mind-at-large isn't actually perceiving the world; it isn't actually representing its own states on a screen of its own perception. Instead, it is merely inheriting the perceptual states of myriad former alters and spontaneously assembling them together through cognitive similarity and correspondence. The resulting pseudo-perceptual world is thus an approximation containing inaccuracies and imprecisions (the interpolations). Nonetheless, it should still feel as though it were a (colloquially physical) world perceived, since it is made of qualities of perception like the colours and sounds you and I see and hear.

During a RED or OBE, I contend that the dissociative boundary that defines the individual mind of a person becomes weakened, porous, permeable, allowing for partial but direct access to external states in mind-at-large, without the intermediation of a screen of perception. And since these external states contain the Phantom World, the experiencer gains temporary access to that pseudo-perceived world.

I suggest, therefore, that the experiencer is not actually perceiving the real world, but the Phantom World instead. For this, the experiencer indeed does not require working eyes or ears, for he or she is accessing the compound result of myriad episodic memories—the assembled jigsaw puzzle—of people who did have working eyes and ears. Analogously, when you are lying on your bed at night, with your eyes closed, visualising your route to work the next morning, you too can visualise it by recalling episodic memories and without using your eyes.

Perspectival transposition

A number of possible criticisms of this hypothesis must be popping in your mind right now. I will try to anticipate and address them in this and the next sections.

The first issue is the perspective experiencers report: a bird's-eye view of things, as if they were floating above other people, the furniture, the cars on the streets, etc. This perspective does not correspond to the episodic memories of any human being, dead or alive, since we don't ordinarily float around like air balloons. How can this be accounted for under the Phantom World Hypothesis?

Even in ordinary waking states, our minds routinely adjust our perceptual experience so to conform to an expected context or perspective. In other words, we don't just perceive the world as it is, we manipulate our perceptual states so they fit with the context we cognitively expect. This is so even when you know what is going on. In the picture below, for instance, the squares marked A and B have exactly the same colour. Yet, because the context forces you to expect them to have opposite colours, that's what you see. And you will continue to see it even after you convince yourself that the squares do indeed have the same colour.

The drawing below contains a variety of perspectival illusions. Even after we realise that what we think we are seeing is impossible, we continue to see it nonetheless. This is an intrinsic property of mind: it tries to fit what it perceives to its expectations and models of what is going on.

There are countless other compelling examples of our minds imposing a perspective onto the contents of perception that is not there at all. The video below is just one more example, where we impose very specific movement where there is none. And even knowing this, and being convinced of it, does not reduce—let alone eliminate—the seeming perception.

Staring at this optical illusion where the boxes are not moving - my brain can't comprehend! pic.twitter.com/9TcgbQfxVL
— CreativeCorner (@Creativefun2024) February 6, 2024

My contention is thus the following: during a RED/OBE, the experiencer expects to perceive the world from his or her own unique and contingent point of view, not the objective perspective of other people, dead or alive. To reconcile his or her access to the Phantom World with this expectation, the experiencer transposes his or her experiential vantage point accordingly, thereby generating the bird's-eye view. This is possible because the Phantom World is already a cognitive model—an interpolation—anyway, so any perspective can be 'computed' from it through a form of grounded, calibrated imagination.

Ongoing experiences

Another issue with the Phantom World Hypothesis is that experiencers often report, veridically, what is going on in the world during the RED/OBE: what people are saying, doing, etc., while the experiencer is in, e.g., cardiac arrest. This means that their pseudo-perceptions cannot be grounded only in the episodic memories of the deceased, but also in the ongoing experiences of living people, as they unfold.

Under Analytic Idealism, the mental inner lives of two different people are ordinarily separated from one another by two dissociative boundaries, each defining the limits of each person's individual mind. During the RED/OBE, however, we've hypothesised that the dissociative boundary of the experiencer becomes weaker, porous, permeable. As such, it is reasonable to conjecture that access to another person's on-going experiences becomes easier than under ordinary circumstances. This is especially so if those other people are emotionally connected with the experiencer, which could spontaneously shift their own state of consciousness in a manner that weakens their own dissociative boundary as well.

If this direct mind-to-mind access does take place, it is in principle reasonable to conjecture that the experiencer will import it into the Phantom World—to keep everything consistent and unified—and again spontaneously apply a perspective transposition, as discussed in the previous section, so to portray such access as if it were taking place from an external vantage point. After all, the experiencer doesn't expect himself/herself to be another person. Instead, things will be experienced as if he/she were seeing or hearing another person. The experiencer will then report having seeing or heard other people say or do this or that, while, in fact, the experiencer has directly accessed their inner mental states.

Implications and validation

To check whether the Phantom World Hypothesis is consistent with the (anecdotal) RED/OBE data, we must derive its implications and check them against what experiencers report. So let us do this, one implication at a time.

If some of what is reported corresponds to direct access to the inner mentation of living people—subsequently transposed to an external perspective—then experiencers should, at least occasionally, report accessing endogenous mental states of others as well. In other words, in addition to knowing what people said or did, experiencers should, at least occasionally, claim that they knew what people were thinking or feeling. And indeed, this is precisely what is often reported. In the recent mini-documentary by Dr. Sam Parnia, linked above, an experiencer claimed to have become aware of what his doctor was thinking—a claim confirmed by the doctor—while the experiencer himself was in cardiac arrest. If the experiencer can access someone's thoughts, than she or he surely can access what one is seeing, hearing, or otherwise perceiving. This corroborates the hypothesis that experiencers aren't actually perceiving the real world without functioning eyes or ears, but pseudo-perceiving the world by proxy, through the inner mental states of both the deceased and the living.

Another implication of the Phantom World Hypothesis is that, since the Phantom World is a cognitive construct, a model containing interpolations and extrapolations, at least occasionally experiencers should report things that don't actually match with the real world. These inaccuracies are probably filtered out in the popular literature, since they can easily be (mis)interpreted as refuting the validity of the RED/OBE. Yet, under the Phantom World Hypothesis, occasional inaccuracies and oddities are precisely what one would expect. These inaccuracies—provided that they are localised within a broader context that is itself veridical—in fact corroborate the validity of the RED/OBE.

Finally, the most important implication of the Phantom World Hypothesis is this: the experiencer should not be able to know any fact that has never been experienced by any organism still alive or already dead. Because the hypothesis entails that experiencers only pseudo-perceive the world—that is, perceive by proxy, through the inner mental states of others—whatever no one has ever perceived or otherwise known cannot be accessed by the experiencer. As such, when Dr. Sam Parnia devised his famous experiment to test the veracity of REDs—wherein he placed electronic displays on top of tall cupboards, facing up and displaying random numbers automatically chosen by a computer, to see if the 'free-floating soul' would be able to read the numbers—he ensured that no experiencer would succeed. After all, the experiment was designed to be double-blind: the experimenters themselves didn't know what numbers were displayed. Therefore, no one, dead or alive, knew what the numbers were. It was impossible for the experiencers to access such information, since their access is always by proxy and not direct. The experiencers don't have eyes to perceive the displays; they can only see what others see or have seen. Again, this implication of the Phantom World Hypothesis seems to match with the data, as Parnia's experiment is known to have 'failed.'

Conclusions

The Phantom World Hypothesis should not be taken as a rigorous scholarly theory, for it is no such thing; at least at the present time. As it stands, the hypothesis is merely educated speculation and conjecture, with very little theoretical underpinning or empirical basis. But the little it does have is, well, a little intriguing.

I am not an experimentalist in the field of REDs/OBEs. I cannot, therefore, take it on myself to design and carry out experiments to validate or falsify my own hypothesis. But those who are in the position to do so could perhaps allow themselves to be informally informed by the Phantom World Hypothesis in their experimental designs. Doing so would prevent the understandable but possibly equivocated jump to concluding that Parnia's experiment debunks the veridical aspect of REDs, for its very double-blind design could have precluded any veridical report.

New experiments are needed that are informed by the Phantom World Hypothesis.

UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the most reasonable scenario?

2024-01-06T02:49:00.065+01:00

Editorial note:

I originally intended to publish the essay below in an (online) magazine, not my own blog. I still have this intention, but opted to publish the complete draft here first for several reasons: (a) most magazines will place the essay behind a paywall (I already tried to negotiate this out, but it is not negotiable); (b) most magazines will require me to significantly shorten the essay (even Aeon Magazine, which publishes long-form essays, limits them to 5,000 words, while the text below has over 6,800 words); (c) most magazines will force me to edit at least some parts of my argument in a manner that is not preferable to me; and (d) the editorial process entailed in a magazine publication of an essay as elaborate as this can take many months. For these reasons, I decided to publish the entire draft here first, prior to any editorial changes, in the spirit of a pre-print in the ArXiv. It remains possible that future, shortened, edited versions of the material below will appear in other magazines.

If you prefer a printable PDF version of the text below, it is available on my Academia profile.

Update 6-Jan-2024: the essay is now also on The Debrief.

Introduction

Allow me to start with a confession: although the topic of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, previously called UFOs) has always fascinated me, my reaction to confronting much of the related literature—beyond the safe harbour of a few serious authors—has been one of considered dismissiveness. In my view, a significant portion of the published material could benefit from greater rigor, empirical grounding, theoretical clarity, and logical reasoning. This field often appears to diverge from the standards of intellectual precision and level-headed analysis that hold in academia. However, recent developments over the past six or seven years invite us to re-examine the subject from a more open and inquisitive perspective.

Because there are so few—if any—consensus launchpads for such a polemical topic, I must explicitly justify each step of my thinking and, thus, cover a lot of ground in this long essay. I shall start, below, by motivating the validity of the mystery: UAPs are no longer just tall and questionable tales shared on social media, accompanied by grainy, out-of-focus cellular phone footage. Enough has been officially acknowledged since 2017 that the topic is now undoubtedly deserving of serious treatment. After laying foundations for my argument, I will then proceed to elaborate on what I currently consider to be the most level-headed and plausible account of the phenomenon. And to anticipate a question you are bound to be already asking, no, I don’t think it is aliens from Zeta Reticuli; the facts may be a lot more surprising and closer to home than that.

Surprisingly much has recently been disclosed

In 2017, several videos of UAPs—soon to become known as the ‘Pentagon UFO videos,’ as they were recorded by infrared cameras in military aircraft—were circulating widely on the Internet. At around the same time, the story behind the videos was covered in a now-seminal report by The New York Times.

The videos seem to show airborne craft without wings or engines, flying and hovering deliberately, sometimes against high winds. They perform manoeuvres despite the absence of flight control means—no rudder, elevators, ailerons, thrusters, etc.—and display surprisingly high acceleration with no detectable means of propulsion. The US Department of Defence later officially acknowledged the authenticity of the videos, as well as the fact that the objects visible in them remain unidentified.

Years later, in the summer of 2023, US Navy pilots involved in these incidents provided public testimony to Congress, under oath, adding detail and background to the odd images. Asked whether the UAP he saw with his own eyes moved in a way that defied the laws of physics, Commander David Fravor replied: “The way we understand them [i.e., the laws of physics], yes.” He then confirmed that the UAPs were not only captured on camera, but also tracked by radar from three different vessels: “The Princeton tracked it. The Nimitz tracked it. The E2 tracked it.” Asked to describe how the UAP manoeuvred, CDR Fravor said, “Abruptly, very determinant. It knew exactly what it was doing. It was aware of our presence and it had acceleration rates—I mean, it went from zero to matching our speed in no time at all.” Finally, asked if any human technology could emulate the UAP’s flight characteristics he observed, he said: “No, not even close.” Navy F-18 pilot Ryan Graves—another military witness giving sworn testimony—described a UAP sighted from 50 feet away as “A dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere,” something that cannot be conflated with a drone or ordinary aircraft.

Still in 2023, United States Air Force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch became a UAP whistle-blower. In interviews with various media outlets, he claimed that several defence officials had confirmed to him that the US government maintains a secretive UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme, and is in the possession of several technological craft with Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) provenance.

Mr. Grusch, too, provided sworn testimony during the congressional UAP hearing of July 2023. Asked whether the US has the bodies of the pilots of the recovered UAPs, he said: “As I have stated publicly already … biologics came with some of these recoveries.” Pressed on whether these “biologics” were nonhuman, he confirmed without ambiguity: “Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.” Mr. Grusch understands that the penalty for lying under oath is jail, and offered several times during his testimony to confidentially—as required by law—provide specific details to law-makers.

Mr. Grusch, Mr. Graves, and CDR Fravor are far from alone. In recent times, other individuals in a position to plausibly be privy to what the US government knows about the subject have come forward. For instance, oceanographer and retired US Navy Rear Admiral Timothy Cole Gallaudet has acknowledged having seen footage of UAPs while on active duty. Some of these UAPs have displayed the capability to go under water (the so-called ‘transmedium’ capability described often in UAP reports). He has also expressed his belief that Mr. Grusch’s claims are true. Recently retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell—currently an aerospace executive—along with Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the US Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, have lent credibility to the claim that there are active UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programmes. Defence Intelligence Agency Programme Manager Dr. James T. Lacatski did the same, in a book officially cleared for publication by the Defence Office of Prepublication and Security Review of the US Department of Defence.

Up until 2017, the profitable UAP rumour mill was fed mainly by ‘anonymous sources,’ filmed with their faces and voices concealed, and telling vague stories largely impossible to verify independently. Even when one of those anonymous sources eventually identified himself—Mr. Robert Lazar—his credentials and even college education could never be verified. This has changed now: the names and credentials of the individuals mentioned above are not in doubt; they are who they say they are. And their ranks and roles put them in a position to plausibly know what they claim to know. These individuals are willing to testify under oath in public hearings and confidentially provide evidence to members of congress. All this, while not proving that UAPs are of exotic origin, does lend credibility to UAP speculation.

Even the former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the US Department of Defence—Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a man widely reviled in the UAP community as a prejudiced gatekeeper working against UAP disclosure—has made very consequential revelations during an official NASA press briefing: there are seemingly metallic spheres out there that, somehow, move and manoeuvre without any signs of propulsion or flight control surfaces. He proceeded to show a declassified video of one such a sphere, as recorded by an MQ-9 'Reaper' military drone, one of the most sophisticated sensor platforms in the world today. The sphere shown moves fast, in a controlled, non-ballistic trajectory. Dr. Kirkpatrick then stated that this is just “a typical example of the thing we see most of; we see these all over the world.” That the spheres are described as making “very interesting apparent manoeuvres” is significant, as it rules out balloons and ordinary drones. That they are seen frequently and all over the world also rules out elaborate, expensive hoaxes.

Prejudiced gatekeeper or not, Dr. Kirkpatrick has thus officially acknowledged that there are concrete UAPs “all over the world,” for which there is no prosaic account thus far. They have been recorded by a variety of military-grade sensors, not just cell phones. That Dr. Kirkpatrick’s revelations have not become headline news in every mainstream media platform across the world is emblematic of the apathy and cynicism—the ‘don’t-look-up syndrome’—that has been assailing Western societies in recent years.

Cross-roads

As a culture, we’ve thus reached an impasse. On the one hand, the meagre amount of data that has been declassified or leaked isn’t enough for us to derive any firm conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, enough has been begrudgingly but officially acknowledged that we can’t dismiss the phenomenon under prosaic accounts either. The best we can do is thus to take the data seriously, but not extrapolate from it without basis.

In this spirit, I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human. The counterargument to this is, of course, that UAPs may be top-secret but very human military devices, often called ‘black technology.’ Yet, this seems to contradict much of what has been disclosed since 2017. The following passage from the testimony of CDR Fravor to Congress illustrates the point: representative Ms. Nancy Mace asked, “Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?” To which CDR Fravor responded: “No. We have test ranges for that.”

Moreover, if UAPs such as the metallic spheres were black technology the US Department of Defence were trying to keep secret, it is hard to imagine why Dr. Kirkpatrick—an official of that very department—would publicize their existence and even declassify a video showcasing their size, form, flight capabilities, etc. Also, the fact that UAPs often seem to defy our understanding of physics doesn’t line up with the black-technologies hypothesis, as it would require not only the engineering to be secret, but also the very advancement of the human understanding of physics. This isn’t impossible, but isn’t very plausible either. Finally, it is difficult to imagine why such game-changing black technologies—which would have to have been around for at least as long as the UAP phenomenon itself—were never used in large and conspicuous scales to advance the geopolitical interests of any nation.

Secondly, if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs. This does not imply that the NHIs are extra-terrestrial; it means simply that they aren’t human.

As implausible as these two premises may sound in this particular historical junction, the data, if taken seriously, does not seem to allow for prosaic alternatives. So whatever hypotheses we entertain, they will per force stretch our credulity. Indeed, to insist on prosaic explanations we must disregard the data. The latter is not necessarily invalid—it isn’t incoherent to imagine that all the data are the spurious fabrications of some sprawling disinformation campaign stretching over decades—but it certainly doesn’t advance the discussion. It thus seems more productive, at this point, to bite the bullet of what the data suggests—at least hypothetically—and then check whether we can make sense of it in a manner that renders the data less vexing.

Before we can try that, however, we first need to understand the key characteristics of the phenomenon we are trying to account for.

The hallmarks of the phenomenon

Although the disclosure process is relatively young, having publicly started only in 2017, the phenomenon itself seems to be at least as old as humanity. Ancient mythology, religious and otherwise, contains narratives largely consistent with today’s UAP observations. And serious researchers—the most prominent, competent, and reliable of which, in my view, is French astronomer and computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallée—have been collecting data on it, applying statistical analyses to such data, and deriving conclusions from such analyses for decades now.

Two key conclusions from Dr. Vallée’s work are particularly pertinent to our challenge here. The first is that, based on countless witness reports, the phenomenon does not seem to make any distinction between physical and psychological effects; it produces both, as if they were mere facets of one and the same causative mechanisms. The boundaries we draw between the mental and the physical don’t seem to be observed by the phenomenon, which transits casually back and forth across the dividing line. Dr. Vallée acknowledges the undeniable physical aspect of the phenomenon—it can be filmed, tracked by radar and other sensors, emits measurable energy, often leaves physical footprints and vestiges behind, etc.—but adds that at least part of what the witnesses experience is “staged”: the UAP sometimes evokes archetypal, symbolic imagery directly in the witness’ mind to convey a feeling-laden metaphorical message, which transcends the objectively measurable characteristics of the phenomenon.

Though Dr. Vallée had already come to this conclusion decades ago, recent investigations into secret US Department of Defence programmes on UAPs, by journalist Ross Coulthart, seem to confirm it (see pages 265-267 of Mr. Coulthart’s 2021 book, In Plain Sight). Stanford Professor Dr. Garry Nolan, perhaps the most respectable scientist to actively research the phenomenon, acknowledged Mr. Coulthart’s reporting on the matter. He went on to recount a specific UAP case that illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the UAPs’ ability to directly manipulate human perception: “[this is a] story that Jacques Vallée brought to me, of a family in France, driving down the highway. This was like in the last five or ten years [from June of 2022]. And they had a glass-topped car. They look up and they see a UFO, you know, basically paralleling them down the highway. The mother looks around and sees that no other individuals nearby are freaking out about this thing above them. The children in the back take out their cell phones, take a picture of it. They get home and they look at the pictures on their camera, and they don’t see an object [of the kind they thought they had witnessed]; they see a little star-shaped thing about thirty or so feet above, and I have the picture. That doesn’t look anything like a drone. … I think it has like seven spokes and a central hole of some sort. So, you’re left with this: they saw a giant craft, but the picture shows that it was nothing [like it] there. Nobody else could see it. So, even if it was an object that was there, others weren’t capable of seeing it, so it was manipulating vision” (my emphasis).

The second pertinent conclusion from Dr. Vallée’s work is that the pattern of behaviour of UAPs is not consistent with the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (see chapter 9 of his book, Dimensions). Dr. Vallée estimated that, in a period of just twenty years, there have been about three million UAP landings. This is not consistent with visitations by beings from another planet for the purposes of surveying the Earth or researching its inhabitants (orders of magnitude less visits would have sufficed for these purposes); instead, the UAPs’ behaviour is precisely what one would expect if they were from here—and were simply going about their business. After all, there are many rare—and some not so rare—animal and plant species that human beings encounter a lot less frequently than 150.000 times per year, and they are undeniably terrestrial. In his interview with Mr. Coulthart, also Dr. Nolan expressed the view that UAPs are not extra-terrestrial.

Two distinct phenomena?

Although the two characteristics discussed above generally apply to most of what we colloquially label ‘UAP,’ ‘UFO,’ or ‘alien’ encounters, there are reasons to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with at least two distinct phenomena here. If so, it is crucial that we do not conflate the two, otherwise any viable account of one phenomenon may be discarded merely because it is not suitable for—or even contradicts—the other, leading to an insoluble impasse.

One clearly discernible class of observations, which I shall henceforth refer to as ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs, entails physical craft that can not only consistently be seen, filmed, and tracked by radar, but also—if we are to believe Mr. Grusch’s informants and other sources in a position to plausibly know—stored in hangars for decades, drilled into, analysed under a scanning electron microscope, etc. The bodies of their occupants can also—again, if we are to believe the sources—be kept in freezers and harvested for biochemical analysis. This means that the phenomenon in question has a physical aspect as consistent and stable as our own body and the car in our garage. Moreover, these ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs are more frequently observed in the proximity of military exercises and installations, particularly nuclear installations (this has been the case for decades, the recent Pentagon UFO videos simply reiterating the pattern). They don’t seem to be interested in teaching us anything, but simply in monitoring human activity that could lead to large scale destruction and compromise the planet’s habitability (incidentally, this is exactly what one would expect if the NHI in question is terrestrial).

Unlike the above, another class of observations entails encounters in one’s bedroom, at school, during one’s commute back from work, and other ordinary, random situations unrelated to military activity. These are the so-called ‘high strangeness’ events, encompassing the ‘alien contactee’ and ‘alien abduction’ cases. The craft and beings observed don’t have a consistent physical aspect but are, instead, elusive, appearing and disappearing, taking on an absurd variety of incongruous forms and behaviours. They leave either none or scarce, ambiguous physical traces, such as spontaneous nose bleeds, ordinary cysts found in places where the witness claims to have been implanted with alien technology, marks on the ground consistent with a variety of causes, and so on. This ambiguous physical evidence is better described as synchronistic—i.e., coincidental in a meaningful way—as opposed to causal. The observations are elusive, illogical, and shapeshifting like a dream. They seem focused on a form of deliberate, symbolic communication with the witness, aimed at conveying a teaching of some kind, as opposed to arising from chance encounters. Like a vision, they can’t be photographed.

I am not dismissive of this ‘high strangeness’ class of observations. As a matter of fact, I have written an entire book—Meaning in Absurdity—in which I try to account for it. I believe these visions are real as such; they are part of a natural feedback mechanism intrinsic to the human mind, which seeks to dislodge it from ossified worldviews that, despite having become stable, no longer serve the advancement of our understanding of ourselves and nature. The visions in question emerge from collective, phylogenetically ancient layers of the human mind shared by all of us, which, for being incapable of language and conceptual reasoning, communicate to the executive ego through dream-like, immersive metaphors. They should be taken seriously, just not literally.

But I do not think that the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon is the same as the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs. Conflating the two, in my opinion, may make it impossible to account for either, as no one account will be consistent with the sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics of both. For this reason, and because I have explored the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon in previous work, I shall henceforth exclusively discuss the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon.

If terrestrial but not human, then who?

The idea that the intelligence behind the UAPs is terrestrial and ancient is itself not new. Dr. Hal Puthoff calls it the “ultra-terrestrial” hypothesis. He raises the possibility that remnants of a pre-Diluvial high-tech human civilisation—think of the Atlantis myth—may have survived at the end of the last ice age and remain active today, though discreet in their activities.

The problem with this hypothesis is that any truly high-tech civilisation—unless it has moved underground very early, which may not be plausible due to difficulties related to the space required for industrial and logistical infrastructure, difficulties with waste management and pollution, etc.—leaves vast and long-lasting footprints on the terrain and environment, such as mining holes, landfills, urban infrastructure, artificial pollutants such as microplastics, etc. These footprints, though degraded, would have remained conspicuous enough over the period of only several thousand years since the last ice age. Yet, we find no such traces predating our own civilisation.

Because high technology development requires—at least at first—extensive industrial infrastructure, any ancient civilisation capable of technology as advanced as that in UAPs will almost inevitably have had to go through steps of industrialization and resource extraction analogous to ours, and then some. It will have had to go through phases of urbanization, mining of metals and burning of hydrocarbons, the construction of vast industrial parks, logistical/transport infrastructure, and so on. If the intelligence behind UAPs is terrestrial, it will thus need to be ancient enough for the associated footprints to have been almost completely erased by natural weather and geological processes. Yet, it will also need to be recent enough to already have had access to fossil hydrocarbons to fuel the early stages of its industrialization process. Are these seemingly conflicting constraints reconcilable?

They are, as per the so-called “Silurian Hypothesis” first proposed by Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank in a 2018 paper on the International Journal of Astrobiology. The idea is as follows: our planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, with life on it for about 4 billion years. The genus Homo, to which we belong, has been around for less than 3 million of those 4 billion years; the blink of an eye in geological terms. And modern humans—Homo sapiens—for just 2 or 3 hundred thousand years. There is, thus, plenty of time and opportunity for other non-human species to have arisen on Earth, developed to a level of technology far beyond ours (imagine where our own science and technology will be in a mere thousand more years, if we don’t kill ourselves before that), and then to have effectively vanished due to one or more of the myriad possible civilisation-ending cataclysms that could end our own (climate change/collapse, comet/asteroid impact, pandemics, solar storms, thermonuclear war, etc.).

Any sign of abandoned urban and industrial infrastructure is unlikely to survive a period of only a few million years, due to weather erosion. Synthesized chemicals, alloys and other compounds, technological artefacts, as well as terrain signatures such as mining holes, are ultimately unlikely to survive the constant recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics. What is now the Earth’s crust will eventually sink into the molten asthenosphere and mantel beneath, where it will be reforged, just to eventually re-emerge through volcanic activity as a brand-new crust. As a rough estimate, if we assume an average plate movement of a few centimeters per year, it could take only tens of millions of years for large swathes of the Earth's crust—especially the ocean crust but, to a more limited degree, also the continental crust—to be recycled in this manner. No conspicuous remnants of an ancient, technological, nonhuman civilization would likely survive all this.

The question now is, when were fossil hydrocarbons first available in large-enough quantities to fuel the initial growth of an ancient industrial civilisation? Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank estimate that this was already the case in the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago, which leaves us with a window of hundreds of millions of years for industrial NHIs—multiple different ones—to have developed on Earth.

Notice that my claim here is not that it is likely that high-tech nonhuman civilisations have emerged on Earth before us; I cannot evaluate the probabilities involved. My claim is that, based on what we know, such civilisations are not impossible or inconsistent with the geological record. On the contrary: as Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank point out, the record shows several periods of global warming consistent with large-scale industrialization.

Now, since we cannot visit an NHI city today, it is necessarily the case that, if such ancient terrestrial civilisations ever existed, they have largely died out—at least as far as the surface of the planet is concerned. This, however, is not implausible: as we know from our own case, civilisations can start, reach high-tech levels, and then be annihilated in a mere few thousand years. Indeed, although our civilisation is still going, we are painfully aware of how easily and quickly it can be brought to a swift end tomorrow, in a thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, climate collapse, a more deadly pandemic than the one we have just survived, etc.

Yet, it is unlikely that all members of our species would die in a planetary catastrophe. There is a good chance that few but enough of us would survive in shelters and preserve a minimum level of knowledge to keep some of our technology going, especially if we get some advance notice of the impending doom. In as little as a decade or two from now, for instance, we will likely have mastered the technology of small-scale, portable, clean nuclear reactors that can be buried in a backyard (or a cave) and provide effectively unlimited energy. Portable 3D-printing technology is reducing our reliance on centralized, large-scale manufacturing facilities. Our computers, which were once the size of buildings, now live in our pockets. If we extrapolate these trends for another mere century or two, it is reasonable to imagine that technological miniaturization and portability will allow our civilisation to survive at a reduced scale in, for instance, underground shelters. It is thus not unreasonable to imagine, purely speculatively, that the same could have been the case for ancient NHIs hypothetically behind today’s UAPs.

Any culture once exposed to the magnitude of a planetary catastrophe will have a historical trauma transmitted down the generations through myth and storytelling, similarly to—but much more acutely than—how flood stories have survived since the end of the last ice age. Such a culture will be wary of the planet’s surface, for the latter is a notoriously exposed and volatile region: it undergoes far more extreme temperature swings then, say, the deep oceans and underground caves; it is prone to severe weather that can ruin crops and flood entire cities; it is exposed to irradiation from solar storms and other cosmic events, which can ruin technology and life; it is extremely vulnerable to comet and asteroid impact, as the dinosaurs found out; etc. And since such a post-apocalyptic culture would have been reduced to relatively few members, their requirements for living space would also be relatively modest. Depending on the surviving level of their technology, they could have made a home for themselves underwater or underground. A few generations of (directed) adaption—genetic and cultural—to such an environment would render the planet’s surface perhaps as alien and inhospitable to them as the Mariana Trench is to us. They would be okay with allowing the monkeys to run amok on top of the roof (provided that the monkeys don’t start a thermonuclear war and compromise the entire house), but would rather stay safely indoors.

But what about the weird mind-manipulation stuff?

Science fiction has inculcated in our culture the notion that communication with another, completely different species is a matter of translation or word-swapping; something akin to what we do to convert Chinese text into English. Indeed, we now have a completely manufactured sense of the plausibility of such an idea. But it is naïve.

Ordinary translation presupposes two important things: a shared cognitive structure (templates of thinking) and shared empirical references. The latter is easy to see: if both you and I have already had the experience of seeing and driving a car, then to understand each other we just need to learn what word the other uses to denote that experience. However, things are more subtle when it comes to shared cognitive structures, as they operate based on abstractions, not direct empirical experiences. For instance, think of the concept of ‘flow’: it can be used to denote a concrete empirical experience, such as watching a river flow. But it is also used in much more abstract ways: we say that ‘time flows’ even though we can’t see time, let alone its flow; we speak of the ‘flow of ideas’; we say that ‘we are in the flow’; and so on. ‘Flow’ is an abstraction that refers to sequential, somewhat ordered changes of state, something entirely bound to our human mode of cognition. To understand ‘flow’ one needs to share the basic cognitive templates that gave rise to the concept in us to begin with. Without these shared templates, it is impossible to merely translate the word.

All humans share these basic cognitive templates by the mere fact of being members of the same species. In other words, we think alike because we are alike. Some linguists—such as Noam Chomsky—go as far as to say that the basic structure of all human languages, which he refers to as the ‘Universal Grammar,’ is biologically encoded in the human cognitive system. And although Chomsky’s opponents argue that language is merely invented and shared by convention, it is still necessarily the case that the underlying foundations of whatever is invented reflect cognitive modalities the inventor shares with all other members of their species. It is this commonality that enables what we call ‘translation’ across human languages, and we tend to take it entirely for granted.

But NHIs, by definition, don’t share such commonality with us. After all, they belong to a different species. Their cognition will almost certainly unfold with vastly different patterns and modalities. Even their logic may bear little resemblance to our own Aristotelian axioms. Moreover, their cultural context is bound to be entirely different from ours, leading to different empirical references: originally, they may not have had a cognitive category for, say, ‘car’ or understand the concept of a wheeled vehicle (for instance, if they are an aquatic species). It is naïve to expect that NHIs could learn our language as easily as a Chinese person can learn English. The underlying cognitive structures and references won’t line up; why should they?

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that we and NHIs can never communicate. What it does mean is that achieving this feat will require an effort to enter each other’s cognitive inner space—literally. In other words, before they could communicate with us, they would have to gain direct access to, and manipulate, our abstract mental processes. This is not something that can be casually achieved in the way I can pick up Italian during a holiday.

You will be closer to appreciating the difficulties if you think of whales: we know they have a language that scores higher in some relevant measures of complexity than our own. Yet, we can’t translate ‘Whalish’ into any human language, even though whales, just like us, are air-breathing, breast-feeding mammals.

To really appreciate the difficulties we have to go beyond whales—close relatives of ours—and imagine that, say, praying mantises—ancient insects much less related to us than whales—would have some form of language, and that we would try to communicate with them. Now we’re getting closer to the mark, for the cognitive templates and inner logic of insectoids are bound to be very largely incommensurable with ours. The challenge here is not mere translation; to speak ‘Insectoidish’ one would have to enter the cognitive space of insectoids—i.e., enter their mind.

Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will per force have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally.

There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, so to prompt us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space.

Notice the similarity between this and the ‘high strangeness’ class of observations: both entail symbolic communication by means of direct manipulation of our inner cognition. In the latter case, the communication is between deeper and shallower—primitive and modern, respectively—layers of our mind, taking place naturally and spontaneously. In the former case, the communication—likely mediated by technology—is between an NHI and a human, taking place in an artificial and deliberate manner. But both are metaphorical, akin to dreams and visions. This similarity is part of the reason why we feel tempted to conflate the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ and ‘high strangeness’ classes of observations.

In conclusion, I submit the hypothesis that, when UAPs manipulate our perceptions during an encounter, they are, in fact, attempting to communicate in the only way they can. Analogously, if you are hiking in a remote trail and come across a wild bear—another terrestrial species with a cognitive structure different from ours, which we encounter by chance as they go about their business in their own habitat—the bear, too, will communicate with you in the only way it can: through meaning-evoking body posture and sounds; and you will even understand it. The difference is that UAPs are better, more nuanced and sophisticated at the task.

How can we confirm this hypothesis?

For every useful, truly scientific hypothesis, there must be an experiment or a passive observation under controlled conditions that can either confirm or contradict it. As we’ve seen in the foregoing, the hypothesis in question is that the NHI—or NHIs—behind the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon is(are) ancient but terrestrial. We’ve discussed the characteristics of the phenomenon that motivated the hypothesis to begin with: (a) the frequency of UAP encounters, which suggests that they are from here and we meet them as they go about their business, just as we meet a bear in a trail; and (b) their interest in human activities that may jeopardize the habitability of this planet, such as nuclear installations and military exercises. But these characteristics aren’t conclusive. So just what could be conclusive?

If it is true, as Mr. Grusch claimed in his testimony to Congress in July 2023, that the US government has “biologics”—that is, the bodies of crashed UAP pilots—then a biochemical analysis of these biologics, if not conclusive, would at least be very indicative of whether they are terrestrial or not.

All terrestrial life we have studied in detail thus far, despite their drastic morphological differences—think of the differences between an amoeba, a praying mantis, and a cat—share the exact same biochemistry: they have two-stranded DNA with sugar-phosphate backbones and four nucleobasis (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) that form two possible base-pair configurations. Despite their extreme morphological differences, all terrestrial life thus looks the same when observed ‘under a microscope with sufficient magnification,’ so to speak.

Yet, the functions performed by this very specific biochemistry are multiple-realizable: there are many other conceivable ways in which these functions could be performed based on different biochemistry. The fact that all life we’ve studied thus far shares such specific biochemistry means simply that we all have a common ancestor dating back to an abiogenesis event: the rise of life from non-life. That event has defined the biochemistry we have all inherited. But it could just as well have been quite different; there is no a priori reason why biochemistry must be the way it is in us.

Indeed, a different event of abiogenesis—there is no a priori reason why life must have arisen from non-life only once on Earth either—could have set a different biochemistry; one still capable of storing the organism’s body-plan, of constructing the organism’s building blocks (proteins, in our case), of metabolizing, and of passing the organism’s body-plan to the next generation via reproduction; yet one different from ours. This is acknowledged in biology in the hypothesis of a “shadow biosphere”: there may, in fact, be organisms on Earth with biochemistry different from ours, because they may be descendants from a different abiogenesis event; we haven’t detected them yet because we haven’t done a detailed biochemical analysis of most organisms on the planet.

If even terrestrial organisms, which arose and evolved on this very planet, could have biochemistry distinct from ours, it stands to reason that organisms evolved in another planet, with different environmental conditions and chemical composition, are very unlikely to have the exact same biochemistry we do. That would require an implausible coincidence of literally cosmic proportions, even under the assumption of convergent evolution at the level of the phenotype (i.e., body form).

Therefore, if the biologics in the freezers of the powers-that-be have the same biochemistry we do, I believe it is safe to assume that they are terrestrial; they are our older cousins—likely forever traumatised by earlier planetary cataclysms—and certainly not aliens.

Another prediction of the ‘ultra-terrestrial’ hypothesis is this: the materials—say, the metals—used in the UAP craft should have isotope ratios compatible with an earthly origin, as opposed to one outside the solar system. If the powers-that-be are in possession of such craft, this shouldn’t be a difficult test to perform.

Together, the two test results suggested above, if mutually consistent, should be conclusive.

Conclusions

The hypothesis I put forward is that, if the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon and the Non-Human Intelligence(s) behind it are real, they are unlikely to be extra-terrestrial. Instead, they may consist of remnants of industrial, technological NHIs evolved on Earth up to 350 million years ago. We cannot find conspicuous archaeological or geological footprints of such civilisations because, according to the so-called ‘Silurian Hypothesis,’ not only weather erosion, but also the regular recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics, erase them. The anthropocentric notion that nothing intelligent has arisen on our planet in the billions of years for which no conspicuous evidence would have remained on the geological record is unjustified. There has been plenty of time and opportunity for many technological, industrial, but non-human civilisations to have arisen and disappeared from the surface of the Earth.

Though I understand that many may consider this hypothesis disturbing at some level, it does not require anything fundamentally beyond natural processes we know to exist: we know that intelligent life can arise on this planet, given its environmental conditions; we know that industrial civilisations can arise, develop, and go extinct in a period no longer than a few thousand years, which is the blink of an eye at a geological scale; we know that our own technology today would have looked like magic to the Great Goethe, only 200 years ago; we know that intelligent species that evolved the ability to act according to an abstract ethical code can operate under a policy of non-interference towards less evolved life (just think of human wildlife researchers); and so on. The present hypothesis requires nothing more than the foregoing. As such, there is nothing unnatural or truly extraordinary about it. If it violates our sensitivities, then this informs us about our sensitivities, not about the plausibility of the hypothesis in a naturalist framework.

Notice, however, that the hypothesis proposed here presupposes the UAP data disclosed thus far to be authentic, and not the result of a sprawling disinformation campaign. In the latter case, the key motivations and empirical ground for the speculations in this essay would be void, and the hypothesis should be disregarded in its entirety.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Dr. Hal Puthoff, Dr. Garry Nolan, Rob van der Werf, and Paul Stuyvenberg for generous feedback provided on earlier drafts of this essay.

Analytic Idealism, UAPs, the Daimon, and a model of dissociation: challenges for 2024

2024-01-01T22:58:00.003+01:00

You may have noticed that, since Essentia Foundation started in earnest in the summer of 2020, my philosophical output essentially ground to a halt. Indeed, my latest published book to-date, Science Ideated, was finished in April of 2020, even though it only came out in 2021. The reason for this is that Essentia Foundation took all my time in its first years. Starting a new organisation and team from scratch isn't trivial. Moreover, running Essentia Foundation resonated so profoundly with the path of meaning in my life that it basically became an 'obsession'—something I don't consider bad at all; in fact, I love it, despite the overtones of the word 'obsession.' In view of this, my own personal production had to take a backseat over the past three or four years.

Yet, ideas have been autonomously arising and simmering in the back of my mind, growing and congealing beyond the scrutiny of my ego, in their own space and their own time, with little to no effect in my outward daily life. And now they seem to be mature enough to be birthed into the world with little demand on my time. This is what I'd like to share with you now, as 2024 begins.

My intent with what follows is not so much to commit to any kind of new year's 'resolution,' but instead to bring you more squarely onboard our journey together through idea-space; for 2024 marks the beginning of a period of a few years that will probably be remembered as one of the most defining in the whole of human history; a unique time to be alive. I will also share, towards the end of this post, my predictions for this seminal period that has just begun.

The new book

The first news is that my new book, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, will be officially published in October of 2024. Here is an overview of the book's goals, quoted from Chapter 1, so to help you place its usefulness, value-add, and role in the broader context of my work:

Analytic Idealism—the subject of this book—represents a correction of our known metaphysical mistakes; a step forward. As I shall soon argue, it offers the most plausible and parsimonious hypothesis we have today about the nature of reality. Herein lies the value of what you are about to read.
I have written ten earlier books and a PhD thesis on the subject, not to mention a number of technical papers in academic journals, blog posts, and popular science & philosophy essays in major publications. So, what is new in this particular volume? As the title of this book indicates, here I attempt to summarize, in an informal but direct manner, the key salient points of Analytic Idealism and the argument that substantiates it. Ideas from several of my previous writings are revisited here, but often in a new form, from a different slant. And they are brought together so to give you the briefest and most compelling overview of Analytic Idealism I could muster.
In addition, as I’ve found myself having to explain and defend Analytic Idealism in countless interviews, Q&A sessions, panels, debates, courses, and other public events over the years, I’ve had to distill a more optimal way to bring forth the core ideas. I’ve learned over time what the main difficulties are that different people have with Analytic Idealism, and refined ways to explain it so to meet people where they are, honoring their intuitions and tackling their hidden assumptions more explicitly. All these learnings and refinements are built into the present volume.
Stylistically, my previous ten books were meticulously documented. The same goes for my second PhD thesis and my many technical papers in peer-reviewed academic journals. I thus believe that I have earned the right to discuss Analytic Idealism now in a less formal, less documented, but more fluent and easy-to-read manner, capturing the most salient points in more intuitive, colloquial language. This is what I try to achieve in this book. Unlike previous writings, here I shall thus deliberately avoid formal literature citations, bibliography, and notes. Whenever a literature reference seems particularly productive or unavoidable, I shall mention it in the running text, just as I already did above.
This book is meant to be as close as possible to a verbal discussion of Analytic Idealism, as if I were explaining it to you in person. The tone adopted deliberately reveals more aspects of my own humanity and emotional state to the reader, which can be contrasted to the drier and more objective character of my technical writings. For those readers who prefer or require a technical and more rigorously documented argument, I recommend my earlier output, much of which—such as the academic papers and thesis—is freely available online.

An IIT-based model of dissociation

But as much as Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell brings a form of closure to my formulation of idealism, it also opens a door to a new theoretical development. Although the empirical appeal to dissociation is sufficient to substantiate Analytic Idealism, one would like to have a more formal, conceptual, explicit account of the process of dissociation—What is it, precisely? How does it work? What are the causal mechanisms and dynamics involved? etc.—something that isn't available in the literature today. This new theoretical effort will be the main focus of my personal work in the course of 2024, and very likely beyond.

Since 2017, but mostly in 2023, an idea has been taking root in my mind about how Integrated Information Theory (IIT) can be used as the basis of a theoretical model of dissociation. IIT's 'exclusion principle,' in particular, seems to be the missing theoretical insight that enables such a model. Therefore, instead of taking most of my spare time to talk about Analytic Idealism in podcast interviews, in 2024 I plan to give less interviews, go to less events, generally talk less and do more. I feel a movement of the impersonal inside me that pushes me to return to theoretical meditation, to developing new ideas, as opposed to communicating older ones.

It will be a challenge to carve out more time to retire in quiet thinking—a return to the mode of being that characterised my philosophical life before I wrote my first book—because my email box has never been so overwhelmed with requests for interviews, participation in events, debates, travel, etc. But I will do my best, for my Daimon wants precisely that: a return to the contemplative state of mind that enabled my entire work thus far, and is necessary for its progression. If you thus notice less public material featuring me coming out this year, please know that it is for a good cause.

The Daimon

Speaking of the Daimon, for the past three or four years I've been thinking of writing a book about my life with the Daimon: the irresistible movements of the impersonal within me, which set the direction of my life and couch it in meaning. As you're bound to have heard my saying before, my life is not about me: instead, it's about what nature—embodied in the metaphorical figure of the Daimon—wants to do through me. This relationship with the impersonal has marked my entire life, since long before I was explicitly aware of it. And because I often get loads of questions about it, I thought I would write it all down.

I have, in fact, been writing this book very slowly for the past couple of years. What is new and salient, though, is that, since a couple of weeks ago, the book is finished in my mind; I just have to write the rest of it down. And this I shall do in the first couple of months of this year.

I now finally know exactly where I want—err, where the Daimon wants—to go with this book, so it's just a matter of taking some time off in the wee hours, after work, to type it all out. If everything goes smoothly, a book titled The Daimon and the Western Mind will come out early in 2025, discussing not only my own personal relationship with the Daimon, but also how the Daimon colors—even defines—the 'Western mind,' the Western mode of being in the world.

This 'Westerness,' of course, has nothing to do with 'race' or ethnicity; it doesn't even have anything to do with geographical location, the word 'Western' being just a vestige of past circumstances. 'Westerness' has to do with a way of life, a set of values, a mode of relating to nature and transcendence. In the book, I shall argue that these things have a lot to do with the flow of the impersonal will of nature—embodied in the Daimon—within the Western mind. So stay tuned for it.

UAPs

Several recent posts in this blog have been about Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomena, or 'UAPs' (the modern Pentagon parlance for 'UFOs'). Indeed, as I will discuss in the next section below, revelations about UAPs and Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) present on Earth will be one of the key developments in the next few years. In an attempt to bring some—at least temporary—closure to my participation in UAP discussions, I wrote a long essay (about 7,000 words) summarising what I consider to be the most reasonable and empirically-based account of the phenomenon.

The essay is currently being reviewed by colleagues and some editors, as it is still in draft format. I have not yet decided where I will publish it. The topic is contentious and the ideas in my essay aren't easy to take. But all this should be clearer in the coming days or couple of weeks at the latest. Publication itself may take a little longer than that. We will see. But know that this is coming, as many of you sent me messages on social media asking for the continuation of my blog series on the subject.

Once the essay is published, I'll have to decide whether I should continue my public participation in UAP discussions or not. This is a field plagued by precious little solid, concrete data. Instead, there are overwhelming amounts of hear-say, ungrounded speculation and fantasies, rumours, whispers, etc. So it's hard to proceed with educated theorising in this semi-vacuum of reliable data. And it may be counterproductive too, as the last thing I want to do is help amplify the nonsense.

So I guess I'll have to see, after the essay is published, how I will feel about the whole thing. I may continue writing on UAPs after that, or I may stop entirely until new, officially acknowledge information is publicly available and citable. In any case, as this post makes clear, I have too many projects for 2024, so something is likely to fall by the wayside.

Predictions

It is no secret that, geopolitically, the next few years will be defining for our civilisation, and may even end it if we are not careful. The conflict between Western liberal democracies on the one hand, and the repressive, totalitarian coalition of Russia-China-Iran-North Korea on the other, is likely to come to a climax and reshape the world's order (it has already done away with globalisation, in any case). But other events will be just as defining for how we live our lives, if not more.

Although I cannot (yet) list everything I know that motivates what I am about to say, it is crystal-clear to me that materialism is well into its dying process as the West's mainstream metaphysics, both in academia and the media. And this process is playing out significantly faster than my most optimistic predictions of ten years ago or so. In summary, it's happening; the process can no longer be reversed. Naturally, it will still take years for the implications of this change to percolate through all layers and corners of society, but the vast majority of us will be alive to see it unfold. Soon we will be living our social lives in a manner informed by a very different understanding of what is going on.

Also, as I summarise in my upcoming essay, the past few years—particularly 2023—have seen amazing disclosures regarding the UAP phenomenon; disclosures that, only ten years ago, would have been headline news across all media platforms in the world for months on end. Therefore, in the coming few years we have every reason to believe that such disclosures will continue and reach a climax, in which the presence of NHIs on our planet will be officially acknowledged. This, ultimately, won't be any novelty, as the NHIs have been here for, well, a long time (more on my upcoming essay). Yet, the acknowledgment of this presence in our culture will force us to reassess our own place and role in the natural order of this planet; a readjustment that will be—I'm quite sure about it—psychologically very healthy, even if challenging and difficult.

Now a big one: I think, in the coming twenty years or so, we will finally see a comprehensive cure for cancer; all cancers. This cure may require regular treatment, in a manner that will render cancer a chronic but completely manageable condition. But no one will need to die of cancer anymore, if they have access to health care. I say this based on the work of, for instance, Michael Levin, who I now consider one of the most important people alive.

Finally, in my last prediction for the cultural revolution that awaits us in the coming few years, I believe that a new, emerging understanding of the nature of time will revolutionise our conception of the personal self. I discuss this at length in the last chapter of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell and will not repeat that discussion here; I just felt the need to mention it for the sake of completeness.

Anyway, it has begun. 2024 marks the beginning of one of the most dangerous, yet interesting and revolutionary, periods to be alive in the entire history of humanity. May God be with us in the rollercoaster that now starts.

My unfortunate attempt at debating Tim Maudlin

2023-10-05T01:20:00.101+02:00

I recently was invited by Curt Jaimungal, of the Theories of Everything podcast, to debate philosopher Tim Maudlin on issues of philosophy of physics. I accepted after briefly looking up Maudlin's name and seeing that he was an academic. The result of this attempted debate, however, was a complete and unqualified disaster:

As much as this unfortunate event is deserving of forgetting, I think I owe my audience some clarifications. I'll try to keep it brief, to the point, and factual.

Did I know about Tim Maudlin's work before this attempted debate? No, I didn't. I essentially knew nothing other than the fact that he teaches philosophy of science at NYU, which I considered sufficient to justify my engaging in a conversation. I do follow the field of foundations of physics as closely as I can, but I follow the physics literature, not philosophy of physics. This doesn't mean that I dismiss philosophy of physics; it means only that I don't have time to follow everything of relevance to my work, and thus have to make choices. My past with experimental physics makes me more predisposed to prioritise the physics literature directly, and that's all there is to it.

Therefore, my usage of the expression 'grotesque theoretical fantasies' in my opening statement was not directed at Maudlin at all; I had no idea what his positions were. If he presumed that I did, then he presumed too much and that's not my responsibility. What I did know was that Maudlin wasn't a creator of any of the theories or interpretations I was alluding to. The expression 'grotesque theoretical fantasies' is one I had used many times before, and it has always referred to ideas, such as Everettian Many Worlds and Bohmian Mechanics. It was never directed at individuals, alive or dead. That Maudlin seemed to be offended by my usage of this expression is something I could not have anticipated; for all I knew, he would wholeheartedly agree with it. But if he felt, instead, that the hat fit his head, that was his judgment, not mine.

Maudlin stated that "everything [I had] just said is silly." So let us look into what I said and see whether any of it could conceivably be considered silly:

I started by saying that there was no consensus in the physics community about whether the experiments in question refuted physical realism. Maudlin obviously agrees, so that couldn't have been the silly part.

I said that, in addition to Bell's inequalities, there were also Leggett's inequalities, which can discriminate between physical realism and locality. Was that the silly part? Clearly not; it's a fact. Here is the paper in question.

I then said that these inequalities had been experimentally verified. Was this silly? No, here is one paper reporting on the experimental results. And here is another.

I proceeded to say that these results refuted a broad class of non-local hidden variables theories. Was that silly? No. This is an explicit conclusion of one of the papers in question, one of whose co-authors is a 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate in physics.

I then said that Bohmian Mechanics, which Maudlin refers to as "Pilot Wave Theory," is one of the speculations that could perhaps survive the experimental results. Maudlin obviously agreed with that, so that wasn't silly either.

I followed up by stating that there were other reasons why Bohmian mechanics wasn't plausible, one of them being that it does not have a relativistic extension. Is that silly? No, it's a broadly known fact that doesn't even require a citation. So what was the 'silliness' Maudlin was alluding to?

Towards the end, I shared my view that, short of "grotesque theoretical fantasies," physical realism is untenable in the face of those experimental results. Is this silly? Perhaps in Maudlin's opinion it is, but I certainly substantiated my view explicitly and rigorously enough before stating it, so immediately characterising it as silly seems to be just that: silly and gratuitously provocative.

Finally, although acknowledging that physical realism seemed to be refuted experimentally, I still expressed my support for a realism of another kind; a realism entailing that the world is still made of real, external states, but states that aren't describable by physical quantities or properties. Clearly, Maudlin is a realist, so my expressing support for some surviving form of realism couldn't be silly from his point of view.

Given the above, the vast majority of what I said in my opening statement wasn't even polemical, let alone silly; it was factual in a manner that no informed player in the field of foundations of physics would fail to see. Maudlin's prompt and thoughtless characterisation of it as silly was purely emotional; it betrayed a surprising level of insecurity. I inadvertently poked his sensitivities and he took his frustrations out on me. Something in him clearly knows that his theoretical preferences are in serious trouble, otherwise he would have maintained a normal, calm, confident demeanour appropriate for the situation.

Now, why did I leave the debate? There are three reasons:

In an of itself, the usage of the word 'silly' is, in my view, acceptable in a debate, provided that it is substantiated by the preceding context and the corresponding tone conducive to conversation. But Maudlin's overtly aggressive, obnoxious, disrespectful tone in his loud outbursts made it clear to me that he wasn't open to any such conversation. My taking exception at his characterisation of my opening as 'silly' was as much about his tone and demeanour as it was about the word itself. He was simply out to have a schoolyard brawl with me (which I could even be in for, as long as we did it in the schoolyard, and without the pretence of intellectual aspirations). As things stood, there clearly was no point in pursing the exchange further.

Secondly, I frankly didn't feel like being insulted again, for although I take myself less seriously today than I ever did before in my life, I still have self-respect, which I think is healthy. There is no contradiction between these two things. Be that as it may, Maudlin's uncalled-for insult and overt toxicity angered me, and still anger me when I re-watch the video. I am not a saint and have never made a secret of it; much to the contrary. As someone who was educated to never tolerate bullying or insult at any age, I found myself wishing that Maudlin would speak to me in that tone in person, man to man, not from behind a camera. Clearly, such a thought was not conducive to continued conversation.

Thirdly, Maudlin's claims that the experimental results were also "predicted" by physically realist interpretations of quantum mechanics struck me, content-wise, as so outdated and biased as to make the engagement pointless. For instance, he claimed that the experimental results were also "predicted" by the Everettian Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Strictly speaking, this is indeed correct, in that MWI predicts that everything happens; every possible outcome is 'predicted' by MWI to actually unfold, just in some inaccessible parallel universe for which we have precisely zero direct empirical evidence. Obviously, this 'predictive power' of MWI is what makes it unfalsifiable and explanatorily useless, since a theory that predicts that everything will happen might as well predict nothing. That Maudlin should appeal to the 'predictive powers' of MWI to justify his calling me silly was rather rich.

Maudlin then appealed to Bohmian mechanics as an interpretation consistent with the experimental results. Bohmian mechanics is very niche in physics today for a number of excellent theoretical reasons, and even the experiments that once were construed to give it some basis have turned out to be wrong and do exactly the opposite. Its own creator, Louis de Broglie, abandoned the theory already a century ago. Yet I don't have to refute Bohmian mechanics, as the burden of argument here is not on me; it is on its proponents. It is they who need to show how it could be reconciled not only with the experimental results, but with Relativity. They also have to show how Bohmian mechanics could replace Quantum Field Theory, whose basic tenet—namely, that particles are field excitations—contradicts Bohmian mechanics (according to the latter, particles are little marbles riding a pilot wave). Before Bohmian mechanics can be used to base any philosophical argument, it first needs to be proper physics. Of all possible interpretations of quantum mechanics, that Maudlin chose to use "pilot wave theory" to substantiate his charge of my being "silly" was remarkably ironic; the man seems to completely lack self-awareness.

Finally, Maudlin's repeated rhetorical questioning of how any physical experiment could possibly refute physical realism, as if such a thing were obviously impossible a priori, betrays such a lack of awareness of the issues in contention, and of developments in foundations of physics, that further discussion was pointless.

You see, I am known to like and engage in confrontational critiques and robust exchanges, as accepted and even encouraged in academia. I am also known to have used words such as 'silly,' 'naive,' and even 'crazy' when referring to certain ideas. But I challenge you to find a face-to-face debate or conversation wherein I gratuitously insulted my interlocutor in tone, demeanour or language, or treated them with any level of disrespect. Therefore, my usage of the words above should be evaluated in their proper context, and not be misconstrued as permission for others to take on a nasty or disrespectful tone with me in any conversation; I shall tolerate no such thing.

I was sincerely willing to engage in a robust exchange with Maudlin, provided that the opportunity for such an exchange were there. Maudlin's unbecoming, unacademic and rude behaviour made it clear that such was not the case. He came across to me as a nasty and crass street brawler, not a thinker. I have thus no plans to engage with him ever again, for I have no respect for the attitude he displayed and what it betrays about his character. Nor do I find his ungrounded, tendentious, hand-waving and wishful technical statements worthy of in-depth discussion in debate format. I am sure he can continue to believe in his unfalsifiable, pseudo-scientific fantasies without my help.

In-your-face media bias regarding UAPs

2023-08-31T02:26:00.023+02:00

PREVIOUS POST on UAPs

I thought I'd share with you something I observed today, which I thought was remarkable. Browsing YouTube video recommendations late this evening, I first clicked on a months-old video of a NASA press conference on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), which NASA has been officially investigating. In it, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the investigative team, discusses two types of UAP cases. The first is that of seemingly metallic spheres that, somehow, move and manoeuvre without any signs of propulsion or control surfaces (go to timestamp 2:18):

As you can see, Dr. Kirkpatrick:

Shows a video of one such sphere, as recorded by an MQ-9 'Reaper' military drone. The sphere shown moves fast, in a controlled, non-ballistic trajectory, despite the absence of any visible means of propulsion or control surfaces. It clearly isn't a floating balloon.
States that this is just 'a typical example of the thing we see most of; we see these all over the world'—i.e., there are many other cases on their records, some more 'enigmatic' than the unclassified video shown;
Proceeds to say that these spheres make 'very interesting apparent manoeuvres' (this is a significant acknowledgment, as balloons and craft without control surfaces shouldn't be able to manoeuvre at all).

Clearly, Dr. Kirkpatrick is acknowledging that there are UAPs 'all over the world' for which there is no prosaic account, even though there is no doubt about their existence and capabilities; they've been captured on film and by other sophisticated, military-grade data collection instruments.

Here is a more detailed video showing the sphere:

Dr. Kirkpatrick then shows another video clip, of a case that, although apparently anomalous, does have a prosaic account and represents no mystery at all. There are thus two types of cases: those that are genuinely anomalous, such as the spheres, and those that can be accounted for prosaically.

Literally a couple of videos later, during my lazy evening browsing, YouTube recommended a clip showing how CNN reported on this NASA press conference and Dr. Kirkpatrick's presentation:

Notice how CNN's Pentagon correspondent, Tom Foreman, mentions only the case that can be prosaically accounted for; there is mention neither of the first type of case Dr. Kirkpatrick talked about, nor of the extraordinary video of the sphere—let alone a replay, which was obviously the most journalistic significant and news-worthy part of the whole press conference. With clearly dismissive tone and body language, Foreman proceeds to state that the UAPs are "measured with all sorts of crazy instruments out there." Should we construe this as meaning that an MQ-9 'Reaper' military drone, one of the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering platforms in the skies, is a dismissible "crazy instrument"?

I found it striking that CNN wouldn't even mention the spheres or replay the remarkable video that had just been declassified. They just replay now-old videos the Pentagon released years ago. The smirking commentary and laughter seem to have higher journalistic value than the very clear, concrete evidence discussed in the press conference; more value than NASA's explicit admission that there is a genuine mystery here. This is extraordinary; I mean, not only the video of the sphere and NASA's acknowledgment, by also CNN's coverage of this press conference.

It's difficult for me to imagine that this kind of coverage isn't a deliberate editorial attempt at perception manipulation and narrative control. Which raises the question: Why is there a need for such kind of manipulation?

How interesting, isn't it?

Accounting for UAPs' zigzagging, 'brownian motion'

2023-08-04T22:28:00.022+02:00

PREVIOUS POST on UAPs

As discussed in my previous post in this blog, I admit to having been caught off guard by the latest developments regarding UAPs and non-human intelligence. Nonetheless, I cannot help but take these developments seriously, and thus felt compelled to explore the subject further in two directions: first, to understand clearly how (im)plausible it is that the allegations are fabrications, given the legal context of the case; and second, to apply reason and information already disclosed to speculate educatedly on what we can expect a non-human intelligence to be like.

As luck would have it, the first part was already done 'for me' by Marik von Vennenkampff, writing for The Hill. I recommend his level-headed and well informed essay, which explains better than I could why I now take this whole thing quite seriously. In addition, yesterday I decided to watch James Fox's wonderful new documentary, Moment of Contact (about the Varginha UAP case in Brazil). I have always had respect for Jamie's work and this latest film doesn't disappoint at all: he captured very well what is perhaps the most important UAP/close encounter case of all times, because of the sheer amount, detail and consistency of witness accounts. As most of you know, I spent my childhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And although I haven't been there in almost three decades now, childhood is a formative time, so I like to believe—perhaps too optimistically—that I can still judge the Brazilian demeanour, body language and tone of voice, in a culture-bound manner. Based on this, I do think the witnesses interviewed in the film were all telling the truth.

What this means is that, in addition to being a definitely psychological phenomenon in many ways—as I discussed in my own book Meaning in Absurdity several years ago—UAPs also have a stable physical facet: it would seem that there really are biological E.T.s from another star system visiting us by means of technologically advanced craft. Again, I hadn't expected this, but I am too committed to truth to ignore the new data. Perhaps, in fact, the high-strangeness aspect of the phenomenon is a thing apart, not directly related to metal spaceships from another planet. We may be dealing with two or more distinct categories here, artificially trying to stuff them together in our conceptual drawers. Or perhaps not; I don't know. (More on this in the next instalment of this series of posts.)

However, whatever the case may be, the idea of very physical—meant here in the colloquial sense, not as a nod to physicalism—aliens coming to visit us in very physical craft raises a number of new questions: what can we expect these beings to be like? What about their technology? And how can we make sense of their weird behaviour, such as the typical 'brownian motion' of their craft?

Since we are far from being able to visit other star systems, if these beings are visiting us they are obviously more technologically advanced than we are. Therefore, one educated way to speculate about them is to extrapolate the technology development curve we have been following. This is admittedly fraught with potential errors, as there is no a priori reason to think that their development arch would resemble ours in any way; yet, it's the best we can do when armed only with our own cultural and conceptual references.

With the advent of DNA manipulation technologies such as CRISPR, it has become clear that, in a perhaps not-so-distant future, humans will be able to edit their DNA to suppress undesirable characteristics and emphasise desirable ones. Even without understanding how protein manufacturing relates to morphogenesis—i.e., how the proteins made by DNA are assembled together in just the right way to form a working body—we can still learn to tune our bodies by means of DNA manipulation on a merely empirical, trial-and-error basis.

Therefore, it is plausible that a more technologically advanced alien civilisation would have vast control of their own genotypes and phenotypes, thereby designing themselves for whatever functions are culturally valued. Space travel is one such a function, which could benefit greatly from DNA manipulation: just as ants specialise phenotypically—some are 'armed' soldiers, others flexible engineers, yet others tireless farmers, etc.—E.T. probably also specialises for space flight and other activities. For instance, since space if a near-vacuum, the senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste become redundant except for intra-craft communication and instrumental output; only vision remains relevant with regard to the extra-craft environment. This way, it is an educated guess that the 'biologicals' found in crashed alien craft aren't the typical alien walking about in Zeta Reticuli, but specialised phenotypes meant for space travel. What we see here is not necessarily what we would see there, in their homes.

Another human technology trend to take into account is that of higher integration between the human body and the technology it controls. Today, we still interact with our phones and computers through physical touch. But there are promising developments in thought-controlled technologies, be it through measurement of brain waves or internal brain implants. Extrapolating this development arch, the ultimate goal is technology that reacts as instantly to our intentions as our own eyes and limbs do.

If this is where we are going, it is plausible to think that E.T. is already there. Then, by putting this idea together with the first trend discussed above, we get to a scenario in which alien pilots are DNA-engineered to be directly integrated with their craft. We should thus not expect their craft to have displays, keyboards, buttons and levers like ours do, but to be an extension of the pilots' minds, directly reactive to the pilots' intentions just as our eyes and limbs directly react to ours. This is an important point for any reverse-engineering team: they must abandon our paradigm of what 'controlling the craft' means, and think of it in a more organic manner. Regrettably, this also means that we probably won't be able to go for a joyride in an alien craft.

Interestingly, these ideas provide a way to understand one of the most bizarre but consistent aspects of the UAP phenomenon: their seemingly random, zigzagging, 'brownian motion' way of moving, which doesn't conform to any reasonable trajectory. They go back, forth, and sideways, in a manner we can't quite make sense of... unless, we understand that the craft aren't 'controlled' by their pilots at arms-length, but are instead extensions of the pilots' minds.

To see this, just consider our own eyes: we are constantly moving them around, scanning our environment in a fashion akin to brownian motion (most of us don't even realise that they are doing it all the time, even while dreaming, in the so-called 'Rapid Eye Movement' or 'REM' state). Different elements of our visual field grab our attention at different moments, leading to immediate, instinctive, jerking movements of the eyes so they can focus on that part of our visual field. We do it because we can only see the very centre of our visual field in focus and in high-resolution—an area corresponding to just about 0.1% of the field (!)—and must thus constantly scan our surroundings seemingly haphazardly, so to construct an accurate visual model of our environment. We do it autonomously, instinctively—as opposed to deliberately—this being the reason why the motion ends up being 'brownian' in nature. We bypass deliberation because our eyes are directly controlled by our minds, without the intermediation of a control panel. If the minds of E.T. pilots are directly linked to the motion and operation of their craft, their movements stand to also be spontaneous, instinctive, non-deliberate, and thus somewhat 'random.' And sure enough, this is precisely what witnesses report, repeatedly and consistently.

That UAPs move in a manner akin to how we autonomously move our own eyes—so to scan and construct a model of our surroundings—seems to me to betray their immediate, seamless connection with the minds of their pilots. This is the only logical, reasonable, satisfying way I could find to account for this consistent peculiarity of the phenomenon. And it, of course, suggests a more sophisticated metaphysical perspective, which does away with the delusional separation between mind and matter still prevalent in our own culture. But this is a topic for the next instalment of this series of posts, so stay tuned.

NEXT POST on UAPs

UAPs, advanced non-human technology, and disclosure

2023-07-31T01:53:00.050+02:00

Over the past few weeks, the subject of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) and advanced non-human technology has been catapulted to the forefront of our cultural attention. The historical UAP hearing at the US congress has conferred on it a whole new level of legitimacy, and for good reason: this time, the whistleblower isn’t an ‘anonymous high-ranking official’ shot in silhouette with a distorted voice, but someone with a name, credentials, a history, willing to appear on camera and make statements under oath, and with corroborating witnesses. Pilots with impeccable credentials are reporting phenomena that seem to violate the known laws of physics, and their observations are corroborated by instrumentation. Throughout the cultural history of UFOs, we haven’t seen anything like this before, despite the persistent lack of a proverbial smoking gun. So, what do I make of all this?

More than ten years ago, I wrote a book—Meaning in Absurdity—discussing anomalous phenomena such as UAPs. Those who read that book know that I view UAPs and so-called ‘alien abduction’ phenomena as largely psychological. Now, as an idealist, when I say that something is psychological I don’t mean that it is unreal, for under idealism everything is ultimately psychological. But I did regard these phenomena, at least to a large extent, as the result of our own ‘subconscious’ projections onto elements of the world. Under this view, UAPs really are real, but ‘dressed in the clothes’ of our own projections. Their core is independent of our human psychology, but their physical presentation isn’t.

One could argue that an implication of this view is that the physical phase of the phenomena is necessarily unstable, fluid, not immutable or permanent, but mercurial and impossible to pin down, like the Hessdalen lights. And this is why the allegation that human beings have managed to recover, store, disassemble, and even attempt to reverse engineer craft not created by humans, if true, would force me to put my view in a new perspective. Although their mental phase is self-evident, I had not expected the phenomena to have such a stable physical phase.

Which, of course, raises the question: are the allegations true in the first place? I feel quite comfortable in saying that what the pilots are reporting is true. They experienced these phenomena themselves—unlike the intelligence official, who has not observed anything directly—and their observations match measurements from instrumentation. The number of witnesses is also overwhelming. So, it’s quite safe to say that there is something out there—something controlled by a deliberate agency—which behaves in ways that seem to contradict the laws of physics as we understand them. In and of itself, this is already spectacular, but not really new, if you’ve been paying attention.

What is new is the weight of the allegation that the US defense establishment has possession of several of these craft. And this is what forces me to reconsider the view that the phenomena always have an ephemeral, fluid physical phase. Can we trust such a grave allegation?

The sincere answer is: I don’t know. I am impressed by the circumstances of the case; I am struck by the willingness of those involved to double-down under oath; and by their carefulness in following a lawful process. This is all new and inspires some confidence. Yet, they didn’t present any smoking gun. So, all I can say is that I now take the allegation more seriously than before.

I believe it’s clear—as I argued in Meaning in Absurdity—that the phenomena have been with us since as far back as the beginning of recorded history, and probably much earlier than that. It is therefore unreasonable, in my opinion, to think of UAPs as performing some kind of survey or mapping of our planet and species; any such mission would have been completed long ago, and wouldn’t require the recurring, frequent visiting of UAPs that we witness.

If UAPs are, to some extent, mental projections of our own, then their repeated visits simply reflect ourselves, and will thus continue to recur for as long as we are us. There is no deep mystery here. But if they are solid, concrete technology bringing life from other planets, dimensions or realities here, then we must ask: what makes them keep on coming? What are they trying to do? Potential planetary surveys can’t explain the visits, for the reasons above.

Now allow me to say something that you won’t like to hear. Do I think that we have the right to know the truth about UAPs?

Well, if by ‘right’ one means legal right, I don’t know; I am not a lawyer. Only a US lawyer can answer the question in this sense, but there should be a definitive, non-polemical answer. On the other hand, if by ‘right’ we mean ethical right, my answer is: it depends. I’d love to believe that I, along with everybody else, have an extra right—who doesn’t like rights?—particularly because I am very curious about the phenomena. But I am too committed to truth to allow my preferences to dictate my opinions on the matter. I don’t think there is a trivial case to be made here; our potential ‘rights’ are not self-evident.

For the past 18 months we have been watching the overwhelming level of evil, carnage and destruction that a totalitarian regime in Europe is unleashing upon the continent. Now imagine a Russia with high-energy beam weapons, gravity drives and invisibility cloaks—that would be the end of democracy, personal freedoms and our very way of life. So no, I don’t think it is obvious at all that we have the right to know everything there is to know about the phenomena. In fact, I feel enthusiastically inclined to believe we don’t. Any information that is made public is also made available to those who want to destroy our way of life; regrettably, there is just no way around it.

That’s not to say that some level of carefully redacted disclosure wouldn’t be useful. The mere suspicion that we might not be alone in this universe has already brought the Democrats and Republicans together; imagine what disclosure would do for bringing humanity together. There is much to be gained from it; so much it is hardly imaginable. And thus I do think disclosure should be done. But it should be done responsibly; not because we are psychologically unstable kids that need to be protected from the truth, but because the world is crammed with criminal regimes that would use whatever technical means at their disposal to exploit, and curtail the freedoms of, everybody else. Let us not be naïve here, thinking that disclosure will cause we all, Putin and his cronies included, to hold hands and sing the Kumbaya. The only reason we still enjoy the freedoms and way of life we do is our ability to apply superior military force when threatened. And if the phenomena have demonstrated anything beyond any doubt about the intentions of non-human intelligences, it is that they won’t protect us from ourselves.

Disclosure, when properly done, can significantly advance our culture, science and civilization at large, in almost unimaginable ways. It can open entirely new horizons for human life and aspirations. But we should guard against irresponsible disclosure and the demonization of a defense establishment that, whatever else might be true about it, ultimately protects our freedoms and way of life.

NEXT POST on UAPs

AI won't be conscious, and here is why (A reply to Susan Schneider)

2023-01-10T01:32:00.062+01:00

I have just participated—literally 10 minutes ago as I write these words—in an online debate organized by the IAI, in which Donald Hoffman, Susan Schneider and I discussed the possibility that computers become conscious in the future, with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). My position is that they won’t. Susan’s position is that they very well may, and Don’s position is that this isn’t the right question to ask.

If you watched the debate live, you know that, at the very end, I wanted to reply to a point made by Susan but couldn’t, since we ran out of time. The goal of this essay is to put my reply on the record in writing, so to take it out of my system. Before I do that, however, I need to give some context to those who didn’t watch the debate live and don’t have a subscription to the IAI to watch it before reading this essay. If you did watch the debate, you can skip ahead to the section ‘My missing reply.”

Context

In a nutshell, my position is that we have no reason to believe that silicon computers will ever become conscious. I cannot refute the hypothesis categorically, but then again, I cannot categorically refute the hypothesis of the Flying Spaghetti Monster either, as the latter is logically coherent. Appeals to logical coherence mean as little in the conscious AI debate as they do in the Flying Spaghetti Monster context. The important point is not what is logically coherent or what can be categorically refuted, but what hypothesis we have good reasons to entertain.

Those who take the hypothesis of conscious AI seriously do so based on an appallingly biased notion of isomorphism—a correspondence of form, or a similarity—between how humans think and AI computers process data. To find that similarity, however, one has to take several steps of abstraction away from concrete reality. After all, if you put an actual human brain and an actual silicon computer on a table before you, there is no correspondence of form or functional similarity between the two at all; much to the contrary. A living brain is based on carbon, burns ATP for energy, metabolizes for function, processes data through neurotransmitter releases, is moist, etc., while a computer is based on silicon, uses a differential in electrical potential for energy, moves electric charges around for function, processes data through opening and closing electrical switches called transistors, is dry, etc. They are utterly different.

The isomorphism between AI computers and biological brains is only found at very high levels of purely conceptual abstraction, far away from empirical reality, in which disembodied—i.e. medium-independent—patterns of information flow are compared. Therefore, to believe in conscious AI one has to arbitrarily dismiss all the dissimilarities at more concrete levels, and then—equally arbitrarily—choose to take into account only a very high level of abstraction where some vague similarities can be found. To me, this constitutes an expression of mere wishful thinking, ungrounded in reason or evidence.

Towards the end of the debate I touched on an analogy. Those who believe in conscious AI tend to ask the following rhetorical question to make their point: “If brains can produce consciousness, why can’t computers do so as well?” As an idealist, I reject the claim that brains produce consciousness to begin with but, for the sake of focusing on the point in contention, I choose to interpret the question in the following way: “If brains are correlated with private conscious inner life, why can’t computers be so as well?” The question I raised towards the end of the debate was an answer to the aforementioned rhetoric: if birds can fly by flapping their upper limbs, why can’t humans fly by doing so as well? The point of this equally rhetorical question, of course, is to highlight the fact that two dissimilar things—birds and humans—simply do not share every property or function (why should they?). So why should brains and computers do?

Susan then took my analogy and gave it a different spin, taking it beyond the intended context and limits (which is the perennial problem with analogies): she pointed out that, if the Wright brothers had believed that only birds can fly, they wouldn’t have bothered to try and build an airplane, which is itself different from a bird. Her point was that one phenomenon—in this case, flight—can have multiple instantiations in nature, in different substrates—namely, a bird and an airplane. So although silicon computers are different from biology, in principle both could instantiate the phenomenon of private conscious inner life. This is a point of logic that I wanted to react to at the end of the debate, but didn’t have time to.

My missing reply

Here’s what I wanted to say at the end of the debate: indeed, we are not logically forced to limit the instantiations of private conscious inner life to a biological substrate alone. But this isn’t the point, as there are a great many silly hypotheses that are also logically—and even physically—coherent, yet obviously shouldn’t be entertained at all (such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or that there is a 19th-century teapot in the orbit of Saturn). The real point is whether we have good reasons to take seriously the hypothesis that private consciousness can correlate with silicon computers. Does the analogy of flight—namely, that airplanes and birds are different but nonetheless can both fly, so private consciousness could in principle be instantiated on both biological and non-biological substrates—provide us with good reasons to think that AI computers can become conscious in the future?

It may sound perfectly reasonable to say that it does, but—and here is the important point—if so, then the same reasoning applies to non-AI computers that exist already today, for the underlying substrate (namely, conducting metal, dielectric oxide and doped semiconducting silicon) and basic functional principles (data processing through electric charge movement) are the same in all cases. There is no fundamental difference between today's 'dumb' computers and the complex AI projected for the future. AI algorithms run on parallel information processing cores of the kind we have had for many years in our PCs (specifically, in the graphics cards therein), just more, faster, more interconnected cores, executing instructions in different orders (i.e. different software). As per the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness,’ it is at least very difficult to see what miracle could make instructions executed in different orders, or more and faster components of the same kind, lead to the extraordinary and intrinsically discontinuous jump from unconsciousness to consciousness. The onus of argument here is on the believers, not the skeptics.

Even new, emerging computer architectures, such as neuromorphic processors, are essentially CMOS (or similar, using philosophically equivalent process technologies) devices moving electric charges around, just like their predecessors. To point out that these new architectures are analog, instead of digital, doesn’t help either: digital computers move charges around just like their analog counterparts; the only difference is in how information arising from those charge movements is interpreted. Namely, the microswitches in digital computers apply a threshold to the amount of charge before deciding its meaning, while analog computers don’t. But beyond this interpretational step—trivial for the purposes of the point in contention—both analog and digital computers embody essentially the same substrate. Moreover, the operation of both is based on the flow of electric charges along metal traces and the storage of charges in charge-holding circuits (i.e. memories).

So, if you grant Susan’s point that there can be instantiations of private consciousness on different substrates, and that one of these substrates is a silicon computer, then you must grant that today’s ‘dumb’ computers are already conscious (including the computer or phone you are using to read these words). The reason is two-fold: first, the substrate of today’s ‘dumb’ computers is the same as that of advanced AI computers (in both cases, charges move around in metal and silicon substrates); second, whatever change in organization or functionality happens in future CMOS or similar devices, such changes are philosophically trivial for the point in contention, as they cannot in themselves account for the emergence of consciousness from unconsciousness (vis a vis the hard problem). If you are prepared to go this far in your fantastical hypothesizing, then turning off your phone may already be an act of murder.

Alternatively, if today’s computers aren’t plausibly conscious, then neither do we have good reasons to believe that future, advanced AI computers will be, even if Susan’s flight analogy holds. For the point here is not one of logical—or even physical—possibility, but of natural plausibility instead. A 19th-century teapot in the orbit of Saturn is both logically and physically possible (aliens could have come to Earth in the 19th-century, stolen the teapot from someone’s dining room, and then dumped it in the vicinity of Saturn on their way back home, after which the unfortunate teapot got captured by Saturn’s gravity field), but naturally implausible to the point of being dismissible.

Are water pipes conscious too?

You see, everything a computer does can, in principle, be done with pipes, pressure valves and water. The pipes play the role of electrical conduits, or traces; the pressure valves play the role of switches, or transistors; and the water plays the role of electricity. Ohm’s Law—the fundamental rule for determining the behavior of electric circuits—maps one-on-one to water pressure and flow relations. Indeed, the reason why we build computers with silicon and electricity, instead of PVC pipes and water, is that the former are much, much smaller and cheaper to make. Present-day computer chips have tens of billions of transistors, and an even greater number of individual traces. Can you imagine the size and cost of a water-based computer comprising tens of billions of pipes and pressure valves? Can you imagine the amount of energy required to pump water through it? You wouldn't be able to afford it or carry it in your pocket. That’s the sole reason why we compute with electricity, instead of water (it also helps that silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, found in the form of sand). There is nothing fundamentally different between a pipe-valve-water computer and an electronic one, from the perspective of computation. Electricity is not a magical or unique substrate for computation, but merely a convenient one. A wooden tool called an 'abacus' also computes.

With this in mind, ask yourself: do we have good reasons to believe that a system made of pipes, valves and water correlates with private conscious inner life the way your brain does? Is there something it is like to be the pipes, valves and water put together? If you answer ‘yes’ to this question, then logic forces you to start wondering if your house’s sanitation system—with its pipes, valves and water—is conscious, and whether it is murder to turn off the mains valve when you go on vacation. For the only difference between your house’s sanitation system and my imaginary water-based computer is one of number—namely, how many pipes, how many valves, how many liters of water—not of kind or essence. As a matter of fact, the typical home sanitation system implements the functionality of about 5 to 10 transistors.

You can, of course, choose to believe that the numbers actually matter. In other words, you may entertain the hypothesis that although a simple, small home sanitation system is unconscious, if you keep on adding pipes, valves and water to it, at some point the system will suddenly make the jump to being conscious. But this is magical thinking. You'd have to ask yourself the question: how, precisely, does the mere addition of more of the same pipes, valves and water, lead to the magical jump to conscious inner life? Unless you have an explicit and coherent answer to this question, you are merely engaging in hand waving, self-deception, and hiding behind vague complexity.

Conclusion

That there can logically be instantiations of private conscious inner life on different substrates does not provide reason to believe that, although ‘dumb’ computers aren’t conscious, more complex computers in the future, with more transistors and running more complex software, will become conscious. The key problem for those who believe in conscious AI is how and why this transition from unconsciousness to consciousness should ever take place. Susan’s flight analogy does not help here, as it merely argues for the logical possibility of such transition, without saying anything about its natural plausibility.

If, like me, you believe that ‘dumb’ computers today—automata that mechanically follow a list of commands—aren’t conscious, then Susan’s flight analogy gives you no reason to take seriously the hypothesis that future computers—equally made of silicon and moving electric charges around—will become conscious. That they will run more sophisticated AI software only means that they will execute, just as blindly and mechanically as before, a different list of commands. What those computers will be able to do can be done with pipes, pressure valves and water, even though the latter isn't practical.

It is very difficult—if at all possible—to definitely refute someone whose view is agnosticism, or a wait-and-see attitude, since that isn’t a definite position to begin with. So what is there to argue against? “Well, we just don’t know, do we?” is a catch-all reply that can be issued in face of any criticism, regardless of how well articulated it is, for what can we humans—monkeys running around a space rock for less than 300 thousand years—know for sure to begin with? Yet, I feel that I should nonetheless keep on trying to argue against this form of open-mindedness, for there is a point where it opens the doors to utter and pernicious nonsense.

You see, I could coherently pronounce my open-mindedness about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for we just don’t know for sure whether it exists, do we? For all I know, there is a noodly monster floating around in space, in a higher dimension invisible to us, moving the planets around their orbits with its—invisible—noodly appendages. The evidence is surely consistent with this hypothesis: the planets do move around their orbits, even though no force is imparted on them through visible physical contact. Even stronger, the hypothesis does seem to even explain our observations of planetary movements. And there is nothing logically wrong, or even physically refutable, with it either. So, what do we know? Maybe the hypothesis is right, and thus we should remain open-minded and not arbitrarily dismiss the Monster. Let us all wear an upside-down pasta strainer on our heads! Do you see the point?

No, we have no good reason to believe in conscious AI. This is a fantasy unsupported by reason or evidence. Epistemically, it’s right up there in the general vicinity of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Entertaining conscious AI seriously is counterproductive; it legitimizes the expenditure of scarce human resources—including tax-payer money—on problems that do not exist, such as the ethics and rights of AI entities. It contaminates our culture by distorting our natural sense of plausibility and conflating reality with (bad) fiction. AIs are complex tools, like a nuclear power plant is a complex tool. We should take safety precautions about AIs just as we take safety precautions about nuclear power plants, without having ethics discussions about the rights of power plants. Anything beyond this is just fantastical nonsense and should be treated as such.

Allow me to vent a little more…

I believe one of the unfortunate factors that contribute to the pernicious fiction of conscious AI today is the utter lack of familiarity, even—well, particularly—among highly educated computer scientists, with what computers actually are, how they actually work, and how they are actually built. Generations have now come out of computer science school knowing how to use a voluminous hierarchy of pre-built software libraries and tooling—meant precisely to insulate them from the dirty details we call reality—but not having the faintest clue about how to design and build a computer. These are our ‘computer experts’ today: they are mere power users of computers, knowing precious little about the latter's inner workings. They think entirely in a realm of conceptual abstraction, enabled by tooling and disconnected from the (electrical) reality of integrated circuits (ICs) and hardware. For them, since the CPU—the Central Processing Unit, the computer's 'brain'—is a mysterious black box anyway, it's easy to project all their fantasies onto it, thereby filling the vacuum left open by a lack of understanding with wishful, magical thinking. The psychology at play here has been so common throughout human history that we can consider it banal. On the other hand, those who do know how to build a CPU and a computer as a whole, such as Federico Faggin, father of the microprocessor and inventor of silicon gate technology, pooh-pooh ‘conscious AI’ every bit as much as I do.

Having worked on the design and manufacture of computer ICs for over two decades, I estimate that perhaps only about 2000 people alive today know how to start from sand and end up with a working computer. This is extremely worrisome, for if a cataclysm wipes out our technical literature together with those 2000 people tomorrow, we will not know how to re-boot our technological infrastructure. It is also worrisome in that it opens the door to the foolishness of conscious AI, which is now being actively peddled by computer science lunatics with the letters ‘PhD’ suffixing their names. After all, a PhD in conceptual abstraction is far from a PhD in reality. (On an aside, PhD lunacy is much more dangerous than garden-variety lunacy, for the average person on the streets takes the former, but not the latter, seriously. With two PhDs myself, I may know a thing or two about how lunatics can get PhDs.)

But instead of just criticizing and pointing to problems, I’ve decided to try and do something about it, modest and insignificant as my contributions may be. For almost three years now, I have been designing—entirely from scratch—one complete and working computer per year. I put all the plans, documentation and software up online, fully open source, for anyone to peruse. I hope this makes a contribution to educating people about computers; particularly those computer scientists who have achieved lift-off and now work without friction with reality. Anyone can download those plans—which include gate-level details for how to build the associated custom ICs—and build their computers from scratch. The designs were made to not only work properly, but to also be easy to understand and follow. If I can bring one or two computer scientists back to the solid ground of reality with those designs, I’ll consider my efforts successful.

Hallucinated Implications Creep (HIC): A bane of our time

2022-05-26T04:48:00.024+02:00

Let me invite you to a thought experiment that you can conduct in the privacy of your own mind. Carefully observe your own inner reaction to the following statement of mine, which truthfully reflects my opinion on the matter:

Donald Trump is a pathologically narcissistic, dangerously manipulative, clinically sociopathic and conspicuously unintelligent individual whose sole priority is himself, and who has no scruples about lying through his teeth so to deceive and use millions of people for the sole sake of his own personal agenda.

I've chosen my words so to deliberately evoke a strong emotional response in you. Now that you are aware of my opinion, you can conduct the thought experiment—whose results only you will ever know—by checking which of the statements below you now think apply to me:

Bernardo would have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Bernardo is a liberal/lefty/democrat.
Bernardo likes Joe Biden.
Bernardo doesn't espouse conservative values.
Bernardo is a manipulative elitist.

Make a mental note of how many of the 5 statements above you are inclined to think are applicable to me, because of my opinion about Trump. Now let's try another sincere opinion of mine:

Consuming red meat regularly is something that we, at an individual level, should stop doing for our collective sake.

Don't overanalyse it, just check which of the following statements you feel apply to me, given my sincere opinion above:

Bernardo is ignorant of the nutritional value of red meat.
Bernardo doesn't understand that meat consumption is entirely natural for predatory primates such as ourselves.
Bernardo is too romantic and naive about animal suffering, for nature is ruthless anyway.
Bernardo is trying to take away my personal right to choose my own diet and life style.
Bernardo is not sympathetic to the economic needs of animal farmers.

You, of course, know where I am going with this, given the title of this essay. Therefore, you are more-than-likely analysing all this with much more attention than usual, so to find whatever trap I might be laying for you. That's fine, but keep in mind that, under normal circumstances, you would be judging my opinions much more spontaneously and unthinkingly than in the context of this essay, and that is what I am trying to get at.

In this spirit, here is another sincere opinion of mine:

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is unjustified, criminal and completely unacceptable. It should be opposed economically, politically and militarily by the West.

Now, what do you think applies to me, given my opinion above?

Bernardo doesn't understand that NATO's eastwards expansion was provocative towards Russia.
Bernardo is ignorant of the plight of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas and Crimea.
Bernardo is a hypocrite, for Western powers have carried out criminal military interventions in other countries.
Bernardo is a hypocrite, for the West supports authoritarian regimes in the middle east.
Bernardo wants World War 3 and nuclear apocalypse.

Now go back and look more carefully at each of these three opinions of mine. This time, avoid the emotional knee-jerk reaction and analyse objectively what follows from my opinions and what doesn't; what I did say and what I didn't. If you do it carefully, you will see that none of the five seeming implications listed below each opinion is actually entailed or implied by the respective opinion. If you think any of them is, you are suffering from what I shall call 'Hallucinated Implications Creep,' or HIC, a very common bane of these troubled times.

Let us now review all this together, starting from my third opinion expressed above: it is perfectly coherent to both agree that NATO's expansion was a needlessly provocative step and believe that such a provocation doesn't justify—not even remotely—the barbaric invasion of another country. It is perfectly coherent to both think that the Ukrainian government has neglected the needs and rights of its Russian-speaking citizens—which it probably did—and believe that a barbaric invasion that indiscriminately kills and maims all Ukrainians, Russian-speaking and otherwise, is not the way to address the issue. To acknowledge that the West is guilty of criminal military actions does not mean that it is OK for Russia to do so now, let alone at a much greater scale; two wrongs don't make a right. The regretful Western support for totalitarian regimes elsewhere in the world doesn't mean that the West should overlook Russia's ravaging of another country in Europe; compounding a problem doesn't solve it. And finally, it doesn't follow from any of the above that I want a nuclear apocalypse; I just think that we shouldn't surrender to criminal totalitarian regimes such as Russia's because of a remote risk of wider confrontation. Otherwise, we might as well hand over everything we have to North Korea tomorrow. If the risk of nuclear confrontation justifies cowardly surrender, where does the surrendering then stop?

Notice that the key error here has to do with creating false dichotomies.

Now let's shift our attention to my perceived need for dramatically reducing our consumption of red meat. It doesn't occur to many—perhaps not to you either—that such an opinion may be motivated by, and based on, reasons other than the ones you would ordinarily expect. As a matter of fact, my key motivation for urging a reduction of red meat consumption has to do with the extremely inefficient, wasteful use of resources—think of land, energy, water, etc—required by intensive, industrial-scale red meat production (on a side note, only intensive red meat production can satisfy current demand levels, let alone the expected future demand as countries in Asia become more affluent). With the same resources, much more food—calories, proteins, vitamins—can be produced with much less detrimental environmental impact, feeding a lot more people more affordably. To mention only one example, red meat production is driving the destruction of the amazon, both directly—i.e. land clearances for pasture—and indirectly—i.e. land area used for the production of animal feed. As such, my opinion has little to do with the health value of red meat, the naturalness of predation, your personal dietary rights, etc. You may just have projected all that on me, but if so, that was your own hallucination, not anything I said.

Indeed, the error here has to do with assuming certain motivations or justifications for my opinion. In other words, the error is attributing to me something I did not say.

Now on to Trump. My opinion about his character is an opinion about, well, his character; not a global statement of general political positions or sympathies. As a matter of fact, I am largely a conservative, in the sense that I live my life rooted in certain traditions, have a strong sense of historical continuity and context, a relationship with the very land under my feet, have respect—even a feeling of responsibility—towards my ancestors, and a profound appreciation for a truly religious life. I have a deep anti-elitist mentality—which is rather obvious in both my work and interviews—and generally do not sympathise at all with Hillary Clinton. Were I an American citizen, I would have nullified my vote in 2016, as a protest against what I perceive as a profoundly dysfunctional two-party system.

The error here is trying to bin every political opinion in one of only two baskets. So if I am against Trump, I can only be pro Biden, right? If I detest Trump, I can only be a liberal and not a conservative, right? And so on: everything is either black or white—or rather, blue or red. This is, of course, silly. Indeed, it is entirely arbitrary and extraordinarily implausible to imagine that society is so simple as to allow for a binary classification of every position.

Hallucinated Implications Creep (HIC) is characterised by false dichotomies, unjustified assumptions, projections, implausibly simplistic categorisations, failures to recognise what was said and, perhaps even more importantly, what was not said. It renders us blind to every nuance and subtlety, thereby being literally stupefying.

The projections and hallucinations underpinning HIC spread like a web of false inferences and unjustified conclusions, creeping through the entire social dialogue like a virus. Indeed, it has come to characterise what passes for the present social dialogue. It causes us to talk past one another, fail to see what is being said, fail to understand what is and isn't entailed or implied by what is said, and generally make a mess of everything. It makes us argue against mere hallucinations—ghosts, fantasies—like deranged zealots, seeing enemies everywhere. It renders it impossible to find consensus.

HIC is a cognitive plague that social media has amplified to a level never before seen. And it may be our demise.

PS: You probably noticed that I've switched to British spelling. It's just that I have a newly-developed aversion for the letter 'Z' and what it has come to represent in 2022.

Sabine Hossenfelder digs herself into a deeper hole

2022-02-26T18:01:00.032+01:00

YouTubing physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has now replied to my criticism of her debate performance against me, published yesterday on this blog. Her reply can be found here. As you read it, try to keep in mind the context. Namely, in my criticism I focused on the following statement that Hossenfelder made during the debate:

I argued that this was simply not true: in the papers she referred to as substantiation for her statement, hidden variables are not defined. This is important, for this false statement has set the ethos of the entire debate, and made me look like I was fatally uninformed about her output. I had just "looked at the wrong paper," poor silly me:

Never mind the fact that the very paper she is referring to in the clip above does not define tenable hidden variables; it's just a toy model, as discussed in my previous post.

Her reply now is, one would assume, meant to argue that her statement that she did define the hidden variables somewhere is, in fact, correct. Now go ahead and read her reply with this in mind, before I influence you with my commentary below.

Notice first that the first 14 paragraphs of her reply have absolutely nothing to do with the points in contention. They broaden the scope of the discussion not only beyond physics, but beyond anything of any technical relevance to the discussion. This is particularly peculiar since Hossenfelder had insisted, as a precondition for her participation in the debate, that the scope be limited to her superdeterministic views alone, and not encompass anything beyond, especially philosophy. I had to agree to that. But now she voluntarily broadens the scope way beyond my wildest dreams. One must wonder what motivated her to do so, instead of staying focused on the very specific issues in contention. Be that as it may, right now the roles seem to be inverted, for I am much more interested in staying very sharply focused on the issues in contention.

I leave it to you to interpret the 14 initial paragraphs of her reply and extract conclusions from them. I think what they reveal is clear enough (and interesting, too) to obviate further commentary from me.

Now, notice that in the rest of her reply, instead of trying to argue that, as per the video clip above, she did define the hidden variables, she tries instead to justify why she didn't. As such, her reply is a rather explicit admission that her categorical statement during the debate was indeed false: she did not specify the hidden variables in those earlier papers. I will quote the salient passages of her reply below just for an abundance of clarity; but basically the entire reply, after the weird initial paragraphs, is an admission. I use snapshots below to preclude any chance of misquoting her.

The above is pretty clear: she is justifying why she did not define the hidden variables; after all, it's a "waste of time" to do so and she is very busy. Be that as it may, this unambiguously confirms my criticism: Hossenfelder misrepresented her own work during the debate, in order to save face and try to make me look like someone fatally ignorant of her output. And as an aside, the reason why "there are too many ways [the hidden variables] could be [defined]" is that they are entirely arbitrary figments of the imagination, ungrounded in empirical observation, so anything goes.

Now a very strange passage:

Indeed she said that at a later passage of the debate, but that isn't the point. The point is that she is suggesting here that it was me who incorrectly said that she claimed to have defined the hidden variables; she has always maintained that she never did it! To this, I can only offer the following, once again:

I am not doing this just to gratuitously and repeatedly stick my finger in the wound; I'm not trying to do character assassination. But during the debate Hossenfelder attempted (and probably succeeded, in the eyes of many viewers) to make me look like an ignorant fool by flat-out misrepresenting her own output. I ought to defend myself against that overt suggestion, which I consider to have been rhetorical and dishonest, violating all basic debate ethics. Just consider the vibe in this segment again, and pretend that you don't know what you now know, having read my posts and, above all, her admission:

Now, if at this point you feel like ignoring this whole thing because it's becoming too personal and ugly, and not about content anymore, I urge you to stay the course, because it's integral to understanding what's going on in our culture. The problem is largely about trust and character. The accumulated human knowledge at our disposal today makes it impossible for any one person to know enough about everything of relevance without having to trust some authority figure. Therefore, we must trust someone, and choosing who to trust is critical.

What this ugly engagement shows is that it is entirely possible for someone who sincerely considers themselves honest to arbitrarily dismiss substantive points, deflect and mislead to a level that flirts with lying, just to save face and avoid being pinned down during a debate, thereby protecting their public image at the cost of someone else's. How many of Hossenfelder's YouTube subscribers have the knowledge of particle physics required to objectively and critically evaluate her countless bold claims? How many even want to do so, as opposed to taking her on her word, insofar as it confirms their own views and provides reassurance?

This is the cultural game today. If you want to really understand what's happening, an engagement like this one is quite revealing, even if ugly.

Now a slightly more technical point, for the sake of completeness, if you still have the energy to stay with me on this. The point of her reply where Hossenfelder suggests some possible definition of the hidden variables is this:

Of course, to just say that the hidden variables are "the degrees of freedom of the detector" is just a linguistic definition, and a very loose one at that, not a scientific one. For comparison, imagine a neuroscientist saying: "consciousness is the involuntary wiggling of the left big toe." This, too, is a linguistic definition, but not a scientific one. For scientific definitions entail characterizing the thing defined in a way that is explicit and coherent with the role the thing is supposed to play within a theory. In the case of consciousness, the neuroscientist would have to justify their definition by explicitly and coherently hypothesizing a link between left-big-toe-wiggling and the felt qualities of experience.

For instance, not that long ago the Higgs boson was just an imaginary theoretical entity: it had never been observed (well, actually it had been, but we didn't have enough statistics to claim a discovery). Nonetheless, imaginary as it was at the time, it was still scientifically defined: Peter Higgs had given us a fairly complete, explicit and coherent characterization of the Higgs boson, and its role within the standard model. We knew the energy ranges in which we expected to find it; we knew which particles it likely decayed into and why it did so; importantly, we also knew how it played its role within the standard model: namely, by accounting for inertia (i.e. making sense of why not everything is moving at the speed of light all the time) through its associated Higgs field. Now that was a scientific definition of an imaginary theoretical entity. Hossenfelder provides no such a thing; not even remotely (and no, her 'toy model' obviously doesn't count, because, as the first author of her own paper admits explicitly and as discussed in my previous post, that model is not applicable to... well, reality).

As a matter of fact, Hossenfelder seems to have acknowledged, during the tweet exchange between us upon the publication of her reply, that she adopts a merely linguistic understanding of what a 'definition' entails:

Of course, what Kermit the frog can do is an arbitrary, merely linguistic definition of the hidden variables, such as 'hidden variables are the blueness of the sky,' or something to that effect. But that is not what I could have possibly meant when I confronted her with her lack of theoretical definition; and Hossenfelder, of course, knows it. But just as she did in the debate, she is willing to use dismissiveness, deflection, dissimulated confusion and misleading statements, all for purely rhetorical purposes.

Anticipating a question that is probably coming, I will never say 'no' to a debate against a person whose positions I have taken the initiative to criticize harshly in public. So if Hossenfelder wants to debate again, I am game. That said, I don't think another debate would be any more productive than the first, or take this discussion any further; for I am now convinced, to my own satisfaction, that Hossenfelder does not engage according to what I consider to be the minimum level of intellectual honesty required to render the debate fruitful.

Sabine Hossenfelder's bluf called

2022-02-25T20:42:00.026+01:00

My debate with YouTuber physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is now available in video format:

This was originally motivated by an essay I wrote a couple of weeks ago criticizing Hossenfelder's 'hidden variables' theory as fantasy. Since then, I offered further criticism in parts of a more recent essay.

As such, the point of the present post is not to rehash arguments already presented, but to tackle one specific part of the debate: at one point, I claim that Hossenfelder has never precisely specified what the 'hidden variables' are supposed to be. I was referring to a 2019 draft paper in which Hossenfelder makes an experiment proposal to substantiate hidden variables, even without specifying what they're supposed to be. The reason the proposed experiment is so vague and cumbersome is precisely because it tries to control for the initial state of undefined hidden variables.

But during the debate, as you can see in the video above, Hossenfelder claimed unambiguously that she had in fact defined what the hidden variables are supposed to be (see the video from this point, where she says, "you are asking, did I define the variables? I've defined them"); and that she had done that all the way back in 2011. This would be a case in which her earlier literature would have been more complete than her output of ten years later, which was confusing to me. Why propose an experiment, in 2019, that is so cumbersome precisely because Hossenfelder didn't know what she was supposed to control for, if she actually had this knowledge ten years earlier?

After the debate, I received a number of links from her by email. Two were meant to address the point mentioned above—namely, the specification of what the hidden variables are supposed to be: this and this paper. The former is a small subset of the latter, so I'll limit my commentary to this latter one.

The paper is an experiment proposal largely identical to the 2019 one, just with some more introductory discussion. But it, too, explicitly acknowledges lack of knowledge of what the hidden variables are supposed to be. Indeed, the thrust of the paper is precisely to propose an experiment that is somehow meaningful while not specifying the hidden variables. Consider this passage, for instance, in which the experimental conditions are discussed step by step:

1. Instead of measuring a sequence of individually prepared states, chose a setting in which the state (at least with some probability) is returned into the initial state and repeated measurements on the same state can be performed.
2. The experimental setup itself and the detector should be as small as possible to minimize the number of hidden variables (i.e. N should be small).
3. The repetition of measurements should be as fast as possible so any changes to the hidden variables of the detector in between measurements are minimized (i.e. κ < τ).

These proposals are meant precisely to circumvent lack of understanding of what the hidden variables are supposed to be. It is for this reason that one needs to avoid "a sequence of individually prepared states" (so not to reset the hidden variables, whatever they may be), make the detector "as small as possible to minimize the number of hidden variables" (whatever they may be), and repeat the measurements "as fast as possible so any changes to the hidden variables [whatever they may be] in between measurements are minimized." Throughout the text, the paper implicitly acknowledges that the authors do not know what the hidden variables are supposed to be; they just make assumptions about some boundary constraints. For instance, in this passage:

Most crucially, we have made the minimalist assumption that the hidden variables stem from the correlation with the detector and possibly other parts of the experimental setup. (emphasis added)

If they knew what the hidden variables were supposed to be, there would have been no need for such an assumption; they would know, not assume.

I am not sure, therefore, why Hossenfelder felt that this, in any way, addresses my point of criticism; if anything, it seems to reconfirm it. Perhaps she felt that the extended introductory discussion provides some more definition. She talks, for instance, of "Corr(ν, κ)," the correlation that one expects to observe if hidden variables are true. But this just formalizes, mathematically, what the 2019 paper proposed; it doesn't provide any additional clarity about what the hidden variables are supposed to be. It is also true that this earlier paper provides some more discussion about some boundary conditions of the experiment, but that doesn't entail or imply any precise definition of the supposed hidden variables.

In the spirit of being as charitable as possible towards her position, I perused the other links she sent. The paper that seems to come the closest to defining what the hidden variables are supposed to be is this one, seemingly yet to be peer-reviewed and published, from 2020.

While this later paper makes an attempt to be more specific about the nature of the hidden variables, it is based on a toy model. As a matter of fact, the title of the paper is 'A Toy Model for Local and Deterministic Wave-function Collapse.' The model is not meant to be realistic at all; it's just an exercise in imagination to make some abstract mathematical points; it's not applicable to reality, but just to a much simplified, imaginary universe based on arbitrary assumptions known to be untrue in the real universe. It's a valid exercise, but it doesn't do anything about providing clarity regarding what real hidden variables are supposed to be. And this is not just my interpretation, it is acknowledged in the paper itself:

One should not think of this model as a viable description of nature because the way that the random variables enter the dynamics has no good motivation. ... This toy model avoids non-local interactions by hard-coding the dependence on the detector settings into the evolution law. This is another reason why one should not take this model too seriously: A good, fundamental, model should allow us to derive that the effective law for the prepared state depends on the detector settings. (original emphasis)

In conclusion, the papers referenced as answers to my criticism during the debate not only fail to refute my criticism, they appear to validate it. Hossenfelder's citation of these papers during the debate was a misleading—even flat-out false—rhetorical tool of deflection: it sought to convey the impression that I was fatally ignorant of her work (an impression casual viewers are bound to walk away with) while my points were spot-on. This kind of misleading, hollow, but self-confident, assertive rhetoric seems, unfortunately, to be characteristic of Hossenfelder's videos and—as I now know from experience—her defence of criticisms. Her rhetorical assertiveness is, at least sometimes, a facade that hides a surprising lack of actual substance. She doesn't debate, she deflects. These are very different things.

(Since publication, Hossenfelder has replied to this post and I offered a rejoinder here)

Thou Shall Deceive Thyself: On cognitive hallucinations and mind's prime directive

2022-02-07T19:18:00.071+01:00

I am often asked if psychedelic or meditative insights have inspired my philosophical views, or at least confirmed them in some way. They did, but not in the way—or for the reasons—that most people would imagine. Indeed, I have a very ambiguous, dubious relationship with first-person revelations. I think they are very useful in a certain way, but should seldom be taken on face-value. This is what I want to talk about today.

I have often come across people who developed intricate metaphysical views after returning from rich trance states, be them induced by psychedelics, intense prayer or other meditative techniques. They regard their experiences in those states as revelations of 'The Truth' that underlies the illusion they then consider our ordinary lives to be. Complex mythologies emerge, involving demiurges, aliens from the Pleiades, transcendent entities with intense interest in humanity and intricate plans for our future, invisible backstage activity that allegedly maintains the veneer of the physical world, and so on.

I sympathize with these, for I know, from personal experience, how compelling—vivid, internally consistent, structured, familiar as childhood memories—those insights can be. They come accompanied by a sense of hyper-reality that is difficult to describe or shake off. It is as if they constituted a deeper, more original, primordial and authentic layer of experience than our ordinary lives. Therefore, I am not surprised at all that many buy into those insights wholesale. They do feel like something you once knew, then forgot, and now remember again. You say to yourself, "Of course! How could I have forgotten this? This is what is actually going on, I know it." These are powerful experiences that do convey important and true insights; just—perhaps—not the insights one initially thinks they do. Indeed, the disposition and power of mind to deceive itself is unfathomable, something a recent series of dreams has reminded me of.

As many of you know, I was born in Rio de Janeiro and spent my childhood there, before returning to the ancestral lands of Europe, the "mother of all demons," as Jung once put it. I've had what can only be described as an idyllic childhood, in contact with the extraordinarily rich nature that surrounds the city. Yet, I haven't been back there for about 25 years now—and even then, last time I visited I spent only a few days there.

The death of my father, when I was still quite young, sliced my life into two seemingly irreconcilable parts, completely alien to one another. My child self not only lived in a different place, but also thought different thoughts in different languages. As such, from the point of view of my adult self, my childhood has acquired the quality of a fairytale, a numinous myth that unfolded in an exotic land of dreams. It feels so unreal that sometimes I catch myself wondering if it actually happened; if it wasn't all just a familiar dream I grew so used to that I now take for granted.

Strangely, given enough time, reality can feel just as much like a dream as a dream can feel like reality. But I digress.

Recently, something—I no longer remember what—prompted me to reminisce about my strange, alien, yet wonderful childhood and the places where it unfolded. I suddenly realized how disconnected I have become from it, how long it has been since I re-visited those places, how estranged from an early part of myself I have become. And so I started wondering whether I shouldn't just hop into a plane—something I've done so regularly throughout my professional life—and go back there for a week. This may sound easy and trivial, but for me it isn't: I am an alien in my birth country; literally indeed but, most importantly, figuratively. I never really fit in, which was OK when I was a child but, as an adult, it can be confrontational, especially because Brazilians expect me to be and act Brazilian. And so I was struggling with the emotionally-charged question of whether to visit the city once again or not.

It was then that my 'obfuscated mind'—my preferred term for what Jung and Freud called 'the unconscious,' the matrix of dreams—responded to my emotional ambiguity and stress with a remarkable series of dreams.

In the first dream, I was back in Rio de Janeiro, as the adult I am today, walking around the city and wondering whether I might be just dreaming. "No," I said to myself; "this is real, I am really here at last; it's happened!" Soon enough, however, I woke up and realized it was indeed just a dream.

A couple of days later, another dream: again I was in Rio, ridding a bus this time, looking out the window and watching the people and buildings go by. While in the second dream, I remembered the first dream, as well as the fact that the first dream had been... well, just a dream. And so I wondered: "Some time ago I had this very realistic dream that I was back in Rio, and so maybe this, right now, is also just a dream; maybe I am not back at all." But after looking around more carefully, feeling the seat and the inner walls of the bus with my hands, I convinced myself that now, this second time, it wasn't a dream; that I was really there, in Rio, after all these years; that it had finally happened! And then, I woke up.

Another few days go by and I have a third dream, during which I remembered the first and second dreams, as well as the fact that the first and second dreams had been just... well, dreams. And so I wondered, "Could it be just another dream now as well? No, this time it is real. The very fact that I remember the previous dreams as dreams proves that I am lucidly awake right now..." And so on. You get the picture. This happened no less than five times during a period of perhaps two weeks. Each time I remembered all the previous ones, and knew that they had been just dreams. Yet, each time I convinced myself anew, without a shadow of a doubt, that that time it wasn't a dream; that that time it was for real.

There are two things my obfuscated mind was trying to tell me in its own more-than-allegorical language—the only language it can speak—with these dreams. The first is this: I am always in my Rio, for my Rio exists in me. I never left, for I carry it with me wherever I go. I really am in my Rio already right now, so why struggle with the question of whether I should fly there or not? The question misses the point entirely and arises from a misunderstanding of what is actually going on. My Rio is not a point in space; not even a point in spacetime; it's a state of mind. The series of dreams was the insistence of my obfuscated mind that I really am in Rio. Each time I dismissed this conclusion the obfuscated mind conjured up another dream, very explicitly addressing my specific doubt and taking the whole thing one meta-level up. It's amazing: the dreams were brilliantly designed to deal precisely with my ego's tendency to dismiss dreams! After so much insistence, how could I ignore the message? Only when I understood it, did the dream series stop.

The second message is a mirror image of the first: in insisting that the dreams were true, the obfuscated mind was indirectly insisting that the truth is dream-like; that our sense of reality, right now, is as much internally conjured up by mind as my sense of reality was during the dreams. In other words, our sense of reality isn't derived from objective observations, but arises endogenously instead; it's a phenomenon of mind, in mind.

And this, I think, is the take-home message from hyper-real trance states: that we so strongly believe them to be literally real during the trance—whereas we know, afterwards, that they couldn't have been so—tells us something crucial about our impression, right now, that our ordinary lives are literally what they seem to be. If mind can conjure up that kind of robust certainty during a purely mental event—even when explicitly and repeatedly confronted with sceptical questions about the reality of the event—how can we be sure that it isn't doing precisely the same right now? If it is, then this ordinary reality, too, is mind-made; this, too, is real in the same sense that my glorious return to Rio was real five times: it is mentally real, and that's all there is to it and anything else.

As such, the message from trance states is not that the demiurges and aliens from the Pleiades are realities outside mind; to conclude that is to invert the meaning of the metaphor, to get things backwards. The message is, instead, that this waking reality, too, is not outside mind; for in both cases our sense of reality is endogenous—a cognitive hallucination, or a hallucination of beliefs and reasoning, as opposed to perceptions—not an external, objective fact.

Nonetheless, our sense of hyper-reality during trance states is justifiable: yes, the aliens and demiurges are indeed true. And our subsequent skepticism is also justifiable: yes, the demiurges and aliens are indeed just mental creations of mind. Do you see the point? Common and tempting as it may be, the dichotomy between the qualifiers 'mental' and 'real' is a false and unhelpful one, a culture-bound logical fallacy. It is precisely in their hallucinatory nature that the aliens and demiurges are as true as our ordinary lives (notice that I'm leaving aside the question of how consensual these hallucinations may be, which is an important question I've addressed in my books, but which is outside the scope of this essay). Both embody the metaphorical language of the deeper, transpersonal layers of the obfuscated mind, forever busy talking to itself through self-deception. Just as my series of dreams, it will only stop when it gets itself.

Self-deception is mind's way to talk to, and make sense of, itself; for it can only express itself to itself through the production of inner imagery.

Stronger yet, mind's prime directive is to deceive itself, for only through self-deception can reality—any reality—be conjured up into existence and thereby evoke enough affection. Parmenides already hinted at this at the very birth of the Western mind. Peeling the layers of self-deception is like peeling an onion: at the end, nothing is left other than the mere potential for experience. The demiurges and aliens are all, indeed, just mind-made hallucinations; but so is this, right now. If you can wrap your mind around that, you will see the world with very different eyes.

Reality is nothing and everything at once

2022-01-14T19:01:00.010+01:00

Every year, for the past four years or so, I give a four-week-long course on idealism in collaboration with the UK's Psychedelic Society. Today, a short clip extracted from the latest edition of that long course was published. Have a look at it below.

In the clip, I argue that past and future exist solely in the present, and that the present moment is infinitely small, a singularity. Therefore, there is a fundamental sense in which everything exists in nothing, for the present moment, being infinitely small, is a kind of nothing.

This may seem to contradict my key criticism of Carlo Rovelli's contention that the universe is relational "all the way down": I maintain that such a contention is an obvious instance of the fallacy called 'infinite regress'; you can't have relationships all the way down, without something that relates, for the same reason that you can't have movement all the way down, without something that moves. For details on my criticism, see this essay. For Rovelli's acknowledgment that he is indeed arguing for "turtles all the way down," see this clip.

To justify his stance, Rovelli appeals to Buddhist mystic Nagarjuna's notion that reality is ultimately nothing. By acknowledging, in the clip above, that reality is made of nothing I may seem to be agreeing with this and, therefore, to be contradicting my own criticism of Rovelli. The need to clarify this apparent contradiction is what motivated me to write this brief essay.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the clip above is a very brief extract from a four-week-long course, which provided a lot of context and language to couch my acknowledgment of the nothingness of reality adequately.

The second thing to notice is that the 'nothing' I am talking about is a mental nothing, not an absolute nothing; it is a mental substrate without substance in the exteriorized sense we use the word 'substance,' not an absence of substrate. As such, I am talking about no-thing, rather than nothing, if we understand for 'things' entities that seem to exist outside mind. My no-thing has an ontological essence (namely, mentality) that exists; it's not an ontic vacuum. This is clear throughout the clip even without its full context, as I constantly speak of a (universal) mind trying to make sense of the fact that it creates everything out of no-thing. My position is thus different from Rovelli's absolute nothing, in which the whole universe is like movement but there is nothing that moves. In my case, there is mind 'moving.'

The third thing to notice is that, more rigorously speaking, my point is that reality has no extension, not that it is an ontic vacuum. Indeed, what I am saying is that everything unfolds in an infinitely small period of time. At the limit, this period has no extension. So my no-thing means that there ultimately are no extended entities; that is, entities with size or duration. And since extension is what characterizes 'things,' then in my view reality ultimately has no-thing. Now, can there be structure, complexity, real existing 'somethings' in the absence of extension? As I argued just a few days ago in another essay, the answer is yes.

Finally, the fourth point: as I allude to in both the clip above and my original criticism of Rovelli, we are allowed to play two different games, as long as we remain consistent with the game we choose to play at any one time. The first game is that of the Enlightenment values: Aristotelian logic, conceptual explicitness and unambiguity, empirical adequacy, and so on. The second game is one where we acknowledge that Aristotelian logic is arbitrarily limited (e.g. the law of excluded middle, questioned by Intuitionist logic), our conceptual dictionary is too limited to capture every salient aspect of reality, and a great many important things cannot be tested under controlled laboratory conditions. Instead, we play a more intuitive game, based on first-person insight, where we try to suggest and hint at things. Again, both games are valid, as long as we remain consistent with the rules of the game we choose to play at any one point. In other words, what is not allowed is to begin an argument by implicitly adopting the rules of the first game and, at the crucial point of the argument, switch to the rules of the second game. This is internally contradictory and invalidates one's point from the perspectives of both games.

In the clip above, I explicitly say that most of my work assumes the game of the Enlightenment values, and that the specific argument I am making in the clip belongs in another game: the one I played in my book More Than Allegory. I am thus willing to play according to the rules of both games at different times, but not change the rules midway through the game. The latter is what I believe Rovelli does: the whole of Relational Quantum Mechanics is developed under the Enlightenment values and then, at the crucial point in the argument, Rovelli switches to vague subjective intuition, handwaving, and appeals to Buddhism. I don't think this is valid because it is internally contradictory.

Whenever I am playing the Enlightenment game, I will maintain that reality isn't an ontic vacuum, but a mind. Whenever I play a more intuitive game that acknowledges the obvious limitations of our conceptual reasoning, I will say that reality has no extended entities and, as such, is a no-thing. I play consistently within the rules of both games, and don't cut across them.

I hope this helps clarify the potential appearance of contradiction the video clip above may trigger.

New Analytic Idealism literature

2021-08-08T16:26:00.009+02:00

This summer lots of exciting new literature on Analytic Idealism is coming out, some of which you may already have noticed. If not, this brief post provides an overview.

My new book, Science Ideated, is coming out. Like my earlier Brief Peeks Beyond, it is a collection of re-edited, previously published essays. Many of the original essays are now behind pay- or registration-walls, so the book provides a one-stop-shop for them all. The originals were also edited to conform to the specific editorial requirements of the respective publishers, and therefore did not fully embody my style or the entirety of the message I wanted to put forward. The versions published in the new book, on the other hand, are more complete, up-to-date and authentic as far as my tone is concerned. The book also has two never-before-seen essays, which I personally think are particularly important. The overall theme is the emergence of a new theory of reality for basing a scientific way of looking upon nature. The times are most definitely changing and this book aims to capture these changes in a clear, explicit but concise manner.

New audio editions of three of my previous books have now also just been published by Tantor Media. You can click on the figures below for more information. More Than Allegory, in particular, is delightful in audio, as the book was written in a kind of story-telling format from its inception. Part III is literally a story, almost a novel, although loosely based on real events. I am very happy that it has now got an audio edition.

My best-seller, Why Materialism Is Baloney, has now been published in Spanish, in hardcover format, by ATALANTA. The book has a delightfully high production quality, and I have high hopes for the effect it will have in the Spanish-speaking world. Although books in Spain are mostly sold through brick-and-mortar book shops (a very old tradition in the Iberian peninsula, which I personally love), there is an amazon page for it as well. Click on the picture to go there and see more details.

I hope this material is of some value to you!

Is ad hominem always a fallacy?

2021-06-20T23:05:00.036+02:00

In a series of recent social media posts, I've criticized Sam Harris for his horrendous strawmannning of idealism in a recent podcast interview:

What a spectacularly sophomoric misrepresentation of idealism @SamHarrisOrg displays here. He conflates personal consciousness with consciousness as ontic category, idealism with solipsism, and it's a train wreck from there. (1/2)https://t.co/QTOmYAIwmM
— Bernardo Kastrup (@BernardoKastrup) June 19, 2021

As part of that series, someone tagged me on, and I re-tweeted, a link to an essay of anonymous authorship castigating Sam Harris. Although there is no denying that the essay was filled with ad hominem attacks, there was also substance in it that I considered relevant enough to share, particularly regarding alleged methodological errors in Harris's PhD thesis and criticisms of Harris's positions by renowned intellectuals:

My retweeting this is NOT an endorsement. I simply think it may deserve a critical reading, for the author seems to be fluent on the technical issues. The points made are very detailed. Suspiciously, though, it is anonymous and lacks references altogether.https://t.co/da3OiScVi7
— Bernardo Kastrup (@BernardoKastrup) June 20, 2021

A number of comments followed, some expressing interest in the re-tweeted essay and others criticizing me for amplifying what they considered to be an unfair hit-piece. That made me re-think our modern attitudes about ad hominem: is it always a fallacy to bring up questions about someone's motivations, integrity, qualifications or past actions? The very words "ad hominem" seem to have become synonymous with error and unfairness, regardless of circumstances, which strikes me as a somewhat unexamined attitude.

There obviously are circumstances in which ad hominem is just fallacious. Specifically, if the points in contention have been clearly identified and are not related to the character or background of any of the participants in the discussion, then to attack a participant during one's argument, as if it helped make one's point, is obviously illogical: the argument must be relevant to the points in contention. For instance, if the discussion is about whether idealism is a tenable metaphysical position or not, to argue that a participant in the discussion is dishonest, as part of one's argument for or against idealism, is obviously fallacious: idealism either is or isn't tenable, regardless of the honesty (or lack thereof) of the participants.

Sometimes, however, the legitimacy of one's participation in a discussion, or the relevance of one's background to the discussion, or even the reliability of one's assertions of fact during the discussion, are the points in contention. This happens often in both business hiring decisions and political elections, for instance. In those situations, ad hominem is obviously not a fallacy, for it is precisely the point in question.

Often, of course, circumstances will be such that we will have shades of gray to deal with, not clear black or white: although the points in contention may not be directly related to character or background, the ebb and flow of the discussion can go in a direction that lends some legitimacy to questions of character and background. This may happen, for instance, when a participant appeals to his or her own authority as a key logical bridge in the weaving of an argument. Is an attack on the person's character or background—that is, an ad hominem—then a fallacy? It's impossible to answer this reliably a priori, as only the specific circumstances of the case can allow for a fair assessment.

In the specific case of my re-tweet, I believe that not only were there substantial, non-ad hominem points made in the anonymous essay (whether they are true or not is another question entirely), but even some of the ad hominem attacks were legitimate in the context of my original tweet: I argued precisely that Harris displayed a surprising lack not only of basic understanding, but also foundational knowledge, of the metaphysics he was criticizing. Insofar as the re-tweeted, anonymous essay laid out an admittedly ad hominem case for Harris's lack of solid background in both neuroscience and philosophy, I think sharing a link to those particular ad hominems was not fallaciously out of context. As a matter of fact, I confess to having had a feeling of 'this-explains-it' when I read those parts of the essay (which, of course, doesn't mean that those parts are actually true!), for they provided some sort of account, tentative and unreliable as the case may be, for what I had hitherto considered an incomprehensible lack of knowledge on Harris's part.

Indeed, idealism is one of the foundational topics in both Eastern and Western philosophy. A basic understanding of idealist claims—the claims of Berkeley, Swedenborg, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and arguably even Plato, Parmenides and Empedocles—is part of the 'ABC' of philosophy. That someone who "received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA" (quote from Harris's website) can fail so resoundingly at such a foundational level is, well, quite amazing. Harris conflates very basic concepts. For instance, he conflates personal consciousness with consciousness as ontic category, something no self-respecting philosophy freshman would do (it's like conflating a wooden table with wood). Parts of his 'argument against idealism' also imply a direct conflation of idealism with solipsism, two entirely different metaphysics that, again, no self-respecting freshman in philosophy would conflate. How is that possible?

My openness to the potential legitimacy of certain ad hominems applies, of course, to me as well. If one of my dialectical adversaries were to think that I make misleading, sophist and ultimately incorrect points consistently, it would be valid for them to question and investigate my motivations, my background, my credentials, my education, my past. And if they were to find funny things during that investigation, an ad hominem attack would be appropriate, I think (notice that this is in no way a nod to libel or defamation, both of which are based on false accusations, and both of which I would respond strongly to, with all recourses at my disposal). I am not saying this just because I happen to know that no such funny things would be found—I'm not hiding behind my private knowledge of the relevant facts—but because I sincerely believe in what I am saying.

As a matter of fact, ad hominem attacks directed at my background and education have been made in the past, and I have taken them seriously. Years ago, a couple of scholars attacked my then-lack of a formal degree in philosophy. They argued that my PhD in computer science was rather irrelevant to the points I was making, as well as to the authority I was implicitly claiming while making those points. And although I knew that their attack was moot (I've been studying philosophy very seriously since early adolescence), I still took the time and trouble to publish—over three years—a number of papers in peer-reviewed philosophy journals and ultimately get myself a second PhD to address the original charge. No one in their sane mind would go to such lengths if they didn't take the original ad hominem to be legitimate, would they?

More generally speaking, I think we have to guard against irrational and runaway political correctness, which is a growing issue in our culture. Not all ad hominems are fallacies, even if you have grown to associate the very words "ad hominem" with unfairness and low blows. Sometimes it just isn't so. And the discernment to know when it isn't and when it is, is something I believe we must cultivate more carefully. For if our culture is being led by false prophets, emperors with no clothes, it is not only legitimate, but also a moral imperative, to point at them and scream in public: "before y'all listen to him, look and realize that the man has no clothes!"

Here I part ways with Rovelli

2021-06-06T16:12:00.064+02:00

My endorsement, promotion and defense of physicist Carlo Rovelli's Relational Interpretation of quantum mechanics has been very overt and public for years, on Scientific American and other publications. I have also never hid my personal liking and admiration for Rovelli as a scholar and a person: I find him exceptionally thoughtful and open, a bit of a renaissance man, something we so thoroughly miss in a world that often takes its cues from immature nerds passing for intellectual wizards—incomplete human beings who have very narrow relationships with life and themselves, but who happen to excel in fashionable niches or be good at rhetoric.

None of that has changed. I still hold Rovelli in the highest regard and have profound respect for him and his output. But a consequence of this very respect is that I cannot overlook recent output of his with which I also profoundly disagree. The latter is what this post is about. I have made criticisms of Rovelli's latest commitment to certain philosophical ideas in recent interviews and discussions, so I think it is appropriate that I summarize those criticisms in one go-to place. Unlike those about the work of other people I have criticized in this blog, the assessment below—I insist—comes from a place of respect and admiration, not of scorn or patronization.

Rovelli and I are in full agreement when it comes to our view of the nature of physical reality: there is no absolute world of tables and chairs with defined mass, position, momentum, etc., out there, but instead an entirely relational world. The observable properties of all physical systems are entirely relative to the particular vantage point of the observation. Measurement doesn't merely reveal what the properties of a physical system already were immediately prior to the measurement, but brings those properties into existence. In summary, the physical world has no standalone reality. Both Rovelli and I concur that this is the inevitable conclusion from quantum theory and the overwhelming experimental confirmation of its predictions over the past 42 years or so. (Unless, of course, one believes in a de facto infinitude of real physical universes popping up into existence every de facto infinitesimal fraction of a moment, for which we have precisely zero empirical evidence; I believe both Rovelli and I dismiss this alternative as little more than silly fantasy.)

In his original Relational Quantum Mechanics paper of 1996, Rovelli defends the conclusions of quantum mechanics discussed above, but explicitly and deliberately refrains from exploring their philosophical implications. I, on the other hand, am on record—both the popular and academic records—deriving precisely those implications. In my view, if the physical world has no standalone reality and is entirely relational, then there necessarily is a deeper, by definition non-physical but absolute (in the sense of not being relative) layer of reality that grounds the physical world, and of which the physical world is but a measurement image akin to a set of dials. I've known for a while now that Rovelli isn't comfortable with this conclusion of mine, but neither did I expect or require him—as someone approaching the problem from an eminently scientific perspective—to agree with my philosophical exploration of the topic.

Recently, however, Rovelli seems to have gone all the way into philosophical territory. Am I bothered that a scientist is making an incursion into philosophy? Absolutely not! Some scientists do philosophy while believing that they are doing science; that kind of cluelessness is dangerous and reprehensible, but that's not Rovelli's case at all. Perhaps atypically amongst scientists, Rovelli has clarity regarding the difference between science and philosophy and displays great care and thoughtfulness in treading on the latter. So I think it is fantastic that he is daring to do so and wholeheartedly welcome his foray. At the same time, entering philosophy territory does—of course—expose him to hopefully healthy and constructive criticism. This is my intent with the present post.

What Rovelli seems to be now saying is that, although the physical world is constituted of no more than relationships, there is no underlying, non-physical world to ground those relationships. This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it immediately runs into infinite regress: if the things that are in relationship are themselves meta-relationships, then those meta-relationships must be constituted by meta-things engaging in relationship. But wait, those meta-things are themselves meta-meta-relationships... You see the point. It's turtles... err, relationships all the way down.

This is surely bad enough, but it isn't the worst part. The worst is this: to speak of pure relationships without non-relational entities to constitute and ground those relationships is literally meaningless, in a semantic sense; there is just no discernible meaning pointed to by the words in this claim, even though the claim itself can be articulated in language. The issue here is analogous to the Cheshire Cat's grin, which stays behind after the Cheshire Cat disappears: there is no meaning in this statement, even though Lewis Carroll was able to articulate it in language, to great effect.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example: movement is a prime instance of a relational phenomenon, one which Rovelli himself uses in his original 1996 paper. Movement, indeed, is always relative: if you are sitting inside a high-speed train, relative to you the train is not moving; but relative to someone standing on a platform, the train is moving at high speed. Movement is relational. With this example in mind, Rovelli essentially maintains that the entire physical world is like movement; it's not made of things with standalone reality, but of relationships. Up until this point I agree wholeheartedly with him, for the theoretical and experimental results simply prove this to be the case. However, Rovelli now proceeds to deny that there is anything that moves. So we end up with a world in which everything is movement but there is nothing that moves. Is this coherent? Does this even have any meaning, in a semantic sense, beyond the words themselves?

How does Rovelli justify this rather surprising proposition? He cites 3rd-century Indian mystic Nāgārjuna, interpreting the latter's writings to mean that there is no ultimate essence to reality except emptiness. So the world is made of movement, although there is nothing that moves, because ultimately the world is empty; it's made of nothing. This surely would sound great in a late-romantic poetry book, but is it reasonable when taken literally? Does it make any explicit sense? After all, when I look around I do see a lot going on. That I deny naive realism doesn't entail or imply that I deny the obvious existence of something.

Although I think and work mostly under the value system of the Western Enlightenment—which takes objective, explicit, unambiguous, logically consistent, conceptually clear, empirically substantiated reasoning to be the reliable path to truth—I am known to admire Indian and Eastern philosophy in general as well. They embody a different avenue to knowledge: that of meditative introspection and self-inquiry, a subjective—as opposed to objective—path of exploration. Kierkegaard referred to the exponents of these two paths as 'geniuses' and 'apostles,' respectively, highlighting their differences.

Personally, I think both paths have their merits and are complementary. I myself have adopted both paths in different works. Although the majority of my output is based on objective reasoning and evidence, I've treaded the subjective path in e.g. my book, More Than Allegory. However, I don't think it is valid to mix and match these paths in the course of defending any particular point of view, because doing so is blatantly inconsistent; it's a way to indulge in confirmation bias. Allow me to elaborate.

Rovelli takes a purely objective path to the conclusion that the physical world is entirely relational. He uses explicit, conceptually clear logical reasoning and empirical evidence to do so. He goes where this reasoning and evidence take him, all the way until a point where the inevitable implication is something he doesn't seem to like: that there must be a deeper, non-physical and non-relational layer to reality, which grounds the relationships that constitute the physical world, giving semantic meaning to the very word 'relationship.' From that point on, Rovelli arbitrarily abandons all post-Enlightenment epistemic values and switches to a vague, ambiguous, hand-waving, second-hand appeal to the mystical insights of someone who is no longer around to clarify what he meant. Never mind that the result is a peculiar Frankenstein monster, neither objective nor subjective; that Rovelli managed to avoid a conclusion he doesn't like—he describes how relieved he was upon reading Nāgārjuna, because the latter freed him from the pressure of having to find out what the underlying essence of reality is—seems satisfactory to him.

It's far from satisfactory to me. The paths of the 'genius' and the 'apostle' are complementary in the sense that, when both are applied in an internally consistent manner and lead to the same conclusion, we get a particularly satisfying kind of reassurance that we are on to something. But switching between these two modes in the course of making a point is entirely akin to changing the rules of the game while it's being played: it's cheating. When Rovelli does this, he puts his subjective preferences ahead of an objective inquiry into nature, and abandons the post-Enlightenment epistemic values that he has been known to champion. We get Rovelli the mystic, the apostle, dressed in a lab coat. This is not okay, not only because it isn't honest—and by this I don't mean that Rovelli is being malicious or deliberately deceptive, just that he seems to be deceiving himself and inadvertently misleading his audience, which has come to expect level-headed objectivity from him—but also because it leads to a literally meaningless conclusion: that the world is made entirely of movement, although there supposedly is nothing that moves.

Not only is it internally inconsistent to mix and match objective and introspective modes, introspective insights are also well-known to be largely ineffable. Therefore, when put to words, they almost invariably fail to capture the salient nuances of the intended point. That's why whole schools of thought in the East (and some in the West) have entirely given up on trying to explain what reality is. Instead, their writings are what Peter Kingsley refers to as forms of 'Μῆτις' (Mêtis) or 'incantation': they are meant not to describe reality, but to trick you into seeing it for yourself; to make you 'trip over' your own conceptual narratives and finally see through them. In weaving these incantations, sages will freely and liberally use contradiction, cognitive dissonance, metaphor, sleight of hand, shocking absurdities pronounced with a solemn face, deliberate inconsistencies, lies and, sure enough, even true statements mixed in; only the desired effect counts (Nisargadatta Maharaj, the Eastern sage I admire the most, contradicts himself several times in each page of I Am That). And I believe this is all epistemically valid because it is entirely consistent with the stated goals. The problem only arises when one fishes out a particular statement from the mystical writings of someone else, interprets it literally—as if it had been written by an 18th-century European philosopher in the finest Apollonian tradition, as opposed to a 3rd-century Indian sage—and then uses it as an arbitrary bridge to change the course of what is otherwise meant as an objective argument. This just doesn't work and should be viewed with at least great suspicion.

Rovelli has been one of the greatest exponents of the post-Enlightenment epistemic values in the 21st century. I regret that he now seems to be so breezily departing from those very values, so as to acquiesce to his own subjective preferences about what nature should or should not be. Subjective, introspective paths of inquiry may even be the royal road to truth, but their value rests precisely in direct, personal insight. I would find it laudable if Rovelli decided to engage in self-inquiry and the whole arsenal of meditative techniques, in order to directly experience the nature of reality for himself; he might then find out that that 'emptiness' is mind at rest, a subject without objects, pregnant with the potential for every conceivable internal relationship. But fishing out statements from someone else's introspective insights is consistent neither with objective reasoning nor with the schools of direct knowing, for the words of the latter were never intended to be used in this manner (again, they were meant as 'incantations,' not descriptions). Instead, it's a disservice to both and dilutes the credibility of the otherwise priceless legacy Carlo Rovelli has been methodically building for decades.

The Church's incomprehensible suicide

2021-03-15T23:33:00.036+01:00

I woke up today to the news that the Vatican has declared homosexuality a 'sin' and a 'choice' (Some have claimed that what the Vatican considers a 'choice' is merely a homosexual union, not sexual orientation per se. But let us be frank: if one's sexual orientation isn't a choice, neither is one's aspiration to a homosexual union. I therefore stand by my interpretation: by framing homosexual unions as a choice, the Vatican is effectively framing homosexuality itself as a choice. For sexuality without union is either an empty notion or a call to promiscuity. And I doubt the Vatican is guilty of the latter.). The irony is pungent, as the only choice here is the Church's: that of insisting on playing legislator, prosecutor and jury, instead of nurturing re-ligion—from the Latin re-ligare, to re-connect with transcendence. As a result, while the Church busies itself with using its now-scarce airtime to encourage violations of human rights, we are left without religion. How did it come to this?

I have had the rare privilege of—very, very briefly—meeting His Holiness Pope Francis almost three years ago; an opportunity I treasure sincerely and with all my heart. He strikes me as a man who understands the Church's dilemma, who wants it to focus on liturgy—the preeminent expression of true religion—and has enough human empathy to cognize the suffering the Church has historically inflicted on the LGBT community. But clearly, either I am wrong about him, or he is unable to lead the Institution of which he is the head. Either way, the result is the same: the pursuit of a suicidal path for the Catholic Church and the imposition of even more suffering on a community that has already had a lot more than its fair share. This is a multi-dimensional catastrophe. If this Pope couldn't change course, what hope have we left?

It's not like the issues in question are subtle, or nuanced, or difficult to evaluate, or ambiguous, or unclear, etc. No. They are crystal clear and very plain. Let us review them briefly.

If an institution were to tell you that you cannot love the person you love, that loving them is a sin, that you are sick for loving them, or—insult beyond insult—that you choose your sexual orientation and gender identification, you would immediately and unambiguously declare it a violation of your most basic human rights: the right to love and the right to be who you are.

If an institution were to declare that your sexual orientation is some kind of willy-nilly game of make belief—that you, in reality and by your very nature, are sexually attracted to another gender than you purport to be, presumably just for the heck of it or to irk others—you would revolt at such a preposterous accusation. Who believes that a homosexual transsexual chooses to live a life of constant exclusion, scorn and discrimination, and to engage in sexual acts with people they supposedly aren't attracted to, just for the heck of it? No, really, who in their sane mind believes this? I mean, we don't even need to bring science into this—never mind, for instance, that about 25% of fruit flies are homosexual, presumably because they choose to be so just to irk the scientists who study them—this is a matter of plain, good-old commonsense.

Let me try to make this more alive for you. I happen to have been born a heterosexual male. So I imagine the Church telling me: "Bernardo, you don't really like women, you just choose to pretend to like women, just for the heck of it. What you really like—and should like—is men, and you should go have sex with men and dress like a woman." How about that? This is what is being said to the LGBT community.

While the Church busies itself with this kind of ancillary and dangerous nonsense, we, our culture, our society, continue to starve of meaning, of purpose, of spiritual nurture, of transcendence, of love—in short, of re-ligion. Why? Because the Church is missing in action, busying itself with stuff that, at best, has little, very little, to do with re-ligion. You see, nobody in their sane mind is going to go to Sunday mass just to be judged according to archaic standards. And therefore—guess what?—few, and ever fewer, go to church. What they need—namely, re-ligion—is not to be found in a church anymore. And this is the Church's deliberate choice; the only true choice being made here.

The Church's notion that it does what it does because it is grounded on the solid tradition of the Bible is a monumental intellectual misunderstanding and failure. I, for one, would never call for the Bible to be re-written or re-edited or upgraded; that's not the point. On the contrary: the Bible, as it is, is the spiritual treasure of the West, just as the Holy Quran, the Vedas and other traditional scriptures are spiritual treasures as well. The Bible shouldn't be made out to be something other than what it is, for the value of a treasure resides in what it is.

HOWEVER, it is naive to think that the Bible embodies its own standalone meaning; that's not the nature of the written word. The meaning of words is evoked through an act of interpretation. We cannot evade it: without interpretation, the written word is just squiggles of ink on paper. Whatever you think the scriptures say, is the result of an interpretation. Maybe you espouse a particular interpretation and reject others, and maybe you are even right about it, but your choice is still an interpretation; it cannot be anything else, for only a deliberate act of interpretation can extract meaning from mere syntax and grammar.

As such, when one calls for the Church to evolve, to progress, to stay in tune with the needs of the time, one is not necessarily calling for a break with the traditional written word, or a departure from our tried-and-tested spiritual foundations. Again, I shall grant this unreservedly: the sacred words of scripture must not be upgraded or re-edited; they do not need to—and should not—evolve, for they are the intuitive reflection of eternal absolutes. But—and this is the crucial point—we evolve, we change, we develop the ability to interpret the absolute through new perspectives, under new lenses, with more depth and nuance. And we have the moral obligation to do so, for anything else constitutes an evasion, a denial of life.

Therefore, our very act of interpretation—which determines how the eternal words of scripture reveal themselves to us—evolves, changes, unveils hitherto obfuscated angles, perspectives and layers of meaning. To deny this is to deny the divine gift of becoming; to willfully choose ignorance over wisdom. For if the progression of our own spiritual insights are to be cavalierly dismissed and pooh-poohed, what spiritual perspectives are we left with? How is any moral code ever to be grounded on spiritual insight, if the latter becomes a mere fossil?

The Church's take on conservatism is thus based on a logical fallacy. It misses the whole point and then—to add insult to injury—encourages and provides moral justification for flat-out violations of human rights. This is a disgrace, and all I have for it is contempt.

I have long despaired over the slow death of the Church in the West. But no more. This is the final straw for me, personally. Perhaps the death of this Church is, after all, what is required, so that something with true life in it might emerge from the ashes. For an institution that makes the inane and cowardly choices the Church insists on making—including the recurring choice to focus on everything but re-ligion—has no true life in it anymore. It is a mere phantasm running on inertia.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: Prelude

2021-02-26T12:04:00.017+01:00

Today my new book, Decoding Jung's Metaphysics, is being published. To celebrate the occasion, I am reproducing below Chapter 1, 'Prelude,' of that work. Enjoy!

Prelude

Call it not vain—that lofty thought

Which peoples heaven with visioned lore,
So that each star of light is fraught
With some fair chronicle of yore:—
Call it not vain, though earthly vision
May not peruse that page Elysian,
But strive to read it in vain;
Mind will the links of form supply,
Of forms that never more may die,—
To mind they are all plain.

Leopold J. Bernays, from the poem The Constellations, published in the appendix of his translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1839)

Born on the margins of Lake Constance, in Kesswil, Switzerland, in the summer of 1875, Carl Gustav Jung was one of the most important figures of early modern psychology. Together with Sigmund Freud, he pioneered the systematic exploration of the depths of the human psyche beyond the threshold of direct introspection, a mysterious realm he and Freud called ‘the unconscious.’ Both men discerned tremendous significance in aspects of our inner lives that had hitherto been neglected by science, particularly dreams.

The author, sitting on the margins of Lake Constance, across from where Jung was born.

However, unlike Freud—who thought of the unconscious as merely a passive repository of forgotten or repressed contents of consciousness—for Jung the unconscious was an active, creative matrix with a psychic life, will and language of its own, often at odds with our conscious dispositions. It is this aspect of his thinking that led Jung down avenues of empirical investigation and speculation rich with metaphysical significance. This little book is about those extraordinary speculations and their philosophical implications.

As we shall soon find out, for Jung life and world are something very different from what our present mainstream metaphysics—materialism—posits. The conclusions of his lifelong studies point to the continuation of psychic life beyond bodily death, a much more intimate and direct relationship between matter and psyche than most would dare imagine today, and a living universe pregnant with symbolic meaning. For him life is, quite literally, a kind of dream, and interpretable as such.

Jung was many things: psychiatrist, psychologist, historian, classicist, mythologist, painter, sculptor and even—as some would argue with good reasons—a mystic. But he expressly avoided identifying himself as a philosopher, lest such a label detract from the image of empirical scientist that he wanted to project. Nonetheless, much of what Jung had to say about the psyche has unavoidable and rather remarkable philosophical implications, not only concerning the mind-body problem, but also the very nature of reality itself. Moreover, when he was being less guarded—which was often—Jung made overt philosophical statements. For these reasons, as I hope to make clear in this book, Jung ultimately proved to be a philosopher, even a very good one.

In the pages that follow, I shall first attempt to tease out the most important metaphysical implications of Jung’s ideas on the nature and behavior of the psyche. Second, I shall try to relate Jung’s many overt metaphysical contentions to those implications. Third, based on the previous two points, I shall try to reconstruct what I believe to have been Jung’s implicit metaphysical system, demonstrating its internal consistency, as well as its epistemic and empirical adequacy. I shall argue that Jung was a metaphysical idealist in the tradition of German Idealism, his system being particularly consistent with that of Arthur Schopenhauer and my own.

The consistency between Jung’s metaphysics and my own is no coincidence. Unlike Schopenhauer—whose work I’ve discovered only after having developed my system in seven different books—Jung has been a very early influencer of my thought. I first came across his work still in my early teens, during a family holiday in the mountains. Exploring on my own the village where we were staying, I chanced upon a small bookshop. There, displayed very prominently, was an intriguing book titled I Ching, edited and translated by Richard Wilhelm, with a foreword by one Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s introduction to the book revealed the internal logic and root of plausibility of what I would otherwise have regarded as just a silly oracle. He had opened some kind of door in my mind. Little did I know, then, how far that door would eventually take me.

Jung’s hand in my work can probably be discerned in many more passages than I myself am aware of, for I have internalized his thought so deeply over the years that I don’t doubt I sometimes conflate his ideas with mine. Moreover, Jung’s image has been a perennial presence in both my intellectual and emotional inner lives. In moments of stress, anxiety or hopelessness, I often visualize myself in conversation with him—he would have called it ‘active imagination’—so as to envision what he would have had to say about my situation. This level of intimacy hopefully helps me represent Jung’s thought accurately and fairly in this volume. The reader should have no doubt that doing so is of utmost importance to me.

Naturally, it is also conceivable that the same intimacy could hamper my objectivity, leading me—surreptitiously and unintentionally—to pass an idiosyncratic amalgamation of his views and mine for his metaphysics. To guard against this risk, I’ve re-read—for the third or fourth time in my life—all of Jung’s relevant works in preparation for writing this volume. I have also reproduced relevant excerpts of Jung’s writings to substantiate my case, only making assertions I could trace back to multiple passages in their corresponding context. This, I hope, ensures the objectivity and accuracy of my interpretations.

Jung has written over twenty thick volumes of material over his long and productive life. Much of it is limited to clinical psychology or mythology and has little metaphysical significance. The material that does have metaphysical relevance, however, is still quite extensive.

The author, with a red pyramidal lake stone uncannily reminiscent of the one Jung describes in his autobiography.

So whenever Jung’s views changed—substantially or simply in terms of nuances—over the years, I have prioritized his later writing. In addition, Jung’s metaphysical views seem to have congealed only towards the end of his professional life, which renders his earlier writings less relevant. For these two reasons, my argument is based mostly on works he wrote from the 1940s onwards, with two exceptions: the edited transcripts of his Terry Lectures, held at Yale University in 1937-1938, and a collection of essays published in 1933. Both provide tantalizing early insights into Jung’s growing confidence regarding his metaphysical views.

It is important to notice that, regardless of the period in which it was written, Jung’s discourse on metaphysics and related topics comes nowhere near the level of conceptual clarity, consistency and precision that today’s analytic philosophers demand. Jung was an extremely intuitive thinker who favored analogies, similes and metaphors over direct and unambiguous exposition, appearing to frequently contradict himself. This happened because he didn’t use linear argument structures, but instead circumambulated—a handy Jungian term meaning ‘to walk round about’—the topic in question in an effort to convey the full gamut of his intuitions about it. Indeed, he didn’t arrive at his views purely through steps of reasoning to begin with, but largely through visionary experience. It is thus only natural that he should express these views in an intuitive, analogical manner.

In this context, Jung’s many seeming contradictions reflect attempts to explore a theme from several different perspectives and reference points. For instance, if he claims that the psyche is material, just to turn around and say that it is spiritual, he means that there is a sense in which the psyche is analogous to what we call ‘matter’ and another sense in which it is analogous to what we call ‘spirit,’ each sense anchored in its own implicit reference point. It is these radical and sudden flips of perspective—confusing and aggravating for an analytic disposition as they are—that help Jung delineate and express his views in a way that appeals to more than just reason.

Before closing this brief introduction, a few notes on terminology are required. Throughout this book—unless otherwise stated—I try to stick to the same terms and denotations that Jung himself used, even though his terminology is now largely outdated. I’ve done so to maintain consistency with his corpus. For instance, Jung defines ‘consciousness’ as something considerably more specific than what philosophers today refer to as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ or simply ‘consciousness’ (this, in fact, has been the source of endless misunderstandings of Jung’s work). So, unless I explicitly write ‘phenomenal consciousness,’ I use the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscious’ according to Jung’s own restrictive definition.

Some of the other terms I use have both colloquial and technical philosophical meanings, which unfortunately differ. I try to consistently use those terms in their technical sense. By the term ‘metaphysics,’ for instance, I don’t mean supernatural entities or paranormal phenomena, but the essence of being of things, creatures and phenomena. As such, a metaphysics of nature entails a certain view about what nature is in and of itself, as opposed to how it behaves (which is the subject of science) or how it appears to observation (which is a subject of cognitive psychology and phenomenology).

But fear not: knowing as I do that much of the readership of this volume will be composed of psychologists, therapists and people generally interested in metaphysics—as opposed to professional philosophers alone—I’ve striven to keep the jargon to a bare minimum. I also either explicitly define technical terms on first usage or use them in a way that makes their intended meaning clear and unambiguous from the context.

This is only one of many stylistic choices I’ve made to ensure that this little volume is not only readable, but also clear, compelling and enjoyable to a general readership. I hope you find inspiration in it to, someday, delve more deeply into Jung’s extraordinary legacy.