Kastrup : “ a former hardcore materialist scientist at CERN, now an anti-materialist”
Information does not physically exist
Post 75.March 27, 2019
Information Realism
Mathematical Reality
Artificial Intelligence researcher, Kastrup, seems to be finding evidence to support the ancient philosophy of Idealism, which further weakens the equally venerable Atomic & Material-istic paradigms of modern science. He is the author of a book, The Idea of The World, which argues for the “mental nature of reality”, also known as “metaphysical realism” . In this article he discusses “information realism”, and begins by quoting physicist Max Tegmark, author of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. “For Tegmark, the universe is a ‘set of abstract entities with relations between them,’ . . . Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real.” Kastrup then describes how reductive methods failed to find the definitive atom, and instead discovered only amorphous fields. “At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.” This is the conceptual conundrum that launched by own investigation into “the mental nature of reality”, which I call Enformationism.
Alas, making sense of reality without a sensible grounding in matter requires some philosophical leaps of imagination that go beyond the rules of scientific investigation. Our language, including generalizations, abstractions & technical terminology, is based on our sensory experience with physical reality. So, it’s not surprising that most scientists refer to metaphysical speculations as “non-sense”. They understand Information in the physical sense of Claude Shannon’s theory. In the macro world the definition of Information as anti-entropy is extremely useful for all sorts of computer & artificial intelligence appli-cations. But in the Quantum realm, scientific certainties get turned upside down. “Indeed, according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation.” The notion of purely abstract information does not compute in a materialistic world1.
So information realists have been struggling to make their ghostly underworld conceivable to those of us not inclined to believe in phantoms of the mind. The problem is that “Such obscure ambiguity lends information realism a conceptual fluidity that makes it unfalsifiable.” Yet, philosophers are not professionally committed to empirical evidence for their beliefs. Instead, they follow logic to plausible conclusions. Abstract Information can be comprehended by humans only as ideas in a mind. So, in this case, a supernatural psyche is a credible hypothesis as the creator & knower of all information. It must exist prior to the Big Bang in order to serve as an explanation for the sudden emergence of everything we know from who-knows-where. And it must be more powerful than the whole universe in order to be accountable for its existence. These reasonable criteria point to an entity equivalent to the essential qualities for a world creator, such as formless timeless Brahma2 of Hinduism.
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Intelligent Evolution (IE)
Intentional Evolution with a mind of its own.
This concept is the mutant offspring of an inter-species mating between Evolutionary theory and Information Theory.
• Darwin’s 19th century theory was expanded and improved in the 20th century by incorpo-rating Genetics, with DNA as the carrier of essential “design” information from one gen-eration to the next. Natural Selection then
removes the new design prototypes that don’t
“fit” the requirements of the current context and environment.
• Now 21st century science has discovered
that natural Evolution is also guided by artificial Memes. Genes are information in physical form, while Memes are information in meta-physical form. Human minds are now capable of trans-mitting information from one generation to another faster and farther than old-fashioned sex-organs.
• Inadvertently though, Memetic Evolution—otherwise known as human culture—like a naïve student driver, has begun to steer the course of natural progression toward a dangerous down-ward spiral of Devolution. But we can’t expect a hands-off deistic God to save us from our own stupidity. So it’s up to us (homo sapiens) to collectively grab the wheel of Artificial Selection and get back on track: to put the intelligence back into evolution. • Contrast with Intelligent Design (ID), which attempts to justify ancient scriptures by wresting modern science.
Heuristic versus Rational Search for Truth
Quote from Skin In the Game :
"Religious beliefs are simply mental heuristics that solve a collection of problems."
For pragmatists like Taleb, such short-cuts to wisdom may be sufficient. But for those who are motivated to get as close as possible to Truth, it's a cop-out.
Quote from Wikipedia :
"In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circum-stances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called "cognitive biases" . . . . Heuristics usually govern automatic, intuitive judgments but can also be used as deliberate mental strategies when working from limited information." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_decision-making
1. Immaterial World : Tegmark’s theory replaces the material world with a mathematical field. He seems to not need the theory of a deity to imagine the infinite dimensionless dots of location & relation. They are self-existent. Nevertheless, his mathe-matical field is equivalent in some ways to an omni-scient omnipotent god. In place of an eternal deity, he prefers the eternal infinite multiverse theory. In the Enformationism thesis, the MV is a reasonable alternative to traditional god models. But it still must function in some ways as an ententional creator of new worlds, and must possess the potential for emergence of metaphysical Life & Mind. Tegmark uses the term “absurdity heuristic” to describe a cognitive bias that limits our exploration into unfamiliar conceptual territory. I suppose he finds the interventionist god-model absurd, in view of the gapless evolutionary mechanism. That’s also why I think of G*D as a system programmer instead of a prestidigitating magician.
2. Brahma : In the Hindu trinity, Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. However, Brahma is not worshipped in the same way as other gods because it is believed that his work - that of creation - has been done. I use “Brahma” in a mono-theistic sense though, since the infinite power to create should include the power to sustain and to destroy. No need for anthro-morphic sub-deities to perform those tasks.
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