Why I am a naturalist

This is my response, specifically to a post by blogger Prudence Louise titled Why I’m not a Naturalist (also on Medium, which is what served it up to me) and generically to a host of similar effusions in the blogosphere.

There is a prologue, to which I will return, followed by four section headings in the form of assertions about things naturalism ‘can’t do’. The first of these is: “Naturalism can’t define the word natural.” This is a silly one. Prudence Louise obviously has in her mind a provisional definition of what naturalism entails, and she doesn’t like it.

The second and third headings read: “Naturalism can’t explain why the universe exists” and “Naturalism can’t explain why there are uniform and orderly laws of nature.” The fact that we are able to ask, and to some degree answer, “why” questions about matters of ordinary experience does not imply that any “why” question that we can state in words has an answer at all, let alone an answer that we can determine or prove. Supernaturalist worldviews can make handwaving assertions that purport to answer these questions, but there is no reason to take such claims seriously.

The final section heading declares: “Naturalism can’t explain the conscious dimensions of reality.” Many supernaturalist bloggers seem to consider this the knock-down argument. It is hard to see why. Anyone who doesn’t simply reject our knowledge about the brain must know that it is an organic information-processing system with a million million million synapses, and that the exact configuration and strength of these synapses changes over the lifetime of the brain, responding to the experiences of the world that the ‘owner’ of the brain undergoes. The supernaturalists claim to know that this system cannot possibly be responsible for the ‘conscious dimensions of reality’, but how can they know this? How does the evolution-formed ability to make judgments about everyday matters confer an ability to have correct intuitions about a enormously complex grey-box system like the brain?

We should also ask those who use this line of argument, What would count as an ‘explanation’? How could any explanation tell the whole story, a story that would account not only for why my synapses are arranged the way they are, but that would answer this question for everyone? (And, of course, an appeal to an immaterial, immortal [why immortal?] soul is not an explanation in any sense.)

The second paragraph of Prudence Louise’s prologue is revealing. She writes: “The naturalist story says that as scientific knowledge advances, it’s proving beyond reasonable doubt there is no God, no eternal soul, no afterlife, and we live in an insentient and purposeless universe.” Well, I am a naturalist in her general sense, but I would never make such an assertion. What I would say, however, is that I see no reason to include in my worldview any role for a god, or an eternal soul, or an afterlife. Anyboy who thinks they can give me such a reason is encouraged to make the attempt.

Consciousness again

Medium author Paul Pallaghy has a recent post titled ‘Yes, consciousness is essentially proof of God (or the simulation hypothesis)’. He might just as well have said ‘proof of magic’. (And another Medium author, Gerald R. Baron, summarizes and discusses the accumulated comments on Pallaghy’s post as of a few days ago.)

First, allow me to say that the style suffers greatly from what we might call ‘Twitterism’. There are 33 paragraphs; the average paragraph length is less than 20 words, and 21 of the 33 consist of a single sentence. This is not the style I associate with a philosophical argument (though it is preferable to erring on the side of total obscurity).

But to address the substance of the post: a great deal of it consists of the fallacy of Assuming the Conclusion. There are a series of claims like these: (1) “there is apparently no mechanism for consciousness in existence or even conceivable in this level of reality”; (2) “things made from atoms shouldn’t consciously see imagery or have feelings”; (3) “I just can’t remotely see (this reality’s) science allowing bunches of atoms to feel stuff”; (4) “there is no physical mechanism for consciousness”. These (rather repetitive) claims simply bring in the conclusion that the author is supposed to be making an argument for: they do not constitute or contribute to an argument.

The author seems to be at pains to distinguish something that he is calling ‘consciousness’ from mental phenomena in general: (1) “Not that we can think. That we experience the thinking.” (2) “Don’t confuse experiential consciousness and cognition.” (3) “Don’t confuse that with sensing and responding. I mean actually feel stuff.” (4) “It’s not so much the thinking, sensing and responding that’s the puzzle. That’s all basic neuroscience.”

The implication (especially in the fourth quote) is that he doesn’t feel surprised that ‘a bunch of atoms’ can think, or sense, or respond, as long as they don’t ‘feel’. But why should we believe that such a bright line can be drawn between these mental phenomena and the supposed magic sauce of consciousness? I would say that our mental life is a stream of experience of which the current sensorium (things now being seen, heard, felt, and so on) is part, as also are unverbalized thoughts relating to the past or the future, together with verbal content (things we imagine ourselves saying or writing); and that within this mental landscape the element of ‘conscious awareness’ is quite variable. In performance contexts like sports and music, consciousness has the potential to get in the way of the performance; hence the Zen of archery.

At one point the author uses the phrase ‘our feeling of soul’ as an apparent synonym for consciousness. But he must be aware that there is a substantial current of philosophy, mostly from Eastern sources, that regards the ‘feeling of soul’ as a delusion, even as the central delusion that we are subject to.

There is also a claim about what it would be like if the magic sauce of consciousness were removed: the philosophical zombie idea. Again, to suppose a philosophical zombie possible is to draw a bright line between overt behavior and mental activity on the one hand, and ‘experience’ or ‘conscious experience’ on the other. I see no warrant for this move.

An organism that can summon memories of past events, that can imagine future scenarios, and that can talk about all this with its fellow organisms cannot be a philosophical zombie: the idea is a completely incoherent one, and it astonishes me that people have taken it seriously.

Near the end of the piece there is this paragraph: “It’s easy to accuse us of ‘God of the gaps’ thinking. But at some point we as scientists need to consider that many lines of evidence actually point to the simulation / God hypothesis.” The word hypothesis is misapplied, since there is no prospect of subjecting these notions to scientific testing.

I would diagnose the problem rather as an Argument from Incredulity. But how can we expect to have accurate intuitions about what an organic information-processing system with a million million million synapses can do? How can we say “Consciousness is totally unexpected if you think about it” when we are precisely the conscious beings that would be doing the ‘expecting’?

I discuss these matters further in some older posts: Thoughts on dualism and related matters, and its followup, Simulation thought experiment.

Earth Day 2023

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Today Planet Earth announced that the subsidy it has been providing to human civilization, commonly known as “fossil fuels”, would be withdrawn over the next few decades. The statement noted, “This was always the plan. The original contract disclosed that the supply was finite, and urged the humans to make wise use of this energy bonanza, by building long-lasting, easily repairable infrastructure that would allow civilization to flourish using the ongoing energy flux from the sun. Instead it seems that it has fueled a cancerous growth in the size and energy ‘demands’ of human societies. They really should have read the disclaimers more carefully.”

In memoriam

Four years ago, on April 14, 2018, David Buckel died to protest our species’ reckless consumption of fossil fuel.

News stories at the time published a few quotes from his farewell letter, but not the letter itself. It is now available as part of a post on resilience.org, the website of the Post Carbon Institute.

Prophets Wanted

Mission: to bear witness to the truth, the more-than-inconvenient, the almost intolerable truth, that our species has caused the system of Life-on-Earth to move far, far outside the envelope within which it operated for billions of years, the envelope of “what can be done by using energy arriving from the sun to drive chemical reactions”; and that there is no reason to believe that this highly unusual state of things can go on for much longer.

How have we done this? By expropriating the Earth’s stock of ‘fossil fuels’, treating it as just another resource, and incorporating it into the market system at a price determined by the cost of extraction. This was never framed as a decision, but it amounts to a decision to throw a wild, wasteful party, followed by a chaotic, suicidal downward spiral.

Many people are now waking up to the fact that we are causing ourselves (and other species that we share the planet with) a lot of future suffering because of increasing CO₂ levels (while others treat this piece of well-established science as fake news made up to force them to live under socialism). But it doesn’t take any scientific knowledge to notice that we have burned an enormous amount of coal, oil, and natural gas and that almost all of it has been wasted, in the sense that after the burning there is nothing left to show for it. Except insofar as we have used cheap energy to build durable infrastructure (and even that has a finite lifetime), the benefit we get from fossil fuel is completely transitory. Worse still, making artificial nitrogen fertilizer from air and natural gas (the Haber-Bosch process) is what has allowed the world’s population to grow far beyond organically sustainable levels.

Simply put, everything about the way we live today is morally compromised, because everything depends on the assumption that it is okay to burn as much fossil fuel as we can afford. We have outsourced morality to the price system, but the monetary price we pay for everything is wrong, that is, it is wrong if we think that the ‘party followed by collapse’ sequence is something to be avoided.

So everything about our world depends on this distorted price regime. Everything: airplanes, big box stores, cars, cheap food, container ships, HVAC, the Internet, refrigeration, plastics, suburbia, trucks, 24·7 electricity. The cost of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels. The cost of fighting wildfires and defending coastal infrastructure against rising sea level and worsening storms.

This has implications for how we think about politics. For example, a commonly-heard refrain is “How will we pay for X?” But the fact is that we have not really paid for anything in several generations. Almost all the value that has been created, the work that has been done (in physics, ‘work’ is a synonym for ‘energy’), results from giving ourselves permission to burn fossil carbon or hydrocarbons.

The humorous bumper sticker reads: “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance.” But in all seriousness, the main funding source for our current lifestyle needs is and has been: stealing from future generations.

This is a much bigger moral issue than race, gender, or inequality. Properly understood, this is the killer argument against the whole libertarian/small-government theme that the right has been singing; unfortunately it also means that the happy progressive future, with no painful sacrifices required, is a total pipe dream, and to be selling it to voters is ultimately to be lying to voters.

Our planetary future is the Prisoner’s Dilemma writ very large indeed: cooperate, and make the best of a very bad situation, or fight to maintain a lifestyle that we are not entitled to, until the worst scenarios start to materialize.

The title is Prophets Wanted, and this is a serious pitch, especially to retired people with some free time and to young people about to choose a life path: you could do worse than devote your life to trying to get people to understand the predicament of the 21st century for what it is: human overshoot enabled by the one-time bonanza of fossil carbon.

If such a prophet had arisen around 1860, and if enough humans had heard the truth in their message, we might have used a small amount of fossil fuel to build a paradise on earth for 1.5 billion people: but only by also making a decisive shift away from growth to sustainable flourishing, from competition to cooperation. But that’s not what happened, and so we are in a much more difficult position today.

Human beings do have a yearning for the chance to align themselves with a cause that transcends their own lifetime, and this really is The Big One: can we grow up as a species before we commit civilizational suicide?

World economic history

The Wikipedia page for Gross world product includes a dataset developed by Berkeley professor Brad DeLong that estimates world economic production over the course of history.

Here is a streamlined version of this data. The time periods are chosen to coincide with significant changes in the growth rate. (Data for the last period is from the World Bank, as found here.) Here goes:

Time period (AD)	Annual growth rate (%)
600–1600	0.13
1600–1700	0.26
1700–1800	0.56
1800–1875	1.58
1875–1950	2.66
1950–1975	5.38
1975–2000	4.06
2000-2019	2.83

I think we are safe in attributing the slope change around 1600 to two related factors, both of which raise serious moral questions: colonization (European civilization occupying the Western hemisphere) and enslavement. These factors continue to play a role through 1875, but are joined, and overshadowed, by the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution was, of course, heavily dependent on human cleverness, but more specifically cleverness working to harness an energy source. The more productive textile mills of the English Midlands and elsewhere got their start with water power, but soon it was all about coal, and later oil and natural gas.

Then came electricity, which of course is not an energy source but an energy carrier. Again, some electricity came from water power (I grew up where the electric utility was Niagara Mohawk) but most from the burning of fossil fuel, as it is to this day.

Many people are foolish enough to believe that ‘Peak Oil’ is a debunked idea, but the table above is enough to show a prima facie case that Peak Growth, at least, is already well in the rear-view mirror.

On mortality

One element of my personal philosophy has its origin in the mythology of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, where the two kindreds of Elves and Men received complementary Gifts from Ilúvatar: immortality for the Elves, and mortality for Men. Some human beings rejected their Gift, with disastrous consequences.

I first read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, and have read through it, or dipped into it, countless times since. Although I am not a theist, and harbor no belief in any kind of individual survival beyond death, Tolkien’s ‘theology’ concerning the Gift of Men has always made sense to me: this is what it is to be a human being, and being at peace with it is a big part of accepting reality.

My father died at 52, and as of tomorrow I will exceed his age at death by 13 years, so I have little reason to complain.

On the other hand, the processes of bodily deterioration are well underway. The higher notes of my falsetto range went away decades ago; my sense of smell has been almost at zero for over a decade (unless reversed by large doses of prednisone). Then two years ago I developed some ulnar neuropathy: the fourth and fifth fingers of my left hand (nondominant, fortunately) are weak and slightly numb in feeling. I can still type and play the piano, but I’m always aware of the problem. (The actual damage is where the nerve bundles emerge from the spine.) ‘What a drag it is getting old.’

As human beings, what we get is to be part of the web of the species. This is true in the DNA sense, as it is for the rest of life; but we as humans also participate in culturespace, by way of language, literature, history, science, music, art, architecture, technology, and so on. We don’t all have to make major contributions to culturespace. But it has started to become a question I ask myself: will this or that action of mine contribute to something that has a chance of outlasting me?

And the fact that it looks like a great deal of culturespace will be lost in the coming Great Simplification is a sadness that far outweighs anything I might feel about my personal mortality.

A fitting successor to the PDP-10

If I still had the energy for an extended project, here is one that I might take an interest in: to design and simulate a 48-bit child of the PDP-10, on which it might be pleasant to craft elegant assembly language programs (note that everything can stay in human-friendly octal instead of hellish hexadecimal).

I envision 64 registers, memory addressed in units of 48-bit words, 24-bit halfwords, a 9-bit opcode almost identical to the PDP-10’s. (As usual, I’m going to forego the effort of constructing nice word diagrams. Text will have to do.) ‘Small’ processes could use a 24-bit address space (96 MB: remember, 6 octets per [addressable] word); large processes could use a 36-bit address space (384 GB); 36 bits leaves 12 bits at the high end of a word, allowing for a byte pointer with 6-bit position and width fields. Some applications might use the 12 high bits for a type code.

With these assumptions, the high half of an instruction word takes the form [9-bit opcode][3 bits t.b.d.][6-bit AC][6-bit XR]. I think the 3 bits could be put to good use with the meaning ‘choose an algorithm for computing the effective address, given XR and RH’.

To take the architecture in a more modern direction, we might imagine a second order code that is more pipeline-able, for use in writing mission-critical inner loops, and programmed only via high-level languages.

Could be fun, in an alternate universe. (Heck, in a really alternate universe it could be the open-source architecture everything runs on today, having taken over on the strength of its high elegance-to-gate-count ratio!)

Simulation thought experiment

Apparently, there are people who think it possible, even likely, that we are living in a ‘simulation’ in some sense.

If the notion is that it is our minds that are simulated, and the rest of what we think of as the physical universe is only rendered in just enough detail to be convincing to us, this is completely insane. I’m taking a look at the Bostrom paper now, and he acknowledges that ‘Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered.’ But the proposed alternative, that the simulators add detail (or start erasing memories) when they notice that humans are getting too curious, is—well, insane. I find it just mind-boggling that some very intelligent people take this idea seriously.

But consider another idea, a thought experiment. Suppose the existence of a physical universe of higher dimensionality and great size (the ‘macroverse’), within which our universe is embedded. All of our little universe is ‘open to inspection’ by the (obviously superintelligent and immortal!) beings of the macroverse and their analog or digital instrumentation, just as we can see everything on the two-dimensional surface of a globe.

What would it mean for the macro-beings (let’s just call them ‘gods’ and be done with it) to ‘understand’ what was going on in the little universe? They might know more than we do about the Big Bang and the evolution of galaxies, but let’s bring it down to this planet. I contend that they would have to acquire (a version of) the same knowledge that we, understanding our universe from within it, have attained.

In the previous post, I hit upon the idea of thinking about the universe in terms of ontological layers, representing successive stages in the ‘colonization’ of the physical world by information. I’ll restate it here.

Layer 0 is the world of non-life. In layer 1 we get replicators, that is, life. Layer 2 is the appearance of nervous systems, shading up into minds. Layer 3 is the evolution of human language. Layer 4 is the invention of written language, and layer 5 the invention of digital information technology. (There are some possible refinements and edge cases: crystals, possible language-equivalents in other species, communication in social insects [the bee dance], photography and other analog technologies.)

At each of these layers the universe gets radically more ‘interesting’, and so, to be convinced that the gods really understand what’s going on I would say that they need the equivalent of all our scientific knowledge. (There is, of course, the question of why they would care.)

Knowing what even we can do with machine-learning systems, it seems at least thinkable that a sufficiently-powerful macroverse computer could detect the new patterns that emerge in the matter of (this small corner of) the little universe as life emerges. But once there are minds, the complexity within the minds is many orders of magnitude greater than what is revealed by the behavior of the minded organisms, and achieving real understanding seems really difficult.

I don’t want to take such a foolish premise very far; the point is to think about how hard it is to make sense of phenomena from the ‘outside’, even with perfect information.

Thoughts on dualism and related matters.

Does reality contain something in addition to the bits of matter and energy (call them, collectively, Weltstoff) whose interactions the Standard Model deals with, something called ‘Mind’, of which the question ‘How does Mind interact with Weltstoff’ can be sensibly asked?

No. Mind is implemented in Weltstoff. Interaction comes for free.

To have a complete understanding of reality, do we need to talk about entities other than Weltstoff?

Of course. And before we even get to Mind, let’s consider Life for a moment. Life represents a colonization of Weltstoff by information, in the form of DNA, and the dance of genotype and phenotype makes the world a very much more interesting place than it would be without life. Organic chemistry is a big field already, and we go from there.

And Mind represents a further level of colonization by information. When I Google ‘brain storage capacity’ the highlighted result is 2.5 million gigabytes. Very difficult to quantify, but it’s ‘really, really big’.

Finding the sentence ‘Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?’ in the first paragraph of Annaka Harris’s book, Conscious, I am rather bemused. We are not talking about a ‘collection of matter’, we are talking about a living information-processing system.

Two predicates there: (1) living, and (2) an information-processing system (IPS). For everything living, we know that the ultimate answer to ‘why’ questions is, ‘because it worked for that organism’s ancestors’. As for IPSs, now that we can make comparisons to a member of the genus with a completely different architecture—the digital computer—we have some inkling about the potential for relatively small ‘collections of matter’ to have enormous causal efficacy.

What does Mind do? Fundamentally, I would say, it makes the world a familiar world. Everything we encounter with our senses falls into place, more or less. The same is true of all organisms with a brain.

The evolution of language is yet a further colonization of the material world by information: words represent a move in the direction of digital processing, having a definite structure in terms of phonemes. And a fourth layer is the invention (finally we are in the realm of invention rather than evolution) of written language. (And digital technology is a kind of fifth layer, come to think of it; if true AI ever happens that would be a sixth layer.)

Mind is implemented in Weltstoff. But of the architecture of the human brain we can say very little; of course we know a good deal now about what the various areas of the brain ‘do’, but the fine details of, say, what neuron firings correspond to ‘driving east on Occidental Road while listening to Sugar Magnolia on the sound system’ or ‘working on this blog post’ are not something that we have access to, or would be able to form theories about even if we did.

It seems to me that the brain is ‘meaning all the way down’ in this sense: that the state of every synapse in this brain I’ve got here depends in a lawful way on (for all we know) everything that this organism has experienced in its 65 years of life, but that no finer-grained description can be had.

If we supplied a sufficiently powerful machine learning system with, on the one hand, a complete record of neuron firings in a subject brain over a year, and on the other hand, detailed information about what the organism housing that brain was doing at every moment of that year, it would presumably be able to detect patterns so that (after the training period) it could, from subsequent neuron firing data alone, assign correct truth-values to predicates like ‘Joe is in deep sleep | dreaming | talking | listening to music | doing calculations | eating popcorn | tying his shoelaces’ and on and on. But asking the machine learning system to produce an understandable theory covering how those patterns work and interact would be asking the impossible.