It is fashionable to deny the creativity of people. Often that denial is disguised. It is fashionable to deny that we are special. But ultimately, at root, regarding humans as "predictable" or in some other sense little more than animals with slightly bigger brains (just more environmentally damaging) is a denial of our humanity - our personhood. Our creativity. Ever since (and perhaps before) Copernicus dared to suggest Earth was not the centre of the universe there have been people who have concluded there is nothing particularly special about us. The denial of the claim that God set us motionless at the centre of a vast cosmos that swirled unthinking about us must have been powerfully jarring to those who, coming from a religious sensibility, that all of this was not, in fact about us. Cosmically we were nothing special.
And when Charles Darwin showed how complexity and diversity could arise from simplicity and homogeneity it appeared as though we humans were both accidental and, perhaps worse, as quite similar to all other living things. Related even! An incremental step in the long chain of evolution. Just another animal. Biologically we were nothing special.
But the counterclaim stares back at us in stark contrast each and every time we wake inside a comfortable home, turn on a screen powered by electrons and producing photons in just the right way we can see images of the world - vast cities and great works of art, science and technology constructed over centuries and in mere seconds on the same screens learn the news of Planet Earth and beyond. That we can do this, and no other creature ever has (so far as we know) cries out for explanation. Because these capacities seem not merely special but unique. Our civilization. Our science. Our history. Our art. Our capacity to create, take control and construct.
What is so very different about us? If we are “nothing special” and our creativity is only apparent and not actual - why is it our lives, organised into grand civilisations, represent nothing like what any other system extant or extinct has ever accomplished?
What is it that is special about people? We can say it in a word, but the word fails to do much more than circularly define itself and what possesses it. Creativity. It is creativity that sets people apart from all other systems. But then no system that is uncreative is a person. To be a person is to be creative. Not creative in the “blind” sense that evolution by natural selection creates biological knowledge. Creative in the intelligent sense of having a problem first and then conjecturing solutions. (On the other hand, in biological evolution, a “solution” (mutation) is often attempted before there is any problem. That conjecture is often deadly. Not so with the explanatory creativity of people. We can “guess ahead” in the privacy of our minds running simulations using imagination before actually constructing the thing out of atoms.
But in either case we cannot define creativity. To do so would be to be able to formalise whatever this thing is and so anything not captured by the formalisation would not be creative. That’s how definitions work. So if everyone agreed on some definition for this “creativity” that people possess then what if some person wanted to solve a problem outside the bounds formally set by the definition? Well there’d be nothing for it but to violate the formal definition. Creativity is like this. It breaks free of any attempt to confine it. It breaks free of any attempt to predict its outcomes. It can disobey. It is, indeed, disobedience looked at from another angle. Creativity is the capacity to see of things already in existence and to say: no! This can be better. Or: this can be changed. Let’s try that out. Oh, you want to predict what I will do next? Go ahead. But tell me first so I can disobey your prediction. Creativity allows for that. Creativity is that. The inability to be predicted ahead of time because if we could predict ahead of time the content of some genuinely creative act, we would never need to engage in any creative act because we would already have its products at the moment of the prediction.
No one can predict what the successor to Quantum Theory will be. Or Neodarwinism. Or even what the headlines for next Tuesday’s 6pm news broadcasts will be. If we could, we would have that information now. And creativity would be false. But creativity is real. And people are engines of creativity, which is why they are inherently unpredictable. One can typically not even predict what their own behaviours will be like an hour from now, much less in a week. We just don’t know what we’ll be doing. Not in fine detail. Because we create. And if we could make such a prediction then what could possibly stop us from creating something new that refuted the so-called prediction?
Oh sure, if I toss you down a waterslide I can predict you’ll be soaking wet by the end of it. Or if I offer you $1 million no strings attached I can predict you’ll take it. Except in the first case, your creativity does not come into it and your sliding down the slide is not actually a behaviour. You’re not consciously choosing to slide down the slide. You are, in a very real way, required to reach the end of that slide because of simple laws of physics. In the second case you might very well think: obviously that’s easily predictable. But if “you” are Grigori Perelman and it's 2006 and someone has indeed just offered you $1 million no strings attached you say “no”. Why? You’re super creative and entirely, inherently unpredictable. People are special. We should celebrate this unique quality we posses. A quality no other living creature we are aware of has.
Because people are creative we are the generators of explanatory knowledge. Karl Popper was the first to explain the unified view of knowledge which underpins what is known as fallibilism. This is the idea that all knowledge is conjectural - not certainty true. Everything we know contains misconception - its incomplete and our “best guess”. In the final analysis even our most cherished ideas will be overturned and improved. But even if they are not in practise this does not mean that in principle they are not the final word. They are always conjectures - all of our ideas. And it is ideas that drive behaviour and we can change our conjectures in ways unpredictable ahead of time making predicting the behaviour of people, strictly impossible. Which is another way of saying: from no explanation of human behaviour can you derive a prediction about what any human will do. Our good explanations in chemistry of acids and bases allow us to make actual scientific predictions. Anyone with the relevant background knowledge will know how to calculate just what volume of hydrogen gas at room temperature will be produced if 1.0 grams of magnesium metal is placed in excess hydrochloric acid. This prediction can be made before any actual experiment is carried out in the real world because a good universal explanation of acids, bases, the "mole" concept and more besides come together in order to allow us to apply all of that formal apparatus to specific cases and logically derive (or calculate) a prediction. No such general theory of human behaviour exists, except a theory that says: human beings are creative people and this makes their behaviour inherently unpredictable.
In order for people to be "predictable" we would need a theory of human behaviour from which we could derive specific instances at will where we predict what Joe will do on a Friday afternoon. Or what some large group of people will do. Anyone can make guesses about the future. But actual predictions are the rate exception for they are logical consequences of good explanations. And in the realm of "conjecture making" - the very thing human minds do, there is as yet no "good explanation" of what a mind is precisely or how it generates conjectures. But we have some clues and the first of those is: those conjectures really are creative acts. Conjectures are unpredictable before they are made.
But the other arm of Popper’s epistemology is “refutation”. Objective knowledge to be objective and form part of a fallibilist world view must have the quality of “could possibly be wrong”. Popper was no relativist. In the case of physics and the physical sciences more broadly we have a job of demarcation to do precisely because some areas of our study are about the real physical world where we can, to some degree, some of the time at least, and for all practical purposes, ignore what impact human creativity might have. So astrophysicists make predictions about the trajectory of asteroids or the life cycle of stars. They can do this assuming people do not make choices (or are unable to make choices) to alter the course of those things. In the physical sciences (and biological, geological etc) we set them apart from other areas of our discourse which are not sciences by the standard of whether or not we can perform some experimental test - the crucial test in the ideal case - which rules out all purported explanations but one. Figuring out how to do such experiments is itself also a creative act.
But in all other areas outside of science, refutations must still be possible for progress to occur. “Conjectures and Refutations” is a universal claim about all knowledge - not just science. It is just that in science there exists a specific kind of refutation available to us: the experimental test where we compare the outcome of an experiment to the predictions made by competing theories. Again, those predictions must not involve the possibility of human creativityhaving any impact on them because this would make those predictions impossible because human creativity would introduce a necessarily unpredictable element.
There are many ways to falsify (better yet: refute) economic theories. One way would be to simply assert: coercion is immoral and go from there. That coercion is immoral stands as a refutation of, for example, socialism, is decisive. But we can also point to all the data on economies that tend in the direction of socialism over time. The more they approach the limit of something like North Korea, the more impoverished the people. The more they approach the “ideal” of something like a free trading society like The United States, the more we see prosperity (and, predictably, inequality - a feature, not a bug, allowing for people to freely choose what to work on and how to create wealth, if at all). And as always often the most clear cut way of refuting economic, political or moral theories is simply by recourse to the fact they are bad explanations. No one need test anything. If your economic theory is: just have the government print more money to pay off the national debt, we should not want to test this (admittedly this is any odds with “modern monetary policy as subscribed by many nations right now). It is a bad explanation because it is naive about the causes of inflation. We should not want to test such a theory, although we have and did during covid and now we reap the falsifying rewards thereof. It was a bad explanation all along and everyone who understood this simple fact about our circumstance (printing money = higher inflation, especially when there is no growth) is seeing the logic play out like our person down the waterslide. It was inevitable. Or was it? Of course even here we can imagine that, for example, someone might have invented small modular fusion reactors during the covid lockdown and now we’d all have near-free electricity and inflation would be falling. Or any of countless things might have happened. But absent human creativity the link between printing money and inflation is simply a logical necessity. All else being equal. It’s not so much a “prediction” that printing money leads to inflation. It’s just logic unless you think a claim that cutting an apple in half leads to two pieces is a “prediction” of number of pieces given “cutting in half”. Very well. Then all such necessary truths are predictions too. Like: I predict you cannot draw a 4 sided triangle.
Popper wrote about how economic theories can be tested or compared one with another and thereby refuted as worse explanations of how economic systems should be arranged. Of course all such predictions must be made on the condition they are unaffected by the intrusions of the creativity of people. And in the economy, of course, ultimately this is not possible in the real world because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable. One can imagine a company “predicting” their new widget is going to upset the market entirely when it is released next Wednesday - and they have exceedingly good reasons for thinking so. Because this widget is unlike anything else and is the kind of thing people have long said “If only we had this. But only in science fiction films”. I don’t know - maybe it’s a hoverboard.
But come next Tuesday their competitor releases their widget. Superior in every way to the first company’s. Their well-founded “prediction” of disrupting the market Wednesday turned out to be nothing but pure prophecy because there was no way of knowing that other people - creative competitors of their’s - had been working long, independently and in secret on something so much better. (Think “magic carpet” type thing that can do everything the hoverboard can only it can go a lot higher, faster and is safer to boot (if you fall off, it catches you again before you hit the ground - it’s basically impossible to fall off.)
Whenever a prediction is made about people, it is an attempt to deny they are creative and can do the unexpected. Sure, you might ask your friend where they would like to have coffee and they respond just as they always do. “You’re so predictable” you might say. Of course that’s not a prediction. You share a culture - a history - a set of memes that tend to cause people to behave alike. But absolutely nothing, in reality, is requiring your friend to choose the same place. They are making a creative choice (and likely creating anew each time you ask them a theory in their mind of your mind and your preferences and wanting to make you happy). And having now said “you’re so predictable” they take offence and insist on going elsewhere - they create a new idea. But never mind that - just because you confirm your “prediction” does not make it a true prediction. It was still just a prophecy because you did not actually know the content of their mind. You had no good explanation - only a rough guess because you know your friend well. But not that well. We do not observe their ideas. Only their behaviours. And even if their behaviours align with our expectations much of the time, it’s never all of the time. We do not confirm our theories. We fail to falsify them.
People are unpredictable. And so communities are unpredictable. Nations and civilisations are unpredictable. In large part because individuals inside those groups can be decisive in creating something new, whether it be widgets, wine or wars. We should celebrate our creativity - it is the thing that sets us apart from other creatures. It is what makes us unpredictable. Even in those cases where others say “you’re so predictable”. They are, of course, verificationists. And Popper refuted that entire line of thinking root and branch.
People are creative. And that is why we are unpredictable.
In response to my very recent blog post about consciousness in animals a follower tweeted/posted the following:
So I thought - great. I will do this. I’ll take the advice and open my mind to alternatives. So it turns out there exists a very popular podcast on Youtube with a slick website and lots of episodes (178 as of writing this today according to the website https://www.philosophizethis.org/, although in other places on the website episode 181 https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcasts and if you go to the feed itself it says episode 187 (like on Youtube)) That might seem pedantic, but it just means things are not synched up and it makes searching for specific recent episodes a little difficult. The host, Stephen, began "Philosophize This!" as a podcast not entirely unlike my own (ToKCast) remains - focussed just on explaining his perspective on ideas and certain thinkers. But he has moved recently more and more into another “interview” style podcast. Which is all fine - but the ones where he just speak are more illuminating about where he, personally comes from. His motto for the podcast is “Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.” But, and this will sound terribly arrogant, at no point in over an hour listening to two episodes did I feel I learned a single thing - except about his personal approach to podcasting. Which I admit, and will come to, is interesting. And may explain why he has so many downloads and I do not by comparison. “Philosophize This!” Is hosted by Stephen West and he is even endorsed by a reviewer at University College London (no less) right here https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/philosophize-this/#:~:text=The%20Philosophize%20This!,prior%20experience%20with%20the%20subject.
So that’s amazing. And he won’t be hurt by my saying that in the two episodes I heard it was less Philosophize and more “Misrepresent This” or perhaps “Misunderstand This” I will explain this further so it doesn’t seem I’m just slinging epithets. Misconceptionism after all, everywhere and I think he actually is doing something good here with the podcast. His listeners will find other thinkers - they would surely be led to Harris and some other mainstream podcasters and intellectuals and then maybe they will find David Deutsch. Which is why I say: it’s all to the good. He’s not promoting evil - he’s not out there spouting communism (from what I see) but some anti human pessimism and absolutely some prophecy some creep in. But then he is in good company there. He seems like a really nice guy. He says “Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. My only goal in life is to make a podcast that brightens people’s lives a little bit. I want to be the notification on your phone that doesn’t induce any stress. Thank you for making that dream of mine possible.” Which is sweet and nice and that’s great. But all that said it won’t shield him from my criticism. It’s what I do and I do not think criticism is anything but showing respect and taking ideas seriously in their own terms as I explain in many places but for example here: https://youtu.be/_vHAe86isdE?si=1Z3S1qqeJs7cndgg
Ok, let’s get to it. I listened to two episodes. The first was the episode all about the ethics of eating meat. I will come to that soon as that is the main point of my post here. The second episode I listened to was a far more recent one all about AI existential risk which can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO6ZEeH9XNM and is titled “Episode #184 ... Is Artificial Intelligence really an existential threat?” This gave me a good gauge or benchmark of whether I should listen to more of his work. In both cases the episodes made very mainstream arguments of the kind I spend my podcast steel manning (or faithfully representing as Popper admonishes!) And then refuting. Only Stephen West puts those mainstream arguments made by other thinkers through a “Philosophize This!” Filter that extracts out muchof the more sophisticated details that actually make the cases passably work in many cases. So in the one on AI (which I won’t do a full breakdown of here - I’ve already done a breakdown of the steel manned version in many places not least of which is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&list=PLsE51P_yPQCQMuCsxeUWxVWmEixmgnWJD&index=5 and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&list=PLsE51P_yPQCQMuCsxeUWxVWmEixmgnWJD&index=6 Stephen in his episode on AI risk basically takes as read the work of Bostrom, Yudkowsky and especially Harris and rehashes all those arguments with little criticism. I heard nothing new in the entire episode that I have not already refuted as my own listeners will be well aware of. It’s a horse I have flogged not until was it dead but cremated and buried. Yes, I’ve overdone it. So I won’t recapitulate anything here except that the podcaster fails to deal with any of the substantive criticisms of those thinkers on any of this and he comes down on the side of “alignment” and the dangers of AI and compares it to the trope of nuclear weapons and so on. It is Bostrom’s perspective to the core filtered through Harris but, as I say, filtered again through a mechanism that makes it suitable, I guess, for people with almost no interest in philosophy at all. Which I admit is a very good idea. “Philosophize This!” has 125,000 subscribers on Youtube alone. It’s a huge podcast for this kind of material. So he won’t even notice my criticism and is no doubt big enough to take it (or simply ignore me). But he desperately needs to understand universality, personhood, David Deutsch and Karl Popper. We will return to that.
His technique of reducing almost all technical arguments has the effect of straw manning even what Harris, Bostrom and those he seems to be aping are actually saying. Which means he straw mans the opponent argument even worse (as we will see in the present critique on his stuff about the ethics of eating animals). This technique, as I say, will find a large audience who has no time for technical arguments and wants something not merely mainstream but also digestible in very sugary form. This is the other end of the spectrum to people like Sean Carroll or Eric Weinstein whose podcasts at times do not shy away from reminding the listener they are professional physicists and mathematicians and so will pepper episodes with talk of topology and tensor calculus, the wavefuntion, the Dirac Delta Function, manifolds, differential geometry and lots of things only those with a graduate understanding of physics would appreciate. Fair enough - some people like that style too. I try to walk a middle line where when the technical physics and mathematics comes up I always try to explain it in plain, simple English. I try to follow not merely the arguments of Deutsch and Popper but their style. Don’t talk down to the audience but do unpack the technical stuff in a new way that you think helps people you have talked to about this stuff who don’t have a background in science and philosophy. I may fail at this and sometimes get it wrong, but that’s the aim. I don’t avoid the technical stuff but I don’t leave the technical stuff as assumed knowledge either unless in the rare instance I have just talked about it in a previous episode (see my Multiverse series for examples of this where really the 5 or 6 episodes are a sequence where we build towards something quite technical and assume one is familiar with other episodes).
So all of this is to say thankyou to my new follower on Twitter who suggested (quote) “Anyone interested in this should totally watch philosophize this’s video on whether it’s moral to eat them. Search him up on YouTube” - this being my post about animal consciousness. Which actually was not about whether it was “moral to eat them”. And philosophize this did not talk about consciousness so actually there isn’t a close relationship. However there is some crossover.
But I want to thank him for the link. Genuinely it is very useful. 😊 But not for the reasons he might think. Now trigger warning again: this analysis and reflection will sound terribly harsh as perhaps the previous brief analysis of the AI one was. This one will be longer. But I did spend time listening to the entire thing at https://youtu.be/HsZsg3mlsNM?si=AdMtfT_rgbits22k called Episode #071 ... “Is Killing Animals For Food Morally Justifiable?” so unless there is yet another episode he does on this I get the idea of his ideas, his podcast and this issue in particular. And conjoined with his AI episode that I listened to straight after, I get the tone, tenor and methodology of his podcast. I get his worldview not only on these issues but approach to philosophy and epistemology. It is a kind of “Sam Harris Lite” take. I know that sounds terrible! But it’s just to give an indication of how I think he is coming from a mainstream perspective which, as I said, is further refined, so the speak, for an audience who might find even Harris too erudite and hence boring.
Brief Interlude on the thinking behind ToKCast
Perhaps I’d have more subscribers if I employed some of the tactics of those guys with massive audiences. Or not! I may just not be to most people’s taste. And that’s ok! I know precisely where I sit in the “intellectual landscape” and it is to counter mainstream misconceptions and by definition the mainstream is the majority. So I’m appealing, a priori, to a minority. And a minority within a minority. I mean compared to Rogan, Harris is the minority (people interested in the philosophy of science, neuroscience, computation, physics and all the stuff I talk about). But he takes mainstream views on those things and so appeals to a large minority of the “majority” of people interested in long form podcasts. I’m basically over here disagreeing with everyone on lots of things so of course Harris’, Carroll’s, Weinstein’s - and well even Yaron Brook’s audience (which is itself a minority of a minority) won’t like what I have to say. The worldview of Deutsch, Popper and Feynman is a very narrow intersection of refined ideas that forms a robust but sophisticated worldview that actually is coherent. Each part of the web holds together with the other and captures the fabric of reality to serve as a beginning of infinity (did you like that? Tortured, wasn’t it?)
There’s a few things to “get” with my podcast when you come to it especially “mid stream” to a random episode and I can never find the one easy way in for people. Is it conjectural knowledge? Guessing? The woven web? “Guessing knowledge” seems to put people off - they think “relativism”. Is it “people are cosmically significant” is that my “in”? No, rationalists think “religious sounding woo”. Is it quantum computation and universality? They think: technobabble. Optimism? They think glass half full self help. The problem is we use all the regular words…we don’t neologise wherever possible (unlike Weinstein who is a master of this) and try to explain things in common sense terms. Ultimately that works against us as people begin to think “I already know this” or at the other extreme “That is so preposterous and challenges my deeply held assumption none of the rest is even worth listening to”. So, as I say: small audience. But with Naval’s help and David’s increasing popularity we are getting there.
Back to “Philosophize This!”
This is not a post intended to be about me or ToKCast (although I now have an idea for writing about what ToKCast is for those new to it). This is about the "Philosophize This!" podcast and specifically the episode “Is Killing Animals For Food Morally Justifiable?”
I’m posting part of this (what will fit) to Twitter/X and so I’m again breaking my general rule t/here about making long posts on that platform just to get this out. These are my notes as I listened:
First: the misconception of “justificationism” is right there in the title and goes on to be deeply embedded throughout the entire piece. He keeps repeating what is “morally justifiable” over and again (rather than focussing on what is known and unknown and good explanations from science and epistemology) and at one point near the end compares the whole issue to the keeping of slaves and how we changed our opinion on that which is just a common, lazy, mainstream take and trope. Second: Stephen then moves seamlessly into moral subjectivism (asking about what’s “good for you” not objectively good.) and so litters the entire tone of the thing with what is personally right for you rather than being concerned about objective knowledge and good explanations. It’s not even a “principled” stance where we can talk fundamentals. Instead it is all couched in terms of what is “good” or “right” FOR YOU. Now, what I thought was *good* in the podcast early on was he says he doesn’t know the answer to whether it’s “justifiable” to eat animals. Ok. So I guess he won’t be judgemental? No. He then goes on to be judgemental of those who do eat animals implying he does indeed know and thus only makes arguments for one side of the issue (all the reasons against ever eating meat). He takes it for granted that the arguments for eating meat are just known by the audience but what he assumes is completely false in his attempt to refute those assumptions. Namely: it’s just not true it’s about about “nutrition” and “taste” (for example) when it comes to the philosophy of this. I’ll come back to that. The episode is also fixated on how the animal suffers - like so many do. But this *begs the very question I am not*. I am asking: how can we know the animal suffers? What is the philosophical criteria? What even is suffering? He doesn’t say.
So the stuff about taste and nutrition is all irrelevant to the question but he spends a long time on it. Who actually makes that argument? His argument from who is bigger and stronger? The idea people/humans are higher on food chain. I never actually hear that argument either *philosophically sophisticated* (like Harris or say Singer who is big on refuting arguments from meat-eaters on this) and understandably because it’s so bad. Even they don’t assume their opponents ever make those arguments. Sure, the guy down the pub might, but why are we worried about him here? He then says, and returns to this, that all these arguments so made so far about eating other animals would also apply to eating other *people* too. This is completely wrong. No, they do not! No one makes that argument. It’s a very weak straw man.
But he makes this because at no point does he ever grapple with the crucial philosophical l question of *personhood*. What is a person? He just says more than once that we have a more “rich and vibrant experience of the world”. Again: who says *merely* that? It’s very weak. He hasn’t read the literature or listened even to someone as mainstream as Harris on this: at all.
So then he talks about aliens being better than us. Ok. So now he mentions an argument people like Harris also make. Which says very little. It’s a weak argument. Aliens would not want to eat us. If they’ve travelled across the galaxy they’re not looking for snacks on Earth and *they* understand universality and the moral qualitative difference between people and all other structures in physical reality. He doesn’t (of course then neither do the AI doomers, vegans, Singer, Harris, Gervais or anyone else pushing the “don’t eat animals” barrow).
Ultimately he comes down on the side of anti-humanism. Who are we to say we are more important than other animals? This is a standard trope. I deal with that at length in various places including directly in that post I made. This is the most obvious way in which Deutsch’s criterion of universality makes all the difference here. He’s not aware of it. Or fallibilism. Or “hard to vary” explanations. Or conjectural knowledge/Popper. Conflates pain and suffering: the main point of my post is to tease this apart. He doesn’t mention consciousness or qualia at all. Those are key.
None of this was at all insightful or made me think anything else he says would be worth listening to, I’m afraid. Again: that sounds a little harsh but we need heuristics in this world and “Philosophize This!” does not seem to have anything interesting on this issue to say in terms of actual, legitimate philosophy. He could change his channel, on the basis of this episode to “Misrepresent this”. That would be closer to the mark.
But as I say: thankyou to my follower for the link as it gives me an important insight into how yet another “type” of thinker goes about reasoning on these issues and representing their opponents and what the standard of discourse in general is. Even on “philosophy” podcasts.
We still do not know if animals have "consciousness" because we just do not know what consciousness is yet. We can ascribe it to other people because they can explain they have it as I explain below in "Consciousness and Creativity". Animals close to us socially (cats, dogs (especially) and farm animals (such as cows, pigs, etc) and great apes and even monkeys which is to say largely those animals that have coevolved with humans in one sense or another display individual preferences (and hence “personalities). But those preferences are all due to genetic variation alone and so lead solely to entirely inborn behaviours or recombinations of inborn behaviours ("behaviour parsing". I.e: they’re due entirely to genetic *variation* (especially in dogs). This may indicate the presence of a kind of "mind" software running on the brains of those animals but in any case this "mind" is of an altogether qualitatively different kind to the mind of a person able to in principle universally explain the worlds both actual ad possible; physical and imagined.
Introduction Whether the existence of a rudimentary "mind" in dog or chimpanzee brains confers the experience of anything at all (qualia or consciousness) on them is *unknown*. Hence whether they experience pain as we do is unknown. But whether it gives them the capacity to explain anything is known. They cannot. so they cannot suffer - which is “pain” but with the capacity to explain it (even inexplicitly). And because we do not know what consciousness is, we cannot know if animals suffer. Let me explain!
On the distinction between pain and suffering
Suffering and pain are not the same thing. Pain comes in many forms: physical (stress and distress) and mental (anguish). Physical distress is what most people think of when they think of pain. That's the sort associated with injuries: broken bones, cuts, burns, surgery recovery, headache, stomach ache and far worse. We all know some of this with some of us unfortunate enough to experience the worst of it. Living long enough the sad truth is many of us will experience some of the worst of it and we will beg for the soothing salves of modern pharmacological pain relief in the form of everything from mild analgesics through to the most powerful opiates science (in the form of highly expensive to do and carefully managed pharmaceutical research) has struggled to develop and refine. Thank God - or rather capitalism and science for that!
Then there is the pain that is merely a consequence of stress but not distress. This difference makes all the difference in the mind of a person. I have pain working out. Actual athletes no doubt have even more. But are we in distress? Ok, so some in Olympic Marathons might be. But in general, no. We enjoy training. I might feel "pain" when working out or running but I am also listening to my favourite upbeat music and I can reinterpret the pain signals as an indication to do more, go heavier, go faster and it actually begins to feel just a bit pleasurable. There's a fine line between pleasure and pain, as The Divynals sang:
"It's a fine line between pleasure and pain You've done it once, you could do it again Whatever you done, don't try to explain It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain / Why do you push? Why do you push? / Break my body with the back of your hand Doesn't make sense from where I stand / Please don't ask me How I've been getting off Ha, no, please don't ask me How I've been getting off / Pleasure and pain (It's all the same) You've done it once, you could do it again (It's all the same) Whatever you done, don't try to explain (It's all the same) It's a fine, fine line between pleasure and pain"
But only for people, right? Not animals. They (perhaps!) experience pain. They cannot tell us. We cannot rule out Descartes' argument that they might just be like a plucked violin. They make all the sounds as if they have emotion, but do they? Is it just a mindless automaton response that elicits in other animals mindless responses? But why? Well why anything in evolution? Survival? Why survival? Why life? Like Agent Smith interrogating Neo in The Matrix. Smith is not supposed to be "human" - he is supposed to lack empathy - perhaps even emotion. He is not a real person. He is the trope of "artificial intelligence" - a form of existence I do not think is physically possible (for one thing Smith gets increasingly angry in the following exchange which adds to the drama but undermines the philosophy). But let us put that aside for now lest I get sidetracked. Angent Smith says in one scene of "Matrix: Revolutions"
Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting... for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson?! Why?!! Why do you persist?!!! Neo : Because I choose to.
People are unique in physical reality
So people are a qualitative step above, beyond and on a different staircase altogether compared with what other animals are and the Matrix is confused at times with respect to providing a coherent philosophical perspective nonetheless it asks some of the right questions. By "people" I mean our erstwhile ancestors and ancient cousins bipedal hominid cousins who likewise had this capacity, extraterrestrial intelligence that must and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which will.
The observation that other animals also vie for survival on a finite planet does not indicate the existence of qualia in what might be mindless biological robots for all we know. Survival alone isn't an explanation. And animals don't know why they want to survive. Even we cannot say why animals seem to desire to survive. But we can explain why we do. We explain that we choose to, as Neo says above. This makes all the difference. Smith apparently has no choice. So he doesn't understand this. On this, the script writers were correct. If Smith is a "mindless" suoerintelligence he does not understand choice. But we do. He must just do what he is doing - destroy the Matrix. He has a purpose. The purpose does not change. He is turning the world into paperclips and cannot reflect on why. But he can only not reflect on that very purpose. ON everything else, he seems to have a general capacity to reflect. This is a paradox unresolved in AI doomer circles.
In any case, pain, for us, is a different kind of thing as compared to what other animals "experience" if they experience anything at all when a bodypart of theirs is damaged. Our pain, the pain of people, comes with an explanation. If it's the good kind from working out, when we are not in distress, even if the physical sensation is the same for a heavily worked out muscle as for a strained one we can interpret the former as fine, even pleasurable while the latter evokes suffering.
Suffering is pain with an explanation (of why it is bad).
Animals cannot explain anything ergo, they cannot suffer - in the way I have explained what suffering is - which is the way I think that matters. People understand the possibility of the future and pain, that we regard as bad, we expect to continue into the future causes us suffering. Grief over a lost person, concern about losing someone, how a recently broken bone will hurt for days or weeks yet to come and cause us to be immobilised. Some do say it is possible to learn this power - but I admit I have not myself, yet.
So far I have said little different to anything else I have said on the topic here. But let me add some things I have not previously or failed to emphasise or simply expressed poorly. And that is the following:
Cats and Dogs have preferences and personalities. But why?
Cats, dogs (especially) - cows and horses perhaps (i.e: especially animals that have coevolved with humans) or animals that most closely resemble humans in terms of hardware (nervous systems) and software (the code that controls their behaviour) - in other words all great apes, but also monkeys do have rather (and more or less) individual preferences (and hence “personalities") but they’re all inborn or recombinations of inborn behaviours. They "behaviour parse". See the work of Richard Byrne on this: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~johnson/COGS260/Byrne2003.pdf or the index of "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch for a more refined and succinct explanation of Byrnes work on this. Who is all just to say: yes! Those differences in personality are due entirely to genetic *variation* (including, notably, in dogs). This gives a strong illusion of being "human like" - but only in comparison to animals that do not show so much variation. I am thinking the trope of literal sheep who are supposed to all behave alike. Although shepards no doubt disagree. Carefully edited documentaries of things like meerkats and kangaroos give a false (overly strong) impression of personalities where there are none. Or at least the variation is minimal. Or take it more simple still - rodent like mice. Or starlings. Or fish. Let alone mosquitos. The genetic variation causing behavioural differences is minor meaning their preferences are due entirely to minor differences in their DNA.
With dogs genetic variation between breeds is large so we expect the genetic variation in behaviour (i.e: "personalities") to be large too. And these creatures can behaviour parse in very different ways.
Do animals suffer? Can we avoid suffering as it includes the worst qualia people can experience.
So, do animals suffer? Perhaps. They experience pain is my guess and close to that of humans - but they do not suffer. Pain is just a kind of first blush "detection" of damage utilising circuitry the evolved in our ancient ancestors. But other animals today do not suffer. This pain experience they have, if experience it is, does not lead them to an appreciation that this experience (for example) means the end is near. Although they do seem to mourn death at times as dogs, elephants, whales and gorillas do. They do seem in pain or sad. That demands an explanation. Maybe they can explain some very limited things inexplicitly. But they are not universal and so their suffering, if it exists at all, is, thankfully, bounded. Small mercies. Maybe they already have a kind of native enlightenment without effort. I've often thought that having seen some pets near the end of their lives, in some pain, but going quiet, as if they have accepted it. Our suffering is not "natively so enlightened in that way - even if some are "enlightened" like James Pierce here: https://www.james-pierce.com/writings/the-experience-of-enlightenment and on suffering James says:
To which I responded, having made a similar point just a few weeks earlier:
Conclusions to my new editorial on animal suffering
So, I do not think animals can suffer though they may experience pain. But if they can suffer, their suffering is bounded and in any case we are not condemned to suffering. We can learn to experience the world better because we are universal explainers. Animals are not - even the more "sophisticated" ones.
In animals - especially those close to people (both genetically like apes and close socially like dogs and cats) display great genetic variation and the existence of literal memes. This implies something like a mind, but nothing like our mind. Moreover this does not necessarily confer upon them qualia or consciousness. It may but that is, for now, *unknown*. Hence whether they experience pain *as we do* is unknown. But whether it gives them the capacity to explain anything is known. They cannot. so they cannot suffer - which is “pain” but with the capacity to explain it (even inexplicitly).
The problem with fallibilism is that it is not well understood. Well, there I’ve said it, so why bother going on with this piece? Well I want to attempt to understand why exactly this simple idea is deceptively simple and therefore so easily mistaken for something else. Moreover many who claim to be fallibilists of some kind often turn out to be dogmatists of another kind which means they never were (thoroughgoing) fallibilists to begin with. I don’t like labels - I’d prefer they not be applied to people and instead reserved for ideas as a matter of convenience. Persons are not defined by their ideas but rather the capacity to create them in the first place. Labels tend to negate whatever else a person might say on the topic once you think they are a “rationalist” of some kind, for example. Even the bright and cheery “optimist” label has become a little “cliquey” of late but more importantly it too is too easily misunderstood. “I endorse optimism in David Deutsch’s sense of the word”, I prefer to say rather than answering to “I’m an optimist!” like some yellow pilled cultist with a big silly grin. But fallibilist? Well I don’t much mind admitting I might be wrong and indeed to be accused of as such is never an insult. Even about fallibilism. We will come to that. So call me fallible. I don’t much go in for those “pilled” things though I’ve already mentioned yellow pilled (I don’t know if that is already a thing) but if fallibilism was to be “pilled” I guess it’d be pink. Is it a colour? Isn’t it? It’s not on the rainbow. It’s negative green as some physicists have joked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9dqJRyk0YM
Pink is a kind of mysterious colour. Is it a boy’s colour or a girl’s colour? At one point it was a boy’s (or at least considered “masculine”) now it’s a girl’s https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-girl-gender/index.html Of course with what I guess can only be called the 2020s “Gender Wars” the meaning of pink is once again up in the air. So if a butch man thinks a pink shirt is just divine is he or isn’t he…you get my meaning. It’s all questions. Get pink pilled.
I tweet now and again that one way to think about fallibilism is simply the stance that “It is always possible to be wrong because there is something to be wrong about”. Very few people are thoroughgoing fallibilists. Even fewer than that recognise fallibilism in others.
The issue is that most people are either dogmatists (at least about something or other) or relativists (increasingly and sometimes even the same people on other issues).
Dogmatism is the misconception there exists something (usually many things, for a dogmatist) about which it is impossible to be mistaken. What is often held aloft are things like “1+1=2”. Pythagoras’ theorem. Everything in mathematics. Much of science. Or, of course, in a conversation with a sufficiently adept fallibilist the dogmatist will retreat like George Custer to the philosophical equivalent of Little Bighorn River: “I think, I exist” - Descartes’ cogito. Their last stand. They think that because they think then they are entitled to assert that it is absolutely certain and impossible to be mistaken at least on that point - they exist. They cannot imagine how it could be otherwise and so their lack of imagination on this point is somehow proof, in their minds, of truth. But why is it important for people to be absolutely certain they are in possession of a final truth? Isn’t simply knowing you exist enough? Brett, why does the distinction matter anyway? Who cares about the difference between “knowing” and “possessing certain truth”? It matters deeply for two reasons. (1) Dogmatism everywhere is dangerous and as Popper admonished “The doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny” and (2) because only fallibilism always allows the possibility of infinite progress via continuous error correction. Admitting you can always be wrong (even about fallibilism) means that there is always more left to learn and understand. When it comes to “I think therefore I am” or just “I exist” as being a statement - indeed logical proposition one can utter as some kind of necessary truth about which one cannot possibly be mistaken - it can be difficult for people to doubt this. They desire a foundation and, following Descates thing “Well this is it! The foundation! I am certain I exist!” But a fallibilist needs no such foundation. They can pursue instead conjectural knowledge. On this I agree with Descartes: “I exist”. I can say that honestly. There’s no problem here. I can even add, rather unnecessarily, “I know I exist”. That’s enough for me. So rather than say “it cannot possibly be false that I exist” or even “I am certain I exist” I just say “I know I exist”. Or even “I exist”. Just not infallibly. Because I’m not infallible. About anything. Including “I exist”. I can improve my understanding of “I exist” and correct errors in what I think about it. I might not know right now how to improve it, but that is true of almost everything I know so there’s nothing special about that. And much of what we know like “I exist” contains inexplicit content too. Like what “exist” means or what “I” means and so on and on. Much about any claim when you dig deep is inexplicit. Indeed an infinite amount of inexplicit content lies there in an infinite potential well of inexplicit possibility. This infinite depth of the possibility for further understanding underscores the possibility of progress: the possibility for improvement. Optimism. I cannot say how it might be possible that “I exist” might be false - but this - my failure of imagination on that point - is no proof that it might nevertheless be false. I am a fallible human. There are many things I might be unable to imagine. Now having said all of this, especially saying all of this clearly and indeed coherently and even sometimes passionately then the criticism comes: well you sound terribly dogmatic. Which of course comes down to tone. Or not even tone but rather perceived tone. It’s like homophobia - one doesn’t actually need to be homosexual to experience homophobia. One only has to be perceived to be homosexual. And so too with dogmatism. The thoroughgoing fallibilist holds the position that all dogmatism is wrong is accused then of defending a dogma…about how all dogmatism is wrong. But that is simply a misconception to do with playing word games and trying to hold the fallibilist to the meanings of terms and explanations that the dogmatist insists on. When I say “this is how it is: fallibilism is the only reasonable stance to take” - people think this is somehow self refuting. Indeed any time one explains any theory at all: matter is made of atoms. Or “I know that evolution by natural selection explains the diversity of species” or “The Big Bang happened” - people throw accusations of dogmatism around. “I know we people are universal explainers” really gets people’s backs up - especially in these times of discussions around AGI and AI. “You can’t know that! Dogmatism! You’re refusing to consider the alternative!” come the accusations thick and fast. Let us linger on this related point for just a moment. Those who object to the claim “people can understand anything in principle” are arguing for a kind of anti-human alternative that…human beings cannot, even in principle, understand some things?
And yet I, like everyone else in history, has been steeped in that lesson - that people are rather pathetic creatures. I know the argument well. Here let me make the case:
Our memories are limited. Our brains are finite. We just cannot comprehend somethings. You, Brett, don’t even understand the Korean language and yet you claim to have tried! If you’re a universalexplainer find the successor theory to quantum theory right now! You see? You’re not a universal explainer! I’ve just told you two things you cannot understand or do. You’re just dogmatically committed to a faith claim.
But all of that is to ignore the explanation offered elsewhere about all this. I know the retorts and objections. It takes time to appreciate the power of universality - what a deep shift in perspective it takes to appreciate this relationship between what a person is, how they explain and understand by generating models in their mind of anything else in physical reality and that physical reality itself. How, as David Deutsch explains in his TED talk: the one structure comes to resemble the other: the mind and whatever in physical reality it is explaining.
But if one does explain all that and says “that’s the way it is” because that is what we know and we know that because it literally follows from our rational understanding of the world (we reject the supernatural) and…the accusations of dogmatism flow.
Stating “It just is the case that X. We know X. And we know X because our best explanation of science - quantum theory - implies X. Or our best theory of epistemology - conjectural knowledge growth - implies X” is not dogmatic. All those claims might be false. For a fallibilist that goes without saying.
Of course when you do say it, as a fallibilist, the criticism flips. A moment ago the interlocutor accusing you of dogmatism now says “Oh, so you think nothing is actually true?! Relativist!”
This is the experience of the fallibilist. Stating as clearly as possible what we know and making the case with passion and curiosity and dare one say fun and excitement only to have that mistaken for dogmatism. At no point during what I sometimes call my “tirades” - which in truth are really just monologue summaries of explanations about exciting parts of science and philosophy - do I ever presume it’s not possible that I’m wrong. I could always be wrong. But how tedious would that become to add that caveat after every claim?
And as I say, having just made the exciting case for some bit of science or philosophy and being accused of dogmatism and so adding the caveat “no, I can always be wrong because of the universal fallibility of the process of knowledge creation” you are accused of relativism. All this is because the only frame many have is: either you’re certain of certain truths (dogmatic in some sense as they are)…or you’re untethered to these foundational truths of reality entirely and you’re a relativist.
This is the problem with fallibilism. It’s very poorly understood. But that should be expected because we’re all fallible. All is a woven web of guesses.
Note that this post is focussed largely on science and how it works.
If you think that it is possible to accumulate evidence for a theory then a red pen is evidence in favour of the claim “all swans are white”. How is this so? And, Brett, aren’t you one of those people who keeps on saying you cannot have evidence for a theory anyway? Yes, I am. But let’s understand the reasons against this claim at a deeper level than some realise.
It’s not enough to know falsification works - that the existence of one black swan refutes “All swans are white”. You have to also know why the alternative perspective - almost universally subscribed outside of what is called “critical rationalism” is false. It needs to somehow become a deep part of your thinking that *positive evidence* just is not a thing and never can be. Which is to say you cannot have evidence for a theory; evidence that supports a theory or makes it more likely to be true and so on. That is not only unnecessary but it is absurd and let us see why momentarily. Let us first recap why it’s unnecessary.
Once you have an explanation of the evidence, it no longer cries out for “support me” because there are no alternative theories. There’s just the one - the explanation. But, ok, imagine you’re in the rare position of having two good explanation. Well then if you find yourself in that rare position of having two or more good explanations then the function of evidence is to decide between those theories already guessed. When evidence does this it also serves the simultaneous purpose of serving as the so called “explicandum”: the thing to be explained. The explanation is there to explain the evidence. The evidence is there to decide between explanations. Ok, so all of that means “evidence in support” of a theory is unnecessary. But why is it also absurd?
Now we shall take a little lesson in logic. Consider if you like the claim “All swans are white” - so often held up as the pedestrian example of either “how falsification works” (find the unexpected - a black swan in other words, or maybe a translucent one these days) or as a way of teasing out exactly what Bayesian “epistemology” is trying to get at. How many swans need to be observed before we can say it’s “probably the case all swans are white”? Or likely? What is the threshold? And once you do employ Bayes’ theorem (that almost never happens, by the way: what is called “Bayesianism” never much involves Bayes’ theorem being actually deployed) - say you “update your initial prior probability in light of more white swans to 85% confidence that “All swans are white”) well then you can conclude, with something less than certainty, that “All swans are white”. Of course how certain you are that the 85% is 100% correct no one can say.
But let us put aside all of those concerns about how many white swans need to be observed before concluding “all swans are white” - put aside that no finite list of observations (like seeing one millions swans) can never logically be equivalent to a universal claim about “All” anythings - and let us even put aside science is not about making claims like “all swans are white” in the first place (it’s about explaining the world).
All that aside.The idea that one can have “evidence in support” of a theory or claim like “All swans are white” by finding ever more white swans is logically equivalent to my looking on my desk any seeing any random thing there - like a red pen as also evidence in support of “All swans are white”.
If that seems absurd to you, it is. But this is one of the counter intuitive things about logic and one of the absurd consequences of the “evidence can support a theory” account of how science functions. It is a problem for that idea - but not a problem for falsification or explanation. What on Earth am I talking about?
The red pen on my desk is…a non white non swan.
“All swans are white” is logically equivalent to: “all non-white things are not-swans”. (In formal logic this is known as the “contrapositive”).
So given this rock solid logical fact of reality, anything at all in the universe you can point to that is not a swan and isn’t white is evidence in favour of “all swans are white” if you think there is such a thing as evidence in favour or support of any claim at all. So on the inductivist or Bayesian account of things every time you observe non white non swans (basically everything in the universe) your confidence in your theory about the truth of “All swans are white” should increase precisely because it amounts to being evidence in support of your theory.
Do you see how absurd the inductive account of science is? Of Bayesianism? Of non-explanatory, falsifiable conjectural scientific knowledge?
Science does not consist of claims like “All swans are white”. It consists of explanations. Evidence cannot be used to support a theory. It serves only to decide between explanations already guessed.
No amount of gathering more evidence about the world allows us to extrapolate general truths about it. What we have are problems - that’s where we begin. Our ideas at times fail to account for what is out there in the world. In science to resolve this clash of ideas between what we think and what we observe we have to use our imaginations to conjecture - guess - into existence a new and better explanation. Once we’ve done that, once we can explain the “problematic observation” we have a solution. And once we have that, there’s no need to further support it because, it’s all we’ve got. It’s the solution. It’s the good explanation.
------- Credit to my lecturer at The University of New South Wales, Professor Michaelis Michael who, aside from being the only professor of logic I know to have a name which is itself a tautology (Michael is Michael) - was the lecturer I most admired. His lectures were always fun. He meandered through the luminaries of philosophy and his encounters with some of them and peculiar stories of their lives and his as well as diving very deep in the classes I took with him on formal logic. It was Michaelis who set us the challenge of proving the soundness and completeness of sentential logic for one assignment. Sometimes assignments can be fun - and that one I remember was. And it's him I credit for leaving our class one afternoon at the end of the lecture with the problem as to why, as he held his red white board marker up, it was “evidence in favour of the claim that all swans are white”. It was on the bus ride home I realised I had the answer. Of course next lecture so did many others. It was class of logic students after all.
Infinite Travelators. Choice in the Quantum Multiverse
Preamble: This is a philosophical “self help” story that bends some rules and breaks minimal others just to get a couple of points across. Pushed too far, it will like all analogies break apart into demands for what things are *really* like and the answer there is simply: the corpus of fundamental physics as we understand it. But mysteries lurk in our circumstance as they always will. As fascinating as any other is the relationship between consciousness, choice, creativity and a fully deterministic universe of what can happen does happen - given the right knowledge and the decision to make it so.
By the way, I prefer the word “travelator” (and that particular spelling) to “moving walkway” or “conveyer belt for people”. I use all three terms here but it’s the one I revert to. Apologies to those who find it grating. _______________________________
Imagine a flat 2 dimensional floor (as all floors tend to be): yet infinite in all directions. Like some vast aircraft hanger, but empty of aircraft and you cannot see the walls. You are on the ground standing. It is dark but where you turn your attention becomes lit with a bright light. You direct your attention to your feet - they are illuminated to reveal you are not standing on regular ground. You are on a travelator - one of those conveyer belts for people more common in airport terminals than aircraft hangers. You direct your attention left and right and lights illuminate a greater reality. The travelator you are on in this infinite space is not alone. There is another beside you running parallel. It’s moving at an ever so slightly different rate - a little slower to your left and another! A little faster to your right. And then you notice them all parallel travelators off into infinity all moving at different speeds as your vision suddenly explodes with the whole space illuminated with a great white light and travelators all across the infinite floor in every direction you look and parallel, though all going in the same direction: away from where you have just come. And then you notice it - all around you - as you imagine them into existence - places to go and experiences to have. You simply have to choose to move travelators to get to them. Or stay on the one where you find yourself. You can see what’s up ahead - more or less. It’s in your imagination for the moment but simultaneously it’s coming closer and closer - all you need to do is stay put. Doesn’t seem so bad. You’re reading something. This.
But over there: you can see something better and the more you look the clearer it is what set of travelators you need to jump on and cross over to, to get closer to that thing. Seems a bit of effort though. This is fun. Interesting for now, anyway. And besides all around you see an unbounded number of things that really exist and are out there that you would like to see and experience. Some are truly amazing. That’s real?! You wonder. That can’t be real. Can it? Could I actually go there? Your mind wanders. Some of those things seem far off and fanciful - it will take a long journey of clever choices to get to experience that - the travelators are moving at all different paces and they carry all sorts of wondrous things (and sometimes dangers). But they’re there. They’re real. But just because they’re real doesn’t mean you will ever experience them unless you choose to make the effort and - make it a reality *for you*. There’s a lot to think about. Maybe you’ll stay right here, carried along by, doing little more than choosing to just stay on this travelator.
But - there are simple things nearby - oh look one step over is coffee. Grab that. No wait…skip past that - grab the tea. You’re on another travelator now. Tea travelator. It’s…all the same it seems. Here you are reading this again. Well, it’s all the same - but now you’ve got tea. Looking around things still look basically the same here on tea travelator. As elsewhere except…you look back to where you were and…there you are! Still they're not leaping across. Just reading. But no tea. The copy of you continues along for a while until they jump to another travelator - but they leave behind themself again - yourself again - too! Or rather a copy of you. You’re here, not there. What you thought was you seems to be an inexhaustible supply of identical copies of you. You stand up and look down and…well there you are not standing up too. Ok, sit back down again, that’s a little too strange. Let’s keep on reading because this thing you're reading right now this very moment that's telling you about what's really going on right now tells you that up ahead you can see - (this is the power of your imagination in this multiverse!) - that some of those copies of you really do go on forever into immortality. You go on forever! You can see you need to follow this and that travelator and you can’t quite see how you would even get to some of them. Looks very difficult from here. Like: Climbing Mount Everest difficult from where you are. Maybe someone knows a faster route. You want to go on forever! Ok that’s quite a quest so let’s just take a breath because for now - tea. You notice another copy of you is on the coffee travelator. Over there the same thing is happening. Copies of them - you - are moving from travelator to travelator making different choices. But you’re here now so where to next? It’s all happening around you and it seems you’ve no choice in any of it. Except you do - you can choose which travelator to occupy. You can switch universes with a choice. Other copies of you seem to be having a much better time. Some of them - not so much. You call out to them: but they can’t hear you. This is a strange place. But at the same time, you’re more familiar with it than anywhere else. You’ve been experiencing this all your life. This is your life.
Whoosh! Woah - look out. This travelator - just like the rest of them moves irrevocably forward. It just took you under a low hanging bridge where you could have bumped your head! You see - you’ve also got to pay attention. You might be able to choose which travelator to jump to, but you also can’t see everything ahead of time. Sometimes some things appear with very little or even no notice at all. Stay sharp! But, you can also relax. Those things do not contradict each other. Stay in a relaxed state of sharpness as you’re carried onwards. That seems best. The best way to notice what is best and just in reach and which leads to better places. How to make progress towards the things in your imagination that you see out there.
Relaxed again and looking around there doesn’t seem to be anything urgent just now. You’ve got your tea. You’re reading this and being carried along. But look! Over there - you can see travelators with lots of different books coming into view. That journey to there looks like more of a commitment than just skipping over to the tea travelator. This choice seems like it’s gong to take a little more effort but let’s try. The closer you get the more you see persevering with that travelator seems committing yourself to a travelator that moves at a rate you’re not yet sure will be comfortable and then - wow - it branches into many others. But you can choose which to join as always, or…things are moving slow here you can leap back to here again without much fuss. But those others do offer you, as it were, more options and they bring new things into view. But you will be carried forward once you take that leap onto it. You’re always being carried onwards. You’ve got no choice in that. Whether this goes to a better or worse place well: that’s at least partly on you. You can see some of what’s around. You’re only limited by your imagination. You can imagine some pretty bad stuff. That’s ok: best to do what it takes to avoid bringing that any closer. Choose to switch tracks. Switch to what’s going to carry you to the good stuff.
Imagination is the mind’s capacity to see across the multiverse.
To actually experience what is for youfor now only in your imagination means working towards it which means making active choices. What you are determined to do is determined by the laws of physics but you can choose between the things that are determined to happen.
Reality is like an infinite number of conveyer belts moving all in one direction: time away from the Big Bang. But some conveyer belts lead to far more interesting, fun and wondrous places than others. You can see some of these places. That is the power of your capacity to create. You can imagine a better place. That place is real (so long as it does not violate any physical law). You need to jump, leap, trot across the moving walkways making your way towards that thing you see. It may be a very long way off. You may not see it clearly. But it is there. And the more you focus on it the clearer not only it becomes but the route to getting there - the sequence of travelators you must traverse - becomes clear too. Step here, step there, watch out, this one’s fast. A little slower here. Bend down quick. Jump over that. Step, jump to the side, up and over and you’re nearly there. Wait - this looks like a maze and - bam. You’re knocked down. Oh that hurt a bit and damn! You’ve gone backwards. Never mind pick yourself up and - there it is again but wait! That over there. That looks even better. Let’s go there it’s closer and a far easier journey. Well now this is just too much fun! And someone has taken your hand and they’re helping you and now you’re in this together. Fantastic.
Between you and what you have imagined but are enjoying the journey towards now are other interesting places to experience and people to journey with. Many seem to have advice and offer assistance in ways to help you fly across the travelators much faster than you ever thought possible. Choosing to join travelators that have certain books or lead to certain people or require you to solve certain puzzles and problems or in some other way deliver you new ideas help you see new possibilities on the horizon. New ideas expand what you can see and imagine and then illuminate the path across travelators to make what is on the distant horizon something that is now well within reach for you to truly experience. The best source of new ideas besides books are other people. Although even books are really just other people talking to you when you cannot have them next to you. People and the ideas of people - these are what help you bring into view what you want and make it more beautiful and make it the journey there fun and worthwhile.
These travelators of time carry you irrevocably forwards and away from the start of it all and the start of your life. The pace of change when you pause to rest is not yours to choose either. Rather much is completely out of your control going on around you and no matter the choice you make it goes on - all determined to do so by a set of laws you can only vaguely guess at that controls all the motions of all the travelators and what is being built out there and brought into view. You don’t determine much of it - but you do determine some of it. Right now for example you can choose to go in this direction or that. Hopping upon this conveyer belt or not. How do you know which one to choose to get on? Which way left or right? You need to look and see what is the place you wish to experience. Envision it. It’s real. Now the world before you reveals itself as problems: the problems of travelators to get between here and there. I can’t tell you which belts get you where. That’s your job to figure it out (create the knowledge!) to bring that distant thing ever closer to you - to bring yourself ever closer to it and so you begin to see it ever more clearly and see ever more clearly exactly what it takes to get there.
It’s all determined. It’s all going on. It - that other better world you want with all you want in it is already there really happening. Copies you of you right now have already got there. Other copies of you chose poorly. They’ve been left behind going the wrong way. But they are in the tiny slender minority because you being you make the good choices you tend to and so have a purpose. Your purpose is to solve your problems - without this ever coming to an end. Even death if you can. But that’s just one problem. You’ve got many more to solve before that. What problems exactly? Again: that’s for you to figure out. There are preferences you have - things you would rather be experiencing and you can envision those because they are real. That is the great unique power of being a person. This capacity to see a landscape of possibilities that are actualities and can be experienced by you if only you choose to make the choices. Choose to move in that direction. How? Create the knowledge of how to make the requisite choices possible.
People can see genuine possibilities in physical reality. All fiction is fact somewhere in the multiverse. Or: everything in your imagination that does not violate the laws of physics is real somewhere in the multiverse. If it’s at all physically possible for people to experience then some people in the multiverse are *determined to* experience it. Which is to say they are experiencing it. Now. And if it’s a dream of yours, why shouldn’t you strive to be one of those people? __________________________ Afterward: The relationship between consciousness and its contents including the products of our imagination and the capacity to choose are unknown - let alone any of them explained by our present understanding of the laws of physics. You are a physical thing that makes choices as my story above tries to illustrate. Something of the character of our experience as multiversal beings I have tried to capture here but I cannot help but encounter genuine problems with the analogy. It seems that while the travelators obey one set of laws, you, the traveller in my story making the choices herein appears to obey different laws of physics. But that should not be so. Everything in this world obeys “travelator laws” - the traveller cannot help but be carried along - and just as any object on a travelator is (including the travelator itself - whatever that represents exactly). The difference is that you - the traveller - can make choices and "choices" are something that no travelator and seemingly nothing else ever brought into view can do. Except for other travellers - specifically people - on the travelators they make choices to do the things to have the experiences they wish to. Which means creating the knowledge of how to make reality around them what they want it to be like. To take what is in their imagination and to actualise it right in front of them.
People are unique in this world. Only peoplestep from travelator to travelator because people are the only entities that see that there are other travelators. They’re the only entities that see possibilities. Options. And that those possibilities can be actively chosen. By them. By understanding them and what it takes (at least in part) to bring themselves into a world with the things they want - the things they imagine. Other objects including other living things that are not people lack the revenant “eyes” so to speak. They can’t look side to side and see the possibilities which is to say understand that there is possibility. If they have eyes then they are like the eyes of owls - but owls that can never move their heads. Other animals on travelators for are staring always straight ahead. Their heads and eyes fixed in one direction. They can see what’s up ahead of them and only what’s up ahead of them. The lion can rear up as it sees another lion strange to it up ahead. It cannot look to the right or left and consider those other possibilities where it could have done otherwise. Indeed in no universe does it. It never chooses. You can see what’s going to happen. It cannot. It just does what the that travelator it is on takes it to.
But we can choose another travelator. This is free will and choice in a fully deterministic physical reality. Your choice is determined by what you can imagine is possible. And what you imagine is possible is bound by what you think the laws of physics are and that knowledge is bound by what the laws of physics actually are.
Another problem with my analogy here is that you the traveller see copies of yourself really experiencing the world you are striving for. And copies of yourself at all stages along the way - even if some of them are not quite clear. The thought experiment would seem to imply a very crowded place and it is in reality we of course have no actual experience of it being crowded. My thought experiment here violates that part of quantum theory prohibiting us from actually seeing how crowded with copies of us the multiverse is right around us. But here we are not actually seeing. This is an analogy. Seeing is an analogy for your imagination. And in a sense even "genuine" seeing is just that. We are minds trapped in the darkness of our skulls. We imagine what reality seems like once the eye has collected photons and the retina converted their energy into electrical impulses and the mind interpreted those neural firings. We don't see our copies ever - we are alone. Alone but for the companions we choose (and perhaps some we do not from time to time) and only if we uses our imagination does the place get crowded again: but just in that direction of our imagining. And that line of people between us and the better world we can imagine are giving us important information: do this to make a little progress towards that thing you can only imagine for now but is real.
The point here at the end now is that right now, you’re here. And from here you’re determined to go somewhere. Why not choose to go towards where things are better. You’re completely free to do so. Just don’t expect to exceed the speed of light, know simultaneously with perfect precision the position and momentum of any particle around you nor use more energy than is available in the universe. Everything else is yours, and ours, for the making.
