The Brouhaha Over Consciousness and “Pseudoscience” — John Horgan (The Science Writer)
The Brouhaha Over Consciousness and “Pseudoscience” — John Horgan (The Science Writer)
You’ve been playing low-stakes poker with a bunch of buddies for years. You might peek at someone’s cards now and then, but only as a joke. Suddenly your buddy accuses you of cheating. Shocked, you exclaim, What the hell! It’s just a game! Chill out! Something like that just happened in the field
This is still nagging at me - there's more I want to say. So, another response.
This particular theory is a pretty good illustration of the unfortunate ignorance of philosophy I mentioned, but an even better one is mentioned in the article - "the popular claim, advanced by philosopher Nick Bostrom and taken seriously by physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Chalmers, among others, that our reality is a simulation being run on a computer, as in The Matrix."
That's not just pseudoscience, but embarassingly ignorant. If these people had even the vaguest understanding of the idea, they'd recognize that it's about as far from science as it's possible to get.
The whole concept was first popularized by Descartes in the 17th century. He presented it as the possibility that one's perception of reality could be manipulated by an "evil demon," but the underlying concept was the same as "the Matrix."
But the thing is that it was never intended to be an actual theory of perception and consciousness - rather it was a thought experiment meant to illustrate the fact that it could be the case that our perceptions of reality are controlled by an evil demon (or are a computer simulation), and we could never know.
The exact point is that it's literally impossible to somehow step outside of our perceptions and our consciousness and analyze them, since any observations we might make are and can only be products of the very perceptions and consciousness we're trying to analyze. So they could be entirely right or entirely wrong or anything in between and we could never know, since they simply are and can only be whatever they are.
As far as that goes then, it not only falls astray of but pretty much explicitly illustrates the distinction between science and pseudoscience.
And if Tyson et al had even the faintest understanding of philosophy - if they weren't blinded by some ludicrously ignorant species of reductive physicalism - they'd already understand that, and recognize how foolish it is to treat the Matrix, or any other such idea, as a legitimate theory.
I totally agree. What we perceive around us is the reality we are trying to understand. A simulation is by definition a copy or simplified version of something occuring in reality. Describing our reality as a simulation is just meaningless, as it just somehow moves the definition of reality as "something above or beyond what we can experience". That is not useful and makes me think of flying spaghetti monster stuff.
Aa far as I've understood things correctly, IIT does position itself as philosophy though, and you can eg. find it in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
It's certainly legitimate in the metaphysics sense but it's unfalsifiable, which limits what can actually be done with the idea.
I'm pleased to see this.
In recent decades, science has been trying to move into areas, like consciousness, that are really philosophy, and all that does is fuck things up for everyone.
Yes - of course it's pseudoscience - it can't help but be, since it's all untestable.
The problem is that, by labeling it "science," whatever it is that someone proposes is immediately treated by devotees of scientism as certain fact, when in reality it's philosophy, and thus "fact" is a quality it can't even possess. And that's doubly a problem because not only is it not and can't ever be legitimately treated as fact but, not to put too fine a point on it, when it comes to philosophy, all too many scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about. In ways, many of them are even more ignorant than laypeople, since they tend to disdain and thus ignore the philosophy that's gone before them.
But... there also has to be room for us to change our understanding of reality. An overly dogmatic approach to science keeps us in the dark. The germ theory of disease was dismissed as pseudoscience for a long time, in favor of the widely accepted miasma theory.
Obviously, science requires a rigorous approach to examining reality. If an idea cannot be tested, it is not scientific and therefore exists only as speculation. But we can't just assume that our current models of reality are fundamentally correct and unassailable - we know that they're not, we know that the standard model is limited and fundamentally incomplete.
Check out this lecture: Consciousness and the Physics of the Brain. This idea is absolutely not science yet because we don't really have the tools to test it. But consciousness as we experience it must be the product of physical processes at some level, and therefore it should be possible to study it scientifically.
Conveniently enough, I just wrote another response to the thread, since there was more I wanted to say on the topic, and it addresses this.
It's not a matter of not having the tools to test theories of consciousness - it's more fundamental than that. We are consciousness. When we theorize on consciousness, we are engaging in consciousness. It's inescapable - it's the very thing that makes it possible to theorize. And it's entirely experiential - you necessarily experience your own consciousness and cannot possibly observe anyone else's. We are each and all, and necessarily, behind a veil of perception. It's literally impossible for it to be otherwise - to somehow step outside of consciousness and observe it, since the only thing that can meaningfully observe it is that same consciousness.
Yes - we can concevably at least make some good guesses regarding the physical processes that correspond with our experiences of consciousness, but that's necessarily the extent of it. Again, it's not simply that we don't have the tools to do more than that, but that it's inherently impossible for it to be otherwise.
Personally, I do think, philosophy should not exist without a scientific basis. So, science should research questions that arise from philosophy.
However, the concept of consciousness underpinning most of modern philosophy, morals, laws etc. is entirely unscientific.
And in that respect, yeah, I do also think that science should not bend over backwards to accomodate that. It's society that needs to catch up.
IIT confuses me. Every time I try to understand it, it sounds like incoherent pseudoscience using technical-sounding language that doesn't actually describe anything actionable. Yet it's also very popular and has some implementations approximating its metric? Maybe I'm just dumb... Though I'm pretty sure random networks of XOR gates aren't conscious fwiw.
I really enjoyed this article. It's very validating to see that other people see the same issues as I do with pseudoscience, especially when spouted by reputable scientists.
The field of psychology, in particular, still feels riddled with pseudoscience everywhere you look (probably due to being so young compared to other fields), which has already severely undermined its reputation in the eyes of many people I've talked to.
I didn't know about IIT specifically, but I've definitely heard way too much quackery around the concept of consciousness. To me, the first issue that I find around this topic is the lack of an operational definition. There seems to be no agreement about what are we looking for exactly. If we are going to look for this human-made construct called consciousness, first we need a clear definition that allows us to measure it, and separate what is conciousness from what isn't. Once we have that definition, we can search for consciousness, and after that, then we can start making theories about how it emerges.
Completely agreed. Quantum Woo is all over, and being used as "evidence" to support all sorts of unscientific bullshit.
But what makes it so insidious is that, to many laymen, it sounds scientific. Quantum Woo peddlers deliberately use confusing terminology to make their ideas sound profound and scientific.