A disclaimer on my philosophy on the world

A draft version. I've pushed this out publicly now so that I can more easily get comments form certain family members and friends, but this text might get minor or major revisions in the near future. In particular the style might be inconsistent at times. I'll update this text when it is polished.

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This is basically a statement or a disclaimer about my philosophical views about life, universe and everything. Or at least on how I try to view the world. I've never studied philosophy beyond high-school philosophy 101, so what follows might very well be quite naive and unoriginal. But I recently read a blog post that had the following quote¹:

"When you write, you have to explain something in words, and that forces you to think through the details. You can't fudge things the way you can in your head. Writing forces you to be precise."

So I feel that there is value in putting these things to words, if not otherwise then to for the sake of myself. Moving them from my computer and notebooks to a public blog also encourages me to polish them up a bit more than I would otherwise bother to do.

I've also been recently reading on the humanists' view on the world, and in one of their² books³ Soininvaara discusses on the importance of not only using language but to use it publicly so that others might respond to your thoughts for the benefit for everyone involved. Admittedly, the commenting on this blog is on only intermittently but I find it more intellectuelly honest to state my ideas publicly.

So let's get to it. I'll try to expose here some basics of my approach to both on how I try to understand the world and what I currently think on consciousness.

The natural world and how to understand it

In life, at least so far, one of the biggest fascinations for me has been to try to understand the world. There is a lot in the world to be understood, and with my natural tendency⁴ towards analytical thinking my focus has usually focused to the more physical side of the world. I like to see how mechanical things work and read on thoughts about how the universe might be put together. I was one of those kids who loved taking machines apart try to see what makes them tick. Still am.

I do find also humans, societies, politics, social networks and the like interesting, but I don't think I have a similar knack in understanding people and social situations as I have for understanding mathematics and mechanical topics. Nor do I feel such a yearn towards comprehension and study as I do with e.g. mechanical objects. In recent years I have been trying to extend myself in this by studying the humanistic point of view to the world, but I have the nagging feeling that I am just using my existing mental toolkit and I am trying to absorb a new framework by forcing it to my existing mental models. I think I would really need to get more involved with more humanistic scholars who could call me up on my thinking.

Anyway. My scientific brain was forged to its current shape largely in the flames of mathematics with a bit of natural science added for flavor. I'm not sure if it's experience or just old age, but as years pass I've grown increasingly aware of how all of that math and science is happening as a human action. And so the value of humanities keeps increasing in my world view. So next I'll try to verbalize next what I think of math, physics and humanities in the context of trying to make sense of the world.

Mathematics

Mathematics is the domain of pure and absolute truth. It is an absolutely rigid method of going from axioms to unavoidably true consequences. It's also very remarkably able to turn this lens onto itself and prove that not all true things are provable. It can also be beautiful and hard in ways that can't be found elsewhere. I do find mathematics to be one of crown jewels of human thought.

And like crown jewels it's purpose is not really to be useful, per se. There are applications of math, of course, but any step in an applied direction immediately breaks down tha absolute nature of mathematics. I sometimes think about the scene in the movie Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan has built a beautiful glass or crystal machine/ship/palace on Mars and it shatters from a single blow of a human hand. It was made for great and complex things with no tolerance of outside influence without shattering completely. To me it sometimes feels very much like a metaphor of mathematics.

Despite this challenge, mathematics has a very clear role in my personal approach to making sense of the world as it provides an absolute comparison point. For an example: let's think about the volume of a spherical object in the world. There are no mathematical spheres in the real universe as any object turns discrete when studied at the level of molecules or atoms, and if we dive to the quantum level the whole idea of an "object" or its "boundary" is, if not meaningless, then at least very complex concept. But if you ask me to calculate the volume of a football with radius of 22cm I have no issue of using the formula for the volume of a mathematical sphere. The idea, for me at least, is that while the football is not a mathematical sphere it is nevertheless approximated reasonably well by one in this context. If I decide to use the volume of a mathematical sphere formula, or if I decide that it is not valid, then there will be in the background some kind of argument on why in this context the level of approximation is or is not good enough. From this point of view the mathematical background also gives rise to improved communication with other people. If we all use the mathematical sphere as the absolute reference point then we can compare our approaches by discussing how much we think the current context differs from the absolute one.

So what we get here is that the backbone of many of my approaches to understanding the world start from a rigid mathematical baseline. The absoluteness of the mathematical structure dissolves in contact with the real situation, but it does give a⁵ reference point. Furthermore the mathematical machinery in my head is very good at detecting and parsing various functional relations and connections between topics. It goes a bit beyond the scope of this text, but after a decade of university level math, and half of that in research, my brain has learned interesting mental frameworks. One of the main "superpowers" for me would probably be the capability of noticing that several different phenomenon are actually just different facets of some larger concept. And noticing these things in new environments is one of my favourite mathematical joys.

Physicality

In mathematics I'm pretty much agnostic or nihilistic towards questions about Platonism i.e. if mathematical objects really exist or if they are human constructs. I have no idea which way I feel about it and I find it sort of irrelevant even for my more abstract mathematical work. The whole question feels to me like asking if math is blue if it had a color. In the realm of natural philosophy, however, I have a very strong feeling that there does exist an objective reality independent of how we humans or I as a person observe it. This is of course something disagreeable, but it does form a sort of axiom in my framework of world-understanding. I do also feel that this is supported by the observation that scientists and scientific theories do tend to converge on similar concepts like "mass and movement exist" in different cultural settings.

So suppose there is an objective reality. How do we make sense of it? Since I think that the objective reality exists independent of human thought, I feel that it is not enough to just sit and think really hard with your eyes and ears closed. Or to just debate it in an isolated cave with other philosophers. To understand the world we must observe the world. We should do the observations first. And after. And then repeat. Keep observing as much as is reasonable, and try to figure out theories that explain those observations as a secondary excercise. You shouldn't go around trying to find data for your theories but put your observations first and let the theories live and change based on what you really see. So in essence what I am humbly proposing here is that the scientific method might be a good idea.

There's a catch, though. In my world view you cannot form absolutely true statements outside of mathematics, and any mathematical truths are vacuous from the world's point of view. So what can you really then say after all your observations and the fancy idea that you've built to explain them? No physical theory we build from our data will be true in the absolute sense so what can we do? To me the answer is that this is not a problem but simply the state of the world. ("It's not a bug, it's a feature!")

We can have varying degrees of belief about the verity of the theories we form and how much we believe that other peoples' theories are valid. There is a name for a mental framework you use to try and make sense of all these degrees of belief, and by the beautiful Cox's theorem it is simply called probability theory. Simply put, Cox's theory claims that if you have a system that you use to assign degrees of belief to events that satisfy a few quite natural basic axioms, then you can just reparametrize what you are doing into probability theory, i.e. you are aldready doing probability theory but you're just using nonstandard language. Once you've gotten to the mindset that probability theory is a nice (or unavoidable) tool for modelling the world, Bayesianism⁶ can then be a next natural step as the framework you use to actually make sense of it all. For a more practical introduction to the topic for anyone working with scientific data, I really liked Sivia's book on the topic.

So for the techincal side of things, in making sense of the world I am a fan of probability theory as the core and Bayesianism as the framework. But we should be a bit careful here, since Cox's theorem is again a mathematical theorem. Meaning that it is mathematically true, but all guarantees are lost if we try to use it in our messy world. So in real world there is no guarantee that Cox's theorem is true. Furthermore, in any real life situation you cannot actually calculate a single exact probability with the Bayes formula. But here, like with the volume of a ball of radius 22cm the whole idea is that this will still work as an absolute reference point. We can't really do exact probabilities, but we can use the theoretical version as a yardstick. And in some limited situations where we can control more of the variants, we can test how humans really act to detect various types of biases that we can have in our decision making.

I've focused here a lot on the challenges on how to create understanding from observations. This is natural as this is what feels to be more about "thinking", and improving "thinking" is what I often feel is what I need to improve upon. But I wish to emphasize that no amount of thinking power or scientific method can save you from not observing the world. It is easy to look but hard to see, and we have so many blockers between what we notice and what is. These go from simple things like taking things for granted into various cultural biases or mental blindspots we have. It is futile to try to form any kind of list on the ways we are blind and deaf to the world. It might be even detrimental as such a list might suggest that there is a fixed list you need to work through and then you're done and see the world as it is. There are books by more knowledgeable people than me who have written in depth how little we really see about the world. Suffice it to say here that I've heard that there is a specific form of mindfullness practice where you try to learn how to again see the world as a child. When a you see a tree, your brain just preprocesses everything to you and informs you "it's a tree". When a small child sees a tree they will se a thousand leaves and a big trunk and some sky which might or might not be a part of the tree and the branches and the birds going around it and the hum of the wind in the tree is in their ears and... And next to them you look at this spectacle of movement, life and color of a million hues and say "yeah that's a tree" and go back to thinking about your grocery list. I believe we do this with everything all the time unless we really really focus. There are of coures good reasons for these types of optimizations, but it is still sometims a bit sad to me.

So just try to remember that you need to go look at the world. And when you look, you should really try to see. And when you do, remember to be humble and understand that it was still just a glimpse.

To summarize these thoughts about the physical world:

1. I deeply believe that there is an independent objective reality.
2. I also believe that the scientific method and Bayesianism (if these should even be listed as separate ideas) are some of the best possible tools we can use to make sense of the world.
3. I strongly believe that these methods are flawed, and for fundamental reasons any methods we might use would also be flawed.
4. We as human observers are even less perfect than the methods we've built as species in the past millenia.
5. Being aware of the imperfection of this all at all levels is crucial if you want to create a LessWrong understanding of the world.

This, in particular points 3, 4 and 5, are a natural segue into the art of humanities.

Actual life - the lens of humanities

So now the humanities. I've earlier written a bit on some of the reasons why I've recently started getting interested in humanities in general and general linguistics in particular, but that is describing more the starting spark. One of the things that really pulled me in was the combination certain ideas that prof. Soininvaara expresses very well in the book⁷ I mentioned earlier. Besides discussing the importance of language, he very eloquently drives in the point that humanities work in the context where all of your tools (mostly based on language) are flawed and biased from the start.

You study phenomena that are not independent objective concepts that you can study in a lab. Rather the concepts only exist in the world, they are created in the minds or interactions of people and do not only depend heavily on their subjective world-views but are often created by them. To study these events you have to use the non-objective tool of language, e.g. by having discussions, and then out of all this you try to eke out something that would improve your understanding of the world.

Trying to force this kind of research to the mold of natural science would most often⁸ end up badly. Pushing this all to a controlled laboratory situation will easily damage many of the moving parts that are crucial to the phenomenon. Instead the field of humanities needs to approach many concepts differently. And here we get to the idea of using different conceptual points of view when looking at a problem. Since the situation and our tools are imperfect by design, we should not be too worried about trying to make them "as perfect as possible". Instead we should be aware that any apporach only reveals a part of what we are studying. So we can have different tools to study a situation, and we can use them together even if they might be, strictly speaking, logically contradictory with each other or even by themselves. Even methods like Freudian interpretations of symbols might be considered nowadays invalid by psychological standards, but they still get at least mentioned surprisingly often in various books on linguistics I've recently read. And a part of the reason they are mentioned if not used is that despite they are not considered scientifically valid any more, they still provide a special approach to view a situation. An approach that was widely used by many great thinkers. So understanding others' approaches you might need to at least familiarize yourself with the core idea, and using it might even reveal some facet of the phenomenon you are studying.

To my eyes this sort of supports my earlier discussion on the importance of making observations in the world. And hopefully reporting them. In the field of humanities I feel there is a kind of built in idea that you should always be aware that you can see the world through various distorting lenses. Observing about phenomena is then not only about describing a set of measurements, but reporting on what lenses you were using to observe the situation and how a particular framework would then interpret what you were observing. And here I have been finding a lot of new value in reading the basics of some humanities subfields. It is opening up new ways for me to see the world, and this improves my capabilities of observing the world. Both by seeing new facets and by understanding some of the limitations of everything I observe.

Now, I don't want to make it sound like I only appreciate humanities in how they help me on my task of understanding the (mechanical) world. Humanities is by its core about humans and not atoms. On the other hand, most of what I know of e.g. atoms is based on what other humans have told be through language. I have not built measurement devices to analyze the structure of matter, and I probably never could.⁹ Instead I am building massive parts of my understanding in some socio-cultural context that I am not usually consciously aware of.

So all we do as humans happens in the human framework, coloured by the human experience. I can only discuss high-dimensional topology or quantum mechanics because there are other people who have used language in such a way that coherent thoughts and topics like these can travel between human minds. And even though I believe that there is an objective reality, I think that our conceptual model of it is very much subjective. Especially since I believe that the objective reality is independent of humans, there should be no reason why the core baseline of existence should easily map into anything that our neural networks are built to handle. So the reality is always lossily projected into the very limited conceptual space of ideas that fit into my head.¹⁰

So reality is. But to understand it we can only hope to try to understand the proxy version that can be mapped to what we can do as humans. The distorting lens we get here is very much what the humanities have spent a lot of time analyzing, and I have benefitted a lot from my currenlty very brief and amaeteurish skim into their traditions.

Understanding the world with these tools

So putting this together, how do I approach understanding the world? On the one hand I claim that I build everything on top of the scientific method and a Bayesian belief updates, but I don't really spend a lot of time making measurements or calculating a posteriori probabilities. Instead I get most of my information on the physical observations from the world via language. I read what a book on physics says, I might do some checks that the math chekcs out or is consistent, and maybe even consider some faux-Bayesian heuristics on if some wild new theory sounds plausible or like an overfit. And I should constantly remind myself that I am absolutetly riddled with various biases, most of which I am completely oblivious to. But I very much rely on the core idea that I can trust the scientific community.

A lot of this trust of course comes from getting my PhD. During that I really did usually go through the gritty details of research papers and verify that they hold water. In math you can even do it all in the relative comfort of an office. (Though I did actually spend some time in a physics lab to wrap my head properly around the scientific method.) After the n:th time of truly verifying that the scientific community is not lying you start to trust what you read more and more. And after slowly turning from being a student into being a member of the scientific community you start to see the self-enforcing social structures that work in the background, making it easier and easier to rely on the giants whose shoulders you have to stand on to make any new research.

Consciousness

Let's now turn to the other side of the distorted lenses that I view the world with and try and see if there actually is anyone on the other side. In the question of "How can I make sense of the world?" there is a built-in assumption that there is some sort of an "I" in here/there that is the protagonist of the sense-making. Let's dive into this assumption by discussion a bit about consciousness.

A hard word to spell, a weird concept to understand. In a nushell, I think that "I" is a concept in the same category as centrifugal force or the idea of a Tuesday. It exists, but it is not an independent thing like mass or an apple. So to me the statement "I am conscious." is not false but ill-formed since it presupposes a well-defined "I". This belief is mostly based on my short-term practices of meditation and mindfullness. My longest contiguous effort of daily meditation lasted for half a year and I think I got glimpses of the fact that "I" is only one player on a stage where things just appear. I recommend Sam Harris' Waking up and the related app if you're interested in trying to replicate such a glimpse.

In this topic I can rely very little in my scientific background, so verbalizing any of my ideas is quite hard. I'll nevertheless try my best here, though it largely feels like groping around in the dark.

My vague ideas put badly into words

My general feeling is based on the following "axioms" that I think should or might be true. In these you should mentally put each "me" and "I" into very bold quotation marks.

1. There are many things happening inside of my brain.

2. Some of these things I am aware of, many others not.

3. Some of these things, or a combination of them, sometimes get the bright idea that they form an "I".

4. The rolling bumblefuck of things that considers them an "I" thinks that they are a unique instance inside my brain.

So putting these together I kinda feel that I would like to say that "I think that I am much more than that part of me that thinks to be 'me' and thinks it's running the show." But the sentence is sort of broken since I only have the one word for "I" and it's referring to many things in this sentence that is also sort of saying that there is no "I". I'm sure that if I would familiarize myself with the literature, they would have some collection of more nuanced terms to help with this, but alas I am very much an amateur in here.

With this conclusion I don't mean to say that I don't exist or that the somewhat illusory "I" is meaningless. Those things in my head that create the illusion of "I" do exist. But it is not the whole picture. But it is kind of hard to figure out how much of my "conscious action" is done by the parts who say "I". In Cialdini's Influence the author mentions several studies that suppor the idea that a very large part of we do is make up stories for our behaviour. We make decisions for possibly somewhat random or emotional reasons, but then create a convincing story on how our decision was based on serious logical thought. The point is not that we would create such stories only for others, but for ourselves as well.¹¹ From this point of view it is then hard to figure out "who" exactly is writing this text; is it being written by one of the parts that thinks itself as an "I" or is it generated by some other part and the "I" is just creating a coherent story about it's involvement and primality on the fly.

Other peoples ideas put much better to words

Daniel Böttger's guest post on ACX resonated very deeply with me.

Humans are not concious. [...] Only thoughts are conscious, some of the time. The part of you that’s reading this right now and feels itself to be conscious, is a thought. Consciousness is not a thing [...] “Consciousness” is a funny word. It takes the adjective “conscious” and makes it into a noun. That noun is then easily mistaken for an actual thing in and of itself, something with a degree of independence, rather than merely an attribute or a characteristic of something else. You are not your consciousness [...] An additional error is made when people identify themselves with “their” consciousness. Not only do they wrongly assume that there’s a thing there to identify with; this assumed identity also creates false intuitions [...] Consciousness seems like there’s only one of it, since people usually believe there’s only one of themselves.

I would like to quote the whole thing here, which means that you should probably just go and read that one instead.

Final thoughts

The world exists. There are methods that can consistently help make sense of it. I exist but "I" doesn't; the "I" is just an illusion cooked up by the "I". In the sentence "I love my daughter." the implied feeling is true and exists, even though the sentence itself is somewhat silly since there is no real "I" to begin with.

So How do I make sense of the world? My conclusion here might be that "the world" is real and objective, the "I" is illusory and "make sense" is a completely subjective concept that only lives in the social collaboration of other people who also think they are conscious. But we are able to build up world-models that are beneficial for us, which I think means that they must be reflecting the real world at some level.

I feel like we still should rely on the idea that making observations about the world is a good starting point. Especially if you then use math or statistics to analyze your observations and try to keep an open mind in updating and improving your internal model of the world. And after that you should at least marvel at the fact that by using language several different people seem to be able to create a similar model of the world in their heads. Or at least similar with respect to the more mechanical apsects like "how gravity works". Besides just marveling, it might also be prudent to actively remember or even study on how the fact that this all arises from humans doing human things to and with each other, which brings in all kinds of side effects. Especially after considering that most of this is built on top of something as imperfect as human language.

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