So, how do all of us dummies get on board the peace train? Just change academia?
It is a truth train rather than a peace train. Those are two very different problems, and their relationship is what politics is all about.
Just change academia?
I don’t know how to solve that problem. It also involves a great deal of “politics”. The people who really matter either have to work outside academia, or expect to be viciously attacked for challenging orthodoxy and power structures.
I’m very excited about Gemini’s recommended curriculum for this purpose! Just one little problem - it takes 4 full-time academic years. But by considering less formal, more on-demand learning modalities, we might be able to mount this as an asynchronous online service.
The curriculum is indeed something which could be offered, and the world would be a better place if it was.
However, at the end of the day there is something much more spiritual about this, which does not take four years of academia. It is more like choosing to be confirmed, in Christian symbolism, or baptised as an adult. It is a commitment to take truth seriously, not to study it academically.
If it’s not a course of study, do you have any ritual in mind?
I’m less interested in the ritual itself and more interested in what values it represents.
So Geoff, you’ve correctly identified a problem: people, in general, are not ready or willing to digest big, complicated theories of everything. As you yourself have stated, even people on a forum like this one, nominally interested in paradigmatic cultural change, do not seem to value your work enough. Furthermore, the people on this forum represent a small portion of the population in terms of willingness to engage in abstract theoretical discussions, so if this is true of us, it is more true of the intended subjects of the cultural change. So, this leaves us with a problem: 1) your approach is based on the purported usefulness and correctness of your theory 2) this is something almost no one except you is capable of understanding 3) you are interested in cultural change, which would imply something collective, approachable, digestible, and easy to propagate. Am I missing something?
They don’t even get the point where they are capable of making a fair valuation of it. They are ignoring it. They therefore must be assuming it is irrelevant, based on something other than the work itself.
No. The problem is not that my theory is very difficult to understand. What is missing is the will to even try, not the capability of understanding. Maybe 20 people so far have engaged with it sufficiently, and actually tried to understand it, and then got back to me. From those people the reaction has been very positive indeed, but it is a tiny fraction of the number of people who have been made aware of its existence.
Yes, you are missing two things.
The first is that the most serious obstacle I face is people’s unwillingness to admit their current beliefs don’t actually stack up. This applies to physicalists, idealists, panpsychists, postmodern anti-realists and many other groups. Because no coherent model has been on offer, we’ve culturally become accustomed to believing in nonsense. Celebrating it, even. Most people do not seem to be capable of thinking deeply about the foundations of their own worldview, and anything which challenges those foundations is automatically treated as a threat. It is therefore ignored, which is a very easy option when faced with a new theory coming from a “non-official” source.
The second is that this is never going to be easily digestible, because we are not accustomed to thinking holistically. The “proof” of this theory is its scope, internal coherence, and explanatory power across many disciplines. This is the exact opposite of what we are familiar with. It requires right-hemisphere holistic thinking, and most of the population of the Western world are completely controlled by left-hemisphere reductionism. They demand that I prove it is correct using left hemisphere means: the single “kill-shot” empirical prediction. This is not possible, because the whole purpose of what I am doing is to show that a large number of problems are cleanly solved with the same basic model of reality. That necessarily requires a lot of integrated thinking, which most people do indeed find difficult.
Seems like you missed the point. You keep saying “they”, "most people’, and so on, bemoaning the people whose culture needs to change. “They” are terrible at getting it. Okay, so what’s your solution? Or do you not see “they” as part and parcel of the very problem that needs to be solved?
Do you endorse the work of Iain McGilchrist on brain laterialization?
Perhaps an example will help. This theory, at its core, is a new interpretation of QM, which synthesises Many Worlds and John von Neumann’s “consciousness causes collapse” (though actually it claims consciousness is collapse, and the cause is logical).
A very large number of people in the scientific community have spent their entire lives repeating nonsense about the metaphysics of QM. They are 100% certain that consciousness couldn’t possibly have anything to do with wavefunction collapse, and they respond to anybody connecting them with a one-sentence dismissal as “woo”, usually accompanied with something like “Here we go again. Another moron!”
In order to be able to begin understanding what I am proposing, somebody like this is required to do something completely new to them, which is to actually take seriously the idea that consciousness and collapse could be two names for the same process. In the vast majority of cases, this does not happen. They never even consider that I might be right, and that what I am saying might be important enough for them to actually try to understand it, because they dismissed me as an idiot the moment I mentioned consciousness and QM in the same sentence.
How do I solve that problem? I can’t. Those people will be the ones who resist this new paradigm the hardest. Most of them will probably die still believing what they do now. As Max Planck once said: “science advances one funeral at a time.”
100%. This is how the book starts (bold added in quote), and it is turning McGilchrist’s brain theory into a methodology. This is how I define the paradigmatic cultural change that is needed:
A new kind of paradigm shift | Two-Phase Cosmology
A new kind of paradigm shift is long overdue. This paradigm shift must change our concept of how paradigms shift, and redefine the confused relationship between science and philosophy. For its entire modern history, science has operated by breaking things down into ever smaller pieces, trying to understand and assess each piece in isolation, and hoping that a bigger picture will somehow emerge from the fragments. Sometimes, though very infrequently, something like this does actually happen, but until now it has only ever applied to one part of our model of reality, never the whole thing. Darwinian evolution is a good example of the sort of thing we think of as a major paradigm shift. It transformed our understanding of the origin of species, but the rest of the scientific account of reality was unaffected; there was no corresponding shift in physics or cosmology. In the new paradigm, the priority will be to discover and develop a model of the whole of reality, and the value of that model will be judged by its coherence and explanatory power across the entire spectrum of science, as well as adjacent parts of philosophy.
It is not that there is anything wrong, per se, with paying attention to the details. Far from it; the details absolutely do matter. The problem starts when individual proposed pieces of a potentially completable holistic model are conclusively rejected for inconclusive reasons, even in the absence of any coherent model of the whole. If we are not already in possession of a comprehensive model of reality, free from unresolvable anomalies and unanswerable questions, whose equations add up without the need to posit any unidentifiable “dark stuff”, then the strategy must change. Instead of just inventing new ways to zoom in, we need to be prepared to zoom out, and to start thinking outside the boxes we have built. The knee-jerk rejection of ideas we don’t like the sound of must stop. It is time to acknowledge, collectively as well as individually, that the failures of materialistic science have reached breaking point. The scientific community has now spent a century arguing about the implications of quantum mechanics for our model of reality, nearly three centuries failing to provide a credible account of consciousness1, and since the 1990s cosmology has degenerated into a tangle of proliferating paradoxes and deepening discrepancies. Those working within this field are well aware of this, but they are reluctant to communicate the scale of the problem to outsiders.2 Meanwhile, any proposed solution to these problems that isn’t some version of physicalism is dismissed with a contemptuous wave of the hand (no “woo woo” please, we’re scientists). And no, I am not attacking science, because the failures I am talking about aren’t empirical. They are philosophical failures dressed up in scientific clothing which manifestly does not fit.
The new paradigm begins from the same impulse that gave rise to modern science in the first place: the wish to understand reality as a single, intelligible whole. The difference is that this time, instead of just collecting ever more fragments, we must look for principles that can make the fragments fit together. The central example of what this is the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. I will start with a relatively unproblematic claim: that quantum wavefunction collapse and consciousness are both processes. More controversially, there are five notable similarities between them.
1: Both have proved extremely difficult for scientists to pin down, define and test.
2: As a result of (1), a significant number of scientists have controversially concluded that they don’t actually exist (resulting in the Many Worlds Interpretation and Eliminative Materialism respectively).
3: Wavefunction collapse is typically described as being triggered by an “observation” or “measurement”. Consciousness is the internal subjective experience of some kind of external reality. Therefore, both processes fundamentally involve a relationship between a subjective entity (an observer or a conscious subject) and an external, objective reality.
4: Wave-function collapse is famously non-local: the collapse at one location instantaneously affects the entire wave function, no matter how far it is spread across space. Consciousness is equally resistant to strict localisation: there is no single “seat” or moment where a unified field of experience arises; it emerges all at once from processes distributed across the brain (and, I will argue, beyond it). Both phenomena refuse to be restricted to a classical space-time point; both demand a fundamentally holistic description.
5: Consciousness involves the modelling of a mind-external reality, and assigning value to the various possible futures in order to select a best option. Wavefunction collapse involves the reduction of a set of unobserved physically possible outcomes into a single observed actual outcome. Therefore, both processes involve the transition between a range of possible futures or histories, and a single observed outcome in the present.
Now the difference between the old paradigm and the new can be made clear. The old paradigm approach to this is to examine each claim individually, demand irrefutable empirical justification, and consider the alternative explanations which are available. This is likely to result in the rejection of all five, not because of any clear justification for ruling them out, but for inconclusive reasons: there are too many competing theories (some of which are more to our personal taste), empirical confirmation is complicated, elusive or impossible, and the whole thing feels like woo. And anyway, correlations aren’t evidence of causation, so even if we accept that there really are five structural similarities, it doesn’t prove anything. There the discussion will be extinguished, no new thinking will take place, and we can all go back to our comfortable lack of a coherent model of reality.
The new paradigm takes the opposite approach: instead of breaking things down, it tries to integrate them into a bigger picture. First it takes seriously the idea that instead of being unrelated processes which just happen to share five similarities, consciousness and wavefunction collapse could be two different descriptions of a single process. Perhaps consciousness is the internal, subjective (“view from somewhere”) and wavefunction collapse is the external, objective (“view from nowhere”). Then it tries to figure out how this might actually work, not just physically but metaphysically. If a coherent and elegant synthesis starts emerging, then the old paradigm will insist on empirical verification of the synthesis itself, preferably involving shiny new mathematics, before any more integrative thinking is attempted. The new one zooms even further out: it asks how the proposed synthesis might be related to other major problems, especially those in cosmology. For example, could such a model help us to understand why we can’t quantise gravity, or shed any light on the Hubble Tension or the Cosmological Constant Problem? The old paradigm forbids this approach3. It actively resists it, places obstacles in its path and tells us that this is the only way science has ever progressed. It insists that every proposed piece of the Big Puzzle must be empirically verified before we can even start to imagine how the pieces might fit together. This is why it so rarely succeeds in even fitting two pieces together, and why it has about as much chance of delivering a grand synthesis as it does of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The new paradigm simply asks what kind of whole could make sense of the pieces we already have. All of them. Not just the ones that that don’t challenge our own assumptions and belief systems.
Are you aligned with Penrose on this?
So if you’re not solving their problem, whose problem do you solve? Please answer with a noun phrase.
Yes and no. Penrose is the best example of a well-known person who has seriously attempted to integrate consciousness, QM and cosmology into a single, coherent model of reality. So we are aligned in that goal. But Penrose is a physicalist – a strange sort of physicalist, because he openly admits that he doesn’t really know what “physical” means – but a physicalist nonetheless.
Penrose’s solution is also closer to mine than any other existing interpretation, but his model is the causal reverse of mine. He agrees that wavefunction collapse and consciousness are the same process, but in his model gravity causes collapse, whereas in mine collapse causes gravity. That is an oversimplification, but basically true.
I am solving their problem. They just don’t realise this, because they dismiss it without thinking about it. The same applies to the crisis in cosmology. The number of cosmologists who believe the Hubble Tension is even possibly being caused by a metaphysical mistake is tiny. Most cosmologists have never read any philosophy of mind, and just assume physicalism is true. If you offer them a metaphysical response to the Hubble Tension their brain doesn’t know what to do with this information. So they ignore it, having made no effort at all to understand it.
They did the same to Thomas Nagel, and he’s one of the most famous philosophers alive. Mind and Cosmos was viciously attacked by the scientific community, but their objections were entirely based on a complete failure to understand the reasoning. The reasoning itself was faultless. The problem was that Nagel was breaking a taboo – he claimed consciousness evolved teleologically.
Solving a problem in a way that isn’t recognized as a solution by those who have the problem. Is this not… part of the problem? Or does presentation not matter to you? Suppose you wrote a 10,000 page novel that introduced your ideas and no one read it. This would be on you, no? You could be faulted for not being able to express your ideas more cogently and falsifiably, right? So, presentation is part of the problem.
How does your model compare to this?
"1. The “Consciousness Causes Collapse” Theory
Pioneered by physicists John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner, this idea suggests that quantum probabilities only resolve into a definite reality when a conscious mind perceives them. In this view, inanimate measuring instruments aren’t enough; the chain of observation must end in a subjective experience"
It is closely related, but with a couple of crucial modifications. Most importantly I do not claim consciousness causes collapse. That sets up a problematic dualism – it imagines consciousness as a self-existing “substance-like thing” which “pokes” the physical world from the outside. Wigner himself eventually rejected this interpretation for another reason – if your consciousness is causing collapse in your body, and my consciousness is causing collapse in my body, how to these two consciousness combine to share a single objective reality? Whose consciousness is collapsing the whole of reality? Finally there is the problem of “what happened before the first conscious animal evolved”? If you take neuroscience seriously, and accept that brains are necessary (though insufficient) for consciousness, then who collapsed the wavefunction before there were any brains in the universe?
It is this last question to which I am supplying a revolutionary answer which is retrospectively obvious: nothing did. Before there were any brains, the cosmos was in a giant superposition. Effectively, Many Worlds was true. This directly answers the challenge Nagel set up at the end of Mind and Cosmos. He argued that consciousness can only have evolved teleologically, and suggests we need to search for teleological natural laws…but did not propose any. In the system I am describing, we do not need any new laws, because the telos is structural. If MWI is true than it is guaranteed that brains will evolve, because all physical possibilities co-exist. All possible cosmoses and all possible timelines exist as possibilities, and when a brain appears in one branch then it selects that entire timeline as actuality. This would then appear exactly like consciousness evolved teleologically, but instead of requiring new laws, I am proposing a new interpretation of QM. Nagel barely mentioned QM in M&C. He made no attempt at that integration, which is why he failed to propose my two phase model.
It is this sequential combination of MWI and CCC which grounds the rest of the cosmology. This idea is both genuinely new, and genuinely revolutionary. Once you understand it, it seems incredible that nobody has thought of it before now, because with hindsight it is obvious. What has misled people is that word “causes” in “consciousness causes collapse”, because that leads to idealism or panpsychism, both of which assume consciousness can exist without a brain (which would invalidate the central mechanism and structure of my model).
It is a central part of the problem, yes. I write about it at length in the new book.
I spent thousands of hours getting the presentation right. Of course it matters. But some problems cannot be solved: if people are going to assume I am wrong without making any effort to understand what I am proposing, then there is no way for me to get through to those people. They will not be among the first adopters of the new paradigm. They will resist it.
Yes, which is why I have not attempted to put it in a novel. There is a fundamental problem with doing so, which is that novels are supposed to entertain, not to teach. What makes a story a good story has got very little to do with whether or not it could be a true account of reality.
I do not believe that my presentation of this theory, as non-fiction, could have been any better. That is not the problem. The problem is that if I am right, then almost everybody else has a belief system founded on something which is not true, and most people are unwilling to consider that as a possibility. This problem is to do with their psychology, not my presentation.