How to deal with non-realism?

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May 22, 2012

From Being a Realist (even if you believe in God):

theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.

My mother, who doesn't call herself a theist (I think she's agnostic), doesn't even accept realism. She doesn't even agree with this:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique. The corollary is, we all live in the same reality. We do not percieve it in the same way, but our perceptions and reality itself aren't the same thing.

Every description of reality that matches it is true. Every description of reality that doesn't match it is false. In this sense, truth is unique and universal.

(We can nuance the truth/falsehood dichotomy with probability distributions. Some probability distributions are closer to reality than others, and so on.)

That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

I'm happy to have finally found the root cause of our ongoing disagreement, but now, how can I deal with that? It looks pretty hopeless, but just in case, does someone have a suggestion, or should I just leave it at that? (My ego doesn't like it, but giving up is an option.)

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

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Mitchell_Porter

24 points

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I can't accept your philosophical diagnosis without knowing more about how it was obtained. What did you do, email her the three paragraphs and ask what she thought? Your comment history shows there's a long backstory here, that you are an enthusiastic believer in a complex of ideas including Bayesianism, uploading, and immortalism, and there's a persistent clash about this with people who are close to you. You call your mother a philosophical "non-realist", she says you're a control freak who doesn't want to die... Clearly we need a new Balzac (is it Houellebecq?) to write about this 21st-century generation gap, in which the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists. It sounds wonderfully dialectical and ironic: your mother's intellectual permissiveness probably gave you the space in which to develop your rationality, and yet your rationality now turns you against her radical open-mindedness or principle of not believing anything. Extreme agnosticism is not the same as "non-realism", and she probably rejects your "tautologies" because they seem to come packaged with a lot of other stuff that she wants to reject.

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"Extreme agnosticism" sounds mostly accurate. She will doubt as a matter of principle, but she won't put a probability on that doubt. As for why I believed what I wrote here…

We talked. A lot. It spanned over multiple conversations, for several months, if not over a year. First, I tried to talk about transhumanist things, like mind uploading. She found it impossible sounding, scary, horrible, and sad. We talked about the potential power of science. She seems to think that science isn't omnipotent (sounds true enough), and some specific things, like the understanding of the human soul, seems definitely out of reach. But I don't recall she ever stuck her neck out and flatly said that there's no way science could ever unravel the mysteries of our minds, even in principle (I personally have some doubt, because of the self-referencing involved. But I don't think these difficulties would prevent us from understanding enough low-level mechanisms to effectively emulate a brain.).

We moved on to more basic things, like reductionism. She often "accuses" me of wanting to control everything with math. So I tried to assert that our world is math all the way down, even if it's way too complicated for us to actually use accurate math. But she doesn't seem to make the bridge between the laws of physics and a full human brain. She seems to assert that there is something there that is by nature incomprehensible. But when I call that "magic", she rejects the term.

At some point, I wrote this (French or English depending on your browser settings). I don't think very highly of it, but I thought it would at least serve my point: stopped being called intolerant just because I take the logical step from believing something to asserting that someone who doesn't believe it is mistaken. (Modulo tiny uncertainties.) It didn't work at all. She just found it juvenile, besides the point, and by the way, the colour of my socks and the existence of God are not the same thing, and should not be reasoned about in the same way. My informal formulation of the Auman's agreement theorem also fell on deaf ears.

We had some more fruitless debates, where I believe she doesn't understand me, and where she believe she perfectly understands me, but I cannot perceive her arguments the same way humans can't perceive ultra-violet, which is why I reject them, the same way some ignorant fool would say "there's no such thing as invisible light". This feels very close to saying that I lack some brain circuitry, though I don't think she would actually say that if I asked. But I do feel like I talk to some mystic who claim to have higher perceptions, and I should not call them hallucinations just because I lack them. (Sounds like Freudian psychoanalysis: If you don't believe it, something is wrong with you.) Of course, her high status (being my mother and older than me) doesn't help. Heck, she even said she used to think like me, but got past that. So I'm clearly immature. I suspect she hopes I will understand her when I get older.

So I ended up writing this (French only for now). She hasn't read it so far, but I told her about the first paragraphs (which I roughly translated in my post here). Then she told me there's something wrong with this. (But again, she won't outright contradict me, and say there isn't a world out there.)

By the way, she thinks I believe all that stuff for some "deep reason", which I take to mean "something unrelated to the actual accuracy of such beliefs". She thinks I have some deep fear inside that makes me cling to that. (No kidding: I see small hopes of making a paradise out of our world, and I would give up on them? OK, if it's impossible after all, let us enjoy our short lives. But if there is a possibility, then missing it is unforgivable.) Strangest of all, she sees a contradiction between my humanistic, left-wing, environmentalist ideas, and my consequentialist, positivist, transhumanist ideas.

Now to her credit, I must note that she probably changed her mind about longevity: without taking into account some problems like world population, she wouldn't be against doubling our life expectancy, or more. Living forever seems too much yet, but a couple centuries seems like a good idea. (She is closer to death lately: her aunt, which she loves dearly, starts to have health problems that may prove serious in the coming years, if not months.)

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Mitchell_Porter

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One way to test your mother's attitude to science, explanation, and so on, would be to see what she thinks of theories of the mind which sound like nonreductionistic quantum mysticism to you. What would she think of the theory that qualia are in the quantum-gravity transitions of the microtubule, and the soul is a bose-einstein condensate in the brain? I predict that she would find that sort of theory much more agreeable and plausible. I think she's not hostile to reality or to understanding, she's hostile to reductionism that falsifies subjective reality.

People here and elsewhere believe in ordinary reductionist materialism because they think they have to - because they think it is a necessary implication of the scientifically examined world - not because that outlook actually makes sense. For someone who truly believes in an atomistic physical universe, the natural belief is dualism: matter is made of atoms, mind is some other sort of thing. It's only the belief in the causal closure and causal self-sufficiency of atomistic physics that leads people to come up with all the variations of mental materialism: eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, various "identity theories" such as functionalism. A lot of these so-called materialisms are actually dualisms, but they are property dualism rather than substance dualism: the mind is the brain, but it has properties like "being in a certain state of consciousness", which are distinct from, yet somehow correlated with, properties like "being made of atoms arranged in a certain way".

I regard this situation as temporary and contingent. It's the consequence of the limitations of our current science and currently available concepts. I fully expect that new data from biology, new perspectives in physics, and a revival of rigorous studies of subjectivity like transcendental phenomenology, is eventually going to give us a physically monistic account of what the self is, in which consciousness as it is subjectively experienced is regarded as the primary ontological reality of self-states, and the traditional physical description as just an abstracted account, a mathematical black box which does not concern itself with intrinsic properties, only an abstracted causal model. But abstracted causal models are the whole of natural-scientific ontology at the present time, and materialists try to believe that that is the fundamental nature of reality, and the aspect of reality which we experience more or less directly in subjectivity, is some sort of alien overlay.

The folk opposition to reductionist materialism derives to a large degree from people in touch with the nature of subjective experience - even if they can't express its nature with the rigor of a philosopher - and who perceive - again, more intuitively than rigorously - how much of reality is lacking in a strictly "mathematical" or "naturalistic" ontology. In rejecting reductionism, they are getting something right, compared to the brash advocates of materialist triumphalism, who think there's no problem in saying "I'm just a program, and reality is just atoms".

I know it must sound scandalous or bizarre to hear such sentiments on Less Wrong, but this really is the ultimate problem. The natural-scientific thinkers are trying to make models of the mind, but the intuitive skeptics are keeping them honest, and the situation will not be resolved by anything less than a new ontology, which will look in certain respects very "old" and retro, because it will reinstate into existence everything that was swept under the carpet of consciousness in order to construct the physical/computational paradigm of reality. It is very clear that people with a highly developed capacity for thinking abstractly are capable of blinding themselves to vast tracts of reality, in order to reify their abstractions and assert that these abstractions are the whole of reality. It is one particular form of belief projection to which "rationalists" are especially susceptible. And until the enormous task of perceiving and articulating the true ontology, and the way that it fits into science or that science fits into it, has been done, all that the enemies of premature reification can do is to make suggestive statements like this one, hoping that something will strike a chord and reawaken enough prescientific awareness in the listener for them to detach themselves a little from their constructs and "see" what the intuitives see.

Similarly, some part of the rejection of life extension through uploading comes from a rejection of the metaphysic implied. It looks like the uploader is denying reality. Life extension through rejuvenation is much more acceptable for this reason - though even there, the wisdom of the human race says that striving for literal immortality is unhealthy because it's surely impossible, and it's unhealthy to attempt impossibilities because it only sets you up for suffering when the inevitable comes. There are a bunch of other psychological issues here, about how much striving and how much uncertainty is rational, the value of life and the rationality of creating it, and so on, where I think transhumanism is often more in the right than tradition. But I will assert emphatically that the crude reductionisms we have available to us now are radically at odds with the facts of subjective experience, and so therefore they are wrong. It is better to revert to agnosticism about fundamental reality, if that is what it takes to retain awareness of subjectivity, rather than to reify mathematics and develop distorted ideas, so here I do side with your mother.

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I upvoted your comment/house because I think it can be looted for valuables, but not because I think it's sturdy enough to live in.

A lot of these so-called materialisms are actually dualisms, but they are property dualism rather than substance dualism: the mind is the brain, but it has properties like "being in a certain state of consciousness", which are distinct from, yet somehow correlated with, properties like "being made of atoms arranged in a certain way".

This is not true. The reductionist claim is that the arrangement of the atoms is entirely sufficient to produce consciousness, and not that there is consciousness and then the atoms. Until you shake this style of thought, you will never be able to see single-level-of-reality reductionism as anything more than a mutated form of dualism, which is not what it is.

But abstracted causal models are the whole of natural-scientific ontology at the present time, and materialists try to believe that that is the fundamental nature of reality,

No! Of course, if a more accurate map of reality is developed, the reductionists will say that "this is the closest we have to knowing the true base level of reality." Only strawman-level reductionists will say "this is the most accurate map we have? Okay, that's base reality." It could be that the laws of physics do fit in 500 bits, or it could be that they're just like onion layers and for whatever reason there is no bottom layer or no one ever finds it. But it is not the case that reductionism is the claim that the extent to which we have figured out how our subjectivitity is delusional, that that is The True Reality. But it's far better than just plucking from the naive intuitions. We know where they came from, after all, and it wasn't from a deep experimental study into reality.

and the aspect of reality which we experience more or less directly in subjectivity, is some sort of alien overlay.

Also not true! Why, if there was a direct one-to-one correspondence between subjective experience and reality, there would never be any surprising facts, and there would be no need to distinguish the map and the territory. In fact, I confess I have no idea what such a world would look like. What would it be like to be the universe? It is a wrong question, certainly. The subjective delusions arise from experiencing reality imperfectly, or else, once again, we would have already known about atoms and gluons and whatever-mathematics-are-really-down-there.

But I will assert emphatically that the crude reductionisms we have available to us now are radically at odds with the facts of subjective experience, and so therefore they are wrong.

And I will assert twice as emphatically that the reductionism we have available to us now, while incomplete (and knowing that it is so), is not at odds with subjective experience (they add up to normality, after all) and do more to explain the facts of subjective experience than any dualism, substance or otherwise.

You have said in the past that the computational theory of mind implies dualism. When I first saw this, I was outraged and indignant and did not wish to read any further. Later I discovered that you make much more sense than this initial impression led me to think, so I read more of your work, and yet I never found an argument that supported this claim. Do show me, if you've got one.

I will show, however, that even if the computational theory of mind is wrong (as implying dualism would necessarily force it to be), this does not matter for transhumanist realism. For even if you could not copy the brain on a computer, obviously the brain exists, so there is some way of creating them. It can and will be understood so that new brains can be made, even if its substrate isn't "computations". (I admit, though, that I have no idea what else it might be doing, that isn't computable).

Also, curse you for getting me to write in your style of incredibly long comments!

Edit: This comment was upvoted three seconds after I posted it. I don't know how or why.

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Reading your article, I see a possible problem:

Some opinions about facts aren't open to criticism. They are deemed personal, and as such no worse than opposite opinions. Attacking them is often considered rude, if not outright intolerant. This essay is about why this should stop.

There is something like "Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally" here. Sometimes it is better to be wrong than to be right in a wrong context.

Imagine that a powerful majority of a people share the same opinion. What kind of society would you prefer? One where it is considered OK to believe differently, because personal thoughts are exceptions from public rules? Or one, where the opinion of the majority is considered so important that it is considered OK to attack people who disagree, and there is no good excuse for disagreement?

I have simply replaced "truth" with "opinion of a powerful majority". Why is this legitimate? Simply, because if someone has an opinion, they consider it truth. And if the agree with each other, the more sure they are. And if they are powerful enough, who dares to openly disagree? Especially if there is a rule that it is OK to attack people do disagree.

Therefore we have a rule that it is OK to have your own opinions about private matters. We have often seen that people who try to break this rule, do it to increase their power, even if their professed goals are noble.

But this situations is different, because unlike those people, you are actually right. Therefore those social rules obviously don't apply to you. Is there a good reason to follow those rules anyway?

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John_Maxwell_IV

18 points

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This sort of protracted disagreement rarely gets resolved. Give up now and work on other stuff.

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In general, my approach to dealing with such people is to stop talking about what's really true, and instead talk exclusively about what experiences I anticipate if I perform various actions.

We may not be able to agree on whether there's really a hammer in my hand or not, but if we can agree that if I do something I experience as swinging this hammer at someone's skull, the other person will reliably experience having their skull hit by a hammer, then our disagreement doesn't matter much.

Of course, as you say, ego gets tied up in having other people talk about the world in ways that match my preferences.
I try to reject that when I find myself doing it.

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Jayson_Virissimo

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In general, my approach to dealing with such people is to stop talking about what's really true, and instead talk exclusively about what experiences I anticipate if I perform various actions.

Talking about your anticipated experiences rather than the Truth is what many people mean by anti-realism.

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Agreed - I've found that most people do have fairly solid anticipations, even when they refuse to accept a realist philosophy.

Failing that, it's their fault for perceiving that hammer in the first place, am I right? ;)

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Are you sure your mother is a physical anti-realist, as opposed to a moral anti-realist?

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Ask her what it is that lets her know when she's wrong.

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That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

I think this is pattern matching more than anything else. People have been ingrained that thinking one has the Truth leads to bad things. It might help to say something like "I'm not asserting that I know the Truth for certain about things, I'm asserting that there is only correct answer even as we are uncertain about what that answer is."

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I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

I'm more with Orwell, seeing the totalitarian dangers from non-realism.

I don't know if you want to yank your Mom's chain, but I think it would be fun to deal with irrationalists of all stripes by gleefully hitting the gibberish ball back into their court. Contradict yourself, then say that you're "beyond" such limited thinking as logic. Claim "faith" in your nonsense. When she points out your claims are false, decry her totalitarianism.

And above all, do this when she has a practical purpose in mind and wants to get something real done.

A lot of people peddle this claptrap when they argue. Sam Harris has a catchy and appropriate term for it - playing tennis without a net. I think the only real response is to find where they want a net, and start playing without it, and see how they like it.

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RichardKennaway

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Dobzhansky said "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", and I would borrow that expression and say, "Nothing anywhere makes sense except in the light of realism".

Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe.

An accurate one, except that the forcing is not being done by any agent, human or divine. The world ineluctably is, whether we like it or not: we have no freedom at all to choose what is true, only to choose what to do about it.

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

Stick to near mode, then. Point out in some concrete instance of what she does in everyday life, that she can choose only actions, not truths.

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I'm happy to have finally found the root cause of our ongoing disagreement

What seems basic logically is not particularly more likely to be the root cause of peoples' actions, I've found. So it's probably more complicated.

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What do you hope to accomplish in this argument? Unless your mother's far beliefs cause her to take near actions which make local lives unpleasant, I suggest that fixing her stated beliefs about reality is not a high priority. It's especially not a priority for you; your interactions with your mother cannot help but be coloured by prestige.

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For what it's worth, I don't think your statements are self-evident. If the mathematical multiverse hypothesis is true, the underlying laws may well talk only about how the structure of a mind determines the probabilities of its sensory inputs, and nothing beyond that about the probability that something "actually exists". In that case different minds (even interacting ones) can perceive different physical worlds. I'd place a pretty high probability that the right answer is at least as strange.

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If the mathematical multiverse hypothesis is true, then that is the underlying unique reality. The different physical worlds perceived by different minds are different parts of the mathematical multiverse. Minds perceive the physical world they are embedded in, and there is a fact of the matter as to which physical world a particular mind is embedded in, just as within our own physical world, our minds are embedded in particular locations and we perceive those locations rather than our entire physical world.

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Heh. I decline to have a serious conversation with someone who insists on denying that there is an objective reality. Because 100% of the time (rounded up) they are just trolling you. I just claim I don't see any advantage in talking to someone who doesn't exist. :)

If they maintain that there is still some kind of subjective reality (whatever that could possibly mean in the absence of, like, you know, actually real reality) then my position is: I'm sure their subjective reality is really absorbing for them, but there's a whole universe of fascinating, surprising real stuff out there, and I'd rather go and find out about that.

Doesn't mean the conversation is over (although sometimes it is), but it's no longer being taken seriously. That meets the optional social requirement of not being blatantly rude, while fulfilling the mandatory ethical obligation of calling bullshit.

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Because 100% of the time (rounded up) they are just trolling you.

I don't think so. I think that more likely rounds down to zero. Few are consciously using it as a tactic - though perhaps I'm just a dullard and all this gibberish is a conscious ploy. I doubt it, because I don't see the general level of philosophical sophistication to believe that is likely. Maybe the world is full of people pretending to be conceptually addled buffoons for some nefarious purpose I can't grasp, but I doubt it.

No, like faith, unrealism is just a philosophical immunizing strategy that they have gotten away with in some circumstance, so they use it again, like a monkey pulling a lever for a grape.

If you can get away with punting out of any intellectual difficulty with , "I just believe", "that's just logic", "it's all relative", "that's not my reality", etc., you will. As long as the get out of jail free card works, you'll keep using it. Well, maybe not you, but a lot of people will and do. I don't think they're consciously trolling.

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I had the exact same argument with my girlfriend (a bad idea) a while ago and asked for references to point her to on the IRC channel. I was given The Simple Truth and The Relativity of Wrong.

So I was about to write a very supportive response when I saw Mitchell Porter's comment. And this

(...) the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists.

aptly describes recent interactions I've had with my father¹. The accusation of narrowmindedness was present.

So, recurring conflicts with friends and family because of a newfound perspective on, well, everything? Values quickly changing as a consequence of new beliefs on what is true and what is not? Assuming we are in the they-were-right-this-time subgroup of this cliché, there must be smarter ways of dealing with it than making ourselves look crazy in front of the people who care about us.

¹ Except he's a raging atheist but has never propagated the consequences of this belief to his philosophy.

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In ordinary usage, 'real' is merely an antonym for 'fake'. It's probably best to collapse most distinctions involving the word 'real'. The real question is, "Can you be wrong about a prediction?", and then you can stipulatively label the thing that generates the experimental predictions "reality" if you'd like. The Simple Truth.

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Yup. That link contains one of the simplest and most effective antidotes to non-realism I know of:

I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”

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Most people (sadly, even our parents or other people we respect) are not conditioned to update on a belief merely because it is true. Look at your mother's objections: she compared it to totalitarianism. If we take that objection at face value, then we know that she believes that such "narrow thinking" puts her at risk for totalitarianism, which is a risk she is not willilng to take for what is merely true.

Generally, if you want someone to believe something, you need to either trick them into believing that they already value what you are about to make them believe, or you need to trick them into modifying their values. This will be harder with your mother than with a stanger, as the idea has already been presented to her and she has parental authority to maintain. But there are ways to manipulate someone even in those circumstances, if that's what you wish to do.

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I think you and your mother might be conflating different meanings of 'truth'- i.e. she is thinking of MORAL truths, and you are thinking of SCIENTIFIC truths. The fact that I can test my beliefs against an objective reality tells me very little about how I should interact with my fellow man.

Anyone who reads a statement like yours who is even a little familiar with Ayn Rand would probably recoil, not at the actual words but at what they fear is coming next- 'reality exists therefore INSERT MORAL CODE HERE'. Unfortunately, we don't have your mother's response, but its possible when she was suggesting totalitarian dangers she was thinking along the lines of objectivism and other MORAL codes.

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Ask her, if you hide an object from her, if she thinks she can find it without looking in the place that you know you actually put it.

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How to deal with non-realism?

Ignore it until it goes away.

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