What can We Know about Reality?

The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality

We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?

There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.

Abstract Painting 599 by Gerhard Richter. You may not know what it is supposed to represent, but you know that you are perceiving colors and textures.

But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?

The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.

Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.

Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.

The Fool's Gift – The Well of Images Part 4

Read “The Fool’s Gift” at WritersCafe.org.

The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.

“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.

As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.

NaNoWriMo 2018 – Back to My Roots

It is November again, when the trees lose their leaves, the jackets come on, and the writing bug bites. I think by now I’ve conditioned myself Pavlovian-style to put my fingers to the keyboard when the weather starts cooling off. And once again, I am sprinting the marathon of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), cranking out a draft of a book in 30 days. This time, I am going the whole ten yards, shooting for the standardized goal of 50,000 words, with no less than 1,667 per day. I wrote 1,935 yesterday, so I’m going strong.

Last year, my goal was only 1,000 words per day, and I had a really rough time. But I have improved since then, practicing both on this blog and with The Well of Images, and I have a game plan.

First, the book I have chosen is sure to keep me going at it day after day. I have mentioned Moebius a few times on this blog, the story I have been building for over ten years, and with which I hope to make a name for myself when I finally publish it. But I started writing a version of Moebius a long time ago, back when I was about 13. Since then, it has grown into something completely different, the only similarities being a few names and that it takes place in space. This NaNoWriMo, I am going back to the original idea, and writing a full draft of MoebiusQuest, where the two protagonists, Zoink and Oliver, go on a quest to find the seven elemental medallions and stop the evil Disassembler. It will be fun, whimsical, and positively drenched in nostalgia.

The second thing I am doing is joining a chat group of other NaNo writers. I went onto the NaNo forums early this year and hit it off with someone who invited me to their Discord server, which now has ten or fifteen members, all hyped to write and ready to keep each other going.

Thirdly, I have gotten into the writing habit, having cranked really hard on The Well of Images part 4, so that it would be beta ready before November. NaNo is still a step up from that, but it is half a step less than it would have been. Part 4 is in beta stage right now, and will be released online next week, so get hyped for that.

Finally, I have a caffeine plan. Caffeine’s potency depends on how much caffeine is normal for your system. Have two cups of coffee each day, and you need three to get a buzz. But if you’ve been off it for a month, a single cup of tea is all you need. For the past few years, I have been largely caffeine-free, making those rare occasions when I indulge at a restaurant or coffee shop quite powerful. I still drink decaf in the mornings out of habit, and that is the target of my plan. Starting yesterday, I changed one of my two tablespoons of grounds from decaf to half-caf. A week from now, I’ll change the other to half-caf as well. In two week, I’ll change one to full-caf, and for the final week, I will use two scoops of regular caffeine-loaded coffee grounds. Hopefully this gradual ramping up of caffeine intake will keep me burning brightly through the whole month.

I’m ready. It’s time. My first real NaNoWriMo challenge has begun. It’s time to prove to my future self that I have what it takes, that I am the real deal now. Wish me diligence, wisdom, and luck.

Work and Purpose

Most people believe that there is some connection between work and a meaningful life. But it is not straightforward, by any means. There are many different kinds of work, and many factors that contribute to or take away from the meaning they provide. Today, we are going to try to better understand where exactly the value of hard work lies, though it is far more complicated than the scope of this single blog post.

There is no question that work in itself does not make life meaningful; everyone knows the life of a slave is anything but. So why do so many people believe that more jobs and harder work will lead to more meaning in people’s lives?

To explore this question, we have to look at the opposite of slavery, total leisure. When people have all they need, and have the option to do only what they feel like, two things can happen. Either they seek out difficult tasks and projects to do, or they become nihilistic and conclude that life is meaningless. A life without work is certainly better than that of a slave, but it is not much more meaningful.

If the two extremes of work, slavery and total leisure, are equally meaningless, it means there is more to the story. That is no surprise, because truth almost never comes in simple yeses and nos. So let’s take a look at some of the factors that go into work, and see if we can distill a recipe for meaning.

Perhaps a little bit of meaning comes from being paid a living wage. Of course it has to be enough to live according to society’s standards of dignity; a job with too little pay is essentially a lesser form of slavery. However, there are other kinds of work that don’t pay, like housework, raising kids, maintaining relationships, volunteer work, and personal projects, and these are very often more meaningful to people than the jobs they do to pay the bills. So although it is nice to earn money, it contributes only a small percentage to the meaningfulness of the work.

Perhaps one element of the sense of purpose people get from hard labor is an illusion. Once, as I walked the mile home from the grocery store in the humid heat of the summer with a bag of groceries slung over my shoulder, I was exhausted. As I surveyed the long stretch of bicycle trail I had yet to get through, my heart sank. But then I had an idea. Instead of thinking of how much I had left to do, I started thinking of myself as a grocery-carrying machine. My purpose in life was to carry groceries, one step at a time, along the hot, humid bike trail. And wonder of wonders, I started to feel better. And the next thing I knew, I was across the road from my apartment. Convincing myself that I was a labor robot helped me in the moment, but I ultimately knew it was a delusion, and left it behind as soon as I got home. I can’t help but wonder if a good portion of society’s praise of hard work is a result of people unaware that they are continually under this delusion themselves.

However, there are other, more real factors that contribute to the sense of purpose in work. For one, we want to contribute to society’s prosperity. The modern world is full of comforts and conveniences, and we feel guilty if we partake in these without contributing our fair share of support.

Yet another possibility comes to mind from my own experience. As NaNoWriMo approaches, I’m reminded that every year I push myself so hard that I bring myself physical pain every day for a month, in order to complete an entire draft of a book that will never be published, no one will ever read, and I will never get paid for. What could drive me and so many others to voluntarily endure such torment? Well for me, the answer is simple; the experience of NaNoWriMo helps me to become a better writer. I find meaning in work that improves my skills and broadens my abilities to appreciate the variety of experiences that life has to offer. Self-improvement, with a sense of having earned it.

In a discussion about work, we cannot forget camaraderie. Shared struggles bring us together like nothing else. No matter what the job, no matter what the circumstances, having others to collaborate with, to share encouragement with, to move forward together with, makes it so much better than going through it alone.

Hard work by itself does not make life meaningful, nor does its absence. For every person, many different factors contribute different amounts. For some, the meaning in work is found in the reward, in the money earned. For others, the meaning is found in contributing to society, in making one’s community a better place. For others, the meaning is in the friendships forged in the flames of the struggle. For those like myself, the meaning is found in improving oneself, gaining skills and knowledge that lead to a greater enjoyment of everything life has to offer (although I wouldn't mind if you decided to click on the orange button on the sidebar). It’s not simple. There is no one answer. So instead of praising hard work for hard work’s sake, let’s remember that it’s the reasons we work that matter, and that everybody’s reasons are a little different from everybody else’s.

Respecting People with Different Beliefs

This post has a similar message to The Stigma Against Being Wrong

At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”

At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.

Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.

But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.

In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.

Building an Economics View: Basic Needs

Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality

I’ve recently noticed that when people say things I disagree with about economics, I find myself tempted to reply with an angry rant. I have no idea why any reasonable person would say something so obviously incorrect, so I feel it must be because they are a bad person, and I treat them as such. But when the fire dies down and I look at what I have said, I realize this is counter to my own philosophy of assuming people are good and peacefully allowing them to disagree with me. This suggests that the problem lies with me, not them.

So what is going on? When I think about it, I realize I’ve been through this before. This anger is a result of cognitive dissonance between my intellectual pride and evidence that one of my views is not well thought out. When I examine my views of economics with a clear head, I find an incoherent jumble of ideas mashed together from all kinds of different sources. One moment I will say something capitalist, the next something socialist, and the next something anarchist, without any notion of how they might fit together or contradict. Clearly this is no good.

With this realization, I have decided to do with economics what I have done in the past with religion and morality, and that is to break apart my crumbling views, sweep aside my cultural influences, and start over from a clean slate. This time, though, I am going to write up the process here on A Scientist’s Fiction, so that you, dear readers, may see my thought process as I go.

The first step, when constructing a view, is to define what we’re talking about. What is economics? The first thing that comes to mind is money, but that is an emergent feature of economics in practice. At a more basic level, economics is the study of the production and distribution of resources. It would be good to have a term that means a specific rule, tradition, or regulation that affects how things are produced and distributed, so let’s call those economic mechanisms. An economic system is a collection of economic mechanisms that work together as a whole.

There are two parts to economics. The first is to study economic mechanisms and systems to find out how they work and what they do. But before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what separates a good economic system from a bad one, or in other words, for what purposes we are producing resources.

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, in which I argued for a version of Utilitarianism that can be summed up as “more good is better.”  Good is defined in another post as the perceptions we get through our moral sense, which is the same kind of sense as our most well-known five senses. The moral sense can be stimulated by circumstances, actions, states of being, etc. These things are not themselves good or bad, but take on a level of goodness when they are paired with someone's moral sense. In line with Deontology, everyone's individual good is equally valid. This gives us a context in which to construct our economics views. We are looking for systems and mechanisms that do as much good for as many people as possible.

Here we run into a problem. Economic mechanisms do very specific things. If “good” is different for everyone, how is it possible to know what kind of economic system will maximize it? What we need is an environment where people can pursue good in whatever form it takes for them. This is the motivation for the idea of basic human rights. The United States Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I am going to be pedantic and say it should have been the pursuit of a good life, because there are other forms of good besides happiness. The measure of an economic system, then, is how easy it makes exercising these rights to as many people as possible.

Some people believe that human rights are a government responsibility, and economics has nothing to do with it. But that view is misguided. If someone does not have enough food, they do not have liberty, because they must spend all of their energy to get food, rather than pursuing a good life. Sure, some people may find good lives by the same actions that get them food, but even for them there is no liberty if there is no choice.

In order for someone to be free to fully exercise their fundamental rights, they require a basic set of needs to be met. What are these basic needs? Well, in order to pursue a good life, people need food and water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. With these five needs covered (I count food and water as one), people have all that they require in order to pursue their own good, whether that be to earn money and live in more luxury, to volunteer for service projects, to plant and tend a personal garden, to contemplate the nature of existence, or any of a billion other ways for people to find meaning in life.

But what determines how much of the five basic needs is enough? After all, a person can live, albeit uncomfortably, on one meal a day. This question is not easy to answer, but at the very least, people should not have to spend energy worrying about how they are going to remain healthy and whether they will have sufficient options available for pursuing purpose. Perhaps we will examine this question more deeply in the future.

We now have a foundation for our views: an economic system or policy is good in proportion to the percentage of people to whom it provides sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. Of course, a system that adequately provides all of these things to everyone will have its own problems, and maybe we'll have a discussion about them in the future, but for now it makes sense to focus on the problems we face right now.

You may notice that we have not actually talked about any particular economic system or mechanism yet. That is because if we hadn't set up the moral foundation, we would have no way to evaluate it. I am not sure where this series will take us from here, but that is the beauty of constructing a new view. Maybe we will talk about work and purpose. Maybe we will talk about taxation and redistribution. Maybe we will talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the market. Whatever it is, it will be explored in the spirit of curiosity and of making the world better for everyone.

What is Good?

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.

We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.

You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.

But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.

There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.

One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.