I just found a whole bunch of amazing videos! To avoid flooding my Reader Shared, I’ll embed them all in this collection post. 

The first three of the following was found in this article about digital synesthesia (via Mind Hacks). The rest I found on my own (the last one a long time ago).

Skepticism does not lead to nihilism. It leads to agnosticism. This realization makes evident the fictionalist solution to the problem of skepticism: To evade the void of absolute agnosia by means of a certain leap of faith (or even just a short skip of faith).

It’s not inconsistent to be radically agnostic on an absolutely strict level while retaining a more useful outlook (such as standard materialism) on a slightly less scrupulous level, because these “levels” are parallel to each other: They do not meet, and cannot contradict each other. One mind can (and, I will argue, should) entertain a whole range of worldviews on different “levels of faith”.

I like to think about this as analogical to how fractals develop through iterations of its equation: Think of the range of worldviews as developing from completely faithless agnosticism through gradual iterations of faith. If absolute certainty is all you’ll accept, you’ll be left in absolute darkness. With a cautious number of faith iterations, the moderately admissive materialist outlook produces an image far more complex and informative than the simple “I don’t know” of radical agnosticism. At the aft end of the range, magical thinking, with its very lenient attitude with regard to faith, is capable of producing the most beautiful, intricate and exciting sorts of fiction, with the cost of sacrificing accuracy in how reality is interpreted (in fact, the interpretative pretension can be dropped altogether).

Here’s a demonstration of how a Mandelbrot fractal develops (I think it goes up to about 200 iterations in the end):

Both extremes (of doubt and faith) are far less useful than the moderate position (at least when it comes to science and most practical purposes), but they both have significant strengths as well: Radical agnosticism is philosophically interesting (in much the same way a black hole is interesting to a physicist, even though he/she has no wish to live anywhere near one), and the latter is psychedelically interesting (in the literal sense of revealing the soul). Here’s a demonstration of how incredibly deep and rich the Mandelbrot fractal can be with a whole lot of iterations (watch in high quality):

The analogy fails to capture one important factor, namely the strong correlation between faith-satiated worldviews and psychosis. Hopefully, virtualism can, if not vaccinate against it, at least build resistance to this tendency. Because faith-satiation is key to a lot of good things as well.

Here’s an explicit list of levels that I alternate between, from the strictest to the most lenient:

• Black hole agnosticism: I’m completely and utterly agnostic about absolutely everything. I can’t say if the sun will rise tomorrow, if there’s a hippapotamus in my room, not even if 2+2 equals 4. I acknowledge no truth, not even logic. This extreme level of agnosticism would, if lived, render a person completely dysfunctional. (In a schizofrenic way, I guess.)
• Philosophical agnosticism: Hume’s fork appears. I still don’t believe that any statement about reality is true, but math, logic and the entire virtual realm is trusted to be stable and safe. This is where I try to be when doing philosophy.
• The rational level: I accept a lot of science as true. I’m a materialist, and try my best to disregard speculative nonsense surfacing from my subconscious. What I’m interested in is communicable general statements that are very precise in prediction. 
• The irrational level (or range of levels): The scientific method is disregarded. I’m free to immerse myself in naive realism, practice some mental dancing, or believe in free will. As a formula: I’m a character in a play or a game where I also have producer powers (as opposed to how it is at the rational level, where I’m trying to be objective). My fictional world has to be internally consistent to some degree, but there is very lax requirements with regard to reality-fittingness. In fact, I’m almost indifferent to reality. All that matters are my circumstances, both external and internal.
• The magical level (or range of levels): Even contradictory things can be believed. Dreams typically dive into this level. It can be very enjoyable, but the experience is usually too fragmented and confused to be of any value beside relaxation.

This picture of a range of parallel levels can make it a lot easier to avoid some of the classic mistakes, like hypostatizing ideas or allowing faith-based thinking to interfere with strict philosophy. Even the most threatening of all, that of becoming coerced by skepticism into an impoverished and bloodless worldview.

A short discussion on Conscious Entities inspired me to compose a text too long and too off-topic to post as a comment there. So I’ll post it here, and link to it from there in case Peter or anyone else is interested. If not, at least I got a lot out of writing it myself. For context, here’s the two relevant comments from the comment thread:

My comment:

The physicalist account of qualia is that it is, in principle, reducible to the physics of brains. But here’s a question: What brains and what physics are we talking about? Is it brains and physics as experienced interpretatively by the physical brains of neuroscientists? Or is it the true or real brains and physics themselves, which, so far at least, are far outside the grasp of science?

Physicalist monism seems plausible to me, but very impractical as a frame of mind. I’m not suggesting that we take ontological dualism seriously, but I don’t think we can dispense with some kind of dualist conception, at least not just yet. What I propose is a dualism of true reality on the one hand and virtuality on the other, the latter here being understood as the experiential or phenomenal reality rendered somehow by real brains and real physics. Viewing experience as a virtual reality in this way allows one to identify more directly with one’s experience (as opposed to thinking that a more true approach would be to do like the Churchlands and try to translate experience into neuroscientific terms), because one is this virtuality. Trying to reduce it to physics is of course crucial for science, but it is derailing for the sense of self, and unnecessarily so. Subjectivity as we know it today is not something illusory that will be disposed of once we get our theories right, but the very stuff of our subjective being. Virtuality is a kind of fiction, to be sure, but not one you can dispel without at the same time dispelling subjectivity. I’m even inclined to use the word soul in connection with virtuality, devoid of the Christian connotations of course.

I think that even when (or if) we reach a physicalist explanation of subjectivity, a virtualist or fictionalist dualism of the kind I’ve tried to sketch out will continue to play an important role for us, for practical reasons. The same practical reasons that I think lead many to fight for ontological dualism today. A future theory of subjectivity will be too complicated for our modestly equipped brains to handle, at least for practical purposes. Like quantum physics, it will be so strange and difficult that it will be irrelevant for everyone except a few frontier theorists, for whom the relevance is almost entirely theoretical and detached from the rest of their lives.

I believe that to acknowledge the value of dualism in a virtual variety would be very good for the physicalist cause. What do you think?

Peter’s reply:

In essence, I agree, Gorm. I don’t think many people, even materialist monists, would claim that a single account of the world can exhaust everything there is to be said about it. We certainly at least need to address the world on different levels of description - in fact, on more than just two. So in practice any sensible view of the world has at least two and usually many more aspects to it. It may well be that this is what impels people into dualism; but philosophically, dualism is one of those concepts (like omnipotence, perhaps) that is just drawn too strong to make sense, and needs dilution for safe use. So while I basically agree with your point, I wouldn’t call that dualism. It might be that the best thing would be for us all to stop worrying about whether a theory is ‘monist’ or ‘dualist’, and just discuss the theory itself.

What would be interesting would be a good attempt to explain why the world needs different levels of explanation, how many there are, how they relate, and which levels are fundamental in any particular sense (it looks as if the account given by physics is fundamental in some sense, for example). Alas, I don’t know of any good theorising along these lines that gets very far.

And finally, my text, where start out trying to address the above problem from a virtualist point of view:

According to virtualism, there are no fundamental explanations about the world, because all explanations are in the end merely fictions that fit some relevant portion of the evidence we have available. Fittingness is not a fundamental quality of these fictions, because it is dependent on empirical investigation. The currently fitting fictions may suddenly become unfitting in light of new evidence.

Some distinctions: The kind of fictions that one tries to fit with reality should be distinguished from the kinds of fictions that are more or less indifferent to reality. A further narrowing of the former category would be those fictions that are trimmed by Occam’s razor and experimented with in accordance with the scientific method. Left out would be common sense, mysticism, religion etc, all of which are influenced by other aims than that of fitting with reality (e.g. the aim of making life more comfortable), at the same time as they are competing with science in trying to make sense of reality. (To some people, science is the obvious winner of this contest, because science is more sharply focused on the all-important fittingness issue — while to others, the unscientific theories are superior, because they allow for a more complete and habitable worldview, in that they satisfy more than just the fittingness requirement.)

To think of these different kinds of explanations in terms of degrees of truth or even degrees of fittingness, would make it into an empirical question, and like with all empirical questions, answers can only be provisional until all possible evidence has been gathered. Only then can one compare and make a final judgment about exactly how well and in what way the proposed explanatory fictions actually fit. This gathering is, of course, a task for science, not philosophy.

What philosophy should do instead is to look into the nature of fictions, stripped of their explanatory pretentions and independent of reality. The realm of philosophy, then, is virtuality, a term that includes everything – when disregarding any pretension of reflection of or correspondence with reality. That is to say, even frontier scientific theories are completely virtual, if you view them as models. The same goes for everything we can understand, even everything we can experience, because we can only understand or experience anything in terms of virtuality. This is of course a basic tenet of virtualism. (I’ll try to deal with the problem of justification near the end of this text.)

An example: Gravity. There are several theories of gravity in use in physics today, none of which are useful to our daily lives when dealing with the reality of gravity. In fact, most people live with the outdated Newtonian theory of gravity, or even the Aristotelian one. The truth of the matter is irrelevant to us in our limited circumstances. General rule: What we demand from models of reality in terms of fittingness is usually limited to what is useful in our circumstances. More information than this is cumbersome and distracting us from whatever it is that we’re doing (unless it’s theoretical physics, in which case it’s our job to find out about reality; or philosophy, in which case it’s our job to be encumbered and confused).

But circumstance-fittingness is not the only or most attractive quality in fictions. More important for us is whether or not the fiction in question allows immersion, whether it allows us to believe that it’s real. And in this, circumstance-fittingness is only one of several factors, three of the other being a) the dramaturgical quality of fictions, b) their aesthetic quality and c) our social context. All of these need a bit of explanation:

1. What I mean by the dramaturgical quality of fictions is that fictions need to be engaging for us to be interested enough to immerse ourselves in them. Typically, a story-like fiction is what does the trick. We’d love to belive of the world that it is in fact story-like, where we play a well-defined part etc. For most of us, this is hard to take seriously, but in pre-scientific times, it was a very important factor of what fiction or set of fictions could survive.
2. The aesthetic factor I would define as the balance of simplicity/elegance against complexity/elaborateness. Too simple is boring, too complex is overwhelming. A simple worldview needs to be stimulated by some kind of ornamentation. A difficult worldview needs to rest in minimalism.
3. The social factor is simply that it is harder for us to really believe that our fiction is true and that we live in reality, when people around us voice conflicting beliefs. Relativism kills immersion. When our fictions and those of people around us are mutually exclusive, we have to find some resolution, in order to maintain the illusion of being in true reality. We might group up with those that agree with us, and try to battle off those who don’t. Or we can modify our beliefs to be more vague and compromising. Most often, this manouver weakens at least the dramaturgical factor and the fittingness factor, something which is felt as a severe loss — but the fiction on its own is practically worthless if we’re not able to immerse ourselves in it. So the price is paid, again and again. 

This last factor is why, together with the gradual development of civilization from tribe to city state to empire etc, cultural development has become more and more vague, abstract, distant and impersonal.

The fact that fictions are shared is what makes possible things like sports, our money system, philosophy, physics etc. All cultural things has a virtual existence that is shared by a significant number of people (things that are not shared also have a virtual existence of course, but it’s not a cultural one until it lives beyond the individual). Fictions are like programs that run on brains. Our ability to synchronously run identical or very similar programs is the bedrock of culture.

In conclusion: Privileging science is advantageous for a lot of purposes, but this privilege shouldn’t degenerate into an ontological claim. Science is in the end merely a set of tested and useful fictions. Where it’s counterproductive to apply it (e.g. where it becomes way too complicated), we should be able to go with a more practical alternative, even though it’s false in the eyes of science. Fictions have strengths and weaknesses, and we shouldn’t artificially restrict usage of them. Believing that one branch of fictions (e.g. science) is true would be exactly such a restriction. Truth about the world is not accessible to us, because everything we can say must necessarily be said in the language of fictions. The best we can have is thus justification, on the basis of fittingness or otherwise.

Virtualism itself, as a metaphysical framework, should be judged in this same light. It should be justified in empirical terms. Just like with scientific theories, metaphysical theories should be judged as more or less plausible on the basis of certain results in neuroscience, physics, AI research etc.

Metaphysics is, according to virtualism at least, the field of metafictions — the fictions that are supposed to encompass all other fictions, as the operating system of life. It may resemble religion or mysticism in that it’s speculative, but I am quite confident that a satisfactory justification can be found. And if not, well, it’s simply indispensable, so I guess I’ll have to become religious.

A couple of months ago, I wrote to Mike Earl, suggesting that his position is very close to Kant’s. He responded with this video (where he reads out loud what I wrote to him, making the video accessible for anyone):

I think it’s a great idea to make our discussion public. That’s why I’m posting this my (embarrasingly late) reply here:

Hey Mike. Thanks for giving my suggestion serious consideration. I’m sorry it has taken me this long to reply. I’ve tried several times to compose a text, but found it very hard to do properly. I now see that my attempts failed because I was trying to dig into too many issues at once. This time, I’ll try to keep the focus on the central issue you bring up, about compositeness.

The number analogy was a bit confusing at first, as mathematical and empirical objects are understood by both Kant and myself as belonging to completely separate realms (in Kant’s terminology, a priori and a posteriori). I think I understand what you’re saying though, at least when you relate the analogy to things (like the table). But you’re wrong about Kant’s position:

First of all, Kant didn’t see numbers as “out there” in the empirical world, whether composite or singular ones. He did view mathematics as objective, but not in the sense of being external, only in the sense that it is true regardless of which subject is engaged in mathematical thought.

Secondly, things-in-themselves are not viewed by Kant as having definite properties like for instance spatial extension or causal relations to other objects. Properties such as these are supplied not by objects but by our cognitive apparatus when we’re viewing objects. The particular ones I mentioned are “transcendental concepts”, the full set of which I think could be called “the necessary and constitutive optic of experience”, by which I mean that experience would be impossible (or at least unintelligible) if the transcendental concepts (extension, duration, causality etc) hadn’t been applied. The application of transcendental concepts is a minimal requirement for cognition, and are thus present in all functioning humans. This is the ground for Kant’s peculiar form of “physical objectivity”, where the objectivity in question is similar to mathematical objectivity in that it contains no claim about external reality.

Kant would probably sympathize strongly with the view you attribute to him, that things-in-themselves are composite entities, but his own system prohibits him from any positive claims about noumena at all. The concept of noumenal reality is in fact defined as radical negation, as a resounding “I don’t know” to the question of what is the source of empirical appearances. To Kant, the answer to this lies beyond our cognitive limits, and we have no choice but to be agnostic about it. The only thing we can obtain certain knowledge about is the rules of cognition (math and the transcendental concepts).

You claim that “independent of our experiences, there are only prime entities”. I sympathize with this view, but just like with Kant and his opposing (hypothetical) preferences above, I too have to suspend judgment, because the claim is a metaphysical one. Strictly speaking, agnosticism is the only viable position here. (But of course, there is no reason one has to be this strict all the time! I’ll come back to this important point and elaborate in a later post here on my blog.)

“Green and hairy” is to Kant not a priori categories. A green and hairy experience is to Kant just a confused one. If the confusion is overcome, the experience becomes clear and distinct, but not because one has connected somehow to the noumenal realm, not at all. Clarity or purity of thought is merely an internal matter of mental discipline, not about taking part in noumenal reality. 

To your last point, the one with the painting analogy: I wholeheartedly agree, and I think this is a profound and very important issue. Not that I think it would change the course of scientific research a whole lot — because science needs communicable results to progress, and must therefore limit itself to what’s quantifiable (in other words, it is necessarily materialist, at least methodologically so) — but it certainly would be very valuable for scientists to frame the problem in the way you describe. I think their theoretical intuition would benefit. But the most important consequences of “physical subjectivism” is for philosophy. I see it as an intellectually fertile new “platform of the age”, much like how Kant’s system was in the 19th century, but in an improved, modern skin, complete with clear language and the possibility of direct connection to frontier sciences (in particular neuroscience and computer science). I think you’ve done a wonderful job explaining the basics of the theory, particularly in the first two videos of your Emergence series (for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, see my previous post). I’d love to see more videos from you on the subject. And I’d like to make a serious contribution of my own. This fall, I started on a master’s program in philosophy, and hope to be writing my master’s thesis on “virtualism” (as you know I prefer to call it). I won’t be starting on that until next fall, but it is, of course, constantly present in the back of my head. And any discussion that relates to it is much appreciated.

One last remark, about Kant: I’ve been having second thoughts about him lately, because of a class I’m taking where we’re reading the Critique of Judgment. I now think his whole “critical approach” is flawed, in that the posited transcendentals are given a status that is far too high. They should not be priviledged and set apart from other concepts (like table-ness or redness or personality etc). The so-called transcendentals are elevated above the rest of our perspectival capabilities only (it seems to me) in virtue of their quantifiability. And this is a rather arbitrary attribute, as can be demonstrated by how technology conquers new ground in what can be quantified, e.g. in neuroscience.

Instead, I now think Nietzsche is the closest to both our positions. I recently read an excellent unpublished essay by him called “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” that I think is very opportune for me to recommend in this context. It’s not very long, and can be found in its entirety online, here.

I’m curious of what you think of Nietzsche. How familiar are you with him, and how close do you think your position is to his?

Watch these two brilliant videos:

This guy, Mike Earl, is the first living person I’ve found that agrees with me on this issue! And what’s more, his explanation is very valuable to me, in that it is far more comprehensible than my own attempts so far.

Phenomenalism is one of the two core components of virtualism, the other component being computationalism. Sadly, Mike is of a different opinion on that one.

I think he’s trying to tell me something…

A great talk on memes by Susan Blackmore has just been posted on TED. You have my guarantee it is worth your time.

In addition to rejuvenating some old fears of mine, her talk made me realize how memetics is perfectly consistent with virtualism, even complementary! I need to read up on it, fast!

Mind consists of Forms: The brain is a machine running a software programmed with the language of Forms, and the living mind is best conceived of as a virtual reality — a continuously updated model of external reality (among other things).

Another name for the Realm of Forms is “Ideality”. But I think “virtuality” is a lot more suitable. One, because this word makes evident the connection between Platonism and computationalism, and two, because the word evokes an immersed, subjective point of view (through association with computer simulation).

Virtuality, then, is understood to be the very substance of mind. This is opposed to external reality, which is transcendent, i.e. entirely incomprehensible unless translated into the language of the Forms. Reality can’t be accessed at all except as a virtual model, constructed as an interpretation of raw sense data. In other words, we never interact with our environment directly: All of what you take for granted as external reality is in fact more correctly viewed as an incredibly powerful “virtual space of orientation”, continuously updated to fit with incoming information.

This picture seems to present an answer to the question of why physics is unable to describe reality with perfect accuracy: Because our minds are restricted to the simplicity of Forms. Our virtual models are necessarily simplistic, because of their computational restraints (limited time, energy and hardware size). Because of this, we can only hope to approximate truth. There’ll always be aspects left out by our descriptions.

I think it’s useful to think of reality-modelling as something that can be approached in a spectrum of ways, from the mathematical and unambiguous to the mythical and ambiguous. Both of these extremes have serious weaknesses, but their strengths complement eachother: Mathematics offers precision, while Mythos offers meaning. Therefore, the two approaches need to be reconciled. This, I think, is one of the most important tasks of philosophy today. And I think virtualistic epistemology can accomplish it.

Jeg har endelig begynt på det jeg håper vil bli en forholdsvis grundig lesning av Kants “Kritikk av den rene fornuft”. Jeg vil føre studielogg her, hovedsakelig om ting som kan berøre min egen planlagte masteroppgave om virtualisme. Ting som det følgende:

Kants argument for viljesfrihetens mulighet er godt: Determinismen slik den springer ut av naturvitenskapene, har kun gyldighet for ting slik de fremtrer, ikke for tingene i seg selv. Vår erkjennelsesevne er begrenset, og kunnskapene våre vil alltid være ufullstendige. Ting i seg selv er strengt tatt størrelser vi ikke kan hevde å vite noe som helst med absolutt sikkerhet om. — I denne uvitenheten er det rom for tro på viljesfrihet, idet vi er noumenelle vesener, ikke bare fremtredelser.

Kant kan dog ikke komme med den positive påstand at vi faktisk har fri vilje, like lite som han kan si at tingene i seg selv eksisterer som tidløse eller romløse. Det eneste han kan si er at han ikke kan si verken det ene eller det andre. Denne konklusjonen er det han bruker til moralens forsvar mot trusselen fra determinisme (Kants moralbegrep forutsetter viljesfrihetens mulighet).

Det er altså plass for troen på viljesfrihet, men en slik tro vil være ubegrunnet, og derfor irrasjonell, i hvert fall i første omgang. Ved nærmere øyesyn blir det dog klart at denne troen har verdi for den levende aktør som heuristikk, en verdi som er nok til å berettige troen — men vil ikke dette nødvendigvis også gjelde annen nyttig overtro?

Today, it is one full year since I last touched cigarettes or alcohol.

The spartan lifestyle will be generalized and continued.