Evolution News

Can you explain #3 and 4# more clearly?

in #2 you are claiming there is no objective reality or no 'broadcaster' of reality

We must assume some things as being objective such as a rational universe in order to make any claims at all.

-if you are saying in #3 that humans as conscious agents make subjective claims about reality but that those claims are in fact 'the reality' for that agent or person, that is a subjective claim. (I'm not saying that that subjective reality isn't true for that person)

Also, Hoffman doesn't make a 'supernatural' claim per se, his claim is simply that reality as 'we all see it' is NOT the whole story, and that it is in fact only the projection of a vast, infinitely complex network of conscious agents that creates what we perceive as the material universe and time. He starts with the idea that consciousness as a property is fundamental, existing outside of space and time and that if you apply reasoning and mathematics that networks of agents acting as UANs in a sense project that material universe into being, with that assumption, ie that it extrapolates to our entire universe.

I'm not sure I'm (or anyone for that matter) is really qualified to answer that claim..it's so big that it does verge on mysticism. that's why I said its such a wild idea, but I found the article above another interesting piece of evidence for Hoffman, because it talks about a general theory underlying such networks:

whose "repeated and recursive evolution of Universal…

> and often take more than minimal effort to dispute

This is where all ability to have a rational discussion breaks down in many cases, especially when people care a lot about their initial opinions.

Take an issue like evolution. You start with a source like https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/evolution-and-natural-selection/a/lines-of-evidence-for-evolution, which outlines a pretty good case for how evolution is supported by today's evidence. It gives plenty of lines to follow if you're curious to dig deeper, and absent other factors most people would just see it as a boring science thing that's probably true and they don't care much about.

But because some people are bothered by the idea, they've spent a lot of time thinking up objections. A whole lot of time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution for summaries of just some of the complaints that people have come up with. These have all been thoroughly demolished, of course, but to do so often involves a lot of really labor-intensive science.

As far as science goes, that's all good - it's great to be detailed and thoroughly justify every piece of a theory, chasing any loose ends down at any cost. It's part of the job description.

But casual debate about the issue is devastatingly difficult, even if everyone is acting in good faith. All someone that has a problem with evolution has to do is throw out three or four big complaints (the eye! carbon dating! transitional fossils! micro vs…

I assure you if my arguments look strong it's an illusion! Biologists know their field and they either dismiss things that anger people or they go on a million wild-goose chases. It's no-win. They know this area far better than Taleb and I have to defer to their expertise while accepting that in very rare occasions they'll be wrong.

Looking around the rebuttals[0][1][2] seem pretty non-exceptional. From the looks of it nobody's claiming Wilson's math is incorrect on a technical level, but that it's wrong on a conceptual level. Taleb's mathematical audit may have preemptively refuted a claim nobody was even making.

If Wilson et al. have a better tool it's on them to demonstrate it. Nobody needs to check the math, they just state their better predictions and the community examines them. Sometimes the claimed mathematical tools aren't even as good as the current ones, and then the correctness of the math is moot. FWICT, the biologists are saying they already have better tools and they're declining the offer to downgrade.

[0] - http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/03/researchers-challenge-e.-o.-wilson-over-evolutionary-theory
[1] - https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/a-misguided-attack-on-kin-selection/
[2] - http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/eo_wilson_disavows_his_own_kin046341.html
[mathy rebuttal] - http://kinselections.blogspot.com/2013/12/nowak-and-wilson-are-at-it-again.html

> I’ve previously encountered the idea of equating the state prior to my birth (nothing), with that of my death (also nothing).

Given that there is evidence of fetal/prenatal memory, it implies there is pre-birth state, and thus not nothing:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_memory

Some argue (small) post-birth states are the same as pre-birth states; Jerry Coyne:

> If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born? I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral.

* https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/07/13/should-one-be-allowed-to-euthanize-severely-deformed-or-doomed-newborns/

* Via: https://evolutionnews.org/2017/08/why-does-this-evolutionary-biologist-want-to-euthanize-handicapped-babies/

Evolutionary-biologist Will Provine's perspective on free will helped very much to inform my own:

https://evolutionnews.org/2015/09/william_provine/

(Edit: this is apparently an intelligent-design advocacy publication, but it is telling how much his opponents respected him. Provine would have been touched. Here's another link, for context: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ptb/6959004.0007.003/--william-provine-1942-2015?rgn=main;view=fulltext*)

He had a lot of thoughtful and kind things to say, and a lot of courage to back it up. Have a gander at some of his work if it piques your interest.

Thanks for your post -- it led me to the news that he had passed away. He had so long surpassed the odds on his specific guaranteed-to-recur cancer that I almost believed him to be invulnerable.

Thank you, Will. We lead best by example; yours was superb.

I heard Robert Wright talking about this sort of idea, I think he was inspired by Smolin.

> Smolin thinks our universe may itself be a product of a kind of evolution: maybe universes can replicate themselves via black holes, so over time — over a lot of time — you get universes whose physical laws are more and more conducive to replication.

from here: https://evolutionnews.org/2017/01/robert_wright_a/

A wikipedia article describes Smolin's "Cosmological natural selection" as an alternative to the anthropic principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection