[willchang]

"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real."

Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?

Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols. Such bullshit.

[madaxe_again]

No, they're symbols which accurately represent information to us in a useful fashion.

Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind.

You, the external observer, know that this is all just code running on silicon.

The mind within the simulation, however, has no concept of outside, however knows itself to be real, that beach ball to be real. This mind could ultimately reason that perhaps it is merely perceiving representations of information in a way that is useful to it. Perhaps this "space" is just information. Perhaps I am just information. I express this to another mind I just met in the simulation, it tells me I'm nuts, such bullshit.

The thing is, it's a testable theory, and it doesn't require a simulation, either. A holographic universe (totally testable and being tested now) would fulfil the condition he posits, and a simulation, natural or artificial, could too. The simulation argument also applies - if we ever manage to accurately simulate even a small section of a universe even at massive time dilation, it becomes rather likely that this is a simulation too.

For all we know our universe exists on the surface of a black hole.

So yeah, what we perceive is not "real", but you can pick at that thread ad infinitum, and it's turtles all the way down, so it all becomes a bit epistemologial.

That said, there could be useful applications. If it turns out that there's another spatial dimension with which our reality is better described (and it appears there is if you like susy, brane/M theory, strings) that we can access but only with difficulty so our sensorium excludes it that's big news - hyperspace.

Edit: just remembered a JBS Haldane quote that applies nicely -

"Nature is not only queerer than we suppose -- it is queerer than we can suppose."

[thedaemon]

Reminds me of a quote of H.P. Lovecraft:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

[eanzenberg]

Unprovable, unable to generate predictions on nature: not science.

[madaxe_again]

Eh? One can test every theory I've mentioned in there, and many, such as the holographic universe principle, currently are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Experime...

[fit2rule]

Science is just one mans useful ontology in relation to another mans un-useful one.

[wmt]

The funny thing is that we can measure reality with all kinds of instruments, and based on those measurements have been able to make theories (in the scientific meaning of the word) that have taken us to other planets of our solar system.

So yeah, I'd say our perception of reality is pretty okay.

[ccallebs]

The point he makes is that those instruments and theories have an inherent bias to the kind of reality we perceive. That reality is a result of our evolutionary fitness and is not objective. Even the words we use to describe concepts are a function of the limitations our vocal cords and frontal lobe.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM3CptVZDYU

[kazinator]

So what? A bias doesn't mean that these observations and theories are wrong. There can be non-conflicting, different ways of looking at the same thing. Usually they will have something in common (at least that thing itself, plus some of its attributes that are included in both aspects).

A bias doesn't preclude objectivity, either; "biased" is not a synonym for "subjective", and therefore not the opposite of "objective".

[ccallebs]

I'd argue that any sort of bias is orthogonal to the idea of an absolute reality. However, it doesn't preclude any reality. Out of pragmatism we need to be able to define one. The survival of our species also hinges upon that.

But thought experiments have the luxury of not needing pragmatism.

[fit2rule]

He's talking about the words we use - that they are just symbols, and are only representative of the observations made, and are not the actual thing being described, itself. We call it a 'brain', but it is so much more than that, and the more we look at it - the more we need to invent new symbols in order to describe what we're looking at. In fact, words are not the things they describe - words are just abstract symbols, and concepts which we attempt to communicate about. They aren't the actual thing.

So yes, bullshit. Fallacy. Lies. You get the point, entirely. We cannot use anything but a new word - which is, basically, a lie until everyone believes it (i.e. we all have the same abstract agreement about what the word means). No word is the thing it describes. So we really only have handles, or pointers, to reality .. and that is not the same.

[TheOtherHobbes]

But it still hurts when you kick a rock.

The article is trite hand waving. Of course we parse the world through symbols, but the symbols are shorthand for consistent, predictable experiences.

Does it matter if the physical experiences are created by physical objects in the Newtonian sense, or by quantum fields?

Not at all. Because if you drive a car into a wall fast enough you're still going to die. And so is everyone else who drives the same kind of car into the same kind of wall at the same speed.

If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.

Most humans don't experience reality in that way. (Writers of New Age books try to say otherwise, but there's no evidence they're right.)

The casual arrow of symbolic perception goes in one direction, from outside to in. So unless you have some way to hack the symbols and the experience they create, this kind of "explanation" is irrelevant.

[fit2rule]

>If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.

Ah, but it does: it gives you the ability to create new words for new things, and thus extend your reach and control out into the universe. We couldn't get to the moon until we'd figured out the right words to get us there. Then, we used those words to get us there.

The moon is still there. We got there because we described the effort to do so sufficiently well enough that the actions manifested into the universe, and we altered it according to our will - which is the real force of reality in the universe, since we can use will to both experience the natural world, and alter it irrevocably from what it would have been, had we all just left it alone - or at least not describe what we were going to do, so well, that it then just happens ..