A very brief introduction to Immaterialism

We very strongly feel the world exists out there independently of us. We feel it is solid, has colours, that sounds are out there and so on.

However, the scientific story holds that we are profoundly mistaken in all of this. The apparent solidity of objects is -- scientists allege -- merely the repulsive force between the electrons in the tips of our fingers and the electrons near the surface of the "touched" object. Colours, in reality, are merely a certain wavelength of light that objects reflect. Sounds are merely rarefactions and compressions of the air. Smells are merely molecules in motion.

So reality is entirely divest of colours, sounds, and smells, and really nothing is solid either. These qualitative experiences are supposedly entirely a creation of the mind. The world out there is wholly quantitative and devoid of anything qualitative. And hence unimaginable. The greenness you experience when looking at a green object is entirely a creation of your mind. The perceived object is not actually green at all in the commonsensical use of the word green.

This scientific picture not only applies to materialism, but any position that holds that science depicts a literal state of affairs.

I want now to take a very brief look at the metaphysical ideas of the 18th Century philosopher, George Berkeley. He subscribed to a metaphysical view of the world called immaterialism, commonly referred to as subjective idealism. This rejects the notion that science depicts a literal state of affairs and, with commonsense, affirmed that colours really are out there in the world, as are sounds and smells. They are not merely entirely a creation of our own minds. The world is as it seems.

But, in another respect, his immaterialism radically departs from commonsense.  He is notorious for denying the existence of a mind-independent reality. Normally, we think that a coloured object is wholly independent of our minds, or indeed any minds whatsoever. But Berkeley held that our very perceptions constitute reality.   

Now, consider that when I see grass and I see it is green, this is clearly not entirely a creation of my own mind. There is, after all, a difference between my perceiving grass and when I think and hold an image in my mind of grass.

So, if what we think of as the external world doesn't have a mind-independent existence, but yet what we perceive is not entirely conjured from our own minds, then why do we have any perceptions of an ostensible external world like grass, trees, houses, stars and so on at all?  

The answer is that Berkeley held that when I see something, I am participating in God's conception of the world. Our various perceptual experiences -- vision, sounds, smell, tastes, sense of touch -- are a result of God directly conveying to us his conception. Our perceptual experiences of the external world are, in a sense, a direct communication with God.

Of course, one need not follow Berkeley all the way here. Perhaps all sentient minds somehow create physical reality. It is this collective mind that we are participating in when we experience "physical" reality.

It might be thought that immaterialism profoundly contradicts what science has discovered about the world. This is a mistake.  We can never break out of our world of perceptions. Science is purely in the business of describing the connections between our various perceptual experiences. There is no requirement that we hypothesize a reality forever beyond what we can in principle perceptually experience.

So, does this mean that something like atoms do not exist since they are in principle unperceivable? Let's step back a bit and consider a normal everyday macroscopic object. Let's consider an apple. What we call an apple has a certain physical appearance that shifts according to perspective, a certain feel, and a certain taste. But, according to George Berkeley, the apple I see and the apple I touch are not literally caused by a mind-independent apple out there causing both. Rather, certain visual appearances, and certain tactile (touch) sensations are constantly conjoined together. It is a family of associated perceptual experiences that we label an "apple".

So the apple itself and indeed all physical objects are an implicit hypothesis we all hold about the world. The existence of objects serves to explain the course of our perceptual experiences. The existence of unobservable entities such as atoms, although more hypothetical or theoretical, also play a fruitful role in our hypotheses and theories about the world. Therefore, they can be said to exist in a comparable manner to the common objects of our experience.

Why does the external world exhibit uniformity? If there is no mind-independent reality, what accounts for the fact that the tree outside remains there regardless of whether I look towards it or look away? The answer for Berkeley resides in the fact that the world is governed by physical laws. Compare to the environment in a computer game. The character I control might be facing towards a tree. I can turn the character a full revolution through 360 degrees and the tree will still be there.  The tree is still there because the computer game environment is governed by rules implemented by a computer programmer. Likewise, our external world exhibits uniformity due to physical laws, with physical laws simply being directly caused by God.

I'm not sure if I would follow Berkeley in everything he says, but he provides much food for thought and I would gravitate towards some type of idealism, even if not subjective idealism.

26/05/2021  Update:  I've just published another blog post on Berkeley's immaterialism. 

Never never give up!

From an unknown author:

One day, two frogs were enjoying the day in the barn when they accidently fell into the farmer's bucket of cream, and they couldn't get out. The two frogs kept swimming around to keep from drowning, and every once in a while they would try to climb out, but this was becoming very tiring.

One frog kept saying, "This is useless, we should just give up." But the other frog just ignored the comment and kept swimming.

Finally, the pessimistic frog gave up and drowned. The other frog was sad at the loss of his friend, but he wasn't going to give up. He kept swimming and swimming, and, finally, the cream turned into butter and the frog simply climbed out.

This story shows that even if we stumble and others try to pull us down, we've got to keep on swimming because, eventually, the cream will turn into butter and we'll make it out of the pail.

I wholeheartedly concur.  No matter how desperate a situation may seem, no matter how unlikely it seems to be able to attain the desired outcome by continually struggling, nothing is achieved by simply giving up.  And even in the most dire circumstances all hope might not be lost.



Moreover the striving itself serves to give us purpose and direction in life.  No
chance of landing that dream job?  Well certainly not with a negative
attitude.   And we can even grant it might be unrealistic even with a
positive attitude.  But negativity makes failure a certainty. 
Positivity, even where it fails to achieve the specific goal in mind,
gives us hope, gives us something to look forward to, gives us a reason
to live even if only to see if our plans come to fruition.  And if they don't?  Then make some new plans!   Always fight, and never never give in! 

Does the self as opposed to a mere "sense of self" exist?

An interesting blog entry by someone regarding whether the self actually exists.


Can the Chariot take us to the land of no-self?

Here is the issue as I see it. It seems to me that materialists cannot believe in a self. This follows when we remember our bodies are in a constant state of change and hence our mental states too. There can be nothing permanent to which materialists could hang their hat on and call a self. And materialists sometimes approvingly speak of Buddhism as sharing their belief here.


But what does it mean to claim the self doesn't exist? Well first of all it certainly doesn't mean that they are claiming that we are not conscious. We know in a most immediate manner that we are conscious. Nor would they deny we have a sense of self. Thus from one minute to the next we feel we are the same self, or the same person, enduring during that time.



The materialists (and Buddhists) claim this is an illusion. In other words, although we have a sense of self, this does not correspond to a real self. This can most easily be seen when we compare ourselves now to when we were children when we had very different personality characteristics. If our intelligence, interests etc have changed so radically since then, then in what sense can we be claimed to be the same person?



But the materialist and Buddhist are claiming much more than this. They claim that even from one second to the next there is no actual enduring self. To understand what they mean by this we need to be aware of the distinction between alterational change and existential change. The author of the article expresses it in the following way:

Phenomenologically, mental
change is not existential change, but alterational change, or in a word,
alteration.  Existential change, as when something comes into being or
passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a
change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to
exist is no longer available to be that in which  this change occurs,
and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to
exist to be that in which this change occurs.  We express this by saying
that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however,
requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the
same individual is in different states at different times.

Let me put this in a more readily easily understood manner. Consider a table. We could paint it a different colour. That's alterational change. It's the same table, but has been altered slightly. But now consider destroying a table, and putting in it's place a table looking identical. That's existential change.


I take it that commonsense takes it for granted that, at least from one minute to the next, we undergo alterational change and emphatically not existential change. If the latter were true then, since we continuously change from one second to the next, then we would, from the commonsensical perspective, be effectively constantly "dying" from one second to the next. And this is precisely what materialists are obliged to believe. Hence both materialism and Buddhism entail a profound shift in the manner in which we view ourselves -- for one thing it would entail our fear of death is wholly misplaced!



In part one of the linked article we are presented with an argument for such existential change. I want to supplement the arguments there with my own. Imagine that in the future teleporting is possible. In the teleportation booth we scan a person, and simultaneously destroy (kill) that person, and create an identical person in the destination booth. That person will feel as if he has "jumped" from the original booth to the destination booth and will have the same memories etc and will feel that he is the same person that was killed.

So the teleported person will feel he is the same self i.e his sense of self will be intact. But in reality he has been killed and been replaced by a different self who looks exactly like him, shares the same memories and in every other way is psychologically identical to the original.



But -- so the materialist will argue -- the exact same position pertains in our everyday second by second existence. We have an almost identical physical appearance, almost identical memories and more generally an almost identical psychological state from one second to the next. However there's absolutely nothing persisting any more than a table does if we were to continually destroy the table and replace it with almost identical versions every second.

The author of the blog argues that this no-self hypothesis is untenable. As he puts it:

Suppose
my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is
painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly
broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the
painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the
painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful
shows that it is directly  perceived. It is not as if there is merely a
succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a
consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the
transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a
consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be
reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession
is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of
consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the
self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful
one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not
only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a
painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable
state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a
painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our
access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models
taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness,
there would be no consciousness of transition.

If we are aware of not only a pleasurable state followed by a painful state but in addition an awareness that I have changed from a pleasurable state to a painful state, then there must be something enduring which persists through both states. So, in addition to mental states at specific instances in time, there is an underlying awareness of these mental states at specific instances in time. This underlying awareness plays the role of uniting these experiences. To wit:

 . . the self is experienced not as an object alongside objects, but as the conscious transtemporal unity of the pleasurable and painful states.

Has the author established that it is plausible to suppose the self exists? I certainly think the example of the self is very different to that of a chariot or any other physical object. The self or I seems to serve the purpose of demarcating one set of experiences from another. I do not experience your experiences, and you do not experience mine. The prospect of an enjoyable night out down town seems very different if I were to experience it rather than an identical twin of mine were to experience it. Simply because the self can neither be pointed to nor is discernible in isolated conscious experiences does not entail such a self does not exist. In short if the materialist or Buddhist is to assert that there is no persisting self then he needs to address this challenge of the "conscious transtemporal unity" of successive conscious states.


But what about the teleportation example? Indeed we can imagine the following scenario. Imagine that every infinitesimal fraction of a second you are getting teleported from place to place. Obviously if you keep your eyes open you'll just see a confusing blur. But you could close your eyes, and everything would seem to be normal. You could be thinking of a problem, daydreaming, or whatever. Nothing would seem different as compared to when you have your eyes closed normally, except in the teleportation scenario you are continuously being killed and spontaneously coming into being every infinitesimal fraction of a second! Does this then refute the notion there can be an enduring real self? Well, yes, but only if you believe that teleportation in the manner described is possible. And this possibility is dependent upon some materialist position being true. When the original body is scanned it is typically implicitly being supposed that a person is exhausted by the total sum of information constituting his body. But to suppose this is to assume that reductive materialism is true, or more specifically that human beings are nothing but their material bodies. But non-materialists will reject that either consciousness or selves are themselves material. More specifically they will deny the self or its conscious states can be constituted by information (for if they could why would they not by definition be material?). A weaker materialist position could be adopted which holds that even though conscious states are not the very same thing as the brain or its processes and hence cannot be scanned and reproduced, conscious states are nevertheless produced by a person's brain. In which case the teleported person's body will produce consciousness and teleportation will be possible after all, even if we reject strict materialism. 


None of this though says anything about the possibility of a persisting or enduring self should we reject all materialist positions. Perhaps the body doesn't produce either selves or their conscious states but only modifies conscious states whilst leaving an unchanging self intact. This might be compared to tinkering with the innards of a TV set and altering the picture quality being displayed, yet without altering in any way whatsoever the actual content of the programme being screened. It seems to me that if this is so then the implications for teleporting would be that it is impossible, at least in the manner described, and a mere corpse would appear in the destination booth.


Edited to add: For those who might be interested there's a paper on why Berkeley's conception of a real enduring self is not susceptible to David Hume's dismissal (I also talk about Berkeley's philosophy here: )


Berkeley's Refutation of Hume On the Self

Does the discovery of fake psychics provide good evidence that there are no genuine psychics?

Imagine 2 possible worlds:

a) No psychics exist due to the fact that anomalous information acquisition is simply not possible i.e the physical laws of nature prohibit what we refer to as ESP.

b) Psychics do exist, but they are comparatively rare.

It is clear to me that in world "b" there will be more fake psychics than in world "a". Why? Here's an analogy. If we lived in a world where £20 notes didn't exist, then it is likely there would also be no counterfeit £20 notes either. There would be no purpose in counterfeit £20 notes since no one would be fooled by them. However, in our world where £20 notes exist and they are in demand, then inevitably there will be many counterfeit £20 notes.

Similar reasoning applies to psychics, albeit to a much lesser degree. That is to say in world "a" there will be fake psychics, but it seems clear to be that they will not be as numerous as fake psychics in world "b".

Skeptics of the paranormal often allege that the discovery of fake psychics provides compelling evidence that genuine psychics do not exist. But since there are many more of them in world "b" this is not only false, but arguably (and admittedly counterintuitively) makes the existence of genuine psychics more likely.

In addition, they sometimes use the argument that since every psychic they have heard about turns out to be a charlatan, then it is reasonably, via induction, to infer there are no genuine psychics. But this is rather like a person flicking through a wad of £20 notes, carefully removing those counterfeit notes which are fairly easy to discern with the naked eye, and then declaring that since every note they've examined so far is counterfeit, it's reasonable to infer they all are! 

In other words skeptics focus on the easy targets and insinuate that similar debunking can be applied to all alleged psychics. And this is the strategy that skeptics of the paranormal seem to me to apply across the board to all paranormal phenomena (to be fair though such underhand tactics are pretty well universal no matter what the subject matter happens to be i.e. people have the propensity to attack the weakest articulation of a position or resort to attacking straw men, and to avoid addressing the strongest or most compelling articulation of a person's position on any subject).


 

Predictions for 2024

A few months ago, as a result of making disparaging comments about Isaac
Asimov's predictions in 1964 for 2014, someone asked me to make predictions for
2024. 

I think making predictions is extraordinarily difficult. And
I don't have the knowledge to attempt such a thing. However I decided not to be
boring and gave it a crack anyway. This is what I said: 

2024? Well I'll predict everything will be more or less the
same.

OK google glasses will have limited success when they are
first launched. But later models will become more and more popular as all the
issues are ironed out. It'll be like the history of mobile phones (cell
phones). At first very few people will have them, but eventually they became
all pervasive.

People will not make a one way trip to Mars in April 2023 to
live the rest of their lives there! I just can't see that happening, at least
not by that time.

Smart watches will find a market, but they will never become
that popular. They're too small and people will prefer their smartphones.

Much less stress will be placed on the notion that saturated
fats are a great evil. It will be increasingly recognised by 2024 that it is
sugar and refined carbs, rather than dietary fat and lack of exercise, which is
largely responsible for rising obesity rates and ill-health.

Yeah not very startling exciting predictions.  But I'm trying to be realistic.  I think I may have been proven to be correct with the Mars trip already since the last time I heard a year mentioned it was 2025!  But, regardless, I cannot imagine it happening before 2040, and I doubt that a one way trip will ever happen -- or at least not until Mars is terraformed!

A Purposeful Life?

We find ourselves in this world not knowing what we are, who we are, or
why we are here.  Are we  mere meat robots with no free will living out
our purposeless lives in a purposeless Universe?  Or are we souls with
an ultimate purpose to our existence -- a purpose which we cannot as of
yet know, or possibly even comprehend. Worst of all we don't know what
our ultimate destiny might be, whether it will be oblivion or whether it
will be to ascend into some mysterious new reality.



In our day to day lives let's just be happy for the day and have a few
pints of beer. Problem is I made a new years resolution not to drink from
the 1st January 2014 to the 31st March 2014.  I am mortified  🙁

The proposed changes to the UK National Lottery

Camelot, the operators of the UK National Lottery, have announced that the price of a national lottery ticket in the UK is set to double from £1 to £2 in the autumn (2013). The prizes are also changing. Currently the prizes for the Saturday draw are approximately as follows:

 

Match 3 balls = £10 (could be less but only under truly exceptional circumstances).
Match 4 balls = £60 (average)
Match 5 balls = £1,500 (average)
Match 5 balls + bonus = £100,000 (average)
Match all 6 balls = £4,100,000 (estimated)

Come the autumn these prizes will be:

Match 3 balls = £25 (could be less but only under truly exceptional circumstances).
Match 4 balls = £100 (average)
Match 5 balls = £1,000 (average)
Match 5 balls + bonus = £50,000 (average)
Match all 6 balls = £5,000,000 (estimated)

However a meaningful comparison of these figures has to take into account the fact that the stake has doubled. It is more useful therefore to compare the prizes as a ratio of the stake. So we have:

Match 3 balls current ratio = 10 new ratio = 12.5
Match 4 balls current ratio = 60 new ratio = 50
Match 5 balls current ratio = 1500 new ratio = 500
Match 5 balls + bonus current ratio = 100,000 new ratio = 25,000
Match all 6 balls current ratio = 4,100,000 new ratio = 2,500,000
 

Let's make it clear what this means by looking at matching 3 balls. Currently the stake is £1, the winnings are £10, hence the winnings are 10 * the stake, or a ratio of 10. In the autumn the stake will be £2, the winnings will be £25, hence the winnings are 12.5 * the stake, or a ratio of 12.5.

The important thing here which should concern people is how these ratios are going to change. We get the figures by dividing the new ratio by the old ratio. So we get the following figures:

Match 3 balls = 12.5/10 = 1.25
Match 4 balls = 50/60 = 0.83
Match 5 balls = 500/1500 = 0.33
Match 5 balls + bonus 25,000/1000,000 = 0.25
Match all 6 balls = 2,500,000/4,100,000 = 0.61

 
What this means is that for the number of balls matched other than 3, the prize money proportionate to the stake is going to go significantly down. Proportionate to the stake the jackpot prize will only be 61% of what it is now . The match 5 balls + bonus will only be a quarter (25%) proportionate to the stake of what it is now!

I assume that the 1.25 proportionate increase in the prize money for 3 balls will precisely offset the relative decrease in the prizes for 4 balls or more (since 3 ball prizes vastly exceed all other prizes combined). That is to say that I suspect that as a percentage the amount devoted to prizes will remain the same.


It seems to me that people predominantly play the lottery, not at the prospect of matching 3 balls and winning £10 (strictly £9 once the £1 stake is taking into account), but rather for that very small possibility of winning the jackpot, or at least matching 5 balls + bonus and winning a life changing ~£100,000. And given that lottery players tend to disproportionately come from those with lower incomes, one imagines that they want this small possibility for as small a stake as possible. If I am correct in this supposition then Camelot's proposals seem, if anything, largely diametrically opposed to these wishes.

I have therefore taken the liberty of emailing Camelot in order to express my dissatisfaction with their proposals. Within their response they state:

We know that players still love Lotto, but through extensive consumer research, they have told us that they want more ways to win more money. This is exactly what we will be introducing with the following changes to Lotto later in the year:

• More than doubling the bottom prize tier which is what players have said they want, from £10 to £25. This creates by far the most winners on Lotto on each draw.
• Increasing jackpots. £2.5 million on a Wednesday (£2.2m) and £5 million on Saturday (£4.1m).

I have no doubt that people have expressed the wish that the prize for 3 balls should be significantly increased. I also find it likely they expressed the wish to be able to win more money. Although peoples' motivation for playing is to win a life changing sum of money, in reality they realise that they most probably will only ever match 3 balls. So clearly they will express a desire for the £10 prize money to be increased. But I also strongly suspect that if it had been made clear by Camelot that such an increase in the smallest prize will be accompanied by a doubling of the price of a ticket, in addition to a relative decrease in the value of the Jackpot, and an absolute decrease in the value of the 5 balls + bonus and 5 balls prizes, then I'm sure peoples' reactions would have been somewhat less favourable.


But we shall see. Perhaps most people will welcome these changes with cries of delight. However I doubt it. Once it has sunk in that not only is the price of a ticket doubling, but that the relative amounts won relative to the stake for matching 4 or more balls is undergoing a substantial decrease, then I cannot imagine most people being happy.