I want to state more explicitly where I’m coming from, about LW and woo.
One might think: “LW is one of few places on the internet that specializes in having only scientific materialist thoughts, without the woo.”
My own take is more like: “LW is one of few places on the internet that specializes in trying to have principled, truth-tracking models and practices about epistemics, and on e.g. trying to track that our maps are not the territory, trying to ask what we’d expect to see differently if particular claims are true/not-true, trying to be a “lens that sees its own flaws.””
Something I don’t want to see on LW, that I think at least sometimes happens under both the headings of “fake frameworks” and the headings of “woo” (and some other places on LW too), is something like “let’s not worry about the ultimate nature of the cosmos, or what really cleaves nature at the joints right now. Let’s say some sentences because saying these sentences seems locally useful.”
I worry about this sort of thing being on LW because, insofar as those sentences make truth-claims about the cosmos, deciding to “take in” those sentences “because they’re useful,” without worrying about the nature of the cosmos means deciding to acquire intentionally-unreflective views on the nature of the cosmos, which is not the thing I hope we’re here for. And it risks muddying the rationality project thereby.
(Alternate version I’m fine with, that is a bit close to this: “observe that people seem to get use out of taking in sentences X and Y. Ask what this means about the cosmos.”)
(Additional alternate version I’m fine with: notice that a hypothesis seems to be paying at least some rent, despite being false. Stay interested in both facts. Play around and see how much more rent you can extract from the hypothesis, while still tracking that it is false or probably-false, and while still asking what the unified ultimate nature of the cosmos might be, that yields this whole thing. I think this is another thing people sometimes do under the heading of “fake frameworks,” and I like this one.)
Something else I don’t want to see on LW (well, really the same thing again, but stated differently because I think it might be perceived differently) is: “let’s not read author X, or engage with body of material Y, or hypothesis Z, because it’s woo.” (Or: “… because people who engaged with that seem to have come to bad ends” or “because saying those sentences seems to cause instrumental harm.”) I don’t want this because this aversion, at least stated in this way, doesn’t seem principled, and LW is one of the few places on the internet where many folks aspire to avoiding unprincipled social mimicry of “let’s think this way and not that way,” and toward instead asking how our minds work and how epistemics work and what this means about what ever works for forming accurate maps.
(I really like having meta-level conversations about whether we should talk in these ways, though! And I like people who think we should talk in the ways I’m objecting to stating their disagreements with me/whoever, and the reasons for their disagreements, and then folks trying together to figure out what’s true. That’s part of how we can do the actually principled thing. By not shaming/punishing particular perspectives, but instead arguing with them.)
Are people here mostly materialists? I’m not. In a Cartesian sense, the most authentic experience possible is that of consciousness itself, with matter being something our mind imagines to explain phenomenon that we think might be real outside of our imagination (but we can never really know).
In other words, we know that idealism is true, because we experience pure ideas constantly, and we suspect that the images our minds serve up might actually correspond to some reality out there (Kant’s things-in-themselves).
The map might really be the territory. Like, if you read a book by Tolkein and find that the map doesn’t match the text, which is right? And if Tolkein clarified, would he be right, considering the thing he’s talking about doesn’t even exist? Except it kinda does, in that we’re debating real things, and they impact us, etc?
I don’t think we’re anywhere near approaching a meaningful metaphysics, so the confidence of the materialists seems misplaced. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen matter, so I know it’s real. But I’ve also seen matter in my dreams (including under a microscope, where it continued to be “real”).
Okay, since you seem interested in knowing why people are materialists. I think it’s the history of science up until now. The history of science has basically been a constant build-up of materialism.
We started out at prehistoric animism where everything happening except that rock you just threw at another rock was driven by an intangible spirit. The rock wasn’t since that was just you throwing it. And then people started figuring out successive compelling narratives about how more complex stuff is just rocks being thrown about. Planets being driven by angels? Nope, just gravitation and inertia. Okay, so comets don’t have comet spirits, but surely living things have spirits. Turns out no, molecular biology is a bit tricky, but it seems to still paint a (very small) rocks thrown about picture that convincingly gets you a living tree or a cat. Human minds looked unique until people started building computers. The same story is repeating again, people point human activities as proofs of the indomitable human spirit, then someone builds an AI to do it. Douglas Hofstadter was still predicting that mastering chess would have to involve encompassing the whole of human cognition in 1979 and had to eat crow in the introduction of the 20th anniversary edition of his book.
So to sum up, simple physics went from spiritual (Aristotle’s “rocks want to go down, smoke wants to go up”) to materialist, the outer space went from spiritual to materialist, biological life went from spiritual to materialist and mental acts like winning a chess game went from spiritual to materialist.
We’re now down to the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re also still missing a really comprehensive scientific picture for how you go from neurons to high-level human thought. So which way do you think this is going to go? A discovery that the spiritual world exists after all, and was hiding in the microtubules of the human brain all along, or people looking at the finished blueprint for how the brain works that explains things up to conscious thought and going “oh, so that’s how it works” and it’s all just rocks thrown about once again. So far we’ve got a perfect record of everybody clamoring for the first option and then things turning out to be the second one.
Thank you, this makes a lot of sense. I do see how the history of science kind of narrows its way down towards materialism, and if we assume that path will continue in the same direction, pure materialism is the logical outcome.
But...
I disagree with the narrative that science is narrowing in on materialism. Popular culture certainly interprets the message of Science with a capital S that way, but reading actual scientific work doesn’t leave that impression at all.
The message I got from my middle school science classes was that science is profoundly uncertain of what matter is, but that it appears to manifest probabilistically under the governance of forces, which are really just measurable tendencies of the behavior of matter, whose origin we also have no guess at.
The spiritualists were wrong in their specific guesses, but so were the scientists, who as you note when citing Aristotle.
I have no doubt you will be on the right side of history. The priesthood will change the definitions of matter to accommodate whatever spiritual magic we discover next. Past scriptures will be reinterpreted to show how science was always progressing here, the present is the logical endpoint of the past, or at least, of our team in the past.
So far we’ve got a perfect record of everybody clamoring for the first option and then things turning out to be the second one.
That’s because materialists write the record. It’s easy to construct History to serve Ideology, so history, at least not epic narrative history like this, is a bad teacher when received from power. Primitive pagan mythology stumbled ignorantly towards the True Religion, or even the inverse of your claim, history is full of self-sure clockwork Newtonians eating crow when the bizarre, uncertain nature of modern physics slowly unraveled before their arrogant, annoyed eyes.
---
Thanks again for taking the time to discuss this btw, your response answered my question very well. After all, I’m arguing about whether people should be materialists, but you only explained why they are, so feel free to ignore my ramblings and accept my gratitude :)
You seem to be claiming that whatever does get discovered, which might be interpreted as proof of the spiritual in another climate, will get distorted to support the materialist paradigm. I’m not really sure how this would work in practice. We already have a something of a precommitment to what we expect something “supernatural” to look like, ontologically basic mental entities. So far the discoveries of science have been nothing like that, and if new scientific discoveries suddenly were, I find it very hard to imagine quite many people outside of the “priesthood” not sitting up and paying very close attention.
I don’t really follow your arguments about what matter is and past scientist being wrong. Science improved and proved past scientists mistaken, that’s the whole idea with science. Spiritualists have not improved much so far. And the question with matter isn’t so much as what it is (what would an answer to this look like anyway?), but how matter acts, and science has done a remarkably good job at that part.
Okay. I’m curious to understand why! Are you yourself materialist? Any recommended reading or viewing on the topic, specifically within the context of the rationalist movement?
I’d say that something-like-materialism feels like the most consistent and likely explanation. Sure we could assume that maybe, despite all appearances, there isn’t a real world of matter out there after all… but given that we do assume such a world for pretty much everything else we do, it would seem like an unjustifiably privileged hypothesis to assume anything else.
There’s a pretty strong materialist viewpoint in the original LW sequences, though it’s kinda scattered across a number of posts so I’m not sure which ones in particular I’d recommend (besides the one about privileged hypotheses).
I want to state more explicitly where I’m coming from, about LW and woo.
One might think: “LW is one of few places on the internet that specializes in having only scientific materialist thoughts, without the woo.”
My own take is more like: “LW is one of few places on the internet that specializes in trying to have principled, truth-tracking models and practices about epistemics, and on e.g. trying to track that our maps are not the territory, trying to ask what we’d expect to see differently if particular claims are true/not-true, trying to be a “lens that sees its own flaws.””
Something I don’t want to see on LW, that I think at least sometimes happens under both the headings of “fake frameworks” and the headings of “woo” (and some other places on LW too), is something like “let’s not worry about the ultimate nature of the cosmos, or what really cleaves nature at the joints right now. Let’s say some sentences because saying these sentences seems locally useful.”
I worry about this sort of thing being on LW because, insofar as those sentences make truth-claims about the cosmos, deciding to “take in” those sentences “because they’re useful,” without worrying about the nature of the cosmos means deciding to acquire intentionally-unreflective views on the nature of the cosmos, which is not the thing I hope we’re here for. And it risks muddying the rationality project thereby.
(Alternate version I’m fine with, that is a bit close to this: “observe that people seem to get use out of taking in sentences X and Y. Ask what this means about the cosmos.”)
(Additional alternate version I’m fine with: notice that a hypothesis seems to be paying at least some rent, despite being false. Stay interested in both facts. Play around and see how much more rent you can extract from the hypothesis, while still tracking that it is false or probably-false, and while still asking what the unified ultimate nature of the cosmos might be, that yields this whole thing. I think this is another thing people sometimes do under the heading of “fake frameworks,” and I like this one.)
Something else I don’t want to see on LW (well, really the same thing again, but stated differently because I think it might be perceived differently) is: “let’s not read author X, or engage with body of material Y, or hypothesis Z, because it’s woo.” (Or: “… because people who engaged with that seem to have come to bad ends” or “because saying those sentences seems to cause instrumental harm.”) I don’t want this because this aversion, at least stated in this way, doesn’t seem principled, and LW is one of the few places on the internet where many folks aspire to avoiding unprincipled social mimicry of “let’s think this way and not that way,” and toward instead asking how our minds work and how epistemics work and what this means about what ever works for forming accurate maps.
(I really like having meta-level conversations about whether we should talk in these ways, though! And I like people who think we should talk in the ways I’m objecting to stating their disagreements with me/whoever, and the reasons for their disagreements, and then folks trying together to figure out what’s true. That’s part of how we can do the actually principled thing. By not shaming/punishing particular perspectives, but instead arguing with them.)
Are people here mostly materialists? I’m not. In a Cartesian sense, the most authentic experience possible is that of consciousness itself, with matter being something our mind imagines to explain phenomenon that we think might be real outside of our imagination (but we can never really know).
In other words, we know that idealism is true, because we experience pure ideas constantly, and we suspect that the images our minds serve up might actually correspond to some reality out there (Kant’s things-in-themselves).
The map might really be the territory. Like, if you read a book by Tolkein and find that the map doesn’t match the text, which is right? And if Tolkein clarified, would he be right, considering the thing he’s talking about doesn’t even exist? Except it kinda does, in that we’re debating real things, and they impact us, etc?
I don’t think we’re anywhere near approaching a meaningful metaphysics, so the confidence of the materialists seems misplaced. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen matter, so I know it’s real. But I’ve also seen matter in my dreams (including under a microscope, where it continued to be “real”).
Sorry to rant on this single word!
Okay, since you seem interested in knowing why people are materialists. I think it’s the history of science up until now. The history of science has basically been a constant build-up of materialism.
We started out at prehistoric animism where everything happening except that rock you just threw at another rock was driven by an intangible spirit. The rock wasn’t since that was just you throwing it. And then people started figuring out successive compelling narratives about how more complex stuff is just rocks being thrown about. Planets being driven by angels? Nope, just gravitation and inertia. Okay, so comets don’t have comet spirits, but surely living things have spirits. Turns out no, molecular biology is a bit tricky, but it seems to still paint a (very small) rocks thrown about picture that convincingly gets you a living tree or a cat. Human minds looked unique until people started building computers. The same story is repeating again, people point human activities as proofs of the indomitable human spirit, then someone builds an AI to do it. Douglas Hofstadter was still predicting that mastering chess would have to involve encompassing the whole of human cognition in 1979 and had to eat crow in the introduction of the 20th anniversary edition of his book.
So to sum up, simple physics went from spiritual (Aristotle’s “rocks want to go down, smoke wants to go up”) to materialist, the outer space went from spiritual to materialist, biological life went from spiritual to materialist and mental acts like winning a chess game went from spiritual to materialist.
We’re now down to the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re also still missing a really comprehensive scientific picture for how you go from neurons to high-level human thought. So which way do you think this is going to go? A discovery that the spiritual world exists after all, and was hiding in the microtubules of the human brain all along, or people looking at the finished blueprint for how the brain works that explains things up to conscious thought and going “oh, so that’s how it works” and it’s all just rocks thrown about once again. So far we’ve got a perfect record of everybody clamoring for the first option and then things turning out to be the second one.
Thank you, this makes a lot of sense. I do see how the history of science kind of narrows its way down towards materialism, and if we assume that path will continue in the same direction, pure materialism is the logical outcome.
But...
I disagree with the narrative that science is narrowing in on materialism. Popular culture certainly interprets the message of Science with a capital S that way, but reading actual scientific work doesn’t leave that impression at all.
The message I got from my middle school science classes was that science is profoundly uncertain of what matter is, but that it appears to manifest probabilistically under the governance of forces, which are really just measurable tendencies of the behavior of matter, whose origin we also have no guess at.
The spiritualists were wrong in their specific guesses, but so were the scientists, who as you note when citing Aristotle.
I have no doubt you will be on the right side of history. The priesthood will change the definitions of matter to accommodate whatever spiritual magic we discover next. Past scriptures will be reinterpreted to show how science was always progressing here, the present is the logical endpoint of the past, or at least, of our team in the past.
That’s because materialists write the record. It’s easy to construct History to serve Ideology, so history, at least not epic narrative history like this, is a bad teacher when received from power. Primitive pagan mythology stumbled ignorantly towards the True Religion, or even the inverse of your claim, history is full of self-sure clockwork Newtonians eating crow when the bizarre, uncertain nature of modern physics slowly unraveled before their arrogant, annoyed eyes.
---
Thanks again for taking the time to discuss this btw, your response answered my question very well. After all, I’m arguing about whether people should be materialists, but you only explained why they are, so feel free to ignore my ramblings and accept my gratitude :)
You seem to be claiming that whatever does get discovered, which might be interpreted as proof of the spiritual in another climate, will get distorted to support the materialist paradigm. I’m not really sure how this would work in practice. We already have a something of a precommitment to what we expect something “supernatural” to look like, ontologically basic mental entities. So far the discoveries of science have been nothing like that, and if new scientific discoveries suddenly were, I find it very hard to imagine quite many people outside of the “priesthood” not sitting up and paying very close attention.
I don’t really follow your arguments about what matter is and past scientist being wrong. Science improved and proved past scientists mistaken, that’s the whole idea with science. Spiritualists have not improved much so far. And the question with matter isn’t so much as what it is (what would an answer to this look like anyway?), but how matter acts, and science has done a remarkably good job at that part.
Yes.
Okay. I’m curious to understand why! Are you yourself materialist? Any recommended reading or viewing on the topic, specifically within the context of the rationalist movement?
I’d say that something-like-materialism feels like the most consistent and likely explanation. Sure we could assume that maybe, despite all appearances, there isn’t a real world of matter out there after all… but given that we do assume such a world for pretty much everything else we do, it would seem like an unjustifiably privileged hypothesis to assume anything else.
There’s a pretty strong materialist viewpoint in the original LW sequences, though it’s kinda scattered across a number of posts so I’m not sure which ones in particular I’d recommend (besides the one about privileged hypotheses).