If I only had a single blind spot… But probably the most prominent is that I can’t stop feeling inside that life is guided by some sort of coherent narrative. E.G., I’ve had some hard times in the last few years, but very recently I got lucky and found a really good job (and considering the situation of the job market in Italy this means REALLY lucky). I just can’t stop feeling that I somewhat deserved it, via the usual narrative pattern of great difficulties → final reward.
It’s a very subtle mechanism, and I very often fail to notice that my mind is organizing what happens into a pseudo-coherent pattern. This sometimes leads to very stupid decisions, like not going out with friends because it doesn’t properly fit with my schedule (even if I can accomodate it with some efffort), and so it wasn’t meant to be. I’m working on it at the moment, but it will probably be a long way to eliminate the blind spot.
I had an existential crisis a few weeks ago that was very helpful. I now fully believe “it’s physics all the way down.” It’s also given me some insights as to how self-awareness arises in physical systems, and made me realize cryonics is trivially workable. I also have an intuitive feel for how humanity is collectively wearing rose-colored glasses, and am very curious what happens when these will get taken off! (In other words, I look forward to the creation of a fully rational agent according to a prescribed utility function.)
This also means I can hardly stand news and movies anymore, because I deconstruct everything. I have no problem maintaining social interactions, but no longer carry any of the standard social obligations. It’s a little eerie, like feeling the matrix.
The culmination of a long process of reconciling my decision to go to grad school in mathematics with meaning. I didn’t realize it before, but I had not expressly realized that mathematicians did all their work using clusters of adaptations that arose through natural selection. Certainly, I would have asserted “all humans are animals that evolved by natural selection,” and “mathematicians are humans,” but somehow I assigned mathematics privilege. This was somewhat damaging because I didn’t expressly apply things like cognitive science results on expertise and competence, unbeknownst to me treating the enterprise of mathematical thought as somehow not being reducible, or it being a silly question to ask of its reducibility, to a particular expression of a mammalian organ. I suspect this was due largely to mistaken classical exposure to the philosophy of science and mathematics, that is, prior to Darwinism. As a result, I experienced a prolonged period of confusion about why I seemed much more capable of learning certain kinds of mathematics (like abstract algebra) than others (like differential geometry) because my mental representations of these subjects were of abstract algebra and differential geometry being something different than particular clusters of functionally similar neurons in a particular mammalian brain. In effect, I had a belief in belief that learning mathematics is an act which crucially depends on cognitive processes, themselves evolutionary adaptations, but this was not reconciled into a belief prior to the existential crisis. The resolution of the existential crisis was that my reductionism of everything to physical particles and forces, or cognitive processes, was recursively embedded in the very things I was trying to comprehend, not expressly realizing that the mental state of ascribing meaning or feeling like you understand the core of a subject is—despite all intuition—physically embeddable.
To add to my comments above, I mean that there is no paradox or unnecessary ache in thinking about minds as physical objects (and hence pausable, storable, and replicable). Everything we’ve ever done happens within minds anyway, and there is nothing we can do about that. Whatever mental representations we conjure when we think of atoms or molecules or electromagnetic forces are inaccurate and incomplete: this “conscious” experience and sensory perception and thought is what a particular collection of molecules and forces is, rather than a visual or abstract representation of it. This requires a certain level of recursiveness to accede, and is essentially the mental flip that shuns treating everyday sensory experience and “life” as your axioms, and instead adopts axiomatically (even though the flip might have been due to evidence processing) that everything you or any human has ever experienced is a subspace of whatever mathematical structure we’re embedded in.
In light of all that, and further confirmations from cognitive science and neuroscience that “the self” is a distributed physical process unlike any Cartesian dualist conception, cryonics strikes me as being as natural as the notion of love or justice prior to performing the mental flip.
Well, another possibility would have been the negation of (what’s usually called around here) Tegmark’s Level IV. (That’s probably not the only other possibility.)
ETA: Not that your interpretation isn’t the obviously correct one.
If I only had a single blind spot… But probably the most prominent is that I can’t stop feeling inside that life is guided by some sort of coherent narrative. E.G., I’ve had some hard times in the last few years, but very recently I got lucky and found a really good job (and considering the situation of the job market in Italy this means REALLY lucky). I just can’t stop feeling that I somewhat deserved it, via the usual narrative pattern of great difficulties → final reward. It’s a very subtle mechanism, and I very often fail to notice that my mind is organizing what happens into a pseudo-coherent pattern. This sometimes leads to very stupid decisions, like not going out with friends because it doesn’t properly fit with my schedule (even if I can accomodate it with some efffort), and so it wasn’t meant to be. I’m working on it at the moment, but it will probably be a long way to eliminate the blind spot.
I had an existential crisis a few weeks ago that was very helpful. I now fully believe “it’s physics all the way down.” It’s also given me some insights as to how self-awareness arises in physical systems, and made me realize cryonics is trivially workable. I also have an intuitive feel for how humanity is collectively wearing rose-colored glasses, and am very curious what happens when these will get taken off! (In other words, I look forward to the creation of a fully rational agent according to a prescribed utility function.)
This also means I can hardly stand news and movies anymore, because I deconstruct everything. I have no problem maintaining social interactions, but no longer carry any of the standard social obligations. It’s a little eerie, like feeling the matrix.
Anything in particular that triggered it?
I am interested in reading it too, if you don’t mind to share.
The culmination of a long process of reconciling my decision to go to grad school in mathematics with meaning. I didn’t realize it before, but I had not expressly realized that mathematicians did all their work using clusters of adaptations that arose through natural selection. Certainly, I would have asserted “all humans are animals that evolved by natural selection,” and “mathematicians are humans,” but somehow I assigned mathematics privilege. This was somewhat damaging because I didn’t expressly apply things like cognitive science results on expertise and competence, unbeknownst to me treating the enterprise of mathematical thought as somehow not being reducible, or it being a silly question to ask of its reducibility, to a particular expression of a mammalian organ. I suspect this was due largely to mistaken classical exposure to the philosophy of science and mathematics, that is, prior to Darwinism. As a result, I experienced a prolonged period of confusion about why I seemed much more capable of learning certain kinds of mathematics (like abstract algebra) than others (like differential geometry) because my mental representations of these subjects were of abstract algebra and differential geometry being something different than particular clusters of functionally similar neurons in a particular mammalian brain. In effect, I had a belief in belief that learning mathematics is an act which crucially depends on cognitive processes, themselves evolutionary adaptations, but this was not reconciled into a belief prior to the existential crisis. The resolution of the existential crisis was that my reductionism of everything to physical particles and forces, or cognitive processes, was recursively embedded in the very things I was trying to comprehend, not expressly realizing that the mental state of ascribing meaning or feeling like you understand the core of a subject is—despite all intuition—physically embeddable.
I gather that by this you mean “trivially shown to be theoretically possible”, not “trivial to do in practice.”
Yes.
To add to my comments above, I mean that there is no paradox or unnecessary ache in thinking about minds as physical objects (and hence pausable, storable, and replicable). Everything we’ve ever done happens within minds anyway, and there is nothing we can do about that. Whatever mental representations we conjure when we think of atoms or molecules or electromagnetic forces are inaccurate and incomplete: this “conscious” experience and sensory perception and thought is what a particular collection of molecules and forces is, rather than a visual or abstract representation of it. This requires a certain level of recursiveness to accede, and is essentially the mental flip that shuns treating everyday sensory experience and “life” as your axioms, and instead adopts axiomatically (even though the flip might have been due to evidence processing) that everything you or any human has ever experienced is a subspace of whatever mathematical structure we’re embedded in.
In light of all that, and further confirmations from cognitive science and neuroscience that “the self” is a distributed physical process unlike any Cartesian dualist conception, cryonics strikes me as being as natural as the notion of love or justice prior to performing the mental flip.
Mmm. Sounds familiar. But what do you mean by ‘”physics all the way down”’?
Thou Art Physics or, as a philosophical position, reductionism or materialism.
Well, another possibility would have been the negation of (what’s usually called around here) Tegmark’s Level IV. (That’s probably not the only other possibility.)
ETA: Not that your interpretation isn’t the obviously correct one.