"There is no conflict between causality and randomness or between determinism and probability if we agree, as we must, that scientific theories are not discoveries of the laws of nature but rather inventions of the human mind" -- Athanasios Papoulis, S. Unnikrishna Pillai, Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes (2002)

Irrelevante

Os direitos humanos apenas fazem sentido num contexto social. Um direito que force -- para que seja respeitado nos seus detalhes -- uma sociedade insustentável a médio ou longo prazo, torna-se assim contraditório. Infelizmente não é trivial saber de antemão quais as consequências não intencionais dos direitos que optamos defender e implementar. Ainda mais infelizmente, nada de diferente acontece quando as sabemos.

Blindsight

Blindsight é um livro de SciFi do autor Peter Watts cujo principal tema é a consciência. Fundamentado em leituras de vários autores de ciência cognitiva -- em especial no trabalho de Thomas Metzinger -- é um livro que faz refletir o leitor sobre o que é ser humano. O livro pode ser lido online em www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm. Algumas citações (e eventuais spoilers):

[...] you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting.

***

It's not about trust, Major. It's about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted."
"And yours isn't."
"I'm outside the system."
"You're interacting with me now."
"As an observer only. Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable"

***

There was a model of the world, and we didn't look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?

***

"Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.

***

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious

mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.

***

A vampire folk tale: "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere."

Overshoot

When Americans not equipped with ecological concepts tried to describe and explain the contrast between their land of opportunity and the old countries from which they had come as immigrants, it became conventional to emphasize the political and ideological contrasts. We tended to forget that the freedoms America offered were not exclusively political. Even more, we forgot that the political differences between America and the older nations in Europe was full of people; America was full of potential. 

When population density was low, human equality is feasible and even probable. Each individual is economically valuable to others; it is, accordingly, hard for others to subordinate him. Class distinctions fade in such circumstances. [William Graham] Sumner tried to get us to see that democracy in Europe as well as in America had been fostered by the New World's low population density. His low density had relieved Old World pressure. Abundant land in another hemisphere influenced the European labor and land markets. Wages went up, food prices were held down, and land rents were kept lower than they would otherwise have been. The power of each European landed aristocrat was reduced by the availability of land elsewhere on the globe, not under his control. Still, Europeans tended to attribute their new freedom to new institutions and new doctrines, not seeing that the institutional and doctrinal changes were responses to the effective reduction of population pressure.

Homo Sapiens mistook the rate of withdrawal of savings deposits for a rise in income. No regard for the total size of the legacy, or for the rate at which nature might still be storing carbon away, seemed necessary. Homo Sapiens set about becoming Homo Colossus without wondering if the transformation would have to be quite temporary. [...] The essence of the drawdown method is this: man began to spend nature's legacy as if it were income. Temporarily this made possible a dramatic increase in the quantity of energy per capita per year by which Homo Colossus could do the things he wanted to do.

Population pressure can be defined as the frequency of mutual interference per capita per day that results from the presence of others in a finite habitat. [...] Population density in the ordinary sense is simply the number of people per square mile. Two nations with equal population density could differ in population pressure if their peoples differed in level of activity. A population using more prosthetic equipment would tend to subject its members to more pressure by doing more things. [In America] more people had been pumped into our finite living space, to make demands upon our finite resources. But our pace of living had also been greatly accelerated. We traditionally welcomed such acceleration as a sign of progress, seldom recognizing that it meant people had increased the ways in which their co-presence resulted in mutual interference. The loss of independence and the failure to understand how it was lost can be illustrated by a fundamental change in the occupational structure of an industrialized nation's labor force.

It is high time to learn that the wisest "use" of coal and oil may be to leave them underground as nature's safe disposal of a primeval atmospheric "pollutant" - carbon. By our ravenous use of fossil acreage to extend carrying capacity we not only prolonged human irruption but also began undoing what evolution had done in getting the atmosphere ready for animals (including man) to breathe, and ready to sustain the kind of climate in which present species (including ourselves) had been evolved. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution had produced the oxygen-rich and nearly carbon-free atmosphere we need [...] We need to accept the earth as it was when our species evolved upon it. had it been different, Homo Sapiens could not have emerged [...] Barring human extinction, there will never come an end to man's need for enlightened self-restraint - the conservation ethic.

Overshoot, William R. Catton

Quality Data

Every time an official statistic, like inflation, unemployment of GNP growth is presented in the media, we should remember Campbell's and Goodhart's «laws» and take the data with a grain of salt:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." -- Campbell's law

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -- Goodhart's law

Imagine if there was corruption in the reporting of scientific data. Would, say, Physics or Chemistry advanced as they did? It's much harder to do Science, Economic or any other, in such biased context.

Tweet discussions

‏@philosophytweet: A reminder of philosophy’s embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues.

‏

@rudivanetteger: The goal of philosophy is not to provide definite answers, but to provide reasons for individual choices, which it does.

@svarricc: Philosophy is a process not a product. Assess results for value based on the quality of their reasoning.

‏

@rudivanetteger: if you equate philosophy to process of reasoning, does that not reduce philosophy to rhetoric, processing the facts of science?

@svarricc: I never said reasoning had to based on science - although scientific methodology is a popular form.

@rudivanetteger: I spoke of philosophical method: rhetorics and possibly logic, and of scientific results. To me philosophy as process is empty

‏@svarricc: A process is necessarily empty. Its a form for perspective and dialogue but needs content.

‏@rudivanetteger: Does philosophy provide its own content? Or who does?

‏@svarricc: We provide content. We do philosophy. It does not exist without us, and is only as effective as the craftsman who uses it.

From https://twitter.com/rudivanetteger/status/328056251806273537

Intuition Pumps quotes by Daniel Dennett

Giving an intentional-stance* interpretation of some sub-personal brain structure is like putting a comment on a few lines of code; when done well, it provides an illuminating label, not a translation into English or other natural language of some formula in Brainish that the brain is using in its information-processing.

(*) the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties [wikipedia]

---

In general, the cryptographer’s maxim holds: if you can find one solution to a puzzle, you’ve found the only solution to the puzzle. Only special circumstances permit as many as two solutions, but such cases show us that the existence of only one single solution to a question like this is not a metaphysical necessity, but just the immensely probable result of very powerful constraints.

People are much more complicated than either crossword puzzles or computers. They have convoluted brains full of neuromodulators, and these brains are attached to bodies that are deeply entwined with the world, and they have both an evolutionary and a personal history that has embedded them in the world with much more interpenetration than the embedding of a crossword puzzle in a linguistic community. So Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation* is truly negligible in practice. Still, the principle survives. The reason we don’t have indeterminacy of radical translation is not because, as a matter of metaphysical fact, there are “real meanings” in there, in the head (what Quine called the “museum myth” of meaning, his chief target). The reason we don’t have indeterminacy in the actual world is that with so many independent constraints to satisfy, the cryptographer’s maxim assures us that it is a vanishingly small worry. When indeterminacy threatens in the real world, it is always just more “behavioral” or “dispositional” facts—more of the same—that save the day for a determinate reading, not some mysterious “causal power” or “intrinsic semanticity.” Intentional interpretation almost always arrives in the limit at a single interpretation, but in the imaginable catastrophic case in which dual interpretations survived all tests, there would be no deeper facts to settle which was “right.” Facts do settle interpretations, but it is always “shallow” facts that do the job.

(*)  Radical translation is a term by W. V. O. Quine to describe the situation in which a linguist is attempting to translate a completely unknown language, which is unrelated to his own, and is therefore forced to rely solely on the observed behavior of its speakers in relation to their environment. [wikipedia]

---

How can meaning make a difference? It doesn't seem to be the kind of physical property, like temperature or mass or chemical composition, that could cause anything to happen. What brains are for is extracting meaning from the flux of energy impinging on their sense organs, in order to improve the prospects of the bodies that house them and provide their energy. The job of a brain is to “produce future” in the form of anticipations about the things in the world that matter to guide the body in appropriate ways. Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do this important job well, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines. What brains are made of is kazillions of molecular pieces that interact according to the strict laws of chemistry and physics, responding to shapes and forces; brains, in other words, are in fact only syntactic engines. [..] Don’t make the mistake of imagining that brains, being alive, or made of proteins instead of silicon and metal, can detect meanings directly, thanks to the wonder tissue in them. Physics will always trump meaning. A genuine semantic engine, responding directly to meanings, is like a perpetual motion machine—physically impossible. So how can brains accomplish their appointed task? By being syntactic engines that track or mimic the competence of the impossible semantic engine.

---

Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn't have a mind, doesn't itself have reasons, but it is nevertheless competent to perform this “task” of design refinement. This is itself an instance of competence without comprehension. Let’s just be sure we know how to cash out the scare quotes. Consider a population with lots of variation in it. Some members of the population do well (at multiplying); most do not. In each case we can ask why. Why did this one have surviving offspring while these others did not? In many cases, most cases, there is no reason at all; it’s just dumb luck, good or bad. But if there is a subset, perhaps a very small one, of cases in which there is an answer, a difference that happens to make a difference, then what those cases have in common provides the germ of a reason. This permits functionality to accumulate by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them. The Need to Know principle reigns in the biosphere, and natural selection itself doesn't need to know what it’s doing. So there were reasons before there were reason-representers. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales," [...] There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees’ reasons. Sponges do things for reasons; bacteria do things for reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don’t have the reasons; they don’t need to have the reasons. There are reasons aplenty for these behaviors, but in general, organisms need not understand them. They are endowed with behaviors that are well designed by evolution, and they are the beneficiaries of these designs without needing to know about it. This feature is everywhere to be seen in nature, but it tends to be masked by our tendency, adopting the intentional stance, to interpret behavior as more mindful and rational than it really is.

---

Then what might the self be? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. [...] It may be a “theorist's fiction,” but it is a very valuable fiction from which a lot of true predictions can be generated. [...] What then is a center of narrative gravity? It is also a theorist’s fiction, posited in order to unify and make sense of an otherwise bafflingly complex collection of actions, utterances, fidgets, complaints, promises, and so forth, that make up a person. It is the organizer of the personal level of explanation. Your hand didn't sign the contract; you did. [...] In the same way that we can simplify all the gravitational attractions between all the parts of the world and an obelisk standing on the ground by boiling it down to two points, the center of the earth and the center of gravity of the obelisk, we can simplify all the interactions—the handshakes, the spoken words, the ink scrawls, and much more—between two selves, the seller and the buyer, who have just completed a transaction. Each self is a person, with a biography, a “backstory,” and many ongoing projects. Unlike centers of gravity, selves don't just have trajectories through space and time; they gather as they go, accumulating memories and devising plans and expectations.

Inércia

Um magnífico resumo e resposta à cansativa resistência da direita conservadora:

O QUE NUNCA ESCREVEREI

No caso da adopção  homossexual, os adversários da tendência têm de provar que casais homossexuais  são sempre um ambiente nefasto para uma criança se desenvolver. Assim mesmo, no geral, porque as leis são gerais. Ora, postas as coisas neste pratos , a tarefa é impossível.

A impossibilidade decorre do principal, e, do meu ponto de vista,  único ,  argumento:  toda  a criança necessita de um pai e de uma mãe. Em Portugal uma pessoa solteira radical pode adoptar, o que, só por si, já parece contrariar o argumento, mas  há mais. Notem:

It is estimated that there are 500,000 children in foster care nationally, and 100,000 need to be adopted.² But last year there were qualified adoptive parents available for only 20,000 of these children.³ Many of these children have historically been viewed as “unadoptable” because they are not healthy white infants.

Ou seja, dezenas de milhar de crianças ficam sem um pai e uma mãe. Podemos especular por que motivo tantos casais heterossexuais católicos e bem na vida não adoptam estas crianças, mas as coisas são o que são  e já dizia Ratzinger que falta muita Igreja na vida quotidiana. O importante é outra coisa.  Os adversários da adopção gay são obrigados  a dizer isto: é preferível ficar institucionalizado do que ser adoptado por duas mulheres. Dito de outra forma, têm de dizer isto: o superior interesse da criança fica sempre melhor defendido com ela  a crescer numa instituiçao do que com qualquer casal homossexual.

Pode o Estado saber se é melhor ficar institucionalizado do que ser adoptado por duas Marias?  Claro que não. O que o governo pode saber, via  comissões de peritos,  é se cada casal candidato tem ou não condições para adoptar. E pode vetar casais  gays.

Já escrevi mutas vezes e em muitos lugares ( livros, artigos e blogues) que entendo que a família tradicional é a melhor combinação para uma criança crescer. O que nunca escreverei é que para uma criança, qualquer coisa é preferível a ser criada por duas irmãs mais velhas  ou por uma tia e uma avó ( como já aconteceu tantas vezes). O “superior interesse da criança” é o laço humano, não  a irritação pela militância LGBT.

FNV

Drive your car

"The categories and classes we construct are simply the semantic sugar which makes the reality go down easier. They should never get confused for the reality that is, the reality which we perceive but darkly and with biased lenses. The hyper-relativists and subjectivists who are moderately fashionable in some humane studies today are correct to point out that science is a human construction and endeavor. Where they go wrong is that they are often ignorant of the fact that the orderliness of many facets of nature is such that even human ignorance and stupidity can be overcome with adherence to particular methods and institutional checks and balances. The predictive power of modern science, giving rise to modern engineering, is the proof of its validity. No talk or argumentation is needed. Boot up your computer. Drive your car." -- Razib Khan

Escalas 1:1 antes de Jorge Luís Borges

‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

Os Despojados II

• It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
• It is hard, however, for people who have never paid money for anything to understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace.
• You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
• What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain [...] But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy.
• The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
• We came from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is  because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world.

Ursula K. LeGuin -- The dispossessed

Os despojados I

"“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die." Ursula K. LeGuin -- The dispossessed

Inevitabilidade

Temos um problema catastrófico nas fontes da economia global -- recursos, energia -- e nos seus escoadouros -- poluição, aquecimento global. De que forma e quão profundamente as nossas soluções para os direitos económicos e políticos -- capitalismo, democracia -- terão de se transformar para serem capazes de verdadeiramente atacar esta questão? 

Ontology & Epistemology

I tend to gravitate around "the Map is not the Territory" concept in the ontology/epistemology discussion. I understand «territory» as the event generator, aka reality. We are only able to measure events indirectly using our senses and tech (events with no effects are non-existent for all purposes). The 'map' is a tangled web of shared and private beliefs that we, Humanity, build and maintain for centuries. The «Map» is the meaning generator (I'm dropping the guillemets now).

The terms objective/subjective imho only make sense in the Map. Objective beliefs are those not dependent of personal mind states, and those dependent are subjective (this is more like a spectrum than a boolean feature, but let's keep it simple). Beliefs not dependent of private or social features (even if they are known just because of specific historical contexts) and which are known using logic/evidence/reason are (more) objective like Math. This does not mean that objective beliefs are necessarily 'true' (it depends on the semantics of the word 'true') but they are not, or should not be, dependent of persons X's or Y's state of mind. This also does not mean that objective beliefs are necessarily better than subjective ones (that requires a value judgement which is context-dependent). Anyway, this is why I think that, say, my liking of ice-cream is subjective. That is a private belief that would not exist if I would not exist. It depends of my current mind state. On the other hand, the theory of evolution by natural selection or the Central Limit Theorem are beliefs that do not depend on any person's mind. But, either objective or subjective, all are map denizens. Even scientific models are just that: maps; not intrinsically true or false, just more or less adequate to the known relevant evidence and current knowledge. 

However this way of classifying beliefs is just one way not the way. Thinking about the divide between public or private beliefs is as important as seeing them as objective or subjective (Ethics and Politics seems a much more interesting and important subject that Ontology and Epistemology but that's my perspective). 

One more thing: in a subtle way, every belief belongs to the Territory -- human beliefs are caused by certain neuro-electric impulses, and those are measurable events -- which is a trivial fact and not that interesting (even if it is important, because it protects this model of ontology against the charge of dualism, the Map is not independent of the Territory). The meaning of those brain impulses only makes sense in the Map. Without humans -- the makers and keepers of the Human Map -- the only thing that would exist would be the physical phenomena that we label with words and inject with meaning. Without a 'Map' there would be no stars, no colors or sounds, no art or philosophy or love. There would only exist 'meaningless indifferent stuff' (for lack of better words).

Alternatives

Evidence for a model (or belief) must be considered against alternative models. Let me describe a neutral (and very simple) example: Assume I say I have Extra Sensorial Perception (ESP) and tell you that the next dice throw will be 1. You throw the dice and I was right. That is evidence for my claim of ESP. However there's an alternative model ('just a lucky guess') that also explains it and it's much more likely to be the right model (because ESP needs much more assumptions, many of those in conflict with accepted facts and theories). This is a subject of statistical inference. It's crucial to consider the alternatives when we want to put our beliefs to the test.

Unpacking faith

Guy Plowman: "I have faith in science because it has been consistently useful in helping me to navigate the physical universe." 

Don't you have instead confidence in Science? I think sometimes we overuse the word 'faith'. Eg, I don't have faith in my wife, I trust her. I don't have faith in my daughter's future, I hope she'll do fine. I prefer to reserve 'faith' where it's used to describe that belief that gets stronger especially when the evidence is overwhelming against it. Let me quote Jesus on this one: "I assure you, if you have faith and don't doubt, you can do things like this and much more. You can even say to this mountain, `May God lift you up and throw you into the sea,' and it will happen." (Matthew 21:21) That's the faith I'm talking about!

Never ending stories

Arguments and topics that consider data as irrelevant become exercises is Aesthetics, which is not intrinsically bad but might turn into a never ending discussion. On the other hand, I'm not sure we should easily dismiss a good argument that goes against current evidence. Perhaps the evidence is not good enough, and the argument can show new ways to search for new knowledge. Heliocentrism comes to mind.

Reification

Colors are in the eye of the beholder. For a bat-like agent there are no colors. However, for him there are sonar textures that he would also consider universal properties of the world. Colors, sounds, smells are just names describing the different ways our primate brains process sense data. Which, by the way, is an amazingly restricted subset of all possible data that can be sensed. Something similar happens with numbers. What I see as one wall, another sees a lattice of bricks (are lattices also universal properties?). What we see as one person, a virus «sees» as a population of cells with no well-defined boundary.

Livre Arbítrio e Dores de Cabeça

O que têm as dores de cabeça a ver com o livre arbítrio? Ora bem, eu tenho uma valente dor de cabeça e estou em casa, em silêncio, na esperança dela se ir embora. Tocam à porta. É o meu vizinho a pedir-me uma cebola para o refogado. Falo da maleita que me aflige e logo começa a argumentar que as dores de cabeça não existem. Elas não são detectadas nas ressonâncias magnéticas, não existem modelos científicos que as justificam (imaginemos que é verdade) e etc e tal. É uma ilusão, afirma. E assim aplica todo o seu arsenal argumentativo e o vasto conhecimento científico sobre o assunto (imaginemos que é neurologista) nesta sua posição. O que ganho com tudo isto para além de me aumentar ainda mais a dor de cabeça?

Uma dor de cabeça pode ser um fenómeno 100% mental, uma forma da mente interpretar um determinado estado do cérebro ou nem isso. O que significa afirmar que as dores de cabeça não existem porque não interagem, para todos os efeitos práticos, com o mundo exterior? Se eu acredito que tenho uma dor de cabeça, não me faz isso ter uma dor de cabeça? O que se pode argumentar contra o óbvio da própria experiência mental de ter uma dor de cabeça?

É-me atraente fazer a analogia com o livre arbítrio. Se o livre arbítrio for também ele um fenómeno 100% mental, se eu achar que o tenho não me faz isso tê-lo? Estas duas situações são totalmente diferentes de afirmar que se eu acho que compreendo Teoria Quântica então eu sei Teoria Quântica. Nos primeiros casos apenas é necessário introspeção. No caso da Teoria Quântica é necessário validação. Lá por me convencer que compreendo os fundamentos da Física subatómica não significa que consiga desenvolver investigação na área ou sequer resolver os exercícios mais simples de um livro introdutório sobre o assunto. A convicção de eu saber algo sobre o mundo externo só é justificável se realmente for capaz de interagir em conformidade com as crenças que alimento.

Mas isso não acontece tanto na dor de cabeça como no livre arbítrio. Pelo contrário, sendo processos inteiramente introspetivos, que ocorrem e só fazem sentido no interior de cada mente, dificilmente o mundo externo tem algo a dizer sobre o assunto. Para o mundo exterior, saber se um agente acredita que tem livre arbítrio apenas é relevante como informação que ajuda a explicar ou a prever o seu comportamento. Em termos ontológicos esta crença, bem como a de ter dores de cabeça, é inconsequente, nada adiciona nada retira.

O cartoon seguinte poderá fazer sentido do ponto de vista externo, mas não do ponto de vista interno. As únicas ilusões que eu posso alimentar são ilusões sobre o que se passa lá fora. Cá dentro, no labirinto de crenças internas que alimento e me alimenta, a crença de ter algo -- uma dor de cabeça, medo das alturas, amor à minha família, ansiedade, nostalgia, livre escolha -- é esse algo.

Provincianismo

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal