Paradoxes in Science

This might offer a nice reference list

List of paradoxes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes#Cosmology

 

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"Boltzmann brain: If the universe we observe resulted from a random thermodynamic fluctuation, it would be vastly more likely to be a simple one than the complex one we observe. The simplest case would be just a brain floating in vacuum, having the thoughts and sensations you have."​

Either mislabeled or an act of wry humor. It wouldn't be a short-lived brain, but some kind of internally consistent phantasm generator that could survive in such an environment. Furthermore...

The very physics proposed as giving birth or possibility to Boltzmann brains would be something abstracted from the regularities of the "oneirocosm" (world dream) itself -- as well as all rules, ideas like causation, and human expectations slash findings.

Thus, BBs should slide into ordinary solipsism, since whatever one contended as reasons for there being physics and existence beyond the dream would just be useful fiction (if not outright crap) circularly extracted from the character and contents of the hallucination itself. Figuratively and crudely akin to a child growing up on an isolated island with a mad person, and limited to the unreliable rantings of that grown-up when it comes to supposed knowledge of civilization abroad.

But to trim all the excess fat away... It would be yet more speculation extracted from the phantasm to assume there was anything beyond that oneirocosm -- much less such reflecting the nature of what it resided in.

The experiences could be parsimoniously floating on their own, minus belonging to any external situation or entity. Which is to say, even solipsism still sports a bare metaphysical assumption (apparently taken from residual belief in supernatural minds) that there is some transcendent entity that has ownership of the sequence of manifestations and thoughts. Rather than the latter simply being a brute phenomenal continuum with a POV adhering to its own structural logic.

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Hi,

List of paradoxes, Logic, Self–reference, Grelling–Nelson paradox

Logic at its Limit: The Grelling-Nelson Paradox


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Dialect
https://www.youtube.com/@dialectphilosophy

 

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Yessss..!

I am sure this is why Penrose calls the collapse of the wave function, "a moment of internal cognition", a resolution and realization of dynamic tension relaxing into a state of "quantum equilibrium".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equilibrium

Note that the term "libra" also means "scales" or "balance"

Is this a reach too far?

 

Whether it is conditions seeking temporary/permanent stability or those trying to achieve bland homogeneity, it does seem to be a classic archetype of the human conceptual apparatus -- from golden ratio to the heat death of the universe.

Today I'd revise the Boltzmann Brain scenario to include that the illusion of a phenomenal continuum could be established by mere short-lived "mind configurations" sporadically popping in and out of existence. Which shared the same memories, but with each instance of a BB supplying a new experience that became an added memory for the "next" one.

It wouldn't matter what order the BBs actually occurred in -- the subjective past and future could be scrambled like crazy, but the events would still internally seem to be experienced in proper causal order thanks to the overall memory/cognitive scheme being adhered to by distinct states of the jumbled sequence.

Of course, the vast majority of countless BB materializations winking in and out would be random and have nothing to do with the inter-consistent life experiences of a particular individual. But somewhere in that exhaustion of all possible "mind configurations" would be certain ones that did conform to the same incrementally developing identity or personal theme. Which to the latter itself would seem to be in happening in correct temporal sequence, though they (randomly) were not.
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And for what Tegmark calls conscious patterns, such as found in brained organisms, current science proposes an ability for "expectation" and "recognition"

How expectation influences perception
Neuroscientists find brain activity patterns that encode our beliefs and affect how we interpret the world around us.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
Publication Date: July 15, 2019

A few beautiful examples are found in this video by Anil Seth, who demontrates that the brain has a hardwired survival program that can force the mind to perceive something that does not exist , but paradoxically also is able to integrate new information that allows it to recognize something that otherwise may seem completely chaotic at first.
The first time I saw this demonstration, the hair on my neck stood up. It was a true Eureka moment.

For the specific demonstration start video @ 5:00

 

Kant also posited "innate" or a priori faculties whose ordering principles (foundational "expectations") shaped and interpreted how raw data was experienced.

He was arguably the first to actually posit and map an abstract structure for how mind operated, instead of just declaring it a "thinking substance", an initial blank-slate, etc.

This was "mind" in a generic or universal plan context, independent of how it is concretely and contingently instantiated by brains and other possible organizations of components.

Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/

EXCERPT: Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

• The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
• The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
• These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called transcendental arguments.

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.​

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Thank you for the link!

 

Isn't that similar to Descartes' "brain in a vat"?

What about the notion that the universe has a self-referential aspect to dynamical interactions at quantum scales?

 

In the current day, BBs are considered a possibility to be avoided rather than entertained -- taken to indicate an error if they arise in the calculations. But with respect to the question...

BBs would be natural events resulting from random fluctuations (or whatever context) rather than an artificial setup like BiV. Their lifelike experiences wouldn't necessarily correlate to inputted data or anything objective, vaguely similar to AI generated movie trailers like this (or dreams that would be highly lawful rather than arbitrary and inconsistent):

video link --> generated movie trailer

Reciprocal processes behaving as if they have a sustained identity with purposeful goals could purely consist of outward mechanistic behavior. I.e., particle and aggregate interactions at large in the universe don't entail experiences of any kind (panpsychism, panphenomenalism, etc would be add-on assumptions / speculation).

 

What are the chances that the apparent self-ordering formation of complex patterns are seen everywhere and AFAIK the earth is not an exceptional planet as far as the minimum required chemicals needed for the formation of biochemicals and the evolutionary specialization are abundant. (Robert Hazen)

He did a very neat back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many chemical reactions might occur on a planet the size of Earth and a timeframe of some 3.6 billion years.

He estimated that given the fundamental resources, the earth might well have naturally performed some (2 billion, trillion, trillion, trillion) chemical experiments during its 3.8 billion year existence, that would seem long enough for the evolution of large self-duplicating biochemical polymers.

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The fact that we exist proves that a planet like earth is capable of spawning life and more complicated self-consciousness.

Humans are not the only self-aware species, which proves that considering the incredible variety of motile life that has roamed the earth for 2.1 billion years, the evolution of life happened early in the history of Earth's mineral chemistry.

And as Anil Seth observed, the concept of life is no longer a mystery, and with greater knowledge of the workings of the neural network in the brain, the concept of consciousness will also become less mysterious.

p.s. I realize I'm straying...... sorry.....will bow out.

 

It's YOUR thread. Why post about paradoxes then change subject?

 

He can't help himself for some reason.

 

It was an informative post about existing paradoxes.
Most paradoxes except religions do get resolved, don't they?

 

I suspect that, in his woolly mind, the connection is that both topics are manifestations of his “mathematical universe” religion, and this thread is really yet another attempt to ballock on about that.

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