Howsagoin? Been awhile, I know. I apologize for that. The band just wrapped up touring for 2023, which is always a bittersweet time for me. It’s around this time every year that I take full stock of all the crap I didn’t do that I said I was gonna. And then, even though everything in my nature is telling me to be in harmony with the seasons and slow down, I run around like a maniac and try to cram everything in that I possibly can before “it’s too late”- with varying, and usually disappointing results. A well-thought-out Substack post was definitely top of that list for the last month or so but alas I’ve failed. Tons of ideas over here, too many in fact. That’s the problem. And the problem has been swirling around in my head like one of those 5 gallon per flush toilets for at least a month or two. And then, an angel appears as they so often do. A good friend and reader of this publication gently let me know that the slacking hadn’t gone unnoticed (his words not mine), and maybe I’d consider letting someone else have the megaphone for a minute. Capital idea! Far from a cop-out, the essay below is on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot and a subject I’ve wanted to write on for a long while. I simply don’t have the mathematical, scientific, or logical swagger to put most of my thoughts on the subject in writing and feel ok about and let them loose on the world. Pretty cool to have a real life, actual expert (and an interesting one, at that) to help us delve into the finer points, IMO. I could go on and on but without further ado, I present the work of my smarty-pants friend, Mr. Field:
Consciousness, Realism and Creativity
J.E. Field
November 9, 2023
I used to think about big things. Now I think about the little things. I find I am happier this way. As I got older, I started to wonder why it was that so many of my heroes seemed to have spent their time thinking about little things but all the people I worked with seemed to be intent on the “big” things. Gradually, I became convinced that the little things were actually the big things and the big things were actually the little things. If you’re totally confused now, that’s okay because what we’re actually going to talk about today is the incredibly delicate (and highly utilitarian) foundation upon which all of science and reason stand and the vast unexplored hollows outside of (current) science and reason within which our human creative force must lie. Let’s go on a strange journey.
First of all, the scientific method is bogus. I don’t mean to say that it’s not useful, and I’m certainly in favor of doing lots of experiments and learning a bunch from them. That’s all OK. The problem concerns exactly which experiments are we going to do? Who gets to decide, and why? Technically, we should be asking the question of where these hypotheses even come from in the first place. Without getting into the mathematics, formally there is no guarantee of convergence to truth at all. That is a scary thing!
“But”, you say, “we fly in airplanes! And we carry smartphones around! And we have lots of nuclear bombs lying around”! What we’re really talking about here then is what is useful. Even alone as a concept, useful is a slippery thing- hard to define exactly. One man’s useful could be another man’s extinction. I suppose many would simply say that the proof of what’s useful is in the pudding. The airplanes don’t crash, the smartphones do display cat videos, and the bombs do seem to go off.
Let’s take a closer look at this “pudding.” All of these devices in some way or another required a leap of intuition - a jump into the complete unknown. We’ve sort of convinced ourselves that while “great” leaps require “great” men that are made of stuff that we may never understand, the “little” leaps can be made by all of us. And the scientific method is a way to sort of mass produce or democratize these “little” leaps so that when added up over time they yield what we’re going to identify as “progress.” It is something we can kind of measure and we sort of do, for example with proxy statistics like GDP. It’s a little like saying that matter is made up of lots of little atoms and that’s all there is to it. As if the little “leaps” were the atoms here. But, without having any idea at all what an atom is!
The problem is a lot deeper than I’ve made it out to be, actually. The current scientific orthodoxy is of the mind that, antecedent to all of these devices, hypotheses, and intuitive leaps there must be a foundation in something called quantum measurement. And when I say othodoxy, I really mean that this is not controversial among scientists. This is governed by and in some sense even created by a postulate- something assumed or axiomatic- called the Born rule in quantum mechanics. This rule is stated and justified by the massive experimental evidence that seems to confirm it in all known situations. That’s great, except that what it quantifies is the probability of a certain observation by a so-called “conscious” observer. What on earth is a “conscious” observer?
If you think about this for a while, you may become somewhat desperate. It would seem that an essential ingredient in all this stuff we have - besides of course maybe jet fuel, silicon, and sadly maybe plutonium - are these big and little “leaps” we’ve been identifying. And we don’t know what the stuff of those “leaps” is made of except that it’s been defined in circular fashion by a bunch of smart guys who call themselves scientists to be founded in “quantum measurement.” Why should I trust that? Or them?
Coming back full circle, it would seem that this trust ultimately rests on utilitarian grounds. That damn word useful again! We trust science because it is useful, and it is useful because we trust it. If we didn’t trust it, we couldn’t use it after all! Even though it really doesn’t explain anything at all about the experience of thinking - and living.
From the High Druids of science, the next step is the one that really frustrates me. The step is taken at real expense to the sublime beauty of our existence. And it could easily be wrong. In fact, I and many other scientists believe it is wrong, but it would take us too far out of our path for me to explain in necessary detail. Those high druids would have us believe that this utilitarian circular loop (à la the Born rule) implies realism in the world. That is to say, there is one and only one reality; it is the one we all agree on by mutual trusted experiment. And that reality is the only one that matters. Huh? How did we get to that? In one sudden and completely unsupported assertion, they just said the universe we inhabit just shrank by a factor of a million millions. And ultimately, the technicians did it to feather their own nest. I mean they think they’ve figured out how to dominate that one “realist” universe with their theories and have no idea about anything outside it - like where consciousness emerges. And so, in perhaps the largest land grab in history, they have declared themselves in some sense the rulers of all existence. “Consciousness” is stuffed off to the side under the rug as something too complicated in the biological wetware- and therefore by implication also too trivial to cleanly understand; and therefore of no interest in the big cosmological considerations of physics. Yeah, maybe. And if not, it will be perhaps the greatest blunder in all human history.
Regardless of how you feel about realism though, it is shocking to me the recent breathless news coverage of AI. Fear and awe and dread. A world without toil. Killer robots gnawing on human flesh. These are really just an overgrown tech bro’s nocturnal emissions about domination. Fuck them. Ultimately, we choose! To surrender that choice is a kind of living death. It is the death of an automaton that produces nothing and gratifies the selfish fantasies of the few against the many.
But we’ve had robots forever! How is a self-driving car fundamentally different than a taxicab from the riders’ point of view? Either way it’s a robot of sorts to the customer, right? A taxi driver is just an autopilot of flesh and blood whose consciousness has been carefully and commercially decoupled from our world (editors note: Sorry taxicab drivers, the same could be said for professional banjo players and that big stuffed gorilla that plays the drums at Chuck E. Cheese). Time for money. Money for time. Exchange of two completely incommensurate things. But what we face now in our era is that the biggest choice- the only choice really- of how we all shall live, is growing impossible to elude.
The time is now for us to stand tall separately and together as one. And to shout with all our voice to the heavens that we will not tolerate it. We were born to live and love, free to celebrate with everything we can give. And that is why it is time for us to play. To give life to every leap and atom of creation that we have in us. Because nobody understands where it comes from or knows where it is going. Therefore its essence can’t be dominated or devalued for cheap purpose. We must pay no attention to futile affronts. In the final analysis, this time is the everything and only thing of value we have in this life. Not just for us as individuals, it is also the only thing of any value at all in the entire world. And so we have to hold, caress, and cherish it.
And so, let me say how grateful and lucky I am to see you celebrating the music. And our shared time. The only thing we will ever have. Make it beautiful. Separately and together. Stand tall.
”All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.”
- Buddha