Response to Thought Experiment 28: The Nightmare Scenario

10/9/2015

Now that's my kind of dreamscape.

Dude, what if this is all, like:
   a) the Matrix and we're all actually lying in alien tubs.
   b) a computer simulation from a really advanced race trying to figure out evolution.
   c) a universe within a universe within a universe of nested nuclear explosions for each big bang.
   d) a 3D hologram in a 6D multiverse that we don't have the senses to understand.
   e) a trick being played on us by God who really set everything up in one day 6,000 years ago.
   f) the dream of that bird over there and as soon as he wakes up we'll all disappear.
   g) etc., etc., etc.

Whoa.... Pass me another slice of pizza bro.

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Lucy was having the most awful nightmare. She was dreaming that wolf-like monsters had burst through the windows in her bedroom while she was asleep and then started to tear her apart. She fought and screamed but she could feel their claws and teeth tear into her.
   Then she awoke, sweating and breathing heavily. She looked around her bedroom, just to be sure, and let out a sigh of relief that it had all, indeed, been a dream.
Then, with a heart-stopping crash, monsters burst through her window and started to attack her, just as in her dream. The terror was magnified by the remembrance of the nightmare she had endured. Her screams were mixed with sobs as she felt the helplessness of her situation.
   Then she awoke, sweating even more, breathing even faster. This was absurd. She had dreamed within a dream, and so the first time she had apparently woken up she was in fact still in her dream. She looked around her room again. The windows were intact, there were no monsters. But how could she be sure she had really woken up this time? She waited, terrified, for time to tell.

Sources: The first meditation from Meditations by René Descartes (1641); An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis (1981)

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 82.
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This week's thought experiment is the kind of head-in-the-cloud nonsense that used to plague philosophy and caused Ludwig Wittgenstein to react by saying:

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Wittgenstein went too far as he helped create the school of thought known as analytical philosophy and described it by saying:

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

That is drawing the circle around the love of wisdom much too narrowly, but reading this thought experiment makes me a little more sympathetic to his overreaction. In his discussion of this chapter, Baggini says:

"Everything I 'remember' could be popping into my mind for the first time. This life, which feels as though it is more than thirty years old, could have begun in a dream only moments ago. ... Perhaps only when you awake will you realise just how absurd what seems normal to you right now really is."

And so what exactly are we supposed to do about any entry on the infinite list of infinitely remote possibilities that we're all just really acting under a monstrously big and fiendish illusion? Should we all give up trying to live good lives because, hey, you never know if the answer to life is really, a, b, c, d, e, f, or g from above? Of course not. So let's just move on and deal with the world as we see it. I'm sorry to have wasted your time with this particular diversion as much as I already have.

7 Comments

atthatmatt link

10/9/2015 07:45:02 pm

Whoa, that's it? I should have made time to respond earlier. This is one of the most interesting question frameworks in philosophy.

As far as I'm concerned, the foundation of philosophy is "I think therefore I am." That allows us to put everything into perspective. But the mere fact that I know I exist because I have to exist just to doubt my own existence doesn't say anything about what existence itself is. We've gotten to a local minimum, but the global minimum is still a mystery.

So the most interesting thing to do is to try to hack the things that seem to be fundamental. Whatever's hackable is not, in fact, fundamental. If we're in a computer simulation then we can try communicating with outsiders or with the computer itself. If we're in some dimension weirdness we can try building special machines to translate between dimensions. If we're in God's brain then we can demonstrate that thoughts and matter/energy are actually the same thing, possibly through spiritual or psychic phenomenon.

For every scenario in which our "laws" of reality are actually arbitrary subsets of more fundamental laws we can come up with tests.

@EdGibney link

10/10/2015 07:46:01 am

I'm afraid you're falling down a rabbit hole my friend. Sure, in the course of our scientific explorations, we *may* find some more fundamental reality that we don't presently perceive, but so far we haven't found a "glitch in the system" or evidence of supernatural intervention. I only listed 6 possibilities above for alternate universes, but of course there are as many as anyone would care to take the time to dream up. To go chasing after proof that each and every one of them is real or fake is to focus on an impossible task.

And I strongly disagree that Descartes' saying is "the foundation of philosophy" that "puts everything into perspective." I wrote a whole post about it called "I Think, Therefore I Think I Think." (http://is.gd/fBbjvz) Knowledge is probabilistic so we can only do the best we can with what we've got and learn to live with uncertainty, howsoever small it may feel in relation to the choices of everyday life. To speculate on the rest is not something philosophy will ever make any headway on.

atthatmatt link

10/10/2015 04:07:13 pm

You call it madness, I call it interesting.

There isn't much left to discover in philosophy. It's mostly new people repeating attractive mistakes over and over again. Philosophy literally means discovery of the fundamental nature of knowledge and the world. Avoiding the weird bits is bad philosophy...or, at best, tepid philosophy.

I suppose there is the same split in philosophy that's in other subjects: between science and engineering; theoretical and practical; eventually and immediately. Figuring out a newer and/or better implementation of old wisdom is useful right now. That doesn't mean attacking the fundamental theory is madness, it just has an undefined ROI.

"Deal with the world as we see it" is exactly the kind of horse sense that justified every philosophical mistake throughout history. Of course matter is made up of little balls, it's obvious. Of course the aether is real, we just have to bottle it. Of course elements can transmute, now pass the sulfur.

I agree that we picked all of the low hanging fruit, but that doesn't mean it's crazy to climb the tree looking for more. Someone does need to count the fruit, and organize the fruit, and explain the differences between the fruits to newbs. But plotting out ways to obtain more fruit is not crazy, it's how we got any fruit to categorize in the first place.

@EdGibney link

10/10/2015 05:01:56 pm

A few minutes after I posted my reply, I realised I should have made the distinction of what is the job of philosophy vs. what is the job of science. If cosmologists want to hypothesise and test for these things you are talking about, of course that's in their job description as scientists pushing the forefront of knowledge to try to do so. What's a philosopher going to do about this though? Just speculate. Endlessly. Indulging in that is a waste of time, not a love of wisdom.

"Philosophy literally means discovery of the fundamental nature of knowledge and the world." That's not a definition I've heard before.

"Deal with the world as we see it" is exactly the kind of horse sense that justified every philosophical mistake throughout history... That's too strong an overgeneralisation. The specific errors you mentioned came from fallacies of overconfidence. From my review of the history of philosophy, I think most errors actually came from people insisting on fitting the facts of the world into their wild speculations about the (mostly religious) underpinnings behind reality.

atthatmatt link

10/10/2015 05:37:06 pm

Seriously?
The first result when googling "definition philosophy" is: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline" which looks like it's being pulled from here https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/philosophy
Half of the definitions here http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philosophy are investigating truths and basic principles
Here it means http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/philosophy all learning and the pursuit of the basics
The first definition here https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/philosophy includes the phrase "what is possible to know."
So we can paraphrase, but the general point is that philosophy is more fundamental than the other sciences. Since one of those sciences is particle physics, that's pretty fundamental. Philosophy would tell particle physics what, how and why to do what it does. So the question of what reality is made out of is a philosophical question. I mean literally phrasing the question belongs to philosophy, while answering it belongs to physics. If the question is phrased incorrectly the work will be useless. It's the job of philosophers to speculate, endlessly, and therefore to get good at doing it without wasting time. The plebes waste time when they speculate. The wise man speculates constructively.

What your horse sense tells you is a wild speculation today looked an awful lot like a reasonable idea to the horse sense of yesterday. Horse sense and common sense are basically interchangeable, so switching to common sense helps this point. The thing about "common" sense is that it's derived from majority agreement, which means it has nothing useful to say about "uncommon" situations with which the majority aren't familiar. Philosophy, at least proper philosophy, is one of those areas.

I'm not trying to make you talk about weird ideas if you don't want to. And I'm not trying to change your mission. I'm just trying to uncover the root of this disagreement since it came as a surprise.

@EdGibney link

10/10/2015 06:56:30 pm

Ah shoot, I'm responding too quickly on a Saturday night. I didn't mean your "study of fundamental knowledge..." wasn't philosophy. I was just reacting to that is what it "literally means". I took that too literally and was thinking about the etymological root as the "literal meaning". Your cited definitions are right. Thank you for challenging me to clear that up.

I do think there might be an important difference in job description between "discovering" fundamental knowledge and "studying" it, but more importantly I think there is something crucial about considering "what is possible to know." You once talked about preferring to put forth testable hypotheses in an argument and I agree that is effective. I don't see any testable hypotheses coming out of the slippery speculations about dream worlds or the other arguments a) through f) in my post above. To me, they are in fact entirely constructed around the fact that they can't be proven or disproven--they are always a step too smart to be caught. So while I agree that wise men speculate constructively, I don't consider the type of speculating in this thought experiment to be constructive. Perhaps I haven't been clear about just what kind of speculation I'm throwing out and why. Does that help? Or do you think these are genuinely trying to offer testable theories?

atthatmatt link

10/10/2015 09:09:57 pm

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. I won't defend my use of the word "literally" there. I think I'm starting to literally overuse it.

I figured there was something simple but unnamed causing the disconnect. Yes, I agree that a lot of those fanciful explanations for the nature of reality are constructed (maybe this is too cynical) with the intention of them being un-falsifiable. That's just people being wankers. There's nothing new about it. All progress has to account for the fact that sometimes people throw monkey wrenches into the system and sometimes they even do it just to see what happens. The scientific method deals with all of those cases the same way it deals with misunderstanding and honest mistakes. At least, it would, if people devoted any resources to sciencing the weird ideas. I think the theories that are more "out there" get a worse reputation than they deserve because scientists don't want to be seen working on them. It's like the cool kids don't want to catch a case of loser from the freaks and geeks, so the weirdos get a worse rap than they deserve. It doesn't help that all the people who are good at socializing stay together, so the people who are bad at it don't learn from them. The people who are really into perpetual motion or whatever can't learn from the people who are good at science because they don't hang out. Maybe I'm pushing the metaphor too far.

Anywho, I think that good philosophy means figuring out whether or not an idea is testable. I provided a few testable hypotheses in my first comment. Honest theories always have something testable in them and the dishonest ones are easy to expose because they'll quickly fall back to a blatant "this is not testable" statement. Like if someone says that God answers prayers, that's testable, unless they fall back on some nonsense like "not THOSE prayers." If the theory is that we might be inside a simulation (good odds) then we can come up with all sorts of tests based on how we currently understand computers. That's a really valuable contribution philosophy can make; phrasing the question. Then the other sciences can try to answer it. But if we give them bad questions, or avoid giving them good questions, then they don't have anything new to work on.

I think it's important to dismiss an hypothesis as untestable. Not to dismiss a theory. Maybe we just haven't been clever enough to phrase the question correctly.

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