Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

MICHAEL LEVIN TRANSFORMING INTO RUPERT SHELDRAKE
Sorry to express my frustration again, but Prof Michael Levin appears to be on a mad dash to surpass Rupert Sheldrake for the most absurd public intellectual. Anthropomorphism is just … ridiculous.

It’s the origin of middle eastern mythicism, and it’s a multi-millennial war against european realism, naturalism, and operationalism.

He could, instead of engaging in pseudoscience and sophistry, just refer to the spectrum of paradigms of expression from embodiment, to anthropomorphism, mythicism, to theology, to philosophy, to natural philosophy, to empiricism, to science, to operationalism.

And that each of these paradigms, from the most anthropocentric, subjective, and experiential to cosmocentric, abstract, and objective.

We have the science of representation. It’s called N-Dimensional Neural Networks. An n-dimensional geometry. All we are doing is determining with each paradigm and grammar (rules of continuous recursive disambiguation between the permissible dimensions) the weight between the subjective and objective – the simple and broadly auto-associative and the complex and necessarily associative.

Philosophy is dead for a reason. So is theology. Because they need to be. They manifest in the ignorant as pseudoscience.

CD

Sorry but this doesn’t hold up – Hoffman’s either exaggerating to make a point or simply wrong.
1) There exists a zero point of energy in the quantum background.
2) There exists a zero point of time in the quantum background.
3) All life forms exist at some scale, in some gravity, processing information at some rate, categorizing objects, spaces, and backgrounds at some rate, given the rate of sensation, perception, action, and rewards on action possible by the organism.
4) The difference between life forms is merely their scale and their rates that determine the priority of objects, spaces, and backgrounds. However otherwise, there is no meaningful difference in the abstract – the processes are the same.
5) As organisms evolve complexity they will deterministically grasp this just as humans have, and as such all intelligent organisms will converge on the same general laws of the universe, and categorization of the universe as we have: by scale independence.
6) There is no evidence that humans perceive the world differently from other animals except in degree of resolution (precision of information), memory (volume of information) and capacity for categorization (scale) and prediction (time). In fact the precision of human sense-perception-cognition(modeling)-prediction(auto-association)- and action(coordinated motion) is so disturbingly accurate that we must intentionally construct ‘deceptions’ (optical illusions) to overload our pattern recognition to violate that precision.
7) As such we can demonstrate for example the shading problem (checkerboard) or the object disambiguation problem (missing jet engine problem) or the shape prediction problem (elephant legs example) all compensate by assisting us with disambiguation (increased precision) rather than falsehood (simplification of prediction of object recognition).
8) AFAIK Hoffman is only trying to make this point. But making it poorly and therefore promoting pseudoscience. The truth is I cannot find a single philosopher that is not engaging in pseudoscience of some sort today, with the least bad being John Searle and recently deceased Daniel Dennett. I’m surprised anyone even interviews anyone else. It’s embarrassing.

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