Are we/you in the kingdom of the blind?

Great Debates
1

This may be moved to a different forum soon, but in fact I believe it shouldn’t be, since what I’m asking about is actually the greatest debate of all time if you think about it. I’ll try my luck with you moderators though :smiley:

Basically, I’ve had some thoughts recently. I hope that most of you can follow what I’m trying to say, as some of it involves creative use of mathematical concepts. It helps if you’re aware of the concept of the singularity in the sense of the Omega Point of the conscious universe, but even if you’re not, I hope you think about my questions.

So here goes: what if you were the blind man in the kingdom of the sighted? Alternatively, what if you were the sighted man in the kingdom of the blind? How would you tell the difference? Obviously, you can’t.

Now take it a step further: aren’t these two states mutually orthogonal but indistinguishable states of the universe? (at least, until you learn the truth in retrospect). Isn’t this similar to considering whether you are Schrodinger’s cat in the state of dead or alive? (please think somewhat metaphorically for that…)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would be rather embarrassed (possibly infinitely so) if I turned out to be the blind man in the kingdom of the sighted, basically Truman on the Truman show. But I would be feel the weight of an awful lot of responsibility (possibly infinitely so) if the opposite was the case and I was Neo in the Matrix. So I’d rather not think that either possibility is true. I’m going to bet neither case is, unless I’m somehow God and hid the knowledge from myself.

However, think about this: you might not be Truman in Truman show, or Neo in the Matrix, but you are almost certainly in the linear combination of those two states. Basically, there must be conscious entities out there wiser than you, and you must be wiser than other conscious entities. How many times in your life have you felt embarrassed in retrospect about something you didn’t understand? Alternatively, how many times in your life have you felt smarter than everyone else around you and responsible for teaching them how to do the right thing? Probably lots, right?

Now let’s examine the situation further. How many times were you in one of these states or the other, and then things happened to show you you were wrong and actually in the exact opposite state? Doesn’t that make everything much much worse? How do you avoid situations like that? I’ll tell you how: you have to make your algorithm for life a continuously differentiable linear operator with regard to the Truman-anti-Truman axis of symmetry. Basically, you should try your best to act completely and totally indifferent between the two extreme possibilities, and you’ll never have to experience infinite regret (hopefully). This is the essence of enlightenment: unbiased thinking in the most extreme way possible. At least, you might think so, if you thought this far and agree with my
reasoning.

If you do though, you’ve got a problem: once you get this far, you’re the anti-Truman again, because you’ve just concluded that you’re wiser than everyone else around you. So what do you do? Why don’t you try to teach other people this concept, but make sure you do it in the most Truman-ish way possible: why don’t you stop answering questions and just start asking them, and make them the best questions you can think of. This is the essence of a religion known as Zen Buddhism (or at least, I think so). I mean, seriously, what’s the sound of one hand clapping? :wink: Zen koans like this are basically big jokes to test how deeply one is amused at the symmetry between points of view.

Alternatively, you can answer questions, but make sure you never get caught with your pants down, and try your best to help everyone else avoid the same. How do you do that? Make everything a very flexible metaphor. So why don’t we come up with stories about people who save the world in outlandish ways, thereby resolving all others of the responsibility to do the same. And make sure you tell everyone that, as long as you truly believe this happened, you’ll never have to experience infinite regret (again, hopefully). This, I think, is the essence of a religion that most people in the Western world are quite familiar with.

So I hope you’re following me this far, because I’d like to ask an even bigger question now: why do mental illnesses like schizophrenia exist? Aren’t the chemicals in our brain implementation substrates for our personal algorithms for life? We already established that the correct one needs to be linear, but who decided if you’re linear or non-linear? Is someone ill because their function along the Truman-anti-Truman axis is more linear than yours or less linear? How could you ever tell the difference? Interestingly though, mental illnesses (or at least those involving psychosis) all tend to cluster around similar symptoms, like thinking one is Jesus Christ, seeing conspiracy theories, seeing messages directed at you from public sources, feeling creative and euphoric with the need to share one’s knowledge with the world immediately, etc. Isn’t is slightly suprising chemical charges in the brain be so consistent in their behavioral outcomes?

Now finally, consider this: who’s the most famous schizophrenic in popular culture? John Nash. What was he responsible for before the worst of his illness? “Game theory”. What did he start seeing afterwards? Conspiracy theories, political intrigue, etc. Could he have been the anti-Truman? How would we know? And by the way, if you take out the possibility of infinite regret (i.e. hell), wouldn’t that really imply that everything we’re doing is part of some game anyway? If the singularity exists and contains conscious entities, won’t they necessarily be playing more and more convoluted and interesting games with each other in order to make life interesting?

Anyway, I’m not sure how far any of you have followed me, but I hope as many of you can consider as many of the question I’ve asked as possible.

P.S. Just to make this a debate, should we have killed Osama Bin Laden, and why? Was HE the anti-Truman? Moderators, feel free to do whatever you want with that one :slight_smile:

2

Animals (including humans) are not always constructed perfectly, due to genetic or environmental reasons. Brain chemistry is no different. Sometimes a human is constructed (or develops) brain chemistry that does not function correctly.

You don"t need to look any further than this. No odd theories are required to account for mental illness.

3

I always thought that I knew I’d always have the right to be living in the kingdom of the good and true.

4

Actually, just to offend less people with the OBL remark:

Can we define religions as strategies held by culturally-bound individuals in order to propropage their social genetic code (i.e. memes) as efficiently as possible? Can we use game theory (for example) to one day predict the behavior of societies over time based on the interaction of these memes? Can the brain do this implicitly without really knowing it? What are your psychological biases and why do they exist? What the hell was all that political intrigue that John Nash saw about anyway? Has he forgotten, or just stopped trying to tell us?

Can Hari Seldon please join the conversation :stuck_out_tongue:

5

Have you ever read Jung? What’s your opinion of him? Would you say that modern psychiatry is more scientific than Jung’s ideas?

Have you heard of the collective unconscious or synchronicity? They’re very odd ideas. Do you have any opinion of them?

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Also, do you think Wolfgang Pauli was a wacko? He and Carl Jung connected deeply over synchronicity.

By the way, what’s your opinion on the Everett’s many-world’s theory vs Copenhagen? Have you ever noticed that taking Copenhagen seriously requires one to be rather solipsistic?

7

You lost me. Obviously, you can.

8

REALLY? What? How? Who would tell you, and how would they do it?

It might help if you read this reply on everything-list, a forum of mostly math and physics types for discussing theories of everything.

9

It might be easier if you just consider that someone/everyone has a big secret and you don’t know it. That’s what being blind is about.

10

Uh, no-it really isn’t.

11

You’ve asked an awful lot of questions in a rather hard to follow OP. you might be better served by focusing the discussion so that the rest of us “Truman types”:slight_smile: can follow it. But I can inject a few critiques of your argument.

I think the difference between being a blind man in the world of the seeing versus being a seeing man in the world of the blind is that in the later case you can make predictions such as “there is a baseball that is about to hit my face” that others can’t but which turn out to be right. So it is really a question as to whether the abnormality is adaptive or not.

This assumes a very one-dimensional view of the state of competence. In fact it would seem more to me to be a massively high dimensional space with blindess and sight of different degrees in different directions. I suppose it is possible to functionally map that into a single direction, but the mapping function would be entirely arbitrary.

I don’t find this surprising at all. It seems likely that there are pathways and heuristics in our mind such that a number of different causes could collapse to represent the same set of symptoms. In the same way that all sorts of different problems with you computer can all lead to hanging unresponsiveness or the blue screen of death, so too could a number of different illnesses lead to an over excitement of a part of the brain that expresses feelings of grandeur which in turn could cause the patient to associate himself with the grandest figure in his social culture, namely Jesus Christ.

12

How well do you really know something? Can you predict what colors you’re going to see in a blind spot? (Hint: you can, but you have no clue how you’re doing it, and no one else does either, at least not fundamentally.) Also, do you understand the symmetry of red and green? Do you really understand it? Unless you’ve done some computational neuroscience work that similar to what I did once, I highly doubt it. (Then again, maybe I’m Truman, so I’m not going to say anything absolute). The only thing I can really say is that it’s really quite funny how it works out.

About adaptivity: is being gay adaptive? Why or why not? Adaptive on what scale, and for who? Was Jesus Christ adaptive? He never had any children, at least if the official story is to be believed.

Also, think about split-brain patients. What do they “know”? What about lobotomy “victims”? Isn’t the world a rather complicated place? Isn’t it sometimes just easier to just say “who cares, God make it work out somehow?”

With proper constraints satisfied, you can renormalize a linear system so that any axes of symmetry are “fundamental”. You usually do this so make it easier to talk about what you want to talk about. Sure we can define the 40% Buddha, 30% Jesus, and 30% Buck Godot (with properly defined angles, etc.) but who the hell is going to follow the conversation then???

Also, if you’re thinking about linearity anyway, think about the Everettt interpretation of quantum mechanics

So are you suprised that you’re not suprised by this fact? How deeply recursive is your surprise? Would you have been suprised if I told you this when you were 4? 6? 8? How many patterns did you see until you implicitly decided “that’s a pattern that makes sense to me”? Who taught you how the brain works, and how deeply recursively did they actually think about what they told you?

13

http://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html

Try very hard to understand the answer to that problem. (It has to do with “common knowledge”). Then ask yourself how to “see” your own “eye color” on an island with no “mirrors” until a “guy shows up and says something random”

You’ll get it eventually :stuck_out_tongue: unless you already have it and I’m talking to someone much wiser than me. If you are, though, I’d suggest you be less rude about it and try to explain yourself better.

14

OK, you really confused me with that. You might be the wisest man on this forum. Or maybe not. Please explain to me later why you linked to that, but only when you really understand it, even at a subconscious level :stuck_out_tongue:

15

Look look, I think you are missing something more fundamental. You’re not Hellen Keller. No one is telling you you’re blind. You’re Truman on the Truman show, ok? But they might not even be making you Truman on purpose, it might be because the particular type of blindness you have is orthogonal to anything they could express to you in any language you can comprehend. Does that make more sense?

And in the kingdom of the blind, no one knows they’re blind. Same deal, but in reverse.

If you’re into QM, these are basically linearly separable macrostates. You can even use bra-ket notation if you want. (Chronos, are you there?)

16

No, I have not read Jung, and my knowledge of him is limited to my opinion that he probably suffered from some form of mental illness himself.

I don’t know a great deal about modern psychiatry, but I would hope that it’s better than Jung’s ideas.

I have never seen any evidence that would lead me to think that the collective unconscious or synchronicity have any validity.

If I had to identify my philosophical leaning, it would be positivism or possibly postpositivism

17

Well, you’re going to think me crazy, but I highly doubt those statements. Almost no validity I can buy, but no validity and I think you’re an alien or a robot.

About collective unconscious: What’s your favorite fictional work and why? Try to convince yourself you have the full answer to that question as recursively as possible.

About synchronicity: have you ever, explicitly or implicitly, thought or relied on the concept of luck? Do you think “luck” is a good heuristic for distributing resources? Are you mad that celebrities born into good fortune have more money than you?

Obviously these are not the full concepts or collective unconscious or synchronicity. But they are not linearly independent of these concepts either, so the cross products with “logical reality as you understand it” are not zero-length vectors.

By the way, do you know math? Imagine that the English language exists in a vector space, and that all possible singularities of that vector space exist. (This is probably mathematically definable if we get enough neuroscience and linguistics). Do you understand how cool this concept is, or is just gibberish to you?

18

Dude-pick a topic and stick with it, please. I’m getting dizzy here.

19

Sorry, understood, I’ll try my best.

It’s all the same concept though: the symmetry of the singularity. Maybe I should have made that the OP title?

The kingdom of the blind is just a nice metaphor

20

Do you?