Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…There's something super interesting about computers. What a computer ultimately is, is it's a causal insulator. The computer is is a layer on which you can produce an arbitrary reality. For instance, the world of Minecraft. You can walk around in the world of Minecraft and it's running very well on a Mac and it's running very well on a PC and if you are inside of the world, you don't know what you're running on. And it's not going to have any information about the nature of the CPU that it's on, the color of the casing of the computer, the voltage that the computer is running on, the place that the computer is standing in in the parent universe, right, our universe. So the computer is insulating this world of Minecraft from our world. It makes it possible that an arbitrary world is happening inside of this box. And our brain is also such a causal insulator. It's possible for us to have thoughts that are independent of what happens around us. That we can envision a future that is not much tainted by the present. We can remember a past that is independent from the present in which we are. And it's necessary for us, our brain has evolved as such a causal insulator as well to allow us to give rise to universes that are different from this 1, For instance, future worlds, so we can plan for being in them. Bach says that money is an example of a causal pattern. It's not the ink on a banknote. It's not the electrons in your bank server. It persists across and ensconces in various physical instantiations. So paper, coins, gold, digital ledgers. And yet they say money causally affects the world. It gets you fed. It starts wars. It builds cities. He says that software is the same. A program is an abstract pattern that can run on many types of chips, maybe even neurons. And that pattern has causal power because it controls whatever substrate it's running on. The same algorithm produces the same effects regardless of what physical stuff implements it. So the invariance, that sameness across substrates is the causal mechanism, the pattern itself, at least according to Yosha. He even accepts that physics is causally closed. He says that the abstract description and the physical description are 2 ways of looking at the same causal structure. Neither is reducible to the other, both are real. But I'm pretty sure Chiramoto would ask, who identifies that invariance? When we say the same algorithm runs on different chips, completely different things are actually physically happening. Right? Different voltages, different electrons doing different things. The sameness is something that we impose. It exists in our description, not in nature. And as for the money example, money only works because of human interpretive practices. Right? If you take away the humans and their agreements, it's just paper. Right? Money is just paper. And the causal power is actually in the social substrate that participates in it. Now I think Yosha has taken a useful way of talking about complex systems and promoted it to metaphysics. And that's simplicios all over again, right? Mistaking the elegance of our descriptions for the structure of reality itself. I mean, maybe information really is more fundamental than matter, but that's another philosophical wager and we've made these bets many many times before. Just look at the history of all of this. So Descartes thought that the nervous system worked like the hydraulic automata in French royal gardens. Fluids pumping through tubes, pushing levers. That was the high-tech metaphor of his day. Later, when scientists figured out that nerves carry electrical signals, the brain became a telegraph network. Then it was a telephone switchboard, signals traveling down wires, operators routing calls. And now in our era, the brain is a computer. To be precise about what we mean by physical. And everything has to be physical because even GitHub, you know, has to store its data in some sort of hard drive or magnetic field or whatever technology, but it's not storing it in in nothingness. You know? So so knowledge information always has this form of physical embodiment. Now, I think we tend to think about it as non physical because it is a thing that is not a thing, which is the same as temperature. You wake up, you look at your phone, and you see the temperature, and you decide how you're gonna dress, and nobody has any doubt that temperature is something that can be measured. But it took about like 2000 years for us, you know, as a species to figure out, you know, what temperature was and the fact that it could be measured. And there were 2 fundamental difficulties that I would say made it difficult for us to understand, you know, temperature. The first 1 is that first people thought that hot and cold were 2 separate things. Okay? So that temperature was like a mixture of the 2. It's like when you make green out of blue and yellow. Okay? And it took a while for people to understand that cold was the absence of heat and not that cold and heat were 2 different quantities that were tempered together, that were mixed. So temperature actually mix means mixture, not, you know, like what we now mean by temperature. The other thing that was very difficult to understand is that people thought that temperature was a thing, was some sort of fluid that grabbed onto things. So let's say if you had a steel rod that is hot, is that steel rod kind of like has this sort of invisible fluid that is heat and they had good reasons to believe that it was an invisible fluid because it could flow, let's say, you could connect that rod to something that was cold and that cold thing was going to warm up because that fluid was going to be flowing in that direction and so forth. So, they thought that it had a physicality as a thing. A brilliant Englishman, Jowell, basically figures out that that is not the case, that, you know, temperature is not a thing. And the way that they do it is through this observation which I don't know if you know how cannons used to be built, you know. So, if you just grab a piece of sheet metal and you make it into a cylinder and you try to make a cannon out of that, the moment exactly that you that you shoot the cannon, that's gonna open up like a flower in a cartoon. You know, like like, you know, like a Looney Tunes type of situation. So what they would do is they would make these solid, you know, cylinders of metal and they would bore a hole in it, you know, to create the cannons. And boring those holes released an enormous amount of heat. So Joel thought, well, how come all of that heat is there? It's like an infinite amount of heat if I continue to bore a hole in a piece of metal an infinite amount of time, I'm not gonna it cannot be a thing then.…

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