My Beliefs

The beliefs that are most important to me cluster around particular abstract topics, and from there reach out into all the particulars of life. Before anything else, I believe in ideas and their relationship to the world. You might say in this sense I am very much a Physicist. This is true, although I do seek out and take seriously ideas in many other forms. Most explicitly, I believe strongly in Literature and the force of narrative in forming the human world. If I can be greedy and take two guiding stars, they are these: physics and literature. I will try to describe the way in which these seemingly contradictory ontologies shape my worldview.

Nature and Nurture

Let’s start with the Nature/Nurture debate, as this connects to and illustrates a lot of the topics that I have strong views on.

Nature is often treated as synonymous with genetics. That’s a fine enough first approximation, but the view I think is more accurate is simply– nature is physiology¹. A great deal of our physiology is determined by the genome, but the genome never exists in isolation– the epigenome and the host of RNA and proteins that go with them carry their own information. And the interactions we have with our environment, in particular the physiological environment during early development (that is, the physiology of our mother), contribute significant influence to our morphology. As does everything we do for the rest of our lives. Here is where the distinction to nurture needs to be kept clean. But let me come back to that, as I want to be as clear as possible about the essential nature of nature first.

I believe that genetics² have a very significant effect on our development and therefore our entire lives. Genetics determine what is physiologically possible for us³. They define the possible morphospace that we will inhabit for our entire lives. It should be noted at this point that this has a lot of unfashionable implications. It implies I believe in significant differences between sexes, between people of different ancestry, between people of different abilities and endowments. With regard to all of that I can only say: yes, I do believe that there are significant clusters of subpopulations in the human species and inasmuch as their physiological potentials are not completely overlapping they will have different outcomes and different life trajectories. This is almost tautological, on the level of saying ‘you are not me, your life is not mine’. If all humans had identical physiological endowments, we would be living in a very different world and it would be immediately apparent that we are living in that world. We do not live in that world, we live in a world where there is an enormous diversity of physiological forms, clusters, capacities and developmental paths. These views are unfashionable, but I believe they are unfashionable because people too quickly slide from difference to hierarchy, and because people think that a belief in nature means denying nurture.

I do believe in difference, but I believe that cooperation is a more fundamental drive than hierarchical organization⁴. Unfortunately we have dominated the natural world, otherwise I could point to a jungle and say look– look how all the species collaborate in dense symbiotic harmony. We can be like that! But you will reply that we have subjugated nature and so we will subjugate one another if given the chance or the justification. Perhaps I am naive, but I find this too cynical a view of human nature. I believe we can acknowledge our differences without using them as grounds for abuse. And on the second point, I absolutely reject that nature dominates nurture. At least bear with me until I get to nurture.

On nurture– beyond birth, nature starts to entangle itself more and more intensely with nurture. I believe that the development of the mind is structurally synonymous with this entanglement. I understand a mind as being a virtual structure⁵ implemented by neurology (and, by extension, all of physiology and to a lesser extent our environment).

Allow me a little detour here– when I say the mind is a virtual object, I don’t mean to diminish it in any way. Far from it. I mean that it can’t be straightforwardly identified with any physical part of the body. If we can start to ‘see’ some of its activity with EEG, MRI, fMRI, MEG, neural probes etc it’s because we are developing the tools to directly observe it on the right level of abstraction. Computers are also virtual objects created by all the dense complexity that surrounds each individual transistor. In quantum computing this is explicit: many physical qubits are required to make one error-corrected logical qubit. Classical computing hides the same general lesson under layers of engineering. A software bit is not simply a transistor; it is a stable virtual object maintained by circuits, thresholds, clocks, encodings, and sometimes explicit error correction.

So, the mind is a virtual object that grows or emerges from the interactions between our physiology (neurology) and our environment. That environment is increasingly made up of information-rich structures, objects that are made by minds for minds. If I look around me now, the only things that have not been explicitly formed by human minds are the four plants I have on my windowsill, my hands and feet (I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor not wearing gloves or socks), arguably the wine in my glass, the sky outside my window, and the tip of my nose. That’s it. A few other marginal phenomenal objects: the textures of the wooden objects, and the illustrations that contain living things. But these have been selected and arranged by minds– as have the plants on my windowsill. Perhaps only the sky and my body parts are truly natural. I have no tattoos or piercings or painted marks I can see from where I’m sitting. So– two hands, two feet, and a blue sky. Everything else has been crafted by a mind.

Living all our lives surrounded by the products of minds, our minds have distanced themselves significantly from their nature, from Nature. Human minds collaborating across thousands of years of history are demonstrably the most powerful structure nature has ever created. There are other living structures that arguably had an equivalently significant impact on the Earth, such as the cyanobacteria that caused the Great Oxygenation Event and wiped out most of their contemporaries, but even they took hundreds of millions of years to reshape the Earth. Our unparalleled domination of the Earth has happened much quicker.

I’m not saying this to revel in our triumph. I think the destruction of the natural world is a great tragedy. Having grown up on a farm and among foresters I’m perhaps more attuned than most to the reality of it. I have spent years studying the animal welfare literature, studying and thinking about and practicing responsible forms of consumption (with very variable commitment). I say this to point out how immensely powerful is nurture. I believe it was, broadly, nurture that led us to dominate the Earth, not nature. Nature did lay the foundations, and perhaps with our physiological endowments (our sociability, our cooperativity, our intelligence) it was inevitable that nurture would lead us down this path. But it was nurture that did it.

I said earlier that the development of the mind is synonymous with nurture. If you have studied the evolution of the mind you might have noted its aggregative, cumulative nature. Human consciousness has undergone many revolutions and ‘evolutions’ across history, although that word should be seen as metaphorical here. Natural selection has been acting, but not fast enough to explain all this. Human consciousness also goes through many stages of development in a single life. By the time it reaches maturity it has been nurtured into something very particular, very much a product of its civilization, its culture. If we agree that civilization and culture are aggregations across time of the products of minds, then saying the mind is nurtured by culture is like saying the mind is nurtured by minds.

This is the sense in which nurture separates from nature. Going back to the room I’m in– it isn’t just a collection of man-made objects that surrounds me. Almost everything can be interpreted as art, as a contingent shape derived from the choices of minds across history. These choices have important connections to physiology– the chair is shaped for a human body, but it is also shaped for the eye and it is also shaped for the aesthetic preferences of whatever melange of cultures influenced it.

My point in saying all this is this: I absolutely and completely respect the immense power of nurture in shaping a mind. So when I said earlier, unfashionably, that we have natural physiological affordances– please temper your complaints with the great emphasis I place on the mind and its ability to reshape its nature and the nature of things around it.

And to be clear about the way the two interact in daily life– over time, during development, during the emergence of the mind, the mind’s ability to guide its own physiology grows and grows. A mind fully come into its power has a huge range of physiological opportunities available to it. Nurture and a mind can make a body into a ballet dancer or a body builder or a soldier or a teacher. These are all roles that involve dressing up and utilizing physiological affordances in very different ways, pushing into different parts of the extremes of the possible morphospace defined by genetics.

Mind and Body

What I have described above covers the essentials of another of my core beliefs. I said a mind is a virtual object grown during development in the substrate of physiology. Let’s keep this terminology. But it’s worth stating clearly: what ‘I am’ or what ‘constitutes my mind’ at a given point in time is not some totally physically independent collection of nurtured cultural biases. The substrate always has its voice. The substrate is a living, complex organism, a collection of trillions of cells organized into tissues and systems and deeply entangled with everything around it through sight and sound and other senses, and entangled with its recent history of eating and movement and physiological and social interactions. Yes the mind has huge power over physiology and the environment but your hands and feet and the sky remain. And much more besides the things I can see around me– my tissues are still human tissues, my cells still human cells. I ate living things for dinner, plants and animal tissue. I spent the day in the mountains near the city where I live, looking at trees and mountains and smelling the Scottish country air. The body knows all these things and has relationships to all of them that evolved through billions of years of life on this planet. Even something as ‘unnatural’ as driving at physiologically impossible speeds on a motorbike through the Scottish highlands– this activity is the product of human minds, of a mind-crafted machine flying over mind-crafted smooth surfaces. But the effect is physiological. Indeed, the very mechanisms that I am targeting (inasmuch as I’m not riding to get from one place to another) are all physiological. Moving at speed through the world has an impact on my physiology and my visual cortex that is quite well determined by evolutionary pressures, and hardly affected at all by the fancy beliefs nurtured into me. And the physiological aftershock of this experience is still with me now, many hours later as I sit in my living room.

The body is loud. Its voice is clear. The mind is in constant negotiation with it. No mind is free of it, not yet. Minds vary enormously in how strongly they are influenced by their physiology, but none are free of its influence.

I do believe that the mind and the body should be distinguished, although never fully separated. I’m sure all of us have at one point or another experienced the transcendental lifting of the burden of physiology under the influence of the intellectual sublime– I mean simply a good film or a book or a concert. Or even a good conversation. I believe quite literally that minds inhabit a separate space from the rest of the natural world. Human minds specifically have developed an intellectual universe that is so burdensome and so literally real that it rebuilds the physical environment around us to suit it. Whales and dogs and all and sundry may have minds of a sort, may have complex relationships and the ability to communicate with one another. But without the technologies we developed to carve our minds into our environments– most obviously in the form of writing– their intellectual universes are necessarily small.

The most interesting illustrations of this come from studying preliterate societies. For many thousands– likely tens of thousands– of years, human culture had to be memorized in its entirety by the community. The best examples that survive are perhaps the Vedas, an enormous body of work that was memorized by the poets, priests and people of ancient South Asia. They contain a broad swath of the cultural practices that constituted that civilization, from agriculture to medicine. The Bible would be another example of a collection of scriptural and epic traditions that describe in broad strokes how a particular society functions. And the poems of Homer are assumed to be a small slice of the poems from that particular region of the world.

How much information can be stored in this way? A Bible’s worth? Two? Ten? Whatever the number, it’s finite and small. When writing was invented the intensification of knowledge began and, needless to say, we are many orders of magnitude removed from that world today. But even in the time of Homer, human physiological affordances had led us a long way from the rest of the animal kingdom. Our ability to memorize discrete sequences of words is far far beyond any other animal. How large can the whale intellectual universe possibly be? It is limited to the number of whales that can communicate and the length of their sequential memory.

With billions of minds now communicating and vast encyclopedias on each and every topic, the human intellectual universe has become an object in its own right that has no parallel in evolutionary history. We have no reasonable option open to us other than to treat it as its own ontological category. I am no fan of anthropocentrism. I have known many wonderful, wise, caring, intelligent nonhuman animals. I have personally witnessed animals demonstrate highly complex behaviour, showing love and intelligence and forethought. But I am forced to concede that humans, or our creations, have entered a unique regime that needs its own treatment.

So, a human is an animal body hosting a human mind, a mind that is connected to and embedded in a vast and novel and non-animal space, a space constructed by billions of minds cooperating and communicating over more than 10 thousand years. A human is an animal body hosting a human mind; a human mind is an animal-culture hybrid embedded in a vast external intellectual world. We are never free from the body, and we are never merely bodies.

Gradualism and Panpsychism

An adjacent commitment that I hold firmly is gradualism. Adjacent in the sense of understanding the evolution of the mind in history and the development of the mind in a human life. But this belief covers much more ground than human society. I expect the lineage and origin of most real categories to be continuous, historical, and reconstructable. I acknowledge that discrete things exist but I believe that this observation is less useful than its inverse: nothing exists independently of anything else, nothing is intelligible except through its causal, historical, and material dependencies.

This commitment mostly rears its head in evolutionary biology. In fact it is fundamentally Darwinian– evolution by small steps, small changes. I believe that everything came about through a series of discrete steps from everything else, and even superficially distinct things retain deep similarities and close ties– deeper and closer than might at first be apparent.

The way gradualism bites with respect to everyday life is in dissolving binary categories. I do not believe in sharp distinctions like living/non-living, conscious/nonconscious, body/mind, animal/human. You may say this contradicts what I said earlier about the human intellectual universe. This is a good example to push on, and illustrates what I mean: there are many cases where clear distinctions seem to be apparent, such as between human culture and animal culture. This commitment forces me to ask: how did this distinction come about? I assume that this distinction is not sovereign in any way, that it is the result of distinct historical lineages that can be understood. Much of the evolutionary history of the human mind and culture is lost (though perhaps not forever, as archaeological techniques and findings improve and increase). But by studying what culture does exist in nonhuman animals and the cultures of ancient humans (Neanderthals and others) and the cultures of small collections of humans without recording technology (particularly writing) we can start to reconstruct this lineage. I hope we will eventually understand exactly the series of changes that occurred that made the human intellectual universe so different from our animal ancestors.

Living versus nonliving things is another illuminating example. On the smallest scales the élan vital apparent in e.g. single-celled organisms and multicellular organisms disappears. At some point we are left with chemistry which seems prosaic and deterministic. Where is the juncture between nonliving and living things? Levin has a nice one-liner for this: living things have a cognitive lightcone⁶ larger than their physical body. In plain English, living material has a relationship to its surroundings that is informational rather than straightforwardly physical. This is the sense in which people are correct to say that machines are not alive (although machines as augmentations of living things should be treated separately– we can agree that a bicycle is not alive but we can hopefully also agree that a human on a bicycle is a different thing than a human not on a bicycle). But with the rise of machines that manipulate information, this distinction becomes blurry. A smartphone clearly has many informational relationships to parts of its environment– it is scanning for faces, for network infrastructure, for Bluetooth connections, it is responding to touch input and often audio input. I don’t know if the cognitive lightcone of a smartphone is on the order of a bacterium or a fly or a kitten but I do believe it qualifies as a living thing if a paramecium does. Not that a smartphone is alive in the same way that a paramecium is– a smartphone cannot feed itself or reproduce⁷. But the simple relationship to modern technology that sees them as inert nonliving things has failed. A smartphone may be less organismic than a bacterium, but it is plainly more cognitively entangled with the world than a virus.

Entropy, Learning and Time

Corresponding with my commitment to gradualism, I also believe that everything is changing at all times. I believe this is baked into the nature of the universe– I believe in the Entropic Arrow of Time:

The universe ‘started’ (tautologically) with an extremely low-entropy event, the Big Bang. Wherever there are possible pathways to relaxation, entropy will increase. In a closed system, entropy does not decrease. Wherever gradients have available pathways to relax, they tend to relax. This fact is experienced by us as the directed nature of time, which is our word for the process of entropy relaxation.

I believe, though we don’t yet have a theory that I know of that establishes this cleanly and rigorously, that entropy relaxation is coupled to the complexification of matter. When a free-energy gradient is forced through matter under constraints, it can produce structure. For example, the Earth is between the sun and the vacuum of outer space, and captures a significant quantity of the low-entropy photons. If those photons missed the Earth, they would mostly continue into space, doing little local work. But Earth intercepts them. Their energy is absorbed, scattered, stored, transformed into chemical gradients, routed through air, water, rock, pigment, metabolism, ecosystems, and machines, and eventually re-emitted as lower-energy infrared radiation.

The flux captured by the naked Earth interacts with material there. If it finds harmonic couplings with the matter that is present, it can start to build dissipative structures.⁸ These structures route the free energy of the incident light through more and more complex relaxation pathways. Given enough time, some of those structures become autocatalytic, then metabolic, then evolutionary.

The speculative step is this: I believe evolution by natural selection is a special case of a broader physical tendency. Where gradients persist, matter searches the space of possible structures. Structures that dissipate, store, and route the gradient better become more stable and more available as scaffolds for further complexity.

On the human level, I believe this process can be understood as learning. I believe that the subjective experience of the passage of time for human beings is determined not by the ticking of a mechanical clock but by that human’s personal learning rate. In early life the learning rate is high which means for each mechanical second more experiential updates occur– ‘time passes more slowly’. As life goes on and the learning rate drops, the clock ticks faster. Learning is our word for the complexification of the information structures in our minds that process the phenomenal world in order to lower prediction error. This is a higher-level analogue of the same processes that route entropic or free energy fluxes through long chains of matter. Exactly why this occurs, whether it maximizes entropy production on a planetary scale or something else, is one of the most important unsolved mysteries in my ontology. I look forward to the day when I can understand it completely– I believe it is tractable, and likely some clever combination of FEP, ERD, AT, MEP and dissipative adaptation⁹ would get us there, if only we had entities smart enough to meld them all together.

Believing in the entropic arrow of time and that complex dissipative structures are natural products of entropy fluxes interacting with matter, I believe the universe has an inherent telos, a drive to complexification. Given those assumptions, teleology re-enters the picture without requiring intention, design, or a cosmic mind. This belief is supported by numerous lines of evidence that show changes over time in certain quantities such as DNA (Sharov and Gordon, Life Before Earth), GDP, neurons, energy flux through organisms (Chaisson 2011) etc.

I believe therefore that the universe is destined to bloom into life and fill itself with complex living structures. I can’t yet show this rigorously but I hope one day we will have a theory that supports this. For this to be true, complexification must increase the rate of entropy production. That is all that is needed.

Being in the World

All that is very grand and nerdy and perhaps profound and perhaps even true. But where does it leave us as living things, acting in the world? How am I supposed to relate to the deep yearning of the universe for annihilation? How can I help the sun burn itself out, as it so plainly desires? What, fundamentally, is up?

It’s first worth mentioning Hume’s is-ought distinction. Much of the physicalist picture of mind in the cosmos that I paint above is described as an is. I claim that physics drives something like the divine telos that religious practices have gestured at for millennia– but if physics provides it, then it is simply how things are, not how they should be.

Forgive me, but I am fundamentally a physicalist materialist. While I may claim that the noosphere is a separate object from the materially immanent things around us, hands and feet and smartphones etc, I do still fundamentally believe it runs in the material world, just as a virtual layer that needs to be perceived and measured and described with very different tools than a rock or an animal. But we acknowledge lots of these things– ecosystems, nations, language. It’s not so surprising to say that you can have an abstract entity that is made up of the relationships between many concrete entities.

And as a physicalist materialist, I believe that fundamentally an is is an ought. To separate the two is to believe in exactly the kind of human divinity that I deny— that minds sit outside physics, handing down values from a throne the laws of nature cannot reach. And yet. If you will forgive me again, I will reinstate the distinction— without the throne. There is a gap between is and ought, but it does not open onto divinity. It opens onto the noosphere. And that is where I really get my oughts.

Because like I said, the virtual world of the human intellectual universe is not fake, it’s not an illusion. It is a real space made up of real things, only those real things do not map cleanly one-to-one to everyday material objects. They are distributed across many objects and they move with the speed of information. Up to this point my analysis has been living in the substrate. But I can also describe the world from the perspective afforded me by my role as a mind, as a first-class citizen of this abstract world.

In this role, I am a physicalist materialist only to the extent that I am a Scotsman or a software engineer or a scientist. These are tags, memes, roles that I assign myself or others assign to me. They are stable roles, perhaps even stable across an entire lifetime. But they are roles, constructed in the noosphere over many many generations by many many minds with increasingly tenuous connections to the substrate.

In this sense I am also a constructivist. I can’t tell you how it pains me to say this, as I identify very strongly as a materialist and have been on the frontlines of that holy war too many times. But per my discussion of nurture in the opening section, I believe very strongly in the constructed nature of the mind. I believe that there is a huge degree of arbitrariness in these constructed worlds. Information begets information and over long enough timescales it forgets its nature. But arbitrary is not the same as ungoverned. Not all stories are equal, and the criterion for ranking them is the same telos I have been describing all along: the stories worth taking as guiding stars are the ones that teach us to climb— to complexify, to build minds and the objects of minds, to route more of the universe’s blooming through ourselves. The arbitrariness lives in the substrate-level details. The direction does not.

Therefore I believe in literature and art as a guiding star, as a body of operating principles that teaches you how to act in the world. This is probably broadly a Jungian view. It is a meme-theory view. It is a view that speaks quite literally of egregores and other inhabitants of mind-space as real first-class entities.

A great meta-example of this kind of thinking can be enjoyed in Camille Paglia’s flamboyant Sexual Personae, where she pits the Apollonian against the Chthonian– the virtual world of the mind against the substrate. And this kind of act, taking stories from ancient Greece or the Indus Valley or wherever else and learning from them what your role is, how you should relate to others, how you should relate to the mind-body problem, to the nature-nurture problem, to time and learning and being in the world, to acting and doing something more than what is needed to satisfy our animal bodies, to craft objects of the mind for the mind– I believe deeds like this are the Apollonian analogues of eating and breathing and walking in the world, the primitives, the most basic actions of a first-class citizen of the noosphere and are as natural to we hybrid creatures as ede, caca, morere¹⁰.

Free Will

I am also a free will compatibilist in exactly this same sense. I believe that free will is a word that belongs in the noosphere and can only be understood properly in that space. We exercise free will when we make choices that are derived from our intellectual history, not our basic animal drives. The old debates about where free will can possibly come from in a universe with deterministic laws of physics are uninteresting– you might as well ask ‘with what authority do you claim you exist, when you are quantum-entangled with everything around you’. You might as well ask where any intellectual object comes from. We can construct scientific definitions of entities, of species, of objects, and even of ideas but they are all bootstrapped from the same space and collapse in exactly the way that gives career constructivists their joy.

Free will is a constructed idea that describes some of the dynamics of mind. We can start to build out scientific definitions for it. But much like the mismatch between the physicist’s rigorous understanding of ‘energy’ and what we understand that word to mean in everyday life, the word will evade simple definition for one simple reason: nothing in the noosphere can be simply described in an unarguable form in terms of the substrate, because the noosphere is a virtual world that does not map directly onto the substrate.

Perhaps in the future we will have built machines that can capture the dynamics of the virtual world with perfect accuracy, pass every Turing test and diabolical ethical conundrum with flying colors, and assign every meme and egregore a token that captures their slippery dynamics perfectly. But I am certain, with Douglas Adams, that when that day comes to pass, a new and more complex virtual world will magically emerge into incomprehensible being from the newly comprehensible substrate below. And thus the divine telos of the universe will obtain, as it always has, in reaching higher and higher up the slopes of Olympus.

Footnotes

1. Or even more accurately: morphology. This word is precise enough to capture the moment-by-moment dynamics of the living form as it acts in the world.

2. Including epigenetics and whatever other information is passed on to us at the moment of fertilization.

3. This may change in the near term with the introduction of commercial gene-therapy, and arguably other transhuman-adjacent technologies such as HRT expand our morphological potential somewhat.

4. The best description of the dynamics of collaborating networks versus organized hierarchies I have read is in De Landa’s 1000 Years of Nonlinear History.

5. By virtual I do not mean fake or unreal. I mean a higher-level object implemented by lower-level physical machinery, as a file, process, or software bit is implemented by electronics.

6. A system’s cognitive lightcone is the region of the world it can sense, affect, remember, predict, or otherwise take into account. A bacterium’s lightcone is small; a literate human culture’s is enormous.

7. Individual ants also cannot reproduce, and a queen bee cannot feed herself. We already allow life-functions to be distributed across systems rather than contained inside a single body.

8. A dissipative structure is an organized pattern maintained by a flow of energy or matter through it, such as a whirlpool, flame, storm, organism, or ecosystem.

9. FEP is the Free Energy Principle; ERD is energy-rate density; AT is Assembly Theory; MEP is the Maximum Entropy Production principle. Dissipative adaptation is the idea, associated especially with Jeremy England, that driven systems can become structured in ways that improve their dissipation of applied work. There is other work that could be called out here as speculative attempts to form an entropy-complexity theory of life the universe and everything but the fact remains that this work is not finished or completed to anyones satisfaction.

10. Eat, shit and die. A caustic summary of the basic nature of being.