Galileo’s Delusion
Mathematics may well be the language of the physical universe, but what it says of consciousness makes little sense
Opening Thoughts
The title for this essay was an intuitive leap. On the face of it, it seems absurd to claim that Galileo was deluded. But in its defense, we are all geniuses in hindsight.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us, no matter how great or small. That is the wonder, the ‘magic’ even, of collective human endeavour and knowledge. But what if all this seeming affective wonder is just an illusion? Or worse, a delusion? An unquestioned belief that a particular perception of reality is all there is to it.
Well, this is one conclusion that can be drawn from a line of reasoning that starts with Galileo, and ends with a contemporary hypothesis about the fundamental nature of reality being nothing but information. The problem, however, is that it is also, arguably, an inescapable delusion which presents a philosophical problem. How can it be a delusion if it is all there seemingly is?
This essay is a largely intuitive wander through this question that wonders whether knowing the language of the universe is the best means of progressing ‘the good of humanity’.
Some Background Context
The dawn of the public world wide web (‘internet’) in the early 1990s brought an extraordinary burst of collective positivity, even as general economic sentiment was weak. A few years later, then American Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan, wondered out loud about whether the uncertainty of “” of stock driving the emerging digital revolution.
Around this time, American (then) software specialist and (now) evolutionary scientist, Stephen L. Talbott, made the following observation in ‘.”
“[The] willy-nilly imposition of technology destroys the fabric of meaning by which communities are knit together. Our bafflement over conflicts in the global village reflects a forgetfulness of the fact that human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information. When we disrupt this meaning with our detached logic and unrooted information, we cast the villagers into the same cultural void that we have been able to endure only by filling it with endless diversions.” (Talbott, 1995, Ch. 9, — my emphasis)
We might wonder if ‘irrational exuberance’ is a fitting way to describe a general mindset in the fields of computing and science. It certainly came to mind when reading two very different articles on Medium that make philosophical claims under the banner of ‘Science’.
‘Science’ is capitalised to create an important distinction. On the one hand, there is the reasonable process of evidential inquiry that leads to knowledge, no matter the discipline. On the other, the authority attached to the term ‘science’ and, by association, increasingly more pressingly, ‘technology’ that is presupposed as a necessity that values it as the only source of knowledge.
The ground on which the banner of Science stands is circumscribed by two articles of faith, one metaphysical, the other epistemological.
Firstly, that the fundamental nature of reality is, necessarily, physical; it is fully explained and exhausted by the language of the physical. There are two important corollaries to this article. One, that it is . This means it is grounded by, in, and arises from, one fundamental kind of stuff. The other, that there is nothing outside of this reality, nothing ‘supernatural’.
Secondly, that the only things of any substantive meaning and truth value of and in this reality are those things said under the banner of Science and, by extension, Technology. A corollary to this article is that these are inseparable. One cannot be done without the other. We might call this S-a-T, Science-and-Technology. Everything else is at best informed opinion, maybe stretched to reasoned argument, but more likely mere speculation. Like this essay. 😂
That the Medium articles in question, like others under the banner of S-a-T, make either implied or expressed philosophical claims while either dismissing, or side-stepping, philosophy would be quite funny if they were being openly ironic. They weren’t. Knowledge of the world, and reality, is, apparently, delimited to Kantian pure reason, in spite of his view that delimiting ‘reality’ to this is .
Both articles presuppose the leap of faith that S-a-T is the only means of explaining reality. This leap presupposes the delusion that started with Galileo, which we will get to in due course.
Boldly Going into Infinity
The first article was ’s “Descartes Did Not Separate Thought from Reality.” What stood out about it was not the peremptory dismissal of philosophers, but the implied authoritative demand of S-a-T, represented in this case by “computational cognitive neuroscience”. The article included a link to a video, “?,” which, according to Thibadeau, “pretends to tell the truth about Descartes’ writings and what he believes”. It was the video, not Thibadeau’s polemic, that came to mind when reading the second article.
The second article was ’s, “Does Quantum Physics Give Us Consciousness?” What stood out about this was the offer to “fill the quantum gaps” in Anil Seth’s thesis on a “.”
Seth’s “new science of consciousness” follows a metaphysical orthodoxy supposed by S-a-T. He subscribes to an explanation of consciousness known in philosophy of mind as emergentism, which Ferrie summarises nicely — when enough “biological molecules (chiefly neurons)” come together in a sufficiently complex way, “they will start to have experience.”
Ferrie simplifies the complex esotericism of quantum physics making his articles a ‘must read’. The mediation between consciousness and quantum physics in his article is no exception. For instance, we learn we can dump fantasies about teleportation because quantum theory says it is simply impossible.
But what about things that steadfastly straddle S-a-T and the Realm of Woo, like ‘consciousness’? Ferrie’s mediation offers a sensible caution against the temptation to speculate from one to the other. It does have one problem, however. It entails an idea that shines a light on Galileo’s delusion — that the fundamental nature of the universe is information in the form of mathematical abstractions.
Galileo’s Delusion
The thing about Galileo’s delusion is that, at the time, he was thought to be somewhat delusional. Actually, heretical is the proper term. He faced the kind of tightrope that no western academic/intellectual (yet?) faces — a society in which the state is society, is culture, is one ideology or religion determining how people conceive of themselves and the world.
Galileo’s delusion is no more clearly expressed than in his proclamation in ‘.
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, … in the language of mathematics … without which it is … impossible to understand [everything in the universe].” (Galilei, 1623, p. 4)
“Philosophy” in this sense was natural philosophy, or what became known as science. This is held to have been the , when philosophy and science began to be seen as different disciplines.
For Galileo, and all that followed in his wake, all that can be understood about the universe will be found in the Book of Science. An infinite tome of blank pages to be filled through experiment, written in the language of mathematics. And, as ‘the universe’ was as much as could be imagined to be real, it entails reality. Everything else is consigned to the Realm of Woo, except for reason when in the employ of Science.
The conceptual ground of Galileo’s claim was not new. It is known as ‘Galileo’s Platonism Thesis’, which goes roughly like this. Galileo believed Plato’s ideal realm of necessary truths grounded by mathematics was not some abstract thing beyond experience. It is not ‘Reality’, but a rigorous law-like principle that determines nature, the universe, reality, and all there is to know about them. (Matteoli, 2019, pp. 70-84)
For Galileo, the world, the universe, is not Plato’s imperfect reflection of a perfect (ideal) Reality beyond or behind experience. It is instead an empirical, phenomenal reality that is fully explained in terms of physical laws determined by the necessary truths of mathematics. Put a slightly different way, for Galileo we were already out of , we just needed to methodically measure and document all that could be seen in the language of mathematics.
While Galileo’s Platonism Thesis has been questioned (De Caro, 2018, pp. 85-104), the conception of reality being fundamentally grounded by the language of mathematics remains an article of faith for S-a-T. This gets us back to Galileo’s Delusion that grounds Seth’s conception of consciousness.
For Seth, consciousness is no more than something that pops out of quite uniquely particular configurations of physical stuff that arises from mathematical probabilities when wave functions collapse. For Ferrie, and presumably those working on developing quantum computing and/or artificial general intelligence, once we have cracked quantum computing we will be able to crack consciousness.
In light of the world as it is today and the most probable, foreseeable scenario for what’s left of this century, and the world, an obvious question comes to mind. With great respect to everyone who is committed to quantum computing and/or artificial general intelligence, on what grounds can this irrational exuberance be justified, other than for its own sake?
The more the reality of the Anthropocene bites its way into whatever collective consciousness might be said to exist, the more pressing the question of meaning. And the more pressing the question of meaning, the more pressing the question of purpose. In this light, Talbott’s observation is salutary to say the least.
So, if we are in the process of digitising the world in purely mathematical terms, the most obvious question is to what purpose? What is inevitably offered up is the altruism response — ‘for the good of humanity’, because anything alluding to ‘because we can’ is fatuous.
But is it really for the ‘good of humanity’? Let us return to this after a diversion through Seth’s “real problem of consciousness.”
The Really Hard Problem of Consciousness
The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is an epigram coined by Australian philosopher, David Chalmers. It was previously known as the ‘explanatory gap’.
The explanatory gap continues to stump scientists and philosophers who admit to a particular metaphysical narrative — physicalism, which says everything throughout time and space is fully explained and exhausted by physical stuff. The problem they have — the gap — is that explaining first-person subjective experience in physical terms makes no first-person subjective experience sense.
Put simply, we just don’t experience life in the way S-a-T describes it, which is why Chalmers called it ‘hard’. The irony is obvious.
S-a-T tells us that what we have a direct first-person subjective experience of being, is not what we are.
There are vast amounts written on this since Descartes. But, let us not rehash the history. For there is a different path into the problem that becomes obvious when questioning the practicality of Seth’s ‘real problem’.
Seth claims to have dissolved the ‘hard problem’ with the ‘real problem’. When we dig a little deeper, we can be excused for wondering if this is just a No True Scotsman fallacy. The ‘hard problem’ is not a ‘true’ problem, is not ‘real’, because it is not S-a-T.
S-a-T holds the only ‘true’ mandate over ‘Reality’. Or so the story goes.
The ‘real’ problem according to Seth is not that S-a-T cannot explain our first-person subjective experiences of life in purely physical terms. It is that S-a-T has not quantified the phenomenological properties of individual subjective conscious experience, and mapped them against the physical structures of our brains. How might this play out in practical, experimental terms?
For instance, in light of the eight billion-ish humans, what sample size of measures of the phenomenological properties of people’s individual subjective conscious experiences warrants significance? Which experiences will be measured — all, some? Is all even possible and, if some, what are the selection criteria? Which people?
What kinds of subjective experiences? Will the phenomenological properties of the experience of biological functions, say, going to the toilet be measured? Or psychological (memory) functions, say, remembering to take the trash out? Or of grief over a parent dying? Or, to veer back towards philosophy, of different subjective conscious experiences of the ‘same’ colour, or smell, or sight?
What if there are a multiplicity of phenomenological properties of the same kind of experience? Are these somehow ‘averaged’ into a ‘standard model’ human? What of divergence? Are our brains unique physical configurations that correlate to unique subjective conscious experiences in a state of constant flux? Is testing the hypothesis through experiment even feasible?
That this seems absurd suggests something about the claim that the “new science of consciousness” actually prescribes the ‘real problem’. It suggests that, maybe, consciousness as such is not ‘the problem’.
The problem of consciousness is not in quantifying the phenomenological properties of internal subjective conscious experience into objective data, but
how our experiences of life manifest objectively as external affects.
For this, as Nietzsche tried to point out in his iconoclastic way, we don’t need philosophers or, to expand his observation, scientists. What we need are psychologists.
The really hard problem of consciousness is what it has been since the beginning of written human history. It is playing out in front of us right now.
After all, can S-a-T really explain the subjective conscious experience of those subject to the disproportionate use of power and force that underpins the supposed ‘justification’ of continuing to murder civilians in Gaza and Lebanon? Or the subjective conscious experience of disaffected, indignant, angry citizens of the most militarily powerful nation in the world being manipulated with blatant lies by sociopathic demagogues and billionaires merely for the purposes of attaining political power, wealth, and personal gratification?
Infinite Prison of Foolishness
The most fascinating, yet paradoxical, dimension of this is the platitude of pursuing it to progress the ‘good of humanity’. Whether in the name of S-a-T, or religion, or academic philosophy, it is invariably from without. A kind of well-intended, paternalistic Jack Hornerism that has been successful so far.
However, if we want to continue to pursue ways of understanding the world for the ‘good of humanity’, then would it not make sense to try understanding from within ‘humanity’ for a while? In light of the explanatory gap, this intuitively seems more promising than quantifying it in terms of S-a-T?
The hyperbole is not unwarranted. After all, if there is one thing we can be quite sure of when reflecting on human history, it is that no amount of describing the Science of water to a horse will give it cause to drink. For, “as far as the horse is concerned, what is important about water is not what it is, but what it does.”
The same can be said, with certainty, about consciousness.
This is not to say that S-a-T is ‘wrong’. That is not the point being made here. It is undoubtedly foolish to imply that the beneficial advances of S-a-T in terms of advancing the ‘good of humanity’ have not been worth the suffering that accompanied them. This is the basic that has worked to date.
The problem, however, is that the endlessness of time implied in the premise has been eroded by what is to be the most probable scenario for the state of the world in the coming decades.
It is, of course, no small irony that we will need to rely on S-a-T to help address the challenges ahead. But it is not sufficient. In fact, it can be said from progress to date to be far from sufficient.
The ’infinity and beyond’ irrational exuberance of S-a-T, particularly in respect of the is deeply problematic. For while it appears to be an exciting, balls-out ‘boys own’ adventure into the infinite, it can also be said to be an infinite prison of foolishness.
What makes it a prison is the supposed exhaustively authoritative necessity of S-a-T. To adapt , any protestation that S-a-T has gone too far and needs more lay regulation is met with an immediate threat. The threat is that doing so denies ‘humanity’ the promise of theoretical ‘goods’ waiting to be discovered at some future point.
We can say it is a delusion because no amount of S-a-T delivers certainty over what ‘reality’ really is, even as S-a-T is converging our ideas of it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is what makes it foolish. The convergence of artificial intelligence ‘learning’ from an unfathomable ocean of data, at the same time as relegating the actual living beings through which meaning and purpose arises, humans, to mere maintenance and janitor tasks.
The best we can say is that reality is what ‘we’ — the royal we - make of it. Importantly, the majority of the ‘we’ that make it, as opposed to the minority of the ‘we’ who claim to know it. To continue on the current trajectory of S-a-T is to push it, ourselves, and the world into something increasingly convergent and artificial that a vanishingly small minority has significant influence over.
Until the world, inevitably through the laws of nature, pushes back.
End Thoughts
If we might take anything at all as a generalisation from S-a-T in respect of ‘the good of humanity’, it is that the world is a complex system of things existing in different states of being. And, if we harbour a view, as many seem to, that the state of this world warrants improvement, then an obvious place to look to make improvements is where they will have the most effect. Surprisingly, in light of the polemic so far, mathematics offers a suitable analogy for system improvement by means of the concept of a lowest common denominator.
We don’t need to believe the fundamental nature of reality is written in the language of mathematics to ‘discover’ this. Or be an expert in neuroscience, or the complex esotericism of quantum theory. We just need to look in the mirror. And find a way to redirect the irrational exuberance.
While it is moralistic to suggest so, the profound advances of S-a-T can nonetheless be seen as an illusion. For S-a-T is not all of reality, i.e. what is known and can be knowable, as the premise of exhaustively authoritative necessity of S-a-T implies. That the dominant paradigm, at least of the western intellectual-cultural tradition, claims this to be ‘true’ in the sense of being the only meaningful expression of ‘reality’ makes it a delusion, which can be said to have started with Galileo.
However, S-a-T has nonetheless become an inseparable and indispensable too-big-to-fail part of our human reality we call ‘the world’. The challenge is, as already observed, tempering and regulating its impulsive, irrationally exuberant, demands of authority and necessity. For this, the most obvious question is how?
There will be all sorts of answers to this. The most obvious clue lies in the direction of the ‘good of humanity’ necessarily being a communitarian proposition. After all, it . And if we are as smart as we think we are, then surely the past decade of turmoil in the western socio-cultural zeitgeist tells us that the “trust us, we’re scientists/philosophers/experts” approach simply won’t wash in the digital age.
But as this is already a long read, let’s leave inquiring into the ‘how’ to the imagination for now. As for mathematics, information, and the fundamental nature of reality? Well, the most we can say about them is that they only exist because of our subjective conscious experience of them.
Funny thing that, eh?
REFERENCES
- Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies, 2 (3), 200–219.
- De Caro, M. (2018). “On Galileo’s Platonism, Again. Hypotheses and Perspectives” in the History and Philosophy of Science: Homage to Alexandre Koyré 1892–1964, 85–104.
- Galilei, G., The Assayer, 1623, trans., Drake, S., 4.
- Hare, B. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual review of psychology, 68 (1), 155–186.
- Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. T., (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.
- Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific philosophical quarterly, 64 (4), 354–361.
- Matteoli, G., 2019, “Galileo, Plato and the Scientific Revolution: The Origins of Galileo’s Platonism Thesis in the Historiography of Science,” Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, 2019 (7): 70–84.
- Nietzsche, F., (1989) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (trans., Kaufmann, W.), Vintage Books, 12–13.
- Talbott, S., 1995, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, O’Reilly & Assoc., (Ch. 9, online edition).
- Williams, G., “Kant’s Account of Reason,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).
