Idealism to Logical Positivism

It is not that the deepest assumptions of Plato's idealism that pervade much of western philosophy are wrong, they are misplaced. Maybe we should take a couple of steps back before we move forward. He is assuming his conclusion. He is making a metaphysical assertion that the existence of ideas is both prior and more fundamental than the world of appearances, what we see and sense. In the end this sort of metaphysical question may not have a definitive answer, but in the spirit of abductive reasoning we can explore all of the practical consequences of our hypothesis. Stated in the positive a modern idealist's first hypothesis would be more like the physicist Max Tegmark who suggests that the math (basic physics == simple math => complex emergent phenomina) implies existence.

I want to follow the pragmatists who offer some ways out of pure idealism to more of a stance where ideas are real, but external reality is something else again. They place ideas properly in the space of cognition, in the space of what humans can be analytically aware of. Or maybe in a larger space of what any aware being could know, and to consider whether omniscient awareness is even meaningful. I am more comfortable stating a different set of basic metaphysical hypothesis than saying the other side is wrong. We could both be right in the same way that particles and waves are both right in there own contexts.

The idea is that there is something else that is necessary on a basic level to explain everything we see. Basic physics plus emergence is a handwave to some magic math that connects different levels of description. It is not a handwave to suggest that all that randomness at the fundamental level and confused interpretations of information and a systems theory that is very incomplete might be necessary for emergence. If we call the something else consciousness, then we have Basic physics and basic consiousness plus emergence => a foundational theory of everything. We may even find good mathematical descriptions of these ideas and be able to confirm them, but in the end that doesn't matter.  I don't have to postulate any magic math to suggest that what actually happens in the world isn't being guided by our mathematics but must be spontaneously generated from the metaphysical substances. I'm not actually arguing for something more than physics, but for a physics with consciousness. I understand that this model has a fundamental observer problem, and so does physics.

Religion and philosophy can speculate with equal authority on the nature of the expanded spaces thus created and debate them to the end of time. What the mathematicians and physicists have invented to describe the universe is far more awesome than anything in the religious books. The faith that the scientist has that these relations hold for all time and space has to be stronger any religious faith. I'm not just talking about the measurements that cannot be made because of fundamental limitations, but also about the potentially knowable measurements not made because we just don't know how (yet). There is some fascinating work about a 'fourth phase of water', where experiments can be done that suggest there is a lot of hidden information in water and the ways it relates to other molecules in solution. Stuff that cells need to know in order to function.

Chomsky, referring to Newton having destroyed any hope of the kind of mechanistic world that if fully comprehensible. Mentions the idea (from?) that the difference between a problem and a mistery is the limits of understanding imposed by actual cognitive capacity, not just on some measure of intelligence but the capacity to understand in practice. This could fully explain the Dunning–Kruger effect if you simply posit that for a given level of intelligence, some minimum level of depth/complexity is required to understand a situation, the phenomena will be a mystery.  Religious and scientific explainations are equally mysterious and the former may be more aesthetically pleasing. We'll return to this idea when we consider the political phillosophy of open democracy and the ethical use of religious sentiments in political rhetoric.

In the current context, we could call this the arrogance of the lesser genious. The real geniuses like Newton instinctively know there are problems beyond the reach of human intelligence. For the lesser genius who by Dunning-Kruger is further from Newton than he thinks, but imagining his powers greater than they are he also imagines difficult problems are all expected to fall before the legions of geniuses as science marches on to victory. The real genius knows there are a great many problems that are difficult to formulate much less solve. Even with all the staggering progress since Newton there are still problems that are barely cracked. Nobody has any idea if they will be solved much less how.

I don't need a deity to explain levels of intelligence beyond our reach, or even that human levels of cognition will remain beyond artificial intelligence for quite some time. This is not to say that we won't continue to augment and extend human intelligence, collective and individual even as the qualitative limit remains beyond our horizon. For the true genius, the intelligence scale extends well beyond herself and any other human. If you don't want intelligent beings from a higher dimensional world, then aliens or artificial super-intelligences will do for the thought experiment.

One durable result of modern physics is the idea that if it can happen, it will. Life and intelligent life can be explained with this principle, but then so can any of them. We just don't have any reliable information about any of them, although we have many reasons to think one or all of them might turn out to be real in our collective future.

(we may need a foundation here to be detailed in one of the chapters about artificial wisdom. The foundation is about our concepts for knowing: information, knowing, wisdom and such.)