262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World

/ Philosophy / 8 Comments

Scientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty of this.) It shouldn't be surprising that reality, in regimes far away from our everyday experience, fails to conform to common sense. But it's also okay to maintain a bit of skepticism in the face of bizarre claims. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel wants us to face up to the weirdness of the world. He claims that there are no non-weird ways to explain some of the most important features of reality, from quantum mechanics to consciousness.

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Eric Schwitzgebel received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books, including the new The Weirdness of the World.

8 thoughts on “262 | Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World”

  1. Ted Farris

    Schwitzgebel likes playing with silly or fringe ideas thrown out on social media and in popular books by people like Chalmers., Bostrom and Philip Goff. But his analysis is always supercilious and lacking in rigor and he always skips logical steps in getting to his conclusions. His idea that ethics professors are “no better” than other professors when it comes to their ethics is not surprising perhaps, but you can’t even analyze it until you have an accepted definition of objective ethics to measure the behavior of these professors against. We have no such ethical system and Schwitzgebel doesn’t propose one so he has no basis for his conclusion.

    Another basic flaw in Schwitzgebel’s arguments is that, like Bostrom and Chalmers, he makes up probabilities by pulling them out of the air when there is no basis for assigning probabilities to the question at all. There is no possible way to assign probabilities to the idea of us living in a simulation as there is zero evidence at all that we might be in a simulation beyond pure speculation. The same is true for Panpsychism, belief in god, souls, or belief in the possibility of philosophical zombies or for that matter many worlds. You can’t assign a non zero probability to these theories without some sort of evidence to support the ideas and there is none beyond speculation and twisted logic.

    Also Schwitzgebel goes off on an irrelevant tangent in discussing substance dualism by talking about “souls”. Souls need not have anything to do with dualism and Schwitzgebel never even tries to say what a soul is or what it might do, instead relying on common Christian religious usage which has no relevance to any serious debate. His refutation of materialism by saying that the United States could be a conscious entity is just pure nonsense and Sean should have pushed back on such an obviously specious assertion. All conscious entities that we know of are biological organisms and a country is not a biological organism (it is basically just a concept in people’s minds like a corporation but in any case it is not a living organism).

    On Many Worlds, that hypothesis is just an effort to make physics deterministic at the particle level. Hidden variable theory is another effort to make physics deterministic (Sean is a physicalist/determinist). But there is no reason to believe that the universe is deterministic. All the evidence we have in our own universe is that the universe is probabilistic. That’s what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us. So Many Worlds ignores everything we observe and goes off into pure speculation in order to find some way for the universe to be deterministic. There is no reason to do that.

    But all Schwitzgebel (who seems not terribly philosophically sophisticated) can say is that Many Worlds violates his “common sense.” That’s not a very convincing argument and it doesn’t even address the determinism issue which is at the heart of Many Worlds.

    So what I object to about Schwitzgebel is that his thought is superficial and sometimes supercilious and also relies almost wholly on his own personal sense of “common sense” and not very much at all on rigorous logic.

  2. Bartl Dzivi

    During law school final exams, many decades ago, I used to dream about the 2 page outlines I had distilled for each class before finales. An exact copy of the actual outline. I dreamed about it after memorizing it during the day.

  3. Andrew C

    I found the Nicolausian discounting discussed (coined too I think, though it is from Nicolaus Bernoulli) in Monton, B. (2019). How to avoid maximizing expected utility. Philosophers, 19. https://philpapers.org/rec/MONHTA-2

    Should we rather be thinking of these small number probabilities like 1e-9 not in linear, but in log or logit as is common in ML? If you have tons of tiny probabilities, it is less important to worry about the difference between 1e-9 and 2e-9 than it is about 1e-9 and 1e-11.

    Who says what is a small probability? Surely it must go down inversely to the number of trials you expect to happen. More trials requires considering even lower probability events.

    For example, when thinking about origin of life at the bottom of a bubbling ocean, you have several large numbers adding together on the number of “trials performed” that eventually created the first cell (or cell like thing, something like the self replicating RNA protocell). A trial in this case would be an interaction between two atoms or molecules that randomly occurred in hydrothermal vents. That number should be something like 1e23 particles/liter + 1e6 liters + 1e7 seconds/year + 1e8 years = 1e44 trials.

    Even if that estimate is off ±9 it is still 1e35 on the low end and I think my point still stands. Here I’m clearly thinking in logs because a confidence interval that spans 1e18 is one the hand awfully large, but on the other 18/44 is only 40%

    So shouldn’t we expect the probability of the sequence of interactions that leads to the first cell to similarly be close to 1e-44? Sequences of actions are a natural source of small probabilities because of their multiplicative (or additive in log) conjunction. 1e-44 could be 11 steps of 1e-4 each or one step at 1e-40 and then one step at 1e-4, etc. Though we do need to sum over all paths in the chemical reaction network that leads to the first cell.

    I don’t think it is that weird to think of the US as conscious. If we consider our own complex interactions of cells to result in something we call conscious, then why not complex interactions of humans too? Easier to go up the chain than down and accept that a cell is conscious. That one seems weirder to me as of now, but I don’t rule it out. And I don’t think that reasoning necessarily goes all the way down to electrons with feelings.

  4. Howard Gary

    Hopefully some day with continuing advancements in quantum computer technologies that deal directly with superpositions and entanglement of elementary particles we will get a better understanding of how to interpret what is going on at the microscopic level. And present-day theories like the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics were just a phase we went through in getting to a more complete understanding of reality at the microscopic level, and perhaps we’ll even be able to come up with a meaningful definition of consciousness.

  5. Pingback: Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast: Eric Schwitzgebel on the Weirdness of the World - 3 Quarks Daily

  6. Luis Lopez

    All this talk of souls. We can accept that human society as an emergent structure has an objective reality to us, you, me. Doesn’t that make a soul real as a concept on in that emergent framework? Yes, it has no objective reality outside human ecology, but it absolutely does within. The concept of a lawyer is entirely within our minds and a shared collective belief, that after achieving levels of accreditation(college,bar,etc..), we all believe that this person is now a lawyer subjectively. But lawyers have objective reality because if you choose a bad one it can be bad for your wellbeing. So I think in that sense we do have a soul that exists only within human society, but is entirely made up of your interactions with others. There is nothing divine about it, but there is plenty to hold in awe.
    And yes, I actually think of human beings as a collective group that can socially create what is essentially a superorganism. That doesn’t mean the organism is alive in the sense that we think about, but alive in the sense of an ant or termite hive.

  7. no_profundia

    I just wanted to comment briefly on this comment from Ted Farris because I found it interesting to think about:

    “His idea that ethics professors are “no better” than other professors when it comes to their ethics is not surprising perhaps, but you can’t even analyze it until you have an accepted definition of objective ethics to measure the behavior of these professors against. We have no such ethical system and Schwitzgebel doesn’t propose one so he has no basis for his conclusion.”

    I agreed with this when I first read it but as I thought about it I don’t think this is true for the following reason: Even with no objective ethics (and I’m not convinced there is such a thing) we pretty much all agree that ethics has something to do with human behavior. There may be disagreements about what behaviors are ethical but it’s hard to understand what the concept of “ethics” could mean if it didn’t in some relate to human behavior.

    So, I think to determine that ethics professors are, as a group, “no better” than non-ethics professors it is not necessary to have an objective moral standard. We can simply point out that there are no systematic differences between how ethics professors behave and how non-ethics professors behave. Surely, if there was an ethical difference between ethics professors and non-ethics professors it would show up in systematic differences in their behavior.

    In other words, I think there are two propositions embedded in the claim that ethics professors are on average morally better than non-ethics professors. Proposition 1: The behavior of ethics professors differs systematically from the behavior of non-ethics professors. Proposition 2: Those differences are such that when evaluated morally the behavior of ethics professors on average is “morally better”. We need some kind of moral standard to assert proposition 2 (though I don’t see why it would need to be ‘objective’ or what that would even mean) but we don’t need such a standard to assert proposition 1 and denying proposition 1 is all that is needed to deny the claim that ethics professors are morally better than non-ethics professors. If their behavior is not different in any way from non-ethics professors then it also can’t be morally different (better or worse).

    I think most people asserting the claim are basing it on an empirical observation of this kind, i.e. that they don’t perceive any major differences between the behavior of ethics professors versus non-ethics professors.

  8. MagZ Magee

    Love the show, but I mean what I’m about to say in the spirit of the original argument. In other words, nothing personal, right?

    So here goes.

    Have either of you guys ever cooked and washed the dirty dishes? Changed a shitty baby diaper? Broken a bone? Attended a death?

    The physical evidence of these events is undeniable—empty cans, dirty dishes, stinky poo, pain, a rotting corpse, the subsequent absence of a lived/loved person and your interactions. If these results are not then attended to, a human existence would soon become intolerable, or painful, or dangerous or just miserable.

    I just washed my floors. I have compressed disks and now my back hurts.

    Simulation? Dream? There’s two fewer Advils in the bottle and the pain is reduced. That’s real.

    As for sentient AI-powered machines? Pull the plug. Blow up the power plant. Bring down the electral grid. Bingo. It’s neutralized.

    I can’t believe someone makes a living publishing books and prating to impressionable students about this stuff. Pick up a shovel. Plant a garden. Eat the tomato. Excrete it. Clean the dirty toilet.

    Life us real. Period. Get out of your heads and live it.

    Or maybe I’m wrong.

    And you never read this.

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