I was a co-founder of CFAR in 2012. I'd been actively trying to save the world for about a decade at that point. I left in 2018 to seriously purify my mind & being. I realized in 2020 that I'd been using the fear of the end of the world like an addictive drug and did my damnedest to quit cold-turkey. I'm now doing my best to embody an answer to the global flurry in a way that's something like a fusion of game theory and Buddhist Tantra.
Find my non-rationalist writing, social media, and projects at my Linktree.
"Realityfluid" - terrible name by the way, lets call it "fundamentals"
I don't think that quite captures what I was pointing at. I'll buy there are better words for it, but I don't just mean "fundamentals". Or at least that phrasing feels meaningfully inaccurate to me.
I picked up the phrase "magical reality fluid" from a friend who was deep into mathematical physics. He used it the same way rationalists use (or at least used to use?) "magic": "By some magic cognitive process…." The idea being to name it in a silly & mysterious-sounding way to emphasize that there's something non-mysterious but that we don't yet understand.
"Magical reality fluid" is a reference to whatever it is that the Schrödinger wave equation shows is wiggling. There's probably a technical term for this. It's a mathematical structure, just like the electromagnetic field. Lots of physicists give up on the philosophical question and just say "We use it to compute probabilities, we don't ask how it works, maybe 'how it works' is a confused question."
Presumably there's something in, uh, actual reality (whatever that is) that our Schrödinger-based math is somehow related to. Currently the math makes it look like it's some kind of fluid or something that has waves in it.
Hence "magical reality fluid".
Also, my being a cofounder of CFAR doesn't mean I'm immune to sufficiently complex basic confusions! This might be simple to clear up. But my mind is organized right now such that just saying "map vs. territory" just moves the articulation around. It doesn't address the core issue whatsoever from what I can tell.
Yep. The trouble is that all maps are in the territory. Even "territory" in "map vs. territory" is actually a map embedded in… something. ("The referent of 'territory'", although saying it this way just recurses the problem. Like reference itself is a more fundamental reality than either maps or the referent of "territory".)
So solving this by clearing up the map/territory distinction is about creating a map within which you can have "map" separate from a "territory". The true territory (whatever that is) doesn't seem to me to make such a distinction.
The issue is, how do maps arise in the first place? It's not like "map" is a natural thing-like cluster in reality independent of human minds.
I think another way of asking this is, how does reference arise?
I don't know if it does. It's not that kind of shift AFAICT. It strikes me as more like the shift from epicycles to heliocentrism. If I recall right, at the time the point wasn't that heliocentrism made better predictions. I think it might have made exactly the same predictions at first IIRC. The real impact was something more like the mythic reframe on humanity's role in the cosmos. It just turned out to generalize better too.
Post-reductionism (as I understand it) is an invitation to not be locked in the paradigm of reductionism. To view reductionism as a tool instead of as a truth. This invites wider perceptions which might, in turn, result in different predictions. Hard to say. But the mythic impact on humanity is still potentially quite large: the current reductionist model lends itself to nihilism, but reality might turn out to be vastly larger than strict reductionism (or maybe any fixed paradigm) can fully handle.
Post-reductionist: ...well, I don't know what to write here to pass the ITT.
I can't speak for the post-reductionist view in general. But I can name one angle:
Atoms aren't any more real than apples. What you're observing is that in theory the map using atoms can derive apples, but not the other way around. Which is to say, the world you build out of atoms (plus other stuff) is a strictly richer ontology — in theory.
But in a subtle way, even that claim about richer ontology is false.
In an important way, atoms are made of apples (plus other stuff). We use metaphors to extend our intuitions about everyday objects in order to think about… something. It's not that atoms are really there. It's that we use this abstraction of "atom" in order to orient to a quirky thing reality does. And we build that abstraction out of our embodied interactions with things like apples.
Said more simply: infants & toddlers don't encounter atoms. They encounter apples. That's the kind of thing they use to build maps of atoms later on.
This is why quantum mechanics comes across as "weird". Reality doesn't actually behave like objects that are interacting when you look closely at it. That's more like an interface human minds construct. The interface breaks down upon inspection, kind of like how icons on a screen dissolve if you look at them through a microscope.
(This confusion is embedded in our language so it's hard to say this point about mental interfaces accurately. E.g., what are "human minds" if objects aren't actually in the territory? It's a fake question but I've never found a way to dispel it with accurate language. Language assumes thing-ness in order to grammar. It's like we can only ever talk about maps, where "territory" is a map of… something.)
So really, we already have examples of constructing atoms out of apples (and other things). That's how we're able to talk about atoms in the first place! It's actually the inverse that's maybe impossible in practice.
(…as you point out! "…a hypothetical superintelligent being with an insane computing capacity (probably would need to exist in a different universe) might be able to describe the apple in the terms of atoms….")
I think the core issue here is that the standard reductionist view is that maps can be accurate. Whereas my understanding of post-reductionism basically says that "accurate" is a type error arising from a faulty assumption. You can compare two maps and notice if they're consistent. And you can tell whether using a map helps you navigate. But things get very confusing at a basic philosophical level when you start talking about whether a map accurately describes the territory.
In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.
That's actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they're trying to be seen.
There's also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the "hidden" bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn't something that gets advertised very much and can be explained away. It's pretty important to make such incidences as plausibly deniable as possible given the game theory of MAD.
But in terms of "better sensors make the UFOs seem to vanish", that's just flat-out false. That's not what the reports suggest basically at all.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were "real". How could these events happen?
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say "larger", I don't mean just "more dimensions" or "parallel universes". It's worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn't mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there's something we'd interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we'd find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if "survival" as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-"entities" with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion's possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don't know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river's local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It's awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there's a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.
In which case their behavior makes absolutely no sense to me, either completely hiding themselves, or full outright reveal would make sense to me, but this weird "let humans have sneak-peaks but never any actual proof" is just weird.
For whatever it's worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer's field and then perfectly normal-looking people coming out to offer the baffled farmer… pancakes. Just pancakes. Upon close inspection it became clear that they were perfectly normal pancakes with the single exception of having absolutely no salt.
There are other oddities like MLB encounters where the MLBs were driving absolutely brand-new cars from half a century prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to wonder what kind of being goes through the effort of looking human and trying to blend in but constructs a car that's several decades out of style and basically cannot be acquired that new anymore. It smacks of the way Rowling's wizards are strangely clueless about how to pass as muggles.
Vallée's point, though, was that these phenomena seem to adapt to what's expected of them, but always with a twist. It's almost as though they're trying to keep us off-balance as to what they are, confirming our suspicions whatever they may be 90% of the way and then tossing in something bizarre that doesn't fit the picture at all.
A number of people have noticed the strange similarity to DMT entities, and to legends of faeries.
Of course, I'm sure there's nothing to these. Just statistical anomalies plus quirks of human cognition. That seems to clearly explain 90% of the phenomena. There's just this little bit off to the side that we haven't quite figured out how it fits…
Is anything uniformly praised in the rationalist community? IME having over half the community think something is between "awesome" and "probably correct" is about as uniform as it gets.
Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 particularly jumps out at me: it highlights the self-reference in the answer, which makes it sound plausible as a path to an answer.
Thank you!