The cult of skepticism

Summing up my old report

The main categories of those points:

• I developed a long list of contradictions and a list of sectarian aspects of the Zetetique movement
• I also listed lots of similarities of the Zetetique movement with both Christianity and Postmodernism (both are movements which skeptics officially claim to be radically opposed to), leading to classify "Scientific Skepticism" on the side of irrationality together with its "best enemies" that it is just a mirror image of, as opposed to mainstream science.
• I reported in French an attempt at discussion with the editors of the main French skeptical publication (Association Française pour l'Information Scientifique), showing their nonsense and scientific illiteracy. Some notes about them in English here, there and there.

• Their views are more diverse and naturally divergent, than the scientific community usually is; and it all diverges from the normal ways of science too. Divergence can be found among skeptical movements in France, even though most of them are based on the same doctrine written by their guru and founder (Henri Broch).
  Elsewhere, the Skeptical Inquirer, numbers 31/3 and 31/4, published an article in two parts, « Global climate change triggered by global warning » from the Center for Inquiry (organization for the defense of science and reason), explaining that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change really is the expression of the scientific consensus, and refuting one by one the main climate-skeptical arguments. Since the publication of the first part, and even more after the second, the editors received lots of letters from unhappy readers arguing that "Skeptics can only be climate-skeptics", some even requesting an immediate unsubscribe from this journal (Many such readers' letters are in 31/5). Generally, skeptics' forums are full of controversy and conspiracy theories about global warming, such as cannot usually be found in mainstream science.
• Their paranoia, that is, an exaggerated and unjustified belief in their opponents' irrationality and conspiracies, so as to dismiss them too easily. Namely, the way skeptics dismiss any contradiction by assuming without proper examination, that any opinion different than theirs (such as belief in afterlife, or claims of having observed paranormal phenomena) must be due to human error, fraud or desire to believe something, no matter how implausible such an explanation can sometimes be.
  
• Essentialism, that of mistaking reason with a specific metaphysical doctrine (ontological materialism); in other words, their confusion between a specific belief and an irrational way of thinking, under the same name "faith";
• Misunderstanding about what the existing body of scientific knowledge is really saying: while they are right to dismiss many pro-paranormal claims that distort the message of quantum physics and pretend to deduce much more from it ("law of attraction"...) than what it really says, the usual materialistic claims by skeptics (that the laws of physics would be complete enough to exclude the plausibility of paranormal phenomena) are usually no more compatible with quantum physics either. (In one argument page from the French Association for Scientific Information (AFIS), I even read the claim that the laws of physics are deterministic !!!).
• Lack of familiarity with the existing body of scientific knowledge that they claim to criticize (parapsychology)
• Lack of serious extended work to develop experiments (instead, skeptics are a lobby against experiments on the paranormal, not developing serious experiments themselves)
  
• Simplicity, amateurism
• A caricatural view of the scientific method
• Essentialism on their interpretation of the scientific method, which they present as a sort of spiritual, intrinsic virtue, a matter of intentionality, to praise and develop for itself, making us deserve to be right, forgetting that it should rather be undertaken as an adventure to explore and adapt to a reality that does not care about us, or for our virtue, sincerity and dedication.
• Double standard of criticism: blind uncriticized belief of biased and even sometimes false information from their own group (whatever agrees with them), but systematic reactions of hyperbolic doubt towards opposite claims
• Their focus on evangelization rather than curiosity and research
• Their conformism, assuming that everything is already known and that anything not conforming to their laws and fundamental truths would be evil.
• Their lazy confusion between all kinds of opponents
• Ad hominem arguments, with blind assumptions of the irrationality of opponents to avoid serious rational debates on the core of the subjects. Opposing views are often blindly dismissed as merely caused by feelings, such as desires, conspiracies, delusion or fear.
• A form of collective infalsifiability within the movement, that consists in remaining insensitive to having members of one's group convinced by contrary evidence, by excommunicating them as never having been authentic members of the movement; and replacing them by naive newbies to continue the movement.

Some historical aspects in France and in the world

The study of paranormal phenomena developed as a scientific field, that is parapsychology, which came to be somehow officially accepted as a science when the Parapsychological Association became affiliated to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. Among researchers in this field, a sort of consensus more or less emerged, that some proofs of existence of supernatural phenomena are present, but they are often very tenuous (with casual exceptions) so that it is not possible to provide as clear and simple proofs as many skeptics are usually requiring, but a long study in the field is required to figure out the existing evidence.
There is only one research organization on parapsychology in France, Institut Métapsychique International (IMI), which is recognized as a public interest organization but hardly has any public support, and roughly no recognition of its views by any other organization. (So, thorough debates usually have to refer to the data produced outside of France as evidence for psi)

Instead, the views of the skeptics groups ("Zététique") are strongly supported by the academic system and other official scientific organizations.

The founding organization of the whole French skeptical movement (Cercle Zététique) was more and more discredited and finally self-dissolved, as the leading and finally remaining few members were the most sectarian.
One of them is the Laboratoire de Zététique, an official laboratory in the University of Nice, directed by the founder of the Cercle (Henri Broch), and officially supported by 2 French Physics Nobel laureates, both dead but still put forward as honorary members.

The other, less official but the least sectarian and thus most respectable, thus with the most members, is the Observatoire Zététique, based in Grenoble. So they have basically the same ideology from the same guru (Broch) but make a difference by their "soft attitude".
Smaller groups and independent skeptical webmasters also exist.
The Observatoire made clear its independence to not be mistaken with the others' bigotry, and prefers to not put forward its divergence with the other groups, but all is explained in its forum.

The whole ideology of the Zététique groups is that they are not interested in the paranormal for itself, but made the choice to focus on paranormal claims (preferably the most crazy and incredible ones, or their own caricatural interpretation of them) as a toy model for a pedagogical project of teaching the scientific method to a large public. But the practical effect of doing so is a dogmatic, ideological fight against all paranormal claims across society through unserious investigations only; and their discrepancy with science is particularly manifested by their amateurist, demagogic approach of the scientific method (which one web site of a small zététique group claims to be applicable by a child) - while of course keeping the conclusion fixed by "science".

The Skepticism pole of IMI's student group, whose members had to remain anonymous to avoid any sort of personal attacks, hold a blog and made a lot of contributions to many online discussions. Finally they set up a web site (old version) to debunk the claims of the Zététique movement.
By taking the time to review some of the many debates across forums and blog comments, it is striking how more rational and convincing (while remaining very polite and civilized) is the argumentation of these critics, as compared to the visible dogmatism, sectarianism, amateurism and paranoia of the skeptics, who were already widely discredited across any forum not hosted by them nor by any "officially scientific" organization.

"To finish with some clichés: parapsychologists would be marginal, while skeptics would be the official representatives of science. And what if it were the contrary ?

(This text is an introduction to the lecture given by Pierre Lagrange January 28, 2005 at IMI)

I want to consider two points during this presentation. The first is how all actors, whether favorable to the study of parapsychology or against this study, present the debate. In their view, this debate would oppose a parapsychology at the margins of science that would be barred from becoming a normal science because of the opposition of skeptics, integrated with the institution. But if you look at the situation as it stands, we notice that it is parapsychology, particularly through the Parapsychological Association, that belongs to the institution, while the skeptics are those gathered in associations outside the establishment. It is therefore not a controversy for the admission of a discipline but a controversy between scientists (parapsychologists) and science consumers (the rationalists) who are skeptical towards the interest of obtained results for society, as often happens (GMOs, nuclear energy etc.). Thus why do even parapsychologists accept reports on the controversy that do not correspond to reality and promote the discourse of skeptics ? That is an enigma.

But this puzzle does not come alone. In fact, I think it is related, at least in France to another very powerful speech in parapsychology circles. Indeed, for decades, endless controversies always occurred following the terms imposed by rationalists. Thus parapsychologists scramble to meet the requirements of proof raised by rationalists rather than rely on the normal scientific practice and seek in the plurality of scientific practices the allies they would need. And this discourse on evidence taken from rationalists (that has the disadvantage of being by definition impossible to satisfy) is coupled with a lack of real practice of the discipline. However, it is difficult to accept that rationalists are such a great danger when we see that parapsychology has scientific societies such as the PA, newspapers referees and symposia. (...) there were other times, especially in the early 50s with Robert Amadou, when parapsychology had created the conditions for a debate without worrying constantly of the only rationalist opponents (...) By focusing on rationalists, parapsychologists today give the impression of wanting to support them at all costs by refraining in finding elsewhere the relays to build an identity for research in parapsychology (...)"

"If you want, to give you a picture, what OZ does for me represents what a young physics student who would suddenly want to do chemistry experiments would do. He knows nothing about chemistry but he wants to test what his neighbor told him about a chemical phenomenon that he is sure he can reproduce. The neighbor in question does not understand anything about the phenomenon and does not know that this phenomenon had appeared thanks to a catalyst. The physics student, who knows nothing about chemistry and who has not read the literature, does not know the catalyst. He therefore makes his experiment under these conditions, the most rigorous possible, and obtains nothing (because there is not the catalyst). He therefore concluded that he never saw this chemical reaction but that he remains open. He even publishes a detailed account on the Internet. When chemists see his work and suggest modifications to it, notably taking into account the catalyst, our physics student replies that he does not do research in chemistry, what he does is test what his neighbor said. He is not interested in knowing the scientific literature on the subject. Then, this student sometimes makes on stands (at exhibitions) some experiments supposed to show this chemical experiment, but in reality, he then demonstrates that it is a trick, he cheated to show this phenomenon. In reality, he never observed it. And on his site and when he talks to other people about this subject, he does not refer to the work of chemists because it is not his field.
...
In short, what I am trying to tell you is the following: if you want to allow scientific thought to be disseminated, that is fine. But please, do not do it using the support of Paranormal. Because by acting in this way, perhaps involuntarily, you harm parapsychology because for the public, OZ is a valid interlocutor in the field of the scientific approach of the so-called paranormal phenomena. Many people think that if you do not get anything, it is because these phenomena do not exist. However the question is very complex. You do not do research, you do not consult the publications and it is not your goal. If you really want to use the paranormal, then make it clear that you are not referring to scientific parapsychology and the reasons for that. For now, this is not clear on your site.

Popularization, amateurism and attempts of originality

In such a jungle, then, the winners of popularity are likely to be those who make the most fun-looking stuff, adapted to the level and topics of interest of a majority of not so intelligent people. Dictatorship of the intellectual proletariat (underclass), once again. To repeat what I explained in my video and elsewhere such as the need of teachers paradox: you cannot run after 2 rabbits at the same time. To altogether produce serious stuff and attract viewers, are hardly compatible requirements. Some people specialize in informing, others in knowing. But people who inform may fail to know, because people who know may fail to inform.

So, his list of videos... is kind of messy. Some of these touch to the foundations of science (math and physics), yet others are more anecdotal, I mean not as much as what is the 100th decimal of pi but...with not as much sense of unifying architecture of knowledge as I see needed and possible. Of course such a relatively discontinuous approach, with not so much connections between topics, and some topics made of brief surveys over big works skipping crucial details, leads to relatively less sense or purpose for a needed lengthy improvement. Skeptics and popularizers (quite correlated activities, as skepticism is itself a kind of "science popularization" enterprise) are themselves promoting in guise of science a similar (and often much worse) kind of mess of disconnected anecdotes from which these same skeptics are champions in doubting the possibility to draw any significant conclusions, thus ultimately feeding their relatively pointless, inconclusive version of "science". By this I do not mean that it is worse than official teaching curricula. These suffer a similar lack of rework towards some unifying perspective. It is actually very hard in the current world to reach the appropriate unifying perspectives. Many scientists could essentially reach them, but only as an end result of a much longer path and experience dealing with existing theories, than could have sufficed if the needed clarifications of these theories had been done.

Now 20th century science brought crucial clues to metaphysics, especially with quantum physics and the problem of its interpretations which is very uncomfortable for naturalism. There are great debates among experts trying to compare the different naturalistic options (same link as given in Part 2), all facing great difficulties which is why none of them could "win" against others, letting several ones persist with respective supporters. But to understand this debate requires a certain level of expertise, namely a proper understanding of some core concepts of quantum theory, followed by a review of the main interpretations. But quite few people reached that needed level to become able to say something scientifically decent on the topic.

Yet much more people are feeling confident that this problem with quantum theory is not indicative of a problem with naturalism. But how can they know that ? Actually just rumors as we shall explain below. As commented in another page, the usual flow (e.g. in Quora) of people's expressions of confidence that quantum theory does not challenge naturalism is very negatively correlated with competence in this field. Precisely, most of such expressions either come as bare denials of such a challenge without any explanation, or "explanations" are made of claims which are known to be either inaccurate or flatly untrue by specialists. A frequent example of such claim is the claim that any interaction between systems, or interaction with the environment, suffices to collapse the wavefunction ; while all what quantum mechanics in itself actually says is that it only makes decoherence (more comments below)

How could that happen ? Usually, experts just avoid the topic by lack of precise arguments (except when focused on wrong targets), letting non-experts fill the flow of replies with their own guesses about that state of the debate which they do not actually know. Such guesses are naturally formed according to the natural expectations of what the laws of physics should look like if naturalism was correct, expectations which are assumed reliable based on the rumor of compatibility, just like skeptics are comfortable in explaining NDE testimonies which they did not really study, based on their own guess that these testimonies they need to explain are looking like the way they woud naturally be expected to look like under naturalistic assumptions. Of course. But then systematically they only successfully "explain" versions of stuff completely offset from the reality of these things. But skeptics never see anything wrong with this behavior since it is there to support the right conclusion, and they cannot expect any need to study things to discover that these things are not actually fitting their expectations.

Now in one of his videos, this skeptic presented his own tentative interpretation of quantum physics. This description is very vague, and so vaguely succeeds to vaguely account for diverse aspects of modern physics as they may look like from a popularized viewpoint. Unfortunately this kind of behavior is just the same as that of so many authors of crackpot physics, such as those trying to explain how Relativity is a mistake from Einstein uncritically followed by physicists, or inventors of perpetual motion machines, or inventors of new theories of everything who feel sure (uh not exactly sure, details of what I mean below) they can explain all known physics with no need to study it or as they already know it because the high school physics teaching said it all, and found it necessary to directly inform the large public bypassing the review of experts because the latter appeared too dogmatic and closed-minded in lack of "rational arguments" against their ideas.

Now of course not the same motivations pushed him to publish his ideas in his YouTube channel. Nevertheless it reflects a similar lack of awareness to the distinction between scientific research and popularization : a similar way of insinuating that amateurish viewpoints and inspirations on issues of top physics research might be as legitimate as views of experts. I had a very long and fruitless dispute with him, where I tried to explain the need to first actually learn and understand quantum physics as a requirement to make sense of a debate on interpretations, including the opportunity of popularizing one's own suggestion of a fresh new one beyond the list of the main ones which experts are currently considering. In particular I asked him if he had grasped the concept (which I regard as crucial for this debate) that the Hilbert space of a composite system is the tensor product of the Hilbert spaces of its sub-systems. He didn't. So it is on the basis of such an ignorance that this skeptic is so proud of sharing to the large public his confidence in the scientific plausibility of materialistic expectations... (the day when all such bullshit will be removed from scientific popularization spaces, what will remain of this rumor of scientific plausibility of naturalism ? I am curious to see...). Anyway, he stays proud of his method of essentially praising ignorance in physics as a wiser and higher basis than knowledge and intelligence for developing and directly popularizing new ideas on the field of interpretations, bypassing any expert review.

At the beginning of the discussion, his line of defense on this question (the question of the opportunity of making that video, not the debate on the depth of ideas given there) was of 2 main ideas. Here is the quote of his first idea.

Already I want to clarify that I am also familiar with the problem, you do not teach me what it is to get lost in ramblings:
• Neither as the one who gets lost in it.
• Nor as the one who observes the one who gets lost (I too have come across a lot of people with their ideas etc ...)
  But therefore you did not understand my purpose: Already I am not posing myself here in opposition to the existing, I make a paradigm shift... And I repeat: there is nothing in what I do that stands in opposition to the existing, it is on the contrary extremely flexible.

  — I do not know anyone who altogether opposes the existing and is aware of doing so. They cannot be aware of opposing what they have never learned. They only object to what they believe to be unjustified presuppositions.

  — Well if you prefer I rephrase "if ever an element in what I do is opposed to the existing I would change it" I mean that it is not the point.

You can see what I did not as a theory (Because it is not one, it is obvious that it does not contain 10% quantitatively usable, it is not to me that you will teach what I am aware of presenting) but as an exercise which aims:
• To give a concrete and studentable meaning to what would mean not having space and time at the fundamental level ; and give a concrete meaning to what would mean to let both concepts emerge.
• Give examples of nondeterministic behavior of a fundamental determinism that are not hidden variables.
  And I consider achieving both tasks successfully and I am not sure that you have neither seen nor understood the last one which is however very interesting.

We have precise theories making precise predictions, precisely verified by experience. And you come up with the idea: ah if we imagined the world in the shape of Alice in Wonderland maybe it would stick better, why not ? Indeed... you assume the things just coming up but you have not the slightest beginning of concept on what could have decided to parachute all this in a way rather than another that we might as well imagine with all the fantasies we want. You haven't defined any law.

And no it is not necessary to understand 100% of the existing physics to make my two points above, it is independent. So I ask you the question do you see what I'm talking about here?
[second idea quoted in the next section]
My paradigm shift is general, I am not building a theory, I am looking at the family of behaviors that concrete cases of emergence of observables can bring. I have no reason to try to fine tune my "theory" which is not one before knowing what fundamental physics quantitatively corresponds to. The simple fact that you think it is my purpose makes me say that you did not understand neither this purpose nor what I emphasized as a mechanism.

Let us compare his justifications to popularize his speculations, with his view on the behavior of Didier Raoult popularizing the success of his treatment against the virus:

What Raoult does as a doctor : it's normal and it's very good.
What Raoult does in terms of scientific communication : it's very average (I'm talking about the objective arguments he puts forward) but it doesn't matter, that it is average, it's a start.
What Raoult did in terms of public communication : it is a real disaster, terribly counterproductive, and whose harmful effects are for the moment much greater than the positive effects of the rest.
What is wrong with Raoult?
• A botched and very poor quality study where he had time to do things properly, time he chose instead to use for:
• irresponsible media coverage of a result of which the majority of people will not understand the preliminary character, and for whom everything must be black or white. It therefore led to:
• catastrophic self-medication of chloroquine with disastrous consequences.
• a media occupation masking the real questions.
• A large delay in the ongoing emergency studies concerning the other alternatives which are equally promising but which have not been sold in media by a rockstar ...
  There is NO block negation on procedural basis for the use of it scientifically, these people have brains. There is only one mediatic controversy, because it sells simple articles on "the savior of humanity has the miracle molecule against the wicked procedural scholars" who are so naive and of a quite rare level of caricature, because it is not unique, it has by no means a miraculous effect.

Long later we had the last (much shorter) dispute on the issue as follows (his replies in italic):

—You claimed to be able to interpret QM without understanding it
—This is where the huge difference between you and me is. In the video in question I start by doing a whole minute where I say:
• that's totally personal.
• that I'm just proposing.
• and I encourage any criticism.
• that my level of doubt is quite clear.
I do this before, during and in conclusion of the video. As well as in comment. Which is the opposite of your way of doing things:
• never present any doubt.
• prevents any discussion,
• is systematically unable to distinguish what is your personal opinion from the rest or to exhibit your level of doubt.

Looking through all the comments which were posted by viewers of that video, well, most of these were expressions of the highest enthusiasm towards this intellectual rubbish which they love so much. I do not remember seeing there any trace of a negative feedback. Visibly none of the participants in this comments thread have any clue about modern physics either, yet an unanimity is formed and unchallenged in praise of this which is openly claimed to be rubbish.
And guess how he reacted to this tsunami of praise ? Well.... he thanked those people for their encouragements. As if a Jesus-Christ neither known for, nor claiming to have, any special wisdom, and not feeling sure that claiming to be the Son of God was the right thing to do, was thanking his crowd of followers for their encouragements in doing so, taking their praise as a confirmation of that claim, ignoring the famous verse (Matthew 15:14) "...If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit". So I think he was the one not understanding his own disclaimer, and how his disclaimer is anyway doomed to stay ineffective due to the role he took by his channel, as a popularizer of science. (On this topic of the understanding of disclaimers, there is a video in French of a skeptic visibly too dumb to understand a similar disclaimer by a non-skeptic, as well as the sense of freedom of thought).

One big problem I see that was overlooked there is, his attitude does not significantly differ with the flow of thousands of pseudo-physics theories out there. It looks like, he fancies to crucially differ from them by his way of claiming loud that his ideas are personal ones, not validated by other physicists, and that he remains open to criticism. Of course, this attitude seems to justify him at first sight. And of course there is no way to figure out what there may still be wrong in such conditions... from the viewpoint of any good newborn thinker trying to guess how the processes of scientific research and rational debate should be working.

Yet it turns out unfortunately (I already explained things there, I repeat them here) that the real state of affairs in the way science works crucially differs from this so honest and plausible newborns guess about it, in the fact that most of these thousands of pseudo-physicists out there have (more or less) that same attitude of warning that their theories are neither ready nor confirmed yet but need more work, and thus are welcoming high-level physicists to come help checking, completing and developing their new theory for them. And of course, to bring critical review. Yet there is an obvious condition : the criticism they are inviting professionals to bring of course needs to be a rational one and hopefully "constructive" in order to deserve consideration. That is, well-explained and logically articulated arguments, which make sense. And they are very disappointed in their experience with official scientists from "the establishment", that none of them ever behaved in such a rational way, but all reacted by either mockery or "dogma", for those who replied at all.
In a sense however, they cannot be surprised in this "disappointment", since the rules of the "rational" debate they are offering to play, are rules where they give themselves the position of judge for what it should mean for an argument to be objectively "rational". These rules are relative to the data of their own precise personal background in physics, which is their only acceptable source of references for "rational arguments". In a sense, these rules already determine the conclusion : as they somehow implicitly know in advance, relatively to this background their position is anyway invincible : no "rational" argument against it is possible. So they are, so to speak, absolutely and irrefutably sure, not that their theory is valid (of course such arrogance would be indefensible and they know it), but that it is anyway absolutely possible (relatively to their background), an attitude by which they are essentially winning the debate in their own eyes by putting the hat of arrogance on the heads of their opponents.
But the certainty of the maybe, however relatively absolute, can still remain absolutely relative.

Now here is the deep misunderstanding of how science works (which unfortunately, is almost impossible even for the best of newborn thinkers to expect) : there is actually no logical possibility for a genuine, deeply scientifically informed review to ever seem "rational" in the eyes of these people who don't understand the current state of science and how things look from that perspective. As from this perspective, the ideas put forward are really completely ridiculous and worth absolutely nothing, not worth any reply. And this cannot be explained in any way which the authors of these ideas can understand. Because the only way to understand "the reason" is to just forget (un-learn) that misleading fuss, then go and study high-level physics as it now stands. And there is no other possible way to explain why. In other words, there are 2 kinds of people : those who know physics, and those who don't. To those who know, the reasons to dismiss this stuff are obvious and don't need to be explained. But those who "need" explanations, only do so because they have not the required background, but their case is hopeless and no amount of explanation can suffice either. So nobody can exist for whom any work of "rational criticism" can be useful. Being "open to rational criticism", no matter how sincerely, is not a scientific attitude since that "expected" criticism can anyway never come no matter the need, but only a vain posture whose only actual result is to (involuntarily) give oneself an illusion of rationality in naive eyes.

Now of course, he would rather believe such a state of affairs about how science works (in both physics and the epistemology of debates about physics) that does not fit his expectations, if he could find clear and strong experimental evidence for this. So he did the social experiment of making that video to see what feedback he would get, then I warned him about the lack of expectable scientific feedback from there. Aside that warning, I also gave him my own feedback as an exception, and we had long discussions about it ; but, as usually happens, despite this and also, again, how he knows my competence in theoretical physics for which I gave my kind assistance for another purpose, he did not appear to give to my feedback much value (details below).
So, the last conversation above went on as follows:

Let me add that the formalism that I propose is in fact an existing formalism, it is an approach to quantum gravity: Causal sets which in fact for almost 30 years has demonstrated mathematically many things that I present in the video, such as the emergence of a Lorentzian space-time structure from a causal set etc.

—"I encourage any criticism" It means nothing. There is no sense in waiting for a serious critical discussion from anyone who would know why it sucks, since those who know do not watch your videos and have no interest in doing so, and even if they do it like me it is logically impossible to expect from them any expression of a criticism, since true physics is not expressed in the terms that you pose.

—But yet it did happen, I was told the name of this approach existing since Sorkin in the 1980s as I mentioned to you above. It has been just 40 years since it existed and it remains active as a research branch. What does that prove? not that it is correct, but that it is worthy of interest. Oddly you have passed over in silence your reaction to this point, the fact that it exists as a branch of research and that it publishes.

Basically I had blindly trusted what you told me, during the first discussions we had on this subject, I assumed that you had clearly understood what I was saying and that, with your knowledge of physics, you had obtained that it had no concrete application. But a few weeks later, one day in particular, I felt a little betrayed when I read a few remarks which showed me a caricatural presentation of my statements, and that I had only communicated very vaguely what I considered "important"...

On the other hand, there are very simple criticisms to make on what I presented, for example "why would space be 3d ?" "why would the metric graph be compatible with an embedding in a mathematical manifold ?" these are obvious pitfalls of what I presented, and the fact that on the side of the antithesis you do not mention them, made me wonder about understanding. (Other viewers made these criticisms, and I have no problem receiving them).

Finally no I do not consider myself smarter than the experts, but even if it were the case it would be outside the framework of a scientific discussion, the arguments of authority have only little place there, let me point out for instance the following things, suggested by the viewers in comments: Causal sets. It is far from naive, and the page’s bibliography shows it well. As well as questions on the superdeterminism of the universe: "Entangled quantum states in a local deterministic theory" the title speaks for itself. And it is from "Gerard 't Hooft". What I am talking about is at least not naive ...
And it is not true that I would not consider that I do not understand, I have absolutely no problem putting aside personal ideas under construction with my progress in understanding the existing, I always try to advance the latter.

"Gerard 't Hooft has an incredible patience and the paper looks formally fine – it is surely no garden-variety amateur physicist's paper by its format and wording (although the author does praise himself as a heretic – it's no heresy to say the same thing that about 7 billion people on this planet freely think about quantum mechanics; his musings are just wrong, misconceptions equal to those of an average man, not a heresy).
(...) Of course, this departure is exactly what makes everything that 't Hooft has written about the foundations of quantum mechanics childishly wrong. (...) According to both definitions, an ontological basis doesn't exist and cannot exist. Why hasn't Prof 't Hooft first asked the question whether the key new object whose existence he hypothesizes may exist?

The naturalism of physicists

Imagine a world very similar to the one in which we live, except that people would behave a bit differently.
There would also be traditional religions, where the pastors would preach "God created the universe 6 millennia ago !" and the attendees would say "Amen !" (I write it caricaturally to simplify). Then in quest for God and further understanding His creation, some people would be sent in mission of scientific investigation of the world, developing the sciences of geology, paleontology and astrophysics. These scientists would do their job rigorously and successfully, progressively retracing the history of the planet and the evolution of life there. As the progress goes, the discrepancy of their findings with their traditional religious creed would start raising some issues. Some of these scientists would find no more sense in attending those religious ceremonies, and thus just stopped going there, without further comment. Others would keep attending the ceremonies, still saying "Amen" to the creed, not trying to contradict it, because... it would be way too complicated to explain what difficulties could be found about it; anyway that is their religion, which cannot be easily dropped. The pastors would be proud of this, and say: "See ! We have some of the best scientists of the world among our faithful members ! This confirms the scientific plausibility of our creed."

These scientists would keep practicing their investigation work without worrying too much of the discrepancy. Some would do so like a treasure hunt, a sort of big fictional game to play. Others would feel it as something more serious and truthful. However this diversity of feelings between scientists towards the status of their discoveries would hardly have any practical consequence in the process of their research. From time to time during coffee breaks, one of them would ask the others : "How strange it is to see all our calculations appearing to converge to give our planet an age of about 5 billion years when we know from our Bible that God created it all 6 millennia ago, don't you think so ?". To such often heard idle talks, their peer scientists would regularly reply : "Shut up and calculate !"

Sometimes, someone with an acute sense of religious values would try to look through the works of these scientists, and express his dissatisfaction in these terms : "Your work does not appear to make any sense ! as it still does not explain how all this was created by God 6 millennia ago". Then in an attempt to make things clearer, he would try to examine some of the known fossils. He would object to the calls to learn about the long evolutionary accounts which were developed, arguing that what really matters is to check and account for the facts which are clear (fossils), not the theory which is fictional and subject to revision (evolutionary history). He would care to figure out and propose his own candidate explanations for the fossils which were presented to him, in a more religiously coherent manner. Yet scientists would know that his explanation fails to account for the rest of fossils they know which he does not know yet, but could not explain this to him in a simple manner. He would challenge any scientist to show him "the fossil which proves to be millions of years old. I just ask for one !", to which no scientist would reply.
Now in an intermediate position in this debate, religious scientists are much more aware than lay religious people about the huge difficulty to offer any such young-age "explanation" able to successfully fit the real, much wider range of data they know, so most of them just would not try. Yet it could happen for some of them to dare starting attempts of this daunting task.

The above skipped second idea was

On the other hand my objective is also methodological, there is an inherent mysticism in quantum that I will always find unhealthy, it seems necessary for all "those who understood it" to declare that no effort can be made to understand it and that is an unhealthy position no matter what you say. It is an obstacle to science.

PT: In the first chapter, you write that your book was “born out of dissatisfaction with the existing explanations” of the fact that “our universe appears to be controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics.” What, precisely, did you find unsatisfying about existing approaches?

’T HOOFT : I do not believe that we have to live with the many-worlds interpretation. Indeed, it would be a stupendous number of parallel worlds, which are only there because physicists couldn’t decide which of them is real.(...) What is the reality described by quantum theories? I claim that we can attribute the fact that our predictions come with probability distributions to the fact that not all relevant data for the predictions are known to us.(...)
The response has been very mixed. Many other researchers are clearly very skeptical. They should be, because there are important unanswered questions. Others have expressed their interest and support. What concerns me is that I haven’t yet found colleagues who completely understand my approach.

More references on the topic:

• Short summary of Gerard ’t Hooft’s The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2014 book)
• Debate in Physics Stackexchange (different link than the one given by Peter Woit)
• A blog article by Peter Woit (2012) with the following comments

  "Gerard ’t Hooft in recent years has been pursuing some idiosyncratic ideas about quantum mechanics (...) Personally I find it difficult to get at all interested in this (...) One of ’t Hooft’s motivations is a very common one, discomfort with the non-determinism of the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics. The world is full of crackpots with similar feelings who produce reams of utter nonsense. ’t Hooft is a scientist though of the highest caliber, and as with some other people who have tried to do this sort of thing, I don’t think what he is producing is nonsense. It is, however, extremely speculative, and, to my taste, starting with a very unpromising starting point.

  Looking at the results he has, there’s very little of modern physics there, including pretty much none of the standard model (which ’t Hooft himself had a crucial role in developing). If you’re going to claim to solve open problems in modern physics with some radical new ideas, you need to first show that these ideas reproduce the successes of the established older ones. From what I can tell, ‘t Hooft may be optimistic he can get there, but he’s a very long way from such a goal. (...) the central mathematical structures of quantum mechanics fit so well with central, deep and powerful insights into modern mathematics (through symmetries and representation theory) that any claim these should be abandoned in favor of something very different has a big hurdle to overcome. Basing everything on cellular automata seems to me extremely unpromising: you’re throwing out deep and powerful structures for something very simple and easy to understand, but with little inherent explanatory power."

— Your theory is worth nothing, not even as a hypothesis or sketch of anything, as long as you do not actually know quantum field theory, with which you must remain compatible. As long as you don't know what there is to "explain" you cannot realize if an idea has the slightest chance of explaining it or not.

— The QFT model describes much more than what is observed experimentally. To consider it as a truth on the entirety of its domain is an error of approach. Like to consider Newtonian theory as absolute before relativity.
I don't judge knowledge I judge a method, these are unrelated.

— But you judge what you can know, and speculate what you think should be compatible with knowledge you don't have. How can you know that?

— Uh no there is a misunderstanding

— If you have ideas which you do not see how they could be incompatible with established physics it may be only because you ignore established physics while who knows it would know why it is incompatible. You thus expose yourself to the risk of having no chance that your speculations will work, that the physicists will know why but cannot explain it to you because their reasons rest on a knowledge that you do not have. And these reasons cannot be summed up by the question of whether space-time can be emerging or not.

— So if the only available model of the planet movement was geocentric, do you consider that not mastering it would prevent any discovery? The existing model does not have to be known to progress but the observations yes. We have to bring ourselves back to what was once observed and not only to the way we explain it. But it won't prevent me from learning about the existing model

— You compare what is not comparable. First you need to learn that established physics is a success. That means it is hugely simpler to learn about "the model" (the theory that has been verified) than about the observations that support it. This makes your "The existing model does not have to be known to progress but the observations yes" completely ridiculous. It is impossible to learn about observations otherwise than in the form of the known theory which accounts for them. In addition, the theory is precisely formulated to almost contain only the data of what is observable. The idea of ​​uselessness to learn a theory, namely that it would involve complications compared to simple observables, would be precisely applicable only to hidden variables theories. In fact, hidden variables theories make things very complicated despite their attractive appearance for beginners ! They only give an illusion of totally demagogic comprehensibility which has nothing to do with any real learning of physics data...

I commented [in French long ago, then in English] on those who believe they can reinvent science as amateurs. So I'm very familiar with the problem: there are thousands of people who get caught up in their fantasy to think that in their ignorance they are smarter than those who know. They think they are valiant adventurers with a critical mind, "questioning" "dogmas".

"The aim of this group is to try to make physical sense of the empirical evidence from the quantum world. We are looking for a purely rational and causal, matter-in-motion, qualitative physical worldview for Quantum Physics. "

"This is a group to discuss all things "quantum" and related—ideas, theories, empirical data...—of a HETERODOX nature. This is not a group that will impose orthodox (junk) quantum mysticism, but we will explore the full heterodox (heretical) realm of quantum science, or anything related thereto."

There is actually no consensus whether modern physics as it now already stands, is compatible or not with naturalistic expectations. The above quotes illustrate the behavior of those who found them incompatible (with such high sincerity, both in their view of incompatibility and their attachment to naturalism, that they are ready to pay the price of throwing overboard the most spectacular success of all science in the name of these). Other physicists seem just happy accepting both naturalism and current modern physics, seeing them compatible: this is the way of the Many-worlds interpretation (while all other naturalistic "interpretations" are not accepting current physics but trying to modify it, without any clear success), as notably advocated by Sean Carroll. Or, whether they really see it good I cannot tell. At least they so combine a recognition of the success of science good enough to refuse breaking it for any reason, with their attachment to naturalism, that they go on condoning any philosophical issues that may result from this combination (which are unacceptable to others).

But let us see how Sean Carroll, one of the most vocal proponents of this acceptance of compatibility of naturalism with the achievements of science through the many-worlds interpretation, presents the case for naturalism (his blog post about it):

(4:35) ...as physicists, we know how atoms behave. The laws of physics governing the behavior of atoms are completely understood. You put an atom in a certain set of circumstances, you tell me what those circumstances are, as a physicist I will tell you what the atom will do".

"If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain in your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they are in a rock or a crystal then what you're saying is that the laws of physics are wrong, that they need to be altered"

So his reasons for naturalism did not seem very clear there. However he actually has another "reason" which he stated in the older video of his debate on the interpretations of quantum mechanics (time from 50:50):

"How is many-worlds different than speaking about God or angels ?
—We have an equation ! If we had an equation for God and angels, I might believe in them !"

Now some people may be tempted to take this requirement seriously, and in hope to fulfill it, dream of possibilities to explain consciousness as made of mathematical systems, from which they hope that the laws of physics might emerge. So did Donald Hoffman (unfortunately neither a mathematician nor a physicist but only a cognitive scientist) with his mathematical theory of "conscious agents" (articles Objects of consciousness and The origin of time in conscious agents, 2014). Similarly (more loosely), some spiritual people in quest for "scientific credibility" but without a solid scientific background, may give in to the temptation to get interested in diverse speculative ideas offered by scientists on the nature of reality (such as the ideas of Penrose with his "Orch Or", or the "Integrated Information Theory") which superficially seem closer to spiritualistic metaphysics than usual, as possible models or sources of inspirations by which they may hope to exchange politeness and mutual recognition with what superficially looks like credible science.
Actually such tries to fit with inspirations or requirements presented by these scientists are traps, in the following ways :

• Behind the relatively more spiritualistic facade of these ideas, some root mistakes of naturalism remain, which results in effectively siding with naturalism : seeing minds as mathematical systems, or anyhow obeying mathematical laws, remains essentially similar to the view of the Artificial Intelligence program trying to explain consciousness as an emergence from the mathematical complexity of naturalistic processes;
• It leads to an incoherent view (mixing elements of naturalism and supernaturalism), vulnerable to contradictions.
• Theoretical physics (Quantum Field Theory + General Relativity) is actually such a success, that it enjoys a quality I would qualify as "mathematical completeness" in the sense that all attempts to mathematically extend, modify or rebuild it to account for the selection of a specific measurement result among possible ones, are essentially hopeless. So, behind their nice-looking journalistic facades of ambitious "research programs", all these quests for mathematical laws which may underlie quantum physics, just like the one of Gerard ’t Hooft, are just ways of following the naturalists who do not like the many-worlds interpretation, lost on their paths to nowhere.

Depending on the reference or even the particular statement inside a given reference, the principles of Naturalism may suffer ambiguities, between

• Being essentially tautological, a vain play of words by redefining "existence" as "being part of Nature", itself defined as whatever has any causal connection with us, regardless how supernatural that may be ;
• Or making some effective claims of what "Nature" is like, meaningfully denying "supernatural" phenomena which are otherwise conceivable. In this case we need at least a clear formulation of which claims are these.

Naturalism, in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way.
Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable. There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd. (...)Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed.

This actually contains 2 quite different ideas.

One idea is the requirement of causal connection with us : to be part of Nature and thus exist, something must be potentially able to causally affect us. This is indeed, roughly speaking, the condition for our possibility to start investigation about it.

Adding to this the assumption of physicalism (with its causal closure), this excludes from Nature and thus from "existence":

• The inside of black holes;
• What lies beyond the cosmological horizon;
• Parallel worlds described by the many-worlds interpretation, which are irreversibly disconnected from us in causal terms, only sharing with our reality a common past;
• Even if exception was made for all the above, the exclusion from existence would anyway have to apply to all other universes with different physical laws which are totally causally disconnected from us, such as those in some range whose existence Sean Carroll needs to invoke in order to account for the appearance of fine-tuning of our physical laws in a naturalistic framework.

The second idea is that of "regularity".
Let me first re-phrase what I see valid there: in order for science to be possible, we need to reject the idea of Last Thursdayism despite the lack of empirical grounds to do so. Then, if we want to investigate anything through indirect evidence, we need to assume that the intermediate processes in the causality chains separating our perceptions from the target of investigation, are reliable: that their behavior conforms to known laws, to a sufficient extent for us to be confident about our deductions by these laws, from the available data to the state of the target. Actually, there is no strict need to take this regularity as an assumption, as it can be verified with some more efforts, by finding a plurality of indirect means of diverse kinds to investigate the same target, and observing that these all agree with the same hypothesis on the target : this validates the regularity hypothesis, as its negation would require not just a breach in the known regularity but a conspiracy (thus another regularity) of such breaches in the specific way which could produce this result.

All these issues can be analyzed in terms of entropy measures and the file compression problem, with concepts I wrote in the bottom half of first page of this text: scientific investigation can be understood as an exercise of file compression, aiming to put information in its most compressed form split in 2 parts: "the law" i.e. the executable file of the most efficient known compression algorithm, and the "deciphered data" containing in clear form the information on target objects, obtained by so compressing the longer file of the brute (undeciphered) data of direct measurement outcomes.
In such terms, then of course, the need of scientists (which reality has no duty to fulfill) is that the once found law would be regular, as, to compress a lot of stuff, we need to re-use some known efficient compression algorithm to compress many other files instead of having to repeatedly add copies of this algorithm to all compressed files (which would make the compression worthless, heavier than the brute files).

Empirical sciences (i.e. sciences other than math) can be roughly split in the following parts (though this division is not always clear in practice):

• Theoretical physics studies the fundamental expression of the laws (those aspects of our universe which are perfectly uniform) to understand them exactly. For this to make rigorous sense, these laws must be mathematical ones.
• Applied physics aims to find more practical aspects of these uniform laws which may be determined by the fundamental laws but in ways sometimes too complex to be deduced in purely theoretical ways, so that empirical methods can help.
• All other empirical sciences are about contingent facts, which are not perfectly uniform in our universe, even if many of these may play a law-like role for our concerns due to the large space-time extension of their impacts. These sciences are usually open-ended : they seek to gather a practically endless amount of information compared to human knowledge abilities.

Theoretical physics has a unique feature among all sciences: it is the only science which is not open-ended, since its goal is to establish THE equation, mathematical expression of the law which is perfectly uniform throughout this universe. Once done, the investigation ends, research institutes can close and there is no job for theoretical physicists anymore.

Now comes the field of the supernatural, with the question of its position with respect to this picture. It has observable effects, so it fits the first condition of naturalism : investigation about it can start. If there was an equation for it, this would mean that the investigation of its foundations could end by completion. Quite a different requirement, which no science fulfills except theoretical physics. Now why do some theoretical physicists want to put this requirement ? Of course one main explanation is by the famous saying "If you are a hammer, everything is a nail".

It is the very point of supernaturalism as I see it to dismiss the claim of universal determination of everything by any single equation (even in terms of probabilistic laws), to recognize instead the existence of free will with a crucial role of some mathematically undefinable qualia. Some people did not expect this, as they expected something absolutely regular (mathematically expressible) to be the ultimate foundation of everything. More precisely, empirical sciences are about phenomena assumed by many to result (emerge) from physics, where the equation is the most fundamental stuff. Now supernaturalism does not anyhow deny this well-known regularity of the laws of physics as they were found, and thus the possibility and validity of all other sciences which rely on it. It only denies the role of absolute foundation of everything, to this physics in particular, or to any so absolutely regular causality law in general.
Well, so what ? In so many cases, this is completely irrelevant, while the lesson of indeterminism from quantum physics is already well-accepted. For example, biological evolution describes how the most advantageous genetic features win the way things go, but it does not matter whether this condition of how things go is behaviors obeying the quantum probabilities, or the completely different behaviors from the free will of conscious individuals : this leads to quite different kinds of winning species, and yet, in itself, the theory of evolution still holds.

Other possible factors which may contribute to the naturalism of many physicists, come from misunderstandings. I will describe the situation by symbolizing the mind-matter interaction problem with the metaphor of the key-locker connection. Consciousness will be symbolized by a man with a key; the locker symbolizes the laws of physics. The key represents the few aspects of consciousness which are relevant to understand the general form of its possible interaction with matter. The key is much simpler than the locker, itself much simpler than the man. Before this universe was created, there was no locker, only the man with the key. It could be a very hard problem to invent and make a locker with the right mechanisms for the key to fit in. This problem was finally solved, so the locker could be created, in which the key could fit.

Then come philosophers and physicists trying to figure out whether and how such a key-locker interaction is possible. Philosophers hardly know anything about either the key or the locker, so they have no chance to understand anything of the key-locker connection either. Physicists, on the other hand, spent their life studying the locker, yet may still fail to figure out the possibility to open it because most of them have no clue about what the key looks like. The locker is made of mathematics; the key isn't. Some physicists spend the rest of their life searching for a mathematical key to fit into this mathematical locker, and cannot find any. Others, aware of the vanity of this quest, decide to end it by concluding with the many-worlds interpretation, according to which this locker is not a locker and it is there to remain forever locked, since no key exists that can ever fit in.

Finally some physicists considered the possibility for the key to be given by consciousness, and yet could fail to see it fit, due to some misunderstanding ; or some thought that it fitted but mistook the precise way in which it did, and for this reason failed to convince more than a few others. Now let us review such possible misunderstandings. Beyond the mistake of expecting a mathematical key, I noticed 3 more main mistakes that could be committed.

One is the mistake by Henry Stapp (and also by Penrose) of expecting the action of free will to require a suspension of quantum decoherence to explain for the action of mind on matter. Such an expectation is indeed unfortunate (falling in the delusion that "we need a strange solution, quantum superposition or entanglement looks strange, so we need it as a mechanism"). This led some materialist physicists to imagine refuting the role of consciousness in quantum physics just by pointing out the ineluctable high speed of quantum decoherence in natural conditions, while the proponents desperately persist searching for ways to escape this. That is actually the wrong target, which needs to be discarded.

The other 2 mistakes are about the shape of the key, i.e. the relevant features of the metaphysics of consciousness. These are kinds of naturalistic mistakes, assuming consciousness to fit materialistic models or assumptions more than it really does : so we actually need more boldness in the rejection of naturalism in order to escape inconsistency failures.

One is Wigner's mistake, of expecting the different conscious individuals, who intervene as observers of quantum measurements, to be fundamentally distinct (separable) entities. They are not : for the purpose of properly interpreting quantum physics, they need to be regarded as all faces (appearances) of a single universal consciousness.
A related mistake by some people trying to interpret parapsychological phenomena, is to present telepathy as a case of quantum entanglement. Of course, entanglement cannot explain telepathy : it is the other way round. Namely, telepathy, i.e. the usually uncommon manifestations of the root unity of all consciousness, is what explains the consistent possibility to create a material universe able to manifest quantum entanglement smoothly in all cases (while those cases when it is really involved, ideal implementations of what is basically described in theory by the EPR paradox, were never actually experimented yet, since the measurement processes in relevant time intervals were purely physical). In telepathy experiments, the "communication process" itself occurs in totally nonphysical ways, thus does not involve any quantum-entangled physical particles either.

The other, I may call Wheeler's mistake (I saw it vaguely from J Wheeler, who, by the way, opposed parapsychology; also from Richard Conn Henry), is the idea that brains are needed for conscious observations to take place, so that the universe remained in large quantum superpositions as described by the many-worlds interpretation until biological structures were sufficiently developed to proceed the big quantum collapse. Of course, such a view would be very awkward, but it can be easily dismissed : since consciousness creates physical reality rather than the other way round, it does not need any brain structure to proceed either. There was no problem for observers to be already present as ghosts since the big bang.

I explained in other documents about quantum physics (shape of the locker) and the Von-Neumann Wigner interpretation (shape of the key), needed to make it clear how well they fit.

Missing the real core of Science

We shall now dig further into their contradictions by analyzing their attitude towards the God of their God: while the God of Naturalism is Physics, the God of Physics is Mathematics. Yet much of Naturalism leans towards the despise of Mathematics (as illustrated by the lack of mathematicians in skeptical organizations).

First we need to explain how Mathematics is the God of Physics, and which Mathematics we are talking about. Mathematics is generally the only way to form any clear concept of a regularity law, unaffected by any fantasies of how any given regularity law is to be interpreted. So it is essentially required as a cornerstone of naturalistic expectations.
Then, I would roughly divide mathematics into 2 kinds: the "low" and the "high" styles of mathematics. This division is of course not strict. Different criteria can be considered for this distinction, which are not always equivalent, but are interestingly correlated.

One criterion, is to label as "low" the finitistic mathematics (which deals with finite systems only), in other words the mathematics of algorithms. Then the "high" mathematics is the one which involves infinite or continuous systems.

Another criterion, is to label as "high" the mathematics of symmetric systems, and as "low" that of asymmetric ones. A correlation between both criteria can be illustrated by the following example which is actually a toy model of mathematical facts which play an effective role in theoretical physics.

It is possible to approximate a circle by a regular polygon with a large number of sides. This approximates the continuous symmetries of the circle by the still numerous symmetries of the regular polygon. However, when the circle is replaced by a sphere, such a possibility breaks down: the 3D analogues of regular polygons are the Platonic solids which are very few. So the symmetry group of the sphere cannot be the approximation of any group of exact symmetries of a large but finite system: whatever system you may take trying to approximate a sphere, as soon as more than a quite small number of spherical symmetries work on it, infinitely more of these symmetries still do, and essentially all of them. When symmetry matters, no small escape from continuity is mathematically conceivable.

Daringly, a third criterion is sociological : the low-style math is the math of non-mathematicians, for whom math is "just a tool"; while high-style mathematics is the one of mathematicians, who see math as their home and a reality in its own right.

In these terms, the large anti-mathematical trend I mean to point out among naturalists, consists in dismissing the value of high-style mathematics, essentially for its touch of mysticism, to focus on (only accept the legitimacy of) low-style mathematics. Or (since it may look bad to make this position explicit), many of them express this in a completely implicit manner, in the form of giving descriptions of mathematics or physics as if low-style mathematics was the only mathematics that existed, or sufficed to express physics.

However, the found laws of physics belong to high-style mathematics. This is what I see as actually meant by the famous Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (wikipedia - a page I wrote with notes and references on the debate).
So, physicists did not seem to expect this, but why ? I can offer anyway the following clue why high-style math is likely to be better suitable than low-style math to express a law of Nature: high-style math is needed for a law to meaningfully serve as a law of Nature because that style is needed for a law to carry its own necessity (virtue of logical unbreakability).

Indeed, low-style mathematical laws would be unable to carry their own necessity:

• Take any algorithm and run it on some defective hardware, then nothing remains to prevent any law expressed by the software, from being occasionally broken at any time and place in the computation.
• Without symmetries, every case differs from every other case, so that any law that worked on previous cases has no reason to still work in new cases.

Concretely, here is how this fact answers to the people who imagine the conservation of energy as a postulate : consider a universe A with a certain distribution of energy at a given time t. Can we imagine that at just the next time t+dt, the energy appears to vary at one given place in violation to the conservation of energy, everything else being the same ? We can proceed by figuring out a different universe B which at that time looks very similar to A, with the essentially the same distribution of energy, except just the different concentration of energy at that precise place. Now how can we transition from universe A to universe B ? I mean, of course we might proceed just by destroying the universe A at time t, to not let it exist anymore from now own, then creating the universe B to start existing only from the same time as if it was old while it isn't. However, that may or may not satisfy us for the following reason: once we so took our big scissors to cut the space-times of A and B at hopefully "the space-like slices marked by the same time all over the place", kept just the past side of A and the future side of B, we still need a way to... kind of glue both pieces together. And this is when we are running into trouble. Even allowing ourselves to do it completely arbitrarily, it is ... just mathematically impossible to do it without violating the laws of physics not just at one place, but more or less everywhere. Concretely, any energy added at one place must anyway come from somewhere else.

That even would not be much of a problem from a low-style mathematical perspective : seeing the laws of physics as a computation, the cosmic cut-glue process, no matter how dirty, can just be done by switching off the cosmic computer (Doomsday), modifying its memory as much as we need, and then restarting it all Last Thursday. By the way, if consciousness was a computation, as naturalism claims, then for the same reason there would be no way to ensure the validity of our own thoughts (especially our memory), which would condemn us to skepticism and hyperbolic doubt. By the way, skeptics are really subscribing to hyperbolic doubt when, faced with the case of Pam Reynolds (who had OBE perceptions when the brain was really totally inactive), they put forward the possibility for the brain to build up memories of perceptions that were never real in order to fill the gaps of a given scenario. This idea that memories can be, and even sometimes did happen to be, completely built up with all their vividness about experiences that were never real, is indeed a logical consequence of the hypothesis of the material nature of memory, and has no essential difference with Last Thursdayism.

The conservation of the electric charge has the same necessity as the conservation of energy. Then maybe not all other physical laws have the same spectacular character of necessity, yet it remains hard to mathematically conceptualize, in quantum field theory, any process leading to some outcome which the laws would forbid. A semi-exception to this is given by the "wavefunction collapse" we shall comment below.

That was why and how the laws of physics belong to a high style of mathematics and need to be accepted as such. This does not contradict the possibility to re-express them algorithmically, which is indeed another requirement for some mathematical theory to be qualified as a physical law: it must be possible to effectively compute its predictions. Yet remains some deep structural difference between the law in its high-style formulation, and any algorithm which can produce its predictions. Namely, the former looks much more elegant than the latter.

But, what does it mean for some mathematics to be elegant ? Interestingly, this is precisely a typical example of an essential topic of disagreement between naturalism and supernaturalism: the status of qualia.

A famous illustration is given by Mary's room thought experiment: is a sensation fully explained by the physical description of its neuronal stimulation pattern, or is there something more to learn by having this sensation as one's own personal experience ? In other words, is a sensation, such as that of a color, anything more than the pattern of neuronal stimulations which form it in the brain ? This question may sound hard to figure out, because we do not have a ready scientific description of neuronal stimulation patterns for sensations under hand.
Another famous example of the same question, is "What is it like to be a bat ?".
Yet another example of, I would say, roughly the same question, is so much easier to effectively experiment that... probably most people already did it. Here it is: the question of the difference between a melody and its partition. Someone can have learned music theory, then read a music score, know in principle how it should be played on the piano, be familiar with hearing the piano and how each note sounds, and yet not figure out how nice is the melody which is written until the time of effectively hearing it. Of course good musicians can manage to read a music score in the sense of playing it in imagination and this way effectively feeling it, but that takes a special training or effort. I even once watched on a screen the display of the sound analysis of a music I was hearing, I am not sure how much this display was actually faithful, or did it lose a lot of fine crucial aspects of the sound, but I was very puzzled to experience how hard it seemed to figure out the connection between what I heard and what I saw...
So, when perceived by the right senses, a structure can induce a feeling (qualia, subjective appearance), that is something more than the sum of the parts which the structure was made of. Yet this feeling is not something complex like the structure was, but something simpler, and of a completely different nature.

Now the point of this reminder, is that I see a very similar phenomenon crucially concerning the core sciences : mathematics and physics. Mathematics is much more than the sum of its theorems, and the laws of physics are much more than the sum of their experimental predictions. And the way they are more, is not anything more complex, but something so much simpler than the parts they are made of, and at the same time something transcending these parts: they make sense. In other words, I find some special qualia of what it is like to be a mathematician, and what it is like to be a physicist. There is some qualia of the activity of exploring high-style mathematics, which may be more or less lacking in that of low-style mathematics. Metaphorically speaking, the laws of physics are written in symbols of color, whose qualia we need to feel in order to fully understand these laws, even though, strictly speaking, no qualia exists among either physical objects, the laws of physics, or generally any mathematical theory or entity.
Of course I cannot prove these things, since it is generally impossible to prove the existence of some qualia to those who do not happen to perceive them. For this reason, even those who perceive them may remain doubtful, either when challenged to justify these in debates, or even for themselves.

Now this is an important dimension of the opposition I see between Skepticism and Science : skeptics ignore and even despise the heart of science. Because the core of sciences is math and/or physics, the core of physics is mathematics, the core of mathematics is its high-style fields, some of which being also the part of math which matters for physics, and the core of these high-style fields of math is the qualia we can experience by studying them. And that qualia is a general light of scientific understanding which transcends all particular scientific facts or methods. Skeptics with their favorite methods miss that completely. Mathematical concepts and theorems are neither proven by double-blind randomized testing, nor falsifiable, and yet they perfectly belong to Science.

An important qualia of mathematics, is the sense that mathematics forms its own reality. This is usually called mathematical Platonism. Unfortunately, the usual attempts of philosophers to describe it are quite terrible and usually made of claims which I would dismiss as category mistakes instead of being meaningfully either true, false or debatable. So, let me offer my own formulation of mathematical Platonism. Actually I would split it in 2 thesis which may be considered independently of each other

• Mathematics comes with its own ontology: its own type of objects (the mathematical objects, which include the mathematical structures, but are devoid of any qualia), and its concept of mathematical existence relevant to qualify these objects. This mathematical ontology is meaningful and legitimate (valid) independently of both our physical universe and the thinking activity of any mathematician, while the concept of mathematical existence is distinct from, though possibly similar with, our other concepts of existence relevant to qualify other kinds of objects (non purely mathematical ones, which may carry diverse qualia).
• The world of mathematics has an objective, coherent and unifying architecture behind its formal diversity of possible theories, by which the main possible controversies find natural solutions (some of these solutions take the form of pluralism and are still rather satisfactory, with only relatively minor issues left).

But this second point once made, supports the credibility of the first point, as there is no less reason to believe in the mathematical reality than in the physical reality once found that mathematics has all the qualities in the name of which the physical universe is usually accepted as real (unless I missed something). Moreover, the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" with the observed crucial role of high-style math in theoretical physics, supports mathematical Platonism. Yet this support may be not very clear because, inside the world of mathematics, the precise part of mathematics which provides for what I will call here the native mathematical ontology is the tandem of set theory and model theory ; it is not the same as those parts of mathematics which matter in physics, so that both ontologies (the mathematical and the physical) do not coincide. This gap will be further commented below.

But the validity of mathematical Platonism, either the one with the native mathematical ontology, or some variant more suited to physics, remains controversial among both philosophers and physicists. For example Peter Woit strongly supports the value of high-style math, while Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin oppose mathematical Platonism by denying high-style math. (Both Rovelli and Smolin work on Loop Quantum Gravity, a tentative approach to quantum gravity based on a kind of discretization of space-time, but for what I saw on Wikipedia it seems unclear whether this succeeded anything at all).

Along such lines, here is an excerpt of the debate

"For example, one day you said to me "I don't see how from a discrete reality one can bring out the continuous with such properties of symmetries" and, with other points, this seemed to me quite clear. I represent it in a few lines and tell me if sincerely you don't find an answer: In what I was explaining, space has no concrete reality, but the graph-metric between the constituents of the universe has. So we can consider that if we have N bodies, we have N (N + 1)/2 distances, giving us the metric graph between these bodies. If I simplify, it is the metric which is therefore discrete. Talking about space is simply talking about an abstraction in which you can give positions to our N objects, and which is compatible with the metric graph, this is called making an embedding. But it is obvious that embedding a metric graph presents gauge symmetries in all directions: all the translations and rotations in the model space preserve the metric graph... So in what I presented, it is the metric which is in a way discrete but the model of space itself can be continuous, uniform, isotropic etc ... And here I simplified because the way I define my metric, gives space to Lorentz properties. etc .... so it was an example of points, which is really not on the side of the weaknesses of what I described"

A much more caricatural situation occurred one day I discussed with a philosophy student. He was skeptical to the claim that sciences, especially physics with its mathematical theories, achieved any success in understanding the universe. He thought that theories of physics are made up, and physicists just give themselves the illusion of verifying their theories, since they need their theories to interpret data, their reasoning would be circular; there would be no way to prove theories. I tried to explain that it really makes precise sense to say that we have successful theories verified by observation, and the criterion for this is in the success of these theories to reduce the entropy of observed data. But he did not understand what I meant because he did not study the concept of information entropy. So he needs to study it first. But he dismissed this request, claiming that if I need mathematics to define the concept of entropy and this way justify the success of mathematics in physics then my reasoning is circular. Well in the same way, animals can claim that human language does not make any sense, as if we tried to explain what human language can be useful or meaningful for, we would need to use human language for the explanation, so the argument would be circular as well.

In a similar vein, many philosophers of mathematics are very fond of so-called intuitionistic logic™ (a phrase so trademarked by one of the most absurdly anti-intuitive ideologies ever) and/or finitism, giving these topics an extremely oversized importance compared to their interest for mathematicians. As far as I could see, such philosophies are mainly about arbitrarily denying the validity of much of mathematics or its proofs, for hardly any serious or fruitful reasons beyond the fun of this denialism. I mean, I can accept the study of distinguishing what can be made with finitistic mathematics, as a possible specialized topic in mathematics among hundreds of others; however those who focus on philosophical issues making a fuss of their skepticism about the law of excluded middle are really wasting time. Well, of course everyone is free to undertake such an exploration of the mathematical world in ways restricted to these viewpoints of mentally transabled people. However I would beg them to not go as far as expecting the taxpayers to provide for their metaphorical wheelchairs. Because, well, hopefully the world may have more useful jobs for people who do not really like math, beyond the job of just making a fuss about it.

More generally aside such extreme cases, a kind of obscurantism can be found as having taken the role of orthodoxy in academic philosophy, where the respective statuses of knowledge and ignorance have essentially been switched. Namely, where consideration is only given to reasonings based on the purest scientific ignorance and immaturity of understanding. This is well aligned with the general principles of skepticism, of the form "what can I discover and verify if I am the most stupid and ignorant person possible" taking such a framework as a prerequisite for the validity of judgements. It is on this basis that some ill-defined concept of "naturalism" is regarded by philosophers as the most advanced thought of the time, raising the enigma of how this obscurantist orthodoxy of naturalism should be articulated with the scientific orthodoxy of mathematical Platonism. Hence the great debate about which of both oxymorons "Naturalized Platonism versus Platonized Naturalism" would be a better fit.

Now, here are some explanations I can think of for this attitude by both some physicists and many philosophers to reject mathematical Platonism and still recognize the physical (the so-called "concrete objects" as if this concept of concrete object had to make any clear sense — a presumption of meaningfulness which reflects so much ignorance in physics) as "more real" (or even the only reality) than the mathematical.

The possibly main explanation is that so many people are more familiar with the physical than with the mathematical. At least, it takes more work, and usually comes later in life, to become familiar enough with mathematics to perceive this as a case for mathematical Platonism, than it was to get familiarity with the physical and accept the reality of the physical on this basis.

Then for those who finally become familiar enough with math for it to weight as much as physics, the reluctance to endorse mathematical Platonism may of course have a part of explanation in the general difficulty to switch views. But more precisely here, the difficulty comes from the question it raises of how all these things can fit together. Namely the difficulty comes from the temptation of monism : the assumption that there should only be one kind of reality, since a plurality of ontologies raises difficulties to figure out their articulations. Once the mathematical and the physical are so seen as in competition for the role of unique reality able to contain everything, the physical seems a better candidate than the mathematical indeed.

Yet Mathematical Monism, also called Mathematical universe hypothesis has some supporters, most of which also support the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics. These should be distinguished from the computationalists, who are roughly the most common kind of naturalists, that may be considered more or less also mathematical monists, but low-style ones (finitists), thus generally offset from genuine theoretical physics. This position is usually labelled "Simulation hypothesis or "Digital physics". Among its proponents, Gerard 't Hooft and H. Pierre Noyes are the only physicists I can see, while others are usually clueless in physics (Stephen Wolfram, Brian Whitworth...)

On the other hand, Roger Penrose offers a trio of realities : the mathematical, the physical and the mental. This may sound good, but the problem is how they relate to each other. He describes them as cyclically dependent on each other, which is quite a mysterious architecture.

Now, mathematical Platonism brings an ontological challenge to naturalism (especially physicalism), as it is a clue about ontology, thus a unique chance to bring light to the previously mentioned ontological question on the nature of consciousness. This challenge consists in the following questions:

• If the physical systems are mathematical structures, or at least describable by these, then how could their ontology differ from the mathematical one ? This question may be unclear, since it can be seemingly solved by cheaply relabelling the physical ontology as a "mathematical" one. But the problem remains that it differs from the native ontology of mathematics.
• The discrepancy becomes even more acute concerning the ontology of consciousness: even if the mathematical nature of physical reality was not clear, then anyway the assumption that consciousness emerges from physical process would oblige to define consciousness as a mathematical structure which is not natively "understood" by physical ontology because it comes like "by accident". This would make incomprehensible the possibility for the ontology of consciousness, which was famously pointed out as "I think, therefore I am", to be anything more than a mathematical one.

• One is to just be happily ignorant about the issue, as was my skeptic debater who never heard of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis before I told him about it (but he thought I was the ignorant one for not having studied cognitive science which is mute on ontological issues)
• Dismissing it as nonsense, since they are not taking any mathematical ontology seriously;
• Developing such interpretations of these ontologies, twisting the understanding of either or all of these so that they would appear to coincide.

• As in my text on the Many-worlds interpretation (assuming this interpretation to be correct), physical existence appears as a divisible quantity between the parallel worlds, where "some of these exist more than others" ; while the native mathematical ontology gives equal recognition to all possibilities, a so equal one that it is insensitive to any such trick as considering different numbers of faithful copies of the same system (even this trick would could not match the requirement of many-worlds anyway).
• Mathematical ontology is ordered by its own growing block flow of time, but this time of mathematics plays no role in the mathematical expression of the laws of physics (to such a point that most physicists have no idea that such a time of mathematics exists); these laws describe the "time" of physics as of the same nature as space (thus appearing to support eternalism for physical time), raising the question how physical time could happen to look otherwise. Namely, physical time also feels to our consciousness as another growing block flow, similar to the native mathematical time (and, once computers are made, able to emulate the computational time of finitistic mathematics), but which appears orthogonal to the native mathematical time, when considering how both are articulated at the piece of mathematics which forms the fundamental laws of physics. Of course we have a well-known answer from thermodynamics, which provides a time orientation from outside the laws by using the Big Bang as the fixed initial state of everything but... as an explanation by emergence, its relevance for ontology remains unclear, at least if this question of the status of physical time was meant as a genuinely ontological question.

Among these numerous problems are, for example

• Is there anything wrong (impossible in principle) with Last Thursdayism ?
• Same question with Solipsism
• Same question with Boltzmann Brains
• Does it make sense in principle to imagine transportation like in Star Trek : scanning - transfer as information - reconstruction at destination - destruction of the original ? Would there be anything wrong for the last step to occur a bit late ?
• If the spontaneous collapse interpretation formed an acceptable ontology (or why not ?) then what would be wrong with slow collapse ?

Aside these ontological issues, another qualia which emerges from the studies of both mathematics and physics, is the qualia of recognizing the situation described in the previous section : that the laws of physics indeed form a metaphorical locker and that no mathematical key (candidate complement to the laws of physics) can fit in. This is the unified understanding behind diverse no-go theorems against classical realism, and the feeling of "conspiracy" in the face of all experiences of failures trying diverse candidate mathematical keys and seeing them not fitting.

A first approach is the idea to accept as plausible the message which happens to be rather clearly given to us from Nature, rather than going for a headlong rush of seeing it as an accidental conspiracy of appearances hiding opposite kinds of underlying facts.
More precisely, this approach is the message of Logical Positivism, which was needed to motivate the success of modern physics away from imaginary obstacles : if some hypothetical parameter stubbornly and perfectly escapes measurability among all of a given range of diverse experiments (with no good "natural reason" for this), then it is reasonable to dismiss this parameter from the "explanations", i.e. the expression of the laws of physics which are relevant for these experiments. Then the success of such theories which do not use this parameter, in both terms of mathematical consistency and confirmed predictions, validates their terms.

An important point, which so many people could be led to underestimate by their naturalistic prejudices, is how amazingly great is the success of our theories of modern physics which explain so well so many experiences based on a formalism which reject such naively expected parameters. Now this success is so well-known to anyone caring to get informed, and other physicists did this supporting work already, making totally irrational any persistent belief in their underlying existence in some "true" fundamental laws of physics which remain to be discovered. This is why I see no duty to develop this point in too much details myself.

So here is the resulting picture:

• Since there is no physical measure of simultaneity of distant events (as expressed by Special Relativity) we should accept that the laws of physics contain no such concept, but only the concept of independence (separation by space-like intervals) and such independent events cannot have any physically causal effect on each other (physics can only describe them as correlated by common causes from the intersection of their past light cones)
• The state of any physical system precisely consists in the mathematical object called "density matrix", which gathers all possibly available information on probabilities for any result of any possible measurement (so, this object being precisely made of the data of what is observable, there would be no sense to doubt its reality). Physically, measurements involve a process described by the concept of decoherence, yet both are conceptually distinct:
  • Decoherence only results in the situation described by many-worlds: a state just practically indistinguishable from a persisting coexistence (classically probabilistic superposition) of all possible measurement outcomes, themselves not objectively distinguished from each other.
  • But conscious observers perceive measurements differently: as a "wave-function collapse", which involves, first a distinction of a list of possibilities, then a choice and actualization of only one of these. But this wave-function collapse cannot occur before decoherence, otherwise some breach of the known laws could be observed. However this condition remains mathematically ill-defined (not even letting us formally define some cases of clear fulfillment), because decoherence is an emergent process (at the limit of interactions a with a large chaotic environment). Yet it should occur in order to let the very mathematical structure of these physical states match the basic ontological reason for this structure (that is so precisely the structure of the data of probabilities of results of any possible future measurements), escaping the ontological difficuties of many-worlds (divisibility of existence as a quantity). This leaves as a "mystery" for physics the question of when and how it can occur. The laws of physics do not describe this transition process, which needs to be arbitrarily postulated from outside the laws. This suggests that it must belong to a non-physical level of reality (it may be called a metaphysical process, occurring "outside space-time", instead of a physical process).
• If 2 distant particles from an entangled pair are independently measured (the "measurement" events are separated by a space-like interval), then the correlations of their results, given this impossibility of advance determination, cannot be accounted for by local causalities; since physical causalities are local, this confirms the non-physical nature of the process of wave-function collapse.

Now my skeptic debater appeared quite reluctant towards such a logical positivistic attitude. So he expressed his skepticism towards these great advances of modern science as follows :

"Decoherence is for me only a model of emergence, and it is based on what is for me only a model of description of the world (and I'm not ready to swear to the realism of something as a wave function as I just said). It seems very difficult to refute all the flaws in the logical interpretation of what is happening, and also to refute all the ways of bringing out the concept of measurement (of which decoherence is only one element of this family) and I do not think that in your pages you refute this kind of thing. Your refutation seems essentially based on the unshakable faith in the realism of the standard model equations. But for me it will always be a methodological error, you will never observe a wave function, it is only a model that represents a form of aggregation of results that you would observe if you put the world in states that you consider to be similar, to postulate a realism behind it all seems really dangerous to me. It doesn't prevent it from working very well, I know. I think it is on this point that we will always have a hard time understanding each other, because you will always start from the principle of realism of this model and show that nothing can explain this model. And that is also why you are so attached to the fact that I must master the precise mathematics of quantum, because for you the realism of the model is at the base of everything."

• Non-local hidden variables (Bohmian mechanics)
• Spontaneous collapse

Besides these, is the range of super-deterministic locally causal theories, which is usually not considered by specialists, but compared to the above, would have the great advantage of not involving instantaneous actions at a distance. It happens to be his favorite one. Here are some excerpts of his replies :

"I too consider that the pilot wave theory it is not worth much, but the difference is that I do not consider that it is a waste of time, there are things to take from it, mainly the understanding of why it does not work and also the errors of logic of the opposing side "we can not observe the result of a double slit experiment with classical explanations": well yes, we can. Even if this is not what is happening, even if what happens is not and never will be classical, giving a counterexample, even only hypothetical, shows that the argument (for this precise point) is shit since we can build an example that behaves like this (and again I absolutely do not believe in the Bohm approach) but it dismantles peremptory arguments.

And maybe what I build is trivial too. But it is an exercise that I rarely come across. Therefore it is missing. When we can no longer go down into the nature of things to understand them, it is sometimes interesting to construct hypothetical examples and see what we could conclude from them. But in any case I want to make it clear that I am not naive about what I think to accomplish. I never said I had the slightest quantitative theory here. There is not 10% usable stuff. It is the approach that I find interesting and the illustrations of mechanism it gives

Overall I like superdeterminism as an explanation for entanglement. Methodologically speaking I find it interesting to wonder what one could observe as bizarre behavior if one were, as an observer, included in a global determinism. It is possible to be able to observe nothing in particular, but it is also possible to observe behaviors like entanglement."

The clearest reason is about quantum computation, which cannot be accounted for by locally causal theories (assuming behaviors as given by some kind of classical computation with locally limited resources). Actually I had to raise the issue in the discussion, because he was not aware of it, since... he did not even figure out how much there was such a concept as quantum computation which may sometimes be more powerful than classical computation. His first reaction was

"do you know the gain in complexity by heart? (in the sense of algorithmic complexity). If for example you can interpret a record of n qbits as an interconnected grid of n "classical elementary processors" it is important to understand the gain quantitatively"

"I unearthed a little what I had already read on quantum algo, and about the question I asked there are a lot of restrictions:
We are already talking about complexity in algorithms that are not certain. Ideally I thought that there were quantum algorithms that completely destroy destructive non-solutions and therefore could give solutions for sure. In theory there is nothing against it, in practice that does not seem to be the case. And therefore talking about complexity with a form of uncertainty is not very clean, it is as if I said that I had a certain way to win at roulette at the casino, by doubling my bet each time. In theory I do not lie this is the case, in practice it is a form of scam.
Then the shor algorithm for example uses a quantum circuit designed for a given N and that also I find that it is a little debatable to speak of the complexity of a machine or an algo or both if we allow ourselves as N changes to change the machine.
From a circuit point of view, it is much less direct than with a traditional algo. When you type the limit it is not enough to "add something" you have to rethink the thing as a set of more qbits, it is not a simple addition of qbits in a system to make a bigger one, and the same for logical circuits.
So there is initially a real problem of definition, at least it is not trivial to define and compare complexities in a context of this kind. But I keep looking for an ideal algo, like the thing that does something completely useless from a practical point of view but that properly demonstrates the gain in the most canonical way possible.

But, what a strange universe it would be, that would be basically working in one kind of way (local classical computation) but on top of that would be programmed in such an extraordinary way that it would maintain the appearance of so perfectly following a completely different kind of laws (quantum mechanics) for seemingly all experiments until the day when its success to do so would completely break down because of special circumstances which make it run out of the computing power needed to maintain this appearance. Actually I once saw a physicist (Valerio Scarani if I remember well) make a similar remark about the relevance of experiments to test the violation of Bell's inequalities : it would be so strange to see quantum mechanics perfectly predict everything in all previous experiments including those on entanglement with defective devices failing to fit the conditions of violation of Bell's inequalities, then suddenly break down when devices are perfected enough to fit. Now since experiments approved the expectation that this paradoxical prediction of quantum mechanics would keep working on perfected devices against classical realistic expectation, then why would the case of quantum computing be different ?

This leads us to the other answer I see : the violation of Bell's inequalities (the prediction of quantum mechanics which is the point of the concept of "superdeterminism" : the virtue of a local deterministic law to match this prediction). Why it is a really strong problem, is not so easy to clearly explain, but I will try by analogy with a different, more simply expressible mathematical problem that is subject to the same issues. Just one arbitrary example of an endless range of similar problems.

Here is the example. Let us call conspirational number any nonzero integer whose exponential only has finitely many 3s in its decimal expansion.
Now, does a conspirational number exist ? The point is, any good mathematician would be confident that no such number exists, and yet would not be able to write a proof for this. It is worth hesitating whether this conjecture is actually provable. It is expectable that no simple proof exists, so any proof would be extremely complicated. But the point is that mathematicians do not need such a proof, since their intuition suffices instead of a proof to know the non-existence of conspirational numbers anyway.

Now, superdeterministic laws are like conspirational numbers: mathematical intuition (the qualia of what it is like to be a mathematician) can give confidence that such a law cannot exist, despite the lack of proof for this impossibility. The reason is essentially the same, both for the confidence in the conjecture that no superdeterministic law can exist, and the lack of means to prove this non-existence. Of course I cannot prove the validity of this analogy between both problems, I am simply confident in this, just like I cannot prove but I am confident that conspirational numbers do not exist.

Here by any superdeterministic law, I do not even require one which matches much details of the Standard Model of particle physics. I even expect toy models to be impossible as well. Uh, maybe not the absolutely most straw ones. So let us be more precise: my conjecture is the non-existence of any toy model of superdeterministic law (i.e. which statistically violates the Bell's inequalities) that would be Turing-complete on a visible level, with a lower bound on the efficiency in which it can process visible computation. Here by "visible" I mean as opposed to the "hidden" character of hidden variables. So I mean a law of a world in which it is possible to build a visible computer, in the same sense of those computers we have in our world, able to make classical computations (to use the result as a choice of direction to measure one entangled particle).

Here is a quote from the conversation:

"For my part I consider that what is bizarre in quantum, boils down to relatively little: behaviors of interference (which oppose any simple interpretation of classical statistical ignorance) and entanglement (which is neither a causal relationship, nor an independence, and it is always very "bizarre" even very difficult to simply consider, even only mathematically) and finally the problem that we are dealing with a model that reconciles the micro to the macro. Then you also have to understand special relativity to make relevant remarks. But apart from these points (unless I forgot one) I see no need to know the details of implementation of the quantum model to seek an interpretation. That is to say that I would consider it a huge success to simply build a "world" which illustrates how we can have these bizarre points, even if this world does not give exactly the same equations, for me, any way of exhibiting something else that satisfies these bizarre points would inevitably give us something usable in our reality, it would be just a matter of time for a mathematician to do the job. You need Einstein-like discoveries, and you need Riemann-type guys, they don't have the same job."

Should the Universe be designed for the Method or vice versa

The precise aspects of science picked by skepticism are somehow naturally those which are more likely to be picked when approaching science in a religious manner, that is, as an object of evangelization. They may be the clearest answers to the question of what are the most straightforward things to share if you want to spread a scientific mindset. Doing that, they could have overlooked the fact that, well, this question of how to most clearly and easily share a scientific mindset may be a wrong question about such a mindset, while their dear goal of popularizing science may be a kind of oxymoron. Because these are rather extroverts expectations about something which may actually require some introversion instead. Other crucial aspects of science thus missed would be much harder or even sometimes impossible to share in such popularized manners:

• An open-ended range of hundreds of methods instead of just a few
• Extensive enough background knowledge (familiarity) on the relevant subject matters
• Discernment skills (either from innate intelligence or long training), including on how to apply the diverse possible methods and principles appropriately
• And of course, once you officially took as your objects of worship a few scientific methods and principles which are usually so convenient for you to put forward as a good excuse to defend your prejudices against the conclusions of people who followed different methods, you should not just easily throw them out of the window in the few cases when they turn out to contradict these prejudices.

Unfortunately, the current mainstream libertarian ideologies fell into similar traps with respect to the potentialities of libertarian solutions, as skepticism fell with respect to the scientific ideals: the trap of perverting its best principles by essentializing them and neglecting the need of thorough analysis to discover the appropriate ways of applying them. Namely, many fell to the temptation of extrapolating their confidence in the few classical methods of free market, justified by the success we know in classical cases, to dream of a straightforward universal applicability of these methods in all cases. They can rightly point out some cases where these methods were attacked for either wrong or controversial reasons, such as the institutions of rather heavy taxes to maintain some sub-optimal systems of social security and official education ; and extrapolate from there to less wisely dismiss as similar "attacks on liberties" any other calls for regulations, namely those for environmental concerns.

So in the discussion, I drew the parallel between both ideologies as follows:

Would God ought to have taken up the duty to create the world with the precise details to ensure that there can exist a category of people enjoying the guarantee to be always the right ones under just one condition: that they apply "the right method" well known in advance, against anyone else with a different line of thought ?
This reminds me of the ultraliberals who, essentially (not explicitly of course) believe that since freedom in general is a fundamental value, and free market proves in many cases the most effective method for everything to go well in the best of all worlds, therefore God had to conceive the laws of climate dynamics so as to always make right the fanatics of the best methods, namely those of free market.

Ironically, this strange hypothesis that the universe would happen to be adapted to the expectations of methodologists for the intellectual comfort of investigators (in terms of explorability : the superiority of a fixed exploration method), would actually be very bad news for these investigators. Indeed:

1. It would make their work boring ;
2. it would open the way to the automatization of their work, so that machines could ultimately overcompete them and leave them jobless.

• It is not fair, in the sense that there is no such thing as a fair share of abilities and diverse other sources of chances (circumstances...) between people, to ensure that the resulting visible success (reaching the correct truth) would be any proper measure (criterion) for the merits of players or any specially valuable quality ;
• It is not unfair, in the sense that there is no such thing as a supreme privilege given to winners and denied to losers, such as an entrance right to heaven. Thus, there is really no such thing as a charity duty to care correcting other people and drive them to correct beliefs in order to "save" them either. The diversity of chances being no secret, it is well considered when assessing the deeper interest behind a given level of visible success.

In particular, different people may happen to be at different stages of their spiritual evolution (in particular their series of reincarnations). It can seem funny to stare at children's mistakes; but everyone has been a child someday, and the experience of committing and struggling with mistakes can be a necessary part of the learning process.

Let me reply to the possible suspicion that, by the above picture, I would be undermining the sense of seriousness (meaningful purpose) of scientific investigation. I happen to be very serious by nature, tempted to take everything extremely seriously. This went to the point of leading me to spoil my life trying to follow purposes and requirements which claimed to be serious ones but which actually weren't, such as "giving my life to God" with Evangelical Christianity, and accepting to follow the academic system up to PhD as if it would be needed for me to fulfill my wish of doing great science in my life, when it was actually a huge waste of energy. After such disastrous tries to integrate myself in the university system, I finally left it for good, disgusted of the reign of vanity and lack of meaningful purpose in so much of what is going on there. I already commented above about the mess of scientific popularization. I also reported elsewhere the degree of vanity I found in academia, both in scientific research and teaching activities. Indeed, what is the sense of passing an exam, really ? What is the sense of repeating the same lecture every year, on the same topic which thousands of other teachers are also teaching around the world, and still doing it as badly as decades ago without anyone giving any serious thought on needed restructuration ? What is the sense of racing to publish a given finding in a given popular research field, in hope to do it either before or at the same time as others, so as to become listed as one more of its co-discoverers ? What is the sense of doing some "great" work which will only interest the curiosity of a handful of specialists of the same topic but has no chance to be of any use for the rest of mankind anyway ? What is even the sense of all specialists of a given field focusing their works on publishing stuff to be read by their peers working on the same field around the world, but none of them even caring to help maintaining a list of those existing research teams in this field (I was the one doing it for them, despite being out of that system) ?

A vanity for another, let us compare the value of rational investigation to that of passing an exam. What really matters there is not, in itself, the discovery of the right result, since those truths to be discovered are anyway no mystery from the viewpoint by which the ultimate value of the investigation will finally be appreciated. What matters instead, is the method which is followed. Not because the right method is fixed in advance, but precisely because it isn't : you have to invent you own, and see how it goes. You have a large freedom in both your choices of target questions and methods to investigate them, and no secret will remain about this.
A possibly legitimate method is to copy your work from your neighbor's. Indeed this can be valuable in two ways. One way is to save your time, using the fruits of his work as a basis you need for your own other works, the different game you want to play where you can then develop and test different skills. The other way is to test your skills of discerning which works are worth copying from, and which aren't.
But, if you altogether undertake to get and wear dark glasses, proclaim that these glasses are the brightest of all (since only some of the brightest lights are visible through these), and complain against your neighbor, who disagrees with you on this, that you cannot see whether his work is worth copying from when you look at it through your glasses, then you may be the one actually failing.

Back to site : Antispirituality main page