{"id":3322,"date":"2020-02-29T07:06:47","date_gmt":"2020-02-29T07:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/02\/29\/information-realism\/"},"modified":"2020-02-29T07:06:47","modified_gmt":"2020-02-29T07:06:47","slug":"information-realism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/02\/29\/information-realism\/","title":{"rendered":"Information Realism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Physicists love to play the philosopher, and when they do the result is often nonsense. A recent example is the so-called information realism of physicist Max Tegmark. Here<\/a> is the gist of it:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind\u2014psyche, soul\u2014is supposedly a derivative phenomenon<\/a> of purely abstract information manipulation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When I read this, I said to myself, "I will have no trouble blowing this nonsense out of the water." Reading on, however, I noted that the author of the Scientific American<\/em> piece, Bernardo Kastrup, did exactly that. <\/span><\/p>\n

We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well<\/em>.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category<\/a> for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Physicists love to play the philosopher, and when they do the result is often nonsense. A recent example is the so-called information realism of physicist Max Tegmark. Here is the gist of it: . . . according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind\u2014psyche, soul\u2014is supposedly a … Continue reading “Information Realism?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scientism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}