Jul 11, 2022
The Meaning of the Replication Crisis
The impossibility of understanding the Three-Mind Problem
I’m a big fan of science. I love me some science. I love the science I can touch, the science I can think about, and all the science in between that I can wrap my head around and intellectually fondle in an amicable way. I write pop science because I’m a wizard — and sometimes I write about computer science because I’m a software engineer. I’m definitely not a scientist but I spend a lot of time poking around in the spaces they do so I can tell myself fun stories about life and reality.
One of the weirdest things I’ve learned about over the past few years — and look let’s be honest I’ve learned a lot of weird things — is the Replication Crisis.
What is the Replication Crisis?
The long and short of it is that a bunch of the output of our psychological sciences over the past few decades, including a bunch of foundational findings upon which future psychological science has been scaffolded, can no longer be replicated scientifically. As an oversimplification if this were physics it would be like all of a sudden finding out that E=mc(banana), except that it’s not physics it’s the science of the things we use to discern physics (our minds).
It’s pretty weird and complicated stuff. A lot of smart folks are talking and thinking about it and hoping no one really notices.
Is this problem Quantum?
The science of physics will take a front row later on in this piece because they’re related but I promise not to say “It’s quantum!” — I don’t find that term to be particularly useful in these discussions at this point. There still isn’t an acceptable mechanism through which we can describe psychological sciences in quantum terminology, and anyway history seems to indicate that taking that route leads to having your views be dismissed by the mainstream. The replication crisis is a mainstream and merits thoughtful discussion by everyone.
Also I wanna get dismissed in a new way because I’m a motherfucking innovator.
As an aside: There’s some research that shows that there is as much evidence for some widely accepted psychological phenomena as there is for some widely rejected parapsychological phenomena like ESP or remote viewing. When I go around saying there are undiscovered physics of consciousness I’m not inventing or imagining anything — I’m just describing what’s being shown to us elsewhere.
The Hard Problem of Figuring Shit Out
Figuring shit out is really hard and anyone who says otherwise is a big lying sack of crap. All the shit you have figured out is shit you didn’t used to have figured out. Some of the shit you have figured out is wrong and you don’t even fucking know it. This often applies to everyone everywhere because a lot of the time everything is a great big fucking mess. (Said with 🧡)
Before we talk about how to figure out the incomprehensible energies that exist within the activity of our minds in the ecosystem of consciousness let’s talk about how to figure out the incomprehensible energies that exist within the activity of 3 objects of equal mass with equal gravity and different intentions.
The Three-Body Problem
The Three-Body Problem seems like it shouldn’t be a problem because we all know math and physics are totally fucking awesome. And yet…. reality is so inherently chaotic that we don’t seem able to come up with math to solve this problem. We can’t predict the outcome of complex physical systems. It’s a real pickle.(Especially since science isn’t allowed to talk about faith.)
We have the ability to understand where “matter” in the universe came from and predict where it will go and what it will do, but we don’t have the ability to do this for distinct things.
Is this problem Quantum?
This is the first point where people throw the word Quantum around and it derails things. There’s a meme from the space of quantum physics that tells us that measuring something changes it. (It’s not a meme to scientists but most people aren’t scientists)
So if you know that meme and you see the above animation, and you think about thinking, it’s possible to think “The Three-Body Problem happens because we try to measure reality and we can’t because Quantum!” That sounds cool but we don’t have evidence of this so it’s not accurate. At this point all we can say is that reality is so chaotic that our best science is incapable of predicting the behaviour of 3 identical pieces of mass and we don’t know why. It could be because E=mc(banana).
Chaos remains ever-present in the material spaces of reality.
The Three-Mind Problem
The findings discerned through the efforts numerous psychological scientists, which originated in the replication crisis, were accurate. The crisis at the core of the replication crisis isn’t that good science wasn’t done — it’s that good science was done and then reality changed in such a way that new science is now required and old assumptions must be reviewed.
We always think this is the part that will happen to someone else.
Part of the problem is obviously chaos. We don’t want to think of chaos as being a variable that must be considered when considering the behaviour of our minds because chaotic minds are crazy minds and we’re not crazy, right? Cognitive biases around changing our minds can arise from our unwillingness to accept the true reality of the changing nature of our minds.
And yet… when we look. Change has come.
Is this problem Quantum?
This is the next point at which people often seem to start throwing the word Quantum around. I get it. This definitely looks like measuring our minds changes our minds, right?
And maybe it does. But we don’t know yet. We also don’t really know what the heck we mean by using the word “Quantum” in this context, it seems accurate and is a suitable narrative but it’s not science.
The New Agers of the 60s and 70s really seem to have hindered their brands and efforts by tethering them so significantly with the scientific terminology of String Theory. Folks today do this with Quantum in a very similar way. When the chaotic nature of our universe changes the science attached to the science upon which we build spiritual ideologies we then have to change any other narratives associated with it if we want to keep everything aligned. I’m not saying calling this stuff “Quantum” isn’t where we’ll end up — it seems likely that it may — but we’re just not there yet. All of this is at best pop-science. Treating it like real science alienates actual scientists — who are already alienated by virtue of having to hold unsustainable views about undiscovered physics of consciousness in order to maintain their materialist worldviews — and this risks keeping all of us farther away from discerning any shared truth about reality.
The third mind is every mind
The Three-Body Problem is highlighted by virtue of the fact that the 3 bodies of mass are identical and yet the whole system becomes unpredictable. The Three-Mind Problem is different: minds are incomparable and also one of the minds involved in the Three-Mind Problem is probably the database of consciousness (What Bernardo Kastrup calls the Mind of Nature). This means that one of the minds in this system potentially contains or created the other ones.
We use psychological sciences to build models and frameworks for human activity, as individuals and in groups, but we still don’t account for the fact that the data stored in the database of consciousness evolves over time.
Pop science is fucking bananas.
OK so maybe don’t come to me for serious ideas
Donald Hoffman has some math that says that a conscious entity can be a single things or two separate things operating in the right kind of unison. That’s some pretty fucking amazing stuff. I don’t know what to do with it or how to measure it. Probably the best use of your time here is to watch him talk about it instead of read any more of my thoughts:
There’s a bunch of reputable folks saying a bunch of shit that clearly points to something about our current pop science being more accurate than some stuff about traditional mainstream science.
A bunch of it relates to our minds.
A bunch of the science about our minds is no longer accurate.
These are real things you need to know about because you have a mind.
Thanks for reading. Here’s a poem I wrote with the intention of maybe enabling some sort of nonviolent populist uprising or something idk
