Genetic determinism

[bhamgeezer]

That's debatable at the very least. Positing something outside existence to explain existence begs more questions than it answers.

No way modal arguments are great fun, and whilst their are many reasons why such a thing is nomologically impossible, it seems to me at least concievable. It might not answer a question that will tell you anything about physics but it is certainly interesting from a psychological perspective.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

No way modal arguments are great fun, and whilst their are many reasons why such a thing is nomologically impossible, it seems to me at least concievable. It might not answer a question that will tell you anything about physics but it is certainly interesting from a psychological perspective.

Personally, I cannot conceive of anything outside existence! And if you do posit such a thing, you need at least to say what kind of thing it is. Otherwise, what you say is, literally, meaningless.

 

[bhamgeezer]

Personally, I cannot conceive of anything outside existence! And if you do posit such a thing, you need at least to say what kind of thing it is. Otherwise, what you say is, literally, meaningless.

I am saying what kind of thing it is, an existent thing that is capable knowing all the subatomic facts there is to know and additionally with enough intelligence to understand them all. There are plenty of reasons why this is practically impossible. The point is it's not logically impossible, so you can still ask the question.

 

[Jonti]

If you want to suggest a phenomena like this you have to explain exactly how this occurs.

That's just a rule you made up; and it's not even true!

I'd do better just to retort: if you want to lay down the law about how one must think, you have to explain exactly why those laws are valid.

Methodologically speaking, one must first recognise the phenomenon, then work out what's going on, that makes it happen. Continental drift had to be recognised before the theory of plate tectonics could be developed to explain it.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I am saying what kind of thing it is, an existent thing that is capable knowing all the subatomic facts there is to know and additionally with enough intelligence to understand them all. There are plenty of reasons why this is practically impossible. The point is it's not logically impossible, so you can still ask the question.

How does it know?
How does it interact with the system it stands outside without affecting it? How can any knowing thing be 'outside' existence in that way?
What do you mean by 'outside'?

These are practical problems inherent to the question. It is a badly formed question, so no, you can't ask it.

 

[bhamgeezer]

How does it know?
How does it interact with the system it stands outside without affecting it? How can any knowing thing be 'outside' existence in that way?
What do you mean by 'outside'?

These are practical problems inherent to the question. It is a badly formed question, so no, you can't ask it.

That's simply ridiculous. Philosophy finds seemingly coherent yet vague statements and attempts analysis. Fine if you want to argue the question is actually incoherent, but you can't constrain the questions to only well defined ideas, it's the process that defines them.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

That's simply ridiculous. Philosophy finds coherent yet vague statements and attempts analysis.

Your example was not a coherent question. Any analysis of it has to begin with working out exactly what the question is asking before you can go on to any possible answer. If you find, through analysis, that you have asked a badly formed question, you cannot proceed to possible answers.

And please don't try to tell me what 'philosophy' does.

 

[Knotted]

Going back to gene-centrism. Here's a quote from that Dawkins' paper I sited earlier:

Sterelny, Smith and Dickerson (1996), follow Griffiths and Gray in saying “Most acorns rot, so acorn genomes correlate better with rotting than with growth”. But this is dead wrong. It misunderstands the very meaning of correlation which is, after all, a statistical technical term. Admitting that most genomes rot, the relevant question is whether such variation as there may be in acorn genomes correlates with such variation as there may be in tendency to rot. It probably does, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the question of covariance is the right question to ask. Sterelny and Kitcher (1988) in their excellent paper on ‘The Return of the Gene’ are very clear on the matter. Think variation. Variation, variation, variation. Heritable variation; covariation between phenotype as dependent variable, and putative replicator as independent variable. This has been my leitmotif as I read all three commentators, and it will be my refrain throughout my reply.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/351530/Richard-Dawkins-Extended-Phenotype

Doesn't this goes to show how a gene centric point of view can be compatable with the developmentalist point of view of Oyama, Griffiths and Gray? A gene might have a great phenotypic effect but without variation it is of little interest to the population biologist. A gene might have only slight phenotypic effect (say a minor effect on eye colour) but if there is variation then the population biologist will recognise it. Causality in the gene centric point of view is relative to variation whereas causality in developmental biology is to do with causal significance in ontogeny. The gene centric point of view is there so you can be sensitive to phenotypic mutations.

When I look at the above and the nuanced debate about the computer program metaphor on pharyngular, I'm quite convinced my original hunch was right - a lot of this debate seems to be generated by different definitions of key words. "Gene", "causal", "computer program" are all being understood differently by different people. The argument against never talking about "gene for..." seems quite obscure to me. On the other hand, the argument for reducing everything to genes is non-existent.

Having said that PZ Myers list of deficienices in modern evolutionary theory seem quite real. The idea that developmental biology can influence evolutionary biology seems quite plausible in my non-expert opinion.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/deficiencies_in_modern_evoluti.php

 

[Knotted]

That's just a rule you made up; and it's not even true!

I'm with bhamgeezer on this one. Implicitly your top-down causality cannot be described in terms of bottom-up causality. Implictly your emergent phenonmenon cannot in principle be described in causal terms of it's constituent parts.

Perhaps you are saying human behaviour cannot be described in reductionist terms and that physics needs to incorporate a fundamental new category of human causation.

Perhaps you are saying something much more banal.

You need to clarify your point.

Also don't assume theory comes after phenonmenon. There are some very striking examples of the reverse - sub-atomic particles for instance.

 

[bhamgeezer]

Your example was not a coherent question. Any analysis of it has to begin with working out exactly what the question is asking before you can go on to any possible answer. If you find, through analysis, that you have asked a badly formed question, you cannot proceed to possible answers.

And please don't try to tell me what 'philosophy' does.

Then don't tell me what questions I can and can't ask. The question is reasonably coherent to me and I am sure at least some would agree. If you disagree you can simply explain your view. I don't think you can get to an exact working out of any question without a bit of casual discussion either, and if the question fails oh well but then at least you might achieve a more precise idea of why it does.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Then don't tell me what questions I can and can't ask. The question is reasonably coherent to me and I am sure at least some would agree. If you disagree you can simply explain your view. I don't think you can get to an exact working out of any question without a bit of casual discussion either.

I wasn't giving a lecture, though. I was trying to show what is and is not a valid question.

I really do think you are very misguided in thinking that it is anything other than confusing to pose questions that you cannot explain. I'll ask you a couple of very simple questions that should hopefully show you that your question was meaningless: What does it mean to 'know' without having a 'knower', and if there needs to be a knower, how can that knower exist outside existence? Your question was inherently self-contradictory.

I'm afraid it is very necessary to clarify which questions can be validly asked and which not. Your initial appeal to be allowed to ask whatever you like is at the same level as the idea that 'everyone's opinion is valid'. No, it is not. eg: How loud is courage? we can all think up nonsense questions that cannot be answered because they're bad questions.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

if the question fails oh well but then at least you might achieve a more precise idea of why it does.

Yes, I agree with this. But that was all I was trying (and evidently failing) to explain: why your question failed.

But I shall leave it there. I've no desire for a bunfight on this.

 

[bhamgeezer]

I wasn't giving a lecture, though. I was trying to show what is and is not a valid question.

So your definition of a valid question is?

I really do think you are very misguided in thinking that it is anything other than confusing to pose questions that you cannot explain. I'll ask you a couple of very simple questions that should hopefully show you that your question was meaningless: What does it mean to 'know' without having a 'knower', and if there needs to be a knower, how can that knower exist outside existence? Your question was inherently self-contradictory.

I see no internal contradiction in the idea of a the knower really existing and being aware of everything on a sub-atomic level without causally influencing it. I only see physical laws why it is impossible, and for the purposes of the argument I am assuming natural laws are contingencies.

I'm afraid it is very necessary to clarify which questions can be validly asked and which not. Your initial appeal to be allowed to ask whatever you like is at the same level as the idea that 'everyone's opinion is valid'. No, it is not. eg: How loud is courage? we can all think up nonsense questions that cannot be answered because they're bad questions.

Valid in what context? The only restriction I see is one of logical consistency.

 

[Caecilian]

Going back to gene-centrism. Here's a quote from that Dawkins' paper I sited earlier:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/351530/Richard-Dawkins-Extended-Phenotype

When I look at the above and the nuanced debate about the computer program metaphor on pharyngular, I'm quite convinced my original hunch was right - a lot of this debate seems to be generated by different definitions of key words. "Gene", "causal", "computer program" are all being understood differently by different people. The argument against never talking about "gene for..." seems quite obscure to me. On the other hand, the argument for reducing everything to genes is non-existent.

Having said that PZ Myers list of deficienices in modern evolutionary theory seem quite real. The idea that developmental biology can influence evolutionary biology seems quite plausible in my non-expert opinion.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/deficiencies_in_modern_evoluti.php

You're right in thinking that a lot of the problems are definitional. 'Gene' is a particularly problematic one, as is 'information'. I'd also agree that the eventual outcome is likely to be some sort of integration of the insights of gene-centrism and DST, not to mention the work of Kauffman, West-Eberhard, Margulis, Ulanowicz and many others. The whole field is in flux at the moment- its a really exciting time to be debating these issues in.

Having said that, IMO the eventual integrated perspective will look a lot more like DST than, say, Maynard Smith or Dawkins.

 

[Caecilian]

Re the bhamgeezer/ littlebabyjesus dispute.

I really can't see any problems with what bhamgeezer is arguing. As the man says it all hinges on:
1. Conceivability
and
2. Logical Consistency.

OTOH, the position that littlebabyjesus is taking seems tantamount to saying 'God is an incoherent concept'.

How I wish that were true!

There are many good arguments for Atheism and against Theism, but the incoherence of the 'God' concept isn't one of them.

 

[Knotted]

You're right in thinking that a lot of the problems are definitional. 'Gene' is a particularly problematic one, as is 'information'. I'd also agree that the eventual outcome is likely to be some sort of integration of the insights of gene-centrism and DST, not to mention the work of Kauffman, West-Eberhard, Margulis, Ulanowicz and many others. The whole field is in flux at the moment- its a really exciting time to be debating these issues in.

Having said that, IMO the eventual integrated perspective will look a lot more like DST than, say, Maynard Smith or Dawkins.

I've just been reading this paper (yes, I have far too much time on my hands!). It's really cleared up a lot of things in my mind. If I could sum up, if a genotypic variation is dependent on environment and vice versa AND throughout the population the environment is significantly varied THEN the statistical test (ANOVA) is dodgy and it is impossible to say whether that trait is genetic.

In particular, this point seems pertinent:

In contrast, scientists like Gottlieb insist that the ultimate practical goal must be causal understanding; for this purpose, potential variation—even to extents not normally encountered in nature—is as important as actual variation.

Basically it's a stats problem - when does the statistician know when their test is valid? The above criterion will fix it and that surely requires looking at developmental questions.

It all makes sense once you see the maths.

This is the problem with imputing a genetic base to racial IQ differences and presumably this is why the whole field of evolutionary psychology is dodgy.

It seems that DS theorists are coming from a developmental psychobiology perspective which might be the reason they are so insistent on this point - big co-dependency of genetic and environmental factors combined with large envirnomental variation in human populations.

Now I should go and do something useful with my life...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

OTOH, the position that littlebabyjesus is taking seems tantamount to saying 'God is an incoherent concept'.

That's really quite close to what I'm saying, yes. I would put it slightly differently – 'god' is an incompletely formed concept. The question I put to anyone who uses the word is this: What do you mean by 'god'? In its usual usage, it normally means little more than 'that which we do not understand', which is more an anti-concept than a concept.

 

[bhamgeezer]

I wasn't even talking about God but a hypothetical alien being with super powers, it doesn't require half properties ascribed to a God concept. What LBJ is saying seems to me equivalent to saying that Superman is an incoherent concept because we can't answer questions such as, how does he fly? How is he outside of the laws of physics? How is he not contrained by gravity? That doesn't mean any question regarding a hypothetical superman is going to be meaningless despite the only account we can give to supermans power's is that which we don't understand. It does mean that there will be no objective way by which to check the truth value of an answer, maybe this is the contraint LBJ is putting on meaningful questions?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Your recourse to magic makes your question worthless, though. You're attempting to examine an aspect of the physical world by appealing to something that is metaphysical, ie that is nonsense.

This is where the philosopher's distinction between 'ontological' and 'epistemological' can get you into a tangle. It is far from obvious how this distinction can be made.

 

[bhamgeezer]

Your recourse to magic makes your question worthless, though. You're attempting to examine an aspect of the physical world by appealing to something that is metaphysical, ie that is nonsense.

This is where the philosopher's distinction between 'ontological' and 'epistemological' can get you into a tangle. It is far from obvious how this distinction can be made.

You mistake the purpose of the question then, it's not a synthetic question about how the world is independently of us, but rather a test of personal intuitions and how they relate to our beliefs regarding how the world is. Using "magic" as you describe it, using nomologically impossible concepts, is perfectly valid move. Super-spartans, twin earth, remartians, mary in a box, zombies?

 

[Jonti]

I'm with bhamgeezer on this one. Implicitly your top-down causality cannot be described in terms of bottom-up causality. Implictly your emergent phenonmenon cannot in principle be described in causal terms of it's constituent parts.

Perhaps you are saying human behaviour cannot be described in reductionist terms and that physics needs to incorporate a fundamental new category of human causation.

Perhaps you are saying something much more banal.

You need to clarify your point.

Also don't assume theory comes after phenonmenon. There are some very striking examples of the reverse - sub-atomic particles for instance.

I'd call that a methodological necessity, rather than an assumption.

Non-locality means (as in a sense, does indeterminism) that the universe cannot in principle be described in causal terms of its constituent parts.

The banal point is the metaphysics of the mechanic isn't the only useful form of understanding, and is not even that useful in physics these days, let alone the other sciences.

 

[Caecilian]

Using "magic" as you describe it, using nomologically impossible concepts, is perfectly valid move. Super-spartans, twin earth, remartians, mary in a box, zombies?

Not to mention beetles in boxes, grue, inverted spectra, Swampman...

LBJ: Do you really want to get rid of thought experiments?

Aren't they a really useful philosophical tool, especially for clarifying our assumptions?

As well as being fun!

 

[Knotted]

I'd call that a methodological necessity, rather than an assumption.

Non-locality means (as in a sense, does indeterminism) that the universe cannot in principle be described in causal terms of its constituent parts.

The banal point is the metaphysics of the mechanic isn't the only useful form of understanding, and is not even that useful in physics these days, let alone the other sciences.

In a sense the need for the use of calculus in physics shows that the universe cannot be described in causal terms of its constituent parts, if by that you mean it can't be described in terms of cause and effect. (How would you describe a planet orbiting a star in terms of cause and effect?)

Non-localism is no problem. Remember that before Einstein it was assumed that gravity was a non-local effect and remember that classical physics had no problem with irreductionism. With quantum mechanics you just refer to the evolution of the universal wave function and that's just classical Newtonian mechanics with a twist. Admitedly the twist is very strange from a sense of physical intuition, but mathematically quantum mechanics is a close cousin of Newtonian mechanics (Hamiltonians).

I can appreciate that there are emergent phenomenon that we might consider in high level terms as this is the easiest way for our minds to comprehend them, but that doesn't mean that you can't in principle reduce these high level phenomenon to their low level nuts and bolts. I'm with bhamgeezer and Caelcilian in that I'm a reductionist in this sense ie. ontological reductionism.

What I think should be resisted is the idea that our concepts are necessarily high level approximations of the low level reality - that ignores that our concepts should be understood as human concepts that we use for our purposes. Different theories can have disimilar uses and that makes it senseless trying to reduce one to the other. When we talk about human causality we have quite different interests to when we talk about causality in physics - why reduce one concept to the other when their disimilarity is useful? I suspect that this sort of reductionism (epistemological/conceptual reductionism) is a result of insisting on a rigid fact-value dichotomy and that talk of causality is value-free (see Putnam).

 

[Jonti]

It's just not true that the picture of the world implied by non-locality, as demonstrated at the end of last century, is essentially no different from the picture painted by classical gravity. An obvious difference is that, in a non-local world properly speaking, the part cannot be explained absent the whole picture.

That is why you cannot in principle reduce all high level phenomenon to their low level nuts and bolts ~ the universal (sic) context matters.

 

[Knotted]

It's just not true that the picture of the world implied by non-locality, as demonstrated at the end of last century, is essentially no different from the picture painted by classical gravity. An obvious difference is that, in a non-local world properly speaking, the part cannot be explained absent the whole picture.

Possibly. This makes classical physics worse than quantum physics though. Quantum physics isn't radically non-local like classical physics - for example you don't get super-luminal signalling in quantum physics.

You can't consider the orbit of a planet absent the whole picture of the solar system.

Even more basically with structural questions - you can't consider the operation of an arm without looking at a shoulder and indeed the rest of the body.

That is why you cannot in principle reduce all high level phenomenon to their low level nuts and bolts ~ the universal (sic) context matters.

The universal wave function is a low level description not a high level description. It doesn't describe emergent phenomena. It is the nuts and bolts.

Perhaps what you are getting at is that you can't reduce everything down to interactions between particles? Particles are no longer discrete, definite units. You can't necessarily conceptually divide up a system. But that doesn't mean the system is something high level. Why is the whole high level and the part low level? Surely for our purposes, what makes a description low level is it's precise, mechanistic nature and what makes a description high level is it's approximate and emergent nature. Quantum mechanics is a type of mechanics.

A human being might be a high level phenomenon. But humans are not formed by quantum coherence - it's really difficult to get quantum coherence without dropping temperatures down to near absolute zero. Organisms aren't large scale quantum phenomena. You might have a point if organisms were constructed out of Boze-Einstein condensate, otherwise invoking quantum mechanics is just desperate. When a human decides to do something we don't model this decision making process on quantum mechanics and if we did, the description would be inhuman and mechanistic. Our high level concepts bare no resemblance to anything quantum mechanical just like they bare no resemblance to anything in classical mechanics.

I don't believe non-locality has any relation to emergence. I don't believe exotic physics have much to do with living organisms. These are bullets you are just going to have to bite.

 

[bhamgeezer]

I am quite impressed with how this thread went, its been interesting and I definately learnt something the debates in this forum are usually about political philosophy (marxism), random stuff people think is "philosophical" (noego) or simply bunfights (gorski)

 

[Caecilian]

I am quite impressed with how this thread went, its been interesting and I definately learnt something the debates in this forum are usually about political philosophy (marxism), random stuff people think is "philosophical" (noego) or simply bunfights (gorski)

Its been great!

Have to confess, though, that I've become somewhat less interested since yourself, myself and knotted all started agreeing with each other.

Anyway, I think that we should start a new thread, preferably something that won't invite mumbojumbo replies (so Consciousness might be out). I'd certainly be up for pretty much anything in Philosophy of Science/ Philosophy of Mind/ Cognitive Science.

Will try to think of some concrete suggestions.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Ok, finally, I have the space to make a considered response. Apologies if I was a little abrupt earlier – one of the hazards of dipping into here when you're working on something else.

You can't really believe that is the case due to anything more than epistemological limitations though can you?

I think this comes down to what you think epistemological limitations are and what it is possible to say outside them. Others have since touched on this. What does it mean to ask what lies beyond knowledge? I would say that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, it is backwards thinking to go from what can be known to what cannot be known – and anything that truly cannot be known also cannot be expressed, or even hinted at, since a degree of knowledge about it is required to express it.

I wasn't even talking about God but a hypothetical alien being with super powers, it doesn't require half properties ascribed to a God concept. What LBJ is saying seems to me equivalent to saying that Superman is an incoherent concept because we can't answer questions such as, how does he fly? How is he outside of the laws of physics? How is he not contrained by gravity? That doesn't mean any question regarding a hypothetical superman is going to be meaningless despite the only account we can give to supermans power's is that which we don't understand. It does mean that there will be no objective way by which to check the truth value of an answer, maybe this is the contraint LBJ is putting on meaningful questions?

This is linked to what I say above. It is of course valid to ask such hypothetical questions. We can imagine what would happen if we could travel at the speed of light, for instance, despite the fact that according to relativity, nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light. But it is revealing to imagine this, depending on the question you want answered.

In the case of superman flying, you could ask that question for all sorts of reasons, but the one subject a hypothetical superman flying by magic cannot shed any light on is the subject of flight.

Similarly, you're stuck with your hypothetical omniscient being – you cannot answer any questions about knowledge using that thought experiment as knowledge as we know it is physically constituted. It is very easy to unwittingly fall into a form of dualism, with all the contradictions that entails, with such thoughts of 'gods' (and it is as well to use the word god for what you're postulating as anything else – something that can know without being a knower, without any physical basis for its knowing).

In short, you cannot consider physics questions through recourse to anti-physics. (Or 'metaphysics' if you prefer, a term I'm not keen on – anti-physics sums up for me its true (false) nature.)

 

[Caecilian]

Ok, finally, I have the space to make a considered response. Apologies if I was a little abrupt earlier – one of the hazards of dipping into here when you're working on something else.

I think this comes down to what you think epistemological limitations are and what it is possible to say outside them. Others have since touched on this. What does it mean to ask what lies beyond knowledge? I would say that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, it is backwards thinking to go from what can be known to what cannot be known – and anything that truly cannot be known also cannot be expressed, or even hinted at, since a degree of knowledge about it is required to express it.

This is linked to what I say above. It is of course valid to ask such hypothetical questions. We can imagine what would happen if we could travel at the speed of light, for instance, despite the fact that according to relativity, nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light. But it is revealing to imagine this, depending on the question you want answered.

In the case of superman flying, you could ask that question for all sorts of reasons, but the one subject a hypothetical superman flying by magic cannot shed any light on is the subject of flight.

Similarly, you're stuck with your hypothetical omniscient being – you cannot answer any questions about knowledge using that thought experiment as knowledge as we know it is physically constituted. It is very easy to unwittingly fall into a form of dualism, with all the contradictions that entails, with such thoughts of 'gods' (and it is as well to use the word god for what you're postulating as anything else – something that can know without being a knower, without any physical basis for its knowing).

In short, you cannot consider physics questions through recourse to anti-physics. (Or 'metaphysics' if you prefer, a term I'm not keen on – anti-physics sums up for me its true (false) nature.)

I'm not convinced by this. I can think of at least two thought experiments involving (sort of) omniscient beings with full knowledge of a perfect physics, and the ability to 'see' things at a microphysical level. These are:

Hans Jonas The Phenomena of Life, essay entitled 'Is God a Mathematician?'

Daniel Dennett Brainchildren, essay entitled 'Real Patterns'

Neither appears to be available online.

Despite their very different backgrounds, Jonas and Dennett make similar arguments. Jonas considers the organism as a constant state of flux- matter and energy are constantly interchanged with the environment, unlike with say a rock. He then asks the question: 'Would a being with a perfect physics and a perfect knowledge of microstates (and that sees the world in terms of microstates) even recognize the existence of an organism as an entity?' He concludes not, and says that in order to recognize an organism, you need to be one yourself.

Dennett asks a related question: 'Would a being with a perfect physics and a perfect knowledge of microstates (and that sees the world in terms of microstates) recognize the existence of intentional explanations?' Again he concludes not, and argues that this shows that intentional states are real patterns that are not epistemologically reducible to lower-level explanations.

Personally, I'd say that these are both very good thought experiments that really do increase our understanding of the issues in question. However, by your criteria, both appear to be invalid.

Which leads me to conclude that the kind of 'philosophical therapy' that you're practicing is rather over-zealous. My own feeling is that instead of creating overarching rules for what can and can't be done in a thought experiment, its better to take them on a case by case basis, and see how useful/ illuminating they actually are in practice.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Dennett asks a related question: 'Would a being with a perfect physics and a perfect knowledge of microstates (and that sees the world in terms of microstates) recognize the existence of intentional explanations?' Again he concludes not, and argues that this shows that intentional states are real patterns that are not epistemologically reducible to lower-level explanations.

Ok, I'm just going to take Dennett's argument. The problem with it, from what I can see, is that it assumes that you can know what this perfect knowledge is. I would say that you cannot, and that Dennett's conclusions are not valid. I agree, as it happens, that intentional states are not reducible to lower-level explanations, but I don't agree with his path to that conclusion. I don't think it is at all obvious, given the level of possible knowledge that we have, how to conceive properly of a perfect knowledge and say what that perfect knowledge could be.

To take another thought experiment:

First a couple of working assumptions. Our consciousness (by which I mean the totality of the content of the model of reality that we construct and call our minds) is a simplification of 'reality'. It contains shapes, curves, solidity, a 'present' with various content, conforms to a Newtonian physics. We only have our little brains with which to model the universe, so we have to simplify, and we do so in a way that allows us to make our way through the world at our particular scale of existence.

Now, that which is modelled, that which causes the information that we take and use to run our models, is something of a very different order. We gain glimpses of that different order when we examine the very small, the very large or the very fast. It is an achievement in itself to be able to see that our models are not in fact what is 'out there' (and of course 'in here' as well – our models of ourselves conform to our models' simplifications).

Somehow, mysteriously to us, but no doubt because we are intentional beings, we have a point of view – there is something that is able to examine the model we run. That something is none other than us ourselves, and we wonder at how that can be. The nature of that wonder, and whether we are capable of resolving it, is another matter that I'll leave to one side.

So here comes the speculation about that which is modelled: the totality of existence, which contains among other things these simplified models of itself. We have no reason to believe or not to believe that it is also running, like us, as a model that examines itself. Modelling another level, itself one among many, who knows? But let us assume that it is as we are. What can it know about what is inside it? Can it 'see' us in here? Not while remaining a unified whole, no it cannot. (And similarly, we cannot know, if our consciousness is unified, whether or not there are smaller models of us running inside us.) To see the whole you need to be outside the whole. A system cannot fully understand itself, and this is where Godel's theorum about mathematical systems is relevant: the statement that is true but cannot be proved by the system cannot be eliminated.

So, to go back to Dennett's thought experiment, for it to work, the entity must have an existence that goes beyond our universe, an existence that we necessarily cannot imagine. And that invalidates any conclusion you might wish to draw – as we have no way of knowing what kind of understanding might be available to such a 'being'?