I Was Googling "Is there agency in the universe?"

And the first article that came up was an incredibly brief one from Scientific American.

It makes perfect sense that a scientist using the Darwinian model would reduce the problem to this...

"The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real."

The article is by Michael Shermer and is here.

It sames strange to even call it an article it's so brief, but I guess an article can be briefer than an essay, and it feels sillier calling this an essay. But if I remember correctly, I think some of Montaigne's essays were about this brief. Okay. You're saying "whatev" by now.

I thought this line was very funny: "Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person)."

And I love his closing line, the idea that we are "natural-born supernaturalists."

I also like his neologism "agenticity."

He doesn't really make a claim for inventing the word. I didn't even feel like backpedaling in the language to look for an earlier use or date of origin.

I'm thinking that word might have popped up before this. But I can see the usefulness of the word to Shermer's argument for the way it rubricizes and unites the diverse types of behavior he's describing.

His "patternicity" I find more awkward and factitious-sounding. As a word I mean, not necessarily as a concept.

The author of this article really didn't nail down everything I was intending by my Googled question.

I don't think I'm asking it in a mystic sense.

Agenticity for me could be used more in the Kantian sense. I mean the sense of Kantian categories.

Maybe I'm really being disingenuous with my question, since I'm not really sure if I'm just asking about the a priori.

I mean I can see a thinker believing mathematics itself is a form of agency in the universe.

Isn't that the funny origin of the religion Pythagoras mixed into his mathematics?

I suppose the Kaballah also goes in that direction, and there it's spiritualism too.

Most mathematicians would probably say "There's no agency there" or simply admit the question is outside of their bailiwick.

I'm talking about the a priori and how it meshes with mathematics--whether you believe mathematics originates or only explains.

Whether it's a source or a figment overlaid.

Metaphysical naturalists like Santayana subscribe to the principle of supervenience when it comes to abstractions like these.

They evidently don't see or feel a mystery there

"Can an abstraction have an independent existence?" What does that mean? I don't know. Reformulate: "Can an abstraction have an existence independent from consciousness." Is that too an agenticity error, apres Shermer? (Maybe I am just drawn to mathematical Platonism.)

Is the universe itself a form of consciousness? Then you're into Buddhism suddenly. With that question. Hinduism too a bit.

The weird thing for me is the feeling of a symmetry between consciousness and the rest of the universe. I know most scientists would say right there, "Why are you wasting my time creating a (false) duality. We don't need Cartesianism back."

The idea that consciousness contains something is itself a big leap or stretch I suppose.

And yet this is a sort of human ur-perception. The idea that the universe is inside our head. We create a topology already as soon as we speak in those terms. And then our consciousness exists in the sense of space this topology posits.

Do you see the relationship of consciousness to the world as 1) consciousness immured, sealed off, a Wittgensteinian "fly-bottle" 2) consciousness open at one end like the fly-bottle uncorked 3) consciousness like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle or an infinite figure eight 4) consciousness as fly-paper 5) consciousness as synonymous with the universe, just the way the universe exists 6 some other thing?

You can still drown in a Klein bottle. If it's filled with water.

The Klein bottle is so ATM, so ass-to-mouth.

But here's the weird thing for me: either consciousness reflects the universe (and that seems like philosophical duality to me) or consciousness is one with the universe. In the latter case, I'm drawn to the conclusion that the universe itself is consciousness. They are synonymous. And I guess that's what most scientists believe, whether they articulate it that way or not.

Empiricism is a monism.

All of science is based on the idea of reproducibility, predictability.

I don't think consciousness is all that predictable and I'm not sure I believe it is ever reproducible.

This still seems to lead to a fundamental paradox for me. Because if the universe and consciousness are synonymous (and you invoke dualism if you don't believe that) why doesn't consciousness behave as predictably as other matter does? Or under the quantum mechanical models of today, do we attribute consciousness's erratic nature to the unpredictable nature of subatomic particles?

Is Taoism the religion most in agreement with physics? "As above, so below."

Is consciousness an anomaly in the universe? Or is consciousness a universal anomaly? If it's a universal anomaly how is it an anomaly--I guess that's an oxymoron.

Our sense of identity is predicated on the idea that consciousness is predictable and reproducible. Of course, philosophy has been hacking away at that "person" since at least Hume and company and probably long before.

The good news is a person can never die, because that person never existed.

The person was just a diverse series of empirical data flashing across the (surface? interiority?) of the universe like a television screen on the fritz.

So feel consoled.