Why is that the same as 'giving up'? I call it a better hypothesis. It's like saying there is a halting problem and there are problems that are fundamentally unsolvable by computers. If true, it's pointless trying to create an algorithm to solve the halting problem. Instead, perhaps the mind is a halting oracle, and we can progress even further in the sciences by that realization.

> Why is that the same as 'giving up'? I call it a better hypothesis.

It's not a hypothesis, because it doesn't explain anything. It's also not falsifiable, so it is not useful for the purposes of science.

> It's like saying there is a halting problem and there are problems that are fundamentally unsolvable by computers

The halting problem is a rigorously defined mathematical problem which has a mathematical proof that demonstrates that it is indeed unsolvable. That's entirely different from saying that "there might be such a thing as a halting problem and it's probably unsolvable".

Furthermore, the halting problem is abstract from physical reality. It is true regardless of anything observed in physical reality. In physical reality, there is no such thing as a program that will not terminate, because there is no such thing as a computer that runs forever. The "physical halting problem" is solvable. The answer is always: The program will halt at some point because of thermodynamics.

Similarly, it is my position that the physical phenomenon of intelligence can be entirely explained by natural processes involving no metaphysics whatsoever.

> Instead, perhaps the mind is a halting oracle, and we can progress even further in the sciences by that realization.

Perhaps it is, but there is no such realization. You haven't even defined what you mean by intelligence and why that would even require a non-materialist explanation.

Well then, how is materialism falsifiable? If it isn't, how is it a scientific hypothesis?

> Well then, how is materialism falsifiable? If it isn't, how is it a scientific hypothesis?

It isn't a scientific hypothesis.

You use the word "materialism" to segregate yourself philosophically, but I haven't made a philosophical argument.

Let's suppose your "hypothesis" is true, but given that it is beyond physical observation, we can never hope to know that it is true or even know the probability of it being true. Then what would be the benefit in assuming that it is true?

We could conceivably save some time on trying to figure out AGI and instead do something "more productive". However, that's true of almost any endeavor. Anything you do in life has a chance of failure and an opportunity cost. Just imagine what could have become of us, had we not bothered to write HN comments!

Ok, then if materialism isn't a scientific hypothesis, why is it scientific?

I don't know what "materialism is scientific" would mean exactly. I never made that claim, so don't ask me to defend it.

Remember, you are the one who wants to fight this "materialism vs. dualism" battle, not me. I'm not saying your position is wrong. I'm saying your position seems inconsequential at best, but harmful at worst.

To illustrate this, let's take a hypothetical "dualist" explanation for disease:

"Disease is caused by spirits that attach to our bodies, but we cannot observe these spirits by any physical means and we can never interact with them in any distinguishable way."

In other words, we cannot perform experiments, we cannot learn anything, so these spirits might as well not exist at all. There is no practical difference.

Now that's all fine and well until you realize that disease is actually caused by physical processes than you can understand and intervene with. Had you been convinced that it was spirits all along, you wouldn't have bothered trying to figure out the physical processes.

Today this example may sound ridiculous, but for most of history similar convictions held people back from turning quackery into real medicine.

And on the materialist side we have similar quackery with phrenology, bogus medicines, Darwinian evolution, and the like. There is quackery everywhere. The fact that one can concoct a false explanation within either materialism or dualism means such an example doesn't help determine which paradigm is better.

The important question is whether one paradigm allows us to explain reality better than the other, and dualism does this very well. There is no materialistic explanation for consciousness, free will, abstract thought or mathematics. Instead, those who follow materialism strictly end up denying such things, and we end up with incoherent and inaccurate theories about the world.

> And on the materialist side we have similar quackery with phrenology, bogus medicines...

Yes, but the key distinction here is that phrenology or bogus medicine are testable. If you claim phrenology predicts something but then statistics show that this isn't the case, phrenology is proven wrong. It's more difficult with medicine, but it's at least possible.

Furthermore, we know that many of our "materialist" theories in physics are wrong. We know it because they disagree with experiment. However, they still have enough predictive power to be very useful.

> ...Darwinian evolution, and the like.

I'm not sure what you mean here. The principles behind Darwinian evolution are easily reproduced. Re-creating billions of years of evolution in a lab would be difficult, of course.

> The important question is whether one paradigm allows us to explain reality better than the other, and dualism does this very well.

I don't think it does it well at all. An explanation that you can not test isn't useful. In fact, a wrong explanation that you can test is more useful.

There's an infinite number of "dualist" explanations, all of which we cannot test. So which one to choose? Why stop at dualism, why not make it trialism? Why not infinitism?

Why not just say that there's an infinite number of intangible interactions, that every mind in the universe is connected with every other mind through a mesh spanning an infinite-dimensional hyperplane? You can't prove that this isn't the case, why not believe that one instead?

> There is no materialistic explanation for consciousness, free will, abstract thought or mathematics.

Well, so what? All of the "dualist" explanations are equally useless, so I might as well do without any explanation whatsoever.

> Instead, those who follow materialism strictly end up denying such things, and we end up with incoherent and inaccurate theories about the world.

Inaccurate and incoherent theories that are testable can nevertheless be very useful. Coherent theories that are untestable are useless, unless maybe you can turn them into a religious cult.

Why do you assume dualism is not testable?

Also, Darwinian evolution is well known to be false. Just read any modern bioinformatics book. There are a whole host of other mechanisms besides Malthusian pressure, random mutation and natural selection that are used to explain evolution nowadays. As Eugene Koonin says, the modern synthesis is really a sort of postmodern evolution, where there is no ultimate explanation for how it works. Koonin even promotes a form of neo-Lamarkianism. Darwin's unique contributions to the theory of evolution have been experimentally discredited. You can easily disprove Darwin yourself with all the genomic data that is online these days.

> Why do you assume dualism is not testable?

I assume that your conception of dualism is not testable because, in your own words, it is "beyond anything in this physical universe".

If it's beyond the physical universe, it cannot be observed and therefore it can not be tested. Otherwise, it would be part of physics and the physical universe just like gravity, if only hitherto unknown.

> Also, Darwinian evolution is well known to be false.

So is the general theory of relativity. Yet, it's "right enough" to allow us to make sufficiently accurate predictions about the physical world.

Furthermore, one theory being wrong doesn't make other theories "more right".

> There are a whole host of other mechanisms besides Malthusian pressure, random mutation and natural selection that are used to explain evolution nowadays.

As you say yourself, that's besides random mutation and natural selection, not instead. It would be a miracle if somehow Darwin could have gotten all of the details right with the tools available to him.

Also, in science everything is an approximation to some degree, there are always factors you disregard so that you can actually perform a prediction in a finite amount of time. There's variance and uncertainty in every measurement.

> As Eugene Koonin says, the modern synthesis is really a sort of postmodern evolution, where there is no ultimate explanation for how it works.

There's no "ultimate explanation" for anything. It's turtles all the way down.

It doesn't follow that for something to be observed it must be part of physics. If the physical universe is a medium, like our computers, they can transmit information from other entities without the entities themselves being embedded in the computers. It sounds like your argument begs the question by first assuming everything that interacts with us must be physical.

Darwin's mechanisms do not explain anything in evolution. All of his mechanisms select against increased complexity and diversity, so are useless to explain the origin of species as he originally claimed. Darwinian evolution is dead and died a long time ago. Modern evolution is very much non-Darwinian.

> It doesn't follow that for something to be observed it must be part of physics.

It's the other way around. If it can be observed, it interacts with matter. If it interacts with matter, it is within the domain of physics, by definition. I don't understand why you have a problem with this.

Physicists are well aware that we do not understand all the interactions and we do keep discovering more and more interesting phenomena, such as quantum entanglement.

> All of his mechanisms select against increased complexity and diversity, so are useless to explain the origin of species as he originally claimed.

I don't know where this criticism comes from, but it sounds like a straw man. Natural selection may select against "complexity and diversity", but random mutation puts "complexity and diversity" back in the game.

I think you are equivocating between the laws that govern material interaction and things that interact with matter. They are not the same thing. The laws of physics are developed by breaking matter down to its most uniform and granular components, and then characterizing their interaction. An immaterial soul would not be captured by such an analysis, but its interaction with matter could still be empirically identified.

As for evolution, I see where you are coming from. Randomness, like flipping a coin, is always complex and different. However, if there are only a few specific, long coin sequence you are trying to construct, then flipping a coin does not get you there. There are just too many possibilities within a couple hundred coin flips to check within the lifespan of the universe. And, if you have one of these sequences, then randomly flipping some of the coins will destroy the sequence. Just think about what happens if you flip random bits in a computer program. For the most part, unless you get really, really lucky, it will destroy the computer program. So, while a few random mutations may be very lucky and flip the right nucleotides to create new functionality, the vast majority of mutations are destructive, and will kill off the species before there is the chance to evolve new functionality.

> I think you are equivocating between the laws that govern material interaction and things that interact with matter. They are not the same thing. The laws of physics are developed by breaking matter down to its most uniform and granular components, and then characterizing their interaction. An immaterial soul would not be captured by such an analysis, but its interaction with matter could still be empirically identified.

If an "immaterial soul" interacted with matter in an empirically identifiable way, it is part of physics. The forces that interact with matter are themselves not made out of matter. To be precise, matter is only that which has a mass, but there are also particles that don't have mass. Their interactions are nevertheless part of physics and we can measure them at least indirectly. They're not abstract constructs, they're very much part of the physical universe.

In that sense, perhaps the term "materialism" is misleading, because ultimately physics is about forces, not matter. Remember, I'm not using that term for myself.

> However, if there are only a few specific, long coin sequence you are trying to construct, then flipping a coin does not get you there. There are just too many possibilities within a couple hundred coin flips to check within the lifespan of the universe.

There isn't just a single coin though. There's about 10^46 molecules in the ocean[1]. That's a lot of interactions over the span of billions of years.

> And, if you have one of these sequences, then randomly flipping some of the coins will destroy the sequence. Just think about what happens if you flip random bits in a computer program. For the most part, unless you get really, really lucky, it will destroy the computer program.

It depends on the bits flipped. Bits flip all the time[2] and people rarely notice, because they're not necessarily important bits. It also depends on whether the program will abort upon error detection. Without memory protection by the operating system, most programs wouldn't terminate, they'd keep trucking along, perhaps producing some garbage here and there. In fact, the difficult part about memory corruption bugs is that the program often won't terminate until well after the corruption has taken place.

Also, computer programs aren't like organisms exposed to nature. In nature, it's possible that a mutation kills you, but it's far more likely that some physical process or another organism kills you.

> So, while a few random mutations may be very lucky and flip the right nucleotides to create new functionality, the vast majority of mutations are destructive, and will kill off the species before there is the chance to evolve new functionality.

The vast majority of mutations are relatively inconsequential, at least for short-term survival. Our DNA mutates all the time, but also we have evolved error correction, which you probably also will not accept as evolving "by random mutation and selection".

[1]https://www.quora.com/How-many-water-molecules-are-in-the-Ea...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effect_on_electroni...

So, it doesn't really seem we are disagreeing, it's just a matter of terminology. You seem to want to call every interacting thing 'physics', which you are free to do, but then I'm not sure what the value of the term is. And, you agree we already empirically measure many immaterial things. So you seem to agree that in theory an immaterial soul is an empirically testable hypothesis, in which case I'm not sure what your objection is.

As for the number of interactions, we have trouble reasoning about large numbers. Billions of years and molecules sound like unimaginably large numbers and of similar magnitude to trillions or decillion, even though the latter are many orders of magnitude greater. DNA sequences can be hundreds of billions of base pairs long. So, if we could only depend on random mutation and natural selection, we'd need 4^10^11 attempts to hit a particular sequence, which is more trials than even a multiverse of universes can offer.

> So, it doesn't really seem we are disagreeing, it's just a matter of terminology. You seem to want to call every interacting thing 'physics', which you are free to do, but then I'm not sure what the value of the term is.

Everything that interacts with matter is in the domain of physics. So if your concept of a "soul" (or whatever makes you a "dualist") can at least in principle be observed, we can count it in. It's then not "beyond this universe".

It would also raise a lot of questions: Are souls "individuals"? If so, does every organism afford a soul? If so, where do new souls come from when the amount of organisms increases? Where do they go if they decrease? Is there really only one soul spanning all organisms? How can we test for any of these things? What are the consequences?

It's perfectly fine to explore such questions, but I am personally not convinced that something like a soul - within or outside the realms of physics - is at all necessary to explain life or intelligence as the phenomena we can already observe. That's what we disagree on.

> DNA sequences can be hundreds of billions of base pairs long.

Perhaps, but the simplest lifeforms alive today have on the order of hundreds of thousands of base pairs.

> So, if we could only depend on random mutation and natural selection, we'd need 4^10^11 attempts to hit a particular sequence, which is more trials than even a multiverse of universes can offer.

Yes, but DNA didn't just form spontaneously, fully assembled. It formed from simpler precursors, which formed from simpler precursors still, all the way down to proteins which formed from the simplest of molecules. Those precursors don't survive because they can not compete with their successors. They could be forming in the oceans right now, but they won't progress because they'll just get eaten.

There have been experiments done reproducing it up to the "protein formation" step. Anything more complex than that is likely going to take too much time to result in a new lifeform - especially one that could survive ex-vitro.

Even staying within materialism, it isn't clear that 'everything is physics'. For example, our computers operate according to the laws of physics, but the physical laws tell us nothing about how they operate. To understand how computers operate, we need to know a lot of extra information besides the physical laws. In other words, physical laws tell us nothing about physical conditions. This is why there are many other scientific disciplines besides physics. So, since this notion of 'everything is physics' doesn't even work within materialism, it is hard to see why it would exclude immaterial entities.

And as you point out, the notion that Darwinian mechanisms can account for evolution of complexity and diversity is pure speculation. Which is why modern evolution theory does not use Darwin's theories. It uses mechanisms that we can see operating in the lab and in bioinformatics, such as bacterial horizontal gene transfer and empirically calculated substitution matrices. And the further that bioinformatic algorithms diverge from Darwin's ideas, the better they perform.

There's a difference between the physical laws (that we know) and the "domain of physics". There's a great deal we don't yet know about physics that's nevertheless within its domain.

Not everything is in the domain of physics. "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" is not in the domain of physics. However, physics (or its subsets chemistry and biology) can explain how life may have emerged.

Physics can't rule out that a god snapped his godfingers 5000 years ago and made it all appear the way that it does now. It can't rule out an immortal soul. It can't rule out that we're in a simulation, or that unobservable fairies are actually behind all the forces in the universe. For those cases, I like to apply Occam's Razor - not because it's true, but because it's practical.

> And as you point out, the notion that Darwinian mechanisms can account for evolution of complexity and diversity is pure speculation.

Random mutation and natural selection do result in complexity and diversity. This is a fact, not speculation. You can try it at home, on your computer. We do have genetic algorithms working on those exact principles. They're generally not preferable to more informed algorithms, because they're slow, but they do work.

> It uses mechanisms that we can see operating in the lab and in bioinformatics, such as bacterial horizontal gene transfer and empirically calculated substitution matrices. And the further that bioinformatic algorithms diverge from Darwin's ideas, the better they perform.

As we can see from computer simulation, pure selection and mutation is inefficient. If nature can find a shortcut mechanism that "Darwinian evolution" itself does not account for, it's not surprising that it would become a dominating factor. However, what makes you believe that such a mechanism itself could not possibly arise from natural selection and random mutation? Is it the improbability? It's a big universe, you know. We're not even talking about the probability of this happening on all planets, but on any planet in the universe.

I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws.

As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored.

> I think you are missing my point. Physical phenomena are not reducible to physical laws, and cannot be explained by the laws. You cannot derive a binary adder from the laws of electricity, and that is why computer engineering is not a field of physics, but is its own domain with its own set of laws.

Fair enough, let's just leave it at that.

> As for Darwin's mechanisms, I'm not speaking from personal incredulity, but from what I see reading bioinformatics textbooks and what leading biologists write, not what we are taught in high school. Darwin's mechanisms are only given lip service, and when the rubber meets the road in practice they are completely ignored.

Okay, I've done some googling. Now let me take a shot at reconstructing what happened here. You read that one paper[1] that quite boldly claims that the CRISPR mechanism proves that Lamarckism is real. You stumbled upon it because it appeared to confirm something that you already wanted to believe: "Darwinism is wrong". You otherwise have no background in bioinformatics.

The thing is, that paper doesn't prove Darwin wrong at all - he never ruled out other effects besides random mutation and selection. Darwin just wasn't very fond of Lamarck's work, which wasn't very scientific even by the standards of its time.

The effects of random mutation and selection have been readily reproduced countless times. Lamarckian effects on the other hand have not been observed until epigenetics (a bit of a stretch), HGT (rather uncommon in eukaryotes like us two) or this here CRISPR (more of a bacteria thing). That's despite lots of experiments that have been performed to prove Lamarckism right. If anything, nature has a lot of obvious Darwinism and maybe some not-so-obvious Lamarckism here and there. To quote the paper:

"Neither Lamarck nor Darwin were aware of the mechanisms of emergence and fixation of heritable variation. Therefore, it was relatively easy for Lamarck to entertain the idea that phenotypic variation directly translates into heritable (what we now consider genetic or genomic) changes. We now realize that the strict Lamarckian scenario is extremely demanding in that a molecular mechanism must exist for the effect of a phenotypic change to be channeled into the corresponding modification of the genome (mutation). There seems to be no general mechanisms for such reverse genome engineering and it is not unreasonable to surmise that genomes are actually protected from this type of mutation."

Personally, I actually find the prospect of Lamarckian effects in the evolution of "higher" species exciting and plausible. It's not exactly a proven thing that this is common in nature, as you seem to believe.