Conversation with Rick Rosner on Metaphysics: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/15

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*

Abstract

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here. He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizzanamed him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine. Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory. Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.  Rosner discusses: metaphysics.

Keywords: Giga Society, Mega Society, metaphysics, physical law, physics, Rick Rosner, truth, universe.

Conversation with Rick Rosner on Metaphysics: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about the bullshit of metaphysics. I think that metaphysics, in so far as we currently understand it and have historically taken it in its existence, is outmoded in many ways. In that sense, I would argue for it being bullshit. I take that as a shorthand as mostly. It will have some uses; however, the space of what we have considered metaphysics for the last 2500 years as a ballpark has shrunk incredibly as we’ve developed physical principles or the elements of physical law in our sort of principles of existence have become more and more unified and discovered and convergent on more fundamental truths. Metaphysics has sort of shrunk to a degree where physical law has taken its place in any regard. However, you can provide frameworks, discussion, and question framing to help with the orientation around that physical law; that physical law, though, replaced the metaphysics of yesteryear or yester millennia. In that sense, I would argue as a shorthand; metaphysics is bullshit with an asterisk mostly (mostly*).

Rick Rosner: Okay, two things. One is the extreme success of science, particularly physics. Everything boils down to physics, biology, and chemistry; if you take it far enough, psychology and everything can be traced back to physics, which doesn’t mean you can’t make statements about biology. Every time you talk about biology or psychology, you don’t have to take it back to what happens among atoms that constitute cells. You can talk about the phenomena of larger systems that rest on physics but have their own more efficiently characterized phenomena. Did I say both things? The success of physics squeezed out metaphysics that people don’t like considering metaphysical questions, which are the ‘why’ of things, while physics tends to answer the ‘how’ of things; this is how things behave. We’re going to not worry too much about why things are the way they are, like, you have the Big Bang, and you have the physics of the Big Bang, and you even have explanations for it. Let’s say that instability of the vacuum field leads to, when that symmetry is broken, it leads to a tremendous release of energy which constitutes all the mass-energy in the universe, but that still doesn’t get to why it should be that way, which is least a marginally metaphysical question and one that few people dare to think they can get results for.

We talk metaphysically quite a bit. Here’s a metaphysical principle: existence is permitted, or to put it another way, the rules of existence permit existence. So, non-existence is not absolute. That seems obvious from the fact that we exist or don’t exist. At least the illusion of our existence exists, which argues for at least that amount of existence.

Jacobsen: If we take that frame, the asterisk for me sits there mostly. However, if we take ideas of the past where we were using questions of a why about a higher power or a higher order, not in the sense of vertical but in the sense of a larger consciousness or law constructing things and the elimination of that, why through answering it with a how shrinks that metaphysical landscape, and by that metaphysical landscape, I think the simplification of it would be the way landscape, where the whys become much smaller, manageable, and pragmatic but highly abstract in the sense of existence.

Rosner: They’re pushed farther away than they’re pushed further down. When physics can account for everything, most of the whys are stripped out of the other disciplines: biology and chemistry. Or at least the idea is you’re waiting for the whys to be… the whys will arrive in due course and the only whys that you don’t know if they’ll ever be answered or pushed down into physics and away from the sciences that build from physics.

Jacobsen: So, those principles from physics, the physical law, comes to all of the house, the functional answers.

Rosner: It’s like the God of the gaps thing; you’re right that religion has less to do as science accounts for more and more things.

Jacobsen: I mean, we have the area of time. We have the second law of thermodynamics. We have a quantum structure.

Rosner: I believe that information pressure accounts for the Big Bang, for a Big Bang-y type deal where I don’t believe in just one Big Bang, but I believe that the bangs you get result from collapsed matter wanting to un-collapse. Well, collapsed matter collapses into generality. In a black hole, everything is collapsed into all the information; you can argue about it, but basically, you’re looking at systems with less capacity to hold information.

Jacobsen: The descriptors of that information will be mathematicized, and in a sense, that is the character of physical law.

Rosner: I’m just saying that states of collapsed matter want to expand back into specific information containing states, and by what I mean, the flow of time is such that it’s incorporated into time that you go from collapse-y to expand into a specific lower entropy state; less general states and that that accounts for the exploding pressure of the Big Bang. If so, that pushes the why of the Big Bang away with a fairly specific explanation. So, in that case, if that’s sufficient, which it would be on several levels, then your argument succeeds that all the whys are also a part of physics.

Jacobsen: So, a lot of traditional framing, even within the scientific community, implies an anti-science framing even though it’s a community of scientists because there is an invocation of a ‘why’ framing, which would be teleological.

Rosner: Can you say that again?

Jacobsen: Even among community scientists, if they’re framing a why rather than a how they’re framing things teleologically.

Rosner: I don’t agree with that. A lot of the talks we’ve had that apply to IC but probably also apply in general is that consistency is required for existence, which is kind of a general metaphysical principle, and that is a why statement without assigning motive to the universe.

Jacobsen: So, maybe it’s a lowercase why where a teleological indication be a larger case WHY.

Rosner: Teleological to me, if I understand correctly, is there’s a conscious moving force behind something like there’s no teleology behind a most grounded understanding of evolution; that evolution runs without motive. What succeeds under evolution succeeds without being pushed to any ultimate ends and without being pushed by any conscious being with an agenda. It’s just that according to the processes in the universe, some species survive better than others, some individuals survive better than others, and these species and individuals, over the course of evolution, come to embody certain characteristics. However, no being in the universe wanted those characteristics to be manifested.

Jacobsen: It was engineering without forethought.

Rosner: Pretty much. Now, I’d argue that aspects of evolution involve consciousness when people breed dogs or other animals. The people are conscious and have an agenda.

Jacobsen: So, any characteristic of a system, say, cut off at mammals where there’s a sexual selection pressure is, in a sense, a conscious selection mechanism within evolution.

Rosner: But there’s no divine being; there’s no God who set everything in motion.

Jacobsen: It’s a smaller aspect of a why without invoking a bigger WHY.

Rosner: All right, let’s go to a different thing: the chemical principle of elements combining in small ratios, 1:2, 2:3, which was a principle known before electron shells were discovered. That’s still a chemical principle, a ‘how’ without a ‘why.’ However, there’s a similar principle we’ve discussed, which is the usefulness of numbers in all sorts of areas of the life of existence, particularly small numbers, which seems like a metaphysical principle.

Jacobsen: I think there might be a meta metaphysical principle where there’s a driver, even at that level, towards an informational optimization, a driver to simplicity.

Rosner: I’d say that the driver is that you need a lack of contradiction; you need self-consistency to exist. You can’t exist and not exist, which is probably both metaphysical and physical. However, then you can apply it to be the why behind the efficacy of math and the commonness of math principles in the world. Simple mathematics is very consistent, and you’ll see existing systems having an easier time existing when they are built from simple math or the same consistencies that make simple math consistent.

Jacobsen: Yet those symbolic representations, those are describing the real world…

Rosner: There seems to be a lot of how and also a lot of why in there.

Jacobsen: I mean, we abstract beyond where those laws can take us, even in this universe, just to make the quantities and constants much larger than what is there to have thought experiments.

Rosner: I’ve got another issue. Do we need to be familiar with the idea and the aim of metaphysics to think about science? Science is how we figure out how everything works, like, why does the tail of a comet point away from the sun? That’s a why question because radiation pushes the tail out behind it.

Jacobsen: You seem to imply a how in that particular frame. You can make the equivalent question by saying ‘how’ at the start rather than ‘why.’

Rosner: Yeah, I mean, you can say, how is this phenomenon of the comet and its tail pointing in a particular way? How does that happen? You can put it either way, but I’m asking, don’t you need a kind of metaphysical orientation to even get you into science?

Jacobsen: I need the ability to make the concrete abstract and then to reverse engineer from the abstract to the concrete in terms of an experiment. Test this abstract principle on this physical reality.

Rosner: But every freaking kid in the world who is science, I don’t know, probably you can divide the kids into the engineers want to want to make things and do stuff…

Jacobsen: Well, kids engage in trial and error. That’s not science; that’s protoscience.

Rosner: I mean, so you got the cosmologist, and you got the engineers. I would think that the cosmologists would need a healthy dose of wanting to know why, and the engineers might be able to get by with less wanting to know why and more how I make this happen.

Jacobsen: Here is the distinction I’m hearing: modern Isaac Newton looking at the sun and saying it’s a nuclear furnace and then understanding the principles undergirding them. You can have a poet like William Blake looking at it and saying I see a choir of angels singing to the Lord.

Rosner: No, let’s go back to the old Newton, the actual Newton who saw an equivalence between an object falling to earth and the moon orbiting around the earth and made the connection that there is a common force that’s making the moon stay in orbit and the apple if you believe the story, fall to earth.

Jacobsen: We can frame the question here. Why is there an equivalence between these two? You could also ask: How is there an equivalence between these two?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: All the same question, and in that sense, that goes from my original statement that metaphysics, in that basic sense which is very general now, is bullshit. Yet, there are areas like you are noting on a very abstract level of existence, non-existence, etc., where metaphysics is legitimate and that I agree with.

Rosner: And why would you want to do away with metaphysics if it’s an easy way into scientific thinking?

Jacobsen: If that’s the way for people to become more informed on science and scientific thinking, too, I’m all for it.

Rosner: I mean, I remember a set of books. I was probably too old for them, but I remember a set of books called “Tell Me Why,” they weren’t titled Tell Me How. They were books of science.

Jacobsen: Were they written to an American audience, Rick? [Laughs]

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: What year was this? What decade?

Rosner: I don’t know. They started coming out in the ’70s and probably went through the ’90s.

Jacobsen: How religious was the United States back then compared to now?

Rosner: Okay, if you’re going to talk about religion, it’s tough to talk about it because the US has been getting steadily less religious, but also, there’s now a loathing of religion in America because of what the Evangelicals have done to it. I’m looking up when “Tell Me Why” came out.

Jacobsen: I’ll make my commentary while you’re doing that.

My sort of current position is anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-Semitism, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic sentiment, and anti-secular sentiment, which is apparent in different areas of American Life. The decline of religion is very stark in the United States. The God concept still has much of a hold in the United States. I think people have the freedom to believe and practice as they wish in the United States and elsewhere if they can. Yet, I don’t think an individual’s theology or philosophy should impede open discourse and education on what we call objective or what would be more properly termed something like inter-subjective abstraction in public education and elsewhere where it’s really important in a time where science and technology are incredibly powerful and is still the most technologically and scientifically powerful nation on the earth. And the Evangelicals, particularly with the politicization of their religion, I find abhorrent and ugly.

And in Canada, where I live, as you all know and as I’ve written about, Evangelical Christianity does have a political bend. It does have an American flavour about it, which is problematic. I’m intimately aware of this population, and they are very clear on where they stand.

Rosner: I found out when the first book in this series came out; it was 1965. It thrived for a long time.

Jacobsen: American religious demographics 1965: The United States was approximately 90% religious; 86.07% was Christian in 1965.

Rosner: But there’s another thing going on in 1965. Sputnik, Russia put the Soviet Union Rights Act.

Jacobsen: Civil Rights Act.

Rosner: Yeah, but that doesn’t affect people’s… Sputnik went up in 1957. The US freaks out because Russia put the first satellite up, and then there’s a big math-science push in America as part of the Cold War and kind of framed as a struggle for our very existence. In 1965, a few people, maybe some pundits, were worried that embracing science would make people less religious, but I don’t think that people were making much of an issue out of that. What America wanted was technological expertise in order to beat the Soviets, and nobody thought that that kind of science was going to make people less religious.

Jacobsen: So, where would a larger why question makes sense in the context of science?

Rosner: I don’t know. I think it’s one of the first questions kids ask. I was very annoyed asking a zillion ‘why’ questions. I mean, maybe the naive question is, what is that? A younger child might ask ‘what,” but an older child is going to ask why a bunch of different shit happens. He is going to observe, and once the kid understands the elements of the world, he will start asking why those elements behave the way they do. There’s a reason these books are called Tell Me Why. Most of the answers will be rooted in science and basic first principles because I just read the definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of the principles behind the first principles; if physics is going to be this way, if we have a certain number of particles arranged in ways like it’s the questions behind the questions.

Jacobsen: When I’m looking at the definition now, it also discusses cause, time, and space. Several of these concepts have been characterized by physical law. So, those aren’t physical questions anymore but things like identity, being, and knowing; those still have an abstract characterization that would qualify as metaphysics.

Rosner: I’d argue that even if physics ever became complete, there would probably still be room for metaphysics. There’s still room for biology and chemistry; some general principles that could be considered metaphysical could still arise out of physics.

Jacobsen: We can take those three things I mentioned before: the arrow of time, second law thermodynamics and sort of quantum structure of the world. Those guarantee any large-scale precision will be entirely impossible to predict 100%. So, there will be a need for principle-based thinking following any laws that are found. Metaphysics will always have a place; I’ll give you that.

Rosner: Also, when the Big Data models of analysis or styles of analysis will likely produce a lot of principles applicable at various… I don’t know if we’ll get big universal principles from Big Data thinking. However, it’s not inconceivable that the big information processing engines of the future could come up with a big general principle that couldn’t be discerned without being able to process more data than humans can.

Jacobsen: I mean, the evolution of metaphysics is a shrinking landscape, but I think there’s a positive argument to be made about it. So, I will give another tip of the hat for you, in the sense that those first questions to your point as the Ionian school and others asked you as a kid in a very abstract sense, not a lot of science; I mean this is another trivial point we made before about… before was metaphysical physics. Yet those first questions in metaphysics were the first stats in the dark that began to take form, really picking up pace 500 years ago with the empirical revolution. Something else that takes a lot of the magical aspects of thinking about these things will probably come around the corner, which would be like a third category.

Rosner: There’s also the possibility that big-based thinking, AI-type thinking, not by dumb AI now but by the smart AI of the future that uses tremendous amounts of data, that there may be perversities in the results of looking at the huge amounts of data that the future computation engines will be able to look at. That may not be metaphysics, physics, or some just emergent type of defiantly perverse phenomenology that you can only see when you’re looking at billions of exabytes of data.

Jacobsen: Ultimately, we’re going to… find things sort of inconsistencies internal to the structure of the universe that sort of speaks to, not only its incomplete structure, its ontology, but also its incomplete self-knowledge at all times in terms of its self-interaction for consistency. So, it’s going to be something like where it’s not entirely physical law, where everything’s sort of you can kind of get a pinpoint on it. It’s not like grammar or language with some linguistic structure, even though math helps describe it. It’s going to be something much different, and it’s not going to be like the Stephen Wolfram thing where he has an infinite number of models and how the universe can unfold; that’s not in the abstract and not very helpful.

Rosner: It will always feel like being at the end of the world.

Jacobsen: It’s not the end of the world like a disaster movie, but there are places you can stand in certain cities like Manhattan because it’s on an island. You can stand in certain places in Manhattan, and it looks like just the world ends; you’re at the end of the world. There are buildings, buildings, buildings, and buildings, but then, like a block away from you, it falls away to nothing, and it feels precarious. I feel like the beings at the forefront of this swirl of Singularity analysis are acceleration; they will feel naked before existence in their precariousness, being subject to a constant, having to ride this constant flow of information processing.

I just want to make one last point on the processing front there. I mean the rickety structure of self-knowledge and being of the universe; if it’s information processing based ultimately, then it will be like a ship that takes on water in random places that are constantly being drained out for that self-consistency. That is an uncomfortable thought, but it probably will be the case because the universe also came from a rickety, chaotic early life.

Rosner: Well, self-built. You’re constantly having to build the ground you stand on.

Jacobsen: So, I would end on metaphysics, which is still useful in abstract concepts, though many of its fundamental concepts have been taken over by descriptions of physical law or principles of existence. Yet, it will always have a place, and physics will be very dominant in the future, while information processing will be some kind of bridge between the two.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.