> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Doug Pensinger > Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:16 AM > To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion > Subject: Re: Science and Ideals. > > Dan, I hope that You and yours and your home are OK. I heard that half > of the Houston area is still without power, if you're home I hope you're > among the lucky half.
Power came on, finally, yesterday afternoon. Thanks for asking. > Dan wrote: > > > > > Ok, where on the web can I read about the truth apart from us? Can I > find widespread support for the idea among scientists? Well, there was a multiplicity of articles in Phys Rev. Letters (_the_ place for a physicist to publish in the US; Europe has Phys Letters) on the falsification of local realism. That is what I was talking about, when I talked about the difficulties of realism. Science is, well when it's done right it is, not philosophical in its fundamental nature. I've worked with folks with a wide variety of ontologies and epistemologies. > Or will I find, as Wiki suggests, that "most physicists consider > non-instrumental questions (in particular ontological questions) to be > irrelevant to physics. They fall back on David Mermin's expression: "shut > up and calculate" BTW, Mermin may have said it, but Feynman said it much earlier. But, you can shut up and calculate and still accept Bell's work on the EPR paradox. Let me quote the Wikipedia article on the EPR paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox <quote> The EPR paradox is a paradox in the following sense: if one takes quantum mechanics and adds some seemingly reasonable (but actually wrong, or questionable as a whole) conditions (referred to as locality, realism, counter factual definiteness, and completeness; see Bell inequality and Bell test experiments), then one obtains a contradiction. However, quantum mechanics by itself does not appear to be internally inconsistent, nor - as it turns out - does it contradict relativity. As a result of further theoretical and experimental developments since the original EPR paper, most physicists today regard the EPR paradox as an illustration of how quantum mechanics violates classical intuitions. <end quote> EPR is probably the best example of non-intuitive QM. If we limit ourselves to this, and we agree that when physics and commons sense differ, we take physics, I think I can make my case without referring to other physics (except for answering questions about say the inequality inherent in Bell by pointing to experiments that show the same physics without "resorting" to inequalities. The point is that there are certain well verified and long researched results of quantum mechanics that need to be taken into account into any philosophical system that has observations as having some validity (i.e. just about everything except the most extreme forms of idealism and narcissism). The Kantian worldview, which I tend to favor, certainly associates some correlation between phenomena and nomena. Wearing my scientists hat, I think I know my QM well enough to state the well verified outcomes of the theory. When it comes to interpreting those outcomes, then I take of my scientist hat and put on my philosopher's hat. So, MWI, Copenhagen, pilot waves, etc. all interpret the same physics. Thus, I cannot use physics to falsify any of these interpretations (they are just philosophy). I can, however, use the QM to state what must be part of such an interpretation for it to be a proper interpretation of QM (proper in that it needs to be consistent with the theory it interprets). > Is there no way to define success in evolutionary terms? Wiki describes > natural selection thus: Over many generations, adaptations occur through a > combination of successive, small, random changes in traits, and natural > selection of those variants best-suited for their environment" Is the > use of best in that description a mere tautology? Or if I had said best- > suited would it have changed the meaning of my statement appreciably? Other posters have pointed out the fact that "best suited" is dependant on the particulars of the environment, the history of environments, etc. Charlie may correct me, but I think I recall him stating that there is no teleology in evolution. In some cases, such as eyes IIRC, there have been separate evolutionary developments of eyes, so they could be seen as nearly inevitable. But humans, well we're the dominant species and there is recent evidence that we almost went extinct (50k years ago, I think)...so fittest to survive a given sequence of events need not be the same as fittest to survive a slightly different sequence of events. In other words, we're lucky to be here. > First of all, I respect Guatam's credentials, but he's been wrong on more > than one occasion (remember the guarantee that there would be WMDs in > Iraq) so his they aren't impeccable. Second, you state that totalitarian > regimes are inherently stable but the only valid example you can give is a > regime that lasted less than a century. I think the point is that it failed due to outside pressure. As you pointed out, Gautam (like most folks) were shocked that Hussein was willing to be killed to hide the fact that he didn't have WMD. He is fallible in predicting the future. But, statements of historical fact are easier to be accurate in than predictions. I cannot think of a totalitarian government that fell from a democratic domestic revolt....and I can think of a number of totalitarian governments that haven't. Russia's lasted 60+ years before it failed trying to match US defense spending. Hussein lost a war and stayed in power. North Korea and Cuba have stayed in power for 60 (50) years, even with considerable outside pressure. China has changed slightly in order to allow capitalism..in order to compete with the west, but individual political freedoms are still controlled. >Thirdly I don't believe it is valid to > compare societies from different eras because of the widely varying > circumstances. It's like trying to compare experiments that had thousands > of uncontrolled confounding factors. So aside from the fatal flaws in > your historical analysis that Rich pointed out, I don't believe that that >type of comparison is valid in the first place. My point is that the arguments from "The End of History" are overstated, and that even if it were to be true, it was the result of a lot of luck. > > Can you site an example or two? See above > > > All the above does a pretty good job of corroborating my argument, and I > don't see how they reinforce yours. By saying that we drew to an inside straight several times? That's what happened. We're lucky that the US defied the conventional wisdom of the time and be the first Republic that has not fallen to tyranny. It was assumed, until the Civil War, that the fall of the Roman Republic to "temporary" Caesars who stayed in power past their term, and the history of the world since then showed that Republics couldn't work. We know it took a lot of luck for the US Republic to work. > > All correct, but let me point out one thing. The fact that humans were > more intelligent than their competitors is the kind of chance you > point out above, but the fact that intelligence itself is successful is > not chance at all!!! The ability to understand and manipulate your > environment is a profound advantage! Only if you survive long enough for the high rate of women dying in childbirth to be overcome by agriculture. It was touch and go there for a while. We are lucky to be here. Human existence is not an inevitable result of evolution. > This remains true in the discussion on ethics. Because we have the > ability to understand what the effects of various modes of treatment > have on us, and the ability to imagine differing modes of treatment, and > the ability to find ways to implement those changes, we have the ability >to choose those ethical values we prefer without having to rely on chance. Only if the "we" means the folks with power. Ethics are not based in evolution. > > So the fact that Hitler and (ultimately) Stalin lost wasn't purely chance > because there were enough of us that could see that these were not ethics > that we were interested in adopting, and we did something about it. Ah, that's not what happened. The US military won WWII and the Cold War. Lotsa people thinking good thoughts didn't. > > Here you fail to separate the ideas from the actual practices. Slavery, > the subservience of one sex, the exploitation of children, xenophobia etc. > have all been condoned by the written law until very recent times in even > the most advanced societies. Hypocrisy fails to describe the gap > between the ethics idealized and those practiced. You mean people doing things they know are wrong make it right? > This last section of your post is what stymied my reply for so long. Am I > to believe that "love thy neighbor" is the "truth apart from us" to which > you refer? I started a rant about the absurdities of this idea, but I > guess I really need to confirm that's what you mean before I ramble on. Well, if you believe in the naturalistic fallacy then my viewpoint it is absurd. If you don't, what do you base ethics on? I think I understand William; folks with good taste can just tell, and William, being superior to most all of us, can just tell what is good and evil. It seems that you think that what you want is inevitable. But, it is very hard to argue for inevitability when the US Army stopped the Japanese; the USSR (with the help of the US) beat Hitler, and the US's containment policy for the USSR worked because the US stood up militarily to the USSR (unless you believe that Stalin wouldn't have gone beyond Berlin because he changed his stripes). So, my argument is this. If you think ethics is reducible to evolutionarily favorable, then that is the position that William called "the naturalistic fallacy." If you believe that a democratic society is inevitable, that is based on faith, unless you think that Lincoln was fated to be in the half that lived through childbirth, Egypt was fated to have good cotton harvests, etc. If you believe that collective will works by some non-military means against ruthless people, then I'd like some examples. In particular, I'd like to see why you think MLK was wrong on the appropriate use of non-violence (as I've quoted him here. I'm not trying to jump at you, as I'm sure you're not trying to rant at me. But, in reading your posts, I seem to see some mixture of these three concepts. For my side, my point in this discussion is the same as Weinburg's "there is no rational-calculus basis for ethics" which he said was his greatest disappointment. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
