Prime Numbers
It seems to me that numbers are based on our ability to judge relative magnitudes: "Which is bigger, which is closer, which is heavier, etc." Many animals have this ability - called numeracy. Humans differ only in the degree to which it is developed, and in our ability to build higher level abstractions on top of this fundamental skill. SO - prime numbers, I think, emerge from a peculiar characteristic of our ability to judge relative magnitudes, and the way this feeds into the abstractions we build on top of that ability. =*= Let’s say you take a board and divide it into 3 sections of equal length (say, by drawing a line on it at the section boundaries). Having done so – is there a way that you could have divided the board into fewer sections of equal length so that every endpoint of a long section can be matched to the end of a shorter section? In other words – take two boards of equal length. Divide one into 3 sections. Divide the other into two sections. The dividing point of the two-section-board will fall right into the middle of the middle section of the three-section-board. There is no way to divide the second board into fewer sections so that all of its dividing points are matched against a dividing point on the longer board. Because of this – three is a prime. (Notice that I do not say: “this is because 3 is prime” – instead I reverse the causal arrow). =*= Let’s take two boards and divide the first one into 10 equally sized sections. Now – there are two ways that we can divide the second board into a smaller number of equally sized sections so that the end-points of every section on this second board are matched to a sectional dividing point on the first board (though the opposite will not be true): We can divide the second board into either 2 sections (in which case the dividing point will align with the end of the 5th section on the first board), OR We can divide the second board into 5 sections – each of which is the same size as two sections on the first board. Because of this, the number 10 is not prime. =*= The entire field of Number Theory grows out of this peculiar characteristic of how we judge relative magnitudes. Do you think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Prime Numbers
On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: > > HI Rex, > > Nice post! Could you riff a bit on what the number PHI tells us about > this characteristic. How is it that it seems that our perceptions of the > world find anything that is close to a PHI valued relationship to be > "beautiful"? > > Thanks Stephen! Actually my initial example of "numeracy" isn't quite right, but it's not important to the rest of the argument. My main point is that you can get to the concept of "prime numbers" just using relative magnitudes that we have an innate sense of. As for the significance of PHI - well - I guess there's probably some plausible sounding evolutionary story that could be told about that. Though how satisfying or useful an explanation like that is just depends on what you're after and what your interests are. An explanation that might be useful in one context might be useless in some other context. Explanations are observer dependent. Probably. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Prime Numbers
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > > I think an easier way to intuit prime numbers that can't be represented as > rectangles, only a 1-wide "lines". > > While the concept of primes is straight forward, there is an unending set > of not-so-obvious facts that we continue to discover about the Primes. > > Right. My proposal is that this entire infinite edifice is built on top of our innate sense of "more", "less", and "equal". Which I am tentatively advancing as the basis of an argument against Platonism. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Prime Numbers
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: > Rex, > > Do you have a non-platonist explanation for the "discovery" of the > Mandelbrot set and the infinite complexity therein? I find fictionalism to be the most plausible view of mathematics, with all that implies for the Mandelbrot set. But ;et me turn the question around on you, if I can: Do you have an explanation for how we "discover" mathematical objects and otherwise interact with the Platonic realm? How is it that we are able to reliably know things about Platonia? I would have thought that quarks and electrons from which we appear to be constituted would be indifferent to truth. Which would fit with the fact that I seem to make a lot of mistakes. But you think otherwise? > How can you make > sense of that in terms of the constructivist point of view that you > are (I think) compelled to take if you argue against arithmetical > platonism? It seems obvious that all possible intelligences would > discover the same forms of the Mandelbrot so long as they iterated on > z' = z^2 + c, but maybe I am missing the point of your argument. > I will agree with you that all intelligences that start from the same premises as you, and follow the same rules as inference as you, will also draw the same conclusions about the Mandelbrot set as you do. However - I do not agree with you that this amenable group exhausts the set of all *possible* intelligences. Could there be intelligences who start from vastly difference premises, and use vastly different rules of inference, and draw vastly different conclusions? If not - what makes them impossible intelligences? =*= What are the limits of belief, do you think? Is there any belief that is so preposterous that even the maddest of the mad could not believe such a thing? And if there is no such belief - then is it conceivable that quarks and electrons could configure themselves in such a way as to *cause* a being who holds such beliefs to come into existence? And if this is beyond the capacity of quarks and electrons, does it seem possible that there might be some other form of matter with more exotic properties that might be up to the task? And if not - why not? Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Prime Numbers
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: > On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Rex Allen > wrote: > > > > On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Terren Suydam > > wrote: > >> > >> Rex, > >> > >> Do you have a non-platonist explanation for the "discovery" of the > >> Mandelbrot set and the infinite complexity therein? > > > > > > I find fictionalism to be the most plausible view of mathematics, with > all > > that implies for the Mandelbrot set. > > I'm curious about what a plausible "fictionalist" account of the > Mandelbrot set could be. Is fictionalism the same as constructivism, > or the idea that knowledge doesn't exist outside of a mind? > I lean towards a strong form of fictionalism - which says that there are few important differences between mathematics and literary fiction. So - I could give a detailed answer - but I think I'd rather give a sketchy answer at this point. I would say that mathematics is just very tightly plotted fiction where so many details of the story are known up front that the plot can only progress in very specific ways if it is to remain consistent and believable to the "reader". Mathematics is a kind of world building. In the imaginative sense. > > > But ;et me turn the question around on you, if I can: > > > > Do you have an explanation for how we "discover" mathematical objects and > > otherwise interact with the Platonic realm? > > > > How is it that we are able to reliably know things about Platonia? > > I think just doing logic and math - starting from axioms and proving > things from them - is interacting with the Platonic realm. But how is it that we humans do that? This is my main question. What exactly are we doing when we start from axioms and prove things from them? Where does this ability come from? What does it consist of? > I would have thought that quarks and electrons from which we appear to be > > constituted would be indifferent to truth. > > > > Which would fit with the fact that I seem to make a lot of mistakes. > > > > But you think otherwise? > > I didn't understand the above... what do quarks and electrons have to > do with arithmetical platonism? > Are we not composed from quarks and electrons? If so - then how do "mere" collections of quarks and electrons connect with platonic truths? By chance? Are we just fortunate that the initial conditions and causal laws of the universe are such that our quarks and electrons take forms that mirror Platonic Truths? > > >> > >> How can you make > >> sense of that in terms of the constructivist point of view that you > >> are (I think) compelled to take if you argue against arithmetical > >> platonism? It seems obvious that all possible intelligences would > >> discover the same forms of the Mandelbrot so long as they iterated on > >> z' = z^2 + c, but maybe I am missing the point of your argument. > > > > I will agree with you that all intelligences that start from the same > > premises as you, and follow the same rules as inference as you, will also > > draw the same conclusions about the Mandelbrot set as you do. > > > > However - I do not agree with you that this amenable group exhausts the > set > > of all *possible* intelligences. > > I only meant that all possible intelligences that start from a > mathematics that includes addition, multiplication, and complex > numbers will find that if they iterate the function z' = z^2 + c, they > will find that some orbits become periodic or settle on a point, and > some escape to infinity. If they draw a graph of which orbits don't > escape, they will draw the Mandelbrot Set. All possible intelligences > that undertake that procedure will draw the same shape... and this > seems like discovery, not creation. > It seems like a tautology to me. If you do what I do and believe what I believe then you will be a lot like me...? Is there anything to mathematics other than belief? What are beliefs? Why do we have the beliefs that we have? How do we form beliefs - what lies behind belief? Can *our* mathematical abilities be reduced to something that is indifferent to mathematical truth? > > > Could there be intelligences who start from vastly difference premises, > and > > use vastly different rules of inference, and draw vastly different > > conclusions? > > Of course, but then what they are doing doesn't relate to the Mandelbrot > Set. > However - they might *believe* their creations to be just as significant and universal as you consider the Mandelbrot Set to be - m
Re: Prime Numbers
On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:27 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > On Sep 18, 2012, at 9:19 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Terren Suydam < > terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Rex, >> >> Do you have a non-platonist explanation for the "discovery" of the >> Mandelbrot set and the infinite complexity therein? > > > I find fictionalism to be the most plausible view of mathematics, with all > that implies for the Mandelbrot set. > > But ;et me turn the question around on you, if I can: > > Do you have an explanation for how we "discover" mathematical objects and > otherwise interact with the Platonic realm? > > > We study and create theories about objects in the mathematical realm just > as we study and create theories about objects in the physical realm. > So in the physical realm, we start from our senses - what we see, hear, feel, etc. >From this, we infer the existence of electrons and wavefunctions and strings and whatnot. Or some of us do. Others take a more instrumental view of scientific theories. So you're saying that "thought" is another kind of sense? And that what occurs to us in thought can also be used as a basis to infer the existence of objects which help "explain" those thoughts? But we believe that electrons interact causally with us because we are made from similar stuff - and by doing so make themselves known to us...right? How do Platonic objects interact causally with us? Via a Platonic Field? PFT - Platonic Field Theory? It's not much different from how we develop theories about other things we > cannot interact with: the early universe, the cores of stars, the insides > of black holes, etc. > > We test these theories by following their implications and seeing if they > lead to contridictions with other, more established, facts. > > Just as with physical theories, we ocasionally find that we need to throw > out the old set of theories (or axioms) for a new set which has greater > explanatory power. > So you think our current mathematical theories are not "true" in any metaphysical sense - but rather are approximations of what exists in Platonia? Is there an equivalent of the idea of "domains of validity" that holds in some circles in physics? I'm not sure any of this counts as being evidence in favor of Platonism... How is it that we are able to reliably know things about Platonia? > > > The very idea of knowing implies a differentiation between true and false. > > Nearly any intelligent civilization that notices a partition between true > and false will eventyally get here. > > True in what sense? A coherentist conception of truth? A correspondence conception of truth? How do we know truth? Do we have an innate "truth sense"? Does the ability to know truth require free will? For instance: If we say a statement is true because it is true, that is different than saying it is true because our neurons fired in a way that determined our response. If all our decisions were predetermined from the moment of the big bang then rational discussion is meaningless. Whether or not anyone agrees with you has nothing to do with the truth of your claim. Their beliefs were "hardwired" from the beginning of time. It follows then that your own beliefs are not based on their truth value. You believe what you believe because your neurons have determined that you will believe in this rather than that. SO - what is this "truth" stuff, really? > > > I would have thought that quarks and electrons from which we appear to be > constituted would be indifferent to truth. > > > The unreasonable effectiveness of math in the physical sciences is yet > further support if Platonism. If this, and seemingly infinite physical > universes exist, and they are mathematical structures, why can't others > exist? > > > Which would fit with the fact that I seem to make a lot of mistakes. > > But you think otherwise? > > > We are imperfect beings. > What is the source of imperfection? Where does it come from? What explains it? Objectively, intrinsically, absolutely imperfect? Have you heard the term "Works as coded", with respect to software development? So I can write a program that has a bug in it - and the computer will run it perfectly. The computer will do exactly what I told it to do. The program works as coded. When running my program, the computer is perfectly imperfect. I am the source of its imperfection. However, in a functionalist theory of mind - I am actually just executing my own "program" right? Given the initial conditions of the universe and the causal laws that govern it - I could not do other than I did when I wro
Re: Prime Numbers
Just to avoid confusion, this sentence: *I would say that mathematics is just very tightly plotted fiction where so many details of the story are known up front that the plot can only progress in very specific ways if it is to remain consistent and believable to the "reader".* Should probably be: *I would say that mathematics is just very tightly plotted fiction where so many details of the back-story are known up front that the plot can only progress in very specific ways if it is to remain consistent and believable to the "reader". * On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Rex Allen wrote: > On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Terren Suydam > wrote: > >> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Rex Allen >> wrote: >> > >> > On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Terren Suydam > > >> > wrote: >> >> >> >> Rex, >> >> >> >> Do you have a non-platonist explanation for the "discovery" of the >> >> Mandelbrot set and the infinite complexity therein? >> > >> > >> > I find fictionalism to be the most plausible view of mathematics, with >> all >> > that implies for the Mandelbrot set. >> >> I'm curious about what a plausible "fictionalist" account of the >> Mandelbrot set could be. Is fictionalism the same as constructivism, >> or the idea that knowledge doesn't exist outside of a mind? >> > > I lean towards a strong form of fictionalism - which says that there are > few important differences between mathematics and literary fiction. > > So - I could give a detailed answer - but I think I'd rather give a > sketchy answer at this point. > > I would say that mathematics is just very tightly plotted fiction where so > many details of the story are known up front that the plot can only > progress in very specific ways if it is to remain consistent and believable > to the "reader". > > Mathematics is a kind of world building. In the imaginative sense. > > > > >> >> > But ;et me turn the question around on you, if I can: >> > >> > Do you have an explanation for how we "discover" mathematical objects >> and >> > otherwise interact with the Platonic realm? >> > >> > How is it that we are able to reliably know things about Platonia? >> >> I think just doing logic and math - starting from axioms and proving >> things from them - is interacting with the Platonic realm. > > > But how is it that we humans do that? This is my main question. What > exactly are we doing when we start from axioms and prove things from them? > Where does this ability come from? What does it consist of? > > > > > I would have thought that quarks and electrons from which we appear to be >> > constituted would be indifferent to truth. >> > >> > Which would fit with the fact that I seem to make a lot of mistakes. >> > >> > But you think otherwise? >> >> I didn't understand the above... what do quarks and electrons have to >> do with arithmetical platonism? >> > > Are we not composed from quarks and electrons? If so - then how do "mere" > collections of quarks and electrons connect with platonic truths? > > By chance? Are we just fortunate that the initial conditions and causal > laws of the universe are such that our quarks and electrons take forms that > mirror Platonic Truths? > > > >> >> >> >> >> How can you make >> >> sense of that in terms of the constructivist point of view that you >> >> are (I think) compelled to take if you argue against arithmetical >> >> platonism? It seems obvious that all possible intelligences would >> >> discover the same forms of the Mandelbrot so long as they iterated on >> >> z' = z^2 + c, but maybe I am missing the point of your argument. >> > >> > I will agree with you that all intelligences that start from the same >> > premises as you, and follow the same rules as inference as you, will >> also >> > draw the same conclusions about the Mandelbrot set as you do. >> > >> > However - I do not agree with you that this amenable group exhausts the >> set >> > of all *possible* intelligences. >> >> I only meant that all possible intelligences that start from a >> mathematics that includes addition, multiplication, and complex >> numbers will find that if they iterate the function z' = z^2 + c, they >> will find that some orbits become periodic or settle on a point, and >> some escape t
And yet...
"This world of dew is only a world of dew - and yet, and yet..." -- Kobayashi Issa, after the death of his daughter. "This world of quantum states is only a world of quantum states - and yet, and yet..." -- Rex Allen, after a very cold shower. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Manifesto Rex
Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness comes before everything else. It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. For example: The experience of color is directly known and incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. We do not have direct access to meaning. We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic meaning. It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious experiences just keep piling up. Why is this? Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just a brute fact that has no explanation. If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: 1. The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. 2. The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. Again, if we believe that option 1 is correct, we can just stop. Or not. It doesn’t matter. So - let’s *provisionally* assume that option 2 is correct. I say “provisionally” instead of “axiomatically” because we will revisit this assumption. Once we’ve gone as far as we can in working out the implications of it being true - we will return to this assumption and see if it still makes sense in light of where we ended up. At this point I am willing to grant that modern science provides the best methodology for translating (extrapolating?) from our truth-pointing conscious experiences to models that represent the accessible parts of how things “really” are. To the extent that anything can be said about how things really are “outside of” conscious experience - science says it. But we never have direct access to the truth - all we have are our models of the truth, which (hopefully) improve over time as we distill out the valid parts of our truth-pointing conscious experiences. Okay - now, having said all of that - what models has modern science developed? Apparently there are two fundamental theories: General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory. >From Wikipedia: GR is a theoretical framework that only focuses on the force of gravity for understanding the universe in regions of both large-scale and high-mass: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc. On the other hand, QFT is a theoretical framework that only focuses on three non-gravitational forces for understanding the universe in regions of both small scale and low mass: sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc. QFT successfully implemented the Standard Model and unified the interactions between the three non-gravitational forces: weak, strong, and electromagnetic force. Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed with tremendous accuracy virtually every prediction made by these two theories when in their appropriate domains of applicability. In accordance with their findings, scientists also learned that GR and QFT, as they are currently formulated, are mutually incompatible - they cannot both be right. Since the usual domains of applicability of GR and QFT are so different, most situations require that only one of the two theories be used. As it turns out, this incompatibility between GR and QFT is only an apparent issue in regions of extremely small-scale and high-mass, such as those that exist within a black hole or during the beginning stages of the universe (i.e., the moment immediately following the Big Bang). Now - in addition to those two fundamental theories, we have other higher level theories, which are in principle reducible to GR+QFT. Chief among these is the Theory of Evolution. Wikipedia again: Evolution – change in heritable traits
Re: Manifesto Rex
Hi Telmo, Is there a better starting point than consciousness? My main thought was to suggest that the theory of evolution, taken to it's logical conclusion, supports a Kantian division of reality into phenomenal and noumenal realms. We are entities whose consciousnesses are shaped only with an eye towards what promotes survival and reproduction. Consciousness isn't the least concerned with truth - only with usefulness. Maybe this explains many of the conundrums that are pondered in this group. If you completely discard the concept of "truth" and replace it entirely with "evolutionary usefulness" - does that change anything? Rex On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > Hi Rex, > > Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking > about, along these lines (I believe). > > It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are > prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as > lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. > > These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are > not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time > itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all > fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. > This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you > posit. > > I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely feel > a resistance to them. > > So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears > maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied > with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved > to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust > ourselves to do science? > > Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* behind > nerds and geeks being bullied. > > A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the > future, if we transcend Darwinism. > > Cheers > Telmo. > > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen > wrote: > >> Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms and >> logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. Consciousness >> comes before everything else. >> >> It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what >> consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, >> what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. >> >> For example: The experience of color is directly known and >> incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means* is not directly >> known - any proposed explanation is inferential and controvertible. >> >> We do not have direct access to meaning. >> >> We only have direct access to bare uninterpreted conscious experience. >> >> So - any attempted explanation of consciousness from the outside (i.e., >> objectively) must be constructed from inside consciousness, by conscious >> processes, on a foundation of conscious experience. >> >> Not a promising situation - because any explanation must be based >> entirely on conscious experiences which have no intrinsic meaning, and >> arrived at via conscious processes which are equally lacking in intrinsic >> meaning. >> >> It “seems” like we could just stop here and accept that things are what >> they are. And what else do we have other than the way things “seem”? I >> experience what I experience - nothing further can be known. >> >> HOWEVER - while we could just stop there - most of us don’t. >> >> For most of us, it seems that non-accepting, questioning, doubting, >> believing, disbelieving, desiring, grasping, wanting, unsatisfied conscious >> experiences just keep piling up. >> >> Why is this? >> >> Well - it seems like there is either an explanation for this - or it just >> a brute fact that has no explanation. >> >> If there is no explanation, then we should just accept our >> non-acceptance, our non-stoppingness, and let it go. Or not. Doesn’t >> matter. >> >> Alternatively, if there is an explanation - then there are two options: >> >> >>1. >> >>The explanation is not accessible to us because our conscious >>experiences do not “point” towards the truth of the way things are. >>2. >> >>The explanation is accessible to us, because our conscious >>experiences *do* point towards the truth of the way things are. >> >> >&
Re: Manifesto Rex
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:53 PM, meekerdb wrote: > On 1/20/2015 5:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > Hi Telmo, > > Is there a better starting point than consciousness? > > My main thought was to suggest that the theory of evolution, taken to > it's logical conclusion, supports a Kantian division of reality into > phenomenal and noumenal realms. > > We are entities whose consciousnesses are shaped only with an eye > towards what promotes survival and reproduction. Consciousness isn't the > least concerned with truth - only with usefulness. > > Maybe this explains many of the conundrums that are pondered in this > group. > > If you completely discard the concept of "truth" and replace it entirely > with "evolutionary usefulness" - does that change anything? > > > That's essentially the thesis of William S. Cooper's book "The Origin of > Reason" - that our language, logic and mathematics were driven by > evolution. And he suggests how it may go further. Whether you agree with > him or not, it's a thought provoking book (and not a long one). > I remember you mentioning this book a few years ago. I read the first chapter then, and it was in the back of mind when I wrote the manifesto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 6:48 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: > > > On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 2:54 AM, Rex Allen > wrote: > >> Hi Telmo, >> >> Is there a better starting point than consciousness? >> > > No. > > >> >> My main thought was to suggest that the theory of evolution, taken to >> it's logical conclusion, supports a Kantian division of reality into >> phenomenal and noumenal realms. >> > > Yes, I think I got your point. You could say that the Plato's cave becomes > a metaphor for being stuck inside survival machinery, and not necessarily > truth-seeking machinery, no? > Basically correct, yes. Though it might be better to say that we *are* survival machinery, instead of just being stuck inside of survival machinery. In that we can't act against our evolved nature. > > >> >> We are entities whose consciousnesses are shaped only with an eye towards >> what promotes survival and reproduction. Consciousness isn't the least >> concerned with truth - only with usefulness. >> > > But here I feel you contradict your initial point of "starting from > consciousness", because you seem to implicitly assume that consciousness > emerges from matter. I would have no problem if you replaced > "consciousness" with "brain" in the above sentences. > I am kind of thinking that our conceptions of both matter *and* consciousness are artifacts of our evolutionary history. Neither is "true". Or, if either conception does happen correspond to the way things are, then it is just due to luck circumstances - in that blind evolution forced us to that view. Rex > > >> >> Maybe this explains many of the conundrums that are pondered in this >> group. >> >> If you completely discard the concept of "truth" and replace it entirely >> with "evolutionary usefulness" - does that change anything? >> > > I think it might. For example, suppose we all share the same > consciousness. It is evolutionary useful to maintain the illusion that this > is not the case (thus my previous rant). > > Telmo. > > >> >> Rex >> >> >> >> >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Telmo Menezes >> wrote: >> >>> Hi Rex, >>> >>> Interesting read. I will just start with something I've been thinking >>> about, along these lines (I believe). >>> >>> It is interesting that there are a number of models of reality that are >>> prima facie as plausible as any other but are more consistently rejected as >>> lunacy, woo, new-age-mambo-jambo, etc. >>> >>> These models tend to have something in common: they suggest that we are >>> not what we appear to be, that we are not mortal or immortal because time >>> itself is a dream. That there is only one consciousness and we are all >>> fundamentally the same entity, from the amoeba on. Quantum immortality. >>> This sort of thing. They start with consciousness as the brute fact, as you >>> posit. >>> >>> I have no intellectual reason to reject such ideas, but I definitely >>> feel a resistance to them. >>> >>> So it also occurred to me that believing in such things appears >>> maladaptive. Intuitively, such beliefs may lead you to be less preoccupied >>> with survival and reproduction. So it's not so surprising that we evolved >>> to reject such ideas but this leads to a terrible doubt: can we trust >>> ourselves to do science? >>> >>> Another distasteful speculation: maybe there's *survival instinct* >>> behind nerds and geeks being bullied. >>> >>> A more optimistic take: maybe real science is a possibility for the >>> future, if we transcend Darwinism. >>> >>> Cheers >>> Telmo. >>> >>> >>> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Rex Allen >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. Axioms >>>> and logic exist within conscious experience - not vice versa. >>>> Consciousness comes before everything else. >>>> >>>> It is self-evident that there are conscious experiences. However, what >>>> consciousness *is* - it’s ultimate nature - is not self-evident. Further, >>>> what any particular conscious experience “means” is also not self-evident. >>>> >>>> For example: The experience of color is directly known and >>>> incontrovertible. But what the experience of color *means
Re: Manifesto Rex
I think my main problem with platonism is that I don't see why a mathematical universe would generate beings who then develop true beliefs about the mathematical nature of the universe. Which was also my problem with physicalism - in that why would a random (i.e., not specially chosen) set of physical laws and initial conditions lead to the development of beings who are then able to correctly (or even approximately) discover those physical laws and initial conditions. If we say that GR+QFT+IC+Evo is true - this is a problem, since evolution seems to only care about survival and reproduction - not truth. So how do evolved beings like us arrive at a true theory like that? However - if we only say that GR+QFT+IC+Evo is *useful* (and not true) - this is more consistent - since it also predicts that evolved beings will develop useful (i.e., survival-enabling) theories. Rex On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: > I used to think that way. If you examine previous posts, you will see my > posts reasoning along these natural-selection lines (evolution is a very > very bad name for natural selection). > > But now I think that this is incomplete. More or less your point of view > is similar to the Konrad Lorentz when he said that natural selection is > what introduces the Kantian a prioris in the mind since evolution makes the > mind. Kant is famous for positing synthetic a priory truths that are self > evident and toward which we can not create any simpler explanation. > > You are following the Kantian lines, that are part of the folk metaphysics > of today: There are an external reality that is inaccessible to us, and > that external reality is the "True Reality". Kant called phenomena what we > observe and the external inaccessible reality is what Kant call noumena. > Only by means of experimentation on phenomena we can known something about > the true external reality . The results are scientific models and theories. > Internally there are only subjective things : feelings, values etc. Only > what is objectivated by science are facts. the subjective gain objective > status by means of science or direct shared observation. Since internal > states are not observable, this positivistic metaphisics despise all of > this, including metaphysincs. So it is self reinforcing and self > contradictory at the same time. > > But I think that this is not that way. the noumenal external reality does > not exist. the reality is in the mind. The external reality is purely > mathematical an evolution creates the conscious experiences, the values, > feelings and perceptions (including tacticle and visual) necessary to > maintain the body in this mathematical four dimensional reality along the > time dimension. > > Then there are no two realities but a single meaningful one, that is > mental. and the models are the true external reality or an approximation to > it, that is mathematical. we share almost identical internal realities > because we share the same mind functional architecture. > > But there is more. QM and GR are not the only mathematical structures out > there. Both need other mathematical structures to work and the space time > generate other structures along the time dimension,seen locally as > evolution: it generates structures that are in the physiology of living and > non living beings but also in the mind of inteligent beings. It could be > said that a perfect mind is also a mathematical structure toward which our > mind is evolving. natural selection does not produce arbitrary forms, but > optimize designs close to an optimum of efficiency and simplicity for a > task, many times in ways that apparently look weird but other times are > very clear. there are mathematical relations in living beings. > > In terms of behaviours, there are also mathematical relations in game > theory that may be used in the future to relate love, goodness, evil and so > on to mathematical entities, and degrees of good and evil in terms of > variations of entropy. Being will be also something objectivable > mathematically in the future. I think that a notion of mind or soul, can be > also a ideal mathematical structure towards which our evolved minds try to > imitate in his evolved imperfection, in the same way that by convergent > evolution the fin of a dolphin and a shark tend to the same ideal dorsal > fin. And this Mind really encloses not phisically, but mathematically, the > universe and we are part of it and this Mind is the ultimate reality. It is > not an evolved mind but a "mathematical" one in the platonic sense but also > in the same way that we are not maths, but math is our model, He is not > only that. > > 2015-01-20 3:33 GMT+01:00 Rex Allen : > >> Consciousness precedes axio
Re: Manifesto Rex
That is not what I was thinking, but it makes a certain amount of sense. Rex On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 4:43 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 Rex Allen wrote: > > > Consciousness precedes axioms. Consciousness precedes logic. >> > > That would be consistent with my idea that consciousness is easy but > intelligence is hard and is the reason Evolution developed animals that > were conscious of environmental stimuli and could use induction as far back > as the Cambrian Explosion, but took another 500 million years for Evolution > to develop animals that could deduce answers to problems by using logic. > > John K Clrk > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 22 Jan 2015, at 05:58, Rex Allen wrote: > > I think my main problem with platonism is that I don't see why a > mathematical universe would generate beings who then develop true beliefs > about the mathematical nature of the universe. > > > But Gödel + Church + Kleene + Post + Turing + Matiyazevich... discovery > *is* the discovery that just the arithmetical reality if full of entities, > machines, and non-machines, which struggle to understand what happens, and > develop true and false beliefs around the subject. > But does "arithmetical reality" exist outside of the human mind? I would tend to say - no. The human mind entertains concepts. This is one of them. > > This is proved. What is not proved is that they are conscious, but they > need to be if you assume that there is no magic (actual infinities, > non-local 3p influences, 3p indeterminacies) playing in the brain. > So there is no way that that GR+QFT+IC can (in principle) mechanistically explain observed human behavior and mathematical ability? I am not referring to the first person subjective experience. Just the third person observed behavior. Which was also my problem with physicalism - in that why would a random > (i.e., not specially chosen) set of physical laws and initial conditions > lead to the development of beings who are then able to correctly (or even > approximately) discover those physical laws and initial conditions. > > If we say that GR+QFT+IC+Evo is true - this is a problem, since evolution > seems to only care about survival and reproduction - not truth. So how do > evolved beings like us arrive at a true theory like that? > > > But a scientist will never say that is true. He will just say > what he believes in, knowing he might be wrong. > We can only hope getting close to the truth, but even in arithmetic, lies > can be consistent, and truth can depart from wishes, etc. > > However - if we only say that GR+QFT+IC+Evo is *useful* (and not true) - > this is more consistent - since it also predicts that evolved beings will > develop useful (i.e., survival-enabling) theories. > > > "usefulness" would reduce science to instrumentalism, and then the > question which will be forbid will be "instrument for what"? Torture? > Correct. I like instrumentalism. Instrument for what? For whatever we want. As a tool for accomplishing our goals. Whatever they may be. > But you are right, truth is not always useful, but lies makes things > harder, and should be avoided in most situations, I think. > > I think I understand why you think consciousness "precedes" logic and > arithmetic. I think that this is coherent with the first person view of the > "universal person", as consciousness is atemporal at that level, and is the > origin of all possible consciousness content. But that is still an inside > view. That general consciousness is the atemporal consciousness of the > löbian machine, and perhaps even just the universal one. It is something > approximated by > > <>t? & <>t > > It is an unconscious "Am I consistent?" in consistent situation. It is > also a semantical fixed point. It provides the meaning of "meaning" > somehow, and let the senses filtered it into consistent scenarios. > I tend to think that, like information, meaning is a difference that makes a difference. Which is to say, meaning is a felt difference that makes a felt difference. Which is to say, meaning is a difference in conscious experience that feels like it makes a difference to conscious experience. Which is to say, that our consciousness is just a web of felt differences that feel like they have some significance. As to what accounts to all of these differences - a "useful" way of looking at it is is that they are a product of evolution's focus on survival and reproduction. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Manifesto Rex
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 1:09 AM, Kim Jones wrote: > > > > On 22 Jan 2015, at 3:58 pm, Rex Allen wrote: > > > Which was also my problem with physicalism - in that why would a random > (i.e., not specially chosen) set of physical laws and initial conditions > lead to the development of beings who are then able to correctly (or even > approximately) discover those physical laws and initial conditions. > > > But the laws surely are not random. Laws cannot be random. Look, the > universe is a setup job. Either we are simulated and the limitation to our > minds is intentional or "we" are enjoying a ride of some sort where we are > real and the ride is the simulation. I go for that interpretation - that's > comp. > Who set up this setup job? And why? So you gave two simulation scenarios: (1) The universe is a simulation, and we are a part of that simulation. (2) The universe is a simulation, but we are not part of that simulation. *In the first case* - if you are being simulated, then all of your thoughts and beliefs are part of the simulation. You can not think or believe anything except what is entailed by the rules of the simulation. If a simulated entity correctly deduces that they are inside a simulation - then their deductive process must necessarily be explainable purely in terms of the rules of simulation - because these rules determine the state changes that underlie the entity’s thought processes. So in this case - it really is a setup job. Frame by frame, the movie plays out. The main character in the movie says, “I’m a character in a movie.” Just as the script requires. But the simulation could make you think or believe anything - anything at all. Do you think there is any limit to the possible craziness of simulated thoughts and beliefs? Of all the possible simulated thoughts and beliefs, how likely is it that a simulation would cause you to have the true belief that you are in fact in a simulation? *In the second case *- it seems like there would be a detectable “seam” in reality. Our behavior and abilities would not be explainable in terms of the observed universe - because we are not part of the simulation. Our behaviors and abilities would be “supernatural” - coming from outside the simulation’s “nature”. Here, the simulated part of reality can’t force thoughts and beliefs on you. Your ability to reason comes from outside the simulation. So in this scenario, my questions would be: which of our behavior and abilities do you think can’t be explained in terms of GR+QFT+IC? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 4/15/2010 8:01 PM, rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: > >> Let's assume that our best scientific theories tell us something >> true about the way the world *really* is, in an ontological sense. >> And further, for simplicity, let's assume a deterministic >> interpretation of those theories. > > Haven't you heard? Almost all scientific theories are false; that's why we > keep changing them. First, I mean "scientific realism" in the sense described by this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism Which I'm not sure you are taking into account in your response. Second, you say "almost" all scientific theories are false. Which scientific theories do you believe are not false in a scientific realist sense? And third, I set the bar somewhat lower than you imply. A closer reading of my first sentence shows that I am only assuming that our best scientific theories tell us something true about the way the world really is (ontologically)...not that they are true in every respect. This would be in opposition to a purely empirical, Kantian, instrumentalist view that our scientific theories tell us about our perceptions without necessarily revealing anything about what really exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism >> It seems to me that it would be a bit of a miracle if it turned >> out that we lived in a universe whose initial state and causal >> laws were such that they gave rise to conscious entities >> whose beliefs about their universe were true beliefs. > > I think you need the concept of "approximately true", otherwise you will > conclude there are no true beliefs whatsoever - in which case "true" loses > all meaning. The approximation can be both in scope and accuracy. Then I > think it might be possible to show that all conscious entities arising > through deterministic evolution of the universe must have approximately true > beliefs. So given our current knowledge of the universe, it would seem that a computer simulation of a human brain would be conscious in the same way that I am conscious. Some kinds of 2-D cellular automata are Turing complete and thus could run such a simulation and also have a cache of data that could be fed into the brain simulation in a way that the simulated brain would interpret as sensory data from a surrounding environment. No simulation of the environment actually needs to be done, just time-indexed lookup tables of equivalent data. Going further, it seems possible that a very simple "physical" universe could exist with the bare minimum of furniture (e.g., 1 spatial dimension, 1 time dimension, only 1 type of particle that has 2 states, etc.) necessary to implement such a cellular automaton, and a single causal law that was the equivalent of Rule 110. Given the right initial conditions, this cellular automaton would give rise to a human consciousness whose beliefs about how his physical universe really was would be false. Only his beliefs about his perceptions would be true...e.g. "I believe that I'm having the experience of seeing 3 birds fly overhead" would be a true belief. However, "I believe that three birds flew overhead" would be a false belief...because there really are no birds in that universe (not even simulated ones). Also, since that universe only has 1 spatial dimension, there were be no "overhead" either. The birds and the extra two spatial dimensions would only exist in the mind of the simulated brain. They would only exist within his perception, not external and independent of it. SO...it seems to me that it is NOT possible to show that all conscious entities arising through deterministic evolution of a universe must have approximately true beliefs. Unless you can show that the above scenario is impossible. A good XKCD comic that runs along similar lines! http://www.xkcd.com/505/ >> Note that a similar argument can also be made if we choose >> an indeterministic interpretation of our best scientific >> theories. > > Except in a stochastic universe another form of "approximately true" is > introduced: approximation in probability. Note that even if a universe is > deterministic, it may be strictly unpredictable because at any give time > only a portion of the initial state can have affected us due to the finite > speed of light. So new and unpredictable information continually reaches > us. So this is operationally equivalent to inherent randomness. An interesting point. But I don't see that it changes any of the conclusions I drew in my initial post...do you? My central point is that if we are in a deterministic universe, then for us to have *any* true understanding of this universe, that understanding *must* have already been implicit and inevitable in the universe's first instant. Which doesn't seem probable if you were selecting a universe at random from the list of conceivable universes. The most common type of conceivable univers
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:01 PM, rexallen...@gmail.com > wrote: >> >> What would make universes with honest initial conditions + causal laws >> more probable than deceptive ones? For every honest universe it would >> seem possible to have an infinite number of deceptive universes that >> are the equivalent of "The Matrix" - they give rise to conscious >> entities who have convincing but incorrect beliefs about how their >> universe really is. These entities' beliefs are based on perceptions >> that are only illusions, or simulations (naturally occurring or >> intelligently designed), or hallucinations, or dreams. >> > > One reason might be that for life to evolve, and therefore lead to conscious > observers, the process of life must be able to "learn" true or approximately > true laws of physics. While true there are more possible ways to imagine > yourself being in some simulated or dream-like environment, consider the > possibilities that get you there. In a universe without evolution the > initial condition must be that sophisticated reality generating environment, > of which there are very few. Why do you say there are very few? Again, it seems to me that for any "honest" universe, there would be an infinite number of "deceptive" universes that mimic it's appearance. Unless you have some reason to exclude universes like I described in my response to Brent. > However in a universe with evolution, the > initial condition can be a more or less random arrangement of particles, for > which there are far more possibilities. FIRST: Evolution doesn't add anything. It's all in the initial conditions and causal laws. In a determinisitic universe, things can only happen one way. Evolution is just a label that we put on the way that they appear to have happened in our universe. Evolution is a description, not an explanation. SECOND: Your statement is only true if our causal laws are such that any random starting conditions lead to conscious life. But there all that you've done is moved the "specialness" from the initial conditions to the causal laws. You are claiming that our universe has a "special" set of causal laws that can start with nearly any random arrangement of matter and end up with conscious life that will be able to perceive true things about their universe. A good analogy would be the quicksort algorithm, which can start with any randomly arranged list and always produce a sorted list from it. BUT, the quicksort algorithm is special. If you just randomly generate programs and try to run them, the probability of getting one that will correctly sort any unordered list must be very low compared to the probability of getting a program that won't do anything useful at all, or sorts the list incorrectly, or sorts it very inefficiently. Equivalently, if you just randomly chose sets of causal laws, the probability of selecting a set of laws that can start from almost any random arrangement of matter and from that always produce conscious life that perceives true things about the laws that gave rise to it must also be very low. Right? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 18 Apr 2010, at 03:15, rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: >> I agree in theory, though I still hold to my "consciousness is >> fundamental and uncaused" mantra! > > > Would you agree that the distribution of prime numbers is "uncaused". I would say that anyone starting with the same assumptions and using the same rules of inference would reach the same conclusions. I would not go so far as to say that the assumptions, rules of inference, OR conclusions exist, except as objects of thought. > I can understand that consciousness is fundamental, and "uncaused". Yet it > is explainable in term of simpler things, like numbers and elementary > operations, in term of high level self-consistency. I agree that I can use numbers to represent and model aspects of what I perceive, but this falls far short of "explaining" consciousness. > In the DM theory, consciousness is fundamental, yet not primary. You can > 'almost' define consciousness by the unconscious, or instinctive, or > automated inference of self-consistency, or of a reality (it is more or less > equivalent in DM). Fundamental but not primary. Hmmm. That sounds interesting, but I'm not sure what you mean by it. If you only know numbers as they appear in your conscious thoughts, how is it possible to conclude that they are more "primal" than the only medium in which you know them to exist? If only two things exist, numbers and consciousness, in some relationship to each other, how do you decide which is first and which is second? Numbers cause thought. Thought causes numbers. Why prefer one over the other? If they're co-equal, then it's two sides of the same coin... > It is the whole coupling consciousness/realities which can be explained by > addition and multiplication (or abstraction and application, etc.) once we > bet on DM. Again you use the word "explained". But I think you mean "described". > Privately, by contrast, we can know some truth (like I'm conscious), but we > can never communicate them as such. Can anything fundamental ever be communicated to someone not already possessing knowledge of it? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote: > > I think you've got the argument wrong. I think you're wrong about my getting the argument wrong. :) > Carroll discusses this in his book "From Eternity to Here" >From Eternity To Here, Pg. 182 (my comments follow the quote): "Cognitive Instability I know from experience that not everyone is convinced by this argument. One stumbling block is the crucial assertion that what we start with is knowledge of our present macrostate, including some small-scale details about a photograph or a history book or a memory lurking in our brains. Although it seems like a fairly innocent assumption, we have an intuitive feeling that we don't know something only about the present; we *know* something about the past, because we see it, in a way that we don't see the future. Cosmology is a good example, just because the speed of light plays an important role, and we have a palpable sense of "looking at an event in the past." When we try to reconstruct the history of the universe it's tempting to look at (for example) the cosmic microwave background and say, "I can *see* what the universe was like almost 14 billion years ago; I don't have to appeal to any fancy Past Hypothesis to reason my way into drawing any conclusions." That's not right. When we look at the cosmic microwave background (or light from any other distant source, or a photograph of any purported past event), we're not looking at the past. We're observing what certain photons are doing right here and now. When we scan our radio telescope across the sky and observe a bath of radiation at about 2.7 Kelvin that is very close to uniform in every direction, we've learned something about the radiation passing through our *present* location, which we then need to extrapolate backward to infer something about the past. It's conceivable that this uniform radiation came from a past that was actually highly non-uniform, but from which a set of finely tuned conspiracies between temperatures and Doppler shifts and gravitational effects produced a very smooth-looking set of photons arriving at us today. You may say that's very unlikely, but the time-reverse of that is exactly what we would expect if we took a typical microstate within our present macrostate and evolved it toward a Big Crunch. The truth is, we don't have any more direct empirical access to the past than we have to the future, unless we allow ourselves to assume a Past Hypothesis. Indeed, the Past Hypothesis is more than just "allowed"; it's completely necessary, if we hope to tell a sensible story about the universe. Imagine that we simply refused to invoke such an idea and stuck solely with the data given to us by our current macrostate, including the state of our brains and our photographs and our history books. We would then predict with strong probability that the past as well as the future was a high-entropy state, and that all of the low-entropy features of our present condition arose as random fluctuations. That sounds bad enough, but the reality is worse. Under such circumstances, among the things that randomly fluctuated into existence are all of the pieces of information we traditionally use to justify our understanding of the laws of physics, or for that matter all of the mental states (or written-down arguments) we traditionally use to justify mathematics and logic and the scientific method. Such assumptions, in other words, give us absolutely no reason to believe that we have justified anything, including those assumptions themselves. David Albert has referred to such a conundrum as *cognitive instability* - the condition that we face when a set of assumptions undermines the reasons we might have used to justify those very assumptions. It is a kind of helplessness that can't be escaped without reaching beyond the present moment. Without the Past Hypothesis, we simply can't tell any intelligible story about the world; so we seem to be stuck with it, or stuck with trying to find a theory that actually explains it." So it seems to me that physicalism (the proposal that our experiences are "caused" by an independently existing material world) is riddled with "cognative instabilities". As is Bruno's mathematical platonism. And as is any theory that proposes a causal mechanism for conscious experience. There is no sensible story to be told about existence. Sean says: "Without the Past Hypothesis, we simply can't tell any intelligible story about the world" I'd go further and say that even with the Past Hypothesis you can't tell any intelligible story about the world. We *can* say that the "big bang" theory is consistent with what we observe. But so is a higher-entropy past. And so is Bruno's AUDA. And so are a lot of things. BUT these things all inevitably lead to more questions. There seem to be only two possible "final" answers: 1) Everything exists. 2) Reality is essentially arbitrary. There is
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > This argument is not > definitive mainly because we don't have a definitive theory of > consciousness, but to the extent we assume a physical basis for > consciousness it seems pretty good. Ha! As long as you assume there is no problem of consciousness, then there's no problem! That is pretty good. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > But if the universe arose from a quantum fluctuation, it would necessarily > start with very low entropy since it would not be big enough to encode more > than one or two bits at the Planck scale. If one universe can start that > way then arbitrarily many can. So then it is no longer clear that the > evolved brain is less probable than the Boltzmann brain. I asked Sean about the application of probability to the Boltzmann brain scenario on his blog: > "So, in chapter 10 you rule out the possibility of the eternal > recurrence scenario based on the low probability of an observer of our > type (human) being surrounded by a non-equilibrium visible universe > compared to the probability being a “boltzmann brain” human observer > who pops into existence to find himself surrounded by chaos. > > As you say, in the eternal recurrence scenario there should be far far > more of the later than of the former. > > Okay. So, my question: > > If the recurrences are really eternal, then shouldn’t there be > infinitely many of BOTH types of observers? Countably infinite? > > And aren’t all countably infinite sets of equal size? > > So in an infinite amount of time we would accumulate one countably > infinite set of our type of observer. And over that same amount of > time we’d could also accumulate another countably infinite set of the > “Boltzmann Brain” type of observer. > > The two sets would be of the same size…countably infinite. Right? > > So probabilistic reasoning wouldn’t apply here, would it? > > Especially not in a “block” universe where we don’t even have to wait > for an infinite amount of time to pass." AND, here was his reply: > Sean Says: > January 27th, 2010 at 9:49 am > > Rex, this is certainly a good problem, related to the “measure” issue > that cosmologists are always talking about. Yes, in an eternal > universe there are countably infinite numbers of “ordinary” observers > and freak (thermal-fluctuation) observers. But the frequency of the > latter — the average number in any particular length of time — is much > larger. We generally assume that this is enough to calculate > probabilities, although it’s hardly an airtight principle. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 5/1/2010 12:25 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Brent Meeker > wrote: > > This argument is not > definitive mainly because we don't have a definitive theory of > consciousness, but to the extent we assume a physical basis for > consciousness it seems pretty good. > > Ha! As long as you assume there is no problem of consciousness, then > there's no problem! That is pretty good. > > > So you do have a theory of consciousness in which we can have timeless > thoughts? I'll go with Kant. Time is an aspect of consciousness, not something that exists independently of conscious experience. So one possibility is that the universe exists and causes our conscious experience...that our conscious experience is an aspect of the physical world. But what stops us from reversing that and saying that our consciousnesses exist and the physical world is just an aspect of that conscious experience? How do you justify accepting the former while rejecting the latter? I accept the latter and reject the former because I don't see what introducing the "physical world" as something prior to and independent of consciousness buys us in our attempts to explain our orderly conscious experiences. If it is intended to explain the order and consistency of our experiences, then what explains the physical world's order and consistency? It seems to me that we've just changed the question, not answered it. And in the process introduced the additional question of how consciousness arises from matter. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > > Seems like a good answer to me. Suppose there were infinitely many rolls of > a die (which frequentist statisticians assume all the time). The fact that > the number of "1"s would be countably infinite and the number of "not-1"s > would be countably infinite would change the fact that the "not-1"s are five > times more probable. So let's say that we have an infinitely long array of identically sized squares. Inside each square a single number is written, from 1 to 6. First let's say that the numbered squares just repeat: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...over and over, infinitely many times. Now, we randomly throw a dart at this infinitely long row of squares. Should we expect to hit a 1, or not-1? Not-1, right? Because we have extra information about the internal structure of the infinitely long row. The dart has to hit in some finite space, and the layout of the numbers in the squares for any given finite space is known. So the probability of hitting a "1" is "1 in 6". NOW. Let's say the ordering of the numbers in the squares is completely random. We've lost information here. When we throw the dart at the row, we have no idea what numbers will be in the randomly selected finite area we aim towards. In an infinite sequence, any given finite sequence will appear infinitely often...so there are stretches as large as you want to specify that contain only 1s or only not-1s. Further more, as you say, the 1's and not-1's can be put into a one-to-one correspondence...both sets are countably infinite. There are as many "1's" as "not-1's". And there are as many 2's as "not-2's" and so on. So, we lost a lot of information there when we abandoned the strictly repeating structure. Before we lost that information, we could safely say that the probability of hitting a 1 was "1 in 6"...but after losing that information surely we can't say anything at all about the probability of hitting a "1" with our dart. "Whereas the interpretation of quantum mechanics has only been puzzling us for ∼75 years, the interpretation of probability has been doing so for more than 300 years [16, 17]. Poincare [18] (p. 186) described probability as "an obscure instinct". In the century that has elapsed since then philosophers have worked hard to lessen the obscurity. However, the result has not been to arrive at any consensus. Instead, we have a number of competing schools (for an overview see Gillies [19], von Plato [20], Sklar [21, 22] and Guttman [23])." (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0402/0402015v1.pdf) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > Fine. You solve all problems by postulating that your consciousness is > fundamental, it just IS, I don't solve all problems. I only solve all metaphysical problems. But isn't that what physicalists attempt to do by postulating a physical universe? > and for some unknowable reason it is a sequence of > experiences which happen to correspond to living in an orderly and time > directed universe. The reason isn't unknowable. There is no reason. Period. Full stop. This is in comparison to the two physicalist alternatives available to explain *actually* living in an orderly and time directed universe: 1) There was a first cause that led to our orderly universe, but that cause was itself *uncaused*. 2) There's an infinite chain of prior causes that led to our current orderly universe. Option 1 is not significantly different from my proposal. It just adds this extra "physical" component that in some way underlies the conscious experience that we all know and love. Option 2 is...also not significantly different. There is no finite "knowable" reason for our orderly universe's existence. And this also raises the further question of why our infinite causal chain instead of some other? And if you have an answer, then why that answer instead of some other? So not only does option 2 lead to an infinite causal chain - it also requires an infinite chain of infinite chains of reasons to explain why *our* infinite causal chain exists instead of some other infinite causal chain. If you ever stop and say "because that's just the way it is", then you collapse back into option 1. Right? > And do you believe this sequence will persist in > producing orderly and consistent experiences? I do believe that. BUT...why do I believe it? Well, ultimately, there is no reason I believe it. I just do. Do you believe it? And if so, why? I would expect an honest physicalist to say that he believed it because, given the initial conditions of the universe plus the causal laws of physics as applied over ~13.7 billion years, it could not be otherwise. He has no *choice* except to believe it. To not believe it would require different initial conditions, or different causal laws. > Do you imagine you are discussing this > question with someone named Brent? I go back and forth on whether I believe this. I certainly believe that there is a Brent out there somewhere who is experiencing the flip side of this conversation, but not necessarily that there is any causal connection between us. And I certainly don't believe that either of us has any choice in the path the discussion takes. What would causality amount to in an Einstein-style static block universe? If it turned out that 4-dimensionalism was correct, what would it mean to say that you and I are discussing this question? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > > Sure we can, because part of the meaning of "random", the very thing that > lost us the information, includes each square having the same measure for > being one of the numbers. If, for example, we said let all the "1"s come > first - in which case we can't hit any "not-1"s, that would be inconsistent > with saying we didn't have any information. We have two things here. Random. And infinite. Three things actually. My random aim. An infinite row of squares. And each square's randomly assigned number lying between 1 and 6. If, due to the nature of infinity, there are the same number of 1's and not-1's, then I'd expect the probability of hitting a 1 to be 50-50. But, there are also the same number of 1's and even numbers. And the same number of evens and odds. And the same number of 1's and 2's. And the same number of 2's and not-2's. AND...I have the *random* aim of the dart that I'm throwing at the row. So it's not a question of saying which number is likely to be next in a sequence. Rather, the question is which number am I likely to hit on this infinite row of squares. SO, I think we have zero information that we can use to base our probability calculation on. Because of the counting issues introduced by the infinity combined with the lack of pattern. There is no usable information. All we can say for sure is that we won't ever hit a 7. Ha! We could say something about the probability in the case where the numbers followed a repeating pattern. There we only had one random variable...my aim. And we had definite information...the repeating pattern. Actually the infinite aspect in that case didn't add anything. So, I think the eternal recurrence Boltzmann brain scenario is more similar to the random aim at an infinite grid of randomly arranged numbers. > My personal view is the probability is a mathematical tool something like > linear algebra. It's useful precisely because it has different > interpretations. Here's the introductory paragraph I wrote for a course for > engineers I taught years ago. If you'd like can send you the rest of the > hand-out off-line: By all means, send it my way! I'll give it a gander. More information is better! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > >>> And do you believe this sequence will persist in >>> producing orderly and consistent experiences? >> >> I do believe that. BUT...why do I believe it? Well, ultimately, >> there is no reason I believe it. I just do. > > Then why don't you believe that a physical universe is a good explanatory > model for it? Or do you believe that and you're just playing at not > believing it? It seems like I've explained my position on this before: "because I don't see what introducing the physical world as something prior to and independent of consciousness buys us in our attempts to explain our orderly conscious experiences. If it is intended to explain the order and consistency of our experiences, then what explains the physical world's order and consistency? It seems to me that we've just changed the question, not answered it. And in the process introduced the additional question of how consciousness arises from matter." Kant was on the right track generally I think. If you drop the noumena. At least that's the description of the experience of my thought processes on this topic. >> I would expect an honest physicalist to say that he believed it >> because, given the initial conditions of the universe plus the >> causal laws of physics as applied over ~13.7 billion years, it >> could not be otherwise. > > That's a particular model. It's not why one "believes" the model. Actually > an honest physicist or engineer never *believes* a model - he entertains it, > he uses it, he considers it. He prefers one to another because it predicts > more of his experience or is more accurate in those predictions. He only > believes it in the practical sense that if acting he will act as if it's > true. I'm fine with that as a practical guide to life and ramjet design. However, surely there must be some fact of the matter as to what exists and how things really are. And surely you have some belief about that. In fact, as I recall, you said that you believe that a physical world exists and that it is indeterministic. You often return to this "usefulness" point...but, in these discussions at least, I'm not really interested in engineering principles and guidelines. The question isn't what's useful. The question is what's true...and more specifically, what do you believe is true, and why. > But I'm not sure where that leaves you. You started with the Boltzmann > Brain argument that our thoughts are probably mistaken. But that "probably" > depended on a certain model universes and how they work. And it implied > that having thoughts is already extremely improbable. So if you have > thoughts - and you must since you take consciousness as fundamental - then > that already implies something about the world, i.e. it is not timeless > since thoughts have duration. So if you don't adopt solipism, if you assume > there is some world outside the flow of your thoughts to which they refer, > then a model of that world needs to include time, both duration and > direction. Just like there is no "red" in the world (in the sense that I experience it), there is no "time" in the world (in the sense that I experience it). Time is like red. Both only exist as aspects of experience. The world is all surface, all appearance. Like a movie. No depth. >> I would expect an honest physicalist to say that he believed it >> because, given the initial conditions of the universe plus the >> causal laws of physics as applied over ~13.7 billion years, it >> could not be otherwise. >> >> He has no *choice* except to believe it. To not believe it would >> require different initial conditions, or different causal laws. > > > I thought you were not believing it because there were no initial conditions > or causal laws or universe. It's all what a physicalist would call an > illusion - i.e. a seemingly coherent series of experiences that do not refer > to anything but just are. But then you seem to switch viewpoints and want > to use the consistency of a solipist know-nothing position to argue about > which universes might exist?? I'm not switching positions, I'm saying that the "honest physicalist" should believe that his beliefs are determined only by the initial conditions and causal laws of the universe. The two paragraphs went together. The second was a continuation of the first. You treated them separately. Of course, I also believe that I have no choice about my beliefs. But I don't attribute this lack of choice to initial conditions plus causal laws. I don't attribute it to anything. There is no process or mechanism that gave rise to my beliefs. They just exist as aspects of my conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 8:40 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote: > > > On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Jesse Mazer >> wrote: >> > >> > I think you've got the argument wrong. >> >> I think you're wrong about my getting the argument wrong. :) > > I suppose it depends what you mean by "the argument". It is possible you > could find *some* mainstream scientist who seriously considers the > possibility that all our historical records of a low-entropy past are wrong > or that we are actually Boltzmann brains with false memories, but for any of > the physicists I have read who have brought up these ideas, like Sean > Carroll and Brian Greene, it is completely clear to me that they only > consider these to be reductio ad absurdum arguments, not that they actually > think these are likely to be true. If you disagree, I suggest you haven't > actually read these authors very carefully, or haven't really understood > what you read. Well, I think the passage I quoted pretty much stands on it's own. Without the extra assumption of the Past Hypothesis, the data we have available leads to a conclusion that isn't cognitively stable when combined with the assumption of physicalism. I would take this as a reductio ad absurdum argument against physicalism. The eternal recurrence problem is a related, but not identical, problem than the issue introduced by the principle of indifference. Here Sean invokes probabilistic reasoning on infinite sets, which Brent and I are still discussing. Though I just noticed that we accidently wandered off the main list into a private email exchange. Oops. Anyway. Onwards: > Then on p. 223 he explains in more detail why we can be confident we aren't > Boltzmann brains: because the level of order we experience is far greater > than what the vast majority of possible Boltzmann brains should be predicted > to experience (though he does bring up the possibility that our experience > of an orderly environment could just be a hallucination). This was one of the points of my "The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism" thread...which died an untimely death. So how does he rule out this hallucination possibility? Or the Boltzmann brain simulator possibility? What facts do we have about the nature of reality that rules it out? Another extra assumption. The "we can trust our observations, even though our observations imply that we can't trust our observations" hypothesis. Quoting the book, page 363: "This version of the multiverse will feature both isolated Boltzmann brains lurking in the empty de Sitter regions, and ordinary observers found in the aftermath of the low-entropy beginnings of the baby universes. Indeed, there will be an infinite number of both types. So which infinity wins? The kinds of fluctuations that create freak observers in an equilibrium background are certainly rare, but the kinds of fluctuations that create baby universes are also very rare. Ultimately it's not enough to daw fun pictures of universes branching off in both directions of time; we need to understand things at a quantitative level well enough to make reliable predictions. The state of the art, I have to admit, isn't up to that task just yet. But it's certainly plausible that a lot more observers arise as the baby universes grow and cool toward equilibrium than come about through random fluctuations in empty space." SO. I think it's significant that *even with* all of his auxiliary hypothesis, he still judges it likely that Boltzmann brains do exist. And in such numbers that it's not clear whether they are more or less common than "normal" observers. >> BUT these things all inevitably lead to more questions. There seem to >> be only two possible "final" answers: >> >> 1) Everything exists. >> >> 2) Reality is essentially arbitrary. There is no reason why >> existence is this way as opposed to some other way. It just is. > > Even if "everything exists", there is still the possibility of some definite > probability distribution on this "everything"--either a probability > distribution on all possible universes/computations/mathematical structures, > or a probability distribution on all possible observer-moments. It's quite > possible that the probability distribution would be such that observers who > had *true* memories of a low-entropy past would be much more common than > random Boltzmann brains with no memories or false memories. Isn't it also quite possible that the opposite is true? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
Returning to the thread: On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 5/1/2010 7:10 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> >>> On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Brent Meeker >>> wrote: >>> >>> It's invalid simply because your conclusion depends taking the cardinality >>> to be the measure. The cardinality of infinite sets doesn't satisfy >>> Kolomogorov's axioms for a probability measure. For example one of the >>> axioms is: If A and B are disjoint then P(A) + P(B) = P(A union B). Let >>> the measure of the integers be 1. The let A be the evens and B be the odds. >>> You get 2=1. If you're going to talk about probabilities of infinite sets >>> you have to introduce some measure other than cardinality. >> >> >> Isn't that exactly what I said here: >> >> >>> SO, I think we have zero information that we can use to base our >>> probability calculation on. Because of the counting issues introduced >>> by the infinity combined with the lack of pattern. There is no usable >>> information. >> > > No that's not the same. If you based the order on a die toss there would be > no pattern, but there would still be a measure even when the cardinality was > infinite. Your use of "information" is ambiguous. On the one hand you use > it to mean "no pattern" and then you assume that must be the same as "we > don't know the measure". > >> >> I claim vindication. >> >> But having done so, what measure are you suggesting for this >> particular example instead? For this particular example. Not for >> general cases involving telephone surveys. > > In my example, a die toss, measure is based on the symmetry of the die. In that case it seems to me that we are ignoring the *actual* infinite set of randomly generated results and only talking about the measure. Effectively we're saying, "We have no useful information about the random infinite set - because it's random...and infinite. So let's go back to the measure and ask what would we get if we generated another number according to that definition." So returning to my infinite row of numbered squares, let's say we take the 1-squares and put them into a one-to-one correspondence with the not-1-squares. Now, let's put a sticker on each 1-square that says "A". And another sticker on each not-1-square that says "B". Now, let's put them back into an infinite row. What is the probability of hitting an B-square with my randomly thrown dart? What is the probability of hitting a 1-square? It seems to me that we can't say anything about the actual infinite set. We can only talk about various measures on it. Which is what you said. But I think is still consistent with my original example. I'd think that if you have an actual randomly generated infinite set, then you can't draw any probabilistic conclusions about that infinite set, even if you know how it was generated (e.g., dice rolling). You can only draw conclusions about the measure that describes the generating process. Right? Or wrong? But, now returning to the Boltzmann brain problem, Carroll says: "This version of the multiverse will feature both isolated Boltzmann brains lurking in the empty de Sitter regions, and ordinary observers found in the aftermath of the low-entropy beginnings of the baby universes. Indeed, there should be an infinite number of both types. So which infinity wins? The kinds of fluctuations that create freak observers in an equilibrium background are certainly rare, but the kinds of fluctuations that create baby universes are also very rare." Well, since these are physically existing infinities of the same size, then neither infinity wins. So, given eternal recurrence, there are an infinite number of Rexs. And an infinite number of not-Rexs. Let's pair the Rexs off in a one-to-one correspondence with the not-Rexs. Then, let's go down the list and put an "A" sticker on the Rexs. And a "B" sticker on the not-Rexs. Then lets randomly arrange them in an infinitely long row and select one at random. What's the probability of selecting a Rex? What's the probability of selecting an "A" sticker? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > That's assuming I believe some things are true in some absolute sense > unrelated to usefulness. I don't. I am having the experience of seeing a red book. This is absolutely true, regardless of usefulness - and regardless of whether I am actually seeing a book or just hallucinating. The experience exists, even if the book doesn't. I am NOT having the experience of seeing a blue pen. This is also absolutely true, even if I am suffering from "blind-sight" and there's actually a blue pen here that I would react to correctly if pushed to do so. Truths about conscious experience are absolute truths, regardless of what (if anything) generates the experience. >> Just like there is no "red" in the world (in the sense that I >> experience it), there is no "time" in the world (in the sense that I >> experience it). >> >> Time is like red. Both only exist as aspects of experience. > > But (according to you) that is the only way anything exists. So time and > red exist if "exist" has any meaning at all. When I say time and red are aspects of consciousness, I mean it in the same way that a scientific realist means that spin is an aspect of an electron. >>>> On 5/1/2010 6:15 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >>>> I would expect an honest physicalist to say that he believed it >>>> because, given the initial conditions of the universe plus the >>>> causal laws of physics as applied over ~13.7 billion years, it >>>> could not be otherwise. >>>> He has no *choice* except to believe it. To not believe it would >>>> require different initial conditions, or different causal laws. >>> >>> >>> I thought you were not believing it because there were no initial conditions >>> or causal laws or universe. It's all what a physicalist would call an >>> illusion - i.e. a seemingly coherent series of experiences that do not refer >>> to anything but just are. But then you seem to switch viewpoints and want >>> to use the consistency of a solipist know-nothing position to argue about >>> which universes might exist?? >> >> I'm not switching positions, I'm saying that the "honest physicalist" >> should believe that his beliefs are determined only by the initial >> conditions and causal laws of the universe. > > Why would he be a determinist? If he's a physicalist, why wouldn't he believe that his beliefs are determined by the nature of the physical world? What else would they be determined by? > And what if they were? According to the > best physical models we have they are mostly determined by the recent > history of the universe plus probabilistic laws (QM) - Probabilistic laws are still causal laws, right? > and this explains why they are "true" in the sense of useful Which brings me back to the point that I made in the "no miracles" argument against scientific realism thread. Which you never responded to. > to those purposes we imagine we have. We *imagine* we have? What do you mean by that? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
> Probablistic statements are always about measure. What you write above is > true, but it is also true if you substitute "finite" for "infinite". It's > just that when you have a finite set or you are generating a potentially > inifinite set, then the cardinality and the relative rate of generation > provides a canonical measure. But it's not the only one and not even > necessarily the right one depending on the problem - did you read the paper > I sent? So I did read your handout on probability. And I'm *still* not an expert on the subject. SO. Epic fail on your part. >> So, given eternal recurrence, there are an infinite number of Rexs. >> And an infinite number of not-Rexs. Let's pair the Rexs off in a >> one-to-one correspondence with the not-Rexs. Then, let's go down the >> list and put an "A" sticker on the Rexs. And a "B" sticker on the >> not-Rexs. Then lets randomly arrange them in an infinitely long row >> and select one at random. What's the probability of selecting a Rex? >> What's the probability of selecting an "A" sticker? > > > I suppose your intent is to assign equal measure to each position on > the list so, for any finite subsection of the list the measure of As > and Bs will be equal. If that was my intent, what would your response be? >> But, now returning to the Boltzmann brain problem, Carroll says: >> >> "This version of the multiverse will feature both isolated Boltzmann >> brains lurking in the empty de Sitter regions, and ordinary observers >> found in the aftermath of the low-entropy beginnings of the baby >> universes. Indeed, there should be an infinite number of both types. >> So which infinity wins? The kinds of fluctuations that create freak >> observers in an equilibrium background are certainly rare, but the >> kinds of fluctuations that create baby universes are also very rare." >> >> Well, since these are physically existing infinities of the same size, >> then neither infinity wins. > > Carroll is hoping that future advances is physics will tell us the relative > rate of creation of freak observers as compared to normal observers. This > will then provide a measure that is independent of whether the number is > finite or infinite; just like we can say the probability of not-1 on die > throw is five times as likely as a 1 throw independent of any assumption > about the number of throws. Okay so let's say that Carroll is correct. And after an infinite amount of time we end up with an infinite number of Boltzmann Brains (BB) and Normal Brains (NB). Now, even at the end of infinity, physics still hasn't advanced to the point that we can infer from theory what the relative rate of creation of each brain type is. BUT...(somehow) we have access to a record of what actually happened...an infinite set of time-indexed data that shows a (BB) plus a time-stamp for each boltzmann brain that was created and a (NB) plus a time-stamp for each normal brain. Now, what can we say about this infinite set? Can we reconstruct a probability distribution from it and have any confidence that this measure accurately reflects the true nature of the actual physical processes that explain the distribution of the two different kinds of brains? In other words, if (unknown to us) in reality what controlled the relative rate of creation was the equivalent of the random results of a fair 6-sided die being rolled - where a "1" meant a Boltzmann brain would be created while a "not-1" meant that a Normal brain would be created - could we recover the fact of that 16.67% Boltzmann brain creation rate using just the data in our infinite data set? Or would the random nature of the generation process plus the infinite nature of the data set result in us being unable to recover that information with high confidence? If at the end of time we have the same number of boltzmann brains and of normal brains...then I'm not sure what difference it makes to talk about the measure that generated them. There's the same number of each type. There's a 1-to-1 mapping between the subset of BB's and the subset of NB's in our infinite dataset. Isn't there? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > I notice I didn't respond to your first question in this post. So... > I appreciate the response! >>>> On 5/3/2010 7:41 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >>>> So, given eternal recurrence, there are an infinite number of Rexs. >>>> And an infinite number of not-Rexs. Let's pair the Rexs off in a >>>> one-to-one correspondence with the not-Rexs. Then, let's go down the >>>> list and put an "A" sticker on the Rexs. And a "B" sticker on the >>>> not-Rexs. Then lets randomly arrange them in an infinitely long row >>>> and select one at random. What's the probability of selecting a Rex? >>>> What's the probability of selecting an "A" sticker? >>>> >>> >>> I suppose your intent is to assign equal measure to each position on >>> the list so, for any finite subsection of the list the measure of As >>> and Bs will be equal. >>> >> >> If that was my intent, what would your response be? >> > > The usual way of dealing with "infinity" is to use a measure that works for > finite cases and converges in the limit as the number is arbitrarily > increased. Notice that there is no way to "randomly arrange" the infinite > sets, except by some process that "randomly" selects elements and places > them on the list. So you're really back the generating frequency. Okay, so this is my point. So let's say we use a process to randomly distribute our newly-stickered Rexs and not-Rexs so that they are randomly arranged according to sticker-type. Even though we have now rearranged them...these are still the same Rexs and not-Rexs we started with when they were randomly arranged according to the 6-sided die. We haven't changed the relative number of Rexs and not-Rexs, we've just labeled them with an extra property and then rearranged them according to that additional property. They retain their original properties though. So, we still have a countable infinity of Rexs, and a countable infinity of not-Rexs. Who can be placed into one-to-one correspondence. SO...what difference does the "measure" make when deciding, as Carroll put it, "which infinity wins"? What does winning mean in this context? Okay, the not-Rexs have a greater frequency, but so what. They still don't outnumber the Rexs. Frequency seems like an arbitrary definition of "winning". Cardinality seems like the correct measure to decide who won. At least in the case of Rexs and not-Rexs, as well as with Boltzmann Brains and Normal Brains. The only way for the not-Rexs to "win" is to not allow the "eternal" part of "eternal recurrence." To keep it finite, where they win on cardinality. At the very least it seems like a defensible position...? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 5/3/2010 7:14 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Brent Meeker > wrote: >>> That's assuming I believe some things are true in some absolute sense >>> unrelated to usefulness. I don't. >>> >> >> I am having the experience of seeing a red book. >> > > But do you *believe* you are seeing a red book. You could be mistaken about > that (in fact you've argued you're probably mistaken). No, you only believe > that you are having an experience that is described as "seeing a red book". > But I will concede you may have confidence in such a belief (provided you > know what "see", "red", and "book" mean - which requires references that are > less than certain). For myself I don't formulate such beliefs, although I > suppose I could say, "I believe I am experiencing something that could be > described as looking at a computer display." Do you really believe that you are experiencing looking at a computer display, OR, do you only believe that you believe that you are experiencing looking at a computer display? Ha! What is belief except another aspect of conscious experience? So there are blind people with anosognosia, who deny being blind and will invent visual experiences. When they claim to see a red book, what is their conscious experience? I would guess that their experience is not the same as mine, but who knows? Maybe it is the same. Maybe the sincere belief that you're having a visual experience *is* a visual experience. If so, that works for me. Maybe that explains the visual aspects of dreams? Maybe belief is all that exists? Fundamental and uncaused... OR maybe the blind anosognosiacs don't truly believe that they are seeing a red book, but their impaired condition forces them to behave as though they believed they were? OR, maybe they aren't having any experience at all. Maybe they have become zombies...? I can only work with what I know about my own experiences. But, thanks to Salvia Divinorum, I have some idea of what it's like to both believe really strange things, and to experience really strange things. If you asked me what I was seeing on one of those Salvia outings, I would have told you all sorts of crazy things. The visual experience was real, even if what I saw wasn't. > It doesn't seem to be useful to obtain certainty by giving > up all reference. Is that what you are doing and that's > why you regard your experiences as uncaused and not > referring - so you can have certainty? Well. I am trying to fit everything that I know into a single consistent, coherent framework. Why? Well...I don't know. Too much spare time on my hands? In general though, it seems like a reasonable way to pass the time. >> When I say time and red are aspects of consciousness, I mean it in the >> same way that a scientific realist means that spin is an aspect of an >> electron. > > > Red and time are mathematical attributes in a model of consciousness?? Ok, > what's the model? By definition, a scientific realist believes in the actual existence of electrons and of the attribute of spin. If he didn't, he wouldn't be a scientific realist. He might instead be a structural realist. > On 5/1/2010 6:15 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >>>> I'm not switching positions, I'm saying that the "honest physicalist" >>>> should believe that his beliefs are determined only by the initial >>>> conditions and causal laws of the universe. >>>> >>> >>> Why would he be a determinist? >>> >> >> If he's a physicalist, why wouldn't he believe that his beliefs are >> determined by the nature of the physical world? What else would they >> be determined by? >> > > Maybe we're using "determined" in different ways. I use it in contrast to > random or stochastic. I use "deterministic" in contrast to random or stochastic. > So if the natural world has stochastic aspects then > one's beliefs could be undetermined and yet still "determined by the nature > of the physical world". For example, one of your momentary experiences > might be due to the decay of a radioactive calcium atom in the blood stream > of your brain. Exactly. >>> And what if they were? According to the >>> best physical models we have they are mostly determined by the recent >>> history of the universe plus probabilistic laws (QM) - >> >> >> Probabilistic laws are still causal laws, right? >> > > Depends on what you mean by causal? I take "pro
Re: The past hypothesis
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > We haven't changed the relative number of Rexs and not-Rexs, we've > just labeled them with an extra property and then rearranged them > according to that additional property. They retain their original > properties though. > > So, we still have a countable infinity of Rexs, and a countable > infinity of not-Rexs. Who can be placed into one-to-one > correspondence. > > SO...what difference does the "measure" make when deciding, as Carroll > put it, "which infinity wins"? To me this sounds very similar to the Tristram Shandy Paradox. Yes? No? http://www.suitcaseofdreams.net/Tristram_Shandy.htm -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
Ha! Indeed, these nesting levels do get fairly obscure. On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:49 AM, John Mikes wrote: > Dear Rex, > I tried to paraphrase your next to last par. of this post. > It was: > "As if we could do otherwise. If we assume physicalism, then our > constituent particles are doing all the work. Given the universe's > initial conditions and causal laws (which may be probabilistic), they > could behave other than they do. In this view, the emotion we feel > would seem to be an irrelevant non-causal side-effect at best. Maybe > even an illusion?" I made a typo there that kind of spoiled the point I was trying to make: > Given the universe's > initial conditions and causal laws (which may be probabilistic), they > could behave other than they do. SHOULD HAVE BEEN: > Given the universe's > initial conditions and causal laws (which may be probabilistic), they > could NOT behave other than they do. Sorry about that! > > In my paraphrasing: > > As if we could think otherwise. If we assume physicalism, then our assumed > constituent particles are assigned to "do all the work". Assuming the > universe's initial conditions and the conventional 'causal' laws (which may > be part of the believe system) they could be assumed to behave other than we > presume 'them' to do. In such view the emotion we feel would seem to be an > irrelevant (non causal? secondary?) side-effect at best. > Maybe even an illusion (if we assign an adequate meaning to this term). > So you've taken my ontological statement and translated it into it's epistemological equivalent? Are you saying that ontological speculation is pointless? If so, I tend to agree. But of course, in unguarded moments we inevitably slip back into ontological speculation anyway. BUT, taking your epistemological equivalent and then adding the belief that ontological speculation is ultimately pointless - and then translating *that* back into ontology gives us Kant's transcendental idealism (or maybe just pure idealism), not physicalism. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The past hypothesis
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 06 May 2010, at 04:24, Rex Allen wrote: > >> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >>> >>> We haven't changed the relative number of Rexs and not-Rexs, we've >>> just labeled them with an extra property and then rearranged them >>> according to that additional property. They retain their original >>> properties though. >>> >>> So, we still have a countable infinity of Rexs, and a countable >>> infinity of not-Rexs. Who can be placed into one-to-one >>> correspondence. >>> >>> SO...what difference does the "measure" make when deciding, as Carroll >>> put it, "which infinity wins"? >> >> >> To me this sounds very similar to the Tristram Shandy Paradox. Yes? No? >> >> http://www.suitcaseofdreams.net/Tristram_Shandy.htm > > > Nice page. I think people should find there enough to conclude that > cardinality if on no help in probability measure problems. What I get out of it is that measure is irrelevant to ontological questions involving infinity. Even though events happen more frequently that completed autobiographical entries, ultimately every event has it's associated entry. At least according to Bertrand Russell. Translating back to Normal brains, Boltzmann brains, and eternal recurrence - ultimately every normal brain can be paired with a Boltzmann brain, so anthropic reasoning is irrelevant in that case. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:01 PM, rexallen...@gmail.com wrote: > Let's assume that our best scientific theories tell us something true > about the way the world *really* is, in an ontological sense. And > further, for simplicity, let's assume a deterministic interpretation > of those theories. > > In this view, the universe as we know it began ~13.7 billion years > ago. We'll set aside any questions about what, if anything, preceded > the first instant and just draw a line there and call that our > "initial state". > > Given the specifics of that initial state, plus the particular causal > laws of physics that we have, the universe can only evolve along one > path. The state of the universe at this moment is entirely determined > by two, and only two, things: its initial state and its casual laws. > > But this means that the development of our scientific theories *about* > the universe was also entirely determined by the initial state of the > universe and it's causal laws. Our discovery of the true nature of > the universe has to have been "baked into" the structure of the > universe in its first instant. > > By comparison, how many sets of *possible* initial states plus causal > laws are there that would give rise to conscious entities who develop > *false* scientific theories about their universe? It seems to me that > this set of "deceptive" universes is likely much larger than the set > of "honest" universes. > > What would make universes with honest initial conditions + causal laws > more probable than deceptive ones? For every honest universe it would > seem possible to have an infinite number of deceptive universes that > are the equivalent of "The Matrix" - they give rise to conscious > entities who have convincing but incorrect beliefs about how their > universe really is. These entities' beliefs are based on perceptions > that are only illusions, or simulations (naturally occurring or > intelligently designed), or hallucinations, or dreams. > > It seems to me that it would be a bit of a miracle if it turned out > that we lived in a universe whose initial state and causal laws were > such that they gave rise to conscious entities whose beliefs about > their universe were true beliefs. Note that Gottlob Ernst Schulze made a similar point in Aenesidemus (1792): “Where do the representations that we possess originate, and how do they come to be in us? This has been for a long time one of the most important questions in philosophy. Common opinion has rightly held that, since the representations in us are not the objects themselves being represented, the connection between our representations and the things outside us must be established above all by a careful and sound answer to this question. It is in this way that certitude must be sought regarding the reality of the different components of our knowledge. [...] As determined by the Critique of Pure Reason, the function of the principle of causality thus undercuts all philosophizing about the where or how of the origin of our cognitions. All assertions on the matter, and every conclusion drawn from them, become empty subtleties, for once we accept that determination of the principle as our rule of thought, we could never ask, ‘Does anything actually exist which is the ground and cause of our representations?’ We can only ask, ‘How must the understanding join these representations together, in keeping with the pre-determined functions of its activity, in order to gather them as one experience?’” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > > I'm confused about your theory of this, Rex. You talk about "honest" vs > "dishonest:" universes and how the initial conditions must determine what > theories we have about the universe This point about initial conditions and causal laws "determining" what follows, including our discovery of various theories, is reasonable isn't it? IF you assume a physicalist view of reality, of course. > and since there are a lot more dishonest > ones than honest (a point not in evidence) we have no reason to believe our > theories of the universe. So the "no miracles" part of my title is a reference to Hilary Putnam's observation: “The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle” This is discussed here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/ As to my statement that "It seems to me that this set of deceptive universes is likely much larger than the set of honest universes", my reasoning is: 1) If we assume physicalism/materialism 2) and if we assume that a computer simulation of a brain+environment would give rise to the same conscious experience as a real brain in a real environment (i.e. multiple realizability) 3) Next, we know that there are infinitely many different Turing machines capable of running any given computer simulation. 4) We can therefore conceive of a universe containing nothing but an implementation of such a Turing machine. 5) And we can therefore conceive of infinitely many universes, each containing a different Turing machine that runs the same "brain simulation" program. 6) Therefore it's conceivable that there could be infinitely many of these deceptive universes running "Matrix"-style simulations of *any* "honest" universe. So how many honest universes can there be that will "honestly" generate our conscious experiences? I would think that the more accurate our observations become, the fewer universes there are that can honestly generate them... With maximumly accurate observations, then only 1 universe (and it's exact duplicates) could honestly generate those observations. Though maybe we get into quantum uncertainty issues here. > But then you cite Schulze and Kant who contend > that you have no reason to think there is a universe or causal laws or > anything except your cognitions. Well, Kant contended that we had good reason to believe that a noumenal world existed...but that we couldn't know anything about it beyond the fact of it's existence. He explicitly addressed this in the "Refutation of Idealism" which he added to the second edition of A Critique of Pure Reason (1787) to avoid the charge that his Transcendental Idealism was just a variation of Berkeleyan Idealism. Schulze basically showed that Kant's arguments against Cartesian Doubt, Berkeleyan Idealism, and Humean Skepticism didn't go through. According to Schulze, Kant's arguments end up strengthening the case for these views, instead of countering them. Interestingly, one of the reviewers of Schulze's Aenesidemus was Johann Fichte (1764-1814), who came to this conclusion: "Fichte did not endorse Kant's argument for the existence of noumena, of 'things in themselves', the supra-sensible reality beyond the categories of human reason. Fichte saw the rigorous and systematic separation of 'things in themselves' (noumena) and things 'as they appear to us' (phenomena) as an invitation to skepticism. Rather than invite such skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we should throw out the notion of a noumenal world and instead accept the fact that consciousness does not have a grounding in a so-called 'real world'. In fact, Fichte achieved fame for originating the argument that consciousness is not grounded in anything outside of itself." So. There's nothing new under the sun... > You can't draw any conclusions about > probability from that. Before you can count up the infinite number of > "Matrix" universes and Boltzmann brains, you need to suppose there is > something beyond your own thoughts. So I guess in the future I need to be more clear about where I'm assuming physicalism to make arguments against it. I'm not actually arguing that "Matrix" universes and Boltzmann brains exist. I'm saying that IF we assume Physicalism, I don't see how we can rule out Matrix universes and Boltzmann brains, except by fiat. They seem to be "likely" consequences of Physicalist assumptions. As likely as the mainstream physicalist conclusions that the world really is (generally) as it appears to be. I commented on Sean Carroll's position on "Cognative Instability" in "The Past Hypothesis" thread. Cognative instability is only a problem if you refuse to relinquish the starting assumption that an independently existing physical world is the cause of our experiences. > And I doubt you've had an infinite > number of thoughts about anything. If physicalism and
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 1:16 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 5/12/2010 9:48 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> I commented on Sean Carroll's position on "Cognative Instability" in >> "The Past Hypothesis" thread. Cognative instability is only a problem >> if you refuse to relinquish the starting assumption that an >> independently existing physical world is the cause of our experiences. >> > > But you seem to stop short of the last step. Assume physicalism: this leads > to the inference that all the evidence for physicalism and for an external > world is unreliable and all perception and thought that seems to refer is > unreliable and so your only reliable knowledge is that of ephemeral thoughts > that in all probability have no meaning. That "last step" is one of the points I try to make in my posts. BUT, I have a further point. Which is: Let's say we add two more supplemental "axiomatic" assumptions: 1) "The Physical World Hypothesis" - a physical world exists independently of us and causes our experiences. 2) "The Honest Universe Hypothesis" - our experiences tell us something true about this physical world...we're not in a "Matrix" universe. Now we can claim to have reliable knowledge about the physical world. But so what? This knowledge is purely a function of the initial conditions and physical laws of this world. Either the initial conditions were just right to allow us this knowledge, OR the physical laws are such that a wide variety of initial conditions will ultimately "converge" with the result that conscious entities have this knowledge. Either the initial conditions were fine-tuned or the physical laws were fine-tuned to produce reliable knowledge. Regardless, why is this kind of "reliable knowledge" more desirable than the reliable knowledge of ephemeral thoughts? You seem to imply that it is "better". Why? It seems to me that both kinds of knowledge are equally meaningless. In either case, the only possible meaning is subjective. A meaningless physical world, or meaningless ephemeral thoughts. Take your pick. So...you'd rather be a material cog in a (deterministic or probabilistic) rule-driven physical machine than an insubstantial entity composed entirely of ephemeral thoughts. I wonder why you have that preference? What causes you to be that way? I don't see any significant difference in the two options. I incline towards the later because I know that my conscious experiences exist, and I don't see how positing an inferred-but-unexplained physical world which somehow causes my experiences adds anything "useful". >> Tangentially: isn't your claim that you are only interested in theory >> to the extent that it is "useful", essentially a skeptical position? >> > > That's not my only interest in theories, but it's one. What are your other interests with respect to theories? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> On 5/13/2010 9:27 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
>> Either the initial conditions were fine-tuned or the physical laws
>> were fine-tuned to produce reliable knowledge.
>>
>
> What happened to "...a wide variety of initial conditions will ultimately
> "converge" with the result that
> conscious entities have this knowledge." That's contrary to "fine-tuning".
Okay, in the discussion that follows: the algorithm is analogous to
the laws of physics; the unsorted input list is analogous to "initial
conditions"; and producing a correctly sorted list from this input is
analogous to arriving at "reliable knowledge".
1) Fine-tuned physical laws: The Quicksort algorithm can start with
any unsorted list and it will "converge" to a sorted version of that
list.
So regardless of the initial condition of the data, the result will
always be the same: a perfectly sorted list.
This happens because the Quicksort algorithm is very finely-tuned.
Unlike most other algorithms, this one is perfectly suited to produce
sorted lists from a "wide variety of initial conditions."
2) Fine-tuned initial conditions: Alternatively, you could have an
algorithm that will only produce a sorted list when provided with a
very specific "unsorted" initial input data. Freshman Computer
Science students sometimes produce this type of "sort algorithm." It
only correctly sorts when provided with one particular starting
list...which happens to be the list they tested with before turning in
their homework assignment. If you run their (supposed) sort algorithm
on any other unsorted input data, then the output will not be a
correctly sorted list.
So in this case, arriving at the correct solution ("reliable
knowledge") is entirely a function of the initial conditions. The
initial conditions must be very fine-tuned for that algorithm to give
correct results.
Right?
Note that the Randomized Quicksort can even be said to be
indeterministic. And yet it still reliably and efficiently produces
correctly sorted lists from any initial conditions.
>> Regardless, why is this kind of "reliable knowledge" more desirable
>> than the reliable knowledge of ephemeral thoughts? You seem to imply
>> that it is "better". Why?
>>
>
> There is no "knowledge of ephemeral thoughts". Knowledge, by definition is
> a kind of thought that refers, but emphemeral thoughts don't refer. So they
> cannot be knowledge.
Even assuming physicalism, I can have thoughts that refer only to
"ephemeral" things...including other thoughts (not explicitly to the
material substrate that instantiates the thoughts).
It would seem to me that one ephemeral thought could refer to another
ephemeral thought. And ephemeral thoughts could refer to perceptions,
impressions, emotions, "ideas", whatever...the same kinds of things
that "non-ephemeral" thoughts can refer to.
Again, I don't know that I am looking at a *real* book, but I
definitely know that I am having the experience of looking at book.
Another definition of knowledge is "a true, justified belief."
So how would I justify my belief that I am looking at a real book that
exists independently of my perceptions of it?
My belief that I am having the experience of looking at a book is
undeniably true and justified, as I have direct knowledge of my
experiences.
It is inconceivable to me that I could be wrong about what I experience.
>> So...you'd rather be a material cog in a (deterministic or
>> probabilistic) rule-driven physical machine than an insubstantial
>> entity composed entirely of ephemeral thoughts.
>>
>
> I'd rather be system that interacts with a universe of physical systems and
> thereby form thoughts correlated with the rest of the universe. I dont'
> think "physical" adds anything - it's just a word that indicates some
> external reality. Why do you find it preferable to be dreamer?
The coherence, scope, and simplicity of the idea is attractive.
And being correlated with something beyond my experiences isn't that
big an attraction.
Though, ultimately I think the two options are interchangeable in
terms of their "usefulness". I don't necessarily see that believing
one over the other would result in different decisions.
A rule-driven cog in a vast implacable machine.
OR, not even a dreamer, but rather just a dream.
In either case: Why are things this way? There is no reason. They just are.
>> I wonder why you have
>> that preference? What causes you to be that way?
>>
>
> The laws of physics and reality.
What are "the laws of physics", do you think? Are they real thin
Re: The 'no miracles' argument against scientific realism
On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > > I don't know what "fine tuned" means in this context. You're back to the > measurement problem. If it is observed that unsorted lists of words (for > example) sort themselves alphabetically, then one might hypothesize a "law > of physics" to explain this. And physicists seeking to test this law might > hypothesize different ways it works. One might speculate it works like > Quicksort while another hypothesizes it works like Bubblesort. This quickly > leads to an experimental test. By preparing different initial lists and > seeing how long it takes for them to be sorted the test may favor Quicksort > over Bubblesort. But of course there are infinitely many different sort > algorithms which would produce the same results. Except in this case, we're not observing the sorting process from the outside. Instead, our observations are a side-effect of the sorting process. We aren't free to develop experimental tests...instead the "underlying process" dictates our selection of which tests to perform, our execution of those tests, and our interpretation of the results. Our learning about the process would have to be hardcoded into the process from the start. Pretending otherwise is just fantasy and wishful thinking isn't it? > So one just takes the more favored, simplest one. Isn't the simplest explanation that our experiences are fundamental and uncaused? If our experiences aren't fundamental and uncaused, then the process that underlies them must be. But, that being the case, what good does it do to insert this hypothetical underlying process, except as a calculational device? If you take reality as a whole, then it makes no difference whether there is a material world (or a platonic world) that underlies the world of subjective experience or not. What difference does it make if there "really" is a layer of rule-driven particles (or numbers and logic) between our experiences and reality's foundation? Ultimately the result is the same...things just are the way they are, and there is no answer to the question "why?" >> It is inconceivable to me that I could be wrong about what I experience. >> > > It's inconceivable that "I am looking at a real book." can have any meaning > unless there are real books and real looking at them and a real "I". So you > can only have certainty at the price of losing all reference. It'd still be a bargain at twice the price! "By what argument can it be proved, that the perceptions of the mind must be caused by external objects, entirely different from them, though resembling them (if that be possible) and could not arise either from the energy of the mind itself, or from the suggestion of some invisible and unknown spirit, or from some other cause still more unknown to us?" - David Hume "As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always increases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them.” -- David Hume "Now, while it happens, sometimes, that anti-realism drives people to skepticism, actually, it usually goes the other way. As Rorty once explained, 'people become Pragmatists for the same reason they become idealists or verificationists: they hope to frustrate the skeptic.' If we can know nothing about any mind-independent, external world, then, if we say the world is inside the mind, maybe we can know about it! So, historically, it’s been a dread of the demon that scared philosophers off the pedestrian realism of less enlightened folk." -- Quee Nelson I wonder why you have that preference? What causes you to be that way? >>> >>> The laws of physics and reality. >>> >> >> What are "the laws of physics", do you think? Are they real things, >> which we approximate with our scientific theories? Or is there really >> no necessity behind how events transpire? >> > > I think "the laws of physics" are our inventions to explain the regularities > we observe. Is there *really* some necessity in how events transpire. I > don't know how to answer questions with *really* in them. It's my best > theory that there is some necessity in how events transpire and I'm willing > to use it as a guide to thought and action. If there was a necessity, what enforces it? What makes it necessary for events to transpire according to that rule? If the answer is "nothing", then I'd say it wasn't actually a necessity...it was just a contingent pattern. If the answer is "something", then I'd ask what enforces that "something". And what enforces what enforces it. And so on. Again, the infinite chain. >> Tangentially: isn't your claim that you are only interested in theory >> to the extent that it is "useful", essentially a skeptical position? >> > > That's not my only interest in the
Re: The Irrationality of Physicalism
I think my previous email address ended up on a spam list or something, because all of my posts were blocked. Trying a new address. On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: >> On 7/21/2010 8:31 AM, Allen Rex wrote: >> >> But, this belief isn't entailed by methodological naturalism. It's a >> leap of faith. And my position is just that it does no good. >> >> And the same goes for any metaphysical theory that claims that our >> conscious experiences are caused by more fundamental rule-governed >> processes. >> >> No matter what the fundamental components and rules of the proposed >> ontology are, there is always the question: "Why would this >> rule-driven configuration, and no other, give rise to something like >> my experience?" >> > > Cooper has one idea of an answer to this. Bruno has a different one. I > don't think either one is fully worked out - but I see them as different > possible ways of looking at the question. So first, there's the relatively concrete problem of identifying and representing the recurring patterns in what we observe, and even in what we think. And second, there's the more abstract question of what it means *that* we observe and think. The question I posed is entirely centered on this second point. It seems to me that Cooper tries to explain what we think in terms of what we observe. So his focus seems to almost entirely on the first point. Bruno's goal seems to be to address both points, but I think his approach is largely developed to address the first point, and then because his preferred framework is "abstract logic" he just goes ahead and claims victory on addressing the "abstract" second point also. I will address this in more detail in a separate response to him! >> The extra inferred-from-experience "behind the scenes" infrastructure >> serves no (metaphysical) purpose because I can ask the exact same >> questions about them as I could ask about the consciousness that they >> supposedly explain. >> >> But, if your a hardened skeptic, and a fellow instrumentalist, whose >> mind never turns to metaphysical questions, then I suppose we really >> have no disagreement. >> > > When I turn to metaphysics I conclude that physics is a human invention > created to explain this in terms of that. The "laws of physics" are not > active elements of reality creating this or that. Then what does create this or that? In your opinion? This sounds like a Kantian position: We can only know the phenomenal world...the world of experience. There is a noumenal world which underlies and "supports" the phenomenal world, but the fact that we actively process information to build our own internal models of reality means that we can never discern the "true" nature of what exists. To quote Lee Braver in "A Thing of This World": "The linchpin of this synthesis was what [Kant] called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax." Continuing later on the subject of true beliefs: "When we turn from noumena to phenomena as the possible objects of correspondence, there are two candidates for the aspect of the object with which our beliefs correspond - the matter or the form. The matter would be the sensible manifold which comes to us from the outside and which forms our ‘contact' with things-in-themselves. However, this quickly becomes problematic, for how can a fully formed judgement of experience correspond to an unformed, nonunified sensible manifold? The comparison between a finished, processed item and its raw materials is hard to cash out. In what sense does a window correspond to sand, heat, and bits of wood, or a Matisse painting to a piece of canvas and globs of colored paint? Since perception is an active process, what comes out precisely does *not* correspond to what went in; that's the whole point. This is basically the same problem that confronts correspondence with noumena, which is unsurprising, since the sensible manifold is the closest we get to noumena." >> If, in a moment of weakness, one's thoughts do turn to metaphysics, >> then I propose just hypostatizing the skeptical position. >> Epistemically, the only thing we can be certain of is that our >> experiences exist. > > Correction, the only thing "you" can be certain of is that there is > experience now. "You" is an inference as is the passage of time. I agree, and I'm comfortable with that position. But really, I don't see physicalism as being any better on this point. Once things are reduced changing patterns of matter, perhaps with a real flow of time, perhaps not (block universe), what is an individual? Or, for Bruno, once things are reduced to relations between numbers, then what is an individual? What is time? You're making critical noises about
Re: Divided by Infinity
One of my favorites, also appropriate to the list - Ted Chiang's "Exhalation": http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Ted%20Chiang.html On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > I wonder if Bruno has read this story by Robert Wilson - or maybe Wilson > has read Bruno? > > Brent > > Original Message > > This is a good short sci-fi story about that (but more interesting > than resurrection) > http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/divided-by-infinity > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:37 PM, David Nyman wrote: > If we could remove ourselves from the universe and take a strict > reductionist-god's eye view (which means having to drop all our usual > mental categories - a very hard thing to achieve imaginatively) then, > strictly adhering to the above hypothesis, all that would remain would > be some ground-level physical machine grinding along, without the need > for additional composite or macroscopic posits. Take your pick from > current theory what is supposed to represent this "machine", but that > needn't necessarily be at issue for the purpose of the argument. The > point is that removing everything composite from the picture > supposedly results in zero difference at the base level - same events, > same "causality". It seems to me that the primary question is about causality. Once you commit to the idea of a rule-governed system, you're already in a radically restrictive regime. Whether the system is physical or "ideal" or whatever seems largely irrelevant. But what is the alternative to a rule-governed system? How can the occurrence of any event be explained *except* by attributing that occurrence to some rule? Which is just to say that the event occurred for some reason. But if everything has a reason, then there are an infinity of reasons even if there are only a finite number of things that initially need explanation. Because for every reason there should be a another reason that explains why the rule the reason refers to holds instead of not holding or instead of some other rule holding in it's place or in addition to it. And then we need a reason for each one of the reasons for our original reasons. And so on, ad infinitum. But why our particular set of infinite reasons instead of some other set of inifinite reasons? What is the reason for that? The alternative is that some things happen for no reason. But in this case, why would some things have explanations while others don't? What is the reason for the two categories? Maybe, instead, there is no reason for anything? How would we know? What would eliminate this possibility from consideration? So...reductive physicalism. It seems like only one example of a larger problem. Maybe "Idealist Accidentalism" is the answer? On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 7:04 PM, David Nyman wrote: > I suppose that evolution has equipped us with such an > instinctive commitment to naturalism... Why would that be the case? And if true, what does it mean? In a deterministic world view, such as the Newtonian one that was in favor in 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the answer is simple: it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of the universe's initial conditions and causal laws that humans have an instinctive commitment to naturalism. So in a deterministic universe, questions about evolution are ultimately just questions about initial conditions and causal laws. In a probabilistic world view, we add an element of chance to initial conditions and causal laws. The universe no longer plays chess...instead it plays poker. There are still rules, but the rules include randomly shuffling the deck between hands and keeping the hole cards hidden. In a probabilistic universe, questions about evolution are still ultimately questions about initial conditions and causal laws. The constrained randomness involved of how events actually transpire is an aspect of the universe's framework of governing laws. So, either way: We have an instinctive commitment to naturalism because the universe has caused us to have an instinctive commitment to naturalism. Given that this is the case, should be more inclined to trust this instinct, or less? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: > > Excellent topic and comments! Naturalism does seem to be a > natural condition of humans given their predilection for supernatural or > supranatural explanations of events that have no simplistic explanations, > i.e. in terms of their common every day experiences which are limited by > their socioeconomic conditions. I am not sure what Idealist Accidentalism > would entail… Could you elaborate on this, Rex? By "idealist" I'm referring to metaphysical idealism...that what fundamentally exists is mental, not physical. And by mental I mean either consciousness or existing only as an aspect of consciousness. For example, there is my conscious experience of a dream, and then there are the things that appear in my dreams that I am conscious of...houses and chairs and trees and people. Both categories of things are mental. The trees that appear in my dreams only exist as an aspect of the dream. And by "accidentalism" I mean the theory that nothing that exists or occurs is caused. There is nothing that connects or controls the flow of events. The only rule is that there are no rules to appeal to. So "idealist accidentalism"...the view that what exists is mental, and that there is no underlying process that explains or governs this existence. Explaining the order of our experience by positing the existence of orderly underlying processes (as with reductive physicalism, for example) is just begging the question...because then what explains the order of those underlying processes? The total amount of mystery was conserved. We just transferred the mystery to a new location - from our conscious experience to a hypothetical underlying process. We are unwilling to accept that our experiences "just are" orderly, so instead we appeal to an underlying process which "just is" orderly. "Ordo Ex Machina". Not only that, but this reductionist approach raises the question of why we would be so lucky as to have our conscious experiences generated by underlying processes that "cause" us to have correct knowledge of those very processes. We can only know what the underlying process causes us to know. Thus, the tendency to believe true things can't be a special feature of humans. Rather, it would be a special feature of the process that underlies human experience. But, again, this is a problem with any rule-based explanation of reality, not just with reductive physicalism. But the only alternative to a rule-based explanation of reality is accidentalism, isn't it? > Could I propose a hypothesis about rules and causality? I will try to keep > my explanation here simplistic to save time and space so please take that > into account as you read this. First, if we are going to eliminate all > traces of supranaturalism from our considerations, does it not behoove us to > be sure that we are bringing the Observer at Infinity in some other guise? > This notion of "rules" concerns me because it seems to imply that either > some entity established them ab initio or else their existence is simply the > result of some selective mechanism. But then what is the selective mechanism a result of? > Naturalism would involve making sure > that it is not the former case. I think that the work of thinkers like > Russell Standish and Nick Bostrom are making great strides to help us > understand this later possibility. It could very well be that these "rules" > are simply patterns of commonality that emerge between a large number of > interacting systems, Emerge by what rule? Or do they emerge randomly? If so, that takes us back to accidentalism, doesn't it? Also, a large number of interacting systems is just "a system", isn't it? At the very least a system of interacting systems. Where the boundaries are drawn is all in how you look at...I would think. With the right mapping you can find any pattern anywhere, can't you? What privileges one interpretational mapping over another? > What Pratt proposes is a more subtle version of this that assumes a > duality relationship between information and matter. Explained here > http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech , this duality involves a > transition rule that move us a bit toward making sense of the kinds of great > questions that Rex points out below. Maybe it is that way...but if so, I wonder why? Why is it that way instead of some other way? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> So "idealist accidentalism"...the view that what exists is mental, and >> that there is no underlying process that explains or governs this >> existence. > > If idealist accidentalism is correct then there is no theory at all. Well, I'd have to hear your definition of "theory" and what the conditions are for its existence. So obviously something exists...my conscious experience of this moment. This experience is a multifaceted thing...in that there are many "things" I am conscious of in this moment. But this is true of dreams as well. I am conscious of many things in a dream, but those aren't things that exist outside or independently of the dream. So what accounts for the dream? Numbers? How does my experience of dreaming of a tree connect to numbers? What is it that generates my experience of a tree from the brutely existing substrate of numbers? Why should numbers give rise to my dream experience of a tree? Obviously I can use numbers to represent the tree...in the sense that I can use saved numerical measurements to "re-present" the tree to my self...if I can remember how to interpret the measurements. And I'm even willing to grant that I can use numbers to represent my experience of the tree. But representation is just the re-presenting of something to your conscious experience, which is not at all the same as explaining the fact of that experience. > But idealist accidentalism is a theory (even if vague) > So there is no theory, and there is one theory. > So 0 = 1. > Contradiction. > So idealist accidentalism is refuted. I think you should have your logician license revoked... > You may save it by insisting that idealist accidentalism is not a theory. It > would be a mere philosophical injunction of the type "dont' ask, don't > search". I think it is a just a recognition that Agrippa's trilemma and the principle of sufficient reason lead to infinite levels of infinite regress. Which I take as a sign that there's something wrong with that type of interpretation of our conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: > > I should just add that "idealist accidentalism" is *exactly* as irrefutable > as solipsism. > > Hence by that it has no value... but it's not refuted. What would refute physicalism? It would seem to me that quantum mechanics is sufficiently flexible to account for nearly any observation, especially since the many worlds interpretation and the possibility of multiverses would seem likely to give rise to so many permutations. Even probabilistic physical laws and a single infinite universe would still seem likely to give rise to some pretty bizarre scenarios, wouldn’t it? Now, maybe quantum mechanics will be replaced by a different theory, but can you imagine any possible feature of such a theory that would rule out a physicalist interpretation? And, again, any rule-based framework for explaining our conscious experiences means, by definition, that don’t present or believe arguments for reasons of logic or rationality. Instead, the arguments that we present and believe are those entailed by the rules that underlie our experiences. That these rules generate rational beliefs is a leap of faith, and can neither be refuted nor proven. If the underlying process *didn’t* cause us to present and believe rational arguments, there would be no way to detect this, since there is no way to step outside of the process’s control of one’s beliefs to independently verify the "reasonableness" of the beliefs it generates. A physicalist may be correct about the physical nature of reality, but if so, this is solely due to his improbable good luck in existing in a rare "honest" physical universe whose initial conditions and causal laws resulted in his holding true beliefs about his universe's initial conditions and causal laws. Given all that, ultimately I doubt your beliefs are any better footing than solipsism either. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 2:14 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: > Euh.. > > I'm sorry but where did I state my belief in the preceeding message ? Where > did I spoke about physicalism ? > > I spoke about "idealist accidentalism" in answer to Bruno who said wrongly > it's been refuted when it's not because well... read the preceeding message. I did read your preceeding message. And what I got out of it is that if you consistently apply your evaluative criteria, you should conclude that physicalism, platonism, deism, theism, arithmetical realism and all other metaphysical theories that reduce conscious experience to some sort of underlying rule-governed framework are irrefutable and thus valueless. But what are alternatives to rule-governed metaphysical frameworks? Accidentalism, and...what else? Refraining from metaphysical speculation altogether? Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > In some case the metatheory can itself be an object of the theory. For > example zoologists are animal (but botanist are not plant). Since Gödel we > know that the theory "Peano Arithmetic" can be studied "in" Peano > arithmetic. And monist philosophies makes mandatory that the theory and/or > the theoretican has to belong to the collection of objects or phenomena of > the theory. Physicists do obey to the laws of gravitation for example. A > physicist of masse m will attract a physicist of mass M with a force > proportional to mM/(square of the distance between two physicists). of > course that force is negligible compared to the natural repulsion that a > physicist can or cannot have for a colleague ... This is part of the point I'm making. You have to place yourself within your proposed framework. If you posit the existence of a rule-based system as an explanation for conscious experience, then the rules of that system "determine" the arguments that you present and believe. At this point you are merely a cog in the machine of your system. Your every thought, belief, and emotion are the byproduct of the inexorable action of its metaphysical gears. How is this situation an improvement on solipsism? Only you exist. Only the machine exists. Six of one, half a dozen of the other I’d say. And there’s still the problem that the vast majority of physical universes (or mathematical structures) would be dishonest “Matrix” universes (or structures), so how likely is it that our beliefs are true of anything outside of our subjective experience? >> So obviously something exists...my conscious experience of this >> moment. > > That is obvious for you. I have to postulate it. I don’t see the importance of this point? I am certain that my experience of this moment (or instant) exists...nothing important hinges on whether your experience exists. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. I’m not trying to explain your conscious experience, I’m only trying to explain mine. Bouncing ideas off of you is a useful activity...which would still be true even if it turned out that you were just an Eliza-like chat-bot that parsed incoming emails, rearranged the wording, and added some logician-speak before mailing them back out. > I can agree with that, at some level, but you waould not refer to "this > moment". I am not sure what you mean by "moment" with idealist accidentalism > (IA). Moment as in “Instant of consciousness”. Or even as in “instance of consciousness”. >> This experience is a multifaceted thing...in that there are >> many "things" I am conscious of in this moment. >> >> But this is true of dreams as well. I am conscious of many things in >> a dream, but those aren't things that exist outside or independently >> of the dream. > > In which theory. I was thinking of physicalism. > Such a sentence seems to assume a lot, if only to make some > sense. If IA is correct, words like "world", "outside" refer to what? Aspects of experience. >> So what accounts for the dream? Numbers? > > In the theory "digital mechanism", aka "computationnalism", we can argue for > this, indeed. So IF it is true that some particular some set of numbers and the relations between them just *are* my conscious experience of seeing an oak tree, THEN *something* has to make that true. It’s not the numbers themselves that would make that true, because numbers are numbers, and have nothing obvious to do with oak trees or experience. And it’s not the relations between numbers, because these also have nothing obvious to do with oak trees or experience. So, what is it that makes the previous statement true? If it is true, then it seems to me that there must be some other kind of relationship that can connect numbers, relationships between numbers, and the experience of oak trees. What, in your opinion, is the nature of this extra relationship? > I have no problem with people trying different kind of theory, but to posit > consciousness at the start (or matter, actually) does not satisfy me. Consciousness is the start though, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to be posited...it’s a given. Directly known. Trying to ignore this givenness and re-derive it from things that are inferred FROM conscious experience is where you go astray I think. > As I said it prevents further research. Why do you want to do further research? Putting yourself in your own proposed metaphysical framework, what is the cause of your insatiable lust for more research? In the grand scheme of things, what does it mean that you want further research? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 3:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> On 02 Sep 2010, at 04:15, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> Accidentalism, and...what else? Refraining from metaphysical >> speculation altogether? > > That is the good idea! Easier said than done! I've sworn it off 4 times this year...but here I am again. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: >> >> I did read your preceeding message. And what I got out of it is that >> if you consistently apply your evaluative criteria, you should >> conclude that physicalism, platonism, deism, theism, arithmetical >> realism and all other metaphysical theories that reduce conscious >> experience to some sort of underlying rule-governed framework are >> irrefutable and thus valueless. > > > You're the one saying that. You are correct, I seem to be the only one saying that if you apply your evaluative criteria consistently, then your charge against idealist accidentalism applies equally to physicalism and the rest. > The problem with "idealist accidentalism" (like > with sollipsism) is that you can change at will to adapt to the fact. It's > not the case with the others (but is the case with > theism/deism/magic/bisounours world/etc). Physicalism is exactly as changeable as idealistic accidentalism. That was the point of my earlier response to you. What new fact could possibly refute physicalism??? (or mathematical platonism, or whatever) Keep in mind that idealistic accidentalism is an alternative to physicalism, not to quantum field theory. Physicalism just being the thesis that that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. So, what new data couldn't be interpreted as being consistent with that? An idealistic accidentalist would take an instrumentalist view of quantum mechanics. As opposed to some form of scientific realism that a physicalist might support. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:12 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: > >> >> What new fact could possibly refute physicalism??? (or mathematical >> platonism, or whatever) > > How could physicalism account for a big giant hand of god (?) appearing in > the sky ? :D Would you believe it was the hand of god? Why not the hand of some space alien *pretending* to be god? That would be a physicalist interpretation. How could anyone prove otherwise? OR, it could turn out that god just is a superpowerful space alien...that would also be a valid physicalist interpretation. OR it you could say you were hallucinating it. Also a physicalist interpration. OR it could be taken as the result of an extremely unlikely but not impossible quantum fluctuation, followed by a whole series of supposed miracles that are *also* just quantum fluctions. In an infinite universe anything that's not strictly impossible in inevitable. So another physicalist interpretation. Did you never see that episode of Star Trek TNG where Picard faces down a woman claiming to be the devil? "Devil's Due". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Due_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) SO, as I said,physicalism is exactly as changeable as idealistic accidentalism. > It can't... "idealist accidentalism" can account *all* the facts, not some > of them but all... the worst thing is that it can account everything and has > no explanatory value, it denies explanation in its own definition. So yes > it's useless, you can posit it and then go sleeping. > > If you can always say to any question some thing like 'it's because the > pastafari did it'... then I don't see the value of the theory. Whereas a phyiscalist would always say, "quantum mechanics did it", or "unlikely but not impossible initial conditions explains it", or whatever. I don't see the value of a physicalist interpretation of the descriptive/predictive equations that constitute quantum theory. > And yes theories which could never ever be disproved have little value. Then physicalism, mathematical platonism, deism, etc. have little value. >> Keep in mind that idealistic accidentalism is an alternative to >> physicalism, not to quantum field theory. >> > > quantum field theory in a "idealistic accidentalism" world has no value > because it accidentaly works... Even assuming that physicalism is true, what explains the fact that our universe had the particular initial conditions and causal laws that it does? Aren't these, in effect, accidental? Everything else that we observe is just a coincidence of those two contingent things...initial conditions and causal laws. Everything, *including* our discovery of these causal laws and our theories about the initial conditions. If we're right, this is an accident...a stroke of good fortune in living in an "honest" universe, and not a "matrix" universe. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > Scientifically I think there are possible data > that would count as evidence against physicalism. For example, if persons > reporting out-of-body experiences could actually gain knowledge not > otherwise available via these experiences. Another example would be prayer > healing studies. If it happened that prayers by say Sikhs were effective > with statistical significance while prayers by other religionists were not; > that would be strong evidence against physicalism. First, one might prefer the physicalist "Nick Bostrom" style explanation that we are in a computer simulation over adopting a supernatural explanation. In effect making God physical. The "deity" outside the computer simulation can arrange things however he likes...including allowing OBEs and Sikh prayer healing. Or those might be a sign of a flaw in the simulation's programming. Second, both OBEs and Sikh prayer healing might be explained by entanglement style "action at a distance" mechanisms. Certainly one could start with that claim, quantum mechanics having already blazed the trail. Why only Sikh healing? Well, presumably different beliefs would be associated with different physical brain structures, and maybe only some brain structures have the right "triggering" configuration. Third, even without action at a distance or resonant brain structures, there's still the equivalent of "dark matter" style explanations. That there is an additional physical layer that only weakly (and maybe probabilistically) interacts with the layer we have relatively easy access to. If the OBE/prayer process could be mathematically modeled, then it would just be a matter of assigning physical interpretations to the equations of the model. As the Many Worlds, consistent histories, copenhagen, and Bohmian interpretations do for quantum mechanics. And again, it seems to me that in an infinite universe, SOMEWHERE someone should find what seems to be statistically significant evidence of Sikh prayer healing and OBEs. Since it seems to me that in enough trials with all possible initial conditions and all possible outcomes of probabilistic causal laws, *someone* should see a false positive...in fact, a lot of false positives. So many false positives as to establish reasonable belief that there is a causal connection. And that's just off the top of my head. So, I don't see how OBEs or prayer healing would in any way falsify physicalism, or even dent it. Though they might demolish the Standard Model. >> An idealistic accidentalist would take an instrumentalist view of >> quantum mechanics. As opposed to some form of scientific realism that >> a physicalist might support. >> > > Many physicists take an instrumentalist view of quantum mechanics, c.f. > Asher Peres graduate textbook. For the record, I didn't claim that physicalism entailed scientific realism. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > > You've made up some just-so stories about how some other quasi-physical > explanation *might* be adopted. In what way are my proposed explanations "quasi-physical" instead of just physical? > You haven't show that they *would* be > preferred to supernatural ones. I don't need to show that they would be preferred. I just need to show that physicalism is still a live option, and thus not falsifiable. And honestly I find my proposed explanations more plausible than supernatural ones. While God would explain the Sikhs prayer thing, that also runs into the problem of evil. The simulation argument alone is enough to see off any God-based competition. Anyone who already leans in that direction would probably take this option over God in the event of an outbreak of miracles. Initially I'm sure the vast majority of people would be convinced of a supernatural explanation for OBEs or healing prayer...*but* the vast majority of people are already religiously inclined. So I'm not sure that a popularity contest counts. I'd bet that the majority of atheists would choose one of my proposals, or maybe come up with an even better physicalist alternative. > You can always speculate that any > regularity we note is just a false positive that in inevitable in an > infinite universe - but that will convince no one. "No one" is way too strong. It would convince some. Also you could conclude that we'd wondered into a low-probability branch of the universal wave function a-la the many worlds interpretation. I think all "many worlders" would take this interpretation of events if there were an outbreak of miracles. Do you disagree? And the many world interpretation isn't that different than the infinite universe option. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this? ("And Another Thing" edition)
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > You can always speculate that any > regularity we note is just a false positive that in inevitable in an > infinite universe - but that will convince no one. Also, I think you're underestimating the extent to which people will re-evaluate their estimates of what's likely and unlikely when presented with scientific evidence for OBEs and Sikh prayer healing. A lot of things that had sounded far-fetched before will sound much more plausible when set against the reality of OBEs and Sikh prayer healing. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 9/4/2010 12:45 AM, Rex Allen wrote: >> In what way are my proposed explanations "quasi-physical" instead of >> just physical? >> > > Brain-in-vat and the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation are not really > physical theories since they assume that everything we consider physical > just exists at the whim of some mad scientist. That still makes them physicalist theories, not quasi-physicalist. As long as the mad scientist and his vats/computers are physical. >> And honestly I find my proposed explanations more plausible than >> supernatural ones. While God would explain the Sikhs prayer thing, >> that also runs into the problem of evil. >> > > Who said God is omnibeneficient? The Sikhs. >> The simulation argument alone is enough to see off any God-based >> competition. > > No, it's just a another conception of God - the world is still created and > formed by a supernatural agent. We'd just be inside the Matrix. Nothing supernatural about that. >> I think all "many worlders" would take this interpretation of events >> if there were an outbreak of miracles. Do you disagree? >> And the many world interpretation isn't that different than the >> infinite universe option. >> > > That's one of the criticisms of many-worlds. If the theory can't derive the > Born rules then it's not falsifiable, even in a probabilistic sense. See? Physicalism isn't falsifiable. It falls into the same category as idealistic accidentalism. And thus, according to Quentin, is worthless. Specific scientific theories that posit the existence of particular physical entities are falsifiable, but in no sense does physicalism stand or fall with them. > I think this argument though is ill defined. "Physicalism" or "naturalism" > isn't a particular theory anymore that "supernaturalism" or "everythingism" > or "Platonism" is. The Merriam Webster dictionary shows 9 definitions for the word "theory". I'm pretty certain that our usage here fits at least one of them. > It's kind of metaphysics which says some things exist > and some don't, and things that exist are ones we can in some sense interact > with (If you kick it, it kicks back. is the slogan). But generally > metatheories aren't testable in the same sense that theories are. This is fine. As long as you're not claiming that physicalism is superior to idealistic accidentalism by virtue of being falsifiable. > If you > want to test whether God exists, you first need to make your definition of > "God" sufficiently precise to make some inferences about what would or > wouldn't be the case if God did or didn't exist. Indeed. The same goes for the "physical". What's good for the goose is good for the gander. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 9/4/2010 5:28 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> That still makes them physicalist theories, not quasi-physicalist. As >> long as the mad scientist and his vats/computers are physical. >> > > Does this mad scientist have free will, i.e. can he act independent of any > physical constraints in our universe? Then he's *super* our natural. Hmmm. This is a peculiar direction for you to go. Why would I think the mad scientist has "free will"? Again, I don't even think free will is conceivable. Every decision is either caused, or it's not caused. I see no third option. If the decision was not caused, then it's random. No free will. If the decision is caused, then what caused the cause? And what caused the cause of the cause? And so on. The decision is a link in a causal chain which must eventually be traced outside the person making the choice. No free will. I assume that by "free will" you mean that the mad scientist is ultimately responsible for his actions. But I don't see how that could ever be the case. >> We'd just be inside the Matrix. Nothing supernatural about that. >> > > Yes it is. It's "super" our natural. Anything can happen - no physical > laws. Anything can happen in dreams too - no physical laws apply there. But dreams aren't generally considered supernatural occurrences. Being inside the Matrix is just like being inside a dream. A more coherent, orderly dream. But a kind of dream nonetheless. Assuming physicalism, the physical world causes our dream experiences. Assuming physicalism, the physical world causes our Matrix experiences. Finding out you were in the Matrix would be equivalent to realizing you were in a dream. >> This is fine. As long as you're not claiming that physicalism is >> superior to idealistic accidentalism by virtue of being falsifiable. >> > > I'm not. But I claim that particular physical theories are falsifiable, > whereas idealistic accidentalism either has no theories or has ones that are > not falsifiable - depending on how you look at it. But it doesn't matter that particular physical theories are falsifiable, because in the event of falsification you will always just fall back to another physical theory. With the many-worlds interpretation serving as an ultimate safety net. Further, physicalism isn't necessary to formulate falsifiable theories. Take, for instance, "idealistic occasionalism". Here mathematical theories would be interpreted as describing the patterns behind God's causal interventions so that you can predict what God will cause to happen next. If your theory gets falsified then you theorized incorrectly about the pattern behind God's actions. The existence of God himself is taken as a given. As the existence of a physical substrate is taken as a given in physicalism. However, note that both physicalism and idealistic occasionalism have similar problems when you put yourself inside the framework of your theory: the formulation of the theories is a result of the underlying mechanism that is being theorized about. So if the idealistic occasionalist theorized correctly, this can only be because God *caused* him to theorize correctly. Alternatively, if the physicalist theorizes correctly, this can only be because his universe's particular initial conditions and causal laws *caused* him to theorize correctly. >> Indeed. The same goes for the "physical". >> >> What's good for the goose is good for the gander. >> > > Exactly my point. What's your definition of "physicalism"? I would say that physicalism is the claim that *all* conscious experiences are due to the independent existence of some other more fundamental set of entities (particles, fields, wavefunctions, strings, whatever) whose nature must be such that their existence and properties are (in principle) directly inferable from the details of our sensory data and serve some role in generating that sensory data. Note that the "in principle" qualifier is meant to include counterfactuals...i.e., the existence and properties of these entities *would be* directly inferable from the details of our sensory data if some particular scenario were to occur. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 3:13 PM, John Mikes wrote: > Brent and Rex: > after many many discussions I suffered along - reading utter stupidity, Ouch! > this > one is a refreshingly reasonable one. Excellent! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 9/6/2010 6:45 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> I would say that physicalism is the claim that *all* conscious >> experiences are due to the independent existence of some other more >> fundamental set of entities (particles, fields, wavefunctions, >> strings, whatever) whose nature must be such that their existence and >> properties are (in principle) directly inferable from the details of >> our sensory data and serve some role in generating that sensory data. >> > > But in that case the conscious experiences and the existence of those > particles are *not* independent. Your definition seems incoherent. The words "are due to" is meant in the sense "are dependent on". The word "independent" was meant in the sense that the more fundamental entities are not affected by conscious experience. As an example of what I mean: Conscious experience is *dependent* on the interactions of quarks and electrons. But quarks, electrons, their interactions are *independent* of conscious experience. The dependency flows one way. Put a different way: According to physicalism conscious experience supervenes on quarks and electrons. Quarks and electrons do not supervene on conscious experience. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> On 9/7/2010 1:48 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: >> > > Having said this your point does not follow, in the sense that even if > consciousness supervenes on interactions of particles (non mechanism) this > would not prevents consciousness to retroact on the particles, like when a > painter moves ink and papers to express his artistic feelings. Another > example: we may argue that guns and atomic bombs are produced in part by > human fears. But then what causes human fears? You could say quarks and electrons cause human fears which then cause guns and bombs. OR, you could say quarks and electrons cause human fears *and also cause* guns and bombs. Human fears being epiphenomenal and non-causal. How could you tell which option was correct? Human flesh and guns and bombs all boil down to specific arrangements of quarks and electrons. There's no mystery as to how one could lead to the others. The mystery is why there should be an experience of fear associated certain arrangements of quarks and electrons and experiences of happiness associated with other arrangements and (presumably) no experience at all associated with yet other arrangements. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: What's wrong with this?
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 12 Sep 2010, at 21:43, Stephen P. King wrote: >> The only >> explanation that I can think of for this is that the hope of an impersonal >> determinism that obtains from the block-static reality doctrine allows it >> adherents to avoid all notions of personal responsibility for their >> behaviors. >> > > On the contrary, it is explained that free-will and responsibility is > unavoidable from inside. To use the determinacy of the big whole would be > like to give a name to God, and that is explicitly making any Löbian machine > inconsistent, and worth: incorrect. > We are typically partially responsible for our normal futures. Bertrand Russell: "Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on behaviour. The apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The one effect that the free- will doctrine has in practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Intelligence and Nomologicalism
What is the significance of intelligence in a universe with deterministic laws? Your performance on any IQ test is not due to your possessing some property called "intelligence", but rather is an inevitable outcome of the universe's initial conditions and governing causal laws. The questions you are asked, the answers you give, the problems you are presented with, the solutions you develop - these were all implicit in the universe's first instant. You, and the rest of the universe, are essentially "on rails". The unfolding of events and your experience of them is dictated by the deterministic causal laws. Even if time flows (e.g. presentism), the causal structure of the universe is static...events can only transpire one way. So, what can be said of intelligence in such a universe? Well...only what the deterministic laws require you to say about it. What can be believed about intelligence in such a universe? Obviously only what the deterministic laws require you to believe. Solving a problem correctly is no more impressive or significant than rain falling "correctly". You answer the question in the only way the deterministic laws allow. The rain falls in the only way that the deterministic laws allow. The word "intelligence" doesn't refer to anything except the experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a consequence of its causal structure. =*= What about the significance of intelligence in a universe with probabilistic laws? The only change from the deterministic case is that the course of events isn't precisely predictable, even in principle. However, the flow of events is still governed by the probabilistic causal laws. Which just means that to the extent that the flow of events isn't determined, it's random. Again, the analogy with poker comes to mind: the rules of poker are stable and unchanging, while the randomness of the shuffle adds an element of unpredictability as to which cards you are actually dealt. So, to the extent that poker isn't determined, it's random. The questions you're going to be asked and the problems you're going to be presented with in a probabilistic universe aren't predictable...but neither are your answers or your solutions, which result from the exact same underlying rule set. Again, to the extent that any of these things aren't determined, they're random. Adding a random component to an otherwise deterministic framework does increase the number of possible states that are reachable from a given initial condition, but it doesn't add anything qualitatively new to the content of those states or to the process as a whole. Nothing new is added to the deterministic case that would give the word "intelligence" anything extra to refer to. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:14 AM, 1Z wrote: > On 21 Sep, 18:10, Rex Allen wrote: >> What is the significance of intelligence in a universe with >> deterministic laws? >> >> Your performance on any IQ test is not due to your possessing some >> property called "intelligence", but rather is an inevitable outcome of >> the universe's initial conditions and governing causal laws. > > it is of course both I guess I'd have to hear your definition of "property" to make any sense of that. In what sense is it like the properties of charge, mass, spin, or color? And in what sense is it different? >> Solving a problem correctly is no more impressive or significant than >> rain falling "correctly". You answer the question in the only way the >> deterministic laws allow. The rain falls in the only way that the >> deterministic laws allow. > > so your actual conclusion is not that intelligence isn't > intelligence, but that intelligence isn't an achivement No, my actual conclusion is the part where I conclude: "The word 'intelligence' doesn't refer to anything except the experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a consequence of its causal structure." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 12:12 PM, 1Z wrote: > On 22 Sep, 17:20, Rex Allen wrote: >> I guess I'd have to hear your definition of "property" to make any >> sense of that. In what sense is it like the properties of charge, >> mass, spin, or color? > > it's a distinguishing characteristic > that is detectable So your position is that there is an algorithm that would correctly detect all instances of intelligence with no false positives? If you possessed this algorithm, I could present you with a large cube of metal, silicon, and flashing lights, you could apply your algorithm to determine for certain whether any form of artificial intelligence was instantiated by the cube? No matter how obfuscated, encrypted, or abstract the representation used to instantiate the AI? This would be in contradiction to Hilary Putnam's work: "Putnam's proposal, and its historical importance, was analyzed in detail in Piccinini forthcoming b. According to Putnam (1960, 1967, 1988), a system is a computing mechanism if and only if there is a mapping between a computational description and a physical description of the system. By computational description, Putnam means a formal description of the kind used in computability theory, such as a Turing Machine or a finite state automaton. Putnam puts no constraints on how to find the mapping between the computational and the physical description, allowing any computationally identified state to map onto any physically identified state. It is well known that Putnam's account entails that most physical systems implement most computations. This consequence of Putnam's proposal has been explicitly derived by Putnam (1988, pp. 95-96, 121-125) and Searle (1992, chap. 9)." Or, as Hans Moravec puts it: "What does it mean for a process to implement, or encode, a simulation? Something is palpably an encoding if there is a way of decoding or translating it into a recognizable form. Programs that produce pictures of evolving cloud cover from weather simulations, or cockpit views from flight simulations, are examples of such decodings. As the relationship between the elements inside the simulator and the external representation becomes more complicated, the decoding process may become impractically expensive. Yet there is no obvious cutoff point. A translation that is impractical today may be possible tomorrow given more powerful computers, some yet undiscovered mathematical approach, or perhaps an alien translator. Like people who dismiss speech and signs in unfamiliar foreign languages as meaningless gibberish, we are likely to be rudely surprised if we dismiss possible interpretations simply because we can't achieve them at the moment. Why not accept all mathematically possible decodings, regardless of present or future practicality? This seems a safe, open-minded approach, but it leads into strange territory." Where do you think that Putnam and Moravec went wrong? >> And in what sense is it different? > > it's not physically basic Then what is it? In what sense does it exist, if not physically? >> >> Solving a problem correctly is no more impressive or significant than >> >> rain falling "correctly". You answer the question in the only way the >> >> deterministic laws allow. The rain falls in the only way that the >> >> deterministic laws allow. >> >> > so your actual conclusion is not that intelligence isn't >> > intelligence, but that intelligence isn't an achivement >> >> No, my actual conclusion is the part where I conclude: >> >> "The word 'intelligence' doesn't refer to anything except the >> experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a >> consequence of its causal structure." > > I have no idea what that means Okay, so here's a definition of intelligence from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)" But what is an ability in a deterministic universe? For any given input, a deterministic system can only react in one way. If you expose a deterministic system to a set of inputs that represent a particular environment, the system will react in the one and only way it can to that set of inputs. Knowledge is just the internal state of the deterministic system. This is true of a human. This is true of a bacterium. This is true of a Roomba vacuum cleaner. This is true of a hurricane. This is true of a rock. And, as I pointed out in the original post, probabilistic systems are no better. Intelligence is an arbitrary criterion based only on how things "seem" to you, and which has no other basis in how things are. So, that is
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 9/23/2010 8:26 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> If you expose a deterministic system to a set of inputs that represent >> a particular environment, the system will react in the one and only >> way it can to that set of inputs. >> > > And if that reaction is to manipulate it's envrionment is a way advantageous > to it, it's intelligent. A rock interacts with its environment. A human interacts with its environment. The term "manipulate" is misleading...in that it adds nothing over "interacts with" except the implication of intentionality. Which assumes that which must be proven...that there is something intrinsically different in the rock's interactions and the human's interactions. Basically I am arguing that intentionality is epiphenomenal in a rule-driven universe. It has no causal power, it doesn't add anything to the underlying rules, and it isn't part of the underlying rule set. Intentionality is just part of how things seem to us...an aspect of our conscious experience. It is a concept that we are conscious of, but which has no existence outside of conscious thought. Since intentionality is merely experiential, epiphenomenal, and non-causal - an abstract concept - then intelligence is as well. > Intelligence must always be relative to some > situation or environment. That's where Putnam and Moravec go wrong and > Merriam-Webster get it right. If you can find a Putnam-mapping that can extracts a representation of a conscious entity, you can also find a mapping that extracts a representation of an environment to go with it. The attribution of intelligence is just part of our experience. Which is just to say, "that person seems intelligent to me". But the rule-generated belief that the person is intelligent is all there is to his intelligence. Therefore: No one is intelligent, but many people are believed to be. >> Knowledge is just the internal state of the deterministic system. >> > > That's not a usable definition: internal=inaccessible. Knowledge must be > expressible. It must be information that makes a difference. Otherwise you > fall into the paradox of the rock that computes everything. A rock's internal state does make a difference in how it interacts with its environment. It's just that these differences are too subtle to be easily detected. The way the rock absorbs and emits heat and radiation, it’s response to vibrations, and even the precise way air molecules interact with it all reveal information about it’s internal state. To quote Jim Holt: "Take that rock over there. It doesn't seem to be doing much of anything, at least to our gross perception. But at the microlevel it consists of an unimaginable number of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that even our fastest supercomputer might envy. And they are not jiggling at random. The rock's innards 'see' the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers's slogan, 'Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.' But the rock doesn't exert itself as a result of all this 'thinking.' Why should it? Its existence, unlike ours, doesn't depend on the struggle to survive and self-replicate. It is indifferent to the prospect of being pulverized. If you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being. And you might draw the moral that the universe is, and always has been, saturated with mind, even though we snobbish Darwinian-replicating latecomers are too blinkered to notice." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 2:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > The word 'universe" does not refer to anything except the observable > experiential first person plural (sharable among collection of programs) > that arithmetic places on us as a consequence of addition and > multiplication. I agree that first person experience can probably be represented that way, but I doubt that it "is" that way in an ontological sense. > But that is not a reason to say that the universes and intelligence does not > exist, only that they are not primitive. I think I agree. The term "intelligence" has meaning in the first person experiential sense, but not in the third person. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > The text is well done. Thanks. A question. What would be the consequence of > the nomologicalism for a person that would like to earn some more money? > Well, let us not consider the case when one successfully sells the text > about nomologicalism. Hm. Well, I'd say the consequence is that whether you earn more money in the future is a function of the universe's initial conditions and (possibly probabilistic) causal laws. Either things will go your way, or they won't. To the extent that it isn't predetermined, it's random. Bottom line: At the end of the day, the day is over. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: >> If you can find a Putnam-mapping that can extracts a representation of >> a conscious entity, you can also find a mapping that extracts a >> representation of an environment to go with it. >> > > Sure - but it's not our environment. Is our environment the only environment? Is the mapping that constitutes our environment priviliged in some way? Perhaps environment is relative to observer? But then from whence the observer? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> "if laws were contingent, they would change so frequently, so >> frenetically, that we would never be able to grasp anything >> whatsoever, because none of the conditions for the stable >> representation of objects would ever obtain. In short, if causal >> connection were contingent, we would know it so well that we >> would no longer know anything. As can be seen, this >> argument can only pass from the notion of contingency to the >> notion of frequency given the presupposition that it is >> extraordinarily improbable that the laws should remain >> constant rather than being modified in every conceivable way >> at every moment." >> > > Here we have what appears to be a well reasoned argument until > we inquire as to the definition of the term "to know" that is > used. If an entity exists in a universe subject to frequent > and contingent change what is to allow the mind of that entity > the ability to have the ability to know anything at all? The > entity and its brain/mind would be subject to the very same > capricious randomness that the rest of that universe undergoes > and thus the notion of knowing becomes null and void. If an entity exists in a universe that is subject to unchanging causal laws, how can it have justified true beliefs (a.k.a. knowledge) either? If the entity's beliefs are the result of some more fundamental underlying process, then those beliefs aren't held for reasons of logic or rationality. Rather, the entity holds the beliefs that are necessitated by the initial conditions and causal laws of it's universe. Those initial conditions and causal laws *may* be such that the entity holds true beliefs, but there is no requirement that this be the case (for example, our own universe produces a fair number of delusional schizophrenics). So holding true beliefs, even in a universe with causal laws, is purely a matter of luck - i.e., is the entity in question lucky enough to live in a universe with initial conditions and causal laws that lead to it holding true beliefs. Further, if the initial conditions and causal laws don't cause the entity to present and believe true rational arguments, there would be no way for the entity to ever detect this, since there is no way to step outside of the universe's control of one's beliefs to independently verify the "reasonableness" of the beliefs it generates. Again...schizophrenics are generally pretty convinced of the truth of their delusions. Even in a lawful universe how do you justify your beliefs? And then how do you justify your justifications of your beliefs? And then how do you justify the justifications of the justifications of your beliefs? And so on. Agrippa's Trilemma. So. Given the capricious randomness involved in the selection of the entity's universe's initial conditions and causal laws (of which the vast majority of conceivable combinations would result in false beliefs) the notion of knowing becomes null and void. Neither Meillassoux's scenario nor the "lawful universe" scenario allow for knowledge. In both cases, holding true beliefs is a matter of luck, and no belief can be justified (not even the belief that no belief can be justified). > Does Meillassoux not understand anything about > calculus, analysis, computational complexity > theory or other higher mathematics? Perhaps you could be a little more specific in exactly how you feel he exposed his ignorance? > OTOH, to wonder which infinity the set of all > possible worlds belongs to is not trivial matter I think Meillassoux's main point with this digression into Cantorian set theory is that just as there can be no end to the process of set formation and thus no such thing as the totality of all sets, there is also no absolute totality of all possible cases. In other words, there is no "set of all possible worlds". And thus "we cannot legitimately construct any set within which the foregoing probabilistic reasoning could make sense." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: > > [RA] > If an entity exists in a universe that is subject to unchanging causal > laws, how can it have justified true beliefs (a.k.a. knowledge) > either? > > [SPK] > I am not sure of what you mean by "unchanging causal laws" so I will > offer a definition: A set of relations that given some sharp configuration > of energy-momentum on a plane of simultaneity there will always be some > other sharp configuration and none other. Is this a satisfactory definition > of "unchanging causal laws" to you? Note that this definition is consistent > with the classical "block universe" model of the universe. Hmmm. Well, no. I didn't intend it to be limited to the apparent laws of our universe. By "causal law", I am just referring to whatever it is that is intended to explain why events transpire one way instead of some other way. "Unchanging" isn't intended to mean much except that the laws don't change *unless* caused to do so by some other law. So I just mean that the laws don't change for no reason. Bottom line: I am referring to a universe where everything that happens does so because it is *caused* to happen by some "law". Nothing happens without a reason for it to happen. A universe where the Principle of Sufficient Reason applies. As opposed to a Meillassouxian universe, where there is no reason why events transpire one way instead of some other way. > [RA] > If the entity's beliefs are the result of some more fundamental > underlying process, then those beliefs aren't held for reasons of > logic or rationality. > > [SPK] > What is "more fundamental"? If the block universe of classical physics > is taken to be the totality of what can and does exist, there can be no > "more fundamental" anything, not even a "process". I am amused to reread the > occasionalist and epiphenomenalist theories of mind that have been offered > to account for the notion of knowledge (a.k.a. justified true belief). I am > sure that you agree that without a mind there can be no belief, justified or > otherwise, not logic nor rationality. So if the universe does not allow for > entities to have something that can be considered as mind then we can go no > further down this line of reasoning as we have removed all possible means to > continue. It's not the mind that I have doubts about. I know that my experience of this moment exists. How could I be wrong about that? It's the universe that is meant to explain *why* my experience of this moment exists that I have doubts about. So, we want to explain our conscious experiences. To do so, we postulate the existence of some "underlying" system (e.g., the physical world) that accounts for the order and predictability of what we observe. But then the inevitable question is, "what accounts for the order and predictability of the underlying system"? What explains the explanation? And then what explains the explanation of the explanation? And so on...infinite regress. But further, why this particular infinite chain of explanations instead of some other infinite chain? Why not nothingness? And if you have an answer, what explains that answer? Why that answer instead of some other answer? Another infinite regress! If you keep going you end up with an infinite number of infinite regresses... So. That doesn't seem right. Perhaps the answer is that there is no reason for why things are the way they are. Which Meillassoux calls this the "principle of unreason", or the "principle of facticity", in contrast to Leibniz's "principle of sufficient reason". > [RA] > Rather, the entity holds the beliefs that are necessitated by the > initial conditions and causal laws of it's universe. > > Those initial conditions and causal laws *may* be such that the entity > holds true beliefs, but there is no requirement that this be the case > (for example, our own universe produces a fair number of delusional > schizophrenics). > > [SPK] > We have not established that an entity can have a mind in a universe > that is subject to unchanging causal laws so until we do we can ask no > further questions. My proposal is that no such universe exists. There is nothing to reality except our experiences. > [SPK] > OTOH, in the spirit of the discussion I will overlook > this fatal flaw, but we are presented with another problem: How do we > distinguish the schizophrenics, deluded or otherwise, from the > non-schizophrenics? Following your reasoning, the same causal laws would > generate both, so the difference is a set of initial conditions. What > determined those to be such rather than some other? I see a crack opening > here that allows us to recover many worlds... The point is that if there is > any choice at all in the state of the universe and anything therein, then it > is necessary that a multiplicity of prior possibility exist. OR, it could be that there is no reason for the current state of the universe. It just is this wa
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 3:53 PM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 4, 4:40 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> If an entity exists in a universe that is subject to unchanging causal >> laws, how can it have justified true beliefs (a.k.a. knowledge) >> either? >> >> If the entity's beliefs are the result of some more fundamental >> underlying process, then those beliefs aren't held for reasons of >> logic or rationality. > > That doesn't follow. It follows by definition. 1. IF a universe governed by causal laws - 2. THEN everything that occurs within that universe is a result of those laws acting on the universe's state. Every change of state happens according to some law. 3. The entity's holding of some belief occurs within that universe. 4. Therefore the entity's holding of some belief (whether rational *or* irrational) is a result of causal laws acting on the entity's state, and nothing else. What else could account for the entity's holding of some particular belief? "Logical" and "rational" are adjectives. You're confusing descriptive labels with causal forces. A. "Bob believes X" - True. B. "Bob believes that believing X is rational" - True. C. "Bob believes that he believes X because it is rational" - True. D. "Bob believes X because believing X is rational" - FALSE E. "Bob believes X, and believing X is rational" - may or may not be true. Maybe we need to define our terms. What definition are you using for "belief"? What is a belief? Is belief fundamental or does it reduce to something more basic? If belief just reduces to physical brain states, then option D above is *still* false. In our entity's universe the brain being in state Y isn't caused by it having previously been in state X. Rather, the governing laws cause the transition from X to Y. Under different causal laws, the brain might instead have transitioned from state X to an irrational state like Z. >> Rather, the entity holds the beliefs that are necessitated by the >> initial conditions and causal laws of it's universe. > > That doens;t stop them being logical or rational. > It only stops them being the result of a free choice > to adopt logic or rationality Once you give up free choice, you're left with skepticism. Bryan Caplan had an interesting comment on this: "Now it is a fact that people disagree on many questions; this leads us to wonder if on any given issue we are correct. How is the determinist to come to grips with this? If the content of my mind is determined entirely on the level of micro-particles, how would I ever double-check my views? I would be determined to believe them; and if arguments convinced me, then they would be determined to convince me. The crucial point is that my views -- correct and incorrect alike -- would be the result of inexorable causal forces. And these forces determine people to error just as inexorably as they determine them to truth. Of course, I might be correct by coincidence. But knowledge is _justified_ true belief; and when we are pre-determined to believe whatever we happen to believe no matter what, it is hard to see what the justification of our beliefs is. Put succinctly, if we have knowledge we must accept beliefs only because we understand them to be true; but if determinism is correct, then we automatically accept whatever beliefs that our constituent micro-particles impose on us. It might be the case that those micro-particles coincidentally make me believe true things, but the truth would not be the ultimate causal agent acting upon me. Determinism, then, leads to skepticism, the denial of the possibility of justified true belief. " And probabilistic laws aren't any better. >> Those initial conditions and causal laws *may* be such that the entity >> holds true beliefs, but there is no requirement that this be the case >> (for example, our own universe produces a fair number of delusional >> schizophrenics). > > OTOH, it;s more likely than not. Organisms with delusional > beliefs would have trouble surviving and reproducing, Again, you're confusing descriptive labels with a causal forces. Some organisms are caused to hold delusional beliefs by the same forces that cause others to hold rational beliefs. Further, those same causal forces also determine the fates of both delusional and rational organisms. That schizophrenia hasn't been observed to vastly increase reproductive success is merely a contingent outcome of the our universe's particular initial conditions and causal laws. >> this, since there is no way to >> step outside of the universe's control of one's beliefs to >> independently verify the "reasonableness" of the belief
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: >> On 11/10/2010 4:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> Once you give up free choice, you're left with skepticism. >> >> Bryan Caplan had an interesting comment on this: >> >> "Now it is a fact that people disagree on many questions; this leads >> us to wonder if on any given issue we are correct. How is the >> determinist to come to grips with this? If the content of my mind is >> determined entirely on the level of micro-particles, how would I ever >> double-check my views? I would be determined to believe them; and if >> arguments convinced me, then they would be determined to convince me. >> The crucial point is that my views -- correct and incorrect alike -- >> would be the result of inexorable causal forces. And these forces >> determine people to error just as inexorably as they determine them to >> truth. Of course, I might be correct by coincidence. But knowledge >> is _justified_ true belief; and when we are pre-determined to believe >> whatever we happen to believe no matter what, it is hard to see what >> the justification of our beliefs is. >> > > I don't know what "pre-determined" adds to this and "no matter what" is > inconsistent. By pre-determined I just take him to mean that our beliefs are determined by the state of things at some previous point in time. The state of the universe at time t0 (plus the causal laws that govern the state changes) determines our beliefs at time t1. Given the state at t0, the outcome at t1 is...pre-determined. So the "pre" just emphasizes the impact of the past on the present. I don't think it adds much to use "pre-determined", but I don't see that it is really cause for complaint either...? As for "no matter what" being inconsistent...well...I suppose so. It does imply fatalism instead of strict determinism. In other words: "no matter what happens between time t0 and t1, the outcome will still be the same." But I'm pretty sure that he meant: "The only events that can occur between time t0 and t1 are the specific events neccessitated by the state of the universe at t0 and the universe's causal laws, and thus the outcome is not in doubt". He did *not* mean to imply that additional events are possible, but will not alter the outcome. > If you are a determinist then all beliefs are causally > connected to facts (facts about your brain, perception, the world...). If > the facts and the belief are congruent and they are causally connected then > they are justified_true_beliefs. If the facts and the beliefs are congruent, then the beliefs are true. I agree. However, just because Belief X is causally connected to Fact Y doesn't meant that Belief X is justified. The question of justification is how do you *know* that Belief X is causally connected to Fact Y? It may be a fact (Fact Z) that Belief X is causally connected to Fact Y, but how do you justify your belief in Fact Z? And then, how do you justify your belief in your belief that Belief X is causally connected to Fact Y? And then, how do you justify your belief in your belief in your belief that Belief X is causally connected to Fact Y? And so on. The problem is that the only facts that we have direct access to are facts about our current beliefs. It is a fact that I believe this. BUT, I can't say for sure that it's *true* that we only have direct access to facts about our current beliefs. It's just what I believe at this moment. Though, I can't even say for certain that I believed it an hour ago. I believe I did, but I can't justify that belief. >From our current beliefs we infer the existence of other facts, but why should we believe that our current beliefs are true or that our process of inference is correct? Skepticism doesn't say that there are no true beliefs. It just says that we can never justify them. >> Put succinctly, if we have knowledge we must accept beliefs only >> because we understand them to be true; but if determinism is correct, >> then we automatically accept whatever beliefs that our constituent >> micro-particles impose on us. It might be the case that those >> micro-particles coincidentally make me believe true things, but the >> truth would not be the ultimate causal agent acting upon me. >> > > Whatever truth is, it isn't a causal agent. Right. And neither is logic or rationality. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
e Anthropic Principle implicitly does, the set of possible worlds to those obtained solely by the linear variation of constants and variables found in the currently observable universe, and in whose name do we limit such a set of worlds to a determinate infinity? In truth, once the possible is envisaged in its generality, every totality becomes unthinkable, and with it the aleatory construction within which our astonishment finds its source. The rational attitude is not, in actual fact, to seek an explanation capable of responding to our astonishment, but to trace the inferential genealogy of the latter so as to show it to be the consequence of an application of probabilities outside the sole legitimate field of their application." > If I left my watch on the dresser last night I can usually find it there in > the > morning. To imagine that it would be a better justification of this to have > some complete, deterministic theory of everything is the fallacy of the > misplaced concrete. First, I’m not arguing that it would be a better justification. So I’m not sure how this connects to my post. And second, what is it that would be incorrectly reified by such a belief? The deterministic laws? Believing that such laws were in some sense “real” just because of their completeness and predictive success would be to succumb to the fallacy of the misplaced concrete? It seems to me that Meillassoux is arguing against that exact fallacy. That there is no "concrete" necessity behind the orderliness of our observations. > On 11/11/2010 10:43 AM, Rex Allen wrote: >> Bryan Caplin: >> “Put succinctly, if we have knowledge we must accept beliefs only >> because we understand them to be true; but if determinism is correct, >> then we automatically accept whatever beliefs that our constituent >> micro-particles impose on us.“ > > If determinism is true...nothing whatsoever follows. It's like saying "God > did it." Unless you can specify the initial conditions and the causal laws > of evolution, it's nothing but a form of words. If determinism is true, there are no specific predictions about the physical world that can be made as a result. But there are facts about our universe that can be logically inferred from the definition of "determinism". And Caplan’s point is one of those facts. So even without knowing the specific initial conditions and causal laws, one can still draw general conclusions that would hold *if* the universe is deterministic (and if your starting assumptions and processes of inference are valid). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > On 11 Nov 2010, at 02:37, Brent Meeker wrote: > >> On 11/10/2010 4:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >>> >>> Bryan Caplan: >>> >>> Put succinctly, if we have knowledge we must accept beliefs only >>> because we understand them to be true; but if determinism is correct, >>> then we automatically accept whatever beliefs that our constituent >>> micro-particles impose on us. It might be the case that those >>> micro-particles coincidentally make me believe true things, but the >>> truth would not be the ultimate causal agent acting upon me. >>> >> >> Whatever truth is, it isn't a causal agent. > > > There is plausibly no sense to see truth as the ultimate "causal" agent. If you are proposing a logico-mathematical underpinning for reality, then aren’t you thereby proposing that truth *is* the ultimate causal agent? In that the nature of reality is determined by “true” logico-mathematical statements, and not by the “false” logico-mathematical statements? What causes only true statements to have an effect? > We have good reason to believe that our brains are not so bad dynamical > mirror of the most probable consistent neighborhoods. Why only consistent neighborhoods? Why couldn’t inconsistent neighborhoods (a la Graham Priest) have role in determining the nature of reality? > Eventually beliefs work *because* they are (self) determined, like > 'free-will' can be seen as relative partial self-determination. How do beliefs determine themselves? Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > On 14 Nov 2010, at 22:17, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> We have good reason to believe that our brains are not so bad dynamical >>> mirror of the most probable consistent neighborhoods. >> >> Why only consistent neighborhoods? Why couldn’t inconsistent >> neighborhoods (a la Graham Priest) have role in determining the nature >> of reality? > > Priest handles paraconsistency, not arithmetical inconsistency. Priest can > be modeled in arithmetic by a sentences of the type Bf (not on the type f). > This is because G* proves DBf (the consistency of the provability of the > false). "Though the construction of inconsistent mathematical theories (based on adjunctive paraconsistent logics) is relatively new, there are already a number of inconsistent number theories, linear algebras, category theories; and it is clear that there is much more scope in this area. The theories have not been developed with an eye to their applicability in science—just as classical group theory was not. But once the paraconsistent revolution has been digested, it is by no means implausible to suggest that these theories, or ones like them, may find physical application—just as classical group theory did." -- Graham Priest -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 1:39 PM, 1Z wrote: > > On Nov 11, 12:54 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> It follows by definition. >> >> 1. IF a universe governed by causal laws - >> >> 2. THEN everything that occurs within that universe is a result of >> those laws acting on the universe's state. Every change of state >> happens according to some law. >> >> 3. The entity's holding of some belief occurs within that universe. >> >> 4. Therefore the entity's holding of some belief (whether rational >> *or* irrational) is a result of causal laws acting on the entity's >> state, and nothing else. >> >> What else could account for the entity's holding of some particular belief? >> >> "Logical" and "rational" are adjectives. You're confusing descriptive >> labels with causal forces. > > > Your argument still doesn't work. You re tacitly assuming that > being the result of causal laws is exclusive of being the result > of logic/.reason. But that is , to say the least, not obvioius. How can it not be exclusive? Either the causal laws explain the result -or- logic and reason explain the result. If logic and reason reduce to causal laws, then ultimately causal laws alone explain the result. If causal laws reduce to logic and reason, then ultimately logic and reason alone explain the result. If causal laws and "logic and reason" are entirely different things, and causal laws are sufficient to explain the way that events transpire, then what do we need "logic and reason" for? They are superfluous, except as descriptive categories. > OTOH, it *is* obvious that being the result of causal > laws is exclusive of being freely chosen. You need, but > don't have, an argument to the effect that free choice is essential > to rationality. Actually I would say that the burden of proof is on you to show that abstract concepts, like logic and rationality, can also be causal forces. Is a computer executing a chess program logical or rational? Does logic cause the computer to select one move instead of another? OR do specific arrangements of electrons and quarks that make up the computer, and the laws of physics, cause the computer to enter one physical state instead of another, and we merely categorize and interpret these physical states using abstract concepts like logic and rationality? Logic and rationality are in the mind beholder if they are anywhere, and certainly not in the quarks and electrons of computers, which are the same as the quarks and electrons of rocks or clouds, and are *literally* unmoved by reason. A computer is moved by logic only in the figurative sense. >> >> >> A. "Bob believes X" - True. >> >> B. "Bob believes that believing X is rational" - True. >> >> C. "Bob believes that he believes X because it is rational" - True. >> >> D. "Bob believes X because believing X is rational" - FALSE > > > Saying it doesn't make it so. If Bob goes fishing because of > causal laws, he still goes fishing. If Bob is rational because of > causal laws, he is still rational. (Whether he *chooses* to go > fishing is another matter...) This is, of course, Case E. Bobs actions may fall into the category of "rational", but he didn't take those actions because they were rational. >> E. "Bob believes X, and believing X is rational" - may or may not be true. >> Bryan Caplan had an interesting comment on this: >> >> "Now it is a fact that people disagree on many questions; this leads >> us to wonder if on any given issue we are correct. How is the >> determinist to come to grips with this? If the content of my mind is >> determined entirely on the level of micro-particles, how would I ever >> double-check my views? I would be determined to believe them; and if >> arguments convinced me, then they would be determined to convince me. >> The crucial point is that my views -- correct and incorrect alike -- >> would be the result of inexorable causal forces. And these forces >> determine people to error just as inexorably as they determine them to >> truth. Of course, I might be correct by coincidence. But knowledge >> is _justified_ true belief; and when we are pre-determined to believe >> whatever we happen to believe no matter what, it is hard to see what >> the justification of our beliefs is. > > If double checking is unmiraculous, it can be caused as well > as anything else. But how do you double check your double check? If you doubt the assumptions and reasoning that led to your initial belief, why wouldn't those doubts a
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > ? Are you saying that it is obvious that compatibilism is false? Compatibilism is false. Unless you do something sneaky like change the meaning of the term "free will" to make it true. Which is like changing the definition of "unicorn" to mean "a horse with a horn glued to it's forehead". I agree with the critics of compatilism in this passage: "Critics of compatibilism often focus on the definition of free will: Incompatibilists may agree that the compatibilists are showing something to be compatible with determinism, but they think that something ought not to be called 'free will'. Compatibilists are sometimes accused (by Incompatibilists) of actually being Hard Determinists who are motivated by a lack of a coherent, consonant moral belief system. Compatibilists are sometimes called 'soft determinists' pejoratively (William James's term). James accused them of creating a 'quagmire of evasion' by stealing the name of freedom to mask their underlying determinism. Immanuel Kant called it a 'wretched subterfuge' and 'word jugglery.'" -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Probability, Necessity, and Infinity
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 5:38 AM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 16, 3:27 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> If logic and reason reduce to causal laws, then ultimately causal laws >> alone explain the result. > > If causal explanation and rational explanation > are categoreally different, they don't exclude each other. > We can explain the operation of a calculator in terms of > electrical currents, or we could explain it in terms of > the laws of arithmetic. The two operate in parallel. The law of electromagnetism (or whatever physical law it approximates, if any) operates in the world and has causal power. The laws of arithmetic operate only in your mind and have no causal power. So, the two don't really operate in parallel. In fact the laws of arithmetic don't "operate", in any literal sense, at all. > What makes a calculator a calculator is that its > operation is susceptible to an arithemtic description. Arithmetic description exists only in the mind of a describer. One man's calculator is another man's hammer. One man's kindling is another man's slide rule. What makes a calculator a calculator is that you use it as a calculator. It's only a calculator in the sense that it's a calculator to you. There is some Putnam mapping that would let you use a rock as a calculator. But since you don't know this mapping, the rock is just a rock. Unlike the calculator, the rock wasn't designed to have easily interpreted inputs and outputs. > How can you infer from that that there is no valid arithimetical > description? Where did I say that there are no valid arithmetical descriptions? I certainly never meant to say that. Though I do claim that you can't justify your belief in valid arithmetical descriptions... >> If causal laws and "logic and reason" are entirely different things, >> and causal laws are sufficient to explain the way that events >> transpire, then what do we need "logic and reason" for? They are >> superfluous, except as descriptive categories. > > We need logic and reason to explain how premises lead > to conclusions. That is different from explaining how > causes lead to effects, although the two can run in parallel, > > That you can eliminate talk of forests in terms > of talk of trees does not mean there are no forests. The existence of trees and forests. Assuming that some sort of scientific realism/materialism is true, then trees and forests are both abstractions - rough approximations of reality forced upon us by our limited mental resources. In this case, if we had sufficient mental capacity there would no need to think in terms of trees or forests - we could think exclusively in terms quarks, electrons, photons, and whatnot. Thinking in terms of trees and forests is a "good enough" computational shortcut. However, there is certainly no prediction I could make based on my knowledge of trees and forests that would be as accurate or precise as the predictions I could make if I had the mental and sensory capacity to comprehend the forest at the level of it's constituent quarks and electrons. The only advantage of thinking in terms of trees and forests is brevity and economy. Shortcuts. If you had no need of brevity or economy, then you would have no need for concepts like trees and forests. Rather, you might as well think exclusively in terms of fundamental entities...quarks, electrons, photons, and whatnot. Note that you would also have no need of "emergent" laws like evolution or the laws of thermodynamics. Further, given sufficient computational power there's no "abstract interpretation" that you couldn't legitimately extract (via the right Putnam mapping) from the collection of electrons and quarks that comprise the forest. It would be like looking for bunny-shaped clouds in the sky. Trees and forests and squirrels and hikers *might* be the most obvious higher-level interpretation of what exists...but certainly not the only interpretation, and not privileged in any way. My point being that, even assuming scientific materialism, trees and forests only exist in your mind. They are part of how things seem to us. They are part of us. Like logic and reason and arithmetic descriptions. >>> OTOH, it *is* obvious that being the result of causal >>> laws is exclusive of being freely chosen. You need, but >>> don't have, an argument to the effect that free choice is essential >>> to rationality. >> >> Actually I would say that the burden of proof is on you to show that >> abstract concepts, like logic and rationality, can also be causal >> forces. > > Not at all. If L&R were causal, then they *would* exclude other > causal explanations. But their compatibility with causal &
Compatibilism
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > On 16 Nov 2010, at 04:51, Rex Allen wrote: > >> On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> ? Are you saying that it is obvious that compatibilism is false? >> >> Compatibilism is false. Unless you do something sneaky like change >> the meaning of the term "free will" to make it true. >> >> Which is like changing the definition of "unicorn" to mean "a horse >> with a horn glued to it's forehead". >> >> I agree with the critics of compatilism in this passage: >> >> "Critics of compatibilism often focus on the definition of free will: >> Incompatibilists may agree that the compatibilists are showing >> something to be compatible with determinism, but they think that >> something ought not to be called 'free will'. >> >> Compatibilists are sometimes accused (by Incompatibilists) of actually >> being Hard Determinists who are motivated by a lack of a coherent, >> consonant moral belief system. >> >> Compatibilists are sometimes called 'soft determinists' pejoratively >> (William James's term). James accused them of creating a 'quagmire of >> evasion' by stealing the name of freedom to mask their underlying >> determinism. Immanuel Kant called it a 'wretched subterfuge' and >> 'word jugglery.'" >> > > What is your position? And what is your definition of free-will? My position is: So either there is a reason for what I choose to do, or there isn't. If there is a reason, then the reason determined the choice. No free will. If there is no reason, then the choice was random. No free will. I don't see a third option. =*=*=*= As for my definition of free will: "The ability to make choices that are neither random nor caused." Obviously there is no such ability, since "random" and "caused" exhaust the possibilities. But some people believe in the existence of such an ability anyway. Why? Well...either there's a reason that they do, or there isn't... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > Rex, > > Your post reminded me of the quote (of which I cannot recall the source) > where someone asked "Who pushes who around inside the brain?", meaning is it > the matter that causes thought to move around a certain way, or is it the > opposite? The looped hierarchies described by Hofstadter, if present, make > this a difficult question to answer. If the highest levels of thought and > reason are required in your decision making, does it still make sense to say > we are slaves of deterministic motions of particles or is that missing a few > steps? Well, I find it entirely conceivable that fundamental physical laws acting on fundamental physical entities (particles, fields, strings, whatever) could account for human behavior and ability. So if human behavior and ability is what we are trying to explain, then I see no reason to invoke thought and reason as causal forces. And, even if you wanted to, I don't see how they could be made to serve that role. 1Z and I discussed this in the other thread. We don't invoke thought and reason to explain the abilities and behavior of chess playing computers - and while human behavior and ability is much more complex and extensive, I think it can be put in the same general category. The conscious experience that accompanies human behavior is another matter entirely, but I don't think it serves any causal role either. > I could not perfectly predict your behavior without creating a full > simulation of your brain. Doing so would instantiate your consciousness. > Therefore I cannot determine what you will do without invoking your > consciousness, thought, reason, etc. I wouldn't necessarily agree that a full computer simulation of a human brain would produce conscious experience. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. I have serious doubts. I'm not a physicalist, or a dualist, but rather an accidental idealist. Or maybe an idealistic accidentalist? One or the other. > I do not disagree with your assertion that something must be either caused > or random, but does _what_ caused you to do something have any bearing? If > your mind is the cause, does that count as free will? Even if that were the case, there must be *something* that connects the mind to the choice. Otherwise how can you say that the mind is the cause of the choice? So what is the nature of that connective "something"? If it is a rule or a law, then the choice was determined by the rule/law. If there is nothing that connects the mind to the choice, then the choice was random and the mind didn't cause it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:28 AM, 1Z wrote:
> On Nov 18, 6:31 am, Rex Allen wrote:
>>
>> My position is:
>>
>> So either there is a reason for what I choose to do, or there isn't.
>>
>> If there is a reason, then the reason determined the choice. No free will.
>
> Unless you determined the reason.
How would you do that? By what means? According to what rule? Using
what process?
If you determined the reason, what determined you? Why are you in the
particular state you're in?
If there exists some rule that translates your specific state into
some particular choice, then there's still no free will. The rule
determined the choice.
>> =*=*=*=
>>
>> As for my definition of free will:
>>
>> "The ability to make choices that are neither random nor caused."
>>
>> Obviously there is no such ability, since "random" and "caused"
>> exhaust the possibilities.
>>
>> But some people believe in the existence of such an ability anyway.
>
> Free Will is defined as "the power or ability to rationally choose and
> consciously perform actions, at least some of which are not brought
> about necessarily and inevitably by external circumstances".
How does this differ in meaning from my definition? I don't think it does.
> Not that according to this definition:
>
> 1. Free will is not deterministic behaviour. It is not driven by
> external circumstances.
OK. Not in conflict with my definition.
> 2. Nor is free will is randomness or mere caprice. ("Rationally
> choose and consciously perform").
OK. Not in conflict with my definition.
> 3. Free will requires independence from external circumstances. It
> does not require independence or separation from one's own self. Ones
> actions must be related to ones thoughts and motives
Related by what? Deterministic rules? Probabilistic?
If one's actions are determined by ones thoughts and motives, what
determines one's thoughts and motives?
And why do some particular set of thoughts and motives result in one
choice instead of some other? If there is no reason for one choice
instead of the other, the choice was random.
> 4. But not complete independence. Free will does not require that
> all our actions are free in this sense, only that some actions are not
> entirely un-free. ("...at least some of which...").
OK. Not in conflict with my definition.
> 5. Free will also does not require that any one action is entirely
> free. In particular, free will s not omnipotence: it does not require
> an ability to transcend natural laws, only the ability to select
> actions from what is physically possible.
Select using what rule? What process? What mechanism? Magic?
Either there is a reason that you selected the action you did, in
which case the reason determined the selection - or there isn't, in
which case the selection was random.
Also the phrase "from what is physically possible" is suspicious. If
the natural laws determine what is physically possible, don't they
determine everything? Where does this leave room for free will?
"the ability to select actions from what is physically possible"
Select by means that is neither random nor caused. Okay. That's what I said.
> 6. Free will as defined above does not make any assumptions about
> the ontological nature of the self/mind/soul. There is a theory,
> according to which a supernatural soul pulls the strings of the body.
> That theory is all too often confused with free will. It might be
> taken as an explanaiton of free will, but it specifies a kind of
> mechanism or explanation — not a phenomenon to be explained.
OK. Not in conflict with my definition.
> I.1.v Libertarianism — A Prima Facie case for free will
As for the rest of it, I read it, but didn't find it convincing on any level.
RIG + SIS <> Free Will
A random process coupled to a deterministic process isn't free will.
It's just a random process coupled to a deterministic process. If you
ask most people "is this free will?" - they will say no.
Free will (in most peoples estimation) requires a process that is
neither random *nor* determinstic. Not one that is both.
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Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 18 Nov 2010, at 07:31, Rex Allen wrote: >> As for my definition of free will: >> >> "The ability to make choices that are neither random nor caused." >> >> Obviously there is no such ability, since "random" and "caused" >> exhaust the possibilities. >> >> But some people believe in the existence of such an ability anyway. >> >> Why? Well...either there's a reason that they do, or there isn't... > > > Lol. > I agree with you. With your definition of free will, it does not exist. I think that if you question most people who believe in free will closely, my definition is what their position boils down to. > But your reasoning does not apply to free will in the sense I gave: the > ability to choose among alternatives that *I* cannot predict in advance (so > that *from my personal perspective* it is not entirely due to reason nor do > to randomness). So that is a good description of the subjective feeling of free will. But if you question most people closely, this isn't what they mean by “free will”. They mean the ability to make choices that aren't random, but which also aren't caused. They have the further belief that since the choices aren't random or caused, the chooser bears ultimate responsibility for them. This further belief doesn't seem to follow from any particular chain of reasoning. It's just another belief that this kind of person has. Silly, I know. > When you say "random or not random", you are applying the third excluded > middle which, although arguably true ontically, is provably wrong for most > personal points of view. We have p v ~p, but this does not entail Bp v B~p, > for B used for almost any hypostasis (points of view). I'd think that ontically is what matters in this particular case? Why would I care about whether or why I or anyone else *seem* to have free will from their personal points of view? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:36 AM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 19, 3:11 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Jason Resch wrote: >> > Rex, >> >> > Your post reminded me of the quote (of which I cannot recall the source) >> > where someone asked "Who pushes who around inside the brain?", meaning is >> > it >> > the matter that causes thought to move around a certain way, or is it the >> > opposite? The looped hierarchies described by Hofstadter, if present, make >> > this a difficult question to answer. If the highest levels of thought and >> > reason are required in your decision making, does it still make sense to >> > say >> > we are slaves of deterministic motions of particles or is that missing a >> > few >> > steps? >> >> Well, I find it entirely conceivable that fundamental physical laws >> acting on fundamental physical entities (particles, fields, strings, >> whatever) could account for human behavior and ability. >> >> So if human behavior and ability is what we are trying to explain, >> then I see no reason to invoke thought and reason as causal forces > > No-one is. They are just valid descriptions. There is no argument > to the effect that logic is causal or it is nothing. It is not > the case that causal explanation is the only form of explanagion “Valid descriptions” don’t account for why things are this way rather than some other way. Only causal explanations do that. > . >> And, even if you wanted to, I don't see how they could be made to >> serve that role. 1Z and I discussed this in the other thread. >> >> We don't invoke thought and reason to explain the abilities and >> behavior of chess playing computers > > Sometimes we do...see Dennett;s "intentional stance" See my other post in the previous thread on shortcuts, forests, and trees. >>- and while human behavior and >> ability is much more complex and extensive, I think it can be put in >> the same general category. > > Dennett would agree, but push the logic in the other direction: > > Humans are a complex sort of robot. Wild speculation. As I said before, materialism could conceivably explain human ability and behavior, but in my opinion runs aground at human consciousness. Therefore, I doubt that humans are a complex sort of robot. > Humans have intentionality. Granted. I do anyway. So at least one human does. > Therefore some other, sufficiently complex, robots have intentionality Not proven. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > > Have I understood you correctly, that the current discussion has been > already predetermined by the initial conditions of the Universe? Well...maybe. But I'm not overly concerned with the question of whether the causal laws of the universe are deterministic or probabilistic. The implications are mostly the same either way. And it's the implications of there being causal laws that mainly interests me. So we have orderly perceptions and ask where the order comes from. Perhaps causal laws? But then where do causal laws come from? What causes causal laws? And why our causal laws instead of some others? Do these "causal laws" actually cause some things to happen and actively prohibit other things from happening? Or do they merely describe what happens, without any actual causation? In other words, is it the case that A) nothing *can* violate the laws of physics, or is it merely that B) nothing *does* violate the laws of physics. If A), why not? What enforces the causal laws? If B) why not? Why do things happen *as though* there were governing laws? I lean towards B. There are no causal laws, and there is no reason that things happen as though there were. Which is the gist of the Meillassoux paper that started the other thread. > I am not sure that I agree but at least with computational irreducibility > there is some logic in all this. Do you agree with Stephen Wolfram? I thought it was an interesting talk. Things could be that way I reckon. Though the problem is that things could be lots of other ways instead. If reality is as Wolfram believes instead of as Leibniz believed (e.g., in Monadology), why is that? What explains the difference? And then, what explains the explanation of the difference? And then, what explains the explanation of the explanation of the difference? And so on. If reality is one particular way, we're faced with the question of "why this way and not some other?". Which leads directly to infinite regress, as above. The only way to avoid this is to accept, as with Meillassoux, that there *is* no reason that reality is this way. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 11/21/2010 10:43 AM, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:36 AM, 1Z wrote: >>> >>> Therefore some other, sufficiently complex, robots have intentionality >>> >> >> Not proven. >> > > Proof is for mathematics. Not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in the juridical sense. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
Well it would seem to me that ignorance is not free will. Ignorance is ignorance. "Belief in free will" is not free will. "Belief in free will" is *belief* in free will. Why do you want to define it in terms of ignorance? What motivates this? And how does that fit with how the term is used with respect to ultimate responsibility for acts committed (good and bad)? Why not just say: "Free will as it is commonly used doesn't exist, but we have this other thing you might be interested in: faux will - which we define in terms of ignorance..." On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: > The problem you're making is that, we can't choose (freely) under > deterministics rules and we can't choose (freely) under random rules... > > Because the world is ruled (random or not). I think free will is compatible > to both views. As long as you defined it to be ignorance of the knowing > entities, the burden rest to define what in that context are the knowing > entities (and what knows mean, where I think Bruno is near the truth) ;-) > > Regards, > Quentin > > -- > All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 11:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > On 21 Nov 2010, at 19:47, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> But your reasoning does not apply to free will in the sense I gave: the >>> ability to choose among alternatives that *I* cannot predict in advance >>> (so that *from my personal perspective* it is not entirely due to reason >>> nor do to randomness). >> >> So that is a good description of the subjective feeling of free will. > > I was not describing the subjective feeling of free will, which is another > matter, and which may accompany or not the experience of free will. > Free-will is the ability to choose among alternatives that *I* cannot > genuinely predict in advance so that reason fails, and yet it is not random. The ability to choose among unpredictable alternatives? What??? In no way does “ability to choose from unpredictable alternatives” match my conception of free will. Nor would you find many people in agreement amongst the general populace. You’re just redefining “free will” in a way that allows you to claim that it exists but which bears little relation to the original conception. In a deterministic universe, there are no alternatives. Things can only unfold one way. Our being unable to predict that unfolding is neither here nor there. Again, ignorance is not free will. Ignorance is just ignorance. >> But if you question most people closely, this isn't what they mean by >> “free will”. > > You have interpret too much quickly what I was describing. Free-will as I > define it is not the subjective feeling of having free-will. It is really > due to the fact that the choice I will make is not based on reason, nor on > randomness from my (real) perspective (which exists). I didn’t say that the options were choices based on “reason or randomness” I said: “Either there is *a reason* for what I choose to do, or there isn't.” By “a reason” I mean “a cause”. I don’t mean “reason” in the sense of rationality. > Subjective does not mean inexisting. Free-will is subjective or better > subject-related, but it exists and has observable consequences, like > purposeful murdering, existence of jails, etc. It is the root of moral > consciousness, or conscience. How does my inability to predict my choices or alternatives in advance serve as the root for moral conscience? >> They mean the ability to make choices that aren't random, but which >> also aren't caused. > > And this becomes, with the approach I gave: "the ability to make choices > that aren't random, but for which they have to ignore the cause". And I > insist: they might even ignore that they ignore the cause. They will say > "because I want do that" or things like that. The vast majority of the populace certainly does not equate free will with ignorance of causes. > I disagree that many people would accept your definition, because it would > entail (even for religious rationalist believers) that free-will does not > exist, and the debate would be close since a long time. If you ask “most people”, they will not agree that the human choice is random, and they will not agree that human choice can be explained by causal forces. Rather, they claim that human choice is something not random *and* not caused. Though they can’t get any more specific than that. The debate isn’t settled because they won’t admit that there is no third option. They feel free, therefore they *believe* that they must actually be free. Free from randomness and free from causal forces. “I feel free, therefore I must be free.” That reasoning is what keeps the free will debate alive. >> They have the further belief that since the choices aren't random or >> caused, the chooser bears ultimate responsibility for them. > > They are right. That is what the materialist eliminativist will deny, and > eventually that is why they will deny any meaning to notion like "person", > free-will, responsibility or even "consciousness". How does ignorance of what choice you will make lead to ultimate responsibility for that choice? I deny the possibility of ultimate responsibility and I’m not a eliminative materialist. But I also deny that mechanism can account for consciousness (except by fiat declaration that it does). As to “person”, I take a deflationary view of the term. There’s less to it than meets the eye. >> This further belief doesn't seem to follow from any particular chain >> of reasoning. It's just another belief that this kind of person has. > > Because as a person she is conscious and feel a reasonable amount of sense > of responsibility, which is genuine and legitimate from her first person > pers
Re: Compatibilism
On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:12 PM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 21, 6:43 pm, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:36 AM, 1Z wrote: >>> >>> No-one is. They are just valid descriptions. There is no argument >>> to the effect that logic is causal or it is nothing. It is not >>> the case that causal explanation is the only form of explanagion >> >> “Valid descriptions” don’t account for why things are this way rather >> than some other way. >> > > If a higher level description is a valid description of > some microphysics, then it will be an explanation of > why the result happened given the initial conditions > > It won't solve the trilemma, but neither will > microphysical causality So Agrippa's Trilemma revolves around the question of how we can justify our beliefs. It seems to me that an entirely acceptable solution is just to accept that we can't justify our beliefs. >> As I said before, materialism could conceivably explain human ability >> and behavior, but in my opinion runs aground at human consciousness. >> Therefore, I doubt that humans are a complex sort of robot. > > Is human consciousness causally effective? I don't believe so, no. And claiming that consciousness is itself caused just runs into infinite regress, as you then need to explain what causes the cause of conscious experience, and so on. Therefore, taking the same approach as with Agrippa's Trilemma, it seems best to just accept that there is no cause for conscious experience either. Is it a useful answer? Maybe not. But where does it say that all answers have to be useful? Besides, what causes you to care about usefulness? Evolution. What causes evolution? Initial conditions and causal laws. What causes initial conditions and causal laws? And so on. We've been through this before I think. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:20 PM, 1Z wrote: > > > On Nov 21, 6:35 pm, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:28 AM, 1Z wrote: >>> On Nov 18, 6:31 am, Rex Allen wrote: >>>> If there is a reason, then the reason determined the choice. No free will. >>> >>> Unless you determined the reason. >> >> How would you do that? By what means? According to what rule? Using >> what process? >> >> If you determined the reason, what determined you? Why are you in the >> particular state you're in? >> >> If there exists some rule that translates your specific state into >> some particular choice, then there's still no free will. The rule >> determined the choice. > > And if there isn't...you have an action that is reasoned yet > undetermined, as required If there is no rule that translates your specific state into some particular choice, then what is it connects the state to the choice? The state occurs. Then the choice occurs. But nothing connects them? That is accidentalism isn't it? >>> I.1.v Libertarianism — A Prima Facie case for free will >> >> As for the rest of it, I read it, but didn't find it convincing on any level. >> >> RIG + SIS <> Free Will >> >> A random process coupled to a deterministic process isn't free will. >> It's just a random process coupled to a deterministic process. > > If you insist that FW is a Tertium Datur that is fundamenally > different from both determinism and causation, then you > won't accept a mixture. However, I don;t think Tertium Datur > is a good definition of DW sinc e it is too question begging It seems to me that when people discuss free will, they are always really interested in "ultimate responsibility" for actions. Any defense of "free will" must allow for ultimate responsibility for actions. I say that ultimate responsibility is impossible, because neither caused actions nor random actions nor any combination of cause and randomness seems to result in "ultimate responsibility". Ultimate responsibility means that reward and punishment are justified for acts *even after* setting aside any utilitarian considerations. So *if* it were possible to be ultimately responsible for a bad act, we wouldn't need to justify the offender's punishment in terms of deterring future bad behavior by the offender or others. We wouldn't need to justify the offender's punishment in terms of rehabilitating the offender so that they don't commit similar bad acts in the future. We wouldn't need to justify the offender's punishment in terms of motivating better behavior by them or others in the future. We wouldn't need to justify the offender's punishment in terms of compensating their victims or insuring social stability. Instead, we could justify the offender's punishment purely in terms of their ultimate responsibility for it. Using their free will, they chose to commit the bad act, and therefore they deserve the punishment. End of story. So, given that the punishment would no longer need to be justified in terms of anything other than ultimate responsibility, how would one justify limits on the punishment's severity? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Against Mechanism
On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
>>
>> But I also deny that mechanism can account for consciousness (except
>> by fiat declaration that it does).
>>
>
> Rex,
> I am interested in your reasoning against mechanism. Assume there is were
> an] mechanical brain composed of mechanical neurons, that contained the same
> information as a human brain, and processed it in the same way.
I started out as a functionalist/computationalist/mechanist but
abandoned it - mainly because I don't think that "representation" will
do all that you're asking it to do.
For example, with mechanical or biological brains - while it seems
entirely reasonable to me that the contents of my conscious experience
can be represented by quarks and electrons arranged in particular
ways, and that by changing the structure of this arrangement over time
in the right way one could also represent how the contents of my
experience changes over time.
However, there is nothing in my conception of quarks or electrons (in
particle or wave form) nor in my conception of arrangements and
representation that would lead me to predict beforehand that such
arrangements would give rise to anything like experiences of pain or
anger or what it's like to see red.
The same goes for more abstract substrates, like bits of information.
What matters is not the bits, nor even the arrangements of bits per
se, but rather what is represented by the bits.
"Information" is just a catch-all term for "what is being
represented". But, as you say, the same information can be
represented in *many* different ways, and by many different
bit-patterns.
And, of course, any set of bits can be interpreted as representing any
information. You just need the right "one-time pad" to XOR with the
bits, and viola! The magic is all in the interpretation. None of it
is in the bits. And interpretation requires an interpreter.
SO...given that the bits are merely representations, it seems silly to
me to say that just because you have the bits, you *also* have the
thing they represent.
Just because you have the bits that represent my conscious experience,
doesn't mean that you have my conscious experience. Just because you
manipulate the bits in a way as to represent "me seeing a pink
elephant" doesn't mean that you've actually caused me, or any version
of me, to experience seeing a pink elephant.
All you've really done is had the experience of tweaking some bits and
then had the experience of thinking to yourself: "hee hee hee, I just
caused Rex to see a pink elephant..."
Even if you have used some physical system (like a computer) that can
be interpreted as executing an algorithm that manipulates bits that
can be interpreted as representing me reacting to seeing a pink
elephant ("Boy does he look surprised!"), this interpretation all
happens within your conscious experience and has nothing to do with my
conscious experience.
Thinking that the "bit representation" captures my conscious
experience is like thinking that a photograph captures my soul.
Though, obviously this is as true of biological brains as of
computers. But so be it.
This is the line of thought that brought me to the idea that conscious
experience is fundamental and uncaused.
> The
> behavior between these two brains is in all respects identical, since the
> mechanical neurons react identically to their biological counterparts.
> However for some unknown reason the computer has no inner life or conscious
> experience.
I agree that if you assume that representation "invokes" conscious
experience, then the brain and the computer would both have to be
equally conscious.
But I don't make that assumption.
So the problem becomes that once you open the door to the "multiple
realizability" of representations then we can never know anything
about our substrate.
You *think* that your brain is the cause of your conscious
experience...but as you say, a computer representation of you would
think the same thing, but would be wrong.
Given that there are an infinite number of ways that your information
could be represented, how likely is it that your experience really is
caused by a biological brain? Or even by a representation of a
biological brain? Why not some alternate algorithm that results in
the same *conscious* experiences, but with entirely different
*unconscious* elements? How could you notice the difference?
> Information can take many physical forms.
Information requires interpretation. The magic isn't in the bits.
The magic is in the interpreter.
Rex
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Re: Against Mechanism
On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:08 PM, 1Z wrote: > > > On Nov 27, 6:49 pm, Rex Allen wrote: > >> Given that there are an infinite number of ways that your information >> could be represented, how likely is it that your experience really is >> caused by a biological brain? Or even by a representation of a >> biological brain? > > Occam's razor: BIV, matrix and other sceptical scenarios are > always more complex, and therefore less likely than > "things are the way they seem to be" Actually not. We have our experience of the world, which is not direct (e.g. colors, illusions, delusions, dreams, etc.). And then we have the cause of our experience. This is true in all cases: scientific realism, scientific materialism, BIV, matrix, other skeptical scenarios. BIV, matrix, etc. don't introduce additional elements, they just arrange the "causal" elements differently. None are more or less complex than the others. *My* preferred option is simpler. Only conscious experience exists, uncaused and fundamental. There is nothing else. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 7:17 AM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 26, 6:01 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> So Agrippa's Trilemma revolves around the question of how we can >> justify our beliefs. >> >> It seems to me that an entirely acceptable solution is just to accept >> that we can't justify our beliefs. > > ..in an absolute way. We still can relative to other > beliefs. And that isn;t a problem specific to higher-level > categories such as reason and logic. The Trilemma applies > just as much to microphysical causality How do you justify your belief that you can justify your beliefs relative to other beliefs? As for microphysical causality, right, it doesn’t solve any ontological problems to introduce it as an explanation because it just raises the question “what causes microphysical causality?” And also, if you buy multiple realizability, then you can’t justify your belief in one particular microphysical causal structure instead of some other functionally isomorphic one. >>>> As I said before, materialism could conceivably explain human ability >>>> and behavior, but in my opinion runs aground at human consciousness. >>>> Therefore, I doubt that humans are a complex sort of robot. >>> >>> Is human consciousness causally effective? >> >> I don't believe so, no. > > Then the sense in which we are not robots is somewhat honorific: > we are not because we have consciousness, but consc. doesn't > explain out behaviour since it doesn't cause anything , so we behave > as determined... OR, there is no reason we behave as we do. >> And claiming that consciousness is itself caused just runs into >> infinite regress, as you then need to explain what causes the cause of >> conscious experience, and so on. > > The claim is more that it causes. And it could be causal under > interactive dualism (brain causes consc causes different brains state) > and it could be causal under mind brain identity: mind is identical > to brain; brain causes; therefore mind identically causes. If you anesthetize me, the brain is still there. Where is the mind? If you lightly smush my brain in a press, the brain is still there. Is the mind still there? Assuming multiple realizability, if you run a simulation of me on a computer, the mind is there. Where is the brain? Mind-brain identity doesn’t seem so convincing to me. >> Therefore, taking the same approach as with Agrippa's Trilemma, it >> seems best to just accept that there is no cause for conscious >> experience either. > > Again, the trillema only means there is no non-arbitrary ultimate > cause. Well, the Agrippa’s trilemma applies to justification, not “cause” per se. I just said we should apply the same approach and do away with the “causal trilemma” by denying its assumptions. Though your right in that the causal trilemma does look pretty similar to Agrippa’s trilemma. Our three choices are: 1) An uncaused first cause. 2) Some sort of circular causation. 3) An infinite number of prior causes. Kant was pretty close to this with his first antinomy of pure reason. > The trillema does not mean that nothing whatsoever is caused. > In any case it is a rather poor reason for dismissing the causal > efficacy of consciousness. The causal trilemma just shows that attempting to explain our experiences by invoking a cause merely results in the question “what causes the cause”. You don’t get anywhere. You could just be satisfied with the predictive success of your “useful” explanation and not inquire further...but people don’t seem to like to stop there. They go on to ascribe metaphysical/ontological significance to it. But if you do, then you have to face the causal trilemma. > You are saing that you are not causally > responsible for what you have written here, for instance I am saying that, correct. >> Is it a useful answer? Maybe not. But where does it say that all >> answers have to be useful? > > If true knowledge is unobtainable, it makes a lot > of sense to settle for useful knowledge. Sure, if you believe that your beliefs are useful, that’s fine with me. Just don’t go pretending that they’re justified. >> Besides, what causes you to care about usefulness? Evolution. >> >> What causes evolution? Initial conditions and causal laws. >> >> What causes initial conditions and causal laws? >> >> And so on. We've been through this before I think. > > Yep. That it is in a sense caused by evolution does not make it wrong. Doesn’t make it right either. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 7:44 AM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 26, 6:31 am, Rex Allen wrote: >> Any defense of "free will" must allow for ultimate responsibility for >> actions. > > Mine does Random events don't qualify as free will. A deterministic process doesn't qualify as free will. Random events feeding into a deterministic process don't qualify as free will. It doesn't matter how complex you make the whole system, it's still doesn't have free will. This system isn't ultimately responsible since it isn't responsible for the random events that feed into it, and it isn't responsible for the deterministic rules that filter the random events. Every act this system executes is traceable to those two things, and it can never be free of them. Neither is sufficient for ultimate responsibility The only way you can get free will from this is to redefine free will. And I still don't understand why your so desperate to do so. "Free will", like "square circle", refers to something that doesn't exist. "Free will" = "ability to make choices that are neither random nor caused" "square circle" = "an object that is both a square and a circle" -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Compatibilism
On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > With your definition of free will, it does not exist. I think we agree. Very good. So what we are really arguing about here is whether your definition or my definition is closer to what is generally meant when people use the term “free will”. I think your definition is not very close to what is generally meant, and so you should come up with a different term for it. I assume that you resist doing this because you are trying to convince the general populace that they don’t *NEED* what is generally meant by “free will” in order to continue with their lives pretty much as before. However, you (and the other compatibilists) don’t just come out and say “free will doesn’t exist, but you don’t need it anyway”. Instead you say: “I have found a way to make free will compatible with determinism!” And then you proceed with explicating your theory as to why they don’t need free will after all - hoping that they won’t notice the subtle switch from “free will is compatible with determinism” to “you don’t need free will”. Ultimately, you have found a way to make free will compatible with determinism: change the definition of free will. And maybe this is the best way to get the general populace on-board with a more reasonable view of things. But it’s still a rhetorical tactic, and not a valid argument. >> Nor would you find many people in >> agreement amongst the general populace. > > That is not an argument. Yet many compatibilists reason along similar lines, > but this is not an argument either. But we’re arguing over whose definition is closer to the general usage of “free will”. The general usage by the general populace. > Few people agree that mechanism entails that physics is a branch of > theology, and that matter is an emerging pattern. Few people understand that > QM = Many worlds. At each epoch few people swallow the new ideas / theories. > Science is not working like politics. it is not democratic. Usually the > majority is wrong as science history illustrates well. Many people today > find hard the idea that "they are machine" (except perhaps in the DM large > sense for people with a bit of education). I’m not necessarily saying that there’s something wrong or inconsistent or impossible with your proposal. All I’m saying is that it’s not free will. >> The vast majority of the populace certainly does not equate free will >> with ignorance of causes. > > Again that is not an argument. It would even be doubtful that humans would > be naturally correct on such hard technical question, especially with the > mechanist assumption which justified *why* most truth are just unbelievable. “What do you mean by ‘free will’” is not a technically hard question. Also, “do you believe in ultimate responsibility” is not a technically hard question. > G* minus G is the precise logic of what is true but unbelievable. > It shows that machine have genuine free-will. But humans already dislike the > idea that their neighbors have free-will. They *love* the idea that their neighbors have free-will. Bertrand Russell: “Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on behaviour. The apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The one effect that the free- will doctrine has in practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.” > People will not like that, but in > the long run, they will prefer that to the idea that *they* have no free > will themselves. It is still genuine partial free will. You can manage some > of your classes of futures, you have a partial control. What causes you to manage them one way as opposed to another way? >> If you ask “most people”, they will not agree that the human choice is >> random, and they will not agree that human choice can be explained by >> causal forces. > > Such question are known to be hot, and most people disagree with each other. > Many among those who criticizes determinism often relies on sacred texts, > and show an unwillingness to even reason. This is true. And it could be that your sneaky app
Re: Compatibilism
On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 11/27/2010 12:53 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> "Free will" = "ability to make choices that are neither random nor caused" >> > > This is a false dichotomy. If a deterministic algorithm evaluates the > probability of success for three different actions as A=0.5 B=0.45 and > C=0.05 and then a choice between A and B is made at random, then the process > has made a choice that is both deterministic and random. Then we have two processes. The deterministic process evaluated the probabilities and deterministically rejected C. Then the deterministic process deterministically chose between A and B by using the output from some other random process. The deterministic process's use of the random process’s output was deterministically constrained to A or B. If it had *become* a random process in the sense I mean - it might have gone in with the options of (A or B) but then ended up taking entirely unrelated action X. Or not taken any action at all. Or turned into a bird. By random, I’m using the Merriam-Webster definition of: “without definite aim, direction, rule, or method”. I don’t mean: “relating to, having, or being elements or events with definite probability of occurrence”. As I’ve said before, I think that probabilistic processes still count as "caused". Ultimately I think the difference between deterministic and probabilistic laws is not significant. If a law is deterministic then under it's influence Event A will "cause" Result X 100% of the time. Why does Event A always lead to Result X? Because that's the law. There is no deeper reason. If a law is probabilistic, then under it's influence Event B will "cause" Result Q, R, or S according to some probability distribution. Let's say that the probability distribution is 1/3 for each outcome. If Event B leads to Result R, why does it do so? Because that's the law. There is no deeper reason. Event A causes Result X 100% of the time. Event B causes Result R 33.% of the time. Why? For fundamental laws (if such things exist) there is no reason. That's just the way it is. Determinism could be seen as merely a special case of indeterminism...the case where all probabilities are set to either 0% or 100%. Yes? Or no? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Against Mechanism
On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
>> "Information" is just a catch-all term for "what is being
>> represented". But, as you say, the same information can be
>> represented in *many* different ways, and by many different
>> bit-patterns.
>>
>> And, of course, any set of bits can be interpreted as representing any
>> information. You just need the right "one-time pad" to XOR with the
>> bits, and viola! The magic is all in the interpretation. None of it
>> is in the bits. And interpretation requires an interpreter.
>
> I agree with this completely. Information alone, such as bits on a hard
> disk are meaningless without a corresponding program that reads them. Would
> you admit then, that a computer which interprets bits the same way as a
> brain could be conscious? Isn't this mechanism? Or is your view more like
> the Buddhist idea that there is no thinker, only thought?
Right, my view is that there is no thinker, only thought.
Once you accept that the conscious experience of a rock exists, what
purpose does the actual rock serve? It's superfluous. If the rock can
"just exist", then the experience of the rock can "just exist" too -
entirely independent of the rock.
Once you accept the existence of conscious experiences, what purpose
does the brain serve? It's superfluous. If the brain can "just exist",
then the experiences supposedly caused by the brain can "just exist"
also.
If not, why not?
>> SO...given that the bits are merely representations, it seems silly to
>> me to say that just because you have the bits, you *also* have the
>> thing they represent.
>>
>> Just because you have the bits that represent my conscious experience,
>> doesn't mean that you have my conscious experience. Just because you
>> manipulate the bits in a way as to represent "me seeing a pink
>> elephant" doesn't mean that you've actually caused me, or any version
>> of me, to experience seeing a pink elephant.
>>
>> All you've really done is had the experience of tweaking some bits and
>> then had the experience of thinking to yourself: "hee hee hee, I just
>> caused Rex to see a pink elephant..."
>>
>> Even if you have used some physical system (like a computer) that can
>> be interpreted as executing an algorithm that manipulates bits that
>> can be interpreted as representing me reacting to seeing a pink
>> elephant ("Boy does he look surprised!"), this interpretation all
>> happens within your conscious experience and has nothing to do with my
>> conscious experience.
>
> Isn't this just idealism? To me, the main problem with idealism is it
> doesn't explain why the thoughts we are about to experience are predictable
> under a framework of physical laws.
But then you have to explain the existence, consistency, and
predictability of this framework of physical laws.
You still have the exact same questions, but now your asking them of
this framework instead of about your conscious experiences. You just
pushed the questions back a level by introducing a layer of
unexplained entities. Your explanation needs an explanation.
Also, you’ve introduced a new question: How does unconscious matter
governed by unconscious physical laws give rise to conscious
experience?
> If you see a ball go up, you can be
> rather confident in your future experience of seeing it come back down. It
> seems there is an underlying system, more fundamental than consciousness,
> which drives where it can go. In one of your earlier e-mails you explained
> your belief as "accidental idealism", can you elaborate on this accidental
> part?
Basically I’m just combining accidentalism and idealism.
Here’s the link to that earlier post that you refer to:
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/msg/74a368a670efaf16
Also the Meillassoux paper that I attached to the original post
(“Probability, Necessity, and Infinity”) that spawned this thread is
in this same vein:
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/browse_thread/thread/18406fb83d9fbebd
This paper addresses the exact question you raise...how to explain the
consistency and predictability that we observe, but without invoking
the unexplained brute existence of “physical laws”.
Meillassoux’s solution uses Cantorian detotalization to counter
proposed resolutions to Hume’s “problem of induction” that involve
probabilistic logic depending upon a totality of cases.
Meillassoux's main point with this digression into Cantorian set
theory is that just as there can be no end to the process of set
formation and thus no such
Re: Against Mechanism
On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> On 11/27/2010 1:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
>>>
>>> Even if you have used some physical system (like a computer) that can
>>> be interpreted as executing an algorithm that manipulates bits that
>>> can be interpreted as representing me reacting to seeing a pink
>>> elephant ("Boy does he look surprised!"), this interpretation all
>>> happens within your conscious experience and has nothing to do with my
>>> conscious experience.
>>
>> Isn't this just idealism?
>
> If it were consistent it would be solipism.
By inconsistency I assume that you are referring to my use of "you"
and "your" while claiming that, ultimately, Jason's conscious
experience has nothing to do with my conscious experience?
If there are no causal connections between our experiences then...why
am I addressing him in my emails as though there were?
There are three answers to this question:
1) To be consistent, I have to conclude that ultimately there is no
reason for this. It's just the way things are. That I do this is
just a fact, and not causally connected to any other facts.
2) The related fact that, lacking free will, I have no real choice
but to do this.
3) My "experienced" justification is that these emails are mostly an
opportunity to articulate, clarify, and develop my own thoughts on
these topics. I take an instrumentalist view of the process...it
doesn't matter what Jason's metaphysical status is.
As to solipsism, meh. In what sense do you mean?
Methodological solipsism, yes. Metaphysical solipsism, no.
1. My mental states are the only things I have access to. Yes.
2. From my mental states I cannot conclude the existence of anything
outside of my mental states. Yes.
3. Therefore I conclude that only my mental states exist. No.
So, I only score two out three on the metaphysical solipsism checklist.
Why do I reject #3? This comes back to taking a deflationary view of
"personage". It isn't "mental states belonging to Rex" so much as
"mental states whose contents include a Rex-like-point-of-view".
I have recollections of mental states which did not include a Rex-like
point of view (Salvia!). Based on those recollections I find it
entirely plausible (though not certain) that non-Rex-flavored mental
states exist.
But beyond that I can't say anything further about what kinds of
mental states do or don't exist. Maybe Jason's mental states exist,
maybe they don't. It's not really important.
> It's when your conscious
> experience infers that you are communicating with another conscious
> experience that the need for an explanation of the similarity of the
> experiences is needed. Objective = intersubjective agreement.
And I would say that trying to explain intersubjective experience is
getting a little ahead of things until one has a plausible explanation
of subjective experience.
What can you reliably infer from your conscious experience without
knowing what conscious experience "is"? It's building a foundation on
top of something which has no foundation.
>From conscious experience, I'd think that you can only reliably infer
things about conscious experience, not about what exists outside of or
behind conscious experience.
As Hans Moravec says:
"A simulated world hosting a simulated person can be a closed
self-contained entity. It might exist as a program on a computer
processing data quietly in some dark corner, giving no external hint
of the joys and pains, successes and frustrations of the person
inside. Inside the simulation events unfold according to the strict
logic of the program, which defines the 'laws of physics' of the
simulation. The inhabitant might, by patient experimentation and
inference, deduce some representation of the simulation laws, but not
the nature or even existence of the simulating computer. The
simulation's internal relationships would be the same if the program
were running correctly on any of an endless variety of possible
computers, slowly, quickly, intermittently, or even backwards and
forwards in time, with the data stored as charges on chips, marks on a
tape, or pulses in a delay line, with the simulation's numbers
represented in binary, decimal, or Roman numerals, compactly or spread
widely across the machine. There is no limit, in principle, on how
indirect the relationship between simulation and simulated can be."
Without a limit on how indirect the relationship can be, then there's
no conclusions that can be drawn.
And, as always, if the simulation of conscious experience can "just
exist", then why can't conscious experience itself just exist?
Rex
Re: Against Mechanism
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 2:45 PM, 1Z wrote: > On Nov 27, 7:40 pm, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:08 PM, 1Z wrote: >> > On Nov 27, 6:49 pm, Rex Allen wrote: >> >> >> Given that there are an infinite number of ways that your information >> >> could be represented, how likely is it that your experience really is >> >> caused by a biological brain? Or even by a representation of a >> >> biological brain? >> >> > Occam's razor: BIV, matrix and other sceptical scenarios are >> > always more complex, and therefore less likely than >> > "things are the way they seem to be" >> >> Actually not. We have our experience of the world, which is not >> direct (e.g. colors, illusions, delusions, dreams, etc.). > > How do you know? You can't maintain > that indirect realism is true independent > of any metaphysical presumptions. I don’t maintain that indirect realism is true. Only that direct realism isn’t, as it can’t account for colors, illusions, delusions, dreams, hallucinations, etc. > You can't maintain that it is true because > that is the way the brain works, since it > is a metaphysical presumption that there is such > a thing as a brain as distinct from experience. I can maintain that if conscious experience is caused by the brain, then direct realism isn’t plausible. And if conscious experience isn’t caused by the brain...then direct realism still isn’t plausible. > You can't maintain that it is a direct subjective > fact that your experiences are only of mental > representations. There is nothing about > an experience that labels it as indirect. You > experience would be the same if it actually > was direct experience of objects. I see no way that my experience of a chair in a dream could be a direct experience of a real object. >> And then we >> have the cause of our experience. >> >> This is true in all cases: scientific realism, scientific >> materialism, BIV, matrix, other skeptical scenarios. > > It is not the same in all cases. > > World+Experience > > is simpler than > > World+Vat/Matrix+Experience The Vat/Matrix is part of the World, not something that exists in addition to the World. That’s obvious enough. Assuming functionalism/computationalism (which is necessary for the BIV/Matrix scenario to even get off the ground), consciousness isn’t in the quarks and electrons of the brain. If you smush the brain, the quarks and electrons are still there but the consciousness is gone. Rather consciousness is associated with the arrangement of the quarks and electrons of the brain. Therefore the question is: what kinds of arrangements of quarks and electrons will give rise to a particular experience...say of sitting under a tree. One such arrangement is a person actually sitting under a tree. But most of the quarks and electrons in this scene are only there to provide surfaces for photons to bounce off of before reaching the persons eyes and to provide surfaces for skin contact. To generate sensory inputs in other words. For the BIV scenario, we leave the brain intact, but reorganize all of the other quarks and electrons so that the sensory inputs are generated by a computer and fed to the brain directly. Note that we don’t need a perfect simulation of the tree and ground and air molecules and intestinal bacteria. Only good enough to produce the same experience...and experience is obviously pretty course-grained. Many different microscopic states will produce the same macroscopic experience. Theoretically we don’t even need a simulation...just a table of time indexed sensory input values to feed to the brain. Given this, it’s not clear that a real body sitting under a real tree on a real planet orbiting a real sun is even the simplest way to generate the experience of sitting under a tree. Where would the Vat/Matrix come from? Well, where did the tree, planet, and sun come from? It just takes a rearrangement of initial conditions to get a vat/computer instead of a tree/planet/sun. What would make one set of initial conditions more complex than the other? I assume that you somehow feel that the BIV scenario must be more complicated because it is a vat AND it is somehow a representation/simulation of the environment that the brain experiences. But this is false. The vat/computer is just what it is. The fact that it can be interpreted as representing an environment adds no additional complexity. It’s just another way to arrange things. >> BIV, matrix, etc. don't introduce additional elements, they just >> arrange the "causal" elements differently. > > Wrong. The vat is an additional element Wrong. It’s just a different arrangement of quarks and electrons. >> No
Re: Against Mechanism
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: > On 11/28/2010 8:15 PM, Rex Allen wrote: > > ... > > Things might be that way. But this requires an explanation of the > existence of the information and the interpreter. And then an > explanation of the explanation. And then an explanation of the > explanation of the explanation. And so on. > Down the rabbit hole of infinite regress. Doesn’t seem promising, and > doesn’t seem necessary. > Why not just accept accidental idealism? > Rex > > > Maybe I would if you could explain it. Which part do you not understand? Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Against Mechanism
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 10:15 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote: >>> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Rex Allen >>> wrote: >>>> "Information" is just a catch-all term for "what is being >>>> represented". But, as you say, the same information can be >>>> represented in *many* different ways, and by many different >>>> bit-patterns. >>>> >>>> And, of course, any set of bits can be interpreted as representing any >>>> information. You just need the right "one-time pad" to XOR with the >>>> bits, and viola! The magic is all in the interpretation. None of it >>>> is in the bits. And interpretation requires an interpreter. >>> >>> I agree with this completely. Information alone, such as bits on a hard >>> disk are meaningless without a corresponding program that reads them. >>> Would >>> you admit then, that a computer which interprets bits the same way as a >>> brain could be conscious? Isn't this mechanism? Or is your view more >>> like >>> the Buddhist idea that there is no thinker, only thought? >> >> Right, my view is that there is no thinker, only thought. >> > > Do you believe as you type these responses into your computer you are > helping bring new thoughts into existence? Bringing "new" thoughts into existence? No, I don't think I'm doing anything like that. To the extent that "I" exist at all, I do so only as a spectator to thought, not as a generator of it. Though, you do introduce here the question of time. Since my position is that only conscious experience exists...time can only be an aspect of conscious experience, not something that exists in addition to conscious experience. As I mentioned to Bruno earlier, even assuming physicalism, we can only be consciously aware of what is represented by the neural structure of our brains. Our awareness of time can only be of our internal representation of it. We can't be directly aware of the external passage of time, can we? So I would say that time exists within conscious experience, conscious experience doesn't exist within time. All experiences that exist, do so eternally and timelessly. There are no "new" thoughts coming into existence. > If I understood the other > threads you cited on accidentalism, it seems as though you do not believe > anything is caused. Wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that responding to > these threads is pointless? Well, there is the possibility that I'm wrong and that someone will point out something I've overlooked. Other than that, ya it's pointless. And yet I do it. Damn my lack of free will... >> Once you accept that the conscious experience of a rock exists, what >> purpose does the actual rock serve? It's superfluous. If the rock can >> "just exist", then the experience of the rock can "just exist" too - >> entirely independent of the rock. > > Believing thought alone exists doesn't give any explanation for why I see a > relatively ordered screen with text and icons I understand, compared to > something like this: > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Tux_secure.jpg > > There are far more possible thoughts that consist of a visual field that > looks random, do you find it surprising you happen to be a thought which is > so compressible? Nope. Meillassoux addresses your mistaken feeling of surprise in his paper: "Such an astonishment thus rests upon reasoning that is dearly probabilistic. The anthropist begins by being surprised by a coincidence too strong to be imputed to chance alone, and then infers the idea of an enigmatic finality having predetermined our universe to comprise the initial constants and givens which render possible the emergence of man. Anthropism thus reactivates a classical topos of finalist thought: the remarking of the existence of a highly-ordered reality (inherent to the organised and thinking being) whose cause cannot reasonably be imputed to chance alone, and which consequently imposes the hypothesis of a hidden finality. Now, we can see in what way the critique of the probabilist sophism permits us to challenge such a topos in a new way." > Accepting that rocks exist allows the understanding that some of these rocks > have the right conditions for live to develop on them, and evolve brains to > use to understand the worlds they appear on. Which all sounds very neat, if taken out of context. But what is the significance of evolving brains? What is evolution? What causes it? What is the
