newcomputerwhodis
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User ID: 3218
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
I dunno man, all the "physicalists" out there still worrying about the hard problem of consciousness or p-zombies or free will or identity seem like they could use a hand. Beyond that, if parsimony doesn't get you finding dualist a dirty word I've got no more ammo on that front.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
You, you're the tricky one. I probably shouldn't have tried to preempt the math/logic objection at all, because that was clumsier than it needed to be, and you're obviously right about everything you've said, so I'll have to back up a half step. Nothing that followed the math aside depends on it, it's only trying to swipe away a potential objection before anybody lands on it and fumbling the move.
So let's see... Platonism is bupkis. Describing a non-contradictory thing doesn't mean squat for whether or not it actually exists. Math is hypothetical relations built using the same mechanisms the physical world uses - if X, then Y. If there were 7 spatial dimensions, then 7 dimensional "cubes" (hepteracts?) would work like so. When the hypothetical is something actual, when the math is instantiated, all that changes is that we get physical confirmation that our math is correct. I'm not happy about this exact phrasing and would need to workshop, but that would be the basic idea, and I don't think it's remotely a dangerous blow to the overall thrust to just strike the original without replacement.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Buddy, we all contend that every single day we aren't committed solipsists. We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.
But I'm really not making much of a change at all - everything follows from physicalism.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Har har, very funny, but you're not talking to a much more straw-filled version of me, you're talking to the actual me. There is no ground to stand on when trying to define "good" without dualism of some sort, because there is no objective connection between the adjective "good" and any part of the physical world. Good is describing different things entirely depending on reference frame - if there exist 10x our number of aliens whose lives/utility functions/whatever thing you want to find valuable are irreconcilably opposed to ours (they only live if we die, they are only happy if we are sad, etc) then there is no classical definition we can even potentially share. There is no universal reference frame for goodness, and there cannot be one. The only way to reason about goodness is to take an axiom that gives goodness a definition. That is not my stance, that is the only way pure physicalism can ever be. Pick one, check your conversational/civilizational partners roughly agree, then proceed.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Is just offhanded snark. I have no philosophical grounding - for all I know 80% of all philosophical texts are centered around whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Parsimony very much does demand not introducing deities when physics already explains all elements, no further assumptions needed. The relevant objection is whether parsimony is appropriate, and you're now the second person to come from that angle, so maybe I do need to add a bit about why it is.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
I don't know how best to respond to this. There's a lot where you seem confused or where you're making a notable attempt to sound more poetic than actually get a real idea across, but to my ear it doesn't lend the wise learned sage image so much as someone who is educated in one domain and drastically undervalues others trying to leverage what they do know in a vague way while nodding at smart concepts from what they don't. Ironic to accuse you of that while dunking on famous philosophical problems, I know. I don't think you've stated any substantive objections to anything I've put down, other than perhaps "why do this", to which I can only respond that if you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive [oh hey a typo] systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
Reason cannot tell you what is good. It never could in any physicalist frame because "good" is not a physical or measurable property. It's not even defined! Pure consequentialism doesn't try to pretend it is.
You take your axioms, your selection of what is good and what is bad, and then you measure how much of what you have taken as good or bad results from an act. Attempts at other ethical systems are higher-order evaluations, "the kind of society that... the kind of person that... the kind of thinking that... results from... results in the kind of thinking that... which results in the kind of person that... which results in the kind of society that..." and so on. You be virtuous (however that is defined) not because doing so makes you happier right now, but because the downstream effects bring about good results (by your measure). You do not engage in a specific bad act (however that is defined) not because it causes a specific bad thing to happen in the moment, but because the downstream effects make the world worse (by your measure). Mapping it all manually is hard, so ethical frameworks make good heuristics, but that does not make them "true" - it only makes them useful.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.
The point isn't the limitations of the hardware she has or the time available, the point is the separation between "information" and "experience" that people intuitively feel.
But she "has all the information" about how vision works and what apples are made of. In a physicalist frame, there can't be any non-physical process. There's nothing else but the physical processes involved, so consciousness and qualia and whatever other things are proposed either don't exist or arise from the physical phenomena. It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
In a purely physical world, there can't be anything that "goes against determinism". You have to bite the whole bullet or not at all.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
To those who don't accept brute physicalism, sure, I've done nothing. But there are a great many who sure seem to like labeling themselves physicalists, yet hold on to some strange ideas that I don't think hold up. So I've only solved one half of philosophy, downstream of the physical fork.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute. The point is that the experiment assumes a difference between the physical processes and "seeing red", because if it didn't it wouldn't be interesting. The answer would be no.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
A dog is allowed to enjoy the taste of human food that fell to the floor without any presupposition of a soul or self-conception that would pass the mirror test, and you are allowed to have a rich inner life composed of your various physical systems without attributing mystery to it. Your brain is doing a lot of things, all the time.
I don't know the third thing about how the brain works (I barely know the second), but I don't need to know the how to show that physicalism demands that whatever it is it must be a deterministic or probabilistic process just as I can show there is a Kolmogorov complexity of some object without being able to tell you what it is. If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.
...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Friday afternoon culture war thread? No formal education outside STEM? Alright, let's solve philosophy by messily banging out a manifesto in under an hour and just paste it out there like I know what I'm talking about:
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.
Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. Either the mind is deterministically/probabilistically generated by the physical processes in play within the brain (or perhaps elsewhere in the body if your theories are exotic enough) or it is not. ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.
To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity. If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.
"Free will" is a popular card in the theist deck beyond the necessary, saying that God has granted us this. Agency is a useful fiction, and as we cannot map the causal web anywhere near deep enough to fully apply determinism to the actions of conscious beings, we are (for now?) free to let ignorance be bliss. But how could it be any other way? For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.
Philosophy's mostly hokum. Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism, but remembering that unknown and unknowable are distinct classes and keep in mind that Chesterton's Fence works everywhere. That is, assume an external reality exists (because without one everything falls apart and you can't get anywhere), find out what you can, be humble about what you can't or haven't yet, and make decisions based on the known consequences and not-known-to-be-impossible possibilities for which those Fences help you choose in the absence of your own data. To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning. Categorical imperatives are just nth order effects with very high n. Being the kind of person who does/doesn't do the thing reinforces other practices of doing/not doing the thing and sets the example that people should/shouldn't do the thing and etc. You're free to use these heuristics, because you can't fully map the causal web, but don't pretend they're some fundamental truths.
Justice (and many of its brethren concepts) are n-th order effect based feedback mechanisms that society instantiates to adjust the behavior of its constituents.
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
This is Physical System Realism.
To leverage PSR and eliminate even more persistent questions: the "self" is the shared boundary of several cooperating systems - a mind, a body, a genetic sequence, perhaps a few more - where they all align in roughly the same place: where their direct and immediate physical instantiation and control end. There are quite a few known pathologies of confused identity that map precisely to these boundaries falling out of sync. In some cases, when a person is particularly invested in the fate of a social organism they are a part of and very strongly feel "part of a community" their identity model may well include that (and this may again explain some pathologies).
Art fulfills axioms related to happiness and wellbeing through satisfying aesthetic preference or providing new heuristics (subtextual messages). Ideas are potential memes or infiltrators or viruses of the cognitive system, but upon examination most are benign. The true threat category is those that change axioms, but then we must allow for the possibility that if the axioms are ranked, a meme may "beneficially" change lower axioms in service of optimizing the higher.
Put very plainly, "believe what is true, act on what is helpful" - which just sounds like common sense. You only have to take it seriously.
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?
None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.
One last stroke. Surprise is your heuristic for detecting that you need to update your model. If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible. If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe. Theism is now isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis. Because this generates infinite regress, parsimony demands we remove it. There can be no god.
Philosphy's pretty easy - you just can't give up when something feels cold. Friend, the universe is on average quite cold. Axiomatically choose warmth, then go find it.
newcomputerwhodis
6d ago
Quants care about latency, yes, but they're more than happy to throw a bit more hardware at their problems.
I can see I'll have to be more specific about what I take "performance" to mean. Performance is... efficiency. How much time, how many CPU clock cycles, how much memory, how many watts do you use while performing your task? Latency is one slice of it - a poorly written program will have poor performance on multiple dimensions, including latency - but low-latency alone is not the whole picture. A data center would likely not be happy to know you've reduced their latency at the cost of a large increase in power draw - power and cooling are a major factor in their operations! For game consoles, the hardware is fixed. If you take more compute than the console has to give you to get the next frame ready, your performance is poor. On any platform, if you use more memory than is available, everything suffers as you swap out to disk.
If your overriding concern is latency, to the exclusion of other performance concerns, I guess I can soften to say that GC may be workable.
newcomputerwhodis
6d ago
Please update your prejudices to reject the current state of technology.
Gladly!
But more seriously, low latency isn't the whole picture. If I care about performance, why would I have so much spare CPU time laying around that I can essentially pin an entire core to be the GC manager?
newcomputerwhodis
7d ago
Preemptively: garbage collection is a collection of garbage and we would do well to rid ourselves of it. I do not consider garbage collected languages a viable option for anything that even vaguely cares about performance, and they are objectively not a viable option for kernel or firmware spaces.
That said... yes, a safer-C would be useful, and it would be nice if Rust could be that, but I don't think it can. C has too much inertia and there are too many places Rust made seemingly-arbitrary-from-the-perspective-of-C-programmers decisions that grind against C-like intuitions for a comfortable swap, and so since the "pain" of C is actually pretty darn low on a per-developer basis (even if the occasional memory safety CVE is a big problem for society) nothing short of an official Software Engineer Licensing system is going to get them to move. Sort of a tragedy of the commons problem. Try again, but be more like C. Maybe then.
newcomputerwhodis
7d ago
You can build anything with C if you're not a coward.
newcomputerwhodis
6mo ago
10-2 has excellent combat. If only I liked the story enough to push it higher... probably lands somewhere in high-mid. 7-remake was pretty fun at first, but eventually I got really frustrated with the way ATB fills for the active vs passive characters and the need to constantly ping-pong control around. Felt like I could never get a groove going on anybody. And then of course the plot gradually revealed that it's
Apologies, folks, never seems to be enough time. I tried to keep up the other day, didn't have any time yesterday, and now I'm gonna have to collapse and condense a bit here and move on. Maybe hit round 2 in a future week, dunno how available I'll be this coming one.
The most prominent flavor across the disagreeing replies seems to be of the stripe "of course if you assume your theory is true it is true!"... but that's not what's happening here, not at all!
I'm taking a handful of parsimony-guided steps through the initial fog to land on physicalism. If you want to call that part "assuming my theory is true" then I won't fight you further (today) because dualists are exhausting and my time is short, but what do you call everything after that? Assuming a non-novel, in fact popular, and not-trivially false framework, can you honestly say that nothing after that follows and I'm assuming the whole thing? I don't think that's a tenable interpretation of what I've written, and I think - as I've emphasized in some replies - that if you take physicalism seriously then there are a lot of bullets here that need to be bitten which many who call themselves physicalists have not even put in their mouths.
Enjoy the holidays if you partake, find something else fun if you don't, I'll try to reengage at a later date.
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