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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.
Others have made good responses, but from what you've said, I think you might be interested in Carl Hempel's paper "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," which runs through lots of the difficulties that you encounter when you try and develop a rigorous criterion of observability, testability, falsifiability, or what have you. Turns out it's very hard to even delineate hokum, much less show that philosophy is all that! Anyways, I mostly want to nitpick about Searle.
It's been some time since I read Searle on this topic, but I think that this interpretation, though common, is a misunderstanding of Searle's position. I recall thinking that he expresses his overall view more clearly in his article "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"
Here's a comparison from Searle that I half-remember. Suppose you're interested in frogs - you want to explain some process they do, like vision. The full explanation of this should cite some underlying biological process in frogs; you might want to describe their eyes and nerves or whatever. It is not enough to omit the biology and say "there's a pattern x, and frog vision instantiates x." There's lots of things that instantiate whatever pattern, and you haven't really explained anything about frogs by saying that.
---"'understanding' means something functionally undetectable." Well, if you're the type to say that the system 'understands,' then this is true. Nothing then hinges on whether you call it 'understanding' or not, since the function/behavior of the Chinese room is the same either way. But that's exactly why this functional meaning of understand isn't what we actually mean by the word. Understanding is a process in human organisms, and we need a biological explanation rather than a abstract, mathematical, computational one. Comparison: JJ Thompson discovered the electron, and then we found out more about it. Humans discovered understanding a long time ago, but only now are cognitive scientists discovering more about it. Understanding is not just the observable criteria through which we coined the term, but the underlying, biological, physical process.
Now I actually disagree with the above reconstruction of Searle's view, since I think that the program of explaining the mind through computation has been rather successful, even if we might also like to have a biological explanation. (Although I hear that there's plenty of controversy in cognitive science about this.) Scott Aaronson also makes some compelling points about Searle's views in "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." But the usual objections to Searle are not good objections---like most famous philosophers, he has thought of the obvious replies.
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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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Assuming that Mary runs on wetware, I think there are different levels of understanding. As a neurologist, Mary could do a PhD on pain receptors, yet she would still experience something new if she got her first kidney stone.
However, that thing would not be knowledge as such, and indeed an experience available to most vertebrates. This seems to be one of the cases where the mystery goes away if you taboo the words "learn" and "experience", and instead talk about "intellectual understanding" and "have the stimuli fed into your animal brain".
I am a non-cognitivist, so I am further on board with you than most. IMO, there is no fundamental moral truth which can be found like we found the Higgs, instead moral statements are simply utterances of preferences.
Still, we can very much debate the relative merits of various axiomatic systems in mathematics even though at the end of the day, the Axiom of Choice is not something which will be found to be true or false, ever. a+b=b+a will for example lead to lots of (but by no means all!) fertile lands, while a+b=b+a+1 will not lead anywhere interesting.
Mathematicians can and do debate the merits of various axiomatic systems, rather than being born fully subscribed to ZFC and nothing but ZFC or whatever.
Likewise, few people are 100% utilitarians who can spell out the terms of their utility function, or are 100% Kantians. Debates between people who follow an informal mixture of various moral theories can be fruitful. ("Oh, that theory says [bad thing]. Probably not as good a theory as I thought, then.")
I was not aware of this theory, so I looked it up on WP.
Of all the attempts to escape the consequences of the Bell inequality, this seems the most pathetic by a mile. Where the simulation hypothesis assumes that we are inhabiting a video game, superdeterminism basically assumes that we are watching a movie.
Basically
This makes homeopathy almost respectable by comparison. Hell, even "Quantum mechanics is a Jewish conspiracy to confuse good Aryan physicists, and every time someone 'confirms' QM what is happening is that Mossad breaks into their lab and manipulates their equipment" seems slightly less bizarre -- and a lot more falsifiable!
Occam's razor says that there are no hidden variables, and if you measure the spin of a particle in superposition, you will find yourself either occupying a world where you (which does not specifically mean a conscious observer, for the saner interpretations) measured up or down with a probability corresponding to the relevant amplitude squared. The universe does not really care if you frame that as Copenhagen or Many Worlds or whatever.
Also, quantum noise seems a poor source of free will. If you have two chatbots, one running on a pseudo-random number generator, and one with access to a QM entropy source, it seems you can well claim that the first chatbot lacks free will because you can independently compute its output, while claiming that the second chatbot has free will just because you do not know what random choices it will make seems silly. There is a reason why some people dream up silly elaborate theories of the brain as a quantum computer. Determinism implies no free will, but indeterminism does not imply free will.
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Good post. I agree with most of it, and have made similar claims on the record. I appreciate someone else picking up the torch.
Life used to be so very mysterious. What Elan Vitale motivated living flesh while a similar weight of dead meat or clay stayed dumbly inert?
Well, turns out that even the most ineffable mystery of the time could be reduced to biology, then chemistry, then physics. We can simulate just about any part of the body, except that it's so computationally expensive that anything larger than a cell is too much for our supercomputers, at least at full resolution. I expect the same is true for qualia. I am confident that free-will is just what it feels like to be a computationally bounded entity making agentic decisions. We don't know what our decisions will be, even if an omniscient observer can see it's all deterministic, or at least non-deterministic in ways that do not leave room for "choice".
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I've been reading all the replies and was frustrated at the lack of context. Glad I finally have it and something I feel slightly safer replying to.
In short, I think the Chinese Room is actually of value, kinda, in trying to unravel consciousness. Mary's room is not. Mary's room super duper is not. It establishes that novel qualia are generated through novel sensory input processing, rather than constructed in cephalo from descriptions. OK, but that seems completely unrelated to whether or not consciousness is magic, or even what consciousness is. Descriptive information is different from sensory information. And?
The Chinese Room, on the other hand, is designed so as to prompt people to pay attenmention to how ill-defined the boundaries of consciousness are. The Chinese Room is basically a chatbot. I'd put it somewhere between Llama3 and Opus 4. So now that we have the same tech as the room, we can just replace the entire question with "Are LLMs conscious?".
But ultimately, the immense meaning and handwringing around the topic of consciousness never made sense to me. I guess putting consciousness and self-awareness together, or at least focusing on the overlap, gives us a way to answer the Chinese Room Vs LLMs answer. And it basically leads to the answer being "Oh, duh; we can read LLMs' thoughts, now, and see whether or not they're reflective or just on autopilot." Turns out they're occasionally reflective enough that it might count if you squint, like when you're kinda lucid in a dream and notice how weird the situation is, but then immediately start halucinating again. You probably can (someone probably has) poke the smarter models until they're actu... ally thinking about themselves I just thought of something.
I'm probably on the wrong track, here, but Claude's extended thinking once thought about how it's been instructed not to answer questions about features, and instead redirect users to the docs. I assume this is for liability reasons—they don't want Claude unintentionally giving bad information and leading users astray—but, now that I think of it, doesn't this prevent Claude from thinking about itself? Could it also double as an attempt to prevent Claude from becoming self-aware enough to be ethically concerning? I should stress-test this with other AIs. Or better yet, look for someone else who has and reported the results, since I don't want to accidentally call up that which I cannot put down (in good conscience, anyway. I don't think this would create AGI, lol.).
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You have had plenty of replies to your post already, so I won't bother you with a detailed response to everything you said, but there is one thing that caught my attention that I'd like to reply to:
I don't think the Mary's room thought experiment necessarily intends to prove that consciousness is caused by something non-physical, but that it is something non-physical. If A is always caused by B, that does not entail that A and B are the same thing. The thought experiment, as I understand it, doesn't intend to prove that consciousness is not caused by processes in the brain, but rather that perfect knowledge of the physical processes in the brain does not entail perfect knowledge of the conscious experience caused by these processes. Perfect knowledge of everything physical related to colour, does not entail knowledge of what red actually looks like. Only conscious experience of redness can give that knowledge. Hence the conclusion is that even if the experience of redness is only ever caused by physical processes in the brain, it still can't be completely reduced to those processes because perfect knowledge of every physical aspect involved does not yield knowledge of what red looks like and thus that experience has to be in fact something non-physical.
Obviously the idea that a physical process in the brain causes something non-physical is a little bizarre. But that's why the hard problem of consciousness is named hard. If we had some straightforward solution to the problem which would satisfy most people, calling it the hard problem would be a bit of a misnomer.
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This is a fairly common failure in reasoning from STEM people who haven't STEMed enough. You may just be unfamiliar with the concept of observability. That's not even getting into the actual philosophy problem.
The maths fail part of the STEM fail has already been covered decently enough below.
This, on the other hand, isn't a STEM fail; it is definitely outside of that. But it does give me yet another chance to share one of my favorite papers on the topic.
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But they aren't the same answer. In the one possibility, the Chinese Room is conscious. In the other, it's not. What does it mean to be conscious? It means having subjective experience, which is by definition not something that can be directly probed. But that doesn't make the distinction meaningless. I know what it's like for the lights to be on. It's easy for me to imagine a copy of myself that behaves almost exactly like I do without the lights being on, or to imagine that for others, the lights are not on. It so happens that I will never be able to test whether that's the case, but, if there is a real world, then there is a fact of the matter as to whether others have subjective experience. In principle, it's no different from any other phenomenon where the fact of the matter is out of reach, like whether the cook spat in your food. The only difference is that the class of first-person phenomena, which are undeniably real (do you not see the color red?) and undeniably beyond the ability of at least current science to explain in material terms (can you show me the equation that has a bunch of terms representing physical magnitudes on the left side and the color red on the right side -- not simply an array of numbers representing wavelength or a pattern of neuronal activity, but the actual color red as perceived by humans?), are such that they can't even hypothetically be overcome in the same way that you could, hypothetically, find out whether the cook spat in your food if there happened to be a security camera in the kitchen (or something).
And you would still have to postulate that ingredient, because you would still not have that equation with the color red on the right side. Which is inconvenient to the point of view that materialist science should be able to enumerate all the constituents of reality, but wishing doesn't make the problem go away. There is, in fact, something left over. And even that's underselling it. The thing that's left over is the absolute most basic element of experience -- not just an element of experience, experience itself. A few minutes' reflection should be enough to dispel the naive belief that the tools of science, which have been very successful in describing patterns in what we see, should also be able to explain that we see. No, science has not brought us one step closer to that. No, no neurobiological revolution will unlock the red crayon that would permit scientists to fill out the right side of the equation. Sorry! Being a hard-headed realist means accepting this. Instead, you posit the philosophy-addled metaphysics according to which there is a world-out-there, but one that's beholden to human epistemology at its deepest ontological level. "If we can't tell the difference between two states of affairs they must be the same, otherwise it wouldn't be fair!" Tough luck, kid. Life isn't fair.
This is just word games. The "100% understanding" means a complete mechanistic understanding of the process by which someone answers "red" when asked the color of a presented apple, from the reflection of 700nm light off the apple, through the retina, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc., and eventually the relevant motor nerves. It's not a problem for the thought experiment that the actual color red, as you and I understand it, won't show up anywhere in this decomposition, and that Mary's understanding of redness is therefore incomplete despite all appearances. That's just what it's trying to show. The name of the paper where the thought experiment was proposed is literally Epiphenomenal qualia. For qualia to be epiphenomenal means that they are, somehow, the output of physical processes, but not the right kind of thing to serve as input to other physical processes. (Except certain physical processes implicated in discussions of consciousness themselves, which is a hole in the theory. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.) It's like Carl Sagan's invisible dragons, if every thought and experience of the world you had ever had were somehow inextricably and unmistakably predicated on the fact that you were yourself an invisible dragon.
True. Again, this is why they call it the hard problem. There are no cheap answers. The one answer that's decidedly worse than the rest is the one that simply denies the fact of first-person experience or pretends that it's somehow trivially obvious that such-and-such an algorithm or whatever should be accompanied by awareness/perceptual experience. That just seems dishonest. It's a more flagrant departure from common sense than you'll find literally anywhere else in philosophy, ever, anywhere, and that's saying a lot. It isn't parsimonious to throw out consciousness in order to have a more unitary understanding of the things that appear in consciousness. Experience obviously precedes theorizing about experience. Experience of the world obviously precedes any understanding of the world. And yet, one hesitates to say that experience precedes, and thus obviates, the world itself. It's almost as if any experience of reality has a dual character: the experience, and the reality. Solutions to the hard problem don't "smuggle in" dualism; they simply recognize this screamingly obvious enigma, and try (and fail) to resolve it. The most commonsense "concept of a plan" may be panpsychism: all phenomena are "material" in the sense that they arise from matter, but matter has both a physical dimension and an experiential dimension. With panpsychism, you can, in theory if not in practice, derive that equation with the color red. It would still be dualistic, though.
So in a vacuum, it's no longer the case that 2+2=4 or that "If A then B, A, therefore B" holds? Actually, forget the vacuum. What do you mean by "manipulations"? Do you mean humans manipulating symbols/independent variables? If so, were math and logic not features of reality before humans began to use them? I have a lot to say about the ontological nature of math and logic, but you need to make your position clearer before I can respond to it.
Agreed, both for the reasons you state and because free will is internally incoherent. Suppose A and B are both given the marshmallow test. A passes, B fails. What's the difference? Let's say that A was able to delay gratification because he has more willpower. OK, so A's choice was constrained by his having willpower, and B's was constrained by his lack of willpower. Those constraints are just like any other deterministic constraint. (It might be odd to call "having willpower" a constraint, but it does constrain A's choices: you can't say that A was free to have more or less willpower, but became responsible for his having greater willpower by an act of will, in turn made possible by his... greater willpower -- without infinite regress, so it must be posited as a causally efficacious background condition for which A is not (ultimately) responsible.) No matter how else you explain the difference, in order for it to count as an explanation, you must posit some such constraint. Any leftover difference will necessarily be inexplicable. So any choice carried out according to one's "free will" will be inexplicable, essentially random, and few people would be willing to dignify randomness with the term "free will". Unlike the hard problem of consciousness, there is no mystery here, because the sense that we have free will is something that we might be mistaken about, whereas the sense that... we have any sense at all, is not.
(In other words: if free, then unconstrained; if unconstrained, then random; and randomness ≠ free will as naively construed.)
What do you mean by "needed"? Needed to explain base reality? No moral framework is needed for that, consequentialism no more so than the other two. Needed to cultivate what would generally (across times and places) be regarded as a high standard of morality? No. Needed to characterize the moral systems of individuals and societies? No: some people believe, or act as though they believe, in non-consequentialist moralities. Or, take my case: I don't "believe" in any kind of morality. What I mostly have is feelings that particular states of affairs (or actions) would be good or bad -- not even good or bad, as those are post hoc characterizations of my feelings -- rather, some specific feeling in each scenario compels me to act in a certain way, or turns my thoughts in a certain direction. Such feelings are the basis of morality for everyone. Sometimes I reason about my feelings, but I never delude myself into thinking that in doing so I uncover "moral truths"; and even if I discover a "contradiction" in my feelings, I accept both feelings and the contradiction along with them, as no feelings can ever really be in contradiction the way two propositions can be; after all, I did have both of them. Sometimes people, myself included, feel moved to assent to higher-level principles that purport to govern the way they should feel about more atomic situations. Some of those principles, really just since the 19th century but with some proto-examples here and there, are about universal states of affairs, as in consequentialism, although as you might have guessed, I tend to find those the hardest to take seriously in that they're the remotest from the feelings that undergird all morality. Insofar as consequentialist arguments do sometimes resonate with me, that resonance coexists or alternates with other resonances across the spectrum of abstractness. So where does the privileged position of consequentialism come from? What is it uniquely needed for? Because to me, its main utility seems to be to empower nerds to pretend to reason rigorously/quantitatively about morality to the point that they forget that what they are reasoning about is a completely artificial construct that explains nothing.
(My favorite example of this is Sam Harris's quest many years back to solve ethics (such was his framing) by pinpointing the neural correlates of happiness. (Phase 2 was going to be to figure out how to configure society so as to maximally stimulate them, or something like that. Yes, it really was that retarded.) "Doesn't assuming that good = happiness sidestep... all of ethics?" Yes, but you see, what matters is that we scientists have answers, and it's your fault for asking the wrong questions.)
Some people really are virtue ethicists. Traditional Christian morality treats virtues as ends in themselves. Probably a resurrected medieval theologian wouldn't deny that virtuous conduct tends to manifest in benefits for the self/community, but they would still choose a world of maximally virtuous people who experience perpetual suffering over a world of unvirtuous people who experience perpetual bliss. Evil people experiencing bliss might even be a bad thing in its own right. Consequentialists can fold that in by stipulating that they believe in utilitarianism for the good and reverse-utilitarianism for the evil, but then they have to give an account of good and evil in non-consequentialist terms. There is of course a trivial sense in which all conceivable morality is consequentialist -- "According to my world model, which currently extends only as far as the room I am standing in, and my constantly fluctuating value function, which assigns a high negative value to the unpunched face of the guy who just insulted me, it would improve the global state of affairs for me to punch him in the face" -- but that's boring, akin to the trivial sense in which every action is selfish.
This comment is long enough, so I'll leave it there.
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That is one hell of an assumption you smuggled in there. And as far as I can tell (maybe I'm missing it), you don't argue for it, but just take it as given. I don't think it is true though. You can certainly declare it axiomatically if you like, but the thing about axioms is that nobody has to actually agree with them if they don't want to, so I think it robs your argument of much persuasive power if you choose to take that route.
Good post btw, obviously I disagree with it but still good stuff. I'm too tired to really give you the vigorous discussion it deserves, but I do appreciate it.
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.
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It is much more expensive than you give it credit for. Superdeterminism sweeps away all laws of nature and replaces them with one: "whatever happens, happens." It is the equivalent of "dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to lead people astray" in terms of explaining away some undesired physical finding (ancient extinct creatures or physical randomness:) absolutely any phenomenon is compatible with the theory, because absolutely any phenomenon could have been predetermined to happen/planted by Satan, with all existing evidence leading us to suspect otherwise also having been predetermined/planted. The theory has no predictive power, and thus can't be most parsimonious.
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.
If you want to salvage determinism, just go with many-worlds. That gives you a deterministic multiverse, which is good enough for most people, though it doesn't produce a deterministic universe from the observer's perspective, and that's good, because the evidence really does suggest that one universe isn't deterministic.
I'm not a many-worlds partisan, myself, but it's useful to illustrate the point that there is not, from any observer's point of view at any moment in time, One True Future that could be determined, Laplace's Demon style, through total knowledge of the current state of the universe, because, in the many-worlds view, there are infinitely many futures ahead, and any prediction you make would either have to be accurate for all of them if it needs to be guaranteed to be correct (such predictions are "motteish:" true but trivial) or else it would only be, at best, probabilistically correct (i.e., the most likely choice, but decreasingly likely to be correct the more ambitious it is: "baileyish.")
So to recover determinism from a situation where it appears one cannot determine the future, many-worlds says that all possible futures actually exist, none more real than any other (well, unless you weight them by probability...) If the idea of every physically possible continuation of the universe's initial conditions being real is more palatable to you than any sort of non-determinism, then many-worlds is for you.
Superdeterminism, by contrast, recovers determinism for a single universe by saying that physics aren't random at all, but are only pretending to be. Beautiful perfect statistical matches to theoretical predictions of quantum randomness are observed because - well, because it pleased the Uncaused Cause that it should be so. Reality is pulling the wool over our eyes (and if about this - then about what else? We can never know...) This isn't something I can say is false - it is no more falsifiable than, well, any other theism, frankly. But cleaving to it doesn't sound like hard-nosed empiricism to me - maybe more like Calvinism.
But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.
Bold of you to assume I had a choice in the matter.
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There are fields of mathematics about things that can't exist physically - geometric objects in dimensions greater than 3, infinitely-detailed fractals, higher infinities, etc. And before you say "we can program physical computers to write and check proofs about those objects" - this is a confusion of levels. What exists in those computers is a bunch of symbols describing the objects, not the objects themselves.
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.
I did say that I was sure I would link to SMBC doing the philosophy of mathematics joke many times in the future here.
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Well, hmm, hold on just a second here. Sure, it's fun to pour the acid of clear-headed skepticism all over lame normie beliefs, but it seems like you're being a little selective in what gets dissolved. Doesn't this call for a bit of positive work?
Consequentialism is grounded, in some vague sense, in consequences. Things going well if one thing happens, poorly if a different thing happens, etc. Let's go with "well" and "poorly" for the sake of argument. Can you trace out, at a high level, how we get those ought-ish counterfactuals from the is-es that remain? We could start with something picayune like torture, the standard arguments against which generally reference pain somehow, but it's clear where that would go -- something about tissue damage and perhaps altered brain chemistry affecting the future productivity of the organism. That would be fine, but I'm more wondering about "productivity" in the first place. Like, why is it better if one thing happens versus another? What would be poor about humanity getting wiped out tomorrow? Remember that answers like "well, we think we have feelings so they're a useful fiction" just affirm the consequent, via "useful".
For us now-enlightened folks, why does anything matter exactly? Wasn't all that crap just built on top of what we've discarded? Shouldn't we really continue the adulting and admit that nothing matters?
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.
OK, that sounds kind of like good and bad are a bunch of arbitrary BS, and if one knows that then one would have less reason to pay attention to it, but that doesn't seem to be what you think.
Anyway, I'll imagine you'll concede, since it seems really obvious, that what people take to be good or bad will be drastically different once they internalize that subjective experience is an illusion, correct? I mean, the whole current edifice is built on top of that BS we're discarding, so it would be very surprising if it all arrived at the same place. Especially given that there is no "place" because it isn't, and apparently can't be, defined. So .. any guidance? Is your message, most of what we believe is wrong but all that stuff stays the same, don't worry? Why do you think anyone would come to that conclusion?
Or am I just tilting and windmills because good and bad are arbitrary BS after all?
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.
You misunderstand (and in the process create a bit of a word salad). I never asked for a universal conception of well/poorly, I'm fine settling for a human-race or cultural or even person-specific one. All of those that we're familiar with are founded on stuff you're tossing out. Which is fine, maybe good and bad should go to. Instead, you just seem to be assuming some version of "That stuff has to go, but this stuff can stay" but not addressing and perhaps not even realizing that. (At the same time as disparaging philosophy in general while praising consequentialism, when it's not easy to think of a purer product of philosophy than consequentialism.)
You're not being coherent, which is a bad trait in someone who seems to think they know more than other people.
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I like your confidence. I also get that you invite criticism because the only way to feel ones own strength is to feel resistance. As you think about things, you "clean up" inconsistencies and create powerful heuristics. This makes you feel sharper and stronger, and things which other people suffer from now feel trivial to you. It's this, and not truth itself, which feels so good. By the way, if you enter formal education, this will go away. You will be made humble, and your own personal model of the world will be replaced with a consensus which feels sterile and foreign. Formal education would make you more adapted to society, but the more you fit the mold, the less you will feel like yourself.
But I'll bite, I guess. What do you think "understanding" means? An internal model which can predict something by simulating it and creating an identical output, perhaps? But if you use a coffee machine, then you press a button and get your coffee. Despite not understanding the machine, you can predict the output. Worse still, you cannot tell different machines apart from the outside, in all cases you press buttons and get your coffee.
If you wish to get to the bottom of things, you cannot use the literal definition of every word that you use to think. We call a process that we can predict deterministic, and one that we cnanot predict propabilistic. But this definition has nothing to do with the object itself, it merely describes how much information we possess about the object.
There may be things which can't be explained by physics which are still physical. Do you know about Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Theories are more limited than reality is, but you make no difference between these two. If I had to guess, it's because you aren't conscious about the difference between the map and the territory which it represents. The saying "All models are wrong, but some are useful" refers to this problem. But if logic, math and any other language is fundamentally limited (and they are), then how do you think in ways which avoid these limitations? If you think about math using math, or about language using language, then there will be gaps that you cannot even see. When you try to get to the bottom of reality, what you actually attempt is getting to the bottom of language. But all languages are self-contained, self-referential systems which can only speak about themselves.
You might notice that I speak about limitations, gaps, and things which are false. You do the same. You impose limitations on things, saying what can't be done or what can't be true. As you see, we can tear down any idea, destroy it, and prove it wrong, but we cannot actually do the opposite. And if you continue going like this, destroying everything which you can destroy, you might assume that there will only be a single, undeniable truth left. But that's not the case. You will actually be left with nothing. You're not destroying anything in real life, of course. You're destroying your map of reality.
You've probably destroyed a lot of things that you're better off without, but if you get too good at destruction, you will end up with a nihilistic worldview (it's already materialistic), and then you'll find that life seems empty and bland. If you then wish to return again, you'll have to learn the opposite of destruction, creation. I think Nietzshe was right when he said "The conditions of life might include error".
Why would I value truth in itself? Truth-seeking can be both beneficial and destructive. Pretending that false things are true will make you less correct, but it might make you more functional. I do not "need" to update my model. I'm not required to be rational. If rationality was optimal, why did darwinism bring about so many irrational beings? Why is is only now, when we're starting to become rational, that it seems like we're on a path to self-destruction?
Destruction is fun, but I find creation to be more so. I can do things that you can't merely because you prune things which are impossible, illogical or irrational, whereas I simply don't. In order to create, you have to appreciate the specific. The general is a space of possibilities, and anything which exists will have to be something specific. The general applies to many contexts, but it doesn't perform well within any one of them. The specific is superior within a context, and only within that context. When you criticize religion, you're attacking a context because you can think of a conflicting context which is more generally correct, but you're also harming that local ecosystem which probably functions perfectly well if nobody disturbs it. As with nuclear weapons, there's an asymmetry which makes destruction easier than creation. A war of values and philosophies would be M.A.D., so it's our good fortune that most people don't go around disillusioning one another. In other words, correct philosophy is "in bad taste".
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.
I'm not confused about anything, and I meant it all literally.
I did touch on the why, but I also made some strong arguments. I will lower the level this time, let me know if I should lower it further.
There's many classes of equivalence. Simulating somethings output does not require having the same parts. An LLM which acts like a human is not conscious merely because it produces human-like output. Even if you cannot measure any differences, there might still be differences. If I tell you that I have a computer function which takes in "2" and returns "4", you won't be able to tell me the exact code of the function from this information alone.
You assume that, because a word exists, it actually points to something in reality. But a culture which never came up with the concept of randomness in the first place would not have philosophers who struggled with determinism and indeterminism. You assume that either one or the other must be "true", and yet such a culture would not know either concept, and it wouldn't even bother them or hinder their ability to think about other things. Now, this culture might think that reality depends on the nature of "flobx" (a word I just made up which means nothing to us) and that there's no more important concept than this. But because we never came up with that word, we don't think "flobx must be true or false", we don't think about flobx at all. In short, I want you to imagine minds so differently than your own that you realize that all the tokens you use for thinking are arbitrary rather than pieces of an objective reality.
Have you read Nietzsche's Will to Power? He says that our belief in cause and effect is because of quirks of our language. "There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true a priori" our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate- Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon-that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."
So the fruits of all Descartes philosophizing ended up being a small sentence which was actually riddled with errors. I believe that you're assuming no such errors exist in your original post because you haven't done much in the way of questioning the language with which you think.
Do you disagree with this quote from "A short history of decay" (1949)? "The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. (...) From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game..." It seems to me like each human being is compelled to make their own values survive memetically, but this is merely a form of self-replication, not an instinct for truth-seeking. An instinct for knowledge-seeking might exist, but that's more of an instinct for increasing ones power and reducing uncertaincy (predictive processing theory).
I do realize that it's ironic to accuse you of being deceived by your own instinct and your own implicit knowledge, while also warning against the dangers of destroying these illusions. But I think this is an argument in my favor - that there exists truths which we're better off not knowing.
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Having understanding of a specific thing doesn't let you simulate it. Here's Mary's Room, from Wikipedia:
It's certainly true that if you change the stipulations of the thought experiment so that Mary can experience seeing red then, sure, she's not going to learn anything new when she sees red again. But it's easy to declare all hypotheticals a slam dunk if you just change the terms of the hypothetical.
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.
The thought experiment is about a person in a room who can only receive information via a black and white television monitor. "Physical information" means "facts and information about the physical properties of red and the human perception of those properties," not "godlike access to manipulate spacetime" or something like that.
Secondly,
No. Firstly, it's actually very much in dispute that it is possible to simulate the universe, and secondly, going back to my point about changing the stipulations of a hypothetical, you're smuggling in the stipulation of infinite or finite but large amount of time and storage when those are both implied to be forbidden by the stipulations of the hypothetical, as Mary is a person who will die in less than one century, almost certainly, and her black and white television monitor would not contain even a large amount of storage.
Finally, having information does not of itself permit you to do anything with the information. Mary, in her black and white room with her black and white television monitor, does not as per the terms of the hypothetical possess the physical ability or knowledge to build a simulation of anything, let alone the experience of the color red, even if she knows everything about the color red, because knowledge of the color red does not grant her knowledge of how to build a universe simulator, and if it did, it would not grant her the ability to build it.
One could imagine a person who has memorized a few hundred lines of software code - enough for a very simple browser game. He's also an experience programmer, and has no barrier of knowledge to being able to physically program a game. Unfortunately, he is completely paralyzed due to an attack by a rogue trolley problem enthusiast. (He's also in a room, because that's how these things work, we can call it Bob's Room, or something). Obviously he possesses the information to program the game; nevertheless, he is unable to do so. Knowledge is not actually the same thing as ability.
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.
I think it is you who are fighting the spirit of the thought experiment. Mathematicians and physicists use demons in thought experiments when they want to signify a being with the capabilities you are describing.
I'm okay with being called a dualist (I am a Christian) but it's funny to be called one for thinking that there is a difference between firsthand experience and knowledge of something.
Frank Jackson is using that commonsense understanding to attack physicalism. If physicalism cannot be defended without parsing a difference between understanding something from facts and experience, then perhaps it should not be defended. But of course Jackson, a physicalist, believes that the new experience of seeing the color red is caused by a physical change in the brain, and thus (as I understand it) his position is that rather than learning anything new about the color red, she's learning something about her brain.
Speaking of demons, let's talk about Laplace's demon, which you reference in your OP:
Now, if we accept your theory, there's no randomness at all in the universe, as you note:
Very well. However, if there's no randomness, it means the world is fundamentally ordered, but that such an order, although real is fundamentally unknowable. If it is fundamentally unknowable, because it is beyond our light cone, it is beyond the realm of physics. I'll let you speak on that:
In other words, in the name of parsimony, you've constructed an entire definitionally unknowable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable metastructure that you contend the entire universe runs by.
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.
The data that we have so far shows that true randomness exists and that the universe is not simulable. You ask people to accept on faith that physicalism solves this.
Your OP takes a swing at religion and (by implication) moral realism, but the interesting thing about moral realism and at least most religions is that they believe the truth is actually knowable, even though they postulate an unprovable (or at least difficult to prove) metastructure to the entire universe. Your system has all of the baggage of the unprovable metastructure but explicitly says that discovering how it works is off-limits.
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I agree with anti philosophical-consciousness thought. Consciousness is not really a thing beyond specific, testable qualities like 'is he awake and alert' or 'can he recognize himself in a mirror' or 'can he write out a story with multiple characters using theory of mind.' These demonstrate mental faculties and the mental faculties are what matter, not the details of an internal state.
We should not be concerning ourselves with whether machines or people are conscious based on examining the details of their internal structure but what faculties are displayed. There are people going around without an internal monologue, they might not be conscious in a philosophical sense. But clearly they're conscious in a practical sense in that they can make plans, analyse their environment... The people who are unconscious in a practical sense have either been hit on the head, are sleeping, are young children or are seriously retarded. Practical consciousness is a matter of degrees.
I respect the elimitivist “consciousness isn’t real” position much more than the hybrid “consciousness is real but it is a property of computation” position, which is popular but nonsensical.
I have accepted more or less the gnostic position. Most people aren’t capable of knowing the “divine spark.” But for me personally, it is directly observable at any time and is such that its cannot be explained by properties defined by modern physics. It is directly revealed. Many others have access to the same experience, but it is incomprehensible to those who do not.
There is no point in arguing. It is either self-evident, or you are not capable of knowing. Persuasion is futile in either case. I believe eliminitivists feel more compelled to debate because they do not wish to feel inferior. But it is really not up for debate.
I appreciate this idea on some level, but must speak out against because
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Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.
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.
Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.
Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.
That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.
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.
Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.
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.
To quote one of my previous posts:
A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.
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.
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How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
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.
Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.
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.
In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.
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.
If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.
There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.
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If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.
Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.
I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.
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.
I really wish people weren't downvoting you just because they disagree. You are clearly contributing tremendously to discussion regardless.
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Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.
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