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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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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.

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".

"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).

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.")

Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap.

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

The universe is conspiring to railroad you into only taking the measurements which would not contradict the Bell inequality. That U-238 nucleus whose decay will feed into your random number generator is woo-entangled with both your measurement procedure and the particle you are measuring (because all was one in the Big Bang), and will decay exactly so that the universe can continue to gaslight you about EPR.

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.