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RobinZ comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
I think you might be confused on the matter of free will - it's not obvious that there is any conflict between determinism and choice.
I used the word choice, but 'free will' do as well.
Was your response to my question biologically determined or was it a matter of conscious choice?
Whether there is going to be another response to this comment of mine or not, would it have been completely determined biologically or would it be a matter of conscious choice by some?
If all human actions are determined biologically the 'choice' is only an apparent one, like a tossed up coin having a 'choice' of turning up heads or tails. Whether someone is a determinist or not should itself have been determined biologically including all discussions of this nature!
The correct answer to this is "both" (and it is a false dichotomy). My consciousness is a property of a certain collection of matter which can be most compactly described by reference to the regularities we call "biology". Choosing to answer (or not to answer) is the result of a decision procedure arising out of the matter residing (to a rough approximation) in my braincase.
The difference between me and a coin is that a coin is a largely homogenous lump of metal and does not contain anything like a "choice mechanism", whereas among the regularities we call "biology" we find some patterns that reliably allow organisms (and even machines) to steer the future toward preferred directions, and which we call "choosing" or "deciding".
Yep, your view is confused.
The optimizing function is implemented in your biology, which is implemented in physics.
In other words, the 'choices' you make are not really choices, but already predetermined, You didn't really choose to be a determinist, you were programmed to select it, once you encountered it.
Yep, kind of. But your view of determinism is too depressing :-)
My program didn't know in advance what options it would be presented with, but it was programmed to select the option that makes the most sense, e.g. the determinist worldview rather than the mystical one. Like a program that receives an array as input and finds the maximum element in it, the output is "predetermined", but it's still useful. Likewise, the worldview I chose was "predetermined", but that doesn't mean my choice is somehow "wrong" or "invalid", as long as my inner program actually implements valid common sense.
You couldn't possibly know that! Someone programmed to pick the mystical worldview would feel exactly the same and would have been programmed not to recognise his/her own programming too :-)
Of course the output is useful, for the programmer, if any :-)
It doesn't appear that regardless of what someone has been programmed to pick, the 'feelings' don't seem to be any different.
If my common sense is invalid and just my imagination, then how in the world do I manage to program computers successfully? That seems to be the most objective test there is, unless you believe all computers are in a conspiracy to deceive humans.
Just to clarify, in a deterministic universe, there are no "invalid" or "wrong" things. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as valid as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
No, this belief of yours is wrong. A deterministic universe can contain a correct implementation of a calculator that returns 2+2=4 or an incorrect one that returns 2+2=5.
Sure it can. But it is possible to declare one of them as valid only because you are outside of both and you have a notion of what the result should be.
But to avoid the confusion over the use of words I will restate what I said earlier slightly differently.
In a deterministic universe, neither of a pair of opposites like valid/invalid, right/wrong, true/false etc has more significance than the other. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as significant as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
I program computers successfully too :-)
The only way that choices can be made is by being predetermined (by your decision-making algorithm). Paraphrasing the familiar wordplay, choices that are not predetermined refer to decisions that cannot be made, while the real choices, that can actually be made, are predetermined.
I like this phrasing; it makes things very clear. Are you alluding to this quote, or something else?
Yes.
Of course! Since all the choices of all the actors are predetermined, so is the future. So what exactly would be the "purpose" of acting as if the future were not already determined and we can choose an optimising function based the possible consequences of different actions?
Since the consequences are determined by your algorithm, whatever your algorithm will do, will actually happen. Thus, the algorithm can contemplate what would be the consequences of alternative choices and make the choice it likes most. The consideration of alternatives is part of the decision-making algorithm, which gives it the property of consistently picking goal-optimizing decisions. Only these goal-optimizing decisions actually get made, but the process of considering alternatives is how they get computed.
Sure. So consequentialism is the name for the process that happens in every programmed entity, making it useless to distinguish between two different approaches.
In a deterministic universe, the future is logically implied by the present - but you're in the present. The future isn't fated - if, counterfactually, you did something else, then the laws of physics would imply very different events as a consequence - and it isn't predictable - even ignoring computational limits, if you make any error, even on an unmeasurable level, in guessing the current state, your prediction will quickly diverge from reality - it's just logically consistent.
How could it happen? Each component of the system is programmed to react in a predetermined way to the inputs it receives from the rest of the system. The the inputs are predetermined as is the processing algorithm. How can you or I do anything that we have not been preprogrammed to do?
Consdier an isolated system with no biological agents involved. It may contain preprogrammed computers. Would you or would you not expect the future evolution of the system to be completely determined. If you would expect its future to be completely determined, why would things change when the system, such as ours, contains biological agents? If you do not expect the future of the system to be completely determined, why not?
I said "counterfactual". Let me use an archetypal example of a free-will hypothetical and query your response:
I'm off to the market, now - I'll post the followup in a moment.
Now: I imagine most people would say that Alice would receive the fettucini and Alice' the eggplant. I will proceed on this assumption
Now suppose that Alice and Alice' are switched at the moment they entered the restaurant. Neither Alice nor Alice' notice any change. Nobody else notices any change, either. In fact, insofar as anyone in universe A (now containing Alice') and universe A' (now containing Alice) can tell, nothing has happened.
After the switch, Alice' and Alice are seated, open their menus, and pick their orders. What dishes will Alice' and Alice receive?
Do your choices have causes? Do those causes have causes?
Determinism doesn't have to mean epiphenomenalism. Metaphysically, epiphenomenalism - the belief that consciousness has no causal power - is a lot like belief in true free will - consciousness as an uncaused cause - in that it places consciousness half outside the chain of cause and effect, rather than wholly within it. (But subjectively they can be very different.)
Increase in consciousness increases the extent to which the causes of one's choices and actions are themselves conscious in origin rather than unconscious. This may be experienced as liberation from cause and effect, but really it's just liberation from unconscious causes. Choices do have causes, whether or not you're aware of them.
This is a point which throws many people, but again, it comes from an insufficiently broad concept of causality. Reason itself has causes and operates as a cause. We can agree, surely, that absurdly wrong beliefs have a cause; we can understand why a person raised in a cult may believe its dogmas. Correct beliefs also have a cause. Simple Darwinian survival ensures that any conscious species that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years must have at least some capacity for correct cognition, however that is achieved.
Nonetheless, despite this limited evolutionary gift, it may be true that we are deterministically doomed to fundamental error or ignorance in certain matters. Since the relationship of consciousness, knowledge, and reality is not exactly clear, it's hard to be sure.
I don't equate determinism with epiphenomenalism, but that even when it acts as a cause, it is completely determined meaning the apparent choice is simply the inability, at current level of knowledge, of being able to predict exactly what choice will be made.
Not sure how that follows. Evolutionary survival can say nothing about emergence of sentient species, let alone some capacity for correct cognition in that species. If the popular beliefs and models of the universe until a few centuries ago are incorrect, that seems to point in the exact opposite direction of your claim.
It appears that the problem seems to be one of 'generalisation from one example'. There exist beings with a consciousness that is not biologically determined and there exist those whose consciousness is completely biologically detemined. The former may choose determinism as a 'belief in belief' while the latter will see it as a fact, much like a self-aware AI.
That's true. And there is no problem within it.
If the cognition was totally incorrect, leading to beliefs unrelated to the outside world, it would be only a waste of energy to maintain such cognitive capacity. Correct beliefs about certain things (like locations of food and predators) are without doubt great evolutionary advantage.
Yes, but it is a very weak evidence (more so, if current models are correct). The claim stated that there was at least some capacity for correct cognition, not that the cognition is perfect.
Can you explain the meaning? What are the former and what are the latter beings?
Not sure what kind of cognitive capacity the dinosaurs held, but that they roamed around for millions of years and then became extinct seems to indicate that evolution itself doesn't care much about cognitive capacity beyond a point (that you already mentioned)
You are already familiar with the latter, those whose consciousness is biologically determined. How do you expect to recognise the former, those whose consciousness is not biologically determined?
At least they probably hadn't a deceptive cognitive capacity. That is, they had few beliefs, but that few were more or less correct. I am not saying that an intelligent species is universally better at survival than a dumb species. I said that of two almost identical species with same quantity of cognition (measured by brain size or better its energy consumption or number of distinct beliefs held) which differ only in quality of cognition (i.e. correspondence of beliefs and reality), the one which is easy deluded is in a clear disadvantage.
Well, what I know about nature indicates that any physical system evolves in time respecting rigid deterministic physical laws. There is no strong evidence that living creatures form an exception. Therefore I conclude that consciousness must be physically and therefore bilogically determined. I don't expect to recognise "deterministic creatures" from "non-determinist creatures", I simply expect the latter can't exist in this world. Or maybe I even can't imagine what could it possibly mean for consciousness to be not biologically determined. From my point of view, it could mean either a very bizarre form of dualism (consciousness is separated from the material world, but by chance it reflects correctly what happens in the material world), or it could mean that the natural laws aren't entirely deterministic. But I don't call the latter possibility "free will", I call it "randomness".
Your line of thought reminds me of a class of apologetics which claim that if we have evolved by random chance, then there is no guarantee that our cognition is correct, and if our cognition is flawed, we are not able to recognise that we have evolved by random chance; therefore, holding a position that we have evolved by random chance is incoherent and God must have been involved in the process. I think this class of arguments is called "presuppositionalist", but I may be wrong.
Whatever is the name, the argument is a fallacy. That our cognition is correct is an assumption we must take, otherwise we may better not argue about anything. Although a carefully designed cognitive algorithm may have better chances to work correctly than by chance evolved cognitive algorithm, i.e. it is acceptable that p(correct|evolved)<p(correct|designed), it doesn't necessarily mean that p(evolved|correct)<p(designed|correct), which is the conclusion the presuppositionalists essentially make.
Back to your argument, you seem to implicitly hold about cognition that p(correct|deterministic)<p(correct|indeterministic), for which I can't see any reason, but even if that is valid, it isn't automatically a strong argument for indeterminism.
Huh? Presumably if the dinosaurs had the cognitive capacity and the opposable thumbs to develop rocket ships and divert incoming asteroids they would have survived. They died out because they weren't smart enough.
I will side with Ganapati on this particular point. We humans are spending much more cognitive capacity, with much more success, on inventing new ways to make ourselves extinct than we do on asteroid defense. And dinosaurs stayed around much longer than us anyway. So the jury is still out on whether intelligence helps a species avoid extinction.
prase's original argument still stands, though. Having a big brain may or may not give you a survival advantage, but having a big non-working brain is certainly a waste that evolution would have erased in mere tens of generations, so if you have a big brain at all, chances are that it's working mostly correctly.
ETA: disregard that last paragraph. It's blatantly wrong. Evolution didn't erase peacock tails.
The asteroid argument aside it seems to me bordering on obvious that general intelligence is adaptive, even if taken to an extreme it can get a species into trouble. (1) Unless you think general intelligence is only helpful for sexual selection it has to be adaptive or we wouldn't have it (since it is clearly the product of more than one mutation). (2) Intelligence appears to use a lot of energy such that if it wasn't beneficial it would be a tremendous waste. (3) There are many obvious causal connections between general intelligence and survival. It enabled us to construct axes, spears harness fire, communicate hunting strategies, pass down hunting and gathering techniques to the next generation, navigate status hierarchies etc. All technologies that have fairly straight forward relations to increased survival.
And the fact that we're doing more to invent new ways to kill ourselves instead of protect ourselves can be traced pretty directly to collective action problems and a whole slew of evolved features other than intelligence that were once adaptive but have ceased to be-- tribalism most obviously.
The fact that only a handful of species have high intelligence suggests that there are very few niches that actually support it. There's also evidence that human intelligent is due in a large part to runaway sexual selection (like a peacock's tail). See Norretranders's "The Generous Man"" for example. A number of biologists such as Dawkins take this hypothesis very seriously.
Dinosaurs weren't a single species, though. Maybe better compare dinosaurs to mammals than to humans.
Or we could pick a partciular species of dinaosaur that survived for a few million years and compare to humans.
Do you expect any changes to the analysis if we did that?
Nitpicking huh? Two can play at that game!
Maybe better compare mammals to reptiles than to dinosaurs.
Many individual species of dinosaurs have existed for longer than humans have.
Dinosaurs as a whole probably didn't go extinct, we see their descendants everyday as birds.
Okay, this isn't much to argue about :-)
Are you claiming that the human species will last a million years or more and not become extinct before then? What are the grounds for such a claim?
I don't think one should compare humans and dinos. Maybe mammals and dinos or something like that. Many dinosaurs went extinct during the era, our ancestors where many different "species". Successful enough, that we are still around. As were some dinos which gave birds to Earth.
Just a side note,