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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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If the absence of maliciousness in the laws of physics is good evidence that God is not evil, is the absence of benevolence in the laws of physics good evidence that God is not good?
That would be a reasonable argument to make.
I would follow it up by claiming that the existence of free will is evidence of benevolence in the laws of physics.
With what definition of "free will"?
"Free will" consists of the ability of a person to determine their own future actions by some entirely internal process (which can observe, but is not controlled by, external factors); where "person" is defined as a collection of stuff such that the collection of stuff that makes up you has no overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up me and neither of us have any overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up (say) Barack Obama, or Trevor Noah, or Jacob Zuma.
Do you understand "is not controlled by" in such a way that having "free will" is inconsistent with (1) purely deterministic physics and/or (2) purely deterministic+random physics? (On the face of it your definition makes free will inconsistent with #1 but not with #2, but I can e.g. imagine a definition that restricts those "external factors" to, say, the state of the world outside one's body in at most the last year, in which case "free will" might be compatible with outright determinism.)
I don't think that free will can be reconciled with purely deterministic physics - free will implies that, in exactly the same situation, with each and every particle in exactly the same space, I can still choose whether to purchase those biscuits or not.
On the other hand, my decision whether or not to purchase those biscuits is not exactly random, either. There are a number of factors that go into it - in fact, considering force of habit, quite a few of my decisions are extremely predictable. So I'm not sure that random physics is entirely reconcilable either.
OK. So, do you consider that you actually have good evidence for the existence of free will in this sense? If so, what is that evidence?
The obvious alternative hypothesis, which seems to me to explain all the evidence I know of just as well, is that at the level of physics there's nothing but determinism and maybe randomness, but it looks different to us because we can't see all the details. We think "I could have done otherwise in the exact same situation" because we have seen ourselves and others do different things in very similar-looking situations, we can imagine making a different decision in what feels like the same situation, etc.; but we don't get to observe the exact states of all the particles that compose us and the world around us, and what we think of as "the same situation" may actually be quite different in its details. We also don't get to observe the mechanisms that lead to our making whatever choices we do, so those choices feel like opaque black-box miracles to us. No magical contra-causal free will is required for things to look this way to us.
I did think I had a good argument for free will (given the existence of God), but TheAncientGeek has punctured that. (I had a second argument as well, but I'm waiting to see whether TheAncientGeek has any comment on that one).
Aside from that, all I've really got is that:
(a) What I do feels like free will; that may be an illusion. (b) What other people do is consistent enough to suggest that their actions are being guided by individual, similarly free-willed minds.
...both of which are fairly weak evidence, if anything.
It's clear that if you put someone in very similar situations and ask them to make a choice, over time they will converge to making a certain choice a certain percentage of the time. That could easily be the same percentage of the time that would be predicted by deterministic physics plus e.g. quantum uncertainty, so I don't see any reason in principle why your account of free will could not be consistent with everything happening according to the laws of physics, if there is randomness in the laws of physics.
As for the feeling, if a deterministic chess computer had feelings, it would have to have the feeling that it could make any move it wanted, because if it didn't feel that way, it couldn't consider all the possibilities, and it can't decide on a move without considering all the possibilities. This doesn't prevent chess computers from being deterministic, so it might not prevent you from having a feeling like that, even if your actions are in fact deterministic.
No, it's not clear at all. If ask me to make choices in similar situations, first I might humor you, then I'll get bored and start fucking around with the system, and then I'll get really bored and stop cooperating with you. There won't be much of a convergence over time.
The abstraction is not the territory.
...I'm not seeing this. It can consider all the possibilities even if it knows that it must play the possibility with the highest odds of winning - in fact, knowing that means that it must consider all the possibilities in order to calculate those odds, surely?
There is at least one thing in the laws of physics that seems like benevolence rather than the absence of it.
When animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, e.g. eat or engage in sex, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal.
That seems like benevolence. I could imagine a situation where everything that animals tended to do, was painful to them. You might say that is absurd, since then they would not tend to do those things. But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel. So there is nothing absurd about it, just like a person can be on a rollercoaster without any control over what is happening. It would be pretty terrible if life was like that, but fortunately it's not.
How do you know that? (For central examples of "animal").
Think about someone who owns a dog.
I did. How do you know that? You can't read the dog's mind and the dog can't talk to you. The dog could act in ways that you interpret as the dog being pleased, but trying to interpret it that way here would be circular reasoning since you are trying to show that the dog's actions show that things are pleasant to it.
What are you claiming -- that a dog is inherently unable to have "pleasant" feelings, or that humans have no capability whatsoever to judge the what's happening in the mind of a dog on the basis of its behaviour?
In this context, you are claiming that "when animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal". Judging what is happening in the mind of the animal on the basis of its behavior, in order to support this claim, is circular reasoning.
Nope, that's not me, that's entirelyuseless.
But you haven't answered my question.
Sorry. Make that "you are supporting a claim that..."
If you want the literal answer to your question, the answer is that I'm not claiming anything.
Note that disputing a claim of X is not itself a claim of not-X..
The same way I know that you are a conscious being. In other words by comparing the way they behave with the way I behave.
That would imply that a bacterium engaging in things that feel pleasant to it. After all, like me, it tries to avoid things that cause it harm and tries to do things that benefit it.
It would also imply that a Roomba is engaging in things that feel pleasant to it.
obligatory xkcd response:
http://xkcd.com/1558/
That isn't in the laws of physics, except in the trivial sense in which everything that happens in the world is "in the laws of physics" (in which case of course there are vastly many benevolent and malicious things "in the laws of physics").
I think there's a false dichotomy there. They do those things because of how they feel, and they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics. (Note that if you deny the latter half of this then you definitely aren't entitled to say that this is "in the laws of physics".)
I agree that in the normal sense, they do those things because of how they feel, and that they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics.
That's kind of my point. When I said, "They do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel," I meant this: I can imagine laws of physics that would imply that they do more or less the same things they do now, but they constantly feel bad about it. This is not something that might be impossible, like a zombie hypothesis. It is certainly possible, as is evident from the rollercoaster example.
In other words, the question is why the laws of physics and the way people feel are related in the way that they are, instead of a different way which would be much worse. I don't see any strong argument that the actual way is intrinsically much more probable.
And even if we showed that it is intrinsically more probable, someone could simply say that this shows that God is intrinsically good.
Physics seems like a weirdly low-level thing if we're thinking about whether or not animals' behavior could remain the same and their subjective experience could be a state of what we would call suffering in some possible world. I just don't think that you could make edits on that level and have changes that are so fine-tuned. Editing physics doesn't leave everything alone except subjective experience; editing physics breaks fire.
And if we have to settle for a physics that leaves at least most everything the same and life remains possible, then why wouldn't we expect reward mechanisms to evolve and for the default state of affairs to be one in which adaptive experiences 'feel good' and others 'feel bad'?
gjm called this a false dichotomy, but I think a better though perhaps more complex way of putting it is that you're mixing up your multi-level maps. Take free will and determinism as an example. Some people become fatalists because they think that determinism contradicts their idea of what possibility means. But they're contaminating their maps. You have a low-level map of physics where everything is lawful and there is no thing similar to what you might call 'possibility.' Then you have a high-level map of decision-making, and the fatalists take the lawfulness from their low-level physics map and draw it onto their high-level decision-making map, and say, "Well, the lawfulness overrules the possibility", and then they start making null decisions, but that's wrong. Possibility is a primitive notion in your high-level decision-making map and only in that map, just like the laws of physics are primitive notions in your low-level physics map and only in that map. In the territory, your brain runs on physics and your decision-making algorithm runs on physics, and your decision-making algorithm computing the output of logical nodes making decisions other than the one that it must make makes you feel possibility, and the whole process is lawful, and you have a bridge map between these two levels of maps; but the map is not the territory, and that goes both ways, and your high-level decision-making map is not the territory either, and sticking physics into it is like mixing apples and oranges. And even if that seems counterintuitive, I would say that any other policy is wrong, because the fatalists lose and the compatabilists win.
I agree with you about compatabilism, but I don't think that answers my question.
I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
But with those physical changes, why couldn't you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
Maybe this is impossible. But if it is impossible, maybe that just shows that God is necessarily good.
How are you defining "bad" and "good", in this world whose creatures are so different from us?
I suggest: "feel good" means "have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures seek experiences that have them" and "feel bad" means "have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures avoid experiences that have them".
In which case, a world in which adaptive experiences feel worse than non-adaptive ones is a world in which creatures systematically pursue maladaptive goals and avoid adaptive ones. Evolution will get rid of such creatures pretty quickly, no?
Suppose I'm right about evolution (see above); how would you get from there to "God is necessarily good"?
I basically agree with your definitions. However:
Subjective properties that tend to make a creature seek something can only do that because those subjective properties correspond to some objective physical property, at least if you aren't supporting dualism.
Why do the subjective properties that, in fact, tend to make people seek such experiences, correspond to objective properties that lead to that particular physical result (i.e. tending to physically move toward those results.)
You can say this is a tautology, and it is, in a way. But if we are simply talking about the particular subjective property in itself (as opposed to the fact that we happen to be pointing to it using our tendency to seek it), it is not a tautology, even if it may be a physical necessity.
In other words: zombies are probably physically impossible. But if they were possible, and if they were actual, instead of real humans, then reality would be neutral, neither good nor evil, since there would be no experience. In a similar way, negative-humans (who tend to seek painful experiences and avoid pleasant ones) are likely physically impossible. But if they were possible and actual, then the universe would be evil, and nearly all experiences would be bad.
But as it is, most experiences are good, and the universe is good. Talking about God here is probably a distraction, but if the universe is good, then its cause or causes should also be good. If the facts that make the universe good are necessary, then its causes are necessarily good.
I suggest that things coming out of evolutionary biology are more like logical than physical necessities; we would expect the same sort of dynamics to apply even with very different physical laws. (On the other hand, the "necessity" involved is weaker, because evolution is a stochastic process and it's very possible for suboptimal bits of design to get fixed in a population.)
So, anyway, the situation seems to be something like this: Any organisms with anything we could reasonably identify as "feeling good" or "feeling bad" experiences will tend to seek the ones that "feel good" in preference to the ones that "feel bad", almost tautologously. This means that, doing whatever they do, they will tend to "feel better" than we can imagine them doing if (e.g.) they absurdly sought out "feeling bad" experiences in preference to "feeling good" ones.
So far, so good. But to describe this by saying that "most experiences are good, and the universe is good" seems wrong to me, and I don't see how you get from "the facts that make the universe good are necessary" to "its causes are necessarily good". To expand on those points:
First: yes, living things will do nicer things in preference to nastier. But those are comparative terms. If everything in (say) human experience were made substantially more or substantially less pleasant uniformly it would have little impact on our decisions, but surely it could change whether "most experiences are good". My actual impression is that most experiences are neutral and the amounts of good and bad aren't terribly different. We have both orgasms and headaches; both enlightenment and boredom; both the satisfaction of a job well done and the frustration of failing to achieve what we should. I don't see any reason to think other animals' balance is very different.
Second: if "the universe is good" is meant to be just another way of saying "most experience is good" then I don't think passing from one to the other does anything other than invite confusion. If it's not, then I think you need some further justification for saying that the universe is good.
Third: let's suppose, e.g., that some simple argument in terms of evolution does lead to the conclusion that, largely independent of the details of physical law etc., most experiences of most living things will be experienced as good rather than bad. How do you get from there to "the causes of the universe are necessarily good"? I just don't see it. There certainly isn't any generally valid inference from "X has property P" to "the causes of X have property P"; consider e.g. the case where X is the physical universe and P is "is made of matter and energy" or "is made of quantum fields" or something of the kind; if the physical universe has causes at all then they might be mathematical laws, or gods, or happenings in some other universe with different laws; they certainly needn't be made of the same stuff as our universe.
I think I disagree with the first part (that we can't understand the idea of something doing things that feel bad rather than feel good, or that there are obvious reasons why this is impossible in principle), but I won't argue that for two reasons. First because that would probably end up being a very time consuming discussion, and second because, as I said, I think I can make my argument even if I grant your point.
Regarding your three points:
It sounds like you are saying that there is a balance of good and evil in human life which is basically equal, so that overall life is neutral. If this is the case, it would certainly make sense to say that the universe is neutral as well. But I disagree that the overall balance is neutral, and I think that most people disagree. Most people have a strong preference to live, rather than to die, even in a painless way. This implies that they think the value of the rest of their life is significantly higher than zero. This suggests that you are undervaluing positive experiences and overemphasizing negative experiences, compared to the values that most people place on those. And I doubt that in practice you personally think your life is worthless on balance.
When I say that the universe is good, I do not just mean that life or experience is overall good. If that needs additional justification, I will do that in addressing the third point.
I agree that a cause does not always have the properties of the effect. But goodness has a particular meaning which affects the issue. Without trying to give a formal definition, saying that something is good certainly means something like "this is a desirable state of affairs," and likewise saying that something is bad would mean something undesirable. But then if a cause brings about a good effect, it brings about a desirable state of affairs. And if the thing was desirable, bringing it about was desirable, and so there is reason to call the cause good as well, even though it still doesn't mean exactly the same thing (to call the thing good and to call its cause good.)
Actually, you're affirming the consequent. If the cause of the universe is good, then the universe will be good. But if we observe that the universe is good, then we cannot infer that the cause of the universe is necessarily good.
Classic example:
Affirming the consequent is valid in the terms of the evidence relation. In other words, the fact that I have a sore throat is evidence that I have the flu, although not proof.
In the same way, the universe being good is evidence that the cause is good. If up to that point, we assumed that the cause was entirely neutral, our best estimate will now be that the cause is good.
To be clear, I didn't think you were proposing any sort of p-zombie-like hypothesis, where mental states are epiphenomenal or otherwise.
I think this is the same sort of error that a lot of people make when they ask "Why am I who I am instead of someone else?" They think that their identity exists primitively in the territory or even that it existed before their body; but it's a wrong question because they have the causality reversed. The question would make sense if you were some ghost-in-the-machine and you or someone else picked some physical body, but that's not how it works. Your body caused your mind, so you always are who you are and the question is confused. (I also don't mean to exclude the possibility of anthropic reasoning in this example.) The good and the bad don't exist primitively in the territory, they are caused by evolutionary processes that develop organisms with reward mechanisms, and we identify reward and punishment, among other things, with these high-level concepts of 'good' and 'bad' that didn't exist before us, so good is always good and bad is always bad and the question is confused.
Although with what I've seen in neuroscience, some creature like what you describe doesn't necessarily seem outside of the realm of physical possibility to me. If people can simultaneously observe that they are paralyzed and come up with endless excuses for why they aren't, and the cognitive processes we're talking about in this case aren't too intertwined, then I can perhaps conceive of a creature that continues to perform adaptive behaviors but experiences suffering and happiness in the reverse. But I would expect someone to have to construct it, not for it to evolve. Or maybe an evolved creature with the most horrible sort of oddly complex neurological lesion.
I see a very strong argument that the actual way is much more probable. What does it mean to say that something feels bad? Mostly, I think, that whoever (or whatever) it feels bad to is strongly motivated to make it not happen. That's what feeling-bad is for, evolutionarily; it's what distinguishes those feelings as bad ones. So of course we should expect that people (and other animals) tend to do things that feel better in preference to things that feel worse.
(You might argue that the overall level of good-feeling is higher than we'd expect. But I don't see any reason to think that.)
As I said, I think there's an argument there for the goodness of God (or at least of the goodness of the universe) even if this relationship is intrinsically probable or even necessary.
This is probably another way of putting the same thing: do you think that overall it is good to exist? If the universe overall is neutral, the overall expectation would seem to be that it would be neutral to exist. But most people think it is good to exist. That suggests that overall the universe is good.
We just had someone argue that in practice they don't (speaking of evolution). I don't wholly endorse the argument, but let's not casually dismiss it - the point that people need something to live for seems true enough.
That post was not arguing that people think that overall it is bad to exist. It was arguing that people don't think it is good to exist forever, which is quite different.
Balderdash. The link argues that people do not want to keep living for even a matter of millenia if they "have nothing to live for," in the author's own words (and he argues that most people only care about having/raising children, which they lose interest in). This is clearly evidence for people being indifferent between existence and non-existence without a goal, or "neutral" as you put it before you somehow forgot that alternative.
That would still mean that existence was overall good for them by giving them the possibility of raising children (or reaching other goals they might have), which they would not have otherwise.
I don't see how such an argument would work, as I've said in another comment. Perhaps explain there if you feel like it?