= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (429)
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word "Then". That word ("az") does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here's an interesting bit o' trivia: the original of "a tree to be desired to make one wise" is "w'nech'mäd häëtz l'has'Kiyl" which literally means, "and the tree was cute for wisdom." (Actually, it's not quite "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that. A better translation would be something like "smartness" or "brainpower".)
Sure, but 1) I don't grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn't know it was evil except in retrospect.
That's the Ethan Couch defense, and it's not entirely indefensible. We don't generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
You are mistaken.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it's actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn't make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it's useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it's much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It's kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don't you go read the book before we go further.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it's a vector space.
Huh. Maybe I've been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with "smartness" being more related to academics and book-learning and "wisdom" more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
I'll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others - Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished - just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing - so education is still important to reduce sin).
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we're considering computable in practice, then there's the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that's more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you're coming from - you're saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I'm not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn't mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Okay, I've had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy - that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It's also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I'm not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I'm saying I don't follow the reasoning that leads to it.
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can't exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
This is a contradiction. If you don't have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I'm not saying that the certainty can't improve the illusion. I'll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and - somehow - use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I'm rather left wondering how, but I'll trust that it's possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I'd have to find a copy first.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that's how I think of it), but as a vector space?
Well, they are. Maybe "mental faculties" would be a better translation. But it's neither here nor there.
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
Indeed. But God didn't provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
Huh? I don't understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity "cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate". I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can't.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can't do; that's kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can't do.
Actually, that's not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that's a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you've travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you're predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That's what it means to be reliably predictable.
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I'll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I'll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
Sorry, that didn't parse. What is "that"?
Well, yeah, at root I'm not doing it deliberately. What I'm doing (when I do it -- I don't always, it's hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I'm doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I'm not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I'm slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
Yes. Did you read "31 flavors of ontology"?
The word "could" is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of "could" (and of its associated notions like "possible" and "inevitably").
The reason "could" is tricky is that whether or not something "could" happen (or could have happened) is usually reckoned relative to some state of knowledge. If you flip a coin but keep your hand over it so that you can see how it landed but I can't then from my perspective it could be either heads or tails but from yours it can't.
To assess free will you have to take the perspective of some hypothetical agent that has all of the knowledge that is potentially available. If such an agent can predict your actions then you cannot have free will because, as I pointed out before, your actions are determined by factors that are accessible to this hypothetical agent but not to you. Such agents do not exists in our world so we can still argue about it, but in a hypothetical world where we postulate the existence of such an agent (i.e. a world with time travel in to the past without the possibility of changing the past, or a world with a Newcomb-style intelligent alien) the argument is settled: such an agent exists, you are reliably predictable, and you cannot have free will. (This, by the way, is the resolution of Newcomb's paradox: you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb's paradox) evidence against it.)
You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take, or whether or not to believe in free will. But if your argument is correct, then they do not.
Do I? That wasn't my intention. They don't have a choice in which box to take, any more than they have a choice in whether or not they find my argument compelling. If they find my argument compelling then (if they are rational) they will take 1 box and win $1M. If they don't, then (maybe) they won't. There's no real "choice" involved (though there is the very compelling illusion of choice).
This is actually a perfect illustration of the limits of free will even in our own awareness: you can't decide whether to find a particular argument compelling or not, it's something that just happens to you.
This is questionable, and I would expect many compatibilists to say quite the opposite.
What can I say? The compatibilists are wrong. The proof is simple: either all reliably predictable agents have free will, or some do and some don't. If they all do, then a rock has free will and we will just have to agree to disagree about that (some people actually do take that position). If some do and some don't, then in order for the term "free will" to have meaning you need a criterion by which to distinguish reliably predictable agents with free will from those without it. No one has ever come up with such a criterion (AFAIK).
My intuition has always been that 'free will' isn't a binary thing; it's a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that 'entropy' and 'free will' are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)
Yes, I think that's exactly right. But compatibilists don't agree with that. They think that there is such a thing as free will in some absolute sense, and that this thing is "compatible" (hence the name) with determinacy/reliable predictability.
There are a number of useful terms for which no one has ever come up with a precisely stated and clearly defensible criterion. Beautiful, good, conscious, etc. This surely does indicate that there's something unsatisfactory about those terms, but I don't think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.
Having said which, I think I can give a not-too-hopeless criterion distinguishing agents we might reasonably want to say have free will from those we don't. X has free will in regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X's preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.
So, if you do something purely "on autopilot" without any actual wish to do it, that condition fails and you didn't do it freely; if you do it because a mad neuroscientist genius has reprogrammed your brain so that you would inevitably have done Y, we can go straight from that fact to your doing Y (but if she did it by making you want to do Y then arguably the best explanation still makes use of that fact, so this is a borderline case, which is exactly as it should be); if you do it because someone who is determined that you should do Y is threatening to torture your children to death if you don't, more or less the same considerations apply as for the mad neuroscientist genius (and again this is good, because it's a borderline case -- we might want to say that you have free will but aren't acting freely).
What does this criterion say about "normal" decisions, if your brain is in fact implemented on top of deterministic physics? Well, an analysis of the causes of your action would need to go via what happened in your brain when you made the decision; there would be an "explanation" that just follows the trajectories of the elementary particles involved (or something of the kind; depends on exactly what deterministic physics) but I claim that wouldn't be a good explanation -- in the same way as it wouldn't be a good explanation for why a computer chess player played the move it did just to analyse the particle trajectories, because doing so doesn't engage at all with the tree-searching and position-evaluating the computer did.
One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren't necessarily any easier to define clearly than "free will" itself. Would we want to say that that computer chess player had free will? After all, I've just observed that any good explanation of the move it played would have to go via the process of searching and evaluation it did. Well, I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will! (Free will, like everything else, comes in degrees). Still, "clearly" not very much, so what's different? One thing that's different, though how different depends on details of the program in ways I don't like, is that there may be an explanation along the following lines. "It played the move it did because that move maximizes the merit of the position as measured by a 12-ply search with such-and-such a way of scoring the positions at the leaves of the search tree." It seems fair to say that that really is "why" the computer chose the move it did; this seems like just as good an explanation as one that gets into more details of the dynamics of the search process; but it appeals to a universal fact about the position and not to the actual process the computer went through.
You could (still assuming determinism) do something similar for the choices made by the human brain, but you'd get a much worse explanation -- because a human brain (unlike the computer) isn't just optimizing some fairly simply defined function. An explanation along these lines would end up amounting to a complete analysis of particle trajectories, or maybe something one level up from that (activation levels in some sophisticated neural-network model, perhaps) and wouldn't provide the sort of insight we seek from a good explanation.
In so far as your argument works, I think it also proves that the incompatibilists are wrong. I've never seen a really convincing incompatibilist definition of "free will" either. Certainly not one that's any less awful than the compatibilist one I gave above. It sounds as if you're proposing something like "not being reliably predictable", but surely that won't do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will? Or a mechanical randomizing device that works by magnifying small differences and is therefore not reliably predictable from any actually-feasible observations even in a deterministic (say, Newtonian) universe?
Yes, obviously. But it is also a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is beautiful, so too it is a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is free will. Like I said, it's really quibbling over terminology, which is almost always a waste of time.
OK, that's not entirely unreasonable, but on that definition no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent's desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.
Indeed.
OK, then you're intuitive definition of "free will" is very different from mine. I would not say that a chess playing computer has free will, at least not given current chess-playing technology. On my view of free will, a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn't want to play chess any more.
I'd say that not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right:
I think that's wrong for two reasons. The first is that the model might explicitly include the agent's desires. The second is that a model might predict much better than it explains. (Though exactly what constitutes good explanation is another thing people may reasonably disagree on.)
I think that's better understood as a limit on its intelligence than on its freedom. It doesn't have the mental apparatus to form thoughts about whether or not to play chess (except in so far as it can resign any given game, of course). It may be that we shouldn't try to talk about whether an agent has free will unless it has some notion of its own decision-making process, in which case I'd say not that the chess program lacks free will, but that it's the wrong kind of thing to have or lack free will. (If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.)
Your objection to compatibilism was, unless I badly misunderstood, that no one has given a good compatibilist criterion for when something has free will. My objection was that you haven't given a good incompatibilist criterion either. The fact that you can state a necessary condition doesn't help with that; the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.
There seem to me to be a number of quite different ways to interpret what he wrote. I am guessing that you mean something like: "I define free will to be unpredictability, with the further condition that we apply it only to agents we wish to anthropomorphize". I suppose that gets around my random number generator example, but not really in a very satisfactory way.
So, anyway, suppose someone offers me a bribe. You know me well, and in particular you know that (1) I don't want to do the thing they're hoping to bribe me to, (2) I care a lot about my integrity, (3) I care a lot about my perceived integrity, and (4) the bribe is not large relative to how much money I have. You conclude, with great confidence, that I will refuse the bribe. Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn't freely refuse the bribe?
On another occasion I'm offered another bribe. But this time some evildoer with very strange preferences gets hold of me and compels me, at gunpoint, to decide whether to take it by flipping a coin. My decision is now maximally unpredictable. Is it maximally free?
I think the answers to the questions in those paragraphs should both be "no", and accordingly I think unpredictability and freedom can't be so close to being the same thing.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can't calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable... predestined.
I still don't understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don't understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
I'll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I'll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist - even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
The idea that "You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will".
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don't see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by "enough"? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that's a bit irresponsible. You aren't completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
What's the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? "If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them."
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it -- OK, fair enough -- but he doesn't tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn't give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn't in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else -- the serpent -- who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God's told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is "now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don't press that button" -- why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then "in that day you will surely die", and they don't; the serpent tells Eve that they won't, and they don't.
I take your point - it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad's expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn't understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
I'd understood that to mean "on that day your death will become inevitable" - since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
I don't think you answered my question: what's the underlying principle?
I agree that it is generally best for people who, perhaps on account of being very young, are not able to survive effectively by making their own decisions to obey the people taking care of them. But I'm not sure this is best understood as a moral obligation, and surely sometimes it's a mistake -- some parents and other carers are, one way or another, very bad indeed. And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don't seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
But let's run with your analogy for a moment, and suppose that in fact Adam and Eve were as incompetent as toddler-you, and needed to be fenced about with incomprehensible absolute prohibitions whose real reasons they couldn't understand. Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone? If they had, what would you think of someone who said "oh, it's all CCC's fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to."?
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: "Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents' arbitrary instructions, they're likely to throw you out of the house." Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
That's an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation? I'm going entirely off translations -- I know maybe ten words of Hebrew -- but it sure looks to me as if God says, simply and straightforwardly, that eating the fruit means dying the same day. Taking it to mean "your death will become inevitable" or "you will die spiritually" or something of the kind seems to me like rationalization.
But, again, I don't know Hebrew and maybe "in that day you will surely die" really can mean "in that day it will become sure that on another day you will die". Anyone want to enlighten me further?
I'm not actually sure.
I do think that there's really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it's rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it's pretty deeply buried).
I'm not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be "the rules are there for a reason, don't break them unless you're really sure". Part of it may be intended for children - "listen to your parents, they know better than you". (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice "listen to your parents" is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
I do wonder, though - how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler's naivete.
Not if they had any option.
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
I see it as more "obey your parents, or you're going to really hate what comes next". It's not perfect, but it's pretty broadly applicable.
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
In short, I have no idea.
Do you mean there's incredibly good evidence that it's not literally true, or there's incredibly good evidence that it's not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I'd forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.) Of course the actual point here is that neither of us knows Hebrew, so we're both guessing about what it means to say (as commonly translated into English) "in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die".
I think there's incredibly good evidence that it's not literally true, and (at least) very good evidence that it's not intended literally. I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it's not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it's not intended literally..
Shalom - I think that's "peace", right? I'm not sure. I don't know shema at all, and adam I know only as the name of the first man.
So, it seems I know more Hebrew than I thought; but nonetheless, you are perfectly correct about the point.
This comment has been moved here
You might want to know that you have accidentally replied to my comment instead of CCC's. (In particular, your reply won't have made CCC's inbox icon light up.)
Doh! Thanks for the heads-up.
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you're at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there's a button on your universal remote that you've never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You're too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, "You didn't push that red button on your remote last night, did you?" "Why yes, yes I did," you reply. "Is that a problem?" "Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I'm afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we're going to have to take you in. Turn around please."
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it's perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it's perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
Yeah, that's another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we're on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Your either-or construct is missing the "or" clause.
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
No, we can't.
I didn't say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
No, you've got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Will do. (UPDATE: the article is here )
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these "dimensions" a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That's a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
(BTW, the author of "31 flavors" is me.)
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".
And I'm not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked "do not press" is probably justified.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider - biting a kitten's tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten's tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Delegation?
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel - Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Whoops.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out "head!" and "tail!" in whatever order he freely desires to do).
...I'm going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
Agreed.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I'm not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can't be colinear.
(Incidentally, I'd consider "George Washington the physical object" and "George Washington the fictional character" to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, "DO NOT PRESS" and on the right it says "PRESS THIS BUTTON". (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, "Do not press this button" and "Press this button for important information on how to use this remote". God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
Also, let's look at man's next transgression:
"Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."
In other words, God's first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God's will?
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
I really don't get what point you're trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you've lost.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare's plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You've lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone's head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn't. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn't.
But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.
Hmmmm. Not sure that's quite right. The serpent wasn't an authority figure. Maybe label the button "DO NOT PRESS" and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you'll never know what the button does until you try it?
Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same - a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because it's really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?
If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: "anyone who finds me will kill me"). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they'd have reason to want to kill him.
I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)
The point I'm trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future - even perfect knowledge of the future - does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
(Side note: I don't actually know GW-the-myth. It's a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven't really been exposed to. I'm not certain whether it's important to this argument that I should)
Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.
Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it's entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.
So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Seriously?
No he didn't. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he's lamenting the result of that curse.
Yes, because he's cursed by God.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
But that doesn't work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you'd have less computational power than a single iPhone.
Of course it does. That's what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here's a reference. The details don't really matter. If you tell me your background I'll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
Indeed.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure, from Genesis 2 verse 20-24, in which God created Eve (from Adam's rib) and brought her to Adam.
So you accept self-defense as a justification, but not complete (but not wilful) ignorance?
Well, I'm guessing, but yes, it's a serious guess. Omnipotence means the ability to do everything, it does not mean that everything is pleasant to do. And I certainly know I'd start to lose patience a bit after explaining individually to the hundredth person why stealing is wrong.
The curse, in and of itself, is not what's going to make people want to kill him (if it was, then God could merely remove that aspect of the curse, rather than install a separate Mark as a warning to people not to do that). No, the curse merely prevented him from farming, from growing his own food. I'm guessing it also, as a result, made his guilt obvious - everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he'd killed his brother.
But the curse is not what's making Cain expect other people to kill him. He clearly expects that other people will freely choose to kill him, and that suggests to me that he knew he had done wrong.
I don't see how that follows. I can imagine ways to produce a next generation consisting of entirely evil (or, at best, morally neutral) actions. What do you think would prevent the appearance of a new generation?
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
I'm not saying it's fast. Compared to a computer, pen-and-paper is really, really slow. That's why we have computers. But fourteen billion years is a really, really, really long time.
That's provided that the perfect knowledge of the future is somehow derived from a study of the present state of the universe. The time traveller voids this implicit assumption by deriving his perfect knowledge from a study of the future state of the universe.
Ah, thank you. That explains it all quite neatly.
I'm not sure it's really worth the bother of coming up with a different example at this point - your point was quite clearly made, even without knowledge of the story. (If it makes any difference, I'm South African, which is probably going to be less helpful than one might think considering the number of separate cultures in here).
Your point is well made.
Here you go.