with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today
100%? Really? Not just "close to 100%, so let's round it up" but actual complete certainty?
I too am a believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I don't see on what grounds anyone can be 100% certain that the SLoT is universally correct. I say this mostly on general principles -- we could just have got the physics wrong. More specifically, there are a few entropy-related holes in our current understanding of the world -- e.g., so far as I know no one currently has a good answer to "why is the entropy so low at the big bang?" nor to "is information lost when things fall into black holes?" -- so just how confidently would you bet that figuring out all the details of quantum gravity and of the big bang won't reveal any loopholes?
Now, of course there's a difference between "the SLoT has loopholes" and "someone will reveal a way to exploit those loopholes tomorrow". The most likely possible-so-far-as-I-know worlds in which perpetual motion machines are possible are ones in which we discover the fact (if at all) after decades of painstaking theorizing and experiment, and in which actual construction of a perpetual motion machine depends on somehow getting hold of a black hole of manageable size and doing intricate things with it. But literally zero probability that some crazy genius has done it in his basement and is now ready to show it off? Nope. Very small indeed, but not literally zero.
the sun will not rise in the west. [...] I will not be the president of the United States
Again, not zero. Very very very tiny, but not zero.
Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions?
It does something a tiny bit like making decisions. (There is a certain class of states of affairs it systematically tries to bring about.) However, there's nothing in what it does that looks at all like a deliberative process, so I wouldn't say it has free will even to the tiny extent that maybe a chess-playing computer does.
For the avoidance of doubt: The level of decision-making, free will, intelligence, belief-having, etc., that these simple (or in the case of the chess program not so very simple) devices exhibit is so tiny that for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful simply to say: No, these devices are not intelligent, do not have beliefs, etc. Much as for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful to say: No, the coins in your pocket are not held away from the earth by the gravitational pull of your body. Or, for that matter: No, there is no chance that I will be president of the United States tomorrow.
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding, or are you playing to the gallery and trying to get me to say things that sound silly? (If so, I think you may have misjudged the gallery.)
perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible.
Empirical things? Do you not, in fact, believe in quantum mechanics? Or do you think "in half the branches, by measure, X will happen, and in the other half Y will happen" counts as a perfectly reliable prediction of whether X or Y will happen?
is possible by definition.
Only perfectly non-empirical things. Sure, you can "predict" that a given Turing machine will halt. But you might as well say that (even without a halting oracle) you can "predict" that 3x4=12. As soon as that turns into "this actual multiplying device, right here, will get 12 when it tries to multiply 3 by 4", you're in the realm of empirical things, and all kinds of weird things happen with nonzero probability. You build your Turing machine but it malfunctions and enters an infinite loop. (And then terminates later when the sun enters its red giant phase and obliterates it. Well done, I guess, but then your prediction that that other Turing machine would never terminate isn't looking so good.) You build your multiplication machine and a cosmic ray changes the answer from 12 to 14. You arrange pebbles in a 3x4 grid, but immediately before you count the resulting pebbles all the elementary particles in one of the pebbles just happen to turn up somewhere entirely different, as permitted (albeit with staggeringly small probability) by fundamental physics.
[EDITED to fix formatting screwage; silly me, using an asterisk to denote multiplication.]
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding,
I'm not sure what I "expect" but yes, I am trying to achieve mutual understanding. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our intuitions of what "free will" means and I'm trying to get a handle on what it is. If you think that a thermostat has even a little bit of free will then we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you think even a Nest thermostat, which does some fairly complicated processing before "decid...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.