The Craft and the Community
This sequence ran from March to April of 2009 and dealt with the topic of building rationalist communities that could systematically improve on the art, craft, and science of human rationality. This is a highly forward-looking sequence - not so much an immediately complete recipe, as a list of action items and warnings for anyone setting out in the future to build a craft and a community.
Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity
This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.
Suppose that someone built an exact duplicate of you on Mars, quark by quark - to the maximum level of resolution that quantum physics permits, which is considerably higher resolution than ordinary thermal uncertainty. Would the duplicate be really you, or just a copy?
It may seem unlikely a priori that physics, or any experimental science, could have something to say about this issue.
But it's amazing, the things that science can tell you.
In this case, it turns out, science can rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the same atoms - because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. There are no tiny billiard balls with individual identities. It's experimentally ruled out.
"Huh? What do you mean, physics has gotten rid of the concept of 'same atom'?"
No one can be told this, alas, because it involves replacing the concept of little billiard balls with a different kind of math. If you read through the introduction that follows to basic quantum mechanics, you will be able to see that the naive concept of personal identity - the notion that you are made up of tiny pieces with individual identities that persist through time, and that your identity follows the "same" tiny pieces - is physical nonsense. The universe just doesn't work in a way which would let that idea be meaningful.
There are more abstract and philosophical arguments that you could use to rule out atom-following theories of personal identity. But in our case, it so happens that we live in a universe where the issue is flatly settled by standard physics. It's like proposing that personal identity follows phlogiston. You could argue against it on philosophical grounds - but we happen to live in a universe where "phlogiston" itself is just a mistaken theory to be discarded, which settles the issue much more abruptly.
And no, this does not rely on a woo-woo mysterian interpretation of quantum mechanics. The other purpose of this series of posts, was to demystify quantum mechanics and reveal it as non-mysterious. It just happens to be a fact that once you get to the non-mysterious version of quantum mechanics, you find that the reason why physics once looked mysterious, has to do with reality being made up of different stuff than little billiard balls. Complex amplitudes in configuration spaces, to be exact, though here I jump ahead of myself.
37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
Followup to: Just about every post in February, and some in March
Some reader is bound to declare that a better title for this post would be "37 Ways That You Can Use Words Unwisely", or "37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On Your Cognition".
But one of the primary lessons of this gigantic list is that saying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
Besides, I can define the word "wrong" to mean anything I like - it's not like a word can be wrong.
Personally, I think it quite justified to use the word "wrong" when:
- A word fails to connect to reality in the first place. Is Socrates a framster? Yes or no? (The Parable of the Dagger.)
- Your argument, if it worked, could coerce reality to go a different way by choosing a different word definition. Socrates is a human, and humans, by definition, are mortal. So if you defined humans to not be mortal, would Socrates live forever? (The Parable of Hemlock.)
- You try to establish any sort of empirical proposition as being true "by definition". Socrates is a human, and humans, by definition, are mortal. So is it a logical truth if we empirically predict that Socrates should keel over if he drinks hemlock? It seems like there are logically possible, non-self-contradictory worlds where Socrates doesn't keel over - where he's immune to hemlock by a quirk of biochemistry, say. Logical truths are true in all possible worlds, and so never tell you which possible world you live in - and anything you can establish "by definition" is a logical truth. (The Parable of Hemlock.)
- You unconsciously slap the conventional label on something, without actually using the verbal definition you just gave. You know perfectly well that Bob is "human", even though, on your definition, you can never call Bob "human" without first observing him to be mortal. (The Parable of Hemlock.)
- The act of labeling something with a word, disguises a challengable inductive inference you are making. If the last 11 egg-shaped objects drawn have been blue, and the last 8 cubes drawn have been red, it is a matter of induction to say this rule will hold in the future. But if you call the blue eggs "bleggs" and the red cubes "rubes", you may reach into the barrel, feel an egg shape, and think "Oh, a blegg." (Words as Hidden Inferences.)
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