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What? I really didn't understand that.
To a non string theorist, string theory seems like a theory which makes few testable predictions, like phlogiston. That's the feel I got from it from whenever I read all the relevant Wikipedia articles, anyway. If it is not like phlogiston, but actually useful for designing experiments, then obviously I concede.
My annoyance came from the fact that my 06:45:05 comment got a few down votes, while the parent got deleted for reasons unknown. I can't remember who the parent was, or what it said, and it bothers me that they deleted their post, while I feel an obligation to not delete my own downvote-gathering comment for reasons like honesty and the general sense that I really meant what the comment said at the time, which makes it useful for archival purposes.
The majority of physicists working on those kinds of questions are using some form of M-theory of string theory. The next nearest rival is Loop Quantum Gravity. Other theories are minority views. M-theory is favoured because milage can be got out of it in terms of research. The metaphor or a random grab into hypothesis-space isn't appropriate.
Without knowing anything in particular about the difference between Quantum Loop Gravity or why M-theory is useful, I concede the point, although I'm a bit annoyed that I feel obligated to leave my comment there to collect negative karma while the parent, whoever they were, felt no similar obligation and removed any context my comment might be placed in.
Are we not solely interested in consequences?
What you mean we, consequentialist?
Hmm. I guess I had not considered people on this forum might not be consequentialists. And yet you are somewhat of a known community figure, and not as a contrarian. Is consequentialism not evident? I ask as an honest inquiry to someone whose username I recognize (being a sort of lesswrong == sequences person myself) and therefore is at least aware of the Standard position for certain, and yet is not known for the reason of contradicting the Standard position (like Caledonian might be).
To me, the knowledge of human psychology which makes clear why humans find acts of omission acceptable, while humans find proscriptive acts with the same consequences unacceptable, is enough to make me a consequentialist. Is its not the same for you?
Sure, as I said, it's interesting that's how these analogies work — by inviting the reader to (for the sake of argument, of course!) zero out almost all of the salient real-world information about the act. They move us further from the real-world scenario and toward increasingly abstract contemplations of possible combinations of rights and obligations.
That's a wide-open invitation for bias — an invitation for each reader to pick and focus on whichever analogy fits their prejudices, instead of more closely examining the facts ... and in particular any facts that may be available about who chooses abortion, why they do that, and what the consequences of that choice are.
To me this suggests that using these analogies is likely to lead to worse decisions — policy decisions and personal decisions.
We want to figure out a head of time what we should do in morally ambiguous situations. An easy way to find discrepancies in our ethical framework is to invent thought experiments where some particular aspect of a scenario is made arbitrarily large or small. Would you kill a person to save two people? why? would you kill a person to save 200 people? why? what about killing a billion people to save two billion? If we actually have values which we'd actually like to maximize in the world around us, slight differences in the specific details of these values might prefer greatly different actions in various circumstances, and the easiest way to pin down those slight differences is to invent situations where the distinctions become obvious.
Why do we want to know in advance what we'd do if asked whether we'd kill a billion people who are only being simulated on a computer in order to save a million people who run on real neurons? because in determining a course of action, we can begin to investigate what our values actually are.. Narrowly defined values are easier to maximize; less computation is required before you have decided on a course of action. If your values are not narrowly defined, or for some other reason computing your actions is costly or timely, that incurs a huge bias towards inaction, whatever choice is realized by "waiting too late". And so proscripted acts are weighted differently than they should be in our moral framework, as you can see by the other long comment thread on this article.
It seems to me like grandparent criticized the idea of thought experiments as a way to investigate complicated ethical dilemmas, and parent kind of agreed. What is the argument? By invesgigating problems unlike the problem we're actually faced with, we forget to look at relevant data about the problem because it isn't relevant in the thought experiment. That, in our ability to focus on a particular abstraction, we allow for arbitrarily large biases. I'll concede that point, but this isn't a bad thing. If a particular value system, as a logical conclusion, endorses infanticide, as demonstrated by some thought experiment, and we claim to have that ethical framework, then we should either be willing to endorse infanticide (perhaps in the privacy of our own minds) or renounce the ethical framework. Similarly, a framework which can be shown to endorse all effort going towards impregnation of all women or technology towards the goal of realizing every potential human: we should endorse this route of action or renounce the value system that led to it.
What do we actually want to maximize? What are our theoretical, infinitely narrow, values? What should they be? The reason abortion is such a controversial issue is because it is currently an issue some people will be forced to decide on. Our lack of narrow values becomes apparent when we end up making actual, real-life decisions about actual, real life actions, and when we try to defend those actions, our arguments end up describing values which, while narrow, are not consistent with the rest of our actions. People who value human life, and say life begins at conception, are not actively trying to conceive as many humans as possible. People who value human life, and say that a human starts out as a "0 value" human, which grows steadily into a "1 value" human around 12 or 18 or 25 or whatever, are generally unwilling to endorse post-pregnancy abortion of non-sentient infants (even, perhaps, in the privacy of their mind).
Since our possible future light cone looks very different depending on which of these two values we hold, we clearly will at some point need to decide between courses of action, which means we will have to actually decide what values we'd like to maximize in the universe. Hopefully, we will make this decision ahead of time and not at the moment we need to act, because obviously we want to maximize the right value, and waiting to decide incurs a giant penalty in our ability to plan ahead and also a giant bias towards inaction. That's why thought experiments are valuable: we can increase the amount of certain values of different outcomes to arbitrarily high levels, and discover each value's relative worth, or if perhaps a value is instrumental to another value and has no worth on its own. Thought experiments are our way of hacking our value system, reverse engineering what our actual values are. For this reason, it is an absolutely essential process.
edit: written on phone. first read-through found 3 typographical errors, wikk correct at a computer.
abortion is more evil than contraception is because it's an error of commission rather than omission.
I think taking birth control precautions is pretty comission-y. Abstinence would be the omission version of not having babies.
After reading the entire debate this comment spawned... if the goal is to determine whether we should support abortion legalization and fewer restrictions (possibly up to infanticide? (!)), or perhaps support more heavy regulation, it seems like arguing over whether an action is reactive, proactive, etc can't possibly have any relevance, and seems like a particularly virtuist way of looking at things.
Are we not solely interested in consequences? What are our values and how do we maximize them? Clearly saying we value "human life" isn't enough, and we need to be more narrow. What do we actually value? If we say we value all potential humans, should we be spending all of our time impregnating women, being pregnant, or researching how to shorten pregnancy and/or grow humans in a test tube? If we draw the line in what we value somewhere else, do we end up with post-pregnancy abortions? Is that okay? I feel like there are real questions, and the reason those questions are interesting is because we can't just take the copout answer of "proactive actions bad, acts of omission okay" because consequentialism won't let us.
It has a couple weaknesses, like taking M-theory seriously,
As opposed to what?
As opposed to not elevating any particular hypothesis out of the hypothesis-space before there is enough evidence to discern it as a possibility. Privileging the Hypothesis and all that.
In response to
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
For someone who currently has a teacher's-password understanding of physics and would like a more intuitive understanding, without desiring to put in the work to obtain a technical understanding (i.e. learning the math), I would recommend Brian Green's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I feel does for physics (and the history of physics) what An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Law does for Bayesian probability. It goes through history, starting with Newton and ending with modern day, explaining how the various Big Names came up with their ideas, demonstrates how those ideas can explain reality incrementally better than the previous ideas by using easy-to-envision thought experiments, and also contains a skippable explanation of the mathematic principles behind the new ideas for those who want that, although the book is valuable even without these sections. In this way, it's like a popular science book with an optional textbook component.
It has a couple weaknesses, like taking M-theory seriously, but in general I would say that it accomplishes its goal of imparting an intuitive understanding better than other popular physics books with similar goals, like Hawking's A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, or Green's The Elegant Universe.
So I think perhaps we are talking past each other. In particular, my definition of reductionism is that we can understand and model complex behavior by breaking a problem in to its constituent components and studying them in isolation. i.e. if you understand the micro-hamiltonian and the fundamental particles well, you understand everything. The idea of 'emergence' as physicists understand it (and as Laughlin was using it), is that there are aggregate behaviors that cannot be understood from looking at the individual constituents in isolation.
A weaker version of reductionism would say that to make absolutely accurate predictions to some arbitrary scale we MUST know the microphysics. Renormalization arguments ruin this version of reductionism.
In a sense this
if you wanted to know with 100% accuracy where the shell was going to land, you would have to go further down than this.
seems to be espousing this form of reductionism, which I strongly disagree with. There exist physical theories where knowing microphysics is irrelevant to arbitrarily accurate predictions. Perhaps it would be best to agree on definitions before we make points irrelevant to each other.
there are aggregate behaviors that cannot be understood from looking at the individual constituents in isolation
Can you give me an example of one of these behaviors? Perhaps my google-fu is weak (I have tried terms like "examples of top down causality", "against reductionism", "nonreductionist explanation of"), and indeed I have a hard time finding anything relevant at all, but I can't find a single clearcut example of behavior which cannot be understood from looking at the individual constituents in isolation.
Let's start with something rather uncontroversial. We would probably all agree that reducing top-down a complex system, like a brain or a star, we find its increasingly small constituents interacting with other constituents, all the way down to the lowest accessible level. It is also largely uncontroversial that if we were to carefully put together all the constituents exactly the way they were before will give us the original system, or something very close to it. Note the emphasis.
However, this is not what EHeller and myself mean by emergence. This analysis/synthesis process is rather unpredictable and unstable in both directions. The same high-level behavior can be produced by wildly varying constituents, and this variation can happen at multiple levels. For example, ripples in a bowl of liquid can be produced by water, or by something else, or they might be a mirror image of an actual bowl, or they might be a video someone recorded, or a computer simulation, or a piece of fabric in the wind producing a similar effect, etc. You won't know until you start digging. Looking bottom-up, I'd call it "emergence convergence".
If you look at the synthesis part, you will find that rather tiny variations in how you put things together result in enormous changes in the high-level behavior. A minor variation in the mass of one quark (which is probably determined by some hard-to-calculate term in some QFT equation) would result in a totally different universe. An evolution of the same initial conditions is likely to produce different result in the one world you care about (but let's not get sidetracked by MWI). Laplace-style determinism has never worked in practice on any scale, as far as I know. Well, maybe there are some exceptions, I'm not sure. Anyway, my point is that what emerges from putting lots of similar things together in various ways is quite unpredictable, though you often can analyze it in retrospect.
While "emergence" is not a good explanation of anything, it happens often enough, people ought to expect it, so it has some predictive power. 2+2 might be 4, but 2+2+2+...+2 might not even be a number anymore. Like when these twos are U-235 atoms. When you get lots of people together, you might get a mindless mob, or you might get an army, you won't know the first time you try. So, while emergence is not a good explanation, the idea is useful in a Hegel-like meta way: expect qualitative jumps simply from accumulating quantitative changes. Ignore this inevitability at your own peril.
I have no disagreement that high level behaviors are wildly variable, unpredictable, and all of the other words which mean "difficult to reduce down to lower level behaviors". Yes, wildly different constituent parts can create the same macroscopic behavior, or changing just a single lower level property in a system can cause the system to be unrecognizably different from before. But my point is that, if the universe is a physics simulator, it only has to keep track of the quarks. When I wake up in the morning, the universe isn't running a separate "human wake-up" program which tells the quarks how to behave; it's just running the standard "quark" program that it runs for all quarks. That's all it ever has to run. That's all I'm saying, when I say that I believe in reductionism. Reductionism doesn't say that it's practical for us to think in those terms, just that the universe thinks in those terms.
Finding a counterexample to this, a time when if our universe is a physics simulator, it must run code other than one process of 'quark.c' for each quark, would be a huge blow to reductionism, and I don't think one has been found yet. Perhaps I am wrong, although I have looked pretty thoroughly at this point, as I continue to google "arguments against reductionism" and find that none of them can actually give an example of such top-down causality.
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Here's some background reading with more details about my personal views in the comments. I consider consequentialistic shut-up-and-multiply kind of thinking appropriate for questions of prudence and simply don't think it constitutes morality. I'm definitely an oddity within LW.
What could an ethical framework be if not the way you decide what actions to take in order to maximize your values? Obviously consequentialism has nothing to say about what those values are, but it rules out the idea that an act of omission with consequence 'foo', and a proscriptive act also with consequence 'foo', can be morally distinguished.