Comment author: simplicio 14 March 2010 03:59:49PM 5 points [-]

if "Science" doubts the existence of free will then there is something wrong with Science not my clear perception of my free will (along with the clear perceptions of just about everyone alive and who has ever lived)."

Whatever the conclusion here, it will not be attained by ninja'ing "everybody's perceptions" into natural law. Everybody perceives that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Everybody perceives that squares A and B are different colours.

Do I need to recite the whole litany? We aren't Aristotelians or apologists or something, we don't get to do philosophy just by sitting back in our armchairs and imagining how the world "must" obviously be. You have to actually go and look at the world. Hence our "faith" in the lab.

Comment author: moedavid 15 March 2010 12:52:06AM -1 points [-]

Perhaps I should state it in a slightly different way. There is no reason for me or anyone else to doubt the clear perception we have of our own free will. Prove to me scientifically that it does not exist, that it is some kind of illusion that all human beings experience.

Comment author: XiXiDu 01 February 2010 10:56:48AM 0 points [-]

There's no scientific reason to believe that we have free will. There's no buffer zone that we've found in any of the physical laws of how the universe works to make room for free will. There's non-determinism; but there's not choice. Choice is the introduction of something, dare I say it, supernatural: some influence that isn't part of the physical interaction, which allows some clusters of matter and energy to decide how they'll collapse a probabilistic waveform into a particular reality.

-- Mark Chu-Carroll

Comment author: moedavid 14 March 2010 03:37:28PM -11 points [-]

In my opinion you have made a rather egregious error in your evaluation of the issue of free will. You seem to have a dearly held pre-conceived notion that for anything to be established as true it must be proved in a laboratory. From which Mount Sinai did you receive this proclamation? In fact it is an article of faith.

The perception of every human being who has ever lived and is alive today tells us clearly that our actions are based on free will decisions. I can change the way I feel, I can change the way I behave by exercising my free will. I can decide what I want to think about and when I want to think about it. I can decide whether to shut off the alarm and go back to sleep or get out of bed early and do my daily exercise regimen.

if "Science" doubts the existence of free will then there is something wrong with Science not my clear perception of my free will (along with the clear perceptions of just about everyone alive and who has ever lived). It is your problem to "prove" that free will does not exist, not my problem to prove that it does exist.

One thing I do agree with; Free will is something that is beyond the material world. But of course we are involved in non-material (supernatural, spiritual, etc.) activities from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep. Communicating in written language like everyone on this blog is doing is one of them. We type absolutely meaningless symbols on a screen and somehow the ideas in my head get conveyed to whoever "reads" them. Take the most advanced laboratory in the world, and have them analyze the ink on a piece of paper and the paper itself. The laboratory can tell you everything about the chemical and molecular structure of both, but it cannot hope to ever figure out the message that is written there, AND YET IT IS THERE NONETHELESS. We attach non-material ideas to meaningless symbols on a piece of paper or on a computer screen.

Comment author: Rain 01 February 2010 12:42:53PM 15 points [-]

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain, excerpt from The War Prayer

Comment author: moedavid 14 March 2010 03:20:40PM -7 points [-]

It seems to me this would have been a wonderful prayer to pray before going into battle against an evil enemy like the Germans or Japanese in WW 2.

In response to An Alien God
Comment author: MrHen 11 February 2010 07:19:17PM 9 points [-]

The human retina is constructed backward: The light-sensitive cells are at the back, and the nerves emerge from the front and go back through the retina into the brain. Hence the blind spot. To a human engineer, this looks simply stupid - and other organisms have independently evolved retinas the right way around. Why not redesign the retina?

Some of the biggest jaw dropping comments I hear have to do with taking something that is an obvious flaw and bending over backwards to come up with a reason that it isn't flawed. Instead of saying that old elephants starving is cruel and a flaw* they say that there is a deeper purpose or design that can explain away the cruelty.

Instead of calling out a nasty thing for being a nasty thing they try to claim that our understanding is flawed. and the nasty really isn't all that nasty. This is fuzzy enough on topics like retinas and dying elephants to trick people who don't know much about retinas or dying elephants. But what happens if I point at something like Cerebral Palsy and say, "Explain that!"

The typical next step is to add an intelligent Super Nasty that ruined the perfectly nice world. If we keep pushing Explain we delve into huge swaths of arguments about good, evil, gods, and devils but are still left with hospital wards packed full of children inflicted with Cerebral Palsy. At some point, most people push Ignore. And then their child is born with Cerebral Palsy. It is kind of hard to ignore that. When they complain that something nasty happened, someone nearby tells them that there is a deeper purpose or design.

I can understand why people aren't big fans of this.

And... reading back over my comment I forgot to make the point I going to make and made a different one in its stead. Ah well.

In response to comment by MrHen on An Alien God
Comment author: moedavid 14 March 2010 03:13:51PM -15 points [-]

In his rant against intelligent design theory , Yudkowsky seems to have overlooked a simple fact. Darwinian Evolution is irrelevant to the whole discussion. Darwinian Evolution is only operative and relevant from the moment you have a DNA based organism capable of self replication. (I know that there are highly speculative theories of earlier "simpler" self replicating molecules. There is no evidence at all that they ever actually existed, and no one has ever seen one outside of a laboratory where even the highly limited ability to self replicate is a product of the intelligent design of the chemists and microbiologists involved)

Since absolutely no one has ever come up with anything even approaching a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of life from non-life, the obvious truth is that the first DNA based bacterium (the simplest life form we know of) with it's staggeringly functionally complex digital code was created by a supernatural intelligence.

Again, all forms of life are possible (I.e. Darwinian Evolution and Natural Selection are possible) if, and only if, the proper molecular machinery is in place. The irony is that not only is Darwinian Evolution not an explanation nor the cause of the fantastic and astounding functional complexity of life on this planet, Darwinian Evolution is a process that is the result of the astounding functional complexity of life on this planet.