LESSWRONG
LW

All of lisper's Comments + Replies

I completely agree that engaging in the debate is worthwhile. But I think you can engage more effectively if you understand how people might come to the opposing point of view.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

trying to do the right thing counts

Jesus very plainly disagreed:

"Mark16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

Matthew 25:46

Yeah, that's a better example.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

other crimes

Fair enough, but a lot of those "other crimes" are thought crimes too, e.g. Exo20:17, Mat5:28.

was never intended to be taken literally

Jesus was pretty clear about this. Mat13:42 (and in case you didn't get it the first time he repeats himself in verse 50), Mark16:16.

-2gjm9y

Oh yes. I wasn't saying "Christianity is much less horrible than you think", just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude. Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the "final destruction" interpretation better than the "eternal torture" interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a "blazing furnace"; I don't know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn't in the original version of Mark's gospel and (2) just says "will be condemned" rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference? There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

Exactly. "Did not" is not the same as "can not." Particularly since God's threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don't happen even though they can.

But we don't even need to look to God's forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.

0CCC9y

I wasn't speaking about "did not". I was speaking about "will not", which is distinct from "can not" and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future - unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being. According to official Catholic doctrine: In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.

-1gjm9y

I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn't for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes. And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we've now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

the intent behind those words was not given

"The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him". Again, I don't see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.

I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure.

If you're not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person's family as punishment for a crime t... (read more)

1CCC9y

Looking at another translation: (footnote: "Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.") Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of "so that no one would kill him", but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning - something easily understood as "DO NOT KILL THIS MAN" - but I don't see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain's life. There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, "if A then B". Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes "if 1=2 then B". Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two. Now, the statement given here was as follows: "If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold". Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned. I don't see how it's possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds. I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God's Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point. I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am

2hairyfigment9y

CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God's motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that - for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree - you're both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you.

You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:

"Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."

I don't know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can't help but wonder how you take se... (read more)

0CCC9y

That wasn't a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we're given here is an if-then - if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the "if" is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain's irrational fear of the "if" part happening. I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure. Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from "continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff" to "doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time". In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5: ...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the "and"). But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on - things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

I agree with most of what you say. Consciousness is not supernatural. But it is still problematic because:

the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty

"Only outcome you can experience" is not quite the same thing as "Will experience with certainty." Let's go back to the case where you survive in both branches. The outcome you do experience is the only outcome that you can experience. The trick is that this is really two statements disguised as one. After the event there... (read more)

0qmotus9y

It was two statements: "only outcome the participant can expect to experience" because I think that no, it is not possible to experience a null experience; and "will experience with certainty" because I believe quantum mechanics, when interpreted literally, means that the experience will exist. As I said, I don't find the Russian roulette a particularly interesting scenario in reality, nor something that I would like to try myself; it's because I think this applies to other life-and-death situations as well that I think the basic question is important.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

Oh, come on. Surely you do not dispute that there are ways of dying that are both unavoidable and non-instantaneous. What difference does it make what the details are?

0qmotus9y

If I decide to open my wrists, there are many ways that I can still keep going: I may simply faint and wake up in a hospital, the paramedics having arrived just in time despite all odds; quantum fluctuations may spawn a hitherto unkown angelic being who heals me; or a highly advanced future civilization may decide to run an afterlife simulation for 21st century earthlings that I end up in. As far as I know, these are all scenarios with a non-zero probability according to quantum mechanics and that this is in principle generalizable to any other life-and-death situation, although I have to admit that my understanding of QM is somewhat fuzzy. Feel free to correct me.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire.

No, that's not quite true. QIT predicts that if you notice anything then you will notice that the gun didn't fire. But QIT does not guarantee that you will notice anything. You could just die.

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

See also my response to akvadrako.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

Don't you mean n-factorial?

Yeah, probably. It's actually probably N!-1 because you have to trace over one degree of freedom to obtain a classical universe. But the details don't really matter. What matters is that it's >>N.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

QIT and MWI don't make any different predictions that are testable in a single classical universe (obviously, because QIT and MWI are just different interpretation of QM, so they both make the same predictions for all observables, namely, the predictions made by QM).

QIT and MWI are simply differences in perspective -- the God's eye view (MWI) versus the mortal's-eye-view (QIT). Neither view is "correct", but since I (the thing engaged in this conversation) am a mortal, I choose the mortal's-eye-view as more relevant for day-to-day decision makin... (read more)

0qmotus9y

(This comment is a reply to another branch of this discussion as well.) I disagree. To keep things simple, let's suppose that the bullet, if it hits, really will kill the participant with practically 100% certainty and will do so practically immediately (I'll come to this a bit later). In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire. This is exactly what happens if you take the mortal's-eye-view; God, as you mentioned, will notice that elsewhere in the multiverse, the participant did get hit. Now, whether the participant cares about their loved ones or the copies that die in the attempt is a matter of preferences, but if we're simply talking about which outcome to experience, this is how it goes, I think. With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be. But there are practical situations that are somewhat analogous: think, for example, about a terminally ill patient who faces an almost certain death within several days. Should they expect to survive or continue to experience things, and if so, in what way? My understanding is that according to quantum mechanics, there are all kinds of weird scenarios with non-zero probability that make "survival" possible, such as simply surviving one more day indefinitely despite all odds, being miraculously cured, or maybe being resurrected by a hyper-advanced future civilization in a simulation. Note that, in principle, this probably applies to any possible life-and-death situation. I used the word "experience" a number of times there, which brings me to a point you made in another comment: I don't think this can of worms is that bad. We have a pretty good grasp of what it means to be conscious, even if we can't define it exactly; and also we're (at least I am) pretty confident that it's a purely physical ph

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

according to MWI there surely will

No. Not "will". IS. If you're going to take the God's eye view then you have to let go of your intuitions about time along with your intuitions about classical reality. The wave function is a static four-dimensional thing. Time emerges from the wave function in exactly the same way that classical reality does. You have to be careful not to apply terminology from the mortal's-eye-view to the God's-eye-view. That's how you get yourself into trouble.

UPDATE: Here is a popular article about how time emerges ... (read more)

1qmotus9y

I think what I said applies when you take a first-person point of view. If you're a participant in a quantum suicide experiment, then if you expect a collapse interpretation to be an accurate description of reality, you should expect to eventually be hit by a bullet and die. But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire. The difference is not in the point of view taken, it's in the fact that the parts of the wavefunction that contain a (from first-person eye-view) future version of the participant actually are there.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

I will perceive being every one of them

It depends on what you mean by "I". This is the crux of the matter. MWI takes a God's-eye perspective and looks at the whole wave function. On that view, there are many you's (i.e. many slices of the wave function that contain macroscopic systems of mutually entangled particles that perceive themselves to be you).

QIT takes the perspective of the-you-that-you-currently-perceive-yourself-to-be. You will only ever perceive one of that kind of you.

For the purposes of making decisions it makes more sense t... (read more)

0qmotus9y

I would say that a major difference between MWI and various collapse interpretations is that there are situations where according to collapse interpretations there most likely will be no future you; but according to MWI there surely will, although their amplitude is low (the aforementioned Russian roulette is one such situation, for instance). I find it somewhat difficult to think about those from the perspective you advocate.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

Doesn't the QIT you describe make the exact same predictions, also the Russian roulette you mentioned?

Nope.

But there's no single privileged future you, right?

There is no single privileged future me now, but when my future becomes my present there will be. (Also, see note below.)

You can actually do this experiment: listen to a geiger counter, or tune an old-school TV to an inactive channel and watch the snow on the screen. The math says that during this process there are an inconceivably vast number of you's being split off every time the geiger co... (read more)

0akvadrako9y

Hi lisper, I found your paper easy to follow and maybe insightful (I'll have to read it more carefully the second time) but like qmotus, I don't understand your reasoning in this thread. I'm assuming MWI is just an interpretation of unitary QM, so makes all the same mathematical predictions as other non-collapse theories. And the roulette story is just one way of looking at it, from the perspective of what I consider my (classical) self and what I call the future. Since you are not claiming that QIT makes different mathematical predictions than MWI, how can you claim they make different predictions at all?

0qmotus9y

Well, I'd rather say that I will perceive being every one of them; it's just that no future me will perceive being more than one of the future mes. The terminology gets quite confusing here, but I think the Quantum Russian Roulette you mentioned (and quantum suicide and immortality, by extension, for example) is one situation where this aspect of quantum theory becomes somewhat apparent, which is why I think it would be interesting if you elaborated a bit more on how you think the predictions QTI and MWI make differ from each other.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y-10

Can you derive the Born rule?

Yes.

Can you settle the single/many world dichotomy?

That depends on what you mean by "settle". The only thing that you can definitively say is that the transition between the quantum and the classical is gradual, not abrupt. Because of this, any statement about a classical world is necessarily an approximation of some sort, and all approximations break down if you lean on them in the right way. Copenhagen breaks down most easily because it only applies under some very particular circumstances. Those circumst... (read more)

0qmotus9y

Doesn't the QIT you describe make the exact same predictions, also the Russian roulette you mentioned? But there's no single privileged future you, right?

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y20

(DO:A) raises the probability of B.

Yes, but there's still some terminological sleight-of-hand going on here. It is only fair to say that a future A affected a past B if P(B) is well defined without reference to A. In this case it's not. Because B is defined in terms of correlations between measurements made at T1 (noon) and measurements made at T2 (evening) then B cannot be said to have actually happened until T2.

correlation is a two-way street

No, it's an n-squared-minus-one-way street. It appears to be a two-way street in one (very common) spe... (read more)

0torekp9y

You're right. Good point. Don't you mean n-factorial? Anyway, ... hmm, I need to think about this more.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?

Maybe because God has cursed him to be a "fugitive and a vagabond." People didn't like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don't ).

I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.

Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill y... (read more)

0CCC9y

I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down." ...fair enough. Doesn't mean they weren't doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y10

we'd both do whatever we're going to do and it wouldn't matter at all!

Exactly right. I live my life as if I'm a classical conscious being with free will even though I know that metaphysically I'm not. It's kind of fun knowing the truth though. It gives me a lot of peace of mind.

I was curious if you are in that camp.

I'm not familiar with Rosenberg so I couldn't say.

Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett's views! (He's a compatibilist, I believe.)

Yes, I think you're right. (That video is actually well worth watching!)

Ga

... (read more)

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y10

neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other

That may be. Nonetheless, at the moment I believe that free is an illusion, and I have some evidence that supports that belief. I see no evidence to support the contrary belief. So if you want to convince me that free will is real then you'll have to show me some evidence.

If you don't care what I believe then you are under no obligations :-)

None of those experiments provides strong evidence

The fact that you can reliably predict some actions that people perceive as volitional up to ten seco... (read more)

0g_pepper9y

As a matter of fact, I think the free will question is an interesting question, but not an instrumentally important question; I can't really think of anything I would do differently if I were to change my mind on the matter. This is especially true if you are right - in that case we'd both do whatever we're going to do and it wouldn't matter at all! Interesting. The reason I asked the question is that there are some thinkers who deny the reality of free will but accept the reality of consciousness (e.g. Alex Rosenberg); I was curious if you are in that camp. It sounds as though you are not. Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett's views! (He's a compatibilist, I believe.) Understood. My confusion came from the term "Galilean Universe" which I assumed was a reference to Galileo (who was actually on-board with the idea of the Earth orbiting the Sun - that is one of the things that got him into some trouble with the authorities!)

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

That's not a valid argument for at least four reasons:

There are many perceptual illusions, so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim. (In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!)
There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion.
It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into exist

... (read more)

0g_pepper9y

I agree with that I basically agree with that too - it is you rather than me who brought up the notion of extraordinary claims. It seems to me that the notion of extraordinary claims in this case is a red herring - that free will is real is a claim, and that free will is not real is a claim; I am simply arguing that neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other. In fact, I think that there is room for reasonable people to disagree with regard to the free will question. I don't know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information? None of those experiments provides strong evidence; the article you linked lists for several of the experiments objections to interpreting the experiment as evidence against free will (e.g., per the article, "Libet himself did not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will"). One thing in particular that I noticed is that many of the experiments dealt with more-less arbitrary decisions - e.g. when to flick one's wrist, when to make brisk finger movements at arbitrary intervals, etc. Even if it could be shown that the brain somehow goes on autopilot when making trivial, arbitrary decisions that hold no significant consequences, it is not clear that this says anything about more significant decisions - e.g. what college to attend, how much one should spend on a house, etc. That is a reasonable statement and I have no argument with it. But, while it provides a possible explanation why we might perceive free will even if it does not exist, I don't think that it provides significant evidence against free will. I agree with that. If that statement is valid, then it seems to me that the following statement is also valid: "There is no property that a brain can have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely are not conscious. So if consciousness is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to di

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

The serpent wasn't an authority figure. How could Eve have known that? Eve could have known that God was an authority figure

That's a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.

it's a serious guess

Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don't think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not ... (read more)

0CCC9y

Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question. ...I want to say that it's common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But... Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with. There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years' time there's a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children... Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning "he can't grow crops, therefore he killed his brother" is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that? And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist). I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think. On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a "pure evil" tribe easily. But even the "pure evil" tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations. I'm not claiming they'd be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short. That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it's intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question. Yeah... wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

That's you pointing to a shared understanding of free and not you pointing to your private experience.

You're conflating two different things:

Attempting to communicate about a phenomenon which is rooted in a subjective experience.
Attempting to conduct that communication using words rather than, say, music or dance.

Talking about the established meaning of the word "free" has to do with #2, not #1. The fact that my personal opinion enters into the discussion has to do with #1, not #2.

I think that humans do have desire that influence th

... (read more)

0g_pepper9y

Pretty much everyone perceives himself/herself freely making choices, so the claim that free will is real is consistent with most peoples' direct experience. While this does not prove that free will is real, it does suggest that the claim that free will is real is not really any more extraordinary than the claim that it is not real. So, I do not think that the person claiming that free will is real has any greater burden of proof than the person who claims that it is not.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

Yes, of course that's true. But collapse is only an approximation to the truth. It is a very good approximation in many common cases. But the Aharonov experiment is interesting precisely because it is a case where collapse is no longer a good approximation to the truth, and so of course if you view it through the lens of collapse things are going to look weird. To see why collapse is not always a good approximation to the truth, see the references in the OP.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there's no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen.

No, that's not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.

I actually go even further than that. If I am not reliably predictable, then I might have free will, but my mere unpredictability is not enough to establish that I have free will. Weather systems are not reliably predict... (read more)

1ChristianKl9y

To the extend that the subjective experience you call free will is independent on what other people mean with the term free will, the arguments about it aren't that interesting for the general discussion about whether what's commonly called free will exists. More importantly concepts that start from "I have the feeling that X is true" usually produce models of reality that aren't true in 100% of the cases. They make some decent predictions and fail predictions in other cases. It's usually possible to refine concepts to be better at predicting. It's part of science to develop operationalized terms. This started by you saying But the word "free" has an established meaning in English. That's you pointing to a shared understanding of free and not you pointing to your private experience. Human's are not reliably predictive due to being NFA's. Out of memory Heinz von Förster bring the example of a child answer the question of: "What's 1+1?" with "Blue". It needs a education to train children to actually give predicable answers to the question what's "What's 1+1?". I think the issue with why weather systems are not predictable is not because they aren't free to make choices (if you use certain models) but because is about the part of "will". Having a will is about having desires. The weather doesn't have desires in the same sense that humans do and thus it has no free will. I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make even in the absence of them being conscious of the desire creating the choice. Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn't trival. There are many competing definitions. You can define it over what the human eye perceives which has a lot to do with human genetics that differ from person to person. You can define it over wave-lengths. . You can define it over RGB values. It doesn't make sense to argue that color doesn't exist because the human qualia of color doesn't map directly to the wave-length definition of c

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

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... (read more)

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y-10

So I read the paper, and it is kind of a cool experiment, but it does not show that "future choices can affect a past measurement's outcome." Explaining why would require a separate article (maybe time to re-open main!) But the TL;DR version is this: if you want to argue that A affects B then you have to show a causal relationship that runs from A to B. If you can do that, then you can always come up with some encoding that will allow you to transmit information from A to B. That's what "causal relationship" means. But that is (uns... (read more)

0torekp9y

I disagree. Following Pearl, I define "A causes B" to mean something like: (DO:A) raises the probability of B. Bob's choice in the evening to make strong measurements along the beta-axis, raises the probability of Alice's noon measurements along the beta-axis measurements having been the ones that showed the best correlation. It doesn't raise the probability of any individual measurement being up or down, but that's OK. Even on a many worlds interpretation, where perhaps every digital up/down pattern happens at some "world" and the overall multi-world distribution is invariant, "probability" refers to what happens in our "world", so again that's OK. Correlation can only be observed after the fact, in the evening, not at noon. So isn't this just a case of Bob affecting Bob+Alice's immediate future, where they go over the results? Why do I say Bob's choice affected Alice's results? Because correlation is a two-way street, and in this case there isn't much traffic in the forward direction. Alice's measurements only weakly affect Bob's results.

0entirelyuseless9y

I disagree: if you interpret EPR experiments as wavefunction collapse rather than many worlds, then you can conclude that either one measurement affects the other, or both affect each other. But you cannot come up with any encoding that will allow you to transmit information.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y20

Just FYI, I am Ron Garret. Also just FYI, the Aharonov study does not show that future choices can affect a past measurement's outcome. If this were possible, you could use it to send yourself information about the future of (say) the stock market and become the richest person on earth.

0entirelyuseless9y

I don't understand Aharonov's experiment enough to say what it does or doesn't show. But your argument surely does not disprove his claim, since he is talking about particular circumstances, not making a general claim that there is some method that will tell you general truths about the future such as what the stock market is going to do. In fact, he does not appear to be saying that you can send yourself information at all, in a form which will be intelligible to you before the future events.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

rudely patronizing

Sorry, it is not my intention to be either rude or patronizing. But there are some aspects of this discussion that I find rather frustrating, and I'm sorry if that frustration occasionally manifests itself as rudeness.

you can never say "with 100% certainty will not" about anything with any empirical content

Of course I can: with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today. With 100% certainty, no one will exhibit superluminal communication today. With 100% certainty, the sun will not ris... (read more)

1gjm9y

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. Again, not zero. Very very very tiny, but not zero. 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

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

No, not even remotely close. We seem to have a serious disconnect here.

For starters, I don't think I ever gave a definition of "free will". I have listed what I feel to be (two) necessary conditions for it, but I don't think I ever gave sufficient conditions, which would be necessary for a definition. I'm not sure I even know what sufficient conditions would be. (But I think those necessary conditions, plus the known laws of physics, are enough to show that humans don't have free will, so I think my position is sound even in the absence of a ... (read more)

0ChristianKl9y

I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there's no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen. If I misunderstood that you make the argument feel free to point that out. Given the dictionary definition of "free" that seems to be flawed. That's an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition. It prevents your statements from being falsifiable. It moves the statements into to vague to be wrong territory. If I have a conversation with a person who has akrophobie to debug then I'm going to use words in a way where I only care about the effect of the words but not whether my sentences make falsifiable statements. If I however want to have a rational discussion on LW than I strive to use rational language. Language that makes concrete claims that allow others to engage with me in rational discourse. Again that's what distinguish rational!LW from rational!NewAtheist. If you don't simply want to have a replacement of religion, but care about reasoning than it's useful to not be to vague to be wrong. The thing you wrote about only calling the part of you I that corresponds to your conscious mind looks to me like subclinical depersonalization disorder. A notion of the self that can be defended but that's unhealthy to have. I not only have lungs. My lungs are part of the person that I happen to be. If we stay with the dictionary definition of freedom why look at the nature of the moon. Is the fact that it revolves around the earth an emergent property of how the complex internals of the moon work or isn't it? My math in that area isn't perfect but objects that can be modeled by nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons might be a criteria. Nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons can reasonably described as using heuristics to make choices. They make them based on the algorithm that's programmed into them and that algorithm can by reasonably described as being part of the nature of a specific nondeterminist

3TheAncientGeek9y

Some people can, and it is not unhelpful to be able to do so.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

I think this is a difference in the definition of the word "I", which can reasonably be taken to mean at least three different things:

The totality of my brain and body and all of the processes that go on there. On this definition, "I have lungs" is a true statement.
My brain and all of the computational processes that go on there (but not the biological processes). On this definition, "I have lungs" is a false statement, but "I control my breathing" is a true statement.
That subset of the computational processe

... (read more)

0ChristianKl9y

Basically after you previously argued that there only one reasonable definition of free will you now moved to the position that there are multiple reasonable definitions and you have particular reasons why you prefer to focus on a specific one? Is that a reasonable description of your position?

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y40

The serpent wasn't an authority figure.

How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.

Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?

Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.

Because it's really boring

Seriously?

he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world

No he didn't. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he's lamenting the result of that curse.

he thinks they'd have reason to want to kil

... (read more)

0CCC9y

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 unive

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

I don't think that's at all clear

How would you define it then?

a clear majority of philosophers

This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.

Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?

No, I get that. But "a very little bit" is still distinguishable from zero, yes?

nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like

Nothing about it seems human decision-like. But ... (read more)

1gjm9y

I already pointed out that your own choice of definition doesn't have the property you claimed (being fundamentally incompatible with determinism). I think that suffices to make my point. Very true. But if you are claiming that some philosophical proposition is (not merely true but) obvious and indeed true by definition, then firm disagreement by a majority of philosophers should give you pause. You could still be right, of course. But I think you'd need to offer more and better justification than you have so far, to be at all convincing. Well, the actual distinguishing might be tricky, especially as all I've claimed is that arguably it's so. But: yes, I have suggested -- to be precise about my meaning -- that some reasonable definitions of "free will" may have the consequence that a chess-playing program has a teeny-tiny bit of free will, in something like the same way as John McCarthy famously suggested that a thermostat has (in a very aetiolated sense) beliefs. Nothing about it seems decision-like at all. My notion of what is and what isn't a decision is doubtless influenced by the fact that the most interesting decision-making agents I am familiar with are human, which is why an abstract resemblance to human decision-making is something I look for. I have only a limited and (I fear) unreliable idea of what other forms decision-making can take. As I said, I'll happily revise this in the light of new data. Me too; if you think that what I have said about decision-making isn't, then either I have communicated poorly or you have understood poorly or both. More precisely: my opinions about decision-making surely aren't altogether IA/AI-ready, for the rather boring reason that I don't know enough about what intelligent aliens or artificial intelligences might be like for my opinions to be well-adjusted for them. But I do my best, such as it is. First: No, it hasn't. The hypothesis that humans make all their decisions by heuristic search certainly seems pretty un

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

Free has many different meanings.

Are you seriously arguing that "free" in "free will" might mean the same thing as (say) "free" in "free beer"? Come on.

What ontological category does physics have in your view of the world?

That's a very good question, and it depends (ironically) on which of two possible definitions of physics you're referring to. If you mean physics-the-scientific-enterprise (let's call that physics1) then it exists in the ontological category of human activity (along with things like "c... (read more)

0ChristianKl9y

You can see free will as 1 d : enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another. There no other person who controls your actions. The next definitions is: 2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself I think you can make a good case that the way someone's neurons work is part of their own nature or being. You ontological model that there's an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever.

That's like saying, "I prefer triangles with four sides." You are, of course, free to prefer whatever you want and to use words however you want. But the word "free" has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism. Free means, "not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes." If my actions are determ... (read more)

1gjm9y

I don't think that's at all clear, and the fact that a clear majority of philosophers are compatibilists indicates that a bunch of people who spend their lives thinking about this sort of thing also don't think it's impossible for "free" to mean something compatible with determinism. Let's take a look at that definition of yours, and see what it says if my decisions are determined by the laws of physics. "Not under the control or in the power of another"? That's OK; the laws of physics, whatever they are, are not another agent. "Able to act or be done as one wishes"? That's OK too; of course in this scenario what I wish is also determined by the laws of physics, but the definition doesn't say anything about that. (I wouldn't want to claim that the definition you selected is a perfect one, of course.) Yup. Much much simpler, of course. Much more limited, much more abstract. But yes, a tree-search with an evaluation at the leaves does indeed resemble human deliberation somewhat. (Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?) Nope. But not having such processing seems like a good indication of not having free will, because whatever free will is it has to be something to do with making decisions, and nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like, and I think the absence of any process that looks at all like deliberation seems to me to be a large part of why. (Though I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.) I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word "impossible" inappropriate. For whatever reason, you've never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so. But let's set that aside. I shall restate your claim in

-2ChristianKl9y

The dictionary disagrees. Free has many different meanings. What ontological category does physics have in your view of the world?

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

Here's a firsthand account of someone having the sort of spiritual experience I'm referring to in the main article.

0eof-jessica9y

personal experience which is often motivated by how we interpret our beliefs based on what we have been told or conditioned to think about it should give it merit to convert us or take over our mind or think for us rather then our own mind.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

Free will is a useful notion because we have the perception of having it, and so it's useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don't really have it. It's useful in the same way that it's useful to talk about, say, "the force of gravity" even though in reality there is no such thing. (That's actually a pretty good analogy. The force of gravity is a reasonable approximation to the truth for nearly all everyday purposes even though conceptually it is completely wrong. Likewise with free wil... (read more)

2gjm9y

I think it's more helpful to talk about whatever we have that we're trying to talk about, even if some of what we say about it isn't quite right, which is why I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever. I agree that gravity makes a useful analogy. Gravity behaves in a sufficiently force-like way (at least in regions of weakish spacetime curvature, like everywhere any human being could possibly survive) that I think for most purposes it is much better to say "there is, more or less, a force of gravity, but note that in some situations we'll need to talk about it differently" than "there is no force of gravity". And I would say the same about "free will". I don't know much about Pachinko machines, but I don't think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation, in which case I would not want to describe them as having free will even to the (very attenuated) extent that a chess program might have. Again, I don't think there are any sort of deliberative processes going on there, so no free will. So there are two parts to this, and I'm not sure to what extent you actually intend them both. Part 1: decisions are made by conscious agents. Part 2: decisions are made, more specifically, by those agents' conscious "parts" (of course this terminology doesn't imply an actual physical division). Of course "actually possible" is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible? If I'm understanding you right, you'd cash it out roughly as follows: look at the probability distribution of possible outcomes in advance of the decision; then freedom = entropy of that probability distribution (or something of the kind). So then freedom depends on what probability distribution you take, and you take the One True Measure of freedom to be what you get for an observer who knows everything about the universe immediately before the decision is made (mor

0ChristianKl9y

The common understanding of free will does run into a lot of problems when it comes to issues such as habit change. There are people debating whether or not hypnosis can get people to do something against their free will, with happens to be a pretty bad question. Questions such as can people decide by free will not to have an allergic reaction? are misleading.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

an example that doesn't even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point

Sorry about that. I really was trying to be helpful.

I haven't, as it happens, been claiming that free will is "objectively real". All I claim is that it may be a useful notion.

Well, heck, what are we arguing about then? Of course it's a useful notion.

chess

A better analogy would be "simultaneous events at different locations in space." Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers. Simultaneity, like free will, depends on your point of view.

0gjm9y

You're arguing that no one has it and AIUI that nothing in the universe ever could have it. Doesn't seem that useful to me. I did consider substituting something like cricket or baseball for that reason. But I think the idea that free will is viewpoint-dependent depends heavily on what notion of free will you're working with. I'm still not sure what yours actually is, but mine doesn't have that property, out at any rate doesn't have it to do great an extent as yours seems to.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y40

None of this is original research on my part. My only contribution is pedagogical. QIT doesn't make any predictions that QM doesn't make because it's an interpretation, just another way of looking at the math. But the reason it's a better way of looking at the math is that it solves the measurement problem. It explains measurement in terms of entanglement. It reduces two mysteries to one. IMHO that's progress.

0TheAncientGeek9y

How far does it go in solving the measurement problem? Can you derive the Born rule? Can you settle the single/many world dichotomy?

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y20

It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.

Of course. Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?

I have read both books.

Oh, good!

I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible

You're right, the argument in chapter 7 is not complete, it's just the 80/20 part of Deutsch's argument, so it's what I point people to first. And non-explanatory models with predictive power are not impossible, they're just extr... (read more)

0gjm9y

I think some of our desires are more freely chosen than others. I do not think an action chosen on account of a not-freely-chosen desire is necessarily best considered unfree for that reason. That isn't quite what you said before, but I'm happy for you to amend what you wrote. It seems to me that the argument you're now making has almost nothing to do with the argument in chapter 7 of Deutsch's book. That doesn't (of course) in any way make it a bad argument, but I'm now wondering why you said what you did about Deutsch's books. Anyway. I think almost all the work in your argument (at least so far as it's relevant to what we're discussing here) is done by the following statement: "Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power." I think this is incorrect; simplicity plus past predictive success is a pretty decent filter too. (Theories with these properties have not infrequently turned out to be embeddable in theories with good explanatory power, of course, as when Mendeleev's empirically observed periodicity was explained in terms of electron shells, and the latter further explained in terms of quantum mechanics.) OK, but in that case either you owe us something nearer to necessary and sufficient conditions, or else you need to retract your claim that incompatibilism does better than compatibilism in the "is there a nice clear criterion?" test. Also, if you aren't claiming anything close to "free will = UIP" then I no longer know what you meant by saying that ialdabaoth got it more or less right. Sure. That would be why I said "with great confidence" rather than "with absolute certainty". I might, indeed, take the bribe after all, despite all those very strong reasons to expect me not to. But it's extremely unlikely. (So no, I don't agree that I've "chosen a bad example"; rather, I think you misunderstood the example I gave.) If you say "you chose a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a b

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

don't do that

If you were to ban every mode of argument that has ever been used to justify a false conclusion then it would be impossible to argue for anything.

this is becoming a discussion of a real science

Heaven forfend! ;-)

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y20

No, what you say is correct, but you don't even need to bring entanglement into it at all: moving faster than light is the same thing as moving into the past (in some reference frame). This is why information can't propagate faster than light.

The kind of time travel that I'm talking about here is not merely sending information into the past but sending yourself into the past, that is, sending your body into the past. But that's not possible because your body is on the most fundamental level made of entanglements, and entanglements define the arrow of time.

Go see Ex Machina

lisper9y50

Hm, I searched for "ex machina" on the LW site search before I posted this and got no results.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y10

the model might explicitly include the agent's desires

OK, let me try a different counter-argument then: do you believe we have free will to choose our desires? I don't. For example, I desire chocolate. This is not something I chose, it's something that happened to me. I have no idea how I could go about deciding not to desire chocolate. (I suppose I could put myself through some sort of aversion therapy, but that's not the same thing. That's deciding to try to train myself not to desire chocolate.)

If we don't have the freedom to choose our desires... (read more)

0gjm9y

(I see you've been downvoted. Not by me.) If Jewishness is inherited from one's mother, and a person's great^200000-grandmother [EDITED to fix an off-by-1000x error, oops] was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human and had neither ethnicity nor religion as we now understand them, then on what basis is it reasonable to call that person Jewish? If sentences are made up of letters and letters have no meaning, then on what basis is it reasonable to say that sentences have meaning? It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can. I have read both books. I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible, but it is some time since I read the book and I have just now only glanced at it rather than rereading it in depth. If you reckon Deutsch says that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you remind me where in the chapter he does it? Or, if you have an argument that starts from what Deutsch does in that chapter and concludes that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you sketch it? (I do not guarantee to agree with everything Deutsch says.) I seldom use the word "will" other than in special contexts like "free will". Why do you ask? One such might be: "For an action to be freely willed, the causes leading up to it must go via a process of conscious decision by the agent." Meh, OK. So let me remind you that the question we were (I thought) discussing at this point was: are there clearer-cut satisfactory criteria for "free will" available to incompatibilists than to compatibilists? Now, of course if you say that by definition nothing counts as an instance of free will then that's a nice clear-cut criterion, but it also has (so far as it goes) nothing at all to do with freedom or will or anything else. I think you're saying something a bit less content-free than that; let me paraphrase and you can correct me if I'm getting it w

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".

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.)

Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to

... (read more)

0CCC9y

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 so

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

What can I say? I've met a lot of believers who claim that God talks to them on a regular basis. They seem sincere, but maybe they're all just really good liars (or maybe I'm really gullible).

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisper9y00

Well, I didn't say we could do it reliably. :-) But we can do it. You can look at something and say, "It's green" and I can look at the same thing and agree, "Yes, it is green." And then we can look at the same thing a minute later and say, "It's still green." The remarkable fact is not that we can do this 100% of the time, but that we can do it at all.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

Let me know if/when you write that separate article.

Here you go.

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

I don't think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.

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.

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

... (read more)

1gjm9y

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 t

Is Spirituality Irrational?

lisper9y00

You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take

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.