He’s still battling dualism, as seen in this New Yorker profile. He’s still arguing with Chalmers, and he’s still going strong…with some exasperation.
Despite his affability, Dennett sometimes expresses a weary frustration with the immovable intuitions of the people he is trying to convince. “You shouldn’t trust your intuitions,” he told the philosophers on the Rembrandt. “Conceivability or inconceivability is a life’s work—it’s not something where you just screw up your head for a second!” He feels that Darwin’s central lesson—that everything in biology is gradual; that it arrives “not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly”—is too easily swept aside by our categorical habits of mind. It could be that he is struggling with the nature of language, which imposes a hierarchical clarity upon the world that’s powerful but sometimes false. It could also be that he is wrong. For him, the struggle—a Darwinian struggle, at the level of ideas—continues. “I have devoted half a century, my entire academic life, to the project, in a dozen books and hundreds of articles tackling various pieces of the puzzle, without managing to move all that many readers from wary agnosticism to calm conviction,” he writes, in “From Bacteria to Bach and Back.” “Undaunted, I am trying once again.”
There’s something about this concept, that the mind is a product of the physics, chemistry, and biology of the brain, that some people cannot accept. But then I have an equally strong intuition that it is, so it’s hard to fault people for wanting to disbelieve it; I can still fault them for ignoring the growing evidence for the purely material basis of the mind, the absurdity and poor quality of the evidence for dualism, and the inability to come up with a mechanism, even an outline of an idea, for how dualism would work.
I have no problem with the mind being an emergent property of activity of the brain, but–then–I’m a programmer. Where in a computer is a program or an OS? Sure, you can point to where individual bytes are stored that make up a program, but that isn’t the dynamic that “is” the program. In an analogous sense to the mind disappearing when the brain dies, so too does the OS when the computer is powered down. (And yes, I am quite aware that the analogy is far, far from accurate, but I think the overall *concept* is analogous, at least to the extent I;ve laid out here.)
Ah, but don’t you know we humans are special, god’s gift to the the planet, and he gave us a soul so we would be sure of our senses? So goes Plantinga. Blech, need some mind floss after writing that drivel.
I gave up on the intuitive notion that mym ind wassomehow apart from the flesh of my brain when I was 14 or so. I didn’t like the revelation, or its implication,s but I was, at the time, recently introduced to the concept of “brain damage.” Quotes for conceptual emphasis in relation to my young self. The thought that a lump of matter in my skull, altered by injury, could fundamentally change who I was, how I thought, and even how the rest of the world saw me was earth shattering.
Though, it should be mentioned, I failed to really internalize the consequences of that revelation until much later in my life. You see, I don’t drink, or I don’t anymore and I don’t think I’ve ever imbibed to the point of inebriation. Being 6’2″, and perptually over 250 pounds whether fat or not makes this rather expensive, so I never did it. Then, I nearly died, and while at hospital was introduce to dilaudid to help with the pain of one of my organs desperately trying to liquefy itself right next to my liver. Add to this, an apparent sensitivity to opiods and someone at the hospital also giving me an anti-anxiety medication to help handle the trauma. Or at least that’s what I assume, because I wasn’t told I was being given the the anxiety meds until, after I was just barely strong enough to get out of bed, I woke up late at night to find the room empty and dark.
My sister was watching me, keeping me company, but she was gone and I was completely out of it when I woke up. It was the older wing of the hospital, only a few years away from being completely turned over to storage, build in the 70’s with an old AC system. The kind you still sometimes see in schools, running along the length of the wall, next to the windows, and it was always susurrating. Throughout my stay, I was aware of this constant, deep hiss coming from the AC. It must’ve reminded me of the engine noise from Star Trek: TNG, because when I woke up that night, the combination of the noise, the darkness, how awful yet unreal I felt had somehow convinced me that I was on a holodeck. If I could just get up, get away from the noise, get to the radiology department waiting room (built in the 90’s, sound dampened, central air) that where I was sleeping would fall away and I’d be in reality again. This didn’t end well for me. The floor nurse had found me and was failing to convince me to get back to bed. A police officer was called, and more nurses came. My sister came, and she failed to calm me down. I’m hazy on the finer details, I remember being touched without wanting to be touched and getting angry, and I had done or said or looked at her in a way to bring up old fears; she left that night and never visited me again.
That’s when the hospital told my father (he was my contact on the form I signed in case I was incapacitated) I was on a psyche med without anyone telling anyone else for over a week. He was furious, I was too ashamed and scared and weak to care. That wouldn’t be the last time I wandered about at night, either, to bad results.
POINT IS, THOUGH, it took a complete loss of control and self to finally hammer home the lie of dualism. It was an ego-shattering, shaming, traumatic night that nearly ripped my family apart that managed to fully convince me that I’m little more than a product of chemistry. So I feel for this guy’s uphill battle when all he can do is talk at intact people.
Dualism just won’t go away. I have yet to hear an argument for free will that doesn’t either explicitly invoke dualism or try to smuggle it in the back door. Think of how much science fiction still invokes it, especially Star Trek. When Captain Picard and others were turned into children by a transporter accident, how come Picard still has an adult mind in his child body?
I’m also reminded of something that I think Dawkins wrote, though it might have been Dennett, or someone else entirely: that our minds evolved to deal with problems involving “medium-size” masses and velocities, so the fact that we find some scientific principles involving the very small (quantum physics) or very large or fast (relativity) should not surprise us.
It continues to surprise me that some people think that our intuitions are a really great guide to solving problems that we have no reason to think we should be well-suited to solve. (Well, unless you’re a theist who believes we were designed to understand the Mind of God or whatever.)
Can you accept that it’s all physics but discount the moral dilemma of determinism that it entails? The Nazi brain is the product of such determinism and therefore could never have been prevented in our universe. An answer could be that the laws of physics are such that another ethical brain is ultimately determined to kill the Nazi brain. But is that the answer to this dilemma? I accept materialism but I have trouble reconciling it to our ethics of justice, equality, etc. Solution?
Ah, ethics. It is all matter of tribalism, to a degree. Who is or should be your tribe? The xenophobic Nazi’s defined it very narrowly. I define it as all humans on the planet.
Most people are somewhere in-between.
At one extreme, the liberurds, the only members of the tribe is them and their male offspring. Females don’t count as people.
At the other extreme, nobody is excluded. I tend toward that extreme.
Determinism falls in the face of education leading to realization, and that affording some degree of control. To be aware of your tendencies means you are more likely to be able to choose to act with or against them.
I do it by asking myself questions and then trying to project possible outcomes versus a desired outcome. I dont do that for everything, just the important bits that could wind up enhancing or retarding suffering.
All that said, I suppose it’s not feasible to expect everyone to do what I try to do, or to understand why I do that. I’m white, male, single, and comfortable. Not everyone has my resources in education and time to stop and ask themselves if their first choice is the correct one. Which brings me to the point at which the dualist misconception as it relates to desicion making can actually be quite bad. … But that’s an entirely different wall o’ text, on a pretty different tangent largely unrelated to dualism as it stands within philosophy, I think.
ragdish@5 “Can you accept that it’s all physics but discount the moral dilemma of determinism that it entails?”
Yeah I think I can. All you have to do is follow the logic to it’s conclusion, and drop the dualistic notion of a separate “self”. If all I do is the result of “external” forces then what does me, and therefore *is* me, is those so called “external” forces. But in turn I am one of the “external” forces that makes *you* do what you do. So the whole thing is free and the illusion of not being “free” is just the product of your irrational belief in a “self” that is somehow separate and apart from all that surrounds you. This is not a mystical notion at all, it simply follows from the physical nature of the universe.
In my opinion. If my logic is wrong, feel free to educate me.
Now if you are not responsible for your actions, say murder, which you claim are caused by external forces, then please don’t complain that I shouldn’t have you executed. After all I am by that logic not responsible for my action of having you executed either.
To ragdish in #5
I suggest my favorite video by Dennett, here:
> A public lecture by Daniel C. Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, entitled “Is Science Showing That We Don’t Have Free Will?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cSgVgrC-6Y
It’s long by most people’s standards, but if you haven’t read or seen any Dennett before, I strongly suggest it. The topic of the long video is precisely your question.
My first suggestion is that you have to abandon this false notion that “choices cannot exist in deterministic systems”. I would argue the opposite: moral choices can only exist in systems that are fully or mostly deterministic. Moral culpability is often extremely reduced by claiming “it’s an accident”. Particularly, moral culpability is extremely reduced without what is known in legal terms as mens rea, commonly known as “intent”. Intention itself can only exist in a fully or mostly deterministic system. In order to have intentions, and in order to be able to act according to one’s intentions, the system must have a strong degree of predictability, e.g. a strong degree of determinism.
We punish people most harshly precisely when their decisions are a deterministic outcome of their intentions, personality, etc., and we lessen punishments, often outright give no punishments at all, for “decisions” are the unintended accidents.
IMHO, once you wrap your head around that, then you just need one more step. We punish people justly for several reasons, and a primary reason is deterrence. We punish people who do certain things with the expectation that other people will see this punishment, and take the possibility that they will be similarly punished into their internal calculations on whether to perform the same illicit action. Again, this sort of moral reasoning only makes sense in a fully or mostly deterministic world. We’re talking about taking certain actions to influence the choices of others which requires the ability to predict to some extent the choices of others.
We also justly punish for rehabilitation, and we justly confine particularly dangerous people to protect the safety of others. Punishment for rehabilitation also only makes sense in terms of determinism, and confinement is similarly compatible with determinism.
Dan Dennett, dueling with dualism daily. Dashing the point of departure for demagogues dramatically with the desire of delicious denouement. Do your darndest, Dan.
“everything in biology is gradual”
Not only in biology.
“I have an equally strong intuition that it is.”
I don’t. It was the gradual (!) realization that dualism adds exactly zilch to our knowledge and understanding that made me accept that the human mind is fully material.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
Really? How so?
Care to try to justify how one can’t have intentionality in a non-deterministic milieu?
More to the point, determinism doesn’t entail predictability, though it does entail predestination.
(Also, “mostly deterministic” is logically equivalent to non-deterministic)
No need to repeat yourself. ;)
What? Yes it does. The standard definition of determinism, Laplace’s demon, is explicitly in terms of predictability: it’s the ability of an observer with full measuring access to reality and unlimited computation power to perfectly predict every future event.
Further, I am aware of no other definition that is even coherent on my post-positivism philosophy, and I find it dubious that there is such a thing. But, please, take a shot. However, odds are that I will complain that it’s incoherent, or that it reduces down to predictability.
If there’s no elements of determinism at all, then there would be no “rule” that says that your actions have anything to do with your intentions. To have your actions be a product of your intentions requires a fully or partially deterministic system. That’s what the words “a product of” mean in this context.
Hell, to even have intentions in a morally meaningful sense requires a strongly deterministic system. With zero elements of determinism, there isn’t even a “rule” that says that your intentions at 5 minutes in the future will have anything to do whatsoever with your intentions at this moment in time. If your intentions are constantly changing at random, then there is no such thing as “premeditated”.
I wrote a long-winded negative response to your phrase “logically equivalent”. But what the heck. Instead (and not actually speaking to your point at all…) I’ve got a nice quotation from the probabilist/mathematical statistician I.J. Good, reviewing a book called The Freedom of the Will. (He didn’t think too much of it.)
Good is using, as has become common, the phrase “Laplace’s demon” to refer to what Laplace himself referred to simply as “An intelligence […] vast enough” (1) to know, at a single instant, “all the forces animating nature, and respective beings that compose it” (i.e., the positions and velocities of every particle in the Newtonian universe), and (2) to use that data as input to Newtonian dynamics, therefore (3) being able to calculate “the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future like the past would be present to its eyes”.
I should respond to this:
Granted. So, what’s your point? My point still remains clear: Moral responsibility only makes sense to the extent that our choices are determined products of our intentions and our ability to predict the future. As you consider actions where the negative consequences are less intended, and less able to be predicted in advance, then moral culpability goes down. As you consider actions where the negative consequences are more intended, and more able to be predicted in advance, then moral culpability goes up.
You object to my usage of the phrases “mostly deterministic” or “elements of determinism” to describe this. I don’t give a fuck.
EnlightenmentLiberal @15:
I think you’re wrong; the standard definition does not depend on the possible existence of an omniscient third party.
It’s about how things are, not how they might conceivably be perceived.
( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ )
So? How does that deny anyone intentionality?
(That one can’t provably act towards one’s desires doesn’t entail one cannot attempt to do so; that attempt is what constitutes intentionality)
@17:
Duh. My point is that when you write “Intention itself can only exist in a fully or mostly deterministic system.”, you’re essentially writing “Intention itself can only exist in a deterministic or non-deterministic system.”
—
leerudolph @16:
21 March 2017 at 10:29 pm
So, no long-winded negative response. OK.
The rest of your comment essentially makes the same claim as does EnlightenmentLiberal, to wit that its definition entails some third party. The same reply therefore applies.
aeon published an appalling article a week or two ago arguing that consciousness disproved materialism using long-debunked quantum magic fallacies. (Which shows how stupid it all was anyway — even if quantum theory explains consciousness, which is highly unlikely, it’s still a materialist theory.) It never ceases to annoy me how stupid, stupid arguments can be recycled endlessly so long as they support some people’s entrenched smug superiority.
Quoting you:
As I foreshadowed, I will now object to that kind of talk as incoherent word-salad nonsense. It’s fruitless – and nonsensical – to talk about the “really real” reality. All we can fruitfully talk about is our perceptions of reality. We don’t have “direct” infallible access to reality. We only have our perceptions. If determinism is going to be a useful concept in any sort of meaning, just like any other discussions that purports to be about shared material (or immaterial) reality, then the discussion have to be framed in terms of our access to it, not in terms of nonsense like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”.
Quoting you:
Ok. What about the other part of my post?
Quoting me:
PS:
Now that I think about it, we could also define the word “determinism” as a modifier on models of reality. For example, Bohmian mechanics is deterministic in the usual sense. However, any discussion about whether reality is deterministic depends our perceptions of it, and necessitates a proper definition in terms of our perception, just like any other scientific discussion.
The map is not the place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
EL @15:
EL @20:
What does Laplace’s demon have to do with our access to reality? John is right: determinism doesn’t mean predictability; it means that any future state of the universe has already been determined, whether we can predict it or not (and we can’t, not even in principle).
BTW, how do you define “strongly deterministic”? Is it just a vague “feeling”, or can you quantify it?
ragdish:
Why would you say that being caused to do whatever you’re going to do (bad as well as good things, as you note) would pose some kind of moral dilemma? What is that supposed to be about? Would you please try to state what you think this moral dilemma is?
Right now, it sounds incoherent. Wouldn’t you need some sort of determinism, in order for anything to be “prevented”? Maybe that sounds counterintuitive, but try to follow me here. I’ll put it differently than EnlightenmentLiberal, but I don’t think our views are too different on this….
If nothing causes a person’s actions, then likewise nothing would be able to prevent them or have any other effect on them. That is, if determinism is false, such that Nazis are utterly free to choose to be horrible people, with nothing physical determining what kinds of choices they will make (because perhaps their immaterial souls do that), then it looks to me like there’s nothing which anybody or anything physical could do about how horrible those Nazis are going to be. Even if those things you might do to prevent it are caused by yet other stuff of some other sort, that is nevertheless what I would mean when I say that something could or could not be prevented. That is, something could logically be done, with the consequence that the preventable thing doesn’t happen, whether or not such possibilities are ever realized, whatever sorts of conditions or processes may be involved in their realization.
To me, it looks like the fact that some other, “external,” non-you stuff causing your behavior can be a very good thing, because it allows for you to be influenced (positively or negatively) by the world around you, including of course other people in the world. Whether those people are more like Hitler or more like MLK is presumably where most of the action is, morally speaking. In any case, your experiences and memories and so forth can in some way or another shape what you’ll do in the future. You can learn things, and you can (at least in principle) become a better person than you already are, because that kind of stuff isn’t an inherent quality that you (or your soul) have which can’t be affected by anything else in the world. Ask yourself: what kind of absurdly nightmarish place would we be living in, if things like that were not true? What if, even in principle, that kind of stuff just can’t happen, because you’re “free” in this totally wacky sense of being uncaused by physical stuff? It’s pretty hard to imagine for me. But if we had libertarian free will, wouldn’t you be able to say we’ve got ourselves some kind of a dilemma, because in that case it’s actually true that literally nothing could prevent us from doing anything good or bad or otherwise? If that’s how it was, then by that hypothesis (and not by the deterministic one), nobody would be motivated to do anything good or anything else for that matter. And even if some started with some kind of good motivation that their souls happened to have, their actions would still not make a difference in terms of preventing the Nazis from doing horrible Nazi shit.
So, if that’s what you would get with libertarian free will, as seems to be the case, why think determinism is offering all of the same shit, except I guess wrapped up in a somewhat more sciencey package? Maybe … just maybe … some people are a bit confused about what is entailed by each those, so you’d probably want to think through it pretty carefully, before you get yourself too worried about what you’ve heard random people claim about one or the other. And if you think you’ve got the story about right for one of them, then it’s probably a good question to ask yourself how (or whether) the alternative would be different.
That’s circular. You realize that, right? What do you mean by “determined”?
PS:
To consciousnessrazor:
Sounds good. As for me, I generally take the position that “libertarian free will” is an incoherent concept. At a logical level, either something could be predicted by a Laplacian Demon, or it couldn’t. We have a word for that second term: “random”. Random choices don’t get one anywhere regarding moral responsibility and choices in the moral sense.
A deterministic system is not necessarily or even most commonly predictable. A. M. Turing, and his proof of the insolubility of The Halting Problem. Q. E. D. (basically a system with reentrancy will suffer a “combinatorial catastrophe” rendering its future state beyond a limited number of steps computationally impossible to evaluate … we’re talking plank grained computational elements filling the universe end to end being insufficient after a dozen or so steps for even a small system … and the (more than) square of that in the next step, and the (more than) square of that in the step after)
A deterministic system is only predetermined to the extent that has been exactly transacted previously.
By elegant tautology, a deterministic system is only pre-determined to the exact extent for which there has been a precise pre-existent transaction of those iterations of states.
Deterministic means that for any specific configuration state, the NEXT state is explitly determinable. The intuitions about this meaning “predetermined” or “predictable” rely on rather quaint and unsupportable assumptions about the granularity and regularity of the real world.
Rob:
You’ve added a premise here, although it’s not clear to me which one it is — the idea that future states are produced by past ones, more or less. I don’t know if that’s just an assumption about the arrow of time, or maybe you have a sort of non-Humean view of physical laws… If laws aren’t things that govern the world (from the outside, as it were) and in particular they’re not things that produce future states out of past states, since they’re just how we can summarize the numerous particular facts efficiently and in a way that’s comprehensible to us… Well, if that’s so, then what content is there supposed to be in the statement that a future state has “already been determined” which is different from “it’s determined”?
If the world’s deterministic, then you can just say that any specific state (in the future or whenever) is associated with some exact set of specific states at other times. That’s not to say that the future is “predestined” by the past, which is about as sensible as saying the past was “postdestined” by everything that came afterward. Sure, you can’t have different future states given a present state, but there also aren’t different histories given that present state … which for some reason doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Indeed, some might be a little worried (or at least confused) by the thought that things they do now could change which actual history they had (as if there were another one!) or which entire universe it is that they’re living in. But for whatever reason, many do seem think there’s a selection of futures to pick from, which maybe is supposed to be different from shopping for a selection of past events that you’d prefer to have read about in your history classes. Maybe I could choose a past (or one could randomly materialize or who knows what) in which Julius Caesar wasn’t assassinated…. I have no idea why I would do that or what that would be like, but for better or worse, it doesn’t seem like that could happen.
You’re misusing the Halting problem. A Laplacian demon could predict the state at any time T, which was all I was claimed. If we want to reduce ourselves to Turing machines, for any Turing machine, it’s trivial to determine the state of the machine after X steps: just run the machine for X steps. It is not part of the definition that a Laplacian demon could predict whether the universe would ever enter a particular configuration (analogous to “halting”). The Halting problem is simply non-sequitir.
However, I grant that there problem in my definition relating to “computing” where the model of the world is not formally and exactly computable, and instead we can only compute approximations. I suppose most people try to handwave this with “unlimited computing power”, and maybe one can argue that this solves the problem, but I am unsure.
Tautologies are useless. Tautoligies are empty, useless, circular. I complained about this reasoning above. I have tried to explain “determinism” and “determined” as in “[an event is] determined” in terms of something that we’re more familiar with, but you are defining it in terms of itself, which is simply a non-definition.
…
To consciousness razor
Thanks for bringing up Hume and causation. I thought about bringing that up myself, because it seemed to fit, but I decided against for the moment. Thanks for bringing it up.
EL The point is that the “metaphysical conceivability” of Laplace’s demon is incompetent. And we’re not talking about the computability of the universe for, but of even quite simple algorithms in the systemically trivial idealized Turing Machine (the perfect deterministic system). THAT’s what yields impossible computability. Real systems, much less the real world are … literally inconceivably … more incomputable. The tautology is that a deterministic system is only predetermined if . it can/has been run previously One which state is not even known obviously cannot.
Sure. I certainly agree with your statement about moral responsibility. But a couple of points:
1) No such demon exists in the real world, and it can be tricky making sense of what nonexistent things could or could not do. Maybe that’s not such a big issue here, but it’s worth considering at any rate. I mean, you could name anything whatsoever, and it is literally and always true that nonexistent things can’t do that. For example, a beautiful superintelligent unicorn can’t look beautiful to you, and it can’t solve any problems intelligently (or unintelligently), because it doesn’t exist. That of course doesn’t imply there’s some kind of generic problem with beauty or intelligence or whatever it may be, and it doesn’t say much at all about those things that this unicorn (or any unicorn) can’t exhibit them, since as I already suggested I could’ve picked practically any other arbitrary things and would’ve gotten the same result through this line of reasoning.
Is the demon’s problem here (if it can’t predict) simply that it can’t be in that sort of world or specifically in our sort of world? Or is it that something indeterministic actually happens in that world, and that’s why it isn’t predicted? It seems like we can distinguish between those fairly well, and we should probably be more interested in the latter, especially if the subject is something like determinism and not the existence of a certain type of agent who would be doing this type of predicting. I would say it makes pefect sense to talk about a deterministic (or indeterministic) world which doesn’t have any agents in it at all, so we don’t need to introduce them into the picture for this.
“Predictability” has to do with the knowledge a person (or whatever) can have. When you put it this way, you’re not saying anything very precise about the predicted thing itself (that is, the actual world), but more about the person predicting it, what they are or are not capable of, how they’d go about knowing whatever they’d know, whether they could be sure, how sure should they be or would they be, etc. In short, epistemic questions are just a very different kettle of fish, and they raise very different types of concerns, than ontological questions. If I ask “what is there” or “what is the world like,” I want other types of information about the world, ones which can’t summarized by saying anything remotely like “a person could predict it.” And if it’s “a hypothetical demon could predict it,” that seems somehow even less informative. I want to hear things more like “it’s a type of rock” or “it’s made of these chemicals” or “this is what happens when you do X,Y,Z with items P and Q.” Those describe things and events and so forth, at some level of detail, with maybe a little bit of explanation about what it is, how it relates to other actual things, how it happens, how it works, and so forth. If it isn’t put in those terms, then it’s not clear what (if anything) you’d be saying about the real world, as opposed to how we relate to it or which methods/theories/etc. we’re using to understand it or whatever else you may feel like saying instead of what there is and how it works.
To Terrence Zellers:
I’m getting confused. It seems that you’re complaining about my appeal to “calculated in principle”, and it also seems that you’re saying that “it’s not calculable even in principle”.
Regarding one of those points: I agree that some mathematical problems are unsolvable. What does that have to do with cranking out the numbers of the rules of physics? The rules of physics are solvable (in principle).
Regarding the problem that it’s not computable in practice: So what? I don’t see your point.
…
To consciousness razor
I just don’t find ontological questions very interesting. Often, I find that such discussions are comparable to the proverbial discussion “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”. Such discussions usually seem to be defined circularly, and thus devoid of value.
Well, it’s getting late for me. But that is what the question is, whether or not you’re very interested in it. The world exists. Some people (maybe not you) want to know stuff about the world; and at the moment in this thread the specific question is whether or not it has a feature called “determinism.” There’s very little evidence at this point to give us much of a handle on that; but in the mean time, we can at least try to sort out what those mean and what they don’t mean. Free will and such doesn’t even sound coherent, as we’ve both said, so bothering with that as a genuine possibility seems like a waste of time. That much is true — but of course it doesn’t follow that all other questions about reality are riddled with the problems that this one particularly incoherent concept happens to possess….. So I would just want to know what alternatives there are, without making any sweeping conclusions like that.
Do you exist? Yes, you do. So do I. Those are ontological questions, which conveniently enough are really fucking easy to answer. Those are not comparable to your question about dancing angels. So I think that horseshit has been well and fully refutated.
Angels don’t exist. To me that seems like a decent and entirely reasonable and extremely efficient place to start. In one fell swoop, that by itself immediately settles questions about how many there are (zero), whether they can dance (no), where they do this activity (nowhere), how much space in those locations they need in order to do it (they can’t do it at all), and so forth. Pretty fucking easy, right? If you’re going to coherently agree (or disagree) with me about any of those, then like it or not you’re engaging with ontology. It doesn’t need to be anything fancier than that, it isn’t anything that should make you feel suspicious. And I don’t think there’s any sense in trying to avoid it somehow or whatever it is you think you can do.
So, I’m not sure what you may find “interesting,” aside from things that are real, but for myself I would generally like to have a thing to be interested in. If there is no such thing, my interest in it is probably going to wane, or anyway (like a fictional character for example) I’ll probably be interested in it for vastly different reasons than I would have if it were real. It occasionally seems helpful to know what those reasons may be like. Are there real things that interest you? I bet there are some, even if it’s only accidental. Is their reality not a valuable question to you — do you mean that sincerely — and if not, then what exactly does happen when you evaluate different questions or topics?
The central paradox is not going to be intuited by whole persons. He’s just typing ‘This is not a sentence’. And they are saying it is. And he is saying it is emergent from its constituent letters. This could go on for a while. Chalmers asks who is illuded? The answer is yes. Two at once is the answer. Look how hopeless humans are at Time. They can’t see it because that is how they see.
Nowadays you can have a look, live as it were, and see it isn’t there. You’re not there – Yes I am. Odd conversation. People take it personally.
#10-EnlightenmentLiberal
Thanks for the Youtube link to Dennett lecture. Will come in handy. Currently dissecting Sam Harris podcast where he and Dennett are at loggerheads over free will and had some previous acrimony. As much as I don’t cotton to Harris on many things especially Moral Landscape I found his short book Free Will quite hard to dispute. Dennett is probably the last hope for volition. He has a timing argument that seemingly counters Libet in his “The Self as a Responding- and Responsible- Artififact” which reminds me of Mel Gibson as trench runner at ironic finale of “Gallipoli”.
Here’s the Harris-Dennett exchange:
https://youtu.be/vFa7vFkVy4g
EnlightenmentLiberal @20:
But I’m not talking about the “really real” reality, I’m talking about the concept of determinism itself and its standard definition, which most emphatically is not what you imagine it to be.
The appeal to epistemic doubt, eh?
Seriously, the concept itself doesn’t require considerations about whether it’s veridical or can be perceived.
Ironically, the only times those are relevant is when (ahem) the talk is about the “really real” reality.
You’re making a claim about predictability, not determinism.
Also, you made a claim about a strongly deterministic system being required, but your justification on the basis of zero determinism failing doesn’t preclude meaningfulness within a weakly deterministic system.
And, even then, I can’t see why intention can’t exist even if there’s no way to achieve what’s intended, useless though it would be.
EL re “calculated in principle”.
Where is “principle” on the periodic table or standard model chart? Don’t recall seeing it.
Nor any to combine things that are in any way to make a beaker full of “principle”. “Principle” is an idea. The point of AMT’s proof is that even simple deterministic systems can be not determinable even in principle for *any* finite computational engine (reasonably sure this has been extended mathematically to countable infinities of resources – KG’s proof underlying AMT’s has, but am not absolutely certain the correspondence has been done).
The idea of “computable in principle” is, in this case false.
Materialism =/= determinism.
Determinism works quite well on inanimate objects like rain drops and rocket ships; we can very accurately calculate their speed and position, given a certain initial state, for example. However, we can hardly predict how people will act in a given situation. Though the classical notion of free will may be naive, I don’t think determinism can accurately describe human behavior either.
Tsk, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin has already been determined. It’s 16 if it’s an ordinary house pin.
(Thanks for the determinism discussion, it’s not that complicated people and adding souls doesn’t solve any apparent problems..)
=8)-DX
Lovely article, by the way. Reads like a eulogy.
EL @24:
It’s not circular, it’s definitional. You know perfectly well what “determined” means. Given a particular slicing of spacetime into spacelike sheets, the state of a particular sheet (let’s call it t=0) uniquely determines the state of a sheet at any positive (or negative, cr) t.
cr @26:
I haven’t added anything; that’s determinism. And yes, it works both ways, past and future.
The wonderful thing about going outside of the physical realm is that there’s no longer a need for mechanisms. Same with calling consciousness a “fundamental ” component of reality. The dualist (or nondualist or idealistic monist or whatever term they’re using) gets to dance around with brute facts. You don’t have to explain how brute facts got to be brute facts, or how they work their magic of performing equally brute actions inherent in their brute nature. It just is; it just does.
The magic even continues: this is supposed to be “deep,” and inquiring about mechanism is supposed to be “shallow.”
I do want to know things about the world. That’s “perception” and “epistemology”. I don’t see where this sort of magical “ontology” fits into it. I don’t need any of this “fancy ontology stuff” to do science.
When I say that a chair exists, what I mean, as opposed to what someone else means, is as follows. When I say that “a chair exists”, it’s a special case of “a physical object exists”. When I say “a physical object exists”, I’m appealing to a shared model of reality, the model of physical objects. When I say that “this particular physical object exists”, I’m communicating particular claims about sensory experience that have been encoded in the language of a shared model of reality. In particular, I’m communicating the claim that they can see it, touch it, etc. I don’t understand what else someone might mean by asserting the existence of some object in reality. Again, it seems pretty clear to me that this other sort of discussion, ontology, is defined circularly, and therefore useless. Discussions about reality have to be grounded in perception to be non-circular and therefore meaningful.
I don’t think that they are. I think that they’re scientific questions.
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Again, I thought the Laplace demon was the standard definition. What do you think is the standard definition? If you’re going to define it in terms of the word “determed”, then please at least define that too.
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No, I really don’t know what you mean by “determined”, except as it might be defined in terms of predictability and computability.
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To Terrence Zellers
You’ve lost me. I’m still pretty sure that you’re tilting at windmills. I’m not claiming that the Laplacian demon can do anything beyond what a hypothetical infinite-tape Turing machine can do in a finite number of steps. I am claiming a sufficiently large Turing machine, a Turing machine so large that any concrete finite-tape implementation would require many more particles than what currently exist in the observable universe, but still a finite number of particles.
Again, at no point does the Laplacian demon have to determine that the “Turing machine of reality” will halt or not. the Halting problem is simply non-sequitir.
Again, the particular equations that seem to govern reality are computable in the formal sense of a computable number, which is something distinct from the formal sense of a computable function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_function
It seems that the laws of reality are computable in the sense of a computable number – in other words it seems that given an exact initial state of the universe scribed on the tape of a Turing machine, the Turing machine can produce a future state of the universe, up to a degree of precision loss (which might be compounded and magnified in particular situations). However, the Turing machine can be configured, via another input parameter if you will, to take more time to do error correcting, in order to lessen the error bars, in a very comparable sense to the formal definition of a computable number.
I do grant that I don’t know if it’s possible to prove offhand (in finite time) that a degree of precision and a particular amount of computation time will be sufficient to run a Turing machine to completion that also happens to produce an answer to physics equations that is accurate to within N decimal places, as per the the formal definition of a computable number. However, it is to this sense that I appeal. Please at least address my arguments. If you wish, we can address this particular concern that the functions of physics may not permit a finite-time proof that a particular Turing machine can compute any physical system so that the final state has a accuracy a configurable required number of decimal places. I don’t actually have an answered prepared offhand. You have me thinking.
Computability is my area of expertise. Please do us both a favor, and take me seriously.
Alternatively, I will grant that I can understand it in terms of what I might call “hypercomputability”: In particular, I can see someone defining the word “determined” so that there is a set of mathematical equations, and the claim is that there is a single, unique, exact solution to those equations, but also the claim that the solution is not computable. I think I can work with that definition of “determined” and “determinism”.
I don’t know if that helps move the conversation along. I’m trying to be helpful here.
EnlightenmentLiberal @42:
The one you can find by Googling works fine.
I provided a link in #18, but essentially, what Rob wrote above.
Laplace’s demon was a thought experiment illustrating the concept of causal determinism, not its definition.
(It was proposed during the era of classical physics — the clockwork universe)
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But this is a digression; my point all along is that you should not equivocate between predictability and determinism.
To John Morales
I don’t see a proper definition. I see a circular definition. I am still no closer to understanding what you’re talking about.
I did a quick google. Merriam-Webster online defines “determinism” in terms of “determined”, and their definition of “determined” simply leaves me confused. It lists example usages, but it doesn’t clearly define it for our purposes here.
So, then I went straight to the Stanford online philosophy encyclopedia:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#Int
There’s quite a few obvious philosophical mistakes in there, which is surprising. Usually the Stanford online philosophy encyclopedia is pretty good. It’s also quite longwinded in finally reaching a goddamned point; it takes forever to even try to give a proper definition of “determinism” and “determined”.
The Stanford page make the common mistake regarding the distinction of natural law vs “supernatural” law. In particular, it makes the common mistake pointed out by Boudry et al. here:
> How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism
> (final draft – to appear in Foundations of Science)
> Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, Johan Braeckman
https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/teksten-1/methodological-naturalism
In other words, the Stanford page assumes that there’s a logically coherent class of things called “supernatural law” that is somehow immune to normal scientific thinking, but that’s just wrong. There is no such thing.
The Stanford page also seems to take as given that compatibilism is false, which is wrong. Funny that we’re also discussing Dennett, one of this era’s champions of compatibilism.
It finally reaches some sort of reasonable definition with this quote:
I already consented to this definition above. It’s quite reasonable, and it’s probably the approach that I would take. The question then becomes defining “determinism” and “determined” for models of reality, or natural laws. Well, I already gave one such possible definition: The natural laws lead to a “natural” and obvious computable scheme that takes as input a description of the current time T0 and which gives as output a description of some next time T2. I even offered a more extensive version of this that drops computability for the mere requirement that there is a single unique solution to the mathematical equations at time T2, even if such an answer is incomputable.
It continues on for a while more, and it finally reaches a proper definition, which repeats more or less exactly what I’ve already said here:
It doesn’t require computability nor predictability in any practical sense (or even “in principle” sense for any hypothetical creature), but it does require that reality is fully described by a set of mathematical equations which, when given a particular full description of the universe at some time T0, permits exactly one single unambiguous unique solution to the equations for each other time Tn, even if those solutions are not formally computable in any sense.
So, it seems that I have the Stanford online philosophy encyclopedia on my side (which isn’t the best ringing endorsement, considering the basic mistakes that it makes on the same page on some related topics – details above).
In particular, it takes the approach that I suggested earlier, which is that reality is deterministic iff a fully accurate model of reality is deterministic, and then it defines what it means for a model of reality to be deterministic. Again: the map is not the place.
So, is there any remaining disagreement? I presume that there’s some remaining disagreement.
EnlightenmentLiberal, you’ve certainly demonstrated your degree of philosophical expertise and your reasoning acumen.
After the discussion here (not just between us), do you stand by “In order to have intentions, and in order to be able to act according to one’s intentions, the system must have a strong degree of predictability, e.g. a strong degree of determinism.”?
EL:
Here’s what I said to Rob above. You weren’t arguing with it then, so maybe it will suffice now:
But I’d say “associated with” isn’t very helpful. Given a state and the correct dynamical laws, then if the world is deterministic, there is only one sequence of other states before/after it which are a consequence of the evolution of those dynamics (and nothing other than that). That description of the world can be made as clear and as mathematically rigorous as you like, but hopefully that’s good enough to clarify what in fact it is and is not describing.
Notice that nobody needs to predict a fucking thing here, nor does there even need to be anybody who might attempt to predict a fucking thing. It’s not too hard to think of a universe with no people, and that universe could be deterministic or indeterministic, just as well as one like ours which does happen to have people. There are only those states, forming a linear sort of pattern as opposed to some other sort of pattern. That’s it.
Did you jam people into this picture, when you said they have “models” and for some obscure reason we’re supposed to be talking about those instead? Yeah, you did. What exactly makes you think there’s any need to do that? This is not about what people can know or predict or how they model/represent the world, nor is it about anything else people can/would/should do or any other features they may or may not have. It’s just plain not about people or their activities, and it is instead about the whole world.
That is after all what’s being described as “deterministic,” so you’d better at least start by giving some kind of description of it, and if you feel like you ought to address some of the niceties of your peculiar brand of positivism then that can come in time. What won’t work very well is if you never get around to describing it in any coherent way, because you’ve got some kind of prior commitment to only describing things other than that.
To John Morales
I still think yes, qualified. Determinism doesn’t require predictability of any kind. However, any sort of morally interesting intentionality requires strong degrees of predictability.
For example, in order to have intentions in a morally relevant sense, one must have some ability to execute plans that have some reasonable chance to achieve defined goals. Someone could have intentions with zero ability to properly predict any future event, but that’s not a very interesting case.
Also, in order to talk about meaningful intentions, one needs a mind, and minds cannot exist without at least some basic laws that guarantee relative stability of the mind. If the mind is radically changing to a completely new and random mental state every nanosecond, then I think that it’s not particularly reasonable to talk about intentionality of such a chaotic mess; I don’t think it’s even meaningful to describe such a chaotic mess as a mind in any usual sense. This basic requirement of some stability in the evolution through time entails some element of predictability; intentions have to survive longer than a nanosecond and be somewhat stable through time evolution in order to even have a mind at all.
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To consciousness razor
A universe could be deterministic without observers. Agreed.
Also, as I already admitted, I also grant that my earlier definition was hasty and in error, and a reasonable definition of determinism is: If the world is deterministic, then there is a fully accurate mathematical model of reality so that given a description at time T0 (aka a solution at T0), there is a single unique solution to the equations for each time Tn (aka a full and complete and exact description of the universe at time Tn).
Also, still, the only workable definition of “determinism” that I see which can be applied to reality must be defined by proxy in this way. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see it yet. I again note that this is how the online Stanford philosophy encyclopedia defines “determinism” as well.
Also, as soon as you can describe to me what you mean by “exist” in reference to the existence of physical objects in reality, without referring to the perceptional implications that existence entails, then I’ll be interested. My philosophical position is that such a thing is impossible, and the belief content, the meaning, of our knowledge and beliefs of the existence of physical objects in inalienably rooted in the perceptional implications of existence (and any relevant models that give further perceptional implications to existence claims). Otherwise, it’s like math: Defining new things into existence by fiat, where there is no way to define what “existence” means in terms of something that I’m more familiar with.
EnlightenmentLiberal @48, that’s a much more cogent expression of your position, and it vitiates my original criticism. Nice.
Thanks.
EL:
Why would I do that? I’m not claiming that any physical things don’t correspond to empirical evidence of one sort or another. We can find things in our experience corresponding to stuff in the world, and we find it natural to refer to them with English words, etc., and therefore……. what?
Am I somehow unreasonable because I don’t just want to know — full stop, whatever the fuck that would be like — but instead want to know about things? I’m pretty sure I do have good reasons for wanting that, but perhaps you could explain why they’re not so good.
Here’s a question: what is there? Is it true that predictions or models or methods or whatever are about anything? Or is that a bad thought? What you seem to be telling me is that we shouldn’t think certain bad thoughts like that (never a good position to be in). The justification for it, as far as I can tell, is that whenever there is a physical thing, then we can have evidence for it. So somehow that means we can dispense with the things, whatever they are. Or for some reason, I’m supposed to think that’s some kind of a problem for the view that an existence claim (or the concept of one) isn’t meaningless noise.
Maybe you could try to explain how that argument is supposed to work, because I certainly can’t make sense of it. Perhaps give a coherent example of you claiming that you have “evidence for….” without finishing that thought. Would that be meaningful? Could it be? You would apparently do that because you just refuse on principle (although who knows what the fuck that principle would be) to make substantive claims about actual stuff. Somehow or another that’s just the intellectually responsible thing to do, or whatever the fuck it is that you think you get out of taking a position like this. Maybe it’s better if you try to explain some of that, because it definitely isn’t clear to me.
If you’re like other people I’ve known over the years, what you really want is just to make an escape route for yourself, so you don’t risk saying anything that might turn out to be wrong. Anyway, there are worse things than being wrong, as scary as it may seem. It can be a good learning experience. But are there things to learn? I don’t know, maybe that’s a bad thought too. Speaking of which, how do you determine which ones are the good ones and bad ones? Is that process like anything else I’d be familiar with?
They’re about the perceptible aspects of shared reality, whatever that shared reality may happen to be.
This is one way that I solve the “brain in a vat” problem. Doesn’t matter if I’m a brain in a vat. My hunger is still very real, and I will still need to take the same sort of actions to acquire food – which may be “really real” or just simulated – in order to sate my very real hunger.
That is why I do not accept your kind of talk about reality.
PS:
Of course, I still need to dismiss Last Thursdayism and solipsism through some other means.