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.”
lisper
Karma: 269
Matthew 25:46
Yeah, that’s a better example.
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.
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.
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 they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing.
Sure, and so are everyone else’s.
my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
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 sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
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.
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
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 are two you’s, you1 and you2. The outcome that you1 do experience is the only outcome you1 can experience, and the outcome you2 do experience is the only outcome you2 can experience. This remains true (I believe) even if one of those experiences is the null experience of having your consciousness enter the cosmic void.
Reasonable people could disagree, I suppose. We can never know what the null experience “feels like” because by definition it doesn’t feel like anything. Personally, I find even the possibility that this argument could be correct to be sufficient reason for me to avoid playing quantum roulette. But everyone needs to choose their own risk posture.
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?
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.
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.
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 making. But as I keep saying, it’s ultimately a matter of personal preference.
The problem with quantum roulette is that it takes a prediction made from a God’s-eye-view and tries to apply it in a mortal’s-eye-view context. Yes, God will be able to see that there is a you that survived the process and went on to live the life of Riley. But whether or not you will be able to see that is a very open question. (God will also be able to see a lot of branches of the multiverse containing your friends and loved ones mourning your untimely death.)
Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. Trying to play by slitting your wrists, for example, doesn’t work because once you see that your wrists are slit you can’t roll that back. So the success of the enterprise depends entirely on killing yourself fast enough that you don’t become aware of your imminent and (in the relevant branches of the multiverse) unavoidable death. How fast is fast enough? Well, that is (literally!) the sixty-four-million-dollar question. Unless you have an answer that you are very confident is the correct one, it seems to me like an imprudent risk to take.
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 from entanglement.
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 to take the latter perspective because it’s the-latter-kind-of-you that is making the decisions and has to live with the consequences.
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 counter clicks (or fails to click) or every time you perceive a light or dark pixel on the screen. But you will only ever experience being one of those you’s. Yes, all those other you’s do exist, but the you that you perceive yourself to be can never interact with any of them, so they may as well not exist for the one you that you perceive yourself to be. And so the one you that you perceive yourself to be may as well live your life as if all those other you’s didn’t exist even though they really do.
(NOTE: there is really no such thing as “now”, and you don’t even have to go quantum to see that. Simultaneity gets tossed out the window with special relativity. There is my “now” and there is your “now” and they will not, in general, be the same.)
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 circumstances happen to be very common, which is why Copenhagen is not completely useless, but nowadays it is common to do experiments under which the Copenhagen approximation conditions do not apply. Multiple-worlds is mathematically tenable, but it has some very serious problems as an explanatory theory and it makes predictions that even its adherents seem unwilling to accept.
Personally, I find the rhetoric of QIT/relational-QM/Ithaca to be far less taxing on my intuition than multiple-worlds. These interpretations acknowledge that classical reality is a slice of the wave function, that there are many different ways to slice up the wave function to obtain a classical reality, and therefore there are many potential classical realities. But there is one classical reality that is privileged to me because it happens to be the one that I’m living in, which is to say, it’s the reality that is mutually entangled (and therefore classically correlated) with the massively-mutually-entangled system that is me. In an absolute sense I am no more or less real than all the other potential mes that you get by slicing up the wave function in different ways, but I don’t care about that except in the abstract. Day-to-day, what matters to me—this me, the one that is writing these words—is what is correlated with (this) me.
The cool thing about this is that if you are reading these words—the ones written by this me—then you are entangled with me and therefore classically correlated with me and therefore we are both emerging from the same slice of the wave function, and so the exact same argument applies to you: both of us can proceed on the assumption that our classical reality is the One True Classical Reality even though we can both understand in the abstract that this isn’t really true, and that by doing the right kinds of quantum experiments we can actually demonstrate to ourselves that it isn’t really true. For me personally, that makes QIT the best approximation to use because it’s the one that applies in the greatest variety of circumstances and has the fewest conceptual problems. But it’s ultimately a matter of personal preference.
(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) special case (two macroscopic systems mutually entangled with each other), but weak measurements are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the conditions of that special case. When you go beyond the conditions of the common special case you can’t keep using the rhetoric and intuitions that apply only to the special case and hope to come up with the right answer.
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 you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
If it’s intended to find the answer
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn’t make your argument any less bogus.
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!)
Galilean Universe
Sorry, my bad. I meant it in the sense of Galilean relativity (a.k.a. Newtonian relativity, though Galileo actually thought of it first) where time rather than the speed of light is the same for all observers.
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 seconds in advance seems like pretty strong evidence to me. But I suppose reasonable people could disagree about this. In any case, I didn’t say there was strong evidence, I just said there was some evidence.
So, do you believe that consciousness is a real thing?
That depends a little on what you mean by “a real thing.” Free will and consciousness are both real subjective experiences, but neither one is objectively real. Their natures are very similar. I might even go so far as to say that they are the same phenomenon. I recommend reading this book if you really want to understand it.
And, can a Turing machine be conscious?
Yes, of course. You would have to be a dualist to believe otherwise.
If so, how are we to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not?
That’s very tricky. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that our current methods of determining consciousness produce a lot of false negatives. But if a computer that could pass the Turing test told me it was conscious, and could describe for me what it’s like to be a conscious computer, I’d be inclined to believe it.
I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information?
It’s not that deep. It just means that your perception of reality is different from actual reality in some pretty fundamental ways. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but it doesn’t. The chair you’re sitting on seems like a solid object, but it isn’t. “Up” always feels like it’s the same direction, but it’s not. And you feel like you have free will, but you don’t. :-)
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.