lisper

Karma: 269

lisper Feb 27, 2016, 8:59 AM
0 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

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! ;-)

lisper Feb 27, 2016, 8:57 AM
2 points
in reply to: Drahflow’s comment on: The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory
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.

lisper Feb 27, 2016, 3:17 AM
5 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Go see Ex Machina
Hm, I searched for “ex machina” on the LW site search before I posted this and got no results.

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 8:03 PM
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

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, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decisions that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account “free will”?

a model might predict much better than it explains

This is a very deep topic that is treated extensively in David Deutsch’s book, “The Beginning of Infinity” (also “The Fabric of Reality”, particularly chapter 7). If you want to go down that rabbit hole you need to read at least Chapter 7 of TFOR first, otherwise I’ll have to recapitulate Deutsch’s argument. The bottom line is that there is good reason to believe that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are not possible.

If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.

Sure. Do you distinguish between “will” and “desire”?

the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.

Really? What are they?

Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn’t freely refuse the bribe?

Yes.

Is it maximally free?

Yes, which is to say, not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.

The only difference between the two cases is in your awareness of the mechanism behind the decision-making process. In the first case, the mechanism that caused you to choose to refuse the bribe is inside your brain and not accessible to your conscious self. In the second case, (at least part of) the mechanism that causes you to make the choice is more easily accessible to your conscious self. But this is a thin reed because the inaccessibility of your internal decision making process is (almost certainly) a technological limitation, not a fundamental difference between the two cases.
What links here?
- gjm's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by lisper (Feb 27, 2016, 11:48 PM; 0 points)

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 5:36 PM
0 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

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 bite a kitten’s tail?

No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?

(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)

Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?

Delegation?

Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?

Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel

How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.

Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:

“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?

Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.

Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.

the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do

I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.

why they can’t be colinear.

Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you’ve lost.

I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things

See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.

Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.

But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 4:36 PM
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
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).

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 6:56 AM
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory
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.

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 2:01 AM
0 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

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

Here you go.

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory

lisperFeb 26, 2016, 2:00 AM

9 points

55 comments3 min readLW link

lisper Feb 26, 2016, 1:47 AM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

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 regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X’s preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.

OK, that’s not entirely unreasonable, but on that definition no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent’s desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.

One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren’t necessarily any easier to define clearly than “free will” itself.

Indeed.

I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will!

OK, then you’re intuitive definition of “free will” is very different from mine. I would not say that a chess playing computer has free will, at least not given current chess-playing technology. On my view of free will, a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn’t want to play chess any more.

It sounds as if you’re proposing something like “not being reliably predictable”, but surely that won’t do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will?

I’d say that not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right:

‘free will’ isn’t a binary thing; it’s a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that ‘entropy’ and ‘free will’ are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 10:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: g_pepper’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

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.

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 10:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. But compatibilists don’t agree with that. They think that there is such a thing as free will in some absolute sense, and that this thing is “compatible” (hence the name) with determinacy/reliable predictability.

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 8:33 PM
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
What can I say? The compatibilists are wrong. The proof is simple: either all reliably predictable agents have free will, or some do and some don’t. If they all do, then a rock has free will and we will just have to agree to disagree about that (some people actually do take that position). If some do and some don’t, then in order for the term “free will” to have meaning you need a criterion by which to distinguish reliably predictable agents with free will from those without it. No one has ever come up with such a criterion (AFAIK).

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 7:49 PM
2 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?

Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.

The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”

As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit.

Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.

He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit,

But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.

And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.

Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?

And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.

Any designed object is either...

Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.

could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer

Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?

we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs

No, we can’t.

Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.

I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.

The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me … that there are no free variables in any observation

No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.

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

Will do. (UPDATE: the article is here )

it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit

Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.

Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.

Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.

Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?

The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.

Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.

I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though.

There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these “dimensions” a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That’s a vector space.

The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?

(BTW, the author of “31 flavors” is me.)
What links here?
- lisper's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by lisper (Feb 25, 2016, 4:50 PM; 0 points)

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 7:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Doh! Thanks for the heads-up.

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 4:50 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
This comment has been moved here

lisper Feb 25, 2016, 3:45 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
The reason “could” is tricky is that whether or not something “could” happen (or could have happened) is usually reckoned relative to some state of knowledge. If you flip a coin but keep your hand over it so that you can see how it landed but I can’t then from my perspective it could be either heads or tails but from yours it can’t.

To assess free will you have to take the perspective of some hypothetical agent that has all of the knowledge that is potentially available. If such an agent can predict your actions then you cannot have free will because, as I pointed out before, your actions are determined by factors that are accessible to this hypothetical agent but not to you. Such agents do not exists in our world so we can still argue about it, but in a hypothetical world where we postulate the existence of such an agent (i.e. a world with time travel in to the past without the possibility of changing the past, or a world with a Newcomb-style intelligent alien) the argument is settled: such an agent exists, you are reliably predictable, and you cannot have free will. (This, by the way, is the resolution of Newcomb’s paradox: you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb’s paradox) evidence against it.)

lisper Feb 24, 2016, 6:12 PM
2 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

I tend to think of “wisdom” and “smartness” as somewhat but not entirely correlated

Well, they are. Maybe “mental faculties” would be a better translation. But it’s neither here nor there.

the ignorant man is still being punished

That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.

education is still important to reduce sin

Indeed. But God didn’t provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.

then there’s the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait

Huh? I don’t understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity “cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate”. I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can’t.

In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can’t do; that’s kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can’t do.

I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me.

Actually, that’s not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that’s a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you’ve travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)

[if] someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.

Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you’re predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.

Just because I could choose something else doesn’t mean that I will choose something else.

But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That’s what it means to be reliably predictable.

but nowhere is it explained what that means

Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I’ll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I’ll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)

the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist

Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).

that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion

Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?

the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.

Well, yeah, at root I’m not doing it deliberately. What I’m doing (when I do it—I don’t always, it’s hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I’m doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.

[1] For example, I’m not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I’m slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.

a vector space?

Yes. Did you read “31 flavors of ontology”?

lisper 23 Feb 2016 23:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

Since the context of the discussion involved quotes from Torah/Bible, I thought it was apparent.

It isn’t apparent. Genesis is part of three different religious traditions with radically different theologies. For example, there’s a rich tradition in Judaism of arguing with God, and even winning sometimes (e.g. Exo32:9-14), something which would be unthinkable in Christianity or Islam.

Humans are not Turing machines.

The software processes running on human brains can, as far as anyone can tell, be modeled by a Turing machine, so if a TM can’t do it, neither can a human, and hence neither can any fictional character a human can describe.

I still don’t see it as particularly profound

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that.

lisper 23 Feb 2016 21:58 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

so discussing His attributes is no better than debating patterns on wings of fairies

I disagree. People can (and do) have interesting and constrained discussions and even debates about fictional characters all the time.

Another position is to add an implicit “conditional on God being real” to statements.

OK, but that begs the question of which god (lower-case g) you’re conditioning on. This was actually the mode I was arguing in when I cited the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the carob tree.

Fictional characters are subject to fictional laws of physics in the fictional worlds the authors create.

That too, but they are also subject to constraints imposed by the theory of computation on their authors (at least so long as their authors are Turing machines). That actually rules out omnipotent gods even in fiction. Simply saying that something is omnipotent doesn’t make it omnipotent even in a fictional world.

But that’s a trivial observation

It might be a trivial observation, but it has very profound consequences that are not immediately apparent. Specifically, there’s a positive feedback loop where certain beliefs produce effects which provide evidence that support those beliefs. Such beliefs can become self-sustaining even in cases where the beliefs themselves are objectively false. But because they are self-sustaining, they can be very hard to dislodge.

Ironically, an example of such a self-sustaining but objectively false belief is the belief that rationalism will win the battle of ideas, or even that it’s a better way to live your life, simply because, well, it’s rational. (I’m not saying you believe this, but many people do.)

lisper

The Philo­soph­i­cal Im­pli­ca­tions of Quan­tum In­for­ma­tion Theory

The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory