Free will
in [Lisp]
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From: RG on 27 May 2010 21:51 In article <1jj61bh.l06zl31wp0ryN%wrf3(a)stablecross.com>, wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote: > RG <rNOSPAMon(a)flownet.com> wrote: > > > In article <1jj5ywl.1m4nlfb1bs3my6N%wrf3(a)stablecross.com>, > > wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote: > > > > > Bob Felts <wrf3(a)stablecross.com> wrote: > > > > > > > RG <rNOSPAMon(a)flownet.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > > In article <1jj5o1o.zxe1og1o73kdaN%wrf3(a)stablecross.com>, > > > > > wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > What provides that creative spark and (apparently limitless) state > > > > > > space? What determines what you imagine? > > > > > > > > > > It is instructive here to do some math. > > > > > > > > How many bits does it take you to imagine a google (10^100)? > > > > How many bits does it take you to imagine a naked Douglas Adams, painted > > > > blue, riding a pink unicorn on a tightrope? > > > > > > > > How many bits do illusions need for things, anyway? > > > > > > To add a bit of levity, after I wrote this I remembered this old joke: > > > > > > Bob and Ron decide to prove their manhood by naming the biggest number > > > they can imagine. Ron goes first and thinks and thinks and thinks. > > > After about three hours, sweat starts streaming off his forehead. > > > Finally, with much effort, he announces 3. > > > > > > To which Bob replies, "You win!" > > > > > > More seriously, http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html, > > > shows that there are numbers that we can imagine that aren't computable. > > > So Ron's question isn't appropriate. > > > > Wow, you have so completely missed the point. Did you actually do the > > exercise? The point is not that the number you end up with is huge. > > I really want to spend some time working on my reply to Don. So why > don't you just make your point? Because some things cannot be learned except by discovering them for yourself. rg
From: Don Geddis on 27 May 2010 22:16 wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote on Thu, 27 May 2010: > Don Geddis <don(a)geddis.org> wrote: >> Or, by analogy: you can keep patching epicycles upon epicycles in an >> attempt to save your favorite theory, but at some point you need to >> realize that planets probably just orbit in ellipses, not circles. > > But ellipses are not circles and observation can show the difference > between ellipses and circles. Do you not know what an epicycle is? Are you unfamiliar with the transition in astronomy between the old Ptolemaic system of circular orbits centered on the earth, vs. the Copernician revolution of orbits centered on the sun, and then Kepler's transition to ellipses? The important part of the story, which seems to have escaped you, is that the predictions of the various theories all had about the same amount of accuracy. It was not observation (at the time) which distinguished the theories. In particular, "epicycle" (which I mentioned originally) does NOT mean "just one circle". It means "circles within circles". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle Turns out, if you add enough circles, you can get very accurate predictions. Or, you can just use a single ellipse. So you missed the whole moral of my example. Which is that, sometimes, experimental data is not sufficient to distinguish between two theories. Nonetheless, science does not come to a halt in those cases. There are still other methods for ranking theories, besides just data. > I may be totally befuddled, but I thought he said that there were > possible experiments, that just couldn't be performed at that time, > but the state of the art was advancing rapidly enough that it > shouldn't have been to much longer. Quantum wave functions clearly don't collapse at the level of individual particles. Wave functions appear to have collapsed (but it's an illusion!) at the level of humans. "Somewhere" in that enormous range, suggest collapse fans, the collapse occurs. A few decades ago, people suggested that maybe by the time you get up to the sizes of atoms or molecules, quantum superposition no longer happens and you get collapse. These are very difficult experiments to run. Nonetheless, physicists have recently demonstrated superposition at molecule sizes. Do the collapse fans look at this data, and say, "by gosh, we were wrong! Multiple Worlds is right, and Collapse has been overturned!" No, of course not. They merely modify their ad hoc theory, and now say, "well I guess superposition collapses at scales larger than molecules. Maybe ... an order of magnitude larger?" Wave function collapse is completely unmotivated, unsupported by experiment, and basically unfalsifiable. Every data point can be accommodated by carefully modifying the claims of the collapse interpretation. It's a horrible, horrible "scientific" theory. (Its only virtue is: a few decades ago, quantum physicists couldn't think of anything better.) > Without experiments, it's not science -- it's philosophy. And usually > bad philosophy at that (e.g. dependence on Occam's Razor, which ends up > depending on our notions of good and evil). What does Occam's Razor have to do with good and evil? They seem totally orthogonal to me. >> > I never said that intelligence was a simple binary property. Are you >> > intelligent? Is Ron? >> Are those yes-or-no questions? > > For you and Ron, I would have thought yes. > You're the fourth person I've asked this question, and I'm 4 for 4 on > not getting an answer. > (http://stablecross.com/files/category-dialogs.html) > This is just absolutely fascinating. One would think that you wouldn't > hesitate a bit in answering "yes" to the question "are you > intelligent?" Well, aside from the obvious fact that you're trying to trick me and play "gotcha!", I don't have a problem at all. Yes, Ron and I are intelligent. But you missed the whole point of my response. It wasn't at all reluctance to answer the question. Do you see what you yourself wrote? "I never said intelligence was a simple binary property. Are you intelligent?" Does the contradiction not leap out at you? You are asking the very binary question that you claimed you never say. In two sentences, you disprove your own claims! THAT'S what my "yes-or-no" question was commenting on, but it appears that you completely missed the implication. >> > At some level, intelligence includes the ability to refuse to submit >> > to experiments. I look forward to see how science deals with that. >> Observation in the wild, natural experiments, etc etc etc. > So if you were going to answer the question "are you, Don Geddis, > intelligent" what observations or natual experiments or etc. etc. etc. > would you use? I would observe problem solving in novel situations. Watch the entity fail to solve some goal it has originally, then watch it learn over time and get better and better at solving the problem in similar situations. >> (E.g., how does macroeconomics test their theories? National economies >> also "refuse to submit to experiments".) > National economies don't have free will. True, but you again missed the point completely. Macroeconomics is a reply to your confusion about "how can science deal with an intelligence that refuses to submit to experiments". National economies also refuse to submit to experiments, but macroeconomics is an example of a science that does just fine with that topic. By analogy, having an intelligence that refuses to submit to experiments is not an absolute barrier to investigation by science. > 1) There is some true knowledge which is inaccessible to science, or No. > 2) Science doesn't have a good handle on either a scientific definition > of and/or scientific tests for intelligence. Well, that part may well be true. Science is just a frontier, of our current understanding. There's lots of true stuff that science doesn't (yet) have a good handle on. But there's a huge difference between the conditional fact that science has not yet explored some topic, and your universal claims that the topic is beyond any possible future science. -- Don _______________________________________________________________________________ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org The Meaning Of Life: The reason that we're all here is that it was too crowded where we were supposed to go. -- Steven Wright
From: Don Geddis on 27 May 2010 23:08 wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote on Thu, 27 May 2010: > What provides that creative spark and (apparently limitless) state > space? What determines what you imagine? We don't fully understand the algorithm, for sure. But making up answers doesn't get you closer to the truth either. Most of imagination is simple extrapolation from things that are already known. You make a submarine, you learn about space, you wonder what would happen if you put the two together ... aha, a spaceship! You watch trains chug and ships sail, you see birds flying, and you wonder if there could be a version of a train or ship that flys like a bird .... aha, airplanes! This isn't randomness. This is much more like looking at some sparse process in the world: INPUT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...goes to... OUTPUT 2 4 6 - 10 12 14 - 18 20 and saying, hey! I notice that 4 and 8 are missing from the table. I wonder what to expect in a possible, not-real world where 4 and 8 were inputs to the process. Maybe ... 8 and 16, respectively? It's deduction and induction -- deterministic processes -- not randomness. Now, in the full complexity of marvelous human thought, of course there is lots going on that we don't yet understand. (Otherwise, AI would be done already!) But there's no reason to suppose that the remainder is qualitatively different from the stuff we do understand. >> > _Why_ don't you consider randomness free will? >> Because there's no sense of choice or responsibility with randomness, >> which intuitively seems like a criticial component of what people mean >> when they use the term "free will". > But there's likewise no sense of choice or responsibility with > determinism. Says you, over and over again. And each time, I need to correct you that this is not at all true. A deterministic decision process can perfectly well be correctly characterized as making choices and having responsibility. In any case, EVEN IF you don't believe me about deterministic decisions, you still never answered the original question. Why do you think that randomness has anything at all to do with choice or responsibility? -- Don _______________________________________________________________________________ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org "Why do bad things happen to good people?" "God loves you. Unfortunately, the alien overlords who put you on this planet are using you to test cosmetics." -- Dogbert (Scott Adams, "Dilbert")
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 28 May 2010 09:02 On 2010-05-27 09:38:57 -0400, His kennyness said: > (no way exists to determine the choice without waiting for them to make it) The whole point of the experiment pointed to is that the experimenters *could* determine what choice was going to be made before the person felt they were making it. Again, it is (as you point out) trivial to point out that a choice is *being made* (note passive voice!). But that which we naively assume to be making the choice, our witness conscious awareness, is *not* the thing making the choice. two related points: 1. a chain of deterministic physical events *does not* equal the sort of thing traditionally considered free will in western philosophy and theology. 2. unconscious processes that precede and predict our subjective experience of choosing, often by several seconds, give the lie to our subjective experience of choosing. warmest regards, Ralph -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 28 May 2010 09:04
On 2010-05-27 11:41:55 -0400, Pascal Costanza said: > There is also the possibility that free will is an emergent property, > where it doesn't matter whether there is determinism in the university > or not, or whether there are extra-physical causes or not. Absolutely, but: 1. The burden of proof for such an emergent free will would be on those who claim its existence. 2. That still doesn't rescue our *subjective* experience of choice from experiments that can predict our choices before we feel that we make them. If we do have an emergent free will, it operates *before* we think it does, and is therefore, something distinct from what we subjectively feel to be our choosing (unless one of its emergent properties is time travel of course). My whole point here is simply this: a. the experimental evidence gives the lie to our subjective experience of choice. b. the simplest explanation of the experimental evidence is that our experience of free will is a perceptual illusion like many other documented perceptual illusions. c. making other arguments for free will as yet unsupported by experimental evidence (quantum indeterminism, emergent properties, etc.) is special pleading. Science doesn't operate by special pleading, but by taking the best explanation for existing evidence. Right now, that best explanation is that our subjective perception of choosing is a perceptual illusion. warmest regards, Ralph -- Raffael Cavallaro |