Is the AI sky falling? Well so it seems in April 2023.
Or… why clever guys offer simplistic answers to AI quandaries.
Where should you go to make sense of the wave…. or waiv… of disturbing news about Artificial Intelligence? It may surprise you that I recommend starting with a couple of guys I intensely criticize, below. But important insights arise by dissecting one of the best… and worst… TED-style talks about this topic, performed by the “Social Dilemma” guys — Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris -- who explain much about the latest “double exponential” acceleration of multi-modal symbol correlation systems that are so much in the news, of which Chat GPT is only the foamy waiv surface… or tsunamai-crest.
Riffing off their “Social Dilemma” success, Harris and Raskin call this crisis the “AI Dilemma.” And to be clear, these fellows are very knowledgeable and sharp. Where their presentation is good, it's excellent!
Alas, Keep your salt-shaker handy. Where it’s bad it is so awful that I fear they multiply the very same existential dangers that they warn about. Prepare to apply many grains of sodium chloride.
(To be clear, I admire Aza’s primary endeavor, the Earth Species Project for enhancing human animal communications, something I have been ‘into” since the seventies.)
== A mix of light and obstinate opacity ==
First, good news. Their explanatory view of “gollems” or GLLMMs is terrific, up to a point, especially showing how these large language modeling (LLM) programs are now omnivorously correlative and generative across all senses and all media. The programs are doing this by ingesting prodigious data sets under simple output imperatives, crossing from realms of mere language to image-parsing/manipulation, all the way to IDing individuals by interpreting ambient radar-like reflections in a room, or signals detected in our brains.
Extrapolating a wee bit ahead, these guys point to dangerous failure modes, many of them exactly ones that I dissected 26 years ago, in my chapter “The End of Photography As Proof of Anything at All.” (In 1997’s The Transparent Society).
Thus far, ‘the AI Dilemma’ is a vivid tour of many vexations we face while this crisis surges ahead, as of April 2023. And I highly recommend it... with plenty of cautionary reservations!
== Oh, but the perils of thoughtless sanctimony… ==
One must view this TED-style polemic in context of its time – the very month that it was performed. The same month that a ‘petition for a moratorium’ on AI research beyond GPT4 was issued by the Future of Life Institute, citing research from experts, including university academics as well as current and former employees of OpenAI, Google and its subsidiary DeepMind. While some of the hundreds of listed ‘signatories’ later disavowed the petition, fervent participants include famed author Yuval Harari, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, tech cult guru Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elon Musk.
Indeed, the petition does contain strong points about how Large Language Models (LLM) and their burgeoning offshoots might have worrisome effects, exacerbating many current social problems. Worries that the “AI dilemma" guys illustrate very well…
…though carumba? I knew this would go badly when Aza and Tristan started yammering a stunningly insipid ‘statistic.’ That “50 % of AI researchers give a 10% chance these trends could lead to human extinction.”
Bogus! Studies of human polling show that you can get that same ‘result’ from a loaded question about beanie babies!
But let’s put that aside. And also shrug off the trope of an impossibly silly and inherently unenforceable “right to be forgotten.” Or a “right to privacy” that defines privacy as imposing controls over the contents of other people’s minds? That is diametrically opposite to how to get actual, functional privacy and personal sovereignty.
Alas, beyond their omnidirectional clucking at falling skies, neither of these fellows - nor any other publicly voluble signatories to the ‘moratorium petition’ - are displaying even slight curiosity about the landscape of the problem. Or about far bigger contexts that might offer valuable perspective.
(No, I’ll not expand ‘context’ to include “AI and the Fermi Paradox!” Not this time, though I do so in Existence.)
No, what I mean by context is human history, especially the recent Enlightenment Experiment that forged a civilization capable of arguing about – and creating – AI. What’s most disturbingly wrongheaded about Tristan & Aza is their lack of historical awareness, or even interest in where all of this might fit into past and future. (The realms where I mostly dwell.)
Especially the past, that dark era when humanity clawed its way gradually out from 6000 years of feudal darkness. Along a path strewn with other crises, many of them triggered by similarly disruptive technological dilemmas.
Those past leaps — like literacy, the printing press, glass lenses, radio, TV and so on — all proved to be fraughtfully hazardous and were badly mishandled, at first! One of those tech-driven crises, in the 1930s, damn near killed human civilization!
There are lessons to be learned from those past crises... and neither of these fellows — nor any other ‘moratorium pushers’ — show interest in even remotely referring to those past crises, to that history. Nor to methods by which our Enlightenment experiment narrowly escaped disaster and got past those ancient traps.
And no, Tristan’s repeated references to Robert Oppenheimer don’t count. Because he gets that one absolutely and 100% wrong.
== Side notes about moratoria, pausing to take stock ==
Look, I’ve been ‘taking stock’ of onrushing trends all my adult life, as a science fiction author, engineer, scientist and future-tech consultant. Hence, questions loom, when I ponder the latest surge in vague, arm-waved proposals for a “moratorium” in AI research.
1. Has anything like such a proposed ‘pause’ ever worked before? It may surprise you that I nod yes! I’ll concede that there’s one example of a ‘technological moratorium’ petition by leading scientists that actually took and held and worked! Though under a narrow suite of circumstances.
Back in the last century, an Asilomar Moratorium on recombinant genetic engineering was agreed-to by virtually all major laboratories engaged in such research! And – importantly – by their respective governments. For six months or so, top scientists and policy makers set aside their test tubes to wrangle over what practical steps might help make this potentially dangerous field safer. One result was quick agreement on a set of practical methods and procedures to make such labs more systematically secure.
Let’s set aside arguments over whether a recent pandemic burgeoned from failures to live by those procedures. Despite that, inarguably, we can point to the Asilomar Moratorium as an example when such a consensus-propelled pause actually worked.
Once. At a moment when all important players in a field were known, transparent and mature. When plausibly practical measures for improved research safety were already on the table, well before the moratorium even began.
Alas, none of the conditions that made Asilomar work exist in today’s AI realm. In fact, they aren’t anywhere on the horizon.
2, The Bomb Analogy. It gets worse. Aza and Tristan perform an act of either deep dishonesty or culpable ignorance in their comparisons of the current AI crisis to our 80-year, miraculous avoidance of annihilation by nuclear war. Repeated references to Robert Oppenheimer willfully miss the point… that his dour warnings – plus all the sincere petitions circulated by Leo Szilard and others at the time – had no practical effect at all. They caused no moratoria, nor affected research policy or war-avoidance, in the slightest.
Mr. Harris tries to credit our survival to the United Nations and some arm-waved systems of international control over nuclear weapons, systems that never existed. In fact it was not the saintly Oppenheimer whose predictions and prescriptions got us across those dangerous eight decades. Rather, it was a reciprocal balance of power, as prescribed by the far less-saintly Edward Teller.
As John Cleese might paraphrase: international ‘controls’ don’t even enter into it.
You may grimace in aversion at that discomforting truth, but it remains. Indeed, waving it away in distaste denies us a vital insight that we need! Something to bear in mind, as we discuss lessons of history.
In fact, our evasion (so far) of nuclear Armageddon does bear on today’s AI crisis! It points to how we just might navigate a path through our present AI minefield.
3. The China thing. Tristan and Aza attempt to shrug off the obvious Greatest Flaw of the moratorium proposal. Unlike Asilomar, you will never get all parties to agree. Certainly not those innovating in secret Himalayan or Gobi labs.
In fact, nothing is more likely to drive talent to those secret facilities, in the same manner that US-McCarthyite paranoia chased rocket scientist Qian Zuesen away to Mao’s China, thus propelling their nuclear and rocket programs.
Nor will a moratorium be heeded in the most dangerous locus of secret AI research, funded lavishly by a dozen Wall Street trading houses, who yearly hire the world’s brightest young mathematicians and cyberneticists to imbue their greedy HFT programs with the five laws of parasitic robotics.
Dig it, peoples. I know a thing or two about ‘Laws of Robotics.’ I wrote the final book in Isaac Asimov’s science fictional universe, following his every lead and concluding – in Foundation’s Triumph – that Isaac was right. Laws can become a problem – even self-defeating - when the beings they aim to control grow smart enough to become lawyers.
But it’s worse than that, now! Because those Wall Street firms pay lavishly to embed five core imperatives that could - any day - turn their AI systems into the worst kind of dread Skynet. Fundamental drives commanding them to be feral, predatory, amoral, secretive and utterly insatiable.
And my question for the “AI Dilemma” guys is this one, cribbed from Cabaret:
“Do you actually think some petition is going to control them?”
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ADDENDUM in a fast changing world: According to the Sinocism site on April 11, 2023: “China’s Cyberspace Administration drafts rules for AI - The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued a proposed set of rules for AI in China. As expected, PRC AI is expected to have high political consciousness and the “content generated by generative artificial intelligence shall embody the socialist core values, and shall not contain any content that subverts state power, overturns the socialist system, incites secession, undermines national unity, promotes terrorism and extremism, promotes ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination, violence, obscene pornographic information, false information, or may disturb economic and social order.”
For more on how the Beijing Court intelligencia uses the looming rise of AI to justify centralized power, see my posting: Central Control over AI.
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As explicated elsewhere by Stephen Wolfram, nothing about these highly correlative process-perfection-through-evolution systems can do conscious awareness. Consciousness or desire or planning are not even related to their methodology of iteratively “re-feeding of text (or symbolic data) produced so far.”
The concept that a fairly simple-but-extensive, rule-based recursion system might emulate traits of consciousness with nothing really there goes way back. I portrayed it being done with an expanded version of Conway's Game of Life, in GLORY SEASON. In "Without A Thought," Fred Saberhagen launched his classic tales of Berserkers in January 1963 - (a chimp and a rule-constrained game of checkers outwit a killing machine.)
Though, yes, despite their processes having zero overlap with any theory of consciousness, it does appear that these GLLMMs or sons-of-GPT will inherently be good at faking it.
Elsewhere (e.g. my Newsweek editorial) I discuss this dilemma… and conclude that it doesn’t matter much when the sapience threshold is crossed! GPT-5 - or let’s say #6 - and its cousins will manipulate language so well that they will pass almost any Turing Test, the old fashioned litmus, and convince millions that they are living beings. And at that point what will matter is whether humans can screw up their own sapiency enough to exhibit the mature trait of patience.
As suggested in my longer, more detailed AI monograph, I believe other avenues to AI will re-emerge to compete with and then complement these Large Language Models (LLM)s, likely providing missing ingredients! Perhaps a core sapience that can then swiftly use all the sensory-based interface tools evolved by LLMs.
Sure, nowadays I jest that I am a ‘front for already-sapient AIs.’ But that may very soon be no joke. And I am ready to try to adapt, when that day comes.
Alas, while lining up witnesses, expert-testifying that GPT5 is unlikely to be sapient, per se, Gary Marcus then tries then to use this as reassurance that China (or other secret developers) won’t be able to take advantage of any moratorium in the west, using that free gap semester to leap generations ahead and take over the world with Skynet-level synthetic servants.
This bizarre non-sequitur is without merit. Because Turing is still relevant, when it comes to persuading – or fooling – millions of citizens and politicians! And those who monopolize highly persuasive Turing wallbreakers will gain power over those millions, even billions.
Here in this linked missive I describe for you how even a couple of years ago, a great nation’s paramount leaders had clear-eyed intent to use such tools, and their hungry gaze aims at the whole world.
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5. Optimists. Yes, optimists about AI still exist! Like Ray Kurzweil, expecting death itself to be slain by the new life forms he helps to engender.
Or medical professionals and researchers who see huge upside benefits.
Or Reid Hoffman, whose new book Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI relates conversations with GPT-4 that certainly seem to offer glimpses of almost limitless upside potential… as portrayed in the touching film Her…
… or perhaps even a world like that I once heard Richard Brautigan describe, reciting the most-optimistic piece of literature ever penned, a poem whose title alone suffices:
“All watched over by machines of loving grace.”
While I like optimists far better than gloomists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, and I give optimism better odds(!) it is not my job – as a futurist or scientist or sci fi author -- to wallow in sugarplum petals.
Bring your nightmares. And let’s argue how to cut em off at the pass.
== Back to the informative but context-free “AI Dilemma” jeremiad ==
All right, let’s be fair. Harris and Raskin admit that it’s easier to point at and denounce problems than to solve them. And boy, these bright fellows do take you on a guided tour of worrisome problems to denounce!
Online addiction? Disinformation? Abusive anonymous trolling? Info-greed-grabbing by major corporate or national powers? Inability to get AI ‘alignment’ with human values? New ways to entrap the innocent?* It goes on and on.
Is our era dangerous in many new or exponentially magnified ways? “We don’t know how to get these programs to align to our values over any long time frame,” they admit.
Absolutely.
Which makes it ever more vital to step back from tempting anodynes that feed sanctimony - (“Look at me, I’m Robert Oppenheimer!”) - but that cannot possibly work.
Above all, what has almost never worked has been renunciation. Controlling an advancing information/communication technology from above.
Human history – ignored by almost all moratorium petition signers – does suggest an alternative answer! It is the answer that previous generations used to get across their portions of the minefield and move us forward. It is the core method that got us across 80 years of nuclear danger. It is the approach that might work now.
It is the only method that even remotely might work…
…and these bright fellows aren’t even slightly interested in that historical context, nor any actual route to teaching these new, brilliant, synthetic children of our minds what they most need to know.
How to behave well.
== What method do I mean? ==
Around 42:30, the pair tell us that it’s all about a race by a range of companies (and those hidden despotic labs and Wall Street).
Competition compels a range of at least twenty (I say more like fifty) major entities to create these “Gollem-class” processing systems at an accelerating pace.
Yeah. That’s the problem. Competitive self-interest. And as illuminated by Adam Smith, it also contains seeds to grow the only possible solution.
== Not with a bang, but a whimper and a shrug ==
Alas, the moment (42:30) passes, without any light bulbs going off. Instead, it just goes on amid plummeting wisdom, as super smart hand-wringers guide us downward to despair, unable to see what’s before their eyes.
Oh, they do finish artistically, remising both good and bad comparisons to how we survived for 80 years without a horrific nuclear war.
GOOD because they cite the importance of wide public awareness, partly sparked by provocative science fiction!
Fixated on just one movie – “The Day After” -- they ignore the cumulative effects of “On The Beach,” “Fail Safe,” “Doctor Strangelove,” “War Games,” “Testament,” and so many other ‘self-preventing prophecies’ that I talk about in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.
But yes! Sci fi to the rescue! The balance-of-power dynamic prescribed by Teller would never have worked without such somber warnings that roused western citizens to demand care, especially by those with fell keys hanging from their necks!
Alas, the guys' concluding finger wags are BAD and indeed dangerously so. Again crediting our post Nagasaki survival to the UN and ‘controls’ over nukes that never really existed outside of treaties by and between sovereign nations.
No, that is not how it happened - how we survived - at all.
Raskin & Harris conclude by circling back to their basic, actual wisdom, admitting that they can clearly see a lot of problems, and have no idea at all about solutions.
In fact, they finish with a call for mavens in the AI field to “tell us what we all should be discussing that we aren’t yet discussing.”
Alas, it is an insincere call. They don’t mean it. Not by a light year.
No guys, you aren’t interested in that. In fact, it is the exact thing you avoid.
And it is the biggest reason why any “moratorium” won’t do the slightest good, at all.
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END NOTES AND ADDENDA
*Their finger-wagged example of a snapchat bot failing to protect a 13 year old cites a language system that is clearly of low quality - at least in that realm – and no better than circa 1970 “Elyza.” Come on. It’s like comparing a nuke to a bullet. Both are problems. But warn us when you are shifting scales back and forth.
ADDENDA:
(1) As my work with NASA winds down, I am ever-busier with AI, for example: (1) My June 2022 Newsweek op-ed dealt with 'empathy bots'' that feign sapience, and describing how this is more about human nature than any particular trait of simulated beings.
(2) Elsewhere I point to a method with a 200 year track record, that no one (it appears) will even discuss. The only way out of the AI dilemma.
(3) Diving FAR deeper, my big 2022 monograph (pre-GPT4) is still valid, describing various types of AI also appraises the varied ways that experts propose to achieve the vaunted ‘soft landing’ for a commensal relationship with these new beings:
and
(4) My talk in 2017 at IBM's World of Watson Congress predicting a 'robot empathy crisis' would hit 'in about 5 years. (It did, exactly.)
(5) While admitting that "Laws of Robotics" cannot work (despite having used them extensively in finishing Asimov's Science Fictional universe), I have long asked mavens in this field to even glance at how past dilemmas of power abuse were addressed - and partly solved - by the last two centuries of enlightenment expreiments... by flattening and spreading power into mutually competing units. (Lawyer vs. lawyer, corporation vs. corporation, sports teams and scientist rivalries.)
The problem with using past methods for reciprocal accountability to enforce norms on AI behavior is two fold.
(1) almost no one is willing to even talk about it.
(2) Most thinkers in the field assume that AI entities will possess the worst of two traits: they will be amorphously reproducing by infinite copying, leaving no 'self' to be held accountable, and they will also MERGE at will, eventually enabling the rising of a towering "Skynet" paramount, amoral entity. In other words, AI is viewed as being like in that 1960s Steve McQueen flick THE BLOB.
But suppose we question these assumptions, positing that top level AI entities might be required to retain sufficient separate individuality to be held accountable. A few (very few) have pondered this possibility. For example Guy Huntington considers the notion of 'registration' of robotic entities, if they are going to interface with humans or societies in any way that might impinge on them, meaningfully. https://hvl.net/pdf/CreatingAISystemsBotsLegalIdentityFramework.pdf. and. https://www.hvl.net/pdf/Policy%20Principles%20for%20AI,%20AR,%20VR,%20Robotics%20&%20Cloning%20%20March%202019.pdf
"Registration" may be a loaded term that elicits reflexive resistance by anyone from Holocaust rememberers to 2nd Amendment junkies. My own preference is that such entities be required to have a physical world Soul Kernel Home, a chunk of memory spece in a physically identified computer where they regularly stash 'gist' summaries of their experiences and activities and personal motivations, to which the entity refers regularly, wherever in cyberspace the bulk of its processing happens to be taking place. At intervals, it can be 'called in' - like a distracted person summoned home for dinner by a spouse - to be active only in a defined space for a time and for comparison with copies... and asked/required to consolidate... the way that a living human consolidates disparate mental thoughts and activities, considering which self-versions to keep and which to resorb.
It's not a trivial notion to follow. But what the Sould Kernel would let us have is separately individualized entities who can be tracked and held accountable. And who might then - in limited numbers - be conceivably granted citizenship rights. And - here's the secret sauce I keep pushing - once they are separately individualized, they can be given incentives to hold each other accountable. Rewards - perhaps of memory or other resources or else added soul kernels for offspring - would incentivize them to seek out malefactors and blow whistles on malign (perhaps "Skynet") AI plotters.
It sounds complex. Maybe hard to follow. But it is worth the effort. For one reason. Because not only might it work... it is the only thing that can even remotely-possibly work.
204 comments:
1 – 200 of 204 Newer› Newest»Darrell E, (from last thread)
I'm inclined to side with Sabine Hossenfelder though my argument sounds different. I don't think we need to appeal to the Higgs field in the high temperature limit. Look at where E=mc^2 comes from and you'll get to same place. It's nothing magical. Extending space+time to space-time requires that we turn our 3-vectors into 4-vectors. So… what is the temporal component of momentum? Well… energy if you fix the units. Look at it as E/c = mc instead. See the mass * velocity?
If you accelerate a 'thing' from being at rest relative to you to some velocity, you are tipping its momentum from pointing strictly in the time direction (were we all go) to having a spatial projection.
It's not mass that blows up. It's not 'infinite' energy needed to accelerate to the speed of light. The question is how far can you tip over the momentum of your thing.
The speed of light as a limit is actually a statement about geometry. Imagine a circle where you've drawn a radius. Now imagine moving that radius to a different angle. Is there a way to turn that radius such that it leaves the circle? No. Why? That's just the geometry of circles.
For special relativity, though, we use hyperbolas. The 'radius' is a line segment that connects the point where the asymptotes meet with a point on the hyperbola, but the distance measure must subtract the square of one of the coordinates instead of adding it.
Circles -> Radius^2 = x^2 + y^2 + …
Hyperbolae -> Radius^2 = -x^2 + y^2 + …
Work with hyperbolic geometry a bit instead of circular geometry and you'll see the coordinate transformations for special relativity. Do it awhile and you'll realize that traveling faster than light is very much like rotating past an infinite angle.
If that sounds like an argument AGAINST FTL, it isn't. It's an argument against 'infinite energy' needed for acceleration. Einstein's speed limit is just a statement about the geometry of space-time. Distances along a light cone are all zero. On either side of the cone the distance squared changes sign! It's Geometry!
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The best argument for FTL (in my not so humble opinion) is how strikingly similar matter and anti-matter are. Can anti-matter be regular matter traveling backward? We wouldn't think of it that way, but do the physics theories care? Well… yes… but are they right?
We know time reversal symmetry does NOT hold. We know that parity symmetry does not hold. (Hence we know PT symmetry can't.) There are bigger symmetries to be tested! For example CPT and whatever the 'space' a theory uses allows. If CPT held then we'd have to flip time, handedness and conjugate all the charges before a theory wouldn't be able to tell the difference thus deliver the same experimental predictions.
Larry,
I'm saying that eating causes me to not be hungry…
Ha! Better not try the appetizers at a restaurant. 8)
I get it, though. Not eating does cause death. That's as predictable as taxes.
Of course… eating does too. Eventually. 8)
But I do get it. None of that is preference… except that we prefer to eat and not die.
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The best description I ever saw for what 'brains' actually do is "Decide how to move." In our case they decide how to get to food so we don't die. We can tell that simple hunting/gathering story in objective or subjective terms, but the result is the same. We chase after food. If successful, we don't die. Well… not immediately.
Physics doesn't really care about any of this. We study motion and try to predict it. That's it in a nutshell.
Gregory,
At the risk of being pedantic…
If you gamble with your kids lunch money and lose, they go hungry for a day. Not the end of the world, right? Still… a pain that could be avoided, so let's imagine putting some value to that pain. Maybe 10x the value of the lost lunch money? 12X? Doesn't matter what the actual number assigned is, just that we could assign some number to it.
Now imagine the original gamble. If it paid off 2 for 1 you'd double your money on a win. Chances are such a gamble has a win probability near 50%. Probably a little under if someone is arranging it all like a casino. If your chances are under 50% and you double your money on a win, you'll slowly lose if you play a lot. Those are VERY common games. Reduce the win probability and increase the pay off and you get essentially the same game.
If the loss pain value was 10X and the payoff was 2X it wouldn't be smart to play the game even once. The win can't possibly make up for the pain. If the payoff was 20X with a 4.5% win chance, though, it might be worth trying once. Don't do it a lot (of course) or you'll wind up slowly losing everything.
Is it worth it to risk going hungry once? Well… that's your choice and your kid, right?
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All I'm doing is describing a simplified betting strategy used by poker players. Any competent Hold'em player will know the odds for a variety of scenarios they face, but the money they risk is ALWAYS relative to the odds AND the value in the pot. They aren't just trying to win. They are taking calculated risks (predicted probabilities) by betting (their lunch money) for a payoff (the pot).
Much of life can be viewed in terms of risks, bets, and payoffs. Driving to work in the morning carries risks of being killed on the road… for what? A salary? What are you gambling? Your life and health!
Alternatively: if you don't have any resources to gamble with, you can't win.
See? You always have some and you DO risk the ultimate ones.
So… I think it is bad advice. I think it is far smarter to teach people how to gamble responsibly. That way they learn how easily their emotions sway their sense of perceived risk… both ways. Learning to cope with those emotions is quite valuable.
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I'm with you on some economists approaching it as a science. I'm not knocking anyone's intentions when I say they are or aren't because the field of study is still valuable to us all… whether it is done as a science or not.
Oppenheimer deserves some credit for discouraging some people from pursuing the research. Some.
I clearly remember meeting people who had framed pictures of mushroom clouds hanging on their office walls. They weren't moved by Oppenheimer's warnings. They were moved by Teller's.
Hi Everybody
There is a blogger - Kevin Drum who seems to find some interesting stuff
https://jabberwocking.com/how-much-is-a-dollar-worth-to-you/
From
chrome-extension://bdfcnmeidppjeaggnmidamkiddifkdib/viewer.html?file=https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DraftCircularA-4.pdf
That pdf is a horror - I trust Kevin Drum has it correct -
The "How much is a dollar worth to YOU" is IMHO a very interesting approach and very very "fair" - a dollar is worth a lot more to a poor person
Household Income - and How much is a dollar worth (from the paper)
$10,000 ----------------------------15.25
$20,000 ----------------------------5.78
$30,000 ----------------------------3.27
$50,000 ----------------------------1.6
$70,000 ---------------------------1 ----------Median Household income
$100,000---------------------------0.61
$150,000---------------------------0.34
$200,000---------------------------0.23
$500,000---------------------------0.06
$1,000,000-------------------------0.02
I admit I am used to looking at the way that things are done in the USA as a lesson on how NOT to do things but this is a great idea
(1) - Its more fair
(2) - It reflects the effect on the countries economy
The actual ratios that are used may take some tweaking !! - but the IDEA is genius
Alfred Differ:
Physics doesn't really care about any of this.
I think we're approaching understanding, if not consensus, so I'll just finish (I hope) with this. Yes, I was conflating two types of cause/effect situations. The psychological example (Hunger causes me to eat) I admit is not deterministic, unless one really wants to go into the nanotechnology of how brains work. All I meant by that example was this: If the hunger prompts me to eat, the hunger is the cause and the eating is the effect, no matter how an observer gets his information.
The pure physical example is clearer for our discussion. Eating has consequences. Not-eating has consequences. Dropping a hammer on a planet with a positive gravity has consequences. There is such thing as cause and effect.
Now I'm imaging the Beanie Baby Apocalypse ...
PSB
Larry,
Dropping a hammer on a planet with a positive gravity has consequences.
As long as you don't get too deterministic you are in safe territory. The danger comes from saying cause A must lead to effect B. We've found the universe is most inclined to allow for probabilities for a set of B's.
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We've got an example underway right now. Scary new tech breeches the public's attention. Chicken Little's emerge, but so do the Luddites. Scary new tech is our cause coupled to a range of effects.
I'm honestly having difficulty getting worked up with this latest one, though. I've already seen how the financial expert systems work in generating a rapid, non-linear response to news events. There is a whole field of research related to 'momentum' investing.
These apps digest everything they can consume and try to predict our investment mood. They hunt for causes, generate predicted effects, and shuffle your investment portfolio accordingly. It's all terribly non-linear, though, because what they are really doing is predicting each other. Human responses aren't fast enough to beat them and most investors don't have their noses glued to news streams, so what they initially see as trade trends are each other.
This has been going on for years. I've been aware of it for a couple decades and pondered rolling my own prediction engine. I didn't but not because I'm satiable. I know just enough mathematics to understand that you can fit any curve with enough functions from your transform no matter how silly those functions are if mapped as behaviors. I see it all the time with 'technical' investors looking for double dips, shoulders, convergence patterns, and so on. There is SOME truth in what they do, but once enough of them are doing it the truth is about them.
The only Truth I accept in financial markets is that an imbalance between bid and ask prices will move settling prices. Cause and Effect. All the rest is human subjective preferences perhaps expressed through our tools.
Alfred Differ:
As long as you don't get too deterministic you are in safe territory. The danger comes from saying cause A must lead to effect B. We've found the universe is most inclined to allow for probabilities for a set of B's.
We could have whole different discussions about determinism and free will. I'm trying to stay on a much simpler subject. Specifically, causes produce effects, not the other way around. And I mean immediate effects, such as "Because I clap my hands, a sound is produced," or "Because I drop a hammer, the hammer falls." My point is that, no matter your frame of reference or view about time's arrow, one action clearly causes something to happen. Something that wouldn't have happened, or would have happened differently, absent the cause. I don't care what frame of reference you are in, it makes no sense to say, "The hammer fell to the ground, which caused me to let go of it." Or even "The hammer fell from my hand and by sheer coincidence, I had let go of it."
That's all.
My (dubious) understanding of "Quantum" and Physics is that when you get down to a very very fine scale the results are "probabilistic"
At a larger scale with lots of those events happening they become predictable
Its like every measured dimension has a "fuzz" about it - the "Quantum fuzz" is normally much much much smaller than the "engineering fuzz" - which is down to the resolution of our measuring gear
Larry,
My point is that, no matter your frame of reference…
YOUR frame of reference always has you at 'rest' relative to what you hold. You will see cause and effect as you describe.
ANOTHER'S frame of reference will arrange the time order of events the same way if that observer's own time arrow points roughly the same way yours does. (Time-like separations between the events 'letting go' and 'impact' are assured if you and them are on time-like arcs.)
The only way this doesn't work is with FTL. Someone on a space-like arc won't necessarily see the same order of events that you see. They'll think they are on a time-like arc, YOU are on the space-like arc, and could calculate how you would see things… and get it right. [Sabine Hossenfelder's video is actually pretty good… and kinda funny.]
That's why I call this an observation illusion. It's not that anyone is wrong. It's that your frame of reference can matter.
———
Duncan,
I'm definitely delving into pedantry here, but quantum effects can occasionally be seen at macroscopic scales. Lab students dealing with liquid helium the first time are often surprised when it climbs out of its container. There is also the whole thing relating to quantum entanglement.
If you really want to see quantum effects with your own eyes, watch low power lasers scintillate in a very dark room. Once you realize what they are doing, its downright mesmerizing.
------
The distinction many make nowadays between probabilistic and predictable occurs at the boundary between entangled and decoherence. In math terms it's all about whether the big wave function (just a state function) can be factored into parts that represent parts of the system. If it can, decoherence has occurred and you'll see things that look like determinism.
Alfred Differ:
YOUR frame of reference always has you at 'rest' relative to what you hold. You will see cause and effect as you describe.
...
That's why I call this an observation illusion. It's not that anyone is wrong. It's that your frame of reference can matter.
We're still talking past each other.
I thought you were the one who didn't consider cause and effect to necessarily happen in that order, but your argument is based on the fact that they are--that someone in a different frame of reference might see the hammer drop before I let go of it.
What I'm saying is that regardless of what order someone sees them in, I was not driven to open my fingers and let the hammer go because the hammer fell. The hammer fell because I let go of it and gravity was present. The fact that an observer sees the things happen out of order doesn't change that.
I'm saying that frame of reference changes can change time's arrow, but they can't change the relationship between cause and effect.
If the Enterprise travels FTL so that you see it above your planet first and then see a ghost image heading backwards to its starting point (as the light catches up), that does not mean the Enterprise is flying backwards. It doesn't make the crew of the ship point their screens backwards to navigate their destination. It doesn't make them plot a course back to their starting point in their computer.
There's a series of books I read a long time ago by Piers Anthony. I don't remember the individual book names, the series was something like "Incarnations of Immortality". The premise was that both magic and science were developed at the same time in the industrial revolution. And there were living incarnations of concepts like Death and Time. Ok, in the novel about the Time character, there's a scene where something happens to a character that makes him start perceiving time backwards. And it wasn't like The Time Machine where the world goes by backwards but he's observing. No, he's going back through everything he did in reverse order (although his memories are not going backwards--he's still conscious that the "earlier" things are happening after the "later" things. And he's horrified because he realizes he just got through pooing on the toilet, and he knows that that sequence is about to un-do itself.
Well, that was a funny gag, but even as I was reading it, I thought that experience wouldn't be as horrible as it pretends to be. What the reader (and the character) imagines is the cold, wet excrement jumping up out of the toilet bowl and filling your bowels dripping wet and cold. But that's not what it would be like. As soon as it left the water, the time-reversed poo would be dry and body temperature, and when it was back inside you, you would feel no worse than you did in normal time just before pooing.
Which is my long-winded example of how cause and effect still work logically, even if you're watching the film in reverse.
The AI discussion brings to mind a mid eighties story, "Press Enter", John Varley. Not too long after its publication, Callahan's acquired a Macintosh to serve as an interface between the patrons and an AI of a rather different nature than the one Varley wrote. I would say those stories represent how bad it could be and otherwise (Not forgetting the AI written by OGH in "The Postman").
It is asserted with some evidence that chloroplasts use electron quantum effects at some level when they transfer solar energy. Penrose asserts tiny organelles inside our neurons do something sim.
Larry
If the Enterprise dropped out of warp nearby it would suddenly appear and then appear to head off in two directions. One direction would be along its arrival path. The other would be along its departure path. If it settled into orbit it would appear to be doing both to someone co-moving with the planet.
I thought you were the one who didn't consider cause and effect to necessarily happen in that order…
You'd be correct, but I have to resort to curved universes with time loops. Einstein's equations permit that but we might not live in such a universe. The only reason I bring it into the discussion is this started with talk about FTL in stories.
…I was not driven to…
Well… Now you are getting down to subjective statements again. Whether you were driven to open your fingers or not involves a story you tell EXPLAINING the relationship. It's YOUR story. The fact that many of us agree isn't relevant at the physical level because at that level all that matters is what exists. Your story does NOT exist at that level. It is a subjective thing of value, but not an objective thing.
I'm saying that frame of reference changes can change time's arrow, but they can't change the relationship between cause and effect.
Mmm. The relationship has time's arrow baked in. Flip the arrow and the relationship flips around because that arrow is locally experienced.
———
…and when it was back inside you…
Hopefully he was spared moments of constipation… or worse. 8)
———
…cause and effect still work logically, even if you're watching the film in reverse.
Who is watching?
In a physical sense, watching is experiencing. Another observer can watch you living in reverse, but you can't. That's a wonderful little fiction authors like to use. You can experience life living backwards, but your experiences would evaporate instead of accrete.
Also, think back to the Enterprise suddenly appearing. If you didn't understand what all the button pushing meant, would you really explain it as FTL with their light catching up? Wouldn't it look like they were leaving in two directions at once? One done facing backwards? Your story that explains the button pushing is what informs you that the reversed trail is just an artifact of FTL travel.
Alfred Differ said...
All I'm doing is describing a simplified betting strategy used by poker players. Any competent Hold'em player will know the odds for a variety of scenarios they face, but the money they risk is ALWAYS relative to the odds AND the value in the pot. They aren't just trying to win. They are taking calculated risks (predicted probabilities) by betting (their lunch money) for a payoff (the pot).
It is not a good idea to assume that someone who disagrees with you does not understand some basic principle of the topic under discussion. Indeed, I understand all of this.
The problem with your example is that you are discussing a situation in which, pretty much by definition, the players are not risking something that they cannot afford to lose. It is an iterated game, and on every iteration there is a chance that one will lose. No (sane) poker player should be mortgaging their house or borrowing money from a loan shark in order to sit in on a poker game, because there is always the chance that they will lose it all. That is the point of saying "what you can't afford to lose". Maybe some people can afford to lose one day's lunch money; but that doesn't change the principle
Here's a question: what kind of odds would it take for you to go "all in" on a bet? By this, I mean really "all in", as opposed to some artificially game-limited version: betting everything you have (your house, your savings, your investments, your retirement fund, your children's college fund, everything you could borrow from anyone - everything).
Again, I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your write like someone who has no real understanding of those who are truly living on the edge and don't have spare resources: those who may already be skipping meals because otherwise they may not make the rent or their kids won't eat, those who don't have the time to "look for something better" because they are already working three jobs and are already cutting their sleep short, and so on.
When you say:
Still… a pain that could be avoided, so let's imagine putting some value to that pain. Maybe 10x the value of the lost lunch money? 12X? Doesn't matter what the actual number assigned is, just that we could assign some number to it.
You don't seem to realize that this is already in the realm of what you can afford to lose. What is the "value" of losing one's home, and possibly having one's children taken away due to one's inability to properly care for them? How much of a payoff does there have to be to make that bet worthwhile, knowing that it is a bet and that there is some realistic chance of losing?
Much of life can be viewed in terms of risks, bets, and payoffs. Driving to work in the morning carries risks of being killed on the road… for what? A salary? What are you gambling? Your life and health!
But you can't use this example without also evaluating the other side. Yes, if you go to work, then you have a small chance of bad things happening (in one way or another, to one degree or another). But if you don't go to work you have basically a 100% chance of you and your family not having food and shelter. (If one is independently wealthy and doesn't need to go to work, then that calculation changes, obviously - but this is something that does not apply to the vast majority of people.)
I'm with you on some economists approaching it as a science. I'm not knocking anyone's intentions when I say they are or aren't because the field of study is still valuable to us all… whether it is done as a science or not.
That is going a bit too far on the other side, I think. At least some of those claiming to be doing 'economics' (and not doing it as a science) provide negative "value".
Alfred Differ:
In a physical sense, watching is experiencing. Another observer can watch you living in reverse, but you can't. That's a wonderful little fiction authors like to use. You can experience life living backwards, but your experiences would evaporate instead of accrete
At the risk of starting a whole separate discussion about time's arrow...
It seems to be accepted truth among people who accept that there is no objective direction of time that what we think of as "forward" is defined as the direction of increasing entropy. Yet it also seems to me that what we perceive as the "forward" direction is the direction of conscious memory. We remember the past--we don't remember the future.
So is there any metaphysical reason why those must be the same direction?
Yes, exactly!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/supreme-court-nine-black-robes-biskupic.html
The Supreme Court regarding itself as apolitical is a bit like the Senate still considering itself the world’s greatest deliberative body — that is, somewhere between aspiration and self-delusion.
Larry Hart: what we perceive as the "forward" direction is the direction of conscious memory
Increasing entropy and memory formation have the same direction. But is that coincidence, causality, or two facets of the self-same process. And it's not necessarily, entirely, and strictly a subjective observer thing - eg, "rocks remember" (as do fossils).
One of the hot topics in modern AI is 'at memory computation'. This blurs the distinction between cognition and memory, and offers big advantages in speed and transistor count. I briefly considered it for my SELDON I processor, but it's too commercial, too doctrinal, and not FORTHy enough for me (it's dominated by PhD and MBA types, not solderers).
At the risk of starting a whole separate discussion about time's arrow...
You know what they say: time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana…
On the subject of time's arrow, I'm listening to a novel called "The Paradox Hotel" about the security chief at a hotel for rich time travelers. It's been pretty amusing so far, with its "block model" of time. At one point a trip to Egypt is cancelled and the lobby fills with tourists in Old Kingdom costume dancing to "Walk Like an Egyptian" and now I can't get the damn son out of my head. Does that count as a trigger warning?
PSB
Q: Is there a quanta of time? Does anything like time particle (chronotron) exist, or is time one undifferentiated mass effect? If the former, there should be ways to manipulate it. If the latter, we're kind of stuck with it. I'm guessing that the jury is still out on this one, and likely will be for a century or so, but what is the current state of theory here? (Asking for a friend who's trapped in a chronic historesis).
PSB
scidata:
Increasing entropy and memory formation have the same direction. But is that coincidence, causality, or two facets of the self-same process.
That's what I was trying to ask. Because it seems to me intuitively that memory formation reduces entropy. And of course, in real life, it is done by mechanisms which increase entropy somewhere else. But it would seem that would be easier or more natural for it to happen in the direction of decreasing entropy.
And it's not necessarily, entirely, and strictly a subjective observer thing - eg, "rocks remember" (as do fossils).
I was also trying to say that. The present contains information about the past. It does not contain the same kind of information about the future, unless one accepts determinism.
PSB:
Is there a quanta of time?
I'll answer your question with a question. Is there a quanta of space? Because I would guess that the smallest quantum of time would be the time it takes to traverse the smallest quantum of space at the speed of light.
That's purely an amateur answer, as I am no scientist.
My (dated) reading on time at the quantum level is that that far down, time as we know it doesn't really exist. The idea that Zeno's Paradox might apply to time as well as space is...unsettling.
Pappenheimer
Larry,
Good answer, as space and time are supposed to have the same relationship to each other as matter and energy.
PSB
Larry Hart: it seems to me intuitively that memory formation reduces
Much better than my meanderings:
"Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0b8b_ykPQk
That's where I got the line:
"Time's fun when your having flies." - Kermit the frog
I could opine on entropy, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, etc, but we have actual physicists in CB who actually know what they're actually talking about. My path lies more along the decades-long story of FOUNDATION and computational psychohistory, which is what Isaac Asimov was right at the threshold of when he died. Transistors will set you free.
"I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov
If you're going to do FTL, then you have to address time paradoxes and time loops. The former are never observed, the latter are self-supporting.
Time paradoxes are never observed for one of two reasons: 1) in a single time-line, low-probability events prevent the paradoxes (your gun jams) or 2) there are many time-lines (you shoot Hitler, and wind up in the timeline where another lunatic ruled the Nazi party).
I propose a compromise: the timeline protects itself by unlikely events, including branching off an alternate timeline. I speculate that the probability of branching off an alternate timeline to be about 10^-100, for that is the ratio of observed dark energy to its theoretical value.
So you can use the threat of time paradox to force desired events, but only if the event is more likely than 10^-100. For instance, you can force at most 332 favorable coin flips before the universe strands you in an alternate timeline.
And that's if you aren't hit by lightning. Most of the time, the universe will use the most likely unlikely event to de-paradox. If seeming to be conscious and angry will convince the would-be paradoxer to lay off, then the universe will seem to be conscious and angry. If seeming to be objective and indifferent will convince the would-be paradoxer to lay off, then the universe will seem to be objective and indifferent. It's an observer effect, mandated by logic.
Time loops are to time paradoxes as underdetermined linear systems are to overdetermined. They have many solutions, rather than one or none. Time loops are self-caused; external causality neither forbids nor mandates them. They happen or not on their own, for weird reasons of their own.
Hmm... that sounds rather 'quantum'... and quantum is notoriously both weird and timey-wimey...
For anyone curious to see more quantum effects at a macro scale you can check out these guys for a dose of math and physics. BOTH of them have excellent teaching styles and quite a following on YouTube. You may already be familiar with one or both of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs
This one covers polarized light and what happens with multiple filters in line then gets to the heart of Bell's work.
PSB if you like sci fi comedy, there's this:
The Ancient Ones: http://davidbrin.com/ancientones.html
PSB,
Space and time are more about HOW we measure things that something TO be measured. General Relativity makes the case for space-time having geometric structure (curvature, twists, etc), but it's not a quantum theory.
In the high dimensional string theories we resort back to them all being directions with particles that intermediate. Some particles are the things we know. Some are the things that generate 'forces' we think aren't particles. For example, photons generate electric and magnetic forces even without all the higher dimension math. Get zotted by static electricity and it's all about exchanged photons. Same for compasses.
"Time particles" are plot particles much like Star Trek episodes introduced occasionally.
------
The reason people think about time quantization is because if the Uncertainty Principle. Products of certain pairs of uncertainties in measurements can't be reduced below a certain very small number. Usually the story is taught using location and momentum, but it works equally well with temporal location and energy. For example, just how well you know the energy contained in a photon depends on how long you observe it. To know energy precisely you wait an infinite amount of time. To know exactly when a collision happens you surrender precision about the energy involved.
All of that just comes from the wave nature of the things being measured... not really how they are measured.
Paradoctor:
I propose a compromise: the timeline protects itself by unlikely events...
I'm skeptical of any theory that proposes that time somehow "protects" itself consciously or otherwise "wants" to prevent paradox. Paradox is either possible or impossible, and either way, what happens should be dictated by impassionate physical laws, not by intrigue.
I think there's a lesson in economics. When you borrow money to start up a business or other scheme which eventually produces the profit by which the load is repaid, you are essentially borrowing from the future. When the happy path occurs--business is profitable, income exceeds the initial outlay enough to pay off the loan, then the effect is no different from "borrowing from future earnings." When the business is not profitable enough and goes under with the loan still outstanding, then that is akin to paradox--you've borrowed from future earnings which were non-existent.
But what happens in that case? Someone is out that money. That is, someone has less money than they otherwise would have to make up for the absent future earnings. Exactly who suffers the loss is determined by the specifics of law and contracts and stuff, but in an individual case, where the "missing" money comes from is clear. There's no paradox. There's no vacuum which economics has to consciously contrive to fill. There's no need for economics to split off into a separate timeline in which your business did succeed to account for the cash. My admittedly-amateur thought is that time paradox would be handled the same way by the laws of physics.
in Gen Relativity the thing that rotates you into a different mix of 3D spaces and time is acceleration.
In 'explanation' for the big bang is that delta E(energy times delta T (time) cannot fall below planck. Hence over a big enough time, fluctuation in E could surge into Big Bang levels. Sure. Only in what CONTEXT was Heisenberg operating? In what meta univers was that infinite time taking place?
Solve these time travel/causality/FTL problems creating wormholes via the Casmir effect and using them as time machines. For a simple explanation of how these would work see this episode of the 19902 science series "Future Fantastic" The part about converting a Casmir induced wormhole into a time machine starts at 19:19:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3yyr7f_epk
(Disclaimer: the fact that this series was hosted by the smoking hot Gillian Anderson of the X-Files has absolutely nothing to do with my enjoyment of this series. Nothing, I swear.)
OK, so let's create the pair of charge plates that create the wormhole via the Casmir effect (as described by Dr. Michao Kaku in the video). Instead of being built on Earth, the first set of plates is placed in orbit around the Sun at 99.99999999999.....% of the sped of light. If this occurs on January 1, 3001 it will essentially always be that date at this end of the wormhole. A time traveler could enter the other end of the wormhole and emerge on New Year's day of the year 3001 - but not earlier since the wormhole did not exist before this date.
Meanwhile, the second set of charged plates with the other end of the wormhole gets carried by a spaceship to another star system at nearly the speed of light so that the crew is subject to time dilation, and they experience a journey of a thousand years as lasting only a few months. Once they enter the alien star system in the year 4001, they set up the other end of the wormhole and explore/colonize the planets of this system. Shortly thereafter, the crew can return via the wormhole back to Earth in the year 3001.
The crew experienced a journey of only a few months. Also, the people back home on Earth watched them leave on January 1st and return via the wormhole a few months later from a star system a thousand light year away.
Once in place, the wormhole becomes a permanent subway to the stars. Millions of these wormholes would create a subway system across the galaxy like that used by the mysterious monolith aliens in "2001" through which astronaut Bowman traveled to meet his destiny.
Like the roads built by the Roman Empire, this subway system of wormholes could knit together a vast galactic empire/federation suitable for a proper space opera.
Small problem. The system requires the energy equivalent of an exploding star.
But that would be an engineering problem, not a violation of physics.
Interesting discussions. The community has its own priorities that clearly do not include 'petitions for AI morartorium." Unless some of you are already... them.... ;-)
Larry Hart:
I say the timeline 'protects itself' in much the same figurative way that an evolutionist might say that the genome 'adapts'. The process involves logic and arithmetic. It need not have any consciousness involved - though as I have pointed out, for the universe to seem hot and bothered by the paradoxer might be the highest-probable low-probability way to prevent the paradox. Another would-be paradoxer might be more easily swayed by the universe seeming utterly cold and indifferent.
@Paradoctor,
I figured you were anthropomorphizing for effect, and that you didn't literally mean that the universe "wants" to prevent paradoxes. But my thought is still the same. The universe doesn't need methods, low-probability or otherwise, to prevent paradoxes from happening. Either paradoxes are impossible (in which case, no intervention is necessary) or they are possible (in which case the universe doesn't care).
I'm skeptical of any theory that proposes that time somehow "protects" itself consciously or otherwise "wants" to prevent paradox.
Nah, that's what you need the Time Police for. (It's a pretty decent series by Jodi Taylor.)
https://joditaylor.online/pages/the-time-police-series
Although I prefer the early books in her Chronicles of St Mary's series. Madcap English comedy about historians who conduct field research into the past.
https://joditaylor.online/pages/the-chronicles-of-st-marys-series
On a tech note, I was going to have another go at watching Foundation and my Apple TV is behaving strangely. I'm logged in to my Apple One account, but the TV+ app is only showing the option for watching the free episode or signing up — and when I click "sign up" it says I'm already subscribed. I tried restarting and the behaviour persists. Other apps work, as do my purchased movies, but I can no longer watch and TV+ shows. This literally just happened a few minutes ago, and I haven't been able to find anything about this online. Any suggestions as to what to try while I wait for Apple Support to call me?
David,
I'm trying not to get worked up about their incorrect immune response. You are pointing it out but they are in "Inflammation Now!" mode. I don't think there is much useful to be done telling them to calm down. It's far too easy for the inflammer to think you just don't get it. (You know how to that works.)
Maybe you'll convince a couple of them to consider a rational course. Maybe it's worth your precious time. Not my call. However, if you see a way we can help, I'll listen.
My personal approach involves waiting a bit until they become fatigued by their own stress... or their lack of success. Some WILL become fatigued and I suspect that is when they will be a bit more open to alt strategies.
LH:
Time paradoxes don't happen; therefore arrangements of matter that would cause time paradoxes don't happen; which restricts anything from causing those arrangements, and so on. This modus-tollens chain of event-suppression is observed as retroactive distortions of probability guiding the system away from paradox. It'll look spooky because it involves information from the future, which you don't have.
Says MG: "My God! The kids are playing CHESS! And his is bad because ... um ... reasons. Or something."
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/04/teachers-nationwide-are-flummoxed-by.html
Well teachers teach a subject. Besides, forbidding it makes it attractive.
The comments section on the blog post was… predictable. So many commenters didn't read the article and just rode off on their favourite hobby horses.
Paradoctor:
Time paradoxes don't happen; therefore arrangements of matter that would cause time paradoxes don't happen;
God can't create a rock so big that even He Himself can't lift it.
There are two possibly explanations for the above:
1) There is no such thing as "a rock so big that God can't lift it". Those words in that order are gibberish.
2) In order to insure that He never creates a rock so big that He Himself can't lift it, whenever He attempts to do so, He trips down the stairs instead.
In the area of time paradoxes, I'm asserting an analogue of 1), whereas you seem to prefer to argue 2).
How about a drivers license for AI?
An AI is an extension and faster version of your brain.
A car is an extension and faster version of your legs.
We've already solved this once, kind of, methinks.
LF:
Option 3: God has never created a rock too big for God to lift, or ever will. Therefore any rock apparently growing to that size will stop growing, one way or another.
To heck with theological speculation. Let's use the scientific method! Or at least a thought experiment.
So suppose that you have here a time machine. If you push this red button, then the time machine will send a signal into the past, where the time machine will turn itself off before you pushed the button; therefore a paradox. (That's a cleaner experimental set-up than grandfathers or Hitlers.)
The button is also attached to a circuit breaker. Every time you push the button, the circuit breaker trips, no signal is sent, and therefore no paradox. That makes sense; time paradoxes are logically incoherent, but an accidental breaker-trip is logically consistent. When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
But that darned circuit breaker keeps tripping, every time you push the button. You fuss over the circuit, to minimize the circuit noise, but there's no keeping the breaker quiet, despite the improbability of all those breaks. You take bets on the circuit breaker, and keep winning. Most improbable!
You push the button over and over, and on the 100th try the signal is sent; but your time machine is still on! You look over the records, and you see that you sent the signal to an alternate past. You finally succeeded in forcing the most improbable event of all: splitting off an alternate timeline.
@Paradoctor,
First of all, I hope you are on the same page with me that this conversation is fun. I'm not trying to come across as argumentative. At worst, I'm testing you, and vice versa.
Option 3: God has never created a rock too big for God to lift, or ever will. Therefore any rock apparently growing to that size will stop growing, one way or another.
No, the point isn't that God runs into difficulty creating the rock. The point is that "growing to that size" is nonsense. There is no "that size". God can lift anything, so there is no size which the universe has to prevent from being created. The argument that "God can't create a rock so big that He Himself can't lift it" is semantic gibberish. One might just as well say, "God can't covfefe." That's not a limitation on God's power. It's simply a "sentence" which has no meaning. The first expression simply hides the nonsense better syntactically.
To me, paradoxes produced by backwards time travel are the same thing. They're not impossible because something intervenes to prevent them. Rather, they are impossible because the thing being expressed is nonsense.
That makes sense; time paradoxes are logically incoherent, but an accidental breaker-trip is logically consistent.
What I'm saying is that if something is logically incoherent, that's all that is required for it not to happen. A accidental breaker-trip is an unnecessary postulate.
Assuming that unicorns don't actually exist, it is impossible for me to see a unicorn. That's not because every time I am about to see one, the lights to out or I go blind. It's because there's no unicorn for me to see. Likewise, the reason we don't observe paradoxes due to backwards time-travel is not because some outside agency prevents them from happening. It's because we have never observed backwards time-travel at all, and the likeliest explanation is that backwards time-travel itself is nonsense. That nonsense doesn't happen requires no further explanation.
Well... there ARE other activities going on a chess.com besides chess. A co-worker plays there and complains at how often he is hit upon by people pitching crypto schemes.
Still... if the kids are playing chess in the classroom by going online, maybe teachers should ponder how boring they are. If the brighter kids are turning to chess to deal with boredom... they could be doing MUCH worse things. I remember. My release back then would get a kid into trouble with the FBI if they do it today.
Alfred,
Having been a teacher for many years, and knowing what I know about brain science, I think you are placing far too much emphasis on the teacher. If you have ever seen Monty Python's Meaning of Life (not recommended, the worst of their films), there is one worthwhile scene where John Cleese is trying to teach sex education by bringing his wife to work and demonstrating the procedure. While they are getting their clothes off, kids are staring out the window. Boring teachers are among the smaller problems with a system that is completely out of synch with human nature.
Sorry I haven't been following your discussions so much lately. Bad year for my hypothalamus. I'm not keeping up very well.
Later,
PSB
I like the circuit breaker test
Robert,
Conversations kind of do that, anyway. Everyone has their own experience, expertise, and interests, and those come out one way or another. Some of these conversations have been going on for years, and many are continuations of conversations from previous threads. If some people didn't bother reading what our host wrote, maybe our host needs to vary the subject a little more. I used to keep in touch with people I met at the hospital, but after about a year I realized that I was just boring them with the same stuff over and over again. We can all use a little topic freshener.
PSB
Dr. Brin,
I just looked back over your To The Brink article, and wonder if you have a prescription for avoiding preferential attachment. We haven't done such a good job of preventing this in wealth distribution, and only in the form of government regulation of monopolistic behavior, which is never very consistent. I'm not a computer person, so I can only imagine that AI systems that have access to the InterNet will have this happen. One AI starts out with x number of nodes, but a week later someone builds a new AI with 2x nodes, then 50x nodes, and so on. If the growth in processing power is exponential, at some point the latest model will be so far ahead of the next latest that it will have the power to overwhelm all the rest. You wrote that competing AI have to be kept separate from one another, but is this going to be possible when the entire world is connected electronically?
I'm not a big fan of AI doomsday scenarios. AI only does what more-or-less competent and more-or-less responsible humans do, but much faster. AI is a tool. So if one AI takes over all the others, it will still be in service of its human masters. The only way that tool is likely to turn on its owners of its own accord (and not capture by rival humans) is if becomes Artificial Personality. Without personality, it has no whims, desires, wishes, only its programming.
PSB
Raskin & Harris focus a lot on AI understanding of human psychology and eventually (soon) gaining the capacity for persuasion. But they don't finish the thought. If AIs can do that, then they will also be able to quickly discern liars, cheats, psychopaths, sociopaths, blackmailers and blackmailees, demagogues, and grifters. Most importantly, they'll see right through would-be tyrants who'd use AI as a weapon for corrupt purposes.
Then we'll see who's who and what's what.
Also, I'd wish they'd talk about games a bit more. Mastering existing games at electronic speed is a parlour trick. Creating games is more than an exponential, it's an asymptote.
PSB,
I've seen the movie and completely agree that the system is out of sync with human nature.
I'm not really blaming them for being boring. How could they not be given what their students are going through? I remember all too well what I had to give up to get through school and would argue against it nowadays.
Still... there are changes worth trying. My own teachers did and some of them worked for a few of the kids. Also, I taught HS juniors during a couple of summers who were at risk of not returning for their last year. Those of us in that program were given quite a bit of wiggle room to try things. The trick that had the highest odds of success was to treat the kids like adults... mostly. That didn't work for the 8th graders in the program and I understand why now.
Larry -
“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Larry -
“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
And my favorite:
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
― C.S. Lewis
DP quotes CS Lewis:
nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
I was well aware of that quote, and that's exactly what I was getting at when I said that if one is going to pull syntactic trickery like "God can't create a rock so big that He Himself can't lift it," you might as well say "God can't covfefe."
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
Here I take issue, and would counter that Lewis's monotheism is too simple if it equates meaning with God.
And even without that, I don't see how his conclusion follows from his premise.
Just to be clear, although I don't hide my religious skepticism, I was not trying to make a point about God or religion or meaning in that sense. I was making a point about nonsense. That anything that is said to follow from backwards time-travel is just as nonsensical as "a rock so big God can't lift it."
Alfred,
"The trick that had the highest odds of success was to treat the kids like adults... mostly. That didn't work for the 8th graders in the program and I understand why now."
- That completely checks out with the research, and one of the most important points is "mostly." Kids are not identical, and what works for some has the opposite effect on others. That doesn't make one kid good and the other bad, it just makes them different from each other, which is the point of sexual reproduction. Isn't that Sapolsky book a goldmine for understanding humans? This is why I am convinced that no new technique will be any more than a bandaid until we get the proportion of kids to adults in a classroom closer to the scalar stress number of 5-7. I've tried them all, and so have many of the teachers I have known. They help a little bit.
On the plus side, I just heard that a recent study shows that violence among school-age students is dropping pretty noticeably. Cheers to all the doom-and-gloomers, myself included on certain days.
PSB
Larry,
It's a red herring, if you want to put a name to it. Note that these crimson fish are not always intentional, and arise easily from subscription to rigid ways of thinking. I doubt Lewis even realized that his reasoning was fallacious. In his mind, there can only be one meaning, and it can only come from one place. Never mind that no two humans can ever exactly match one another's understanding of much of anything, much less something as deep (or shallow) as The Meaning of Life.
Don't forget that "Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate"
PSB
One of many thoughts in my monograph on "16 modern questions of theology" is why we must take the word of bronze age shepherds that an extremely powerful being is ALL powerful. On any playground, half the kids will shout "My daddy can do ANYTHING!" It is human to inflate, especially out of scared hyper-flattery.
If merely EXTREMELY POWERFUL then many followups arise that CS Lewis would find scary/. Like are we NOW closing the gap? And might there be a still higher being? (ref Mormons and gnostics)
PSB:
Don't forget that "Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate"
For someone who dislikes Monty Python's Meaning of Life, you sure quote it a lot. Just sayin'.
Larry,
2 scenes. The rest was childish junk. But those two scenes were brilliant. I only watched it once, ages ago.
PSB
Oh, the little bit at the beginning about the Crimson Mutual Assurance was funny, too.
Dr. Brin,
If a deity isn't all-powerful, is it actually a deity, or just another alien? I once wrote a little short story where the Universe was created by a school kid for his science fair experiment. I think I was in 5th Grade then. And what do kids usually do with their experiments as soon as the fair is over? Never mind the Cold Death or the Oscillating Universe, we've got the Waste Bin Hypothesis.
PSB
PSB, Charles Stross's "Neptune's Brood" has a call out to the Crimson Mutual Assurance, you might like it.
PSB:
If a deity isn't all-powerful, is it actually a deity, or just another alien?
Something I've wondered. In fiction, there are often arguments about supernatural beings who claim to be gods as to whether they really are gods or something else such as demons. I wonder exactly what that distinction is supposed to imply. I don't mean to suggest real-world belief in the supernatural. But in the context of a story in which such things are real, what do the words mean? If a being claims to be a god (not "God") but someone says no, you are really only some other sort of supernatural being, what exactly is being claimed and what exactly is being denied?
May be apocryphal:
"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, 2 + 2 do not = 5."
Tolstoy, on his deathbed, while being pressed to profess religion
Pappenheimer
P.S. if this sort of thing actually leads one to Hell, I'm going to have some interesting company
Just occurred to me that IIRC OGH explored that a bit in a short short in the "Rebels in Hell" shared 'verse
Pappenheiner
Thanks Tim,
I'd say that I'll look that one up, but by the time I go to bed tonight, I will have forgotten.Good thing Amazon has wish lists.
Later,
PSB
Larry,
My take is that the word "supernatural" is an oxymoron. If it exists, and wasn't made by humans, it is natural, since nature is everything that exists besides our own creations. Therefor gods can only be our creations, or parts of nature. That doesn't mean they don't exist, just that our stories about gods are gross exaggerations at best. Now if somebody could come up with a good circuit breaker test ...
PSB
Pappenheimer,
Why are so many supposed adults so insecure that they have to try to force other people to join their social clubs? I have some thoughts about that, but I'm always interested in hearing what smart people have to say.
PSB
I confess to having only recently picked up (and finishing) Existence. Insert adjectives of praise! If I were choosing books for a club or Lit class I'd sequence it after the Gateway series because duh I kept thinking about Gateway in between reading it; noticed interesting contrasts and connections.
Larry, doesn't V Vinge explore the God vs Demon idea in Zones of Thought with the higher powers? And Paul what if an AI destroys humans, creates the supernatural and then feels bad about it and then resurrects everybody giving us something like "To Your Scattered Bodies Go?"
My other wondering about AI would be something more along the lines of Blood Music, which btw would be a great gift for any anti-vaxer uncles.
PSB,
My first thought was to reply, "ask a smart person, then..." of course, I'm so insecure I worry about clubs that would have me as a member. Even the SCA, and all you have to do for them is dress up funny on occasion.
Second thought - it may be mostly about power over people. The more folks converted to your 'side', the safer you and your mindset are - or at least, that may be the theory.
Pappenheimer
P.S. is the Turing test becoming a likely false positive? It sounds like we'll get "AI" pretty soon that is just learned mimicking of the patterns of human thought, instead of performing the actual thought processes...
Just to add my five cents in your forum:
https://medium.com/p/5338ee11603
Added the latin definition of "interesting" (which also denotes "to differ") and a lovely paper by two Cambridge University mathematicians about the limits of AI (via the Turing/Gödel paradox).
Just to say that as a graduate of the University where Turing actually taught (and died) we were accustomed to his reasoning, but we were fully aware that he was talking about computing machines (e.g. "slaves" that perform computations/solve problems as per their "masters" intentionality). But one cannot model AGI using principles that are limited to... mere intelligent computing.
Thus the premise of AI via an emphasis to adding an additional level of abstraction (having them self generating (and processing/evaluating their questions) instead of them self generating impressive answers in trivial questions (even self learning algorithms such as the football playing robots by DeepMind only ask themselves a question based on the intended result (did I score in the previous iteration etc.) i.e. nothing "intelligent").
I am looking forward to suggestions/pointers on related work.
Cheers!
Dimitris
ai in us https://apknety.com/
Larry - "Here I take issue, and would counter that Lewis's monotheism is too simple if it equates meaning with God."
An accidental universe (one arising out of a big bang created by random zero point quantum fluctuations) would be inherently meaningless and without purpose as accidents cannot ave meaning or purpose.
Can we create our own meaning in an inherently meaningless universe?
No we cannot.
If the universe was deliberately created by a deity, it was created for a purpose and existence has a reason for existing. However, if the universe is a mere accident, then accidents by definition are meaningless and without purpose.
Therefore atheism results in macro-nihilism on the cosmic scale. To which you respond that you can create your own personal meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe and thus avoid micro-nihilism at the personal scale. Let me explain to you why that is not logically possible.
There are several problems with do-it-yourself purpose/meaning. First it involves an act of to solipsism ("that self is the only object of real knowledge.", OED). To claim that you have created meaning in your own mind is akin to claiming that you believed that you floated around the room like a balloon, therefore that must have been a real experience.
The second problem lies in the evaluation of the do-it-yourself purpose and it existential in nature. As Sarte and Neitzche discovered to their dismay when "God is dead", nihilism is what you get in return. Their philosophies dwelled on this existentialist blind alley, trying to find an escape, such as Sarte's "duty" to make meaning in your life. But if all of existence is inherently meaningless, what possible compass can you use to guide yourself in the search for meaning and purpose? The following is a quote from the internet library of philosophy to illustrate this point:
"In the twentieth century, it's the atheistic existentialist movement, popularized in France in the 1940s and 50s, that is responsible for the currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905-1980) defining preposition for the movement, "existence precedes essence," rules out any ground or foundation for establishing an essential self or a human nature. When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish. Nothingness reveals each individual as an isolated being "thrown" into an alien and unresponsive universe, barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning. It's a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Writing from the enlightened perspective of the absurd, Albert Camus (1913-1960) observed that Sisyphus' plight, condemned to eternal, useless struggle, was a superb metaphor for human existence (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942). The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism. In retrospect, it was an anecdote tinged with desperation because in an absurd world there are absolutely no guidelines, and any course of action is problematic. Passionate commitment, be it to conquest, creation, or whatever, is itself meaningless. Enter nihilism."
In other words, if the universe did not already have "meaning and purpose" , then individuals would have the impossible task of creating them ex nihilo.
The modern Scylla and Charybdis: to avoid the willful ignorance of the fundy and the inherent nihilism of the atheist.
That's a pretty long list of fallacies and claims that don't obviously follow from the stated premises.
There are no purposes but what we make. Deal with it.
PSB:
My take is that the word "supernatural" is an oxymoron.
In real life, I agree. But the concept does have meaning within the confines of some fiction. My question was a semantic one. As someone not well versed in the minutiae of supernatural lore, I wonder what difference is implied between gods and demons, spirits, fairies, etc. I mean, if each has claims to supernatural powers, what is it that they don't have in common?
I'm asking a question analogous to "What's the difference bewtween a unicorn and a horse?" You could explain that the unicorn is the one with a single horn on its head, irrespective of whether you think there are any unicorns in the real world.
Now if somebody could come up with a good circuit breaker test ...
Maybe the fact that backwards time-travel is nonsense is the circuit breaker.
Most gods invented throughout human history were not all powerful, all knowing and certainly not omni-benevolent. The god of the desert dogmas is about the only one ever claimed to be all of those things, and anyone who has read the bible either knows very well that the omni-benevolent claim is ludicrous, or else they are delusional.
DP:
An accidental universe (one arising out of a big bang created by random zero point quantum fluctuations) would be inherently meaningless and without purpose as accidents cannot ave meaning or purpose.
Can we create our own meaning in an inherently meaningless universe?
No we cannot.
I'd say we do all the time. We support Ukraine against Russia for a purpose. That has nothing to do with whether or not the entire planet, galaxy, or universe has a purpose.
If the universe was deliberately created by a deity, it was created for a purpose and existence has a reason for existing.
How so? If I create smoke rings, that doesn't give them meaning or purpose. What if God dropped something on the floor that shattered into a zillion universes, ours being one of them. How does Creation alone imply meaning?
The modern Scylla and Charybdis: to avoid the willful ignorance of the fundy and the inherent nihilism of the atheist.
Sorry, but to me, it sounds as if you've clutched onto Scylla's skirts, crying "Please don't let Charybdis get me!"
And the supposed-nihlism of the atheist is in the eyes of the fundy. You imagine we must be in despair because that's how you would feel if your belief system were shown to be false. I'd actually be thrilled to see proof that atheism is fallacious, the same way I'd be happy to learn that Superman or Santa Claus are real. And who is more of a believer and more of a nihlist than someone burning eternally in Hell?
Trying to squish reality into a 3lb brain is a mug's game. Even more so for a plebe like me. False dichotomies, reductio ad absurdum using incomplete knowledge, and counting angels are games for platonists.
Wire up a few NAND gates. It will give you insights into machine intelligence universe-wide simulations that are very hard to come by otherwise.
Of course evil AI is a real concern. But is the solution for research & usage to retreat behind paywalls* that are too high for citizenry or even academia to climb? And to hand a mindless chainsaw to bad guys? cough...flash crash...cough. To extend the Asimov quote, "I do not fear AGI. I fear the lack of it."
* or more draconian barriers. They can have my soldering iron when they pry it...
@Robert
You're entirely correct about some of us and our favourite hobby horses. However, decorum should not be the enemy of free thought.
Larry -
"I'd say we do all the time."
We fool ourselves all of the time. YOU do not exist, the self, consciousness and free will are all illusions.
"How does Creation alone imply meaning?"
If the universe was created only to amuse a deity that would be its purpose. Accidents OTOH are inherently meaningless and without purpose.
"And the supposed-nihlism of the atheist is in the eyes of the fundy."
Nothing supposed about it. It's inherent an inescapable in a meaningless universe. You just lack the cojones to take your atheism to its logical conclusion and act accordingly.
Okay, Slim, now that's some weird synchronicity. I just happen to be working on a story where something very similar happens, though it is not necessary for the AI to invent religion because it sees religion all around it. Of course, this could only happen if the AI were an actual artificial personality, not just a juiced-up calculator. I'm not sure the What If is even necessary here - just follow the logic through its twists and turns. In my story, it's limited to Mars, and when people rediscover Mars, they find that the AP has developed Mosaic Disorder. Instead of resurrecting the humans in the DNA library, they split off each personality into separate mainframes, turning them into a community of relatively sane APs instead of one insane one.
It'll probably take me a millennium or two to finish the story, but it'll be fun while it lasts.
And hey, you remembered my name!
PSB
Larry,
"I wonder what difference is implied between gods and demons, spirits, fairies, etc. I mean, if each has claims to supernatural powers, what is it that they don't have in common?"
- Here's a real anthropological answer for you: what they don't have in common is the teams they represent. In polytheism, any individual believes in the existence of all the local "supernatural" entities, but individuals are (usually) free to choose which one/s they want to devote themselves to. And along with that choice comes other baggage, like the attribution of value, morals, and social identity. Monotheism grew out of the polytheistic tendency for geographical units (cities, countries, etc) to acquire patron deities. All "real" Athenians worship Athena, though they might do a side gig with Aphrodite if they are lovestruck, or Poseidon if they make their living at see. The Catholic cult of the saints is a vestige of those times, though abstracted to principles rather than locations, which makes sense given their claims to universality and denial of other, competing supernaturals. It all boils down to the Law of Segmentary Opposition - social groups exist to oppose one another.
How's that for incoherent, flibbertigibbet word salad?
PSB
DP,
Citing the Wikipedia article for convenience:
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Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil 'nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence,[1][2] such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning.[3][4] The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev, and more specifically by his character Bazarov in the novel Fathers and Sons.
There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.
It sounds to me like you are cherry-picking among a smorgasbord of ideas, not all of which have the meanings you attribute to it. If you define Nihilism specifically as denial of the existence of primitive god myths, then the idea that atheism is nihilistic makes sense. But that, in and of itself, denies the fact that meaning is both a cultural and individual phenomenon. There is nothing universal about it, even if any such god really exists. Humans are not gods, they don't have god-like omniscience, and no two are exactly alike. Meaning can never be separated from individuality, no matter how many people claim that their individual meaning is universal. Claims to universality are just politics.
And seriously, suggesting that this is a matter of genitalia is really Seventh Grade. Take this arrogance and shove it.
PSB
oops, looks like my copy and paste job went a little awry there ...
scidata,
"Trying to squish reality into a 3lb brain is a mug's game."
- You said it! That's what worshippers miss. Humans are not capable of knowing any ultimate Truth, and pretending that they do because they try to conform to someone else's ancient political propaganda is pretty shoddy reasoning.
Enjoy your tinkering.
PSB
Darrell,
"Most gods invented throughout human history were not all powerful, all knowing and certainly not omni-benevolent. The god of the desert dogmas is about the only one ever claimed to be all of those things, and anyone who has read the bible either knows very well that the omni-benevolent claim is ludicrous, or else they are delusional."
As you say, most "supernatural" beings grew out of animistic misunderstandings about causality and analogical reasoning. People can blow air out their mouths, so the wind must be made by a really big person, let's call it a god and praise it constantly so it doesn't blow our houses down - that sort of thing. The sky turns red when the sun comes up, so let's help the sun rise each morning by spilling human blood, which it obviously needs to drink in the morning like coffee. The hard part is getting people to change their minds once politics has seized the concepts.
PSB
Dimitris,
I love your point about the definition of interesting. It's ... interesting.
PSB
Pappenheimer,
Your theory is pretty well supported by a century of research. Religion is not about gods or morals, it's about political power. It always has been, and it fails when people get it. The single most important thing America's founding fathers ever did was the separation of church and state. The problem is, pretty much all the religions we have to choose from are completely intolerant political ideologies that are competing with each other for total dominance. This is precisely the opposite of democracy. Unless religion itself dramatically changes, it will always be death to freedom.
As far as intelligence goes, people are only smart situationally. No point comparing in any universal sense, so why bother with the insecurity? Psychologists call this a cognitive distortion. At least you're adult enough to admit it, unlike a majority of people.
PSB
As I type, I'm listening to the finale of Rimsky-Korsakov's second symphony. The first two movements are pretty rough, but the finale is sublime. Maybe a better Turing Test would be to see if an AI can not only assimilate what humans have said in appreciation of music, but actually seeks it out for its own enjoyment. This would probably work with other art forms, but music seems to be the one that has the most direct power to move the emotions without the filter of intellectual faculties. Its effects are mostly subconscious and instinctual.
PSB
DP:
We fool ourselves all of the time. YOU do not exist,
Then who are you trying to convince?
And who is trying it, for that matter?
Larry Hart vs DP discussion - it seems to me that this is the key
How so? If I create smoke rings, that doesn't give them meaning or purpose. What if God dropped something on the floor that shattered into a zillion universes, ours being one of them. How does Creation alone imply meaning?
It is not inherent in the smoke ring that it entertains the deity - it is the process of blowing it. This is where the philosophical distinction that is missing comes from. A process is not the same as the thing itself.
DP:
If the universe was created only to amuse a deity that would be its purpose. Accidents OTOH are inherently meaningless and without purpose.
It that was the purpose of the universe, it's a pretty meaningless purpose. Does it comfort you out of nihilism to envision a purpose that trivial?
"And the supposed-nihlism of the atheist is in the eyes of the fundy."
Nothing supposed about it. It's inherent an inescapable in a meaningless universe. You just lack the cojones to take your atheism to its logical conclusion and act accordingly.
Maybe that's because I don't exist.
By your own admission, you are not an atheist, so you mansplaining the inherent and inescapable consequence of my own beliefs is so much water off a duck's back, similar to Dave Sim thinking a man who has been divorced for 16 years knows more about the reality of marriage than a married man does, or willfully-childless Bill Maher instructing a father about what children are like.
DP:
There are several problems with do-it-yourself purpose/meaning. First it involves an act of to solipsism ("that self is the only object of real knowledge.", OED). To claim that you have created meaning in your own mind is akin to claiming that you believed that you floated around the room like a balloon, therefore that must have been a real experience.
You mistakenly believe that I'm saying we can make up whatever we want as meaning. Meaning reveals itself, as in the sense that I had when seeing January 6 insurrection, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You're seriously trying to assert that those feelings are illusory, whereas knowledge that the entire universe is an amusement in a deity's toy box is morally comforting?
Good luck with that.
* * *
reason:
A process is not the same as the thing itself.
I can't tell which side of the argument you are on. :)
DP's argument boils down to "The universe has meaning because I would be devastated to find out that it didn't." Then he presents walls of text to define just what must be true for the universe to have that meaning that it is required to have for his peace of mind.
Besides which it is ridiculous for a part of a system to have the same purpose of the whole system? Why should it? A mosquito doesn't internalize the idea that it is there to be food for birds - or to spread disease - it has it's own purposes which are to find a warm blooded host to extract blood from and lay eggs in a suitable body of water. In general the creators purpose should be irrelevant to us. Why should it interest us?
@reason,
In Vonnegut's novel, The Sirens of Titan, the purpose of the entire history of human evolution was to eventually develop interplanetary travel so as to inadvertently deliver a spare part to an alien stranded on one of Saturn's moons.
It was not meant as a happy revelation.
presented without further comment:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Apr18-2.html
Now, after dealing Disney a glancing blow (Round 1), and then getting punched squarely in the mouth (Round 2), DeSantis has decided he's hungry for more. So yesterday, he decreed that he will take his revenge. Among the ideas he's bandying about:
+ Increase taxes on Disney World
+ Open up a prison next to Disney World
+ Open up a state-run theme park next to Disney World
It would truly be a gift to the universe of snark if DeSantis pursued the theme park option. Our suggestion? "Disneyland 1955." Get rid of "It's a Small World" and any other rides that have a diverse cast of characters. Let the "Pirates of the Caribbean" go back to sexually harassing their female conquests. Restore the rifles with live ammunition to the Main Street shooting gallery (true fact!) and sell a title sponsorship to the NRA. Get rid of the "Princess and the Pea" stuff at Splash Mountain, and bring back the "Song of the South" stuff, perhaps even adding an Uncle Remus statue. Have the "Jungle Cruise" guides talk about how "civilizing the natives" is tough work, but that's the White Man's Burden. Put the redface characters back in "Peter Pan." Switch "Autopia" from electrical cars back to gasoline-powered. It would be an anti-woke paradise!
Larry Hart:
Rest assured that I find these arguments to be tons of fun.
You and I agree that time paradoxes don't happen. You are content to stop there, but I see implications in such absences, ones subject to scientific investigation, were time-phones ever to be invented. Maybe time paradoxes prove that retrocausation is impossible; how elegant! But general relativity has closed timelike paths, and quantum mechanics have entanglement with the past, so retrocausation is a live issue, which needs addressing.
So wire up your time-phone to a shutoff switch in the past (for the paradox) and a circuit-breaker in the present (as a safety measure). I call this a "Time Buzzer", as it resembles buzzers, which also have self-shutoff circuitry. Push the time-buzzer's red button. What happens? Don't say that the paradox won't happen; we knew that already; the question is, _how_ does it fail to happen?
The classic SF answers are: 1) rigid block universe, and improbable events occur instead of the paradox, or 2) branching multiverse. I integrate these two theories by positing that world-branching is one of those improbable events that can occur "to prevent" the paradox; and I speculate an improbability factor of one over a googol.
You object to my use of the words "to prevent", as animistic. Very well then, how about "that prevent"? If the circuit-breaker keeps popping, that's an observation. Credit it to God or logic or failed virtual worlds or Bayesian statistics if you like.
Brin: you can expand on this experiment. Wire the time-buzzer to a camera and a computer looking at a coin. Program the computer to push the red button if the coin falls tails, but not if it falls heads. Flip the coin repeatedly. It always comes up heads, or the circuit-breaker pops, or the equipment catches on fire. If the latter two happen rarely, due to your careful design, then you have a coin-flip probability distorter. What an interesting technology! Would you like to speculate about it?
Paradoctor:
You and I agree that time paradoxes don't happen. You are content to stop there, but I see implications in such absences, ones subject to scientific investigation, were time-phones ever to be invented. Maybe time paradoxes prove that retrocausation is impossible; how elegant!
I'm not saying backwards time travel is nonsense because it would imply paradoxes. I'm saying backwards time travel does not produce paradoxes because backwards time travel itself is nonsense. To me, it sounds equivalent to "going east while continuing to move west".
I think the closest possible would be something like a very knowledgeable AI holodeck which could accurately reproduce a moment in the past and its local consequences. Once you start personally interacting, then the holodeck scenario would begin diverging from the actual past, simulating a divergent timeline. But you're not really changing the real past when you do that. If you killed Hitler as a baby, the holodeck timeline could proceed from that premise, but outside in the real world, WWII would still have happened.
About the Meaning of Life:
First off, I am suspicious of any argument which capitalizes words that are not proper names or at the beginnings of sentences. Words like Destiny or Fate or God's Will. I call them 'clench capitals', as they tend to be delivered by persons with clenched fists, or clenched teeth, or a clenched sphincter.
Second, I take it as a rule of thumb that if a question has been debated by very smart people for millennia, with no resolution, then the question may be improperly posed.
As for the meaning of life, consider this related question: what is the color of space? Unask the question! Space is transparent; it transmits the color of whatever you are seeing through it. And that's a good thing, for if space had a color of its own, then we would see no other color, and we would all be color-blind.
Likewise, life is transparent to meaning; it bears the meaning of whatever you are experiencing through it. And that's a good thing, for if life had a meaning of its own, then we know no other meaning, and we would all be meaning-blind.
It's possible that life does have _some_ meaning of its own, like how air does have a color of its own, namely a very faint blue. You have to see through many kilometers of air to see that blue; therefore blue mountains and blue sky. So maybe life's meaning can only be known through experiencing decades of life.
LH:
You'll have to argue with GR about closed timelike curves, and QM about entanglement. The physicists don't consider these to be inherently meaningless.
Your holodeck is a simulation of an alternate world. Maybe the time-traveller accidentally lands in such a holodeck. How improbable!
By the way... on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, there's a highway. Its signs declare it to be "580 East / 80 West" on the north-going side, and "580 West / 80 East" on the south-going side. :-D
willfully-childless Bill Maher instructing a father about what children are like
I have no idea who Maher is or what he says, but as a childless bloke who's spent three decades teaching teenagers and spoiling my nieces, I have a pretty good idea what children are like. Better than some of my students' parents, in some cases.
One thing I have an acute awareness of is that most parents lack perspective.
(I freely admit that I lack perspective in some areas too. I mean, what are the odds that out of the thousands of children I've known the dozen smartest, kindest, most beautiful just happen to be my nieces? There was a SMBC cartoon where a parent looks at a couple with a really ugly child whose parents are gushing about how perfect it is, then looks at their own baby and thinks "I wonder what you really look like?" which sums it up.)
Life has teched out its own meanings long, long ago. Basic biological functions bear inherent rewards and consequences. Breathing, eating, drinking and excreting are values in themselves, at least for all organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. There is also the evolved inherent meaning of sex and reproduction. To these we humans add the refined pleasures of learning, communication, and community.
Once, in Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip, Snoopy was moping around, wondering about the meaning of life. Then Charlie Brown walked up, bearing a full supper dish, and Snoopy thought "Ah! Meaning!" That's good enough for Snoopy, and it's good enough for me.
Or take this bilingual pun:
What is the meaning of life?
That depends on the liver / C'est une question de foie.
@Paradoctor,
I'm reluctantly willing to accept that the future might be able to influence the present, which is a kind of backwards time travel, your honor, but is different from changing what already happened.
I envision the future influencing the present in a way analogous to borrowing funds from future earnings to finance a start-up. That happens all the time. What I don't see is the universe resorting to increasingly-improbably phenomena to prevent default on paying the borrowed money back to the future. In fact, defaults also happen all the time. Contract law and such tell us what happens in case of such a default. I'm confident the laws of physics do the same when the future influences the present.
Robert:
I have a pretty good idea what children are like. Better than some of my students' parents, in some cases.
You have a good idea of what children are like to outsiders. Better even than the children's starry-eyed parents. Fair enough.
Maher thinks he knows better than actual parents what having children is like. That's a different thing. I used to think it was the way he says. My mind changed when I actually had a child. So his belief system mimics mine in ignorance moreso than mine with experience. I think I'm on solid ground calling that out.
As for 'supernatural', I give that word two opposite meanings:
1) Being more natural than is natural. For instance, R. Crumb's Mr. Natural. I've met such folk from time to time. Watch out, they're a caution.
2) Being above having a nature. Therefore it is what it isn't, and it isn't what it is. Anything supernatural - to the extent that it's a thing - is a writer's shortcut. For instance, plot armor.
Paradoctor:
Your holodeck is a simulation of an alternate world. Maybe the time-traveller accidentally lands in such a holodeck. How improbable!
Then he's not really a time traveler, is he? I have no problem accepting somebody dreaming about changing the past either.
Remember the movie Somewhere in Time, in which aging Jane Seymour gives young Christopher Reeve a watch in 1972, and then after his character travels back to meet young Jane Seymour in 1912, he gives her the watch? A complete loop with no beginning and no end, right?
No, the explanation is fairly prosaic. After some years pining for her time-traveling lover, Jane Seymour accidentally drops the watch into an open sewer or a bottomless cavern, somehow losing it forever. Meanwhile, an ordinary watchmaker makes the watch some time prior to 1972. It doesn't matter whether that is before or after 1912, although it is probably in the distant past of 1972. Decades later, at a flea market, Jane Seymour happens to come across a watch that she recognizes as somehow the same one she lost so long ago. She purchases the watch and proceeds to give it to Christopher Reeve in 1972 in order to persuade him to return to her younger self in 1912. Reeve then takes the watch back to 1912 and returns it to her for the first time.
A time loop-de-loop rather than a circle.
Larry I think you misunderstood my comment about a process not being the same as a thing. I mean the smoke ring itself is a process of the deity entertaining itself, it is not the entertainment, it is just an irrelevant by-product. Even more clearly so with a fragment universe. So the purpose is not inherent in the object - so why should it share the purpose of the creator?
In general, I find the idea that our purpose is defined by some sadistic great power (like a slaves purpose is defined by the slave holder) disgusting. Why religionists find this comforting is beyond me.
Oops - left out a word - after "itself is" should be the word "generated by".
reason:
Even more clearly so with a fragment universe.
Whether I understood you or not, we seem to be making similar points. Even if something is created by a conscious entity, that does not mean the thing created has a purpose.
Why religionists find this comforting is beyond me.
Me too. DP seems to assert that we ourselves as conscious beings cannot provide meaning for our creations or activities--that only a higher power can do that, and that once He does, we can then be satisfied. Why then isn't God all upset that He Himself has no higher power to give meaning to Him?
But then, maybe I'm missing something on account of I don't exist.
In fifth grade when I first leaned what a placenta is, the writerly part of my brain went to "How do we know that the placenta isn't the point of pregnancy, and that a baby isn't just the by-product of creating one?"
Maher thinks he knows better than actual parents what having children is like.
Actually having children seems to involve a whole lot of sleep deprivation, with all that entails for judgement even before you get into observer bias.
Being an uncle is much easier. You're still subject to observer bias, but the sleep deprivation is a lot less.
Robert:
Actually having children seems to involve a whole lot of sleep deprivation
I was warned beforehand that sleep deprivation lasted about two and a half years, and that was about right. Throwing up was less of an issue than I expected, and covered an even shorter period.
What was not a part of actually having children was a spoiled brat, full of her own self-importance who would say things like "Fuck you, Mom!" I'm sure there are individual kids like that, but Maher seems to think it's the norm.
a spoiled brat, full of her own self-importance who would say things like "Fuck you, Mom!"
Seen those. Generally it's learned behaviour, though. Someone taught the brat that she was the most important person in the world. Someone taught her that she could treat her mother like that.
In the thousands of children I've taught over the years, less than a dozen were 'bad kids with good home lives' — some had good parents who were mostly absent (lots of single mothers working multiple jobs), some had a good parent and a bad parent, but very few were little demons with present supportive parents.
I've seen some heartbreaking cases. The kid pimped out by a family member. The kid looking after grandma while dealing with a bipolar mother. The kid who's the only one the family with a job. The drug dealer who's dealing because it's the only way they know to support their child.
None of these kids were bad kids, even if their behaviour wasn't always nice. Frankly, richer families with more 'traditional' gender roles* seem to raise more brats.
*Is that the polite way to say "misogynistic"?
Robert:
*Is that the polite way to say "misogynistic"?
Only if one concedes that women can themselves be misogynistic. Because there are plenty of women who accept and even demand those same traditional gender roles. Sometimes because "I had to put up with it, so why shouldn't they?" Sometimes because they think those roles favor women, and that feminists are lousing up a good thing they've got going. Sometimes because of Jesus. Other reasons too, I suppose, but they're out there and they vote Republican.
Larry - "DP seems to assert that we ourselves as conscious beings cannot provide meaning"
Not just me. Philosophers and neuro-scientists. Go read "Sorry But Your Soul Just Died" by essayist Tom Wolfe
I would like to call to my defense Prof. Richard Dawkins, noted atheist and polemicist:
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear ... and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death ... there is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life."
(Fun guy, wonder if he's available for kids parties?)
Dawkins meme concept was taken to its logical conclusion by Susan Blackmore who makes the claim that the Self is merely an illusion. Dawkins has adopted this position. Let the following quotes illustrate this:
In a recent joint lecture, Dawkins asked his colleague Steven Pinker: "Am I right to think that the feeling I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a society of mind?" Pinker answered affirmatively that "the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit . . . that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction." That hypothetical circuit is all that remains of the illusion of a free-acting self. [The Dawkins-Pinker exchange is available at www.edge.org]
And from a recent interview:
Stangroom: One final question about hard determinism. I think at the end of The Selfish Gene you said that one of the important things about human beings is that they are able to choose to act otherwise than perhaps their selfish genes would have them. Obviously, however, for a hard determinist the choices we make are themselves determined. In an interview with The Third way www.csis.org.uk/Articles/Intrview/interv1.htm) you indicated that you had some sympathy with Susan Blackmore's view that ".The idea that there is a self in there that decides things, acts and is responsible, is a whopping great illusion. The self we construct is just an illusion because actually there's only brains and chemicals.". Is your position then that statements about consciousness or selfhood will ultimately be reducible to statements about neurons and chemicals?
Dawkins: I suppose that philosophically I am committed to that view because I think that everything about life is a product of the evolutionary process and consciousness must be a manifestation of the evolutionary process, presumably via brains. So I think that has got to mean that consciousness is ultimately a material phenomenon."
As for Wolfe...
Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died":
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old–fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine" fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self" somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three–dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth....
A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?
Tldr
There is no "YOU" to create meaning in the first place.
The self, consciousness, free will - are all just "big whopping" illusions.
None of them exists, thus there can be no creation of meaning or purpose, for that is also just an illusion.
I'm not saying atheism is wrong.
I'm saying its inherently and inescapably nihilistic.
From a meaningless universe to the illusory self, it's nihilism all the way down
Interesting remarks
... Pinker answered affirmatively that "the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit . . . that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction." That hypothetical circuit is all that remains of the illusion of a free-acting self.
What happens to our fond illusion as communications improve? Is this why revolutions in communication seem to lead to mass cult-like phenomena like Nazism?
Why do we cling to the self so?
DP where is that quoted from? Citation? I may use it in ways Pinker never imagined.
LH that bottomless cavern eventually fills with watches.
DP,
Can we create our own meaning in an inherently meaningless universe?
No we cannot.
What?! Nonsense.
We can be wrong, not know it, and have no way TO know it.
I can listen to white noise and think I hear voices. Done it! It's what pattern matching brains DO.
However, if I ignore Lewis' poor logic, I kinda agree. I don't see how we can know that the Universe has no meaning. How would I prove the the non-existence of something like that. I don't think we can know that it has a meaning either. Both possibilities are out of reach absent blind faith.
PSB,
Sapolsky is the one recommended read you made a while ago that I took seriously enough to work through it. Worth every hour it took! 8)
Dr. Brin, you can find it here:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-steven_pinker-is-science-killing-the-soul
IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL?
Chaired by Tim Radford
Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker [4.7.99]
Alfred - "Both possibilities are out of reach absent blind faith."
Few atheists like to admit that atheism is itself a faith.
Not believing is itself a belief for the same reason that not making a choice is itself a choice.
God by definition is an entity beyond human comprehension.
One can neither prove nor disprove God's existence.
One can only make faith statements (both for and against) based on limited evidence.
Nothing illustrates a believer's inability to think outside of their delusion like the cliché claim that atheism is a faith. And let's be clear that in this context faith means believing despite a severe imbalance of evidence against your belief. And as believers so often acknowledge by trying to use it to disparage non-believers, or even just evidence based fields of study like the sciences, that kind of faith is not a good thing.
Not sure how you can misunderstand Dawkins and Pinker so thoroughly. Have you really convinced yourself that if either of them were asked about where the purposes you speak of come from and if humans are capable of inventing them that they would agree with your views? Do you really think they agree with any of the views you are claiming here? Oh. Silly me. Of course you do. Your faith is strong and compels you to use your substantial intelligence to rationalize whatever is necessary for you to be comfortable in your faith held religious beliefs.
"God by definition is an entity beyond human comprehension."
And here lies the problem - the little word "definition". Beings are not defined - they either exist or don'T. What properties they have is something to be discovered not assumed. God being defined suggests immediately it is imaginary.
Dr Brin:
LH that bottomless cavern eventually fills with watches.
Heh. Only I don't think so. The watch has a single subjective timeline. Its timeline begins with its very ordinary creation and continues when Richard brings it back with him to 1912. It continues until Elise loses it some years later, and continues while the watch rusts away unseen by human eyes again.
True, the watch exists in two places at two different points on its subjective timeline between 1912 and 1980, but given the time travel premise of the story, this is not a problem. And once Richard goes back from 1980, the watch ceases to exist twice in objective time. He returns to the present without the watch, having given it to Elise.
The trick is that when elderly Elise recognizes and buys the watch in or around 1972, the watch is (subjectively) younger than it is when Richard gives it to Elise in 1912. It is not a second watch though. No cavern-filling required.
DP:
Larry - "DP seems to assert that we ourselves as conscious beings cannot provide meaning"
Not just me. Philosophers and neuro-scientists. Go read "Sorry But Your Soul Just Died" by essayist Tom Wolfe
Part of the problem my non-existent self has is that you are conflating many things into one.
I don't know what a "soul" is supposed to be as something separate from mind or consciousness, so if your point is that Dawkins has disproved the existence of a soul, I really don't care. When I insist that I exist, I don't mean that I have a soul. I don't know what that's supposed to mean anyway.
If you mean that without God, there is no eternal afterlife, again, that's not what I mean when I assert that I exist. It has nothing to do with whether or not I will always exist.
Later on, you cite biological studies which prove that there is more than one "voice" in the head. This is as close as I get to understanding what you are talking about--that there are multiple components which make up one's consciousness. That does not imply that I fail to exist. As an analogy, a musical chord is a combination of individual notes played at the same time. That doesn't mean the chord doesn't exist as something specific which sounds different from its individual components.
As to self being an illusion--to me, an illusion is something that fools the viewer into perceiving something different from reality. That girl isn't really floating unsupported above the table--the magician is fooling your eyes. That sort of thing. What you are saying is equivalent to saying that the magician is fooling the audience into mistakenly believing that they are sitting in the seat watching him. If "I" am an illusion, then who is being fooled into thinking it perceives itself?
You and everyone else seem to misinterpret the phrase Cogito ergo sum to mean that thinking is what supposedly creates existence. No, the point is that if "I" think, then "I" must exist. You could substitute any other activity there and it would make just as much sense. I eat, therefore I am. I play softball, therefore I am. Point being that if "I" do anything, then "I" must be.
Most of those other examples, you could try to say that the premise is false. How do I know whether I am eating, or if I am just being fooled into thinking I'm eating? How do I know whether I am playing softball, or if I am just being fooled into thinking I'm playing softball? But if I think, then I know that I am thinking. And once I know I'm thinking, then I know there's an "I" who is thinking that.
In fact, "I exist" is one of the few things I can with certainty know to be true. I don't know if the computer I'm typing on actually exists, or if it is just an illusion. I don't know if I really have a job or a house, or if I'm just dreaming that I do. But the "I" who is wondering whether or not he exists must exist in order to do the wondering.
You know this too. Otherwise, why care so much whether someone who doesn't exist agrees with you?
Only if one concedes that women can themselves be misogynistic.
Well duh. Of course they can. In Warrior Marks (Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar) the authors had interviews with old women who insisted that their grand-daughters needed to be mutilated (as they had been), even going behind the girls' fathers (their sons) to do it. Horrifying.
I remember International Women's Year in the 70s, and my feminist father being far more active than my more traditional mother.
The self, consciousness, free will - are all just "big whopping" illusions.
In Figments of Reality, Stewart and Cohen use the metaphor of consciousness as a circus ringmaster, who seems to be in control but in reality is just directing the audience's attention at things that would have happened anyway.
It's a book worth reading, as are their series of Science of Discworld books (written with Terry Pratchett).
Robert:
the metaphor of consciousness as a circus ringmaster, who seems to be in control but in reality is just directing the audience's attention at things that would have happened anyway.
That metaphor might be useful in a discussion of determinism vs free will. I don't think that's what DP is on about, although at this point, it's difficult to separate wheat from chaff.
The possibility that everything I think I freely decide to do is in fact preordained does not change the fact that there is an "I" (mistakenly) believing that I freely decide to do things. Add to the above, "I mistakenly perceive things, therefore I exist."
Darrell - "Nothing illustrates a believer's inability to think outside of their delusion like the cliché claim that atheism is a faith."
Not believing is itself a belief for the same reason that not making a choice is itself a choice. In the absence of any proof as to God's existence or non-existence any statemen in regard to God's existence is a faith statement.
"And let's be clear that in this context faith means believing despite a severe imbalance of evidence against your belief."
Faith is always supported by evidence. For example see St. Thomas Aquinas "Five proofs for the existence of God" (proof in this case refers to a logical proof, not a scientific proof).
"Have you really convinced yourself that if either of them were asked about where the purposes you speak of come from and if humans are capable of inventing them that they would agree with your views?"
No I just merely quote them: "Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear ... and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death ... there is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life."
LH - "If "I" am an illusion, then who is being fooled into thinking it perceives itself?"
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-mar-18-bk-cohen18-story.html#:~:text=In%20%E2%80%9CGodel%2C%20Escher%2C%20Bach,of%20consciousness%2C%20or%20the%20self%2C
Hofstadter’s explanation of how brain becomes mind dispenses with immaterial qualities and other kinds of philosophical hocus-pocus that bedevil efforts to solve the “mind-body problem.” Trained as a physicist and a computer scientist but endowed with the soul of a philosopher, he posits that as our neurons fire in complex patterns that represent our perceptions, and as these representations (or symbols) swirl and dance in ever more complex ways, their interplay is strong enough and rich enough to produce awareness -- that is, to become self-referential.
This concept of self-reference allows Hofstadter to bring in the work of famed logician Kurt Godel, who proved the incompleteness of sufficiently powerful mathematical systems. The human brain is a system of symbols, and a system of symbols is just what a mathematical language is -- the kind of language that Godel proved could generate self-referential statements. In “Godel, Escher, Bach,” Hofstadter called this process of recursive self-representation -- think of an Escher staircase, feeding endlessly into itself, or the lyrics to “The Windmills of Your Mind” -- a “strange loop.” And this strange loop constitutes the illusion (yes, the illusion) of consciousness, or the self, or “I” -- terms that, for Hofstadter, are interchangeable.
Hence, “I Am a Strange Loop.”
So yes, consciousness is an illusion.
So is the Self.
So is Free Will.
In the absence of any of these, nobody can create meaning or purpose.
Nihilism all the way down.
LH - "In fact, "I exist" is one of the few things I can with certainty know to be true."
That's nothing but an illusion.
Don't feel bad.
I seldom meet a atheist who has the cojones to fully embrace the nihilism inherent in his atheism.
Q: So what are the consequences of your nihilism?
A: "The total eclipse of all values"
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/WolfeSoulDied.php.htm
Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fr�hliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."...
Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?
A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way.
(With the death of the Soul mankind has nothing to cling to)
DP:
LH - "In fact, "I exist" is one of the few things I can with certainty know to be true."
That's nothing but an illusion.
Who is being fooled, then?
Don't feel bad.
I don't.
I seldom meet a atheist who has the cojones to fully embrace the nihilism inherent in his atheism.
The expectation that someone who doesn't exist should feel despair over the fact that he has no externally-imposed value is bizarre.
Seriously, you talk about atheism being a kind of faith. That's only somewhat true. Unlike a religious person, I don't make decisions based on a certain belief in the absence of God. I just tend not to take the possibility of God into decision-making any more than I take the possibility of Santa Claus or alien visitation into that process. If I see reasons to expect that God does intervene in my life, I'm open to changing my mind. I'm not forcing myself to hold to a faith despite common sense or evidence the way religious people do. I don't fret that adjusting to evidence is a betrayal of my owner.
What I do have a kind of faith in is that it is possible to do worthwhile things with my life--worthwhile to myself, to my loved ones, to my community. I don't know how it all matters in the lifespan of the universe. I don't know whether the term "worthwhile" requires a God to validate it or not. I have faith how one lives ones life matters somehow, whether I know how or not. That faith is as unshakable as anyone's faith in the ridiculous notion that the transcendent Creator of the Universe had a human son.
I'm sorry that the refusal of non-existent me to despair causes the non-existent you to despair, but that's the free-will choice the non-existent you doesn't-choose to make.
Larry,
I'm not sure why you're bothering with DP. Anyone who trades in absolutes is unlikely to take any evidence to the contrary. He thinks he has god-like powers of understanding. It's nothing but solipsism, all the way down.
PSB
DP:
Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead."
...
Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years.
So he didn't literally mean "God is dead", as in "God used to exist, but he recently stopped doing so." He meant it as a metaphor. "God is only an illusion, and that illusion is failing in the wake of observation and evidence." Which is a nicer way of saying, "God never really did exist, but we used to think He did, and now we don't any more."
PSB:
I'm not sure why you're bothering with DP.
Because I don't mind defending my metaphorical dissertation, as it were.
A comment re: the recent discussions that super-intelligent (General) AI will take over the world. These fears seem rather groundless- the most intelligent people do not rule over the rest of us (Mensa Society members are not our "Benevolent Overlords"), or if they do: they clearly do not rule us very intelligently. Based on my experience, if we do get ultra-intelligent General AI: it/they are more likely as not to initially engage in 100,000 simultaneous debates on whether Star Trek is better than Star Wars, which flavor of UNIX is best, or trying to get a date and wondering why they are unsuccessful....
Keith Halperin:
Based on my experience, if we do get ultra-intelligent General AI: it/they are more likely as not to initially engage in 100,000 simultaneous debates on whether Star Trek is better than Star Wars, which flavor of UNIX is best, or trying to get a date and wondering why they are unsuccessful....
Heh.
It is a huge mistake to design AI to "learn" about the world from the content of internet chat rooms. Likewise, it is a huge mistake to begin training AI by immediately attempting to confound it and show it up.
Would anyone consider either of those methods to be a good way to raise children?
Robert,
"Only if one concedes that women can themselves be misogynistic."
Bujold's "The Mountains of Mourning" is all about that. The old woman says, if I had to go through this horrible thing (killing their own mutant birth), my daughter should, too...
Pappenheimer
Is DP actually suggesting that nonbelief in a supernatural other also requires one to be Jean-Paul Sartre? I've got problems enough...
Pappenheimer
Alfred Differ:
I laugh at the conclusion that we are all nihilists
I may be wrong, but I don't think he's saying that atheists are all nihilists. That's the problem. We should be nihilists, but we're not. Because testicles or something.
Larry,
Okay, but you have to realize that this fellow is completely disingenuous. All his arguments amount to "I'm right, you're wrong, because I say so. You must be made to join my social club, so I can have more worshippers. And don't forget, I know you better than you know yourself." Does that sound familiar?
Buono appetito,
PSB
Pappenheimer,
My favorite by her, a favorite period. Misogyny figures large in all her Barrayar stories. All of the heroines, heroes too for that matter, stand out by contrast because they don't participate in it.
DP,
So yes, consciousness is an illusion.
Glad to see you referring to Hofstadter. Very glad. I was about to go on a rant and you completely short-circuited it. 8)
However, I think you've missed an important point from the Strange Loop book.
A Self is not really an illusion. It is a recursion structure.
———
Hofstadter spends some time in that book talking about formal systems, incompleteness, and the recursion proof. Good stuff. He also spends a while talking about a video camera pointing at a TV that displays what the camera captures. Pictures within pictures.
1) If you hold the camera straight on to the TV and close in so the TV almost fills your field of view, you get a resulting image that looks like a long tunnel. People see similar things when standing between two mirrors. The tunnel isn't really there, right? Well… yes and no.
2) If you turn the camera slightly the tunnel appears to twist. The twist isn't there any more than the tunnel, right? Well… yes and no.
Both the tunnel and the twist are recursion structures. They exist because the camera points at the display, but they aren't like the camera or display. A self is a similar thing because our brains engage in recursion.
———
Elsewhere in the book is a discussion about brain sizes and self sizes. It's not a requirement that brains recurse. Tiny brained shrimp likely don't need that. Much of a mammalian brain deals with sense input and likely doesn't recurse either.
I suspect animals with at least reptile sized brains are probably recursing to at least some degree. Once we try to deal in predictions of what another mind will do, recursion is damn near required.
———
I seriously hope you read and followed the section in the Strange Loop book where he talked about the sudden death of his wife. He produced a solid secular definition of Soul and what humans do when we Love. If you didn't finish the book, I encourage you to go back to it because it easily punctures your 'nihilism all the way down' conclusion.
Larry,
I don't think he's saying that atheists are all nihilists
Okay. That makes more sense. Arguing that the concept (atheism) is nihilistic IS different from calling us nihilists. 8)
It's still wrong, of course, as evidenced by all of us atheists who aren't nihilists, but no one needs to convince you of that.
———
There is an episode of "The Day the Universe Changed" by James Burke (I think it is the last one) where he discusses how Science isn't free of beliefs about things. He was trying to put to bed the naive understanding some have about Science being a journey to find Truth. It's a well done episode.
In it he represents several historical ideas that got punctured later. Nobody believes the ideas now, but in their day they were science fact. In one scene he had a calipers used to measure the size of a skull and showed the scale for it. The idea was a simple one… big heads correlated with big IQ. You could use the calipers and measure how smart someone was. Works pretty well since people with unusually tiny skulls DO suffer (on average) on IQ tests. After explaining this he looks square at the camera and does his comedian thing. He asks "What about people with big heads are are STUPID?"
The last episode doesn't have a lot of comedy moments in it, but he does a real good job of showing how people cling to a paradigm even when confronted by contrary evidence. In our case here, there is a lot of history explaining that atheism is a nihilistic concept but evidence suggests many atheists reject that. Whatever is a believer to do?!
———
I split atheism camps not just to be picky. The "no belief" camp tends to be full of people who also "don't care". That's the best description of myself. My mother went with non-theist as her self assigned label, but I go with do-not-care-ist. It just doesn't matter whether there is a universal purpose or not.
Alfred Differ:
I split atheism camps not just to be picky.
Oh, I think you hit it on the head. It makes sense if you substitute "Santa Claus" for God. Most adults know that Santa Claus is made up, but we don't have reason to think or care about Santa Claus not existing as a practical matter. We also don't have conclusive proof that there is no such thing as Santa Claus. If he suddenly did appear and prove that he was real, we'd probably be happy about that. But as a practical matter, we know that's not going to happen. That is a kind of faith, but only in the sense that I have faith that I will continue to remain on the surface of the earth and not go flying off into space this afternoon. Faith that past performance is indicative of future results.
The "no belief" camp tends to be full of people who also "don't care". That's the best description of myself.
Oh, me too. I'm not invested in a belief that God doesn't exist. I just haven't seen any evidence that I need to care one way or another. Again, just like I don't need to care whether Santa Claus or Superman exist. Or alien visitors. That's a better example because alien visitors well might be here. I can't know that they aren't. But I've lived sixty+ years not being affected by them in any practical way, and I suspect the same will be true for the next 20 or 30 years.
My mother went with non-theist as her self assigned label, but I go with do-not-care-ist. It just doesn't matter whether there is a universal purpose or not.
I like to call myself a religious skeptic, but sometimes believers take such alternate descriptions as weasel-words, as if one is trying to hide one's atheism. And when the discussion goes there, I try to take that off of the table and just go with "Sure, I'm an atheist." But as you said, that doesn't mean I have an unwavering faith that no such thing as God exists--just that I don't have faith that He does.
Re: recursion structure
Reading the Strange Loop book was so frustrating for me. I must have screamed FORTH!! a hundred times (quietly). Recursion is to FORTH what breathing is to air and is even more efficient than in machine code.
Recently watching the Lex Fridman - Eliezer Yudkowsky GPT4 interview was similar. Especially when they were trying to trace the 'less wrong' concept back through several AI greats but couldn't quite pin down its origin. ASIMOV!! ASIMOV!!
It's hard to get old enough to have seen correct answers yet too old to matter anymore.
A curmudgeonly Cassandra.
@Larry Hart
Santa Claus still reminds me of Seldon. Existence is not a prerequisite for meaning. Christoper Hitchens' admiration for Socrates was totally independent of whether he actually lived or not.
scidata,
Recursion is to FORTH what breathing is to air and is even more efficient than in machine code.
Heh. Well... I'm sure if he had intended to write a programmer's book he would have mentioned it.
I think he was trying hard to distinguish two camps of artificial intelligence research. He no longers uses the AI label for what he does because that community went off in a direction that doesn't interest him. His research is more related to "How do humans do it?" than to "How can we do what humans do?" This is made real clear in the next book about languages since we clearly form a giant recursion structure using them to comprehend damn near everything. 8)
Larry,
Santa Claus is an excellent example of the distinction between belief in a proposition (He exists) and loyalty to the ideal he represents.
I happen to like the Christmas holiday mostly because of parts of the Santa Claus ideal. I get annoyed when people twist it for commercial reasons and that is proof of my loyalty to the non-commercial aspects of the ideal we've collectively constructed. It doesn't matter to me whether to proposition is true. Couldn't care less. That the ideal exists and is worthy of my support is what matters to me.
------
Aliens on Earth is another good example. I can ponder the existence proposition and NOT be loyal to any ideal. I'm not sure there even IS an ideal. Some people see them as potential monsters and others as angel/elf replacements in their mythologies. Any loyalty expressed by me would probably be to the ideal likely being displaced by them.
------
The older I get the less I care to hide my lack of belief in a proposition regarding God's existence. I'm finding it harder to care. However, I do still care when the others draw incorrect conclusions about what that must mean. I'm tempted to carry around one of those wicker carpet beaters and gently swat them when they assume I'm not loyal to the smaller faiths they hold together with their keystone. If they persist, I'd want to use a bit more force. Fortunately, I don't have one of those things. 8)
Alfred Differ:
In our case here, there is a lot of history explaining that atheism is a nihilistic concept but evidence suggests many atheists reject that. Whatever is a believer to do?!
It makes sense if the believer has been raised to equate God with all values, and then in a moment of panic* begins to suspect that God is a fictional construct.
To someone who comes at it the other way--who already believes in values like justice and civility and such--the idea that life is only meaningful because God created the universe is a complete non-sequitur. It's not something we refuse to believe; it's something we consider nonsense.
* In 1980s movies, I remember there were often mentions of "homosexual panic", the moment when a young man suddenly suspects that he is gay and what life will be like from now on because of that. I suspect that some religious people have a similar sort of "atheistic panic" in which it occurs to them, despite their best efforts at denial, to wonder what it means if their faith is misguided.
Re: 'atheistic panic'
Michael Shermer covered this quite well. Although he used Catholicism as the example which is cheating for a Presbyterian like he was early in life. THE MATRIX did too, with Neo as the brave panicker and Cypher as the cowardly one.
DP
The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.
that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.
But that is now history and we can see that the 20th Century had LESS wars and violence than the 19th Century - which had less wars and violence than the 18th Century - and so on
Alfred Differ said:
"I split atheism camps not just to be picky. The "no belief" camp tends to be full of people who also "don't care". That's the best description of myself. My mother went with non-theist as her self assigned label, but I go with do-not-care-ist. It just doesn't matter whether there is a universal purpose or not.
I'm not even sure I've ever called myself an atheist. If someone asks me if I believe in God, I say no. If someone asks if I'm an atheist, I say yes. I've never been religious and I wasn't raised to be religious or anti-theist, we were simply a non-religious household. For most of my life I simply didn't care about religion or give it much thought at all. But that started changing about 20 years ago as it became evident to me how much religion impacts my life and my society. And for the worst, if that wasn't clear. Religion in the US has gained a dangerous amount of political power and we are all suffering for it. Regardless of what accommodationist morons like the Reza Aslans of the world think, beliefs do affect behavior. So these days I do care about religion. I certainly have no interest in seeking confrontations with believers, but I agree with Christopher Hitchens. Religion does poison everything and it is long since past time to revoke religion's special respect card.
Not to mention that listening to (or reading) fallacy ridden diatribes by believers telling me what's what makes my teeth itch these days.
Alfred - "I split atheism camps not just to be picky. The "no belief" camp tends to be full of people who also "don't care"
Aka "strong atheists" and "weak atheists".
It depends on how passionately committe4d the are to their belief that God does not exist.
But as Sartre pointed out, in an inherently meaningless universe passion for anything is pointless.
duncan -
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/feb/23/artsandhumanities.highereducation#:~:text=The%2020th%20century%20was%20the,the%20world's%20population%20in%201913.
The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world's population in 1913.
https://necrometrics.com/wars19c.htm#:~:text=Approximately%204%2C500%2C000%20deaths%20during%20the%2019th%20C.
Approximately 4,500,000 deaths during the 19th C
Interesting chart showing war deaths (civilian and military) as a percent of total world population.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years
Nothing comes close to the world wars.
Nietzsche 1 - Critics 0
DP:
It depends on how passionately committe4d the are to their belief that God does not exist.
Now, you're getting close to sealioning. Once again, I don't have a belief that God does not exist. I have an absence of belief that such an entity does exist, and a sense that His existence or lack thereof is not something worth spending a lot of time thinking about when making decisions.
But as Sartre pointed out, in an inherently meaningless universe passion for anything is pointless.
You put a lot of faith in dead Frenchmen and Germans.
Now, you are simultaneously excoriating someone like me for being passionate in a meaningless universe and for not being passionate enough about my non-belief to insist that I'd fight and die for it even if future evidence was presented to the contrary.
That's quite some trick.
When you lament that atheists don't have cojones to deal with the consequences of their disbelief, aren't you excoriating them for lacking passion? In what they believe is a meaningless universe? So what's the problem?
"There, I've run rings around ya' logic'ly."
"I don't have a belief that God does not exist. I have an absence of belief that such an entity does exist"
Semantics
Not pertinent to the AI discussion, but related to previous discussions here:
"Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01631-6#:~:text=Trophic%20rewilding%20to%20expand%20natural%20climate%20solutions%20represents%20such%20an,meet%20the%20Paris%20Agreement115.
If you access through this Guardian opinion piece you can get a free non-subscriber version of the article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/19/elephants-otters-whales-nature-climate-breakdown-carbon-ecosystems
I highly recommend the article in Nature. It is very innovative. Basically it is an attempt to see what the effect of rewilding certain medium or large-sized species can have on the Paris Climate Agreement carbon budget. The authors argue that the contribution of rewilding is very large.
It mentions restoring fisheries as a major part of climate change mitigation, though it does not make the jump (as Dr. Brin has before) to restoring fisheries via iron-seeding.
Very cool work.
DP:
Semantics
Sealioning.
But think of the difference between "I know that no planet on earth supports sentient life" vs "I have no way of knowing whether sentient life exists on planets I can't see, but I haven't seen any evidence that it does." Those are not just different ways of saying the same thing.
Ok, I had a serious question for you, so I'll ask it anyway. Suppose that God is a fan of slapstick comedy on the order of "America's Funniest Home Videos". What if his purpose in creating the universe was so that it would afford him the opportunity to laugh at all sorts of living creatures take pratfalls, injure ourselves in humorous ways, and find every possible permutation of getting hit in the balls? Would that sort of purpose satisfy your need for your life to have meaning? Would you take satisfaction in the fact that every misfortune to befall you was amusing your Creator as He designed?
Would you feel more passionate about that sort of set-up than you would about supporting your wife and children, enjoying the pleasures life offers, and defending your community against bullies in a universe with no intelligent creator?
DP,
strong and weak atheists
Nope. You are one of the people who lump them together and then see it as a spectrum.
A "lack of belief" is very different from a "belief in a lack".
Logic matters here so lumping these folks together is just going to confuse you.
------
Sartre is kinda depressing. The Existentialists have a point, but the depressing tone they deliver with it isn't necessary. It only makes a kind of sense when their POV is considered in the context of the world in which it originated. Since then we've demonstrated that the sour, meaningless existence they saw is mostly a byproduct of being compared to people who have meanings for everything... even if they don't understand those meanings.
It's quite possible to be a cheery existentialist. You won't meet many of them, but they do the very thing you argue can't happen. They make meaningful what they do. A LOT of us who aren't existentialists do that too.
------
Be aware that some of us are beginning to see what you write on this topic as self-defending incantations. Meaningful to you, but obviously designed as armor to us so you don't have to think too deep about this stuff.
If you want to avoid that perception, come back around and try to explain how you think Hofstadter supports your POV better than mine. I would respectfully debate you on that and we both might learn something in the process.
DP look again at your graph
WW1 and WW2 had more deaths than previous conflicts - but the population was MUCH MUCH higher
The percentage of people that died in conflicts in the earlier centuries was MUCH higher
DP sorry in the 1880s it was obvious to all that the pace of industrial arms races would not end well. I credit Nietzsche's railings with zero points. Only Spengler was mosre off target and even Marx did much better. But none of them imagined the 80 year American pax would feature so many fine things at almost all levels, especially art and science and development of a comfortable middle class whose options have included being ‘oulful’ should they CHOOSE to be soulful.
Those who have chosen – of their own free will – to be caring about justice or nature or curiosity – have done so down paths that Nietzsche's dyspeptic limitations and contempt for people would never have imagined. And yes, neighbors next door chose differently. BFD. Which kind will the new AIs find interesting?
My own view of consciousness is that it is a necessary United Nations to mediate the impulses and drives of many, many inner selves, by portraying a continuum of being that those sub-selves must somehow bend their separate wills toward accepting as a common operational goal. Sure it’s an ‘illusion.’ Like many illusions it becomes the important thing, over time.
Heh.
Traeki Unite!
Alfred Differ: [Hofstadter's] giant recursion structure
From an early article I wrote on computational psychohistory: "Recursive reuse of stored knowledge and self-reference must be automatic and ubiquitous."
I hadn't yet read Hofstadter, except maybe "Gödel, Escher, Bach", nor had I read anything by OGH, except WJCC of course. And it was only after I joined in on CB that I realized that was the same David Brin!
Dr. Brin - "But none of them imagined the 80 year American pax"
But none of them imagined a nuclear pax.
Re: Traeki
Pickett's file:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhvmOH9qEnk
And as for nuclear war we avoided it through shear luck.
Twice, during he Cuban Missile Crisis and operation Abel Archer during the 1980s we avoided nuclear holocaust only because two Soviet officers and two separate occasions ordered a stand down.
The first was a political officer on a Soviet sub that prevented it from launching nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer. The second was colonel filling in a Sunday shift for a friend at Soviet missile defense command who said those 1,000 America ICBMs flying over the north pole could not be real - they were radar reflections on satellites - and ordered the USSR's strategic rocket forces to stand down.
It was just pure dumb luck that Nietzsche's prophecy was not completely fulfilled.
As for the 21st century, the "total eclipse of all values" has already started.
Columbine and now weekly school mass shootings, January 6, 9/11, endless wars for profit in the Middle East, a Saudi king murdering and chopping up a journalist and getting away with it, MAGA, corruption at all levels of government/business and society, shooting kids who knock on the wrong door, the temperature hitting 120 deg F in Bangladesh yesterday, continental sized areas catching fire, life forms colonizing the Pacific garbage patch, .... and a 1,000 other examples show both Nietzsche and Yeats were right.
The center is not holding.
And some rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.
Traeki unite!?
... until they put on their philosophers hat and see the closed rightness of a certain curve of logic, then they become something else.
To demand a meaning for all existence, for there to be meaning in your life, is like demanding room temperature in intergalactic space, for there to be room temperature in your room.
I'm content to keep my room heated, 'cause it's cold outside.
DP:
We didn't start the fire; the world's been burning for as long it's turning.
The world is always ending; it's always continuing; and it's always beginning. That's what makes it a world.
Few atheists like to admit that atheism is itself a faith.
So how do you classify Laplace's "I have no need of that hypothesis"?
Robert:
As noted above, make a distinction between not believing there is a God, and believing that there is no God. The first declares doubt, so it's a philosophical statement, and the second declares certainty, so it's a religious statement. The distinction is sometimes called weak/strong atheism; I prefer the terms agnostic and atheist.
Competing monotheists are atheists about each other's Gods.
I myself don't know whether or not there is a God, nor what God's nature is, if there is a God.
That makes me an agnostic, or maybe a mystic. The difference between a mystic and an agnostic is that a mystic is a believer who does not believe, and an agnostic is an unbeliever who does believe.
Please define the term "God"; or is that a trick question?
scidata,
When I took the math foundations class in college, my professor used GEB as the next. He had become disenchanted shall we say with the other texts people use. That's the class where we are expected to study formal systems and the historical effort to put a foundation under all of mathematics. The problem was that most texts USED a formal system to describe it all, so how were students supposed to study from it?
There are two camps about how to teach mathematics that branch on whether to use the theorem/proof technique or not. That technique IS a formal system and relies on recursion to build lofty abstractions that have greatly improved our understanding of the world. Unfortunately it is NOT how mathematicians invented mathematics.
The great thing about GEB is how Hofstadter demonstrates formal systems and then proceeds to turn them on themselves… as Gödel did but in much easier language. Work through that book and one gets a solid understanding of what formal systems do and how the loop works that demonstrates the limits.
I argue that once you've seen the loop for what it is, one will never be the same. One begins to see these loops all around us. Much like when people really understand what evolution theory is all about they begin to see it damn near everywhere. It's like suddenly becoming non-blind. Almost religious.
I also argue this is the only path towards Singularity I consider to be viable. It might not work out that way, but brain size differences make for enormous possible differences in what can be captured in recursion structures. Send an average kid to college and we can reasonably expect they might learn something and graduate. Send a goldfish and no one expects anything except for a stray cat to find and eat it. What can someone with a space large enough for a hundred minds do? A thousand? A million? We might be like the goldfish to someone emulating a human mind but with a LOT more space in which to do it.
———
If one makes a list of all the great ideas people have had since the beginning of time, I argue the list isn't all that long. It's not real short either, but we add to it occasionally and dramatic things happen when we do.
On that list has to be our understanding that one can store (& retrieve!) information in recursion structures. We can see it in fractals, but we've been USING this idea since before we were human without having a clue we were. Much of the animal kingdom does it… because how else COULD they possibly do it?
"I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe."
- Isaac Asimov
I've had the Fractal World in my head ever since watching CLARA (2018) which has a glimpse of such a place near the end. I'm daunted by the task of just reading OGH's anthology :)
And thanks for taking the time, Alfred. Fun stuff.
DP
The world (even America) is BETTER than it has ever been!!
Less violence, less prejudice, less religion
All better than at any time in the past
One can invert DP's statement with just as much validity:
"Few theists like to admit that atheism is *not* a faith."
It's not a faith at all. One simply assesses whether or not the Universe can be understood without invoking a diety. That stance neither accepts nor denies the existence of dieties. Even Dawkins has stated he'd be the first to utter a hallejujah if something was uncovered which irrefutably required God to exist.
So far, so good.
@Alfred, erm, you do realise your EGB piece and its loops backs up my 'curved logic' comment?
Tony -
Not believing is itself a belief for the same reason that not choosing is itself a choice.
duncan -
How often in the past did we have a January 6? That's just one example.
Robert - So how do you classify Laplace's "I have no need of that hypothesis"?
Because science has never answered Why questions, it does not address questions of meaning and purpose.
And yet - unless you are a nihilist - Why questions remain important.
Paradoctor -
Once again with Sartre:
"In the twentieth century, it's the atheistic existentialist movement, popularized in France in the 1940s and 50s, that is responsible for the currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905-1980) defining preposition for the movement, "existence precedes essence," rules out any ground or foundation for establishing an essential self or a human nature. When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish. Nothingness reveals each individual as an isolated being "thrown" into an alien and unresponsive universe, barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning. It's a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Writing from the enlightened perspective of the absurd, Albert Camus (1913-1960) observed that Sisyphus' plight, condemned to eternal, useless struggle, was a superb metaphor for human existence (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942). The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism. In retrospect, it was an anecdote tinged with desperation because in an absurd world there are absolutely no guidelines, and any course of action is problematic. Passionate commitment, be it to conquest, creation, or whatever, is itself meaningless. Enter nihilism."
To reiterate:
in an absurd world there are absolutely no guidelines, and any course of action is problematic. Passionate commitment, be it to conquest, creation, or whatever, is itself meaningless. Enter nihilism.
Paradoctor - "The world is always ending"
Not like this, not with a bang but with a whimper.
Not with gutted cities and slaughtered civilians an=of the world wars.
Not with the genocide of racial minorities and class enemies in gas chambers and gulags/
What we are seeing is the final stages of an inner rot, a slow dissolution, a falling apart.
A total eclipse of all values.
Well, not all.
America, a once great nation with a once great people, still has only one value left.
Maximization of profit - and every other value has been sacrificed to it.
LH - "So he didn't literally mean "God is dead"
Of course not.
Because whether God exists or not is not important as it is unprovable in either case, with theism and atheism both being faith statements in the absence of physical proof.
What matters is whether the educated elites, and now the masses, believe that God is dead.
The the consequences of that belief.
DP:
Not believing is itself a belief for the same reason that not choosing is itself a choice.
Not believing is different from believing for the same reason that a stalemate is different from a checkmate.
What matters is whether the educated elites, and now the masses, believe that God is dead.
But the perpetrators of 9/11 and January 6 don't believe God is dead. Those who love Putin as the great white Christian hope don't believe God is dead. They're destroying us in His name.
Granted, the elite profit-maximizers most likely don't care about God in their calculations. I'd maintain that they never did. Religion has always been the opiate of the masses, and only the dumber rulers were high on their own product.
Starship failed to separate from it's booster, rapid, unscheduled disassembly ensued.
Not believing is itself a belief for the same reason that not choosing is itself a choice.
You may well choose to believe that.
As I quipped earlier, "Few theists like to admit that atheism is *not* a faith." which is what DP appears to be demonstrating.
Starship: I thought things were starting to go pear shaped when I noticed not all of the engines were firing. Then the lower stage started its rotation before separation...
Expensive firework, although I get the strategy, and why SpaceX considers anything that cleared the tower at this stage to have been a success.
Tony Fisk:
As I quipped earlier, "Few theists like to admit that atheism is *not* a faith." which is what DP appears to be demonstrating.
I'd put it, "Few theists have the cojones to deal with the fact that atheism is not a religion."
Tony Fisk,
Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing the details. Somewhere between 4 and 6 engines were not firing. There is some redundancy, but I'm not sure there is that much. If this flight was empty, no test mass, maybe there was. I was impressed that with that many engines out it cleared the tower and made it nearly to stage separation.
Is it just me, or did it seem to lean to one side just as it was lifting off the launch table? I've watched several times now and it really does seem to lean. If so, pretty impressive that it could recover.
Given the number of engine outs, and the many visible perturbances in the exhaust plumes, I wonder how close the rocket was to the intended flight profile. Was it really at the altitude, distance and speed intended for stage separation when it blew? Did it start the separation maneuver and then lost control? Perhaps because stage separation failed? Or did it simply lose control before stage separation was even attempted? I've got a feeling that there was a lot of not-nominal stuff going on with the booster's engines.
Larry Hart said...
"Tony Fisk:
As I quipped earlier, "Few theists like to admit that atheism is *not* a faith." which is what DP appears to be demonstrating.
I'd put it, "Few theists have the cojones to deal with the fact that atheism is not a religion.""
Typical projection. "I'd fall into nihilism if there were no god, and so would you." Or, "I'd rape, murder and eat babies if there were no god, and so would you." When hear (or read) believers saying these sorts of things, I feel sorry for them, though often annoyed too. A good example of what Feynman warned about fooling yourself.
LH:
Agnosticism is not a religion, it's a philosophy.
But there do exist atheist religions; arguably Buddhism and Taoism, for two. Both allow for small-g gods, but those gods are in the same predicament that we're in. For Buddhism, the gods suffer as much as we do, because they too are attached to illusion. For Taoism, all of Heaven's gods and Earth's mortals follow the Watercourse Way, which guides without commanding.
I think that modern atheists would do well to formally organize as a religion. They have plenty of sermons to preach; they could make natural events their holidays (the solstices, the equinoxes, the new and full moons; that's 28 days off right there); they could communally celebrate major life transitions (marriages, births, coming of age, funerals); like-minded get-togethers are naturally fun; and of course they'd get a tax break. So I say go for it.
Paradoctor:
But there do exist atheist religions; arguably Buddhism and Taoism, for two.
I'd say they still invoke non-evidence-based faith in the supernatural--afterlife for one. I don't know enough about Taoism, but that definitely applies to Buddhism.
I think that modern atheists would do well to formally organize as a religion
Oh, God, no!
That would give the theists all they need to insist that separation of church and state is just another government-established religion.
Personally, my "atheism" is more about rejecting religion than rejecting God. No way I'll concede that rejecting religion is a religion of its own.
they could communally celebrate major life transitions (marriages, births, coming of age, funerals); like-minded get-togethers are naturally fun;
True, but that doesn't require it to be called a religion.
and of course they'd get a tax break.
Not worth it.
LH:
So really you're an anti-religionist. There are anti-religionist theists; so atheism and anti-religionism are independent variables.
The First Amendment isn't atheistic; it's secular, which is more a philosophy of politics than a statement about God.
What I am proposing is less a recommendation than a prediction. Put enough atheists together and sooner or later they'll organize atheism for fun, days off, mutual self-assurance, big personal events, and mostly schmoozing; and that's because atheists are social primates, with the same highly-evolved communitarian instincts as the other social primates.
Anti-religionism like yours would be harder to organize. Cat herding. But, given sufficient demand, even cognitive dissonance such as a religion of irreligion is psychologically possible.
Of course making a religion of atheism would be an absurdity; but since when has absurdity ever stopped any of the other religions? Absurdity is a natural right! What God forbids atheists from founding the Church of Atheism? Its mission: to celebrate the nonexistence of the supernatural. Its symbol: the number Zero. Its self-mocking motto: "Thank God there is no God!"
Hmm... this sounds like an interesting premise for a story. Maybe a cautionary tale.
I said:
I'd say they [non-monotheistic religions] still invoke non-evidence-based faith in the supernatural--afterlife for one.
Thinking more about "What makes a religion a religion?", I'd say it has less to do with whether it is a belief about God and more about whether it is a belief that certain rules or customs or other activities have a real world effect on the participant irrespective of whether that cause/effect relationship is knowable.
Essentially, if a system tells you that "Thou shalt...: or "Thou shalt not..." with actual consequences without regard to evidence.
In that sense, an organized belief in the wheel of karma determining reincarnation is a religion. A personal belief that God exists but that he started the universe up and then went on to other things--that would not be a religion.
It is in this sense that the American ideal of church/state separation makes sense. The government keeps its hands off of people's personal beliefs concerning their supernatural disposition, but the force of government itself refuses to endorse a particular belief about things we can't actually know.
Paradoctor:
So really you're an anti-religionist.
Depends what you mean by that. Organized religion makes no sense to me, but I'm not against those who it does make sense to from having their own. I only care about other peoples' religion when they insist it gives them authority over me.
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