Let’s suppose there really is a Ghost in the Machine – a “little man” (“homunculus”) who “looks out” through our eyes, and “listens in” through our ears (interestingly, those are the two senses most usually ascribed to the floating Ghost in NDE accounts). Or, if you prefer, a Soul.
And let’s further suppose that it is reasonable to posit that the Ghost/Soul is inessential to human day-to day function, merely to conscious experience and/or “free will”; that it is at least possible hypothetically to imagine a soulless simulacrum of a person who behaved exactly as a person would, but was in fact a mere automaton, without conscious experience – without qualia.
Thirdly, let’s suppose that there there are only a handful of these Souls in the world, and the rest of the things that look and behave like human beings are Ghostless automatons – soulless simulacra. But, as in an infernal game of Mafia, none of us know which are the Simulacra, and which are the true Humans – because there is no way of telling from the outside – from an apparent person’s behaviour or social interactions, or cognitive capacities – which is which.
And finally, let’s suppose that souls can migrate at will, from body to body.
Let’s say one of these Souls starts the morning in Lizzie’s body, experiencing being Lizzie, and remembering all Lizzie’s dreams, thinking Lizzie’s thoughts, feeling Lizzie’s need to go pee, imagining all Lizzie’s plans for the day, hearing Lizzie’s alarm clock, seeing Lizzie’s watch, noting that the sky is a normal blue between the clouds through the skylight.
Somewhere an empty simulacrum of Barry Arrington is still asleep (even automatons “sleep” while their brains do what brains have to do to do what brains have to do). But as the day wears on, the Soul in Lizzie’s body decides to go for a wander. It leaves Lizzie to get on with stuff, as her body is perfectly capable of doing, she just won’t be “experiencing” what she does (and, conceivably, she might make some choices that she wouldn’t otherwise make, but she’s an extremely well-designed automaton, with broadly altruistic defaults for her decision-trees).
The Soul sees that Barry is about to wake up as the sun rises over Colorado, and so decides to spend a few hours in Barry’s body. And thus experiences being Barry waking up, probably needing a pee as well, making Barry’s plans, checking Barry’s watch, remembering what Barry did yesterday (because even though Barry’s body was entirely empty of soul yesterday, of course Barry’s brain has all the requisite neural settings for the Soul to experience the full Monty of remembering being Barry yesterday, and what Barry planned to do today, even though at the time, Barry experienced none of this. The Soul also notices the sky is its usual colour, which Barry, like Lizzie calls “blue”.
Aha. But is the Soul’s experience of Barry’s “blue” the same as the Soul’s experience of Lizzie’s “blue”? Well, the Soul has no way to tell, because even though the Soul was in Lizzie’s body that very morning, experiencing Lizzie’s “blue”, the Soul cannot remember Lizzie’s “blue” now it is in Barry’s body, because if it could, Barry’s experience would not simply be of “blue” but of “oh, that’s interesting, my blue is different to Lizzie’s blue”. And we know that not only does Barry not know what Lizzie’s blue is like when Barry experiences blue (because “blue” is an ineffable quale, right?), he doesn’t even know whether “blue” sky was even visible from Lizzie’s bedroom when Lizzie woke up that morning. Indeed, being in 40 watt Nottingham, it often isn’t.
Now the Soul decides to see how Lizzie is getting on. Back east, over the Atlantic it flits, just in time for Lizzie getting on her bike home from work. Immediately the Soul accesses Lizzie’s day, and ponders the problems she has been wrestling with, and which, as so often, get partly solved on the bike ride home. The Soul enjoys this part. But of course it has no way of comparing this pleasure with the pleasure it took in Barry’s American breakfast which it had also enjoyed, because that experience – those qualia – are not part of Lizzie’s experience. Lizzie has no clue what Barry had for breakfast.
Now the Soul decides to race Lizzie home and take up temporary residence in the body of Patrick, Lizzie’s son, who is becoming an excellent vegetarian cook, and is currently preparing a delicious sweet-potato and peanut butter curry. The Soul immediately experiences Patrick’s thoughts, his memory of calling Lizzie a short while earlier to check that she is about to arrive home, and indeed, his imagining of what Lizzie is anticipating coming home to, as she pedals along the riverbank in the dusk. Soul zips back to Lizzie and encounters something really very similar – although it cannot directly compare the experiences – and also experiences Lizzie’s imaginings of Patrick stirring the sweet potato stew, and adjusting the curry powder to the intensity that he prefers (but she does not).
As Baloo said to Mowgli: Am I giving you a clue?
The point I am trying to make is that the uniqueness of subjective experience is as defined as much by what we don’t know as by what we do. “Consciousness” is mysterious because it is unique. The fact that we can say things like “I’m lucky I didn’t live in the days before anaesthesia” indicates a powerful intuition that there is an “I” who might have done, and thus an equally powerful sense that there is an “I” who was simply lucky enough to have landed in the body of a post-anaesthesia person. And yet it takes only a very simple thought experiment, I suggest, to realise that this mysterious uniqueness is – or at least could be – a simple artefact of our necessarily limited PoV. And a simple step, I suggest, to consider that actually a ghostless automaton – a soulless simulacrum is – an incoherent concept. If my putative Soul, who flits from body to body, is capable not only of experiencing the present of any body in which it is currently resident, but that body’s past and anticipated future, but incapable of simultaneously experiencing anything except the present, past, and anticipated future of that body, then it becomes a redundant concept. All we need to do is to postulate that consciousness consists of having accessible a body of knowledge only accessible to that organism by simple dint of that organism being limited in space and time to a single trajectory. And if that knowledge is available to the automaton – as it clearly is – then we have no need to posit an additional Souly-thing to experience it.
What we do need to posit, however, is some kind of looping neural architecture that enables the organism to model the world as consisting of objects and agents, and to model itself- the modeler – as one of those agents. Once you have done that, consciousness is not only possible to a material organism, but inescapable. And of course looping neural architecture is exactly what we observe.
I suggest that the truth is hiding in plain sight: we are conscious because when we are unconscious we can’t function. Unless the function we need to perform at the time is to let a surgeon remove some part of us, under which circumstances I’m happy to let an anaesthetist render me unconscious.
A silly thought (or maybe not, or maybe one that re-makes a point that has been made somewhere above in this thread).
If there is a “little man” looking out through your eyes, how does he do it? Does he have eyes too? If he does, who looks out through those? Do we have an infinite regress?
Building is beyond our capabilities. The model I think is fairly wel understood. The hang up on the model, in my experience, comes from critics’ intuitions about qualia and the sensation of subjective experience, which is first not a coherent articulation of a practical problem, and second not germane to the models that are being sought here, models of sentience and intelligence from a computing system.
Not speaking for Liz, of course, but “chaotic” and “includes chaotic or stochastic features” are not interchangeable here. Blackjack includes a solid dynamic of randomness in its card shuffling, but the game itself is depressingly predictable in the aggregate; you can’t predict with any confidence the fate of the next hand about to be dealt to you, but you can quite confidently predict that over a large number of hands, the house will win, by a small margin.
Does that make BlackJack a ‘chaotic’, ‘unpredictable’ system? I think that’s a very sloppy way to think about systems like this, and even less useful for talking about human cognition, or synthetic facsimiles of it.
I agree — the simplistic process you are putting forward is not a good model of how humans process input. It doesn’t begin to capture the scope of factors involved. It doubles down on its error, though, by concluding (apparently) that whatever the process actually is, it’s not predictable, at all — see your focus on the word ‘chaos’, here. To say that Lizzie’s or anyone’s reaction are not perfectly predictable, even with robust knowledge of external and internal states is NOT to say it’s not predictable.
Outcomes may be quite reliably predicted, but not perfectly so. If Lizzie prefers cream in her afternoon tea, generally, this Thursday she might decline, for the first time in a month. Why? Dunno, and I don’t think a list of possibilities matters. If she heard reports of milk from the local dairy having to be recalled, perhaps some subconscious concern was instrumental in her refusing cream on Thursday. Even with robust knowledge of what’s going on in her head, it’s quite possible that close or nearly-ambivalent decisions get tipped one way or another based on the brain sampling noise in the system, and while the fears from those reports this morning didn’t rise to the level of refusing cream on Wednesday afternoon, due (in part) to a “random coin flip” in the brain for a close call, on Thursday the coin flip did come up “refuse”.
The point being, in that scenario, that some decisions may integrate a “coin flip mechanism”, others are not so iffy and are “calculable” based on more settled understandings and compelling interests — predictable, in other words (with deep knowledge of internal states).
That’s too long of a treatment here for that small point, but the way you are talking about this problem reflects a kind of disregard for what actually takes place in the process.
Here you should be precise in your definition of “predictable”. Do you mean totally unpredictable in the sense that any and all possible outcomes are equiprobable? Are predictions as to outcomes only 90% reliable? Your operating definition here makes a big difference. We cannot say for certain that the next card in a newly shuffled deck will be the Queen of Spades. But we can predict with a high probability that it won’t be. Is that a predictable outcome, in your view — that the next card will NOT be the Queen of Spades? Not even bothering with what a “correct” view of predictability is on this, yet, just pressing for some substance in the terms you are using.
More anon.
Joe Felsenstein,
Not at all silly. It is the homunculus objection and is a well established in philosophy. I think various posters have referred to it above.
Absolutely agree. I think it’s impossible to understand the human computational system without understanding that it is profoundly non-linear and unpredictable – it’s what I’ve been trying to say!
That unlike a desktop computer, the human organism is dominated by deep feedback loops that include loops that result in seeking new input. As Hofstadter says, “I” is a “Strange” i.e. chaotic, non-repeating [feedback] “Loop”.
And yes that makes us prone to error – many of these loops are in any case probability-weighting systems, so error is built-in, but so is error-correction
Absolutely not. In fact the “butterfly” could, in theory, be a “causeless cause” – a virtual particle. However, as I disagree that having a causeless factor in their makes us free in any way we’d want to be, I’m not all that interested in that, per se (although it may explain certain prey-confusing behaviours in some animals, pigeons, for instance, or gazelles). But yes, of course, the brain is part of a chaotic system. Which doesn’t mean it’s a “mess” of course. I’m using the word in the sense in which I assume you are using it meaning unpredictable because including feedback loops which make the system deeply non-linear.
Chaos is fundamentally logical. You can build a deterministic chaotic system with a few logic gates. Even a deterministic chaotic system is unpredictable, and in actual empirically observable systems, they are stochastic too.
I’m puzzled that you even ask this, William – it suggests to me that either you have misunderstood what many of us (including me, in this post) have been saying, or that perhaps you have misunderstood the meaning of “chaos” in this context?
One of the things I do as a neuroscientist is model chaotic feedback models of neural networks – and interestingly one of the things you can get them to do, very easily, is adapt and learn. Which is not very surprising, as this is exactly what an evolutionary process does, in which we also have non-linearity resulting from feedback loops, and feedback itself is core to learning and adapting.
As I’ve said many times: in a real sense, evolution is an “intelligent” system in that it resembles in many important ways the processes by which we ourselves react “intelligently” to our environment. However, it doesn’t simulate, and we do.
ETA: linked to the post in which I made that point (not this one, oops)
You still mantain that given the exactly all the same conditions you will act in the same way?
I´m interested in what you call learning. This models can learn what are prime numbers without a human including the definition in the program? Or programmed the definition can learn how to search prime numbers in alternative ways?
Can they learn to play chess?
Just seen this pair of posts at UD:
What do you see as “the GIGO problem”? And why should a “a ‘chaotic’ processing system” compound it? The processing system is certainly chaotic, in the technical sense, which is precisely why there isn’t a GIGO problem! The feedback that renders the system chaotic includes both error-correction and the inputting of further information relevant to solving the current problem.
Well, no – unless you think we live in a deterministic, but in any case you can have both stochastic and non-stochastic chaotic systems. I regularly model both.
Well, “noise” can be amplified, but also “signal”. Which is why chaotic systems can be such sensitive decision-making systems. Both stochastic “noise” and signal can be important (the “noise” because of stochastic resonance). So, for example, when we are faced with a cognitive click, lateral inhibition between the two alternative courses of action will ensure that neither get ahead until sufficient additional information has been recruited – then you will get a rapid surge in the “winning” program. A linear system would be either much slower, or proceed with much less information.
I think that KF is confusing “unpredictable to an external observer” with something to do with non-intentional. I think this (surely inadvertent) equivocation between “random” meaning “unintentional” and “random” meaning “unpredictable” is a real problem, and needs to be unpacked. Just because a decision is unpredictable from the outside doesn’t mean it is unintended from the inside! Matching output to intention is precisely what our chaotic conflict-resolution architecture allows us to do. KF seems to think that the output of a chaotic system must be “random” and therefore unintended (not intentional), and also therefore also “random” in the sense of “noise”.
This simply does not follow. Not only can output from a chaotic system be “intended” it can also not be “noise” – in other words it can consistently output appropriate results.
As always, I invite KF to respond here if he would like (and crosspost at UD as he wishes).
Cheers
Lizzie (still in Milan, but with some time left on my hotel wi-fi :))
Well, I gave my response to this question at some length earlier, Blas. Yes, but only in a sense that I find irrelevant – what matters in my opinion is not whether if the universe were replayed I would do the same (after all I act the same way in the mirror as I do in reality), but whether I would act the same way in scenarios very similar.
The answer to that is no.
No, and nor can humans. If we don’t know what prime numbers are we can’t learn them.
But certainly models can learn things that are not programmed in – the problem is programmed in, of course, but not the solution – they have to learn how to solve the problem, and often solve it in ways that were unknown to the programmers. That’s why we use machine learning – for problems that are too hard for mere humans to learn how to solve!
I believe so, although I don’t know – it’s not my field. They can learn to do other things though, including walk, even if the solution is not “programmed in”.
I’ve written models that learn to do the tasks I get kids to learn to do. It’s one of the ways I test my tasks!
KF raises an interesting issue:
Yes, that’s a very well known phenomenon, and quite close to areas I work on. KF is absolutely right to say that “intelligent conscious choice” are involved in the error correction, the “over-ride”. But that doesn’t “break the analogy to programming loops” – it just breaks the analogy to the programming loops with which KF is clearly familiar.
And we even know which parts of the brain are involved in the “circuit breaker” as it’s sometimes called, that halts the routine “program” and pulls in “executive” regions in frontal cortex. Sometimes the circuit breaker is triggered by an external stimulus, sometimes an internal – and I would agree that the result is conscious, non-automatic reorganisation of the motor program – we become aware of the error, and correct it.
Where of course I disagree with KF is that this is evidence that there is something immaterial going on. I don’t see why it should be. Consciousness is not evidence of the immaterial! If it were, then we wouldn’t need to even invoke that rather interesting example. We know we are conscious of lots of things.
The issue is: how does this work? I don’t think the question is intractable to a computational answer. But many people do of course, not just theists.
KF also writes:
I’d say:
Brains are neural networks and can be explained as part of the system by which we process signals from the external world, and make our plans as to how to act in response, which is what gives the signals their function and meaning.
And cannot resist the temptation to add:
But then, it seems that a priori ideological commitment to immaterialism blocks KF’s ability to perceive that.
But only to make the point that what is obvious to one person may be just as obviously not the case to another. And I’ll add: far from my perception being the result of an “a priori ideological commitment to materialism”, it was actually a direct result of that perception that I felt I had to abandon my prior “commitment” to immaterialism – to Christian theism, in fact.
A ghost of it remains in the machine still 🙂
So KF is actually, in my case, wrong.
KF
How similar scenarios? Can we think that the answer is ramdom? If not is it in between? How do we know it is not ramdom and do not determined?
Your models also give different answers in very similar scenarios?
Interesting. Who teach prime numbers to the first man that knew them?
May I found information about this learning models?
Elizabeth generally has it right; and it appears that William is still conflating chaos with “anything can happen despite input.”
A stochastic substrate for the processes of the mind is just exactly what is needed in order for the system to have the flexibility to change state in response to input.
Here is a simple analogy.
When an object sits on a table, the friction between the object and the table keeps the object in place even if the table is tilted slightly. However, if one applies a small, continual random vibration to the table, the object moves much more easily when the table is tilted. The object seems to nearly float above the table.
Adding the stochastic jiggling to the system makes the object on the table more responsive to external perturbations; it now “senses” much smaller variations in the levelness of the table.
This mechanical analogy is a general rule in sensing systems. Stochastic enhancement of sensitivity is a commonly used strategy in sensing systems of all types.
Hearing, for example, can be enhanced by the introduction of a small amount of “white” noise. Without the stochastic background, there is a threshold for hearing a tone below which nothing is heard; the mechanical processes in the inner ear do not respond. If you then gradually bring up the white noise, a tone which was below the threshold of hearing can then be heard.
Our nervous systems exist in a bath of phonons and photons that provide a stochastic enhancement to their sensitivity. Hypothermia takes the nervous system below that threshold and nerves cease responding to stimuli. Hyperthermia is too much white noise.
At the level of atoms and molecules, we are in the domain of mesoscopic physics where classical indeterminacy meets quantum indeterminacy. Soft matter systems immersed in a heat bath become sensitive not only to perturbations from external inputs; they are sensitive to events taking place within the system itself. Memories of external events can also provide input to the system.
The existence of the phenomena of hypothermia and hyperthermia is an extremely important clue to the behavior of complex nervous systems. These systems exist in an extremely narrow energy window, outside of which they can no longer work.
Such a system can exist in a superposition of states, a few of which are then selected by perturbations from external input or input from memories.
Liz,
It appears that what you (and others here) call free will, logic, will, convince, etc. is indeed categorically and fundamentally different from how I and others use those terms. For instance, how you describe “freedom” under your schema is exactly the opposite of “freedom” under my schema. For you, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing you to change your mind about something being argued is “the same as” being “convinced” via your “will” via reason, when for me such an arrangement is necessarily and obviously the opposite of applying free will to arbit an argument and becoming convinced of anything in a rational way.
It astonishes me – quite literally – that you can even seriously say such things, much less mean it and believe it.
It’s not a bad thing to be astonished 🙂 One more perplexing wonder to observe in a very grand and mysterious universe.
Why are you astonished William? You believe what you want, not what reality shows you, by your own admission. So for you to be astonished by other people’s interpretations of reality suggests you have different rules for yourself and others. Perhaps if you aligned them, more productive dialogue many be had.
Who was the first person to understand prime numbers and how dis they learn about them?
It seems to me that number theory is the product of thousands of years of human learning.
I’m not conflating chaos with “anything goes”, nor am I holding that materialists or that materialism is a “billiard ball” view of the universe. Nothing I said or implied implies those things at all.
Regardless of what is involved, material reality under materialism is a computation, even if the ongoing results of the computation can only be uncovered in the process of it actually occurring. Liz said the system was both chaotic and unpredictable; I understand what “chaos” (chaos theory) means. Like “random”, it doesn’t mean “anything can happen”, blah blah, those are the straw man diversions and interpretations.
Liz has agreed that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil **could**, through the material computation, end up being the trigger bit of computation that ends up with her being convinced of something. That’s the essential diversion of this part of the two schemas; that being “convinced” of the logic and proof of something at hand because you ate a pizza last night or because, ultimately, a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, is meaningfully called “freedom of will” or “coming to a rational conclusion”.
The dialogue has been quite productive – for me. Whether or not it is productive for you or anyone else is irrelevant to me.
William,
What strikes me as odd is that you don’t know one way or the other what the actual situation is.
Materialist reality is indistinguishable from “theistic reality”.
So all you have to do is think up an experiment that’ll prove it one way or the other.
So, given that reality is the same under both circumstances (or you’d be able to point to X as a differentiating factor) what is your point?
And if reality is exactly the same either way then don’t you find that odd?
So demonstrate a difference between the two schemasand thereby demonstrate if we live in a “material reality” or not….
Has this made you happy William? Given your belief system, you could just choose to believe you’ve already had the dialogue before having it thus saving time and increasing your smugness per keystroke. Just a thought.
But if what you believe is not based on evidence, then what possible good can any dialog be for you? You believe what you believe because you want to, not because of any “dialog”.
And it has been productive for me also, insofar as it demonstrates that even the latest crop of ID supporters is much the same as the old.
Exactly so. One wonders why William is not ruling the world by now. Or perhaps he is, in his head anyway.
One has to enjoy the polarization; William thinks we see ourselves puppets of the universe, when really the universe is his puppet 😉
William J. Murray,
This is what you get for refusing to learn even the most basic notions of science, William. Reality astonishes you? Really?
You can’t possibly know what anyone here is talking about if you refuse to learn the science.
Neil is right; you have no business taking umbrage at what someone else says if you reserve for yourself the right to believe anything you wish despite the evidence.
There are concepts to be learned here, William. Either learn them, or stop sneering at “materialists.” Your sectarian loathing of “materialists” is showing all too clearly.
I still find it very odd the way they all say if the universe is X then Y.
If? If?
Given that nobody can point to anything that demonstrates the truth of the matter one way or the other it’s vastly amusing that they construct their arguments on the construct . And of course, it’s trivially true that if X is true then X is true. And that’s exactly their claim!
So their entire argument seems to be that they’ve made an argument!
William,
But you believe anything you like regardless of evidence supporting those beliefs. So double standards much?
I know it is rued, but I have to ask William and Blas to show us the fruits of your worldview.
I won’t be so crass as to ask you to show us your digital watches, but I think the question would be apt. Show us your medicine, especially your dentistry. Show us your centuries of steady progress.
On the rather mundane political front, scientists from hundreds of countries and opposing political systems routinely cooperate on research and routinely agree on findings. Show us the world in which theists of opposing tribes cooperate and agree on findings.
petrushka,
It’s easy to believe whatever you want regardless of evidence. People are doing it right now. Some people believe that the penis of a tiger will give them virility.
It’s nothing special. In fact it’s a little sad and I have some pity for those trapped inside such a worldview. An inability to engage with reality as it is rather then how you want it to be is not very productive.
William,
You seem to think that if a butterfly flapping its wings in the rainforest causes Lizzie ultimately to believe X, versus not X, then her belief in X is irrational (or maybe arational).
Not so.
For example, Lizzie might be trying to decide whether the duchess of Cambridge knows anything about quantum mechanics. She is thinking about this one morning as she prepares to leave for work. Her only evidence up to this point is a quote in a magazine article in which the duchess indicates that she was “terrible at science” in school. Based on this information, Lizzie is leaning toward “no”.
The radio is playing. Lizzie is about to turn it off and head out the door when she looks out the window and sees that it is raining. She looks for her umbrella, and while she is searching, an interview comes on the radio in which the duchess of Cambridge expounds knowledgeably on superposition, entanglement and Schrödinger’s Cat. Astonished, Lizzie decides that yes, the duchess of Cambridge knows quite a bit about quantum mechanics.
If the rain was caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Brazilian rainforest, then Lizzie’s conclusion depended on the flapping. If it hadn’t been raining, she wouldn’t have searched for her umbrella. If she hadn’t searched for her umbrella, she wouldn’t have heard the interview. If she hadn’t heard the interview, she wouldn’t have realized that Kate was a QM aficionado.
Was her conclusion therefore irrational or arational? Not at all. She would have reached rational conclusions in both cases; it’s just that her conclusion in the non-flapping case would have been wrong, because she would have lacked the crucial evidence of Kate’s quantum mechanical prowess.
It’s only “arational” by my perspective of what “rational” means. Obviously, since the materialist perspective of “rational” is that it **is** whatever the computation says it is (since “reason” and “logic” are nothing more than expressions of internal biological states computed by the biology involved), it is perfectly rational by Liz’s schema. In fact, anything Liz says and does is perfectly rational when the system says so, and is non-rational or irrational when the system says so, because the system itself is what establishes what those things are.
The arbiter is the system, and cannot be anything other than the system. It’s tautologically self-referential and inescapable.
William,
That’s not what we materialists say. It’s quite possible for the computation to go wrong and produce bad answers, as it frequently does in your case.
The dualist has the same problem — it’s just that the system includes an immaterial component. Even if your mind is immaterial, you still depend on it to judge what is rational and what isn’t. We know that human minds are not perfectly reliable. Therefore you cannot know with certainty that your beliefs are rational or true — including fundamental ones like your beliefs about the rules of logic.
If William’s father had stopped for a glass of water on the way to the bedroom, William might be Wilhelmina.
Big effects from small causes are part of the way the world works.
There are also systems that are relatively imperturbably. Not all systems are the same in this respect. The weather is probably among those systems that dampen disturbances.
It seems rather odd that the radio mind, the disembodied non-material mind does not continue to have control when we are drunk or when the brain is injured.
If the mind cannot tell when the brain is disabled by physical or chemical forces, how can it dependably know anything?
I realize we can know when we are drunk — at least some of us can — but the evidence says we can not always know when the brain is physically impaired.
Petrushka,
Actually, it’s the other way around. The weather is extremely sensitive to small disturbances. In fact, weather simulations were the first arena in which deterministic chaos was recognized.
From the obituary of Ed Lorenz, in the LA Times:
Are we going to discuss history? Your science is our science, no differences. Probably there was more theistic scientist than atheist scientist. And not all the “centuries of steady progress.” is due to science. Probably is more related with technic than science.
I think both can be true. Weather may be sensitive to initial conditions — which is to say that the location of rain might be affected by a tiny variation in initial conditions — but at some point a weather system can become insensitive to perturbing forces.
That would be a continuum.
True, there is only one science. It makes no difference whether a scientist is a theist or an atheist, so long as he is looking for regularities.
If he stops looking for regularities and concludes that angles or demiurges are intervening in nature, he ceases to be a scientist.
Scientists do not label unexplored regions as having dragons.
And your “system” is exactly the same as you cannot differentiate between the two.
I’ve been looking at this for over 50 years. I came to evolution through learning theory rather than the other way round.
It’s far more difficult to get people to accept thought as an evolutionary process than to get people to understand biological evolution. In 50 years my conversion count is zero, or close to it.
Since AI is going in this direction, it is getting easier to talk about it, but it’s still not accepted.
And do not say we are sure to get the answer.
>> The arbiter is the system, and cannot be anything other than the system. It’s tautologically self-referential and inescapable.
William J. Murray
Yes, that’s true, but the materialist needs objective evidence to believe otherwise. There are arguments like Aquinas’s five proofs (persuasive to some) but these too lack conclusive evidence. This is ultimately a metaphysical debate that relies upon faith.
For Christians, salvation requires faith and that can only exist if we have God-given free will. Thus to believe that faith can be circumvented by logic and deliver one to the Truth is a perversion of Christianity. That’s not a problem for you, since you’re not a Christian, but it is a problem for most of your ID fellows.
The gap between the limits of logic and evidence and the path faith leading to Truth is deliberate. So the only way to escape the tautology you presented is to escape logic and give oneself over to faith and accept another tautology:
Logic, rationality, science, etc. are not required in the least to be saved, but both halves lead to a deeper, richer understanding. There is no doubt that the tools of the intellect lead to truths of the physical world – for that Christians can thank God. We Christians should praise their efforts, and pray that their journey of discovery will encourage a leap towards transcendence.
What exactly is troubling you? the age of the earth? The configuration of the solar system?
*yawn*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism
William is making the same childish mistake that Sal is making with his “mathematical” version of genetic entropy. It is the inability to conceive of that fact that there are billions of other things going on when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil.
There are millions of butterflies all over the world. There are also birds, and bumblebees, and bats. There are airplanes and helicopters; there are fans and air conditioners. There are cars zooming along a highway, there are whales and dolphins splashing up water into the air. There are meteors entering the atmosphere, there are cheetahs chasing gazelles kicking up dust and disturbing the air.
We exist in an environment filled with contingency and stochastic events. It is impossible in principle to trace the outcome of a particular event in our nervous systems to the occurrence of another specified event separated in space-time. Each of those other events is also immersed in a din of stochastic variability due to billions of other events.
We cannot send out photons and phonons to detect incoming photons, phonons, or particles that are about to impact us in the future. There are no operational methods for detecting determinism of the events that take place in our consciousness. Everything taking place within our nervous systems is local to our nervous systems.
What resides there in the way of “learning” is the result of interactions that take place locally over a period of time. We can’t trace a “deterministic history” of our immediate experiences by tracking the histories of every puff of air, every rain drop, every photon, every phonon that impacts us right now.
Plasticity of the nervous system – i.e., its ability to respond to stimuli coming from the environment and from memory – is what makes learning possible; but there can be no learning without memory, and there can be no memory without plasticity. And there can be no such plasticity in tightly bound systems; those systems have to be loosely bound and subjected to stochastic enhancement.
Rigid dogmatism is the end of learning; it is a tightly bound state that no longer responds to stimuli.
If this is true, how science that is the search for regularities can study the process of learning?
How is it a problem? We study weather.
Do you know what emergent properties are?
Do you know what air pressure is? Do you know any connections between air pressure, temperature, and volume?
Do you know any relationships between temperature and the motions of atoms and molecules?
Do you know why solids have the properties they do? How about liquids? Soft matter? Gases?
Here’s the situation.
That butterfly, flapping its wings in Brazil, happens to affect our weather. It affects our weather so much, that the result is a tornado heading straight for you.
So will you seek shelter from that tornado, or will you refuse to seek shelter, and die in the storm?
You seem to be saying that you have a specially powerful form of free will, according to which you will die, rather than seek shelter.
Some of us are really puzzled that anybody could think that to be a reasonable understanding of what “free will” means.
You are conflating my argument that Liz’s conviction is determined by the material events involved in the run-up to that conviction with someone’s ability to compute that determination beforehand.
However complex and deep and plastic and indecipherable the run-up to conviction is, doesn’t matter to the point that given X as the comprehensive run-up, Y will always be the conclusion, and there’s no way of telling, as you say, what particular bit of X, if taken away, will result in a different conviction (or conclusion) on Liz’s part.
Take away the pizza eaten 10 years ago on a particular night, or a single butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil 10 years ago, and who knows what the possible ramifications would be cascading down, but they could possibly result in Liz reaching a different conclusion.
I thought you and Liz have said that such outcomes are not predictable, and that the results of the process cannot be determined beforehand.
My point is not about the storm, but rather that a butterfly flapping it’s wings (metaphor for cascading chaotic effects) can make me decide, one way or another, whether to get out of the storm or not. The “you” that you refer to in asking “will you refuse to seek shelter …” is nothing but an effect of the material computation, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can (ultimately) cause me to believe the storm poses no threat and that I can go.
Under materialism, there is no agency independent of the computation (with the butterfly effect) to overturn that belief or decision. I am the computational results, nothing more, nothing less. If the computation of material interactions say “the storm is not going to harm you, go on out there”, that is what “i” believe and that is what I do. Period.
Whether or not it can be computed by anyone beforehand, and whether or not “what will happen” can only be known as it happens, is entirely irrelevant to the fact that what I believe and do, under materialism, is entirely caused by that which precedes it.
If the computation says bark like a dog and believe you are reciting Shakespeare, that is what I will do and believe, because I **am** the computation, and I have no agency with which to overturn that computational result.
William J. murray said:
rhampton replies:
If materialism is true, materialists will believe anything the computation tells them to believe, any time it tells them to believe it, whether any objective evidence exists or whether a collection of pizzas consumed and butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil causes you to believe it.
The rest of your post has nothing to do with me, but I will point out that if materialism is true, your entire argument fails. Under materialism, Christians and materialists and everyone else believe what they do for the exact same reason: the computation of material interactions, which are chaotic and unpredictable, makes them believe what they do. Nobelief has anything to do with “logic”, “science” or “faith”, per se, other than what the respective physical computations puts in their brain or outputs from their mouth concurrently as pure semantics. Under materialism, the understanding of logic, faith, and science and their relationships are whatever the respective computations happens to generate in each individual. Nothing more, nothing less.