Contradiction between materialism and freedom of choice?

deathsupafire · 1 month

Rare, probabilistically tame, I agree on all that. And it is a comfort to anyone breathing such dust that the odds of cancer can be calculated to be low. But then we humans play dice with all sorts of risks everyday. I don't think our psychological comfort can tell the difference between playing the odd based on ignorance vs playing the odds of indeterminate events.

I think the two hypotheticals can be seen as equivalent, and can be cleaned up so as to be useful against anyone that doesn't feel the salience of indeterminism (figuring that "oh well, that is just small stuff, who cares"). The assassin can be thought of as choosing to only pull the trigger if the Geiger counter shows some very unlikely reading, so unlikely as to match the calculations available for getting cancer from a radioactive mote of any type and size one picks.

And however messy the biology is there is some kind of threshold of damage above which the cellular repair can't work effectively enough in most people so as to prevent cancer. And it isn't ruled out that whatever sufficiently large-N radioactive atoms in a mote of dust would all decay around the same time. QM puts lower odds on that, but even so, whether a moment in which the mote is in someone's lung is one that conforms to the larger probability of only a couple of atoms decaying or whether it is a moment of the type that is only rarely seen, that isn't determined by the history of the universe up to that moment. So each moment a mote is in a lung it is a very-weighted-quantum-coin holding assassin.

The assassin case makes the dependency of big events on small ones more salient (probably just because it can involve the mental image of a gun), and the mote one shows that we need not wait for strange assassins before this kind of dependency actually occurs. I like the combo.

But then you didn't disagree, just pointed out the practicality... and I'm not disagreeing on that. I was motivated more by wanting to share the scale-of-events-blurring considerations, but you knew something similar from Kane, so I guess that wasn't even needed.

At this point, I think I'm just procrastinating on something I'd rather not do, because commenting with you is more fun. Oh well, no escape. See you around.

deathsupafire · 1 month

The trouble is, one can't simply screen off quantum events from large ones. Say an assassin has a large country's leader in his sights, but has, because he likes weird Batman villains so much, chosen to "flip a quantum coin", by deciding to pull the trigger or not based on the reading from a Geiger counter at a particular moment. In this physically plausible thought experiment, the course of world politics tomorrow is indeterminate.

If one doesn't like that particular thought experiment, consider that sometimes people breathe in dust that contains radioactive atoms. That dust is then exhaled. The two possible futures, them not getting lung cancer vs them getting lung cancer can causally hinge on whether the few radioactive atoms which are briefly in their lungs decay in that moment or at some later time.

shotglassanhero · 1 month

You mean the SuperCreepyMan movie. In which SuperCreepyMan flew around outside an old girlfriend's house and uses his see-through-stuff vision to spy on her and her family. SuperCreepyMan is a faithful upholder of the American way.

rhpfan · 1 month

Have fun (re)watching. I agree about Burke's wit. I would love to share some pints with him and just keep him rambling on as long as possible.

One thing to watch out for in The Day the Universe Changed, that a couple of people I shared them with didn't like (and so please allow me the chance to inoculate you a bit against that annoyance)... he sometimes does this bit where he talks about some historical person and doesn't use/give their name for quite some time. The people I was showing episodes to took that to be a unwanted history quiz question, breaking up the flow of trusting him, as narrator, to be informing you, the viewer. But I think it has another motive, at least in part.

I think he is trying to get you to think about what the person knew and was doing at the time, in their context, not yours. If he said their name, and you recognized it, then you would remember the success or failure of their efforts and all the later effects of what they did. But his subject isn't just the effects that follow, his subject is that moment when what we humans knew about the world was changing. So he has to try and shield you from prematurely thinking about all the other stuff you know about the famous person(s) he is talking about.

GodLike1001 · 1 month

Indeed, I would think that ethical egoists would claim something that sounds better. Unless they think honesty is going to pay out more (perhaps looking to find other ethical egoists to join in a con of someone else), or they believe that literally no cost/benefit is on the line so their decision method has nothing to say on the matter.

Well, I was inclined to be whimsical. But the bit about it probably being better for the rest of us to not trust ethical egoists (at least, not further than we can throw them) was real. To me, ethical egoism seems either a bit vacuous (reducing back to the hard problem of picking between other ethic systems via something like "best for me" = "strive to get the world nearer or into that of maximally promoting human flourishing") or to be functionally nigh indistinguishable from a descriptive ethics of psychopaths.

GodLike1001 · 1 month

Cool. Good of you to step back and be honest about all that. See you around.

GodLike1001 · 1 month

edit--I have no idea why I included the word ethical.

Maybe you are just using the term to trick us all into trusting you more than we should. Given that stated "ethics", such deception would be consistent of you.

GodLike1001 · 1 month

In philosophy, it can be a great kindness for someone else to explore the workings of one's current framework... I got no "mean" vibe from soldout's questions, but this comment of yours feels, unlike the previous ones, a bit abrasively defensive. For instance, you pulled out what can easily look like a classic "well why don't you tell me if you know so much" rhetorical move.

deathsupafire · 1 month

Lol... I need a membership card.

deathsupafire · 1 month

"It goes against all observed processes in a fundamental way..."

Sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to pull back on that "all". Otherwise please present a way in which the time of an alpha-particle decay is predictable, or present an extension of Bohmian mechanics into the domain of quantum field theory which has passed layers of peer-review by physicists.

deathsupafire · 1 month

Thank you for taking up this "tiny thing" thread and thus freeing me from needing to. Friends don't let friends forget that the weight of current scientific evidence/understanding supports us being in a universe that includes indeterminism.

For those that might not like that, they should get to work on updating Bohmian mechanics.

Dog-Modernist · 1 month

Other people have already listed some of the Big Names around. But always going for Big Names in an area can have you missing so much.

So I'll say that I've always thought that Gilbert Ryle's Systematically Misleading Expressions is a bit under-read, so I suggest that.

rhpfan · 1 month

You might be thinking of the ending episode of The Day the Universe Changed. He could have used the same imagery in a Connections episode, I can't recall one way or another at the moment, but I know he did that at the end of "Worlds Without End". I just finished watching that series (all the Connection episodes are top in my Netflix queue now).

At the end of that episode Burke presented the case for an optimism regarding the dawning computer age. And it wasn't just the communicative power, it was also the ability of computers to give us each a repository of information that mirrors/tracks with our own developing and individual understanding of the world. Like imagine you had your own personal Wikipedia, and as you learned about a topic, what you learned got stored away for your own review and cross-analysis with previous and new info, and also comparison with other people's personal Wikipedia versions. Of course, he was looking at the dawning computer age as through a morning fog, the details and pitfalls obscured. So I think it was a bit over-optimistic. But realistically, the age is still not done dawning, so all that is up for grabs.

The light glinting off the computer chip, btw, fits with the "ray of light" metaphor he starts that episode with. And every other episode ends with the dawn imagery, but in that last episode, the chip replaces it. Nice visual symbolism.

Addendum: Just rewatched, the chip doesn't replace the sun-rise, it interleafs with it. My mistake. Also, the ability of the computers to hold lots of different systems of understanding, plenty for each person to have their own ongoing one, is also talked of as having political implications.

appsnack · 1 month

Attention control. Ever send someone an email and then have them duck questions about the issue for days, saying they haven't got around to opening that attachment or whatever yet. That is no way to ensure that the ship runs properly. So when someone has a report to give to a member of senior staff, seems helpful to put it in their hand and see if they have something to say in reply right then and there.

Passing the report about something around might be a way to physically show who is the current bottleneck on some issue.

Conversely, sometimes I show up to meetings with a separate folder for each "little side issue" I'm working on. Is a great way not to have more shit delegated my way.

cmgerber · 1 month

Arg, figure 4 is maddening! Why are the homologous bundles not given the same (or at least similar) colors from one species to the next? Having CC/CB be a different color in each makes it harder to compare and contrast visually to how it interacts with the various other paths across the species.

cmgerber · 1 month

What implications on the output does the "too deterministic" technique have? Does it act as a filter by overlooking some tracts or something?

theguyjb · 1 month

Back in my day, we had to hand crank our walls to get them standing up in the morning.

thekemkid · 1 month

Lay the cloth out on the floor. Open portals. Reach through (but don't cross through) one portal to the floor across the room and pick up the end of cloth there, pull it back through the portal to where you are standing. Pick up the end at your feet. Tie the two ends together.

You don't have to reach across the room when you have a portal from the side you are on to the other side. In short, I don't think you were thinking with portals.

missbunnyfoofoo · 1 month

Lucky bunny.

I once found a camera in a parking lot and thought "Oh great, now I can use the internet to track down these people and get all that sweet reddit cred." But I looked and found three utterly useless pictures. Hell, one was of one of the bushes not twenty feet away. Another in a restaurant I recognized, but of other tables, clearly not associated with the person taking the picture. I forget the third... something like a shot looking down the street the restaurant was on, I think, no people.

I had to just put it back where I found it. :-(

ChiverMatt · 1 month

Best theory on the horse bit I could think of was that... well, we didn't see anything of the outside world, and the horse panics at a bridge, maybe representing connection to the rest of humanity or something. Not all that well-anchored a theory, I'll admit.

Well, that, and the sister's husband said he rode it some (when the sister said that it was the bride's special horse that only the bride rode)... I couldn't tell if that was supposed to play into what it was about.

Mind_Virus · 1 month

... and at one point held an indifference to child pornography because the concept of what constituted exploitation was just too vague.

I've heard that before and have thought about saying it myself in conversation, but stopped myself when I remembered that I haven't done any due diligence on that meme. So if anyone can pass along a good bit of evidence to save me the trouble, I'd be obliged.

Two, very beside your points... ugh... kids... just in general, politically speaking. Little irrational creature constantly being created, with no ability to really give much informed consent until over a decade later when they are in the midst of an emotionally driven, slow-burn fugue state with their long-term-planning/simulating neural modules still not fully wired up to inform their impulsive-action generating faculties, resulting in, among other things, little to no patience in most of them for comparing subtle greys in moral and philosophical systems. Ugh. Every "everyone explicitly consents" system for organising a society can be expected to have a one generation half-life, at best. Ugh.

I seldom if ever see people acknowledge that much of political theory is just pissing in the wind in regards to kids, ignoring the full reality of them and hoping that the issue never really comes up.

Mind_Virus · 1 month

I think we have some points of agreement, but allow me to be a bit critical of libertarians as a group in regards to communicating the message (putting aside the various difficulties that all such constructions of language about groups as units have for the moment).

If you (the group) never said something like 'get rid of government' without always also including 'and corporations' (and, heck, sometimes switched the order of presentation there for good measure), then you could really blame them (people not in the group) for this misperception of your position which you think they have. But libertarians don't state that part of their position clearly or much day to day. And some/most of the politicians who call themselves libertarian leaning in office don't work for that second point at all, while going for the first bit full bore. If your position has two components that are meant to work in balance with each other, stop showing people statements and actions only reflecting one part.

Now, backing away from the criticism a bit, I know many members of the group under critical review here do, in fact, try to put the two parts together in what they say. But as a whole, that message (I think most reasonable people should agree here) isn't the one being communicated to outsiders. One can blame the outsiders or the group or both. I don't see that the outsiders are exclusively to blame.

Personally, I think you should have an acronym for something like "we ratchet limited liability out of existence and thus deconstruct the corporate power structures". Then you could just pop that on the front, or somewhere in the middle, of your explications of steps in a solution as you see it. Like: "WRLLOOEATDTCPS, then we get government out of healthcare" or something like that. The point being, stop letting yourselves leave that part out. Leaving it out should be the rare thing that other people see. Because without other people seeing it, they are quite right to think your plan leaves one huge, obvious structure of perverse and insane, easily destructive power in the world without anything capable of restraining it. Having checks and balances of powers (governments vs. corps.) sounds way better than that to many people.

feureau · 1 month

I bet Watson can find her. It knows plenty of geography and history and such.

ChiverMatt · 1 month

Well, maybe, but not a great leader for her sister, whose plan for meeting the end the ex-bride shits all over. See my other comment nearby for more elaboration of my take on that.

And, the horse, what do you think?

nomdeweb · 1 month

Venus has lots of volcanism and is though to have resurfaced itself relatively recently. So whatever went on in its deep past is not to be found there now.

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