He can speak for himself then. Because the faults of believers is more obvious than any evidence of God.
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Scientific Proof For The Existence of God/ Heaven
- Thread starter white gardenia
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He can speak for himself then. Because the faults of believers is more obvious than any evidence of God.
It's one of the assumptions of the method. Literally none of the method works without there being an unknown objective reality.
The first step of the scientific method is to make observations and ask a question. For these we require an objective reality that we don't yet understand.
So, I'm not sure what you're quibbling about.
You wan't me to document for you every single scientific advancement in understanding ever?
Each and every one of them would have depended upon there being an objective reality that was not yet understood.
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Yes, it seems to me that in order for it to be a worthwhile enterprise, you at least need the assumption of something that is observable/measurable, and that observations of it will show patterns or regularities. It may be that we call the subject of those observations 'objective reality', but we necessarily assume it in order to make sense of what we're doing when we make observations. The scientific method itself has been developed explicitly to distinguish between subjective and objective reality.
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Yes you're right, the signal is what is broadcast, but I was taking "broadcast" as referring to the output from the receiving device.
Again, we are talking about two different things, and again I think it's useless. IMO compatibilism does not say that free will is compatible with determinism, rather it's an attempt to say that determinism is compatible with morality.
You may already know of this, but a couple days ago I learned of something which further discourages me from continuing discussing this with you. Upon release of Harris' book, Harris and Dennett had a nasty disagreement. I learned of this from a discussion where they sat down to try and hash it out. In an hour and a half talk, they cannot agree on what compatibilism means, and neither offers a clear definition. Their discussion is remarkable only for how jumbled and inarticulate it is. Harris later said about it, "...the nature of our remaining disagreement never became perfectly clear to me...". So I think that if those two friends and allies, who both claim to be compatibilists, can't seem to discuss compatibilism, you and I will have an even worse time of it.
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OK, so now you know that by 'broadcast' I meant the signal the device was receiving, can you accept that being able to change the content of what is produced in the way I described would falsify the broadcast receiver hypothesis?
Compatibilism is defined as describing compatibility between free will and determinism. Some interpretations make a transitive link to moral responsibility:
"Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I find the concept of moral responsibility useful only in consequentialist terms, where attribution of praise or blame, and reward or punishment, are likely to be effective in encouraging or deterring future behaviour of that type, and where a humane society will favour praise and reward over blame and punishment, e.g. discourage negative behaviours by rewarding positive behaviours. YMMV.
That's philosophical debate for you - sometimes protagonists fail to understand each other. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try. As it happens, Harris and Dennett did get back together to work out their differences and the reasons for them - in one of Harris's podcasts: #39 Free Will Revisited.
I like to try to understand why people with differing views have those views and, if they're willing, help them understand why I have the views I have. People are never going to agree on everything, but some understanding is worth making an effort for, because not only do we learn why other people hold the views they do, but in trying to articulate the reasons for our own views we learn more about ourselves.
E.T.A. Incidentally, if you read his book 'Free Will', you'll see that Sam Harris isn't a compatibilist, he doesn't think we have free will in any useful sense, although it feels as though we do; i.e. he thinks it's illusory. This goes part way to explaining why he and Dennett disagree.
Listening to the podcast, it becomes clear that he and Dennett are describing different levels of meaning - Harris looking at the semantics of free will in terms of physical determinism, and Dennett looking at the semantics of free will in terms of human behaviour and existing social structures. Sean Carroll's warning about mixing levels of description seems apposite here.
I prefer the clarity of Harris's exposition - Dennett gives the impression of being evasive, and although he does seem able to explain his reasoning, it's rather opaque.
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No, because if a video image of a red apple is broadcast, I can adjust the tint or color levels to produce (from the receiver) a non-red apple.
That's certainly how it's defined. But I need to have that contradiction explained before I can accept it as a valid definition. And I've never heard a good explanation.
That's the discussion I was talking about.
Sure I agree with that. So do you have a tentative opinion on why I hold the views I do? (Don't worry, I'm thick-skinned.)
That's what I'd always thought of him, but I seem to remember at some point Dennett saying "we're both compatibilists" and Harris doesn't object. But if I just go by hearing a lot of his online talks and whatnot, he seems to waver from time to time.
So do I.
If I were trying to propound a contradiction, I'd probably find it useful to be evasive and opaque too.
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.. I'm watching this part of the conversation with intrigue ..
The so-called main 'objects' in this discussion ('broadcast transmitters/receivers') have no objective evidence that they, themselves, 'exist' entirely independently from the minds that invented them .. (by 'invented' here, I mean by way of cleverly designed (human engineered) electronics .. for which there is abundant evidence).
The evidence thus leads to the firm conclusion that the main 'object' here, ie: 'signal', is in fact, a model representation of a time varying, propagating E-M field (the latter of which is also a model invented by minds .. for which there is also abundant historical objective evidence).
Any receiver design can be modified to produce different representations on their output side because receivers are themselves, derived from the original model of a 'signal'. (Ie: a 'signal' is a model which we conveniently overlook in our eagerness to perceive it as an object .. I say, for the sake of expediency in scientific conversations .. and nothing more than that).
All we have here is a bunch of objective evidence of nested models conceived (historically) by human minds.
Even if a 'signal's' source is detected as originating from the cosmos, it has in effect, been derived from how we perceive the E-M propagation model .. which was also invented by human scientific minds (abundant evidence for this, yet again).
Wheeler's quantum mechanics delayed choice experiment gives rise to a time paradox, which is yet again, simply 'undone' by reorienting the human mind's perception of the observations:
From this, we can clearly see that the human mind is very much at play in deciphering what we're actually observing in these experiments .. and no evidence of some kind of over-riding, predetermined physical law of the universe which somehow magically exists independently from our abilities to perceive the observations ... and also no evidence for the existence of some over-arching being, who conspired to deliberately confound us when they supposedly created the universe.Wiki said:
All I can see by way of evidence in this sub-conversation thus far, is two beliefs and a bunch of embedded philosophical-languaged smoke-screening!
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Yaeh, that's why I used examples like, "change the gender of a newsreader, or the layout of the studio, or the news itself, or change the plot of a play or its actors, or change the schedule of programmes" rather than colour.
But hey, if you don't want to play...
OK. Well, I tried.
They talked out their differences and came to an understanding. They don't have to agree.
I don't recall that you've given an explanation, besides that you believe "..there's something supernatural going on...", which isn't so much an explanation as a denial of one. From this discussion, I'd guess you'd rather not look too closely or question your beliefs - but I couldn't say why you hold them; upbringing (e.g. cultural indoctrination) ?Sure I agree with that. So do you have a tentative opinion on why I hold the views I do? (Don't worry, I'm thick-skinned.)
I don't recall that quote - Dennett did say that they agreed on all the fundamentals but disagreed on their interpretation of them.
His position isn't contradictory, he explicitly defines the 'free' of free will in terms of the degrees of freedom an agent has.If I were trying to propound a contradiction, I'd probably find it useful to be evasive and opaque too.
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I'm playing with the rules of good analogy in mind. What you're suggesting is an unrealistic science fiction scenario where a brain surgeon can tweak a brain to, for example, make a particular male newsreader appear female, or make a sofa look like a rocking chair, etc.
I'm not sure they came to an understanding considering what Harris later said, but how could they both be privy to the same neuroscientific evidence and not agree?
What have I said that makes you guess that?
Certainly not upbringing. I don't know, do you think America is a Christian culture?
Which is evading the physics problem, and redefing something into something it's not. Same with you, when you say it's the "experience of making choices that we perceive to be free of constraint or coercion..." Constraint and coercion are two different things. Yes, you can physically constrain someone against their will, which is just proof that we have will, but you can't actually coerce anyone. I mentioned a man I knew who was given a choice of "your money or your life" and he gave his life. And history shows many people who have been told to recant their beliefs or die horrible deaths, and they chose to die. So defining "free" in terms of "degrees of freedom" is meaningless.
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No; you're confusing the TV receiver analogy with what it's analogising. In brief: just as being able to change the content of programmmes shown on a TV by messing with the TV would falsify the claim that they were received via a broadcast signal, so being able to change all recognised aspects of consciousness by messing with the brain falsifies the claim that the brain is a receiver for consciousness.
They weren't discussing the neuroscientific evidence. They were discussing the meaning and usage of 'free will'.
It's what you haven't said.
The statistics indicate that - over 73% of the population are Christian and a majority says religion and prayer is part of their daily life.
On the contrary, it's expressing freedom in physical terms, i.e. capability; defining your terms is part of such discussions - the whole point is that the popular conception of 'free' in free will is incoherent, so a coherent definition is required for a coherent & meaningful discussion.
I'm well aware they're different - that's why I mention them both; it's a common definition of freedom in philosophical discussions of free will.
The fact that people are and have been coerced (and that there's a legal definition of it) shows that you can coerce someone. If unethical means are used to persuade or convince someone to act, particularly against their will or better judgement, that's coercion; it happens a lot.
Degrees of freedom (in Dennett's description) is about the number of different ways an agent has to arrive at a choice, i.e. decision-making flexibility/complexity/sophistication. He explains this in the podcast you say you listened to...
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Errr .. why even attempt to 'falsify' an implied source of 'consciousness' by inventing (or even playing along with) a notion such as the existence of a consciousness-carrying 'signal', when the very meaning of 'consciousness' itself, is a demonstrably, human invented concept? (The latter is easily testable and generates abundant objective evidence).
There is no objective evidence that what we mean when we use the word 'consciousness', comes from anywhere other than human minds, thus there is no need to even pretend that it does in order to falsify its existence in the form of a 'signal' (or a receiver/brain supposedly designed to detect it). Logic, in this instance, does nothing other than preserve the original untestable assumption .. ie: that what we mean by 'consciousness' (or its supposed propagating 'signal') exists independently from the minds that demonstrably conceived it.
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And if horses had wings they could fly. So what? The analogy is useless unless you can show that we can "change all recognised aspects of consciousness by messing with the brain".
I asked how they could know the same science yet disagree.
Well that narrows it down.
By that reasoning, you have no religion because 53% of the U.K. say they have no religion.
There is no freedom in physical terms. Are gravity and photons free to do other than what they do? Free will is mysterious, not incoherent. Mystery only means "unknown". Free will is only incoherent in terms of naturalism/materialism.
It seems to be a common definition used to avoid discussion of actual free will, and to try to salvage morality.
You can coerce someone if they choose to allow it.
I don't recall that part. What are the different ways? Flexibility, complexity and sophistication are nouns, not ways of doing anything.
I wasn't going to go into detail of his errors, but can you explain how or why Dennett confuses (or pretends to confuse) the evitability of being hit with a brick with the inevitability of ducking to avoid being hit with the brick? What accounts for that? He's either being foolish, or he's trying to fool people.
Now this was a casual conversation, and normally I wouldn't hold anyone strictly accountable for something said in casual conversation, but he's used this same example before.
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I can only cite reported observations, IIRC they include alertness, memory, attention, sense of location, body ownership, bounds, viewpoint, emotional response, sense of self, various aspects of personality & personhood, moral values, religious belief, etc., but if you'd can suggest some aspects that you feel are unlikely to be included, it might be interesting to see if there are any reports of such changes.
And I said they're not disagreeing on the science, but on the meaning and usage of the term 'free will'.
No; your question was whether America is a Christian culture, so by that reasoning, the UK is a broadly secular culture.
If you recall from the podcast, Dennett was talking of freedom in terms of degrees of freedom as used in control theory; for example, in terms of movement, a hinge joint like the elbow or knee has a one degree of freedom, but a ball & socket joint like the hip or shoulder has many degrees of freedom. Similarly, creatures with complex brains have more cognitive degrees of freedom than creatures with simple brains. Dennett is saying that our freedom in this context is related to the number of different ways we can arrive at, and express, our will, and our competence to control this complexity.
The popular conception of free will is incoherent as matter of logic, not naturalism or materialism. An event either has a prior cause or causes, i.e. is determined, or it doesn't, i.e. it's random. In my experience, people generally say they have reasons (explanatory causes) for the choices they make, which suggests the choices are determined by those reasons rather than being random. An observer of human behaviour can see that it isn't significantly random, and generally involves a range of (fairly predictable) responses to particular situations. The more unpredictable an individual's responses become, the more likely it is that you'll find some underlying cause for the unpredictability, e.g. stress, illness, emotion, etc., that 'disturbs the balance of their mind'.
It's generally used as an acceptably coherent definition of the 'free' in free will.
If you can provide a coherent definition of what you mean by 'free' in 'actual free will', i.e. without invoking inexplicables like 'the supernatural', we could discuss that.
Yes; but the point is whether they would voluntarily make that choice in the absence of coercion. For example, if a mugger threatens to stab you unless you give him your wallet, and you then give him your wallet, you have been coerced if you gave him your wallet because he threatened you. If you had decided, in a moment of improbable generosity or madness, to give him your wallet before he even approached you, then you would not have been coerced. In the former case it would not be considered a free choice, in the latter it would.
See the description of cognitive degrees of freedom above/below.
As I understand it this is part of his pragmatic argument that, in practice, we need to take a high-level, i.e. behavioural, societal, view of free will rather than a low-level deterministic view; the former is emergent from the latter, and follows rules that are not applicable or meaningful at the lower level, so our analysis should be at the emergent level, not the substrate level.
The inevitablility of his ducking (the deterministic view) is distinguished from the evitability of being hit by the brick (the behavioural view). Under 'raw' determinism everything is inevitable, so trying to discuss human behaviour becomes pointless - at that level there is no meaning, it's 'just the deterministic interactions of fundamental particles'. However, in practice, at human scales and levels of interaction, we do experience making choices, we can avoid the brick, we do describe human behaviour in terms of meaning, motivations, goals, etc., so Dennett says that we should take these concepts seriously at their level of applicability.
He measures our freedom of will in terms of degrees of freedom, especially of cognition (as previously explained), implying a continuum of freedom, e.g. from the lack of freedom of the simplest organisms that can neither sense nor respond to approaching bricks, through the limited freedom of creatures with hard-wired avoidance responses to sudden movement (perhaps one degree of freedom), to the greater freedom of more complex creatures that can track a moving object and navigate to avoid it, up to the extensive freedom of the most cognitively complex creatures (us) that can (in principle) recognise the object as a brick, visualise multiple strategies involving not being hit, and select the perceived most appropriate strategy. In this sense, the freedom is in the almost infinite variety of responses we could make, and the cognitive means we have to control the processing and selection of these responses.
To make a crude analogy with the emergent concepts of temperature and pressure, he's saying yes, it may ultimately be all to do with the vibrations and velocities of atoms and molecules, but if you want to analyse why you're sweating and your ears are popping, think about adjusting the temperature and pressure, not about the vibrations and velocities of atoms and molecules.
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I work in the AI field, and for an AI to simulate something like a "consciousness", whether internally perceived or externally assumed based on behavior, it's only going to come about, ironically, via evolution, which is how artificial life is simulated.
There's no programming involved. The digital life form "evolves" to react to its environment and if it develops language to communicate among themselves (already been done), perceive threats or dangers (already done), consume or predate in its environment (already been done), then that's great, but is it "alive"? Maybe, but only within that environmental simulation, which doesn't mean much.
As far as MWI and all that, it just sounds like navel gazing and marijuana smoking to me. Something to pass the time while you're stoned.
There's no programming involved. The digital life form "evolves" to react to its environment and if it develops language to communicate among themselves (already been done), perceive threats or dangers (already done), consume or predate in its environment (already been done), then that's great, but is it "alive"? Maybe, but only within that environmental simulation, which doesn't mean much.
As far as MWI and all that, it just sounds like navel gazing and marijuana smoking to me. Something to pass the time while you're stoned.
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I find many claims from many AI proponents frankly, quite naive.
The statement "there's no programming involved" is one of them. The entire simulation environment is 'programmed' for goodness sake!
The consciousness and intelligence of the observer and the simulation designer (or 'programmer') running the simulation, is usually hidden in AI descriptions and the effect of that is almost never taken into account.
On the contrary, it explicitly demonstrates that 'life' behaviors and 'environment' appear as being intrinsically linked in the mind of the (undistinguished) observer.digitalgoth said:
Different perspectives (or interpretations) can be made useful by making testable hypotheses. This is the process by which we come up with the meaning of what science calls 'objective reality' .. all that is required is a human mind.digitalgoth said:
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I dunno, it seems to me that life is as life does - does 'living' in an environmental simulation make it less a life? I'm not a big fan of the simulation hypothesis for our own experience (or universe), but it seems a logical possibility, and if we somehow found some signature that it was true, life would still be life...
I remember, many years ago, running one of the earliest evolution simulations, Tierra, where minimal self-replicating sequences of code competed in a simulated environment, and discovering that 30 to 40 thousand generations would produce populations with parasites, symbiotes, cooperators, etc. These started as very short sequences, around 60 instructions IIRC, but still produced some rather life-like evolutionary population dynamics. I'm not sure there's a clear distinction to be made between life and non-life in such environments unless one explicitly excludes simulations.
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Arrgghh ...(
) .. a bunch of truisms here ... What is a signature that is 'true'?This argument really boils down to whatever we so choose as being the definition of (or the meaning we associate with) the term 'life'. But meanings change with new evidence. Definitions themselves are therefore an insufficient basis for justifying 'existence' independently from the mind providing them.
Its interesting when one considers the (very likely) scenario of how would we diagnose 'life' via an onsite exploratory expedition of a nearby planet. Following the scientific method, one would observe the 'landscape' first and take note of any unusual features .. I think it all starts with that simple, but often overlooked, first step.FrumiousBandersnatch said:
I think observations of the unusual features would then lead (maybe) onto a defintion of life in that specific environment. Such a new life may or may not be comparable with what we've adopted as the definition from our own Earthly experiences (and knowledgebase).
I think the same applies for the AI scenario.
Ultimately we may well end up with a bunch of 'lifeforms' which only make sense in the environment it evolved in(?) (.. The latter necessarily being objectively evidenced, of course).
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Reading error: Not a signature that is true, a signature that would indicate that the simulation hypothesis is true; i.e. something that would give us a high degree of confidence that we were part of a simulation.Arrgghh ...(
I have no idea what that would be - 'ACME Universe Simulations' and a logo stitched into the fabric of spacetime?
Sure.
I agree; many definitions include a requirement for Darwinian evolution that seems short-sighted - I can imagine other forms of evolution that could conceivably produce life-like complex systems. One of NASA's is: "A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution."
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... which would make that activity no different from the quest for the Holy Grail.
Yet another religion is spawned .. (courtesy of the foundations of Realism .. ie: beliefs).
Well then why not just call it the search for God?FrumiousBandersnatch said:
Directed searches for what 'might be possible' amounts to the search for the Holy Grail because: 'Its possible its out there somewhere ... therefore it must also be possible to find it'. (Directed searches seek specifically the 'it' .. again, merely by definition).FrumiousBandersnatch said:
Exploration of what we are capable of perceiving however, (from say, an alien landscape), is an entirely different approach which sustains the distinctions of our own honest skepticism in that we really don't know with any accuracy what we're looking for in the first place .. (other than, for eg: a duplicate of Earth-life, including its already known functions such as evolution functionality).
Exploration of what we can perceive is human nature and has a looonngg evidenced history, whereas historically 'gold-hunts' are short term because motivation diminishes in the face of 'no evidence'.
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