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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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What does "assume that determinism is true, despite it appearing in every testable way that it's false" add to my thinking? Does it help me make better circuit boards or chip designs?

Yes it does. If natural laws don't work and time isn't real and consequences don't follow actions... then yeah...you can't make computer chips.

If natural laws don't work and time isn't real and consequences don't follow actions... then yeah...you can't make computer chips.

If they aren't real at all, that would follow.

If they aren't universal constants in areas having nothing to do with computer chips, it doesn't follow.

Materialism's core claim is that all matter works according to the same principles, and so you can't claim exceptions in one area. Yudkowski's Universal Fire is as good a formulation of this claim as any.

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus - "safety matches" have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body's chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the "molecular currency". It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can't change just one thing.

This is the basic argument you are making, yes?

I feeeeellll....like it is a trick if I say yes, but yeah pretty much.

It's not a trick, it's just the straightforward truth about how reasoning works.

Here's the intro and the ending of that essay:

In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported from our own universe into the universe of Norse mythology. This world is based on magic rather than technology; so naturally, when Our Hero tries to light a fire with a match brought along from Earth, the match fails to strike.

I realize it was only a fantasy story, but... how do I put this... No. [...]

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe.

Rather than make the back-and-forth additionally tedious, I'm going to assume you'd likewise endorse the bolded part of the conclusion above. The problem is that the bolded part, the actual conclusion, is straightforwardly, obviously false as he's written it.

You will probably disagree with that statement, so let me try to reformulate it into a perfectly-equivalent statement that will highlight the problem:

"Impossible things can't happen, so if an impossible thing happens, you can be sure another impossible thing won't happen."

This is a logically-incoherent statement.

Yudkowski appears to be correct that reality is laced together a lot more tightly than many humans might like to believe. What he's missing is that this fact cuts both ways. If you observe something "impossible", then there is an error somewhere; either your observation is wrong, or your understanding of what is possible is wrong; it could be either, and you don't know which. What it can't be, is that something impossible actually happened but the rules of possibility as you understand them are still valid.

You cannot, in fact, step through a portal to another world where matches don't work. If you could step through such a portal, there is no valid reason to believe that the matches not working means you don't work. The whole point of the chain of logic about phosphorus chemistry is that the physical laws are supposed to be perfectly seamless from phosphorus down to subatomic physics and up through your internal chemical makeup. Portals to another world have already proved that the chain isn't seamless, and in fact there's a gap the size of the grand canyon. Once you have one confirmed breakdown, there is no valid reason to suppose that the rest of your model is reliable enough to make confident predictions about the region of the break.

The correct statement is, "If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, who the fuck knows? Maybe you instantly die because phosphorus chemistry doesn't work there. Maybe it's magic. Maybe you're in a simulation and match-striking has been hard-locked by a recent patch. Maybe someone is playing an elaborate prank on you, and swapped your matches for fakes."

Do you disagree?

To add some levity, https://youtube.com/watch?v=OCCYvPlsp7o

Amusing I'm sure, but do you have a more substantive answer?

You can believe what you want! But if we can't at least agree on a framework of reality, or if reality is actually reality, then none of it matters anyway.

It is air I'm breathing now, and we know exactly what it is.

I'm also a huge typical minder, I simply can't fathom smart capable people truly believing in some religion/afterlife or another. I don't think they really actually do. Barring true jihadists their actions certainly never show it. Don't listen to what people say, watch what they do. People don't act like eternal life is just around the corner in death, that is for damn sure for 99.9% of the population.

You can believe what you want!

One can indeed. As Bertrand Russell puts it:

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can [...] be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a caricature of what happens under some modern governments.

Your belief in Determinism is observably a "Sunday Truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life." It makes no testable predictions, and it directs no useful actions. It has no connections of any kind to the real world. Maybe it will not be so in the future, but appeals to the future are not part of empiricism.

More frustratingly, my entire point in this discussion has not been to prove why you should believe in free will or stop believing in Determinism.

The whole point is that evidence doesn't stop being evidence when it goes against a theory you don't like. Under the Empirical framework we have both been claiming at every step of this discussion, evidence must be explained rather than handwaved. You cannot explain the evidence of free will under a materialistic framework, and Determinism is very explicitly a handwave. And this means, inescapably, no matter how much you would rather not admit it, that the apparent existence of free will is evidence against materialism. Further, evidence doesn't force conclusions, in exactly the way it's not forcing this conclusion on you!

You don't have to accept that evidence as conclusive, but I'm not really interested in a discussion based on Empiricism with someone who insists on ignoring the rules of empiricism when it suits them.

There is no apparent existence of free will. That is what I am saying. All evidence is explicitly to the contrary if you have even a passing understanding of physics at an observable scale. Action, reaction, all that 8th grade jazz. It means everything is determined. I ask again, do you not accept cause and effect?

Nothing handwavy about it. It is reality.

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