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asplake 2 hours ago [-]
There are less reductive forms of materialism. For the view of a Nobel prize physics laureate see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. From the philosophy world, read Manuel DeLanda or Alicia Juarrero.
ndriscoll 9 hours ago [-]
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters. There can be no morality: a criminal was always destined to commit a crime. It was never right for us to punish them, but that’s okay: we couldn’t have acted differently, so we shoulder no blame.
Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.
confidantlake 6 hours ago [-]
Why does it matter how you "should" act if there is no free will. You are just going to act how your are going to act.
igorkraw 2 hours ago [-]
In smart psychopath Logic, because life is a repeated game and you will have moments of weakness and imperfections, so you would like the world to he in a moral equilibrium where even if you let your guard down for a moment you will not risk immediately be butchered by the other person. The game theory of collaboration and nice mess is pretty solid once you account for transaction costs, risk, repeated interactions etc.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
> In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
svnt 4 hours ago [-]
I do not understand how your argument works.
You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?
What does choice even mean in this context?
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
Pre ... choose? No, you can choose. You are a thing that chooses. Why is everybody so hung up on determinism? What do you want choice to mean? Really I think it's just because "deterministic" sounds like "determined for you", but it doesn't mean that. Everything is deterministic, including things that choose, by which I mean people. You are a fully paid up (and incidentally deterministic) person with the (also deterministic) freedom to make choices.
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
svnt 2 hours ago [-]
So you are saying it is deterministic but unknowable in advance.
This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.
It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?
RhysU 8 hours ago [-]
> In classical physics, the universe is deterministic: every action is a necessary consequence of what happened before. In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required.
Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body.
Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior.
Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4].
[4] Things one observes when procrastinating on a turbulence-related dissertation.
plastic-enjoyer 9 hours ago [-]
> Alas, the only flavor of philosophy that’s popular with techies is what I’d call edgelord utilitarianism — a collection of materialist, pseudo-mathematical beliefs favored by the SF Bay Area rationalist community.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
speedster217 9 hours ago [-]
My degree required taking an Ethics in Computer Science course and I thought it was very interesting.
applicative 8 hours ago [-]
Philosophy of technology has existed since Plato and Aristotle. Every other word in their corpus is technē, which is why we call technology 'technology'. In every succeeding epoch the theory of the technological has been developed. It isn't clear there are 'disciplines in philosophy': there are only a few thousand researchers to begin with, on the scale of art history. I asked perhaps doubtful AI but it said that in AI there is an 'elite tier' of AI researchers of 5000 from maybe 100,000 total; the corresponding figure for philosophy was 500 out of 5000. The AI world could finance its own army of philosophers and it could be bigger than real philosophy, and no one would notice the dent on funds
lern_too_spel 7 hours ago [-]
Author tries and fails to rationally argue that rational thinking is incorrect by pointing out that some people trying to think rationally have failed.
Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?
What does choice even mean in this context?
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.
It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required.
Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body.
Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior.
Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
[2] https://cvphysiology.com/hemodynamics/h007
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
[4] Things one observes when procrastinating on a turbulence-related dissertation.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.