Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[ipecac]

That's certainly an interesting reading of T-Hawk's position, of some kind of method behind the madness.

But abandoning the conception, which T-Hawk is understandably reluctant to do, seems to mount a massive challenge to any objective knowledge at all.

Classical objectivity is untenable for other reasons anyway. It gives rise to problems, many issues for those who think that man can really measure all things, especially when they subsequently realise that it's impossible.

Regarding the Tractatus, I couldn't get though it some years back. Maybe I'll try again.

[ipecac]

It's worse than I had remembered. It's the sort of thing that makes one suspect that such texts are an elaborate form of hazing. Once you've made it through them, you can call yourself a philosopher.

[Zed-F]

Well IMO it's pointless to suppose you can reduce everything to particles, and (a) somehow know the state of all the particles and thereby know everything, or (b) that everything is predetermined in any meaningful sense because the particles do what they will do based on the states and arrangements they are in. Such premises are non-starters as long as there are such things as quantum effects and chaos theory to keep things less than 100% predictable. There is not and cannot be a fundamental scope where things are deterministic, because the smaller the scope the more it is influenced by things which only behave in probabilistic fashion, not in a deterministic fashion. The most fundamental particles only become somewhat predictable when you take them in large numbers and apply statistics, which only works to a degree sufficient to allow educated guessing, and includes zooming out to larger scopes where the quantum effects are drowned out by the number of particles involved.

In short, you can’t know the initial conditions well enough to prevent chaos theory from coming into play and ruling out determinism entirely. There are tons of cellular structures and processes involved in neurophysiology and neurochemistry which operate on scales where they are potentially impacted by quantum probabilities. In fact it's very arguable that intelligence and free will exist in the first place because of quantum effects.

[T-hawk]

BTW, I just noticed a quote that Morgan also gets on board the reductionism train.

"Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called “moral value” of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements." —CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Ethics of Greed”

Well, if that statement by itself doesn't strike you as odd, let's look at it closer. Now that she actually sees, there are actual particle changes in her brain that previously weren't there. Her thinking, on a particle basis, has clearly changed, these new particle processes will be interacting with the old ones, and to extent these just do constitute the knowledge it's hard to say how nothing has been added to it.

If I'm reading this point right, you're talking about one more level of indirection: not the photons striking, or the neural processing, but what you're calling the experience which I say is something that amounts to the memory of the neural processing.  And once again I think you're still underestimating the connotations included by your original postulate of complete knowledge of all the particles.  That necessarily includes that memory, and anything else you can define as the result of seeing red.  I agree that there's an objective distinction as to what steps of which processes happened, but not that the difference between the physical process versus the (unspecified) mechanism of your "complete knowledge" constitutes any difference in knowledge.  (Assuming that they really can lead to identical particle results, setting aside Huinesoron's point about conservation of information.)

Specify a mechanism for that complete knowledge, let's say a computational simulation.  If the blind neuroscientist is using a computational simulation to calculate the results of all the particles in the brain, I would say that the simulation is experiencing that perception of seeing red.  Whatever knowledge you claim the neuroscientist lacks is present in the simulation.  Consider the system of the neuroscientist-plus-computational-ability, which implicitly has to exist to satisfy your postulate of complete knowledge of the particles; the knowledge represented therein is constant.

If you don't agree that the simulation is perceiving and experiencing red, then I think your distinction is that you're defining perception in terms of a consciousness.  Would you say that a tree undergoing photosynthesis is an experience, that the chemical changes induced by 700nm photons constitute the tree perceiving red?  I would and you wouldn't, but I think that's no difference other than the definition of perception.

Because if there is a link, then your first-person experience is not an illusion, it really tells you something about pain, and it's something that you have no way of finding out except by experiencing it.

This isn't an argument against determinism or materialism; it's an argument for the material reality of perceptions and against describing them as illusions.  Yes, a perception is a real phenomenon (or at least a real aggregation of elementary phenomena), since its reality is defined by the material.  What I meant by illusion was a perception whose perceived truth doesn't match the underlying objective reality.  It's an illusion that the sun and the moon seem to be the same size to unaided perception; experimental evidence has shown otherwise with tools that are more sensitive than biological human observational capability.  The same goes for free will.  That we perceive our will as free doesn't mean that it is so, and that discrepancy is the illusion.  Sufficiently sensitive tools could experimentally show that particle behavior is absolute.

So why even hang on this 'there is nothing but basic stuff' statement? Isn't it much simpler to say: look, we have no idea what the basic stuff of reality may be or even if there is such a thing, we can postulate a bunch of ontologies, each of which has a pragmatically appropriate scope of operation and whilst to some extent those ontologies are translatable to one another, any question of fundamentality between them has no real answer. All of these ontologies are attempts at making sense of one world, the world that we have experience of, because that's the only world we can speak of at all.

This came up because of Yang, of course.  We postulate the ontologies to deconstruct them.  With the Genejacks, we eliminate the perception of pain in order to eliminate ethical obstacles in the way of fashioning a useful tool.  Of course we can't prove any ontology from inside it, but we can gather what experimental evidence we can and use intuition and heuristics where experimentation can't reach.  Yes, the intuition can be flawed: perhaps fundamentally, the universe is actively perverse in opposition to Occam's razor.  But none of that stops us from making a best-guess and acting accordingly.

We can safely say that we have the capacity to differentiate between good and bad reasons

I'm afraid I don't follow any of your argument from here.  Good and bad are subjectively defined.  Things like slavery and sacrifice have been considered good at plenty of points in human history.  Defining an action as bad is relative to some measure like the quantity and severity of pain perceptions.  This argument only holds if you start from an objective definition of good and bad as a first principle, which is possible within Christian or some other deism, but that holds no stake in materialism.

To address the inevitable question of "what about a software program that makes use of a capacity to differentiate between good and bad reasons" -- the same applies. There is a perfectly meaningful sense in which AlphaZero was more free to learn and to come up with strategies than Deep Blue. Of course, it still had a single objective function, so a pretty hard cap on that capacity for differentiation. When there'll be a program that's not tied to any one objective function, that can formulate its own objective functions, including second- and higher-order ones, in response to stimuli -- well, that would be as free as anything else. And any argument against the freedom of that program could rest on anything, but the fact that it's running on silicon, so it can't be free, because it's actions are determined by electrical impulses.

Here I don't agree.  I think the concept of "free" you're using means only in degree but not in kind.  If you agree that both AlphaZero and Deep Blue give results determined by electrical impulses, then you're merely using "free" to describe that AlphaZero has more possible states than Deep Blue.  I think you're trying to describe that AlphaZero can write its own operational rules, but I would not say it does that, since those rules can all be defined as manifestations of the original objective function.  When the complexity of those processes within AlphaZero's synthetic neural network exceeds what our human brain can encompass cognitively, we intuitively try to define that as some higher state of behavior or functioning; but that's only true within the scope of human perception; an alien (maybe SMAC's Planet) with sufficiently more orders of magnitude of cognition would have no need to define the higher-order abstractions; or conversely an observer with fewer than 64 neurons would be unable to encompass a single state of Deep Blue and would see it as equally incomprehensible.

It's precisely this arbitrariness that T-Hawk picks up, when he calls all higher-order phenomena "abstractions" -- they are statements at a selected scope, at it doesn't appear there is any non-human justification for selecting one scope and not the other. ... But here is the way out -- what if there was, objectively, a fundamental scope? ... Which is I think why T-Hawk wants to say that his view inextricably unites materialism, determinism, and objectivism. ... me and T-Hawk had a big problem understanding each other at start. He kept saying that I step into dualism, or subjectivism, and I didn't quite see why.

We've both educated each other, and perhaps you more to me.  Your restatement of my position there is absolutely correct and more clear than I've ever expressed myself. Yes, I unite materialism, determinism, and objectivism, and didn't even see any distinction until it was clarified by this thread.

I'll check out the Tractatus, may have some reading time this weekend.

[TheHumanHydra]

We can safely say that we have the capacity to differentiate between good and bad reasons

I'm afraid I don't follow any of your argument from here.  Good and bad are subjectively defined.  Things like slavery and sacrifice have been considered good at plenty of points in human history.  Defining an action as bad is relative to some measure like the quantity and severity of pain perceptions.  This argument only holds if you start from an objective definition of good and bad as a first principle, which is possible within Christian or some other deism, but that holds no stake in materialism.

(I think he meant good reasoning and bad reasoning, not moral good and evil.)

[Bacchus]

@ipecac The texts are difficult mostly because the subject matter is difficult. Also, because he is German, and it seems those guys just can't write plainly. If anything, Tractatus makes for one of the clearest pieces of German philosophical writing, which of course speaks volumes.

Having a look through it again, it actually has a nice response to the 'laws aren't particles' and 'what's the status of mathematical truths':

6.341 Newtonian mechanics, for example, imposes a unified form on the description of the world. Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots on it. We then say that whatever kind of picture these make, I can always approximate as closely as I wish to the description of it by covering the surface with a sufficiently fine square mesh, and then saying of every square whether it is black or white. In this way I shall have imposed a unified form on the description of the surface. The form is optional, since I could have achieved the same result by using a net with a triangular or hexagonal mesh. Possibly the use of a triangular mesh would have made the description simpler: that is to say, it might be that we could describe the surface more accurately with a coarse triangular mesh than with a fine square mesh (or conversely), and so on. The different nets correspond to different systems for describing the world. Mechanics determines one form of description of the world by saying that all propositions used in the description of the world must be obtained in a given way from a given set of propositions—the axioms of mechanics. It thus supplies the bricks for building the edifice of science, and it says, 'Any building that you want to erect, whatever it may be, must somehow be constructed with these bricks, and with these alone.' (Just as with the number-system we must be able to write down any number we wish, so with the system of mechanics we must be able to write down any proposition of physics that we wish.)

6.342 And now we can see the relative position of logic and mechanics. (The net might also consist of more than one kind of mesh: e.g. we could use both triangles and hexagons.) The possibility of describing a picture like the one mentioned above with a net of a given form tells us nothing about the picture. (For that is true of all such pictures.) But what does characterize the picture is that it can be described completely by a particular net with a particular size of mesh. Similarly the possibility of describing the world by means of Newtonian mechanics tells us nothing about the world: but what does tell us something about it is the precise way in which it is possible to describe it by these means. We are also told something about the world by the fact that it can be described more simply with one system of mechanics than with another.

For those interested and reading, I wouldn't worry too much about all subpoints to 3.2. and 3.3., and generally skip liberally where you see mentions of Russel, Frege and propositional signs, unless you have an unhealthy interest in formal logic.

[T-hawk]

He also noted that this approach renders a whole bunch of statements, including philosophical ones unfactual and kind of meaningless.

Right, which has also been said here. But the argument that determinism makes itself false by disallowing the meaning of arguments for its truth doesn't follow. If determinism is physically true, then it's true, it doesn't become false by some particle-bags perceiving that it's true. That construct merely says we can't prove determinism, but failure to prove is not at all disproof.

Note, I'm not reading anything but one post out of 50 in here, but that one I think I've read about before.

Just out of curiosity, are you favoring any particular contributors or viewpoints in what posts you read?

Such premises are non-starters as long as there are such things as quantum effects and chaos theory to keep things less than 100% predictable. ... In fact it's very arguable that intelligence and free will exist in the first place because of quantum effects.

I was wondering why this hadn't come up yet. The other participants haven't challenged my simplifying assumption of determinism ignoring true quantum randomness, which I do believe is sufficiently experimentally supported. I agree that your last point is possible, and that if materialism is compatible with free will that's how it would happen, factoring out determinism by way of quantum effects. That's also the dividing line between biological and digital consciousness, that electronic signals operate on scales too large to invoke quantum effects. (I've read that one bit in a modern CPU is 30,000 electrons.) I don't subscribe to this position because as far as I know there isn't any experimental evidence or measurements correlating consciousness to quantum effects, only speculation, but I would refactor if there were.

[Bacchus]

I was wondering why this hadn't come up yet.

This is quickly addressed, and can be done within my self-rationing of participation in this thread for a bit. The probabilistic argument actually isn't an argument against your position at all, if you drop the somewhat confusing "particles" terminology, which suggests something like sharply defined rigid bodies. The fundamental granularity of the universe can well be in the form of probabilistic distributions over space, and everything you previously said still holds -- all facts are deriveable from aggregation of distributions, etc. Distributions are mathematically defineable, separate objects, as are their compositions. You could say it raises some problems for causality, in that we lose the ability to say why in our specific case a distribution collapsed to a particular point and not another, but to me that doesn't rip out the heart of determinism at all. It also certainly doesn't allow for anything like a free will, as THH noted -- random variations specifically lacking a reason would produce free noise, not free will. And the influence of reasons over distribution collapse is specifically precluded by definition of "randomness".

Also, there are far, far bigger problems for causality in any case. Which is largely why I haven't talked about the "determined" aspect of T-Hawk's position, there is an entirely separate bucket of issues, basically amounting to the conclusion that we can't really unproblematically say what it even means for X to be determined by Y.

You are also right and Zed-F is wrong about the scales at which conscious-relevant biological facts happen, far too big for quantum effects.

[Bacchus]

I'm afraid I don't follow any of your argument from here. Good and bad are subjectively defined

I'm just referring to the apparent mechanics of practical reason. We look at a range of available actions, we identify reasons for pursuing those, we discard some reasons as bad, accept others as good, and proceed with the action accordingly. The fact that the process relies on some internalized conception of good and bad is just the point, to have that conception and act upon it is to have free will.

And I repeat again that never in this thread have I yet argued against determinism or materialism. Because we come at the question from very different places, I think you are still making background assumptions to my position, which are natural for you, but completely absent for me. That's mostly regarding the "material reality of perception", but it will come here too -- I am fully prepared to give that the capacity for differentiation of reasons rests upon particles, just as experiences do. What I'm not prepared to give is that the full knowledge of particle movements gives us full knowledge of what those movements amount to, especially from a first-person perspective.

[T-hawk]

This is quickly addressed, and can be done within my self-rationing of participation in this thread for a bit.

Thanks again for a better restatement of my own position than I could. I know we can discount the probabilistic argument for the reasons you give. It doesn't tend to convince anyone, though; the difference in scale between subatomic quanta and biological cells is not at all intuitive.

And the influence of reasons over distribution collapse is specifically precluded by definition of "randomness".

Randomness as a pure mathematical concept, yes. Randomness as experimentally observed in quantum phenomena, not necessarily. It is possible that a 'consciousness field' could systematically affect the probability distribution of a large number of quanta, and at scales large enough (say an entire brain) to induce macroscopic biological phenomena. I don't hold this position, but not as an impossible principle, but by lack of observational evidence.