Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[Bacchus]

Sure enough, but he still wants to talk about it. That is, use words or other logical constructions to describe it. Actually that's another problem I have with his whole approach, it's that after all the self-righteous dismissal of abstractions, it proposes an isomoprhism, or even an identity between an abstract structure (a microphysical model) and reality. That was most clearly expressed when he said that if you put all the particles comprising the brain into a simulation, if you really put all of them, and you put the right mechanics in, then that simulation will have consciousness and experiences. But anyway, that's exactly what I say in the wall of text -- he wants to say that the world (the picture) really is a theory (a mesh), a theory (a mesh) which doesn't describe (overlay) anything else, but itself constitutes all the facts of the world.

[shallow_thought]

I'm afraid with PB40 kicking off rather more rapidly than I anticipated, I'm probably going to struggle to answer even the questions raised against my posts, let alone fully write up the rest of what I want to say. Sorry. It's amazing what a crimp having limited Internet access at work puts on your life - if I could access this site or even easily draft text things might be different.

Two last quick things.

Oh, here's another point.

General relativity "works". It predicts the way time flows in gravity wells.

The GPS satellites operate under different gravity than you and your smartphone, so that requires a correction for general relativity.

The accumulated error from not accounting for general relativity is approximately 50 microseconds per day. 

"Dark Matter" is certainly one area to look at. For some reason I don't understand it does seem to evoke particularly strong views (both within the scientific community and the broader public): I suspect it fails the "elegance" test for a lot of people, both with the "let's just suppose this exists" and the "it's 95% of stuff", in a way that wouldn't be true if it was only a few percent.

In short, such 'undetectable objects hypotheses' if wrong amount to adding epicycles to save the theory. That's why people are uncomfortable with it.

The analogy is one I had in mind when I decided to use celestial mechanics as my worked example. I think it's possible to argue that parts of physics have reached such a rarefied mathematical stage ("just shut up and calculate") that it's almost a risk (renormalisation and similar techniques also spring to mind). I was going to that the difference is Dark Matter as a hypothesis is open to testing (actually find the stuff, or come across observations of it in isolation from visible matter through gravitational lensing or something), but I realised that actually you could argue the same was true of epicycles: a sufficiently high observer (mountain; balloon; orbital spacecraft?) should have been able to actually detect them from its viewpoint. Not that that would have necessarily occurred to those arguing at the time.

[TheHumanHydra]

1. Would you feel that empathy for an electromechanical robot that exhibits the same functionality and responses as a Genejack?

No. But, erm, why are you arguing on the moral aspect of this subject? I hold strongly that morality (as an objective standard) is irrational without belief in a singular deity. If you wish to argue on moral grounds, then, you must submit your reasoning to the preferences of the divine, from whom we derive such ideas as the perversity of depriving other humans of the potential with which he vested them.

I'm not trying to argue on moral grounds; I'm deconstructing where you're doing so.  You would feel empathy for a biological Genejack but not for an electromechanical android that behaves and perceives indistinguishably.  From where does that difference derive?  Your answer depends on a deistic creator giving special treatment to the biological.  That's your first principle, and at that point we've simply agreed we hold different ones.

But I don't think you answered my query. Why not assign yourself different goals? There is no intrinsic value to creating a Genejack under your framework. The Genejack provides you the practical benefits of slavery, but not trying to force the issue promotes social unity, allows collective time and thought to be spent more efficiently, and likely averts violent conflict.

Sure, there's intrinsic value.  Flip it around: why should your moral opinion have the power to alter my self-assigned goals?  I can value my own time and thought above the collective.  Why wouldn't I want a Genejack to wash my laundry and dishes and such?  Problems with social unity come from opposition, not implementers.  You (general 'you') create conflict by making a demand on my actions (that I not have a Genejack); I make no demand that you have one.

Your answer can only come back to the prospect of a deity to enact judgment.  Yes, my position is abhorrent given a first principle of Christianity or most religions, anything that posits that the genejack has/had a soul or any other right to not incur that treatment.  But in that absence as defined by materialism and determinism, no one has been wronged by the existence of a genejack, the genejack cannot lose something it never had.

There is an intermediate position that is basically Pascal's wager.  If we don't know if the genejack has a soul, then we should act as if it does, since creating it represents infinite loss to it as compared to finite gain to its master.  I reject this argument on two grounds.  One, that Christianity's soul gets no special consideration compared to any other religious claim; I can as easily posit a Satanic deity who encourages torture.  Two, we have no standing or observational evidence to say that the genejack had a soul but an electronic neural network of equal functionality and complexity doesn't.

(I think you might already have agreed with me that materialism/determinism justifies genejacks, and that your opposition comes all from your first principle of deism.)

That's actually not quite what I was arguing. Bacchus restated the thrust of it yesterday -- 'random variations specifically lacking a reason would produce free noise, not free will.' Alternatively, will is preference. Preference requires feedback. Feedback requires a receptor. So will is consistent with physical feedback and a physical processor. Will is consistent with a particle existence.

It's a hypothesis. I do believe in a soul. But I'm not sure that the definition of free will you proposed way back is accurate.

I've clarified since then that yes, free will can be consistent with particle materialism, as in my reply to Bacchus just above.  But not with determinism.  I'm defining free will as "that which is not deterministic", perhaps minus quantum effects.  For a will to be free requires the capability for it to manifest some result according to its own desire and not deterministic particle behavior.  I don't propose a means to distinguish between that desire and free-noise; I don't need to; that burden is on proponents of free will; I merely need to be receptive to considering observational experimental evidence.

Sorry, I think I'm failing to follow -- you seemed to propose some aggregate concepts as relevant to our description of a particle grouping. In any case, we would accurately describe those two particles as part of a binary system. If we needed a word to describe only the solar matter in a binary system, we could come up with one, and it would reflect a reality. Whenever the similarities of a collection break down, we already have or can make a word to describe the realities of the level of granularity or the particular similarity we wish to discuss. They always reflect the real.

I grant you that our words are sometimes approximations. But that does not detract from that they describe real things.

The concepts are always approximations, except when dealing with something fundamentally unsubdividable (at least as far as we know experimentally) like an electron.  Any composite description is an approximation that can fail to reflect reality.  Of course we can always use a different approximation that is true, but that has nothing to do with the approximation that fails.

Actually, regardless, you're right; all objects are mutable, because they undergo decay. But I think we know that when we say that the objects are, nevertheless, real and definable.

A fundamental object such as an electron does not undergo mutability or decay, as far as we know experimentally; if it reacts with something such as an antielectron then it unambiguously entirely ceases to be an electron.

But any composite object can fail to be real and definable.  How about the Ship of Theseus paradox?  Is your pen still your pen if we swap out the rubber grip for another?  How about if we also swap out the clicky button, then the ink tube; when is it no longer your pen?  The solution to the paradox is either that the abstraction of the ship/pen was meaningless in the first place, or at best that such a description of reality applies to no more than one instant in time.

Now that I think about it, that last solution seems particularly elegant.  To describe an object also requires recognizing the time coordinate along with whatever recognition you're according its spatial coordinates.  One can unambiguously define and speak of the sun or pen or ship only at some particular instant.  That description no longer holds once time is introduced as a variable.  What if we throw your pen into the sun - would you still describe its formerly constituent protons and electrons now dispersed among the solar plasma as your pen?  The most elegant solution to that is to discard time as a variable and say that any description of your pen only applies at any particular instant.  Any grouping of observations over time is yet another abstraction of perception.  Maybe this is what Bacchus meant about the problems of defining causality and fixing future behavior.

1. I'm not trying to argue on moral grounds; I'm deconstructing where you're doing so.  You would feel empathy for a biological Genejack but not for an electromechanical android that behaves and perceives indistinguishably.  From where does that difference derive?  Your answer depends on a deistic creator giving special treatment to the biological.  That's your first principle, and at that point we've simply agreed we hold different ones.

I'm not sure there's much to deconstruct! Yes, my moral code depends on a deity (I would argue that any cogent moral code does). This deity is held to have assigned moral value to things and actions in a way that is consistent but ultimately arbitrary -- i.e., idiosyncratically, according to his preferences. So it's a bit fruitless to try and correct that moral code, unless you are pointing out a way in which the moralist has misunderstood his deity.

I appreciate that you are trying to point out an inconsistency, which would suggest a misunderstanding of the deity, but, as you have already pointed out, we can look to a substantive difference in that the deity seems to have privileged the biological (and the human). There is also the idea of abrogated potential and (relatedly) of corruption or perversion, of pride in the tampering, etc., and of the soul.

So, yes, we certainly hold different principles, but I think we knew that already! The next question is how people of different principles can coexist and cooperate in a society.

Through long experience, I think we've learned that this largely consists in individuals and groups making the least demands on each other as possible. So we enforce no belief, nor any code of conduct arising therefrom, except where held in common and to be of mutual benefit.

So you, reasonably, ask why I demand that you not possess a genejacked slave. And a better answer than I gave before is that I hold the genejack to be a member of the polity ('humans living in X') and that the policy both does him detriment and makes demands upon his being that violate our social contract. I would call this a social-legal argument.

Then there is an argument from accommodation. This is the difficult area where privileges and duties are held in tension. Permitting you to hold a slave, particularly a genejacked one, even though I don't hold one myself, makes an intolerable demand on my conscience. As you know, my personal code requires me to oppose such perceived exploitation, where possible, to the hilt (like an abolitionist in '61). Usually, we prefer the freedom over the objection (e.g. with the Muslim obligation to kill the apostate). I think there's a case to be made here, however, that the benefit that accrues to you from holding the slave does not outweigh the severity and broad reasonableness (across social groups) of the objection and attendant duty.

This leads to the argument from social unity and peace that I expressed before. However, instead of an argument that you should be prohibited from making a genejack, this is an argument that you should voluntarily refrain from doing so (or from trying to make it legal). Here I'll quote you again.

2. Sure, there's intrinsic value.  Flip it around: why should your moral opinion have the power to alter my self-assigned goals?  I can value my own time and thought above the collective.  Why wouldn't I want a Genejack to wash my laundry and dishes and such?  Problems with social unity come from opposition, not implementers.  You (general 'you') create conflict by making a demand on my actions (that I not have a Genejack); I make no demand that you have one.

Your statements check out according to the principals of secularism I articulated above, though I've already addressed why I think this case is exceptional in the way of the rest of our laws. I find your attitude regarding the assignment of blame for conflict problematic (i.e., yes, your opponent is responsible for opposing you, and may violate the principles of secularism by so doing, but you know that you have the power to pick your battles, and sometimes it is either pragmatic or conscientious to choose not to fight, however foreign this idea may be to modern Western minds).

So you can certainly value your own time and thought above the collective. But ought you to? Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Society will have less conflict if you abdicate this apparent freedom. And you will get on quite fine without it.

And again, under your philosophical framework, there is no intrinsic value to your ease, comfort, thoughts, or preferences. Under mine, there is intrinsic value to the genejack and to your/our collective actions on this subject. Your stand is unreasonable, in that you can't point to an ultimate reason to stick to your guns, while mine is constrained by an objective standard. It is of less cost to you to alter your stand, and great cost to me. Under your framework, it is sensible to change your stance, under mine, it is not. I propose that we follow the path of least resistance and that you not make a genejack.

(I think you might already have agreed with me that materialism/determinism justifies genejacks, and that your opposition comes all from your first principle of deism.)

Yes, 100%. Like I said, the question is now how we reconcile our beliefs in society.

3. I've clarified since then that yes, free will can be consistent with particle materialism, as in my reply to Bacchus just above.  But not with determinism.  I'm defining free will as "that which is not deterministic", perhaps minus quantum effects.  For a will to be free requires the capability for it to manifest some result according to its own desire and not deterministic particle behavior.  I don't propose a means to distinguish between that desire and free-noise; I don't need to; that burden is on proponents of free will; I merely need to be receptive to considering observational experimental evidence.

I think I'm going to concede this argument, with an asterisk or two. The first is that I do belief in a superphysical aspect to the being that influences decisions. But you've persuaded me that a materialistic version of will is indeed deterministic. I would encourage you to go back and read what I've written at some point (if you're interested), though, because I'm not sure we quite connected fully. You were hung up on the 'free' part of free will, I was hung up on the 'will' part. I still do think your definition of free will needs refining, in that will must have reasons that are likely physical in a way that your freedom doesn't. I will agree with you, then, that materialistically, there is no free will, but -- sorry! -- must continue to disagree for now that there is no will. Like Bacchus, I think that the aggregate physical processes are accurately described as will (choosing -- even if predictably). Anyway, thanks for the argument, as you can see, you taught me something.

4. The concepts are always approximations, except when dealing with something fundamentally unsubdividable (at least as far as we know experimentally) like an electron.  Any composite description is an approximation that can fail to reflect reality.  Of course we can always use a different approximation that is true, but that has nothing to do with the approximation that fails.

Yeah, sure. You're right. 

5. Now that I think about it, that last solution seems particularly elegant.  To describe an object also requires recognizing the time coordinate along with whatever recognition you're according its spatial coordinates.  One can unambiguously define and speak of the sun or pen or ship only at some particular instant.  That description no longer holds once time is introduced as a variable.  What if we throw your pen into the sun - would you still describe its formerly constituent protons and electrons now dispersed among the solar plasma as your pen?  The most elegant solution to that is to discard time as a variable and say that any description of your pen only applies at any particular instant.  Any grouping of observations over time is yet another abstraction of perception.  Maybe this is what Bacchus meant about the problems of defining causality and fixing future behavior.

Yeah, I agree that the time coordinate is important. I'm not sold that I can't say I'm looking at the same pen as a moment ago (evidently it has changed, but --).

I've thought of two more arguments relating to the reality of higher-order phenomena, but I don't have time to write them right now. I want to say, though, that I think you'll win the argument. I don't think I'll come up with an objection you won't be able to answer (especially since we all do acknowledge that everything physical is made up of particles, or whatever makes up particles). As I observe the world, however, your world view (that higher-order phenomena are not real as such) seems patently incoherent. How can this be? ('They are figments with utility' doesn't quite seem to cut it.) I must not be smart enough to generate the appropriate rebuttal or perceptive enough to make the correct observations. Your framework seems to reflect 'the truth, but not the whole truth', but I can't provide the reasons for the second half of the assertion (pending further discussion). I will have to continue to observe others' arguments and seek to broaden my own.

(Lest anyone misunderstand me, this is not an abandonment of my afore-stated religious views, which have not come under discussion, except insofar as T-hawk has claimed Occam's Razor. The foregoing concerns differing interpretations of the physical world, and is areligious.)

[Japper007]

I'm not sure there's much to deconstruct! Yes, my moral code depends on a deity (I would argue that any cogent moral code does). 

Unless you have a different concept of what "cogent" means (the two definitions I keep coming up against are "constrained" or "convincing") this is non-sensical. There are numerous moral codes that do not rely on any divine intervention. "Do, or do not, do onto others as you would have them do, or not do, unto you" is a common rational baseline. This just means that if you want to be free from murder, you agree to have rules imposed on you that also prevent you and everyone else from murdering.

Or hedonism, which basically comes down to live and let live unless your pursuit of happiness is prevented by someone elses pursuit of theirs, or yours infringes on theirs. Murder may give you a chubby but you shouldn't do it as it infringes on someone elses enjoyment of life.

No god needed.

Both of these systems also invalidate T-Hawks argument for Genejacks btw.

I'm curious do you therefore think an Atheist can't have a moral code? 'Cause I would very much like to disagree with that, thank you very much. (Mine is somewhere between system 1 and 2 if you're curious)

I'll counter your assertion with my favorite True Detective quote:

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit - and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible."

[TheHumanHydra]

I'm not sure there's much to deconstruct! Yes, my moral code depends on a deity (I would argue that any cogent moral code does). 

Unless you have a different concept of what "cogent" means (the two definitions I keep coming up against are "constrained" or "convincing") this is non-sensical. There are numerous moral codes that do not rely on any divine intervention. "Do, or do not, do onto others as you would have them do, or not do, unto you" is a common rational baseline. This just means that if you want to be free from murder, you agree to have rules imposed on you that also prevent you and everyone else from murdering.

Or hedonism, which basically comes down to live and let live unless your pursuit of happiness is prevented by someone elses pursuit of theirs, or yours infringes on theirs.  Murder may give you a chubby but you shouldn't do it as it infringes on someone elses enjoyment of life.

No god needed.

Both of these systems also invalidate T-Hawks argument for Genejacks btw.

I'm curious do you therefore think an Atheist can't have a moral code? 'Cause I would very much like to disagree with that, thank you very much. (Mine is somewhere between system 1 and 2 if you're curious)

I'll counter your assertion with my favorite True Detective quote:

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit - and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible."

Japper, if you're interested in this subject, I'd be happy to discuss it with you. [Edit -- misunderstood the quote, sorry if you read that.]

It's possible we have different definitions of morality.

The definition I am working off of essentially casts morality as an objective element of the universe that humans can be right or wrong about -- so that one can say one 'ought' to do something because it's right or ought not to do something because it's wrong. If you think of morality instead as a pragmatic code of conduct that allows humans to live with each other, a social contract (as in my articulation of secularism in my previous post, or what you seem to be saying in your first two paragraphs), then I'm agreed. Clearly, most everyone operates according to some such code (one almost has to). These codes can even have a rational consistency, being based on principles of equal treatment or mutual non-interference. But they don't have a basis in the fabric of the universe. They are mutable -- a different society could have a different code, and we're not truly able to say that theirs is more right or more wrong. Theirs is convenient to them, and ours to us. We cannot even truly say that an individual code-breaker or law-breaker is wrong. He has simply chosen, foolishly or not, not to abide by the code -- perhaps this benefits him more than adherence to the social contract, as for a sufficiently powerful dictator. Basically, morality, as humans practice it, is determined by the preferences and pragmatism of its adherents -- it is definitively subjective. If morality as such is held to be objective -- true across cultures, circumstances, etc. -- it must be attributed elsewhere than the preferences of its creators, likely to a being of a different order (whose preferences it is).

Please note this is not (only) a fundamentalist religious position I'm expressing. I think T-hawk would agree. An atheist friend of mine has argued the same very convincingly (that's what he says, by the way, morality is collective preference, but that even though he doesn't believe he 'ought not to' commit capital crimes, he doesn't because he himself prefers not to).

It's also not a judgement on your character. I am sure you do and think many things that are, under my framework also, morally good. (I am also sure you do and think things that are morally wrong -- alas, I do!)

I hope that came across clearly -- more clearly than my thing about randomness, preference, and will!

TL, DR morality is collective preference, not an objective standard, unless there is a lawgiver.

[TheHumanHydra]

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit - and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible."

Oh, I wanted to add -- this is really not the most fair representation of the motives of Christians. Our religion starts with the admission we are pieces of shit and goes from there to get to a solution.

[Bacchus]

There are various ways towards objective morality that do not require a transcendental lawgiver.

Utilitarianism is of course one such, it puts suffering and satisfaction, or some aggregate of the two as an objective fact of the world -- and can consequently at least try to judge actions in terms of their net effect on the amount of suffering and satisfaction. This kind of approach can look particularly convincing on aaterialist-determinist-soft reductionist reading, where satisfaction and suffering are objective neurological phenomena that perhaps can be physically measured.

There are lots of problems with utilitarianism and thankfully it's not the only way forward. There is a kind of logical rationalism which starts with the will and works through just what it means to will, and shows that acting immorally amounts to a categorical failure. When you take your carnal desires as overriding reasons for acting, for example, you are just not willing. This is can also be couched as a 'lawgiver' argument -- you act freely only insofar as you act according to a law you give yourself, you have to be the lawgiver and, if you believe in free will, you do have the capacity to be such. That's Kant's argument.

There is another way to objective morality which is my favourite.

[ipecac]

Sure enough, but he still wants to talk about it.

It's hard to tell where you or Wittgenstein coming from. Can we only just make maps of the phenomenal, or is it possible to speak meaningfully of the noumenal? I would say that phenomenal-talk and noumenal-talk are two different things, similar to how a map and reality are different things.

That is, use words or other logical constructions to describe it. Actually that's another problem I have with his whole approach, it's that after all the self-righteous dismissal of abstractions, it proposes an isomoprhism, or even an identity between an abstract structure (a microphysical model) and reality. That was most clearly expressed when he said that if you put all the particles comprising the brain into a simulation, if you really put all of them, and you put the right mechanics in, then that simulation will have consciousness and experiences. But anyway, that's exactly what I say in the wall of text -- he wants to say that the world (the picture) really is a theory (a mesh), a theory (a mesh) which doesn't describe (overlay) anything else, but itself constitutes all the facts of the world.

I agree that one of the most tired parts of his position is that he relies heavily on abstractions to build it up but then dismisses them all at the end, it's something I've pointed out since the beginning. It is also true that the best map cannot fully describe the reality.

[ipecac]

There are various ways towards objective morality that do not require a transcendental lawgiver.

I think the point is that while certain moralities can be proclaimed as objective, they can't be grounded in reality.

[Bacchus]

Can we only just make maps of the phenomenal, or is it possible to speak meaningfully of the noumenal? I would say that phenomenal-talk and noumenal-talk are two different things, similar to how a map and reality are different things.

I'm wary of us misunderstanding each other's use of technical terms, so I will just try to outline my position as plainly as possible. Ontologies consist of objects and a relational space (what the Tractatus calls 'form'). Ontologies are how we think the world -- as split into some discrete things that are related to each other -- and they are closely related to how we speak about it. Reality only becomes speakable and thinkable if it's ontologized -- without any ontology, by definition, it is an unstructured mess of undifferentiated stuff (even stating that requires an ontology). An ontology is not imposed 'over' facts to describe or explain them, it's what makes facts possible, without an ontology there are no facts, there's just the world.

Our minds are naturally receptive and even self-generative of ontologies -- we learn a lot from how babies go from perceiving reality in an undifferentiated kaleidoscope of sensory input to 'object permanence', to being able to attach names to objects, to be able to explicitly relate objects to each other, most of all in space. Once we get to abstract thinking we can go beyond the ontology that our psychology develops "naturally", to ontologies which are freely postulated. This means being able to make statements about ontologies, which themselves become factualized and statements about relational structure. "If a glass is behind the book, and the book is behind the computer, then the glass is behind the computer" -- these sorts of statements are very interesting, because we can actually see how children come to make sense of them, as this understanding comes when they can already speak.

I think you mean statements about the constituent parts of an ontology, its objects and relations to be noumenal, whereas statements that we express using an ontology to be phenomenal. These are different, to be sure. Tractatus suggests that statements of the first sort are either necessarily true (tautologies) or necessarily false (contradictions), which seem to me sensible. It also says that this makes them meaningless, but here I'm not at all sure. To borrow from later Wittgenstein, these statements certainly have a use -- they help us understand just what the rules of the language-game we are playing are and what they are not.

Maybe one last thing to note is that ontologies themselves can of course be objects. "This ontology is unproductive" is perfectly fine as a statement, we can have maps of maps, to use your terminology. What we can't have, or rather what we can't make any progress in is an unmapped reality.