[LINK] Why Talk to Philosophers: Physicist Sean Carroll Discusses "Common Misunderstandings" about Philosophy

Replying separately to the section you edited in after your reply. If you are going to edit in additional replies it might be helpful for you to note when you have done so explicitly so people can see them.

You metaphysics may be the opposite of theism, but your epistemology is identical.

This sentence is apparently part of your general insults to my epistemological framework, so I'll just note that I'm mildly amused here- you accused me earlier of thinking of "theists as some sort of Bad people that no one should associate with in case it's inferiors" ([sic]^3) but you seem to think that theism must inherently be connected with terrible epistemologies, which isn't the case as demonstrated by the many theists in many disciplines (math, science, history, etc.) who do very good work.

. But if you want an example of good philosophy that's being done outside professional, academic philosophy, I'd be happy to point to the recent paper by Eliezer et. al. on modal agents and the prisoner's dilemma. See here.

Not philosophy. Filed under .CS.

This seems like a No True Scotsman more than anything else. Have you read the paper in question? If so, can you explain how what they are doing does not have a strong philosophical element?

Counterexample: his theory of metaethics...the one no one understands.

I don't think the word "counterexample" is what you are looking for here; it might make sense if I had argued that everything philosophically Eliezer says is great and productive or something like that. Since no one has made that argument, your "counterexample" isn't terribly relevant.

? Taking apparent subject matter experts as genuine experts as a default is fraught with peril.

You have no evidence that philosophers are frauds. It's all (uninformed) opinion.

Ok. First of all, no one has said that professional philosophers are "frauds" or anything like that. Not doing your subject well, is not at all the same thing as being a fraud. You may want to reread this discussion subthread- I've tried repeatedly to explain that the problem under discussion is not that no one is doing good philosophy, it is that a large fraction of the discipline is not, and that includes focusing on questions that should be already settled. Since I've also explained already that many attitudes on LW are mainstream philosophical standpoints, it would be very strange for me to think that philosophers as a whole were frauds.

I'm also puzzled by your choice of reply. It may be that there's some subtle illusion of transparency issue here, but it looks to me like you took one sentence, repeated and assertion as a reply to that sentence and didn't grapple with the central point of the paragraph containing that sentence: It is easy to give examples of whole classes of nominal classes of subject matter experts who are just wrong. As I said, any presumption of subject matter experts by itself being worthwhile to pay attention to is difficult at best. Now, do you intend to actually respond to this issue?

That doesn't respond substantially to the point other than to say "hey, someone disagrees with you".

If you have put forward the fact that you, uninformed, can't see how it works as amounting to the fact that it cannot work, then the existence of Kanes work is significant....because, whilst his theory may just .be opinion, so therefore is yours.

It appears you are (ironically enough!) presuming a degree of ignorance on my part which isn't accurate. I'm familiar with Kane's work, I summarized already the many problems with it. It might help if you'd actually read that section of my response.

But we know this isn't how humans make decisions- i

Please expand

You know, I did give a link which does just that. But if you want, I'll expand on how this is relevant: Two stage notions of free will posit that there are two steps: first, a list of options is compiled, then a mind makes a decision from that list. But we have a host of psychological data demonstrating that that isn't how humans make decisions. Options which occur early on are given more weight than those which occur later for example.

many in the other field are simply ignoring physics wholesale when discussing these issues.

Please provide examples

Aside from free will proponents, I already gave an example- most versions of A-time are not consistent with the laws of physics.

will. As far as I can tell, most versions of it are either obviously false, or are intuitively appealing but logically incohere.nt

But you made no attempt to steelman the contrary view by surveying the literature to find the best arguments for it. If you had, you would have heard of Kane.

I'm mildly curious what makes you think I hadn't heard of Kane. Do you really think Kane's arguments are so strong that anyone who disagrees with them, and doesn't feel a need to bring them up specifically out of a myriad of different views must not be familiar with them? This is not a helpful approach to things.

I'm going to skip your comparison to creationism other than to note that insulting comparisons really aren't helpful, and that if you think I'm making any form of argument that amounts to one of personal incredulity you really need to reread what I've wrote.

Theism is also backed by some professional philosophers, and that includes a majority of phil religion people. Should I pay attention to theism?

You can't claim to know theism is false unless you can refute the best arguments for it. Where do you go for those? (Do you think of theists as some sort of Bad people that no one should associate with in case it's inferiors

Ok. This is exactly what you don't seem to be getting. There are plenty of people out there who've spent massive amounts of time for all sorts of arguments for theism- there's a strong incentive over literally thousands of years for people to come up with good arguments for it. And the arguments that are thrown around today are the same things thrown around a hundred or two hundred years ago or more, cosmological arguments, design arguments, ontological argument, etc. You have the language dressed up to the point where they try to do things like make the arguments look more sophisticated (like Platinga and others trying to use modal logic in the ontological argument). But at a certain point, after enough study of these arguments, it gets to the point where one can say that if there were a genuinely convincing argument it would have shown up at some point. If someone introduces what looks like a genuinely novel argument and not just ontological argument iteration 552, I'll take a look. As to your second sentence, it is obnoxious and irrelevant: I've made no comment at all about "associating" with theists as being bad, or that they are inferior, and your implications that there is something like that going on is not conducive to a productive conversation.

One doesn't need to be a neurologist to know that classical libertarianism

What do you mean by classical libertarianism?

Something like the naive versions of free will espouses by most of the general population when they mean free will- it has a mix of interaction dualism and a notion that choices are being made by irreducible ontologica mental entities.

prior discussion

No different in content to the percent discussion

As a guess, I suspect you mean "recent" rather than percent (are you typing with some sort of autocorrect? None of the letters in "recent" are near "p" on a standard QWERTY keyboard). In any event, simply asserting that rather than actually discussing the linked prior discussion is not helpful. I note that you incidentally completely dropped my point to Unger's work- so let's be clear here, we're talking about a professional analytic philosopher who essentially sees the same problems in question.

That 70% of a major discipline consistently get such a basic question wrong and the rest of the philosophers are taking them even remotely seriously as a discipline shows a major part of the problem.

My epistemology is that ideas are true, when they are true for reason, and in offer to find out whether p or not p is true, you look at the best arguments on both sides. Therefore , you need arguments on both sides. Like a trial where the prosecution and defence put forward their best cases, even though one of them must be wrong.

You epistemology seems to be that there is a list of things that are Wrong for no Particular Reason, and that none should argue for thing that are Wrong...and that "knowing" what is right .or wrong is a a matterof reading them of the Lists

It is generally not a sign of a productive conversation where one feels a need to not just insult a strawman of someone's argument but apparently their entire epistemological approach. Therefore, unless you have something really interesting to say in any reply, this is going to be my last reply in this subthread. (I hope! There are of course, always problems with that).

It may surprise you that our epistemological frameworks are more similar than you think, and that people can disagree with you without having an epistemological framework that is utterly wrong.

The issue you seem to be missing is that there's a point where the best arguments or best evidence for a position is weak enough that further investigation is not warranted. To use your trial analogy, at a certain point the trial is over- if there's some sort of substantial new evidence then maybe a new trial will occur, but we don't need to spend time on every single question. And even you believe that- I suspect for example that you aren't searching out for the best arguments for flat earthism or hollow earthism (you can find sincere proponents of both on the internet), and in terms of philosophy, I suspect you aren't spending much time looking for the best arguments for Aristotle's four causes or Heraclitus's claim that all is fire. So, the problem is that many philosophers are doing essentially that sort of thing, and it is worth noting that they are doing it the most for things like free will and A-time where there are basic human psychological reasons to want to believe they are true.

Despite my earlier request you haven't given any expansion at all of what your testable theory of free will is. Are you going to discuss it or not?

Kane versus Dennett II

Dennett has a real point against Kane with his accusation that there is a special time at which free will occurs. In Kane's theory the essence of free will is something called a "self forming action" which occurs at particular times in the life of an individual. This leads to a number of problems:1 An SFA may or may not occur at all in an individual, yet by all common-sense standards an individual without SFA's is as free and responsible as anyone else.2 Since SFA's are the essence of an individual's free will, they must also be the essence of an individual's responsibility. Yet they are indeterministic — mere caprice!3 There must have been a first SFA , which itself cannot have been brought about intentionally, freely and responsibly.

II.4.iv.1 First Objection to Self-Forming Actions

An SFA may or may not occur at all in an individual, yet by all common-sense standards an individual without SFA's is as free and responsible as anyone else. This is a valid objection to SFA One of the innovations of our approach will be to replace Kane's isolated SFA's with an "ongoing process of self-formation" which all physically and psychologically normal adults engage in.

II.4.iv.2 Second Objection to Self-Forming Actions

Since SFA's are the essence of an individual's free will, they must also be the essence of an individual's responsibility. Yet they are indeterministic — mere caprice! This is a very important objection which gets to the heart of what people dislike about indeterminism-based free will. Bear in mind that we have accepted Dennett's point about the distributed mind. It is the agent as a whole who is responsible, not the any particular part of the agent, including any "indeterminism" module the agent might possess. The agents actions are not caused by any particular neuron, or any particular subsystem, but by the central nervous system acting in concert. An "indeterminism" module would therefore not cause actions, simpliciter, any more than any other module.Responsibility is a relationship that holds or fails to hold between an agent and an action performed externally. You are not responsible for things like earthquakes: the relationship fails to hold. You are also not responsible for neural firings as such; in this case is a category error to say that you are responsible or not for your neural firings. A different relationship holds: you are constituted by them. So, no, you cannot be held responsible for what your RIG does. But you are responsible for actions you perform (whether or not your RIG is involved).Moreover, in our model we posit another module in addition to the indeterminism module (or Random Idea Generator) whose function is specifically to "filter" the output of the Random Idea Generator. Thus the objection that you cannot control which signal the indeterminism module is going to generate is vitiated by placing the control after the generation of the signal. (Just as Natural Selection rescues Darwinian evolution from being mere caprice by acting on genes after they have mutated). There is no straightforward inference from a lack of causal responsibility for one's indeterminism generator to a lack of moral responsibility an agentFinally, recall that in our discussion of semicompatibilism and responsibility we agreed that there are forms of moral responsibility which are compatible with determinism. Thus, responsibility does not kick in when and only when the R.I.G or indeterminism module fires; responsibility is not created ex nihilo. 3

II.4.iv.iii Third Objection to Self-Forming Actions

There must have been a first SFA , which itself cannot have been brought about intentionally, freely and responsibly. It's important to understand the difference between a regress and an infinite regress. Earlier, we said:And this works —up to a point. If you did something you intended to do, you are responsible, and if you did something which was not your intention, it was accidental or under duress. But the intention has to have the right sort of causal history. If the intention "flew into your head" shortly before you performed an action based on it, without being based on previous intentional stated, you action was not responsible — or rather you are not a responsible person. Equally, our intuition is that people, or other entities, are not responsible if they did not originate their intention. We don't hold people who are acting under hypnotic suggestion responsible. If a mad scientist created an intelligent killing-machine, we would hold him ultimately responsible even if the machine was a sophisticated enough AI to be deemed rational.Since we must exclude capricious intentional states, states that do not have enough of history of being produced intentionally by previous states. Thus, there must be some kind of a regress to intentional states. Dennett has a parable that can act as a warning of what happens if you think about regresses in a too rigid, absolute way. it also illustrates that this is indeed a structural problem about regresses, not a problem about free will specifically)."You may think you're a mammal, and that dogs and cows and whales are mammals, but there really aren't any mammals at all — there can't be! Here's a philosophical argument to prove it.1) Every mammal has a mammal for a mother 2) If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only a finite number of mammals 3) but if there has been even one mammal, by (1), there has been an infinity of mammals , which contradicts (2), so there can't have been any mammals.Since we know perfectly well there are mammals, we take this argument only a challenge to discover what fallacy is lurking within it. [..] A gradual transition occurred from clear mammals to clear reptiles, with a lot of hard-to-classify intermediaries filling the gaps "(Daniel Dennett, "Freedom Evolves", p126)The absolutist way of thinking about things falls on the "infinite" side of the dichotomy. For the absolutist, and intentional state has to be fully and 100% brought about by the preceding state...ad infinitum.Kane's SFA's fall on the other side ...the regress just stops dead.We favour the kind of solution that is the correct solution to the Prime Mammal problem. The parent of a mammal only needs to be more-or-less mammalian. The mammalhood can fade out as you trace things go back. Likewise the "at least partially" clause in the definition of free will allows us to regard present intentional states as being only more-or-less engendered by previous ones, so that the causal and intentional history of an intentional state peters out rather than going back forever or stopping dead.

Kate versus Dennett I

"Ultimate Responsibility" is a term introduced by the Naturalistic Libertarian Robert Kane. It, and the thinking behind it, have led to some confusion."Only a Libertarian account, Kane claims, can provide the features we [...] yearn for, which he calls ultimate Responsibility. Libertarianism begins with a familiar claim: If determinism is true every, then every decision I make, like every breath I take, is an effect, ultimately,, of chains of causes leading back into times before I was born. [...] As many have claimed, then, if my decisions are caused by events leading back before my birth, I can be causally responsible for the results of my deeds in the same way a tree limb falling in a storm can be causally responsible for the results of the death of the person it falls on, but it's not the limb's fault that it was only a strong as it was, or that the wind blew so fiercely, or that the tree grew so close to the footpath. To be morally responsible I have to be the ultimate source of my decision and that can be true only if no earlier influences were sufficient to secure the outcome, which was truly "up to me". Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk in the Oval office saying the "The Buck Stops Here". The human mind has a place where the buck stops, Kane says, and only libertarianism can provide this kind of free will, the kind that provides Ultimate Responsibility".(Daniel Dennett, "Freedom Evolves", p99Let's get one confusion out of the way: the libertarian only needs to claim that responsibility stops with the agent, not that there is a single place within the agent where it stops, or a single time at which it stops.Dennett has an eloquent series of arguments against a "single place" within the mind where it "all happens", a "homunculus", which he has developed in "Consciousness Explained", and which he re-deploys in "Freedom Evolves".If it really matters, as Libertarians think, then we had better shield your process of deliberation from all such externalinfluenceWhy all ? Our definition of free will is "The power or ability to rationally choose and consciously perform actions, at least some of which are not brought about necessarily and inevitably by external circumstances". "At least some of which" is not "all" there is no need for such "shielding". The engineering is not required by the specification. (Ultimate) Responsibility belongs to the agent as a whole, not to a subsystem within the agent. We are quite happy to accept Dennett's distributed model of the mind.Compatibilists and determinists are able to argue that it is undesirable for a "snap" decision to be made randomly, since such decisions need to be reliable — indeed, they may even be "life or death" decisions. This is far from being a smoking-gun refutation of Libertarianism, however. The libertarian only needs to be able to say that her decision could have been different under the same external circumstances at time T. The libertarian's internal state could have been different under the circumstances prevailing at T (In other words, there are sets of possible worlds where everything outside the libertarian is identical), so the action resulting from the libertarian's internal state could have been different, even if it was brought about more-or-less deterministically by their state at time T. Thus they could have done otherwise so long as the series of states leading up to the reactive snap decision could have been different. Thus, freedom of the will can, as it were, be stored and used at a later date. (The idea that free decisions occur immediately before action is criticised in section III.1. We also argue for this point in section II.2; and compare what Dennett says about Libet's work in section II.4)To use another metaphor, it is as though there is a conscious executive which sets "policy" which less conscious sub-systems then follow in making snap decisions. In an organisation, responsibility stops with the executive who sets policy, rather than the junior staff member who implements it. Likewise people are held morally and legally responsible for acts which are snap decisions, because they have trained themselves to react in that particular way.However, this idea of stored inentionality (or deferred responsibility) has some problems, whcih we will now consider.Dennett has a real point against Kane with his accusation that there is a special time at which free will occurs. In Kane's theory the essence of free will is something called a "self forming action" which occurs at particular times in the life of an individual. This leads to a number of problems