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The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory 2016-02-26T02:00:27.888Z
Is Spirituality Irrational? 2016-02-09T01:42:33.894Z

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Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-05-09T22:09:49.302Z · LW · GW

I completely agree that engaging in the debate is worthwhile. But I think you can engage more effectively if you understand how people might come to the opposing point of view.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-30T16:12:39.840Z · LW · GW

trying to do the right thing counts

Jesus very plainly disagreed:

"Mark16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-21T05:49:15.848Z · LW · GW

Matthew 25:46

Yeah, that's a better example.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-20T00:03:05.504Z · LW · GW

other crimes

Fair enough, but a lot of those "other crimes" are thought crimes too, e.g. Exo20:17, Mat5:28.

was never intended to be taken literally

Jesus was pretty clear about this. Mat13:42 (and in case you didn't get it the first time he repeats himself in verse 50), Mark16:16.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-18T14:56:10.889Z · LW · GW

Exactly. "Did not" is not the same as "can not." Particularly since God's threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don't happen even though they can.

But we don't even need to look to God's forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-15T19:12:18.586Z · LW · GW

the intent behind those words was not given

"The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him". Again, I don't see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.

I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure.

If you're not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person's family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.

the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds

No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn't matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.

But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing.

Sure, and so are everyone else's.

my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture

A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It's just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?

But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-09T15:47:11.964Z · LW · GW

I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you.

You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:

"Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."

I don't know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can't help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)

Doesn't mean they weren't doing a lot of evil, though

You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:

I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.

You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God's Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, "Whoa, that doesn't seem right to me." At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-08T16:50:18.641Z · LW · GW

I agree with most of what you say. Consciousness is not supernatural. But it is still problematic because:

the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty

"Only outcome you can experience" is not quite the same thing as "Will experience with certainty." Let's go back to the case where you survive in both branches. The outcome you do experience is the only outcome that you can experience. The trick is that this is really two statements disguised as one. After the event there are two you's, you1 and you2. The outcome that you1 do experience is the only outcome you1 can experience, and the outcome you2 do experience is the only outcome you2 can experience. This remains true (I believe) even if one of those experiences is the null experience of having your consciousness enter the cosmic void.

Reasonable people could disagree, I suppose. We can never know what the null experience "feels like" because by definition it doesn't feel like anything. Personally, I find even the possibility that this argument could be correct to be sufficient reason for me to avoid playing quantum roulette. But everyone needs to choose their own risk posture.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-08T16:31:34.605Z · LW · GW

Oh, come on. Surely you do not dispute that there are ways of dying that are both unavoidable and non-instantaneous. What difference does it make what the details are?

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-07T22:55:45.410Z · LW · GW

But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire.

No, that's not quite true. QIT predicts that if you notice anything then you will notice that the gun didn't fire. But QIT does not guarantee that you will notice anything. You could just die.

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

See also my response to akvadrako.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-07T22:51:40.611Z · LW · GW

Don't you mean n-factorial?

Yeah, probably. It's actually probably N!-1 because you have to trace over one degree of freedom to obtain a classical universe. But the details don't really matter. What matters is that it's >>N.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-07T22:49:34.426Z · LW · GW

QIT and MWI don't make any different predictions that are testable in a single classical universe (obviously, because QIT and MWI are just different interpretation of QM, so they both make the same predictions for all observables, namely, the predictions made by QM).

QIT and MWI are simply differences in perspective -- the God's eye view (MWI) versus the mortal's-eye-view (QIT). Neither view is "correct", but since I (the thing engaged in this conversation) am a mortal, I choose the mortal's-eye-view as more relevant for day-to-day decision making. But as I keep saying, it's ultimately a matter of personal preference.

The problem with quantum roulette is that it takes a prediction made from a God's-eye-view and tries to apply it in a mortal's-eye-view context. Yes, God will be able to see that there is a you that survived the process and went on to live the life of Riley. But whether or not you will be able to see that is a very open question. (God will also be able to see a lot of branches of the multiverse containing your friends and loved ones mourning your untimely death.)

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. Trying to play by slitting your wrists, for example, doesn't work because once you see that your wrists are slit you can't roll that back. So the success of the enterprise depends entirely on killing yourself fast enough that you don't become aware of your imminent and (in the relevant branches of the multiverse) unavoidable death. How fast is fast enough? Well, that is (literally!) the sixty-four-million-dollar question. Unless you have an answer that you are very confident is the correct one, it seems to me like an imprudent risk to take.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-07T00:13:04.779Z · LW · GW

according to MWI there surely will

No. Not "will". IS. If you're going to take the God's eye view then you have to let go of your intuitions about time along with your intuitions about classical reality. The wave function is a static four-dimensional thing. Time emerges from the wave function in exactly the same way that classical reality does. You have to be careful not to apply terminology from the mortal's-eye-view to the God's-eye-view. That's how you get yourself into trouble.

UPDATE: Here is a popular article about how time emerges from entanglement.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-06T19:58:43.974Z · LW · GW

I will perceive being every one of them

It depends on what you mean by "I". This is the crux of the matter. MWI takes a God's-eye perspective and looks at the whole wave function. On that view, there are many you's (i.e. many slices of the wave function that contain macroscopic systems of mutually entangled particles that perceive themselves to be you).

QIT takes the perspective of the-you-that-you-currently-perceive-yourself-to-be. You will only ever perceive one of that kind of you.

For the purposes of making decisions it makes more sense to take the latter perspective because it's the-latter-kind-of-you that is making the decisions and has to live with the consequences.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-06T18:27:04.142Z · LW · GW

Doesn't the QIT you describe make the exact same predictions, also the Russian roulette you mentioned?

Nope.

But there's no single privileged future you, right?

There is no single privileged future me now, but when my future becomes my present there will be. (Also, see note below.)

You can actually do this experiment: listen to a geiger counter, or tune an old-school TV to an inactive channel and watch the snow on the screen. The math says that during this process there are an inconceivably vast number of you's being split off every time the geiger counter clicks (or fails to click) or every time you perceive a light or dark pixel on the screen. But you will only ever experience being one of those you's. Yes, all those other you's do exist, but the you that you perceive yourself to be can never interact with any of them, so they may as well not exist for the one you that you perceive yourself to be. And so the one you that you perceive yourself to be may as well live your life as if all those other you's didn't exist even though they really do.

(NOTE: there is really no such thing as "now", and you don't even have to go quantum to see that. Simultaneity gets tossed out the window with special relativity. There is my "now" and there is your "now" and they will not, in general, be the same.)

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-05T18:56:07.022Z · LW · GW

Can you derive the Born rule?

Yes.

Can you settle the single/many world dichotomy?

That depends on what you mean by "settle". The only thing that you can definitively say is that the transition between the quantum and the classical is gradual, not abrupt. Because of this, any statement about a classical world is necessarily an approximation of some sort, and all approximations break down if you lean on them in the right way. Copenhagen breaks down most easily because it only applies under some very particular circumstances. Those circumstances happen to be very common, which is why Copenhagen is not completely useless, but nowadays it is common to do experiments under which the Copenhagen approximation conditions do not apply. Multiple-worlds is mathematically tenable, but it has some very serious problems as an explanatory theory and it makes predictions that even its adherents seem unwilling to accept.

Personally, I find the rhetoric of QIT/relational-QM/Ithaca to be far less taxing on my intuition than multiple-worlds. These interpretations acknowledge that classical reality is a slice of the wave function, that there are many different ways to slice up the wave function to obtain a classical reality, and therefore there are many potential classical realities. But there is one classical reality that is privileged to me because it happens to be the one that I'm living in, which is to say, it's the reality that is mutually entangled (and therefore classically correlated) with the massively-mutually-entangled system that is me. In an absolute sense I am no more or less real than all the other potential mes that you get by slicing up the wave function in different ways, but I don't care about that except in the abstract. Day-to-day, what matters to me -- this me, the one that is writing these words -- is what is correlated with (this) me.

The cool thing about this is that if you are reading these words -- the ones written by this me -- then you are entangled with me and therefore classically correlated with me and therefore we are both emerging from the same slice of the wave function, and so the exact same argument applies to you: both of us can proceed on the assumption that our classical reality is the One True Classical Reality even though we can both understand in the abstract that this isn't really true, and that by doing the right kinds of quantum experiments we can actually demonstrate to ourselves that it isn't really true. For me personally, that makes QIT the best approximation to use because it's the one that applies in the greatest variety of circumstances and has the fewest conceptual problems. But it's ultimately a matter of personal preference.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-05T18:03:40.422Z · LW · GW

(DO:A) raises the probability of B.

Yes, but there's still some terminological sleight-of-hand going on here. It is only fair to say that a future A affected a past B if P(B) is well defined without reference to A. In this case it's not. Because B is defined in terms of correlations between measurements made at T1 (noon) and measurements made at T2 (evening) then B cannot be said to have actually happened until T2.

correlation is a two-way street

No, it's an n-squared-minus-one-way street. It appears to be a two-way street in one (very common) special case (two macroscopic systems mutually entangled with each other), but weak measurements are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the conditions of that special case. When you go beyond the conditions of the common special case you can't keep using the rhetoric and intuitions that apply only to the special case and hope to come up with the right answer.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-04T17:10:35.520Z · LW · GW

why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?

Maybe because God has cursed him to be a "fugitive and a vagabond." People didn't like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don't ).

I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.

Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I'd better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you." (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)

even the "pure evil" tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.

How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn't last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.

If it's intended to find the answer

This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn't make your argument any less bogus.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-04T07:19:01.566Z · LW · GW

we'd both do whatever we're going to do and it wouldn't matter at all!

Exactly right. I live my life as if I'm a classical conscious being with free will even though I know that metaphysically I'm not. It's kind of fun knowing the truth though. It gives me a lot of peace of mind.

I was curious if you are in that camp.

I'm not familiar with Rosenberg so I couldn't say.

Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett's views! (He's a compatibilist, I believe.)

Yes, I think you're right. (That video is actually well worth watching!)

Galilean Universe

Sorry, my bad. I meant it in the sense of Galilean relativity (a.k.a. Newtonian relativity, though Galileo actually thought of it first) where time rather than the speed of light is the same for all observers.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-04T03:10:48.668Z · LW · GW

neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other

That may be. Nonetheless, at the moment I believe that free is an illusion, and I have some evidence that supports that belief. I see no evidence to support the contrary belief. So if you want to convince me that free will is real then you'll have to show me some evidence.

If you don't care what I believe then you are under no obligations :-)

None of those experiments provides strong evidence

The fact that you can reliably predict some actions that people perceive as volitional up to ten seconds in advance seems like pretty strong evidence to me. But I suppose reasonable people could disagree about this. In any case, I didn't say there was strong evidence, I just said there was some evidence.

So, do you believe that consciousness is a real thing?

That depends a little on what you mean by "a real thing." Free will and consciousness are both real subjective experiences, but neither one is objectively real. Their natures are very similar. I might even go so far as to say that they are the same phenomenon. I recommend reading this book if you really want to understand it.

And, can a Turing machine be conscious?

Yes, of course. You would have to be a dualist to believe otherwise.

If so, how are we to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not?

That's very tricky. I don't know. I'm pretty sure that our current methods of determining consciousness produce a lot of false negatives. But if a computer that could pass the Turing test told me it was conscious, and could describe for me what it's like to be a conscious computer, I'd be inclined to believe it.

I don't know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information?

It's not that deep. It just means that your perception of reality is different from actual reality in some pretty fundamental ways. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but it doesn't. The chair you're sitting on seems like a solid object, but it isn't. "Up" always feels like it's the same direction, but it's not. And you feel like you have free will, but you don't. :-)

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-04T00:39:49.751Z · LW · GW

That's not a valid argument for at least four reasons:

  1. There are many perceptual illusions, so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim. (In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!)

  2. There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion.

  3. It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into existential despair, which is not generally salubrious to reproductive fitness.

  4. We now understand quite a bit about how the brain works and about how computers work, and all the evidence indicates that the brain is a computer. More precisely, there is nothing a brain can do that a properly programmed Turing machine could not do, and therefore no property that a brain have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely do not have free will (if you believe that a thermostat has free will, well, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about that). So if free will is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that have free will from those that do not. I have heard no one propose such a criterion that doesn't lead to conclusions that grate irredeemably upon my intuitions about what free will is (or what it would have to be if it were a real thing).

In this respect, free will really is very much like God except that the subjective experience of free will is more common than the subjective experience of the Presence of the Holy Spirit.

BTW, it is actually possible that the subjective experience of free will is not universal among humans. It is possible that some people don't have this subjective perception, just as some people don't experience the Presence of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that this lack of the subjective perception of free will is what leads some people to submit to the will of Allah, or to become Calvinists.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-03T18:12:11.364Z · LW · GW

The serpent wasn't an authority figure. How could Eve have known that? Eve could have known that God was an authority figure

That's a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.

it's a serious guess

Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don't think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin' person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, "OK, I've had it, I'm going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!" ???

Sheesh.

everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he'd killed his brother

You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can't see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.

I don't see how that follows.

Because "the good stuff" is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That's why we are social animals. That's why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.

Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?

What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it's exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.

I'm South African

I've been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that's saying something.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-02T23:06:51.472Z · LW · GW

That's you pointing to a shared understanding of free and not you pointing to your private experience.

You're conflating two different things:

  1. Attempting to communicate about a phenomenon which is rooted in a subjective experience.

  2. Attempting to conduct that communication using words rather than, say, music or dance.

Talking about the established meaning of the word "free" has to do with #2, not #1. The fact that my personal opinion enters into the discussion has to do with #1, not #2.

I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make

Yes, of course I agree. But that's not the question at issue. The question is not whether we have "desires" or "will" (we all agree that we do), the question is whether or not we have FREE will. I think it's pretty clear that we do NOT have the freedom to choose our desires. At least I don't seem to; maybe other people are different. So where does this alleged freedom enter the process?

Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn't trival

I never said it was. In fact, the difficulty of grounding color perception in objective reality actually supports my position. One would expect that the grounding of free will perception in objective reality to be at least as difficult as grounding color perception, but I don't see those who support the objective reality of free will undertaking such a project, at least not here.

I'm willing to be convinced that this free will thing is real, but as with any extraordinary claim the burden is on you to prove that it is, not on me to prove that it is not.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-02T22:36:33.399Z · LW · GW

Yes, of course that's true. But collapse is only an approximation to the truth. It is a very good approximation in many common cases. But the Aharonov experiment is interesting precisely because it is a case where collapse is no longer a good approximation to the truth, and so of course if you view it through the lens of collapse things are going to look weird. To see why collapse is not always a good approximation to the truth, see the references in the OP.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-02T18:37:37.077Z · LW · GW

I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there's no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen.

No, that's not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.

I actually go even further than that. If I am not reliably predictable, then I might have free will, but my mere unpredictability is not enough to establish that I have free will. Weather systems are not reliably predictable, but they don't have free will. It is not even the case that non-determinism is sufficient to establish free will. Photons are non-deterministic, but they don't have free will.

That's an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition.

Well, yeah, of course it is (though I would not call my intuitions an "authority"). This whole discussion starts from a subjective experience that I have (and that other people report having), namely, feeling like I have free will. I don't know of any way to talk about a subjective experience without referring to my personal intuitions about it.

The difference between free will and other subjective experiences like, say, seeing color, is that seeing colors can be easily grounded in an objective external reality, whereas with free will it's not so easy. In fact, no one has exhibited a satisfactory explanation of my subjective experience that is grounded in objective reality, hence my conclusion that my subjective experience of having free will is an illusion.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-02T18:25:43.482Z · LW · GW

Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding,

I'm not sure what I "expect" but yes, I am trying to achieve mutual understanding. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our intuitions of what "free will" means and I'm trying to get a handle on what it is. If you think that a thermostat has even a little bit of free will then we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you think even a Nest thermostat, which does some fairly complicated processing before "deciding" whether or not to turn on the heat has even a little bit of free will then we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you think that an industrial control computer, or an airplane autopilot, which do some very complicated processing before "deciding" what to do have even a little bit of free will then we'll have to agree to disagree. Likewise for weather systems, pachinko machines, geiger counters, and computers searching for a counterexample to the Collatz conjecture. If you think any of these things has even a little bit of free will then we will simply have to agree to disagree.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-02T18:02:07.848Z · LW · GW

So I read the paper, and it is kind of a cool experiment, but it does not show that "future choices can affect a past measurement's outcome." Explaining why would require a separate article (maybe time to re-open main!) But the TL;DR version is this: if you want to argue that A affects B then you have to show a causal relationship that runs from A to B. If you can do that, then you can always come up with some encoding that will allow you to transmit information from A to B. That's what "causal relationship" means. But that is (unsurprisingly) not what Aharonov et al. have done. They have merely shown correlations between A and B, and then argue on purely intuitive grounds that there must have been some causal relationship between A and B because "Bell's theorem forbids spin values to exist prior to the choice of the orientation measured." While this is true, it's misleading because it implies that spin values do exist after a strong measurement. But that is not true. There is no fundamental difference between a strong and a weak measurement. There is a smooth continuum between weak and strong measurements, and at no point during the transition from weak to strong does the spin value begin to "actually exist" (a.k.a. wavefunction collapse).

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-03-02T05:18:45.853Z · LW · GW

Just FYI, I am Ron Garret. Also just FYI, the Aharonov study does not show that future choices can affect a past measurement's outcome. If this were possible, you could use it to send yourself information about the future of (say) the stock market and become the richest person on earth.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T23:17:30.027Z · LW · GW

rudely patronizing

Sorry, it is not my intention to be either rude or patronizing. But there are some aspects of this discussion that I find rather frustrating, and I'm sorry if that frustration occasionally manifests itself as rudeness.

you can never say "with 100% certainty will not" about anything with any empirical content

Of course I can: with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today. With 100% certainty, no one will exhibit superluminal communication today. With 100% certainty, the sun will not rise in the west tomorrow. With 100% certainty, I will not be the president of the United States tomorrow.

Nothing about [a pachinko machine] seems decision-like at all.

a thermostat has (in a very aetiolated sense) beliefs.

Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions? Do you believe that a thermostat has (a little bit of) free will?

Perfectly reliable prediction is not possible in principle in our universe. Not even with a halting oracle.

I presume you mean "perfectly reliable prediction of everything is not possible in principle." Because perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible. And perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) with a halting oracle is possible by definition.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T22:41:08.184Z · LW · GW

No, not even remotely close. We seem to have a serious disconnect here.

For starters, I don't think I ever gave a definition of "free will". I have listed what I feel to be (two) necessary conditions for it, but I don't think I ever gave sufficient conditions, which would be necessary for a definition. I'm not sure I even know what sufficient conditions would be. (But I think those necessary conditions, plus the known laws of physics, are enough to show that humans don't have free will, so I think my position is sound even in the absence of a definition.) And I did opine at one point that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the word "free" in a context of a discussion of "free will." But that is not at all the same thing as arguing that there is only one reasonable definition of "free will." Also, the question of what "I" means is different from the question of what "free will" means. But both are (obviously) relevant to the question of whether or not I have free will.

The reason I brought up the definition of "I" is because you wrote:

You ontological model that there's an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic

That is not my position. (And ontology is a bit of a red herring here.) I can't even imagine what it means for a neuron to "do something that not in their nature or being", let alone that this departure from "nature or being" could be caused by physics. That's just bizarre. What did I say that made you think I believed this?

I can't define "free will" just like I can't define "pornography." But I have an intuition about free will (just like I have one about porn) that tells me that, whatever it is, it is not something that is possessed by pachinko machines, individual photons, weather systems, or a Turing machine doing a straightforward search for a counter-example to the Collatz conjecture. I also believe that "will not with 100% reliability" is logically equivalent to "can not" in that there is no way to distinguish these two situations. If you wish to dispute this, you will have to explain to me how I can determine whether the reason that the moon doesn't leave earth orbit is because it can't or because it chooses not to.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T18:57:56.029Z · LW · GW

I think this is a difference in the definition of the word "I", which can reasonably be taken to mean at least three different things:

  1. The totality of my brain and body and all of the processes that go on there. On this definition, "I have lungs" is a true statement.

  2. My brain and all of the computational processes that go on there (but not the biological processes). On this definition, "I have lungs" is a false statement, but "I control my breathing" is a true statement.

  3. That subset of the computational processes going on in my brain that we call "conscious." On this view, the statement, "I control my breathing" is partially true. You can decide to stop breathing for a while, but there are hard limits on how long you can keep it up.

To me, the question of whether I have free will is only interesting on definition #3 because my conscious self is the part of me that cares about such things. If my conscious self is being coerced or conned, then I (#3) don't really care whether the origin of that coercion is internal (part of my sub-conscious or my physiology) or external.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T18:42:15.923Z · LW · GW

The serpent wasn't an authority figure.

How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.

Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?

Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.

Because it's really boring

Seriously?

he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world

No he didn't. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he's lamenting the result of that curse.

he thinks they'd have reason to want to kill him.

Yes, because he's cursed by God.

I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.

If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.

Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.

But that doesn't work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you'd have less computational power than a single iPhone.

perfect knowledge of the future - does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.

Of course it does. That's what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.

I don't actually know GW-the-myth.

Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here's a reference. The details don't really matter. If you tell me your background I'll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.

the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary

Indeed.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T18:13:49.848Z · LW · GW

I don't think that's at all clear

How would you define it then?

a clear majority of philosophers

This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.

Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?

No, I get that. But "a very little bit" is still distinguishable from zero, yes?

nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like

Nothing about it seems human decision-like. But that's a prejudice because you happen to be human. See below...

I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.

I believe that intelligent aliens could exist (in fact, almost certainly do exist). I also believe that fully intelligent computers are possible, and might even be constructed in our lifetime. I believe that any philosophy worth adhering to ought to be IA-ready and AI-ready, that is, it should not fall apart in the face of intelligent aliens or artificial intelligence. (Aside: This is the reason I do not self-identify as a "humanist".)

Also, it is far from clear that chess computers work anything at all like humans. The hypothesis that humans make decisions by heuristic search has been pretty much disproven by >50 years of failed AI research.

I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word "impossible" inappropriate. For whatever reason, you've never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so.

I hereby acknowledge your having pointed this out. But it's irrelevant. All I require for my argument to hold is predictability in principle, not predictability in fact. That's why I always speak of a hypothetical rather than an actual predictor. In fact, my hypothetical predictor even has an oracle for the halting problem (which is almost certainly not realizable in this universe) because I don't believe that Turing machines exercise free will when "deciding" whether or not to halt.

it is just a restatement of incompatibilism.

That's possible. But just because incompatibalism is a tautology does not make it untrue.

I don't think it is a tautology. The state of affairs for a reliable predictor to exist would be that there is something that causes both my action and the prediction, and that whatever this is is accessible to the predictor before it is accessible to me (otherwise it's not a prediction). That doesn't feel like a tautology to me, but I'm not going to argue about it. Either way, it's true.

Please consider the possibility that other people besides yourself have thought about this stuff

Of course. As soon as someone presents a cogent argument I'm happy to consider it. I haven't heard one yet (despite having read this ).

It means you will not choose B, which is not necessarily the same as that you cannot choose B.

That's really the crux of the matter I suppose. It reminds me of the school of thought on the problem of theodicy which says that God could eliminate evil from the world, but he chooses not to for some reason that is beyond our comprehension (but is nonetheless wise and good and loving). This argument has always struck me as a cop-out. If God's failure to use His super-powers for good is reliably predictable, then that to me is indistinguishable from God not having those super powers to begin with.

You can see the absurdity of it by observing that this same argument can be applied to anything, not just God. I can argue with equal validity that rocks can fly, they just choose not to. Or that I could, if I wanted to, mount an argument for my position that is so compelling that you would have no choice but to accept it, but I choose not to because I am benevolent and I don't want to shatter your illusion of free will.

I don't see any possible way to distinguish between "can not" and "with 100% certainty will not". If they can't be distinguished, they must be the same.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-03-01T17:04:25.193Z · LW · GW

Free has many different meanings.

Are you seriously arguing that "free" in "free will" might mean the same thing as (say) "free" in "free beer"? Come on.

What ontological category does physics have in your view of the world?

That's a very good question, and it depends (ironically) on which of two possible definitions of physics you're referring to. If you mean physics-the-scientific-enterprise (let's call that physics1) then it exists in the ontological category of human activity (along with things like "commerce"). If you mean the underlying processes which are the object of study in physics1 (let's call that physics2) then I'd put those in the ontological category of objective reality.

Note that ontological categories are not mutually exclusive. Existence is a vector space. Physics1 is also part of objective reality, because it is an emergent property of physics2.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-29T19:29:02.324Z · LW · GW

I prefer notions of free will that don't become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there's an omnipotent god or whatever.

That's like saying, "I prefer triangles with four sides." You are, of course, free to prefer whatever you want and to use words however you want. But the word "free" has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism. Free means, "not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes." If my actions are determined by physics or by God, I am not free.

I don't think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation

And you think chess-playing machines do?

BTW, if your standard for free will is "having processing that resembles human deliberation" then you've simply defined free will as "something that humans have" in which case the question of whether or not humans have free will becomes very uninteresting because the answer is tautologically "yes".

So there are two parts to this

I'd call them two "interpretations" rather than two "parts". But I intended the latter: to qualify as free will on my view, decisions have to be made by the conscious part of a conscious agent. If I am conscious but I base my decision on a coin flip, that's not free will.

"actually possible" is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible?

Whatever is not impossible. In this case (and we've been through this) if I am reliably predictable then it is impossible for me to do anything other than what a hypothetical reliable predictor predicts. That is what "reliably predictable" means. That is why not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition for free will. It's really not complicated.

Why make it part of the definition?

Because that is what the "free" part of "free will" means. If I am faced with a choice between A and B and a reliable predictor predicts I am going to choose A, then I cannot choose B (again, this is what "reliably predictor" means). If I cannot choose B then I am not free.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-29T03:06:10.186Z · LW · GW

Here's a firsthand account of someone having the sort of spiritual experience I'm referring to in the main article.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-29T03:01:07.738Z · LW · GW

Free will is a useful notion because we have the perception of having it, and so it's useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don't really have it. It's useful in the same way that it's useful to talk about, say, "the force of gravity" even though in reality there is no such thing. (That's actually a pretty good analogy. The force of gravity is a reasonable approximation to the truth for nearly all everyday purposes even though conceptually it is completely wrong. Likewise with free will.)

You said that a chess-playing computer has (some) free will. I disagree (obviously because I don't think anything has free will). Do you think Pachinko machines have free will? Do they "decide" which way to go when they hit a pin? Does the atmosphere have free will? Does it decide where tornadoes appear?

When I say "real free will" I mean this:

  1. Decisions are made by my conscious self. This rules out pachinko machines, the atmosphere, and chess-playing computers having free will.

  2. Before I make a decision, it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative. Ergo, if I am reliably predictable, I cannot have free will because if I am reliably predictable then it is not possible for me to choose more than one alternative. I can only choose the alternative that a hypothetical predictor would reliably predict.

I don't know how to make it any clearer than that.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-28T06:56:31.174Z · LW · GW

an example that doesn't even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point

Sorry about that. I really was trying to be helpful.

I haven't, as it happens, been claiming that free will is "objectively real". All I claim is that it may be a useful notion.

Well, heck, what are we arguing about then? Of course it's a useful notion.

chess

A better analogy would be "simultaneous events at different locations in space." Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers. Simultaneity, like free will, depends on your point of view.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-02-27T20:11:08.834Z · LW · GW

None of this is original research on my part. My only contribution is pedagogical. QIT doesn't make any predictions that QM doesn't make because it's an interpretation, just another way of looking at the math. But the reason it's a better way of looking at the math is that it solves the measurement problem. It explains measurement in terms of entanglement. It reduces two mysteries to one. IMHO that's progress.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-27T17:39:04.776Z · LW · GW

It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.

Of course. Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?

I have read both books.

Oh, good!

I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible

You're right, the argument in chapter 7 is not complete, it's just the 80/20 part of Deutsch's argument, so it's what I point people to first. And non-explanatory models with predictive power are not impossible, they're just extremely unlikely (probability indistinguishable from zero). The reason they are extremely unlikely is that in a finite universe like ours there can exist only a finite amount of data, but there are an infinite number of theories consistent with that data, nearly all of which have low predictive power. Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power. Hence, it is overwhelmingly likely that a theory with high predictive power will have high explanatory power.

In this world, would you accordingly say that first-me is choosing much less freely than second-me?

No.

First, I disagree with "Free will means unpredictability-in-principle." It doesn't mean UIP, it simply requires UIP. Necessary, not sufficient.

Second, to be "real" free will, there would have to be some circumstances where you accept the bribe and surprise me. In this respect, you've chosen a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one: we're in a restaurant and I know you love burgers and pasta, both of which are on the menu. I know you'll choose one or the other, but I have no idea which. In that case, it's possible that you are making the choice using "real" free will.

in the second case I am coerced by another agent, and in the first I'm not

Not so. In the first case you are being coerced by your sense of morality, or your fear of going to prison, or something like that. That's exactly what makes your choice not to take the bribe predictable. The only difference is that the mechanism by which you are being coerced in the second case is a little more overt.

You may prefer notions of free will with a sort of transitive property

No, what I require is a notion of free will that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that can predict anything that can be predicted in principle. (I also want to give this hypothetical observer an oracle for the halting problem because I don't think that Turing machines exercise "free will" or "decide" whether or not to halt.) This is simply the same criterion I apply to any phenomenon that someone claims is objectively real.

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-02-27T08:59:55.554Z · LW · GW

don't do that

If you were to ban every mode of argument that has ever been used to justify a false conclusion then it would be impossible to argue for anything.

this is becoming a discussion of a real science

Heaven forfend! ;-)

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-02-27T08:57:22.548Z · LW · GW

No, what you say is correct, but you don't even need to bring entanglement into it at all: moving faster than light is the same thing as moving into the past (in some reference frame). This is why information can't propagate faster than light.

The kind of time travel that I'm talking about here is not merely sending information into the past but sending yourself into the past, that is, sending your body into the past. But that's not possible because your body is on the most fundamental level made of entanglements, and entanglements define the arrow of time.

Comment by lisper on Go see Ex Machina · 2016-02-27T03:17:34.320Z · LW · GW

Hm, I searched for "ex machina" on the LW site search before I posted this and got no results.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-26T20:03:50.658Z · LW · GW

the model might explicitly include the agent's desires

OK, let me try a different counter-argument then: do you believe we have free will to choose our desires? I don't. For example, I desire chocolate. This is not something I chose, it's something that happened to me. I have no idea how I could go about deciding not to desire chocolate. (I suppose I could put myself through some sort of aversion therapy, but that's not the same thing. That's deciding to try to train myself not to desire chocolate.)

If we don't have the freedom to choose our desires, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decisions that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account "free will"?

a model might predict much better than it explains

This is a very deep topic that is treated extensively in David Deutsch's book, "The Beginning of Infinity" (also "The Fabric of Reality", particularly chapter 7). If you want to go down that rabbit hole you need to read at least Chapter 7 of TFOR first, otherwise I'll have to recapitulate Deutsch's argument. The bottom line is that there is good reason to believe that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are not possible.

If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.

Sure. Do you distinguish between "will" and "desire"?

the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.

Really? What are they?

Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn't freely refuse the bribe?

Yes.

Is it maximally free?

Yes, which is to say, not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.

The only difference between the two cases is in your awareness of the mechanism behind the decision-making process. In the first case, the mechanism that caused you to choose to refuse the bribe is inside your brain and not accessible to your conscious self. In the second case, (at least part of) the mechanism that causes you to make the choice is more easily accessible to your conscious self. But this is a thin reed because the inaccessibility of your internal decision making process is (almost certainly) a technological limitation, not a fundamental difference between the two cases.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-26T17:36:52.658Z · LW · GW

For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".

Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, "DO NOT PRESS" and on the right it says "PRESS THIS BUTTON". (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, "Do not press this button" and "Press this button for important information on how to use this remote". God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)

Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten's tail?

No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?

(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)

Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?

Delegation?

Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?

Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel

How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.

Also, let's look at man's next transgression:

"Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

In other words, God's first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God's will?

Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.

Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.

the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out "head!" and "tail!" in whatever order he freely desires to do

I really don't get what point you're trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.

why they can't be colinear.

Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you've lost.

I'd consider "George Washington the physical object" and "George Washington the fictional character" to be two different things

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare's plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You've lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.

Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone's head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn't. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn't.

But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-26T16:36:13.718Z · LW · GW

What can I say? I've met a lot of believers who claim that God talks to them on a regular basis. They seem sincere, but maybe they're all just really good liars (or maybe I'm really gullible).

Comment by lisper on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory · 2016-02-26T06:56:04.278Z · LW · GW

Well, I didn't say we could do it reliably. :-) But we can do it. You can look at something and say, "It's green" and I can look at the same thing and agree, "Yes, it is green." And then we can look at the same thing a minute later and say, "It's still green." The remarkable fact is not that we can do this 100% of the time, but that we can do it at all.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-26T02:01:11.995Z · LW · GW

Let me know if/when you write that separate article.

Here you go.

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-26T01:47:08.095Z · LW · GW

I don't think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.

Yes, obviously. But it is also a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is beautiful, so too it is a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is free will. Like I said, it's really quibbling over terminology, which is almost always a waste of time.

Having said which, I think I can give a not-too-hopeless criterion distinguishing agents we might reasonably want to say have free will from those we don't. X has free will in regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X's preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.

OK, that's not entirely unreasonable, but on that definition no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent's desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.

One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren't necessarily any easier to define clearly than "free will" itself.

Indeed.

I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will!

OK, then you're intuitive definition of "free will" is very different from mine. I would not say that a chess playing computer has free will, at least not given current chess-playing technology. On my view of free will, a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn't want to play chess any more.

It sounds as if you're proposing something like "not being reliably predictable", but surely that won't do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will?

I'd say that not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right:

'free will' isn't a binary thing; it's a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that 'entropy' and 'free will' are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)

Comment by lisper on Is Spirituality Irrational? · 2016-02-25T22:47:30.170Z · LW · GW

You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take

Do I? That wasn't my intention. They don't have a choice in which box to take, any more than they have a choice in whether or not they find my argument compelling. If they find my argument compelling then (if they are rational) they will take 1 box and win $1M. If they don't, then (maybe) they won't. There's no real "choice" involved (though there is the very compelling illusion of choice).

This is actually a perfect illustration of the limits of free will even in our own awareness: you can't decide whether to find a particular argument compelling or not, it's something that just happens to you.