CFI Forums

Life without senses

2008-06-23T15:31:49-05:00

what if you were born with no senses whatsoever? it should be possible as long as your brain and heart are functioning properly. since you could not at all sense the outside world, would your mind therefore become its own self-contained universe? Would you even have a sense of self-identity?

Another similar scenario...what if you suddenly lost all senses? in this circumstance you would have recollection of sensory data in your mind. would this effect the way you mind would function? i think that this situation would allow you to keep your self-identity.

would this even be possible?

What is it like to be a human?

2008-07-02T17:54:22-05:00

This is a tongue in cheek variation of Thomas Nagel’s classic article “What is it like to be a bat?” published in 1974 in which he proposed that consciousness is an intractable problem which cannot be easily solved by reductionist means because only a bat will know what it is like to be a bat and it is subjective:

http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.

We will never know what is it like to be a bat.

The issue here is, do we know (assuming we are all humans here) what is it like to be a human?

Your views?

Religious is not the same as spiritual

2007-09-19T05:24:55-05:00

Hi,

I just came to this idea reading the ‘salesman thread’, but then I thought it might be a topic of its own.

There seems to be a certain religious kind which sees religion as a kind of business: if you live a good life, you will be rewarded, at least in your afterlife. So being a moral person is a profit calculation. In the end, you are only interested in your own well being. The only difference with a ‘real egoist’, is that you postpone your reward.

To be genuine spiritual, I think, you should do the right thing without thinking about a reward. Something like a potential Hitler assasin who is warned that by killing a human being he will burn in hell eternally, answers: ‘OK, then, if that is price’. Think about the Muslim suicide killers: they know they will be rewarded with 95 (what is the exact number?) virgins when they die for Allah. And so they do it just for themselves. And they are not loyal to their wives.

I am not a native English speaker, so I hope I use the words in the right way: I would say that having faith is something else then believing. Believing means you trust on some reward you think you will get, faith that whatever the outcome, it is OK. So agnosticism seems to be the best ‘metaphysics’ for having faith.

Writing this, I remember a categorisation of Averroes: behaving morally correct can be induced by three kinds of argumentation:
1. Threaten with heaven and hell (this is good for the ‘normal’ people)
2. Make some nice stories about God and your relationship with him (this is for theologians)
3. Have real insight (much too complicated, only for philosophers)

In category 1 it is impossible to be spiritual. In category 2 it might be possible, but on the wrong grounds. Only in 3 it is really possible. But who has the ‘real insight’ in these? The Brights?

GdB

Free Will (Merged)

2006-03-07T10:51:49-05:00

Hello All!! :D

Here we can continue the free will discussion from the list serv that is to be shutdown (or so we are told).

Do human beings possess free will?

There is a good argument that we do not. It suggests that we are a combination of mechanistic (deterministic) actions and probability. The analogy used involves strings of dominoes and dice. You can imagine many strings and branches and probabilistic switches. All the things we do are controlled by such systems.

While I certainly understand that all the firings of neurons in my brain are in principal determinable as a cascade of dominoes and probability I think that the shear number of such possible events and probabilistic outcomes is so vast that the difference between having free will and not having free will is not discernable. For me it comes under Arthur C. Clarke’s rubric of "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The difficult part comes in when applying the no free will idea. For some it lets everyone off the hook for their behavior. Well not really off the hook, but punishment/rehabilitation in measure to their lack of ultimate culpability. Some argue that no free will implies no death penalty because the person was, by definition, not in control. A sort of "my genes made me do it" defense. I personally have quite a bit of difficulty with that line of thought. Yes, there are people who are outside the normal range of mental function. Their dominoes and probabilities do not work like most folks. But for most people behavior can be modified to be socially acceptable. It seems to me that the concept of rehabilitation suggests that there is more culpability than some will admit.

How is that for a start? :D

Wes

Homo Sapiens

2008-06-01T11:32:02-05:00

This was inspired by another thread.

Imagine, in the next 50 years Homo Sapiens undergoes speciation catalyzed by the radically changing climate.
From philosophical point of view, can we call them humans? will they deserve to have rights?

Even though they are superior to Home Sapiens, do you think the difference between them would cause humans to subject them to slavery? call them inferior species?

What about religion? How will they react?

v1ktor

Godel’s Incompleteness theorem vs determinism

2008-03-28T23:43:41-05:00

Can somebody explain to me what Godel’s Incompleteness theorem means in plain English? Also, what implications does it have on determinism?

Digital philosophy

2008-06-18T08:00:54-05:00

What is digital philosophy?

From the wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_philosophy

Digital philosophy is a new direction in philosophy and cosmology advocated by certain mathematicians and theoretical physicists, e.g., Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse (see his Calculating Space).

Digital philosophy grew out of an earlier digital physics (both terms are due to Fredkin), which proposes to ground much of physical theory in cellular automata. Specifically, digital physics works through the consequences of assuming that the universe is a gigantic Turing-complete cellular automaton.

Digital philosophy is a modern re-interpretation of Gottfried Leibniz’s monist metaphysics, one that replaces Leibniz’s monads with aspects of the theory of cellular automata. Digital philosophy purports to solve certain hard problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of physics, since, following Leibniz, the mind can be given a computational treatment. The digital approach also dispenses with the non-deterministic essentialism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In a digital universe, existence and thought would be equivalent to computation. Thus computation is the single substance of a monist metaphysics, while subjectivity arises from computational universality.

Zuse’s Thesis: The Universe is a computer

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995; pronounce: “Conrud Tsoosay") not only built the first programmable computers (1935-1941) and devised the first higher-level programming language (1945), but also was the first to suggest (in 1967) that the entire universe is being computed on a computer, possibly a cellular automaton (CA). He referred to this as “Rechnender Raum” or Computing Space or Computing Cosmos.

Gregory Chaitin and Omega, the unknowable number:

http://www-2.dc.uba.ar/profesores/becher/ns.html

Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can’t actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it’s an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.

The reason for Chaitin’s provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. “Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason,” Chaitin says. “Maths is true by accident.”

Chaitin’s mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.

The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. “It’s the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics,” Chaitin says.

The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won’t exist. And if you can’t make connections, you can’t solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. “Chaitin’s work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions,” Casti says.

Now, the Super-Omegas:

Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. “We can go beyond Omega,” Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the “Super-Omegas”.

Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an “oracle”. And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega’.

But if one oracle knows Omega, it’s easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega’. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega’’, which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. “There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas,” he says.

Are there Super-Omegas in the real world?

But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. “Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers,” he says.

Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.

Real computers don’t just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. “Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output,” Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.

Free Will in theodicy

2007-09-27T18:45:42-05:00

Hi,

Free will is usually given as an explanation to the problem of evil.

I think it is a bad idea for the following reason :

Not all our actions are bad because of choice. Sometimes we are delluded, and it brings to suffering just because of that.

For example, when muslims are brainwashed about virgins in heaven, that influences their choice.
Or, when people are taught that certain people are “just animals” and given false information to prove that.
Or when people are mislead by the government, and don’t have enough critical faculties to think for themselves.

Free Will Yes or No, Step Two- So What?

2007-09-09T17:45:34-05:00

It seems there are a couple of roughly distinct positions staked out in all these free will threads. These don’t necessarily correspond to traditional categories in debating the subject (for example, no one here appears to believe in counter-causal free will based on a soul or other non-physical entity that gives us free choice independant of the material constituents of our brains). Unfortunately I’m not able to summarize them as clearly as I’d like, but I’m doing so only to get to the next step in the discussion, which as I see it is talking about the consequences of which position one takes. So we have:

1) No such thing as free will, complete determinism; we don’t in any meaningful sense make choices since what we “choose” at any given moment is the only possible action given the state of our physical being that determines our behavior.

2) Compatibilism; in some way, even though determinism is true or likely true, the concept of our deliberating and choosing between alternative actions has meaning in describing how we act.

I tend to fall into the second category. Though ultimately our thoughts, actions, and choices all emerge from a physical substrate subject to deterministic or probabilistic laws of physics and chemistry, the relationship between substrate and the subjective experience and actual expression of thinking and choosing is so complex as to be essentially unpredictable, and this means the model of active free choice is a useful practical device for explaining and evaluating human behavior, even if it may be incomplete at a fundamental level. As an analogy, Newtonian mechanics works on any scale I’m likely to be alive at, so I’m happy to use it as my model for the behavior of objectxs even though at other scales it falls apart. Similar reasoning works for me on the subject of free will.

Anyway, the important thing for this thread is what are the consequences of choosing one of these positions? Stephen said something in another thread to the effect that if we want to treat each other better we have to give up on the notion that anyone is morally responsible for their choices and actions because these actions are not the consequence of free will but deterministic mechanics. Others here have also made the link between rejecting any kind of free will as a necessary step to eliminating such things as a justice system based on punishment and retribution. I disagree . Though I am essentially a compatibilist when it comes to free will, and I think people can be said in a meaningful sense to be responsible for their choices, within certain limits that we may want to go into, I don’t support the notion that punishment for its own sake is a useful or moral response to socially condemned behavior. Anyone care to take a stab at defending or demolishing the notion that one’s free will stance must necessarily determine one’s approach to ethics?

Realist being mistaken as pessimists

2008-03-04T07:41:25-05:00

I consider myself a realist in the sense that I “keep it real,” respect and acknowledge reality. Often when I give my views on a topic, many claim I am being pessimistic. But I am not. I am just acknowledging the reality of the topic being discussed. I find people often holding on to overly optimistic views distorts the reality of the situation and they often do so because it makes them feel “good” about the situation rather than just acknowledging the reality of it. But when acknowledging reality, one doesn’t have to hold a preference about it one way or another. Your thoughts?