Thought Experiments

Originally Submitted by emil10001 on Fri, 11/26/2010 - 15:36

I was listening to some lectures by Shelly Kagan, where he is discussing the idea of self, identity and what do we follow to determine where the self is. He lays out three options, the soul, the body (more correctly, the brain), or the personality. He dismisses the soul argument as not being compelling, and I agree. He then says that he is sort of stuck on which to follow, the body or the personality. He provides a few thought experiments to try to tease out our intuitions. He offers Peter van Inwagen’s thought experiment counter to the body theory.

Here is that though experiment:

Suppose that my son builds a tower out of wooden blocks. We have a set of wooden blocks at home. Suppose that he builds some elaborate tower. It’s very impressive. And he says, “Please show it to mom when she comes home.” And he goes to bed. And I’m very good. I’m cleaning up the house after he goes to bed and oops, I knock over the tower. I say, “Oh my god, he’s going to be so angry. I promised him I’d be careful.” So what I do is I take the blocks and I put them back together, building a tower in the very same shape and the very same structure, the very same order as the tower that my son had built. And in fact I’m so careful–perhaps the blocks are numbered–I’m so careful that every block is in exactly the same position as in the case where my son built it.

All right, I rebuild or I build this tower and my wife comes home and I say, “Look what our son built. This is the tower that our son built.” Ah, that doesn’t sound right. That’s not the tower that our son built. That’s a tower that I built. This is a duplicate tower.

The idea here is that it’s not really the same body if it has been destroyed and rebuilt, even with the same parts, in some important sense. Kagan then offers a couple of thought experiments from Bernard Williams involving a mad scientist:

• First experiement

All right, so case number one. Here you are. The mad scientist has kidnapped you and he says: I’ve been working on mind transfer machines. And what I’m going to do is I’ve got you and I’ve also kidnapped somebody else over here, Linda. And I’m going to hook you up to my machines and swap your minds. And what that means is, I’m going to read off the memories and the beliefs and the desires from your brain and read off the memories and desires and beliefs from Linda’s brain. And then I’m going to electronically transfer Linda’s memories and beliefs and so forth over here and implant them onto this brain. And take your memories and beliefs and so forth and implant them onto Linda’s brain. First, we’ll put you to sleep when we do all this procedure. Then when you wake up, you will wake up in Linda’s body.“ There’ll be something here that, you’ll wake up and you’ll say, "What am I doing in this new body? What happened to my beard? How come I’m speaking in this high female voice?” Whatever it is, but you’ll think to yourself, “Well, here I am, Shelly Kagan. I seem to be inhabiting Linda’s body. Don’t know how that happened. Oh yes, the mad scientist kidnapped me and he transferred us, he swapped us. He swapped our bodies, swapped our minds. I guess the whole thing works.”

So the mad scientist explains all of this to you, but in order to give it a little kicker, because he’s also an evil mad scientist–that may be evil already, but because he’s an evil mad scientist–he says, “And then when I’m done–” So over here we’ve got Shelly’s body but Linda’s personality. So Linda thinking “What am I doing?” and “What am I doing in Shelly’s body? How did I get a beard?” So over here, Linda, in Shelly’s body. Over here, Shelly, in Linda’s body. “I’m going to torture one of these. But because I’m a generous evil mad scientist, I want to ask you which one should I torture?”

• Second experiement

Now, let’s tell a different story. Both of these stories, as I say, come from Bernard Williams. Bernard Williams says here’s another example we can think about. Mad scientist, again, kidnaps you, kidnaps Linda. And he says, “Shelly, I’ve got some news for you.” I’m switching between you and me. He says, “Shelly, I’ve got some news for you. I’m going to torture you.” I say, “No, no! Please don’t do it to me! Please, please, don’t torture me!” He says, “Well, you know, I’m in the mad scientist business. This is what I do. I’m going to torture you.” He says, “But because I’m a generous mad scientist, before I torture you, what I’m going to do is give you amnesia. I’m going to completely scrub clean your brain so that you won’t remember that you’re Shelly Kagan. You won’t have any memories of growing up in Chicago. You won’t have any memories of deciding to become a philosopher. You won’t remember getting married or having children. You won’t remember the–you won’t have any desire. The whole thing wiped clean, complete perfect amnesia before I torture you. Don’t you feel better?”

No, I don’t feel better. I’m still going to be tortured and now we’ve added insult to injury. I’ve got amnesia as well as being tortured. No comfort there. “Well,” he says, “Look, I’ll make the deal sweeter for you. After I give you amnesia, before I torture you, I will drive you insane and make you believe that you’re Linda. I’ve been studying Linda. There she is. I’ve been reading her psychology by looking at her brain waves and so forth and so on. And so I’m going to delude you into thinking that you’re Linda. I’m going to make you think ‘Oh, I’m Linda.’” You won’t talk like that. “Oh, I’m Linda.” “And you’ll have the memories of Linda growing up in Pennsylvania and you’ll remember Linda’s family and, like Linda, you’ll want to be an author, or whatever it is that Linda wants to be. And then I’ll torture you. Are you happy now?”

No, I’m not happy now. First of all, I’m being tortured. I was given amnesia. And now you’ve driven me crazy and make me–deluded me into thinking that I’m Linda. No comfort there. He says, “Okay, last attempt to make–you’re not being very reasonable,” he says. “Last attempt, I’m going to, after I drive you crazy and make you think you’re Linda, I’m going to do the corresponding thing for Linda. I’m going to give her amnesia and then I’m going to drive her crazy and make her think that she’s Shelly. Give her all of your memories and beliefs and desires. Now is it okay that I’m going to torture you?”

My personal view is that as soon as you destroy the information on your brain, you no longer exist. The person who thinks that they are you is just a copy. I think that it would be interesting to add in the term ‘copy’ or 'clone’ in the above experiments, when talking about the body containing your personality, to see if your intuitions change. I have thought up a bit of a twist to Bernard Williams’ experiments:

• Smith has decided to murder his neighbor. But, before he does, a mad scientist has kidnapped Smith and Jones. The mad scientist hooks up Jones and Smith to a machine that he says describes as a brain swap machine. The way the machine works is that it reads does a complete brain scan of one individual and writes that information onto the brain of the other individual. The same is done in the opposite direction. There is no movement of the physical brain. He does the brain swap, and then releases both individuals. The body of Jones goes out and murders his neighbor. Who is responsible?

• A mad scientist has kidnapped Jones and Smith. The mad scientist hooks up Jones and Smith to a machine that he says describes as a brain swap machine. The way the machine works is that it reads does a complete brain scan of one individual and writes that information onto the brain of the other individual. The same is done in the opposite direction. There is no movement of the physical brain. He does the brain swap, and then releases the body of Jones on the condition that he go out and commit a murder. Who is responsible?

Original responses on Reddit.

My answer to the question ‘Would you like to know the time and cause of your death?’

Originaly Submitted by emil10001 on Mon, 11/22/2010 - 10:48

I might first ask if the knowledge of my death would have any impact on the time and cause. If it does have an impact, I might ask if I will live longer if I know the time and cause. Then, if it is in my best interest to know, then I would like to find out. If my knowledge did not have any impact on the time and cause, then I would like to know. If my questions could not be answered, I would like to know.

Here are a couple examples intended to illustrate why these might be pertinent questions.

Example A)

This would be an issue regardless of whether or not we have free will. The information of my time and cause of death would only be known to the agent up until the time he interfered with me by giving me said information. Let’s assume that the agent is the Laplacian Demon, and we’ll also assume that determinism is true. In order for the Laplacian Demon to have perfect information about the universe, and be able to project from a given point all future events, the demon must be able to store that much information. Turing postulated that it is impossible for a system to have perfect information about itself, and it is impossible for a program to be able to know how long it will take to complete execution. See the Halting Problem. We can apply that knowledge to the Laplacian Demon to say that the demon can only have perfect knowledge of the universe, if it exists outside of the universe and does not interfere with it. It must exist outside the universe, because it needs more resources than the universe has to offer, and it cannot interfere and still have knowledge because of the halting problem.

In the situation described above, it would be the case that the information would only be good up until you were told of it. You could obviously then take steps to avoid getting yourself into that situation, and the Laplacian Demon would have no way of modeling that new information until it stopped interfering.

Example B)

Alternatively, we could shift our view to that of a sci-fi paradigm. Let’s suppose that instead of a demon, the agent with said information is a time traveller. We will say, for the purposes of this story, that the time traveller is a physics and philosophy double major who is very interested in causality. Her university is testing out its time machine, the first ever, and she has gotten approval to run some experiments. She would like to know, once and for all, the rules about causality and time travel. She decides that a good test for this would be to go back in time and inform people of the time and cause of their death to see if they can avoid it. The time traveller would read my obituary in the paper in her current time, find out the pertinent details, and then travel back in time to tell me about it. At this point, she would not know whether or not my knowledge would have any impact on its coming true. Then, the time traveller would need to go back to her originating time to know whether or not it was still true that I died at that time. There are two possibilities, possibility A, in which I die at the same time before and after I have been given the information. Or, possibility B, in which I do not die at the prescribed time.

Possibility A would leave the time traveller with the option of trying this again, reading another persons obituary, going back, informing them, and returning to check its accuracy. In possibility A, the time traveller would not be able to be certain that she knew until this process was repeated enough times without fail. Once there is even a single chink in the chain, we fall over to possibility B. Possibility B would then prove to the traveller that knowledge of the information could change the outcome. She would never be able to posses any real knowledge about the time between her present and a given previous time if she were to interfere with it.

Notice that these examples preclude the option of knowing all possible futures, which I am always instantly skeptical of. You would need universes’ worth of storage and processing power to even attempt such a feat. Also, notice that neither of these scenarios requires Free Will. I’m sure that there are many other cases where some sort of magic is the source of knowledge which have different rules, but I think that my cases are still interesting.

See the original Reddit post here, posted by _Winters.

Speed

Submitted by emil10001 on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 12:56

My cell phone just hit 6mbps down 1mbps up from my apartment. That is faster than my dorm connection was throughout college. It’s faster than what typical cable internet speeds were 5 years ago. And my phone is faster than desktops were (about) a decade ago. I just did some checking and found that my phone calculates pi to a million digits a bit faster than a 3GHz P4 processor (my phone does 0.5s with one algorithm, and 1.9s with another). However, I would not trust the results without doing a lot more digging.

Consider that people have their phones with them all of the time, and that many people now carry phones with the ability to access the web. Think about how much information you have access to 24 hours a day, compared to just a couple of years ago. Next year, phone processor speeds are going to double, again, and the major mobile providers are all going through significant network upgrades. Our phones are powerful enough now for most of us to do actual business work on. I wonder what will happen a couple of (tech) generations from now (5-10 years).

Update - I’ve been able to over-clock it to 1.7GHz.

Values

Submitted by emil10001 on Thu, 11/18/2010 - 01:23

I remember when I was at University, while taking a course on Nietzsche, I decided that I would really think about what values I wanted to have for my life. I think that a lot of people don’t do this explicitly, and if you asked them, they probably couldn’t really tell you what they value. Some people might be able to list off some things, and a few might be able to back up some of those values. Others might take offense to the idea that you can choose your own values, thinking that values must be external to have worth.

I think that values are important because they can inform us in difficult situations. If we are facing a particularly difficult problem, we might want to stop and think about what we consider to be important, qualities that we respect in others, and the implications of a particular decision. Values can also serve as a measure for your life when you’re feeling reflective.

Here is a short list of things that I value in no particular order (this might get edited over time):

• Truth (notice the capital ’T’)
• Honesty
• Responsibility
• Hard Work
• Education

These are mostly personal reasons for the values that I hold. But, I think that values, in and of themselves, are personal things. I am also not suggesting that anyone else should adopt my values, or that the reasons that I have for holding something as important should persuade anyone else.

Truth

I think that the search for objective truth is important because it is the main thing that pushes us forward as a civilization. The more our scientific understanding grows, the more we know about our place in the universe, where we came from, and the places that we should go. I look at Truth as synonymous with a scientific understanding, and what science is trying to get at, what it is working towards. I think that metaphysical truth is a lot more slippery, not in the sense that it doesn’t or can’t exist, but in the sense that it is much more difficult to nail down and to understand. What I respect about philosophy is that it tries to take a scientific approach in trying to answer questions.

Honesty

This is a tricky one, but is not too difficult for me to hold as a value, as I am a terrible liar. I think that it is worth being honest with people because I don’t want to give people excuses not to trust me, not to give me work or not to discuss things with me. It also feels good to be honest with people. I never need to look back with regret at something that I said, wondering if maybe I should have been a little more forthcoming about some detail. Instead, I can look back and feel comfortable taking responsibility for what I had said.

I also have trouble with situations where I feel like somebody is expecting me to act in a certain way, or to bend to their views. In those situations, depending on the circumstances, I might be more apt to keep my mouth shut, and not say anything, but if I am asked a direct question, I will give an honest response.

Intellectual honesty is also important. If you aren’t going to be intellectually honest, then there is very little point in having a discussion with you.

Responsibility

I think that from a metaphysical point of view, moral responsibility is very difficult to justify. But, from the personal perspective, taking responsibility for a mistake can not only make you feel better, but it can provide you with opportunities. Namely, if you screw up and admit it, you can then learn from your mistake and make sure not to repeat it. If, instead you refuse to take responsibility, you might be tempted to repeat your mistake again, since you are claiming that whatever it was that went wrong before wasn’t your fault. When somebody screws up with me, I want them to just tell me so that we can figure out how to fix it and move on. I worked for a guy who refused to do that, and his stubbornness cost the entire team lots of time and money.

Hard Work

This one has really paid off for me. I remember growing up and observing my family. The extended family on my mom’s side has a few cottages on Lake Ontario, and every weekend during the summer we would all stay down there. The whole family would work on projects all weekend, usually a couple of different things going on at a time. One of my uncles doubled the size of his cottage over the course of a couple of years, and built an automated boat ramp. Another uncle actually built a cottage from the ground up. Hard work has been something that I had always respected, but it didn’t really click until I sat down and seriously considered what I thought was important.

For me, it is what got me my current job. I had spent a few years after college working at a job that I didn’t really like, and was eventually laid off when we lost a big client. I spent some time thinking about what to do, and what I decided was that I wasn’t just going to sit around all day sending out resumes. Instead, I took some classes and completed some of my own personal projects. I wrote a couple of small video games, as well as one or two other software projects. When I applied for the job that I have now, my interviewer was really impressed with what I had done on my own and decided to hire me. Since then, I haven’t disappointed, I just kept working. I know that there have been several people that have come and gone from my group, but the CEO keeps calling me with work.

Education

This is an essential way for us to grow. I love learning new things. I’ve been out of school for almost five years now, but I’m still taking classes when I can. I’m on my fourth course since I graduated. I’ve taken Intro to Computer Science, Data Structures, Game Development and now Free Will. I love reading about new studies, or new ideas. I want to keep learning things for the rest of my life, and I want to take as many courses as I can to learn things in-depth. I think that this also ties into Truth, in that education is required for us to move towards a better understanding of the world that we live in.

What are your values? Original comments here.

Discussions with Dualists

Originally Submitted by emil10001 on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 15:27

I am planning on writing a paper about how to have a constructive conversation with a Dualist, on the topic of Free Will. I have read several papers from experimental philosophy that suggest that the intuitions of common people are that of the Dualist Libertarian position. I think the best way to describe myself would be a Phsyicalist and as a Compatibilist (if Determinism were true). I would like to have a discussion with some Libertarian Dualists with the goal of trying to figure out how best to have a constructive discussion.

I know a couple of seminary students who have agreed to sit down with me and have a discussion. I have been warned by my professor that there is a danger that I may not find the answers that they provide to be satisfying. He thinks that there is a good chance that it is either something that they haven’t really given much thought to, or that they just won’t be able to provide good answers. My response to this issue is that the purpose of my paper is not to have them answer my questions, instead, the purpose is to try to figure out the best way of discussing the topic, and to see if we can move the discussion forward a bit. He said that I might be ok having that as a goal.

I have written up an outline (pdf).

An Argument for Compatibilism

Originally Submitted by emil10001 on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 15:05

There was a post recently on r/atheism that suggested a proof that an omnicient God is incompatible with Free Will. I think that the author was incorrect in their proof, and I would like to try to take it apart.

If perfect foreknowledge of a being’s actions exists, then that being does not have free will (its actions are predetermined and cannot deviate).

This supposes that God is the Laplacian Demon, and implies determinism. I honestly don’t think that a majority of the people in the world, and especially in the US are determinists.

The existence of an omniscient god implies the existence of perfect foreknowledge of all humans’ actions. This can be granted with or without determinism. Therefore, omniscience implies a lack of free will. (We’re done; any definition which includes omniscience and free will is thus inconsistent.) This does not follow for all types of Free Will. Perhaps it follows for Free Will in the Libertarian sense, with respect to determinism. But that is simply incompatiblism, and a fairly obvious conclusion. Most Incompatiblists will argue against the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that there is room for a Libertarian Free Will. Free Will in the Libertarian sense is also not incompatible with an idea of God, as long as God is not required to know the entire whole of time, just have perfect knowledge of the current. The Libertarian view is actually fairly easy to put in a religious context, and that is the view of Free Will that says that not even God could know what you are going to do next. Most of the Libertarians that I have read have justified the view by saying that real, quantum randomness plays a role in the making of certain decisions.

I am not going to justify the Libertarian view much more, because from the materialist perspective, I think that it is incoherent. I am not yet decided on whether or not a persuasive argument can be made from the point of view of a dualist. Shifting back to Compatibilism, this is more the idea that there are types of Free Will that can be had even if determinism were true. There are a few problems in the determinism vs indeterminism debate, and not all of them are well understood by most people.

One such issue is the principle of ‘could have done otherwise.’ This is a staple of the Libertarian view, but it is really difficult to get them to pin down how one could have the ability to have done otherwise in a given situation. Robert Kane, of the Libertarian view, suggests that there is something like a garden of forking paths, others have made similar suggestions. There is a fundamental question about the nature of the universe that we have to ask at this point, 'does a multi-verse exist, and if so, are those multi-verses the result of our decisions?’ If the answer is 'yes,’ then we can go on discussing the Liberatarin view without modification. However, I think that the answer to that question is a sound 'No!’ and as a result, the Libertarian view must be modified a bit to accomodate this, such that the garden of forking paths becomes a model that is intended only to describe the possibilities, and not something to be taken literally. This is important to the idea of 'could have done otherwise’ because it demonstrates that regardless of whether or not determinism is true, there is only one path forward, just as there is only one chain of events in our past. We are no more able to 'change the future’ as we are to 'change the past’ (assuming that we do not have some sort of time machine).

On the idea of a branching indeterminism with real randomness. Here we have random events that cause branching points, and the universe will branch faster than exponentially at every instant. We follow one of the paths along the branches, and other versions of ourselves follow different branches to occupy an ever-expanding multiverse of possibilities.

The big problem that I see with the branching options is that the branch-points in these models would explode faster than exponentially at every agent choice and/or every truly random event. This would mean that if we did exist in a multi-verse, that multi-verse will have been multiplying at an extremely high rate since it was first created. How does that physically work? It’s fine to think about metaphysical possibilities, but the branching would need massive amounts of energy to work, so much so that the multi-verse likely wouldn’t have sustained itself for this long. I think that the branching multi-verse idea doesn’t work.

Dan Dennett suggests that we should modify our view of 'could have done otherwise’ to be more along the lines of possessing the ability to take some different action in similar, but not exactly the same circumstances. He has a brilliant analogy for this, which is that of two computers playing a game of chess against one another. Program A and Program B play each other in a game of chess, Program B looses, because it didn’t castle when it had the opportunity. The programmer who wrote B says that B could have castled. In what sense? There appear to be two distinct possiblities, either that the programmer is correct in that B could have castled if something as simple as a random number generator had thrown a different value, and B does have the ability to castle in a meaningful way. Or, that the programmer was not correct, that in almost every similar circumstance, B would not castle, as B is not a good enough program to realize the effectiveness of the move. This thought experiment is useful because it lays out the 'could have done otherwise’ idea in a completely deterministic world (that of a computer), yet it gives the ability to say, meaningfully, that something 'could have done othewise.’

Another typical sticking point in the compatiblist/libertarian debate is real vs pseudo randomness. Libertarians use real randomness to justify that we have indeterminism, as that is a pre-condition for a Libertarian Free Will. Kane places the randomness in our brains, during the making of certain types of decisions (self-forming actions, he calls them). I think that this argument does not hold much water, as any sort of randomness in the decision making process would seem to detract from the control that we have in our decision making process. I think that Bob Doyle has a better idea here, which is that real randomness is always running in the background of our brains, churning up new ideas out of the noise of activity going on. Dennett’s view is that it shouldn’t matter if the randomness is real or pseudo-random, since there is no Laplacian Demon haunting us, and no agent has the ability to step outside of the universe and take a peek in. Dennett does grant that real randomness would be useful in certain, special cases.

If a decision comes down to random chance, what is the point of using this as an argument for free will? If your self-forming actions are influenced by randomness, then so are the desires between which you are choosing in your SFAs (self-forming actions), as are the causes of those desires. This issue is not a problem for the compatiblist, as they accept that we are sometimes subject to outside forces. However, for the libertarian, it seems as though the argument that chaotic randomness in the brain contradicts the sort of free will that they claim to desire.

Responsibility is an important point here, but I think that the general idea of the compatiblist is that since there are no Laplacian Demons, and we are all on the same playing field with respect to the information that we have about the universe, it is perfectly reasonable to hold people responsible for their actions. Further, within the context of society there are some good reasons to keep responsibility around, if not from the purely moral perspective, but from the consequentialist perspective. Dennett does a nice job of laying out the reasons for this in his book “Elbow Room.”

Basically, there is a consequentialist argument to be made here. We can have responsibility, even if determinism is true, in the sense that we need some way of holding people accountable for their actions. Having a society with rules is important, because it helps to keep things moving in a positive direction. We might need to give up a bit of our intuitions about why we punish, we might want to say that we do not punish someone because they deserved it through their actions. Instead, we should punish because there are consequences to certain actions, and those consequences should serve a purpose. Sometimes, that purpose is to deterpeople from taking some action, other times the purpose is to try to correct the negative behavior, sometimes the purpose is both. This is also not to say that our feelings of guilt or holding somebody accountable for their actions on a moral level need to go away either, as these may server consequentialist purposes. If a person is averse to feeling guilt, and they know that if they take some action, that they will be made to feel guilty for having done it, that may be a good enough deterrant for them to avoid taking that action. (See Dan Dennett’s, “Elbow Room” p156 for a better explanation)

Control may be a sign that even in a deterministic universe we can affect our environment to bend to our will. If we are cold, we can turn up the thermostat. If we are flying a model airplane, we can determine the course that it should take, or some stunt that we would like to see. This is something that Dennett thinks is an important facet of our freedom.

Finally, we are subject to reasons and introspection. This should be something that we welcome, as a sign of our ability to think rationally, and make choices based on our experiences. This has a sound foundation in determinism. We have a wealth of experiences and reflections to draw on when we make a decision, and we typically try to open ourselves to the best reasoning that we can muster while making a decision. Reasons, in the deterministic universe would hold just as much sway as they do in an indeterministic universe, if not more. We have the ability to look within ourselves and reflect on previous decisions that we’ve made and either remain with those previous decisions, or decide to depart from them with the presentation of new evidence.

All in all, I think that there is much to be said for a Compatiblist Free Will. I have done my best to cover the topic in a post, but I know that there is much that I have left out.

Original comments here.

The Big Idea

This is my humble blog. I intend to write about philosophy, science, religion and maybe some technology. Instead of hosting comments here, I will just submit the story to Reddit, and post a link that directs to that discussion.