I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism.
The real problem for me has not been that materialism implies in principle that things are going to be gloomy, for example because of lack of free will, souls, consciousness, etc. It is not the rules of physics that I find problematic.
It is the particular arrangement of atoms, the particular initial conditions that are the issue. Things could be good under materialism, but actually, they are going more mixed.
Personally, I really, really hate the laws of thermodynamics; among other things, they make survival more difficult because I have to eat and maintain my body temperature. It would be nice to be powered by a perpetual motion machine, wouldn’t it?
You have to critique the rules in aggregate, rather than in isolation.
The laws of thermodynamics are not actually basic laws by the way—the basic laws are the standard model plus gravity. Thermodynamics (may be, probably is) an emergent property of these laws.
The laws of the physics are the rules, without which we couldn’t play the game. They make it hard for any one player to win. If you took any of the laws away, you’d probably be a paperclip-equivalent by now. And even if you weren’t, living without physics would be like playing tennis without a net. You’d have no goals or desires as we understand them.
I assume Crono was objecting to these particular laws of physics not the idea of there being any laws of physics at all. I’m actually not sure if there can be existence without laws of physics.
The real problem for me has not been that materialism implies in principle that things are going to be gloomy, for example because of lack of free will, souls, consciousness, etc. It is not the rules of physics that I find problematic.
It is the particular arrangement of atoms, the particular initial conditions that are the issue. Things could be good under materialism, but actually, they are going more mixed.
Huh? “More mixed”? What could be better, and how is it getting worse?
Mixed in terms of goodness/badness from the point of view of my preferences.
Personally, I really, really hate the laws of thermodynamics; among other things, they make survival more difficult because I have to eat and maintain my body temperature. It would be nice to be powered by a perpetual motion machine, wouldn’t it?
You have to critique the rules in aggregate, rather than in isolation.
The laws of thermodynamics are not actually basic laws by the way—the basic laws are the standard model plus gravity. Thermodynamics (may be, probably is) an emergent property of these laws.
The laws of the physics are the rules, without which we couldn’t play the game. They make it hard for any one player to win. If you took any of the laws away, you’d probably be a paperclip-equivalent by now. And even if you weren’t, living without physics would be like playing tennis without a net. You’d have no goals or desires as we understand them.
Except that, as far as thermodynamics goes, the game is rigged and the house always wins. Thermodynamics in a nutshell, paraphrased from C. P. Snow:
You can’t win the game.
You can’t break even.
You can’t stop playing.
I assume Crono was objecting to these particular laws of physics not the idea of there being any laws of physics at all. I’m actually not sure if there can be existence without laws of physics.