@Caledonian—as you say, there’s no a-priori reason to believe that a thing composed of predictable parts must itself be predictable. We just have to learn by observation whether it is true or not, and so far the evidence is that we can not predict individual humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
Ian_C.
Karma: 143
I read it as “You can consciously choose your actions, but your ultimate reasons will always be subconscious and unchangeable.”
I disagree with this. Many of our conscious choices are driven by subconscious desires, but not all. We do have veto power. What’s more, through conscious repetition we can reprogram the subconscious and change how we feel about things, even on a very deep level.
@Lake—I think Subhan is only about whims. Yes, he sees that values are tied closely to human nature, but only uses that to argue against Obert. What Obert should have pointed out is that he goes from “there is not one true morality” to “there is only preference” without arguing why those are the only two possibilities.
I think that Subhan and Obert may represent two sides of a false dichotomy, namely the idea that there’s either one absolute morality for all minds, or it’s all subjective. But a third possibility exists—that of objective morality, where the results depend on the physical nature of the being in question, but not their whims.
Relationships are real. For example if a plant is “under” a table, that is a fact, not a subjective whim of the observer. So if morality is a relationship, then aliens and man can have different moralities but both be objective, not subjective. The relationship would be between the object sought and the entity seeking it, e.g. murder + man = bad, murder + alien = good.
I think there may be 3 essential types:
The whim type, who thinks whatever he wants in automatically right.
The authoritarian type who thinks that whatever society or religion says is automatically right.
The scientific type who thinks he has found a morality based in fact.
I don’t think 3s should be lumped in with 2s. Yes, he is following an external standard, but it is because he thinks there is a reason to do so, and is open to reason to change his mind, unlike the 2s (or 1s for that matter).
Not a huge amount snicker
The only thing I can think of right now is I’d get a private plane, because I’ve been rather fed up with airports lately.
“Maybe you should just do that?”
Heck, hell with physics too. Let’s just make up all human knowledge. If we’re going to invent the prescriptive, why not the descriptive too?
I guess logically I would have to do nothing, since there would be no logical basis to perform any action. This would of course be fatal after a few days, since staying alive requires action.
(I want to emphasize this is just a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question—I would never really just sit down and wait to die.)
In my experience men in technical fields are very welcoming towards women (and I have been in the field for 10 years). It is social pressure from other women that keeps them out. They judge each other on their social skills, technical skills get no props.
The solution to get more women on this blog is for there to be more “social” oriented posts so women can use those as an excuse to their friends why they come here, and not have to feel embarrassed. But the deeper solution is for women to put less pressure on each other.
I have noticed that communicating with the opposite sex is challenging even in the workplace (not just romance). When it’s just “a bunch of guys” we somehow get the engineering meeting done a lot faster.
Another way a 2-argument function can become 1-argument is to become an OO method, e.g. global function “void likes(Person, Person)” becomes “class Person { void likes(otherPerson); }”
i.e. the first argument becomes the receiving object.
And this is what people are forgetting—that actions (such as attraction) are not disembodied things, rather there is always a thing that acts. OO makes it impossible to forget this.
Ah yes, you covered that in Optimization and the Singularity.
Is this true of ideas/memes also? Because there are a lot of wacky groups out there, more than just froth on the surface.
“The problem with this statement is that you don’t define what you mean by sum.”
I mean if you list all the actions that it’s parts can do alone, the combined thing can have actions that aren’t in that list.
Sorry, that should be “no need.” No need because if you keep going back you won’t find it, it only exists at the higher level, like the ability to grasp only exists at a higher level.
Objects are more than just their attributes, they are their actions also. Both are aspects of the whole that is the object. OO programmers recognize this with the concept of a “method” in which an function is part of an object instead of something somewhere else in the program.
Therefore a hand is more than just fingers, palm and thumb. Attribute-wise, that’s all it is, but action wise, the hand has a new ability (“grasping”) that the component objects don’t have. So reductionism is wrong—a thing can be more than the sum of it’s parts (since “thing” includes action). And a man made of predictable little atoms does not necessarily have no free will.
So there’s need to go recursively back in to the atoms. You go back far enough until you see something that exists. Until you witness yourself making a choice or you don’t.
If you model causality as existing not between two events, but between an object and it’s actions, then you explain the regularity of the universe while also allowing for self-directed entities (i.e. causal chains only have to go back as far as the originating entity instead of the Big Bang).
There’s lots of ways to implement something as simple as addition, but how many ways are there to implement a man? Curently, the slightest mutation can cause a miscarriage, and a few molecules of poison can kill a man, that’s how sensitive the implementation is.
What is the math on this? As the complexity of a thing goes up, surely the number of ways to implement it goes down (given each building block has a limited number ways of combining)? To the point where with something as complex as man, the way he is is the only way he can be. i.e. artificial man is impossible.
I know the claim was that morality was implementation-independent, but I am just bothered by the idea that there can be multiple implementations of John.
“That is not what I said, and it’s not what’s true. Something composed of only predictable parts is predictable itself, because there’s no place for unpredictability to enter in.”
Sorry, I thought that’s what you meant by “I suppose it’s logically possible that there are high-level priorities that are neither formed out of nor controlled by lower-level ones.”
How do you know that two predictable actions composed must equal another predictable action? There is no a-priori reason to believe that is true in every possible universe. I regard actions as just another aspect of objects, like their attributes. Logic won’t tell you that red + blue = purple, and it won’t tell you how the actions of atom X with combine with atom Y.