That would be very surprising for a species that reflexively attempts to explain things
Not really. Failing to do stuff that works will kill you. Doing stuff that works inexplicably won’t.
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Best. Comment. Ever.
Under which laws of physics?
But we almost certainly are talking past each other , because Twin Earth isn’t really about water..it’s about naming and necessity . Any example where naming is contingent would have done .
The Dome was questioned about that a few months ago.
Of course, Turkey does want to join the EU...they have been trying to get in for decades. But they never did get in, and it’s not like Erdogan is a particularly EU friendly figure,so it’s not like it’s suddenly likely.
Of course heavy water is different to ordinary water . That’s not the point. The point is that in Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment, it is never asserted that XYZ is completely indistinguishable from water. The point is only that something similar sufficiently similar would have been called water when we started using the word thousands of years ago… thousands of years before a scientific understanding of water.
This sort of thing happens in our world too. For instance the “wasabi” available in the West is not wasabi.
Can you imagine a planet where all the water is heavy water?
How do you know?
Connor has answered the first point.
As to the second, BJ was singing DG’s praises at recent Conservative conference.
“Just like water,” they might say, and I would nod.
“Liquid, and transparent, with a density of 997 kilograms per meter cubed.”
“Sure,” I would reply.
“Which freezes and melts at exactly 0º Celsius, and which boils and condenses at exactly 100º Celsius.”
“Yyyyeahhhh,” I would say, uneasiness settling in
So assuming all the laws of physics are the same in this parallel world, you can’t have another water. Ok, but it’s a parallel world, so it need not have the same laws of physics.
But that’s not even the main problem: the XYZ thought experiment doesnt require XYZ to have identical fine grained properties to H2O, it just requires it to some superficial properties , like making up lakes and oceans .
In order to seek explanations for the patterns we see in reality, we must first embrace the idea that even when we don’t know the reasons why something has happened, we still hold that there are reasons why it happened.
That’s a much weaker claim than a claim to strict determinism.
Yet you do in fact end with a claim of strict determinism..
Therefore, a person who makes choice A had to make that choice, for to have made any other choice the person would have either had to be different than they actually were, or the situation/environment would have had to be different than it actually was
By a kind of semantic drift … from patterns reasons to causes to deterministic causes .
Causal determinism is a form of causality, clearly enough. But not all causality is deterministic , since indeterministic causality can be coherently defined. For instance: “An indeterministic cause raises the probability of its effect, but doesn’t raise it to certainty”. Far from being novel, or exotic, this is a familiar way of looking at causality. We all know that smoking causes cancer, and we all know that you can smoke without getting cancer...so the “causes” in “smoking causes cancer” must mean “increased the risk of”.
In order to seek explanations for the patterns we see in reality, we must first embrace the idea that even when we don’t know the reasons why something has happened, we still hold that there are reasons why it happened.
That’s a much weaker claim than a claim to strict determinism.
Yet you do in fact end with a claim of strict determinism..
Therefore, a person who makes choice A had to make that choice, for to have made any other choice the person would have either had to be different than they actually were, or the situation/environment would have had to be different than it actually was
By a kind of semantic drift .
Someone in the community told me that for me to think AGI probably won’t be developed soon, I must think I’m better at meta-rationality than Eliezer Yudkowsky, a massive claim of my own specialness
In relation to a massive claim of his own specialness...
What’s the point of worrying about decisions if everything is determined?
It’s like by having a vote that counts as opposed to a fake democracy.
Rationalists tend to think about these things in terms of toy problems, where they get so many utilons for making a correct decision, by the toy problem’s definition of correct. But there is no objective utilon. People value things subjectively , and a lot of people subjectively value actually making a difference.
You are not alone. There’s never been a meta level proof that you can apply the same decision theory to any possible universe. But most lesswrongians want to fiddle with the details, and not look at the big picture.
Basically, if you settle for decond best, then you lose some potential value...unless you are completely confident that the first best is unattainable.
What? Where did I say that?
You said that some people would feel more free if counterfactuals and probability, which are part of our decision making algorithm, existed somewhere outside of our mind.
No I didn’t. For future reference, you should respond to that kind of question using direct quotation.
In particular, I had no intention to comment on the feeling of freedom as opposed to actual freedom. I think you have been mentally translating “free will” into “feeling of freedom” because you believe in the doctrine that “free will just is the feeling of freedom” ….but I don’t believe in it, so it doesn’t represent my views.
Similarly, I don’t believe that counteractuals are only only logical or “in the mind”.
You are doing a thing where you misunderstand me because you are filtering my statements through your beliefs.
You are also doing a thing where you change the usual meanings of words to fit a certain worldview. That makes it impossible for to me express any other worldview …unless you accept that my usages differ from yours
There seem to be a huge gap between “something could have happened differently” and “there actually exist a parallel universe where this indeed happened differently”.
Yes. So what? I have never claimed that real counteractals are the same thing as parallel worlds. Nor have I claimed that they are the same thing as logical counterfactuals.
There are at least four possible stances
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No counterfactuals
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Logical but not real counteractals
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Logical and real counteractals.
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Multiple worlds.
If we consider probability and counterfactuals to exist only on the map,
I don’t. I have already stated that the argument is invalid.
But otherwise I don’t see how one follows from the other.
If “the one” is parallel worlds and “the other” is real counterfactuals, I never asserted that. But maybe you meant something else. Please read AND write carefully.
I agree. But that’s what my initial claim was about: libertarian free will not making sense
So why bring in counterfactuals?
For the same reason why we haven’t yet developed means to be immortal.
There is no reason to believe immortality is possible. Please understand that I don’t agree with most Rationalist doctrine.
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Well,not quite ignored...but there were a lot of problems. The first lockdown was too late , PPE wasn’t available, the track and trace system was too late and not good enough..and so on. Attempts were made.
Many of those who blame defeat on ‘lies’, including Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg themselves told flat-out lies. One example will do. Cameron and Osborne claimed repeatedly on TV, almost always unchallenged, that their new deal meant ‘after six months if you haven’t got a job you have to leave’. This is not an argument over the fairness of using a gross/net figure, like ‘£350 million’, or even a properly bogus figure like the Treasury’s £4,000 per household figure. It is a different category of claim – a flat out 100% lie. (For more details see HERE.)
Some people now claim this [claim about the NHS] was cynical and we never intended to spend more on the NHS. Wrong. Boris and Gove were agreed and determined to do exactly this. On the morning of 24 June they both came into HQ. In the tiny ‘operations room’ amid beer cans, champagne bottles, and general bedlam I said to Boris – on day one of being PM you should immediately announce the extra £100 million per week for the NHS [the specific pledge we’d made] is starting today and more will be coming – you should start off by being unusual, a political who actually delivers what they promise. ‘Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. We MUST do this, no question, we’ll park our tanks EVERYWHERE’ he said. Gove strongly agreed.
Ok. So The Dome’s justification of the £350m lie is that BJ kind of verbally agreed in principle to an extra £100m for the NHS.
So...a ballpark figure is OK on his side, but the Treasury can’t make an estimate of Brexit losses?
If they had not blown up this would have happened
What does this mean? BJ and MG fell out? They’re BFFs now.
So because something is based on induction and therefor probabilistic, it is somehow based on intuition
That’s not what I said.
So you haven’t shown that intuition isn’t needed to accept the validity of a reductive explanation.
You substituted “inductive” for “reductive”.
As soon as we understand that probabilities are part of the map, not the territory,
That’s equivalent to assuming determinism. If you assume determinism, then all the best things you have said are indeed the best you can do with regard to decision making. But I am not assuming determinism. The argument that probabilities are only in the map is invalid, because “only in the map” doesn’t follow from “in the map”.
I also do not understand why would anyone feel more free if their decision making algorithm existed outside of their mind
What? Where did I say that?
Another thing that I have troubles understanding, is how the objective existence of counterfactuals follows from, or even is compatible with indeterminism. When we model some event with multiple outcomes we can either perceive it as random in one world, or determinable in many worlds, where each world correspond to each outcome. But you claim that it won’t be enough for libertarians. For some reasons they need both at the same time?
I don’t know what you are referring to. Counterfactuals follow from indeterminism because indeterminism means an event could gave happened differently. It’s quite straightforward.
If it’s indeterminable even for the universe itself, how can it happen at all in this universe?
Why wouldn’t it happen? To me that looks like a circular argument: nothing can happen unless it is determined , so everything is determined. Determinism, therefore determinism.
I can think of some justification via our universe being an interventionist simulation
Why would it need to be a simulation? You are assuming that a law of physics must be a deterministic law. But it doesn’t say that anywhere.
And if someones defenition of free will requires decisions to be undeterminable, I claim that such definition doesn’t make any sense.
Whether indeterminism based freewill makes sense is a separate question from whether indeterminism makes sense.
What does novelty have to do with anything here?
Why haven’t we reduced qualia already, if reductionism is an old idea?
That strengthens the case for explanation being ubiquitous at the expense of the case for explanation being important. What can you do with a bad explanation that you can’t do with no explanation?