>>You have not shown that it is not always in principle possible to determine the future state of the universe.
It was a bit of a detour for the short form argument.
Remember, the deterministic universe is a clockwork mechanism. (Again, we're ignoring Quantum Mechanics here.) Given universal knowledge of state and knowledge of the equations that govern all atoms in the universe, the future state can be precisely determined. This is an essential component to the argument, heading all the way back to Descartes. While it may be impossible in our universe (given the enormous size, we can have atoms whose state we cannot know due to speed of light issues), in a slow, simple Newtonian universe, it could run slowly enough for a robot to do the math himself given the state of the universe at time T.
The problem is, if the future state of the universe can be calculated, and it says that you're going to respond to this Slashdot post, you can choose, well, not to respond to this Slashdot post.
>>Searle is claiming that there is something biological about the human brain that makes it special, in a rather incoherent but dogmatic way.
Not... exactly. I've got a couple books of his. The key point you got wrong here is not his point that it is something biological that makes the brain special, but that there is something special about the biological brain.
In other words, in some of his writings he says that it is perhaps possible for a robot brain to possess inner consciousness if the neurons etc. were replaced with identical silicon parts. Though maybe not. He laid out some possibilities for what would happen if you were to replace a person's neurons with computer equivalents: 1) Everything works fine, and you're a computer with an inner life 2) Everything goes bad, and the person dies or goes insane or whatever 3) You outwardly appear normal but are trapped on the inside, unable to control yourself. 4) You outwardly appear normal, but have no inner life.
Anyhow, his primary argument is about the difference between semantic and syntactic data processing.
It shouldn't be the teacher's responsibility to slow a whole class down so one or two kids can have enough time to get it, but it isn't a teacher's responsibility to spend time teaching advanced topics, only to have the entire class aside from 1 completely lost.
Uh, no. Then you just end up with a bunch of kids with a terrible education.
You certainly can use different curricula for different levels of students, and it works far better that way than forcing everyone into the baseline. Various ways of doing this are different books for different reading level students (the old color-coded reading cards were a wonderful example of this, which allowed students to advance at their own level), or to have different groups studying different subjects, and letting students graduate out from them when they mastered the topic.
Using an example for the GP, as students master addition of small numbers, they advance into a group with addition of larger numbers, and then into subtraction, subtraction of bigger numbers, then into multiplication, then fractions, then division, and so forth. Tests are used as gatekeepers between each level. In fact, my own 2nd grade class was set up this way, and I loved it - it was a challenge for me to catch up with the advanced 3rd graders. By the start of 6th grade, I'd taken everything the school had to offer, so they bought be an algebra textbook and told me to go at it. Algebra turned out to be easy at first, but without a teacher able to help (my 5th/6th teacher was not a math genius - she thought 10/100ths was different from 1/10th) I sort of sputtered out until middle school.
>>He might be better served by going to a private school though.
Not everyone can afford a private school, and public schools should be doing a better job with differentiated instruction anyway.
He already knows his times tables up to 5 and wants more. But school is boring to him because they don't push him. He isn't being challenged at all. He tends to act out when he's bored too which makes everything more complicated. If you have a child who is falling behind in school, there are resources to help them catch up. If you have a child who is gifted and wants to pull ahead, your kid needs to sit down, be quiet and learn for the fifth time what 8+3 equals.
Too true. All too true. While a lot of the people on Slashdot like to say that our education system is only tailored for the superstar students, nothing is further from the truth - schools spend nearly all of their focus on the kids falling behind. I work in the education field, and love it when I actually get to visit a GATE class and really see a difference there.
Things like group study, pair-and-share, spiraling, etc., are all pedagogical tricks for the less advanced students. For advanced students, they get frustrated with how easy everything is, and don't see any value in all the group work, because they usually just end up doing everything.
And the worst part is, gifted kids get so used to having everything they learn be trivially easy, so that when they get to AP classes or college, and they first encounter stuff that's actually hard, they're not equipped to deal with it. The sense of failure can cause some students to give up, and they often don't have the time management skills, since they atrophied from a life spent being able to do all the work very quickly.
>>If the purpose of your argument is not to show that there is free will then why is your conclusion that there is free will?
The point is to challenge the assumption that the state of the future universe is completely determinate. If it is not, then hard determinism is not true, and free will is true. (It's much easier to define free will in terms of what it is not, than in terms of what it is.)
>>All that is necessary for determinism to be true is for it to be in principle possible to determine the future state of the universe given the current state.
>>Your argument can simply be rephrased "assume there is a robot with free will, therefore free will". That is precisely what PF3 assumes because the whole point of determinism is you cant build a robot which can decide to do something other than what it is going to do.
No, the robot has no free will at all. He's a robot. He sets the status of the LED to exactly the opposite of the result of the simulate function.
The point is not to show that the robot has free will, but rather that the state of the universe (even a toy universe) can be completely deterministic.
>>I think you've proven that you can't build such a device (one that both simulates a universe and modifies said universe) - to put it another way, you may not be able to build the universe simulating device inside the universe it is simulating.
As I said, if you have a simple enough Newtonian universe that moves slowly enough, you should be able to determine all the mechanics of the universe out into the arbitrary future, and do whatever the opposite of that simulate() function says.
Mathematically, it's the equivalent of a division by 0.
If you'd like a heuristic version of it - Imagine yourself forecasting what you are going to do in the future. The more likely it is you are going to do something, the easier this will be. Decide if you want to do it or not.
This is 'good enough' free will.
The essential ethical and moral problems with determinism stem from the fact that it relieves us of our ethical problems. "I didn't want to shoot the guy, but the universe was wound up in such a way that I had no decision in the matter" and so forth. But if we stop and reflect on our possible decisions in the future, and choose the good option we never* end up doing bad things.
>>because the games in question aren't valuable enough to me to justify the higher price tag.
It's true. I felt ripped off by Halo: Reach's $60 price tag, but then again I got a $20 gift certificate to Best Buy when I bought it, so I felt that price was more fair.
Likewise, I waited for Front Mission Evolved to drop to $20 new (which took all of a month... the game sold so badly they still had preorder cards to give out with it) - which was a fair price for a game that was all "Pro: giant robot combat, Con: writing makes you want to stab your ears out so you don't have to listen to it any more."
The thing about the indy games is that I'll take a chance on them at the 5$ price point, but I won't for much larger. I know what I'm getting when I order a Halo or a Front Mission or whatever - I have absolutely no idea if a puzzle game about a mermaid (Aquaria) is even remotely something I'd consider playing.
The issue is not that simulate() halts or not. It obviously does.
The structure of the proof is the same as that of the halting thesis. I linked it to show people who had problem understanding an algorithm that doesn't halt if it halts, and halts if it doesn't halt is identical to displaying a LED if it doesn't and doesn't if it does.
Indeed. I consider reflection to be the source of free will.
In other words, if you stop to think, "Wait, I'm about to KILL this guy!" then you can make an ethical decision, instead of just following your baser instincts.
>>Similarly, in terms of bits, if your world has N bits, then you can't represent an N-bit world state inside it.
>>we would be practicing precisely the thing you hoped to make obsolete: philosophy.
You misunderstand. I like philosophy. There's more mind-bending and mind-expanding concepts in philosophy than you get in any other field. You can basically flip open any book in philosophy and find an interesting problem to chew on while you're on the road for 8 hours.
I simply dislike what the 20th Century has done to it, confusing logical tools used to solve problems with the problems themselves. Aristotle published his logical tools in a manual called The Organon which means... "The Tool". In other words, it is something that philosophy uses, not philosophy itself.
Now get off my lawn, you damn logical positivists....
My point wasn't that math was a science, really, but that the categorizations of "science" vs. "art" is a deeply flawed one, with science (/tongue in cheek here) meaning anything difficult and requiring lots of intelligence to solve, and art meaning anything for people trying to skate through college without really needing to know anything.
At a practical level, it does actually make a difference because (at my school at least), arts majors were required to take a LOT more GEs (6 more classes, I think, maybe more) into which Math major best friend was lumped in with my Comm major girlfriend. He switched into Math/CS (which is "science") mainly to avoid the extra course requirements.
>>For all we know, it is impossible to simulate the universe within itself anyway, because that would require an infinite amount of information.
Infinite? Very large, certainly, but not infinite.
If you'd like, as I posted above, you can have our universe be a very very simple one, with only a few very slow objects and perfect Newtonian motion. Our little robot friend would have plenty of time to observe the state of the universe and make his calculations.
>>Your implication in PF2 is false. There is no known way to determine the state of the universe U1 at time interval T1 = T0+1 quicker than the time interval itself. Prove that that is possible, and your implication stands up to scrutiny, until then it's remains unproven.
I think you're missing the point of a thought experiment, but sure.
Let's say the entire universe is a giant billiard table, lightyears across, and our friendly robot is traveling across it at relatively low speed. We know the exact state of the location of the billiard table and the robot - we have plenty of time to measure it en route. (For this entire proof we're ignoring quantum mechanics, because they don't actually change the truth of the proof, only the details, complicating things.) The robot has little thrusters that he can use to maneuver himself around, and is programmed to not go wherever he is destined to be at T = 10000. Where does he end up?
The only thing you've shown is that such a simulate function cannot exist, or at least cannot complete execution in time to affect the state of the world at T1. This follows from the fact that in order for the simulate() function to be a true simulation then it must also simulate itself. Put another way, if simulate() were to compute an accurate result, then it must include its own effect on the future state of the world. In essence it's a little paradox machine.
If you're not familiar with the form of the argument, essentially it is the Halting Thesis repackaged, which most people consider a paradox the first time they hear it.
>>What if computing simulate() in a reasonable time requires more energy than is in the universe?
You're missing the point of a thought experiment.
In practice it simply devolves down to figuring out what is going to happen, and then not doing it.
>>Put very simply, if your robot computes simulate() and simulate() exists as you define it, it cannot turn it's LED to any state other than the one it computes
The robot sets the LED directly to the inverse of the return value of simulate(). There's no free will per se in the robot, it merely demonstrates that predicting the future is impossible.
Maybe you should read what I actually fucking wrote before flying into outer space. I didn't say Wittgenstein liked science, I said Philosophy, as a field, was trying to coopt the patina of physics. It's not just Philosophy - after the successes of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, there was a rush to science-ify a lot of softer fields. Wittgenstein, I said, tried to turn Philosophy into - lemme check my phrasing - "a tenured grammar police".
>>Do you think computer scientists invented logic? No, buddy, logicians invented computer science.
No fucking shit, idiot. This is what I said. Did the Bertrand Russell reference fly over your head?
>>Socrates did not invent the syllogism. That was Aristotle.
Have you read Socrates? Where do you think Aristotle got it from?
>>Couldn't one just get a Bluetooth dongle and use the PS3 pad itself?
Yeah. I've been playing it on the PS3 with the controller. It works fine, though dealing with a lot of powers is kind of a pain.
It really feels more like a brawler game than an MMO, which has some real appeal.
On the downside... it's the DC Universe. The Villain campaign is especially black and white ("Doing Good is an affront to Trigon!" says random NPCs), and poorly written.
>>My background is physics, but I think it's a mistake to dismiss philosophy the way that some in this discussion are doing.
So do I. Or more precisely, I consider all the work done in the 20th century on predicate logic, necessity, etc., to be more properly "discrete math" than philosophy, and consider it something of a tragedy that the big questions and ethics have fallen by the wayside.
"Does God Exist?" is a very interesting question, with a lot of relevance to a lot of people, both those who believe in the affirmative and the negative. But in my philosophy classes they basically regarded such questions as outmoded and irrelevant, as if wishing so could make it so. Of course, I had the Churchlands for some of my classes, who are especially rabid atheistic materialists.
>>I don't see how any amount of CS can determine whether the world can necessarily be divided into discrete entities at a level at which those properties apply, whether all entities can unambiguously be assigned to one or other set, or whether both of those sets are necessarily non-empty
Well, the point I didn't really explicitly make was that a lot of his verbiage in Being and Nothingness translates into CS concepts like constructors/initialization, pointers, identity, etc., which I consider interesting to analyze "concretely", so to speak.
As far as countermanding his argument, you could attack his assumptive dichotomy that objects much all either be for-themself or in-themself by defining them in CS terms, and seeing if it's logically consistent in several different ways. It's something I've been meaning to do, since he builds up quite a large edifice over this dichotomy.
>>Can someone with Free Will invalidate Free Will?
Sure. If we go with the definition of Determinism that "if an action must happen it is not free", then holding a gun to someone's head and making them rob a bank is not the result of the victim's free will.
Or if that's too philosophical/vague, shooting them in the head pretty effectively removes their free will.
>>I doubt philosophers give a rats ass about pointers, let alone fill up books on the subject.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
* Almog, J., J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.) (1989), Themes from Kaplan, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Bach, K. (1987), Thought and Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Bach, K. (2004), 'Points of Reference,' in Bezuidenhout & Reimer (eds.) 2004. [Preprint available online]
* Barcan Marcus, R. (1947), "The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order," Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12(1): 12-15.
* Barcan Marcus, R. (1961), 'Modalities and Intentional Languages,' Synthese, 13(4): 303-322.
* Barcan Marcus, R. (1993), Modalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Bezuidenhout, A., and Reimer, M. (eds.) (2004), Descriptions and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Brandom, R. (1994), Making it Explicit. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
* Brueckner, A. (1986), 'Brains in a Vat,' Journal of Philosophy, 83: 148-167.
* Davidson, D. (1984), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* DeRose, K. (2000), 'How can we know that we are not Brains in Vat?,' Southern Journal of Philosophy, 39: 121-148.
* Devitt, M. (1981), Designation, New York: Columbia University Press.
* Devitt, M. (1990), 'Meanings just ain't in the head,' in Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79-104.
* Devitt, M. (1996), Coming to our Senses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. (1999), Language and Reality (2nd edition), Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* Devitt, M. (2004), 'The Case for Referential Descriptions,' in Bezuidenhout and Reimer (eds.) 2004.
* Donnellan , K. (1966), 'Reference and Definite Descriptions,' Philosophical Review, 75: 281-304. [Post-print online version]
* Donnellan, K. (1972), 'Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions,' in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds) The Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel.
* Evans, G. (1973), 'The Causal Theory of Names,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47: 187-208.
* Evans, G. (1982), The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Field, H. (2001), Truth and the Absence of Fact, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J. (1990), A Theory of Content and other Essays, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* Frege. G. (1893), 'On Sense and Reference,' in P. Geach and M. Black (eds.) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell (1952).
* Kaplan, D. (1989), 'Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals.' In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Kripke, S. (1977), 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference,' Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2: 255-76.
* Kripke, S. (1980), Naming and Necessity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Meinong, A. (1904), 'The Theory of Objects,' in Meinong (ed.) Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie, Barth: Leipzig.
* Mill, J. S. (1867), A System of Logic, London:
The type of advanced symbolic logic you mention is a relatively late development.
The massive movement toward emulation of physics in philosophy is older. It goes back, at least, to Newton and the success of the mechanistic world.
Mmm, well, fair enough. But specifically I was talking about the development of philosophy from Frege onwards with the aim of converting everyday sentences into logical predicates that can then be logically analyzed, revealing the inner truth. Philosophy went from being a study of foundational concepts and ethics to a sort of analytic linguistics thing. Wittgenstein believed (before he did a 180) that if we could just express all our statements in a logical predicate form, that all the problems of philosophy would collapse... reducing the profession of philosopher to nothing more than a sort of tenured grammar police.
While it was trendy in the 20th century to hand-wave problems such as "What does it mean to live the Good Life" and "What is Right?" into irrelevance, the fact that they've maintained their relevance refutes the very starting point of Logical Positivism and its ilk.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You have not shown that it is not always in principle possible to determine the future state of the universe.
It was a bit of a detour for the short form argument.
Remember, the deterministic universe is a clockwork mechanism. (Again, we're ignoring Quantum Mechanics here.) Given universal knowledge of state and knowledge of the equations that govern all atoms in the universe, the future state can be precisely determined. This is an essential component to the argument, heading all the way back to Descartes. While it may be impossible in our universe (given the enormous size, we can have atoms whose state we cannot know due to speed of light issues), in a slow, simple Newtonian universe, it could run slowly enough for a robot to do the math himself given the state of the universe at time T.
The problem is, if the future state of the universe can be calculated, and it says that you're going to respond to this Slashdot post, you can choose, well, not to respond to this Slashdot post.
>>Searle is claiming that there is something biological about the human brain that makes it special, in a rather incoherent but dogmatic way.
Not... exactly. I've got a couple books of his. The key point you got wrong here is not his point that it is something biological that makes the brain special, but that there is something special about the biological brain.
In other words, in some of his writings he says that it is perhaps possible for a robot brain to possess inner consciousness if the neurons etc. were replaced with identical silicon parts. Though maybe not. He laid out some possibilities for what would happen if you were to replace a person's neurons with computer equivalents:
1) Everything works fine, and you're a computer with an inner life
2) Everything goes bad, and the person dies or goes insane or whatever
3) You outwardly appear normal but are trapped on the inside, unable to control yourself.
4) You outwardly appear normal, but have no inner life.
Anyhow, his primary argument is about the difference between semantic and syntactic data processing.
>>You don't seem to have understood my argument. I can't be bothered to re-state it. I'll give you a hint though: I am not an absolutist.
Sure, I know.
I was just mocking you because you couldn't understand the difference between some and all.
Uh, no. Then you just end up with a bunch of kids with a terrible education.
You certainly can use different curricula for different levels of students, and it works far better that way than forcing everyone into the baseline. Various ways of doing this are different books for different reading level students (the old color-coded reading cards were a wonderful example of this, which allowed students to advance at their own level), or to have different groups studying different subjects, and letting students graduate out from them when they mastered the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_instruction
Using an example for the GP, as students master addition of small numbers, they advance into a group with addition of larger numbers, and then into subtraction, subtraction of bigger numbers, then into multiplication, then fractions, then division, and so forth. Tests are used as gatekeepers between each level. In fact, my own 2nd grade class was set up this way, and I loved it - it was a challenge for me to catch up with the advanced 3rd graders. By the start of 6th grade, I'd taken everything the school had to offer, so they bought be an algebra textbook and told me to go at it. Algebra turned out to be easy at first, but without a teacher able to help (my 5th/6th teacher was not a math genius - she thought 10/100ths was different from 1/10th) I sort of sputtered out until middle school.
>>He might be better served by going to a private school though.
Not everyone can afford a private school, and public schools should be doing a better job with differentiated instruction anyway.
Too true. All too true. While a lot of the people on Slashdot like to say that our education system is only tailored for the superstar students, nothing is further from the truth - schools spend nearly all of their focus on the kids falling behind. I work in the education field, and love it when I actually get to visit a GATE class and really see a difference there.
Things like group study, pair-and-share, spiraling, etc., are all pedagogical tricks for the less advanced students. For advanced students, they get frustrated with how easy everything is, and don't see any value in all the group work, because they usually just end up doing everything.
And the worst part is, gifted kids get so used to having everything they learn be trivially easy, so that when they get to AP classes or college, and they first encounter stuff that's actually hard, they're not equipped to deal with it. The sense of failure can cause some students to give up, and they often don't have the time management skills, since they atrophied from a life spent being able to do all the work very quickly.
>>I assume it is missing the word 'not'
You're right, it's missing a not.
>>If the purpose of your argument is not to show that there is free will then why is your conclusion that there is free will?
The point is to challenge the assumption that the state of the future universe is completely determinate. If it is not, then hard determinism is not true, and free will is true. (It's much easier to define free will in terms of what it is not, than in terms of what it is.)
>>All that is necessary for determinism to be true is for it to be in principle possible to determine the future state of the universe given the current state.
And that is not possible.
>>Your argument can simply be rephrased "assume there is a robot with free will, therefore free will". That is precisely what PF3 assumes because the whole point of determinism is you cant build a robot which can decide to do something other than what it is going to do.
No, the robot has no free will at all. He's a robot. He sets the status of the LED to exactly the opposite of the result of the simulate function.
The point is not to show that the robot has free will, but rather that the state of the universe (even a toy universe) can be completely deterministic.
>>I think you've proven that you can't build such a device (one that both simulates a universe and modifies said universe) - to put it another way, you may not be able to build the universe simulating device inside the universe it is simulating.
As I said, if you have a simple enough Newtonian universe that moves slowly enough, you should be able to determine all the mechanics of the universe out into the arbitrary future, and do whatever the opposite of that simulate() function says.
Mathematically, it's the equivalent of a division by 0.
If you'd like a heuristic version of it -
Imagine yourself forecasting what you are going to do in the future. The more likely it is you are going to do something, the easier this will be. Decide if you want to do it or not.
This is 'good enough' free will.
The essential ethical and moral problems with determinism stem from the fact that it relieves us of our ethical problems. "I didn't want to shoot the guy, but the universe was wound up in such a way that I had no decision in the matter" and so forth. But if we stop and reflect on our possible decisions in the future, and choose the good option we never* end up doing bad things.
(*When possible, your mileage may vary.)
>>because the games in question aren't valuable enough to me to justify the higher price tag.
It's true. I felt ripped off by Halo: Reach's $60 price tag, but then again I got a $20 gift certificate to Best Buy when I bought it, so I felt that price was more fair.
Likewise, I waited for Front Mission Evolved to drop to $20 new (which took all of a month... the game sold so badly they still had preorder cards to give out with it) - which was a fair price for a game that was all "Pro: giant robot combat, Con: writing makes you want to stab your ears out so you don't have to listen to it any more."
The thing about the indy games is that I'll take a chance on them at the 5$ price point, but I won't for much larger. I know what I'm getting when I order a Halo or a Front Mission or whatever - I have absolutely no idea if a puzzle game about a mermaid (Aquaria) is even remotely something I'd consider playing.
The issue is not that simulate() halts or not. It obviously does.
The structure of the proof is the same as that of the halting thesis. I linked it to show people who had problem understanding an algorithm that doesn't halt if it halts, and halts if it doesn't halt is identical to displaying a LED if it doesn't and doesn't if it does.
Indeed. I consider reflection to be the source of free will.
In other words, if you stop to think, "Wait, I'm about to KILL this guy!" then you can make an ethical decision, instead of just following your baser instincts.
>>Similarly, in terms of bits, if your world has N bits, then you can't represent an N-bit world state inside it.
Only true if the world is incompressible.
>>we would be practicing precisely the thing you hoped to make obsolete: philosophy.
You misunderstand. I like philosophy. There's more mind-bending and mind-expanding concepts in philosophy than you get in any other field. You can basically flip open any book in philosophy and find an interesting problem to chew on while you're on the road for 8 hours.
I simply dislike what the 20th Century has done to it, confusing logical tools used to solve problems with the problems themselves. Aristotle published his logical tools in a manual called The Organon which means... "The Tool". In other words, it is something that philosophy uses, not philosophy itself.
Now get off my lawn, you damn logical positivists....
>>You cant work out what is going to happen and then not do it because by definition it is what is going to happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
I basically agree with everything you say.
My point wasn't that math was a science, really, but that the categorizations of "science" vs. "art" is a deeply flawed one, with science (/tongue in cheek here) meaning anything difficult and requiring lots of intelligence to solve, and art meaning anything for people trying to skate through college without really needing to know anything.
At a practical level, it does actually make a difference because (at my school at least), arts majors were required to take a LOT more GEs (6 more classes, I think, maybe more) into which Math major best friend was lumped in with my Comm major girlfriend. He switched into Math/CS (which is "science") mainly to avoid the extra course requirements.
>>For all we know, it is impossible to simulate the universe within itself anyway, because that would require an infinite amount of information.
Infinite? Very large, certainly, but not infinite.
If you'd like, as I posted above, you can have our universe be a very very simple one, with only a few very slow objects and perfect Newtonian motion. Our little robot friend would have plenty of time to observe the state of the universe and make his calculations.
>>Your implication in PF2 is false. There is no known way to determine the state of the universe U1 at time interval T1 = T0+1 quicker than the time interval itself. Prove that that is possible, and your implication stands up to scrutiny, until then it's remains unproven.
I think you're missing the point of a thought experiment, but sure.
Let's say the entire universe is a giant billiard table, lightyears across, and our friendly robot is traveling across it at relatively low speed. We know the exact state of the location of the billiard table and the robot - we have plenty of time to measure it en route. (For this entire proof we're ignoring quantum mechanics, because they don't actually change the truth of the proof, only the details, complicating things.) The robot has little thrusters that he can use to maneuver himself around, and is programmed to not go wherever he is destined to be at T = 10000. Where does he end up?
It's indeterminate.
If you're not familiar with the form of the argument, essentially it is the Halting Thesis repackaged, which most people consider a paradox the first time they hear it.
>>What if computing simulate() in a reasonable time requires more energy than is in the universe?
You're missing the point of a thought experiment.
In practice it simply devolves down to figuring out what is going to happen, and then not doing it.
>>Put very simply, if your robot computes simulate() and simulate() exists as you define it, it cannot turn it's LED to any state other than the one it computes
The robot sets the LED directly to the inverse of the return value of simulate(). There's no free will per se in the robot, it merely demonstrates that predicting the future is impossible.
>I'll just scratch at the surface:
Maybe you should read what I actually fucking wrote before flying into outer space. I didn't say Wittgenstein liked science, I said Philosophy, as a field, was trying to coopt the patina of physics. It's not just Philosophy - after the successes of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, there was a rush to science-ify a lot of softer fields. Wittgenstein, I said, tried to turn Philosophy into - lemme check my phrasing - "a tenured grammar police".
>>Do you think computer scientists invented logic? No, buddy, logicians invented computer science.
No fucking shit, idiot. This is what I said. Did the Bertrand Russell reference fly over your head?
>>Socrates did not invent the syllogism. That was Aristotle.
Have you read Socrates? Where do you think Aristotle got it from?
>>Couldn't one just get a Bluetooth dongle and use the PS3 pad itself?
Yeah. I've been playing it on the PS3 with the controller. It works fine, though dealing with a lot of powers is kind of a pain.
It really feels more like a brawler game than an MMO, which has some real appeal.
On the downside... it's the DC Universe. The Villain campaign is especially black and white ("Doing Good is an affront to Trigon!" says random NPCs), and poorly written.
>>My background is physics, but I think it's a mistake to dismiss philosophy the way that some in this discussion are doing.
So do I. Or more precisely, I consider all the work done in the 20th century on predicate logic, necessity, etc., to be more properly "discrete math" than philosophy, and consider it something of a tragedy that the big questions and ethics have fallen by the wayside.
"Does God Exist?" is a very interesting question, with a lot of relevance to a lot of people, both those who believe in the affirmative and the negative. But in my philosophy classes they basically regarded such questions as outmoded and irrelevant, as if wishing so could make it so. Of course, I had the Churchlands for some of my classes, who are especially rabid atheistic materialists.
>>I don't see how any amount of CS can determine whether the world can necessarily be divided into discrete entities at a level at which those properties apply, whether all entities can unambiguously be assigned to one or other set, or whether both of those sets are necessarily non-empty
Well, the point I didn't really explicitly make was that a lot of his verbiage in Being and Nothingness translates into CS concepts like constructors/initialization, pointers, identity, etc., which I consider interesting to analyze "concretely", so to speak.
As far as countermanding his argument, you could attack his assumptive dichotomy that objects much all either be for-themself or in-themself by defining them in CS terms, and seeing if it's logically consistent in several different ways. It's something I've been meaning to do, since he builds up quite a large edifice over this dichotomy.
>>Can someone with Free Will invalidate Free Will?
Sure. If we go with the definition of Determinism that "if an action must happen it is not free", then holding a gun to someone's head and making them rob a bank is not the result of the victim's free will.
Or if that's too philosophical/vague, shooting them in the head pretty effectively removes their free will.
>>I doubt philosophers give a rats ass about pointers, let alone fill up books on the subject.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
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* Bach, K. (1987), Thought and Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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* Barcan Marcus, R. (1947), "The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order," Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12(1): 12-15.
* Barcan Marcus, R. (1961), 'Modalities and Intentional Languages,' Synthese, 13(4): 303-322.
* Barcan Marcus, R. (1993), Modalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Bezuidenhout, A., and Reimer, M. (eds.) (2004), Descriptions and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Brandom, R. (1994), Making it Explicit. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
* Brueckner, A. (1986), 'Brains in a Vat,' Journal of Philosophy, 83: 148-167.
* Davidson, D. (1984), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* DeRose, K. (2000), 'How can we know that we are not Brains in Vat?,' Southern Journal of Philosophy, 39: 121-148.
* Devitt, M. (1981), Designation, New York: Columbia University Press.
* Devitt, M. (1990), 'Meanings just ain't in the head,' in Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79-104.
* Devitt, M. (1996), Coming to our Senses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. (1999), Language and Reality (2nd edition), Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* Devitt, M. (2004), 'The Case for Referential Descriptions,' in Bezuidenhout and Reimer (eds.) 2004.
* Donnellan , K. (1966), 'Reference and Definite Descriptions,' Philosophical Review, 75: 281-304. [Post-print online version]
* Donnellan, K. (1972), 'Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions,' in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds) The Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel.
* Evans, G. (1973), 'The Causal Theory of Names,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47: 187-208.
* Evans, G. (1982), The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Field, H. (2001), Truth and the Absence of Fact, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J. (1990), A Theory of Content and other Essays, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
* Frege. G. (1893), 'On Sense and Reference,' in P. Geach and M. Black (eds.) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell (1952).
* Kaplan, D. (1989), 'Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals.' In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Kripke, S. (1977), 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference,' Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2: 255-76.
* Kripke, S. (1980), Naming and Necessity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Meinong, A. (1904), 'The Theory of Objects,' in Meinong (ed.) Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie, Barth: Leipzig.
* Mill, J. S. (1867), A System of Logic, London:
Mmm, well, fair enough. But specifically I was talking about the development of philosophy from Frege onwards with the aim of converting everyday sentences into logical predicates that can then be logically analyzed, revealing the inner truth. Philosophy went from being a study of foundational concepts and ethics to a sort of analytic linguistics thing. Wittgenstein believed (before he did a 180) that if we could just express all our statements in a logical predicate form, that all the problems of philosophy would collapse... reducing the profession of philosopher to nothing more than a sort of tenured grammar police.
While it was trendy in the 20th century to hand-wave problems such as "What does it mean to live the Good Life" and "What is Right?" into irrelevance, the fact that they've maintained their relevance refutes the very starting point of Logical Positivism and its ilk.