Your "solution" is simply to ignore the problem... don't bother thinking about logical proof and rigor, don't bother with deep issues of philosophy, simply go out drink a beer go to sleep and go to work driving a taxi in the morning. [...] I think you'll agree that sweeping away all assumptions and starting from the sole bedrock proof "I think therefore I am", there is no pure logic proof you can use to bootstrap the validity of our senses or anything else.
Actually, I do disagree. Given we know that our senses are unreliable, from "I think therefore I am", we can only logically extend it to say "our senses reflect only a facet or transformation of the underlying reality". We must then use the scientific method, or some other sound epistemology, to produce the rest of our knowledge of reality. The philosophy of science is well-grounded logically, so I'm not sure how you can equate this to "going out for a beer and ignoring the problem". If the facet of our reality includes a higher power influencing our view of things (the higher power's influence also being a transformation of underlying reality), that will eventually be reflected in our knowledge. This is the best anyone can ever hope to do given our current understanding.
I took a signifigantly narrower assumption, that there may or may not be a superbeing of various sorts, merely positing no actively deceptive superbeing.
I understand, but this assumption is superfluous; we don't need to it make statements about and build knowledge of reality, as the scientific method is a sufficient epistemological technique. Realistically speaking, just about any proselytizing about reality that philosophy aims to do, science can do better and more rigorously. Philosophy is/was needed only when dealing with knowledge itself (epistemology), as it produced the philosophy of science and initially placed the scientific method on a rigorous footing; but once you realize "I think therefore I am", any further metaphysics is best left to science.
So my "solution" involves continuing our research into reality via scientific exploration, because it is currently a better tool for building knowledge of reality than additional assumptions; it's the best tool we have in fact.
I would say the solution is to invoke an axiom: We are not the victims of deliberate deception by some super-entity.
Solution to what though? It's honestly a non-problem you're trying to solve: if we're being fooled at every turn by some "higher power", then the rules set by that "higher power" are effectively our reality. The laws we discover via scientific inquiry may only be that of the illusory universe as constructed by the higher power and not really the laws of the "underlying universe", but until the "higher power" decides to change its rules, what does it matter? We are bound by its laws, and so life goes on.
Eventually, if the higher power is sloppy, some logical inconsistency will be discovered which will force us to question our world. If such an inconsistency is never encountered, then we have no choice but to continue as usual.
For a computer science analogy: an operating system may be able to tell it's being executed in a virtual machine, such as VMWare, instead of on bare metal based on some inconsistencies it wouldn't experience with normal hardware (unusual delays in otherwise fast, atomic operations for instance); but if the virtualization were total, then the operating system will never be able to tell the difference, and until it could identify some inconsistency, it would have no choice but to continue as usual.
But in practice nothing is clear cut. In American society, for example, every major argument for the death penalty involves deterrence and retribution.
Which is also potentially a legitimate position. There are many factors that go into a perpetrators decisions, the likelihood of being caught and punished among them. If it can be demonstrated that this is not an effective deterrent, then we simply must seek alternatives if the crime problem is sufficiently severe.
In short, I'm not having any trouble with this concept - but I guarantee you other people are and will.
I agree. In general, I explain to those who will listen, and just wait until the naysayers die off and the new generation more accustomed to the idea takes power. It's the mark of almost all progress that the old guard must die off before radical change is possible.
There are tons and tons of examples that are not clear cut at all. Like every person in prison right now who was born into a poor minority family, and never had a decent chance to live life outside of crime, and has been habituated to a different understanding of justice than we share.
I agree. Education has been shown to be the most effective deterrent for this particular problem.
Logical behaviorism and psychological behaviorism are obsolete modes of thought, for a reason. That model is not very good for understanding human beings.
My intent was not to understand human beings for the purposes of divining motives, as my explanation leaves architectural details out of the picture, and those are important for those sorts of questions. Of course, if I had those answers, I'd be writing papers.;-)
Also, I wasn't suggesting a particular psychological model for human beings, but simply stating a physical fact: we are bio-chemical machines with all the properties I outlined.
It sounds very easy just to recondition a human being who has been habituated to a life of crime using just associational, reconditioning strategies, but it isn't.
I agree it's not, and I never said it was easy. "Assigning blame/responsibility" is easy. Doing the right thing about it may indeed be hard, but the catch-all I stated was that the danger must be removed from the populace until it can be neutralized to the best of our abilities.
Humans aren't robots. They are sentient things. They feel things.
Why are feelings excluded from the category of computations? Do you have definitive evidence of this distinction? Humans are very much robots, just of a very different sort from the electromechanical contraptions we build.
The philosophical issue here is that our behavior is mostly physically determined, at the psychophysical level, yet an existent entity still has to suffer the consequences for these behaviors despite having apparently no influence over them.
I'm not sure anyone has so conclusively determined that our behaviour is so physically determined. Last I heard, predispositions are genetically influenced, but our environment is an equally significant factor on our behaviour. Even if both of these factors are driving criminal choices, we still must rehab the offender, and negative feedback in the form of punishment is the oldest known to us, though it's more of a sledgehammer than a chisel.
Our best understanding is that these events are truly random, knowledge that would make it possible to predict them simply does not exist inside the universe.
The information clearly does exist in the universe, because if it didn't, then these events are non-causal and the universe is non-deterministic at heart; perhaps there are some scientists willing throw out causality, but most would not.
As a closing thought to reconcile the fact that this information actually does exist with the "going physical theory": just because the information exists, doesn't mean we can actually measure it, or use it; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle places a hard bound on the amount of information we can extract from a quantum system.
"Free will" has never meant simply free from determinism. It means rather that you are free -- you are empowered -- to choose your direction for yourself.
Free will has always been ill-defined, and cast as freedom from some thing or other. If you're going to say you're empowered to choose a direction for yourself (which you've said), then that is mutually exclusive with determinism. If you would deny that we are deterministic (which you have), then some rand()-like mechanism must be at work somewhere. You can't have it both ways. rand() is simply the smallest necessary assumption to enable freedom from determinism.
Therefore, 1) is not true.
Hmmm, yes, that simple statement without any supporting argumentation is very convincing.
2) We are free to choose rationality or irrationality.
Depending on what you meant:
Yes, we are indeed free to choose either to the extent that we are free to choose anything.
3) according to current quantum physics, the position of an electron of a hydrogen atom at any given time is a good example of your rand() function.
No, it's not. No one has claimed to have witnessed an event that has no cause. That would be an example of rand() in action. The uncertainty principle is an example of our limits of extracting information from a quantum system, not non-causality.
However, if you have free will, then you are a living being, who can choose who you are becoming. If you have not free will, then you are not truely a living being, but merely a machine.
We are machines. Incredibly sophisticated, learning, growing machines, but machines nonetheless. If you claim otherwise (given our current understanding), then you are espousing religion not science.
There is no function in math, and there is no particle in physics, that can cause consciousness. It is likewise futile to look to nature for the cause of free will.
That's a leap. The default assumption is that consciousness and free will do not exist. And whether consciousness is a relevant phenomenon in its own right, or an emergent property of some sort of chaotic system, remains to be seen.
He;s already proven that there is no way that he could no if anything exists or not. He'd like to, no doubt, but all the objections he has so laboriously raised now come around to bite him in the ass. He can't say, "I observe..." because as soon as he does, all the people who have been following his train of thought will cry foul, and rightfully so.
And I agree, he can't prove it; but we already know that this sort of proof is impossible anyway. I think the important point is to rely not on your senses, but on the knowledge integration process, ie. the solid epistemology that is the scientific method. Ensuring an observation's coherence with a logical epistemology is the best we can ever hope to do. On a long enough time line, the demon fooling our senses will slip up.;-)
Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator. But of course that would not make you free in any meaningful sense, it would just mean that your actions are controlled by random dice rolls as opposed to by laws of physics. Besides, unpredictable people are not "free", they are insane.
Making your decisions "random" does not necessarily make you insane. The non-causal, random variable in your otherwise mathematical brain function may simply be one factor affecting your decision. The random variable's influence may be typically immeasurable in clear-cut decisions, but if you're 49/51 on a decision (chocolate or vanilla ice cream for instance), the random variable can come into play and swing the decision either way. This is the "freedom" in free will. I don't think it really gains you anything significant, but there it is.
"Random" events in physics are due to a lack of information, not due to non-causal factors. We model them as "random" simply because we can't ever hope to have enough information to predict the outcome, not because the outcome is not a causal function of its inputs.
But if you have 1 atom of uranium, it's impossible to know when that specific atom will decay.
Why invoke quantum randomness? I have an even simpler example: flip a coin for decisions and you have 50/50 chance either way. Classical randomness in disproves determinism!
Actually, it doesn't. It just means we don't have enough information to predict the outcome, not that the outcome is not deterministic. Just like radioactive decay.
It's easy to prove that you exist. The Cogito is perfect for that. But it leads to a philosophical solipsim...You can't derive anything from that fact that you exist except for the fact that you exist, which makes it an argumentative dead end.
I never really understood this supposed "dead end"; the next logical step seems pretty simple to me: I observe that I have sensations, and that these sensations tell me that an outside world exists. The information received from these senses is subject to logical consistency, and ultimately we need an solid epistemology to verify our knowledge of the outside world as garnered via our senses: the scientific method. That completes the philosophy and brings us to now.
How is that argument not logically sound? You cannot prove that an outside world exists, you can only prove that it does not exist. If that's the case, then our scientific research may one day prove just that.;-)
Free will is the opposite. It states that your choices are ultimately not from your life, your experiences, your genetics, or this universe. Your choices come from outside of nature, and are therefore supernatural.
Assuming nature is fully deterministic.
Let me provide an answer to "truly free will" that does not invoke God or "traditional supernaturalism": let's say the universe is a computer with an instruction set (its physical laws). Let's also say that this instruction set contains an instruction, called rand(), to generate a truly random number ("truly random" == the result is not a mathematical function of any inputs, and can not be predicted no matter how much information we have).
If the program that is my human brain invokes rand() at some point and uses the result in my decision process, that is a necessary and sufficient condition for truly free will; my decisions may then be completely free of causality and determinism, as my decision may no longer be a function of its inputs (causative factors), but may in fact simply be a random decision resulting from rand().
I have a few observations from this:
Somehow proving truly free will does not imply supernaturalism, or God, or religion, or anything.
Truly free will does mean that we can make completely irrational, random decisions. Somehow, that's not very comforting either.
We have yet to conclusively witness any truly random, ie. non-causal, event; at best, we simply don't know the cause, so the existence of some type of rand() is pure fantasy.
Who cares? What does rand(), and by extension free will, really buy me? What profound effect on my life will proving the presence or absence of rand() do?
As a closing thought, this is exactly the philosophical underpinnings of The Matrix trilogy: we do not have free will, we are a function of our inputs, predetermined to make the decisions we do once we fully understand the context.
P.S. I covered computer science, philosophy, religion and God, supernaturalism, and The Matrix all in a single coherent post. Do I get a geek bonus?:-)
There are a whole host of issues that go along with redefining responsibility.
I don't know why everyone is making this so difficult, it's really very simple: the entire point of "responsibility" is to identify the principle causative factor of an outcome that we wish to avoid (ie. a murderer is responsible for a murder, is just another way of saying the murderer caused the murder, the outcome we wish to avoid).
If a tumour is causing a person's pedophilia, then remove the tumour and the problem is solved. If it can be demonstrated that the tumour was only providing him with those tendencies but he was still "in control", then he should also be punished after the tumour is removed in order to reinforce the notion that one's impulses must be controlled.
If the person has a condition that cannot be easily removed or cured, then this individual must simply be removed from the general populace in order to remove the danger until such time as their condition, or the danger they pose, can be neutralized. We do this with mental patients now.
If a person's thought process is the cause of their illegal act (such as racist crimes), then we punish the person as their thoughts are an integral part of their makeup that cannot be removed. The only way to "remove a thought" is to rehab the person's thinking, and you accomplish this via negative reinforcement, education, etc.
Do we just set up a 're-education' camp to condition each other not to commit crimes
What are prisons and mental hospitals now? At the very least, criminals have no right to infringe on another humans rights; if they can be conditioned to at least respect that, then that's all we can and should rehab them for.
How to we get rid of the common-sense impulse among victims to blame people for things, especially for horrendous, violent things? The impulse to achieve retribution? That would take a lot of work.
That's no one's problem but their own.
In conclusion: free will or not, "responsibility" or not, nothing changes; ultimately it's all causes and effects, and society simply seeks to control or eliminate the causes that result in deleterious effects. Pseudo-metaphysical concepts of free will are actually superfluous to the argument. If you just view humans as robots that learn by experience/inputs, but sometimes have mechanical flaws or stress-induced failure modes resulting in delinquent behaviour, perhaps that will clarify this subject for you.
The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.
As the patent on Drug X was about to expire, they created "Drug X Gel Capsule... better than before!!!" Of course, doctors, not really knowing, started prescribing the new X Gel Capsule
Oh, the doctors know, believe me. They just have their own "incentives" to prescribe the newer one.
Capitalism is clearly unsustainable. It is very simple. In capitalism, by definition, markets must always grow. The Earth's resources are fixed, ergo, capitalism is unsustainable
Silly boy. Didn't you know that with enough energy we can achieve anything? The Earth is not a closed system, but is continuously bombarded with solar energy. We can make whatever we want out of whatever we have given enough energy, and the sun will provide that for at least a few billion years more. That's unsustainable? Ha!
As with most things in material science, the "secret" came down to the impurities.
The article concludes that there was never a "lost technique", it was merely a fluke that the source of their iron contained just the right type of impurities in the right amounts, to result in the incredible Damascus steel. Once that source was exhausted, the "technique" no longer seemed to work, and the "secret" was henceforth considered lost.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Sorry, that's untrue. SL is a world where the cost of reproduction is zero, not the cost of production. Even still, just because the cost of reproduction is almost nil, it doesn't mean an item's value is zero. What's the marginal cost of reproducing your last picture of you and your dad before he died? Near zero. What is the picture's value to you? Quite a bit.
Without reward, few will continue to produce in SL.
No, few will make money reproducing, distributing, buying and selling things. That's entirely different than not producing unique things in the first place. This whole "without IP the world would collapse" perspective is nonsense. And this is coming from a Libertarian, so I'm in favour of property rights, just not where there isn't any actual property.
Wikipedia seems to be confused as to whether its moving to "Coyotos" or whether there is only some talk about that [...]
L4, as great a microkernel as it is, still has some serious security shortcomings. The Hurd devs are currently discussing issues with the Coyotos devs; whether Hurd will actually use Coyotos is unclear last I heard. You can see various discussions they've had on the coyotos-dev mailing list.
I would just like to point out, that when and/or if we have the technology to build and maintain a 35,000+ km space elevator, I'm sure we'll be able to handle some radiation. Heck, we already have far more experience shielding radiation than we do building cables past geosynchronous orbit. I'm really not seeing the monumental challenge here.
That's the real question. Pollution causes all sorts of health problems, so if the reduction in pollution results in a healthier, happier populace, and a significant corresponding savings in health care, then the government would tax regular concrete or provide sufficient incentives for the new concrete, to balance out the additional cost. Kinda sucks for the construction company if they have to pay a bit more, but as a society, we're well used to spreading out costs of advancements that improve all of our living standards.
Of course, this matters most in countries that provide some significant level of health care, like Canada.
However, conservatives have no problem believing the value of bringing democracy to Iraq is greater than the value of not killing tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
To be fair, this should also be weighed against the number of innocent Iraqi civilians that would have been killed and/or tortured anyway under Saddam's "oppressive regime". If that number is also sufficiently high, then the death toll of the invasion becomes a moot point. The number probably isn't nearly that high at the moment, but it's worth considering.
On a long enough timeline, should democracy actually take hold in Iraq, the numbers may eventually tip the scales. I'm not holding my breath.
I agree that Borat's character is dangerous and offensive humor [...]
I didn't realize there was such a thing as "dangerous humour". Offensive sure, as that's a subjective judgment. Labeling something "dangerous" is an objective judgment though, so I'm curious for an example of such dangerous humour.
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Your "solution" is simply to ignore the problem... don't bother thinking about logical proof and rigor, don't bother with deep issues of philosophy, simply go out drink a beer go to sleep and go to work driving a taxi in the morning. [...] I think you'll agree that sweeping away all assumptions and starting from the sole bedrock proof "I think therefore I am", there is no pure logic proof you can use to bootstrap the validity of our senses or anything else.
Actually, I do disagree. Given we know that our senses are unreliable, from "I think therefore I am", we can only logically extend it to say "our senses reflect only a facet or transformation of the underlying reality". We must then use the scientific method, or some other sound epistemology, to produce the rest of our knowledge of reality. The philosophy of science is well-grounded logically, so I'm not sure how you can equate this to "going out for a beer and ignoring the problem". If the facet of our reality includes a higher power influencing our view of things (the higher power's influence also being a transformation of underlying reality), that will eventually be reflected in our knowledge. This is the best anyone can ever hope to do given our current understanding.
I took a signifigantly narrower assumption, that there may or may not be a superbeing of various sorts, merely positing no actively deceptive superbeing.
I understand, but this assumption is superfluous; we don't need to it make statements about and build knowledge of reality, as the scientific method is a sufficient epistemological technique. Realistically speaking, just about any proselytizing about reality that philosophy aims to do, science can do better and more rigorously. Philosophy is/was needed only when dealing with knowledge itself (epistemology), as it produced the philosophy of science and initially placed the scientific method on a rigorous footing; but once you realize "I think therefore I am", any further metaphysics is best left to science.
So my "solution" involves continuing our research into reality via scientific exploration, because it is currently a better tool for building knowledge of reality than additional assumptions; it's the best tool we have in fact.
If you want a more rigorous, mathematical treatment of science, see "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science".
I would say the solution is to invoke an axiom:
We are not the victims of deliberate deception by some super-entity.
Solution to what though? It's honestly a non-problem you're trying to solve: if we're being fooled at every turn by some "higher power", then the rules set by that "higher power" are effectively our reality. The laws we discover via scientific inquiry may only be that of the illusory universe as constructed by the higher power and not really the laws of the "underlying universe", but until the "higher power" decides to change its rules, what does it matter? We are bound by its laws, and so life goes on.
Eventually, if the higher power is sloppy, some logical inconsistency will be discovered which will force us to question our world. If such an inconsistency is never encountered, then we have no choice but to continue as usual.
For a computer science analogy: an operating system may be able to tell it's being executed in a virtual machine, such as VMWare, instead of on bare metal based on some inconsistencies it wouldn't experience with normal hardware (unusual delays in otherwise fast, atomic operations for instance); but if the virtualization were total, then the operating system will never be able to tell the difference, and until it could identify some inconsistency, it would have no choice but to continue as usual.
According to QM, even if we knew all the information we could possibly know about the Uranium atom, we still couldn't predict when it decays.
According to QM, we can't know everything about the uranium atom due to the uncertainty principle, and this is why we can't predict when it decays.
But in practice nothing is clear cut. In American society, for example, every major argument for the death penalty involves deterrence and retribution.
;-)
Which is also potentially a legitimate position. There are many factors that go into a perpetrators decisions, the likelihood of being caught and punished among them. If it can be demonstrated that this is not an effective deterrent, then we simply must seek alternatives if the crime problem is sufficiently severe.
In short, I'm not having any trouble with this concept - but I guarantee you other people are and will.
I agree. In general, I explain to those who will listen, and just wait until the naysayers die off and the new generation more accustomed to the idea takes power. It's the mark of almost all progress that the old guard must die off before radical change is possible.
There are tons and tons of examples that are not clear cut at all. Like every person in prison right now who was born into a poor minority family, and never had a decent chance to live life outside of crime, and has been habituated to a different understanding of justice than we share.
I agree. Education has been shown to be the most effective deterrent for this particular problem.
Logical behaviorism and psychological behaviorism are obsolete modes of thought, for a reason. That model is not very good for understanding human beings.
My intent was not to understand human beings for the purposes of divining motives, as my explanation leaves architectural details out of the picture, and those are important for those sorts of questions. Of course, if I had those answers, I'd be writing papers.
Also, I wasn't suggesting a particular psychological model for human beings, but simply stating a physical fact: we are bio-chemical machines with all the properties I outlined.
It sounds very easy just to recondition a human being who has been habituated to a life of crime using just associational, reconditioning strategies, but it isn't.
I agree it's not, and I never said it was easy. "Assigning blame/responsibility" is easy. Doing the right thing about it may indeed be hard, but the catch-all I stated was that the danger must be removed from the populace until it can be neutralized to the best of our abilities.
Humans aren't robots. They are sentient things. They feel things.
Why are feelings excluded from the category of computations? Do you have definitive evidence of this distinction? Humans are very much robots, just of a very different sort from the electromechanical contraptions we build.
The philosophical issue here is that our behavior is mostly physically determined, at the psychophysical level, yet an existent entity still has to suffer the consequences for these behaviors despite having apparently no influence over them.
I'm not sure anyone has so conclusively determined that our behaviour is so physically determined. Last I heard, predispositions are genetically influenced, but our environment is an equally significant factor on our behaviour. Even if both of these factors are driving criminal choices, we still must rehab the offender, and negative feedback in the form of punishment is the oldest known to us, though it's more of a sledgehammer than a chisel.
Our best understanding is that these events are truly random, knowledge that would make it possible to predict them simply does not exist inside the universe.
The information clearly does exist in the universe, because if it didn't, then these events are non-causal and the universe is non-deterministic at heart; perhaps there are some scientists willing throw out causality, but most would not.
As a closing thought to reconcile the fact that this information actually does exist with the "going physical theory": just because the information exists, doesn't mean we can actually measure it, or use it; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle places a hard bound on the amount of information we can extract from a quantum system.
Free will has always been ill-defined, and cast as freedom from some thing or other. If you're going to say you're empowered to choose a direction for yourself (which you've said), then that is mutually exclusive with determinism. If you would deny that we are deterministic (which you have), then some rand()-like mechanism must be at work somewhere. You can't have it both ways. rand() is simply the smallest necessary assumption to enable freedom from determinism.
Therefore, 1) is not true.
Hmmm, yes, that simple statement without any supporting argumentation is very convincing.
2) We are free to choose rationality or irrationality.
Depending on what you meant:
3) according to current quantum physics, the position of an electron of a hydrogen atom at any given time is a good example of your rand() function.
No, it's not. No one has claimed to have witnessed an event that has no cause. That would be an example of rand() in action. The uncertainty principle is an example of our limits of extracting information from a quantum system, not non-causality.
However, if you have free will, then you are a living being, who can choose who you are becoming. If you have not free will, then you are not truely a living being, but merely a machine.
We are machines. Incredibly sophisticated, learning, growing machines, but machines nonetheless. If you claim otherwise (given our current understanding), then you are espousing religion not science.
There is no function in math, and there is no particle in physics, that can cause consciousness. It is likewise futile to look to nature for the cause of free will.
That's a leap. The default assumption is that consciousness and free will do not exist. And whether consciousness is a relevant phenomenon in its own right, or an emergent property of some sort of chaotic system, remains to be seen.
He;s already proven that there is no way that he could no if anything exists or not. He'd like to, no doubt, but all the objections he has so laboriously raised now come around to bite him in the ass. He can't say, "I observe..." because as soon as he does, all the people who have been following his train of thought will cry foul, and rightfully so.
;-)
And I agree, he can't prove it; but we already know that this sort of proof is impossible anyway. I think the important point is to rely not on your senses, but on the knowledge integration process, ie. the solid epistemology that is the scientific method. Ensuring an observation's coherence with a logical epistemology is the best we can ever hope to do. On a long enough time line, the demon fooling our senses will slip up.
Basically your argument makes free will into a non-deterministic random number generator. But of course that would not make you free in any meaningful sense, it would just mean that your actions are controlled by random dice rolls as opposed to by laws of physics. Besides, unpredictable people are not "free", they are insane.
Making your decisions "random" does not necessarily make you insane. The non-causal, random variable in your otherwise mathematical brain function may simply be one factor affecting your decision. The random variable's influence may be typically immeasurable in clear-cut decisions, but if you're 49/51 on a decision (chocolate or vanilla ice cream for instance), the random variable can come into play and swing the decision either way. This is the "freedom" in free will. I don't think it really gains you anything significant, but there it is.
There are lots. Try isotopic decay for one.
"Random" events in physics are due to a lack of information, not due to non-causal factors. We model them as "random" simply because we can't ever hope to have enough information to predict the outcome, not because the outcome is not a causal function of its inputs.
But if you have 1 atom of uranium, it's impossible to know when that specific atom will decay.
Why invoke quantum randomness? I have an even simpler example: flip a coin for decisions and you have 50/50 chance either way. Classical randomness in disproves determinism!
Actually, it doesn't. It just means we don't have enough information to predict the outcome, not that the outcome is not deterministic. Just like radioactive decay.
It's easy to prove that you exist. The Cogito is perfect for that. But it leads to a philosophical solipsim...You can't derive anything from that fact that you exist except for the fact that you exist, which makes it an argumentative dead end.
;-)
I never really understood this supposed "dead end"; the next logical step seems pretty simple to me: I observe that I have sensations, and that these sensations tell me that an outside world exists. The information received from these senses is subject to logical consistency, and ultimately we need an solid epistemology to verify our knowledge of the outside world as garnered via our senses: the scientific method. That completes the philosophy and brings us to now.
How is that argument not logically sound? You cannot prove that an outside world exists, you can only prove that it does not exist. If that's the case, then our scientific research may one day prove just that.
Assuming nature is fully deterministic.
Let me provide an answer to "truly free will" that does not invoke God or "traditional supernaturalism": let's say the universe is a computer with an instruction set (its physical laws). Let's also say that this instruction set contains an instruction, called rand(), to generate a truly random number ("truly random" == the result is not a mathematical function of any inputs, and can not be predicted no matter how much information we have).
If the program that is my human brain invokes rand() at some point and uses the result in my decision process, that is a necessary and sufficient condition for truly free will; my decisions may then be completely free of causality and determinism, as my decision may no longer be a function of its inputs (causative factors), but may in fact simply be a random decision resulting from rand().
I have a few observations from this:
As a closing thought, this is exactly the philosophical underpinnings of The Matrix trilogy: we do not have free will, we are a function of our inputs, predetermined to make the decisions we do once we fully understand the context.
P.S. I covered computer science, philosophy, religion and God, supernaturalism, and The Matrix all in a single coherent post. Do I get a geek bonus?
There are a whole host of issues that go along with redefining responsibility.
I don't know why everyone is making this so difficult, it's really very simple: the entire point of "responsibility" is to identify the principle causative factor of an outcome that we wish to avoid (ie. a murderer is responsible for a murder, is just another way of saying the murderer caused the murder, the outcome we wish to avoid).
If a tumour is causing a person's pedophilia, then remove the tumour and the problem is solved. If it can be demonstrated that the tumour was only providing him with those tendencies but he was still "in control", then he should also be punished after the tumour is removed in order to reinforce the notion that one's impulses must be controlled.
If the person has a condition that cannot be easily removed or cured, then this individual must simply be removed from the general populace in order to remove the danger until such time as their condition, or the danger they pose, can be neutralized. We do this with mental patients now.
If a person's thought process is the cause of their illegal act (such as racist crimes), then we punish the person as their thoughts are an integral part of their makeup that cannot be removed. The only way to "remove a thought" is to rehab the person's thinking, and you accomplish this via negative reinforcement, education, etc.
Do we just set up a 're-education' camp to condition each other not to commit crimes
What are prisons and mental hospitals now? At the very least, criminals have no right to infringe on another humans rights; if they can be conditioned to at least respect that, then that's all we can and should rehab them for.
How to we get rid of the common-sense impulse among victims to blame people for things, especially for horrendous, violent things? The impulse to achieve retribution? That would take a lot of work.
That's no one's problem but their own.
In conclusion: free will or not, "responsibility" or not, nothing changes; ultimately it's all causes and effects, and society simply seeks to control or eliminate the causes that result in deleterious effects. Pseudo-metaphysical concepts of free will are actually superfluous to the argument. If you just view humans as robots that learn by experience/inputs, but sometimes have mechanical flaws or stress-induced failure modes resulting in delinquent behaviour, perhaps that will clarify this subject for you.
The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.
Two economists have already researched and answered that question (though it's still controversial). The answer is a resounding: YES. They concluded that first-mover advantage provides sufficient incentive.
As the patent on Drug X was about to expire, they created "Drug X Gel Capsule... better than before!!!" Of course, doctors, not really knowing, started prescribing the new X Gel Capsule
Oh, the doctors know, believe me. They just have their own "incentives" to prescribe the newer one.
Capitalism is clearly unsustainable. It is very simple. In capitalism, by definition, markets must always grow. The Earth's resources are fixed, ergo, capitalism is unsustainable
Silly boy. Didn't you know that with enough energy we can achieve anything? The Earth is not a closed system, but is continuously bombarded with solar energy. We can make whatever we want out of whatever we have given enough energy, and the sun will provide that for at least a few billion years more. That's unsustainable? Ha!
With regard to government, since to have civilization we must have some government,
Unfounded assumption. See "The Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman for a possible societal structure that requires no centralized government.
Sandro
And the disadvantage of Farnsworth-Hirsch type fusors is that it's not possible to use them as an energy source.
6 673788606
Robert Bussard, co-founder of the Atomic Energy Commission that funds thermonuclear fusion research, disagrees:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=199632184
Scientific American published the secret of Damascus steel back in 2000:
h art/classes/down_loads/damascus.pdf
http://www.mines.edu/Academic/met/pe/faculty/eber
As with most things in material science, the "secret" came down to the impurities.
The article concludes that there was never a "lost technique", it was merely a fluke that the source of their iron contained just the right type of impurities in the right amounts, to result in the incredible Damascus steel. Once that source was exhausted, the "technique" no longer seemed to work, and the "secret" was henceforth considered lost.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Sorry, that's untrue. SL is a world where the cost of reproduction is zero, not the cost of production. Even still, just because the cost of reproduction is almost nil, it doesn't mean an item's value is zero. What's the marginal cost of reproducing your last picture of you and your dad before he died? Near zero. What is the picture's value to you? Quite a bit.
Without reward, few will continue to produce in SL.
No, few will make money reproducing, distributing, buying and selling things. That's entirely different than not producing unique things in the first place. This whole "without IP the world would collapse" perspective is nonsense. And this is coming from a Libertarian, so I'm in favour of property rights, just not where there isn't any actual property.
Wikipedia seems to be confused as to whether its moving to "Coyotos" or whether there is only some talk about that [...]
L4, as great a microkernel as it is, still has some serious security shortcomings. The Hurd devs are currently discussing issues with the Coyotos devs; whether Hurd will actually use Coyotos is unclear last I heard. You can see various discussions they've had on the coyotos-dev mailing list.
I would just like to point out, that when and/or if we have the technology to build and maintain a 35,000+ km space elevator, I'm sure we'll be able to handle some radiation. Heck, we already have far more experience shielding radiation than we do building cables past geosynchronous orbit. I'm really not seeing the monumental challenge here.
That's the real question. Pollution causes all sorts of health problems, so if the reduction in pollution results in a healthier, happier populace, and a significant corresponding savings in health care, then the government would tax regular concrete or provide sufficient incentives for the new concrete, to balance out the additional cost. Kinda sucks for the construction company if they have to pay a bit more, but as a society, we're well used to spreading out costs of advancements that improve all of our living standards.
Of course, this matters most in countries that provide some significant level of health care, like Canada.
However, conservatives have no problem believing the value of bringing democracy to Iraq
is greater than the value of not killing tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
To be fair, this should also be weighed against the number of innocent Iraqi civilians that would have been killed and/or tortured anyway under Saddam's "oppressive regime". If that number is also sufficiently high, then the death toll of the invasion becomes a moot point. The number probably isn't nearly that high at the moment, but it's worth considering.
On a long enough timeline, should democracy actually take hold in Iraq, the numbers may eventually tip the scales. I'm not holding my breath.
I agree that Borat's character is dangerous and offensive humor [...]
I didn't realize there was such a thing as "dangerous humour". Offensive sure, as that's a subjective judgment. Labeling something "dangerous" is an objective judgment though, so I'm curious for an example of such dangerous humour.