463 thoughts on “2. Cosmic Consciousness-the experimental evidence”

1. GlenDavidson,

   Well, it could be a test for CSFI.

   Ok. We found some common ground.

2. colewd: The better tool is a roulette wheel.

   Or you use two differently colored dice to generate 36 equiprobable outcomes.

   colewd: How many mutations on average do you predict it will take for the words to become unrecognizable in the 3 languages discussed?

   Beats me. Pretty fast, I guess, depending on how forgiving the tool is you use to check your strings.

3. colewd: Very good catch. The dice have 2 problems first 1 would need to be offset and an additional dice added so 6 represents the letter A. The bigger problem is asymmetric probabilities of the numbers arising between 6 and 33.

   Two dice would do

   ETA: ninja’d by Corneel

4. Corneel,

   Beats me. Pretty fast, I guess, depending on how forgiving the tool is you use to check your strings.

   Common ground:-)

5. Mung: Rumraket: The “landscape” of functional language strings is potentially equal in size to the total size of the string landscape as we can in principle invent a language in which the string coherently conveys information.

   Mung: So as an example, just to explore this idea, we create a language with just two words in it, yes and no.

   Then we generate strings, starting with one character strings, then two character strings, etc, and randomly assign each string the meaning of either “yes” or “no.”

   In what sense would they convey information?

   How is that relevant to what I said?

6. Mung: Rumraket: Show me where I derive or attempt to derive an ought from an is.

   What you expect from others is what you think they ought to do.

   Yes, but that’s not how I get the oughts. I don’t just pull them out of my expectations. Basically oughts have to be assumed in a way like this:

   P1 (assumption)) If we want to achieve X and avoid Y, then we ought to do what achieves X and do what avoids Y.
   P2 (fact-claim)) We (at least the vast majority of us) want to achieve X and avoid Y.
   P3 (fact-claim)) Doing A achieves X, and doing B avoids Y.
   C (conclusion)) Therefore, we ought to do A and B.

   That’s how it has to work for all of us. But notice how the oughts aren’t derived from anything. They’re stated outright as a premise. They will have to, whether we are dealing with a secular or theistic moral system. You can either accept the premise or not. But I’m not claiming I have derived them from anything.

   Rumraket: I have not claimed that oughts can be derived from anything at all. I have told you why I have expectations of others, not that I claim to be able to derive oughts from any statement of fact.

   Mung: Your expectations are of what other ought or ought not do, and they are derived from facts.

   The facts I appeal to are in P2 and P3 in the above syllogism. But the oughts are stated already in P1 as a basic assumption.

   So you are doing exactly as I claimed. What are these “expectations” if not how others ought to behave?

   You are wrong about the first part, but right about the latter. I have expectations of people and think they ought to behave a certain way, but I haven’t derived the the idea THAT they ought to do it from any facts. What I have derived from the facts is WHAT they ought to do GIVEN the assumption that we OUGHT to do something. I understand that THAT we ought to do something has to be assumed on any moral theory, theistic or secular. But it seems I’m the only one of us prepared to admit that.

7. Mung: Rumraket: But let’s be clear: Neither can you.

   You ALSO can’t get to any oughts from anything in your theology.

   So? Assuming that is true, how does that justify OMagain calling J-Mac a liar?

   That has to come down to some theory of justification. What justifies calling a person a liar?

   Is it merely enough that J-Mac lies? Is coming to be aware of that as a fact enough to justify calling J-mac a liar? Do J-Mac’s lies have to have particularly egregious consequences for the wellbeing of sentient beings? I wouldn’t claim to have figured out exactly how that comes down in any and all situations.

   In general I think if J-Mac lies about physics, or cosmology, or evolution, or about other people, on a forum such as this, then it is okay to call him out on it.

8. Mung: So you don’t see any reasoning here as to why others ought to do certain things and ought not do other certain things?

   Yes but THAT they ought do something has to be assumed. WHAT they ought to do can be informed by facts when we know what it is they want.

   If someone intends to rob or kill someone you love, you wouldn’t go so far as to say they ought not do that based upon the reasons you’ve written above?

   I don’t believe you’re going to be able to argue yourself out of such a situation with a technical ethical theory.

   At best you can make some sort of appeal to their own self-interest. Maybe you can convincingly claim that you happen to know some “special people” who “wouldn’t like it” if they proceeded with their act of violence. Probably not. You’re probably going to have to fight them.

   But start blathering about how you can derive what they ought or ought not do I think you’re wasting your breath. I never really understand the appeal of these kinds of “what would you say to person X who is about to commit a horrible crime”. You couldn’t really show the Nazi guards at concentration camps to be objectively wrong! Maybe not, but neither can you. So that kinda renders the whole idea of engaging in the thought experiment as an argument, completely moot to begin with.

   Such a thought experiment, in order to be persuasive, has to be capable of being plausibly solved by the person putting it out as a “gotcha” to someone else. So let’s hear it, what would YOU say to stop the person about to rob and kill a person you love?

9. Rumraket: P1 (assumption)) If we want to achieve X and avoid Y, then we ought to do what achieves X and do what avoids Y.
   P2 (fact-claim)) We (at least the vast majority of us) want to achieve X and avoid Y.
   P3 (fact-claim)) Doing A achieves X, and doing B avoids Y.
   C (conclusion)) Therefore, we ought to do A and B.

   Right. It’s an axiom.

10. Rumraket: If someone intends to rob or kill someone you love, you wouldn’t go so far as to say they ought not do that based upon the reasons you’ve written above?

    I’d recommend using the same axiom. If it doesn’t handle that case, you probably need to rewrite it so it does. There’s no point settling on one that doesn’t handle a good chunk of our moral intuitions. The problem with those intuitions (moral values) is that they tend to be more all-over-the-place than our prudential values.

11. Rumraket: then we ought to do what achieves X and do what avoids Y.

    I would phrase that as “do what achieves X and avoids Y” to avoid the possibility that what achieves X also achieves or allows Y. Or the case where what avoids Y also excludes achieving X.

    I think these perverse cases are common, even pervasive. We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

12. petrushka: I would phrase that as “do what achieves X and avoids Y” to avoid the possibility that what achieves X also achieves or allows Y. Or the case where what avoids Y also excludes achieving X.

    I think these perverse cases are common, even pervasive. We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

    Agreed.

13. Then there are neutral cases.

    But the phrasing is less important than the sentiment.