http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
keiths:
Neil:
I’m not discounting its importance at all. The movement might actually be the key to identifying the object, because the change in sensory information during and after the movement might yield essential clues.
That doesn’t change the fact that the stream of sensory information is still the only information I’m receiving about the object. My movement aids perception, but only because it causes new information to come in via the sensory channel. The movement itself tells me nothing about the object.
keiths,
There are two senses of the word “How”.
“How did you win the match?”
1) by scoring more points than my opponent
2) by employing my superior talent, strategy and timing to attack at my worthy opponent at his weakest point by using misdirection.
It’s a shame you aren’t able to differentiate them.
answer number one is not the same as number two. knowing number one does not remotely mean you know “how” the match was won.
peace
PS At least you feel you are able to contribute with more middle school humor
OMagain,
I am not against it. I am just wondering why your side wants to claim this, when it is not what they believe at all.
I guess because acknowledging that they believe it happens by accident sounds too stupid.
As I posted previously, I agree that the interesting cases are ones where the causal structure of the world is constant across the scenarios, eg the scenarios of ordinary objects, of simulation, of brains in a vat, and of the virtual reality technology of say 50 years from now.
I think there are interesting discussions to be had of which of these is the most reasonable scenario to accept as an explanation of our perceptive experiences.
I see these sorts of discussions as for example what I understand Hall’s categorical framework to support, that is “All we can do is try to determine which is most consonant with both common sense and modern science” (from Walt’s Wiki summary). Such discussions might also correspond to discussions of the framework principles of Putnam’s conceptual schemes (from his Analytic and Synthetic paper of the 60s), but I am less sure that that is the correct understanding of what Putnam meant by framework principles.
Of course, that seem people find these discussions interesting does not mean that you should!
Yet, to me, it seems that the entire purpose of your post (the one to which I am responding), is to discount the importance of actions.
I guess I’ll just leave it as a point of major disagreement.
Posts like that are when you lose most people around here. I don’t get why we have to spend so much time pointing out the ridiculous caricatures. Allow me to try to make it clear what your post reads like in a way you might recognize. It’s probably a bit like how you feel when atheists caricature god as an old white-bearded dude sitting on a cloud. A magical man in the sky.
To make it more explicit: Nobody on “our side” literally believes the evolutionary process is “giving stuff away” to anyone or anything. And you obviously know this.
But then you immediately proceed to silly mistake number two, which is to caricature the reason why people don’t bother spelling out how evolution works, as being “because you don’t want to say it’s just accidents because it sounds stupid”.
It’s true, that sounds stupid.
But nobody believes “it’s just accidents” either, so it literally cannot be the case that they express things the way they do because “it’s just accidents” sounds stupid, when they literally don’t believe that anyway.
So since you are in need of some help with understanding this, the reason we usually don’t bother spelling it out is because it would take a lot of time and clarification to describe that “populations of repoducing organisms living in environments permeated by electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum undergo mutations that alter the properties of already existing photoreactive molecules sitting in the membranes of cells that sit in the surface and skin of multicellular organisms, such that light and shadow-patterns induce reaction cascades to cause behaviorally beneficial (with respect to long-term reproductive success) responses in the individual organisms, leading in turn to an accumulation of such changes in the populations over time” (or something along those lines) every time we want to say that eyes evolved without planning and foresight.
It’s really just a whole lot easier to say that natural selection gave us eyes so we could navigate our environments. It is for ease of communication and nothing else.
Rumraket,
Doesn’t explain where you think the codes came from.
Accidents.
I think “the codes” came from accidents? Cool, I didn’t even know this myself. I’m so glad you’re here to tell me what I believe particularly when I was not myself aware of it.
Why don’t you rather ask what I believe than try set me with some silly caricature?
What code does gravity use to tell rain to fall down?
I suspect phoodoo needs “why” answers. “How” things happen is the only answer scientific enquiry can provide.
Neil,
It’s just a logic error on your part. The fact that I see the sensory channel as the sole source of information about the object does not imply that actions are unimportant to perception. They are important because they can cause new information to flow in over the sensory channel.
Later I’ll give some examples that demonstrate both the former and the latter.
So Richards thinks the codes in our DNA are akin to rain falling because of gravity. It just happens because that is the property of gravity.
And you agree with him?
Still only one code in DNA, the genetic code of protein translation.
Everett Hall, as quoted by walto:
That’s a telling admission. Hall is conceding that his principle — that we should trust our perceptions by default — has no basis!
He tries to mitigate the damage:
Here he falls victim to the circularity he warned against earlier in the passage. “Everyday and scientific pursuits” are already based on the tacit assumption that sensory information is basically reliable. When Hall takes “a greater agreement with actual thought and practice in everyday and scientific pursuits” as support for his principle, he is concluding his assumption!
A paragraph and a half past the point where walto’s quote ends, Hall presents an interesting analogy (you can find the full text of the book here):
The problem with that analogy is that the presumption of innocence is based on moral, not epistemic, considerations. We don’t presume innocence because we think the defendant is more likely to be innocent than guilty; we do so because it’s less morally acceptable to punish an innocent person than to let a guilty one off the hook.
All reasoning must stop somewhere–at least so says the foundationalist. Hall discusses the (incorrect) charge of circularity in another work, Philosophical Systems, which is devoted to metaphilosophy. But there are no proofs–either of his categories or yours.
walto,
How is the charge incorrect?
‘innocence’ in the epistemic context is not a moral notion. We accept the original evidence of our perceptual experiences because that best comports with common sense, the possibility of communication, science, etc. Better than the Humean ‘way of ideas’ that you seem to be supporting, anyhow. I discuss this in my paper on Reid Hall and error, which you can find on-line I believe.
walto,
Exactly. That’s why Hall’s analogy fails. Our reasons for presuming innocence are moral, but there are no corresponding moral motivations for presuming the reliability of our perceptions.
Which is circular reasoning, as I explained above.
walto,
I’m not a foundationalist, but even if I were, the presumption of perceptual reliability wouldn’t be a necessary foundational belief.
It’s not supposed to be a moral notion, and it’s not circular. So that post is like something Kevin Love might have put up. I think you need to get a better handle both on how analogies work and and the difference between supporting an axiom from within and without an axiom system.
But at least I recognize the keiths posting style. No responses whatever to questions or criticisms and a bunch of half-baked attacks.
He’s back, baby! Just like Love!
walto,
Right. It’s supposed to be an epistemic one. But there isn’t an epistemic justification for the presumption of innocence, only a moral one. And there isn’t an epistemic justification for the presumption of perceptual reliability, either.
The only justification Hall offered is circular.
In that case, please point out where my analysis goes wrong:
No. It’s a communication failure.
What I am seeing as important is completely invisible to you.
Does he? He should probably answer for himself.
Well, that was my point. There are inherent properties to matter and energy in the observable universe that we can observe and measure, then use to formulate hypotheses and test predictions. These processes give explanations as to how the Universe works. Why there is a universe and whether it was created by some “supernatural” entity are philosophical questions, I guess.
If that was his point, yes.
Probably I am missing some subtle connection in phoodoo’s two threads, but shouldn’t you and RumRucket be in the DNA code thread (AKA as the Joe and Keith thread)?
Can’t speak for Rumraket, but I should be doing something else entirely.
Epistemology is a moral endeavor don’t be mistaken.
At it’s core it’s about the moral question of choosing to follow my own opinions verses submitting to the truth. Giving my judgement the benefit of the doubt is morally wrong because it’s not innocent.
peace
Alan Fox,
So you think the DNA code is an inherent property of the universe? Or that the universe would inevitably create DNA strands because that is a fundamental consequence of the universe?
Does that follow from his statement? Then prove it with a deductive argument. Have fun.
fifth:
No, epistemology is distinct from the ethics of belief.
Anyway, it’s interesting that you can write something like this…
…without the slightest twinge of self-awareness. You are doing exactly what you decry. Confronted with an inconsistency in your position, you are dismissing the truth and clinging to your own idiosyncratic and heretical opinions regarding the incarnation.
I’m still curious about how you’ll deal with your predicament:
keiths:
Neil:
Both of us see actions as important to perception, Neil.
Your mistake is to take this statement of mine…
…as evidence that I consider actions unimportant. It’s a bad inference. The latter does not follow from the former.
It’s a logic error on your part, not a communication failure.
I see them as fundamental, not merely as important. That’s what seems to be invisible to you.
Not that I think it has anything to do with Walt’s points, but there is
deontological justification in epistemology, which says we are obligated to pursue truth when assessing the justification for our beliefs. It’s an older position which is no longer generally accepted.
There is also an epistemological analog of virtue ethics; in virtue epistemology, one assess the overall epistemological virtues of a subject before assessing the justification for any of their individual beliefs. Example: do they carefully review evidence or do they jump to conclusions based on their biases?
I follow virtue epistemology when assessing who to engage with at TSZ. Others seem to engage with most people here, but do vary their mode of engagement to suit their assessment of the interlocutor’s epistemological virtues.
I was curious what the basis for the “billions-to-one” estimate (that we are not living in a simulation) in the interview linked in the OP to this thread. It’s this:
So, now, finally, the question can be answered of “What makes the musk rat guard his musk?” (and it ain’t Courage).
I take your position as saying empirical evidence as in observing a tree is consistent will all of the scenarios in your disjunction, so that the situation is described by:
I see a tree AND (the tree is an ordinary object OR it is a demon-induced hallucination OR I am a Boltzmann brain OR …)
This is also how I understand your references to underdetermination in this context.
Now if a scientific theory is underdetermined by observation, we choose among alternatives by using pragmatic criteria, like simplicity, fecundity, unification. Do you think we can similarly use non-empirical arguments to reject options in the disjunction?
For example, here is an argument against one being a Boltmann brain as presented in Sean Carroll in his latest book (which by the way is a fun, quick read but sacrifices depth for breadth IMHO):
Is it possible that you and your surrounding environment, including all of your purported knowledge of the past and the outside world, randomly fluctuated into existence out of a chaoticsoup of particles? Sure, it’s possible. But you should never attach very high credence to the possibility. Such a scenario is cognitively unstable, in the words of David Albert. You use your hard-won scientific knowledge to put together a picture of the world, and you realize that in that picture, it is overwhelmingly likely that you have just randomly fluctuated into existence. But in that case, your hard-won scientific knowledge just randomly fluctuated into existence as well; you have no reason to actually think that it represents an accurate view of reality. It is impossible for a scenario like this to be true and at the same time for us to have good reasons to believe in it. The best response is to assign it a very low credence and move on with our lives.
BruceS,
I still prefer a response that reduces the (claimed to be extremely high) probability of WHAT is claimed over one that could be taken to attack the epistemological basis of all claims, as Carroll’s does. So I ask the science wonks here again, isn’t it the case that the entropy argument takes every state as (otherwise) having the same likelihood–leaving the expectations to be solely a function of thermodynamic principles? But isn’t it the case that, as the redit response indicates, given evolutionary theory….they don’t? Thanks.
I imagine the high odds (not the exact number) are based on the probability estimates in Bostrom’s work, as summarized and critiqued here and also here.
There is also this recent reply. I don’t think much of the arguments it presents, but the tone that they are presented in is amusing.
I needed DuckDuckGo to understand that. Funnily enough, the search seemed to bring up equal numbers of links to the Wizard of Oz and the Republican leadership/Trump fiasco.
I’m not sure what you mean by “thermodynamic principles” in the above. I think the expectations relate to the probability assigned to various macro configuirations, and these configurations are described by biology theory in this case (and such descriptions cannot be reduced to descriptions of in physics of molecular states, of course!).
I don’t think that reddit response works if you assume our universe will eventually reach thermodynamic equilibrium and then stay in that state for infinite time. Equilibrium allows for random fluctuations, so Boltzmann brains* would happen infinitely many times.
Of course, one can assume we are living in the finite timeframe before heat death and argue that evolution makes us more probable than Boltzmann brains in that timeframe but this begs the question.
If there are an infinite number of universes in the multiverse, things get more complicated, to say the least.
———————-
* As Keith linked in a previous post, Carroll has published papers arguing against the possibility of Boltzmann brains.
Thanks for that respose, Bruce; I appreciate it. But I’m still confused. When you mention ‘the probability assigned to various macro considerations’ what I want to know is if that assumes a ceteris paribus clause. I mean, wouldn’t those have to be revised if there are countervailing ‘forces’ (like natural selection) also at work?
Sorry in advance if this is a shoddy analogy, but consider the odds of rolling a six with a single die. If we know the die is weighted, we have to throw out our apriori expectation, don’t we?
Oh, by ‘thermodynamic principles’ I just meant expected declines in entropy. (But do we add at the end ‘all else equal’?)
Here’s a response to this and the preceding post of yours. I don’t claim a deep understanding of any of the following, so corrections are welcome.
In the entire universe taken as one system, total energy stays the same. It is EQUAL TO “heat” energy, (useless for work in any context, AKA entropy) PLUS free energy (useful for doing work in some context). This equation is very rough, eg it ignores the role of pressure and temperature.
The heat death of the universe means free energy is zero. There is no possibility of ongoing life and evolution in this state.
If the random fluctuations that could produce Boltzmann Brains (BBs) are possible during heat death, then it does not matter how tiny their probability is. BBs will occur an infinite number of times in an eternal and heat dead universe, swamping the number of evolved brains which occurred in the finite time before heat death.
Could one estimate the probability of an evolved, living brain versus a BB in the finite period before the heat death? For BBs at a given time, one could count the number of micro state configurations characterizable as a BB, which would involve describing those states biologically or perhaps functionally based on cognitive science and assuming multiple realizability. I don’t know how the presence of free energy affects the probability of the random fluctuations. If it does not, then I guess one could count the number of configurations for BBs and divide by the total number of configurations to get a probability for a given short time interval. That assumes all configurations are equally likely, which I understand is your everything-else-being-equal condition. You’d also have to taking into account the minimum size for the configuration and the size of the universe. Then specify a minimum lifetime for the configuration to last for it to count as a BB, assume everything is independent, and figure out a total probability over time by addition over each interval (that ignores time interval overlaps).
Or something like that.
For evolved life, it’s not clear to me that the counting of configurations will work and perhaps that is the point you make in your first post. Instead, you have to figure out the number of locations where life could originate, the local chemical and energy conditions needed to make a kind of life possible in each, the probability it would arise under those conditions, and then the probability it would evolve over time into some kind of thinking being. All those probabilities involve considerations of chemistry, biology, cognitive science which might not weight micro configurations equally. After all, one role of evolution is to rule out probability calculations which simply count all possibilities and assume they are equally likely. I think that point may have come up previously at TSZ.
Thanks, Bruce.
I look forward to any amplifications/corrections/corroborations that anybody else may wish to share on this.
keiths:
Neil:
Your objection was that I wasn’t treating them as important:
But I don’t discount its importance. That was bad reasoning on your part.
My last sentence…
…does not mean that actions are unimportant.
There is no inconsistency between the following two statements:
And:
It was just a logic error on your part.
walto,
It’s the other way around. Musk is saying the odds are billions-to-one that we are living in a simulation.
That’s right. It’s muskrat love.
Bruce,
Well, we can definitely reject incoherent options in the disjunction, and that counts as a non-empirical criterion. But the real question isn’t whether we can reject individual options, but rather whether we can reject the disjunction as a whole. I think the answer is no, which is why I remain a Cartesian skeptic.
Also, when we favor certain theories based on the criteria you listed — simplicity, fecundity, unification — we’re not saying that the alternatives are false. It’s a pragmatic rejection, not an epistemic one. For example, we may favor simpler theories because they’re easier to work with, but that doesn’t mean that the more complex alternatives are wrong. Ockham’s Razor is a heuristic, not a law of nature.
Right.
I changed that to “fundamental”, once it became clear that you took “important” to mean something of only minor importance.
Enjoy your parlor game of finding imaginary logic errors.
Neil,
A couple of experiments to help you see your mistake.
First, a thought experiment:
I’m looking at an unknown object about 30 feet away. I stare and stare, but I can’t make out what it is. Finally I walk 10 feet to the left while keeping my eyes fixed on the object. As I walk, I begin to make out its 3D shape and it suddenly becomes clear what the object is.
My action — moving 10 feet to the left — was crucial. I couldn’t have recognized the object otherwise.
Now suppose a blind person, whose optic nerves have both been severed in an accident, repeats the experiment. She repeats my motions with exactly the same timing, yet (unsurprisingly) she is unable to recognize the object.
Why? Because the sensory channel — vision, in this case — is the only source of information about the object, and it is unavailable to her.
Action is crucial, and I couldn’t have recognized the object without it, but all of the information about the object comes through the sensory channel.
Both statements are true:
a) Action is crucial.
b) All of the information about the object comes through the sensory channel.
Now the second experiment:
Watch the GIF below. You start out seeing five bollards installed in a lane of traffic. The car appears to be headed for disaster, but then the motions of the car and of the camera reveal the illusion: only two of the bollards are real. The others are just a thin layer of paint on the pavement.
The motions are critical, but you aren’t peforming them. You’re just watching a GIF on a screen. All of the information you’re getting about the objects and their motion comes from the sensory channel.
So again, action is crucial, but all of the information you’re getting about the perceived objects comes through the sensory channel.
Thinking that the latter negates the former was just a bad inference on your part.
keiths,
I’d put that the other way around. Highly likely bets aren’t paid a billion to one.
Yes, that’s what you are talking about. It is not what I have been talking about.
As I said — miscommunication.
walto:
keiths:
walto:
Bookmaker odds are odds against something occurring. You were talking about odds that — in this case the odds that we are not living in a simulation. When you’re taiking about the odds that something will happen (or is true), you need to flip the bookmaker odds around.
So Musk is saying that the odds are billions-to-one that we are living in a simulation. If you want bookmaker odds, which are odds against, you have to flip that around: one-to-billions.