http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
In this discussion, I have been taking “identical” to mean atom for atom the same as, including quantum states.
I don’t see much point to the discussion. If we have quantum same as, there can be no difference in behavior, other that that induced by differences in the ongoing environment.
If they are superficially similar, but have different histories, they are not the same at all, for the purposes of this discussion. Identical twins reared in different cultures would likely have different languages and different religious views.
The circularity arises here because you are insisting (rather dogmatically, I might add) on treating justification here as having the structure of a deductively valid argument. Only when put into that form is the argument circular. That’s like creationists who insist that evolutionary theory is circular because it assumes what it sets out to prove.
The mistake in both cases is neglecting the difference between the structure of justification in purely formal domains, where deductive validity is the appropriate kind of structure, and the structure of justification in non-formal domains — such as science, politics, art, law, and so forth. (I think that this conflation of formal and non-formal domains is the best way of thinking about what goes wrong with Descartes’s ‘quest for certainty.’)
The non-deductivist alternative is to recognize that — to take one example of non-formal justification — scientists formulate some constitutive rule or principle on which a model is then based, and then devise ways of testing that model against reality through constructing highly constrained experiments. This generates a process that is rational by virtue of being self-correcting, not by virtue of being deduced from principles.
Likewise, philosophers can both appeal to our naive judgments of introspection, memory, and perception in order to develop a theory about those judgments which explains why they are reliable, to the extent that they are, and also why they are not reliable, to the extent that they are. This is no more circular than scientific reasoning generally, though both will look circular if one insists on deductive validity as the sole model of justification.
True, but the rejection of foundationalism clears the way for accepting a version of epistemological holism according to which rationality lies in the self-corrections across the network of inferentially linked commitments and entitlements. On that epistemological methodology, there’s nothing viciously circular about using our naive judgments of perception, memory, and introspection in order to construct a theory about those judgments that explains why those judgments are reliable, to the extent that they are, and also why they are not reliable, to the extent that they are.
There is no non-circular argument against Cartesian skepticism. Hume was the first philosopher to realize this, and he’s completely right. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you here.
I meant that the non-asterisked use of “knowledge” was the one purported to rest on a mythical foundation, and that the use of an asterisk signals that there is no foundation. That’s why I wrote:
I thought the construction of the sentence would make it perfectly clear that — pairing your terms with mine — I was trying to say that
“knowledge” = “knowledge with a mythical foundation attached to it”
“knowledge with an asterisk” = “genuine knowledge without the attempt at “grounding” it in anything else”
As long as we recover the entire quantum state and stay with the entire quantum state (and not just subsystems which might decohere), then the evolution of that quantum state is deterministic.
I did say “in principle” when I brought this up, so concerns like unpredictability due to inexact information on the initial state do not apply.
I am not sure why you mention supervenience. I was trying to make the point that causal history at the lowest level of physics is still there for those who were uncomfortable with history in their physicalism.
If you mean it that it would not be possible to recover that history when you express it at a higher level which supervenes on the physics, I suspect you right.
AFAIK you do have to use quantum information to support time reversibility and information preservation. I did say “in principle”.
petrushka:
I addressed that yesterday:
There’s a classic little paper by Max Black (“Black Max” as he was known at Cornell) refuting the identity of indiscernibles, by discussing a universe that has nothing in it but two “identical” spheres. Every (qualitative) property* one has, the other has too. But….there are still TWO spheres.
*”Qualitative” is added here to rule out “individual essences” or what the medievals called “haecceities.” That is, if one contains X atoms of Y type arranged in such and such a fashion, so does the other one. No distinguishing characteristics, but two spheres nonetheless.
ETA: all the relational properties of each sphere are the same too–again, assuming we don’t try to sneak proper names or individual essences into the designations of such properties. E.g., say one of the sphere’s is exactly one mile away from a perfect sphere, 1/2 mile in diameter, of pure titanium. So is the other one.
I mentioned supervenience because you responded to Patrick’s example about a person being conveyed to a the same location by two different routes, by referring to the characteristics of particles upon which I presume you take this person to supervene.
Consider a game of pool or, since we’re all intellectuals here, chess. In the endgame the positions of the last few balls or pieces can be the same for many different preceding games. There is not one unique path to those states.
Sounds about like the Barry Arrington’s position in the last thread before i was banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
Why do you suppose two great physicists thought this quip is amusing? Because it is true, or because it is interesting?
Patrick:
Yes, because the rules of chess aren’t deterministic or time-reversible.
petrushka, to Neil:
That’s the point of my Anaximander Rodriguez scenario. Bruce wants differences in the meaning of the name ‘Anaximander Rodriguez’ to supervene on differences in the brain states and physical environs of the linguistic community on Earth versus Twin Earth. There are no such differences, so Bruce’s theory of meaning fails.
He points out that the relevant differences in causal history are implicitly preserved in the present state of the entire universe. That’s true, but it doesn’t rescue his theory because the differences are preserved in the wrong parts of the universe.
OK, I see. I do agree there is no reversibility for such macrostates.
I only included that that quote to point out that those weren’t the type of situations where my points applied when I said to “consider the time reversibility of physics” in reply to a post which said a given end state could arise from different previous states. I should say I have not read any of the intervening comments.
If a supervenience physicalists are worried about supervenience on past states, then perhaps they would be happier to accept that the supervenience can remain on current states, as long as one allows that that base state for the supervenience can expand at the speed of light, to account for any stray photons that interacted with the subsystem of interest.
Those games are played in a universe that, if I understand you correctly, you are claiming is deterministic and time-reversible. They are an existence proof that those characteristics do not result in a single path to any particular state such as the end of a chess game.
If you can’t determine the history of a chess game from the state where only a few pieces are left on the board, why would you expect to be able to determine the history of more complex states?
Checkmate! 🙂
I made one significant mistake here that I’d better correct before someone gets there first: scientists respond to a problem, where the problem is sometimes a deficiency in an model already in use, by revising a model even to the point of devising new constitutive principles. I didn’t want to convey that I thought scientists invented models ab initio.
Not sure what you’re saying there. If I understand that quip, their simply agreeing with Black that piling on qualititative similarities doesn’t produce numerical identities. It simply can’t.
“Atom for atom the same” is ambiguous.
I think you don’t see the point because you haven’t quite gotten what is being discussed. The externalist (someone who makes the causal history essential) doesn’t suggest there will be differences in BEHAVIOR. They will completely agree with you that there can’t be.
Patrick,
Yes, but there’s a huge difference between the following two claims:
1. The entire history of a chess game is implicit in the positions of the remaining pieces during the endgame.
2. The entire history of the universe is implicit in its current state.
#1 is obviously false, but #2 is actually true according to current theory.
Complexity isn’t an issue, because this isn’t a question of human ability. No one (including Bruce) is suggesting that humans can do anything remotely like this. Bruce’s point was that if you consider the state of the entire universe, then causal histories are implicitly preserved, so there actually is something physical upon which differences in meaning can potentially supervene, given his history-based definition of meaning.
The problem for Bruce is that the potentially “supervenable” state isn’t where he wants it to be. See this comment for an explanation.
Bruce,
The problem is far more serious than a few “stray photons”. Take the earliest relevant event in the causal history and visualize its light cone. The “base state” encompasses the entirety of the light cone up to the present. Anything within that section of the light cone potentially matters, not just a few stray photons.
What do you take the the status of 2 to be? If it’s supposed to be a necessary truth, it seems like it will be inconsistent with swampy hypotheses. If it’s not, I’m not sure what its philosophical significance is thought to be (if anything).
walto,
I don’t think #2 is a necessary truth, because other possible worlds presumably admit of physical laws that are not deterministic, not time-reversible, or both.
The philosophical significance of #2 (in the context of the current discussion) is that it offers something physical for history-based meaning to supervene upon. From my comment to Patrick above:
Do you have a cite for that? I may not have been paying sufficient attention to the earlier part of this thread.
If a chess game is part of the universe and its history is not implicit in its current state, how can the history of the universe be implicit in its current state (which includes the chess game)?
Yes, I understand. That stray photon stuff was humor. I also had the additional line that “one might have some trouble keeping pace with it”. But I guess it would not have helped.
I did say “in principle”. There is a fact of the matter about causal history at the lowest level of physics, even we cannot know it.
It’s only different in scale from the fact of matter about Ceasar’s sneeze even if we cannot know it. That was the topic of the exchange with Neil.
There’s so much talking past each other here. From my perspective the only interesting cases involve qualitatively identical entities where meanings are nevertheless thought to diverge by externalists. So much of the epistemological stuff here about whether one might be able to find out which item is authentic doesn’t much matter. If the stories involve eventually discernible differences, we either rule them out in favor of Star Trek type hypotheses, or we postulate that the items can’t be distinguished, or just ask the questions about reference prior to anybody discerning anything.
What the externalist claims is that referents of terms can be in a sense finer-grained than any physical specification that does not somehow include the histories of the speakers and the referents. Now, if one insists (with Leibniz?) and, I think Bruce in his ETA 1 above, that complete histories are necessarily embedded in current micro-structures, I’m not sure what’s left of swampman-killing externalism.
If so, then I think you should be cleaving to a more limited version of externalism than you have been pushing. keiths has been making that argument, I believe.
OTOH, you could, I think, stand with Patrick on the time-reversibility issue. But I don’t see how opposing both keiths on meaning and patrick on reversibility can work.
Patrick,
Here’s one. From the Wikipedia article on the black hole information paradox:
Patrick:
It’s because the universe is self-contained, but the chess game isn’t.
The chess game (as a physical system — see the cautionary note below) is influenced by physical “inputs” from its environment, and that’s where the variability in its behavior comes from. It’s next state is a function of the current state and the current inputs. For a given current state, different inputs may cause different next states. If there were no inputs, then the next state would be a function only of the current state, and thus any given state could have only one possible successor. The history would thus be implicit in the current state.
The universe doesn’t receive inputs from its environment because there is no environment from which to receive them, and so its next state is a function of the current state and only the current state. The history is therefore implicit in the current state.
Also, just as a caution, there are two ways to think about the chess game. One is as a physical system consisting of board and chess pieces and players; the other is as a logical system.
When you consider the chess game as a physical system, the “rules” are just the laws of physics, and one of the explanations for how the pieces got into a certain configuration on the board is that your three-year-old, who knows nothing about chess, was playing with the board and pieces this afternoon and left them that way.
When considered as a logical system, it is the rules of chess, not the laws of physics, that govern the state transitions. In that case we’re worried about logical states, not physical states, and what matters is whether the rules of chess — not the laws of physics — are deterministic and time-reversible. (They’re neither, and so considered as a logical system, the history of a chess game is not implicit in its current state.)
You’ve already conceded that your reasoning is circular!
No, because evolutionary theory doesn’t assume what it sets out to prove, but your argument does.
keiths:
KN:
Exactly. Hence my question:
Please answer this time.
Is it? How do you know? What’s outside thé light cone?
Alan:
By definition.
keiths,
So you don’t know.
Alan,
I told you — I know it by definition.
This isn’t hard, Alan:
But you claimed the universe is self-contained and you know it is so. Yet we are constrained by the finite speed of light never to know what is outside the past light cone of the Earth. Where’s your lack of certainty when it matters?
Christ, Alan.
Things that are true by definition don’t require empirical confirmation.
Now run along and check whether all bachelors are unmarried.
It’s all universes are self-contained now? How do you know about anything beyond the past light cone of the Earth? Or do you mean to talk about the observable universe?
So sad. We’ll never know if all bachelors are unmarried, because there might be a contingent of married bachelors just outside our light cone.
I’m going to bed, Alan. Good luck wrestling with this.
I am actually not seeing what is obviously obvious to Keiths. So just recapping,
I’d just like to clarify where observation of reality ends and where untestable hypothesis begins. I’m suggesting it is the past light cone of the Earth.
And I’m curious as to whether this is a claim about reality. Are you claiming that the (observable) universe is deterministic?
Apparently you are.
Thanks for this citation. Do you have anything else suggesting this is a “commonly assumed tenet”? I ask because the same article suggests the claim is controversial when it says this:
Also, I note that for the claim that unitarity is a commonly assumed tenet, the article provides nothing but one citation to a show on the Discovery Channel regarding the Hawking Paradox and one citation to an article in the NY Times called “A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox”. (That article could use more cites generally, IMHO.)
It seems to me that, although it could be false, there’s an awful lot of evidence for determinism (leaving out quantum irregularities). But I’m wondering what there is for this unitarity thesis besides some speculations of Hawking’s. Do you know? If so, can you summarize the evidence for backwards determinism? Or, if it’s basically in all the textbooks, maybe some other source (I might be able to understand) would be helpful. Thanks again.
walto,
Scott Aaronson keeps popping up as a recommendation as a good communicator.
Determinism is a quantum context is different from determinism in a classical context.
In a classical context, if we know the state of a system, such as all the positions and momentums of its elements, then we can know the outcome of any measurement.
But in a quantum context, all we know is the quantum state, and it only gives us the probability of various outcomes of a given type of measurement. It is only that quantum state that is deterministic.
In quantum mechanics, the quantum state at time is given by Q(t) = U(t)Q(0). The operator U(t) that takes state at time 0 to state time t must be unitary (a mathematical property) in the quantum formalism, and that constraint entails the determinism of quantum state. Of course, the justification of that limitation in the formalism is the fact that the theory is so successful.
The SEP sections on the Info lost Paradox and on QM dynamics may help.
As in my reply to Walto, quantum determinism is not the same as classical determinism
BruceS,
Thanks. I’m going to (try to) read that Belot et al. paper.
Is it supposed to ENTAIL classical determinism (in both directions)? And, if not, is it actually responsive to patrick’s claim about one-way (classical) determinism?
keiths,
At this point, your steadfast refusal to answer questions I put you, your attempts to use the dictionary as if that settled all questions of conceptual analysis, and pugilistic style all indicate to me that I am no longer capable of treating you as if you are arguing in good faith. Hence I shall withdrawn from this exchange before I say something in violation of the site rules.
I will note a certain irony in that keiths’s epistemology consists largely in responding to Agrippa’s Trilemma exactly as FMM and KairosFocus do — all justification relies on “foundations” that are themselves unjustified. (Whether this is skepticism or dogmatism is a nice question.)
No, I don’t think QM determinism entails classical determinism. The converse might be true (since probabilities would all be one for some quantum measurement), but since the classical conceptions of reality are wrong, I am not sure if that matters.
Classical determinism says once I know the classical state I know the outcome of all measurements, and so if the current state determines future classical state, I’d know the future state of all measurements.
But QM denies that we can know the future outcome of all measurements; it only says we can know their probabilities given the current quantum state. So it cannot entail classical determinism, I think.
I don’t know what Patrick has said; I’m only looking at this thread when you post, to be honest.
It is fair to say that my earlier post of macro states etc only applied to classical determinism.
And of course all of this ignores issues with “quantum collapse” on the assumption that such a thing is not part of the quantum formalism but is only one possible interpretation. Further, AFAIK, it is not an interpretation that is popular among the philosophers or physicists who are interested in such matters.
There is also the issue that the quantum state is a mathematical entity; whether there is anything “real” about it is a definitely a controversial issue.
I just wanted to put those issues on the table in case no one else has. They definitely affect this thread somehow, but the details of how they do so are beyond my pay grade.
OK. And classical determinism posits that if we know the precise locations and trajectories of all particles in the universe at one moment, we can also know the past and future of the universe if we have sufficient computing power. Nobody holds this view today, though, do they?
There is the “ignore” option, though it doesn’t help when people quote who you happen to be ignoring, when you see the list of quoted comments, or if you haven’t logged in, or if you look at comments via the dashboard. Other than that though…
Because there are no classical states as we now understand quantum reality at the lowest level.
But can get close enough to knowing it and its future for practical purposes (ie limited system with well-understood interfaces to world external to system, limited time, predicting macro states at some level)? Different question.
Good luck with that. I had a quick look but it is beyond me.
I did read Susskind’s book on the topic a long time ago. I remember the human interest parts better than the math and science! He also has lots of lectures on YT but I am not interested in sitting through them. You can find his Scientific American paper as cited in SEP on sci-hub.cc
This thread is pretty much open-topic, I think.
I think classical determinism only requires the forward moving results. It doesn’t have to be “unitary” AFAIK.
In a deterministic universe the state at one point in time determines all future states. There is no reason, though, to think that a state at a given point in time has only one possible history. Your cite does not support that conclusion.
That doesn’t matter. The chess game is part of the universe. At some point in time the state of the universe includes a chess board with a half-dozen pieces remaining in an unfinished game. Someone steps into the room to find both players have suffered fatal aneurisms simultaneously. There were no other observers of the game. There is no way to tell from the current state of the universe how the pieces came to be in their current configuration.
Am I mistaken or are you trying to make the case that any current state of the universe has a unique history that can in principle be reconstructed from that state? If so, you haven’t supported that position yet.