h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, your quite right - it works in Brunel but not in Pliny. Very strange.
The second link just went to Robbie's article "Plato and AI"

The third rendition is the one that's intended

We'll pass this info on to Tech, and see if Brian can make anything of the phenomenon.

Chris,

How about just continuing the dialogue in short chunks?

Yes, short posts are fine but sometimes I like to try and summarise the overall picture just to see how my understanding is going

And I appreciate. I start off mad, then end up nodding and chuckling...

Chris,

Well I hope we can get back to the discussion we were having at some point.

Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?

Has anyone, over the last week or two, been thinking about how to explain their views here in a way that makes more sense (to himself as well as everyone else) and, found that as this conversation has considerably sharpened their understanding of what their talking about, decided to go back to basics and review the original question?

<BB<

I cannot tell a lie, your honour. Guilty on all counts

Hi folks! I hope the convo can resume. Lots of things I've wanted to say but not got around to saying yet.

Anyways just about one point - believing you yourself has free will: I think that while it might not be true, you sort of have to believe that it's true, to lead a successful and meaningful life. It's not really coherently possible to believe that you don't have free will. It is part of the category I call 'belief by default'. You can only believe what you're conceptually equipped to believe. Certain things might indeed be true, but if it is impossible for you to believe them, you can't believe them.

When it comes to science, it is in my view wrong to expect people to *believe* in the truth of scientific theories. Science itself doesn't believe anything. But more importantly - to *believe* something is not merely to assert it - you also have to understand it, it must mean something to you. So you can't say, for instance, that you believe in quantum mechanics when you have no deep understanding of what quantum mechanics is. That would be a content-deficient 'belief' and not a real belief as I hold it - belief being conviction of a well-formed idea. A person might not protest that a scientific theory is *wrong*, and yet not actually commit to a *belief* in the theory.

Well said, that man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KUEg8rwzUA

I entirely agree with both those points

I think this might be relevant here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBrSdlOhIx4

Willem, #131

Although it might be the case that it is impossible to believe p even if p is true, I am not sure this is true in the case of p = 'I don't have free will'. Here, I am taking 'believe p' to mean just to hold that p is true.

Now, you might counter that what people /say/ they believe and what they /actually/ believe are often different and the way to tell them apart is to look at what people do. Since people living normal lives invariably behave /as if/ they have free will then in this sense they believe it, hence it is impossible for them to believe to the contrary.

I don't buy that though, here's why. Consider one of the cognitive illusions like the concave face illusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKa0eaKsdA0

Although I know it is concave I can't help seeing it as convex. Seeing, as with all perception, is a kind of behaviour. So I think we sometimes can't help that our behaviour and what we believe diverge.

Similarly, behaving /as if/ one has free will is conceptually different from behaving /in the belief/ one has free will, even if the behaviour is the same.

On your second point about science, I don't think that's quite right either. Whilst I do agree that it makes no sense to say 'I believe p' unless you understand p enough to assign a truth value, this is not the situation at all when we assess scientific claims.

For example, suppose p = 'it is the case that anthropogenic climate change is underway'. I can make my assessment of whether p is true without being a climatologist, because I delegate my doxastic responsibility. This is ok, as long as I do due diligence.

Similarly, I would be ok with p = 'quantum mechanics is a scientific model that allows predictive calculations to a very high degree of accuracy', despite the fact that I am no expert in it.

On the other hand, I am not convinced that p = 'quantum mechanics is true' is itself truth-apt. So what I am saying in summary is that it is important to be careful with language and attend the the detail when it comes to questions of belief.

Hi Psiomniac, thanks for the link! I am not completely in agreement with that guy but he does make some good points. The whole matter of 'will', free or not, is very complex. I actually do see that our wills are not *completely* free, but there is indeed enough freedom in what we do that we could and should be *responsible* for what we do.

As for believing one's will is not free: going by that same video it seems to be possible for people to believe their wills are not free ... but that belief is a kind of theoretical one that as far as I can see does not get very far in terms of being acceptable as integral part of a coherent belief system. Now, really having a coherent belief system is something I see as an ideal ... in truth, in practice, most people do not have very coherent belief systems. This of course makes it possible for people to assert to certain beliefs which, if they really thought deeply about them, they would see don't really follow from their other beliefs or that may even contradict some of their other beliefs.

I merely say that it seems to be somewhat pointless to think we don't have free will. You can believe that (or believe that you believe it), and go on with your life and do what you think you want to do or what you think you should do, but if you amidst all of this really don't believe you're actually free in your will - it seems to me that something important is going to be sucked from your life. Believing that everything you do is controlled by something or someone outside of yourself - even if just the laws of nature - is for me a recipe for either irresponsibility, or paranoia. By this I don't mean to say that we are outside of the laws of nature - the only conclusion I can make that still preserves personal autonomy, is to say that our conscious selves are indeed part of the framework of the laws of nature.

As for science and belief: yes you do have a point there. I'm just concerned about speaking of science and of 'beliefs' in the same breath. Science isn't really about beliefs or about truths for that matter. When we assess whether climate change happens or not - a part of it is science, the evidence that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible for that. But deciding that the evidence is enough to warrant practical action, goes beyond mere science. We can (and I feel we should) be less than 100% certain about the truth of the science behind climate change, but commit 100% to combating climate change because *potentially* it can be such a big problem in practice and it's better to be safe than sorry. That involves more than mere science - it also involves politics and ethics.

Willem,

Yes the matter of free will is very complicated, Dennett has written books and academic papers on this topic.

I think you make a good point about a coherent belief system being an ideal. It might not be possible to have a completely consistent set of beliefs (see the paradox of the preface for example).

As for whether it is pointless to think we don't have free will, I think the problem with that view is that just choosing what to believe according to what we would like to be true is not a responsible belief forming method. I do think we have a sufficient measure of control to ground moral responsibility and make sense of our lives, but if the evidence indicated otherwise, would I just put my fingers in my ears and sing 'la la la...'?

As for science and belief, I think it is important to make some distinctions and be a bit more precise in talking about science. It does not follow that if I believe p, then I am certain that p. Rather, I try to proportion my confidence in the truth of p to the strength of the evidence. Science is not one thing, it is a collection of human behaviours with sub-domains that have slightly different procedures, but a rough approximation is that hypotheses and models are tested against evidence. Science isn't 'about' beliefs or 'truth', but to say these concepts don't play a part would be mistaken. I agree that science alone doesn't tell us what we should do about climate change, but I don't see why you say 'mere' science?

You sort of demonstrate my point there, Psiomniac! It's not (just) a matter of believing what one wants to be true. In the case of free will, rejecting it leads to a cascade of contradictions. Like you, I believe that we have 'enough' free will for practical purposes, to be held accountable for what we do. But if science produces evidence otherwise? I mean now, for science to *completely* overthrow the very idea of freedom in any sort of situation at all. How would you accept this kind of evidence? Personally I would still reject it! It would make nonsense of too many different other things. I would put my fingers in my ears and go 'la-la-la' ... but the funny thing is ... if free will is nonsense then I would of course not be acting freely if I did that - I would be under compulsion by the laws of nature, my environment, or what have you - but I would not have the freedom to *not* go la-la-la. So you won't be able to blame me for it! And indeed, without freedom there is no responsibility *including* the responsibility for proper belief forming methods.

So while it may still be true that we have no free will, the belief that we have no free will would contradict many of our other beliefs - as I've said, rendering an entire belief system incoherent. And indeed, the belief that we don't have free will may even undermine the basis for scientific inquiry, the whole project of science. If we have no power to do anything differently, to choose what we wish to do - what use is science?

Willem,

You make a good point I think. I like your argument structure, a classic recoil argument.

You are right to say that if evidence came along to show that we have no free will, then talk of responsible knowledge acquisition is thereby rendered meaningless. However, since we both think we do have a sufficient measure of control to ground moral responsibility, we can argue that we have to follow the evidence in order to be consistent with our /current/ understanding of responsible knowledge gathering.

If evidence emerged that denies free will, we might of course no longer feel obliged to believe the evidence, but if we did there would be no cascade of inconsistency, since we could argue that we have no choice but to believe it! However, we /would/ be inconsistent if we rejected the evidence and said 'la la la' since, in refusing to believe the evidence, we would have held on to the premise of free will and hence moral responsibility. But we would not have followed the evidence responsibly, so would be inconsistent!

So I think your argument bites your position rather than mine.

How would free will work if this is an ancestor simulation?

http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-odds-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation

And no, I'm not being frivolous - I just found out people were talking about this. I shouldn't have been surprised, given that Reddit has a very productive 'living in the Matrix' thread. Whether your fellow humans actually think they're inhabiting a computer simulation could affect the way you approach them (warily)... and it's not exactly un-Biblical.

I have an answer of my own, which is largely based on viewing the work of Philip K Dick as a set of metaphysical parables, but hey, I'd like to know what the logical thinkers say.