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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from free will
  • What about Good and Real, state-of-the-art block-world thinking?
    • On the contrary, people often insist that determinism would indeed make choice futile even in such clear-cut situations. Accordingly, many reject determinism and invent an incoherent ‘‘free will’’ to preserve a sense of efficacy of their actions. Even those who explicitly disavow free will may still need to pretend other- wise in order to salvage the feeling that choices matter (for example, Minsky advocates such a subterfuge in The Society of Mind, p. 307). When I reflect that the future and past alike sit immutably in spacetime, I do feel an uncomfortable challenge to the notion that my choices make a difference, even in the most clear-cut instances.
    • There's an elaborate theory based around Newcomb's Paradox.
from block universe
  • A cosmological view of time as simply another space-like dimension. All times past present and future exist at "once", they are just different slices through a single 4D block. Good and Real lays out this theory and its consequences in some detail.
from Minsky/Block Universe
  • I wonder if Minsky would be a blockist. Good and Real came out of his world and he's of course anti-free-will Marvin Minsky/on free will. But, he also definitely believes in human creativity and agency, at least for mind-like activities.
from The Atheist's Guide to Reality
  • Belongs in the same pitiless-materialist bucket as Determined. And maybe Good and Real although I think that's a step up.

Good and Real

04 Dec 2022 - 17 Oct 2026
Open in Logseq
    • book by Gary Drescher. Full title: Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics. Full PDF
    • I want to push this to Weird Studies as the most diametrically opposed thing to their own views. Demystifying is precisely what they don't like. Since they believe in enantiodromia, they should eat it up.
      • As usual my own position is unstable, a non-quantum superposition of contrary opinions. Demystification is all very well, who could be against knowledge and understanding? But acknowledging that some things might just be beyond the reach of reason also seems important, and reason's overreach has some well-known problems.
    • Lots to say on the free will question (obviously doesn't believe in it)
    • He discusses Ainslie I should reread that part.

    • Ch 4 quantum stuff

      • (rereading because of Randy's stuff)
      • If even inanimate physical objects are not mechanical in nature, and especially if their reality depends somehow on us observers, then surely we observers are not plausibly just mechanical. Not surprisingly, then, the defection of quantum mechanics from the clockwork camp has been seized on as a vindication of the view that consciousness is not merely a particular example of mechanical computation, but rather is something that is special all the way down to its underlying substance
      • Agenda of book is articulated here.
      • The Everett interpretation solves the philosophical problem. Everything is still perfectly mechanical and deterministic.
      • At the cost of positing a huge number of separate worlds...
      • we have here an interference-observation duality: there are many superposed, mutually interfering states whenever we’re not looking, but only one such state whenever we do look.
      • According to the Copenhagen interpretation, no physical phenomenon is real until it has been observed. Nothing real passes through both slits of the apparatus. Instead, there is a potential for a real particle to pass through either slit, but that potential is not realized unless the passing-through is observed; at that point, the particle settles, at random, into one of its potential positions. The potential itself is wavelike, exhibiting interference effect
      • OK didn't know the Copenhagen interp was formulated that way, in terms "potential" like Thomists. Makes me dislike it even more...
      • Thus was von Neumann (of all people) led to conclude that human consciousness (of all things) plays a fundamental role in physics
        • Heh
      • there are two ways to achieve this symmetry: either none of the superposed states are real, or all of them are. The Copenhagen interpretation says none of the yet-unobserved states are yet real. Everett’s relative-state interpretation (Everett 1957) says all of them are real.
      • Following Everett, I argue here that this interpretation (which may sound desperately implausible on its face) is in fact the far more parsimonious one

      • Fredkin gates

      • Configuration space ≡ dimemsions are "particles" (1s), not wires. Analagous to phase space.
      • U1: at t exactly one point in phase space is 1, others are 0, evolution happens accoding to gate rules
      • U2: ever point in conf space has a weight [0,1], that sum to 1. Gates work as you would expect. So "observation" (correlation) happens.
        • But no interference. There's no collapse within the universe because the states never interact. That's next bit
        • Therefore, the superposition is evident only to an observer external to the entire universe who can examine configuration space directly. To any observer embodied in any “branch” of the universe (any element of the superposition), there is never any evidence of the existence of any other branch. Hence, this universe, as seen from within, appears entirely classical. It is indistinguishable from U1.
      • U3:
        • multiple successor and predecessor states,  complex rather than real-valued weights, and  a binary-valued sign associated with each particle. (Particles’ signs are analogous to spin, for example, in real quantum mechanics.)
        • quantish conf space has 2 dimenstions per particle: position (as in U2) and sign.,

    • . Ch ? Ought from Is

      • States the problem fairly enough. If we are determined beings, machines with no real agency or even selves, then what is the basis for morality?
      • I strive in this chapter to defend the intuition that amoral conduct is indeed mistaken.
      • For some reason I do not want to believe this. I'm not even sure why. It seems naive about evil, that it only happens because people aren't smart enough (mistaken). I smell mistake theory. Unsurprising, Drescher and the Berkeley Rationalists share a fundamental world view, I think. But I can see why you might want to believe it.