Tag: idealism

A Fool and a Dunce Walk into a Counterfactual Freezer

Mark DavisLeave a comment

 

I was reading Yablo’s “No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility” (That’s not a typo: “Cold”) that continues the theme of modal skepticism, when I came up with a radical possibility. Of course, if someone thinks up something in the 21st century it likely has been thought a thousand times before, and this is no different. But let’s start at the beginning and check out whether there is anything new to be discerned.

I might initially think that the contents of my thoughts are the only thing I can truly be confident about since all the world of the senses could be an illusion. Given such a starting point it would be wise to try to understand the relationship between my thoughts and what is perceived by starting with the phenomenon of thought. I immediately become skeptical of my thinking, however, since I am unconscious nearly a third of the day, often accompanied by strange hallucinatory imagery in my dreams. More, I tend to agree with these zombie-intellects who inhabit this society-thing projected on my sensorium-thing and claim to study biases and perceptual trickery. Those perceptual-psychologist-patterns seem right, too, given the number of times I’ve been startled by faces coalescing out of twilight shadows or my overly generous past assessments of my own competency.

Thoughts seem unreliable.

But what is reliable? Some Platonic ideas, geometry, math in general, deductive proofs (uh oh, coarse premises as well as the indeterminacy of synonymy creep in here), and then scientific results (tentatively), perhaps. Let’s take the latter, though, and start with the notion that science contains a methodology that distills out many biases and misperceptions, arriving at a tentative model that is of higher truth value than simple guesses, traditions, and feelings.… Read the rest

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

Mark DavisLeave a comment

One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest