This is a blog that takes the name of my magnum opus on scientific philosophy called "The Scientific Worldview." Reviewers have called it “revolutionary,” “exhilarating,” “magnificent,” “fascinating,” and even “a breathtaking synthesis of all understanding.” There is very little math in it, no religion, no politics, no psycho-babble, and no BS. It provides the first outline of the philosophical perspective that will develop during the last half of the Industrial-Social Revolution.
20180523
How to have great ideas in a deterministic world
2 comments:
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I disagree that any other animal has a linguistic consciousness, regardless of its ability to make sounds or communicate in some rigid stereotyped and instinctive way. As evidence for this, I posit human development as a social project. A horse today is the same as a horse from a century ago, whereas a human is radically different. We are linguistically programmed, they are instinctively determined. While still an unbroken chain of causation, to say there is no distinction whatsoever is to miss everything that defines humanity. Behavior we find abhorrent in humans cannot be judged so in animals precisely because this level of consciousness is unavailable to them.
ReplyDeleteWe are not just animals, just like animals are not plants - regardless of the extreme similarities (I read somewhere we share 60% of our DNA with bananas). There is something objectively, qualitatively different about our species that permits it to come to know its environment and change it so that we are able to exist outside of the natural habitats in which our recent ancestry evolved. It is this that they call free will (and I agree it is a confused muddle to consider it as without "cause"). But reducing human intellectual determinants to matter in motion is like reducing a television program to the pixels on a screen flashing on or off. With no more understanding than that, one has no understanding of the program whatsoever.
A computer can react to language sounds but it in no way is listening and reacting in the sense that a human can. That is an example of pure mechanical determinism. Computers cannot and will never replicate human subjectivity, which our current model of the universe hasn't even attempted to explain. Why would it even be necessary? AI can approximate human behavior and even learning (and in many respects exceed it) without any subjectivity at all. What makes awareness necessary in a naturalistic worldview? Why does matter wake up at some point in its evolution? How does DNA come into being if natural selection presupposes DNA? These are unanswered questions within the Scientific Worldview. That isn't to say it can't answer them. It's just the typical reaction is to dismiss them instead of making an attempt to tackle them head on.
Joogabah:
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you after such a long time. Unfortunately, your arguments are pretty much the same as the ones I already answered. They are typical of religious folks who think humans are so special that they will escape the divergence common to all other microcosms (a violation of the Sixth Assumption of Science, complementarity (All things are subject to divergence and convergence from other things)). Free will, as you know, is a violation of the Second Assumption of Science, causality (All effects have an infinite number of material causes) as well as the Third Assumption of Science, uncertainty (It is impossible to know everything about anything, but it is possible to know more about anything). Religious folks assume the universe consists of “something more than matter in motion.” That “something more” is purely imaginary. There is no convincing such folks that what they cannot explain is simply the workings of infinitely subdividable matter in an infinite universe.