[HN Gopher] "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
___________________________________________________________________
"Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
Author : benbreen
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-01-05 19:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (psychclassics.yorku.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (psychclassics.yorku.ca)
| TheBlight wrote:
| Slightly tangential, but is anyone aware of an app/site that can
| take a URL like this one and convert the text to a format and
| layout that's easier on the eyes and easier to read in general?
| Like Kindle-fy a web page full of text?
| whoisthis12 wrote:
| Try the reader view in chrome or Firefox. For chrome on android
| I automatically got a prompt to view simplified page
| TheBlight wrote:
| Wow, this works great! On Android I recall getting the
| "simplified page" prompt but never found that to be all that
| great of a solution but using reader mode with Chrome is
| pretty neat. You can format it to basically be the same as
| reading a book from the Play store.
|
| One nit is that if I tab away from the page and tab back the
| highlighted area is wiped from the reader pane -- assuming I
| had unhighlighted it in order to start reading.
| stevebmark wrote:
| On iOS you can click the icon to the left of the URL input
| and select reader viewer as well. Hides ads too.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| In Chrome it seems like clicking the pop up is the _only_ way
| to access simplified view. If you exit, follow a link, tab
| away, whatever... I can 't figure out how to get it back! Any
| tips? Really confusing that I'm either missing something
| obvious or the explicit option is missing.
| jabyess wrote:
| Most browsers have a reader mode. Firefox has one built in, I
| just click the icon to at the right end of the URL bar and it
| does it nicely for me.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Safari, Firefox, and Edge all have a built-in Reader mode that
| doesn't exactly the thing you want for the device that you are
| on. Lots of extensions do this as well. There's used to be a
| handful of websites but it seems they no longer exist (they
| were also commonly used to bypass paywalls).
| konto wrote:
| You can use browser extensions to send articles (blog posts
| etc.) directly to kindle.
|
| I am on mobile app at the moment so I don't have links for
| those extensions.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Did not expect to see William James pop up on HN.
|
| If you're interested in philosophy (especially epistemology), the
| pragmatists were a fascinating offshoot.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
|
| IMHO they were a reasonable response to the irreducible
| complexity that accreted as a result of applying increasingly
| specific and complex empiricism to questions far broader than it
| might be suited to. (E.g. How do we know anything?)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| _The Varieties Of Religious Experience_ was a great read for me
| sherr wrote:
| Both James and Pragmatic Philosophy have had their own program
| on the BBC's In Our Time radio show. Very good.
|
| https://www.braggoscope.com/2010/05/13/william-jamess-the-va...
|
| https://www.braggoscope.com/2005/11/17/pragmatism.html
| ethanbond wrote:
| The Metaphysical Club is an excellent book about how the
| pragmatists shaped all of American thought, too.
|
| Obviously doesn't replace reading the source material but it
| does articulate how ideas become encoded into a society.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's been a minute now, but I'm pretty sure that was on the
| reading list for my undergrad pragmatism course. Enjoyed it
| as well!
|
| PS: Hello to another Ethan, although we seem much more common
| these days.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 1879
|
| These arguments aren't new.
|
| This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read
| history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with
| the science that has come before, either to know what was
| discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten
| knowledge that could still have value.
|
| A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so
| much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.
| ryanklee wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued
| non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage,
| so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties
| and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition,
| consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of
| years of prior studies on these matters.
|
| Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant
| literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as
| if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say
| on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally
| unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these
| issues.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Are the STEM educated thinkers publishing AI doomsday think
| pieces or is it the supposedly enlightened non-STEM
| journalists?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Doesn't have to be 'doomsday'. Plenty of 'stem' thinkers
| expound on 'what is consciousness' by re-hashing old ideas
| as if they just occurred to them.
|
| It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously
| wrote that "philosophy is dead" because the big questions
| that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the
| hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists
| then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown).
|
| The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for
| decades before someone realized what it could be used for.
| In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear
| view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the
| latest obvious area.
| practicemaths wrote:
| I suppose for meeting Gen. Ed. requirements more history
| and philosophy classes with a focus on where certain Math
| and Science comes from could be great.
|
| Additionally math courses for the non-stem majors that
| focus more on the history and importance of something,
| say the quadratic formula, instead of applying
| it/remembering it without much context from where it came
| from could help out a lot of non-stem majors with their
| math requirement.
|
| However I think it boils down to interest and a degree of
| time whether or not someone in a stem field feels
| compelled or not to pay attention and learn where their
| math tools come from or the experiments that built the
| respective sciences.
|
| That is, I've found while stem classes may not focus on
| the above, they do cover it and for the more enthusiastic
| and self motivated student right there in their books to
| read about.
|
| I've also found professor's that love this stuff too,
| which I've found pleasure in them sharing these stories
| when they can.
| pineaux wrote:
| I1 get it. The STEM educated people are better at technical
| stuff like math and logic, thus they must be a lot more
| enlightened than these non-STEM journalists that walk
| around in the darkness of the intellectual void. We smart,
| They stupid. /s
|
| You should ask yourself where this arrogance stems (so
| punny) from. Although you could argue that the liberal
| arts/humanities are stifled by leftist worldviews, which is
| true, I also believe that the study of the humanities is
| the one thing that created the societal structures -like
| democracy and education- that we cherish today and I
| believe they will be crucial for a nice non-authoritarian
| future. And the ideological pressure to discredit the
| humanities is something that I believe comes from a pro-
| authoritarian, conservative side of the political field.
|
| 1STEM-educated (molecular biology, with a focus on
| computational analysis)
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I find it very suspicious that people who avoid learning
| rhetoric, or formal logic, or axiomatic thinking in
| general, are able to draw useful conclusions from
| studying humanities.
| ryanklee wrote:
| I think you are putting words in GP's mouth. They never
| said anything about avoiding learning formal logic or
| math. The context of that statement was a sarcastic
| position.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| You misunderstood, I was criticizing the majority of
| people who study humanities in college, because they
| don't have the requisite skills to make valid conclusions
| about what they are learning.
| ryanklee wrote:
| And you think that those individuals are representative
| of the value of the field of humanities? Sorry, but
| that's just a red herring.
|
| I mean, I'm suspicious of individuals who can't hack it
| in general, too, but not sure how that's relevant.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| you are pointing out I did a poor job of distinguishing
| the material itself and the current pedagogy surrounding
| it.
|
| I'm skeptical of the latter, not the former, if that
| helps clarify my position.
| thriftwy wrote:
| LLMs should requalify Liberal Arts education. The people who
| can ask questions and understand answers are quite relevant
| now, seeing how STEM worldview is in many ways no longer
| relevant.
|
| SDEs should double down on soft skills now, since these are
| as useful with LLMs as with people.
| dnissley wrote:
| > _STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years_
|
| What does this refer to?
| tempodox wrote:
| History, for instance, is not part of STEM.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I think it in general refers to a (seeming) lack of
| awareness/acknowledgement of non-stem topics like
| philosophy, theology, ethics, history, etc.
|
| I'm not sure I would phrase it as STEM itself devaluing
| non-stem (I mean it's an acronym for subjects) but, rather
| society in general devaluing these, example, how hard is it
| go out, get a philosophy degree, and practice/write that
| and live comfortably with that occupation (no external
| sources of income). History/Literature seems to be much the
| same
| ryanklee wrote:
| This is not correct. This attitude was nurtured by
| science's most successful public mouthpieces. Stephen
| Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been running around
| for decades telling everyone that the humanities are
| worthless. Young students, unfortunately, listened to
| them on this subject. A real tragedy, I think.
|
| Carl Sagan would have been a much better steward for
| science today, as he had a very healthy respect for the
| relationship between science and humanities and the
| latter's value for understanding our world.
|
| This dangerous rift goes back even further. See C.P.
| Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures".(1)
|
| EDIT: Not sure how this slipped my mind, but Sean Carroll
| is exactly the kind of representative of the syncretic
| relationship between sciences and humanities that ought
| to be the default, rather than the exception.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
| kbenson wrote:
| Has NDT been saying that? I wouldn't know, since I mostly
| consume him as small segments of larger appearances, but
| it seems half the time he's conversing with someone he's
| spouting philosophy as he sees it, so it would be
| surprising to me that he denigrates it.
| ryanklee wrote:
| 1. Tyson dismissed the intellectual value of philosophy
| in a podcast, which led to criticism from those within
| the discipline[1].
|
| 2. He has been quoted saying, "What they teach in the
| humanities is not 'skepticism' or 'critical thinking.'
| It's mental masturbation disguised as critical
| thinking"[5].
|
| 3. Tyson warned that philosophy "can really mess you up"
| and has implied that philosophy does not progress in the
| way science does[5].
|
| 4. His attitude towards philosophy has been characterized
| as science-defeating by some, as it dismisses the role of
| philosophy in addressing moral and aesthetic questions
| that science cannot answer[6].
|
| 5. Tyson's comments have sparked discussions and defenses
| of the humanities and philosophy, with critics arguing
| that his views are overly simplistic and do not represent
| the true value and diversity of philosophical
| inquiry[1][4][5][6].
|
| [1] Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Wrong about Philosophy
| https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2014/05/13/neil-degrasse-
| tyso...
|
| [2] An Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson https://www.red
| dit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2521di/an_open_...
|
| [3] Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-
| the-v...
|
| [4] Why Does Neil deGrasse Tyson Hate Philosophy? https:/
| /www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/05/22/why_doe...
|
| [5] Please Save Me from Neil DeGrasse Tyson
| https://humanitiescenter.byu.edu/please-save-me-from-
| neil-de...
|
| [6] Neil deGrasse Tyson and the value of philosophy - 3
| Quarks Daily
| https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/05/neil-
| degrasse-...
|
| [7] Neil deGrasse Tyson's Scientism and the Scapegoating
| of Philosophy
| http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2014/05/neil-
| deg...
|
| [8] Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson Should Embrace The
| Humanities More
| https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2018/03/06/maybe-neil-
| degra...
|
| [9] Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins on how
| philosophy has ... https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/co
| mments/2554xu/neil_deg...
|
| [10] 225 thoughts on "Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly
| Things about Philosophy" https://www.preposterousuniverse
| .com/blog/2014/06/23/physici...
|
| [11] Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong to dismiss all of
| philosophy, but he may have a point on some of it
| https://selfawarepatterns.com/2014/05/14/more-thoughts-
| on-ne...
|
| [12] Neil deGrasse Tyson and Philosophy: The Voice and
| Never-Was of Science Insults the Foundation of All
| Intellectual Thought
| https://milliern.com/2014/05/31/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-
| phil...
| notjoemama wrote:
| Back to the concept rather than an individual, isn't part
| of the problem that STEM fields feed back into actionable
| ways, but perhaps philosophy doesn't?
|
| For example, if a new exo-planet were found to have a
| certain chemical make up that our current understanding
| didn't agree with, that would go back to theoretical
| physics and mathematics, where they might discover a way
| to better describe the discovery. That then becomes a new
| model that allows us to recognize a new pattern of solar
| system formation, etc etc.
|
| There's a practical application to STEM work. In what way
| is there a practical application in philosophy? Is it
| isolated to educating people on broader more complex
| thought?
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| So, when your boss is asking you to design a better way
| of hiding the waste products from your industrial
| projects that you know could hurt folks-- that's a good
| place where having some ethical principles might help.
|
| Without those principles, people are often left with "I
| am just doing my job" and "this is what any person would
| do, right"?
|
| Whereas a lot of us won't do certain things because, say,
| if everybody did them they'd be self contradictory (Kant)
| or when we look at the overall utility of dumping toxic
| waste into a river we might it has some larger negative
| consequences for society (Mill).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think this is the point. You are discrediting
| Philosophy, but that is where science and math came from.
| You don't go back and say "man Plato was such a waste,
| lets toss out western civilization".
|
| The point is someone has to start somewhere, and
| frequently philosophy is the field that tackled open
| ended questions. Once the questions get 'solved', it gets
| spun off into another branch of science.
|
| Philosophy is the startup of science, the leading edge.
| Once it become a 'common' ordinary science, it gets re-
| named, re-packaged as 'the accepted way'.
|
| It is happening a lot right now, because so many STEM
| people building AI are suddenly arm-chair philosophers
| coming up with 'new' questions, that are really 'old'. So
| the whole field is re-discovering philosophy.
| Avicebron wrote:
| It's been really bemusing to watch, especially because
| groups like Less Wrong espouse things like "rationality"
| as some sort of revelation, when I'd bet that...
|
| >"Rationality is the art of thinking in ways that result
| in accurate beliefs and good decisions. It is the primary
| topic of LessWrong."
|
| ...is something that people have been probably practicing
| and thinking about for as long as humans were bipedal.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >Stephen Hawking and Neal Degrasse Tyson have been
| running around for decades telling everyone that the
| humanities are worthless. Young students, unfortunately,
| listened to them on this subject. A real tragedy, I
| think.
|
| Neither of them has said anything like this. Hawking's
| "philosophy (metaphysics) is dead" is a narrow point
| about the relevance of philosophy to basic theorizing
| about nature. NDT said something along the lines of he
| doesn't have time for questions like "what is the meaning
| of meaning". Neither can be reasonably construed as
| denigrating humanities. There have been a lot of folks on
| the other side who have put words into the mouths of
| these two for the sake of self-promotion. It's created a
| very warped perspective on what Hawkings and NDT actually
| believe.
| ryanklee wrote:
| This is not correct. See my comment with numerous
| citations.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| I looked at it. Randomly opened a couple of links, none
| of which really support the idea of NDT thinking
| humanities are worthless. All I see are a lot of
| overinterpreting and misrepresentations for the sake of
| using popular guys as a jumping-off point for one's own
| defensive screed. If you have a specific citation that
| you feel best represents the case against NDT or Hawking,
| I'm happy to consider it.
| ryanklee wrote:
| Sure. Please tell me how I can possibly read this
| interview in any other way than NDT doesn't see the value
| in philosophy:
|
| https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/neil-
| degrasse...
|
| As far as I can tell, he doesn't say one charitable
| thing, and more, his attitude comes off as smug and
| arrogant.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Figuratively, how all my physicist and computer science
| friends rolled their eyes when I took degrees in the
| humanities. Literally, how true the joke is about the
| difference between an English major and a large pepperoni
| pizza is that the pizza can feed a family of three. On the
| other hand, the humanities did plenty to devalue itself, by
| adopting the view that 'value' itself is likely a social
| construct.
| dimal wrote:
| > On the other hand, the humanities did plenty to devalue
| itself, by adopting the view that 'value' itself is
| likely a social construct.
|
| Bwahh! Sick burn.
| ryanklee wrote:
| > the humanities did plenty to devalue itself, by
| adopting the view that 'value' itself is likely a social
| construct.
|
| The humanities is not a monolith.
|
| If you ask a philosopher in the analytic tradition, which
| is the tradition in which most of the philosophical world
| resides, they are likely to disagree with social
| constructivist views.
| johngossman wrote:
| This made me go look up whether STEM includes psychology and
| medicine. Wikipedia says "depends how you ask." In any case,
| William James trained to be a doctor and is considered the
| father of American psychology. If you've read any of his
| stuff, he was certainly not science illiterate. Which is not
| to say I disagree with your point. However, it turns out a
| lot of people, especially the really smart ones we've all
| heard about, aren't easily characterized as STEM or non-STEM.
| That includes all the AI researchers I know.
| zo1 wrote:
| This is because the humanities got taken over in some sense
| and filled with mumbo jumbo. Technical people don't want to
| touch that with a ten foot pole.
|
| Besides, science used to be very much a "thinkers" only
| thing, because only those people went into studies instead of
| just being laborers. These were people that would question
| and ponder the things you mention. These days, STEM is filled
| with factory widget repeaters that are taught to regurgitate
| the syllabus and apply it in context so they can be good
| workers.
| ryanklee wrote:
| > humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with
| mumbo jumbo
|
| This is exactly the kind of opinion that results from
| improper familiarization with the various sub-fields of the
| humanities. Is there bullshit? Yes. Is it typical?
| Absolutely not.
| bbor wrote:
| Very true! I think it's eye opening that almost every one of
| Chomsky's lectures on such topics (I.e. "what kind of creatures
| are we?") start with a discussion of what Newton, Galileo, or
| Descartes has to say about it.
|
| The great thinkers of the past aren't necessarily outdated, in
| some ways they might still have things to teach us from beyond
| the grave that we didn't really appreciate when they were
| alive.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _These arguments aren 't new._
|
| True; the 1768-1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-
| Droz_automata were implemented specifically because writing,
| music, and art were at the time accomplishments that
| distinguished upper classes from lower.
|
| (their biggest weakness is that being analogue instead of
| digital, their programming is very sensitive to environmental
| changes)
| retrac wrote:
| I recently stumbled across a speech from 1855 by an American
| physician [1], and I suppose proto-electrical-engineer, talking
| about the telegraph. In it, he makes a direct analogy between
| the telegraph and the animal nervous system. (People were aware
| by then, that the nervous system was partly electrical in
| nature.)
|
| The complexity of the nervous system and its ability to
| coordinate across distance, allows it to support more complex
| and bigger organisms, whether that organism is biological or
| political. Continuing with his analogy, the railroads and
| canals are the arteries and veins, supplying the raw materials
| and finished products, etc.
|
| More tenuously, he also appears to make a kind of proto-
| evolutionary analogy (Darwin hadn't published but Lamarck had
| published decades before, by this point). And I even detect
| small hints of an antecedent to the concept of emergent
| complexity, and the notion of shared structures across biology,
| sociology, etc.
|
| > The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this
| nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no
| distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface
| of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a
| perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social
| forms than have hitherto existed. [...]
|
| > We are thus conducted to the result of the highest
| philosophy: that society in its form of organization, is human,
| and that it presents in its progressive development continually
| higher analogies with the laws of individual being. [...]
|
| [1]
| https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765...
| wwweston wrote:
| I wonder if Channing would be gratified to see the telegraph
| analogy survived to find new expression in 1970s popular
| culture:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY
|
| which means that there's probably a bunch of Gen Xers with
| this song still in their head somewhere (and since it's
| pretty catchy, some of HNs audience now).
| lisper wrote:
| > These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why
| tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science
| history.
|
| Sure, but it is also important not to lend too much credence to
| these arguments, because they were devised from a position of
| ignorance. In particular, in 1879 we didn't have neurobiology,
| nor the theory of computation and complexity, and we barely had
| evolution. OoS had been published just 20 years before, and
| molecular biology was many decades in the future. There is
| value in studying Ptolemy and Aristotle too, but mainly to
| understand how they got things wrong.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I agree. You can't take something from 1800's as gospel, like
| that was the final word and we shall not progress.
|
| Just saying, shouldn't ignore it either.
|
| It is ok to study Plato or Leibniz, and realize it is
| historical background, and might spur new thoughts. We don't
| worship Plato as if that was the end of all thought. But lets
| not forget it, ignore it like it didn't happen, like all
| ideas today are new.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Yes, we are and some observable Automatisms are hyper creepy. And
| if you become aware of them it turns society into a collection of
| walking grandfather clocks in some aspects. Not a recommendable
| direction to move, madness is preferable.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| An old Fritz Leiber novel, _You 're All Alone_, aka _The Sinful
| Ones_ , is about a man who discovers that most of the people in
| the world are automata, and he has been functioning as one for
| some time.
| stevebmark wrote:
| I tried to read this but I can't deal with the writing quality. I
| think it's partly the historical nature of the piece, but James
| is a terrible writer. He is obtuse and pompous and clouds his
| meaning with confusing sentences. Even the first sentence is a
| nightmare to read. I'll try again when I have more focus!
|
| And yes, we have no free will. Not sure if that's related to this
| piece.
| suburbanwaste wrote:
| You just have bad taste.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It was kind of funny to me that Dostoevsky coincided with biology
| development which made him ponder painfully if we are just
| reactions of our neuron's "tails" and that there is nothing
| underlying (such as Soul and God).
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Fwiw nothing with outside influence is automata as the true
| randomness from quantum phenomena propagates.
|
| Eg. If you take in real world visual input to a system that from
| that point on is deterministic the output of that system is now
| non-deterministic. Similar to how Shrodinger talked about the
| macro scale cat being alive and dead at the same time.
|
| So the arguments that the neurons in the brain are deterministic
| or that the transistors in a computer are deterministic breaks
| down at the first introduction of real world input. The outputs
| of those systems actually aren't deterministic at all.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| I see no reason why that can't be modeled as an automata?
| Nondeterministic automata are still automata. I think your
| meanings of 'deterministic' are confused- it's about impulse
| response. A little bit of stochasticity in the thermal voltage
| doesn't ruin the determinacy of a computers ALU operational
| modes.
| atticora wrote:
| Deterministic systems, or at least highly predictable ones, can
| arise for non-deterministic components, as for example the
| Boltzmann equation demonstrates. Other examples include the
| models that we build of automata on machines made of matter
| made of non-deterministic particles.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| As far as we've been able to determine, almost all macroscopic
| objects can be behaviorally described in terms of classical
| physics, and this includes neurons.
|
| Even in rare cases where quantum effects are seen, such as
| photosynthesis, or radioactive decay, it's extremely localized.
| The fact that a plant's efficiency of conversion of light to
| chemical energy appears to use quantum effects doesn't affect
| the rest of the plant or turn it into some "Schrodringer's
| cabbage" thought experiment. We can still understand the rest
| of the plant in classical terms.
|
| Even if it were to be discovered that neurons are sometimes (or
| even always for that matter) behaving randomly due to quantum
| effects, that would not mean that we have free will and are not
| automata. It would just mean we are non-deterministic automata.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| There can be macro objects with non-determinism. The cat in
| the box in the Shrodinger experiment has deterministic
| neurons but you don't actually know the state of the cat as a
| whole due to the initial quantum event that set the entirity
| of the cat on one path or another.
|
| This is where the entire problem with the thought that
| systems are deterministic or not comes into play. If there's
| a single photon that can hit a pixel on a sensor (or retina)
| or not and that ultimately has a cascading effect to make
| that larger object do something completely different or not
| then that larger object is non-deterministic as a whole. Yes
| as others have stated there's ways in which non-deterministic
| inputs can end up not mattering - the system has the same
| output. But there's also systems, eg. the cat in the box
| experiment, where the macro object ends up taking on the non-
| determinism of a single quantum event.
|
| An AI that can behaive one way or the other based on what it
| read into the sensor input is absolutely as non-deterministic
| as that input. Likewise humans are as non-deterministic as
| their inputs. If a photon can hit your eye today and cause a
| flash of light that sets you on the path of doing something
| you otherwise wouldn't have done it doesn't matter if your
| neurons are essentially a machine or not. You are still non-
| deterministic. The focus on neurons being deterministic or
| not kind of misses the bigger picture. We absolutely live in
| a non-deterministic world and those inputs from this world
| cause ourselves to ultimately be non-deterministic.
|
| This really gets down to the regularly discussed thought
| experiment of simulating a human. If you fully simulated a
| human with non-deterministic inputs everywhere you probably
| would indeed have a fully deterministic system. But that's
| just not how the real world environment a human is in
| behaves.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It's not at all clear how quantum mechanics in general, or
| a thought experiment like Shrodinger's cat, should be
| interpreted.
|
| In the lab one can perhaps coax a few atoms near absolute
| zero into a superimposed state, but not a large room
| temperature object like a cat, so that particular thought
| experiment is just that - not an observed experimental
| outcome.
|
| Is quantum randomness actually real, or just a reflection
| of an imperfect model of reality ?
|
| In any case, isn't William James really just considering
| the issue of free will ? If the world, including ourselves,
| is just an automata evolving according to (say)
| Schrodinger's equation, then does it really make any
| difference if it's deterministic or not ? Even at a
| classical level the future is unpredictable due to chaotic
| dynamics, and from a subjective (presumably misleading) POV
| we have free will, regardless of what the reality is.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| There's an entire field of deterministic mathematics called
| Chaos Theory, that pretty much encompasses what it says on
| the tin.
|
| It turns out that -innocent, simple looking- finite state
| deterministic automata can actually be less predictable than
| the non-deterministic kind. (and it can get pretty wild!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE )
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure - not everything that looks random is random. How
| about Stephan Wolfram's finite automata "Rule 30" for
| another example.
|
| But anyways, neurons don't even APPEAR to be acting
| randomly - they appear to obeying the laws of chemistry,
| and behaving in meticulously studied and well understood
| ways.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Definitely.
|
| It's the behavior an emergence level or two up that can
| appear to be quite chaotic again.
| kouru225 wrote:
| When people say we're nothing but computers, neurons firing,
| chemical reactions, etc they think they're saying that humans
| aren't special.
|
| But I take it to mean that the rest of the world is way more
| special than we've been giving it credit for.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Sometimes I entertain the idea that inanimate objects have
| consciousness too and it's pretty disturbing because it would
| mean we are doing pretty much everything wrong.
| kouru225 wrote:
| You mean we're killing things?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Not sure about killing, but maybe harming.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I feel like it would mean we're doing less damage than
| before: if everything is conscious then death isn't what
| we think it is. Decomposing suddenly means something
| completely different.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Do we even have consciousness or merely the illusion of it?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I'm not sure what the illusion of it would even mean. A
| known true statement for me would be "I appear to be
| experiencing something."
| kouru225 wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to ask this question without
| rigorously defining what we mean when we say
| "consciousness."
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| By this point I think the _" nothing but"_ part is the bit
| that's actually wrong.
|
| It's about putting yourself up on a pedestal while downplaying
| others.
|
| Of course, at some point those "others" (be it peoples,
| genders, creatures, or machines) turn out to be as good or
| better at certain things than you are. And what do you do then?
| You won't have anywhere to go psychologically without devaluing
| yourself.
|
| So then you end up shutting down avenues of thought that might
| otherwise have been productive.
| nataliste wrote:
| I would strongly recommend the reading of Huxley's address^1
| before reading James's response. The difference is palpable.
|
| ---
|
| 1- https://doi.org/10.1038/010362a0
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