Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
A number of high profile intellectuals defend (good) hierarchies.
Combining the strange idea of a multiverse with the bizarre one of property dualism to get “immortality”? No thanks.
Can we trust medical science? Why are we so critical of pharmaceutical companies?
The problem with the “privilege police.”
Studying the emergence of complexity by way of “digital alchemy.”
The battle over the status of Pluto, the (dwarf?) planet.
Footnotes to Plato 
I’ll have to be honest, at times like this, I feel more and more, not just sympathetic to, but in a fair amount of agreement with, Dan. It’s not just for commentary issues, with me, though that’s a fair amount of it.
But, also, at times, the Friday links post? I know Massimo said he doesn’t agree with all of them. But, that’s not what I’m getting at.
Whether he agrees or disagrees, and whether they’re in the philosophy or science half of his scientia, or whether they’re only partially overlapping that scientia, like politics-related links, I believe he normally posts material that he thinks will be stimulating.
And sometimes they’re not, or they’re not as stimulating for me, within those fields, as other relatively recent items.
I noted earlier that Thursday was the centennial of the American entry into World War I. Whether one would agree with my take on it or not, it’s an issue ripe for discussion.
So, too, of course, speaking of politics, is Trump’s missile strikes on Syria, and I’m surprised Massimo didn’t post about that.
We could have discussed how bad Trump is.
Or we could have noted how far Trump has to go to catch up (or sink down) to “Dear Leader.”
“In 2016 alone, Obama dropped over 12,000 bombs on Syria.”
Who says? Some far-right site?
No. The Nation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/what-is-it-with-us-presidents-and-tomahawk-cruise-missile-strikes/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
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That said, on the Pluto piece?
That (frigid) beauty and complexity is equalled by Titan, all four of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites and more. None of them are planets either.
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Dan is pointing out his patience is finite. We are all finite, otherwise everything would fade to meaninglessness. The essence of what makes us individuals is definition and with eternity and infinity, all that fades to nothingness.
Socratic, I well agree the current political situation is ripe for discussion, but my current feeling is to wait and see. There is no clarity, but lots of interesting commentary;
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/159264981001/the-syrian-gas-attack-persuasion
My own thoughts are whether the generals can start WW3 before a massive financial implosion takes the wind out of their sails. 🙂
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Massimo–
I’ve scanned the comments quickly (I might have missed something), but I’m really curious about your reactions to the Glotzer Digital Alchemist piece. i was put off by the repeated teleological language to the effect that inanimate objects “want” to do things in systems of increasing entropy and even that forces in systems “want” things to happen. I know this was just an interview and not a peer-reviewed article, but I find these kinds of anthropomorphism distracting at best and misleading at worst–I can’t say that I understand how such objects are organized in situations of increased entropy. I was interested to see how you took this piece.
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Socratic,
American policy toward the middle east has always been stupid; the CIA has pursued a policy of de-stabilization worldwide since the 1950s, with horrible results; and the Cheney regime codified this as a ‘war on terror,’ without any clear understanding of regional politics. Obama continued many of these policies; but I’m not sure how he could have done otherwise – the Pentagon is essentially a shadow government, and security agencies are essentially answerable to them.
However the current Syrian strikes unravel the many problems with the Trump regime. It was not simply ‘dropping bombs on Syria,” it was technically an act of war, and it’s unclear where this will lead us. Also of course, it means that the bromance between Trump and Putin has taken an unpredictable turn.
The back story appears to be a minor coup in the National Security Council, with ‘Maddog’ Mattis pushing out Bannon.
As a cynical (and Cynical) journalist, you might be thinking, ‘well, what’s the difference?’ The difference is that we have a madman in the Whitehouse, surrounded by right-wing sycophants trying to wrestle him into some semblance of sanity. It won’t work, but it might be fun to watch them try.
Unless he starts dropping nuclear bombs somewhere, which is, unfortunately, quite possible.
And yes, I agree that the US should never have entered WWI – but that was then, this is now. Whether we learned anything from that is debatable; it’s not clear that Americans ever learn anything from history.
You live near the border; I suggest slipping across before the Wall is built. You might get in touch with Morris Bermann, he might be able to find work for you.
I know if I could leave, I would. This ship is going down….
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Alan,
“You’re absolutely right that it’s completely counterintuitive. We typically think entropy means disorder, and so a disordered structure would have more entropy than an ordered structure. That can be true under certain circumstances, but it’s not always true, and in these cases, it’s not.”
My completely unscientific view is that efficiency is cause and entropy is effect. Least energy…..
Both gravity and radiation ‘seek’ lower energy states. One by collapsing, the other by expanding, resulting in a cyclic effect. Go figure.
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Hi Socratic
For my part I am not even sure what his gripe is and with whom. As I said, these discussions are only interesting if we try to understand what the other person is saying.
And if his complaint is condescension then it should be pointed out that sometimes he comes across as condescending himself, whether or not this was his intention.
I don’t know to whom Dan’s original comment was directed but if anyone had gained the impression that I was worrying about quantum immortality when I had said the opposite, then I have the right to correct that.
If I have corrected a misunderstanding and someone says “we will have to disagree” then that ambiguous and I have the right to point this out.
Stomping off in high dudgeon is fine, obviously I have done this myself.
But I don’t accept that he has any good reason for it.
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“I was looking at, for example, what happens if the polymers are stuck to each other, or linked. What kind of structures could you get when there’s competing driving forces — one that wants polymers to separate and one that wants them to mix? What emergent phenomena come from that? Back then I didn’t use that language to describe it, but that’s when I figured out that I like this idea of unpredictable emergent complexity coming out of simple things.”
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Obama asked the repugs to approve the war. They refused. They blamed him for obeying the constitution.
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ej,
One point I think gets overlooked is that the basis of money is debt, much of it government. Which means they have to find things to spend it on, such as a large military. So it is my suspicion that a significant aspect of military power is a byproduct of the belief that infinite notational wealth can be stored, when there are finite amounts of investment the economy can productively absorb.
Blasting off a few cruise missiles puts smiles on the faces of Raytheon stockholders.
My idea, from back in the ‘line item veto’ days, was to break these bills into all their various items, have every legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back together in order of preference and have the president draw the line at what gets funded. “The buck stops here.”
That way, the legislature still prioritizes while the president has finial say/veto.
Which would crash capitalism as we know it.
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Arthur,
Just like Wall St., it’s simple; Fear and greed. The greater the forces, the more elemental the factors.
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Or, to quote Deep Throat; “Follow the money.”
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Or, to quote Deep Throat; “Follow the money.” https://goo.gl/xSCQU6
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Socratic,
What I post on Fridays here is simply what I came across, read, and thought might stimulate some discussion. Which, obviously, it does. It isn’t mean to be a professional, balance, cover of th news. As for Trump, it seems to me there are plenty of other outlets to discus him.
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Least energy=path of least resistance=efficiency
Arthur,
Lol.
Rich or poor. Money is hope, security, desire, needs, power. All wrapped up in one little commodified contract. The ideal ideal. Who needs gods.
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I liked the digital alchemy piece. I do something similar pn a much more modest basis. Not that i expect to derive any general rules, but it a good way to get a handle on the idea and scope of emergence at a certain level.
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With the orivilege piece, it seems somewhat odd to judge any subject on the amount of condescension and vitriol it generates in the comment section of various blogs.
Is there any subject at all that doesn’t generate condescension and vitriol in the comments section of the blogs of the world?
And can the comments sections of the blogs of the world really be fairly said to reflect the current debate on a subject.
It is like those who say that the views of radical feminists can be accurately gleaned from the handful of people who trolled Joss Whedon on twitter.
The review seems uninformative on the subject and makes the book seem like it is the same.
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I have to admit I think the whole credentials debate is a bit of a storm in a teacup. Yes, its important that people with greater knowledge are listened to, and given greater weight than someone coming to a topic with little understanding. But people on this forum often forget a few important points:
Many people here are highly credentialed. I am certain that several of the commentators here have PhDs, and most probably come from some kind of academic background. Many people have formed their ideas after careful study and consideration, even if wrong they still need a valid argument to understand their mistakes.
Lets be honest. Academics are just narrow specialists. The idea that someone can be such a great polymath as to straddle the sciences and humanities died a very long time ago. These days academics have enough trouble keeping abreast of publications in their own speciality. For example, in my own field of physics it would be difficult to know about everything happening in a fairly narrow topic such as loop quantum gravity, let alone understand at an advanced level everything from quantum computation to astrophysics.
A great deal of what we discuss here does not have single right answer. I am certain that if I told people that because I have PhD in physics and have published in peer reviewed journals on QM, then they must accept the many worlds interpretation of QM, that most everyone here would hold my feet to the fire over it. Yet we get here arguments consistently telling people that they are wrong even though their view is also held by plenty of academic specialists just as credentialed and often more so than anyone here.
Finally. What about the fun? I suspect that most people come here for the fun of engagement and to perform some level of conceptual play. What is the point of this forum otherwise? I realise that I have things wrong sometimes, but I need to hear arguments to understand why. Being told that I should go away, read 20 technical books, and only then I will agree with the commentator, kind of makes this whole forum unnecessary.
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The numbers separating the sections in my post were removed. Is this a feature or a bug?
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DM, having had an over-night think about your position, which I’ll summarise as “you are the set of all copies of you” (ok?), two questions:
First. How similar does a copy have to be to be a copy? I don’t think that one can go for absolute identicalness. First, we ourselves are not absolutely the same nanosecond to nanosecond, and second, given the uncertainty principle (sorry everyone for bringing QM into it!) there is some inevitable fuzziness about things. I suspect that your account is going to run into big trouble in defining “sufficiently similar”.
Second. I don’t claim to really understand first-person consciousness, but one thing that I am fairly sure about is that it has a spatial location. For one thing, when my physical body moves from one place to another, the first-person consciousness follows along with it in a rather faithful way.
Thus, to say that my consciousness is a collection of spatially distributed copies seems weird. If we had instantaneous action-at-a-distance I could just about make sense of that, but we have a finite speed limit at which information or influence or anything can travel. All of these copies of me are so far away that they are literally irrelevant, there is no way in which the existence of a copy a quasi-infinite distance away can have any effect on what I am thinking or experiencing.
The “you are the set of all copies of you” idea might be coherent in a universe with: (1) a good account of “identicalness” at the level of a human being, (2) instantaneous action-at-a-distance, and (3) exact synching of all time frames at widely separated distances, but none of those things would seem to hold in our universe.
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The teleporter a la Star Trek scares the crap out of me. I hope that even if the technology is possible, the technology is based on ideas from quantum teleportation. At least that would rule out copies via the no-cloning theorem.
Otherwise, intuitively, I would expect a perfect replica to be created. Complete with all the same thoughts I had up to the point of replication and believing itself to be me. It would instantly realise that it must now share its life with mine – sharing money, friend, lovers. It would also realise that as a copy it would have second class status. The conclusion would be that it must kill me, kill me now, and hide all evidence of being a copy. After all, there can be only one!
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Coel:
The arguments for Quantum Immortality can’t be separated from the Many Worlds view of things. In some of these views, your consciousness, or just “YOU”, is associated with the whole superposition of the yous along all the world lines in Hilbert space. Collapse of the wave function along individual world lines happens instantly but doesn’t move your consciousness any where – its already everywhere.
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Just a comment on this remark to DM,
That’s not really what DM is doing. What he’s doing is thinking through the coherence and implications of concepts that do pertain to what we do know. We all invent a set of concepts to enable us to understand the world. Given that, thinking about how they fit together and what implications they have is valid. In that, DM is one of the more intellectually rigorous and honest of the commenters here. I end up disagreeing with him but I don’t think he’s that easily dismissed.
NB: to no-one in particular but just to reinforce a point. The original piece had nothing to do with quantum mechanics of a many-worlds QM multiverse. Of the various concepts that are called “multiverse” that is by far the silliest and least plausible.
The point is simply that in any sensible model of cosmology the “universe” continues far beyond the portion of it that we can observe, and may well extent to infinity. That “multiverse” concept is actually very mundane. That infinity is all that is needed for the question that the article and DM raise.
Bunsen,
If you used square brackets then wordpress likely tried to interpret them as html commands, so use round brackets.
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WordPress does some daft processing, if you do paragraph numbers, ie 1 with a dot at the beginning of a line then it is converted to an html list. But then another part sttips away that html code because only a small subset of html is allowed, so the numbering just disappears.
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One thing to remember is that infinity is not a quantity. “ad infinitum” is very much the same kind of dead end as “ad absurdum”.
Ironically, quantum theory got its name from “piccolissimi quanti”, the idea that with a lower bound to minimum granularity, infinity could be avoided. As early as 3rd century BC, Archimedes used granularity to show that “grains of sand on shore” is not a substitute for infinity.
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Hi Coel,
Not all that similar. There is no fact of the matter. There is only whether something is similar enough to you to be reasonably considered a copy.
For instance, the you who falls asleep at night is not identical to the you who wakes up the next morning, but even though there is no unbroken continuity of consciousness you are happy to consider the two yous to be the same person. You could probably tolerate quite a bit more difference than that.
There are borderline cases even in the familiar world. If someone sustains a brain injury and suffers a personality change and/or amnesia, are they really the same person? There’s no real answer there. You could go either way. That’s how it is with you and your less than identical copies. But however stringent your concept of personal identity, there are going to be an infinite number of copies that satisfy your requirements.
Right. Because your consciousness is instantiated by that body, but the very same consciousness (i.e. the very same set of experiences) is instantiated by another body in another time and place that is moving in just the same manner.
Of course it does! It is weird! Thinking about infinity (which is outside of human experience) often leads to weird outcomes. GR and QM are weird too, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
No communication between copies is required. What links them is that they happen to be identical (or very similar) to each other. They are not entangled or anything like that.
Right, it doesn’t. But you are not any one of these copies, is the idea. The idea is that you are your mental experiences, and those mental experiences are realised in more than one place. Nothing you know about yourself, nothing in your sense data, identifies as any specific one of these copies. So maybe you are not a specific copy. You are a pattern, the way “planetary system” is a pattern, and that pattern is realised in more than one place in the universe. The “planetary system” pattern of a star surrounded by a bunch of planets is not any specific planetery system, and if you destroyed one planetary system the pattern would continue to exist elsewhere. Similarly if one Coel is destroyed there are still plenty of other instances of the pattern elsewhere, so Coel is immortal.
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DM,
Isn’t location an element of the pattern? Even if we relativize, quantize or dismiss space as an effect of the patterns defining it, it does seem this ‘blank sheet’ of the vacuum, in which these patterns are occurring, is unavoidable. In which case similar patterns are still distinguished by their location.
I pull out two eggs for breakfast and they are pretty similar, but to argue that because of this, they are the same egg seems to miss the dismiss the quantity aspect and focus the quality aspect.
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Coel,
“Second. I don’t claim to really understand first-person consciousness, but one thing that I am fairly sure about is that it has a spatial location. For one thing, when my physical body moves from one place to another, the first-person consciousness follows along with it in a rather faithful way.”
Imagine that while you slept last night, a super-surgeon had removed your brain while replacing all its connections with the rest of your body with minute wifi tranceivers. If your brain was then removed to New York while your body woke up in its usual location (somewhere in UK?), where would your consciousness be?
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Hi Sherlock,
I suspect that my consciousness would actually be in New York, though it would seem to me as though it were in the UK.
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Coel,
Not sure where this is going, but what the hell. Super-surgeon then splits your brain in two while again maintaining all links between the two halves and transports one half to Moscow. Where’s your consciousness now?
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