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 
Coel,
To take this idea to the limit, super-surgeon separates every neuron and replaces axons and dendrites with instantaneous wifi links and scatters your neurons all over the universe(s). Where is your consciousness?
LikeLike
Who knew Moscow and New York were so in sync?
LikeLike
Coel, if you changed your moniker to Watson, this exchange would be very funny 🙂
LikeLike
Alan,
I don’t particularly care for the teleological language either, as it projects exactly the wrong image to the public, and plays into the hands of ID supporters. But the research is interesting nonetheless.
LikeLike
Hi Brodix,
I don’t think it is, no. Perhaps location relative to other things in its environment, but not absolute locaiton in space.
They are not the same egg. But they are both instances of the “egg” pattern. In order to regard them as distinct eggs, you have to identify properties which distinguish them, such as size or weight or colour of pattern of speckles or location in space, which are differences you can perceive.
But you cannot perceive any distinguishing characteristics of different instances of yourself. They are completely interchangeable from your perspective in a way the eggs you had for breakfast are not (at least not entirely). As such, I claim that it makes more sense to regerd yourself as being the pattern they both share rather than being a specific instance.
LikeLike
Hi Alan, Massimo,
I reread the paoer to see what you meant about the teleological language. Well OK, but surely no worse than is par for the course in biology and thermodynamics?
LikeLike
Massimo,
“I find it really bizarre that people don’t realize that societies with division of labor simply cannot work without hierarchies. The trick, as the article clearly states, is distinguishing good from bad hierarchies.”
Some children must be able to inherit property that gives them enormous power over human economic life, because hierarchies are essential to division of labor. Women must play proper their role in the family because hierarchies are essential to the division of labor. Different races, nationalities, sects must occupy a specific level in the world because hierarchies are essential to the division of labor. Life itself does not work without division of labor, therefore, needs must. I’m sorry but this is unthinking.
The article pretends that hierarchy is in dire need of defense when it manifestly is not. The article pretends that hierarchy might not even imply the power of the higher members over the power of the lowers, or the people at large. The article does not even attempt the trick of distinguishing good hierarchy from bad in economic life, even as you talk about how essential hierarchy is to economic life. The article in short, despite lip service to the “trick,” is itself a trick, a professional obfuscation of clear thinking.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This approach is pretty much a gift to the ID crowd in any case.
The first thing they will do is point out that these programs are intelligently designed. Then they will say something like that it turns out that the first rule of self organisation is that systems have to be carefully organised to self organise.
Haven’t checked in with the DI blog lately but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have already said just this about this article.
LikeLike
DM,
“…I claim that it makes more sense to regerd yourself as being the pattern they both share rather than being a specific instance.”
If sharing an identical pattern makes them one entity, wouldn’t it be true that sharing a part of our pattern would constitute a shared identity to the extent that our pattern is shared with another? And wouldn’t this imply that we have a more or less shared identity with all humans on this planet, and not just doppelgängers in other universes?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brodix: Note that the atoms that make you up completely turn over in a matter of years. For some organs even faster.
Still you are you, aren’t you? You are the dynamic pattern not the stuff.You are a wave (kind of Iike a soliton).
And to confuse things further the electrons in Jesus are identical to those you are made of. They too are waves (excitation of the electron field).
LikeLiked by 1 person
E.J.:
“The back story appears to be a minor coup in the National Security Council, with ‘Maddog’ Mattis pushing out Bannon.”
Minor matter: Mattis is Sec of Defense. I think H. R. McMaster wanted Banyon out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
–The Angles piece in Aeon: “On the one hand . . . .On the other hand.” Repeat tediously and laboriously explore fine distinctions until the reader decides to have scrambled eggs for breakfast.
–Question for Angles: Have you read Lozada’s review of Bozy’s Stations of the Cross depiction of how ubiquitous the sturm und drang of privilege outing commentary on social media is? At least Lozada has a sense of humor:
“Someone needs to book Phoebe Maltz Bovy on one of those television shows featuring people who have the most awful jobs in America, because she has just completed a project so soul-crushing that I can’t imagine anyone ever doing it again, certainly not voluntarily.” This coming Monday my fellow neighbors and I will meet with our local councilman who will be assisted by various department heads to discuss the inadequacy of water drainage on our street. Dare I raise issues of hierarchy and privilege? I think we will talk about money. Money and taxes.
–On Vieira’s Multiverses and Afterlife: “All this is very speculative.” Yes. Back to scrambling the eggs.
LikeLike
Steven Johnson: Red herring. Leaders and organizations do not necessarily imply high levels of inequality. Besides, without organization, theft, etc., at communes, or sexual exploitation by gurus, is easy to conduct.
LikeLike
Hi Sherlock,
Split between Moscow and NY, I would expect.
Scattered all over the universe, I would think! Though instantaneous links between widely separated neurons are unphysical, and whether consciousness could still exist at the much slower speed of light-speed communication is something I wouldn’t claim to know, though I’d suggest probably not.
LikeLike
Hi DM,
Sorry about this, but based on your reply to me I’m now going to accuse your stance of being entirely vacuous. (In the same way that, as we’ve discussed, I see you notion of Platonism as so “thin” that it amounts to literally nothing.)
Under the assumptions about infinity, there would be, somewhere, an exact copy of me that, starting in ten minutes time, will be hideously tortured for a year. Should I be upset about that? Well, the first thing to be clear about is it is not the me me that would experience the torture, it is a copy of me.
So, let’s ask a related question. There is, presumably, somewhere in the world, a human being who, starting in ten minutes time, will get tortured. Or there is one that will shortly burn to death in a house fire.
Should I be upset about this? Well, to an extent, we all have empathy with other human beings, so to an extent we’re upset by such things, but we ourselves do not experience any of the torture or burning, and while we’re aware that such things are going on across the world we don’t overly concern ourselves with them.
So, question, why would I be any more upset about the experiences of the close-copy of me than of the many other humans around? I see no reason. (Indeed the other humans are close enough for me to do something about it, or to one-day meet them; the close copy of me is not.)
Based on your responses, your concept of “you” as the set of close-copies of you is so “thin” that it amounts to nothing. It doesn’t carry any implication that I experience anything that they experience or that I care about or even know about their experiences.
I could equally produce a conception of “you” as including all human beings. (After all, you’ve said that there is no fact of the matter as to how similar they have to be to me.) Your conception of multiple “yous” amounts to something pretty similar to there being other humans; that’s all.
So if one of these copies of me lives to infinity, or experiences something horrible, that is pretty much the same — from my point of view — as another human being dying in a house fire aged 10, or something similarly nasty.
The fact that the copy is a close copy is literally irrelevant, unless you are wanting to develop a much thicker version of your stance, in which their experiences somehow affect my experiences. (Entangled brains or whatever.) But your answers deny that you are arguing for anything like that.
LikeLike
Coel: The chinese room. How fast does the computer have to be to produce consciouness?
LikeLike
DM,
“I don’t think it is, no. Perhaps location relative to other things in its environment, but not absolute locaiton in space.”
Yes, but your description is of other versions of you, scattered in an otherwise infinite space, not some Everittian branching of space. So they would be in different locations and ultimately relative to each other.
“But you cannot perceive any distinguishing characteristics of different instances of yourself. They are completely interchangeable from your perspective in a way the eggs you had for breakfast are not (at least not entirely). As such, I claim that it makes more sense to regerd yourself as being the pattern they both share rather than being a specific instance.”
I can see your point, but you do specify exact copies of myself in different locations. That would be like the two eggs. Personally I have enough trouble dealing on the psychic energy level with the people I meet on a regular basis. They keep tugging threads of parts of my subconscious in ways I have limited control over and I constantly have to keep patching my sense of self.
Now if I was to perceive that I existed in two places, wouldn’t that be a bit like double vision?
As I said before, my view is that as individuals, we are the pattern, if you will, though it would be the locus of our particular point of view and location is integral to that. My sense is that there is some elemental sentience at the core of consciousness; Sort of like the light shining through a movie projector and we, as individuals, are those patterns dancing on the screen. A bottom up theism, if you will.
Arthur,
“Still you are you, aren’t you? You are the dynamic pattern not the stuff.You are a wave (kind of Iike a soliton).’
To continue my point to DM, this goes back to my observation about time; That only the present is physically real, with time as change, coalescing and dispersing those patterns we perceive, as observations, thoughts, sensations, feelings. So this elemental sentience of being aware only exists in this present state, like the projector light is only in the present, as the movie frames move past it, from future to past.
So, yes, as an individual point of view, I am only the pattern of myself. If I was to die, this sense of self would cease. There would be no element of sentience shining through me. I would no longer be one of the characters on the screen. Any sense of being would return to being one with the universe. The bubble of being would burst and there would no longer be the point of view that is me. The patterns of memories would be erased. Big reset button.
My sense, though, is being part of a larger network. The sense of being part of a flow or river that is coming from somewhere and going somewhere and I am just one of the swirls and eddies along the flow. So I don’t really have a sense of dying as loss, because my life only makes sense in this larger context.
LikeLike
I read an interesting quote by Sabine Hossenfelder on Peter Woit’s blog.
She’s not talking about QM, but perhaps this explains why QM is popping up continuously here. Now that I think about it, it’s probably what I wanted to write when I wrote the QM is a “safe space” for discussions.
Obviously QM is not unconstrained by data, but the areas where it is constrained, are rarely the subjects of the discussions about QM here. It’s usually about Many Worlds, the various interpretations etc. etc.
LikeLike
For those of you in the US who have heard about it, from Harper’s archives, THE piece of fame by Richard Hofstadter: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/?single=1
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brodix: “The bubble of being would burst and there would no longer be the point of view that is me. The patterns of memories would be erased. Big reset button.”
Break that karmic cycle of rebirth! 🙂
LikeLike
Most people know less than me about QM and I know next to nothing about it.
This is likely the reason it pops up in popular discussion all the time, it is easier to talk nonsense about it.
AI seems to be the new QM in this respect. I just read a really daft article in the Guardian about animatronic mannequin named Erica, which they are trying to convince us is excited to meet people and has hopes and dreams and considers herself a child of humanity.
Basically it is like saying that the townspeople in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ ride really are scared of the pirates.
They have only animated the head so far, so naturally one of Erica’s hopes and dreams is to get working arms and legs.
But the article invites us to send questions if we are interested in whatvan android thinks of humsnity and Erica’s creators will put the most interesting ones to her.
In other words they will think up answers and program Erica to say them. Who buys this nonsense?
Makes me wonder how much BS I am accepting in fields I don’t know about.
LikeLike
I hope nobody minds if I go on and on and on … Everybody does on Plato Footnote … Massimo, feel free to delete. I don’t mind.
A thing that strikes me about discussions about QM here, is that it’s always about the easy stuff. QM is difficult and you need a very solid background in mathematics to understand it. But understanding why Einstein had problems with QM actually is very easy – you don’t have to know anything about the mathematics of Hilbert spaces and linear operators and Hermitian operators etc. to get what Einstein didn’t like in QM. Even the many worlds interpretation is easy, at least on the level it’s discussed here.
Nobody on Plato’s Footnote believes he could have discovered general relativity – in this respect Einstein is distant, far removed from ordinary humans. But when we think about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox – it’s easy, suddenly he is close to us. We can “think with Einstein”, we can be a bit Einstein ourselves. Perhaps we get nowhere – but that’s not too bad: Einstein didn’t get nowhere either when trying to decipher the mysteries of QM.
This is very attractive, in a certain sense. When we discuss EPR or many worlds or whatever, we are close to the giants.
LikeLike
Ok Massimo two more questions about the Glotzer interview.
One is that these conclusions about entropy and organization are based on computer simulations only (as far as I can see). Might there be a disconnect between assigned parameters of the analysis and the real world?
Another is what kind of explanation of the results is being offered. Is it somehow causal? Descriptively pragmatic? When we have simulations as the basis of explanation, I have to say I worry about how to understand the nature of the explanation.
LikeLike
Hi Coel,
No, you should not be upset about that, because this describes very few of your futures. Your “self” is splitting all the time, quite like in the many worlds interpretation, as different copies diverge for various reasons. So you should be concerned to the extent that hideous torture is a probable future, i.e. just as you would be without all this talk of multiple selves.
No, I would say that it is you. One of the futures that diverge starting now. Subjectively, it will feel like you happen to end up in one of those futures and not the others (because once your identity splits, each branch is only aware of itself), but in fact you, or rather future selves who remember this conversation, end up in all of them, and each of them has equal claim on inheriting the identity of the you who is partaking in this discussion.
Because it’s genuinely you, not a copy. That’s what I’m claiming anyway. As long as the biography of this Coel has not already diverged from the Coel I am conversing with (that is, this tortured Coel remembers this conversation), then it really is you. But we can both bet against this appearing to happen, subjectively, because this is a rare future, and the future you and I should expect to experience is subjectively chosen at random from all possible futures and so is not likely to involve an instance of Coel being tortured.
Say the torture is supposed to happen next Wednesday. Speaking now, this is one of your potential futures, and is going to happen to you just as much as anything will happen to you next Wednesday. All of your possible Wednesdays will happen to a future you. But by the time Wednesday rolls around, and you find that you are not being tortured, then your identity has already split form that of the torture victim and the Coel being tortured can be considered to be a copy. But before the split you can’t call it a copy.
Again, visualise a river. Before it forks, the two forks of the river are each downstream — each fork is just as much a part of where the river is going as the other, and both are affected by changes to the river, e.g. if it is dammed or whatever. But after the fork, each fork has its own identity and its own path and are more or less causally disconnected. Though they were both “futures” of the unified river, they are not identiical to each other any more. You can say each fork is a “copy” of the other, if you like, but from the point of view of the river before the fork it doesn’t make sense to say one fork is the real river and the other is a copy.
For them to be a copy then what they experience is exactly the same. Ex hypothesi, you experience everything that they experience (because the only reason I’m saying you are all of them is because all these Coels are having precisely the same experiences) and you care and know about this experience because this is your experience.
You could. There is no fact of the matter on any of this stuff. The only question is what do you identify with? There isn’t really a right answer because the universe doesn’t care about personal identity — like morality and money and universities it is a human construct — personal identity is whatever humans say it is. The problem is not to find the objectively correct answer to any of these issues but to find an approach that makes sense.
Suppose you care about whether you are alive and well a year from today. This desire depends on the vague wishy washy intuitive notion of personal identity — the assumption that we can identify the real you somehow. Try to make it objective. What objective criteria would a future have to satisfy in order for you to be sure that you are alive and well? Imagine you could send a little robot spy into that future and ask it to report back. What would you program it to check?
If you identify simply as a human being and nothing more specific than that, then you can deem yourself to be alive as long as any human being is found to be alive. I don’t think anybody actually thinks this way, though. If you actually want to be alive this day next year, you are more likely to program the robot to look for a person who has your memories, personality, abilities, etc. You might also tell it to look for someone with your genes, name etc, and while this would certainly do for practical purposes these seem to me more superficial. You might change your name or undergo some sort of gene therapy which would change your genome, but you would still be you. On the other hand, you could suffer brain damage and lose your memories and have your personality drastically altered, in which case I would be inclined to say that the person I am discussing this with no longer exists on the planet being scanned.
In an infinite multiverse, whatever criteria you chose will always be satisfied somewhere, so you can never die — but only because you cannot experience death. So that you will always be alive is pretty much the only certainty. There will always be a Coel who is happy and there will always be a Coel who is suffering, and these futures each belong equally to the real you. But what you should expect to experience, subjectively, is a future randomly selected from all the possible futures.
The problem is you keep thinking of them as copies of you rather than as instances of you, various branches of a constantly diverging life story. But why? What is it that distinguishes you from the person who is indistinguishable from you who dies in a fire? What criteria are you using to say that this person is not you? As long as this event has not happened yet, there is absolutely nothing you can point to from an objective point of view to say that this person is not as much you as any of the other yous who don’t die in a fire.
LikeLike
Stevenjohnson (and his response to Massimo)
Yeah I think you gave a much better response to Massimo then me. No one is arguing that some hierarchies aren’t necessary, but why accept the degree of hierarchy as acceptable now? It’s kind of difficult to argue against excess of hierarchy without criticizing the dangers of hierarchy and the need to dismantle them in general, because as a political philosophy, you just don’t know all the technical details so it’s impetus for us to experiment.
LikeLike
SocraticGadfly (response to Steven Johnson)
This is a blatant strawman. Even in the utopian communes (and no one is advocating that here) there are leadership positions and organizations.
LikeLike
“Leaders and organizations do not necessarily imply high levels of inequality.”
But our state-capitalist society does create high levels of inequality, extreme high levels of inequality. It’s the nature of the system, if you’ve read Piketty, or just understand State-Capitalism in general. (inequality meaning not only wealth, but power, control, resources)
LikeLike
Thomas,
When I was young, I used to project everywhere and everything. As I’ve grown older, I have ever more trouble just dealing with the incredible strangeness of the moment. The more you accept the present as the only reality, the more it folds around you.
Like some Venus flytrap.
LikeLike
DM,
Are the two rivers proportionally smaller than the original? Otherwise you offer unsupported assumptions.
A link to Peter Woit’s recent post seems in order here;
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9207
LikeLike
Here’s a twist on the transporter issue, via the Enterprise Continues new online series and its twist on the Tholian Web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQeO5uuUbH4&feature=em-subs_digest
LikeLike