Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins
From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Making fires and making minds - the laws of physics prevail
Message-ID: <17466@cup.portal.com>
Date: 22 Apr 89 06:33:50 GMT
References: <2792@tank.uchicago.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 121

In article <2792@tank.uchicago.edu> cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:

>The interesting question, to my thinking, is that if choice really is an 
>illusion, what is the point of this illusion's having evolved in the first
>place?

     It's a useful hack that serves until something better comes along,
just like Newton's laws of motion, geocentric astronomy, the ether theory
of space, alchemy, and other notions too numerous to mention.

     Punishment, responsibility, rights, and other notions that in
operation help society survive require the notion of free will to justify
them.  More recently, there have grown other ways of looking at these
issues that are as or more effective in practice than those based on free
will.


>>     But if you say that the laws of physics cannot even in _theory_
>>explain these macro-level phenomena, then I must disagree with you.
>>[...] The fact that we don't have the computational resources to
>>actually make the prediction doesn't matter; that's a logistical problem,
>>not a theoretical one.
>
>There are two problems here. First, modern physics have given up as
>hopelessly flawed the Newtonian belief that if one knows the complete
>state of the Universe at one instant, he should then be able to predict
>all the future states of the Universe, should he only know the appropriate
>physical laws.

     Well, yeah.  The difference now is that instead of a single state, one
has to compute an entire wavefront of possibilities, which collapses to a
single point at the moment of measurement.

     So although it is not possible to predict the _precise_ state of the
system, it is possible to predict the possible _range_ of states.  The
direction of collapse of the function, as far as we know, has nothing to do
with consciousness; rather, it follows the probabilities.  Indeterminancy
which you do not control does not give you free will, any more than making
all your decisions by flipping a coin would.

     I omitted discussion of the random nature of wave function collapse
because I didn't think it affected the point being made, either in a
positive or negative way.

>[re difference between theory and practice and its dissolution]
>One may say that, in theory, an electron occupies a particular point in
>space at a particular time, but since we will never  be able to observe it
>as such, we are best to treat an electron as though it occupies a
>probability function, and not a point in space. 

     Latest I heard, a few months ago, there was still considerable debate
on this point.  The unsettled question is essentially this:  Is the
universe deterministic, and are we embedding the limits of measurability
into our theories, or are the entities involved really spread out in some
fashion (i.e. macro-level visualizations are simply not applicable at the
micro-level)?

     Obviously I lean toward the claim that you can't carry macro-level
analogies too far.  An electron really _is_ smeared out in space in
important ways, and therefore there is a valid distinction between theory
and practice.


>question. I think it was either Stephen Hawkins or Heinz Pagels who refer

     If you're going to use the respectability of some famous person to
back up your position, you could at least spell his name correctly.  And
just because Stephen Hawking says something doesn't make it true (although
it raises the probability).  I do agree in this case;  you can't predict
the exact position of all the particles.  They're too smeared around.  You
can, however, compute the range of positions.


>One final note here, is that there is an implicit assumption throughout
>Mr.Hankins posting that Mind is subject to physical law. That's all well
>and good, and it may very well be true, but it is an ASSUMPTION which has
>never been proven, either by physics or any other science.

     Well, let me put it this way:  That which we define as Mind is an
observable information behavioral phenomenon.  That is to say, there is
some set of behaviors sharing certain characteristics that we label as
Mind.

     In order to have knowledge of something, one must observe it or infer
it from observable phenomena.  Since all observable phenomena/behaviors are
physical in nature, then so are all their inferred properties.

     One observes a computer in operation, and infers from its physical
observable behavior that an instance of a program is operating within it. 
The instance of a program is itself a physical phenomenon, being
characterized entirely by physically observable behavior.

     One observes a human being in operation, and infers from her
observable behavior that a mind (an instance of Mind) is operating within
it.  The mind is itself a physical phenomenon, being characterized entirely
by physically observable behavior.

     One is as physical as the other.


>The quantity or quality that we know and experience as self and
>conveniently refer to as Mind is so far removed from physics that most
>physicists would just as leave pretend that it doesn't even exist. And yet
>we know that it does. Don't we?

     The physicists do not pretend that it doesn't exist; they simply
ignore it because it does not affect the outcomes of events on the scale
they are used to dealing with.  They know that Mind is an epiphenomenon of
the operation of physics, rather than the other way around.

     In order for mind to do something not predictable by physical law, it
would have to _consistently_ move particles to extremely low probability
positions.  That is, if the particle movements show the normal wave
function spread, then they are following the laws of physics and not of
Mind.  On the other hand, if they are consistently moving to the
low-probability locations, then the physicist had better start looking for
an external force such as Mind.  Far as I know, it's the first of these two
situations that holds.


Dan Hankins