RestoringGuy

This seems interesting. If creating life is initiating harm due to downstream events, then I would argue (sarcastically) that sufficiently humane and painless murder is prevention of harm due to elimination of all future harms the murder victim would have to endure. At least it should be factored in since the discussion includes misery, etc. on newly created life. A problem seems whether we are allowed to include all inevitable future events and tie in every single event responsibilitywise. If they can all be tied in piecemeal (not sum total), there is a sense creating life is wrong. But then suffering as a result of not being murdered seems to be an inevitable piece that seems admissible. Or if you don't like the murder analogy, saving somebody from death is on the same level because, like the created life, they will be initiated to new harm that their death would have spared them from. For that reason I think it is hard to avoid some measure of totals.

I hope there is a third paradigm. The dominant idea is the author of work retains control after selling to the public. So you have EULAs and licences and usage restrictions. The second idea is that the enforcement of this first idea is based on violence, the state, etc., so IP works should instead be morally copyable without permission because violence was first initiated by the author by leveraging the state to apply restraints. Copying only responds as correction of the initial wrong. What I envision as a third way is to treat copying the same as rudeness. There is no pure foundational way to prove copyrights, trademarks are universally legit, just as you cannot objectively prove somebody is being rude. So if you are dealing with IP between author and customer, taken in isolation there is no ethical answer who is right. But in the broader context of systems and social responses, there can be non-violent reactions to IP violation. Although it seems stupid to say somebody can patent the alphabet, everybody seems to know that, and anybody that tries to enforce such a thing would lose credibility very fast, just a somebody who swears at everyone all the time is socially avoided. The difficult thing is how to quantify this concept. We have currency to define economic value. What I would like to encounter is some kind of social-currency, orthogonal to economic-currency, which holds up a framework of IP and builds it into voluntary pricing. As an author releases works, or inventor sells a product, some quantified basis of IP would be attached as a metric. To make this work, all of the economic things would be linked algorithmically. Maybe the sales systems (web sites, mobile commerce devices, etc.) would possess their own linear relationship between social and economic currency. For example, if you copy an author's book, or sell a competing product that uses ideas taken from another inventor, these relationships would be manifested as less profits for you because your core systems would run slower, reach fewer customers, all your prices of living go up as a response, etc. being detected by all of the other vendors you must deal with. This would happen all in small increments and only to the degree the various participants have opted-in using their particular linear formula. So there are no discontinuous thresholds ("less than N words is fair use") and other subjective tricks. At the same time, you could totally ignore IP but there would just be emergent economic impact.

If one word is quoted from a book, and credit (not monetary, but verbal) is given, it would seem morally OK and not rude. So what about one sentence, or one paragraph or chapter? It's all just arbitrary limits about how many bits of data constitutes a product. If you copy a product and pretend you invented it, that seems like fraud or counterfeiting, just as lying about commodity weight or volume. But if you copy a product and admit it's "a copy of so-and-so's work", there is no lie being told. This IP violation without misrepresenting the source seems morally at the level of rudeness. There is a sense that, when a contract is broken, you are free to collect damages without escalating the wrong that was being done. For example, if a store lied to about what electronics are in a sealed box, and the store will not remedy after you discover a brick in the box, you can withhold credit card payment or seek other remedy. I think the same applies to IP. Once we are lied to by a company or author about the quality of their product, having a fine-print EULA, or the same product or brand name applied to inferior sequels, there is a strong sense IP becomes intentionally deceptive.

Elliptical orbit is just another twist. If orbits were circular, forces are non-constant because force is normally taken as a vector which includes direction. Force is different vector from one moment to the next even when circular orbits are carried out. Also, I think what is implied in Einstein's quote is that once you have engineering precise enough to distinguish the two cases, you can always make the laboratory smaller to retain the principle. It is a limiting case, like epsilon-delta in calculus. If you give an engineering-inspired variation threshold (epsilon), then Einstein can designate a laboratory size (delta) that forces all experiments to stay constrained to variations smaller than the threshold you specified. Delta is a function of epsilon, not some fixed size that holds for all epsilon.

Sorry to misunderstand. Yes it does seem arbitrary if you are talking about determinism. But when someone says "X caused me to do it", that refers to causation not necessarily determinism. In a non-determinist framework, causation can be probabilistic. By this I mean previous forces can only influence the odds, rather than seeming to determine one particular outcome.I would like to note that the radical free will position is also arbitrary. If a guy is inside a car, I could say the car acts with free will. But if you draw a line and say "no only the driver has free will, the car is controlled", one could take it a step further and say "no only the driver's brain has free will, the rest of their body is merely controlled". Or you could even say just some bits of the frontal part of the brain has free will, not the brain itself.

Brain and outside environment are both made of the same "stuff", matter and energy. I don't see how you can suggest the environment influences your feelings, but your feelings, etc, cannot influence it given that your muscles,etc. are influenced by feelings and are tied into the environment. It seems like you are suggesting the brain is the "real" reaction, but responses to your brain (elevated heartbeat, kicking your feet) do not qualify as real reactions. The are just outside somehow. Also, internal and external are where you choose draw the line.

The standard of behavior is based on responses to stimuli, and adaptive power of those responses to entirely new conditions. I conclude no computer can be simply programmed to provide any response you can imagine, because the problem space is too large. Even random numbers generated by an algorithm are only pseudorandom, they are behavior that fails to qualify as unpredictable behavior. A computer program can lose in a game where strategy is fixed by algorithm. For an example of why I reject the matter of who built and programmed the computer, a calculator must be pre-programmed with algorithm to add, multiply, etc., rather than possessing a mere lookup table that relates inputs to outputs. The problem space is too large to simply be a table of responses. The calculator is programmed by a human, but that fact is not essential to the continued operation of the calculator. Its correct behavior remains a decisive factor in whether the algorithm tracks the larger problem space. Similarly, if you build a living human one molecule at a time it will not automatically dictate that the human is a non-thinking being by virtue of its unnatural origin. The way a thing came to be is logically (but perhaps not biologically) separate from its behavior. The full spectrum of its behavior will tell me if a thing is a conscious being, just as we are able to distinguish (by behavior alone) an unconscious person from one who is wide awake. We can also distinguish a calculator that works without consulting with the inventor and their credentials. The behavior is an observable fact, and consciousness is one of those things we observe at face value without constantly contemplating whether we came from sperm or microchips.Since this discussion is big on quotations, there are four ways of thinking about AI that Roger Penrose describes (Shadows of the Mind, 1994, p.12) which I believe are distinct viewpoints: A pure determinist (holding to strong AI & functionalism) basically believes A. Penrose says "A is regarded by some as the only viewpoint that an entirely scientific attitude allows." Clearly Searle is holding to position B. I agree with Penrose in defending position C. Finally, position D is mysticism or anti-science.The reason I reject position B is because it is too vague. The other positions are vague also, but they can be remedied in principle. B just postpones the definition of awareness into the definition of the word "brain". Then it seems to rule out a behavioral definition of what is a brain, ignores whether the brain is conscious or not, alive or not, etc. and just sticks to whatever thing it is that brains might do. But once you admit we need a good behavioral definition of what is a conscious brain, that seems to admit defeat. Next, if all behavior can be simulated, now you have to behaviorally define what constitutes simulation versus real action. Without a physical metric, how do we do that without using a pure faith assumption that human behavior is real and computer behavior is fake? I believe the Chinese Room argument has merit, but it does not prove what it is believed to prove. Searle mainly seeks to reject position A. I do not feel that rejecting computationalism implies being committed to dualism or any subjective approach. You may be surprised to learn Searle has said "of course the brain is a digital computer. Since everything is a digital computer, brains are too." (Searle 1980).

This is fascinating but it makes no sense. To take cognition as a "starting" point seems entirely like religious faith, just as accepting the soul as a given. I do not claim an ordinary computer program can have consciousness. Quite the opposite. But I do not accept the idea that behavior is not a decisive factor. This Chinese room fraud basically says that no matter what tasks a machine does, it will always be fake, and that only the human brain defines real cognition. This is like saying gravity only applies to things that you choose. It seems far from being an objective standard. Instead, I claim human brains engage in behaviors that exhibit free will, and anything that exhibits the same behavior also has free will. It is an objective standard, one that you can test for without assuming a bunch of crazy stuff about what constitutes a legitimate "room". I believe computer programs lack free will, not because they are inhuman or "only simulations", but because they can never exhibit precisely any kind of free behavior (as humans do exhibit). We seem to agree computers cannot presently have free will. But why adhere to the Searle way of going about it? It seems to do nothing but give the determinists exactly what they want, proof that free will is just a fabricated assumption, rather than a real result of observing and measuring the universe.

But how do you know the falling book does not understand, and do you hold humans and computers to the same standard of judgement by dropping them to the floor? If there is some methodology to making your claims, I would like to hear about it. Otherwise all I know is you are making assertions and categorizations about what qualifies as understanding. The methodology I am using is behavior-based. If concrete or abstract things exist, I am judging that based on behaviors that are exhibited, behaviors I can witness and measure. If a human gets an equation wrong, you can say it's not a programming or computation problem, but only because those are words picked out to describe computers. If a human and computer get an equation wrong by being supplied with the wrong equation in the first place, or using a trial-and-error procedure, it seems you are only making a "computational" distinction that serves to prove a vocabulary definition that is already assumed. There is nothing new that is shown. By way of automated deduction, a computer can use logical connections to establish new equations, similar to an algebra student trying to solve an equation. While I can certainly accept this has nothing to do with free will, it seems to overlap with the kind of mathematical understanding people have. I am sure you can augment these computational associations with sensors to provide "subjective experience", but it sounds to me as if you've already decided nothing a computer can do will qualify as true understanding unless there is a human brain attached.

It does not prove the computer is incapable of understanding. What is demonstrated so far is only that we tend to select humans as the definition of understanding. The chinese room is an old cop-out argument, and very uncompelling because you can always select what is inside and what is outside the room and place a claim of "nongenuine" on whatever consciousness-like behavior the room exhibits. The only way I know that a thing exists is from behaviors exhibited. This seems to be how scientific definitions work, by describing behavior and not metaphysical rooms and linguistic slight of hand. I think this is the fundamental flaw of those who doubt the reality of abstracts. Science involves correspondence between abstract models and concrete experiments, correct? But in order to measure the error, or to weigh how extreme is the failure of the model, we must use mathematics. We can use standard deviation, for example, as a metric. But the reliability of the metric itself is founded on abstraction. In order to sum up the errors and know how bad the model is, that act necessarily involves mathematics, so there is yet another abstract to rely upon. If a human and computer program are both engaged in solving equations, in some cases using memorized deductive methods, some of which were accepted without proof in order to accomplish a task at hand, what is the objective basis for saying one is engaged in understanding the equation and the other is not?

I am so glad you said causality and not determinism. Why do you isolate meaning to "human minds". Cannot a computer process equations? If a computer makes use of equations to carry out specific actions, does the syntax have no meaning?

Although EA is talking crazy, your response about "entered voluntarily" is not that accurate. Some people seem to be bound by the contract without signing, children and guests for example can be regulated to some extent. The contract is limited by laws, entangles with other contracts, and there is fine print Microsoft EULA-style. When a contract says just one side can change it without notice, I think the extent of you having "entered" can similarly change without notice. Some of these condo places do crooked stuff nobody can predict by reading the contract, and the contract is worthless (in the current scheme of things) without judicial force as a tool to enforce it. The contract seems a lot like an election promise. To me, it's not proof things are entered voluntarily, but only makes some opportunity for a voluntary condition to happen. Contract is just a necessary feather, it doesn't guarantee the bird will fly.

When property is wasted I think there is mild ethical cause for others to borrow but not permanently steal. I am reminded of that car in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Also, if some kid does not feed their cat, I think it is OK to take away and feed the cat for a little while without owner's consent. I feel that I can also borrow a pen off a vacant desk. Maybe negotiation is mainly for the long-term plans.

They spelled "pegnancy" and missed a lot of punctuation. It must be nice for them to get paid for writing so poorly.

I think it should be asked the other way around. At what age should people stop owning property? We take it for granted that property rights magically exist in some "estate" form even after death. But old people are not in a good position to reciprocate property rights, so why preserve them? You can also argue younger people are exploited, forced taxes, forced schooling, prohibitions on working, so much of the old people's property is illegitimate anyway. It seems parallel to the other questions asked here.

Everything you said except stuff related to "outside forces" was awesome: The Determobot, the implications of messing up on what constitutes "aggression", the physics of the brain. Everything except on Dec. 15th with "this guy thinks emotions are external to us". I did not see that as the intent. You can say "the reaction occurs inside our heads", but there is influence from food eaten, people talking, sunlight, etc. You decided what constitutes "reaction". It is another toxic word because physicists say "action and reaction", but it is often very much just an opinion which is which. There is recoil from a gun, but bullet and gun recoil from each other. Basketballs in the air pull "up" the Earth with force equal to the force the basketball is pulled down. And I would say, if the word emotion is used to include its causes and effects, that is not the same how you understood it because that does not seem to divorce emotion from the brain. Maybe you did understand it all and you can set me straight.

To borrow your antibiotic example, it depends what you mean by "advent". If there are effective antibiotics right there on the shelf, the ethical optimum may be to use them. I doubt this because the optimum probably has not been discovered yet, but if they are essential to the outcome, it is still less erroneous than not using them. Next, if antibiotics simply exist, but because of local shortage they are unavailable, or they are fake, or they are otherwise defective, or the guy gets run over on the way to the drugstore, prescribing them is a larger error.I suppose that is the extreme case. I am not going so far as saying the we are personally and fully responsible for all these variables. It's just that they cannot be excluded because you can often pick out a scenario where somebody "should have known better" (a phrase I dislike but can't avoid because "should" and "better" seem a bit redundant). I think something like "access" to knowledge is a perhaps a bigger factor than knowledge itself, but "access" is another topic. Another extreme example I will give is natural disaster. In my view I do not go up to an avalanche or volcano and blame it for murder. But that's not because I hold it as ethically exempt. To me it is technically right to say a tornado is "evil", but it is also useless to say it. The toronado and all of its causes are not susceptable to words, at least not in any way that correlates words to avoiding deadly outcomes. This means, shockingly perhaps, that I am comfortable with a tornado being ethically "bad", but I believe that's a pointless (but not genuinely false) thing to say. Feel free to highlight any gaps in my thinking.

You're not confused by your own definitions. It makes discussion confusing. I have no desire to say emotions are some mysterious thing, extending outside the brain. But I accept some people will say there are angry words or sad stories. I will need to fit the word emotion to that context. Reading words is always doing a them-to-you dictionary translation. Just as you say anger is in your brain, the meaning you connect to your words is also in your brain. I will give your words different meaning until I find a problem, and then I will revise my mental picture of your meaning of words. But you do not appear to revise your mental picture of words others use, or recognize them at all. Why are you typing stuff unless you expect others to do what you will not?I do not recall creating boundary called human. But I guess you can also say ice cream comes in strawberry, so the universe is strawberry and atoms are strawberry. My answer seems kind of odd, but I am not really sure I get your point of how the word human fits in. I do not put any trust in human as a viable definition. A conscious gorilla probably has more free will than a sleeping human.

It is good but not compelling. There are pretty feathers, colorful flowers, and other elaborate natural beauty that is resource-expensive. The butterfly has false eyes, a useful trick. If I were a determinist, I would say your illusion of free will is simply a trick to make the opposite sex impressed with your powers of control, convince your competitors you are not bound by rules that they are. There is a payoff to faking it, although I don't believe free will is fake.Consider two things:(1) There is a sense that free will does not exist for really stupid things, such as the rock, my big toe, a rolling die. This has nothing to do with determinism. Stupid and non-strategic behavior rules out "will" in general.(2) There is a sense that free will does not exist for things with a fixed and determined outcome, such as a closed deterministic computer program. This has nothing to do with stupidity. Fixed behavior, no matter how smart or strategically-inclined, rules out freedom because there is only one way to go.My impression is that physics is being discarded by the free will side too quickly, with the belief that physics isn't up to the job. So when you say "it will fail", it does not fail because it does not address both considerations, it only addresses #1 and subsequently gives the compatibilists a free ride.

That is a good point. But by similar argument, by deliberately avoiding the scientific side, free will people (which I am) should really shut up about rocks and the weather. Once you are dealing with combined measurements smaller than Planck's constant, all deterministic bets are off. Once a rock rolls far enough, bounces enough times, to make its outcome sensitive to sub-Planck uncertainties in initial position, not a difficult task given chaos, pure determinism is gone. Chemically, there is no determinism of whether two atoms will bond. To concede that determinism is hunky-dory when it comes to rocks and weather is just playing into mystical causes. That metaphor for determinism should be abandoned. The expensive phenotype thing does not work either. For all we know, it is like pretty feathers, tricking mates and competitors to believe who is superior. Neither side can get the science right. I think fixing that problem is the best approach.

You could also say the Moon is part of the sky. I have found in many discussions that it's confusing to talk about what is internal or external. It all depends on what you want to define as a boundary. The brain is not a closed system, and anybody can say a property is internal or external merely by placing a boundary in the right place. I am not arguing properties are external to the individuals like some kind of disembodied ghost. I am arguing all properties influence the environment however slightly, and you can always draw a boundary that let's you identify the property as exposed externally, so it's counterproductive to add internal and external to the discussion (or the similar idea that properties are possessed rather than just present). Emotions are influencing people to do things, externally do things, if you want to call it that, and you make a vocabulary choice to accept only the mental bit. If somebody else says written words convey emotion, they are just making a different choice of what to include. Like inertia, we don't need to argue about whether emotion is a part of us. Desires, wants, needs, etc. also become shown as part of behavior.

I take a more absolutist position. If ethics is relative to knowledge, a person could just take a pill that makes them stupid or fail to learn some fact that now gets them off the hook ethically. You can say that act of ignorance is yet another choice they make based on knowledge, but the chain is now potentially infinite because ethical responsibility for that lack of knowledge comes from prior knowledge, and where does it all start exactly? People will make errors, however small, correct them in the wrong way (because ethical wrongness is related to their knowledge of what is wrong), and without some absolute truth as the ethical correction they are free to leverage their lack of knowledge to make a slightly larger error until it eventually qualifies as initiating force. To put this in perspective, knowledge-based ethics seems to say that to become completely right all we have to do is become stupid enough so that ethics no longer applies. I take the opposite approach: knowledge is a sideshow to ethics, only the optimal strategy is technically the right one, and we are imprisoned by imperfection, coping with our varying degrees of error from this ethical optimum. Knowlege may make the error smaller, but it should not define ethics itself.

As another viewpoint I suggest emotions cannot be measured or even defined as precisely as mass or charge. I am confused why it is worthwhile to argue about what is called a real thing or attribute as opposed to a real behavioral consequence given a name for pure convenience. Nobody should really care whether the sky officially possesses the color blue, it is just whether certain light rays are scattered or not.

It's a philosophical argument. The reason determinists remain unconvinced and they become irritated is that they are not yet presented with purely scientific basis for knowing their error. If the decision is externalized to an objective test, independent of the cultural baggage of what exactly characterizes "will", there would seem to be no further requirement than to simply decide truth on the basis of fundamental physics.

Mostly the quantum effects cancel out. Chaos (a deterministic theory) provides that any effect, however small, can have influence on larger scales. It is a dead horse. Your response exhibits the same error both free will people and determinists often make. Because a choice is random does not prove there is no prior cause. A loaded die for example, may have a definite and reproducible preference, but only a preference not a guarantee. The die exhibits behavior that is both random and causally influenced by its special construction. The fact that the die is static, having no dynamic internal metabolism, seems to make it rather stupid. OK people make choices based on accumulated knowledge and experience. Why is that not a simple change, or even a severe tilt in probability, rather than a sure-fire guarantee that behavior must change once proper stimuli is given? The determinist and the free will people both will disguise probability as senselessly biased away from any structure. I am suppose to accept without proof that "random must mean stupid". If deterministic rules can be combined and meshed together in complex ways to produce surprising and rational outcomes, then it seems random events, when linked together and tamed by uneven odds, can also produce a surprising outcome. Imagine a machine with randomly wearing parts, where the random bits are there to purposely break logical stalemates. Through selection, machines that employ randomness at the proper level will gain the most advantage. It would seem a deterministic machine that plays "rock, paper, scissors" can always be beaten by a suitable random device, assuming both machines can witness the inner workings of the other machine.