RestoringGuy

Spastic Ink, you seem to take this all too seriously. When you push on a ball, the shape of the ball distorts and the elasticity of the ball pushes on you with equal impulse. My definition is not great either, but i think it is less vague.

You missed my point. Resisting was used as a clarifying word in the discussion. Yes, if you claim kicking your feet while your center of mass is fixed in space constitutes "moving", then by that argument all matter is moving because of thermodynamics of atomic motion. That changes the idea of motion to include subsystems. You have a choice: allow "moving" to include the parts, or else only to describe the whole (center of mass) as I intend. If it is the former, then it is inescapable that all matter is alive if you believe the definitions given here. All matter has microscopic parts that move on their own. Does that not seem correct? No, not on your own. You also kicked a pebble on the ground. Every step you take propels the earth in the opposite direction. This is conservation of momentum. The effect is tiny but you know it's true. You cannot move "on your own" without moving something else, and then you didn't do it "on your own" but with traction and force-assistance of nearby matter. Imagine you are alone in space, and then fart in space --- you and your fart move in opposite directions. So your fart gas now adds a secondary motion and there is not just one thing (you) moving "on your own". There are two things moving, you and some fart gas half a mile away. I know this is tedious, but it is unavoidable if crazy ambiguous words like "own" are used in a scientific definition. What is something "on it's own"? I have never heard such a phrase in any of my three dozen physics classes. Is there some apparatus which can distinguish matter that moves "on it's own" and matter that does not? There is nothing strawman here. I didn't present this idea, but I know there is some refinement needed, and odd implications that are difficult to reconcile. You are correct. I believe definition of life should include unstable metabolism, and I doubt simple physics concepts are specific enough. My feeling is life should allow some inclusion of robots and computer simulations, and it is only the behavior that should dictate whether life is present.. The origin of a thing (artificial or natural), and whether it has adequate (external) propulsion systems does not seem easy to include. I will try this definition: Life is that which reacts in unpredictable ways, and through that process of unpredictable reaction it can recognize patterns of behavior that improve its chances of continuing to exist. It is the reaction that is the "identity" of life, so if I am totally eaten by parasites I am now "dead". My continued motion through space does not qualify me as "alive". By "recognize" I mean there is a set of external conditions that are sensed, and there is a statistical correlation between some internal indicator (inside its metabolism) and the external stimuli. The internal indicator guides the thing what to do, but does not require it. Just to clarify, by "continuing to exist" I mean there is a continued reaction in this specific statistical way. That clarification allows the word "death" to cover replacement of living matter by some other organism that consumes it.

That leaves me asking where does it end? As a QM system myself, acting to collapse wavefunctions of all experiments in front of me, who then collapses me? Either (1) we do not experience true wavecollapse and we all stay oblivious to not having any reality, only an false observational world, or else (2) collapse happens objectively. In either case the wavefunctions are defined in space, and space is curved by matter which is now indeterminately positioned, meaning that we are allowing space to be indeterminately positioned. More specifically there is some infinite series of wavefunctions for both space and matter which hopefully will converge if our cause-and-effect are to make any sense. If the series does not converge, nature must resort to some method. It is information shared between subsystems (matter and space). Does such an exchange not qualify as time evolution and give more credibility to option (2) ?

Those definitions seem mostly right in a classical Newtonian way. But just saying "preceding events" leaves some ambiguity. An event on Mars and an event on Earth let's say "2 seconds later" cannot be causally linked, deterministically or otherwise. But I think most determinists believe something magical by thinking that time is monolithic and absolute. There is no sense in saying "a moment in the future can be determined from a preceding moment" unless moments of time can be shared universally. I have never heard of any way to establish a standard frame across the entire universe. Even if you could establish a standard frame, the Lorentz transformations will constrain strict determinism to behave like your standard time frame is merely a convenient fiction.

Naddrin, No. Don't confuse causality with determinism. Influence and Fate are not the same thing! You can influence your computer to send a reply. You cannot guarantee it.

My opinion is that legitimacy requires consistency. We would not accept a certain litmus paper as "legitimate" if a person believes in it but it detects acid no better than chance. Maybe the answer to this topic should be yes, simply because anarchists are the only legitimate opponents of anything.

It can be transformational or exclusionary, but there is still subjective acceptance of a landmarker while the owner is absent. The exact same thing occurs with dead people. While a living person is away from homestead, there are fences and arbitrary markers supposedly binding on people who never agreed to obligate themselves to them. While a dead person is decomposing, there are wills and heirs with the same constraints applied to those who never agreed to self-obligate. We are only culturally inclined to believe in these things and the extent to which they apply to people who are living and present. It does not seem compatible with anything universal.

It would seem by using words like "resisting" we could be already preloading a decision whether something is alive. I could say a dead leaf fallen on the ground can be blown by the wind, and move upward against gravity. Is it resisting gravity? Well the answer is yes if you take gravity at face value and admit sometimes other forces work against it. The leaf and the rest of the Earth move away from each other. But the answer is no if you intend to word "resistance" to apply only to living things. Now I know some will say "ah, but the leaf was blown and that is external force -- the dead leaf did not move on its own". But all forces of motion are external, because without recoil on the Earth as a body, and traction on the ground on the soles of the shoes, we could do nothing but kick our feet in space and never move. Nothing can ever move "on its own". Motion always has a reaction on a secondary body just as Newton's laws tell us. There is no such thing as one body going off into motion all by itself. It has to push,pull, or grip its environment and modify the environment in the process. The idea of using "motion" to define life seems inconsistent and filled with circular reference.

"Without compensation" always gives unearned privilege to who gets there first. I think market compensation is owed to everybody who is forcibly excluded from a resource built by nobody, Nothing is a gift from God.

It's like answering a loaded question. If it's a moral act, you can argue it doesn't qualify as stealing, it is only taking. Saying "stealing isn't immoral" already sounds crazy, because it loads the act being done with a moral judgement ("stealing") before it is evaluated logically.

It is only a small and subtle error, not worth spending a lot of time. Nobody who is rational argues with a rock, and the reason we seem to give is that a rock is determined to do what it does, and discussion will not affect it. My slightly different view is that the rock is mostly insensitive to sound, we do not expect a rock to be conditioned to have grammar to be encoded within it, and whether it is strictly rational is not important to whether we speak to it. The idea that swaying opinion is an act of self-contradiction for a determinist really only holds with some implicit assumption that the sounds being spoken would have been without the stimulus provided by the other side. I doubt when this conflict was started centuries ago that people had words and reasoning defined carefully enough for us to say who was a first cause, and then to conclude that the first causer was an unworthy speaker.

Indeed. But it makes no sense to put forward a definition, watch somebody state something that meets the definition, and then watch people say "but it doesn't do X so it doesn't qualify" even though X was never remotely mentioned in the original definition. That did happen in this thread. Whether something moves against gravity "on it's own" says nothing about "how it was built". What is agreeable is all that matters because definitions are subjective constructions.

Yes but they all require non-local simultaneity, which requires abandoning relativity or allowing backwards time travel or at least backwards-time communication. In which case causality partially goes away. You can certainly have acausal determinism -- like if the universe were simply a played-back movie of fixed events that had no mandate for forward stochastic causation. Strict determinism does not care which way time flows. If you reverse the direction of every particle, everything should work backwards. Eggshells should unbreak on the floor and rise up into your hand. Any why do we not have memory of the future, if both past and future are equally fixed and connected to the present by deterministic rules? Since time prefers one direction, determinism alone is simply not good enough to explain why time prefers to flow one way. Stochastic causality can explain such things. There are really four options: (1) Causal determinism - universe plays like a movie and the entire movie can be deduced from one frame (2) Acausal determinism - universe plays like a movie with no requirement for the movie to make sense or go in any order (3) Causal indeterminism - universe events are limited/biased by nearby events but there is no "movie" (4) Acausal indeterminism - universe makes no sense, and future & past are only dreams

Why cannot freedom be caused by indeterminacy of matter? I think the scientific method only gives us a probability that some outcome will ensue. Even a chemical reaction described by some exact equation will happen in reality with some random variation in reaction speed. Sometimes my next action will be determined, but when enough time passes and my neurons are affected slightly by random events (subatomic) then I argue that my next action becomes free. While this can happen with non-living matter, that is differently only by degree of how many outcomes are considered to be likely. When I am affected randomly, my brain is able to think of actions that I do not have to manifest in terms muscular output. Like a chess-playing computer, the brain can "try out" some outcomes and then we have a filtering process. Combine that filtering idea with random events, and we call it "free will".

Correct. Whether a DRO-compatible estate is a thing believed in as having moral truth, or whether God is believed in who morally directs us, the result is the same: We get an involuntary coercion of people who do not agree with the conventional fiction, carried out by believers who initiate force based on pure faith in some entity. If a person rejects the precedent and claims the unattended property of the dead, then there only two choices. One can allow it to happen because it is not morally disagreeable, or one can overlay moral beliefs based on a unproven entity who "holds" the property and use that as a theory to initiate force. It would seem to me the only reason to not "steal" the property of the dead is a concern for everybody else who wants a piece of the action. They feel excluded, just as we all are when some rich kid gets a billion dollars without doing anything to earn it. In anarchic society, I think the estate idea only holds for those who sign on to playing by those arbitrary rules.

It was proposed that artificial makes a difference and makes something "not alive" (even if it has metabolism and cells and so on). An airplane made of wood is not alive because it is artificial byproduct. But what is artificial, if not arising from a lifeform? So natural process leads to life, and life defines what we call natural. It is circular definition. In order to call something alive, we must consider whether it grew "naturally". To call something natural, we must consider whether a lifeform built it. I do not agree with ANY of these definitions, I only point out the flaw in the sort of thinking that definition of "life" depends on being "naturally grown" and somehow robots can be ruled out on that particular basis.

I like the analogy of sudoku puzzle. Often interactions are presented as: this my view and if you cannot find flaw with it, then your view is wrong and yours should be replaced with mine. With the sudoku idea, it is a given that a person has drawn conclusions with varying degrees of certainty, and we are all set in our strategic ways. But myself, I still have some open squares on the board, such as why people choose to be self-destructive. I certainly do not remember being any "happier" when I was young. If anything I was far more miserable knowing there were people, much smarter than I, who would tolerate and even condone obfuscation of facts and promotion of violence. As I learned about their errors, I take comfort in knowing the errors in judgement were not mine. With regard to judgement, I have heard it said there are two concepts: "we must all submit to a 3rd party" and "there is a 3rd party to which we must all submit". Both of these concepts include a "universal" requirement, but they have extremely different meanings.

So far no dead people have come to me and said "I want you to respect my wishes for transfer of property to my descendants/heirs!". Unless there is an afterlife, I do not think that can ever happen. It does not matter whose claim is superior, because an owner who dies ceases to be an owner. Superior claim is based on an owner who can say what is a superior choice. Their contracts also die, because their signature is only an artifact of a being no longer able to exercise rights. It seems to me the only way the dead can own things is if one believes they are somehow in heaven holding the property until the right living person of their choice on earth is ready to receive it. Atheism seems to require that inheritance of property is only.a loose matter of convention (good manners, reciprocation, etc.).

By chaos, it does not matter how small a random event is, because it can still be magnified to macroscopic effect by some arrangements of matter. The hatred of the word "random" by the free will people seems caused by the faulty idea that random=senseless. Anything that is non-determined is random by definition, so free will is technically random. That is not the same as meaningless or senseless, but pop culture seems to use the word random in that way. The mathematical concept missing from this discussion is called Independence. When two random events (eg. two coins being tossed) are totally uncoupled, they are not just random, they are also "independent". The result of coin A has no measurable effect on the result of coin B. On the other hand, if you have a bucket with 2 red and 1 blue marble inside, and you draw one marble and see it is red, the probabilty of getting a blue marble on the second draw has now moved from 1/3 to 1/2 simply because you witness what happened on the first draw. Without observing the red marble, probability would stay 1/3. If you study the "Monte Hall problem" it is good example of how knowledge, probability, and choice become amazingly intertwined. It makes sense to me that brains can be totally limited to material action (like determinism), and emergent properties exist (free will) and the apparent contradiction goes away once dependent probabilities are considered and you consider that the brain has so many interconnected "random" events which clearly are not all "independent" events. By Monte Hall, it is financially bad to be a determinist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

A tough logical problem with wanting internal consistency in an absolute way is that, if you want to stick with one system of axioms, completeness is lost (by Godel's incompleteness theorem). So there will be truths that are undecidable by proof methods. "This sentence is unprovable by system X" is clearly a true statement whenever X is what we accept as the "right" system. Why should that be a problem? If the universe is deterministic, we have no access to that truth because the universe can only play out one possible set of results, and those results are all encapsulated by simply making some axioms that contain the laws of physics and some initial conditions. As a deterministic universe evolves, there is a truth that we humans can never deduce because we are part of that system that does the deducing. But with a nondeterministic universe, there is a chance a proof can be completed. The price we pay is that mistakes may be made and we've lost consistency on short-term scale, but the experiment (mental or otherwise) can be repeated until we are convinced. Determinism is more consistent. But nondeterminism is more complete. It would seem to me our universe sometimes allows one thing to be achieved as long as it allows the other to fail.

I agree. But it is also clear cause-and-effect and determinism have very little to do with one another. Determinism means there is only one way things can happen (no room for stochastic processes). Cause-and-effect does not require such a thing. Cause-and-effect requires causes to precede effects (temporal causality of timelike events). Determinism does not require such a thing.

I like your point of view. It seems to me by abandoning determinism, things are much simpler. If we keep determinism, and forget consciousness for a second, we could not explain matter without hidden variables which imply action-at-a-distance, and time travel and all sorts of paradox. By finding that matter is not deterministic, we escape such paradox. Human brains can be made out of matter, being atomic mechanisms, and do not need to be anything special in order to possess free will. We have a result of matter doing what matter does, something determinists would like. On the other hand, little bits of matter in the universe are not required to do what anyone can predict, so why should brains be limited in such a way?

That is a cool story. I always wonder about the cops parked strangely. It reminds me of many times I pulled over on the side and parked legally and safely (let's say to look at a map or GPS) I got harrassed and asked why I am parked here, have you been drinking, etc. No wonder people text while driving.

Problem is, in order to distinguish living/non-living we must now distinguish natural/artificial. And to know what is artificial we must know whether it is a byproduct of a living thing. We have a circular reference.

Doing a logical proof requires a physical mind. One person may call a proof "logical", another says it is "empirical" because they describe the determined way our brain atoms spit out a known truth in the context of a language previously learned. In an early podcast, Stef mentioned something about logic. That we derive it from things like object persistence (when a ball rolls under the couch, we learn the ball still exists despite it being totally gone from our senses). At the time I thought that was crazy. What the hell does logic have to do with physical matter, except insofar as it helps us describe physical matter? But no. Now I realize logic itself grows out of the physical world, not just vice-versa. And it does so not in some kooky organic way where our minds create it. Rather logic makes predictions, and if a proposition fails to make any predictions whatsoever (in the physical tangible world) then it isn't a logical proposition at all. The piece we are missing is that our brains and the atoms in them are machines. Not necessarily deterministic -- but predictable enough that we can distinguish between a repeatable logical argument, and one that is non-repeatable. And repetition happens in empirically validated ways. Stef I think was right or at least on to something important.