Overview of the Week's Blog Posts

>Skepticism about free will has become ever more prominent. If one browses the popular science section of any large bookshop or flicks through recent popular science magazines, one is likely to come across some books or articles arguing that free will is an illusion: a left-over from an outmoded, pre-scientific way of thinking that has no place in modern science. The authors typically cite some influential neuroscientific studies that appear to undermine the idea of free will by showing that human actions are caused not by our intentional mental states, but by physical processes in the brain and body. More broadly, if everything in the universe is governed by the laws of physics, and our actions are part of that universe, then how could those actions be free? This line of reasoning, in turn, puts pressure on our traditional notions of responsibility. How could it make sense to hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions weren’t done out of this person’s own free will?
>
>Such skepticism about free will is not yet the mainstream view among the general public. Nor is it the mainstream view among academic philosophers, the majority of whom are “free-will compatibilists”: proponents of the thesis that free will – perhaps after some definitional tweaking – is compatible with a law-governed, even deterministic universe. But free-will skepticism is on the rise, as illustrated by Sam Harris’s best-selling book, Free Will (2012). Many free-will skeptics have a noble moral motive, alongside their scientific motivation: they find the present criminal justice systems in many countries unjust and wish to argue for criminal justice reform. But one can certainly agree on the need for an overhaul of our criminal justice systems and advocate a more rehabilitative and less retributivist approach, while still thinking that it is a philosophical mistake to throw the notion of free will out of the window. Moreover, the idea of free will is central to our human self-understanding as agents, independently of its relevance to criminal justice. How, for instance, could we genuinely deliberate about which course of action to take – say, when we choose a job, a partner, or a political cause we wish to endorse – if we didn’t take ourselves to be free in making this choice?
>
>In my book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), I offer a new defence of free will against the growing skepticism. Crucially, I do not proceed by denying science or watering down the definition of free will. Rather, my aim is to show that if we understand the lessons of a scientific worldview correctly, the idea of free will – in a fairly robust sense – is not just consistent with such a worldview but supported by it. In short, I argue that there is a naturalistic case for free will.
>
>In this series of blog posts, I will first describe what I take to be the main challenges for free will from a scientifically informed perspective and then explain what my strategy is for answering those challenges. And I will illustrate this strategy by zooming in on the most widely discussed challenge, namely the challenge from determinism. Of course, I will only be able to sketch some key ideas relatively informally; more detailed and precise arguments can be found in the book itself, as well as in some of my earlier articles (available on my webpage).

The Rest of the Blog Post(s)

Use the link from the OP to find the rest of the blog post summarized above as well as the remaining blog posts from Christian List throughout the week.

The Podcast Version

You can listen to Christian List discuss their book Why Free Will Is Real on the New Books in Philosophy podcast here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/christian-list-why-free-will-is-real-harvard-up-2019/

> Certainly there is such a partial ordering. Personally, I would never go back to working in C++ and I would love to work again in Smalltalk.

I agree, and to the point, I strongly suspect that if we spelled out how we arrived at our ordering, we'd find quite a bit of overlap.

> I think you may have a overly generous view of other disciplines...

That occurred to me while I was writing that, particularly in the realm of probability and statistics, having read The Theory That Would Not Die recently. :-)

> I do agree that programmers do tend to be thin-skinned, and they also tend to be rude and abrasive dickwads (which seems to be what OP is about).

I don't doubt the latter, but I have to say, honestly, that I agree with the commenter who observed that the article took a tongue-in-cheek in-joke in the Haskell community, poking fun at themselves, and somehow took it seriously, possibly by taking it out of context. To try to put it back in context, I first saw it here, where there's plenty of fun poked at other language communities as well.

> Do you think that, oh, say, physicists are running around promoting new methods of measurement by writing articles about how measurements made with the old method can't possibly be right and that people who use the old method have stunted intellects?

1. Actually, yes, although I still think the statistics community is king here.
   
2. I have not actually seen anyone in the FP community say anything even remotely approximating "non-FP programming can't possibly be done correctly."
   
   With respect to point 2, I have heard said, and have said myself, "FP, particularly with static types and type inference, is almost always preferable to the alternatives," because that's been my experience. And I've been, at turns, a wild-eyed Lisper and wild-eyed OO programmer. And I don't think I was wrong in any of those cases in exactly the sense that matters: getting stuff done (correctly). Common Lisp really was better at a huge range of stuff than Pascal or C, 30 years ago. OO really was a significant improvement on even structured programming, 20 years ago. Now we face a different set of challenges, some having to do with concurrency and distribution, some having to do with severe time-to-market pressures, some having to do with being on the web and/or mobile, etc. My thesis is merely that FP makes it cheaper to address those than the alternatives.
   
   > Regarding the anecdotes: I disagree that good anecdotes are all over the place. Good anecdotes are quantitative and I don't see much of that.
   
   I suppose that's fair, but surely you see the dilemma here: quantitative anecdotes are overwhelmingly likely to be from academia, and therefore dismissed (not without reason). Industrial anecdotes are unlikely to include quantitative data because it tends to be proprietary. I'm particularly conscious of this precisely because I'm a working FPer. I should hasten to add that I work in Scala, and not at all "purely," so add that to the set of variables.
   
   > Anecdotes are anecdotes because they aren't peer-reviewed results of formal investigations, but they need to be more than "we tried it and it rocked" (even if that's true).
   
   I agree that's the ideal situation, but since it seems extremely difficult to get there, what do you propose as some kind of second-best information sharing approach? I honestly don't like giving people a hard time about the subject. I'd like to try to meet people half way. But all too often, the "academic results are academic; I need numbers from industry" thing feels like a trap. If there's a way out, I'd like to know what it is.
   
   Regardless, I owe you thanks for your patience.

>I know many papers have been written about MoC but I'm not sure how many hard conclusions have reached consensus.

Real quick, I like what Kofi Agawu says on the nature of analysis in How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back In Again. Consensus is not the point of analysis:

>>Musical analysis', writes Ian Bent, is 'that part of the study of music which takes as its starting-point the music itself rather than external factors.'" Some may insist on a minimal definition of 'music', while others will wonder how firm is the line between 'external' and (presumably) 'internal' factors. But if we overlook these pertinent concerns, we can draw attention to what is most attractive about Bent's definition, namely, the word 'starting-point'. I stress this because it seems to me that the case against analysis has been made in part by people who failed to recognise that analysis is ideally permanently open, that it is dynamic and on-going, and that it is subject only to provisional closure. In an ideal world, analysis would go on always and forever. (270)

---

>But I think the idea that a set of pop motives could have been directly integrated into the charts which would result in something that sounds somehow less random is probably not accurate. [...] the processes that followed completely erased any sense of how those original elements would have sounded on their own. Perhaps the only thing that would have remained was the chromaticism vs had he allowed only for diatonic pitches.

My point was that the operating definition of "random" is misguided in the first place. Cage's chance music does share similar surface level harmonic and melodic features to Boulez's total serial music, namely chromatic atonality with voices spanning huge ranges. You don't need to look under the hood to figure that one out. It's not that Cage's music would be any more—or any less—random if it was composed of sampled bits of pop recordings, but the comparison to Boulez might be made by analysts rather than pop-musicologists (not musicologists of popular music, but popular musicologists, like "pop-scientists"). The reason why (some of) Cage's music sounds similar to (some of) Boulez's music is pretty obvious: they are similar. Maybe not at a deep structural level, nor at the conceptual level, not at all, but at the surface they absolutely use similar materials.

Let's not forget that there was eighteenth century European chance music that sounds like eighteenth century European chance music because it's built using materials endemic to styles of that culture and period. It's not a surprise to me that Cage's version sounds endemic to the twentieth century. And, of course, there are plenty of examples of "random"-sounding (or "meandering", I might say) pieces written by amateur composers and submitted to this subreddit and /r/composer that use diatonic materials, don't stray very far (or at least can't find a trajectory), and sound disorganized.

I think it's interesting that both Cage and Boulez sought the negation of their own agency in these pieces. Why don't we talk about that instead? Rather, we're fed this tired status quo narrative based on a very surface-level understanding of music. I'm guessing most people who hold the view that Cage isn't a "real composer" of "real music"—because of his chance procedures—haven't spent much time with Cage and who fundamentally misunderstand his philosophy. Ditto on those who use the perceived similarity of Boulez to Cage to suggest that the latter is equivalent and therefore not "real music" either. We should be deeply suspicious of claims about art that put precedence on terms like "meaning," "perceptibility" and "intent," especially those that suppose certain art has transcendent qualities while others do not.

But back to this idea of randomness. Who or what decides what is random? Who or what is doing the randomizing? If there is an agent behind the randomization, what's so random about that in the first place? If randomness is the opposite of intention, is it "random" every time a baseball pitcher fails to strike out a batter on the opposite team? Is it "random" if the batter swings and misses? Cage might not know ahead of time which way the coin is going to land, but that ontological uncertainty, that probability, does not equate to a computational irrationality (trying to deconstruct the term 'random', because neither Cage nor Boulez is, so how can we claim that either "sound random"?). Assuming any of this has to do with what humans want or expect at all. As Karen Barad writes in Meeting the Universe Halfway:

>>the agential realist ontology that I propose does not take separate­ness [N.B. Cartesian dualism - X] to be an inherent feature of how the world is. But neither does it denigrate separateness as mere illusion, an artifact of human consciousness led astray. Difference cannot be taken for granted; it matters—indeed, it is what matters. The world is not populated with things that are more or less the same or different from one another. Relations do not follow relata, but the other way around. Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things. Mattering is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences. Changing patterns of differ­ence are neither pure cause nor pure effect; indeed, they arc that which effects, or rather enacts, a causal structure, differentiating cause and effect. Difference patterns do not merely change in time and space; spacetime is an enactment of differentness, a way of making/marking here and now. (136-137)

---

>I guess it's a question of scope and perception. At what point of applying chance processes does an original deterministic process get erased or is no longer noticeable? In my own chance music the random number generator I use entirely deterministic (as random number generators are for like 99.99% of all computer programs). But we humans are not able to perceive the determinacy involved and the results look random. At what point are we no longer able to trace the results (the score for the MoC) back to Cage's conscious decisions or are we always able to?

This is the interesting question. I've written enough for the moment. I'm glad you have the the perspicacity to make these considerations. What I worry about is the sort of agenda that takes a hammer to these wonderfully nuanced ideas and smashes them flat, co-opting them into the ideology Cage et al were resisting in the first place to use as a weapon against music and ideas that oppose that blocky, imprecise, uncurious, aesthetics-based worldview.

Easiest introduction (too simple, but a great overview):
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-plasma-physics-controlled-fusion/dp/0306413329/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404973723&sr=8-1&keywords=francis+chen+plasma

Better introduction (actually has real mathematics, this is like the Chen book but better for people who want to learn actual plasma physics because it doesn't baby you):
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Plasma-Physics-R-J-Goldston/dp/075030183X/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404973766&sr=8-1&keywords=goldston+plasma

Great introduction, and FREE:
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/plasma/plasma.html

Good magnetohydronamics book:
http://www.amazon.com/Ideal-MHD-Jeffrey-P-Freidberg/dp/1107006252/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404974045&sr=8-1&keywords=ideal+magnetohydrodynamics

Great waves book:
http://www.amazon.com/Waves-Plasmas-Thomas-H-Stix/dp/0883188597/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404974079&sr=8-1&keywords=stix+waves

Computational shit because half of plasma physics is computing that shit:
http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Plasma-Physics-Applications-Astrophysics/dp/0813342112/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1404974113&sr=8-2&keywords=tajima+plasma

http://www.amazon.com/Plasma-Physics-Computer-Simulation-Series/dp/0750310251/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404974148&sr=8-1&keywords=birdsall+langdon

Then there are also great papers, and I posted some links to papers in a previous post, but if you're asking to start, you want to start with Chen (and if it's too simple for you, move onto Fitzpatrick or Goldston). I also forgot to mention that Bellan and Ichimaru also have great books for introductory plasma physics.

EDIT:

I'd also like to add that I love you because this subreddit almost never ever mentions plasma physics.

This is a good introductory essay by Nick Bostrom from The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. And this is a relevant survey essay by Drew McDermott from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.

If folks aren't taking well to the background reading, they might at least do alright jumping to Section 5 from the Descartes' Discourse (they can use this accessible translation). One little snippet:

>I worked especially hard to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that doesn’t have reason, we couldn’t tell that they didn’t possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was practically possible, we would still have two very sure signs that they were nevertheless not real men. (1) The first is that they could never use words or other constructed signs, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. We can easily conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions that will cause a change in its organs (touch it in one spot and it asks ‘What do you mean?’, touch it in another and it cries out ‘That hurts!’, and so on); but not that such a machine should produce different sequences of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence—which is something that the dullest of men can do. (2) Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would be bound to fail in others; and that would show us that they weren’t acting through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is practically impossible for a machine to have enough different •organs to make •it act in all the contingencies of life in the way our •reason makes •us act. These two factors also tell us how men differ from beasts [= ‘non-human animals’].

That sets the stage for historically important essay from Turing of Turing-Test-fame. And that essay sets up nicely Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Scientific America has two accessible articles: Searle presents his argument here, and the Churchland's respond.

As always, the SEP and IEP are good resources for students, and they have entries with bibliographies on consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, computational theories of mind, and so on.

There are countless general introductions to philosophy of mind. Heil's Philosophy of Mind is good. Seager's introduction to theories of consciousness is also quite good, but maybe more challenging than some. Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness was a very engaging read, and beginner friendly. She also has a more textbook-style Introduction that I have not read, but feel comfortable betting that it is also quite good.

Searle's, Dennett's and Chalmer's books on consciousness are all good and influential and somewhat partisan to their own approaches. And Kim's work is a personal favorite.

(sorry for the broad answer--it's a very broad question!)

It's such a good question because it really gets to questioning logic itself. It is a metalogical question, and I think you would find that looking into metalogic will be very interesting for you. I would recommend that you check out Geoffrey Hunter's Metalogic. It is a bit older, but you can find it starts from the most basic concepts and builds up to very advanced concepts in philosophical and mathematical logic. (You can get much of it free on Google Books or even get the physical book for pretty cheap).

In general, the axioms that logicians use to construct their logical systems are chosen by fiat (This fact is sometimes a little shocking to some). There is no special or metaphysical significance to the particular axioms that a logical system has. Usually they are chosen because they have certain qualities that the logician is interested in (e.g. one axiom may make it possible to add conjunction to a line, or another may make it possible to take away a disjunction from a line, etcetera). There are all kinds of different axiomatic systems using differing sets of axioms. Usually the logician will want the system to be complete in some sense (there are different ways a logical system can be complete), consistent, or decidable, or be able to be interpreted in certain ways.

The ultimate goal of all of these systems is to give some account of logical truth and logical consequence. All of logic can be thought of as constructing different models of how logical truth can be expressed, and what expressions can be considered to "follow from" some other expressions.

Your very deep question about how we know the rules we use are correct is a question of epistemology. The goal of logicians is always to follow reason. They use their capacity to reason to analyse whether or not the conclusions "logically follow from" the premises. What the nature of reason is, is still an open question. You can think of a logical truth as being "self-evident" upon reflection. No matter how complex a theorem or logical truth is, it should always be possible to construct it in terms of building blocks, each of which is supremely obvious or "self-evident."

Syntax just refers to the symbols, expressions and rules without regard to any interpretation of them. That means when you are simply moving symbols around according to rules you are using syntax. These rules work just like moving boxes around a room according to rules or moving chess pieces around a board according to rules.

But whether or not you are using chess pieces or boxes is a matter of semantics. Semantics are the interpretations of your syntax. That is when you fill in the values of all the variables like "P"s and "Q"s with meanings. Without semantics you are moving around meaningless symbols. Semantics is when you assign a particular meaning to the syntax. Usually there is a particular intended interpretation of the syntax, but very often the systems will make other interpretations possible too.

I think others ITT have addressed the issue of non-classical logics, so I will leave that issue to them.

Hmmm well if you want something more 'rigorous' than Albert I would assume you are decently comfortable with high level math so I would probably recommend How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? by Auyang. It is (obviously) mostly about issues specific to QFT but it has a lot of great stuff about QM as well. Be warned, it is not for the unmotivated reader.

Another excellent book that deals not just with QM issues, but with all of physics is An Introduction to The Philosophy of Physics by Lange. It has a section specifically devoted to philosophical issues of QM, but the real gold of the book are the discussions of locality, fields, and energy, which will obviously motivate much of the QM stuff.

One other recommendation would be Physics and Chance by Sklar. Although this is a book on the philosophical foundations of Statistical Mechanics, much of the discussion also applies to QM.

This is an episode of New Books in Philosophy, a series of one-hour interviews with authors of new philosophical books.

Summary

Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible?  That is the classical problem of free will.  Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of free will, as well as various attempts to render free will consistent with a physically deterministic world.  Among these latter, there’s a tendency to redefine free will in a way that dissolves the apparent tension between freedom and determinism.

In his new book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), Christian List defends a robust conception of free will according to which it requires intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control.  He argues that humans indeed have free will, and this free will is consistent with a naturalistic and scientific world view.

Hi, I'm about to start a PhD in computational plasma physics in September, concentrating on simulating turbulent transport in the divertor region and the scrape-off layer of tokamaks.

I won a bit of money from my undergrad institution, and I thought it would be fitting to use it to buy some reference textbooks for my PhD. However, although it's easy to find books, it's not so easy to find good reviews of them. I haven't done much plasma physics before but I will be having a lot of lectures on it in September, so I think more advanced books would be more useful, as I will be recommended plenty of resources for the more basic stuff.

Some of the books I've been looking at are:

• Ideal MHD - Freidberg
  
• Advanced Magnetohydrodynamics: With Applications to Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasmas - Goedbloed
  
• Computational Plasma Physics: With Applications To Fusion And Astrophysics - Tajima
  
• Plasma Physics via Computer Simulation - Birdsall & Langdon
  
• Plasma Confinement - Hazeltine & Meiss
  
• Waves in Plasmas - Stix
  
• Computational Methods in Plasma Physics - Jardin
  
• Visual And Computational Plasma Physics - Hsu
  
  but I'm open to any suggestions. I'm particularly interested in books about computational methods, and maybe also about scientific programming in C++.
  
  Thanks!

There are a number of useful guides available but they're all written by aficionados, or other successful players, though - not the designers.

This is the best guide for a high Int/Cha talkie game, I think.

This is well recommended for a more aggressive style of game, but a lot of people mistakenly misapply it to trade - it's really just for combat.

This is great for a sneakier game.

This is a badly written hack job that too many players put a lot of stock in; supposedly it was written by the designers, but it was actually written (and re-written) by a lot of different guys and is very contradictory - i'd avoid

Finally, this won't help you play, but it really explains the deeper mechanics.

And this goes into detail on the meta-game.

Hope that helps!

Though not exactly in the realm of drama, I learned of these lovely whitptail lizards through a poem (and that poem through a book) called "Cascade Experiment" by Alice Fulton. You can find the poem here: about halfway down the page. I really recommend it; it's short and sweet and it's discusses some of the issues at hand here in the great way only poems can. I just had to share it because it's my favorite poem, even if not super relevant to the drama. I'll just share the bit of the section about the lizards, but please check out the entire thing in that link above if you like it!

>Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time

>making themselves felt, as when thirteen species

>of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females

>stay undiscovered due to bias

>against such things existing,

>we have to meet the universe halfway.

>Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what

>looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.

Well this is a bit exhaustive, I would suggest reaching out to more than one person, perhaps making a thread in this sub or really many other subs as the abrahamic framework and the monotheistic framework is a point of belief in many mediums.

>Why does being a creator mean that?

well first we would have to define what the creator even means, how familiar are you with Kalam and Plato's ideas of God and greek logic overall?

>morality is about improving the lives and existences of humans

well we would all hope that as well, but one should be wary of utilitarianism and its shortcomings.

You should really seek out questions like the origin of reason, and philosophical commentary on the matter.

If you want to go deeper here are some books that may be worthwhile to read/ take a look at. like this one or this one

• Wolf Hall (Booker Prize winning historical novel about Tudor England; quite simply superb)
  
• The Windup Girl (one of the most popular and well received science fiction books of the past few years)
  
• Quantum (a very readable history of the birth of quantum mechanics)
  
  That's three recommendations that cover a very diverse set of interests.
  
  Without knowing what you actually like, it's quite difficult to make any worthwhile recommendations.

Hmmm. There is an entire academic field dedicated to this question, and most serious stuff will be found in journal articles rather than books. The Singapore Math curriculum is essentially designed for homeschoolers, and they offer some good guides on how to best use their particular product. If you're interested in a more inquiry-based approach, you might check out

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/

And

http://www.amazon.com/Out-Labyrinth-Setting-Mathematics-Free/dp/0195147448/sr=8-1/qid=1167859040/ref=sr_1_1/002-8958891-7740062?ie=UTF8&s=books

As for the journal, the biggest one is the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, but there are a ton of them. I don't know prices, but it might be worth looking into a membership to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics or the Mathematical Association of America.

Good luck, it's a rabbit hole!

This is a cool question and I'm glad you asked it again. Here are some that come to mind for me:

• Four Laws that Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins is a really enjoyable and informative discussion of thermodynamics. I think it has a similar feel to Feynman's QED. This is the same book as A Very Short Introduction to The Laws of Thermodynamics.
  
  
• Solids and Surfaces by Roald Hoffmann introduces some solid state physics ideas from an molecular orbital/chemistry perspective. This book is basically a transcription of some papers he wrote (which I can share if you want), so don't pay lots of money for it.
  
  
• Chemical Bonds: A Dialog by Jeremy Burdett is my favorite physical chemistry book. If you are interested in chemical physics and the bonding and structure of molecules, this is a must read introduction to the models chemists use to describe these things.

The best introductory logic text you will ever find: Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning, 2nd Edition Donald Kalish, Richard Montague.
This book is especially good if you have done any programming. The structure of main and sub-proofs corresponds to main program and subroutine calls. You can pick up a used copy for around $23 here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/author/kalish-montague-mar/ and you can see the table of contents here: https://www.powells.com/book/logic-techniques-of-formal-reasoning-9780195155044 (but, obviously, don't buy it for $133!)

For meta-theory, take a look at: Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic by Geoffrey Hunter, https://www.amazon.com/Metalogic-Introduction-Metatheory-Standard-First/dp/0520023560. This book explains things in a clear way using ordinary English, before setting out the proofs.
And, if you are interested in model theory, take a look at Model Theory by C.C. Chang and H. Jerome Keisler, https://www.amazon.com/Model-Theory-Third-Dover-Mathematics/dp/0486488217 and you should get a good idea of what additional mathematics you might want to pursue.

> Yes, that's the efficient causation. But final causatively, action begins with ideas. Recall the 4 kinds of causation identified by Aristotle. One of the errors determinists make is not recognizing final causation

Hmm... hadn't heard of that before. Interesting but I think I'd rather read Judea Pearl's book Causality than Aristotle's thoughts on Causality.

> I believe man is born as tabula rasa

I used to believe that, there's a lot of science that contradicts it, or at least limits how blank the slate is. But you don't need science to refute the general idea. If we're all born with no preconceived notions than how did thought itself emerge? Clearly our tools (culture) have written on our slate, often ways we aren't conscious of.

>Regardless, the valuing of society is not part of man's nature; rather, it's discovered and chosen.

Choice is another philosophically loaded concept. If you believe choice can occur on a subconscious level, then I don't disagree with you. But I believe people don't make significant choices unless their emotional state is worse than they think it should be.

>And while human are typically irrational and emotional thinkers in this point of time, I don't think that makes it their nature

It's their history. And my perspective is that history is a pretty good predictor of the future. Young people are often lead to believe that some great change is just around the corner, but that's rarely true.

someday u may eat those words. :) And you'll enjoy every bite.

​

Until then...you may want to learn about the ARIEL SCHOOL INCIDENT. particularly the take home message as revealed by the children....that part about being too TECHNOLOGED (all driven by "science" and love of "scitech"!).

But even then...that doesn't fully explain my critique of science..."early science" is not the same as "modern science"

I like this book cover...though I haven't read the book.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Science-Knowledge-Twilight-Scientific/dp/0465065929

There is now an entire field about this which is not taught, generally, unless you elect it. About seventeen years ago I took a sabbatical during which I really poured my heart into this. One of the best things I read is, unfortunately (because the field has not progressed much) still one of the best things on the subject (and it is in my toilet, so I just re-read it a few days ago). It is chapter in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-All-Directions-Lectures-April-November/dp/0060728892

For a good popular overview that has a strong historical focus, this is great: Quantum

Personally, and I think most philosophers of quantum physics, think Krauss is a bit of a hack when it comes to exploring the conceptual and foundational elements of quantum physics. See this: Krauss review

Albert actually has a really good introduction book to quantum mechanics that focuses on the more conceptual side of things, aimed at those with little background in physics: Quantum Mechanics and Experience

A great book to check out is Worldviews by DeWitt. It's a strong introduction to the history and philosoohy of science that I've had recommended to me. Cohen's The Birth of a New Physics is one of the books I used in my Phil of Sci course and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Maudlin's Philosophy of Physics is highly reviewed.

From a historical perspective The Mind has No Sex is a facinsting exploration on the role of sex and gender in physiology. I believe philosophy of biology is picking up recently, and amazon search for that should give a good series of anthologies to look through.

A good place to start is always the Very Short Introduction series, which covers a lot of the specific topics in brief. Alternatively, the Oxford Handbook series Phil of Physics or Phil of Biology offer a huge range of topics and essays, but they're a little pricey.

Edit: Achinstein's works are what I usually reference. He has an anthology out covering a large range of historical and contemporary philosophy of language.

An eternal inflationary model can explain initial low entropy, and indeed this is one of the reasons motivating it. Perhaps you were confusing it with not-eternal inflation? Eternal inflation is the only inflationary model that I know of that calls for a multiverse. This theory does as you put it call for a very large spacetime that extends far beyond the Hubble volume, with small parts fluctuating into low entropy states, but what this theory does not do is provide support for the idea that Boltzmann brains dominate evolutionary-dynamical brains. It's not just that it's unlikely that Boltzmann brains could appear in the inflationary medium; it's actually impossible in the theory. The inflationary medium in this theory has next to no structure whatsoever, and essentially all it ever does is expand exponentially and create Big Bangs, each one with relatively low entropy. And these for the most part all either blow up or quickly collapse into black holes, with each option leaving very little room for the kind of stable, homogenous equilibriums that we would need for Boltzmann brains to appear.

>Further, it doesn't provide a "structural account" of how low entropy states emerge ...


Right, that's about what I meant. Any structural model of the universe obviously needs to represents entropy, because that's what we observe, but there's no reason to think that this structural model itself shouldn't be simple in some essential sense. If Einstein 2.0 tomorrow unifies GR and QM and ties together all the loose ends in physics with a theory that posits we live in some large finite simple group, there's no need to be surprised that this theory is so well ordered. Whatever is the ultimate ground structure of the universe just exists. No matter how you go about it, there must come a point where a single structure is the last stop in your causal account of the universe. Even if it's turtles all the way down, it's not turtles all the way down, because this tower of turtles is it's own structure, and then that becomes the ground structure.

On that last point, I agree there's fascinating work connecting entropy with the arrow of time, and this is an active area of research in physics. If we think of time as an emergent phenomenon that is defined by the "direction" of entropic flow, then the appearance of low entropy states becomes exactly as odd as the dissipation of low entropy into high entropy states, namely not odd at all, because these processes are exactly as likely as each other.

>Some multiverse theories have been proposed to explain other kinds of fine tuning, like the fine tuning of fundamental constants like the cosmological constant. An inflationary multiverse theory can actually do this job, but these theories don't succeed in avoiding the boltzmann brain problem, and they don't succeed in avoiding fine tuning altogether (as Robin Collins points out, the "multiverse mechanism" in these theories would need to explain things like quantum mechanical life-permitting laws, such as the pauli exclusion principle, which didn't have to be laws in any universe)

So even if we explain fine tuning and miraculously find a set of simple equations and parameters such that everything falls into place, why are those the equations and parameters that construct physical reality, and not any other? Good point. I think this is an excellent motivation for the mathematical universe hypothesis.

~~ ~~

I actually in some ways agree that Boltzmann brains pose a problem that needs to be reckoned with. I just don't believe this problem appears for the reasons you think it does. There is no physical theory that I know of that obviously makes the existence of Boltzmann brains more likely than brains produced from the familiar process of evolution in flat, weak scale spacetime. I think the BB problem comes back around at the end, once we've deduced that even our existing multiverse theories aren't inflated enough. The way I see it, multiverse arguments are suggestive of hugely explosive physical ontologies, and the trend among cosmological string theorists is that the universe as conceived by theoretical physics is growing without bound, and will probably continue to do so far into the future. I've only got anecdotal evidence to back this up, but I've heard similar sentiments from Nima Arkani-Hamed, Max Tegmark, and Leonard Susskind, all of whom are leading physicists in the field of quantum cosmology. Tegmark's mathematical universe is obviously the most inflationary, but surprisingly many physicists are sympathetic to it, as are several analytic metaphysicists that I know of (Ladyman, Ross, Saunders, French (u/RealityApologist, can I add you to this list?)). Boltzmann brains comes back around as a major problem in these inflated ontologies, but the difficulty here has mostly to do with how one defines a measure on such a large class, or category. The difficulties to do with the mathematical universe hypothesis have parallels with absolute generality, and at this level philosophy of physics merges with philosophy of math.

>Incidentally...

Parfit may be a brilliant man, but I haven't seen any evidence that he knows enough about QM to weigh in on the debate. With respect, most philosophers are not so qualified. The ones that are so qualified and who accept the Everett interpretation as the most naturalistic interpretation of QM, are for the most part sympathetic to the idea. For a rock solid argument in defense of this view, see the second chapter of David Wallace's The Emergent Multiverse.

>Further, even if we accepted this view, we would likely not give up our criteria for personal identity in doing so, e.g. we would include spatiotemporal or functional continuity,

Why? It just seems stubborn at this point to appeal to intuition, as if intuition has proven to be a reliable guide to how the universe works.

edit

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger may be a good one for your purposes. There is a talk by him on the basic ideas here.

Though he would probably not describe it this way, I think his view has a lot of similarity with buddhist psychology. One way of thinking about meditation is as a technique for learning to be more aware of the medium of your experience, making it less 'transparent' (in Metzinger's sense) and therefore reducing the illusion of selfhood. But just loosing the illusion isn't enough to be happy. You have to develop compassion as well.

You have good instincts to question your own knowledge. All too often, especially among newly converted atheist communities, you find an arrogance of self-understanding rivaled only by theist counterparts. In many cases, the only thing that changes in the conversion is the content of the beliefs, and not the arrogance and radicalism that goes with some strains of theism.

You might find this book on the history and philosophy of science interesting. It's an easy read. This book takes a more philosophical approach and some of the readings will be more difficult, but you still should be able to learn a great deal.

You could also follow along with a syllabus like this and you'll learn a lot.

>(black holes, statistical data of really any kind, macro scale evolution)

Forget the big stuff. Here's something to ponder: what direct evidence do you have that we live in a heliocentric, and not a geocentric universe? We take it for granted that this is the case today, but if you look at the actual things you experience (e.g. the sun's transversal of the sky), the more intuitive explanation is that we're at the center. We know now that this is the case, but it took a lot of work to figure that out (which you can read about in the first book I mentioned).

Whether gravity would exist in a universe with no mass is probably best answered by physicists (or, at least, people who know actual physics). But I don't think the answer to this question automatically answers the question you posed in your topic title. If could be the case that gravity depends on mass for its existence, but that doesn't answer whether it is "a thing" (in some sense) or "just a description of certain regularities."

Anyway, this isn't my area of expertise, but the question you're asking seems similar to questions posed about the metaphysical status of laws of nature, fields, and energy. I think this book would be helpful:

http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Philosophy-Physics-Locality/dp/0631225013

You're right, I'm not a physicist, but I'm well educated in physics. On the other hand, it seems that you didn't read my post, and that you are not well acquainted with either the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, nor with the rich literature in philosophy of science with respect to the MWI and it's implications. I suggest you take a look at David Albert's Quantum Mechanics and Experience, David Wallace's The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory according to the Everett Interpretation and the anthology Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, & Reality.

I'm a big fan of reading historical physics papers. I have this extremely well-annotated version of Newton's Principia, this collection of Schrödinger's original QM papers, and this fairly easy to find collection of relativity papers (mostly Einstein). Oh yeah, and these Dirac lectures.

Besides that, I just use my university subscription to find old papers, which is usually successful if they were published in English or sufficiently famous. I would say that I have a lot of "classic" papers saved just through finding them on Google Scholar or whatever. I could try to go through and list them, but I'd say it's mostly "usual suspects" plus important papers from my own interests (condensed matter/stat mech/QFT).

Yeah, that was a very sloppy and rather conjectured paraphrase, I apologize. I was aiming for brevity and totally lost the point. Should have checked what subreddit I was in as well...

In The Ego Tunnel, The Brain that Changes Itself and no-doubt other recent neuroscience "dumbed-down" books there is a prevailing theme that our brain creates the world around us by unifying our disparate senses into one cohesive world of meaning. It happens to be splayed into 3-orthogonal angles of space which moves forward in time. Your nerve endings gave your brain enough feedback as a baby who feels stuff to build your "dreambody" for you which you can of course see and feel. Anorexics, amputees with phantom-limbs, etc. get fucked by something going wrong in that whole process. This system is also activated empathetically, like watching a soccer player getting kicked in the groin. That's basically how we communicate -- we tweak our universe slightly to become other people. Freud figured that out. Basic human empathy: some people lack it; some people are very specific about to whom they let it work on. This is the same body that walks around in your dreams... your world-building process without the benefit of sensory backup. It's the same one that loses orientation and gives you an out-of-body-experience, or that disappears when you take psychotropic drugs and "become the universe" or whatever.

Basically, all I'm trying to do is bring a completely different subject into the discussion. My conjecture is that since i. everything I see and hear and touch is just in my head (i.e. trees that fall in forests may create air-vibrations but those fail to classify as "sounds" because sound is a sense) and ii. either we're alone in the universe or not, which reasons because it means there's meaning in the universe beyond our present-day dwellings on the matter, then if there is a better viewpoint, a perfectly objective, whole viewpoint of the macroscopic and quantum world, or at the very least a TOE with perfect predictability so that science didn't have to go about it all the hard way like it does now then would the universe look like 3 dimensions and time? Am I a tan blob of meat or an extrapolation on a string who only thinks he's a tan blob of meat?

Because we're taking about holographic projections meaning that 4D space is a projection from a different, lesser-dimensioned space with all the same information stored in both, I figure the mathmatical projection would need to take place in the process which builds our 4D world, the human brain and nervous system.

edit: 3D!=4D... 'tan'!='lily-white pale' will remain unfixed.

You and the other A/AS-level kids shouldn't worry about complex numbers. At university, you'll come to appreciate the usefulness and beauty of them. For example, see this post I made on /r/math earlier today. People have written entire books eulogising about them. For example, Paul Nahin has written two such books.

>No they aren't causes, they are limiting factors of a cause.

Please define what a "limiting factor of a cause" is.

Hint: It's a cause. (If you search the term limiting factors, by the way, most sentences will say "limiting factors cause...")

Please see: here, or here. Your understanding is simply not there at all. There is no such thing as a "grand cause" for an outcome, and even the distinction between proximate and distal causes is arbitrary. I'd rather not get into this too much (it's a geek-out point for me) but suffice to say that arguing with a practicing statistical scientist about causal modeling over something so basic as what we're calling a cause will not get you very far. We call a "cause", plainly, anything which could hypothetically be intervened upon (even if not practicably able to do so) in order to induce a different outcome, at least by the most common definition.

>> would you seriously suggest that the prevalence of sidewalks/general walkability in a community is having an effect on self-control of the people within that neighborhood?

> What?

The point of this sentence: These are factors that are associated with reduced obesity in communities. Are you suggesting, then, that the only reason there's an observed association is because it has a direct impact on self-control? That having nice sidewalks makes these people "better people" that are better able to control their diets?

> lack of ability to govern calories in vs calories out.

So which is it, the calories in/out themselves (a view which actually isn't totally true, by the way, but that's another story and not particularly relevant) or self-control as a personal factor which then impacts calories in/out? You're sneaking both into one phrase. Many things can impact the calories in/out without necessarily changing self-control.

Not exactly engineering, but here's a pretty good general science book:


Four Laws that Drive the Universe - Peter Atkins

Edit: Link.

This is a good place to start.
http://www.khanacademy.org/

It really just takes time and practice. You have got to get your reps in. As in do a TON of problems in whatever area of mathematics you wish to get good at. Also, checking out this book might not be a bad idea. Lastly, teaching someone else always helps me tremendously.

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
  
• Masquerade - Kit Williams
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
  
• Objectivity - Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison

I did a Maths degree, so I'll admit that's where my main knowledge is. If you're interested in more real-life Mathematics i.e. the Enigma Code and Statistics in the real world, I highly recommend The Theory That Would Not Die (This is the UK Amazon link, sorry if you're from elsewhere). This tells the story of Bayesian statistics without being too overly Mathematical and complex, and how it's applicable in the real world. If you're interested in the actual Mathematics of it, then this book probably isn't for you though.

Math is cumulative, moreso than anything else I've ever studied. When you start looking at equations, behaviors, and relationships that simply blow your mind, it's not such a bad thing, especially while you're still in high school. Hell, if it didn't get infinitely complex, it wouldn't be as awesome as it is.

But realize that there is still a lot that you need to experience and be exposed to. I took a math placement test 9 months ago for my college, and when I got to the 'advanced' level stuff, I felt like I may as well have been looking at some alien language. Now, 9 months and 3 courses later, I am a math tutor at school and I understand everything on the advanced placement test. Of course, I'm still pretty ignorant about an immense pile of things, so I'd hardly pride myself in where I am, because there is so much further to go. Just don't forget that there's four years of study between where you are and graduate-level math. Of course you're intimidated.

But as far as what you should look at? I really liked this book. To be honest, I'm also really interested in how math developed through history. It seems really weird to me that Euler came after Newton, for example, considering how much of what we learn prior to understanding calculus comes from Euler.

But otherwise, also don't neglect socializing, extra-curricular activities, and fine bitches.

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1412983653&sr=8-3&keywords=dummett+mathematics

This book has a good presentation of the most popular philosophical conceptions of mathematics, but might not be exactly what you had in mind. It's fairly technical and require a little bit of logic and set theory. If you'd like something a bit lighter I can try to think of something.

You can't, but so far, there's no evidence of it. People will say "but quantum mechanics!" But consider that Schrödinger's equation is completely deterministic. Now read What About Quantum Theory? Bayes and the Born Interpretation. If you want a couple of good book-length treatments, I recommend The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory according to the Everett Interpretation and Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Exactly! Where would they take off and land from? How would air traffic control be managed? What happens when there is a malfunction? Who would maintain these vehicles to achieve the very high reliability needed for safe operation.

These company's may be just grabbing at free media advertising, but this stuff is not happening in the foreseeable future. It also corresponds with New Atheist and other groups emphasis on science, even as some promanant scientists speak out about how we are reaching the limits of what science can learn. One example is this book, which talks about how scientific claims are becoming increasingly spurious.

I recommend:

http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/libraries/rare/modernity/newton3.html

Or more usefully:

http://www.amazon.com/Principia-Mathematical-Principles-Natural-Philosophy/dp/0520088174

or any basic physics textbook.

If you're interested in the topic, you should check Dr. Thomas Metzinger work too, here is a TED talk explaining his experiments and what let him to develop his theory of the mind.

He wrote a book call The Ego Tunnel that I totally recommend.

If you're interested in Consciousness read Thomas Metzinger's new book The Ego Tunnel. You can thank me later.

Some of the (non-technical) books I've recently read:

• Infinite Atonement
  
• Infinite in All Directions
  
• Abundance
  
• Contact
  
• A Christmas Carol (re-reading this one with my son)
  
  Though, a lot of these quotes are from journals of mine. But many of the above books are great spring boards to other readings (especially the "Infinite in All Directions" book).

[Infinite in all Directions was a great read. It was 30 years ago since I last read it so no doubt the science is dated.] (https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-All-Directions-Lectures-April-November/dp/0060728892)

As others have mentioned, Chalmers is the most prominent contemporary dualist, as well as one of the most prominent and highly respected philosophers of mind active today. Here's what he had to say in Susan Blackmore's excellent book Conversations On Consciousness.


Sue What do you think happens to consciousness after death?


Dave I don’t know for sure. But I’m inclined to think that my consciousness ceases to exist. Whether or not consciousness is reducible to the brain, my consciousness seems to depend on my brain. Damage my brain, and you damage my consciousness. After death, my brain will disintegrate, so my consciousness will disintegrate too. If a panpsychist view is true, it could be that corresponding to my disintegrated brain will be some disintegrated fragments of consciousness. But I don’t think these fragments would count as my consciousness in any recognizable sense. I’ll probably cease to exist. Then again, no one understands consciousness, so I could be completely wrong. That
would be nice!

Philosophies of Mathematics offers a good historical look at the philosophy of math over the course of the 20th century.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic

A good place to start would be to get hold of a copy of Conversations on Consciousness - http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Consciousness-Minds-Think-about/dp/0195179595/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321858604&sr=1-8

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger is supposed to be good.

I think it would be good one.

True and it just happened again. see this book, published in 2015:

​

The end of science...

I took a course on Philosophy of Mathematics with the authors of this book. It contains an entire section on intuitionism, which is well-written and would serve as a nice place to start.

How about Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise or Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's The Theory that Would not die? Both good books about statistics/data science.

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538957790&sr=8-1&keywords=the+signal+and+the+noise

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050QB3EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

yeah either that or this one

I'd half agree, half disagree, but let's not get into arguments about what studies can and can't show :-). (which reminds me that I still have to get through Causality for the next time this issue pops up).

I don't know any books off-hand which cover both.

RE: metatheory - I hear Hunter's Metalogic is good, but it's fairly old.

RE: modal logic - I suggest Hughes & Cresswell or Garson. I don't like Mendelsohn.

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440

This is for a general study guide for logic. Very solid.

http://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/

and I think you can give one of these two a try if you find "Computability and Logic" difficult.

https://www.amazon.com/Metalogic-Introduction-Metatheory-Standard-First/dp/0520023560

or

https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Introduction-Mathematical-Logic/dp/1942341075

Science was originally another subset of philosophy called "Natural Philosophy" at the time. It has since grown in to an independent discipline of course, but I never let those people forget where they came from!