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posted by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the We-could-keep-this-up-forever dept.

Aeon has an interesting article on bullshit:

We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation. Indeed, you have likely come across more bullshit so far this week than a normal person living 1,000 years ago would in their entire lifetime. If we were to add up every word in every scholarly piece of work published prior to the Enlightenment, this number would still pale in comparison with the number of words used to promulgate bullshit on the internet in the 21st century alone.

If you find your head nodding, start shaking it. I’m bullshitting you.

Ha! I knew it!

How could I possibly know how much bullshit you have come across this week? What if you’re reading this on a Sunday? Who is a ‘normal’ person living 1,000 years ago? And how could I know how much bullshit they had to deal with?

It was very easy to construct this bullshit. Once I set out to impress rather than inform, a burden was lifted from my shoulders and placed onto yours. My opening statements could very well be true, but we have no way of knowing. Their truth or falsity were irrelevant to me, the bullshitter.

[...] In his book, On Bullshit (2005), Frankfurt noted that ‘most people are rather confident of their ability to recognise bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it’. However, more than 98 per cent of our participants rated at least one item in our bullshit receptivity scales to be at least somewhat profound. We are not nearly as good at detecting bullshit as we think.

So, how might you – the reader – vaccinate yourself against it? For a non-spiritualist, it might be relatively easy to recognise when Chopra or Oz are concerned less with the truth than selling books or entertaining viewers. But think back to my opening paragraph. Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.


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  • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday July 20 2018, @04:31AM (28 children)

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Friday July 20 2018, @04:31AM (#709801)

    From psychologytoday,

    If we have free will, we can consciously make decisions that are not determined by the physics and biology of our brains. It's a philosophical and religious concept that has found no support in science

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  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday July 20 2018, @06:21AM (26 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 20 2018, @06:21AM (#709821) Journal

    Lovely, one of those things that needs review (i.e. Descartes' doubt):

    The results show empirically that human agency is incompatible with causal determinism, a question formerly accessible only by metaphysics [...] The answer is this: if humans have free will, then some physical events have no cause. [...] Quantum mechanics—and Bell tests in particular—blur the distinction between cause and effect [...]

    From "How the nature of cause and effect will determine the future of quantum technology" [technologyreview.com]

    So maybe we do have free will because Quantum Mechanics says so. Forget Psycology Today, the answer lies in Physics.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Friday July 20 2018, @03:44PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday July 20 2018, @03:44PM (#709971)

      Rolling dice I would not consider to be free will, but rather random will.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday July 20 2018, @04:00PM (23 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 20 2018, @04:00PM (#709980)

      Quantum mechanics introduces random noise into the operation of the brain, but randomness isn't what most people would consider free will - the trajectory of a single molecule within a steaming cup of coffee is similarly randomized by quantum effects - but we generally don't consider the molecule to have free will.

      For quantum mechanics to enable free will, there would have to be a feedback system by which the mind influences the nature of the random noise - and we have no evidence of such a mechanism. Which doesn't necessarily means it doesn't exist, but neither is it extremely hopeful.

      Alternately, the randomness might not actually be random at all - if there's a "soul" that shapes the noise, then the soul may exist outside the domain of our currently understood laws of physics and our bodies and minds are operated as a sort of remote telepresence device. Or, perhaps that molecule of coffee really *does* have a tiny fleck of free will, and what we perceive as randomness is actually the result of choices made by infinitesimal awarenesses - and just as "you" are the gestalt organism created by tens of billions of specialized single-celled organisms, your awareness might be a gestalt of the awareness of untold trillions of subatomic particles.

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday July 20 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)

        by acid andy (1683) on Friday July 20 2018, @07:16PM (#710076) Homepage Journal

        Alternately, the randomness might not actually be random at all - if there's a "soul" that shapes the noise, then the soul may exist outside the domain of our currently understood laws of physics and our bodies and minds are operated as a sort of remote telepresence device.

        Yes but presumably that would interfere with the probability distribution and be detectable.

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:01AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:01AM (#710233)

          In theory, yes. In practice - how would you detect a change in the probability distribution within a living brain? You wouldn't necessarily expect to see it anywhere else.

          Especially since you would be talking about the probability distribution for single particles, or at least comparatively small populations (the molecules within a synapse?). It's easy to see shifts in probabilities over large populations - not so much for individual particles.

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday July 20 2018, @07:28PM (2 children)

        by acid andy (1683) on Friday July 20 2018, @07:28PM (#710085) Homepage Journal

        Just to expand on my other reply a bit, if there's this low level injection of a tiny bit of free will into the brain's decision making mechanisms, and it's put there by some kind of metaphysical mind or "soul", how does that soul decide what information to input? For the free will to be meaningful rather than random, wouldn't that soul have to have some information processing decision making equipment of its own? If so, that's unnecessary redundancy (see Cartesian Dualism and also the Homunculus) because I can't see what it could be other than a duplication of the sort of neurological hardware the brain already has. This makes me suspicious about what precisely we gain from this kind of a free will. It seems superfluous and unnecessary, to me.

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:07AM (1 child)

          by Immerman (3985) on Saturday July 21 2018, @03:07AM (#710235)

          Not necessarily - it could be a symbiotic relationship: you use the body to do your moving and interacting with the environment, you use the brain to do your thinking, and the soul provides the... "spark of awareness"?

          How does a data-miner decide what parts of the data to delve into? The fully deterministic data-processing equipment does almost all the "thinking" sifting data as directed - the user just takes the output of that and applies intuition, pattern recognition, etc. to decide where to direct the much faster computer.

          • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday July 22 2018, @08:34PM

            by acid andy (1683) on Sunday July 22 2018, @08:34PM (#710876) Homepage Journal

            Well we already have philosophical theories of qualia, the subjective phenomena accompanying the brain's experiences such as the first person experience of a color or an emotion. If physical brain states can give rise to these associated qualia then I suppose it's not too far a stretch to suppose that there could be a mechanism for some kind of subjective intuition or will influencing brain states slightly in the other direction. Perhaps it's a reaction to the character of the qualia. Personally, I'm not convinced, but it's certainly possible and it's fun to speculate sometimes.

            --
            If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Friday July 20 2018, @09:14PM (3 children)

        by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 20 2018, @09:14PM (#710117) Journal

        Thank you for the reply.

        You are looking at QM from the physical side, while I’m considering the philosophical side. In Newtonian physics, everything is determined by the laws of physics, so there can’t be free will given that we are made of particles subject so such laws.

        Now, QM tells us that in essence those particles are subject to randomness and therefore we can (at best) give a probabilistic outcome of their interactions; thus they are not predetermined, thus there is room for free will.

        Whether or not free will actually exists, I do not know. I prefer to believe that I am responsible for my decisions and have actually made them, not simply acted out a predetermined script. The evidence for free will is slim in QM but there is none in the classical view.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:03AM (2 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:03AM (#710246)

          Fair enough, and yes - you risk running afoul of the "God of the Gaps", but yes, there is room for free will. Assuming QM is non-deterministic.

          That may be an assumption too far though - the Copenhagen interpretation is by far the most popular interpretation of the laws of QM, but far from the only one. Pilot Wave theory by contrast is completely deterministic and has been seeing a resurgence of popularity, and has been developed much further than its original creator did before abandoning it. An interesting presentation showing macroscopic analogues where bouncing oil droplets perform self-interference to recreate the double-slit experiment and many other QM oddities: https://youtu.be/WIyTZDHuarQ [youtu.be]

          • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:25AM (1 child)

            by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:25AM (#710253) Journal

            Sorry but this morning I was in a hurry, trying to finish a project and help my daughter with a FOOBARed laptop so I totally forgot to finish the message.

            I wrote Smolin in the subject, meaning to point you to "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe" by Lee Smolin, which is not entirely about free will, but it does touch on it and throws doubts on everything from GR to QM, with good arguments and sometimes not so good, but always interesting.

            I don't think (believe) the Copenhagen interpretation is valid, at any rate, we could never test it, so might as well believe in the Fairy in the Sky for which there is, at least, a lot of historical support. :-)

            Lacking evidence either way, I choose to believe that I make my decisions exercising my free will. Of course, I (we) could be on some sort of Matrix-like universe (like Max Tegmark claims) and not be wiser about it.

            Cheers

            • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:58PM

              by Immerman (3985) on Saturday July 21 2018, @02:58PM (#710433)

              I'll look into him - looks like he has several interesting-sounding talks on YouTube.

              As for never being able to test the Copenhagen interpretation - that's rather presumptuous, is it not? I mean, in a lot of ways the gist of it is "we have no idea how to test it, or even if it's theoretically possible to do so, so lets just not worry about what the equations mean, and just focus on their implications"

              If an alternate theory, such as Pilot waves, decoherence, etc. are correct, then there may eventually be corner cases discovered where their predictions would differ from Copenhagen. Heck, we might even come up with some way to detect the pilot waves directly, independent of the particle.

              Not that I'm holding my breath - but any time I hear "we could never..." in any scientific context, my first reflex is to say - look back at how many "impossible" things we've already accomplished... and maybe add a few qualifiers to that statement. Like maybe "If our current understanding of physics is godlike in its perfection, we could never..."

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 22 2018, @01:53AM (13 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 22 2018, @01:53AM (#710632) Journal

        For quantum mechanics to enable free will, there would have to be a feedback system by which the mind influences the nature of the random noise - and we have no evidence of such a mechanism.

        Sure, we do - making choices. It's worth noting here one of the models of free will merely has nondeterminism and the opportunity to make choices.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:18AM (12 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:18AM (#710679)

          But where is your evidence that you actually made a choice - i.e. could have chosen differently, rather than the sensation of having made a choice being an illusion produced as a perspective-based side-effect of a fully deterministic process?

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 22 2018, @12:31PM (11 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 22 2018, @12:31PM (#710736) Journal

            But where is your evidence that you actually made a choice - i.e. could have chosen differently

            Opportunity to make a choice is quite observable. Remember you presupposed the randomness so nondeterminism was already present. And there's a mechanism by which the human brain can amplify quantum randomness. There are a number of chaotic cycles in the human brain which would amplify any quantum effect to observable differences in a short period of time (one effect of a chaotic dynamic is that small differences exponentially increase over time, subject to the bound of the overall system.

            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday July 22 2018, @02:32PM (10 children)

              by Immerman (3985) on Sunday July 22 2018, @02:32PM (#710760)

              No, only the apparent opportunity to make a choice is directly observable, an actual opportunity presupposes that a choice can in fact be made.

              If you consider the particular outcome of randomness that occurs to be part of the ambient environment, then is there still a choice being made?

              Let's take a simple chaotic system we can easily visualize as an example: A small stream winding it's way through rocky terrain, forking and rejoining with itself. That's our greatly over-simplified analogue for the world around us flowing through time.

              Now take a bag full of identical styrofoam beads and start dropping them into the stream one at a time at exactly the same place. Each one will take a different path down the stream, some going left at a fork in the stream, and some going right, but there is no choice being made - they're simply deterministic objects responding to the minute differences present in a chaotic system.

              Now drop in a water-strider instead - unlike the beads we presume the living bug is an active agent, and when it moves to direct itself down one path or another at a fork in the stream we attribute that action to choice.

              If we had total information about the stream, including the eventual outcome of every QM interaction between water molecules, we could exactly predict the path of each of those styrofoam beads, because there is no choice being made - our inability to predict the path is a symptom of incomplete information, not free will.

              But, if we also had total information about the internal state of the water strider, including the eventual outcomes of QM interactions, could we predict it's motions as well? If so, then is it really making a choice, or is it simply a deterministic mechanistic system as well, unpredictable only because of randomness in its inanimate components?

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 23 2018, @12:51AM (9 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @12:51AM (#710975) Journal

                No, only the apparent opportunity to make a choice is directly observable

                And that's all I need.

                an actual opportunity presupposes that a choice can in fact be made.

                No, it doesn't.

                Let's take a simple chaotic system we can easily visualize as an example: A small stream winding it's way through rocky terrain, forking and rejoining with itself. That's our greatly over-simplified analogue for the world around us flowing through time.

                Now take a bag full of identical styrofoam beads and start dropping them into the stream one at a time at exactly the same place. Each one will take a different path down the stream, some going left at a fork in the stream, and some going right, but there is no choice being made - they're simply deterministic objects responding to the minute differences present in a chaotic system.

                You're ignoring quantum randomness.

                If we had total information about the stream

                "If".

                But, if we also had total information about the internal state of the water strider, including the eventual outcomes of QM interactions

                Evidence so far is that you can't have that.

                • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday July 23 2018, @10:12PM (8 children)

                  by Immerman (3985) on Monday July 23 2018, @10:12PM (#711463)

                  Doesn't matter if we can actually have total information or not, all that changes is our ability to predict things ahead of time. So long as your actions are 100% dictated by mechanistic processes there can be no free will - all there is is deterministic processes influenced by random noise.

                  Besides which, there's no guarantee that there is any randomness in QM anyway. Pilot Wave theory is completely deterministic, though there may be no way to observe the pilot waves themselves, without which you get the same apparent results as under Copenhagen.

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:53AM (7 children)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:53AM (#711543) Journal

                    So long as your actions are 100% dictated by mechanistic processes there can be no free will - all there is is deterministic processes influenced by random noise.

                    What is "mechanistic"? You're begging the question again by assuming the existence of a nondeterministic process that somehow rules out free will.

                    Besides which, there's no guarantee that there is any randomness in QM anyway.

                    And yet we have obvious counterexamples that can't be predicted, much less predicted from the modest information contained in the QM system.

                    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:43PM (6 children)

                      by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:43PM (#711682)

                      No, I'm just saying that, if everything is deterministic (after factoring in the inputs of quantum randomness), then there is no room for free will, unless it exists as something that controls the randomness.

                      As for QM randomness - again, no. We see *apparent* randomness. The Copenhagen interpretation says that the randomness is real. Pilot wave theory says it only *appears* random because we can't observe the waves that are guiding the particles, and that if we could, then the particle's seemingly random behavior would be completely predictable. As a macroscopic analogue, we can recreate double-slit experiments, probability distributions of an electron in a faraday trap, etc. using oil droplets bouncing on a liquid surface: https://youtu.be/WIyTZDHuarQ [youtu.be]

                      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:09PM (5 children)

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:09PM (#711728) Journal

                        if everything is deterministic (after factoring in the inputs of quantum randomness)

                        Of course, if you ignore the nondeterminism, you will find no room for free will, which depends on said nondeterminism, in the little you have left. But there's no point to that exercise.

                        As for QM randomness - again, no. We see *apparent* randomness.

                        I disagree. Very simple experimental setups with considerable isolation from the rest of the universe show this behavior. You would need a considerable quantity of "hidden information" to account for it.

                        Pilot wave theory says it only *appears* random because we can't observe the waves that are guiding the particles, and that if we could, then the particle's seemingly random behavior would be completely predictable.

                        Now observe an observer who can observe said pilot waves.

                        As a macroscopic analogue, we can recreate double-slit experiments, probability distributions of an electron in a faraday trap, etc. using oil droplets bouncing on a liquid surface:

                        So?

                        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:25PM (4 children)

                          by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:25PM (#711749)

                          So, you believe deterministic behavior from non-deterministic inputs is sufficient for free will?

                          No, again - those experiments only show apparent randomness - without being able to see the mechanisms behind it (if there is such a mechanism) we can't draw any conclusions beyond that it *looks*random from out limited perspective. And yes, pilot waves would certainly contain a considerable amount of hidden information - most of the information of the quantum wave function in concrete, fully deterministic form. From what I've read it's not clear whether it would be inherently hidden information, or just information don't know how to see. Even if we never glimpse it though, it doesn't change the fact that it would mean that every QM interaction since the beginning of the universe has been completely deterministic, with no randomness whatsoever.

                          As for the macroscopic model - the fact that we can effectively model quantum behavior, including self-interference, tunneling, etc. with a fully deterministic physical system lends some credence to the theory, as well as providing a convenient visualization aid for understanding it. Other quirks hint at just how much hidden information might actually be present in the system - for example another video, that I can't find at the moment, demonstrates a slight phase shifting of the driving system to cause the droplet to land on the back slope of its pilot wave rather than the front - which causes it to reverse direction and retrace its chaotic path, implying that a considerable amount of its history is "recorded" within the pilot wave.

                          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 24 2018, @04:07PM (3 children)

                            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 24 2018, @04:07PM (#711763) Journal

                            So, you believe deterministic behavior from non-deterministic inputs is sufficient for free will?

                            What's deterministic about the behavior?

                            And yes, pilot waves would certainly contain a considerable amount of hidden information - most of the information of the quantum wave function in concrete, fully deterministic form.

                            What are the physical characteristics of something you can't observe?

                            As for the macroscopic model - the fact that we can effectively model quantum behavior, including self-interference, tunneling, etc. with a fully deterministic physical system lends some credence to the theory, as well as providing a convenient visualization aid for understanding it.

                            We observe the information contained in the macroscopic model, which is a lot more than is contained in the quantum model.

                            • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 24 2018, @07:22PM (2 children)

                              by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @07:22PM (#711842)

                              >What's deterministic about the behavior?
                              Given your current state and the random (now known) quantum noise as inputs everything you do. Falling back on quantum randomness for free will makes about as much sense as saying a purely deterministic AI drawing input from a sufficiently large array of dice-rolling machines would have free will.

                              >What are the physical characteristics of something you can't observe?
                              We don't know - that's kind of the point, is it not? Just because we can't observe something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What are the physical qualities of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? Assuming our understanding of physics is basically correct, the overwhelming majority of the universe is unobservable - possibly even in principle.

                              >We observe the information contained in the macroscopic model, which is a lot more than is contained in the quantum model.
                              Where's your evidence? If pilot wave theory is correct, every quantum particle's wave may contain its entire history, as well as information about everywhere it could go in the future.

                              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:30AM

                                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:30AM (#712147) Journal

                                Falling back on quantum randomness for free will makes about as much sense as saying a purely deterministic AI drawing input from a sufficiently large array of dice-rolling machines would have free will.

                                Except that if quantum randomness is nondeterministic, then you've made the only sense that matters.

                                We don't know - that's kind of the point, is it not?

                                No, that just means that it doesn't exist in the physical sense. Here's a related discussion [soylentnews.org] from a few months back. A few posts in to a discussion on whether materialism is , I propose a similar, crude model to that of these pilot waves (though no assumptions about any sort of parameter structure have been made).

                                Basically, a minimum number of states are entangled with that of a physical observer so that we convert the system from the time sensitive viewpoint of the observer to a reversible quantum model (which would be deterministic in both future and past time directions, a stronger condition than determinism). Changes of entropy then become the measure of the creation or destruction of information from the viewpoint of the observer. But from the viewpoint of the reversible model, changes of entropy are merely the movement of information in and out of the scope of the observer.

                                We observe the information contained in the macroscopic model, which is a lot more than is contained in the quantum model.

                                Where's your evidence? If pilot wave theory is correct, every quantum particle's wave may contain its entire history, as well as information about everywhere it could go in the future.

                                Extraction of heat contains the evidence. If one cools the macrosystem, they will extract a lot more energy (by many orders of magnitude) from the oil droplet system than from a few atomic or subatomic particles that would be pushed through the two slit experiment. That heat is crudely proportional to the information content of the system.

                              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:44AM

                                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:44AM (#712155) Journal

                                Just because we can't observe something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

                                Depends on why we can't observe? If observation is physically impossible, then it doesn't matter if it exists or not.

                                What are the physical qualities of Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

                                Dark matter is merely matter that has a low cross-section area for its mass. Dark energy is merely negative curvature of space.

                                Assuming our understanding of physics is basically correct, the overwhelming majority of the universe is unobservable

                                Then how do you know it exists?

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @04:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @04:26PM (#709992)

      If we filter out wishful thinking, freedom and free will boils down to "I like what I think and I don't care if that was externally induced as long as none can claim the credit for it and taunt me as unworthy unauthentic automaton".

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 21 2018, @12:15PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 21 2018, @12:15PM (#710382) Journal

    If we have free will, we can consciously make decisions that are not determined by the physics and biology of our brains.

    Like high frequency stock trading? Next.

    I'll note also that isn't a definition of free will.