I love the name of the scientist Al Unapietra. The thing is very well explained, but it's very sad to see it as a twitter thread, which is a mostly unreadable format.
Yes, una pietra == a stone == ein Stein. Very cute.
A delightful quirk of relativity theory
171–180 of 232 posts
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter threads don’t bother me. The brain quickly adapts to skipping the irrelevant parts (username, like buttons, etc) and to expecting the cadency of tweets. I believe it is harder to write (due to the character limit of each text block), but, far from “unreadable”, I can read it fairly easily.
Personally i think a lot of people do threads because it's easier to write. Also you can take days or weeks of writing threads in public, updating them with new information, without appearing to do "stealth" edits, or adding "Update :" to each added section. For readers twitter threads are pretty crap tho, that's why I really like to use thread reader app.
But it isn't easier to write something like this one in the "tweet storm" format. The author has to carefully consider how to divide the explanation up into separate tweets in a way that flows naturally.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Free will (or lack thereof) is an untestable theory, better categorized as a thought experiment or philosophical debate.
Free will isn't a theory before someone comes up with an actual definition. That is the problem. I keep asking people for a definition, and the outcomes are generally either "smoke and mirrors" (complexity hiding something not at all "free"), appeal to a "soul" which just leads to infinite regress, or failure to even try. Without someone willing to actually define what they mean, the discussion is moot - it makes no…
Wikipedia has a definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
> Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russel's teapot. If I claim Russel's teapot doesn't exist, the burden of proof is on you to prove it exists if you disagree with me, not me, because the set of claims that are so poorly defined and unlikely as to make it an unjustified burden to expect anyone to caveat the claims to make them technically correct is infinite - someone who makes an extraordinary claim without being able to provide a justification there…
The difference between free will and Russell’s teapot IMO is that free will to many is an internal, subjective, untestable experience whereas Russell’s teapot is an external object that is theoretically existent or non-existent for everyone regardless of their internal experience. If someone says they experienced free will today when they chose to stand up, it’s on you to disprove that it couldn’t possibly happen to…
In science, when testing the existence of something, the burden of proof is generally on the one hypothesizing the existence. The existence is generally accepted if experiments fail to reject the hypothesis.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I’m interested in relativity and have been reading about it lately but I’m no authority. > We all move through time at one second per second, don’t we? You need to define “move through time”. The only way to measure time is with a clock, and the clock’s motion relative to you affects the measurement. If you let everyone define “time” as the thing measured by the watch on their wrist, then everyone moves t…
That's my understanding too but I am also saying that "less you move in time" needs to be more rigorously defined. As it stands above I'm not sure it makes sense, even though it might be a useful fiction to get a handle on the weirdness of it all. I'm also no authority whatsoever on the topic :)
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Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic: This is not true, and there are consistent interpretations of QM that are fully deterministic (many worlds, superdeterminism, pilot wave). Still, probabilistic vs deterministic makes no difference. There is no free will in a throw of the dice, and no free will in the wave function collapse. On the other hand, the ma…
I find the most satisfying version of compatibilism one where an agent is mostly determined by 'state' (genes/experiences etc), but the subjective experience of expending mental effort (e.g. when overcoming an addiction) is the agent nudging the wave function collapse this way or that. Add in the ability to influence future 'states' and one has a model much more consistent with the subjective experience of making dif…
That's not compatibilism - as long as "will" can influence the physical world, you have a non-materialist philosophy. Nothing wrong with that, but it's very strange to call it compatibilism.
For what it's worth, I don't see any reason to imagine that hard decisions are of any other quality than easy decisions. It's part of my history and experience just as much that I prefer to eat salty foods than sweet ones as it is that I sometimes abstain from eating that pizza to try to manage my waistline, or refuse that job offer because I don't want to work for a company I don't find ethical.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the most satisfying version of compatibilism one where an agent is mostly determined by 'state' (genes/experiences etc), but the subjective experience of expending mental effort (e.g. when overcoming an addiction) is the agent nudging the wave function collapse this way or that. Add in the ability to influence future 'states' and one has a model much more consistent with the subjective experience of making dif…
Or you can just accept that reductive materialism is not an adequate description of the world.
If only any other system of thought could make any kind of verifiable prediction, it would be wise to reject materialism. As it is though, you either have magical systems of thought, that reject the very framework of science; or ones which amount to materialism plus some handwaving.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#178This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…
Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…
> You can do some mental gymnastics, define free will as being able to do what you want, define it as being free of various kinds of constraints, call it free if the choice is not computable in advance, if you can not measure all necessary variables, in practice or in theory, ... If you are happy with any of those definitions, fine, then you might have this kind of free will, but I would not consider any of those particularly interesting.
It is quite interesting in fact, as it lets you sensibly assign moral responsibility to those who were acting of their own free will, even if the world is deterministic. Arguably that's the only kind of free will worth having, and what people mean when they talk about free will (not what people say they mean).
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between free will and Russell’s teapot IMO is that free will to many is an internal, subjective, untestable experience whereas Russell’s teapot is an external object that is theoretically existent or non-existent for everyone regardless of their internal experience. If someone says they experienced free will today when they chose to stand up, it’s on you to disprove that it couldn’t possibly happen to…
In science, when testing the existence of something, the burden of proof is generally on the one hypothesizing the existence. The existence is generally accepted if experiments fail to reject the hypothesis.
But free will is a concept, a way of viewing the world. It’s not a physical object or mechanical process that can be tested. It’s why trying to prove it scientifically or through logic is just as impossible as trying to disprove it.
It’s a philosophical debate, not a science experiment. In philosophy, a declarative statement asserting the affirmative is always true is just as big a fallacy as saying the negative is always true.
Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory
#180This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…
Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…
What is free will but an experience? I think it is completely plausible that organisms that exist in a fully deterministic physical reality still have the experience of free will. Or vice versa for that matter.
Why do "I" have this experience of having a viewpoint and making decisions? That is a mystery that I am not close to solving. However why would any of that define how the universe must work?
Much like a finite being can hold thoughts of Cantor's classes of infinities in her finite brain. The domains in question are unrelated.