Curt Doolittle

Theme: Causality

  • YES ETHICS (INTERPERSONAL) MORALITY (EXTRAPERSONAL) IS A SCIENTIFIC LAW (core) S

    YES ETHICS (INTERPERSONAL) MORALITY (EXTRAPERSONAL) IS A SCIENTIFIC LAW

    (core)

    Science absolutely positively can tell you about ethics and morality.

    Morality, including the moral instincts, consist in reciprocity within the limits of proportionality, where reciprocity consists of limiting our actions to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer( trade, consumption, harm, destruction, loss) of demonstrated interests free of imposition of costs upon demonstrated interests of others by externality. That’s morality. It’s got to be or evolution (physics) wouldn’t tolerate our existence as a species.

    There is no difference between physics (involuntary change), economics (productive cooperation), and morality (social cooperation), except we have memory so can invest in and borrow from one another across time (. All that varies is the level of immorality tolerated given the stage of development in the current military, political, and economic circumstances.

    So yes, science has told us what manners, ethics, morals, consist of. They cannot tell you what those range of actions will be in three years any more than economics can tell you that, because what constitutes reciprocity within the limits of proportionality, varies with the structure of production of polities, commons, goods, services, and information.

    So we absolutely positively know what the physical and natural laws consist of – because they’re the same – we can judge borrow from one another or invest in one another and punish one another for violating those investments and borrowings (thefts, parasitism, free riding), and we do so by moral intuition we call “altruistic punishment’ – the payment of high personal costs of punishment of others to preserve the high value of trust in cooperation (borrowing, investing) in one another, because of the impossible-to-replace returns on cooperation – wherever cooperation is reciprocal: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary, transfers, and free of negative externality.

    And good luck refuting that scientific claim – because you will not be able to without violating it. It’s a physical law of conscious, cooperative, species beyond which no conscious cooperative species can survive.

    Evil < Immoral < Unethical < Amoral > Ethical > Moral > Good

    Quod erat demonstrandum

    Thus endeth the lesson.

    fin.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-16 13:47:00 UTC

  • “Curt was trying to defend his statement that “Entropy is the prime mover” to re

    —“Curt was trying to defend his statement that “Entropy is the prime mover” to refute the theistic claim that God is the prime mover. In the analysis of entropy, he reduced all phenomena to a “fundamental” component, namely “Differences in charge”.

    There are plenty of other obtuse statements that Curt ought to defend in order to protect his reputation, such as his declaration that “philosophy is a pseudoscience.” That is a wildly hilarious and blatant domain error, that it ought to have disqualified anything Curt has to say on metaphysics or reason.”—- Josef Kalinin Prem Prayojan

    1) Entropy/Charge: Any of the terms: entropy( order to disorder), equilibration (equalization of differences), energy(frequency), charge (energy in difference in states), pressure(effect of different states on one another), and difference satisfy the demand for truthful operational speech. The fact that we are as yet uncertain of the classical (geometric) structure of the universe that we describe with quantum mechanics, is a problem of our present technical inability to measure (observe) it. However, there is no evidence it is other than expressible in the same terms of differences in energy, organization, state, and available transformations (operations). No physicist of note will disagree with this statement.

    2) Philosophy is a pseudoscience: Yes, as far as I know, the demarcation between philosophy and science is complete with philosophy limited to choice of preference, and science to decidability independent of preference. I can find no evidence that what remains of philosophy consists of other than the history of the evolution of science from philosophy. And I can find no evidence of those practicing philosophy for advocacy of truth claims instead of advocacy for preference claims engaging in other than deception. Part of the reason for this is that we have accumulated evidence of human behavior in large groups across mankind on one hand, and we have discovered the tediously simple method by which brain, mind, and experience are constructed on the other – although I do recognize I’m very current or ahead of the curve in that knowledge.

    3) Domain error. There are no domain errors any longer. There is one most parsimonious operational paradigm across all grammars (paradigms) from the deflaitonary to the descriptive to the inflationary to the deceptive. That paradigm is language, because language is the system of measurement we use for thinking and speaking about the world.

    It will be very difficult to falsify those arguments.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-13 08:44:00 UTC

  • If the question is ‘who is the observer’ (which I suspect is the origin of most

    If the question is ‘who is the observer’ (which I suspect is the origin of most problems in philosophy and cognitive science) it’s memory of the last few memories recursively processed as a stream of changes in model in the hippocampal region. Consciousness is a verb not a noun.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-12 19:43:31 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1227679648219324416

    Reply addressees: @robinhanson

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1227679190314573825

    IN REPLY TO:

    Unknown author

    @robinhanson Why do I care? No more woo woo in cognitive science please. If you can’t pass the mirror test, the gesture test, sympathy test (cooperation), demonstrate natural operational grammar (language), and create multi-part tools, or enter into agreement (consent) then you’re far behind.

    Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/1227679190314573825

  • To equate sentience (feeling of changes in state), and awareness (of change inst

    To equate sentience (feeling of changes in state), and awareness (of change instate of environment) and semi-consiousness (prediction of future states and possible reactions), consciousness (prediction of future permutations of state), to transformations of state is a leap.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-12 19:38:56 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1227678491539365890

    Reply addressees: @robinhanson

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1227678025543757826

    IN REPLY TO:

    Unknown author

    @robinhanson So if the point is to clarify that the brain is just a collection of similar cells in various forms of organization, and that for all intents and purposes our brain is an outgrowth of our consciousness (modeling of our body and movement in space) yes.

    Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/1227678025543757826

  • “Just because something is defined as chaotic does not mean that it is any less

    —-“Just because something is defined as chaotic does not mean that it is any less causal as anything that is non-chaotic. There is no such thing as chaos objectively in the material world. There just is a state of matter in the state it is. Order is an expression of value that does not exist in matter. Certainly, we would, if all atoms were clustered by their kind, conventionally define this as order. But any other configuration of matter could just as validly be defined as order if given any other subjective idea of order. That is without any objective validity at all. You cannot assign objective value to the material world inside the material. That is logically baseless.

    Grammar is nothing but subjective, objectively invalid expression if it does not have basis in the immaterial.”—Tobias Grill

    I think you think you made sense there.

    It requires memory to determine whether changes in state are preserved over time (including no change in state) by whatever interval of time we arbitrarily choose.

    order is the name we give to a successful test of preservation of changes in state over time, and determinism to the repeatability of a change in state over time.

    chaos is the name we give to the impossibility of successfully testing a preservation of change in state over some period of time at some degree of resolution.

    At the particle level the world is only deterministic within the scope of the wave function.

    Below the particle level it may only be causal density is such that a test of constant relations over time will always fail at any level below the particle level (i suspect we will discover it shortly).

    So far we decrease the level of resolution until we identify a pattern, and we increase the level of resolution until we identify the next pattern. Likewise we increase the periodicity or decrease the periodicity of the sample to identify patterns. Using those two techniques we are able to identify patterns at every scale.

    Scale is determined by the availability of steady states. So waves, particles, atoms, molecules etc constitute steady states that we can describe with vocabulary and operations (grammars).

    So while we may vary either the time or resolution of our inquiry we will discover different scales at which we discover commensurable steady states that limit the scope of further steady states.

    So to say order doesn’t exist is false because the universe is definitely deterministic, definitely produces a hierarchy of steady states, and a subsequent set of permutations that limit or enable a subsequent set of steady states.

    If you wish to say instead that the universe is just matter (or energy density) in motion and that order is the name for our discovery of constant relations in time at constant relations of scale, then you are describing the same thing from firsts, second, or third person. Nothing more.

    GRAMMAR

    Grammar in P refers to a paradigm of constant relations, a vocabulary (name (state, proptery), action(operation, property)) and the grammar (rules of continuous recursive disambiguation) necessary to construct a contract for agreement on meaning.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-11 15:10:00 UTC

  • FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM (DETERMINISTIC UNIVERSE) —“Could you say then that f

    FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM (DETERMINISTIC UNIVERSE)

    —“Could you say then that free will is a sort of emergent property of determinism?”—Andy Lunn

    Maybe I don’t understand that question enough.

    We have will. That’s a fact.

    We evolved for graceful failure in exercise of our will – so that is what we interpret as somtimes lacking free will.

    We evolved for incremental improvement of our knowledge, and then our will as a consequence.

    The degree to which we develop our will (ability) into agency (successful application) depends on ability, experience, training and general knowledge.

    So the question isn’t do we have free will, it’s that we evolved will and the capacity to develop agency with it. But we are limited by our knowledge. We do not appear to be otherwise limited simply because we are so good at building tools that extend our sense, perception and action.

    Now, within that context, if you mean, that without a deterministic universe (the scientific definition of determinism, not the sophomoric and philosophical definition), then yes, we could never develop agency because there would be no regularity, and without regularity no use for memory, and without memory there would be no use for will reason, or agency.

    So in that sense, yes. But only in that sense.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-11 14:26:00 UTC

  • SANITY TEST —“I’ve adopted Hume’s argument that we should judge men’s sanity b

    SANITY TEST

    —“I’ve adopted Hume’s argument that we should judge men’s sanity by the extent their decisions appear determined by the external causes.”—Martin Štěpán

    Smart.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-11 09:50:00 UTC

  • WHAT ABOUT CAUSALITY IN THOUGHT? —“What do you call the interplay between huma

    WHAT ABOUT CAUSALITY IN THOUGHT?

    —“What do you call the interplay between human thoughts, if not “causality”?—Ben Quimby

    Auto-Association to Free Association to Focused Association.

    A chaotic (‘idiosyncratic’) accumulation of neural patterns using the grammar of the body (that’s our neural grammar), produces an equally idiosyncratic free associations, that due to thee regularity of the perceivable universe, and the regularity of the grammar of the body, converge within the limits of tolerance for error of the neural network.

    So just as causal density at the pre-particle level is chaotic within the limits of the grammar of particle formation, so is the causal density chaotic at the pre-rational neuro-associative level within the limits of the grammar of body’s sensory associative formation.

    Grammars (language) in everything. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-11 08:58:00 UTC

  • DEFINE: DETERMINISM All events, including human action, are ultimately determine

    DEFINE: DETERMINISM

    All events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to human thought (will). We categorize this limitation as constraining causality to realism (the universe exists) and naturalism (causes are independent of human thought and human thought has no influence on causality except through action). Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.

    In science, determinism means that the universe demonstrates regularity and therefore we can identify general rules (laws of nature).

    I don’t pay much attention to philosophy – it’s mostly nonsense. If you can’t say it in testimony: math, logic, science, economics or law then it’s probably nonsense.

    And yeah. The vocabulary, grammar, and logic of economics includes psychology, sociology, politics, and group strategy.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-11 07:49:00 UTC

  • WHERE DID IT START? —“What part of the world did the gene for “higher IQ” star

    WHERE DID IT START?

    —“What part of the world did the gene for “higher IQ” start, and why?”—

    INTERESTING QUESTION

    1) We seem to have been continuously evolving intelligence for a long time. It’s very difficult to make a case for intelligence developing in other than africa. It’s easy to make the case that between exiting africa and the present, selection pressure may have put serious upward pressure on groups in higher latitudes. But there isn’t any difference between a guy with a 140 iq from Ghana, a 140 iq from Beijing, a 140 IQ from Persia, and a 140 IQ from England that isn’t reducible to minor variations in the bias between verbal-experiential and spatial-mechanical abilities.

    2) As far as I know, neoteny (reduction of rate and depth of sexual maturity) provides us with most of our gains in intelligence.

    3) As far as I know the difference between the classes is genetic load (accumulated defects) in the lower classes.

    4) As far as I know the primary difference between the races and sub races is the relative size of the lower classes, meaning that some groups are burdened with many more lower IQ people per high IQ person. This explains differences in averages.

    5) As far as I know races, subraces, classes, and genders vary a bit by standard deviation in both intelligence, and personality traits, with both appearing to reflect degree of neoteny (asians most, then whites then mixes, then africans)

    6) as far as I know there is no gene for higher IQ, so much as lower genetic load, larger brain volume, neurological density, and more time to mature. In other words, it works the other way around.

    7) So you want a small lower class, the optimum degree of neoteny, a big brain with lots of neurons. Han Chinese (most Chinese are not Han) have large round heads, are highly neotenous to the point of producing negative side effects (higher emotional instability), and it seems that their intellectual peak is early.

    8) The delta in intelligence between groups appears limited in the upper classes (at the same level of intelligence) but there appears to be different ability in the way intelligence is expressed between europeans, ashkenazi (half european jews), and east asians.

    Source date (UTC): 2020-02-09 18:20:00 UTC