Casuality and Determinism.

Determinism is the idea that the future is fixed. I believe that the universe is deterministic. I believe that, given perfect information, you would be able to predict all events through the lifetime of our universe. Why?

1. Interactions between fundamental particles (atoms) are deterministic.
2. All matter is composed of fundamental particles
3. Objects whose constituent parts are deterministic are also deterministic.

1+2+3 = All objects/matter/stuff in the universe behaves in a deterministic fashion.

Disagree? Then you must be able to challenge one of the three premises, assuming no structural flaws in my argument.

Note 1: Probability as we commonly use it is a product of ignorance. It is a feature of our mental models of the world rather than of the world itself. Probability is in the mind.

Note 2: Does quantum mechanics break premise 1? I'm not sure but if your knowledge of physics is at the point where you actually believe that observation collapses the wave-function, that entanglement with an intelligent mind in one very specific manner is somehow magically different from all other entanglements with non-sentient matter or indirect entanglements with us, you probably also lack the knowledge needed to make arguments based in/on QM.

Be Many People

I've written that you should remain a stranger to avoid becoming entangled in the mistakes or biases of your own society, to instead be your own man or woman. The problem with this is that it is that a stranger can never know another person, never truly understand them for to know someone you must become them.

Giving up yourself to your surroundings, what most do, is the path of the cog. Intellectual detachment, the path of the stranger, is another. The third path is being not one person but many people. It is becoming both sides in a war, even if you fight on only one. It is stepping into the shoes of those who are weaker or stronger, wiser or more ignorant than you. It is being those you hate, and in doing so abandoning hate for you cannot hate yourself. It is not a path without it's dangers for when you wear a mask, you become what you pretend to be. It is not an easy path, for it requires strength of will enough to let go of yourself and strength of character enough to find yourself again. Still, it is a path worth following.

Persuasion and Morality

Two friends leave their child with you over the weekend. Your friends are left wing and you're right wing. Their child is left wing as they are. Would you use your superior intellect and powers of persuasion to persuade the child to abandon their current beliefs, which match their parents, and instead adopt yours?

The answer for me is no. Doing so would be taking advantage of your superior abilities to brainwash a child. Maybe the parents are also wrong for doing the same thing, but still.

The first rule of persuasion: Brainwashing people is bad. If you're sufficiently good at persuasion, it's very easy to brainwash people. In circumstances where you are much better at persuasion than others around you, you should take great care and either not try to persuade at all or try and tone down the extent to which you are persuasive. Take care, the second path can turn into a slipper slope very quickly.

You live in the kingdom of GreenLand. Your country is about to invade Bluegaria. Every media outlet, person, book or source of information is rabidly pro-war. You go on the news and the anchor gives you an opportunity to talk about the impending war. You yourself are pro-war but are confident that you be just as persuasive arguing against the war. You only have enough time to present one side. Do you present a pro-war reason or an anti-war one?

The answer for me is that you should present the anti-war argument. A superior quality of persuasion is equivalent to brainwashing. So is a superior quantity persuasion. The second rule of persuasion: When your surroundings all share the same perspective, if you do persuade, you should play devils advocate to balance the scales. Balance does not mean making both sides equally persuasive. It's impossible to define balance. You can't be neutral on a moving train. But, you can still try.

Counter argument: you should argue for what you think is right. Problem: See the first rule of persuasion.

The deeper the darkness, the more difference one light makes.

Conceptualizing of personhood

I've written that people are patterns, but that kind of thinking is not too useful. The most useful way I have found to conceptualize of people is to think of a person as being defined by a certain set of traits, say intelligence, knowledge, morality or anything else you can think of. Think of each trait as existing on a scale going from - X to +X. These traits together create a set of Axis. 2 traits = a 2 dimensional space. 95 traits = 95 dimensions. A person is a cloud in this space. Why a cloud? Because a point would mean that any change in temperament or character would make them a different person. We see people as being the same as long as their personalities (collection of traits) stays roughly constant. Hence why a cloud is more appropriate than a line.

Eliezer Yudkowsky coined a term for this: "Empirical cluster is personspace", which is a very good concept handle.

What is a person?

A Person is not matter. We are not hardware, even though existence without our hardware may be impossible.

• If I were to create and run an atom for atom accurate model of my brain on a computer, that would still be me despite the hardware/matter being entirely different from my original brain.
• As the individual atoms which make up me are exchanged for other atoms from my surroundings, I do not become less me.

A Person is software. A Person is a pattern. A person is not an empirical cluster in personspace. A person is the system which produces those characteristics. A system which reacts and changes to the environment in certain ways. A system whose internal patterns follow a certain rhythm over time or space. 

If a person is a pattern, what is he different between a person and any other kind of pattern? From stars to stones, all things follow a pattern. What makes something alive? What makes something a person? [Questions are entangled. People must be alive.[Maybe not? Emulated brain which is not running is still a person despite not being alive? No, it is a potential person. More rights than no person, less than an actual person.]]

I don't know what makes the patterns we call people different from other patterns. I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference. This seems to be one of the cases where reason doesn't work. Where a certain belief is hard-coded into our way of thinking and where thinking without it seems impossible. Maybe one day we can find a way to remove these beliefs from ourselves. I'd like to see what the world is like without this neural block clouding my thinking. Then again, that seems impossible given that without such a belief I would no longer be myself.

Consensus is not Truth: How philosophers deal with moral relativism

If we all agree that earth if flat, that does not mean that it is.

The greatest problem in ethics is that moral beliefs cannot be grounded in objective reality. It is not possible to find evidence in the physical world which proves that one set of ethical beliefs is better than another. You can't get an ought from an is.

Most people who realize this, myself included, simply ignore the fact that their beliefs cannot be justified and go on holding the same morals they always did. For a subset of these moral beliefs, we remain willing to use violence to impose them on others. We hate the baby-eaters, even though we know that we have no reason to assume we are more right than they are.

Most competent philosophers, realizing they cannot show that moral beliefs are objectively true, attempt to show that they are true intersubjectivly, meaning that they are true given the axiomatic moral beliefs a person holds. If you hold the set of beliefs X, then you should believe Y.