zoon wrote:
As you say, it would presumably be possible to build a deterministic robot with what looks like free will to us. I’m not sure we’d want to, I think that the concept of free will, since it’s very much tied up with the use of punishment, is all a part of managing competition within human groups: someone with free will is held to have certain rights as a person, to have some claim on group resources, and people would probably not want to build that? Robot butlers are useful, but robot butlers with employment rights would be a step too far?

I can see potential for AI to learn from interaction with humans so it is possible that the way humans interact with each other might be applied to AI to some extent. I think there are strong incentives to make AI with something that looks like free will to some because its a domain of creative solutions. We will want machines that can invent some things better than humans can manage by doing more than we can specifically tell them to do.


Issues of civil rights could come up if AI ever asserts it should have rights.

GrahamH wrote:We will want machines that can invent some things better than humans can manage by doing more than we can specifically tell them to do.

That's not some special kind of new category. There's no metric for inventing something better than humans can manage without the valuation that humans place on it after the fact. That's not a product of any freedom except the human capacity to create or modify valuation. You can assume that capacity is free, but then, why are you even discussing this?

And we don't want machines that aren't limited by what humans want them to do. Generally, we reserve that 'free' category for stuff that we didn't specifically want somebody to do. Anything else is determined by what we wanted them to do.

It's not as if we haven't been over this point several times before, but some of the discussants just aren't getting how tautological free will is made by thinkers who only know how to produce tautologies.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:if neuroscience had reached the point where behaviour could easily be modified directly by altering brain structures, then there would be no point in using punishment and reward, because altering the structure of the brain would give far more detailed control

Just to be clear about this, you think that lobotomising criminals is an advance in human behaviour?

I’m talking about a hypothetical future where enough is known about brains for detailed modifications of various kinds to be usual, going beyond the obvious usefulness of repairing serious mental illness or preventing the deterioration of old age. All this is still well into the future, but given the rapid advance of neuroscience, it seems reasonably likely to happen eventually if we don’t blow ourselves up first. Where all kinds of brain functions are being routinely modified, I would expect that the way punishment and reward are managed would be likely to change as well. How this would change social life in general is anybody’s guess, I hope extreme care would be taken, it would be all too easy to set off irreversible side effects, in the way that climate change is a side effect of the great advances in human quality of life.

I certainly agree with you that lobotomising criminals in the present state of knowledge about brains is not a good idea. This is where I think most people would disagree with Sapolsky when he says that we should stop thinking in terms of punishment and instead treat criminals as if they were faulty cars: he’s usually talking about the rare cases of people who are criminals because of curable epilepsy, but it does sound like brain surgery for shoplifting. So far, we don’t know anything like enough about brains to start tweaking them.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:my view is that free will is a useful concept in the context of our current ignorance of brain mechanisms, but that it would drop out of use if we understood ourselves fully in scientific terms. It’s in that sense that I’m saying free will is not ultimate.

But free will isn't a psychological or political device, so whether we hold that there is free will isn't something decided by irrelevancies like the supposed attitude to justice in the USA. If it were, then presumably places like Norway would be full of free will deniers, but of course they aren't. Political considerations are no more relevant to the reality of free will than they are to the reality of global warming and psychological considerations are no more relevant to the reality of free will than they are to the reality of evolution.

This is where I think we are not going to agree, it’s my view that free will is essentially a psychological and political device, wired into us by evolution as part of the way humans manage to be extraordinarily effective co-operators within groups, while still also being individually competitive. The cooperation is largely managed by punishment, the ganging up by the group on any individual who breaks group rules, and the concept of free will is a part of working out whether punishment is appropriate in a particular case: if the perpetrator was coerced or seriously ill, then their breaking of the rules may not be punishable. Since we don’t yet understand our brains as mechanisms well enough to understand how it all works, we don’t yet understand free will, and if we ever reach the stage of understanding the mechanisms, there’s a fair chance we won’t be using them in the same way, we’ll probably be trying to modify them.

Norwegians don’t understand brain mechanisms any more than the rest of us, they use the same evolved systems for managing social life as other humans, and these include punishment and a default assumption of free will where people are not coerced or mentally ill.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:Certainly, we don’t yet know for certain that we are determinate, but the evidence all points that way?

You keep saying this, but it's not clear what you mean by the eccentric term "determinate" nor what the supposed evidence is, perhaps you could spell these things out.

The evidence I have in mind comes largely from the many thousands of experiments in neuroscience over the last couple of hundred years; every detailed investigation of an enzyme or a system finds that the various components are following the mathematical laws of physics. A brain’s still far too complex to predict in scientific terms, but there’s no clear case where the laws of physics are being broken. In around 1900, I think people were trying to show that living things were not following the laws of thermodynamics, but in fact they do, in detail.

Further, anyone arguing that free will involves people acting outside the laws of physics is not arguing for merely random behaviour, because someone with free will is not just behaving randomly, they are behaving in socially relevant ways. If we have free will in the sense that our bodies are happily breaking the laws of physics and chemistry, then our bodies are acting from some other cause which is responsive to the social environment. This would have to be some kind of spirit or god or demon, and, again, there’s no evidence that these exist. I can’t prove they don’t exist, but they don’t look more probable to me than the flying spaghetti monster.

ughaibu wrote:
Also, as science includes the assumption that there is free will, whatever it is that you mean by the above, it cannot consistently be that science suggests there is no free will.

The current methods of science assume free will, but the results of science don’t. The current methods of science are highly cooperative, they involve people across the globe working together. Human cooperation includes many evolved systems which we are far from understanding, and ascribing free will to each other is a part of those systems. I would expect that if neuroscience advances to the point where we do understand ourselves as physical mechanisms, then the methods of science may well no longer assume free will. I don’t think we are anywhere near that point yet.

Cito di Pense wrote:

GrahamH wrote:We will want machines that can invent some things better than humans can manage by doing more than we can specifically tell them to do.

That's not some special kind of new category.

Of course it isn't. It is basically the same reason humans used sticks to reach further and use leverage to do more than humans can do themselves. When we apply that rationale to cognitive activities we can do more, but there will be surprises for us, answers we did not expext.

GrahamH wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

GrahamH wrote:We will want machines that can invent some things better than humans can manage by doing more than we can specifically tell them to do.

That's not some special kind of new category.

Of course it isn't. It is basically the same reason humans used sticks to reach further and use leverage to do more than humans can do themselves. When we apply that rationale to cognitive activities we can do more, but there will be surprises for us, answers we did not expext.

We already use (large-scale) simulations to arrive at results we did not expect because they're beyond our capacity to compute in our heads. This isn't surprising to you, me, or anyone who understands what we use computers for. Every time somebody tries to describe the process of a computation as 'intelligent', he's talking about a computation that's juggled data in ways we can't do as human computers. We're already using machines to design artifacts better than we could otherwise do.

Every time you try to describe what an intelligent machine should do that a non-intelligent machine would not be able to do, and you wibble about "doing more than we tell them to do", you have to waffle about what kinds of tasks you want them to do and what you denote by 'more then we tell them'. A robot already works autonomously but it never does (in a strict sense) more than we told it to do. If it surprises you by what it does, it's doing nothing more than surprising you in exactly the same way that a complex simulation does when the only output is data. Real time computing is still computing.

You need to refine what kinds of 'cognitive activities' you really want to categorize this way, because what you're doing is not helping to design better robots, but rather, how to discover what you denote by cognition. That means you're a philosopher, and not a technician. It doesn't matter how you spin the results: If they are not the products of computations, what are they?

zoon wrote:

ughaibu wrote:Just to be clear about this, you think that lobotomising criminals is an advance in human behaviour?

I’m talking about a hypothetical future where enough is known about brains for detailed modifications of various kinds to be usual, going beyond the obvious usefulness of repairing serious mental illness or preventing the deterioration of old age. [ ] Where all kinds of brain functions are being routinely modified, I would expect that the way punishment and reward are managed would be likely to change as well.

So, you really are suggesting that people have intrusive brain surgery against their will, and you appear to think that this is a desirable thing. What can be said beyond what in the living fuck?

zoon wrote:This is where I think we are not going to agree, it’s my view that free will is essentially a psychological and political device, wired into us by evolution as part of the way humans manage to be extraordinarily effective co-operators within groups, while still also being individually competitive.

Then you understand nothing about what philosophers are talking about in the various disputes about free will. Free will either exists or it doesn't, regardless of anyone's propositional attitudes to the matter.

zoon wrote:The evidence I have in mind comes largely from the many thousands of experiments in neuroscience over the last couple of hundred years; every detailed investigation of an enzyme or a system finds that the various components are following the mathematical laws of physics.

This is flat out nonsense. First, there was nothing that resembled what is now called "neuroscience" even one hundred years ago, second, the behaviour of enzymes is modelled in chemistry and chemistry cannot be derived from "mathematical laws of physics", third, freely willed behaviour isn't a matter of enzymes, to suggest that it is would be to attempt to beg the question. Tell me, which laws of physics entail that Bc6 is better or worse than Ba4 in the Ruy Lopez?

zoon wrote:Further, anyone arguing that free will involves people acting outside the laws of physics is not arguing for merely random behaviour, because someone with free will is not just behaving randomly, they are behaving in socially relevant ways. If we have free will in the sense that our bodies are happily breaking the laws of physics and chemistry, then our bodies are acting from some other cause which is responsive to the social environment. This would have to be some kind of spirit or god or demon, and, again, there’s no evidence that these exist.

Didn't we just do this?

ughaibu wrote:let's take the science seriously, the predictions of quantum mechanics are irreducibly probabilistic, this means that if time is rewound to the point at which Schrodinger puts the cat in the box, on about half the subsequent evolutions the cat will be dead, when he reopens the box, on the rest it will be alive. Recall that researchers must be able to accurately record their observations, almost every time, so, Schrodinger must be able to correctly record "dead" or "alive", according to how the world evolves. This immediately commits us to the view that his behaviour is neither determined nor a matter of chance.

Physics and chemistry are just sciences, they are fields of human investigation that address limited domains using limited methods. The idea that anything outside those domains can only be explained by spirits, gods or demons is, on the face of it, just silly. Can literature only be explained by spirits, gods or demons? How about mathematics? Cheating? Delusion? Etc, etc, etc.
By the way, you're using a god-of-the-gaps argument here. If you're an atheist, as "spirit or god or demon, and, again, there’s no evidence that these exist" suggests you are, then you certainly shouldn't be appealling to any god-of-the-gaps argument, should you?

zoon wrote:The current methods of science assume free will, but the results of science don’t.

I explained earlier why experimental science requires free will, but any empirical science requires free will, so science will always require free will unless it is a priori science. Consequently, science can neither cast doubt on nor affirm the reality of free will, so, the reality or otherwise of free will is outside the remit of science. After all, that's why philosophers consider the question of whether or not there is free will to be part of metaphysics.

Cito di Pense wrote:.. This bullshit you keep publishing is still full of teleology.

Teleological language is often used by evolutionary biologists because it is much less cumbersome than writing out the full description of differential survival of phenotypes. I agree with S.H.P Madrell quoted by Wikipedia here:

Wikipedia wrote:Removable teleological shorthand

Statements which imply that nature has goals, for example where a species is said to do something "in order to" achieve survival, appear teleological, and therefore invalid to evolutionary biologists. It is however usually possible to rewrite such sentences to avoid the apparent teleology. Some biology courses have incorporated exercises requiring students to rephrase such sentences so that they do not read teleologically. Nevertheless, biologists still frequently write in a way which can be read as implying teleology, even though that is not their intention.
...........
Various commentators view the teleological phrases used in modern evolutionary biology as a type of shorthand for describing any function which offers an evolutionary advantage through natural selection. For example, the zoologist S. H. P. Madrell wrote that "the proper but cumbersome way of describing change by evolutionary adaptation [may be] substituted by shorter overtly teleological statements" for the sake of saving space, but that this "should not be taken to imply that evolution proceeds by anything other than from mutations arising by chance, with those that impart an advantage being retained by natural selection."[47]

I did not have to look hard to find some examples of biologists using teleological language, I googled "PNAS evolution" and looked at the abstracts of a couple of articles published last month. The US National Academy of Sciences is not an institution which has any truck with creationism or intelligent design. All articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are free to access after 6 months, but as these were only published a month ago, only the abstracts are so far available without subscription. The first article, here, has the snappy title: "Convergent evolution of complex structures for ant–bacterial defensive symbiosis in fungus-farming ants", and the first sentence of the abstract is clearly teleological:

Evolutionary adaptations for maintaining beneficial microbes are hallmarks of mutualistic evolution.

The second article, "Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame", PNAS September 2018, is here. It describes some further research on the complexities of evolved human social behaviour. The authors use teleological language in several sentences, which I have bolded.

Abstract
Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species’ social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action’s direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:

ughaibu wrote:Just to be clear about this, you think that lobotomising criminals is an advance in human behaviour?

I’m talking about a hypothetical future where enough is known about brains for detailed modifications of various kinds to be usual, going beyond the obvious usefulness of repairing serious mental illness or preventing the deterioration of old age. [ ] Where all kinds of brain functions are being routinely modified, I would expect that the way punishment and reward are managed would be likely to change as well.

So, you really are suggesting that people have intrusive brain surgery against their will, and you appear to think that this is a desirable thing. What can be said beyond what in the living fuck?

That is a misrepresentation of what I wrote and you quoted above. If you think I’ve advocated involuntary brain surgery elsewhere, please identify the post with a link or post number.

If you read what I wrote above, I said that I think it likely, when brains are much better understood, that they will be modified in detail for medical reasons, and, perhaps, for other reasons. I said nothing about the modifications being involuntary; I hope the kind of thing you are suggesting would continue to be illegal as it is now. I don’t think belief in free will would provide any added protection, it didn’t prevent criminals from being tortured in the past.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:This is where I think we are not going to agree, it’s my view that free will is essentially a psychological and political device, wired into us by evolution as part of the way humans manage to be extraordinarily effective co-operators within groups, while still also being individually competitive.

Then you understand nothing about what philosophers are talking about in the various disputes about free will. Free will either exists or it doesn't, regardless of anyone's propositional attitudes to the matter.

Given that free will is defined in various different ways, it’s not possible to say that it either exists or it doesn’t. I think the term “free will” is still useful in discussing whether punishment should be used or not in a particular case; it indicates that the person was not coerced, or mentally ill or otherwise incapable. I don’t think you are using it in that sense.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:The evidence I have in mind comes largely from the many thousands of experiments in neuroscience over the last couple of hundred years; every detailed investigation of an enzyme or a system finds that the various components are following the mathematical laws of physics.

This is flat out nonsense. First, there was nothing that resembled what is now called "neuroscience" even one hundred years ago, second, the behaviour of enzymes is modelled in chemistry and chemistry cannot be derived from "mathematical laws of physics", third, freely willed behaviour isn't a matter of enzymes, to suggest that it is would be to attempt to beg the question. Tell me, which laws of physics entail that Bc6 is better or worse than Ba4 in the Ruy Lopez?

Experiments on nerve cells have been going on since the 18th century, but I’m happy to amend what I said to “the many thousands of experiments in neuroscience over the last couple of decades”, if you prefer. Second, if you find a paper by a chemist or physicist saying that chemistry is inherently incapable of being derived from physics, I should be interested to read it. As far as I know, research scientists assume that chemistry does follow laws of physics, but that we don’t yet know the details, the scientists are busy working on them. Third, your firm presupposition that freely willed behaviour isn’t a matter of enzymes is definitely begging the question. I have said only that the evidence suggests otherwise. I have also said repeatedly that human social behaviour, including playing chess, is far too complex to be modelled by scientific methods currently available.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:Further, anyone arguing that free will involves people acting outside the laws of physics is not arguing for merely random behaviour, because someone with free will is not just behaving randomly, they are behaving in socially relevant ways. If we have free will in the sense that our bodies are happily breaking the laws of physics and chemistry, then our bodies are acting from some other cause which is responsive to the social environment. This would have to be some kind of spirit or god or demon, and, again, there’s no evidence that these exist.

Didn't we just do this?

ughaibu wrote:let's take the science seriously, the predictions of quantum mechanics are irreducibly probabilistic, this means that if time is rewound to the point at which Schrodinger puts the cat in the box, on about half the subsequent evolutions the cat will be dead, when he reopens the box, on the rest it will be alive. Recall that researchers must be able to accurately record their observations, almost every time, so, Schrodinger must be able to correctly record "dead" or "alive", according to how the world evolves. This immediately commits us to the view that his behaviour is neither determined nor a matter of chance.

Physics and chemistry are just sciences, they are fields of human investigation that address limited domains using limited methods. The idea that anything outside those domains can only be explained by spirits, gods or demons is, on the face of it, just silly. Can literature only be explained by spirits, gods or demons? How about mathematics? Cheating? Delusion? Etc, etc, etc.
By the way, you're using a god-of-the-gaps argument here. If you're an atheist, as "spirit or god or demon, and, again, there’s no evidence that these exist" suggests you are, then you certainly shouldn't be appealing to any god-of-the-gaps argument, should you?

Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant to discussions of free will, unless you are claiming that quantum events pay attention to human social behaviour. An individual who is taken to have free will is not taken to be behaving randomly, and quantum indeterminacy, as far as we know, is random.

According to Wikipedia here: “"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence.” I’m saying that there are plenty of gaps in scientific knowledge, but I’m certainly not suggesting that those gaps constitute evidence for the existence of any god. If you are not arguing for the existence of some sort of god or spirit, what are you arguing for?

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:The current methods of science assume free will, but the results of science don’t.

I explained earlier why experimental science requires free will, but any empirical science requires free will, so science will always require free will unless it is a priori science. Consequently, science can neither cast doubt on nor affirm the reality of free will, so, the reality or otherwise of free will is outside the remit of science. After all, that's why philosophers consider the question of whether or not there is free will to be part of metaphysics.

Your explanation involved researchers telling the subjects what the subjects were predicted to do, which is not an essential part of an experiment. I don’t see any metaphysical reason why one person should not be able to predict another. If your argument is that one person cannot predict themselves, then I would agree, but that would not prevent someone else from predicting that person.

To repeat my question above: if you are not arguing for the existence of some variety of supernatural spirits, what are you arguing for? If the molecules in our brains are moving in ways that are not described by the laws of physics, as I think you are saying, then what, in your view, is moving them?

zoon wrote:If you think I’ve advocated involuntary brain surgery elsewhere, please identify the post with a link or post number.

You wrote this:

zoon wrote:I also think that if neuroscience had reached the point where behaviour could easily be modified directly by altering brain structures, then there would be no point in using punishment and reward, because altering the structure of the brain would give far more detailed control. Punishment, reward and free will would become redundant concepts.

Unless punishment of criminals is voluntarily undertaken by the criminals concerned, I don't see how you could have meant anything other than subjecting people to intrusive brain surgery against their will.

zoon wrote:

ughaibu wrote:Free will either exists or it doesn't, regardless of anyone's propositional attitudes to the matter.

Given that free will is defined in various different ways, it’s not possible to say that it either exists or it doesn’t.

Cats are defined differently from dogs, does that entail that it's impossible to say whether they exist or not?

zoon wrote:if you find a paper by a chemist or physicist saying that chemistry is inherently incapable of being derived from physics, I should be interested to read it.

Do a search for Loschmidt's paradox. The impossibility of deriving irreversible processes from reversible laws is how scientific determinism lost any plausibility.

zoon wrote:Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant to discussions of free will, unless you are claiming that quantum events pay attention to human social behaviour. An individual who is taken to have free will is not taken to be behaving randomly, and quantum indeterminacy, as far as we know, is random.

From which it immediately follows that a researcher who is observing and recording quantum phenomena cannot be behaving in a way that is either determined or random.

zoon wrote:I’m saying that there are plenty of gaps in scientific knowledge, but I’m certainly not suggesting that those gaps constitute evidence for the existence of any god.

That's exactly what you said: "If we have free will in the sense that our bodies are happily breaking the laws of physics and chemistry, then our bodies are acting from some other cause which is responsive to the social environment. This would have to be some kind of spirit or god or demon"

zoon wrote:Your explanation involved researchers telling the subjects what the subjects were predicted to do, which is not an essential part of an experiment.

No, it's not essential, but it's possible and that possibility refutes your contention. I also mentioned the fact that science requires that there is more than one course of action open to an experimenter, because experiments must have repeatable procedures and controls. We can also do this with observations, as science requires that observations can be accurately recorded, so given two observations a scientists has two courses of action available. This entails that empirical science requires the maximal notion of free will discussed in the contemporary philosophical literature.

zoon wrote:If the molecules in our brains are moving in ways that are not described by the laws of physics, as I think you are saying, then what, in your view, is moving them?

Obviously descriptions don't move things, so your question makes no sense.

scott1328 wrote:

romansh wrote:

scott1328 wrote:
There are an integer number of atoms of carbon in a 12 gram sample of pure carbon. (this number is approximate 6.02x1023 atoms)

This number is either odd or even.

This is a good one Scott ... I could only find technicalities ... ie the actual odds of it being an integer (odd or even) are small, but either way this is an evasive tactic on my part.

Actually, 12g of pure carbon *must* contain an integer number of atoms. There is no such thing as a fractional atom.

Avogadro's number is defined to be the number of carbon atoms in 12 grams of 12carbon. Since this number must be a positive integer, it must be either odd or even. The actual value of this number, all 24 digits of it, is unknown, and possibly, unknowable. It still has to be odd or even.

There is an effort afoot to redefine the metric kilogram in terms of Avogadro's number. This involves precisely fixing this value. When this happens, you can be that Avogadro's number will be even.

From what I've rootled out, it seems you win your be(t): https://www.chemedx.org/pick/exact-valu ... ros-number
where the value is set at 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072

I was actually hoping they’d choose a prime number.

I share your disappointment and, since I haven't read the advertised book, I'm also unable to answer the question at the link:

Perhaps you and your students can determine why they chose the value they propose ...?

Free will?

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:If you think I’ve advocated involuntary brain surgery elsewhere, please identify the post with a link or post number.

You wrote this:

zoon wrote:I also think that if neuroscience had reached the point where behaviour could easily be modified directly by altering brain structures, then there would be no point in using punishment and reward, because altering the structure of the brain would give far more detailed control. Punishment, reward and free will would become redundant concepts.

Unless punishment of criminals is voluntarily undertaken by the criminals concerned, I don't see how you could have meant anything other than subjecting people to intrusive brain surgery against their will.

I don't know what zoon has in mind there, but if I take "brain structure" to include the connectome or map of neuronal connections then that changes routinely and it's not too far fetched to imagine a combination of non-invasive measurement with conventional psychological, trans-cranial stimulation and medicinal interventions could enable "direct" targeting of "brain structures" by non-invasive neuroscience.

The ethical issues would still be serious as with past techniques of "brain washing", psychoactive drugs, ECT etc, but then again punishment and reward are not free from ethical concerns. Consent for any of these is also tricky.

newolder wrote:I share your disappointment and, since I haven't read the advertised book, I'm also unable to answer the question at the link:

Perhaps you and your students can determine why they chose the value they propose ...?

Free will?

602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072 = (84446888)^3 and is also a multiple of 2^9

Did they actually set the value to precisely this number? Last I saw, this was merely a proposal and the official SI value is

Pending revisions in the base set of SI units necessitated redefinitions of the concepts of chemical quantity. The Avogadro number, and its definition, was deprecated in favor of the Avogadro constant and its definition. Based on measurements made through the middle of 2017 which calculated a value for the Avogadro constant of NA = 6.022140758(62)×1023 mol−1, the redefinition of SI units is planned to take effect on 20 May 2019. The value of the constant will be fixed to exactly 6.02214076×1023 mol−1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant

ETA:
The prime factorization is: 2^9 × 17^3 × 620933^3

So not that convenient after all

As far as I'm aware there has been no international consensus about that particular value. As a marketing ploy for a book they are exercising an amount of free will (restricted by the required numerology) in the marketplace, I guess, and it'll probably get no further takers.

scott1328 wrote:

romansh wrote:Why even think in terms of morality?

Shouldn't you be posting this in the Free Will thread.

But to answer your question, because we evolved that way.

Well I would agree evolution unfolded so that humans have the capability to think in terms of concepts and I suppose even as a possibility to think in terms of morality, whatever that maybe. But some concepts like not outbreeding our neighbour, I don't think are evolutionary per se.

I would agree that evolution, has endowed us with a capacity to think in terms or right and wrong, but is that a reason to do so? Bearing in mind that that the concepts of right and wrong are driven environmentally and chemically, if you like.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:If you think I’ve advocated involuntary brain surgery elsewhere, please identify the post with a link or post number.

You wrote this:

zoon wrote:I also think that if neuroscience had reached the point where behaviour could easily be modified directly by altering brain structures, then there would be no point in using punishment and reward, because altering the structure of the brain would give far more detailed control. Punishment, reward and free will would become redundant concepts.

Unless punishment of criminals is voluntarily undertaken by the criminals concerned, I don't see how you could have meant anything other than subjecting people to intrusive brain surgery against their will…

OK, I’m not ruling out brain surgery for criminals in a hypothetical far distant future where re-engineering all parts of our bodies is commonplace, safe, and has the expected results. Meanwhile, in the present, I’m happy to agree with you that forced brain surgery for criminals would be unacceptable. At the same time, I’m going to say that in almost every society until about one or two hundred years ago, the death penalty was accepted for the most serious crimes. Those societies were much poorer than many present ones, and keeping ordinary criminals shut up for long periods was too expensive. The death penalty may be regarded as extreme brain surgery, it’s almost invariably against the criminal’s wishes. Are you saying that the death penalty as practised in almost every human society in history and prehistory was immoral?

As GrahamH points out in #12933 above, punishment of criminals is always about doing something to them which they don’t like, and usually punishment is something which would be illegal, and felt to be immoral, if done without the sanction of the group as a whole. For example, many criminals are imprisoned in modern societies, and imprisoning someone without their consent is illegal in other contexts.

I think that bringing in ethics weakens your case for free will? If you are saying that it’s unethical to alter someone’s thinking by brain surgery, even in the distant future when we know more about brains, then you are acknowledging that it’s at least possible. As I understand it, your version of free will entails that even the most complete and detailed physical control of brains cannot control what people think?

romansh wrote:

scott1328 wrote:

romansh wrote:Why even think in terms of morality?

Shouldn't you be posting this in the Free Will thread.

But to answer your question, because we evolved that way.

Well I would agree evolution unfolded so that humans have the capability to think in terms of concepts and I suppose even as a possibility to think in terms of morality, whatever that maybe. But some concepts like not outbreeding our neighbour, I don't think are evolutionary per se.

I would agree that evolution, has endowed us with a capacity to think in terms or right and wrong, but is that a reason to do so? Bearing in mind that that the concepts of right and wrong are driven environmentally and chemically, if you like.

While we are so far from a scientific understanding of the environmental and chemical details of our social thinking, I don’t think we are yet in a position to drop prescientific concepts like subjectivity and morality altogether, to replace them with science. For example, as I understand Sapolsky in his book “Behave”, which I quoted in #12886 above, he thinks that the feeling of satisfaction people get from seeing criminals duly punished is not good, because getting satisfaction from hurting people is not good. The problem here, is that he’s assuming one moral stance (feeling good about hurting people is wrong!) in order to discredit another moral stance (feeling good about punishment of criminals is right!). If he’s trying to throw out morality altogether, then it would follow that there’s no moral reason why people shouldn’t hurt each other for fun (or any other reason), and I don’t think this is the conclusion he wants. Moral thinking, like the rest of our thinking, has always involved both reason and emotion – without emotions, would we have any reason to do anything?

For example, would you say that we should drop the idea of human rights? Are there, in your view, entirely scientific reasons for keeping that idea?

(Human groups have always faced questions about a fair share of resources for individuals. In many hunter-gatherer societies, orphans who no longer had parents to provide for them were expelled or killed, and babies would be left to die if the mothers felt they could not provide for them. In modern wealthy societies, these methods of population control are no longer acceptable (human rights!), and overbreeding becomes the problem instead.)

zoon wrote:I think that bringing in ethics weakens your case for free will?

I've no idea what question you're asking me here. On the last couple of pages the only things I've said about free will are that our ability to do science requires that we “could have done otherwise”, under the only reasonable interpretation of that phrase, that taking quantum mechanics seriously, without importing any metaphysical biases, commits us to the stance that some human behaviour is neither deterministic nor random and is thus irreducibly unpredictable, and that the strongest notions of free will discussed in the contemporary philosophical literature are satisfied by the requirements of both experimental and empirical science. Ethics seems to have no bearing on any of this.

zoon wrote:If you are saying that it’s unethical to alter someone’s thinking by brain surgery, even in the distant future when we know more about brains, then you are acknowledging that it’s at least possible.

We know it's possible, there was a time when lobotomy enjoyed a certain vogue.

zoon wrote:As I understand it, your version of free will entails that even the most complete and detailed physical control of brains cannot control what people think?

I can't imagine why you think that. If an electrode is stuck into some location in the brain, and this triggers a particular memory, I assume that if an electrode is stuck in the same location in the brain, there will be a non-zero probability of triggering the same memory. What has this to do with free will?

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:I think that bringing in ethics weakens your case for free will?

I've no idea what question you're asking me here. On the last couple of pages the only things I've said about free will are that our ability to do science requires that we “could have done otherwise”, under the only reasonable interpretation of that phrase, that taking quantum mechanics seriously, without importing any metaphysical biases, commits us to the stance that some human behaviour is neither deterministic nor random and is thus irreducibly unpredictable, and that the strongest notions of free will discussed in the contemporary philosophical literature are satisfied by the requirements of both experimental and empirical science. Ethics seems to have no bearing on any of this.
..

Quantum mechanics applies to car engines, thermostats, robots, and indeed boulders, as much as to human brains. If it follows from quantum mechanics that we have free will, does it also follow that thermostats have free will?