The seed of reason

A few TED talks I like

Today I will be writing about an online conference called TED.  TED stands for Technology, Engineering, Design.  However, this conference rarely sticks to these topics.  Typical speakers include entrepreneurs, charity workers, scientists, artists, musicians, politicians and inventors.  Most talks are about cutting edge developments or new work in business, science, art and politics.  There's a particular emphasis on information technology, green energy.

I watch the TED conference videos regularly and I thought I would start a series of posts on particular talks that I like and why I liked them.

In the first talk Hans Rosling talks about myths regarding the 'third world'.  He demonstrates some quite impressive data visualization tools in the process.

Hans Rosling

The second talk is by the comedian Julia Sweeney.  Her talk is insightful and hilarious.  She talks about her atheism.

Julia Sweeney

The third talk is a demonstration of a new multi-touch technology.  I'm impressed by the potential but a little skeptical that people won't get too tired using this screen full long lengths of time.  Still I'd love to have one.

Jeff Hans

The fourth topic concerns Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has been a hobby of mine on and off for many years now.  At some stage I will write a series of articles about the inner world of Wikipedia.  In the mean time you can here a short introduction from someone much better qualified to speak on the matter.

Jimmy Wales

Do take a look at these and tell me what you think!

Finally apologies for the lack of recent blogging.  I am incredibly busy right now.  Things should be more regular by December.

Religious discrimination vs Homophobia

Recently an employment tribunal for a civil registrar has caused a great ruckus.  One Ms Ladele refused to preside over civil partnerships because she believes them to be wrong based on her religion (A version of Christianity).  The tribunal ruled that Ms Ladele had been harassed and discriminated against.

I wanted to put down a few of my opinions concerning both the harassment and the discrimination.

Firstly the harassment:

1) Harassment does not become acceptable merely on the basis that someone is racist, sexist or homophobic.

2) Without further information I would assume that the court decided correctly that Ms Ladele was subject to harassment.  In particular I would understand this to mean that Ms Ladele must not have voiced her homophobic views in a way that would itself constitute harassment.

3) I would also assume that Ms Ladele had informed those harassing her that she considered their behavior to be harassment and that they never the less continued.  Remember that Ms Ladele's colleagues had recourse to the employment tribunal.

Secondly the discrimination:

I see no reason that religious viewpoints should be afforded any special status just because they are religious.

Requests that religious people make should be considered on a par with other personal requests made by people of common beliefs/convictions.  I shall give some examples (religious and non-religious) of such requests along with an analysis of the reasonableness of the request:

A) I request vegetarian food from my college canteen.

This is reasonable.  About 5% of the UK population are strict vegetarians (higher for the younger demographic).  The overall cost of providing food is less if you provide vegetarian dishes so this request is easy to meet.

B) Muslim's in my college request that lectures do not take place at a certain time on Fridays to allow them to attend prayer.

This may be reasonable if the lecture schedules are not too packed.  If they are then it may turn out to be a case that differing groups have incompatible requests.  If so the requests should be weighed up considering how many people made them.  How many requests an individual or group makes is also important.  If the Muslim student body only makes this request then it should probably be met.  If they make hundreds of similar requests then they probably shouldn't be met (I'm not aware on any such situation arising).

C) A land lord refuses to rent out a property to anyone who listens to rap music.

This is unreasonable.  Although those who listen to this musical form may be statistically more likely to damage the property the land lord is treating the individual on the basis of their membership of a group not on their (morally relevant) behavior.  The land lord may dislike rap music or think that it is a musical perversion but that still does not justify their position.  Of course the land lord would be within their rights to insist that the music is not played at too high a level but that is a different matter.

D) Ms Ladele's refusal to officiate over civil partnerships.

This is unreasonable.  By doing this Ms Ladele will ensure that civil partnerships get a lower standard of service (waiting times etc.) than they otherwise would.  Her request is one whose cost will be met by the gay community not herself.  It is an unreasonable request because it interferes with other people's rights in a significant way.

Dangerous Ideas III

Further highlights from "What is your dangerous idea?" along with my commentary...

11) Science must destroy religion - Sam Harris

Sam Harris argues that religions survive by encouraging blind faith.  He furthermore argues that blind faith is incompatible with a reason based outlook on life.  I tend to agree on both points.  Sam Harris also argues that religions are morally pernicious but here I do not fully agree.  I think it is blind faith which is morally pernicious.  Differing religions do better or worse jobs of keeping the moral consequences of blind faith in check.  Furthermore there are non-religious (or pseudo-religious) belief systems which employ blind faith.  An example was soviet communism.

I think rather that science must destroy blind faith.  I suspect that in so doing it will destroy all religion (at least anything that would be called religion in todays world).  My own prediction would be that religions will evolve to require much less blind faith, to coexist with science and to incorporate wonder for the workings of the world revealed by science.  Once this process has concluded they will not be recognisable as religions in todays terms.

12) Human behaviour has evolved over the last ten thousand years - Gregory Cochran

I am convinced that Cochran is right here.  Evolutionary processes can act very fast when the selection pressure is there.  Despite what many people believe selection pressure has probably increased dramatically over the last ten thousand years (due to increased agriculture and the creation of big cities).  This hypothesis has been supported recently by genetic evidence of increasing genetic changes over the last 45,000 years.

Human behaviour is not genetically predetermined, but it is genetically influenced.  The evidence for this (mainly from twin studies) is overwhelming.  Many people are worried that if human behaviour is linked to genetics then this would justify discrimination.  In my opinion this does not follow.  Not discriminating means not judging people on the basis of their membership of a group.  Just because differing groups may have (or come to have) differing average behaviours this does not mean that it is acceptable to discriminate on that basis.

I should add that most of the currently recognised divisions of society have not been demonstrated to incur even an average difference in behaviour.  Sex is the obvious counterexample here and even in this case it is highly probable that the innate differences are actually very slight.

13) Biotechnology will be domesticated in the next 50 years - Freeman Dyson

I agree with this prediction.  The reasons I think we will achieve this are (A) We are creating devices such as the gene chip that will allow us to progress at an amazing rate in understanding biology (B) There is a huge economic potential for the creation of designer microbes, disease control and other medical applications (C) We can use evolutionary processes to solve complex design problems for us.

Some have predicted that we will fail if we attempt to improve on evolution.  I disagree with this because firstly we can use evolution as part of our design process (and therefore we cannot do much worse than evolution) and secondly evolution is an undirected process (and so we can use our capacity for planning to speed up certain evolutionary searches.

14) School is bad for kids - Roger Schank

This is difficult.  Providing free education to a high age is absolutely necessary for a functioning liberal democracy.  Forcing children to attend school is dubious but unless there is a better way to provide this education can we afford to do anything else.  Roger Schank argues that home schooling is a better alternative.  I disagree.  The USA's home schooling tradition is fuelling the creationist/ID movement.  I see tremendous bias in schooling towards (A) acceptance of corporate culture (B) a belief that individuals cannot affect change (C) a view of science as a mere collection of facts.  However, I do not see a substantially better system in the offing.  Certainly a more liberal approach to education may improve on the current system.  Giving students and schools more choice in the education seems like a good direction but this hardly amounts to a new way of teaching.

15)  Technology can untie the USA - Juan Enriquez

I suspect that Enriquez is right.  He argues that the USA is already facing problems including (A) Lack of good quality education (B) spiralling debts [personal and government] (C) Increasing political polarisation (D) Restrictions on promising lines of research.

I would add (E) Abuse of the electoral procedures [including voter registration, electronic voting (Diebold), funding of polling stations] & (F) Legal (and massive) corporate corruption of government (G) Failure to adapt to new challenges in IP law.

It seems to me that these problems are almost insurmountable.  China, India, Brazil and Japan are all either booming or in the case of Japan way ahead technologically.  My bet is on India and China for the worlds new superpowers.  At least India is a democracy (even if it is very corrupt).

Thats all from "dangerous ideas".  I hoped you enjoyed the highlights.

Dangerous ideas

In this blog post I shall give some highlights from a book I have been reading and discuss them.  The book is called "What is your dangerous idea?" and it is a collection of ideas that leading thinkers regard as being dangerous (either if true or if false) together with a few pages describing why they think those ideas are dangerous.

1) The differences between humans and non-humans is quantitative not qualitative - Irene Pepperberg (Psychologist)

This is mainly an ethical issue (In what ways is it ethical to use animals (food/ clothing/ research/ safety tests)).  However, there is another issue.  Have we kidded ourselves yet again into placing ourselves at the centre of a conceptual universe (in this case the moral universe)?

2) Groups of people may differ in their average talents and temperaments - Steven Pinker

To address this possibility properly will take another post.  However, my view on the matter can be summed up as follows:  Not discriminating means not to treat people differently based on their membership of a particular group.  This should apply even if there are statistical differences between their group and others.  Even if there are genetic groupings (e.g based on sex or height) which have particular differences in their talents and temperaments we should still treat members of those groups on the basis of their individual talents and temperaments.

We need to start arguing against discrimination in this way (rather than arguing that groups are identical) because eventually our science will turn up differences between certain groups and we do not want to be caught short by this.

3) Your conscious experience is generated entirely by your brain - V.S. Ramachandran (Psychologist/Neuroscientist)

It seems to me that what is dangerous is the idea that this isn't true (Ramachandran thinks it is true).  Many moral questions come down to this in the end.  Is early stage abortion OK?  Can we turn off the life support of a brain-dead patient?  Is contraception OK?  Could AI ever have a conscious experience?

To me these are no-brainers (pardon the pun) because to me if 'you' have no brain (or in the case of AI some equivalent) then there is no 'you' to speak of.  Given the importance of such issues I would say that those arguing against this idea should be expected to provide evidence supporting this before their opinions influence public policy.  I believe this precisely because there is so much evidence in favour of Ramachandran's dangerous idea.

4) The purpose of life is to disperse energy - Scott D. Sampson (Paleontologist)

Ecosystems take energy from the sun and progressively degrade it into less and less refined forms until it ends up as waste heat.  Many other physical systems such as the weather & ocean currents can be understood in the same terms.  They exist to take relatively concentrated energy and disperse them into them concentrated forms.  Sampson thinks this is a dangerous idea as it may undermine our confidence in ourselves or our moral sense.  I don't think that Sampson is right that he has identified life's purpose.  A key aspect of life is its propensity to undergo natural selection.  The purpose of life (at least crudely speaking) might well be to create more life (or more complex life).  Sampson seems to be confusing a necessary subsidiary aim (processing energy) with the core aim.  It would be like saying that the purpose of the automobile is to create global warming!

5) We are entirely alone - Keith Devlin (Mathematician)

Keith Devlin argues that not only is there no God but that there may also be no direction or purpose in life and that there may not be any other life in the universe either.  Whilst I agree with him that there probably no God I have always found it bizarre to infer from this that there is no direction in the universe (purpose is another matter as it implies an entity to be purposeful).  There is a very clear direction to evolution which when viewed on appropriate time scales seems to be an entirely good direction (towards greater complexity, intelligence, use of energy, morality).  Given the clear directionality of evolution and the clear directionality of chemistry and physics (towards stability) it would be surprising (and a rather arbitrary state of affairs) for there to be no direction towards the origin of life.

On the issue of purpose one could still look at this directionality and see it as an illusion of progress or state that the universe behaves as if it had a purpose to some extent.

on the matter of moral progress people often claim that the 20th century's wars show this not to be the case.  Ponder this:  The rate of death from warfare in hunter gatherer societies was (and still is where they still exist) 4 times the average rate of death during the 20th century.  Similar statistics hold for murder, infant mortality and life expectancy amongst other things.

There really is no excuse for pedalling the myth that the 20th century was no advance on previous centuries morally speaking.  What has happened is that our standards have risen and so we do not appreciate the great leaps forward we have already made.  Not that there isn't still a very long way to go.

Order theory and a theological argument

This blog post is going to be about a very particular style of argument that I have heard from the mouth of a Buddhist and I have read in C.S.Lewis's "Mere Christianity".  I find the arguments interesting because they are essentially mathematical in nature.  This makes them amenable to the rigorous treatment of mathematical logic.

Firstly a rough template of the arguments:

* A thing may be x like.

* Some things are more x like than other things.

* For this to be the case there must be a perfectly x like thing (call it X) which the other things are judged against.

* If X is perfectly x like then for any Y we must have that Y is less x like than X or that Y is in fact X.

This argument has been used with morality.  Then the things in discussion are moral actions and they can be good or bad to differing extents.  This argument can be used with minds which can be more or less knowledgeable than each other (or more or less enlightened than each other).  The argument can be used with entities which can be more or less powerful than each other.

In each of these cases the arguments are meant to conclude respectively that there is a universal morality, that there is a state of universal enlightenment and that there is a unique all powerful entity (which I guess you hope is also good).

There are many problems with these arguments including:

A) The arguments need to show that something exists (or could exist in the case of enlightenment) in the world NOT as a mathematical abstraction (with the exception of the case of the universal morality).  The argument above is an argument for mathematical existence not physical existence.

B) It simply is not the case that whenever you have many different options some of which can be ranked higher than each other that you must have a unique best option.

Here is a simple game called "My daddy's richer than your daddy!".  Two players write down a number privately on a piece of paper.  They show the numbers to each other.  Whoever has the highest number wins.  It is always better to write a higher number down but there is no highest number that can be written down.  A religious person might object by inventing quantities greater than normal numbers.  A mathematician cannot complain because that is essentially what mathematicians call ordinals.  However, then we get the Burali-Forti paradox that there is no highest ordinal (I'm simplifying here for clarity) and we are left with a cast iron instance of this argument style failing.  Notice that what we really need rather than a top number is a concept of quantity.  The concept of quantity is not itself a number.  In the same way to judge morality we need an ethical theory not a perfectly moral entity.

There are further problems including the problem that one might not be able to compare which of two things is more x like.

I think, however that what is really going on here is that people are leaving out assumptions that would make the arguments stand up properly.  I shall give the simplest assumptions I can think of that would suffice to make the above argument work and then we can look at how appropriate they are in the above cases.

1) If we have a set of things that are x like there is something that is at least as x like as all of them.

2) There is a sensible way of ordering things as to how x like they are in the first place.

3) The quantity of objects we are considering is bounded (but possibly infinite).

The problem for this style of argument is that (1) and (2) are generally just as contentious as the results the arguments seek to prove.  (3) is never really going to be true when the argument seeks to prove something interesting.  In all the cases above (1) and (2) are contentious and (3) is false.

It is my opinion that there are other theological arguments that we would do well to examine from the perspective of mathematical logic.

Evidence for the existence of Love

In discussions concerning the supernatural and/or science I have often heard the refrain "But what about Love? I can't show you evidence that she loves me but I know she does."  Sometimes people use this as an argument for the existence of a god "God is like Love.  You know God exists like you know your girlfriend loves you!".  I shall assume romantic Love is meant here.

In this blog post I will address this attitude to Love.  Firstly the contention that one can know that someone else loves you without evidence of any kind.

There are many simple things that you might expect if someone loves you:

* They remember important information about you.  When you have a job interview they ask you about it afterwards.

* They touch you gently when it is appropriate and linger slightly longer than necessary in such moments.

* They smile when they have emotional contact with you (e.g. a letter from you or a glance).

* They become agitated if something goes badly for you.

* They try to see you as often as possible.

* They do things just for the purpose of helping you.

* They tell you that they Love you without breaking eye contact.

There are also things you do not expect if someone loves you:

* They hurt you physically.

* They don't return your calls.

* They sound bored whenever they talk to you.

* They buy you something generic for your birthday or ignore your birthday altogether.

* They tell you they do not Love you.

In addition there are many subtle clues that you may only notice unconsciously:

* Their body language indicates interest.

* Their pupils dilate and contract rhythmically upon seeing you.

* Their friends treat you with particular attention and possibly respect (depends on the friends of course!).

* They start to take up habits or peculiarities of yours.

The lists are not meant to be exhaustive and each item on it is only a valid piece of evidence if its in the right context.  Furthermore some elements are more important than others (some very much so).  Never the less if you imagine a situation in which a friend claims their boyfriend loves them without any of this evidence (and with all the negative indications) would you accept her claim that he loved her? Or would you carefully and politely challenge it and suggest that she might be better off leaving him?

There are of course many pieces of evidence that are difficult to pin down precisely.  An example would be body language.  What exactly constitutes the body language for Love?  Here our own intuition may be much more accurate than any scientific test that has yet been devised.  But are we making use of evidence filtered through our evolved and culturally expanded instincts to come to those intuitions?  How would one know that thats not the case?  There are also many instances when the evidence is confusing or misleading but again this is really a matter of establishing the right context and understanding the emotion better (e.g. they may express their love by teasing you and be slightly too enthusiastic).

To conclude: Its sentimental to regard that Love is something for which there can be no evidence and which is ineffable.  However, it is much more romantic to realise that the love of a close one is shown to you by their every day actions, their priorities and by the way they treat you.  And it is much more poetic to see that their love for you can and is being described to you every day by the way they act around you.

So I ask the reader:

How does this emotional argument fall on your ears?

How do you see this post in light of the post immediately preceding it (God, the supernatural, qualia and the emotional brain)?

God, the supernatural, qualia and the emotional brain

In this (rather long) blog post I shall discuss some scientific discoveries regarding the emotional cortex and the way these discoveries may help us to understand belief in the supernatural be that in the form of god, qualia or ley lines.

A word of warning:  In the following the term emotional cortex is my short hand for several connected regions in the brain that are involved in emotional responses.

I have long found it difficult to understand why it is that emotional arguments (often only internal) with or without logical support are seen to be so convincing (by a sizable fraction or possibly a majority of society) where other arguments rely much more on their logical support.  Examples abound:

1)  I feel the presence of God through his love.  That is how I know he exists.

2)  A purely neurological description (and perhaps high order interpretation of that) of how my brain responds to the presence of a red bucket in my visual field cannot truly express what it is to experience the vitality of the colour red.

3) A computer with its wires and its purely mechanical operation cannot possibly truly feel pain or understand beauty.

4) Killing animals is wrong.  Aren't you disgusted by the images of these dogs suffering abuse?  Doesn't that tell you its wrong?

I think there is an important distinction to make.  People will often believe things because it consoles them or even just because it is easier to accept them than to challenge them.  This is not what I mean by emotional arguments.  It is no particular mystery that people often choose to believe something because it suits them or their mental state.  What is more interesting is when the presence or absence of an emotional response within the individual is presented as if it is a convincing piece of evidence in itself.

Now I shall present some scientific discoveries that are relevant:

Firstly it has been found that a type of epileptic fit occurring within the emotional cortex can produce intense feelings of a decidedly religious nature.  People experiencing these seizures often describe feelings that everything is valuable and that everyone is important.  Some attribute these feelings to a god or a universal spirit.  A scientific hypothesis to explain these feelings would be that their perception of value was altered by the electrical activity in their emotional cortex.  People who have had such fits often describe them as life changing.

Secondly a strange mental distortion sometimes occurs in people with a particular type of brain damage.  The patient stops recognising people close to her.  Furthermore she maintains that these people are imposters who bear a close similarity in appearance to her loved ones.  This change in perception can even extend to familiar environments such as the home or workplace.  These places are viewed of as being elaborate fake homes or fake workplaces.

The hypothesis here is that the emotional cortex plays an important role in recognition.  When the patient sees a loved one she expects an emotional reaction to occur within her as a result of seeing their face.  This doesn't occur because the parts of her brain responsible for such a reaction are severed from those that process the image.  For the patient to decide that the person is an impostor she must be paying more attention to her internal emotional response than to the evidence of her own eyes.

So this demonstrates how powerful emotional responses are in effecting people's perception of reality.  Not only do we decide to believe things because it is emotionally convenient but we also implicitly consider emotional responses as if they were an external and highly reliable form of evidence.

So going back to our earlier examples:

1)  I feel the presence of God through his love.  That is how I know he exists.

If an entity (real or imagined) has a strong emotional effect on someone that entity is perceived to exist in the world (as opposed to merely within the mind).  Similar effects often convince people that their loved ones still exist after death.

2)  A purely neurological description (and perhaps high order interpretation of that) of how my brain responds to the presence of a red bucket in my visual field cannot truly express what it is to experience the vitality of the colour red.

NB: There are two conflicting meanings of 'express'. There is "To contain all the relevant information regarding" and "To convey all the relevant information regarding".  By the second definition no description of any kind could truly express what it is to experience something as the description would always fail to elicit certain unconscious processes in your brain.  Suppose a neuroscientist knows exactly how the brain goes about the task of riding a bike.  She still will not be able to tell you how to ride it.  You will still have to learn certain parts of the skill yourself.  This is not because the neuroscientist lacks knowledge but because some of that knowledge cannot be transfered by speech alone.  I'm assuming the first meaning of the word here.

When you see the colour red that causes emotional responses (as do experiences of the other senses).  The description of the experience of seeing the red bucket as expressed in neurological terms lacks the capacity to induce an emotional response (or we imagine that it would lack it).  This lack is taken as evidence that the neurological description is incomplete.

3) A computer with its wires and its purely mechanical operation cannot possibly truly feel pain or understand beauty (even if it were endowed with software that made it appear to).

No strong AI has yet been produced.  The interaction between minds that produces the range of emotional responses between people is currently totally lacking between computers and people (there are other more prosaic sources of emotional response).  We come to understand other peoples minds mostly by our emotional interaction with them.  Until we have that sort of interaction with computers people will probably assume that computers could never be anything more than our mindless tools.  It is also likely that even then the lack of a face, smooth skin and and coherent physical form will make it difficult for people to develop an emotional attachment to computers endowed with AI.

4) Killing animals is wrong.  Aren't you disgusted by the images of these dogs suffering abuse?  Doesn't that tell you its wrong?

I do actually think that killing animals is wrong (see my posts on vegetarianism and libertarianism).  However, just showing people disgusting images doesn't prove this.  If I showed you photos of surgery they would also be disgusting but this does nothing to show that surgery is wrong!  Again we are seeing an emotional response used (this time deliberately), in the place of more solid evidence, to make an argument.

In conclusion we have a strong propensity to use our emotions implicity and explicitly to form our conception of reality.  This leads us to many dubious notions including god, the soul and the supernatural in general.  However, having understood this we may be able to overcome it.

Remember those patients who had lost the ability to recognise their loved ones.  An experienced medic found the following solution:  He reintroduced the patients to their loved ones on the phone (where they had no illusion) and then slowly allowed those loved ones to become visible.  This rewired the patients brains to respond emotionally to their loved ones again.  Perhaps such techniques would be more effective in convincing people to abandon supernatural notions than many a logical and scientific argument!

Intuitions behind the soul

In this post I shall examine the intuitions that lie behind the notion of the soul (as opposed to the notion of mind).  This is a concept that has been around for millenia and in some form or another has been believed by a large number of people for much of that time.  I should qualify this post by pointing out that it is not meant to be an argument against the existence of the soul (because otherwise I could be accused of knocking down straw men).

Before beginning I'd like to make it clear what my definition of soul will be:  Firstly a soul cannot be understood as a computation that the brain carries out.  Secondly the soul exists before conception and after death.  Thirdly the soul is not physical/material.

Now for four intuitions that lie behind our conception of the soul:

1) The concepts of mind and soul are often viewed as the rational and the irrational components of our mentalities.  There is an intuition that an entity dependent on the physical must necessarily behave in a rational manner.  Here you might think of a ball rolling around on a hilly surface.  The ball will move towards the bottom of the valley closest to it.  The analogy would be that the ball is rationally trying to find the lowest point from its limited perspective.  Another analogy would be the way light travels.  It was noticed many centuries ago that the path a beam of light takes on its journey from point A to point B is often just the quickest path between those points.  Light rays bend in water and glass because light travels at different speeds in those mediums and so the light is better off spending less time within the water/glass.

There are several potential problems with this intuition:  Firstly the notion of rationality is difficult to pin down.  In can be rational for instance to take away ones own ability to make future rational decisions (A protester does this when she chains herself to the railings outside the house of commons).  Secondly what is rational depends on your aims (An act of self sacrifice is often described falsely as being irrational on the basis that it doesn't help you).  The ball is behaving irrationally if we regard it as wanting to find the highest point.  Computer programs that are designed to behave intelligently can and do often exhibit apparently irrational behaviour.

2) During the life of a loved one you develop habits of thought associated with that person.  You wonder about what they might think about X or if they would like Y.  When that person dies these habits of thought are still there.  It is still possible to imagine in detail the persons likely response to their room being repainted or that politician being elected.  The existence of these habits of thought and emotional connections after the death of a friend or a lover makes the world seem more confusing.  Imagining that the person is still around somewhere else (just not here) makes it easier to deal with those parts of your mind still devoted to that person and the world seems to make more sense again.

It is clear that the existence of a mental space within your mind devoted to understanding something does not make that thing exist.

3) People often think in a mode of thought termed the "intentional stance".  We reason about the way people, animals and even inanimate objects behave in terms of goals, desires, emotions, knowledge, belief and other mental states.  Daniel Dennett argues we have evolved to do this as it is a very effective strategy of understanding a world largely made up of intentional beings.  He also points out that in many situations that our ancestors probably had to deal with it is better to assume that an entity is intentional than not to.  Imagine the situation of a lion hidden amongst bushes.  A bush shakes in a strange way.  Your ancestor is more likely to be the sort that would be scared and assume the shaking of the bush reflected a malevolent intent.  It seems to me that the predisposition to see intent where there is none may explain part of the tendency towards the belief in souls.

4) In the early twentieth century it was proved that purely mechanistic processes are not sufficient to deduce all mathematical truth (this was called the incompleteness theorem).  The idea has permeated out into Western culture (and probably Eastern culture as well).  The idea shows that there are inherent limitations to algorithmic entities (I should note the theorem can be generalised to apply to various sorts of non algorithmic processes).  We all like to think that in some, at least potential way, that we are not limited and that entails the existence something beyond the computational.

The main problem with this way of thinking about things (which Roger Penrose tends to favour) is that the incompleteness theorem can be generalised to every deterministic or non deterministic decision making system we can conceive of.  The incompleteness theorem does not just place a limit on what computers can do it places a limit on what anything can do.

You can almost certainly tell that I am sceptical as to the existence of the soul (as defined above).  I have addressed the above intuitions as I have found they are the apparent basis for belief in the soul amongst friends and acquaintances of mine.  It is very easy to argue that souls are silly and so don't exist but unless you address the basic intuitions that lead people to such a belief your argument is unlikely to be convincing.

The anthropic principle

When you ask the question "Is this universe capable of sustaining intelligent beings capable of asking questions?" you should not be surprised when the answer is yes.  The very fact that you are asking the question is sufficient to answer it.  Never the less many cosmologists and theologans seem genuinely amazed by what they take to be the fine tuning of the physical constants (and indeed the scientific laws) that allow our existence.

There are several variables in the standard model of physics that, if varied, could render life as we know it impossible, through various mechanisms (we can call these universes "perturbed universes").  Many argue further that the universes that would result from such variable tweaking seem so ghastly that no other intelligent life could live there.

There are several major problems with the reasoning in these arguments:

1) Calculating the probability of intelligent life existing in a perturbed universe is very dodgy.  You are presuming yourself capable of simulating to the necessary degree of accuracy the formation of an entire universe.  Physicists are clever but not that clever.

2) The probability of intelligent life existing in these perturbed universes is not the probability of intelligent life existing in any randomly chosen universe.  To calculate this you need not only consider universes like ours but all sorts of universes with completely different laws of physics.  We tend to assume that other universes would necessarily be like ours.  Maybe bigger, smaller, with weaker gravity or with an extra force.  Universes similar to our own are an inconceivably small fraction of all possible universes.

3) It presumes that our universe is the only universe to exist.  This would seem to be an incredibly arbitrary way for things to be.  Why should this one universe out of the infinitely many possible universes be the one that exists?  Indeed the only non-arbitrary way for things to be would be for all possible universes to exist (this is what I believe).

One argument against this invokes Occham's razor "Assuming all universes exist multiplies entities beyond necessity.".  This is not really problematic because you can regard Occham's razor as being a tool used only to deduce which universe you are in.  Under this view Occham's razor is not meant to answer philosophical questions or mathematical questions but just empirical questions.

4) Some universes (we will call them bubble universes) will have the interesting property of containing causaly disconnected regions.  These may seem like entire universes from within themselves.  It is also possible that such a bubble universe should contain simalcrums of all possible simply definable universes within it (call it a super bubble universe).  A super bubble universe will certainly contain intelligent life somewhere within it as it will contain a simalcrum of a universe with life in it.  What is the probability of super bubble universes?  We don't yet know.  I'm guessing 100% though.

5) We shouldn't throw out the possibility of non-living intelligences.

Anyway as you can see I have real trouble with a statement that the probability of intelligent life existing is very low.  I would tend to say that all possible universes exist.  I will discuss that in another post.

Free Will

A definition of whether X has a property P must refer to the characteristics of X in some way.  In order to decide whether X has the property P one must define what X is.

Once you have chosen your entity and defined the boundary between it and the external world we can start.  Suppose we choose me and define me to consist of the state of my brain and the hormones raging around my blood stream (everything else is the rest of the universe).

Now consider reasonable perturbations of me.  These would include changing the state of activation of my neurons, changes to my neuronal pathways and the balance of hormones in my blood.  They wouldn't include encoding significant useful information into subsystems of my neurons or introducing psychedelic drugs into my blood stream.

An entity has free will to do X after time T if there exists some reasonable perturbation of the entity at time T such that it subsequently does X and there exists another reasonable perturbation such that it doesn't do X.

We also require that the effect of the perturbation ought not to be destroyed by most minuscule changes to the entity.  This ensures that the perturbation doesn't achieve its change just through the mechanisms of chaos theory.

So if I am sitting in a chair at time T about to be electrocuted I do not have free will to decide to live as there is no reasonable perturbation of me that would result in me living.  By the same reasoning I don't have free will to die.

If I am sitting in a chair at time T and you come up to me and threaten to kill me unless I divulge the whereabouts of my friend to you (so you can murder her) I do have free will as to whether to live (assuming I do know the answer) as there is a reasonable perturbation of me (add lots of adrenaline, stress inducing hormones and set my neurons to the state of someone who doesn't care about the friend) that will result in me surviving.  Note that if I don't know where she lives then it is an unreasonable perturbation to add that knowledge to my brain.

Its easy to come up with degrees of free will using this definition just by allowing varying degrees of reasonable perturbation.  For instance you might decide that the degree to which I care about my friends and my emotional state shouldn't be things that you can reasonably perturb.  In that case I might come out as having no free will in whether or not to die (if I were almost unrealistically selfless that is).

If we consider a rock.  The rock's internal state consists of patterns of heat.  Reasonable perturbations consist of changing the pattern by a few degrees here and there.

The rock has free will in practically nothing as the pattern of heat is very rarely going to make any predictable difference to the way the rock behaves.  In particular in falling down a mountainside a rock does not have free will whether or not to hit someone at the bottom because although a slight change to its heating pattern can drastically change its path (because of chaos theory) a tiny further change to the rock would cause it to take an entirely different path.

It is also possible to ask to what extent people have long term free will.  Can a reasonable perturbation of a persons internal state effect their decisions accurately days, months or even years hence?  In general the answer is yes.  However for a rock or many inanimate object the answer is going to be a resounding no.

Applied to animals we get reasonable degrees of free will out.  The animal in general has free will to perform actions it know how to perform.  Probably though you're going to get little long term free will.  Plants will have a very limited free will in most cases.  Rocks, streams etc will have essentially no free will.  People will have a lot of free will.  A computer program operating on some data will in general have some free will but of course it all depends how you define the reasonable perturbations of the software program.