Hélio Steven > Recent Status Updates

Just had an amazing epiphany-like moment as Ismael makes an analogy between "physical law" and the property of "being a tragedy" as something that can only apply to a whole fictional story *after it's finished* - in both cases it's the unfolding itself that allows us to characterize how the constraints play out, not the other way around. Great food for thought.

Another quick personal comment: it's impressive the way Ismael makes explicit the same puzzlements I have about some hard-deterministic positions that privilege what she calls a globalist physical perspective as their main warhorse against free will. In his excellent FE, Dennett has also thrown very good punches against such position, but Ismael puts it in a way more similar to how I naturally tend to think about it.

Things are getting clearer indeed, as now Ismael discusses how the physics of the universe's thermodynamic gradient relates to choice. In my last comment I already had the feeling I could be being impatient, but wanted to take a little note just in case the apparent ambiguity didn't resolve (or did resolve in another direction).

... Maybe I'm missing something, but she seems to take absence of asymmetry in fundamental physics to be enough to reject objective information transfer of typical macro causal processes - hence the insistence on talk of "strategic routes to bring ends about" and rejection of "one event bringing about another". At other times she hints it's not quite what she thinks. Hopefully things gets clearer later on.

Her discussion on the progress of a scientific notion of causality and its formalism is very good, but also a little confusing and frustrating, at least so far (there's more to come). ...

At this point the book is picking up great momentum. Armed with the conceptual tools she's introduced earlier, Ismael begins to put them to brilliant use; she's already starting to recognize and address every single issue a compatibilist has to work out, from the nature of the choosing self to responding to the simplistic readings philosophers make about "laws of nature" and determinism. Top notch stuff.

Excellent and much needed conceptual work on the difference-making distinction between self-organizing and self-governing systems and its importance. She suggests a much larger (and empirically incorrect) gap between self-governing human selves and other animals', though. But given the book's main concern, it's a passable mistake.

And finally, so far she also seems not to consider much the role cultural evolution plays in amplifying our cognitive capacities (but there's still half of the book to go). If we let culture out of the story, it's a natural move to put too much emphasis on how our nervous system is built - for where else could we look for relevant differences? Natural move indeed, but unwise.

Cortical density is certainly a powerful predictor for complex cognitive abilities, but she seems under-informed about just how complex the cognition of other hypersocial animals really is, and so she latches on cortex-complex cognition in a somewhat rushed manner.

So far very exciting stuff. We have both groundbreaking scientific research and a young scientist's journey behind it. I have some quibbles with how she treats cognitive abilities, though. PFC is certainly a powerful predictor for cognitive abilities, but she seems under-informed about just how complex the cognition of other hypersocial animals really is, and so she

Just getting to the meat of the book. So far there's been some good conceptual clearing to disentangle what is essentially a multidimensional process (ie, consciousness), as well as an excellent motivation for embarking on the project: to be thoroughly Darwinian about subjectivity. That said, a major turnoff is Veit's using introspective intuition in his favor; as a naturalist he should know better.

But of course the picture changes if she's referring to iterated PD, which isn't clear in the passages where she mentions PD so far

She's clearly a good game theorist, which makes me very puzzled as to how she seems to be still holding a confusing "meta-view" of game-theoretic modeling. She keeps treating the prisoners' dilemma as a game that can be "solved" by cooperation, when a one-shot PD is technically a game whose SOLUTION is mutual defection. If you want to avoid this outcome, you want to work to AVOID PD situations, not "solve" a PD

Though the authors make a very good, thorough discussions of the risks presented by global warming and biodiversity collapse, it's just inexcusable to me that they, being scientifically oriented as they are, simply fail to address nuclear energy as a viable option to shift global energy production to cleaner paths

At their most speculative they strech too much, but it doesn't subtract value from the book so far, first because when it comes to our deep evolutionary history speculation about some details are inevitable (and the finer the details the more likely we'll be to strech), and secondly because the fresh insights gained by their speculative framing offset the wilder imaginative leaps

Very good conceptual ground clearing before the hard work. The little phil. of biology background I have has allowed me to immediately appreciate the importance of giving precedence to Darwinian populations over individuals. Only issue so far is PGS' beef with agential thinking, as there's a deflated version of it that respects Darwinian constraints and even seems indispensible to evolutionary theory

I can't for the life of me take "memetics" seriously, and I think Dennett's insistence on it is just embarassing a lot of times. I agree with him much, even most of cultural change doesn't require "conscious uptake" or intelligent projection, and that we can explanatorily benefit from applying evolutionary theory to such change, but we don't need meme talk to engage in this kind of project

It's good to read this with several grains of salt. Granted, there is evidence for the many expectation effects covered so far, but their robustness may vary wildly. It was particularly laughable to see Robson claim expectation effects might be good substitutes for anabolic steroids, and quite ridiculous to take an athlete's failing to be caught on doping as showing they're clean in the whole prep cycle.

Only read ~14% and it already feels tiresome. In 41 pages the authors have already repeated the same words and even the same phrasing several times. The constant combative tone is very annoying too. We have 2 authors aiming at informed laypeople, and there probably was some proofreading too, and the book is still terribly written. I'm very interested in their positive project, though, so I'll power through this shit.

I'm well on the second camp for a while now, but one of the book's virtue is that it offers logical resources to try to persuade those on the other camp to pay more attention to earthly, sustainable movements along social equilibria paths, at least when they want to put their moral/political concepts to do some work in the real societies as they are currently structured.

Second half is paying off beautifully. For ppl used to thinking in terms of analytical political philosophy, Binmore's approach will certainly seem either an evasion of the "foundational moral issues", or an innovative, productive way of re-framing the discussion.

And his tone is wildly arrogant too, especially when contrasting his views with those of his opponents. He even resorts to some moronic name-calling at times. With all of that being said, the building of the book's main project is also very fascinating and has a lot to recommend it, especially with the benefit of hindsight, and so it's worth pushing through the annoyance.

Binmore's active meta-ethical moments are extremely off-putting. He makes a lot of conceptual confusion in the realism x anti-realism debate, with maybe the crassest mistake being conflating prescriptive with descriptive objectivism. But another very strong contender for top rubbish is his assertion that ethical naturalists are logically required to be relativists.

I had no idea Schrödinger's offered a working definition of life, let alone one which seems to be both incredibly useful on general terms and that also beautifully shows how biology and fundamental physics are closely tied together. (The definition is roughly this: life is basically a self-sustaining system that can "keep going" by taking in "free energy" and putting it to use wherever it's needed for that system.)

Thoroughly enjoyed the whole third part of the book, but I'm only commenting here to register some quote I really liked at the end of part 4's first chapter: "Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride."

Carroll breaks the question of the existence of the universe down into different problems and shows just how far modern physics can adequately respond to them. His fair assessment of why it all exists at all deserves special praise: while our total evidence provides us with excellent reason to stick to naturalism, he admits that the regularities we observe in the universe are, by themselves, more likely under theism.

Carroll beautifully expands on the reasons why our current understanding in modern physics disallows the existence of certain entities/phenomena. Every single chapter of part 3 so far has been extremely fascinating. My pick for one of the book's best provocative quote: "Quantum field theory ... knocks down our speculations about what kinds of things can happen in physical reality."

Chs. 18 and 19 are concise, yet fairly good arguments against certain supernatural posits, namely God and various paranormal phenomena. Contrary to what some say, the plausibility of metaphysical claims can often be submitted to empirical scrutiny, and it's perfectly reasonable to appeal to our current scientific knowledge in order justify a lower credence in many supernatural phenomena or entities.

Ch. 17 is by far the worst one. Carroll is wise to warn us against essentialist thinking in science, but he doesn't provide any good reasons for the reader to believe there aren't other ways to resist the gender identity idea on scientific grounds. While I'm inclined to think there are good, scientific reasons to accept the basic gender identity claim, I can see how someone who rejects it could reasonably complain.

Ch. 14 mostly puts Quine's web of belief metaphor in a new dressing, now called "planets of belief". This might be a better analogy because the idea of a "gravitational pull" exerted by mutual beliefs seems a better way to picture a belief system. But I think Carroll fails to appreciate that an element of foundationalism can be accomodated in the metaphor in a way that Kornblith tried before (https://goo.gl/Adkyp7)