I think Musk is right to point out that many people don't reason from first principles-- basically, that they consciously decide not to think about something, but to allow other's thinking to guide their thoughts. ("It has always been done this way")
I recently began teaching in a school where students are required to write extensively in every class, including "extras" like PE, Music, or Art. I've found that, generally, students who have been subjected to that system for a number of years are far better at reasoning (and expressing that reasoning, naturally) than those who are new to the school. (It is astonishing how quickly new students, who inevitably struggle with complex reasoning at the beginning of the school year have made leaps and bounds in this area, and are far more skilled at verbal reasoning by the end of the school year).
All of which is to say: I think that this style of thinking is greatly buttressed by enhanced linguistic ability, as language is critical to higher-level thinking.
Very interesting video, and the interactive transcript was extremely cool.
I'm a little suspicious of people who claim to think "everything" through from "first principles" (whatever those are).
Where do you get your first principles from?
If you get them from observing the world around you, how do you decide what parts to pay more or less attention to?
While you're deciding things from first principles (and coming up with those first principles), how do you make decisions in the mean time?
Note that in physics, computing things "from first principles" is often done to attempt to recreate a result that's already been reached by other approaches, to attempt to verify that you've got the right set of first principles.
Your first principles are the constituents of your worldview. Put in reverse: You worldview is the sum of your first principles.
Unfortunately, understanding your world view is a daunting task. This is why most people don't start with first principles. They have yet to know them.
Your reward system is hard coded. So you pay attention to the sensory data correlates that result in the highest preference satisfaction. This gets compounded until you've bootstrapped up to having a reasonable causal model of the things that affect you the most.
That particular debate goes back to Descartes vs. Bacon.
Descartes was a logician. Bacon was an empiricist, Descarte a rationalist reasoning from first principles, beginning with "cogito ergo sum": I think, therefore I am.
Many people don't have first principles to begin thinking from. While you're certainly right that the quality of one's first principles is at issue in judging their conclusion, the mere fact that so many people don't even bother to try to think presuppositionally seems to be more of the point of the video, IIRC.
You make assessments based on everything else you know (I think he mentions that at one point).
Of course this isn't unbiased, but at least you're thinking for yourself.
I don't think it's just about thinking from first principles, it's also about being able to change your first principles as you go along and understand that you need to reassess everything else that depends on it.
Well you have to decide on what your axioms are to start with. If you're developing a product you might decide your axioms are: "It must ship on time, its quality must be this high, it must sell x number of units", and then reason from there.
The transcript on the right is the same as the video, and easier to read.
I think this is great overall. However, I think he's wrong at the very end. People aren't just hardware and software; they're hardware, software, and the thinking they have done (call it "free will" if you want). That accounts for a lot of the differences in people.
As far as the nature vs. nurture division, there's a good amount of new evidence from twin studies and adoption studies which back up Elon's conclusion about the heritability of traits. Bryan Caplan covers some of this in his new book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."
Yes, I think that's probably more accurate. Anyway, the point is that the end of the interview is a fallacious denial of that which is commonly called free will.
Well, if you're right, and we can't excecise thought independent from our genes and external influences, then all our thoughts, mistaken or correct, are determined anyway.
So who are you to say that you're right and I'm wrong? Maybe your determined thoughts happen to be flawed, and mine happen to be correct.
In other words, a complete and utter denial of "free will" (which is vaguely defined, hence my "complete and utter" qualifier) is a self-defeating argument.
1. Heisenberg would not agree. It's more accurate to say that the universe is ruled by probabality and the probability distributions are deterministic.
Even leaving quantum mechanics aside, complexity of deterministic processes is often such that they are effectively random unless one knows the exact starting conditions and all the inputs.
2. generally agreed. social in the sense that good is what is beneficial for society.
3. Humans are essentially modulating the probabilities that occur naturally and to that extent free will is real. I'm tempted to say free will is as real as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - but since I'm not sure, I'd say the probability of that is greater than 0.5 . Why ? Because biology comes from first principles and modern physics is ruled by probability. The first chemical forms would have to have taken it into account.
1. Yes i should have mentioned that about the universe; the pdfs are deterministic. I dont agree about "effectively random"; chaos != randomness. But, crucially, at the level of biological molecules that mediate most brain processes, quantum effects have little significance.
3. I disagree strongly with theidea that free will can arise from quantum uncertainty or randomness. That's not free will, that's random will. Unfortunately, great scientists have like R. Penrose advocate such things, but i believe most neuroscientists believe it to be hokum nowadays.
Randomness is relative to the knowledge of an observer. If you can not work out what a system is going to do in advance, it's random to you. If nobody in the universe can work out what a system is going to do in advance, even in principle (which can be established by complexity arguments and such), then it's as good as random, even if the universe is fully deterministic.
"Absolute" randomness isn't a useful concept, it tends to come apart in your hand when examined. Even if the universe is deterministic, you aren't smart enough to make it not random for you, nor can you be.
Randomness is random, if it is somehow entangled with another system then it there are hidden variables that haven't been discovered yet. Quantum physics is "absolutely" random ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory for the story).
Hidden variables have not been disproved. What has been proved by Bell's inequalities is that any hidden variables that exist must themselves be irreducibly "quantum", so interest in the theory faded because for those of us on the inside of the universe the existence of fundamentally indeterminate hidden variables is just an unnecessary useless complication. But hidden variables may still exist. For instance, a computer simulating our universe may be using a deterministic PRNG (with strong statistical properties) to resolve quantum mechanics, which makes it deterministic on the outside for those who know and control the PRNG, while appearing fully random on the inside.
There is no such thing as "absolutely random". I'm not kidding, if you try to really seriously define it with math it comes apart in your hands. Both randomness and probability are intrinsically relative.
- I think the OP was referring to chaotic systems as effectively random, which they are not
- It certainly forces us to redefine what is the meaning of free will, if we dont accept dualism. Since Libet's experiments there are many others that have shown quite convincingly that our conscious "will" is predetermined from our brain processes even seconds before we are aware of our "will", and what's more that subconscious process can be manipulated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will has some pointers (although i didn't read the whole)
(1) You've stepped into and apparently completely ignored the exact fallacy pointed out by the grandparent of this comment.
(2) You offered arbitrary assertions without evidence. You know what I think; if you want to counter it, give evidence. Shouting louder doesn't do you any good.
To respond to your arbitrary assertions:
- Yes, but not in the sense you mean.
- No. Right and wrong must be discovered.
- No. Depends on your definition of "free will," but in general, no.
Thanks for an interesting and thoughtful response. :-)
Unfortunately, my reading list is tooo long to add anything new anywhere near the front of the queue, unless it's something that is absolutely earth-shattering. I see that the book you suggest is rated highly on Amazon. But the first review that comes up for me (maybe it's the first one for you, too) is a June 5 review by a neuroscientist (supposedly) who discounts the book as being highly intellectually sloppy.
I actually think we may agree on the second overall bullet point. Which is a lot closer than I thought we were. However, I think certain empiricist philosophers have been pretty mistaken. I'm not an expert in either analytic or continental philosophy, but wasn't Hume the famous empiricist who posed the "is-ought" dichotomy and rejected the possibility of finding any solution to it? Any Rand posed a solution to this problem, and I agree with her. I can provide further references up on request.
On the third bullet point: I think "free will" is properly understood as a person's ability to choose whether or not to think about something. The more they think, the more refined their conclusions become. It's wrong to just claim that people are a product of their genes and environment, which implicitly ignores this thinking process. So to answer the question, the actor's "will" is the key factor here (if you want to use that word), but of course there is nothing supernatural going on.
I think it's ironic that Elon Musk starts off by railing against reasoning by analogy and then ends up with analogizing human behavior using the technological metaphor of his age.
More specifically, it's our tendency to rely on the current technological metaphor to analogize the brain that contributes to misunderstanding and false equivalency: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/metaphors.pdf
I think this ability is really valuable, but there's so many barriers to
people getting experience with it.
To do it, you have to venture into the unknown without a map. You have to
make the map yourself, and you have to figure out how to do that. You don't know how long that will take, but it is likely to take quite a while. While you're working at it you will not have a very clear understanding of exactly what your position is, and you won't be able to articulate it clearly to others. And of course you will have to go against what "everybody knows" (but really just think they know).
There's so many barriers to this that come from our social and
institutional norms, where it's generally expected that you can explain
what you're doing, that you can say why it is better, that you can estimate
how long it will take, etc, and where it's frowned upon if you can't do
these things. And where it's generally frowned upon to "have the arrogance" to "go against" what people of high-standing came up with or take to be true.
In the end he says that after having had 5 kids he believes that nature has a much stronger impact on people's personalities than nurture. That surprised me, I wish he could have elaborated on it.
That book is excellent. In the same vein, you can read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, or if you want to dig deeper, check out the studies cited in those books.
I'm all down for first-principles reasoning, but I don't like that term for some reason. For some reason it makes me think it's unduly favoring deduction and making assumptions whenever possible, even though it's not. If you start from good first principles, like the axioms of probability theory, all of a sudden you get inductive inference and deductive as a special case. Yay! Nevertheless I'd still more enjoy shouting "Baaaaaaaayes!" from the rooftops than "First Principles!"
From the context in which he's saying it, I don't think he means it in the sense you're thinking. I thought his reference to physics was an analogy, not an exact statement. I took it to mean more "don't assume that what you hear is true, if what you conclude based on the things you know is different, you should go with that."
I recently began teaching in a school where students are required to write extensively in every class, including "extras" like PE, Music, or Art. I've found that, generally, students who have been subjected to that system for a number of years are far better at reasoning (and expressing that reasoning, naturally) than those who are new to the school. (It is astonishing how quickly new students, who inevitably struggle with complex reasoning at the beginning of the school year have made leaps and bounds in this area, and are far more skilled at verbal reasoning by the end of the school year).
All of which is to say: I think that this style of thinking is greatly buttressed by enhanced linguistic ability, as language is critical to higher-level thinking.
Very interesting video, and the interactive transcript was extremely cool.