Recollection of a Dinner Party

It’s early. 0100. I’ve just come home from walking a guest at my latest party to her bus stop. Cleaned up a bit. Now I’m sitting here. A few interesting topics came up

For a while I talked to a the smartest man in St Vincent, the philosophy PHD, hedge fund dude and Mats guy about dualism vs physicalism. Hedge fund guy said he used to be a dualist but changed his mind when he heard a good counterargument. The argument was roughly that physical things seem distinct, but actually the way we draw boundaries around them is arbitrary. He perceived himself as distinct from the sofa he was sitting on and the sofa as distinct from the small pillows on it. An alien visiting earth might see them all as one object. It’s unclear why any one set of boundaries would be more correct. Even on the level of a boundary, all objects bleed into each other at an atomic level anyway. So, in short there is no objective, crisp distinction between physical objects. He believes that minds are distinct. It seems obvious to him that his mind is separate from mine. But if minds are based on physical things then they must also flow into each other which can’t be the case. Hence minds cannot be physical.

There were a few objections to this. First, maybe minds do flow into each other in a similar way. The thoughts and ideas of others shape my thoughts and ideas. Even non verbal things, like a friend anxiously pacing next to me, change my mood and state. Just like an alien may draw different boundaries around objects, so they could draw different boundaries around where a “mind” begins and ends. This is reminicent of the spiderweb argument from years ago. The story goes that some spiders have tiny brains but display much smarter behaviour than they should. It turns out that the offload memory and some computation to their web. Is their web part of their mind/brain? The second objection was similar but slightly different. So maybe boundaries and the talk of what objects are real or not is just misleading. There is base reality. The lines we draw around things are just useful abstractions. The most basic physical laws and particles (or the stream of qualia you experience if you want to be precise) is Real with a capital R. A jumbo jet is real in the sense that the label I apply to certain configurations of atoms may or may not accurately describe a given place in space and time. But it’s not Real in an objective sense and an alien or different person could well categorize the same atoms differently. (e.g: seeing a metal shell and an interior hollow space as two different components).

At some point the conversation moved on. The smartest man was a Christian and described himself as a dualist but he actually held a computational view of consciousness. I asked him his intuitions about replacing his brain atom by atom with computational equivalent silicone processors. He thought he’d be the same person. We wasted a bit of time discussing the definition of dualism vs physicalism and whether computationalism was a form of dualism or not really? He argued it was because you believe the mind is a separate kind of thing. A pattern rather than a specific physical arrangement of atoms. Me and Andrea argued that the computationalism still grounded out in concrete reality. The mind was a pattern but that pattern was instantiated in and entirely dependent on the physical world. Yes it could exist on different kinds of substrate or physical material but still it was a physical phenomenon just like other kinds of pattern. e.g: rain. Dualism holds that minds are a separate, non-physical thing entirely. That the destruction of physical objects could sever the connection to the mind, but that the mind still exists independently. So by our definition he wasn’t really a dualist.

After this I left, let people in and generally hovered around. When I came back the conversation had turned to identity and the teleport experiment. Andrea had left and a bit of the way in the polish power couple had joined. The conversation boiled down to personspace vs continuity of consciousness views of identity. There wasn’t a good resolution. They played around with different examples for a bit but the core difference in intuitions always remained. I think over the years I’ve come to the view that philosophy of identity is similar to ethics. It is possible to make meaningful progress, to have thought experiments which make you reify your beliefs etc… But still it ultimately rests not on a shared external reality but on a set of intuitions that people hold. Just like in ethics, even if you do it well sometimes you’ll reach moral bedrock and just discover that two people hold different axiomatic beliefs or tradeoff rations between moral goods, so in identity some people just have very different views of what it mean to be a person. Hmmmm. Maybe. Or maybe with enough prodding with various “simulated minds but running out of order/inparallel/etc…” arguments and the goldfish gun most continuity of consciousness people should on reflection change their view. I’m unsure.

Other things happened. People talked. At some point while walking outside to get ramen I spoke to the scientist whose parents were atheistic christians. He’d been to China recently where he met one of my close friends. He observed how safe China was and felt. He recounted how at a hike starting spot in a large city there was an open container with water bottles and a box for money to pay if you take one. I’ve heard similar stories from my friend about charging banks or various other things. I heard that public safety was far lower in the past and China was lower social trust. I wonder what’s driven the change? A few theories

• There’s a large technological overhang for crime/bad behaviour reduction. CCTV and facial recognition and effective policing. The west ignores the tech. China embraces it, with CCTV everywhere and swift punishment. This creates an environment which is naturally high trust. Doing anything bad is very likely to be punished/caught. Also, because no one does bad stuff generally it becomes even more culturally frowned upon and even easier to catch because the ratio of police:criminal goes up as the number of criminals goes down but police funding stays roughly constant.
• econ grown = more prosperity/wealth = higher trust
• more commercial culture, the slow escape from low trust communist/authoritarian culture
• they’re east asian. Most developed east asian countries have high social trust and safety (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, etc…). Could be genetic. Could be culture

I came home and eventually sat down and talked to a Ukrainian girl. She had an experience with being cancelled a while ago for writing a fairly banal post comparing moral outrage at sexual abuse of children to broad moral acceptance or at least lack of real concern with all the other ways in which parents can and do severely limit their children’s autonomy or disrespect their consent. We talked a bit. She essentially was concerned about the same problems I was when I was a teenager. Moloch, the inevitable grind of evolution, and what back then I had termed the impossibility of “breaking the chains of causality”. Her point was roughly that we are human beings, but many of our desires, thoughts and actions are shaped by our genes. These are things we do not choose, but rather things that we are enslaved to. We should strive to rise above that, to consciously fight those desires and try to cut them out of ourselves. I broadly agree with her but my counterargument was the standard one. Every desire, impulse, etc… which makes up your utility function is a product of processes outside of your control. Nature. Nurture. Random chance if the universe is not deterministic. Why assume that all desires stemming from genes/nature are bad and those stemming from nurture etc… are fine? Aren’t they all equally arbitrary? Isn’t a better criteria to determine on reflection which of your present desires you want and do not want and then to work on excising or resisting those you do not want to control you. e.g: I like/respect attractive people more. On reflection I would rather not do this and so I fight against this tendency in myself. I don’t want people around me to be tortured and to horribly suffer for no reason. I know this desire also comes from evolution (having your tribe/family suffer is bad if you’re related, maybe reciprocity norms are adaptive at the group and individual level etc…), but it’s a desire I want to have.

Ultimately my conclusion here is similar to the one I made as a child. If you cut away every part of you that was instilled in you by moloch or processes outside of your control, you are left with nothing. Every part of you is bound by the chains of causality. Every decision comes down the the remorseless logic of the physical universe. To somehow break that causality is to also break the machine and set of rules which enable the system you draw a boundary around and call “me” to exist and function. We live in a prison but we also the chains.

Still, maybe that’s too dramatic. Breaking free of causality is impossible. More reflection and consciously rejecting your base desires, cultivating virtue and trying to lift your head out of the mud and towards the stars is something worth doing.

On a meta-level, there’s something terrifying and self-referential about this conversation. Rationally I know my thoughts arise from a deterministic or at best probabilistic process. Intuitively I always thought my thoughts were unique and somehow pure and above the physical world. The fact that my ideas and aim were so different from those around me growing up reinforced that. I felt like I stood above and apart from the masses. Now I meet another smart, autistic eastern European and they happen to have pretty much the exact same obsession with rising above the animal inside and breaking the stranglehold evolution has on mind and body. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.  Strange how a conversation about breaking free of evolution/environment makes me realize how beholden to both I am.