Comment by gjsman-1000
4 days ago
"Your honor, I could not have possibly shot that person, because yesterday might not have been before today, or at least, there is reasonable doubt that yesterday was before today, according to some physicists on crack. I treat those physicists with high regard personally though, and they have degrees that you don't have, so the court must reasonably conclude their opinions should be entertained."
I guess that's a joke, but it's actually kind of serious that causality, personhood, identity, free will, etc. are all social constructs.
They are useful to us, but every now and then it's helpful and humbling to remember it's a fiction we assign, rather than fundamental.
Criminal justice or the concept of culpability is one of these areas. I know I've seen material by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist who does not believe in free will, talking about how off the mark criminal justice and punishment for crimes can be.
You’re stating this as if determinism has been proven beyond a doubt which is not the case.
I think it's unclear what kind of determinism you are presuming. Determinism in the universe? Determinism in consciousness? Certainly a deterministic machine can exist in a non-deterministic universe.
However I didn't just assume a lack of free will. I also assumed a lack of identity. Do you realize that who you are is socially defined? When you breathe in, the air in the room around you becomes part of you. When you breathe out, you lose certain gases. When you eat your food, similar story. There's a good case to be made that "you" are in the entire room or the entire food chain. That does make causality and culpability hard to assess objectively. When we do so, we do so subjectively.
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An interesting corner of philosophy for me is when people worry about perfect clones with all your memories. The only reason it bothers us is because we're not used to our doppelgangers turning up and claiming our sofas and relationships. In a polity where clones are commonplace and provision is made to inform the source and the perfect copy that their material possess will be divided or some stuff will be provided, the shock value would fade away.
That doesn’t affect time in the sense discussed here, though, which is a fundamental dimension in our physical theories.
It's been several years and I'm not fresh enough to summarize it, but some time ago I read Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" which is a pop science book on why that isn't true. Ymmv. I'm sure many reading this know more than I do about the topic.
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Let me strengthen the observation to say they are the “social constructs [most] useful to [those who survive] us.”
"Objection, your honor. In the many-worlds interpretation there is a world in which that happened."
Many-worlds doesn’t predict that everything happens somewhere; far from it.
Well, it's just a joke. :) It doesn't necessarily have to make a lot of sense.
In any case, I find your comment very interesting. I'm studying quantum computing at the moment, and I've had to read the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, including Everett's many-worlds interpretation. As a non-physicist, I've found the different interpretations fascinating.
The many-worlds one, as far as I understood it, says that all the possible outcomes of a quantum measurement actually "happen" in different worlds. I have the impression that you would be able to give a much better explanation.
In any case, in the joke the gun is shot in the macro world, not in a quantum state. It's possible that it is a quantum gun, but probably not.
Let's say "overruled" then.
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I wonder how far counsel could take it before the judge hit them with contempt for lawyering while Nietzsche.