07.22.10
Posted in General Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, measurement, ontology, philosophy, science at 6:39 pm by nogre
4.2 Relativistic Evolution
4.2.1 Two Kinds of Fitness
To understand Natural Selection we need to understand fitness and how to calculate its value. One way the fitness of an organism can be understood is in terms of how well it will be able to interact with its ecology to acquire what it needs to live and reproduce. The traits of the organism will be crucial as it struggles to survive: every little adaptation or edge that the organism has can be the difference between survival and death. Therefore the traits of the organism determine its fitness.
However, the fitness of an organism is dependent upon its environment. The different situations an organism finds itself in, which are determined by the ecology and chance, will determine its ability to reproduce. For example being fast is meaningless if there is no secure footing to run on. Therefore it is the situation that determines the traits that matter and hence fitness is a function of environmental selection.
At this point it can look as if there are two distinct and incompatible methods for calculating the fitness of an organism: trait based selection and environmental selection.
4.2.2 The Equality of Trait Selection and Environmental Selection
Imagine a jaguar out in the jungle. Unbeknownst to anyone, however, his welfare is being carefully monitored by stealthy scientists. Any time the jaguar might be in trouble, be it a lack of food or an unfriendly competitor, the scientists step in and protect the jaguar from harm and do it without being seen.
An independent observer, someone who doesn’t know about the scientists watching over the jaguar, might think that the jaguar has an uncanny ability to find food and avoid dangerous situations. He might suspect that the jaguar has excellent ears that can hear danger from very far away and a nose that can smell even the faintest waft of food. He would believe that in the struggle for survival the jaguar was incredibly well adapted.
Ought we to smile at the man and say that he errs in his conclusion? I do not believe we should. We could be in the very same position as the jaguar. We like to think that we have evolved the way we have by struggling and adapting. However, we may have just as easily been assisted by some benevolent but reclusive extraterrestrials. They could be the reason our species has been able to accomplish all that we have, and we would not know.
Regardless of the existence of any such extraterrestrials, the example shows that we cannot tell the difference between struggling and surviving based upon traits, and nature conforming (or disconforming) to our adaptations. It is a matter of perspective to believe either that our adaptations were the cause of our success or if it was the environment that happened to favor us.
4.2.3 The Natural Selection Field
Instead of switching back and forth between environmental and trait selection, we can say that both kinds of selection create a field. This field is ontologically as basic as the two kinds of selection and it is what interacts with the individual organisms and environment. The interactions of an organism and the field determines the course of the organism’s life, and an ecology’s total field is determined by everything in it.
Although every organism and each ecology is unique, none are alien. By looking at similar organisms and similar ecologies, we can use natural history to determine important adaptations and key environmental features. Taken together these features specify the shape of the Natural Selection field of that ecology, which informs us on how an organism or species will interact with their environment.
An organism’s overall fitness will determine how great its effect will be in the Natural Selection field. Introducing a species with high fitness into a new ecosystem can cause great changes, whereas introducing a species into an environment that it cannot survive in will barely create a change at all. For example, when humans, with our high fitness, move into a new area, we will profoundly alter that ecology. However, if we bring a flower with us that can’t survive the cold nights in our new home, then the flower will die, barely registering any change in the Natural Selection field.
4.2.4 General Relativistic Natural Selection
With the existence of the field we can say how evolution acts upon a species. At every moment an organism interacts with a natural selection field created by its surrounding ecology. The constant interaction with the field will gradually modify the species by benefiting certain individuals and by putting others at a disadvantage.
Insofar as the natural selection field is indistinguishable from the struggle for survival, we will not be able to further analyze why species change: this theory is terminal in the same way as General Relativity. If we could show that the way organisms and species benefitted or were put at a disadvantaged by the environment, without regard to the individual adaptations of the organisms, or conversely show how an adaptation increased an organism’s fitness without regard to the environment, then an investigation into these specific phenomena could yield insight into why a species changes. However, since we cannot make this distinction, the natural selection field is the final answer as to why a species changes.
Unlike the previous theory, general relativistic natural selection is wider because it is applicable during rapid ecological changes. The prior theory of natural selection relied upon trait based analysis to determine future reproductive success and hence was unable to accurately predict success during rapid change. Relativized natural selection can say that the organisms and species experiencing a disaster (or utopia) are experiencing a change in the natural selection field. This change in the natural selection field manifests as a rapid change in the lives of the organisms. Once the ecological change is finished, then we can revert back to the old notion of natural selection.
[this is an excerpt from a longer paper, which can be found here]
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07.13.10
Posted in General Relativity, Relativity, biology, epistemology, evolution, fitness, measurement, philosophy, physics, science at 5:18 pm by nogre
New theory of evolution! Hooray!
Patched a bunch of things together to make a nice story. Fixed the little issue about fitness being circular. Expanded natural selection to apply more generally. Causal structure. Epistemological foundations. ooOoOO0Ooooooo.
And it’s good fun. I swear. Epistemology, history of physics, evolution… makes me happy. You should really read it.
Download here. [pdf, 304kb]
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02.23.10
Posted in argumentation, biology, evolution, fitness, news, philosophy, science at 12:13 pm by nogre
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher have posted a review of Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini’s “What Darwin Got Wrong” (via Leiter).
It is a well executed, though flawed, counter to Fodor’s arguments. First they give a nice rundown of the underdetermination issue I posted about here.
Then they discuss the “intensional fallacy”. They argue that the crux of F & P’s argument can be seen as trying to split up the causal efficacious trait and the selected-for trait. This means that F & P believe that there is no way to connect the evolutionary reason – the trait that increased an organism’s fitness – with our explanation of the trait that was selected-for. Block & Kitcher argue that it is trivial to match the two up because
selection-for is a causal notion, and, since causation is extensional, so is selection-for.
Insofar as we believe that our explanation of the selected-for trait is extensional, i.e. truth-preserving when switching between different names of the same thing, we can say that we do pick out the causally efficacious trait.
Unfortunately Block and Kitcher sacrificed our normal concept of explanation to make this counter-argument. They note that explanations are never normally extensional, but that we are making an exception in this case. This is ok to do because
we thinking beings can give (intensional) explanations in terms of [one trait] rather than the other properties. In giving the explanation, we (thinking beings) describe the property in our preferred way.
I do not understand what is going on here. Basically it looks as if “preferred way” is just a fancy way to say “own words”, but describing something in our own words doesn’t make it right. Nor is it a reason to change what should count as an explanation.
Unless Block and Kitcher are prepared to give further justification as to why we should disregard our normal understanding of explanation, it looks as if their solution to Fodor’s argument is ad hoc. They are using explanation* — which is a special kind of explanation that can be extensional — but they have not given a reason why explanation* should be preferred over of regular explanation (outside of causing Fodor trouble). Without this reason, the use of explanation* is ad hoc, and hence the argument fails because it turns on an ad hoc premise: the assumption that explanation* can be substituted for explanation.
However, I did say above that Block and Kitcher’s argument is well executed: My argument against using an ad hoc term-term* distinction is obscure compared to their argument and so, for the vast majority of people, it will appear that their argument is effective. Overall this is a good thing: less nonsense needs to surround evolution (though I’ll be a little sad to see it go: I’m #1 in a Google search for “fodor what darwin got wrong“).
[EDIT: I've put up a new analysis (24 March 2010) of Fodor's argument here: Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo. It also includes a review of the responses of Block, Kitcher and Sober ]
For my take on what Fodor got wrong, see my post What Fodor Got Wrong, and the follow up Dismantling Fodor’s Argument (also linked above in reference to underdetermination). I’ll post something soon specifically addressing the intensionality issue: Fodor’s Intensional Criticism of Evolution.
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10.08.09
Posted in biology, evolution, fitness, philosophy, science at 7:24 pm by nogre
Let us assume that there are different kinds of adaptations. Specifically, some are better than others in the long run: some adaptations will only make a difference in an organism’s ability to reproduce viable offspring over a short period of time, whereas others will be beneficial for many generations.
In asexual reproduction there is no mechanism for distinguishing between a short term beneficial adaptation and a long term beneficial adaptation. This subjects long term beneficial adaptations to being potentially overshadowed by short term beneficial adaptations and genetic drift: if a short-term genetic change sweeps through a population, some adaptations can be wiped out. This sort of (selected for or not selected for) genetic drift would be tempered if it were forced to go across the different biologies of the two sexes.
With sexual selection there is a mechanism for selecting long term beneficial adaptations over short term ones. Long term beneficial adaptations will have to be good for both sexes: if an adaptation is beneficial to both the male and female – individuals with significantly different biologies – then it is more likely to be good for the entire species. Short term beneficial adaptations may only be good for particular individuals or one sex, depending on the mutation. This makes it less likely for short term, provincial adaptations (or drift) to last because they won’t be as effective across different the different biological make-up of the two sexes.
Therefore by distributing mutations across two different sexes – two similar but different biologies – long term beneficial adaptations can be selected for.
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10.01.09
Posted in biology, evolution, fitness, game theory, philosophy, science at 11:20 am by nogre
Say you are a single celled organism. To reproduce you have to double your size and then you need to split yourself in half. Repeat indefinitely.
Now say you are a single celled organism that has the option to reproduce sexually. To reproduce you need to increase yourself to 3/2 your original size and find a similar mate. Then you both contribute 1/2 to the new organism and repeat indefinitely.
Asexual reproduction requires you to double in size; sexual reproduction requires only a 3/2 increase. Therefore the turn-around time for sexual reproduction is inherently shorter than for asexual reproduction (assuming there are viable mates readily available).
Is there a selective benefit to a shorter turn around time for reproduction? If the species must constantly be adapting to a changing environment (that would be everyone), then having a higher rate at which new mutations (and thence adaptations) are introduced into the population is critical.
Secondly, given that there is enough food but it takes time to collect, I count more offspring for sexual reproduction:
In sexual reproduction, there is an additional child from the first generation of children (as compared to asexual splitting) created in the same amount of time: At the +50% mark #1 & #2 mate to create #5, and #3 & #4 mate to create #6. Then, at the 100% mark (or plus an additional 50%) #1 & #2 mate to create #7, #3 & #4 mate to create #8, and, at the same time, the initial children #5 & #6 mate to create #9. #9 is also one generation ahead of the offspring of asexual replication.
Now, to be honest, I’m confused. I don’t think that anything above is particularly complicated. However, Wikipedia does not note this as a benefit of sexual reproduction. It actually says that asexual reproduction is much faster. This makes me think that I must have made a mistake or else someone would have added it.
The going theory appears to be that since every organism in an asexually reproducing species can give off children, then there is twice the potential for offspring. This completely ignores any struggle that an organism might have that would prevent it from reproducing, or that work can be split with a mate making it easier to reproduce.
My main assumptions are, among others, that there already is a significant population of organisms, the organisms are not too fussy about their mates (no significant waste of energy searching for a mate), energy / work is being split with the mate, and that the limiting factor has to do with gathering food. I can’t see how, if these (reasonable?) assumptions hold, sexual reproduction isn’t the dominant, winning strategy.
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04.24.09
Posted in Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, philosophy, science, technology at 4:48 pm by nogre
I’m sure the dearth of posts here has not gone completely unnoticed. So what in the world have I been up to? While it is possible that I had decided to forgo my normal practice of just making up philosophy as I see fit, this, of course, is ridiculous.
I do not know if any of my readers have been around since the beginning, but this blog started out with a good deal of my philosophy of biology. The one-sentence description of my philosophy of biology is: I have relativized the theory of fitness within evolution and comported the rest of evolutionary theory to make it work.
In the last few months I’ve been teaching myself to program and, as of today, I have incorporated as much of my theory of evolution into a simulation as I can possibly hope to accomplish (at the moment). All that is left is to get all the bugs out.
It is not every day that I can say that I have created something that is a direct result of a theory of philosophy, moreover a theory that I have personally developed. I’m pretty stoked. There is still a good amount of work getting the thing to actually run from this point forward, but at least none of the issues will be theoretical, just technical.
And of course there is no guarantee that things will go the way I want them to, but at least I gave it a shot.
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03.20.09
Posted in General Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, measurement, philosophy, physics, science at 1:21 pm by nogre
Fodor argued that the theory of evolution is not a legitimate theory of science because it is either vacuously true or wrong. He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy. (synopsis here)
Insofar as he made no logical mistakes in his reasoning, we need a different strategy to defend the theory of evolution. In this post I will argue that his argument is an instance of gerneral underdetermination, and hence not a problem of evolution but of philosophy of science.
Underdetermination means that we can’t specifically identify the exact cause of scientific phenomena. For example, given some phenomenon, say darkness during the day, there can be many possible explanations: an eclipse, an exploding volcano shooting ash into the air, the sun has gone out, the electric company has blocked the sun to make more money, it was the work of Claw Vipers, etc. The exact cause of the darkness is underdetermined; sure we can research the problem and eliminate some of the possible explanations, but because of our limitations we will never be able to check everything. So the cause of the darkness can be said to be underdetermined, i.e. there is just not enough determining evidence.
Fodor argues that the theory of evolution is vacuous becuase given any trait we identify as benficial to the fitness of the organism is arbitrarily selected. Since there are too many factors to identify within an ecosystem or organism acting within that ecosystem, any hypothesis we propose about the fitness of that organism in that ecosystem will be trivially compatible with evolution.
For example assume there is an argument that having a certain trait, say longer legs, increases a zebra’s fitness. We can recognize that this argument could be unfounded because it might not be the longer legs but something else that increases the zebra’s fitness. It just happened that increased leg length was a harmless side affect of this truly beneficial trait. Either way, if it is the longer legs or some other unidentified trait, evolution is always compatible with our theories, and so it is trivially vacuously true.
In short I would say that he is arguing the cause of natural selection is underdetermined. The task is to identify whether this is a unique case of underdetermination or an instance of general underdetermination. I will now show that this sort of underdetermination can exist in physics*:
Imagine we are doing physics and we want to know which of two metal ingots is the more massive. We pull out our scale, place each object on one of the trays and wait for the scale to indicate which is the more massive.
Why does the scale tip in the direction of object A? We could argue that object A has a trait, it is composed of iron, and that trait makes it more massive than some other object. However, maybe object B is connected to a helium balloon. Maybe there is a gravitational anomaly in the location where we are doing our experiment. Maybe the iron is magnetized and there is another ingot with the opposite polarity under the table. Maybe a God is tampering with our experiment with a noodly appendage. Feel free to make up as many of these as you want. There any number of reasons why one object could tip the scale in its favor, and being more massive is among them, though selecting this as the reason is arbitrary.
(One of the things that is wrong here is that we don’t expect General Relativity to predict which objects are more massive. The mass of an object is the result of the history of its creation and ‘life’ up till the point we measure it. We do expect Relativity to suggest methods for testing such claims, which it does. Likewise Evolution should not be expected to predict which organism is fitter, but to suggest methods for testing fitness.)
If I now recast Fodor’s criticism into physical terms, in reference to the above thought experiment, this is the result: The theory of General Relativity (gravity) is vacuous because any given trait we identify as increasing the mass of an object is arbitrarily selected. Since there are too many factors to identify within a physical system, any hypothesis we propose about mass of the object in that physical system will be trivially compatible with General Relativity.
Therefore physics suffers from the same kind of underdetermination that Fodor accused of evolution. Anyone who persists in disbelieving evolution on these grounds should also deny General Relativity. Of course this is excessive: since the underdetermination criticism goes to the heart of our scientific theories in general, it is a problem of philosophy of science and not a problem of biology or physics specifically. Insofar as underdetermination remains an issue within the philosophy of science we still have to take it into consideration, but this should not be seen as a reason to think our current scientific theories are wrong.
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[EDIT: I've put up a new analysis (24 March 2010) of Fodor's argument here: Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo]
See a continuation of the argument against Fodor in What Fodor Got Wrong, and in Fodor’s Intensional Criticism of Evolution.
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* This is the argument I presented Fodor with during our brief conversation after his talk at CUNY. He tried to block it by saying that Natural Selection is statistical, whereas General Relativity is not. In my previous post, What Fodor Got Wrong, I argued that this position begs the question or is just wrong.
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03.18.09
Posted in biology, evolution, fitness, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 2:29 pm by nogre
Jerry Fodor recently (4 March) gave a talk entitled “What Darwin Got Wrong” at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy and hence said, straight out, that he didn’t believe in the theory of evolution.
So what exactly does Fodor think Darwin got wrong?
He believes that the theory of evolution is vacuously true (or just wrong) and hence not a worthwhile theory of science.
You can sink your teeth into the argument in this synopsis, but be forewarned, the argument is good: you may, depending upon your convictions, be forced to disbelieve the theory of evolution. However, it doesn’t identify all the critical presuppositions that Fodor uses (this is no fault of the synopsis; it is accurate to the argument), and these are what are really necessary to show where Fodor is mistaken.
[The one day, the ONE DAY, a year that there is a talk specifically having to do with my work on philosophy of science and biology and I have an international plane flight to catch only a few hours after the talk. I happily was able to catch the whole talk but I couldn't stay for the question and answer session. So I did the only thing I could think of and asked my questions during the break and ran out of the building (literally). The following quote is accurate as far as I can remember, and, as far as I know, I am the only one who heard him say it.]
Fodor said,
“Natural Selection is statistical. It just is.”
What does this mean?
In my world Natural Selection is a force. It is a force that changes species over time. For example lets take some species of bacteria. A few of the bacteria in that species adapt to be able to eat a novel sort of food and this gives them an advantage over the others. Eventually these bacteria are able to replicate more often and eventually most of the overall bacteria population has this trait. Hence the species has changed from not having a certain property to having a certain property. If you ask me what caused this change in the bacteria population, I would say that Natural Selection was the cause or force behind the change in the species.
There are two ways I can think of interpreting Fodor’s statement: 1) Natural Selection is statistical and not a force. 2) Natural Selection is statistical and a force.
Taking the first interpretation that Natural Selection is statistical and not a force, how are we to understand my little story about the bacteria above? Perhaps: “The change in the physiology of certain bacteria statistically increased their fitness over the other bacteria. Hence those bacteria were able to replicate more readily and eventually outnumber bacteria without that trait.” The thing that changed the species was the increased fitness, which was caused by the physiological change. Natural Selection was the result of this change and can be observed statistically by seeing how individual organisms with that trait were able to fair better than their compatriots. Therefore Natural Selection is a non-causal description or explanation of how species change.
This is immediately problematic because a description or explanation is always describing or explaining something that already exists: it will always be vacuously true, e.g. snow is white if(f) snow is white, or it will just be wrong, e.g. snow is blue. Therefore, by assuming that Natural Selection is statistical and not a force, we have begged the question against Natural Selection.
Now let’s take a look at option 2: Natural Selection is statistical and a force.
As a force Natural Selection is the cause of things. Causes can work directly, such as one object striking another and causing it to change direction, or as a field does, by creating an environmental disturbance of some sort which affects the object. Natural Selection falls (more or less) into the latter category: the environment changes and this causes species to change, to adapt.
Is Natural Selection statistical under this interpretation? No. If Natural Selection acts in the way a field does, by changing the environment which then affects things in that environment, then at every point there is some local interaction between the field and the object. Otherwise we have a theory of action-at-a-distance, i.e. one thing is causing something to happen without any way for us to identify the underlying process: a theory of magic. If something is acting statistically, then it is acting at different places with no known connection between them. However, evolution comes with a ready made theory of local interactions: every organism is constantly struggling for survival. The struggle for survival ensures that there is a connection between Natural Selection and the environment. Therefore if Natural Selection is a force, it cannot also be statistical.
[I can confirm that Fodor believed that the struggle for survival was not critical because earlier in our brief conversation he said that the struggle for survival was merely a metaphor. I responded by saying that Natural Selection is a metaphor then too, but he disagreed.]
In conclusion, by assuming that Natural Selection is statistical and ignoring the local interactions in the struggle for survival, Fodor has begged the question against evolution. As a statistical non-causal explanation, Natural Selection cannot act as a force in evolution. Once evolution has lost it’s driving force, it no longer can function as a working scientific theory. However, believing that Natural Selection is a non-causal explanation is unfounded. The theory of evolution provides a method – the struggle for survival – that explains how Natural Selection causes change in species via the environment, and ignoring this is what Fodor got wrong.
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[EDIT: I've put up a new analysis (24 March 2010) of Fodor's argument here: Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo]
See a continuation of the argument against Fodor in Dismantling Fodor’s Argument, and in Fodor’s Intensional Criticism of Evolution.
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08.18.08
Posted in Relativity, Special Relativity, biology, epistemology, evolution, fitness, independence friendly logic, logic, measurement, mind, philosophy, physics, science, technology at 1:26 pm by nogre
I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability.
What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns:
a measure of how likely it is that some event will occur; a number expressing the ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible …
So it’s a measure of likelihood. What’s likelihood? Google returns:
The probability of a specified outcome.
Awesome. So ‘probability as likelihood’ is non-explanatory. What about this ‘ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible’? I’m pretty wary about the word favorable. Let’s modify this definition to read:
a number expressing the ratio of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
Nor do I like ‘a number expressing…’ This refers to a particular probability, not probability at large, so let’s go back to using ‘measure’:
a measure of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
We need to be a bit more explicit about what we are measuring:
a measure of the frequency of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.
OK. I think this isn’t that bad. When we flip a fair coin the probability is the frequency of landing on heads compared to the total cases possible, heads + tails, so 1 out of 2. Pretty good.
But notice the addition of the word fair. Where did it come from, what’s it doing there? Something is said to be fair if that thing shows no favoritism to any person or process. In terms of things that act randomly, this means that the thing acts in a consistently random way. Being consistently random means it is always random, not sometimes random and other times not random. This means that fairness has to do with the distribution of the instances of the cases we are studying. What governs this distribution?
In the case of of a coin, the shape of the coin and the conditions under which it is measured make all the difference in the distribution of heads and tails. The two sides, heads and tails, must be distinguishable, but the coin must be flipped in a way such that no one can know which side will land facing up. The shape of the coin, even with uniform mass distribution, cannot preclude this previous condition. Therefore the source of probability is the interdependence of physical conditions (shape and motion of the coin) and an epistemic notion (independence of knowledge of which side will land up). When the physical conditions and our knowledge of the conditions are dependent upon each other then the situation becomes probabilistic because the conditions preclude our knowing the exact outcome of the situation.
It is now time to recall that people cheat at gambling all the time. A trio of people in March 2004 used a computer and lasers to successfully predict the decaying orbit of a ball spinning on a roulette wheel (and walked out with £1.3 million). This indicates that after a certain point it is possible to predict the outcome of a coin flipping or a roulette ball spinning, so the dependence mentioned above is eventually broken. However this is only possible once the coin is flipping or the roulette ball is rolling, not before the person releases the roulette ball or flips the coin.
With the suggestion that it is the person that determines the outcome we can expand the physical-epistemic dependence to an physical-epistemic-performative one. If I know that I, nor anyone else, can predict the outcome until after I perform a task, then the knowledge of the outcome is dependent upon how I perform that task.
This makes sense because magicians and scam artists train themselves to be able to perform tasks like shuffling and dealing cards in ways that most of us think is random but are not. The rest of us believe that there is a dependence between the physical setup and the outcome that precludes knowing the results, but this is merely an illusion that is exploited.
What about instances in which special training or equipment is unavailable; can we guarantee everyone’s ability to measure the thing in question to be equal? We can: light. Anyone who can see at all sees light that is indistinguishable from the light everyone else sees: it has no haecceity.
This lack of distinguishability, lack of haecceity (thisness), is not merely a property of the photon but a physical characteristic of humans. We have no biology that can distinguish one photon from another of equivalent wavelength. To distinguish something we have to use a smaller feature of the thing to tell it apart from its compatriots. Since we cannot see anything smaller, this is impossible. Nor is there a technology that we could use to augment our abilities: for us to have a technology that would see something smaller than a photon would require us to know that the technology interacted at a deeper level with reality than photons do. But we cannot know that because we are physically limited to using the photon as our minimal measurement device. The act of sight is foundational: we cannot see anything smaller than a photon nor can anything smaller exist in our world.
The way we perceive photons will always be inherently distributed because of this too. We cannot uniquely identify a single photon, and hence we can’t come back and measure the properties of a photon we have previously studied. Therefore the best we will be able to accomplish when studying photons is to measure a group of photons and use a distribution of their properties, making photons inherently probabilistic. Since the act of seeing light is a biological feature of humans, we all have equal epistemological footing in this instance. This means that the epistemic dependence mentioned above can be ignored because it adds nothing to the current discussion. Therefore we can eliminate the epistemic notion from our above dependence, reducing it to a physical-performative interdependence.
Since it is a historical/ evolutionary accident that the photon is the smallest object we can perceive, the photon really is not fundamental to this discussion. Therefore, the interdependence of the physical properties of the smallest things we can perceive and our inherent inability to tell them apart is a source of probability in nature.
This is a source of natural randomness as well: once we know the probability of some property that we cannot measure directly, the lack of haecceity means that we will not be able to predict when we will measure an individual with said property. Therefore the order in which we measure the property will inherently be random. [Assume the contradiction: the order in which we measure the property is not random, but follows some pattern. Then there exists some underlying structure that governs the appearance of the property. However, since we are already at the limit of what can be measured, no such thing can exist. Hence the order in which we measure the property is random.]
————–
If I were Wittgenstein I might have said:
Consider a situation in which someone asks, “How much light could you see?” Perhaps a detective is asking a hostage about where he was held. But then the answer is, “I didn’t look.” —— And this would make no sense.
hmmmm…. I did really mean to get back to gambling.
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03.18.08
Posted in biology, ethics, evolution, fitness, mind, philosophy, technology at 9:47 pm by nogre
The only ways to enhance the mind is to learn or evolve. Since evolution is out of our hands, all that is left is to learn.
Drugs that purport psychopharmacological enhancement do not do what their name states: they may change certain psychological factors but there is no drug that will make you smarter. This would be to eat from the tree of knowledge.
However drugs may be able to let you do things that you were unable previously, but this is nothing mysterious. If you do not breath enough oxygen, you will not be able to run. You get enough oxygen, you will be able to do more things. Now is oxygen a performance enhancing drug? It depends: the World Anti-Doping Agency recently ruled on oxygen tents (tents that vary the amount of oxygen inside) because using these tents can affect red blood cell counts. This example illustrates two things: that there is nothing inherently special about any particular chemical, be it oxygen or a newfangled drug, and secondly, that drugs only affect intermediary situations, not the final outcome.
The first point is that there is no moral dimension associated with the chemicals themselves. If it is possible to use the most fundamental of chemicals required for our survival in a way that could be seen as inappropriate, then any other chemical could be equally accused. If any chemical can be equally accused, then there is nothing unique about any individual chemical that makes its use morally wrong.
The second point is that drugs only have a specific range of effects. In the above example, the oxygen tents affect red blood cell count. An increased red blood cell count can be used to boost endurance, but this benefit will only appear under certain situations. The tents themselves do not increase endurance: they merely increase red blood cells. If a different drug was consumed to weaken the muscles, then the two ‘drugs’ would counteract each other and there would be no change in ability. Therefore it is not a drug that gives people an ability, such as endurance, but a drug may change how an ability is expressed.
The question is (and always was), “What do you want?” Since drugs have no moral dimension nor imbue the user with unknown (super-human) ability, the only issue is of fair play. Fair play in terms of other people and with your own goals. If you want to be able to lift heavy things, then you can use a machine, you can use drugs or you can work hard. Using a machine or drugs is to use someone else’s technology to assist whatever ability you have. If you use discipline to achieve the same results, then the technology that is being used is your own. Therefore if you are trying to play fair with others, then you have to ensure everyone has access to the same technology, be it machine or drug. If you are trying to achieve something yourself, then only you know whether or not using drugs makes a difference.
As we learn what is safe(r), we are going to have a fun future. Nothing changes our natural born ability or the hard work we have put in, but that has never stopped us from trying. Better drugs are on the way and this means options will be open to us that weren’t possible in the past. Good luck, be safe, have fun.
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