How Elon Musk Thinks: Reasoning from First Principles.
oninnovation.com
oninnovation.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Right and wrong are social constructions. In science, people use empiricism as a criterion
- Free will requires the existence of a supernatural "self" or actor. Good luck finding it.
(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.
- You need a tool to "discover" right and wrong, just like you need a metric tensor to measure length. That tool is empiricism.
- If it's not the actor's will, whose is it?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Does determinism rule out free will? I don't think it does.
- 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)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xj9b1h_selfish-reasons-to-h...
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.
That's not first principles just to be clear.
"First principles"... Must be that our interpretation of physics is THE first principles.