Good and real
"In Good and Real, Gary Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence. Many scientists suspect that the universe can ultimately be described by a simple (perhaps even deterministic) formalism; all that is real unfolds mechanically according to that formalism. But how, then, is it possible for us to be conscious, or to make genuine choices? And how can there be an ethical dimension to such choices? Drescher sketches computational models of consciousness, choice, and subjunctive reasoning--what would happen if this or that were to occur?--to show how such phenomena are compatible with a mechanical, even deterministic universe. Analyses of Newcomb's Problem (a paradox about choice) and the Prisoner's Dilemma (a paradox about self-interest vs. altruism, arguably reducible to Newcomb's Problem) help bring the problems and proposed solutions into focus. Regarding quantum mechanics, Drescher builds on Everett's relative-state formulation--but presenting a simplified formalism, accessible to laypersons--to argue that, contrary to some popular impressions, quantum mechanics is compatible with an objective, deterministic physical reality, and that there is no special connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness.
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8recommend
15mentions
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2008–2024years
73% recommend27% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- As said before in this thread, that won't give you free will, and elsewhere on HN, that you won't even get an uncaused cause. Think of your brain as a cryptographic hash function running on a non-reversible computer mixing the quantum noise into its state if you want, so you get your avalanche effect and chaos theory stuff (though I think that's majorly overstating it, people don't behave that erratically). See Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher (2006), but also see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146
- What do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.
- My brain is absolutely hopeless at top-10-like things. But here are a few gems from some of those categories.
Mathematics: John Conway's "On Numbers and Games". (If you've run across the term "surreal numbers", this is the original source. Absolutely gorgeous, but heavy going if you aren't actually a mathematician.) David McKay's "Information theory, inference, and learning algorithms". (What it says on the tin. Don't expect this to be a practical guide to training neural networks or anything like that; it is a mathematics book.)
Philosophy: Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons". (Contains some exceptionally clear thinking on thorny questions about personal identity and the like.) Gary Drescher's "Good and Real". (Drescher is primarily a computer-science-and-AI guy rather than a philosopher. He addresses a bunch of hairy philosophical questions from that perspective and I personally like it a lot. I confidently predict that some people will hate it.)
Science: Gnaedig, Honyek & Riley's "200 puzzling physics problems". (Just what it says. Roughly undergraduate-physics level, some easier, some harder.) Steven Vogel's "Life in moving fluids". (Explores, e.g., the very considerable differences in what living in water means for a bacterium and for a whale on account of their different size. Fairly technical; he has other lighter books.)
Computing: Donald Knuth's "TeX: the program". (A single volume of literate code, constituting the whole of his TeX typesetting system. The style is pretty old-fashioned but he's a genius.) Steven Skiena's "The algorithm design manual". (This would not be my recommendation if you want just one algorithms book; that should be Cormen, Rivest, Leiserson & Stein. But it's an excellent complement to a more standard sort of algorithms book.)
- Well yes, you could construe any physical object as having conciousness by having a sufficiently detailed/complex schema that assigns 'meanings' to each of its states.
But we all agree a rock is not conscious, so this definition doesn't pass the common sense test.
One mistake is then claiming that this usage of the word conciousness can be substituted for the commonplace usage in all situations. E.g. why don't we feel the same ethical obligation to a potentially conscious rock that we do to animals, humans and, arguably, seemingly intelligent entities?
For a nice exposition of this one can read chapter 2 of Gary Drescher's book 'good and real'.
- Reading the chapter about time in "Good and Real" by Drescher blew my mind. See http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=11068 for a short version.
- Looks to be a rigorous exposition of an argument I saw to resolve Loschmidt's paradox (why there can be an arrow I time in a time symmetric universe). The argument is that formation of memories (whether in a brain or tape recorder or whatever) is necessarily an increasing entropy process, so all memories will be of lower entropy states.
IOW, it's not that "entropy increases futureward, we remember pastward, what a coincidence!" Rather, "if this were not an increasing entropy direction, we could not have memories of it."
First saw the point in Drescher's Good and Real.
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