4d/3d controversy in objects

There is a familiar controversy in the philosophy of time. It has to do with whether objects are 3 dimensional (3d) and "persists" through time or 4 dimensional (4d) spacetime "worms" (or as Ted Sider claims in his Four Dimensionalism, 4d stages). 3ders think that objects do not have temporal parts analogous to the object's spatial parts while 4ders think that the object at any time is just a part of the object at all times (its a segment or slice of the whole worm).

I realized that modern physics might say a thing or two about this. More specifically, quantum mechanics and especially quantum field theory. It could be that both the 3ders and the 4ders are right.

Consider particles in space. In classical physics such as relativity and Newtonian mechanics, objects have a definite position (the classic billiard ball analogy). In quantum mechanics, they do not; rather they have a "quantum superposition" or are "field quanta." They are neither specifically here nor there but their position is kind of spreading out in space. Quantum field theory has it that objects, even large objects, are mere properties of spacetime itself; just ripples or disturbances smeared in that spacetime manifold. Everything can be described by force differentials at any set of localized points in spacetime.

Objects are not only neither here nor there but neither now nor then. But particles do have definite positions once they are being measured or observed in some way. When the wave function collapses under observation and the scope of the scientists' equipment, they will have a definite positions.

I wonder if this can be used as an argument that in some sense, both the 3ders and the 4ders are right much as the corpuscular theory of light and the wave theory of light are both partially right even though they seemed contradictory when they were first proposed but quantum theory eventually resolved the issue in its familiar unforeseen way. Because objects are located in spacetime in quantum field theory, they are more like worms (or fuzzy worms, perhaps caterpillars, as they are smeared in that spacetime) as the 4der claims but may have specific spacetime locations once they are under the purview of observation and common discourse as the 3der claims.

Editors in Chief of Synthese are in hot water

It would seem that one of my ex teachers (John Symons) an editor of Synthese is involved in some controversy among the philosophical community. See here and here. I read some of the papers in the special issue of Synthese on Intelligent Design a while back and the articles I've read seem measured and professional to me. The Editors in Chief included a disclaimer saying that some of them included tone that wasn't professional but did not mention the article(s) and this has pissed off the writers of those articles and many philosophers.

Copy and original revisited

I realized one possible objection to my definition of copy as

Object A is a copy iff its creation was intended as a copy of some object B (or maybe even an idea of such an object) and A does not (numerically) equal B.

Imagine that an entrepreneur makes a supercomputer that is designed to make him lots of money. All he needs to do is supply it with lots of information about the world and the computer will do what it takes to best insure he gets money. The computer decides the best way is to make counterfeit paintings and sell them. The entrepreneur does not know what his computer is up to and just collects the cash it makes him. Since only a machine was involved with the manufacturing of the counterfeits, does that mean that copies of the painting were made without any intention?

I thought of this objection while reading Michael Rea's paper on pornography. He seems to think that the objection is a good one against certain definitions of porn.

However, I have my doubts because it seems that once machines as complex as the computer in the thought experiment is brought about, we can ascribe intentions to it. We already ascribe intentions to certain (complex) animals like dogs, apes, dolphins, etc. A dog e.g., brings you his frisbee. His intention seems to be that he wants to play. No problems there. I have no problems with intentions in many animals.

The issue is whether computers can do the things in the thought experiment without what can properly be called an intention on its part. It seems to be able to choose among available options and compute the best option and implement a plan of action and perform it despite the fact that it may not have the mental phenomenal content that people and animals who perform similar tasks have. Would that be enough to constitute intention? Can "intention" be defined loosely (so that it lacks for example a phenomenal content) but still maintain its close association with the phenomenon we attribute to our understanding of our own intentions? I'm not sure but it seems plausible to me that if the computer can do that it would have what can properly be called an intention.

Puzzle of the self-torturer revisted

One other thing I want to mention about the "puzzle" is that it assumes that pain is continuous and not noticeably discrete. However pain may have various threshold "steps" and experience of pain as it gradually increases may jump to the next step once it reaches certain thresholds. This would also need to be taken into account and it may be one objection raised to the possible rejoinder to my original response that the increments instead be in increases of pain levels (as opposed to external electric currents in the example).

Also see here for evidence of what I alluded to earlier in that blog about the psychological factors which come into evaluation of pain.

Dimensions

In 1968 Melzack and Kenneth Casey described pain in terms of its three dimensions: "Sensory-discriminative" (sense of the intensity, location, quality and duration of the pain), "Affective-motivational" (unpleasantness and urge to escape the unpleasantness), and "Cognitive-evaluative" (cognitions such as appraisal, cultural values, distraction and hypnotic suggestion).^[40] They theorized that pain intensity (the sensory discriminative dimension) and unpleasantness (the affective-motivational dimension) are not simply determined by the magnitude of the painful stimulus, but “higher” cognitive activities (the cognitive-evaluative dimension) can influence perceived intensity and unpleasantness. Cognitive activities "may affect both sensory and affective experience or they may modify primarily the affective-motivational dimension. Thus, excitement in games or war appears to block both dimensions of pain, while suggestion and placebos may modulate the affective-motivational dimension and leave the sensory-discriminative dimension relatively undisturbed." (p. 432) The paper ends with a call to action: "Pain can be treated not only by trying to cut down the sensory input by anesthetic block, surgical intervention and the like, but also by influencing the motivational-affective and cognitive factors as well." (p. 435)

The old children's story of the frog in the pot who is slowly being boiled alive reminds me of this self torturer puzzle. The frog may suddenly feel a sharp rise in pain once some threshold (psychological or otherwise) is reached and jump right out instead of being boiled alive. That would seem realistic and explanatory and thus dissolve the puzzle of the self torturer as well.

Indeed there is some evidence from animal experiments that verify the threshold answer.

In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!". He described how the critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.^[3][21]

When is "enough is enough"?

I think we can all agree that we will never build a perfectly just society. Someone or group will always be at some level, disadvantaged unjustly even if the laws are all perfectly as good as they can be, social inequalities will remain potentially in the form of human imperfections. Humans will always be imperfect when it comes to the sense and practice of justice. Implicit attitudes, even barely perceptible "at the surface" can have big effects on the structure of society as Thomas Schelling and all his influenced subsequent work in the social sciences has shown. Institutions of injustice such as segregation can be de facto established, perpetuated and enforced and surprisingly hard to stop and rectify simply stemming from implicit attitudes that people have (without formal institutions supporting them) and may not even realize they have.

My question is, since there will always be some one or group that may be disadvantaged and the degree of harm done to this person or group may be specific to them in virtue of their basic constitutions such as sensitivity to injustices, when is it acceptable to demand drastic changes to society or even civil disobedience? If it is always acceptable then there will always be the possibility that some group may be permitted to disrupt society even drastically and there will be perpetual civil unrest. This question is obviously related to my previous posts on the relativity of harm and the seemingly impossibility of establishing just political or even social systems. I wish I could find a way to make more clear what I mean by these sets of ideas.

Puzzle of the self-torturer?

Look at this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on dynamic choice.

Suppose someone — who, for reasons that will become apparent, Quinn calls the self-torturer — has a special electric device attached to him. The device has 1001 settings: 0, 1, 2, 3, …, 1000 and works as follows: moving up a setting raises, by a tiny increment, the amount of electric current applied to the self-torturer's body. The increments in current are so small that the self-torturer cannot tell the difference between adjacent settings. He can, however, tell the difference between settings that are far apart. And, in fact, there are settings at which the self-torturer would experience excruciating pain. Once a week, the self-torturer can compare all the different settings. He must then go back to the setting he was at and decide if he wants to move up a setting. If he does so, he gets $10,000, but he can never permanently return to a lower setting. Like most of us, the self-torturer would like to increase his fortune but also cares about feeling well. Since the self-torturer cannot feel any difference in comfort between adjacent settings but gets $10,000 at each advance, he prefers, for any two consecutive settings s and s+1, stopping at s+1 to stopping at s. But, since he does not want to live in excruciating pain, even for a great fortune, he also prefers stopping at a low setting, such as 0, over stopping at a high setting, such as 1000

This passage as stated states that the increments to be increased are of the devices settings (i.e. amount of electric current). But the "puzzle" seem to arise when we consider increments of degrees of pain.

But pain is dependent not simply on one factor such as external stimulation from electric currents. It is a function also of psychological factors. Psychological experiments over the years have shown that individual's pain tolerance and subjective evaluation of the degree of pain vary considerably based on the individual's state of mind at the time. People may experience more pain and tolerate more pain such as electric shocks or having their hand immersed in ice water simply by changing a state of mind either self-induced or by the experimenter or through some uninduced capricious change of the state of the mind. Thus the agent may experience two shocks with very small differences in electric current as drastically different in subjective pain.

So the agent may not be able to predict when his state of mind changes for the worse making him vulnerable to experience an intransitive and unbearable rise in pain in that incremental series of electric current. When it does happen it will be experienced as a pain that is noticeably greater than the pain resulting from the shock administered immediately before.

I think that many philosophical puzzles of rational choice such as Slote's "Satisficing maximizer" can also be solved by appealing to principles of unpredictability and context instability like I have here.

Ubiquitous fictionalism

In a previous post, I talked about the possibility of moral fictionalism and the skepticism this possibility may justify. But fictionalism is not restricted to the moral realm. All kinds of metaphysical fictionalism is possible and the live possibility that there is much truth to them is the history of philosophy itself which has always butted heads against our most common notions of what exists, even the most commonly acknowledged objects are not safe from the existence of good reasons against their existence. Many metaphysicians are monists, many are atomists, and some are even nihilists. All these positions often deny the existence of chairs, basketballs, cars, and even people and claim that they are mere fictions we conjure to make sense of our world. They often claim that normal objects we encounter daily are begotten through abstraction and are not really there, objectively, mind independently, in the sense we may think or assume they are.

Take monists. They believe that there is just one thing that really exist and usually that one thing they believe is just the whole cosmos or "blobject" (some priority monists believe that only one thing exists concretely while everything else is abstract while existence monists believe that nothing else exists exist for that one thing, whatever it is). Now monists give very good reasons for why they believe what they believe. They can show contradictions and inconsistencies in positing normal everyday objects such as chairs, basketballs, cars, persons, molecules, etc. Monists have summoned arguments from mereology and modern physics (Jonathan Schaffer's argument from quantum field theory e.g.) among other resources to argue their case.

Now take atomists. Many of these folks only believe in the existence of atoms, whatever they may be (quarks or maybe strings or something even more fundamental). All other objects are collections of atoms with some relationship holding among them and obtained through arbitrary abstractions and thus there existence is mind-dependent in a sense. Atomists also have good reason to argue their case.

(Pure) Nihilists don't believe in the existence of any object. Many of them believe that there is gunk all the way down and all the way up. Again, nihilists have good reasons for their beliefs and their beliefs are conflicting much like the other positions with pluralism, the common sense view that all everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, persons, etc exist. They often point to contradictions and inconsistencies in the belief in common objects or in the belief in any object qua object in the way philosophers think of them as existing with their internal properties mind independently, etc.

So it might be the case that our belief that everyday objects like chairs, cars, basketballs, and people are mere fictions. And furthermore, our belief in atoms and the cosmos might be fictions. Furthermore, any belief that assumes, posits, and is built on such beliefs may be in turn fictions. Fictions multiply on other fictions and we would need to invent more and more fictions in ever more ingenious ways familiar to philosophical construction to make sense of our world in ad hoc ways just to keep things coherent. That ad hoc constructionism only to run into further problems down the road sounds like the history of philosophy! This would entail, if true, that we live in a world of our own creation in a profound sense, a world of our fictions with reality far different and weirder than we can imagine. This induces a very Taoist sensibility in me. Something exists, that it is The One, but we cannot know its exact nature except in very general, abstract and ineffable terms, and all conceptualizations on this The One goes wrong from the start seems like a Taoist's skepticist view.